Benefit of the Doubt

Slipping Through the Cracks: There Will Be Blood (2007) and the breakdown of truth

2012-02-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

WARNING: THIS ENTRY, LIKE MOST OF MY ANALYSES, IS A RELENTLESS STREAM OF SPOILERS.

There Will Be Blood begs a question -- was Daniel Plainview always an asshole, even when he came from a humble station and chipped away at rocks for silver? Was his early appearance of earnestness simply cover for a calculating, malicious nihilist? Or is this the story of his fall from earthy humility into the madness of alienated wealth? Is it the oil and the money that are evil? Or is it simply human nature, poisoned at the root, fertile ground for corruption and betrayal?

Your interpretation of Daniel's actions must answer that question, and it will, in turn, retroactively color your experience of the whole film. Read as a fallen hero, a failed father figure, Daniel Plainview is a study in disillusionment, a showcase for the destructive power of wealth and obsession. This story is a story of a fall from grace, the story of Adam or Anakin Skywalker. However, read strictly as a villain, Daniel Plainview becomes a culmination of all of humanity's most horrible potentialities. He becomes the type of evil, cruel, unredeemable character rarely found in the bible, or in any literature... a Grendel before he was humanized by Gardner, a Cormac McCarthy antagonist. According to this interpretation, his final sadistic moments are the blossoming of a man who was always rotten deep down.

When a question like this is just floating in the air over a narrative arc, it's easy to take the middle path: "Well, I think he always had the innate potential to be evil, but it was the oil and the money that hardened him into a villain." It's the most logical answer, but also a little bit of a cop-out as to "human nature," as it were. But it's not an open-ended question... in There Will Be Blood, it's a strict binary, and it hinges on a particular point, right at the end of the movie.

That point: when Daniel tells his son that he never cared about him, is he lying, just to injure his son in a moment of passion? Or is he telling the truth?

If Daniel is lying about these things, it means that his concern for his son -- his earnestness as a father -- was real, at least at the beginning. These damning claims are merely weapons that Daniel Plainview is using, here at the end of his life, to scorch the barren earth of his own relationships and good name. But if Daniel is telling the truth to HW, it means that his whole life, his every act of kindness and humanity has been inauthentic, part of his pursuit of profit. It's a striking paradox: if Daniel is lying at the end of his life, it's to hide the fact that he was once a decent human being. If he is telling the truth, it's only to reveal that his whole life has been a lie.

In this final monologue to HW, Daniel offers no less than a sudden, complete revisionist history of his own whole life. This development splits his life into two competing narratives, as revisionist histories tend to do with their subjects. Though you might prioritize one narrative over the other, you can never efface either of them from your image of Daniel... he now exists in two parallel universes: one where he was a practical, competitive man who at the very least loved his son; another where his whole life was a con, an offense against our most basic human sensibilities. In the former universe, wealth and oil have the power to rob man of his humanity. In the second universe, man never had any humanity, except what he fabricated to manipulate himself and the people around him.

But if the truth of Daniel's poisonous confession is the pivot point in this Janus-faced narrative, then we have to consider the damage wrought by these events upon truth itself. There Will Be Blood doesn't just let truth stand, unmolested, to be assessed and accounted for. Rather, the film shows how power and wealth, infiltrating the society and the soul, begin to break down the integrity of truth. Eli Sunday is that part of the story.

Eli Sunday may stand in for "faith" and "religion," but on a deeper level, he represents the universal ideal of "truth." He lays claim to the power of prophecy and revelation; he sees right past Daniel Plainview's neighborly facade when they sit down together at the dinner table. He repeatedly faces down authority, rendering his own father meek and disenfranchised -- a case study in speaking truth to power. And when Daniel Plainview needs to buy Bandy's farm, and supplicates himself before the church, Eli uses "the truth"... or at least a certain variation on it... to put his own final seal of authority upon the oil man.

At this pivotal point, Daniel Plainview is forced to betray himself by conceding his own narrative. In his own version of his life, he did not "abandon" his son so much as simply send him away out of fatherly concern, and when Eli forces him to confront this darker side of the truth, he is exploiting Daniel's fatal existential weakness. In the process, however, Eli effectively destroys himself, because he also betrays the sanctity of truth itself. Using "truth" and confession in this cynical way, Eli turns it into a tool of power, a mere corollary to a world governed by dominance and ambition.

Daniel is the lord of this world, and as soon as he gets the chance, he turns truth -- now enslaved by the whims of power -- back upon Eli as a weapon. Just as Eli poisoned Daniel's personal narrative, so Daniel forces Eli to uproot his own, using the leverage of wealth and influence to force a confession out of the prophet. "I am a false prophet! God is a superstition!" is not entirely the truth, but it isn't a lie, either, especially coming from the lips of the prophet Eli. It's an effacement, a disfigurement of truth, a twisting of the truth in Daniel's hand. And this betrayal of the truth, this malignant counter-revelation, this toxic confession, is as much a part of Eli's death as a bowling pin to the head.

I suspect that Daniel's rotten self-image... his insidious narrative of his own motives... really started taking shape when he discovered that his "brother" was a stranger, clinging to a false identity to ride sidecar on Daniel's success. Daniel's interaction with Henry seemed to be his last chance at trust, the final departure point where Daniel might have placed his faith in a comrade. When Daniel discovers that Henry is a fraud, he finally finds that familial love and cynical exploitation are irresolvably tangled in his mind. At this moment, he begins to doubt all human connection, including his own affection for his son. If his last chance of brotherhood was a mere facade, corrupted by money and lies, how can he trust his own claim to fatherhood any more?

There are endless echoes of the bible in There Will Be Blood, but there are also echoes of Heisenberg and Foucault. Perhaps Daniel Plainview's soul isn't determined at the time it's expressed... maybe it isn't determined until many years later, when he interprets it in the most negative light, crafting a vicious and inhuman narrative with which to bludgeon his son. Maybe, if he had just been more charitable to himself, Daniel Plainview would have retroactively determined his life as the tragic downward spiral of a decent businessman. Or maybe, conversely, the interpretation is meaningless -- maybe "truth" isn't even a thing in this world of wealth and oil and exploitation of the land and community. Maybe, as Foucault has implied, the truth is just a shroud draped over an infernal machine, a grinding apparatus of power and cynicism and influence.

This isn't the first or last word, by a long shot -- it's a wide-open film, full of recessed spaces for interpretation. Eli's relationship with Paul is one of its great unexplored mysteries, as is Eli's claim to moral righteousness. But at the very least, we've made a reasonable start at teasing out some of those complexities and ambiguities, and finding some meaning in a tragic, terrifying film with a nihilist soul.

Dexter Season 4: essential (post)modern man(hood)

2012-01-14T15:00:00.000-05:00

Rita: Car pools and swimming pools? How much are we living the dream?
Dexter: So much.

Dexter Morgan is a performer. Michael C. Hall does justice to this aspect of his character -- Dexter is always saying the right thing, but only after searching for a moment, letting his bewilderment show in his eyes as he struggles to sync up with the people around him. His neighbors, his coworkers, his psychologist, his wife -- they're all the audience, and he's a magician, a Stephen Colbert, always in character.

How much truth is there in Dexter's performance? That question is no easier for Dexter to answer than it is for any of us. Because as far as Dexter is concerned, there's no truth whatsoever. Normalcy is the ultimate role he plays, and every time he switches from a smirk to a smile, it strains his composure. The rest of the world is comfortable with its mundane preoccupations and its rote conversations, and Dexter is aware that he's the outsider, faking it until he can get away from it.

But if Dexter is an outsider, why do you sympathize with him so strongly? Come on, I know you do. And this is what complicates the question... in Dexter's momentary lapses, in his little hesitations, his moments of confusion and alienation, he seems to be saying, "I'm supposed to care about this shit? This is what's on these peoples' minds?" And when you see that look in his eyes, it doesn't register as bizarre and unhinged -- instead, it rings with familiarity. Because we all feel like that outsider, looking into a gallery of normal lives. Whether we're at the water cooler or hosting a garden party, we all have those moments where we feel like phony play-actors trying not to be noticed and called out on it.

Just ask Chris Rock. He's a married man who hates married people.

I know this goes for all humans, but I'd wager that men (or the masculine-conditioned) have a stronger affinity with Dexter than the feminine-inclined. Traditional masculinity is constructed as a double-edged sword of independence and isolation, the keystones of the rugged individual. And the non-traditional male, the "nerd" as it were (Dexter gifts Harrison a shirt with the phrase "My Dad's a Geek") is doubly-bound by this outsider stigma: you are constantly faced with the standards of traditional masculinity (cars babes sports money) but you even place yourself outside of that. The greatest survival skill of the anti-social man is to fully embrace his outsider status, to love his own alienation, to take this isolation as a source of great pride.

So we all do that thing that Dexter does: "I can't believe you punched him!" "Yeah, me neither!" You own up to the little emasculations, you bend with the turbulence, admitting that fighting is out of character for you, preempting any true ridicule with gentle self-deprecation. It's a crutch, a self-defense mechanism... self-awareness and self-acceptance. It's a certain kind of honesty, though perhaps overstated.

Oh, right... except for the fact that it's not really honest. At least not for Dexter. With every humble remark Dexter makes, we're in on the joke: we know that he's not really that gentle nerdy science husband. He's actually a seasoned hunter, an expert in disguise and guerilla warfare and thievery and hand-to-hand combat. He can disarm thugs, intimidate bullies, and outmaneuver vicious killers. He's basically a superhero, and his little passing self-deprecations are steeped in irony, meant just for us, the audience that gets to travel around in Dexter's head.

And that's where Dexter becomes unrelatable, right? He's an outsider, like the rest of us, but unlike the rest of us, he's a superhero deep down? Isn't that where our sympathy ends?

Nay!

Let's take a moment to listen to Neil Stephenson, speaking for all men. From his seminal novel Snow Crash:

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."

This may sound like an adolescent boy's fantasy, but let's face it... all humans, and especially all men, carry that adolescent around with them their whole lives, and we all have a little bit of Hiro Protagonist within us. Dexter actualizes this fantasy. He doesn't just dream of being a superhero -- he IS a superhero, flipping from disguise to disguise, strong-arming thugs into going straight, out-maneuvering cops and murderers, and generally being a black-ops martial arts outlaw whenever it's convenient. Dexter turns the male fantasy into a reality, and it adds an extra dimension to that self-deprecating humor he's always using to protect himself.

Another of Dexter's key moments -- aside from his "how much are we living the dream?" response -- is when he impersonates a truck driver in episode 11, which I would definitely transcribe here, if I could find the quote online. More than any of the beat-downs or boat driving, this is the moment when Dexter becomes the man we all keep in our back pocket, the man who can do ANYTHING, provided he's driven to it by necessity. You need me to be a truck driver right now? Goddammit, I'll do it. I'm a man. This is what we do.

This isn't just cop-educated serial killers in Premium Channel TV shows. This is all men. Some part of us, however small, believes we're secretly a superhero. Hiro Protagonist thinks he could be the baddest motherfucker. Dicky Barrett's not a coward, he's just never been tested. Alias, Mission: Impossible, Cloverfield, your plumber, your neighbor -- every man is convinced that if it came down to it, they could do what's necessary to punish assholes, save their family, protect AMERICA.

And yet, it's tough for us to maintain this illusion, when we're struggling with illusions of control and the ominous shadow of inadequacy, when we're faking normalcy, and also embracing our outsider status so that we can feel it's legitimate. We're all Shrek and Donkey, onion parfaits, starting with "normalcy" on top, then proceeding to a fluffy layer of alienation, all stacked on top of an inner superhero who's forever kept in dire reserve.

This is what it means to perform masculinity. This is where "truth" gets lost in layers of projection, self-preservation, and constructed identity. This is the territory where nerdy men -- nay, all men -- nay, all people -- get lost in their own performances.

Arthur Mitchell: "Which are you?"
Dexter Morgan: "All of them."

Von Trier's Antichrist: The rational masculine, the primal feminine

2011-11-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

I saw Antichrist recently, and at the time, I told myself it was mostly just an obligatory gesture to the cinema scene. Like Enter the Void, it was so much discussed, inciting such controversy, that I figured I should at least give it a go so I wouldn't feel too out of the loop. I'm glad I saw it -- turns out the reason it stirred people up so much is that aside from the provocation, there's a lot there to think about. The foremost is the film's position in terms of gender politics, and though this is the conversation that's been most covered, I think it's far from exhausted.

It strikes me that so much of the discussion of Antichrist alleges that it's misogynist, which seems like a totally misplaced criticism to me... in fact, the type of criticism that could only come from someone already invested in the patriarchy to begin with. Antichrist is, in fact, a highly self-aware film about gender relations on a broad scale, and it demonstrates a certain tortured sensitivity that more traditionally "feminist" films may lack. To see how this works, however, you have to start by understanding where the film is coming from (giving it the "benefit of the doubt," as it were).

Antichrist is not about breaking down or disrupting essentialist assumptions. It's not about showing that women can do what is traditionally ascribed to men, nor about lubricating the slippery contact between physical sex and gender identity. Those are more traditional routes for feminist mass media to take -- Disney films and action movies showing that women can make effective warriors, art-house pictures breaking up our stereotypes of masculinity and offering criticism of the heteronormative order. Nay, indeed, Antichrist works within a symbolically essentialist universe, where masculinity and femininity are isolated and represented as embodied symbols ("He" and "She", respectively). In order to appreciate the film's statements, you have to accept this initial premise.

From there, the viewer can start to see some outlines of themes in Antichrist. The relationship between the masculine and the feminine is a paradoxical one, entailing both dependency and competition. Perhaps the most logical way to see Nic, the infant who dies in the film's prologue, is that he is the offspring that unites the masculine and feminine forces -- he is their cease-fire condition. His death creates an irresolvable break between masculinity and femininity, and in this break, we find the nature of each of them, engaged in a complex dialectic that evolves throughout the film. I know there are a lot of pseudo-academic terms there. The fact is, this movie condenses a ton of dynamics that theorists have taken great pains to unpack and investigate.

"She" is rage and depression, the explosive despair of losing everything and having no recourse or path to redemption. She is also the body, the orgasm, the blossoming subconscious. "He" is the rational order, mustering the power of language and reason to distance himself from the tragedy he's just witnessed. His first scene in Act I -- the ritual of the funeral, the patriarchal virtues of solemn silence and respect -- is interrupted by Her fainting, a break from reason that belongs uniquely to those who suffer. From that moment forward, He assumes her psychiatric treatment, attempting to circumscribe her pain within his perspective, his methods, his exposure therapy.

This is the patriarchal offensive. It's not beating or name-calling... it's the incessant attempt to flank her grief, to second-guess her instinctive reactions and control the source of her catastrophic emotions. Even when He says her pain is "natural," that she should work through it, he's attempting to put it in its place. And when He decides to take She to Eden, he is doing something bold and inadvisable -- he's taking her to the source, the veiled epicenter of her fear, frustration and self-loathing. He's taking on an offensive role against the feminine force that She represents. She has to "face it," armed with his composure, in order to tame it.

It's worth taking a moment to consider some of the mythological references in Antichrist. Obviously there's the various Christian signifiers -- Eden, the witch hunts, and the death of the only son. The other major reference here is a story called The Story of the Three Wonderful Beggars, and/or Vasilii the Unlucky, which is an old Russian-Serbian folk tale. You can read the whole thing here, in its Serbian form, which I think is the more useful of its major incarnations. From this, Antichrist draws a number of images -- the three beggars, the tree with something significant hidden in its roots, and crossing a bridge to reach what is essentially a cursed temple.

The three beggars in Antichrist seem to be symbols of a broken order, especially within the feminine. They are all self-destructive (or destructive of their young, which amounts to the same thing in this case). He and She are not approaching a peaceful, balanced feminine spirit... they're approaching the wooded symbol of a shattered, tortured, guilty soul, ready to lash out at whatever force is trying to control it. The beggars in the Serbian myth are an ambivalent force, acting to destroy power of the father in order to preserve the larger patriarchal chain leading from the father to the son. They are heralds of the Oedipal murder. This symbol functions similarly within Antichrist... though the son was part of the male lineage, a token of the patriarchy's continuation, the mother nonetheless loved it, and she mourns and rages for its loss.

This profoundly complex nature of the feminine spirit is thoroughly explored in Antichrist. She is the vengeful antagonist, inconsolable and violent, but she is also complicit. Indeed, She seems to feel herself to be incomplete, which is a consistent theme throughout patriarchal mythologies. The Freudian/Lacanian image of the female was of an entity that felt itself incomplete, lacking a phallus. In Antichrist, She becomes unhinged because her son, to whom she feels connected on a deep, organic level, is ripped from her, as if a part of her body is amputated. Her rage, pushed to its limit, is expressed as a fear of abandonment, and for a short time, She takes control from He, using the coercive power of a millstone and a fucking huge log. At this moment in the film, the moment when She presides over He's mangled body, the sexual order seems reversed through violence, if only for a moment.

The first reason I claim that this film could be read as feminist, rather than misogynist, is that Von Trier acknowledges the power and the validity of certain forces that he associates with the feminine: pure emotion, including rage, despair, and depression; unconditional love for a son, regarding him as a part of oneself, and the desperation that might be experienced upon the loss of something so irreplaceable. Von Trier seems to acknowledge the injustice of trying to rationalize those things, to fix them through inert spiritual/psychological engineering. I believe he understands these things because he's experienced depression, and he knows that from the abyss of despair, it can't just be explained away (whether as a mere medical condition, or with the platitude that "it will get better").

From that point, the film evolves into a story of the ascension of the patriarchy (a sign, to me, that it was meant to be read as a tragedy, like Orwell's 1984). Once She has dominated He and her rage has abated, She makes a desperate, fateful decision, essentially surrendering her power by neutering herself. This is another sign of the ambiguous nature of the feminine, which is emotionally uninhibited but prone to guilt and self-destruction. This event, depicted so provocatively in the film, is the reversal that allows He to destroy her, reestablishing the patriarchal hegemony.

You may see this as a happy ending or a tragic one (nothing in this film is really happy, per se), but you have to acknowledge, this is what everything was leading up to. In all of the references -- Christian mythology, Freudian theory, the Russian folk tale -- the male lineage has to be broken and reforged in order to circumscribe and control the violent, sexual, physically-potent Female figure, which always threatens to rupture the established order. Christ joins the Father, Vasilii replaces Marko, Oedipus murders Laius, and Nic dies so that He can confront and control She's unstable emotions. And in the end, the women are faceless, dressed conservatively, and gathering as He ascends to the top of the hill. The primal feminine has been dominated, and in Eden as in the Western world, order is restored once more.

On National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and Salon.com's Laura Miller

2011-11-16T18:17:00.001-05:00

-- by the way, this post has been significantly edited for clarity. Please don't be mad. --

Okay, so this thing was published in Salon.com, penned by a Miss Laura Miller, on the phenomenon known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It's both incredibly petty and mysteriously sympathetic (although for any individual, it'll probably strike one of those chords sharply, and miss the other entirely). And it's interesting to parse out as commentary on writing, on our changing literary and creative ecosystem, and on what it means to be an artist in our digital world.

NaNoWriMo is an event, mostly organized online, calling on people to write a 50,000+ word novel in a month. If you successfully do so, you're granted the status of "winner," and there were about 37.5 thousand of those last year. The objectives of this exercise, as gleaned from the NaNoWriMo website, are: 1 - to exercise your innate creativity, which you may ignore or set aside in much of your everyday life; 2 - to commit to a large project and follow it through, which is something you may not often get a chance to do; 3 - to break the shackles of self-censorship that may constrain your intellectual and creative life; 4 - to take part in an important cultural art form, in order to better understand and appreciate it. For the record, I hate that "NaNoWriMo" abbreviation, but I'll keep using it as necessary.

Miss Miller's thesis (perhaps laid out a bit snarkily) is that this organized activity is tragically misguided. She points out that writing demands more than a steady 50,000-word stream of consciousness, and that this initiative creates a glut of amateur prose in a world that's already got too many books and not enough readers. Her arguments aren't very concrete or practical, because she doesn't convincingly show any harms; rather, she's giving voice to a more general frustration, a lack of patience for the narcissistic, the trivial, the self-indulgent that, in her opinion, this initiative seems to appeal to. She seems to be saying, "If you really want to write, you'll learn to do it, and eventually, you'll do it well. Why must there be a widespread movement of people who push themselves and each other to write badly?"

Miss Miller's argument sounds puffed up and crotchety, given the apparently harmless inspirational nature of the NaNoWriMo program. People who participate in NaNoWriMo aren't damaged by the experience; to the contrary, they tend to come out feeling very gratified, like their souls have grown, and proud of having created something personal, often for the first time. Editors may gripe about those few writers who send them amateurish manuscripts thrown together for the sake of a writing exercise, and some random people around the world may be annoyed that their novel-writing friends are forcing them to read badly-written manuscripts, but these complaints are minor at best. There's already quite a bit of writing about how arbitrary the "slush pile" process is anyway, and it's hard to imagine that editors are really that heartbroken by having to scan over and discard a few more pages of bad writing.

And yet, there are reasons to sympathize with Laura Miller's angst.

One of them might be your sense of our digital culture, which has been developing over the past decade: an ecosystem of vapid consumption and creation, of capriciousness and self-regard. This is the age of blogs and Facebook, not to mention the world of self-publishing, of YouTube filmmaking, of self-promotion in 140-character chunks. It is a world of consumption that's accelerated but not well-informed, as people ravenously devour the most accessible and sensationalistic media artifacts -- Snookie and the Kardashians, Jack and Jill, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It may be a new world of digital media, with more ubiquitous access to cultural products, but this doesn't mean it's more favorable to talent, or more rich and evolved. A bookstore owner recently said to me, "The e-book devices don't really threaten my business, because they're not for book-lovers... they're actually more for the book-haters." If he's right, it's that much scarier that these devices are taking over the market so quickly.

If you really wanted to back up Miss Miller's thesis, you could probably argue, on a theoretical level, that NaNoWriMo is contributing to a culture of noise. There is a great deal of content being created, more and more every day, and the capacity to curate this content is not keeping up. Ten new blogs pop up for every new magazine or reviewer. Everybody is talking more and more about themselves, feeling more and more pressured to project themselves into profiles, blogs, and tweets. Noise is starting to overpower signal, and arguably, NaNoWriMo is just going to contribute to that trend.

This argument is shaky, given that NaNoWriMo doesn't sell itself as some sort of Great New Writers Tryouts and Awards. Arguably, the vast majority of the people who write a novel in November don't even try to make that novel public... they ask a couple people to read it, and then allow it to disappear into a drawer, existing simply as a personal badge of accomplishment. You may say, "Then what's the point?", but that's not for anyone to judge except the person doing the writing -- nobody is entitled to judge anyone else's creative act in this mundane little world.

Following this "signal vs. noise," "creation vs. consumption" thread, there's another assertion in Miss Miller's argument: that the world needs more readers, rather than more writers. In a way, this is a pointless observation... the lack of readers may be a problem, but it's not NaNoWriMo's problem, because the organization is devoted to personal growth and the individual journey of writing, not to the issue of informed literacy. However, it clarifies Miller's vantage point: she's coming from a place that's concerned not about writing per se, nor about reading per se, but about the economy of creation versus appreciation.

I think this aspect of her argument can best be summed up thus: we in the Western world are developing a culture, not simply of creation and consumption, but of mindless, impulsive creation and consumption -- and NaNoWriMo is an initiative that trivializes and cheapens the very difficult process of creation, and muddies up the literary landscape, making informed consumption that much harder.

Of course, there's something else in Laura Miller's post that bears witness, and it's not so much a "good reason" as it is a way of understanding where she's coming from. It doesn't justify her sourness, but it brings it a small measure of validity. It's something she touches on in this passage:

"So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. Writers are, in fact, hellishly persistent; they will go on writing despite overwhelming evidence of public indifference and (in many cases) of their own lack of ability or anything especially interesting to say."

If you read the comments on the article, you'll only discover a few that agree with Miss Miller, and these mostly come from people who claim to be writers and editors already. On the other hand, sundry great writers (Neil Gaiman, Dave Eggers, Meg Cabot) have strongly supported to the initiative (via "pep talks" in particular). If you consider the status of these various participants, with their various positions, you discover something: the people who are most irked by NaNoWriMo are semi-successful or struggling writers, and the people who sing its praises most highly are amateurs on one hand, and celebrated masters on the other.

On a superficial level, this may explain Miss Miller's position: she's part of that class of semi-successful and unrewarded writers who resent all the naive amateurs elbowing in on her profession. Perhaps this essay is simply an expression of insecurity, a blast of misguided frustration with her own professional status, which is obviously respectable, but not transcendent. This may be one of the reasons I feel some sympathy with her, as well: when NaNoWriMo tells amateurs that "anyone can do it," we want to say, "Wrong! It's goddamn difficult! We've been working on it for years, and our careers have hardly seen the light of day!" It's a narcissistic reaction, but there's always some narcissism in art.

However, on a deeper level, there's something here to be said about the actual creative process, and how a creative career develops. There are two highly rewarding parts of a creative career: the very beginning, where there's no barrier to at least "trying it out," and the eventual end, when you finally get the fame and recognition that registers as "fulfilled potential." NaNoWriMo is full of the latter famous people commiserating with the former hopeful people, who are just discovering their own potential: their first comments from readers, their first chapter headings and plot twists and cliffhangers, their first obsessions with their own worlds and the characters who inhabit them.

What's obscured by this process is the fact that between the beginning and the glorious end, there's an extremely long, torturous, difficult journey of thwarted expectations, setbacks, and self-doubt. Audiences don't come easily, and you quickly get tired of soliciting people to read and appreciate your work. The amount of effort you put into each piece increases rapidly, until you're strained and exhausted, and the returns on this investment diminish, basically to nothing. The people who once thought you were so talented and promising are now openly avoidant and dismissive, thinking you're misguided, tired of hearing about what they consider your private obsessions. This period of an artist's life is a trial by fire, and this is why so many give up or discard something that they once claimed to do "just because I love doing it."

This period is not just growing pains. Committed artists know this -- many people will begin an artist's journey thinking they've found their calling, only to give up on it after five or ten years have vanished into a quixotic pursuit. Others will continue with their passion their whole lives, but will never actually be discovered, and they'll have to find some reason to keep going without from the thrill of validation (an absence which, unfortunately, often feels a lot like "failure").

I think it's natural, and even somewhat justified (I don't know, maybe 5-10% justified) to feel some frustration and resentment toward something like NaNoWriMo, which calls out to so many aspiring, idealistic, uncommitted amateurs and invites them to experience the first fleeting thrill of an artist, but doesn't provide any fertile ground for them to really commit. It feels like it trivializes the work of the people who have built lives around their art. It feels like a massive giddy tour bus going through a coal mine or an auto factory.

And yet, I can't stand in open opposition to such a movement. It is not claiming to create great writers, nor is it intended to trivialize the hard work of the great authors. Personal growth and new experiences are valuable in themselves; agency, artistic awareness, well-roundedness, and positive mental habits are things the world could use more of. I can think of lots of alternative projects and initiatives I think would be more valuable than NaNoWriMo within the literary cultural space, but I'm not the one who's taken that first step of creating an organization. Even in the dark forest of my own misgivings and anxieties (and Miss Miller's), I have to step back and remember: this is about giving people a chance to make their own lives better through writing. That's utilitarianism and virtue ethics and self-actualization, the groundwork of great individuals and great societies. There are so many bad things in the world. This is not one of them.

By the way, if you know any websites or services that are dedicated to discovering great writers in the digital ocean of amateur work, please let me know. I've seen them for visual arts and music, but not for writers.

Twitter movie reviews: 1 year, 100 movies, 140 characters each

2011-11-14T20:00:00.000-05:00

Over the past year, I've been tweeting movie reviews. I've tried to do this after every single movie I've seen, either in the theater or on video. I also covered a couple of the anime series I watched. I'm guessing I've captured about 70% of my consumption. Not bad, I don't think.

Each review fits perfectly into a Tweet... including the movie title, date, and any punctuation, each one is 140 characters long, no more, no less. The biggest liberties I've taken are the use of ampersands, and the use of the final period, both of which I considered optional. Again, I think I've done pretty well here, managing to get most of the reviews sounding pretty natural while staying within that character constraint.

Below I've compounded my first 100 Twitter movie capsules! Have fun browsing through. You'll notice the format is a bit different at the very beginning (i.e. at the very bottom)... it took me a week or two to settle on the final structure. So, from this past week to more than a year ago, here's my year in Twitter movie capsules:

-91 - 100-

Antichrist (2009) - Harrowing, sinister, & extremely transgressive, a merciless escalation of pain, captured by a viciously invasive camera.

Jigoku (1960) - A treatise on the inherent irredeemability of all men, leading to a descent into Japanese Hell, an eternal tortured bad trip

Hellboy II (2008) - Mignola's lovable brute, transplanted from M.M.'s gothic ruins into Del Toro's carnival of the baroque gilded grotesque.

Season of the Witch (2011) - History? Fantasy? Horror? Still, it's fun watching Perlman and Cage talk trash and fight in barbarian costumes.

Silent Hill (2006) - a wild industrial body-horror throw-down, undermined by some sloppiness, but redeemed by the boldness of its execution.

Wicker Man (1973) - Weird: a story of deception and man's murderous delusions, gilded in a folksy erotic giddiness that's hard to reconcile.

The Machinist (2004) - A tense, jarring psychological echo chamber; the twist isn't as important as the preceding journey of paranoid denial

Strange Days (1995) - A portrait of disconnected people adrift in a world at war, that makes a case for both its destruction and its rebirth

Robocop (1987) - An epic, disjunct hybrid of retro futurist fantasy and gory nihilistic brutality, & a paean to the moral purity of machines

Legend of Hell House (1973) - Offers up an interesting conflict between New Agey science and New Agey spiritualism. Atmospheric, but clunky.

-81 - 90-

I Can See You (2008) - Plays like a twisted wet-dream-turned-nightmare. An uneven, head-trippy romp that shows both inexperience and talent.

Road to Perdition (2002) - Shows the 1930's as a Bauhaus machinist future, its men guided by hard sentimentality & puritan sense of purpose.

Zodiac (2007) - A smart, breathless account of an amateur, willing to reach deep into a dangerous animal's den, even when its handlers balk.

Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales (2006) - A masterpiece of elegant abstraction and subtle storytelling. Blew me away. Esp. the last three ep's

Dead Leaves (2004) - A hyperactive acid-trip anime that becomes a test of patience. Mesmerizing, if you manage to sync up with its insanity.

Elfen Lied (2004) - An apparently cutesy shojo anime subverted by extreme emotional & physical violence. Sailor Moon by way of Takashi Miike

Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988) - Ups the ante on the first film, and comes with the same nightmare fuel set-pieces, but maybe shows too much

Winter's Bone (2010) - The paranoia of a noir, the harrowing grit of Southern Gothic, with just enough love & heroism to keep us sympathetic

Sling Blade (1996) - A movie that fit together perfectly; wouldn't have felt so brutal if it weren't so deadpan, quiet, gentle, & vulnerable

The Beach (2000) - Uneven plotting, at times comical writing, but some earnest sentiment and intense moments between the volatile bohemians.

-71 - 80-

Hellraiser (1987) - Gruesome, thematically focused, unflinching & disturbing at all the right moments. Brilliant, extreme, deservedly iconic

From Beyond (1986) - A parade of semi-human creatures and depravity; provides a great character in the young scientist tortured by the abyss

The Beyond (1981) - Mysterious, relentless, & revolting, full of cheesiness and horror tropes, but redeemed by an epic nihilistic conclusion

Wild Blue Yonder (2005) - Hypnotic at times, definitely a uniquely fuzzy-headed experience, but could stand to be a little bit more focused.

Fear[s] of the Dark (2007) - An eerie and bold psychological study, but not too scary, except Richard McGuire's section, which blew me away.

Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me (1992) - Full of Twin Peaks' enigmatic forces, but more grounded in the main character's troubled hopelessness.

Doctor Zhivago (1965) - A bitter, disillusioned family and political saga with a storybook veneer; stark, beautiful, and surprisingly cruel.

Goodbye, South, Goodbye (1996) - Thoughtful, evocative family crime drama, with a deadpan realism that makes the plot almost indecipherable.

Black Hawk Down (2001) - Gritty, star-studded, shows through audience identification that patriotism is inextricable from vicious bloodlust.

Nietzsche & the Nazis (2006) - Plus side: It's available on Netflix Instant. Minus side: it's a philosophy PhD talking for 3 hours straight.

-61 - 70-

The Sacrifice (1986) - A dreamy meditation on hopelessness and the tragedy and ecstasy of unrepayable grace; muffled, breathless, & hypnotic

Dust Devil (1992) - A parched, haunting, culturally-informed supernatural thriller with touches of abstraction; dense with subliminal power.

General Orders No. 9 (2011) - luminous feature-length meditation on the death of the natural soul of the South; uneven, sometimes beautiful.

Pistol Opera (2001) - spastic Frankenstein of a trippy samurai crime film; loosens up your brain for 70 mins, then attacks it in the finale.

Tree of Life (2011) - Nostalgia and intimacy mustered in service of a heroically ambitious effort. I need another viewing to fully absorb it

Pale Flower (1964) - Japanese sharp-eyed neo-noir, excellent high-contrast camerawork: a disciplined yakuza hitman is devoured by his vices.

Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - A compelling saga of perseverance and surrender, although undermined by its one-sided cultural perspective

Bridesmaids (2011) - Funny at times, but tired with crassness. A few lovable central characters allow it to squeak by as amusing & endearing

Nights of Cabiria (1957) - Cabiria was perfect as the jester maiden centerpiece of a storybook tabloid Rome, pregnant with her joy & tragedy

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) - Effectively tense, but could have used better characters to root for (Wilson was the charismatic exception).

-51 - 60-

Thor (2011) - An epic grade-B movie, full of pomp, that always seems to be smirking itself; yet, the father/brother/son conflict rings true.

Unbreakable (Shyamalan, 2000) - A simple, focused narrative construct, with the intensity & tonal commitment necessary to keep me hooked in.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - An opera of slow revelations, of tragic loss & partial recovery of the soul, against an endless desert backdrop.

Your Highness (2011) - Fun, vacuous vehicle for Danny McBride's crude sense of humor. Props to Courtney, one of the greatest sidekicks ever.

Inferno (1980) - Dario Argento weaves a demented doomsday tale of supernatural forces. Full of slow, lurking suspense & unhinged set-pieces.

13 Assassins (2011) - A samurai adventure hijacked by bleak, bloody, degrading medieval brutality. A tortured, vicious, un-heroic hero story

Wild at Heart (1990) - Flailing, fragmented, and twisted, but fairly straightforward compared to Lynch's later films. And Nic Cage nails it.

The Bird People in China (1998) - poignant, lyrical film about the smallness of human lives against the enduring stories of cultural memory.

Night of the Hunted (1980) - surreal, chilling, & sexual: intriguing, but annoyingly close to depicting actual mental illness as evil force.

Vampyres (1975) - A sometimes-silly erotic horror film that still manages to create a compelling setting and a sense of sensuality and dread

-41 - 50-

Cache (2005) - Unsettling, deadpan thriller, very modern in sensibility, clamped over issues (political, social, moral) that go a mile deep.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) - Voight and Hoffman in a platonic romance that competes with Taxi Driver for urban grit, but remains human in scope.

Barry Lyndon (1975) - never seen somebody balance epic romance with dry amusement like Kubrick. Oh, and the photography is beyond brilliant.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1976) - a meditation on love, the sublime, & self-destruction in the shadow of an endless ocean

Annie Hall (1977) - Heartfelt, inventive, distinguished by its lovable cynicism. Has the inscrutable touch of a brilliant emerging filmmaker

The Holy Girl (2004) - a subtle story: childhood faith and adolescent sexuality meet adult perversion. Cinematography you could get lost in.

Do the Right Thing (1989) - A rare film, both warm and cynical: jovial camaraderie, barely suppressing an undertone of reactionary violence.

Restrepo (2010) - Walks a gritty knife-edge between callous and sentimental. An eye-opening window into the way war reshapes the human mind.

The Mist (2007) - A menacing build-up overflows into an epic, devastating climax. The muscular apocalyptic paranoia is vintage Stephen King.

The Iron Giant (1999) - Luminous animation, with the kind of charm you expect of an old movie. A feat of imagination, flawlessly translated.

-31 - 40-

Time of the Wolf (2003) - Harrowing vision of an untamed, barren world - but with a touch of gentleness & determination. My favorite Haneke.

Tenebre (1982) - A respectable work of art, with some genuinely terrifying and surreal sequences, locked in a swinging new-wave time capsule

28 Days Later (2002) - Brilliant because it succeeds in being methodical, sympathetic, & character-driven first, and only then a horror film

Emperor of the North (1973) - Both gritty and magical, the roughest railroad-weary fairy tale I can imagine. Full of great 1930's shit-talk.

Kwaidan (1964) - four sad, claustrophobic ghost stories, staged in small expressionist spaces that feel like the inside of a disturbed mind.

Harakiri (1962) - a film that's slow-burning, but genuinely angry, culminating in a burst of violence in the face of silence and oppression.

Red Desert (1964) - A movie of modernity as emotional paralysis & lethargy. Haunting, in its way: stifling, neurotic, & visually captivating

Black Swan (2010) - Beautifully-lensed, unbalanced film of the torturous process of relinquishing control; striking in its fixated restraint

Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) - oblique and callous; a strange puppeteer's parade of dead souls on a jaunt through the real world

Come Drink With Me (1966) - The over-the-top theatrics make this 60's kung-fu classic a curiosity; the sick female heroine makes it awesome.

-21 - 30-

The White Ribbon (2009) - A knot of malice gathering slowly on an historical stage; this makes its relative banality strikingly suspenseful.

My Young Auntie (1981) - goofy theatrical kung-fu, like Crouching Tiger meets Three Stooges. This genre has a tone that's truly distinctive.

Chungking Express (1994) - A fluid tale of love losing itself in a big city. Delicate, meditative story with razor-sharp and dynamic visuals

The Exterminating Angel (1962) - surrealism made suspenseful, addictive, & captivating; evokes giddy helplessness, like temporary paralysis.

Samurai Rebellion (1962) - Quiet & relentless; dripping with the angst of a mannered political society barely suppressing its violent urges.

Lone Wolf & Cub 2 (1972) - Fragmented, less scenic, with a heavy emphasis on explosive violence - balanced by surprisingly poignant moments.

Lone Wolf & Cub 1 (1972) - Striking mix of feudal Japanese atmosphere and 70's exploitation violence; definitely feels like a genre classic.

Venus in Furs (1969) - Great film. A sexually-charged near-death fever dream, endearingly self-important, but chilled out enough to earn it.

The Last Winter (2006) - A good psychological/suspense/madness horror movie, undermined by fragments of a bad monster movie late in the game

Solaris (1972) - Lots of exposition, but a well-wrought love story, subverted by the unease of loving a facsimile of reality... all in space

-11 - 20-

Night and Fog (1955) - Resnais contrasts concentration camps with post-war ruins. Full of images that tore me apart. Difficult but profound.

Onibaba (1964) - Dark, sinister, beautiful footage in the reeds. Barely supernatural, but full of a sense of menace lurking just offscreen.

Pineapple Express (2008) - Like a conversation with a stoner... You could get caught up in it, or just caught in it. Franco made it worth it

Flesh and the Devil (1926) - Epic tale of love and loyalty; an intriguing, endearingly maudlin romanticization of desire and self-deception.

L'avventura (1959) - a mellow, melodramatic journey through the sad, guilty process of forgetting a lost friend & lover; captivating visuals

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - alluring recursive mystery, illusions of depth crafted from surface reflections; already a personal favorite

Visions of Light (1992) - A film giving a voice to the image-makers; for such a history of experimentation, it's almost too straightforward.

To Live and Die in LA (1985) - Heavily dated style & music, but the cynicism, hung over the traditional buddy-cop framework, is cutting-edge

Ivan's Childhood (1962) - A dreamy, powerful, ethereal war film on par with Malick's Thin Red Line; also, a pure cinematography masterpiece.

The Last Command (1928) - Slippery, self-conscious, and layered; big ideas for a silent movie, making it (arguably) an early postmodern text

-1 - 10-

The Devil's Backbone (2001) - A historical horror fable, with attention to the microcosmic effect of terror and tyranny in an enclosed space

The American (2010) - Lonely thriller for action fans who want something unusually beautiful and meditative - intelligent & easy on the eyes

Code Unknown (2000) - Cryptic multi-threaded film from Haneke -- makes me feel like I'm missing something very important & should dig deeper

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) - A messy (revisionist) historical action mystery with intriguing gothic stylings. Superficial but satisfying

The Mission (1986) - All-star cast of brooding men makes epic adventure feel strong & sincere, but I feel like it could have used more drama

Late Spring (Ozu, 1949) - slow drama chronicling the tensions within a family, reflecting social change; a sublime cinematic zen meditation.

The Killing (Kubrick, 1956) - Jim Thompson's brilliant writing, plus twisted loyalties and tragic betrayals, make for a palatable retro noir

The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959) - Frank and melancholy saga of youth inadvertently gone wrong; charmingly sentimental, stylish in its honesty

The Piano Teacher (Haneke, 2001) - Twisted, cynical, and insightful -- a film whose perversity makes more sense than we might like to admit.

Heat (Michael Mann) - A+ blend of epic & personal, heightened by intense, unsentimental depiction of violence. Subjective,realistic,powerful

Amazing photos by Luca Pierro

2011-11-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille

A captivating gallery posted at A Curious Brain

Who are you Nicholas Cage?

2011-11-09T19:00:00.000-05:00

A memo inspired partly by my friend Eric's open letter to N.C.

Dearest Nick, the dorky dad of the action pantheon, how do you end up in these situations? Stealing cars, unhijacking airplanes, riding motorcycles under an undead sky. This is such a different man from the guy I see before me... a guy whose droll face says, "I just got home from a long day, I need a few minutes on the couch"... a guy whose arch-nemesis is simply the daily grind, whose epic victory is cracking a joke for his kids when they get home from school, asking them inane questions over a family dinner.

So who in God's name convinced you to put on a suit of chain mail and run off for the crusades? Another actor could sell this as an impulsive act of piety; from you, it seems more like a midlife crisis, prolonged by the interminable travel time to the Middle East... a long road trip with your drinking buddy Felsom, who seems much better cut out for this type of thing, though he's much less serious about it.

Here's the thing, Nicholas -- I've seen you play this character before... a man on a long journey, not sure where he went wrong. There too you were crushed by the guilt of a needless murder, by your own brutality at a moment of release. The only difference: at that time, you were on an airplane instead of a horse, and the demon presiding over the carnage was a man named Cyrus the Virus. You strayed far from your wife and daughter, but at least they were there to ground your clumsy army-guy eccentricities.

That grounding is the anchor that makes you SO GOOD -- so recognizable, so perfectly plausible -- every once in a great while, in one movie out of every ten. Like that time you saved San Francisco from a rogue faction on Alcatraz... you weren't there because you were some sort of master thief or daredevil motorcyclist. You were there because you were a respectable government-employed toxicologist, and they needed someone with your expertise in the field. Never mind that your wife was bizarrely smokin' hot... that happens sometimes, to friendly, awkward, well-compensated professionals.

And there was also that one time, when you dressed yourself and your foul-mouthed daughter up like superheroes and went on a jaunt to ravage the criminal underground. It was just right, because it was YOU -- an awkward dad at heart, a family man who learned his manners in the 50's. A guy whose devotion and insecurity drove him to do unforgivable things. You were no Bruce Wayne, with all his playboy sex appeal to compliment his amateur vigilante-ism. You put on the costume because you wanted to indulge your own boyish fantasies, rather than somebody else's.

And like it or not, Nicholas, those characters are you. You've grown out of those edgy early days, when you were putty in the hands of David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, and the elder Coppola. So now that you should be inhabiting dramas and dramedic Oscar contenders, like Clooney has settled into doing, you've instead devoted yourself to wandering around Hollywood looking for that lost inner Jason Statham, aggressively miscasting yourself as an elite action star. Your career, like the lives of your characters, is a permanent mid-life crisis.

And this leaves the rest of us split, tortured, deciding whether to scoff at you or shake your hand... whether to hope that you grow up... or pray that you ride this quixotic motorcycle into the ground, forever content to pursue characters outside your nature and against everyone's better judgment.

Road to Perdition (2007): Machinist Gothic

2011-10-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition has a lot on the surface -- well-trodden themes of father/son loyalty, that slick neo-noir cinematography, some clever camera work, a host of oily, volatile secondary characters -- maybe too much, according to some. For a director who got famous making morally ambiguous, thematically twisted films like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Road to Perdition seems almost too straightforward, too direct about its hero's journey. Michael Sullivan is indeed a comic book character, and you could be forgiven for mistaking Road to Perdition for a boringly typical comic book movie.

But this figure has a ground -- there is a thematic inner world to the film, expressed in both a literal and a metaphorical layer, that brings a formal unity to the whole thing. You won't appreciate everything this deceptively well-constructed film has to offer until you recognize its inner life, the way all the parts interlock seamlessly.

Of course, we shouldn't pass by without mentioning the beautiful, polished images created by Conrad C. Hall, who won the Oscar that year. This world is dusty and exposed by day, inert in its overcast grays, but at night, it's all angles and shadows... more than shadows, it's a funhouse of black surfaces and bottomless abysses. It's an indifferent world, freezing cold or stuffy and still, with the blessing of a cool breeze only at the end, on the beach, as the plot folds back upon itself.

That polished cinematography is the first clue to how the film functions on a symbolic level. Each scene is meticulous, the camera work is orderly and slow-moving, and every element is isolated in the frame, so that all the spatial relationships can be clearly identified. These people are parts of a well-oiled apparatus, oriented to one another by their loyalty, their malice, their dependence, their pivotal, inescapable utility.

That's the subtext to the whole film: we are inside the machine. Here, before the camera, Mendes and Hall and Hanks lay bare the internals of a great mechanism, and Michael Sullivan Sr. is the rogue component, the cog that's slipping its axle and forcing everything to grind to a halt.

When Harlen Macguire asks Michael what he does, he tells him he's "a salesman. Machine parts." This is the first time he gives a cover story, but it doesn't seem to come out of nowhere... he's spent the whole film assembling various firearms, hiding them away, and explaining their use. In fact, in practically every sequence, the camera fetishizes machines -- we start with a shot of Michael Junior riding his bicycle, and eventually, he graduates to a full motor-car, becoming his father's getaway driver. Harlen the hitman is not simply a murderous reporter -- he's a mechanical eye, a walking camera that captures the souls of the people he murders. It's a world of telephones and combination safes and locks and keys. Everything in the film seems to jingle and click together and "turn over," the totems of a clockwork world that seems to run more smoothly than our own messy digital universe.

That's the literalization of the film's unifying principle. In reality, the whole Irish underworld of the early 30's is a machine, and all the characters are locked into functional relationships with one another. Michael Sullivan, Sr. is the most reliable part in the whole apparatus at the film's beginning, a trusted enforcer for the local boss. Connor Rooney is the companion piece to his father, and John Rooney is the transmission for the whole local system, functioning on its own terms to serve the larger Chicago machine.

Both Michael Sr. and John Rooney carry fatherhood as an inescapable constraint while they fulfill their functions -- murder, profiteering, regulation, organization. John, like a well-designed automaton, remains constrained by this obligation even when it turns out his son is betraying him. Knowing he's being undermined by his own kin, he just keeps idling along, acting as the responsible patriarch, keeping the rest of the community in line, making money for his family and his bosses. He never stops working right, even up to his final stand in the rain, surrounded by his orderly but ineffectual circle of bodyguards

As it turns out, it's Michael Sullivan Sr. who catastrophically malfunctions, provoked as he is by Connor Rooney's subterfuge. Once Sullivan's button is pressed, he switches into revenge mode. He can't be dissuaded by bribery, coercion, or even his desire to protect his son. He will destroy this machine from the inside, even after it's taken care of him since he was young. Michael Sullivan knows that there are some sins that are unforgivable -- there are some breakdowns that can't be prevented.

And maybe that sheds some light on the film's moralistic father-son relationship, too. Michael Sullivan Sr. doesn't seem to be able to extract himself from this system of reflexive violence... being a loyal enforcer, he's totally defined by it. But he struggles profoundly with his attitude toward his son, who he gradually initiates into the criminal lifestyle, while paradoxically trying to protect him from it. He gives his son a pistol to defend himself, he teaches him to drive a getaway car, he tells him to keep a lookout. At the same time, his misgivings are palpable... he distrusts his own father-figure (John Rooney) with the boys, he tries to deliver his son to his wife's sister, and he distances his son from the violence he carries out, albiet erratically. This is the behavior of a firmly entrenched part of a machine, trying to ensure that his son doesn't find a place in that same machine.

And unto the end, in Michael Sullivan Jr's vulnerability -- in his inability to master the stick shift, his intense love for reading and religion, his dislike for math -- he's the most organic element in this plot, the bit of soft tissue that needs to be protected from the grinding gears of the criminal underground, lest he be torn apart. This comes across as clear as day when he sits with his father inside an old farmhouse, providing compassion and patience and sips of water. The boy is not a machine... he's the one real boy in this world of pinnochios, the sole human touch.

The father-son relationships, the intrigue and depravity of the crime world, the Midwestern road trip through heartland prohibition... these are just the flesh of the story. Dig deeper, and you find its iron-clad, mechanical heart, all angles and edges and parts that lock into place... and then, even deeper inside the film, there's Michael Sullivan Jr., the soft soul peeking out from inside the great machine.

Zodiac (2007), Chinatown (1974), and the heart of the noir city

2011-10-11T20:00:00.000-04:00

At the heart of the noir city, there's a spider's web of influences and motives that never quite resolve, never quite explain themselves, never present a clear target for the apparatus of justice. It's this lack of identity, this lack of certainty, that makes the noir city such a terrifying place for us helpless human beings, who strive for clarity, balance, and closure. Humans try to consolidate their power and their organization within the city, but this only empowers the city to tear it away from them, laughing, casting its shadow.

The fact that "justice" is itself a diffuse, teetering bureaucracy of internal contradictions doesn't help; in that sense, it's just another part of the urban structure, which envelops everything within its domain. In trying to organize the truth within the noir city's labyrinth, the justice system simply amplifies its power, like a vaccine in reverse -- the virus is innoculated against the body. The judge who signs the warrant can be bought, the sergeant who carries it out can be undermined and turned aside by his own rules. In this hostile space, the regional departments compete, and the multitide of divisions collapse, burying the truth.

The outsider in these situations may be able to reclaim some power, but not much. Yes, being independent of a department is an advantage. Being free of jurisdictions and bureaucracies empowers the ambitious citizen to make his own inquiries and draw his own conclusions. But disorganization and formality is only the city's outermost defense. The true irresolvable force, the cancer at the center of the decay, is the rotting heart itself, the empty, uncertain soul of the metropolis.

J.J. Gittes discovers noir LA by wandering through its empty reservoirs and dry lake beds, using his "investigation" as an excuse to take a lot of curious walks. Though he is an outsider (a private dick as opposed to a beat cop), he generally falls in line with the city's cynicism, following people around town, taking photographs, and profiting off his clients' troubles. But Gittes has a bad habit: he occasionally takes a personal interest in his clients and tries to save them from the city's tentacles. In this, he is a true outsider, an idealist... a guy who falls stupidly in love with women and trouble, who picks at scabs and turns buried secrets into open wounds.

I rewatched Chinatown (1974) because I'd just seen Zodiac (2007), and the dark tangle of intrigue and bureaucracy in the latter reminded me of the indecipherable architectures of the former. It's hard to overstate how different the Chicago of Zodiac is from the LA of Chinatown, the former being a crowded, murky, confrontational fortress of institutions, the latter being sun-drenched and empty, wealthy and lonely and in a state of gilded deprivation. Chicago is flushed and choleric; LA is dizzy and dehydrated. But both cities are big, cynical centers of misanthropy, and both of them are hard on their heroes. Robert Graysmith is to Chicago as Jake Gittes is to LA: a pesky savant, an outsider looking for the inside track, stirring the mud as he indulges his own obsession.

Of course, Robert never gets the stamp of approval that we all want: an arrest and conviction for his suspect. The city doesn't yield up closure so readily, and sometimes, a glimpse of the truth is all you're ever going to get. But Robert does achieve something heroic, even if he goes unrewarded: he confronts that sinister underside of the city, stepping up to it and staring it in the face on multiple occasions. He finds his way into the basement of a Projectionist who seems unmistakably significant in this whole Zodiac affair; he meets a woman who recalls a dark, shadowy figure at her bohemian painting parties; he looks into Leigh Allen's eyes.

In Zodiac, the city is an empty morass of connections and uncertainties. At least in the LA of Chinatown, it comes down to a few specific people, a few brazen confessions. But what a rotten heart it is! At the heart of the city are the Crosses, one of its most powerful clans, embroiled in incestuous relationships and opportunist plots to destroy farm families and reclaim the land for the wealthy. Gittes unearths the Cross's bizarre culture of transgression, appeasement, and favoritism: Mr. Mulwray, the business partner, is sleeping with his wife's sister-daughter? The connections to Noah Cross are so dense, so intractable, that his motives seem to determine the whole structure. Did Cross and Mulwray really sever ties over the ownership of the water supply? Or are all these wealthy, broken degenerates still in cahoots, working in uneasy but unbreakable cooperation to protect their fucked up family?

Good-looking, bad news

So Gittes discovers the truth. Kind of. He's turned up the soil wherefrom this rotten tree has sprung. But once he sees its face in Noah Cross, once he tastes its tainted fruit in Evelyn Mulwray, his power ends. He can't hold these people accountable, nor expose their poisonous influence. Their crimes converge and dissolve on a street in Chinatown, where nothing's really reconciled. And maybe this is a worse fate than blissful ignorance: knowing the darkness that lurks within the noir city, and knowing that you can't do shit about it.

Where Gittes found an impenetrable knot, Robert Graysmith finds something else: the erasure, the uncertainty, that the noir city presents as its final face, beneath the masks of violence and domesticity. He discovers, in Chicago, a troubling fact: the fact that actual, physical events, in all their brute violence and cruelty, eventually disappear, leaving only a facile layer of information. Four years later, Graysmith is still asking, "Who committed these murders?" A better question may be, "Did these murders actually happen?" and even this is more or less irrelevant, because the murders are gone, diluted in history. All that's left of them are anecdotes, clippings in binders, casings in envelopes, handwriting samples, marks on certain detectives' records, an "open" case file.

Robert Graysmith rages against that emptiness, that void, by drawing together what information he can, but more importantly, by finding the people who were involved in the slayings: Linda del Buono, Rick Marshall's friend the movie poster artist, and finally Leigh Allen. Through them, he finds actual anecdotes, the traces of real experiences, so much of which has disappeared after four years.

Robert Graysmith never really sees as much of his picture as Jake Gittes sees of his own. But Robert wins a small battle against the vast forces of the city's unexplored labyrinth -- in the absence of any confirmation, Robert Graysmith comes to his own conclusion. He approaches his suspect in a hardware store and looks him straight in the eye, and at this moment in the film, we can see Robert Graysmith make a leap of faith -- the leap from suspicion to belief. This is only victory a man like Graysmith can retain in the face of overpowering uncertainty. This leap of faith may be nothing but appeasement, but at least there's that. J. J. Gittes never has anything like that.

SIDE NOTE: I think Zodiac, the film, actually presents us with a possible resolution, though it's never quite spelled out for us. Consider: during the extended climax of the film, Robert Graysmith confronts two different men. First, the projectionist, who admits to making posters that seem to match Zodiac's handwriting. This confrontation happens in the basement of a house, the deepest cavern Graysmith reaches in this affair. And there's someone else in the house... someone who flees before Graysmith can identify him.

The other person Graysmith confronts is the perennial suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, who seems connected to the killer in every possible way: he has the right boots, he has a watch with the symbol, he lived near the first victim. But Leigh Allen is exonerated by... his handwriting! And the DNA samples from the letter.

Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this, but to me, this suggests the simple conclusion: Leigh murdered the victims, and the projectionist wrote the letters on his behalf. No connection between these individuals was ever uncovered, and yet, they fit together, like perfectly-shaped puzzle pieces in a picture that's never assembled. Leigh may even have been in the house when Graysmith was there; if he had seen him, it would have brought the whole affair into focus, but he missed him, and so the truth once again eluded him.

Anyway, that's my leap of faith. I follow Robert Graysmith in coming to my own conclusion, at least in terms of the movie's version of these events, and I'll stand by it until something upsets it.

The Event: Occupy Wall Street and Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T19:30:00.000-04:00

History takes a strange twist when two big things happen on the same day, and they're related enough that they converge in the news media. That's what happened yesterday, when the Occupy Wall Street protests got big enough to spark some police conflict, and then, in the evening, the death of Steve Jobs was announced and totally took over the media. I've been personally following the protests, finding in them an interesting change in the timbre of political participation. Most of the country is still ignoring them, but this is becoming less and less possible.

The news of Jobs' death, on the other hand... nobody could ignore that. It totally overwhelmed public discourse for the rest of the night. Even the protestors, caught up as they were in the surge of a mass demonstration, had to find time to tweet about the Apple CEO's passing.

The two events create a stark contrast, happening at the same time like this. The protests, in the words of McKenzie Wark, are truly an "event" -- they feel unprecedented, as if they're subverting the media cycle of sensationalism and forgetfulness. This kind of public gathering and outpouring of emotion, this mass expression of discontent, perpetual because it doesn't articulate a terminating condition -- it's a rare occasion, and this is truly the first event of its kind in the age of mass media. It demonstrates the validity of those philosophical concepts like "aletheia" (Heidegger) or "event" (Badiou), which seem so useless most of the time, but that take on a new vitality when you're in a situation like this, and you truly don't know where it's going.

Jobs' death is totally different. The signs were there for months: the autobiography, the resignation from Apple -- and yet, it was sudden, like getting jabbed with a needle is sudden, even after thirty seconds of watching the doctor get the syringe ready. In that way, even its suddenness was sort of predictable. Jobs' death was a confirmation of the cycles of seasons, the rhythm of life and death, sweeping up even those people who have been elevated to icons, to ideals. He joins the ranks of Amy Winehouse and Mother Theresa in that respect, a victim of the tyranny of the inevitable. His death wasn't an "event" in the radical sense... it was a landmark, a testament to the power of Eternal Return.

It's hard to overstate the importance Steve Jobs had in our culture. His name is one of the most widely-recognized, and he presided over Apple at a time when it was systematically shaping our whole cultural framework. This is an information age, and Apple's always been at the leading edge of information access and organization. The number of loving eulogies is a testament to this fact (read many of them here, as noted by Jason Kottke).

And maybe Jobs' infamous lack of corporate charity is part of the zeitgeist, too -- the zeitgeist of the super-rich in-crowd, a massive social class of self-made millionaires and billionaires, created by market speculation and booms in information technology. It's been argued that this crowd suffers from a problem of entitlement and self-interest, a disconnected (almost patronizing and authoritarian) attitude toward the social and political structures, which they're subject to, but not really a part of. That's another topic altogether, worth pursing, but outside the scope of this reflection.

Indeed, if we can't pay tribute to Jobs as a humanitarian, we can pay tribute to him as a projection, representing capitalism in all its best and worst attributes. Out of self-interest, he created world-changing products and historical innovations -- radical events in their own right -- and he represented the power of freedom and ambition and authoritarianism. That's free-market capitalism: a blind visionary, seeing the whole world through the prism of itself.

Acknowledging that fact is a cause for concern for some activists, because it leads to a deluge of criticisms, like this one and this one, from both inside and outside the movement. Twitter: the new platform for mass soul-searching, amiright?

Chances are, a lot of people at Occupy Wall Street had to make some very quick assessments of what they really thought of Steve Jobs last night. On one hand, there's a good chance they were using iPhones and iPads. They may have been radicals, struggling to excuse their own brand-loyalty; they may have been moderates, trying to decide where Apple's consumer-friendly empire fits on their gradient of indignation. A few of them -- notably the occasional left-leaning libertarian -- may have looked at their iPhones, looked up at a pro-Obama sign, and thought, "Should I really be aligning myself with this movement?"

Self-defenses are simple to generate. "We're unhappy with the system, not the individuals who have done well for themselves within in." Or how about, "It's the collusion between money and politics, not the actual companies themselves." Or, most obviously, "This is about banks and financial speculation, not about companies making retail products." These are all reasonable, though they don't completely close off the argument.

Ultimately, though, the final answer is a universal truth: we have to accept, in some measure, what we oppose in another measure, or in another form. We have to "waffle," as it were, between seeing the value in personal ambition and monetary incentives, and seeing the danger in letting it run unfettered. In its healthiest form, market capitalism drives human progress and keeps economies balanced. When it's toxic, it takes over everything: the political process, the lives of individuals, the educational system, the military.

The Occupy Wall Street protests aren't so militant that they can't struggle with these questions. It's one of the visible struggles within the protests: anti-capitalist? Anti-consumerist? Or just anti-Big-Five-corporate-banking? It goes right along with the other tensions that are being dealt with: pro- or anti-Obama? Pro- or anti-Cop? These dichotomies are yet to be decided, and in some cases, it may be up to the subject of the dichotomy (Obama, the police, etc.) to win or lose the movement's favor.

Because of this mushy flexibility, the protests are able to absorb outside resources -- support from unions, support from celebrities -- without, thus far, being infected or assimilated by them. These allies are accepted in good faith, even as their merit is being internally debated. Like any good democratic mass, this collective has constant ideological indigestion.

In fact, Occupy Wall Street exhibits all the best and worst of the democratic process, just as Steve Jobs exhibited the best and worst of capitalism. Occupy Wall Street is flexible and open, few voices are "silenced" arbitrarily, and it's in constant flux, adapting to situations and expressing the changing ideologies that are allowing it to build momentum. It's ecstatic and troubled and massively inclusive. At the same time, it's indecisive, anemic in terms of concrete long-term goals, and it frequently splits. Sometimes it seems to teeter on the edge of mindless mob rule. One part goes to Liberty Square, one part goes to the NYPD, one part goes to the Brooklyn Bridge. The human megaphone is empowering somebody, and we can all hear them echoed in that messy multitude, but nobody knows who's talking, or what the hell their qualifications are.

This Occupy Wall Street movement, this "event," as it were, will only survive if it stays true to its troubled nature, its indistinct but deeply-rooted value system. Certainly, as this Tea Partier points out, there will be lots of attempts to appropriate it. It needs to keep thriving off that kick, that emotional resonance, that you get when you're part of a collective sentiment... when your own unsettled idealism is amplified by the voice of the masses.

There is no right time for a landmark like Steve Jobs' death -- it was always predestined, and no matter when it happened, it would have been a shock. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is delivering the kick of rupture, of the radical event -- and those of us who are investing in this movement are watching closely, hoping that for this movement, the "right time" is here.

The Oneiric Break: Dream structures in four major films

2011-10-04T11:00:00.000-04:00

I've sensed a recurring structure in a range of highly-acclaimed films, a lot like the self-destructive female archetype I wrote about a while ago. In this case, I've noticed it repeated in four films, all with that sort of "high-concept mainstream" status. There's an extremely high chance that you've seen at least one, and maybe two or three, of the ones where I've discovered it.

Instead of trying to weave all the criticism together, which I'm sure would result in a big discursive mishmash, I'm going to describe the template right out front, and then describe how each movie fits into it. Like most of these common structures, it's surprisingly elaborate and surprisingly consistent, once you know what essential elements to look for.

This structure always seem to occur when there's a male protagonist. This male's sexual desire, somehow unfulfilled, is a key narrative feature; this male is generally pursuing an agenda of desire, mixing sexual, sensual, and romantic desire. As the story develops, this manifests as pursuit of a particular female.

In the course of the story, there's an initial sense that this protagonist is in the real world (just an assumption of cinema in general, really), but in short order, this reality always gives way to a dream-world. Sometimes this happens just through implication, other times the transition is quite explicit. Generally, this dream-world is trance-like and vaguely hallucinatory -- sometimes through subtle touches of surrealism, sometimes in dramatic and disturbing ways. However, at first, it's a peaceful dream, a dream of comfort and routine.

However, in the climactic moments of the story arc, this dream world becomes a nightmare, manifested as bizarre and sinister disturbances in the surrounding order. This nightmare world is generally unlocked by that obsessive sexual desire -- sometimes right at the moment of its fulfillment.

From here on out, I'll call this moment the "oneiric break" -- when a good dream suddenly turns into a horrible nightmare.

The rest of the plot is the protagonist trying to restore order to this nightmarish world, often through death, either literal or symbolic.

Here are the four test cases. Please let me know if you can think of others! The first two are films that make the "dream" themes explicit, and then fill into the formula from there. Also, warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.

1. Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe)

Crowe's unexpectedly cerebral Cruise-vehicle was loose and jumbled... much to the chagrin of his usual fan base, but to the delight of cinematic masochists like myself. As with many of these, the line between real-world and dream-world is blurry right from the start, as David Aames' self-indulgent playboy lifestyle almost seems like a good dream from the first moment -- complete with references to paintings and echoes of pop songs.

This is the best initial test case, because at the end of the film, Tech Support basically lays out the formula. The dream officially started when Sofia picked up David from the sidewalk after a humiliating bender. The oneiric break occurs when David flashes back to his damaged face when looking into a mirror, and its nightmarishness is consummated when Sofia is suddenly replaced by Julianna. According to Tech Support, this break occurs because of a malfunction in the machine, but according to Dr. McCabe, it might be the result of David's guilt over how he treated Julianna (was it the neglect, or the sexual desire? Or both?) Finally, Vanilla Sky ends with a return to the real world, via a symbolic death: the fall from the top of the skyscraper.

Vanilla Sky is interesting in that there are TWO objects of desire: Sofia is the ideal, the Madonna, a paragon of love and support and intimacy; Julianna is the whore, a seething sexual cauldron of possessiveness and jealousy. This variation on the basic pattern will be repeated in one of the other films.

Also, note the plastic surgery theme, which will be repeated later.

2. Brazil (Terry Gilliam)

Again, in Brazil, the "dream" theme is very explicit. Also, as in Vanilla Sky, the initial "real world" and the parallel dream world hardly vary at all in terms of realism; Sam Lowry's dreams of a monolithic concrete city and an evil samurai, aided by a team of tormented monsters, isn't much more out-there than the clockwork bureaucracy he lives in, the whole of which operates as a sort of Benny Hill Rube Goldberg machine from hell.

If you interpret the whole film as a dream, the oneiric break seems to come when Sam and Jill are finally consummating their romantic interest. This is when the fulfillment of forbidden love becomes the nightmare of incarceration and torture, and eventually, this implied nightmare of torture gives way to the explicit nightmare of Oedipal confusion and madness.

Three additional interesting notes about Brazil: first, it's named after a song, which will occur in one other movie in this group; this song is used to signal the final, empty disconnect as Sam regresses into a permanent dream-state. Second, as with Vanilla Sky, the film includes a fascination with deformation and plastic surgery. Third, there's a "mask" theme in Brazil, though it's not as developed as the mask motifs in Vanilla Sky and a later film.

The next two cases aren't explicitly "dream" films, but when you watch them, it's pretty clear that this is shit that would only happen in a confused person's head while they're asleep. Plus, the "dream" interpretation of each of these films is widespread in criticism and reviews.

3. Blue Velvet (David Lynch)

In terms of this structure, Blue Velvet is the loosest of the four films. There's clearly a mixture of hazy dream and lucid nightmare, but the boundaries between them are porous. Even so, the themes are the same: Jeffrey occupies a sort of idyllic suburban world, ruled by convention and idealism and hope for his future. As the story progresses, this lazy fantasy is fractured by Jeffrey's insatiable curiousity, which attaches to the Ear, and by his unfulfilled desire, which draws him to Dorothy. This leads him into the strange, nightmarish world of Frank Booth.

The Frank/Dorothy lounge music seems to be an essential signal that an oneiric break is taking place -- that we've been lured by voyeurism and curiousity into a nightmare world dominated by Frank's psyche. The first lounge-music scene occurs just before Jeffrey first enters Dorothy's apartment; the second one occurs before Jeffrey decides to follow Frank to the saw mill; another occurs in Ben's house, and yet another occurs as Jeffrey is being beaten.

Two of the other key themes are repeated. First, the object of desire is split into an idyllic Madonna figure (Sandy) and a fallen female figure (Dorothy). Second, the film is named after a song -- and music takes on a pivotal thematic significance.

4. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)

Kubrick's last film is both brilliant and divisive, elliptical, enigmatic, and among his less goal-oriented endeavors. Whether it's really a dream film is up for debate, but I know which side I come down on: I think the film is mostly taking place in Bill's head while he's asleep, right after he and Alice smoke up and have a fight. The fact that a highly sexual post-mortem encounter immediately follows is a good indication: he is entering the underworld of his psyche, and he's going to be working through his subconscious desires and anxieties for the rest of the film.

And indeed, for a little while, it's all fantasy-fulfillment: an intimate moment with a prostitute, a jazz club, a mysterious party, the intrigue of an orgiastic cult out in the wilderness. The intensity escalates until Bill reaches the inner chamber of the party.

The oneiric break is pretty obvious in this film: it comes when Bill is exposed to the scrutiny and judgment of the cult leaders. From this point on, he continually finds himself brushing up against death, guilt, and retribution. The dream of fulfillment and pleasure has given way to a nightmare of anxiety and paranoia.

Bill eventually arrives home to find his mask from the party lying on his pillow. According to my reading, this discovery represents Bill waking up from his extended dream/nightmare. The mask is actually Bill's sleeping face on the pillow beside his wife, and at this moment in the narrative arc, he is finally called to return to the real world.

Note that, though Eyes Wide Shut isn't named after a song, music takes on a vast, important symbolic role. Not least of all, the pianist Nick Nightingale acts as Bill's access point to the dream-world's inner sanctum.

Note, also, the theme of unmasking as a dream transition. This blatantly echoes the dream transitions in Vanilla Sky.

So yes, there are a TON of shared themes, motifs, echoes, and structural parallels between these four films. It's hard to pinpoint any particular statement or position held by all of them; however, the structure itself might indicate some cultural anxities and obsessions that are being worked out. The patterns are just too clear and intense to be dismissed as coincidence.

As a supplement, I've mapped out all these common themes and motifs. Check out the chart below. Fascinating stuff.

Where Photography is Going

2011-10-03T02:12:00.001-04:00

Today I read something called "Is the Art of Photography Dying Due to Digitalization?" It's not a particularly new idea, but it's part of a conversation that needs to be ongoing, as conditions are changing faster than discourse can keep up with them. And the concern being voiced in this essay is still urgent.

Man Ray

As much as I'd like to simply shrug, wave it off, laugh, dismiss it, and tell this author that (s)he obviously knows nothing about photography if (s)he can't appreciate its eternal artistic value, I can't. Why? Because the author is right in pointing out that photography is changing. As the technology improves, it provides easier access, and it changes the value placed on images. This, in turn, changes the expectations, the methods, the purview of the discipline as a whole.

Because, like this essayist, I've heard people play with my DSLR (the cheapest Pentax DSLR I could find) and say, "It's so easy to take great pictures with this!" And as much as I hate hate HATE to admit it, their untrained golden-hour snapshots often look pretty high-level, as long as they're using a camera capable of capturing the light robustly. So part of me entertains, and fears, this idea: that maybe, for all photographers' self-importance about framing, and the rule of thirds, and being experts in "writing with light," blah blah blah, it turns out that there's nothing between a serious (potentially professional) photographer and a random person on the street, except for maybe a $600 camera.

The article seems to suggest that, in becoming automatic, fully democratic, and highly accessible, the process of taking a photograph is losing its artistic value. As thousands of people are able to buy high-quality cameras, and these cameras become very smart about automatically calibrating and manipulating photos, there is no barrier to creation, so millions of people are suddenly taking, and sharing, billions of photos. Brilliant amateur work starts to appear, and people stop seeing great photography as the domain of specialists and professionals.

Diane Arbus

So maybe the democritization of photography is leading to the breakdown of the photographer meritocracy.

I think there's something else, though: photography is changing because it's becoming an art of selection, rather than composition. Good photographers in the digital age know: the key to getting a great photograph is getting thousands of bad ones. This wasn't possible when you had to pay for film, and it was clumsy and took time to load, and had to be selected for the light and the speed of the subject; at that time, a photograph was created like a story or a painting is created. The situation and the intended outcome were considered, creative decisions were weighed, and commitments were made before the shutter ever clicked.

Now, the shutter clicks a hundred times -- we try every exposure setting, every film speed, every focal length -- for every shot or scene that looks even remotely intriguing. Composition isn't so much a concern any more. Instead, the creative process takes place in the office, operating LightRoom or Adobe Bridge. Instead of composing a single great shot, we're selecting the incidental great shot from the SD card full of random crap. We're doing a lot of deleting, both on location and upon later review.

This is a significant change, because it makes the art of photography more like the general process of idetifying images you like. And like it or not, picking out a great picture has never been seen as a specialist activity -- pretty much every person has the prerogative to say, "This shot is awesome!" and/or "I don't really like that one much." They don't have the training to recognize good from bad? Who cares? Everybody has a right to an opinion. And this is now synonymous with the discipline of photography -- it's just selection from a gallery of snapshots.

I do think this is happening. I think it looks like a bad thing, initially, especially to people who are invested in the meritocracy: photography professors, magazine editors, purveyors of extremely expensive professional photography systems. But ultimately, it's not a bad thing, because the new democratic landscape will be built upon that meritocracy. There will be specialization: portrait and product photographers, event photographers, artists who focus intensely on one technology, technique, or subject. The standards and the economic value of photographers' skills will change -- it may even take a big hit, as barriers to entry come crashing down. But we'll eventually find new ways to determine merit, and new ways to manage the flood of new talent at the lowest levels of the talent pool.

Sebastiao Salgado

One thing for sure: photography is on the leading edge of two cultural battles being fought right now.

The first is the wrestling match with Content, which has ballooned in volume over the last few years; photography, along with art and writing, has suddenly burst the dam of cultural access, and we're all desperately trying to manage it using little content delivery buckets, like blogs, and social networks, and self-publishing tools. It's the battle of finding SOME way of auditing and distributing all this content, however subjective, low-brow, or crowd-sourcey it is.

The second battle is the economic one, where we're trying to figure out how to deal with this excess of cultural production: who gets paid for this stuff? Has art, in its excess, dropped out of the need- and value-based economy altogether? Is it going to be the test-case for a post-scarcity economic model?

Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, in the middle of its sudden escalation

2011-09-30T18:05:00.003-04:00

After spending the last two weeks totally writing off Occupy Wall Street, the long-term protest that's been lingering in Zuccotti Park, I finally took notice today. I'd been, like, 13 days, and instead of tragically petering out, it seems to have picked up a bit of support and momentum. I was surprised to hear that.

And then today, there was a rampant rumor that Radiohead would be playing, which drew about 3000 people down to the site. It was false, unfortunately, but it certainly escalated the phenomenon by some orders of magnitude. If you're on this leftish side of the political spectrum, it seems to be worth getting agitated about.

There are widespread claims that they're incomprehensible, they have no solid platform or reasonable goals, and they really just seem like a bunch of hippies out to make a laughing stock of liberals. Those are reasonable criticisms, but they ignore the emergent truth of the protest... that it's not about particular short-term goals, or about one particular issue with a particular event, election, or injustice. If it was one of those things, it would have a clear victory condition, and it would probably have been pitifully narrow and ineffective. Crowds of chanting people don't overturn convictions or get new legislation approved. That, ideally, is the job of those politicians we all elect.

But we can maybe read a different philosophy, a different victory condition, into this whole thing. The possible positive force here -- the one thing a protest like this could potentially accomplish -- is that it reframes the political conversation. This is something that, on any given day and for any given person, is absolutely impossible. No matter how much you blog, you'll either be considered a tepid moderate or a radical twit. And because it's impossible for one person, it's often seemed, in the last decade or so, that it's impossible altogether, as if the tone of national conversation moves according to some supernatural logic (and anti-logic, sometimes).

Who proved this wrong? It was the goddamn Tea Party. The Tea Party emerged spontaneously and kept repeating its anti-government message, and this thread of conversation has totally overtaken the national political discourse. The excitement got those conservatives elected in the midterms, and it's created a marked upsurge of libertarianism, both as a political loyalty and as a theme in the wider conservative platform. It's a movement that still has legs, and as it's taken over the whole discussion, the left has lost its enthusiasm, stalled out, and started suffering a string of minor frustrations: its disillusionment with Obama's superpowers - the special elections - the Wisconsin recall vote.

And I think the reason we don't seem to get breaks is because we've lost a foothold in the national conversation.

So that's where this protest has promise: it's bringing new visibility to a discontent, vocal partisan position that has been marginalized in the national discourse for too long. When this is your criteria for assessment, it doesn't matter if there's a list of concrete demands unifying your movement. All that matters is that there's enough philosophical overlap, enough shared spirit, that it can legitimize more talk, more action, more voting and legislating.

Those claims of "disunity" and lack of focus were valid, back when it seemed like this OWS movement might just peter out. Creating momentum with such a broad base, without any particular incident to incite anger, is REALLY difficult. But the OWS protests have actually cleared that initial hurdle. Now they need to build this whole thing into as large, as global, as visible a sentiment as possible. They need thought leaders and political advocates to see that a serious leftist perspective is legitimate. They need them to sense a serious political force in the left, and they need them to try to mobilize it. They need them to see that the spirit of leftism isn't dead.

Still, this "movement" thing is at a precarious place. After the numbers swelled this evening, and the TWA union joined the protest, they all decided to march to the NYPD HQ as a protest against police brutality. Now, I know this is a convenient way to drum up defensive indignance among activist types, but come on -- this protest is about the bankers' excesses and the politicians' collaboration. It's not about police brutality or the legitimacy of the rule of law. The police officers are public workers being squeezed by the political environment, and they could make powerful allies. I hope the protestors -- especially the General Assembly -- take this into account, and make this "march" as much about solidarity as it is about confrontation.

The last last LAST thing this protest can afford to do is to alienate the middle class and moderate America, both on the left and the right side of the partisan divide. The fastest way for the movement to crash and burn will be: 1) to start railing about leftist issues that have no large-scale traction (i.e. pro-Palestine, PETA, etc); 2) to ignite tensions with working Americans and public employees; and 3) to allow any hint of violence into the conduct of the protest itself.

If you want to know if it's still going on, feel free to check out the Live Stream. The momentum may surprise you.

Southern Gothic: Night of the Hunter (1955)

2011-09-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

Night of the Hunter's genius hinges on a few key sequences, marking pivot points in the narrative and yanking the pastoral Southern setting off its rails. The scenes in between are set-ups and narrative paces, still beautifully shot and skillfully crafted, but they just make it a solid, well-made classic film. It's the intense, beautiful, harrowing moments when all the film's emotions converge -- those are the moments that elevate Night of the Hunter to a masterpiece.

As far as Southern Gothic, Night of the Hunter seems to set the stage for the rest of the genre. I don't feel qualified to ID it as a direct influence, but look how it anticipates the distinctive elements in each of the Southern Gothic tales we've already seen... four very different tones, but all echoing Charles Laughton's dark fable. Even more wondrous is that fact that each of these later films could only project one of these voices, whereas Night of the Hunter was so polyphonic that it seemed to speak with all of them at once.

Like Winter's Bone, Night of the Hunter is a twisted hybrid of Southern Gothic and film noir, its dark, impressionist spaces mirroring the labyrinthine motivations of its key characters. Though they evoke dramatically different moods, both films are stories of fatherhood wasted by poverty and desperation, and both of them chronicle the children of those fallen fathers trying to fill the void left by this loss. In this, both films seem to have a clear-eyed view of the world and its cruelty, and of the scraps of hope left in its margins.

And yet, Night of the Hunter dispenses with Winter's Bone's realism in favor of a fairy tale uncanniness, and the whole thing seems to echo with archetype, as if each character represents some indivisible fragment of the human psyche. Femininity is treated rather unfairly, as all the women in Harry's proximity fall under his spell. Harry is repelled by women, disgusted by even the suggestion of sexuality, and yet, he seems to have a supernatural way of charming them. Is this contradiction within Harry, the murderous acolyte of an abortive spirituality? Or is it within femininity itself, drawn as it is to its own indulgence and destruction? In tapping this kind of primal language, Night of the Hunter echoes Sling Blade, sharing the latter's themes of fatherhood, abandonment, redemption, and cosmic resonance.

In fact, the kind-hearted Rachel Cooper has the same Christian common sense that Karl seems to have developed in the asylum. And on the other side of this epic duality, Harry Powell seems to represent what might have happened if pedophile Charles Bushman had been released from the asylum instead of Karl... the embodiment of ultimate evil, somehow slipping through the fingers of the hand of righteousness.

Finally, like Down By Law, Night of the Hunter juxtaposes a crime/prison drama with a story of a journey through the dilipadated South, with particular emphasis on empty shacks and slow drifts through swampland. Just as Zack, Jack, and Roberto were protected from the law by the river, so John and Ruby are protected from Harry, the sinister patriarch, by the water that surrounds their little boat. And both parties find their journeys' end in the arms of a kind, loving woman whose economic poverty belies her richness of spirit.

In "pure cinema" terms, Night of the Hunter revolves around its sublimely-photographed pivotal scenes: Willa's murder, her subsequent resting place at the bottom of the lake, the dream-like boat ride, the peaceful rest in an empty barn that's interrupted by the dragon's shadow ("Doesn't he ever sleep?"), and the troubled midnight duet of Rachel and Harry. However, narratively, and in its mythical structure, the film revolves uniquely around Harry himself. He kicks the film off with his first on-screen victim, and his capture seems to prompt the eruption of the whole genteel community.

Harry is absolutely unique in all these films. Ree and Karl were Southern Gothic heroes; Harry is the inverse of that hero, the dark side of the "dweller in the margins" who uses his position for evil, rather than good. He is outrageously good at penetrating close-knit communities and gaining their support, especially by exploiting the whims of women (not gonna lie, this film's gender politics are pretty dated). Powell then starts spreading his twisted ideology through spiritual gatherings, tapping into the most vicious impulses of the people around him. He molds the community into something vulnerable and disposed to violence, implanting himself even as he exploits the trust of those he loves. He is truly a parasite.

Powell's outsider status allows him to seem like a rescuer, a soldier sent from God. At the same time, he harbors his own secret agenda, an inverse of Ree's quest to see her family survive: in Powell, it's greed and jealousy, the desire to profit, and a hatred for women... and he exhibits a sadistic willingess to destroy families in pursuit of these goals. He sustains his rampage with a host of internal contradictions... he's the gentlest fascist, the most pious of the Godless and fallen, a neurotic obsessive who's addicted to betrayal.

Of course, Harry's own influence turns on him. His sermons were self-righteous peaens to punishment and retribution. When his crimes are finally discovered, the community turns the vitriol that he inspired back on him. All the Southern Gothic films turn away from a key moment of violence and liberation, and here, the narrative's sudden turn away from Harry's lynching mirrors the camera's original turn away from Ben Harper's murder. A moment of voyeuristic satisfaction is denied us; nonetheless, Harry's trial makes it clear: he who casts stones is rarely without sin, and karma's a bitch.

Harry Powell is a beautiful, terrifying monster, a legend of a villain. He is the gravitational center of this Southern Gothic film noir masterpiece.

Southern Gothic: Down By Law (1986)

2011-09-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

Have you ever known guys like Zack and Jack? Or even BEEN those guys? I bet, if you've been a male in his 20's, you've been there. Because when you try to be hard and dispassionate, like James Dean or Steve McQueen -- which every guys tries to pull off at some point -- you end up being Zack and Jack -- a smirking, idle, ultimately unconvincing klutz who wants to be in control despite the fact that you don't know how to dress or feed yourself.

These hapless mooks are the driving force of Down By Law, a down-and-out indie prison break buddy film from Jim Jarmusch. It would fit more into a comedy than a "Southern Gothic" slot, except for the fact that it treats New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou with grungy sentimentality and discontent. The film is both sparse and humane; it finds freedom in the hopelessness of the rural Southern landscape.

If Zack and Jack are the wheels and the undercarriage of the plot, Roberto is the driver. He appears after everything has been set in motion, and he distinguishes himself from his new friends in almost every important way: he's not jaded, he's competent, he's not running from anything or reaching out for happiness beyond his own life, and he's absolutely earnest. He wins the trust of pretty much everyone he meets, starting with Zack and Jack and his audience.

Like the previous movies discussed in this series (Sling Blade and Winter's Bone), Down By Law turns away from its subject at a pivotal moment: the moment of escape. This is a notable departure from other prison break movies, which tend to focus overly-much on the mechanics of the break-out. Just like with the murders, this film is about what leads up to that escape, and what happens after... the context and the consequences, especially as it relates to the lives of these three guys wandering out into the wilderness.

Jim Jarmusch is mercifully aware that life isn't in the events, the big decisions and acts of courage -- life is in the interstitial moments, in those bunk beds that Zack and Jack find themselves returning to, first in the prison cell and then in the empty shack out in the bayou. Roberto is aware of this, as well, and he turns the mundane into the beautiful at every opportunity, relishing the chance to play cards, to cook, to dance on a kitchen floor.

It's Zack and Jack, the perennial blockheads, who try to make their lives into a series of landmarks and dramatic changes of fortune. Zack thinks he can score big by taking up a driving assignment; Jack follows a tip to find a potential working girl in a hotel room. They start fights over stupid things, apparently trying to create drama where none needs be. Through Roberto's lazy triumphs, one after another, the universe seems to be screaming to Z&J, "Stop trying so hard!"

Roberto, by contrast, is a sort of case study in the power of zen. He's never in a rush to make something happen... he befriends his cellmates through incorrigible persistence, and he tells them, almost in an offhand way, that's he's worked out a way to escape from the New Orleans prison. He doesn't get involved Z&J's squabbles; he accepts those responsibilities that fall naturally to him, like catching and cooking a rabbit as they travel through the bayou. He also accepts the task of entering the little restaurant on the road, and the universe rewards him with a kindred spirit. It's gratifying that his ending is a happy one, even if it's tangent to the clumsy forward-facing inertia of the two main characters.

And of course those two main characters end the movie the same way they began it: on a quest for complication, a collision course with more drama and more unresolvable situations. When they part ways, each of them repeats his implicit promise to keep trying too hard, to keep wandering blind and stupid through the wilderness of the world, unable to embrace the contentment that follows friendship and loyalty. Now that they have left prison and Roberto and one another behind, they will continue down their chosen path into eternity.

Southern Gothic: Winter's Bone (2010)

2011-09-28T03:27:00.001-04:00

Winter's Bone takes place in the Ozarks, in a part of the country that's apparently entirely consumed and thinly supported by the business of meth production. Protagonist Ree Dolly discovers that her father put up her house as bail bond, and if he doesn't return for his court date, the family will lose the house. She goes out to find this absent father, the truant Jessup, approaching her neighbors, and then her best friend, and then his brother Teardrop; everywhere she goes, she meets a reticence born of desperation and fear of reprisal. In this social environment, everybody has their own problems... their self-defensiveness, their resistance to getting involved in anyone else's troubles -- a sort of enforced, frozen-over apathy -- is palpable. This is partly because in this part of the world, each person's personal problems are mountainous, unrelenting, and insurmountable, and taking responsibility for someone else's struggles? Practically suicide.

It doesn't take us long to realize just how alone Ree Dolly is. She may have her little siblings and her infirm mother to keep her company, but she has nobody to depend on except herself, and you can see it in her taciturn manner: she has learned the stoicism required to survive in an economy of strict scarcity. Yet, despite her solitude, Ree is an operator. Aside from survival techniques, she also knows the rules of the community, the boundaries that she's expected to respect, the laws of loyalty, the hierarchies she's supposed to recognize.

Winter's Bone is, essentially, the story of Ree deciding to break these rules for the sake of her family's survival.

Like Sling Blade, this is a story of a member of a community who lingers on the margins. Ree uses her insider understanding to accomplish an outsider's goal: to unearth something that's been buried by the community, so that she can pacify the seige of the law before they destroy her life. Each time she meets a barrier, Ree transgresses it -- carefully, gently, but enough that she upsets the balance. Her refusal to leave Thump Milton's farm after the first warning from Merab is her first serious transgression, and she follows this up with more trespasses. At every step of the way, she finds obstruction, and in the face of each obstruction, she breaks a rule or two... often her own.

So like Karl from Sling Blade, Ree is an insider with an outsider's agenda, alone amongst her own kin. However, there the similarities end. The laws in Karl's life are explicit, products of honesty and transparency. He lives by the code of the bible and by the ethos of Dr. Jerry Woolridge, and when he has a moral intuition, he states it plainly. In the Ozarks, on the other hand, the rules are opaque and absolute, tacit but strictly enforced at every step of the way. They aren't a transcendent code of conduct; rather, they're the products of a rigid power structure and a deeply-embedded community.

This opacity, this inescapable power structure, makes Winter's Bone less of a folk tale and more of a neo-noir, a crime story where bare trees and empty meth labs stand in for city streets. Ree is navigating a labyrinth of motivations, balancing the power claims of many characters, and she only succeeds by playing them against each other. If she hadn't ignited some latent passion in Teardrop, she might never have attracted the sympathy of the Milton sisters. If she hadn't stirred up the hostility between Sheriff Baskin and the community, she might have been forever ignored, left to starve with her brother and sister.

Aside from an arguably happy ending (happy, at least, in that the protagonist's family doesn't freeze and starve), there is very little redemption along the way in Winter's Bone. Hearts don't seem to soften, so much as they seem to temporarily yield to danger and leverage. Teardrop is notably elevated by the plot, going from a negligent addict to a protector and avenger, "showing his salt," as it were. But the meth-ridden mountain community remains brutal and impoverished, and Ree's mother never emerges from her torpor.

And especially, there's the fact that we never learn the details of Jessup's death: who killed him, what enemies he made, what his final months were like. Whether he tried to protect himself, whether he appealed to his brother or his mistress, whether he ever really trusted the Sheriff. Whether he had any thought of his family's safety. The story seems to intentionally turn away from this death, allowing us, the audience, to remain curious and unfulfilled, just as Ree must be as she tries to continue her life. Her father is dead. She knows next to nothing.

And so, two Southern Gothic stories, each with a patriarchal figurehead who oversteps his bounds, who misuses his insider status and pays the ultimate price. In a sense, Jessup is Doyle, and in Winter's Bone, Karl's job has already been carried out by some unknown assailant. And each film, in its climactic moment, turns away from the most brutal deed and looks sternly at its context, its causes and its aftermath. Because in this world, there is no use in being suddenly shocked and disturbed by a murder, whether just or unjust. Shock distracts from survival, and in the face of death, life keeps moving along.

Southern Gothic: Sling Blade (1996)

2011-09-22T23:24:00.000-04:00

I watched a series of films associated with the Southern Gothic family; I'll be writing pieces on a few of them over the next week or so. Here's the first one.

It's a strange, lucid, uncomfortable movie, mythic in its banality. Seeing the incredible central performance, by the director no less, and knowing that it flowered out of a short film he worked on, it's easy to see this as a film born entirely of inspiration, the inscription of a restless muse's voice directly to the celluloid. There's something elemental and absolute about each of the main characters, and yet, their world feels unvarnished and authentic. This is Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade.

Unlike some other films in its family group, Sling Blade was not the result of a lark by the filmmakers. Both Thornton himself, and George Hickenlooper, the director of the original short, were raised in the Bible Belt -- according to good ol' Wikipedia, Thornton grew up in a shack without running water or electricity. This deep-South lineage shows in the film as a stark but sympathetic realism, an obvious love for deep Southerners and their landscape, in all its virtues and eccentricities.

This landscape is soft and pleasantly inert, like Karl seems to be; if it wasn't for Doyle, this film would be as calming and pastoral as a pasture in late Spring. The architecture seems porous and sunlit, crafted by randomness to let the breeze pass through easily. People come and go at all times, stopping by the mechanic's place, walking over to the dollar store, and yelling at the band from the next yard over. The community is so close-knit, there almost no such thing as an unexpected visitor -- anyone can decide to appear pretty much anywhere, at any time. The only exception, of course, is Karl's unnamed father, who occupies Millsburg's only impregnable fortress, packed with refuse, apparently forbidden, weeds grown high... for this fallen patriarch, every guest is unexpected... especially his estranged son, whose very existence he adamantly denies.

Having been thus disowned and exiled, Karl takes on a number of archetypal roles, without ever fully fitting into any of them. Like the Trickster, he comes from outside the community, and he seems to infect and undermine it; it is his status as an outsider that allows him to take on his most important narrative function. However, if he's a trickster, he's the least clever of all his ilk, leaning on pure honesty and lack of pretense, rather than upon strategic subversion of the status quo. In the same vein, he's a father-figure in certain respects, offering a model of morality and kindness and open-mindedness to Frank; yet, he cedes this task to Vaughan at the crucial moment, refusing to become permanently enshrined within the family as a protector and provider. In a certain way, he also fits the messiah/hero archetype, entering the world from a humble beginning, discovering a destructive unbalancing force, and then symbolically sacrificing himself to vanquish it. But as a character, he's too conflicted to be a pure force of justice and/or redemption -- he's dealing with his own demons, vanquishing his own father from his life, and coming to grips with his own history, so much so that his act of salvation seems like a bit of an after-thought.

Karl's status as an outsider is one of the thematic kernels of Sling Blade. At the beginning of the film, just after he leaves the penitentiary, his attempts to assimilate are the main dramatic drive. The tension of the locals suggests that assimilation will be the major point of conflict for Karl's story; we end up watching for hostility between Karl and each person he encounters, including his bosses, Frank's mother, Vaughan, and Doyle. Surely somebody is going to stigmatize him, misunderstand him, provoke him at the wrong moment, and he's going to become a pariah... it's the Elephant Man formula, par for the indie film course. And slowly, wickedly, the film overturns this expectation, revealing that the community is actually made up of compassionate, sympathetic people, and Karl doesn't just have vain hopes -- he has an opportunity for a semi-normal life.

What Karl proves in this red herring of a dramatic arc is that he can comply with the social norms at work around him. He's gone from outsider to insider... though he's not in charge of a household, he's self-sufficient and respectful. The community clearly values his gentleness, his honesty, and his work ethic. Still, he walks on the edge of this community, cut off as he is by his awkwardness and his spotty history. This theme -- the theme of marginal membership, of outsider/insider duality -- will come up in a lot of the Southern Gothic films. At first, Karl's perpetual outsider stigma seems to be a pure detriment, preventing him from fully assimilating -- but eventually, it becomes his greatest weapon, an ability to follow his intuition and act out instincts that the community has had to suppress to maintain order. It seems like Karl's role in the community is to perform its collective anger in the form of violence, and his passivity and introversion is the film's great, heroic irony.

Another of Karl's contradictions: in performing this violence, he takes on an unmistakable Christ-like role. He is the Prince of Peace with a lawnmower blade of justice.

It's easy to correlate Sling Blade with Christian mythology and find a convincing parallel. The asylum is heaven, our home before we're born and after we die, complete with a wise God (Dr. Jerry Woolridge) and a Satanic figure (Charles Bushman). Jerry is the true source of Karl's moral framework, having taught him that murder is wrong, that children should be shielded from the evils of the world, that he can forgive himself for his sins if he takes the time to admit them, and that life is hard but worth living. This moral sensibility is a kind of biblical common sense, learned in the asylum and applied to the outside world, and it seems to come accompanied by a hypersensitivity to good and bad intentions in others.

Interestingly, Karl lives a whole symbolic life during his short time outside the hospital -- he has a shy childhood where he discovers junk food and friendship, and then a productive youth where he lives and works at a mechanic's shop. Like any normalized American male, he goes from independent professional at the shop to stable family man at Linda's; eventually he finds love in Melinda and religion through baptism. It's not exactly in order, but he hits all the marks.

Having lived a whole life in Millsburg, Karl finally sacrifices himself for Linda and Frank, defying Doyle's presumed authority, and giving up all he worked for in the community. At that point, he returns to the afterlife, where he's shown to have chosen inner peace over the devil's insipid words. What a (hero's) journey!

Somehow, despite Sling Blade's insular Southern town colloquialism, these themes take on an epic, sprawling dimension -- perhaps because they echo throughout multiple microcosmic stories. These motifs -- fatherhood and belonging and redemption through sacrifice -- become universal in their repetition within the film, and Sling Blade reminds us (in a very Gothic/Romantic kind of way) that the same perennial human drama plays out in the struggles of each humble human life.

Next, a different Southern Gothic tale, whose dramas are much more contained, more dangerous and particular -- and how its refusal to offer transcendence or redemption, its earthbound fallenness, makes it a uniquely Noirish entry into the Southern Gothic genre.

Speculative Realism: Children of Men (2006) and Never Let Me Go (2010)

2011-09-08T18:16:00.000-04:00

It seems there's a new genre emerging in film, consolidating certain totally-unrelated developments in literature, which is too broad and diffuse for these things to really announce themselves. This is a genre I'd call speculative realism, and I think, though it's barely a glimmer in film history, we can already account somewhat for its beginnings.

The two movies that suggest the beginning of true genre identity are Children of Men (2006) and Never Let Me Go (2010), both based on recent books. These represent the plateau of certain trends in science fiction that have been building for a while, and they firmly plant themselves within some boundaries that have been established by a bunch of other movies, as discussed below. And I think there are going to be more like this. I can sense it just over the horizon.

The main thing that strikes me about Children of Men and Never Let Me Go is that both are understated films built upon science fiction premises, whose thematic sights strongly diverge from that premise, and instead converge upon broad social themes. Children of Men is about society's fascistic responses to crisis, and Never Let Me Go is about the sacrifices made by individuals in service to the vast, impersonal social order. Of course, there are stylistic similarities between them, as well... understated, gritty palettes, the use of the photographer's eye to capture the beauty of the mundane. But the genre identification is more about the set-up and follow-through.

Of course, science fiction has long wrestled with social problems. Zombies, evil artificial intelligences, man-made monsters -- it's all about our enthusiasm and anxiety over progress and social control, right? But going back, very few films engage with broad social conditions like these new sci-fi films are doing, or locate these conditions in individual experience in such a direct, unsensational way.

Still, it's not entirely without precedent. Strange Days (1995) is a direct precursor to this cinematic movement, and echoes can be felt as far back as Godard's Alphaville (1965). Terry Gilliam may be considered a direct forerunner, as well, with films like Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995). These don't have the strict realist impulses of the Cuaron and Romanek films, but they do have the interest in creating complex social relationships within a speculative setting. On the other hand, there is at least one recent sci-fi film with a deadly realist impulse, but without the social engagement shared by the films listed above: John Hillcoat's 2005 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is gritty and deadpan (i.e. "realist"), but which handles its sci-fi premise with an intensely traditional hero-myth structure. You might attach Blade Runner and Alien to that side of the genre boundary, as well.

It's a central tenet of these speculative realist films that they eschew two frameworks that are usually central to science fiction... first, the mythic hero structure centering on a messianic central protagonist; second, the utopian framework that drives most science fiction to either applaud or condemn human progress. Obviously Never Let Me Go has almost no trace of a hero's journey... if anything, it has the gray struggle of gothic romance, eventually leading to acceptance and resignation in the face of an unsympathetic world. It's also mercilessly uninterested in portraying any sort of utopia or dystopia. It portrays progress from the perspective of progress's victims, and it does not sit in judgment of this system, sanctioned by the society, which is so cruel to a chosen few.

Children of Men is a little more heroic, and a little more openly dystopian, but it still downplays both of these frameworks. It's only about a dystopia in so far as it shows a society that's broken down in an attempt to preserve itself... unlike 1984, there's no sense of sinister dominance or absolute control. Rather, the whole film shows entropy and decay winning out over the cynicism of a fascistic government. And as a hero, Theo doesn't win any mythic warrior awards. He protects his charge, as he's been hired and obligated to do, and he's admirable in his loyalty, but his role as a protector is purely secondary to Kee's role as savior of the human race. The film's quiet, unsentimental ending shows us just how insignificant Theo was... how he was essentially an observer, a dedicated servant, and that the true work of saving the species is a much longer journey, of which we have seen only a fragment.

This both connects and distinguishes these films from some recent close relatives. In particular, I'm thinking of District 9 (2009), which certainly starts out as a speculative realist film, a science-fiction film transplanted into a very modern morally-ambiguous social ecosystem. As promising as it was, District 9 eventually mutated into a heroic rebel fantasy, with the transformed Wikus as the token boundary-crossing hero figure, and the apartheid South African society as an oppressive dystopia. Stylistically, the pseudo-documentary format of the film was also too self-conscious to quality as realist. In all traditional realist filmmaking, the eye of the camera is purely transparent, built to preserve continuity and present the characters in a direct, lucid style.

Gareth Edwards' debut feature Monsters (2010) has a similar profile to District 9... it's built around an interesting speculative social reality, but eventually becomes about the main character's acceptance of the hero/savior role, his personal journey of enlightenment, and the traditional romantic love story that ensues.

How about Duncan Jones' Moon (2009)? Another contender, but in that case, I think the setting was too remote from the everyday social reality that it was working to establish. By taking place in an isolated space station, and by adopting certain surrealist tropes, Moon became a direct psychological investigation, more of a cerebral rubik's cube, rather than a film of human experience shot through with social reality.

What connects and differentiates Children of Men and Never Let Me Go is hard to pin down... the sense that they're taking place in an unpredictable, unplanned outside world, controlled by ambient social and political forces... that much of the action is improvisatory and reactive, and that "fate" and "destiny" are conspicuously absent... that ideals and ethics are a loose, unreliable veneer over a wilderness of id and instinct... all these implications are present, and important to the soul of the genre.

There IS one other film that I think belongs squarely in this genre space, and it significantly precedes the two recent ones I've mentioned. This is Michael Haneke's Le temps du loup / The Time of the Wolf (2003), and though the premise isn't exactly high-concept (society breaks down for some reason and everyone becomes a refugee), it does pursue that premise with a relentless eye for the social realities of a struggling populace. It watches like a case-study of what would happen if you took a rural society, with its expectations for comfort, security, and civility, and hit the reset button on its hierarchies, power structures, and property ownership. It doesn't hurt that it's beautifully poetic and humanistic at its critical moments. It is a film that will stick with you.

There are a few that might qualify that I haven't seen yet. Spike Jonze's Scenes from the Suburbs might be a great reference point for this emergent genre. I won't know until I get to check it out, though.

I think it would be lovely to see Jim Jarmusch take on a serious science fiction project... this would be a great area for him to contribute some work. And I can think of one or two novels that would be pretty sweet if you adapted them as speculative realist films: how about Ursula LeGuinn's The Dispossessed, for instance?

Insidious (2010) as a story of Soul Stealing and the Shadow Self

2011-08-23T20:22:00.004-04:00

In his review for ReelViews, James Berardinelli insightfully compares Insidious to David Lynch's Twin Peaks. The comparison is especially illuminating when you consider the final episode of Twin Peaks... Agent Dale Cooper's descent into the madness of the Black Lodge to rescue an innocent soul; a confrontation with a devious presence, and the uncertain possibility of return.

Lots of reviewers praised the suspenseful, haunted house setup of the first half of Insidious, while panning its second half, in which it turns into sort of a surreal malevolent netherworld adventure story (yes, the production design was a bit ghostbustersy, but we'll let that slide for the moment). It's baffling that these reviewers liked that first half so much, when it depended so heavily on the most basic genre formulas... figures appearing and disappearing, quick movement across the field of vision, slow POV shots through doors and hallways, sudden laughter and creaky noises, and spooky shadows and children. It was The Others, The Grudge, The Changeling, The Shining -- it worked fine to unnerve us a bit, prove to us that the director could set up suspense and then disperse it in nice time-release bursts -- but it was pretty much straightforward genre path-tracking.

But the second half of the film, which they called outlandish, over-explained, and silly... that's where the genuinely frightening ideas started to come out, and where the film got adventurous. The reviewers thought the explanation killed the suspense and the mystery, but the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that it's the explanation that suggests the most frightening possibility: the promise of an endless, ticking, static abyss awaiting our minds when they stray from our bodies.

This conceptual horror story starts with Elise's explanations, and if you're not keyed to really think about it, it'll all pass right by you. Astral projection isn't a scary thing unless you start to imagine it as an extension of your weirdest, most confusing nightmares... as with Dalton, who thinks he's dreaming when he travels. And it doesn't seem dangerous until you consider the fact that, as Elise tells Josh and Renai, as you wander further from your physical body, you gradually lose your connection to it, and it becomes an empty vessel.

I think I was especially susceptible to this suggestion because of my own fascination with David Lynch, Renee Magritte, Jorge Luis Borges, and the whole general idea of being alienated from yourself.

For someone who thought this film was just a tossed-off spook story, this may sound like interpretive overreach, but the theme is actually buried very deeply in the film. The photography motif, for instance? Photographs trigger this anxiety, the fear that your selfhood can be stolen from you and captured in a box hung around somebody's neck. There are all sorts of folk stories about foreign cultures, where people think that a camera can "steal your soul" (read a brilliant piece at StealingSouls.org to understand how this belief says more about the people who attribute it to primitive cultures than it says about those cultures themselves). And just as cameras capture souls, so Dalton's soul is captured by the man with fire on his face, his essence ripped from his body like Peter Pan's shadow.

In Insidious, it seems as though some of those "tortured spirits" can only appear as images. The family, murdered by one of its daughters, never moves on-screen except in jump-cuts, and their faces are constantly flicking into grotesque smiles, as if they're always stuck on a strip of film. Other apparitions seem more corporeal; nonetheless, they're often seen through frames: doorframes, windows, or through the veil hanging over a crib. In the real world, their appearances are always mediated.

So Insidious is about characters alienated from themselves, astrally projecting and repressing memories. Further than that, though, it's about a world alienated from itself: when Josh, hypnotized into a trance, steps out of his living room, he finds himself looking into the family's previous home, which they fled in order to escape these bad vibes. That home, with its spiritual hazards, becomes the projection of a shadow world, and Josh has to step into it to find his son. This is the film's Black Lodge, the dark side of the threshold, and we can gain some insight by looking back at Lynch's work.

Infamously, Lynch's Black Lodge harbored shadow-selves of the series' main characters: a version of Laura Palmer with milky white eyes, a version of Dale Cooper with a menacing smile, joyful in his emptiness. There is a similar symmetry in Insidious, and it's between two powerful paternal presences: Josh, the guardian father, on one hand, and the creature called Lipstick Face Demon, on the other. Is it possible that this is Josh's shadow-self, left over from his own travels into the Further when he was a child, matured into something sinister?

This isn't obvious on first glance, but it's worth considering. Josh, as a parent, has sort of an absent spirit. He can't pick up Dalton from school at the beginning of the film; he starts escaping into long hours at work when things get difficult. He's the last of the family to realize the true nature of his son's problem.

The Demon, on the other hand, is the inverse evil aspect of Josh's slow-moving fatherhood. Instead of being disengaged from Dalton, the demon is obsessively interested in him -- especially in exploiting him. It hovers around Dalton's bed, demanding the use of his body, menacing him and intimidating his family. He seems to know Elise, and even to have some connection with Josh's mother. Are these really the actions of some random demon who happened upon a lost spirit?

Insidious is a broad film that's much more complex than it seems on the surface. Not all signs point to this parity between Josh and the Demon, but there are some other signs of a connection between them. Both are shown, at key moments, huddled in empty work-spaces: Josh isolates himself in his classroom to escape his responsibilities at home; the Demon tinkers in a workshop whilst keeping an eye on Dalton. Again, this is the contrast between them: the ghostly, absent father versus the overbearing warden, watching for a weakness to exploit.

And of course, there's one of the most commonly captured shots of the film, where the Demon's face is juxtaposed with Josh's, as seen through his mother's eyes.

The symbol of the flame is the final, cockeyed piece of this puzzle. The ghost of an old woman, a parasite that follows Josh, is almost always shown hovering over a lit candle, and at the end of the film -- after Josh has apparently been possessed by her -- she is seen blowing it out (much like Agent Cooper empties the toothpaste tube at the end of Twin Peaks). The demon surrounds itself with candles, and Dalton calls him "the man with fire on his face."

My full reading works out something like this: when Josh was a child, he ventured too deeply into the Further (just as Elise says), and was followed back by a parasitic spirit (the old woman). However, in repressing his ability to project, Elise actually cut Josh off from a part of himself (represented by the flame) -- and over the years, that fragment developed into something aggressive and hungry, burning with resentment, and eager to return to its family of origin. It developed a hatred for Elise, who had cut it off from its source personality, and it developed a desire to control Josh, and to possess Dalton, his son. And it lingered around the family, waiting, until it discovered that Dalton could wander out into the further, where he could be placed in chains.

And finally, by returning to The Further to rescue his son, Josh facilitated his reintegration with his demonic offshoot, and they merged and vanished into the spiritual abyss. And the only witness to the self destruction of the Josh-Demon entity was the spirit of the old woman, who gets to inhabit Josh's body, and finally, blow out the candle of his fragmented soul.

The Naked City: familiar moments from an NYC noir

2011-07-19T19:00:00.000-04:00

Naked City is a beautiful and curious artifact, especially if you're locked into the little New York City bubble of self-regard (as I am, along with most of the bloggers I follow). It's curious because of the tangible resonance of each scene, the strange alien familiarity of each city-street sequence. Simply writing about it -- waxing prosaic about the soul of the Big Apple, by way of an obscure silver-age film noir -- would have gone beyond even my own limit of self-indulgence, so instead, I looked for the beauty and strangeness in the frames themselves. You can find those below. A lot of what's worth noting is also kind of funny, at least to me.

It's worth noting that LA Noir, the recent electronic entertainment offering by Rockstar Games, was partly inspired by The Naked City. Funny that they repurposed the personality to be so West-Coast, when the film itself prides itself on being NYC Vintage. Still, you can feel the gamer spirit here, as well, with its exploratory pace, its chain of tasks and obstructions, its puzzles waiting to be assembled and unlocked. All the accented side-characters may as well be NPC's, and sometimes the dialog feels like it was written to be repeated to every passer-by.

Go looking for the film, by all means, but don't expect anything groundbreaking from the story itself. It's a detective story reduced to its most predictable beats. Instead, watch it to see this police procedural narrative, these tricks and twists and technicalities, just as they're being repackaged for drama and turned into mythology. Also, watch it for the details, the things the filmmakers probably didn't realize would be noteworthy, some of which I've presented below.

Here is a beautiful on-location shot of the Williamsburg Bridge, from the climax of the film:

In the 1940's, boys did a lot more swimming in the East River than they do now. Is this because 1) it was cleaner? or 2) they weren't as worried about the constant stream of refuse?

Have you EVER seen this many kids playing on a swingset at once? There's a girl standing up on her swing, and a little boy climbing way up one of the poles. I doubt I've ever seen as many kids in a whole playground as Detective Halloran is currently interrogating on that swing set.

Throughout all of recent history, salons have been the testing-grounds for alien brain technology. In the 40's, it was less big plastic bubbles, and more wires and spark plugs.

It's not completely obvious from this photograph, but this blind man's seeing-eye dog is also an attack dog that mauls anybody who bumps into him -- as Willy Garzah is about to find out.

Speaking of Willy, you can tell he's an athlete and an acrobat, because he's the only guy in The Naked City who wears sneakers (Vans? Chuck Taylors?) with his three-piece suit.

But finally, after all these familiar scenes and nostalgic moments, my favorite detail in the film: as Detective Halloran is chasing Willy, this random dude appears behind him, walking the same direction, and carrying a Pomeranian that's apparently too lazy to walk.

It's nice to see that some things never change.

Tree of Life: Malick, Proust, and the cinema of memory

2011-07-14T19:00:00.003-04:00

A month or so ago, I started reading Swann's Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust's epic novel "In Search of Lost Time" (otherwise translated as "In Remembrance of Things Past"). About halfway through, I went to a screening of Terrence Malick's widely-discussed recent film, Tree of Life; there was much to admire in it, but also lots of mixed feelings and dubious appreciation. And just last week, as I was finishing up Swann's Way, I discovered it was Proust's birthday. Happy birthday, Marcel!

Tree of Life is difficult to reconcile privately, I think. It's one of those films that's loose enough -- devoid enough of structure and cues, sufficiently unhinged from standard expectations -- that you might never really know what (or how) to think of it until you can bounce your ideas off of someone else. It's interesting, the way it demands to be reflected upon, and thereby, in a strange way, makes the act of analysis kind of mundane. When you do a critical reading of Wolverine or Harry Potter, there's something subversive about the act... when you write a meditation on Tree of Life, it seems almost perfunctory (i.e. this, and this, and this, and this, and this). The movie is asking for us to read it, to interpret it, to generate conclusions about its themes, its imagery, its technical and creative decisions. In a certain way, being ambiguous and experimental is its way of being predictable (at least to Terrence Malick fans and film students, who seem to be its audience).

In terms of scale, and in relation to the director's other work, I'd liken Tree of Life to Darren Aaronofsky's The Fountain or Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" films. Each of these feels like the director was trying to reach some pinnacle of style, as if to max out their own capacity for filmmaking. In each case, the result seems to overreach, toeing the boundary between eccentricity and self-indulgence. Aaronofsky and Tarantino followed their respective films up with fresh approaches... Aaronofsky totally reversed his heightened melodrama and made The Wrestler, almost comically opposed to The Fountain in spirit. Tarantino took a break from exploring tortured souls with Deathproof, and then went on to make Inglorious Basterds, which was another "masterpiece" film, but felt more like a film he was willing to grow into, and out of.

Perhaps Malick will give us something radically different with his next film, as well; his sensuous-poetic-introspective mode really does seem to have reached some sort of apotheosis with Tree of Life. These speculations aside, however, it's an important demonstration of an artist's ability to push his own defining tendencies as far as possible. The stylistic similarity to Badlands, Malick's first film, is tenuous at best, and he seems to have purged every conventional narrative and literalist instinct that was present in that first film.

Swann's Way was the culmination of Proust's work, as well, though I'm not sure whether he intended it that way (Proust scholars? Steve Carell?). The story is told as a sequence of interwoven memories, some being direct accounts by the narrator of his own life, and others being accounts of the life of Charles Swann, a French aristocrat, whose life intersects with the narrator's at a few key moments. There's a constant theme of budding love and the frustration of romantic asymmetry, all grounded in memories of specific people and places. It's the secondary characters, people like Aunt Leonie and Mme. Verdurin, who make the book so readable.

These two works have the potential to illuminate one another considerably. There are both stylistic and structural similarities between them, and I think you could discover some concordance in their intended effects. Both are experienced as emotionally-fraught reminiscences of grown men looking back on the defining moments of their lives. Both feel like reveries, journeys of the imagination to a personal history of the senses, of sights and smells, less concerned with motivations and grand designs of human lives and more concerned with individual moments.

For instance, the narratives in Proust are evoked via involuntary memory -- the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, the sight of a pink hawthorn flower. These memories, meandering through the narrator's youth, are not called forth as an explanation or a didactic personal history; rather, they emerge as images from a mind freed from immediate tasks. They're the daydreams, distractions, unchained nostalgia, the roaming spirit. They are already filtered, leaving only the most significant, the ones with the most emotional resonance.

And this is why Malick's film feels the way it does, as well: it's a reverie. It's the adult Jack's escape from his solitary life, into his own sense memory. Youth is when memories leave the strongest imprint, and these childhood vignettes quiver with the vitality of boyhood.

One of the tensions in Tree of Life, hinted at in the criticism, is between the feeling that it's "naturalistic" (i.e. referring in an authentic way to memories of an actual time and place) and the feeling that the whole thing has something of the glossed, exaggerated artificial about it. It's a testament to Malick's skill that he can evoke both a real time and place, and also the mood, the golden glow of nostalgia. But the tension between "naturalistic" and "stylistically overwrought" won't really be resolved, because the film is largely about the transition between the two: about how memories become myths, about how the filtering and feedback of internalization can turn the banality of a simple sense impression into a cosmic signifier, a portent, a lesson about good and evil and failure.

Of course, that treatment leads to these scenes having an echo of archetype. (Theory side note: despite the constant references to Heidegger in the criticism, I'd argue that the film owes more to C.J. and Sigmund than to Martin). Mrs. O'Brian's butterfly, and her levitation; a harsh lesson about letting a screen door slam, a backyard wrestling match, a ruined watercolor, a house submerged in water -- to those who are symbolically literate, these might seem too obvious, too blunt. The signification begins to overwhelm the immediacy of the scene. In using such symbolic details, Malick puts himself in a tough position: he has to use convention, tapping the familiar to bring out its semantic resonance, but he has to do it in a way that doesn't feel played out. His product is defensible, but not flawless.

In Swann's Way, Proust seems to have fully solved this problem. He floods his narrative with perceptual details, many of which resist interpretation; he focuses on those things which have personal resonance for his narrator, such as the sight of a female form through the shurbbery, the moments of tension between Swann and Odette, and the unconsciously cruel remarks of Gilberte. Rather than relying on the great reservoir of pre-defined cultural symbols (Malick perhaps overuses the symbols of water and trees), Proust creates an internal symbolic language: the madeleine and the hawthorn, the blue feather, the monocle, the pathways through Combray, the writing of Bergotte. This allows the story to remain contained, and provides a cohesion that Malick never achieves.

In a sense, Malick is trying to do far more than Proust was doing: he's trying to link the episodic memories of an individual life with the mythic history of the universe as a whole. The origin-of-the-universe scene, which I haven't even touched upon here, attests to that ambition. He's also doing it in a single two-hour movie, rather than a seven-volume masterwork of literature. This is perhaps one of the downfalls of this fallible film: it starts to leak out of its scope, and with no horizons, its themes get fuzzy (which is not quite the same as being "complex" per se).

Whether you can appreciate Malick's ambition apart from his execution -- whether you can marvel at his imagery without getting too caught up in the convention and ambivalence of his symbols -- that depends on how you judge execution apart from intention, and on how keyed you are to his particular mode, and to this film's particular time and place. Variance aside, however, it's remarkable how much Malick has to say about what and how we remember our lives, and how these memories make us who we are.

P.S.

I think there's a lot more to be said about this film. Wish I had the time, energy, and expertise. For instance:

Why does it use the language of gestures, in lieu of actual dialog? Could it be seen almost as a ballet or a modern dance?

What of Malick's romanticized and stylized naturalism, especially considered as an objection to "realism" as a filmmaking philosophy?

With a nod to Nathaniel's post of things people were heard saying at the film, what makes this film so difficult? What's to be gained from spurning the audience's expectations of narrative direction, rhythm, and legible emotional cues?

As noted above, what about the debts to Freud and Jung? Just how densely archetypal and psychological is Tree of Life?

Kyle McDonald and PeopleStaringAtComputers: sorting out the issues

2011-07-11T19:00:00.000-04:00

Kyle McDonald's work on PeopleStaringAtComputers has generated a lot of free-floating controversy. He installed a program on computers in various public places, and those programs caused the computers' cameras to take photos, scan them for faces, and then automatically send them to Kyle. He apparently curates them and uploads some of them to that Tumblr once in a while.

News services and commentators (and enforcement agencies, apparently) are all scrambling to figure this whole thing out. It's one of those little hacks that opens up a grab-bag of property rights, privacy rights, and representational politics issues. The idea that a computer is secretly taking pictures of them and sending them to some random dude is making tons of people genuinely uncomfortable. This is true even if it's a public computer, and even if the application asks permission, albiet in kind of a sneaky way.

What's left to consider, skillfully asked in thefactoryfactory's piece on the topic, is the question of how this differs from other, similar situations that set the legal and ethical precedents for it (I didn't see his name explicitly referenced, but his handle is joshuajnoble, so for now, I'll refer to him as Noble). Noble brings up the fact that this is happening in a public space (well, not technically public, but not the private property of the subjects of the photos), and we presumably appear in photos and videos in this kind of space all the time, from security footage to webcam feeds to backgrounds of other peoples' pictures. He also points out that we have our information collected, analyzed, and sold ALL the TIME, usually as statistical information that can be used by marketing people. Yet, a lot of people -- all over blogs, forums, etc -- seem kind of stirred up by this whole thing.

So the ethical question isn't so much a contractual or rights-oriented issue of the letter of the law. It's more about the ethics of consent. If people are all so indignant about this, it means there must be something unique about this particular situation, right? That's not covered by all the related situations that seem to set the precedent?

Noble's approach is illuminating, but also sort of obfuscates the nuance. By breaking the situation down into the various precedents, he shows the various issues at stake, but he fails to account for their convergence in McDonald's work. As I see it, there are three things all in play.

First, CONSENT: if you're going to capture a representation of a person, it's considered ethical to get permission, even if it's just by way of EULA.

Second, VISIBILITY: there's something very intimate about taking a picture of somebody; people don't personally identify with "data" about them, but they definitely identify with an image of their face.

Third, BANALITY: we're all highly sensitive to the fact that computers are everywhere, and we don't really know exactly what they're doing at any particular time; our modern lifeworld is built around this lack of transparency.

So why are these Kyle McDonald photos making so many people exceptionally uncomfortable? I'll let the diagram explain it for you:

Mr. Noble's examples isolate these three aspects and show how each one can be glossed over in the name of an information-rich datasphere. However, when he says, "None of the complaints seem to make very much sense to me," he's willfully denying an important fact: in this case, these issues are all active at the same time.

And it's a rare phenomenon that reminds us just how transparent and visible our personal lives really are.

AFTER-THOUGHT: I'm not trying to argue that this should be illegal in any way, or that it's unethical; in fact, this kind of non-standard boundary case -- this kind of unexpected defensive impulse -- is just what any good art should trigger. I'm just trying to make some more sense of it.

Life Developments: Dixie the Optimus S

2011-07-07T19:00:00.000-04:00

My fiancee and I both finally got new phones this week. She got that 3D Evo, less for the trapped-in-a-virtual-cube effect and more for the processing power and range of capabilities; I got the slightly more modest LG Optimus S, reasoning that I wanted an efficient, capable touch-screen phone with a compact physical profile and the Android OS. It didn't hurt that it was free with the new contract.

The subsequent process, for both of us, can only be described as "pair-bonding." I start by working toward a very basic level of familiarity with my new companion -- figuring out where the most consistent menu options take me, what kinds of touches and taps are acceptable, and which ones cause undue tension. As I get to know my phone better, its capabilities gradually become more transparent: it can help me with directions (GPS), it has access to a whole library of specialized training in the form of Android Market apps, and (perhaps the most gratifying part) it can keep my social life straight for me, doing the constant work of associating names with e-mail addresses, phone numbers, Twitter accounts, and Facebook profiles, and consolidating that all in my list of contacts. My Optimus is frighteningly intelligent sometimes.

Of course, as I learn how to cooperate and respect my companion, it goes through a process of imprinting, as well. I train it to be quiet (at first it would ding every time I got a new email), I decide on a desirable background photo, I go about the work of creating special shortcuts and custom commands. I respect the phone, but at the same time, I have to maintain some authority over it, and even in the short time I've had it so far, it's bonded with me enough that it would be pretty inconvenient for anyone else who tried to kidnap it.

I'v been told to root the phone... to break into its OS so I can control its memory allocation and such... but this feels like it would be too harsh, in a way, a violation of the Optimus's integrity. At the moment, it's being very cooperative, and I haven't even scratched the surface of its capabilities, so I'm not sure hacking its admin accounts is really necessary at the moment.

I haven't named the phone yet, but I'm working on it. I'm sort of scanning my mental library of names and references, considering things from literature, film, video games, and just general names that I like. For some reason, I kind of like "Claude." Also, because my most common screen name is "symbot," I thought of calling the phone "robol," which is a reverse recombination of the two words in that handle. I think I'm gonna skip all the anime names, because naming a

cell phone after an anime character is just a little too obvious.I've named devices after literary main characters before... I had iPods named Mersault and Roquentin, named after the main characters from The Stranger and Nausea. This feels a little wrong, though, because the phone is not really going to be fulfilling a main-character role. I would call it Melmoth, just because I like the book, but there's almost nothing else fitting about the name or the character it would be referencing. Now that I watch more movies and TV, I could always try to figure out a sidekick name for it -- Chewy, Ethel, Sancho, Renfield, Alfred, or Sam.

But as I've thought about it, I've realized that I don't think of the phone as a sidekick, so much as a familiar. It's really, like, a little assistant that I have around so much that it eventually becomes a friend and confidante. So now I'm trying to think of names of familiars: Archimedes (Sword in the Stone), Thing (The Addams Family), Bartok (Anastasia), Boh (Spirited Away), Brown Jenkins (Dreams in the Witch-House) and Graymalkin (Macbeth). There's also some Sapient Steeds that have nice reference names: Falcor and Shadowfax come to mind. I'm sure there are lots more, especially if you start accounting for imaginary friends and such.

Taking it a step further, I think there's a fair stock of digital familiars and sidekicks recently. The Dixie Flatline from Neuromancer is one of my favorites. There's also Jarvis, from Iron Man, and HAL, which is a name I would not want to adopt for something that had an important role in my life.

I think I'll go with Dixie. Now I just need to find a ringtone that sounds like a strange, inhuman laugh.

An appreciation of Simon Abrams' "What is a Bad Movie?"

2011-07-01T17:30:00.000-04:00

An introductory piece in a new series called Simon Says is called "What is a Bad Movie," but it's really not about badness; really, it's more about criticism showing us how movies are good:

"That’s what criticism should strive for: making films like Zardoz, or a vastly more mainstream but still eccentric superhero film like Green Lantern, look good—and in general make films whose faults and/or merits might otherwise be inaccessible more accessible."

I massively appreciate and sympathize with this piece, and want to riff off it a little bit. I'm a constant reader of various types of criticism... popular reviewers like Ebert and Edelstein, critic/reviewers like Jim Emerson and Pauline Kael, and writers with a committed scholarly ethic like David Bordwell (and many others whose names I forget, because I only read a single essay from them). Also, I read various blogs and forums, populated as they are by a Frankenstein patchwork of amateur opinions and analyses.

Some of this criticism is transcendentally good, and some of it is totally parasitic. The difference, I find -- the continuum upon which this merit can be evaluated -- is how much the reviewer engaged with the film they're commenting upon. Indeed, this is the greatest strength of scholarly writing and pop criticism... judgements aside, you really have to attempt to understand a film before you can offer any kind of interpretation or analysis. And the most recognizable common feature of bad amateur criticism -- stupid forum comments, incessant complaints from nay-sayers -- is that you can always sense that the commentor never gave the film a chance, never really opened themselves up to it.

There are certain code-words that indicate whether a person engaged with a film or not. "Pretentious" is a big one, usually used by people who were faced with an opaque or challenging movie and simply weren't interested in going there. "Pointless" is another one. "Boring" is perhaps the most universal -- it can be used in conjunction with both "pretentious," and as its opposite... many high-brow fanboys will refuse to engage with any big-budget summer action movie, justifying themselves by saying, "See, I'm the type of person who finds THAT stuff boring."

This schema favors the descriptive over the prescriptive, and the prescriptive over the proscriptive. It recommends complete surrender to a film as the best possible response, and patience as the second-best (i.e. in the case of films that don't hook you). It's a method that discourages cynicism, and has no regard for dismissiveness or contempt.

To be sure, I pretty much never hate a film. I think hatred is something that only makes sense as an instinctive response to a threat or an enemy -- an automatic, defensive way of reacting to something whose interests seem to conflict with your own. Why would I ever hate an aesthetic object? What has a movie ever done to hurt me?

That said, I don't think criticism has to be exclusively positive. Nay, the most salient and scathing condemnation is the type that first engages with the film, and then discovers its contradictions, flaws, and weaknesses. There are all sorts of films that reinforce negative stereotypes, or act as destructive propaganga, and these require active engagement and critical acuity to be recognized and deconstructed. Troy Duffy's Boondock Saints is probably the most egregious example of subconscious propaganda, a manifesto of postmodern sexism, ranking right up there with Triumph of the Will in terms of films-with-agendas. To a lesser degree, there are also hidden messages in Avatar and X-Men: First Class, the subliminal, insidious expressions of the filmmakers' (and audiences') subconscious minds.

But even with these movies -- even the most egregious -- the critic needs to step into the movie to understand its orientation. Some of the darkest films, the most dependent on stereotypes and negative energy, may actually turn out to be critiques of these ideas, rather than unreserved expressions of them. The difference between something like Hostel and something like Funny Games is subtle, and to engage with it, you need to really engage with the films. Yes, both of them.

Have I said this before? I feel like I have, because I think it, constantly. Every time I read a piece like Dan Kois's Cultural Vegetables essay, or Ebert's blustering, and subsequent further-consideration, over Thor, I think about this. I think about how important it is, for the sake of the medium, and for the sake of our own psyches, to invest in these films, to become as involved with these hypothetical, fantastic, mythological worlds, as we did with our own invented make-believe landscapes when we were children. Criticism, like all consumption, and all its corollary activities, should be about having a strict filter, especially if it's merely an enforcement of one's own tastes and habits -- it should be about being a sponge, a proud cultural processor, desperate to find meaning, even in things otherwise disregarded.

Jay Smooth and the Distributed Personality

2011-06-23T22:55:00.004-04:00

Jay Smooth provided a video meditation on Gil Scott-Heron's death, by way of the media aftermath of that event, and it's poetic and insightful, as with all of Jay's work.

I wanted to respond to this with my own thoughts on the subject. I understand where Jay is coming from, in terms of being frustrated with the amount of bile and hostility that seems to spontaneous jump from digital interaction. Seems like trolling is sort of a standard mode of online interaction at this point, doesn't it? And once it starts -- especially from people who often sound well-informed and reasonable -- it's extremely hard not to get pulled into it right along with them, trying to do your own part in regulating the discourse and making opinions (about opinions about opinions) known.

At the same time, I'm a full-on collectivist futurist technophile floozy, so I can't disapprove of this extra layer of mediation that we're all subject to, even in the sort of calm, tolerant, high-level form that Jay's skepticism seems to take. I think there's a reason for this kind of turbulent crossfire second-guessing that happens constantly, in every sort of online dialogue, that creates both these total rhetorical asshats ("trolls") and, on the other hand, those people like Ze Frank, Roger Ebert, Jason Kottke, and Jay Smooth himself: the people whose voices, for the first time in history, are really finding the cultural capital that they deserve.

It seems to me that the Internet is a sort of higher-level processing unit, emerging from all of our consciousnesses, all interfacing simultaneously. It's a larger consciousness, not necessarily exceeding, but at least reflecting, all the confusions and multitudes of our individual minds: our repressed desires, our frustrations at ourselves (which, as part of the Internet, take the form of frustrations at one another); our mixed feelings about very personal things, our submerged prejudices and twisted senses of humor, our crippling second thoughts. And because it's public, open, and accessible from pretty much anywhere at this point, it makes all those things totally transparent, in a way that they aren't when we suppress them in our own personalities.

The id is particularly strong in the Internet. I've been to porn sites, I've seen flame wars, I've witnessed smart people descend into terrible, destructive lapses in logic... I've seen it everywhere. It's only the appointed, contractual watchfulness of community admins and the restraint of the more rational members of these forums that allows this latent chaos to deflate each time it erupts.

So I love seeing Jay Smooth's own conflicted process as he reads other peoples' tweets, and gets frustrated at their limited ways of appreciating a hero whose work is very personal to him. He seems to scare himself, to some degree, with his own frustrations, and he handles it by returning to Gil Scott Heron's music and discovering an answer: a sort of zen withdrawal, a realization that he can't be fully embodied in a digital world, and that he can't idly let that world define him.

And yet, I'm here offering the flip side to this equation. Those frustrations, that instinct to reject others' inadequate appreciations, that possessiveness and bitterness, is a part of Jay Smooth's personality, just as it's a part of each person's. We can escape the Internet for a few minutes at a time, but we can't escape that darker side of ourselves. The people who follow those instincts blindly are n00bs; the people who intentionally incite them are trolls.

But Jay responds as I hope more and more people do, with an inner strength and insight that I think the larger Internet is slowly developing. He steps back and lets his love, his appreciation, his roots in his younger self, speak to the world and defuse his own hostility. This gentleness, too, is an integral part of his personality, and it's a part of him that emerges in this video. Just as we see all parts of the strange and conflicted human race in the information layer, that digital substrate, so we see a full portrait of Jay Smooth in this video: the id, with its competitiveness and resentment, eventually dissolved by the superego, with its rational, uninhibited love for Gil Scott-Heron, and then his ego, his inner mediator, relating the whole process back to us, his audience.

It's a noble act for him to lay this bare for us. It's a beautiful thing to watch. And it's also a noble legacy, issuing from the teachings of the late Gil Scott-Heron.

Mirror Themes in Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides

2011-06-15T19:00:00.000-04:00

There is a lot of mirroring going on in this text. Lawful and chaotic, land and sea, male and female, decay and renewal... it's all about the dichotomies. At some point, somebody may be able to construct a serious interpretation from these observations. For now, I'm just going to let them stand on their own.

Jack Sparrow meets his double, an imposter who is using his name to recruit a crew, in London, England; he discovers that this imposter is actually his former lover, Angelica, who spends the rest of the film acting as his female inversion: headstrong, clever, fatally loyal to her father, and dangerously fickle in her friendships. At the end of the film, Jack maroons her on a tiny island, a fate to which he has often found himself subjected in the past.

Barbossa, the great pirate, has defected from piracy and become a privateer, working for King George II -- a strange second-degree betrayal, the treason of the treacherous. Barbossa has a history of seeking, and sometimes attaining, a sort of twisted dominance over death, which has brought him to the land of the dead and back. In On Stranger Tides, we meet his counterpart, the legendary pirate Blackbeard, a devoted buccaneer who now seeks the same thing that Barbossa has already found and lost again: the control over his own death, which has is destined to come at the hands of a one-legged pirate (the mortal encounter with his own double).

The mermaids are infamous for being sirens who prey on men, using their beauty and sexual allure to drag them into the sea. The pirates invert this relationship, driving the mermaids toward shore and finally catching one of them, whom they capture and drag onto land with them, keeping her imprisoned in a glass coffin.

This image -- the image of dry land as an inversion of the underwater, always interchangable with it -- is repeated in later sequences, especially the image of the grounded ship of Juan Ponce de León, perched on top of a cliff in Whitecap Bay. Looking at it from below, the main characters seem to be walking on the ocean floor, seeing the Spanish ship floating above them.

The Fountain turns out to be a mirror, as well, through which youth can be attained by way of inversion of the aging process. Two identical chalices are filled, and one of them contains a mermaid's tear; the person drinking from this chalice steals the life force of their reflection, the person drinking from the opposite chalice.

And Jack Sparrow, being the film's center of attention, is mirrored in another way, as well: there's a tiny voodoo doll of him floating around, granting his enemies power over him. This doll, appearing in a sequence after the closing credits, prompts Angelica to ponder an important question: is she sympathetic to Jack, her mirror image, who saved her at the expense of her father's life? Or will her cruelty win out?

X-Men: First Class can't bear its own weight

2011-06-14T19:00:00.001-04:00

This article by Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a broad, sentimental case for reconsidering X-Men: First Class in light of its purview of history. He makes a good observation, but he doesn't really even scratch the surface of the film's politics. It's a film being championed by reviewers across the US, appreciated by critics and fans alike as a return to form for the series, and yet, under even the mildest scrutiny, its politics and fictional histories start to look twisted. And ultimately, First Class proves itself to be a very pure form of that plague of the modern blockbuster: it's a film that doesn't stand up to even a breath of critical thought, and rapidly caves in under pressure of critique.

SPOILERS AHEAD ALL OVER THE PLACE

As Coates points out, X-Men: First Class is a conceit about society and The Other, played out by a small, oppressed group of superhumans, and thematically linked to the Holocaust, one of the greatest genocidal catastrophes to ever affect white Westerners. Aside from being an emotional trigger, the Nazis also abstractly represent the repressed Patriarch, embodied by the evil Sebastian Shaw and eventually co-opted by the troubled Erik Lensherr. This is a worthy background for a film about self-actualization: the rigid, destructive hegemony of the warlike Father is an interesting counterpoint to the whole idea of modern pluralist democracy.

In First Class, there is a proliferation of White Americans and Brits, running the government, running academia, fixing the problems left over from World War II, and managing the new war against Russia. Xavier champions the emerging Western ideals of plurality, rational restraint, and assimilation, the necessary foil to both Sebastian Shaw's wealthy, power-hungry genocidal tendencies and Erik's reactionary liberation violence. What a cluster of conflicts we have here: power, retaliation, and restraint, played out in all those terms defined by Western international politics.

And from the sidelines come our minorities, Darwin and Angel; in the wake of strong men come our female characters, Emma Frost, Raven, Moira, and Angel again. And here is where First Class actually shows its true colors: in the treatment of these marginalized characters, the traces that the real world leaves on this fantasy of rebellion. That's where the film's unstated assumptions appear, and ultimately, these speak louder than any of the pandering aphorisms that Charles and Erik exchange.

The racial minority characters in X-Men: First Class are both African-American. There's nobody of any other race in sight. In a movie taking place in the 60's, during the height of civil rights activism, this is significant: this is a sign that Xavier has already reached the level of consciousness that the whole country is still struggling to attain. These black characters are a stripper and a cab-driver -- two blue-collar jobs, the employment of people just trying to get by, avoiding attention, already assimilated. And in the very first encounter with the primary antagonist, one of these two characters betrays the cause, and the other dies trying to prevent her defection.

I don’t know if this happened to anyone else, but in my theater, there were some groans and boos when Darwin appeared to defect, and then died at the hands of Sebastian Shaw. And why shouldn’t we jeer? These characters, the only two actual minorities in a whole film about being a minority, are treated in the most frivolous way possible, as triggers for our emotional response. The sting of Angel's betrayal is sharp but absolutely empty, coming from somebody who has no apparent reason to betray the rest of the group; the sting of Darwin's death is even sharper, and though we have no more than a few minutes total devoted to his real life, we have a solid 30 to 60 seconds to gape as his body burns up and falls apart. He was effectively rendered a Black Cop Sidekick with no inner life, only developed enough to be a victim, an emotional patsy with a melodramatic long death scene, and a demonstration of Sebastian Shaw's evilness.

I want to keep writing about the stupidity and callousness of this treatment, but writing more about it won't help. If you're not outraged by the first viewing, you should be angry now, since you've gotten a chance to think about it. If you're not, then maybe you'll be outraged on the second viewing. If none of the above, then you're probably not going to be very sympathetic to the rest of this critique, either.

It sucks being a non-white person in this alternate-universe 60's (New?) England, but you know what sucks even worse? Being a woman!

Now, I know women weren't doing so well in the 60's, which were still trying to correct the hyper-domesticated gender relations of the 50's. I know Sebastian Shaw is an autocratic villainous fascist superspy, so it makes perfect sense that he would order Emma Frost around to get ice from glaciers in her underwear. In fact, that line of dialog was one of the few occasions in the film where it seemed to be aware of real-world oppression -- where the actual struggles of human beings seemed to impinge upon its fantasy for a moment -- so I applaud it. There is a wealth of potential here: being a woman, born powerful, in a society that devalues you based on your gender? Being a person for whom "pride" might mean complicity in an entrenched system that constantly oppresses you? What opportunities!

But in First Class, there was a tragic consistency -- an equal treatment of all women, whether they were villainous or noble, willfully subservient or supposedly "liberated" -- in that they were all treated as trophies for the three major patriarchs. Their value within the plot was reduced to sexual interest and ideological loyalty, which were constantly conflated. Emma Frost was basically a concubine for Shaw, and Angel started the film out as a stripper. Raven's key dramatic moments had a consistent sexual/romantic component: her moment of jealousy and suggestivity toward Xavier in Oxford; her fleeting romantic encounter with Hank, which could have become an important character development, but was actually just a way of creating an artificial sentimental bond between them; her apparent attempt to seduce Erik, apropos of nothing. Moira, the CIA agent, was one of the only female characters with any institutional clout, and she attached herself to Xavier from the beginning of the film; in the end, of course, it's revealed that her interest in him went beyond "professional."

The females in this film are not oppressed minorities or the unacknowledged Other, or even independent, active characters in the field of powerful personalities. They're basically a scorecard, awarding points -- in the form of sexual and ideological loyalty -- to whoever's rhetoric is winning at the moment.

A film that deals with The Other is great, and if it can wrap it into a fantasy in order to make it easier to digest, all the more power to it. But that kind of purpose comes accompanied with some responsibilities. In a film about oppression and marginalization, you have to make sure you're always CONSCIOUS of the ways you put that oppression on display. X-Men: First Class was unforgivably blind to its own politics, and its representational devices totally sabotaged its explicit message of self-actualization and liberation.

I would have liked to say it was a good movie, just because it was fun and the young mutants were endearing -- but someone once said to me that you can't call anything "good" if it doesn't stand up to some reflection without immediately becoming "bad." Sorry, Matthew Vaughn... you're going to have to retake Earnestness in Storytelling and Critical Thinking 101.

Film Tropes and Twists in the age of Information Overload

2011-05-20T12:00:00.000-04:00

Nathaniel at Film Experience Blog makes a passing remark about Von Trier's bizarro Nazi situation, and then turns his attention to a more interesting issue (Thank God): is it possible for us to be taken off-guard by a movie these days?

Nathaniel's right, these are changing times. Django Unchained's script has already leaked and been circulating, and in no time at all -- literally with the simple perusal of a fellow blog -- I know it's going to be perhaps his most controversial movie yet. In terms of speed and density, discourse has outpaced the ability of the audience to engage their cultural artifacts. Movie reviews will offhandedly remark that "the twist was (effective/implausible/predictable)" and think they're being opaque, but they're not. Even knowing that there's a twist in a movie will alter your entire perception of the film.

This is a curse that seems to have uniquely affected M. Night, although in very arcane ways. His career peaked right at the moment when basing a movie on a "twist" was still possible, and this was a big dramatic mechanism for him, especially in his early movies. Since those groundbreaking revelations in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, people have lost their appetite for his retroactive game-changing reveals, and his whole artistic identity took a hard blow. People were lukewarm on The Village, cold on Lady in the Water, and positively hostile toward The Happening. Honestly, I thought Lady in the Water was interesting, constructing a subtle fairy-tale ecosystem, hermetically enclosed within the ruins of crass vacation motel kitsch.

And M. Night hasn't been able to recover his artistic footing. He seemed to be flirting with self-conscious irony in the marketing of The Happening, but it did nothing for him (not many people even picked up on it). He tried to move into zeitgeist CGI popcorn blockbuster territory with AirBender, but nobody bought it. I think it was just too big for him. And while I still think the whole Facebook "Send M. Night back to film school" meme was unnecessary and mean-spirited, I still acknowledge that these were unfortunate twists for a twisty director.

Of course, Nathaniel's making the same point about Von Trier's work (did you ever think you'd hear M. Night in the same analysis as Von Trier?). He's pointing out that, though AntiChrist didn't depend on twists and surprises, it DID depend on the visceral reaction you get out of seeing something sudden and gruesome happen on a cinema screen. Same, I think, with Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, which I just rented this past week. It's on NetFlix Instant -- what more clearly signals that a film's lost its "arthouse shock" credibility? At any rate, I suffered the entire time from Information Fatigue. The visuals were bizarre and breathtaking, but I also kept thinking, "Wasn't there supposed to be more sex? When do we see the fetus? Is it time for the shocking climax yet?"

This also describes the reasons that I've been indifferent toward a lot of the "mind-bend" movies on tap lately. I'm Still Here, Catfish, Exit Through the Gift Shop -- these all sounded seriously fascinating, but I never pushed myself to go see them. Knowing, ahead of time, that they all depended upon self-sabotaging twists and revelations gave me the sense that I wouldn't get anything real valuable out of the experience of actually watching them. Like the rest of the wired-up world, I can't really be caught off-guard any more, and even suspecting that a film is trying to sucker-punch me has the automatic effect of turning me off to it.

Nathaniel frames this as a lack of appreciation for the unknown, and he wonders "if this will cycle back culturally to valuing secrets". I don't think that's really the root of the problem. I think it's (as I said above) sheer speed and density of information that's shining this punishing light into the dark spaces of discovery, and I don't think it'll go away. Information is kudzu, climbing all over everything, and there's no reason to think it will suddenly backtrack and become respectful.

I think, instead, the medium will have to adapt to the environment.

After all, there are some aspects of the film-attending experience that are immune to information-dilution. The key quality that's going to survive information-overload is the pure sensory experience, the synthesis of visual and sound that only activates at the moment of apprehension. It's something that Aaronofsky has really been straining to perfect, and it's worked out well for him... you could describe Black Swan or (even more so) Requiem for a Dream shot-for-shot, and you still wouldn't take much away from the immediate visceral experience of actually watching the films.

Cinematography and sound-editing are going to be EXTREMELY important in the future, perhaps more important than writing or timing. You can prepare yourself for a twist or a jump-cut or a shocking scene, and by preparing for it, you'll blunt its effect on you. But you can't prepare yourself for an incredible, surreal, perfectly toned close-up or photographically-composed landscape... at least not in the same way. Films like Blue Valentine and Never Let Me Go can sustain a heavy assault of spoilage, and they're still beautiful films that draw in the eye.

And here's the thing -- I think even the slow wits in Hollywood studios are starting to understand this. The great films of previous decades -- Deliverance, Blade Runner, Terminator II -- were relentlessly plot-driven, labyrinthine in their shifts in momentum, exercises in pacing and expectation and unexpected dialogue. Newer blockbusters, films like Avatar, Bourne, and now Thor, don't try to play on anticipation and disclosure like those older films did. They allow their plots to form organically, around tried-and-tested myths and tropes, so that they can be concerned with the immediacy of experience, the shaking of the camera and the complete sensory immersion in Asgard or Pandora.

Critics will groan over the lack of creativity in writing, about the utter failure of originality in the era of the adaptation, but subconsciously, they'll appreciate the increased emphasis on the senses: Zack Snyder's slow motion, Christopher Nolan's formal experiments in montage and sequence, Tarantino's use of well-known tropes to create truly inspired single moments. And even as they complain about those plots, they will also spoil them for us, and in the future, it won't particularly matter.

Thor: Get up on your soap box, Blondie!

2011-05-06T20:58:00.006-04:00

Thor! Critical response: widely assessed as "definitely good enough," except for a few particular critics, who totally couldn't get into it. The most unique film of the decade? Or of the superhero era? Or of the summer? Or of the month? Probably no, on all counts. And yet, it was worth making, and it's worth seeing -- not just because it worked as a film (it did), but also because it's a wise decision, fellow movie-watchers, to experience this critical part of the Avengers saga that's been developing over the last few years.

Now, I know that a lot of people think this film is very pedestrian, and only really functions as a long-form preview of the Avengers movie. There is some merit to this criticism, but don't take it too seriously... just because it's part of a slowly-developing mythology, and a lot of the film is hitched to this larger, half-formed "Avengers" thing, it doesn't mean it's a bad film. Or even an incomplete one. Nay; in fact, I think one of Thor's accomplishments is that it's both a significant part of a massive whole, and also a self-contained, fully-realized burst of myth-making in its own right.

The film is not ground-breaking. It hits a series of essential comic book beats... a half-hearted romance, a spiritual awakening on the part of the protagonist, an apotheosis, a return to the fray to redeem himself. Most of these are just monomythic tropes, retrofitted to the comic book genre, just as they've been retrofitted to pretty much every other action movie since the dawn of time. Then, it's also got some more precise parallels to its Avengers predecessor, Iron Man: a warlike playboy undergoes a personal struggle that leads him to a place of newfound respect and compassion; he takes on the traditional Hero role, and ultimately has to defeat some monster linked to his own past... Thor battling his brother, Tony Stark his old business partner. Yes, it's a formula, as also seen in Spiderman, Batman Begins, The Lion King, etc etc. Thor commits no crime in adopting the template.

We all know that narrative innovation is not why you're seeing this film. There are other, very good reasons to go see it. First and foremost, Thor nails a very particular tone in both the character and the setting. It's a wide-eyed adolescent idealism and naivety, something that plays as mythic/Shakespearean melodrama in Asgard, and then seems a bit clumsy when displaced into New Mexico. It's all about the fact that Helmsworth's Thor is the perfect virile man, with just a touch of boyishness, and a dash of tenderness to endear him to the female population that he's set to win over. The overserious myth undermines itself in the awkward details, Kenneth Branaugh's touches of craftsmanship. "We drank, we fought, he made his ancestors proud."

The character AND the setting. This is important. That "stay golden" feeling permeates the whole film, from the artificial golden Olympian walls right into the center of the family conflict, with all that courtly drama and those epic speeches and heroic posturing. We come to understand Thor because we see where he comes from. Nobody from those hallowed halls could be cynical, or jaded, or shackled in self-consciousness. This is a land where everyone is regal, and even here, Thor is the son of the king!

So it works. All by itself, as a movie, it works. It's a routine action romp with some big aluminum costumes and grand CGI sets, lots of lens flares, and the appeal of both an outrageous epic courtly drama and an endearing fish-out-of-water action comedy. The same character inhabits both worlds, so ultimately this hero-coming-of-age theme bridges the gap between them.

But it also works as part of something larger. And though you may hate that you seem to be paying for part of something unfinished... really, it's not so bad.

Did you ever watch wrestling? Before every major match, each wrestler gets an entrance sequence. He comes marching out, accompanied by a theme song, and for the bigger matches, there's often a whole stage show, a band, fireworks, a gospel choir, a massive Alice Cooper-style skeleton. For those few minutes, that wrestler basks in the glory of his own identity, merged with his surroundings, establishing his own mythical space.

Or, on a smaller scale, consider the recent character-based trailers for X-Men: First Class, providing individual bios for Banshee, Havok, Beast, and Mystique. You don't have to just jam all the major players into some grand scheme that reduces each of them to a particular role, a narrative chess piece. Without his little trailer, Banshee might always just be a cog in Professor X's wheel (pun less relevant for this film, but whatever). I think the studio owes him this little bit of promotion, a little personal space where his light can shine.

This is what the Thor movie is, in terms of the Avengers. It's an entrance, a character bio -- a platform for Thor to represent himself, where we can fully understand and invest in his character. Same as Iron Man was for Tony Stark. Same as Captain America will be for what's-his-name.

These three individual movies will allow Marvel to set up the cosmic relationship between these three elemental forces. Tony Stark, the savvy, smart-ass pragmatist, represents business and technology, the human technocracy at work in the modern world. Thor, with his wide-eyed Olympian power, will represent the mythic human spirit, man's timelessness and capacity to overcome our puny physical limitations. Captain America, the boy-scout, the nationalist, will represent patriotism, the collective historical spirit of pride and leadership and purpose. Technology - Spirit - Patriotism. And if the Hulk is in there, he will have to represent nature, the animalistic rage of the untamed world, which man finds within himself when he gives free rein to his fury.

Iron Man was already set up. Now we've got Thor, fully fleshed out and forged in his Olympian hyperreality. Next, we need Captain America, rising up from the smoke of a bygone World War. Then we'll be ready to see them get put together, directed by the Wheedster, and the fireworks can begin.

On Dating Tall Men: Rationality and romantic/sexual selection

2011-04-15T17:06:00.006-04:00

Okay, so Kay Steiger wrote a blog post called "Dating Tall Men", arguing that when women relentlessly select tall men over short ones, they're actually exhibiting a form of old-school bigotry.

Naturally, a lot of people don't like this. After all, it's a widespread method of selection among women, and nobody likes having their romantic and sexual criteria questioned. We're pretty protective of that particular liberty! And here's this Kay Steiger woman, calling a very common sexual requirement "irrational." Among the responses is this one by Andrew Sullivan, who says that sexual selection isn't a rational process, and shouldn't be – that it needs to be discriminatory – so Kay needs to put her PC pitchfork away.

But here's the thing -- this blog post makes perfect sense, as long as you look at it with a little subtlety. Granted, the Internet is bad for that kind of thing, but that's why you've got Benefit of the Doubt here to give you some perspective. Miss Steiger's argument is entirely justified from a pragmatic perspective, and it's even credible from a theoretical perspective, if slightly overstated.

Among the commentors, and even in Sullivan's response, there's a general claim that sexual preferences are in-born (one of the commentors calls it "hard-wired"), so we can't change them any more than we can change our height. But a couple things here. First, even if our preferences themselves were genetically determined (yay evo psych![/sarcasm]), our behavior isn't pre-determined, and self-control can do amazing things. But also, as Kay says toward the end of her post, our preferences – our ways of perceiving and judging the opposite sex – aren't just hard-wired, built into our neurons from birth. They're also conditioned by what we're told is acceptable, whether for health reasons, or simply as a nod to convention. You can try to write off all the nuance here, but it's all of these things at once.

So, in short: contrary to Andrew Sullivan's flippant dismissal, sexual selection is not "irrational." It's not done entirely by conscious calculation, but it is relentlessly rational, built on a whole massive algorithm of biological, evolutionary, and cultural "reasons." Kay Steiger: 0, Andrew Sullivan: -1. Having made this fairly banal observation, let us continue!

And I've got no data to back this shit up (lol! Do I ever?!?), but I'd guess that the "height" bias among women is one of the more socially-conditioned preferences. I'm sure there are evolutionary reasons for it, but as Kay said, these reasons aren't terribly important in the modern age, when we don't need to be protected from predators and we don't need to inherit the most physically dominant genes. On a behavioral level, I'm guessing the bias against short men is kind of like many mens' bias against muscular women, or mens' bias for small waists and big boobs. I mean, it's plausible that there's a natural component to it, but it's mostly the result of a constant bombardment of underwear ads and Bond girls in the media. It's something that's worth looking at critically.

It's a little bizarre to me that people like Andrew Sullivan seem to be suggesting that we totally abandon any critical thinking about our own romantic and sexual preferences. After all, that's the process that's allowed people to start dating across, for instance, racial lines, and the process that's created new spaces for homosexual couples. Call it PC if you want, but it's really a genuinely positive cultural thing that's been happening to human society over time.

Now, don't get defensive... I'm not in the business of blaming people for following their gut instinct. Our reasons will always be somewhat opaque, even to ourselves, and some people won't be able to get over their lack of attraction for short men, or for women who are over a size 2, or for Caucasians with freckles. Or their preference for men with beards who sweat a lot. Or their preference for people with visible scars. Or whatever. I mean, you've still gotta have your criteria, for whatever reasons you have them, and a woman who likes tall guys isn't de facto immoral (which is where I can see that Miss Steiger may have overreached a little). But there's no reason we shouldn't ask where our preferences are coming from, and try to work through them a little.We've been achieving positive outcomes in the face of natural tendencies for a long time!

I know I shouldn't take it for granted that you're a progressive or a rationalist, dear reader, but I know my expected audience... and I think the logical, progressive, rationalist position is that if we can recognize our socially-conditioned, convention-driven reasons for something, we can often get over them. This will create a stronger, more adaptable, more tolerant society, and it will also broaden our own individual pool of potential mates. So it's not just navel-gazing here... there's a real pragmatic reason to consider the issue that Kay Steiger is addressing.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence - A defense of the bittersweet ending

2011-04-07T00:02:00.005-04:00

With Cinematical's recent Shelf Life column on the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, I thought this would be a good time to articulate my own thoughts on this film, which I believe is vastly underrated... partly because nobody's given it the analysis it deserves. Commentators uniformly appreciate its daring visuals and its quietly sinister atmosphere, but many (Tolcrist of Cinematical included) seemed to hate a few things about it.

Some hated its general tonal unevenness, blamed on the fact that it's a hybrid of Stanley Kubrick's starkness and Steven Spielberg's love of spectacle. This, in itself, isn't a sin, but because of this unevenness, the film requires total commitment and immersion from the viewer. As with other towering, ambitious stylistic films (Snyder's 300 being an example), any detachment will destroy the engagement, causing the film to alienate the viewer instead of involving them.

Other critics thought it was simply too emotionally manipulative, which, in a film like this, is something that may simply have to be forgiven... both Kubrick and Spielberg are dramatic stylists, melodramaticians, in a certain way, and the film itself is a tortured exploration of desperate childhood longing and the core of the human condition.

The most common specific complaint, though -- and the one that's most vulnerable to an actual analytical response -- is the hatred for the film's ending. Many viewers, including very open-minded ones, and including ones who saw it in the theater, felt that the ending was truly unnecessary and excessive, like a coda that somebody attached to the end of the film to make it more family-friendly. Many say it should have ended when David was at the bottom of the ocean, gazing at the Blue Fairy, wishing to become human.

I'm going to argue that the far-future ending wasn't just appropriate -- it was essential to the structure of the film, turning it from a tortured drama of frustrated longing into what it was truly meant to be: a dystopian fairy-tale in which every act is answered and every movement is integrated into the whole. The ending, though it may have been unexpected, unfamiliar, and incongruous with the preceding events, was also what elevated the film into something that will stand the test of long-term critical scrutiny.

(WARNING: Spoilers for Brothers' Grimm stories, in case you missed out on them for the last 150 years)

David's passage through the collapsing modern world in search of the key to humanity is famously analagous to Pinocchio's journey through the hazardous world of adults to eventually become a real boy. Now, Pinocchio was originally written by Carlo Collodi, was an Italian scribe who learned his craft with the translation of fairy tales, and the feeling of these fairy tales is impressed upon his work. This includes the sense that the world outside the home is dangerous and unpredictable, with no real place for heroism and personal glory. Indeed, the lack of a hero might be one of the strangest aspects of traditional fairy tales, like those of the Brothers Grimm -- the protagonist is always a commoner whose humble virtues are honesty and a sense of duty. These protagonists never discover that they're exceptional, and they never find some kind of inner strength to save the world.

This is a starting point for understanding where A.I. is coming from. David may indeed be exceptional in a scientific sense, but he isn't a hero. In fact, one of his greatest challenges is facing the fact that he's a manufactured creation, no more worthy of love than any of his boxed-up brethren.

Most of the Brothers' Grimm protagonists DO overcome some sort of personal challenge. Hansel and Gretel defeat the witch by taking advantage of a golden opportunity to push her into her oven; in The Robber Bridegroom, the bride arrives at the groom's house when he's not there, and she finds sympathy in the old woman whose head always shakes (damn, what a troubling image...); the prince, through wit and observation, finds a way into Rapunzel's room to win her love; the queen convinces Rumpelstiltskin to wager her child, instead of simply taking it from her.

Each of these represents some willfulness on the part of the protagonist to oppose their fate, and it is the same with David: his search for the Blue Fairy, though it means everything to him, is ultimately a token gesture of agency in the midst of an impossible situation. And yet, none of the above moments of triumph is really a solution, because each of these characters is stuck in a greater bind: Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest, the bride is caught in a marriage to a criminal, Rapunzel is still in the thrall of an evil sorceress, and the queen is still caught in a promise to a tiny, evil man who's great with a loom.

But the thing is, each of these characters DOES find a happy ending, and it's not because they're heroic -- it's because of the grace of nature, of forces larger than themselves. It's because, when they remain true to themselves, they are rewarded with an escape from the impossible situations they're part of. Hansel and Gretel somehow find their way home (there are no breadcrumbs to guide them), and they discover their mother is dead; the bridegroom, by pure luck, acquires proof of her groom's evil deeds, and once she finds her way home, she is protected by her community; the blind prince stumbles across Rapunzel, and in what seems to be a miracle, her tears of sadness cure him; and after the queen is given Rumplestiltskin's name by a messenger, who was in the right place at the right time, and once she has defeated the little monster, she simply stands by and watches him destroy himself.

This moment of grace is essential to fairy tale structure. It's a message that's both hopeful and frightening: when you've done all you can to solve your quandry, you just have to hope that the fates smile down and solve it for you.

And this is what happens in the bittersweet ending to A.I. Humanity might have collapsed, but through their creations, these strange machines that exist beyond the singularity, their spiritual nature has been preserved by the universe, and they finally give David the happiness that he deserves because he so kindly and whole-heartedly desires it. There's also a mythical point here, too: the point that David is the Adam to these robots, that his first glimmer of human emotion is what has allowed them to evolve in the way that they have. However, this wasn't particularly an accomplishment on his part -- he never asked to be the beginning of a new cybernetic species. He's granted mercy simply because he's a thinking, feeling creature, filled with infinite longing, and that entitles him to whatever happy ending the universe can provide.

If he really had been stuck at the bottom of the ocean, which no broader, more transcendental resolution, wouldn't the tale have felt incomplete? Wouldn't the film then be saying that emotion, desire, and human frailty are anchors? That our longing, desperate hands reach for nothing, because there is no grace in the universe that we occupy? Wouldn't the frozen bottom of the ocean have been a truly chilling final image in this vast, cyclical film?

Personally, I would never have asked for any ending but the one I got.

Candy Tangent: Blow Pop Minis

2011-03-30T21:01:00.004-04:00

You know I'm an open-minded man. An appreciator of novelties. A neophile. A dude who loves candy, despite the annoying insistence of his diabetes. But even with all those things being as they are, I found a product -- a candy product, no less, and one that I'm naturally disposed to liking -- in the bottom-floor food vendor in my building recently. And contrary to my every nature, this is a candy product that makes me uncomfortable.

They're called Blow Pop Minis.

Now, I used to love Blow Pops. I liked the gum, and I liked penetrating the protective hard candy shell. It was the right formula of fruit and sugar and tartness... a personal favorite, though I realize I'm no qualified critic. But surely you see the issue with these mini Blow-Pop things.

Once you get through the outer shell, whether by chewing or dissolution, what the hell do you do with the gum?

Maybe if you haven't seen the things, and haven't thought through this process, you'll jump to the most obvious answer: you chew it, like you do with gum. But this isn't a monolithic comestible perched atop a stick... it's a single entry in a bag of hard candy. You're supposed to keep eating them. And when you've got gum in your mouth, it's very inconvenient to chew and swallow something else... especially something sticky, that requires some attention to deconstruct.

And though you may call me impatient, I assure you: it makes no sense to just wait until you're done the first bit of gum before you start on a second piece of candy. First of all, the gum inside is barely the size of half a Chicklet. It's so small, it can practically disappear between your teeth. And besides, when was the last time you opened a bag of Mike & Ike's, or even Milk Duds, and just spend a whole 15 minutes on each one? It's a total breach of protocol.

I even considered swallowing the gum each time, but couldn't bring myself to do it. The aversion to swallowing chewing gum, conditioned into me when I was a child, is still too strong for me to openly defy it.

So what these dangerous little objects prompted me to do was to hold some sort of gymnastics yoga session inside my mouth. Here's how it goes: when you get through the first candy shell and end up with a wad of chewing gum, you shift it off to the side, under your lip or in your cheek, and if you're agile, you can free up enough of your mouth to get a second one in there. When you get through that one, you can add another tiny bit of gum to the first little piece, and you have something a little bigger... it's like eating Big League Chew, but only adding one strand at a time, and with a good deal of effort between them.

Keep working, like you're grinding away in an RPG, picking up experience points. Think of each little piece of gum as a gold coin, once you've defeated that candy shell. Once you get to the end of the bag, you'll have something around the size of a block of Bubblicious. Maybe a little bigger. Not huge, but gratifying, after all you've gone through to get to it.

This doesn't sound so bad, if you really need something to do. But let me tell you -- halfway through the bag, you'll definitely be asking yourself if it was worth it.

Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, with some parallels to Libya and Gaddafi

2011-03-29T22:52:00.004-04:00

Watched Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins the other day (trailer here). Here is a film that takes the heroic crusade story, strips it of any sanitation, and presents it in a raw, relentlessly pure form. The protagonists represent moral outrage in pursuit of a shogunate advisor; this advisor, the antagonist, represents pure authoritarian cruelty. This is one of those defining stories of Western culture, mostly manifested as tales of revenge: Medea (no, not the Tyler Perry creation), The Searchers, the films of Park Chan-Wook, right on up to Die Hard. In all of these films, and thousands of others, there's a crossing-over from the role of "protector" to the role of punitive crusader... from "we need to stop him from hurting people" to "it's time the bastard got what's coming to him."

Takashi Miike purifies this narrative by reducing each side to a 180-proof distillation of itself. I'll try not to give too much away, but in a harrowing scene early on (not the first scene! So don't let your guard down!) the film provides the necessary evidence that Lord Naritsugu isn't just a bad leader – he's a monster, an absolutely deserving target for the audience's hatred and the protagonists' retribution. Here, Takashi Miike does the things that have made him famous in other movies, like Audition and Ichi the Killer: he provokes absolute revulsion, creating one of those rare situations where voyeurism is actually kind of painful for the audience.

So Niragitsu is painted as unabashedly sadistic and cruelly authoritarian. Throughout the film, he's also portrayed as totally indifferent to the world, morally and politically and socially, a blasé despot whose fascism comes less from ambition than from lethal boredom. In nature, even "animal instinct” has a sort of rationality, usually springing from a sense of self-preservation or a vested interest in dominance. Niragitsu doesn't even have this virtue. He embodies the tyranny of sadistic irrationality, and indeed, comes the closest of any villain I've seen to pure nihilism. By the end of the film, he's willfully defied human nature and the ethics of war by wantonly murdering families; he's broken the mandate of brotherhood and military loyalty by disrespecting the remains of his most loyal subordinate; he's even flaunted self-preservation, walking willfully into traps and thanking his assailants for making his life more interesting. Niragitsu is a force of chaos

This makes the thirteen ronin tasked with murdering Niragitsu a de facto force of order and rational retaliation. Interestingly, their motivations are actually split at the top of their hierarchy. On one hand, there is Sir Doi, who hires the assassins, and whose motivation is very political. He sees the threat that Niragitsu poses to the legitimacy of the shogunate, and he is acting to neutralize it. On the other hand, there is Shinzaemon, leader of the assassins, whose motivation is moral outrage. The pivotal scene of the film, referred to above as causing "revulsion," has Sir Doi trigger Shinzaemon's retaliatory instinct, and the rest of the film follows through the brutal, precision-targeted punitive act that results.

So the opposition -- our protagonists -- are embodying both sides of the rational-response position: they are there to protect the political system from breakdown, and they're there to punish a cruel and chaotic criminal maniac.

The desire to inflict punishment sets the stage for some of the most compelling, cathartic moments in the film -- in particular, the presentation of a scroll reading "Total Massacre," and the withering gaze of a master swordsman within a chamber of loose swords. This is male posturing at its finest, obligatory in a movie of showdowns and stand-offs -- those pivotal moments that join the samurai film with its cousin, the Western.

As I was just beginning to forget this vicious slice of filmmaking, I got around to reading Barack Obama's speech about our approach to Libya, and it reminded me that this sort of posturing and aggression and retaliatory instinct appear on the world stage, as well. Whether in the case of Iraq or Libya, it seems that the US has lately been spending a good deal of its military capital on protective/punitive tasks in global politics. This is because, according to the Commander in Chief, "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."

Like Miike's moral schema, whose violent moral indignation is underwritten by a political mandate, Obama sort of had a situation with two competing motivations: to restore order and allow the country to stabilize, and to aggressively depose Colonel Gaddafi. The parallel isn't too exact, I admit, but there's still an analogue between the two sets of cases. Obama spent a good portion of his speech speaking to that tension -- the tension between acting cautiously, in support of political stability, versus bringing down the vengeful might of a powerful nation upon a ruler who has proven cruel and unpredictable.

In referencing Iraq, Obama was drawing attention to a situation where we acted upon our deeper moral instinct -- the morality that comes from emotion, rather than calculation. When we went into Iraq, we were taking a sort of 13 Assassins approach to the problem: our political aims (protect ourselves from supposed WMD's) and our moral aims (punish a relentless enemy of America and of democratic values) appeared to coincide, although in retrospect, the political aims seem like they might have been a bit of a pretext for the moral righteousness. Anyway, after that conflict, America got to have its own little drama of catharsis, when the public got its hands on those cell phone videos of Saddam's hanging.

But Obama's speech was largely about point out that though the situation in Libya is dictated by a broader sense of ethics and protecting just causes (his answer to the true isolationists), it can't be about the need for retaliation and punishment. It can't be about creating an enemy for the United States to crusade against; rather than an emotional morality of retribution and closure, this conflict has to be built upon a rational morality, a calculation of responsibility and a flexibility of approach. And I think that if Gaddafi got executed by the opposition tomorrow, and we got to see it, very few Americans would feel a sense of self-indulgent pride.

After all, we haven't made that kind of an enemy out of Gaddafi. Because as much as it makes good entertainment, it makes for terrible politics. America has no business instituting a policy of Total Massacre.

But anyway, to end on a shamelessly editorial note: luckily, we have a principled, calculating leader at the helm of the armed forces in this country. We have a commander in chief who believes in the importance of the international community, and who believes that the best way to serve American ideals is to create international partnerships. Only in this way will the United States succeed in fighting despots, rather than becoming one.

Cyclic versus Literary Fantasy: Fritz Leiber and Monster Hunter Tri versus Tolkien and Final Fantasy

2011-03-16T01:51:00.007-04:00

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser faced each other across the two thieves sprawled senseless. They were poised for attack, yet for the moment neither moved.

Each discerned something inexplicably familiar in the other.

This text marks the first official meeting of the two iconic characters in Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry, a book that unmistakably fits the descriptions "hack-and-slash" and "swords-and-sorcery." It's part of a whole Swords and --- series, all concerned with the partnership between these two characters, one a brawny defector from a society of snow-barbarians, the other a spritely thief and corrupted student of a white wizard. This particular novel teems with classic literary mechanisms straight from the adventure story guidebook: first loves, betrayals, deaths, buddy-film comraderie, quests for spoils and fame turning into quests for revenge. This book alone has at least three different revenge-quests, between its four most important protagonists.

Reading Leiber's work, you're liable to feel a vast gulf between this style of storytelling and, say the literary approach of Tolkien, who basically set the bar for the high fantasy epic. You may be tempted, initially, to see the difference as one of quality. I don't think it is, though.

Last April, Capcom released Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii here in the states. It's a striking gameplay experience -- the aliased edges aren't smoothed over, and the 3D physics aren't neatly polished. The collision detection is... kind of primitive. Also, there's no attempt to give the game an intuitive gestural interface. Nay, in many cases, you'll be three or four layers deep in menus, browsing items packed together in dense menus, marked by the simplest 8-bit icons I've seen in a long time. It's as close as you can get to a turn-based RPG while still fighting in real time.

Sometimes there are uncanny parallels between very different experiences. Playing Monster Hunter Tri and reading Swords and Deviltry may create just such a juxtaposition. These are both unapologetic throwback experiences, willing to throw away all sorts of artful pretense in order to create a direct, unmediated experience of adventuring. The best way to describe this experience, at its core, may be that it's a Dungeons and Dragons experience, the feeling of being immersed in a world of particular rules and rehearsed beats and well-articulated types, an aggregate of simple elements so numerous that once combined, they create their own sort of complexity.

This may be rather a stretch, but I'd say that there's a qualitative difference between something like Swords of Lankhmar, and something like The Lord of the Rings. I'd call the latter a piece of "literary fantasy," and the former a piece of... what's the best way to describe it?... "cyclic fantasy" is really the best I can do, I suppose.

The basic difference is this: in literary fantasy, there's a sense that the world is continuous, built on a deep history that runs entirely independent of our own. Tolkien was a master of this type of world-creation: from The Silmarillion, a sort of nebulous creation-story, to the vast and complex languages and cultures that populate Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes living worlds, and we always have the sense that we're only seeing a tiny glimpse of them. These worlds are filled with stories, including the story we're reading, that represent subtle and sweeping paradigm shifts, not only for the characters, but for the worlds themselves.

However, in cyclic fantasy, there's a sense that the world is static, only temporarily deviating from its baseline position, and in conjunction with this, there's a sense that the world only consists of whatever we've seen of it so far. In Swords and Deviltry, the first third of the novel takes place entirely in the Cold Wastes, and though the city of Lankhmar is discussed, it's only described in the most generic possible terms as the quintessential fantasy city. It's really rather disembodied, at least until part of the story takes place there, and the place is described a little more directly.

This sense, the sense that you're creating the fantasy world as you explore it, is very different from the feeling you get in The Fellowship of the Ring, where the remote "outside world" beyond the Shire seems to live by its own inscrutable rules, and thus seems hostile and unwelcoming to the hapless explorers. Indeed, both The Swords of Lankhmar and Monster Hunter Tri are very encouraging to the explorer, who can travel through successive landscapes and towns that are static variations on a range of accepted themes.

Of course, the reason I called this "cyclic fantasy" is that there seems to be an unchanging "way things are," and the fantasy world of these tales always eventually returns to this state. Indeed, in cyclic fantasy stories, the main characters are often tasked with averting some cosmic disaster or destroying some villain that's getting too powerful, whether for rewards or for vengeance; thus, they are often tasked with maintaining the status quo. The "quest" is a job, assigned by some guardian or authority in the world, that leads to the restoration of the given order. This cycle repeats forever, throughout the myriad adventures of the story's protagonists.

Indeed, one of the distinctive aspects of Swords and Deviltry is that the two main characters' lives before meeting -- their lives at their ancestral homes -- are barely sketched out, only given enough detail that we can look forward to their dissolution. In effect, it seems like these "normal lives" -- the Gray Mouser's life of tutelage under a good wizard, and Farfhad's life within the community of northerners -- are already deviations from the true way things should be. By escaping and defying their mundane backgrounds, these characters bring into effect the status quo of their world. One of the essential components of this status quo is that these two adventurers are united in friendship and purpose, and that they're free of their histories and obligations, at liberty to explore and undertake quests.

If there's a video game equivalent to the "literary fantasy" paradigm I mentioned earlier, I think it's the Final Fantasy series (I'm thinking of Final Fantasy VI and VII in particular). Like Tolkien's work, these games take place in worlds that seem to be neck-deep in their own history. Exploring and understanding these worlds is remarkable, largely because they're so unpredictable and full of personality and narrative power. However, the feeling of being in a living, historical world is remarkably different from Monster Hunter Tri's sense that the world is waiting there for you to occupy and defend it.

And though I'd never try to make Fritz Leiber (or anyone, really) compete with Tokien for some sort of literary merit award, it does seem like there will always be a place in fantasy for the cyclical, the alchemical and archetypal, the world created as a static structure to frame the adventures of the characters who enter it. This is the setting we enter, not as strangers, but as avatars, harnessing our power to create the world as we experience it.

To the Void: User-driven content creation, and the need for an artificial audience

2011-03-10T00:55:00.006-05:00

A friend's band just released their first album, via Kickstarter. They're called Hurrah! A Bolt of Light! They play pretty rad alt-rock with a teeny bit of folksyness to it. You should check them out.

Today, in More Intelligent Life, Joe Morgan blogged about how Berlin is the new hotness for emerging musicians and music technology, and for a whole segment of culture connected to it. He ended the write-up with this observation:

"While the average music-obsessed teenager is unlikely to be able to emulate the sounds produced by Richie Hawtin on his or her iPad, tapping into this ubiquitous urge to create could become big business in the next stage of the music industry’s development."

These two things, taken together, put my mind on an unexpected track, as follows: does it seem to anybody else that the opportunities for creative production are growing much faster than the interest in consumption of its products? Like, there are currently a LOT of blogs out there. There's an explosion of DIY film and video production, with video-blogs, web series, fan-made music videos, short films, feature films, etc etc etc. There's a burst of music production opportunities, too, as Joe Morgan suggests, above. We're at a point in history when the tools are available to do pretty much anything, and to find pretty much any talent, or develop any personal passion, that might be latent in your personality.

Now, I unequivocally think this is a good thing. Access to communication technology can only enrich our cultural environment, and whatever it takes to make it work, I'm confident we'll adapt.

That said, I am a little nervous about the way access to tools is amplifying the universal love for attention. There really is a broad, universal desire to create something, and a parallel desire to find and captivate an audience. So there are more and more content-creators, an explosion of amateurs both talented and otherwise, some slipping into niches, some desperately searching for big breaks or back-doors to fame and fortune. But for all the rise in people expressing themselves, is there a corresponding rise in people willing to listen to these new voices, willing to help parse them out, give them a few minutes, and offer a fair shake to unproven work?

The ideal solution, of course, is that citizens of the media-scape learn to be mindful. To whatever degree a person creates things, he or she should also be willing to seek out, critique, and reward new work from others, both in the same platform, and in other areas. Blogs are helping with this phenomenon quite a lot, I think, creating bridges between niche communities and mainstream trendsetters, and linking small personal communities with larger communicative spaces.

However, I'm not sure this will ever happen to a degree that will take care of the asymmetry between new creators and new audiences. After all, technologies are enabling people who are both extremely prolific and unfortunately self-centered, and it will always take some extra work and open-mindedness to go out and discover the work of new artists. It's a question of economy, you know?

For this reason, I think there's an emergent market here, for whatever programmer wants to jump in: the market of artificial audiences.

You really just have to supply one app... call it "appreciative critic"... and sell it to anyone who's tired of releasing their blog posts and photographs and installation art into the void. It could look like a robot, like those uncanny-valley things, or it could just be a voice over your phone... or something that used the camera on your mobile device to scan something, and then gave feedback in a pop-up window. The first generation can just randomly generate some responses: "Oh, this is your best work yet!" and "I'd look it over again before posting it anywhere."

Down the line, though, AC (that's my shorthand for Appreciative Critic) should learn to scan for patterns, make constructive comments, and generate praise based on actual characteristics of the work. And after a few more releases, maybe it can actually provide meaningful critiques of new work! I think we'd end up creating artificial intelligence without even realizing we were doing it.

Engineers, semioticians, linguistics programmers, Ray Kurzweil? Somebody wanna get on this? If we can't all become highly responsive and open-minded consumers, we'll have to go ahead and create them, won't we?

Vast Empty Spaces in "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea"

2011-02-26T20:49:00.007-05:00

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea was a simple, well-shot, well-paced movie with a lot of big ideas going on under the surface -- just the type of movie I like, although I must admit, this one was a bit grim and tragic to really make for an enjoyable Friday night. It's adapted from a book by Japanese author Yukio Mishima, and it stars Kris Kristofferson, who was also by far the most convincing actor in the cast. If nothing else, you can watch it to be dreamily captivated by the endless sea-scapes and ancient pastures of England.

You can also watch it for the sense of longing and frustrated desire that permeates the whole film, and that allows us to understand why the children in this gray world are so hollow and spiritually impoverished. It's both a celebration of hope and a warning about its dangers, a call to dissolution into the vast silent emptiness of the sea and a warning against making impossible spiritual demands of oneself and one's idols, who, in the end, are mere human beings, just like all of us.

The "call to dissolution" is a rather zen theme, expressed every time a character gazes out into the ocean and waxes poetic about the romantic call of the waves. Jim feels it, and has already worked through it; now Jonathan is feeling it, and he is placing misguided faith in Jim to stay true to its pursuit. The ocean is the silent, echoic, empty spiritual resonance that flows through all of us, the Platonic world of forms, the Kantian noumenal world, the free, open space of unbound existence. Jim says the sea is always changing, and once he left the grounded world of earth and society, he began to feel like he didn't belong anywhere. This is because he left the world of the body and entered a vast spiritual outland where things of the flesh aren't welcome.

The empty, transcendent world of the sea contrasts sharply with the corrupt, corporeal world that the chief has created for his schoolboy friends. In this world, all purpose flows from the physical nature of things, and we are all bodies, first and foremost. He finds the "true nature" of each being in its heart, the literal physical organ, and he sees every beings true nature as flowing from its physical form, its anatomical makeup, the bitter, earthbound "perfect order of things" (which is not a spiritual order in any way, because the Chief is spiritually dead and rotting).

There's something rather Catch-22 about the whole exercise. The Chief, like Yossarian, has realized that "man is matter," and he's concluded that morality, hope, transcendence, etc. are just inventions by "grown-ups" (i.e. society) to control peoples' behavior and keep the weak under the thumbs of the strong. He's a uniquely Nietzschian character in this regard, and even fascist, because his base materialism has led him to a different sort of purism... the purism of tyrants and libertines, of self-righteous cruelty and entitlement. So he departs from Yossarian's sympathetic pragmatism (sort of anti-social, but still benign) and becomes nihilistic, believing in nothing but himself, and others only to the extent that they serve him.

Of course, you could read mountains of oedipal subtexts in this film, as Jonathan turns his boyhood gaze upon his widowed mother. This is one possible explanation for Jonathan's unreasonable philosophical expectations for Jim: he wants Jim to be a symbol of all the higher ideals that imbue a strong father figure, and when Jim opts to return to land and get married, Johnathan sees it as a sort of castration. The subsequent murder of the father is Jonathan's pathalogical act of retribution.

Have I made this movie seem a bit heavy? Yeah, it's a little heavy, not much of a party movie at all. But the tone is truly unique, and for all its disturbing twists, it's also a very calm, introspective film with a lot of gorgeous scenery and moments of sublime transcendence. If you're looking for something serious to watch leading up to the Oscars, it wouldn't be a bad one to see, and it's on Netflix Instant. Go check it out.

Animation in so many myriad forms

2011-02-10T22:24:00.005-05:00

Wasn't there a time when we didn't have to specify that an animated film was "traditionally" animated? It's been a fairly gradual process, normalizing 3-D animation to the point where it's the dominant form. But it's still worth noting: animation is now process-agnostic, no longer "manual-normative," so it's always useful to specify whether it's traditional animation, 3-D animation, or rotoscoping, which is sort of the outlier type at this point.

I saw this incredible film recently, and it strikes me that it came out right around when 2-D animation was losing its assumed priority over the genre.

It's nice to see, in Iron Giant and others, that the computer has also proven an asset to 2-D animation. I saw another incredible animated film recently, the re-edit and re-issue of Neon Genesis Evangelion (a series that's still ongoing), and although the traditional animation is incredible -- some of the best and most inventive visuals ever put to screen -- the 3-D contributions occasionally sucked out some of the personality. It makes the use of 3-D in Iron Giant even more amazing, retrospectively.

As traditional and 3-D animation methods merge and move forward, traditional animation is slowly going the way of vinyl and vintage cameras -- it's becoming a technology for afficianados and loyalists, whose unique strengths and characteristics are being swallowed up in nostalgia. Luckily, as we've seen with so many other technologies, there will always a community of purists that keep it alive.

In fact, some of them have surfaced in my blog reader recently! Watch their shorts below. They're super-awesome.

How different the feeling is, the tactile quality, in traditional animation. The tension and responsiveness of these shapes is so palpable -- it's something that 3-D animation has tried to emulate for a while, but has it ever quite made it? Is it possible to reach the same drama of exaggeration and intensity with volumes and textures that you can get with the simple lines and shapes of that Medusa short?

Of course, in certain cases, 3-D animation seems to be going in the opposite direction -- away from exaggeration, away from the hyperactive visual dynamics of cartoons. In particular, I'm thinking of a process that's apparent in Wall-E, and that can be traced back to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, where the animation is pushed toward real-world conventions. Sure, there may be some uncanny valley issues, especially in Zemeckis movies and that Final Fantasy film, but in these special cases, it's really about simulating aspects of the real world as closely as possible, rather than exaggerating them. In the case of Wall-E, the brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakins was called in to consult on the shots. This creative decision had a subtle but important effect: it grounded the "camera" in real-world shooting conventions, extracting it from the normal disembodied swooping around that the camera tends to do in a 3-D picture.

And of course, Final Fantasy, as weird as it might have been, was one of the first uses of motion-capture to create realistic character movements, and it was one of the most ambitious applications of lighting and atmosphere in any 3-D animated feature, before or since.

I don't really have the ambition at the moment, but you could create a pretty great Venn Diagram thing, showing the overlapping of live action, 3-D animation, and 2-D animation. Films like Cool World and Roger Rabbit would be in that deserted space between 2-D and live action, and films that used 3-D motion capture for tons of effects -- King Kong, Avatar, etc -- would be between 3-D and live action.

If this stuff is interesting, you could definitely stand to check out a couple blogs:

The Seven Golden Camels is a blog by Mark Kennedy, a guy who's storyboarded and pre-produced with some big names in animation.

AnimationHOORAY is an animation blog that knows how to fish out great independent and student animation work.

Jargon in Primer (2004), Brick (2005), and Emperor of the North (1973)

2011-02-07T03:22:00.006-05:00

Having seen Emperor of the North (Robert Aldrich, 1973) recently, I was thinking a little about the use of jargon to lend linguistic texture to films. Emperor was full of depression-era shit-talk... now, I realize the 70's was far removed from the 30's, but the 00's is even farther removed, so provisionally, I trust Emperor's rendition of 30's vocabulary. Some of it is pretty brilliant, and the slight bit of effort it takes to translate this language makes it extremely engaging. Apart from the epic final fight scene, I'd say the scenes I remember best are the ones where A-no.-1 (Lee Marvin) is rattling off cryptic advice and insults to Cigaret (Keith Carradine).

I love IMDB's quotes section:

"You ain't stopping at this hotel, kid. My hotel! The stars at night, I put 'em there. And I know the presidents, all of them. And I go where I damn well please. Even the chairman of the New York Central can't do it better. My road, kid, and I don't give lessons and I don't take partners. Your ass don't ride this train!"

This quote doesn't even come close to some of the other dialog. I could copy and paste the whole final speech, hollered back from the train as it disappears up the mountain, but I almost feel like I would be ruining it. It just sounds so much better spoken than it comes off written.

There are other movies that have this kind of jargon, used to similar effect. One of the most important examples is Shane Carruth's Primer, an intense, claustrophobic time-travel film released in 2004. One of the novelties of Primer is that Carruth doesn't dumb down any of the technical jargon for his audience, and the engineering and theoretical math comes across (to the layman, at least) as abstract, finely-textured gibberish. Again, it's some of the most memorable stuff from the film: those early nerds-at-work scenes where the protagonists are sussing out the mysteries of the universe in one of their basements. The cryptic language is immersive and engaging.

I think Rian Johnson's 2005 film Brick is worth comparing. Brick was written in jargon, as well -- an approximation of 1930's noir patter, anachronistically displaced into a present-day California high school. Now, I loved the film. It was sharp and intelligent and cynical and daring, a serious and self-assured indie film project. However, the jargon just didn't quite work for me, and in retrospect, the scenes that were heavy on stylized dialog (Brendan meeting with The Brain in the library, for instance) don't really feel like the film's greatest assets.

It's hard to explain this phenomenon, except to say that the stylization of the dialog was a mismatch for the gritty, neo-realist feel of the rest of the film. There's something so lucid and transparent about that desaturated video footage. Indeed, the dialog worked wonders when it spoke directly to the nature of the character and the situation: Brendan's short, muscular challenges to his adversaries, his talk with the principal, and The Pin's talk about J.R.R. Tolkien on the beach.

In my estimation, that talk with The Pin is tied for best exchange in the film; the other contender is this little bit, between Brendan and Laura Dannon:

LAURA: "You think nobody sees you. Eating lunch behind the portables. Loving some girl like she's all there is, anywhere, to you. I've always seen you. Or maybe I liked Emily. Maybe I see what you're trying to do for her, trying to help her, and I don't know anybody who would do that for me."

BRENDAN: "You are dangerous."

With very little bullshit, this gets across a whole range of information: Brendan's heroic character, despite his apparent clinginess and self-exile; Laura's role as a sweet-talker and temptress; the very important fact that in this world, every relationship needs to be regarded with suspicion. It does all this, and even makes reference to one of the classic noirs in a very effective, natural way. And like I said, much less jargony and cryptic than so much of the other dialog in the film.

So it's all about texture, and that subtle relationship between the texture of the film and the texture of the language. I'm sure there are lots of other movies that exploit language effectively, to engage the viewer in an active process of decoding, thereby improving the experience of the film world. I'll mention more if I can think of them.

2010: The year of the signature movie?

2010-12-15T03:38:00.005-05:00

Has anyone gotten the sense, this year, that the "directors of the hour" have all suddenly made their signature movie? By "directors of the hour," I'm not talking about the Hollywood staples (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, etc), but rather of those provocateurs who are emerging into the mainstream. In particular, I've noticed this phenomenon with Christopher Nolan (who's just become the trump card of studios trying to ride the nerd zeitgeist)... Darren Aaronofsky (who's recently graduated from cinema cult-leader to critical boy wonder)... and Gasper Noe (who seems to be following Aaronofsky into the role of "that guy that directs those batshit crazy movies").

For Christopher Nolan, it was Inception. This was obviously the movie the guy's been fantasizing about since he was a teenager, back when he started writing the script. It marries the techno-futurist with the retro-stylist, bring noir into the realm of the virtual and the psychological, and it provides a great forum for structural experimentation and visual flair. As a bonus, Nolan got the creme de la creme of swaggering neo-noir actors, including Leo, JGL, and Michael Caine.

Memento will generally be seen as Nolan's Reservoir Dogs, I think. He came out of nowhere with that little shocker, riding the formal gimmick and stylish presentation out of the obscurity of film school... and The Dark Knight may always be seen as his Pulp Fiction, cementing his fame and proving his genius. But as much as it was a great piece of cinema, Dark Knight was tied down by its reliance on the Batman franchise, and by the legions of comic book fans who don't actually particularly care about cinema per se. Inception is the piece that Nolan will be able to claim as his own, stylistically, conceptually, and in every way necessary for it to become his signature piece.

As I mentioned above, Aaronofsky has gone through a transition recently. He was born as one of those bad-boy director provocateurs, giving us the hyper-intense and disturbed Pi, and then the devastating American neo-realist tragedy Requiem for a Dream. I think that phase of his life ended with The Fountain, which was his little vanity project, offensive to public sensibilities not because it was ugly, but because it was so soaring and uninhibited. But recently, with The Wrestler, he's made a decisive move into character-study territory, and he's become a guy for the middlebrow critics to watch.

Enter Black Swan. Could the man have a more perfect film to give to the world, at this moment of transformation? Black Swan retrieves Aaronofsky the stylist, the impressionist, the conductor of madness and dissociation, which are the themes that characterized his earlier work. It also marries the stylistic precision of The Fountain (the gothic, the erotic, the intimate) with the real-world anxieties and uncertainties that made The Wrestler work so well. And it's admirably reserved, refusing to resort to cheap shocks for his visual and emotional climaxes.

So I think Black Swan will be a signature film, as well: Aaronofsky's first award-winning, show-stopping feature, and also an index of his established themes: trauma, madness, and the tortured mind of the alienated genius.

And finally, we have Gasper Noe, who still sort of fulfills the role that Aaronofsky recently left behind: provocateur, offender of sensibilities, whose challenging and aversive style reads as "courage" to the independent circuit. Irreversible is commonly hailed among cinephiles (horror and extreme cinema enthusiasts, especially) as a breakthrough for extreme cinema. I think it really got noticed because the 9-minute rape scene got so much attention -- but, you know, once he was visible, Noe managed to convince people that he's a proficient auteur, and that's no small task in our skeptical community.

I think it was clear that after Irreversible, Noe had to push his sensationalism to the max before he could break in a different direction. I think, with Enter the Void, he did that. It's not only difficult and arresting in its visual innovations (the strict first-person camera, the hallucinated cityscapes), but it's also provocative in its specific images. If you want to read about them, it's all over the Internet. From what I understand, it's pretty intense.

Sibling loyalty, incest, death, and the cycle of destruction and rebirth are pretty ideal themes for an elusive assault on the viewers' senses. This is the piece that Noe's previous work was leading up to: something that people just had to see, something to polarize the community, something to provide the basis for grand controversy and extravagant claims. Again, it's the signature piece. This is the final draft of Noe's stamp as an auteur, and everything he does from here on out will be a reference to Enter the Void, or a notable departure from it. Or both.

Am I sure? No. It's possible that Aaronofsky will be remembered by his urban grime and realism, rather than his epic stylization. It's possible that Nolan will make an even more Nolan-esque movie in a couple years, or that Gasper Noe will manage to totally leave behind this shock-and-awe period in his cinematic oeuvre. But I'm guessing that one or two of these three films will end up being the signature film of its particular director, even though these directors have a lot of growth and accomplishment ahead of them.

Black Swan and the myth of the self-destructive female: The Red Shoes, Perfect Blue, Lust Caution

2010-12-14T00:37:00.010-05:00

WARNING: Spoilers for the three movies mentioned in the title.

It's hard to know what to say about Black Swan, and I think this is a testament to the film. Every comparison and generalization comes with caveats; the only things that seem to hold unarguably true are the most obvious stylistic observations: it's a psychological thriller with all the aesthetic trappings of the classical world, remixed into a dark psychological landscape. It's a film about the collision of personalities, of the type you only find in an intense world like ballet: aggressive, unreserved personalities that deal in raw human emotional currency, like purity, desire, and control.

What impresses me most about Black Swan, I think, is the intensity of the personalities that collide in order to make this story happen. Portman did a brilliant job playing Nina, the virginal ballet purist who can't seem to let go of herself in order to find her inner "black swan" -- but this role is so perfect a showcase for a brilliant performance, that I think we all sort of expected this of Portman, who's never half-assed a role in her career. Mila Kuniz works wonders as her counterpart, too, but honestly, Kuniz never quite reaches the heights of authenticity that Portman attains. Her character is a bit too much of a foil, a bit too empty and enigmatic, for her to really show off her acting chops.

But Vincent Cassel as Thomas Leroy, the director of the ballet that drives these characters into conflict... he was really the stand-out, wouldn't you say? His performance is noble and degraded and inspiring and vicious, balancing the things that a ballet director would have to be: an embodiment of the art form's allure, and also a medium for its horrifying expectations, its life-destroying pressure. He sails through so many modes -- creepy, charming, enraged, and sensual -- it's hard for me to do any justice in describing his character.

There's a precedent for this character, of course: Boris Lermentov, the ballet director from the Archer Brothers' The Red Shoes, is a similarly ambivalent, enigmatic figure, a dangerous catalyst for Victoria's love for the dance. Ebert said of him, "... the impresario defies analysis. In his dark eyes we read a fierce resentment. No, it is not jealousy, at least not romantic jealousy. Nothing as simple as that." Lermentov may have a special sort of insidious purpose, but ultimately, he's not much worse than Leroy. Both manipulate their dancers, treat them as objects, and in regarding them as avatars for some dancing muse, forget that they're actually just young girls with real lives.

I think, though, that Thomas Leroy is a more complex character than Lermentov, because in place of Lermentov's melodramatic cruelty and cynicism, Leroy seems to really believe in the human possibilities of dance. And though Leroy is insidiously sexual, he seems to believe in love and sensuality, as well, even if he channels it all into the dance. So he's no less responsible than Lermentov was for the fate that befalls his performer, but in Leroy Thomas's case, it's hard to call him a "villain."

Some friends have suggested that Black Swan was not a literal hallucination-murder-death story, but rather a metaphor for the main character's artistic blossoming. They see a large part of the story as taking place inside of Nina's head (which the narrative gladly acknowledges), and they consider the possibility that the ending is inside her head, as well. This reading may be a little Inception-esque for my taste, but it's a compelling one to consider. Remember, for instance, that Nina saw herself as an actual, physical black swan, whereas she was seen by the audience as a dancer nailing the performance.

If you read the narrative in this way, seeing madness as the catalyst for a butterfly-like personal breakthrough, it comes to resemble another classic tale of creative ambition gone bad, told in Satoshi Kon's anime masterpiece Perfect Blue. That film, though dissociation was its organizing principle, turned out to be a coming-of-age story of Mima, its female protagonist, as she moved away from performing crowd-friendly girl-pop and into the adult world of acting and sensationalism. If you read Black Swan metaphorically, it's close kin to this animated cousin. There are a number of character parallels, as well: Nina's cloying mother has a clear equal in the over-protective casting agent in Perfect Blue, and Aaronofsky's Beth Macintyre, played by Winona Rider, plays a parallel part to the murderous fanboy who stalks Mima in order to prevent her from destroying her own innocence.

These three films are part of a broader cultural myth that's started forming in cinema: the myth of the female artist whose devotion, mixed with the dangerous elements of sexual desire and professional ambition, becomes her path to self-destruction. Aside from The Red Shoes and Perfect Blue (thanks, Frankie, for that observation!), this structure also appears in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution in a slightly modified form (thanks, Mai, for that suggestion!). In Lust, Caution, the theater is the political world, and the dissociation is between the protagonist's performance as a collaborator and her true identity as a subversive. It's a fascinating application of the template, remixed but undeniable in its fidelity.

So there are a few common characteristics that surface in these closely-related movies, and I'd like to enumerate them. If anybody knows of any other films that seem to reinforce this myth, please let me know, I'd like to hear about them.

1 - Female protagonist with a creative ambition that she pursues obsessively
1a - to the point of purism, self-denial, and/or monasticism
2 - A career change, accompanied by a high degree of pressure to perform well
3 - A demand, inherent in the performance, that leads to an unresolvable inner conflict for the protagonist

Some other common characteristics:

4 - the protagonist's final self-destruction (BS, RS, LC)
5 - an over-protective maternal figure limiting the protagonist's growth (BS, PB, LC?)
6 - a monster lurking at the margins, nursing resentment and/or jealousy toward the protagonist (BS, PB)
7 - an unhealthy conflation of desire and sexual repression (BS, PB, LC)
8 - a strong male gaze as catalyst for the protagonist's unhealthy obsession (BS, RS, LC)
9 - a theme of psychological dissociation (BS, PB, LC?)

This is among the most powerful mythic structures I've identified in my short time as a cinephile, with Aaronofsky's Black Swan as an apparent epitome of the type. I'd love to hear other thoughts on the growth of this narrative, if anyone has some other ideas. If you haven't seen any of the above movies, by the way, definitely go check them out. They're all amazing.

The Walking Dead: The psychology of enclaves

2010-12-09T01:14:00.007-05:00

The first season of The Walking Dead ended this past weekend. Did it measure up to the standards set by the comic? Not entirely, but it was damn well done, and I'm excited that there's gonna be a season two. Despite my desperate urge to compare Darabont's adaptation to Kirkman's original, I'm going to do my best to resist, and look at the series on its own terms.

After the various tangents and interjections, what we've ended up with, in this AMC series, is a sort of post-apocalyptic anthropology, showing the breakdown and restructuring of society into various enclaves in an economy of self-defense and scarcity. Rick's family group is the control group, an intensive investigation into the unstable power dynamics and desperate decisions of a fugitive community. It'll provide fuel for a lot more episodes down the line.

But perhaps more interesting are what I just referred to as "enclaves," the isolated autonomous zones that Rick and his group come across as they navigate the landscape. There are really three, aside from the main group: the Jones's household, the Atlanta clinic, and the CDC. Each offers a glimpse into how extreme circumstances may effect human behavior and self-presentation; together, they provide a fascinating perspective on the landscape of desperation.

Morgan and Duane Jones initiate Rick into the world of the walkers, reluctantly taking him in when he wanders into their front yard. When we encounter them (Episode 1), they are isolated and paralyzed, still stuck in the state of shock that the zombie apocalypse has caused. The reappearance of Morgan's wife reflects their failure to accept the zombies as inhuman and come fully to terms with what's happened to the world; they are still undeveloped, showing us the early-development stages of bona fide post-apocalyptic survival. They are an important emotional anchor for the show, but they're not the most interesting fragment for analysis.

If the Jones's are in the primitive stages of adjustment, still showing signs of shock and paralysis, the other two communities -- the clinic and the CDC -- are both communities that have been distilled into pure psychology, representing two opposite sides of pure personality. One is the animal impulse for survival and protection; the other is the rational mind, devouring itself as it stares into the void.

The Atlanta clinic (Episode 4) is truly survivalist. It's a collective of folks from the street, with all the ethnic diversity of urban neighborhoods, who exhibit the highly defensive responses of a family group in the wild. When Rick, Darryl, and T-Dog arrive to demand the return of Glen, Guillermo's group is defensive and reactionary, bristling and intentionally escalating the conflict. Their demand for the guns, and their claim that they're willing to enter into a shootout, is almost a bluff, but it's the type of bluff that could be disastrous if called. Rick and his gang, in turn, refuse to concede the guns, their most important resource. These two groups are like wild dogs, circling, exploring their dominance and trying to find some equilibrium before they tear each other apart.

It's telling, of course, that the clinic residents aren't pure evil. Rather, they're protective of themselves and their families, and they are desperate for the firearms that they noticed in the street. Once they find common ground to cooperate with Rick, they're revealed to be reasonable and deeply compassionate people, holding out in the city to take care of their elderly. According to the show's narrative, their behavior is justified by necessity -- they're really just following their survival and caretaking instincts in a desperate bid for survival.

Contrast this with the CDC (episodes 5 and 6), where the lone Dr. Jenner holds out, having just given up on continuing his research into the zombie plague. Rick and the gang find him on the verge of suicide, having just lost his stock of fresh samples. He makes an exception to let them into his sanctuary, where he's the little glimmer of consciousness in the center of a big electronic brain.

Jenner's misfortunes are telling and troubling. He's absolutely isolated, and his wife died under his observation. He is clearly a smart man, driven by a rational engine that continue to run even after his great emotional breakdown. In a pivotal scene, he uses his wife's brain-scan as an illustration to explain all the functions of the mind and the zombie disease that takes over it. This real-time brain scan even includes the bullet that takes the test subject's life. For Jenner, this lecture is an act of self-deconstruction, ending with a reference to the human "extinction event."

Jenner's wife invested him with a final purpose before she departed, perhaps because she knew he was a goal-seeking type of guy, but with the destruction of his samples, this purpose died, as well. Jenner does not seem to be a man who's interested in pressing on no matter what the costs... for him, life has had a point, and it no longer has one, so there's no longer a reason to sustain it. Jenner's tragedy isn't that he dies for no reason, but that he lives for no reason. This is not how they would frame the situation out at the clinic in Atlanta.

And of course, Jenner's despair almost leads to a suicide for the whole company, including the survivors, the protectors, and the children. Jenner's computer, carrying out a "decontamination" that's actually just a self-destruction, is an extension of his own sense of hopelessness. He is higher consciousness turned on itself, the death drive turned into a suicide impulse, and he even goes so far as to argue to Rick and his companions that it's more merciful than trying to live on.

With these two communities, The Walking Dead sets up an interesting argument by juxtaposition. I'm going to stick this into a classic Freudian framework, so bear with me. Jenner, representing the higher faculties, is a nod to the superego, especially since he ultimately directs his own aggression toward himself... according to Freud, this was the basic mechanism that created self-control. Presumably, this would make Guillermo and his crew the id, a vicious, protective, uninhibited animal instinct for self-preservation. It holds pretty well, considering the Atlanta clinic crew seemed so quick to violence and so desperate for resources.

But the inversion brought about by the economy of scarcity is striking. The Atlanta clinic may be aggressive and reactionary, but it's also protective and self-perpetuating, and ultimately these urban warriors live to protect their own and take care of the collective body, even when it's made up of thugs and aging grandparents. Jenner the superego, on the other hand, despite his claims to rationality and order, is the more destructive of these two forces, because in the absence of a purpose, he directs his frustration back on himself. Reason implodes, and without the raw desire to survive into another day, Jenner just gives up on the whole human project, not just for himself, but for those around him.

Assuming there's something to be said here about Freudian psychology and different cognitive levels, it seems that the show is arguing the reverse of the Freud assumption. The Walking Dead is in fact suggesting that in the absence of order and civilization, it's going to be the animal part of the human that preserves the self and the species, and the rationalizing, intelligent part that dooms us to self-destruction.

If I have time, I'll discuss some more of this fascinating show. Shane alone is worth the price of admission -- his character is thoroughly complex and conflicted, an authority figure tortured by a sudden loss of power and intimacy. If Kirkman had developed Shane more thoroughly in the comic, I'm pretty sure he would have looked like Darabont's rendition. It will also be interesting seeing the development of Andrea, as she's already got the emotional groundwork to build into a strong and complicated character.

Hitchens versus Blair on religion, and an alternative defense of religion (warning: Jesse in philosophy mode)

2010-12-01T23:10:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I think I spend too much time trying to read provocative stuff on the computer, and I wonder if I should be getting out more? Or at least watching movies, instead of trying to read words, on these video screens? But today my attention was called to a transcript of a debate between Christopher Hitchins and Tony Blair on the following topic: "Resolved: Religion is a force for good in the world." So I had to read it. And now, having read it, I have to respond to this public display of rhetoric, a showcase of a debate carried out in the most mundane terms possible. It's a sad truth... Hitchens' sensationalist provocation versus Tony Blair's apologism just didn't make a very interesting debate.

Strangely, though the resolution seems to place the burden of proof on Tony Blair's shoulders, Christopher Hitchens immediately takes up the role of arguing a constructive thesis (in essence, arguing the inverse of the resolution), possibly because he's called upon to go first. He does this with relish, of course, because it's a position he's been practicing his whole life. Hitchens' argument is almost too predictable for my taste: organized religion is an irrational institution that makes conflicting and regressive demands of its followers, and it amplifies their negative tendencies, especially tribalism, dependence, and submission. His evidence is pretty obvious: a litany of global conflicts and suppressions undertaken in the name of religion, or at least with religion as an essential component, however ambiguously. Disempowerment of women and the crisis in Gaza are two of his favorite situations to cite, but he also manages to co-opt a number of other genocides and point out the role of religions in their perpetuation.

Tony Blair argues a hazy counter-position that attempts to drag Hitchens' claim into doubt. He essentially says that Hitchens can't prove religion is a wholly negative influence, given all the positive work done in the name of the church. He downplays Hitchens' anecdotal evidence, provides a few counterexamples, and appeals to a sort of common wisdom: that just from everyday social experience, you can tell that a great many people can be part of a religious community, and channel that experience into positive actions and intentions... and that these people can be fully logical and reasonable, as well. But Blair isn't making any positive argument in favor of religion, so much as taking a defensive stance against Hitchens' rabid atheism.

This is a weak-ass debate, I have to say. I'd expect Hitchens to take a stronger position, but he waters down his argument, saying in his second speech, "Well now, in fairness, no one was arguing that religion should or will die out of the world, and all I'm arguing is it would be better if there was a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism." This echoes the circumlocutive nature of Blair's argument, which is infused with apologism. He keeps saying things like, "My claim is just very simple, there are nonetheless people who are inspired by their faith to do good." I'm telling you! Weak weak weak!

These two characters are basically arguing the same thing: religion's done bad stuff, but it's not ALL bad stuff. Hitchens says there should be more secularism, Blair says it's important to see religion in its positive aspects and try to reinforce those aspects. They're like two samurais who circle without ever coming in for a sword strike.

Hitchens won the debate, according to the polls. I think this is just because he's a lot more passionate about secularism than Blair is about theology. But couldn't one of these two find a more creative way of framing and expressing their argument? I think I can, and though I'm a mere non-committal agnostic, I think I could have made a better case for religion as a "positive force in the world" than Tony Blair did. Let me give it a shot.

WARNING: Long, abstract argument about religion looms ahead.

First, to answer Hitchens, who sets the tone for this debate: Hitchens spends his words characterizing religion as a supernatural belief system with detrimental outcomes. Among these:

"To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment"

"To consider women an inferior creation"

"[to force] nice people to do unkind things, and also [to make] intelligent people say stupid things"

These points do not stand as self-evident, no matter how loyal you are to enlightenment thinking. Images of hell and eternal punishment are an Abrahamic staple, mirrored in images of heaven and salvation, and linked to a deeper philosophy that moral choices have spiritual consequences (not, in itself, a terribly negative idea). In many religions, they are replaced by karmic mechanisms of rebirth, or by a yearning for emptiness as freedom from self-indulgence and vanity (Eastern philosophies are definitely religions, make no mistake). Historically, churches have been connected with female empowerment as well as subjugation, and they've been accredited as a powerful part of the civil rights movement. And the last of those three points is such an abstraction, it's almost meaningless... it can be answered readily with the claim that religion provided a social and institutional groundwork for GOOD works, for humility and community and human solidarity, and that religion's role in tribalism is as much a consequence of the latter as a fault of the former.

So these points neutralize themselves, simply because the anecdotal effects of religion are so contingent on its historical conditions (and also, so subject to observational bias and retroactive interpretation). Instead of trying to find reasons to praise or blame religion, we should consider its historical role in the world, the dramatic ambient influence it has had over the centuries. That's where, if anywhere, we'll discover its overarching value: its long-term outcomes, whether they're positive or negative.

When you say, "What has religion always given us, in different ways, throughout the history of civilization?" I think the best answer is that it's created a space for the discussion of morality as a function of transcendental consciousness. There has always been power, and self-regard, and goal-seeking behavior, but by appealing to a transcendental authority, religion has put morality beyond the reach of the contingent historical circumstances, so that "virtue" and "right and wrong" can be discussed and regarded as an independent sphere of principles. That's what's so important in the idea of a higher power, whether it's a monotheistic consciousness or an oligarchy of conflicted dieties... or even, in Eastern cases, a highly-abstracted "heaven and Earth," a Tao or a true nature of the universe. And I'll argue that this not only makes religion justifiable in pragmatic terms... it also clarifies the logic and validity of its truth-claims. Looked at as an historical artifact, religion is neither "evil" or "misguided."

It's hard to imagine a culture entirely without religion -- without any sense of a higher power or a transcendental framework. However, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that such a society would be deeply driven by survival instincts and power struggles. Human interaction can't happen without some sort of heirarchy and authority, however provisional it is, and without the stabalizing force of a "higher power," isn't it pretty reasonable to assume that power struggles would entirely dictate our loyalties and our deference? And that the strongest would become the final authority on moral good? People like Christopher Hitchens may hate the idea of a transcendental source of absolute authority, but isn't this far better than what we would get from an earthly source of absolute authority?

By making morality and virtue a conversation that can take place outside the immediate, strength-based power structure, religion has been an excellent tool to challenge the social and political hegemonies throughout history. If you can have communities of faith, you can escape the tendency to organize into ethnic enclaves, or alliances of wealth, or (especially) strength-based classes of master and slave. I find Nietzsche's ideology to be a bit noxious, but there's something to be learned from his work in The Genealogy of Morality. He claims that religion allowed the slave to become the master by effectively inverting the standard dominant/submissive parity. With religion, weakness could become a virtue; excess and brutality could be seen as flaws. Nietzsche thought this was a shitty development, but I think it's not so bad. Morality SHOULD be more complex than "do what the strongest guy tells you," shouldn't it?

Indeed, as long as we're talking about philosophers, we should mention the idea of discourse ethics: that "moral truths" are gradually being illuminated by way of a collective process of reasoning, carried out in conversation, debate, and rational rhetoric in public discourse. This idea is championed by contemporary philosopher Jurgen Habermas... and though Habermas doesn't talk directly about religion, as far as I know, he does claim that ethics are evolving within society by way of ongoing conversations about morality. And it's hard to imagine many conversations about morality without some appeal to a transcendental moral authority. It's the public institution of religion that's provided the changing platform for this kind of discourse throughout history.

It's actually kind of amazing, the way religion's focus on virtue and moral self-awareness has allowed it to be such a dynamic system. The various reformations couldn't have happened in such a strong, hierarchical system, if that system was purely political and terrestrial. It's only by appealing to the higher power that Martin Luther was able to question the Catholic Church's corruption at the time. And I think, arguably, religion has been involved in every major moral evolution throughout the history of man's moral consciousness. Even in times like the Enlightenment, when man was moving away from centralized organized religion, there was still an appeal to the higher will of God, manifesting in various forms of deism and religious fragmenting throughout the world. This fragmenting led isolated communities to seek freedom, and their spiritual solidarity and desire for liberation led to the formation of our current democratic republic.

The newest version of this kind of shift is the new movement from institutional organized religion to pluralistic, personal religious conviction. It's a credit to the power and flexibility of religion that this evolution can take place so naturally.

I said above that the "transcendental moral" nature of religious thought isn't just pragmatically justified... it's also rationally justified. The reason I say this is that religion, the placement of trust in a higher power, mirrors an actual human faculty for which there is no ultimate natural account. This is the human capacity to treat virtue and moral rightness as ends to be pursued in themselves, rather than mere survival techniques or responses to threats of force. Indeed, we can look for a rational reason for empathy and purity of conviction all we want, but it's always going to become a bit ambiguous when you account for self-sacrifice, stewardship, pacificism, and the passionate devotion to abstract principles. Rational explanation is too strict, too raw, too cynical to account for this whole moral structure.

Religious faith is a way of reconciling the knowledge that these moral impulses come from something greater than the biologically-determined, self-regarding individual consciousness. It's not illogical to perceive a transcendental force of harmony at work in the world, and this force would exist outside the plane of rational, deterministic explanation. Religions are all ways of encountering this transcendental force, through various traditions, metaphors, narratives, and belief systems. Reason legitimizes them, purely by virtue of its inherent incompleteness.

That's my argument, I think -- not short, but hopefully succinct enough to be clear. Religion is indeed a force for good in the world, because it's provided a platform and pivot-point, at every stage in history, for a debate on morality and virtue outside the demands of power and self-preservation. And even in the face of reason, religion is a legitimate project, because we will always have to go looking for "truth" in places that logical and reason can't entirely illuminate... especially in the case of moral and spiritual truths.

The Walking Dead follow-up: tracking some gender issues

2010-11-17T03:30:00.003-05:00

I'm going to do a quick post on gender relations in The Walking Dead, the AMC series that's recently aired its third episode.

The Walking Dead holds true to the atmosphere of the comic, which is good enough for me; I believe an artist has some responsibility to their source when adapting something, but I'm not a purist. Darabont's series treats Kirkman's protagonists lovingly, it adheres to the tone and intensity of the comics, and it remixes these elements to form a great parallel product. It seems to me that most of the new material -- the racists and the domestic abuse, the additional action and escape scenes, the return to Atlanta -- are mostly added in order to keep up with the pacing needs of television. I find this acceptable, even if these additions aren't as graceful as the original writing tended to be.

However, there are a few ways in which AMC's changes effect the tone of Robert Kirkman's narrative. One of the most jarring is the way the TV series handles its females, at least in these first three episodes. Now, I know there hasn't been a lot of development of the secondary characters, but real quick, I'll mention a few of the details that come into play when you talk about gender roles in The Walking Dead.

The first conversation in the TV series is between Rick Grimes and Shane, his best friend. After Shane offers some half-baked female-bashing guy talk, Rick unpacks some of his frustrations with his marriage to Lori, his wife, and he basically argues his side of the argument unilaterally: she undermines him emotionally, right in front of their son. Shane's only answer is to reassure him that this is just a phase marriages go through. This exchange is NOT in the comics; take that as you will.

Later in the same episode, we see Lori, just for a short sequence. She has a minor fight with Shane in front of Carl, and it becomes clear that Lori and Shane have started a relationship, since they both suspect Rick might be dead. Again, this conversation was invented for the show. In light of the previous exchange, it gives us a sense that Lori might be a bit self-righteous and hysterical (a "nag" is one word that springs to mind). This would naturally come as a point of contention for critics with a feminist awareness, such as, for instance, Nathaniel of Film Experience Blog.

But what I think is really happening here is that the writers are filtering these first two to three episodes through an explicitly male point of view. These are Rick's story, following the total collapse of his domestic life, and all the plot points introduced are related to this collapse. He was struggling with his relationship with Lori; now he's been replaced by Shane (though he doesn't know that yet). He's confronted with the unvarnished love and camaraderie between a neighboring father and son. If this unilateral point of view takes over the whole TV series, I'll take issue with it, as the comic is notably subtle and objective in its tone.

In the second episode, there is still a conventional gender divide, but it becomes more complex. Andrea is a presence in episode two, acting courageous, if a bit frantic, in the face of disaster in inner-city Atlanta. Again, there is a sense that she's a bit hysterical, and that should rightly raise some hackles. However, she also shows signs of becoming a strong, assertive female character, confident with a weapon and willing to take action. Her personality dominates the males around her, until the arrival of Rick, who derives most of his authority from the fact that he's a sheriff.

Through these two episodes, the male point of view remains fairly coherent. Rick and Shane are the strong, grounded, controlled leaders of whatever company they keep. The female point of view is kept at arm's length, at least somewhat. Lori and Andrea seem to linger in conventional modes: frantic, over-emotional, and motherly. Happily, in the third episode, these essentialisms break down further.

In Episode Three, "Tell It To The Frogs," Rick is finally reunited with his family. There are already power-struggles fomenting among the survivors, and they seem to ignite when Rick arrives. Lori viciously reprimands Shane for acting as a father figure to her son, since her husband has returned; meanwhile, the other women of the group step up to an abusive, misogynistic husband over the distribution of duties in the camp. Both of these are highly charged events, the cracks in the gender wall that the show has erected.

Lori's angry move to reclaim her family -- especially her son -- from Shane's paternalistic aura is rather jarring. It seems like nobody has even discussed this uncomfortable love-triangle situation, and she's acting like Shane's moving in on her kid. From the rationalistic, "let's discuss the issues" standpoint of a male viewer, her behavior may seem unreasonable, but it's probably appropriate in the circumstances. We've already seen how this post-apocalyptic world has brought out the territorial, the brutal, and the reactionary in its shaken residents. Lori has rediscovered her solid ground, and she takes this opportunity to stake it out.

The sequence that immediately follows justifies her aggression, at least partly. Shane "heroically" steps in to punish the domestic abuser of the group, effectively asserting his own status as the benevolent patriarch and punisher of injustice. However, you can see in the faces of the women he's defending: his reaction is excessively violent and self-indulgent. Read in isolation, Shane's outburst is a gesture of benevolent masculinity. However, seen in the context of his situation -- his sudden loss of a potential mate and protege -- it hints at dangerous reactionary instability. As the law-officer/husband/father patriarchy unravels, it starts to show something sinister underneath.

These are the first hints of something I hope continues through the rest of the season, and the series: the exploration of gender at the horizon of the apocalypse. Georgia has been converted, almost overnight, into a place governed by desperation, paranoia, and scarcity. This could devolve into pure vicious patriarchy (I understand something like this happens in the movie/book Blindness?) but in the hands of the writers and directors at work here, it should become something far more complex. Alliances will certainly be shifting over the next few episodes, and gender struggles will be balanced against familial loyalty and group solidarity.

Ultimately, it will be worth considering the writers' treatment of evolution and regression: do our human natures endure the trial of a desperate, wasted world? Do paranoia and desperation break down the barriers between us, or do they reinforce them beyond repair? If the writers are half as good as the other people writing for AMC, the gender issues will feed into these broader questions, rather than distracting from them.

Walking Dead: Three Episodes Down, First Thoughts

2010-11-16T02:14:00.007-05:00

I'm keeping a close eye on AMC's The Walking Dead. I could give a respectable-sounding reason for this... it's an unusual artifact, being a television series based on a horror comic. We've been seeing a lot of movies based on comics lately, but isn't a television series probably a better match for the comic's format, which stresses perpetual, cyclical continuity? And a horror-based television show... aside from infamous examples like Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone, we haven't had many of those, partly because broadcast television has such strict content controls.

But the real reason I'm following The Walking Dead is that I'm a huge fan of the graphic novels. I have been for three or four years, since they were publishing collection five or six (out of thirteen now). It's fascinating on a personal level to see how the story, characters, and atmosphere of the comic is changing with its move into a new format. As much as that stuff is my real point of contact, I think I should start with the media questions, because in writing these two paragraphs, I've realized that stuff is probably more interesting.

Sure, there have been TV series based on comic books before. Superman, Batman, The Hulk, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- these all jump to mind. And recently, there've been some abortive attempts at creating series based on comic strips -- Boondocks, Dilbert, etc. However, it's worth noting that those first four, the adaptations of superhero comics, totally abandoned the continuity that makes the comic book series such a fascinating medium. Indeed, The Walking Dead is one of the first live-action adaptations that, as far as I can see, attempts to keep the comic book's sense of perpetual continuity and change.

This was one of the great aspects of The Walking Dead in its graphic novel form. The characters weren't unchanging, mythical embodiments of ideals, like Superman and Batman, nor were they stuck in constant cycles of crisis and contrived resurrection, like many superheroes tend to be (the characteristic they share with soap opera characters). It's an inevitable fact of the series that characters, including the ones you hold dearest, have finite lifespans, and as the reader, you never get the comfort of functionally immortal protagonists. The series itself isn't even titled after a hero, so there's always the possibility that Rick Grimes, the series protagonist, may die a permanent death.

Within these limited lifespans, these characters evolve constantly, becoming hardened in the face of the apocalypse, sometimes breaking, sometimes becoming pillars of strength. If the series plays its cards right, we'll see that by about the mid-point of the second season (which has already been renewed, by the way). This is when the first batch of protagonists will have established their roles in the group dynamic, and it's when we'll probably be seeing the first "turnover," if you will, of some of the most important characters.

I have to mention, in passing, the brilliant casting decisions. Carl, in particular, is perfectly cast. His presence in the show is actually one of the first times I've ever seen an adaptation improve upon the spirit of the original. Carl makes the most sense as a character when he's seen as a fresh-faced little boy. Robert Kirkman, the writer of the comic, does a good job of evoking his childlike mentality, but artist Tony Moore can't really do justice to the face of a child. This is mostly because of the harsh, scratchy, India-ink finish of the artwork. Yet, it still stands -- the rough artwork seems to alienate the reader from sheltered little Carl. In the show, on the other hand, Chandler Riggs has exactly the right on-screen presence to evoke the Carl of Kirkman's writing.

We're now past the third episode, and it's become clear that pretty extensive liberties have been taken with the core team in adapting the comic to a television series. In particular, the show has added a couple subplots about social issues: a raving racist becomes a key figure in the show's first major moral dilemma, and some of the early power struggles among the survivors occur because of a wife-beater's treatment of the women of the camp.

These additional elements of drama are only provisionally welcome. They provide some additional opportunities to cast Rick and Shane as heroic defenders of justice and order, and they allow for some commentary on the civil strife within an isolate community. They also feel a little too easy, because "racism" and "domestic abuse" are very easy cues for our moral indignation. Without these little indicators, the comic provided a fairly broad, unpredictable, and murky moral landscape. Perhaps these civil disputes are commentary on culture clash in the American South, where the story is taking place; that rationale is enough to redeem the dramatic baggage, at least for the moment.

Ultimately, and refreshingly, the most powerful scenes in the show are the moments of emotional redemption, brought into relief against a ruined world. The cross-cut "mercy killing" sequence in episode 1, where Rick wanders into the woods to euthanize a female zombie, paralleling Morgan Jones' unsuccessful attempt to put his wife down: this sequence was one for the ages. The reunion scene between Rick, Lori, and Carl was another perfectly directed cinematic sequence, bringing the joy of the reunited family into focus without losing sight of the emerging tension between Shane and Rick.

I'm not completely done discussing these three episodes yet. In particular, I need to devote a post to the gender roles in the show, because they're a bit different from the comic, and they're showing a little regressiveness. However, that's a post for another day, not in the least because it's a bit too foggy and complex to be covered in a mere few closing paragraphs.

With that said, I hope everybody is enjoying the show as much as this Walking Dead fanboy, and I hope you'll stick with me through the first season.

More Politics: The old and wealthy right: Media outrage and resistance

2010-11-08T21:16:00.006-05:00

I know I've been a little over-active in the political writing, but these thoughts need an outlet, or they'll vanish into my cognitive history. I'm connecting various dots from the media and from my previous speculation, and suddenly, I'm understanding how conspiracy theorists are born: they like this feeling too much, the feeling of synthesizing disparate information, and they get addicted to it, and start to do it in excess.

As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, it seems that the effectiveness of John Stewart's rally, at least in the short term, maybe be tragically limited by economic conditions. As Fenzel from Overthinking It points out, it's far more profitable for the media conglomerates to promote outrage, as it tends to draw more viewers, whether in fearful agreement or disgusted skepticism. Somebody else wrote about this just recently, as well: The New Republic's Jonathan Chait suggests that a lot of the misconceptions about policies stem from the disparate amount of influence of the wealthy over the media. The wealthy scream that taxes are going up because they ARE going up, for the wealthy... even when they're going down for the middle class. So everybody thinks Obama is raising taxes, when he's actually just weighing them toward wealth to flatten out the bell curve of privilege.

These points, recalling the theory of the Frankfurt School, explain some aspects of the short-term political environment. The media (whether consciously or unconsciously) milks the outrage of the right, the political party most sympathetic to free-market business interests and most dismissive of social concerns.

There's another line of thinking going on, as well, dovetailing with the first. This is the theory that the older generation has been galvanized against the left, again offered on Jonathan Chait's feed. It might be argued that the older generations are more susceptible to the kind of outrage and sensationalism that the media outlets are selling. They haven't developed enough immunity to the influence of the once-credible traditional media.

To be honest, I've even felt this myself. As I get older, I get more mentally involved in politics and media, and it becomes hard to withstand the bombardment of information. Whether there's necessarily a right-wing bias, I can't tell, because I still mostly exist in the liberal echo-chamber (though I do take occasional excursions to the conservative outlets). However, I can tell you without a doubt that there's a bias toward discontent, alarmism, and cynicism, especially in the mainstream media that fills in the cracks between Salon and FiveThirtyEight. It's hard not to be taken up in the tidal wave of hand-wringing: is the world really going straight to hell, RIGHT NOW, in front of my eyes?

I'm still pretty sure that it's not the real world, but rather the raw, chafed, twitchy sensory organs of the media, which profit from our fear and oversensitivity. After all, it's built on advertising, which works best when we're off-balance, vulnerable, distracted, and hyper-perceptive.

With all that said... even that thing about me feeling mentally vulnerable myself... I can find a lot of hope under the surface onslaught. If this conservative surge is being driven by the older, richer, cynical generation, then it means that the future isn't necessarily in the hands of the conservatives. In fact, there are signs that this populist upswell is being locked out of party leadership now that it's fulfilled its electoral purpose. And if this is all the result of a malignant, outrage-prone media environment, then we see in John Stewart and Stephen Colbert the seeds of a media resistance. That's why I feel their rally was a significant event: it was a manifesto against the infrastructure that profits from our paralysis.

The younger generation won't always be apolitical; we all get more civic-minded when we step out of the bubbles of our childhood homes. And with luck, they'll be totally indifferent to the inane rantings of the media outlets, and much more prone to get their information from alternate sources -- and to know how to filter and synthesize that information in useful ways. Obama's big win was the first glimmer of consciousness from that generation, and recent progress on gay rights is a continuation of its positive influence.

If you came here looking for hope, it's above. If you came looking for some ideas, they're below.

First, we have to stay progressive, even when the real world seems frustrating, and multiculturalism seems to be swimming upstream against poverty and hostility, and social welfare seems like a futile gesture. If every generation really does turn conservative when it gets old, there will always be a culture war between the old and the young.

Second, we need to be vigilant enemies of cynicism and doomsday prophecy. The outrage and sensationalism always seems to turn people into fearful conservatives. As Bill Maher says, there is no equivalence (and he's got a good goddamn point there), but what he doesn't realize is that all irrational, self-righteous discourse will become political capital for the conservative cause. Fire and brimstone are not the liberals' strong suits... discursive agility and broad perspective are the weapons that fall on our side of political asymmetry.

Third, we need to listen to the youth, and groom our leaders from the emerging generation of activists and media personalities. These people will know how to manage the insane, super-complex media environment, and by defining the media environment for the next political age, they'll also be writing its policies. And they're smart and compassionate and hard-working.

The Horn and the Darkness: Love and death and trumpets in Venus in Furs (1969) and The Salton Sea (2002)

2010-11-07T17:22:00.009-05:00

In 1969, Jesus Franco made a film about a trumpet player, living in a world of dreamlike European wealth and sensation, who gets hung up on a mysterious stranger and caught up in her supernatural agenda. Like the art films of the time, it was a sick-soul-of-Europe party, but it was supported by narrative and genre conventions that those other experiments didn't have. That movie was Venus in Furs.

Venus in Furs is steeped in the erotic and the enigmatic; it takes itself deathly seriously, being packed full of dramatic jazzy voiceover, and in this regard it belongs with Roger Corman among the era's kitsch excesses and indulgences. However, Venus in Furs knows how to be a little restrained and a little classy... just enough to be respectful, and therefore respectable. It probably won't do anything for people who love exploitation's self-indulgence, but for someone like me, who's more generally a "good movies" fan, it went down just right. It has its cheesiness (e.g. the title song, the bizarro ending) but it earns it in atmosphere and rhythm and self-awareness.

If you want a more detailed overview, check out an excellent review at Ferdy on Films.

And in 2002, the formula re-emerged as a tweaky cult crime thriller starring Val Kilmer, in one of those strange cinematic parallels that seems like it has to have been intentional, but also, maybe it wasn't. This film was The Salton Sea, and its similarities to Venus in Furs straddle the line between cosmetic and uncanny. Both films are about a trumpet player who's abandoned his craft because of the death of a romantic interest, the protagonists' chance encounters with desire and death. Both come to channel, or manifest, the vengeful personalities of the crimes. Both are lead into obsession and betrayal by their association with these restless demons.

On a slightly deeper level, both of these films are stories of witnessing death and dealing with the guilt that comes of it -- the transfer of responsibility for a lost life, simply because you were present for the crime. The two main characters... Danny/Tom and Jimmy... are led in different directions by this guilt: Danny becomes obsessed with retribution, whereas Jimmy becomes sexually obsessed, and almost enslaved.

It seems to me that their stories part ways at the moment when they make different decisions about the trumpet. Tom (Danny) lets go of his identity as a horn player, and he never goes back to it, taking on a new persona in order to make amends for his idle gaze. Jimmy, on the other hand, can't let it go: as the film begins, he digs up his trumpet and starts to play. This is just the moment when his crime washes up on shore, returning with his old identity, which is still infected with the memory of the murder.

Perhaps if Jimmy had gone Van Allen's route... leaving the horn and taking his life in another direction... he would never have seen Wanda wash up on the shore.

Of course, the journey isn't over for Danny/Tom: he still has to purge his guilt by pursuing the murderers (and contaminating his own body and ethics in the process). This is the amends-making that drives the movie. However, even this fate is better than Jimmy's, who loses the only person who loves him (the only person who seems to notice him), and then accompanies a vengeful spirit through a trippy afterlife. I had the sense, in fact, that Jimmy was Wanda's avatar, her link with the real world, and that she had to stay attached to him in order to carry out her mission.

Franco's tale is a bit more artistically sloppy, as befits a trash culture surrealist, and it has more inexplicable moments of hyperreality: the carnival, where normal people are licensed to release their inner demons; the sexually-ambivalent relationship between Olga and Wanda, involving a doubling collision of lustful glances and camera lenses; the red room, chamber of damnation for the wealthy murderers, where Wanda is condemned to be the object of their guilt. Among the most interesting scenes is the weird imperial fantasy of Ahmed, the host of the party, and by implication, the host of the whole sequences of events of the film.

Another place of overlap: isn't there some interesting parallel between Ahmed (played by Klaus Kinski) and Poo-Bear (played by Vincent D'Onofrio)? Both are the deranged lords of their households, entertaining depraved guests and delusions of grandeur. They are the sinister epicenters of these two psychologically intense films, providing a gravitation center for the themes of guilt, repression, and retribution.

See Venus in Furs and The Salton Sea as a double-feature, and spend a night feeling tweaky and tripped-out, meditating on the meaning of non-intervention and guilt and vengeful reincarnation by way of hapless horn players. While you're at it, hire a jazz band to play during the break. Or call me! I'll organize it, as long as you pay for the pizza.

A couple more observations on politics and discourse

2010-11-04T03:24:00.003-04:00

First: if we're going to try to get this "well-informed, balanced discourse" thing going after the Stewart Rally and the election-day fisticuffs, we can start with some worthwhile articles from reputable sources that address some of the myths echoing around popular discourse:

Here's one on how Obama saved Capitalism, to his own ultimate political disadvantage.

From Bloomberg Businessweek, Obama is meeting his legislative objectives, and very few people are noticing.

And now a more personal response to these unstable political days.

After the Comedy Central rally, I happened to pick up one of my old Media Studies sourcebooks, Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. It argues an elaborate theory that for two thousand years, Western civilization conditioned itself into being an extremely visual society (which he also associates with being individualist, linear, chronological, and structured in our thinking)... he asserts that the Gutenberg press brought about the apex of this form of culture. He then argues that for the past 100 years, we've been reverting into an auditory culture, which he associates with spatial, non-linear, and simultaneous ways of thinking.

And he says that panicked, terror-stricken behavior will be a product of this shift in perceptual mode, if we're not prepared for the changes. His description of this rocky transition is strikingly familiar:

And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. It is easy to perceive signs of such panic in Jacques Barzun [a cultural historian/philosopher] who manifests himself as a fearless and ferocious Luddite in his The House of the Intellect. Sensing that all he holds dear, stems from the operation of the alphabet in and on our minds, he proposes the abolition of all modern art, science, and philanthropy. This trio extirpated, he feels we can slap down the lid on Pandora's box. At least Barzum localizes his problem even if he has no clue as to the kind of agency exerted by these forms. Terror is the normal state of an oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the same.

So, M.M. offers warnings of anti-intellectualism, and a prophecy that our culture will be engulfed in panic and terror, a knee-jerk reaction to the sudden explosion of our mutual awareness (aka loss of privacy, high visibility, and ubiquity of trivial information). And now here we are, scared of terrorists next door, homosexuals infiltrating our childrens' heads, and rats with human brains. It may be a little late for this world, Marshall, but if you can see this from the next, I hope you're saying, "Yup, that's what I figured."

Rally to Restore Sanity: A meta-political landmark. I hope.

2010-11-04T00:49:00.003-04:00

Happy political Halloween! Instead of spending a day working on a costume or watching artsy horror movies from the 60's and 70's, I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity. It was a last-minute decision, made on the fly because I knew it would be a cultural landmark, and I saw the opportunity. At least, I hope it will be seen as a cultural landmark. It was a little microcosm of liberalism, in all its beauty and its vulnerability.

I didn't see all the mad performance pieces at the front; I couldn't hear Yusef or Ozzy or Rahzel. I didn't catch the keynote until I got to a video after-the-fact. You may think that this gave me a narrower insight into the dynamic of the event, but au contraire! It gave me a better one! Because, no matter how diplomatic John and Stephen tried to be, the tenor of the rally would be set by the attendees. If they had been Black Bloc and revolutionary insurrectionists, or even straight-edge punks chanting slogans, the politics would have been pretty one-sided, no matter how the speeches themselves were handled. By wandering among the signs and participants, I got a feeling for the mood of the crowd and the tone of the event as a whole, rather than for the specific performances, which (being affiliated with a major media network) are obviously going to be sanitized.

What I found was pretty impressive: the rally as a whole -- both the on-stage rhetoric and the expressions of the crowd -- were strikingly on-message. Leftist solidarity and socialist advocacy were generally absent, and almost all the signs were meta-political, targeting the language and media of politics, rather than the divisive issues that make up its content. The fears of people like Timothy Noah at Slate, who felt the event automatically had a strong liberal bias that made its message of moderation disingenuous, were pretty much unfounded. And the massive crowd was universally calm, cordial, well-behaved, good-humored, and easy to get along with, even in stressful positions (like shut out of a full metro car, even when they'd been waiting for hours to get downtown).

Now, here's where I'm coming from. I'm a guy who indulges the unhealthy habit of reading highly partisan blog posts from time to time (on both sides of the aisle) and then reading the comments to each of them, wherein the tantrums of the few trolling attention-whores tend to drown out any useful dialogue going on. I get this feeling from the mainstream outlets themselves, too, at least in the past year or so: that participating in the democratic discourse is always a losing proposition, because any argument is automatically hyper-politicized, linked with dozens of bad (usually irrelevant) arguments, and invalidated by proxy. Every attempt to participate is turned into a shouting match, and thus, expressing any political position whatsoever is enabling trolls and reactionaries, and is therefore self-defeating.

So this rally was genuinely refreshing. John and Stephen (and Yusef and Ozzie and the guy next to me with a big "Use Your Inside Voice" sign) had a cohesive message, contrary to some of the nay-saying that's gone on since the rally... and it's a cohesive message I can get behind: discourse needs to be civil. In so many words, we were trying to say, "We respect, and expect, maturity and restraint from our political media, and we will reward it." And there were a lot of people saying that. And it's actually one of the first large-scale, mass-media sentiments I can get behind, because it outflanks the hyper-politicized culture-war rhetoric. Stewart and Colbert stepped back, took the whole situation into account, and fashioned a message that responds to it at a higher level than mere partisanship. It's a little more complex, and it's far more gratifying.

Of course, with the palpable relief comes the fear that many of us leftists (and also tons of moderates) probably still have, especially after yesterday's election: the fear that this whole thing will be overlooked, because it's not sensational enough to be interesting. Unfortunately, no matter how high-level the thinking is, Stewart and Colbert are still subject to the media conditions that created this shitty situation in the first place.

Fenzel from Overthinking It puts it rather nicely:

The rally isn’t going to solve Stewart’s problem with the press — it’s not even going to come close to solving the problem. The economic fundamentals are too heavily stacked against it. The profit motive for media organizations to keep going the way things are dwarfs what they can make just producing news. They can make a lot more money — for their own books, for their own pockets, and through various complex business relationships — selling de facto editorial control of news outlets to private companies (that will turn profits by influencing government policy) than they can make selling time to the Pine-Sol lady and the Scooter Store.

So while I can call this event a "landmark," it won't even be a footnote if it doesn't have some effect on the material conditions that govern these things. And it will be hard, especially if you follow a Marxist framework, like Fenzel seems to... it won't have much effect on the economics of the situation.

But here's where my hopes for the rally come in.

First, it's important to note that shows of solidarity have a powerful effect, if they can resonate with the media. The Tea Party has proven this -- their power isn't in their spending or their economic force, but rather in their visibility, and their ability to reframe the political environment. This rally was indeed a response to the Tea Party (a common theme on the signs), and it makes reframing the discursive environment its explicit business. The exposure from this rally may give everybody -- not just leftists or teenagers -- an essential tool that they didn't have before: a new sensitivity to media sensationalism, which might have been affecting them for a long time without their even knowing it. Maybe, because of this rally, a new crop of people will be able to roll their eyes and change the channel when someone accuses a university professor of "hating America," or a Christian teenager of being a mindless conservative drone.

I especially hope Stewart and Colbert reinforce the younger generation's resistance to outrage and sensationalism, because they're both the most vulnerable to bad discourse, and the its most powerful potential foe. They need to build up a media immune system, and if their influence works out right, Stewart and Colbert could act as vaccines against the festering media conglomerates.

Also, as a progressive, I have some hopes (didn't mean to give away my political persuasion, but there you have it). I think the conservative perspective is currently dominating the media environment because it's created a foundation of outrage and reactionary rhetoric, and this has served its message very well. This is one very important reason for the partisan shift in yesterday's elections. Though the rally came to late to have any effect on the elections, I hope they can do something new: provide a parallel foundation for the leftist platform to be consolidated and articulated. If a discursive framework of moderation, diplomacy, and constructive, hopeful, humorous, self-aware dialogue can be laid, then the progressives may stand a chance of forming a cohesive platform, based on our core values: compassion, economic and social equality, and market capitalism supported by universal social programs providing for basic civil rights (both negative and positive, outlined in documents like the Bill of Rights and the UDHR).

Kanye West's Runaway, post 3: Who is this guy?

2010-10-28T03:15:00.001-04:00

This is my final post about Kanye's recent music video opus Runaway. You can go to the first post to see the video and check out some other blogs' reactions; the second post discusses some precedents for this type of narrative music video treatment.

You got the story on where this fits in... today, I'll talk more about what sets it apart. And I want to start with the opinion of one of its commentators, The House Next Door's Oscar Moralde.

Moralde gets one particular thing right -- like many music videos, this short film stands on the virtue of its individual moments. The extended ballet sequence was particularly visually effective, I think, as the dance itself was beautiful. It was an interesting creative decision: this is the moment when the debutante dinner is watching Kanye the most closely. Thus, this moment represents the spectacle of Kanye's act, and in the middle of an orgy of spectacle, he chooses something restrained and expressive to draw the audience's gaze. And he doesn't half-ass it... it's about 10 minutes long, at the exact center of the 30-minute video. I love the sequence, and I love its contrast with Kanye's persona.

Is it all too grand? Is it all too cheesy? I think this is what some of the commentators think, but this isn't a paradigm that demands great restraint. After all, the "art film" pretense is just a gloss -- this film is made with a musical sensibility, rather than a cinematic one. Where the fine arts of cinema and theater are always looking for new stories to tell and fresh, transgressive ways of telling them, music is more cyclical. In the pop music worlds (rock, rap, country) we don't criticize artists for writing yet another song about love, or another self-praise anthem backed by ironic retro samples. And we have a good deal of tolerance for high drama in music, to the point of celebrating some truly epic melodramatic songs (The Killers and Guns n Roses, I'm looking at you guys). These tolerances bleed over into the world of music video, as well... we appreciate and celebrate lots of music videos weighed down with high drama, repeating the same cyclical structures: performance, abstract, story, performance.

Convention has its place, and the the "cliches" of Kanye's short film are fairly purchased by its musical nature. Just listen to the songs: "Can we get much higher?" ... "Turn up the lights in here baby" ... "Lost in the World." In the music, the self-importance, the epic drama, is a part of the package, and it's not only tolerable... it's necessary. This is where the video is rooted. This is why the project fits together.

Certainly, this video opus is excessive, but it's also very authentic. Kanye put himself into his video piece, including all his self-importance, his feeling of isolation, and his ambivalence about his industry patrons. He also acknowledges that he's kind of a ridiculous centerpiece for a sweeping drama... Oscar Moralde may interpret his lines as simply bad, but for me, they worked great as humorous asides in a very self-important work of art. When his neighbor at the dinner asks if he realizes his companion is a bird, he says, stupidly and drolly, "I never noticed that."

This little clip of dialogue is turned into a strange moment of discomfort and recognition when the patronizing neighbor makes a xenophobic remark. The cheesiness of this moment is mitigated by the awkward line that precedes it, which has already brought some levity to the moment. The recognition of injustice doesn't manifest as shock or heroic indignation, so much as a tiny crack in Kanye's total obliviousness. This makes him a strange character, an idiot-savant center of attention who doesn't fully understand what he's bringing to the table (so to speak).

You can claim he just looks stupid because he's actually stupid, but I don't really buy this. "Felliniesque" is certainly an overstatement, but the guy is shrewd, and he presumably knows what messages he is sending. Seen in this light, his character is a sort of hip-hop Forrest Gump, and his lines, like "First rule in this world, baby: don't pay attention to anything you see in the news" represent intentionally simple-minded wisdom. Life is like a box of chocolates, baby.

This kind of sounds like his Twitter personality, too. He's got GW Bush's pithyness and Joe Biden's tact. And he knows this. "Let's have a toast to the douchebags" is as much a self-criticism as a snipe at his peers.

This self-criticism is part of the general tone that makes this video unique. It may be decked with the trappings and ostentation of big-money hip-hop videos (the Michael Jackson parade! Jesus!), but Kanye's character isn't exactly a hard-ass baller. He's got a cool car and a nice crib, but rather than counting his bitches, he's falling in hopeless, almost adolescent love. Rather than taking over the party, he's asking whether he even wants to be a part of it.

Now, this is on top of the rather uncontroversial "central metaphor" of the film, which is that the phoenix represents Kanye's career, which is being reborn from its own ashes. Now, everybody kind of takes that metaphor for granted, because it's so easy to sum up, as I just did. But if you actually look into it, it's not so simple. The 2009 VMA's were Kanye's Taylor-Swift-boat, but is he equating this process with crashing down into a cesspool of critics, in anticipation of rising up again to return to his fame? Considering the video is about love and loss within this transitional period, and that Kanye himself appears as a companion and a guide through this "lower world," I don't think this metaphor is so cut-and-dry. There's a sense of alienation and uncertainty to the phoenix's predicament, but not a sense of failure or trial-by-fire. In fact, she seems to approach her situation with hope, and with some measured joy. You could say the metaphor is underdeveloped, or you could say it's loose and ambiguous... but it's not so simplistic that you can wave it away as below consideration.

Part of the mixed message, I feel, is that Kanye actually appreciated being lost and dismissed as an artist (now, it's arguable whether this was ever really true, but we'll play along). On Earth, where the phoenix is exiled, there's all sorts of pettiness and sniping and unfulfilled promises... but there's also hope for love, some excellent dancers, fireworks, and the epic paper mache heads of music legends. And Phoenix, when she finally leaves, doesn't seem triumphant or ecstatic to return to her place in the heavens. Indeed, she seems to be tortured by mixed feelings, knowing that she's leaving behind a sad Kanye. And Kanye himself knows that, however broken he found his career to be, his challenges after a "renewal" will probably be all the more stressful (mo' money, you know the story).

There has always been a bit of adolescence and a bit of vulnerability to Kanye, even at his moments of purest arrogance. All of these things come across in Runaway. It may be audacious, self-centered, and grossly over-the-top... but I'd like to give Kanye my props, knowing that he's an artist who will try some crazy shit when it suits him. This is who he is. Hear, hear.

Kanye West's Runaway, post 2: Man, you referenced the wrong history

2010-10-26T21:20:00.001-04:00

This is my second post on Kanye West's recent music video epic, Runaway. In the first post, I discussed the general story framework, and the critics' reactions. I also linked to the video, so click through to see it. Tomorrow, I'll talk about some interesting thematic elements that make this a unique media artifact.

Today: where this project fits into recent mass media history.

Kanye is a big star, and he knows how to make headlines. Just recently, he got a pop music meditation written about him by Taylor Swift and performed at the VMA's, and no matter how you judge that, it's proof that he's made an impression. His Twitter account is followed madly for its insight and comic touch. He's had a funny relationship with SNL, leading to an interesting performance on the show recently. At this point, he's in danger of overexposure. But he's not the first guy to take over the mass media for a while... and his most recent output, that batshit insane music video, is not the first project of its kind, either.

The House Next Door mentions Michael Jackson, who did this sort of thing from time to time. Of course, the MJ line in the song and the paper mache MJ in one of the scenes is a reference to Jacko, who was the progenitor of this narrative-montage format. In terms of message, Runaway is a far cry from Moonwalker, which was strictly a hero fantasy with no sense of irony or self-criticism at all. However, in tone and scale, Runaway strongly resembles the object of comparison, and given how few such projects have really come together, I think this comparison works to Kanye's credit.

This video also strongly reminds me of Madonna's historic Like a Prayer. It's partly the color palette and the thematic ambition; it's partly because of the image of a mythical figure coming to life as an object of desire, and because of the use of classical performers as a backdrop to a pop performance. Madonna was also exploring her own media condition as a theme. Her piece was shorter and much more focused; Kanye is ready to say something about everything. Again, I see this as an asset.

I'm sorry if it just sounded like I said Jesus is a myth, by the way. I meant "mythical" in scope and cultural influence.

There are a couple more notable resonances between these two videos. As with Madonna's black Jesus, Kanye includes a racial theme, where the female protagonist appears to be of mixed race. Kanye also references white oppression in the form of a child in a Klan hood -- a reference that Madonna shares in her controversial video. However, unlike Madonna's video, Kanye doesn't come across as making an activist statement: many of the black characters are the wealthy exploiters, in a clear shot at the big money of hip-hop. It's never clear, along racial lines, who perpetrates the oppression.

Madonna and Kanye also both use the female body as an element of the spectacle, with lots of cleavage in both cases. Obviously this is for different thematic purposes: Madonna's liberated sexuality was transgressive, a feminist response to the controlling power of conservative media, reinforced by her relationship with the black character. By contrast, Kanye's media environment is not conservative, and his use of the female form isn't exactly taboo-breaking at this point; in his case, the almost nude model is garbed in a fashion designer's fantasy of divine wings. Kanye is celebrating the permissiveness and spectacle of his media, using this powerful and remote female presence as a symbol of innocence and desire. Make of this what you will -- it probably deserves a few words from a good feminist critic.

Of course, there's almost a touch of Lady Gaga in her fashionable excess, isn't there? Gaga, who's been mixing narrative and fashion for a few media cycles now, and who is notably influenced by Bjork. The phoenix (non)-costume is reminiscent of Bjork's iconic swan dress from the 2001 VMA's. The phoenix is Runaway's nod to the fashion world, which goes hand in hand with hip-hop and with the global media spectacle as it evolves.

How about another one? As I've written about Runaway, I've realized it also feels like Guns n' Roses' epic rock and roll videos, like November Rain, from back in 1992. Again, it's the themes: love and loss, the return to oblivion as a signal of redemption. It's also some of the techniques. Like Axl Rose, Kanye performs his piece on a piano before a captivated audience; like Slash, he then stands on that piano to deliver the climax.

The context here -- Madonna, MJ, GnR -- demonstrates one of the notable quirks about Kanye: he has the sensibility of a rock music video artist, even as he has the sense of irony and "arrogance" (read: self-praise) of the hip-hop artists who inform his sound. Apparently, when he talked about this video, he talked about it being "Felliniesque," which is a little silly. Hype Williams probably doesn't know who Fellini is. But Italian art cinema just wasn't quite the right context for this project ("Them Italians sure know how to make what the ________s want").

A better context would have been this history of epic music videos, that don't subscribe to the same standards of subtlety and taste. It may have a lot of ideas and references spinning around in there, but this is not intended to play out like literature. It's all about the spectacle, like those giants of the form: Jackson, Madonna, Bjork, Axl and Slash. And watching the videos above, I think Kanye's intense, ostentatious approach is going to prove an asset in the long run.

Luckily, despite all the nostalgia, there's also something here that's uniquely Kanye. I'll cover that tomorrow, when I discuss this particular video's subtexts.

Kanye West's Runaway, post 1: Not terribly well-received

2010-10-25T23:19:00.012-04:00

I happened to catch Kanye's new music-video-cum-short-film opus Runaway on Vimeo the night it came out. I didn't even realize it would be a phenomenon. I think I was lucky in this regard -- I didn't have to see it so much as a media artifact of fame and arrogance, as just a video project, as with everything I see randomly on the Vimeo front page. But now the blog responses have started coming in, and I feel compelled to provide my own bit of discussion.

It's a mythic hip-hop saga of a playah (Kanye, who may or may not be playing himself) who runs across a fallen Phoenix, descended like an angel in a ball of fire. They go through the standard stewardship ritual, where he introduces her to the world in its beauty and tragedy, by way of some baroque music video set-pieces. Of course, he falls in love with her, and then (in the oldest tragic love-story trick in the book) has to let her go.

If you've got a free 30 minutes, watch it below:

First, I ran across the reaction from Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical, to which I responded: what? Your only reaction was to be totally sarcastic and unsympathetic? Haven't you ever seen a music video? Un-subtle symbolism is not a crime against sensibility... it's just a guy going crazy with the expressive tools at his disposal. Surrealism was no less blatant; neo-realism wasn't much more opaque about its deeper implications. If you insist on sputtering vitriol, please give it some substance!

Second, the reaction from Oscar Moralde at The House Next Door. This one is less hostile -- still delivered with an undertone of condescension, but it makes concessions to the imagery and the ambition. His initial problem seems to be that the video is arrogant and self-aggrandizing, and that it's got the sensibility of a film student. I submit that these complaints aren't that serious, either... rappers are generally expected to be adept in the art of self-praise, and cultural reference is one of their stocks in trade. And perhaps he's not exactly a mature, restrained filmmaker, but don't a lot of artists make their best work in their student period? Wouldn't you rather have the ambition of a student who's preoccupied with great works of art, rather than the routine of a rap video with no interest in showing anything but bling and bitches and booty, or (in the case of early gangsta rap) a bunch of dudes engaged in a pot-smoking rager?

[EDIT: I re-read Moralde's piece, and it's much more well-rounded than I give it credit for. He actually does discover some beauty and noble purpose in the video, and honestly, along with his criticism, his take is probably even more balanced than my own. So thanks for that, Oscar -- just wanted to put it out there.]

Okay, so needless to say, I don't buy these criticisms. In fact, I rarely buy criticisms without some sympathetic acknowledgment of what the artist was trying to do, or what makes their vision unique. And in Kanye's case, we have a guy aligned with the rap scene (complete with help from Hype Williams) but who wants to capture an epic tableaux of love, passionate, and self-destruction. It's got the pomp and circumstance and self-importance of the rap game, which is one of Kanye's essential themes, but it's also got a consciousness of myth and the universal human story.

In my next couple posts on the topic, I'll talk about two things: tomorrow, visual precedents for this kind of treatment; Wednesday, the oddities of theme and character that make this video uniquely Kanye.

Searching out the Sick Soul: La Dolce Vita, La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad

2010-10-18T17:41:00.008-04:00

I've seen all three "Sick-Soul-of-Europe-Party" movies now... two recently, one (La Dolce Vita) a while ago. Everybody talks about these movies as being about the alienation of the pampered European bourgeoisie lifestyle, which I think glosses over a more specific reading: they are movies about the anxiety of detached reflection, the fear that in pausing to consider your life, you'll discover that there's just no real point to it. Some people (myself included, and Roger Ebert, as well) felt compelled by this.

Pauline Kael did not. She makes this strikingly clear in her essay for The Massachusetts Review (Winter 1963), entitled "The Sick-Soul-Of-Europe-Parties." She says,

La Dolce Vita, La Notte, and Marienbad are all about people who are bored, successful and rich--international cafe society--but in at least two of them we are told they are artists, and because we know that artists embody and express their age, its soul and its temper, we are led to believe that these silly mannikins represent the soul-sickness, the failure of communication, the moral isolation of modern man.

Fellini and Antonioni ask us to share their moral disgust at the life they show us--as if they were illuminating our lives, but are they? Nothing seems more self-indulgent and shallow than the dissatisfaction of the enervated rich; nothing is easier to attack or expose.

Kael seemed to come at these films from her entrenched spectatorial position: that she lives a well-supplied, respectable everyday life; that what matters in this world is self-evident. This is the point of view of the essential middle-class white-collar citizen, working for their money, just trying to make it though the day. Of course, Kael had the extra bit of detached self-awareness necessary to use that as a frame for analyzing movies. Even so, she made her lens obvious in a number of passages:

"I don't want to sound like a Doris Day character--the all-American middle-aged girl--but when I put the coffee on in the morning and let the dogs out, I don't think I feel more alienated than people who did the same things a hundred years ago."

"Forgive me if I sound plaintive: I've never been to one of these dreadfully decadent big parties (the people I know are more likely to give bring-your-own-bottle parties)."

"I was intrigued by the palaces and parks and wanted to know where they were, who had built them, and for what purposes (I was interested in the specific material that Resnais was attempting to make unspecific)."

Analyzing these three films from this perspective is natural and excusable, but I can't help but feel that Kael was willfully neglecting the point of view that the films are expressing. It's a point of view that she probably had access to, being a well-paid professional writer and film theorist, which are bourgeoisie professions par excellence (this coming from an acknowledged member of the same creative class, of course). Did Kael never indulge the idea that she may have been a cultural parasite, feeding off the structural and economic excesses that place such high value on "abstract thought" and "cultural literacy?" Had she never been scared by the idea that her ultimate role in the universe was the role of privileged navel-gazer? I think she needed to access these anxieties to see where these filmmakers were coming from.

By shoehorning herself into this critical perspective, Kael makes the mistake of treating all three of these films as unequivocally identical, when in truth, each has its own particular dramatic conflicts and lessons. Kael thinks that all three are over-determined by the message that "big decadent European parties are actually sad and pathetic," which isn't actually the message in any of them. If anything, it's merely the tone: the sad-heart-of-privilege is definitely a shared stage, and the idle celebration is an easy way to set that stage, but each film creates its own thematic undertones within this space.

For instance, I can't help but feel that Roman Catholicism is a strong presence in La Dolce Vita, and this may be why this feels like the most full-bodied and hopeful of the three films. Marcello and his band of adolescents don't take religion seriously, but even so, it lingers out there on the periphery of the story, offering a glimpse into a hope that some people can access, even if it's beyond Marcello's reach. This theme of religion and cosmic uncertainty seeps into the story in a number of places: the agony of suicide and death, just off-screen and outside Marcello's blinders; the appearance of father figures who inspire both admiration and ambivalence in the protagonist. The film may be unresolved; it may withhold its thesis; but it can't be accused of being empty of concrete meaning.

The wealth and false narratives, covering meaninglessness like plaster over a gaping hole, is a theme in the work of Resnais, as well. However, like all of his themes, it isn't rooted as deeply in the characters -- generally the film seems to be an exploration of appearances and aestheticization.

You could point to some religious concerns in La Notte, as well, but again, they don't have much emphasis. What does have a strong emphasis in La Notte -- which is minimally addressed in the other two films -- is the faux-creative disposition, the inauthentic position of the self-involved public artist. Kael throws light on this by rejecting the theme before she actually investigates it; she says Giovanni seems like a fake artist, with none of the tortured texture of a truly great writer. Without a doubt, Antonioni would probably make the same observation: Giovanni is not addicted to the act of creation, like a great artist, but rather to the public image that he can attain.

This also relates, in no small way, to Giovanni's relationship with Valentina, who acts as both a muse and a foil. She has everything the couple lacks: spontaneity, artistic ambition and humility, and some respect and regard for the marriage she threatens to break up. I think, as much as it's a simple interpretation to see Giovanni's interest in her as the capricious horniness of a middle-aged man, it's actually a form of possessive denial. Giovanni wants to possess her because she represents a lost part of himself.

Kael calls for a character in these films "who enjoys every minute of it, who really has a ball," who she says would be "the innocent American exploding this European mythology of depleted modern man"... and yet, she fails to recognize these figures when they arrive. They are Valentina, and Marcello's father, and perhaps even M, the husband in Last Year at Marienbad. These characters are the windows to the outside world, alluding to places that haven't become drowned in habit and aimlessness.

Of course, I have the urge to ask of Kael: why write so much about these movies, simply to say that they're generally shallow and overrated? I guess, at the time, the prevailing appreciation of these films was so strong that it was worth voicing some resistance. Kael is also one of the greatest critics in history, so I can't deny that she had good reason, even if I don't understand it. And I must admit, I don't mind the basic idea of a review-criticism hybrid essay, which is pretty much what this is. Even so, I think I got more out of the sick soul films that Kael did, maybe because I watched with a different pair of eyes.

Banksy stacks The Simpsons with different levels of messaging

2010-10-11T21:00:00.001-04:00

Banksy's recent opening sequence for The Simpsons is striking and discomforting, which is a small triumph right from the get-go, as far as I'm concerned. However, more brilliant is the way Banksy has used this forum to navigate a gauntlet of corporate pressure and open critique. He's done this by subverting his own message with sarcasm, which provides just enough of a hook for FOX to let the ad run; it may make the sequence more diffuse in its targeting, but it also makes it much more effective, if only by giving FOX a reason to put it on the air.

WTF am I talking about? Check out the sequence:

Well, let's start with the most obvious reading of the intro: that it's an exposé and a direct, open attack on FOX and The Simpsons' overseas outsourcing policies. I'll call this the CRITICAL READING -- the interpretation that Banksy has used this forum to make a direct comment on FOX's corporate immorality.

This raises an obvious first question: how did this get past the FOX executives? It doesn't matter how powerful Matt Groening is in the FOX heirarchy... the network would never PAY a video artist to create a direct attack on its own policies, and then air it on a high-visibility network show. They also wouldn't give such a dangerous artist completely free license; they would only hire him on particular conditions of review and approval. So how'd Banksy make this work?

Presumably, if this sequence was too literally on-target, it wouldn't have run. If FOX was actually perpetrating human rights abuses for the purposes of creating FOX animation and merchandise, and it wasn't a public issue, and the network was trying to keep quiet about it, then they wouldn't have touched this bit of subversive commentary by Banksy. So there must be something else going on here, something that subverts the CRITICAL READING that's initially evident.

Well, guess what? There IS another reading out there. After all, this information about FOX outsourcing from Korea... this is already public, and the public has already had a chance to chew on it and gripe about it. So the suggestion that The Simpsons outsources its labor isn't so dangerous. People who realize this are seeing this opening sequence as being a satire of media hype, a wry hyperbole of critics' misinformed ideas of foreign labor. This reading, seeing the segment as more tongue-in-cheek and humorous, is what I'd call the SARCASTIC READING.

And it's an adept turn of message that the SARCASTIC READING subverts the CRITICAL READING. Certainly, this was enough of a selling point for Banksy to get the network to agree to air this segment. They know The Simpsons has always been edgy and self-critical, so when Banksy tells them that his opening sequence is actually making fun of the critics for being so sensitive about this "sweatshop labor" outsourcing thing, they buy it. They understand that the segment is controversial, but not outright dangerous to them, so they agree to run it. It's good for all parties.

It's important to note that even with the specific FOX-focused criticism slightly declawed, this intro sequence still makes a statement. For one thing, many people won't notice the sarcastic reading and will just come away with the critical reading. For another, there is a higher-level critical reading that isn't preemptively invalidated: the reading that this intro is a general critique of American consumerism and lack of global awareness. People may follow this insight to a dead end with regards to FOX, but at least they will have taken a moment to consider where their products come from. And there will be lots of people -- the smartest of them -- saying, "Well, maybe FOX isn't the worst offender in terms of exploitive labor, but there are definitely American companies out there who are actually just this bad." ... "And honestly, we don't know about FOX, either. Maybe this is closer to the mark than we realize."

Banksy is walking a deeply ambivalent line between co-opting the instruments of mass culture, and selling out to them. His ability to simultaneously skewer FOX and its critics shows just how complex his messages can be. As much as this attests to his skill at working with the information apparatus, it still begs the question: for whose benefit is this media artifact created? You're sending a valuable message, but is it enabling the offender? Which is more important: what you say? Or on whose behalf you say it?