Cool Shit Alert: Jon Arbuckle's existential misery

I was introduced to something minor but fascinating today. It's a blog, hosted on Tumblr, called Garfield minus Garfield, and it's one of those amusing little media experiments that works out surprisingly well, if you're able to read it receptively. Here's the introduction to the blog:

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb."

Yes, friends, it's a simple experiment: remove Garfield, the commentator and primary personality, from a mundane comic strip and get a glimpse into the angst of a permanent secondary character. Some of the more recent ones are just goofy... "Something is wrong with my pants" is probably my favorite... but if you go back toward the beginning, you discover untold levels of existential anxiety and psychological disorder (such as February 18th, which was truly a miserable day for Jon Arbuckle).

Is there anything to this strange, funny, perhaps unsettling phenomenon, besides simple weirdness? Well, it might stem partly from the fact that Jon Arbuckle is a secondary character whose role is to bear Garfield's ridicule. Of course, Fat Orange Kitty normally distracts us from Jon's tribulations and lightens the mood, but when you remove him, you're left wondering how Jon got like this, what's going on in his head, and how he bears his lonely life. If you removed Sherlock Holmes from Watson's life, would you be left with a failed, lonely writer wandering a ghostly London town? Is secondary characterhood a great curse to be borne throughout literary history?

The empty panels are an effective part of this phenomenon, as well. The blank spaces around Jon give a sense of both physical emptiness (i.e. an empty room) and extended silence. When you have a single line by an afflicted Jon, surrounded by space and silence, you get a very lonely effect... you may sense that the world simply doesn't need Jon Arbuckle, and more frighteningly, you may realize that he feels the same way.

In this way, this reminds me of something else similarly spooky. Rene Magritte painted a piece called "Now, You Don't" which consists of four identical sitting rooms, only one of which contains a human being. His presence is ultimately irrelevant to the room he's sitting in, and ultimately, Jon seems totally insignificant, nonsensical, and even invisible, without his main character to give meaning to his little absurdities.

If you're interested in other creepy phenomena in Sunday funnies, I can suggest a few leads. If you can find it in a library, check out "Family Circus of Horrors" in The Book of Zines, which makes an interesting case about the human condition in Family Circus. You can also check out a Garfield-related existential crisis in the strips of Halloween 1989, which is generally chronicled online, in sites such as this one. Also take a look at the Christian (and anti-Jewish and Muslim) themes in Johnny Hart's comic B.C., which are hard to deny after a review of a few examples.

Anton Corbijn's Control: portrait of a monster

I saw the film Control, by Anton Corbijn, a couple weeks ago. I enjoyed it, if only because I like watching moving images and being immersed in the great media spectacle. I'd recommend it to anyone who's in the mood for a troubling, introspective drama that pulls you into an artist's personal web of tragedy. I know, this doesn't sell very well on paper.

Still, if you're like me and welcome the chance to think a lot about a movie and a public persona, you'll probably find Control worth the watch. It brings up an old question that I find myself recycling every so often: how do I react to narratives wherein the protagonist is really a deplorable bastard? Are they 1) personally enriching and/or educational? or 2) even enjoyable? and if the answer to (2) is "Yes," is it an enjoyment I should be indulging in, or is it just the kind of pathetic voyeurism we get from watching a train wreck or a celebrity breakdown?

Quick backstory: Control is about Ian Curtis, the front-man to the goth/punk band Joy Division. Joy has earned a special place in music history, being the hybrid seed of a whole underground movement. They're the type of band that has resonated through the critical and historical consciousness of pop music, even though they've never surfaced in mainstream memory. They were categorically narcissistic and depressed, but they managed to avoid being a cliche because they were so damn sincere. This was no Brand New self-pity... this was genuinely troubled, sincere disaffected personal turmoil, born out for the eye of a thousand teenage fans.

Part of the reason for this sincerity, and for the fame that attended it, was that Curtis was such a pitiful case. His voice, and his songwriting, are the assets that carried the band to greatness. He was one of the rare people who is vulnerable to crushing emotional pain, and who knows how to express it intelligently and sensitively. The pressure of young marriage, fast fame, and medical issues were the engine behind his voice, but they were also the catalysts for his depression and suicide.

(spoiler warning... arg, too late.)

Unfortunately, he was also a dick. If Sam Riley's portrayal is to be believed, Curtis lived at an unfortunate crossroad between cynicism and sensitivity. He was chronically insecure, and yet he was thirsty to prove himself, so he ended up emotionally numb and vulnerable to self-indulgence. The film doesn't skimp on this point, either. Throughout Control, there seems to be a shadow across the characters and their city (dying industrial Manchester), and the discerning audience might realize that this pall is emanating from Ian Curtis himself, who seems to poison the lives and interactions of his friends and family.

So in a sad, vaguely sympathetic, but also frustrating journey, we see Curtis overflow and collapse. Have we learned anything from him? Have we enjoyed his downfall? Why the fuck did we see this movie?

As always, there's enlightenment to be found in any honest portrayal of a foreign psyche and experience. Even Curtis's flaws are part of the world we live in, and we may recognize some of them in ourselves... the dangerous human impulses of hubris and narcissism may be repressed, but there's a trace of them in each of us. This is a film that sheds some light on them in order that we may face them.

In this sense, Corbijn's Ian Curtis reminds me of John Gardner's Grendel. Grendel was a protagonist of sorts... the reader is placed behind his eyes and forced to see his flawed reasoning and his failure. However, in John Gardner's (totally amazing) novel, Grendel is also a monster through and through, willingly blind to the world so that he can feel justified in ravaging it. As an audience, we're supposed to be along for the ride, and we're supposed to give Grendel some face time for a while, but (as Gardner himself has pointed out) we're ultimately supposed to hate him and reject his nihilism in favor of the awesome humanistic strength of Beowulf.

With Curtis, we're not given this kind of alternative. There's no Eddie Vedder (or whoever) to stand up and be the success that Curtis couldn't become. Still, Ian Curtis's role in Control is directly analogous to Grendel's role in Grendel. As a sophisticated viewer, you can stick with Curtis and feel a sense of tragedy for his misfortunes, not because you like or respect him, but simply because he's human, and because ever human being is in danger of losing control. We're free to be angry at Curtis's abuse of his wife, family, friendships, and of his own talent, but perhaps Corbijn has allowed us to ride the line between rejection and sympathy, so that we can arrive at the end of Control and feel the tragedy of a life that could never find its own rhythm.

Sublime and Unstable in Danny Boyle's Sunshine

This is a riff on a review I posted a week or two ago on BlogCritics. I'm going to cut some of the review fat and elaborate on the philosophical theme a little. Be warned... there are no explicit spoilers, but I've been fairly liberal in alluding to plot points.

Danny Boyle's current film, running on a lower profile than some of his previous work, is a sci-fi thriller called Sunshine. Like Boyle's other films, like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, Sunshine is about a traumatic experience that taxes both the mind and the body. The Earth is at the mercy of a dying galaxy, and a small crew of a ship called the Icarus II is charged with piloting an apocalyptic bomb into the sun in order to restart its fusion mechanisms.

Boyle flaunts his influences. At times, the film seems like a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially during the first half, when the imagery is dominated by slow, balletic interstellar maneuvers and stunning lights and colors. This half of the film is also when the psychological elements are most developed, and it’s this first half that audiences should remember most fondly. This also may be when Boyle seems most an artist: the visuals are unique, sublime, and engaging, and the film looks like it might develop as a ghostly portrait of a crew, rather than as a horror sci-fi scramble.

After the first hour, there’s a key change in tone and pace, and Sunshine becomes less about psychological balance and nuance and more about tension and claustrophobia. The key scene, where the transition takes place, is the crew’s exploration of another ship, the Icarus I, and this scene is punctuated by one of the most ruthless little cinematic tricks available to the filmmaker (a trick popularized by Tyler Durden in Fight Club). This tense, ghostly stretch is where the film breaks down into certain accepted horror conventions.

Reviewers reacted both positively and negatively to this shift. Certain horror aficionados simply didn't find it stimulating enough, and others saw it as eccentric and indecisive. However, as I turn my thoughts back to the film, I can see that it was a whole structure, designed with a creative vision behind it. And I think this vision is centered around a traditional philosophical concept in art called the sublime (also addressed in detail on Wikipedia).

The sublime, according to traditional aesthetic philosophy, is the pleasure derived from regarding nature and not being able to fully understand or assimilate it... the pleasure of being overwhelmed. The better-known philosophers differentiated this sharply from beauty, which could be represented and appreciated by human faculties (i.e. a painting could be beautiful, but it could not be sublime). The sublime is linked with an almost masochistic pleasure, because it usually goes hand-in-hand with a degree of danger, or lurking fear of the unknowable.

For the first half of Sunshine, the sublime was certainly a theme. The characters were reaching toward the sun, intellectually and sometimes physically, and it was almost within their grasp. The earliest deaths in the film are the result of the astronauts letting the beauty of the sun overtake them. They are all overwhelmed by it... it undercuts their powers of reason and invades their dreams.

The first half of Sunshine is a distillation of sublime reflections... it's taken its cues from Kubrick's masterpiece, and it's turned them outward, so the cold, dispirited emptiness of the characters in 2001 is replaced with the hopeful sadness and resignation of the crew of the Icarus II. However, this tone changes dramatically after the crew visits the Icarus I. At this point, the film's psychology shifts from disconnected reflection on nature to the sliding terror of a mission going out of control. The Icarus I seems to represent the danger of losing yourself in your reverence.

If the change in pacing and atmosphere aren't enough, we're introduced to a character who has most certainly slid from veneration into obsession, inhumanity, and madness. Okay, so he isn't developed as a character, so much. Rather, he sweeps through the second half of the film as a sermonizing force of nature, an obstacle that the crew has to deal with to complete their mission. He's hardly even shown on screen, except shrouded in low-lit film grain or obscured in shaky camera motion blur. In this sense, it's not quite a horror film, because the horrifying figure is never shown... he stays a figment, an embodiment of the desperate gravity of the situation.

Ultimately, I think it's the deaths in Sunshine that bring out this theme, and bring unity to the whole thing. The first and last deaths are sad, but they're also celebrations, as characters stand before the overwhelming power of nature and let it snuff them out. It's worth noting that almost all the deaths are either the characters burning up, or freezing to death, either under the sun's gaze or in its absence. The film is poised on the edge between beauty and terror... an edge represented by the sublime in all its philosophical incarnations.

And Danny Boyle makes a noble effort to approach this unapproachable ideal, in all its metaphysical impossibility.

Finding the PoMo in Super Paper Mario (a Postmodern statement)

I'm gonna confess... I've been playing a video game quite a bit. Or at least, I've been facilitating and observing its being-playedness by a passing resident of the household. That game is called Super Paper Mario.

Okay, so in the history of Mario, we've gone from a fully-restricted two-dimensional world (Donkey Kong) to a non-restricted two-dimensional world (Super Mario Bros. through Super Mario World and beyond) to a three-dimensional world (Super Mario 64 through the forthcoming Super Mario Galaxy). Paper Mario is, in a sense, a reflection on the history of the two-dimensional Marios, which the game undertakes by offering a third dimension.

Now, because it's oriented around a two-dimensional game, the third dimension isn't that well developed. That's why it's called Paper Mario... the game is conscious of, and in a sense apologetic for, its two-dimensionality. However, for what it lacks as a three-dimensional game, Paper Mario makes up for as Postmodern Mario. Meta-Mario -- that's what we've been playing, and it's a fascinating experience.

To start, there's a level of historicism in Mario that's been a defining feature of postmodernism for a long time. Just as pop-art brought kitsch and self-conscious reference to art, SPM brings to the Wii a salvo of self-conscious references to Mario history, from the enormous 8-bit Mario you become when you grab a star, to the Princess's ability to float... it's sort of futile for me to list them. There are millions.

There are also references to the world outside the game. Occasionally, the characters mention you, the player, in order to explain their discussions of controller buttons, which Mario himself apparently doesn't understand. One of the enemies even has the Wii "processing" animation playing in its eye. These are discursive and semantic break-downs of the fourth wall that parallel Mario's own breaking of the fourth wall when he "flips" from 2-D space into 3-D space.

And about that "flipping" action, which takes Mario beyond the standard platform game world . He reveals hidden enemies, items, and landscapes that are on other two-dimensional planes, thus retreiving a certain more literal meaning of the phrase "parallel dimension." Most NPC's in SPM can't sense or interact within these alternate planes, making Mario unique, a sort of bodhisattva... come on, doesn't anyone else read a certain Eastern mysticism in that move? A moment of transcendence, perhaps? The same theme that appealed to Heidegger and Jung seems to have appealed to the Nintendo developers. Mario even learns it from a sage.

PoMario. That's the game, my friends. PLAY IT.

Pirates of the Carribean III: Gore goes Lynch

So a new Pirates movie has hit, and in the spirit of my previous in-depth analysis, I thought I'd come to this one with some critical observations, as well. I was struck by... I don't know, by the sort of indescribable character of this movie. Try to describe the plot. You can't. Try to describe the themes or the core relationships. You can't. It was sort of overwhelming.

Obviously this has caused a wide array of critical reactions. Richard Schickel gives the film a reasonable characterization, although he didn't seem entertained by his findings: "They're everywhere, these not-so-merry miscreants — in Singapore, in Antarctica, on a desert island, in a secret pirate cove, riding mid-ocean waterfalls (very odd, that bit), exchanging broadsides while being whirled about in a maelstrom. It is very exhausting, and it makes no sense whatsoever." Here you have a good idea of the impression people got from At Worlds End... strange and incoherent, engaging in its eccentricity, but generally unfathomable.

There's something weird that shows up in these reviews, though... when they reject the movie for its strangeness, these reviewers also snark cynically at the public approval the film is bound to receive. Schickel ends his review by suggesting that "some close variant" of his Pirates III criticism "could be written week-in, week-out every summer movie season." Similarly, and even more cynically, Frank Swietek of ONE GUY'S OPINION says Pirates III "will doubtless repeat the inexplicable boxoffice success of its predecessor—testimony to the lemming-like proclivity of today’s audiences not only to rush to even the worst retreads but in some cases to do so repeatedly." Damn! Such contempt!

But what are we really critiquing here? Seriously... was it too confusing for the critics? In the work of some filmmakers, we see ambiguity and lack of resolution as assets. In the case of a Disney movie, have we no option but to recast them as "confusion" and "lack of focus" and to reject them as failures? Critics need to work out their demands... you can't judge a movie negatively for being weird, incoherent, and dense, and at the same time, criticize it for being another piece of meaningless Hollywood trilogy fluff.

Deep in the writhing mass of special effects and half-realized on-screen relationships, there was something really fascinating going on in Pirates III. It was Gore Verbinsky's cinema freak-out, a desperate, unbridled flash of filmmaking, something... how do I put it...

Lynchian?

Yeah, David Lynch. Anyone who attacks this movie as being too weird or incoherent can go chew on that name for a while. Mulholland Dr. was a tweaky roller-coaster of a film, and it shared a lot of creative and stylistic techniques with Pirates III: unexplained reappearances of characters, strained and shifting loyalties and relationships, and recurrent motifs that were hard to pin down to a particular significance.

There are a few specific elements that made me think of Mulholland Drive as I was watching Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End.

First, Jack Sparrow's on-screen delerium was very Lynchian. He spent whole chunks of the movie interacting with himself, and frequently murdering other versions of himself. Two of them were little shoulder-mounted Jacks, like the old couple in Mulholland Drive who were shrunk to the size of a rodent. Others were alternate-reality versions, Jack Sparrows that laid eggs, Jacks that had been assimilated by the Flying Dutchman, Jacks who were into bestiality. There was no good reason for this tendency... just a lingering postmodern sense of the surreal and absurd, giving us reason to ask: just whose head are we wandering around in here?

Second, the recurrent theme of the crabs was like something from David Lynch. Mulholand Drive also had a few themes that kept coming back into the narrative, like the little box with the key, and these frequently had no clear symbolic significance or obvious associations. There are a number of ways they could fit into the narrative... they could represent something abstract, like deliverance, or they could represent the call of the sea to Jack. They seemed to be metamorphic presences, turning into objects and people and disappearing back into the environment again. They were never capitalized on or made clear... they just showed up and established their surreal presence, and then vanished again.

The mad, forgetful Bootstrap Bill was another strange, surrealist character figure, particularly in the scene were Elizabeth finds him on the Dutchman. He's pathetic and imprisoned in his own uncertainty, caught between mindless loyalty to Davey and futile, misguided hope in his son. Being part of the ship has made him tragic and amnesiac, able to repeat a conversaion as if he's having it for the first time, and it establishes his character as a unique, unpredictable force, both emotionally and narratively. In this sense, he shares a kinship with Mulholland Dr.'s Diane Selwyn, who first appears as a distraught, disturbed, and emotionally crippled actress at a low-point in her career.

There's also the sick anatomy stuff that keeps kicking us gently in the face. The scene where Jack's doppelganger licks his own brain is priceless. The death-by-tentacle lobotomy is pretty brilliant, too. These are the signature scenes of a filmmaker who REALLY wants our attention.

I'm not going to sit here and say I liked Pirates III because it was, like a Lynch Film, a profound, avant-garde piece of art cinema or a masterpiece of surrealist post-modern narrative. But it did share something with Lynch: it was an explosive, ecstatic act of filmmaking, almost childlike in its lack of inhibition.

This is the maelstrom... take it as it is: a mad cinema freakout that none of us could have expected from Gore Verbinsky, hard to follow, but insanely engaging on a dramatic and aesthetic level. Don't hold back, Gore. I'm right behind you.

Casino Royale II: Special Face Cards

I love it when rhetorical devices sneak into big-budget Hollywood films. We've all seen in-depth analysis of art films and classic literature, so we're not surprised to hear about coded complexities of space and gender and difference in Madame Bovary, or whatever (insert literary tropes and important modernist novel as necessary). But we rarely expect to find such coded themes and subtle structural devices in Hollywood blockbusters, so a lot of people stop searching.

But there are a few reasons for us to keep looking. First, Hollywood is smarter than we give it credit for. When you start paying attention to directors' names, you realize that sometimes the people making popcorn flicks (i.e. Hellboy, Blade) are the same people making the psychological mind-benders (Cronos, Pan's Labyrinth). Second, when we manage to find the rhetorical devices in our favorite B-movies, it makes the movies that much more enjoyable. A lot of the pleasure we take in repeated movie-watching is due to expectation and recognition, and the more we have to connect, recognize, look for, and think about, the more it makes sense to keep watching the films and making the connections. Third, finding the smart subtexts in badass films makes us feel smarter, and it vindicates our watching cheesy cinema, even if we're in graduate programs that expect us to spend all our time watching political documentaries and Mulholland Dr.

The new Bond film, Casino Royale, is a sick movie, no doubt, but there's something more there than free-running and hot dialogue (She: "I don't think I'm cruel enough for that." Bond: "Maybe you're just out of practice.") If you try to connect coincidences, you start discovering the subliminal construction of the film, the way it links its characters and its plot to its premise and structure. I'll give you an example, and I'll mention a few other places where you could look for a deeper coded meaning in this film.

WARNING: SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW.

I started figuring this out when I noticed that there were two guys with eye-problems. For the first half of the film, Bond is dealing with Le Chiffre, a slick card-counting gambler who always wears black. He happens to have a glandular problem with his left eye, so it's bleached white, and (get this shit) it cries blood. Later: Bond and Vesper are tailed by a man with an eye-patch, whose name (according to my research) is Gettler. This has actually generated some confusion... a lot of people get these two villains mixed up, assuming Le Chiffre didn't die, but rather returned as Gettler to reclaim the money.

But the oracular issues aren't just part of a random preoccupation Ian Fleming had when he wrote this novel. In a deck of playing cards, there are two Jacks whose faces are in full profile, so you can only see one eye. There two characters represent the two one-eyed jacks in a deck of cards. I'd even go so far as to conjecture that Le Chiffre represents the Jack of Hearts, because of his association with blood. That would leave Gettler as the Jack of Spades.

This could have been a coincidence. It's an unlikely one, but it could have been a random stylistic decision that I'm reading too deeply. But if I can trace it even further, and it turns out to be even more elaborate, it becomes more likely that it's an ingtentional embedded semiotic code (as per classic paranoid schizophrenic logic). So as soon as I recognized the presence of the one-eyed jacks, I started watching for one more special face card that's present in playing card decks: the Suicide King.

And there, before my eyes, Vesper Lynd, Bond's true love (the hearts theme) locks herself into a sinking elevator chamber (the suicide theme) while wearing a red dress (just in case it wasn't clear enough). Don't let the gender inversion fool you... the coding is clear. The three most common special face cards appear in Casino Royale, clear as day, thus informing a semiotic understanding of the characters. There's never any attention drawn to it, but when you start to look, it's almost unmistakable. And if we can find this theme, embedded so cleverly in the design of the narrative, who knows what else we could find?

I'll give some more ideas for future analysis. If anybody has theories, let me know; I might follow up on some of these myself, if I get a bunch of extra free time.

1. What cards might other characters represent? Is Bond an ace and/or a Joker? Is M one of the queens? Are there any other parallels, clearly evidenced, that I'm overlooking?
2. What's the role of luck and/or the bluff in Bond's political actions? If certain characters resemble certain cards, is it possible (or rewarding) to see this whole movie as a macrocosmic poker game?
3. This is based on Flemming's first Bond novel... do the relationships with Vesper and Solange establish the dynamic that informs the rest of Bond's doomed loves? Is the rest of his life dictated by the relationship, established in this book, between love, betrayal, and abandonment?
4. When did Vesper decide to betray Bond? This isn't so much a thematic interest as something that just wasn't clear to me - was she always an agent of Mr. White, helping influence the poker game and playing both sides? Or was she truly devoted to the treasury until Le Chiffre's tortue scene, when she made the deal with Mr. White in order to same Bond?
5. As a sub-question to the above: What were the implications of Vesper's betrayal? Did she betray Bond, or did she save him, and how can both be true at the same time? Is there evidence of a fatal love triangle between Vesper, Bond, and the political institutions that they serve?

This has been a long and enjoyable entry to write... as I reflect further on Casino Royale, I find I like it more and more... it was surprisingly well-endowed with complexities and ambiguities, and like any really good movie, it rewards further analysis and examination. Art meets action, my friends - it's the future of a franchise and the future of a medium.

Don't forget the Diva: Roberto Alagna walks off stage

Thanks to Roberto Alagna, world-class tenor, for walking off stage during an opera performance, thus turning a cliche back into a tradition.

Here's what I gather from the short BBC News article: Aida, an opera composed by (cospicuously Italian) Guiseppe Verdi, was being performed at La Scala, a world-famous opera house in Milan. I hope I haven't already lost your attention. During Alagna's performance of a song called Celeste Aria, the tough Italian crowd, which contained some pretty damn important people, started booing him. Enraged, Alagna walked off the stage. His duet partner was temporarily screwed; his understudy, Antonello Palombi, had to rush on-stage and continue the performance in his denim-wear.

Awesome.

Now, I don't know much about opera (obviously), but thanks to Wikipedia, I DO know that the word "diva" was originally used for female opera singers. We've been using it for bitchy adult alternative vocalists for so long that we've almost forgotten its origins; the first Urban Dictionary definition is as follows:

"a bitchy woman that must have her way exactly, or no way at all. often rude and belittles people, believes that everyone is beneath her and thinks that she is so much more loved than what she really is. selfish, spoiled, and overly dramatic."

There's also a lot of reference to diva being an over-used industry buzzword, and its association with lonely housewives and gay men. A few of the definitions mention the opera singer origins, but that's probably because those contributors looked at the same Wikipedia article that I did.

Luckily, we have Roberto Alagno to thank for reminding us what "Diva" really means. Sure, it's self-important, but it's a matter of being so irrationally proud of your art that you don't take shit about it. He walks off the stage as if to say, "Sure, diplomats and journalists, we have a deal... if you don't want to hear me sing, I don't want to sing for you. Humph!" When you're singing in an opera, you're licensed to be dramatic, and there's no better way to express yourself than to stomp off the stage.

Compare this to American celebrity freakouts. I'll give you two examples...

1) Michael Richards' situation, with the heckling, was kind of like Alagno's. He wasn't being appreciated, and he objected. Unfortunately, he couldn't manage the demands of his art (i.e. he couldn't "jujitsu" it, laugh it off, or take it lightly). Instead, he fucking FREAKED OUT and went on a racist rant that got his name in a lot more headlines than Roberto Alagno will ever manage.

2) Going back a little more, look at Ashlee Simpson's lip-synch faux pas on Saturday Night Live, October 25, 2004 (sorry about the quality of the clip... this video has mysteriously vanished from the Intertron). It resulted in a reaction that was similar to Alagno's... a miffed exit stage-right... but for what? An embarrassing lip-synch switch-up that revealed the authenticity of Ashlee's vocal talents. Not exactly an expression of pride in her art-form. Pretty sad, walking off because you were caught faking... if the crowd had actually booed her during her song, would she have walked off? Probably not, because her voice would have kept on singing.

So good job, Roberto Alagno... if you're not getting the respect you deserve, get off the stage, and do it proudly and angrily. Thanks for showing us the Diva as an indignant defender of his/her own precious performance... a role that still merits respect.

The subtle art of Witty Kitty Photoshop Captioning in the context of modernist painting

Okay, so this is going to be a journey into one of my darker secrets, but I can't help but post on it. But before that, I want to say sorry I haven't been posting much... school and work are converging in an unholy aggregate to swallow my life till about Christmas. It's okay, I like it that way, but still... doesn't leave much time for free thinking.

So through a site I must confess I visit a lot... CuteOverload... I came upon another site. I won't be visiting it as much, but I've sent it to a LOT of people, and I find myself thinking about it perhaps more than it warrants. It's at www.knitemare.org/cats, and it has a lot of well-captioned photos of kitties (some with obvious Photoshopping). First, I just liked the funny references and the amazing photos of cats, and I liked picking out my favorites (among them: Superman, Invisible Bike, Hugs Tiem, and I made you a cookie). But after a while, I started making connections.

It was the Aggressive Cat versus Defensive Cat shot that did it. It felt disturbingly familiar, and after a while I started remembering a paper I did in college about an American Realist painting. This painting is by George Bellows. The picture shown here compares the Bellows painting to the cat photo. Marvel at the similarities.

It's not just because it's two cats fighting. On one side, you have the dark kitty, clearly dominating, and on the other side you have the light kitty, looking like it's about to collapse under the pressure. Both images have a lot of movement from aggressive to defensive, and in both cases the aggressive party seems to be overwhelming the defensive one, folding over it from above. They're too similar to ignore.

So after I found that little gem, I went looking for another couple fine-art/cat-art juxtapositions. I only found one more, and I made a juxtaposition of this one, too. It's a comparison of the "Rape is Imminent" photo (which has since been removed, for obvious reasons) with a painting attributed to Goya. This painting isn't universally accepted as genuine, but it's still associated with Goya's body of work. Besides his disturbing images of Saturn and The Colossus, Goya was commissioned to do a lot of portraits of women from court, and this painting is a little bit of a riff on this project.

Okay, so the connection here isn't so remarkable. Still, in both the cat and the Goya, the subdued figure in the background is the decisive feature, reversing the mood of the image. Goya's portrait of two court ladies is initially pleasant and distinguished; the image of the cat is initially cute. In both cases, the repose of the foreground is disrupted by the sinister figure lurking in the background. Why are they there? What are they planning? Why aren't they letting me enjoy the pretty ladies and/or cute kitty?

What does it mean that such remarkable parallels exist between fine art and sugar-coated amusement? Maybe it means the appeal of images is universal, whether they're exalted as fine art or dismissed as tongue-in-cheek irony. Maybe the shape and structure of an effective visual is the same in every case, from masterworks of portraiture to advertising photography to cute kitty snapshots.

Or maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe I just like pictures.

Unleashed: Jet Li on memory, agency, and aggression

Saw Jet Li’s Unleashed not too long ago, and it was a surprising departure from what I expect of a kung-fu movietruffle. Sure, it had the stylized karate, with lots of jump cuts and acrobatics and people dressed like characters from The Matrix, but those things were just specks of glitter on a much bigger canvas. This might have been Jet Li’s real acting debut, as he portrayed a well-developed character with a convincingly child-like, pathological naivety. So here I am, claiming that there was something insightful in this movie… what was it?

The central theme (as I see it) in Unleashed hinges on Jet Li’s character. He’s a bit bipolar… through the course of the film, we see two different incarnations of “Danny,” one in the care of Bart and one in the care of Sam. There are four primary associations that constitute the gap between violent Danny and non-violent Danny, and I’ve already given one of them away.

1) Violence: With Bart, Danny is raised to be violent. He’s manipulated into being a thug, and when he’s “unleashed,” he acts out an enigmatic rage on his adversaries. This contrasts starkly with reformed Danny, in the care of Sam, whose most important mission is to renounce his violence. Not only does he refuse to exact violence on his new caretakers… when he changes into “reformed Danny,” he refuses to enact violence on ANYONE, including the man who forced him to live by its law.

2) Slavery: With Bart, Danny is a pawn. He’s violent, and he’s used for the purpose of violence… he’s conditioned in a very Pavlovian sense (always with the canine references), and this conditioning is used for the objectives of Bart. With Sam and Victoria, Danny is given the tools and the power to be an active agent, and he’s allowed to make his own choices. There’s an absolutely key scene in this regard: Sam gives Danny the money from his first job, and when Danny asks what to do with it, Sam tells him he can do whatever he wants with it. This discovery seems convincingly shocking to Danny, who is making his transition out of a pathologically submissive role.

3) Culture: With Bart, Danny is a product of contemporary British/American crime culture. The bars where he fights are full of slinky women and people decked out in high fashion, and everybody’s wearing an insane double-breasted leisure suit. Sam reintroduces Danny to classical Western culture, which, it turns out, is part of Danny’s personal history. Piano virtuosity is one of the hallmarks of the classical European tradition, and Danny’s non-violent identity revolves entirely around the piano. In Bart’s dungeon, there’s a ruined piano… a revealing metaphor for the humanity of which Danny has been deprived.

4) Memory: This is probably the most important link in this chain of associations. Bart systematically denies Danny any access to his past, distorting his memories of his mother and lying to him about his upbringing. As I noted above, Danny is boiling with undirected rage, and as long as we don’t know about Danny’s past, we don’t realize that all this violence is probably related to that fundamental event, the murder of his mother… the scene where Danny first appears violent, and that Danny seems to be acting out over and over under Bart’s influence. Only reformed, autonomous, classical, nonviolent Danny can retrieve his history, and he can only fully integrate into society by doing so.

This movie can be read as a defense of 19th century philosophical positions. One of the foremost themes in German idealism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and later social theory is the importance of history, and the construction of an identity through a consciousness of that history. History and memory, duty as the essential moral criterion, and development of rationality and consciousness through cultural progress… in the course of Unleashed, Danny goes through his own renaissance and becomes a true enlightenment European.

So what does this have to do with American foreign policy?

WOAH! Didn’t expect that one, did you? Well, I’ll tell you how I made that jump: I recently read a selection of writing by Edward Said wherein he compared American and French (a.k.a. continental European) coverage of an uprising in the Middle East. He talked about the reductivism of the New York Times, which (according to Said) treated Islamic fundamentalism as though it was an isolated crisis. The Times, and other newspapers like it, refused to acknowledge the political and religious history of Islam, or the history of Middle Eastern interaction with the United States. He compared this with Le Monde, the French newspaper, which ran detailed reporting on Islamic culture, incorporating expertise on the Arabic language and the political history the contributed to the upheaval in Iran.

Said’s point here is that the Times is serving an American agenda of aggression, so it can’t acknowledge the history or bring to bear a complete perspective on Islamic culture. To rephrase: America has to forget the past, deny the roots of its relationships, and fixate on the current “crisis” to maintain its aggression. We’ve come a long way from our rationalist enlightenment roots, where we saw our ideals as a product of our cultural history.

Anyway, I’m kind of digressing. The point is less about the United States and more about the movie. Splitting things into two categories (classical vs. contemporary, violent vs. nonviolent, master vs. slave, memory vs. amnesia) isn’t always a good idea (as per, for instance, Derrida). Even so, there’s something well-constructed and intelligible about the model that Unleashed offers.

And Jet Li kicks Jason Statham’s ass. What more could you want?

Newspaper critics: The Journey to Irrelevance

Pop Politics recently posted a shot blurb on the obsolescence of movie critics, mainly referencing an L.A. Times article, found here. The decreasing relevance of newspaper critics may be shocking to some people, especially those used to traditional journalism for their cultural commentary, but to this blog editor, this phenomenon is almost too obvious to warrant mention.

Luckily, both the original essay and PopPolitics' commentary elaborate on this phenomenon enough that they prompt a response. The Times' reaction to this "news" is cynically traditional, in my decidedly neophilic opinion. This is the assumption that we're seeing the downfall of meaningful cinema, and I think critics who subscribe to it are the ones going out of date the fastest. Just look at this L.A. Times paragraph:

"But today we're in an era in which shared enthusiasm matters more than analysis, stylistic cool trumps emotional substance. The world has changed. The vanguard filmmakers of the '60s — the era that spawned our last great generation of critics — were Godard, Kubrick and Antonioni, filmmakers under the spell of the intellectual fervor sparked by existentialism and Marxism. The filmmakers with a youth-culture following today, be it Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, are largely ideology free, masters of detachment and stylistic homage. Like their audience, they prefer irony to Big Ideas."

This is an unfair appraisal at best, and a spot of messy old-world elitism at worst. Modern cinema is a massive, highly-varied mediasphere with every kind of innovator... from political risk-takers like Michael Moore and Hany Abu-Assad, to passionate storytellers like Jeunet and Aronofsky, to industry personalities like Charlie Kaufman, there's a demonstrable "vanguard" of thoughtful filmmakers at work in the industry.

The fact that these innovators aren't the highest-grossing filmmakers? Irrelevant. In 1968, when Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey, it didn't even make it to the top ten... Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby, and The Odd Couple all beat it out. And do you really think Antonioni's Blowup made it into any top-tens in 1966? Yeah right. The huge junkyard of consumable media is very different from the parched desert of high-art film, and this is how it's always been.

So critics have the choice: on one hand, they could offer their services to the artists, using traditional aesthetic and analytical criteria to isolate the movies that should become genuine classics. On the other hand, they could inhabit the vast world of mass media. That means sorting out and fully understanding the everyday media world of sensory stimulation, rampant reference, and compulsive marketing. It gets messy. I know from experience.

This dilemma is more salient today because the newspaper is losing its mass credibility. Once upon a time, the critics and the newspapers were the only source of authority anyone could depend on, so they had an unrivaled voice of praise or condemnation. Now word of mouth is just so damn available... you can find a massive sampling of opinions, leveled from every preferential and movie-going perspective, and you don't have to depend on the words of a few sanctioned individuals to be your sole source of feedback. At the same time, as the corporate media machine is being lambasted by every political persuasion, the credibility of newspapers is understandably declining. We don't trust reviewers any more than we trust the press corps these days.

So there's a double effect going on: critics are losing popular relevance, and more and more, they're seeing themselves as the sole defenders of artistic integrity. By both their own power and by the sheer volume of modern mass media, critics are being forced deeper and deeper into "traditional cimena" land. The words of L.A. Times critics Kenneth Turan (as reported by L.A. Times writer Patrick Goldstein) are exemplary:

"I'm sorry, but we're not supposed to be applause meters," says Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan. "If you wanted to go to a restaurant for a special occasion and someone said, 'Why not go to McDonald's? More people go there than any other place.' Would that really be enough to convince you?"

And if that wasn't harsh enough, check out this elitist drivel, also reported (not sanctioned) by Goldstein:

Reviewing a collection of critical essays by the long-time Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins, Time film critic Richard Schickel contrasted Giddins' work with "history-free and sensibility-deprived" bloggers who regularly "blurb the latest Hollywood effulgence."

Kenneth is right... he, and his fellow reviewers, have an obligation to offer a better perspective than the brute-force box office numbers. But there's a subtext that may or may not be applicable: Turan and Schnickel might also be revealing their unwillingness to see cinema as entertainment. That's how you go from that desert of the avante-garde to the landscape of the popular, and that's how you anticipate, and influence, an ADHD-ridden public. You look at the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of a film that make it entertaining.

Everyone who faces a new set of conditions has a choice: change or become outdated. I'm not saying critics should sanction stupid movies, but they have to account for a few new variables in order to stay relevant, and to influence the movie-going public (i.e. in order to do their jobs).

First, they have to expand their reach beyond newspapers, because newspapers are losing credibility... whether they can swim or not, they have to get the fuck off the sinking ship.

Second, if they want to become cultural forces instead of empty voices drifting into the shadows, they have to account for entertainment value and marketing focus. If Kubrick and Antonioni are your standard, you won't be able to tell people what they're going to like.

I'm not saying the film critic has to become a mass media adolescent, but like any character facing a critical juncture, he's going to have to make a choice.

Krakthulu (Pirates of the Carribean: Part III)

This is my last note about Pirates of the Carribean II. I'm tired of pontificating about media literacy issues, so this will be a shorter post.

Sometimes it seems like attributing "influences" to popcorn movies is giving them too much credit. When you compare something ridiculous, like The Emperor's New Groove, to something important, like Mitt Liv Som Hund, it's almost like saying that the contemptibly franchisey movie is deep, too. But then again, when something reminds me, however distantly, of something I really like, it's bound to get it some brownie points.

Take, for example, Davey Jones in Pirates of the Carribean II.

Did this guy look familiar to any of you other nerds? Especially you nerds with gothy or occultish tendencies? Did it make you want to speak in tongues and gaze into the ocean, wondering about non-euclidean islands that appear once every millenium? It made me do those things. Why? Because he screamed H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu.

If you don't know about Cthulu, take a moment to look him up. Don't just stop at the silly nerd culture references on t-shirts and in webcomics (here too), either... read some of Lovecraft's stories, which can generally be found around the Internet. He's a brilliant ambient occultist, and his prose deftly demonstrates that the most frightening things are the empty spaces, the margins of our perception and understanding.

There have been some movies made out of Lovecraft's mythos, but they mostly all suck.

Lovecraft's most famous character is a demigod named Cthulu, characterized as having a "pulpy, tentacled head," usually rendered with the tentacles hanging down from the jaw or thereabouts. Sound familiar? I can't but assume that this image was the inspiration for Davey Jones' octopustastic goodness, and I have to say, it resonated with me.

But the unlikely convergence of Disney and occult horror brings some other scenes to mind. For a slapstick swashbuckler, Dead Man's Chest had some surprisingly dark edges... the shipwreck, manned by insane sailors, precluding Jones' introduction, was reminiscent of Lovecraft's Innsmouth. Davey's heart was gut-wrenchingly realistic. The Kraken wrought a compelling level of destruction upon the sea-vessels, and Disney didn't seem to hold back on the deaths at sea. Even Tia Dalma (see previous post) was a dark turn on the Magic Negro archetype.

In this film, which was pretty cotton-candyish, this dusting of morbidity hardly scratched the surface. What it DOES give us, however, is a new reason to hope for the best out of the third movie. It's going to be called "Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End," and from that title, I sense that the Lovecraftian undercurrent isn't going to fizzle out between episodes. Like Lovecraft's stories about death and sublimation, I expect the third Pirates to be filled with a more profound sense of anxiety and unknown. There's the hint of a compelling journey, the simultaneous geographical / psychological exploration of the unknown, and I hope it's realized.

As far as I'm concerned, this movie has made promises. I expect Mr. Bruckheimer to deliver on them.