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.