Being the Body: Henri Bergson and embodiment in Pacific Rim (2013)

Giant Robots everywhere in my life right now... having spent the last month or two playing Xenoblade Chronicles, I've been in the presence of some of the largest robot(-like entities) in any fiction I've come across. In that game, you guide an ensemble of heroes, drawn from various fantasy races, through a landscape entirely situated on the body of a massive humanoid creature, large enough that whole continents can protrude from its limbs and tissue. It places you, the protagonists, on the scale of bacteria, which is a pretty amazing speculative premise.

And then, of course, there's the robot-kaiju film on everybody's tongue: Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim.

As usual (or unusual, in the recent waning of my productivity), I'm going to use the film as a jumping-off point for some thematic observations. If you want to know how I liked it, I liked it. It was a fun, positive, humanistic action film that tapped into our adolescent monster worship without treating us with contempt. It was rich with detail and draped in vibrant production design, and its characters were glowing, sympathetic protagonists, free of cynicism, except for occasional comic effect.

In terms of big themes, the film plays a lot with ideas of embodiment and the relationship between mind and matter. There is, in fact, a particular philosopher who explored these topics at length, and his work dovetails nicely with the devices in Pacific Rim. His name was Henri Bergson... and in recalling the film's motifs, I might actually go so far as to say the universe was kind of Bergsonian. Maybe talking about the parallels will help someone understand Bergson better, or maybe it'll shed some light on the film's universe. I'm lucky... for me, the guy working through these concepts, it did both.

I'm not intimately familiar with Bergson, but from reading a chunk of his book Matter and Memory, I've come to understand and appreciate at least part of his philosophical project. Bergson was a grounded, practical philosopher, looking to dissolve some of the paradoxes that have infected philosophical thinking about the mind and body... in particular, he felt the "realism versus idealism" dichotomy was based on faulty logic, a consequence of our bad habit of seeing the "mind" as an isolated, self-sufficient entity whose primary purpose is passive reflection and knowledge-production.

Bergson took the rather radical position that "matter" should actually be seen as "images" -- halfway between the conceptual objects of the mind and the raw physical objects of the external world -- and that the universe is a system of images interacting with one another. One of these images, of course, is our body, which breathes air, kicks sand, runs away from danger, and reacts in various other ways to its external stimuli. To Bergson, the body is continuous with the outside universe, and the "mind" is just a part of the body that slows down that process of stimulus and response, so that more pathways and branches of causation can be opened up between each stimulus and its resulting action(s).

To Bergson, the way the mind does this is through memory. Most perception, he claims, is actually just memories, conjured up spontaneously to organize the raw data that's always coming in through our senses.

It's easy to apply this framework to the Jaeger, the giant robots in Pacific Rim, which are piloted by multiple human pilots to fight the giant monsters called Kaiju. The body is just an image, a construct that reacts to certain stimuli (responding to a jo staff strike by parrying)... the Jaeger is an extension of this body, an image to contain the image, that scales the body up to the size of its monstrous opponent. Deep inside this construct, the human presence provides a narrow but critical function: it allows the responses to be delayed, multifaceted, and complex. It does this by tapping into and intertwining the memories of two pilots, the twin homunculi of this experiment in embodiment.

Bergson never uses the term embodiment, as far as I know, but it's highly relevant in this context. It's a noteworthy aspect of Bergson's writing that he sees the mind and the body as essentially inseparable... seeing a flash of light is as much an action of the eye as it is the action of the mind, and shielding the eyes is as much a physical function as it is a behavioral decision. Bergson claimed that the rational behavior of the brain is essentially identical to the unconscious impulses of the spinal cord... it's just that the brain slows the process down, so the response can account for more stimuli at once.

It should be noted that the humans piloting the Jaeger are entirely different from the humans in their native form. Operating on a different scale, using a different set of tools, requires extraordinary adaptation by the human mind, to a point where it becomes a totally new kind of entity. To explain why this is true, take a moment and think about the movement of the Jaeger and the human pilots.

If the Jaeger were moving at exactly the speed of their human pilots -- action for action, a second and a half for each step, a half-second for a punch -- they would be moving insanely fast, accelerating faster than any airplane, to a degree that would probably challenge credibility of physical laws. For a human, a punch that takes 0.5 seconds has to cover about 2 feet of distance. For a Jaeger, that same punch has to cover... what, 60 yards? A punch that moved an average of 300 feet per second... that's silly, right? That's not just me? That's why the Jaeger always look like they're moving in slow motion... the filmmakers had to make it clear that their every gesture covered an enormous distance, and it would probably take an unnatural amount of time.

Of course, the pilots could slow down their movements, right? Just get in sync with their massive avatars? Yeah, but this would get pretty weird-looking in fast-paced action sequences... every punch taking 4 to 8 seconds for the people inside the Jaeger cockpits. It really was better for everyone that the film used editing to gloss over this discrepancy.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Bergson? Oh, right! It's the fact that cognitive activity... reaction times, impulses, decisions, the timing and rhythm of movements... is not some kind of isolated process, separate from the physical reality it governs. Thinking is done with the body, as well as the mind. Just as humans have to think on a smaller, faster scale than Jaeger and Kaiju, so it is with other creatures: houseflies, despite having very small brains, have to think on a much smaller, faster scale than humans. When we're going in for a swat, we probably look as slow to the fly as the Jaeger did to us. That's why they can get out of the way so effectively.

If that's not enough brain-twisting epistemology for you, Bergson went deeper into how the body actually processes this data. Turns out, he says, the body turns sense data into actions mainly through a process of discernment... it's actually a highly efficient machine for filtering input. Whereas every other image in the universe -- every rock and leaf and air molecule -- has to react to the whole universe all at once, responding equally to every effect, the body is an image that can choose to react to some stimuli and ignore others. In fact, most stimuli don't even reach us, since they have no relevance to us and don't affect any of our five senses. Of the effects that DO reach us, we are extremely good at sorting it out and only letting the most relevant data into our consciousness. We are reductive machines, organizing all input according to our faculties.

I think it's very possible that this is what the human pilots are doing for their Jaeger, as well: processing all the input from various artificial sensory organs, prioritizing it, and reducing the possible responses to a manageable subset. This is something a computer could certainly do, but come on... nature developed the human mind as the best possible computer for this type of thing, complete with ethical impulses, survival instincts, and carefully-calibrated judgment. The only problem, of course, is that there is always too much data coming into those spinal conduits for a single human mind to effectively filter. Thus, two humans... two bodies, complete with all their cognitive patterns... two filters for reducing and streamlining that massive flow of sensory data. There you go: a possible interpretation of the cryptic phrase "reducing the neural load."

The rest of the stuff in Pacific Rim... the love story, the World War II references, the dubious feminist politics... the other critics can cover that stuff. We can all decide what aspect of this cinematic experience affects us, using these beautiful, strange, reductive brains of ours. For me, it was the subtleties and complexities of embodiment and shared consciousness, and trying to figure out what that might mean. It happens that the best answers I've found are the ones furnished by Henri Bergson, back in 1896.

That's pretty weird, right?

My Capsule Review of Like Someone in Love

Back in March, I did a capsule for Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love for 366 Weird Movies. If you're curious about the film, feel free to go check it out. A selection:

One of the great things about Like Someone in Love is how it demonstrates the strength of this kind of ambiguous, minimalist filmmaking: within its naturalistic treatment of its subjects, it creates huge fertile spaces for the proliferation of symbolic meanings and psychological resonance. It’s shot painstakingly, with the camera always intensely aware of its space. Doorways, reflections, confined interiors, obstructions, and the space outside the frame: all these become Kiarostami’s playthings. In his control of objects and the camera’s eye, he is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick, whose style was similarly deliberate, ostensibly naturalistic, but profoundly self-aware.

Ashura (2005): the kabuki of trash cinema

New Years Eve 2012 brought some fun and unexpected things, like Linguini in Sea Urchin Sauce, and some tragically predictable things, like three different pedestrians throwing up on the subway ride home. New Years Day 2013 -- that brought something else, sometimes amusing, sometimes unexpected, and sometimes inane: a kaidan samurai movie from 2005 called Ashurajō no Hitomi (or by its American title, Ashura).

It's been two days since I saw Ashura, and I'm in danger of suddenly and sadly forgetting the entire film. It wasn't the type that lingers in your consciousness for days, eating away at you with its moral ambiguities. The plot is adapted from a 1987 play, and it runs through the standard litany of romantic, kung-fu, and fantasy tropes. The world harbors a secret population of demons, and their requisite containment force, a militant cult called Demon Wardens. During one of their standard purges, one of the Wardens accidentally kills an innocent child, and he decides to retire from the monster killing game. He is only thrust back into it when he encounters a young woman with amnesia, and takes a mysterious personal interest in her. She rapidly complicates his life, and leads him into an entanglement in a long-simmering plot to bring Ashura, the demon queen, back from the dead, according to prophecy.

The film does not look expensive, nor created with any subtlety of craft. Indeed, the cover on the film's Netflix page looks a lot cleaner and more beautiful than any frame within the actual running time. You know the demons because they flash distorted toothy smiles and green eyes, and they splash green blood when they're killed. There are copious badly-rendered backgrounds and strange computer-generated landscapes. Most of the mysterious magic power that manifests is silly CGI fireballs and glowing laser "threads of fate." It's bad cinema in the best tradition, melodramatic and desperate to be impressive in whatever way it can.

Of course, being the forgiving type, I noted all the things I appreciated about it. One of the stock main characters becomes a pretty compelling villain, and the love story that's central to the plot is handled with the kind of soaring drama that's uniquely allotted to unselfconscious trash-cinema stylists. The film's ambitions are kind of endearing. It's also notable in that the true villains of the story are not puppets who embody pure evil, like Bizan... they are all characters who start out as heroes, and whose motivations are twisted by ambition and resentment. Also, "My Funny Valentine" is a pretty awesome closing credits song, totally unexpected and eccentric at the end of a movie like this.

But most interesting to me, above all, was the storyteller's subtext. After he leaves the Demon Warden profession, Izumo, the main character, becomes an actor in a kabuki theater, under direction of a doddering playwright who's forever trying to sacrifice his own employees to demons in order to create drama for his productions. Of course, he ends up writing down the deeds that make up the film. This whole parallel plotline deserves at least a little exploration, before I rate the film on Netflix and stop thinking about it.

The film actively emphasizes the Kabuki element. Izumo is depicted on the banners outside the kabuki theater, and he repeatedly makes the cross-eyed kabuki face... first as an actor in his plays, and later during his confrontations with Bizan, the demon mistress. This may just be meaningless comic detailing, an attempt to add a little spice to a generally boring main character.

To me, though, it actually suggests something about the level of self-awareness that went into the crafting of Ashura (either the film or the play, depending on their differences). Kabuki theater is infamous for its exaggeration and stylization, and at least in Ashura, it's also noted for its high melodrama and tragic conclusions. This is part of what characterizes this very movie... a capricious use of cheap effects, an uninhibited rendering of a desperate, flawed romance, and an intensely stylized, heightened depiction of life in medieval Japan. The film and its director are saying, "We can't create a conventional masterpiece, with the control over tone and setting and style that a larger budget and longer timeline would allow, so we are going to let loose and go all out with those things that we CAN control: the glow effects, the background compositing, and the sentimentality of the performances. We have no reason not to make this as epic as we can, within those parameters."

And when you feel this enthusiasm, this kabuki-inflected confidence and self-regard, you may discover a deeper level to this film's charm. You may allow hold your laughter for a second, and in receiving it as the vast and soaring myth that it wants to be, you may discover a really elemental, beautiful movie, doing its best to escape a second-rate Kabuki fever dream.

Django Unchained: Opinions, Reactions, Critiques and Reflections

If I were a movie reviewer, I'd describe my reaction to Django Unchained as follows: it was an intense movie with a lot of great moments, some funny, some poignant, and some satisfying in the way that a good action movie is satisfying: sudden, climactic, and cathartic. Is there a word for that? Anyway, those strengths are just enough to outweigh the fact that the film is stretched out and paced and plotted in such a way that it wears out its welcome. The theatrical violence and racism are exciting and indulgent for the first hour and a half, and the bloodbath and Candieland really tops it off, but it becomes exhausting by the time Jamie Foxx's genitals make their appearance. By the end, I was numb to the film's strengths, and honestly eager for it to end. It had already spent all its momentum by then.

This might be the rare film that's better in a home-viewing environment, rather than the theater. At home, you can let off steam by yelling at the screen, making remarks to your friends, or getting up and getting food. It would make the film feel less insistent, like it was leading you on through its twists and turns, rather than jabbing spurs into your sides and yelling in your ear. I might like to see it again, once it's out on Blu-Ray. I think it would benefit from a second viewing in a slightly different context.

Despite being overlong and sometimes toilsome, the film doesn't lack for substance, and I did detect an honest consideration of racial issues, rather than frivolous postmodern regurgitation of provocative material. Candieland is a vivid symbol for the collusion of wealth, power, violence, and tradition in the racist fabric of American history. Django himself embodies a racial fury that echoes forward (or back, I guess) through the black panthers, Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son, and a whole succession of hip-hop, jazz, slam poetry, and political discourse. Perhaps it's fitting that at the end of the film, Django has found his identity as a vengeful outlaw, rather than as a law-abiding citizen of the enlightened North.

Christoph Waltz's character is fascinating, as well, forming the third part of the Django/Calvin/Schultz triad. Schultz is the kind of immigrant that has always made the United States what it is, an idealist who's been shaped in equal parts by his native culture and by the American experience. He fights for Django's freedom, but he does so in an idealistic spirit, an enemy of the idea of slavery, as much as he is a friend and mentor to Django. His idealism is encouraging, but as the plot reveals, it is also suicidal: it acts on emotional impulses, turning minor slights and symbolic offenses into massive, bloody conflicts. If Schultz had really seen Django's agenda as his own, and had considered Broomhilda's rescue as a victory, he would have shaken Candie's hand and headed off into the sunset. His final act of defiance revealed that he was a slave to pride, not to necessity.

The discussions about race and discourse that have been occurring subsequent to the film are colorful and volatile, as should be expected. On Razor Horizon, Joel Randall hits pretty much all the beats, claiming that it's part of a long history of hip racism in Tarantino's films, revealing a perverse fascination with black Otherness. Of course, Spike Lee is the most visible opponent of the film's language, as Spike tweeted, not having yet seen the film in question.

I have a gut response to Spike Lee that I have to get out before I go on. Spike is entitled to an opinion, but is anybody entitled to such an uninformed opinion? Simultaneously nursing such a strong reaction, but also refusing to see the film, and then pronouncing a judgement via Tweet... it seems vaguely passive-aggressive and pathologically defensive to me. I would have seriously appreciated a well-reasoned critique from Spike, as provided by Joel Randall, above. It could have been a much more savage take-down than his twitchy Twitter response, had it been backed by some actual insight into the film itself. But for that, he would have to see the film, either by paying to watch it in the theater, or by requesting a promotional copy, from the studio or from Quentin himself. Or by pirating it.

So, in my search for other reactions, I get to read things like Steven Boone's interesting reaction piece in PressPlay, in which he discusses his own feelings about the N-word and his valuation of Spike Lee's career against Tarantino's. And reading the piece, and the comments, stirs up all those doubts and irresolvable confusions that discussions of race and power always seem to entail. For others, especially non-whites and non-Christians and non-cisgendered-males, but even for me, a standard-bearer of the American race/gender hegemony.

Of course, I still understand the counterpoint, the ugly scent of absurd unfairness that a film like this gives off, directed by a mass-marketed white man who often presents himself with a shrill, sanctimonious air. One of the liberal parts of me -- the part that twitches and shudders thinking of Daniel Tosh -- wants to write Boone's article off as contrived apologism that misses the emotional core of the controversy. But one of the comments defends the film in simpler terms, and I think, before it can be pronounced as vile and opportunistic, it has to be glimpsed in those terms, at least for a moment. That comment is from Bryan Hill, and the relevant section is as follows:

'The fact is that DJANGO UNCHAINED is the most expensive and most mainstream film depicting the horrors of slavery in the history of American filmmaking. It has a black hero. A black heroine. An unflinching look at violence (psychological and physical) and a bonafide superstar playing a slave owner. As a cultural achievement, it's remarkable. "Django Freeman" is the kind of black hero most black storytellers (me included) wouldn't dare to think they could get Hollywood-land to finance, and Tarantino spent his political-cultural capital to do it. In the theatre, my wife and I constantly looked at each other during the film sharing the silent sentiment: "Wow. They did this." I imagine that has to hurt Lee personally. Even with Denzel by his side, Hollywood would never finance DJANGO from him.'

For me, this is underlined, at the very least, by the fact that Django Unchained is serious and sickening at the right moments. A lot of mook deaths are played for laughs, but the physical and psychological torture of the slaves is always sobering and uncomfortable. If white people are allowed any freedom to take an unflinching look at racism and slavery and at the white cultures and institutions they've seeded -- and I'd be hard to convince otherwise, as long as progressivism still pushes us toward greater awareness of ourselves and our privilege -- then Tarantino's film deserves to be seen as an honest exploration of those issues. Tarantino and I are absolutely, irresolvably outside the black experience of history, but we have to find terms to examine it and even -- am I allowed to say this? -- relate to it. At some point, in some capacity, we have to scour that boundary between the black experience and the white experience. Blindness and disconnection from these issues, this inheritance of violence and these systemic social failures, is not an option.

If I get a chance, I may write another post about Django... specifically, about how Candie, Freeman, and Schultz form a triadic structure with some kind of symbolic or semantic weight. We'll see what I can come up with. I suppose I should watch Blazing Saddles and the original Django, huh? Factor in the most important reference points?

Skyfall, a photographer's Bond, and the theme of obsolescence

There are times during Skyfall when I felt like Sam Mendes was scoffing at Marc Forster, his predecessor in the lineage of James Bond directors. By my reading, the film was thoroughly aware of the recent history of the franchise, not least because it linked the new Bonds to the very old ones in some trivial homages. But also, the film's didactic content -- its message of old and reliable methodology versus whiz-bang novelty and gimmicks -- is also a comment on the way the series has been going so far. Lucky for us, part of Sam Mendes's message required him to prove himself, and he did that by making a damn fine Bond film, on par with the excellent Casino Royale... kind of a rebuke to Quantum of Solace, which is fine by me.

An argument in the background of the film, the ground to the figure of chase scenes and assassinations, was the confrontation between M (Judy Densch) and the Board of Inquiry that was investigating her conduct in running MI6. Given that espionage and terrorism is largely conducted online in our modern age, the board asks M a practical question: does MI6 even need human agents at this point? In response, M argues for the continued human engagement and expertise that her agents (like Bond) can provide. This explicit argument is just a few token lines of dialogue in the film, but its implications resonate through the whole narrative, affecting its characters, its themes, and its progression and resolution.

This whole debate is, of course, underwritten by the strong presence of Q and Silva in the film. Q is Bond's new Quartermaster, is a young, precocious computer hacker who seems to feel that he can solve most problems from his control room. He regards agents as clumsy but necessary appendages: "Occasionally, a trigger must be pulled." Silva, the arch-villain of the film, is a vengeful ex-agent who turns out to rival Q in the realm of digital espionage. He uses YouTube as a medium to broadcast the identities of the MI6 agents around the world; he masks his own digital signature by hopping around remote servers; and he transforms his laptop into a sort of reconnaissance bomb that, upon being connected to the MI6 computers, takes them over and breaks open the compound's security systems.

Bond villains always have to seem superhuman; in this case, Silva is a dangerous combination of Q's high-level computer skills and Bond's unbelievable physical and social prowess. He is a strong parallel to Q, in that both of them seem to think they can rule the world by dominating it through their computer terminals. Q is fortunate in that for him, as opposed to Silva, being proven wrong by Bond doesn't mean getting killed.

These themes of Old-Busted-versus-New-Hotness are infused into a categorically excellent action movie, which is what a James Bond film really needs to be. What made Casino Royale so brilliant was its ferocious attitude and its groundbreaking action sequences; for Skyfall, the action is smart and serviceable, but not necessarily brilliant. We've all seen fights on top of trains; we've all seen arenas with unlikely creatures in them. We've all seen the Home Alone sequence where a house is rigged with traps. What's fucking fantastic about Skyfall is its visionary cinematography, its insistence that every scene look like a painting, with mesmerizing relationships between light and color and shadow, ballets of figures and silhouettes and backgrounds playing off one another. It's a photographer's Bond film. Were any of the old ones like that? I don't remember them well enough to say.

But how gorgeous was the empty office in Shanghai, surrounded by glass, with the pulsating monitor visible across the gulf outside?

And how perfectly composed was Silva, staggering over layered crests of pasture, barely illuminated by the flames of a burning mansion off in the distance?

How chilling were those shots of Bond suspended in a frozen lake, fighting to get to the surface as a henchman sank into the abyss below him?

Mendes brought his stylistic strengths fully to bear in this Bond film, and that turned out to interface neatly with the film's larger thematic issues. Quantum of Solace, the previous Bond film, was embodied in Skyfall by Silva and Q, who thought that high-tech, high-fidelity solutions were the way of the future. In case you don't remember (or didn't see it), Quantum of Solace was fatally sabotaged by its action sequences, which were totally incoherent, shot in a queasy shaky-cam style, with debris and flames flying by the camera and no respect for space or continuity. This is what you get when you invest a lot of your resources in equipment and post-production... quick effects, crane shots, tons of coverage, but no economy, continuity, or coherence. Marc Forster must have seen the Borne films and thought that style was a great fit for Bond. It turned out to make the film intolerable.

Bond represents Skyfall, the film itself, as a refutation of the Quantum aesthetic. Bond is a human element, running on cunning and judgment and loyalty, whose skill as an agent allows him to defeat Silva's vast resources and technical capabilities. Skyfall is the low-fi rejoinder to Quantum of Solace, showing fans that the way to make an excellent Bond film is through the traditional techniques of writing, pacing, and cinematography. Both Bond and Skyfall go back to fundamentals, and in being so goddamn good, they prove that the new Hotness can't replace the old standard... at best, it can build on top of it.

The Fiction of Politics: Sweet Home Alabama and American Beauty

I suspect that most of my small audience is liberal types, media and design and art and culture people who identify strongly with things like academia, city life, secularism, and technocracy. In case you haven't noticed from previous posts, this blog comes from that framework, as well. I think it's important to step back and reflect on those things once in a while.

I rarely notice politics in film, except when I'm watching a documentary (those tend to make open statements on politically charged ideas), or when the politics are farted clumsily into the story as a bunch of generic devices (see: The Dark Knight Rises, Avatar). I suspect I frequently miss the broader political assumptions of films I'm watching. Sometimes, the politics only surface at the broad philosophical level, with frameworks that have political implications... like "war is the way to solve the tough problems," "business people are greedy," and "teenagers are bad decision makers."

Other times, the politics are rather more immediate.

I saw Sweet Home Alabama on TV today, and it struck me again -- just as it did the first time I saw it -- that though this film doesn't adhere perfectly to conservative dogma, it comes from a very conservative framework. However the film wants to apologize for it, the message can't be scrubbed away: city life has ruined Melanie, and though it creates an illusion of happiness for her, only the earthy, family-oriented, idealistic humanity of Southern country living can really give her lasting fulfillment. The Yankee North is caught up in the pursuit of money and status; New Yorkers are self-absorbed, ambitious at the expense of authenticity, and closed off from the awesome power of nature and childhood.

The cues are clear: Melanie's parents won't like Andrew because "he's a democrat" (and their assumed reaction turns out to be right, as if they exist in Melanie's subconscious, warning her against this course of action). Kate Hennings, played by Candace Bergen, is a transparent caricature of Hillary Clinton, with touches of other PR-happy politicians. At the end of the film, Melanie reverts entirely back to a stomping, drinking country girl, as if city life was a dress she put on for a few years while she played around in fashion (a very successful career that she gives up completely, to no fanfare whatsoever).

There are positive portrayals of gays in the film, to its credit. You may read this as a whitewash of the actual attitude toward gays in the South, or you may feel it's refreshing, because you know that many rural Southerners aren't as homophobic as the liberal rumors would have you believe. Nevertheless, there is no real confrontation with the politics... none of the gay characters make any mention of wishing they could get married or adopt kids. In fact, the film conveniently glosses over the fact that Bobby Ray had to stay in the closet for so long in the first place.

The film's attitude toward homosexuals feels rather like the attitude of some liberal films toward religious leaders: Shepard Book in Serenity, Father Barry in On The Waterfront, Friar Tuck in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves... though the films themselves are clearly secular, they make a gesture toward religious figures to acknowledge the positive, paternal spirit that a man of God can embody. Such films tend to ignore the fact that the main characters are not churchgoers, and that they are often acting in a very unreligious way.

My first reaction to Sweet Home Alabama was lukewarm indifference, but after I thought over it and picked up on the conservative bent, it gradually turned to annoyance and aversion (yes, I do change my opinions of films after having some time to think about them... my initial reaction has no special authority). Now, seeing the film for a second time, I have a chance to step back and consider that refined reaction, and I think that Sweet Home Alabama has something to teach me, especially considered in relation to many drama and character study films. Particularly, it can teach me something as a liberal cinephile who doesn't want to be irrevocably stuck in his own dogma.

I sometimes forget that serious films often (very often) have a liberal framework to them. Some of the greatest enduring celluloid antagonists are the bugaboos of liberal identity politics: racists, sexists, businesspeople, and military authorities. Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Avatar, A Beautiful Mind, even down to The Muppet Movie: films considered "serious idea films" overwhelmingly come from a socially-conscious, vaguely leftist framework, and it's easy to become blind to that.

Consider, for instance, American Beauty, in which (SPOILERS AHEAD STOP READING IF YOU WANT TO SEE IT TONIGHT) an ex-army homophobe murders a suburban dad, just as he reaches some sort of personal epiphany about his place in the universe. To us liberals, who are consciously sensitive to issues of racial, sexual, and heteronormative marginalization, that's pretty unremarkable. But how would it have changed the movie if that murder had been committed by the angsty pot-dealing teenager trying to impress his girlfriend? You know... the one who was vaguely glorified, in an offhand way, in the course of his character development?

So if you're a liberal cinephile, think about Sweet Home Alabama, and remember: if that movie inspires frustration, that might be how a media-literate conservative feels all the time. That might be why conservatives often claim to be oppressed by a liberal media conspiracy. And if you're a conservative cinephile, take some comfort in the fact that Sweet Home Alabama is out there, an enjoyable, technically competent, well-acted romantic comedy that makes liberals feel as ideologically needled as Avatar makes you feel.

I have another hypothesis: that Will Ferrell made a double-feature of political parodies in Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory, satirizing the right and the left, respectively, through sports. I need to see both of those before I can really sink my teeth into that idea, though.

The Avengers compelled me to write this review immediately after seeing the film, which is totally not my style

I've read the backlash against The Avengers by the Serious Movie Advocates like A.O. Scott and Andrew O'Heir, and at my most disenchanted moments, I sympathize with them. However, it's a mark of the success of The Avengers that when I came out of the theater, I had turned into a fan of the purest, most obnoxious order... I wanted to go back to their reviews and post snarky responses about how they obviously didn't give it a chance, and they just didn't get it, and no matter how even-handed they sounded, I felt offended by the sneering subtext in their meta-criticism.

And as much as I find Samuel L. Jackson's snap at A.O. Scott to be childish, I understand where it came from. Just watching the movie made me want to stand up and cheer for it... I'd imagine that working on the film, acting the part of inspirational supervisor, can turn you into an unequivocal defender of its honor and integrity. Even the "splatter" graphic beside some Rotten Tomatoes reviews was enough to piss me off when I got home from the cinema. This is a testament to the very primal effectiveness of Whedon's film.

If I listed all the great things about the Avengers, I would certainly mark myself as a partisan. But I can't go and write a detached, ruminating reflection on its strengths and weaknesses, either, because I would severely understate its appeal. It's a film that feels great, even through all the spoilers, all the predictable twists, and all the formulas. So I'll take an entirely different angle in reviewing it: I'll list all the ways it COULD have gone wrong, and didn't.  All the pitfalls it managed to avoid.

NOTE - Minor Spoilers Below

1 - sidelining any particular character, either in terms of plot-significance, or in terms of screen time

With Captain America and Tony Stark as the two sides of guiding authority, and Hawkeye and Black Widow acting as sharpened but compromised tools of team cohesion, the other Avengers are free to take on rogue personalities and profound narrative significance. In fact, arguably, Banner and Thor are both the best-rendered characters and the most interesting individual stories within this omnibus. Reegardless, all six Avengers are absolutely given their due, which is a lot to ask in such a broad ensemble film.

As other critics have pointed out, the dialog is also written with remarkable agility, giving each character a unique voice that becomes clear immediately and remains refreshingly consistent. I won't harp on it. Joss Whedon knows how to handle characters.

2 - failing to create sufficient tension and chemistry between the protagonists

A number of critics point out how important it is that the Avengers have to face one another for a while before they get around to saving the world. It does indeed entertain the old comic book impulse of asking, "Who would win? Thor, Iron Man, or the Hulk?" But saying it that way makes it sound like a gimmick, a mere necessity, checked off a comic book fanservice checklist. It's not.

These moments showcase the primal appeal of comic books and give it a platform to become universal. In particular, when Thor's hammer strikes Captain America's shield, or when Iron Man starts showing signs of distress in Thor's grip... these moments are the small climaxes and reactions that keep the adolescent male imagination engaged.

For the record, the writers of The Avengers also manage to create a surprisingly subtle ecosystem of emotional relationships between the heroes. By the end of the second act, tensions within the group have risen to dangerous levels, but this tension is always ambient, an inexact collision of big egos and cross-purposes. If the writers had reduced it to simple binaries at any time -- authority versus renegade, confrontation versus surrender, interpersonal vendettas, etc -- it would have cheapened it. Instead, the characters' relationships retain their complexity and ambiguity throughout the film.

3 - failing to create a central, compelling antagonist

Loki was not thoroughly sketched out in The Avengers. A good deal of this work was left to Thor; The Avengers treated him as a fairly generic fascist supervillain. Nonetheless, Tom Hiddleston does justice to the role, giving Loki the burning, resentful self-importance that the character needs to set the end of the world in motion. His sheer malice gives a special endearing significance to all his confrontations and evil speeches, and it makes for a whole array of great moments.

4 - failing to raise the stakes enough for us to care

Throughout the course of the extended climax, there are a whole range of things for us to be vicariously protective of. The world as a whole... New York, which is a focal point for an alien invasion force, threatened by both the invaders and by its own supposed protectors... Tony Stark's life, which he offers as a chip in an intergalactic gamble... and Tony Stark's love for Pepper Potts, which is tapped as a corollary to his potential sacrifice. There is a great deal on the table by the end of The Avengers, and the film insists on our continued investment.

5 - not giving us enough huge, city-blasting special effects

Okay, so they obviously weren't going to make this mistake.

A good deal of the credit for The Avengers goes to the film for reasons that are hard to nail down. In particular, it balanced dialog and action in an elusive way -- somehow it functioned as a "screwball comedy" tucked within a constant stream of combat set-pieces, as if a personable, charismatic virus had infected a Michael Bay film. To fans of comic books, this creates a universe in cosmic harmony, because we're used to a medium where people manage to make long expository speeches in the middle of hectic combat. Its overstated dramatic moments (big speeches, flashes of sentimentality) also resonated with that comic book artificiality, which becomes a worthy aesthetic in its own right when it's applied with conviction.

The Avengers was so committed to its audience and so respectful of its constraints that it might feel disappointingly pedestrian if it's not taken in a certain spirit. However, pedestrian it is not. For a 2.5-hour film, it moves incredibly fast. For a massive high-flying actioner, it's amazingly human. And for an obvious ensemble franchise entry, it's strikingly intimate. Whedon was given a pile of bricks and mortar, and out of it, he fashioned a sculpture that respects the materials, and at the same time transcends them, and all our expectations.

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

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.

Road to Perdition (2007): Machinist Gothic

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

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 Oneiric Break: Dream structures in four major films

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.

Southern Gothic: Night of the Hunter (1955)

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)

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.