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.

Southern Gothic: Sling Blade (1996)

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.

The Naked City: familiar moments from an NYC noir

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love IMDB's quotes section:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRENDAN: "You are dangerous."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some other common characteristics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By shoehorning herself into this critical perspective, Kael makes the mistake of treating all three of these films as unequivocally identical, when in truth, each has its own particular dramatic conflicts and lessons. Kael thinks that all three are over-determined by the message that "big decadent European parties are actually sad and pathetic," which isn't actually the message in any of them. If anything, it's merely the tone: the sad-heart-of-privilege is definitely a shared stage, and the idle celebration is an easy way to set that stage, but each film creates its own thematic undertones within this space.

For instance, I can't help but feel that Roman Catholicism is a strong presence in La Dolce Vita, and this may be why this feels like the most full-bodied and hopeful of the three films. Marcello and his band of adolescents don't take religion seriously, but even so, it lingers out there on the periphery of the story, offering a glimpse into a hope that some people can access, even if it's beyond Marcello's reach. This theme of religion and cosmic uncertainty seeps into the story in a number of places: the agony of suicide and death, just off-screen and outside Marcello's blinders; the appearance of father figures who inspire both admiration and ambivalence in the protagonist. The film may be unresolved; it may withhold its thesis; but it can't be accused of being empty of concrete meaning.

The wealth and false narratives, covering meaninglessness like plaster over a gaping hole, is a theme in the work of Resnais, as well. However, like all of his themes, it isn't rooted as deeply in the characters -- generally the film seems to be an exploration of appearances and aestheticization.

You could point to some religious concerns in La Notte, as well, but again, they don't have much emphasis. What does have a strong emphasis in La Notte -- which is minimally addressed in the other two films -- is the faux-creative disposition, the inauthentic position of the self-involved public artist. Kael throws light on this by rejecting the theme before she actually investigates it; she says Giovanni seems like a fake artist, with none of the tortured texture of a truly great writer. Without a doubt, Antonioni would probably make the same observation: Giovanni is not addicted to the act of creation, like a great artist, but rather to the public image that he can attain.

This also relates, in no small way, to Giovanni's relationship with Valentina, who acts as both a muse and a foil. She has everything the couple lacks: spontaneity, artistic ambition and humility, and some respect and regard for the marriage she threatens to break up. I think, as much as it's a simple interpretation to see Giovanni's interest in her as the capricious horniness of a middle-aged man, it's actually a form of possessive denial. Giovanni wants to possess her because she represents a lost part of himself.

Kael calls for a character in these films "who enjoys every minute of it, who really has a ball," who she says would be "the innocent American exploding this European mythology of depleted modern man"... and yet, she fails to recognize these figures when they arrive. They are Valentina, and Marcello's father, and perhaps even M, the husband in Last Year at Marienbad. These characters are the windows to the outside world, alluding to places that haven't become drowned in habit and aimlessness.

Of course, I have the urge to ask of Kael: why write so much about these movies, simply to say that they're generally shallow and overrated? I guess, at the time, the prevailing appreciation of these films was so strong that it was worth voicing some resistance. Kael is also one of the greatest critics in history, so I can't deny that she had good reason, even if I don't understand it. And I must admit, I don't mind the basic idea of a review-criticism hybrid essay, which is pretty much what this is. Even so, I think I got more out of the sick soul films that Kael did, maybe because I watched with a different pair of eyes.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961): Considerations of a Complex Space

If you have a friend who

1) didn't understand what happened in Inception, and always calls the movie "confusing" before applying any other adjective, or

2) always talks about the movie by launching into a lecture on what was real and what wasn't and whose dream they were in and whether or not the top fell down,

don't let that person get their hands on Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais's 1961 film about the fragments of remembered experience within a hermetically-sealed European resort. Resnais, with the help of his modernist script-writer Robbe-Grillet, will drive both of the above-mentioned people insane -- the former with frustration, and the latter with giddy speculation. I loved it, though. I thought it was a razor-sharp dreamlike drama that greatly rewards a patient spectator. It's also one of those films that will get better with each viewing, as I further acclimate to the refracted logic of its chronology.

Last Year at Marienbad is tragically betrayed by the synopses floating around out there. NetFlix's summary is as follows:

At a lavish European hotel, a handsome stranger tries to convince a lovely young woman that they had a passionate affair a year ago. When she claims not to remember him, he keeps trying to convince her, weaving a story that mixes memory and fantasy. Or is it all fantasy? French new wave director Alain Resnais helms this complex, controversial film that earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

The closest thing to a summary on IMDB goes like this:

In a huge, old-fashioned luxury hotel a stranger tries to persuade a married woman to run away with him, but it seems she hardly remembers the affair they may have had (or not?) last year at Marienbad.

These are all well and good, but they don't make clear just how experimental this film is (for the record, Wikipedia's summary is much more informative). From the outset, the viewer will assume that there is a definitive "time" and that this lavish hotel is at a definitive location in space; readers will assume that these strangers have backstories, whether explained or implied, and that their conversations and flirtations unfold in something like a coherent reality. None of these assumptions will turn out to imply. I'm not sure how NetFlix would have alluded to that in its summary, so I guess it's fair that viewers will be surprised.

For those who aren't already scared away, a bit of cultural background will deepen the hypnotic experience of Last Year at Marienbad. The film seems to take place at a crossroads of time, conditioned by both actual and possible events, but always delimited by the walls of the hotel -- no outside world is acknowledged. The central narrative thread is the ongoing recollection of X, the stranger who acts as the male protagonist, as he attempts to "remind" (or convince) a beautiful married woman of their previous stays at the hotel, and of their romance in its gardens and salons. This thread is cushioned by the depiction of other hotel guests engaged in socialite rituals: conversations over drinks, theater productions, gambling and card games, and loitering in the hallways.

My first thought upon seeing the film is "hypertext," given its willingness to reject any clear surface meta-narrative. Even Inception had one of these (Cobb's "last job" in order to get home to his children). It's a postmodern truism that there's no authority to give meaning to our experiences any longer, so we can jump from YouTube video to Wikipedia article to IRL conversation to the calculated representations of the evening news. Last Year at Marienbad's refusal to provide a well-defined establishing story or context recalls Lyotard's rejection of metanarratives in The Postmodern Condition.

However, in terms of style and figurative content, Last Year at Marienbad seems to have more in common with the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges than it does with the world of postmodern theory, which still struggles with the need to find a footing in its slippery cultural environment. Borges' fiction, obsessed as it was with recursive structures and the complexities of representation, exhibits many of the same themes and stylistic tendencies as Resnais's film. In particular, the hotel seems hermetically sealed, like the infinite labyrinthine halls of The Library of Babel. And the imperfection of memory, and its effect on the present and the future, is addressed in Funes the Memorious, a short story about a character who remembers every detail of his life with perfect clarity. Marienbad also plays with the idea of alternate destinies for its underdetermined characters, a theme at work in Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths.

As much as I'd like to accredit postmodernism with this kind of complexity, I have to admit that it's more a concern of high modernism, with its emphasis on structure and form. The extraction of the core narrative from all contextual concerns is right in line with minimalism, an offshoot of the modernist sensibility, and the treatment of fantasy and memory as interchangable, and equal even to at-hand experience, is something that you can find in all sorts of formally intensive modernist works, from Italo Calvino to Nabakov to Joyce. Last Year at Marienbad may share a sort of hypertextual, non-deterministic philosophy with postmodernism, but this is actually something the postmodern inherited from its modernist precursors... and without that postmodern emphasis on recontextualization and low culture, this film remains firmly situated in the modernist artistic mode.

I said this background would deepen the experience... I never said it would explain it. Indeed, no amount of wily-nily reading and research will fully capture the many meanings of Last Year at Marienbad. This is because the film has no surface story, nor any guiding narrative, nor any clear signposts to help sort out the themes. The creation of such a self-enclosed world, and such a commitment to mixing up all different types of experience (lived, remembered, imagined) is quite a powerful statement, and it's one of the things that makes this film such a landmark. If you have yet to watch the film, the first piece of advice I can give you is to trust your instincts about whether you're in the past, present, or future, and don't look too hard for actual visual indications, because there are very few, if any.

If you can keep from getting distracted by the non-linear storytelling, you may notice the film's occasional switches into horror techniques, suggesting psychological trauma: the strobe-like cuts to the female character standing alone in an empty room; the jarring rhythmic approaches when she's reaching like a worshipper toward the approaching camera. Resnais's long walks down hotel hallways probably influenced Kubrick's filming of The Shining, where Danny rides his tricycle through the endless corridors of the Overlook Hotel. So could you read this as a horror film, a movie about the loss of one's soul in a decadent pit of circular conversation and remembrance? Maybe, although I'd love to meet the person who was sensitive enough to that sort of stuff to actually be scared by it.

There are many readings of the film, I'm sure, including the assessment that it should be experienced and meditated upon, but not interpreted into some "reading" (since the vagueness of the story rules out any authoritative interpretation). I personally feel that any very complex movie deserves the benefit of some interpretation, even if it's only a tentative thesis against which to judge the twists and turns of the plot. So I came up with at least one reading of Last Year at Marienbad, which I believe is strongly supported by the text.

I understand the characters A (the female) and M (presumably her husband) as a married couple who have entered the hotel from the outside world. They have actual connections -- their love, the mastery of gambling and parlor games -- that link them to a real life, with genuine shared experiences. The hotel is an escape for A (as her husband suggests at one point, implying that she came there for her health), but it is also an existential trap, an enclosed reality sealed off from the world, which threatens at all times to engulf those who enter it looking for solace.

X seems to be a dashing stranger, but he's actually a parasite, the only native inhabitant of the labyinthine hotel. He is the hotel's minotaur, a parasite who only exists within that sealed space, and his life is devoted to trapping people inside its walls. He spends the whole film in pursuit of A, evoking memories both real and false; all the memories he calls on take place within the hotel itself, because he has no access to any experience outside that reality. He uses these memories, with their golden glow of nostalgia and mystery, to lure A away from her husband, and from her life outside the hotel walls. He only reveals his malicious nature to us in the final line of the film (which I won't give away here).

I haven't studied the film enough to find more support for this reading, and I know it doesn't conclusively tie together all of the film's imagery... or even a significant part of it. However, it's a worthy starting point for my next viewing of the film, if I ever get around to it. It will require a long, quiet night and a flexible, patient mind, because those long corridors are alluring and dangerous.

Age, Identity, and War in Russia: The Last Command (1928) and Ivan's Childhood (1962)

The films I watched this weekend turned out overlap pretty significantly... both were films about the human cost of war in early 20th-century Russia, and both are lesser-appreciated films from great masters of cinema. Also, they were both in black and white. They were Tarkovsky's first feature film, Ivan's Childhood, and Von Sternberg's monumental production The Last Command, chronicling a great Russian general's descent into obscurity after the Bolshevik Revolution. Both are excellent films, and I would recommend them as a double-bill. There is a lot of insight in the space between them, in their similarities and reflections and contradictions; they are mirrors of one another, built on the same framework, reflecting and refracting the Russian legacy of violence in the formative moments of the modern age.

In Tarkovsky's film, Ivan is an orphan of war, and he lives his memories as fantasies, suffused into his grim life as a Russian scout. These visions of the past skirt reality without fully obeying its laws; there is water and flight, descent into a well, and non-linear repetitions of faces and voices. Memory becomes a stage for symbolism and sensation, a lived experience of lost contentment and orderly nature. A shot of a truck loaded with apples, driving along a beach where horses linger and leaving a trail of the fruit, is one of the most beautiful shots I remember seeing in cinema. It's a pure, singular snapshot of harmony and promise.

It says a lot about Ivan's psychological state that his childhood memories are constantly shattered by visions of trauma... he keeps remembering his mother, and then at the height of his fugue, he keeps experiencing her death at the hands of an unseen enemy. War has already subverted his journey, even in its formative moments; yet, in each of these memories -- and especially in the film's final flashback -- we see that Ivan is only whole in these fragments of the past.

Von Sternberg's Russian general, Sergius Alexander, has also left his glory behind... but for him, this is at the height of the war, and with peace, he has found only debasement. During the war, he was proud -- a pride bordering on hubris -- the pride of a showman, tasked with protecting his men and impressing the czar. Whether he's a Hollywood extra or a Grand Duke, Sergius Alexander is always putting on a show. The difference is that during the war, he was a loved, respected performer, and perhaps a soldier to boot (we never actually see him active in combat operations), but after its over and he's exiled, he is merely a ghost, an anonymous symbol of an historical myth.

With all the similarities between these films, there are also extensive inversions between them: where Ivan is a symbol of youth and poverty, the fodder on the front lines, so Sergius Alexander is age and prestige, the ruling class that represents the old social order. The drunken partisans in Von Sternberg's revolution become the gritty soldiers on the front lines, holding back the Nazi advance. The sting of loss and betrayal becomes the bitter victory against the invading force. Pogroms become concentration camps. The complexities of romantic love become the simplicities of familial affection, and both are shattered by the cruelties of conflict.

Coming from a time when the cinematic art was still young, still exploratory and theatrical, one of The Last Command's greatest merits is its carefully-conserved ambivalence: its ambivalence toward heroism and authenticity, its delicate treatment of the rivalry between Sergius Alexander and the revolutionary Andreyev, its mixed feelings about the virtue of the Russian aristocracy. It certainly has no remorse for the revolutionaries, who are basically depicted as a bloodthirsty drunken mob, but in the Russian Czarists, we see a petty, deceptive upper class, questionably redeemed by its desperation as it clings to dignity and tradition. Sergius is often contemptible, and when he takes his position for granted, or humiliates his rivals, he seems deserving of his eventual downfall. However, like any protagonist, he also elicits sympathy... even as we look in from outside and judge him, so we also see out from within, and feel the stumbles and blows of his long fall from grace.

There is a moment in The Last Command that has almost as strong an effect on me as the shot of the truck and the apples in Ivan's Childhood. This is the momentary shot of Sergius stepping out of the train car and facing a mob of revolutionaries, who seem to cringe, just for a moment, before his show of strength. It's a compelling moment, a visualization of the whole geography of the conflict: Sergius stepping forward, a representative of his cause, unwilling to pass quietly into their hands even at the edge of defeat. They are the mob, endless and unyielding, faceless, crude, vicious, the vast proletarian counterpoint to the glory of the aristocracy.

And Sergius's strength at this moment seems to parallel another shot in Ivan's Childhood, when bombs are raining down on the Russian base and one of Ivan's commander-caretakers comes into the bunker where Ivan is staying -- the bunker where he has just confronted his traumas of violence and hate and loss -- and tells Ivan not to be afraid. This cuts to a shot of Ivan, standing on something in the dark, looking as weathered and self-assured as any czarist general. Ivan's response to the soldier is clear and confident: "I'm not afraid."

These lessons in Russian history, accounts of the human costs, bear remarkable resemblances to one another: each is sublime and unflinching, and together, they scan as long-lost twin tales of how war both elevates man and destroys him.

Further reading: here's a pretty great Criterion Current essay on The Last Command.

A Short Survey: Microcinema from RSA, Harmony Korine, and Maxence Cyrin

Up until the digital age, the forum for short video and film has been pretty emaciated. MTV provided a market for the very small commercially-viable subgenre of music videos, and there were a couple shows for the experimental animated shorts... MTV's Liquid Television, and Sci-Fi Channel's Exposure... but generally, you could only see shorts at the film festivals, along with independent films and niche cinema. This is comparable to the short story, which could only get an audience through small periodicals and specialized anthologies.

But now, it's the age of Vimeo and YouTube, and there are new gatekeepers: blogs like Motionographer and Shape+Color (Vimeo channel here), funneling traffic into the most interesting and ambitious work. Of course, the music video is still a dominant subgenre, especially now that publicity has cemented the alignment between free entertainment and brand recognition. However, the new media environment is also creating some strange sinews between the worlds of cinema and advertising (Wong Kar Wai's Philips short film), and fashion (Lynch's short for Dior). These films are aesthetic collisions: fragments of these distinctive and studied directors in all their boldness and idiosyncracy, repurposed to reinforce the calculated and focus-tested images of these branded companies.

The short-form film/video space is vast and versatile, covering a lot of ground. Below are a few interesting instances I've discovered in the past week or so, with a little commentary on each of them.

1. RSA's shorts for Agent Provocateur and Quatre

These two shorts are contracted for intimate fashion companies; they're sufficiently erotic and risque to remind us of the fashion spreads we often see in designer magazines, which are famous for focusing heavily on the shape and sleekness of the body, in all its suggestive capacity. What makes them interesting is that they transcend the basic advertising paradigm, which pretty much always focuses the viewer's attention on a gimmick, a catch-phrase, or a pure product image; commercial narratives are always constructed to advance these product punchlines. These two shorts, on the other hand, are structured around opaque and elliptical narratives, skeletons of storylines abstracted into motifs of power and indulgence and objectification. Unlike the common commercial, it's hard to tell exactly what these pieces are trying to say, and for a certain breed of viewer, this is a powerful technique.

The two shorts offer a case study in empowering versus objectifying sexuality. In the Agent Provocateur short, the traditional gender power dynamics are reversed, with the male playing a role as object to the dominant female. He ends up working as a diminished embodiment of male desire: easy to satisfy, easy to manipulate, and often adolescent and self-involved. The film both highlights and critiques the traditional gender roles by reversing the gaze and subjecting male sexuality to its withering power. This is in stark contrast to the short for Wallpaper, which is a case study in male dominance and female submission, by way of the wandering eye and the closed door. It's possible that RSA literally decided to make the most self-consciously sexist erotic film possible: female sexuality overturned and activated purely for the panoptical eye of the male, looking out of a closed door; the eventual possession of the various women by the male Casanova, who is apparently absolutely justified in thinking he's entitled to this sexual indulgence.

And both are beautifully shot, of course... a common effect of having a short duration to fill, and a large budget and a lot of freedom to fill it.

2. Act Da Fool - Harmony Korine's short for Proenza Schouler

Korine is a bastard child of the video age of filmmaking, a reckless skateboarding maverick who's famous for his challenging films about degenerate outsider America. Act Da Fool is a microcosm of Korine's style, focusing on urban environments and filtered through mutilated film effects, with a stream of consciousness voiceover. It sounds disjointed and raw, but as it goes, you'll discover a flow, through defiance and crassness and into subtle, angst-ridden meditation on the cold reassurance of the indifferent universe. The visuals feel like they were shot with an amateur's hand, but they're too consistent and rhythmic to be dismissed as amateurish; it's really a handcrafted dusting of grime and distortion to distance us just enough from the subjects that we have to make an effort to approach them.

This seems even less goal-driven than the previous shorts. Korine's style is infamously off-putting, even to avant-garde viewers, and it's not going to sell any fashion by making it look sleek and sexy. Luckily, we finally live in a time when being challenging and unpredictable can be profitable, which allows Korine's brutal style to be a valid marketing point. All Harmony Korine has to do is be interesting, and use opportunities as they come... as he used this one, a chance to express his uncompromising view on the beauty and frustration of idle urban life.

3. Maxence Cyrin's film/pop remixes

Here is an interesting project: Maxence Cyrin recomposes pop songs on the piano, and then uses them as a score for re-edited film sequences from classic films. My favorite so far is The Cocteau Twins' Ivo cut with scenes from L'Atlante; there's also Where is My Mind (The Pixies) + The Mysterious Lady, Crazy (Beyonce) + Last Year at Marienband, Around the World (Daft Punk) + 1930's synchronized swimming footage, and D.A.N.C.E. (Justice) + Burlesque footage.

If (somewhat like me) you've always found really old, primitive film footage interesting in theory, but not necessarily for watching, these might appeal strongly to you. Maxence's compositions both defamiliarize and refamiliarize the footage, stripping away the camp and the old-fashioned pacing and the bad dialogue and voiceovers, and creating a more melodic and fluid space for these old images to occupy. The songs, which are recognizable, but still adapted enough to evoke a certain state of mind, are able to transform this footage into something hypnotic and hazily enchanting. Within the listless and disconnect aural space of a solo piano playing melancholy pop tunes, the sentimentality reemerges from this outdated footage, converted into video and reborn for modern eyes.