Renegade April: Clash of the Titans (2010) reaction and reflection

NOTE: Minor spoilers to follow, especially in the second half of the post, which is a discussion of the way the movie's themes play out in various plot developments.

Remember back at the beginning, when I discussed movies, I would often take up the causes of badly-reviewed, popcorn-munching films and unravel interesting elements within them? I've spent more time lately on classic cinema and art film, which makes me happy and all, but now I have to go back to that original Benefit of the Doubt tradition and unpack some meaning in a truly silly, indulgent, pop-culture piece of cinema fluff. Why? Because I insisted on seeing Clash of the Titans for Renegade April.

Now, granted, Clash of the Titans, released last weekend and starring Sam Worthington, Gemma Arterton, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and a bunch of other beautiful women and scruffy dudes, has a lot of history. First, there's the cinema history of being based on a previous ridiculous action film, released in 1981. Critics like New York Post's Kyle Smith point out that if you're going to do a trashy remake, what better to remake than a trashy original like Davis's stop-motion monster masterpiece? Second, there's the fact that it's based on mythological figures and actual folkloric references, however loosely. Third, there's the blog-wide controversy about the artificial 3D treatment, which caused an uproar among technical purists, dismissiveness among critics, and which probably doesn't really warrant that much discussion, except to say, "Do you think we can spare another three bucks per ticket for bad 3D?"

I'd furnish a plot summary, but that's probably not necessary, considering the two millennia of synopses and spoilers that are out there. Also, I'd critique Sam Worthington as an action star, but I think it's a bit superfluous, considering this movie wasn't written or filmed in a way that it could be acted well. Instead, I'm going to talk about the interesting tension between institution and subject, highlighted in the narrative conflict between godly brothers and a demigod son.

First, I'd like to point out what I liked about Clash of the Titans. It wasn't the drama, and it definitely wasn't the pacing. The effects themselves were only passable, with their imperfections obscured by the hyperstylization (lens flares, massive color-correction, post-production atmospherics). Among the monsters, Medusa was the least impressive, because she had to be built on an actual human face and body, so her slithering looked exceptionally artificial and computer-generated. She would have benefited greatly from having been designed around costuming and make-up effects, rather than completely built on some designer's desktop.

Medusa also had one of the least creative creature designs. It surprises me that every time Medusa is rendered on-screen, she's designed as a beautiful woman, and then tweaked to look dangerous. If I'm not mistaken, the character from folklore would turn men to stone because she was so ugly, which provides the thematic counterpoint with her lost youthful beauty. You can justify her sinister beauty by appealing to continuity from her former self, but this renders her power of ossification a mere magic trick. Meanwhile, female oracles -- women known for their mysterious wisdom -- are allowed to be disgusting-looking, like the Stygian Sisters. Action movies have this classic problem: any female adversary has to be beautiful, perhaps because this is the only way men are able to see women as powerful. This makes movies like Charlize Therzon's Monster especially subversive.

Okay, sub-digression over. It's safe to say that Clash is accomplished, at least as a monster movie... its creature designs had an antediluvian malevolence to them, alluding to the Great Old Ones and Tolkien's Balrog, and they escalated beautifully throughout the movie: from giant scorpions to gruesomely deformed sister witches, to a fight with Medusa, a quiet, explosive evil creature that provides a landmark in the journey -- and from there to the Kraken, a triumph of scale and incomprehensible shape and movement, like Matt Reeves' Cloverfield, a monster that was so strange and massive that you could never get the full picture of it. After the Kraken, the banishment of Hades to the underworld is just a formality... the destruction of the Kraken was the real hard work.

Still, it the subplot (or maybe meta-plot) with Hades and Zeus that makes for the most interesting fodder for reflection, after all the action has played out. As simple as Clash seems to be, it's easy to forget that it encompasses at least two intersection conflicts. First, there's the explicit conflict between Olympus and Earth, in which Perseus becomes a pivotal figure after Hades kills his family; this is basically a battle of armament and brute force, as Perseus and the Olympians each harness their "greatest weapon" and face off against one another. Second, there's the undercurrent of conflict between brothers Hades and Zeus, which seems to have a lot more intrigue involved. It's worth noting that in this meta-conflict, Perseus isn't a great hero primed to change the universe. If anything, he's a weapon that his father ultimately uses against his upstart brother Hades.

Hades helps incite the war against the humans, and he uses it as an excuse to persuade Zeus to empower him: unleashing the Kraken is also unleashing Hades, because the Kraken, a force powerful enough to kill the Titans, is explicitly aligned with Hades. Once Zeus allows this force to be unleashed, he'll be subject to its power, and Hades can depose him as ruler of the gods. Hades has a great plan, but he seems to set it off at the wrong time: Perseus, being a champion among the humans, is positioned to shut down the whole Kraken arms-race before it gets too big for Zeus to handle.

There are some real Godly politics here. Zeus and Hades are both part of a rather incohesive governing council, but they have very different philosophies. Hades is rather fascistic, using intimidation and militarism to inspire fear and loyalty in the populace. He's the enforcer, and it's worth noting that he suppresses free speech rather ruthlessly, showing up any time anyone badmouths the Olympians. Zeus, on the other hand, depends on the love and worship and loyalty of the humans (which still sounds a little totalitarian, but better than the "regime of terror" alternative). Zeus is told repeatedly that he has "too much love" for the humans, which is something that you might expect to hear Thomas Hobbes say to Barack Obama. In this sense -- the sense that Zeus tolerates conflict, struggles with the demands of power, and assimilates difference into his worldview -- Zeus represents a more modern social democracy than Hades, for whom fear and obedience are the only successful outcomes.

The more flexible and conflicted worldview would presumably be the more vulnerable one, and I think this is the assumption Hades makes about Zeus. However, it's clear that in Clash, Zeus is not easily undermined. In fact, he seems to get the jump on Hades, empowering Perseus ahead of time and giving him the means to disrupt the Krak-attack. When you haven't fully grasped the intersecting conflicts of Clash of the Titans, this is a strange moment, when Perseus discovers a magic sword provided by the gods without any explanation. He represents the humans, right? At war with those same gods? Why would he be getting gifts of war? Perseus assumes it's a trap, but he doesn't realize: his subversion, his resistance to the powers-that-be, are actually a gift to those very Olympians. Perseus can be assimilated, his aggression directed, in invisible skirmishes that he's not even aware of. Zeus the diplomat, willing to extend an open hand even to those who claim to be his enemies, is the one who's capable of harnessing this power.

This echoes another great myth, more modern than the Greeks' stories: the myth of Star Wars (episodes IV to VI, that is). Luke, the hero, is fighting a personal war of self-discovery and vengeance, battling on behalf of his dead family, and in support of a political machine ("the Republic"). However, as a professor once pointed out to me, he's also being used as a tool in a higher-level war, the war between the force and the dark side. As episodes I to III make clear, the previous story, in which Palpatine, Yoda, and Obi-Wan are the major players, encompasses the later story, the personal struggle between Luke and Lord Vader. The deposed champions, Yoda and Obi-Wan, may love Luke as a person, but they don't make any effort to save him from a life of struggle and responsibility -- rather, like any great political ideologues, they train him to fight, and they aim him like an arrow at their enemies.

So in Clash, the question of the great cosmic revolution -- humans versus gods -- is generally left open. Conceivably, the gods could be deposed by Perseus and the newly-invigorated Greek armies. That statue of Zeus is still destroyed, after all. However, the gods have gotten rid of their immediate problem, Hades' attempted coup. Further, by consolidating their power, destroying the Kraken, and making allies with Perseus, they've presumably protected themselves against revolution for the time being. They did it without totally destroying Argos or murdering anyone's children, royal or demigod. That's good diplomacy, right there.

So was Perseus really much of a renegade? Yes, he was, as long as you allow for the outlaw to be considered an integral part of the institutional structure that he opposes. This is the paradox of postmodern power: the only way to keep from being destroyed by subversion is to embrace it. Perseus is the revolutionary, the god-killer, who is ultimately pardoned and adopted as an ally against far more sinister hostility. He's still no government agent, preferring to return to a life of fishing, but he's discovered a path that's parallel to that of the gods he opposes. And so, as always, the renegade becomes an integral part of the health of the society, which must become more open and adaptable as it faces up to its own internal contradictions.

PERSEUS
Renegade Profile

Demigod adopted son of a fisherman who take up a personal quest for revenge; eventually, he's adopted as a symbol of human resistance to the Gods, and ultimately, he becomes a pivotal factor in the wars of the gods against one another

• Heresy
• Assault with a deadly weapon
• Destruction of property
• Draft-dodging
• Animal cruelty

Renegade April: Throne of Blood

Along with Robin Hood, one of the other infamous renegades of Western literature is a Scottish general, seized with pride and ambition, who decides to murder his king and take his place on the throne. This is Shakespeare's Macbeth, treasonous war hero, and he's unique among this month's renegade characters in that he's not a noble outlaw, but rather a figure of treachery, chaos, and self-destruction. He's been played on film by Sam Worthington, among others, but that's not the version I bothered with... the Macbeth I saw was Toshiro Mifune in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

It's worth looking at what it might mean to be a "renegade" for Kurosawa in Japan, as opposed to Shakespeare in Scotland. Going back through the Elizabethan viewpoint on the feudal system, obviously the hierarchies are strong, and loyalty to kin is a powerful force. However, presumably, even in this ancient era of Western history, the importance of individualism and self-reliance was already forming... Shakespeare's time was, after all, the age of exploration and mercantilism, shortly following the Protestant reformation and the progressive rule of King Henry VIII (aka Jonathan Rhys Myers).

Displaced into feudal Japan, Macbeth has extra punctuation on the themes of loyalty and honor. Nobody was more bound to their lord than the samurai, the great retainer of ancient Japan, who staked his life on his service to his lord. There's no way to quantify the difference between the Eastern and Western sensibilities, but it's fair to assume that for Washizu, this inner conflict is deeply-rooted. The Great Lord isn't just at the top of a political ladder -- he's a focal point for the society's ideology, its spirituality, and its whole familial structure... and themes of disgrace shudder under the surface of the whole bloody affair, from the haunted death-chamber of Fujimaki ("this is dog's blood") to the unsettling ambivalence of Washizu's soldiers, whose loyalties are tested in the final minutes of his short reign.

The politics of Throne of Blood are sweeping, and Washizu's inner conflict is severe -- however, it doesn't have the stormy turmoil of Macbeth, partly because we never hear any soliloquies from the treasonous main character. In fact, Throne of Blood simply doesn't feel as violent as Macbeth, despite a great deal of viciousness, assassination, and warfare. It feels more harmonious, as a whole, than the bard's masterpiece, and to what extent this is an effect of the Noh influence, I can't say. To my uneducated eyes, it's the result of rhythm and tone, and to a presence that infects the setting from the forest journey onward: the presence of the evil spirit, puppetmaster to Washizu's intrigue and anxiety.

In accordance, the whole film seems obtuse and haunted (as opposed to fierce and uncontrollable, as Macbeth felt in the reading). The presence of that forest spirit hangs over the affair, speaking through animals and manifesting as different sorts of presences at different times: the chilling echo of a traitor in a bloody chamber, the sad, silent ghost of a friend betrayed, late to a lords' dinner. Even in the minimalist ballets of implied intrigue and control between lord and lady Washizu, there's something watching. Perhaps it's us, the omniscent eye, giving a perilous meaning to the events that unfold. I'd give this theory a chance: perhaps the viewers are the evil spirit, and our expectation is driving the plot's sinister, inevitable machinations. Perhaps fate is not so much predestined by Washizu's personality, nor enforced by the invisible hand of the kami, but rather propelled by our own demands for bloody resolution. This feeling of order and inevitability, the dark clouds of fate gathering from the moment the prophecy is uttered, is partly because of a lack of soliloquy, but it's probably more because every scene of Throne of Blood is so perfectly constructed, and so pregnant with meaning.

Indeed, one of the contextual effects lacking in Throne of Blood, that gives it such a sense of purpose, is an indication of an everyday life outside the intrigues of the main characters. The castle, the North Garrison, and even the fields at times... the sites for conversation, routine, and employment... frequently seem empty, providing sparse stages purpose-built for putting ambition and uncertainty on display. Has anyone noticed that when the other castle-dwellers are shown, they always seem to be loitering, sitting in one place, gazing around a courtyard, barely conversant? They don't seem to be at home in their own residences, and like us, they seem to be waiting for some sudden development, some turn of fortune or deferred sign of fate. The peasants outside are less "folk" and more like ghosts of everyday life, just crossing into this mysterious spirit-world for a moment when the Great Lord rides past them through the field. Perhaps in Throne of Blood, the characters have already crossed into the spirit world, so they all feel like unwelcome guests, in a hurry to do their violent duties and get the hell out.

And in the midst of this haunted feudal Japan, we have a great deal of action that ultimately seems to center on Washizu, victim of the voices around him. He is the transgressor, the scapegoat for the sin of disloyalty, which is a fire lit within him by an evil forest spirit, and then fanned by a scheming spouse. He supplies the fuel for this inevitable flame to burn him to ashes, and when he finally falls, it's at the hands of his own army, assembled from his victims' soldiers -- a roundabout method of suicide, for sure, but still, in a certain way, it's death by his own hand.

I wish I had more original analysis to provide, but one of the triumphs of Throne of Blood is the fact that so much of the film is felt, rather than sensed, understood, and deconstructed. Other critics have talked about the use of editing to create confusion, or the narrative symmetry of the film, layered over visual symmetry in a number of important scenes, or about the lines of force (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal) that signal shifts in tone and temprament. However, these factors are fairly insignificant in comparison with the whole effect, which is vast, empty, and uneasy. This is a rare occasion where it's hard for me to analyze the experience, which is so intuitive and complex, so I'll leave you with a recommendation to go see this film if you haven't, and if you have, maybe even see it again.

And I'll also leave you with Washizu's Renegade Profile, in accordance with our monthly theme.


TAKETORI WASHIZU (Macbeth)
Renegade Profile

Hot-shot general who, under the influence of an evil spirit and a scheming wife, makes an unscrupulous grab for power, discovers the political and psychological consequences of being too ambitious

• High treason
• First-degree murder
• Consorting with evil spirits

Renegade April: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

If you take the Renegade (“heroic outsider”) back past the beginning of film and into the endless void of literature and storytelling, you find that the paradigm case – the alpha and the omega of the archetype – is Robin Hood, the green-clad arrow-firing legend of the English countryside. Luckily, you don’t have to be a cultural historian PhD to talk a little about how this narrative has shaped up, because it’s come up a number of times in recent years. In fact, the topic is especially timely right now, because Ridley Scott is releasing the latest revisionist Robin Hood blockbuster in May. Crowe will probably be the definitive Robin of Locksley in the eyes of an emerging generation, so they’ll know Sherwood Forest as a dark, gritty place and Robin Hood as a wartime leader against the armies of the crown, appropriated by the villainous sheriff. However, Crowe will never be my Robin Hood… my Robin Hood will be the one that appeared on-screen in 1991, the Prince of Thieves, played by Kevin Costner.

Since I started poking around movie blogs and film forums, I’ve discovered a lot of ire directed at this particular adaptation of the Locksley legend. I can’t relate, even in the most clinical critical way… I loved Costner as Lord Robin when I was a boy, and rewatching the film for Renegade April, it still holds up as a down-to-Earth medieval adventure story and a loving portrait of the infamous outlaw, speckled as it was with occasional cheesiness. I mean, I love Lord of the Rings as much as the next guy, but since when did medieval action movies have to be nine hours long? Since when did they require two battlefronts of opposing armies, running at one another and clashing on an open field? I tried to watch Excalibur recently, and I couldn’t get through more than half an hour, with the muddled pacing, the laughable delivery of key lines, and the honest but futile attempts to muster up fascinating effect-driven magic spells. Yet, rewatching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, I found it was still the fantastic film I remember.

So why all the hate? I’ve seen a few broad claims: first, that Kevin Costner was simply the wrong guy to be Robin Hood. I’ll address that more at length, below. Second, I’m constantly seeing the complaint that Kevin Costner couldn’t “hold an English accent,” which… and I hate to make unqualified statements of critical judgment, but… is a dumbass reason to discount the performance. There’s no such thing as an “authentic” Crusades-era British accent any more, and if anyone had one, I’m sure they would need to be subtitled. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Kevin Costner spoke in a nondescript American accent so that a strained enunciation wouldn’t get in the way of his character portrayal. It’s sad that I even have to defend against this claim. I’d defend against other complaints that critics have thrown around, but honestly, I haven’t seen any that are specific enough to warrant addressing.

I think, really, Prince of Thieves was a victim of certain circumstances surrounding its release. First of all, it was attached to one of the most catchy, sappy songs ever written (I don’t think that’s a hyperbole), and it’s very difficult to think about the movie without getting the song stuck in your head. The romance aspect of Prince of Thieves is actually fairly minimal; there’s no sex scene, tender or otherwise, and the central romantic relationship often consists of Robin Hood being a smart-ass and Marian making fun of him. Unfortunately, the sap has seeped too deep into the perception of the film, and now it’s infected.

The other historical circumstance that brought down Prince of Thieves was the subsequent release of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which is one of the few parodies to become more culturally relevant than its target. This is certainly understandable… Men in Tights is an amazing film, possibly Mel Brooks best work, and strikes with pinpoint precision. At no less than 5 or 6 moments in the first half of Prince of Thieves, I had to stifle laughter, because I remembered the corresponding moments in Men in Tights: the removal of Locksley castle, the river-crossing, and Ahchoo’s various remarks to Blinkin and Robin Hood. In fact, I think the criticism mentioned above, re: the accent, may have come directly from Men in Tights, when Cary Elwes said to Prince John (and the camera), “Because unlike some Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.” Attention, Mel Brooks: you made a masterpiece. However, I rather pity Prince of Thieves for having to live in the shadow of its parody.

Parodies aside... I'd like to go ahead and talk about that (overly?)-serious 1991 version of Robin Hood. I'd like to talk about why it will always be my favorite.

The core question of this analysis: is Kevin Costner appropriate, or indeed even qualified, for the part he plays in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? He’s bracketed by the likes of Russell Crowe (2010), Cary Elwes (1993), Sean Connery (1976), and Errol Flynn (1938). There are some others in there (I’m lookin’ at you, Virgins of Sherwood Forest) but the ones cited here are the primary portrayals, methinks. Even Connery is a dubious addition to the list… sure, he’s well-known, but his Robin Hood film appears to be a bit lightweight. At any rate, you can always find the true precedent for a popular image by tracing its parodies, and the consensual image of Robin Hood is obviously Errol Flynn, subsequently parodied in Men in Tights and Shrek (among others, I’m sure). As the dancing, balletic hero of traditional melodrama, Flynn is a perfect poster-boy, but since the 30’s, we’ve started to demand a bit of a grittier and more realistic quasi-historical world.

Enter Crowe and Costner. These are two wildly different visions of a medieval hero, with Costner making the transition from old melodramatic fantasy, and Crowe carving an alarming new model of muscle and anger and mud-soaked angst. If we were playing NetHack (or WoW, or D&D, or whatever… how old are you?) then Costner’s character class would be “Rogue,” whereas Crowe’s would be “Barbarian.” Costner would have the advantages of speed and agility, exemplified by his swinging from ropes, stabbing with knives, and firing quicker than Will Scarlet can throw a knife. I can’t really see Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood outrunning his foes, or engaging in a spritely sword-fight. He’s kind of a brute, isn’t he?

And despite protests, I still see two figures in Costner that make him a fantastic Robin of Locksley – much better than he was as Mariner in Waterworld. The first is this “Roguish” thing I mentioned just now. In Prince of Thieves, Robin is charismatic, allowing him to be a leader, following from his confidence and the life experience he has from the crusades… but he’s also a smart-ass, which is what qualifies him to be a thief, a classic trickster figure, a true subversive. Costner has always had one of the best smirks in the business, and his lines in Prince of Thieves bring out his boyishness, as when he’s asked to turn around and present himself to Marian, and he asks, “Am I to dance next?” … or when his companion, Azeem, says of a river, “In my dreams alone have I imagined such a place,” and Robin replies, “Then imagine a way to cross it.” I know, he’s no Juno, but he can deliver dry sarcasm with the best of them.

Then, Costner balances a second persona with the first, and this balancing act may be what drove critics like Ebert to say things like, “What bothered me was that the filmmakers never found the right tone for Costner to use, no matter what his accent.” This second persona is the father figure, which is another role that Costner plays well, alongside his adolescent self. Costner’s fatherly tone comes through most in his sentimental moments… and yes, there are a lot of these… and in his confident authority dealing with individuals, like Wolf, Friar Tuck, and Will. Again, I quote Ebert, who says that Costner is “a thoughtful, civilized, socially responsible Robin Hood,” which reflects an inner peace that we understand comes from the character’s trials in the crusades. Calm and paternal and earth-bound: I may be mistaken, but I think this is how many of see our own fathers, and Costner plays it well.

This fatherly tone is the greatest departure from the old tights-and-singing characterization of Robin Hood, and it made this version a bit alarming for some. However, it’s important to the thematic backbone of this version of the tale, which is romanticized, but tilted toward realism. This strong paternal instinct is what prompts Robin to start taking care of the displaced peasants of Nottingham, his altruism touched with the slightest bit of chauvinism. It’s a tone that also links this particular Robin Hood strongly to two themes that have always been with the hero, but that haven’t necessarily been capitalized upon so much: the theme of the father’s death, which is an overpowering force in Prince of Thieves, and the theme of loyalty to his king. Robin is a loyal subject, but clearly he sees King Richard as a father figure to his country, and strongly respects him and defends his authority, like a good eldest son. His personality throughout Prince of Thieves is defined by a willingness to step in and take the reins, first temporarily as steward to the kingdom, and then permanently as husband to Marian, and presumably as father to some kids.

I’ll speculate a little here: I doubt Crowe will manage either of the qualities that Costner brought to bear. He doesn’t have the face or the manner to be sarcastic… his confidence is heavy and self-possessed, more fitting for a Roman general. He also doesn’t really have the warmth to be fatherly, which is why, in Gladiator, it makes sense that we never even see him with his family. As a military-father-in-absentia turned vengeful force of nature, he’s great… but can a band of the disenfranchised trust him to build a community? Perhaps they won’t need to, if Ridley Scott focuses on Robin Hood as a master of guerrilla warfare and a great battlefield strategist. And from the trailers, it looks like this may be what happens.

However, I’ll always think of Robin Hood as Costner’s character, “thoughtful, civilized, and socially responsible,” with his attendant ambiguity and introspection. For earlier viewers, Robin had to be a dancing, joyous forest minstrel, and for later viewers, he will have to be a brutal medieval warrior rising from the Earth. For me, he’s a smarmy, lithe, forest-dwelling romantic who will be remembered for much worse movies, when he should be remembered for this one.

ROBIN HOOD
Renegade Profile

Outlawed by acting law enforcement; appropriates "criminal" identity in order to defend locals and protect true king's rule

• Robbery
• Theft
• Resisting Arrest
• Incitement / Conspiracy
• First-degree murder
• Probably second-degree murder

Renegade April: Scott Pilgrim: some thoughts

The Scott Pilgrim trailer has generated an inordinate amount of nerd excitement, and I can see why. Writing as a man who hasn’t read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, I can attest that I’m genuinely excited for this film, which (from the trailer) seems to unite energy, humor, and sincere sentiment in a way I haven’t seen before. I appreciate the comic book and video game tropes, I’m enthusiastic about a light-hearted, exaggerated approach to action (see The Rundown, one of my favorite action movies EVAR) and I welcome the heartfelt romantic subplot that I detect at the start of the trailer, reminiscent as it is of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Is it too early for a little bit of analysis? I’d say yes, but every other blog is doing it… picking the trailer apart, frame by frame, to affectionately compare it to the graphic novel. I don’t see the harm in applying a little bit of my own approach to interpretation, even if the movie is still months away, and I haven’t actually engaged with the story or the characters. After all, the trailer makes the general premise pretty clear, and that, in itself, is worth looking at.

And what I see is a social metaphor that has a lot of potential. We’ve all been there before, right? At the onset of a relationship, one of the first things we have to wrestle with is our new love interest’s romantic history, and sometimes that romantic history seems to dictate all the terms of the new relationship. This usually involves coming to terms with all those exes, who are still out there, and may still be part of that love interest’s life. You may have to hear a lot of stories about the kinds of guys they were. You may have to endure comparisons to them, as painful as that may be. You may even have to meet them and shake hands with them.

Having to confront them on the battlefield? Prove their match in a test of skill and courage? Perhaps destroy them? It sounds harsh… does it trivialize the process? Invalidate the metaphor? Wouldn’t you rather Scott just say, “Ramona, if you’re really into me, you’ll have to stop letting these old relationships define you, and get these guys out of your life”? Here’s the thing, though: that’s not how it works. Nobody gets to just cut themselves off from their romantic history, because that’s what’s made them capable of making a new relationship work. So it’s not up to Ramona Flowers to excise her past from her life.

It turns out the “defeating the exes” metaphor is pretty accurate, because getting over your new mate’s romantic history is a journey you always have to undertake. Read metaphorically, this is Scott’s journey to “defeat” the exes by taking control of the relationship, asserting himself as the most important man in Ramona’s life, and securing his role as her champion. In real life, it probably wouldn’t involve dragon punching anyone… rather, it would involve always being the smarter, better-behaving, and stronger-willed partner, able to meet those old crushes with confidence in himself and loyalty to his girlfriend. The exes aren’t going to vanish without a fight, but Scott can find a way to marginalize them, change their role in the relationship, and put them in the place they deserve: former prospects who may still hang around, but who no longer set the terms of the budding relationship.

So it's a metaphor of single-handed combat as a road to peace, paralleling the struggle with insecurity, eventually leading to inner peace. YOU WIN. FLAWLESS VICTORY.

Renegade April kick-off

We do have a fascination with the outsider, don't we? The outlaw fixation in American pop culture goes back a lot further than Avatar and The Dark Knight (obviously)... it goes back through the gangsters of the Public Enemy Era, the folk heroes of the Old West, and right back to our national genesis, the revolutionary war, where we were successionists -- terrorists, criminals en masse, etc. You can continue to trace this back into European history, into the folklore of the Old World. Britain's celebration of Guy Fawkes, its long-entrenched legend of Robin Hood, and the celebration of other national heroes and revolutionaries, from Rob Roy and William Wallace to Martin Luther, Protestant rabble-rouser.

In the United States in particular, this romanticization of rebellion probably links strongly to the idealization of colonists, the memory of George Washington, and the spirit of rugged individualism advocated for by transcendentalists, survivalists, and generations of populist discontent with the government. Of course, the flip-side is the dystopian story best exemplified by Orwell's 1984, and then retold in novels like A Handmaid's Tale, movies like Brazil and Gattaca, and myriad other works of speculative fiction. We tell stories of great rebels and outlaws, and we tell stories of the worlds that make them necessary, whether it's due to stifling central control or to an epidemic of malaise. Contentment, loyalty, and appreciation for structure and tradition are not our strong suits here in neo-liberal Western culture.

The result is a particular brand of hero that's a product of the Western sensibility -- especially here in the United States, where modern pop culture emerges from the historical intersection of cowboys and colonial freedom-fighters -- that earns "heroic" status and title because they assert their individualism over and above all obstacles. The rugged individualist, the noble savage, the revolutionary, the iconoclast, the prodigal son... these are the fetishes of the Western imagination. This is the cud that the movie industry chews on, year after year, for better (Lady Gaga the provocateur) or for worse (Sarah Palin the Maverick).

This archetype is going to be the theme for Renegade April, here at Benefit of the Doubt. It turns out that April 2010 is a good month for swimming upstream: in major cinemas, we'll be seeing Clash of the Titans this coming week, featuring Perseus, half-human champion, facing Mount Olympus, the most powerful Board of Trustees in the universe. Later in the month, Kick-Ass premieres, a story of non-superhumans taking on the mantle of the superhero and attempting, against all odds, to take down a very real criminal element. On April 23, The Losers opens: a special-ops team finds themselves the target of government retribution, and go from being a paramilitary elite squad to being a high-profile target. There are some minor renegade-themed films coming out, as well: The Runaways earlier in the month, and Harry Brown, later on. I probably won't see either of those two, but they're worth keeping in mind.

Outside the cinemas, I'll see a bunch of classic renegade films, which may include any of the following: Throne of Blood (Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth), Bonnie and Clyde, Bullitt (the sourcebook for all those "against the grain" bad-boy cop movies), The Getaway (another Steve McQueen flick about a heist, from renegade director Sam Peckinpah), Natural Born Killers, and Malcolm X. Also, I know Russel Crowe will play Robin Hood next month, so in preparation for his highly-anticipated chops-busting, I'll discuss Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which I still consider a great film despite much protest from other film-lovers. Also, I'll talk a little about Scott Pilgrim, which has everyone all excited, with that new trailer circulating. All together, this should provide enough fodder for a month of movies about rebels and revolutionaries and upstarts and anti-establishment antics, and it should make April marginally more exciting than Chromatic March, with all its rumination on aesthetics and craft.

This month, as part of Renegade April, you may witness:

• Bucking the system
• Breaking the mold
• Taking on the world
• Flying in the face of convention
• Sticking it to the man
• Defying convention
• Going maverick

Please stick around for a lot of conflict and catharsis, and give me suggestions for other movies, if you have them.

Chromatic March Wrap-Up

The end of Chromatic March was not the best time for me to discover Martin Scorsese's list of "The Best Uses of Color in Film, Ever, Both Foreign and Domestic." If I had discovered it earlier, I might have tried to check them all off. I might have seen Duel in the Sun instead of Mon Oncle, or Cries and Whispers instead of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I might have missed The Color of Pomegranates, or skipped the only contemporary film I saw, Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I might have gotten to see Invaders from Mars.

Or maybe it's a good thing, I guess. I saw a couple off there -- The River, The Red Shoes (his two favorites), and I'd seen some before: In The Mood for Love (I'm a Wong Kar Wai fan), The Searchers, and Singin in the Rain. It turns out I also would have missed some amazing stuff: Dario Argento's Suspiria, an operatic horror opus... and the desert fever tones of Ashes of Time, with its hallucinogenic woven narrative and its confessional landscapes.

The general consensus seems to be that color was used best back when it was still a new thing to the cinema, in the days when Technicolor was the ruling power. In those days, stylization was achieved in-camera, as part of the set and costumes. This seems to have changed: now, color seems to be largely a product of post-production, as with Ashes of Time and Alice in Wonderland. It's so easy to take control of color on a computer now, and the hand of the director can mess with so many more dimensions of the experience.

This says something about the changing nature of film. As these classic color movies have shown, dramatic stylization can be achieved even without the intervention of digital coloring software, and in many cases, these production-level palette choices are more complex, more subtle, and more interesting than the highly controlled post-production of contemporary stylists. However, it's also less predictable, and this is the name of the game: digital effects give the filmmaker more opportunities for intervention, and a higher degree of control over a finer grain of detail. Ashes of Time is an excellent example of a tightly-controlled chromatic experience. As some DVD comparisons show, there's a dramatic difference between various cuts of the film, and it's clear that these changes have been made in order to control the harsh chromatic contrasts of the film's Jianghu.

Suspiria stands out among the films of the month. The later films use digital modeling and correction to introduce color choices; the earlier ones generally use objects, clothes, and colors on sets. However, Suspiria almost exclusively used light... the whole film appeared to be lit with colored bulbs, creating dramatic, unnatural gradients between red and blue. It was also one of the only films to attempt narrative continuity, but to abandon chromatic continuity: the same set, in the same scene, could be lit in red, and then cut to being lit in blue, snapping us from hysteria to paranoia and back.

This is a more subtle form of experimentation than, for instance, the bizarre non-narrative world-creation of The Color of Pomegranates. Parajanov used color as one symbolic artifact in a movie made almost entirely of artifacts: carpets, lace, knives, chickens, lambs, and people acting out roles with a cultural and psychic significance, performing a ballet in a barely-comprehensible visual language. In an unhinged film, the colors seemed like the most orderly aspect, performing their well-defined roles: red for the body, black and white for life and death. They provided the groundwork for what was essentially a visual and intuitive experience, and if you worked too hard to force it into narrative logic, it probably frustrated the crap out of you.

In general, though, it was the 50's masterpieces that were the gems of this month of films: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Red Shoes, and The River. These films point to a time when stylization and plot were balanced carefully, never drawing undue attention, and when sequences of events could move along with a mysterious honesty and self-evidence: without the scripted and telegraphed twists and turns of modern Hollywood, or its indulgent didacticism; and without the well-trod self-awareness and forced eccentricity of art cinema, which is creating its own consciousness of culture, but which seems to be losing touch with the human condition. This is probably hyperbole, but it's worth a moment of pause.

Here's what I've written up this month, each film accompanied by the title I've given its palette:

Shutter Island - Overcast / Lurid
Umbrellas of Cherbourg - Ebullient
Alice in Wonderland - Acrid
Suspiria - Delirious
Mon Oncle - Plastique / Provincial
Ashes of Time Redux - Alkaline
The Red Shoes - Portentous
The Color of Pomegranates - Wounded
The River - Enamorous

Hope you've enjoyed Chromatic March as much as I have. Don't worry, I have another theme for next month... check in after a couple days, and I'll get started on it.

Chromatic March: The River (1951)

The River: A coming-of-age tale by Jean Renoir, renowned French director of Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion, that moves through its paces without providing the cliches of redemption that plague this archetypal plot. The River is about the beauty and naivety of childhood dreams of romance, the quiet frustration of being stuck on the outside of a culture, and the need to allow life to continue, even when it seems unbearable. It's a brightly-lit movie of mid-day India, photographed in the shameless colors of youth: on the background of browns and greens, earth and vegetation, it's a vision of reds, oranges, and blues, a culture expressing itself to the eyes of a child.

Renoir's setup is simple enough to be effortless, and yet multifaceted enough to be emotionally complex and pluralistic. A little girl named Harriet, an older child in a family of girls living in a British household in India, receives news of the arrival of a soldier named Captain John. Naturally, the family of young girls is smitten with him, and Harriet almost immediately recognizes Valerie, her slightly older cousin, as a romantic rival for the veteran. In their adolescent rivalry, their channel for their own sexual awakening, both Harriet and Valerie fail to notice that Captain John is struggling with conflicts of his own: a sense of aimlessness and alienation in the aftermath of war, and a frustrated romantic interest in Melanie, the half-Indian daughter of his host in India.

These issues are not sudden emergent conflicts to be resolved through heroics or revelations. Rather, they are the complications of everyday life, the uncertainties and complexities that only unravel with the patient therapy of time and ritual. That's what Renoir's film is ultimately about: man's ability to accept life's challenges, and in accepting them, to let them gradually resolve themselves. Even the most dramatic moments of the film -- a first kiss and an unexpected death -- don't seem to change the characters' worlds, though they do prompt some drastic reactions.

There are lots of stories about the inspiration for The River, mostly focusing on Renoir's collaboration with Rumer Godden, the author of the source novel. Only a few mention the paintings of Jean Renoir's father, noted Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but some of the father's paintings could be interpreted as direct source images for the film. In particular, consider a painting of a little girl in a garden, holding a hoop, or various images of emerald landscapes, gazed upon by society women in porch chairs. The epicenter of Renoir's film is an echo of these pastoral scenes... his India is a sun-drenched landscape of greens and earth-tones, and the moments he captures resonate with the same sensuality as his father's landscapes and feminine figures.

Upon this lush background, Renoir places a distinctive palette of simple colors: the red chalk dust of a public ceremony, thrown over all who pass through it; the oranges of the Indians' Sari's; the blue of the embodiment of Lord Krishna, in a mythical narration by the main character from a story she wrote in her journal. According to Ian Christie, writing for The Criterion Current, this was largely due to Renoir's awareness of his technology:

Like many filmmakers of this period, shaped by the discipline of black-and-white photography, he was highly conscious of the limitations of three-strip Technicolor, which produced rich, saturated hues. Rather than try to nuance these toward a more subtle palette, Renoir took the view that the filmmaker should set color film only “simple problems.” He thought the tropical vegetation of Bengal ideal, with its “colors neither too vivid nor mixed,” reminding him of the painters Raoul Dufy and Henri Matisse. Renoir and his lighting cameraman (and nephew), Claude Renoir, working with the designer Eugène Lourié, aimed at avoiding all “half-tints,” even going so far as to paint a lawn a more definite shade of green for one scene.

Whatever the director's reasons, these strong colors take on their own particular role in the film. Specifically, they become cultural indicators for the icons of Indian and Hindu tradition... the brightest reds and oranges are the chalk dust, the Indian garb, and the flowers and decorations during the Hindu festivals. Blue, though often present, is only brought into the foreground in the skin of Lord Krishna, who is of a living artifact of this culture. The whole mythological system is seen by the young girls (especially Harriet) as a vibrant mystery that holds the keys to the strangeness of life on the banks of the Ganges. It's a mythology that vibrates in these bright, living colors, contrasting severely with the white, brown, neutral and earth-toned European colonial sanctums that comprise Harriet's own native world.

The River is cited by Martin Scorsese as one of the two greatest uses of color in film, the other being the (recently discussed) film The Red Shoes (see his whole list of great color films here). These two films make interesting sister pieces, at least in terms of aesthetics: as I mentioned before, the most vibrant colors in The Red Shoes are the colors of darkness, the shadowy interiors of hallways and backstage hiding places. It's a subtle palette, wherein even the signature color, the red of the titular ballet shoes, is generally immersed in shadow. This contrasts sharply with the color treatment of The River, which is a day-lit film about sunlight and vibrant exterior space. As Ebert said in his Great Movies essay, "Although the film covers one year, the impression is of an endless summer day during which the girls play and write in their journals". It's a movie full of splashes of bright color, representing the products of a vibrant culture and religion. Interior versus exterior, shadows versus sunlight, subtlety and nuance versus simplicity and distinction: these are two lessons in visualization, two opposing chromatic worlds, rendered at the genesis of widespread color cinema.

Ultimately, though, this use of Technicolor is only the technical and artistic touch upon a subtle, delicately-wrought poetic narrative. It's a film that resists many pitfalls of such sensitive material: cultural paternalism, cliches of exoticism, moralization about its characters' behavior, or the easy solace of resolution to the myriad challenges it offers to the viewer. Like the river of its title, the film flows into its own horizon, willing to redeem itself through repetition and recreation of the conditions of its own existence.

Palette: Enamorous

Chromatic March: The Color of Pomegranates (1968) discussion

Sayat Nova (aka The Color of Pomegranates): one of the most challenging movies I've seen in the entirety of my mission to see interesting movies, up there with Fata Morgana, Sans Soleil, and The Holy Mountain. The composition and orientation of scenes, the choreography of action, and the rhythm of events all fly in the face of my accepted viewing habits, and in order to appreciate this ostensible masterpiece by maverick Soviet director Sergei Parajanov, I had to take a deep breath and fully buy into it. It took a lot of patience, and an effort to thoroughly relax my brain and accept my intuitive reactions without question. Aside from those instinctive, aesthetic, and subliminal reactions, there's not much to work from when trying to create meaning from Parajanov's disparate images.

Commentators like talking about two things with The Color of Pomegranates: first, Parajanov's arrest and imprisonment in a Gulag for his Armenian nationalism; second, the subversive aesthetics of the film's images. For instance, you'll frequently hear the film referred to as "poetic," generally as a way to explain its non-narrative, often impenetrable treatment of its subject. Second, because of his strange, motionless use of his camera, and his tendency to have all his actors address it directly, Parajanov's images are commonly referred to as "tableau," and critics make observations that he seems less like a filmmaker and more like a folk painter in motion. If you think of these in that light, then this whole film is sort of a tapestry of small stories, each represented in a static scene. This is sort of fitting, considering Armenian woven carpets and religious tapestries are one of the foremost motifs in The Color of Pomegranates.

The Color of Pomegranates is known for its effective use of color; indeed, this is what led me to it, here in the middle of Chromatic March. The film actually has a gestalt structure of color consciousness, I think... the background palette is arid and earth-toned, light brown and gray, the color of dry desert ground in oversaturated sunlight. This sets the dusty exterior tone for the whole film; indeed, even interior sequences seem to be infused with open air and penetrating sunlight. As we've read before, Technicolor required a lot of light to work right... but Parajanov's lighting is intense, a reminder that we're out in a bright, dry world, exposed to its elements.

This desert palette provides the ground for the second palette in The Color of Pomegranates, which is basically black, white, and dark red, with a touch of pastel blue-green in one key sequence. This palette is used to separate objects from the background: the white of lace and a desert rose, the black of the monks' robes, and the crimson of pomegranates, rugs, dye, and animal blood. Of course, I can't give you a simple reading of these foreground objects that seem to take on such intense significance. In order to do that, I would have to construct correspondences for the whole movie, which is a massive agglomeration of such symbols, all of which seem to be speaking a foreign visual dialect.

So, to return to an earlier point: is this visual dialect truly "poetic"? The descriptor comes up too often to ignore. Is there some similarity between the way a poem speaks in words, and Sayat Nova speaks in images? Well, from a quick survey of dictionary.com, I find that most of the definitions define poetry as written work using heightened language, and/or words chosen for their sound, and/or using certain formal devices, such as "meter, metaphor, and rhyme." It's fairly safe, I think, to say that poetry is expressive writing that prioritizes formal aspects over natural language use, and expression over communication.

And in a sense, this does describe The Color of Pomegranates. Formally, it's a deeply experimental work, deconstructing the "language" of cinema and reinventing it in an eclectic painterly style. In terms of content, it eschews the traditional means of telling a story through recreation of a hypothetical reality... instead, it collects references and symbols and motifs, and it assembles them into a constellation of concepts gravitating around the character of Sayat Nova, accompanied by his muse, his parents, the monks of his monastery, and others who passed through his life.

Before and during my viewings of this film, I glanced around the web for some guidance in watching it. I found very little... most of the sources merely expressed their appreciation, and repeated their first and second impressions of the film: it was poetic, emotional, subversive and meditative. It has great use of color. I'm a guy who needs to find some conceptual anchor points, especially in an obviously complex, highly semantic film like Sayat Nova, and these sources generally weren't helpful.

So I'm going to try to take a step and give you a starting point for forming some interpretations of the elements in Sayat Nova. These are just tentative observations, but if you're about to watch this mysterious, beautiful film, they may at least give you an idea of what to look for.

1. The simplest thing to note: the film has a bit of chronology to it, and if you're clued in ahead of time, you won't have to work so hard to figure this part out. It's roughly divided into four periods: childhood, when the protagonist is played by a child; adolescence, when he is played by a young man; adulthood, when he is played by a tall man with a goatee; and late adulthood, when the same grown man appears, but with a streak of white.

2. The Pomegranate and the color red: the pomegranate and the splashes of red, especially in the rugs and the animal sacrifices, seem to represent the body. This becomes a spiritual focal point at a number of moments in the film... for instance, the implied birth at the beginning, with a trio of whole pomegranates and a knife. Could this symbol reappear at the end? Hmm...

3. Armenian culture is famous for, among other things, two textiles: carpets, and lace. The former figures prominently into the young life of our protagonist, and if we're to read the film's primary female figure as his muse, then the second is a motif associated with her. Wool and lace, love and desire -- these themes are constantly at the forefront of the film's imagery.

4. Note the use of white garments and face paint, which has a pretty clear representational role.

5. A bunch of other motifs that will be repeated, and that form the texture of Sayat Nova's symbolic vocabulary: the books, a golden shell, cherubs, water spilling from the earth, the flock of sheep (which, at one point, act as a congregation witnessing the death of a spiritual leader), a pair of fools, the troubadour's lyre, and skin turned red, either with dye or with blood.

6. Watch for three of the most beautiful moments in film: first, on a rooftop, surrounded by books drying in the sun; second, in the Land of the Dead, before a cadaver in a storm of ashes; third, toward the end, when the protagonist's voice is preserved in a clay vessel.

You may not need to do any active interpretation of The Color of Pomegranates. Many (perhaps most) of its advocates love it purely for the visuals, and for the mystery and atmosphere of the experience. It's absolutely a beautiful film in this regard, and so if this is true of you, I applaud you. If you're not this type of person... if you need a semantic foothold before you can maintain interest in a film... then I hope my list above gives you what you need to enjoy it. It may be a masterpiece, but going out on a limb, I'd say it's definitely not for everybody. But if you've got an open mind and a curious, patient soul, I'd recommend giving it a look.

Palette: Wounded

Chromatic March: The Red Shoes (1948) analysis

The Red Shoes: a dark, classical, and enigmatic 1948 movie about a bunch of different stuff (as all good movies are), but mostly ballet. It's an adapted fairy tale, but it feels more like the balanced, sweeping composition that ballet and stagecraft imply. The core story is about a rising ballet star who is recruited by a great director for his company. She meets another talented recruit, the director's new composer, and in the midst of growing recognition, they fall in love. The director, a ruthless devotee of his art, resents and opposes the happiness they've found together, which conflicts with his puritan ideas about the purity of an artist's lifestyle. His resentment brings about a heartbreaking conflict between human love and devotion to an artistic pursuit. The acting is brilliant, the experimentation is heartfelt and effective, and judged as a traditional narrative piece, it stands with the best films I've seen.

The three leads in The Red Shoes play to a perfect pitch, each exhibiting that charisma and alluring distinctiveness that old Hollywood was so good at creating. Victoria Page, the rising ballerina, is radiant and captivating... before being chosen for the part, she was indeed an accomplished ballerina, and so she reinforces the film's commitment to the art it showcases. Julian Craster is a young idealist swept up in the early stages of success, and whether he's testing out a new composition at the piano or professing his love for Victoria, he follows each of his passions with fetching sincerity. However, it's Boris Lermontov, the daunting director of the company, who provides the core character of the film. He is a manipulative totalitarian, obsessed with success and purity in his art, but his presence is also one of incredible charisma. He is ruthless, but never quite evil, because in his private moments, we can see that he is sincere about his love for ballet, and when circumstances conflict with this ambition, it visibly tortures him. Ebert is correct when he identifies Lermontov as a centerpiece of the film's mysteries:

The motives of the ballerina and her lover are transparent. But 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.

In Lermontov, actor Anton Walbrook provides directors Powell and Pressburger with an unfathomable antagonist.

The Red Shoes, like many more recent (more stylized) films, employs the device of using red objects (the shoes especially) to create small focal points of attention. However, it's far from a one-note production. In fact, the colors in The Red Shoes provide the starting point for engaging with the deeper themes and subtexts of the film. It's a film about ballet and high society, a romance based on a fairy tale, but this belies the darkness and disquiet that lurks below its aesthetic surface. In The Red Shoes, those festive, high-spirited scenes on the stage and in the theater are just a veneer over a movie full of resentment, frustration, and uncertainty.

Likewise, those well-lit interior scenes, whose warm yellow plaster is offset by the colorful stage objects scattered about... those scenes are common, but they aren't the scenes that really set the film's tone. The scenes that really establish the tone are the ones in unlit hallways and dark bedrooms, private spaces lit by candlelight... the shadows cast over a dimly-lit stage, a single spotlight in a dark chamber in the depths of consciousness. It's rare that you see this many colors of darkness, sometimes all in the same scene: a yellow wall in the glow of a candle flame, a gradient from blue to gray or pale red to dark green. In some movies (Suspiria, for instance... I love using this movie as a comparison) the darkness is invaded by color from outside. However, it's rare to see an effect like the one in The Red Shoes, where the colors seem to be emanating from the darkness itself, filling empty spaces and inhabiting volumes that should be completely invisible.

Of course, blues and greens aren't the only colors. The Red Shoes would get a bit bland if it was just red shoes and dark hues... this miasmic shadow is broken up by the occasional beautifully-lit practice stage or sunlit parlor. These gilded scenes are astoundingly romantic and reassuring, but they're also artificial and transient, like a spotlight encroaching just for a moment on the infinite shadow of an empty stage. They ultimately serve to remind us of their own flattering, gilded impermanence. The darkness is where all the substance of the film resides, alluring and foreboding and unpredictable.

Director Michael Powell, working here with frequent collaborator Emeric Pressburger, ventured further into these dark spaces with later characters, like the infamous Mark from Peeping Tom. Peeping Tom was Powell's infamous failure, a complex and intelligent horror movie that was too controversial for the audience at the time. In it, Powell further pursued his theme of dark spaces and landscapes of the mind, showcasing the rainy streets of London and the unlit apartment of its disturbed central character. He also had a scene in a theater, with Mark victimizing a flirtatious actress, and the sinister sets and stages of The Red Shoes seem to anticipate this scene, in a way. In these two films, arguably Powell's best work, he explores theme of theater as a psychological stage, a place where we're able to play out our deviant fantasies, put them on display, and ultimately bear witness to them ourselves.

This film is a reconstruction of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same title, a story that then plays a prominent part within the film itself. Interestingly, some of the anxiety in The Red Shoes may come from Hans Christan Andersen himself. According to some notable news stories and reviews¹, Andersen was a failed dancer, and feet and shoes figure prominently into some of his stories as aversive fetishes. The imprint of his failures, his fears, and his personality upon his story, then upon the ballet based on that story, and then upon this film, derived from that source material, would be a great topic for some obtuse postmodern theory.

The Red Shoes comes highly recommended, like so many of my Chromatic March films; if you've seen it, let me know what you thought of it, and if you haven't, I highly recommend it.

Palette: Portentous




[1] This "tribute" piece is obnoxiously patronizing and backhanded, by the way. After you read it, please read The Self-Styled Siren's response to it, which I definitely relate to.

Chromatic March analysis: Ashes of Time Redux (2008)

Ashes of Time: a period drama from Hong Kong’s current it-boy auteur, full of drama and adventure and style and stylization, enigmatic and non-linear, with an ensemble of hyper-cool Hong Kong acting talent. Director Wong Kar Wai has made some beautiful films, including In the Mood for Love, a nostalgic platonic love story with a soft touch; 2046, a retrospective on failed romance; companion films Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express; and his most recent, an American travel saga called My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law and Nora Jones. Wai comes from a graphic design background, and his movies are all delirious blurs of city lights, reflections, and slow motion. They’re also famous for their slow, wistful sentimentality and open-ended plot arcs and relationships. Wong Kar Wai revels in the power of the vivid image, and his characters coast quietly and sadly through his stylized worlds.

For a fairly recent movie that flew a bit under critical radar, Ashes of Time has generated a good bit of online discussion and interpretation, largely from the director himself. A fairly comprehensive overview and analysis can be found in the online Press Kit, which may help you sort out the complex and ambiguous plot, if you don’t want to tackle it yourself. Another site has an excerpt from a magazine interview with Wong Kar Wai, wherein he discusses the relationship between Ashes of Time and some of his other work. In particular, he likes to discuss the Jianghu, the imaginary alternate Earth where the classic Wuxia hero stories tend to take place… a world envisioned in the breathy close-ups and epic landscapes of Ashes of Time.

This world – Wong Kar Wai’s Jianghu – is a garish yellow-and-blue universe of empty-space compositions, where a landscape is defined by a horizontal horizon line and a single tree. It's a gilded world, impressing itself aggressively on the senses, and this gives the landscape and its characters an alkaline sensory edge, keenly lucid and immersive. Christopher Doyle's cinematography adds to this effect, focusing our attention on facial expressions, single gestures, and the most minute details of the visible landscape. Even in the close-ups and action sequences, the visuals are dominated by solar yellow, harsh light, and overexposure. The first shot of Ashes in Time Redux, which was apparently added for this re-cut, sets the stage for the sensory mode that Wong Kar Wai establishes. Looking into the sun through dust clouds, we can imagine our eyes burning, and they seem to keep the radiant after-image of that sun for the whole film.

This heightened reality supports a madly complex narrative that follows the interactions of at least seven major characters (I'm counting Feng, Yaoshi, the blind swordsman, Huang, Murong, Feng's lost love, and the girl with the donkey and the eggs). Their stories are entangled in a chronology that's challenging and non-linear, although as far as I can tell, it's not self-contradictory. To make the situation even more complex, many of the characters are connected by parallel themes... the fight with the bandits, the lost love of a woman at home, the desire to remain pure of purpose, the thematic recurrence of blindness and the Peach Blossom. A number of the reviews I read seemed to mix up multiple characters, and without a second or third review, I can understand why.

Wong Kar Wai can fit these complexities in partly because he makes no attempt to capture them on-screen. The general shape of the narrative comes from voiceovers by various characters, and the visuals mainly serve to set the tone for this exposition, and to support it by rendering the emotional content, and filling in details and drama where necessary. The visuals are thus used almost entirely to capture key moments that supply substance to the narrated plot. However, even as this approach allows an abundance of storytelling material, it also serves to obfuscate those stories, to the point where they're almost indecipherable. The first time through the film, you might think those seven characters are as few as three or four, and they may seem to change places in impossible ways. You may actually end up thinking this film is more artsy than it actually is. According to the filmmakers, this is because the Jianghu is a place of moral absolutes and human universals. The ideas driving these characters are more important than the conflicts and personalities of the characters themselves.

And we see this sense of absolutism, this harsh confrontation between light and dark and loyalty and betrayal, in the way the colors infuse the landscape with harshness. This is a world without soft edges, without flexibility or nuance. It's a world where the sky meets the earth at the unbreakable barrier of the horizon.

In the course of the film, three of the heroes are associated with the cardinal directions. These are Feng, the Lord of the West, Yaoshi, the Lord of the East, and Huang, the Beggar King of the North. Nobody seems to represent the South, but I think at least two characters could qualify. These are the two great warriors of the tale who never reach satisfactory conclusions: the Blind Swordsman, and Yin/Yang, the dissociative princess of the Murong warrior clan.

My first choice is the Blind Swordsman, who comes from the South, but never manages to attain the other characters' fame. The Blind Swordsman is killed before he makes it to whatever kingdom awaits him, and his corpse has to speak from the ground to warn Hueng about the left-handed swordsman. The loss of his love, his status as a wandering Ronin of the Jianghu, and his association with his home in the South, where he has left Peach Blossom behind -- these all point to his status as unfulfilled Lord of the South. Of course, it's also possible that Princess Murong represents the South, for she becomes an infamous, enigmatic warrior, and her story after her night with Feng is never told. Like the men of the East, West, and North, Lady Murong pines for a lost love, and this longing ultimately drives her to pursuit of perfection and solitude... whether she earns the Lordship over that final cardinal direction is an open question.

If you're already totally confused, and you're asking, "Did I even see the same movie?", it might be because you're still afflicted with first- or second-viewing syndrome. This is the feeling this film causes that all the characters are all interchangable, and that they somehow exist in an impossible space-time continuum. Honestly, this reaction is acceptable and understandable, because it means you've already engaged Ashes of Time at the first, most important level of understanding. It only takes one attentive viewing to experience the drunken power of the movie... but if you want to untangle it on a narrative level, and appreciate the distinctive beauty of each of the characters' stories, you'll have to watch it at least a few times. I actually did my best to help with this process, by creating an extended timeline of the Jianghu of Ashes of Time.

The timeline (clickable at left) takes all the little details and twists and revelations, dispensed wily nilly throughout the film, and arranges them into an order that allows them all to make sense. There are certainly ambiguities that I've overlooked or made assumptions about, but this is a good starting point. For instance, it's a striking moment when you realize that the whole ordeal with the girl and the horse-bandits... a pair of adventures that make up at least half of the movie... all take place after Yaoshi has taken the wine to forget his past. This final meeting between Feng and Yaoshi is presented early in the movie, but it seems like it happens at the end of the chronology, when it actually happens right in the middle.

Using this pivot-point as a landmark... the death of a lost love and the gift of forgetfulness... I've separated the film into two chronological sections. I call the first half the "Time of Wandering." This is when Yaoshi is making his rounds, visiting Feng and his lost love in turn, bringing them news of one another. During this time, the free-spirited Yaoshi sets the stage for many of the later developments: he steals the blind swordsman's wife, he makes a false offer of marriage to the princess of Clan Murong, and he generally damages and alienates people around him, despite his best intentions.

I call the second half of this chronology the "Time of Fighting and Forgetting". This is a period in which Feng, true to his calling, is cleaning up the complications engendered in the first half of the film. He encounters Mourang as Yaoshi, he provides a final, fatal task to the estranged Blind Swordsman, and he mentors Huang, the Lord of Beggars, who will eventually become his adversary (this destiny is barely mentioned in the film, and it's depicted with no real explanation, but all the foreshadowing is there). During this period, Yaoshi vanishes, losing his memory and eventually retiring to hermitage. This is Feng's time to start creating history.

A beautiful, powerful, complex film, and at this moment, my personal favorite from Wong Kar Wai. The enigmatic structure of Ashes of Time provides a powerful lens for its intensive exploration of loneliness, longing, and uncertainty, and for its experimentation with time and space. Wait to see Ashes of Time until you're ready to really work for it... when you get there, I can assure you, it will be a rewarding experience.

Palette: Alkaline