The great "Sevens" of film, and the what it means to move slowly

Every so often, while I mentally review the films I've seen, it occurs to me that there are three truly iconic films that all feature the number Seven in their title. I'm proud to say that as of tonight, I've seen all three.

I don't remember when I saw Se7en, the most recent of these films. For years, I'd heard it mentioned, and it seemed that its reputation was growing, because every time somebody mentioned it, it would sound a little more reverent than the last time. When I finally got around to seeing it, it was every bit as harrowing as its reputation suggested. Fincher's bleach bypass colors and uncomfortable intimacy with the killer and his victims -- these were the groundwork for a vicious, merciless film experience. Despite the gruesome imagery and shock tactics, it's still the conclusive conceptual twist that I remember best... perhaps the only payoff that could have lived up to the film's escalation.

To me, this is the essential Fincher movie, and the most successful Brad Pitt has ever been in playing a (deadly) serious role. It's also one of Kevin Spacey's major achievements, as he becomes the case study for soft-spoken introversion as something purposeful and terrifying.

There was an element of expectation involved in my viewing of Se7en, but not nearly so much as there was with the other two Great Sevens, Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal. These two totally definitive films are burdened with a common weight: the reputation for being impossibly slow and difficult to sit through. Having finally seen both of them, I can say definitively, I find this characterization to be a little unfair.

Now, if you're not used to old movies in general, you need to know: the current pace of filmmaking has changed dramatically in the past forty years, and even more so in the past ten. So honestly, you may find any movie created before 1980 to be rather slow, and as for the ones created back before 1960? Until you've learned a little bit of patience, those might seem totally insufferable.

But I'll tell you straight: Seven Samurai is a heavy undertaking, but it isn't slow. And The Seventh Seal, even more so, is totally misunderstood... for something jam-packed with existentialism, it actually moves along pretty evenly.

Of these three Great Sevens, Seven Samurai is the most epic, the most adventuresome, and the most heroic. It's also reputedly extremely difficult to sit through, possibly because it's almost three and a freaking half hours long, including an intermission in the middle. Make no mistake: it will take up a chunk of a day, and if you want to see it, I'd recommend setting aside a whole afternoon, with some buffer time to take a break or two, stretch, get food, and pee. This is how I got through it in essentially one sitting... I made the space for it, and I made myself comfortable.

However, don't let the bad press fool you... Seven Samurai doesn't have the ponderous slowness of Brown Bunny or 2001, which are replete with atmospheric shots of objects moving through space, people sitting in reflective silence, and other sorts of cinematic images that may as well be still photos. Seven Samurai has a story that always moves.

So it's 207 minutes long, and yet it moves along the whole time? Well, if distance=rate times time, and the movie moves at a good clip for 207 minutes, it must mean it covers a hell of a lot of distance. This is, in fact, the case: this story is extraordinarily elaborate, with copious numbers of important characters, all working out minor relationships and developments. This is the kind of in-depth plot and rising action that we, as modern consumers, are only used to seeing in serial television. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the film being broken into a nine- or ten-episode series, and each episode being accessible and engaging.

This far-reaching story, revolving around the complex personal politics of the medieval samurai, provides ample space for the central dialectic of the film, a discourse on loyalty and individualism that engages Western sensibilities of heroics, leadership, and subversion with Eastern ideals of commitment and self-sacrifice. Any mention of the film will always immediately evoke its final image... a reflection on an ensemble of warriors, united in duty and divided by fate.

The third "Seven" movie is the one I saw tonight, The Seventh Seal. Like Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal has the universal reputation for being extremely slow, artsy, and pretentious. In Seventh Samurai, this reputation is partly because of the length and complexity; in Seventh Seal, it's harder to explain. The movie clocks in at a lean 96 minutes, and it's essentially a story of a veteran knight of the crusades, traveling home through the European countryside, and discovering the human spirit within the wasteland of the plague. He only makes it as far as he does because he distracts Death with a game of chess... so yes, there's some "symbolism" here, and some reflection on the nature of good and evil and faith, but this is not a philosophical tract over a game board. This is a movie about some good people and some not-so-good people, and about their adventures.

Perhaps The Seventh Seal has been pigeon-holed as a slow movie because it's also been characterized as an artsy movie... which is probably because the main character, a knight having a crisis of faith, tends to ask his philosophical questions very directly. He likes to talk about God, the devil, and the failure of faith, and he occasionally uses the other characters as sounding boards to make dramatic speeches. As Roger Ebert pointed out, this is historically equated with over-philosophizing, and with the kind of comedic melodrama that invites parody after parody. However, it's worth noting that the film is actually among Bergman's most accessible... for me, it beats out Persona, which is intimidatingly cryptic, but also such meandering dramas as Wild Strawberries and The Hour of the Wolf.

Funny that a brief movie, full of small adventures and entertaining characters, is so widely considered slow and pretentious; or that it's considered cryptic when it addresses its themes out in the open, with no obfuscation.

Daybreakers: A survey of a science fiction world

“Any sufficiently advanced technology something something magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke, apparently

Remember when Vampires were good ol’ reliable devil worshippers and hosts to evil spirits? When Vlad was the last word on Vampirism, even up into the goth Vampire The Masquerade / Anne Rice days, a world with vampires was pretty much a world allowing for supernatural events and inhabitations. Sexy, bloodthirsty vampirism was justified by symbolism and folkloric mysticism, and didn’t really depend on empirical verifiability. Has anyone noticed how this has been changing?

Daybreakers is one of the recent movies that's displaced vampire lore from Victorian superstition to post-apocalyptic science fiction. This is a film that starts with a very interesting premise: the world is populated almost entirely by vampires, and their supply of fresh human blood is dwindling… they’ve tried farming, but it can’t keep up with demand, and they’re consistently failing to produce an acceptable blood substitute. The desperation is causing serious civil unrest. It’s tempting to read it as an environmental/sustainability metaphor, but don’t… it just makes it boring.

However, even resisting this impulse, you won’t be able to help seeing this as a very modern premise, based on the sciences of economics and scarcity, and the logic of technological solutions to chronic biological and ecological limitations. It’s an extension of a folkloric monster, operating within a scientific discourse. I Am Legend and Blade both work this way, as well. Compare this with the original, sourcebook vampire legends, Dracula and Nosferatu: in these, the vampire was a predatory master of a supernatural world, governed by laws of the spirit (I’d argue that the Anne Rice and White Wolf vampires are the modern inheritors of this tradition). Also, for arguments’ sake, compare with the image of the vampire as spirituality-on-the-margins: the vampires that represent an inexplicable supernatural presence, but that coexist with modern society, albiet at arm's reach. This is the vampire lore of Twilight and Let The Right One In: vampires don’t represent some ominous, ever-present “other world” so much as the mysterious exception ("the other") to rational society. Whereas the classical vampire represented a threat to “normalcy,” these new vampires are outcasts, representing a sentimental nostalgia for folklore and mysticism.

Kay, typological tangent over. Back to the vampire world of Daybreakers.

So in Daybreakers, we have a "virulent" vampirism that's infected the entire population, save a few straggling individuals. Way cool. Vlad the Impaler probably had the same disease, which happens to have "immortality" as a fortunate side-effect. And it makes the host vulnerable to sunlight, which causes total immolation. That's cool, too... you might call it "ultraviolet photosensitivity." And also, they have to drink live blood, which has some combination of nutrients that vampire blood doesn't have.

And if the vampires lack this nutrient for too long, they start to degenerate, physically and mentally, which is one of the deliciously awesome twists that Daybreakers brings to Vampire mythology. It might be even better than "torpor," which was Vampire: The Masquerade's state of hibernation for underfed vampires.

In an even more fascinating stylistic twist, the vampires that don't get enough blood tend to follow a reverse evolution, from Stoker-esque white collar vampire studs to Murnau-esque creatures with bald heads and huge, ragged ears. In fact, Daybreakers is the first vampire movie that I've seen combine the two dominant vampire images. Only Vampire: The Masquerade has done this before, using the Nosferatu clan to fudge in the deformed subspecies. The mental degeneration of these Subsider vampires is harrowing, as they revert to deformed scavengers with no instinct but to feed. The fact that this condition is brought on by feeding from other vampires, and feeding from oneself, associates it with sexual perversity, on top of the addiction and devolution implications.

These rules lay the groundwork for a fairly satisfying science fiction world, mostly rationalized, but with a glaze of mysticism. My main critique of the narrative space is that the Spierig brothers tried too hard to reference the older, folklore-based vampires of Victorian gothica. This goth loyalty resulted in a couple useless details: first, that the vampires are apparently invisible in mirrors; second, that they explode in flames when impaled on a stake.

We all know how various wavelengths of light affect the rods and cones of the eye, and it's a far stretch to assume that the same reflected light that reaches our eyes can vanish when it touches a mirror. Furthermore, it's hard to imagine a biological reaction that incites immediate combustion, but only from the heart, and only when it's impaled on something as inert as a crossbow bolt.

First, I admit, these are details. I'm a big supporter of this movie, and if you need confirmation of that, read my review over at BlogCritics. However, that review will also tell you that in my opinion, it's the innovative conceptual treatment of vampires and society that really makes this a good movie. The silly narrative tropes and campy lines are offensive, but they're also easy to write off as a sort of action movie syndrome. But those inconsistencies in the beautifully-rendered universe of Daybreakers... they're cracks in the core merit of the movie. They break up the texture of a well-rendered world, and thus they merit mention.

Still, it was an easy world to get caught up in, and I give the Spierigs credit for that. The future was not only vampire-y... it was frigid and lonely, disconnected, and desperate. For the vampire citizens of Earth 2019, the world is poised on a razor's edge between the empty stasis of immortality and the suffocating catastrophe of implosion and violence. It's a future wasted, partly by greed, but moreso by the same cruel hand of fate that gave mankind so many gifts and so few promises.

Shared Worlds: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

It's been about a week since I saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Over the course of this week, I have almost entirely lost my mental grasp on the world of the movie. It was so overloaded with stimuli, so awash in hallucinogenic imagery, and so random and fanciful that I can't call back the feelings that it evoked. Maybe this is the type of thing you just can't hold onto... a world that exists only within the space of the movie, and can't subsist anywhere else. This is a world that vanishes, even from the memories of the viewers who experienced it.

The sheer randomness of the movie actually lost me at times, creating empty enigmas and blasting me with discordant imagery. For a while, I was actually a bit irritated at the total lack of cohesion that I saw as the only unifying element to the narrative. I've chilled out on that, though... a fair number of critics (like Mr. Ebert) were willing to forgive it, and even I was able, almost right from the start, to excuse these narrative excesses and oversights in favor of an uncontrollable directorial vision.

In looking back, though, I've realized that I've seen this world before. Even as it slips from my memory, it's registered something, recalling another movie I only remember in fragments. This is Gilliam's previous phantasmagoric sideshow, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and the more I think about it, the more I'm sure of it: these two films took place in the same universe.

So what happens in this universe? What kind of a bizarre, dwarf-populated, uninhibited place is it? Well, first, it's a place where the Earth and the cosmos are built on non sequitor and whimsy. It's a universe that only exists because its story is being told, as the young Parnassus so kindly informs us, and thus it's a world defined by its storytellers and reenactors. It's a world where powerful ideas manifest, whether they're personifications, like the King of the Moon and Vulcan the Fire God, or the living sparks of confused imaginations, like the inner worlds of Parnassus's mirror. It's a shared world, but at any one time, it issues forth from the voice of its storyteller, like a tree growing from a seed. It's a world that can be saved from war and ruin by the Baron's ability to tell a tale with a happy ending.

This is a world divided into the common people, a naive and unruly lot, and the heroes, the redeemers of daily life. These commoners are well-meaning, but just tend to get themselves into trouble, whether by falling prey to Tony's empty promises, or by shouting down the Baron himself. It's always a world on its way to ruin, sinking inevitably into normalcy, but generally barely held aloft by the heroic efforts of its heroes and hopefuls, who lift it up by its own bootstraps, even as they fight off their own inner demons.

Interestingly, this is also a world of singular beautiful women, the radiant centers of their universes. Whether they're Roman goddesses or flirty daughters of immortal drunkards, they're inevitably impossible to contain, and they always seem to become the stakes in showdowns between supernatural powers. Venus, played by a noticably naked Uma Thurman, pioneered this role, catalyzing the rivalry between the Baron and Vulcan. However, Valentina, played by Lily Cole, took the archetype to a new level. Her love was not only a point of contention between Anton the rascal and Tony the undead con man, but between her father and the devil himself.

I often wonder about the strange process that results in a half-formed world within the imagination of a culture. These worlds... the world of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, the world of 2046 and In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, the world of With Honors and Good Will Hunting (I'm convinced that all three of these constitute self-contained worlds)... these are mysterious and robust, and in their incompleteness, they seem almost more complete than our confusing, disorderly everyday universe.

To these we can now add the world of Baron Munchausen and Doctor Parnassus... a harlequin universe of mythical figures engaged in cryptic games of life and death... and it's a universe that will keep growing, because its story is still being told.

Cinephiles and Consumers: a meditation on film and the elitist/populist debate

Cinematical posted a reflection on the difference between "informed" and "uninformed" film-goers.

All these discussions about film snobbery and validity of taste... they tend to gravitate around certain points, and totally miss others. This is true of all sensitive topics... just look at gay marriage, which has bizarrely coagulated around the question of whether homosexuality is "natural," rather than considering the basic question of human rights that's implicit in the issue. The "film snobs versus pop culture apologists" debate has its own gravitational centers, and they're a bit distracting from the key topics that underlie the debate.

One of those gravitational centers is "What exactly is a 'good film'?" This leads to clashes between the relativist position of the pop culture apologists versus the aesthetic and technical purism of the film snobs. Another one is, "_____ are biased against _______ films," which each side fills in to their liking. Pop culture apologists say, "Film snobs are biased against popular films," and film snobs say, "Mass consumers are biased against thought-provoking films." These kinds of claims are false... they're really just a way of converting merit-of-taste arguments into populist ad hominem arguments.

Let me try this from a different direction. Maybe I can avoid these ideological pitfalls altogether.

First, I'm going to reframe the two groups we're talking about into cinephiles and consumers. A consumer is any person who sees movies casually, in equal proportion to other amusements and entertainment. Cinephiles, by contrast, are people who identify one of their primary interests as "film" or "movies," and back it up by meeting at least one of two qualifications: they see a disproportionately large number of movies (like, three or four a month at minimum), or they make an appreciable effort to see movies outside the Hollywood mainstream.

I'm obviously taking some fuzzy factors here and turning them into some really artificial distinctions. Still, it's an important starting point for this kind of discussion, because so much of it rides on the distinction between people "in-the-know" and people who aren't. At times, the pop culture apologists advance the idea that taste can't be universalized, so how "educated" you are (whether formally or informally) shouldn't factor into the discussion... effectively treating all audience members as equally-informed. This approach doesn't hold water in our cultural universe.

Pretty much every discussion of the merits of mass culture, high-brow versus low-brow, the abundance of bad movies in major theaters, etc. is actually about the cultural divide between consumers and cinephiles. Consumers rarely, if ever, make public assertions of their opinions on various films – they generally just talk about them in private conversations, or by recommending or scoffing at movies, or by going to see certain films a second time. There are MANY more consumers than cinephiles, and they exert a much more powerful force on Hollywood, because their money speaks for them. Cinephiles carry out a much more explicit, public debate about film, but they aren't a big enough demographic for Hollywood's investment. Hollywood isn't looking for acclaim... it's looking for a return.

Most bloggers and commentators (including Cinematical, above) want to ask whether the opinions of "film snobs" are somehow "more valid" than the opinions of average movie-goers. In fact, confusion over this question has led cinephiles to be called "elitists" and taste-fascists. When you step back to think about it, though, everyone... cinephiles, consumers, fanboys, etc... we all prioritize our own tastes, and hold those who share those tastes in higher esteem. I don't ever remember a cinephile demanding that an opponent relinquish his or her personal "favorite movie" designation. Cinephiles are more enthusiastic about films, so they may be more likely to assert their own preferences and challenge the preferences of those who disagree with them. This isn't a pretense to superiority, though. It's just a higher level of intensity, both of loves and of hates.

We have to give up this question of whether or not cinephiles have a more valid opinion, and instead look to see where that opinion is coming from. By definition, a cinephile is a person with distinctive experience in film-watching. The opinions of cinephiles will therefore be based on comparisons between films, and on an appreciable background of cinema experience, much more than the opinions of consumers. This will tend to result in a wider range of opinions, whether those opinions tend to be enthusiastic and positive (which tends to be true of cinema-lovers like Roger Ebert) or nit-picky and negative (which tends to be true of graduate-student critics and people who bitch on movie forums). Will cinephiles have a greater tendency to complain about certain movies? Yes, because of the wider range and intensity of their opinions. Are they inherently biased toward "blockbusters"? Absolutely not. Virtually every cinephile has a significant knowledge-base of movies, and they will identify most blockbusters as unexciting, but they will hold a few in very high regard. This doesn't represent a bias, so much as a representative cross-section of their taste in movies as a whole: lots of unimpressive stuff (whether among blockbusters or classics), and a few treasured gems.

So is the reverse true? Are consumers biased against thought-provoking movies? I don't think so... I frankly don't think we have any particular evidence to that conclusion, because thought-provoking film hasn't been promoted on a large public scale for a while now. There are certain cultural forces that dictate what movies get the most funding, the most publicity, etc., and these forces generally favor the most eye-catching, sense-overwhelming movies possible. The opinions of consumers, also more or less by-definition, will be dictated by the general habits and preferences built up from the individual's exposure to all media. Consumers will factor in certain characteristics that cinephiles weigh less heavily: franchise loyalty, ideological agreement with the movie's message, and sensory and sentimental reaction.

To be fair, a certain subset of cinephiles can elevate some things that consumers don't appreciate as much... ambiguity of form, for instance, which I blogged about a month or so ago, and formal experimentation and technical achievement, whether within the scene or in terms of the crafts of editing and cinematography. These criteria are especially important to film students and professors, because in studying the history of film, they become acutely aware of each technical method: its invention sometime in the golden age of cinema, its increased use in a certain country or a certain era, its resurgence in a certain genre or a certain director's work. The fact that consumers tend not to notice these things does indeed demonstrate difference between these ways of looking at the film, but it proves neither the superiority, nor the aloofness, of the cinephile approach.

This editorial piece has turned into an attempt to defend cinephiles without resorting to elitism, so I'll continue in that vein for at least one more paragraph. Before you go and accuse your local film buff of being "snobby" because they throw around harsh criticism, note that there is another type of film person who does this: the genre afficianado. This is the guy who has seen every samurai movie, or the girl who knows the detailed history of the Brat Pack and has seen every romance movie with any of the original members. For my money, these people fall squarely into the "cinephile" category, rather than the "consumer" category, and I think they're an important group to consider... they have strong opinions, based on a comprehensive background, but they're not snobby -- in fact, they often appreciate the lowest of the lowest-brow with intense enthusiasm. If you're a pop culture apologist, and you have the urge to equate strong, unapologetic tastes with elitism, make sure you consider these fanboy types. They are the strongest argument against that corroboration.

It seems to me that within this context, we get a new picture of the role of movie critics, as well. Movie critics are basically socially-empowered cinephiles... the outreach program for people who consider movie-watching a primary interest. Their opinions aren't necessarily privileged, or accurate, and you may find that you consistently disagree with critics (a sign that you may be a subversive cinephile, bravely swimming upstream against your own group's tendencies). Nonetheless, a good critic is a public representative of cinephilia -- (s)he evaluates movies based on what other movies are doing, and what other movies have done before, and (s)he forms strong opinions in accordance with her/his role as an enthusiast.

Should consumers be more like cinephiles? Should cinephiles just relax? Honestly, these questions are unnecessary. This is a social difference that we can discuss without making some sort of moral or prescriptive claim. I think this can potentially bring some clarity to the elitist-versus-populist flame wars... although admittedly, clarity may make those shouting matches a lot less amusing.

Wolf's Rain: Benefit of the Doubt reviews an anime series

It's striking how a well-handled end note can change the tone of a whole narrative work. I watched the anime series Wolf's Rain this weekend, and I think my opinion of the whole piece hinges on the developments that happened on the final disc, in episodes 27 to 30.

To be clear, I'm not a serious anime/manga buff. I've seen my fair share -- I usually go for essential film-length anime, like Studio Ghibli, Perfect Blue, Ghost in the Shell, Vampire Hunter D, etc. As far as series go, my only full-length viewing experiences have been Neon Genesis Evangelion and Trigun, although I've seen a lot of standalone episodes of other anime. This means Wolf's Rain is my third full anime series experience.

I need to structure this review carefully, because it's largely a spoiler-laden discussion; however, I think my spoilers would actually spoil the whole series for any potential viewers, and I want people to watch this anime and have a full experience of it.

So this is the basic review, for people who are considering watching Wolf's Rain: go for it. I muchly enjoyed it, and though I had to stifle some laughter during some of the more ham-fisted segments, I was able to buy into the characters and the setting. Skip episodes 15 to 18 - they're pure, boring recap. Be prepared to suffer some anime tropes and stereotypes, but allow the series to take you along on the ride, which is mostly moody, escapist action.

If you're halfway through the series and you're on the fence about it, I strongly suggest you watch to the end, and then come back and tell me what you think.

For both of the groups cited above, please stop reading. Watch the series, finish it, and then come back to this review and discuss your opinions. The following paragraphs will definitely contain spoilers, and they're spoilers that will probably make the experience of Wolf's Rain less profound and less interesting.

For those of you who have finished it, I have to ask a question: how often do we see an anime close on such an unrelenting, apocalyptic note as Wolf's Rain's final disc? How often do we see such a change in tone? How often do we sit through the honest, unflinching demise of each of the characters we've come to see as our protagonists? Is this common? The darkest anime I've seen -- series like Trigun and Eva, or movies like Perfect Blue -- seemed to end with some sort of confrontation, cessation, and redemption. Wolf's Rain's last disc took me completely by surprise.

In general, the series isn't too shy about its traditional anime trappings. The cohort was a predictable clash of personalities, from the streetwise bad boy with a heart of gold to the idealistic child character who discovers his inner strength. The journey to Jaguara's palace and the second-to-last disc's plot-twisting revelations and personal triumphs ... these things are common anime fare, familiar from Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and Trigun, and various other similar experiences I've had.

However, the final disc of Wolf's Rain took a turn into the wasteland. The journey of adventure and discovery seemed to become, in the space of a single episode, a futile trek across a ravaged landscape, empty of purpose and emotionally unstable. The characters sacrificed themselves for their causes, but against the backdrop of extinction, these idealistic deaths seemed strangely empty and insignificant, even as each revealed the tragic beauty of the individual's life.

In the last disc, the series became strangely remote and melancholy.

Paradoxically, it was in these final bleak episodes that the whole series seemed to take on an unexpected glow. Until the characters started to die on the final trek across the snow, I hadn't realized how attached I'd gotten to them. By and large, I'd written them off as stereotypes... but their unexpected mortality brought an extra sentimentality to my relationship with each of them. I'd found Tsume and Toboe rather annoying during the meat of the series... why was I so sad when I saw them die ascending the mountain?

Setting aside the merits of anime, and the more general aesthetic question of whether a whole series can be redeemed by the final 10% of the narrative, it's worth noting: Wolf's Rain is a series that found its themes and treated them remorselessly. If you want to see it as a 22-episode introduction and a one-disc climax, go ahead, but in its closing notes, the writing was gutsy, and it finally earned its stripes as an epic tale.

Vanity Fair is scared of Cuteness

Jim Windolf of Vanity Fair apparently thinks we're all becoming addicted to cuteness. At least one blogger saw the recent trailer for the movie Babies and wondered if he was right about that.

The Vanity Fair article is probably great press, but only because it's contentious, not because it's convincing. Making a sweeping claim... like the claim that the "cute" aesthetic is taking over all of Americana... may be provocative, but you can't back it up simply by citing a catalog of examples of the phenomenon. Windolf undermines his own argument by packing his article full of offhanded derision and snarky asides, and by including examples that only loosely support his point... the Geico Gecko, the shape of Smart Cars, and company names like "Google" and "Twitter" are barely relevant to any of this.

A stylistic trend doesn't automatically translate into a zeitgeist. "Cuteness" has a long history in culture and genetics, and there's not much chance that it'll suddenly take over modern culture and destroy it. There's also not much chance that it'll go away, since it's rooted so deeply in our reactions to our surroundings... really, what Windolf is ranting against is a certain segment of the culture industry that's gotten very good at tapping the maternal instinct. It's not so much a cultural takeover as a newly-minted aesthetic gimmick that's gained a lot of traction in post-postmodernism. I'd argue that the "sincerity purges" of the postmodern years, exemplified by irony and detachment and nihilism, have caused a blowback of childlike over-sincerity, an assertion of our basic right to have biologically-motivated chemical reactions to empty, escapist pleasures.

Of course, pomo hasn't been left completely in the dust. Cuteness is an extension of kitsch, the great stylistic advancement of the 90's... or, to be more precise, it's vindicated by kitsch, which allowed us to celebrate the cheapness and shallowness of throwaway culture. Cuteness is arguably an advancement, though... kitsch was supported largely by irony, and by taking up the token cause of things that were genuinely ugly. At the very least, cute culture makes the assertion that we should like it and feel authentically edified by it, even if it's childish.

In a certain way, it seems like an antidote to the worship of dominance that plagues American (and human) culture... in turning toward vulnerability and innocence, we're turning away from images of power, control, and competition. This may be refreshing. However, as Windolf points out (and I give him credit for this), it may indicate its opposite: the focus on the small and cute may actually be a way of belittling the object, and subconsciously reinforcing our own sense of superiority. Or, as he argues in a bit of a self-contradiction, the attention to cuteness may indicate that we're identifying with the object and developing a victim complex, attempting to repackage ourselves as a country that needs to be protected. He cites Japan as an example of this behavior. These points are valid, and should prompt some reflection.

However, I would say that the maternal instinct enacts the best of each of these tendencies, rather than the worst. It makes us protective, rather than asserting some sort of tyrannical dominance; it allows us to appreciate and identify with the innocence and immediacy of infancy, rather than indulging fantasies of belittlement.

Now, with regards to Babies... there is such a thing as a movie that relies too much on a style and excuses itself from having any of the other strengths of a good movie (concept, writing, narrative form, etc). When I saw the poster for Smokin' Aces, I was pretty sure I knew what it was offering – a heavy-duty stylistic commitment, draped over a lot of propulsive inanity. Babies looks like an analogous movie for the nurturing crowd, although without having seen it, I can't rule out the possibility that it will manage a complex and unexpected execution of its core stylistic concept.

So I'm not here to justify cuteness as substance. I'm just here to caution against what Windolf is tending to do: to equate a stylistic trend with a cultural groundswell, and to confuse his own taste with some kind of genuine standard of merit.

Avatar: Some Possible Alternate Endings

The reviews have come in. It’s groundbreaking – a masterpiece of motion capture, a triumph of space jungle world-building. Record numbers of people didn't feel like they were just watching James Cameron play a very expensive video game. And I have to give it props for the pacing and cinematic technique, which made the story stick... Cameron has a knack for making a narrative seem interesting and profound.

Still, my opinion of the film in general is strongly in the camp of Elisabeth from Cinematical and Annalee Newitz from io9. I had fun, and cheered at the big hits, but my troublesome critical brain couldn’t stop saying things like, "Why are the aliens so much like African/Native American/Aboriginal people?"

But as they say, don't criticize if you can't come up with an alternative. In that spirit, I hereby offer some suggestions on other ways Avatar could have played out… maybe with fewer clichés, or less obvious about its white guilt fantasies, or even just less predictably. When I see the movie again, I'll be hoping the ending magically transforms into one of these. So without further ado, wouldn’t it be awesome if:

(WARNING: SOME OF THESE MAY CAUSE "SPOILAGE" OF THE ACTUAL ENDING A LITTLE)

1) The humans drop a nuke on Home Tree, and Sully, having foreknowledge of this plan, is the only one able to escape. He becomes the sole bearer of the Nav’i legacy, and through his influence, the Earth eventually learns of its crimes. However, failing to find solace in his own lifetime, he dies destitute and frustrated.

2) The Nav'i do what makes the most sense when they find out Jake was always with the humans: they cut off his head, eviscerate his body, and send the remains back to his comrades. They then disappear into the forest, abandoning Home Tree, and use their planet’s neural network to mount a grueling, two-hundred year guerilla defense against the human invaders, which is ultimately successful in driving them away.

3) The Nav'i reveal to Jake that they not only invented their own modern weaponry… they’ve fully evolved past needing it. When the invaders arrive with ships and tanks, the tribal elders simply dismantle the metal with their secret psycho-kinetic powers, and the human invaders are left naked in the woods to be eaten by giant cats.

4) The Nav'i and Jake Sully escape, and the humans occupy Home Tree and the Ancestor Tree (or whatever it is), only to discover that the Nav'i aren’t the dominant species on Pandora after all... the trees are actually the most intelligent species, and they use the non-sentient animals as appendages. The "animal assault" from the actual movie then ensues, but without the Nav'i even bothering to help; the planet just uses its various indigenous animals to pound the human invaders into tapioca pudding.

5) With Jake's help, the humans destroy the Nav'i, and then discover that their psychic connection with the surrounding plant-life was generating a centripedal force that was keeping the planet in orbit. Within hours, Pandora drifts off its orbit and crashes into the nearby planet, killing everybody there.

6) When Jake tames his Banshee and becomes initiated, Neytiri realizes that humans are, in fact, superior to her own race (after all, he did in months what it takes them their whole lives to accomplish). She asks him to bring her back to the military base, where she informs him that she’s defecting, and together they help the humans crush and enslave the Nav'i. She then has an affair with Colonel Quaritch. When Sully finds out, he challenges the Colonel in single combat, and kills him using the skills he learned as a Nav'i. Neytiri sees her old lover, now a Nav'i warrior, murder her new lover, the human champion; she subsequently realizes she contributed to the genocide of her own race, and commits suicide by jumping off the back of her Banshee a thousand feet above the ruins of the Ancestor Tree.

7) When Jake enters his Avatar and attempts to lead the Nav'i to war, the simulation suddenly ends. A human military psychologist informs him that Pandora is actually a training facility, and the "Avatar" experience was a virtual reality evaluation of his conviction and patriotism; as he followed the call of nature on an alien planet and the glory of being a champion to the locals, he has obviously failed. He has to return home with a dishonorable discharge.

8) After the destruction of Home Tree, Jake becomes an advocate for the Nav’i, but he’s written off as a fanatical hippy with PTSD. The humans start second-guessing their militaristic approach and regretting their cruelty to the natives, but only after they’ve killed most of the Nav’i, or shuttered them into small encampments and denied them any good education or representation. Eventually, all that remains of Nav'i culture is cheap stereotypes, cottage industry hand-crafts, and casinos. Two hundred years later, one of Sully's great grandsons makes a movie about their plight, but reimagines it with a human leading them to victory and freedom.

^1] Orson Scott Card ending
^2] Battle of Algiers ending
^3] Ian Banks ending
^4] Gaia Theory ending
^5] I don’t know where I got this idea.
^6] Greek Tragedy ending
^7] Wizard of Oz ending
^8] Just completing the implicit analogy here

A quick reflection on David Cronenberg's The Brood

I just saw The Brood, a Cronenberg film from 1979, just preceding his much-lauded Scanners and Videodrome. What a movie... what issues. This body horror opus is a tangle of neuroses about motherhood, psychotherapy, parents, parenting, and physical wholeness. It doesn't provide a particularly fair representation of either mental illness or the mental health profession, and its climatic scene does what Cronenberg is famous for: it uses sickening effects to express deep psychological anxieties about flesh... creating an aversive bridge between body and mind, which are so brutally separated in Western society.

In this way, Cronenberg's work could be read as a critique of Cartesian dualism and the longstanding mind-body difference that infects Western culture. Dr. Raglan's techniques are based on an essential opposition to dualism, asserting that we can't get the body out of the mind, or vice versa. In a practice that was fixated for some time on the idea of unearthing hidden memories and experiences, what could be a more complete method of exposing those repressed feelings than by manifesting them on the body itself? Psychoplasmics seems to be based, at least in part, on the idea that psychological damage can be treated more easily as physical damage.

If this is true, then Dr. Raglan's biggest problem is that he assumes "expressing" these anxieties automatically solves them... that by creating welts on his body, Mikey is fixing the underlying damage that those welts are expressing. The film makes it clear that this is simply not the case: expressed anger and anxiety, left untreated, are just as damaging as repressed anxiety. Again, this could be read as a critique... in this case, a critique of psychoanalysis itself.

Psychological trauma aside, there's something about this movie that makes it relentlessly uncomfortable, and I think it's 70's aesthetic. The Shining benefited from the same effect... the grainy film, the earth tones that seem to suggest mud and soil, the red and yellow accents that suggest body fluids, and the shadows that seem ready to swallow you whole... there's something creepy about that decade, isn't there? In my opinion, it beats the hell out of a lot of our highly-saturated horror movies, shot through blue filters with conspicuous red bursts here and there. The houses in The Ring and Drag Me To Hell feel like they were build ten minutes before the movie was made, and the space feels too scripted. The woods and wooden shacks and attic apartments of the 70's... these are spontaneous, empty spaces, quietly genuine in their loneliness.

For a bit of a longer reminiscence on this topic, mentioning a few of the same concepts that I mention, but with more information on the actual technical qualities of the film: Q Branch on The Brood. Also, this is where I stole the picture.

A Month of Music Videos (Flaming Lips, Lady Gaga, Rihanna)

Monthly music video roundup! I bet it sounds like this is something I do regularly, doesn't it? Well, it isn't, and I doubt it will ever happen again.

Enjoy!

As a man who did a thesis on music videos, I was excited to find that November 2009 was a month of buzz about some new work in the field... specifically, there are three new videos creating buzz, and I'm pretty impressed with them. They are, in no particular order, Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, Rihanna's Russian Roulette, and The Flaming Lips' Watching the Planets (warning: definitely definitely NSFW).

I give at least one award to every competitor. Here they are.

The winner for MOST EXPLOSIVE TREATMENT OF A FAIRLY SIMPLE IDEA:
Lady Gaga's Bad Romance

This award goes to the video that takes a story that can be summed up in one sentence ("I'm drugged and abducted, sold for sex, and turn out to be too much for my buyer to handle") and makes it into a platform for epic deconstruction of fashion, sexuality, and the body, among a number of other things. And I have to hand it to Gaga... nobody does "explosive" quite like she does. Each successive image in this video is striking, from the erotic to the disturbing, and the central themes -- fashion, spectacle, and subliminal violence -- hold them all together.

The winner for MOST SUBVERSIVE USE OF GENITALIA:
The Flaming Lips' Watching the Planets

The Flaming Lips' use of nudity has come up a lot in the buzz, but that's definitely not the most harrowing part of this video, which is so in-your-face that it's almost gruesome. The most intense part of the video is the main "prop," with its yonic orifice, and the general implication of the narrative, which portrays a reverse birthing of that lead singer guy. This is an idea worthy of Cronenberg (in fact, I'm gonna watch the Brood some time this week! Maybe I'll expand on this blog post)... we may use the womb as an image of warmth and comfort at times, but I think we all ultimately cringe at the idea of being forced back into it. There's a lot of anxiety buried under this music video concept, and I think it makes for one of the scarier images of the year, an image of profound unbeing, as the gift of life is revoked.

The winner for BEST DAMN VIDEO, DAMMIT:
Rihanna's Russian Roulette

I think Rihanna really gets what makes a good music video. You don't have time to tell an elaborate story, or make a nuanced political statement... you may be able to challenge some authoritative ideas (Like a Prayer), or evoke some powerful emotions (Closer), but what a good video comes down to is the striking power of a cinematic image. The images in Russian Roulette strike all the right chords... they're vastly suggestive without being too complex, hiding a narrative behind each composition, but never frustrating us with the lack of further exposition. They're evocative, rather than being "symbolic" per se (over-reliance on symbolism may be an issue in videos such as Estranged, although I absolutely love it anyway).

Most importantly, Rihanna's images are mysterious and beautiful and powerful, reiterating the themes of the song: frustration, lack of control, and the desperation and anxiety of living on the edge of a knife.

I like Rihanna's video the best, but as you can see from the three worthy contenders above, the music video is absolutely a living art form. It's an art form that's designed to create buzz, and as buzz becomes a more powerful force (via the blogosphere, YouTube, etc), I think the music video will undergo some serious development and revolution. Blogs like Motionographer and Shape + Colour are providing the buzz required for new creators to break into the traditionally corporate genre, and a lot of these young directors seem to be crowding onto Vimeo, where authorship is strongly emphasized.

One thing I notice about these three videos is that none of them has a "performance" section that's broken away from the main narrative/conceptual footage. This is a major tradition among video direction... even apart from videos that are completely performance-based (Bjork's Big Time Sensuality), we find performance sections even in heavily narrative pieces like November Rain, Janie's Got a Gun, and... uhhh... Behind These Hazel Eyes. Is it because the live performance aspect of music-making is being deemphasized, as remix culture and audio post-production take stronger roles in the creative process?

I don't know. I just know the art form seems to be continuing to blossom, and I continue to be excited about it.

The Fantastic Mr Fox: Good Job, Wes and Raold

Raold Dahl and Wes Anderson are people who have created very personal, stylized worlds over the course of their storytelling careers. Raold Dahl's world is whimsical and exaggerated, acting according to a sort of unfamiliar logic (unfamiliar to us adults, perhaps, because it's a magical and childlike logic). His logic straddles the line of the non-sequitor at times, and his characters are painted in such clumsy splashes of personality that they can be grotesque and almost aversive. Wes Anderson is the complimentary opposite, creating emotional landscapes that are subdued and formal, sometimes clinical, like we're watching them interact in an emotional locked box (represented, in part, by the closed locations where his stories unfold: the Royal manor, Steve Zisou's submarine, Rushmore Academy). However, even in their dissimilarity, these two storytellers reach a similar place: both create worlds that are so spontaneous that they seem naked, bare and overexposed in their quirky internal logics.

It's interesting to see what happens when you cross-pollinate such different personalities. In the case of these two, the result is The Fantastic Mister Fox, which I can attest is a great movie.

The adaptation of Dahl's story moves quickly, but its over-arching themes -- confidence, the need for approval, and the larger commitment to marriage and community -- bring the frenetic plot together into a strong story. The pacing is fun, but the plot doesn't scream "fascinating" or "experimental" (or "pretentious," luckily). The film's true hook is its timing and comedic effect, and in this regard, Anderson hereby proves himself an adept. He gives his wry humor a dose of silliness, and a pinch of punchline, and it makes for a great experience.

I left this film feeling genuinely charmed. George Clooney helped in this regard, but he wasn't the only factor, because in the wrong hands, he comes off as a guy who tries too hard and ends up being off-putting. No, it was truly the whole film that charmed me... I came out feeling like I'd just spent these two hours having a conversation with a really friendly, interesting person in a bar, and they'd taken a personal interest in me and told me I was a really cool guy.

So three cheers for Wes Anderson. I'm a sucker for directors who can adapt to another effect (comedy) or another genre (childrens' stories) or another tone (whimsical), and Anderson does all three of these beautifully. Perhaps, given a sense of purpose and mission, his true strengths as a director come out. I've had mixed feelings about him before, but in this case, I can't find much of anything to criticize. Anderson and Dahl made it work just right.

Well-Resolved Movie Endings: An Ambiguity Intervention

There's been some talk of ambiguous endings over at CollegeHumor and Cinematical. The CollegeHumor video is good fun... the Cinematical article? Probably a bit divisive, since writer Jette criticizes the iconic open-ended conclusions of some truly canonical films. I mean, I know as well as the next guy... unless you're a Tai Chi master, sitting through 2001 is going to require some patience. However, if you're meditating along with 3 hours of Kubrick, or puzzling over all the cryptic cynicism of No Country for Old Men, or especially (and this one simply baffles me) going along with all the absurdity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then your mind should probably be a little loose and pliable by the end of the movie... enough that you can accept some unanswered questions.

Or maybe we're thinking about this backwards. Maybe it's not that they're inflicting ambiguity upon us (as Jette seems to assume) -- maybe we need to look at resolution itself, that polished up, nicely-packaged cereal box prize that comes with every popcorn flick, every childrens' movie, and everything involving Ron Howard. You know what that nugget is, and why studios are so intent on writing it into their pictures? It's because it's an addiction, and they need to keep feeding it to us so we keep the taste in our mouths.

Resolution as an addiction: here's the rationale. A widely-abused drug, generally speaking, is a way of evoking or enhancing something that we occasionally get anyway, just by being human... brain chemicals like dopamine, or stimulation of reward centers, or what have you. The drug is just something that's manufactured artificially, made to trigger those little pleasure-spots.

Now, in real life, there's something else we're always looking for... meaning, fairness, and resolution. Those things are surprisingly scarce in the real world, where things like cynicism, illogicality, and uncertainty are pretty much rampant. So most movies are filled with artifically-produced nuggets of meaning, like "good" and "evil," "karma," "justice," and "retribution." It's not that these things don't exist in real life... it's just that they're not very plentiful, and it sure feels good to get an extra hit once every week or two.

Addiction is just what happens when we condition ourselves to have more of these things than is naturally available. And "annoyance" is what results when we're looking for that weekly fix, and we end up with this movie where things are left up-in-the-air... a movie that pursues some less obvious intention, perhaps offering some sort of slower-acting analytical or thematic payoff, but that doesn't put out the goods we're always looking for.

When I see a truly unresolved movie... The Last Wave, or Blowup, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind... I get a pang of frustration at first. I didn't get to see anyone get rewarded, or punished, or targeted by divine justice. So it's a lot like real life, except maybe with better dialogue. However, once I have time to start reflecting on a film, I end up with this gradual-onset positive feeling, like you might get from successfully resisting a dependency, and feeling its grip on you loosen slightly.

I end up feeling like maybe there's stuff that's as messy and uncertain and pedestrian as the things that happen to me every day, but that it's still worth paying attention to, and even telling a story about.

Steve Tyler's new drama has reminded me how much I love Aerosmith

Did you ever have a favorite desk lamp that sat unused in a corner of the closet, and then one day, you jostled it and knocked it over, and it broke, and you were struck with a rush of sadness, even though you hadn't even plugged it in for, like, six years?

Or a favorite ice cream store that you hadn't been to since you were a small child, but one day you drove past it and happened to notice that it was closed because of the recession, and some small part of you was crushed by its disappearance, even though you're a vegan now and it was under new ownership anyway?

Or maybe you had a porno mag that you hid under a floorboard, and one day, many years later, you realized that you forgot about it when you moved, and you know it wasn't even that great, but you were like, "Oooh... but that was my very first Juggs."

Or maybe somebody assassinates Dan Quayle, and it's like, who cares? He's not even a public personality any more. But secretly, you mourn him, because you actually really liked him back when he was in office.

No?

Well, I had an experience kind of like all four of those when I found out Steven Tyler left Aerosmith. Apparently, he fell off stage during a concert at Abu Dhabi, and declared himself pretty much dissociated from the band. They tried to pull it back together and start looking for a new singer, but there's something a little grotesque about the idea of Aerosmith getting a new vocalist at this point in the band's career. Steven Tyler was a true front-man, the face and body of the band, and even with him in place, they were already well on their way into obscurity. Even in the best of circumstances, a revival would have been difficult, and without Steve, it's pretty dead in the water, I think.

Although I'd love to be proven wrong. For serious. And now I'm hearing that he's not out of the band... it's just a little personal drama, he's mad, people aren't talking, he might take a few years off, but maybe he's sad that Aerosmith didn't call him after he left, and he's wondering, is Joe sad that he left? Do they even care? But he can't hang out with them again right away, cause things are still weird. But if he happens to be at one of their New York concerts, he'll stop by their dressing room and say hi, at least.

Anyway, I'd hardly have noticed that stuff... like, I wouldn't have noticed if Mick Jagger left the Stones... except that Aerosmith was probably my first musical loyalty. I fell in love with Get a Grip when I was young enough that my parents thought the lyrics were inappropriate for me. I then grew with the band, and I listened a little to Nine Lives and Big Ones, but I still remember the band by their 90's epics: Pump, Get a Grip, and Permanent Vacation. I have to say, Pump is my favorite album, and The Other Side is my favorite song. Janie's Got a Gun is by far my favorite video.

I eventually fell in love with the younger spirit of punk rock, but I always held onto Aerosmith as my vision of real rock and roll, with its lewd combination of cheap glamour and grizzly cynicism. Tyler was a fresh face in entertainment for a little while, but he was never a spritely youth... he's always had this weathered, self-destructive, crinkled old man inside his body, so much so that he seems like he's always been dying, but will never fully expire. Maybe you could say the same about the band, too, although it's easier to see it when you've got the howling banshee face and the skeleton body for reference.

I know this post has been a bit self-serving, but sometimes I just want to write a tribute, instead of an analysis. So here's to you, Aerosmith-as-Tyler-and-Perry, whether you're dying or just acting out some old-man drama. Thanks for making some news again.

NYMag's David Edelstein and 'Precious': How to write a controversial review

As much as we'd like to think we can draw a line between racists and non-racists, most of us know, at this point in history, that racism is endemic to many of our basic perceptions and assumptions, and that racial tension and difference infects even well-intentioned communicative action and civil public relationships. Precious, Lee Daniels' recent massively-grossing film, makes some strong statements on racism, classism, sexism, and general normative judgment, and it was only natural that it would be the spark that ignited some heated public discourse on these topics.

I haven't seen the movie, but I've followed a little of the public discourse, and that's what I'm going to talk about right now. I'm going to try to keep this post brief and unassuming, because I'm fully aware that seeing the movie and reading the book it's based on are imperative to really diving into a discussion of representational identity politics. Please bear with me... I'm going to work hard to keep my commentary confined to the discourse itself, which is all I'm qualified to discuss right now.

A little outburst of controversy has sprung up around one particular review: David Edelstein's review of the film in New York Magazine, which prompted a firestorm of criticism in the comments, and which prompted him to follow up with the kind of blog post that reads as both an apology and a self-defense. A lot of the controversy seems to be rooted in the fact that Edelstein used some very provocative language to describe the film:

"She’s also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse. The book gives you quite a bludgeoning. I started to pull back from it in a flashback when the 12-year-old girl is in labor on the kitchen floor and her mother is kicking her in the face. "

"I’m not judging girls who look like Sidibe in life, but her image onscreen is jarring to the point of being transgressive, its only equivalent to be seen in John Waters’s pointedly outrageous carnivals. Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. Her expression is either surly or unreadable. Even with her voice-over narration, you’re meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing. The movie is saying that she’s not an object, but the way that Sidibe is directed she becomes one."

The anger at Edelstein's review goes in all sorts of directions... detractors call him racist and prejudiced, they say that he sees the negatives in such relief only because he's sheltered from real hardships, and they think his lukewarm review of the film is inaccurate, because he fails to understand it on any deeper level. Edelstein retorts: the film was intended to make this negative impression, so he can't be blamed for describing it. And he does understand these issues, because he's dealt with them in his own background and experience. He spends a good deal of his response defending his opinion of the film.

However, this is missing the point, and failing to speak to the issue, which isn't the content of his discussion, but its form.

What Edelstein was trying to do in his review is clear... he was trying to evoke the movie's emotional and tonal content, to reproduce the ugliness that the film represents and critiques. That's the only reason to use such descriptive, provocative language to describe body type, appearance, and sexual abuse. However, Mr. Edelstein needs to realize that this isn't the role of a reviewer. The movie is carefully crafted to evoke these negative reactions, but with two hours of running time, it has the time to critique them and give the audience space to think about them.

You can't do that in a review, so you don't have the license to play on readers' emotions. Your job is to acknowledge and critique the spectacle: warn the audience that they'll be shocked at times, tell them that the images can be too heavy-handed, etc. It's a reviewer's job to have some critical distance, and to address multiple levels of merit and criticism... not to capture and reproduce the same emotions that the movie did. When you do this, your criticism will sound impulsive and ill-considered.

And this is what happened here, of course. A large part of the audience (and a bunch of readers of Jezebel) sensed Mr. Edelstein's negative reactions, but they didn't sense the necessary self-criticism that goes along with them, and that the film is trying to evoke. His sin is that he wrote a knee-jerk reaction, rather than an articulate critical assessment... not as bad as the sin of being racist, but still, a faux pas.

There were certain very measured, insightful critical points here: the observation that Sidibe's appearance is transgressive, and that the film may be too harsh in its Manichean portrayals of pure good and pure evil. When I see the film, I'm going to look for those things. If the whole review had kept that tone, it probably would have been better-received, even if the final opinion was the same.

There are other minor breaks in Mr. Edelstein's logic. For instance, he seemed to be saying that it was the abuse that really took him out of the movie ("I started to pull back from it in a flashback when the 12-year-old girl is in labor on the kitchen floor...") but his most graphic description is a description of the main character's appearance. His conscious emphasis is on the film's cruelty to its characters, but his subconscious emphasis seems to be on his aesthetic reactions to Sidibe's body. I'm not going to start attacking a reviewer's character without knowing them personally, but this point is at least worth thinking about.

The reaction was sudden and vicious, and I'm never one to take Internet forum posts at face value... but there's always a reason for it.

Chris Smith's 'Collapse': Finding the issues in the character you found in the issues

The American capitalist world is a highly specialized, systematic, profit-driven place. There's a structure, and we're expected to support it, along with all its assumptions and implications. Culture, religion, identity, history, innovation, and subversion are all accorded their roles, and there are cracks and bubbles for the outliers, where they can be confined without becoming dangerous enough to threaten anything essential.

Chris Smith is an emerging independent filmmaker, and he's taken an inadvertent interest in these outliers. His second feature documentary, Collapse, was just screened in New York, and it's moving around the country on a tour of a number of major cities. You should absolutely see it when it comes along. It's a an obsessively focused portrait of a man proposing a self-taught ideology that swims upstream against the status quo, and whether you read it as a document on pressing current issues, or a study of a man who lives more drama than most scripted characters, it's a compelling piece of film.

Smith was actually planning on making a fictional film about drug trafficking when he ran across Michael Ruppert, former police officer and self-described prophet of the collapsing capitalist paradigm. Ruppert sidetracked him, and he decided to capture two days worth of footage of Ruppert exposing the vast tapestry of political and economic interactions he had woven in his head. This mostly has to do with consumption, energy use, and natural resources as the dwindling substructure for a global economy of surplus. The footage, shot in the basement of an abandoned warehouse under bare interrogation-style light, makes up the substance of Collapse.

Collapse shares certain approaches with Smith's breakthrough 1999 feature. The film, entitled American Movie, is about Mark Borchardt, a Midwestern salt-of-the-earth filmmaker desperate to produce his first feature-length masterpiece. Boracht is another character right out of a script-writer's imagination... if Billy Bob Thornton and Wes Anderson had a love-child, it might look like Mark. However, Boracht's endearing commonness is the texture upon which his passion stands, and his honest, flawed humanness... worries about money, confusion about the opposite sex, managing relationships with his family and his best friend... is what makes it so incredible when he takes on the passionate filmmaker role that American Movie puts into relief.

Not so with Michael Ruppert. Ruppert always walks the line between prophet and crackpot, and our perspective on him consists almost entirely of his own face and words, the direct window into his obsessive beliefs. He never looks pedestrian... whether by Smith's effort or his own, he keeps an air of mystery and self-confidence throughout the portrayal. When Ruppert plucks his cigarette from his mouth, he becomes Chow Yun Fat in The Killer, a lingering adept who has made this warehouse cellar his domain.

I'd venture that this confidence... coming from a man who at times seems totally defeated and paranoid... is the result of years of hardening one's identity against ridicule and criticism. This is what comes about when your heart has dictated your direction, and no matter how difficult it's been, you can't be turned from that path by skeptics and nay-sayers. The confidence is also Ruppert's greatest asset... his ideas about the future of humanity are cataclysmic, and if they were given to me in a pamphlet, I'd make fun of it and then throw it out. However, from Ruppert's mouth, "the truth" takes on a certain gravity, and it compels people to listen.

According to Chris, the compulsion is strong enough that the vice-president of the Toronto film festival reversed the decision not to show the film, saying (in effect) I didn't like it at first, but I couldn't get the guy out of my head. This film acts on the principle that confidence can be convincing, entirely independent of its specific content.

Chris says that these outliers... idealists, unemployed ideologues, artistic and political dreamers... aren't a project for him. I'm excited to follow his vision, when he starts releasing narrative films, but I also wouldn't object to some more films that occupy this space, where the real American identity is at its fringes. I think he's a filmmaker to watch, and I think the subtle vision he's shown us in his films thus far is worth pursuing to the end of the earth and back.

The New York / Paris / Moscow triad in New York, I Love You

Saw a film this weekend called New York, I Love You... younger cousin to Paris, je t'aime, a 2006 all-star amalgamation of short film vignettes. New York, I Love You featured shorts from a bunch of important directors, most of whom I don't know that well (though I think there are people who would say I should). They were a mixed bag, ranging from overly sentimental to very witty and concise. In any case, it felt fairly New Yorky, by and large... sometimes trying too hard, full of people you recognize, but sincere and accomodating enough that it's hard to begrudge it its flaws.

There's a little theory I've had floating around in my head for a while now, which is a theory on kinship of cities. It's the type of thing that I could turn into a thesis, if I was a very broad generalist of certain types of classical culture, and if I spent a few years hunting down the right studies, explorations, and travelogues. The theory is that there is an old Western world and a new Western world, and these are each represented by a triad of world cities. For the New Western World, I'd say it's Los Angeles, Tokyo, and London. I'll talk more about that some other time.

For the Old Western World, which I'm personally more attracted to, I'd say the triad consists of New York, Paris, and Moscow. And one of these vignettes is a clear illustration of this kinship.

The short piece called "Hotel Suite" on the film's website is about an aging opera singer who's clearly feeling spent and exhausted and lost in her nostalgia. She asks for a room on a higher floor (allegedly to escape the sounds of traffic) and is led there by a bellboy straight from the 40's. This bellboy clearly has a Russian accent, and he continuously discusses the singer's performances in Paris. This luminous setting is where three cities meet, connected by the thread of opera, one of the definitive art forms of classical Europe.

Along with opera, classic European culture is tied together by theater, haute couture fashion, and the romantic/melodramatic philosophy of art and culture. It's about the novelist, the New York and Moscow ballets, the Harlem Rennaissance, the symphony orchestra, the New York studio, the Paris loft, the Moscow Plaza... it's about New York and Moscow having the most distinctive public transportation systems in the world. It's about the culture of the University, Columbia, the Sorbonne, and Moscow State University. It's about two movies, both about finding love in the Old World.

There are other details that connect these cities in New York, I Love You... a film composer reading Dostoyevsky. A young Americanized Russian (Anton Yelchin) playing one of the key roles. Producer Emmanuel Benbihy was educated in Paris, where he learned the business of art. However, I'm not a film conspiracy theorist, and I acknowledge that these fade against the background of a fully international movie... a movie populated by Buddhists, Hasidic Jews, Chinese, and many others of uncertain ethnic origin.

At any rate, feel free to take a look at this little pastiche of a film. A lot of the reviewers may have gotten hung up on its claim to artistic merit, so they judged it a bit harshly, when it's actually more of a pop construction of cute little self-contained characterizations. For someone whose life is saturated with complex two-hour filmic odysseys, this kind of assemblage is refreshing and justifies $12.50 and a couple hours out of the weekend.

The three poles of TERROR: Have a structural Halloween

I was thinking a lot about horror and scary stories tonight, and it occurred to me that fear-inducing entities in storytelling typically have three essential sources. These are very abstract, of course, and they probably leave some outliers that I'm not thinking about, but still, it was an interesting little exercise to look at how they relate, and plot all the major studio monsters I could think of onto a field of horror concept.

I broke it down to three categories:

1) NATURAL: this includes anything with an explanation in plausible, real-world terms. Head-cases and psychological abominations... anything that represents an abberration of nature or humanity... that goes in this category. This category is driven by fear of disorder and lack of control.

2) SUPERNATURAL: supernatural is anything that completely refuses to be explained or justified in terms of physical or psychological laws. Supernatural forces come from other worlds, and the reason these worlds are "other" is that we don't have any way of understanding them. This is driven by fear of otherness and the unknown.

3) THE DEAD: A necessary third category, because it represents so much fiction. Apparently we're in constant fear of having to face an incarnation of mortality, which is where the unknown looms in all our lives. This is driven by fear of death (duh).

All objects of anxiety in horror and "tales of the strange" represent some combination of these essential anxieties. I put them all into a cool little graph, so we can discuss their various roles. Here it is... click for a huge version:



By the way, congratulations to Freddy Krueger, who gets the central spot. He's an insane child molester, murdered by an angry mob, who now inhabits the "other world" of dreams, a common focal point for myths of the supernatural. He's pretty much the best of all three horror worlds, which is why I'll never watch a Nightmare On Elm Street (revision LOL) movie by myself, or after dark, or without being physically forced to do so.

Also, it's worth noting some other little insights here. Dracula is clearly down on the line between "dead" and "supernatural," because he traded his humanity for his immortality, and died a symbolic death in the process. However, other vampires may inhabit other locations on this little graph. Some are the products of science, or a blood disease, like the crazy beasties in I Am Legend. Some don't really die in order to become Vampires, like the gothy teenagers in Vampire: The Masquerade.

It's worth contrasting Dracula with the Zombie myth... zombies are embodiments of death, much like vampires, but unlike vampires, they're usually explained scientifically, rather than supernaturally.

I've placed all "demonic" presences down by "supernatural," with a little nudge toward "dead," because even though they themselves were never human, and therefore never died human deaths, they still preside over the land of the dead, and death is their explicit domain. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones are the only creatures I can think of that are absolutely, completely otherworldly, in a non-scientific way, and aren't somehow related to human mortality.

So that's today's structuralist musing on horror, and a new addition to my list of cute little graphical gestures in this bloggy-blog. I wonder if you'd get more out of it by adding another variable, like original release/appearance date for each villain? You could code that into colors for the dots, and maybe you'd discover that horror has been moving from more supernatural to more natural over time.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY

Revisionist Western and the loss of the father: Sam Peckinpah and Cormac McCarthy, among others

I’ve been swimming in manly media lately – I’ve read two Cormac McCarthy novels almost consecutively, and I’ve watched an old Sam Peckinpah operetta called Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. Peckinpah also directed one of my favorite Westerns, The Wild Bunch. I also read Native Son, the Richard Wright novel about being a black youth in America. It’s been a streak of manhood-themed narratives, and I thought maybe it wouldn’t be a bad time to write something on the topic.

Reading McCarthy’s novels (in my case, No Country for Old Men and The Road) is an experience to be had. I was severely skeptical going in… I read a little critique of his writing some time ago called A Readers’ Manifesto, and it primed me to expect his writing to be rather gimmicky and contrived. This would almost be a valid criticism, as he writes with a conspicuously “muscular” prose that comes across as trying very hard sometimes. However, the pace and rhythm of his narratives carry the reader along with them, so you don’t have to think too hard about individual passages… as it turns out, you hardly have time to linger over them. Finally, what gives his novels the compelling personality that has made him famous is the combination of brutality and sentimentality woven into his writing. I think he’s perfected a certain style of sensitivity-by-counterpoint, writing stories where themes of love and nostalgia are made more poignant by the hostility of the foreground events.

McCarthy and Sam Packinpah share a lot in this regard. Both work with themes of the loss of the old world (the old world of the American West, in particular) and seem to mourn the mechanization and specialization of death. Anton Chigurh and the dope-runners (No Country) are analogues to the gattling gun, the motor car, and the Mexican army (The Wild Bunch). There’s a haunting resonance between Pike Bishop and Tom Bell, both of whom are old-world patriarchs taking up the task of fatherhood for somebody who’s destined to get themselves into trouble. Angel and Llewellyn are strikingly similar, as well… violent, young, sharply instinctive but reckless and doomed young heroes who love too hard to keep themselves safe.

And so, we see the old west becoming a metaphor for the father figure, majestic but ineffective, shuffling into its twilight. The old west is changing into a hostile new war zone driven by crime and accelerating ruthlessness, no place for honor or dignity (or Old Men), and with this death of an old world comes the death of the idealistic father, serving his principles until his last breath. In this new world, the son is on his own to bear the stings of cruelty and hopelessness.

If No Country for Old Men and The Wild Bunch overlap so precisely, The Road and Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia are thematically adjacent, offset in either direction. In The Road, a novel which embodies Sheriff Bell’s final dream of his father, we see the final struggles of the true father figure in a hopeless world, and we come to respect him, even in defeat (this is actually notably similar to 3:10 to Yuma, another revisionist Western). Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia sits on the opposite side of death: Alfredo Garcia himself was the father figure, albeit a young, dashing example, the first and truest object of the female’s affection; unfortunately, the movie finds him already dead. In the wake of his demise, which is essentially meaningless, Bennie takes on the role of the upstart son. He hijacks the mother’s love, as a son is wont to do (both in the Oedipal and the basic familial sense). He confronts the world that destroyed his father, and in so doing, he takes up the father’s cause. And as in all the other works referenced above, he is facing a ruthless, nihilistic world where raw power and violence trump those fallen ideals of virtue and heroism. So, finally, his only choice is to rage against this world, and essentially self-destruct in its face. This resonated even more with me because I read Native Son, which is about a similar effect... the self-destruction of black youth upon being deprived of a father figure, both literal and sociocultural.

If you want a study of the loss of the father figure, I’d recommend adding one more to the list: Michael Douglass’s Falling Down, which is a sad, hopeless, and fantastic movie, one of the most compelling depictions of claustrophobic modern rage that you’ll ever see. If it’s comparable to any of the films discussed above, it’s most analogous to The Road – these are both stories of the father’s journey and his struggle with hope in a hopeless world, and with the need to take on the role of the father in a world where the father is an outdated mode. They’re very different takes on the theme… for instance, where The Road is very introspective, Falling Down is explosively hostile. However, it’s a worthy final edition to the realm of study hinted at above.