The Intelligent Action Film: Heat (1995) and Luc Besson

After seeing Heat (Michael Mann, 1995) this weekend, I took an Internet jaunt to find something rare and beautiful: the intelligent action movie. Now, I'm not a true action film buff (I have yet to see Lady Terminator (Djalil, 1988), which has been on the shelf in my apartment for years), but I know my way around the genre, at least a bit... I have a healthy and justifiable habit of falling in love with random action films, like Terminator 2 (Cameron, 1991) and The Rundown (Berg, 2003), and this habit stretches back into my adolescence, when many of us first discovered the great action heroes (most of whom are now in The Expendables). With the encouragement of my action film literate roommate, I've seen a number of the Van Damme/Kirk Douglas/Steven Seagal canon, and on my own power, I've gotten to check out some of the classic action sci-fi's: Aliens, Starship Troopers, and The Fifth Element. I've also engaged, on a cursory level, the kung-fu classics, including old-school Jackie Chan and Jet Li, kitsch-fests by Seijun Suzuki, and Samurai classics like Sword of Doom and Lady Snowblood. So when it comes to this discussion, I've at least got the safety off and my finger on the trigger.

Now, when I reference the hazy concept of the "action film," you'll just have to take for granted that I'm trying to keep it simple. It's pretty much any film whose, you know, primary dramatic tension is caused by, you know, violence, and resolved by some, like, extended fight scenes. I know, I know, there are a LOT of films that fit into this category. You could go as far back as Buster Keaton and old Westerns. For my own part, I'm focusing more on films after the 1970's, just to make it a little easier on myself. Anyway, I think this is when they started acknowledging "action" as a genre unto itself, with its own section in Blockbuster, totally separate from "drama" and "family" and "music videos."

When I say "intelligent," I'm totally not talking about cryptic or artsy, though I'm not specifically excluding those robust virtues. I'd call Nolan's new one cryptic, and even complex, but its intelligence isn't quite what I'm talking about. When I say "intelligent," I'm talking about action movies that feel real, and clever, without relying on gimmicks or twists; action films that don't pander to their audience. I know this doesn't necessarily make a great action film per se, and in fact, I'm ruling out all my personal favorites: Terminator 2, The Matrix, 300, The Killer, and Unleashed. Nay, I'm talking about a quality that's almost completely missing from action films: subtlety and restraint. I know, I know, it's a very narrow use of the word "intelligent," and I should have been more specific. I'm sorry. I'll do better next time.

See, this is what's so great about Heat: it cuts a razor-thin line, making violence intense and dramatic (one of the best gun battles ever filmed), but also evoking a sense of coolness and procedure. The military-style advance/cover/retreat pattern was goddamn breathtaking, but it's clear that for these characters, it's a day's work, familiar terrain on the roadmap of a disciplined and violent career. The film is refreshing free of over-the-top reaction shots, stunts (was there even a single stunt in this film?), and exposition about plots and heists. There was a time when I thought Reservoir Dogs was pretty realistic, but now it seems like another heist movie that thinks it's clever. There's no workaday rhythm to it... just a lot of shooting, hysteria, and bad planning.

And when you know how to wield the Hammer of Subtlety, you can make a film -- even a heavy-duty action film like Heat -- and still populate it with compelling characters and studies of personality. We see dimensions in Vincent and Neil that we never got to see in John McClain, despite the latter's bevy of movies and constant return to his marital and family problems. These characters express themselves in every aspect of the movie... in their withered relationships with their families, with their professional conduct and tactical decisions, and in their short, poignant moments with one another. It's hard to even count all the insights we get into Neil, including those he shares with Vincent -- his weariness, his strength of will, his loyalty to those close to him -- and those wherein they so sharply contrast -- their motivation, their use of authority, their ways of expressing personal responsibility. It's a study in character consistency, played out over some of the sickest street-set gunfights I've seen in my cinephiliac adulthood.

The only movies I can think of that do the same thing, at least so far, are Luc Besson's earlier action efforts, Leon The Professional and La Femme Nikita. Besson walks a strange tightrope, essentially filming exotic romances built on action-movie premises and occasional set-pieces. La Femme Nikita was a joyous and tragic film about love frustrated by the call to violence. The Montmarte setting, practically sweating with sunlight and Paris accordion music, is a stage for Nikita's rebirth, which is accompanied by a romantic reawakening. It's unfortunate, what we know about the girl: that this rebirth is financed by a top-secret assassin's guild, and that in payment, she has to carry out its missions. The film becomes a study in tension between vulnerability and alienation, guiding us through the love affair between Nikita and Marco, and confronting us with the unbridgeable gap between them, the result of Nikita's need to keep her profession a secret. What allowed this to work so well... what kept it human... was that the violence was quick and nasty, and never romanticized or played for cartoonish effect. It just wouldn't have been much of a movie in John Woo's hands.

As a side-note -- loosely related to the raw authenticity of this film -- it's been frustrating to see the Nikita spin-offs, one after another, that miscast the main character as a steamy supermodel. Anne Parillaud is beautiful in the way that models are never beautiful, because their specifications are so precise. She's gawky at times, with a messiness around the edges of her beauty, and Besson makes it clear that for her, hypersexuality is a struggle. I'm just writing this aside to lament the subsequent casting of Peta Wilson, Bridget Fonda, and Maggie Q in reprises of the roles. They're lovely, don't get me wrong, but part of the sincerity and charm in Besson's version is that Nikita could slide so smoothly from alluring to unremarkable.

Leon: The Professional shares many of Nikita's virtues, being a study of a simmering relationship between two outcasts, each shackled in their own defenses. Perhaps the slightly Cassandratic father-daughter relationship between Leon and Mathilde is what allows Leon to expose his vulnerable side to Mathilde, despite normally being so detached and pure-business about his murderous profession. It's striking how similar Mathilde is to Nikita -- both are wrenched, through violence, from broken former lives, and both begin to express their nascent sexuality under hostile circumstances. Both are being trained as killers. Mathilde is compelling as Nikita's spiritual successor.

Again, the violence is quick and professional (movie title reference LOL), and it doesn't infringe upon the audience's engagement with the characters. These characters, in turn, can be subtle and nuanced, and know how to handle a firearm with a telescopic sight. I contend that these three are all action movies, but that they're rare cases in that the action doesn't crowd out the human drama. Anyone have any more suggestions for films like this? Something I'm missing?

Of course, there are also films like the crime flicks of Jean-Pierre Melville. In the interest of time and space and the patience of any poor readers that might show up, I won't talk about his various milestones, like Le Cercle Rouge and the brilliant Army of Shadows. I'll just talk about Le Samourai for now. In my estimation, it's the most "actiony" of his films I've seen, which tend to fixate on other things, like the psychology of characters in times of war and stress.

Le Samourai is like the previous films in that the violence is quick, dirty, and downplayed, tucked in the cracks between stalkings and stake-outs. The meat of the film is the connective tissue between these murderous moments, which are over in a flash -- the periods where Jef builds and stresses his relationships, which are inevitably constructed around his dangerous mode of employment. Jef's story is not so much a human story, filled with multi-dimensional characters. Rather, it's a minimalist, almost formalist piece of filmmaking, an exercise in tension and perception and focus, with a pervasive sense of abstraction: the bird, the blank spaces, the two woman as object and accessory.

If you're curious, I'd recommend checking out Le Samourai as a companion piece to Clooney's new hit-man film The American, which (according to a couple reviews I've read) has the same sort of silent, solitary mood. I'm guessing The American replaces Le Samourai's abstract minimalism with a more tactile reality, but I suspect these films will reward comparison. I'm rather excited to see Clooney as a tacit, technically-savvy specialist, rather than a moody socialite. Hopefully it will turn out well.

That aside, yay for the intelligent action film -- the movie that uses action beats, but provides enough space and counterpoint to them that it can avoid falling into the standard action blockbuster paradigm (no conflict or resolution except for manichean violence). These are action films that make good on those genre tropes, but ultimately make their own statement, rather than letting their genre speak for them. Please, if anyone reads this and it makes them think of some other movies, let me know.

The Piano Teacher: Sick Movie for a Saturday Night

I saw my first film by provocateur Michael Haneke, The Piano Teacher (2001), and I decided to jot down my initial reflection, centered on my interpretation of the film's central theme, and the parallel themes that inform it.

In other news, I've started posting capsule reactions to Twitter whenever I see a film. Check out my Twitter feed if this interests you. So far, both reactions I've done have taken up exactly the 140 allowed characters... I'll try to continue this irrelevant trend!

This film, insomuch as I've discerned some order in its madness, is about masturbation: a compulsive, self-involved sexual appetite, fueled by fantasy and incompatible with reality. Erika could be a case study of a person whose inability to relate to people drives her to a life of sexual self-involvement, to the point of perverted pathologies. For starters, consider the film's obsession with hands (unavoidable, for a movie about piano virtuosity), and its themes of guilt and voyeurism, the most superficial telltale signs. The film doesn't contrive to explain Erika's obsessive self-indulgence/denial in any simple way... indeed, there are so many psychological forces hovering over her, it becomes a bit of an orgy of negative influences and broken behavioral patterns (if you'll pardon the figure of speech).

Of course, there's a few intersecting themes here... the alienation and indifference of the Vienna intellectual class is certainly a factor, having so deeply affected the psychology of the dominant characters. Only Erika's students are emotionally complete human beings: Walter with his compassion, self-possession, and vulnerability, and Anna, with her frustrated hopes and fragile self-image. The adults of Erika's world can only talk about things clinically, or judgmentally, or academically, having mistaken their aesthetic sensibilities for actual personalities.

Of course, it's hard to tell whether this clique is really so alienated, or whether we're just experiencing them through Erika's distorted lens. Haneke's cold shooting style seems objective, but to Erika, her own detached view of the world must seem equally objective, and indeed, even the earlier, quieter parts of the film are suffused with cynicism. Those who feel The Piano Teacher is objective and external have bought into one of the film's many hustles... it's actually a deeply internal film, but it's internal to a mind that's dead of sentiment and vulnerability, a purely aesthetic self-construction with no sensitivity to anything but music.

It's easy to dig into Erika's relationship with her mother for some deep Freudian explanation -- indeed, it's almost too obvious, considering the film takes place in Vienna -- but we don't really have to dig. Of all the film's relationships, this is one that wears its dysfunction most on its sleeve. It's a relationship with broken boundary issues and abusive patterns... a battle for control on the part of Erika's mother, and an already-lost struggle for independence on Erika's own part. Erika's mother's combination of physical intimidation and guilt-mongering is an extreme extension of bad parenting, and it's got Erika stuck in petulant child mode. This is why Erika's own sexuality is onanistic and adolescent: she's never emerged from that phase of childhood when we start feeling sexual urges and looking for ways to express them, but have to keep them secret from the watchful eyes of our parents. It's telling that Erika's only actual sexual encounters are in clandestine asides in public places: the bathroom of the conservatory, the closet of a skating ring, the classic refuges for guilty teenage sexuality. Stuck in such unhealthy proximity to her mother, it's natural that Erika would develop these patterns -- she doesn't even have the luxury of her own bed to have sex (or masturbate) in!

Among the most curious developments in The Piano Teacher is Erika's belief, apparently mistaken, that she would enjoy being the victim of sexual dominance. She spends the whole film reminding herself of her own power, intentionally undermining the people around her in order to keep herself in control of their emotional states. As her behavior develops, a pronounced dichotomy between reality and fantasy emerges. Apparently, Erika's obsession with dominance is rooted in a deeper fantasy about submission. Erika clearly hopes Walter can help her bridge this gap between the real and the imagined, and this belief turns out to be misguided. As unpredictable as Erika's desires turn out to be, it's even more confounding that these desires can't be fulfilled, or the whole construct comes crashing down.

One of the great strengths of the film is the logical ordering, and simultaneous incomprehensibility, of the main character's psychology. Haneke's storytelling is profoundly unpredictable, building up to missing climaxes (like poor Walter) and staging character developments at moments when the audience's expectations are off-balance. Yet, at the end of the film, all of the characters seem to make sense, their pathologies exhibiting an enigmatic insight into the strangeness of cognition and behavior. Hard to watch? Perhaps... but only because we recognize these twists and turns, though we purport them to be entirely beyond our ken.

Genre Attack: Westerns by way of the spaghetti

The Spaghetti Westerns have reminded me that the whole Western megagenre is concerned with the creation of myths. Whether John Ford realized it or not, his Ringo Kid and Ethan Edwards and Scar were made to be timeless, the embodiments of the wandering spirits of the frontier. Ethan’s emergence from the lonely prairie, and his final departure from society through an open door, are the stuff of icons. For most of the film, Scar is practically a whispered name, an invocation of evil; the Ringo Kid is a rumor come to life. This legacy provided the essential capital for the Spaghetti Westerns that came some thirty years later, trading as they did in nameless heroes and mythical villains: The Man with No Name, Silence, Django, Angel Eyes. The Sergio’s knew how to work with archetype and universality, those essential ingredients of mythmaking.

It’s only recently that the Western genre has become preoccupied with breaking down mythologies, rather than building them up. It may have started with the directorial work of Eastwood, whose later cowboys were less heroic than their distant forebears. It’s a noteworthy theme in 3:10 to Yuma, where the dangerous central villain, a notorious jailbreaker, gradually reveals himself to be a fallible, sympathetic human being. It’s also an important theme in No Country for Old Men: Llewellyn Moss is on the way to becoming a mythical hero, but at the moment of truth, his capital runs out, leaving only the mythical murderer. These used to be myths of redemption, after all… the Coens deconstructed them into Anton Chigurh, a myth of terrifying, unstoppable destruction.

Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is noteworthy in this context, as well, being a sort of reactionary Western, dissolving myth into the mundane and depicting a journey that ends in ambivalence. A slow-burning campfire of a film, Three Burials takes Plato's cave, the feeling of gradual ascent toward some sort of personal revelation, and imbues it with the hopelessness that comes with living in a perfectly imperfect, incurably impure world. It’s got the same oppressive feeling as No Country for Old Men, but Three Burials emphasizes the banality of the main character’s personal agenda, and so forks directly away from No Country’s heroes-of-the-frontier mythological drama. In this, Three Burials makes No Country--and virtually all other Westerns--look like common action films, full of unrealistic gunplay and contrived suspense. I’m not going to go disparage the classics or anything, but still, it’s a striking vision of how two different filmmakers can take the same attitude in two different narrative directions.

Or, more amazing, a single filmmaker, if he's brilliant enough, can take things in two directions all by himself. I'm referring to Sergio Leone, the star-child of the Spaghetti Western, and the inspiration for so much of the genre's later development. It's a credit to the guy that he revolutionized the Western with the Man With No Name, and created an absolute archetype... but it's even more brilliant, to the point of transcendence, that he brought the genre to completion in two different ways: first, as a culmination, with Once Upon a Time in the West, and second, as a send-up, with My Name is Nobody.

It's understandable that recent revisionist Westerns have had to go down the claustrophobic and understated routes, because after Once Upon a Time in the West, it's hard to imagine anybody taking another shot at the epic Western of frontier violence. The film is built around the vast American enterprise of manifest destiny, and the hole it carved in the older traditions of open space and Native American culture. It's about the American way springing up around that point of infiltration... complete with its ruthless capitalism, its social and ethnic diversity, its political vendettas, and its rugged individualism.

And within the context of this American myth, Leone creates a cast of mythological characters: "Harmonica," an ethnic outsider, weathered and solitary, and his counterpart, Cheyenne the bandit, whose gang has staked its claim to the prairie with guns and dusters. Claudia Cardinale's Jill McBain is the vengeful wife, the siren, the independent woman, a survivalist and an entrepreneur, at times resembling Scarlett O'Hara. Harmonica's background is the essential motif that links Once Upon a Time in the West to the whole tradition of Spaghetti Westerns that it maxed out. Each character has their own musical theme, and each has their archetype to uphold and their role to play.

But none of these protagonists can match Frank, the villain, for sheer screen presence. The bandit Cheyenne and the mysterious Harmonica make good on their archetypes, but it's Frank who creates his own legend, right there in the course of the story. He's almost a deranged father figure, with kind eyes and a winning smile, sweeping through the story and destroying lives... not for money, or apparently for loyalty, or even gleeful sadism, but simply because this is the person he was born to be. Leone makes it clear, with Frank, that the West is a fertile ground for tyrants to carve out their empires, and only the willpower of the American frontiersmen, driven by vengeance, will prevent this open space from becoming a wasteland of Franks. Interesting take on the subject, Sergio.

Of course, having brought the Spaghetti era of Westerns to completion in Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone would go on to turn it inside out and inspect its guts in My Name is Nobody (directed primarily by collaborator Tonino Valerii). Having mastered the art of myth-building, Leone was to use Nobody as a vehicle for interrogating and exposing those acts of mythologizing that he had become so good at. After all, Nobody isn't just the trickster figure, following in Eastwood's footsteps... he's also the young guide for the old generation of cowboys, orchestrating both the immortality and the departure/"demise" of his idol, Jack Beauregard (welcome back, Frank).

What's so cool about My Name is Nobody is that it satires the genre, but never loses its sense of respect (an virtue destroyed by the Friedberg/Seltzer comedies, but also preserved by the occasional Black Dynamite-type indie). The shot-glass shootout is among the coolest sequences in any Western I've seen, one-upping the hat-shooting scene from The Great Silence, using the same formula to create a joyous cinematic moment. And Leone/Valerii give shout-outs to their contemporaries, including a couple smirking tributes to Sam Peckinpah, who, by all accounts, should be the one showing his appreciation to the Italians.

Harmonica may be the pinnacle of a slope started with The Man With No Name, and Nobody may be the little flag at the top, but interestingly, the greatest Spaghetti hero might be a character tucked away in a different movie. This is the aforementioned The Great Silence, whose titular protagonist is the epitome of the Spaghetti Western enigmatic cowboy.

After all, Silence is a truly lonely, enigmatic warrior, the product of torture, tempered in the fires of vengeful rage... a motif he shares with myriad Spaghetti protagonists, like Man with Black Coat (For a Few Dollars More), Bill (Death Rides a Horse), and the great Harmonica himself (Once Upon a Time in the West). He has a weapon that nobody has seen before that can play a decisive role in a gunfight (his Mauser), a trait he shares with Django (the gattling gun), and with John Mallory of Duck, You Sucker (the explosives). Like Nobody and the main character from the Dollars trilogy, he has no name, except for the pseudonym determined by his hardship.

And if these things aren't enough, the striking, downbeat ending of The Great Silence provides the air-tight seal on Silence's claim to mythical status. I'll try not to spoil it for you. Needless to say, even if you're not a spaghetti western afficianado, you should try to see The Great Silence, a beautiful, sweeping, and epic Western experience, tempered in the frozen mountains of its unique wintry setting.

I could keep writing about this evolving genre forever... in every sentence, I'm torn between analyzing the troubling and complex themes of fatherhood and violence as a patriotic ideal, and waxing poetic on the beauty of these films, with their vistas and their alluring remoteness. I need to stop myself before I wander off on another tangent. For now, before the summer's end, I simply urge you to go see some more Westerns, the fires where American mythology is forged. Get thee to thy Netflix!

Scott Pilgrim: Attention-Deficit Love Story

Part of the reason the classical reviewers are very lukewarm on Scott - and many of them make the old-hat complaint that they "didn't care about the protagonists" - is easily explained by the whiplash-speed barrage of references and developments. Three or four things happen in each scene, and no scene seems longer than five minutes. The enthusiasts of the previous generation of cinema, raised on Antonioni and Scorcese, want some idle time with their characters, and they want enigmatic and elliptical flashbacks, and they want a gradual succession of insights ("layers," as Shrek might call them). This is how they get to know those characters, and thereby get invested in their conflicts. Pacing.

Wright knows that this shit doesn't work any more, now that we've reached an era when YouTube and video games are as much a part of the cultural discourse as Twain and Joyce. Manipulating the surface is the key, and rapid recognition is invaluable. Scott Pilgrim and his supporting characters are built around confirmations of his audience's expectations: Stephen Stills is the leading man, cool enough to be nigh invisible (Scott Summers with a guitar), Kim Pine is the unstoppable force of tomboyishness and alt-rock angst, Young Neil is the wide-eyed groupie who's made friends with the older kids (his lack of an instrument being his mark of apprenticeship), and as he's directly referred to at one point, Wallace is the "cool gay roommate." I've been some of these characters before, and I've known all of them.

Ramona, being the love-interest, starts as one of the strongest stereotypes: the mythical New York hipster chick. She's beautiful and cynical and savvy, hooked up and culturally literate, and worthy of a main character's obsession. Her roster of ex-boyfriends is pretty insane, comprising a movie star, a rock star, a pair of competitive twin DJ's, and a bigshot hipster record executive. You don't need to have known this girl to know her archetype... every 20-something who migrates to New York has this image in their head.

Ramona's character, kick-started by this detached, irony-ridden archetype, is then given time to develop by way of on-screen quirks and mannerisms. Her snarky attitude is offset by her tenderness on that first date. Her indifference to the fuss being made about her is entirely expected, and as it becomes well-established, her fight with Roxy provides an important turning-point for her character. Ramona has been so aloof in the presence of her exes that up to that point, she was starting to get annoying; it's a good thing that with Roxy, she puts her own pride and her boyfriend's safety on the line.

Even now, it's hard for me to convince myself that a movie can be good on these merits: the fast-paced character shorthand, the jokes and references that are so rapid they're almost impossible to follow. But those things only make the movie fun, and stylistically distinctive... they don't actually make it good.

What makes Scott Pilgrim good, and provides the backbone of its relatability, holding up all its crassness and stylistic excess, is the very human love story, an emblem of young adulthood. The dynamic between Ramona and Scott is very subtle and carefully-handled, providing the stable emotional substance beneath the frills. It starts out as a crush (as desperate and enveloping as those are at that age), and after a few days and a few dates, it suffers from a backlash of resentment (the incomprehensible force that makes Scott act like a douchebag to Ramona for a while). Its intensity is heightened by gossip and social pressure, those slippery experiences of watching your new love getting to know the other people in your life.

The excitement of seeing your crush at the top of the stairs, or among the anonymous crowd at a party you're both attending -- the sudden rush of panic as you realize your girlfriend-on-the-outs has shown up at the same place as your new crush -- the tentative, delicate play of conversation and intimacy that provides the substance of a first date -- the dismay that comes at exactly the wrong moment, when you realize this girl isn't always perfect, and that she may occasionally set off your own negative triggers -- these are the moments, perfectly rendered by Wright and his cast, that make the story of Scott Pilgrim so human, whether on the page or on the screen.

And somehow, the frenetic stylization of Scott Pilgrim enhances this familiar love story, rather than distracting from it. However complicated the on-screen widgets seem to be, Scott Pilgrim is not complex; this kind of observation is usually used as a criticism, but here it's a compliment. The spastic enthusiasm of each scene is engaging, and the simple, emotionally-intense love story is broadly relatable. Scott Pilgrim is a film that lives entirely in the moment: the cultural and historical moment, the emotional moment, and the cinematic moment.

Genre attack: Spaghetti Westerns

I have been watching spaghetti westerns. These have included For a Few Dollars More (the last of the Dollars trilogy I hadn't seen), Duck You Sucker, Death Rides a Horse, The Great Silence, and Django. It's a worthwhile exercise in genre exploration... this is an amazingly homogeneous body of films, all drawing on the same tropes and archetypes, and after three or four, they all start to blur together. Incidentally, it helps me see why Leone is considered such a master of the genre: he brought the loner anti-hero to its apex in Eastwood (he's a stronger protagonist than Django, Silence, and Bill combined) and he also created some of the most distinctive entries in the genre. Duck, You Sucker breaks down the style Leone had established and rebuilds it in service of a revolution movie, a film whose characters inhabit a completely different ethical space from his earlier amoral Westerns. John, the Irish expat cum professional revolutionary, is an incredible hero, a unique voice among all these silent gunslingers.

I'm going to discuss Eastwood's character and Corbucci's directing a bit more, but first, a chart. In an effort to disentangle the undifferentiated heroes of the Spaghetti Western genre, I've broken them down into their essential character tropes, and I've charted them below. They all seem to have facial hair that's either scruffy and untamed, or perfectly clean-cut mustachioed. And most of the mustachioed heroes are played by Lee Van Cleef. Also, they generally seem to be working through some abandonment issues -- either taking revenge for the death of their family, or for the death of a lover. And despite their cracked cynicism, some of them manage to soften up and find love in the course of the stories. Obviously, for those who don't, I'm assuming their epic struggles have made them entirely incapable of it.

Let's compare our heroes.


Now, here's an important technicality... when a character once had a true love, but seems to be crippled by loss, do I count them as "Capable of Love" because they once managed it? Or do I call them "Incapable" because the possibility is henceforth ruined for them? I think I'm going to put them in the latter category. Thus, if the character has a check next to "Capable of Love," it means they find love in the course of their movie. If they have an "X," it means it's clear that love isn't really on their current agenda, whether it's because they've lost it (I'm looking at you, John Mallory!) or because they're just a cold-hearted bastard (*coughEastwoodcough*). If they seem nice enough but the topic just doesn't come up, they get a question mark.

It's notable that The Man With No Name is the only character with two red check marks, indicating in a roundabout way that he's the hero we learn the least about... despite the fact that he's in the most movies! This, among other things, indicates Leone's brilliance. He gave us one of the most interesting spaghetti western heroes, and one of the most compelling amoral cowboys, and he built the character from scratch, right there within the films. He didn't need a profound backstory or a tragic tale. He's a phantom, a thunderbolt, a ghost of the desert. He's inhuman, the fastest shot and the shrewdest player in every game. If he had psychology or personal motivation, he would be too human.

And he's not human. He's an outsider, through and through, the spitting image of the mythological trickster. He's obviously always after the money (those titular Dollars), but he seems to take just as much pleasure in confounding and confusing the people he interacts with, upsetting their images and undermining their assumptions. Whenever he's called upon to perform, whether by a frontier town tyrant or a comrade extending an open hand, he accepts and subverts, reverses the decision and its conditions, and generally screws up everyone's plans.

Sergio Corbucci is considered one of the masters of the genre, and though I wouldn't put him above Leone -- his plots are a little too fixated on the central theme of facile love and the revenge instinct -- I give him credit for pushing some aspects of the genre far beyond Leone. In particular, I'm impressed with Corbucci's riffs on setting. Django takes place in a mud-soaked alternative to the dry, dusty desert, a swampy wallow where the prostitutes mud-wrestle and stench and decay invades every safe space. This is interesting in itself, bringing a more tactile sense of incurable filth, but it's nothing compared to the stark tundra of The Great Silence, which was a bold film if ever I've seen one. At the same time that it participates in the spaghetti western genre tropes, it also confronts them, replacing the Mexican/Italian villain with an Aryan opportunist and substituting a stark, naked, frozen landscape for the dirt and sweat that gives the genre its archetypal tone.

The Great Silence is a harsh and beautiful movie, and before I finish my current entry, I'd like to praise it for a moment. The snow and titular silence pervades every relationship in the film. They all look at each other with a sort of frigid dispassion, and even the daring sexual relationship between Silence and Pauline feels vaguely strained and sterilized, though this gives it a razor-sharp intensity. The Great Silence also creates a strong, effective contrast between shelter and exposure... the snowy landscapes evoke the anxiety of coldness and emptiness, and the dark stony interiors feel temporarily safe, though always under siege. Silence isn't just the hero's rather cheesy moniker -- it's also a command that reverberates through the film. It's a movie about the forbidden corners of conscience and instinct, unspeakable acts committed in distant and echoic voids that stifle cries for help -- a fascinating cinematic achievement.

By the way, that crazy pistol Silence uses... that definitely exists. It's called a Mauser.

My final film in my spaghetti western series will be Once Upon a Time in the West, and after I check that out, I'll write a final blog entry about it.

Cinematography Fix: Black Narcissus: White walls and unknown spaces

For my next group of related films, I'm wavering between two very different threads: either spaghetti westerns, or films renowned for their cinematography. I was ready to commit to the latter group over the past week, so I saw Black Narcissus. But last night I threw in For a Few Dollars More, because I wanted something escapist, and now I'm back on the fence. I think I might have to follow both paths simultaneously.

Future movie-watching aside, I feel I should address Black Narcissus. It's a film deserving of critical consideration, and I want to remember it. It's the second Archer film I've seen, after The Red Shoes (one of my favorite films of Chromatic March). Black Narcissus is no less colorful, though its moods are very different and its tensions spring from a different part of the psyche. It won Jack Cardiff the Best Color Cinematography Oscar in 1947, and has become an essential Powell & Pressburger landmark.

And how different the photography and camera-work was, back when Black Narcissus was made! Today, virtually all films -- big action films and subtle romances alike -- revel in movement and boldness of frame, swinging from picturesque landscapes to intense close-ups, and always setting medium shots in motion, following characters and panning from focus to focus. This is an age of expressive cinematography... when a character has a moment of intensity, their face fills the frame. When they're at peace, the camera takes a leisurely stroll through the garden with them. At moments of strength, we look up at them from the floor. We always seem to be chasing down the emotional cues, carrying our cameras like butterfly nets.

So much of Black Narcissus was stable and calm, even at moments of anxiety and tension. Scene after scene was shot with a dedicated method of composition: the camera would establish the space, and then the characters would move through it, carefully blocked in their action, always part of their surroundings. When Sister Clodagh stands at the top of a stairway and speaks to Mr. Dean, we don't need to follow her up there, or shift between speaker and listener. We can look through Cardiff's lens and see the whole layout of the space, its walkway and its ceiling and floor, and we can appreciate how these characters relate to one another.

In his essay for Criterion, Kent Jones discusses Black Narcissus' use of elevation as a motif: the constant sense that characters' interactions are structured by high and low, whether it's embodied in the status difference between Kanchi and the Young General, or in the moralistic position of the convent at the top of an inaccessible mountain. However, in addition to this, the film also employs a motif of interior and exterior, created through intensive control of color, space, foreground and background (the endless valleys depicted in the film's matte paintings). The nuns never leave the oppressive white stone of the convent, but through every window, and over every precipice, we see the green of the native lands. It's sensual, mythical, and downright dangerous, populated by mystics and hostile natives.

Sister Ruth's journey into the valley to find Mr. Dean is a revealing exploration of this interior/exterior structure. She finds herself deep in the jungle, clad in a bloody red dress (madness embodied in bright red is carried over to The Red Shoes), and she finds the place she's looking for, but not the solace. This lush red and green world is a stage for her insanity, and once she descends, she becomes "native" in all the ways the film constructs them: she becomes a creature of passion and sensuality, and she discovers her hatred for the chalky white world from whence she descended.

In Sister Ruth's final confrontation with Sister Clodagh, there's a flood of symbolic significances. They are on the threshold between the disciplined inside and the wild outside, occupying one of the borderlands that pervade the film: a ledge where you stand in the shadow of the convent, but where the jungle stretches all around you. This threshold has been there throughout the film, buttressed by wind, patrolled by troubled Sisters clinging desperately to their faith, the bell and the stone of their bastion of morality.

And in returning to this protective shell, Sister Ruth wants to kill Sister Clodagh, but not just by stabbing her or bludgeoning her... she wants to rip her out of the convent and cast her into oblivion, returning her to the primordial surroundings to which Sister Ruth herself has succumbed. This space is both outside and below, and Sister Clodagh's fall would represent the defeat of the bastion of order by the sensual world beyond it.

The problem is, the nuns cannot defeat the outside world, because that blood-red sensuality -- the flowers, the lipstick, the errant wives and dying children -- have already invaded the palace. Indeed, they've been there from the beginning. It's fitting that the nuns' only escape is to leave this uncontrollable world behind, letting the "order" they fought to create collapse into the mountain behind them.

Inception: Genealogy of a Poster

Nothing really deep here, but I noticed that Inception's poster is a combination of some of the previous design (I guess the studio is using the same people for print advertising, huh?), plus the work of one of my favorite photographers (i.e. photomontageists), Scott Mutter. Hope this minor moment of recognition brightens your day.

Dreamlike Films: Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), with additional notes on Inception

Yesterday was Stanley Kubrick's birthday. In his honor, I'm gonna take a moment away from Inception and talk about his own dream odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut, although there will be a touch of convergence between the two discussions.

What an interesting film, right? So many of Kubrick’s great films (The Shining, 2001, Full Metal Jacket) take place in universes that are wholly divorced from our own – hermetically sealed mansions and space craft, barracks and war zones – even Clockwork Orange’s future-verse seemed to have its own alien logic – that it’s striking to see a film that takes place right here on Earth, in the bowels of New York City. But STILL, it doesn’t feel like our New York City, our Present Day, our Planet Earth, because it’s not a realist film. It’s still a hermetically-sealed universe, but in a deft deconstruction of his own style, Kubrick gives us a real-world that’s sealed up inside a character’s head, shaped and influenced by that character’s jealousies and obsessions.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill escapes into a hypnotic New York City that’s hyper-sexualized, with every remark and casual encounter having an erotic component (except, arguably, passing the frat boys, whose comment is less erotic than emasculating). Read this however you want, but I have no doubt that Bill is experiencing his world this way because of his recent conversation with Alice, which has forced him to confront their respective romantic and sexual roles in their relationship. In the course of the film’s central narrative – which I would suggest is brought on by marijuana and the experience in the presence of death, signaling implosion and descent – there’s something simply off-kilter about the way things happen. This is an alternate-universe New York City, and I believe that it’s Bill’s dream-city.

Some of the best commentary on the film -- like this Film Quarterly article by Tim Kreider -- argue that the psychoanalytical reading of Eyes Wide Shut is a red herring, and that it should really be looked at sociologically, in terms of class, wealth, and human commodification. I'd agree that this is an important pillar of the film's framework, but I don't think it's a dead-end to consider the film on an atmospheric and aesthetic level. The film may include real-world subtexts, but they're all placed within a very cerebral world. I can't read Eyes Wide Shut in a purely realist-symbolic-allegorical way, because there's so much stylization, and because the experience is so distinctly disconnected and hypnotic. So even if I don't go for a strict ego-superego-id reading of the film, I do believe it speaks with an oneiric voice, and that the dynamic of sex and desire is one of its definitive registers.

[EDIT -- on re-reading, I realized I had pretty seriously misrepresented the FIlm Quarterly article. I insinuated that Tim had rejected all psychological and subjective readings entirely, which he absolutely did not do... if anything, he did the opposite. So I edited that part. Sorry about the original misrepresentation.]

There are a couple things that lead me to believe that even if Bill isn’t literally dreaming, he’s at least entered a sort of fugue. It fits with a couple of my first-post principles: the film certainly makes use of an intensely heightened reality, a veritable painting of crimsons and golds, reds and blues injected at key moments, and expressive spaces that sharply influence the mood of the moment. There is also a dramatic emotional disconnect between Bill, the audience's avatar, and the events that he's falling into. At his wife's dramatic confession, he seems to go numb, and at each key emotional moment -- his departure from the prostitute's apartment, his revelatory conversation with Nick Nightingale, his jarring tour through the orgiastic celebration -- his reaction seems blunt and detached, like a man watching the world through a pane of glass. This is because the film is less about Bill himself, and more about the alternate reality he's entered, which now bears his imprint.

Bill’s downtown NYC seems alien, but navigable. At the very least, he manages to find Nick Nightingale, and to acquire a mask and a robe. However, after passing a series of gateways (most notably giving the password to the doorman), he finds himself in a deeper level of his subconscious: a clandestine party where primal urges are given free reign. Here the bystanders are truly faceless, and they’re openly hostile to outsiders. It turns out that Bill’s biggest problem is that he stands out, and almost as soon as he enters the revelers’ sanctum, he starts feeling like he’s being monitored, and forces are rallying against him. Unfortunately, no amount of warning from a sympathetic spirit can dissuade him from exploring this new space that’s opened up.

The revelers in Eyes Wide Shut treat Bill as a pathogen, an outside agent that has to be destroyed, or at least rejected. This is closely paralleled by the behavior of the projections in Inception, and if you read the structure of the latter film retroactively onto the former, you can easily interpret the party as a stage for Bill’s subconscious, an inner layer where his conscious mind isn’t welcome. The Inception protagonists infiltrate this part of the mind in order to achieve a mercenary objective; Bill gets down inside there not knowing what he’ll find, and unprepared for the consequences of digging too deep (eek! Was that a Lord of the Rings reference?).

And so Kubrick’s story shifts fluidly from a fable of descent to a chronicle of unforeseen reversals, apparently the ramifications of his dangerous curiosity. When he emerges from the Dionysian underworld, Bill discovers that everything in his sexually-charged universe is broken, spent, disturbed, and overturned: his friends and admirers have moved away, or they’ve been “disappeared,” or (in the most unsettling developments) they’ve submitted to macabre breakdowns and perversions (I’m referring specifically to the shop owner who’s suddenly become his daughter’s pimp, and to the prostitute who’s been diagnosed with HIV). Bill’s friend Victor is finally there to wrap up Bill’s loose ends – he provides the necessary guilt (“What were you thinking?”) and the rationalization required to move on, and though he doesn’t actually answer our questions, he at least paves the way for Bill to return to the appropriate private spaces of his own life. There, he can go through a cathartic release, and complete the movement of “waking up” in his own bedroom, with his own wife.

My Inception parallels are still thin, but there are probably a lot more to work through. After all, both films rely on opulence and commodification as a subtext, whether it's prostitution and objectification of the body in Eyes Wide Shut, or mercenary ethics and territorialization of the mind in Inception. Both create multi-tiered spaces that provide an allegory for different cognitive functions, with an "inner sanctum" as the final, dangerous, and unstable destination for the unscrupulous explorations of the main character(s). And both of these main characters embark on these explorations in order to come to terms with their marriage issues.

I'm always fascinated by these kinds of shared structures in unrelated films. Both Inception and Eyes Wide Shut play with the concept of oneiric interiority and infiltration of the subconscious -- the padlocked bank vaults and sacred spaces of the protected mind.

Inception: the elusive architecture of the mind

Okay, I think Inception warrants a series of blog posts. I'm doing my best to resist blind fandom, but I thought it was a brilliant movie, rival to The Prestige, Nolan's other personal masterpiece. Still, I have to make a number of remarks that don't have much to do with each other, and unless I split this endeavor into a few different critical exercises, my thoughts will end up sounding as fragmented as these films I've been reviewing lately.

On that point -- I've been watching films that replicate the dreamlike experience, and writing about them, over the past week or two. Originally, that was because I wanted to see some films by Terrence Malick, and "dreamlike" seemed like a good access-point for his work. However, after seeing Badlands, Days of Heaven, Inland Empire (Lynch), and Heart of Glass (Herzog), it seemed appropriate that the series would culminate in a discussion of Inception, which leans heavily on dreaming as a plot device. It didn't hurt that I've been excited about Inception since the first trailer hit.

Now, having seen Inception, I've realized (drumroll) it is NOT a dream-film in the way those other films are. Lots of reviewers mention this in the course of their reviews. It's true... directors like Lynch and Malick recreate the hazy, loopy experience of oneiric unreality, and Nolan simply doesn't do it, probably because he's not really interested in it. He's less a poet than a crypto-mathematician engineer of narrative architecture, a speculative baroque fabulist whose aesthetic is becoming more focused with every film. There's nothing deeply intuitive or organic about Nolan's worlds. It's all lucid, logical, and aestheticized, without the murky inscrutability of images from the subconscious. Indeed, in Nolan's world, the subconscious is embodied as generic bystanders or militarized Agents (*coughmatrixcough*), prone to hostility if anything breaks the glassy surface of the world they've been placed in.

How different from Lynch, whose worlds are the product of many significances but no clear connections or translations! Whose language is an organic mass developing on a scene-by-scene basis, rather than a streamlined structure of jargon giving names to the rules of a complicated, unwinnable game! But despite their vast difference in tone, Nolan and Lynch are kindred spirits in some ways -- both love creating puzzles for us to solve, fractal structures of mutually-referential ideas. Both love narrative mobius strips and recursive motifs. Both have an unmistakable style that acts like a signature on their most important films. And some day Nolan, like Lynch, will have an adjective of his own (Nolanesque -- I'll explore this idea more in my next post).

If you'd like an academic-sounding way to describe Nolan in general, and especially Inception, I'd say "Baroque" is your best bet. According to Webmuseum, baroque art and culture is defined by its self-confident aesthetic, its dynamic movement and emotional intensity. It's an inarguably ornate, dramatic, uninhibited style that (like all broad artistic styles) was expressed in painting, music, literature, sculpture, and especially architecture. It's the forerunner to the formalism of neoclassical and modernist styles, more sweeping, less focused, but absolutely distinctive.

Baroque was an unapologetic "stylistic" style, focused on appearance and decoration, on outward displays of opulence and complexity, and on overwhelming sensory effects. Read over the features listed on Wikipedia: it was all about spectacle and display and illusion. Inception follows the same sort of philosophy, presenting dream-space as a series of nested interiors for the display of different sensory experiences: a gritty urban landscape, opening up into a 5-star hotel, whose rooms contain a snow-covered mountain fortress, which contains a vast blank canvas, reconstructed by the protagonist's imagination.

Normally, the building/mind metaphor is articulated in terms of levels, from elevated to subterranean. Zizek's analysis of Psycho using Norman Bates's house as a metaphor for his mind is the perfect example of this kind of reading: the top floor represents the superego, the ground floor the ego, and the basement the id. Inception has a much more explicit treatment of the "mind as building" metaphor, but it doesn't just structure this as a question of elevation. It also structures it as a question of container/contained, of security and vulnerability, and of infiltration. In Inception, the mind is a stage for theater (the theater of con-games), an archive, and a bank vault, something to be deciphered, navigated, and penetrated.

Strange, isn't it, that there's no comfort zone, anywhere in Inception's myriad dreamscapes? If the mind is a building, a space to be penetrated, shouldn't it feel like a place where the dreamer can be at home, at least until the thieves arrive? In the spaces Ariadne designs, there is never a sense of true safety: from the urban landscape to the busy hotel to the mountain fortress, and even in Limbo, which was Cobb's own creation, there is never a place where we, the audience, identifying with one of the dreamers, feels at home. Vigilance is a constant requirement in the dream-worlds of Inception, even though they're in our own heads.

I was tempted, at first, to say this is a side-effect of Nolan's large-scale, high-stress baroque narrative constructions, his drama and stylistic flair getting the best of him. But then I think about it, and realize something that Nolan already seems to know, and that David Lynch certainly realized long ago: there is no safe space in dreams, either. According to my sources (okay, I only really have one source), anxiety is the most common emotion experienced in dreams. And maybe Cobb and his team could steal something from a euphoric dream, but it doesn't seem too likely, when their strategy is clearly to make the mark feel paranoid, off-balance, and intensely aware of the secret that's supposed to be stolen.

By and large, the insides of our heads are actually twisted, hostile, and unknowable places, steeped in uncertainty, the expressions of voices issuing from so deep in our minds that they may feel entirely alien. And these are some of the central motifs of Inception: when so many of our thoughts come forth from beyond our reach, can we really trust them to be our own? How much of ourselves can we access, and how hard should we try to do so?

David Lynch's Inland Empire: An oneiric language

Studios expect us to pay for movies... theaters expect us to stay quiet for them. Some filmmakers expect us to sit back and enjoy them, or to be moved by them, or to relate to them. These are all worthy expectations for us, the fickle film audience, and by meeting them, we determine the success of the film, artistically, financially, and historically.

But can we really be expected to decipher a film? To be able to put its pieces together, as if it's a jigsaw puzzle or a game of Sudoku, and work out a meaning that sometimes seems intentionally obscured from us? This is an expectation that David Lynch seems to have for us, if you believe his own claims about his work; and whatever you think of his method or his artistry, you'll always be taking this into account: his films aren't just pure stories, self-expressions, or records of experiences. They're puzzles, complete with solutions, and though Lynch himself never deciphers them for us, he generally informs us that we can figure them out, if we look for them.

Mulholland Dr. was defined, if anything, by its shape. Though it was filled out with striking images, it was really the product of a central inversion, the interaction between the narrative threads, and the shifting relationship between the main characters. However, with his more recent Inland Empire, Lynch seems less concerned with sculpting a shape and more concerned with creating a language. He does this in a stream-of-consciousness visual poem, filmed without an overall plan or a well-defined shooting schedule. The result is a fragmented narrative full of significance-laden people and objects, the words and phrases to which the film gives voice.

This has been said before of dreams... Jung says dreams, like poems, have their own language, and in concert with his psychoanalytical brethren, he believes that this language can be heard and understood. And this helps give us a sense of Lynch's mission: he wants to talk about a certain life experience, but he wants to do it in an oneiric language. Among all filmmakers, he may be the most proficient at accomplishing this goal.

So it turns out this puzzle is to be solved through translation (more goal-oriented than "interpretation" in general). David Lynch refuses to tell us the intended meaning, so he removes himself as a source, and it becomes a lot like the act of reading a dream: we know these images have sources, objects of reference, but we have to determine them through context, and trust our determination. It's hermeneutics, returned to its pre-postmodern relativism level... we can stop asking "What did this movie mean to me?" and go back to asking, "What did this movie mean?"

This is Lynch's dream-logic at work. No meaning is readily apparent; reality is heightened to its peak, and you know every object and word and gesture is pregnant with significance, but you're denied direct access to that significance, and even the code that determines them isn't transparent. This paragraph isn't going to add much to the above discussion, so I'll just let it remain an abortive little tribute: nobody can match Lynch in creating meaningful images, ripped out of their explicit structure and allowed to create their own semiotic system within the space of the film.

Of course, if you're going to make a movie like this, you have to do what Lynch has done here: you have to give your audience something to involve themselves in, even if they can't immediately apprehend the overall meaning you're going for. Luckily, Lynch is a master of mysterious and intriguing images, and I have to confess, the shot of Susan running toward the camera was one of the most terrifying moments I remember seeing in cinema. This shit hits you in the visual cortex, where it will always count, even in the midst of the most oblique narrative imaginable.

It's worth noting some other dreamlike aspects of Lynch. His dialogue is dissociative, like everyone in the film is in a trance. It's as if they're not real people, but rather mere projections of the dreamer in their own mind. Further, once we get into the heart of Inland Empire, everything seems to take place in an interior, including the scenes out on Sunset Boulevard (reinforced when we discover that it's actually a film set). After all, the real world, the expansive landscape of California geography, isn't really our setting... how else could it feel, spending three hours inside the mind of a stranger?

Dream-state in the cinema of Terrence Malick: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978)

Terrence Malick's films are simultaneously realistic and hypnotic, both grounded in historical situations and transcendent in their evocativeness. Both Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) seem to rise above the times and places that provide them with such decisive settings; the characters are not archetypes or mythological heroes, but they aren't mere humans, either, with those quirks and textures that are so important to unique personalities. These characters are projections, spiritual avatars of desires and emotions, and the histories they inhabit are luminous stages for their dramatic interplay.

Malick's films are broad, sweeping dreamscapes, where acts take on special significance, and where emotional reactions are blunted. The acts depicted may be chilling, or traumatic, or disheartening, but rather than strong notes, they evoke sustained tones, extended feelings of bliss and preponderance. Ebert makes much of this in his acute reviews of the films. There is narrative logic, and there is emotional content, but the threads binding them together are tenuous at best... the result is an experience like a daydream, or a revery, where our feelings unfold peacefully no matter what's on the screen before us.

Yet, despite the lack of strong emotional involvement, there is movement and momentum in Malick's narratives. From the very beginning, Badlands is a desire-fulfillment fantasy, chronicling two impulses: first, Holly's romantic desire, her infatuation with and idealization of Kit; second, Kit's violent tendencies, those sudden "heroic" rage issues mixed with paranoia and self-preservation, the emergence of the suppressed death drive. Holly's voiceover and Kit's mean streak are remote from each other, the signs of parallel desires bubbling up from the subconscious and overflowing into everyday life.

Badlands takes place in a messy world, smoothed over by the bright sunlight and deadpan direction. It may be a place of oneiric nostalgia, but it's infused with the mundane. Days of Heaven takes Malick's dreamlike aesthetic one step further, giving us a world that's focused, illuminated, and deliberate, a heightened reality if ever I've experienced one. The film is shot in color, but the golden wheat fields and late afternoon sunlight evoke sepia-toned photographs. The endless emptiness of the Great Plains provides a canvas for the placement of objects, people, faces, bodies, and landmarks. Every element becomes a focal point: the plow, the farm workers scattered along a pathway, the master's house, the gazebo, the airplane; later, the locusts, the fire, the gun, the automobile. There is a sense of isolation that pervades this lonely landscape and filters down into everything, from the objects and locations to the people themselves.

According to some commentators, it's the material nature of the camera itself that brings about this effect. Consider, from Kinema Journal's article LIKE A DREAM. A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE ONEIRIC METAPHOR IN FILM THEORY:

"The cinematic apparatus, in fact, presents the spectator with representations, which offer themselves as perceptions. Even more, it creates an impression of reality which has no comparison with the one provided by normal perception; in front of a film, one has the sensation of seeing something 'more than real'. For Baudry, it is not the film's imitation of reality, of varying precision, which creates the illusion, but the functioning of the apparatus itself. Spectators are like the prisoners in Plato's cave: they see only shadows which, moreover, are projected by statues, that is to say not by reality, but by a reproduction of reality. Analogously, by projecting shadows cinema creates the same 'more than real' effect that is experienced in dreams."

Whether or not the camera is the primary agent, it's undeniable that Malick's direction heightens this sense of hyper-reality, through his flawless control over mis en scene in these earlier films. This is a large part of what replicates the dream-world: each object in each scene transcends its physical referent and becomes a mental image, representing an abstraction of something below the level of awareness.

In Days of Heaven, Malick strengthens this effect by bringing the general mood on the farm into alignment with the emotional states of the characters. Part of the reason emotions flow so naturally through the film is that they're prompted and prefigured by changes in setting. This is true of the dusty and exhausting train ride that begins the film, and it's true of the luminous, idyllic beauty of the Farmer's estate. The correlation becomes even more acute late in the film, as the Farmer starts to feel a loss of rationality and control, and the biblical advance of locusts and fire heralds the tempest of his anger. His anger doesn't shock, because it's been foretold by the apocalyptic changes in the environment. This identifies Days of Heaven as a work of Romanticism, a movement that treats nature as a corollary to man's emotional life.

And after all this discussion, we return to an important observation: Malick's films are not irrational or random, nor full of non-sequitors, nor chaotic and unresolved. They're journeys through a sensory world that's tinted by the imagination, and though they maintain emotional distance, they're strikingly lucid. This is notable different from the other dream auteurs I'll be covering in the next few posts, who surrender their continuity in favor of elliptical causal relationships. What Malick achieves, uniquely among his contemporaries, is a world that's hazy and cerebral, and yet fully plausible, an acceptable surrogate for everyday life. And this is what dreams do: they become our lives when we're sleeping and confined to our own minds, so they're eminently believable, even though they're nothing but the manifest expressions of our restless thoughts.

Malick's style is hard to encapsulate in a description, even if it's a rather long one. However, his affinity with the dream-state should offer some insight into what makes his direction so compelling, timeless, and universal.

Next entries: David Lynch, and Warner Herzog's Heart of Glass.

Dreamlike Films 1 - Definitions and Exclusions

I don't know about ya'll, but I'm super-excited for Inception. I love Christopher Nolan's piercing intelligence and twisted imagination, and I'm a fan of the cast, an ensemble of new-millennium noir superstars. Also, I've been thinking about the oneiric experience and how it's been captured, and Nolan's film, which appears to be an art-deco dreamlike noir film, is a perfect focal point for these ruminations. So in homage and preparation, I'm going to dedicate a few blog entries to dreamlike films.

The experience of dreaming is a very elusive one to capture and describe. Superficially, you might say that in dreams, "weird stuff happens", and this is certainly true. However, as far back as prehistory remembers, we've known there's a deeper significance to those nighttime non-sequitors. Skipping past Freud and his psychosexual descriptions, we find Jung, telling us that dreams have a language comparable to poetry, able to be deciphered and interpreted. It's worth submitting: studies have shown that this language is often expressing suppressed mental content, disgorged by the mind in its rejuvinative semi-aware sleeping state.

More recently, there have been a bunch of studies of dream content. They've discovered that the dominant images in dreams, across ages and cultures, include being chased, falling, and "loss of close persons." As these images suggest, anxiety is the most common emotional content of dreams. Though it hasn't been covered in the studies I read, it seems to me that these reports are probably strongly affected by another factor, the relationship between dream and memory... dreams are infamously hard to remember, and any recollection of images or emotions from dreams are bound to be blunted by forgetfulness.

Synthesizing this research with my own personal experience of dreams, I think I've worked out some characteristics that skillful directors use to make their films feel dreamlike. None of these are necessary or sufficient conditions... they all just contribute to the effect I'm talking about.

1. HEIGHTENED REALITY - In dreams, perceptions drawn from daily life are being filtered and reorganized, so anything that appears tends to be imbued with enhanced significance. Unnecessary details, textures, and contexts are filtered out. Some filmmakers (Malick?) do this with framing and editing; others (Lynch?) do it with colors and production design.

2. EMOTIONAL CLOUDING - For those who have scary-ass nightmares, it may sound unlikely, but at least in my experience, the events in dreams tend to be shrouded in an emotional haze, allowing only simplified, blunted emotional reactions to the events being visualized. The emotion is almost always there, but is rarely complex -- positive emotions tend to be reduced to a feeling of well-being, negative ones tend to manifest as general discomfort. Even the terrifying climaxes of nightmares (the primary exception to this rule) tend to be the culminations of much more gradual build-ups of anxiety. Consequently, the best dreamlike films have a minimum of musical cues and jump-scares, allowing narratives to flow evenly, rather than twisting and rupturing as they move along.

3. DREAM LOGIC - This is the one that people tend to fixate on; I think it's actually the least important of the four characteristics here. Still, it's definitely worth noting: in dreams, conventional continuity and cause-and-effect logic tends to be severely undermined, logic being replaced by more subtle associations and intuitions. This results in locations blending into one another, people changing identities, and inexplicable turns of events. David Lynch is probably the true master of this technique; other, more rational writers and directors can ruin a good "dream" film by leaning too much on logic, or by rejecting it too adamantly, when they attempt to reproduce the voice of the subconscious.

4. IMMERSION - This is simply to say that within the dream world, reality is never questioned, even if it's absolutely distorted, illogical, or discontinuous. Obviously lucid dreamers are the exception to this. The phenomenon is closely related to #2 above, emotional blunting; the shock and confusion that would normally result in skepticism never triggers.

Feel free to revisit this entry if you keep reading this little series. When I discuss the next few films I'm planning to talk about, I'll return to these three aspects. In the meantime, I'm going to touch on a few films that have made an explicit attempt to evoke a dream-state, but that, in my humble opinion, didn't really hit the mark (although some of them were great films).

1. Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006) - a fun, wild anime that's supposedly about a character who can flit in and out of dreams... but there's such an overflowing abundance of intentional strangeness, it overwhelms the fluid, intuitive feeling that we usually get in dreams. Dreams tend to feel familiar, even when things are surreal or amiss. Maybe this is what dreams look like in Japan?

For the record, Satoshi Kon's earlier film, Perfect Blue (1998), is a brilliant example of a dreamlike film. The general sense of interconnected events, the growing anxiety and uncertainty, the fluidness of identity, and the murder and chase themes that provide the film's undercurrent -- this was a fantastic nightmare film, among the best dreamlike films in history.

2. The Cell (Tarsem Singh, 2000) - The Cell, while a gorgeous and engrossing film, has the same problem as Paprika. There's too much detail, too many intentionally bizarre and ultimately irrelevant details, and a general sense of alienation from the inner world of the dream. If my dreams were that vivid, I would definitely stop eating pizza before bed. Incidentally, again, I think Tarsem's later film, The Fall, is more dreamlike, because the reality of the main character's narrative world is more focused, more archetypal, and less intrusively shocking.

3. Waking Life (Richard Linklatter, 2001) - Waking Life was intended to take place inside an extended lucid dream. The director's decision to make the whole film in rotoscoped animation may have been to divorce it from the messy realism of normal film photography; however, in my opinion, it backfired: the world isn't immersive (see #4, above) because the animation style looks two-dimensional, calling our attention to its materiality and artificiality.

Consider the above an explanation as to why I won't be discussing any of those films much in the next few posts. Here's a list of the work I will be discussing. Hopefully it's interesting reading.

1. Terrence Malick - a storyteller whose epic historical tales evoke the sense of drifting reconstructed memory common to dreaming.

2. David Lynch - a classic weaver of dreamlike tales, Lynch is considered cryptic because he operates in an oneiric space.

3. Warner Herzog - I discuss this guy a lot, but there's something about his earlier narrative films that feels both intensely human and totally disconnected from reality.

Over the next few days I'll discuss oneiric evocation in the works of these filmmakers, and sometime next week I'll include something on Inception, which I'm very excited about. For more credible information on the experience of dreaming, check out these sources:

Dream Rebound: The Return of Supressed Thoughts in Dreams
Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory
The Wikipedia article on Dreaming
The Wikipedia article on dreaming in film theory