Banksy stacks The Simpsons with different levels of messaging

Banksy's recent opening sequence for The Simpsons is striking and discomforting, which is a small triumph right from the get-go, as far as I'm concerned. However, more brilliant is the way Banksy has used this forum to navigate a gauntlet of corporate pressure and open critique. He's done this by subverting his own message with sarcasm, which provides just enough of a hook for FOX to let the ad run; it may make the sequence more diffuse in its targeting, but it also makes it much more effective, if only by giving FOX a reason to put it on the air.

WTF am I talking about? Check out the sequence:



Well, let's start with the most obvious reading of the intro: that it's an exposé and a direct, open attack on FOX and The Simpsons' overseas outsourcing policies. I'll call this the CRITICAL READING -- the interpretation that Banksy has used this forum to make a direct comment on FOX's corporate immorality.

This raises an obvious first question: how did this get past the FOX executives? It doesn't matter how powerful Matt Groening is in the FOX heirarchy... the network would never PAY a video artist to create a direct attack on its own policies, and then air it on a high-visibility network show. They also wouldn't give such a dangerous artist completely free license; they would only hire him on particular conditions of review and approval. So how'd Banksy make this work?

Presumably, if this sequence was too literally on-target, it wouldn't have run. If FOX was actually perpetrating human rights abuses for the purposes of creating FOX animation and merchandise, and it wasn't a public issue, and the network was trying to keep quiet about it, then they wouldn't have touched this bit of subversive commentary by Banksy. So there must be something else going on here, something that subverts the CRITICAL READING that's initially evident.

Well, guess what? There IS another reading out there. After all, this information about FOX outsourcing from Korea... this is already public, and the public has already had a chance to chew on it and gripe about it. So the suggestion that The Simpsons outsources its labor isn't so dangerous. People who realize this are seeing this opening sequence as being a satire of media hype, a wry hyperbole of critics' misinformed ideas of foreign labor. This reading, seeing the segment as more tongue-in-cheek and humorous, is what I'd call the SARCASTIC READING.

And it's an adept turn of message that the SARCASTIC READING subverts the CRITICAL READING. Certainly, this was enough of a selling point for Banksy to get the network to agree to air this segment. They know The Simpsons has always been edgy and self-critical, so when Banksy tells them that his opening sequence is actually making fun of the critics for being so sensitive about this "sweatshop labor" outsourcing thing, they buy it. They understand that the segment is controversial, but not outright dangerous to them, so they agree to run it. It's good for all parties.

It's important to note that even with the specific FOX-focused criticism slightly declawed, this intro sequence still makes a statement. For one thing, many people won't notice the sarcastic reading and will just come away with the critical reading. For another, there is a higher-level critical reading that isn't preemptively invalidated: the reading that this intro is a general critique of American consumerism and lack of global awareness. People may follow this insight to a dead end with regards to FOX, but at least they will have taken a moment to consider where their products come from. And there will be lots of people -- the smartest of them -- saying, "Well, maybe FOX isn't the worst offender in terms of exploitive labor, but there are definitely American companies out there who are actually just this bad." ... "And honestly, we don't know about FOX, either. Maybe this is closer to the mark than we realize."

Banksy is walking a deeply ambivalent line between co-opting the instruments of mass culture, and selling out to them. His ability to simultaneously skewer FOX and its critics shows just how complex his messages can be. As much as this attests to his skill at working with the information apparatus, it still begs the question: for whose benefit is this media artifact created? You're sending a valuable message, but is it enabling the offender? Which is more important: what you say? Or on whose behalf you say it?

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

If you have a friend who

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rock and Roll Done Right: Nostalgia with Chris Cunningham and Courtney Love

I had almost forgotten my old tastes in music before I ran across the two videos I saw last week, minor but strangely poignant clips from creative minds that I greatly respect. I had forgotten what it feels like to look into the cultural slipstream and see how history flows through us, from the past into the future. And I had mostly forgotten about Chris Cunningham and Courtney Love, before these two videos turned up and reminded me how interesting they always were.

The first one was Chris Cunningham's beautiful, subdued, abstract visual piece, exhibited this past month at the MoMa. It's called New York is Killing Me, and it's an audio-visual remix of a song by Gil-Scott Heron. The original was a multi-channel work, shown on three screens simultaneously (must have been a hell of an experience). It's bluesy, and dark gritty ambient, and for some reason, I feel like the bastard child of those forms is some sort of rock and fucking roll, a kindred spirit to Joy Division. You can see a clip at Cunningham's website.

Now, this is a pretty chilled-out clip for Chris. He's famous for the ferocious, cerebral insanity of Come to Daddy and Rubber Johnny, the kind of work that makes you grit your teeth. New York is Killing Me is more of a meditation, reflecting the broader, more cunning nature of urban oppression. Gone is the twitchy, glitchy effects work, replaced with a steady hand and an eye for juxtaposition and composition. This is about the landscape, without and within the mind.

The other one, posted later in the week at The House Next Door, is a little Courtney Love moment, among her more photogenic: she sings Lady Gaga's Bad Romance to a tiny crowd in what looks like the back room of a bar. Take a look:



There are so many evocative elements and undercurrents in this video. It all adds up to something strangely beautiful in its nostalgic sincerity. Courtney is part of a whole lineage (arguably its Godmother) of female rock stars cum publicity monsters, succeeded by people like Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga. Between Love and Winehouse, we seem to have adapted to bad behavior enough that we could laugh at Amy, whereas we tended to sneer at Courtney... and with Gaga, we have come to see outlandish public appearances as a sort of performance art. I support this. Lady Gaga is great at what she does.

But here, Courtney is not being an inane fuck-up, which is what she's arguably most famous for. Instead, she's exhibiting those things that made us appreciate her (or forgive her). She's not puking or getting naked -- she's performing a song by the new Mad Diva, obviously not completely knowing it (reminiscent of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious), but ready to share it with the crowd she's part of. She was unstable, but this wasn't what made her great... what made her great was her work with Hole, her razor-sharp, well-written albums and studio tracks, and her general unwillingness to compromise anything about herself. Here, after Joaquin Phoenix self-destructs for show, we get a performance by the real shit, the model train-wreck.

And doesn't she look like she's having the time of her life, singing her ambivalently sarcastic tribute? When Courtney stands up and gets a ripple of love from the crowd, it's a quietly epic moment. It feels like she's bearing her soul, in the same strange, private way that Cunningham seems to be doing in his MoMa piece. These are rock and roll icons with their accolades stripped away, so we can see why they're so untouchable: because they love this shit, and they're 100% sincere about it.

There's something else about these short films: both of them remind me of New York City. The open, endless urban sprawl, interlaced with subterranean rhythms, is an essential part of the texture of Cunningham's video. Now, I know Courtney's video was shot in Paris, but it still has that sweaty, claustrophilic, center-of-the-universe sense that you get from the back room of a bar in a big city, whether it's the Givenchy Party or the Knitting Factory. So the face of the city is reflected in the faces of these artists, which is why it's such a great idea to put the right kinds of visuals with your aural stimulation.

I can watch these a bunch more times, and turn the sound up as high as it goes, and it empties me out and leaves me feeling raw and monolithic. It's good to know that Chris Cunningham is still realigning the audio-visual forces of rock and roll, and it's great to be reminded that Courtney Love's presence screams and echoes in the history of crazy bitch rock and roll. But these little intellectualizations are ultimately irrelevant... the real point is to feel the blood pumping through these media artifacts, drowning out the anesthetized world.

Tyler Clementi - pausing for an imprudent political rant

I composed this post as a comment on this Salon.com article. It's long and undirected, and basically reframes the discussion in that article: on whose head does Tyler Clementi's death fall?

Infantilization is accelerating. As my fiancee said to me recently, college is the new high school; 18 is the new 10 years old. We talk about how the perpetrators were victims of an irresponsible society, and how their actions were adolescent pranks that went too far. I address this comment to all those who were shocked at this kind of incident happening in a Northeastern college, where young people can finally go to escape the bullying of teenagehood: undergraduate programs are feeling younger and younger, less and less decisive as a transition into adulthood. This reflects in both the behavior of the perpetrators, who were criminally negligent of another human being's personhood, and in the behavior of the victim, who wasn't prepared for the crushing blow of an inhumane society.

However, right now, talking about the victim's preparedness is not appropriate. Society is indeed causing confidence and self-image issues, but that's something we need to address in the long-term, on the social level. Punishing, or blaming, anyone for not being prepared for cruelty is bizarro-world logic.

What's much more appropriate -- and the collective indignation of so many of us is a good guideline to the morality of the situation -- is interrogating the perpetrators, and interrogating society to find out where these people come from. Why are we creating people who are so desperate for attention that it overrules their empathy, their practical judgment, and their decision-making skills?

There are a number of steps we need to take, but one of them is to acknowledge and commit to our moral standards. An educated, undiagnosed adult in the United States is responsible for the ramifications of their behavior, and these perpetrators did something almost unspeakably vicious to a classmate. Of course, the law delimits their possible punishment, which is a good thing, but they deserve the absolute maximum allowed for by those terms.

As a side-note, this is one of the reasons this particular story is getting so much attention -- it was the result of a single act of cruelty and moral perversion. People like watching moral train wrecks, and gasping at the outrage it inspires in them.

So, um, yes, there are a lot of people who are to blame for this. For starters, 1) the perpetrators... 2) the media and cultural trend toward attention-seeking behavior... especially 2a) those who do so in order to advance a hateful agenda, like the aforementioned right-wing pundits, and also 2b) those media trollers (some of them very far left) who profit off of cruel, attention-seeking, voyeuristic sensationalism.

I'd like to throw in the leftist political establishment, too, as abetted by Obama. These are the people who are actually able to advance an agenda logically, through argument and diplomacy, in contrast to the sound-byte-screaming right wing pundits. And yet, this political persuasion consistently proves unable to articulate and defend a strong set of principles. I can suggest some obvious ones: anti-opportunistic-corporatism. Social and economic infrastructure to regulate the excesses of capitalism. Oooh, and here's one: tolerance of personal freedom and sexual liberty as a core civil right.

Come on, Officially Licensed Participants in Society. It's the 21st century. We need to get this shit straight.

EDIT FOR CLARITY: I am a supporter of Obama, especially in terms of his actual initiatives, and his approach to political discourse. This just happens to be an issue where I wish he would take a stronger position.

Metroid: Other M, and Fear For Samus's Soul

I wish I had an infinite amount of time to play video games. I don't even need an infinite amount of money... there's such a great time-to-money ratio with a good console game, I think I spent a fair, responsible amount of money on video games, affordable on my normal salary, and still be happy, as long as I had infinite time to spend playing them. That's how calculus works, right?

If I had infinite time to spend playing video games, and if, theoretically, I could distribute that time however I saw fit, I definitely would have played through Metroid: Other M by now, and I'd have revisited Prime and Fusion, and maybe gone as far back as the 8- and 16-bit games, just for background. That's just how fascinating I find the whole Other M debate, which clumsily sideswipes some ideas I've expressed about Samus, in a previous post, which I still think is a lot better than most of the stuff I write now.

For a general overview, you can check out a few key texts on the game:

MetaCritic has it at 79%, which sounds respectable until you realize that other Nintendo key properties on major consoles tend to score in the mid-to-high 90% range. Most of the reviews are lukewarm on the concept, cold on the execution and dialogue, and (with some exceptions) reasonably sympathetic to the new control scheme.

However, one of the major dissenting reviews turned out to be the flash point for a debate on this entry's place in the series. This was Abbie Heppe's negative (2/5) review on G4tv.com. Abbie criticized the controls a bit, but this seemed like an afterthought, coming at the end of a long critique of the game's respect for Samus's character and her place in the canon.

This review has been rejoined: the vast majority of commentary I've read is unsympathetic to Abbie's point of view, preferring to defend the game and either excuse the story or minimize its importance. Of these, the response at Dromble is the longest and most vehement; the poster's name appears to be "Fred," but it's not officially attributed to anyone, so I'll just call it the Dromble review. It's an enthusiastic piece, but seems a bit clumsy, mostly concerned with using obscure references in the series' canon to answer vaporous versions of Abbie's argument, which is so generalized in the response that it becomes a Straw Man.

Side-note: there's also this debate on OBJECTION, which does a decent job of recapping the argument from a middle-of-the-road perspective. I LOVE the use of Phoenix Wright animations, especially at 2:35, when Kenshiro breaks into a little bit of an "America needs more maps" stutter.

Anyway, I would write about this debate for a week if I had the time, and didn't feel totally phony about it. As it is, I haven't played the game, and don't have the time to invest in it, and even if I had, I would want to play back through some of the other recent franchise entries, as well... it seems to me that Samus has been changing slowly for a few games now, taking on a more subtle and sensitive inner life, and her space-world has been changing around her. I could spend a whole post discussing the importance of consistency and continuity within video games, and science fiction, and fiction in general; I could spend another chunk of time talking about Samus as a modern-era Samurai, and about her mixed motivations as a bounty-hunter-peace-keeper in a dark intergalactic future. I could use this as a jump-off point to talk about authorial intention, and whether, theoretically, an author (like Metroid's creator, Yokio Sakamoto) can betray their own work (George Lucas being the paradigm case). Unfortunately, I'll only be able to fit so much into this discussion... so I guess I'll start from the key point in all the exchanges, the scene of Samus's encounter with the alien Ridley. Warning: I've spoiled it for myself, and I will probably do so for you, as well.

You can actually see the controversial cut-scene here.

Now, I was initially skeptical of Abbie's criticism, since I tend to give creators a good bit of license with their creations, and I can accept some pretty broad and unpredictable behavior from a key character. But watching the scene on YouTube, my visceral reaction was: who is this woman? Where is my Samus, always so steadfast in the face of Metroids and Space Pirates? And who is this man coming to her aid, barking one-liners at their shared adversary, and making an immediate belittling remark about Ridley "knowing how to treat a lady"? It's hard to work through those emotions. It's hard to see one of your heroes falter.

Now I'm willing to give Abbie's criticism a bit more credit. We've never had a thorough exploration of Samus's past, but make no mistake: we knew her (I find Abbie's own assertion that she has "only the personality that we have bestowed upon her" to be dubious). She was always alone, flying a single-person ship, shaped like her own helmet... this was pride bordering on narcissism. She ventured into all those planets and compounds without any thought of calling in backup. She has always been a loner. And she has always been a professional, first and foremost, entering each game with a target and an objective. Fix your ship and escape, find this exotic artifact, hunt down this scourge and wipe it from the universe. Take whatever steps are necessary: flood part of the planet, destroy its core, spend hours in the tunnels looking for an alien supplement that keeps you alive in molten temperatures. Shoot the enemy with missiles and power-bombs, and just hope that you can get out when the planet starts to implode. Samus Aran was positively cavalier.

Obviously, these aren't feminine traits. Indeed, claiming that Samus has ever been feminine beyond her mere anatomy is (self-)deception. The fact that young men like me found her hot doesn't prove that she's innately feminine... it just proves that we were gullible enough to fall for whatever 8-bit body was put in front of us. And in this regard, Samus is a monad (a symbolic reduction) for her universe as a whole: she lives in a post-human version of outer space, where technology is so dominant, it renders biological sex meaningless. Samus has a sex, but she has no gender, and her opponents are the same: Ridley has been referred to as a female at some point in the past, and now (s)he's accepted as a male. We could never tell the difference between the female and the male Metroids, and when one of them spawned a baby, we barely registered that as a gender signifier. They may reproduce asexually, after all.

In fact, Mother Brain, Samus's original opponent, is perhaps the best illustration of the post-human nature of her world. Mother Brain is considered female, being the "mother" of the Space Pirate legion... but what makes her a mother? She has no determining features at all... no behavioral patterns considered feminine, no physical body to provide signifiers. Mother Brain, the massive and evil and perversely biological counterpart to Samus, is proof that in this universe, gender is nothing but an empty symbolic distinction, unrelated to physical sex, and in fact, divorced from reality in general.

Those who feel some aspect of Samus is betrayed are mostly talking about series continuity... but in this debate, there is a lot of gender subtext. Samus's return to her childhood state, her sudden panic, and her manly rescuer referring to her as "a lady" to her foe -- these are a sudden resurgence of signifiers for femininity and weakness, suddenly wrought upon a character who was always defined outside the male/female binary. This is what motivates Abbie Heppe to frame so much of her review in feminist terms:

The point is to flesh out one of the most iconic (and nonsexualized) female characters in gaming history and yet the outcome is insulting to both Samus and her fans.

When she isn’t submissive and obedient, the flashbacks portray her as bratty and childish and the whole mess smacks of sexism.

The gap between "discontinuity" and "sexism" is an easy one to bridge, and though Abbie doesn't make the argument explicit, the reasoning is all there. Samus's personality seems wholly different in this iteration of the series, despite the fact that it's the first time her history has been explored... so what's to account for this difference? Why does Samus seem to have suddenly dramatically changed her behavioral patterns, from dominant loner to obedient subordinate, and from rock-solid, nerves-of-steel professional to soul-searching drama queen? One sad but logical answer is that the people who wrote this game tried to furnish her with a personal history, but their own gender stereotypes were the only tools they brought to bear. Conventional solutions are the bane of creative accomplishment.

Here I am, responding to the whole situation based on one YouTube clip. I'd like to defend myself against the inevitable criticism of talking out my ass (not wholly unwarranted) by mediating my response a little. First of all, I'm mostly trying to register sympathy with Abbie's point of view, but I don't necessarily agree with her review, because I haven't played the game, and it might just be fun enough that I would stop caring about the story. Alternately, perhaps there's some twist in the narrative flow of Metroid: Other M justifies Samus's uncharacteristic behavior. Perhaps my insufficient experience with the Prime games have left me out of the loop of Samus's personality. For the sake of the series, I hope the former is true; after all, Samus's ungendered, posthuman nature is what I always found so compelling about her.

Or maybe it's a misstep on the part of the writers of a new Metroid game. And maybe that's okay, too, because my Samus will always survive, in my head and at the far end of my controller.

Katy Perry: Kicked off Sesame Street

Katy Perry recorded a segment for Sesame Street, found below:



Maybe you heard about this? If your reaction was anything like mine, your initial response was, "Woah. That seems weird..." But if you're anything like me, you got over that pretty quickly, realizing that Sesame Street has long featured counter-cultural guest stars and musicians whose work is a bit outside the suburban family mainstream. They've done references to Mad Men, and appearances of Danny Devito, Johnny Cash, Kofi Annan, and Queen Latifah. They seem to know how to make all different types of guests work.

But oops! Not everybody got over it as fast as I did. After it aired on YouTube, the network decided not to broadcast Katy Perry's performance on TV. Watching the video, it's clear why this would come about, even if (like me) you don't think it's necessary. Katy Perry is wearing a gold strapless top that shows her shoulders, and some undeniable cleavage. She isn't as fully desexualized as parents in our culture expect celebrities to be. Obviously the wardrobe people at Sesame Street thought this was well within the bounds of reason, but for the YouTube patrol, it was too outrageous.

My own appreciation of Katy Perry is compromised by her homophobic streak and her occasional outbursts of moralization. But I still recognize her as a talented pop act, committed strongly to her aesthetic and capable of delivering catchy-as-hell bubblegum pop, stuff that's smartly directed at my age group (and a little below it, I guess) by combining the energy and charm of teenagehood with the romantic and sexual concerns of the 20-something crowd. Despite the quantity of skin showing, the clip wasn't crass. It wouldn't confront children with inappropriate images of sexual feelings or body parts. It was a perfectly relatable, decent adaptation for kids who constantly hear this song on the radio.

My opinion aside, the clip makes me wonder: how does Katy Perry play for very young children? I don't know my adolescent psychology too well, but she honestly seems right at home. Her energy comes out clearly in her on-screen persona, and she's all about the bright colors and expressive expressions. If there's anybody I could believe has more energy than Elmo, and wants to play even when he gets tired, it's Katy Perry.

It strikes me as weird, sometimes, that one of our most beloved pop princesses seems like she could double as a childrens' performer. Goes to show that infantilization and "cute" have become perfectly valid aesthetic modes, whether via Hello Kitty, or Katy Perry, or Betsy Johnson. People like Jim Windolf of Vanity Fair have expressed concerns that it's drowning out all the other cultural modes, and though I disagree, I see the point there.

I don't think Katy Perry should have to worry about covering up like a Victorian for a musical number on Sesame Street. If anything, I still think we're a little too touchy about the female body in our culture, especially since we're also obsessed with genuinely sexual images. If we stigmatize Katy Perry's innocuous costume design, but can't stop the sexual images from major fashion companies on every urban billboard, we're going to end up with a pretty damn neurotic next-generation.

Yet, there is still something cautionary about this little debate, and we can't throw the other side out completely, either. With a culture that's so immersed in cute, where the aesthetics of childhood seep so deeply into everyday life, we need to be careful not to let sexuality become infantilized and trivialized. That's on the other side of the demilitarized zone of "reasonable tolerance."

My opinion on the Katy Perry video stands, but I know it's a gray area, you know? Let's hope we can find a healthy relationship to sex and maturity somewhere in there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American: Clearly a Photographer's Film

Anton Corbijn (website here) is originally a music photographer and a music video director; now, he's a painter of place, a filmmaker who demonstrates, in his new film The American, a truly intimate sense of setting. This setting, a small town in the Italian countryside, provides the uneasy core of his narrative, which is severe and spacious, barely the scraps of a plot draped over the solitude and exposure of his remote locations.

The American (played by Mr. Clooney) is alternately Jack, Edward, Mr. Butterfly, and Clark; in any case, he's a lonely freelancer in the employ of shady European double-talkers. He's stripped of history, his past only peeking through telling details: he's fleeing from a gang of swedes, and he seems fond of open-armed European brunettes, and he's obsessively paranoid. His employer keeps dropping hints that he's outlived his usefulness. He knows a lot about butterflies, and has a tattoo of one on his back.

In light of these dim highlights of characterization, Jack becomes almost a formal construct, rather than a narrative one. He isn't given enough volume or detail that we feel we should try to decode him, or fill in his back-story; rather, like the subject of a photo, he's there to provide a focal point, a center of gravity for a story about a time, a place, and a mindset. It seems like Jack is paranoid, but he's not... the whole world is paranoid as it gravitates around him. It seems like he's stark and empty, but he's not; rather, he lives in an empty Italian countryside, in a vacuous world, where nobody (including his lovers and his associates) knows anything but the echoes of human contact.

This is why this is a photographer's take on the thriller. This paranoid international neo-noir isn't about the intricacies of personal and political intrigue, like the classics... like a spy or a military fantasist would write. There's no sense of confidence, investigation, revelation, or betrayal, and the twists are devoid of explanation. I suspect Jack is not the primary target of the plot being hatched in The American, but ultimately, because of the way the film unravels, there's no way to know; it may have been all about him, or he may have been a wrinkle that his employer needed to smooth out. A photographer doesn't concern himself with these details... for Corbijn, who seems to be cherry-picking archetypes and images and set-pieces from the history of espionage lore, all the meaning resides in the surface, not in the enigmatic but irrelevant histories of these assassins.

And so Corbijn does what a photographer does best: he choreographs a synchronicity between the subject and the setting. Clooney is framed and dwarfed by empty windows, and his car constantly appears as a flicker in the bottom corner of an epic landscape. In his first car-ride, a few minutes into the movie, he seems to disappear completely into a white fog, just as he vanishes from the sight of his pursuers. Jack is ruthlessly paranoid, always struggling to maintain awareness of the hiding places, the far corners, the twists and deformations in the landscape around him, and so, in many of the shots, we have to shift our attention from the foreground to the background, or respond to small visual and aural details. As we sense the tension created by the camera, especially in the back alleys of Jack's small town, so our gaze reacts more rapidly and our expectation heightens.

Corbijn's awareness of the photographic nature of this, his second film, shows through in Jack's choice of photography as a cover story. And Jack sells himself as an architecture and travel photographer, further reinforcing the theme of geography, of the film's profound sense of place. This Italian town has a texture and a shape, a pervasive rhythm and dynamic, that compliments Jack's quiet, tense demeanor. Control, Corbijn's first feature, has a similar sense of time and place... Manchester is a desolate industrial backdrop for Ian Curtis's hopelessness. We get little sense of the social scene surrounding Curtis, but as a tableaux, Manchester seems to embody his state of mind.

These are the virtues that somebody like Corbijn can bring to a film: the experienced lens to capture the space around a protagonist; the unique ability to create a strong main character from surface qualities. If Corbijn continues to use these talents to his advantage, and to refine his approach to narrative complexity, then film will benefit significantly from his contributions.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001): The Best Gothic Horror Novel Ever Screened

Looking at reviews and opinions of Brotherhood of the Wolf (directed by Christophe Gans, 2001), you discover a general consensus that the film is a mess (or, to put it more sympathetically, "eclectic"). David Edelstein expresses this opinion by listing an armament of movies that seem to have inspired it: "The movie is a teeming mixture of The Curse of the Werewolf and Cry of the Banshee and Jaws and Sleepy Hollow and A Fistful of Dollars and Let Joy Reign Supreme and The Name of the Rose and Fists of Fury and Mad Max and Once Upon a Time in China II and The Last of the Mohicans and The Hound of the Baskervilles and maybe a thousand other pictures that rumble around in the collective unconscious of schlock fiends." Scott Hunter, in a slightly less receptive review, puts it thusly: "Certainly the loopiest thing that's come along in many a fair year, 'Wolf' is a mad agglomeration of styles and traditions that ultimately results in nothing so much as a mad agglomeration of styles and traditions. Nothing in it really connects with anything else."

These reviewers see this as something to snark at, indicating a deep-seated confusion within the film. Even Ebert, whose review is notably more positive, seems to see it as a triumph of chaos: "The Brotherhood of the Wolf plays like an explosion at the genre factory. When the smoke clears, a rough beast lurches forth, its parts cobbled together from a dozen movies." The reviews all scream "Entertainment!", urging us to forget the goofy anachronisms and campy dialogue, and to forgive what seems like a total breakdown of coherence, abandoned in favor of the filmmaker's fancy. And yes, on this level, it's already a fun film.

However, forgiveness goes hand in hand with dismissal, and as far as I can tell, all the reviewers have dismissed any search for a unifying principle to Brotherhood's form. But it's there... if you step back a level and consider all the motivating elements of Brotherhood's plot and style, you'll find an undeniable formal reference that justifies the cross-pollination of all these random elements: the swashbuckling, the supernatural horror, the mystery, the court intrigue, the colonial-era exoticism.

Two words: Gothic Horror.

I'm not talking about your local teenager's "gothic," with the black eyeliner and the skateboarding. I'm talking about that genre of dark romance fiction that rose to prominence in the mid-1700's and declined by the mid-1800's, with Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer often considered its apex. The gothic genre morphed into classic horror and "tales of the Weird" during the Victorian era, which is when you started seeing more urban settings: Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, and old Bram Stoker are the better-known of this later, more familiar gothic literature. Brotherhood of the Wolf bears more resemblance to the proto-Victorian gothic tradition, which was less gritty and more fanciful and romantic: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and the aforementioned Charles Maturin are all worthy reference points for a study of this form.

And once you're keyed into this worldly, discovery-era gothic aesthetic, with its grand adventure plotlines and dashing heroes, you'll see that Brotherhood of the Wolf, though adapted for a modern action-movie audience, is actually one of the most faithful adaptations of this style ever put to screen. Honestly, it's a hard style to adapt... it set the stage for horror, with its unspoken spiritual threats and transgressions of conventional norms, but it didn't have a lot of the horror tropes that have become so standard. There were no scrambling pursuits through the mud or tiny, secluded, hermetically-sealed spaces, like basements or back rooms; indeed, in the gothic novel, the world always seemed vast and wild and unexplored, and most of the chases were on horseback, in the shadows of forbidden castles. There were far fewer themes of bodily violation, and more of spiritual and mental perversion. Hopelessness and nihilism weren't pervasive; rather, the horror was interspersed with romance and adventure, and there was a frequent sense of heroism and redemption, all but vanished from modern horror.

Brotherhood of the Wolf is told within a framing narrative, transcribed during an old aristocrat's last moments before his submission to the mercy of a mob of revolutionaries. This, already, is an obvious indicator of the gothic nature of the tale. Melmoth the Wanderer was a baroque construction of nested stories, often told or written in the final hours of the narrator's life or sanity. It's a well-established genre convention that's been kept alive through the history of horror, recognizable even in the 20th-century stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti.

Many more motifs and tropes appear in Brotherhood of the Wolf that we find echoed from the classic adventures. Fronsac, the protagonist, is the epitome of the swashbuckling hero, complete with the explorer avocation "naturalist," an indirect reference to so many adventuring doctors from those classic stories: Bram Stoker's Van Helsing, Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr Hesselius. These guys all seemed to be jacks of all trades, ready to go on adventures and track evil to its source; Fronsac is not unique in his ability to fight off ruffians and do taxidermy, though he may be a little more exaggerated than the Gothic gentlemen of old (with his expert martial-arts swordsmanship and all).

Le Fanu's work is definitely worth comparison, along with Mary Shelley's... these authors, along with many others, were instrumental in rationalizing the occult, treating supernatural phenomenon as natural science and vice versa. Brotherhood of the Wolf certainly inherits from this tradition, being the ostensible "explanation" story of an infamous folk mystery (The Beast of Gévaudan, a classic cryptozoologic case). Superficially, the film seems to side with Fronsac, the skeptic, who demands a reasonable explanation for this supernatural phenomenon; yet, Brotherhood subverts its own lesson, allowing side-kick Mani to use his Native American pantheism as a way of collaborating with wolves and trees and the dead. Gans treats one wolf as a totemic spiritual guide (Three Wolf Moon!), and he allows spirits to speak and prophecize in dreams. As with Fanu, who systematizes the irrational as a way of enshrining its enigmas, Gans sides with rationalism and naturalism, while allowing the inexplicable to come into relief beside it.

What else? How about Mani, the Mohawk Indian blood-brother to Fronsac? He represents a motif that appeared in gothic fiction, as well, though not as consistently as the previous ones: the noble savage. Maturin also had a lengthy episode about an innocent uncivilized character, written to shed light on the moral complications of social and political man. This character, and the Spanish Jew who provides refuge to one of the novel's protagonists, demonstrate Maturin's fascination with the exotic, a role filled by Mani the Native American and Sylvia the Italian prostitute in Brotherhood of the Wolf. These characters give Gans' world a sense of expansion and uncertainty, of vastness and rumor and geographical fluctuation, truly an accomplishment, considering it was filmed at the height of 21st-century globalization.

And let's not forget the antagonist, the closest thing we can get nowadays to a moustache-twirling melodramatic villain. In classic romantic fiction, the villain is always a charismatic lord, transparently evil to the audience but inexplicably opaque to his fellow characters. He tends to wear some badge of villainy, and for Jean-Francois, this is the missing arm, later revealed to be concealed and mutilated into a sort of devil's claw. His alarming combination of political savvy, combat proficiency, and sexual perversion, kept under wraps until late in the story, make Jean-Francois the epitome of an aristocratic devil, even to the point of his leading a cult meeting at a caern in the French countryside.

Of course, Brotherhood of the Wolf reaches at least a bit beyond its genre referent. The martial arts are an absurd anachronism, but they serve a purpose in this elaborate referential structure. They are the credentials of the new global adventurer, shorthand for single combat in the modern world... the martial arts face-off is the new equivalent to the duel of sabers or the barroom brawl. Is this necessary? Not technically, but perhaps thematically. After all, of all the genre cliches, fencing and fisticuffs have become some of the most associated with camp and Disney fairy-tale fantasy. When we're seeing a face-off between martial artists, we're still able to take it seriously and accept it as an actual form of violence, though just barely. It also plays into the "exoticism" motif that feeds so much of Brotherhood's aesthetic and atmosphere. As a modernization of an adventure convention, it's definitely covered under Gans's artistic license.

I've addressed some specific conventions that relate Brotherhood of the Wolf to the classic Gothic horror novel. If I had more experience with the genres, I'd find a deeper way to connect this film's structure to those old stories. It is, after all, a canvas of political history, social and aristocratic conspiracy, and partially-debunked supernatural anecdote. One-hundred forty minutes starts to seem rather short when you consider that Gans wove together messages about aristocratic France, the peasantry, social politics, and the birth of rationalism in the age of exploration. There's also significant subtext about motivated messaging and sensationalism in one of the earlier periods of "mass media" (indicated by an early discussion of the availability of newspapers). But as I said before, this baroque architecture of themes and messages isn't unprecedented: already, a few hundred years ago, those Gothic novels were weaving together complex messages about spiritual wholeness, aristocratic greed, religious and secular politics, and the tension between civilization and human nature.

If I've encouraged any action film watchers to go out and read some of these strange old novels, I'd like to reassert that encouragement. And if (less likely) you're a Gothic horror and romance buff who's looking for a film to go along with your reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho, I'd like to urge you to see Brotherhood of the Wolf. I'd love to hear about your thoughts on this long comparison.

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

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

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

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

1. RSA's shorts for Agent Provocateur and Quatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Maxence Cyrin's film/pop remixes

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

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

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.