No Church in the Wild, Les Miserables, and the aestheticization of unrest

Hey, two things came out today. First, Jay-Z and Kanye's music video, No Church in the Wild, directed by Romain Gavras (he's done some videos for MIA, in case you don't recognize the name). Here's that:



Second, there's the first trailer for Tom Hooper's film adaptation of Les Miserables, starring Russel Crowe, Hugh Jackman, and Anne Hathaway. So here's that:



Okay, take a deep breath.

Why mention these two in the same blog post? Because they both aestheticize the SHIT out of social hardship and unrest. Let's take a moment to think about that.

Gavras's video is like a slow-motion ballet of civil violence, juxtaposing the restless aggression of youth against the faceless defensive belligerence of institutions of authority. There array of images evokes a whole spread of emotions, like a shotgun blast of provocation. There are strains of noble solidarity, disaffected coolness, and pure nihilism; only the cops seem to have a consistent, legible characterization, which is: anonymous, inhuman, the true representatives of the empty, reactionary rule of law.

There's no explicit revolutionary message here, but in the sweeping, mythic presentation of these young rioters, it's hard not to read some glorification. There are probably a lot of people (the vast majority, perhaps) in the activist community that would find this a gross misrepresentation of their ethos. On the other hand, these scenes are becoming more common at protests, both on the international stage (the IMF protests in particular) and in certain isolated incidents of pure chaos (i.e. the 2011 England riots).

The Les Miserables trailer is based on a much more stable groundwork of source material, though it's a few generations removed from the actual unrest depicted in the narrative. Victor Hugo adapted by Schonberg, now adapted by Hooper -- from the outset, there's a seriousness of purpose here that it's hard to find in the Gavras video.

Still, this trailer is cutting us with the same blade as the rap video above. There's a striking abundance of images of suffering -- Cosette glancing back over her shoulder in terror, and later, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, crying desperately in close-up. For a trailer, it's surprisingly heavy, and you might be tempted to recoil from it, especially if you're in a public place.

When it comes to fictional depictions of violence, anguish, redemptive fantasies, etc, the fact that they're entirely invented provides a shield, allowing the viewer to be affected in a sort of suspended-disbelief isolation chamber. But for these two media artifacts, that chamber is porous, because however fictional and stylized they may be, these are clearly referencing both historical precedents and current events. Without going into a thesis-length analysis, I can only offer a shallow thought: this media packaging probably presents a double-edged sword to the viewer: one edge being awareness, the other being consumption and desensitization.

But as long as we're thinking of the grand narratives of human history, the social breakdowns, the frayed edges of civilization, we should take a moment to consider the continuing unrest and suppression in Syria, which is gradually intensifying, under our noses. Would that we could take this violent drama and tragedy -- which is all too real, and becoming more so every day -- and contain it within the harmless confines of a highly-stylized short film.

Abraham Licoln: Vampire Hunter is clearly a surrogate for Simon Belmont

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter sounded like a fun idea at first. After we heard it a few times, it almost immediately flipped into "already played out, despite the fact that it hasn’t been released yet." The fact is, at least from the discussion so far, it seems to use this fascinating historical backdrop as a hook, without really engaging it very much. So vampires were trying to use the Civil War as a cover for their own takeover of the American landscape? They wanted their own nation, and only the defenders of freedom like Abraham Lincoln could stand in their way?

After the cutesy cognitive dissonance wears off, it becomes clear that this is simply a rough, exploitative manhandling of history. Yes, he had a period of fierce youthful independence, including making his own solitary journey into the South – but as a young man, he was disciplined and pragmatic. As President, Abraham Lincoln was not a general… he wasn’t even particularly famous for being a soldier, or a rugged individualist, or any of the other romantic notions of a "hero" to justify this kind of appropriation as "clever." The guy was actually a diplomat, a force of balance and principled compromise (opposed both slavery and abolitionism), who built the foundation of a war on the bedrock of popular support, and who ultimately united the country, rather than allowing it to remain divided, or permanently alienating his Southern countrymen.

Bottom line: it doesn’t really jive, as a concept. I would have been more excited about Ulysses S. Grant: Vampire Hunter, or Henry David Thoreau: Vampire Hunter, or Jack Kerouac: Vampire Hunter.

But if you’re like me, you saw the trailer:


... and thought, "Shit, this still looks pretty cool. It uses the bullet-time slow-mo bullshit in a way that’s pretty off the hook, if you’re into that sort of thing, and setting aside the fact that it’s Abe Lincoln, they seem to have created a badass Central Hero to fulfill all our Lonely Gothic Crusader fantasies." So how do you really enjoy this movie, given the fact that it’s based on a totally confusing historical revisionist brain-fart?

Here’s my solution: I’m going to pretend this is actually a Castlevania movie.

With the whips, the Secret Society vibe, and the ridiculous Underworld-style photography transplanted into the 19th Century, this seems like the best approach. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter appears to owe more to Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest than to Interview With The Vampire. Like the best of the Belmonts, Abraham Lincoln seems to be cursed with a warrior’s calling: is the chosen son, bane of the undead scourge, cursed with the double-edged sword of Privileged Insight and Principled Responsibility.

This is an act of mental remixing, like transplanting Radiohead as the musical accompaniment to a Jay-Z album. We’re going to replace one mythos with another, discarding the putative origin story for a new one, ganked from a more appropriate property. By rejecting its premise and substituting our own, we are going to make Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter the brilliant movie it deserves to be.

An epic seriousness fail from Fred (of Portlandia fame)

Watch this video from Fred of Portlandia and see if you like the idea or not:

Comedy and seriousness can certainly coexist. This is part of why I love Nabakov, and part of why Rules of the Game is one of the great works of art (hi Evan!). There are crucial moments in each of those where the comedy and the drama reinforce each other endlessly, in a positive feedback loop, and create staggering emotional effects. But it's also worth noting that comedy and seriousness can be further broken down, and when you look at the different types, you find much more complicated dynamics between them.

For instance, seriousness can be broken down into POMP (i.e. the seriousness of politics, outrage, and theory), HIGH DRAMA (i.e. the seriousness of opera, epic poetry, etc), and REALISM (i.e. the seriousness of documentary, cynicism, etc). Likewise, comedy can be broken into any number of sub-forms... if Aristotle had really written a second volume of the Poetics devoted to comedy (as hypothesized in The Name of the Rose), it would have broken that shit down for us, and I'd have something to cite. As it is, I'll only bother commenting on one particular type of humor: SARCASM.

SARCASM, as a type of humor, doesn't seem to coexist with seriousness very well. Or, at least, it doesn't in this video... there such an intense ironic framework that it cannibalizes the seriousness, breaking down the concept right after the premise. Of course, this is further reinforced by the alleged "rules" of seriousness, which have a smarmy meta-serious tone to them.

I actually have a great love for seriousness. This should be obvious from this post itself, which is just as intolerant of levity as sarcasm is of seriousness. So it rather pains me that in the pop-cultural sphere, irony has become such a powerful force. It's a self-defense mechanism, a knee-jerk response, a permanent filter of perception, and a totalizing framework. Though there are some VERY SERIOUS ARTISTS (I'm well aware), and I understand how lots of people might find them pretentious and annoying, it seems like there's very little space left at the amateur level to experiment with real gravity and seriousness in art. It falls directly into the paper-shredder of judgment and gets laughed out of the cultural record. Just listen to random conversations at art museums, especially during tourism season, to see this in action.

Anyway, to beef up this post a little, I'll include a thing I wrote a while back, and never published, because it's painfully incomplete (it was originally written as a sort of meditation on why I dislike Entourage and Gossip Girl, despite their being fairly intelligent and well-acted).

FROM SOME TIME IN 2011:

I can relate to characters in fiction in two ways -- as caricatures (comedy), or as characters (drama). For the first type, I see their actions as absurdist, non-sequitors, as having no consequences except those of the scene, the immediate scenario, my immediate reaction, etc. For the second type, I form a moral understanding of their behavior. I evaluate their choices as either good or bad, and I anticipate a certain outcome. If they're well-intentioned, relatable, etc., I hope it works out well for them. If they're assholes, antagonistic, etc., I hope they get redeemed or punished in some way. I also try to understand their evolution, their "narrative arc," and when they change, I feel it's a serious change to the dynamic of the world they're a part of.

I'm happy laughing at the clowns, the caricatures. Laughing at them distances me from them. That kind of character is the kind you find in traditional cartoons (The Boss in Dilbert, all the characters in It's Always Sunny, Hagar the Horrible, etc). I feel no need to relate them to real world cause-and-effect or consequences. The second type of character is the type you encounter in anything dramatic, and in a certain way, I judge them... or, you might say, I evaluate their actions. I try to make sense of them and their world. If I don't like that kind of show, it's because I can't make sense of the world it takes place in. This often happens in shows where ill-intentioned characters are rewarded, or the virtue of selfishness or malice is implied. I just don't fit into those worlds, so I don't like those shows. Gossip Girl and Entourage are good examples.

Do I never like shows if I don't agree with the moral alignments of the protagonists? Not quite... the fact is, I just don't like these shows because their moral universe is so different from mine. Maybe the shows frustrate me because they don't validate my own values.

I don't like Entourage because it's all about a frat-boy universe. Even moreso than Friday Night Lights, which is more a family and social community universe. I don't like it because it's all about a flock of men, being the kind of man I was aggressively socialized not to be -- the shit-talking, alpha male, sexually aggressive, massively heteronormative male -- the kind of universe where I would get shit on, and would have to walk away out of shame and frustration. This is a world that I was socialized to reject, and apparently this instinct carries over, even to watching TV shows.

I don't like Gossip Girl because it's about a high school universe I was taught to resist and stay out of, a universe I was taught was unrewarding, even contemptible. The high school universe of cliques and social climbing and talking about people behind their backs and being part of a Machiavellian social battleground. The kind of place where high drama is the order of the day, where you see your immediate social relationships as the most important thing in the universe (I was always taught to try to enjoy myself, but look to the future, be focused on college and on making choices and being independent blah blah blah).

Is it true that aesthetic judgments are so often just our own projections and perceptions of ourselves, displaced onto the things we're critiquing? If so, is that okay?

The Avengers compelled me to write this review immediately after seeing the film, which is totally not my style

I've read the backlash against The Avengers by the Serious Movie Advocates like A.O. Scott and Andrew O'Heir, and at my most disenchanted moments, I sympathize with them. However, it's a mark of the success of The Avengers that when I came out of the theater, I had turned into a fan of the purest, most obnoxious order... I wanted to go back to their reviews and post snarky responses about how they obviously didn't give it a chance, and they just didn't get it, and no matter how even-handed they sounded, I felt offended by the sneering subtext in their meta-criticism.

And as much as I find Samuel L. Jackson's snap at A.O. Scott to be childish, I understand where it came from. Just watching the movie made me want to stand up and cheer for it... I'd imagine that working on the film, acting the part of inspirational supervisor, can turn you into an unequivocal defender of its honor and integrity. Even the "splatter" graphic beside some Rotten Tomatoes reviews was enough to piss me off when I got home from the cinema. This is a testament to the very primal effectiveness of Whedon's film.

If I listed all the great things about the Avengers, I would certainly mark myself as a partisan. But I can't go and write a detached, ruminating reflection on its strengths and weaknesses, either, because I would severely understate its appeal. It's a film that feels great, even through all the spoilers, all the predictable twists, and all the formulas. So I'll take an entirely different angle in reviewing it: I'll list all the ways it COULD have gone wrong, and didn't.  All the pitfalls it managed to avoid.

NOTE - Minor Spoilers Below

1 - sidelining any particular character, either in terms of plot-significance, or in terms of screen time

With Captain America and Tony Stark as the two sides of guiding authority, and Hawkeye and Black Widow acting as sharpened but compromised tools of team cohesion, the other Avengers are free to take on rogue personalities and profound narrative significance. In fact, arguably, Banner and Thor are both the best-rendered characters and the most interesting individual stories within this omnibus. Reegardless, all six Avengers are absolutely given their due, which is a lot to ask in such a broad ensemble film.

As other critics have pointed out, the dialog is also written with remarkable agility, giving each character a unique voice that becomes clear immediately and remains refreshingly consistent. I won't harp on it. Joss Whedon knows how to handle characters.

2 - failing to create sufficient tension and chemistry between the protagonists

A number of critics point out how important it is that the Avengers have to face one another for a while before they get around to saving the world. It does indeed entertain the old comic book impulse of asking, "Who would win? Thor, Iron Man, or the Hulk?" But saying it that way makes it sound like a gimmick, a mere necessity, checked off a comic book fanservice checklist. It's not.

These moments showcase the primal appeal of comic books and give it a platform to become universal. In particular, when Thor's hammer strikes Captain America's shield, or when Iron Man starts showing signs of distress in Thor's grip... these moments are the small climaxes and reactions that keep the adolescent male imagination engaged.

For the record, the writers of The Avengers also manage to create a surprisingly subtle ecosystem of emotional relationships between the heroes. By the end of the second act, tensions within the group have risen to dangerous levels, but this tension is always ambient, an inexact collision of big egos and cross-purposes. If the writers had reduced it to simple binaries at any time -- authority versus renegade, confrontation versus surrender, interpersonal vendettas, etc -- it would have cheapened it. Instead, the characters' relationships retain their complexity and ambiguity throughout the film.

3 - failing to create a central, compelling antagonist

Loki was not thoroughly sketched out in The Avengers. A good deal of this work was left to Thor; The Avengers treated him as a fairly generic fascist supervillain. Nonetheless, Tom Hiddleston does justice to the role, giving Loki the burning, resentful self-importance that the character needs to set the end of the world in motion. His sheer malice gives a special endearing significance to all his confrontations and evil speeches, and it makes for a whole array of great moments.

4 - failing to raise the stakes enough for us to care

Throughout the course of the extended climax, there are a whole range of things for us to be vicariously protective of. The world as a whole... New York, which is a focal point for an alien invasion force, threatened by both the invaders and by its own supposed protectors... Tony Stark's life, which he offers as a chip in an intergalactic gamble... and Tony Stark's love for Pepper Potts, which is tapped as a corollary to his potential sacrifice. There is a great deal on the table by the end of The Avengers, and the film insists on our continued investment.

5 - not giving us enough huge, city-blasting special effects

Okay, so they obviously weren't going to make this mistake.

A good deal of the credit for The Avengers goes to the film for reasons that are hard to nail down. In particular, it balanced dialog and action in an elusive way -- somehow it functioned as a "screwball comedy" tucked within a constant stream of combat set-pieces, as if a personable, charismatic virus had infected a Michael Bay film. To fans of comic books, this creates a universe in cosmic harmony, because we're used to a medium where people manage to make long expository speeches in the middle of hectic combat. Its overstated dramatic moments (big speeches, flashes of sentimentality) also resonated with that comic book artificiality, which becomes a worthy aesthetic in its own right when it's applied with conviction.

The Avengers was so committed to its audience and so respectful of its constraints that it might feel disappointingly pedestrian if it's not taken in a certain spirit. However, pedestrian it is not. For a 2.5-hour film, it moves incredibly fast. For a massive high-flying actioner, it's amazingly human. And for an obvious ensemble franchise entry, it's strikingly intimate. Whedon was given a pile of bricks and mortar, and out of it, he fashioned a sculpture that respects the materials, and at the same time transcends them, and all our expectations.

From the blogroll: Two artworks I feel deserve mention

Photography by Lissy Elle, as found on But Does It Float (check it out at the latter site... it's a very compelling collection, with a perfectly minimalist presentation).

A series of women, terrifying in their vulnerability, defying space and narrative, suspended in seizures of contingency. Women without faces -- complete and confrontational in their abstract existence -- facing down their mirror images, artifacts of constraint (walls, cardboard boxes), tokens of arrested grace (the bed, standing en pointe). Photography is the process of freezing the fluctuation of light as a chronological cross-section, and these particular photos attest to the impossibility of this feat, just as the impossibility of levitation, replication, and perfect balance are the roots of the power of grace, eros, and equilibrium.

A skull of books, found on Colossal.

No matter how abstract and enigmatic your thoughts have become, they are still stuck in your head, smushed between cells and confined to your gray matter, always on the verge of becoming completely inert. When the pages in between your ears melt into the soil, they will feed the worms and the soil and become the fibers of the tree that becomes the paper of the manuscript where somebody writes the next manual for web developers. And those words, in turn, will become as useless as the ones that became the paper they're printed on, and if they're lucky, somebody will turn them into something truly durable, like a skull, filled with stagnant language, carved from the pulp compressed between the arms of a vise.

Mad Men: Peggy and Pete as two faces of Don Draper

I think I have the tendency to turn every story I consume into its own inner world in order to understand it. It's sort of a New Criticism tendency, I think... the show/movie/book/game sets it conditions, and then everything gets to fall into place within that framework. So the observant viewer gets the privilege of figuring out what the framework is, and coming to a more robust understanding of how the specifics fit into it.

As I've watched Mad Men (mainly seasons 3 and 4), I've discovered that the world of Mad Men gravitates entirely around Don Draper. Yes, I realize he's the main character, and sort of our stand-in/protagonist/flawed hero, but he's present in the narrative as more than just a character. His personality also determines the personalities of the people around him, and I think, in a certain way, the whole cast of characters can be seen as refracted rays from the prism of his personality.

Consider: aside from Don, two of the centerpieces of his show – Peggy and Pete – are under his supervision (more or less). Both have risen in the corporate ranks to the point where they're no longer strictly his underlings, but they certainly both answer to him, as the whole of each company he works with has done. I would say that Peggy and Pete are the two most important characters in the world of Mad Men, even more important than Betty, Joan, or Roger Sterling. And I think the reason they're so important is that they share a special triadic relationship with Don -- specifically, as his twin proteges, they have come to embody two contrasting aspects of his personality.

Peggy is Don's introspective side, his hard-working, straight-talking, insightful, and creatively pragmatic inner artist. She not only overcomes her social barriers, as he has overcome his... she actually turns them into advantages without letting herself become defined by them. Over the seasons of the show, she repeatedly shows an uncanny ability to see into the obscure heart of business and personal situations. She stays with Don late into the night when he needs to develop a visual solution for Samsonite. She is the only employee at SCDP who understands his publication of the anti-cigarette editorial in the New York Times. In Season 3 Episode 10, she defies the writer's block that's set in with Don and Kinsey by dropping a pitch-perfect tagline, after Kinsey has spent a full night struggling to come up with something.

In this light, it's worth watching the relationship between Don and Peggy develop. Don, at times, uses Peggy as a cognitive appendage, letting her write copy and disgorge ideas, and then editing them into high-profile ads and taking credit for them. He makes an effort -- whether warranted or not -- to keep her controlled, demanding that she stay humble, even when her work has gained new ground for the firm. Don knows that the creative force in the ad business has to stay organic, opaque, and mysterious, and even as he guides Peggy to her full potential, he also helps delineate the space in which she is most effective. He places a mask over her to keep her secrets safe.

It's also worth noting that in her personal life, Peggy is caught between two pursuits: the pursuit of self-reliance and independence, and the pursuit of lasting happiness and stability. She struggles to honor her own family without being caught in the force field of her moralizing mother; she searches carefully for a sort of love that provides both growth and consistency. Her grounded, carefully-calculated relationships with her various male paramours (Duck Phillips, Mark, Abe Drexler) mirror Don's relationship with Betty, who provides him with stability, but who defers to him on matters of family and business.

Pete, on the other hand, is a reflection of Don's extroverted aspect. He aggressively courts clients and projects a calm, genial persona at all times. His specialty -- something Don, at his best moments, is also able to effect -- is identifying and targeting the specific desires of the client... telling clients what they want to hear, even if they don't realize it themselves. As the series progresses, Pete becomes an expert at raising stakes at the right moment, a skill he puts to use in his negotiations with Trudy's father in the episode "The Rejected."

Through the course of the show, Pete learns a lot about competitive diplomacy. He learns to lie (hastily pretending to be sick when his bosses show up at his house during a job-hunting absence) and he learns self-preservation. This reflects the side of Don that can lie so audaciously to Betty when she suspects him of cheating... this is a crass, calculated lie, never really convincing, but always barely sufficient to give Don some plausible deniability. And Pete, like Don, is an impulsive cheater -- just as he has learned Don's skills of public appearance, so he has developed the same self-indulgent addictions.

When did Pete become a shade of Don's public persona? Probably at the end of Season 1, when he threatened to expose Don's past as Dick Whitman. This, in effect, literalizes the relationship between Don and Pete. After this, Pete not only symbolizes Don's public facade... he also becomes a sort of guardian familiar, responsible for keeping Don's secret and protecting his identity from exploitation and collapse. He is called upon more than once to bear this burden -- for instance, when he intercepts the security clearance in Season 4 Episode 10.

So in Peggy and Pete, we see the Yin and Yang of Don Draper. Peggy is the introverted, creative, ambitious, observant, and faithful side of Don, and Pete is the extroverted, cunning, impulsive, entitled, and carefully suppressed side. So what do we make of the fact that in episode 1 -- the VERY FIRST EPISODE of a long and complex series -- these two facets come together and conceive a child? Is it possible that once Don sublimates into a disembodied marketing blurb signed by the long-lost Dick Whitman, the love-child of Don's two proteges will become a new Don Draper, a Janus-faced ad-man for our own generation?

I hope the answer to this question is as interesting as it deserves to be.

Slipping Through the Cracks: There Will Be Blood (2007) and the breakdown of truth

WARNING: THIS ENTRY, LIKE MOST OF MY ANALYSES, IS A RELENTLESS STREAM OF SPOILERS.

There Will Be Blood begs a question -- was Daniel Plainview always an asshole, even when he came from a humble station and chipped away at rocks for silver? Was his early appearance of earnestness simply cover for a calculating, malicious nihilist? Or is this the story of his fall from earthy humility into the madness of alienated wealth? Is it the oil and the money that are evil? Or is it simply human nature, poisoned at the root, fertile ground for corruption and betrayal?

Your interpretation of Daniel's actions must answer that question, and it will, in turn, retroactively color your experience of the whole film. Read as a fallen hero, a failed father figure, Daniel Plainview is a study in disillusionment, a showcase for the destructive power of wealth and obsession. This story is a story of a fall from grace, the story of Adam or Anakin Skywalker. However, read strictly as a villain, Daniel Plainview becomes a culmination of all of humanity's most horrible potentialities. He becomes the type of evil, cruel, unredeemable character rarely found in the bible, or in any literature... a Grendel before he was humanized by Gardner, a Cormac McCarthy antagonist. According to this interpretation, his final sadistic moments are the blossoming of a man who was always rotten deep down.

When a question like this is just floating in the air over a narrative arc, it's easy to take the middle path: "Well, I think he always had the innate potential to be evil, but it was the oil and the money that hardened him into a villain." It's the most logical answer, but also a little bit of a cop-out as to "human nature," as it were. But it's not an open-ended question... in There Will Be Blood, it's a strict binary, and it hinges on a particular point, right at the end of the movie.

That point: when Daniel tells his son that he never cared about him, is he lying, just to injure his son in a moment of passion? Or is he telling the truth?

If Daniel is lying about these things, it means that his concern for his son -- his earnestness as a father -- was real, at least at the beginning. These damning claims are merely weapons that Daniel Plainview is using, here at the end of his life, to scorch the barren earth of his own relationships and good name. But if Daniel is telling the truth to HW, it means that his whole life, his every act of kindness and humanity has been inauthentic, part of his pursuit of profit. It's a striking paradox: if Daniel is lying at the end of his life, it's to hide the fact that he was once a decent human being. If he is telling the truth, it's only to reveal that his whole life has been a lie.

In this final monologue to HW, Daniel offers no less than a sudden, complete revisionist history of his own whole life. This development splits his life into two competing narratives, as revisionist histories tend to do with their subjects. Though you might prioritize one narrative over the other, you can never efface either of them from your image of Daniel... he now exists in two parallel universes: one where he was a practical, competitive man who at the very least loved his son; another where his whole life was a con, an offense against our most basic human sensibilities. In the former universe, wealth and oil have the power to rob man of his humanity. In the second universe, man never had any humanity, except what he fabricated to manipulate himself and the people around him.

But if the truth of Daniel's poisonous confession is the pivot point in this Janus-faced narrative, then we have to consider the damage wrought by these events upon truth itself. There Will Be Blood doesn't just let truth stand, unmolested, to be assessed and accounted for. Rather, the film shows how power and wealth, infiltrating the society and the soul, begin to break down the integrity of truth. Eli Sunday is that part of the story.

Eli Sunday may stand in for "faith" and "religion," but on a deeper level, he represents the universal ideal of "truth." He lays claim to the power of prophecy and revelation; he sees right past Daniel Plainview's neighborly facade when they sit down together at the dinner table. He repeatedly faces down authority, rendering his own father meek and disenfranchised -- a case study in speaking truth to power. And when Daniel Plainview needs to buy Bandy's farm, and supplicates himself before the church, Eli uses "the truth"... or at least a certain variation on it... to put his own final seal of authority upon the oil man.

At this pivotal point, Daniel Plainview is forced to betray himself by conceding his own narrative. In his own version of his life, he did not "abandon" his son so much as simply send him away out of fatherly concern, and when Eli forces him to confront this darker side of the truth, he is exploiting Daniel's fatal existential weakness. In the process, however, Eli effectively destroys himself, because he also betrays the sanctity of truth itself. Using "truth" and confession in this cynical way, Eli turns it into a tool of power, a mere corollary to a world governed by dominance and ambition.

Daniel is the lord of this world, and as soon as he gets the chance, he turns truth -- now enslaved by the whims of power -- back upon Eli as a weapon. Just as Eli poisoned Daniel's personal narrative, so Daniel forces Eli to uproot his own, using the leverage of wealth and influence to force a confession out of the prophet. "I am a false prophet! God is a superstition!" is not entirely the truth, but it isn't a lie, either, especially coming from the lips of the prophet Eli. It's an effacement, a disfigurement of truth, a twisting of the truth in Daniel's hand. And this betrayal of the truth, this malignant counter-revelation, this toxic confession, is as much a part of Eli's death as a bowling pin to the head.

I suspect that Daniel's rotten self-image... his insidious narrative of his own motives... really started taking shape when he discovered that his "brother" was a stranger, clinging to a false identity to ride sidecar on Daniel's success. Daniel's interaction with Henry seemed to be his last chance at trust, the final departure point where Daniel might have placed his faith in a comrade. When Daniel discovers that Henry is a fraud, he finally finds that familial love and cynical exploitation are irresolvably tangled in his mind. At this moment, he begins to doubt all human connection, including his own affection for his son. If his last chance of brotherhood was a mere facade, corrupted by money and lies, how can he trust his own claim to fatherhood any more?

There are endless echoes of the bible in There Will Be Blood, but there are also echoes of Heisenberg and Foucault. Perhaps Daniel Plainview's soul isn't determined at the time it's expressed... maybe it isn't determined until many years later, when he interprets it in the most negative light, crafting a vicious and inhuman narrative with which to bludgeon his son. Maybe, if he had just been more charitable to himself, Daniel Plainview would have retroactively determined his life as the tragic downward spiral of a decent businessman. Or maybe, conversely, the interpretation is meaningless -- maybe "truth" isn't even a thing in this world of wealth and oil and exploitation of the land and community. Maybe, as Foucault has implied, the truth is just a shroud draped over an infernal machine, a grinding apparatus of power and cynicism and influence.

This isn't the first or last word, by a long shot -- it's a wide-open film, full of recessed spaces for interpretation. Eli's relationship with Paul is one of its great unexplored mysteries, as is Eli's claim to moral righteousness. But at the very least, we've made a reasonable start at teasing out some of those complexities and ambiguities, and finding some meaning in a tragic, terrifying film with a nihilist soul.

Dexter Season 4: essential (post)modern man(hood)

Rita: Car pools and swimming pools? How much are we living the dream?
Dexter: So much.

Dexter Morgan is a performer. Michael C. Hall does justice to this aspect of his character -- Dexter is always saying the right thing, but only after searching for a moment, letting his bewilderment show in his eyes as he struggles to sync up with the people around him. His neighbors, his coworkers, his psychologist, his wife -- they're all the audience, and he's a magician, a Stephen Colbert, always in character.

How much truth is there in Dexter's performance? That question is no easier for Dexter to answer than it is for any of us. Because as far as Dexter is concerned, there's no truth whatsoever. Normalcy is the ultimate role he plays, and every time he switches from a smirk to a smile, it strains his composure. The rest of the world is comfortable with its mundane preoccupations and its rote conversations, and Dexter is aware that he's the outsider, faking it until he can get away from it.

But if Dexter is an outsider, why do you sympathize with him so strongly? Come on, I know you do. And this is what complicates the question... in Dexter's momentary lapses, in his little hesitations, his moments of confusion and alienation, he seems to be saying, "I'm supposed to care about this shit? This is what's on these peoples' minds?" And when you see that look in his eyes, it doesn't register as bizarre and unhinged -- instead, it rings with familiarity. Because we all feel like that outsider, looking into a gallery of normal lives. Whether we're at the water cooler or hosting a garden party, we all have those moments where we feel like phony play-actors trying not to be noticed and called out on it.

Just ask Chris Rock. He's a married man who hates married people.

I know this goes for all humans, but I'd wager that men (or the masculine-conditioned) have a stronger affinity with Dexter than the feminine-inclined. Traditional masculinity is constructed as a double-edged sword of independence and isolation, the keystones of the rugged individual. And the non-traditional male, the "nerd" as it were (Dexter gifts Harrison a shirt with the phrase "My Dad's a Geek") is doubly-bound by this outsider stigma: you are constantly faced with the standards of traditional masculinity (cars babes sports money) but you even place yourself outside of that. The greatest survival skill of the anti-social man is to fully embrace his outsider status, to love his own alienation, to take this isolation as a source of great pride.

So we all do that thing that Dexter does: "I can't believe you punched him!" "Yeah, me neither!" You own up to the little emasculations, you bend with the turbulence, admitting that fighting is out of character for you, preempting any true ridicule with gentle self-deprecation. It's a crutch, a self-defense mechanism... self-awareness and self-acceptance. It's a certain kind of honesty, though perhaps overstated.

Oh, right... except for the fact that it's not really honest. At least not for Dexter. With every humble remark Dexter makes, we're in on the joke: we know that he's not really that gentle nerdy science husband. He's actually a seasoned hunter, an expert in disguise and guerilla warfare and thievery and hand-to-hand combat. He can disarm thugs, intimidate bullies, and outmaneuver vicious killers. He's basically a superhero, and his little passing self-deprecations are steeped in irony, meant just for us, the audience that gets to travel around in Dexter's head.

And that's where Dexter becomes unrelatable, right? He's an outsider, like the rest of us, but unlike the rest of us, he's a superhero deep down? Isn't that where our sympathy ends?

Nay!

Let's take a moment to listen to Neil Stephenson, speaking for all men. From his seminal novel Snow Crash:

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."

This may sound like an adolescent boy's fantasy, but let's face it... all humans, and especially all men, carry that adolescent around with them their whole lives, and we all have a little bit of Hiro Protagonist within us. Dexter actualizes this fantasy. He doesn't just dream of being a superhero -- he IS a superhero, flipping from disguise to disguise, strong-arming thugs into going straight, out-maneuvering cops and murderers, and generally being a black-ops martial arts outlaw whenever it's convenient. Dexter turns the male fantasy into a reality, and it adds an extra dimension to that self-deprecating humor he's always using to protect himself.

Another of Dexter's key moments -- aside from his "how much are we living the dream?" response -- is when he impersonates a truck driver in episode 11, which I would definitely transcribe here, if I could find the quote online. More than any of the beat-downs or boat driving, this is the moment when Dexter becomes the man we all keep in our back pocket, the man who can do ANYTHING, provided he's driven to it by necessity. You need me to be a truck driver right now? Goddammit, I'll do it. I'm a man. This is what we do.

This isn't just cop-educated serial killers in Premium Channel TV shows. This is all men. Some part of us, however small, believes we're secretly a superhero. Hiro Protagonist thinks he could be the baddest motherfucker. Dicky Barrett's not a coward, he's just never been tested. Alias, Mission: Impossible, Cloverfield, your plumber, your neighbor -- every man is convinced that if it came down to it, they could do what's necessary to punish assholes, save their family, protect AMERICA.

And yet, it's tough for us to maintain this illusion, when we're struggling with illusions of control and the ominous shadow of inadequacy, when we're faking normalcy, and also embracing our outsider status so that we can feel it's legitimate. We're all Shrek and Donkey, onion parfaits, starting with "normalcy" on top, then proceeding to a fluffy layer of alienation, all stacked on top of an inner superhero who's forever kept in dire reserve.

This is what it means to perform masculinity. This is where "truth" gets lost in layers of projection, self-preservation, and constructed identity. This is the territory where nerdy men -- nay, all men -- nay, all people -- get lost in their own performances.

Arthur Mitchell: "Which are you?"
Dexter Morgan: "All of them."

Von Trier's Antichrist: The rational masculine, the primal feminine

I saw Antichrist recently, and at the time, I told myself it was mostly just an obligatory gesture to the cinema scene. Like Enter the Void, it was so much discussed, inciting such controversy, that I figured I should at least give it a go so I wouldn't feel too out of the loop. I'm glad I saw it -- turns out the reason it stirred people up so much is that aside from the provocation, there's a lot there to think about. The foremost is the film's position in terms of gender politics, and though this is the conversation that's been most covered, I think it's far from exhausted.

It strikes me that so much of the discussion of Antichrist alleges that it's misogynist, which seems like a totally misplaced criticism to me... in fact, the type of criticism that could only come from someone already invested in the patriarchy to begin with. Antichrist is, in fact, a highly self-aware film about gender relations on a broad scale, and it demonstrates a certain tortured sensitivity that more traditionally "feminist" films may lack. To see how this works, however, you have to start by understanding where the film is coming from (giving it the "benefit of the doubt," as it were).

Antichrist is not about breaking down or disrupting essentialist assumptions. It's not about showing that women can do what is traditionally ascribed to men, nor about lubricating the slippery contact between physical sex and gender identity. Those are more traditional routes for feminist mass media to take -- Disney films and action movies showing that women can make effective warriors, art-house pictures breaking up our stereotypes of masculinity and offering criticism of the heteronormative order. Nay, indeed, Antichrist works within a symbolically essentialist universe, where masculinity and femininity are isolated and represented as embodied symbols ("He" and "She", respectively). In order to appreciate the film's statements, you have to accept this initial premise.

From there, the viewer can start to see some outlines of themes in Antichrist. The relationship between the masculine and the feminine is a paradoxical one, entailing both dependency and competition. Perhaps the most logical way to see Nic, the infant who dies in the film's prologue, is that he is the offspring that unites the masculine and feminine forces -- he is their cease-fire condition. His death creates an irresolvable break between masculinity and femininity, and in this break, we find the nature of each of them, engaged in a complex dialectic that evolves throughout the film. I know there are a lot of pseudo-academic terms there. The fact is, this movie condenses a ton of dynamics that theorists have taken great pains to unpack and investigate.

"She" is rage and depression, the explosive despair of losing everything and having no recourse or path to redemption. She is also the body, the orgasm, the blossoming subconscious. "He" is the rational order, mustering the power of language and reason to distance himself from the tragedy he's just witnessed. His first scene in Act I -- the ritual of the funeral, the patriarchal virtues of solemn silence and respect -- is interrupted by Her fainting, a break from reason that belongs uniquely to those who suffer. From that moment forward, He assumes her psychiatric treatment, attempting to circumscribe her pain within his perspective, his methods, his exposure therapy.

This is the patriarchal offensive. It's not beating or name-calling... it's the incessant attempt to flank her grief, to second-guess her instinctive reactions and control the source of her catastrophic emotions. Even when He says her pain is "natural," that she should work through it, he's attempting to put it in its place. And when He decides to take She to Eden, he is doing something bold and inadvisable -- he's taking her to the source, the veiled epicenter of her fear, frustration and self-loathing. He's taking on an offensive role against the feminine force that She represents. She has to "face it," armed with his composure, in order to tame it.

It's worth taking a moment to consider some of the mythological references in Antichrist. Obviously there's the various Christian signifiers -- Eden, the witch hunts, and the death of the only son. The other major reference here is a story called The Story of the Three Wonderful Beggars, and/or Vasilii the Unlucky, which is an old Russian-Serbian folk tale. You can read the whole thing here, in its Serbian form, which I think is the more useful of its major incarnations. From this, Antichrist draws a number of images -- the three beggars, the tree with something significant hidden in its roots, and crossing a bridge to reach what is essentially a cursed temple.

The three beggars in Antichrist seem to be symbols of a broken order, especially within the feminine. They are all self-destructive (or destructive of their young, which amounts to the same thing in this case). He and She are not approaching a peaceful, balanced feminine spirit... they're approaching the wooded symbol of a shattered, tortured, guilty soul, ready to lash out at whatever force is trying to control it. The beggars in the Serbian myth are an ambivalent force, acting to destroy power of the father in order to preserve the larger patriarchal chain leading from the father to the son. They are heralds of the Oedipal murder. This symbol functions similarly within Antichrist... though the son was part of the male lineage, a token of the patriarchy's continuation, the mother nonetheless loved it, and she mourns and rages for its loss.

This profoundly complex nature of the feminine spirit is thoroughly explored in Antichrist. She is the vengeful antagonist, inconsolable and violent, but she is also complicit. Indeed, She seems to feel herself to be incomplete, which is a consistent theme throughout patriarchal mythologies. The Freudian/Lacanian image of the female was of an entity that felt itself incomplete, lacking a phallus. In Antichrist, She becomes unhinged because her son, to whom she feels connected on a deep, organic level, is ripped from her, as if a part of her body is amputated. Her rage, pushed to its limit, is expressed as a fear of abandonment, and for a short time, She takes control from He, using the coercive power of a millstone and a fucking huge log. At this moment in the film, the moment when She presides over He's mangled body, the sexual order seems reversed through violence, if only for a moment.

The first reason I claim that this film could be read as feminist, rather than misogynist, is that Von Trier acknowledges the power and the validity of certain forces that he associates with the feminine: pure emotion, including rage, despair, and depression; unconditional love for a son, regarding him as a part of oneself, and the desperation that might be experienced upon the loss of something so irreplaceable. Von Trier seems to acknowledge the injustice of trying to rationalize those things, to fix them through inert spiritual/psychological engineering. I believe he understands these things because he's experienced depression, and he knows that from the abyss of despair, it can't just be explained away (whether as a mere medical condition, or with the platitude that "it will get better").

From that point, the film evolves into a story of the ascension of the patriarchy (a sign, to me, that it was meant to be read as a tragedy, like Orwell's 1984). Once She has dominated He and her rage has abated, She makes a desperate, fateful decision, essentially surrendering her power by neutering herself. This is another sign of the ambiguous nature of the feminine, which is emotionally uninhibited but prone to guilt and self-destruction. This event, depicted so provocatively in the film, is the reversal that allows He to destroy her, reestablishing the patriarchal hegemony.

You may see this as a happy ending or a tragic one (nothing in this film is really happy, per se), but you have to acknowledge, this is what everything was leading up to. In all of the references -- Christian mythology, Freudian theory, the Russian folk tale -- the male lineage has to be broken and reforged in order to circumscribe and control the violent, sexual, physically-potent Female figure, which always threatens to rupture the established order. Christ joins the Father, Vasilii replaces Marko, Oedipus murders Laius, and Nic dies so that He can confront and control She's unstable emotions. And in the end, the women are faceless, dressed conservatively, and gathering as He ascends to the top of the hill. The primal feminine has been dominated, and in Eden as in the Western world, order is restored once more.

On National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and Salon.com's Laura Miller

-- by the way, this post has been significantly edited for clarity. Please don't be mad. --

Okay, so this thing was published in Salon.com, penned by a Miss Laura Miller, on the phenomenon known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It's both incredibly petty and mysteriously sympathetic (although for any individual, it'll probably strike one of those chords sharply, and miss the other entirely). And it's interesting to parse out as commentary on writing, on our changing literary and creative ecosystem, and on what it means to be an artist in our digital world.

NaNoWriMo is an event, mostly organized online, calling on people to write a 50,000+ word novel in a month. If you successfully do so, you're granted the status of "winner," and there were about 37.5 thousand of those last year. The objectives of this exercise, as gleaned from the NaNoWriMo website, are: 1 - to exercise your innate creativity, which you may ignore or set aside in much of your everyday life; 2 - to commit to a large project and follow it through, which is something you may not often get a chance to do; 3 - to break the shackles of self-censorship that may constrain your intellectual and creative life; 4 - to take part in an important cultural art form, in order to better understand and appreciate it. For the record, I hate that "NaNoWriMo" abbreviation, but I'll keep using it as necessary.

Miss Miller's thesis (perhaps laid out a bit snarkily) is that this organized activity is tragically misguided. She points out that writing demands more than a steady 50,000-word stream of consciousness, and that this initiative creates a glut of amateur prose in a world that's already got too many books and not enough readers. Her arguments aren't very concrete or practical, because she doesn't convincingly show any harms; rather, she's giving voice to a more general frustration, a lack of patience for the narcissistic, the trivial, the self-indulgent that, in her opinion, this initiative seems to appeal to. She seems to be saying, "If you really want to write, you'll learn to do it, and eventually, you'll do it well. Why must there be a widespread movement of people who push themselves and each other to write badly?"

Miss Miller's argument sounds puffed up and crotchety, given the apparently harmless inspirational nature of the NaNoWriMo program. People who participate in NaNoWriMo aren't damaged by the experience; to the contrary, they tend to come out feeling very gratified, like their souls have grown, and proud of having created something personal, often for the first time. Editors may gripe about those few writers who send them amateurish manuscripts thrown together for the sake of a writing exercise, and some random people around the world may be annoyed that their novel-writing friends are forcing them to read badly-written manuscripts, but these complaints are minor at best. There's already quite a bit of writing about how arbitrary the "slush pile" process is anyway, and it's hard to imagine that editors are really that heartbroken by having to scan over and discard a few more pages of bad writing.

And yet, there are reasons to sympathize with Laura Miller's angst.

One of them might be your sense of our digital culture, which has been developing over the past decade: an ecosystem of vapid consumption and creation, of capriciousness and self-regard. This is the age of blogs and Facebook, not to mention the world of self-publishing, of YouTube filmmaking, of self-promotion in 140-character chunks. It is a world of consumption that's accelerated but not well-informed, as people ravenously devour the most accessible and sensationalistic media artifacts -- Snookie and the Kardashians, Jack and Jill, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It may be a new world of digital media, with more ubiquitous access to cultural products, but this doesn't mean it's more favorable to talent, or more rich and evolved. A bookstore owner recently said to me, "The e-book devices don't really threaten my business, because they're not for book-lovers... they're actually more for the book-haters." If he's right, it's that much scarier that these devices are taking over the market so quickly.

If you really wanted to back up Miss Miller's thesis, you could probably argue, on a theoretical level, that NaNoWriMo is contributing to a culture of noise. There is a great deal of content being created, more and more every day, and the capacity to curate this content is not keeping up. Ten new blogs pop up for every new magazine or reviewer. Everybody is talking more and more about themselves, feeling more and more pressured to project themselves into profiles, blogs, and tweets. Noise is starting to overpower signal, and arguably, NaNoWriMo is just going to contribute to that trend.

This argument is shaky, given that NaNoWriMo doesn't sell itself as some sort of Great New Writers Tryouts and Awards. Arguably, the vast majority of the people who write a novel in November don't even try to make that novel public... they ask a couple people to read it, and then allow it to disappear into a drawer, existing simply as a personal badge of accomplishment. You may say, "Then what's the point?", but that's not for anyone to judge except the person doing the writing -- nobody is entitled to judge anyone else's creative act in this mundane little world.

Following this "signal vs. noise," "creation vs. consumption" thread, there's another assertion in Miss Miller's argument: that the world needs more readers, rather than more writers. In a way, this is a pointless observation... the lack of readers may be a problem, but it's not NaNoWriMo's problem, because the organization is devoted to personal growth and the individual journey of writing, not to the issue of informed literacy. However, it clarifies Miller's vantage point: she's coming from a place that's concerned not about writing per se, nor about reading per se, but about the economy of creation versus appreciation.

I think this aspect of her argument can best be summed up thus: we in the Western world are developing a culture, not simply of creation and consumption, but of mindless, impulsive creation and consumption -- and NaNoWriMo is an initiative that trivializes and cheapens the very difficult process of creation, and muddies up the literary landscape, making informed consumption that much harder.

Of course, there's something else in Laura Miller's post that bears witness, and it's not so much a "good reason" as it is a way of understanding where she's coming from. It doesn't justify her sourness, but it brings it a small measure of validity. It's something she touches on in this passage:

"So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. Writers are, in fact, hellishly persistent; they will go on writing despite overwhelming evidence of public indifference and (in many cases) of their own lack of ability or anything especially interesting to say."

If you read the comments on the article, you'll only discover a few that agree with Miss Miller, and these mostly come from people who claim to be writers and editors already. On the other hand, sundry great writers (Neil Gaiman, Dave Eggers, Meg Cabot) have strongly supported to the initiative (via "pep talks" in particular). If you consider the status of these various participants, with their various positions, you discover something: the people who are most irked by NaNoWriMo are semi-successful or struggling writers, and the people who sing its praises most highly are amateurs on one hand, and celebrated masters on the other.

On a superficial level, this may explain Miss Miller's position: she's part of that class of semi-successful and unrewarded writers who resent all the naive amateurs elbowing in on her profession. Perhaps this essay is simply an expression of insecurity, a blast of misguided frustration with her own professional status, which is obviously respectable, but not transcendent. This may be one of the reasons I feel some sympathy with her, as well: when NaNoWriMo tells amateurs that "anyone can do it," we want to say, "Wrong! It's goddamn difficult! We've been working on it for years, and our careers have hardly seen the light of day!" It's a narcissistic reaction, but there's always some narcissism in art.

However, on a deeper level, there's something here to be said about the actual creative process, and how a creative career develops. There are two highly rewarding parts of a creative career: the very beginning, where there's no barrier to at least "trying it out," and the eventual end, when you finally get the fame and recognition that registers as "fulfilled potential." NaNoWriMo is full of the latter famous people commiserating with the former hopeful people, who are just discovering their own potential: their first comments from readers, their first chapter headings and plot twists and cliffhangers, their first obsessions with their own worlds and the characters who inhabit them.

What's obscured by this process is the fact that between the beginning and the glorious end, there's an extremely long, torturous, difficult journey of thwarted expectations, setbacks, and self-doubt. Audiences don't come easily, and you quickly get tired of soliciting people to read and appreciate your work. The amount of effort you put into each piece increases rapidly, until you're strained and exhausted, and the returns on this investment diminish, basically to nothing. The people who once thought you were so talented and promising are now openly avoidant and dismissive, thinking you're misguided, tired of hearing about what they consider your private obsessions. This period of an artist's life is a trial by fire, and this is why so many give up or discard something that they once claimed to do "just because I love doing it."

This period is not just growing pains. Committed artists know this -- many people will begin an artist's journey thinking they've found their calling, only to give up on it after five or ten years have vanished into a quixotic pursuit. Others will continue with their passion their whole lives, but will never actually be discovered, and they'll have to find some reason to keep going without from the thrill of validation (an absence which, unfortunately, often feels a lot like "failure").

I think it's natural, and even somewhat justified (I don't know, maybe 5-10% justified) to feel some frustration and resentment toward something like NaNoWriMo, which calls out to so many aspiring, idealistic, uncommitted amateurs and invites them to experience the first fleeting thrill of an artist, but doesn't provide any fertile ground for them to really commit. It feels like it trivializes the work of the people who have built lives around their art. It feels like a massive giddy tour bus going through a coal mine or an auto factory.

And yet, I can't stand in open opposition to such a movement. It is not claiming to create great writers, nor is it intended to trivialize the hard work of the great authors. Personal growth and new experiences are valuable in themselves; agency, artistic awareness, well-roundedness, and positive mental habits are things the world could use more of. I can think of lots of alternative projects and initiatives I think would be more valuable than NaNoWriMo within the literary cultural space, but I'm not the one who's taken that first step of creating an organization. Even in the dark forest of my own misgivings and anxieties (and Miss Miller's), I have to step back and remember: this is about giving people a chance to make their own lives better through writing. That's utilitarianism and virtue ethics and self-actualization, the groundwork of great individuals and great societies. There are so many bad things in the world. This is not one of them.

By the way, if you know any websites or services that are dedicated to discovering great writers in the digital ocean of amateur work, please let me know. I've seen them for visual arts and music, but not for writers.

Twitter movie reviews: 1 year, 100 movies, 140 characters each

Over the past year, I've been tweeting movie reviews.  I've tried to do this after every single movie I've seen, either in the theater or on video.  I also covered a couple of the anime series I watched. I'm guessing I've captured about 70% of my consumption. Not bad, I don't think.

Each review fits perfectly into a Tweet... including the movie title, date, and any punctuation, each one is 140 characters long, no more, no less. The biggest liberties I've taken are the use of ampersands, and the use of the final period, both of which I considered optional. Again, I think I've done pretty well here, managing to get most of the reviews sounding pretty natural while staying within that character constraint.

Below I've compounded my first 100 Twitter movie capsules! Have fun browsing through. You'll notice the format is a bit different at the very beginning (i.e. at the very bottom)... it took me a week or two to settle on the final structure. So, from this past week to more than a year ago, here's my year in Twitter movie capsules:

-91 - 100-

Antichrist (2009) - Harrowing, sinister, & extremely transgressive, a merciless escalation of pain, captured by a viciously invasive camera.

Jigoku (1960) - A treatise on the inherent irredeemability of all men, leading to a descent into Japanese Hell, an eternal tortured bad trip

Hellboy II (2008) - Mignola's lovable brute, transplanted from M.M.'s gothic ruins into Del Toro's carnival of the baroque gilded grotesque.

Season of the Witch (2011) - History? Fantasy? Horror? Still, it's fun watching Perlman and Cage talk trash and fight in barbarian costumes.

Silent Hill (2006) - a wild industrial body-horror throw-down, undermined by some sloppiness, but redeemed by the boldness of its execution.

Wicker Man (1973) - Weird: a story of deception and man's murderous delusions, gilded in a folksy erotic giddiness that's hard to reconcile.

The Machinist (2004) - A tense, jarring psychological echo chamber; the twist isn't as important as the preceding journey of paranoid denial

Strange Days (1995) - A portrait of disconnected people adrift in a world at war, that makes a case for both its destruction and its rebirth

Robocop (1987) - An epic, disjunct hybrid of retro futurist fantasy and gory nihilistic brutality, & a paean to the moral purity of machines

Legend of Hell House (1973) - Offers up an interesting conflict between New Agey science and New Agey spiritualism. Atmospheric, but clunky.

-81 - 90-

I Can See You (2008) - Plays like a twisted wet-dream-turned-nightmare. An uneven, head-trippy romp that shows both inexperience and talent.

Road to Perdition (2002) - Shows the 1930's as a Bauhaus machinist future, its men guided by hard sentimentality & puritan sense of purpose.

Zodiac (2007) - A smart, breathless account of an amateur, willing to reach deep into a dangerous animal's den, even when its handlers balk.

Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales (2006) - A masterpiece of elegant abstraction and subtle storytelling. Blew me away. Esp. the last three ep's

Dead Leaves (2004) - A hyperactive acid-trip anime that becomes a test of patience. Mesmerizing, if you manage to sync up with its insanity.

Elfen Lied (2004) - An apparently cutesy shojo anime subverted by extreme emotional & physical violence. Sailor Moon by way of Takashi Miike

Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988) - Ups the ante on the first film, and comes with the same nightmare fuel set-pieces, but maybe shows too much

Winter's Bone (2010) - The paranoia of a noir, the harrowing grit of Southern Gothic, with just enough love & heroism to keep us sympathetic

Sling Blade (1996) - A movie that fit together perfectly; wouldn't have felt so brutal if it weren't so deadpan, quiet, gentle, & vulnerable

The Beach (2000) - Uneven plotting, at times comical writing, but some earnest sentiment and intense moments between the volatile bohemians.

-71 - 80-

Hellraiser (1987) - Gruesome, thematically focused, unflinching & disturbing at all the right moments. Brilliant, extreme, deservedly iconic

From Beyond (1986) - A parade of semi-human creatures and depravity; provides a great character in the young scientist tortured by the abyss

The Beyond (1981) - Mysterious, relentless, & revolting, full of cheesiness and horror tropes, but redeemed by an epic nihilistic conclusion

Wild Blue Yonder (2005) - Hypnotic at times, definitely a uniquely fuzzy-headed experience, but could stand to be a little bit more focused.

Fear[s] of the Dark (2007) - An eerie and bold psychological study, but not too scary, except Richard McGuire's section, which blew me away.

Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me (1992) - Full of Twin Peaks' enigmatic forces, but more grounded in the main character's troubled hopelessness.

Doctor Zhivago (1965) - A bitter, disillusioned family and political saga with a storybook veneer; stark, beautiful, and surprisingly cruel.

Goodbye, South, Goodbye (1996) - Thoughtful, evocative family crime drama, with a deadpan realism that makes the plot almost indecipherable.

Black Hawk Down (2001) - Gritty, star-studded, shows through audience identification that patriotism is inextricable from vicious bloodlust.

Nietzsche & the Nazis (2006) - Plus side: It's available on Netflix Instant. Minus side: it's a philosophy PhD talking for 3 hours straight.

-61 - 70-

The Sacrifice (1986) - A dreamy meditation on hopelessness and the tragedy and ecstasy of unrepayable grace; muffled, breathless, & hypnotic

Dust Devil (1992) - A parched, haunting, culturally-informed supernatural thriller with touches of abstraction; dense with subliminal power.

General Orders No. 9 (2011) - luminous feature-length meditation on the death of the natural soul of the South; uneven, sometimes beautiful.

Pistol Opera (2001) - spastic Frankenstein of a trippy samurai crime film; loosens up your brain for 70 mins, then attacks it in the finale.

Tree of Life (2011) - Nostalgia and intimacy mustered in service of a heroically ambitious effort. I need another viewing to fully absorb it

Pale Flower (1964) - Japanese sharp-eyed neo-noir, excellent high-contrast camerawork: a disciplined yakuza hitman is devoured by his vices.

Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - A compelling saga of perseverance and surrender, although undermined by its one-sided cultural perspective

Bridesmaids (2011) - Funny at times, but tired with crassness. A few lovable central characters allow it to squeak by as amusing & endearing

Nights of Cabiria (1957) - Cabiria was perfect as the jester maiden centerpiece of a storybook tabloid Rome, pregnant with her joy & tragedy

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) - Effectively tense, but could have used better characters to root for (Wilson was the charismatic exception).

-51 - 60-

Thor (2011) - An epic grade-B movie, full of pomp, that always seems to be smirking itself; yet, the father/brother/son conflict rings true.

Unbreakable (Shyamalan, 2000) - A simple, focused narrative construct, with the intensity & tonal commitment necessary to keep me hooked in.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - An opera of slow revelations, of tragic loss & partial recovery of the soul, against an endless desert backdrop.

Your Highness (2011) - Fun, vacuous vehicle for Danny McBride's crude sense of humor. Props to Courtney, one of the greatest sidekicks ever.

Inferno (1980) - Dario Argento weaves a demented doomsday tale of supernatural forces. Full of slow, lurking suspense & unhinged set-pieces.

13 Assassins (2011) - A samurai adventure hijacked by bleak, bloody, degrading medieval brutality. A tortured, vicious, un-heroic hero story

Wild at Heart (1990) - Flailing, fragmented, and twisted, but fairly straightforward compared to Lynch's later films. And Nic Cage nails it.

The Bird People in China (1998) - poignant, lyrical film about the smallness of human lives against the enduring stories of cultural memory.

Night of the Hunted (1980) - surreal, chilling, & sexual: intriguing, but annoyingly close to depicting actual mental illness as evil force.

Vampyres (1975) - A sometimes-silly erotic horror film that still manages to create a compelling setting and a sense of sensuality and dread

-41 - 50-

Cache (2005) - Unsettling, deadpan thriller, very modern in sensibility, clamped over issues (political, social, moral) that go a mile deep.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) - Voight and Hoffman in a platonic romance that competes with Taxi Driver for urban grit, but remains human in scope.

Barry Lyndon (1975) - never seen somebody balance epic romance with dry amusement like Kubrick. Oh, and the photography is beyond brilliant.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1976) - a meditation on love, the sublime, & self-destruction in the shadow of an endless ocean

Annie Hall (1977) - Heartfelt, inventive, distinguished by its lovable cynicism. Has the inscrutable touch of a brilliant emerging filmmaker

The Holy Girl (2004) - a subtle story: childhood faith and adolescent sexuality meet adult perversion. Cinematography you could get lost in.

Do the Right Thing (1989) - A rare film, both warm and cynical: jovial camaraderie, barely suppressing an undertone of reactionary violence.

Restrepo (2010) - Walks a gritty knife-edge between callous and sentimental. An eye-opening window into the way war reshapes the human mind.

The Mist (2007) - A menacing build-up overflows into an epic, devastating climax. The muscular apocalyptic paranoia is vintage Stephen King.

The Iron Giant (1999) - Luminous animation, with the kind of charm you expect of an old movie. A feat of imagination, flawlessly translated.

-31 - 40-

Time of the Wolf (2003) - Harrowing vision of an untamed, barren world - but with a touch of gentleness & determination. My favorite Haneke.

Tenebre (1982) - A respectable work of art, with some genuinely terrifying and surreal sequences, locked in a swinging new-wave time capsule

28 Days Later (2002) - Brilliant because it succeeds in being methodical, sympathetic, & character-driven first, and only then a horror film

Emperor of the North (1973) - Both gritty and magical, the roughest railroad-weary fairy tale I can imagine. Full of great 1930's shit-talk.

Kwaidan (1964) - four sad, claustrophobic ghost stories, staged in small expressionist spaces that feel like the inside of a disturbed mind.

Harakiri (1962) - a film that's slow-burning, but genuinely angry, culminating in a burst of violence in the face of silence and oppression.

Red Desert (1964) - A movie of modernity as emotional paralysis & lethargy. Haunting, in its way: stifling, neurotic, & visually captivating

Black Swan (2010) - Beautifully-lensed, unbalanced film of the torturous process of relinquishing control; striking in its fixated restraint

Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) - oblique and callous; a strange puppeteer's parade of dead souls on a jaunt through the real world

Come Drink With Me (1966) - The over-the-top theatrics make this 60's kung-fu classic a curiosity; the sick female heroine makes it awesome.

-21 - 30-

The White Ribbon (2009) - A knot of malice gathering slowly on an historical stage; this makes its relative banality strikingly suspenseful.

My Young Auntie (1981) - goofy theatrical kung-fu, like Crouching Tiger meets Three Stooges. This genre has a tone that's truly distinctive.

Chungking Express (1994) - A fluid tale of love losing itself in a big city. Delicate, meditative story with razor-sharp and dynamic visuals

The Exterminating Angel (1962) - surrealism made suspenseful, addictive, & captivating; evokes giddy helplessness, like temporary paralysis.

Samurai Rebellion (1962) - Quiet & relentless; dripping with the angst of a mannered political society barely suppressing its violent urges.

Lone Wolf & Cub 2 (1972) - Fragmented, less scenic, with a heavy emphasis on explosive violence - balanced by surprisingly poignant moments.

Lone Wolf & Cub 1 (1972) - Striking mix of feudal Japanese atmosphere and 70's exploitation violence; definitely feels like a genre classic.

Venus in Furs (1969) - Great film. A sexually-charged near-death fever dream, endearingly self-important, but chilled out enough to earn it.

The Last Winter (2006) - A good psychological/suspense/madness horror movie, undermined by fragments of a bad monster movie late in the game

Solaris (1972) - Lots of exposition, but a well-wrought love story, subverted by the unease of loving a facsimile of reality... all in space

-11 - 20-

Night and Fog (1955) - Resnais contrasts concentration camps with post-war ruins. Full of images that tore me apart. Difficult but profound.

Onibaba (1964) - Dark, sinister, beautiful footage in the reeds. Barely supernatural, but full of a sense of menace lurking just offscreen.

Pineapple Express (2008) - Like a conversation with a stoner... You could get caught up in it, or just caught in it. Franco made it worth it

Flesh and the Devil (1926) - Epic tale of love and loyalty; an intriguing, endearingly maudlin romanticization of desire and self-deception.

L'avventura (1959) - a mellow, melodramatic journey through the sad, guilty process of forgetting a lost friend & lover; captivating visuals

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - alluring recursive mystery, illusions of depth crafted from surface reflections; already a personal favorite

Visions of Light (1992) - A film giving a voice to the image-makers; for such a history of experimentation, it's almost too straightforward.

To Live and Die in LA (1985) - Heavily dated style & music, but the cynicism, hung over the traditional buddy-cop framework, is cutting-edge

Ivan's Childhood (1962) - A dreamy, powerful, ethereal war film on par with Malick's Thin Red Line; also, a pure cinematography masterpiece.

The Last Command (1928) - Slippery, self-conscious, and layered; big ideas for a silent movie, making it (arguably) an early postmodern text

-1 - 10-

The Devil's Backbone (2001) - A historical horror fable, with attention to the microcosmic effect of terror and tyranny in an enclosed space

The American (2010) - Lonely thriller for action fans who want something unusually beautiful and meditative - intelligent & easy on the eyes

Code Unknown (2000) - Cryptic multi-threaded film from Haneke -- makes me feel like I'm missing something very important & should dig deeper

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) - A messy (revisionist) historical action mystery with intriguing gothic stylings. Superficial but satisfying

The Mission (1986) - All-star cast of brooding men makes epic adventure feel strong & sincere, but I feel like it could have used more drama

Late Spring (Ozu, 1949) - slow drama chronicling the tensions within a family, reflecting social change; a sublime cinematic zen meditation.

The Killing (Kubrick, 1956) - Jim Thompson's brilliant writing, plus twisted loyalties and tragic betrayals, make for a palatable retro noir

The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959) - Frank and melancholy saga of youth inadvertently gone wrong; charmingly sentimental, stylish in its honesty

The Piano Teacher (Haneke, 2001) - Twisted, cynical, and insightful -- a film whose perversity makes more sense than we might like to admit.

Heat (Michael Mann) - A+ blend of epic & personal, heightened by intense, unsentimental depiction of violence. Subjective,realistic,powerful

Amazing photos by Luca Pierro

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille

A captivating gallery posted at A Curious Brain

Who are you Nicholas Cage?

A memo inspired partly by my friend Eric's open letter to N.C.

Dearest Nick, the dorky dad of the action pantheon, how do you end up in these situations? Stealing cars, unhijacking airplanes, riding motorcycles under an undead sky. This is such a different man from the guy I see before me... a guy whose droll face says, "I just got home from a long day, I need a few minutes on the couch"... a guy whose arch-nemesis is simply the daily grind, whose epic victory is cracking a joke for his kids when they get home from school, asking them inane questions over a family dinner.

So who in God's name convinced you to put on a suit of chain mail and run off for the crusades? Another actor could sell this as an impulsive act of piety; from you, it seems more like a midlife crisis, prolonged by the interminable travel time to the Middle East... a long road trip with your drinking buddy Felsom, who seems much better cut out for this type of thing, though he's much less serious about it.

Here's the thing, Nicholas -- I've seen you play this character before... a man on a long journey, not sure where he went wrong. There too you were crushed by the guilt of a needless murder, by your own brutality at a moment of release. The only difference: at that time, you were on an airplane instead of a horse, and the demon presiding over the carnage was a man named Cyrus the Virus. You strayed far from your wife and daughter, but at least they were there to ground your clumsy army-guy eccentricities.

That grounding is the anchor that makes you SO GOOD -- so recognizable, so perfectly plausible -- every once in a great while, in one movie out of every ten.  Like that time you saved San Francisco from a rogue faction on Alcatraz... you weren't there because you were some sort of master thief or daredevil motorcyclist. You were there because you were a respectable government-employed toxicologist, and they needed someone with your expertise in the field. Never mind that your wife was bizarrely smokin' hot... that happens sometimes, to friendly, awkward, well-compensated professionals.

And there was also that one time, when you dressed yourself and your foul-mouthed daughter up like superheroes and went on a jaunt to ravage the criminal underground. It was just right, because it was YOU -- an awkward dad at heart, a family man who learned his manners in the 50's. A guy whose devotion and insecurity drove him to do unforgivable things.  You were no Bruce Wayne, with all his playboy sex appeal to compliment his amateur vigilante-ism.  You put on the costume because you wanted to indulge your own boyish fantasies, rather than somebody else's.

And like it or not, Nicholas, those characters are you. You've grown out of those edgy early days, when you were putty in the hands of David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, and the elder Coppola. So now that you should be inhabiting dramas and dramedic Oscar contenders, like Clooney has settled into doing, you've instead devoted yourself to wandering around Hollywood looking for that lost inner Jason Statham, aggressively miscasting yourself as an elite action star. Your career, like the lives of your characters, is a permanent mid-life crisis.

And this leaves the rest of us split, tortured, deciding whether to scoff at you or shake your hand... whether to hope that you grow up... or pray that you ride this quixotic motorcycle into the ground, forever content to pursue characters outside your nature and against everyone's better judgment.

Road to Perdition (2007): Machinist Gothic

Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition has a lot on the surface -- well-trodden themes of father/son loyalty, that slick neo-noir cinematography, some clever camera work, a host of oily, volatile secondary characters -- maybe too much, according to some.  For a director who got famous making morally ambiguous, thematically twisted films like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Road to Perdition seems almost too straightforward, too direct about its hero's journey.  Michael Sullivan is indeed a comic book character, and you could be forgiven for mistaking Road to Perdition for a boringly typical comic book movie.

But this figure has a ground -- there is a thematic inner world to the film, expressed in both a literal and a metaphorical layer, that brings a formal unity to the whole thing.  You won't appreciate everything this deceptively well-constructed film has to offer until you recognize its inner life, the way all the parts interlock seamlessly.

Of course, we shouldn't pass by without mentioning the beautiful, polished images created by Conrad C. Hall, who won the Oscar that year.  This world is dusty and exposed by day, inert in its overcast grays, but at night, it's all angles and shadows... more than shadows, it's a funhouse of black surfaces and bottomless abysses.  It's an indifferent world, freezing cold or stuffy and still, with the blessing of a cool breeze only at the end, on the beach, as the plot folds back upon itself.

That polished cinematography is the first clue to how the film functions on a symbolic level.  Each scene is meticulous, the camera work is orderly and slow-moving, and every element is isolated in the frame, so that all the spatial relationships can be clearly identified.  These people are parts of a well-oiled apparatus, oriented to one another by their loyalty, their malice, their dependence, their pivotal, inescapable utility.

That's the subtext to the whole film: we are inside the machine. Here, before the camera, Mendes and Hall and Hanks lay bare the internals of a great mechanism, and Michael Sullivan Sr. is the rogue component, the cog that's slipping its axle and forcing everything to grind to a halt.

When Harlen Macguire asks Michael what he does, he tells him he's "a salesman. Machine parts." This is the first time he gives a cover story, but it doesn't seem to come out of nowhere... he's spent the whole film assembling various firearms, hiding them away, and explaining their use. In fact, in practically every sequence, the camera fetishizes machines -- we start with a shot of Michael Junior riding his bicycle, and eventually, he graduates to a full motor-car, becoming his father's getaway driver. Harlen the hitman is not simply a murderous reporter -- he's a mechanical eye, a walking camera that captures the souls of the people he murders. It's a world of telephones and combination safes and locks and keys.  Everything in the film seems to jingle and click together and "turn over," the totems of a clockwork world that seems to run more smoothly than our own messy digital universe.

That's the literalization of the film's unifying principle. In reality, the whole Irish underworld of the early 30's is a machine, and all the characters are locked into functional relationships with one another. Michael Sullivan, Sr. is the most reliable part in the whole apparatus at the film's beginning, a trusted enforcer for the local boss. Connor Rooney is the companion piece to his father, and John Rooney is the transmission for the whole local system, functioning on its own terms to serve the larger Chicago machine.

Both Michael Sr. and John Rooney carry fatherhood as an inescapable constraint while they fulfill their functions -- murder, profiteering, regulation, organization.  John, like a well-designed automaton, remains constrained by this obligation even when it turns out his son is betraying him. Knowing he's being undermined by his own kin, he just keeps idling along, acting as the responsible patriarch, keeping the rest of the community in line, making money for his family and his bosses.  He never stops working right, even up to his final stand in the rain, surrounded by his orderly but ineffectual circle of bodyguards

As it turns out, it's Michael Sullivan Sr. who catastrophically malfunctions, provoked as he is by Connor Rooney's subterfuge. Once Sullivan's button is pressed, he switches into revenge mode. He can't be dissuaded by bribery, coercion, or even his desire to protect his son. He will destroy this machine from the inside, even after it's taken care of him since he was young. Michael Sullivan knows that there are some sins that are unforgivable -- there are some breakdowns that can't be prevented.

And maybe that sheds some light on the film's moralistic father-son relationship, too. Michael Sullivan Sr. doesn't seem to be able to extract himself from this system of reflexive violence... being a loyal enforcer, he's totally defined by it.  But he struggles profoundly with his attitude toward his son, who he gradually initiates into the criminal lifestyle, while paradoxically trying to protect him from it.  He gives his son a pistol to defend himself, he teaches him to drive a getaway car, he tells him to keep a lookout.  At the same time, his misgivings are palpable... he distrusts his own father-figure (John Rooney) with the boys, he tries to deliver his son to his wife's sister, and he distances his son from the violence he carries out, albiet erratically.  This is the behavior of a firmly entrenched part of a machine, trying to ensure that his son doesn't find a place in that same machine.

And unto the end, in Michael Sullivan Jr's vulnerability -- in his inability to master the stick shift, his intense love for reading and religion, his dislike for math -- he's the most organic element in this plot, the bit of soft tissue that needs to be protected from the grinding gears of the criminal underground, lest he be torn apart.  This comes across as clear as day when he sits with his father inside an old farmhouse, providing compassion and patience and sips of water.  The boy is not a machine... he's the one real boy in this world of pinnochios, the sole human touch.

The father-son relationships, the intrigue and depravity of the crime world, the Midwestern road trip through heartland prohibition... these are just the flesh of the story.  Dig deeper, and you find its iron-clad, mechanical heart, all angles and edges and parts that lock into place... and then, even deeper inside the film, there's Michael Sullivan Jr., the soft soul peeking out from inside the great machine.