They make a Robin Hood movie every few years, because the name recognition of the folk legend and its prior Hollywood iterations is free and in the public domain, and so any studio can poach the Robin Hood "franchise." Recently we had Robin Hood, the disguised remake of "Gladiator," directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe Last year there was a version with Jamie Foxx. No one cared, but studio executives must have had in mind the immense box office of the Kevin Costner hit (and perhaps the ubiquitous theme song by Bryan Adams).
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves looks irredeemably silly and dated now, and basically indistinguishable from the Mel Brooks parody, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. But the reviewers at the time saw something else entirely. Roger Ebert thought Costner's portrayal was "tortured [and] thoughtful," and saw the depiction of Robin Hood as something like the guerilla leader Che Guevara, or at least a "civilized, socially responsible Robin Hood." (Ebert correctly notes that Alan Rickman's performance is high camp: it "has nothing to do with anything else in the movie,
and indeed seems to proceed from a uniquely personal set of assumptions
about what century, universe, etc., the story is set in.") But having just watched it for the first time in 25 years, I can tell you it is only an "adult" and "modern" update if your point of comparison is the Disney cartoon.
I have just been reading Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, where Robin Hood hangs out at the edge of the narrative, displaying his feats of archery at the great jousting tournament, but then retreating back into the woods, only later to bring his band of merry men to aid in besieging the Norman castle in which Ivanhoe lies captive. Scott, as Georg Lukács notices in his critical study on the historical novel, situates Robin Hood (and all of the characters), his loyalties, his principles, his sense of immediate advantage, his relation to the ideology of chivalry, his alliances and friendships, and his personal history and background, within and against the historical class situation which it also illuminates. The good guys in Ivanhoe are the dispossessed and backward Saxon lords and their followers, and the bad guys are the foreign French conquerors who have the backing of the Church (especially its military wing, the Knights Templar). Somewhere in the middle of this is King Richard the Lion-Heart, who is himself a Norman ruler, but has been usurped and so is warring against Prince John (his brother) and his corrupt and irreligious followers.
In Scott's book, Robin Hood is "political" not because of the social vision he espouses, but because he is directly involved in a legible historical struggle. (Remember that the ultimate fate of Prince John was to have wrested from him the legal rights of the Magna Carta, when he ascended the throne after Richard's death.) "Politics" just means immediate historical necessity: how every aspect of ideology, material production, the state, and class struggle "light up" during moments of revolution and unrest. For instance, the Jewish characters Isaac and Rebecca in Scott's novel are always specified as Medieval Jews at the time of the Crusades, whose alliances are complexly mediated by the push-and-pull of that political and cultural situation. Their plot across the novel is a series of pressures that runs through each node of their historical insertion.
In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, nothing the characters do makes any sense because they are governed by attitudes and desires arbitrarily stuck onto a picturesque English landscape. Although the legend of Robin Hood--if we know one thing about it--is about class struggle, the historical class situation (between Normans conquerors and a backwards, residual form of production and rule) in England at the time disappears entirely. Robin Hood's own class position is reassigned; he is no longer a dispossessed yeoman but rather a spoiled "fortunate son" of aristocracy who returns home from the Crusades to find that his castle has been burned and his father disgraced. When he comes across a band of outlaws who are stealing from the rich (i.e. from him), he decides that he can wield them into a fighting force for his personal vendetta against the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Instead of a political explanation for the central conflict in the film, we are made to understand that the Sheriff dabbles in black magic and witchcraft, ravishes young women, starves the populace with unfair game laws, and conducts Ku Klux Klan-type raids, by torchlight, masked and cloaked in white. By contrast, we know that Robin himself has "good politics" because he liberates and embraces the humanity of his black friend, a Moor played by Morgan Freeman. And because Robin's gang "gives to the poor," which here is an obvious allusion to the failure of American troops in the imperialist war in Vietnam to "win the hearts and minds" of the colonized. But "the poor" here are just a rabble of peasants in a village somewhere; is it possible that they were formerly Robin's own feudal serfs, either directly owned or indirectly exploited?
No, it is not possible, because the movie is directly importing the
class relations of 20th century America onto 12th century England:
"rich" and "poor" are just different income brackets, not production
relations. (In Scott's novel, the first two characters introduced have metal chains around their necks to show they are the property of their Saxon lord. When Kevin Costner shouts some nonsense about "freedom," however, it lacks the context in which it could be understood as meaningful.) Likewise, we have no sense of the relation between the feudal nobility and the King, other than that there is a power vacuum into which bad actors can step in and have their own way. And yet this was the main political issue for more than 500 years! The return of Richard as rightful king would not settle this question, as the movie implies; it would open this question (as the story of Ivanhoe demonstrates). Furthermore, why are the Celts aligned with the Sheriff of Nottingham? No explanation is given, which means there is no dramatic interest in what happens to them. Without reasons, they are just stunt people demolishing Robin Hood's Ewok village.
This is not just griping about the film's inattentiveness to history, unsurprising anyways for Hollywood (although Braveheart and Rob Roy, from a little later on, are much more interesting and important as historical films). The basic drama of the film is undermined by hollowing out the reality of the situation and of the different characters. Why does Maid Marion side with Robin Hood (against her own class)? Why has the Church aligned itself with the Sheriff (since he is mixed up with witchcraft)? What is the difference between "the poor" and the outlaws--which brings us to the traditional class character of Robin Hood as a yeoman, a complex social position, but certainly neither indigent nor aristocratic (the two options in this film). But those are the major motivations in the film, and they are all nonsense, because "good" and "bad" are simply indicated by musical cues and costume (the bad guys wear black, the good guys are diverse). One of the symptoms of this incoherence is Costner's famously uncertain accent, which is so distracting that it never fails to take the viewer out of the scene. But then the viewer is never really "in" the scene in the first place, because the action is the mere propulsion and rebound of billiard balls, not the involvement and intensity of real persons with real reasons and purposes.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
First Man (2018)
First Man is not exactly a sequel to The Right Stuff, although it picks up the NASA story where that film ended, taking us through the Gemini and Apollo programs. It is more like a pendant to the earlier film, the way a painting of an Old Testament scene by one artist would call forth a response by another painter depicting a New Testament passage, echoing or commenting on the first. In many respects, First Man is a self-conscious inversion or negative image of The Right Stuff. But what the films have most in common is not the sequences of test pilots and rocket launches, but the understanding of the astronaut as stand-in for the artist. And even here they could not be more different.
To begin with the differences. On one hand, films like First Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Martian, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars all propel a vulnerable human being beyond the limits of our known world, so that the explorer or castaway encounters space not as a complicated individual, but as a specimen of humanity equipped with a basic human toolkit. In 2001, the existential drama concerns whether man (Dave) or machine (HAL) will lay claim to a spurious and limited, in any case homicidal, rationality. First Man and The Martian, products of our moment, tack on traumas and quirks by way of individuation, but without affecting the dramatic premise. In First Man, Armstrong is something of a "yes man," who never asserts himself in any kind of dramatic decision, who is not a figure of destiny but someone slotted into a roster.
The Right Stuff, on the other hand, is set up a series of epic contests, recalling the funeral games for Patroclus in Book XXII of the Iliad. It is about feats of daring: who can go the fastest, highest, etc., who can lay claim to being "the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen." Everything is a competition: Chuck Yeager versus the sound barrier; NASA versus the Russian space program; test pilots versus astronauts; even the romance between Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard is depicted as a horse race. One constantly has to prove oneself. For all that, it is also a movie about work, about bosses and "climbing the ladder" and problem-solving and team solidarity. (Most other space movies are about survival, so that Robinson Crusoe's constructions are, as Marx pointed out long ago, a paradigm of use-value.)
First Man is not about work but about vocation. As Franco Moretti glosses the concept, "we will find the key to the modern personality not so much in specific activities, but in a peculiar disposition of the soul. This infiltrates little by little into each activity." Armstrong models dispassionate dedication and training. He is self-directed, not combative but relentless. We don't see Armstrong deciding or persuading, just executing. Likewise, science does not work here as it did in The Martian, as a reserve of ingenuity; Armstrong physically wrests control of his craft. Science is not rationality--there is no sense of trying to master the laws of a wild nature--but control, as if the mission were a series of trials of the flesh.
In other words, it is a film about art, as were director Damien Chazelle's previous two films, Whiplash and La La Land. Whereas Silicon Valley has yoked technology to an improving social mission and "open" cultivation of creative capacities, and The Right Stuff marvels at rockets as if they were muscle cars, for Chazelle art and science are neither creative play or indulgent messiness. It is hard to imagine a more constrained--literally and emotionally--character than Armstrong, but this is Chazelle's artistic stand-in. Art is not about vision but dedication, single-mindedness.
This is the main contrast with The Right Stuff. In the Tom Wolfe book, the astronauts are also plainly versions of the artist (the journalist) himself: adventurers, men who strapped themselves in for a wild ride, pyrotechnicists, speakers of a professional dialect, etc. But the game here (in the movie, too) is to inhabit their voice, their attitudes, their cool. First Man takes an opposite and less successful strategy with its artist-astronaut. It does not try to inhabit Armstrong, to take any view from the inside. The climactic moment of the film shows only the mirrored image of the lunar surface on his helmet's reflective mask.
To begin with the differences. On one hand, films like First Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Martian, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars all propel a vulnerable human being beyond the limits of our known world, so that the explorer or castaway encounters space not as a complicated individual, but as a specimen of humanity equipped with a basic human toolkit. In 2001, the existential drama concerns whether man (Dave) or machine (HAL) will lay claim to a spurious and limited, in any case homicidal, rationality. First Man and The Martian, products of our moment, tack on traumas and quirks by way of individuation, but without affecting the dramatic premise. In First Man, Armstrong is something of a "yes man," who never asserts himself in any kind of dramatic decision, who is not a figure of destiny but someone slotted into a roster.
The Right Stuff, on the other hand, is set up a series of epic contests, recalling the funeral games for Patroclus in Book XXII of the Iliad. It is about feats of daring: who can go the fastest, highest, etc., who can lay claim to being "the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen." Everything is a competition: Chuck Yeager versus the sound barrier; NASA versus the Russian space program; test pilots versus astronauts; even the romance between Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard is depicted as a horse race. One constantly has to prove oneself. For all that, it is also a movie about work, about bosses and "climbing the ladder" and problem-solving and team solidarity. (Most other space movies are about survival, so that Robinson Crusoe's constructions are, as Marx pointed out long ago, a paradigm of use-value.)
First Man is not about work but about vocation. As Franco Moretti glosses the concept, "we will find the key to the modern personality not so much in specific activities, but in a peculiar disposition of the soul. This infiltrates little by little into each activity." Armstrong models dispassionate dedication and training. He is self-directed, not combative but relentless. We don't see Armstrong deciding or persuading, just executing. Likewise, science does not work here as it did in The Martian, as a reserve of ingenuity; Armstrong physically wrests control of his craft. Science is not rationality--there is no sense of trying to master the laws of a wild nature--but control, as if the mission were a series of trials of the flesh.
In other words, it is a film about art, as were director Damien Chazelle's previous two films, Whiplash and La La Land. Whereas Silicon Valley has yoked technology to an improving social mission and "open" cultivation of creative capacities, and The Right Stuff marvels at rockets as if they were muscle cars, for Chazelle art and science are neither creative play or indulgent messiness. It is hard to imagine a more constrained--literally and emotionally--character than Armstrong, but this is Chazelle's artistic stand-in. Art is not about vision but dedication, single-mindedness.
This is the main contrast with The Right Stuff. In the Tom Wolfe book, the astronauts are also plainly versions of the artist (the journalist) himself: adventurers, men who strapped themselves in for a wild ride, pyrotechnicists, speakers of a professional dialect, etc. But the game here (in the movie, too) is to inhabit their voice, their attitudes, their cool. First Man takes an opposite and less successful strategy with its artist-astronaut. It does not try to inhabit Armstrong, to take any view from the inside. The climactic moment of the film shows only the mirrored image of the lunar surface on his helmet's reflective mask.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Straight Outta Compton (2015)
There is a book I like by David Mamet called On Directing Film, which even at barely over a hundred pages consists of repeating just a few ideas to the point (inevitable with Mamet) of self-parody.
"Tell the story in cuts."
"A movie is not just following the hero around."
"The most interesting thing is what happens next."
"The audience requires not information but drama."
Whatever you think of Mamet's own films, or his cult of Eisenstein and Stanislavsky, these are sound (if analytic) principles. A film may have many good artistic reasons, notwithstanding, for breaking those rules. Straight Outta Compton, however, systematically ravages any rational conception of dramatic or cinematic necessity. Each scene is an untransmuted lump of information. The major characters are stranded in undramatic limbo half way through the film. Nothing happens next, because no scene leads to the next. The few times that cuts are used to advance the story (I am thinking of the scene where the cops have NWA members lying face down on the ground outside their recording studio; or the montage where they lay down the vocals for the album) stand out from the overall plan of having one character tell another character the meaning of the scene. (There are also two notable Steadicam shots, deplored by Mamet but effective here: in a hotel suite full of guns and naked women, and in the opening scene in a drug den.)
Straight Outta Compton has all the narrative thrust of a Wikipedia page. The New York Times review compares it to The Social Network, but remember the intricate double-framing device of that film and its airtight editing: the retrospective structure borrowed from Citizen Kane but also the antagonism (the two lawsuits) competing over the story itself. But Compton never adopts a dramatic structure (in Kane, the reporter is looking for the truth of Kane's last words; so is Kane, you see), so the characters are only ever responding to the latest blip of Important Events on their timeline. Embarrassingly, then, Ice Cube writes "Fuck tha Police" directly after the events narrated in the song. A better strategy would have been that advocated by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel, to show how Ice Cube's character and concerns arise from dramatic collisions within his social development (as, for instance, we learn about Michael Corleone's character in The Godfather from the way he responds to his family upon returning from war). The deplorable result is that "Fuck tha Police" seems like a narrow response to a specific incident of harassment, whereas the movie thematically wants to drape a concern about police white supremacy over the entire (unstructured) film.
This is the kind of movie where characters have to be announced with subtitles, which is unconscionable dramatic laziness. (Mamet: "To really make the audience understand that we're in a garage, what about a sign that says 'garage'?") How many characters and their nicknames and their specialties (and personalities! and accents!) did I learn from a film like The Great Escape (which is only six minutes longer than Compton)? The answer is fourteen. Not only that, but each of these marginal characters had little dramas (Donald Pleasance's blindness, Charles Bronson's claustrophobia) which added danger and irony. Characters like MC Ren or DJ Yella (the #4 and #5 members of the group) don't register at all. I know less about Ren now than I did when I started the movie, since his verses (i.e. his voice, his ideas) are almost entirely cut.
People have complained that the movie does not show Dr. Dre's history of beating women. At bottom, this is a dramatic problem, on two fronts. 1) There are no women characters in the film. Yes, women appear on screen (as sex objects ogled by the camera), they even have names ("Felicia"), they even have lines of dialogue. But in this last case they are never persons, but mouthpieces of exposition or directorial instruction. For instance, watching a clip of the "Sraight Outta Compton" music video years later, Ice Cube's girlfriend remarks how young they were back then, so that we will then notice this. One possible exception, Dre's mother, is not a character but a fantasy of approval and forgiveness. The movie, executive produced by Dre and Ice Cube, is incapable of reflecting on other characters, who are either obstacles (record executives) or temptations (Suge Knight) or blandly anonymous support (Snoop Dogg--what a sin to squander this most charismatic human!). Women fall entirely below even those lines. 2) The movie exists entirely to vindicate Ice Cube and Dre and Eazy-E as geniuses ahead of their time, as social realists, but really as innocents. Everything "bad" in the film is either not-bad (harmless antics like destroying someone's office in a tantrum or waving rifles around in hotel corridors) or is done by someone else. The "worst" thing that Dre does is (for no reason at all that I could discern) drive his car too fast in downtown LA--to signal his confused feelings about success.
Even the character of the manager-villain, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) is unclear. The story is supposed to be that Heller pits the members of NWA against each other by coddling Eazy-E, "taking care" of the charismatic star (you have to imagine this, the performance by Jason Mitchell is so terribly boring) first, at the expense of the real geniuses behind the group. It is suggested, though, by Giamatti's very good interpretation, that Heller truly cares for Eazy-E, almost like the blinding love for a favorite child (the Mildred Pierce story), even that Heller is actually "good" for Eazy-E, whom he always calls "Eric." But nothing is made of this dimension in the story: Eazy-E does not "see" this, and the dramatic collision with Heller is reduced to the much simpler idea that the scales just fall from his eyes when some financial paperwork is at last explained to him.
Finally, even the antagonisms between the three main characters are dissolved when they realize that it had all been a big mix-up (owing to their manager's deceptions). Huh?! The movie should ask me to BELIEVE in its dramatic conflicts. Instead it wants me to EXCUSE its having any tension between the three heroes. The result is that none of the characters have anything to do after the half-way point in the film, since the only interesting thing would be their turning-against one another. The movie, instead, is a kind of wish fulfillment that dispels interesting conflicts, scrubs out character complications, renders arbitrary any causality linking events, and has no consciousness beyond the grandiosity and banal self-appraisal of its heroes.
"Tell the story in cuts."
"A movie is not just following the hero around."
"The most interesting thing is what happens next."
"The audience requires not information but drama."
Whatever you think of Mamet's own films, or his cult of Eisenstein and Stanislavsky, these are sound (if analytic) principles. A film may have many good artistic reasons, notwithstanding, for breaking those rules. Straight Outta Compton, however, systematically ravages any rational conception of dramatic or cinematic necessity. Each scene is an untransmuted lump of information. The major characters are stranded in undramatic limbo half way through the film. Nothing happens next, because no scene leads to the next. The few times that cuts are used to advance the story (I am thinking of the scene where the cops have NWA members lying face down on the ground outside their recording studio; or the montage where they lay down the vocals for the album) stand out from the overall plan of having one character tell another character the meaning of the scene. (There are also two notable Steadicam shots, deplored by Mamet but effective here: in a hotel suite full of guns and naked women, and in the opening scene in a drug den.)
Straight Outta Compton has all the narrative thrust of a Wikipedia page. The New York Times review compares it to The Social Network, but remember the intricate double-framing device of that film and its airtight editing: the retrospective structure borrowed from Citizen Kane but also the antagonism (the two lawsuits) competing over the story itself. But Compton never adopts a dramatic structure (in Kane, the reporter is looking for the truth of Kane's last words; so is Kane, you see), so the characters are only ever responding to the latest blip of Important Events on their timeline. Embarrassingly, then, Ice Cube writes "Fuck tha Police" directly after the events narrated in the song. A better strategy would have been that advocated by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel, to show how Ice Cube's character and concerns arise from dramatic collisions within his social development (as, for instance, we learn about Michael Corleone's character in The Godfather from the way he responds to his family upon returning from war). The deplorable result is that "Fuck tha Police" seems like a narrow response to a specific incident of harassment, whereas the movie thematically wants to drape a concern about police white supremacy over the entire (unstructured) film.
This is the kind of movie where characters have to be announced with subtitles, which is unconscionable dramatic laziness. (Mamet: "To really make the audience understand that we're in a garage, what about a sign that says 'garage'?") How many characters and their nicknames and their specialties (and personalities! and accents!) did I learn from a film like The Great Escape (which is only six minutes longer than Compton)? The answer is fourteen. Not only that, but each of these marginal characters had little dramas (Donald Pleasance's blindness, Charles Bronson's claustrophobia) which added danger and irony. Characters like MC Ren or DJ Yella (the #4 and #5 members of the group) don't register at all. I know less about Ren now than I did when I started the movie, since his verses (i.e. his voice, his ideas) are almost entirely cut.
People have complained that the movie does not show Dr. Dre's history of beating women. At bottom, this is a dramatic problem, on two fronts. 1) There are no women characters in the film. Yes, women appear on screen (as sex objects ogled by the camera), they even have names ("Felicia"), they even have lines of dialogue. But in this last case they are never persons, but mouthpieces of exposition or directorial instruction. For instance, watching a clip of the "Sraight Outta Compton" music video years later, Ice Cube's girlfriend remarks how young they were back then, so that we will then notice this. One possible exception, Dre's mother, is not a character but a fantasy of approval and forgiveness. The movie, executive produced by Dre and Ice Cube, is incapable of reflecting on other characters, who are either obstacles (record executives) or temptations (Suge Knight) or blandly anonymous support (Snoop Dogg--what a sin to squander this most charismatic human!). Women fall entirely below even those lines. 2) The movie exists entirely to vindicate Ice Cube and Dre and Eazy-E as geniuses ahead of their time, as social realists, but really as innocents. Everything "bad" in the film is either not-bad (harmless antics like destroying someone's office in a tantrum or waving rifles around in hotel corridors) or is done by someone else. The "worst" thing that Dre does is (for no reason at all that I could discern) drive his car too fast in downtown LA--to signal his confused feelings about success.
Even the character of the manager-villain, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) is unclear. The story is supposed to be that Heller pits the members of NWA against each other by coddling Eazy-E, "taking care" of the charismatic star (you have to imagine this, the performance by Jason Mitchell is so terribly boring) first, at the expense of the real geniuses behind the group. It is suggested, though, by Giamatti's very good interpretation, that Heller truly cares for Eazy-E, almost like the blinding love for a favorite child (the Mildred Pierce story), even that Heller is actually "good" for Eazy-E, whom he always calls "Eric." But nothing is made of this dimension in the story: Eazy-E does not "see" this, and the dramatic collision with Heller is reduced to the much simpler idea that the scales just fall from his eyes when some financial paperwork is at last explained to him.
Finally, even the antagonisms between the three main characters are dissolved when they realize that it had all been a big mix-up (owing to their manager's deceptions). Huh?! The movie should ask me to BELIEVE in its dramatic conflicts. Instead it wants me to EXCUSE its having any tension between the three heroes. The result is that none of the characters have anything to do after the half-way point in the film, since the only interesting thing would be their turning-against one another. The movie, instead, is a kind of wish fulfillment that dispels interesting conflicts, scrubs out character complications, renders arbitrary any causality linking events, and has no consciousness beyond the grandiosity and banal self-appraisal of its heroes.
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Toni Erdmann (2016)
It now appears that Toni Erdmann will be adapted/remade for Hollywood, in the grand tradition of Breathless, Diabolique, Dinner for Schmucks, The Ring, etc. This makes sense to me, because the nearly three-hour German comedy has a great deal of Hollywood DNA to begin with. It is part Uncle Buck, part Mrs. Doubtfire. Uncle Buck, because of the unsavory, dark aggression with which the life lessons (love life, be yourself, don't judge success by the approval of others, have fun) are doled out; Mrs. Doubtfire, because of the prankster father in disguise.
But there is another strand of Hollywood DNA, what I would call the "saving the soul of uptight executives" genre: Up in the Air (with George Clooney), Money Monster (with George Clooney), Michael Clayton (with George Clooney), The Big Short (Steve Carell's part), Margin Call, The Company Men (I don't think anyone saw this, but it has America's sweetheart Ben Affleck). The lesson here is the incompatibility of workaholic dads and faceless/greedy corporations with the all-important tenderness of white paternalism. This list of movies is of variable quality and explicitness of ideological justification: The Big Short ties itself in knots trying to make heroes of its heroes; Margin Call I've reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
The big exception to this is Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays Leonardo diCaprio's character as fundamentally redeemable. (Also in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, everyone is horrible and there are no families.)
In Toni Erdmann, Sandra Hüller plays Ines, a German consultant working in Romania, whose job is to recommend strategies of neo-liberal outsourcing, downsizing and other methods of efficiency/austerity. Meanwhile, the executives she is working with are untrustworthy men who can be relied upon only to marry vapid blonde Russian trophy wives. What the executives really want are the most savage cuts, but this has to be imposed from outside recommendation. Ines, in turn, is a no-fun, uptight, overcritical boss. The plot of the film is that the spontaneous, kooky father tries to teach her lessons in having fun and being authentic. (Not unlike Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.)
Of course, in those other films, the movie is trying to be as funny as possible, and so the straight man is as loathsome as possible (think Steve Martin in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) and the non-conformist is as loud and outlandish as can be. The disturbances in Toni Erdmann, however, are more askew and awkward (inducing low-level anxiety attacks) than uproarious. It is more like we are watching a drama *about* this "funny" person; as film scholar Genevieve Yue remarks, it is a "sad clown" story, like Pagliacci or Rigoletto, not a comedy.
What I admire about this film is that, having set itself up between these two very predictable formulas (1) Uncle Buck and 2) the movies where we care about George Clooney), director/writer Maren Ade declines the resolutions they imply. In movies of type 1, the life lessons are learned and the "bad" new/alternative family (in Mrs Doubtfire, for instance, Pierce Brosnan) is rejected in favor of some synthesis of establishment values and the capacious humanity of the avuncular non-conformist. (Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning is another, earlier movie of this sort, although I forget how it ends.) In movies of type 2, there are two options: the dad can QUIT the firm/brokerage, choosing to take up some more acceptable and humanizing vocation to spend more time with his family. We should believe this, however, as much as we believe in the disgraced congressman who, having been caught absconding with funds, leaves "to spend more time with his family." The other option is to somehow reconcile the good objective of the corporation with a renewed commitment to honesty, from which we had regrettably departed. This may be combined with a "few bad apples" defense of capitalism, in which the bad boss is at fault for essentially criminal misdeeds (see my forthcoming book's chapter on Dickens's Little Dorrit).
Toni Erdmann studiously rejects all these options. Ines leaves her company (a cesspool of toxic masculinity), but for what we can only assume is an identical job elsewhere. There is zero implication that she will bring some new ethos with her; if anything, her father's reign of misrule has rather ALLOWED her to make a clean break with her current job and advance her career. Certainly she does not take up baking or parenting or any project that would clear her conscience. And then it is totally unclear what "life lessons" she has taken from her father, what effect this whole business is to have had on her. In the NY Times review, A.O. Scott writes that "Erdmann may be able to save Ines", but if this is so, it is nothing like the Uncle Buck formula. One feels, rather, that the comfort offered is cheap, her problems insoluble with the "lessons" on offer, and that it is perhaps too late, or that her resistance to her father AND her acceptance of him have not been cleanly untangled. "Erdmann" himself would appear to need some saving; if the film is about Ines's moral fate, we can only feel that she is WORTH saving but that no ideological prestidigitation can effect that redemption.
But there is another strand of Hollywood DNA, what I would call the "saving the soul of uptight executives" genre: Up in the Air (with George Clooney), Money Monster (with George Clooney), Michael Clayton (with George Clooney), The Big Short (Steve Carell's part), Margin Call, The Company Men (I don't think anyone saw this, but it has America's sweetheart Ben Affleck). The lesson here is the incompatibility of workaholic dads and faceless/greedy corporations with the all-important tenderness of white paternalism. This list of movies is of variable quality and explicitness of ideological justification: The Big Short ties itself in knots trying to make heroes of its heroes; Margin Call I've reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
The big exception to this is Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays Leonardo diCaprio's character as fundamentally redeemable. (Also in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, everyone is horrible and there are no families.)
In Toni Erdmann, Sandra Hüller plays Ines, a German consultant working in Romania, whose job is to recommend strategies of neo-liberal outsourcing, downsizing and other methods of efficiency/austerity. Meanwhile, the executives she is working with are untrustworthy men who can be relied upon only to marry vapid blonde Russian trophy wives. What the executives really want are the most savage cuts, but this has to be imposed from outside recommendation. Ines, in turn, is a no-fun, uptight, overcritical boss. The plot of the film is that the spontaneous, kooky father tries to teach her lessons in having fun and being authentic. (Not unlike Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.)
Of course, in those other films, the movie is trying to be as funny as possible, and so the straight man is as loathsome as possible (think Steve Martin in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) and the non-conformist is as loud and outlandish as can be. The disturbances in Toni Erdmann, however, are more askew and awkward (inducing low-level anxiety attacks) than uproarious. It is more like we are watching a drama *about* this "funny" person; as film scholar Genevieve Yue remarks, it is a "sad clown" story, like Pagliacci or Rigoletto, not a comedy.
What I admire about this film is that, having set itself up between these two very predictable formulas (1) Uncle Buck and 2) the movies where we care about George Clooney), director/writer Maren Ade declines the resolutions they imply. In movies of type 1, the life lessons are learned and the "bad" new/alternative family (in Mrs Doubtfire, for instance, Pierce Brosnan) is rejected in favor of some synthesis of establishment values and the capacious humanity of the avuncular non-conformist. (Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning is another, earlier movie of this sort, although I forget how it ends.) In movies of type 2, there are two options: the dad can QUIT the firm/brokerage, choosing to take up some more acceptable and humanizing vocation to spend more time with his family. We should believe this, however, as much as we believe in the disgraced congressman who, having been caught absconding with funds, leaves "to spend more time with his family." The other option is to somehow reconcile the good objective of the corporation with a renewed commitment to honesty, from which we had regrettably departed. This may be combined with a "few bad apples" defense of capitalism, in which the bad boss is at fault for essentially criminal misdeeds (see my forthcoming book's chapter on Dickens's Little Dorrit).
Toni Erdmann studiously rejects all these options. Ines leaves her company (a cesspool of toxic masculinity), but for what we can only assume is an identical job elsewhere. There is zero implication that she will bring some new ethos with her; if anything, her father's reign of misrule has rather ALLOWED her to make a clean break with her current job and advance her career. Certainly she does not take up baking or parenting or any project that would clear her conscience. And then it is totally unclear what "life lessons" she has taken from her father, what effect this whole business is to have had on her. In the NY Times review, A.O. Scott writes that "Erdmann may be able to save Ines", but if this is so, it is nothing like the Uncle Buck formula. One feels, rather, that the comfort offered is cheap, her problems insoluble with the "lessons" on offer, and that it is perhaps too late, or that her resistance to her father AND her acceptance of him have not been cleanly untangled. "Erdmann" himself would appear to need some saving; if the film is about Ines's moral fate, we can only feel that she is WORTH saving but that no ideological prestidigitation can effect that redemption.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Sully (2016)
If the coming attractions trailer for "Sully" was one of the most exciting I have ever seen, that is because all of the relevant action in the actual events--the emergency water landing of a US Airways flight out of Laguardia--fits into 3 1/2 minutes, about as long as a trailer. Even when replayed four or five times from different angles--like the highlight clips of a game-winning Hail Mary pass--we are still looking at only about 1000 seconds of dramatic incident. The problem that Clint Eastwood's "Sully" does not solve is how to fill the remaining screen time. Instead, one can discern all of the seams and elongating maneuvers, just as while reading a student's term paper I can tell how it was stretched to fit the minimum page requirement.
80 minutes of this film, then, is unforgivable padding. The main task of the filmmakers was to disperse this excess unobtrusively, as in "The Great Escape" the problem is how to dispose of the dirt displaced by digging the escape tunnels, without the Nazis noticing. Some minutes are chewed up with flashbacks to Simpler Times, when Captain Sully (Tom Hanks) first proved his mettle as a pilot. Then there are pointless reiterations of Sully's cellphone conversations with his anxious wife (a one-note Laura Linney), who never leaves the house or speaks to another character. The film lingers over the charmless and inert "humanizing" scenes of passengers taking their seats, and unblinkingly records Sully purchasing a sandwich before the flight. Yes, and if the film had needed to be even longer, I can imagine another scene of him buying gum, or coconut water, and another trip to Hudson News for trail mix. (A later scene involves his co-pilot, Aaron Eckhart, complaining about the price of Snickers at his hotel. We do not see the purchase.)
There is still time to kill, so Eastwood adds some computer-generated dream sequences of the plane crashing into Manhattan (at this point you will remember that this film was released for the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and celebrates a successful, efficient rescue operation by the New York emergency units), as well as clunkier computer flight simulations run onscreen to confirm Sully's assertion that landing the plane in the Hudson River was his only and best option. The insurance companies, you see, don't like to have planes dunked in the water unless it's *really* necessary.
Together with a rehash of the media blitz afterwards (who cares? I can see Katie Couric on TV any day) and three identical scenes of New Yorkers congratulating Sully (in a bar, in a hotel corridor, in a green room), plus the evacuation of the plane and the subsequent bureaucratic investigation, all of this barely staggers over the finish line, at 96 minutes. The supposed drama of the investigation as the structuring framework is plainly borrowed from "The Social Network": an inquiry, and several hearings, after the fact, scrutinizing the accomplishments of our hero while "replaying" those events. I don't need to tell you that the utterly decent Sully makes a less engaging subject for this sort of thing than Jesse Eisenberg's prickly and entitled Mark Zuckerberg.
More bizarre, though, is the decision to invest the film's dramatic arc in the technical confirmation of the Hemingway-ish "grace under pressure" narrative. That is, inasmuch as Eastwood despises the bean-counters of the insurance industry who restage the "miracle on the Hudson" as a mere "video game," the movie still climaxes (if that is the word) with the validation dispensed by the eggheads and their (implausibly unprofessional) testimony about Sully's heroism. This payoff shows rather how *dependent* our judgment is on the technical and abstract performance-reviewers that the movie pretends to cast as its villain. (It was either them or the Canadian Geese who flew into the engines, I suppose.)
Contrast this unsuspenseful device with the second-guessing and reserved approval of blunt, unfussy American heroism we find in "Patton" (to say nothing of the "Dirty Harry" films). In those movies, as here, the higher-ups (who just don't understand real masculinity and the necessity of hard choices) are wrong, but with possible dramatic consequences. Patton is straining at the leash of a politicized command structure (Eisenhower is going to be elected president at the end of all this), and there is a certain tragedy in how he continually confirms the doubts of his superiors. But the sense is that Patton is bigger than all that--that his character and genius don't NEED the judgments of the small-minded bureaucrats and politicians, and that the world was more interesting before they came along and generals were left to do their work their own way.
But "Sully" is desperate for the approval of the simulators and algorithms and insurance men. A much more interesting movie could be made where the heroic pilot was chopped down to size by the investigators. We would still have to judge him "as a man," which is surprisingly NOT Eastwood's conclusion here. Instead, the big climactic scene involves conceding our judgment over to the parameters of a flight simulator. Well, not one flight simulator, but (to take up more time) two.
80 minutes of this film, then, is unforgivable padding. The main task of the filmmakers was to disperse this excess unobtrusively, as in "The Great Escape" the problem is how to dispose of the dirt displaced by digging the escape tunnels, without the Nazis noticing. Some minutes are chewed up with flashbacks to Simpler Times, when Captain Sully (Tom Hanks) first proved his mettle as a pilot. Then there are pointless reiterations of Sully's cellphone conversations with his anxious wife (a one-note Laura Linney), who never leaves the house or speaks to another character. The film lingers over the charmless and inert "humanizing" scenes of passengers taking their seats, and unblinkingly records Sully purchasing a sandwich before the flight. Yes, and if the film had needed to be even longer, I can imagine another scene of him buying gum, or coconut water, and another trip to Hudson News for trail mix. (A later scene involves his co-pilot, Aaron Eckhart, complaining about the price of Snickers at his hotel. We do not see the purchase.)
There is still time to kill, so Eastwood adds some computer-generated dream sequences of the plane crashing into Manhattan (at this point you will remember that this film was released for the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and celebrates a successful, efficient rescue operation by the New York emergency units), as well as clunkier computer flight simulations run onscreen to confirm Sully's assertion that landing the plane in the Hudson River was his only and best option. The insurance companies, you see, don't like to have planes dunked in the water unless it's *really* necessary.
Together with a rehash of the media blitz afterwards (who cares? I can see Katie Couric on TV any day) and three identical scenes of New Yorkers congratulating Sully (in a bar, in a hotel corridor, in a green room), plus the evacuation of the plane and the subsequent bureaucratic investigation, all of this barely staggers over the finish line, at 96 minutes. The supposed drama of the investigation as the structuring framework is plainly borrowed from "The Social Network": an inquiry, and several hearings, after the fact, scrutinizing the accomplishments of our hero while "replaying" those events. I don't need to tell you that the utterly decent Sully makes a less engaging subject for this sort of thing than Jesse Eisenberg's prickly and entitled Mark Zuckerberg.
More bizarre, though, is the decision to invest the film's dramatic arc in the technical confirmation of the Hemingway-ish "grace under pressure" narrative. That is, inasmuch as Eastwood despises the bean-counters of the insurance industry who restage the "miracle on the Hudson" as a mere "video game," the movie still climaxes (if that is the word) with the validation dispensed by the eggheads and their (implausibly unprofessional) testimony about Sully's heroism. This payoff shows rather how *dependent* our judgment is on the technical and abstract performance-reviewers that the movie pretends to cast as its villain. (It was either them or the Canadian Geese who flew into the engines, I suppose.)
Contrast this unsuspenseful device with the second-guessing and reserved approval of blunt, unfussy American heroism we find in "Patton" (to say nothing of the "Dirty Harry" films). In those movies, as here, the higher-ups (who just don't understand real masculinity and the necessity of hard choices) are wrong, but with possible dramatic consequences. Patton is straining at the leash of a politicized command structure (Eisenhower is going to be elected president at the end of all this), and there is a certain tragedy in how he continually confirms the doubts of his superiors. But the sense is that Patton is bigger than all that--that his character and genius don't NEED the judgments of the small-minded bureaucrats and politicians, and that the world was more interesting before they came along and generals were left to do their work their own way.
But "Sully" is desperate for the approval of the simulators and algorithms and insurance men. A much more interesting movie could be made where the heroic pilot was chopped down to size by the investigators. We would still have to judge him "as a man," which is surprisingly NOT Eastwood's conclusion here. Instead, the big climactic scene involves conceding our judgment over to the parameters of a flight simulator. Well, not one flight simulator, but (to take up more time) two.
Friday, January 29, 2016
Le Pont du Nord (1981)
Discussion of Jacques Rivette falls easily into two positions; a first, either a bored philistine or sharply analytic fan of modernism (whose descriptions converge, if not their valuations) finds his work to be allusively deep, "a radical and disruptive intervention in mainstream cinema on the formal level." The second position then asserts that, no, Rivette is actually "playful," whimsical, creative, improvisatory, collaborative.
This film is quite similar to--and in my judgment, more likable than--Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating. Both films turn around a pair of eccentric Parisian women, thrown together and into the meshes of fantasy and conspiracy. (In the link above, the author breaks down the following binaries found in Celine and Julie: "Reality" vs. Fiction; Present vs. Past; Spontaneous vs. Staged; Freedom vs. Entrapment; Autonomy vs. Marriage; Female-centered vs. Male-centered; Telepathic Communication vs. Suspicion and Distrust; Friendship vs. Enmity; Childishness vs. "Maturity." All of these could be found in Pont du Nord without much trouble.)
But aren't these movies telling us something else, by the very people whom Rivette puts on screen? The two women in Pont du Nord (played by real life mother and daughter) are afflicted, broken, damaged, paranoid, detached, even dissociated, at no point functioning in any kind of social life outside of their own (fraught) dynamic. The elder woman, Marie, knows all of this, is self-conscious and anxiously worn down by the difficulties she knows represent her only options and (fringe) mode of being. She can't be indoors or in cars or trains, and sleeps outdoors, periodically meeting up with obvious bad news Julien. Baptiste, on the other hand, represents a Quixotic refusal to see her lonely, homeless existence as it is. At one point, she fights a dragon. ("Real life is a reign of terror," she has said.) The last scene finds her no longer concerned with the inevitable tragedy of Marie, who has capitulated to reality and abandoned the unhinged Baptiste in favor of her own death wish at the hands of Julien. The movie ends with Baptiste doing some kind of judo training at sunset, definitely beyond the grip of the "plot" we had been following up to this point.
The movie shows us two competing forces: an anonymous (male) conspiracy, surveilling, collecting clippings on everyone, involved in crime syndicates and assassinations, building and demolishing a barren, depopulated outer urban zone... and on the other hand, the defiant, tender, needful, feminine perseverance and individuality that dodges and weaves through this sinister and coercive world. The latter is essentially "exposed," left in the open. This is not the Matrix. But there is a heavy, terrible price for this "whimsical" side--it could also be described as neurotic, obsessive, self-endangering, and extremely tenuous. It's not a question of good vs. evil or "strong female roles," but of the sacrifices and unendurable demands of being a free, creative self. What is "whimsical" here is a kind of sickness, a fatal, myopic flight from reality and health into compulsive regimens, "training," and incomprehension. But the human need for one another, is definitely on this side--it is ranged with the forces of reality-making, which are wan, exhausted, pushed to the brink, defeated--if only that was something Baptiste could ever admit or see.
This film is quite similar to--and in my judgment, more likable than--Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating. Both films turn around a pair of eccentric Parisian women, thrown together and into the meshes of fantasy and conspiracy. (In the link above, the author breaks down the following binaries found in Celine and Julie: "Reality" vs. Fiction; Present vs. Past; Spontaneous vs. Staged; Freedom vs. Entrapment; Autonomy vs. Marriage; Female-centered vs. Male-centered; Telepathic Communication vs. Suspicion and Distrust; Friendship vs. Enmity; Childishness vs. "Maturity." All of these could be found in Pont du Nord without much trouble.)
But aren't these movies telling us something else, by the very people whom Rivette puts on screen? The two women in Pont du Nord (played by real life mother and daughter) are afflicted, broken, damaged, paranoid, detached, even dissociated, at no point functioning in any kind of social life outside of their own (fraught) dynamic. The elder woman, Marie, knows all of this, is self-conscious and anxiously worn down by the difficulties she knows represent her only options and (fringe) mode of being. She can't be indoors or in cars or trains, and sleeps outdoors, periodically meeting up with obvious bad news Julien. Baptiste, on the other hand, represents a Quixotic refusal to see her lonely, homeless existence as it is. At one point, she fights a dragon. ("Real life is a reign of terror," she has said.) The last scene finds her no longer concerned with the inevitable tragedy of Marie, who has capitulated to reality and abandoned the unhinged Baptiste in favor of her own death wish at the hands of Julien. The movie ends with Baptiste doing some kind of judo training at sunset, definitely beyond the grip of the "plot" we had been following up to this point.
The movie shows us two competing forces: an anonymous (male) conspiracy, surveilling, collecting clippings on everyone, involved in crime syndicates and assassinations, building and demolishing a barren, depopulated outer urban zone... and on the other hand, the defiant, tender, needful, feminine perseverance and individuality that dodges and weaves through this sinister and coercive world. The latter is essentially "exposed," left in the open. This is not the Matrix. But there is a heavy, terrible price for this "whimsical" side--it could also be described as neurotic, obsessive, self-endangering, and extremely tenuous. It's not a question of good vs. evil or "strong female roles," but of the sacrifices and unendurable demands of being a free, creative self. What is "whimsical" here is a kind of sickness, a fatal, myopic flight from reality and health into compulsive regimens, "training," and incomprehension. But the human need for one another, is definitely on this side--it is ranged with the forces of reality-making, which are wan, exhausted, pushed to the brink, defeated--if only that was something Baptiste could ever admit or see.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Schindler's List (1993)
The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács offers a very useful expression, "intellectual physiognomy," to describe the fictional construction of characters' worldviews--how authors integrate a personality as a synthesis of a life history and an individualized way of thinking. Characters ought not to be mere "mouthpieces of the spirit of the age" (Marx's expression), but vivid and particularized voices emanating from a unique subjectivity.
Spielberg's Schindler's List is about the changing responses of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) to Nazism, and particularly to the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews. But Spielberg presents this response not in the context of Schindler's character (his morality, his conscience, his prejudices, his ideology, his understanding of history, his politics) but in the context of our (the audience's) character. The movie is not about the conflicts in Schindler's breast, which would need to be resolved dramatically--but rather about the obvious repugnance of absolute evil, which is as it were built into our perception of the film. It is not possible to struggle intellectually or emotionally with what we are seeing onscreen (everything Nazi is unambiguously bad and villainous, just as in Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies); and yet the movie asks us to be interested in the pseudo-struggle of the hero faced with the same events!
In order for us to care about this man's disavowal of Nazism, and his dawning awareness of Jewish suffering, we have to understand why someone could be a Nazi. (After all, there were millions of Nazis!) But the answer the film gives, in the person of Ralph Fiennes's character Amon Goeth, is: Nazis were psychopaths. (The closing text informs us that he was arrested while in a mental institution.) This, you will notice, is not an explanation but an evasion.
How did Nazism function as an ideology? What aspects could be accepted under the heading of everyday political cynicism? How much of an illusion (about Hitler's plans for the Jews) were ordinary Germans (and even committed Nazis) living under? To what degree were the Jews themselves asked to buy into the program of their restricted freedom? What sort of personalities resisted and which buckled under? What kind of apologetic arguments were offered by rational people?
We know from history, for example, that the German army was opposed to Hitler in limited and insufficient ways (as were institutions like the Catholic church). But this opposition was couched in terms far from removed from Good Versus Evil. The Wehrmacht had its own privileges to defend, its own authority, its own response to the Versailles treaty, its own history of anti-semitism, its own ideas about strategy, and (above all) an opposition to the Nazi SS as a politicized, ideological intruder into military affairs. One can imagine hours of riveting, fraught argument in opposition to Nazism within the German Army... but one cannot imagine that this opposition could take the form of condemning the badness of Nazism. Schindler's List, however, is limited to this kind of response. (Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, has reproached Spielberg for numerous scenes carried out "without nuance," where "one should, instead, have worked with a pair of tweezers.")
What that means is that the characterization and drama is extremely pallid. Take, by contrast, the varied ideological arguments put forward in Spielberg's Lincoln, which is a flawed and bloated movie but which allows that the argument over slavery was not a matter of "good" and "bad" people lining up according to their basic human decency. This movie is filled with scenes of Abraham Lincoln explaining himself, and it is these rhetorical and argumentative scenes which most convey his personality, his warmth, his reflection on his own life. Take by contrast David Lean's film Bridge on the River Kwai, where Alec Guinness's character, a captured British officer, persuades himself to build a bridge for the Japanese using prisoners of war, through an agonizing and shameful decision that emphasizes an ideology of officers commanding their own troops (rather than the Japanese captors giving the orders to workers). This is a believable and interesting mistake, because it takes place against the background of that character's life and ideological formation.
Nothing of the sort occurs in Schindler's List. We do not understand Amon Goeth (because he is crazy); we do not understand the collaboration of the Judenrat and Jewish ghetto police (because it is conveyed as mere information: this existed, without further probing); we do not understand the mass of Jews saved by Schindler (because they are not characters, they are so many lives to be preserved). And lastly, we do not understand Schindler, because he has no one to speak to about his conflict and understanding: his reversal of conscience is presented not in dialogue but in a vision (the little girl in the red coat).
Not only does this make for a fairly tedious movie, since the central conflict cannot be put onscreen, but it does a disservice to the avowed project of historical memory of the Holocaust. We leave the movie feeling good about ourselves, but with an incredulity that anything so very bad could ever have happened, and a curious belief that the Holocaust was carried out somehow unconsciously, by no one. This is the pernicious line of thought that Marcel Ophüls skewers in his film The Memory of Justice, when an actor admits (I paraphrase): "I am the only surviving Nazi. I must be, because no one else will admit to having been in those mass rallies. And I must also have been the narrator of all of those films you see, because no one else has come forward, it was only me."
The ideas of the individuals are not abstract, generalized and unmotivated. Instead the total personality of each character is synthesized and exemplified through his mode of thinking, in his mode of self-expression, and in his conclusions regarding the subject at hand. Through the specific style and process of thinking, [the author] is able to expose the characteristic approach of each individual: how he confronts a problem, what he accepts as axiomatic, what he seeks to prove and how he proves it, the level of intellectual abstraction he attains, the sources of his examples, what he underplays and evades and how he does so.Lukács offers many examples of characters whose way of thinking--abstract ideas, prejudices, intellectual insights and errors, and so on--is an indelible characterization: Aristophanes, Socrates, and Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium; Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; Shakespeare's Othello; Julien Sorel in Stendhal's The Red and the Black. (The current debate about the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is precisely about the intellectual physiognomy of Atticus Finch.)
Spielberg's Schindler's List is about the changing responses of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) to Nazism, and particularly to the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews. But Spielberg presents this response not in the context of Schindler's character (his morality, his conscience, his prejudices, his ideology, his understanding of history, his politics) but in the context of our (the audience's) character. The movie is not about the conflicts in Schindler's breast, which would need to be resolved dramatically--but rather about the obvious repugnance of absolute evil, which is as it were built into our perception of the film. It is not possible to struggle intellectually or emotionally with what we are seeing onscreen (everything Nazi is unambiguously bad and villainous, just as in Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies); and yet the movie asks us to be interested in the pseudo-struggle of the hero faced with the same events!
In order for us to care about this man's disavowal of Nazism, and his dawning awareness of Jewish suffering, we have to understand why someone could be a Nazi. (After all, there were millions of Nazis!) But the answer the film gives, in the person of Ralph Fiennes's character Amon Goeth, is: Nazis were psychopaths. (The closing text informs us that he was arrested while in a mental institution.) This, you will notice, is not an explanation but an evasion.
How did Nazism function as an ideology? What aspects could be accepted under the heading of everyday political cynicism? How much of an illusion (about Hitler's plans for the Jews) were ordinary Germans (and even committed Nazis) living under? To what degree were the Jews themselves asked to buy into the program of their restricted freedom? What sort of personalities resisted and which buckled under? What kind of apologetic arguments were offered by rational people?
We know from history, for example, that the German army was opposed to Hitler in limited and insufficient ways (as were institutions like the Catholic church). But this opposition was couched in terms far from removed from Good Versus Evil. The Wehrmacht had its own privileges to defend, its own authority, its own response to the Versailles treaty, its own history of anti-semitism, its own ideas about strategy, and (above all) an opposition to the Nazi SS as a politicized, ideological intruder into military affairs. One can imagine hours of riveting, fraught argument in opposition to Nazism within the German Army... but one cannot imagine that this opposition could take the form of condemning the badness of Nazism. Schindler's List, however, is limited to this kind of response. (Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, has reproached Spielberg for numerous scenes carried out "without nuance," where "one should, instead, have worked with a pair of tweezers.")
What that means is that the characterization and drama is extremely pallid. Take, by contrast, the varied ideological arguments put forward in Spielberg's Lincoln, which is a flawed and bloated movie but which allows that the argument over slavery was not a matter of "good" and "bad" people lining up according to their basic human decency. This movie is filled with scenes of Abraham Lincoln explaining himself, and it is these rhetorical and argumentative scenes which most convey his personality, his warmth, his reflection on his own life. Take by contrast David Lean's film Bridge on the River Kwai, where Alec Guinness's character, a captured British officer, persuades himself to build a bridge for the Japanese using prisoners of war, through an agonizing and shameful decision that emphasizes an ideology of officers commanding their own troops (rather than the Japanese captors giving the orders to workers). This is a believable and interesting mistake, because it takes place against the background of that character's life and ideological formation.
Nothing of the sort occurs in Schindler's List. We do not understand Amon Goeth (because he is crazy); we do not understand the collaboration of the Judenrat and Jewish ghetto police (because it is conveyed as mere information: this existed, without further probing); we do not understand the mass of Jews saved by Schindler (because they are not characters, they are so many lives to be preserved). And lastly, we do not understand Schindler, because he has no one to speak to about his conflict and understanding: his reversal of conscience is presented not in dialogue but in a vision (the little girl in the red coat).
Not only does this make for a fairly tedious movie, since the central conflict cannot be put onscreen, but it does a disservice to the avowed project of historical memory of the Holocaust. We leave the movie feeling good about ourselves, but with an incredulity that anything so very bad could ever have happened, and a curious belief that the Holocaust was carried out somehow unconsciously, by no one. This is the pernicious line of thought that Marcel Ophüls skewers in his film The Memory of Justice, when an actor admits (I paraphrase): "I am the only surviving Nazi. I must be, because no one else will admit to having been in those mass rallies. And I must also have been the narrator of all of those films you see, because no one else has come forward, it was only me."
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Selma (2014)
The film biography is a treacherous endeavor. I can think of a few good biopics: Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Ivan the Terrible, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Last Emperor, Raging Bull, Young Mr. Lincoln, Serpico, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Reds. The greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane, is a biopic.
Of the recent Hollywood biopics, I remember seeing Milk with Sean Penn, and Ali with Will Smith. I passed on Milk, The Iron Lady, Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom, J. Edgar, The Aviator, and others.
The reception of Selma has been universal acclaim. According to one aggregator, every single review by a "top critic" has been positive, which would suggest that Selma is one of the greatest works of cinematic art ever produced. Undoubtedly, this acclaim is motivated by the unequivocal rightness and moral power of the events and persons depicted--not solely by the merits of the film itself.
Many of the scenes commit the cardinal sin of movie storytelling: the characters are talking only to provide the viewers with information (political background, exposition, informing us what face matches what historical personage). But information is presumably the last thing the moviegoing public wants. Think about how Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane handles exposition: Lawrence is being kept in the dark about the Franco-British objectives in the Middle East, and so much of the film is his education (along with ours) of the complexities he is not introduced to originally. In Citizen Kane, there is the famous "News on the March" newsreel, a tactic that can probably only be used once. The point is that scenes should avoid having characters tell each other things they already know. (Further, scenes should avoid having simple purposes like a checklist: 1. Show that MLK had affairs and was not "perfect." 2. Show that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had surveillance on MLK. 3. Show that Malcolm X was in Selma for a minute and secretly supported MLK.) It's anti-narrative because the information just sits there; the story doesn't resolve or respond to these scenes.
This approach is dictated by the film's didacticism... but then, what is the message of the film? What do we learn, really, about racism (for instance)? Why did Governor Wallace stake his political career and place in history to oppose voting rights? Why did Johnson stall? Why did the KKK kill white supporters of MLK? The answer to this can only be: there were important, vital stakes in the Jim Crow political dispensation--stakes that these historical actors stood to lose.
But there is no sense of those stakes in the film. Wallace's actions seem arbitrary and unmotivated. LBJ's opposition and turnaround are only sketched in. The result is that white supremacist rule over the south is disentangled from institutional and economic and political privilege and made to seem like a capricious personal misjudgment. (Take by contrast the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas is on the wrong side of history, but his rhetoric and personality are compelling because he has thought through and is able to argue his pro-slavery position as a coherent one. These positions are abominable but they are rooted in real personalities and real concerns. The racists in the film Selma are not real people; this is an enormous mistake.)
Naturally--because the triumph depicted in the film is the abolition of barriers to voting for blacks. If the movie wanted to show OTHER problems (economic exploitation comes to mind), then the film could not show the Selma march as an unequivocal, soaring victory. The picture of racism in the film is dictated not by history, but by the "happy ending".
Unfortunately, by vitiating the motivations and stakes of the Bad Guys, the movie makes nonsense of its narrative structure: a battle of wills. The opposing wills (of Johnson and Wallace) are silly and half-drawn. This saps out most of the suspense.
There is a moment when MLK recalls a long desegregation campaign in Albany, Alabama, which was unsuccessful because the police chief, Laurie Pritchett, patiently waged a war of attrition and de-escalation against MLK's non-violent tactics. Albany was evidently a complicated, stressful, drawn-out, tactical defeat. This to me sounds like a much more interesting movie, because the doubts and debates and frustrations of the SCLC are built into the events themselves: King is not "infallible" in Albany.
In Selma, King is infallible--some weak gestures by the film aside--and this is just not as interesting to watch.
Of the recent Hollywood biopics, I remember seeing Milk with Sean Penn, and Ali with Will Smith. I passed on Milk, The Iron Lady, Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom, J. Edgar, The Aviator, and others.
The reception of Selma has been universal acclaim. According to one aggregator, every single review by a "top critic" has been positive, which would suggest that Selma is one of the greatest works of cinematic art ever produced. Undoubtedly, this acclaim is motivated by the unequivocal rightness and moral power of the events and persons depicted--not solely by the merits of the film itself.
Many of the scenes commit the cardinal sin of movie storytelling: the characters are talking only to provide the viewers with information (political background, exposition, informing us what face matches what historical personage). But information is presumably the last thing the moviegoing public wants. Think about how Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane handles exposition: Lawrence is being kept in the dark about the Franco-British objectives in the Middle East, and so much of the film is his education (along with ours) of the complexities he is not introduced to originally. In Citizen Kane, there is the famous "News on the March" newsreel, a tactic that can probably only be used once. The point is that scenes should avoid having characters tell each other things they already know. (Further, scenes should avoid having simple purposes like a checklist: 1. Show that MLK had affairs and was not "perfect." 2. Show that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had surveillance on MLK. 3. Show that Malcolm X was in Selma for a minute and secretly supported MLK.) It's anti-narrative because the information just sits there; the story doesn't resolve or respond to these scenes.
This approach is dictated by the film's didacticism... but then, what is the message of the film? What do we learn, really, about racism (for instance)? Why did Governor Wallace stake his political career and place in history to oppose voting rights? Why did Johnson stall? Why did the KKK kill white supporters of MLK? The answer to this can only be: there were important, vital stakes in the Jim Crow political dispensation--stakes that these historical actors stood to lose.
But there is no sense of those stakes in the film. Wallace's actions seem arbitrary and unmotivated. LBJ's opposition and turnaround are only sketched in. The result is that white supremacist rule over the south is disentangled from institutional and economic and political privilege and made to seem like a capricious personal misjudgment. (Take by contrast the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas is on the wrong side of history, but his rhetoric and personality are compelling because he has thought through and is able to argue his pro-slavery position as a coherent one. These positions are abominable but they are rooted in real personalities and real concerns. The racists in the film Selma are not real people; this is an enormous mistake.)
Naturally--because the triumph depicted in the film is the abolition of barriers to voting for blacks. If the movie wanted to show OTHER problems (economic exploitation comes to mind), then the film could not show the Selma march as an unequivocal, soaring victory. The picture of racism in the film is dictated not by history, but by the "happy ending".
Unfortunately, by vitiating the motivations and stakes of the Bad Guys, the movie makes nonsense of its narrative structure: a battle of wills. The opposing wills (of Johnson and Wallace) are silly and half-drawn. This saps out most of the suspense.
There is a moment when MLK recalls a long desegregation campaign in Albany, Alabama, which was unsuccessful because the police chief, Laurie Pritchett, patiently waged a war of attrition and de-escalation against MLK's non-violent tactics. Albany was evidently a complicated, stressful, drawn-out, tactical defeat. This to me sounds like a much more interesting movie, because the doubts and debates and frustrations of the SCLC are built into the events themselves: King is not "infallible" in Albany.
In Selma, King is infallible--some weak gestures by the film aside--and this is just not as interesting to watch.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
The King's Speech (2010)
The King's Speech is first and foremost a well-made, beautifully acted film about friendship. Our friends, we learn, are our own courage to get through life. It is a beautiful message, and one in a fine tradition of British film (I'm thinking especially of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.)
But my main interest is not in this heartwarming historical drama, but in King George VI's stammer. What makes someone stammer? To those of us who don't, it is a curiosity not easily explained. It really, really does seem as if someone could just "get over it"--obviously that isn't the case, but the viewer eagerly soaks up every bit of information (or pseudo-information) about the disorder, the quack methods supposed to cure it, and the new (and delightfully contrary and democratic) therapeutic approach that Lionel Logue employs. For a large part of the movie, I was more interested in the disorder than in the future king's (unpleasant, defensive) character. (So that I had some very naive movie-going thoughts, such as, "If he can declaim a text perfectly well when music is blasting in his ears, why doesn't he just read his speech with music blasting in his ears?") In the last analysis, the movie's cultural observations and historical glosses were somewhat trite and shopworn, but the central speech defect completely fascinated me.
Now, I think it is wildly inappropriate to psychoanalyze a character from a work of art, e.g. for Great Expectations, to try and say in just what Pip's neurotic behavior consists. But The King's Speech really and obviously is about a psychological disorder and its treatment; moreover, the movie itself leans heavily on the Freudian themes of childhood recollections, the brother's sexual enjoyment and renunciation (Totem and Taboo)... not to mention the Lacanian topic of the Voice. My contention here is that a number of the movie's scenes only make sense and can be tied together meaningfully with the help of specifically psychoanalytic ideas (mostly the Oedipus complex, repression, the neurotic symptom).
One lesson we learn from Sartre's Questions de méthode is never to explain history by making theoretical categories intervene as direct motivations for historical agents. I like to apply this to art, as well. To take psychoanalytic terms and pin them upon characters, merely re-describing a perfectly good story in undramatic terms: this is less than useless. At its worst, it turns narrative into an endless allegory of the same thing: boring! To reference Sartre again, the point is to make history or narratives "intelligible"; philosophy or psychoanalysis et al should solve problems. The classic example: "Why does Hamlet wait so long to take action?" Ernest Jones' book on Hamlet is a classic for the very reason that it takes the text's own concerns as its starting point. I'll try to do the same here. Why does the character Bertie stammer? And how is he cured? (I can't pretend to deal with the historical reality here.) So I will here attempt that dubious thing, a psychoanalytic reading of The King's Speech.
*
In The King's Speech, to be King is to speak. On the occasion of his Christmas radio address, Bertie's father George V violently lectures him on how important it is to speak like a king, given the advent of modern broadcasting technology. But even to not be King is also to know damn well how to give a speech: witness Edward VIII's resignation speech. Guy Pearce, whom I have mostly seen playing American or Australian roles, delivers the famous lines about "the help and support of the woman I love"--a much more famous and fluent speech than the titular address--with a beautifully English period accent and solemn weightiness. He is showing off.
I ask the reader here to grant me one point that the movie does not advance explicitly: the existence of the Oedipus complex. This once granted, everything falls into place. [The Oedipus complex is, for a boy child, a love for his mother on one hand, which is on the other hand prohibited by the father, who wields the "castrating" authority that makes him an antagonist of the boy. The so-called successful Oedipus resolves itself more or less by "identification" with the father. The unsuccessful Oedipus, for example in the case of "Little Hans," can manifest as a phobia. The child develops an irrational fear of horses, because he has displaced onto the idea of horses the fear that his father will castrate him. Thus, this fear of horses has its root in the love of the mother, a love that is repressed as such and only emerges in this unhealthy fear.] And so I assume that Bertie at some point in his childhood, before he begins to stutter, had desired his mother and correspondingly feared a retaliation from his father, the king. Thus the child would, to protect himself, have renounced this desire, which could only look like the desire to "take his father's place" in bed. But this "in bed" is repressed even further, and modified into a renunciation of the desire to take his place "on the throne."
To give Bertie's symptom its meaning: the stutter is in fact very articulate, since every unbearable pause and swallowed-consonant communicates in full voice, "Daddy, I don't want to kill you." Just as Oedipus' limp marks him as fated with this desire (to kill his father, the king), Bertie's stutter is only ever saying, "Look, I'm not a threat, I couldn't be king, don't worry about me." If being a king=speaking like one, then not speaking like a king=not wanting to take the place of his father.
Which is why, when Logue suggests to Bertie in Hyde Park that Bertie would make a good king if his brother Edward VIII (David) were to abdicate, Bertie flares up and breaks with Logue, insulting him viciously so as to ensure that the separation "takes." Why? Surely Bertie is not upset at the compliment itself. It is rather that this insinuation--that he could or should supplant the king--is exactly the disavowed, repressed content of his stutter. The stutter says, "(Dear father,) I don't want to kill the King of England." (Meaning: "I do want to kill...") To tell Bertie that he would be a good king--which Bertie readily identifies as "treason" on Logue's part--is to say, "Don't you want this (which your entire symptom is a negation of)?"
To show that I'm not making too much of this: consider the use of Shakespeare in the movie. Shakespeare is always associated with Logue (in the exercise of having Bertie read out the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet while music is blasting from earphones; in the game of guess-the-quotation which he plays with his children; in his audition for the part of Richard III). All of this is seamlessly integrated into the plot, to 1) show that Bertie's problem is not "mechanical," 2) to give a glimpse into Logue's home life or 3) his ambitions as an actor and the obstacles his own speech (he has an Australian accent) presents.
But the clue to all of this Shakespeare is given by a remark David makes to Bertie. At his Scottish castle, when affairs with Mrs. Wallis Simpson are coming to a head, David accuses an interfering Bertie to watch himself--he is evincing desires which come awfully close to that (most awful) one, wanting-to-be-king. And David adds, it is like something out of Shakespeare. At this point, Bertie later tells Logue, he is completely struck dumb--all their progress vanishes.
But we know what Shakespeare David is thinking of: either (since they are in Scotland) the "Scottish play," as Logue's children call it--where Macbeth "murders sleep," killing Duncan in his bed; or, the deformed and throne-hungry Richard III--and where have we seen that play before? or... that ultimate Oedipal drama, Hamlet--and where have we seen that in this film?!
In short, "Shakespeare" (explicitly with David, but implicitly with Logue) always equals "killing the king." And Bertie is right (thematically) to see in Logue an instigator, a whisperer-of-forbidden-thoughts, a bad angel--don't we learn that Logue's favorite play is Othello, a play whose Iago is the ultimate in encouraging dissension and envy, of painting pictures of inappropriate pleasures? Just so, Bertie recognizes in these instigations and in the cure itself a danger to himself: the more fluent and "kingly" he becomes, the more his Oedipal desire (so the unconscious thought runs) risks calling down on itself violent reprisals. So, every time someone else (David, Logue) brings up Bertie's wanting-to-be-king, his speech fails and the cure hits a wall.
*
So: how does Bertie get cured? The crucial scene is when Logue is revealed not to be a doctor at all, but only a failed actor. At this point, the magic of his cure vanishes; Bertie has lost all confidence--and right before his coronation, too!
What does Logue do? He sits on the throne of England himself--mimicking in his posture, you will note, Olivier in his film of Richard III--and shows absolutely no respect for the throne or the monarchy. The point being here: the truly pathological thought is to believe that one "really is" King. The King only is such because he is recognized as being such, because he fills out the bizarre English constitutional order, because someone has to lead this empty life of pronouncements and ribbon-cuttings while the real business of government goes on. It is an empty position, as Bertie often notes: no real power, only rubber-stamping and posing-for-photos, and living an isolated, rule-bound existence. And yet Bertie protests at Logue's "blasphemy"--this wooden chair is still to be treated as a sacred place.
When Logue is unmasked as not really-being a doctor, everything in the cure that depended on Logue's credentials for a support falls apart. But when Logue, with his roguish Australian impudence, himself occupies the empty place of power, Bertie sees the utmost incompatible object sitting in the position of his father. At the same time, Bertie understands what his father George V could not understand, and what, from the point of view of his symptom, Bertie was protecting his father from: the emptiness of kingly authority.
That is to say, the stutter is (as we saw above) performed for the father. But it is performed for the father who is imagined as having-speech, as full of authority, as occupying a real position of power (like Oedipus' father Laertes). It is in this sense that the stutter keeps the father from knowing..., because the stutter shows back to the kingly observer his own position as deserved and meaningful.
So when Logue is sitting in the throne (talk about the psychoanalytic transference!!), there is literally no one for whom to perform the stammer anymore. The stammer (in the Oedipus complex) was meant to disavow any interest in the father's place, for the view of the father. But now the father's place (the throne) is looking at Bertie from out the vulgar eyes of the son of an Australian brewer. There is neither the Oedipal disavowal nor the meaningfulness-of-power to keep up for this observer any longer, because the observing king/father has been replaced, on one hand, by the therapist, and on the other hand, because Bertie no longer sees his coronation as an usurpation.
The paradox being here, of course, that being King means he has to "own" (i.e. pretend to believe in) this meaningless wooden chair and silly medieval ritual, and speak to the country as though all of this were full of consequence and metaphysical divine right. But here he is assuming a different viewer than that of his father. He is now performing from the throne, and not for the throne. Thus he has moved into the point-of-view for which the stammer originated as an object of spectacle.
But my main interest is not in this heartwarming historical drama, but in King George VI's stammer. What makes someone stammer? To those of us who don't, it is a curiosity not easily explained. It really, really does seem as if someone could just "get over it"--obviously that isn't the case, but the viewer eagerly soaks up every bit of information (or pseudo-information) about the disorder, the quack methods supposed to cure it, and the new (and delightfully contrary and democratic) therapeutic approach that Lionel Logue employs. For a large part of the movie, I was more interested in the disorder than in the future king's (unpleasant, defensive) character. (So that I had some very naive movie-going thoughts, such as, "If he can declaim a text perfectly well when music is blasting in his ears, why doesn't he just read his speech with music blasting in his ears?") In the last analysis, the movie's cultural observations and historical glosses were somewhat trite and shopworn, but the central speech defect completely fascinated me.
Now, I think it is wildly inappropriate to psychoanalyze a character from a work of art, e.g. for Great Expectations, to try and say in just what Pip's neurotic behavior consists. But The King's Speech really and obviously is about a psychological disorder and its treatment; moreover, the movie itself leans heavily on the Freudian themes of childhood recollections, the brother's sexual enjoyment and renunciation (Totem and Taboo)... not to mention the Lacanian topic of the Voice. My contention here is that a number of the movie's scenes only make sense and can be tied together meaningfully with the help of specifically psychoanalytic ideas (mostly the Oedipus complex, repression, the neurotic symptom).
One lesson we learn from Sartre's Questions de méthode is never to explain history by making theoretical categories intervene as direct motivations for historical agents. I like to apply this to art, as well. To take psychoanalytic terms and pin them upon characters, merely re-describing a perfectly good story in undramatic terms: this is less than useless. At its worst, it turns narrative into an endless allegory of the same thing: boring! To reference Sartre again, the point is to make history or narratives "intelligible"; philosophy or psychoanalysis et al should solve problems. The classic example: "Why does Hamlet wait so long to take action?" Ernest Jones' book on Hamlet is a classic for the very reason that it takes the text's own concerns as its starting point. I'll try to do the same here. Why does the character Bertie stammer? And how is he cured? (I can't pretend to deal with the historical reality here.) So I will here attempt that dubious thing, a psychoanalytic reading of The King's Speech.
*
In The King's Speech, to be King is to speak. On the occasion of his Christmas radio address, Bertie's father George V violently lectures him on how important it is to speak like a king, given the advent of modern broadcasting technology. But even to not be King is also to know damn well how to give a speech: witness Edward VIII's resignation speech. Guy Pearce, whom I have mostly seen playing American or Australian roles, delivers the famous lines about "the help and support of the woman I love"--a much more famous and fluent speech than the titular address--with a beautifully English period accent and solemn weightiness. He is showing off.
I ask the reader here to grant me one point that the movie does not advance explicitly: the existence of the Oedipus complex. This once granted, everything falls into place. [The Oedipus complex is, for a boy child, a love for his mother on one hand, which is on the other hand prohibited by the father, who wields the "castrating" authority that makes him an antagonist of the boy. The so-called successful Oedipus resolves itself more or less by "identification" with the father. The unsuccessful Oedipus, for example in the case of "Little Hans," can manifest as a phobia. The child develops an irrational fear of horses, because he has displaced onto the idea of horses the fear that his father will castrate him. Thus, this fear of horses has its root in the love of the mother, a love that is repressed as such and only emerges in this unhealthy fear.] And so I assume that Bertie at some point in his childhood, before he begins to stutter, had desired his mother and correspondingly feared a retaliation from his father, the king. Thus the child would, to protect himself, have renounced this desire, which could only look like the desire to "take his father's place" in bed. But this "in bed" is repressed even further, and modified into a renunciation of the desire to take his place "on the throne."
To give Bertie's symptom its meaning: the stutter is in fact very articulate, since every unbearable pause and swallowed-consonant communicates in full voice, "Daddy, I don't want to kill you." Just as Oedipus' limp marks him as fated with this desire (to kill his father, the king), Bertie's stutter is only ever saying, "Look, I'm not a threat, I couldn't be king, don't worry about me." If being a king=speaking like one, then not speaking like a king=not wanting to take the place of his father.
Which is why, when Logue suggests to Bertie in Hyde Park that Bertie would make a good king if his brother Edward VIII (David) were to abdicate, Bertie flares up and breaks with Logue, insulting him viciously so as to ensure that the separation "takes." Why? Surely Bertie is not upset at the compliment itself. It is rather that this insinuation--that he could or should supplant the king--is exactly the disavowed, repressed content of his stutter. The stutter says, "(Dear father,) I don't want to kill the King of England." (Meaning: "I do want to kill...") To tell Bertie that he would be a good king--which Bertie readily identifies as "treason" on Logue's part--is to say, "Don't you want this (which your entire symptom is a negation of)?"
To show that I'm not making too much of this: consider the use of Shakespeare in the movie. Shakespeare is always associated with Logue (in the exercise of having Bertie read out the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet while music is blasting from earphones; in the game of guess-the-quotation which he plays with his children; in his audition for the part of Richard III). All of this is seamlessly integrated into the plot, to 1) show that Bertie's problem is not "mechanical," 2) to give a glimpse into Logue's home life or 3) his ambitions as an actor and the obstacles his own speech (he has an Australian accent) presents.
But the clue to all of this Shakespeare is given by a remark David makes to Bertie. At his Scottish castle, when affairs with Mrs. Wallis Simpson are coming to a head, David accuses an interfering Bertie to watch himself--he is evincing desires which come awfully close to that (most awful) one, wanting-to-be-king. And David adds, it is like something out of Shakespeare. At this point, Bertie later tells Logue, he is completely struck dumb--all their progress vanishes.
But we know what Shakespeare David is thinking of: either (since they are in Scotland) the "Scottish play," as Logue's children call it--where Macbeth "murders sleep," killing Duncan in his bed; or, the deformed and throne-hungry Richard III--and where have we seen that play before? or... that ultimate Oedipal drama, Hamlet--and where have we seen that in this film?!
In short, "Shakespeare" (explicitly with David, but implicitly with Logue) always equals "killing the king." And Bertie is right (thematically) to see in Logue an instigator, a whisperer-of-forbidden-thoughts, a bad angel--don't we learn that Logue's favorite play is Othello, a play whose Iago is the ultimate in encouraging dissension and envy, of painting pictures of inappropriate pleasures? Just so, Bertie recognizes in these instigations and in the cure itself a danger to himself: the more fluent and "kingly" he becomes, the more his Oedipal desire (so the unconscious thought runs) risks calling down on itself violent reprisals. So, every time someone else (David, Logue) brings up Bertie's wanting-to-be-king, his speech fails and the cure hits a wall.
*
So: how does Bertie get cured? The crucial scene is when Logue is revealed not to be a doctor at all, but only a failed actor. At this point, the magic of his cure vanishes; Bertie has lost all confidence--and right before his coronation, too!
What does Logue do? He sits on the throne of England himself--mimicking in his posture, you will note, Olivier in his film of Richard III--and shows absolutely no respect for the throne or the monarchy. The point being here: the truly pathological thought is to believe that one "really is" King. The King only is such because he is recognized as being such, because he fills out the bizarre English constitutional order, because someone has to lead this empty life of pronouncements and ribbon-cuttings while the real business of government goes on. It is an empty position, as Bertie often notes: no real power, only rubber-stamping and posing-for-photos, and living an isolated, rule-bound existence. And yet Bertie protests at Logue's "blasphemy"--this wooden chair is still to be treated as a sacred place.
When Logue is unmasked as not really-being a doctor, everything in the cure that depended on Logue's credentials for a support falls apart. But when Logue, with his roguish Australian impudence, himself occupies the empty place of power, Bertie sees the utmost incompatible object sitting in the position of his father. At the same time, Bertie understands what his father George V could not understand, and what, from the point of view of his symptom, Bertie was protecting his father from: the emptiness of kingly authority.
That is to say, the stutter is (as we saw above) performed for the father. But it is performed for the father who is imagined as having-speech, as full of authority, as occupying a real position of power (like Oedipus' father Laertes). It is in this sense that the stutter keeps the father from knowing..., because the stutter shows back to the kingly observer his own position as deserved and meaningful.
So when Logue is sitting in the throne (talk about the psychoanalytic transference!!), there is literally no one for whom to perform the stammer anymore. The stammer (in the Oedipus complex) was meant to disavow any interest in the father's place, for the view of the father. But now the father's place (the throne) is looking at Bertie from out the vulgar eyes of the son of an Australian brewer. There is neither the Oedipal disavowal nor the meaningfulness-of-power to keep up for this observer any longer, because the observing king/father has been replaced, on one hand, by the therapist, and on the other hand, because Bertie no longer sees his coronation as an usurpation.
The paradox being here, of course, that being King means he has to "own" (i.e. pretend to believe in) this meaningless wooden chair and silly medieval ritual, and speak to the country as though all of this were full of consequence and metaphysical divine right. But here he is assuming a different viewer than that of his father. He is now performing from the throne, and not for the throne. Thus he has moved into the point-of-view for which the stammer originated as an object of spectacle.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Man of Steel (2013)
Just as Superman cannot resist kryptonite, so apparently no movie critic can resist comparing Zack S
nyder's new Man of Steel to Jesus Christ.
Entertainment Weekly:
Why the Superman of 'Man of Steel' is the Jesus we wish Jesus would be"Superman, like Christ, is a figure trapped in his own mythology"
How "Christian" is Superman?
There is a great speech in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Part 2, where Bill unspools his reading of Clark Kent as a character played by Superman.
"
What Kent wears – the glasses, the business suit – that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us."
Superman is other than us. The 1978 Superman film by Richard Donner and the new Man of Steel begin by reminding us that Superman is an alien. Whereas Batman is often very noir, Superman belongs in a sci-fi universe. This is where Man of Steel breaks free from the Christopher Nolan influence: the Krypton sequences are genuinely fantastical, otherworldly, closer to Avatar than to any other superhero movie.
The Daily Beast review notes: "Here, Superman isn't human at all." But in that case, all comparisons to Christ should be dropped as irrelevant troping. Christ is entirely human. That's the whole point. Unlike Superman, he can be whipped, he suffers, he dies. There is a line in Man of Steel where Martha Kent, Superman's adoptive mother, warns her husband that people "will kill him." This isn't possible for Superman, but it is the entire story of Jesus. His father sent God here, and we killed him. (Of course, we couldn't recognize him as God, because he wasn't wearing a cape, but came from Nazareth.) As Kierkegaard points out in Training in Christianity, Christ is so far from being all-powerful that he looks like he needs OUR help.
The Daily Beast goes on: "In Man of Steel, there's no clue as to why this brooding, relatively humorless alien wants to save these people, aside from the fact that his daddy told him to."
But Christianity doesn't have an answer to "why should Christ want to save these people," either. The great puzzle of faith is not that it is easy but that it is hard. Scorn, not gratitude, met Christ. Why should he want to save these people? This is a real question, not just an answer that is missing.
Man of Steel does have the problem that we don't understand Superman's wanting to save humanity, at a dramatic level. The filmmakers seem to understand that the point isn't that Superman is a nice guy, that he just cares about people because he's so upstanding and affable. But the expectation that Christianity has a take-away, decisive answer to this question, and one that we would be able to understand, is totally mistaken.
Christianity takes an abysmal view on humanity. Christ's wanting to save us is not something easily represented. In Man of Steel, Superman takes a "leap of faith" in trusting humans, and then saves us. Christ gets completely betrayed by humanity, and he doesn't "save the earth."
Christ's story shows how we repay kindness with treachery and shameful resentment and ignorance. To make a "Christian" Superman movie, we would have to show an utterly vulnerable, mortal Superman being rejected by humanity and murdered, with people refusing sympathy to his dying body, and with no apparent "motive" on his part for allowing this to happen.
I am not interested in "defending Christianity," but I do think the Christian story is more dramatically compelling than any superhero story. Or, it could be. There is a great deal standing in the way of seeing Christ as a "character" in a dramatic situation. The way that the Bible is formatted on the page does not help. There have only been a handful of good movies about Jesus: Ben-Hur, The Last Temptation of Christ, Life of Brian.
How does Superman understand his time on earth? Has his father left him a real choice/any difficulties, in his mission here? Can Superman understand us, or is he in some way autistic regarding our morals and weaknesses? Man of Steel is interested in these questions only about 1/3 of the time, and that is the interesting 1/3 of the movie, dramatically. There is one really excellent fight scene, but I think the movie is most gripping when Superman is treated like someone trying to understand people from the outside.
In contemporary culture (secular and religious), we refuse to let Christ have that same problem.
Monday, April 22, 2013
How Green Was My Valley
The first time I saw this movie was on a TV screen, which even now seems quaint. It was sentimental, stuffed with clichés (the Welsh always have a song in their heart), and ultimately anti-climactic (a sudden mineshaft collapse and then it's over).
Today I watched it on the big screen at the Museum of Modern Art and sobbed uncontrollably for the entire two hours. I would now rank it among John Ford movies only behind The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, and the Searchers--and in the same rank as masterpieces like The Quiet Man, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
How Green Was My Valley is a story of the decline of a Welsh mining community, the encroachment of a sterile and heartless capitalism into the childhood memories of the narrator. The accent and heartstring-tugging music has to be taken with a certain dramatic irony, in voice-overs like this:
In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the sides of our hill. Not yet enough to mar the countryside, nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.
*Already* the countryside has *begun* to be marred, the green has retreated under the implacable filth of industrial mining. And by the end, nothing will be left. The beloved family has broken apart, love has been wasted and come to nought, a promising youth has run aground, brothers have died and been scattered across the world, a community has turned sour and cannibalized its virtues. It is Ford's genius to represent this bleakest series of defeats through the eyes of a child's nostalgia and memories of "happier days."
Of Ford's films, How Green Was My Valley is closest to The Grapes of Wrath and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in relating a historical vision of an unstoppable, dialectical capitalism that remakes the cultural and physical landscape, chewing up men and tearing the old classes asunder. The narrow provincial prejudices and the (idyllically-drawn) old Welsh character will both fall with the growing borders of this world, just as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance literacy, democracy, and statehood push out the indecent violence of the big ranchers. And, along with the Grapes of Wrath, this is one of the great works of American leftist populism: the simplicity and humanism of Ford's sympathy with the workers as they are helplessly ground down by the mine owners, giving their bodies up to a thankless and indifferent apparatus that looms in the background of nearly every shot. We are told early on, by the father, that the mine owners are "not savages," but "men like us." No, the five Morgan sons reply---not like us. This misplaced trust costs the family grievously. Nothing too radical takes place in the film, and I think that is the point: by the end, after holding out hope and dying by inches, nothing is left but death, hate, and black slag in this village.
Like any Ford movie here, there is plenty of singing, drinking, fighting, and a slew of lovable eccentrics at the margins. But unfamiliar here is the sensitive portrayal of childhood, through the youngest, most delicate son (Roddy McDowall). When he loses the use of his legs, and is confined to bed all winter, there is a small miracle at work: the preacher brings him copies of Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, and the Pickwick Papers to read. I don't know who would not burst into tears when the teacher, consoling him, says that he would switch places with the frightened, ailing child, just to be able to read Treasure Island again for the first time.
The last images of the film are heartbreaking in their simplicity--scenes from earlier in the picture, when the entire family was still together. We had lost track of how many tragedies pulled them all apart, of how much has been lost. (The last scene of the Godfather, Part II has a similar effect.)
I should also mention the cinematography of Arthur Miller, also well-known for his work on The Ox Bow Incident. Of especial note is a brief scene of Walter Pidgeon working in a downpour, one of the most senior workers being intentionally humiliated by the mine operators for speaking against a wage cut.Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Carnage (2011)
If Roman Polanski's new film Carnage were a thesis film, arguing that (to quote A.O. Scott), "beneath the surface of civilized behavior lurks an unquenchable animal impulse, a principle of aggression we labor in vain to suppress"--then it would be a pretty bad movie. It's a dumb premise. What is truly awful and uncanny about human indecency and cruelty is (to quote Nietzsche) "human, all too human." Civilization is not built on some successful-but-fragile renunciation of primal violence, but is indeed founded on primal violence (Freud); "discontent" (Unbehagen) is not lurking in the shadows of our primeval natures, but is built into the bitter, vicious circle we know as culture.
We don't get a glimpse behind any curtain here. Although a piece of theater very much in the vein of Sartre's No Exit or Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carnage isn't interested in dredging up the past. There is no rotating set of monologues that walks us through the moment when each character became fixed in their rut or left to cling to a pipe dream. Nor will "everything be different" for these characters going forward: truth has not emerged to shatter their world.
This isn't mere clunkiness in the script. In refusing to bare for us each character's inner drives, failings, and obsessions, Carnage is much closer to Bergman's episodic, inconclusive Scenes From a Marriage than to the catharsis and soul-bearing of the mid-century stage. Not only do these characters not have discernible, rich pasts--their tantrums and excoriations turn only around sarcastic, shallow perceptions. It is a virtue of the film, not a flaw, that the viewer believes less and less of what any character says, as things get darker and more apparently confessional. We only hear the particular lies that these people tell themselves. John C. Reilly plays at being a nihilist; Kate Winslet pursues a tangent about the sanctity of a hamster's life; Christoph Waltz spends the entire film in another reality (his cell phone); and Jodie Foster's awkwardly tries to get hammered. None of this is wending our way through the defiles of some profound truth of these characters; it is all quite forced on their parts.
The great insight of psychoanalysis is that, at some level, whatever deformation and distortion our activities may take on, this is how we get off. The most crippling hysteria is just the way one person organizes their satisfactions. Applied to Carnage, you might say that these characters are living for this: to trot out these petty, shallow, execrable figures of themselves to wallow in, parading a shameful cynicism and sarcasm. There is an obvious glee to it, even an addictive compulsion. Far from being a "one-off," you get the feeling that everyone would be better off if they could institutionalize these afternoons together. The mask of social convention isn't ripped off here against anyone's will: these characters plunge into their degradation with enthusiasm. It is a kind of holiday: the ideological fantasy of, "When I am awake, am I really a butterfly dreaming I am a philosopher?" The answer of course is, no. No more do these Brooklyn bourgeois need some *additional* flavoring of the atrocious to serve as their tombstone... nor as their alibi.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
A Dangerous Method (2011)
Plato's Symposium is a critical text for psychoanalysis. Freud bases his formulation of the death drive, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, on Aristophanes' myth of a primal division at the root of sexual desire. "Love wants to heal the wound in human nature." And Lacan bases his entire seminar (VIII) on transference upon this dialogue.
But the Symposium interests us here not for its doctrinal value, but as a literary text, even as a drama. In the speeches here, you don't just hear a succession of abstractions, relics of 5th century Athenian social opinion. You also receive an impression of what Georg Lukacs calls the characters' "intellectual physiognomy": "What is decisive is that Plato reveals the thinking processes of his characters and develops their varied intellectual positions regarding the same problem--the nature of love--as the vital factor in their characters and as the most distinctive manifestation of their personalities... A character's conception of the world represents a profound personal experience and the most distinctive expression of his inner life."
A Dangerous Method takes as its subject the break (1911 and prior) between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, and the widening cracks in their theoretical approaches which would yield such vastly irreconcilable results in the following decades. The central conversation in the film, the 13-hour first meeting between these two doctors, is a prolonged debate about the preeminence of the libido in Freud's doctrine. Later crucial scenes involve technical criticism of a dissertation/case study on the ego and repression, Freud's monograph on Moses and Ikhnaton, and an early version of the death drive.
This is a movie about ideas, about method. At the same time, it aspires to be a sexual drama, a biopic, and a story of friendship and ambition. But it is rarely both of these things at once. The "Oedipal" rivalry of the younger Jung with Herr Doktor is somewhat obvious, and these scenes write themselves. But when Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is being spanked, or indeed the entire unfolding of her affair with Jung, there is no organic relationship with her psychoanalytic ideas. The movie might be said to be about the contours of her desire, but when she outlines her contributions to Freud, instead of thinking, "Of course YOU would think that!" instead I was confused and bored.
The filmmakers do obliquely demonstrate one theoretical point very nicely: Jung's conception of the libido theory, of "sex" as a positive force, is indeed vulgar and bourgeois--the hedonism of a frat boy. This we see only in his actions. You might say that Freud and Jung's supposed debate about the *centrality* of sex is really a debate about the meaning and limits of the word "sex." Neither of them see this, but we do. The film is also very smart about the Jewish question in pre-war German speaking countries, in relation to psychoanalysis.
What it means to have *these* ideas, and not other ones, is so central to the experience of being a person, and desire is so tangled up in metaphysics already (our "type" is an eminently Aristotelian conception), that the film suffers immensely by leaving these levels uncoordinated. Why is Jung, this prim, austere hypocrite, drawn to the theory of the unconscious in the first place? It's not clear. Why does he stray into mystical territories of study? This has nothing to do with the film's central love story. When Jung laments that psychoanalysis can only show the patient his disease, "squatting there like a toad," this is a powerful image--but it isn't coming from Jung-as-character. It is coming from some external biographical fact.
One of my brilliant readers argues that Jung's ideas about mysticism are a reflection of his refusal to pursue a life with Sabina; they are a kind of alternate fulfillment of what he cannot face and has rejected in favor of the comfortable sterility of his domestic establishment. I am unconvinced. The "person Jung could have been," in his sexual position vis-a-vis Sabina, is hardly a "mystical escape" or even an alternative. In his passionate affair, he is a brutal disciplinarian, the apotheosis of his proto-nazi "Aryan" Protestant restraint... and so not some departure or path not taken.
But the Symposium interests us here not for its doctrinal value, but as a literary text, even as a drama. In the speeches here, you don't just hear a succession of abstractions, relics of 5th century Athenian social opinion. You also receive an impression of what Georg Lukacs calls the characters' "intellectual physiognomy": "What is decisive is that Plato reveals the thinking processes of his characters and develops their varied intellectual positions regarding the same problem--the nature of love--as the vital factor in their characters and as the most distinctive manifestation of their personalities... A character's conception of the world represents a profound personal experience and the most distinctive expression of his inner life."
A Dangerous Method takes as its subject the break (1911 and prior) between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, and the widening cracks in their theoretical approaches which would yield such vastly irreconcilable results in the following decades. The central conversation in the film, the 13-hour first meeting between these two doctors, is a prolonged debate about the preeminence of the libido in Freud's doctrine. Later crucial scenes involve technical criticism of a dissertation/case study on the ego and repression, Freud's monograph on Moses and Ikhnaton, and an early version of the death drive.
This is a movie about ideas, about method. At the same time, it aspires to be a sexual drama, a biopic, and a story of friendship and ambition. But it is rarely both of these things at once. The "Oedipal" rivalry of the younger Jung with Herr Doktor is somewhat obvious, and these scenes write themselves. But when Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is being spanked, or indeed the entire unfolding of her affair with Jung, there is no organic relationship with her psychoanalytic ideas. The movie might be said to be about the contours of her desire, but when she outlines her contributions to Freud, instead of thinking, "Of course YOU would think that!" instead I was confused and bored.
The filmmakers do obliquely demonstrate one theoretical point very nicely: Jung's conception of the libido theory, of "sex" as a positive force, is indeed vulgar and bourgeois--the hedonism of a frat boy. This we see only in his actions. You might say that Freud and Jung's supposed debate about the *centrality* of sex is really a debate about the meaning and limits of the word "sex." Neither of them see this, but we do. The film is also very smart about the Jewish question in pre-war German speaking countries, in relation to psychoanalysis.
What it means to have *these* ideas, and not other ones, is so central to the experience of being a person, and desire is so tangled up in metaphysics already (our "type" is an eminently Aristotelian conception), that the film suffers immensely by leaving these levels uncoordinated. Why is Jung, this prim, austere hypocrite, drawn to the theory of the unconscious in the first place? It's not clear. Why does he stray into mystical territories of study? This has nothing to do with the film's central love story. When Jung laments that psychoanalysis can only show the patient his disease, "squatting there like a toad," this is a powerful image--but it isn't coming from Jung-as-character. It is coming from some external biographical fact.
One of my brilliant readers argues that Jung's ideas about mysticism are a reflection of his refusal to pursue a life with Sabina; they are a kind of alternate fulfillment of what he cannot face and has rejected in favor of the comfortable sterility of his domestic establishment. I am unconvinced. The "person Jung could have been," in his sexual position vis-a-vis Sabina, is hardly a "mystical escape" or even an alternative. In his passionate affair, he is a brutal disciplinarian, the apotheosis of his proto-nazi "Aryan" Protestant restraint... and so not some departure or path not taken.
The way I read the "squatting there like a toad" line is that this really IS what psychoanalysis does. Jung's definition is right! The mistake is, on top of that, to then want to "give meaning" to the bare coarseness of existence. It follows, then, that it is his AFFAIR WITH SABINA that is the symptom, the "toad," the satisfaction and fantasy-formation that makes his bourgeois life bearable.
Let me recommend two better movies about psychoanalysis. The first is John Huston's Freud, with Montgomery Clift, and an early scenario written by J-P Sartre, who knew a thing or two about coordinating the dead facts of biography and oeuvre with the desires at the heart of a "project" (cf. his interminable biography of Flaubert). The second is Cronenberg's own The Brood, which treats a charismatic psychotherapists' own "dangerous method" of inducing sores and mysterious "acting-out" of the violent revenge fantasies of his patients. Without giving anything away, the ugliness of desire here culminates in the unchecked elaborating of symptoms, truly building out into the dark.Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Margin Call (2011)
I have been teaching the Greek tragedies recently, and Margin Call certainly fits Jacques Lacan's definition of Sophoclean tragedy: the central characters are "between two deaths." Yes, they are walking around, breathing, stressing out. But they are dead, in the sense that all the events of their demise are known in advance. The computer models indicate that the bottom has dropped out of the mortgage market that their Wall Street firm (unnamed, but with an ingeniously bland arboreal logo) trades on. Their servants have run into Death at the marketplace. Everything is already in motion, it is only that by a stroke of luck (?) the firm realizes that the game is up before any of the other players. In Lacanian terms, the "big Other," the marketplace, is still unaware--and has to be kept unaware--of what has already taken place in "the Real" (meaning, in a very strict sense, in a computer model).
It's a great setup. But this movie isn't (until the last 20 minutes) interested in the clockwork mechanisms of Greek tragedy, or in unfolding this setup. I actually can't tell what this movie wants to be about. In very many ways (Kevin Spacey's presence not being the most obvious), we are in the David Mamet world of Glengarry Glen Ross. But Mamet's plays are about something: how men talk. I don't believe for a second that this is how Wall Street talks. The monologues in this movie are preposterous, but so are the little touches. I am reminded of a scene from the Billy Crystal movie Throw Momma From the Train, where a buffoonish aspiring writer of nautical fiction, in a story about a submarine mission, doesn't know the name for "the lever that makes the submarine dive," and so she just writes in this circumlocution. Margin Call has some of the same authenticity problems. Characters are repeatedly telling other characters to "simplify," "speak to me in plain English," "I didn't get to the top by crunching numbers." This is transparently, offensively, on my behalf as an audience member. But it takes all the fun out of the Hemingway/Mamet mode of watching Men At Work.
In economic terms, and in the terms of our political moment, this is an extremely cloistered vision--no "real people" are ever on stage--and yet not an enlightening one. We hear a lot about "formulas" and algorithms and how "complex" everything all is, but none of it seems complex at all. There is literally a character who is a rocket scientist (in a previous career), who is the only person (Nicolas Cage must have turned down this role) who sees the catastrophe coming in advance. But when he explains it, anyone who has ever watched 5 minutes of financial news will wonder how risk assessment failed to take into account historical levels of market volatility. In fact, we are in the presence of magic. David Mamet himself is much smarter here, in his film The Spanish Prisoner, where it really is a Macguffin, a "formula" with no content other than its plot function and desirability. Margin Call doesn't really want to explain finance to us. I contend that if the shoddy product being sold in this film were rotten lumber, nothing would need to be altered. What would be revealed is only that this fails at all to take me behind this particular curtain.
One learns nothing about human nature here. The main character in no way provides, what seems likely at first, a Nick Carraway-style naive moral consciousness that has to learn about the world the hard way. Instead this character disappears for long stretches. No one here is likable. No one makes a tough choice. People have tough options given to them. Unlike Greek tragedy, no one makes the interesting choice to stick it out. They are all pleading with an indifferent fate, bargaining with the sword dangling over their head. But I am making it sound more interesting than it ever is on screen. I'm sure the screenwriter/director thought that "everyone caves in" was an interesting spin, but I would not have advised trying to dramatically improve on Sophocles. Hemingway knew to show us bravery. He looked for it in more obvious places, sure. Margin Call is a failure of imagination. To nudge these characters into ethical "ownership" of their symbolic deaths, or of the mandate following necessarily from their desires, would be to create a fantasy world--no longer Wall Street, certainly. What we get instead is a dramatic stage evacuated of any content: a barren conference room marked "the present day."
[Perhaps it is trivial to say "I learned nothing about human nature from this film." But in fact I wept profusely at the trailer for the puppeteering documentary (!) "Being Elmo" during the coming attractions. There I learned that people achieve their dreams, overcome adversity, share love of others through art, and change lives through belief and passion. Margin Call annoyingly and tritely asked me to unlearn those things, and even though it was 120 minutes longer than the "Being Elmo" trailer, lost in the end.]
It's a great setup. But this movie isn't (until the last 20 minutes) interested in the clockwork mechanisms of Greek tragedy, or in unfolding this setup. I actually can't tell what this movie wants to be about. In very many ways (Kevin Spacey's presence not being the most obvious), we are in the David Mamet world of Glengarry Glen Ross. But Mamet's plays are about something: how men talk. I don't believe for a second that this is how Wall Street talks. The monologues in this movie are preposterous, but so are the little touches. I am reminded of a scene from the Billy Crystal movie Throw Momma From the Train, where a buffoonish aspiring writer of nautical fiction, in a story about a submarine mission, doesn't know the name for "the lever that makes the submarine dive," and so she just writes in this circumlocution. Margin Call has some of the same authenticity problems. Characters are repeatedly telling other characters to "simplify," "speak to me in plain English," "I didn't get to the top by crunching numbers." This is transparently, offensively, on my behalf as an audience member. But it takes all the fun out of the Hemingway/Mamet mode of watching Men At Work.
In economic terms, and in the terms of our political moment, this is an extremely cloistered vision--no "real people" are ever on stage--and yet not an enlightening one. We hear a lot about "formulas" and algorithms and how "complex" everything all is, but none of it seems complex at all. There is literally a character who is a rocket scientist (in a previous career), who is the only person (Nicolas Cage must have turned down this role) who sees the catastrophe coming in advance. But when he explains it, anyone who has ever watched 5 minutes of financial news will wonder how risk assessment failed to take into account historical levels of market volatility. In fact, we are in the presence of magic. David Mamet himself is much smarter here, in his film The Spanish Prisoner, where it really is a Macguffin, a "formula" with no content other than its plot function and desirability. Margin Call doesn't really want to explain finance to us. I contend that if the shoddy product being sold in this film were rotten lumber, nothing would need to be altered. What would be revealed is only that this fails at all to take me behind this particular curtain.
One learns nothing about human nature here. The main character in no way provides, what seems likely at first, a Nick Carraway-style naive moral consciousness that has to learn about the world the hard way. Instead this character disappears for long stretches. No one here is likable. No one makes a tough choice. People have tough options given to them. Unlike Greek tragedy, no one makes the interesting choice to stick it out. They are all pleading with an indifferent fate, bargaining with the sword dangling over their head. But I am making it sound more interesting than it ever is on screen. I'm sure the screenwriter/director thought that "everyone caves in" was an interesting spin, but I would not have advised trying to dramatically improve on Sophocles. Hemingway knew to show us bravery. He looked for it in more obvious places, sure. Margin Call is a failure of imagination. To nudge these characters into ethical "ownership" of their symbolic deaths, or of the mandate following necessarily from their desires, would be to create a fantasy world--no longer Wall Street, certainly. What we get instead is a dramatic stage evacuated of any content: a barren conference room marked "the present day."
[Perhaps it is trivial to say "I learned nothing about human nature from this film." But in fact I wept profusely at the trailer for the puppeteering documentary (!) "Being Elmo" during the coming attractions. There I learned that people achieve their dreams, overcome adversity, share love of others through art, and change lives through belief and passion. Margin Call annoyingly and tritely asked me to unlearn those things, and even though it was 120 minutes longer than the "Being Elmo" trailer, lost in the end.]
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part Two (2011)
One should be very skeptical of the well-worn cultural valuation which says that characters should "have depth" and "develop" and that emotional complications and psychological gestures are signs of great art. There are very good reasons to prefer The Pickwick Papers to Anna Karenina.
The Harry Potter series has been applauded by critics and "adults" for taking the embryonic and juvenile characters of the early novels and plunging them into an ever-darker world, showing us their growth and loves and loyalties and adolescent torments. As a reader and a viewer, this has always felt painfully obligatory and even perfunctory. It would be different if, at a deeper level, these stories were "about" adolescence, in the way that Teen Wolf or Twilight obviously are... but they aren't. Harry's problems were never mine, and the confidence he has in mission (revenging the death of his parents and destroying absolute evil) is only ever superficially challenged.
At the same time, the Harry Potter universe is so huge and cool that you can pour pretty much anything into it with a palatable result. The forgettable minor characters, the incoherent political resonances, the comic relief, the uncomfortable racial pluralism (on par with George Lucas'), the needlessly complicated lore of patronus spells and horcruxes and elder wands... none of this can overshadow the basically brilliant premise of a secret wizard world beset by a dark conspiracy.
Through everything, the most interesting thing has been seeing how the present generation is only ever living through the bitter memories, allegiances, and secrets of the last one. Snape, Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Sirius Black... this is all more lively than anything involving the Weasley twins or Cho Chang or Neville Longbottom. This last film really makes something of this (by now fairly dense) network of past survivances... but at the total cost of the Hermione/Ron element. These characters completely fall out of this last installment. Sure, they kiss. But I don't believe it for a second.
Rather, like an unstoppable behemoth, the narrative leading up to the final confrontation levels everything in its path: explanations hang in mid-air and are never taken up, emotional bonds are foreshadowed and never returned to, and the mythology (the most interesting part of the previous movie) is only confusingly alluded to. Instead, we get on one hand a lot of CGI battling, which is not well-managed enough to hold my attention--and on the other hand, a momentum-wrecking lecture by Dumbledore about the power of imagination... This is one of the worst scenes in film this year. But when it is over, we are immediately back in the action.
I guess I'm saying that the great strength of the Harry Potter universe, being JUST the universe itself, means that any narrative resolution, any climax, will not come up to the level of the conception itself. (This is what any child will tell you: they don't want to leave this world.)
But I should qualify this: one character's arc, Alan Rickman's Snape, has been riveting from start to finish, and the final revelation about his role is given appropriate attention and is the best thing in the movie. This is one of the few story lines that has persisted from installment to installment, and the closure is deeply satisfying.
Still, the franchise rests upon what is fundamentally not-story and not-character: the magic, the premise, the geography, the array of good and evil wizards, etc. Built into all of this is a Manichean conception of right and wrong that is substantially less interesting than even Star Wars. When the line is drawn in the sand, and Voldemort demands the allegiance of the Hogwarts students, only the most despicable character crosses the line to join the forces of evil.
These actors may now be able to grow facial hair, but their "world" has not grown up--the basically-decent, shopkeeping, quirky, democratic English who "don't want power" (see the last scene), versus the French-named Voldemort, the openly fascistic and self-proclaimedly evil Death Eaters, whose ideology is the world's clumsiest allegory of racism... The transparency of this obvious divide is Rowling's greatest fantasy, of course, and I wouldn't stop there: this is "bad" for our children, in a way obviously missed by Christian protesters of the novels.
Finally, we don't have "depth" or "development" here--that was covered in Part One--we have stern lectures from Dumbledore plus stuff blowing up. That these are dialectically identical should be obvious to any schoolchild: this is strictly good cop/bad cop stuff. The fantasy that we are "deeper" and more "conflicted" than our (unquestioningly ideological) enemy means that blowing stuff up is only our (regrettable) duty following from our higher conscience. In this sense, Rowling's redemption of Snape is only tossing a bone of humanism (he can cry!) to the other side: Voldemort's betrayal of Snape is the ultimate badge of honor, since Snape learns too late that he was wrong.
When I was a youngster, I would watch the last scenes of Bridge on the River Kwai and Return of the Jedi over and over: I couldn't get enough of these scenes of a suddenly conscientious act of self-destruction. "My life is worth less than what is right." This isn't a possible thought in Rowling's universe, for all of the reasons gone into above. It is, in the last reckoning, super-important that Harry live and that Snape be "taught a lesson."
Every readerly or cinematic trip to Hogwarts is also always going to school.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Bill Cunningham New York (2011)
One of the recurrent narrative elements in this character-sketch is the imminent closing down of the Carnegie Hall artist studios where the film's subject, New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, has lived for many decades. The filmmakers interview the other remaining tenants, who are a batty crew of old lady photographers and choreographers... perhaps this dying artists' colony was initially even the focus or premise of the film. We are supposed to find it a cultural tragedy that, e.g. a place where Andy Warhol or Marlon Brando once stood will soon become a corporate office, because that pays higher rent than the rent-controlled artists' studios.
But Bill Cunningham does not care about this part of his life. His studio is not a cultural landmark. It is a mess of filing cabinets, a twin bed, a couple of clothes-hangers, fashion books, and more filing cabinets. What is there to be nostalgic about? He muses that wherever he lives next will probably have a kitchen and a bathroom (his studio has neither), and his response: who needs 'em? This man does not have a "home life." Doubtless the artists' studios are a beautiful and sadly bygone idea... but Bill Cunningham treats his spartan private quarters as so much square footage. "I have never 'dined in,'" he says.
This is a man without a personal life, a workaholic. Everything that is not photographing clothes, simply doesn't exist for him. The movie provides ample fodder for a Freudian reading of sexual "sublimation"--all of his energies go HERE instead of ELSEWHERE. Yes. 100 % true. But this isn't interesting: what is interesting is that there is nothing "behind" the door marked "Bill's psyche." What is interesting is his practice; his opinions are secondary to his practice, his whole life is secondary to this practice.
Most touching moment of the film for me: everyone around Bill, including the filmmaker, is making a big deal about his having to move into a new apartment. He shrugs it off, is annoyed that this will be an inconvenience. "You can't let that interfere with your life," he says.
Hold onto that thought for a second. Isn't that the exact opposite of what we mean by "life"? Where we live, whom we live with, where our money goes, errands, our stuff... isn't that "life"? And doesn't Bill Cunningham mean... work? How could he have made such a confusion!
Many people will see this film and read it (correctly) as about journalism, or New York, or a curmudgeonly character. It's all of those things; and it is well-paced and punchy and I left the movie feeling better than I have in a long time. The line outside Film Forum has become the stuff of legend, but please brave the dreary weather and the line and go see this movie. It's all of those things... but for me, this movie is the ultimate rebuttal to something like the Youtube sensation of "The Last Lecture," or "Eat Pray Love," or any insipid bourgeois pablum about how life is about who you love, and how much you enjoy yourself, and thanks for the memories and the grandchildren. "Bill Cunningham New York" is a beautiful picture of life--I don't think you can walk away from it without accidentally saying to yourself that Bill Cunningham is an "artist"--but it is a picture of a deeply anti-social, stark, all-consuming obsession, too. What Bill is obsessed with is... life, social life, expression. What he regards is that which makes the world less dreary, more colorful--Walter Benjamin's "wide-eyed facticity" (Adorno); and like Benjamin he is a quintessential flaneur. But make no mistake: it takes an enormous amount of personal courage to live this way, and to do this work. Or: not to live, except by doing this work.
It's an exhilarating challenge on how to live, and all the more so when cast in the reflected light of fashion's ephemera, and the Heraclitean fire of the flash bulb.
But Bill Cunningham does not care about this part of his life. His studio is not a cultural landmark. It is a mess of filing cabinets, a twin bed, a couple of clothes-hangers, fashion books, and more filing cabinets. What is there to be nostalgic about? He muses that wherever he lives next will probably have a kitchen and a bathroom (his studio has neither), and his response: who needs 'em? This man does not have a "home life." Doubtless the artists' studios are a beautiful and sadly bygone idea... but Bill Cunningham treats his spartan private quarters as so much square footage. "I have never 'dined in,'" he says.
This is a man without a personal life, a workaholic. Everything that is not photographing clothes, simply doesn't exist for him. The movie provides ample fodder for a Freudian reading of sexual "sublimation"--all of his energies go HERE instead of ELSEWHERE. Yes. 100 % true. But this isn't interesting: what is interesting is that there is nothing "behind" the door marked "Bill's psyche." What is interesting is his practice; his opinions are secondary to his practice, his whole life is secondary to this practice.
Most touching moment of the film for me: everyone around Bill, including the filmmaker, is making a big deal about his having to move into a new apartment. He shrugs it off, is annoyed that this will be an inconvenience. "You can't let that interfere with your life," he says.
Hold onto that thought for a second. Isn't that the exact opposite of what we mean by "life"? Where we live, whom we live with, where our money goes, errands, our stuff... isn't that "life"? And doesn't Bill Cunningham mean... work? How could he have made such a confusion!
Many people will see this film and read it (correctly) as about journalism, or New York, or a curmudgeonly character. It's all of those things; and it is well-paced and punchy and I left the movie feeling better than I have in a long time. The line outside Film Forum has become the stuff of legend, but please brave the dreary weather and the line and go see this movie. It's all of those things... but for me, this movie is the ultimate rebuttal to something like the Youtube sensation of "The Last Lecture," or "Eat Pray Love," or any insipid bourgeois pablum about how life is about who you love, and how much you enjoy yourself, and thanks for the memories and the grandchildren. "Bill Cunningham New York" is a beautiful picture of life--I don't think you can walk away from it without accidentally saying to yourself that Bill Cunningham is an "artist"--but it is a picture of a deeply anti-social, stark, all-consuming obsession, too. What Bill is obsessed with is... life, social life, expression. What he regards is that which makes the world less dreary, more colorful--Walter Benjamin's "wide-eyed facticity" (Adorno); and like Benjamin he is a quintessential flaneur. But make no mistake: it takes an enormous amount of personal courage to live this way, and to do this work. Or: not to live, except by doing this work.
It's an exhilarating challenge on how to live, and all the more so when cast in the reflected light of fashion's ephemera, and the Heraclitean fire of the flash bulb.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Toy Story 3 (2010)
Although a number of movie sequels have been better than the original number--Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, The Dark Knight, and of course Toy Story 2--this is possibly the only #3 which is better than the original. Maybe this is because Toy Story 3 is under no obligation to remain in the same genre as its predecessors; in fact, the bulk of the movie is a pastiche of the classic prison-break film (with special reference to Cool Hand Luke), with healthy borrowings from the James Bond and Star Wars series. To the filmmakers' credit, these references never reach the cynical, empty allusiveness of other Disney movies, most notoriously that of Robin Williams' Genie in Aladdin. Rather, the creators seems as enamored of "movie magic" as the rest of us; witness the countless small touches that populate the mise-en-scène: Buzz Lightyear's walk, Barbie and Ken's wardrobe, the texture of a toy's yarn-hair, or the way that garbage bags are accorded much more verisimilitude than the human face. While Pixar's Wall-E was endlessly compared to Chaplin and Keaton silent films, Toy Story 3 cries out for remarks about the influence of Kubrick and Welles, masters of the painstakingly conceived minor detail.
Like the robot protagonist in Wall-E, the Toy Story films are simultaneously high-tech digital products and bearers of an imperiled, almost corny humanism, a paradox which is also a variation on the familiar media/message dialectic. On one hand, here is a series of films whose protagonist is a quaint, stitched-together cowboy doll, Woody--a relic of 1950s culture which cites Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody, and Gunsmoke--while on the other hand, the animation is produced using the most advanced 21st century computer technology by Pixar, the brainchild of Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. But at this point perhaps the paradox dissolves; after all, Apple's products really are meant to be cradled, cherished, treated like one of the family. And, once they are superseded in their technology, they don't become "obsolete"--like classic toys, they too become kitsch. But is this to say that the Toy Story films are basically feature length versions of the (already adorable and charming) Apple commercials that screen on TV or in the banners of our favorite websites?
I mention all of this, not to condemn the Toy Story films as subliminal purveyors of consumer culture, reconciling us to commodity fetishism under the premise of children's entertainment, but rather because the films are so smart that they have already envisioned and inverted this criticism. Instead of a fruitless "critique" of consumer culture and materialism--one which will in any case continue to be pursued by a spellbound postmodernism--the films eschew dwelling on what is, philosophically, a naive appropriation of facticity, and, entertainment-wise, not very promising. Toy Story instead shows how our objects think us through, or even--this is Marx's sense of "commodity fetishism"--do our thinking in our place, in the way this very "material" takes on unconsciously metaphysical, fanciful properties in the margins and traces of its movement through our social lives.
Of course, as a basic allegory, Toy Story 3 is about not about toys; it is about "us"--our culture of shoving the dying, aged, and useless out of sight. There is a unmistakable, poignant perversity in representing the plight of human mortality and aging through children's toys. At this level, it is staggeringly powerful, and I was very glad to be wearing the 3-D sunglasses when the movie was over, to hide eyes that were very red from crying. I won't make myself ridiculous by waxing on about the "complexity" of the movie's villain, a pinkish-mauve Lots-o'-Huggin stuffed bear (memorably voiced by Ned Beatty) who smells like strawberries. "Lotso's" spurned, defensive villainy, which manifest itself only as cynical, equivocating self-preservation, is one of the triumphs of recent screenwriting. The cliché would be to laud its improvement over the Manichean idea of evil found in most children's movies, from Snow White to the Harry Potter movies, but of course we learned from No Country for Old Men that "pure evil" is anything but a simple consolation, safe only for children. The best moments in the film are parallel speeches about the disposable nature of human relationships; the first speech is greeted with warm approbation by the toys (and the audience), while the second is a horrific "unmasking," dramatically scored, which leads to Lotso's downfall. But the content of the "good" and the "bad" sides of Lotso is identical.
Ultimately, while Toy Story 3 is a great and moving film, the fate of the toys--the concluding message--is unsatisfactory. The allegory has to eventually collapse back into its ostensible subject, I suppose. In the last analysis, the toys have it easy: they are there to be played with. But here I can no longer find myself in the film. Woody (Tom Hanks) has his owner's name written on the sole of his boot: his destiny is marked. And while the difficulty of living up to that responsibility, and the vicissitudes of fidelity, make for great cinema, in life our destinies are never so clearly marked (not even in crayon). And here it returns to being a "kids movie"--children don't have *this* problem. The toys can't become... anything, other than what they are. On the other hand, this--becoming other than what one is--is the entire problematic of Pixar's The Incredibles. But it really isn't a theme that could be exhausted. That these questions have been almost entirely abdicated by serious cinema--say, by the empty, pretentious formalism of Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker-- and can only be smuggled in under the floorboards, as it were, of these Disney movies, is perhaps even more troubling than anything onscreen here.
Like the robot protagonist in Wall-E, the Toy Story films are simultaneously high-tech digital products and bearers of an imperiled, almost corny humanism, a paradox which is also a variation on the familiar media/message dialectic. On one hand, here is a series of films whose protagonist is a quaint, stitched-together cowboy doll, Woody--a relic of 1950s culture which cites Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody, and Gunsmoke--while on the other hand, the animation is produced using the most advanced 21st century computer technology by Pixar, the brainchild of Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. But at this point perhaps the paradox dissolves; after all, Apple's products really are meant to be cradled, cherished, treated like one of the family. And, once they are superseded in their technology, they don't become "obsolete"--like classic toys, they too become kitsch. But is this to say that the Toy Story films are basically feature length versions of the (already adorable and charming) Apple commercials that screen on TV or in the banners of our favorite websites?
I mention all of this, not to condemn the Toy Story films as subliminal purveyors of consumer culture, reconciling us to commodity fetishism under the premise of children's entertainment, but rather because the films are so smart that they have already envisioned and inverted this criticism. Instead of a fruitless "critique" of consumer culture and materialism--one which will in any case continue to be pursued by a spellbound postmodernism--the films eschew dwelling on what is, philosophically, a naive appropriation of facticity, and, entertainment-wise, not very promising. Toy Story instead shows how our objects think us through, or even--this is Marx's sense of "commodity fetishism"--do our thinking in our place, in the way this very "material" takes on unconsciously metaphysical, fanciful properties in the margins and traces of its movement through our social lives.
Of course, as a basic allegory, Toy Story 3 is about not about toys; it is about "us"--our culture of shoving the dying, aged, and useless out of sight. There is a unmistakable, poignant perversity in representing the plight of human mortality and aging through children's toys. At this level, it is staggeringly powerful, and I was very glad to be wearing the 3-D sunglasses when the movie was over, to hide eyes that were very red from crying. I won't make myself ridiculous by waxing on about the "complexity" of the movie's villain, a pinkish-mauve Lots-o'-Huggin stuffed bear (memorably voiced by Ned Beatty) who smells like strawberries. "Lotso's" spurned, defensive villainy, which manifest itself only as cynical, equivocating self-preservation, is one of the triumphs of recent screenwriting. The cliché would be to laud its improvement over the Manichean idea of evil found in most children's movies, from Snow White to the Harry Potter movies, but of course we learned from No Country for Old Men that "pure evil" is anything but a simple consolation, safe only for children. The best moments in the film are parallel speeches about the disposable nature of human relationships; the first speech is greeted with warm approbation by the toys (and the audience), while the second is a horrific "unmasking," dramatically scored, which leads to Lotso's downfall. But the content of the "good" and the "bad" sides of Lotso is identical.
Ultimately, while Toy Story 3 is a great and moving film, the fate of the toys--the concluding message--is unsatisfactory. The allegory has to eventually collapse back into its ostensible subject, I suppose. In the last analysis, the toys have it easy: they are there to be played with. But here I can no longer find myself in the film. Woody (Tom Hanks) has his owner's name written on the sole of his boot: his destiny is marked. And while the difficulty of living up to that responsibility, and the vicissitudes of fidelity, make for great cinema, in life our destinies are never so clearly marked (not even in crayon). And here it returns to being a "kids movie"--children don't have *this* problem. The toys can't become... anything, other than what they are. On the other hand, this--becoming other than what one is--is the entire problematic of Pixar's The Incredibles. But it really isn't a theme that could be exhausted. That these questions have been almost entirely abdicated by serious cinema--say, by the empty, pretentious formalism of Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker-- and can only be smuggled in under the floorboards, as it were, of these Disney movies, is perhaps even more troubling than anything onscreen here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)