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.

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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.

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

Daily Beast: Man of Steel, the latest cinematic take on Superman, helmed by Zack Snyder, portrays the "last son of Krypton" as Christ.

"Superman, like Christ, is a figure trapped in his own mythology"

LA Times: He's a bird, he's a plane, he's... our savior? 

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.

Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak… He's unsure of himself… He's a coward.

 

Clark Kent is Superman's critique of the human race.

"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.