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.
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
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.
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