Roger really

Disclosure

2010-11-10T00:38:00.000-08:00

Apart from being a perverted twist on the femme fatale, Disclosure is a surprisingly sophisticated examination of surplus value in a capitalist economy. The unusual correlation between the film's techno sci-fi and women in the workplace is that - as the film sees it - they are both sources from which capital extracts surplus value. Technological innovation provides capitalists with a labour substitute and temporary profit advantage over competitors, before it "becomes obsolete in a year". Meanwhile, women are given the executive role not necessarily because they're best for the job, but because they're cheap labour. As Mary Anne Hunter says early on in the film, "women work twice as hard for the same job for less pay". The film daringly (for a ostensibly capitalist, Hollywood pic) aligns this experience of being 'surplussed' with the experience of being raped, on the level of both narrative (the secondary plot to 'screw' Tom Sanders out of a job) and language (the film tells us early on that the euphemism for 'surplussed' is sodomised). Indeed, it's the surplus in language itself - the perceived minimal difference between yes and no, "rich" and "really rich", gossip/rumour and news/truth - that motivates the rape accusation and the corporate conniving. In a capitalist system increasingly tied to what the Other believes (the stockmarket, corporate mergers), language is revealed to be the ultimate source of surplus value.

All of this is conveyed in the film's first seven minutes. Virtuality, production lines, status, wealth, rumours, the 'feminine threat', are all tied together in this brilliantly concise opening. Especially interesting is the camera roaming the wealthy, upper-class family home with just the sound of early-morning domestic talk in the background, but no people. Home/family is here pure signifier - of class, wealth, happiness - performed directly for the audience. The shot will suggest the central crisis of the film - how to signify status? From the 'closed' space of the family home, the film shifts to the 'open' transparent, modernist architecture of the company before venturing into the 'invisible' hallucinatory palace of virtual reality. In terms of the Other, we move from the Invisible (the big Other), to the Multiple (little big Others), to the Virtual (the big Other in the Real or the Other of the Other). As Zizek points out, the subject constructs the Other of the Other - a secret agent pulling the strings from behind the scenes - as a paranoid response to and compensation for the demise of the big Other. For Sanders (Douglas), it's Meredith's promotion that creates this crisis of the big Other (hence the dream of Garvin sexually harassing him), and, appropriately, it's when Sanders starts suspecting Meredith is setting him up that the virtual reality machine first appears .

Sanders' experience with virtual reality is crucial in allowing for a kind of fetishistic disavowal that will restore his symbolic world. When he enters the virtual palace, Sanders denies the knowledge that tells him it isn't real, and instead acts as if it is: "I know very well what I see is an illusion generated by digital machinery, but I nonetheless accept to immerse myself in it, to behave as if I believe it." It's a similar attitude that's adopted in the film's climax. Sanders knows Meredith is setting him up, but he nonetheless acts as if he she has no ulterior motive. Instead, he 'innocently' reminds her it was her decision to alter the technical specifications - effectively sabotaging her by identifying with her act. On a closer look, however, Meredith is in fact the scapegoat here. As she tells Sanders in her final scene, it was Garvin who came up with the idea to fire him in the first place yet she's one that takes the blame. Getting Meredith fired merely allows Sanders to disavow Garvin's central complicity in the matter.

Yet as a consequence of this secret knowledge, Garvin is restored as the big Other and the 'closed' and performative status symbols of the opening return - though not without their own hallucinatory quality. The end sees Sanders publicly celebrated as "epitomising the drive and inventiveness of his division" and he is named the "right hand" of the new female executive Stephanie Kaplan. Kaplan also tells Sanders he is the division's "past and its future", restoring unity to the split introduced by Meredith's Oscar Wilde quotation, "I like a man with a future and a woman with a past". In the final scene, Sanders receives an email of a child's picture telling him 'A Family' misses him - alluding to the shadowy, behind-the-scenes anonymity of the previous 'A Friend' emails while at the same time restoring Family as pure signifier.*

*The film's insane continuity between paranoia and domestic familiarity extends even to the first anonymous email asking 'Is Your C-ck Hard?' - assumed to be sent by Meredith but never actually explicated as such. For all appearances, it's sent in the same anonymous form as A Friend and A Family. (Of course, Michael Douglas playing a family man is by itself a paranoid construction.)

Passenger Side

2010-08-02T02:28:00.000-07:00

My review of Passenger Side, which has its premiere at Possible Worlds Fest tomorrow night:

Matthew Bissonnette’s retro-like Passenger Side has all the trappings of the indie road movie – the offbeat couple, quirky encounters, an emotional life lesson – but its subtlety and intelligence carves out a space of its own that’s refreshingly original. For one thing, there’s never been a film whose sarcasm has been so relentless.

After an early morning phone call, struggling writer Michael (Adam Scott) is forced to chauffer his drug-addict brother, Tobey (played by the director’s real life sibling, Joel Bissonnette) around LA on a series of errands without reason. In a day-long road trip that stretches from Beverley Hills to Joshua Tree, the two ex-pat Canadians come across a transvestite hooker, a boy missing two fingers and a desert psychic, all while debating such national issues as the sexual hotness of the Bush administration (Dick Cheney comes up trumps). Meanwhile, the caustic dialogue is broken up by car window vistas of oil rigs, industrial sprawl and ocean expanse, backed by Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne and Wilco’s eponymous folk-rock piece.

The pair’s detached, knowing humour carries a surrealism that perfectly matches the mystery at the heart of the film. Michael can’t tell whether Tobey’s looking for drugs, money or, as Tobey claims, the love of his life - but he plays it like he does. At the same time, the deadpan dialogue suggests a disavowal of knowledge that adds real pathos. This poignant, sometimes absurd, tension between knowns and unknowns is beautifully encapsulated by the film’s moving and unexpected final twist. It’s a twist that elegantly revises everything we’ve just seen and shows us up for ever underestimating the film.

But at the forefront of all this is Adam Scott. Previously relegated to side characters in Judd Apatow films like Knocked Up and Step Brothers, he takes on the lead role here with charm, intelligence and spot-on comic timing. Scott is a star in the making and Passenger Side is the perfect introduction.

Up In The Air: Enjoy Your Symptom!

2010-07-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

Up In The Air is an ambivalent film to say the least. Praised as the first great film to address the financial crisis, it in fact merely skirts the limits of late capitalist society. It touches upon conflicts of labour and capital, issues of class and economic insecurity - only to shrink back into a series of false dichotomies. Corporate alienation becomes a question of loneliness and personal connection; the trauma of job loss becomes a challenge to fulfill your dreams; marriage is an alternative to atomization, yet framed in purely functional terms. Far from suggesting some deep complexity, these contradictions are entirely symptomatic - the affective result of the film’s displacement of the rupturing effects of capital into the categories of neoliberal ideology.

The film follows Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a corporate operative who jetsets around the country firing workers for companies too cowardly to do the deed themselves. Displaying few qualms about his job, Ryan revels in the perks and freedoms of the transient, corporate lifestyle. Hotel suites, pillow mints, personalised greetings – all act as complementary bonuses to keep his world “in orbit”. But as he closes in on his goal of 10 million frequent-flyer points, we begin to learn he lacks any real connection with people. When Ryan meets fellow corporate flier Alex (Vera Farmiga) and starts training young newstart Natalie (Anna Kendrick), he begins to look towards family as a way to find connection and fulfillment in life. The economic context of Ryan’s job, despite being a central component of the film, gradually becomes subsumed into his banal insecurity about relationships. Family is pitched as an alternative to Ryan’s corporate lifestyle, but in a way that reveals its own disingenuousness. The opposition of family and corporate atomisation disavows how much the film has actually framed family as both a fantasmatic and functional supplement to contemporary neoliberal ideology.

Director Jason Reitman’s comments about the film exemplify this ambivalence between the economic and the personal. During pre-release publicity, the director was explicit in arguing the economic downturn was not the point of the film:

"[T]his is not a movie about job loss. It never has been. The reason why this was just as an appropriate movie in 2002 when I started writing it as it is now is that it’s a movie about human connections... I would say that less than 10 percent of the film takes place in the world of corporate terminations."

In an interview closer to Oscar season, Reitman had this to say:

“What I do feel is that Up in the Air is the most indicative film of 2009. It is the portrait of 2009. And when you look at this State of the Union that happened a couple of days ago, that was all about unemployment being at its highest since 1983, and all about job creation, and you realize how this film is kind of a portrait of America right now…"

The film’s use of real laid-off workers (something Reitman has said he is most proud of) betrays a significant investment in the economic context. But the film’s familiar and generic sentiment deflects the traumatic alienation of job-loss into one man’s journey to “make a connection”. There’s an industry term for this. It’s called ‘faumey’.

Early on in the film, Ryan explains ‘faumey’ as a mixture of ‘faux’ and ‘homey’. The term describes the ‘simulated hospitality’ or little touches of homeliness used by hotels to ease any sense of transience or displacement. But it’s precisely this strange mix of pragmatism and sentimentality – as Nina Power says, “ideology, if ever there was a definition” – that epitomises the ambivalence of Up In The Air. Indeed, Ryan’s method of delivering lay-offs is explaining to the worker that the company’s cost cutting is both a pragmatic necessity as well as an opportunity for them to pursue their dreams and spend more time with their kids. This is initially regarded insultingly by the workers but by the end of the film is viewed as a sincere gesture. In a montage preceding the closing credits, real laid-off workers propound the virtues of family life once you get fired.

Ryan’s mix of pragmatism and sentiment in pitching lay-offs is paralleled in the film’s speeches about marriage and property. In one of the central scenes of the film, Ryan tries to persuade Jim (Danny McBride) of the value of marriage in a last-minute case of cold feet. Set up as a moving and heartfelt moment (it marks a turning point for the character), Ryan’s speech actually portrays marriage in purely pragmatic terms - marriage as a compensation for pure individualism, a salve for the fear of our “eventual demise”. Marry so you don't have to die alone. The speech even ends with a generic slogan: “Life? It’s better with company.” The functional nature of this speech is something Reitman must have been aware of, at least unconsciously. In an August, 2008 draft of the script, the “life is better with company” line is preceded by “I don't want to sound like a Hallmark card but...” - a reference that perfectly evinces the atomized and assimilated nature of Ryan’s marital affirmation. Yet the line was strangely elided in the final cut. Was it because it got too close to the contradiction at the heart of the film? The continuity between its corporate platitudes and familial sentiment? For Ryan, marriage is merely a longer lasting version of his so-called 'fast friends': the airplane passengers with whom he makes sympathetic, entertaining and, for all appearances, genuine conversation to pass the time. Marriage for him is a relationship built less on personal connection than professionalized function - "everyone needs a co-pilot" (Jim later repeats this term to his fiancé).

The contradictions of Ryan’s marriage speech become clearer when we compare it with Jim’s speech about real estate. The night before the marriage, Jim waxes lyrical to Ryan about how his property venture is “a community, not a development”; where everything is “turn-key” (furniture and garden maintenance included in the sale price). This is Jim’s version of ‘faumey’. When you buy a house on Jim’s development, you’re getting “seamless traditionalism yet all the perks”. Instant homeliness. At the end of his speech, Jim even begins connecting his real estate development to a greater American sentiment and ideology about owning your own house: “We all need a place to call our own. This is America. This is what we were promised.” To which Ryan adds, “that’s a nice touch” (a line Jim repeats after Ryan’s ‘life is better with company’ line). The “nice touch” both Jim and Ryan refer to is the point of disavowal. It’s the moment when pragmatism mixes with sentimentality, when function is disguised through empty emotion. Ryan doesn’t just like these moments – they form his identity. As he says in his voiceover introduction about the perks of frequent flying (the “warm reminders that he is home”): “It’s these kind of systematized touches that keep my world in orbit”. Ryan’s placement within the hub of transient capital necessarily posits these homely ‘touches’ at a distance. They are displaced, absorbed within the frame of fantasy. With this fantasmatic distance, they form the coherent supplement to his disjointed life. Rather than opposing corporate atomisation, these ‘touches’ actually allow it to continue, subsumed it into an equally (though less obviously) alienating sentimentality. But it’s not enough to say these moments are hidden from Ryan. As a corporate flier, he's particularly conscious of the function of these 'touches' and his introductory voiceover makes their subsumption transparent. For Ryan, it's not the friendly smiles or pillow mints themselves that create enjoyment, but the tacit and collective disavowal of capital they invoke. His modus operandi is to enjoy his symptom.*

These moments are reflective of a larger neoliberal belief system that has permeated and assimilated capitalist society since the late 70s. As Foucault says in his definitive exploration of the ideology, neoliberalism effects “an inversion of the relationships of the social to the economic”. Under neoliberalism, all social phenomena and relations are seen as economic calculations and investments - a professionalisation of life that extends even towards the family. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, despite neoliberal capitalism holding obsolete the values family life depends upon (obligation, trustworthiness, commitment), it has set up the family as “an increasingly important place of respite from the pressures of a world in which instability is a constant”:

"The situation of the family in post-Fordist capitalism is contradictory, in precisely the way that traditional Marxism expected: capitalism requires the family (as an essential means of reproducing and caring for labour power; as a salve for the psychic wounds inflicted by anarchic social-economic conditions) even as it undermines it (denying parents time with children, putting intolerable stress on couples as they become the exclusive source of affective consolation for each other)."

Neoliberalism reduces family to a functional supplement for the atomised working life and wild fluctuations of capital. Yet it retains its fantasmatic sheen because of its simultaneous placement as a utopian horizon. This encourages a sense of family’s opposition to individualism, but the reality is neoliberalism embraces both. As pioneering neoliberal Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and their families”. The false dichotomy between family and individualism merely circulates what society can't grasp or confront – the role of capital and its formative role in social relations. To some extent, every Hollywood film is guilty of this. But it’s Up In The Air’s explicit backdrop of downsizing and the global financial crisis that makes its ideological bent particularly unsettling.

To make the film's ideological shift clear, compare it to the similar ‘humanist’ and sentimental film Jerry Maguire. Both films confront economic limits (corporate atomization and job loss) but turn to questions of loneliness, family and connection. Both Jerry and Ryan enjoy the fast flying corporate life and each stands by their own version of ‘loyalty’ in place of genuine connection. Both encounter an increasing dehumanization and corporatisation of their professions and both turn to family in somewhat desperate romantic gestures. The difference between the two films is that Jerry Maguire actually confronts the fantasy of family to reveal its own functionality. In contrast to most other romantic dramas, the wedding between Jerry and Dorothy occurs half way through the film. The second half of the film exposes the way that family can act as just a compensation for loneliness. Despite expectations, Jerry finds the same kind of atomization and alienation in marriage as he felt in his corporate life. That’s not to say the film is anti-family. Far from it. But it divorces family from any ideological and functional role so as to reaffirm it as a question of love - not about the virtues of ‘company’ or professional partnership. Up In The Air, on the other hand, not only leaves family at a distance but celebrates it for its functionality.

It’s Up In The Air’s third-act twist that both exposes and obscures its dependence on family's fantasmatic distance. When Ryan makes his sudden romantic gesture to visit Alex at her home, he finds to his horror she already has a family. At this moment, he realizes the fantasy of their relationship, flirted with through multiple transient flings, was just that – a fantasy. Once Ryan got too close, the fantasy instantly revealed itself. Interestingly, the moment could also be seen as a rupture of Ryan's fantasy of the independent and free single lifestyle without connections. But rather than using the twist to reevaluate either of these notions, the film uses it to keep fantasy at a distance. The twist is both an excuse for cynicism and false sentiment.

The film’s final moments show Ryan returning to work and continuing with his high-flying lifestyle. The final shot is a view above the clouds, with Clooney's voice imaging him looking down longingly upon the banality of family life. It’s as if Ryan has realized what attracted to him about the fantasy of family was not family as such but family’s status as a symptom – a symptom of capital. Capital under the constant instability of neoliberalism is an ever shifting and affective form, both transparent and unrecognisable. Its amorphous nature means in some sense it can only ever be a symptom. Hence the final shot represents an apotheosis, but with Ryan identifying with the locus of transient capital rather than capital itself. The bathos of the scene comes from the film's ostensible critique of capital and the simultaneous injunction to enjoy it despite the critique. From this vantage point, family, as ‘touched’ by the sublimity of capital, is both fantasy and banality:

"Tonight most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day and tonight they'll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places, and one of those lights slightly brighter than the rest will be my wing tip passing over."

*This enjoyment of his symptom also explains Ryan's resistance to Natalie's online redundancy proposal. For Ryan, the enjoyment of his job is acting as the 'human' face of capital. Natalie's clinical approach to laying people off strips back any pretence and steals his enjoyment, precisely because it prevents him from disavowing the true nature of his job.

Moving Forward

2010-07-19T07:33:00.001-07:00

Recent Australian campaign slogans sound way too familiar....

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

2010-03-28T03:12:00.000-07:00

By Billy Stevenson

From all the critical buzz surrounding The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I went into its film adaptation expecting a good escapist thriller, with a few stylistic flourishes, and maybe an occasional sly nod in the direction of 'big issues'. All I can say is - what a piece of shit.

Where do i start? Firstly, it was a research/paper-trail thriller - a genre that can really work, but only when the research process is structured around a series of increasingly revelatory/transformative discoveries, or at least elaborates interesting/evocative research spaces (small town libraries, underground microfilm holdings, archives of every sort), or, at the very least, is deliberately bathetic/anticlimactic/underwhelming (think Zodiac). Here, every discovery was prefaced and telegraphed by (literally) about five to ten superimpositions/flashbacks/voiceovers, just in case we hadn't got it.

There was no character development/interiority. Again, not necessarily a problem for a procedural thriller, except that the 'girl' was imbued with this whole sensationalist backstory, which was supposed to imbue her motivations with darkness/depth, but, for me, just felt like one enormous gimmick, or, worse, a mere affirmation of the erotic potency of the central journalist (read: cipher for the author), who certainly didn't have potency of any kind without her.

It was set in a really evocative area of Sweden - but this just clarified how totally functional/unimaginative the direction was. Also, it was an unbelievably sensational/voyeuristic film - again, not necessarily a problem for me, but somewhat disingenuous in a film which purported to be more than 'mere' entertainment, which set itself up as some quite mind-blowing comment on the way we live now. I also get that Stieg Larsson was some kind of bad-ass nazi hunter, but, to be honest, this kind of Nazi Gothic has been done to death narratively (and especially cinematically)...really lazy use of nazism as master signifier, as immediate and idiotic signification of significance.

If this film were made in Hollywood, it would be panned. It was the ultimate middlebrow film: purported to be more than your 'average' thriller (read: to be above cinema), but in fact didn't have a fraction of the craftsmanship or subtlety that supposedly more mainstream, lowbrow films enjoy. From the hype - and especially the hype surrounding the book - i was expecting something with modest ambitions, but which satisfied them artfully and delicately. Instead i got something with grotesque, grandiose ambitions, which didn't satisfy them at all.

Drag Me To Hell

2010-02-26T19:07:00.000-08:00

After three Spiderman blockbusters, Sam Raimi makes his masterful return to horror with this B-movie gore fest. Alison Lohman plays sweet farm girl Christine, a loan officer working hard for her next promotion. But when she forecloses on the mortgage of an old gypsy woman, she finds herself under a deadly gypsy curse: in three days time, she will be dragged to the pits of Hell by a powerful demon.

Raimi shoots the film like it’s stuck in a sealed vacuum. Sound is isolated and focused while the characters are so earnest it actually encourages the abject horror. When the scares do kick off, they’re blissfully original. Trapped in the film’s massive oral fixation, characters inhale and exhale everything from maggots and flies to stationary and bile.

Christine may be cute but in the class consciousness of the film – her boyfriend’s rich parents see her as more trailer trash than country club – she herself becomes the repulsive object. Indeed, the perverse enjoyment of Drag Me To Hell is a sadistic class-based pleasure in watching trailer trash Christine being increasingly defiled.

Published in Cream magazine #49

The Box

2010-01-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

Richard Kelly's The Box is one of the most beautiful films of 2009. So beautiful I was compelled to see it for a second time at the cinema, despite its flaws. Although the film is set in the 70s, its dense yet elliptical visuals work to evoke the hyperreality of today's media landscape. As with Southland Tales, The Box clarifies Kelly's obsession as that of the image, or, more specifically, the circulation of the image. His characters are lost in this circulation - from the network of surveillance in Southland Tales to the circuits of time travel in Donnie Darko - but without knowing the circumference.

Even more than Kelly's previous films, however, The Box is about the anxiety of being caught in this web of images, of becoming merely another medium in its network of exchange. The immanence of Steven Poster's cinematography - of dense cityscapes; a latticed NASA crane during sundown; snow falling across the camera; glaring lights in a vast and crowded lab space - give the film a sense of reticulated eeriness. We are caught behind the looking glass, on the verge of something transcendent emerging from the endless network of images, but we remain trapped. Meanwhile, the film's metonymic editing style invests random gazes and objects with paranoid associations. At one point, a babysitter sees something in the window but the camera refuses to immediately cut to what she has seen (one of the possessed zombies) and instead holds on her horrified reaction. Characters are constantly seen in mirrors and reflective screens, once removed from themselves, their identity inscribed in the image. When Arthur asks the babysitter what is going on he is told he will find his answers by looking in the mirror. In their quest for something beyond the image, the characters themselves become images. Likewise, the intersubjective network of humans has now become an alienating and mediated network of images.

In The Box, the button literally is the image. The button protrudes from the box, covered by a transparent dome, but without any of the machinery or wiring to make it a button. It is simply the image of a button, the surplus value that defines the otherwise anonymous box. This transubstantiation from object to image also invests the button with associative and reticulated qualities. In the background of the kitchen, where the couple examine the box, the wall-paper has button-like patterns, and, in every other scene, the box is constantly associated or placed next to a television. When Arthur (James Marsden) opens the second brown box at the rehearsal dinner, Kelly makes the connection explicit: the box contains a photo of Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), which Arthur immediately hides and which is also (unknowingly for Arthur and Norma) part of a larger photo Arthur keeps in his basement*. The anxiety the photo fosters is an anxiety of the gaze not being our own - not only are we being watched but our own gaze is itself an object in this network of surveillance. Like the 'employees' whose consciousness Steward can seemingly inhabit at will, the image penetrates our gaze but it also leaves us, so that we end up merely another medium/object for its circulation.

This engagement with the image is also presented as a financial transaction ($1 million to be exact) and here Kelly makes the same link between the image and capital that film theorist Jonathan Beller makes in his book The Cinematic Mode of Production. Beller argues that in so far as the image represents the surplus value of the commodity - ie. its attractive and fantasmatic exchange value rather than its use-value - cinema is the intensification of this aspect to the point that the image itself becomes a commodity. In this post-industrial world of image commodities, cinema acts as the primary site of capital production, circulation and accumulation. Not only is value added to the image by the audience (through attention - watching as labour), but new flows of affect and desire are opened up through the montage and circulation of the image, which allow it to accumulate even more value. In the cinema, our alienation from our labour becomes explicitly an alienation from our senses. And like the dominant financial flows of capital, the circulation of the image begins to affect our lives and thoughts in increasingly amorphous ways. The anxiety of The Box then is ultimately of a human consciousness and perception that belongs to capital.

In Kelly's vision, the image has already had a corroding effect on the human, even before the time of the box. When she was a child, Norma's foot was ruined by radiation from an X-ray (the definition of the penetrating image), while Steward's face has been partially shorn off by lightning (light being the very source of the image)**. It's as if Kelly's film is charting a history of capitalist industrial production but via the image. These two more gruesome examples are like injuries from a more primitive industrial period. In the time-period of The Box, however, the image has evolved in such a way that explicit signs of capitalist alienation are now disguised (to the point when the only external sign is a bloody nose).

In this new economy of capital, when you engage with the image (press the button) you yourself become part of the capitalist social machinery, part of a chain or network of which you are unaware. But what Kelly is concerned with isn't just the still image, it is a movement image - in the sense that it must always be circulating, multiplying in order to encompass reality. When Arthur and Norma ask Steward if he will now give the box to some other couple, Steward replies, "of course, that's how it works." The image accumulates value from connections, exchanges and associations, through its very movement to grasp the whole picture. This is made explicit when the film refers to Arthur's invention of a special camera for the Mars Viking Lander that can circulate 360 degrees taking photos. The camera then takes two hours to send its images to Earth, which are transferred as radio signals and then translated back into images. In its work to capture that which is 'beyond the image', the camera not only suggests an expansive and encompassing movement image but digital cinema itself (down to the average feature length!).

This dimension 'beyond the image' is really its next evolution - the third dimension. And as with the columns of water Arthur discovers, it's a movement image that approaches the liquid image, in so far as it gestures towards its own animation and substance. All Kelly's films point to this: from the liquid-like wormhole that emerges from the cinema screen in Donnie Darko to the liquid like one-shots in Southland Tales (not to mention the whole 'perpetual motion machine' and 'liquid karma'). Here, we approach a world of abstraction as substance, where the virtual world of cinema/tv/internet is so encompassing it has become our reality. Is it any surprise that Kelly's next film will not only be in CGI motion capture but also 3D?

Yet there is a key ambiguity in Kelly's obsession, which explains the ending of The Box as well as similar motifs in his previous films. As much as he is concerned with the link between the image and capital, Kelly is also concerned with cults: from Patrick Swayze's motivational speaker in Donnie Darko to the cult of the perpetual motion machine and neo-Marxist group in Southland Tales. Kelly's stance here remains ambiguous however, and in The Box, he makes the mistake of actually identifying with this cult psychology. In what is inexplicably described in the film as a free act that Sartre would somehow have approved of, Arthur murders his wife based on the hope that she will live on in the afterlife - the assurance of which he has received from Langella's charismatic character (more specifically, from his smile). This cult-like sacrifice is not only pitched as a free and altruistic act (to restore sight and hearing to their son) but is also shown to be part of the box's circulatory effects (it is suggested the murder was caused by another couple pressing the button). Indeed, the reason Arthur can kill Norma is because, from both the perspective of the afterlife and of media/capital flows, she is little more than an image. The themes of cult morality and the fetishistic worship of the image should not be left ambiguous or opposed (in the sense it could be interpreted as a happy or bad ending) - the cult morality is what such a worship and belief in the image ultimately leads to. Yet the film is unclear over the nature of such belief and Kelly himself has even come out and called it a happy ending.

That said, it's Kelly's affective density that stands out. His films are more receptive to how the image functions in and envelops contemporary society than most filmmakers working today. The Box is his most explicit film yet about the link between the image and capital and its gesturing towards a 3D cinema promises even more profound connections. As with Avatar and Gamer, and upcoming films like Inception and Tron Legacy, Kelly's aesthetic points the way forward for the cinema of the next decade.

*In line with Marx's definition of the commodity, the photo is literally the part that stands in for the whole (ie. the totality of the production process). Especially when we consider that the larger photo of NASA staff taken by the camera Arthur invented for his job is the perfect representation of the totality of his production process.

**Steward tells Norma he can now communicate with the "those who control the lightning"

The Best Films of 2009

2010-01-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

My Top 20 films of 2009*

1. Antichrist (Lars Von Trier)
2. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
3. Gamer (Taylor/Neveldine) [unreleased theatrically in Australia]
4. Balibo (Robert Connelly)
5. (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb)
6. Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli)
7. Drag Me To Hell (Sam Raimi)
8. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
9. Funny People (Judd Apatow)
10. Two Lovers (James Gray)

11. Blindness (Fernando Meirelles)
12. Lorna's Silence (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
13. Moon (Duncan Jones)
14. The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh)
15. Adventureland (Greg Mottola)
16. Bright Star (Jane Campion)
17. Avatar (James Cameron)
18. Where The Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze)
19. Crank: High Voltage (Taylor/Neveldine)[unreleased theatrically in Australia]
20. The Box (Richard Kelly)

Honourable Mentions: Che: The Argentine (Steven Soderbergh); Bruno; Synecdoche, N.Y.; The Summer Hours; Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen; Samson and Delilah; Let The Right One In; Ponyo; Van Diemen's Land

Most Underrated Films of The Year: Blindness; Gamer

Most Overrated Films of the Year: Gomorrah; The Hangover; Up

Worst Film Of The Year: The Invention of Lying

So Bad It Could Be Genius Film of the Year: All About Steve

Object of strange, obsessive fascination and repeat viewings: Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen

*Based on Australian film release dates. If a film has been denied theatrical release in Australia then I include it on the basis of its original premiere date.

Desplat on Malick's Tree of Life

2009-11-18T01:28:00.000-08:00

Composer Alexandre Desplat, who is working with Terrence Malick on The Tree of Life, gives us a rare (though brief) insight into the auteur's latest film.

Desplat has already composed at least one hour of music for the film "because Terrence wanted to have the music to edit to".

Last year, production designer Jack Fisk said he'd never seen Malick more strong and inventive than working on The Tree of Life and even went so far to say "I think it could change some parts of cinema". The picture is currently slated for release next year.

Recordings From The Middle East

2009-11-09T22:09:00.000-08:00

A quick break from film reviews to give a big shout out to the debut album from the six piece Townsville band The Middle East. I'm probably a little late to the party on this one (the band has been around for a while and their album was released in May), but The Middle East is the most extraordinary Australian band I've ever heard. From the exquisite harmonic vocals to the haunting use of guitar, their sound recalls Simon and Garfunkel, The Doves and Broken Social Scene but at an almost transcendent level. This album literally took my breath away. Truly stunning.

The video clip for 'Blood' by equally incomparable Greedy Hen.

'Blood' The Middle East

the middle east | MySpace Video

Time Traveler's Wife = Tarkovskyian masterpiece?

2009-11-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

Despite some resistance to its mawkish sentimentality, I found myself completely sucked in to The Time Traveler's Wife. I'll even say that if the film had been directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (with better actors), it would have been a masterpiece. As it stands, it's still a fascinating contribution to the time travel genre with some brilliant and original ideas [massive spoilers to follow].

The film's time travel movements actually complicate its sentimentality. Henry (Eric Bana) is such a fragmented character that the film's mawkishness is ultimately a compensation for the violence and indefineability of his subject position. His time travel is caused by a traumatic car crash in which his mother dies, while his relationship with Clare (Rachel McAdams) occurs at scattered points in her life, at which he appears in different ages, in different moods. Indeed, it's hard to know exactly what Clare loves about him. Her feelings towards Henry originate from her childhood, when Henry visited her as a 40 year old man and told her of his time traveling abilities and his relationship with her in the future. Is their love genuine or illusory? The film seems to assert an eternal substance to their relationship, a point in Henry that doesn't change despite his constantly varying age and differing attitudes. Yet what if what attracts Clare to Henry is actually what she keeps missing in her encounters with him? The Real that Bana's fragmented personalities circle around?

The question is whether love can truly exist in such a state of discontinuity. Here the film achieves a real vulnerability in the knowns and unknowns of the relationship - of not knowing or knowing too much, of a relationship that simultaneously exists in two different timelines for both subjects. Without a coherent narrative to their relationship, it often seems like Henry and Clare are being guided by an illusory notion of their coupledom - of which they receive elliptical signs from the future. Ultimately however this creates a relationship caught in the nexus of the Other, or as Zizek outlines, the Other as it is in the Real - "the Other of the Other". In response to the fragmentation of symbolic certainties (the death of Henry's mother, time travel), this belief in the Other of the Other is a way to maintain a consistency of meaning by positing someone else who is pulling the strings and who assures the relationship of its authenticity.

In the film, for example, Henry doesn't know who Clare is when they meet for the first time as adults (he has yet to travel back in time to see her), yet Clare at this stage knows everything about him and is already in love with him. When they make love that same night, Henry can only have faith that he, his future self (the Other of the Other), loves her. But even the love of his future self is a reflexive love originally based on what Clare tells him. Their relationship literally would not exist outside the discourse of the Other, and yet it's precisely this arbitrary and originating condition (its reflexivity) that allows love to develop.

To sustain itself, this reflexivity creates the little piece of the Real (the objet petit a) that can never be quite grasped. By abruptly moving back and forth across time, Henry creates a rupture in the relationship, a fragmentation, that can only become coherent when the Other posits a mysterious element in his character that accounts for this fragmentation. As a time traveler, Henry embodies objet petit a - that which is in him more than himself - and it is this that attracts Clare. Towards the end, the film increasingly associates this elusive point with death. At the beginning, Henry constantly returns to his mother's past in futile attempts to save her. But as the film goes on, Henry encounters his own dying body from the future mysteriously appearing in the present. The unknown and hidden component of Henry's subject position is ultimately his own death, the point when he shifts from subject to object (expressed in his forced and futile time travel movements), and it is here the film reveals its greatest twist. When Henry time travels to his death scene (and is accidentally shot by Clare's father) he is also time traveling to Clare's family garden. The twist is he lands in the same spot he had always returned to when Clare was a child. Earlier in the film, Henry says he is drawn to spots that have a deep emotional resonance for him and this appears to be the explanation for why he always returned to the garden - because of his love for Clare. But what if the real reason was because the garden was in fact the site of his death? At the very moment of his death, his love is instead realised as a horrific misinterpretation!

However, this scene is also the moment when his love achieves an autonomous, impossible, ethical component. At the point of his death, Henry no longer has the Other of the Other (his future self) to guarantee his love and his subject position in the relationship. The moment entails an literal annihilation of his identity in the Real (in the past/future) as well as a radical break from symbolic certainties. Yet at the point when his love is realised as a cosmic misinterpretation, something that simply does not have a hold in reality, that has no ground in the qualities of the Other, it is then that it is asserted all the more fully. As Zizek says:

"true love is performative in the sense that it CHANGES its object – not in the sense of idealization, but in the sense of opening up a gap in it, a gap between the object’s positive properties and the agalma, the mysterious core of the beloved (which is why I do not love you because of your properties which are worthy of love: on the contrary, it is only because of my love for you that your features appear to me as worthy of love)."

At the moment of his death, Henry's love for Clare becomes 'cause in itself'. Faced with the possibility that Fate (and the Other) had nothing to do with his love, Henry instead fully assumes love's utter contingency, attaining a truly 'eternal' and radical love without the guarantee of the Other's desire.

Michael Bay does D.W. Griffith

2009-11-03T15:16:00.000-08:00

I'm currently writing up a piece on Transformers 2 but thought I'd upload this extraordinary clip from the movie before I publish my article. For the record, I think Transformers 2 could be Bay's greatest film to date - but it's not without its share of problems. At its best, T2 is Bay's equivalent of Sergei Eisenstein's Strike. At its worst, it's disturbingly fascist and borderline racist. This short clip below represents one of the most jaw dropping examples of racism I've ever seen in a contemporary Hollywood film. The mind boggles.

Van Diemen's Land: hunger is a strange silence

2009-10-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

First time director Jonathan auf der Heide delivers one of the most impressive Australian film debuts in recent memory with Van Diemen's Land. The true story of eight convicts who escaped from their guard in 1820s Tasmania is realised as an eerie descent into hell as they kill each other one-by-one, turning to cannibalism to survive the lifeless wilderness. Demonstrating a cinematic eye to rival Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog, auf der Heide has crafted a visceral and poetic tale that, despite its nature, never lapses into banality or bleakness.

Indeed, Van Diemen's Land can be placed in the proud tradition of Australian Gothic (ala Picnic at Hanging Rock and Walkabout) in that it seeks to both immerse and alienate Australians in their own landscape. The primeval Tasmanian bush is painted in harsh, washed out tones, and the characters’ authentic Gaelic dialogue only adds to the otherness of the setting. The script by auf der Heide and Oscar Redding (who also plays the film's principle character Alexander Pearce) brilliantly fuses a sense of camaraderie with an archaic, alienating use of language. Initially the convicts sing, joke and tell tales, rejoicing in their new found freedom, but as their escape becomes more desperate and paranoid, their language grows increasingly indirect and opaque (“if you have no scars, the crow will eat your eyes”). In these moments of heightened lyricism it’s as if the dialogue itself achieves the quality of the image, that of an impenetrable stillness encroaching the limits of our own subjectivity.

The real violence of the film lies in this haunting and primal stillness. Characters enter the frame rather than guide the camera, while a recurring tracking shot floats endlessly down a river, a voiceover decrying God’s absence. We are completely immersed in this world but without an endpoint. The cannibalism is less the result of hunger than a violent response to the impenetrable landscape and pervasive silence (hunger itself is referred to as a “strange silence”). For the convicts, the silence/stillness becomes a self-consuming void (“it grows fat on itself”), encouraging a psychotic identification. Pearce (whose confession tells the tale) repeatedly describes himself as a ‘quiet man’, yet he emerges the most violent of all the convicts.

And as the silence attains an obstinate quality, sounds are strangely disembodied. Pearce is haunted by a lone “Cooeey” yelled out by a dead comrade, while his own voiceover emerges less from his thoughts than from a disembodied consciousness (“Wasn’t the devil in you when you brought me here?”). Meanwhile, the sounds of nature become increasingly humanised. Bird-calls evoke babies screaming, the roar of the river becomes a sign of its “anger” and leaking tree sap is hallucinated as human blood. Even the recurring sound of crackling fire eerily recalls the sounds of eating, heard so viscerally in the opening scene and realised so horrifically in the cannibalist acts. Humans may have become objectified, “burning alive, like logs for the fire”, but nature/God has found itself personified, “dancing with an axe in his hand”.

In the film’s closing scene, Pearce sits alone, his final victim lying dead as a shaft of light drops from the canopy. Pearce remarks on the beauty of the scene, questioning God as to why it could be so beautiful. When the film’s end notes tell us that Pearce went on to kill and eat another convict after his capture, the troubling ambiguity of this scene is realised: it’s as if in this final act Pearce has attained a new (though horrific) kind of subjectivity, a shedding of what he once was and an opening into another being. While the film leads us to believe Pearce's cannibalism was done out of necessity, the end notes suggest it may also have become a willing act, seeming necessary only because it has become part of his nature.

Paranormal Activity's Original Ending Online

2009-10-23T17:09:00.001-07:00

Paranormal Activity's original police ending has finally been uploaded online. If you haven't yet seen the wide release version I recommend not downloading the ending until after you've seen the full cut. Context is everything for this film.

Watching the ending for the first time, I would say my response closely matches my initial impressions upon reading a user's description of the ending. Basically I think the original makes better use of the dread than the current ending (although I would have preferred fast forwarding through Katie's 'rocking' rather than a plain dissolve), but it does feel a little anti-climactic by not fully confronting our own position as spectators (which seems like the key to a good ending for the film).

UPDATE
*SPOILER*
Notice at 5:22 of the video the bathroom light mysteriously turns on in the background and then turns off just before the police reach Katie. The police later note that the bathroom door is shut despite it previously being ajar when the light was on. Presumably the light indicates the demon leaving Katie just before she is killed by the cops.

Adventureland and the Carnivalesque of Capitalism

2009-10-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

Greg Motolla's Adventureland is only ostensibly a coming of age tale. The real story, the true awakening, occurs in the background. Set in the summer of 1987, the film follows nerdy college grad James (Jesse Eisenberg) as he is forced to work at a rundown amusement park surrounded by geeks and attractive workers. As the story goes, he has his romantic illusions challenged, his pretensions ruptured, but discovers love and life lessons in the process. Yet the spectre of class and economy haunts the narrative in such a way that it's never simply a coming of age tale. Indeed, Adventureland reveals its genuine 80s insight through a class consciousness that emerges only in the background, gaining an acuity through its very obliqueness.

For just as John Hughes used his teen angst films to preach 80s class consciousness, Adventureland's coming of age tale acts as a framework to explore the intersections of class and capital. In doing so, it recognises the 80s as a decade defined by its wild shifts in status: downward mobility was just as common as upward mobility, while movement both ways across the blue collar/white collar divide was rising. In the film, James’s middle class dad is demoted, while Lisa P's father has fallen into the depression of unemployment. Em (Kristen Stewart) is working at the park despite her wealthy father, while intellectual Joel (an excellent Martin Starr) is embarrassed about his lower class status ('I'm poor. Girls aren't going to go after me when there are all these yuppies around'). Meanwhile, James's college friend (and future yuppie) returns from a trip around ‘the old world’ (Europe), only to realise he wants to be part of the ‘new world’ (Harvard Business School). Late 80s capitalism is here a carnivalesque state - one where social hierarchies are flipped (the old overtaken by the young, upper class forced to work as lower class), the sacred mingles with the profane (religion and pot seem to be constant refrains) and 'truths' are subverted or exposed. Towards the end of the film, James champions Herman Melville for writing Moby Dick - a "700 page allegorical novel about the whaling industry". For Mottola, Adventureland is his 107 minute allegorical film about the carnival industry.

The central underlying tension of the film is between the idea of carnivalesque as a liberating and revolutionary force (as argued by Russian anarchist Mikhael Bakhtin) and carnivalesque as an assimilated and contained transgression. For Bakhtin the carnival was a period when rules were reversed and the social order turned upside down: thus the king becomes the fool; the fool becomes the king; heaven and hell twist ('Satin lives') and fact and fantasy mingle. He argued this allowed people to see the world anew, outside of its dominant traditions and power structures. The concept found support in the counter-culture protests of the 60s and still has its advocates among the radical left (eg. Michael Hardt), who defend it as a theatrical means to subvert capitalism and restructure our bourgeois desires and pleasures.

But what supporters of carnivalesque overlooked was that the carnival itself was an exception that ultimately proved the rule. While it ostensibly endorsed transgression and symbolic usurpation, carnival's real function was to get the masses to blow off steam and, in doing so, allow them to continue with their everyday lives. In the passage from the 60s through to the 70s and 80s, the carnivalesque became merely another means for capital to reorganise its production: the commodity was seen as less a functional necessity than a fulfillment of our own individual sense of self, while consumer culture transformed teenagers into the locus around which capital circulated. By the 80s, the radical yippies of the 60s and 70s were becoming middle aged yuppies, while the conservative PJ O'Rourke's of the world were as much about sex, drugs and rock and roll as they were guns, taxes and defense of country. Rather than a means for resistance, transgression became mainstream behaviour; ‘carnivalesque' became a far more appropriate description of the movements of late capitalism than the means for its subversion.

In Adventureland, the amusement park is the primary symbol of this commodification of the carnivalesque. Its bright signs, cheesy pop music, banal rides and rigged games are about the safest kind of transgression you could imagine. Indeed, one of the recurring images in the park is of bright coloured lights in the background. The lights are shown up close and out of focus in the opening credits, but they gradually become clarified (and commodified) as the coloured globes of the amusement park: the utopian promise of the 60s clarified as a desperate spectacle. Class position too has become a joke, with workers arbitrarily separated into ‘rides’ and the less popular ‘games’. Utopian possibilities exist here only as a thin fantasy lure - the actual games are in fact all rigged.

This utopian failure perhaps accounts for the sense of death and melancholy that pervades the film. When Joel quits the park he is said to have "passed on". Lisa P ponders the existence of God after seeing her unemployed father in extreme pain. Em's own father, whose wife died from cancer, chooses to go out with Francy, a woman he met in temple who has also lost her hair (but from the stress of divorce). Em points out the weirdness of it - her father is trying to relive his relationship with her mother but through its dying form, enjoying the fantasy as ghost. Indeed, Francy's bourgeois manner and Em's description of her as a 'status obsessed witch' gets closest to revealing the class origins of this unnamed spectre.

Class and ghosts are further linked in the film's multiple literary references. James talks of being a journalist ala Charles Dickens, exposing poverty and social stratification. But Dickens of course paid reference to ghosts as much as he did class (‘A Christmas Carol’). In a similar reference, Joel gives Sue a copy of Nikolai Gogol’s 'The Overcoat’ - a book about an impoverished clerk seeking to rise above his class with a fancy coat but who is later accosted by thieves and his coat stolen. As a result, the clerk catches fever and dies, only to reappear in the epilogue as a ghost who steals people's coats. The ending has provoked varying interpretations but it seems clear that the ghosts aren't merely spectral forms of the afterlife (the living thieves are also suggested to be ghosts), but indicative of a more haunting class consciousness that pervades the novel.

A central scene in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ also elucidates a key revelation in Adventureland. Just before the clerk - named Akaky - falls ill and dies, he is scolded by a 'prominent personage' for his improper remarks about secretaries (improper because of his lower class). Yet the remarks themselves were provoked by Akaky’s traumatic awareness of the contingency behind class authority and status. The awareness is so haunting for Akaky it causes him to almost faint and it’s after this scene that he catches the fever that kills him. On his deathbed, Akaky hallucinates the prominent personage, initially asking his forgiveness but then finally cursing him. For Gogol, as with Mottola, class consciousness is linked to a crisis of authority, a traumatic revelation of the contingency involved in symbolic status. The blind spot that defines and haunts both Gogol’s and Mottola’s characters is their inherent (Jew vs Catholic) yet arbitrary (‘you’re definitely a games person’) class position.

In Adventureland, various narrative strands are connected through this crisis of authority. For James it is his father’s demotion and subsequent drinking problem that incite his journey to class consciousness. For Em, the film suggests, it is her father’s collapse of authority (he is going out with a dying version of her mother) that provokes her rebellion against his class expectations. Yet the lie of this authority is perhaps most apparent in Ryan Reynold’s maintenance man. Mike Connell is a figure who encapsulates the essential fantasy of class – the fantasy of superiority.* In the park, he is seen as a ‘legend’ and a person to look up to, precisely because he presents himself as ‘above’ his lowly position (he brags he once jammed with Lou Reed**). Yet this fantasy of superiority is actually what allows the class structure to function. By conceiving reality through the prism of a superior class, Connell disavows its status as fantasy and avoids acknowledging the cultural/economic conditions that frame it. For class consciousness to emerge, James must move beyond these class fantasies. As Mark Fisher writes: “the working class becomes the proletariat when it recognises this - when, that is to say, it begins to dis-identify with the 'class fantasy' which has kept it in its place.”

At first, James tacitly supports the illusory stance of Connell (as well as his father), even after it's been ruptured. But he later turns from this complicity to advocate the liberating potential of symbolic rupture. Herman Melville may have died unappreciated, with his obituary incorrectly written as 'Henry Melville', but as James protests - "He was an impassioned man when he was alive! I hope when I die, I'm fortunate enough to be called Henry". James argues the usurpation of fantasy doesn't have to be disillusioning but can in fact be liberating. The unmasking may lead to uncertainty but it also reveals the limits we thought constrained us were actually illusory in themselves. For Mottola, passion is what counts - regardless of consequence, certainties or limits - a passion that sees something outside and beyond symbolic 'truths' and class aspirations. When James goes to New York, it’s less out of a sense of graduate school entitlement and more out of a desire to escape social hierarchies (“I’m going to look for a shitty job and...I don’t know!”).

Despite the realisation that the carnivalesque of the 60s merely made way for the capitalist carnival of the 80s, Adventureland ultimately seeks to redeem the liberating potential of 60s counter culture. Throughout the film, James aligns himself with the values of the 60s. While Lisa P might believe in God, James believes in the 'transformative' power of love. While his mother reads Tom Wolfe's tale of carnivalesque capitalism, James is engrossed in bohemian author Henry Miller. The utopian lights that appear at the beginning reappear in James' loving gazes at Em and in his breakout journey to New York. Indeed, the lights manifest themselves in other forms, such as the July 4 fireworks (which inspire a collective wonder despite James' preference for Bastille Day) and the flares Frigo fires at an imaginary 'Viet Cong' (an image that explicitly evokes the turbulence of the 60s).

When James finally leaves the lights of the carnival for the similar coloured lights of New York, the utopian possibilities are still there but without the contained and empty carthasis of the carnival. The future may still be 'rigged' but this time he is confronting it with all the uncertainty, irresolution and possibility of the unknown.

* Class fantasy can also refer to a fantasy of inferiority, made particularly apparent in the film by the figure of Joel.

** Lou Reed is played and referenced repeatedly throughout the film in the songs of Pale Blue Eyes and Satellite of Love (both songs about affairs). In one particular scene, James remarks to Connell that Reed is a hero of his as he listens to Satellite of Love on the radio, but Connell fails to recognise the song despite boasting he once jammed with the musician. Ironically, Reed has said the song tells the story of a man who watches the launch of a satellite on television while having feelings 'of the worst kind of jealousy' over his unfaithful girlfriend. Apart from having literal relevance to James' situation, the song also alludes to the pure belief in fantasy (the satellite of love) as well as its inherent ambiguity. While the fantasy may inspire love, it also covers up opposite feelings of envy and distrust, becoming a far more comforting image than confronting the uncertainty of whether your girlfriend is faithful or not. This is of course, the symbolic quandary that James finds himself at the end - how to maintain the fantasy that inspired him without also succumbing to its deception; how to embrace the possibilities opened up by fantasy but without symbolic reassurances. The song Pale Blue Eyes on the other hand ties up money, affairs, carnivalesque and death, all in three lyrics: “She said, Money is like us in time/It lies, but can't stand up/Down for you is up.”

Peter Greenaway's Future Projects...

2009-10-15T03:21:00.000-07:00

I've just learnt the extraordinary news that among director Peter Greenaway's future projects are a Brazilian porno and a film about Eisenstein losing his virginity!

Greenaway via Moving Image Source:

I’m about to do a pornography in Brazil; I’m about to make a big film about Eisenstein; I’m about to make a Japanese horror movie. So there are all sorts of things going on.

You’re about to make a film about Eisenstein?

Yes, I discovered recently that Eisenstein lost his virginity, aged 33, in Guadalajara. And I’ve been spending a lot of time there, so I’m now making a film called Ten Days That Shook Eisenstein.

Think Battleship Potemkin meets The 40 Year Old Virgin!?!

PA: Original Cut vs Current Release

2009-10-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

[spoilers ahoy]

Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli explains that there were actually many different endings shot, even more than the three already mentioned. However, he says most were not screened publicly. He also states that the police ending was in fact the original ending while the suicide ending was a rare alternate ending shown publicly only once. This may be completely subjective but my impression from the interview is that Peli is quite fond of the latter ending and that we may see some sort of special alternate version on the DVD:

Your first draft of the movie was done in 2007. As far as your involvement since then has there been much refinement or has the film been mainly just sitting?

There has been some editing after a few test screening results in order to make the film a bit quicker and shorter, as we had some issues with pacing. So we tried to fix them, hopefully we did. That was the main part of it. Also, we shot the ending. That was the only real significant change.

I've heard varying numbers as to how many alternate endings there are. How many did you actually film?

Well I filmed a whole bunch, but most of them no one has ever seen, they were just for my own options. There was one ending that was shown at some festivals, and then another ending that was shown publicly only the one time. And then the current ending, which we've had for more than a year now.

Can you explain what those other two endings were or is that something we'll see find out later? [Possible Spoiler Alert]

The original ending... I'll just say very briefly, the movie ends with cops entering the house to find the scene of the crime. The other one...there's been some talks about it on the internet, but I'd like to keep quiet on it for now. Maybe one day we'll see them all on the special edition DVD.

Once it was picked up for distribution, were there any other reshoots other than the ending?

There were a couple of little things that came up on their own that weren't suggested by DreamWorks and some were a little suggested as areas of improvement, so we shot them and they turned out great and now they're in the movie. The ending was the one thing we had a lot of criticism about from the original version, so we knew we wanted to come up with something a little bit better.

To find out more about what was changed (aside from the ending) from the rare alternate version to the current release version, I spoke to someone who had seen both cuts:

They cut about 10 minutes of early night scenes and one day time conversation that gave you a little more insight into the characters and their relationship so you cared about them more. They were scenes of conversation between Micah and Katie in their bathroom area.

They also cut out some of Micah's viewing of the nighttime audio and video footage and in the version I saw, he hears more sounds and strange languages.

Most of the changes are technical: They CGI'd the scene where Katie is pulled out of bed, they put in a noise before the demon would do something in the nighttime scenes, and they made the demon's shadows on the door much more pronounced. In the version I saw, it was dead silent during the night scenes so you didn't get a warning before something scary would happen like you get in the released version and some of the shadows and things were subtle so you aren't sure what you really saw, which made it much scarier.

Also, they toned down the scene where Katie's hair is blown around while she's at the staircase. In the version I saw, it was more pronounced and her hair is smacked around (almost like she is being slapped by the demon) whereas now you almost don't even notice her hair moves if you aren't looking for it.

The person I spoke to also really liked the new ending of Micah thrown against the camera but hated the bit that followed where Katie smiles and morphs her face and we are then told her whereabouts are unknown.

UPDATE
The blog The Horror Effect has an even more detailed look at the changes made to the original cut. Among some of the scenes removed is a particularly terrifying exorcism scene:

The exorcism video. When Micah finds the website about the exorcism that went wrong, he watches a video that was leaked out by a priest to inform people that exorcisms don’t always go well. In the video, the possessed woman actually bites off her own arm. It was very disturbing and I was sad to see the scene go. I understand why it was removed. They probably didn’t want to overshadow the later events, making them seem less severe.

For more about what was added and removed click here.

A Physiological Reading of Paranormal Activity

2009-10-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

I'm sure there will be a wealth of theories to explain why Paranormal Activity scares the way it does, but I thought I'd raise two interesting physiological explanations (suggested in discussion forums and reviews of the film).

SLEEP PARALYSIS

One reading suggests a parallel between the use of the static camera in the film and the condition of sleep paralysis. According to wikipedia:

Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain awakes from a REM state, but the body paralysis persists. This leaves the person fully conscious, but unable to move. The paralysis can last from several seconds to several minutes "after which the individual may experience panic symptoms and the realization that the distorted perceptions were false".

The paralytic state may also be accompanied by a sense of dread as well as terrifying hallucinations, the result of being both in a dream and waking state. It's also used as an explanation for encounters with the paranormal (particularly in the case of hauntings from satanic beings), with some cultures referring to it as "the devil on your back". There have even been reports of unexplained deaths attributed to sleep paralysis.

I myself have experienced sleep paralysis (although I never knew it as that until recently) and the sense of being held down is quite accurate. It's also a similar feeling to watching Paranormal Activity, with the film's use of the static camera suggesting a position of paralysis. On the one hand we can't do anything but react, but on the other hand, the camera (and often the characters) don't take into account our reactions. The unbearable sense of dread and even the invisible/hallucinatory nature of the demon I would argue stem from this state of paralysis. Unable to 'move', our imagination goes into overdrive. In addition, the feeling of possession in the night scenes - the way we gradually feel as if someone else is watching through us - correlates with the sense of 'the devil on your back' during sleep paralysis ie. a demon who occupies your blind spot.

BINAURAL BEATS

A user on imdb also suggests the intriguing possibility that the film makes use of binaural beats. The low humming or drone sound accompanying the night scenes corresponds to an increase of anxiety that could be explained by the low frequency sounds. As the user writes:

It is proven that your brain runs on certain wave lengths during different points of consciousness, but if you have an interfering tone pattern that over-powers your brains wave length, your body will be affected physiologically. Some people use it for hypnosis, but I'm not sure how effective it is.

If binaural tones were used, it might explain why this movie was so frightening. One could possibly self-hypnotize himself into believe he was more scared than he actually was. Or the tones could produce a increase of heart rate, making a scene scarier than it was.

I have no way of knowing whether the film uses binaural beats or not but it's interesting to speculate. Indeed, the first experiments with binaural beats were to investigate out-of-body experiences. Could it be that the film gradually raises the sound frequency in the night scenes to induce such an out-of-body response?

Wikipedia has a table listing the effects of increased brain wave frequencies:

> 40 Hz [Gamma waves] Higher mental activity, including perception, problem solving, fear, and consciousness
13–40 Hz [Beta waves] Active, busy or anxious thinking and active concentration, arousal, cognition
7–13 Hz [Alpha waves] Relaxation (while awake), pre-sleep and pre-wake drowsiness
4–7 Hz [Theta waves] Dreams, deep meditation, REM sleep
< 4 Hz [Delta waves] Deep dreamless sleep, loss of body awareness

If the binaural beats gradually increase the frequency of brain waves, the effect could be similar to the experience of waking while dreaming - the mix of consciousness correlating closely with the idea of sleep paralysis.

For an example of a binaural beat which sounds somewhat similar to the one in the film (Beta/anxiety/active concentration and Delta/deep sleep/loss of body awareness) listen to the first 30 seconds of the clip below (works only with headphones):

On The Jewish Question

2009-10-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

A must view. Four speakers (film critics and Jewish scholars) debate Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and the controversy over its portrayal of Jews.

Mark Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, gives one of the most insightful readings of the film I've heard yet. One of his key points is that the Nazi audience which enjoys Zoller killing Allies in Nation's Pride is akin to us enjoying the basterds killing Nazis in Tarantino's flick. Even Shosanna occupies her own bell tower (the projection booth) from where she launches her attack. But I disagree with Baker that this is a point of criticism (Baker argues it leads to an 'anything goes' morality merely dependent on which viewpoint we take). I would argue the parallels are a mark of the film's fundamentalist and violent honesty. They make the revenge fantasy (a complex mix of ethics and enjoyment) even more problematic, but without ever lapsing into a cheap moral relativism.

Jewish studies lecturer Nathan Wolski also delivers a fascinating contextualisation, placing Basterds within the history of Jewish absurdism, revenge and the rewriting of history.

The two film critics though are hugely disappointing. Adrian Martin, who is usually an eloquent and insightful critic, lapses into a quite repulsive and condescending dismissal of Tarantino as an 'adolescent moraliser'. He gleefully discards the director's invocation of enjoyment, catharsis/ritual and ethics as somehow contradictory and hypocritical, while refusing to engage in any of the complexities this raises. To Tarantino's claim that revenge doesn't always end up the way you want, Martin counters that it must do because Tarantino made the film (which not only ignores all the ways Tarantino problematises the revenge fantasy but also the way he lets the characters guide the film rather than crowd pleasing plot points). At the end of the speech, Martin engages in his own bit of adolescent moralising: "The topic of this seminar asks can Hollywood rewrite history...But I think the question should be how does Hollywood rewrite history and why." Huh.

Crank 2: High Voltage

2009-09-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

Crank: High Voltage may not match the non-stop action of its predecessor, but what it lacks in adrenalin it makes up for with a sophisticated and hilarious perversity. If the first Crank was about negotiating the inner limits of the body into a sustained chemical high, Crank 2 is about inverting those limits, transforming the body into a hollowed-out machine in need of constant external stimuli. Instead of finding his heart poisoned with a deadly Chinese drug, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) wakes up to find his 'pump' replaced with a mechanical surrogate. When the artificial heart's generator is destroyed, Chelios must race to find alternative electrical outputs before his body permanently fails. The sequel's brilliant evolution of its founding concept actually fulfills its own video game origins: once literally a body of substance, Chelios has now become a body without substance.

In Crank's hyper hetero framework, this body without substance is also a confrontation with the body's own sexual limits. Indeed, the film's real focus of anxiety is not the lack of a heart in the body but the lack of fantasmatic coherency in the sexual act. The spectacle of bodies rubbing up against each other, made explicit in the film's extended race track sequence, is the literal realisation of sex without substance. Likewise, Amy Smart's character Eve dances in a strip club but with her nipples absurdly covered in black tape, suggesting something fundamentally absent within the heterosexual fantasy.* In a desperate bid to regain this substance (this fantasy framework), the film turns to increasingly extreme sexual behaviour, but in a way that confronts its own heterosexual limit. In one particular scene, the film intercuts between Chelios restarting his heart by using a taser on his body (including on his penis) with Eve being molested by a lesbian in the back seat of a police car. It's as if Chelios can no longer get the necessary rush from heteronormative sexuality anymore, and must desperately restructure his sexual fantasy in order to even function.

Suggesting such a perverse and violent fantasy reorientation, Crank 2 is replete with anal references, violence against women, a hallucinatory love of cock and a conflation of homosexuality with sado-masochism. Efren Ramirez, who played Kaylo in the first film, returns in the sequel as Kaylo's gay twin brother, Venus. But not only is Venus part of a leather wearing, S&M gang, he also has full body tourettes, which lands him in some pretty awkward gay sexual positions. After one such attack, a gangster even remarks to Chelios that "your friend has the gay condition". Homosexuality here is associated with a body without substance, a body needing/out of control, the implication being that this is the same condition Chelios is suffering from.

So it makes sense that one of the first things Chelios does in the film is stick a shotgun up a gangster's ass to retrieve crucial plot details (he leaves it in after he gets the information). And of course the very person Chelios seeks help and advice from is Doc Miles (played by Dwight Yoakam), a character who is constantly associated with anuses. From the scene where Miles rubs ice cubes over his girlfriend's ass, to his watching asses on television, to his answering the phone while taking a shit, the anal references build cumulatively to realise their own excremental substance. As essentially a walking plug/socket, what Chelios needs is a bodily violation extreme enough that it will remind him that he has a body. Or rather, one that will remind him that he has an inner substance that connects to the body (hence the excremental limit).

The opposition of anal violation and heteronormative sexuality achieves a perverse clarity in the scene with the psychiatrist and the paramedic from the first film. In Crank 1, Chelios held a gun to the paramedic's head while ordering him to use a defibrillator (a hint of what Chelios will need in the sequel). Now, with recurring nightmares of a gun pointed to his head, the paramedic visits a female psychiatrist, who tells him that his fears are perfectly normal, that even she would have "shit herself" if someone pointed a gun at her. The psychiatrist then proceeds to aggressively flirt with the paramedic, telling him that he should relieve his anxiety by going to a 'titty bar' and "get some snatch rubbed into his face". Heteronormativity is here framed as a pathetic response to the anxiety of anal violation - a way to deflect the disturbing fact that 'there is no sexual relationship' into a vicarious framework. Both sexual acts may invoke a body without substance, but what differentiates the sado-masochistic sexuality endorsed by the film is that it is open about this lack of substance, and is thus able to attain a more extreme pleasure by embracing violation. Heteronormativity on the other hand still needs the sexual fantasy to delude itself. The perverse pleasure of the film is in rupturing this heteronormative fantasy. At the height of the patient's and psychiatrist's vicarious sexual exchange, the scene is literally violated by a stray bullet which hits the patient in the head and to which the psychiatrist responds by vomiting (and we assume 'shitting herself').

But as much as Chelios is forced to embrace this 'hollowed out' sado-masochism, the film still longs for the sexual fantasmatic substance. This longing and anxiety finds expression in the film's hallucinatory love of cock. In one of the sequel's opening scenes, Chelios is sitting on an operating table while an Asian nurse remarks that he has 'big American cock', and indeed, an attempt to remove the precious organ actually provokes Chelios' escape. But the anxiety about losing his penis continues. Electrical outputs are placed on Chelios' penis even more than other body parts, and there's even one up, close and personal torture scene involving his testicles. When Chelios visits a brothel, we see a prostitute kick a gangster's dick into blood and when Chelios is shown sliding down a rail he slips and hits his nuts, yelling 'cut' in the process. The cock in its fantasmatic phallic form is the thing that ties the body together, the 'quilting point' of meaning. And as the latter scene suggests, the phallus isn't just essential for the image of the body, it's also essential in uniting the film's own rabid, fragmentary, digital form.

The hallucinatory coherency the phallus provides is nowhere more evident than in the film's central sex scene. Set on a racetrack in front of a cheering audience, Chelios and his girlfriend screw in every sexual position possible, less a coital union than a montage of increasingly fragmentary sexual positions. At the scene's climax a band of racing horses leap over them mid-coitus and the camera follows one of the horses' throbbing members in slow motion, the fantasy object par excellence. It's precisely this hallucinatory substance that ties together all the other fragementary positions and gives the sexual act its reality.

The film's ending brings all these elements to a 'head' with Chelios finding himself face to face with Verona from the first film. This time however Verona exists as a decapitated head kept alive and talking by water and electricity - a substance without a body in contrast to Chelios' body without substance. The distinction between the two however is soon rendered moot. Setting himself alight after grabbing hold of high voltage power lines, Chelios' body becomes a flaming hallucinatory object, no longer an object to be ignited but an object that ignites everything else. And with this extreme phallic embodiment Chelios is finally able to fulfill the heterosexual relationship, albeit within a perverse sado-masochistic register. In a fever dream-like state, as his body burns, Chelios hallucinates Eve (in place of Bai Ling's character) alongside the race horse that represented phallus. As he moves in for the kiss, an electronic guitar swells and the couple are framed by rays of sunshine (in reality he is setting Bai Ling's character on fire). Chelios finally fulfills the sexual relationship not just because it has become pure fantasy but because he himself has become the phallic source of the fantasy, the god like creator of it. This extends to the digital medium itself. As his whole body melts in flames and the music reaches a crescendo, Chelios not only ditches the girl but the very medium that gave him fantasmatic consistency. Raising his hands in triumph and then thrusting a one fingered 'fuck you' to the camera and screaming (in pain or pleasure?), his now almost completely computer generated character causes not just the music to distort but the actual film to end. Whereas before Chelios acted as a virtual surrogate for the viewer (if anything we were his substance), here, by addressing/rejecting the camera, he breaks the fantasmatic connection between the viewer and himself, transforming the nature of the film in the process. For just as Chelios approaches the extreme limits of the body, leading to an embodiment of the fantasmatic substance, Crank's digitial medium approaches its own limit - that of a purely autonomous digital video game.

Of course, it's not really the end and the closing credits give way to a bandaged and charred Chelios, his heart back in place but his body beyond all recognition. From body of substance, to body without substance, the film's final minutes suggest that the inevitable sequel will be of a substance without a body.

*The taped nipples have to do with Smart's no nudity clause but their absurd and obvious use can't help but have an aesthetic register. The nipple-as-substance also has its parallel within the film's sado-masochistic sexaulity when a gangster is told by his boss to cut off both his nipples as punishment.

sounds from a darkened theatre

2009-09-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

Someone recorded the sounds of audience reactions to a Paranormal Activity screening. This alone is enough to scare anyone!

Public Enemies: Digital, Death and The Gaze

2009-09-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

Michael Mann's Public Enemies has its share of problems - some awkward editing, poor sound, and early scenes that don't come together - but it's the film's unique use of high definition digital cinematography that really excites.

Like Miami Vice, Mann employs digital as a proto-3D aesthetic. At its best, it seeks to capture a 360 degree viewpoint that leaves you not quite sure where to look. The cinematography captures light so sharply that the background is as visible in detail as the foreground but in a way that is qualitatively different to the use of deep focus. In deep focus, there is often a much clearer sense of the passage through foreground to background. Space has a sense of continuity. The coordinates are fixed, your eye line guided. When a character walks through a space you're more aware of the distance they have to travel because the foreground usually remains stable and thus still acquires a degree of priority. The difference that digital brings into play is its mobility. The background may be as much in detail as the foreground but the camera's mobility constantly threatens any sense of stability we might invest in the two coordinates.

Perhaps as a result of this state of flux the cinematography has a certain glaring quality, one that finds a diegetic equivalent in the chiaroscuro effect of the hall lights outside Nelson's apartment, the sparks of the L train moving past Billie's window and the figures lit up staccato-like by the blaze of firing tommy guns. Background and foreground are simultaneously present but it is the invisible gaps between them that digital makes us aware of. In one of the film's more striking examples of this, we follow Billie through the glaring yellow lights of her apartment but against the darkness of the city and the lights of the L-train as it goes on through the window. The level of detail in the image combined with the handheld mobility gives a sense that we could be looking from outside the window into the house at any moment. Although the glaring interior lights seem to prioritise the foreground there is just as much glare and detail in the background. Depth is privileged in Mann's digital but also mysteriously elided.

The effect of these shots is less of immanence that it is of anamorphosis. Our shifting between the background and the foreground realises a particular sense of depth in the image that isn't always readily apparent. The effect is similar to the optical illusion of two faces forming the outline of a candlestick. The point of the image is not that the second image is concealed in the first but that the very shift in perspective realises a blind spot in our vision. In this shift, we don't where to look and are suddenly without a subjective reference point. The disturbing yet fascinating effect is a sense of the image looking back at us.

This candlestick image is actually used by Lacan when articulating his concept of the gaze. For Lacan, the gaze looking back at us is death - the ultimate unseen gaze that haunts and objectifies our own gaze. As Todd McGowan writes: "Even when a manifestation of the gaze does not make death evident directly...it nonetheless carries the association insofar as the gaze itself marks the point in the image at which the subject is completely subjected to it." Death and the experience of the gaze occur when the subject loses all mastery and subjective privilege and instead becomes wholly embodied in the object.

This 'aesthetic of death' fits perfectly with the thematic concerns of Public Enemies. Every death in the film is given its moment. In the opening scene, Dillinger stares into his mentor's eyes as he is dragged by the car, wounded and dying. There's a similar fascination and reverence when Dillinger's long time companion Homer dies in the car after a bloody shootout. Baby Face Nelson enjoys an extended death scene lit up by the glare of his tommy gun, while one of Dillinger's other companions faces death with a bullet lodged behind his eyeball. The thematic links accumulate when Dillinger strolls unnoticed into the FBI's Dillinger headquarters on the day of his death. The point of the scene is that Dillinger is not the only thing that is unseen. As he gazes over the photos of his associates, most deceased, others wanted, there is a sense that he has reached the apex of the film. He is finally seeing behind the shadows, realising his own public image, yet he is still completely blind to the truth. Because if he had only looked a little closer, he might have realised some note or map signalling that the FBI knew where he was going to be that night, some clue as to his death. In this moment when everything is open to him, his death is still the ultimate blind spot.

For Mann, death and a man's identity are linked. In his quest for absolute realism, Mann tries to discover his characters from the outside in. Depp wears Dillinger's actual clothes, listens to Dillinger's favourite song and acts scenes in the same places they occurred. Perhaps this approach explains why real life charismatic characters are rendered strangely enigmatic in Mann's films (I'm thinking not just of Depp's Dillinger but Will Smith's sombre portrayal of Mohammad Ali).* No matter how much reality you realise through sets, props, research and acting, there is always going to be one element that is missed. For Mann, this element is the real and the reason his films are both abstract and intensely realistic.

In Ali, this comes at the point when the boxer is jogging through the African village and comes across a portrait of himself towering over a defeated George Foreman in their upcoming bout. The scene is the point where the myth meets the man. Or rather, the difference between the man and the myth is realised as a point of difference internal to the character himself. In Lacanese, the mystery of the other is revealed as a mystery to the other itself. In Public Enemies, the encounter in the FBI headquarters also signals a blind spot but it's a blind spot that gives the myth of Dillinger its tragic resonance. As he watches Manhanttan Melodrama at the Biograph, we witness the elegaic interaction between the man and his public image as if it were a eulogy. Dillinger smiles thoughtfully while Clark Gable's gangster echoes Dillinger's own philosophy and tragic love story. When Dillinger finally does step out of the cinema, he is shot dead in a spectacular sequence played out in slow motion from multiple angles and from multiple characters - just in case we might miss a crucial moment of revelation.

*This distinction is most explored by Mann in Heat, which is as much a contrast of acting styles as it is of the myth and the men. Pacino and De Niro's acting reputations are almost mythic in themselves and their scenes together are anticipated as such. But ironically its through their contrasting acting styles - Pacino's charismatic fiery performance in contrast to De Niro's muted enigmatic take - that Mann interrogates the very idea of what makes them mythic.

Paranormal Activity and its Hollywood remake

2009-09-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

Some here will remember that when Paranormal Activity was bought by Dreamworks back in 2007, the producers decided it would be more Hollywood of them to shaft the original on DVD and remake the $11,000 film with a bigger budget. Somewhere down the line they ditched that idiotic idea. Variety's interview with producer Steven Schneider I think is the first time we've heard why:

"DreamWorks, under Paramount, bought it with the intention of remaking it with the original director," Schneider says. "We had test screenings built into the deal, so we could discern what needed to be redone in the remake. But the movie tested so well, they decided that it would be the height of folly to remake a mock-doc-type film with unknown actors."

The article makes reference to Dreamworks' recent divorce from Paramount and mentions that after the split Paranormal Activity stayed with the latter studio. I think it's quite likely there was a legal dispute between the two companies over the film and that this was the reason why the trailer was taken off the interwebs (messages cited 'copyright' issues) and perhaps a big reason why the film has taken so long to be released.

I'm hoping more details about the idea for a remake, the extraordinarily delayed release AND the alternate endings will surface as the film's publicity machine gets underway. It should not be forgotten or overshadowed by the ever increasing hype.

I also think anyone who supports retaining the film's original ending instead of its lame Hollywood alternative should voice their objections to Paramount or even twitter at @ParamountPics and try to build some awareness and support. From the reviews I've read it sounds like the release version will keep the alternate ending, but at the moment it's still not too late for that to be changed. If the support they received from test screenings was enough to change their mind about a remake then a groundswell of internet support will surely affect their decision about the ending.

Taking Woodstock

2009-09-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock is a strange movie, in both good ways and bad. One of the most surprising aspects is that it's more a coming out narrative than a piece on Woodstock per se. Yet even this turn fails to fully explain the film. Indeed, the real twist is in who is doing the coming out.

Although it's unclear for at least the film's first 40 minutes, Taking Woodstock's principal character Elliot (an excellent Demetri Martin) is in fact gay. Moving back to his hometown to help his parents with their fledgling motel business, Eliot has been forced to take on a decidedly more tacit position in regards to his sexuality. However, when he reads that the Woodstock concert has been rejected from its site at Walkill, he sees a way to pay off his parents' debts by offering the organisers a land permit in his hometown. The consequent onslaught of hippies, drugs and free love ends up creating the perfect environment for his burgeoning sexuality.

Ang Lee's restrained style is for the most part sensitive if not always suitable to the film's radical milieu. His use of close ups is particularly touching, bestowing a loving gaze on faces and inspiring an almost tactile quality (this is Taking Woodstock after all). But what's most interesting is in what Lee leaves out. Despite the film's apparent Woodstock narrative, there is barely any attention paid to the concert's actual live music. And despite the film's apparent (or not so apparent) coming out narrative, Elliot never actually has an official coming out scene. By the end of the film, he has supposedly slept with another gay guy from the festival, yet strangely there is next to no reference made before, during or after the event. And while he ultimately finds the strength to lead his own life and leave for California, he never ends up discussing his sexuality with his parents (or anyone else for that matter).

On the contrary, Taking Woodstock is set up so that its real coming out scene belongs to Elliot's eccentric and offensively stereotypical Jewish mother. What should have been the climax of Elliot's coming out narrative (Elliot waking up next to his gay lover) instead merely serves as the parallel to the coming out narrative of his miserly matriarch. As Elliot exits the bedroom he finds his mother in her own compromising position - asleep in the 'closet' clutching over $90,000 worth of cash. The 'booty' is her life savings which she has kept secret from her husband and her son; this despite failing mortgage payments, the bank's repeated attempts to take over the family motel and her son's selfless work to save the business. The mother is essentially outed as a money grubbing Jew, with all the offensiveness that image entails. The tactile quality evoked by Lee's adoring close ups becomes here merely a desire to grasp the substance of capital, money in its material and uncirculated form ie. shining stacks of new dollar bills.

Indeed, the film tracks multiple parallels between money and coming out. From Michael Lang's suggestive, loving gaze while discussing financial transactions and land payments, to Elliot's father's comments on how much money the organisers are making from Woodstock as hippies skinny dip in the background. The connection is made most explicit when Lee divides a central scene into two simultaneous shots: one half spying Elliot chatting up a construction worker he is interested in, and the other half showing the Woodstock organisers discussing the concert's budget and security issues* while pointing out Elliot as the one who told everyone the concert was for free. Lee seems to constantly remind us that Woodstock was primarily an investment opportunity and profit making venture. But perhaps in this scene he suggests the film's true coming out moment was when Woodstock itself was outed as a 'free concert', thus inspiring the collective spirit that ultimately defined it.

*The decision on taking down the security fences was a crucial decision in defining the concert as a 'free concert' and not just another money making venture. By taking down the barriers the night before opening, the organisers helped encourage the social harmony of the concert by preventing any violence between the ticket holders and non ticket holders. It also inspired many more to show up for the event.

Tarantino The Critic

2009-09-03T21:15:00.001-07:00

A must view: Tarantino's praise for Danny Boyle's sci-fi masterpiece, Sunshine.

I gotta say I really dig Tarantino The Critic. His other accounts of There Will Be Blood, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Taxi Driver and Psycho (the Gus Van Sant version...) have all been infectious in their enthusiasm. There's this precocious and theatrical (almost camp?) quality to his reviews that I really love. The guy should have his own show.

This time though he takes on Sunshine and it's good to hear this incredibly underrated film championed so passionately. Although I disagree with his extremely negative stance on the film's 'disastrous third act', it's good that the scope and ambition of the film is given its due.

In the meantime, I promise to have my own take on the film soon-ish as part of the underrated films post I published a while back...

On Beautiful Kate and Australian Cinema

2009-08-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

By Billy Stevenson

First time feature director Rachel Ward recently published an article defending her new film Beautiful Kate, a family drama set in rural Australia and starring Bryan Brown, Rachel Griffiths and Ben Mendelsohn. In the article Ward attacks critics who labeled her film as just another 'dark and bleak' Australian film:

Well, I'm calling a penalty kick for the niche product. Reviews of any movie without Paul Hogan winking, Hugh Jackman flexing, Muriel squealing or pigs flying seem to be limited to describing them as ''dark'' or ''bleak'' - but that does not mean they are.

Here are a few other adjectives with which film writers might broaden their Australian film vocabulary: enlightening, redemptive, inspiring, compassionate, beautiful, transformative, intelligent, human, engrossing, tender, confronting and, yes, entertaining.

Dark and bleak should be kept for describing the time when we did not have an industry, before the Australian film renaissance of the 1970s, or for the depressing time ahead when audiences have been scared off anything Australian that might have some guts.

The main thing that irritates me about this article is that Rachel Ward never specifies who she means by this "campaign...of criticising filmmakers like me." She can't mean critics - the film has received alot of great reviews. Margaret and David both gave it four and a half stars - a rare agreement. My sense is that she's been inspired by the relatively low rating, and poor comments, on imdb - and perhaps, more generally, the poor internet response, such as on the comments section of the 'At The Movies' website. But, to be honest, even these haven't been consistently poor. And who makes a film expecting unanimous acclaim from every sector? In any case, the ultimate result of Ward's failure to identify these evil critics is that anyone who dislikes the film somehow becomes a spoilsport - or, to use her fairly self-important analogy, becomes one of those people preventing the little kid getting to the goal.

Well, I did dislike the film. I disliked it alot, partly because of the very self-importance that pervades this article. At first, I was going to write a humorous, casual response - but after reading this, I feel like being a little more systematic. Firstly, this is not the masterpiece that Ward seems to think it is - and, really, how could it be? How many directors make a masterpiece with their debut? It requires an overwhelmingly, prodigiously original directorial vision. And my main criticism is that this is a generic Australian 'arthouse' film - and, in that sense, is far more indebted to the "dictates of mass marketing" than Ward seems to acknowledge.

Most basically, the plot is an generic prodigal son narrative. This wouldn't be fatal - partly because there is an idiosyncratic incestual subplot - were it not for the script, which sounds like how foreigners think Australians speak; or, perhaps more accurately, how a Balmain director thinks that rural Australians speak. I have family living on small farms all over Australia - none of them speak in this grunted, moronic register, or reminisce about the time "they were swimming in the dam and got a leech in their fanny". The film exudes a contrived, self-important working-class 'voice' whose only purpose seems to be to flatter a Palace cinemas demographic with a sense of 'authenticity'.

About half the film is made up of flashbacks, which follow a relatively linear trajectory, parallel to the contemporary narrative - there's nothing original about this. And they're shot with a completely generic 'breathlessness' - hand-held camera, backlit, extreme close-ups, as if to remind us how sincere, emotional and, above all, undislikable it is. The depictions of the landscape aren't bad, but they're entirely in keeping with the slightly trite immanence that characterised Somersault.

The acting isn't terrible, but the actors aren't given much to work with: Bryan Brown's your average cantankerous old bastard, Ben Mendelsohn's just a place where cliched masculine angst happens, Rachel Griffiths is a mere cipher for good old-fashioned bush wisdom ('Blames a mug's game, mate'). And the portrayal of Aboriginal people is laughable - I'd rather see them omitted entirely than used, as they are, as vehicles for the restoration of our own self-esteem and sense of belonging. Oh yeah, and did I mention that the main character starts writing down his version of events, which gradually segues into an interior monologue? Just in case we don't understand the emotional magnitude of what's taking place.

It's appropriate that Ward refers to the Australian Renaissance. Back in the 1970s, it was an original aesthetic gesture for Australian films to focus on exurban protagonists (and, despite the kangaroo-laden rural backdrop, this effectively feels like yet another elaboration of outer suburbia) in a heightened demotic, vernacular register. Now, it just feels tired - a completely contrived bleakness and banality that reproaches you for not being 'authentic' enough, or caring about Australian cinema enough, if you don't like it.

Well, I do like Australian cinema, and think there have been some great films in the last decade. For my money, Rolf de Heer is the greatest Australian auteur of the last fifteen years or so - a consistently original, daring director, who I always respect, if not always enjoy. Ray Lawrence would also be up there, if he were a little more prolific. And there have been directorial one-offs which have been more impressive as well. 'Praise', for example, was John Curran's first feature film - although it was admittedly based on a very strong novel. Speaking of which, critics have waxed lyrical about Ward's success in transplanting her source material - a short story set in the American South - to the outback, but, to me, this just seems to clarify how much of a generic afterthought its insistent 'Australianness' is.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't an unwatchable film. And it's understandable that any director should feel pride in their product. But you're allowed to dislike it without being un-Australian.

For more on Australian cinema see this previous post on Noise.

The endings of Paranormal Activity

2009-08-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

Rumours are filtering through that one of the scariest movies ever made will finally get a US release date almost three years after it finished production. The facts are still elusive but signs point to September 25 as the date for a limited release in the States. But as audiences begin to gear up for one of the most traumatic experiences to be had in the cinema, controversy will surely turn to which ENDING they will be getting.

The word is director Oren Peli has been tinkering with his cut of the film over the last year and may even have ditched the film's original ending for a an alternative ending. As this site reported, an alternate ending was screened with the film at various festivals over the last 12 months, including the Sydney Film Festival. Unfortunately, as I wrote in my review, the ending was the one time I felt the film went Hollywood and utilised more conventional shock tactics and even added an annoying, self-referential touch. So it made sense when I found out the ending was actually an alternate ending and there was an original ending said to be much longer and much more horrific.

Two months ago I thought I had found it. *SPOILER* A description from someone who had seen a screener of the film described a longer ending in which Kate kills Micah offscreen and then walks into the bedroom with a bloody knife. She then sits and rocks beside the bed for days (long enough that we hear the phone ringing and worried messages left in the background). Katie's female friend then comes to the house worried and Katie goes downstairs where you hear the friend scream. Katie comes back to the bedroom and continues rocking beside the bed as the counter records more days going past. Finally police arrive and as she approaches them with the knife they open fire on her and we fade out to the sound of police radios. It sounded much more unsettling than the ending I had seen and seemed to make better use of the dread that rendered the rest of the film so traumatic. The only thing that seemed off was the use of police - it seemed a little anti-climatic and risked providing too much closure.*SPOILER*

But I've recently learnt that ending was not the original at all. It was in fact one of THREE different endings. So which one was the original? From what I've heard I believe the description below to be that of the original ending, or at least the earliest one screened. Unlike the previous two, I regard this ending to be the perfect finish to one of the most original horror films I've ever seen. When I first heard the description, I gasped. I can't imagine how it's going to feel on screen.

I recommend you go into Paranormal Activity cold but if you've already seen the film and are curious about the original ending here is a description below:

*SPOILER*
This ending initially repeats what we see in the other two endings. We watch through the camera as the couple sleep. Then suddenly Kate sits straight up, gets out of bed, walks over to Micah and stands over him staring at him for a few hours. Then she walks out of the bedroom and we hear her going downstairs. After a few minutes tick off the clock, we hear Kate screaming. Micah wakes up, screams to Kate that he is coming to help her, and he darts out of the room. For the next few minutes you just see an empty bedroom with the ticking clock and you hear both Kate and Micah screaming and a lot of commotion like they are fighting. After a few minutes, the screaming stops and it is silent. After a minute or two of silence, you hear a loud stomping sound (like something very heavy is coming up the stairs).

From here, the ending diverges: Kate walks into the bedroom covered in blood and holding a large butcher knife down at her side. She walks into the room very heavy and stiff-like. She walks right up to the camera so that the upper half of her body is in the shot (but she isn't staring into the camera or looking at you, she's sort of looking downward), and then she simply pulls up the knife and slashes her throat in one quick, graceful movement, and falls down on the ground. The camera keeps rolling so we just see an empty bedroom for a few seconds and then the camera shuts off and the movie ends.
*SPOILER*

I love this ending. It's actually much more in line with how I hoped the film would finish. Not only is there no ironic self-referencing (Kate thankfully doesn't look at the camera) but it is a moment of sudden and horrific violence that would likely mark the most traumatic point of the movie.

If the dread of Paranormal Activity is the traumatic, sustained experience of pure desire (desire being an experience of lack, of absence), this ending is traumatic precisely because it realises that desire. Violence is withheld and withheld in this film, fueling our anticipation for it, an anticipation that becomes unbearable. We know something horrific is about to happen but the more the film shies away from it the worst our expectations become. This ending finally gives us all the violence we feared. More than that, it directly posits the violence as something we desire by offering it up in front of the camera.

What may have started off as a neutral viewing position through the camera has gradually become the eyes of the demon itself. It is less Kate who is possessed in this film than us. The demon is seeing through our eyes. What is shown to the camera is not just guided by the desire of the demon it is also guided by our own desire when we walked into this film - a desire for horror. This other worldly nature of our desire, this implication of our neutral gaze, is traumatic, and it's the original ending that so perfectly realises the nature of this gaze.

Why Dreamworks decided to change the ending is beyond me. Perhaps it was too gruesome for the rating they were trying to secure. Perhaps some timid audiences found it too confronting. Ultimately though it's an insane move. The fact is the film is not complete without its original ending. To give audiences one of the alternate endings would go against everything that is so unique about the film - its avoidance of the usual Hollywood scare tactics, its anticipation of a final moment of raw, unapologetic violence, indeed the very viewing position we have occupied for the last 90 minutes.

But there are signs of hope. At least according to the film's official website, which quotes my review, the filmmakers have read my criticism of the first alternate ending. Hopefully they'll be paying attention here as well. Let's not forget that at one stage we were actually going to get a Hollywood remake instead of the original. Perhaps these alternate endings will go the same route.

UPDATE
According to an interview with Peli, the original ending was the police ending. The suicide ending on the other hand was a rare alternate ending screened publicly only once. Peli goes on to say that there were many more alternative endings but they never got screened. However, we may see all of these endings on some kind of special edition DVD in the future.

UPDATE 2
Watch the original police ending here!

Glorious Basterds

2009-08-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

Inglorious Bastards was the surprise of the decade for me. Having read Tarantino's script mid-last year my expectations were low to abysmal. The script was overly indulgent, juvenile, pretentious, lame and dull. From that first reading, I was ready to predict the end of Tarantino's career. Having seen the film last week, I can say I've never been so happy to be wrong. The film is exhilarating and tense, emotionally poignant yet also unadulterated fun.

But reading the script first actually clarified to me what makes Tarantino such a good director. His films take place in a brilliantly and imaginatively thought out world, down to the last detail. What we’re given though is a privileged but essentially limited insight into that world. The effect is that it leaves us wanting more but in the best possible way – it inspires our imagination. Think of the complete lack of explanation regarding Brad Pitt’s noose mark, or the truly bad-ass characters of Wilhelm Wicki and Hugo Stiglitz – minor roles yet I wished they owned the movie. That’s not a criticism of the film but a sign of my love for it. It's a world that exists outside the constraints of narrative and the demands of the audience - and is all the more real for it. Critics who argue that the Basterds story ended up being fairly insignificant forget how Tarantino's films work. They're films inspired by cinephelia, which means they're based on details, moments and scenes that are decidedly anti-plot. Even the scenes that appear driven by narrative (the tavern scene and the cinema climax) are in fact accidental (the chance presence of Nazis in the tavern, the synchronisation between Shosanna's plot and the Basterds operation). It's an accident that refers not to narrative but to the anti-narrative reality of Tarantino's world, a world that is hidden even to himself.

No Tarantino film explores this more than Inglorious Bastards. Watching the film is like being let in on a secret, a secret that only cinema can encapsulate. So much of the film seems concerned with the way characters are viewed - a secret that is a mystery even to the characters themselves. Think of Landa’s ambiguous discussion of his nickname (first he likes it because he’s earned it, then he disowns it because it degrades him); or the card game played in the tavern where others are aware of your identity but you are not; the scene where Shosanna discovers how Zoller is viewed by the public; the legend of the Bear Jew that the Basterds themselves take pleasure in. When Pitt tells the German officer that the Bear Jew is the closest thing they have to the movies – is he referring to the baseball bat violence or the anticipation of that violence fueled by legend? The amount of time the scene spends on anticipation would suggest the latter. Likewise, the pleasure of the film is the tension of a secret both revealed and hidden.

Inglourious Basterds thus works because it creates a world that is a mystery to us but one that is also revealed in subtle details. Characters work like detectives, each one trying to reveal the secret of the other: Hans 'the Jew Hunter' Landa is of course a self-titled detective; Archie Hicox is a former film critic (another kind of detective); the German officer in the tavern prides himself on detecting accents (indeed the use of foreign languages reveals further details that English speakers would not pick up on); Zoller’s own fascination with the mysterious and resistant Shosanna also neatly parallels these characters. It seems to be this tension of the secret that Tarantino believes cinema embodies and it is a tension that is given full catharsis in the film's epic climax. The enjoyment of the climax is the complicit and transgressive enjoyment of a secret revealed. Not only does the massacre of the Nazis take place in a alternative, non-existent history (the secret transgressive fantasy of history itself), but it seems to be a crime perpetrated by both cinema (the flammable film stock) and the fantasies of dead people (Zoller and Shosanna). In Tarantino's most emotionally poignant scene to date, Shosanna and Zoller end up dying at each other's hands (again the true perpetrator here is simply bad luck) but living on in the image on the screen. Their characters' secrets or fantasies less a personal trait than an 'accidental' yet inherent property of the cinematic gaze itself. Likewise, Inglorious Basterds is a film that almost exists outside of itself, beyond its closing credits. It is a film literally inspired by a love of film, of a world beyond our limited gaze yet also the very condition of that gaze.

ON THE JEWISH QUESTION

In response to those critics who argue that IB is a defense of Israel's position or somehow insensitive to the Jews and the significance of the Holocaust:

Firstly, the film is proudly and demonstrably a fantasy, one that revels in the black and white dichotomy of WWII films. Indeed, Tarantino has said in interviews that he was directly inspired by WWII propaganda films, which were often made by directors living in Hollywood after the Nazis had taken over their countries. Basterds' willingness to problematise this fantasy and our enjoyment of it (eg. Pitt's speech about the Nazi comes straight after Landa's speech about the Jew) is not some sign of disingenuity but actually a mark of the film's fundamentalist honesty. It's the same kind of openly transgressive, cathartic violence that vigilante films like Rambo, Taken and Commando take part in. I don't think there's anything wrong with that precisely because of the level of honesty these films have about their revenge fantasies and means of catharsis. It's their brazen honesty that makes these films so much fun (it's also an enjoyment that you can only really have in the cinema). IB's controversial climax isn't a lie against history but the film's complete honesty about its status as cinematic fantasy (how do you 'lie' about how the fate of WWII anyway?), with all the problems that entails.

Ultimately the film privileges this level of emotional sincerity above all things. The Basterds are literally the name for the band of scalping Jews - there's no glossing over the horror of what they're doing. The Nazis on the other hand are portrayed as disguising their violence with culture, ideological pretension and social mores. For Tarantino this is far more offensive than what the Basterds are doing and ultimately marks their point of difference - emotional honesty. The basterds' carving of swastikas on the heads of Nazis is the film's fundamentalist enforcement of that honesty. No longer do the Nazis have the glamour of class, culture or social pretense to mask their libidinal desires and racist thoughts. Now they've literally got to wear their prejudices on their head.

What I find far more dishonest and offensive are the sentimental or sombre Holocaust realist films which ostensibly sympathise with the Jews but disguise any libidinal desire the Jews might have for retribution. Films such as Jacob The Liar, Life Is Beautiful and even Schindler's List are borderline patronising and condescending. If a Jew has any desire for real agency in these films it is usually minimal, concealed or behind the scenes. Critics of IB's Jewish portrayal seem to prefer the idea that the Jew should not be anything other than a victim in a WWII film, when really what other person but the Jew has the right to enact such divine vengeance against the Nazis? IB is one of the few films I've seen (along with perhaps Black Book) that's fully honest about this and recognises that if any medium should express the Jew's desire for vengeance against the Nazis it's in the WWII propaganda films. Ultimately Basterds is a fantasy, but its honesty about that fantasy is far more real than most Holocaust kitsch.

Is District 9 racist?

2009-08-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

District 9 kicks off with a hallucinatory spectacle. An alien spaceship hovers ominously over Johannesburg, a distant blur through the smog of the city. After three months of uncertainty, humans cut through to discover a sprawling mass of sick, malnourished aliens. The insect-like refugees are rounded up and segregated into shanty town encampments on the ground, then treated with all the prejudice that whites applied to blacks during apartheid. Director Neill Blomkamp sets up his sci-fi blockbuster as a hallucinatory, doco-styled satire on racism, but ultimately favours entertainment and action over politics and social substance. The shift in priority was a deliberate decision made by Blomkamp but it also renders the film's racial subtext worryingly ambiguous.

From the beginning, the aliens (referred to by the derogatory term 'prawns') are portrayed as a dirty, aimless mass, a primordial horde surviving in slums and scrounging through garbage. When they're not sniffing petrol, they're stealing cell phones and sneakers. Moreover, they're a leaderless mob, with their command ship having broken off and disappeared. The film's first 45 minutes sets it up so the aliens are pure Other, a cypher for all our racist libidinal projections. And it's a comfortable set up. Not only are the 'prawns' aliens in a sci-fi film but they're computer generated, detached from our usual human sympathies. A lot of time we even laugh with, rather than at, the racist comments made by interviewees. Indeed, the first act begins to resemble a racist joke: one interviewee wise cracks "they steal sneakers, then check for the brand", while interracial sex becomes a running gag. At one point, Wikus jokes about aborting some alien babies as he kills off some alien pods ('they pop like popcorn!') and callously offers a subordinate a souvenir for his first 'abortion'.*

The jokes would usually just pass as edgy satire. But somewhere down the line Blomkamp passes from straight satire into pure entertainment - and it's not clear when. D9's movement from satire to action to sentimentality creates a half formed, schizophrenic tone that ultimately fails to cohere. Ostensibly realistic with its documentary style and expert interviews, the film also employs a video game aesthetic of violence and action. Despite raising ideas of libidinal projection and our prejudiced subjective responses, it then asks us to enjoy the detached spectacle of bodies of 'bad guys' blown up and shot up. Similarly the film's satirical intent backfires in the face of its cosmic sentimentality. When Wikus tells the aliens they must relocate he advises the camera: “The prawn doesn’t understand. One has to say ‘This is our land. Please, will you go?’” The intention is a satirical reversal of the attitude of European colonisers to South Africa. But as Armond White points out, the allegory is misapplied "because the prawn, who resent their mistreatment, primarily yearn to beam up back to their Mothership." Wikus' racist statement is not only true in the context of the film, it's also in the interests of the aliens themselves. The problem is similar in the case of the 'leaderless' nature of the aliens. Although likely a satirical reference to the racist attitude that blacks are no more than uneducated and unruly workers who need white guidance, the film's narrative actually differs little from this racial subtext - the apparent leader, Christopher, needs the intervention of white guy Wikus before he can help rescue his fellow aliens. The end result is a confusion of genres that turns the film against itself. To quote White again: "Blomkamp and Jackson want it every which way:The actuality-video threat of The Blair Witch Project, unstoppable violence like ID4 plus Spielberg’s otherworldly benevolence: factitiousness, killing and cosmic agape." It doesn't work.

District 9's half formed satire is what I imagine critics thought the satire of Bruno to be: a dangerous representation of stereotypes that inadvertently supports the racist attitudes it satirises. But unlike Bruno, which takes the stereotype to the point of rupture, District 9 fails to even interrogate it. Yet the critics who were so quick to jump on Bruno for its 'gay face' have praised District 9 almost unanimously. They see no problem with the ambiguous cypher-like nature of the aliens or even the more outlandish Nigerian stereotypes, who come across as scary black voodoo gangster figures who wish to steal our jouissance (the alien powers). Indeed, all the characters of District 9 are little more than cartoon caricatures, with the film's main protagonist the most one dimensional of them all. It's hard to see Wikus as anything more than a satirical punching bag yet the film urges us to invest in a completely unbelievable romantic relationship between him and his wife. Not only are we supposed to accept him as a real and complex character but we're asked to sympathise with him to the point of offensiveness. Wikus himself is a racist, but his racism is 'endearingly' portrayed by the film as self-centred stupidity. His sudden 'selfless' shift in the final act appears not only arbitrary and against character but a desperate manipulative bid by the filmmakers to win audience sympathy. Moreover, the film seeks to show him in a positive light by contrasting Wikus' pathologised and bureaucratised racism to the 'real racism' of the hardcore corporate/military elite. Personally, I prefer the hardcore racists - at least they're honest (and coherent).

The film's only real attempt to get behind the alien stereotype focuses on two characters: Christopher and his son. But the way it tries to reveal their 'human' side is through a patronising sentimentality that borders on insult. Exploiting a soppy soundtrack and a cute Ewok-like baby, the film bluntly tries to elicit pity for the two aliens despite a distinct lack of character development. Rather than putting the aliens on an equal level of respect and sympathy, this 'compassionate voyeurism' keeps them at a condescending distance. In its own ignorance, the film thus establishes a link between compassion and cruelty. Both compassion and cruelty treat their object with condescension and ensure their subject's superiority as the one giving compassion or perpetrating cruelty. The effect is borderline sadistic. While the film publicly expresses its sympathy, the viewer can secretly continue projecting the same libidinal fears because the film's sympathy is so detached. District 9 sets up a system of cruelty that it supposedly critiques but its patronising solution is disturbingly similar to that same position of cruelty.

What may have begun as a genuine attempt to reveal the hallucinatory object of racism, ends up merely confirming the racist attitude as the film's ideal vantage point. District 9 has promising ideas - the horrific metamorphosis as a radical turn to empathy - but they fail to be exploited and serve mainly to aid the film's video game aesthetic. Ultimately the film's satirical and sentimental detachment works merely to let the viewer off the hook. The enjoyment of the film's narrative and the dictates of its genre are however completely dependent on the racist stereotype it satirises.

*The main protagonist's surname 'van der Merwe' is also a common name used in Afrikaans jokes.

UPDATE
Mike Ely at Kasama contextualises D9's racism brilliantly:

There is an English-speaking liberalism in South Africa that sees itself as very enlightened and even “anti-racist.” It views the Boers (South African whites speaking a Dutch dialect) as racist cavemen — as the authors of the horrors of apartheid. And yet this same Anglo-liberalism is notorious for its own deeply embedded sense of white superiority, and its own “civilizing” mission. There is a patronizing white racism that self-righteously poses as support for a particularly non-radical kind of “multiculturalism” in South Africa.

This film struck me as a very coherent expression of that Anglo-liberalism in South Africa — with its vague support for tolerance, and its deeply flawed view of the real horrors of sub-Saharan Africa today. In other words, this was not a racist portrayal of Nigerians somehow “plopped down” into a wholly different plotline — the racist view of subsaharan Blacks is part and parcel of a particular critique of apartheid and “the Boers.”

The racism as portrayed in D9 is a view of racism as the product of ignorance. Although an outdated view, it is actually perfectly conducive to view of liberal multiculturalists. Under the liberal viewpoint, Wikus is a racist because he's stupid and doesn't know better. Yet this same viewpoint engages in a more complex and fetishistic disavowal of racism. Instead of 'my culture is better than yours', reflexive racism argues 'your culture is different to mine'. This idea of 'tolerance' allows us to publicly believe that all cultures are equal, but still act as if ours was superior. The way the film then excuses its seemingly derogatory portrayal of voodoo loving Nigerians is that it's out of respect for the uniqueness of their culture - that they enjoy differently. Indeed, the film's portrayal of Nigerians sways between the reflexive and classic racist fantasy: the ethnic Other has access to a jouissance that is strange to us (the voodoo); and that they want to steal our enjoyment from us (the alien blood from Wikus' transformed hand). What both fantasies share is a 'threat' that comes from 'them'.

And yet D9 does (if not self-consciously) show a more complex push-pull in its racist subtext by portraying capital and globalisation as also a threat (the MNU corporation). The strengthening of ethnic identities (the Nigerians) can be seen as a reactionary defense against the spread of capitalism and its Western forms of enjoyment (MNU). But what are the 'prawns' in this context? Zizek offers a clue when he outlines the underlying fantasy of all racism as being "if only they weren't here, life would be perfect, and society will be haromious again". What the prawns represent is this hallucinatory figure of racism. In a sense (the film falls short of entirely exploiting this), the prawns are not blacks so much as they are the racist embodiment of blacks - a fantasy figure whose erasure will lead to an organic, whole society (much like the Nazi's view of the Jews). Yet instead of exposing the racist fantasy - that the subject of racism isn't an obstacle to a harmonious society but actually conceals its impossibility - District 9 seems to actually endorse it. The public fantasy of having the aliens 'get off our land' becomes the private fantasy of the aliens themselves. The spectre of a harmonious society hovers over the film like the alien mothership - one that can only be realised once the aliens leave the earth.

Working with Terry

2009-08-12T01:23:00.000-07:00

Emmanuel Lubezki on working on The New World with Terrence Malick.

I've read just about every interview or essay on Terrence Malick, but these four brief snippets have to be the most insightful portraits of the man I've seen so far.

Coffee and Cigarettes

2009-08-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

Watched Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control last night. Reminded me a lot of the rhyming and rhythms used in Coffee and Cigarettes, so thought I'd post my old MSN review of Cigarettes (since taken down) before I write up my take on Limits:

Long before there was Tarantino, there was Jarmusch. It's a name synonymous with indie cool but his latest opus could be his hippest flick to date. Opening (and closing) to the confidently chilled beat of "Louie Louie", Coffee and Cigarettes preaches Jarmusch's minimalist cool with a slow nicotine burn and the ricochet of caffeine induced conversation. The film was shot in customary black and white over a period of 17 years and collates a series of short, seemingly detachable scenes in which characters engage in natural and bizarre dialogue over coffee and cigarettes.

The humorous exchanges between characters often skirt the void of abstract chaos but there's more method than there is madness. The episodes build up cumulative and interrelated meanings, with Jarmusch making copious use of rhyming and doubling, twins and cousins, characters and real life stars. In the film's inspired use of cameos (including a fantastic double performance from Cate Blanchett), celebrities are shown playing themselves, characters or sometimes both. In turn, their conversations end up happening on two, even three seperate levels simultaneously (as in the hilarious "Cousins?" vignette featuring Alfred Molina and British comedian Steve Coogan).

The titular drugs soon become the rhythmic base line to the characters' tangential riffs and failed attempts at communication (which only seem to result in more doubling), so that towards the end they seem to pull the film back in on itself. It's only in the final scene that the underlying loneliness and estrangement is held back to reveal two old timers blissfully reminiscing, allowing us to settle into a tender poignancy beyond (or amongst) the absurdity. Perhaps in the end, the film seems to say, our greatest human connections will always be in the past, in our memories, or in a tenuous double imaginative that we can rarely grasp.

Why I Love Jeff Goldblum

2009-08-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

Because the only thing better than Jeff Goldblum is a Jeff Goldblum impersonation.

On Bruno

2009-07-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

Bruno is one of the funniest movies of the year, possibly even better than Cohen's previous farce, Borat. So it's surprising and somewhat troubling that Bruno went from Number 1 at the US box office with a hefty (if slightly less than expected) $30 million weekend gross, to Number 10 in the space of three weeks - making little more than its $40 million budget. What's worse is that the majority of critics and audiences saw the film as too crude, 'trying too hard' and simply not funny. David Rakoff at Salon, along with many other commentators, went further and accused Cohen's 'gay face' of reinforcing stereotypes and being offensive to homosexuals.

The true offensiveness however lies in the critical response. The 'too crude' comment is almost completely hypocritical in light of the widespread praise and record breaking success of The Hangover - an inexplicably overrated flick that grossed more than $250 million and still ranks in the top ten at the US (and Australian) box office after several weeks. A lame, safely crude comedy with a far more broad and offensive portrayal of homosexuals, The Hangover feels like a 13 year old boy trying to impress his older brother (the film was originally written as PG-13 and then later rewritten as R). In contrast, Bruno is the sublime of crude comedies - its humour so crude it violates any safe distance from which to enjoy it.

So when reviewers argue that Bruno's provocative antics failed to realise a good enough social insight, or worse, offended homosexuals, they completely miss the point. The self serving, liberal provocation of homophobes is only half the punchline. Far more controversially, the film seeks to satirise the popular mediated image of homosexuality. Cohen's Bruno embodies a pure fantasy figure, but one that is shared by right wing homophobes and the liberal mass media. For homophobes, Bruno materialises and brings into direct confrontation their image of the homosexual as sexually invasive and a threat to the child. But for the mass media, in a double reflexive twist, Bruno represents the liberal conflation of homosexuality with campness taken to its logical yet absurd endpoint. What both sides share is an image of homosexuality as fantasy, as potential - of homosexuality as camp. Bruno not only reveals the dependence homophobes and homosexuals have with this camp image, but by breaking down the fantasmatic distance that sustains it, the film also exposes its absurd libidinal substance.

Under the camp framework, homosexuality exists purely as euphemism, a constantly reflexive identity. You can suggest but you can't be. The homosexual is funny but detached, stylish but clean, sexually provocative but never threatening. Yet this conflation of homosexuality and campness is largely historical. Campness originated in the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when homosexuality was something to be concealed and encoded. Camp behaviour was thus a way for other homosexuals to send signals to each other and find sexual partners, their actions manifesting as ironic artifice because of the closeted conditions of the time. As Johann Hari writes:

So camp behaviour represents the values of the 19th-century closet. To survive and to retain any sense of self-esteem, the gay men of that generation developed a camp outlook on life. Its main features were irony, theatrical frivolity, an aristocratic detachment from the worries of straight people, parody, and an emphasis on style over substance. It made sense then. But I've got news for you: the closet is broken, and we're never going back - yet too many gay people are still trapped on an outmoded camp-site.

What makes the camp attitude a parody of itself today is the rise of the mass media and its inherantly reflexive attitude and obsession with expose. Today, the outrageous is normalised, the private is public. The saturation of popular culture has established a common self-referential attitude. Rather than being subversive in this context, campness is completely commodified. It's no surprise that popular shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy portray homosexuality as more a lifestyle choice than an actual sexual identity. Homosexuality qua the mass media is largely without substance: detached, ironic, and apolitical, within a self-imposed 'edgy' context. Bruno embodies this media stereotype but taken to its absurd endpoint - a narcissistic reflexiveness that revels in false provocations. He 'pushes the limits' with a photoshoot of a crucified black baby; he tells an angry talk show crowd 'they can't handle the truth'. It's not just that the people's reactions are part of the satire (although the association of the child with homosexuality is arguably the most symptomatic image of homophobia), but that the framework of provocation itself is a satire on Bruno and the reflexive image he represents.* What's being satirised isn't homosexuality but the reactionary camp identity that frames it.

Ironically, what's missing in this camp/gay conflation is actual sexuality. Sex only exists in camp in so far as it is suggested. The subversive achievement of Bruno is that it takes this euphemistic sexuality to the point of hallucination. In the most surreal spectacle of the film, Bruno gives an imaginary blow job (and much more) to Milli Vanilli's invisible spirit. The scene marks a hallicunatory clusterfuck of fantasies to rival David Lynch's 'Daddy wants to fuck' scene in Blue Velvet. Not only do you have the fantasmatic figure of Bruno (ie. a character that could not exist without the fantasies of liberals/homophobes) having imagined and increasingly bizarre sexual relations with the ghost of a dead 80s celebrity (Rob Pilatus incorrectly referred to as 'Milli'), but this act itself is also watched/ignored by a phoney psychic who falsely conjured up the spirit. And of course, 'Mili' was himself an infamous fraud, a vehicle for projection, having mimed his own songs, which in turn were not even originally sung by him (his role merely the marketable front man). The conflux of fantasies is stretched to such a degree that the Other, that is the Other who must be convinced of the fantasy (ultimately the cinema audience), is itself revealed as fantasy.** Bruno brings the euphemism of camp to its logical conclusion, that is to a point of rupture, yet without ever becoming anything less than euphemistic. The effect is the sublime of the ridiculous. We have no idea from which position we should be looking from. Any sense of grounding, of distance, is completely subverted, the mode of suggestion itself loses its symbolic efficiency.***

By revealing the absurdity of such a euphemistic identity, Bruno exposes the reactionary and ridiculous nature of both camp and homophobic attitudes. Both sides perpetuate each other by keeping the fantasy image of the homosexual at a distance. That is, both sides fuel their libidinal economy (their means of projection) through homosexuality's suggestive behaviour and its concealed nature (even outing sometimes merely privileges the concealment). The actual homosexual meanwhile remains hostage to this camp framework. Similarly, the critical reaction confuses Bruno's purely camp portrayal with that of homosexuality itself, rather than as an extreme effort to expose its difference. Indeed, before the film came out, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, concerned about Bruno's embellishment of camp stereotypes, requested a disclaimer be placed at the beginning of the film which would advise the audience that Bruno was intended to expose homophobia. Yet the effect of such a disclaimer, apart from misinterpreting the joke, would have been to make the film truly homophobic. By designating a safe liberal vantage point from which to view the film, the disclaimer would have served only to affirm the homosexual/camp conflation and thus sustain the libidinal distance that helps fuels homophobia. Leagues ahead of such reactionary groups, Bruno proves its controversial cred by frustrating any such safe position.

*There is an almost a redemptive naivety in Bruno's belief in society's limits and the power of outing in an age where such symbolic constraints cease to exist. Bruno's awareness in today's hyper awareness is almost innocent (and thus the perfect evolution of Borat's more retro 'innocence').

**Perhaps this framing of the audience's own euphemistic identity accounts for those viewers who complained they "felt homosexual" after watching the film.

***A similar hallucinatory quality is present in the film's climax where Bruno masquerading as Straight Dave mimes sexual acts with his assistant after initially pretending to wrestle him, provoking anger and tears from the drunk homophobic audience as well as fulfilling Bruno's fantasy of controversially outing himself.

Why I Love Bill Pullman

2009-07-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Is Slughorn a pedophile?

2009-07-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

Just watched the latest Harry Potter. Like the rest of the series, it's handsomely made and a lot of fun. But in terms of plot mechanics it never succeeds beyond the functional. Indeed, in some cases it doesn't even function. One of the film's most glaring ruptures concerns the suspicious nature of its new character, Professor Horace Slughorn. As my friend Billy Stevenson honestly queried: Is it just me or is Slughorn a pedophile?

It's not just his closeness to students, or the special parties he hosts for selected teenagers, or his deviant morphing into a couch - Slughorn's character actually constitutes the film's biggest plot hole. Early in the film, Slughorn is revealed to have had a special relationship with the young dark lord himself, Tom Riddle, but in a crucial memory scene between the two characters the actual memory has been suspiciously altered. Dumbledore orders Harry to get friendly with Slughorn and discover what was hidden in the memory, while also stressing that the truth will be essential in combating Voldemort.

However, after a long protracted process, when the truth is finally admitted by a guilt ridden Slughorn, the revelation ultimately doesn't make sense. Slughorn is said to have told Tom Riddle about the horcrux, a magical object that will give Voldemort his invincibility by allowing parts of his soul to remain preserved in various objects (there are seven of them). However, the urgent necessity of this information and the guilty behaviour of Slughorn is rendered moot by the film's backstory. Dumbledore already knew about the horcrux before Slughorn revealed it since his hand was burnt in the process of getting the first object, the ring. And for that matter so did Voldemort since he had already read about the horcrux and surely could have figured it out himself (being the dark lord and all).

This doesn't just represent a glaring plot hole in the film but suggests something even more horrible hidden within the memory. The event not only led Tom Riddle to fully realise his dark powers but also caused some sort of multiple personality disorder (the splintering of Voldermort's soul into seven objects). In this light and taking into account Slughorn's other strange quirks, the only thing that makes sense is that Slughorn was a pedophile and that this repressed memory was actually his sexual abuse of Tom Riddle!

Ridiculous as it may sound, fans have not only suggested this point but backed it up with concrete evidence. As one fan wrote:

He (Slughorn) "collects" young teenagers, and spends a lot of time socializing with them in private parties. In the memory that Harry finally obtains from him, Slughorn has six teenage boys in his office late at night, and is behaving almost flirtatiously towards Tom Riddle - he flatters him shamelessly and winks at him. We never hear exactly why Blaise Zabini is in the Slug Club, but he seems to be good-looking like his famously beautiful mother.

This would suggest that the reason Ron was rejected was not because he was too dumb but too ugly! But the writer goes on to point out something even more revealing. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is not only one of JK Rowling's favourite books but is also indirectly referenced in the Half Prince book.

Here are Harry's thoughts on Slughorn.

Harry had a sudden and vivid mental image of a great swollen spider, spinning a web around him, twitching a thread here and there to bring its large and juicy flies a little closer.

This is a quote from Humbert Humbert, the pedophile narrator of Lolita. He's talking about trying to find her in the house (he's her mother's tenant).

I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting the in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard.

Humbert is an inflated spider; Slughorn is a swollen spider. Humbert gives "little jerks to this or that strand"; Slughorn twitches "a thread here and there". Humbert is "like a wily wizard"; Slughorn literally is a wily wizard. Seeing as we know JKR has read Lolita - in fact, it's one of her favorite books - there are too many obvious comparisons between these passages for it to all be a coincidence.

Of course, the film directly associates Slughorn with inflated spiders when he accompanies Hagrid to mourn his dead pet, Aragog.

All of this suggests Slughorn's close relationship with Harry's mother (a relationship which is never really explained) could be more than just that between teacher and teacher's pet...

Critical Aestheticism

2009-07-16T19:38:00.000-07:00

Steve Shaviro articulates (part of) his argument for 'critical aestheticism' and the relevance of the beauty rather than the sublime:

Most aesthetics of the past century has been focused on the sublime, and has disparaged the beautiful. This is because the sublime involves a moment of rupture or disproportion, whereas the beautiful seems to involve accommodation, comfort, and proportion. Thus, for instance, Roland Barthes is clearly on the side of jouissance (which is sublime) as opposed to mere plaisir (which corresponds to the beautiful).

I argue, however, that Kant’s analytic of the beautiful remains important, because it is really a nascent version of what Deleuze calls singularity. A judgment of beauty is non-cognitive and non-conceptual; beauty is that which cannot be subject to rules, or derived from rules. It is always a singularity or an exception. It cannot be reduced to norms. The problem of the beautiful is how to universalize — or even, how to communicate — something that stubbornly refuses all categorization, all universalization. The beautiful is something that, on the one hand, I feel impelled to affirm, and to communicate, but that, on the other hand, resists all the categories and norms that are presupposed by the pragmatics of communication and the norms of conceptualization.

I think of critical aestheticism, therefore, as a practice of affirmation that resists norms and categories. I think that critical aestheticism can be contrasted with, and perhaps even opposed to, the “ethical turn” in recent critical theory. “Postmodern” ethical thought, from Levinas to Judith Butler, produces a subjectivity that is infinitely responsible, but that cannot really do anything that would be commensurate with the weight of this responsibility. To think “ethically” in this manner is to misrecognize, for instance, the forces, processes, or structures of Capital that create human misery without this misery being anyone’s “responsibility” in particular. Aesthetics does not lead to an alleviation of this misery either; but I think that an aesthetic appreciation of potentialities and singularities is better than an ethical recognition of infinite responsibility, when it comes to responding to the powerful and impersonal forces that oppress us.

The best statement of these matters seems to me to be Mallarmé’s wonderful maxim: “Tout se résume dans l’Esthétique et l’Economie politique” (Everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy). In other words, I favor aesthetics as over against ethics; and I favor political economy (or what in Marxist circles is often disparaged as “economism”) as over against the privileging of the political in such recent thinkers as Badiou and Zizek.

eulogy for the old ratings system

2009-07-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

By Billy Stevenson

These days, cinema ratings are little more than plot synopses. This film is rated M because it contains some sex, a brief, violent scene, and moderate coarse language. This film is rated PG because it contains some questionable supernatural moments, a few scenes that might scare younger children of a particularly sensitive type, and one isolated expletive.

When I was a teenager, however, the ratings system was much more rigorous. There were (by and large) only five major criteria - sex scenes, violence, coarse language, drug use and adult themes - coupled with three degrees of intensity - low, medium and high level. On the one hand, this created a strong, consistent sense of limits and transgressions - I was always very aware that a 'high level violence' film was going to shock me in a more lingering (often visceral) way than a 'medium level violence' film. Medium level violence was violence as entertainment; high level violence was violence as a genuine affront. The clearest memory I have of a 'high level violence' film was the adaptation of Kate Grenville's 'Lillian's Story', which featured an overwhelmingly graphic, brutal depiction of its protagonist cutting her wrists.

On the other hand, this turned the ratings system into a kind of ingenious act. How eloquently could a film be reduced to its component transgressions? Order played a big part. From what I remember, 'Reservoir Dogs' pointedly placed 'coarse language' before 'violence' in its rating information, as if to suggest that even the nauseating spectacle of a man having his ear cut off was somehow less affronting, or perhaps even original, than the sheer proliferation of expletives throughout that film. But the most ingenious, fascinating and transgressive category was 'Adult Themes' - and its most compelling attachment was to the 'R' category. When a film was rated 'R' for adult themes alone, you knew it contained something crazy, something so fucked up that it had to be euphemised from the very beginning. When I was in my mid-teens there were many films that I wanted to see simply because they had this rating - including 'Happiness', 'Lolita' and 'Passion' - their 'unmentionable' transgressions turning out to be homosexual paedophilia, heterosexual paedophilia and incest.

There were other, slightly more watered down versions of this 'adult themes' euphemism. For example, an apocryphal designation was 'horror theme'. When this occurred - and I distinctly remember it in a Stephen King adaptation called 'Sometimes They Come Back' - you knew that you were in for a film that, despite not containing violence per se, would be suffused with violent, horrific imagery of a sort that was possibly even more disturbing than violence itself. David Croneberg's films would also frequently fall into this category. Similarly, 'Sexual References' always seemed to denote a film in which something far dirtier than the mere act of copulation was taking place, especially when it was the only reason given for a high rating (as occurred, for example, in 'Cruel Intentions').

There were many other interesting nuances to this system. For example, 'Low Level Violence' typically occurred when violence didn't have any individuated, or moral agency, and was often attached to the havoc wrecked by natural disaster films. 'Drug Use' was the least titillating category, since even a film that was rated 'R' purely on the basis of it was usually about as exciting as going behind the scenes at some dodgy chemist, or seeing people mismanage medication. And, speaking of chemists and medication, graphic medical imagery was usually classified under 'adult themes' or the more apocryphal 'horror theme', not quite falling into the category of violence.

I think the new, mildly idiotic model of censorship ironically reflects a decline in cinema's pre-eminence and cultural presence. It seems that new popular media go through a censorship bell-curve. When they first emerge, they are not deemed worthy of censorship, and allowed a (in retrospect, extraordinary) degree of latitude in dealing with sex, violence, political heterodoxy etc. A similar thing can be observed in the early days of the novel (early eighteenth century). At the height of their time in the cultural spotlight, they experience the most stringent censorship. Cinema had been the dominant medium of the twentieth century from about the 1920s onwards, but it was only after the critical and artistic experimentalism of the 1960s and 1970s that it gained a wider cultural legitimacy, such that, by the mid to late 80s (around the time this rigorous censorship came in), the cinema had become a hallowed space - pleasure-ground of both the masses and the cultural elites, the church for whom Spielberg's wondrous aesthetic provided the liturgy.

However, no medium stays at the forefront of cultural life forever, and the rise of the internet, as well as the DVD market (so different from the VHS market) has ensured that the movie theatre is no longer the centre of the media world as it once was - and has perhaps become almost the opposite, a kind of dead place or no-place; a media backwater. Which is to say that our experience of the media has become, and will continue to become, less embodied - once everyone has the Internet and television as a mobile device, it will seem so surreal that we ever associated our point of access with specific rooms in our house: computer rooms, studys, television rooms, lounges etc. I think the same has already happened with cinema - with the advent of DVDs, and the availability of films to stream and download (both legally and illegally), it's become almost surreal to think that there was a time when the only way to see a film was in a single, socially designated space (or, alternatively, that you could confirm or subvert ideology simply by choosing what cinematic venue you attended - a much more difficult task, now that Dendy shows 'He's Just Not That Into You'). I guess my final point, then, is that the aesthetic and taxonomic elegance of the ratings system turned spectator transgression into a systematic art - the few times I sneaked into an R rated movie, I felt like an auteur, rather than some teenage punk wanting to catch a look at some actor's throbbing member.

Underrated Film #2: War of the Worlds

2009-07-14T23:39:00.000-07:00

I've already posted a detailed analysis of Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds so I won't spend further time defending the film here. Suffice to say that it is not only one of The Beard's best films but *the* best film on 9/11 (followed closely by Man On Wire). What hasn't been engaged with as much though is the film's subtle dialogue with that other Spielberg alien blockbuster, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It goes without saying that the two films are in stark contrast but a comparison offers some revelatory insights into Spielberg's maturing aesthetic.*

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CEOTTK) represents Spielberg's most utopian picture to date - a worship of cinematic spectacle and a celebration of Spielbergian wonderlust. The film's final twenty minutes approaches something close to the religious in its encounter with the sublimity of the image. Yet it's in the film's references to cinema and television that the transcendent connection of the image is born. More than any other Spielberg film, Close Encounters establishes the communal cinematic and televisual experience as the contemporary equivalent of a church. In one of the film's opening scenes, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfus) insists his children go see Disney's Pinocchio because of the magic and wonder it promises. Meanwhile, The Ten Commandments plays on the television in the background, alluding to the religious significance of Spielberg's image. The biblical epic's 'angel of death' scene echoes the aliens appearing within the clouds in an earlier scene, while the Mount Sinai narrative suggests the mountain Roy will later have to climb to encounter the mothership. In a later scene, Roy is woken up by a cartoon set in space and referencing a 'thing from another world' - suggesting both the childlike wonder and immaturity in what he is doing. In each occurrence, Roy expresses a fascination and joy in watching the image.

Spielberg (who worked as a television director for many years) seems to suggest it is the television which has the potential to bring a sense of the mythic into the quotidian, the panoramic into the domestic. The film's editing between the suburban, family drama and the global, panoramic narrative is itself an attempt to bridge these two points and realise a mythic sense of wonder within American suburbia. In the process, however, there is a sense of disconnect (the image of old ships and planes found in the middle of the desert) and a breakdown of the barriers between outside and inside (Roy begins throwing dirt and uprooted bushes into his house through the kitchen window, all in service of creating a sense of the monumental in his living room). Yet even in this disconnection there lies the promise of transcendent connection. Indeed, in the midst of Roy's breakdown, as the quintissential suburban television show Days of Our Lives plays, a newsbreak reveals the image and location of Devil's Tower, thus providing the vital link to Roy's vision.

It is this utopian promise hidden in the image that Close Encounters realises and fulfills. Truffaut's character Lacombe comments later in the film: "There must be hundreds of others also with the implanted vision who never made it this far, simply because they never watched the television. Or perhaps they watched it but never made the psychic connection." The communal possibilities exist in the image but can only be realised by those open to seeing it. The transcendent object in Spielberg's film may initially seem absent but it is in fact truly existing.

But if the image in CEOTTK is a mode of transcendence, War of the Worlds realises it as a point of trauma. Indeed, in WOTW, the images are completely disconnected. Even the initial promise of connection only points to further disconnection. Early in the film, Robbie flips through television channels and we see random, brief images that reference later incidents in the film: an ad for robots (a reference to the Tripods); then a shot of someone waking up (suggesting all the times Ray is shown waking up); then a shot of an oncoming train hitting a truck on the tracks (referencing the flaming train that passes Ray and the kids at the rail crossing). Although hinting at some sort of revelation, each image merely references its own disconnection. The alien tripods remain a mystery throughout the film; Roy's waking up reveals only his disorientation; while the flaming train is a disconnected image by itself. Indeed, the reference to the train seems to refer to the latent, disconnected train imagery that appears throughout Close Encounters. From the model train crash in Roy's opening scene, to his encounter with the alien spaceship at the rail crossing, to the fake rail accident used by the government to hide the arrival of the aliens. The train imagery in Close Encounters represents the film's unconscious anxiety - it suggests a sense of hope not realised (the model train crash) and an appearance that means nothing (the cover up story). This anxiety is fully realised in War of the Worlds. The image once revealed is still a disconnected image without a uniting vision.**

The effect of this disconnected imagery is to open up a traumatic hole that threatens to destabilise the characters' sense of meaning. In WOTW, this causes a break down of the senses and the social order while failing to lead to any transcendent resolution. Indeed, the difference between the two films lies in the way they resolve this disorienting effect of the image/spectacle. The locus to measure each film's point of departure lies in their homages to John Ford's The Searchers.

Spielberg has praised the Ford classic as one of his all-time favourite films and claims to have watched it a dozen times, twice while on location for Close Encounters. Both WOTW and CEOTTK share The Searchers' narrative of a man trying to save someone - a child, a teenage son - from an alien people even though that person doesn't want to be saved. But while CEOTTK realises the transcendent horizon and hope of rescue embodied in the Searcher's opening scene, WOTW recognises the isolated father figure encoded in the Searcher's final scene. In WOTW, it is the father who resolves the trauma of the image, yet, as in The Searchers, he is also seen as an isolated, silohetted figure. Although Ray has brought back the daughter, there is also a melancholic sense that he can never fully return to the innocence of the family. Such is the paradox of the film's resolution of the traumatic image - it both creates the father and isolates him. Thus while the sublimity of the image in CEOTTK is a means to renege on fatherly duties and attain a transcendent union (Roy deserting his family for the aliens), in WOTW it is a means to restore the role of the father yet inscribe a more profound alienation.

*The key similarity and difference lies in the name - Roy Neary and Ray Ferrier - with the respective surname perhaps alluding to the character's relation to the image.

**Although the television transmits the news reports of the lightning strikes it is ignored or not recognised by the main characters. In WOTW, the fascination with the image is little more than dumb transfixion. Even when they do pay attention to the news reports in a direct manner (ie. from the reporter) the image provides no real explanation, only more questions that are never answered.

David and Jason

2009-07-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

David Lynch talks up Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix and Richard Strauss in an awesome guest DJ spot with Jason Aldrich on KCRW...

Speaking of Jasons, how's this for a hypothetical:

If David Lynch had directed Friday the 13th Part V...

Debating Robespierre

2009-07-12T04:26:00.000-07:00

BBC2 presents this documentary on Robespierre, terror and the French Revolution, with interviewees including Slavoj Zizek arguing in favour and historian and art critic Simon Schama arguing against (although the documentary overwhelmingly favours the anti-terror stance).

The real argument seems to be the cross over of the philosophical and the political. Zizek's argument of terror as virtue has philosophical weight but fails (or is not shown) to properly engage in the more concrete details of the Red Terror (and the similarities to Stalinist terror). Critics of the terror are simply dismissed as wanting a revolution without a revolution (that is, without the terror involved in real change). In rebuttal, Schama says a revolution without a revolution was the American Revolution...

Downloadable for the next six days:

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution

Bonus: soundtrack includes Hans Zimmer's gorgeous score from Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line!

UPDATE
Lenin's Tomb leads the attack against the documentary and its 'counter-revolutionary' bias.

Over The Rainbow

2009-07-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

David Lynch's fascination with sex is no secret. His films portray some of the most provocative sexual imagery in American cinema. But unlike standard Hollywood fare, sex in a Lynch film is not just an ecstatic physical sensation but "the key to some fantastic mystery in life". Lynch himself comments on how he sees sex as a "vast realm with many different levels, from lust and fearful, violent sex, to the real spiritual thing at the other end."

"It's like jazz: you can listen to one pop song just so many times, whereas jazz has so many variations. Sex should be like that. It can be the same tune, but there are many variations on it."

Out of all Lynch's films, Wild At Heart provides the most explicit exploration of the sexual relationship. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect to the film is the way Lynch colour codes the various sexual positions. It's as if in these various sex montages Lynch is seeking to create a tonal mapping of the sexual act.

We begin with RED.

In a Lynch film, RED indicates fantasy. Think of the association of Billy with the red lamp shades in Inland Empire or the red suit worn by the mysterious Man From Another Place in Twin Peaks. The passion of RED suggests the ecstacy of coming as close as possible to the fantasy object. In Lynch's mapping of sexual positions, RED is sex while sitting up, both partners facing each other. Since the sexual relationship can never be equal (there is always some sort of power imbalance or some sort of fantasmatic distance), RED is the closest sex can come to achieving an impossible equality with the least fantasmatic distance. Of course, the fantasmatic distance tends to reassert itself just before it breaks down.

When that occurs we have GREEN.

GREEN is an eroticisation of the sexual object. It places the object at a certain distance which enables us to enjoy it. The position also often entails looking up at the image in awe or admiration. In Wild At Heart, Lynch equates GREEN with the woman being on top, allowing the man to desire her at a distance.

The opposite of this position is BLUE, which depicts penetration from behind.

Whereas GREEN looks up at the object, BLUE looks down. In contrast to the presence evoked by GREEN's fantasmatic distance, BLUE recalls a sense of absence constitutive of desire itself. In some cases this position can be a response to the enigmatic desire of the Other. By enjoying the absence in the Other's desire one relieves oneself from the trauma of its unreadable presence.

What makes these scenes exceptional though is the way Lynch varies the degrees of shading and even mixes colours up. A blend of reds, oranges and greens often penetrate a white haze as depicted below.

The ambiguity of these filters perhaps indicates the relatively neutral status of the position they depict. The typical sexual act always involves a power imbalance and it usually favours the man on top. The white/yellowish haze registers this imbalance as standard while also invoking the influence of other shades. For example, Lynch shows an awareness of the fantasmatic distance involved in the woman's position here when he adds a slight dash of green on a close up of Lula's face.

What's most interesting about Wild At Heart's colour coding however are the connections to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick famously revered Lynch, regarding Eraserhead as the one film he wished he had made, and it seems Lynch's artistic treatment of sex influenced Kubrick's sexual exploration in Eyes Wide Shut. A quote made by Lula after one sexual sequence ("Sailor, sometimes you just about take me right over that rainbow") is echoed in Eyes Wide Shut. When two beautiful women tempt Bill at Zigler's party they ask him "Don't you want to go where the rainbow ends?", while the dress shop Bill visits is named Rainbow Fashions. Kubrick even employs similar lighting to Wild At Heart with vibrant use of reds, yellows, greens and blues. The colours seem to draw as much from Christmas decorations as they do from the spectrum of the rainbow, and, indeed, both films share a connection in their references to Christmas: Lula tells a story about her cousin Dell who is obsessed with Christmas; Kubrick's film takes place during the holiday season and is replete with Christmas decorations. For both films Christmas works as a symbol of enjoyment while also suggesting the anxiety of achieving full enjoyment.

Underrated Film #1: Blindness

2009-07-06T03:35:00.000-07:00

Fernando Meirelles’ (‘The Constant Gardener’, ‘City of God’) powerful adaptation of Jose Saramago’s classic novel inspired not only bad reviews on its release but outright hatred. Roger Ebert called it "one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen". Talkbackers described it as one of the worst movies ever made. And those who didn't walk out half way through lambasted its creators for wasting their time and money. Even the positive reviews were highly conditional due to the film's excessive 'bleakness' and ugly aesthetic (even when those same critics called the film beautiful). A relative of mine, despite liking the film, was unable to sleep the night after watching it. Yet in spite of these responses Meirelles’ adaptation is said to be remarkably loyal to the tone of its original source as well as much of its content. (Saramago's own reaction to the film is more than positive.)

This inexplicably hostile response suggests something more confronting and radical at work than simple stylistic preferences. More than any other film this year, 'Blindness' addresses contemporary audiences' mode of enjoyment - then seeks to break free of it. Set in an anonymous city (parts Toronto, parts San Paulo), the plot concerns a mysterious disease, known as the ‘white blindness’, that ravages the population and leaves the social order in tatters. One woman (Julianne Moore) retains her sight and is able to help the infected even as she witnesses the destruction going on around her. The film never says directly what the blindness represents or what causes it, or even whether it is a good or a bad thing. However, there are hints along the way. Mark Ruffalo's character raises the idea early on of agnosia - a state in which a person suddenly fails to recognise a previously familiar object, person, colour or smell. The word derives from agnostic, a state of 'not knowing' or lack of faith. Yet, rather than interpreting this as some sort of moral blindness, as most reviewers assumed, we should take it as representing a more fundamental lack intrinsic to belief itself.

Although ostensibly alienating, the lack imposed by the blindness also has a ‘disalienating’ effect on its subjects. Initially unappreciative of their respective spouses, Mark Ruffalo’s doctor and the First Blind Man's Wife (Yoshino Kimura) gradually find their desire renewed after they become infected. The one eyed man (Danny Glover) also declares that he’s never felt better than when he was completely blind. It is this liberating side of blindness that the film privileges. In this respect, the blindness of the film correlates with the advent of the law, as explicated by Slavoj Zizek. In contrast to theorists who emphasise the law’s oppressive and alienating effects, Zizek praises its emancipatory potential. He argues that the law distances the subject from the Other and thus frees him from total submission to the Other’s whim, opening up a space for desire. Here desire is not a response to a presence but an absence. That is, the subject’s desire under the law, as much as it is still a desire of the Other, must always involve a dissatisfaction, a lack, since it can never line up exactly with the desire of the Other. Ironically it is through this distance that the subject's desire to no longer totally alienated in the desire of the Other.

The aesthetic of the film imitates an aesthetic of desire. Scenes are painted in harsh, washed out tones, sometimes completely filling with white, mimicking the white blindness experienced by the characters. Other scenes take place in a darkness of murky browns and dull greys. Oblique camera angles are often favoured in which a principle character may only partially be in the frame (if at all) while other shots even drift out of focus. Although the cinematography still retains a cinematic beauty and level of convention allowing us to understand what's going on, we are constantly reminded that we lack a stable position from which to view events. In this world of blindness, the gaze itself acts as a motivating absence. Unlike most Hollywood films that offer a fantasmatic experience of the gaze (the object-cause of desire), Blindness portrays it as impossible. (Roger Ebert's comment that a more worthy filmmaker would have exploited the film's voyeuristic possibilities is here less a criticism than a desire to return to this fantasmatic enjoyment of the gaze).

All these characteristics locate Blindness in what Todd McGowan calls the ‘cinema of desire’. By rendering the cinematic gaze as absent or unstable, the film produces a space for lack which sustains our desire. In so doing it acts as a reproach against an inherently fantasmatic cinema that allows spectators to minimise a sense of lack and immerse themselves in images. (Even when desire is incited by fantasmatic cinema it is ultimately resolved)* Desire as McGowan conceives it indicates the subject's dissatisfaction with the social order and thus aquires an "incipient radicality", becoming associated with the political films of Italian neorealism as well as the avant garde works of Orson Welles and Clair Denise. Recent American independent films (what some call ‘New Hollywood’) have also adopted this style, such as Lars and the Real Girl, Two Lovers and Steven Soderbergh’s Che. Even Paranormal Activity can be put into this category since it offers the viewer a traumatic experience of pure desire (something I'll discuss in a follow up post). What these films share is an aesthetic loyal to the traumatic question desire poses and the impossibility of its resolution.

Such a cinema of desire is particularly confronting for contemporary audiences. The rise of mass entertainment and the internet has led to a state where instant gratification quickly fills in the lack constitutive of desire. In this world, enjoyment is a ceaseless demand on the subject; happiness a duty that must be followed. Social network sites and reality television nullify the trauma of the absent gaze, while the unstated subtext of words are constantly brought to the fore in contemporary reflexive attitudes and more literally in the hypertext of the web (see Jodi Dean’s paper on the internet). In this way, the absence of the object loses its power to incite desire and meaning itself begins to lose its symbolic efficiency. What the cinema of desire attempts is to reinscribe that gap back into the social order and thus redefine our own limits and possibilities.

To this end, 'Blindness' undercuts any fantasmatic resolution to the desire it posits. When Mark Ruffalo’s character is having sex with the prostitute we experience the ecstasy of the sexual fantasy as the image approaches complete whiteness(we still see partial outlines). But at the point of expected transcendence, Meirelles jarringly cuts to an objective point of view which depicts the unflattering sexual act against the grey background of the hospital lunch room. In another scene, a crowd rushes the hospital in panic after a new quarantine member is shot by a sniper. Meirelles then crosses from the peaceful conditions of the original ward members to the crowd rushing the doors and smashing windows. The parallel editing is set up so that we expect to see the ward violently overrun, but instead the film cuts abruptly mid action to a different time and place. Rather than providing an expected resolution, Meirelles emphasises the irresolution of the two points of desire he has set up. Even the relief provided by the following scene is undercut by its enigmatic quality: it is a day time shot of the empty hospital yard where a spade falls from the sky onto the ground (later revealed to be for the burial of those killed in the panic).

As much as the film privileges desire, it also exposes the ideological effects of avoiding desire's impossibility. In their attempts to cope with the blindness, characters oscillate between a sense of public order and an obscene demand for enjoyment. But in contrast to critics who saw the film as revealing the obscenities beneath the social order, Blindness instead reveals the mutual dependence between the two. Gael Garcia Bernal’s bartender appears at the moment Mark Ruffalo’s doctor takes charge of the ward and tries to set out rules for burying the dead. Rebelling against Ruffalo, Bernal instead lays down an obscene list of rules governing food supplies: food in exchange for valuables, and then later, women. In a similar way, the soldiers guarding the quarantine tease the blind as much as they help them. Instead of the law disintegrating to reveal the obscene enjoyment it opposes, the film reveals this obscene enjoyment as the motivation for the rule of law.**The two sides work in mutual dependency. Idiotic enjoyment provides relief from the demands of the public law just as the public law provides relief from the demands of enjoyment.

The utopian drive of the film attempts to break free from this vicious cycle by looking beyond the law. Since the law is always incomplete – it has no truth to ground it – it always reaches for something beyond itself which it can never attain. It is this beyond which offers the hope of releasing the law from its obscene supplement. Indeed, once Moore's group kills the bartender and the accountant, their attachment to the public law vanishes in a literal sense: Moore opens the hospital gates and realises the guards have abandoned their posts. This turn in the film does not provide a resolution to the character's dilemma but opens up a space for faith and for new possibilities (the food, the rain, the house). What makes Blindness radical then is not that it asserts the emancipatory potential of law beyond the law but that it reinscribes this beyond back into the law itself. In reference to the agnosticism quoted earlier, the film doesn't just reveal a lack in faith, it also celebrates a faith in lack.

This move is most evident in the film’s final scene and its relationship to the prophetic character of the one eyed man (Danny Glover). Glover's character acts as a mysterious paternal figure in the film, occasionally speaking in lyrical narration and seeming to provide an emotional relief from the film’s ‘bleak’ aesthetic. He enters the film as an absence (introduced by the sound of his radio) but is discovered hiding in a kitchen cupboard by Moore (the only seeing character). Once revealed, he is able to give a broad account of the epidemic's fallout and the situation outside, providing a narrative knowledge previously lacking. In a film which constantly notes the traumatic absence of the gaze, Glover’s character domesticates it. Even his eyepatch gives the false impression he can see through the other eye. Yet the tone of his character is somewhat in contrast to Meirelles' bleak aesthetic. Indeed, one of the main criticisms of the film concerns the use of Danny Glover’s character and his narration, with critics accusing him of being allegorically heavy handed and overly sentimental. Yet Glover's fairy tale-like narration is not only carefully framed by the film’s aesthetic but allows for a profound reversal in the film’s ending.

In contrast to Moore’s Madonna-like gaze (Ruffalo complains that she has become less his wife than his mother), Glover’s gaze is almost pagan-like. He is the character who offers the blind their first taste of enjoyment through the music from his radio. He is explicitly linked with the prostitute, a character who enjoys the sensations of life and was also visually impaired originally. Recounting that his life has never been better since he turned blind, his voice registers a deeply melancholic sense of enjoyment characteristic of paganism. For the pagan, enjoyment is always to be captured before it ends ('enjoy it while it lasts'). Glover’s final narration emphasises this melancholic limitation when he interrupts the celebration of the First Blind Man's sight (“Who would be so foolish as to cling to this blanket of blindness? Who would be so foolish as to think its intimacies might be lost?”). He points out that not all the group’s rejoicing was entirely selfless and introduces Moore’s possible blindness as the ‘price’ to be paid for happiness. Glover’s narration occurs at the highest moment of enjoyment in the film, but the effect is less an expression of the characters’ true feelings than a conditioning of the enjoyment we see on screen.

The key here is the narration’s fairy tale quality. Glover’s ‘conditions’ recall the Christian philosopher GK Chesterton's 'Doctrine of Conditional Joy' in pagan fairy tales. Fairy tales always operate under the notion that you can enjoy but only on a certain condition eg. you can only go to the ball until midnight, or as Chesterton says “you may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion”. The 'doctrine' allows us to believe that if it wasn’t for this condition, we would be able to experience full enjoyment. But rather than acting as obstacles to enjoyment, the conditions are precisely what enables enjoyment. The return of sight feels like a relief after the insistence to live out our dissatisfaction, the deadlock of desire. But for this fantasy resolution to maintain its value as fantasy, its enjoyment can never be a full enjoyment. Glover's narration thus feels intrusive precisely because it tries to cover up the inherent failure of the fantasy.

However, at the point Glover introduces the possibility of the prohibition – that Moore could be going blind – his narration stops. Here the film shows the crossover between the pagan condition and the Christian faith as well as their opposition. As Zizek states, “the function of the arbitrary condition is to remind us that the object itself, access to which is limited, is given to us by an inexplicable arbitrary miraculous divine nature.” It is precisely this very arbitrary nature that reveals the beyond of law itself. The law is law because it is law. That is, the beyond of law is an affirmation of law in the irrationality of its injunctions, in its incompleteness - of law as faith. Faith is ultimately what attaches us to law more than enjoyment and it is faith that suspends the law's spectral attachment and opens up the space for new possibilities. It is a faith in the lack of law as such, not filled in by its superego underside. Glover's narration thus stops after announcing Moore's blindness because it is this very condition (and its reinscription) that enables the film to break free of his melancholic tone. Pagan enjoyment is not privileged over the Christian substance but is in fact framed by it.

This reversal is illustrated in the editing of Moore’s final moment: "I'm going blind she thought", the narration stops, we cut to whiteness, back to Julianne Moore, and then back to the whiteness as it pans down so that we see the city skyline below, and then it ends, without a final reverse shot. The ambiguity is essential here. We are not certain Moore has turned blind since the second shot reveals the city in the ‘blind perspective’ but does not cross back to Moore to confirm this is her point of view. In a state of narrative suspension, we are literally seeing as if we were blind. In this way, Moore’s Christian enjoyment is clarified as that of Saint Paul's 'as if' mode ("from now on let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing"). As Zizek argues, while the pagan limit, the condition of joy, allows us to rejoice, the Pauline 'as if' mode deprives us of rejoicing by displacing the external limit into an internal one. In the context of the film, what prevents us from seeing is in fact the condition of sight itself. Thus we have to “rejoice as if we were not rejoicing” or see as if we were blind – only then can faith emerge.

Glover’s father like figure is thus exposed as merely a symptom, a figure that prevents us from recognising the impossibility of desire. Moore’s final moment then confronts the subject with the ultimate choice between “the Father or worst”. Her final act is not to integrate or sublate the Father qua symptom but to fully assume the impossibility constitutive of desire, summed up in the paradoxical final image. The lack of reverse shot lends this image a fragile singularity that marks it as the apotheosis of the film's aesthetic. As the absent gaze itself, the shot represents desire at its purest. As Zizek writes, such a desire occurs when the subject assumes without limitations its “being towards death”, the ultimate annihilation of its symbolic identity. In this light, the final shot represents a true example of the act, not a response limited by the Other.

One could say the opposite of this shot is the response from critics and audiences. Accustomed to the limited fantasmatic enjoyment inherent in cinema, contemporary audiences were unable to realise the more radical enjoyment of desire encoded in the film. Yet their reaction still remains somewhat inexplicable. Despite the bleakness I have emphasised in this piece, the form of the film is perfectly conducive to love, subtlelty and even beauty. By sustaining a faith in lack that redeems the law's liberating potential, Blindness' aesthetic realises a utopian space that triumphs any ugliness. In a cynical age that compulsively supplements the lack with idiotic enjoyment and fantasy images, championing a utopian dimension to the law is perhaps the film's most radical of acts.

*Even when the experience is traumatic and leads to a breakdown of fantasy (like most David Lynch films), fantasmatic cinema still allows the audience to experience this enjoyment of the gaze.

** The effect of the white blindness is not then that it completely dissolves this obscene attachment to the law but that it makes it more explicit. Part of the reason is because this attachment is mostly disguised in the image. Theorists like Pierre Legendre argue that the image is the primary means by which the subject’s desire is directed and his attachment to the law confirmed. According to Legendre, the image offers a fantasmatic relay to the question of desire, seducing and fascinating the subject. Blindness thus becomes the perfect metaphor for revealing the relief encoded in the enjoyment of the image and for reopening the space for desire.

UPDATE
One of the things I fail to address in this piece is the film's use of white instead black to illustrate blindness. The complete whiteness would seem to contradict the lack I argue is imposed by blindness, but it in fact reveals the emancipatory quality of this lack. The whiteness is still an absence but an absence achieved through too much presence. The film's aesthetic still privileges the lack constitutive of desire but it sustains it through a form of too much fantasy (presence), such that that the fantasy breaks down and the distance/attachment of the image dissolves. The effect is similar to the reinscription of the beyond of the law back into the law itself. By depicting the blindness as whiteness, the film achieves an aesthetic that opens up possibilities in lack rather than merely recognising a basic lack as such.

A similar 'ethics of fantasy' is depicted in the scene where Moore walks in on Ruffalo having sex with the prostitute. What's noticeable is the character's utterly unconventional response. She does not chastise, weep or get angry. Such a reaction would only increase the sense of prohibition and the pleasure this entails (already suggested in Ruffalo's hypocritical guilty cries). Instead Moore tells them not to say anything so that she can begin to understand the act. She then turns to soothe the prostitute, confronting the traumatic Real of the Other not with anger but with love. As she speaks, Moore reveals the secret of her sight to the prostitute, placing herself in a vulnerable position. This exposure of an inner fantasy (that which is kept secret) dissolves the sense of beyond that sustains fantasy, collapsing any sense of distance. One of the drawbacks of a 'basic' loyalty to desire is its isolating detachment (which Moore initially chooses after first seeing the act). By pursuing an ethics of fantasy, that is pursuing it to the point when it is no longer fantasy, Moore breaks down this isolation, achieving a vulnerability that also engages with the trauma of the adultery. She thus not only dissolves the beyond that enables the act's transgressive enjoyment but subversively reinscribes it into a love for the act's traumatic form.

The original Paranormal Activity ending?

2009-07-05T00:32:00.000-07:00

According to a user on the film's imdb message board, this is what happens in the original ending of the movie:

*SPOILER*

The version I saw had Kate standing over him, then she went down stairs and started screaming, then he went down after her. There was a bit of screaming from Micah, then Kate walks back upstairs covered in blood and holding a knife. She sits next to the bed and just rocks there for hours. You hear one of her friends call the house worried cause they haven't heard from her. Later the friend visits to check on them and you hear her scream downstairs. The camera is still on Kate who is still rocking having not moved the entire time. It fast forwards again and the police arrive. They come in the house find the body (again all off screen). They start calling for anyone who's inside to show themselves. Finally they make it up to the room where Kate still is. She stands up (with knife in hand) and goes toward the door asking for Micah and the police think she's dangerous and coming at them and shot her. The movie basically fades to black with police scanner calls and what not.

The user goes on to say the ending was not particularly scary but fit in with the rest of the film. While it was somewhat anti-climatic, he/she says it was also more grounded and real.

From the sounds of it, this ending could be great. In contrast to the conventional shock tactics of the alternate ending, it seems the original returns to the terror of anticlimax or irresolution played with throughout the film. I love the idea that we see Kate just rocking, not for hours but for what sounds like days post-Micah's death. Waiting, watching and not knowing is all this film requires to terrify. *SPOILER*

Thought Of The Week

2009-07-02T17:02:00.001-07:00

The Hangover would be a much funnier movie if Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum and Woody Harrelson played the three lead characters.

Underrated Films

2009-06-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

Discovering a truly underrated film today is harder than you think. The rise of video, DVD, the internet and niche film sites has got to the point where your average underrated film can slip easily into the mainstream. Traditional cult films like The Hudsucker Proxy and Dark City now enjoy widespread recognition. The release of little known classics on DVD means fewer films are forgotten due to their unavailability. But despite the expansion of film appreciation, there are still big holes in the critical consensus.

I consider the films on this list - ranging from little known cult films to recent blockbusters - to be the least widely recognised films in contemporary film criticism. What they share is an unjust critical response on release and a recognition today that is marginal at best. Yet each film offers a unique cinematic experience and one worthy of canonisation. Such underrated films are not only genuine rediscoveries but also symptomatic of the limits in contemporary critical thinking.

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch)

Criticised for its radical tonal difference to the popular TV series, Fire Walk With Me actually represents Lynch's most original and harrowing film to date.

2. The Lord of the Rings (Ralph Bakshi)

Almost universally hated, this is in fact one of the most visionary and haunting animations ever made. Legendary director Ralph Bakshi captured more of Tolkein's gravitas and Middle Earth's strangeness than Jackson's uninspired trilogy ever did.

3. Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt)

This 80s apocalyptic cult film leaves Los Angeles to a group of teenagers and some crazed zombies. Of course, the end of the world is really just an excuse to go shopping. If ever there was a film which directly evoked the utopian excess of the 80s this is it.

4. Sunshine (Danny Boyle)

One of the most sublime experiences to be had at the cinema yet Boyle's gorgeous sci-fi epic received tepid reviews on release and a mixed response from audiences.

5. Speed Racer (Wachowski Brothers)

Truly a feast for the eyes, this is surface spectacle at its purest. Critics who panned it for CGI overload kind of missed the point.

6. War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg)

The best film to deal with September 11 on the level of pure affect, Spielberg's intense alien invasion blockbuster combines a searing sense of iconography with a relentless intensity. Yet audience response was mixed and critics largely unimpressed. See my defense of the film here.

7. Blindness (Fernando Meirelles)

Inspiring inexplicably hateful reviews, this much slammed adaptation of Jose Saramago's novel is actually Meirelles' best film and one of the most politically radical films of the year.

8.Primer (Shane Carruth)

Made on a budget of $10,000, this little seen indie gem is one of the best time travel films ever made. Carruth's script lends an ingenious twist to the time travel paradox, such that enjoying Primer is like enjoying the infinite convolutions of a math's problem (that's a good thing).

9. In the Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader)

Adapted from Ian McEwan's novella by Howard Pinter, with cinematography by Dante Spinotti and music by Angelo Badalamenti, this is actually one of Schrader's most complex and haunting films. Christopher Walken has never been better as an aristocratic sado-masochist.

10. Dark Passage (Delmer Daves)

This noir is perhaps the most appreciated of all the films on the list yet the critical consensus still regards it as the worst of the Bogey-Bacall pairings. It is in fact a terrifically strange and surreal journey with a far more original aesthetic than critics recognise.

I'll be posting pieces defending each film over the next several weeks but feel free to use the comment section below to discuss the films above or list any other films you consider underrated.

The Spot

2009-06-25T00:42:00.000-07:00

Just realised Richard Kelly's new film 'The Box' features Holmes Osborne again (he played the father in Donnie Darko and the Senator in Southland Tales)

My Spot: Holmes Osbourne and Jack Nance.

I can't be the only one who's thought this!

Double Down On Oscar

2009-06-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

Oscar has decided to expand their best picture nominations from five to ten for the first time since 1943.

Initially I was hesitant about this. Some years it's hard enough to dredge up five worthy nominees let alone 10 (ahem, 2008). But fortunately the Academy has made the switch during what is shaping up to be one of the best years of the decade. I can already pick 10 great contenders off the top of my head:

1. The Road (John Hillcoat)
2. Nine (Rob Marshall)
3. Public Enemies (Michael Mann)
4. A Serious Man (Coens)
5. Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
6. The Informant (Soderbergh)
7. Shutter Island (Scorsese)
8. Avatar (James Cameron)
9. Invictus (Clint Eastwood)
10. The wild card that pops up from nowhere and becomes movie gold.

When you think about it, ten nominees is not much different from what the Golden Globes does every year with its drama and comedy categories. In fact, for most of Oscar's first decade it had ten best picture nominees, with a record 12 in 1935.

However, apart from the occasional dud year, I can foresee a few problems. One is that the number of director nominees will remain the same. As far as the two categories correlate, this could automatically highlight the more worthy best picture nominees while revealing the rest as token. The whole exercise could simply become a pathetic gesture. As one commentator somewhat controversially noted, it turns the Oscars into the Special Olympics!

In this light, I can see the expanded category being used as an excuse to nominate more studio blockbusters (such as The Dark Knight) so as to attract a larger audience share. This may not initially be a problem but could later turn Oscar into an even more populist award than it already is.

The benefit of increased recognition could also backfire. In a bid to give each best picture contender its token set of nominations, other worthy films could be squeezed out of the remaining categories. Or the Academy could simply ditch the formula that the film with the most nominations wins best picture...

Of course, all of this pales beside the fact that five more best picture nominees will mean a longer and even more masturbatory award show than ever thought possible.

Update

Nikki Finke is violently against it. She makes the same point I do that this will only lead to more studio nominations as opposed to independent films. But she also reports the change was the direct result of pressure on the Academy from the studios.

The Horror of No-Activity

2009-06-04T21:42:00.000-07:00

This is an edited version of my review of Paranormal Activity which Aint It Cool News published:

Paranormal Activity is the scariest film I've seen in years. Unpredictable, hyper realistic, it left me (and much of the audience) physically shaking. But unlike most examples of the genre it's a horror film built almost exclusively on dread, on empty time, empty spaces, more on lack of movement than movement. The horror resists being defined by one thing and it gradually seeps into the whole film.

The story is simple enough - a couple experiencing paranormal activity in their house decide to set up a camera to catch any strange behaviour while they're asleep - but it's the execution that really scores. The film divides into documented sections (like 'October 6, 2006, Night #11") where we watch the bedroom via night vision while the rest of the film deals with Kate and Micah's reactions the next morning and the growing tension inside the house. Initially the day drama feels like a relief to the horror sections but more and more it just accentuates our dread for when the next "night #" title comes up. By about Night #19 there were shudders and loud moans from the audience, as in 'I don't know how much more of this I can take'.

Looking back, however, the film really only has a few big scares (including one which gave everyone a collective heart attack). The real horror comes from a strange in-between space where you're not sure how to react or are anxiously waiting for the characters to respond. But the more you go crazy worrying about what will happen the less the film has to do to scare the living shit out of you.

Part of what makes Paranormal Activity work though, as opposed to other DV horror (like Open Water), are the performances. For the first 15 minutes, the two leads appear like non-professional actors - there's no particular realism they're trying to achieve, their mannerisms feel goofy, amateurish. But then you realise it's because there's no fourth wall. They don't act 'real' because it feels like they're not acting. Instead, they respond like any other contemporary couple - with a reflexive, detached attitude in which the horror is just something cool to record, something to joke about. But as the happenings increase, the film turns that distance against them.

That's what makes Paranormal Activity more than just a horror film. Like The Ring, it fully meets the challenge of creating horror in the digital age. As the internet and the screen increasingly become the windows through which we experience the world, our own ways of seeing develop a vicarious structure. We see things from a distance, encode even the most shocking of things within a banal, ironic frame. It's an automatic form of demystification that becomes a coping mechanism for a rapidly changing and increasingly strange world.* Anything unknown is Googled. Anything traumatic (ie. sept 11) is reproduced from a hundred different angles. Horror films begin to work the same way. No matter how scary the film tries to be we always approach it from a safe distance where we can enjoy the scares. However, when that very distance becomes part of the horror itself, the effect is not just scary it's traumatic. Part of the horror of The Ring, for example, was that it directly addressed our own distance to the screen - the possibility that what was in there (the tv) could also be out here was traumatic.

There is no distance with Paranormal Activity. Our comfort zone, our sense of superiority, is already depicted (and subverted) in the characters and on the screen. From Micah's jokey and detached fascination with the demon to the way the couple use technology to examine what happened post-event. So much of the time we are watching Kate and Micah rewatching what happened while they were sleeping, or researching on the internet a similar case, or examining the audio for signs. Yet despite all this, when the horror does actually happen, we don't know where to look, what's going to happen, or where to retreat. We are immobilised, forced to confront the gap that exists between us and the object. The previous ironic detachment is revealed to be actually a form of fantasmic connection: it allows us to maintain our control over the object without actually confronting it. The direct confrontation with the object is actually a point of violent rupture which shatters how we are defined. Our true subject position is in fact a 'no-subject' position, a point of immobility, of pure gaze. In this way, Paranormal Activity engages our own reflexive attitude, twists it and throws it right back at us, in the process becoming a true horror of the sublime.

When the film ended, it cut to a white screen with strange sounds and subtle digital interference. The lights in the cinema didn't return. For about five minutes, the audience I was with didn't know how to react. The feeling in the cinema again became one of pure dread, not knowing if something else was going to happen. Eventually someone waved their hand in front of the projector allowing the audience to laugh. The laugh though was a nervous one, conscious that any reaction was better than the horror of no reaction, of uncertainty.

Despite all this, the film's most shocking feature has been its distribution. Not only have Dreamworks yet to set a release date (the film was first screened in 2007), they may have remade the film. A person who saw the film over a year ago told me that the ending I saw was an alternate ending, completely different and "not nearly as good". The original ending was apparently much more intense and brutal, while also sticking closer to the tone of the film with more action taking place off screen. The ending I saw did indeed feel like the one time the film went Hollywood. It's abrupt end and self-referential tone was a little too obvious for a film that constantly challenged how you reacted to it. The person I spoke to also said the entire film had been edited down by about ten minutes, with some of the day scenes cut.

Having scoured the net for any information on the film's final cut I have come up with naught. There are a growing number of fans for this film and even more people who are dying to see it. The question is why isn't there more of an outraged push from the fan sites to keep this original ending? Why is one of the scariest films of the decade being royally fucked over by the studios without protest?

*One of the hallmarks of Family Guy is the way it converts the strangest and most traumatic characters/events into banality.

Inland Empire Connections: The Marine's Sister

2009-05-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

Despite having only a few seconds of screen time before exiting with a pleasure droning ‘Sweeeet’, the character known simply as "the Marine’s Sister" is a far more revelatory key to David Lynch's Inland Empire than she initially seems.

Indeed, this crutch bearing figure is actually identified a long time before her appearance. In her angry monologue to Mr K, while describing a marine from North Carolina* known as the Phantom, Susan Blue (Laura Dern) makes reference to the Phantom's one-legged sister "with a car stick for a leg". She also mentions that his sister killed three kids in the first grade. Considering how central the Phantom is to Inland Empire - he first appears looking for an opening and is then shot by Blue at the end - what does his sister reveal about his role in the film?

Here, it is Lynch's previous films that hold the clues to the Marine's sister, most noticeably in the character of Juana Durango (played by Grace Zabrinskie) in Wild At Heart.

Juana is the hit-woman called upon to assassinate Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton). Like the Marine’s sister, she is somewhat incapacitated and need crutches to walk (the sister with no leg, Juana with one foot bigger than the other). Echoing the Marine's sister's long drawn out 'Sweeet', Juana is a figure of obscene enjoyment, perversely circling around her object (counting to ten) before finally killing him. But what’s important here is that Juana is not the one actually doing the killing. Although her partner Reggie warns Johnnie that "he can't stop her", it is in fact Reggie who is doing the killing in order to serve her enjoyment.

Closer examination of this scene reveals further clues. As Juana is harassing Johnnie, the character of Dropshadow holds a gun over Johnnie's shoulder, calling it "a marine issue". In a previous scene from the script (deleted in the film), Reggie reveals that he owns an appliance store but also works for the government in the Secret Service. The dialogue also states that he has a sponsor (General Osvaldo Tamarindo y Ramirez) and that he requires permission to kill. I will explain these clues further in my next post, but at this point merely make note that Bobby Peru (Willem Defoe) also has a US Marine Corps (USMC) tatoo on his hand and is said to have served in Vietnam where he killed "lotta women and kids and old people". Peru is not only the recipient of the second silver dollar but he also works with Juana's similar looking daughter (Isabella Rossellini).

This brings us to the connections with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The relationship between MIKE, the Man From Another Place (MFAP) and BOB is an even more revealing clue as to the nature of Juana and the Marine's sister. Echoing Reggie's statement that he owns an appliance store, Man From Another Place, MIKE and BOB "live above a convenience store". As with Reggie's subservience to Juana, the character of BOB (who appears so dominating and threatening) is eventually shown to be subservient to MIKE and the Man From Another Place. As critic Todd McGowan points out in his book 'The Impossible David Lynch', instead of possessing the source of enjoyment, BOB's actions actually allow MFAP to enjoy (symbolised by the corn MFAP eats). After BOB has killed Laura Palmer, MFAP puts his hand on MIKE and both ask for “all their garmonbozia (pain/suffering)”.

Here, one should recall MFAP's earlier statement - “I am the arm” - and the connection between MIKE and MFAP, Juana and the Marine's sister becomes clearer. Each of the characters are somehow disjointed, incomplete. As McGowan explains using Lacan's theory of subjectivisation, the body detached from itself is a result of the subject's submission to the signifier, the social symbolic sphere, which imposes itself as a cut on the body. The detached body part then functions as the libido for the subject, the source of drive. As we continually seek our detached body part, we continually return to and repeat the experience of loss (the movement of drive as such) and it is this that provides enjoyment. With their detached body parts, MIKE/MFAP, Juana and the Marine's Sister can be seen as representative of drive, a drive whose enjoyment BOB, Reggie and the Phantom ultimately feed.

What does this then reveal about Inland Empire's key character - the Phantom himself? I'll take this up in my next post.

*North Carolina happens to be the state in which Blue Velvet takes place and the violent opening of Wild At Heart also took place "somewhere on the border between North and South Carolina".

Inland Empire: Finding An Opening

2007-07-16T20:04:00.000-07:00

I was going to write this after I'd seen Inland Empire a second time but thought I'd post my personal thoughts now and see where they go. A first viewing of a Lynch film should always be an intuitive one and Empire is no exception. With that in mind, I thought it was important to try and articulate my experience of the film first and only then attempt a provisional reading of the film. I still haven't sorted out who's who and what's what so if there are mistakes in my reading or recounting of the narrative I ask that they be considered as part of a continual progress of exploration and decipherment, where wrong roads will be taken and new openings appear. In a film like Inland Empire, which constantly frustrates any base of understanding and whose very purpose seems to be to violate the cognitive position of the spectator, the temptation is to dismiss it as obscurantism or, worse, wallow in empty abstraction. If art is to have any opening to the new, both paths should be resisted.

Firstly, however, I cannot understand the criticism that this wasn't the typical Lynch film. This is pure Lynch. It's true that there wasn't as clear a divide between conventional narrative and psychological narrative (although it is still there) but I think that the conventional narrative framework has always been (or at least more and more so) an arbitrary hook Lynch can hang his abstract art on. In the context of his work, Inland Empire is almost the epitome of the themes and style developed in his previous films. It fulfills the unbearable anxiety and disintegration seen in the last third of Lost Highway, the relentless sensory violation of the murder of Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me and the semi-religious pop-culture iconography in Wild At Heart. All Lynch's least liked films but they occupy too much of his body of work now to be simply dismissed as 'bad Lynch'. There are similar thematic and aesthetic moments in these films (hints of what is to come) that find their true fulfillment in Inland Empire. For me these moments are what Lynch has always been about - this panic state where fantasy and reality combine and identity disintegrates - and here he takes it to its (il)logical extremes.

Secondly, there is still a stupid conventional narrative that works within the film (I say stupid since its function is purely as a hook for the abstract emotion and ideas - as are all narratives in a certain sense). In case you missed it, the plot as I read it is essentially this: there's a curse on the film '4/7', now renamed 'High On Blue Tomorrows', and the previous Polish actress (the one watching the tv) is stuck in some sort of limbo. As Laura Dern starts to play her character she finds herself trapped inside the film world and is no longer able to distinguish between herself and her character (the Laura Dern with the southern drawl). In order to rescue the other actress and break the curse she must kill her character and it is her attempts to initiate this radical break that we experience for most of the film. Eventually, through a suicidal act, the character is killed and the Polish cast are freed from limbo. There's obviously more to the narrative but I think this is the essential gist of it.

Now, I think the first reaction to a Lynch film should always be intuitive. Forget the usual critical criteria you judge from - Lynch films invent their own rules and meanings and part of the pleasure is discovering them. While Inland Empire is a harder film to understand (it's very purpose to constantly destroy any cognitive mapping that fixes upon it) it is still incredibly rewarding, meaningful and coherent on an emotional and intuitive level. Throughout the film I was in a state of extreme anxiety and dread. At the same time Lynch filters through a beautiful spectrum of emotions - sensuality, humour, love, sexual desire, pop euphoria - but all through this distiller of anxiety. The effect was one of the most extraordinary cinematic experiences I've had. Everything is felt on a completely abstract level. I was never bored. I left this film shaking.

(This may be a silly analogy but) The experience that comes to mind when describing the experience of the film is something that happens to me during long distance running. After a long period of running, when I reach the point of exhaustion, it's then that I always try and run my fastest. And as I run, it feels as if my whole body and its movements have become terrifyingly alien to me - in fact, I find it incredibly hard even to maintain a sense of self. The fear is that my body will run away from me (or that my mind will completely dissolve). It's also at this point that whatever trashy pop music I'm listening to becomes almost pure and direct sensory affect. It's almost as if, in this state of extreme stress, your self is disintegrating, each part hanging together - just - by an expanding, fragile thread, so that you reach the point where each speck of self is defined by (or even becomes) each sharp note of music. This is similar to what I experienced in Inland Empire. With such extreme disorientation, affect becomes pure and self becomes completely abstract. (Incidentally, this is why I loved the beautiful digital cinematography; the grainy, dissolving pixels make it feel as if your disintegrating self is part of the film).

It's in this way, that I think the film tries to integrate our responses - not just through the extreme horror, but also through more predictive methods. The rabbit sitcom, for instance. Even though the audience was laughing at this scene, their response was eerily and uncomfortably mirrored in the canned laughter. The effect is similar to the moments when we realise that the scene we were watching was actually a scene being filmed. Even the 'interrogation scene' 3/4 way through the film, when the man with glasses picks up the phone and his responses seem to be addressed to questions from the audience ("Yeah, she's still here" "Yeah, it'll probably be a while longer")! In the middle of our screening an audience member yelled out 'It's not a comedy!' in response to the constant laughter of the audience. In a way she was right. This film turns our very responses as an audience into a source of anxiety. The effect is that we are as trapped within the film just as the characters are. There is little sense of safe distance, of 'awareness', of what comes next. Our only sense of self is the immediate affects that the film provides us.* The film attains a direct immediacy as a result, almost like a violent bypass to our personal subconscious. It is the true horror of the New. No symbolic protection. No critical distance. We are completely vulnerable and it is terrifying.

So what the hell is going on then?

I think this is Lynch's most religious film to date, almost apocalyptic. The sudden changes in place, the switch of actresses playing Laura Dern's character, the different groups of people she surrounds herself with (the whores, the working class bbq guys, her two friends), even the schizophrenic shifts back (and forward) in time - all these are attempts to violently seperate and capture her character, distill its identity seperate from her surroundings, from the context that frames her. It's about trying to grasp that elusive X about a person, that which exists in pure appearance and cannot be substantiated or grounded. Slavoj Zizek defines it as "that imperceptible, unfathomable, and ultimately illusory feature that accounts for the absolute difference within the identity", "that which is in them more than themselves". What the film ceaselessly tries to do is a violent uncoupling of the self from this self in appearance, Nikki Grace from Susan Blue.

Perhaps, this elusive X is best described in the anxiety of a love relationship (when we can't pin down what is about that person that possesses us so) but it is also explored in the overlap of the divine and the human in Christ. Zizek's reading of the crucifixion is applicable here. He describes divinity, the X to which man strives, as operating like a 'bone in the throat' of man. That is, the X of the Beyond is actually its own limit, the obstacle that prevents man from being fully man (as opposed to being divine). This 'bone in the throat' description seems a perfect description of Empire, which involves a constant, violent repetition, whereby the X constantly returns. There is someone always there watching.** No matter how many times we destroy the self it constantly returns as self in appearance, self within the symbolic.

The radical act of Christ then, in his crucifixion, was that he took upon himself this excess, the remainder, the limit itself (ie. the sins of man) but also that, as son of God, he transposed that gap back into God Himself, so that He became an impotent God who has failed in his creation. What dies on the cross was not God in his finite representation then but the God of Beyond himself, the God as excess, remainder. In this way, Christ's crucifixion is an authentic Act, a free act in that it contains within itself the very coordinates that create it and opens up a space for struggle, to find again that primordial Event proper by which identity was established.

So what does this have to do with the film? In a similar way, this is what Laura Dern's character accomplishes in her suicide. I say suicide but it should also be remembered that Dern does not kill herself - it is her watcher, the Polish actress, who kills her. Yet it's long, drawn out nature and the Polish actress' quick disappearance, makes it feel like a suicide and thus reveals what's truly going on here. No longer is Dern experiencing the abstract dread as something external that threatens to annihilate her but she is now internalising it and it is this internalisation that radically affects her contingent identity and creates the violent break she has been searching for. It is this shift that Zizek argues occurs in the passage from Judaism to Christianity - what changes is not God so much as the identity of the believer him/herself and the change in God (no longer the transcendent Other but Christ) is just the 'reflexive determination' of this change. Uncannily, it is this movement from Judaism (religion of anxiety) to Christianity (religion of love - love for the abyss) that bears a striking resemblance to the film's movement from Anxiety to Love (the strangely euphoric ending).

Other religious (and Lynchian) archetypes emerge. The two homeless women who talk over Dern's dying body seem to engage in existential conversation like two angels. The black girl telling Dern "No more blue tomorrows... you on high now" - death of the Beyond? The Asian relating the story of her blond wigged friend who has an apartment and which is later seen at the end occupied by various characters throughout the film - is this heaven in the non-transcendental sense? The apartment is owned by the one legged lady - a symbol of existence without excess? And is not the community of people, the singing, representative of something like the Holy Spirit? The Christian love for the incompleteness of man (the love for sinners) seems exemplified in the dubbed, lip synching of Simone's aptly titled 'Sinnerman'.

This is just one reading and of course doesn't come near to clarifying the film, whose strands stretch out and interlock in a thousand different ways. With Inland Empire, Lynch has created a film that seems to create itself as we are watching it. Never before have I been so aware of a film existing in the very moment of witnessing it, as if it is not a recorded piece of tape but is actually spontaneously becoming right there on the screen. A second viewing could be an entirely different experience.

* This is why, despite the fact that it was filmed on DV, Inland Empire is a film that must be seen on the big screen with an audience. Using the grainy DV, Lynch is utilising a media that has grown to be the common lens through which people view their personal lives (ie. mobile phone cameras, youtube, home movies etc). The reactions and anxiety of the audience are thus as much a part of the film as the actors.

** Is not one of the most terrifying things to discover that a stranger has secretly been watching you? That your identity and actions have always-already been part of someone's elses perspective (similar to the feeling of an ideological awakening)?

The Politics of Deja Vu

2007-06-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

It was with a mixture of hope and trepidation that I went to see Tony Scott’s latest film Deja Vu. Ever since his outrageous and morally bankrupt Man On Fire (see my review here), Scott has been on my black list. I find his aesthetic utterly repulsive. His recent films have combined the extremes of liberal decadence with the vigilantism of the right wing. But unlike Martin Scorsese or say Abel Ferrera, Scott has no shame, no guilt about this amoralism. Instead, he glosses it up, jazzes it up and then tries to sell all this sex and violence like it’s some means to transcendence or self-realization. His films aren’t just exploitative, they're actually quite insidious.

Now, Deja Vu isn't as exploitative but it’s just as insidious in my opinion.

For Tony Scott’s latest isn’t just a simple time travel film. It’s actually a thinly veiled apology for George Bush incompetence over Hurricane Katrina.

There I was - watching the final act and waiting, hoping, for some sort of redemptive twist to come and restore logic to this increasingly ludicrous film. Of course, it didn’t. But when the screen went to black and a title dedication came up, ‘In the memory of the victims of Hurricane Katrina’, it hit me. This was the twist. I flashed back to all the seemingly random Hurricane Katrina references throughout the film – the flood devastated setting of New Orleans, Bruce Greenwood’s comparison of the ferry explosion to Katrina – this film wasn’t about some act of terrorism – it was about Hurricane Katrina. Here lies the real deja vu of the film – it views the devastation of Hurricane Katrina through the (now accepted) frame of the war on terror and, in so doing, fundamentally re-imagines Katrina's political significance.

It’s through this lens that Katrina’s uncontrollable devastation, its radical rupture of the social sphere, in which America's forgotten lower class and hidden racial divide rose to the surface, is contained and neutralised. Instead, it’s turned into George Bush’s fantasy - a physically and politically contained event that would only serve to bolster his support within the current political dialectic ie. the war on terror.

So, while Bush incompetence over Hurricane Katrina destroyed American faith in the omnipotence of its government, Deja Vu, on the other hand, completely restores this faith. Not only can the government monitor every man, woman and child, 24 hrs, 360 degrees, within a 200 km radius, it can even turn back time! The message here is don't worry, Katrina was just a blip on the radar, the government’s still in control, so just sit back and relax and let us take care of you.

And while the logic of the film runs around like a headless chicken, the radical politics and motivations of its characters are strangely contained and reductive. The purpose of Jim Caviezal’s terrorist, the film’s only interesting character, is reduced to a one scene digression before being completely ignored for the remaining third of the film. Even Denzel Washington’s vigilantism is motivated more by personal love interest than political rebellion. And then there's Val Kilmer – what is he even doing in this film? His bureaucratic character is purely functional. Likewise, the film’s threats and devastation are never uncontrollable. Washington’s character can always phone up an ambulance to take care of any collateral damage he causes. Interruptions into the past never create uncontrollable butterfly effects. And time travel paradoxes? Well, they’re simply ignored.

The first beautiful irony to note is that the film knows this. There is an odd, uneasy feeling about the ending, its lack of logic, its disavowal of Washington’s fate, its far too neat and safe conclusion. It’s as if, in this forced formal displacement of Hurricane Katrina within the war on terror, the film has generated its own a gap, it’s own excess that doesn’t quite fit in within its arbitrary framework. It’s this excess that underlies and haunts these final scenes and is exemplified in the forgotten drowning of Denzel Washington’s character (an apparent nod to the victims of Hurricane Katrina).

The second irony is that this formal displacement perfectly describes the feeling of deja vu. Is not deja vu an overlap of our short term memory of the present with our long term memory of the past? In other words, present events are directly stored into the memory instead of being received by the conscious part of the brain. So in the context of the film, it’s our short-term memory of Hurricane Katrina that takes place within the long term memory of the war on terror.

The bad news is that Deja Vu is only a hint of how Scott’s decadent right wing aesthetic is finding more and more political outlets. Scott has recently optioned a biopic of the ‘right wing Hunter S Thompson’, Pat Dollard, a decadent Hollywood talent agent who appeared in porn films, did copious amounts of drugs and now believes brutality is the only response to terrorists and that the war on Iraq is the last bastion of Western civlization (Dollard will also co-script the film). I don’t think you could ask for a better explication of Scott’s 'liberal-fascist' aesthetic.

As a fan of time travel films, I thought Deja Vu could have been Tony Scott’s redemption. Unfortunately for Tony, he still holds a prime position in my own personal movie hell.

It's So French...

2007-06-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

There comes a time in every critic's life when he or she is entitled to a fully-fledged Rant. I’ve just watched Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. It is an absolute disgrace. I’ve never hated a film so much in my entire life.

I’m a fan of The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation but I did worry that Lost In Translation was hovering dangerously close to bourgeois indulgence (although I think it ultimately avoided it). Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, is the perfect fulfilment of this bourgeois temptation. Sofia Coppola has turned the French Revolution into an episode of My Super Sweet 16 - the tale of a spoilt rich girl who we're supposed to feel some sort of sympathy for because she doesn't quite 'fit in' at the new palace (oh, and she lost her dog too). Meanwhile the French populace is starving and living in abject poverty because of the outrageous taxes placed upon them to finance the lifestyle and excess she more than willingly takes part in.

I still can't conceive how it was even possible to omit the politics as much as this film did, let alone during one of the most defining political periods in history. I can only conclude that it was a completely wilful decision on Coppola's part. Yet I don’t think that this purposeful disavowal of politics redeems the film or negates my criticisms by implying some sort of superficial aesthetic that comments on itself. The temptation here is the fallacy of the post-modern aesthetic: just because you bracket something in inverted commas, doesn't necessarily separate you from what you're saying – it can actually make you more complicit. Indeed, it’s this minimal distance that allows you to safely engage in what you’re saying without really committing to it. This is what differentiates Marie Antoinette from the pure surface aesthetics of Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven - it still secretly believes there's something meaningful beneath its surface. It ultimately doesn't have the guts to follow through with its own aesthetic.

And of course such a wilful disavowal of politics doesn’t alter the content. If you watched this film knowing nothing about Marie Antoinette or the French Revolution you’d sympathise with her cause and lambast the intolerant multitude for selfishly intruding on her lifestyle. Such is the lack of context or counterpoint in the film that the only images of the revolution are a brief scene featuring a wordless mob (who are essentially there to buck up the image of the queen) and a trashed palace bedroom the morning after. As one critic said, Coppola can’t even imagine the revolution.

If we're to judge on aesthetics, let’s be honest: Is Coppola really doing much more than utilising a commodified aesthetic replicated in Nescafe ads and fashion shows? And is glossing an eighties pop soundtrack over a period drama supposed to be radical? To my mind, it’s not just lazily anachronistic but MTV's aesthetic of choice. And it's been done plenty of times before in such masterpieces as A Knight's Tale and Ella Enchanted. Meanwhile, the rest of the film feels like a second-rate Clueless with better cinematography. Was there really anything going on beneath this fim’s narcissistic surface? Or is this just Sofia Coppola reflecting her own rich lifestyle back to herself?

If we’re to judge on the level of intention, Coppola fails with an even moderately insightful portrayal of her subject. Her film generalises so much with atmosphere that it becomes praise for the aristocratic lifestyle rather than the person. If the film were really concerned about Marie Antoinette (as opposed to the aristocratic lifestyle she represented) it would have shown her at her trial, divorced of her surroundings and where she at least makes quite a spirited defence. But it doesn't. It stops when the partying ends. The Revolution is effectively one massive party-pooper.

This is one of the most offensive and insidious films I’ve seen. It’s lazily anachronistic and completely overshadowed by its political unthought. By disavowing the politics in one of the most politically turbulent periods in history, Coppola has made the move to fuse her aesthetic with bourgeois ideology. By being wilfully apolitical it has become purely ideological.

In response to the film’s infuriating lack of context, allow me to end with two quotes that effectively frame the film in my mind:

In answer to a scathing review by a French film critic in the Guardian, Sofia Coppola’s reply was, “It’s very French”….

During a fiery speech on the question of whether to put Louis XVI on trial, the young revolutionary Saint-Just pronounced the sentence that would be remembered throughout the revolution: "No one can reign innocently". It’s this quote that sums up what I think of Marie Antoinette.

Bleak Banality

2007-05-29T02:19:00.000-07:00

Australian films in recent years can be (perhaps a little unfairly) reduced to two types. The first concerns the Aussie ‘naivety films’ (eg. Crackerjack, Crocodile Dundee, The Castle). They usually employ the typical colloquial outsider who doesn’t quite fit in to his surroundings but whose innocent naivety assures him of social triumph. Essentially the fish out water story adjusted for Australian colloquialisms.

In recent years, this type has seen a reactionary slew of more artistically ‘serious’ films – films that still revel in Australian banality but tell it through a precocious bleakness, which is somehow profound (eg. Jindabyne, Lantana, Somersault). Occasionally, a winner emerges, such as Chopper, whose bleakness perfectly suited the disturbed view of the friendly but delusional Aussie protagonist; or The Proposition, where the film’s detachment was mirrored in its vast and rugged landscape, existential plot and dialogue, and visceral violence and imagery.

As the latest ‘bleak’ Australian film to be critically lauded, Noise has a lot of qualities. It’s well directed by Matthew Saville, with interesting use of sound-scapes and a tense and haunting opening sequence; the performances are subtle and realistic, especially Brendan Cowell and new comer Maia Thomas – all as far as it goes. This is the film’s problem. It contains within it its own limitation. It strives for a level of profundity that it ultimately fails to achieve despite having the structural coordinates all in place.

Paul Byrnes of the Sydney Morning Herald called Noise “a film with a lot on its mind”. To that I would add, yes, it is a film with a lot on its mind, just not much to say. This is precisely the cause of its banality. It is thematically and stylistically loaded but it doesn’t cohere into anything substantial artistically. The direction is ponderous and languorously paced and it wants you to know that. This is a film with a lot on its mind after all. It’s thinking about…stuff.

The problem of the film is that its bleakness can’t distance itself from its banality. Instead of presenting this banality in a disturbing or contrasting light, it reifies it through a pseudo-ambiguous tone. The bleakness thus becomes overbearing as precisely as it is under-whelming.

The film touches generally on various themes and stylistic notes but ultimately leaves it up to the viewer to fill in the disparate gaps. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this but it treads a fine line. Few films can effectively achieve this ambiguity on an artistic level. Richard Linklater and Terrence Malick are two masters at sublime ambiguity and, on the other side of the spectrum, Robert Bresson, Michael Haneke and Gus Van Sant (in his ‘Death Trilogy’) manage to turn this ambiguity into something bleak yet still artistically coherent.

Why doesn’t Noise work then?

While the style of Noise is to keep a certain distance, a ‘bleakness’, this jars with the acting style, which is much too ‘natural’, ingratiating and familiar (the colloquial motifs). In contrast, the ‘spiritual detachment’ of say Bresson (as with the other directors mentioned) de-psychologises the performances, resists audience sympathy and focuses on physical movements. For Van Sant’s films in particular (a director whose ‘bleak banality’ bears the most similarity to Noise), the dialogue is always sparse. Despite a certain naturalness, it becomes thoroughly alien in quality. With Van Sant, dialogue or the pretensions of characters are not privileged in any way. As one critic said of Bresson, “characters do not motivate into action; they simply move. Yet these movements are not without dramatic construction or significance.” The common style these films share is a symbolic materialism, an aesthetic detachment between the characters and their actions. Noise fails to make this distinction, thus lending itself to banality. The same applies to the narrative structure. As much as Saville may have intended otherwise, Noise’s tense dramatic moments contrast too much with the banality of the other scenes (whereas one could say in Bresson, their significance is equalised). There is a certain artistic schizophrenia here. Noise engages in a bleak spirituality that privileges banality, but it also retains a psychological and dramatic hierarchy whose affect contradicts with that banality.

Half way through the film, Cowell notes that the brain still functions ten seconds after you die and for those ten seconds it must seem like an eternity. He muses that heaven or hell would be what you think of yourself in those final ten seconds. “So if think you’re an arsehole in those ten seconds then you would be in hell”. As the film reaches its inevitable conclusion with that final transcendental shot, the film shifts to black and we are given ten seconds to think about what this means before the credits start rolling. It encapsulates the way Noise leaves a lot of strands unanswered (or underdeveloped). Those last ten seconds of blank screen are not so much for the character as they are for the film itself. It may seem like ‘you be the judge’ but for me it was a disavowal of artistic responsibility: ‘This may all be crap but I’ll let you decide on that’. Profound?

Has Zizek finally lost it?

2007-05-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

There's been quite a internet ruckus building over the latest Zizek film review. Academic bloggers, even supporters of Zizek, have objected to his reactionary (and, to be honest, dull) interpretation of the box office smash, 300.

In his review, Zizek performs his typical reversal of a popular 'subversive' theory by celebrating its complete opposite. 300 has been widely criticised by film critics and leftist commentators (not to mention Iran itself) as being a fascist allegory of American militarism and their fight with Iraq. Of course, Zizek argues that, on the contrary, the film is an example of the true revolutionary left battling the Evil Empire and goes on to propose the reclamation of discipline and sacrifice by the left against the hedonistic forces of Capitalism. As Steven Shaviro points out in his excellent responses to the article (here and here), this is Zizek's contrarianism at its most infantile, "an idiotic macho one-upmanship", a simplistic reading that comes across as no better than that of the loonies from the Christian Right.

Criticism of Zizek has usually been reactionary or formalistic, from the sophisticated (see David Bordwell) to the ignorant (see Johann Hari), but this latest round of criticism has been refreshingly intelligent and substantial.

From K-Punk:

What irks and disappoints about Zizek's tiresome reversal of the 'accepted leftist orthodoxy' on 300 is not so much the reversal itself, but the poverty and banality of the concepts it has yielded. Not every standardly-held view is worth reversing, and the meagre conceptual fare that Zizek's contrarian stance has produced proves that this is the case in respect of 300.

To Daniel:

Is there really nothing fascist about these values? Could a party that held discipline and the spirit of sacrifice as values - as opposed to simply strategic/organizational principles - really be called a leftist party? To my mind, the thrust of Zizek's claim here rests on a fundamental misunderstanding

And, since Zizek fails to pay sufficient note to the film's sexualised and racialised fascist tendencies, this from Dana Stevens' review in Slate:

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the "bad" (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

The only real reference Zizek pays to these fascist aspects is in regards to the Spartan's 'eugenics program', in which any less than perfect infant is hurled off a cliff. Zizek's view?

But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom and Reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding the weak children? This "absurdity" is simply the price of freedom - freedom is not free, as they put it in the film.

I'm a fan of Zizek but I have to wonder: has his dialectical system finally reached its limit? Has the old man gone crazy?

Celluloid To Heaven

2007-04-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

In the quest for some sort of cinematic authority in our film watching, a couple of friends and I devised what began as a relatively small list of about 400 films, originally garnered from the book '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die'. Gradually, however, as we found ourselves continuously adding films and directors' oeuvres, the list began to grow and swell until it covered well over two thousand films. Starting chronologically, we estimate we will finish 'The Canon' by mid 2009...

To keep a record of this quite momentous undertaking, I'll be posting a top ten list from each decade as we finish them, starting from the '20s. In the meantime however, my fellow canoniser, Billy Stevenson, is reviewing each film on his blog 'A Film Canon'. Check it out.

Zizek A Calvinist?

2007-03-19T19:11:00.000-07:00

Slavoj Zizek on top form - at Calvin College of all places! Here, he presents a masterful weaving of opposing theological and philosophical ideas with his trademark humour, vulgarity and clarity. Everything's covered, including how German toilets relate to German political beliefs, the structure of enjoyment behind sex orgies, the Book Of Job, Judith Butler, Britney Spears, love, global warming, the horror of tolerance and multiculturalism and the disgust of swallowing your own spit.

This is an absolute must see. Comes in 12 parts:

Why Only An Atheist Can Believe

The Banality of Freedom

2007-03-11T19:38:00.000-07:00

The first part of Adam Curtis' much anticipated documentary series, 'The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom', just started screening on the BBC. Here's the summary from an excellent review in the Guardian:

"The central tenet of the argument is that during the cold war an understanding of human nature as suspicious, distrustful and always operating out of self-interest came to dominate political thinking. From that emerged a narrow definition of freedom as "giving people the ability to get whatever they wanted". This kind of freedom has become the central political idea of the past 25 years, but it's a corrosive form of pessimism rooted in a bleak, simplistic view of human nature."

Curtis goes on to take a critical look at economic neoliberalism, cold war strategy and game theory, as developed by John Nash and the Rand Institute, and details their role in fostering a 'banality of freedom' in our inward and individualistic society today. The Guardian says it could be Curtis' most important documentary yet but I'll withhold comment until after it's screened in Australia. In the meantime, you might want to send an email to SBS urging them to show it (comments@sbs.com.au).

For those who have no idea who Adam Curtis is, here's a little bit of background: A professor of politics at Oxford, Curtis left to begin a career in television at the BBC after becoming tired with the isolation of university life. From there, he went on to make several fascinating documentaries that garnered him high praise and a reputation for exploring the effects of ideas on our contemporary social and political outlooks. He is perhaps best known for the 2004 controversial series, 'The Power Of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear', which argued that US neoconservatives exaggerated the terrorist threat to justify the 'war on terror'. But his best work is undoubtedly 'A Century of Self'. Using masses of archival footage and interviews, 'Century' reveals how Freud's theories of the unconscious were used to manipulate the masses in an age of democracy. As the program develops and the forms of manipulation change, we realise the full extent as to which our desire for self-expression has been commodified by corporations and politicians alike. Without pretention, it is the most mind blowing and important documentary you can watch. The series is free to download here.

Update

A good interview with Curtis re: The Trap from the Guardian.

And TimesOnline has a piece

20 Most Anticipated Films of 2007

2007-03-04T01:20:00.000-08:00

1. Inland Empire (David Lynch)
June 21

David Lynch's first film since 2002's Mulholland Drive has gathered a mixed bag of reviews (some fantastic, others bored, most confused) but Lynch's extraordinary sensitivity and artistic genius automatically make this a must see film. With Lynch you can be assured of a cinematic experience unlike anything you've ever seen and Empire looks to be no exception. Explaining the plot would be self-defeating but for those who still need some sort of narrative carrot, the film's poster provides a suitably abstract synopsis: "A Woman In Trouble". Judging from the truly disturbing trailer (see link above), this a film that will leave you shaking.

2. Grind House (Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez)
May 10

Kicking off with Rodriguez's shlock zombie film Planet Terror and followed by Tarantino's stunt man slasher film Death Proof, Grindhouse is a two-for-one double bill that sounds like a wet dream for the two fanboy directors. But what's most cool about this is how Tarantino and Rodriquez are going all out to create that raw grindhouse experience. There's scratched and faded prints, hard core violence, shifting genres, and even missing reels where for 15 minutes the audience won't know what happened. On top of all that, the films are divided by faux exploitation trailers from Eli Roth and Rob Zombie. This promises to be one hell of a lotta fun.

3. No Country For Old Men (Coen Brothers)
August 2

I'm a huge fan of author Cormac McCarthy so when I heard my favourite filmmaking duo were set to adapt his latest novel I just about had kittens. The Coens are absolutely perfect for this. McCarthy's novel is a Tarantinoesque thriller about a hunter who comes across a drug deal gone wrong and decides to take the money for himself. On the run, he's chased by the FBI (Woody Harrelson), an ageing sherrif (Tommy Lee Jones) and a nihilistic badass assassin (Javier Bardem). McCarthy's dialogue is that quotable, turn-of-phrase wordplay that is vintage Coen, told within a minimalist but haunting existential atmosphere. If done right, this could be one of the best films from the brothers, as well as a magnificent return to form.

4. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)
Release Date Unknown

It's taking a while to be released but the reviews that have slipped out have been fantastic. What's most interesting though is the term reviewers are using to describe the film - a "Terrence Malick Western". That's all this fanboy needs to feel weak at the knees! The film also has a reportedly superb performance from Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, James' most trusted friend who eventually betrayed him. It's Andrew Dominik's first film since Chopper and, from the reviews, it sounds like he's chosen to highlight atmosphere, tense silences and abstract imagery alongside a suspensful and tense plot. This could well be a masterpiece.

5. Zodiac (David Fincher)
May 17

Another film that has garnered terrific reviews. Fincher takes an incredibly dense, although stylistically restrained (for Fincher), look at the true story of the San Francisco 'Zodiac' serial killer. The story is told through the eyes of journalists, detectives and one man who became obsessed with solving the clues that the Zodiac spread. This was one of the most famous killers to use the mass media to hint at his identity so the film is just as concerned with symbols, spatial patterns and communication systems as it is with the killings. As a result, Zodiac is reportedly as relentless, obsessive and exhausting as the case it tells. Its superb cast features Mark Ruffalo, Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jnr and Chloe Sevigny. I can't wait.

6. Spiderman 3 (Sam Raimi)
May 3

I loved Spiderman 2 for its surprising emotional complexity so I trust Sam Raimi enough to fully deliver on this sequel. This new outing is said to feature three villains, two love interests, and two Spidermans! What more could you want!

7. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
March 29

Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, The Lives of Others has also fuelled great word of mouth. Set in former East Germany, it tells the story of a Stasi agent assigned to spy on a famous actress and her playwright lover, who may have Western leanings. The agent gradually becomes more and more fascinated with the man's life. The directing is supposed to be stunning and the story sounds like an intelligent and moving insight into the history of the GDR.

8. Pirates of the Carribean: At The World's End (Gore Verbinski)
May 24

The second one left audiences on such a cliffhanger I have no choice to make Pirates 3 a must see! Gore Verbinski can always be trusted to bring a welcome intelligence to action scenes and a visceral horror to the special effects. And then there's Jack. If it's as much fun as the last one, count me in.

9. Sunshine (Danny Boyle)
April 12

Danny Boyle's biggest film yet. Fifty years into the future, the Sun is dying and Earth is dying as a result. A team of astronauts is sent to revive the Sun - but the mission fails. Seven years later, a new team is sent to finish the mission. Could be great. Could also be another The Core.

10. Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola)
Release Date Unknown

Francis Ford Coppola's return to directing after ten years, Youth Without Youth is a passion piece based on the novella by intriguing writer and thinker Mircea Eliade. The story concerns an elderly academic in Nazi ruled Germany who goes on the run after a cataclysmic incident returns him to his youth. Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural. The film stars Tim Roth, Bruno Ganz and Alexandra Maria Lara. A recent test screening was attended by Spielberg, Scorsese and Lucas among other celebrities. The awestruck response - it was a visionary film but "very very difficult". This could well be Coppola's long delayed return to form. Let's hope so.

The Rest

11. Knocked Up (Judd Apatow)
July 5
Word of mouth on this film about a first date that results in a pregnancy is fantastic. Seems like it'll combine hilarity with intelligent sentimentality similar to Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin. Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan are apparently at the top of their comedic game.

12. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
Featuring Anna Paquin as a 17 year old high school student who is convinced she is partly responsible for a tragic accident she witnessed. While trying to set things right, she finds her youthful ideals coming up against a compromised adult world. Kenneth Lonergan's films (You Can Count On Me) are truly heart wrenching but never melodramatic and his latest promises more of his subtlety, compassion and light humour. Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and Matt Damon also star.

13. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)
The famous Bob Dylan biopic with Dylan portrayed by numerous actors (and actresses) such as Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Ben Whishaw.

14. Snow Angels (David Gordon Green)
Poetic and Malick-like romantic drama starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. Looks beautiful.

15. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
A coming of age story set in the skateboarding community. Van Sant's powerfully affecting 'Death Trilogy' (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) make his next film one to watch out for.

16. Across The Universe (Julie Taymor)
A combination of live action and painted, three-dimensional animation, Across The Universe is a love story told during the anti-war period of the 60s. The film is paired with many Beatles songs that defined the time. Looks and sounds beautiful.

17. My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai)
Wong Kar Wai's first American film with Norah Jones in the main role. Also starring Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman, the film is a "soul-searching journey across America to resolve questions about love". I'm not a huge fan of Wong Kar Wai but his original visual style is reason enough to have this film on the list.

18. Away From Her (Sarah Polley)
The beautiful Sarah Polley with her directorial debut about an old couple coping with the wife's Alzheimer's disease. The reviews tell of an extraordinarily moving and mature film. Based on a short story by Alice Munro. Starring Julie Christie.

19. Margot At The Wedding (Noah Baumbach)
Expect more unflinchingly honest familial observations and humour in Noah Baumbach's next film after his critically praised The Squid And The Whale.

20. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates)
July 12
Helena Bonham Carter is the latest British actress to join the Harry Potter series. Here's hoping for an even darker spin on the tale.

CURIOSITIES:

Live Free or Die Hard (Len Wiseman)
July 5
Die Hard 4... It's been too long since a genuine tough guy action film graced our screens. Who better to take us there than John McClane? Although this time the bad guy is an "Internet-terrorist organisation". Whaa... Also starring Timothy Olyphant.

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly)
Following its disastrous screening in Cannes last year, Richard Kelly's sophomore effort seems to have crawled under a rock before it's even been released. As a fan of the cult film Donnie Darko, I'd like to say I have faith in Southland Tales, set in a futuristic LA on the brink of disaster, but then I saw the travesty that was Donnie Darko: Director's Cut... Starring The Rock, Stifler and Mandy Moore.

PRICELESS FILM ALREADY SEEN AND COMING OUT MAY 3:

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (Michel Gondry)

AND FINALLY, POSSIBLY THE GREATEST MOVIE OF OUR TIME:

AQUATEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FILM FOR THEATRES
Release Date Unknown

"The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters is an action-adventure epic that tackles the mysterious circumstances that brought Meatwad, Frylock and Master Shake together. An immortal piece of exercise equipment threatens the balance of galactic peace, and it is up to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force to run away from it. Complicating matters, the Plutonians team up with the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past for ultimate control of the deadly device."

Awesome.

Best Films of 2006

2007-02-14T04:33:00.000-08:00

1. The New World (Terrence Malick)

"There is only this, all else is unreal"

A Terrence Malick film is different. You can't watch it like you would any other film. Traditional narrative, character psychology, formal continuity - these things don't apply. Yet, in a way, a Malick film is almost pure cinema, working on a completely sensory and emotional level, washing over you and carrying you with it. Often its resonance will awaken in you only after the film has finished, through images, sounds and movements that work their way inside your mind, like a dream lost and half remembered. Malick's latest opus, The New World, is perhaps his most abstract. From its opening, meditative shot floating over the surface reflection of the water, it is a film that strives for a sort of parallax symmetry, uniting worlds, perspectives, surfaces, through movements inwards and outwards, journeys forwards and back. We experience things as we would a relationship, seeing worlds through different eyes. What was once beauty is later misery, once love is then betrayal, once nature becomes form, and then which was before? Which was the dream? What was true? At the same time, the editing, cinematography, voiceovers rebuff any of the usual critical deconstructions. Its meaning lies always elsewhere, radiating, I would suggest, around the enigmatic Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, who conveys so much of the film's extraordinary beauty, spirit and eternal becoming. In relation to the Malick canon, it doesn't stand as tall as 1998's masterpiece The Thin Red Line (one of the greatest films ever made) and lacks some of the gritty realism that Malick combines so effectively with his romantic moods (think Linda Manz's gruffy Chicaga accent in Days of Heaven). But even then, The New World is still the most breathtaking and original film to come out in 2006.

2. Cache (Hidden) (Michael Haneke)

"I called you because I wanted you to be present..."

Michael Haneke's masterpiece. Hidden is a brilliant if confronting puzzle that reveals the traumatic part of every life that we repress and hope to reconcile. Its disturbing impact however lies in its unresolved nature. This was the film that provoked the greatest post-movie conversations - who was sending the video tapes? What was the significance of that last shot? One theory penned the stalker as the unseen filmmaker friend talked about over dinner; another argued it was Georges' mother! Yet all these theories and uncertainty surrounding the film merely reveal our own paranoia and point to the possibility that perhaps there is another question we should be asking - not who is the watcher but who is being watched. Think of the opening shot where we first believe that we are the ones observing only to realise that our point of view is actually what is being watched by (initially) unseen watchers. The film reverses this shift with the end shot. Initially it seems to suggest that the sons were the watchers all along but we might later realise that we are in an observational position much like the previous surveillance shots. Perhaps the real answer is that we are simultaneously the watchers and the watched - both positions implicating us in guilt, one through distance, the other through implication. The traumatic part is the actual shift between positions. Hidden is a film where every person and thing in the frame is suspect, each detail another clue, so that foreground and background become absolved of heirarchy. In a way, we are in a better position to know than the characters yet at the same time we are implicated in their denial by the film's refusal to highlight these clues. The central traumatic scene of the film then (between Georges and Majid) is the one that uses this seeming detachment to leave us breathless in a move of almost paralytic horror. From this point on, our neutrality as spectators can only be a malevolant one.

3. Munich (Steven Spielberg)

"Stop chasing the mice inside your skull"

Munich stands as one of the most emotionally devastating films of the year. Spielberg's masterful manipulation of suspense, iconography and acute emotional engagement all work to craft a superbly tense espionage thriller, only to have it inverted to horrific effect. For Spielberg, Munich crystallises a theme he has been confronting more and more in his work - the dark underside in the longing for and realisation of a home, both personally and politically (see War of the Worlds post). Munich's thematic apex, the (almost universally criticised) sex scene, portrays this longing with a disturbing intensity and rawness. Critics have pointed out the ridiculousness of the scene but it is precisely this ridiculousness, Avner's extreme longing for and founding lack of affect, that is so horrific. With a disturbing inevitability, Avner mounts, begins the empty rhythms, the frame to himself, staring at something, fucking nothing. Spielberg takes this longing beyond any realistic sense or meaning to its raw horrific conclusion - a forced transcendence, which, interspersed with flashbacks from the terrorist attacks, is also a senseless violence. By this I don't mean merely physical violence but the psychological violence of a forced perspective. The horrific part of the flashbacks is that we are forced to see it from the terrorists point of view (a sign of what Avner has turned into), forced to found our self in a horror we cannot prevent, a gaze we cannot escape. It is this founding trauma that the film has been working towards, contrasting so effectively with the tender scene at the start where Avner lies naked in bed with his pregnant wife, now a distant image of nostalgia. The scene is the most surreal part of a haunting film, painted in dream-like but intricate shadows by Janusz Kaminski's visceral cinematography and written with a commanding intelligence and empathy by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. I left this film shaking, emotionally drained, my soul turned inside out.

4. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)

"You're a fascist pig!"

I love films that earn your trust. Films that allow you to invest yourself fully, eyes closed so to speak, your aesthetic instincts so aligned that you're able to float with the assurance that it will lead you to a place of truth. Children of Men is such a film. With it, Alfonso Cuaron has made science-fiction radical again and cemented his position as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Children of Men is not an excessively dystopian future but one that is uncomfortably close to our present. It's a future-present without a future, a possible world without hope or possibility, a decaying landscape without horizons in which to open up space and determine meaning. Those jaw-dropping and effortless long takes bear witness to a space where the background is just as, if not more important as the foreground, bringing the horizon into direct proximity. Action thus takes on a radical authenticity and necessity through its very negation of future meaning. This is a world where characters are seldem privileged with cuts or close ups, where scenes suddenly shift from tenderness to brutal ferocity, where schools lie empty, desolate and forgotten while classical statues stand disconnected from any world that would give it meaning. Yet, as an audience, we are never distanced or detached. Cuaron's honesty and respect for the reality and subtleties of his world draws you in as much as his technical intensity shakes you up. The result is the most visceral and relentless cinematic experience of the year with an ending that is so much more affecting because of it.

5. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)

"Brokeback got us good don't it?"

Sometimes it's hard to appreciate how rare it is to see such a human, moving and heartfelt picture. Ang Lee accomplishes this with beautiful restraint in Brokeback Mountain. He's helped in no small part by a powerful script from Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana that affects with perfect economy. For a subject that could easily have spilled over into melodrama and false dramatics, the film's use of subtext and minimalism is all the more skillful here. We see the relationship develop almost in silence, not even through gazes but through gazes not taken. Here, the beauty of the landscape emerges as as much a part of the relationship as Ennis and Jack. While the film's despiction of homosexuality is never given a false sense of certainty, of either/or, it is within the remote and majestic nature of Brokeback Mountain Ennis and Jack find a home, a place. Their connection to each other is not just through friendship but also deeply informed by their longing for landscape, although constructed by their ultimate disconnection from it. Of course, the performances here are what make the film. Heath Ledger gives his career best work as Ennis, a man struggling to retain what control over himself he has left. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams are equally affecting. This is an understated but deeply moving film that will no doubt be revered in years to come.

6. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)

"When you dream, do you dream you're Joey?"

A History of Violence is one of the most ingenious films on this list. Cronenberg utilises various genre devices (Tarantino pulp, Spielbergian Americana, film noir revenge) yet seemingly subtracts something from each so that we recognise their stylistic intent but remain curiously ambivalent towards their affect. The psychology and aesthetic of the film thus become flattened. Carl Foggarty (Ed Harris) asks Tom 'When you dream, do you dream you're Joey?' but it's unsure who is dreaming who. There's not a clear point when we realise that Tom has become Joey, nor is it a simple idea of Joey being the 'true' personality of Tom. The parallel sex scenes also operate this way. When Tom has sex with his wife in the first scene it's through the spectral fantasy of her as a reimagined high school cheerleader. When the second sex scene occurs, it is his wife having violent sex with the spectral fantasy of Tom as mafia hitman Joey. Both scenes are performative and operate on the coordinates of sexual fantasy - yet what does this mean for Joey? Is he real or a fantasy? Cronenberg refuses any obvious psychological heirarchy here and as such puts our relationship with violence into confusion. Sometimes the violence is visceral, othertimes it appears brutal or even funny, yet without the internal subjective determinates our relationship to it is thrown into aesthetic confusion. Violence is rendered to a surface aesthetic, without a vertical structure (or 'history'), and thus both sides of violence (humorous and shocking) appear on the same side. A History of Violence isn't just Cronenberg's best film since 1996's Crash, it's one of the most intelligent films ever made about violence.

7. The Departed (Martin Scorsese)

"I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me"

Scorsese's kinetic energy is channelled through this deliriously fun piece of cinematic pulp. He's helped in no small part by William's Monaghan's biting dialogue, which casts everything in an existential and stage-like aura - not to mention testorone. This is certainly a man's man's film. And naturally, it's also the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio proves his maturity. In fact, the entire cast is brimming with energy here and it's this, as well as the fantastic plot (remade from the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs), that keeps you coming back for more. The ending is messy but for a film with as many double crosses as this it should be messy. A great throwback to the old gangster movies of the 30s and 40s.

8. Brick (Rian Johnson)

"She called me a dirty word"

The best debut film of the year. Director Rian Johnson owes a lot to Dashiell Hammett (not to mention the Coen Brothers) but his mastery of the hardboiled dialogue and complicated plot turns is astounding. This was the most fun I had at the movies this year - an absolute gem for any noir fan. (See long review here)

9. Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest (Gore Verbinski)

Elizabeth Swann: "There will come a moment when you will have a chance to show it. To do the right thing."
Jack Sparrow: "I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by."

One of the most thrilling fantasy action epics since Return of the Jedi. There is some slow exposition towards the beginning but once it gets going there is no stopping it. And it's a mark of the film that its intensity holds because of the sheer energy of its characters and their criss crossing motivations rather than special effects and explosions. In fact, the action scenes provide for a curious aesthetic, what I like to call a 'vectorisation' of space. Think of all the moments of suspension, falling, rotating that occur throughout the film. At the same time, the characters themselves are involved in a state of suspension or vectorisation, their bodies disconnected from their own organs, their subjectivity from their own desires: Davey Jones from his heart; Jack Sparrow from his desire (externalised in the compass); the mute pirate and his talking parrot; the lanky pirate and his rolling eye; not to mention all the undead and half-human, half-crustacean pirate crew. Desire has been disconnected and misdirected. Ultimately what the film tries to say (through its main character Jack and the compass) is that true ethical desire and subjectivity can only be realised externally and objectively, rather than internally, if it is ever to be re-connected. Yeah, that and the film kicks some can in the action stakes.

10. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom)

"This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about."

The funniest film of the year. Winterbottom succeeds brilliantly in translating the first post-modern novel onto screen. It's a mess but somehow it all feels so goddamn natural.

Honourable Mentions: Volver (Pedro Almodovar), Babel (Alejandro Innaritu), Inside Man (Spike Lee), A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater), The Three Buriels of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones)

Clark vs O'Reilly

2007-01-20T18:13:00.000-08:00

This is several days old but it's always a pleasure to see former NATO Commander Wesley Clark verbally sparring with Fox News' nut-job Bill O'Reilly. Clark impressed in the 2004 democratic primaries with his intelligence and eloquence and here he seems sharper and more forceful than ever before. Loud mouthed O'Reilly looks woefully naive in comparison.

There's some vague talk of Clark being a Democratic contender for the 2008 election. He's certainly the person talking the most sense about Iraq.

Check it out

"If you're an act, then what am I?"

2007-01-19T16:08:00.000-08:00

Truly surreal stuff.

'Papa Bear' Bill O'Reilly appears on Colbert Report and Colbert on O'Reilly.

Update
After the interviews, O'Reilly got in a body expert to read what both Colbert and himself were really saying. Yep, as Colbert says, O'Reilly got someone to tell himself what he was really thinking. I think this just confirms the success of Colbert. One of the most revealing parts of the Colbert interview was when O'Reilly revealed "It's all an act. I'm really a kind and sensitive guy!". Faced with this over-identification in Colbert, O'Reilly has to distance himself effectively from himself if he's to maintain his self in opposition. And that's exactly what he does on his show. Flog a self and a stance completely contingent and reflexive on a fantasised opposition. Take that away, force him to confront what he's actually saying, and he's nothing.

Brick: Negative Space

2007-01-15T18:41:00.000-08:00

Brick swings the genre of the hardboiled detective and throws it into the setting of high school. In a way, there couldn’t be a more perfect setting. As a young student with little knowledge of the outside world, high school takes on an almost surreal significance. Everything is not quite what it is but is at the same time and it is because of this ambiguity that high school becomes the perfect place for subversion. For the detective, a rebel loner at once part of the seedy underbelly as he is outside of it, subversion is always a natural inclination. For the noir film, this subversion must always take place at the level of language, of form.

With Brick, first time director Rian Johnson has achieved an seductive autonomy of form. Dialogue is twisted into a highly stylised slang and objects are so persistently emphasised that the film raises every sound and image onto a sensory level. It is at this sensory level, of sounds hallucinated as images, of negative space rupturing into symbolic space, of an obsessive return to things, places, images, that Brick should be experienced. Indeed, it is at this level of signs, of clues, that the detective himself exists.

However, it is important to note that despite this playfulness of form, scenes are often tightly framed, the dialogue curt, the establishing shots repeated. There is a tendency to have the sun shine directly in the background, bursting with brightness, as if the unity and totality of the frame were too much for it to handle. In fact, it is from this very tightness of frame, this direct confrontation of the sign, that anxiety emerges, gaps appear and forms are manipulated. We see this during Tug’s first fight with Brendan when a subliminal image of the sun appears with each punch, until Brendan’s eyes finally rest upon its glare before he loses consciousness. In the words of feminist critic Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, what we are seeing here is ‘the shimmering of a signifier that terrified flees its signified”.

It is within these blanks that separate the signifier from signified, and not in their connection, that affect takes place. Brick explores these blanks by developing a kind of ‘negative space’, a negative space within the frame as it is without. Sometimes, these spaces operate like blind spots, hidden spaces that are outside the frame, such as Kara’s ever-present ‘lapdogs’ that suddenly rise up in a scene. Other times, it can act as a superimposed space that characters drop in and out of, as a frame within a frame (for example, Brendan and Brain outlined by empty spaces in book shelves) or as a space contingent on light or reflection (such as Pin’s men hidden in the darkness of the corridor).

In the same way that space contains its own negativity, so do the characters. Brain and Brendan work together within a mental/physical dichotomy, a relationship more explicitly mirrored by Tug and the Pin. Pin is a ‘cripple’ (emphasised by the walking stick) yet has the brains to run the operation. Tug is the muscle but doesn’t take time to think things through (his lack of thought referenced by the scar on his head). This brings negative space into the realm of Kristeva’s 'abjection', which describes a self that can only be constructed by what it rejects, by what it isn’t – although this abjection continues to have a tight hold over the self, constantly threatening to bubble up. Examples of an abject overwhelming the self are numerous in Brick but the most explicit is Tug’s screaming to the Pin that “I aint under your thumb no more, that I aint playing lapdog to no gothed up cripple”, drawing a comparison here with Kara’s ‘lapdogs’ and their formal rupture. It is this negative space, in all its variations, that Brendan must confront, occupy and manipulate to subvert the level of narrative reality, of symbolic space.

Sound as space is especially emphasised here. When Emily tells Brendan over the phone, “it’s good to see you Brendan”, she is alerting him first to the fact that she is close by (although unseen), but also alluding that sound itself occupies a space. At the point when Emily uses “see” instead of “hear” our initial response is to replace our idea of Emily as semi-passive listener with a more immediate subject who is actively watching. However, this response disregards the fact that we don’t witness Emily at all in this scene. Despite her reference to an ocular space, she is still only a voice. The absence of visual referent means that this space reverberates back in on itself, creating a signified space existing on the level of a signifier - a sound that is a space. Kristeva describes this as “sound hallucinating images”, a floating image, a sound that refracts against nothing but more signifiers, a presence marked by its very absence.

This is best exemplified by the chase between Brendan and Chuck Burns (the lug with the knife). The film traces the chase through the rhythmic sounds of the characters’ shoes. Their incessant repetition is so emphasised here and the different boot sounds so distinguished that we reach the point when the characters actually seem to become their sound. Even their relationship to place becomes defined less by their visual presence as by the echoes of their boots. This is why Brendan takes off his shoes to elude Burns. By removing himself from this world of sound he enters another, unseen space - the silent space in between the footsteps, a negative space that ruptures the linear space and creates rhythm.

However, what this particular scene shows is that rhythm can also become a deadly circuit. There is a seduction in the endless inevitability of the two-step rhythm, as if the man himself is controlled by the sounds, by a rhythm without object. In the end, the abrupt clang preceded by the stretched silence also seems inevitable, foreshadowed by its own rhythm. In this way, rhythm turns back on itself, to the point when it controls us, so that we are swallowed by the abject, by our own negative space.

What the film tries to show is this inversion of rhythm (or of a rhythm disguised as linearity). The film’s exaggerated punch sounds operate in a similar way. The bruises they leave on Brendan’s face act as existential markers, reassuring him of his presence and charting a sense of progressive linearity. But, like the chase, this linearity becomes a rhythm that turns back upon itself, into a revulsion, as Brendan starts vomiting up blood and staggering, dizzy-like from the barrage of hits he has taken.

Time also takes place as an inversion. Frequent references are made to digital clocks, watches, meeting times as if time charts a fragile linearity. Yet time itself is retroactive - it exists only by being returned to, by being historicized in the present, effects reverberating between different periods, As such, it resembles one of the film's key clues, the burning cigarette with an arrow pointing upwards away from the filter, towards a space that burns itself away – a negative space. By the end of film, we are back at the beginning, at least the earliest period glimpsed – that of the flashback on the football field. Despite the fillm's initial emphasis on linearity, we gradually realise that we are only returning to places again and again, out of an almost obsessive desire to realise their secret, their cause.

It is this trauma/cause behind negative space that, to quote Zizek, “gives rise to an indeliable inconsistency in the symbolic field” and it is this which Brendan as detective searches for. The paradox is that it can only be seen through its distorted reflection in symbolic space, most particularly in the image of the tunnel, the site of Emily's murder. Notably then, it is in the reflection of Brendan’s nightmares that Emily and the tunnel become inextricably linked. And just as the tunnel is referred to as ‘A’, Brendan refers to Emily as Em or ‘M’. Place and the feminine become signs here. They cannot be approached directly. Our relationship to space exists only in so much as it refers to something else, as when the Pin gazes out towards the sea and says, “Do you ever read Tolkien? His descriptions of places are really beautiful, makes you want to be there” Even when we are there we are not quite there.

Thus, the more Brendan penetrates the mystery, the more ‘mirrors’ he encounters, the more bluffs and guises. In a fit of rage and frustration, Brendan throws a clock at Kara’s mirror, shattering it, only for Kara to raise her made up face in place of the smashed mirror. Negative space is constant and re-emerging. Brendan’s desire to discover and subjectivise the cause outside of it reflections, to destroy this negative space and discover the Thing itself, is futile. For as he shall eventually realise, it is precisely this negative space which constructs space as he knows it.

The mysterious last word that Laura whispered to Brendan is that he is a ‘mother[fucker]’ – ie. the father. By the end of his investigation, Brendan has discovered the reason why Emily was killed - her pregnancy. But the cause of her pregnancy falls back upon him. And here Brick’s twist enters three movements.

'Father' as symbolic authority: The subversion and manipulation that Brendan engaged in was always a rebellion against the father, against the paternal prohibitions that institute symbolic meaning. ‘Father’ is thus ‘a dirty word’ and the final insult.

'Father' as void: Father is not just a dirty word, it is an unspoken word. Laura’s whisper is neither completely audible nor the word 'father' itself. Brendan even declines to tell Brain what she said. Indeed, throughout the film, there is a distinct lack of reference to real fathers. The only parental figure we see is the Pin’s mother and the only other references made are of mothers (specifically those of Brendan, Brain and Laura). Kristeva explains this twist indirectly in Powers of Horror: “Manipulation of words is not an intellectual play but a desperate attempt to hold on to the ultimate obstacles of a pure signifier that has been abandoned by the paternal metaphor’ (italics mine). This is the film’s encounter with the void behind language, that there is no external Big Other authorising its meaning.

But, in an almost Hegelian movement, Brick goes further and returns to the father. The twist then is not that there is no father, but that the father is you, that the meaning can only be authorised by yourself on the level of signifier. The trauma/cause is not something outside of our symbolic world but something intrinsic in it. This negative space is not a subversion or rebellion against the paternal prohibitions but actually, effectively constitutes paternal authority.

In this way, it is the paradoxical nature of the object cause, its own constitutive yet necessarily unattainable identity, that defines Brendan as a subject. Once Brendan gets too close, once he steps out to grasp the trauma as it is in itself, then it evaporates into nothingness (like the Brick shattering into white powder at the end) while he as subject turns in on himself and is erased. The object cause that he desires is itself the negative of the subject - the father - that which he thought he was resisting. Hence his last words are ‘She called me a dirty word’, not only registering himself as object but also, at the same time, as subject. Seemingly despite himself, he is restarting the prohibition of language that begins with the Father (and thus Brain disappears back inside Brendan's head, Brendan turns his back on the feminine). And so, in the desire and progression to realise the cause behind form’s distortion, we realise that we as subjects are already the cause, that we were always-already on the other side.

Torture too real

2006-05-18T20:07:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post recently published a bizarre story about the MPAA banning the poster for the new doco by acclaimed British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom. The doco, titled 'The Road to Guantanamo", investigates the abuses and torture within the infamous US detention facility, following the stories of three British prisoners who were released after two years but with no charges ever filed against them.

Its poster (as above) was deemed by the MPAA as being too distressful because of its depiction of torture (in particular, the bag over the head). The approved poster (left) was framed to show only the prisoner's shackled hands.

This smacks of political censorship. Especially when we compare it to the posters the MPAA did approve for the recent, #1 box office horror movie, 'Hostel'. Both films centre on torture. The difference? 'Hostel' is fictional and unapologetically exploitative of torture. 'Road', on the other hand, actually proposes to take a serious and concerned look at the issue.

The WaPo article distills the layers of irony better than I can:

"Although Osterberg says that torture is not specifically cited in the guidelines governing print materials, the proscription against violence, blood and disturbing scenes "would probably encompass" it. Thus, the MPAA's decision puts it at odds with the U.S. government, which has repeatedly defended techniques, including hooding prisoners, as not legally torture, and not inconsistent with the basic American values the MPAA tries to uphold.

In a 2003 Department of Defense report, hooding was given a green light, as not inconsistent with the United States' obligations under international conventions or U.S. law. The report also approved prolonged standing, though stipulated that it "should never make the detainee exhausted to the point of weakness or collapse." And that it not be "enforced by physical restraints."

Which means that the MPAA required a change in the image that removed something not deemed torture (hooding) and focused the image on the bound hands and extended arms that clearly depicts someone forced to stand (or worse, hang) under restraint to the point of collapse, which might well be torture."

The semiotics of torture. I get chills.

Karl Indicted...Maybe

2006-05-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

Jason Leopold at Truthout.org reported something Saturday that has been ignored by the mainstream media: Karl Rove has been indicted.

According to five of Leopold's anonymous sources, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent half a day on Friday telling Karl Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, about the indictment, informing Rove that he had 24 business hours to get his affairs in order. The story has been vigorously denied by a spokesman for Rove as well as directly by his attorney. It has still not yet been officially announced nor will you see it confirmed in the mainstream media. Leopold has broken several stories on truthout on the Plame Affair (most reliable some not) and he stands by his latest story, having re-checked with his sources and promising to out them if he is proved wrong. His latest estimate is that the indictment will be officially announced "either Wednesday or Friday" (24 business hours being about three days, and Wednesday and Friday the days when the Grand Jury meets every week).

The story has attracted criticism from the MSM as well as raising a number of issues simmering between the mainstream media and indy media sites. If the story turns out to be true, it will be one of the biggest stories to have been broken by an independent news site and will bring the MSM to shame. If it proves to be a fabrication, it'll not only provide another, huge stumbling block for internet credibility but calls into question whether Leopold himself was set up, either by Fitzgerald looking to entrap possible leakers, or the White House, in perhaps some sort of Rove payback to one of the reporters constantly at his heels.

At the risk of having egg on my face by Friday, here's my two cents: I'm skeptical. Mainly because of Leopold's shady background (a previous breaking story at Salon over Enron and a Bush Administration official could later not be substantiated), but also the vagueness over his sources and the nagging question about why Rove's people would deny the story so outright if they knew they would be disproved later in the week. Granted Rove's spokesman has been known to lie before (remember when he denied Rove was a 'Target' in the investigation?) but Leopold is also a shady character with a history of lying, stealing and even mental illness. Leopold seems to be placing what's left of his career and credibility on this story. It's a leap of faith I'm not quite ready to take.

Colbert: Assimilated or Assimilating?

2006-05-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

RR reader Ryan Van Den Nouwelant thinks Colbert may have played into Bush's hands:

When Labour polling showed Tony Blair to be considered too confident they sent him on a number of right of centre interviews to get grilled to buggery. Looking suitably humble and receiving some fairly bias criticism improved public perception no end.

I just hope Colbert wasn't inadvertantly doing Bush a favour, with a swinging public perceiving the leftist ribbing inappropriate for the occasion.

Thoughts?

This is an interesting argument. Lee Siegel over at The New Republic raises a similar point, positing that Colbert's criticism was already planned for and assimilated by Bush. But I don't buy it.

More interestingly,Jodi discusses it in reference to Zizek on the contained transgression in ideology. According to the theory, dissidence occupies an escapist and cathartic space within the space of the dominant ideology, thus paradoxically allowing people to accept and conform to the very things they criticise, while privately believing that they play no real part in it. As Padraig says, "The knowing cynical distance from the ruling ideology, the fact that everyone knew it was a sham, actually enabled it to function."

And in a lot of ways, this is exactly what the White House Correspondents Dinner has traditionally been all about: 'Humbling' the President through faux criticism (ie. jokes about how he talks not how he acts), expunging any excess hate and making him more personal to voters. In fact, this 'humility as spin' has been a well used Bush strategy for containment of criticism.

However, in response to Ryan, I think Bush's version of humility has been very different to Blair's. While Blair looks genuinely sympathetic and regretful in those interviews, drowning himself in sweat, furrowing his brow and looking quite helpless, Bush maintains his forceful swagger, his jokey deflections and endless platitudes about how great freedom and differing viewpoints are. While Blair's humility is based on acceptance, Bush's humility is just more denial. And, judging from the consistently declining approval ratings, I think the public are becoming more and more aware (and tired) of this protective level of media spin.

What I think was so sublime about Colbert then was not his critical distance but precisely his over-identification with Bush. And not just in his co-option of the Bush spin to its logical extreme, but the startling visual fact that Colbert was no longer on a contained, fantasmatic, late night Comedy Central spot but transposed six feet from the President in an official White House function containing Karl Rove, Scott McClellan, Fox News and 2,000 'other' political journalists. Colbert's previous subversive distance became a shocking engagement of negation. He was both the attack and the response on Bush, the pin that punctures the circle of spin. Perhaps the reason journalists didn't find him funny in the end was precisely because his humour was all too real. Colbert trounced the fantasmic level of transgressiveness epitomised in Bush's reflexive spin and, through its very acceptance, forced Bush to assimilate. The key problem was that (and people may differ in opinion here) I don't think Bush changed his response. The grim look, the smile and pat on the back after the speech, the angry 'ready to blow' backroom reports afterwards...There was no sincerity, understanding or humility there. Just more denial. If anything, I felt more sympathy for Colbert. With little laughter coming from the audience and only the icy glare from Bush to respond to, you can't help but feel for the guy - if only in the protective feeling of disbelief!

That all said, Ryan raises a good point. With approval ratings as bad as they are and the political crises overwhelming, Bush has got to take on the criticism somehow and the only way may be to absorb it (think about the public's turn of support for Clinton when he got visibly hammered by Ken Starr over Monica Lewinsky). As a future spin strategy then, I think there's a good possibility you might be right.

Two Towers, One Ring....

2006-03-04T15:50:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of Mardi Gras, I thought I'd link to these two hilarious spoof trailers of Top Gun: Brokeback Squadron and Brokeback Mount Doom. The subversive queer reading of Top Gun has always been bubbling away at the surface of that movie, with its slick images of half naked guys playing beach volleyball or showering in the locker rooms. Director Tony Scott (Man on Fire) even modelled Ice Man and Maverick on glossy photographs by gay photographer Bruce Webber. No shit. But the whole Top Gun theory was never fully explicated until Tarantino's character in Sleep With Me explained to a bemused crowd how the film was actually a metaphor for a man struggling with his homosexuality.

Now, I've always made the argument that Lord of the Rings is the definitive example of man's struggle with homosexuality pitched on an epic scale. What other conclusion could one gather from a story that features an all-male pub called 'The Prancing Pony' in which a shady mountain hick known only as 'Strider' whisks away a bunch of 'hobbits' into his motel room?

One could say Frodo and Sam were just really good friends (you know, the usual kind of relationship you have with your gardener). But it's hard to believe when you also have to account for the sheer paucity of female characters in Tolkein's epic (Liv Tyler's character actually had to be excavated from one of the appendixes). Clearly Frodo Baggins is a character in some serious agony over his feelings towards Samwise Gamgee. How many romantic gazes, hazy cinematography, "Oh Sam"s and "Mister Frodo"s can one straight man take?

Now, I'm not an expert on Freud, but it struck me that old Siggie would have a field day with the phallic images and castration symbols that dominate this trilogy. Take the One Ring for example. Clearly this evil ring represents the self-driving and self-destructive phallocentric cycle of the dominant patriarchal sexual paradigm. The Ring, we discover, was originally dislodged from the Dark Lord Sauron by cutting off his 'finger', while also snapping the King's 'sword' in half in a disorienting scene of dual castration. Sauron later returns as the 'Eye of Sauron', in an image that looks suspiciously like the female genitalia, the monstrous threat of symbolic castration. Frodo experiences this eye whenever he puts on the Ring, a horrific sign of the threat posed by the phallocentric paradigm on the invisible remainder of homosexuality.

Ironically once Frodo and Sam put on this ring they immediately become invisible, invisible to the dominant sexual system. They meld in, no longer standing out as something Other. But their invisibility also becomes a devouring sense of self that weakens their souls. It becomes a denial of their sexual identity. Their journey then is ultimately a journey of becoming sexually visible, climaxing of course in the 'eruption' of Mount Doom. Yet once Sam and Frodo are back in the Shire, Sam, in a truly tragic scene, leaves Frodo for Rosie, denying the secret love they shared together. Thus Frodo, rejected and forlorn, runs away to the Grey Havens with the Gay Parade of Elves (surely the ultimate gay fantasy of uniformed, long blond-haired toy boys??).

You could apply this brilliant and penetrating theory to almost every scene and character of Lord of the Rings (notice that Gandalf is played by Sir Ian McKellan, the gayest actor in Hollywood, and how about Gollum as the Aids victim that haunts Frodo and Sam?). Although I found it starts getting weird when you find yourself pontificating on just how those talking trees symbolize the homosexual relationship with landscape. And hell, it's far more fun to discuss it amongst friends with a few beers behind you..