It's been pretty quiet 'round these parts as the summer begins to wind down and August and the new semester approach. But I recently posted the following review on Amazon, and I thought I'd post it here (with some minor editing) as well.
Breughel's The Tower of Babel, which also serves as the opening image from Naqoyqatsi. Image found here.
This film, the third and last of the Qatsi trilogy, is every bit as visually and sonically spectacular as its predecessors. But, though it clearly belongs with them, it is finally a less hopeful film than the first two. I suspect, though, that that's part of director Godfrey Reggio's point. Any film that opens with an image of the Tower of Babel is probably not going to be very hope-filled.
In Koyaanisqatsi ("Life Out of Balance") and Powaqqatsi ("Life in Transformation"), the two realms being compared and contrasted (respectively, natural and urban spaces, and indigenous and Western ways of living) were given fairly equivalent amounts of screen time, suggesting (to me, at least) the possibility of an equilibrium being achieved between the two--if not within the space of the film, then among viewers as they ponder how best to live. Perhaps that is why I prefer the first two films. Naqoyqatsi, released 14 years after Powaqqatsi, seems to suggest that that possibility of equilibrium has been lost: Technology, as signified in the film by its recurring sequences of strings of binary numbers, not to mention the digital generation and/or alteration of the vast majority of what we see on the screen, has ceased being only a tool by and through which we interact with nature. It has become, in significant ways, our surrogate for nature, blurring our traditional notions of what is "natural" and what is "artificial." The short sequence in which we see the head of Dolly the sheep (image found here)
encapsulates this idea for me: as she moves her head from side to side, the image blurs, doubling and tripling, raising in a visual way the philosophical questions raised by our ability to clone animals.
Technology, this film seems to argue, is the worst sort of dystopia: one that we don't entirely realize we live in because we can no longer be entirely sure whether what we see is the world as it is, or whether it's been tweaked to our liking or convenience.
As if in counterpoint to all this, though, Philip Glass's score floats over all of what we see; it's scored for a small orchestra and isn't as heavy (or heavy-handed) as was his music for the first two films. Lovers of cello will want to hear in particular Yo-Yo Ma's elegant performances.
I will be showing this film to my students this fall. I am hoping one of them will note the film's outdated computer graphics; I'm hoping he'll say that we have better graphics now. "Better? In what way?" "Ours are more realistic." "Yes--and? Is a near-invisible line between the real and the computer-generated necessarily a good thing?"
Over at his excellent film blog, Scanners, Jim Emerson has an ongoing feature called the Opening Shots Projects. Here's its rationale, in brief:
1) The movie is about what happens to you while you watch it. So, pay attention -- to both the movie and your response. If you have reactions to, or questions about, what you're seeing, chances are they'll tell you something about what the movie is doing. Be aware of your questions, emotions, apprehensions, expectations.
2) The opening shot (or opening sequence) is the most important part of the movie... at least until you get to the final shot. (And in good movies, the two are often related.)
The opening shot can tell us a lot about how to interpret what follows. It can even be the whole movie in miniature.
(The full (I assume) list of films discussed is here.)
In the spirit of these examinations, I want to try my hand at writing one of these for the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film The Conversation.
The short review, first of all: This is a first-rate, tightly-constructed suspense film worthy of Hitchcock. (Indeed, at a couple of moments it seems to pay quick homage to Vertigo via the films' shared San Francisco setting, but that's a subject for another post.) Its real subject, though, is its central figure, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), and his gradual emotional investment in the task he's been given despite his usual ability to remain detached from his assignments. For a couple of reasons, I am considering showing The Conversation to my Comp classes in lieu of the Hitch films I've been showing, and the only thing that makes me hesitate is the film's slow-paced middle section: most of it does nothing to advance the story, but it's absolutely vital for our understanding of Harry.
Here's the clip, via Turner Classic Movies (you might want to follow the link to see the full image as it plays):
The discussion is below the fold.
This high overhead shot of Union Square has to be one of the slowest zoom-ins in cinema. Lately, I've become fascinated by how static and nearly-static cameras hold our attention in ways that rapid cutting does not; this film is filled with such shots, and so the opening is already preparing us to be patient and watchful. Our eyes sweep the space we're shown; we look for something without (yet) having any clue as to what that something is.
The credits play an interesting role in all of this via their placement on the screen relative to the scene: though the frame is, at first, centered on the median that forms the square's central axis, the credits appear in in the lower-right corner of the frame, balanced by the grey space of the promenade that, as the shot tightens, will come to dominate the entire left-hand side of the frame. Thus, the viewer's attention keeps getting pulled back and forth between that space and the text of the credits. Thus, the credits' distracting us from watching the square creates in us, before this movie about surveillance has even begun, the great fear that we're missing something. (Why else would the camera be taking its own sweet time zooming in?) From about the 1:10 mark on, though, the shot has become tight enough that the credits--now listing those unimportant people who, you know, actually made the film--are now superimposed over the median, which allows our attention to shift over to the promenade. Perhaps for the first time, we now notice the mime; perhaps, we wonder, he will be this sequence's subject, at least for a little while.
The audio for this shot is surprisingly quiet; its ambient, faraway quality befits the positioning of the camera high above the proceedings, isolating us emotionally even as we wonder what, if anything, we are looking for. The first clear sound we hear is a small jazz ensemble playing in a Dixieland style, the most prominent instruments being the clarinet and tenor sax. The tenor sax, we'll learn, is Harry's instrument of choice--and,
and, we'll learn, forms an aural bookend for the film. (Image found here.)
For a little over a minute, all we hear is the ambient noise drifting up to us from the square; then, at the 1:05 mark, we suddenly hear a bubbling electronic sound of some sort that ends as abruptly as it has begun. We're given no explanation for it. We'll hear a similar sound at around 1:45, again with no clue as to what we're hearing, but from then on it will recur more frequently in the scene--clearly, then, it is something of significance for this scene--and, well learn, for the film.
During all this time--from about 1:10 to about 2:12--the camera's attention, or at least that of our eyes, has been on the mime, who keeps in nearly constant motion, moving both with and against the general flow of traffic in the square. At the 2:12 mark, though, the mime begins to circle a man on the edge of the crowd. This man is balding, he's wearing classes and a grey translucent raincoat. (It's a cool but sunny December day.) Harry Caul's raincoat effectively names him before we actually know his name; he wears it even when he's lying in bed with his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr). Moreover, in scene after scene some sort of membrane-like material will be interposed between Harry and the audience. There is much more to say about this coat, but we don't yet know this.
From 2:12 till about 3:04, Harry will begin to walk away from our vantage point, the mime following him for a bit. At the 3:04 mark, the point of view suddenly shifts: we seem to be at or near ground level, looking up (perhaps Harry's perspective?) toward the large City of Paris sign on a rooftop, a man sitting under it. Another cut, and now we're on the roof observing the man; he's pointing what appears at first to be a rifle but is really a specialized microphone with a rifle scope on it. A few seconds more, and we'll peer through the scope with him as he watches a couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams), the earlier electronic sounds burbling in earnest now. This unintelligible sound, we suddenly realize, is why we're here, but as to what it means . . .
These three-and-a-half minutes here are the film's essence in a nutshell: the introduction of the plot and principle characters; the establishing of jazz as a leitmotif that will run up to and including the last scene of the film; the introduction of its central themes of surveillance and the decoding of language. It's brilliant in and of itself; as a kind of Cliff's Notes for the entirety of the film, it's hard to imagine how it could be more effective.
Terence Malick and Christian Bale, Austin, Texas, September 2011. Image found here.
Dear Mr. Malick,
I'm under no illusions here. You almost certainly will never read this. For one thing, who the heck am I to you? For another, you don't strike me as the sort of guy who has a publicist who Googles for mentions of you. Finally, and most important, you are pretty busy right now, it appears, what with a film just finished last year and two that you're shooting this year. But I still feel compelled to say a little something that's directed toward you, so I'll get right to the point so that you can decide whether to read further.
I think you should direct the film adaptation of Blood Meridian.
I admittedly don't know a whole lot about you, but I do know this: Back in March, at some point during my watching The Tree of Life, I remember thinking, This guy should be making films of Cormac McCarthy novels. Maybe that thought was prompted by how you film Nature and landscapes as though you take seriously Emerson's descriptions of wooded areas as plantations of God. Maybe it was during one of those scenes in which Brad Pitt's character Mr. O'Brien isn't saying too much but the viewer can sense his frustration and even anger--but not in/with that particular moment per se, but with the totality of his life that has brought him to that moment and not some other, more preferable one. Or it simply may have been my growing awareness that you take seriously and head-on the enormous questions of how and in what we find meaning in human existence without making it all sound sappy or easy--and, by the way, doing so via rich, lyrical--yes, McCarthy-esque--language. Anyway, it wasn't long after I had cast you as my preferred director of McCarthy's work that I thought, Yes: Blood Meridian is the film you should be making--this despite the very obvious fact that that novel and The Tree of Life don't have a whole heck of a lot in common on the surface.
Recently, though, my colleague Larry the Movie Guy lent me his copy of your film The Thin Red Line (IMDB), and I watched it. As the Wikipedia entry makes clear, it's a bit of a mess, especially with all the cameos of Stars We've Heard Of and, "offstage," the upset egos surrounding all those other performances that were truncated or cut altogether. But as I watched your war film, I felt that my earlier judgment about you was vindicated: the opening sequence with the AWOL soldiers living in a Gauguin-esque South Pacific world; the scenes in which soldiers crawling through the tall grass can barely see through it a yard ahead of them; the scene in which a squad silently contemplates the brutally-mutilated bodies of two Army Rangers (the power of this scene, for me, is not in the horror of what was done to these bodies but in the men's contemplation of them); the chaotic scene in which the squad takes the hill from the Japanese; the fleeting recollections Private Bell has of his love for his wife; and through it all, again, those unapologetically gorgeous voice-overs contemplating the good and evil in each of us, asking about their origins and what causes which to be revealed--all of these things caused me to think about corresponding moments in McCarthy's novel and how you might render them and I found myself thinking Yes. Yes.
According to both Wikipedia and IMDB, the film adaptation of the novel is languishing in whatever the Hollywood equivalent of an "In" box is. In a way, I'm glad that's the case. When I'd read, some years back, that Ridley Scott had initially been chosen to direct it, I confess that my heart sank a little; much as I admire Blade Runner--a comparable narrative, to my mind--I think Blood Meridian requires a lighter touch. (And yeah, you Blood Meridian fans--I know just how that sounds.) As for the other names associated with adapting it and bringing it to the screen--Todd Field, James Franco and Nicolas Winding Refn (whose Drive was one of last year's Best Picture nominees)--I admit to not knowing their work. Maybe they'd be adequate to the task. But I feel certain that you would be.
Here's why: There's no getting around the fact that Blood Meridian is filled not just with violence, but with scene after scene of the most extraordinarily brutal violence in, perhaps, all of American literature. Everyone who reads McCarthy gets that part, and any film version of this novel has to depict that inflinchingly. But McCarthy's goal here is not to depict violent acts for their own sake but to say something about the nature of the people--and peoples--committing it: how the very people sitting around campfires arguing against Violence in the abstract can, the next day, commit themselves so fervently to horrific acts of violence the next day; and how it cannot be an accident that McCarthy has included in his narrative Delaware Indians--members of the tribe that had raised James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo--and, shall we say, thoroughly de-romanticizes them in the process. And on and on.
But there are two final things that I think most people miss about this novel but you, Mr. Malick, would not, and would make sure to make present in your film version. In fact, these features are what help me get through this thing whenever I read it--because, I must be honest, even after having known and admired Blood Meridian for so long, it has become no easier to read because of its violence. The first is that, while this novel is not long on depictions of introspection on the part of its characters, those moments are there, and you'd be certain to reveal them, as, for example, in the novel's opening scene as the kid listens to his father's drunk ravings about his wife's death while giving birth to the kid or, in the briefest of biographies of Glanton, when we learn that he is married and will never see his wife again. In both The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, you make powerful use of brief flashbacks that reveal the interiority of your characters, revealing them to be more complex than they would otherwise appear; these flashbacks are crucial in the novel, and would be equally crucial in any film version, in making these characters more than unthinking killing machines. The other thing is something of a corollary to the first: page after page of McCarthy's novel contain richly-described scenes of weather and landscape. The scalp-hunters often don't notice their surroundings except insofar as it reveals something of the Indians they're seeking, but someone certainly notices, or else they wouldn't be in the novel. Vereen Bell, in The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (the first book-length study of the writer's work (but only up to Blood Meridian); no longer in print, but I'd assume most university libraries would have it) makes the (to me) persuasive argument that the novel "is haunted by the mystery that its own language challenges the very nihilistic logic that it gives representation to" and that we see this most clearly in its "reverence for nature and for the way in which nature corresponds to an imagined condition of being that the facts of life otherwise contradict" (128). As one of his examples, he quotes a scene in which the scalp-hunters are riding through an aspen grove that has turned golden in the fall: "The leaves shifted in a million spangles down the pale corridors and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem and held it and let it fall and its perfection was not lost on him" (qtd. in Bell 128-129, my emphasis). These are the sorts of thing--subtle but crucial to the novel--that you would not miss: neither these richly-described landscapes, nor the text's (and its characters') occasional noticing of them. There are also various surreal set pieces (the Comanche attack; the Judge and the idiot as they hunt the kid in the desert; the kid's encounter with an old Indian woman; the saloon scenes at Ft. Griffin at the end of the novel; etc., etc., etc.) that you'd be able to handle without making them ridiculous-looking.
So what do you say, Mr. Malick? I am not certain of too many things, but I am absolutely convinced that you'd not mess up this job, which would be oh-so-easy even for a skilled director to mess up. If you want to know more, I have no "people" to talk to. Just let me know. One last thing: even if you don't take up this project, thank you for making such extraordinary films.
Thanks to my colleague (and film buff) Larry the Movie Guy, the Mrs. and I watched Midnight in Paris this past Friday night. The Mrs.' quickie review: "That wasn't as terrible as I had expected." (She had said earlier that she has had trouble understanding Woody Allen films in the past and was afraid this might be the case again with this one.) As for me, I confess to not being too excited about seeing this one; I'd read a positive review last summer that, even so, made its time-warp sequences sound to me, in that precise film-critique term, "flaky." But because I still have yet to see many Woody Allen films and because the first R-rated film I ever saw was Manhattan (I was mesmerized; I'd never seen a film like that before), and because Midnight in Paris was nominated for Best Picture last year, I thought I'd give this one a go.
I liked it, too, though it's not a film I absolutely must own a copy of. But something about it nagged at me and, as I sit here thinking about what nagged at me, I think also that that feeling just may be intentional on the film's part.
T.S. Eliot called London "Unreal city" in "The Waste Land;" that's probably the best way to think of Allen's Paris in the "now" of this film. The film's 4-minute-long opening sequence of shots of Paris progressing from morning to late afternoon, some scenes more familiar than others, all of them looking like images for travel posters, their colors looking a whole like any number of Impressionist paintings you've seen, sets the mood for the rest of the film. This is pretty ironic when you think about it: the Impressionists sought to paint exactly what they saw in the instant that they saw it, unedited. But of course paintings, no matter how spontaneous their creation, are themselves a mediated medium, just as all art is. For those of us whose sole experience of this city comes via photographs and paintings, these images become "Paris" for us; Paris the actual city, where millions of people live and work, not all of them especially happily, recedes from us. Towards the end of the opening sequence, we hear Owen Wilson's Gil Bender in voice-over, waxing rhapsodic about turn-of-the-(20th-)century Paris, and Gil's fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) tells him that he's not in love with a city but with a fantasy, and we'll eventually come to realize that what we've been seeing is Gil's image of what he imagines must have been the ideal time to have been in Paris, not the actual place. (Unless I'm forgetting something, the most contemporary structure we see in the opening sequence is the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre.) We've just been shown a Paris, in other words, that is the result of Gil's fashioning from things he has read and seen of it from a time that he admires.
This post was going to be a bit of a rant about how we have here yet again a film in which Americans glide across the surface of a place, never seeing it on its own terms, for good or for ill; that this film asks us to prefer Gil's culture tourist to Inez's and her parents' (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) chilly, cash nexus-driven engagements with the place, yet Gil's back-in-time midnight perambulations aren't any more genuine. Nor is the desire of the flapper Adrianna (Marion Cotillard) to stay in the warp that deposits her and Gil in the Belle Epoque of late 19th-century Paris. That is, her desire is genuine, but that which she seeks to achieve through its pursuit is not.
As I first thought about this film, I thought it was diving into some pretty, and pretty deep, nostalgia-wallowing. In thinking about it more, though, I see that it pulls out of that dive. These desires for times other than Now, as Gil rather wordily tells Adrianna towards the end of the film, are pursuits of happiness rather than of genuineness--just as Inez in her own way had told him near the beginning of the film. Inez isn't well-suited for Gil, but she knows him better than he knows himself.
I think to say much more would be to spoil some things, so I will stop here. But I will say that Midnight in Paris is a sly meditation on the seductiveness--and, thus, the perils--of nostalgia. Worth seeing, or borrowing from someone.
Hello, reader(s). All is well here; just busy and lacking in things worthy of troubling you to consider reading.
By some fluke, over the course of the fall and winter the Mrs. and I ended up seeing four of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. While I'm glad that one of them, The Artist, won, the post below is about the most interesting and challenging and demanding of the lot.
A still from The Tree of Life. Click on the image to enlarge. Image (and a remarkably thorough (and laudatory) assessment of the film) found here.
The Tree of Life (2011; dir. Terence Malick). The Wikipedia article is a good place to get oriented.
I can say one articulate thing about this film, so I'll get that out of the way now so you can move on if you wish: It's the most beautifully-photographed film I've seen in a long time. Camera movement, static shots, the quality of light (much of it is shot in natural light at around sunset). . . don't worry if you don't understand this film's story (such as it is); just watch, and marvel at cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's work. A writer for Total Film (quoted in the Wikipedia article) writes, "You could press ‘pause’ at any second and hang the frame on your wall," and actually, that's not too much of an exaggeration. Besides: This film does most of its work at the level of the visual: we're not so much told the story of the O'Brien family as we're shown it.
I'll also let you know that, after my one viewing, I don't pretend to have the firmest of grasps on everything going on here. Like most people, one of the first things I'd heard about it was that it has dinosaurs in it, and that led me to expect something very unconventional. It is that, but not as unusual as I'd expected; still, compared to its fellow nominees for Best Picture for last year, it might as well be Koyaanisqatsi (a film, by the way, that The Tree of Life does bear some resemblance to).
The film's plot, such as it is, is pretty simple: We are presented the life of the O'Brien family, who live somewhere in Texas (most of the film was shot in Smithville, a town about 50 miles southeast of Austin). The film moves forward and backward in time as Jack (Sean Penn), one of the brothers, reminisces about his childhood--his domineering, artistically-frustrated father (Brad Pitt), his nurturing mother (Jessica Chastain), and his younger brother, R. L. (Laramie Eppler), whose offstage death from unknown causes (perhaps a casualty of war) at age 19 is the film's first big moment--and his (Jack's) gradual estrangement from and, in his heart at least, reconciliation with his family.
In a film full of beautiful and/or enigmatic images, the one at the beginning of this post is one of the latter. It's thanks to this still, in fact, that I now know just what it was that I was seeing in the film: It's the distended shadows of two kids playing on a concrete slab; the viewer's perspective is upside-down relative to the kids. In order to make sense of what we're seeing, that perspective requires us to abandon the typical position most films place us in, that of detached observer watching close by but at a remove. We're forcefully compelled to ask why "we" are hanging upside-down from the whatever-it-is we're hanging from. We're still observing, but there's no 4th wall here. We are in the space of the film.
This film has any number of moments like this, in which the scene is so immersive in its quality that, even when we recognize everything we're shown in the scene, we still have to determine where we are in the film's time and space (which sprawls over millions of years and throughout the cosmos and, perhaps, a supernatural realm as well). As several other reviewers I've run across have noted, in its scope this film reminds me of no other so much as it does Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I am embarrassed to mention this next bit, but: when I saw the scene that the still is from, the first thing I thought as I watched was, "Are those aliens?" Dumb, I know: Texas is strange-looking enough in this film without having space creatures come and visit, too. But in thinking about things more, I thought, Well, in a more figurative sense, this film does seem to be suggesting that we are aliens relative to the cosmos. Our visits here in this place are, really, so brief. If we're lucky, we'll dimly and gradually come to understand our own families, the individuals in them and the dynamics among them; all the while, the titular tree that we ourselves planted in the yard grows before our eyes, known but not really seen and then suddenly There, big enough to climb in (and hang upside-down from?); and then, as the long creation sequence (that's the bit with the dinosaurs) and Fellini-esque closing sequence seem to suggest, there are the still-longer, still not-quite-known/understood histories of the cosmos and the supernatural.
I don't think the film argues that it's our responsibility to have a full knowledge of all this. Rather, it seems to posit that we should accept the knowledge that we cannot know, much less understand, all that surrounds us. (This is good advice for the first-time viewer of The Tree of Life, too.) This lack of acceptance of knowing that we do not know seems to be at the root of the father's general frustration with his life and his confrontational style of parenting; meanwhile, the mother's resonant line, "The only way to be happy is to love," suggests an approach to living that arises from that acceptance. Incidentally, that line reminded me of a line from Where the Wild Things Are, which I posted on last year: "Happiness is not always the best way to be happy." Both films, both in part about the emotional fragility of childhood, are also in part about the inevitable failure of what Wild Things's Max calls sadness shields and how the idea of Happy helps us to cope with that failure. But neither film is anything like glib about all this Happy stuff; in each, this knowledge feels earned and thus genuine, worth hanging on to.
So, yes: try to see this, and just let it do its thing. Watch it as you would read a challenging poem: don't try to understand everything, but try to see it whole and entire. Be patient with it; let it present its story in its way, rather than insist that it try to satisfy your assumptions about what a film "should" do. I think you'll be richly rewarded.
Tenzin Phuntsok Rinpoche, the reincarnation of Geshe Lama Konchog, contemplates a statue of the Buddha in this still from Unmistaken Child. Wikipedia entry. Trailer (which contains (highly intriguing) images not in the DVD release). Image found here.
Most parents would say that they cannot imagine any circumstances under which they would give up their children. Yet they do all the time, in symbolic ways at least: to marriage, to formal education, to jobs or the military. Far rarer, in Western culture, is the giving up of children--especially very young children--as an act of religious faith, as a gesture of belief in something far larger and unknowable than we are, and those few stories we do have can make us extremely uncomfortable if we ponder them long enough. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 might be the one that comes to most people's minds, but one that might not is the story of the boy Jesus in the Temple. Look in particular at vv. 48-50 at the link, with its clearly different meanings of "father." What does it mean that, at least in the canonical Gospels, Joseph is never mentioned again? In the apocryphal gospels that record stories from Jesus' childhood, Joseph is much more prominent, but/and in these stories, it's pretty clear that Joseph, um, has his hands full (have a look at the Infancy Gospel of Thomas; you won't have to read long before you see why this one didn't make the canonical cut). Despite the near-absence of stories from Jesus' childhood in the canon, it seems to me worthwhile to ponder Joseph's role as Jesus' parent and, for that matter, his disappearance from the Gospels after Luke 2. This can seem ominous--Joseph no longer remains emotionally invested as Jesus' parent--or it can signify a kind of (positive) letting go of his role as parent in favor of what appears to be Mary's deeper understanding of this child.
It hadn't been my intention, and still isn't, to raise these questions in my students by showing this film.
In my Comp II classes this semester as part of a unit on film analysis, I've been showing Unmistaken Child as an example of a documentary (the other films I'm showing are Rear Window and Koyaanisqatsi). I initially chose it because it presents a world that, not just for my students but for almost all of us in the West, is very nearly unknown, and because, editing aside, it presents the story of Tenzin Zopa's five-year search for the reincarnation of his master in as unmediated a manner as I've ever seen (aside from some text at the very beginning that establishes the religious and historical contexts for what follows, there's no narration or explanation of what we're seeing apart from Zopa's occasional reflections on his dead master, the importance of his task, and his own felt inadequacy for performing it; if you're curious, here is more information on Zopa's own upbringing). The viewer, immersed in a world in which all the participants s/he meets take as given the truth of what is shown and said, is left to make of all this what s/he will. And, I figured, if nothing else, we'd have a whole lot of beautiful scenery to look at.
My students' response to this film has been overwhelmingly positive and thoughtful, in the sense that they are engaged in Zopa's quest; in their recognition that, as they see young Tenzin undergo the tests intended to prove he is the reincarnation of Geshe Lama Konchog, something is going on that we find difficult to explain even as we watch these things happen; and in the drama of Zopa's asking young Tenzin's parents to give the boy up to be raised in a monastery, perhaps never to see him again. This is not the same thing as saying that my students approve of the parents' choice, but the moment has caused at least some of them, no matter their own beliefs or lack thereof, to think more deeply about the idea of faith: that faith has to be more than "just" belief, that at some level faith requires action. As Ahpe, Tenzin's father and clearly the more reluctant of the parents (though neither is eager to make this choice), says, "If he is to be a blessing to all sentient beings, I can give him up. Who would give their child up for nothing?"
It's a devastating question. He is absolutely right, and yet it's also very tempting to reply, But that's exactly what you're doing. But I'd argue that Tenzin's parents are confronting a version of the mystery that confronts all parents, really: The giving-away of a child is a sacrifice of self on behalf of something better for the child or, in this film, for all conscious things, that is, still, unseen. The Dalai Lama's assertion that this boy is the reincarnation of a revered monk, or our marrying off a child to some relative stranger: at some level, there's really no difference in what is demanded of parents in either instance.
Notice that I've not tried to make a case for reincarnation. But then again, neither does the film. It's less interested in "proving" anything than it is in documenting Zopa's extraordinary search and its fruits. I'll just say this, though: There may be some rational explanation for what we see in the scenes in the testing of the boy; but let's just say that reminding myself that this little boy is no more than five years old by the end of the film makes me realize that if "coincidences" is all we have in the way of explanation, "coincidences" gets a really thorough workout over the course of this film.
See this film. You will be challenged to examine what you think you know about the nature of faith . . . or what it means to be a parent.
_______________
So, yeah: I'm back "here," at least for the moment. We're well, just busy--me with teaching, and the Mrs. with trying out new recipes. She has always been a good cook; of late though, she's become a pretty serious cook. Here's a little sample of just how serious: a while back, she spent, quite literally, most of a Saturday making mole negro oaxaqueño. Moles, for those of you who don't know, are thick, complex sauces that blend chocolate and peppers and other goodies and are served over chicken or pork; some are sweet and some are spicy, but this one balances the two and adds a smoky taste to the mix. If someone loves you, s/he will make this for you at least once in your lifetime.
I think the Mrs. really loves me, because she says she will make this again sometime.
Where the Wild Things Are (2009; dir. Spike Jonze). Trailer here. And here is a (dead-on, I think) review by Christopher Orr (which is one starting point for this post). Image found here.
The Mrs. and I finally saw this for the first time back on Labor Day. First things first: I highly recommend this film. The poster you see here is a pretty good encapsulation of its dynamics, I think: big, furry creatures (of course) that seem to be responsible for the scratches on the tree trunk (but what do they mean?); a mysterious round section removed from a distant trunk; is the creature hiding out of fear or playfulness, or the desire to harm?; and, suffused throughout, a bright-but-hazy light filtering through a forest in a late-fall state. Max (Max Records) may or may not be lurking about. The mood is ambiguous. It could turn in any direction, and without warning.
The whole film is like this. I had to sleep on it and go on my morning walk with Scruffy before I could think of a comparable film; and, this past Tuesday, while musing on how to introduce compare-contrast papers in an "interesting" way, the film I thought of was The Wizard of Oz.
I do like The Wizard of Oz, but for a long time I have wondered what the source of its enduring appeal (too polite: how about, "its stranglehold on the American popular imagination") is and, in particular, why it's presented these days as a film whose target audience is children. Is it its glossy, brightly-lit cartoonish surface in the Oz sequences, or Judy Garland's luminous voice when she sings "Over the Rainbow," or Margaret Hamilton's having entirely too good a time in her dual roles as Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West (the flying monkeys scare me more than she herself does), or what? Whatever traces of political allegory in L. Frank Baum's novel that might remain in the film are clearly not meant to be its focus--indeed, its preamble makes clear that the film, released almost 40 years after the novel's publication, is itself meant to be a nostalgia trip (already!) for "the Young in Heart"--it's intended for adults, in other words. (It's hard to have nostalgia-filled childhood memories of debates over the gold standard or the shortcomings of farmers, manufacturers and governments.) As one of my students blurted out in class when we were discussing this, it's really not a children's film, though it clearly is about childhood. There's something very strange about all this, though, something that neither nostalgia nor the tradition of having grown up watching it and so your kids should, too, don't fully explain.
It was in making certain connections between Oz and Wild Things that Oz became less strange to me. Max and Dorothy are very similar in their relationships to their respective families: each feels pushed aside as their parents/guardians are busy with their own concerns; each seeks protection from sorrow (Dorothy wants to go over the rainbow; Max, when he lands on the island of the Wild Things, announces that he has brought with him "a sadness shield that keeps out all the sadness, and it's big enough for all of us" (If that isn't enough to meet your minimum daily requirement of poignancy, by the way, pay a visit here; this film's language, by director Spike Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers, is extraordinary). The figures each meets in his/her respective fantasy sequence bear striking resemblances to figures from their "real" lives--indeed, in Wild Things Max also meets himself, though he doesn't recognize this, in the creature named Carol (who is male, and about whose name I have some completely unfounded speculation later on); as Dorothy says at the end of Oz, in each fantasy sequence, "some of it was awful, but most of it was beautiful"--which is to say, the fantasy sequences are troubled spaces as well, a fact which explains the long, wordless closing scene in Wild Things and Dorothy's realization that "it wasn't enough to just want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em - and it's that - if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!" (all sorts of stuff is rumbling beneath the surface of those words) and her declaration at the close that she's "not gonna leave here ever, ever again."
If you think about it, Dorothy's speech about looking for her heart's desire is a much less direct way of saying what one of the Wild Things tells Max: "Happiness is not always the best way to be happy." And it's realizing that, along with the other striking similarities between Max and Dorothy, that leads me to say that Oz has endured as long as it has because we sense it's telling us something genuine about childhood after all. That something is harder to see in Oz--one gets the feeling that Dorothy's speech went through a whole lot of re-writes so that it doesn't sound like it's saying what it actually says, which is, "A sepia-toned Kansas is what you've got in this life"--and much closer to the surface in Wild Things, a fact which seems to be at the root of the criticism it received.
Watching Where the Wild Things Are is kind of like watching your ecstatically-happy three-year-old daughter jumping up and down on the couch and being too far away to catch her if she happens to fall toward the coffee table: you feel their delight and yet can't help but feel at least some vague dread and, sooner or later, anguish (part of the anguish having its source, of course, in your not ever quite knowing when she'll fall), and then, after an interval, watching it all start all over again. (Yes. Her collarbone. Just once, though.) The scene from which this still comes (image found here) is a case in point. Max has just seen his mother (Catherine Keener) kiss a man she has invited to the house for dinner; he is angry, and when his mother asks him to call her sister down to eat, he does what you see here instead. I had expected this either to turn into slapstick or that there'd be some simple, violin-filled resolution to this scene as I watched--how many other films with similar scenes are there in which the parent tries to placate the child in some way?--but this scene only escalates from here. Max will end up biting his mother on the shoulder and then run out of the house into the woods. Soon, he'll find the boat that he sails to the island of the Wild Things, where he will declare himself king and declares he can make his enemies' heads explode . . . oh, and that he has brought along his sadness shield, too. We're only a third of the way into the film. Lots more couch-jumping to come, each scene standing on the edge of a knife, the sad ones veering into happiness every bit as quickly as the happy ones suddenly careen into an aching poignancy.
It's hard to watch; but then again, we know there's nothing truer one can say about childhood.
It's never in real doubt that Max will return home and be reconciled to his mother, and certainly never in doubt that she will choose to meet his needs. But the film's end doesn't tie everything up in a bow, either, the way that, again, any number of films with similar moments have conditioned us to expect: the mother still has to earn a living; there's no discussion of the would-be boyfriend; and where is Max's sister, Claire?
Back in 2009, before Where the Wild Things Are was released, I had this to say in a post on Carol Reed's great film, The Fallen Idol--another film that is not for children but which has a child at its center:
Such films reveal the uncomfortable truth of childhood that children, heavily dependent on adults for nurturing and protection, must learn to deal with their growing realization that adults are not dependent on them for anything at all--that kids have no choice but to rely on grownups, but adults--yes, even parents--are free to choose (or not) to acquiesce to satisfy that reliance. Kids are lucky--and luckier than they know--when grown-ups make that choice.
I have no evidence whatsoever for thinking this, but I do wonder if Jonze and Eggers gave the name Carol to the central Wild Thing as a tribute to Reed. Reed knew how to make movies about childhood. So also do Jonze and Eggers. I somehow doubt that yearly showings of Where the Wild Things Are will become a treasured American tradition, but I'm perfectly okay with that. One slightly-odd movie per year is enough annual nationally-shared weirdness.
Rick and Ferrari's first scene at the Blue Parrot. Image found here; click to enlarge.
[Edited and amended to avoid implying some things I don't mean to suggest.]
In my post on Casablanca from a couple of days ago, I briefly mentioned the arrangement of the space of the Blue Parrot, the bar run by Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet). Here, following up on some leads provided by Roger Ebert's commentary (and to get this film out of my head for a little while), I want to toss out a few observations about something seen there (and not seen elsewhere).
Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) functions as a metonymy for Casablanca's indeterminate spaces: He has an Italian surname, speaks with an English accent, uses French forms of address, and wears a fez while in the Blue Parrot and a panama hat when out and about. He is another version of the citizen of the world that Renault has declared Rick to be, someone who seems to be from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Yet, as I mentioned in the previous post, of all Casablanca's expatriates, Ferrari appears to have become fully assimilated into the Moroccan backdrop against which the film's central action plays out: When he makes his entrance at Rick's, the first people Ferrari acknowledges (with local hand gestures showing his respect) are north Africans. Moreover, we later learn that Ferrari is firmly in control of Casablanca's black market (which Rick makes clear he wants no part of) and, perhaps, even more unpleasant endeavors--when Ferrari offers to buy Sam's services from Rick, Rick tersely replies that he doesn't buy or sell human beings, to which Ferrari says that human beings are precisely Casablanca's "leading commodity."
Perhaps all this is why each of the two scenes set in the Blue Parrot conclude with Ferrari swatting at flies. Apparently in the corrupted world depicted in Casablanca, only the Blue Parrot has any trouble at all with flies. But in a place like Casablanca, corruption gets measured by kind rather than degree. The Parrot's chaotic exterior and seamy, dimly-lit interior seem intended to underscore Ferrari's full investment in Casablanca's unseemly side; compare to Rick's clean, brightly-lit, grid-like interior. In his commentary on the first scene, Ebert notes that the fly-swatting isn't in the script, that either director Michael Curtiz or Greenstreet himself added it as a bit of business. Whoever had the idea, it's a subtle touch that's no big deal in and of itself but, if we happen to notice it and think about it, at the very least enhances the film's texture. If we think about it a bit more, the flies' presence at the Blue Parrot but nowhere else serves as an implicit judgment on Ferrari.
[A later, quick comment on the empire-vs.-colony politics of this: While it's true that Ferrari is the film's firmest link to the local population and equally true that Ferrari is utterly corrupt, I don't think it follows that the film is arguing that the local population in its entirety is corrupt and to be avoided when not exoticized. There's something about Ferrari's lack of hesitation in owning up to who he is and what he does that leads me to conclude its judgment stops at Ferrari's indeterminate shores--or, more abstractly, at the shores of all those who would prey on or perpetuate human misery (which, alas, knows no political or cultural boundaries. Hence, again, why the flies are present only at the Blue Parrot.]
A still from Humphrey Bogart's first scene in Casablanca. On the set, Bogart played chess with Claude Rains and Paul Henried; it was Bogart's idea to have the chess board be Rick's stage business as he talks with Ugarte. According to Roger Ebert's commentary in the edition of Casablanca I have, Bogart preferred chess to poker because in chess, no one can cheat. Image found here.
[UPDATE:This piece in chessville.com is something of a summation of attempts to explain Casablanca's enduring appeal. It includes a nice discussion of the details of Rick's chess board and chess's larger semiotic function in the film--in particular, for both chess and the film, the significance of Rick's playing black.]
Humphrey Bogart doesn't have a traditional entrance in Casablanca. He doesn't walk into a scene. Rather, it's more like the audience makes its entrance into Rick's scene--which is to say, his space: the camera, taking on the point of view of a customer at Rick's who moves through the bar's entrance and seating areas and observing all the bargaining and haggling for papers, for money, for favors, then moves toward a table on which we see a drink, an ashtray, a chess board with a game in progress, and the hands of someone signing someone's tab for a waiter. (Perhaps he's signing our tab--after all, the scene is shot to appear as though we're accompanying the waiter who brings it.) The camera then pulls back to show Rick contemplating the board, holding one of his opponent's already-captured pieces.
The board itself isn't the scene's focus, of course; if it were meant to be, director Michael Curtiz would have made it thus. (Ebert in his commentary notes several times on Curtiz's economy as a director; with very few exceptions, every shot we see in Casablanca functions to help move the story along.) Still, in those shots in which we see the board in this scene, there seem to be some continuity problems that are worth pondering in their own right. Each time it appears, it is as though we're seeing a different game: at least two shots show different, well-advanced games; two others show a board whose game has barely begun, if at all. I think, to be honest, that the only work the chess board is intended to do here is just be a chess board and thus serve as an outward sign of Rick's careful, strategic thinking. We're probably not supposed to notice the pieces' very different arrangements on the board; the film's continuity editor (if it had one) either missed the problem or decided (or Curtiz did) that it didn't matter. But let's imagine for a bit that these inconsistencies are in fact intentional. Then, we can read the chess board as conveying the idea of different games being played simultaneously, all of them on one board, as we stand there waiting for Rick to OK our tab. Rick is in his bar all night, every night. Each night is a new series of simultaneous games for him--in those opening scenes, Rick deals with a bewildering variety of customers and they with each other--all playing out in the space of his bar, whose very tables are laid out like squares of a grid. [Aside: compare the interior of Rick's to the chaotic interior of Ferrari's bar, the Blue Parrot.]
Perhaps that is why, in the scene(s) involving the chessboard(s), we never see who Rick's opponent(s) is/are. "Everybody comes to Rick's," Captain Renault tells Major Strasser earlier in the film. Perhaps, potentially, everyone is Rick's opponent. Even--and especially--Ilsa: the one person most capable of hurting Rick . . . because, we will learn, she already has.
Ilsa confronts Rick in his office. Note the shadow pattern on the walls behind her; click in the image to enlarge. Image found here.
More below the fold.
Again: The last thing I'm claiming here is that Curtiz intends for the chess board to work in his movie in the way I've described it above. However, I do want to claim that these apparent errors in fact end up reinforcing Casablanca's strong sense of de-centeredness, of the city's being comprised of façades behind which little if anything (and certainly nothing pleasant) withstands closer scrutiny. Better put, Casablanca shows us a constantly-shifting space with no constants ruling apart from a far-off, bureaucratic System and, within this place on the periphery of that System's domain, most everyone's acting solely out of his/her self-interest. Few if any here are traditionally Good or Bad; all have in them the potential to be either, though corruption in this place is far more likely than redemption is. We have vague allusions to shadowy pasts; multiple rumors of deaths that turn out not to have been true--or, as Laslow says of the five different rumors regarding his death, "True every single time"; language either emptied of meaning or obliquely acknowledging that its speaker cannot freely speak the truth of a matter; and, presiding over all, the rhetoric and machinery of the Surveillance State. In such a place, people alternate between wanting to believe in and mocking the old verities of love and disinterested sacrifice for others in service to a Greater Cause. The verities are no different from any other narrative whose intrinsic value (never mind their truth or the motives of those who act in accordance with them) can be scrutinized and adopted or mocked, too, because, after all, what does anything matter in the end? ("[I]t doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.")
Chess boards are stylized maps on which one can assert power over another. I suspect Rick much prefers them to real maps, which depict spaces divvied up and controlled by others. I hope no one tells him, though, that he happens to be a character in Casablanca, a movie obsessed with maps and grids--human projections of virtual boundaries onto physical space, over which the vast majority of us have little say, much less the power to control. Consider the film's opening sequence: a raised-relief globe which turns to the western end of the Mediterranean; the camera moves toward France and, at the same time, a wipe replaces the relief map with a two-dimensional paper map that shows the circuitous route people fleeing the Germans had to take to get to Lisbon and thence to the U.S.--this map functioning at the same time as a screen on which is projected newsreel footage of war refugees. The film's central plot device is the possessing of Letters of Transit. Rick Blaine's language often wryly comments on the conflicts between what people wish the world were and its stubborn physical and political realities. Rick says he had come to Casablanca "for the waters;" when Captain Renault asks what waters Rick means, that Casablanca is in the desert, Rick says, "I was misinformed." When the German Major Strasser asks what nationality Rick is, he replies, "A drunkard," which prompts Captain Renault to declare Rick "a citizen of the world"--yet Rick's Everyman's homeland--his saloon--cannot hide him from Ilsa: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she had to walk into mine." When Victor Laslow requests a table as far from Major Strasser as possible, Rick tells him, "Well, the geography may be a little difficult to arrange . . ." This world is a rootless one: with the single exception of Ferrari, the owner of the Blue Parrot, who seems to have fully assimilated into the culture of the place, it seems anyone who speaks on the matter would rather be somewhere, anywhere, besides Casablanca. Everyone here is in some sense a refugee. Moreover, the name aside, no one can really say what Casablanca is on its own terms, apart from the palimpsests the expatriates have turned it into.
Casablanca, in other words, is a virtual-space rendering of a place called Casablanca--and that place's correspondence to a real place by that same name is a tenuous one at best. All we know about these places, really, are what we can say about them via the suspect medium of language.
One of this blog's very first posts asked about the source(s) of Casablanca's enormous popularity among both cinephiles and people who just love good movies. Aside from the usual responses of "good acting" and "good story, tautly told," in that earlier post I couldn't make sense of how this film, shot on a very tight 2-month schedule and "just" one of 50 that Warner Bros. made that year, "just" one of the three films Curtiz would direct that year, is #2 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 films. As I watched it yesterday for the first time in quite a while, searching for possible answers, the simplest one of all is the one that occurred to me: It retains its immediacy despite its precise placement in time (December 1941). For this film's first audiences, it must have felt like a newsreel: A reader for Warner's first read the play on which the film is based on December 8, 1941; in the very week of Casablanca's release, the Allies had begun the north Africa campaign. For us watching it today, I daresay, it feels like we are watching our own world in embryonic form--and, if we're really thinking about the particulars of the film's romantic triangle, we're seeing just how difficult it is to love authentically, balancing self-interest and sacrifice, in such a place.
Some films, their intentions aside, just get really, really lucky. Casablanca appears to be one of those films.
Last weekend, the Mrs. and I saw Objectified (it's instantly available via Netflix's online service--which because of its addictive properties should probably be illegal). Watching it felt almost providential. Long-time readers may remember that I keep returning to the subject of how to get my students to think about technology and their relationship to it; design, of course, is the art of making technology useful and, at its best, almost unnoticeable. If you think you might possibly be interested in seeing a film that serves as an introduction to the metaphysics of design, this is the film for you.
Here's the trailer:
Its director, Gary Hustwit, also made the much-acclaimed Helvetica--yes, the typeface. But before you run for the exits, at least give the trailer a try. In that film (which we also saw last weekend--see, again, my earlier suggested legislation re Netflix), and to a much broader extent in Objectified, Hustwit's big theme (as articulated in various ways by people in both films) is that good design doesn't call attention to itself as we use it. These objects feel like natural extensions of ourselves even as they remain outside us. But in the otherwise-affectionate tribute to Helvetica (the film was made in honor of its 50th anniversary), some of its interviewees make clear that that ubiquity can be both blessing and curse: successful designs can become analogous to invasive species who meet little or no resistance in their new environments. Subtly-made case in point: if you watch either or both films, keep score of the number of Macs you see people using compared to the number of PCs.
As it should be, Objectified is a friendly discussion of its subject. All of us, often unconsciously, are the beneficiaries of good design and, again without quite knowing why, feel frustrated when we encounter bad design. The frustration arises in part, I think, from the mystery that bad design creates in the user: we wonder if we're not using the object correctly, if some reason exists for its design that's escaping us. But, as a furniture designer in the film says, there's no reason for uncomfortable chairs to exist. Good design is aspirational, or should be: an end in itself, no matter the object or the wealth of its user.
I hate uncomfortable chairs, too. But toward the end of the film, when a designer gestures in the direction of a utopia in which designers would be included in the crafting of laws and policies, I took her point, but I also found myself thinking that too often in this discussion of how design makes our lives better, it feels as though ALL that's being talked about is making more-comfortable chairs (as opposed to, say, making a better world--not necessarily the same thing). Within that context, her remarks just seemed a bit silly. At one point, a designer indirectly acknowledges this when he says that good design is being used less as an end in itself than as a marketing ploy to sell stuff to people who already have too much stuff. (Here's one of many examples.) There's no discussion in the film of design being employed in developing countries to make people's lives demonstrably better; why not, I asked myself, some examples of that (such as One Laptop Per Child, the Life Sack, and Kona Bicycle's AfricaBike program) in place of a several-minutes-long paean to Apple? But my thinking also ran in another direction: we here in the developed world may complain about uncomfortable chairs, but the post-WWII built environments in which most of us in the U.S. live are designed not with people in mind but to accommodate automobiles and the illusion they create in people of preferable ways to occupy space and move about in it. (As just one example of what I mean, contemplate for a while the suburban phenomenon of the cul-de-sac. Heck: contemplate for a while the concept of suburbia itself.) Just as Thoreau saw happening with the locomotive's shaping influence on human activity in Walden (it was their speed's creation of the need for a uniform system of time-keeping that would lead to the creation of timezones), so also has the automobile's ubiquity so shaped our thinking about urban spaces that it is only with a struggle that we can begin to imagine urban cores whose default settings don't presume that the people who live and work in them will only or primarily drive around in them. (Along these lines, Kevin Kelly's new book, What Technology Wants takes up this same idea within the context of digitalized information and the devices and networks that store and transmit it.)
So, at a couple of points while watching Objectified, I couldn't help but think about how design's tendency to begin to serve not people but the machines we've built has led to a collective myopia with regard to the worlds we've built for ourselves, most famously expressed by Koyaanisqatsi:
But, though Objectified doesn't address these matters, Hustwit himself isn't blind to them. It was while writing this post that I was surprised and pleased to learn that he is working on a new film called Urbanized, which, it appears, will be taking up some of the questions Objectified prompts in me. I'm looking forward to seeing it and to finding some academically-legitimate way to inflict both it and Koyaanisqatsi on my unsuspecting freshmen.
A still from early in the opening sequence in Caché. Click the image to enlarge it. Image (and a brief but meaty discussion of the sequence) found here.
In Wilkie Collins' novel The Woman in White, there's a longish sequence in which we read some of the heroine Laura's diary entries concerning her growing fear of Sir Percival and her suspicion that he plans to imprison or even kill her and acquire her fortune. As readers, we already like Laura; and as we read these entries, we can't help but feel a growing empathy for her plight. So, when she writes in the final entry of her plan to give Sir Percival the slip, we silently wish her well.
And then, Collins plays a truly terrible trick on his reader (but, from a narratological standpoint, a truly kewl one): The very next thing we read after that final journal entry is Sir Percival's closing of Laura's diary in smug satisfaction! The reader is suddenly cast into an awfully ambiguous position--all this time, it had felt as though Laura had drawn us into her confidence; yet, in the moment of revealing that Sir Percival has just finished reading the diary, we feel as though we've let him read over our shoulder and thus inadvertently betrayed her. Or, worse: during at least part of that time, without our realizing it, we become Sir Percival.
Granted, this sort of thing doesn't happen often in fiction. Still, the fact that it does happen leads me to wonder: Why don't films do this sort of thing more often? Just to be clear: I'm not speaking of films with fractured narrative structures. Those may be disorienting, but what's disorienting is the difficulty in finding the film's narrative ground, its "now," its starting point. Rather, I'm speaking of films that leave deliberately ambiguous their narrative perspective, the point of view from which the story is being told and, implicitly, with whom the audience is to identify. I don't claim to have seen a whole lot of films, so my range of knowledge in this field isn't exactly encyclopedic. But of the ones I have seen, the only film I can think of that does something akin to what happens in Collins' novel is Caché (2005; dir. Michael Haneke; French w/ subtitles). Here's a plot summary, and here's the trailer:
Actually, I'd rather be showing you the opening sequence, because it's in recalling it that I decided to try to write a little about this subject. Caché opens with a static shot of a house in a residential neighborhood, the perspective distant from but on the street and in full view of the house. After a bit, the opening credits begin to appear. There's ambient noise; the occasional car passes; eventually, a man leaves the house and walks toward the viewer, eventually stopping at his car and getting in; otherwise, nothing moves, nor does the camera, for what feels like an interminable length of time--perhaps three or four minutes, an eternity in film. (Is there any more powerful weapon in the director's arsenal than the static shot for making us really watch--and in so doing, build tension?) Then suddenly, some voice-over discussion not of what we're seeing but of the nature of its making; scanning lines appear across the image, and the second portion of the sequence begins: we're in a living room with a man and a woman, Georges and Anne (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), looking at that same static image on their TV; the woman had found the tape, with no note, on their doorstep; their dialogue reveals that the tape's total run-time is two hours; Georges--whom, we realize, is the man approaching the car that we had seen earlier--wonders why he hadn't seen the camera (he should have been able to).
All film by its very nature turns the viewer into someone conducting surveillance; more often than not, though, that feeling rather quickly gets set aside and is replaced with our identification with, if not actual feel sympathy for, the person(s) at the center of the film's narrative. Yet from the outset of Caché, we want to empathize with the couple we've just met (who wouldn't feel unnerved upon having received such a package, especially with no accompanying explanation?); but because of what had transpired prior to the scene in the living room, it's difficult not to feel complicit in their surveillance--indeed, the way the opening sequence is constructed, it is as though that tape is the product of the audience's gaze. The film's later events--the growing encroachment into Georges and Anne's psychic space of whoever it is responsible for the tapes (more are to come) and, later, disturbing drawings--somehow seem to be our fault: we started it, after all . . . whatever "it" is.
"You're like me": Frank Booth wants to take you--yes, you--for a ride!
I suspect I've just answered my question. The cinema is billed as escape. We want to be anonymous while there, we just want to see what there is to see. We sure as heck don't want to be responsible for what's onscreen. Those rare onscreen moments when a character looks straight into the camera and we have the strong sensation, as in the above scene from Blue Velvet (image found here), that s/he's not talking to another character but to little ol' invisible, anonymous us, out there in our safe, dark room in our comfy chairs, are unnerving enough as it is. To our relief, Caché could have kept knocking down that fourth wall between us and the plight of Georges and Anne, but it doesn't. But what if it had pushed that dynamic further and harder?
It'd be fairly easy to imagine what such a film would look like . . . but would anyone be able to stay through to the end of it?
Two fun couples: Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi in Last Year at Marienbad (image found here); and Zoe Saldaña and Sam Worthington in Avatar. Image found here.
It is a little strange to refer to the entities in the second picture by their actors' names. These figures, after all, never existed in this form in front of a camera; we see them in this form because of a computer: a combination of motion-capture and digital imaging of the sort first introduced to a mass audience via Andy Serkis' Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. Peter Jackson thought of and promoted Serkis' performance in The Two Towers as Supporting-Actor-Oscar-worthy but, somewhere in the hours and hours of apparatus on that film's extended edition, he relates to the listener/viewer that he was rebuffed: Gollum is computer-generated, he was told. How much of what we see of Gollum is actually Serkis' work, and how much is the machine's work? These are legitimate questions to consider, a version of the dilemma of separating the dancer from the dance that Yeats could never have foreseen but the road for which, thanks to technology, we're already well down. In the commentary for The Fellowship of the Ring, Sean Bean notes that he knows for a fact that he was not physically present in his role as Boromir for the filming of the Fellowship's departure from Rivendell, yet there, in the film, "he" is. True, Boromir has no lines and doesn't do very much for the couple of seconds that he (or his image) is onscreen--he/it stands there, then glances down at the ground. But if I hadn't heard the commentary, I would have been none the wiser regarding what I was seeing. Still, I don't feel deceived, exactly: after all, Middle Earth is not my world, no more than is any space presented to an audience as fictive, no matter how closely it corresponds to my world. But it is strange, this brief, meta moment in which even the actor is reminded that while onscreen he is not himself but a character: an image, a representation of someone else.
In Avatar, we of course do see Worthington in his human incarnation in the film; for those (like me) who don't know what Saldaña looks like when not 10 feet tall and blue-skinned, here you go.
The art of acting is already, in its essence, the creating of an alternate reality that an audience experieinces vicariously. But we traditionally think of that art as a human activity--enhanced by props (broadly defined), of course, but whose final success is attributable at some level to a human agency. At what point, though, will the incorporation of technology so enhance that that activity ceases to remain identifiably a human one? Are there moments in Avatar where that point is passed? Of course, all the above assumes by omission that Alain Resnais' CGI-free Last Year at Marienbad is straight-up realism in which everything we see and hear is a kind of truth; but, as I'll get to a while later, this film is actually the far trickier of the two if the question we're thinking about is, "What is real in the world of the film?"
All this has come to mind in the days since the Sunday before last, when the Mrs. and I donned glasses and joined a few of the developed world's remaining laggards who had not yet seen Avatar so as to become one with the mass-culture cosmos, if only for a little while. THE reason to see this film is, well, to see it. It's visually stunning, and the 3-D technology is easy on the eyes (the aged among you will recall that watching older 3-D films would often lead to headaches). The story, though, is so skeletal as to allow this film to be about all kinds of things, as the Mrs. and I enumerated on our way out of the theater: A retelling of the exploitation of the Americas by Europe (or, alternately, of the destruction of Native Americans by white Americans); an allegory of environmentalism; a commentary on current, competing schools of thought regarding U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan; yet another in the very long continuum (at least in American literature) of "going native" stories. Lots of other people are saying such things about the film as well, so I don't claim for us any particular insightfulness. I'll modestly claim a bit of independent thinking for the following, though: Given my scholarly interests, I perked up early on when I learned that the Na'vi avatars Jake Sully (Worthington) and the others manipulate via their minds are products of the combination of human and Na'vi DNA--in other words, the avatars are somewhat analogous to people of mixed race, and those who have seen the film know that, just as is true of mixed-race characters in 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, neither the humans nor the Na'vi fully trust them, suspecting them of having conflicted loyalties at best.
But the thing that really started me thinking about posting on this film is something else that occurred to me as I thought about the film: that we can also read it as something of a meditation on virtual worlds such as Second Life--in particular, the potential that those worlds have for shaping the off-line lives of those who participate in them.
More on this, and on Last Year at Marienbad, below the fold. The superficial connections between Second Life and the world of Avatar are obvious: the figures in Second Life are called avatars (or avis for short); male Second Life avatars are scaled to be 7' tall; the Na'vi (and the avatars) are 10'. But all of us have heard or read stories about participants in Second Life for whom the distinction between it and RL ("real life") become dangerously blurred, and it may be that Avatar is (or can be) understood as exploring this territory as well. As viewers of the film know, Sully is a paraplegic. Whatever his other motives for enlisting to be the stand-in to animate the avatar created for his now-deceased twin brother, surely the primary one is, or soon becomes, his virtual liberation from his wheelchair, which soon becomes as good for Sully as an actual liberation. Long before he actually encounters and grows to respect and then love the Na'vi (and I'm not spoiling anything--if you've read the list of allegories above, you could write this film yourself), he's already sucked into this world in a much more fundamental sense: he feels whole in this other, very different world as he has not felt in his own world for a very long time. Add to this the fact that, in the film, it's a risky proposition to abruptly end the sessions while the humans are manipulating their avatars, and the comparison with some people's deep engagement with Second Life seems pretty evident.
The film's point of view is never in question; those hoping for a little Kierkegaard-style moral wrestling to go along with their cool visuals will leave the multiplex disappointed. We will root for jakesully, as the Na'vi come to call him, so that by the time Sully goes all Dances with Wolves on us, those who work to oppose him have become intellectual/spiritual knuckle-draggers in our eyes. But it wouldn't be hard to rework what is here in such a way that we alternately root for Sully and clearly see what he gains through his virtual life with the Na'vi and yet also wonder with him what he loses by trading in his world on Earth for that virtual life. None of that is to imply that Avatar is bad, necessarily. I don't think it strives to be intellectually or emotionally ambitious; thus, it more than succeeds on its own terms. But in stark contrast to Pandora's world of such dazzling color, the black-and-white distinctions it makes among its agents are a little disappointing.
Last Year at Marienbad (which, thanks to a gift card from my daughters, I now own) is just the opposite: a black-and-white film that, for the right viewer, will be every bit as compelling as the film whose mood it so strongly reminded me of as I watched it last night, Hitchcock's Vertigo. Imagine a less plot-driven but still-more-detail-obsessed (and French) version of that film, and you'd be pretty close to this.
The trailer is below; if you like it the least little bit, you might possibly like all 96 minutes of this sort of thing:
(Further nudges: here's the Wikipedia entry; and here is Roger Ebert's brief but thoughtful meditation on the film; and here is something I wrote on the occasion of the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay. One last nudge--probably away from the film: a friend of mine told me that after he saw it a first time at a theater he learned that the projectionist had mixed up some of the reels, so he went back to see it again. He said it didn't make any difference.)
Whereas Avatar's scaffold of a plot gives that film a palimpsest-like quality such that it could be "about" any number of things, Last Year is only about itself . . . which, depending on your tastes, will either fascinate or frustrate you. As the trailer makes clear, the film expects us to be active participants in determining what--if anything--really did happen that previous year between the man and the woman. If, that is, they even met to begin with. The thing is, we can never know for sure: we can know only what we see and are told, but close watchers of the film will note that the man's descriptions of their meetings and images that accompany his descriptions often contradict each other; often, images we see in quick succession will contradict each other as well. When the woman finally seems to admit that they had indeed met, is that in fact the truth, or is she feeling so hounded by the man that she surrenders in hopes of ending his hounding? We cannot know for sure.
I think one thing we can say for certain about Last Year is that while watching it, we find ourselves inside the greatest virtual-reality machine of all: a version of one person's memory of something. The man's memory of his encounter with the woman is, for him, every bit as seductive as some people's experience with/in Second Life is for them. Yet it's important to recall that our recollection of the past and our perception of the present are reality, so far as we can be certain of such a thing. Individual memories can be seductive, but memory itself--specifically, our need to be able to rely on it--is a necessity and not a luxury. So far as we can tell, the man in Last Year really did have an encounter with the woman; his frequent request of her to "try to remember" is evocative of Scottie's request of Madeleine (and, for that matter, of Midge's request of Scottie) to "try" to recall a past that seems to elude their ability to recall it. But the key phrase there is "so far as we can tell." Whether or not he in fact did--or, for that matter, believes he did--are, for us, unknowable.
It's that final unknowableness that makes the world of Last Year a far stranger place than that of Avatar. Odd, isn't it, how CGI-generated worlds have more metaphysical certainty to them than room upon room upon room of people in evening dress.
