When I was small, my father brought my to the library every Saturday, where he left me to wander the aisle of the young readers’ section while he did his research in the adult area. Because I had an hour or two to spend, and because I was too young to have heard of any authors to investigate (I was the most voracious reader I knew), I would walk along each shelf at a snail’s pace, reading the title and author of each book before moving to the next, pulling out the interesting ones, and adding them to my stack or putting them back on the shelf. Usually, my stack was too big to check out, and my father would make me put some back to save for the next week. I would then spend the rest of the weekend decimating the stack, finishing five, eight novels in two days, proving that I could have taken out more.
Last month, I found myself downtown with a few hours to kill, nothing to read, and in weather too brutally cold to simply wander. So, I found a library, and walked the shelves for the first time in years. I picked out two unknown volumes, one very big and one very small, both with an exciting air of mystery printed into the opening pages. They were Australian Eliot Pearlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and Canadian Thomas Wharton's The Logogryph, respectively, and I read them, as I almost never do, in tandem, because Pearl’s book was just too big to carry around, and Wharton’s book was just too precious to gobble up in one sitting.
Pearlman’s book seemed to reminisce another I had just finished, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, both in length and scope, readability, and literary intention. But where Messued failed egregiously, giving her characters name-brand authors like Tolstoy to masticate like plastic chewing gum*, Pearlman’s obsessed protagonist Simon is obsessed equally by his ex-girlfriend Anna, who left him a decade ago, and the literary theorist William Empson (after whose tract Seven Types of Ambiguity is named). Pearlman divides his novel into seven sections that illuminate one story from seven different perspectives (that is, seven interlocking characters’ voices, though all voices have the measured, intellectual tone of Pearlman, who seems to identify best with protagonist Simon and his equally-obsessed psychiatrist (Simon becomes the doctor’s Anna). Though the cast of characters includes a prisoner, a prostitute, a gambler, a stockbroker, and a number of love-triangles connected like those infuriating twenty-five cent puzzles that come apart with a twist, so long as it’s in the right direction, the novel is never the dishy, shallow, or merely entertaining the way The Emperor’s Children constantly is. We never doubt the characters, who are the fully dimensional needy, expressing the full gamut of human desire and disappointment (Messud’s characters, on the other hand, try on lifestyles like outfits; they are needy, but their needs are skin deep.) Pearlman’s is the first happy ending that hasn’t offended me in some time.
The Logogryph, though it is tiny, contains even more than Seven Types. It’s a proposition for a book more than a mere book, a kind of literary experiment in the vein of Borges, though richly emotional and therefore much more captivating. Wharton proposes a book, unbound, that contains, well, everything. At moments, he includes lists, more myriad than those of Julie Andrews’ most favorite things. He also includes snatches of stories not his “own”—for his own story is that of his obsession with the young girl he knew as a child, who lived at “the English House,” whose mother kept a garden and gave him a suitcase full of mold-scented novels when he was a child. Some of the stories turn out to be those belonging to the English House, the story of how it was built, long before he’s born, for the woman who will come to garden its grounds, but others, like the story of a half-raving missionary who, fascinated by the new world’s natives’ storytelling practices, wanders their country, collecting their devil-inspired tales, are related only thematically. Certain of the sections, like one on the aqueous recordings of the underwater people of Atlantis, are more Borgean and less compelling, but they quickly pass, giving way to the tender lists of lost items and the poignant, suppressed longing for the girl of the English House. The book, tiny, printed on fine paper with icons stamped onto the beginnings and ends of each chapter, is a curio in itself, a spectacular library find for a blustery, empty afternoon.
*this metaphor isn’t mine—it’s too good. It comes from PK Dick.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Movies: Tanz und Ekstase: Alain Platels VSPRS (VSPRS: Show and Tell)
When VSPRS: Show and Tell began, I was certain it would be awful. I am predisposed to dismissing conceptual and ugly art out of hand, and VSPRS was both—seasoned by the heavy dose of pretension required to put something so conceptually ugly onstage. The first dancer, shot from behind, shuddered compulsively while masticating an entire round of French bread, never swallowing, with the apparent goal of putting the entire thing into his mouth at once. At last, another dancer came onstage; he wore a suit and performed a series of compulsive ticks to shrug himself out of and back into his clothes. The next dancer, a woman in fire engine-red tights and black high heels, performed an inelegant, vampy flamenco (a dance I don’t care for from the most acclaimed, much less the theatrically indulgent, muddling novice). The fourth dancer, another ugly, big-bottomed woman, whose long, black hair hung free, had drawn herself a unibrow, and, like the woman in tights, was ranting. She rattled off a (somewhat amusing) poem about her poo-poo, but, strangely enough, did not gain my affection.
This was perhaps unexpected, as filmmaker Sophie Fiennes had before cut away to a discussion of the piece by a sympathetic audience, one member of which said that the woman in the unibrow had moved her to tears. This was a frumpy Frenchwoman (VSPRS is choreographed by the French Alain Platel, performed by the French ballets C. de la B., and the film was, thus, shot in France) whose looks did not suggest an appreciation for avant-garde theatre, so my expectations were for something more accessible. Instead, the stage, covered with an undulating, stringy backdrop to suggest something organic and internal (perhaps the inside of the mind, perhaps the inside of the digestive tract), on which a fascinating ensemble of world musicians, led by the blind violinist Tcha Limberger and including the strangely appealing, bald and black soprano, suggested a kind of Freudian gesamptkunstwerk.
The next two dancers won me over, for not only did they not speak, they also danced. Certainly, the other performers to this point had “danced,” technically, but these two (who I later discovered both worked in the circus) did astonishing things with their bodies, that brought me to quick tears of jealousy and joy, longing and ecstasy (ecstasy would become an important word, but I felt the intimations of it already). These two, who used their arms as second sets of legs, shifting with the most natural ease from right-side-up to upside-down to, seemingly, inside-out, undulated, with exquisite delicacy, terrifyingly slowly, over and across and through each other, an asexual mating ritual of no creature we know, subaqueous, feline, invertebrate. Their dancing was beautiful—not the pretty, easy beauty of the prima ballerina in her tutu turning endless pirouettes, but raw, animal beauty—the human body performing at it’s physical limit to express visceral truths that remain just out of the reach of words.
Each of the dancers, though, had words to describe the work, and by cutting to conversations in the dressing room between groups of dancers, with and without their choreographer, or the occasional one-on-one interview (always by the choreographer, never the filmmaker), we begin to gather a better understanding of the piece—why the majority of the dancers shudder with ugly tics, and why the recorded audience members had been moved to tears. The dancers had studied old footage of the emotionally disturbed, spent time practicing the movement and speech of the deranged. Each has created his or her own kind of mad character, who, at the dance’s climax, trembles with increasing force to a kind of shared apex (their hands, at the beginning of this “ecstasy,” rubbing at their genitals). The dancers describe the work as incredibly freeing—they’ve accessed the dark recesses of their own minds and emotions, tapped into them for every performance, so that the work is deeply personal, a manifestation rather than a construction. The physical release created by the more than ten minutes of trembling contractions required by the ecstasy leave them essentially naked, yielding, liberated, fresh. This knowledge enabled me to better appreciate the work as a whole, but I still kept my focus, when possible, to the circus dancers, to the rail thin ballerina with ragged hair who assumed the posture of a crucified Christ, and to the other dynamic, young dancers who worked primarily with their bodies rather than their voices and faces. Concepts are fine, but dance ultimately must always be primarily about the body, rather than the mind.
This was perhaps unexpected, as filmmaker Sophie Fiennes had before cut away to a discussion of the piece by a sympathetic audience, one member of which said that the woman in the unibrow had moved her to tears. This was a frumpy Frenchwoman (VSPRS is choreographed by the French Alain Platel, performed by the French ballets C. de la B., and the film was, thus, shot in France) whose looks did not suggest an appreciation for avant-garde theatre, so my expectations were for something more accessible. Instead, the stage, covered with an undulating, stringy backdrop to suggest something organic and internal (perhaps the inside of the mind, perhaps the inside of the digestive tract), on which a fascinating ensemble of world musicians, led by the blind violinist Tcha Limberger and including the strangely appealing, bald and black soprano, suggested a kind of Freudian gesamptkunstwerk.
The next two dancers won me over, for not only did they not speak, they also danced. Certainly, the other performers to this point had “danced,” technically, but these two (who I later discovered both worked in the circus) did astonishing things with their bodies, that brought me to quick tears of jealousy and joy, longing and ecstasy (ecstasy would become an important word, but I felt the intimations of it already). These two, who used their arms as second sets of legs, shifting with the most natural ease from right-side-up to upside-down to, seemingly, inside-out, undulated, with exquisite delicacy, terrifyingly slowly, over and across and through each other, an asexual mating ritual of no creature we know, subaqueous, feline, invertebrate. Their dancing was beautiful—not the pretty, easy beauty of the prima ballerina in her tutu turning endless pirouettes, but raw, animal beauty—the human body performing at it’s physical limit to express visceral truths that remain just out of the reach of words.
Each of the dancers, though, had words to describe the work, and by cutting to conversations in the dressing room between groups of dancers, with and without their choreographer, or the occasional one-on-one interview (always by the choreographer, never the filmmaker), we begin to gather a better understanding of the piece—why the majority of the dancers shudder with ugly tics, and why the recorded audience members had been moved to tears. The dancers had studied old footage of the emotionally disturbed, spent time practicing the movement and speech of the deranged. Each has created his or her own kind of mad character, who, at the dance’s climax, trembles with increasing force to a kind of shared apex (their hands, at the beginning of this “ecstasy,” rubbing at their genitals). The dancers describe the work as incredibly freeing—they’ve accessed the dark recesses of their own minds and emotions, tapped into them for every performance, so that the work is deeply personal, a manifestation rather than a construction. The physical release created by the more than ten minutes of trembling contractions required by the ecstasy leave them essentially naked, yielding, liberated, fresh. This knowledge enabled me to better appreciate the work as a whole, but I still kept my focus, when possible, to the circus dancers, to the rail thin ballerina with ragged hair who assumed the posture of a crucified Christ, and to the other dynamic, young dancers who worked primarily with their bodies rather than their voices and faces. Concepts are fine, but dance ultimately must always be primarily about the body, rather than the mind.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Movies: Che
It’s little surprise that Cuba—a country much more glamorous than Bolivia—gets the full Hollywood treatment by super-savvy Soderbergh in Che Part One, leaving landlocked Bolivia, the unbeating heart of Central America, to the gritty, guerrilla styling of handheld in Part Two. The aesthetic difference between the two halves is startling; though an untrained eye might not notice the taller frame of the second, one does notice a zooming in and down: many more scenes on or near the ground, and many more shots of bodies than vistas. The Cuba film alternates between that country's warm tones and a lusciously grained black and white, which describes Che's 1964 visit to the United Nations in New York; the constantly-shifting timeline is anchored by elegantly bold titles. The Bolivia film, though, is relentless; the frame is crowded with bodies pushing through vegetation; we almost never leave the training camp, except on marches that offer more of the same. The few splashes of color come from a hostile barrio, filthy and faded, where twenty townspeople crowd into their tiny mountaintop church and listen to Che lecture on the importance of health care. There are no open shots of the sea, no red sports cars, no filmy cigar smoke. There is a disobedient donkey, a child with a maggot in its eye, and a hirsute and wasted Che, wheezing in a brown poncho. Dialogue is exchanged for gunshots. Inspiration is exchanged for pleading.
While this difference renders the Bolivian film an almost insufferable punishment, that treatment is completely valid and appropriate. The Bolivian people didn't have half the love for Che that the Cubans did; they didn't trust him and they wouldn't join him. Che in Bolivia is an example of a man past his zenith: what does one do when one has accomplished one's greatest goal? Cuba was Fidel's (though Che had been his right-hand man, he was also always originally Argentine, and too much a guerrilla—the grittiest brand of idealist, but an idealist nonetheless—to become a politician), and Che had to find a country, a revolution, of his own. At a certain point, it becomes clear that Bolivia is something of a suicide mission (as his stint in the Congo, which Soderbergh does not include, almost was) for a man so committed that death was always preferable to compromise.
In a question-and-answer period after the screening, Soderbergh pointed out that Che's character arc is actually a straight line, and that the drama comes from the possibility of deviation from that standard (of which there is little). This is why, he explained, the film might seem cold, dry, or unemotional (an audience member noticed the lack of music, which uncompromising choice I commend). To one constantly cloyed by sentimentalism, though, this "minimalism" (it's not, really, minimal; it only seems so in comparison to the barrage of hyperbolic films in vogue this decade) is so incredibly welcome. Soderbergh needs no crutches; the screenplay (in Spanish, another key refusal to compromise), the acting, and the framing of each shot are all so taut, so on point, that we are inspired to think and feel (as opposed to being cued to unthinkingly feel, like Pavlovian dogs). Soderbergh also mentioned choosing these jungle battle scenes less for any polemical reason than one of identification: making a movie in the jungle with a disorganized group of assistants is something like fighting a revolution in the jungle with a disorganized group of recruits. But the brilliant director was too humble to go so far as to explain his other synergy with Che: complete dedication, and a refusal to compromise. Had this film been made in English, it would have been unwatchable. Had this film been a mere two hours, it would have only told half the story. Had this film ended with a shot of the astounding Benicio Del Toro collapsing to the plangent pluck of a guitar string, it would have garnered my wrath. Instead, Soderbergh films the execution from Che's collapsed eyes: the dusty floor, and the shadowy shoes of his executioner melting into the frame's corner. It's gorgeous and perfect.
While this difference renders the Bolivian film an almost insufferable punishment, that treatment is completely valid and appropriate. The Bolivian people didn't have half the love for Che that the Cubans did; they didn't trust him and they wouldn't join him. Che in Bolivia is an example of a man past his zenith: what does one do when one has accomplished one's greatest goal? Cuba was Fidel's (though Che had been his right-hand man, he was also always originally Argentine, and too much a guerrilla—the grittiest brand of idealist, but an idealist nonetheless—to become a politician), and Che had to find a country, a revolution, of his own. At a certain point, it becomes clear that Bolivia is something of a suicide mission (as his stint in the Congo, which Soderbergh does not include, almost was) for a man so committed that death was always preferable to compromise.
In a question-and-answer period after the screening, Soderbergh pointed out that Che's character arc is actually a straight line, and that the drama comes from the possibility of deviation from that standard (of which there is little). This is why, he explained, the film might seem cold, dry, or unemotional (an audience member noticed the lack of music, which uncompromising choice I commend). To one constantly cloyed by sentimentalism, though, this "minimalism" (it's not, really, minimal; it only seems so in comparison to the barrage of hyperbolic films in vogue this decade) is so incredibly welcome. Soderbergh needs no crutches; the screenplay (in Spanish, another key refusal to compromise), the acting, and the framing of each shot are all so taut, so on point, that we are inspired to think and feel (as opposed to being cued to unthinkingly feel, like Pavlovian dogs). Soderbergh also mentioned choosing these jungle battle scenes less for any polemical reason than one of identification: making a movie in the jungle with a disorganized group of assistants is something like fighting a revolution in the jungle with a disorganized group of recruits. But the brilliant director was too humble to go so far as to explain his other synergy with Che: complete dedication, and a refusal to compromise. Had this film been made in English, it would have been unwatchable. Had this film been a mere two hours, it would have only told half the story. Had this film ended with a shot of the astounding Benicio Del Toro collapsing to the plangent pluck of a guitar string, it would have garnered my wrath. Instead, Soderbergh films the execution from Che's collapsed eyes: the dusty floor, and the shadowy shoes of his executioner melting into the frame's corner. It's gorgeous and perfect.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Movies: Ballerina
I have never been a fan of classical ballet, finding the music soporific, the choreography repetitive, and the dancers rigid. In its traditional form, it is an art that constantly affirms outmoded gender and class relations. But Bertrand Nostrand's intimate documentary, which follows five Russian ballerinas for three years, managed a rare feat: it changed my mind about the entire thing.
This is Nostrand's first feature-length documentary, and certain aspects of it (the title sequence, the generalization-laden voiceover narration) are a bit rough. Nevertheless, Nostrand cuts to the quick of the most important thing: the dancing. Filming at school, in rehearsals, and on stage, Nostrand shows the obscene amount of work that these girls do. Russian ballerinas are not in any way coddled, and a very telling interview with a French (male) ballet dancer, highlights the difference between Russian and European training, technique, and style. The Russian dancers are given more responsibility at an earlier age; they therefore mature more quickly. Perhaps more importantly, they dance with more spirit than their European counterparts. Rather than being clones, they have very distinct personalities, which they bring to their roles, acting as much as dancing. Though this may sound unfair, Nostrand's footage backs it up: there is nothing rigid about these dancers; their faces are open and expressive (rather than spackled with paste-up smiles like Americans), and their arms and torsos bend with exaggerated curves, stylized lines that recall the twisted, anxious bodies drawn by Egon Schiele.
The Kirov Ballet's style, too, is instantly discernible as far more expressionist and manered than the dry, pompous designs of the Balanchine-obsessed New York City Ballet. Balanchine may have been from the same city (and the Kirov certainly stages his work), but Nostrand's footage of ballets choreographed by Petipa (La Bayadère), Grigorovich (The Legend of Love), and especially Fokine (Schéhérazade) demonstrate a shared, distinctly Russian sensibility that leaves Balanchine the odd man out.
Of the five dancers that Nostrand singles out, four are stunning: the snaky Diana Vishneva, an "older" dancer who brings a dark, seasoned grist to her work; the equally dark Ulyana Lopatkina, who after a two-year break to nurse an ankle injury and have a daughter not only reestablishes her previous technique, but also acquires a new soulfulness not typical in ballet; the impish Evgenia Obraztsova, whose limpid eyes and open face are the most innocent you will ever see in a dancer of her intelligence and technique; the elegant Svetlana Zakharova, whose extravagant arms and neck make even Swan Lake worth watching. The fifth dancer, Alina Somova, is young, and her dancing still seems unsteady to me; she lacks the endearing naivete of Evgenia Obraztsova's expression, while her legs, like a filly or fawn, still falter. Nostrand does good work, though, recording her rehearsals, where the Director says simply, dismissively, again and again, "I don't like it," without giving much more helpful feedback. Her will, then, is stronger than her legs, as is the will of each of these other dancers. I wonder if any art requires so much work, physical and emotional. Certainly not film-making.
This is Nostrand's first feature-length documentary, and certain aspects of it (the title sequence, the generalization-laden voiceover narration) are a bit rough. Nevertheless, Nostrand cuts to the quick of the most important thing: the dancing. Filming at school, in rehearsals, and on stage, Nostrand shows the obscene amount of work that these girls do. Russian ballerinas are not in any way coddled, and a very telling interview with a French (male) ballet dancer, highlights the difference between Russian and European training, technique, and style. The Russian dancers are given more responsibility at an earlier age; they therefore mature more quickly. Perhaps more importantly, they dance with more spirit than their European counterparts. Rather than being clones, they have very distinct personalities, which they bring to their roles, acting as much as dancing. Though this may sound unfair, Nostrand's footage backs it up: there is nothing rigid about these dancers; their faces are open and expressive (rather than spackled with paste-up smiles like Americans), and their arms and torsos bend with exaggerated curves, stylized lines that recall the twisted, anxious bodies drawn by Egon Schiele.
The Kirov Ballet's style, too, is instantly discernible as far more expressionist and manered than the dry, pompous designs of the Balanchine-obsessed New York City Ballet. Balanchine may have been from the same city (and the Kirov certainly stages his work), but Nostrand's footage of ballets choreographed by Petipa (La Bayadère), Grigorovich (The Legend of Love), and especially Fokine (Schéhérazade) demonstrate a shared, distinctly Russian sensibility that leaves Balanchine the odd man out.
Of the five dancers that Nostrand singles out, four are stunning: the snaky Diana Vishneva, an "older" dancer who brings a dark, seasoned grist to her work; the equally dark Ulyana Lopatkina, who after a two-year break to nurse an ankle injury and have a daughter not only reestablishes her previous technique, but also acquires a new soulfulness not typical in ballet; the impish Evgenia Obraztsova, whose limpid eyes and open face are the most innocent you will ever see in a dancer of her intelligence and technique; the elegant Svetlana Zakharova, whose extravagant arms and neck make even Swan Lake worth watching. The fifth dancer, Alina Somova, is young, and her dancing still seems unsteady to me; she lacks the endearing naivete of Evgenia Obraztsova's expression, while her legs, like a filly or fawn, still falter. Nostrand does good work, though, recording her rehearsals, where the Director says simply, dismissively, again and again, "I don't like it," without giving much more helpful feedback. Her will, then, is stronger than her legs, as is the will of each of these other dancers. I wonder if any art requires so much work, physical and emotional. Certainly not film-making.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Movies: Master and Commander
A beautiful and expensive set piece is useless if empty of equally compelling plot and/or characters. Master and Commander, therefore, is nothing other than an exquisite waste of money, a too-long advertisement for the Weather Channel (know before you go!), in which sheets of driving rain and bucketfulls of seawater drown out the little dialogue there is between a cast of one hundred men and boys all wearing the same clothes. The only distinguishable figures are, of course, the inexorable Russell Crowe as, yes, the master and commander of the ship, and his right hand man and philosophical foil, the ship's surgeon and lone thinking man. Everyone else—young or old, thin or fat, with hair long or cropped—is ultimately interchangeable, and we only know to feel sorrow for the drowning of one or the shooting of another by musical cues: plangent strings, for the most part.
Not only does this film offer little in the way of plot or character development; it lacks even mere points of interest, excepting a brief excursion onto the Galapagos islands, where we see a few giant turtles. This is, in fact, the only moment during which any genuine emotion springs up; otherwise, Weir depends on hackneyed visual clues (a letter and a tiny photograph; a native woman with inviting eyes) and musical cues (Bach's Cello Suite No. 1, sullied by its use in commercials hawking everything from car insurance to vanilla yogurt, fits the cliche requirement nicely) to ensure that the audience emotes at the necessary junctures. With so much gray water washing across the screen, I barely noticed that a likable character had just drowned to his death. Luckily, the strings, screeching across Crowe's furrowed brow, confirmed that this was a moment for sorrow. Similarly, blue skies and a rousing round of plucked strings confirmed that troubles had blown by, and that Crowe had come out on top. Unfortunately, we had known that he would from the film's first few minutes, rendering the entire "adventure" unnecessary. Next time, I'll just spend two hours on my sit 'n spin.
Not only does this film offer little in the way of plot or character development; it lacks even mere points of interest, excepting a brief excursion onto the Galapagos islands, where we see a few giant turtles. This is, in fact, the only moment during which any genuine emotion springs up; otherwise, Weir depends on hackneyed visual clues (a letter and a tiny photograph; a native woman with inviting eyes) and musical cues (Bach's Cello Suite No. 1, sullied by its use in commercials hawking everything from car insurance to vanilla yogurt, fits the cliche requirement nicely) to ensure that the audience emotes at the necessary junctures. With so much gray water washing across the screen, I barely noticed that a likable character had just drowned to his death. Luckily, the strings, screeching across Crowe's furrowed brow, confirmed that this was a moment for sorrow. Similarly, blue skies and a rousing round of plucked strings confirmed that troubles had blown by, and that Crowe had come out on top. Unfortunately, we had known that he would from the film's first few minutes, rendering the entire "adventure" unnecessary. Next time, I'll just spend two hours on my sit 'n spin.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Movies: Gruz 200 (Cargo 200)
An amusing list of pithy comments ("so bleak and horrifying that you might think Francis Bacon served as DP;" "incredibly perverse and weirdly fascinating;" "a goth cousin to Delicatessen;" "as vile (and strangely aesthetically pleasing) as anything you might see in contemporary torture porn") promised more than this film could quite deliver; I left the theatre feeling only mildly sordid and mostly confused.
The soot-clogged industrial landscape of Leninsk offers little redemption for the well-meaning Professor of Scientific Atheism. He is on his way there to visit his mother with a trunk full of groceries when his jalopy breaks down in a desolate area. The nearest sign of life is a rural compound where a rifle-wielding utopian serves him excessive quantities of vodka out of a jar. A Vietnamese servant fixes his car while a homely woman sets the table with mushroom soup, brown bread, and pickles. The utopian and the professor argue about the existence of God, the utopian insisting that with the abolition of religion comes the abolition of ethics. The professor remains firm that ethics predate religion.
Meanwhile, the professor's niece is at home sleeping while her gawky, wannabe rockstar fiance goes to the disco and picks up her best friend. They leave the club and he drives her to—you guessed it—the same rural compound which, we now begin to understand, is a vodka outpost. He leaves the girl in the car and goes inside to get the booze; the professor has just left and the utopian isn't in a very good mood. They start drinking. When the girl gets spooked by a ghastly face staring at her through the window, she comes into the shack just in time to see her companion fall over, dead drunk. Meanwhile, the utopian has begun leering at her.
The woman of the house makes a half-hearted attempt to protect her, locking her in another shed for the night with a rifle. But the ghastly man gets the key and finds her, taking the gun right out of her trembling hands and shooting dead the Vietnamese mechanic before instructing her to remove her underwear and get down on hands and knees. He dispassionately molests her with the neck of an empty vodka bottle; the next morning he handcuffs her to his motorscooter and drives her to—you guessed it again—smoke-spewing Leninsk, and his mother's apartment. There, he handcuffs her to the bed while his vodka-chugging, television-watching PTSD or mildly demented mother ignores the screaming and crying from the bedroom: the ghastly man has, incidentally (because of his position in the military), received the body of the girl's paratrooper fiance, who had been serving in Afghanistan, and deposited it in bed beside the girl. As it rots, he brings in another man to rape her (again, from behind) while she cries and he watches dispassionately, reading aloud letters her fiance had sent to her (which he has procured by visiting her distraught parents, who trust him as a government detective looking for clues.)
It is onto this scene that the mushroom soup wench, livid that the utopian was arrested (and subsequently murdered by prison guards), breaks into the ghastly man's apartment and shoots him dead. The girl, still cuffed to the bed, is nude and howling between two—and now three—men's dead bodies, but the wench stomps off, leaving her there. The demented mother still says nothing, except "we've got flies," which is something of an understatement, thanks to the rotting bodies in the bedroom.
We never see the girl saved. Instead, we see the professor enter a church and inquire about the rite of baptism, and we see the fiance befriend another young man (incidentally, the professor's son) at a rock concert and invite him to join in a smuggling venture. Then the credits roll. The utopian, then, would appear to be right: a Godless country is beyond dangerous. But this is not a very compelling argument; my take is that a country without mental health care is beyond dangerous. Clearly the ghastly man (who almost never even touches the girl, but stares at her incessantly, and calls her his wife) is mentally ill, as is his mother. The utopian and the fiance are alcoholics. The wench has suffered to the degree that she no longer empathizes with another woman's suffering. In fact, dispassion, a total lack of human empathy, is rampant, from the guards who beat prisoners to death to the fiance who never returns to his betrothed's apartment, where she cries in her mother's arms. Is this because of Godlessness, or because of psychological damage inflicted on an entire class of people?
The soot-clogged industrial landscape of Leninsk offers little redemption for the well-meaning Professor of Scientific Atheism. He is on his way there to visit his mother with a trunk full of groceries when his jalopy breaks down in a desolate area. The nearest sign of life is a rural compound where a rifle-wielding utopian serves him excessive quantities of vodka out of a jar. A Vietnamese servant fixes his car while a homely woman sets the table with mushroom soup, brown bread, and pickles. The utopian and the professor argue about the existence of God, the utopian insisting that with the abolition of religion comes the abolition of ethics. The professor remains firm that ethics predate religion.
Meanwhile, the professor's niece is at home sleeping while her gawky, wannabe rockstar fiance goes to the disco and picks up her best friend. They leave the club and he drives her to—you guessed it—the same rural compound which, we now begin to understand, is a vodka outpost. He leaves the girl in the car and goes inside to get the booze; the professor has just left and the utopian isn't in a very good mood. They start drinking. When the girl gets spooked by a ghastly face staring at her through the window, she comes into the shack just in time to see her companion fall over, dead drunk. Meanwhile, the utopian has begun leering at her.
The woman of the house makes a half-hearted attempt to protect her, locking her in another shed for the night with a rifle. But the ghastly man gets the key and finds her, taking the gun right out of her trembling hands and shooting dead the Vietnamese mechanic before instructing her to remove her underwear and get down on hands and knees. He dispassionately molests her with the neck of an empty vodka bottle; the next morning he handcuffs her to his motorscooter and drives her to—you guessed it again—smoke-spewing Leninsk, and his mother's apartment. There, he handcuffs her to the bed while his vodka-chugging, television-watching PTSD or mildly demented mother ignores the screaming and crying from the bedroom: the ghastly man has, incidentally (because of his position in the military), received the body of the girl's paratrooper fiance, who had been serving in Afghanistan, and deposited it in bed beside the girl. As it rots, he brings in another man to rape her (again, from behind) while she cries and he watches dispassionately, reading aloud letters her fiance had sent to her (which he has procured by visiting her distraught parents, who trust him as a government detective looking for clues.)
It is onto this scene that the mushroom soup wench, livid that the utopian was arrested (and subsequently murdered by prison guards), breaks into the ghastly man's apartment and shoots him dead. The girl, still cuffed to the bed, is nude and howling between two—and now three—men's dead bodies, but the wench stomps off, leaving her there. The demented mother still says nothing, except "we've got flies," which is something of an understatement, thanks to the rotting bodies in the bedroom.
We never see the girl saved. Instead, we see the professor enter a church and inquire about the rite of baptism, and we see the fiance befriend another young man (incidentally, the professor's son) at a rock concert and invite him to join in a smuggling venture. Then the credits roll. The utopian, then, would appear to be right: a Godless country is beyond dangerous. But this is not a very compelling argument; my take is that a country without mental health care is beyond dangerous. Clearly the ghastly man (who almost never even touches the girl, but stares at her incessantly, and calls her his wife) is mentally ill, as is his mother. The utopian and the fiance are alcoholics. The wench has suffered to the degree that she no longer empathizes with another woman's suffering. In fact, dispassion, a total lack of human empathy, is rampant, from the guards who beat prisoners to death to the fiance who never returns to his betrothed's apartment, where she cries in her mother's arms. Is this because of Godlessness, or because of psychological damage inflicted on an entire class of people?
Monday, January 5, 2009
Movies: Bigger Than Life (1956)
To a savvy contemporary audience, Nick Ray’s over-the-top domestic drama about the negative side affects of experimental “miracle drug” Cortisone for the otherwise terminal rare vascular disease afflicting kind husband and father Ed Avery seems rather like an anti-feminist propaganda film (Father knows best!) littered with product placements by the milk lobby, topped off with a PSA to only take prescribed medicine as directed by your doctor. In fact, in its rigid hierarchy of trust, which demands that one subverts one’s own common sense to the unsound demands of the authority figure (son obeys mother, wife obeys husband, family obeys doctor, even when mother is being bullied, father is suffering from drug-induced psychosis, and doctor isn’t very cautious about the drug’s dangerous side-effects, in spite of knowing about them), the film feels rather hokey, though still terribly funny in a midnight-movie kind of way.
If one stops to consider even for a moment that Lou Avery's stand-by-your-man complicity in Ed’s madness and cruelty is de rigeur for the average American family in the 1950s, one will have trouble enjoying the movie. If instead one revels on the almost-Hitchcockian obsession that lights Ed’s face in the climactic scene, where Lou tries to pit feminine mettle against masculine brute force to protect their son from a sacrificial murder with broken scissors and then gets locked in the closet, only to be rescued by a male family friend who breaks in and physically subdues Ed by brute strength alone, starting a brawl that takes them both tumbling down the stairs and through the banister, turning over a piece of furniture in every room of the house, one can watch the film with the kind of shell-shocked glee that only comes with old movies.
If one stops to consider even for a moment that Lou Avery's stand-by-your-man complicity in Ed’s madness and cruelty is de rigeur for the average American family in the 1950s, one will have trouble enjoying the movie. If instead one revels on the almost-Hitchcockian obsession that lights Ed’s face in the climactic scene, where Lou tries to pit feminine mettle against masculine brute force to protect their son from a sacrificial murder with broken scissors and then gets locked in the closet, only to be rescued by a male family friend who breaks in and physically subdues Ed by brute strength alone, starting a brawl that takes them both tumbling down the stairs and through the banister, turning over a piece of furniture in every room of the house, one can watch the film with the kind of shell-shocked glee that only comes with old movies.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Movies: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Played as a double feature with Fight Club as a film that shaped the young David Fincher’s cinematic sensibilities, this classic is surprisingly spare, a kind of extended chase sequence that sets a posse of six at first unidentified lawmen blazing after the unstoppable Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman), the brains (with a twinkle in his eye), and his partner, the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford), the crack shot (with a glued-on mustache).
After one too many railroad hold-ups set the posse on their backs, the friends enlist their friend (and the Kid’s lover) Etta (“I’m 26 and I’m single and I’m a school-teacher. . . That’s the bottom of the heap!”) and run away to Bolivia (via steamer from New York, their short stay in that city depicted in a long montage of sepia-toned still photographs, rather than moving film). There, they immediately begin robbing banks again, earning the risible moniker Banditos Yanquis, until the posse shows up there too, forcing them into a “straight” life, and sending Etta on her way back to the States alone.
The still photograph figures prominently again when, at the film’s end, the two are cornered by not only the police but a regiment of the Bolivian army, who line the parapets of the courtyard in which the Banditos are hiding, pointing their rifles at the empty plaza. Rather than show our heroes shot full of holes and falling down dead, the film freezes into a sepia-toned still at the moment they charge out to their deaths, guns the air, grins on their faces. They are, then, memorialized completely without sentimentality, which cool touch I would like to say Fincher learned for use in Fight Club, even if he forgot it in time for Benjamin Button.
After one too many railroad hold-ups set the posse on their backs, the friends enlist their friend (and the Kid’s lover) Etta (“I’m 26 and I’m single and I’m a school-teacher. . . That’s the bottom of the heap!”) and run away to Bolivia (via steamer from New York, their short stay in that city depicted in a long montage of sepia-toned still photographs, rather than moving film). There, they immediately begin robbing banks again, earning the risible moniker Banditos Yanquis, until the posse shows up there too, forcing them into a “straight” life, and sending Etta on her way back to the States alone.
The still photograph figures prominently again when, at the film’s end, the two are cornered by not only the police but a regiment of the Bolivian army, who line the parapets of the courtyard in which the Banditos are hiding, pointing their rifles at the empty plaza. Rather than show our heroes shot full of holes and falling down dead, the film freezes into a sepia-toned still at the moment they charge out to their deaths, guns the air, grins on their faces. They are, then, memorialized completely without sentimentality, which cool touch I would like to say Fincher learned for use in Fight Club, even if he forgot it in time for Benjamin Button.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Movies: Fight Club
Some movies barely warrant one watching. Some movies require two or three, before you can completely understand them. Most movies with a gimmick are great the first time, but totally boring once you know the twist. Fight Club, though, is a movie with an easily digested gimmick that, somehow, never gets old. I just watched it for the sixth or seventh time, and found it as exhilarating as the first. The gimmick, of course, is that Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is the same person—the surprise alter-ego—of the insomniac Ed Norton (whose character’s name isn’t revealed explicitly to the audience until it’s revealed to him, though clever audiences might get an early inkling).
What makes Fight Club so spectacular is less the gimmick (though Ed Norton is really so amazing that his shock is our shock, each and every time, even when we know what’s coming) than the motivating philosophy: divorced from our base instincts, we are sick, miserable, and frankly shameful; functioning merely at our base instincts, we are dangerous. Either way, we are followers, gullible herd animals looking for a leader, and desperate for stimulation. Our consumerist society is ugly, but anarchy is no better.
Durden’s Fight Club evolves into the anarchist army Project Mayhem, a kind of antics-oriented terror organization whose ultimate project is to explode the office buildings of all major credit card companies and the credit bureaus in order to reset everyone’s debt record back to zero (for the sake of the film’s grander philosophical considerations, don’t waste time quibbling about how feasible this scheme is). When Norton’s Tyler realizes that his Pitt ego has been planning this, he knows that his initial impulse against socialization—starting a brawl with himself in a roadhouse parking lot, leaving his designer condo and cable television for an abandoned house with barely-working power, and balling the strangely appealing but appallingly depressed Marla Singer/Helena Bonham Carter—however healthy and necessary it was, went overboard, but it’s incidentally too late. The film has a rather dark happy ending; holding hands, Norton’s Tyler (head dripping from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that killed Pitt’s Tyler) and Marla watch the buildings all around them explode. Strangely, we feel warm inside, knowing that everything is going to be okay, whatever that means (it’s to Palahniuk and Fincher’s credit that they don’t consider showing us).
Even if Norton’s Tyler is ultimately the sound, rational voice, once liberated, Pitt’s Tyler is the one with the actual take-home message of this film, the dark but surprisingly valid reminder that you are not a special snowflake, that you (that is, we) are the all-singing, all-dancing manure heap, that God not only doesn’t care about us, but might not even like us. Does it sound a little silly? A bit teenaged-angsty? In our decade’s pan-spiritual, new-aged, positive-intentioned society, I find it rather honest and refreshing. Right before the movie’s climax, before Norton’s Tyler realizes what exactly is going on, Pitt-as-Tyler is driving a car through a rainstorm. He takes his hands off the wheel and increases the gas, illustrating his instruction to Norton-as-Tyler to “let go.” He asks the people in the car what they want to achieve before they die; how they would feel about their lives if they died at that moment. Norton-as-Tyler, who has yet to let go, cannot answer the questions. The car crashes, runs off the road, flips over. They all emerge unscathed. Pitt-as-Tyler whoops with glee to have added another raw experience to his life. Norton-as-Tyler remains unconvinced. But is it silly, teenaged-angsty, to live your life with zest, as if any moment could be your last? Pitt-as-Tyler promotes recklessness in a way that I can’t condone, but his ultimate message—you’re not your job, you’re not your car, you’re not your clothes; “the things you own end up owning you,”—is not only valid, but completely liberating. Let the fuck go and live your life a little closer to your physical edge, and if you forget how, watch the movie again.
What makes Fight Club so spectacular is less the gimmick (though Ed Norton is really so amazing that his shock is our shock, each and every time, even when we know what’s coming) than the motivating philosophy: divorced from our base instincts, we are sick, miserable, and frankly shameful; functioning merely at our base instincts, we are dangerous. Either way, we are followers, gullible herd animals looking for a leader, and desperate for stimulation. Our consumerist society is ugly, but anarchy is no better.
Durden’s Fight Club evolves into the anarchist army Project Mayhem, a kind of antics-oriented terror organization whose ultimate project is to explode the office buildings of all major credit card companies and the credit bureaus in order to reset everyone’s debt record back to zero (for the sake of the film’s grander philosophical considerations, don’t waste time quibbling about how feasible this scheme is). When Norton’s Tyler realizes that his Pitt ego has been planning this, he knows that his initial impulse against socialization—starting a brawl with himself in a roadhouse parking lot, leaving his designer condo and cable television for an abandoned house with barely-working power, and balling the strangely appealing but appallingly depressed Marla Singer/Helena Bonham Carter—however healthy and necessary it was, went overboard, but it’s incidentally too late. The film has a rather dark happy ending; holding hands, Norton’s Tyler (head dripping from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that killed Pitt’s Tyler) and Marla watch the buildings all around them explode. Strangely, we feel warm inside, knowing that everything is going to be okay, whatever that means (it’s to Palahniuk and Fincher’s credit that they don’t consider showing us).
Even if Norton’s Tyler is ultimately the sound, rational voice, once liberated, Pitt’s Tyler is the one with the actual take-home message of this film, the dark but surprisingly valid reminder that you are not a special snowflake, that you (that is, we) are the all-singing, all-dancing manure heap, that God not only doesn’t care about us, but might not even like us. Does it sound a little silly? A bit teenaged-angsty? In our decade’s pan-spiritual, new-aged, positive-intentioned society, I find it rather honest and refreshing. Right before the movie’s climax, before Norton’s Tyler realizes what exactly is going on, Pitt-as-Tyler is driving a car through a rainstorm. He takes his hands off the wheel and increases the gas, illustrating his instruction to Norton-as-Tyler to “let go.” He asks the people in the car what they want to achieve before they die; how they would feel about their lives if they died at that moment. Norton-as-Tyler, who has yet to let go, cannot answer the questions. The car crashes, runs off the road, flips over. They all emerge unscathed. Pitt-as-Tyler whoops with glee to have added another raw experience to his life. Norton-as-Tyler remains unconvinced. But is it silly, teenaged-angsty, to live your life with zest, as if any moment could be your last? Pitt-as-Tyler promotes recklessness in a way that I can’t condone, but his ultimate message—you’re not your job, you’re not your car, you’re not your clothes; “the things you own end up owning you,”—is not only valid, but completely liberating. Let the fuck go and live your life a little closer to your physical edge, and if you forget how, watch the movie again.
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