The more things change the more they stay the same.

I've moved. There are posts on cinema and video.

Argo

When the screen faded to black and Ben Affleck's name appeared, everyone clapped. Renata Adler notes in 1968 that clapping for a movie is a peculiar gesture, "quite different from what it means in live theater." Who are you applauding? Nobody is there to hear you clap except the rest of the audience, and you. This was quiet, as applause goes. This is Ashland; audiences are gentle folk with multicultural pretensions. We listen to NPR. For us, Mr. Affleck had moved in just the right ways in his turn on the stage; he affirmed our concerns, and successfully navigated our national shame to give us a patriotic happy ending that we could approve of. For that moment, the audience basked in the communal warmth of their shared appreciation. I'm in basically the same boat as far as qualms, but I'm one of those prideful people who can't bear to participate in a crowd. I felt at once superior and pathetic for getting up to leave--passing relaxed, vaguely postcoital smiles that I envied and reviled--as everyone else stayed for the rest of the credits.

I gather that Affleck feels a similar mixture of pride and shame about his country's involvement in Iran. His movie opens as a grave documentary, with footage of the Iranian Revolution. A voiceover narrates Iran's history up to 1979. The Shahs. The democratic election of a president. The period in which (the narrator tells us proudly) Iran's oil was their own. The U.S. installation of a new Shah (here the narrator's voice turns bitter). The 1979 uprising against this Shah. It's not that I disagree on any particular point (I'm not informed enough), but I have to wonder why this bit of exposition is here. This is the story of getting American "hostages" (actually they're just hiding out in the Canadian ambassador's house in Tehran) out of Iran. It's an American story. This five-minute introduction to a place that throughout the rest of the movie must at all costs be fled is the lefty equivalent of a hail-mary. Without it, the audience would not have clapped, but only enjoyed, somewhat guiltily. Affleck is atoning for his privileged Americanness in a popular style: by having fits of reaching for the experience of who he isn't.

The experience that the movie can't show becomes quite clear when the actual movie begins with a crowd of Iranian protesters storming the U.S. embasy. Affleck's direction in this scene exercises admirable control, but this I think is because he's straining to resolve it in a politically correct way. It flicks back and forth between the panicked Americans in the embasy, and the crowd. The crowd is a crowd: impossible to sympathize with, because this kind of sympathy has the individual as its basic unit. What can an American director who wants not to offend anyone do, when given Americans under a siege of foreign righteousness? I suppose you can push the onus of morality onto individual irrationality, which is to say you can do away with moral thought entirely. To protect the embassy there are some policemen of some sort or other, in full riot gear, with tear gas launders. Their commander tells them over the radio to "only use the tear gs a last resort--I repeat, as a last resort only." Cut immediately to tear gas canisters being launched into the crowd.

What is the point of a movie that on the one hand refuses to be overtly political, and on the other refuses to be a drama--something it seems to view as being of inadequate importance? One might equally ask what is the point of Affleck's taut montages, in which he smashes all the locuses of tension together? A man behind me during one of these breathtaking multiscenes said "interesting juxtaposition." It was. All at once, prisoners are sent to a firing squad and almost but not quite executed, a press event Hollywood party in which the actors read the terrible Argo script aloud proceeds gaily and vapidly along, and some other thing that I can't quite remember. I'm sure it was important. But that's the trouble. Shouldn't I remember, if this meticulously edited sequence--in which audio from all three scenes piles up into a cacophony-- really made an impact? I remember a similar, simpler technique in Lord of the Rings: while on the raging battlefield millions die at a king's strategically poor orders, this king eats cherry tomatoes alone. He makes quite a mess, spurting tomato juice with every bite. Cutting back and forth between these two things, the king's minstrel sings a plaintive song. It was memorable because its moralistic meaning was too unmistakeable. Affleck's crucibles of disparity are just the opposite. The justaposition is interesting, and not at all obvious in its intent, but all I can do is scratch my head, and feel inexplicably somewhat moved.

The script, likewise, aims away from the head toward the heart, but politely fires a very small calibur. Hearts pump with and are revealed by epistles, and this movie's heart is written on a postcard to Affleck's character's son as he goes to the airport. "Sorry I missed ya, buddy-man," he writes. He tried to call him for his birthday, but nobody picked up. His son's absent presence is the tiny looseness from which narrative flows. As the direction is restrainted, so is the world these characters inhabit. When Affleck's character is on the phone with his son (someone who is nerver on screen), there's a needful lapse. His son is telling him about school, but his voice mutes out as Affleck spaces out, staring at the television, on which Planet of the Apes is playing (his son is watching the same). He's listening, but all we get is emotional content. The idea to make a fake movie as a cover to rescue the Americans stranded in Iran comes to him during a swell of love for his son.

This particular brand of masculine sentimentality for the family holds throughout. Affleck's character and the fake filmmaker he hires (Alan Arkin) bond over the absence of their families, from whom they are both estranged ultimately, they think, because they're in "the bullshit business." In this movie, the bullshit business is lifesaving potential; the ability to create, believe, and convince others of narratives is survival out there in the public sphere. What they're saying is that their heroism tragically seperates them from domestic life. Which is nice for them because it's sad for them. How else to maintain such a sentimental attachment but absence? And how else to drive the creation of narrative but by this attachment? Besides, as Arkin's character says, "kids need the mother." One thing about a period piece based on a true story is that characters can say things like this without comment, cinematic or verbal.

I don't mean to suggest that the script or Affleck's direction are dumb. Rather, the movie's intelligence all goes into saying as little as possible.

Affleck is capable of trying to engage with the world. The Town wrapped its head around the phenomenon of how one becomes trapped in a place, a family, and a destiny, try as one might to escape it and its criminality. It's about a very particular place; I got the impression there was research involved in writing the script. Argo's script is too scary to direct because too potentially contentious. Affleck tries to tiptoe around Iran, however much time the camera spends there, because of how relevant the subject matter is right now, when two presidential candidates are debating about what to do or not to do about the country. He becomes much like the protagonist he plays--an escape artist.

He has a boyish face, with sharp rather than rough features--as angular as a young Bruce Willis, but open and gentle about the eyes somehow, especially in profile. Both can summon an immense, suffocating smugness, but Affleck has chosen to avoid doing so in this movie. Instead he is a man so conflicted he's taciturn, and rigorously maintains a neutral expression, just barely smiling when pleased. When their flight out of Tehran reaches altitude and the stewardesses begin serbing drinks, the six he's rescued cheer and embrace. He sits alone at a window seat and allows himself a tiny, sheepish, one-sided smile.

I am endeavouring, ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.

Star Trek (the original) is nearly unwatchable. Thus it is populated with babes in costumes whose designer seems to grin lasciviously from behind the camera. When their bodies aren't giving relief from the creak of plastic gears--or if you prefer, the shouting of men--a particular kind of head shot is. The female guest star's face is in soft focus, and lit from a slightly oblique angle, so that her hair shines ethereally. Her face glows, and her glowing smile appears indeed from another planet.

While the rest of our heroes boldly go where no man has gone before--namely, portals--Uhura says "Captain, I'm afraid."

To a trekkie, it's already apparent that I'm really speaking of one episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever". (But that way of filming female faces holds throughout the series, I swear.) I began watching the episode because I know someone who is obsessed with the writer, Harlan Ellison. I was wikipediaing him, and discovered he wrote an episode of Star Trek. What really interested me, though, was that he hated the adaptation of his script so much that he went to court. I had to see what all the fuss was about.

Controversy could only bouy me so much against the sinking dullness of the show, however. I couldn't make it through the episode. It was one of those "travelling back in time screws up the present" plots. When it is revealed that what changes the future for the worse is the U.S. not going to war with Germany during World War Two, my cursor fled to the pause button. I longed for a non-butterfly-effect time travel concept, as in Kage Baker. At least when written history cannot be changed, jingoistic self-justification (whenever we feel national shame, it seems, we can always fall back on "but we saved the world!") isn't possible.

But anyway, I wasn't intending masturbate about taste. I haven't read Ellison's script, but I have a conjecture. When he wrote an episode for Star Trek, what was he expecting when it got aired? Star Trek is still Star Trek. Every writer has a rebellious streak of some sort--otherwise why write--but I think Ellison's was particularly strong. When he wrote an episode of Star Trek, he wanted it to exceed the bounds of what a Star Trek episode could be. He wanted to make something daring, perhaps with a bit of commentary on the show itself. He wanted to inject a bit of not-Star Trek into Star Trek, to give it a little life. So when he saw what ultimately made it to the screen, he was pissed. This wasn't the edgyness he had imagined.

I make fun, but it's perfectly understandable. (Although it does take a special kind of stubbornness to take Paramount to court four decades later for rewriting his script.) Even writing a piece for Bright Wall in a Dark Room, at least half my motivation was something along the lines of I'll show them! I felt that I was in some way shaking up the genre of BWDR. Such an attitude may be necessary, along with the idealizations that come with it.

There's something phallic about this conception of creativity in which one creates within confines but yearns to exceed those confines, and in so doing reveal one's idealized self in the difference. One pretends to want freedom from the confines, but without them one would not be able to create, nor would one want to. Ellison raged against the apparatus of his articulation. He saw too much of the apparatus, and not enough of himself. Despite the angelic face of its female guest star, the episode wasn't pornographic enough.

Elena

There is a horse. There is also a man, and his grandson in law. The first two die; the last lies on the ground so long after being beaten that it seems he dies, but he gets up. What else needs to be known? When the horse passes into view out the train window, a little boy cries "look!" Hitting it, presumably, was why the train came to a stop a few moments before, and why policemen hurried through the car. The eponymous Elena seemed to fidget when the uniforms clomped through, but then, she doesn't actually move much. I just know that she killed the aforementioned man, her husband, Vladimir, and therefore I imagine her pang of fear and guilt at the sight of the law. Anyway, in the extreme long view Elena--but not Elena--takes Vladimir may as well be the dead horse. Indeed, why does he die? For the sake of her grandson, who could die any day in a gang fight. Vladimir, who unapologetically cares for nothing but money, would have thought his own death a poor investment.

About perspective. The film begins and ends with a shot of winter tree limbs in front of Vladimir's house. The focus begins at the foremost branch, and very slowly shifts to the house's windows. Vladimir and Elena live in one of those brutally convenient modernist things that was once so outside the box, it became one. He sleeps in the worst part of it, she on a fold-out couch in the coziest room, truer to her class origins. The two of them met when she was nurse to him in the hospital, and it seems that as his wife she has carried on in this same capacity. Watching Elena go about her domestic duties is like a defanged version of Jeanne Dielman. She has less routine, and less time for her routine to explode, but explode it does.

When Vladimir tells her that he plans to write a will, that his daughter, Katya, will get almost everything, and that he has no intention of providing for her grandson, she takes his dishes (on a designer wooden tray) back to the kitchen and sets them down roughly, with a clang. The next day she furtively reads his draft; cut to her feeding carrots into a juicer, which sounds remarkably like paper shredding. It is alongside this frothy carrot juice that she serves him an excess of pills, popping extras into the cup with a kind of nervous whimsy.

Elena speaks, but she is understood through her actions, though the body language of her long, patient time on the screen. I fell in love with the head of this film, who does nothing but speak, and who happens to be Vladimir's pretty daughter. It seems not too shaky of a conjecture that Andrey Zvyagintsev, writer and director, fancied her, too. He imbued her with the whole of the truth-telling--and all the word play, to boot.

As the linguistic articulation of the film's cinematic distance, she, too, takes the long view. Her father accuses her of saying everything is pointless. She does. There is a bit of cheek, though, to her dire pronouncements. She's deadly serious, but so sometimes are the best comedians. Everything may be pointless, but people like Zvyagintsev would like to believe that there is a point in communicating why. I'm in the same boat.

One of the more memorable things she says is that one has children to suck the life from them. Of course, the opposite occurs--quite literally, if indirectly. Not that Elena's grandson wants the money that she goes to such ends to get for him.

As for Vladimir, he smiles and says that he's cheered up by his daughter's caustic words. So, I find, am I. These two scenes, in which with her tongue she first dispatches Elena and then Vladimir in his hospital bed following a heart attack, are the only clarity, and the only real mirth. Although, personally, I giggled at the bits of television that were chosen for the domestic scenes. After Elena kills Vladimir, she's watching people evaluate a new "sausage product." "I like No. 6. It's quite edible." "No 3 tastes very sausagey." Katya's verbal flaying, however, did more than elicit quiet giggles. I was warmed through.

"I barely see you, Katya," says Vladimir.

"That's because I'm standing against the light." (She's in front of the window.)

"I didn't mean it in that sense."

"Dad, you know that nothing like sense even exists."

"Looking at you, sometimes I think, that might even be true."

"So, it's OK that you barely see me."

Their dialogue goes on like this, full of puns and metaphor. Yes, this was the filmmaker's transparent philosophizing, yet its agile twists along words' axes thrilled me. I could've kissed her. Her father did. The consonance of these was, I admit, a little discomforting. Yet still my fervor is enough that I want to reprint just a bit more of the script here:

"You've always loved those word games."

"Games help children come to terms with the cruel laws of reality."

"Children?"

"Nope. Not going to happen. I'm not pregnant, if that's what you were asking."

"Too bad. It'd sort you out."

"I am sorted. Alcohol and drugs only on the weekends. It's clean living now. Of all the pleasures I'm still getting sex and food under control, but I'm working on myself, trust me."

Katya does nothing but express her interiority, however sarcastically; Elena becomes a sublime object, despite how much time there is to watch and get to know her. In part this is because Katya--who has the last word on everything--distrusts her performances. "Listen, Elena Anatolievna. You're playing the role of the worried wife. You do that very well. Congratulations." I therefore contracted the same paranoid reading of Elena's every facial movement. This both made her fascinating to watch, and is rather unforunate. Vladimir by contrast is highly readable. For a little while the camera follows him about his day. He goes to the gym; he ogles girls. The only perhaps mystifying thing about him is his rejection of pleasure, which is a fairly mundane bit of father psychology.

Defamiliarizing the feminine is rather familiar. But then, I already admitted the origin of this scrutiny. Isn't this just how the wealthy eye the poor: with the suspicion that the poor are out to take their money? In this case, it's true. By the end, Elena's family have taken over Vladimir's house. But while the hysterical search for the actor behind the act may have a sound cause, there's no sense in it. Which makes me wonder about having watched Elena, during which I looked endlessly for signs of Elena.

Do you prefer your movie-going sensible or senseless?

Date Night

It's the seed of the whole plot, but I'm sorry, this couple is not discontent. Which is to say I would have been quite content for them to continue lazily, guiltily going to the same dreary place for dinner every "date night", endlessly deferring sex for some other night, and becoming (god forbid) "excellent housemates". But for some reason or other--I'm guessing because there was a movie to be made--this was a nightmare scenario. You wouldn't know it, though, watching the two of them. They seem quite pleased with themselves engaged in what appears to be the foundational pleasure of their relationship: making up stories about the couples at the other tables. And I would be quite pleased to have such uproarious company. But no. There has to be a problem to fix.

There being to my mind no problem to fix, you can imagine that the build-up to its resolution was to me a declension. Everything, depressingly, slides into place: Carrel's character rediscovers his masculinity, and Fey's remembers how to supplicate. The comedians manage not to get subsumed into the genre action flick they poke fun at, but slip instead into the sad conventions of a romantic comedy. Their complaints against each other are just cliche mercenaries hired for their pointless arguments. He leaves drawers and toilet seats open. She does every domestic task because she doesn't trust he can do anything right. I find myself, unsurprisingly, on her side. When it turns out he's compotent at planning their escape from the criminal mess they stumbled into, I'm incredulous. He has to explain everything to her, twice, because "you know I've never been good with complicated plots." After his second explanation, I'm still lost.

It's noteworthy that the only way out of the ossification of marriage, in this film, is mortal danger. Their complaint is that their life together is too smooth, which is after all the advantage of having an income and a spouse, in theory. During the course of their crazy night, their motives get mixed up. They're trying to get out of danger, to "just go home", but they're trying to get in as many scrapes with death as possible to avoid the routine of their marriage. These two drives are crystalized in conflation when, after a half-frank, half-sappy discussion in which Fey's character says she doesn't dream of running off with another man, but of being alone, they pause at a window pane: "this will be our second time breaking and entering this evening, making us repeat offenders." "Better than excellent houesmates."

Oddest of all about this movie is its paradox: to reconstitute the dull, it must be shaken up. There are a lot of politically correct gender gestures in the shaking up (he's a better pole dancer, she has the balls to break into an office), but ultimately it's a shake-down. They go through all this so that their normativity might feel like it has more "panache." Which is the word the husband uses, comically, to describe the heroic drive to the city he's gonna--by god--take his wife on. They end up stuck in traffic.

Hackers

The Legacy of (Zero) Cool

Coolness has always slain me. (Who adds the awkward “ness” to cool but the uncool?) No matter how much older I am, unruffleable youths in sunglasses constitute a crisis of difference for me. Will they hurt me? How can they pull it off? How do they not betray their bluff? How dare they? The answer, of course, is quite simple, and quite impossible for me to understand more than notionally: they’re not me.

So it’s not surprising that in middle and high school, when the above crisis was a daily occurrence, I became attached to a film that integrated coolness with the identity I held at the time...

Beasts of the Southern Wild

That I would see "Beasts" (as everyone buying tickets called it) was not at all certain. The trailer had induced an exasperated groan. A child's voice said "The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If just one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted." At the words "get busted", it cuts to a shot of antarctic ice crashing into the ocean. Oh lord. Ecological fallacies for environmentalist campaigns are all well and good, but as a master narrative veiled as a child's wisdom, it grossed me out. Here was one more to add to my list of movies not to see, which has been growing unmanageably large lately.

But there I was in front of the Varsity (the sense of this name eludes me), looking at showing times. I had just sat in the cafe above Bloomsbury (a far less opaque name for a bookshop), poking laconically at my keyboard at about one sentence every five minutes. Two cups of coffee, somehow, had given me ennui rather than the characteristic ballooning of the ego. I kept blaming various things. It was one of those days. The coffee was bad. The thick smoke that turned the light yellow and the mountains charred and hazy made me tired. (That which claims things as parts of an identity protested with desperate confusion: but I like smoky days!) None of this changed the fact that I was undead, standing there in front of the theater. I saw that "Beasts" began in ten minutes. I looked at the other films. "Hope Springs", solely on the basis of its title--ew. "Moonrise Kingdom", STILL PLAYING--ew. "Savages", I'm not even sure what that is, but I guess Blake Lively's agent has found ways to try to keep her career from dying after the last season of Gossip Girl ends next year, although honestly I think it's the rest of the cast who might need to worry. Something with Jack Black--ew. I had not watched trailers for any of these. At least with "Beasts" I understood what kind of ew I was getting into. What the hell, I thought, I have a regular source of income for the time being, I'll spend $6.50 on ew. Who knows, maybe the trailer's barely obfuscated environmentalist moralizing totally misrepresented the film. Maybe I'd even like it.

There were some things to like. But my urgent need to urinate halfway through sent me to the bathroom, rather than willing myself to stay in my seat for the last 45 minutes. One thing I liked was the epigrammatic speech the fisherwoman cum voodoo practitioner cum mother to lost children gave to her little flock. She slaps a red mess of glistening red crayfish in front of the camera. "Animals are made of meat. You're meat. I'm meat." (She goes on to name a number of familiar farmyard animals.) The film is constantly daring the audience to be comfortable with their own fleshiness. This off-the-grid estuarine community appears to live solely on meat and booze. The ritual back at Hushpuppy's (the child star of the film, who I also liked) home is: Her father slaps a freshly slaughtered chicken on the grill, rings a bell and yells "feed up time!" She rushes off to eat, making her way among a chaos of chickens, goats, and pigs. In her voiceover narration she refers to everyone as an animal, not distinguishing humans. Actually, the voiceover is less narration than a collection of pithy, extremely general teachings, like a tiny, impractical Sun Tzu. She does, however, introduce her community in voiceover, known as The Bathtub. She says of this primitivist wet dream that "Daddy says The Bathtub celebrates more holidays than anywhere else," and we are given a montage of Bathtubians hollering from a parade float that could've been made at Burning Man, swilling booze, playing with fireworks. I was given the impression of people trying very hard to convince themselves they were having a good time, and I was not at all sure this was the intended effect. The music was joyful during these celebrations.

Despite the deliberate gross-out provocations of the camera (look at all this meat), I think The Bathtub is supposed to ultimately look like a noble alternative to late capitalism. This story divides the world in two: the people in the city, and the people in the Bathtub. The plot revolves around the city people constructing a levee that raises the water level and sinks The Bathtub. It is this artifice to which Hushpuppy refers when she says that something busts. (That shot of the ice crumbling gets carted at the same moment in the film as in the trailer, to my disappointment.) The trouble with the philosophy that Hushpuppy develops of a perfect universe that busts is that, honey, the universe is always already busted.

The film points to complications in the future rather than the past. As our drunken Bathtubians try to put the world back to the way it was, everything just keeps going more wrong. They blow a hole in the levee with dynamite, only to find that their home is half dead and muddy after all that time underwater. Then the city people forcibly evacuate them with helicopters to a hospital. The Bathtubians soon escape from this nightmare ward where sick people are "plugged into the wall", in what I guess is supposed to be a triumphant rebellion against a civilizing mission. The busting of their home is mirrored in Hushpuppy's father's health. "My blood," he says, in a rare moment of nondenial, "is eating itself." Which is a poetic way to talk about an autoimmune disorder, but that, ultimately, is what grates: the artifice of these voices posed as authentic alterity. It is the "Forrest Gump" problem: having someone simple speak your half-baked philosophies makes them sound profound.

That, and how distant these characters ultimately are to us. Chances are, the audience lives in the capitalist world this community so vehemently rejects. Like a Jean Jeunet film, we are entrated to love this band of misfits. They're rough, drunk, and scary, and yet they're drowning in cute. The problem is, we may all be animals, but animals have this thing planted in the animal: a mind. This is a film convinced that the solution to the mind-body problem, and to every other binary opposition, is to privilege the other side.

~
It has come to my attention, via an article in Film Comment that I spotted while waiting for my brother to finish reading Backpacker in the periodical section of the public library, that Benh Zeitlin (the filmmaker, who I'm sure would scrupulously reject this title) may not have fashioned all of the contours of Bathtubian speech in the image of his own romantic vision of how simple folk should live. (Incidentally, there are a number of backpackers about town this weekend. The herd of Pacific Crest Trail hikers, brought on, as my brother deduced, by the recent publication of Wild, are all at this point in their journey. Four of them entered the library in the twenty minutes we spent there. They generally come in what I assume are romantic pairs, with tiny packs carrying virtually nothing. Their food is cached at several points along the trail. I still wonder at the logistics of this, just as the gritty realism of "Beasts" makes me wonder where they get all their booze and breakfast cereal to feed the chickens. Maybe I just can't handle magical realism. In any case, trade does not exist in this film, but its artifacts seem to undergird the Bathtubians' alternative society. This turns their moralizing about The Big Bad City, to my mind, like the whiny urgings of dumpster divers to bring down The System.) In this article, in which he is interviewed in New Orleans, he says he had to "revise toward the people"--that is, revise his script to the actors' lives, mannerisms, etc. (He also says that the film came out of an epiphany he had in Europe that he "didn't want to be an expat", yet he moved to New Orleans. As much as the article declaims Hollywood tendencies to exoticize that city, I think it's safe to say that those "clichés about black magic and magical negroes" are precisely why Zeitlin has planted himself there, and what animates the fantastical in "Beasts".) He likes to think of the process as "organic". He says "I think it was hard for people, people who don’t know this city and this region, to understand how deep the roots go and how impossible it is to transplant what’s here to somewhere else." His film has failed to translate to "people who don't know this city" the deep roots of its characters, instead leaving them, well, floating. The mystery that drew Zeitlin to the Mississippi delta has been preserved, or missed entirely--your pick.

Yes yes, the beasts. There are in fact beasts, which occupy a parallel cinematic universe for most of the film, a bit like the hilariously nonsequitor dinosaurs in "The Tree of Life" (but then in that film, what isn't a nonsequitor). The Aurochs, tattooed on The Bathtub's resident earth mother goddess's arm, are said to eat people. They are, then, the animal that busts our supremacy over the animal world. They also look like pigs. Sort of cute, gentle-eyed pigs, with snuffling snouts. They have big tusks, yes, and they allegedly eat their kin (I know, I'm wading into a big pool of muck by selectively distrusting parts of the fictional world), as well as trample stuff. Anyway, they bow to Hushpuppy at the end. I guess we were expecting them to do something bad, seeing as they were loosed from the ice by the catastrophic storm (Katrina). I think I missed the point. I stopped following the metaphoric register about halfway though.

"Damages" Season 5 Episode 3

Every season of "Damages" fictionalizes some real-life scandal. This fifth season, the material is Wikileaks and the sexual charges against Julian Assange. My understanding of this material is, as with every other season's, limited. But it was the first season whose references I broadly understood, which had me giddy in the same way a birder identifies the bird in front of him. That is to say, cursorily.

The plot of this season combines Assange's sexuality and the functioning of WikiLeaks. That word, leak, echoes around as a kind of innuendo, until in the third episode it reaches a pitch of conflation. Sitting on the toilet taking a leak, I come to the depressing realization that all of my thoughts on the matter of leakage hinge on an Anne Carson essay--depressing not because, gosh, thoughts come from somewhere, but because I've come to the conclusion that every essay that uses Anne Carson's work does so in the manner of quoting gospel, and the effect upon the essay is invariably death. She is so unassailably cool in the eyes of certain people (of whom I'm one) that she cannot be quoted without taking over as sole purveyor of meaning. Which is why it is better here to instead cite a glaring plot point. The "whistleblower", as those who supply information to the Assange analog are called, is a woman whose leak, when it gets leaked onto his website, for some reason contains personal emails detailing her, as a newspaper puts it, sexcapade. The leak, ostensibly about the leakiness of her company, is also, through some unidentified leak, about her sexual leakiness.

If I say leak one more time, I'll kill myself. Which is what the "whistleblower" almost but did not do in response to hers. In the events leading up to her death, she and whatever his name is meet in a hotel room, against protocol, to discuss the information she is to supply. He assures her that it will be confidential, then comes onto her. She pushes him away, and then says that "I'm afraid this isn't something I can follow through on" "What isn't?" he asks, and she says "the leak" (saving me, happily), but in what comes out of his mouth immediately afterwards it is not clear what, or rather which: "You think I can't take what I want?", "I think this is what you wanted", "If I give you what you want will you give me what I want?" (As he unbuttons his pants and forces her onto the bed.) I believe I've made my point as clear and articulate as a blog post demands. As for the show, what exactly is being said is unclear to me, but it sure is bludgeoning it into us.

Batman The Third

I've always been lured into the pleasures of watching movies already made sense of by a piece of writing, but it's always folly. Whether it's the gentler stuff of movie reviews, or the cocaine of academia, either I'm miffed (because the movie failed to live up to the exemplarity it was made to be in writing), or I keep up the same irritatingly mimicking zeal that the article sent me to the theater with. Well, okay--usually it's a queasy cohabitation of the two. Any kind of synthesis is out of the question.

While I was sent off to "Brave" with the promise of a smile by an analysis that tied the whole movie together, I hung to Batman (I mean "The Dark Knight Rises", if you can swallow that) by the thread dangling off the end of Anthony Lane's review. (Unlike Batman himself, who, while perilously strung throughout the movie for dramatic effect, is that which wins, we know. Surviving a nuclear blast, as he does at the end of the film--appearing like an American Jesus of The Good Life to Michael Caine, who makes a good stand-in for Mary Magdalene--is surely confirmation of this definition.) Having since the second movie petulantly rolled my eyes at the high-falutin seriousness that plagues this trilogy, Lane had given me high expectations for Cat Woman as precisely that element of ridicule. She is fun, but it occurred to me about the time she straddles Batman's motorcycle in skin-tight black, that Lane's article simply needed a closing twist, and the movie needed female eye candy. However, Anne Hathaway is the most entertaining part of a movie that otherwise does little else but beat drums in your ears for two hours. She has the cleverest lines, for one thing--maybe the only speech that's even written to engage us. While every other muscle-bound orator drones on (or, as the case may be, whispers, or speaks into a malfunctioning loudspeaker) about souls, fear, privilege, and power, she's amused, and almost leaves the doomed little island that Gotham becomes to save herself. There, there's my imitative little fit.

It sounds vaguely believable, but honestly I couldn't even follow most what she was saying, either. The plot was hazy to me. I think there was some big twist toward the end, as Marion Cotillard's knife twisted in Christian Bale. Turns out it was her who as a child escaped the prison, instead of Bane, the gurgling, mouthless villain. Okay. So I guess her and Bruce Wayne's little fling was a farce, but we knew that, in different terms. In any case, what, after all the explosions, dystopia, growling (and did I mention the drumming?), was the denouement?

There is for the first half a thick sense of portent brewed around Bane, while he remains underground the city. I don't mean so much the bits of dialog in which everyone worries about that crazy man in the sewers, but how the movie seems to cinematically strain to build this man's threat to a mysterious extreme. His mission is occluded enough at first that some sort of event seems sure to come, as if Nolan is screaming at us "SOMETHIN' GONNA HAPPEN HERE!" What happens? He gets himself a nuclear bomb. Any emergence this movie's emergency may have had just vanished. It is as this point I lost interest.

The "darkest" part of the film, then, coincided with my lowest. Bane became a surface-dweller, and proceeded to tear shit up like an adolescent's fantasy of revolution (release the prisoners! kill the rich!). Indeed, beside me, my brother was aping all this. He giggled, I think, at the shots of torn-up American flags, as if this was some profound ideological statement. He acknowledged it was all silliness when the lights came on, but as it unfolded in the dark I could tell he was thinking like one of those people whose idol is Tyler Durden.

Meanwhile, the on-screen gunfire sent me into paranoiac imaginings of the sensation of a bullet entering my skull. When the lights were dimming and the movie began, the man in front of us turned conspicuously around, seeming to inspect the platform from which an Aurora imitator might target the theater. Perhaps this fear is why the movie's attempts at terror disconcertingly struck home.

So what's left? Should we look to the wisdom of Robin's take on all this? He resigns from the police, saying to the commissioner by way of explanation "you know what you said about structure becoming shackles? You're right--I mean, who's going to know who saved Gotham?" The trouble with the Law, apparently, is that it prevents (super) heroes from public recognition.

The only conclusion I can possibly come to is that "The Dark Knight Rises" has abandoned the project of adding up to anything. The noise, the darkness, the talk of class and privilege, the violence, the tests of mettle, the mushroom cloud, the resurrection: it doesn't mean anything. Stepping out of the theater, my brother said it was awesome.

Disorganized Thoughts on the Consumption of Cinema

My brother and I recently purchased Civilization V. What is your moneys worth in such a game, in which there is no single player campaign to mark completion? It's absurd to measure the duration of gaming you get out of Civilzation, because the transaction works the other way around: Civilization is a vessel into which you pour time. It has an incredible capacity, even a kind of suction. Play for eight hours and force yourself to stop, wanting only to continue playing. There's something monstrous about being taken, held, and never released. Isn't the most optimistic point of games to renew our sense of freedom, to be drawn in enough that being ejected feels like a beginning? Nearing the end of a movie, I feel a great excitement for leaving the theater. What I pay for is that exit.

There's another reason I wanted to play Civilization V, a reason I haven't quite used up yet, even though my brother is understandably fed up with the incredible time commitment a game of Civ requires, and refuses to play any more. (The game is on his computer and won't run on any other in the house.) Still hungering for more Civ, I searched the internet for free alternatives that would run on my dated computer. One of the clones, c-evo, has an ambitious mission statement. They contend that the problem with computer games is that they're not designed to be crystaline like chess, but instead are designed as baubles to be consumed for their novelty value and then discarded out of boredom with an imperfect game. I think they're overestimating the genre's potential, but the observation that computer games are played for their novelty is one I find irrefutable. Why, for instance, play Diablo III? New weapons, new items, new characters, new graphics. The game itself is still as blindingly dull and addictive as before. In fact, I'm not sure games have changed that much since the release of Quake, but novelty has eternally sprung.

And novelty has another draw: Before the game is ever finished, press releases hint at everything that's new and in so doing give it a utopian glint on the horizon. You begin thinking "if I could play it..." Like many other products, you buy them to fix your life. It can almost be better not to buy them at all, to never be disappointed or face reality, and instead to let the wished-for products sprout whole imagined kingdoms of better life. Almost.

Movie hype is not new, but its intensity has been able to ramp enormously with the many mediums the Internet has availed. And as updates of older films are made closer and closer to the last iteration's release date, movies are starting to be consumed a lot like video games.

A new Spider Man movie is made not even a decade after the previous, and we itch for its revitalizing potential. "Prometheus" is essentially "Alien", but with more glitz (both pseudophilosophical and visual). "Avatar" is just a rehash of every James Cameron trope, but with a shiny technology called 3D (yes, I am one of those grumpy old people who think 3D is a lame fad to sell tickets at a higher price).

People pay for that moment of hope, the ticket in their hand, the film not yet begun, full of anticipation, and they pay for afterwards, when the film becomes a conversational token. Watching the film gets happily syncopated away, leaving only desire and signification. "The Avengers" is, I hear, a wildly successful film, but does it bubble up into your life? Do you dream of Captain America gripping a trash can lid?

I don't know about you, but I take a perverse pleasure in not being surprised by a film. Walking in with an asernal of reviews to agree and disagree with, steeled with several lines of analysis to keep the film at bay. I may as well; I can't not read about it before going.

It's funny, I want to see "Prometheus", but the thought of actually sitting through it is unpallatable. This huge gap between the fantasy it promises to deliver and my imagination of how it would actually be to watch.

Which is to say our relationship to the cinema is essentially lust. Aroused by hype, our desire has nothing to do with spending time with or having ourselves in any way complicated by a movie. We simply have found a fresh locus for hope. We gape and think "if only I could have that, everything would be good again." Its contours become the articulations of our future. And we don't have to give anything to get it, we just have to pay for it. Wow, I've been watching too much "Mad Men".

Who is us and why is lust bad, again? I'm bad at sustaining a polemic (or even merely a line of thought) because I hardly begin articulating passion before I no longer believe it. It all rings false. A good polemic is neither a liar nor faithful, but simply does not see things as either true or untrue. You can push belief because you've given up. Yup, there's a romanticization of advertising if I ever heard one.

The Avengers

There are two scenes I remember from "The Avengers", and that's because I was trying to for the purpose of this blog.

Aliens are in the process of blowing up Manhattan. Captain America, in his regalia, jumps on top of a car and begins giving rapid-fire orders to two policemen. They look at him, a little perplexed (and why not, there's a man literally covered in stars and stripes--perhaps he is some sort of street performer). "Why should we take orders from you?" one asks. A few invading aliens are then upon Mr. America, and he dispatches them quickly with a flourish. The fight ends with him holding one of their severed cocks. I mean guns. Without another word, the policemen immediately get on the radio to relay his orders. Might makes right. The audience laughs.

Some of those in the way of salvation are a bit more prickly. Namely, the villain, a sickly-pale Tom Hiddleston. When the Hulk threatens him with smash, Loki has a hissy fit. The Hulk may be the "monster," but it's Loki who is feminized, who will lose because he "lacks conviction." Joss Whedon milks the moment for slapstick comedy. Loki stands there ranting that he's a god, and won't be pushed around by puny green creatures. But he gets what's coming to him. Watch the Hulk swatting him repeatedly into the ground like a cat breaking a mouse's neck. Force is so hilarious. The audience is in stitches.

They howl, they cheer, they clap at the end. It's like being at a party--loud, offensive, and full of the grotesque squeals of public pleasure. It's my worst nightmare, except, thankfully, I am not expected to participate. And the movie, well, what is it but dancing? Bloody, brutal, noisy dancing. Bumping and grinding escalated to coreographed hate sex. Which by the way is apparently all Whedon can imagine when faced with a female super hero. Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson in skin-tight black) has "too much red on her record." When asked "what did he [Loki] do to you?" (there's a leading question if I ever heard one), she says that she has been "compromised" and must make up for it. Her whole strategy as a spy hinges on manipulating people with her vulnerability. Original.

I found myself wondering at the perversity of me paying to watch this, something I didn't even want to enjoy. (Though I had hoped that it would be more of a distraction than it was.) There must be something sick about paying eleven dollars to stew in my own loathing and alienation--precisely what I wanted to do. What I didn't bargain for was a headache. I had never seen a movie in 3D before, and now I want never to do so again. The image has a niggling, pixelated, out-of-focus quality even with the glasses on. And for what? So that the film can look like a diorama? It's not a breathtaking addition of another dimension, but a transformation into cardboard cutouts. It's also a distancing irritant. Rather than immersed, I kept having to ask myself "what am I looking at?" Then again, this is not a film from which I should expect immersion.

The Deep Blue Sea

The walls are thin in the The Varsity and invariably I'm not in the loudest film there. If I were, the booms, crashes, and thuds of Shit Happening in my own theater would drown out the negligable voices and music of the adjacent. But I was watching a matinee of "The Deep Blue Sea", so instead subwoofers bled through the walls in a kind of sinister growl. The resulting soundscape wasn't unfitting. For at least the first quarter of the film I had no idea the foreboding rumblings were from another theater. I marvelled at the use of horror conventions in a period melodrama. Actually even without the extra sound effects, there's still a bit of that. It's put together in a way both thoroughly manipulative and modernist.

It's a noisy film, too, in its way: It begins with an orchestral piece so embarrassingly loud that the images on the screen are overpowered. There's something ugly, tactless about such dramatic music continuing to play. It's like someone yelling to himself in the corner of a room--everyone fidgets awkwardly, pretending not to notice. I think "oh god, what have I gone in for?" Face burning, I wonder if the whole film will play out in this tiresome "The Tree Of Life" mode: epic music trying to inject deep signifigance into short scenes of banality. Then something surprised me. I don't remember what, but the brutality of the sequence was replaced by intrigue. The music fades with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston interlocked, nude bodies spinning.

Someone I know avoided seeing it because it looked scary, and she's not wrong. The trailer, however, makes the film look like a belaboured, anachronistic shriek about adultery, which turns out not at all to be the fulcrum of its thrills. On IMDb the plot is summarized thus: "The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot." "Caught" is misleading. She isn't trying to hide her affair in the first place. After bitching out her husband's mother at tea, she nonchalantly goes up to the bedroom and phones her lover. What really grabs me is the rash unpredictability of Rachel Weisz in this role.

To use the title as a metaphor, Weisz as Hester is a slippery fish. It's some time before she ever speaks. In the memories that float up to us--their balast released by her suicide attempt--it's never she who speaks, it's whichever man she's looking at. Either her husband or her lover. I scrutinize her face, looking for a sure sign written there. Which I think is, in a way, to become her. When someone in her building wakes her up from her gas-induced suicidal slumber, she remains abstracted, self-posessed, looking intently for her cigarettes while a woman acquaintance solicits her emotional state.

"Are you sure you're alright?"

"Yes I'm fine, just feeling a bit dopey," her expression full of everything else. She lights her cigarette, and smoking it becomes the present to which we return from her reminisces. She leans back onto the couch, takes a drag, and the camera follows the smoke swirling away from her into the dark room. This is exactly like the memories feel--drifting slowly into form.

While she broods around her apartment, the orchestral score comes up again. Like her initial voicelessness, omission is used to great effect. Her lover, Freddie, comes in, and the shock is triple: The affair she was remembering is still going on, she's living with him, and he turns the radio from the melancholy score to "something livelier." How to revitalize a script from 1955? Make it a psychological thriller. Who and where is Hester? Even as voices explode, the film keeps a tense distance.

Hester holds very little back from her husband's mother. Over dinner and tea the next day the two have a barely veiled argument about attachment. The mother favors "a guarded enthusiasm" and advises Hester to "beware of passion, it always leads to something ugly." Hester could not be more disgusted by this worldview. A life of strict control and practicality to her is unbearable to imagine. So she boldly dives head-first into Eros, but then what?

There is something to the historical connotations of this love plot. For the boastful soldier home from the war won she has passion, but absolutely no connection. (At the suggestion that "there is more to love than physicality" she instantly rebuts "for me there isn't.") Her old judge of a husband, her connection to the prewar past, to wealth and culture, she rejects. Nothing but the brutally erotic relationship she has with Freddie will do. The kind of cold consistency of heart her husband's mother classically prescribes is too late, no longer responsive to the world that has spring up since she married.

But then under this film's cold gaze her oaths of passion for Freddie don't ring true either. The contradictions of her passion are thrown into a harsh light. Utterances echo in a queer glass chamber. To her husband she declares that Freddie is "my whole world." He rules her emotions (which he "didn't ask for," to him becoming her will to power over him), but the specificity of him is nothing to her. His ignorance about art is an annoyance, especially as his insolance about the pointlessness of art doesn't allow her to believe she's getting through to him. When he comes in after her experiment with using the gas for something other than fire, she's looking out the window, smoking. He enthusiastically tells her about his golf game.

"Are you aware you haven't looked at me this whole time?" he asks jovially.

"I know what you look like, Freddie."

The cause of her suicide is always presumed and never confirmed. Before he finds out she tried to kill herself, Freddie assumes she's angry at him because he forgot her birthday. It's unclear whether she cares at all or if she's just using this as a plausible reason for her mood. When he does find her suicide note, he assumes it's all because of him, for which he rages at her. On this subject she pleadingly yells back "I wasn't blaming you!"

Her husband, too, assumes that her relationship with Freddie drove her to suicide, and advises her, as you would expect, to get out of it (and to come back to him, of course). She tells him it wasn't that, which he ignores.

Hester and her suicide are, in other words, empty signifiers. Well, not are--I'm just too willing to see her in that tired way. I've fallen in love with her mystique, distrusted every word and every gesture. Even if she said why she wanted to die, it would be to someone. There would be an audience and therefore an agenda. I wouldn't believe it. Ugh.

Total Recall

I would totally recall the movie for this.

I have a friend, D., who has aspired all his life to be a stand-up comedian, though he has never said so, and indeed he may not think so. He's at his best impersonating. His impersonations are nothing groundbreaking, but they're infectious, and they do what they should: improve upon the source martial. So much so that the source material becomes completely lost, and the far more entertaining impersonation is all we remember. No one has become more lost and more improved by impersonation than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Thus watching any movie he's in is an excavation of the real Arnie, quickly thereafter forgotten. It's a disorienting thing--him and the activity of unearthing him. Imagine my shock at the first scene of "Total Recall", in which he is thrown into the Martian desert without a space suit, and he begins to scream. In a special effect that is unsettling as much for its gruesomeness as its cheesyness, his eyes bulge out of their sockets, and he emits the proto-Arnie-noise. You know, the one everyone does, from Dana Carvey to Dylan Moran to my D.: alwalwalwalwalw--a guttural vowel through jaws moving rhythmically up and down as if on an exercise machine. Undoubtedly that's how it began--as a jaw exercise. The amazing part about this is that even though I watched this only 24 hours ago, I have just described D.'s impression to you, not what I heard. Because I don't remember what I heard.

This is exactly the kind of tiresome mind-game that can sustain Phillip K. Dick's wonder. (He wrote the short story on which Total Recall was based, of course, as he did quite a few other fanboy-enshrined Sci-Fi films.) He subjects everything to the same kind of philosophical doubt, and so his work is a gold mine for film-makers aiming for the "let's smoke a bowl and watch something" crowd. The basic "whoa" in this film: Is the protagonist's experience a self-indulgent fantasy being synthetically pumped into him by--you guessed it--a sleazy corporation or is it real? It turns out that both his identity and his idealism are constructs intended to secure the corporation's monopoly. But oh no! It back-fires: He, the construct, fights to not be erased by his "true" identity, and triumphantly saves the world from the corporation's greed.

Among all this, there are innumerable funny Schwarzenegger noises, or action scenes as some call them. The unpathologized nonchalance with which he spins innocent bystanders into his heroic imperatives gave me pause. People who have barely met him sacrifice their lives for him, and then he uses their corpses as body shields. His role is comparable to one of the most gruesome weapons he wields in the film: an enormous hand-held drill. He uses it to drill all the way through the armor plating of a vehicle threatening to kill him and his sidekick/lover, and finally into the flesh of its operator. Ugh.

Let's talk about something else. How about that this heavily accented actor is supposed to pass for a white American everyman? At the film's start he and Sharon Stone flounce about their apartment like the married couple you want to murder every time they come over for dinner. When he wakes up, she hounds him for information about this other girl in his recurring dream. He sulks, and watches the news on their enormous flat screen. She bitchily turns it off with the most awful smile (this perhaps is Stone's talent). He sulks some more, and then goes to work. Apparently, he's a construction worker. Like his more recent job as governor, one is always thinking that surely he's actually a body builder, and surely he's just visiting from Austria. Maybe he's actually perfect for both this role and in politics because his accent and mannerisms form a kind of cognitive bomb. One sees and then, in a flash of bent diphthongs and flexing muscle, one does not.

The only part of all this worth watching as far as I'm concerned is Schwarzenegger being apathetic and sarcastic. It's a very brief scene, but unparalleled. He's watching a video of himself telling him what to do, because the one watching has contracted amnesia under duress. What he's watching, then, is the way back to himself. The route involves a lot of difficult, adventurous tasks, and he's depressed by this. "Yes, yes," he says, slouching, as if his wife just scolded him, and then, hearing the worst of it, "great," dripping with ennui. Captured on screen is the most honest reaction he's ever had to his life's work.

Pina

In "Pina", nothing ever goes wrong. Dancers dance on a wet floor, on a precipice, in the road, and in a room full of chairs. None slip (without being choreographed to do so), fall (likewise), run into chairs, or get hit by cars. In these dances, the possibility of an accident is constantly thrown in my eyes like sublime sand.

There is a theme of women falling over to be caught by men. The gravitational potential of her body shoots invisibly through his anticipatory movements. He follows her like a grave, loving spotter, and when she falls forward, he catches her at the last moment before her nose hits the concrete. The audience doesn't quite know what to do with this. It's almost slapstick, but deadpan, modernist. Laughter flares uncertainly through the theater in short fits. Her face is never allowed to make contact with the ground. He saves her from it, but what kind of salvation is that?

A similar dance features a woman not falling face-first, but tipping to the side like a ship in a storm. As before, there is a man to keep her from going over. He keeps close and watches her intently, moving quickly to the perilous side when necessary and kneeling to catch her. She walks and looks forward, zombie-like. When at unpredictable intervals she falls to the side, her eyes do not move. He must keep her on track, keep her from haplessly deviating.

Each dancer in the troupe gives a short monologue. One of them explains lovingly how much Pina loved obstacles. In one of her productions, "Cafe Mueller", the floor is filled with chairs. There is, of course, a man whose role is to move chairs out of the way of dancers who, seeming not to notice the chairs underfoot, would otherwise trip. His work is frantic as the other dancers move wildly about the cluttered space. He makes no false move. He deprives them of clumsiness, their one avenue of expression. While moving chairs is anything but quiet, and the movements of the dancers are anything but understated, nonetheless a tense, kinetic hush settles over them.

There is one dance in which a dancer falls, so predetermined it stings with the caustic amusement of a pompous psychoanalyst. It made the audience so uncomfortable that they laughed sincerely. A man and a woman embrace firmly, both looking needy but on the brink of satiation. They don't move, but a man with the suit, hairstyle, and manner of Agent Smith comes over to them. He rearranges them into a flipbook of passion--their hands to each other's hips, their lips onto each other's, and then he lays her whole into the still man's outstretched arms, as if supposed to carry her to bed in a cliche. As soon as the stern arranger of limbs lets go, she slips out of the arms, and falls to the floor. It looks like it hurts. She picks herself up and again the two embrace, seeming to be rescuing each other from the trauma that just occurred. Sternness turns to anger in the superegoical overseer, and he repeats the whole thing over again, faster. It repeats over and over. Their breathing becomes loud and rapid. It ends with the two embraced. The angle of the camera reveals a bloody spot on her ankle.

The accident is routed back into itself. To my rapt frustration, nothing ever happens. I have never been more convinced that beauty and terror are the same thing.

Dune

Let me tell you about something remarkable. A movie so impressed me that I’m dying to tell you about it. I’m positively giddy. How couldn’t I be? It’s the worst movie ever, and I’ve watched it somewhere in the realm of a dozen times. For me it’s one of those adolescent artifacts that nobody ever tells you is going to stubbornly stick with you like pencil lead under the skin, or that tiny red spot under my right eye. Actually, they’re like neither of those things, because the culture you haplessly consume in teenagerdom is infectious, ever aspiring to bring everyone else down to its level. For this reason I never stop quoting "The Simpsons", or--ugh--"Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Psychoanalysis gets it right, but misses the point: Yes, we're doomed to endlessly repeat our childhood traumas, but more importantly we're doomed to repeat the inane television we watched when we were twelve.

Of course, not every thing I gobbled back then comes back up tasting entirely of disease. For instance, The Far Side has left indelible bite-marks in my consciousness. I remember one strip quite clearly, in which two crocodiles, distended bellies up, are laying on a beach. In a smashed-up boat, the empty clothing and effects of two humans are at the happy crocodiles' feet. One crocodile says to the other: “wow, that was incredible--pink, soft all the way through, no bones, or nothin’.” Which is a perfect description of the movie in question, “Dune”. It really is an achievement--a movie this long without the slightest hint of tension or movement.

People talk about the intricately plotted political intrigue in Frank Herbert's book. Don't believe them. I've read it, and can say unequivocally that they're imagining things. Of course, I don't remember one word of the book, but that's not the point. I probably can't remember any of it either because I was too of a piece with Herbert’s version of eastern wisdom, or because I, like David Lynch, was reading only for atmosphere. The resulting movie is pure atmosphere--hazy, ridiculous, Lynchian atmosphere. Maybe he too read it ensconced in a canyon crevice in Utah, soaking up Desertness and the most stiltedly philosophical navel-gazers you’ve ever met. Of course I was--the characters were just as bad as me. (Okay, I take it back, I guess I remember something, after all.) In any case, all the movie can remember of the complex politics (if there ever were any) is one line: “I see plans within plans."

Personally, all I see, in close-up, is the fascinatingly not-quite vaginal animatronic monster mouth that utters this--a drooping, undulating thing that in all other parts of the movie spews orange at planets. Apparently, this is the effect of being mutated over a period of 4,000 years by an expensive substance. "But," you interject, "4,000 years seems a bit exaggerated. I've had mornings like that." But did your vomit fold space? That's what these entitled, pink whales do all day, floating around in amniotic fluid with their stubby t-rex arms stiffly outstretched: They're master origamists. I can still see these creatures clearly because I recall all the surreal imagery whose inexplicable, banal haunting is the hallmark of decent sci-fi (well, not entirely inexplicable, and not always decent--one doesn't need much of an imagination to explain how the Enterprise's shapely hull and ample nacelles compel as surely as a hot dog), and I recall the silly dialog, but I do not recall any of it adding up to anything.

“Hey!” 16-year-old me rebuts, “there’s a story!” Sure. I’ll recount it: Ambitious boy wants to impress father. Family goes on an adventure to this crazy-dry place (researching it on his 102nd-century iPad, the boy recites, with some concentration, “Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet,” and we wonder how a script of such breathtaking efficiency managed to fit so little in over two hours). There father and son make mega bank off of, err, spice (sound familiar?). Father’s fat, gross, homo, evil nemesis attacks. Father dies. Precocious boy finds way of impressing dead father by going Lawrence of Arabia on Father’s nemesis’ fat ass. Unlike Lawrence, boy is not crazy, and really is messiah. Montages of training his native army and blowing shit up. Together, boy, Patrick Stewart, and army of white Taoist Arabs storm the evil palace by shouting at it (the palace offers that much resistance). And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach! (Which is what? The most apparent--and aggravating--explanation offered is that “there is a place terrifying to us--to women--that we dare not go.” Gosh, thank god our hero dares to!)

There is no contingency in this series of events. Never are we led to believe that something else could happen. We never think "oh no! What if they fall off the back of that huge sandworm they're riding, and the whole evil palace takedown is a bust?" Well, okay, I did think that (man, riding sandworms looks precarious), but I never actually doubted that they would triumph. Which makes it not much of a triumph. Things just happen. Movies that seem to go on without me are not, it turns out, what thrill me, but rather movies that seem to play with my expectations, to be engaging with me, or--just as good if not better--manipulating me. Engagement with "Dune" is entirely unnecessary, because it doesn’t make the story any more interesting. Which is an odd coincidence, because intense, focused engagement appears to be the protagonist’s only attitude toward the world. It’s this universe’s whole shtick, really: the discipline of the mind. That’s why we’re always hearing everyone’s thoughts in voice-over, in imitation of the book’s endless italics. These are not, however, the thoughts of people engaged with any aspect of the world. For people allegedly possessed of precognition, they sound profoundly dimwitted. Often they just narrate what’s going on in the movie, because someone rightly guessed it would be too incoherent otherwise. At one point the boy and his mother are tied up in the back of an evil black hovercraft. His mother is gagged, because, playing out the misogynistic fears of men everywhere, their captors are afraid her voice will trick them. She’s a witch! Burn her! (I told you "The Holy Grail" could not be purged.) So, little omnisex god that he is, the boy decides to trick them with his witchy, reverbed voice. “He’s trying the voice!” we hear her think. Whoa now. Let’s not get too hasty.

When the characters' voluble thoughts aren’t stating the obvious, they're super-suspicious. Meeting someone new, the future messiah thinks “he’s hiding something.” Following a scene during which he stares at this someone intently, he astutely deduces “he's hiding many things.” He reminds me of myself at my worst, convinced that if I just look at someone hard enough, I will suddenly understand them whole. It’s as if the movie is full of Watsons--all aspiring to be Sherlocks, all falling short. However, rather than this condition of amateurism leaving them with an erotic longing for the real thing, they are all satisfied with their dead-end observations. Maybe when humanity expunged computers from the universe, Twitter took up permanent residence in their thoughts. On that note, snark seems to have gone the same way as the internet, leaving us with ingenuousness the likes of which God has never seen, and an interrogative that I suspect is directed through the fourth wall: “I have NO FEELINGS!! Why?”

Maybe this awarenessless awareness is what this movie has afflicted me with. I parrot its absurd, hyperbolic lines with as much mindfulness as a meme. Lynch and those other people involved in the movie (whom fans decry, as if waiting on the horizon of this movie is his untainted masterpiece) have unintentionally created a movie for postmodernist intellectuals to masturbate about: It obviates narrative entirely, leaving oddly memorable bits of speech to float without context and work their insidious way meaninglessly into the audience. Speaking of which, oh, fuck it, here you go:

“I will kill you!”

“I will bend like a reed in the wind.”

“Not in the mood? Mood is a thing for cattle, and loveplay, not fighting!”

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.”

“I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnan, will encompass their doom!”

“Tell me of your homeworld, usul.”

“Stop your speaking!”

“Give me spice!”

“They tried and failed?”
“No, they tried and died!”

Melancholia

I watched “Melancholia” on one of those streaming video websites. This one allowed comments. I have to admit that the predictably resulting sea of inanity determined my viewing to an alarming degree. I kept finding myself helplessly arguing with the comments.

Someone had commented “might as well jst watch part two of the film thats wen it starts to getin intresting.” So I eagerly awaited the second half of the movie, in part because as in all movies with a potential catastrophe, I wanted it to happen. As the planet Melancholia approached, I was filled with a mixture of dread and anticipation--a split melodramatically explored through the movie’s characters. When Part Two rolled around, it didn’t live up to the commenter’s contention.

Part One is a massive failure of a wedding reception; Part Two follows the bride's deep depression and her sister taking care of her. Watching Kristen Dunst’s transformation in the first part from ostensible happiness to agitated depression is more interesting than her journey to destruction in the second part. Perhaps this is because the former feels like consciousness brewing. This is something one prays for after the first non-slow-motion scene in which bride and groom try to maneauver the limo up the country road’s tight curve. For all of their post-marital giddiness and good humor, it is deliciously awkward.

Someone else commented that “this movie will haunt you for days or weeks.” Despite how exasperatingly heavy-handed it is at times, this seems true. It’s only been a day, but it’s hard to purge the image of the giant watery world crashing into our own. What are more memorable, though, are the violently honest outbursts. This is why I enjoyed Part One so thoroughly: The way the wedding reception falls apart is as delightful as it is uncomfortable. The best nasty shards of speech come from the bride Justine’s mother, Gaby (Charlotte Rampling, who has unfortunately limited screen time). At the beginning of the reception there’s a round of obligatory speeches. Gaby stands when she becomes too fed up with Justine's father (John Hurt) and can't keep quiet.

“I don’t believe in weddings,” she announces. “I just have one thing to say: enjoy it while it lasts.”

It's the most unnecessary speech ever, and pointlessly mean. I was charmed to the bone. Her other daughter, Claire, asks her "why did you even bother coming?" When it comes time to cut the cake and Gaby and Justine are missing, Claire's husband John gallantly (not really, he’s just pissed--they’re wasting his precious money he spent on the wedding, which he has so little of) goes up to fetch them.

“Gaby,” he says politely at the door to her bathroom, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s time to cut the cake.” Which is a sitting duck of a sentence.

“I wasn’t there when Justine took her first crap on the potty. I wasn't there when she had her first sexual intercourse. So give me a break please from your fucking rituals.”

This was an even more enjoyably spectacular lack of caring than Justine suddenly pushing a stranger to the ground and fucking him on the eighteen-hole golf course (eighteen, John keeps reminding everyone) that surrounds the mansion, merely because he happened to be there, or her subsequent monologue to her boss: “I hate you and your firm so deeply I couldn’t find the words to describe it. You are a despicable, power-hungry little man, Jack.”

The stranger was hired by Justine's boss to extract a tag line from her (she works in advertising). He proposes to her at the end of the night, and calls the sex they had "good" ("mechanical" would be accurate).

Another comment read: "Brilliant ending. Left me breathless." I thought this meant there was a twist. So I kept expecting that despite all indications to the contrary, including the beginning in which we see Melancholia crash into Earth, that the planet would pass them by anyway. But maybe they'd all kill themselves before that happened, and we could all laugh drily at the cruel irony. The trouble is that from Part One to Part Two, harsh bemusement gives way to fantastical brutality. This is true, too, of the utterances of the melancholic. Justine's black outlook expands from the personal (for example asking her husband "what did you expect?" when he tells her the wedding and their relationship could have gone differently) to the cosmic: "Life on earth is evil. Nobody will miss us." In the same scene she pronounces that she knows we're alone in the universe because "I know things." Deadly seriousness sounds silly, and the consciousness that melancholy has brought sounds like delusion.

Though the commenters on this website have a tendency to laud the movie's profundity if they're not telling us how boring it is, the blatantly metaphoric register that might pass for profundity gets tiresome quickly. By the third time someone repeated that Melancholia (the planet) was “hidden behind the sun,” I wanted it to crash into them, already. Yes, we get it. The planet is called Melancholia, for fuck’s sake.

While the grand metaphors often induced snickers ("it [Melancholia] looks friendly," Claire says wistfully, or how about the "Melancholia and the Dance of Death" diagram that Claire finds on the internet, showing how the planet will pass Earth and then turn around again and crash into it after all), the latter half the movie did terrify me. This is no doubt in part because I was watching it after midnight, and because the previous night I had been kept awake by a mysterious buzzing. It returned at irregular intervals, rattling the window like a subwoofer. Just when I thought it would go away, it came back. In the late hours with no one else to hear it, the unidentified noise gave me similarly apocalyptic feelings as the roaring of Melancholia as it grazes Earth's atmophere. As annoying as Claire is (of course, who isn't in this movie), I sympathized with her complete panic at the prospect of not just dying, but of the whole planet dying. It's the most radical aloneness possible. But Justine knows, I imagine, that we're just as alone already from the day we're born. Because she uh, knows things. The fact that I doubt her knowledge means, I suppose, that I'm attached to life. Or maybe that I'm not as much of an exhibitionist as Lars von Trier.

The Iron Lady

A friend of mine was excited to see "The Iron Lady" because she admires Margaret Thatcher. My friend does not so much admire her policies, but rather the way she made her way in a government of men. My friend points out that people are usually unable to separate her politics from her sex. In all of this movie's cold pity, it also fails to do anything but reify an unexamined impression. Here her political decisions are not decisions, but the collateral damage of a psyche that demanded of its bearer to, as my brother says of Hilary Clinton, have a bigger penis than the men. (His view of Clinton as a woman so obsessed with one-upping male politicians that she ends up more monstrous is this script's view of Thatcher.)

The movie's crude psychoanalysis of Margaret starts early. Giggled at by girls her age (literally there is a scene in which they walk by her father's shop, glancing over at her and giggling as if we're in Constance and Margaret has just received a damning blast), teenaged Margaret becomes entrenched. After all, although nobody else does, her father loves her more for her ungirlish ambition. When she is accepted to Oxford, her father warmly congratulates her. Her mother, washing the dishes, says that her hands are still wet. She doesn't bother to dry them, turns back to the dishes, and the script has suddenly explained Margaret's life. Before Margaret agrees to become Thatcher she sums up her need to not become a housewife by telling her future husband "I do not want to die washing a teacup." (She does not, but there is one drawn out scene of her washing a teacup as a widow, during which I half expected her to keel over from the force of the movie's need for poetic resonance.)

Throughout the movie the lack of her mother's love is reiterated. She is shown hating every other woman who walks on screen. She ignores her daughter and swoons over her son. "I always have preferred the company of men."

The most egregious scene is in a meeting of the cabinet. She explodes at the president for a typo in the agenda. The men silently gape at her raving. The scene keeps cutting away to shots of her looking malevolently at the ceiling. Someone in the audience asked "is this real?" (The alternative being that it's in her head, like her dead husband.) Wrenching her body, she finally wails "you're all so weak! So weak." The body language of her outburst is about as subtle as a silent film. I would not have been surprised had she begun skulking around the government halls like an animal, hunched over, fingers clawed.

When she sends Britain off to get back the Falkland Islands, she has ceased being depicted as a person, and we are now only allowed to see madness. Why does she decide to go into the Falklands when, as the President (played by Anthony Head) tells her, the country can't afford it? Penis-envy gone wild, obviously. Cynicism about people's motives in politics is usually a gas, but this is lazy. The movie may as well have been titled "The Crazy Bitch". The effort to show her humanity has deprived her of it.

If I'm to watch an unyielding woman hell-bent on securing power at whatever cost, how about one who is judged insane by the other characters, not by the screenwriter. In other words, give me Patty Hewes in "Damages," not some old bullshit of a case-study served up as Margaret Thatcher.

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

I went into "Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy" with a humorless mood. This was embarrassing because it was sure to share my grim view. On my way out the door, my brother read me this quip from a review: "it’s a movie of chain smokers and whisperers, of grey skies and glum expressions, of rattling tea cups and rotary-dialed telephones," which once inside the theater gave me an uncomfortable sense of being in colusion with the movie. I was glum; it was glum. In an absurd flight of self-consciousness I imagined others rolling their eyes at me for taking this terribly serious movie so seriously.

It's so serious that even a little relief had the audience in stitches. Smiley, the retired spy who is investigating his former peers (because he has hero fantasies or because he's power hungry, take your pick) goes to talk to a woman who no longer works at The Circus, as they call the intelligence agency. It is implied that they were once romantically involved. They sit down to tea, and have a view into the kitchen where youths make out on the counter and then go upstairs. She says "I don't know about you George, but I'm feeling seriously under-fucked!"

George is not to be seen doing anything dirty, so that when we see him at the top of the Circus at the end of the movie, it's supposed to be like a coronation of the righteous king. The film dryly observes just as its spies do, so that this final  cut feels as if it, too, is under scrutiny. But there's nothing behind this habitual scrutiny. The spies in this movie analyze but are not insightful, are observant but not thoughtful. One could read the camera the same way.

To give everything away, when the villain is slain, it is Colin Firth. He's shot through cleanly the cheek. The gore in this film is gratuitious, but not in the campy way. It's not fireworks in slimy red for us to marvel at, but quick and terrible. This must be a singular moment in his career, getting shot.

Rising stars, on the other hand, get another sort of glamor. I'm convinced that Benedict Cumberbach's agent insists that he wear fabulous clothes ever since the success of "Sherlock" and its resulting coat and scarf sales. As Peter he's the peacock in the Circus, strutting about in his bright blue tie and handkerchief, doing Smiley's bidding. Who, in contrast, insists upon a protective shell of drab.

There's a kind of defensive criticism in which one faults the movie for the parts one didn't understand in it. Did you understand all the dialogue in this movie? Honestly I didn't understand what was going on half the time. The music swelled menacingly and I thought "um, what are you driving at?" It's a good device to put the audience in the position of an imperfect observer, doling us out little facts as the story unfolds in both directions. But sometimes it seemed as if we were expected to have already read Le Carre's book.

Personally, I found the only fun reading of this movie was as a psychodrama of purification. The corrupt Circus, who gives information to its professed enemy, is the mess of the psyche's attachments. Smiley, somehow standing outside of this is here to perform a superegoical audit. In the end the Circus is reconnected with itself, restored as, well, an agency. Its will will once again be carried out without turning against itself. In parallel to this is the purification of Smiley's marriage. Anne, who we never see, is a contested posession between Smiley and Bill Haydon (Colin Firth). "It was nothing personal, I hope you understand," Haydon tells Smiley, "I knew that if you saw me as Anne's lover, you couldn't see me straight on. It worked, up to a point." Apparently Smiley is the perfect spy, able to overcome the compromises that emotions allegedly wreak on objectivity. In the end he and his wife are reunited. Through a doorway we see him gently touching her shoulder. Order is restored; the scapegoat for the two mirroring plotlines is one person, and he is punished. Hooray.

Young Adult

What I should not do is review this movie. (Or any movie, really, but that’s another matter.)

This town is small enough that one of the audience came to the same coffee shop afterwards. “it’s not about a young adult writer,” she was saying emphatically to the barista, who was I suppose curious or pretending to be for the sake of small talk. It is about a young adult writer, but I was caught in the same identification that she was. “It’s not just high school” she said, eyes widening in confidence, “people--young people--really do get stuck like that, and they’re not psychotic.” Neither is Theron, despite the absurd character, Mavis, she is supposed to be playing. She knows better, but she does it all anyway: chases after her high school sweetheart, keeps but only loves her fluffy, purse-sized dog as much as she loves him, and drinks coca-cola every morning. It's supposed to be darkly funny, deadpan, but is instead depressingly real to people like me, and, apparently, someone else.

I imagined a crisis of imagination leading to this script. The author (”author,” Mavis always corrects anyone who calls her a “writer”) can’t write, as her protagonist cannot in the beginning. Fed up, the author decides to not filter anything, to do the authorial “fuck it” that her protagonist does with life. She sends Mavis off to do the least imaginitive thing possible, for her: get her high school boyfriend back. This is the author’s bare imaginitive act, while the rest is filled in with unhappy vignettes of mundanity: sending the dog out to feed from a plastic container that she never cleans up from the balcony (the camera shows us a pile), not connecting with but cynically sleeping with her date anyway, playing the same tired song on her mix tape over and over as she drives to her home town (which is tiresomely metaphoric). What was startling to me was the misery of interstate travel through small towns. Shot after shot of off-ramp chain eateries, mostly empty parking lots. This sort of imaginationlessness that Ashland, with its relative wealth, has relegated to the edges of town.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” I told her, “but then I don’t hate Ashland as much as she does Mercury.” Ashland sucks less than Mercury. It’s more bearable, and complicates the upward mobility narrative blackly played out in this movie. Even the terribly cruel and self-loathing probably wouldn’t say that only nothings live here, as one tragic and ignored character does to our blonde heroine. What I said to the other moviegoer was that there seem to be two endings: the conventional ending in which everything is wrapped up in the last ten minutes: She decides, somewhat bewilderingly, to move on with her life. She gets into her broken car, eyes sunken with makeup meant to amplify a lack of makeup, but changed for the better. What this neat ending doesn't deal with is what I called the other ending, but it's not really an ending: After sleeping with the self-described "fat geek," she comes upstairs in her wine-stained getup and sits at the kitchen table with his sister, who idolizes her. The sister gives her a pep talk that consists of Mavis being better than everyone in Mercury. She, after all, went to the city, and writes things. Everyone who lives in Mercury is meant to, because they are nothing. She eats this up, smiling, and is convinced to go back to Minneapolis. "Take me with you," the sister pleads. "You're good here, Sandra, you're good," Mavis says, and leaves.

It figures that I would think that it’s too bad that the “having a life” option in this movie is marriage. The lifeless are single; the living are married with children.

It was not the sort of movie during which you have to keep from peeing your pants because you laugh so hard. But then, thankfully, it was also not the sort of movie in which characters regularly pee their pants to make you laugh. The most it ever roused the audience to was a sharp chuckle. More often I breathed out loudly through my nose in that barely laugh that's like a whisper. We all began laughing because, I guess, we expected a comedy to be funny. At some point we stopped straining.