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.