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.