The Horrible Perfection of A Wes Anderson X-Men

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There’s a decent number of Wes Anderson spoofs floating around: his ostentatious and predictable style of filmmaking makes him a sitting duck for parody. However, most are only moderately successful– even SNL could only manage to blandly lampoon his work in “New Horror Trailer: The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders,” a well-named skit which misses more targets than it hits. Why joke about Gwenyth Paltrow, who only appeared in The Royal Tenenbaums, when you could take on Jason Schwartzman, who has spent his entire career playing Anderson roles? Margot is iconic, but why not give the Anderson treatment to an existing horror icon? That’s the genius of the skit’s unaffiliated follow-up, “What if Wes Anderson made X-Men?,” which more than spiritually succeeds the SNL effort. It lovingly captures Anderson’s rhythms, charms, and awkwardness nearly beat for beat. On one hand, the Anderson-X-men pairing is so absurd that Patrick (H) Willems and his crew suggest that you could give the Anderson treatment to any series—What if Wes Anderson made The Flintstones? What if Wes Anderson made Breaking Bad? On the other hand, they make an amazing case for Anderson rebooting the X-Men in particular. Anderson’s quirky, nostalgic style would celebrate the goofy excitement and teenage longing of the original, while removing the toxic ‘epic-ness’ of recent reboots. In turn, the X-Men would give Anderson license to make the uncomplicated boys adventure story he clearly wants to make, free from intellectual expectations and his colonial pretenses. It’s a match made in heaven. Almost.

Wes Anderson would make an unexpectedly wonderful director of superhero movies for several reasons. First off, his films are devoted to the tension between boyhood fantasy, empty manhood, and maternal reason. (He makes a little room for feminine fantasy, which is often portrayed as wistful, and resigned to abandonment.) This axis resembles Superhero logic more than it departs from it. The superhero, a muscled Peter Pan, is the boyhood fantasy, and is juxtaposed to his faltering alter-ego who faces real life, ‘adult’ responsibilities. Superhero stories, however, tend to make dupes and conquests of the women. Not in the Anderson-verse, where the ladies call it like they see it, (even if their role is rather proscribed.) Wes Anderson’s third act typically calls for a reconciliation between fantasy and reality. He’s a generous filmmaker, in that neither side comes out victorious over the other; they instead consent to the necessary, life-affirming quality of both perspectives. I treasure Anderson’s formula, because I am grateful to find movies that simultaneously act as an ode, a critique, and an apology for grandiosity, and that don’t ignore the ways that women are often alienated by grandiosity. Thus, Anderson could honor the grandiosity of the superhero narrative, while assenting that this grandiosity can be destructive, delusional, and gendered.

Secondly, Wes Anderson assumes that people go to the movies for the same reason they go to see a middle school play: to see someone they love say something amazing (and/or ridiculous,) while wearing an amazing (and/or ridiculous) costume. In essence, Anderson transforms celebrities into the audience’s family members. Fans will come to see who Bill Murray or Tilda Swinton will be in this one, or because they could never imagine Ralph Fiennes or Bruce Willis in that role, wearing those clothes. This isn’t so different from how comic books work– they are sold based on reader’s attachment to certain, iconic characters, who are put in unbelievable situation after unbelievable situation. Fan devotion is laid most bare in fan-art and fan-fiction, where fans put favorite characters, even destructive, “evil” ones, into absurd, adorable, and kinky situations. Wes Anderson’s style is a close relative of the fan-fiction mind-set. His films are ‘love letters,’ to Jaque Costeau, or the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his troupe of real-life actors. This may explain part of his appeal. Like a mother bird regurgitating food for her babies, Wes Anderson handles the digestion of a story beforehand, putting it on-screen so that its inherent love-ability is accessible to all, (who are willing to eat it.) Anderson would make a perfect match for superheroes, who are already celebrities and icons. He would derive great pleasure by putting characters into ridiculous costumes, in ridiculous settings and scenarios, while making them say earnestly ridiculous things. These components are already native to the genre, although most modern filmmakers try to evade or disguise them through ‘bad-assery’ and self-mockery. Wes Anderson would call a jump-suit a jump-suit, and would love every freaking minute of it.

Finally, the X-Men would be a wake-up call for the filmmaker. I have a sinking suspicion that each consecutive Anderson film reduces the female characters’ voices, reaching a point of near muteness in The Grand Budapest Hotel. As their voices fade, the films lose the friction that made his movies interesting in the first place, and the ‘boys adventure’ quotient increases inversely. Wes Anderson seems to be in the business of making bouncy, nostalgic escapades that lionize the value of cross-generational male friendship, and displaced father-son relationships. He’s careening head-first into superhero narratives, but he may be in denial about it, convinced that he’s actually making smart movies about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, (or Lord help him, fascism.) If Anderson were to truly commit to a superhero franchise, he might need to back-pedal a bit, and perhaps re-discover the power, and ethical necessity, of his earlier approach.

There’s a problem, however. Anderson’s style is inaccessibly white. His movies cater to white nostalgia about self-absorbed aristocrats. While I do not find him to be an explicitly racist director, I sometimes wonder why I don’t. He indulges in non-stop colonial nostalgia, from the wall-paper to the entire premise of The Darjeeling Limited. He employs racist language to elicit shocked guffaws from the audience, making his character ‘flawed’ in the way that your grandfather is ‘flawed,’—incorrigible, yet loveable anyway. But are they lovable? This friction makes his perennial father-son conflicts poignant, yet the racist language is never really addressed, or treated like a flaw worth resolving.  Anderson cast an indeterminately ethnic actor as Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel, playing a refuge from the Middle East, yet most of Zero’s lines are spoken in narration when he’s an older man– a role played by a white, Jewish actor. Anderson would white-wash perhaps the noblest part of the X-Men—its commitment to diversity, and its stories about civil rights, hate-crimes, prejudice, and genocide.

Then again, X-Men often does a pretty terrible job talking about racism. I am not an avid reader of the X-Men, and never have been, so I will cite the opinions of better informed writers than myself. In his piece “What if the X-Men Were Black,” published on this blog, Orion Martin comments, “What’s disturbing about the series is that is that all of these issues are played out by a cast of characters dominated by wealthy, straight, cisgender, Christian, able-bodied, white men. The X-Men are the victims of discrimination for their mutant identity, with little or no mention of the huge privileges they enjoy.” In “Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants,” Neil Shyminsky argues that the X-Men appropriates the Civil Rights struggles for a white audience, re-imagining these morality plays with white victims. He cites the work of recent authors like Grant Morrison in combatting this, but largely finds, “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.” Noah Berlatsky reviewed Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s original X-Men, which was created before the series committed itself to having a diverse cast. 

Noah and Neil both reflect that the original X-Men’s creators were Jewish men who anglicized their names, perhaps with the same mix of eagerness and frustration that Angel voices when trussing his wings behind his back.  Most generously, the X-Men comics could be seen as a metaphor for Jewish assimilation and combatting anti-Semitism, but only of a masochistic kind: “[Lee and Kirby] nonetheless persevered in tightening that truss, which, in this comic at least, consisted not merely of new names, but of what can only be called a servile, deeply dishonorable acquiescence in hierarchical norms, casual misogyny, and imperialist fantasies.”

The films don’t look to be much better: Elvis Mitchell wrote of the 2000 original, “the parallels to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Xavier) and Malcolm X (Magneto) are made wincingly plain,” and “clumsy when it should be light on its feet, the movie takes itself even more seriously than the comic book and its fans do, which is a super heroic achievement.” You can’t accuse Mitchell of being a hater, however: he repeatedly extols the poignancy of the original comics in comparison, saying, “Perhaps that was the reason “X-Men” comics struggled and failed initially; the world wasn’t ready for misunderstood young martyrs with special powers saving the world and living through unrequited flushes of love.”

Wes Anderson would be the kind of director who would value those flushes of love, while completely disregarding the “seriousness” of the series, special effects, civil rights and all. The Anderson treatment would be honest about the X-men’s heart, but it would also be a confession of defeat. I’m not sure whether Patrick H Willems intended that as part of the commentary: in 2011 he mocked Hollywood whitewashing in “White Luke Cage,” without really pointing fingers at anyone, least of all Marvel. “What if Wes Anderson Made the X-Men?” is part of a series of auteuristic take-offs on superhero properties, which are as much love-letters as spoofs. Intended or not, the skit functions like a critique of Marvel, not of the X-Men or Wes Anderson. How perfect would it be for Hollywood’s whitest director to re-make Marvel’s most prominently diverse cast? So perfect. That’s the sad part.

Resuscitating Wonder Woman

Editor’s Note: This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.
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There’s long been talk about how superhero stories are getting ambitious. The histories and planetary layouts of comic book universes, once created haphazardly, are solidifying into un-breachable canon. Characters from diverse series will “cross over” and team up during climactic event episodes. Meanwhile, film adaptations attract talented, occasionally brilliant, actors, and pack in enough pseudo-philosophy and current polemics to merit thoughtful reviews, (or at least avoid outright dismissal.) Captain America fights military surveillance, dancing around his own imperial baggage. The Nolan Batman trilogy harnesses fearful imagery of mental illness and the Occupy movement to apologize for its own elitist and authoritarian nature, which it presents as perversely anti-heroic. Guardians of the Galaxy seems aware of its own ridiculousness, and so avoids stigmatization as overt camp. The cinematography, special effects, costume and set design are top-notch. The appearance of being an ambitious film counts more than the internal logic of the final work. It counts more than actual narrative ambitions, like championing a truly underdog protagonist, envisioning utterly alien societies and technologies, or portraying good and evil in an insightful way. Contemporary superhero narratives indulge in emotionally disconnected escapism, sexuality and violence, all carefully leavened with inside jokes and buddy comedy. These films, and their comic source material, feature all the bells and whistles of ambition, while being safe projects at heart. It’s a sad day when a quippy, trigger-happy raccoon (with a heart of gold) surprises audiences —he’s written exactly according to Marvel formula.

Some of this might be endemic to the superhero genre; in the words of Noah Berlatsky in a recent piece in The Atlantic,

“Tony Stark [of Iron Man] invents new magical energy sources three times before breakfast, but he uses them mostly to punch Thunder-Gods in the head, rather than, say, to completely transform the world’s technology and economy.”

It didn’t have to be this way. Noah’s recent book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948, records an alternative which had been present at the dawn of superhero comics. Unlike Superman, the original Wonder Woman comics were not a personal fantasy of power and assimilation, born already calibrated to the yearnings of depression-era, immigrant, and wartime youth. The Wonder Woman comics were an intentional manifesto, meant to instill radical concepts of femininity, masculinity, sexuality and heroism into children. Noah’s book elucidates William Marston’s radical philosophies and agendas, which informed every aspect of the forties run. If not for the kaleidoscopic visuals and zany scenarios, the barely-sublimated kinkiness and infectious fun, Wonder Woman might have been remembered as being propaganda designed to re-educate America’s youth. Instead, Marston and artist Harry Peter created one of the most original and unclassifiable comics in history. Despite its initial success, publishers didn’t know what to do with it, and America came out of the war more sexually repressed than it had entered. The Marston/Peter run hangs off comics history like a forgotten evolutionary branch. The indomitable Diana of the original comics faded away, and less interesting archetypes convergently evolved to take her girdle, to fit DC’s limited ‘heroine’ niche.

Even a casual glance at the original Wonder Woman issues elicits curiosity, if not alarm, as they depart from the standard procedure of most superhero work. The forties Wonder Woman comics featured a great deal of bondage, and a cavalcade of sexual reversals. Many villains are introduced as one gender, and then transform into or are revealed to be another. Occasionally their gender identity is never fully resolved. Wonder Woman binds enemies with her magic lasso, which makes them obedient to her will, but only after being bound and made helpless herself. The male protagonist, Steve Trevor, repeatedly injures himself, begins the series comatose, and is at points slung over the shoulder of a villain and kidnapped, yet he is never portrayed as being dithering or pathetic. Marston and Peter obsessively repeat classic melodramatic scenarios of bondage and hysterical emotion, while constantly changing who is doing what. This fetishizes the action, blends characters like a Venn diagram, and causes the linear narrative to coil in on itself, disrupting the temporal logic.

This entanglement allows all characters to participate in what Marston called the two “normal, strength-giving emotions” of inducement, or dominance, and submission, Marston’s key to a happy ending. An eminent psychologist of his time, Marston theorized that the world would be a better place if people learned to accept and practice both dominance and submission, as opposed to harshly overpowering others. Neither dominance nor submission was considered the superior state, and Marston links both in a pleasurable, loving cycle that ultimately leads to world peace.

Yet Marston and Peter don’t let the confounding cycle of bondage continue forever; Wonder Woman ultimately re-educates the villains, sometimes impressing the importance of love-leadership (and being sexually dominant,) on oppressed female characters. Marston intended Wonder Woman to be the model of female leadership. She is boisterous, positive, friendly and even-keeled– an athlete, adventure lover, caretaker, and confident romantic. Wonder Woman throws herself into the fray of battle one minute, while openly crushing on and nursing a wounded Steve Trevor the next. Marston saw no contradiction in these actions, nor in Steve’s vulnerability and strength. Wonder Woman anticipates the multi-dimensional “strong” female characters found with greater frequency today, although this chain was broken by decades, where Wonder Woman was treated like a glorified pinup.

Noah’s book resuscitates these largely forgotten, original comics by examining them as carefully and closely as they deserve, and by meeting Marston and Peter’s work on its own terms. Noah matches the recursivity of the comics with an interweaving analysis of Marston and Peter’s three major concerns: “feminism, pacifism and queerness—or, if you prefer, bondage, violence and heterosexuality.” As Noah explains, “For Marston, these topics were all inextricably intertwined… the book presents not so much a linear argument as a braided exploration, in which the same ideas and obsessions recur in slightly different formations and slightly different perspectives.” As not being strictly formal opposites, bondage and feminism may be the least intuitive pair of the bunch; fortunately, Noah starts there.

Noah argues that the comic’s sexualized fixation on disempowerment, binding, abuse, and manipulation resonates with women and girls, who have been traditionally disempowered in patriarchal society. The representation of subjugation matters as much to women as denunciation of it, (and possibly more,) an idea Noah supports through the theories of several respected literature and media scholars. The Marston/Peter comics have been criticized for eroticizing the bondage of women for a male audience, although Marston’s writings show that he deliberately geared the comics to be read by children of both genders, and at least some evidence indicates they were. Marston and Peter also turn bondage on its head, displaying male victims and female abusers. Noah makes the case that readers simultaneously desire and identify with both men and women, victims and abusers, which highlights a peculiar, and radical piece of Marston’s vision: he denounced rape and abuse as the greatest of evils, but preached the healthy pleasures of reciprocal, consensual, bondage. “Marston, [assistant writer] Murchison, and Peter want to provide these pleasures to everybody, even, or perhaps especially, to the most oppressed and the most wounded.” Noah writes, “That remains a rare ability and an extremely precious one… We can condemn child abuse or we can acknowledge children’s sexuality, but we have enormous difficulty doing both at once.”

Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism… also articulates what is problematic about Marston’s theories, often bringing dissenting voices into the mix. Noah largely supports and expands upon Marston’s ideas with a diverse range of supporting sources. This is brave, especially when Marston casually reconciles themes that many consider mutually exclusive. The chapters on pacifism and queerness contain many theoretical surprises, including alternative visions of the proper functioning of education, motherhood, and sexual orientation. Noah also contributes great ideas of his own. His exploration of gendered responsibility and heroism, and how expectations change for female characters, is both inspired and concise, and hopefully destined to enter into wider discussions of superheroism. Best of all, Noah does a great job of showing that these ideas clearly appear in the Wonder Woman comics themselves, and are not projected onto it by later minds.

Marston didn’t shy away from advocating a new world order ruled by a new order of women, and he casts the net of his imagination widely. Noah does well to bring a wide variety of scholars from many disciplines, tackling each component of Marston’s broad vision piece by piece. Occasionally, this diversity scatters the argument. Readers may question why Noah includes some voices, and not others: he extensively draws on Anne Allison, a scholar of post-war Japanese domestic life, and even then, on a very limited spectrum of her work dedicated to mother-son incest urban legends, (and a bit about lunchbox making.) Allison’s observations parallel the Wonder Woman comics in interesting ways, but an example of ‘matriarchal rule’ closer to the comic’s original context might have served better. I would have also appreciated a second, corroborating source. On the same note, is Pussy Galore the only available example of male fantasy lesbianism? Her significance to the discussion of Wonder Woman’s homosexuality feels both sketchy and undeserved. The most egregious cameo would be Luce Irigaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One. No matter how well her ideas match the argument, statements like “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere,” will seem anatomically preposterous to many, especially when left to float outside a considerate introduction to her work. Distracted by moments like this, a skeptical reader could disengage from the greater point.

My chief criticism of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is that there should have been more evidence from indisputably relevant and more general sources, and the argument should have relied less on isolated examples. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is not a case for the application of Marston’s ideas, as much a case for their remembrance and relevance, particularly within comics and feminist scholarship. As the book stands, Marston’s ideas, freshly unearthed, may be unfairly vulnerable to re-burial, simply because of missing or dismissible evidence.

This would be tragic, considering that Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism illustrates the terrible stakes in making Wonder Woman the afterthought of DC Comic’s line. Noah details two contemporary runs of the Wonder Woman comics, one disturbingly anti-female, the other well-meaning but inane. I would have appreciated a run-down and time-line of the character’s entire development, particularly George Perez’s re-launch of the character in the mid eighties, as Noah goes against the grain in labeling it as trivializing. I would have also liked a discussion of why, after the close of WWII, Wonder Woman repeatedly targets imaginary misogynist dystopias, often on alien planets. The forties run seems equally split between war-propaganda and planetary colonization, and this schism seems rich for exploration.  Most of all, I felt the book skipped over an examination of early twentieth century melodrama. Was Marston’s obsession with bondage an exaggeration of existing bondage tropes, sawmills, train tracks, and all, that filmmakers repeatedly inflicted on the female daring-doers of popular cinema? How much of Wonder Woman comes from The Hazards of Helen?

These criticisms essentially come down to a wish the book had been longer, which I realize is a backwards compliment. I wish this because I too am convinced that the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics are relevant today. People love superheroes, perhaps now more than they ever did. The current popularity of superhero entertainment has lasted longer than their initial explosion in the forties. I hope there is room in mainstream entertainment for risky visions of what it means to be a hero. Even more, I hope there is room for visions like Marston’s, who was willing to embrace paradox, and attempted to describe the wonderful, ineffable, irrationality of love.

Severed From Reality

This piece contains spoilers, although I do not reveal the ending of the movie.

Some stories seem too smart to be symptomatic. Rather than try to suppress or exorcise the fraught, irrational elements that inevitably bubble up through the floorboards, some stories court the absurd directly. This instinct is the one truly smart thing about the movie Snowpiercer, the summer’s critical dark horse, recently released to a very positive reception on Netflix. The world’s audiences and film critics can be forgiven for projecting this intelligence upon the rest of the film, which doesn’t deserve it.

In Snowpiercer, the world’s governments attempt an easy-fix to climate change, releasing a cooling agent into the atmosphere. While this addresses an overly simplistic understanding of ‘global warming,’ (adding particles would enhance the greenhouse effect, if anything,) in the world of Snowpiercer, the cooling agents actually work. In fact, they completely freeze the Earth. The final survivors of humanity exist on a train, reputedly the only shelter designed to withstand the freezing temperatures outside. The train runs nonstop on a track that spans all of the Earth’s continents. Over the course of eighteen years, the original passenger assignments– first class, economy class and stowaways– become abstracted into a brutal caste system. The first class passengers live in a steampunk wonderland of galleria cars, beauty salons, mini mall arcades, swimming pools, greenhouses and aquariums. They worship the train’s inventor and unseen tyrant, Wilford, and the ‘immortal engine’ he tends. The economy passengers are barely seen (perhaps they’ve become the soldier class that oppresses the residents of the tail section?) The tail enders live in a windowless slum in the back, abused and barely subsisting on grotesque, gelatinous protein blocks. People are harvested for mysterious uses by the first class passengers, never to be seen in the tail again. The story follows the uprising of these passengers, who break through to the front of the train, witnessing the extravaganza car by car. Their forward movement mirrors a reel of film itself, the protagonists jumping from cell to cell, from set-piece to set-piece.  Snowpiercer gets to have its cake and eat it too, decrying the excesses of the wealthy while relishing them. Along these lines, its allegories sound smart on paper, yet bamboozle more than they enlighten.

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The fun of the film lies in its rigorous application of the rules of the childhood ‘hot lava’ game, where the threat of ‘instant death’ confines pretend-play to a bed or jungle gym, which can then be re-imagined into a self-sufficient world. It also borrows from the nightmarish joys of Juan José Arreola’s The Switchman, an absurdist satire of the Mexican rail system from 1952. The Switchman smartly excuses itself of having a plot, and revels in its own bizarro world-building. Snowpiercer would have been a better film if it had done the same, perhaps witnessing the train through the eyes of the kidnapped children or violinist, spirited away into the forbidden first-class cars, than from the vantage of the ambitious revolutionary who forces his way into them. Snowpiercer-the-film stems from Snowpiercer-the-comic, yes, but as Ng Suat Tong shows in his earlier essay, Curtis’ rebellion dramatically diverges from Proloff’s misanthropic death-drive, and the film’s uprising is a invention of the director, Bong Joon Ho. Bong follows the accepted Hollywood wisdom that an epic setting deserves an epic storyline, yet to prioritize the absurdity and delicious visuals, this storyline must be kept as a barebones as possible. In the words of Jones of the Jones boys, commenting on Suat’s piece, “The script’s role in an action movie is to get the hell out of the way, and stay there.” I’d argue that Snowpiercer is a rather sloppy, if inventive, action movie: the choreography is unclear, the chain of action and reactions extremely garbled. Its not the action that pushes the script out of the way, but the insistence on dreamlike spectacle. The point is not the axe-fight, but that everyone pauses to celebrate New Years in the middle of it.

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The characters  rehash the most generic ‘motley band of heroes’ tropes. A bland, angst ridden woodsman named Curtis leads the revolt. Curtis is guided by Gilliam, aka Gandalf/Trotsky, the aged leader of the tail section, and followed around by an eager younger-brother figure, Edgar, who chiefly serves to open up giant plot holes. (He has an Irish accent and misses eating steak, yet is an orphan raised in the tail section from infancy.) Curtis’ plan relies on a enigmatic, manic Korean engineer, long imprisoned in a jail car, who tows along his doll-like and inexplicably psychic daughter, Yona, (essentially River from Firefly.)* The engineer knows how to open the doors between cars, but must be bribed with drugs. We’ve got a gutsy black mother, and a mute, ethnic, martial arts kid. Bong likely suspected that these empty shells couldn’t generate much emotional investment on their own, so he falls back on trite parent-and-child melodrama. Cue the wistful soliloquys of grown-up orphans, and the desperate plight of the parents of the kidnapped children.

When Curtis finally reaches Wilford in the final car, the inventor breaks and tempts him with a bland, 50s caricature of fatherhood, calling Curtis “My boy,” and promising to make Curtis heir to his hallowed position. This exchange contains the pessimistic, political twist so critically beloved. Gilliam and Wilford turn out to be co-conspirators, encouraging tail-end rebellions so as to ‘decrease the surplus population.’ This twist, and its corresponding political allegory, seems to be the one time where Bong really cares about the storyline, (it is his invention, after all.) Bong even leads the audience away from this suspicion early on, when Gilliam requests Wilford’s minister to relay the message that he and Wilford “need to talk.” Wilford’s sneering, flippant report of his and Gilliam’s intimacy, especially considering the inhumane conditions Gilliam suffered as part of the tail class, undermines the reveal. Wilford must still be lying on some level, as Bong never connects why Gilliam would endure what he did, and care for the tail enders as he did, under such false pretenses.  It’s a twist alright, crossed off the list of what a good action movie plot should accomplish, but one that’s hardly believable. It counts as political allegory, but one deeply out of touch with its own humanity.

The character’s motivations and the political allegory must be dropped whenever they threaten to overshadow the dream-logic and dream-visuals themselves. For example, the tail-section people talk a lot about food, a basic necessity of which they are almost deprived. The revelation that their protein blocks are made of bugs is mined for horror, and ‘steak’ becomes a running symbol. When they first make it into the vacated economy class cars, a rebel protests that the residents had abandoned their food “on the table.”  Most horrifically, Curtis confesses that in the first month onboard the Snowpiercer, the stowaways came so close to starving that they resorted to predatorily cannibalism– not just eating deceased humans, but hunting each other for food.  Hunger, and outrage over hunger, is a useful and efficient way to flesh out these characters as oppressed and desperate people. Yet, this essential motivation must be dropped where it distracts from the film’s absurdist agenda. After sustaining massive losses of their people in battle, a small group of rebels finally makes it into the first-class section, and into a marvelous aquarium. At the end of the aquarium sits a sushi bar. The rebels sit down and begin to have sushi, which is prepared by a man in African dress. There’s no griping about the elitist luxury, the wait, the small portions. Tanya, the black woman, makes a quick jibe about their not being enough fish to have sushi all the time, but there’s no urgency in their hunger, or even to keep moving ahead. This is one of the strongest sequences of the film, where the dream logic completely dominates the action, and the disposability of the storytelling becomes most transparent. Its easy to miss Minister Mason’s explanation of the aquarium as a closed ecosystem, “where the number of individual units must be closely, precisely, controlled,” later reprised by Wilford in half-explaining why certain amounts of tail end people must be periodically slaughtered.

Deliberate absurdity, particularly in high budget films, communicates a kind of intelligence. The director and crew are “in” on the artificiality, the fictionality, the letter-box. They enjoy interrupting the audience members, who are busy putting together the pieces to understand what’s going on. Audiences enjoy these interruptions because they are surprising, and because it connects the audience and author, who can “secretly” recognize each other. (As long as the audience privileges aesthetic distance over emotional absorption in a film, something that is statistically more prevalent with the wealthy, and consciously resisted in working class audiences. Pierre Bourdieu covers this phenomena in his book, Distinction.) While absurdity, irrationality, and surreality are present in popular culture, they debuted as high brow developments in art and literature, and still carry a kind of ‘legitimizing’ earmark. “This action movie is smart, because it is so dream-like,” for example.

Frank Kermode, a scholar devoted to reading between the lines of popular and religious texts, finds high-brow literature to be less rife for analysis because of its intentional irrationality. ‘Weirdness’ arrives in the strictly popular text by accident, seeping through routine hackwork and cliché, and exposing period or authorial concerns. This weirdness often comes in the form of repetition and/or fetishization of inessential details or descriptions, or of strange sequences that have nothing to do with the plot, (called BLAMs on TV Tropes.) High-brow authors deliberately insert weirdness, largely to avert or disrupt literary formulas. Kermode writes that in high-brow literature, “there is much more material that is less manifestly under the control of authority, less easily subordinated to ‘clearness and effect’ more palpably the enemy of order, of interpretative consensus, of message.”

Bong repeatedly prioritizes surreality and effect over message and order in Snowpiercer, positioning it in Kermode’s reasoning as a high-brow text intended to be appreciated from a critical distance, (but still enjoyed for its tittilating battle scenes.) Yet Snowpiercer is not without its symptomatic fixations. Notably,  it betrays a fascination with amputation. Just before Curtis meets Wilford, he confesses that the tail-enders initially cannibalized each other to survive, and he hates himself because he knows “that babies taste best.” Curtis killed a woman for a baby, but before he could eat it, he was stopped by Gilliam, who cut off his arm for Curtis to eat instead. “And then one by one, other people in the tail section started cutting off arms and legs and offering them. It was like a miracle. And I wanted to. I tried, it’s… A month later, Wilford’s soldiers brought those protein blocks. We’ve been eatin’ that shit ever since.”

Snowpiercer purports that the tail section became a kind of dystopic utopia, a situation so horrible it brought out ultimate selflessness. Gilliam’s response is the Eucharist made real, and was not only presumably repeated with his leg, but by a whole assembly of amputated elders, who limp notably in the film’s present on crutches. When Gilliam appoints Curtis as his successor, Curtis struggles, replying, “How can I lead if I have two good arms?” Gilliam then reveals the scar from when Curtis ‘tried.’ Curtis’ character arc isn’t completed until he loses his arm between the gears of the engine, in order to rescue a kidnapped child. As if released from his earthly limitations, he then instinctively sacrifices themselves to save Yona and the child from a fiery explosion.


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The obsession with amputation is not limited to Curtis’ realization. When two children are kidnapped at the outset, a father lurches out in rage and throws his shoe at an elite. In punishment, his arm is shoved outside of the train for seven minutes, and then pulverized by a sledgehammer. In the opening scenes of the film, an old man is also abducted by soldiers to play violin for the first class. At first he volunteers, thinking that he and his wife, another violinist, will both be able to go. A soldier demands, “Show me your hands… you follow me. Leave your belongings. We just need your hands.” The man, realizing he must go without his wife, asks, “Not both?” The soldier sneers, “Yes, both hands.” When the man resists, the soldiers respond by knocking the woman unconscious, and crushing her exposed hand underfoot.

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The lower classes have long been equated with their hands and manual labor. Its worth noting that the children are kidnapped because they are small enough to fit inside the train engine and remove grease by hand. According to Bourdieu’s ethnography of France in the 1960s, Distinction, this symbolism is understood at all levels of society, but, “At higher levels in the social hierarchy, the remarks become increasingly abstract, with (other people’s) hands, labour and old age functioning as allegories or symbols which serve as pretexts for general reflections on general problems.” When shown a picture of an old woman’s gnarled hands, working class respondents tended to respond to the picture intimately albeit conventionally, considering and personifying the photographed person, and the work she did. The middle class respondents are the first to routinely overlay ethical virtues and aesthetic comparisons onto this, and the highest classes tend to ‘amputate’ the woman entirely, with responses like “‘These two hands unquestionable evoke a poor and unhappy old age.’ (teacher, provinces.)” The upper classes also have a tendency to make highly aestheticizing references, such as in this representative remark from an engineer in Paris: “I find this a very beautiful photograph. Its the very symbol of toil. It puts me in mind of Flaubert’s old servant-woman… That woman’s gesture, at once very humble… It’s terrible that work and poverty are so deforming.” Its worth noting that Bourdieu’s class system is based more on educational level and inherited capital than earned capital, as these are not tendencies based as much on wealth as on the ability (both learned and afforded) to live abstractly.

Conflating the labor class with hands is so established that it can be found within Wikipedia’s basic definition of ‘synecdoche.’ This synecdoche also consists of the message and opening epigram of Metropolis, perhaps the most canonical caste-system dystopic film, when it says,  “There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.” Snowpiercer reiterates this in a baser, more pessimistic form, in the Minister’s speech during a torture demonstration:

“Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot. Yes? So it is. In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket. First class, economy, and free-loaders, like you … Each in its own particular, preordained position. So it is. Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place of the head, a sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Be your place. Be a shoe.”

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If Bong were simply interested in amputations, visually or conceptually, they might appear more frequently in the graphic battle scenes. Instead, they are explicitly connected to anxieties about the tail end people, particularly in their functioning either as leaders or workers. Also, while the amputations discussed or shown on-screen almost exclusively pertain to arms and hands, Snowpiercer alters the standard synecdoche, assigning the base class to feet. More than that, the relationship of the elite and lower classes is further abstracted to clothing from anatomy, as if the parts of humanity no longer constituted the body of humankind, but served a greater reality that could exist without them. In Snowpiercer, a train’s engine is abstracted into a god, and the caste system into a holy order. Perhaps the greater reality is the train, which people serve but do not constitute. Perhaps it is abstracted Order itself.

In Snowpiercer, the lowest class is no longer a labor class. That may provide one answer to these questions. Hands work. Unlike Metropolis, or the grand body of film dystopias that followed, the tail enders are not shown toiling in factories or industrial wastelands. They are explicitly a welfare class. Only the kidnapped children have jobs maintaining the train, but they are slaves, and the one mentioned janitor died seventeen years ago. The tail enders did not have a fare when they boarded, and by the accepted logic of train travel, can be kicked off at any time. The fact that they aren’t is then an act of charity. The fact that the elites manufacture and provide them with food and water becomes an act of charity.

The tail enders can decry the insanity of prejudice and poverty in a post apocalyptic world, but the problem is, reality has been replaced with an insane, man-made system where economic class is not arbitrary. The rebels rarely appeal to concepts of ‘justice,’ or ‘human rights.’ They know their treatment is despicable, but their ability to express why, or imagine an alternative social order, has shrunk with their horizons. The tail enders never ask a question that Bong never has to answer– what more is demanded of Wilford and the elite passengers, who have ‘legitimate’ passage on this train? As long as they keep the tail-enders alive, they could be said to do more than enough. The protection of ‘a closed ecosystem’ where the stowaways are essentially parasites, make horrific, horrible sense. By avoiding the consequences of this logic, Bong made a movie that only falsely champions the human spirit. In truth, Snowpiercer participates in the same conservative media effort to reconfigure the ‘labor class’ into a ‘welfare class,’ and redefining social services into ‘entitlements.’

On a gut level, Bong may be uneasy with the severing of labor from the ‘labor class,’ although I won’t try to assume the level of his involvement or awareness of American politics or journalism.  Amputation is a violent and disturbing image, and Bong does not shy away from its horror. It’s a fitting symbol, especially considering that conservative pundits sever labor from the labor class to drum up support and engagement from their political base, at the expense of real lives. Propoganda is entertainment. When Wilford discusses his perspective of the uprisings, he judges them based on their entertainment value, and the value of entertainment in quieting the masses. He says to Curtis,  “We need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror, in order to keep life going. And if we don’t have that, we need to invent it. In that sense, the Great Curtis Revolution you invented was truly a masterpiece.” A military class seems like an unnecessary expense, unless it’s to give the paying passengers a living video game.  All the first class passengers do is entertain themselves. The satire isn’t toothless, and the victimized tail-end have real-life counterparts in the working class. Still, the question stands– the logic that the tail-enders are parasites is never confronted, and thus never rebutted. The film envisions social service as dehumanizing, and the idleness of the base class as a given in an entertainment-based society. A labor-less lower class is the one great absurdity left unexplored. Violent entertainment may be an opiate, but the film itself is complicit in it.  Which is fitting for a high-brow treatment of an indulgent action premise, which sidelines the struggles of oppressed people for frivolous absurdities.

 

 

House Wine: Obvious Child’s Cheap Anonymous Red

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Wine signifies wealth on film. The successful boyfriend in the beer-fueled Drinking Buddies packs wine on a picnic hike. Robocop’s cocaine kingpin drinks it at work. In Say Anything, the heroine’s affluent family grills her blue-collar boyfriend while sipping from crystal glasses.

This connotation obscures a fundamental truth about wine: that it is often the cheapest booze available. A bottle of wine costs as little as a few dollars. Yet many film-goers would not recognize whether a bottle was expensive or cheap just from the look of it. Plenty of cheap wines have fancy labels, while prestigious boutique producers use the same eye-catching, colorful designs as mass-produced corporate brands. (Highly branded wines are the easiest to identify. Many people have a basic understanding that ‘Silver Oak’ is expensive, which underlies its popularity despite its poor price value.) If a glass of wine isn’t known to be high class, its assumed to be aspirational of high class. The same could be said of wine drinkers.

A pile of cans’ or ‘a flask’ visually connote cheap drinking more effectively, but their representation becomes inextricably tied with characterizations of desperation, and recklessness. So chalk it up to Obvious Child, whose heroine Donna finds herself knocked up by a relative stranger after losing her job, apartment, and serious boyfriend, to be the movie that documents the reality of the struggling wine consumer.

As a time capsule for the 2010s Brooklyn, Obvious Child captures the sparse apartments, the well-worn bars, and silent taxi rides of an urban twenty-something’s (and thirty something’s) life. It also articulates its character’s drinking behaviors just as accurately. In Obvious Child, wine is only drunk at home, and its always red (the film is set in winter.) A lonesome comedian spills a good deal on his shirt, during a doomed seduction of attempt in his bachelor pad. Donna and her friends drink wine over dinner, haranguing and playfully debating women’s rights.

On the other hand, these characters order call drinks and beer at the bar, (notably hipster-staple Pabst Blue Ribbon and Brooklyn Lager by Brooklyn Brewery.) Donna and her date don’t order wine at the Italian restaurant, where it would be most stock in trade. Which makes perfect sense: ordering a glass out in New York City would start at $7 at the absolute cheapest. Buying the bottle at a store is almost always cheaper. At a bar, the choice is between a good beer and a decent to terrible wine for $2-4 more. At home, the choice is between a six pack of good beer and a decent to terrible wine for $5 less. And if someone is bent on spending that $7, the cocktail will at least be stronger, and wouldn’t make you sleepy.

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Unfortunately, its difficult to determine how expensive the wines in Obvious Child are. Only one wine is potentially identifiable. Toward the beginning, Donna leaves a series of drunken voice mails on her ex’s line. She swaggers, jeers, back-pedals, hurls her phone, and brandishes a bottle of red wine. Bottles accumulate on the bedside table and dresser as the night drags on. The low quality of the video before makes it hard to tell, but the cheery yellow label and neck foil are emblazoned with a logo of a black sun. Personalized neck foils are usually only found on highly mass-produced wines, where the extra brand-ability justifies the extra expense. Small production wineries opt for solid color neck foils manufactured for general use. The sun logo suggests a balmy appellation like Spain or Central California, which coincidentally are areas well suited to producing hundreds of thousands of tons of cheap, ripe grapes. The logo is nearly a silhouette of the Mirassou logo, and the yellow foil recalls Cupcake, two grocery story brands. (Except in New York, where wine can only be sold in liquor stores.) In its own way, this label is actually a pinnacle of iconicity—its so iconic, it evokes other generic brands without even being identifiable itself. A couple dozen wine store and website searches through NYC turned up empty. In fact, its possible that the wine is Mirrasou from a previous marketing cycle. Whatever it is, the wine looks polished and is probably priced at a dollar or two cheaper than the brands it rips off. Donna clearly stocked up in advance, which would have been between $6-$8 at a local wine shop. She even drinks it out of a mason jar.

Still, there are times when beer should be drunk in house. Especially when its purchased after midnight, and all that’s open is the deli below the apartment. Or, when its the only thing on hand at a young man’s apartment. Wine may be a cheap drinking option, but Donna’s wine consumption is as gendered as its close pint-of-ice cream correlate. David Cross, dressed in a ridiculous tank top, is feminized for comedic affect, (not unproblematically,) when he drinks wine later in the film. When Donna and her one-night-stand, Max, drunkenly revel through the wee hours of the night, they’re pounding local microbrews, (Brooklyn Lager and Sweet Action from Sixpoint Brewery.) The shining silver cans ornament the blissful scene of the two kids parading and messing around, which unfolds to the Paul Simon song from which the movie takes its name. This is also the moment that immediately precedes their off-screen, unprotected sex. The conflict and title of the movie are linked together in a moment of innocent bacchanalia.

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Obvious Child is a comedy, but it also a fairly realistic portrait of a young woman making the decision to have an abortion. No matter where audiences fall politically, both sides would agree that this is a serious situation that preferably would have been avoided. It would be easy for the film to jettison Donna’s life-choices, if only to better illustrate her deepened maturity at the end. The bottle swigging and beer pounding could have been shown as problematic and unstable. Yet the drinking is shown normally, neutrally, with a streak of slapstick. It doesn’t seem to be part of the problem. Similarly, Donna doesn’t seem remorseful about her choices. She doesn’t waver in resolve to get an abortion, or agonize with guilt about it. She grows up a little, notably in her ability to connect with others, but without giving up pieces of herself. Obvious Child fiercely insists on the normalcy of Donna’s decision to have an abortion, and of the decisions that led her there. It doesn’t reject Hollywood’s conflation of cheap-drinking, immaturity, and bad choices, as much as say “Hey, we’re all human here. Let’s be generous.”

This post is part of the series on wine representation in film, called What Were They Drinking?!, co-posted on The Nightly Glass.

Skin Deep: Under The Skin

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I went to Under The Skin on a date. Poor guy. Before the movie started, I had looked forward to a little kissing, a little hand-on-thigh. I sat in a back row to be minimally obtrusive, and grew bothered when he was late. I confess I had no idea what the movie was about. I had seen the trailer before The Grand Budapest Hotel, and had laughed through it. I assumed it would be pompous, sexed up and non-narrative, thus perfect for some smart guy on smart girl action. If things went really well, we could pillow talk about the cinematography and haute-scifi genre afterwards.

Then the trailers started, and he jumped into his seat as the lights dimmed. The first fifteen minutes are meant for good behavior, and there were neat visuals and key plot information to puzzle out of the silence. Yet as soon as the shadowy protagonist begins to drive her van down the streets of Dublin, the date went cold, and was eaten by the film. The camera begins to follow the paths of everyday men, aging men, frumpy men, men walking alone in crowds. The ‘heroine’ is preying on men, the camera and the audience implicated in the hunt. I wanted every part of this reversal, and the enforcement of the unsympathetic perspective of the spider lady. I sat enthralled, and completely present, and very hungry. The film kept moving into the old horror terrain, but freshly, like someone forced to describe a dream exactly, background details and all. It didn’t skip over the dance of how each man comes to get into the van, and into her house, and into the dark pool of water. It doesn’t shy away from showing what happens underwater either. Remarkably, it makes this spectacle more harrowing than its concealment. It is exhilarating to see a cruel desire spelled out so intimately.

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At the tipping point of the predations, the woman seduces a man with proteus syndrome, which she must do very carefully, as he’s distrustful and suffering. Their exchange is as emotionally generous as the film gets. (The trailer maker understood this, accompanying the clip with swelling orchestral strings.)  Yet the woman breaks down mid-consumption, questioning herself with a glance in the mirror. She releases him. (Remorse over an abandoned baby also contributes to her personal transformation, of course.) She runs away, and the film madly unspools into dusky, unbounded country side. Pursued by her ex-conspirators, who are dark, silent, interchangeable men on motorcycles, she finds refuge in care of a lonely bachelor, but leaves when they fail to literally connect.

In the final scene, the woman attracts the attention of an isolated man sleeping in the woods, who tries to rape her. Her skin slips off as she struggles, revealing a black-widow spider shell figure beneath. The rapist recognizes an abomination when he sees one, and lights her on fire. She dies. This can be read bitterly as a sort of revenge for all those harvested men, and a return to Hollywood order. After two hours of uncomfortably sympathizing and identifying with the man-eater, she is restored to the monster movie ‘other.’  A narrow, violent representative of Frankenstein’s mob acts as a foil to her exceptionality, but still must vanquish her.  Its ambiguous if the end is also her victory. The film begins with the motorcyclist harvesting her (dead?) body from a roadside,  a Scarlet Johansson lookalike, who the woman strips and usurps. Destroying the body could break the cycle. But perhaps the motorcyclists had been out to off her anyway, and cut off the metamorphis. Who knows. The script barely attempts to world-build, and demands that viewers fill in the blanks themselves.

If the spoilers above didn’t faze you, I feel safe in continuing on about skin. The woman’s victims, after wading into the black water of her netherspace, hang suspended for some time. Their skin prunes and pickles, and finally, with a roar, an invisible mouth sucks away their innards completely, leaving only a drifting sheath of skin. A belt conveys the blood and guts into a furnace-like hole, perhaps to feed or create the black shelled female/s, a creature only briefly displayed before the final reveal. The heroine is a shell for this creature, a full body mask. Only skin deep, she is physically unable to have sex, and a literal tease.

In our rather un-flirty conversation after the film, my date  didn’t seem as conflicted about the woman’s victims as I had been, or expected him to be. I had just sat through a movie not wanting to kiss him, exalted about a spider lady eating men. I wrongly assumed he felt a little victimized on multiple counts. Yet he referred to the victims as “extraneous.” Insecure, dejected, in flabby dress shirts and ridiculous underwear, passionless, of low intelligence and few prospects, friendless and girlfriend-less– what better purpose did these men have, than serving to fuel the body of an incredible, beautiful monster? I wondered about what fear this betrayed. He spoke to a social anxiety about these men, reconciling their failure to self-acutalize. The spider lady’s hunt is the natural order of things, but she must rebel against it to support the monster-movie plot.

Thus, the woman’s extinguishment in a column of smoke, over a snowy plain, is an Eastern solution. She learns compassion from a man with elephantiasis, someone whose skin is also literally slipping off, and badly matches their inside. Her ability to identify with him makes her unable to eat him. She seeks to remove herself from the food chain. Unable to replace her nature, she creates discord, and her own food source destroys her. In my reading, the men were sympathetic, if pathetic, and the film did them justice by not trying to justify or dodge the woman’s actions. She was deceiving and killing them. They were worthy of compassion, which is why she eventually changes, and won’t be reborn again. I resisted my date’s interpretation that they were ‘fair game,’ but couldn’t deny that his interpretation fit the tone better. I had found a way to sum up the movie in a kind, satisfying way, but I couldn’t ditch the feeling that Under the Skin is rather mean-spirited.

Skin is useless in this alien conspiracy, a floating remain. Yet the motorcyclists and filmmakers alike make very good use of Scarlett Johansson’s. She examines herself naked in front of a mirror, slowly stripteases men to their doom, and strips herself. She begins the movie as a lifeless body, all corporality. She is primarily a body during the film. Her story arc suggests a developing consciousness, but she becomes vacant and doll-like when she breaks away. The filmmakers only seem to respect her, and hold interest in her, as the embodiment of a nightmare. We never really get under her skin until the end, when she’s revealed as totally inhuman. As the movie is ostensibly about aliens, mission accomplished, I guess– if aliens are assumed to be bland ciphers. The woman puts ‘extraneous’ men to use, and in turn becomes extraneous when she stops being a sexy fantasy. The machinery of this is deadening, if not alarming. In the movie theater as well as the film, Johansson lures people into a dark space and suspends them there. It would be nice to be consumed by her, but her hunt is a ruse. It turns out she’s just a dull puppet, trotted out by a few grim men who operate the human sluice gates.

Deus Ex Machina By Alien

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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adulthood-ritesIn order to keep relevant, the contemporary film adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy would update its nuclear holocaust to apocalyptic climate change. With a few exceptions, most of the end-of-times imagery can remain unchanged. Mass rioting and civil wars erupt over deadened landscapes and disintegrating cities. All seems lost. Then: an alien race, the Oankali, swoops in from space, scooping up the last surviving species, humankind in particular.

The Oankali also restore Earth to pristine, pre-Industrial health, yet Butler treats this like a neutral fact, important to the world building, (literally,) and not singled out for the miracle that it is. This would change in the modern movie remake. In the book, the humans seem barely appreciative, and quickly move onto other concerns. They take the healed planet for granted, but as victims of an atomic war, they were never responsible for its loss. Everyone blames the few military plutocrats who pushed the button. The Oankali try to prevent the redevelopment of technology, which irks a great many survivors. How could innocent people not wish to restore everything that was stolen from them—houses and streets and mines and guns and all?

In the hypothetical film update, the world is destroyed by the narrowness of the human race, albeit orchestrated by these same military plutocrats. No one prized the environment above all, and everyone lived unsustainably. The blame becomes collective. The equators flood, and food and water run out. The humans are widely aware of their hopelessness as they approach the end of the world. Then: almost divine intervention. Redemption. The audience watches the human survivors emotionally leveled, toppled by grace and humility, rapture and grief. Cue swelling strings, a long pan over waterfalls, or intact glaciers. Hands sifting the soil. They could easily reapply the John H Williams score from Jurassic park—the part when the jeeps pull up into a field of Brachiosauri.

In this version, it’s also easier to imagine humanity consenting to what the Oankali require in return—to interbreed with them completely, leaving no further generation of purely human beings.

Would humanity still value Earth, if humankind had to take the fall, and extinguish itself instead? The reverse narrative is far more dominant—humans racing out in spaceships for a replacement planet. Interestingly, the Oankali believe that letting the human species continue as is constitutes mass-suicide. ‘The Human Contradiction,’ the mixture of intelligence and hierarchical behavior, will always guide humankind to utter destruction of themselves and the Earth. The Oankali believe they are offering a way out—humans may not survive, but their genes can.

It is eventually revealed that the Oankali plan a parallel fate for Earth. They had to save the environment to have something to feed their animalesque spaceships. Once these ships reduce Earth to a desolate core, the half-Human, half-Oankali people will take off in search of more intelligent life to augment. Sadly, this development comes too soon in the books, nullifying what had been a beautiful, difficult paradox. Why not resist, if they’re destroying the Earth as well? So what if the solar system will be eaten by the sun, or a passing black hole, in the matter of aeons? Perhaps humans will outrun it. That’s what the Oankali are doing. The movie version breaks down in development hell.

Wine Looks Bad On Film: On Shopgirl

This post is part of the series, What Were They Drinking?!, and was originally posted on  The Nightly Glass. Part two will post next week. 

Most stories feature wine as a prop, and little more. A bottle of wine indicates that this is that kind of dinner party, that kind of restaurant, or that kind of aristocrat or bohemian. A film audience can distinguish whether its white or red, sparkling or still, but that’s about it. Less commonly, there are books and films and songs which concern wine, like Sideways.  A middle ground is rarer still, where wine becomes a nearly silent device with which the characters work out their desires and conflicts, without traveling to a vineyard, or making stirring monologues about Pinot Noir. Few book, screen and song-writers realize that a character’s glass of wine reveals as much about them as a dog-eared copy of The Sun Also Rises, or a Ramones poster.

Steve Martin seems to understand this. Wine threads through both the novella and film formats of Shopgirl. Wine drinking is also one of the few ways the two versions meaningfully depart from each other. Both tell the story of a Mirabelle, a shy, waifish art school graduate who works in the neglected glove department of a luxury department store. Mirabelle struggles to meaningfully connect with people, and is medicated for depression. When courted by a wealthy, well-meaning divorcee, she waylays her uncertainty for hopes of a lasting relationship. The divorcee turns out to be as emotionally limited as the mistress-like role he proscribes for Mirabelle, who leaves him, takes control of her life, and happily gets together with Jeremy, the lost-soul from the b-plot. Everyone “grows up” and self-actualizes. Claire Danes plays Mirabelle, Jason Schwartzman plays Jeremy, and the divorcee, Ray Porter, is played by author, screenwriter and director Steve Martin. In both versions, an omniscient voice, (again, Steve Martin,) narrates the characters’ internal dramas with tender, if patronizing, candor.

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©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

 

Mirabelle eagerly drinks wine in the book. She abstains in the film. In the book’s first date, Ray is attracted to Mirabelle’s desire to learn about wine, and audibly orders a Barolo. In the film, they crack a joke—“Red wine?” “What shade?” “Maroon.” “Bring me a maroon wine.” While unfinished glasses pile up on the film’s tables and bed-stands, Mirabelle never visibly puts a glass to her lips, and turns down all spoken offers of wine. Meanwhile, wine becomes inseparable from Ray. It codes him as a member of the cool, collected elite, sipping away on his private jet. (In fact, that shot zooms in on the glass, just to be clear.) He drinks wine alone, eating Chinese food, and while wistfully overlooking the Los Angeles skyline. He snubs the old wine Mirabelle offers him from her fridge. Even the close up as he pours water resembles the glamour shot on a box of Franzia. Yet the one instance where he gets sloppily drunk with another woman, and then tries to honorably correct the situation, is not included in the film. Film-Ray is always controlled and sophisticated, yet never quite gallant.

 

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©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

 

Along these lines, the film cuts Ray’s internal monologues. Fewer voice-overs make for better films, yet the baby is thrown out with bathwater, and the removal of Ray’s vulnerabilities reduces him to a sex driven automaton, only human when regretting the loss of Mirabelle ‘too late.’ Their closing dialogue might have been copied from the book, but the film’s melodrama is a new addition, where Ray appears as a lost and lonely man, watching Mirabelle and Jeremy triumphantly, (theatrically!) embrace under a shower of flower petals. In the book, Mirabelle and Ray’s intimacy remains intact, if dormant, and their parting appears less tragic for Ray.

 

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©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

 

If a glass of wine paints Ray as a sophisticated aristocrat deserving of punishment, it plays into the Madonna-whore complex for women. Sipping wine, Mirabelle reveals that she is tempted to be worldly. Eagerly drinking it would signal that she succumbs. Refusing wine, she appears virtuous and innocent. Mirabelle obviously drinks wine through the story, but the audience only watches her resist it. Wine is something that brings Ray and Mirabelle together in the book, but separates them on film. Part of the problem is that a filmed glass of wine triggers the memory of all the glasses of wine poured in movies before it, and who tended to drink them—mostly wealthy villains. By participating in the popular iconography of wine as a dangerous class luxury, a connotation developed over centuries in popular film, theatre and illustrated pulp literature, the film Shopgirl plays into the classic Hollywood dichotomies of good versus evil, rural versus urban, honesty versus sophistication, and alcohol versus temperance, which were largely absent in the book.

For example, Shopgirl’s storyline doesn’t seem so far from D W Griffith’s 1920 re-creation of a typical nineteenth century theatrical, “Way Down East,”  where lustful aristocrat Lennox lures country girl Anna into an out-of-wedlock arrangement, and destroys her honor. Cast out of society, she is nearly about to perish on an ice floe when the young, noble farmboy David comes to her rescue and marries her. Mirabelle’s reputation never suffers, (although, it would be interesting to see how Jeremy and her parents would react,) yet Way Down East’s subtitles eerily mirror Martin’s writing in a number of places. Mirabelle wants to be in a committed, monogamous relationship with Ray.  He fails her and leads her on, causing her much heart-ache, and contributing to a paralyzing depression. Way Down East begins,

“Today Woman brought up from childhood to expect ONE CONSTANT MATE possibly suffers more than at any point in the history of mankind, because not yet has the man-animal reached his high standards`– except perhaps in theory..”

Suddenly, Mirabelle and Jeremy’s almost nonsensical exchange toward the end of the film makes sense:

Mirabelle: “Jeremy—So what made you do all this?”

Jeremy: “All this what?”

M: “All this… success?”

 J: (beat) “Well, you did.”

M:  “I did? How?”

J: “Well you said, ‘Just do it.’ So I did it.”

M: “Well, that’s not very much.”

J:  “Yeah, but I’ll protect you.”

They embrace and Mirabelle begins to cry.

 On its own, “I’ll protect you” seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. But it flows from the heart of this relationship—Anna/Mirabelle inspires David/Jeremy, who offers his devotion and protection from the corrupted influences that seek her. This is the classic romantic model of centuries of British and American melodrama, a narrative mode that partly developed to address (and sensationalize) the changes and social ills that came with industrialization—poverty, urbanization, race, youth culture, women and child abuse, and alcoholism being prevalent themes. Temperance movies comprised an entire genre of early film, and politicians and activists drew on melodramatic tropes to convince voters to ban alcohol state by state. Melodramatic visuals, like families cowering beneath violent, drunk husbands, contributed greatly to the passing of prohibition. Temperance activists cast alcohol as an evil of the city—conveniently, immigrants concentrated in urban areas, and tended to defend balanced consumption as a part of daily life. Alcohol thus became enveloped in a race war, and the enemy of the honest, American, white male hero. These tropes did not die, but engendered the formulas, frameworks and narratives at the heart of current politics and film-making. It is not easy to imagine Superman drinking wine, (although he only insists “he doesn’t drink when he’s flying.”)  And between Betty and Veronica, the future wine drinker is an obvious choice. It doesn’t make Veronica evil, but it lines up with her frivolous, stuck up, aggressive nature.

 

shopgirl_ruralhomecoming©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

Wine drinking, portrayed in Shopgirl as an aristocratic tendency, seems to have no part in Mirabelle’s life after Ray. Mirabelle collects herself in her parent’s rural Vermont home, and drinks a beer after the break-up. Wine, constantly associated with Ray’s appetite, becomes conflated with exploitation. Judging by the wines mentioned and featured, Martin may be a connoisseur, but as a director, he failed to reverse the negative connotations carried by a glass of wine in a rich man’s hand. Combined with the physical bodies of the actors, ceaselessly articulating their age difference, largely understood to be inappropriate, the film sets a moral battle where there had been mutualism and humanity in the text.

shopgirl_seconddate_2

©Touchstone Pictures, 2005