Tag Archives: film

The Truth Is Out There

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Considering they’re both serial TV dramas, Twin Peaks and the Wire couldn’t have much less in common. Twin Peaks explores the quirky surrealism of a small town; the Wire looks at the intricate realism of a city. Creator David Lynch uses the improvisational rhythm of dreams; creator David Simon relies on the layered narrative of investigative reporting. And where the Wire is one of the most multi-racial shows ever to appear on television, Twin Peaks is, insistently, not.

Yet, on closer inspection, the two shows had in common. In particular, both Twin Peaks and the Wire are obsessed with the real.

In part, this obsession is a function of genre. For all their differences, both shows are at heart police shows, and both are built around investigations and the ferreting out of secrets. In both, the techniques and expertise of the protagonists are leant to the viewer, who is enabled to approach nearer and nearer to a provocatively concealed heart of corruption. The famous scene in the Wire, where McNulty and Bunk deduce how a murder was committed while communicating solely by using the word “fuck” is analogous, in its flamboyant hermeticism, to the scene in Twin Peaks where Dale Cooper identifies likely suspects by referencing Tibet and throwing stones at bottles.

Whether through a triumph of earthy procedure or through semi-mystical intuition, the results are the same — the knowing expert shines light into the heart of darkness.

“Heart of darkness” has racial connotations of course — and that’s apropos for both shows. The connection between race and reality is most obvious in the Wire, a show immersed in the vibrancy, and despair of Baltimore’s African-American community. Omar’s transcendent cool, Kima’s understated integrity, D’angelo’s tragedy, and Snoop’s brutality are all manifestations of intertwined authenticity and blackness. The white characters, too, draw their grit in large part from the show’s integration. Thus Entertainment Weekly praises McNulty for his funk, which it links to his “easy rapport with his African-American work partners.”

Race at first appears to be almost entirely absent from Twin Peaks…but the absence speaks loudly. The show is set in the perfect American small town, with people who are all friendly, all decent, all blessed with movie star good looks, and, oh yes, (with the exception of a stereotypically untrustworthy Asian woman and a stereotypically spiritual Native American) virtually all white.

That whiteness — the trusting small town, the blonde homecoming queen cheerleader — is part and parcel of the perfection. And as the town’s secrets are revealed, it is not just the perfection, but the whiteness, which is shown to be a facade above a swirling pit of jealousy, greed, and deformation. Laura Palmer, that blonde homecoming queen, is addicted to cocaine just like all those black junkies on the Wire. Her father, Leland, is, in the depths of his twisted soul, not white at all, but rather the demonic spirit BOB played by Native American actor Frank Silva.

Moreover, the whiteness in Twin Peaks is undercut and doubled by its own queerness. The show is an extended meditation on the campiness of whiteness; the perfect exterior concealing melodrama and lust. When Laura’s best friend Donna wears her friend’s sunglasses, she turns into a teen femme fatale, exterior transforming interior. More pointedly, after Laura’s death, her murderer/rapist father, Leland, begins to compulsively dance to show tunes, his dark sexual secret finding expression through his response to stereotypically gay cultural responsiveness.

The truth in Twin Peaks is ultimately Freudian; the revelation of the ogre father and the primal scene. In the prequel, Fire Walk With Me, we learn that Leland has been raping her daughter since she was 12; in the series itself, another father almost sleeps with his daughter. In The Wire, on the other hand, the revelations are less psychological and more pragmatic, focusing on the overwhelming, crushing, and corrupting power of institutions.

There are many other cop shows built around investigation, of course. But where something like Bones or the Mentalist lets the knowing detective tie up the truth in a pretty bow at the end of (at least most) episodes, the Wire and Twin Peaks treat truth as an overwhelming excess, which expertise can provisionally master but not contain. The resulting tragedy is is in many ways the guarantor of the reality. The real does not have a happy ending. The Wire concludes by establishing that life in Baltimore will go on as before; while some individual characters may escape to provisionally bright futures, the city as a whole is no closer to escaping its pathologies than it was at the beginning of the series. Twin Peaks effectively ends with the death of Leland and the escape of BOB. The culprit is dead, but his spirit lives on…and to the extent that the series abandoned that grim insight in its later part, it became virtually unwatchable (or, at least, I couldn’t watch it.)

I love both Twin Peaks and The Wire. I think they both deserve their reputations as the greatest television show ever. I do wonder though how much that reputation is about their mutual obsessions with the real. Television has often been seen as uniquely irrelevant bone-headed escapism. The Wire and Twin Peaks both, in quite different ways, present themselves as windows onto unpleasant truths. They’re serious because they show us what is, and provide no escape. Laura’s ascent to heaven in Fire Walk With Me seems more a dream to emphasize the tragedy than an actual cause for optimism, while McNulty’s final attainment of peace seems like an instance of accepting what he can’t change rather than a broader assertion of hope. Evil is fixed; experts know but can’t save us, or even themselves. It’s a grim vision so critically embraced that one starts to wonder if it could be, at times, self-fulfilling.
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Coincidentally, I just watched Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, which has a very different take on the real. Stalker is ostensibly a science fiction tale set in the Zone, a mysterious, dangerous realm where your deepest wish may be granted. Tarkovsky, though, makes no use of special effects of any kind, and so the Zone appears as simply any other piece of countryside. The three men wandering through it, casting nervous glances this way and that, seem like children playing a not-very-convincing game of make-believe — a sensation only emphasized by Tarkovsky’s long takes and excruciatingly slow pacing. The camera frames a long shot of a field, the men in the distance move across it…and still move across it…and still move across it…giving your attention a chance to wander to the trees, and the sky, and then back and yep, the men are still crossing the field…and you’ve got plenty of time to think about how silly the actors must have felt, and wonder whether they were thinking about their motivation, or how silly the script is, or just about whether they were ever going to get to stop walking across the field and go to the bathroom, for the love of God.

Eventually the guide (Stalker) leads his two followers (Writer and Professor) to the wish-granting center of the Zone, called the Room. But at the last minute both of the followers, perhaps fed up with the transparently ersatz nature of the whole endeavor, refuse to participate in the silliness anymore and balk at going in. One of the film’s last scenes shows Stalker back in his beautifully grungy hovel, lying down into his bed as if reclining in an Old Master painting, bewailing the intelligentia’s lack of faith. “Can people like that believe in anything!” he moans. “And nobody believes! Not just those two. Nobody!” After comforting him, his long-suffering wife breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the camera, insisting that despite all her troubles, she has never regretted her life with the Stalker. “It’s better to have a bitter happiness” she says, “than a gray, dull life.”

On the one hand, Stalker is like the Wire; it fetishizes grit. The first part of the film, before the protagonists make it into The Zone, is set in an urban landscape which is run down even by the standards of the Wire’s Baltimore. On the other hand, Stalker shares characteristics with Twin Peaks. Both fetishize a secret, dangerous realm just out of sight.

But where the Wire and Twin Peaks figure the physical and spiritual as truths for genre to reveal, in Stalker both function more as consciously framed tropes. The Stalker’s hovel is so ravishingly shot and carefully composed that it becomes a quotation about grit rather than a direct apprehension of it. The intimations of otherworldliness in the Zone are so stubbornly unrealized that they become quotations about surrealism rather than an actual apprehension of subterranean dangers.

Stalker loves these genre references, but not because they show reality. Rather, it loves them as genre — as the imaginary. And if there’s a real in Stalker, it’s not in these pulp gestures, but in the process of film itself; the shots of grassland or a wall or a face held so long that narrative drains away, and you’re left looking at grassland or a wall or a face. The real is not the end result of a process of meaning, but the beginning of a process in which meaning must be added. The wall can be poverty; the grassland can be an ominous psychological truth; but the viewer must make it so. Art does not strip away to an essence, but adds to a blank. The Wire is worthwhile not because it is true to Simon’s Baltimore experience, but because of the energy of its narrative entanglements; the energetic metaphoricity of D’Angelo at the chess board or the profaner-than-life dreamed-of universal signification of “fuck”. Twin Peaks is profound not because it shows the real corruption of small town America, but because of its hollow flamboyance, haunted by specters of irony and dread. The shows are great not because they’re real, but because they’re imagined.

The very last scene of Tarkovsky’s film shows the Stalker’s crippled child sitting at a table, staring at glasses, and apparently moving them (slowwwwly) with her mind. After she stops, we hear a train pass, and the glasses shake. The telekinesis is, of course, just a special effect…and it emphasizes the fact that the train shaking the house is probably a special effect too. Tarkovsky seems to be almost taunting us, daring us to accept the shaking but not the telekinesis — or rather, to accept both. For Stalker, film is not about gaining expertise and seeking truth. It’s a way to practice faith.

Your Grandpa’s Porn

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Since we’re kind of having a porn week on HU (Michael Arthur’s article on yaoi here, my article on Jenna Jameson here, I thought I’d end up with this review I first published on Splice Today.
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When I ordered the DVD American Nudie Classics, I had somehow thought it would be a documentary about classic (if that’s the word I want) pornography from the early days of American cinema. Or, failing that, I figured it would include a handful of porn reels along with some sort of contextual information. After all, I figured, anyone buying this is doing so out of historical interest, right?

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“Then Protest!”

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by James Romberger

François Truffaut’s films are most often analyzed in terms of their cinematic structure and the interpersonal relationships of their stories, and these qualities do account for a good part of their appeal. His films are not considered particularly political in the context of his contemporaries of the French New Wave. However, Truffaut does critique the forces that shaped his world: the destructive nationalism and militarism that crush people and culture in their wake, and the patriarchal structures that keep women the longest-suffering victims of oppression on the planet. Since women do not share equal rights with men, gender relations are political. Truffaut made some sincere efforts to explore those dynamics.

Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules and Jim bears reexamination in this light. In his adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché’s semi-autobiographical novel Jules et Jim, the director compresses the whole to fit within the confines of a movie that is an hour and three quarters long. Truffaut chooses passages from the book and recombines them to create new meanings unique to his production. He alters the real people and events that inspired the original text, to construct a new narrative about female autonomy and fidelity in love, and affords key correspondences between the early pivotal scene on the bridge and the ending. Truffaut also extends beyond the WWI scenes of the book to incorporate his more personal references in the form of veiled and overt references to WWII: he “post-actively” incorporates his memories of his childhood in occupied Paris and his perception of the deep repercussions in France from the collaboration of some of the country’s citizens with fascism.

The credit sequence immediately foreshadows Truffaut’s intent. It recontextualizes an incidental dart game played in the book to become a metaphor of sexualized violence: a competition to penetrate a target. The title characters of Jules and Jim are young artists of bohemian Paris before World War I, who compete for the love of their lives. They and their relationships mirror Roché’s own experience. Jim is meant to represent Roché, an extremely influential high cultural connector who, among other networking flourishes, introduced Picasso to Gertrude Stein. But Roché’s acute sophistication and legendary promiscuity are not so present in Jim, in the film portrayed as a man without the courage of his convictions and underplayed by the tall, hesitant Henri Serre.
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History for the Future: Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Francaise

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Comics needs an Henri Langlois.

As collectors, most comics geeks have nothing on Langlois. I don’t care how many storage units you have. I know the longboxes block the closet. But from the ‘30s through the ‘70s, back in the days when a single film could take up several cans and a couple square feet of space, Langlois and his wife accumulated and preserved over 60,000 films, using primarily their own money, creating out of his collectors’ obsession the institution known as the Cinémathèque Francaise.

His scope was omnivorous: “People, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything.” He rescued numerous nitrate prints of silent movies and the only existing negative of The Blue Angel; he saved early Soviet cinema and “decadent” films from the Nazis; he stole film prints from the back rooms of movie houses that were about to destroy them (theaters destroyed their film prints to prevent piracy). For decades, he screened three films a day in his house in Paris, carefully selecting the films for the resonance of their justaposition. His screenings introduced the auteurs of the French New Wave to the American cinema that would define them and to the early European art cinema that would inspire them to transcend Hollywood.

But his archival impulse, and even his passion for sharing his films, are not why comics needs a Langlois. (Bill Blackbeard has all that mostly covered.) Comics needs a Langlois because of his particular inspired belief, poetic, imaginative, and non-didactic, about how cinema’s history should inspire its future:

An art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scratch, demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world.

An odd sentiment for an archivist – to “start from scratch, demolish accepted norms.” Especially an archivist so intent on screening and programming, whose model for training in cinema was to organize one’s life around watching films, to complete immerse oneself in cinematic heritage and in conversation with other people who are equally immersed. This is the man who comforted Buñuel after the disasterous premiere of El at Cannes (and who introduced the film to Lacan), the man selected to pin the Legion of Honor on Alfred Hitchcock’s lapel. When protests broke out after the French government shut down the Cinematheque in 1968 for bad bookkeeping, Godard took a punch from a policeman on Langlois’ behalf (it broke his glasses, not his face, but still…)

Leaud speaking to the protesting crowd, 1968

 

How can we reconcile the historian archiving the past with the poet advocating the genius’ new world? Langlois himself suggests the answer in a story he tells about his childhood experience viewing Mèliés’ 1899 film Jeanne d’Arc:

As a boy in Turkey, they told me Joan of Arc took Paris. Knowing my dad was posted there, when I saw Jeanne d’Arc, I believed he was living in Joan’s Paris. Told that was wrong, I began to imagine parallel Parises: Joan’s, my father’s, etc. Hence, in my somewhat odd view, time isn’t time: it’s space.

Although the concepts are surely related, Langlois is not describing the relation of time and space found in Chris Ware – Ware’s use of space to evoke time, to transform our sense of time, and to highlight both pointed and sequential continuity through time, is still ultimately an exploration of temporality and its effects: of an experience living in history. Langlois’ formulation is the denial of time: an idea of history not as something past, things having happened and remembered, but something entirely now, aggregated all together, present – meaning both presence and in the present tense.

This idea of “history in the present tense” — omnipresent history — is both very French and very characteristic of Langlois’ time and his circle of friends. Forming in the years after WWII, the idea was influenced not only by Surrealism and Dada but by Sartre and Levi-Strauss and Lacan and their project of reimagining realism without materialism – the bloody, painful materialism of the wars and their aftermath. Structuralism’s forgetting of “history in the past tense” was an effort to find inspiration and humanity despite that trauma, and the result of their efforts was a concept of history that serves human imagination rather than subordinating imagination to the dictates of history and materialist historical thinking.

This sensibility is nowhere more apparent than in the Museum of Cinema that Langlois assembled in the last decade of his life.

An exhibit room at the Musée du Cinema

 

Langlois’ curatorial choices, although rich with minute historical detail, were almost completely non-chronological and non-genealogical. He cared about establishing composite effects among the films and artifacts, emphasizing thematic contiguity, resonance and suggestion. The result was a Museum that was itself a work of art, not of history, an experience that inspired questions and curiosity rather than a lesson that offered canned, approved answers. The 2004 documentary Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (from which these English translations of the Langlois quotes are taken) posits convincingly that the museum itself was as much the work of an “auteur” as any New Wave film.

Notions of resonance and suggestion and composite seem very at home in comics, even more so than film. Images accrue meaning through juxtaposition far more than in the dynamic cinema or even in prose text, which always retains at least some small echo of the temporality of spoken language. Langlois’ approach to history – never for its own sake but always in the service of imagination, not the trace of the past but the texture of the present, always pointing toward the future – is particularly inspirational as an antidote to nostalgic minutiae, the biggest obstacle to the troublemaker’s new world:

There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage – a film nerd – sits in the front row and writes down the credits. If you ask him whether it’s good, he’ll say something sharp. But that’s not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It’s incompatible with note-taking!

The documentary from which the quotes and stills in this essay were taken is worth every minute of the time spent watching it. It’s currently available on DVD and Netflix on Demand.