Tag Archives: movies

I For One Welcome Our New Superhero Overlords

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Okay, I’ve just seen The Avengers, Marvel’s and Disney’ latest blockbuster superhero movie, and first I want to state: yes, Jack Kirby does get his name in the credits.

In a half-assed way.

The credit line states: “Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.”
True enough, as far as it goes. A more honest credit would have read: “The Hulk, S.H.I.E.L.D., The Avengers and Nick Fury created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; Thor and Loki created by Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby; Black Widow created by Stan Lee, Don Rico, and Don Heck; Captain America created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”

(And justice would further be served by the additional line: “Iron Man created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Don Heck; Hawkeye and the Black Widow created by Stan Lee and Don Heck.” Don Heck was never a fan-favorite, and has been dead for some years; there’s no constituency for his memory; but his contribution should not be slighted.)

The problem is, as the dominant paradigm now has it, individuals don’t create; only corporations create. And Marvel/Disney would rather slit their entire management’s throats than acknowledge that this fiction, the source of their billions, is based on a lie.

Well, I shan’t continue in my grumpiness — after all, I was hypocrite enough to ignore the boycott of the film initiated by Kirby family supporters such as Steve Bissette.

So how was the movie?

Alan Moore, when asked his opinion of the first Image superhero comics, made an interesting analogy.

He said an old-style superhero comic (say, a Dick Sprang ’50s Batman) could be compared to coca leaf: a mild stimulant. The powerful superhero comics of the seventies, like those drawn by Neal Adams, would be the equivalent of refined cocaine. And the Image comics were the equivalent of crack.

To steal his simile: The Avengers is the crack cocaine of superhero movies. It will stimulate the comics fan into a near-fatal geekasm.

That’s not a criticism, actually; this flick’s an exceptionally well-made distillation of its genre. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like, to quote Abraham Lincoln. It hits all the right notes. Superheroes beating the shit out of each other? Check. Cool, sexy super spy? Check. Neat-oh futuristic equipment and weaponry? Check (The rise of the Shield helicarrier from the ocean to the skies invokes genuine awe.) Nasty-ass aliens, supercilious super villain, awesome costumes (Loki finally gets to see action in his bitchin’ horned helmet), tons of death and destruction, and Cap instructing old Greenskin: “Hulk, smash!”? Check, check, check, check and check!

The film isn’t lacking in non-infantile pleasures, either. The dialogue is crisp and witty — although poor Thor and Captain America are handicapped by having to wax solemn or anguished while the rest of the cast are given all the zingers. The best lines go to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark (Robert Downey Jr); one scene between the two makes one think more of Noel Coward than of Stan Lee.

(There are plenty of physical laughs, too, mostly coming from the Hulk. After an incredibly snotty divine put-down by Loki, Greenskin educates him with a beat-down that looks like a violent gag from a classic Popeye cartoon.)

Ah, Loki. An adventure tale is only as good as its villain. The classically-trained British Hiddleston plays the part with such relish that one only sees in hindsight the nuances he brings to the character: there is an under-layer of pain and anguish to his posturing. And, true to both the comics Loki and that of Norse mythology, he relies as much on cunning and the psychological manipulation of his foes as upon brute force.

(I won’t tell why, but the funniest line in the film is Loki’s “I’m listening.”)

Downey somewhat unbalances the flick: as some wags put it, a better title would have been ‘Iron Man III, co-starring the Avengers’. Not that I’m complaining — it’s always a delight when he takes the screen, especially when out of armor.

However, Marvel showed great judgment when they chose Joss Whedon to direct. Whedon has extensive experience in comics and feature films, but I’d wager that he was chosen especially for his experience in television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where he proved his ability to handle large ensemble casts in fantastic milieus. The script perfectly characterizes every role, far better and more subtly than the comics ever did. It’s a masterpiece of psychological clockwork.

Two of the minor heroes particularly stand out: Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). There are hints of dark, complex, anguished pasts for both of them. I get the feeling Whedon would have been more than happy to have centered the film on these two.

One surprise, on the other hand, is how overshadowed Thor (Chris Hemsworth) emerges. Frankly, he cuts a poor figure compared to the dashing Stark, the brutish Hulk, the glittering Loki. In Thor, he towered; here, his cape looks tatty, and his previous vikingly cool beard makes you think now that he was too rushed to shave that morning.

The fights, the Hulk-smashing, the repartee are all top-notch. In sum, if you want a summer blockbuster where “you can check your brains in at the door”, this is for you.

But we never can do that, can we?

Art by Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia

The Avengers has special place in my nostalgic pantheon: issue 5 was the very first Marvel comic I’d ever purchased, back in spring 1964, when I was 9 years old. Sure, I was aware of the marketing hook behind it — “Your favorite heroes TOGETHER!”– and didn’t care a whit. Yeah, I’d already seen it with Justice League of America from DC. Loved it there, too.

Looking back, there were troubling aspects to this comic. The Avengers were the élite, and pretty much also the tools of the élite. They were bankrolled by Tony Stark, comics’ epitome of the military-industrial complex; they lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York — the swankiest address in the world. ( Of the great mansions built there by the “robber baron” capitalists of the 19th century, only the one housing the Frick Collection remains.) They fought commies and aliens and worked with the government. And they were self-selected: the aristocrats of the superhero world.

They resembled nothing so much as an elite private club, like the Yale or Century clubs, floating high above hoi polloi.

The film carries this conceit to the next step, arguably an even more sinister one.

The last half-hour of the movie shows a gigantic battle between the Avengers and an army of extraterrestrial invaders in the streets of Manhattan. And my childish, fannish joy in these shenanigans was overlaid by a feeling of dread — of appallment.

I realized why halfway through: it was the location of this mass destruction that roiled me. A ten-year-old taboo had been shattered, one dating to 9/11. It’s now acceptable once more to depict buildings in New York, and the people inside them, being destroyed.

And this is where my unease was compounded. This iteration of the Avengers wasn’t the old “gentlemen’s club,” obnoxious though that be.

This one was conceived from the start as the auxiliary of a tremendously powerful secret American government defense agency. This élite cadre of superhumans, following the orders of a wise leader, Nick Fury, was there to protect us from unreasoning, fanatic aliens bent on flying into our greatest city and toppling its skyscrapers.

From Space Al-Quaeda.

So that’s my reading of The Avengers. Its subtext, hardly subtly advanced, is the glorification of Homeland Security and of the current security state. Why, even the Hulk, that powerful adolescent fantasy of revolt against authority, meekly goes along with the program. Who are we to gainsay him?

Hmm… maybe I really should’ve checked my brain in at the door. Then again, maybe I did, and just forgot to check it back out…

P.S. I saw this film in Paris, where it was released on April 25; it won’t be in general release in the States until May 5. Such divergences between international release dates are less common than they once were, for two reasons: a) the studios want to discourage piracy, and b) cultural globalisation. It’s only in the past twenty years that France adopted summer as a movie blockbuster season, as it has always been in America: before, summer was given over to b-films and re-releases. (Hey, if you were spending the summer in France, would you want to waste it in a movie theatre watching Hollywood fare?) And gone are the days as recent as 1989, when Warner Brothers had to launch a whole campaign in advance of the Tim Burton movie explaining who Batman was to the French. The crowd I saw Avengers with was wholly familiar with the characters. La coca-colonization culturelle n’est pas morte, helas!
 
 

Spoiler alert:
 
 
The usual post-credits closer reveals who Loki’s mysterious alien ally is. Yep, it’s Thanos.

Dystopian Fashion

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Hollywood loves dystopias. They’re blockbusters with brains – mass market morsels with box office potential just waiting for grad students and culture writers to dissect, contextualize, and elevate. Regardless of whether the movie is meant to be camp or self-serious, the stories and themes need to be as intricately drawn as the world creation of fantasy films and novels, yet still rooted in some recognizable reality. In the simplest, and perhaps most confusing of terms, a dystopia is the opposite of a utopia. Dystopias aren’t the same as post-apocalyptic anarchy. That might be the origin of the dystopia, but after the chaos comes control. In a dystopia, the miserable structures are institutionalized – whether by a government, a corporation, or technology.

On one level, dystopias are entirely artifice. Everything is manufactured and tightly controlled to support whatever claim the controlling force has given for its power, from language, to information, to material goods. Individuals are dehumanized, and uniformity reigns. But with all the deconstruction of the plots and themes and texts and Cave allegories, it’s easy to overlook how the films are styled to show the audience a new and bleak world. What might seem an afterthought can become one of the most important elements of telling the visual story, exposing informative elements and details of the society that’s been created. Along these lines, I’m most interested in how wardrobe choices can illuminate something crucial about the world of a film.

Or: what will we wear when everything turns to shit? And why does it matter?

Why, for example, do all of the characters in the “real world” of The Matrix have to wear thin, holey, ill-fitting sweaters? What, beyond its blatant gesture to noir, is the meaning or significance of Rick Dekard’s trench coat? Why do all of the clothes in Children of Men just look…normal? In this essay I want to examine the great costumes in Gattaca and The Hunger Games — two examples of films with particularly weird dystopian fashion — to suggest some ways to think about costumes in the broader context of Hollywood’s visions of Dystopia.

Just as there are half a dozen varieties of dystopias in films, the costumes are similarly varied. Broadly speaking costumes in these films tend to fit into three categories: minimalist, over-the-top gaudy and garish, or retro poverty. Even something as straightforward as minimalist clothes can mean different things in different films. In Los Angeles Plays Itself Thom Anderson notes that films like to put the bad guys in modernist homes. Though of course not the point of modernist designs, the starkness of the sleek minimalism can easily be manipulated to signify some sort of deranged obsession with the superficial. Perhaps the ubiquity of high design might make that jump more difficult today, but with the right tone and the introduction of a pre-established villain, the minimalist home itself becomes the opposite of the calm utopia it was intended to be. Instead, the home becomes sinister, vapid and empty, not only of furniture, but of tenderness and humanity too. In other words, the good guys are never as well dressed as the bad guys.

Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca presents the audience with a “not-too-distant future” where potential is predetermined by genetics. Employment and educational opportunities and advancement are set from birth, and liberal eugenics are used to manipulate genes to ensure the best possible outcome for people before they are even born. In this world, there are the successful and there are the defective and there is no real in between. Your genes tell the only story that employers need to know. Ethan Hawke’s Vincent is one of the defectives, with a life projection of only 30 years due to a heart condition who uses the black market to assume the identity of a genetically ideal person in order to become an astronaut.

The clothes in the world of the genetically superior are sleek, modern, and minimalist. The men wear impeccably tailored suits, All of the colors are either dark or neutral. Men and women wear their hair slicked back neatly and tightly. At the highest level of genetic perfection, and correspondingly prestigious places of employ, everything is pressed and starched. The white cotton shirts that peek out of the somewhat androgynous suits are flawless. In essence, no individuality needs to be shown through the clothing, because anything that you’d ever need to learn about a person you could learn through a simple gene report. Though we never find out where the mandates for these sorts of clothes originate, it would be reasonable to think that it likely started with the government or a corporation. In Gattaca, individual agency is rare. But the clothes represent an implicit acceptance of the world that they’re in – the shame of their flaws and individuality are so deeply ingrained in all of the characters that a different way of life and dress likely does not even occur to them. Even Jude Law’s crippled Jerome who doesn’t leave his home dresses in bespoke suits and vests.

Those outside of this top echelon still dress in muted colors, but the outfits are ever so slightly more rumpled. The cops and private investigators sport noir like Fedoras and unassuming suits. Those at the lowest level, the janitors, wear uniforms too. Everyone has their place, and every place has its predictable dress. No one would be mistaken as being part of an elevated status. Genetic makeup and class are intertwined.

There’s a brief suggestion of subversion when Uma Thurman’s Irene goes out for the night with her hair down and wavy, in a form fitting gold sequin gown. In this scene she even acknowledges that the pianist that they’re watching couldn’t play as beautifully as he does without his flaw (extra fingers). Perhaps the wild hair and seductive gown represent individuality peeking through outside of the workplace. But the shame permeates the night off too. Work, perfection, and the company define and shackle our characters, and it’s where this otherwise “perfect” society starts to crack. Though it might be beneficial for insurance agencies and companies to know the exact genetic potential of all of its employees, once genetic discrimination becomes institutionalized, leaving no room for individual advancement or self-betterment, the individuals begin to falter. Jude Law’s character commits sucidie after realizing that his life in a wheelchair in this society is no life at all. Afraid of their own humanity and fearful of flaws, the characters resign themselves to the standards of their own society, reinforced by dress and presentation. It’s not an injustice, it’s just the way things are. Ethan Hawke’s character subverts the system only for his individual gain by conforming to its expectations – altering himself to meet their demands and exfoliating away as much of himself as possible.

Gary Ross’s adaptation of The Hunger Games is somewhat more simplistic and ultimately more frustrating. In this post-revolution world, there are the haves and the have nots and material goods are the only determinant. In the movie we get no explanation as to why the society is divided as it is. Why do the people in the Capitol get to be there? Intelligence? Money? Birth? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Much has already been made about the disappointment that some avid fans of the book felt upon seeing some of the film’s representations of the costumes, but for our purposes we’re only going to talk about what we actually saw on screen in light of what the movie tells us about the world.

Those in the Capitol dress in lavish and gaudy clothes, reeking of invasive and discriminating excess that suggests both Marie Antoinette and a 1980s Wall Street Banker. The ladies wear puffy sleeves, full faces of white makeup, 1920s bee-stung lips, and neon shade of hair color. The men wear sparkly suits and facial hair so intricate that it resembles a tattoo. Grooming and appearance are clearly of great importance in the Capitol and everyone who resides there has both the money and the time to execute these looks daily.

In contrast, Katniss’s mining town of District 12 looks straight out of Harding-era West Virginia coal towns, with the earthy colored trousers and suspenders for the men, and modest knee length, short sleeved cotton dresses for the women. Makeup is non-existent, hair color is natural, and faces are smeared with soot. This is supposed to be a desperate people. Putting the citizens of District 12 in frocks that look like they were transported from The Great Depression could be a way to keep morale down. Not only do they have to lead miserable, impoverished lives, but they don’t even get any updated poverty clothes. It’s likely this was just an affectation of the movie, though, trying to make poverty look prettier thanks to the blinding revisionism of a style of clothes almost 100 years old.

Excusing the poverty porn of District 12, the initial division is striking. The contrast between Katniss in her drab blue dress and Effie in her magenta power suit sharing the same stage perfectly conveys the vast wealth disparity. Effie has everything, and Katniss has nothing. But once the film moves forward, and the tributes are transported to the capitol, things become less coherent. After examining the controlled and limited options for dress in Gattaca, The Hunger Games looks like it is verging on potential anarchy already. The varieties of dress are just too great. Everyone in the Capitol is so loudly individualistic, authoritarian control is hard to reconcile. But perhaps this is where The Hunger Games is a bold departure from the Gattaca-like uniformity. The control and the power is so pleasing to folks in the Capitol that they are willing to support the state since it allows them a superficial leniency in dress and decoration.

The makeovers for the tributes, though, seem inconsequential to the society in the movie. It’s all for show and entertainment and essentially looks like little more than fattening the pig before the slaughter, and has little to do with the power structures in place. Perhaps the fire costume was indeed more subversive in the books, but in the filmed adaptation it was more difficult to find the significance.

We could assume that the effeminate clothes and seemingly relaxed gender standards in The Capitol represent the government’s half hearted way of convincing those privileged enough to live there that they are indeed part of a liberal society. But when we step back and look at the evil oppressors in The Capitol as those in the districts might, it seems a strange choice on the part of the author and filmmaker to dress the bad guys effeminately. Is the point to just scoff at the excess and stop there, or is there something inherently dangerous in equating gay identity with the immorality of The Capitol? It becomes even more problematic considering the fact that beyond the suggestive clothes and makeup, we don’t see any sort of realized gay identity on screen – things are aggressively heteronormative. The ambiguity of the purpose of putting the bad guys in effeminate clothing ends up hurting the story, because it shouldn’t be a question that we have to ask, and it is irresponsible to leave it to unclear.

There are many other films to investigate. Sometimes clothes are just clothes, but in these dystopian films, they can be as meaningful and telling as a working knowledge of Huxley and Plato, even when the choices don’t quite seem to work.

Lost and Found Horror

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The Blair Witch Project (1999) is the most likely starting point for the “found footage” sub-genre of horror. If you want to nit-pick, the first film to use the found footage concept was the Italian sleazefest Cannibal Holocaust (1980). But the film never pretended that the found footage (filmed by a “lost” documentary crew) was real in our world. Instead, the documentary footage was contained within a narrative that was clearly fictional. The Blair Witch Project, on the other hand, never stopped pretending. Even the marketing campaign (which included a fake documentary on the “legend” of the Blair Witch) passed the film off as real footage of the filmmakers’ last days.

Since Blair Witch there’s been a steady trickle of these films. They are not a new genre so much as a hybrid genre that steals ideas from older horror movies, and combines them with the conceit that the film depicts real events, or at least that the film was produced by individuals who are actually present within the story (usually amateur filmmakers). This means poor lighting, shaky camera-work, and unknown actors who can pass as normal people. But the films still contain the tropes that moviegoers expect from mainstream horror. After The Blair Witch Project (killer in the woods genre) came [REC] and its inferior American remake Quarantine (pseudo-zombie genre), Diary of the Dead (zombie apocalypse genre), Cloverfield (giant monster genre), Apollo 18 (alien genre), and Paranormal Activity (haunted house genre).

But how real is found footage? If I were being stalked by a ghost/slasher/zombie/serial killer/tropical cannibal, the last thing I would do is record my demise for posterity. No offense to my tiny audience, but I don’t give a flying fuck about entertaining you in my final moments. And who in their right mind would waste time  recording the ghost or giant monster that’s trying to kill them (as well as the touching romantic sub-plot during the lulls in the violence)? The common defense of the genre is that we live in the Youtube and cellphone camera age, and the genre simply reflects the fact that we are saturated with amateur video. But amateur footage of protests, crimes, terrorist attacks, etc. tends to be brief, incompetently filmed, and rarely has anything resembling likable characters or a plot. In other words, actual amateur video bares no resemblance to the professionally crafted narratives that lurk underneath the “found footage” concept. And there’s the little fact that it’s impossible to record video of ghosts, zombies, or giant monsters because those creatures don’t exist.

And yet audiences eat this shit up, and I’m right there with them. My favorite set of films in the genre is the Paranormal Activity franchise. The first Paranormal Activity is not particularly innovative. It’s cut from the exact same cloth as a thousand other haunted house movies, and it’s at least as campy as anything starring Vincent Price. But I found it scarier and far more entertaining than The Haunting, Amityville Horror, The Others, or any other haunted house movie that exists in a fictional universe. Paranormal Activity 3 is the perfect example of the genre. The entire premise is ridiculous: a demon is terrorizing a family in 1988, and the dad just happens to be an audio/video expert who rigs his house with video cameras and always walks around with a massive camcorder. The film is unabashedly cheesy, and even includes the old ghost-under-the-sheet gag. But it’s great! The simple plot sucks you in and the old-fashioned scares still work. The viewer quickly forgives the implausibility of a man walking around with a camcorder all the time, because how else would there even be a movie?

It’s not the phony realism that matters, but how that realism connects the audience with a familiar narrative. To put it another way, found footage works not because we belong to the Youtube generation, but because we belong to the Real World generation (youngsters can replace Real World with Survivor or Real Housewives of Who Cares or whatever reality TV series floats your boat). So-called reality TV is quite fake. Real people are encouraged to behave in unnatural ways for the sake of our entertainment. They are less inhibited, more reckless, and generally stupider when in front of the camera. Then a team of professional editors and writers crafts an artificial narrative from countless hours of random shit caught on tape. Through this process reality TV creates the ultimate illusion – that normal people are actually interesting to watch. Normal people can have exciting singing careers, or scheme to win a million dollars, or have lives filled with catfights, hot tub sex, and soap opera drama.

The found footage genre works in much the same way. The pretense that the film is real isn’t so much about fooling people but in bringing the audience further into familiar narratives that they love. The shaky camera and unknown actors create an illusion of reality. Scary and exciting things don’t just happen to movie stars. They can happen to normal people, just like you or me! But this illusion of reality is plastered over a conventional genre film. So the scares are structured in a narrative format that we instantly recognized and appreciate. In movies and in “real life,” a ghost wouldn’t reveal itself right away, but would instead spends several days doing little things to build up the suspense. It would be a disappointment if the “real” haunted house experience lacked the requisite tension and cheap thrills. After all, what’s the point of being haunted by a demon if he doesn’t even do it right?

Tech Messiah

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Tron Legacy
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring…
Jeff Bridges
Garrett Hedlund
Olivia Wilde

I have a confession to make. I’ve never watched the original Tron from beginning to end. Sure, like everyone else I’ve seen bits and pieces on TV. I saw the part with the frisbee and the light cycles. And I remember it had David Warner, one of those great British actors who always appear in the shittiest movies. But I could never sit through the entire thing. It was boring, the special effects looked dated, and I just don’t care that much about the “infinite possibilities” of cyberspace. So why did I watch Tron Legacy? Because it was on Netflix streaming and I had nothing better to do. Spoilers below…

Tron was about a programmer named Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who accidentally transported himself into a computer-generated universe. Once there, he was forced to compete in gladiatorial games for the amusement of a race of sentient programs (a.k.a. humans in silly costumes). He eventually teamed up with the local Spartacus, the titular Tron, and together they overthrew the despotic government.

Tron Legacy picks things up just a few years later. Flynn’s divides his time between raising his son, Sam, and building a better world in his computer. To help him manage the latter task, Flynn creates a virtual doppelganger of himself named Clu (Jeff Bridges with digitally younger face). Everything seems to be going well until the digital universe spontaneously creates a new race of sentient programs, the isomorphic algorithms (ISOs). Flynn sees them as a miracle, but Clu considers them an aberration that will ruin his utopia. So Clu seizes control of the digital universe, kills nearly all the ISOs, and leaves Flynn stranded as a fugitive unable to return to his son.

 

Jeff Bridges as Clu

Flashforward several years. Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is a computer genius like his father, but he’s spoiled and directionless. While he inherited ownership of his father’s company, Encom, Sam would rather ride his cool Ducati than run a business. So he leaves it’s management to boring suits who rip off consumers with overpriced products. Of course Sam has major daddy issues, which leads him to investigate what happened to his father. One thing leads to another, and Sam is transported to the digital universe where he’s quickly arrested and forced to compete in the gladiatorial games (with updated special effects!). Sam is eventually rescued by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the last surviving ISO who was raised by Flynn. Father and son are reunited again, there is much awkward bonding, and they team up to defeat Clu and escape the virtual universe.

Along the way, Flynn essentially gives Quorra to his son because she has some techno-fairy magical nonsense that will revolutionize everything and Sam has to bring her into the real world. Quorra is presumably content with being a tool that the Flynn boys will use to save mankind. I say “presumably” because the filmmakers care little about her motivations (beyond trite shit like wanting to see a sunrise). When Sam returns to the real world, he takes over management of Encom and vows to change the company. So were left with the warm feeling that Sam will use his billions of dollars and techno-magical girlfriend to fix our planet.

 

As popcorn entertainment, Tron Legacy is about average. The special effects are mostly well done, the soundtrack by Daft Punk is great, and attractive women in skin-tight outfits is never a bad thing. On the other hand, the film treats women as mere appendages to men, most of the characters are dull, the plot drags in the middle, and the visual design is lazy. Apparently the inside of a computer looks just like a modern city, but with superfluous running lights everywhere.

To the extent that Tron Legacy moves beyond popcorn and deals with actual ideas, it embraces one core idea above all others: social progress through technological progress. And no other character embodies this idea better than Quorra. She isn’t important as a person. She’s the embodiment for every technological innovation that will usher in the next golden age. She’s a personal computer, a smartphone, the Internet, an iPad, and a cappuccino machine all wrapped up in the body of Olivia Wilde. She will usher in a revolution! But what kind of revolution will it be?

It’s clearly not a Marxist or anarchist revolution. Hardly surprising, given that Disney isn’t in the habit of producing films that advocate the dissolution of mega-corporations like Disney. It isn’t a populist revolution, as the common folk hardly factor into the film. The closest thing to Joe Schmoe is the race of sentient programs in the digital universe, and they’re a decadent, slavish lot. It isn’t a New Agey, “back-to-nature” revolution either. Sam doesn’t give away his fortune or move to a commune. He starts and ends the movie as a billionaire.

But he’s the good kind of billionaire. Good billionaires don’t care about silly things like profitability or market share. They use their wealth (which they undoubtedly earned through hard work and intellect) to fix our world’s problems. And they occasionally beat up criminals too.

So the revolution that Quorra brings is not a revolution of wealth distribution or weath creation, but a “revolution” of wealth investment. The problem with the rich people at the beginning of the film isn’t that they’re rich, but that they only care about becoming slightly richer. Rich people should care about saving the world, preferably by inventing some new technology that fixes all our problems (including the problems created by the last new technology). The rest of us can just sit back and enjoy our gadgets, comfortable in the knowledge that our benevolent overlords and their techno-magic girlfriends have everything well in hand.

A Movie Built on Sand

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This was first posted on Splice Today. I just mentioned it on this really long thread, so thought I’d reproduce it here.
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Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, the argument will go. It’s a derivative, malformed mess, with a plot that manages to be both preposterously ludicrous and tediously predictable. Jake Gyllenhaal is largely wasted as Prince Dastin, a role which requires him to alternate between looking raffishly earnest and earnestly raffish. Gemma Arteton as Princess Tamina does her best Princess Leia impersonation, and succeeds in demonstrating that she can be significantly less sexy than Carrie Fisher even while having a much larger chest. The super-special mystic knife appears to have been purchased from Toys R’Us, and a troop of dark riders have been shamelessly borrowed from the Lord of the Rings films. Except these Dark Riders aren’t called Nazgul. They’re called “Hashashins.” Which, in ancient Persian means, “Assassins who lisp.”

So, okay, it’s true — this is a big, dumb, Hollywood action-adventure vehicle with nothing in its head except things blowing up, swordfights, and pretty actors staring soulfully into each others eyes for a moment before more things blow up.

But you know what? I’m okay with that. Prince of Persia has no lofty ambitions and virtually no pretensions; it isn’t an ironically clever action movie, or a thoughtful action movie, or anything but a breezy summer stunt fest. And within those boundaries, it’s really surprisingly decent. Gyllenhaal has charisma to burn, and he leaps from battle to dashing close-up to battle with winning ease. He has no chemistry with Gemma Arteton, but then, they hardly have any love scenes. And really, even if she is more pert than smoldering, and has not a single line worth reciting — well, let’s just say I’ve been waiting to see more of her ever since her head-turning walk-on in Quantum of Solace. The sword fights are well choreographed, and many of the set pieces are entertaining and creative. One of the highlights is early in the film, when Dastin scales a wall using crossbow bolts fired just ahead of his ascent by his retainers.

Moreover, the writing is surprisingly good, in a workmanlike way. The opening scene explains Prince Dastin’s background (he’s a street urchin adopted by the king) in a burst of action-filled exposition that’s as professionally efficient an origin story as I think I’ve seen on film. The close relationship between the king (Ronald Pickup) and Dastin is only developed in a couple of scenes, but Gyllenhaal sells it; he looks genuinely stricken at his father’s death, and you feel throughout the film that he is motivated by the king’s memory. The dialogue for ostrich-racer, small time thug, and anti-tax activist Sheik Amar (Alfred Molina) is even witty. A heartfelt lament in which Amar declares his determination to keep a close watch on a suicidal ostrich lest she “do something stupid” is, for example, laugh-out-loud funny — and his feeling embrace of said suicidal ostrich is certainly the movie’s romantic high point.

I think my favorite part of the film, though, is the ending. [Warning! Spoilers follow!]

Prince of Persia’s denouement involves the mystical turning back of the clock practically to the film’s beginning, effectively erasing the entire action of the movie. Dastin foils the villain even before his plot can begin, and every meaningful emotional moment of the narrative is ruthlessly disappeared. The king doesn’t die. Dastin’s brothers, both of whom were murdered in his arms at a moment of reconciliation, don’t die either. The honorable black sidekick doesn’t inexplicably sacrifice his life for the stupid lighter-skinned peoples. Sheik Amar doesn’t bow to the remorseless logic of lovable rogues and show an inner nobility. The Princess doesn’t fall in love with Dastin, nor does she sacrifice herself for him and the world (though Dastin gets to court and marry her anyway). In short, nothing happens. You get the happy ending without any of the events leading to it.

Which seems perfectly reasonable. I mean, I liked the king; I don’t want him to get killed. The brothers were fun too; I don’t need to see them offed. And lord knows I really, really don’t want to see the honorable black sidekick do that thing that all the black sidekicks have to do. Why not just wipe it out? It’s all just a fluffy fantasy anyway. It kept me cheerfully entertained for two hours. It wasn’t real, it had nothing to say, it’s over and there are no consequences to speak of. Would that all Hollywood action movies were equally forthright.

Deep Red

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This is the second part of my discussion of Italian giallo films. The first part can be found here.
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Deep Red a.k.a. Profondo Rosso (1975)
Directed by Dario Argento

Movie reviews usually begin with a summary of the plot. Which is a problem in this case, because the plot of Deep Red makes no fucking sense. It begins in Rome at a conference sponsored by the European Congress on Parapsychology. It may sound far-fetched, but it’s every bit as scientific as phrenology or evolutionary psychology. The marquee attraction is a German psychic named Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril) who entertains the crowd by reading their minds. But someone in the crowd is a murderer, and Helga stupidly announces this to the audience even though she fails to identify the killer. And so the killer tracks Helga home and chops her but good with a cleaver.

 

 

The first person to discover the body is English pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings). Marcus decides to solve the murder all on his own because he apparently has nothing better to do, and pianists are naturally gifted as criminal investigators (and since this is a giallo, the police are worse than useless). Marcus is helped by a reporter, Gianna (Daria Nicolodi), but is warned to drop the matter by his friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia). Marcus enlists the aid of a parapsychologist, Dr. Giordani (Glauco Mauri), and uncovers a clue to the killer’s identity by reading a book on urban legends. The book conveniently (and implausibly) identifies a house once owned by the killer, which leads to several more fortuitous discoveries, eventually revealing that the killer is none other than Carlo’s crazy-ass mother, Martha (Clara Calamai). Back when Carlo was a little boy, Martha murdered her husband when he threatened to send her to an asylum. Martha tries to cover her tracks, first by killing Helga, then by stalking Marcus and killing everyone that he drags into his investigation, including the author of the urban legends book and Dr. Giordani.

If I were to judge the film on its merits as a mystery, it would be a failure. No amount of gore can cover up a preposterous plot and mediocre acting. And yet I liked this movie.

About two-thirds of the way into the story, Carlo attempts to kill Marcus so his mother’s actions will never come to light. Carlo even accuses Marcus of being responsible for all the deaths. If only he had minded his own business, no one except the psychic would have died. It sounds like the standard villain monologue, blame the hero for everything, etc., etc. … except everything Carlo says is true. Martha is crazy, but she only killed to hide her identity and cover up the earlier murder of her husband. Psychic Helga was doomed, but Martha killed the other victims only after Marcus got them involved with his amateur sleuthing. Is the viewer supposed to agree with Carlo and condemn Marcus? Not likely. Carlo suffers his own violent death just a few minutes later, which illustrates the primary appeal of the film. Marcus is an idiot, but he’s an idiot who moves the plot forward. And the plot provides a simple framework for the death scenes.

 

 

 

While the entire film is visually attractive, the death scenes are labors of love by Argento. They’re gratuitous, elaborately staged, and almost dream-like. When Dr. Giordani is killed, he isn’t just stabbed. There’s a robotic (?) puppet charging at him, and a shot from the killer’s POV as she grabs Giordani, and a close up of his mouth being jammed into several sharp corners, then a close up shot of the gleaming knife that tracks it’s motion, followed by the actual stabbing. And this mayhem is accompanied by a funky rock soundtrack courtesy of Goblin. Carlo’s death scene is even crazier. While escaping from the police he wanders into the street just as a garbage truck approaches. Any other director would simply have the truck hit Carlo, but Argento allows Carlo to barely evade being hit only to get caught by a hook that for reasons unknown is hanging from the back of the truck. So poor Carlo is dragged through the streets, and the truck makes every turn as sharply as possible so that Carlo will careen into the curb. His physical destruction is capped by a car running over his head.

The death scenes feel disconnected from the slow-paced mystery that contains them, as if a completely different movie takes over when the point-of-view shifts from Marcus to Martha.* But then Marcus is a drearily sane character who inhabits a sub-par crime thriller, while Martha is this delightfully insane monster who thinks she’s in a slasher film. Marcus lives in a world of clues and motives, Martha lives in a world where the violence is obsessive, unlimited, and always viewed from the best angle. Her blood is too red to be real, but who cares? It’s better than real.

Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Terror Train, Scream – countless slasher films have followed in Deep Red’s trail, combining the violence of grindhouse horror with the “whodunnit” mystery plot. And like Deep Red, most slasher films fail as mysteries. The first Friday the 13th, for example, resembles a giallo murder mystery, including shooting the murders from the killer’s POV to hide her identity. but the film doesn’t even introduce the villain until the final act, and since all the other characters (minus the heroine) are dead by that point, there’s no mystery as to who the killer is. Even the half-way clever Terror Train, which at least has a red herring or two, suffers in comparison to traditional mysteries such as Murder on the Orient Express.

It shouldn’t be impossible to produce a decent mystery that also happens to have gory deaths, but why would a mystery writer bother with extreme violence? It adds nothing to the plot and more than likely will become a distraction. And from a commercial perspective, it will almost certainly drive away a portion of the target audience. In contrast, slasher filmmakers lack the subtlety and restraint that mystery requires. The adolescent love of gore, a desire to scare the audience (or at least startle them), and an inexperience with the mystery genre collectively produce barely coherent plots that string together a few gruesome murders.

But in the hands of Argento, at least those murders will look good.

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* Carlo’s death scene is the one exception, because no other character is present to observe his demise.

Politics, Pleasure, and Time

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Usually when you think about the politics of art, you’re thinking about ideology. Nadim Damluji’s recent post in which he questioned the representations of arabs in Craig Thompson’s Habibi is a case in point. So are Jeet Heer’s comments from a while back about Eisner’s use of racial stereotypes. Another example is Alyssa Rosenberg’s recent post where she argues that the movie In Time articulates a surprising and pointed critique of capitalism. I was more skeptical about In Time,, but either way, in instances like these, the political charge of a work comes from the point it’s making, either intentionally or otherwise. The politics of art is what the art says.

There’s another way of looking at politics in art, though. Recently I read this pdf by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna titled “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” Like the title says, the paper is a study of the effect of violence in film on violent crime rates. Here’s the abstract:

Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field. We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6 P.M. and 12 A.M., a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1% to 1.3%. After exposure to the movie, between 12 A.M. and 6 A.M., violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption. The results emphasize that media exposure affects behavior not only via content, but also because it changes time spent in alternative activities. The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings. Our estimates suggest that in the short run, violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend. Although our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects, we find no evidence of medium-run effects up to three weeks after initial exposure.

What Dahl and DellaVigna found was that the movies had an important effect not through what they said, but through the amount of time they took up. People who are seeing violent movies are, presumably, people who are disproportionately interested in violence (i.e., for all intents and purposes, young men.) If these people interested in violence are watching a movie, they are not committing acts of violence. Moreover, they are not drinking, and therefore are not priming themselves to commit more, and more violent acts of violence. The ideological content of the film may be anti-capitalism or racism or the null-set; in terms of actual violent acts committed, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is butts in chairs.

Another example of this dynamic is discussed in Anne Allison’s book Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Allison talks at length about the Japanese obento, a lunch which mother’s prepare for their children in nursery school. The obentos are extremely elaborate; the dishes are to be aesthetically and nutritionally balanced. Moreover, children at school must eat all of their obento, and must do so within a prescribed time period. Mothers, therefore, work to make the obentos attractive and easy to eat. Food is cut into small, easily eatable pieces and is often shaped into cute figures (smiley faces, ducks, crabs, worms) which will entice the child.

As Allison notes, this is an extremely time-intensive process.

Women spend what seems to be an inordinate amount of time on the production of this one item. As an experienced obento maker myself, I can attest to the intense attention and energy devoted to this one chore. On the average, mothers spend twenty-five to forty-five minutes every morning cooking, preparing, and assembling the contents of one obento for one nursery school child. In addition, the previous day they had planned, shopped, and often organized a supper meal with leftovers in mind for the next day’s obento. Frequently women discuss obento ideas with other mothers, scan obento cookbooks or magazines for recipes, buy or make objects with which to decorate or contain (part of) the obento, and perhaps make small food portions to freeze and retrieve for future obentos.

Obentos are very much an aesthetic product; Allison points out that mothers in Japan often express their creativity through the creation of elaborate, funny, cute, and beautiful obentos. But the sheer time and energy required to make the obentos — and more broadly, to shepherd children through the highly regimented and demanding educational system — is itself a form of social control. Allison reports one mother saying that “being a mother in Japan meant being a mother to the exclusion of almost anything else.”

Allison points out that the mothers she spoke to weren’t frustrated; they were devoted to their children, to being good mothers, and even to the pleasurable aesthetic frisson which inhered in creating beautiful obento’s. Similarly, movie-goers aren’t coerced into seeing violent movies; they go because they want to, because they enjoy it, and even because they’d rather see a violent movie than engage in actual violence themselves. Art is pleasurable, and people are moved by pleasure.

In particular, they are moved to spend their time, whether in watching a film or in making an obento or in typing out a blog post. Art manipulates, not just through its message, but through the energy and hours you devote to consuming it or creating it. In fact, you could say that art and its pleasure consume and create you, whether you be blogger or non-violent watcher or dedicated mother. Maybe the politics of art is not really meaning at all. Maybe it’s praxis.