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Women and Children First … To Die!

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Netflix streaming allows for an eclectic diet of movies. You can view not just Hollywood crap, but crap from all over the world. Recently, I’ve been watching Italian gialli films from the 1970s. Giallo (meaning “yellow,” a reference to the genre’s origins in a series of paperbacks with yellow covers) is a sub-genre of the crime thriller notable for its exceptional levels of violence. A giallo plot is typically a murder mystery with a few red herrings, gratuitous sex, and a chase sequence or two. In other words, hardly different than the pulp crime novels familiar to most Americans. But the lasting impressions of these films has less to do with the “whodunnit” plot mechanics than with the gore. Murder sequences are often long, bloody, and elaborate.

Of the four gialli that I watched, Profundo Rosso (Deep Red) was far and away the best. I’ll discuss it in my next post, but for now I’ll focus on three other films: The Black Belly of the Tarantula, Don’t Torture a Duckling, and Who Saw Her Die? Normally I’d give a spoiler warning, but these films are from the 70s, so deal with it.

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The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)
Directed by Paolo Cavara
Starring Giancarlo Giannini, Ezio Marano, Barbara Bouchet, and Barbara Bach

 

Genre entertainment can be roughly grouped into three categories: works that fail to satisfy the bare minimum expectations of the genre, works that transcend the genre, and works that embody the genre so precisely that the details become blurry, and instead you’re left talking about tropes. As you’ve probably already guessed, The Black Belly of the Tarantula falls into the third category. It has a murder mystery – someone is murdering impossibly attractive women (including a Bond Girl). It has a detective (Giancarlo Giannini). It is extremely violent. And it is utterly sleazy and misogynistic.

Giallo, and the crime genre more broadly, is not known for its feminism. Women are objects, women are tramps, and women are targets. In the case of the first victim, she’s all three. The character (played by the gorgeous Barbara Bouchet) is on screen for little more than 20 minutes and half of that time is spent stark naked. The other half of the time is spent teasing her blind masseur, cheating on her husband, and then being terrorized and murdered. And I don’t mean anything as prosaic as being shot. The name of the film refers to a wasp that paralyzes tarantulas with its stinger and then plants its eggs in the tarantula’s abdomen. The killer uses a needle to inject the wasp’s venom into his victims’ spine and paralyzes them. He then rips off their clothes and slowly cuts them open with a knife while they’re still alive.

The filmmakers engage in the pretense that everyone is horrified by this brutality. But brutality, directed at women, is the whole point. The murder sequences are lengthy, gory, and devoted to the display of female flesh as it is slowly penetrated by the killer’s blade. While undeniably loathsome, the intense misogyny gives the murder scenes a demented energy that’s absent in the rest of the film. The tedious domestic scenes of detective and wife and the film’s convoluted plot are poor attempts to legitimize exploitation.

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Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Starring Tomas Milian, Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan, and Marc Porel


Sometimes killing women just isn’t exploitative enough. Thank God for children.

Don’t Torture a Duckling is about a murderer who targets young boys in a small Sicilian village. There are suspects and red herrings everywhere. The killer could be the town idiot, the local witch, the overly-protective priest, or the big city harlot (Barbara Bouchet again). The police are worse than useless, and most of the detective work is done by a reporter, Martelli (Tomas Milian).

While Don’t Torture a Duckling has superficial similarities to The Black Belly of the Tarantula, the latter is nothing more than competent genre hackery with a dose of sexism. The former is a film with an actual point to make, namely that religion and superstition are terrible things. For example, one of the suspects is a gypsy witch (Florinda Bolkan) who confesses to the murder. But when the police ask her how she did it, she admits that she merely “cursed” the boys with voodoo dolls and has no idea how they actually died. The witch is not a killer but a pitiful joke, but that doesn’t save her from the superstitious townsfolk. In a scene reminiscent of medieval witch hunts, the fathers of the slain boys corner the witch and beat her to death in a gruesome sequence.

In contrast, the thoroughly modern reporter and the big city girl, Patrizia, are far more sympathetic. The treatment of Patrizia is notable in how it contrasts to treatment of women in The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Initially, Patrizia seems to be another giallo sexpot, teasing the young boys with her beauty. The film even hints that she might be the killer. But it turns out that Patrizia is neither a seductress nor a murderer – she’s just a harmless pothead who was banished to the country because of a drug arrest. The modern girl actually turns out to be a hero of sorts, and she even helps Martelli solve the mystery.

The murderer turns out to be the village priest, Don Alberto (Marc Porel), who was killing the boys to “protect” them from sexuality and ensure that they would go to heaven with stainless souls. While attempting to kill another child (his own sister!) by throwing her off a cliff, Alberto is instead pushed off by Martelli. This leads to an overdone death sequence where Alberto (actually a dummy that looks nothing like Marc Porel) slowly falls to his death as jagged rocks tear his face off, all the while flashbacks reveal his nonsensical motives.

 

Duckling Finale

Up with modernity, down with superstition! But the film’s point of view doesn’t survive scrutiny. Catholic priests have committed horrible acts throughout history, not least of which is the multinational child abuse scandal, but I can’t find any examples of a priest who actually murdered several children to help them avoid sin. Dying young to escape sin is simply not a Catholic obsession. Sin is unavoidable perhaps, but the penitent can always obtain forgiveness. So the filmmakers essentially invent a flaw in Catholicism that they can then throw off a mountain. One last point: the assertion that modern society is less violent than traditional society is ridiculous, especially in the country that invented Fascism (cheap shot, I know).

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Who Saw Her Die? (1972)
Directed by Aldo Lado
Starring George Lazenby, Anita Strindberg, Adolfo Celi, Nicoletta Elmi, and Alessandro Haber

 

More kid killing!

Who Saw Her Die Opening

Who Saw Her Die? is yet another story about a psycho killer who targets children (this time little girls instead of little boys). Franco Serpieri (George Lazenby) is an artist in Venice living apart from his daughter, Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi), and estranged wife (Anita Strindberg). When Roberta comes to visit, she is immediately targeted by a mysterious killer wearing a black dress and veil. Poor Roberta gets offed fairly early in the film, and Franco becomes an amateur detective to find out who murdered his daughter (because the police are, as usual, useless).

In most respects, Who Saw Her Die? is superior to the above two films. Venice proves to be an excellent locale for film noir. Aldo Lado turns the city of canals into a city of dark passages and winding alleys. The characters are a bit more developed than in the other gialli, and Lazenby puts in a decent performance as the grieving father. There are also a couple of wonderfully off-beat moments, as when Franco interrogates a man while playing a game of table tennis. And the score by Ennio Morricone (who also composed the score for The Black Belly of the Tarantula) is a trippy, addictive mix of rock and children’s choir. Unfortunately, the filmmakers never quite get a handle on how to incorporate the score into the film, and certain riffs such as the killer’s theme are overused.

The early scenes are kinda brilliant in a manipulative and evil way. Every time Franco leaves Roberta alone outside, the killer shows up and begins to close in.  But just as the killer is about to grab Roberta, Franco returns in the nick of time, completely oblivious to the fact that he just saved his daughter. But then Franco leaves Roberta alone to play outside just a little too long, and the killer gets her. First message to parents: your child is being targeted by a serial killer at all times! Second message to parents: do not leave your child outside while you get a blowjob from your mistress. You’ll just suffer dramatic guilt afterward when your child’s corpse is fished out of the water. On the plus side, your guilt will move the plot forward.

As in Don’t Torture a Duckling, there are multiple suspects and red herrings. Suspects include an evil businessman, a child molesting lawyer, a priest … I won’t waste your time, of course it’s the priest. But it gets better! He’s not just a priest but a cross-dressing priest. According to the Psycho Rule, that multiplies the evil by a factor of four. The film chickens out at the end though, when it is revealed that the killer was only impersonating a priest. The filmmakers were likely worried about offending Catholics. Though I suspect they were not so worried about implying that priests are murderers (Don’t Torture a Duckling was released in the same year) and more worried about implying that priests are cross-dressers. Some insinuations are beyond the pale.

Perhaps if cross-dressers had their own country and a global institution with millions of adherents, filmmakers might think twice about portraying them as degenerate child-killers.

Ten Types of Stupid

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Stupidity Type I: The Thoughtless Consumer

Last Saturday I purchased a ticket for Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon. I admit that I did this of my own free will, even though I knew the movie was about robots that turn into overpriced toys, and even though I was supporting the career of Michael Bay. I was bored, my friends were bored, and we had disposable income that must be spent.

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Stupidity Type II: Jingoism

The Autobots (good Transformers) are apparently working for the U.S. government, which includes destroying an “illegal” nuclear weapon site in “The Middle East.” I’m fairly certain there’s more than one country in “The Middle East,” but the movie doesn’t specify which one. Nor does it specify under which law the nuclear site is “illegal,” but I’m going to assume its the Muslims Can’t Have Anything Unless We Say So Act (MCHAUWSSA). But all that really matters is that the Autobots blow up some uppity brown people, proving that they’re the good guys.

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Stupidity Type III: Pathetic Male Fantasies

Shia LaBeouf returns as Sam Witwicky, who’s in a serious relationship with The Girl (I can’t remember the character’s name, and it doesn’t really matter). The Girl is insanely gorgeous, gainfully employed, and quite wealthy, given that she can afford a building (not just an apartment, an entire fucking building) in the heart of Washington, D.C. Sam is average-looking, unemployed, and spends the first hour of the movie constantly complaining that the world does not appreciate his awesomeness. Naturally, The Girl is crazy about Sam. She allows him to live rent free in her palace, props up his ego by getting herself captured (so he can rescue her), and she spends the entire movie reassuring him that he is, indeed, awesome, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

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Stupidity Type IV: Infantile Nostalgia

Leonard Nimoy does the voice of Sentinel Prime. Or maybe it was Spock Prime, I can’t remember. More importantly, Nimoy also did a voice in the animated Transformers movie back in 1986. Do you know who else was in it? Robert Stack! And Judd Nelson! And Eric Idle! And Casey Kasem! And Orson Welles! And the soundtrack had a song by Weird Al’ Yankovic! That shit was cool. Oh, and one of the characters actually said “shit,” which was also cool. Best. Transformers movie. Ever.

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Stupidity Type V: Homophobia

The last Transformers movie was racist. But mocking black people through jive-talking robots is no longer acceptable. It’s okay to mock gay people though, because queerness is funny. Like the scene where the crazy Chinese guy drops his pants and rubs up against Witwicky in the workplace bathroom, and then his boss (John Malkovitch!) walks in, and he thinks Witwicky is gay! It’s funny because Witwicky is a supermodel-dating straight dude. And there’s the character named Dutch (played by Alan Tudyk, for all you Browncoats), who’s the very exemplar of the mincing queer stereotype. The movie doesn’t overtly acknowledge that he’s gay though, because that would make people uncomfortable.

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Stupidity Type VI: Enthusiasm for Mass Destruction

I’m glad that Chicago got fucked up. Every alien invasion movie takes place in either New York or Washington. America has plenty of great cities, and they deserve to be devastated too.

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Stupidity Type VII: Music Videos

Michael Bay began his career doing music videos, which is where he learned that no shot should last more than three seconds. Who needs pacing or spatial relationships when you have rapid-fire editing to remind you that every scene is just as exciting as the last one? One hour into this extended music video and I started to feel dizzy. Another hour in and my eyes felt like they were popping out of my skull. And there was still another half hour to go. By the end of the movie my brain was leaking out my ears but at least it no longer hurt.

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Stupidity Type VIII: Bill O’Reilly

Bill O’Reilly has a cameo.

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Stupidity Type IX: Anthropocentrism

In a movie called Transformers, you would think that the big climax would involve the titular Transformers. But actually, the big climax is a fight between Witwicky and McDreamy (a.k.a. Patrick Dempsey). Someone thought that the audience actually wanted to see that rather than more scenes of giant robots smashing Chicago. I find that doubtful, but maybe people hate Grey’s Anatomy so much they want to see McDreamy beaten up by the crappy lead character? I’ve never watched Grey’s Anatomy so I can’t say I hate it, but I do hate the nickname McDreamy. The point is humans always have to be the center of the story, even when they all suck.

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Stupidity Type X: It’s Not Evil When Good Guys Do It

At the end of the film, Optimus Prime kills Spock Prime. And it isn’t “heat of battle” killing. It’s “busting a cap in Spock’s head while he’s injured and begging for mercy” killing. But it’s okay, because Optimus is the good guy. And after 157 minutes of mind-numbing idiocy, would it really be appropriate to include an ending with taste, decency, and a modicum of intelligence? This was the only way Transformers 3 could end and remain true to its principles.

X-Men: First Class Grades on a Curve

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X-Men: First Class
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Starring…
James McAvoy (Prof. Charles Xavier)
Michael Fassbender (Magneto)
Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Shaw)
January Jones (Emma Frost)
Rose Byrne (Moira MacTaggert)
Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique)

[Spoilers ahead, you have been warned]

Another weekend, another superhero movie. No magic hammers or wishing rings in this one. Instead, there are mutants, Soviets, and Kevin Bacon. The story is a jumble of three loosely related plots: the origin story of Prof. Xavier and the X-Men, the efforts by Xavier and company to foil Sebastian Shaw’s genocidal plans, and (by far the best storyline) Magneto’s quest for vengeance against Shaw (a Nazi collaborator). All that, plus a sexist homage to the Forgetfulness Kiss from Superman 2.

I’ll note that X-Men: First Class (XMFC) was better than Thor, though that’s setting the bar fairly low. And it was better than X-men Last Stand, though that’s setting the bar so low one has to be careful not to trip over it. Thor had a tedious moral about humility, but at the end of the day the movie was about nothing more complicated than Chris Hemsworth’s abs. XMFC is a movie that wants to express an opinion on important topics, including vengeance, intolerance, and minority rights. Like the comic it was based on, XMFC explores these topics through metaphor, but the results leave much to be desired.

Since it’s introduction, the X-Men comic has relied upon metaphor to imbue the concept of mutants with social relevance. In the early 60’s, the X-Men were a metaphor for the civil rights movement. Mutants were “hated and feared” by the rest of the world, but the X-Men fought to protect humanity and demonstrate that mutants could be loyal, tax-paying citizens. Mutants were black people … except that all the mutants were white. The comic celebrated tolerance, equality, and the loftier goals of the civil rights movement, but without ever acknowledging the movement’s existence. I’ll revisit this problem below.

Over the course of the 80’s and 90’s, the mutant metaphor shifted from race to queerness (this change was most evident in the Legacy Virus storyline, an HIV-like disease that only targeted mutants). The change may have been driven in part by a genuine commitment to LGBT rights, even at a time when public hostility to queerness was overt and widespread. But the shift was also necessitated by the success of the civil rights movement. In popular media, black characters were no longer relegated to the role of servant or comic relief. Even in the backwoods that is superhero comics, black heroes were becoming more numerous and prominent. The most prominent of all was the X-Men’s Storm, who led the team for nearly a decade. In a world with black heroes, addressing race issues primarily through metaphor is difficult to justify.*

The X-Men have always been a metaphor for teen alienation. While all teenagers occasionally feel hated or oppressed, most comic readers are nerds (also, geeks, dweebs, and dorks) who feel especially awkward and unappreciated. So what better escapist fantasy than a world where all the misfits have superpowers that they use to save the world? Plus, they get to hang out with their fellow (improbably attractive) misfits at a posh school called Hogwarts Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The makers of XMFC clearly understood the teen alienation metaphor, which was why all the mutants bitched and moaned about being freaks and outcasts. Then they went to the School for Gifted Youngsters, and they suddenly realized that they’re young, beautiful, and have awesome superpowers.

Yet for a film that’s set in the 60’s, there were surprisingly few references to the civil rights movement. Perhaps acknowledging the African American struggle for equal rights would raise too many questions, such as how would the emergence of a superhuman race affect relations between normal blacks and whites? Would race relations improve when faced with a common evolutionary threat? Or would ancient prejudices persist even within the mutant community? These are interesting questions to explore, but that would require a very different kind of movie (one where fewer things blow up).**

While it largely ignores race, XMFC takes full advantage of the queerness metaphor. Because mutants are hated and feared, they must find ways to blend in with the “norms,” though they do so only by denying who they truly are. Mystique’s character arc is largely an “out and proud” storyline. As a shapeshifter, she can easily blend in, but only by constantly hiding her natural, blue form. By the end of the film, she’s embraced her gorgeous blue self. There’s also a moment where Prof. Xavier accidentally “outs” another mutant who works for the CIA, which leads to a humorous dig at “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And there’s an obvious overlap of the queerness metaphor with the teen metaphor. After all, what subset of teens feels more hated and misunderstood than those struggling with their sexual identity?

But metaphor only goes so far. As I mentioned above, the X-Men comic largely abandoned the civil rights metaphor as broader cultural attitudes changed and black characters entered the mainstream. Similarly, attitudes regarding the LGBT community have changed enormously over the past few decades. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will (probably, eventually, hopefully?) be repealed, and a majority of Americans now support gay marriage. So instead of veiled references to queerness, why not include an actual queer character in the ensemble cast? Hell, the film could have gone the safe route by including a lipstick lesbian. Not exactly freaking out the norms, but it’s better than nothing. I’ll also point out that  filmmakers can’t fall back on the excuse that the source material gives them nothing to work with. There are at least a handful of queer X-Men that I can name off the top of my head. Why not use Northstar? He’s gay … and Canadian! Who doesn’t like Canadians? But just as blacks were nonexistent in the early X-Men comics, so queers are nonexistent in XMFC. In all likelihood queer characters were excluded because of the fear that a sizable minority of consumers would refuse to see a movie that promoted “alternative lifestyles.” So the (presumably liberal) filmmakers expressed their support for LGBT rights, but only in a way that wouldn’t hurt profits. Using the mutant-as-queer metaphor seems less a subversive or daring act than a cowardly one.

X-Men: First Class reveals the limits of political expression in the current crop of big, summer blockbusters. Movies can toy with political views, but even the least controversial opinions must be expressed in a vague or indirect manner. It’s far safer, and more profitable, to pretend that you have no opinion at all.

 

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* There are thoughtful ways to use the mutant-as-minority race metaphor in the 21st century, and Grant Morrison did so during his X-Men run. But it requires an intelligent writer with an appreciation for how racial identity and race relations have evolved since the 60s.

** Even if the metaphor was present, it’s hard to overlook that, of the two mutants of color, one gets killed and the other goes evil. Celebrating racial equality in the abstract doesn’t mean much when characters of color are still thrown under the bus.

Wonk vs. Pol

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This was first published on Splice Today.
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Al Gore is a wonk—for a politician. But politicians aren’t real wonks. They’re doughy, be-suited wonk wannabes; plodding poseurs with pasteboard and tinsel craniums. When politician wonks go to the think tank locker rooms, the real wonks snicker and tape “Kick Me!” to the backs of their slide rules.

The documentary Cool It is the revenge of the real wonk—specifically of Bjorn Lomborg, author, statistician, environmentalist and native of Denmark, where they take their wonks seriously. Lomborg’s controversial thesis in Cool It (first floated in his 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist) is, essentially, that Gore and his ilk are full of hooey. Global warming will not cause the apocalypse in the foreseeable future, and the effort to frighten people into lowering carbon emissions is disingenuous and misguided.

Lomborg doesn’t deny that global warming is occurring and that it is a serious long-term problem. Instead, he notes that doomsday scenarios (20 ft. sea level rise! Devastating hurricanes once a week!) are overblown, and that the efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gases through legislative caps are ineffectual. Instead, he argues we should funnel the massive amounts of money it would take to lower temperatures by a fraction of a degree over the course of a century into more productive ventures. He suggests, for example, developing renewable energy resources and fighting poverty, malaria, and other scourges in the developing world.

Cool It has more ambitions than merely setting the record straight on global warming, though. One of the talking heads that Cool It drops on the unsuspecting viewer notes with the slightly condescending chuckle of the large-brained that Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a “great piece of propaganda.” No doubt it was. So is this. Cool It uses, in fact, many of the same hagiographic tactics as its more famous predecessor. We see Bjorn biking healthily through Denmark, chatting earnestly with impoverished children in third world nations, and puncturing bloviating politicians with his rapier wit. We get porn-movie close-ups of his book as voiceovers speak sternly of its controversial and brave counter-intuitiveness. The movie even trots out Lomborg’s Alzheimer-afflicted mother for a few scenes—because nothing adds depth to a wonk’s character like a little family tragedy.

Bjorn may be a bouncing boy genius, but he’s not the only one. The movie has enough reverence for contrarians to spread its shining pixie dust all across the wonkosphere, breathlessly rushing from a plan to cool the world’s cities by painting them white to a plan to cool the earth by spraying particulate matter into the stratosphere by balloon to a plan to turn algae into fuel, and on and on. Economists will tell us what to invest in and researchers teleologically deliver the goods. “The solution is us!” one scientist proclaims. And by “us” he doesn’t mean you and me, child. He means the wonks.

The wonks always think the solution is them, of course. Leave it to wonks and they’ll reason and invent and statistic until our problems are all solved. Of course, one could argue that many of our problems were caused by wonks in the first place. World Bank economists are not generally hailed as saviors in the developing world; the technological miracle of massive irrigation projects has in many places intensified water crises; the massive population boom enabled by modernization in Africa pushed humans into forested areas where, it seems likely, they came in contact with the simian-born HIV virus. Advances can have unintended consequences. But so what? As one cantankerous bearded fellow notes, you may not trust the wonks, but you don’t have a better solution do you? Unless you do, he sneers, “Don’t stop me!”

As it happens, I don’t have any particular desire to stop Angry Bearded Guy. I agree with the film that politicians are largely useless. To the best I’ve been able to determine from doing a moderate amount of research on the topic over the years, global warming really is not an imminent millenarian threat. Lomborg’s suggestions—stop scaring people; stop calling for useless individual actions like replacing light bulbs, invest money wisely—all seem reasonable.

But I wish we could agree to those solutions without engaging in rampant wonkolatry. Because the fact is, wonks are as stupid, as duplicitous, and as self-impressed as the rest of us—a fact this movie inadvertently demonstrates quite clearly. The end isn’t nigh, but neither should we necessarily put our faith in the convenient development of timely techno miracles. And you know what you call a wonk who wants your trust? A politician.

No Face in the Mirror

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“And what does Hollow Man give us apart from a gripping genre exercise? Moviegoing as leering and chortling over crushed mice.” Jonathan Rosenbaum

I just saw Paul Verhoeven’s “Hollow Man”. On first glance (not glance?) it works more or less the way Jonathan Rosembaum says. Scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) figures out a way to make himself invisible, and then uses said invisibility to realize his sadistic rape fantasies while the viewer simultaneously enjoys said fantasies and wags his (presumably) finger at them. The emblematic moment here is the scene (cut from the theatrical release, but restored on DVD) where Rhona Mitra acts out being raped while the viewer fills in the invisible Sebastian. Shot POV, it’s movie-viewer-as-rapist analogy couldn’t be much clearer. Mitra thrashes and shrieks for nobody but the camera. With the rapist transparent, the point of the exercise becomes all too visible. It’s not Sebastian, but the director who is raping her for our elucidation and enjoyment. When the camera lingers on her confused whimpering form following the rape, the answer to her unstated question, Who? is obviously supposed to be “Us.”

So “Hollow Man” is all about implicating the viewer, as the-lack-that-is-not-there provides the excuse for stripping Elizabeth Shue, playing with Kim Dickens’ nipple, and bloodily killing a mouse, a dog, and assorted humans. The Hollow Man is the absent body hollowed out of everything except desire; the full-body-castrati who has exchanged the penis for the phallus/power. The “phase shift” the scientists all gobbledygook about is not just a transformation from seen to un; it’s a move across the plane of the screen — a transformation from movie actor to movie watcher.

All of which is to say that the metaphor is clever. Unfortunately, clever only takes you so far. “Hollow Man” is willing to show the transparent voyeurism of its pulp narrative — but it never actually questions that narrative itself. As a result, all the “implicating the viewer” seems more like hand-waving than actual moral commitment — just a way for Verhoeven and his viewers to have their genre cake while feeling smugly self-aware of it.

The main problem is that, while the movie’s visuals and set pieces raise questions about viewer investment, the narrative itself is much more conventional. In particular, Sebastian is a really predictable power-crazed mad scientist. Even before his transformation, he’s an egocentric leering bastard who refers to himself as God and leches after his neighbor and his ex. Turning invisible doesn’t change him so much as it allows him to release his inner megalomaniac. His final shift to unstoppable insane slasher villain is unbelievable only because unstoppable insane slasher villains aren’t believable. There’s nothing in his character that would make you doubt it.

The point here is that while viewers may occasionally have a stake in Sebastian’s voyeurism, they never have a stake in Sebastian himself. Rape fantasies are not actually rape. One of the differences is that lots of people have rape fantasies while only rapists commit rape. That’s certainly what we tell ourselves, anyway, and “Hollow Man” is happy to go along, providing lots of entertaining voyeurism for the fans while gruesomely punishing the creepy rapist who, we are assured, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Jonathan Rosenbaum thinks the film dings the viewer for “leering and chortling” — but he rather passes over the fact that the most cathartic violence in the film is directed not against mice, but against Sebastian himself, who is lit on fire as Elizabeth Shue triumphantly tells him he’s not God.

In contrast, consider something like John Carpenter’s “Christine.” In that film, we initially pity and identify with Arnie Cunningham, the nerdy protagonist. Because we like Arnie, we want him to succeed — to get his act together, get the girl, and get revenge on his enemies. True to our wishes, the film supplies him with all he wants, with the caveat that he simultaneously turns into a monster. Our narrative investment and desires make Arnie what he is, which raises questions about what our narrative investments and desires make of us.

There are other films that work this way too — Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” for example, where the likable Jeff Goldblum becomes a subhuman insect. But “The Hollow Man” takes a much easier route. Sebastian is never the vulnerable kid or quirky nerdy scientist whose striving is our striving; we never see him as weak and hope for him to get strong. He’s always already the evil daddy-thing; the smug sadistic overlord we want to destroy. And destroying him is just what we get to do, cheering Elizabeth Shue on as she outsmarts and then satisfyingly slaughters him. His death is a straightforward triumph, untrammeled by any considerations of his possible humanity. In Hollow Man, when you look at the bad guy, you don’t see yourself.

Thor: God of Thunder … God of Lightning!

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Thor
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Starring:
Chris Hemsworth (Thor)
Natalie Portman (Jane Foster)
Tom Hiddleston (Loki)
Anthony Hopkins (Odin)
Kat Dennings (Darcy)
Stellan Skarsgard (Erik Selvig)
Jaimie Alexander (Sif)
Rene Russo (Frigga)

Thor has always been the odd-man-out in the Marvel Universe. He was, quite obviously, inspired by Norse mythology, but most of his fellow superheroes originated in shitty sci-fi stories. Iron Man is a guy in a robotic suit, Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider, the Fantastic Four were exposed to cosmic radiation, the X-Men are the next step in human evolution, etc. These sci-fi characters are more fantasy than science, but they’re rooted in a set of genre conventions that American nerds, long accustomed to questionable science in their fiction, accept without notice. But Norse mythology is this weird, funky thing over in the corner. It’s magical, and pagan, and rooted in a dead religion. And to make matters worse, the Norse gods don’t have the name recognition of their Greco-Roman counterparts. In a movie season already saturated with nerd bait, how would Marvel sell such an unusual character?

Marvel Studios and director Kenneth Branagh (a.k.a. that Shakespeare guy) never answer the above question, possibly because they never decided what kind of film they wanted to make. It’s one part high fantasy, one part parody of high fantasy, one part standard superhero film, and one part infomercial for upcoming superhero films. Mix it all together and you get a concoction that isn’t terrible, but it’s never as good as it could be.

First, the good. Thor has an actual sense of humor about itself. This title character does not brood atop rooftops while contemplating the delicate balance between civil liberties and costumed law enforcement. Thor prefers to hit things with his hammer, exclaims how awesome he is, and flirt with Natalie Portman (which seems a pretty sensible way to go through life if you’re a Norse god). And the film freely acknowledges the absurdity of space gods. The special effects look expensive but fake, and the armor and weapons look like toys. But that’s not a flaw, it’s a feature. After all, what the hell are Norse, techno-magical weapons supposed to look like? This is superhero-space god fantasy, not archaeology. Thor is shiny, plastic adventuring in the tradition of Flash Gordon. If only Branagh could have gotten Queen to do the soundtrack …

And the film isn’t exclusive about boys and their toys. There is plenty of action and several gorgeous women to gaze at, but the the filmmakers also threw in some light comedy and a genuinely sweet romance. And there is a gratuitous shirtless Thor scene that elicited several coos and whistles from the female half of the audience I was in.

Now, the bad. While Thor is goofy, it’s never as goofy as it could and should be. Why is Anthony Hopkins required to play such a somber Odin? There are a handful of glorious moments when Hopkins gets to chew the scenery, but the script demands that Odin be the voice of reason. Too bad, because a reasonable patriarch is a boring turd. Plus, while Asgard is garish and weird, it’s never used in an imaginative way. There are no surreal moments or logic-defying architecture. Despite being a fantasy setting, Asgard seems rooted in a tedious realism. But that’s because Thor is still a mainstream action movie, and it has to adhere to the expectations of a mainstream audience. That means action, hero learns a valuable lesson, hero gets the girl, some more action, the end.

The film is also chock full of references to previous and future Marvel films. SHIELD Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) from Iron Man has a prominent supporting role. And there are brief cameos by Hawkeye and Nick Fury, plus set-up for the upcoming Avengers film. In themselves, these glorified shout-outs do not ruin Thor … until the moment when they become the point of the film. That moment comes during the film’s climax, when the main conflict ends on an anti-climactic note because certain plots must be left unresolved until the next Marvel installment.

So that’s Thor. An entertaining, silly, uneven mess. For all its flaws, I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would.

 

Adolescent Power Fantasies for Adults

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A slightly edited version of this was posted earlier this week on Splice Today.
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Superman was one of those ideas that conquered the world through the sheer force of its elegant stupidity. Kids like to imagine that they’re powerful. Wouldn’t they like it even better if they could imagine that they were…superpowerful? Pulp heroes were strong and fast and handsome…why not make a pulp hero who was stronger, faster, and wore primary-colored tights? Okay, so the last bit didn’t necessarily make a ton of sense. But the rest of it? That was sound.

And eight odd decades later, it’s still sound. For evidence, you need only look to Hollywood, where every third film seems to be a superhero fantasy, with tights or without.

The latest entry in the genre is Limitless, a film whose power fantasies are almost as nakedly crass as those of Siegel and Shuster themselves. Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a wastoid wannabe novelist with writer’s block, one failed marriage, and a girlfriend who’s leaving him. But then…an ancient wizard gives him a magic word of power, he is bitten by a radioactive stock broker and subsequently eye-fucked by ghostly ninja warriors who pass him their skills in their ninja semen . And everything changes!

Okay; there are no ghostly ninja warriors, nor radioactive words of power. There’s just a pill, NZT-48, which increases brain capacity, because you only use 20% of the brain of your scriptwriters in coming up with some stupid pseudo-science explanation, and then, hey, you’re off to impress and then screw your landlord’s bitchy wife and write your novel in four days and then clean your apartment and get a shave. Also, extreme sports. For now you are…Superyuppie!

Or, to put it another way, Limitless demonstrates with depressing finality that the power fantasies of adults are much more banal than the power fantasies of children. Super strength, super speed, heat vision, beating the bad guys and saving the day — they’re clichés now, sure, but they still have an exuberant charm. Wanting those things doesn’t make you dumb or boring. It just makes you a kid, or somebody who used to be a kid. My seven-year-old just yesterday looked at me and said, “Daddy, I wish I could fly.” And I laughed because it’s true enough to always be a surprise. Everybody wishes they could fly.

But the power fantasies in Limitless aren’t big, reach-for-the-stars daydreams. They’re cramped and puerile; Superman curdled. As soon as that landlord’s wife appears, looking less like a typical dowdy Hollywood landlord’s wife and more like a typical Hollywood hot-young-transient-fuck, you know that Eddie is going to get some. And the rest of his successes unfold with a similar dreary predictability. He starts stock trading and makes oodles and oodles of money. He gets his old girlfriend back…and then indulges in a wild round of debauchery, canoodling (with admirable political correctness) women of varying melanin, culminating in an especially hot blonde socialite who could be in movies. Which, of course, she is.

The walk on the wild side is, we are assured, Out Of Character; it’s a side-effect of the wonder drug and not of course related to Eddie’s actual real power fantasies no no no. Besides, he is punished for his hubris and his satyrism and, one hopes, for Bradley Cooper’s smug smile, which is insufferable even by the standards of the smug smiles usually distributed to scruffy, raffish, second-tier leading men. And since it isn’t really him doing the bad things, and since he is punished with headaches and withdrawal and the threat of being tortured by the inevitable sadistic gangsters, we can forgive him and cheer him on as he lopes inevitably to chemical-powered victory. Right?

I think that’s how it’s supposed to play, anyway. Something goes rather awry in the delivery though. Maybe it’s Eddie’s utter lack of anything resembling an individual personality — even in his wry, self-deprecating voice over he doesn’t manage to say anything either witty or memorable. For that matter, when he’s on the superdrug that makes him supersmart, he comes across not as a genius but as a superbore. The movie shows landladies dropping their pants for him and stockbrokers struck with awe…but Eddie never actually inspires awe in the viewers. When a upwardly-mobile Eddie Murphy wowed the upper crust in Trading Places, you could sort of see it, because Murphy has charisma. Cooper though — all he’s got is a pretty face. One comes away from Limitless with the sneaking suspicion that maybe the NZT-48 is really just cocaine. Even when Eddie’s making a fool of himself, it lets him think he’s the most brilliant guy in the room.

The real reason it’s difficult to sympathize with Eddie, though, is not that he’s a bore. It’s that he’s kind of an evil schmuck. Blessed with superintelligence, he doesn’t try to cure cancer or develop cold fusion, or even devote his life to the art he ostensibly values. He just scrabbles for cash and then runs for political office.

Along the way, incidentally, he maybe possibly kills a woman — that blonde socialite mentioned earlier. After he slept with her she shows up murdered, and Eddie can’t remember whether it was him who did it or not. With his recently acquired millions he hires a high-powered lawyer and beats the charge, but it seems quite possible that he was responsible. Nonetheless, he shows no particular remorse. He does vomit after he hears she’s dead, but this seems as related to withdrawal symptoms as to conscience, and he certainly seems to experience no long term guilt.

In the final scene Eddie, now a Senatorial candidate, outmaneuvers and humiliates ruthless tycoon Carl Van Loon, played by a text-messaging-it-in Robert De Niro. It’s the final wish-fulfillment fantasy; beating big bad daddy at his own game and taking his place. Our hero started out a hollow narcissist without the focus to achieve his boring ambitions, and he ends up a hollow narcissist with the drive to be Senator — and maybe someday even President. It’s a triumph for us all, I suppose. Still, I think I might have enjoyed the movie more if he’d, I don’t know, gone back to being a loser, or been shot in the head by gangsters. Maybe I’m just a traditionalist at heart, but if it’s going to be a dumb old superhero power fantasy, I’d prefer that the good guys win.