Canted Angles

LOVE WILL TEAR US APART: Zombie Romance and Generic Blending

2011-11-02T14:17:00.021-06:00

One of the more interesting developments in contemporary horror is the expansion of its ability to cross-pollinate with other genres. The 2000s have seen a number of ambitious experiments in hybridization. At the most manic end of the scale, one might cite something like Brotherhood of the Wolf – whose gonzo combination of martial arts, quasi-werewolves, and heritage drama prompted Roger Ebert to describe it as “an explosion at the genre factory.”[1] Less hyperbolic examples abound, of course. The typical approach is to apply what Rick Altman would refer to as horror’s “semantic” elements to the “syntactical” structure of a dramatically different genre. For the uninitiated, a genre’s semantic codes refer to its recurring visual iconography (or “building blocks”) – characters, locations, visual style – and affective tropes. By contrast, its syntax refers to the “relationships linking [these] lexical elements” (the structures into which these “blocks” are arranged, if you will) – i.e., meaningful oppositions, themes, attitudes, etc.[2] Thus, the Twilight franchise serves as the most wildly successful example of this type of hybridity – i.e., a pre-existing syntax (romance) adopting new semantic elements (horror). The positing of vampire as idealized lover in the series requires very little generic recontextualization – just an amplification of the figure’s “dangerous,” Byronic eroticism. Twilight’s success signals a broad willingness to accept horror’s “crossover” potential. An arguably hermetic or niche genre seems to have gained a broader generic respectability through its dalliances with putatively more “mainstream” production cycles.

On the other hand, however, there remain certain hesitancies. A number of horror subgenres remain less conducive to taxonomical blending than others. While vampires are currently enjoying a successful degree of upward social mobility, their other undead brethren – zombies – still shamble along certain well-trodden paths. To aficionados, this proposition must seem counterintuitive. Without question, we’re still in the midst of a Zombie Renaissance that started to kick into high gear in the early 2000s. What makes the popularity of this production cycle distinctive is (1) its pervasiveness throughout all forms of pop media, and (2) its concomitant readiness for generic blending. A brief list of examples that capitalize on the novelty of this hybridity would include the zombie invasions of canonical literature (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), superhero comics (Marvel Zombies), musical biography (Paul is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion), and WWII drama (Dead Snow). The winning formula: familiar generic syntax + arbitrary application of zombie semantics = “awesome.” Its ubiquity has become pernicious enough to be spoofed in (of all things) a direct-to-video Barbie feature, A Fashion Fairytale. “Zombies are in this year,” insists a hack director who randomly throws a musical number featuring zombie peas into a production of “The Princess and the Pea.” Barbie’s reasonable protest – they’re making a fairytale for kids – gets her thrown off the set. Take that, purist!

But despite the zombie’s newfound ability to penetrate even the most venerable of genres, their application to these other fictions are rarely as innovative as their authors believe them to be. Simply put, the syntax of the “host” genre concedes ground to the well-worn survivalist syntax of the “invading” sub-genre. This apocalyptic discourse is typically expressed in clichéd, “We-Are-the-Walking-Dead!” sentiments, whereby a brute survivalist imperative and/or a penchant for unchecked consumption reduces humanity into an unthinking mass devoted solely to its own fulfilment. Zombies and humans begin to pass for one another, and consequently, these creatures frequently serve the purposes of simpleminded social criticism (i.e., anti-consumerism, commentary on the new militarism, etc.). Zombies’ appearances in other genres simply extends this tendency (e.g., Fido uses zombies as emblems of suburban bunker mentality). Or, apolitical artists simply transfer the zombie sub-genre’s apocalyptic rhetoric onto an ostensibly non-conducive milieu for shock-value and/or humour. The results, however, are often predictable or superficial. At worst, we get fanboy thought-experiments like Versus, which simply exists to settle the age-old question, “Who would win a fight between zombies and a gang of yakuza?”

These clichés are to be expected. Zombie cinema is perhaps the most prescriptive of horror subgenres. Its semantic features are often regarded as inherent dictums. Note the so-called “Zombie Rules” – e.g., zombies are cannibals, they are animated corpses, they must not be able to run, etc. – which drive zealots to reject certain films as “inauthentic” for their perceived heresies. 28 Days Later is not a “true” zombie film, so goes the logic, because its Rage-infected denizens are not undead. If nothing else, the Horatian dogmatism of these rules have a good deal of pedagogical value. I have occasionally employed Shaun of the Dead to teach students about the pedantry of prescriptivist approaches to genre. Why? Despite this romzomcom’s brilliant application of zombie semantics to the syntax of the contemporary romantic comedy, it is remarkable how many viewers categorize the film as “a zombie movie” and insist on discussing it accordingly: i.e., the film is primarily about Shaun’s efforts to ward off the horde of oncoming dead, and “getting the girl” is just a by-product of his heroism.

Using Altman’s terms, we might say that not only do zombie mashups become preoccupied with the prescriptive semantics of the zombie film, but the subgenre’s syntax infects and overruns the meaning-bearing structures of the genre with which it is combined. Does that mean blokes who don’t choose to respond to Shaun of the Dead as a romantic comedy are engaging with the film “incorrectly?” Not necessarily. It’s just a testament to the forcefulness of the zombies’ invasive apocalyptic rhetoric.

(Or, maybe a film about the vital role that romance has to play in a young man’s maturation isn’t as “awesome” as watching said young man taking a cricket bat to the heads of rotting corpses.)

One of the difficulties, perhaps, of making creative use of zombie tropes is due to the creatures’ minimal dramatic valence. Unlike their more glamorous vampiric peers, zombies are utterly devoid of interiorities. Without a subjectivity a zombie has little opportunity to contribute to a work’s structural or dramatic interest. As automatons they lack intentionality, and therefore, lack the capacity for malice (i.e., attractors for our antipathy) or, indeed, any feeling whatever (i.e., the potential for pathos). Instead, they function as blank surfaces onto which we project our social ills (e.g., Dawn of the Dead’s simple-minded Zombies ‘R Us analogy: zombies in the shopping mall!), or as empty bags of meat that stand in the way of an ass-kickin’ protagonist (e.g., the Resident Evil series). Their emptiness helps explain the subgenre’s affective preference for disgust rather than terror. Moreover, the generation of anxiety in the average zombie film has nothing to do with their deliberate wickedness, but rather is produced through the massification effect: one zombie = gross; many zombies = Please, God, no. First-person shooters like Left 4 Dead help accelerate this trend. While its splendidly desolate art direction is impressive, playing Left 4 Dead is a curiously inert experience that consists of instinctually blasting at whatever dark shape hurls itself at the screen. The insistence on positing zombies as meatbags for target practice therefore helps explain the subgenre’s affinity for gung-ho action (e.g., Planet Terror) or comedy (e.g., splatstick romps like Dead Alive – admittedly a bloody good time), but precious little else. At a glance, the romzomcom seems to offer more subversive opportunities – particularly the occasional heretical suggestion that zombies might be put to better use than serving as exploding flesh-sacks. And yet films like Shaun of the Dead (despite its generic brilliance), My Boyfriend’s Back, Boy Eats Girl, Wasting Away and Zombieland rarely make the effort.

To be clear: one need not agitate for a more humanist approach to the subgenre. The zombie film is laden with prescriptions enough as it is. And besides, the (blasphemous!) “Zombies are People Too” mandate has been employed to varying degrees of seriousness in such films as the aforementioned Fido, Dead Men Don’t Die, I Zombie, Colin and even by Romero himself in Land of the Dead. Jesse Stomel has provocatively asked, “What is lively about meat and how does the corpse become vital again?” But I’m not sure that offering Romero’s brief rejoinder, “It is reborn. Always already,” is enough.[3] Could this vitality be found through the subgenre’s adoption of certain romantic syntaxes? That is, if the vampire can be a love object – or, even better, a lover her/himself – why not the zombie?

The question is also not a rhetorical call for more pervasive and gratuitous representations of necrophilia in horror, nor an invitation to model the campy eroticism of Return of the Living Dead or (sigh) Zombie Strippers. Rather it is a suggestion that the romance film might consider the zombie film for appropriative possibilities in order to consider other visceral affairs of the heart. The subject has been treated charmingly in Kelly DiPucchio and Scott Campbell’s endearing children’s book, Zombie in Love.[4] It has also been brilliantly explored in Michele Soavi’s rather neglected 1994 masterpiece, Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore).

Based on a story by Tiziano Sclavi (creator of the sprawling fumetti series, Dylan Dog), Cemetery Man revolves around the amorous obsessions – and eventual existential crisis – of a graveyard watchman, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett). Dellamorte manages a cemetery in the tiny northern Italian village of Buffalora – a burial ground with unique restorative capacities. As the recently interred dead insist on returning to life, Dellamorte – and his idiotic companion Gnaghi (who is only capable of saying, “Gna!”) – are charged with ensuring that the “Returners” don’t overrun the town. Rather than contending with the bureaucratic nightmare of filling out forms to request help, Dellamorte claims “it’s easier just to shoot them.”

The story turns on Dellamorte’s obsession with a beautiful woman – simply credited as “She” (Anna Falchi) – who becomes aroused when he shows her the graveyard’s ossuary, and eventually insists on having sex with him on the grave of her dead husband. Unsurprisingly, her former husband is none too happy about the pair trysting on his bed of rest, and he rises from the grave to take a chunk out of her comely frame. Believing her to have died, Dellamorte waits by her body and shoots her in a panic when she regains consciousness. Although Dellamorte believes he has murdered her accidentally, it remains ambiguous as to whether or not She had, in fact, “returned.”

Unfortunately for the forlorn watchmen, his obsession persists after her de facto death, and She persistently returns (as three different women, all embodied by Falchi). Her second resurrection is as a lusty zombie, and Dellamorte is fortunate enough to escape her hungry embrace with a mere neck wound. The bereft watchman encounters her again – this time as an assistant to the utterly oblivious Mayor of the village. When this version of She confesses to a fear of men’s genitalia, Dellamorte undergoes a painful procedure to be rendered temporarily impotent, only to find she has been “cured” in the interim by the unwanted sexual advances of her boss. He will be denied access to the object of his obsession a third time when the final manifestation of She reveals herself to be a prostitute who has simply been indulging his fantasies. By this point, Dellamorte has been driven to mania by this uncanny compulsion towards repetition, and he murders both the girl and her roommate by setting fire to their bedroom with a space heater.

Bizarrely, his misogyny (and more generally misanthropic outlook) evolves into a crisis of existential proportions. Specifically, his actions cease to be acknowledged by others, and Dellamorte goes on a nihilistic killing spree – shooting a group of local hoodlums (who previously mocked his rumored impotence), and randomly killing a nurse and doctor at the local hospital. None of these actions have the slightest consequence: his attempted confessions are ignored by the police; no one reacts to his public acts of murder; his first two crimes are pinned on his suicidal acquaintance, Franco, who is eventually inexplicably unable to recognize him. Dellamorte finally drives out of Buffalora – accompanied by the ever-faithful Gnaghi – only to discover that the road comes to an abrupt end at a deep chasm. The “rest of the world,” it seems, doesn’t exist. Dellamorte is about to kill himself, but Gnaghi prevents him by throwing his revolver off the cliff. “Could you take me home, please?” Gnaghi asks, unaccountably speaking clearly for the first time. Dellamorte’s response is comically eloquent: “Gna,” he says simply.

The extensive summary has been necessary given that the film is not widely known, but also because its dramatic departure from the scope and ambition of most zombie hybridizations deserves full acknowledgment. Even this synopsis cannot fully express Cemetery Man’s wild vacillations in tone and style – from oddly beautiful surrealism, to political satire, to slapstick, to visceral body horror, to unchecked eroticism. And yet these logic-defying generic leaps never seem arbitrary or schizoid. Rupert Everett deserves the lion’s share of credit here, as his performance gives what might have been a scattershot film a surprising degree of coherence. Evidently, the titular character of Sclavi’s Dylan Dog was modelled after Everett’s beautifully hangdog physiognomy, and so his casting here is a masterstroke. Moreover, Everett’s consistently impassioned straight playing gives the film a weird emotional heft – despite scenes which treat the undead for yuks (e.g., an attacking troupe of hungry, undead boy scouts is particularly memorable).

Thus, the film can be viewed as a delirious employment of horror semantics to explore a familiar romantic syntax: the dilemma of amorous obsession and the ensuing consequences when this fixation turns morbid. One way of engaging with the film in these terms is to view Dellamorte as a man who is surrounded by death, yet cannot face up to its facticity. His erotic preoccupations aren’t Freudian, but simply a way to postpone acknowledging death’s finality. And so, She must return. Again, and again, and again. If She is kept alive, Dellamorte doesn’t have to come to terms with his own finality – the prospect of his own non-existence. For to die is to cease to be acknowledged – literally speaking. This crisis of acknowledgment has important connections with romance as a genre. In romance fiction, the obsessed lover becomes fixated on his “beloved’s” perceived ability to acknowledge him in a manner no one else seems capable of doing. In Cemetery Man, then, when She dies, Dellamorte becomes unglued since no one else in the town is prepared to see him (except perhaps the puppyish Gnaghi). Beyond the town limits of Buffalora, there doesn’t even seem to be a world in which he can be recognized.

So what of Cemetery Man’s zombies, then? Remarkably, they are not the brain dead automatons we have come to expect. Zombie Rules seem to mandate that the walking dead are mindless – obviously a carryover from their West African and Haitian origins as the entranced or resurrected slaves of a bokor. The most obvious point of comparison is Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, in which the creatures are shambling, maggot ridden corpses – lively only when fighting sharks. By contrast, Soavi asserts that their mindlessness is arbitrary, serving only to maintain generic prescriptivism. Zombies in Cemetery Man still maintain cannibalistic impulses, but they also retain their subjectivity beyond the grave. Not only do they yearn for human flesh, but they are compelled to repeat the functional behaviours that defined their social roles whilst still alive. Bryant Frazer has astutely pointed out that the undead “may represent the dead archetypes of Italian society come back to haunt the living,” which represents one of the more robust social allegories in the subgenre’s history.[5] And yet, they still remain more than ghoulish emblems of conservative ideologies; many of them are represented as fully conscious subjects still desirous of interpersonal intimacy. Gnaghi even strikes up a tender relationship with the reanimated severed head of the mayor’s daughter, Valentina, that is somehow simultaneously tender and revolting. Miraculously, Soavi applies this impossible dynamic of revolting tenderness to the film as a whole. He does so principally by bestowing upon his lovelorn zombies the gift of interiority.

Soavi’s interest in granting an interiority to typically vacant figures extends to his extraordinarily innovative approach to framing. The most audaciously stylized moments occur when Soavi situates his camera inside impossible spaces, and shoots through the most outrageous apertures. As Dellamorte burns a pile of phone books, for example, a worm’s-eye-view of his face emerges within a slowly expanding circle, and we realize Soavi has somehow placed the camera within the bonfire and is filming through the burning pages. In the film’s most celebrated shot, Valentina’s decapitated head flies on its own accord from the TV where Gnaghi has placed it, and chews into her father’s neck (he has forbidden the romance, you see). But what is most spectacular here is that the camera captures the Mayor’s horrified expression from inside Valentina’s mouth as her head hurtles toward him – her chomping teeth creating the most demented iris effect in cinema history. The moment is hilarious and unforgettable, as Soavi’s demented framing provides a visual correlative for the impossible subjectivity of undead desire.

By proving itself capable of imagining the paradox of undead desire, Cemetery Man offers invaluable new possibilities for horror and its mongrel hybrids. The paradox of zombie desire is an inspired exploration of a recurring dilemma in romance fiction: love’s susceptibility to all-consuming mania, obsessive compulsiveness and helpless repetition. Dellamorte’s necrophilic use of his “returned” lover (in all her guises) guarantees his unceasing acknowledgement. But if a zombie itself can desire – and it is this desire that induces it to return and reprise its lost passions – then love itself is posited as an infection that compels helpless servitude. In lieu of the eternally devoted vampire lover, Cemetery Man offers the lovesick, obsessive zombie, and its depiction of undying romance is both ludicrous and courageous.

[1] Roger Ebert, “The Brotherhood of the Wolf,” rogerebert.com, Jan 11, 2002, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020111/REVIEWS/201110301/1023.

[2] Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 12.

[3] Jesse Stomel, “Pity Poor Flesh: Terrible Bodies in the Films of Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Romero,” Bright Lights Film Journal 56, May 2007, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/56/bodies.php.

[4] For a decidedly more meat-and-potatoes approach to the question, investigate the 2009 winner of the AVN Award for the “Most Outrageous Sex Scene” on your own time.

[5] Bryant Frazer, “Cemetery Man,” Deep Focus, http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/dellamor.html.

SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - The Tree of Life (2011)

2011-10-24T16:06:00.005-06:00

The Tree of Life

There’s something tremendous about experiencing a great artist swinging for the fences – even if such a gesture doesn’t result in an inarguable triumph. While some might bristle at the prospect of a mid-century, middle-American family bearing the weight of the cosmos, the representation of ordinary domestic dramas unburdened by the usual tiresome ideological critiques or sentimental valorizations is a blessed relief. To suggest that the film offers a simple-minded cosmology of “nature vs. grace” is to overlook the carefully structured narrational framework: Malick is not advancing a Christian worldview here, but instead filters The Tree of Life’s action through the consciousness of characters who are devout and/or struggling to contend with this simplistic polarity. It is an extraordinary humanist riposte to 2001: A Space Odyssey in which Malick movingly hypothesizes that human evolution might be driven by a yearning towards transcendence rather than the brute assertion of will.

Rating: * * * * *

SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - White Material (2009)

2011-10-24T16:03:00.012-06:00

White Material

While not as well-acquainted with Claire Denis as I ought to be (The Intruder did not motivate an intrust in Jean-Luc Nancy, but 35 Shots of Rum was a warm and moving family study), White Material strikes me as a near-masterpiece. Isabelle Huppert is typically ferocious, but the film’s incendiary post-colonial politics provides a valuable focus to her rage (usually internalized in icy psychodramas). The final climatic moments arrive with the impact of shotgun blasts, with Huppert’s act of patricide undertaken in a burst of overlapping editing and violent disruption of the 180° rule. Such unexpected stylistic bravura is an inversion of the great burst of revolutionary fervour in The Battleship Potemkin – which initially explodes in the celebrated plate-smashing montage. Here, instead, the abrupt murder of the plantation’s patriarch provides no possibility for liberation, but instead seals Huppert within the vindictive cycle of violence rippling outwards throughout the country. A staggering exemplification of the psychology and politics of racial conflict.

Rating: * * * * *

SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - California Dreamin' (2007)

2011-10-24T15:43:00.008-06:00

California Dreamin’

Cristian Nemescu’s untimely death was an unmistakable tragedy as California Dreamin’ is an extremely confident debut. Most impressive are the juxtapositions of historical memories of past political failures – beautifully rendered in black and white – and present day yearnings for restitution (idealizations that remain unrealized). The promise of America as imagined by Romanian villagers – by turns hopeful, opportunistic, and resentful – is presented as a bathetic rural pageant that degenerates into violent betrayal and desertion. Never a simple-minded indictment of Yankee opportunism masquerading as Democracy-Building, the film surprisingly depicts the intermingling of diplomacy and hostility as emanating from mutual exploitation. One of its most memorable visual rhymes involves a closeup of tiptoes: the first image occurs when the rebellious Monica raises herself up to share a kiss with Sgt. McLaren – an amorous investment that she hopes will propel her away from her father, Doiaru, a despotic (but complex) figure in the village. Nemescu employs the same framing again as Doiaru is killed during the villagers’ vindictive uprising: as he dies in his daughter’s arms she props herself up on her toes to bear his weight. Thus, a trajectory from idealism to disillusionment is traversed with brutal economy.

Rating: * * * *1/2

SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - The White Ribbon (2009)

2011-10-24T11:07:00.004-06:00

The White Ribbon

A great leap forward after the regressive and pointless remake of Funny Games. Haneke’s moralism has a much more ambitious scope – the kindred relations between fascistic and religious thought – but its precision is razor sharp. One of its central images chillingly articulates the single-minded purposefulness of rationalized brutality: the camera follows a farmer’s son from behind as he methodically plows through a landowner’s plot of cabbages with a scythe. Haneke holds at length on the rather banal act of vengeance, and its straightforwardly presentational destructiveness anticipates savageries that are perpetuated later with an equally perfunctory fervour. Particularly nightmarish is the mathematical precision by which a pet bird is placed dead centre on a pastor’s desk – a pair of scissors protruding from where its head should be. While one might find Haneke’s claim that the film addresses “the origins of terrorism” to be unconvincingly grandiose, The White Ribbon still remains a frightfully convincing representation of the ease by which cruelty can be cultivated and perpetuated within insular communities.

Rating: * * * *

SEPTEMBER VIEWING:THE GREATS - If.... (1968)

2011-10-24T10:20:00.010-06:00

If….

Crackling with anarchistic fervour, Lindsay Anderson’s assault on English traditionalism still surprises over forty years after its initial release. One of the definitive works of the late 1960s, its measured buildup to the blackly comic assault occurring in its final minutes exposes the “countercultural” tendencies of contemporaneous films like Easy Rider as exercises in unfocused hedonism. And the so-called “sexual frankness” of the New Hollywood renaissance is revealed as just so much heteronormative prudery next to If….’s explicit homoeroticism. Situating queerness as an instrumental component of the youthful overturning of a moribund class system (the gymnastics sequence is particularly memorable), If…. anticipates New Queer Cinema’s explosive pop politics. Avoiding the easy polemics of “conservative teachers” vs. “liberated students,” Anderson’s masterstroke is to situate the senior prefects – the abusive Whips – as the principal antagonists, demonstrating how the sins of the Fathers are so readily taken up by apt pupils. It’s easy to appreciate how Malcolm McDowell’s cocksure smirk – held even as he anticipates a lashing – served as the performative kernel of his turn as a dandyish thug in A Clockwork Orange. But there’s purposeful steel in his impudence, evident in the film’s powerful final closeup of McDowell machine-gunning the figureheads of a tyrannical education system.

Rating: * * * *

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World

2011-10-01T20:31:00.020-06:00

So, after nearly a year's hiatus - my return to public blogging life! Already, seismic quakes are rippling across the delicate strands of the interweb. It was incredibly depressing to lose the momentum after barely six months of online writing, and I can only hope to stay on top of things this time. Public chastising will help, dear readers.

My thanks, then, to the terrific crowd at the opening screening of the fourth New Media Film Series last Wednesday. The turnout for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was inspiring, as was the excellent participation by those in attendance. I’ve been prompted to expand on some of the ideas I articulated that evening, and so I’ve shared them here below.

* * * * * *

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

In an excellent article on romantic comedy, Fr ank Krutnik writes about the “nervous romances” of the 1970s.[1] These are comedies characterized by their characters’ “wistful nostalgia” for traditional romance, and their simultaneous acknowledgment of the impossibility of these old-fashioned conventions being operable in a changed social climate. Lovers are now very self-conscious about expressing their feelings and worry about a dependency upon clichés for the articulation of these sentiments. Moreover, the institutionalized end result of courtship – i.e., marriage – no longer seems entirely satisfactory, and so the “obstacle race to the altar” is rarely a viable narrative paradigm anymore. As Geoff King puts it, narrative resolutions in contemporary romantic comedies frequently “occur in the form of a disavowal of marriage, a version of the marriage vows based on an agreement…to be not married together for the rest of their lives.”[2]

These nervous romances primarily stem from Woody Allen’s influential comedies, Annie Hall and Manhattan, in which the pursuit of romance is represented as perpetually frustrating and elusive. Such nervousness wends its way throughout some of the most popular comedies of the 1980s as well. While Molly Ringwald hunky birthday wish comes true at the end of Sixteen Candles, John Hughes’ teens cannily pick at the prospect of “true love” as if it were an overripe pimple to be squeezed. John Cusack relies on a ghettoblasted rush of Peter Gabriel as a substitute for his precious self-expression in Say Anything (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j379JbL-xM). The grownups hardly fare any better: witness Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan too preoccupied by neurotic self-scrutiny to settle easily into mutual romance in When Harry Met Sally.

In the 1990s, My Best Friend’s Wedding and Four Weddings & a Funeral were worried enough about romance to posit friendship as a more viable emotional relationship between a guy and a gal. Chasing Amy also played a helpful role in queering up a heretofore straight genre. Meanwhile, Sleepless in Seattle (with its soundtrack of old-timey standards and references to An Affair to Remember) just wished for a good ol’ kiss to build a dream on again. Shifting into the 2000s, however, Judd Apatow & Co., The Break-Up, and Punch-Drunk Love collectively suggested that modern romance is inherently crazy or simply just a way of avoiding being alone. Indeed, romantic comedy in the 2000s became (yet another) phallocentric genre, with many of the most popular or influential films of the decade focussed on the alleged self-centredness of a childish leading male. The nervousness of Allen in the 70s has prompted any number of regressions and many of these comedies now deal with the crisis of juvenile self-absorption.

To me, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World seems like an escape route from the dead end of solipsistic nervousness, and is the most deliriously rewarding romantic comedy since Adam Sandler’s brilliant reflexive turn in Punch Drunk Love, and the tentative fumblings toward mutual renewal in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Edgar Wright is revisiting and elaborating upon similar ideas asserted in Shaun of the Dead – his first superlative feature that had the audacity to suggest that an investment in adult romance saves one from living an unexamined life. I find it fruitful, then, to consider Scott Pilgrim as an extremely thoughtful return to that very old dilemma in romantic comedy: what Stanley Cavell identified as the problem of acknowledgment.[3] While Cavell applies this notion to his study of classic screwball comedies, and their scenarios revolving around the renewal of marriage, it may be promising to move towards an articulation of how this paradigm finds new applicability in the contemporary nervous romance – films in which marriage is an altogether distant consideration for the young lovers within them. In short, then, Scott Pilgrim is a romantic comedy that compels its arrested adolescent to recognize and respond to an other’s difference.

Incredibly, Wright is able to accomplish this feat in a work entirely populated by cartoonish abstractions. Translating Brian Lee O’Malley’s schematics so cannily, Wright provides a delirious cavalcade of one-dimensional models of masculinity and femininity. Indeed the entire hipster gamut is on colourful display here, and these gleeful primaries bring the romantic concerns of the past decade into sharp relief. Michael Cera finally clues into what the rest of us have known since Arrested Development: his nebbish heartthrob is actually a total asshole. Accordingly, Cera shies away from the comics’ relatively sympathetic treatment of their titular hero. He reveals Scott as a young man who can’t make the effort to be interested in experiences outside his own interests and therefore can’t be bothered to acknowledge others’ desires & feelings. The screenplays’ terrific idiom of assertions, aphorisms and inarticulacy conveys this solipsism brilliantly. Great example: Scott’s apathy prevents him from even finishing Matthew Patel’s emailed challenge to a duel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__jiz18l84U). “This is… borrrring. Deeeeleeeeete!”

In fact, Scott tends to flinch from the prospect of recognizing others’ desires, as when he literally chokes on Knives Chau’s perfumed proclamation of love.

Even more bracing is the film’s unsparing treatmen t of the romantic comedy’s token breakup scene. Here, Scott doesn’t agonize over how his lack of regard for Knives has hurt her, but rather he squirms over the memory of being compelled to perform an unpleasant task. And one wipe edit later, he’s giddy at the prospect of moving on to that obscure object of his desire, Ramona Flowers.

So, how does this self-regarding man-child overcome the problems of acknowledgment and authentic self-expression? Scott Pilgrim’s accomplishment is its hyperbolic use of graphic pop cultural iconography to represent the emotional lives of the protagonists. It joyously demonstrates how our feelings are mediated by the technological and popular products that we (or at least those of us of a certain age demographic and/or Toronto scenesters) consume.

To that end, the film improves on an idea taken up by a previous Michael Cera outing: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, with its focus on NYC kool kids finding the Most Excellent Ever music to articulate their mutual attraction. As in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright delights in a ceaseless barrage of densely layered allusions (e.g., every band in the film must be named after an NES game, parody an indie subgenre, and have their music composed by a Pitchfork-endorsed musician). And yet, such intertexuality is all in the name of a neo-romantic sincerity. The “wistful nostalgia” is technologized, which is why the film’s style pays homage to the videogame logics of (relatively) old new media: sequences rendered with 16-bit graphics, multiple shout-outs to SNES and Sega Genesis gaming experiences, the Universal Studios theme downgraded to a MIDI recording, etc. Levelling, bonuses, combos, 1Ups, and life bars are all brilliantly analogized as game mechanics that enable personal maturation and romantic recognition.

Wright’s remediation of manga and anime conventions is also superbly realized. Scott’s experiences are dramatized via an almost non-stop overlay of animated captions and sound effects. Fight scenes feature split-screened close-ups of furrowed eyebrows, speed-lined backgrounds, and ridiculously paced accelerating montages. Reaction shots reveal emotions that change in less than a blink of an eye.

In post-classical filmmaking terms, “intensified continuity” doesn’t even begin to convey Wright’s giddy expressionism here. Nearly every moment is filtered through Scott’s unidirectional consciousness. Because he’s constantly in a hurry to attend to the things that he finds interesting, the editing often skitters along as if it were Chapter Searching. Not only is the camera nearly constantly moving, Wright exhibits a preference for close-ups, and so the film conveys Scott’s perpetual state of distraction and his tendency to wilfully ignore his surroundings. The unifying rule for all digital manipulations is excessive simplification as Scott’s imagination has two modes: Reductive and High Drama.

Therefore the intensity and simplicity of his feelings is a product of Scott’s lack of real-world romantic experience. Only able to cite one occasion of heartbreak, he elevates Ramona’s extensive amorous involvements with a variety of people to an Epic level of Epic Epicness: the League of Seven Evil Exes no less. Little wonder that Ramona is so aloof to Scott’s puppyish adoration. After a final Big Boss Battle, Scott discovers that genuine feelings and desires are accompanied by obligations to others. His subsequent forthrightness of expression and acknowledgement seems to signal an overcoming of the anxieties generated by contemporary nervous romances. Whether or not the Girl of His Dreams (and others like her) has the patience to be conveyed in the terms provided by new media representations remains to be seen.

Insert coin to continue…?

[1] Krutnik, Frank. “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes.” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (1990): 57-72.

[2] King, Geoff. Film Comedy. London: Wallflower, 2002. 57-58.

[3] Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 17-19.

Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)

2009-11-02T01:30:00.011-07:00

“As we awake refreshed from our dreams, better able to meet the tasks of reality, so the fairy store ends with the hero returning, or being returned to the real world, much better able to master life.”

- Bruno Bettelheim

A wolf-suited blur of unfocussed aggression, Max hurtles down the staircase – a fork clenched in his fist – in pursuit of the terrified family dog. The camera, handheld, careens with him like an accomplice. Wildness, yes. But not the exhilaration, the temporary unbounded freedom of acting out – of trapping one’s hurt like lightning in a bottle to release it later in a burst of electric, savage creativity. Here, there is only the white-hot immediateness of anger, the confusion and helplessness that turns on and snarls at smaller things. Almost immediately, however, the frame freezes, and Max’s furious pursuit is cruelly halted – not as an authoritative preventive measure, but as an authorial intercession that denies the boy any liberation from the bewilderment of his young life.

For Maurice Sendak, a private jungle emerges from a boy’s bedroom in order to offer up a dark haven where he might disgorge all his fears and anger in a secret rumpus. This is not to be taken as the condescending reduction of a child’s tantrum; it is a measure of respect for their attempts at fashioning dimensions of solitude where they cannot be dominated or frightened or disappointed – where we cannot touch them. It is also Sendak’s achievement to insist that the inevitable decision to return from this solitude belongs to the young adventurer in question. A hot supper will await him, yes, but the journey back to familial concord will be on his terms, and that private jungle will recede at his behest.

For Spike Jonze, by contrast, family becomes yet another incomprehensible structure from which his young protagonist cannot escape, as befuddling and pathetic a universe as those found in Being John Malkovich or Adaptation (or even some of his more downbeat music videos). Max is driven from his house into the night – away from the perceived betrayals and tyrannies of his sister and mother – towards the little boat that bears him away. Already Jonze has forsaken the crucial autonomy that the book accords the boy. Subsequently, the world into which Max burrows is not an expansive kingdom within the confines of a bedroom, but a hermetic dimension beyond the constrictive boundaries of the familiar. His voyage is an exilic retreat rather than a restorative adventure.

Just as Max is paralysed by the opening freeze-frame, so too is he pitilessly condemned to a realm that is a warped and cryptically refracted image of his home. These wild things are haunted by an unnamed sadness, riven by jealousies and petty resentments, and given to inexplicable bouts of rage and reactionary hostility. Even the initially exquisite natural lighting becomes oppressive in its unvarying twilit tones – as if the sun really were dying, as Max and Carol (his monstrous analogue) fear.

On the one hand, Jonze and Eggers’ screenplay is admirable for its attempt to adopt an amorphous child-like logic: Max attempts to work out these all-too-familiar mystifying conflicts and half-understood problems through improvisational stories and games with ever-evolving rules. On the other, the film pessimistically thwarts every effort to resolve these troubles. Max’s time with the wild things is profoundly melancholic, and characterised by confusion, loss, and ultimately defeat. Although he is declared “King” of this realm, his fraudulence is eventually exposed and he is driven away once again. Unlike the intentional abdication of the throne in Sendak’s story, Max is overwhelmed by his circumstances and surrenders.

Jonze subsequently ends the film ambiguously with Max watching his mother succumb to an exhausted sleep at the kitchen table, but nothing we have seen so far warrants an interpretation of his gaze as an epiphanic reversal of parent-child relationships. The mother remains an inscrutable mystery – yielding up none of her secrets in sleep – and the son can only look upon her with a yearning that is never to be appeased. Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are offers no respite from the fundamental incapacities that it perceives at the heart of childhood, and no opportunity for an emergent self-sovereignty to establish the beginnings of a dominion.

September Film Journal

2009-11-01T14:13:00.003-07:00

Ikiru (1952) * * * * *
Silent Light (2007) * * * * *

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922) * * * *1/2
Let the Right One In (2008) * * * *1/2

Inglorious Basterds (2009) * * * *
When Did You Last See Your Father (2008) * * * *

Duplicity (2009) * * * 1/2

Lou Reed's Berlin (2008) * * *1/2

I Love You, Man (2009) * * *
Body of Lies (2008) * * *
51 Birch Street (2006) * * *

The International (2009) * *1/2
La Strada (1954) * *1/2

Crisis (1950) * *
The Reader (2008) * *
Taken (2009) * *

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) *
Watchmen (2009) *

Summer Viewing

2009-09-20T20:55:00.012-06:00

Hello fellow cinemaniacs,

You may have noticed the Film Journal sidebar. I hope to be maintaining it on a biweekly basis. For those who might be curious about my summer viewings, I present the following list (from the seminal to the deplorable):

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) * * * * *

Synecdoche, New York (2008) * * * * *

Bamako (2007) * * * *1/2

The Decline of the American Empire (1986) * * * *1/2

Up (2009) * * * *1/2

Bolt (2008) * * * *

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) * * * *

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1984) * * * *

Rachel Getting Married (2008) * * * *
Wendy and Lucy (2008) * * * *

Ashes of Time Redux (2008) * * *1/2

Blast of Silence (1961) * * *1/2

The Class (2008) * * *1/2

Frozen River (2008) * * *1/2

Lake of Fire (2007) * * *1/2

Milk (2008) * * *1/2

Pontypool (2009) * * *1/2

Revolutionary Road (2008) * * *1/2

Snow Angels (2008) * * *1/2

Son of Rambow (2008) * * *1/2

Star Trek (2009) * * *1/2

Still Life (2007) * * *1/2

The Wrestler (2008) * * *1/2

Appaloosa (2008) * * *

Changeling (2008) * * *

Diary of the Dead (2008) * * *

Encounters at the End of the World (2008) * * *

Frost/Nixon (2008) * * *

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) * * *

House of Flying Daggers (2004) * * *

Ichi the Killer (2001) * * *

I've Loved You So Long (2008) * * *

JCVD (2008) * * *

Quantum of Solace (2008) * * *

Role Models (2008) * * *

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) * * *

Valkyrie (2008) * * *

Cadillac Records * *1/2

Gran Torino (2008) * *1/2

Hamlet 2 (2008) * *1/2

Of Time and the City (2009) * */12

Step Brothers (2008) * *1/2

W. (2008) * *1/2

Yes Man (2008) * *1/2

Doubt (2008) * *

The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) * *

Mongol (2008) * *

Religulous (2008) * *

Sukiyaki Western Django (2008) * *

Sunshine Clearing (2009) * *

Watchmen (2009) *

Wolverine (2009) *

Feel free to chime in with comments, criticisms, or suggestions for my ever-expanding viewing list.

For all of you cinephiles who don't already know about this enterprise, check out the following sites: The 1,000 Greatest Films and The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films, both sponsored by the indispensable They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (see my sidebar Links for their home page).

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009)

2009-09-20T16:16:00.014-06:00

Duplicity commences with an engaging pas de deux between two predatory cats – a series of shifting tactics, performative evaluations, and self-aware flirtations – that winds its way into the bedroom of a four star hotel in Dubai. The dance ends in an unconventional manner – Julia Roberts drugging Clive Owen and making off with top-secret documents left in his charge – and with a stylistic, Soderberghian flourish: moving split-screens present several moments from various stages of Roberts post-coital departure. In one frame, she has already left the room; in another, she simultaneously checks on the slumbering Owen. This spy is forever in two places at once – caught between an impossible but undeniable attraction on the one hand and a kind of self-interested professionalism that could only erode the trust from which that attraction might flourish.

This is Duplicity’s central dilemma, and the stuff of true screwball fantasies. It is followed immediately by another dance of sorts – this time between the CEOs of two cosmetic juggernauts – and its petty brutality and clumsiness is a hilarious contrast to the sleek, animal elegance of its precursor. On a greyish landing strip of an anonymous airport, two parked Lear jets face off against one another in frank symmetry. Rattling his finger like a sabre in super slow-motion on the right side of the frame in the following cut – his face somehow undulating with hatred – is Tom Wilkinson venting his spleen towards someone out of frame. With a cut, Paul Giamatti is revealed on the far left of the frame, equally enraged. As if slogging through currents of bile, the two gradually make their way toward one another, while their horrified cronies look on. The two titans meet, and the ensuing clash seems to last hours, even though it’s only a brief scuffle: the professorial Wilkinson and the gnomish Giamatti flail about on the tarmac in a brutish reduction of the corporate warfare upon which Roberts and Wilson will try to capitalize.

Between these contrasting “numbers,” are labyrinthine twists and turns of plots, layers of deception, and exquisitely played acts of self-conscious performances. James Naremore has spoken of “expressive incoherence” as being an important aspect of an evaluative assessment of acting: scenes in which we are presented with a performer consciously performing within the story (acts of deception, or moments of emotional repression are good examples). Duplicity – as its title implies – is rife with such moments: Clive Owen channelling Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938) as he masquerades as a clumsy Texan doctor is one delicious example. But a great part of the film’s pleasures are also built upon moments of performance that are surprisingly revealed as such, and scenes in which diegetic audiences explicitly mirror our own regard for the aptitude of the principal actors.

The pre-eminent example is the “rehearsed” encounter between Owen and Roberts, in which they literally replay a scripted version of one of their previous venomous encounters in order to throw off the suspicion of their employers (who may be – and in fact are – following their every move). This encounter is originally played straight, and we are provided with a forum to compare their biting repartee to the lacerations that the two actors inflicted upon one another in their previous outing, Closer (2004). A brief moment of surreality occurs later, when their dialogue is repeated word for word (with some notable variations) in a flashback: we are thrown for a loop (caught within the various crisscrossing nets of deception that the film deploys) until we realize that the originally presented encounter was an elaborate act, performed as part of the lovers’ scheme. Retroactively, we can then assess the qualities of these mirrored encounters and marvel at the shades of difference these two pre-eminent actors bring to the scenes. Certainly, Owens and Roberts have their diegetic fans within the film itself: two field agents chuckle over a play-by-play recording of the scene, taking turns mimicking Owen’s poshness (“Eye oh-wnnn yewww,” they chortle to one another). We are also treated to a literal rehearsal of the encounter during yet another flashback. Owens and Roberts wend their way through a line run of the encounter that they’ll play out the next day: he, gently reminding her to enunciate in between sips of chardonnay (“Are you directing me?” she teases); she, reclining in bed and chiding him for engaging in the star privilege of script revision (“Wrong,” says she, correcting his improvisatory vulgarity, “It’s ‘people I’ve slept with’”).

And yet, neither of these two players realize that their dress rehearsal is being observed by a hidden audience. We track up into a light fixture in the ceiling, through its wiring, and emerge from a speaker placed on the desk of the foxy Tom Wilkinson, who chuckles appreciatively – paternally, even – at their snappy interplay. Aren’t these two Hollywood luminaries simply marvellous? The two actor-cum-directors remain unaware that their “show” has been very craftily stage managed until they attempt to reap the dividends from their treachery (as the camera tracks backward from the dazed couple in the final shot – leaving them to their entangled futures of mutual suspicion – Owen intones, “Well, at least we have each other.” Roberts, as usual, has the final word: “It really is that bad, isn’t it?”). Duplicity is rife with such moments, with actors stepping out from the rhythms of their own “numbers” in order to stand in as our analogues – admiring the playfulness of talented stars at work. In an era in which Hollywood so seldom provides us with opportunities for admiration, such intricacy is an occasion for dancing.

Summer viewing... 2008?!

2009-06-07T13:13:00.001-06:00

As it's been a very busy last month, I haven't had much time at all to post anything new these last few weeks. I'd like to try to get back to a weekly schedule, but like the best laid plans of mice and men...

At any rate, as a way of making up for my lack of new postings, I thought I'd be a little perverse and offer some, well, older musings on films that I was watching last year between January and June. I know, I know... it's a little bit like cutting the mold off the edges of the mozzarella that expired a week ago but it's either that, or no pizza pie at all. Hope I'll be forgiven this once!

Thanks for your indulgence, and enjoy the penicillin...

Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006)

2009-06-07T13:09:00.004-06:00

One of the most joyous films I've seen in a while. A near perfect ensemble cast plays out endlessly inventive variations on their singular theme. The long take and centred framing of the girls during the final minutes of the game is unforgettable.

Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)

2009-06-07T13:07:00.001-06:00

Finally - an American film given over completely to the celebration of everyday carnality. A far cry - thankfully - from all the hate-fucking found in European cinema these days (to say nothing of The Brown Bunny). Frequently witty in its blissed-out frankness, Woody Allen should be taking notes.

Speed Racer (Andy & Larry Wachowski, 2008)

2009-06-07T13:03:00.002-06:00

At last! An adaptation of a lousy Japanese cartoon, coloured only in neon, made by dunderheaded neo-"Marxists." Just what us poor, benighted proles have been waiting for. Racers of the world, unite!

Three Times (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 2005)

2009-06-07T13:00:00.002-06:00

The opening segment taking place in the 1960s is a masterpiece in miniature - exquisite staging and perfectly chosen music ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Tears in Rain"). The second segment is subtle, but powerful silent melodrama. And while the last segment is much less engaging than the first two, the lovers are so exquisite to watch, it doesn't matter. Chen Chang and Qi Shu are two of the loveliest creatures on the planet.

Election (Johnny To, 2005) & Triad Election (2007)

2009-06-07T12:55:00.005-06:00

Scorsese would be proud. Rather routine power-play shenanigans at first, but the final fifteen minutes take the movie somewhere interesting. A worthy examination of honour among thieves, if nothing else.

* * * * * *

Johnny To crafts an emotionally complex study of greed and the erosion of tradition, drenched in shadow and blood. Certainly has "The Godfather" on its mind, but its utter lack of sentimentality and romance are a welcome corrective to Coppola's ambivalency. This is a powerful and ambitious sequel.

In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007)

2009-06-07T12:53:00.002-06:00

Despite being terrific NASA propaganda, this is also a grand tribute to the utopian impulses at the heart of exploration. A compelling use of some very charismatic talking heads (despite the inexplicable compulsion towards extreme close-ups). The juxtapositions between the elderly astronauts and images of their younger rocket-jockey incarnations made for compelling human drama.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

2009-06-07T12:50:00.002-06:00

A near-perfect vivisection of the mythologizing of the West. Deakins' cinematography is breathtaking: both romantic and scalpel-edged (the vignetting gives many of the images the iconic appearance of period daguerreotypes, and the torchlight, night-time train robbery is extraordinary). The cold beauty of the cinematography is complimented by performances that burrow into the typography of the West. Garret Dillahunt is particularly haunting as he puts up a desperate front to circumvent Pitt's harrowing paranoia. Masterful, and quite worthy of its comparisons to early Terence Malick.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, 2008)

2009-06-07T12:44:00.002-06:00

I thoroughly agree with a Metacritic amateur review of this film: Spielberg should stop indulging George Lucas. This is a listless, self-satisfied outing that brings out the worst instincts in a director with unmatchable craft and continually unrealized artistry (the best scene in the film is the rich, deep-focussed diner sequence, with intriguing pockets of teenaged activity blossoming behind Indy and Mutt as they trudge through more humdrum exposition). From the half-assed CGI, to Ford grimacing through every scene, everyone involved in this utterly forgettable dreck should've left well enough alone.

Elizabeth: The Golden Years (Shekhar Kapur, 2007)

2009-06-07T12:41:00.002-06:00

Profoundly silly tosh, but oh so fabulous wigs. The performances are all variations on singular themes: Owen glowers, Rush slinks, Blanchett postures. Particularly camp are the terrifically bathetic Manichean exaggerations: the umbral Spanish Catholics (enshrouded in flickering candlelight) and the resplendence of the Virgin Queen (care of a supercharged CGI sunrise and a few dozen arc lamps) as she overlooks the retreat of the Spanish armada. Flat out goofy!

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, 2006)

2009-06-07T12:37:00.002-06:00

Begins as an enjoyable romp in unfamiliar generic territory for Hartley, but becomes ponderous in its purposefully Byzantine second half. Posey, Goldblum and Urbaniak are wonderfully adept at circumnavigating the deadpan cadences of Hartley's dialogue, but whimsy gives way to ponderous geo-political intrigue all too soon. Hartley's baroque style livens up the proceedings slightly - the exclusivity of Dutch angles, and the blurry stills during action sequences that serve as a riposte to Bourne-styled chop-socky - but all the same, a decline from the heights of his early career.

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly 2006)

2009-06-07T12:22:00.003-06:00

A textbook example of producers utterly failing at their central responsibility - to support, nurture and focus unruly talent. After a promising debut, Kelly squanders his potential by chanelling David Lynch at his most comically unhinged. The problem is that while Lynch has a sense of humour, Kelley evidently does not (but thank God for the charismatic mugging of the Rock). While it certainly begs for repeated viewings, it doesn't warrant them. And yes, the film bristles with ideas (albeit of the half-baked variety), it ultimately fails as a satire. I'm willing to admit that it may work better as a comic book, but ultimately, l'll have to agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum on its effectiveness: you can't be political and willfully incoherent at the same time.

Shi gan (Time) - Ki-duk Kim

2009-06-07T12:14:00.006-06:00

Kim Ki-Duk proves himself to be an expert at quickly shifting affective registers - comedy to melodrama to suspense - with compelling aggression. Certainly more dialogue-driven than his combined previous work, his figures here attack the film's corporeal conceit with often frightening gusto. A disturbing study of the central tension in any romantic relationship: the dangerous dialectic between the promise of novelty and the exhaustion of familiarity.

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

2009-06-07T11:59:00.005-06:00

It's tempting to dismiss this as watered-down McEwan, or hyper-produced Masterpiece Theatre, but every moment in this meditation on the dangers and shortcomings of fiction are carefully considered and finely crafted. And perhaps this is the sole flaw in an otherwise superlative adaptation. Wright carefully attempts to correlate the rigidity of the framing, the expansive mobile camera (the five-minute long take of the beach at Dunkirk), and the percussive choreography of motion, rhythm and light (the close-up of the adolescent Briony on the subway, plunging in and out of darkness) to the protagonist's florid imagination. But our retrospective consideration of the narrration as Briony's fictive construction renders the drama somewhat lifeless and inert. While this final revelation should wound, it settles for dejection. A considerable compromise, but an otherwise extraordinarily beautiful film.

The Politics of Interruption - Bamako

2009-05-08T18:01:00.019-06:00

Admittedly, it’s been some time since I’ve engaged with a work as explicitly didactic as Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006) – outside of my forays into activist documentary. For this reason (and never mind the fact that I’m hardly an expert an African cinema), I was somewhat nervous to feature it as my first meditation on the films I’ve recently been watching. And yet, the film refuses to leave me alone: its impassioned critique of globalization as neo-colonial enterprise cannot readily be ignored. So it seems an appropriate enough work with which to begin these entries.

In a small courtyard in Bamako belonging to Mélé – an incredibly beautiful nightclub singer – and her unemployed husband, Chaka, a conceptual trial of sorts is being held. The plaintiff is Africa itself, represented by numerous Malian representatives: a farmer, a schoolteacher, an economist, an unemployed worker, even Aminata Traoré – Mali’s former minister of culture. The defendants are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – represented by real life defence lawyer, Roland Rappaport (who tries on a pair of sunglasses in one humorous scene, and demands that the street vendor prove that they are genuine Gucci). The G8’s liberalized economy is on trial here, and the defendants are called to account for the disastrous failures of the various economic restructuring programs initiated in Africa over the past twenty years. Surprisingly and often comically, however, the proceedings are often interrupted as various members of the community pass through the courtyard – oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion as they go about their daily business.

Sissako’s fifth feature is the most strident and allegorical of his work so far, but also the most intricately structured (despite its deceptively simple concept and plotting). At first, I must admit that I found its structure both hyperbolic and repetitive. In the spirit of Marxist-inflected third cinema, most of the film features heated debates between the bewigged magistrates and the various witnesses, as well as a number of lengthy monologues, lectures and personal testimonies. These exchanges are typically framed in medium close-up, with Sissako frequently holding on the speakers for extended durations. While this strategy respects the impassioned testimony of the various speakers and is an aesthetic that honours the film’s resistant subjects, it does not always make for compulsive cinema.

This is an old complaint about politicized filmmaking generally, and some of the less dynamic representatives of third cinema – those rooted in the stodginess of reductive, over-simplified Marx or Frantz Fanon – fall into the zero-sum territory of the illustrated lecture. However, I’m not advancing a superficially formalist argument here – that a successful film must be “cinematic.” Rather, I’m asserting that the most compelling representatives of radical, militant, or otherwise political cinema embraced an equally dynamic style to advance its argument. This was the genius of innovators like Solanas & Getino, Rocha, Sembene, Mambéty, etc. Moreover, it was not only that a tri-continental revolution never materialized that (arguably) lead to a diminishment of third cinema in the early 1990s. Not only did the category tend to homogenize class oppression in all three worlds and conflate varied experiences of colonialism, but it often didn’t account for ways that elements of commercial cinema can be used for political purposes – particularly music, humour, and sexuality. As Robert Stam has pointed out in his article on postcolonial filmmaking in The Cinema Book (p. 123), the greatest contemporary African filmmakers haven’t abandoned the militancy of classic third cinema; instead they have adopted an approach that leaves room for doubt, ambiguity, and multiplicity.

It was for this reason that I became an admirer of Sissako – particularly in his earlier works. Indeed, Bamako owes a great debt to his magnificent Life on Earth (1998). A semi-documentary and autobiographical love letter to Mali from a prodigal son, the film lingers on villagers in Sokolo on the eve of the new millennium. While villagers try to make international phone calls on hopelessly unreliable phones, and carry out their daily activities Sissako cuts to news images of other much more fevered millennial celebrations around the first world. Purposefully slow and meditative in its pacing (and featuring exquisite narration from the great Afro-Martinician poet, Aimé Césaire), Life on Earth depicts events that are hardly monumental but are of the utmost importance nonetheless.

This intermittent oscillation between the “important” and “ordinary,” or the “abstract” and the “concrete” is what gives Bamako its poetic force. Sissasko is hardly interested in representing the myth of a united African front: he cuts from the trial’s proceedings to shots of listless villagers outside the courtyard – many of whom become bored or annoyed by the lectures and testimonies broadcasted over shoddily wired loudspeakers and cheap radios. In between witnesses, we are also presented with instances of Chaka tending to his and Mélé’s sick child – real suffering and attempts at relief temporarily take precedence over philosophical disputes about the same subjects. The trial itself is interrupted by a funeral procession that passes through the courtyard (the judge himself suggests a recess, as he reminds us that “real life intrudes”). Finally, the film itself is disrupted by another one: a faux spaghetti Western entitled "Death in Timbuktu," which stars Palestinian filmmaker, Elia Suleiman and Danny Glover. A family gathers around the television to watch the spectacle of impoverished Malians being shot down by ruthless gunslingers, and its difficult to determine whether Sissako intends this parodic moment as an indictment of Hollywood-style entertainment, or canny political appropriation (Michael Sicinski sees it as a tongue-in-cheek poke at Rocha’s earlier radicalized Westerns and third cinema’s “aesthetics of poverty”).

The recurring trope of interruption is ingenious in its ambiguity. For one, it complicates the usual simplistic “West vs. the rest” discourse that reduces much that it is interesting in third cinema to stark dualities. Secondly, it avoids the temptation to make sweeping generalizations about economic circumstances in Africa, and to reduce represented peoples to noble victims – united in both suffering and resistance. Finally, it resists catering to the guilty conscience of privileged liberal viewers. Indeed, Bamako’s climatic moment occurs when an elderly witness addresses the court by singing his wrenching testimony in his native Bambara. It is a dramatic contrast to the silence of the schoolteacher who previously took the stand, and found he could not summon the words to express his anger with the G8’s contemptible 2005 debt relief package. By placing this chant at the film’s climax and refusing to translate the man’s songs for non-native viewers, Sissako resists the naïve inclinations of the social problem film and courtroom drama to provide easy solutions for near-insoluble dilemmas. But just as this strategy places the elder beyond the rhetorical reach of Rappaport, or other defenders of a liberalized global economy, and their ability to rationalize the continued exploitation of the third world, it also succinctly stresses the intractability of Africa’s plight. For despite the best intentions and efforts of a concerned West, the perpetual and enforced poverty of HIPC’s such as Mali is a calamity beyond the ability of privileged subjects to comprehend or appreciate. This is a sobering pessimism to which any would-be idealist should perhaps attend and respect whilst engaging in this remarkable work.

Historic Lethbridge Festival

2009-05-06T20:43:00.002-06:00

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to plug the free screenings being held in the Lethbridge Public Library Gallery Theatre in conjunction with the Historic Lethbridge Festival.

Yours truly will be hosting a free screening of Swing Time this Friday, May 8 at 7PM. For a sneak preview, have a peek at the previous blog entry below.

http://www.uleth.ca/finearts/events/1530

See you there!

Fred 'n Ginger

2009-05-03T21:19:00.016-06:00

An abbreviated version of my upcoming introduction to my public lecture on Swing Time:

Many students who become familiar with my taste for risqué material are often surprised when I declare my devotion to musicals. I suppose that musicals are slightly embarrassing for some. Perhaps this is why audiences either love them or hate them: the only other genre to evoke such a divided response of equal virulence is the horror film. Maybe musicals are equally horrifying, in a way. As with horror, it’s not so much that many find their flagrant disregard for realist conventions discomforting; perhaps it has more to do with our fear of exposure and vulnerability.

Musicals seek to evoke joy from audiences, but their aestheticizing of raw emotion can also be off-putting. I always find these kinds of responses surprising. Personally, I'm enthralled by the idea that characters in musicals sing and dance in order to tap into feelings that they can’t express through ordinary language. These characters give shape to their feelings through performance, and in so doing, they’re laying themselves bare for an audience. In fact, characters in musicals are doubly exposed and doubly vulnerable: 1) their performance is an offering of themselves to you for your approval; and 2) they declare their emotion in the most grand way possible - by proclaiming it through song and dance.

For me, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire represent the quintessential musical couple who offer themselves for your approval and declare their mutual affection in the grandest of terms. The pair were in ten films together between 1933 and 1939, all of which they made for RKO (discounting, of course, their one-off for MGM in 1949, The Barkleys of Broadway). It's not at all surprising that they're the most famous dance team in movie history: rarely have two dancers been so perfectly suited to each other’s rhythms.

One of the recurring comments about Astaire is that “he made them all look good,” and indeed it’s remarkable how he adapts himself to suit the character and style of his partners. Take a look at Easter Parade and Funny Face to see how Astaire plays off of and supports the strengths of Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn respectively, neither of whom are known for their skill as dancers.Rogers, however, needs no such support. Her skill as a ballroom dancer is enviable, and one of the most iconic images from classical musicals is from Top Hat, with Rogers adorned in a feathered gown that give impression of weightlessness. She does not dance so much as she floats.

Ultimately, the pair takes on legendary status for their perfect symbiosis. They are the quintessence of elegance and effortlessness, and we return to them over and over to observe the alchemy of two bodies achieving perfect synchronicity. I love Fred and Ginger for the same reason I love screwball couples like Grant and Hepburn, Fonda and Stanwyck, Sandler and Watson: their dances evoke the dream of compatibility, of finding someone with whom you can move in perfect unison.

Some naysayers have pointed out that the Rogers/Astaire relationship frequently moves from one of equality to inequality. In Swing Time, for example, the “challenge” dance in which the two playfully perform as equals (“Pick Yourself Up”) eventually gives way to the ballroom dance in which Fred leads and Ginger follows (“Waltz in Swing Time”).

Of course, those who want to locate sexist ideology in the classical musical’s emphasis on romantic partnership will no doubt find it there. But for me, partnership in the musical is the means by which characters gain access to and articulate emotion that is otherwise unavailable and inexpressible. Again, musicals seem slightly embarrassing because they are unapologetic about the way they make the inward, private self manifest in the most spectacular way possible. In other words, characters literally make spectacles of themselves. It’s in this disregard for propriety that musicals have their greatest force: there’s nothing that violates middle-class decorum more than putting one’s self on display.

Astaire and Rogers’ means of expression seems to exceed "proper" communication. Indeed, in “Entertainment and Utopia” (2002), Richard Dyer suggests that their musicals offer a longed-for solution to the problems of communication. Complex or confused feelings are presented directly and vividly without being made to seem ambiguous as they are in real life, while the performers become absolutely certain about these feelings. When you can’t speak your mind in musicals, you’ve gotta' dance. In so doing, you look towards an other that can inspire you to proclaim emotion, someone who will understand you and move to your personal rhythms perfectly and naturally, someone who will simultaneously move you as elegantly as Fred and Ginger moved one another while dancing cheek to cheek.

Establishing Shot

2009-04-27T16:56:00.002-06:00

Hello, everyone.

A curious thing happened when I turned thirty a few years ago. My ability to remember in lucid detail extended filmic moments began to erode - almost as if someone had flipped a switch. It was a particularly disturbing debilitation considering my profession as a film studies academic. In a way, I felt like a conservatory trained pianist unable to recall key passages in a sonata, or worse, like an amnesiac who's compelled to pull out old photographs to convince himself that he once had a history.

I first became conscious of this during a film theory seminar that I was teaching at the time. Attempting to describe the blouse Monica Vitti wears in L'Avventura when she and Gabriele Ferzetti stop for a tryst in the grass, I hit a total blank. Now admittedly, this is a pretty innocuous memory lapse. But when I first saw the film when I was twenty, the moment left an inexplicable imprint on me. Something about the contrasting textures: the weave of her blonde hair on grass flattened by lovemaking, and the stylish assertiveness of those tiny white polkadots and the sharp "V" of her neckline. Of course, there's nothing immediately profound about this observation, but for some reason, the image stuck and it's the one that always comes to mind immediately when I think about the film.

Obviously, my students didn't really care about this lapse (and thankfully, one of the more fashion-conscious of the lot bailed me out), but it threw me for a loop. During casual conversations about new films I had only just recently seen, I began to become more and more conscious of a growing inability to recall such detailed moments. I began to resign myself to a bleak future of film viewing (akin to my experience of literature, ironically): fully cognitively present in the moment of engagement, but damn if I could tell you much about the engagement a week afterwards.

Hence, this blog.

I would like to start committing some immediate impressions about films to writing. This is not a substitute for careful criticism, or even cursory "reviews," but an act of journaling that serves as a kind of memorybank. In many ways, it is both rescue act and preservation.

On one level, I do sympathize with Stanley Cavell when he writes in The World Viewed that "a few faulty memories will not themselves shake my conviction in what I've said, since I am as interested in how a memory went wrong as in why the memories that are right occur when they do." On another level, though, it is not that I'm afraid of misremembering films, but barely recalling them at all. Too many films that I professed to love at the time of reception have already "disappeared," so to speak. I'd like to ward off future dissolutions as much as possible with these writings.

To that end, this blog will not just serve as a mnemonic enterprise for its own sake, but will also serve as a series of informal and impressionistic responses to the current cinema. I'm hoping to post some notes on memorable forms of filmic engagements on a weekly basis if possible. "A list of things that quicken the heart," to borrow from Sans soleil, if I may. Somewhat in the spirit of Pauline Kael's dynamic rush to judgement (she was never one to linger over a film), my priority will be on immediacy in the hopes of responding in kind to the movement, energies, sensation and spirit of the movies I watch. Criticism here (I hope) will serve as an attempt to discover forms of permanence amidst the dissipation that haunts our engagement with all art.

It's my ambition that this project will simultaneously help solidify my own critical priorities, and in so doing, will also speak to you cinephiles out there engaged in your own ongoing search for the new, the visionary, and the momentous: cinematic instances that leave a trace, or an imprint - not unlike the crush of flattened grass that marked the idle dalliance of L'Avventura's two lovers.

I hope that you'll find these occasional musings helpful in your own acts of virtual film preservation, and I'll always be happy to hear your own thoughts as well.

Many thanks for joining me along the way!