From "American Sniper" to ... "Triumph of the Will"?
''American Sniper'' is a movie for those who enjoy feeling protected and
safely individuated—disconnected from other people—rather than for those
eager to lose themselves into a brotherhood. Chris Kyle is a sniper—his
organs and privates are always covered as he lies on the ground to ''snipe.''
He becomes a famous sniper—his fellow troops don't see him so much as
just one of them as a hero protector who guarantees them victory. His
mission is not the same as everyone else's, as much as he might pretend that
it is: while the rest of the troops take out the ordinaries, he is bound to face
off against the great devil Mustafa, who picks off vulnerable soldiers like a
death vulture pounced direct from the sky. He can personally handle some
adulation—one soldier who hails him repeatedly as ''the hero'' before the rest
of the troops, is dealt with with a plate of flung food, humbling the alert state
of newlydrawn attention with the drowsiness of the narratively known—but
when other's wellmeant appreciation means him feeling requited to
receiving and accepting, to him becoming a passive receptacle to other's
needs, PTSD lets him off the hook by making background noise suddenly
remind of traumatic previous war encounters, and he's only half there to
receive anything. His wife has never had the advantage of him. He
approached her after attending her shooting down the approach of another,
and his familiarity with her technique means he's able to buttress whatever
riposte she has left in her. Thereafter he's involved in a war they both believe
in, so something along the lines of the devastating attack James Wolcott
levied against those who diminished warserving Salinger in favour of Lena
Dunham, is always at the ready, if need be.
But this is Eastwood when he's still progrowth. He'll do a film like ''Gran
Torino,'' which suggests that in becoming accustomed to Korean neighbours,
the curmudgeon main protagonist isn't so much adjusting to the new as
keeping fidelity with familiar values—now housed in physically different
people—but which overall feels in favour of adaptation and change. He'll do
a film like ''Jersey Boys,'' which lands us back in the conservative 1950s, but
which features a flamboyant gay producer who's portrayed favourably—
whipsmart, innovative, selfinterested but also overall a good friend. And
he'll do ''American Sniper,'' which does lend support to the liberal position
that the government needs to fund therapy for warafflicted troops. When he
tilts the other way—and he will—he'll start doing films more like ''Triumph
of the Will,'' where there will be nothing more gleefully forsaken than one's
individuality, and where the main protagonist will gleefully catch any shared
emotion you might want to intermingle with him so you’re all that much
more ''one.''
This change will occur because anyone who needed to protect his own
growth with defensive strategies, came out of a early matrix that was
smothering. Such a matrix was also claiming ... and in abandoning it one felt
upon withdrawal its massive disapproval, its accusation that you are a bad
boy/girl who deliberately abandoned a wholly selfless, endlessly generous
and provisioning source for flippant and narcissistic—i.e. entirely selfish—
reasons. One cannot handle feeling abandoned, unworthy of one's mother's
—i.e. the ''mountain'' ground within the early matrix—love forever ...
accumulating before you is how apocalyptic this first felt to you when you
experienced it as an infant, and it eventually drowns whatever positive self
evaluation you've mustered for yourself in your individuated adult life. So
off is shuck your distinctiveness, and you merge within a body
masochistically as but added cells to a corpulent grand madame. You
become like Germans when they in the millions forsook their individuated,
growing Weimar selves—something wondrous but totally new and heartily
anxietyprovoking—and lost themselves into the provincial stupidity of the
''volk.''
One of the interesting things that will happen is how the idea of the
sheepdog, the protector—a recurrent idea in Eastwood's films—will change.
In ''American Sniper'' the idea was introduced not just to explain the source
of Kyle's behavioural inclinations but to add another empowered patriarch
into a scene—Kyle’s dad instructed him to be a sheepdog—an empowered
patriarch felt by Eastwood to add a barrier that could succeed against any
giant, bloated, maternal seamonster's efforts to reach out of the swamp and
yank poor Kyle/Eastwood back into a digesting stew. Those with any
trepidation, those who are frail, won't be seen as worthy of being guarded—
as they are to some extent in this film, perhaps most especially with the
marines, who didn't receive the training the Seals did ... who just six months
before were civilians. They'll be seen as adding nothing to the prowess of the
group, as being vile for being useless, and the protector's role will be to
protect the vitality of the group and expunge them—that is, in a sense, to kill
the sheep.
They'll be portrayed a bit like Kyle's younger brother, whom Kyle is
delighted with and proud to see enlisted but whom the film shows as a pale
shadow to Kyle, and who's weak soul couldn't bear the tarnish that a single
tour would incur upon it. They'll seem more like Mark Lee, who dies shortly
after questioning the wisdom of the war and the virtue of warrior
persistence, but that much more as a result of their being in truth aliens that
should have been expunged from the brave collective effort of war that
much earlier. They'll seem a bit more like the damaged vet who killed Chris
Kyle, whom his wife espied as a dark demon in vetclothing as soon as she
spotted him, but who was clouded from acting to save her glorious husband
by the credibility of the idea of keeping faith with the weak—a ''foul''
concept "now" revealed as meaning that such a thing as the greatest warrior
in your history, would be left to be downed by a fart of a man.
Eastwood will be vilifying the weak not just within the group, but outside it.
Within, the weak saps the strength of the group, and is hated for that reason;
outside, the weak and vulnerable are guilty of representing what you mostly
were when you felt targeted within the maternal matrix, and are therefore
targeted because you’re now completely in mind to keep your mother
unblemished in her holiness. So in future films ''enemy'' children that are
being targeted by herosnipers won't be targeted with trepidation, but shot in
the manner of how Kyle in real life actually shot them—totally self
righteously: down goes another little savage! … serve up another! And since
all villainy must be outside the group, all the negative aspects of your
mother must be projected there as well. This means that in future films when
woman come into view needing to be shot for their carrying bombs, we
won't be meant to think of them as tools of the men who commanded them
—as we are to a significant extent in this film— but as issuing forth oblivion
from out of their own selves. It'll mean that the exotic persian Orientalism
won't be found in the "beautiful" Mustafa, the ''sheepdog'' sniper on the side
of the terrorists, but in the ''queen'' at the centre of the hive—''the
butcher''—''herself,'' who'll be made to possess traits that identity ''her'' as
our splitoff villainous mother.
''She'' won't be made to carry a purse, necessarily, but ''she’ll'' surely be
made to lurch over a doomed child in a way that can't help but remind of a
witch adding salt to the bare delicious exposed flesh of the helpless child.
Clint Eastwood's comfort zone, in "American Sniper"
Clint Eastwood feels comfortable when men can rule the public sphere and
women can be ushered into the domestic. He feels that the idea of
male authority is so vulnerable right now, deemed so deservedly vulnerable,
that if you pointed to any instance of it with praise carelessly, you might find
yourself linked to something just about to be devoured into a hole where
devil jezebels will take it to pieces for its rapeenabling vibe. So he makes a
film set in the era of the 1950s—"Jersey Boys”—where ostensibly it's not
"your" preference but just realistic to delineate the journey of a band where
everyone in authority is a man, and where its not your revenge dream come
true but just realistic to show the fate of the agitated woman who marries the
leader of the band to become a housewife who bounces of walls into
craziness. And when he makes his next film, he escapes North America
entirely, and goes perhaps to the one place where we can make male control
not seem a conscious artifice but rather presumed—where one's enjoyment
of patriarchy becomes almost a subliminal satisfaction, outside of critique
because like the 1950s, it's just the way the world is—and where ready
avenue exists to back off female complaint and indeed shame women back
into the role of supplicants. He heads off for warzone Iraq.
Eastwood doesn't want to seem like outcastfromHollywoodsociety Mel
Gibson, which he would have if he made a film which overtly made it seem
as if the war in Iraq was right and that those who responded by signing up
were simply the bravest, most loyal of Americans. So what he does is appear
to be playing to the liberal belief that those who signed up were simply
ignorant, uninformed—good but simple: they were people who knew no
other than mainstream news and who'd been indoctrinated into a belief
system that the best way to carry out their genuine intention to be good was
to be support the war effort. Liberals, who usually want to castigate
"rednecks," disarm this way of thinking of them and switch into another
when one provokes the idea of corporate/media control, then suddenly
they're not people who deserve to be shamed and insulted for their regressive
mindsets but rather protected ... they're just simple people being manipulated
by powers much greater than they, whom liberals must do their best to
educate. Chris Kyle, who's been raised to be someone who values being a
"sheepdog," someone who protects the weak, who knows he has a godgiven
talent with a gun, and who understands participation as only something done
in the dustswirling tempest of immediacy and direct action, sees on tv the
two towers being brought down and knows the right thing to do is to go
whereever "savagehiding" desert his nation tells him people responsible for
this atrocity can be found. And in the course of serving, he will incur PTSD,
an affliction liberals like to think of as making these naive, uneducated men
damaged, ruined ... as used and castaside by a corporate society that
pretends faith with them but really doesn't give one damn.
Eastwood has his way into making a film assuming a reasonably 'cross
Hollywood sympathetic approach to Kyle, and he uses this proxy to re
experience a good part of what was comfortable for him about the 1950s. No
where in this environment is there any family which isn't clearly under the
dominion of men. A woman and a child come into Kyle's sights as possibly
carrying explosive devices, but we were shown their being sent there first by
a man from his cellphone. A woman presents her wounds to Kyle to show
the degree of savagery of "the butcher," but she was ushered to by her
husband, who more or less snapped his fingers to acquire her summons.
Kyle notices that a man they're dining with has bruised elbows—and
therefore is likely not the civilian he claims to be but a soldier—but the fact
of his being at the head of the table, with his son by his side, and with his
wife, barely a presence, quietly taking away and bringing dishes, is meant to
be outside our critical appraisal, like it would be if we were of the 1950s and
were in the 1950s.
Kyle is very hardworking and genuinely shown to be, if not keeping
civilization intact, certainly doing good work—killing brutal men who'd drill
holes in children and the like—and Eastwood makes PTSD serve merely
what hardworking 50s men were ostensibly afflicted with after their arduous
daily grind, battling other men in a competitive society and keeping their
families afloat. 1950s men could not help but "bring work home" too ... and
that's why social norms had it that the wives' fulltime occupation once their
husbands were home was to nurse them: not to confront them with the
problems arising from their own day but bring them drinks, serve them
dinner, soothe them down and spoil them—then, and only then, would the
daily toil accrued from the outside world be met and matched. If a wife
instead started screeching, berating her overworked husband and betraying
the role society needed of her, she could expect to be shamed for it ... just
like Kyle's wife would be shamed, if on the phone to Kyle she started
harping on what his being away was doing to her and he responded, "What
was that dear? ... I couldn't hear you for my jeep turning over and my buddy
just being shot through the head."
Eastwood embraces the idea of PTSD only because it can suggest stature
rather than weakness. If you have a heavier case of it, it's surely because
you've been out on the field longer, endured more of an unsparing
environment ... a fraillooking, elder therapist notes that Kyle has had 180
kills, and you wonder if he's thinking more on how to treat him or how to
become the faintest shadow of him. One of Kyle's good friends, the fellow
sniper Mark Lee, remarks that war is something like kids proving
themselves by seeing how long they can hold on to an electric wire, but
when he dies shortly afterwards it does seem to be out of Kyle's supposition
that he was no longer ready to meet the daily grind. He's disillusioned, but
the film provides no reason for it: there are plenty of very bad guys
out there, and if you're not at your best, good men on your side will die for
it.
In short, Mark Lee makes it seem as if being a soldier is like being a
salesman out of "Death of a Salesman," you just go on to prove you're strong
when what you are really are is being depleted, to no point, while no one
else out there cares. Kyle's retort is what a buoyed 1950s salesman would
winningly reply to this 1930s—"Death of a Salesman" is about someone
working in the Great Depression—world view: "What on earth are you
talking about? We keep at it because we're needed and it's our job. It's just
that simple."
18, 2015
Parting ways, in Ridley Scott's "Exodus: Gods and Kings"
Ridley Scott is known for his strong female protagonists, but there is a
feeling he nestles into this story of ancient lands because he thinks it's one
where tested older male rulers have gotten women who might contest them,
securely contained, and where if these men have had a long enough tenure
over their boys, when power descends to them, the momentary dislocation
incurred when power trades hands won't be sufficient for even an
experienced femaleatcourt to take advantage of. Elder, governing "fathers"
are like guardian sentinels that keep chaos at bay; but are meant to crumble
down at a certain point where hopefully an even better erection of
themselves can immediately step in to keep things generating rather than
succumbing to amendmaking, and other things that mean retreat from
"your" own business.
These fathers are strong, secure and kind, but not without damning flaws
that should mean that at some point they need to exit the scene. Marcus
Aurelius in "Gladiator" nurses his great general Maximus fondly, and has
kept a confident realm, but is warranted in asking if ultimately he'll be
remembered as just cruel—he has launched armies afield that perhaps have
spread civilization but for sure have butchered multitudes. In "Kingdom of
Heaven," Godfrey de Ibelin arrives in time to offer shelter to his insecurely
placed son, but he came to visit him in part to apologize for having had sex
with his mother—who had no choice but to lay with him—and is revealed as
someone who hasn't put much thought into how to provision his terribly
droughtvulnerable desert estates. And in "Exodus," the beneficent pharaoh
Seti is implicated in still listening to gods that may foretell truth but are
serpentine, probably overall uncaring and indifferent, and properly not due
any respect, and of course in being part of the lineage of pharaohs that have
built their grand civilization on the backs of slaves.
But when these shielding "husks" are off—even if it is not consciously
understood as so by Scott— whatever these sheltered "sons" do afterwards
in the space now birthed to them is presented as right, just for the sheer fact
that what they do unravels their own course. They are prepared to beat back
other predators thinking of seizing upon their terrain, and make the world
landscape reflect, rather, their own dispositions. "Gladiator's" Commodus
learned enough about statecraft, about people, from his father that the
senators immediately besieging him to concern himself with what they think
most urgent, can in fact be ignored entirely, as after a brief delay, where they
succeed in unsettling him, making him perhaps think they'll hold sway over
him, he quickly recovers so that the first, second, and third order of business
actually becomes what he wants, how he wants to initiate his reign. He has
garnered enough experience with the wily that his older sister, who is first
presented to us as perhaps Rome's foremost expert in deception, can actually
become ... scared, disarmed from effectively impinging on him. Balian
learned enough about being a knight from his father that he is able to keep
afloat a people and save a city from complete ravaging, sticking to his own
principles while a beautiful queen offers him such a cornucopia in
apparently guiltfree satisfaction that it would appear unaccountable he not
change course and belittle as well the idea/ideal of the perfect knight. And in
"Exodus," Ramses has been allowed enough nurturant days with his
"brother" Moses, enough sincere encouragement by his father to always
keep faith with him, that when his mother starts dictating terms, insisting it
would be unaccountable if he not immediately slay Moses—the foretold
threat to the throne—he brushes her aside, and as much as possible stays
loyal to him. Shipping him off, yes, but shipping him off armed with a
sword that'll deflect any assassins sent by his mother and lend him a credible
future.
You might think that Scott would prefer that the likes of Commodus,
especially, obeyed the experienced and wise when they insisted on his
beginning his rule by following their dictates. But in any situation where
someone is being pressed into making a decision s/he feels under
compunction to heed, whether it might be in accord with what s/he might
come up with on his own or not, is one where I would argue Scott is actually
pulling for the one under “assault,” the one being undermined—there is no
way he would have thought to structure a film where the new young
emperor, good or bad, is effectively hemmed in. He was going to need to
have Commodus find a wily way to avoid the fate he momentarily seemed
obliged to, just as he was going to need Maximus to only seem beholden to
his fate to be executed, just to be willing to journey with them as principle
protagonists. For Scott, to be attendant to others is to impinged ... you feel it
notably in such movies of his as "Prometheus," where the captain, the one
who has rule (over a starship) but who has never been allowed to free herself
from the dictates and machinations of her father, is tight, bitter, frustrated,
wholly unhappy.
It is important you make your own decisions, it is important that you not be
disswayed ... are not thoughts ever aired in "Gladiator," but the former is,
overtly, in "Exodus," and Scott has publicly chided himself for allowing the
opinion of test audiences to sway the form of the released version of
"Kingdom of Heaven." He put his film up for test viewings and end up
heeding the audience's reactions, thereby ruining his efforts by putting a
forth a film shortchanged his own highly astute editorial judgment/skills. He
knows he ought to have been Commodus, confident even if unpopular and
apparently wholly astray, he knows that everything new should be granted
the aggressive stance of being allowed to change people before people
should commence their assault on it, and kept faith with himself.
What he explores in this film with the avenue cleared from obstacles—with
"the parted sea"— is what happens when two brothers need to do the mature
thing and test whether a close friendship that worked in an environment
which didn’t allow one of them to really shine, makes any sense at all when
both have come to know what suits them best. This isn’t “Kingdom of
Heaven,” where when two brothers meet after a long time away the younger
brother’s becoming greater, becoming “an actual baron,” is meant to
humiliate the older. Rather, the film is sympathetic to the brother who,
owing to no other fault other than just being more limited, really would now
just be a hinderance. So while we do see Ramses behaving abominably—
commanding in one instance a family be hanged—Scott’s attention to him is
so much someone who is shedding a friend regretfully that even more
attention is put to Ramses’ kindnesses, his virtues and strengths.
Scott attends to Ramses' manner with his wife, which is loving, and most
especially to his child—whom he truly cherishes. When he loses his son
owing to God’s wrath and his reaction is not just to pursue vengeance but to
spend a long moment with his dead son, speaking to him tenderly—“you
know the reason you sleep so peacefully … it is because you are loved”—we
know that something remarkable has been chastened. He even works to
challenge how implicative and reverberant we’re to allow the hanging of the
family to remain, making it also an occasion for a joke where Ramses is
intended our full sympathies (he didn’t quite have mine, as the one hanged, a
court “scientist,” was commendably bangon in making sense of the
sequence of the blight upon them, even if he wasn’t conversant as to the
whole damage fleas might leave behind, i.e. disease theory).
But Moses is a better person, a much more evolved sort. It shows in his
being able to readily empathize with those not part of his immediate family.
It shows in his attitude towards authority; tradition doesn’t bide him to defer,
something he shows in his taking ready amusement at the silly “science” of
prognosticating from animal guts—a practice that no one else is really quite
ready to abandon, not even his brother, who only pretends wholesale
agreement with him. And it shows in the kind of relationships he prefers,
where challenges, contestation, is seen as reflecting the strong independent
soul that inspired the birth of respect and love in the first place.
His wife and his child are by no means beholden to him as their patriarch.
When he leaves them to help his people—the Hebrews suffering under
Egyptian reign—both confront him with challenges, with their honest
feelings, rather than cozy him with the reassurances he was at some level
hoping for. When his son informs him he doesn’t believe he’ll actually be
coming back to them, he says, “good for you. Don’t ever just say what
people want to hear” … and it reads as entirely sincere.
For at that moment Scott is surely both “in” the son and “in” Moses … to
him, you can’t begin your life if you’re overly respondent to those who
could get your agreement just because you’re not fortified enough to
withstand their rejection. These people don't contest or challenge; they sap
from you the very ability to respond independently.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
One of the arduous things about watching Peter Jackson's "Lord of the
Rings" trilogy was experiencing the intense parentchild tumult. Arwen
gains independence from her father and pledges fidelity to her love for
Aragorn above all else, but it involves her devolving into a frail state,
becoming as fragile as all the rest of Middle Earth before Sauron's ascension
and the elves' retreat. Faramir gains recognition from his impossibly
stubborn father, the steward of Gondor, but not even after essentially
throwing his life away in a hopeless battle and only after being midpart
cooked in a bonfire of his father's own contrivance. This is an older
generation's sturm und dang; a breakthrough occurs — stern authority is
breached — but it's so exhausting you have to hope that once it's been
successfully had out that none of the parties involved ever reacquire the
stamina to restage it. "The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies" threatened a
repeat of this sort of thunderous clash — Bilbo's "unforgivable" "betrayal"
of Thorin — but it seems Peter Jackson had perhaps more how
contemporary parents and children might handle their children breaking
away from them — how he might handle it, with his own children — rather
than what baby boomers like himself had to brace themselves to expect with
their more authoritative parents. For in this film autonomy is recognized
with some grace by elders, and the definition of what "youth" does that
deserves respect is expanded beyond being evidently in the right to simply
possessing persuasive drive.
The scene where Bilbo reveals to Thorin that he gave the outside armies the
Arkenstone is hardly Bilbo's most important scene with him. The attention is
barely on their confrontation, for Thorin's attention is still so much also on
the outside armies at his gate that Bilbo immediately finds an opportunity to
scamper off. We note that Bilbo stands strong in the encounter; he declares
what he did without apology; but it seems the most diluted version of what
Jackson could stand to have offered without belittling the significance of it
in the book and his fidelity to the characters. So what is left mostly
unchallenged in impact is a previous encounter between the two where Bilbo
reveals that he's taken an oak seed he'd found along their adventures,
intending to plant it back near his home when he gets back. What he thereby
shows to Thorin is that, not only was he very much interested in helping the
dwarves reclaim their homeland — so that they could enjoy the same
pleasures Bilbo knows he'll eventually be returning to — but in taking
"their" homeland back with him. Not as a memento, but in the great,
imposing form of a whole oak tree. He does enormous honour both to
himself — the dwarves have meant something to him — and to Thorin ...
indeed, in Jackson's version Thorin's gifting to Bilbo of the mithril armor
almost seems a makeshift equivalent gesture: he grabbed for himself Thorin
Oakenshield's "shield"; Thorin provides him the matching armour. Basically
this encounter, which also involves Thorin once again showing his
appreciation for Bilbo and his sense of him as an equal, is about immediately
breaking the possible predatory stance between them for one which restates
what had been accomplished between them in the previous film. Thorin may
go wholehog regression with the rest of the dwarves, but it's kept to a
surprising minimum with Bilbo in this movie, seemingly because the
exhaustion of having to climb the whole way back doesn't seem something
Jackson wants to degrade them with.
Jackson could be pretty hard on hobbits in "Lord of the Rings," forcing them
to go a long way to redeem themselves after having accomplished feats that
should have kept them bulletproof for awhile. For instance, Merry and
Pippen were primarily responsible for one of the two towers going down,
manipulating the great Ent army into a war they'd just decided not to involve
themselves in. Yet early in "Return" they're back to being pests,
appropriately scowled at by Gandalf, just as they were when he first met
them and were recklessly blasting off his best fireworks and making a mess
of a party. But in this film Gandalf gets ready to release a heavy scowl on
Bilbo but Bilbo is allowed by Jackson the kind of stature that would
immediately have Gandalf draw back. Bilbo decides he's going to cross an
active battlefield to warn Thorin of news of another approaching army, and
Gandalf replies: "you'll be seen" ... "it's out of the question." Bilbo doesn't
reproach Gandalf for the couple of heavy insults he'd implicitly handed him
here — one, that since he'd advertised the importance of Bilbo joining the
journey in the first place as owing in part to his being so small he could
successfully trespass places others would be seen in, he'd basically been
bullshitting both Bilbo and the dwarves about his worthiness of setting out
on the adventure; and two, that the only reason he arrogantly decided for
Bilbo that he was going to go on the adventure, marking his door so a party
of dwarves could turn his place into a tumult, wasn't because his ongoing
existence, sans adventure, and continually amongst all his mother's doilies,
wasn't worthy of respect, but apparently because this was something he
thought he could inflict on Bilbo regardless. He reacts by convincingly
showing that to him what is important is the fact of his own decision, what
he wants to do, regardless of how even good friends see him for it. And
Gandalf recedes, registering that he'd been opposed by someone who in that
moment was probably more in the right than he.
This isn't something you often see happen to Gandalf. In "Lord of the Rings"
everyone who does so is made to seem the fool Gandalf assesses them as ....
Theoden refusing Gandalf's request they meet the army in open battle,
insisting his people would be safe at Helm's Deep; Denethor refusing to
calling for aid. Gandalf's "rightness" is apparently somewhat contestable in
this film, however ... enough so in fact that just before Bilbo doing it
Thranduil kinda does it as well. Thranduil, the elf king, could have been
made to seem appallingly narrowfocussed in this film — the king we were
prepared to encounter given previous references to him as jeweldazzled and
of a "more wild" race of elves. But when he refuses Gandalf and insists on
pulling his troops away from conflict, Jackson insured that we'd been
witness to his previous instant willingness to have his elves join the dwarves
in battle when truly dire opponents showed themselves, and experienced
from his perspective a long look at all the dead glorious elves littering the
ground ... at the ghastly waste of what is clearly Middle Earth's most
precious resource — what shouldn't be put at risk of complete decimation
without risking starving the world of a singularly important source of
delight.
Thranduil is mostly spared, kept safe from, the harsh judgment the previous
film looked like it might assign him mercilessly. We remember him
belittling Thorin by assessing that he was probably moved primarily by
impure motives ... "burglary, and things of that nature." But in this film
effort has been put into ensuring that we notice that when he mistakes
people's motives he doesn't malign them but assesses them admirably .... he
won't acknowledge Gandalf's claim of an approaching army, but does laud
him for his loyalty to the dwarves, his effort to save his friends. He of course
does bear down hard on Tauriel, but his violence is later requited by doing
massive repair work to keep her from coming apart after Kili's death. And
he's barely a baulk to his son Legolas's future, without seeming to mind that
this is so: when Legolas declares he's leaving his longknown elf home and
venturing out on his own, Thranduil implicitly communicates how wrong
objection would be to his son's thoughtthrough stance by giving no
objection at all, and only adding information that might compliment the
direction he guesses his son is venturing. There are several scenes in the
movie where we are made to feel that much of what has defined Thranduil
— his relationship with and loss of his wife — had nothing to do with
remaining home, forever pledged to fathers, but about himself having set off,
facing fiery dragons and terrible northern forts.
This finish isn't elderheavy. The expectation on them — elders, or anyone
who is allowed a position over another as potentially exploitive as one of
parent over child — is to graciously part ways, let go, and they do. The
tumult that might greet one generation finally reaching the age where they
might contest the one ahead of them is to be avoided, if possible, with elders
recognizing the rightness in another generation standing up for itself, making
its own imprint, offering if they can, maybe modestly offered guidance —
maybe they haven't a clue as to what the next generation needs? — but for
sure fulsome love and support. You notice in the film how conspicuously
Jackson puts attention to Bard's relationship with his children. You notice
how Jackson's own children, in, I think, every film of the series, beginning
with "Fellowship," have come of age. You wonder if what is shaping
Jackson's making of Tolkien's finish of "the Hobbit" are thoughts not solely
on preparing things for the alreadydone "Lord of the Rings," but preparing
an audience to consider their children's eventual introduction to them of a
completely open field: the civilization created out of their own drives and
inclinations, however crazy and impossible to us it might be to register them
as societyimproving rather than ruining.
How else to understand the strange case of Alfrid, the servant of the vile
Master of Laketown? He was lent to us after "The Desolation of Smaug,"
ready for our oblivion — if this guy makes it through his master's
destruction by the dragon, it's only in a sense for our killing. And yet what
Jackson does is treat us as if we were the dwarves at the beginning of "the
Hobbit," in completely disbelief over the choice of Bilbo for the company,
with him making a case for him a la Gandalf. He plays us. Or tries to. We
are meant to enjoy seeing Alfrid repeatedly humiliated, beginning with his
being (literally, and figuratively) dumped by his master and then afterwards
by repeatedly being proven an incompetent at any job the likes of Bard and
Gandalf have assigned him, but in doing so almost feel that we've agreed to
allow that he deserves credit for at least earnestly trying — the beginning of
rehabilitation. He's been ordered around a lot, and however bitterly,
complied with everything directed to him ... and by people we'd have to feel
shame in doubting their willingness to task jobs to him, to trust him. And
then not long after when he dresses as a woman in an effort to escape
fighting and flee the town, Jackson seems to almost task us with undue
prejudice if we're still absolutely bent on seeing him destroyed. An angry
older woman sees him in femaledress and charges him as lacking all
courage and bravery, and Alfrid's reply — "Not every man is brave enough
to wear a corset" — does requit some: even in this heroic filmworld, our
outside world that increasingly prefers heroes that are open to being ascribed
as feminine and that views thorough hemen as part of a narrative of gay
hatred and rape culture, seeps in (we remember how Jackson rebuffed he
men in “Return of the King,” Merry’s being mocked as unbattle worthy by
the Rohan warriors but of course proving himself as as able as anyone not
Legolas or Aragon). Jackson shapes Alfrid’s next fate as if given avenue: he
lets him load himself up with gold and be allowed by Bard to head away
from battle and on to enfranchising his own open future. His only rejoinder,
“Alfrid, your slip is showing,” if not affectionate, is a very gentle chide, and
implicitly recognizes that he’s not a dullard incapable of appreciating wit,
i.e., that he's at a different level, a bit more human, than the dullish woman
who accosted him.
Alfrid’s not “Catch 22’s” Yossarian in this epic, but he is somewhat what
Tolkien’s generation’s would have viewed the waravoidant and feminine
men of the postwar 1960s … who perhaps babyboomer Jackson would
ultimately acknowledge as much affinity with as he would the world war
saluting Tolkien, which wiped out a whole lot of people. A whole lot of
young people — in the first one, pretty much an entire generation — who
would have been better off if they’d stuck to joyous feasting, drinking
brandy, and enjoying the comforts of home. That is, if they’d been more like
the default for hobbits … and for the "vile" "Alfrids" and "Masters of
Laketowns" and dragons content to longrest in gold, for that matter.
Fury
Very few people who find themselves on a battlefield are ever actually new
to it. When you see in a movie like “Fury,” warriors that are having to
function even as people by their side are being blown apart, where who they
are mostly is crazily vulnerable to death, they are not people who’ve
discovered some new capacity in themselves. These are not people who’ve
gotten used to blight after having grown up in civilization. Rather, what you
are seeing people who are paying part of their very familiar past a close
revisit.
That sense of vulnerability, that is, is what they knew as infants and as
young children. Crazily vulnerable, obsessed with their own possible
extinction, as they were initiated into the world by caretakers who are
possessed of demons that have them simply unable to look at their children
and feel only love. The child, so attuned to their moods, their intentions,
takes in deep their sadism, their intention to hurt, to extinguish them. To
survive, children project these monstrous intentions outside their caregivers
onto outside monsters — monsters under the bed, trolls under the bridge.
But the looming eyes that chase them down in their nightmares are theirs.
So in war that early childhood environment that was foundational but may
have lapsed away from conscious record, “blooms” back into view —
menace, death is everywhere: black blight. That early nightmare
environment is restaged … and it’s reassuring to have what was still nagging
your life as a more mythic and relevant reality back into full view for your
negotiation, your maybecontrol. You survive it, you beat it, and somehow
tight muscles will relax in you that had always been hard braced against …
something.
Since many of us still have had childhoods of this kind, as we watch “Fury”
we’re in a hurry for the newbie fresh to war and the tank crew to become
“acclimatized.” Even if we’ve already made our everyday life seem such
that whatever we’ve been up to we’ve played the role of the veteran who’s
seen hell, war movies are usually successful in fobbing onto us the new
recruit who’s yet to barf at blood and gore as our way into the film. We want
war to feel a world so different from our everyday — so to be a realm where
fears and demons can be met and bested for good — and the film creators
know and exploit it.
So it’s not true that we’re aghast at the gore the newbie has to clean up in the
tank — the remains of the veteran warrior he’s replacing. We’re relieved
he’s encountered and soon about to best stage one of his initiation into
warrior. And it’s not true that we’re aghast at him having to learn how to
shoot a captured “kraut,” a man with a wife, a family, but relieved that he’s
passed stage two where he’s shown that he’s at least got the base now upon
which familiarity and competency can be layered on. And we’re not aghast
that he beds the German belle, cooperating in making their visit into the two
women’s home not an adventure (into foreign female company and sex) but
conquest (whatever the preamble, the narrative will be one of spoiling), but
relieved that he’s now at the point where his veteran crew now have nothing
on him but having done everything he’s now done a lot more.
The greatest danger the film shows is not being killed, but being killed in a
humiliating fashion. A bunch of kids are responsible for a soldier’s death,
and you know that not even all that warrior’s experience and war cred will
cleanse him of being done in like that. When the six Shermans go up against
the Tiger Tank — here’s where it would be okay to die. The Valkeryie
picking up the dead will pick up every one of these, no matter how splattered
everywhere on the battlefield.
When their one Sherman prepares to go up against a squadron of
experienced SS — to save a supply train that otherwise would be decimated
— it isn’t their dying which is a concern but their being equal to what’s
being staked. If they die quickly, it’ll come across as dying for vanity: a
preposterously heroic finish … something truly Smaugish in stature slain, a
whole supply train saved. Which would shorn them of all they’d accrued.
Fortunately the movie lets most of them die … in the afterlife we feel them
entombed with the momenttomoment capacity they’d demonstrated in
battle. The one that actually lives, the newbie, is the one told he’s a hero; but
his escaping the tank and hiding in the ground is mostly how we associate
him now. That battle belongs to the dead men … those that started in N.
Africa, moved onto France, and now into Germany. What he can take back
with him is that he met the war, his own childhood horrors, and made do
pretty okay … with a guide. “Bilbo” when “Gandalf” was hovering all over
him, not while alone succeeding in Mirkwood.
Still, not bad. But he still feels like us in being only proximate to something
we crave familiarity. Blown up towns all around us, and us acclimatized and
surviving. So no surprise for us, ISIS, Ebola, blackouts, avalanches, Wall
Street crash, and not so much the Paul Krugman assessment that, no alarm
bells, people, we’re actually doing okay.
Guardians of the Galaxy
In one of the initial scenes of "Guardians of the Galaxy," when “Ronan the
Accuser” has a badly tortured Xandarian before him, do we think the
audience is in any way identifying themselves with him? Not at all, of
course. If audience sympathy goes towards the Xandarian culture, it won’t
have anything to do with it first being represented by this guy. And when
Yondu Udonta and his collection of bullies arrives to ask another Xandarian,
“the Broker” — the elderly merchant — about the location of the infinity
stone, looking very much like they’re just going to kill him after throughly
confounding and terrifying him, is the audience in any way just wishing the
bullies would leave the poor guy alone? Again, not likely. In fact, maybe
they too would be looking at this quaking, isolated, precious and mannered
man as deserving being confused with child babble before being dispatched
— Who does this pretentious bag of bones think he is, anyway? And when
“the Collector” instructs his slave assistant, Carina, on her knees scrubbing
the walls, to work harder lest she suffer her sister’s fate — living her life
despondent in a cage — does the audience in any way hope the “Guardians
of the Galaxy” will help her revenge herself against this slaver? Again, not
at all. They’re probably hoping the guardians do nothing in their meeting
with him to show they too are possessed of a bullyable side that might have
the Collector thinking they, pretenders to being streetwise bountyhunters,
coequals, might actually be managed into becoming specimens — and not
when deceased, as he proposes with Groot, but humiliatingly, tellingly,
while still alive.
The film is not about bonding together to defend the weak, but about
defending oneself against feeling weak. Indeed, even Peter Quill’s obsession
with his mother’s soundtrack, with his mother — normally something that
would make an adult endlessly shamed by his friends — is ultimately about
that.
The mother in the film — the cancer victim — is a fantasy. Or perhaps more
accurately: camouflage. Boys at adolescence, the age age Peter Quill is when
his mother passes of cancer, often find themselves more or less permanently
removed from their mothers, gone off to a culture "that’ll make a man out of
them" — which basically means instructing them on how to keep a tight lid
on expressing their emotional needs; bullying, aggressively teasing those
who do express them; and showing their many scars as evidence of how
much violence they’ve “manly” been able to sustain through life. They
sometimes, however, are allowed to express their neediness — like when
they’re badly sick, for example, and get to stay at home with mom. Or if
something horribly tragic happens to them — like their mother passing of
cancer, which, if it happened early enough, can actually be tested as
permitting one to obsess over her lifelong.
But being distanced from your mother at adolescence isn’t really the source
of trying to absolve yourself of ever having your experiences as a needy
person claim conscious acknowledgement. The need, the requirement, that
you not ever be reminded that this is who you still are, comes about from
associating feeling vulnerable to becoming easy monster bait, to being
viciously murdered, which arrives pretty much at infancy. Freud of course
noted how many children were concerned with death, and decided that we
must all therefore be born with a death instinct. But his associate, Sandor
Ferenczi, as well as other psychoanalysts like Dorothy Block and Joseph
Rheingold, observed that this fear owed not to “instinct” but to the rational,
the acute and accurate assessment of the child that their caregivers actually
had murderous inclinations towards them. Mothers, still in most families the
foremost “caregivers” of children, revisit the punitive experiences they
suffered as children upon their own children. Historically, they have tended
to do the like of hallucinating their children as adult accusers — as their own
parents, who in their screams once again express disappointment and anger.
They have tended to see them as requiring bullying, threats and realizations
of overt abandonment, so that they actual fulfill what they were born for —
in so many cases, to satisfy their parents’ own unmet needs. To the infant,
the absolutely vital mother, the primary “object,” is also quickly realized as
a terrorizing titan, which s/he later learns to displace onto “monsters” to
absolve her/himself the guilt, the fear, of consciously realizing what s/he
suspects her/his mother would kill it for having an inkling of. All of this
applies, by the way, not just to children who’ve descended from one of the
sadder generational chains, but to many, many genuinely more hopeful ones,
where mothers from generation to generation were progressively given more
resources so to be able to lend more love to their children than they
themselves received … to the children in playgrounds in more liberal parts
of New York, for example.
Expected to fulfill their parents’ — again, mostly their mother’s — needs for
love, and to serve as poison container and/or as a fetish object — the
provisioning breast, denied to them in their own childhoods — their own
development was seen as a threat, a threat met by maternal distancing and
fury: to the child, by apocalypse! This happens early, so early that the
ostensibly inherent superego, which is actually created by the child’s brain
to save the child from individuating too much and thereby find itself outside
maternal favour for life, can understandably be mistaken as something born
out of genes and DNA rather than defensively out of experience. When the
child becomes an adult, when it realizes the individuation and self
determining freedom available as an adult, it reexperiences the terror of
being abandoned as a child for its initial attempts at individuation. It expects
a revisit of all the tortures and punishments, something warded off for
awhile by pursuing the trauma itself, initiating it or chasing it down, and
thereby showing some confidenceinspiring control (herein, an explanation
for this ice bucket trend?), but which eventually demands full capitulation
and retreat. The adult finds some way to shorn him/herself of the new
freedoms and bond back to some group he fills with injections of his mother
— which is in his own mind becomes essentially her corporeal self, a home
country, a “Mutterland.” He or she experiences and succumbs to “growth
panic.”
A hero is someone who is suffering from growth panic. Out of retreat, he has
fused with the inner Terrifying Mother (i.e. the superego) that’s been
installed in his brain’s right hemisphere, home of the amygdala, our brain’s
alarm system, and distances himself from past allowances, freedoms,
pleasures, that are making him/her feel terribly anxious, so to feel more pure
again — forgiven. Our “guardians” in this film, we note, are prepared to do
exactly that: putting their lives at the service of “the galaxy,” which though
it means no longer being freewheeling rascals — i.e., individuated pursuers
of their own selfdetermined pleasures — means having all their sins
expunged and counted by even the most selfless as those properly to count
oneself indebted to.
The group is not infused with properties of the person the film has
delineated to serve as Peter Quill’s mother, however. That bald, ghostly
white young woman looked nearly a child herself, and probably served as a
child representation of Peter Quill at threat of infanticide — all the
converging, insistently demanding grandparents — he could later imagine
saving by hallucinating Gamora — an abandoned, farmedout child herself
— as his lost self perishing in amniotic space. Given the ethos of the film,
the mother had to have been powerful, not evaporating; and part of powerful
her is found in Glenn Close’s “Nova Prime,” the supreme leader of the
Xandarians —the part believed allprovisioning, fair, decent and good. But
the rest, with all the terrifying aspects, which at the moment are most
meaningful to the child, are out into other powerful beings.
So, yes, “Ronan the Accuser” does at times represent this terrifying,
infanticidal mother. Especially when he’s about to crush innocent victims,
like that hapless Xandarian soldier, who’s blood will quickly be collected
into some drain Ronan is part of; especially when he represents a source
from the conservative past who is furious at all the guilty modernisms being
entertained. But when he is someone feeling furiously betrayed by the titan
Thanos, when he means to rival, strike back and humiliate him, then he
represents part of ourselves we are in urgent need to disown — the part, of
course, that has solid justification for being furious at our mothers for their
treatment of us. Otherwise Thanos, who farmed his children out to a
perpetuator, who sits on a grand maternal throne, casually expecting
everyone — in order to do something about the terrible possibility of him
springing a surprise visit upon “us” — to of course stage our coming to him;
who’s visage is twice in the film represented at a scale that dwarfs even
great Ronan into an infant; serves in the movie as the imperious “object” the
Terrible Mother is mostly interjected into.
But Ronan possesses the hammer, the stick, used historically by mothers to
beat their children, and when he absorbs the power of the infinity stone and
is about to kill a world of Xandarian innocents, he is just the Terrible Mother
with infanticidal thoughts towards forsaken people. The exultation he
demonstrates just before he is about to annihilate all life on Xander, with his
back bent and arms outstretched in a big body laugh, is like that captured
mother representatives were made to do at periods of growth panic in Aztec
culture, where as Lloyd DeMause says, “female victims first made a
prodigious show of their female power … [before being] laid down on their
backs and [having] their breasts cut open and their bodies torn apart.” And
Ronan afterwards too is slain, by the power of the infinity stone.
The stone, like the swords used upon subsequent victims, after first being
used to rip apart Aztec motherrepresentatives, is empowered by the
destructive power of the Terrifying Mother. When Peter Quill absorbs the
power into himself, he is like a Javaro, who after the maternal fusion, who
after “sucking at [his] mother’s breasts, [having taken] n/um, [having drank]
n/um, [which even though it] would [make him] cry, and cry, and cry, [and
even though he] was afraid of the n/um, [though it was] hot and [it] hurt,”
experiences something akin to a “temporal lobe epileptic seizure. [Which]
like these seizures, provides convulsive tremors and feelings of powerful
violence, as the master of [the] n/um continues his energetic dance, [and] the
n/um heats up and rises up the spine, to a point approximately at the base of
the skull, at which time !kia results, [an] explosion [which] throws [one] in
the air … bursting open, like a ripe pod,” as he “then they go[es] out to kill
anyone [he] encounters, believing [he is] superhuman.” As he beams a
climactic red glow, he becomes like the “warriors [who] became the
symbolic equivalent of menstruating women [,] [since] both bloody warriors
and menstruating women were charged with powerful destructive energy.”
He is bathed in the equivalent of “red hematite [as if he’d] expropriated the
destructive power of menstruating women [by] ritual nose bleeding or sub
incision [of their penises].”
So the infinity stone’s power is the destructive power of the mother to
murder infants because every anthropological tribe — all insanely sacrificial
and warprone — borrow the power of the menstruating woman so to feel
superhuman before they go off into war? Yes. The infinity stone’s power is
the destructive power of the mother because psychoanalysts who don’t just
assume a death instinct find for children everywhere “the fear of infanticide
could already be their central occupation,” “that [for them] the world
‘abounded in beasts of terrifying mien, in cruel witches and monsters who
pursued their victims with unrelenting savagery,’” and that “the identities
behind these imaginary, terrifying figures [were] the child’s own parents”?
Especially, yes. But also because the infinity stone is twinned with another
object in the film overtly associated with maternal prowess — Jack Quill’s
precious cassette tape.
Rohan the Accuser exults when he’s in possession of the stone; arriving on
Xander, he casually kicks aside vermin — the raccoon, Rocket — accosting
him. But Jack Quill, singing his mother’s favourite tunes, is still brazen
enough to approach and challenge him to a danceoff. He says he’s just
distracting him, still a marginal figure, despite the attention temporarily put
to him, but there’s a strange sense already of appropriate direct rivalry —
my power against yours, dude: the songs he’s singing were those he was
listening to when he broached the lair containing the infinity stone, where he
too felt immune to everything that’d accost him, casually kicking aside all
the lizards that approached to threaten and ostensibly devour him. It’s like
with his long possession of the cassette — a fetish object, coveted, by him at
least, as eagerly as the infinity stone throughout the movie — he’s already in
possession of an aspect of the power of the stone: the good aspect heroes are
allowed to know of the mothers they’ve fused with, one that still knows of
some levity, permitted because all freedom has been sundered to her. Jack
has coveted every song his mother wanted him to at the cost of listening to
what others might have introduced to him, at the cost of developing his own
life “soundtrack”; he has installed her as a saint he would sacrifice his own
life to recover; and for already in this sense being such a good boy before
becoming an overt hero, he already feels in possession of some of mommy’s
terrible power. He’s like Bilbo, knowing the ring’s — an object primarily
about mass genocide — powers of invisibility, as well as the jokes and
riddles … the good fun, associated with his use of it, and so actually not so
odd a creature to take on directly the destructive power of a dragon, whom
he could not just trick and distract but obliterate if ever the ring took full
control of him.
Peter Quill is the right possessor of the infinity stone because he’ll use it to
destroy the splitoff terrifying aspects of our mothers, while fused
completely with the good. And that it doesn’t destroy him, that he contains it
for as long as he did, is because he’d already been imbibing maternal power,
through devout loyalty, his whole life, not really because of his father’s
DNA. (Question: Was Bilbo able to handle the power of the ring for as long
as he did because before going on adventures, he’d long been someone loyal
“to his mother’s doilies,” rather than to the gallivanting about Gandalf would
like rather to have seen him on? And is this why Gandalf is more or less kept
out of the crucial relationship between the ring and Bilbo — a subtle but
substantial humiliation of him — until “LOTR”?) He’ll use it destroy the
part of himself that would dare accuse a perpetrator for Her past abuse. And
he’ll use it to destroy “two” more: legions of the vulnerable, as well as his
now evenfullymotherloyal own self.
He’ll use it to kill the vulnerable? Yes. He is fused with his Terrifying
Mother alter, and that mother was seen by the child as fully correct to abuse
him, to punish the weak, a lifesaving conclusion, as it keeps the absolutely
essential primary caregiver benign and loving. The child concludes that it
must have been “his worthlessness that made them hate and even want to
destroy him. After the child is convinced he is bad and deserving to be
destroyed, every incident in his life becomes proof of his responsibility for
unhappy events: Is there a death in the family? — he’s a murder. An
accident? — he’s the secret perpetrator. His ‘badness’ causes his mother to
leave him for a job … and drives his father to absent himself on business
trips … he is the subject of every quarrel and the author of every disaster
[even of] divorce.” I’ve suggested that the exact person chosen to represent
the dying mother doesn’t adequately reflect the type of maternal influence
that infuses every creation within this film world — weak and dissipating,
vs. surreally powerful and scary — but Quill’s feeling guilty over her death
for, by appearances, just showing some sanity in not letting himself get
sucked into his mother’s own extinguishment, does gets the relationship
between mother and child right. He is fundamentally a neglectful, guilty
child, and fused with his Terrifying Mother alter his task is to punish and
destroy the same.
He and his guardians to some extent are doing this when they start
obliterating Ronan’s forces. Drax mocks them as “paper people,” and Groot
takes delight in dramatizing their weakness, in humiliating them, by
thrashing columns of them about with his two arms, and this — mocking
their weakness — is what occurs when motherfused soldiers attack their
“enemies.” Seeing them primarily as their own “guilty,” weak childhood
selves, they call them the exact names they were called by their parents as
children — Germans in World War Two, for example, called their captives
“shit babies,” and “useless eaters.” And we’ll find in most films where
“good” forces are up against the “bad,” the bad, whatever their initial scary
show, end up seeming strangely, humiliatingly, impotent … they’ve
become, rather, our own weak selves that deserved to be destroyed and so
pile up readily into accumulations of the dead while the good lose maybe
one or two for their (sometimes) several hundred. But as initially noted, it’s
not just soldiers but civilians that are being set up as deserving death. If
you’re adding vitality to the group, as John C. Reilly’s Corpsman Dey and
his glowingly healthy family are made to seem, you’re cherished. But if you
look like you might be contributing weakness, are single, solitary, or sick,
you’ll come to be hated. Bad and despicable, for the crime of weakening the
glory of the maternal whole.
Killing worlds of vulnerable people is what the infinity stone is all about,
and it’s what war is all about too. After people do the initial fusing with their
maternal alters, they enter wars which end up killing far more civilians than
soldiers. This fact is incredibly obvious today, where in Gaza all we seem to
hear about are this group of youth or that one being targeted and slaughtered.
Are we likely to see something along these lines in the sequel to this film,
where not soldiers but evident “evil” civilians and their families are
“justifiably" killed? Not guaranteed: some things our conscious minds will
not permit. No one overtly gloated over the number of civilian deaths in the
Iraq war, for example. But it’s the fact that the Iraq war ended up killing
over 300 000 people, mostly children, that enabled Americans at the time to
feel so good about it (ninety percent approval rates for Bush). At some level
we know the extent of the carnage, who exactly got killed … and when it’s
legions of civilians, we feel empowered, as the vitality of these extinguished
lives get sucked into us … sacrificed Xandarian blood, into Ronan, and boy
doesn’t it feel great!
And finally, heroes seek to sacrifice themselves. Being shorn of freedoms
and completely fused to their mother alters, the glory of once again being
good boys and girls again still has one better: namely, being permanently
fused to her, through death. The guardians agree to try and take down
Ronan, even after acknowledging it’s sure suicide … and are in this like the
Japanese leaders in World War 2, who when “deciding whether to attack
Pearl Harbor and begin their war with the United States, [realized after
several ministers gave their assessments that] it was obvious that an attack
would be suicidal for Japan. Whereupon Tojo told those present, ‘There are
times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things — like
jumping, with eyes closed, off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple!'” They
are like Hitler, who too “spoke in suicidal, not economic, imagery,
promising Germans glorious death on the battlefield and calling himself a
‘sleepwalker’ as he lead the German people over the suicidal cliff,” to war
against the whole rest of the world.
The raccoon, Rocket, is the one who offers an alternative — “You know, we
could just make our way to the far ends of the universe and, like, enjoy our
lives” — but of course is ignored because it doesn’t satisfy their need for
mommyandme fusion, as they'd lie as blooded corpses on the consoling
battlefield, with their mother imagined as coming down to collect them, or
shrouded in white swaddling cloth in caskets, back permanently home with
their mother's sorrow, appreciation and sympathy. And we shouldn’t expect
any film about heroes to allow the dissenter’s — i.e., someone less switched
into a suicidal mental state — opinion any weight. We do see such
occasionally, though. Though Peter Jackson doesn’t lend too much credit to
Balin’s —Dwarf prince Thorin’s chief advisor’s — insistence that there was
another way, that “you don’t have to do this [— i.e., attempt to destroy a
citydestroying dragon without any real plan as to how to actually defeat him
—] [for] you have built a new life for us in the Blue Mountains,” there is
some … Balin’s going to remain sane and goodhumoured throughout, while
we know Thorin will lose his sanity. And we remember Jackson gave
enormous credit to Gandalf’s insistence to Faramir, in “Return of the King,”
that he shouldn’t “throw away [his] life so rashly” just to please his clearly
insane father, however sadly little he gave to Saruman’s intriguing claim that
Gandalf himself possessed a suspect tendency “to sacrifice those closest to
him, those he professes to love,” which, well, if we aren’t looking at him all
rosecoloured, maybe we’ll acknowledge he kinda did.
I’ve heard many people say they found “Guardians of the Galaxy” novel. I
couldn’t relate, because the film felt like I’d entered a child’s rumpus room,
a “Chucky Cheese” full of rides, “swooshes,” and banal melodies you’ll
remember your eightyearold self was completely lost to. Perhaps the
differing experience is explained because when people don’t get sick of but
cherish listenedtooverandoveragain songs, it’s because what they want is
the simple, protective, and repetitive — something completely isolated from
anything adult and new that’d threaten by maybe drawing you into
considerations that’d lead to an undiscovered and independent self, as even
superhero movies like “the Avengers” — with its wild, cantankerous,
familysquabble scene, where a lot of valid opinions get thrillingly expressed
in a very compressed few moments — and “Iron Man 3” offer. What they
want are fetishes … objects barnished and handled so many times — each
time deposited with accrued power rather than depleted of interest. What
they want is a film which isn’t so much inspired by a catalog of films we’ve
all loved, but which recalls them in a sense that if they somehow appeared
on scene — the originals, the actual creators and creations, on stage,
suddenly, before someone merely “covering” — “you’d” shut yourself down
without complaint and just let the original role: weren’t you just trying to
summon, anyway? So this film takes you into “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the
Lost Ark,” “Footloose” … films you’ve seen a million, bazillion times,
because like the creators you want to be back polishing them like a genie
bottle, hoping for a Great Visitation, ever grateful for your devotion and
complicity to the fullyborderedup infantile.
The movie feels like it took pleasure from building itself up from a restricted
“alphabet,” well aware it was gloriously shunning a larger one available.
Watching it, you don’t take in a lot, but take pleasure in how securely it only
offers repetitive, unsurprising things … hammer on the nail (or actually, in
this film, usually over the head), over and over again. Like a politicians’
repetitive, simplewords baby talk, it probably is helping us trance into
agreeing to a future horrible societal direction, by accessing the normally
hidden, less conscious parts of our brains — the parts hypnotists play to. It
helps us anticipate a time when like autistic soldiers, we isolate ourselves
into repetitive motions, march to drums — become more overtly, “infants
fearing death." But also participating in doing something (horrible) about it
— becoming guardians, to our “galaxies.”
— finis —
Apres: all quotes from Lloyd DeMause’s works, especially “Origins of War
in Child Abuse.”
Boyhood
Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" tells the story of a boy, Mason, and as much
as the title articulates our applying his story somewhat to all boys, the
"chapel" within advises caution. Since Mason's biological father is a major
influence on the boy, it's not quite fair to slough off his inspiration
Lennon, Paul, George and Ringo as "divinities" to seek greatness from,
but it's clear what has clearly replaced the trio of God, Christ and church in
this film is the university, and the supreme research psychologists who've
worked there to incur relevant understandings of what makes human beings
tick.
Behavioralism is the first psychological theory we hear discussed, and it's all
but rejected in the film ... not only because it's mouthpiece turns out an
alcoholic, wifebeating, dictatorial brute, but because it's clearly linked to a
cynical take on human beings and ultimately corrupt societal applications
like the irresistible dopamine hits corporations know we receive when
people "like" us, that Mason references as part of his dislike of popular
culture. We hear of John Bowlby's "attachment theory" next, from Mason's
mother, and the implications of his theory aren't to take all human beings as
essentially the same but to imagine a cut only not that of boys and girls.
According to the theory, if you were a wellattached infant and child, of
either sex, so long as your society's not prohibitive, the future's open to you.
If you weren't you'll be insecure, plagued by demons, who won't amount
any significant adventure into life ... one of Harlow's distraught, selfisolated
monkeys, who knew too little of their mother's breast. Since children can be
suckled close more as a source of nurturance for the parent, however, being
wellattached isn't necessarily a matter of time spent. More if
they truly loved you, rather than from the start, immediately began to reject
and even hate you.
The interesting thing about this film, helped out by the setting which is
somewhere in Texas ... a state which in some parts is a "hightech, social
democracy", and in others, a "Protestant fundamentalist taliban," is that you
could take the same "facts" in the life of this boy and show two very
different fates one that leads to a welladjusted adult with a bright future,
and another as him part of those shortchanging any such a bright and
beautiful thing. All depending on whether or not the primary caregivers in
his life wasn't compelled or unconsciously intent to abandon her children.
The first fact we are introduced to about Mason's life, is that his parents are
recently divorced, and that his mother has decided to uproot him and his
sister further by retreating from their first selfacquired home, back to her
mother. But in the film, the mother's intent throughout is portrayed as mostly
loving ... and so as much we are directed to note that this move will cost
Mason his very first best friend, who in all likelihood he'll never see again,
and how his older sister plants herself heavily against the move as if moved
by the most basic elements of her, shaking her into saying something strong
lest their young organism is requited into something that can't be recovered
from, we know it's something that's maybe probably best in that her mother's
difficulties in keeping their family afloat will be greatly eased by the move,
and she'll be able to attend to them subsequently in less of a harried and
more of a focused manner.
The mother gets her children back into a home that'll allow them each their
own space, their own rooms, and has provisioning enough for herself now to
go to college. There, like any new student entranced by the opened world
of knowledge and therefore further entranced by those familiar with it,
she crushes on a professor, which for her develops into marriage.
Unfortunately, however wonderful his world not just of knowledge but of
palatial affluence is his home is a McMansion, spared our contemporary
derogatory assessment of them as homes for those who borrowed much but
were doomed back to "pumpkinhood" once the investment world sobered
it turns out home life with him means sequestering all of them to a litany
of constant rules, of lines not to be crossed, and herself, also, to the
occasional beating. Again harried with stress over this of innocently
having inflicted this man on her children, and not quite knowing if departure
or weatheringthrough is the wise solution she doesn't quite acknowledge
Mason's complaints about him, doing her best to pretend homage to the idea
that ... "we all have our faults."
But when he grossly grabs Mason and forces him into a military cut of his
longish hair, her true feelings are expressed, without any resolve not to upset
the perpetrator and raise family stakes by placing herself on one side only.
And when he gets close to physically harming her children, smashing plates
and glasses before them he's done. Mason's mother assembles the required
phalanx of guardwomen to block him, while she grabs her children, and off
they're again to a refreshed life.
Mason's adolescent life is mostly made to seem about plenty of harmless
experimentation ... which'll lead to smart sifting and targeted development as
he enters young adulthood and university. He does booze, drugs;
experiments with dress. He knows being bullied, but also hanging with older
boys whose talk is macho and who play with "knives." And though it isn't
him who asks the ifyoursocoolwhyareyouhangingoutwithgrade
8ersonafridaynight?, it's implicit as well in his overall manner with them:
they have no affect. He dates women, and seems already to possess naturally
the genuine interest in them as individuals his biological father advises him
to learn quick to separate himself from the pack. His childhood interest in
spray painting, forging a signature, branches into an interest in finding a
vision through photography, which stakes him purpose and resolve, and also
impressed elders, who want to attach themselves to his promise as he
eventually leaves home for university.
On the cusp of departure, his mother breaks down and admits
how his leaving seems to mean her own life is over; but he's allowed his
retort, as he mostly always is with her, and it's to explain the clear absurdity
of what she is saying. His mother is completely for his own adventure,
however, and so while promise is abundant as he first experiences his life
there, it's shallow of guilt.
But if she wasn't attached to her children, if she meant to hurt, harm, or
abandon them, the film would have veered ... like this. The divorce from her
husband would have been paired with her retreat from her independent
life/home, in that both would meant abandoning the pretensions to a good
lifepartner and a new beginning away from her own mother: selfrealization
and pleasure. Her exhusband, who is treated defensively when he arrives to
see his kids, and who is to some extent blocked away by the grandmother, is
revealed as the film goes along to have been a vastly better man than any of
the others she subsequently marries, as well as being a much better person to
have had around their kids. But she didn't feel she could keep him because
she felt under compulsion to sacrifice her first start, bring her kids around
her mother's orbit, so her mother wouldn't get angry at her for making
herself the centre; for aspiring to greater happiness than her mother allowed
herself. Late postpartum, with kids given/sacrificed to her mother so she
could be spared terrible hauntings of seeing herself driving them into a lake.
She would have been revealed to have been attracted to the psychology
professor, already sensing he would treat her brutally ... his talk of flashing
meat powder before a dog to make it salivate, an anticipation of how he'd
possess a belittling and allknowing sense of the motives of children,
whipping children into shape through rewards and punishments. The
freedomkilling home life he instituted, would have been something she's
wished for her children, so that aspects of herself, projected onto the
children, that she felt required containing actually great things, like one's
desire to explore and grow would have found themselves stifled and
bound up. When Mason came to her and complained of him, she wouldn't
have shown underneath obvious sympathy but only the refusal: how selfish
of you to only see a person's flaws!
Adolescence wouldn't just have been about exploration, but showed more
genuine signs of troubles, delinquency, as his mother spent most of her time
at university and home life was dominated by a thug. His interest in hanging
out with older boys who pretend ninja, would have been him wanting to
distance himself from his aloneness and vulnerability. The fact that they
were all boys and cast all girls as "whores," would have been an attraction ...
a homosexual shell against the rest of the world. The painting of his finger
nails wouldn't, then, have shown femininity, but interest in approbating the
power of the maternal. His earpiercing, a fascination in selfcutting ...
where control of pain is clearly yours. His dark worldview wouldn't have
shown he wasn't a fool for corporate manipulation, but that the only way he
intuited he could allow himself to participate in adult freedoms is if tainted
that terrain with gloom beforehand.
But even that wouldn't prove sufficient for much subsequent adult license,
because his mother would have wanted to know that his abandoning her for
university meant he was bad guilty. And so after enjoying some time self
actualizing in university, he'd eventually be with those others who first
enjoyed liberality before renouncing it thereafter for conservatism the
fiercely conservative taliban, everywhere, who's leaders so often knew for a
time American licence before garbing themselves back into caves and no
running water.
Lucy
Her dress might not look like it, but Lucy is a student devoted to her studies.
She's certainly ready to party, but her life course is not open to anything
really untoward and divergent ... to anything that might spark her onto a path
of selfexploration that hasn't been approved for her, like studyhardand
getastaidsafejob, clearly has. She's forced onto this path, however,
clamped down, and the results aren't the riches promised to her but rather
along the sort of ghoulish fate a disapproving superego would have chased
onto her for the grotesque approbation. It involves pretty much in the
same heartbeat in which a new path was presented the brutal dispatch of
her new lover/friend, a floorplatter of corpses, and a long incision made into
her abdomen/pelvic region, degrading her into the role of a container. She
emerges out of total obliteration, and first thing, calls her mother to tell
her over and over again how much she loves her; how she is, ostensibly, her
perpetual devotee.
Well of course this isn't exactly what went on, which would of had it follow
all films infused with some awareness of how growth and selfactualization
that suitcase of Pandora opportunities, suddenly sprung upon you as a real
possibility in adulthood will necessary lead you to be chastened by
terrifying fears of punishment and abandonment, a la "Eyes Wide Shut,"
that'll have you curling back to your regular routine, beholden to habitual
chasteners, in no time. And I think the reason is that Lucy, despite being
someone who'll learn to use 100 percent of her brain capacity and become
the first human to reach godhood, or full actuality, is really breaching her
somewhat trepidatious and fearful regular self to become the sort of grand
hag that emerges in certain historical periods a witch, as one of her
opponents in the film calls her that daunts the rest of us back into being
quiescent good boys and girls.
Yes, this film is another one this year that follows that so long as you as an
audience member feel that you'd be with those who'd let the great beastie in
the film have Her way whatever the hell she might be up to you get to
participate in the thrill of knowing she's going to be devouring others, not
you, while vicariously enjoying her assertion, her casual, thrilling trespasses
(at one point she barges through the multiple cars ahead of her the wrong
way on a oneway street as if XMen's Storm scattering a gallery of
approaching hellbent sentinels) and power. "Godzilla," where the humans
save themselves by not interfering by correctly choosing to see the
monster as a necessary correction to human arrogance is of course one.
"Maleficent," with the massively powered witch who toys with destroying
an innocent youth just to revenge herself against her father, and who's
resolve to ultimately save or destroy her is something we wouldn't want to
interfere with and which only seems amenable to the victim's total sacrificial
willingness and devotion, one of the many others. In "Lucy," you could
imagine yourself the police captain, who's basic response to Lucy is,
"whatever you want lady ... as if there's any chance I'd say no to you!"
Followed later, as he kills to ostensibly protect her, by capitulated full
devotion. Or as the great scientist, who despite the film's long buildup of
him as a master into new terrain, fielding hopeful and hopefully
provocative and noticeworthy questions from the most promising of
young educated minds, is instantly made impotent and historically irrelevant
by Lucy's full knowledge of brain capacity, compared to his really only just
being on the right track.
Not bad ... a police captain, a great scientist, however deflated; but those
obliged to a power about stilling everyone else which is horribly
corrupt. The rest of humanity who oddly opts out is put in the position of
those gangsters which strangely are allowed to linger in this film when their
relevance seems kaput the moment Lucy shows herself able to defuse a
packed hallway of threatening men at mere 20 percent brain capacity. It is
one of these gangsters that ends up identifying her, not as Lucy, the great
mother, but as an obvious witch as the complete corruption of one. And I
took this as bait for the audience.
These gangsters may have lingered in the film to satisfy the terms of a plot
set up at the beginning ... but really, I think to be honest with ourselves,
there was little in the way of requisite demands, as they could really have
been swept into the apparatus that inadvertently unleashed a superpower into
the world part of a plot that discards the accident that triggered it. They
lingered because someone has to go about killing innocents who's death
Lucy surely could have prevented, to test to see how truly obliged to her we
are, how willing we are to look away. Lucy, about at the point where brain
capacity means she's able to freeze the whole forward momentum of
everyone on the planet, and then swipe herself back to a time when they
didn't even exist, announces at one point that she's got to shut down a bit ...
apparently to war against some of her cells, impertinently staging some kind
of resistance to her. During this time the gangsters intrude at the university
she's at and start killing multiple people on their way to her. We're not just
talking cops, but the regular amble of people you'd expect to find there.
Lucy's selffocus and isolation is meaning a lot of other people's needless
deaths.
It irritated me, just like I was irritated when, after Lucy first starts incurring
powers and kills the men who've trapped her, she then strode out into the
street and shot a taxi driver to ensure the other one standing there would be
instantly obliging (later she tells the driver to "stay here and wait for me,"
with his resolve to do so dependent only on his fear of her). Maybe like you,
I wondered for a moment if the drivers were employees of the gangsters
that is, guilty. But you realize quickly that, no, they're probably just taxi
drivers. And for this reason their soontobeobvioustous obvious total
innocence the film gives us something to quell back qualms. Namely, it
makes clear that the driver had only been shot in the leg, even if this news
feels as if it was spit at us, like as if how pathetic of us to still give a damn
about this evolutionary lesser! It irritated me when she subsequently strode
into the hospital and shot a guy being operated on so her own "more
important" needs could be instantly attended to by the gathered team of
surgeons ... that we were to be bought off to her side by being informed, by
her, that the patient wasn't going to live or was it that the operation
wouldn't work and he didn't have long to live? anyway, as if, given what
we'd already seen of her, we'd be sure this would have mattered one way or
the other.
Here she's surely being "bad to the bone"; but when Arnie does it in
"Terminator," and is allowed to get away with it, in that we're fully with
him, the victims are Harley Davidson thugs, ruffians, bullies to the rest of
humankind. When he doesn't, when we the audience allow themselves to be
terrified of him to know ourselves to be terrified of him the victims are
shop owners (the first film), people like you and me.
The historial periods where the Terrifying Mother emerges to scare everyone
out of their guilty selfactualization and growth, is upon us. To her, we
sacrifice innocents ... representatives of our early selves, who we think
deserve to be casually shovelled into her maw, guilty as we believe we were
the very moment we failed our mothers by attending to our own needs. The
death of innocents is in the news all about us ... Gaza wars killing mostly
civilians including, always, always, those in hospitals, schools; and planes
shot down, full of people like you and me. And the Terrifying Mothers,
those "Kick Ass" superhero women we're seeing everywhere and mostly
only see fit to praise for showing "how far we've come," are perhaps mostly
in our fantasy worlds. But don't be surprised to soon find media portrayals of
Heman Putin in a dress. We're first terrified by her revisit, and placate
her wishes; but later fuse with her, splitting off all our own mother's negative
aspects onto some other.
Lucy isn't quite our allgood Mother ... there's no way we'd allow her to
show such scary reptilian eyes, as she does at one point in the film, nor to be
pictured as blacktarrish (the second time this occurs with the increasingly
remote and abandoning Scarlett Johanssen this year, btw, with the first being
"Under the Skin") if this were so. But she is the beginning of our split. Since
our defensive bonding to the pure mother will also entail revenge against the
bad mothers who abandoned us, Lucy is shown starting about that too (given
how we see Lucy dress, her trampishness, do we really believe her
relationship with her mother was actually so blissful and uncomplicated?).
Her mother is seemingly being hugged close to her on the phone, with all her
"I love you forevers." But it's really an embrace in preparation for dispatch,
similar to the one the abandoned son (Commodus) "offers" his father
(Marcus Aurelius) in "Gladiator" to displace him from the throne. She
follows her pronouncements by remembering her first puppy, which
disorients her mother, in that it was so early she couldn't possibly have
remembered it. And then talks about suckling her mother's breasts, the breast
milk ... which is now hardly factoring in her mother's ability to keep up with
her at all, as she's lost into her own indulgences, as well as likely considering
the greatest need for her new incarnation, for who she is now.
The infant's relation to the breast, is also away from, in a way, her mother, as
it's now abstracted from what is particular about her and now just the
anthropological/biological/Winnicotian phenomena of child, attachment,
breast. It's also closer in its quintessence to what mostly now moves Lucy
her existence as something manifest about the evolution of homo sapiens. To
what it is now about her genes which differentiates her from every other
human being who has ever lived. To what it is which cleaves her from them.
Her mother, that is, is logically being made to seem just one of the
innumerable mothers somewhat indistinct from the one who first begat them
all as members of the same species, the one who truly was different from all
of her progenitors the original Lucy, the very first homo sapien capable of
breeding. She uses her 100 percent brain capacity to swipe time back to the
point where she can meet her, to broach touching, connecting with her.
Swiping back too modestly at first, though, has her face peoples interesting,
and maybe offering some communion, for representing a whole historical
period, but still not interesting enough in their none of them representing a
new species that would span through thousands of them. So she follows by
overshooting, finding herself before a TRex ... not main floor, and arrival,
but seemingly inadvertently the dungeons.
She quickly climbs back to the first homo sapien, but subliminally it's not
lost to the audience why Lucy "erred" by reconnecting with the archetypal
devouring dinosaur. As much as the movie has had us think of Lucy as
someone who's closest affinity is still with "apes," the moment we saw her
possess reptilian eyes revealed something more true about how we
experience her. She's not to be abstracted out as some sort of historical
development, some realization of what something completely evolutionarily
new would make of its current habitat choose to breed, or cling to its own
immortality; some proof of theory. Some might say she represents the
dangerous placenta, in its strangling and deoxiginating stages the first
object we related to before our mother's breast became so important to us,
which I think is fair ... something that in a sense is antecedent to the mother
and matches the film's focus on the chemical mixture of the fetus in the
womb. But more she represents the terrifying mother we knew from "four to
six, [where] the fear of death and imaginary threats [come] to dominate the
child's mind [including] fears of monsters, ghosts, murderers, tigers, lions, or
other predatory animals." She represents the Dragon Mother, "worshipped
by all early states from Lilith, NinTu, Hecate and Ishtar to Moira, Shiva,
Gorgon and Erinyes, [called] 'Terrible Mothers' by their worshippers, [as
they] were seen as cruel, jealous and unjust: 'her glance brings death, her
will is supreme" (DeMause, "Origins of War in Child Abuse").
She swiped to the toothy dinosaur something we all suspected, and we're
thrilled to see realized because this is the archetype the lies behind her, the
real truth about what is emerging from out of her crazily recombinant DNA.
Not the original mother, Lucy, but the dragon one, "T."
Railway Man
If you remember when male potency supplements like Viagra came out, it
was clear the companies believed that men had to have their shame of
admitting to having potency issues abated by addressing them otherwise as
total hemen, totally potent. So we got commercials where a bunch of older
guys playing golf are discussing the twentyyear olds they've bedded, and
where "Viagra" isn't discussed but just flashed on the screen at the end. This
film looked to be going on about the same thing except the issue being
brought a bit more into common recognition was how experiences during
war might never be shucked off.
But we'd hardly need to have Colin Firth's Eric a World War 2 British
lieutenant shown first as a prosperous older man who's just romantically
won himself a resplendent wife (Patti, played by Nicole Kidman), before
dwelling into what he experienced in war, if what was going to be shown up
close was what we've traditionally been directed to allude to when we think
of soldiers refusing to discuss what they experienced friends being slain
before them, civilians … as well of course all their own killing. This is
something, quite frankly, which has always served to make soldiers seem
somewhat greater than other men more broadly experienced, not
shallower, or more shrunken and therefore something of a cheat:
experiences we collectively have insisted on as adding to your manliness
also working as an infallible manner of gaining leverage over people. But it
is perhaps necessary here, where we're going to deal with what soldiers were
reduced to when captured ostensibly something a la Abu Ghraib, but
worse.
To the credit of the film, we are told that what is hard for a soldier to discuss
are things which are embarrassing, not just overwhelming, depressing,
terrifying. Certainly when I heard Stellan Skarsgard's Finlay the "uncle,"
the senior member of the troop mention this, I suddenly had in mind Abu
Ghraib's sexual humiliation of the captives, with their being raped,
sodomized and whatnot. It would have been something, if after encountering
this highly respectable and attractive man, we were back witnessing him
being forced to felatio fellow soldiers, eat his own shit or just watched him
regress in captivity to be a scared child who couldn't help but gain pleasure
in garnering approval from his tormentors. After witnessing that, would we
attend to him with the dignity we know he deserves? Or rather just wish the
film had made him even more the hero in everyday life, someone so
commanding of respect what we had just learned wouldn't be allowed any
permanent grip in our consciousness like the way nothing we might ever
learn about what Nelson Mandela would be allowed to sit there if it couldn't
be squared with the attitude we know he is owed?
But what we actually see are him and his fellow young officers beginning
their servitude by successfully transforming an episode which was supposed
to reduce them into one which showcases their wit, their vitality they
count themselves off into numbers … until they reach "ten," with the four
subsequent counting off as "Jack," "Queen," "King," "Ace." Then we
witness them acting in a way indistinguishable from if they'd been an elite
team sent in to effect a "Saving Private Ryan" moral boost, but rather for all
those still caught in captivity rather than for civilians languishing at home.
In "Ateam" style, they effect various plausible but still very brave and
inventive means to gather all the components to build a radio. And with the
radio, they gain information specifically, that "Hitler" was repelled out of
Stalingrand and that the Americans are bombing all of Germany day and
night to spread a boost in moral to all the troops building an "impossible"
railway for the Japanese.
However, the Japanese do learn what they did, and the guilty fourteen are
rounded up. And here they all witness one of their own being repeatedly
beaten upon by a rifle, which has them shrink in fear … until Eric steps up
and volunteers for punishment. This act was never forgotten by the rest of
them; it was the bravest thing any of them had ever seen, in fact, including
everything they'd seen by the during the war, and the inverse of what their
servitude was supposed to render for them all.
But for this show of undaunted spirit, this defiance/mockery, Eric is isolated,
taken into the shack he has spent so much of the rest of his life
remembering; and so here, finally, is where the film is going to broach the
kinds of embarrassing things there's no way he'd ever be able to share with
any one else or shuck off. Only, it turns out not so: an interpreter
repeatedly tries to daunt him through tersely asked questions but has trouble
gaining ground even with that: "I ask the questions, you only answer." And
then he endures torture which looks terribly painful he's repeatedly
pumped so full of water he's near bursting but not evidently worse than
that awful rifle beating; and this time almost as indication of his hereto
inability to be broken a weird kind of flattery, but recognition and flattery
none the less.
And the truth is, this scene in the shed seems even more concerned to
manage how the interpreter is portrayed so that when Eric ultimately later in
life befriends this man, it can seem doable without it making him seem
some sort of gargantuanly pathetic, intrinsic kissass. So the interpreter is
shown several times reacting to what the Japanese camp officer is doing to
Eric with some alarm; he tells Eric at one point in good faith that he'd
best just tell the officer what he wants to hear because they'll get their
information out of him anyway, and it'll mean less pain. And he only
explodes at him when Eric dooms them in finally revealing what they've
been trying to chase out of him, what he learned from the radio: that
Japanese industry, towns, hospitals were about to be decimated by attack,
that "your hopes are [already] burning, and your families are starving." So
when afterwards the Japanese are defeated, it seems fully appropriate that
the interpreter not suffer the fate of the those who committed war crimes and
instead is permitted to step to the side. And when Eric catches up with him
later and is allowed the obligatory turning of the tables, with the interpreter
having "to answer, not ask," and briefly submit to being in a bamboo cage
and further later apologizing and bowing sincerely to him it seems very
agreeable they end up friends. Two educated, fundamentally decent men, but
of different cultures and of differing perspectives during the war … a
satisfying bromance for the literate baby boomer to enjoy.
But as to the matter of the great shame that has troubled his Eric and his
friends for life, it's near literally an aside. For we do end up seeing some
sense of it, but not amongst them but in those Eric and his fellow
engineeringeducated peers were deemed too valuable to be cast amongst.
When Eric is passing through the passage being made for the railway
deemed impossible to be constructed without slave labor for it'd surely
killing most of the people involved in building it he sees a major working
there whom he once served under. He tries to recall him to himself, but the
major recoils as if he's now at the point where he assumes anyone
advancing upon him must be about to beat him. He's a totally broken man
the intrinsic slave the Japanese assume inhabits the soul of any man weak
enough to have let themselves be captured. Whatever they do to Eric, he
never, ever, appears recoilworthy, and this poor manghoul mostly certainly
is that. If what Eric's wife had to account for in trying to understand him,
why he couldn't get past his experiences thirty years before in the camp, was
him being broken as badly as this then his being otherwise made to seem
so comfortably established and identificationworthy would make sense.
In fact, when later the movie allows the major to be the one who initiates the
spreading of the news down the railway line, there almost seems room to
assume it something we were all agreeing to simply allow for him after the
horror of "meeting" him rather than it keeping in line with the story's
otherwise ostensibly truthful account. He was too broken for it ever to have
actually happened that way, so in tribute to who he was formerly and in
recognition of our inability to adequately ever square his future self with
who he had revealed himself as here, we're going to have to collectively
agree to momentarily step to the side within this film some, and attenuate the
details … in fidelity to something more important than facts or our
enjoyment of the film to goodness. Then of course, back to the story.
Eric, however, we're simply to take straight … presumably because the
people making and watching a movie such as this are not so interested in
dealing with trauma as they are in defensively coping with it. That is, by
keeping the person they are supposed to identify with a respected man
outside of war and capture, and persistently heroic and empowered during
servitude, as we match up our own life experiences with his own, Eric ends
up being a kind of sturdy railway overlay of tricky matter in our own minds.
In truth, a kind of contagion.
Someone might object that the repeated beatings Eric endures, as well as the
water torture and the for awhile living in a cage, would be enough to
create a traumatic experience he'd never recover from, even if he never knew
the shame of capitulation. The reason this is in fact fatuitous is because these
tortures are designed by captors so that inmates know humiliations that they,
the captors themselves, experienced during childhood the unconscious
intention behind torture is to shame one's own "guilty" childhood self, whom
you've projected into inmates: it certainly means to but doesn't really have
"you" in mind. If you didn't experience the equivalent in your own
childhood, as physically painful as these experiences would be they would
not serve to remind you of how scared and powerless you were when you
were infantile that shame. The reason many Jews who endured Nazi
tortures were able to recover from them somewhat adequately was not
simply owing to the fact that they formed terrific support groups afterwards,
but because they had had better childhoods than the Germans did. That is,
these tortures were essentially new to them, something afflicted upon them
now from people outside their family and for the most part outside of
childhood it was intrinsically foreign to what they had previously
experienced in life and to what had gone into shaping their personhood. It
could be shucked off, for it was mostly overlain from the outside upon an
already solid core.
The film we really need to see involving an older man still crippled by
something he experienced decades earlier, wouldn't let it settle in his
experiences as a soldier in wartime, even if shown more honestly than this
film is interested in. For "wartime" is in this situation a plank we've set up,
way aloof from the age where experiences can really destroy us, presumably
for us to further pontificate if we mean to allow the plank to drop lower. It's
actually a safe zone, a "simulation room," to maybe prepare ourselves for the
leap back into infancy, where the ferocious soldier screaming at us would
become our mother and father repeatedly doing so, where being locked in a
cage becomes our own being shut into closets, where being beat on
repeatedly or sexually used becomes our parents having been these kinds
predators.
Since captors force captives to experience what they themselves experienced
in childhood, the film we need to see would explore something along the
lines of this passage from psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause. Whether of
Japanese war camps, or German ones ... or otherwise, it would be this:
Jews, then, were the main poison containers for the restaging of traumatic
German childrearing practices four decades earlier. Every one of the things
done to Jews in the Holocaust can be found to have been perpetrated by
parents and others to German children at the turn of the century. The precise
details of earlier events that were reinflicted upon Jews later are
astonishingly minute and literal. Jews were, of course, murdered by the
millions, just as German children had watched their siblings murdered in
infanticidal acts earlier, using the exact same phrase for the genocide of
Jews"elimination of useless eaters"as parents had used earlier for their
infants and children as they murdered them at birth. Because infanticide
rates were so high, the majority of German children would have witnessed
the murder of newborn siblings by their mothers, would have heard the
murdered baby being called a "useless eater," and would themselves have
been called a "useless eater" as children and so could have wondered if they
might also be murdered. One can hardly read a single Holocaust book
without having to wade through endless accounts of children buried alive by
Nazis, "children having their heads beaten in like poultry and thrown into a
smoking pit," "babies thrown from the fourth floor and crushed on the
pavements," "children's bodies lay around, torn in half with the heads
smashed in," "'little Jews' caught on bayonets after being thrown from upper
story windows," etc. Even the specific methods German mothers had used
for killing their newbornespecially smashing the baby against a wall or
throwing it into a latrinewere "a regular occurrence" against Jews in
concentration camps:
When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with them. A German
guard took the baby by its legs and smashed it against the wall of the
barracks until only a bloody mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate
mother had to take this mass with her to the 'bath.' Only those who saw these
things with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans
performed these operations. [Also] SS men used to amuse themselves by
swinging Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their
deaths. He who threw a Jewish child farthest won.
Jews were also regularly tied up and made to live in their own filth exactly
as swaddled German infants were earlier. Rarely washed, Germans had
spent their early lives covered with their own excreta, addressed by their
parents simply as "little shitter." In the concentration camps, Jews were
subject to what Des Pres calls a constant "excremental assault," in which
they were forced to defecate and urinate upon each other, were often thrown
into the cesspool if they were too slow, lived in barracks "awash with urine
and feces," walked about "kneedeep in excrement," were forced to eat their
own feces, and finally died in gas chambers "covered all over with
excrement." In one camp, 30,000 women not only had to use a single latrine,
but in addition, "we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day.
We stood in line to get into this tiny building, kneedeep in human
excrement." Holocaust scholars, missing the childhood origins of all these
gratuitous excremental cruelties, have been puzzled by how much of the
concentration camp routine was devoted to the endless humiliations: "Why,
if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the
humiliation, why the cruelty?" Gitta Sereny asked of Franz Stangl. But of
course the humiliation was the point, restaging early German childhood
exactly. Hitlerhimself swaddled and left alone in his feces by his mother
had told Germans in Mein Kampf , "If the Jews were alone in this world,
they would suffocate in dirt and filth." In the Holocaust the Jews"so much
like us" (Hitler)would suffocate in dirt and filth, as all little, helpless
German babies did all day long at the hands of their mothers. And since the
"little shitter" German babies were also covered with lice, vermin and
rodents as they lay swaddled in their cradles, unable to move, Jews too were
called "lice, vermin and rats" as they were locked into the concentration
camps, told "This is a death camp. You'll be eaten by lice; you'll rot in your
own shit, you filthy shitface." Some guards even restaged the rodent attacks
"by inserting a tube into the victim's anus, or into a woman's vagina, then
letting a rat into the tube. The rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the
victim's internal organs." Later toilet training of German children was also
restaged, often in precise detail, as by having the ghettolatrine supervised
by a "guard with a big clock, whom the Germans dressed comically as a
rabbi and called the ‘shitmaster.'"
Incidentally, this film has it that you can visit someone who tortured you
thirty years previously and they can be fully recalled to it. As the film shows
these two men, this is plausible for they're never lost to themselves during
the war. But this normally would not have been the case. Wars are periods
where people have bonded with their mother nations, set about to destroy
guilty villains projections of their own childhood "bad selves" and
thereby nurture for themselves a glorious feeling of purity, of cemented
"good boy" or "good girl" status, absent contaminants. Once this madness is
over, like the postwar 1950s after WW2, people are mostly detached from
whom they once were literally, a map of their everyday mental life would
be completely different; have it lorded over by more regular areas. They'd be
back to whom they were previous, the Weimer Germans who were all set
about their regular bourgeois life before they became the 1930s40s Volk,
would be back simply to "shopping" and building families, not ganging up
on Jews on the streets, which they not just the Nazis collectively did.
Transcendence
In a recent New Yorker we learned that many of those earning instant
fortunes for their apps are feeling pretty guilty about it. It's pretty tough, they
proclaim, to enjoy your millions when you're aware of just how hard and
rewardless a life your own mother had to make due with. Specifically,
though to make their apps they "borrowed office space and subsisted on a
diet of instant ramen," though they knew "in the back of [their] heads […]
[how] hard you worked, that you sacrificed your stability and you took on
the risk of financial ruin for a long while," that "[y]ou did things that other
people were not willing or capable of," it still "feels awful," for they
"couldn't get rid of the image of [their] mothers in [their] cars, driving to
work." The truth is, that if the only thing they had to contend with was the
fact that their mothers had much harder lives, they've already amply
contended with it as a source of guilt. For added to their belief that their
mothers worked hard for them to live easier lives, would be how
conceivably they've fit their sacrifice and gumption in creating the apps in
with how society normally lauds and backs those who've achieved success
endless hours and ramen noodles: no silver platter there! Stop your fretting
and start enjoying your hardearned money, son! So the reason some of them
are even shutting down their apps so they can be spared the guilt of fifty
thousand dollars daily accruing to them, is because they didn't so much
intuit that their mothers deserved more in life but were thoroughly aware of
it since birth: their mothers had them to provide them some of the love and
devotion they hadn't yet received in life, and not only weren't much
interested in them otherwise but couldn't help themselves from being angry
when their children switched off them to focus on their own pursuits. Some
success might somehow be justified but not a surfeit of it, for it'd feel
nowhere within the vicinity of what should be lent to you after you'd been
the good boy and seen to your mother first. To deal with that, you'd need a
miracle to be spared the selfrecriminations that'd accrue from it. You'd need
transcendence.
Nominally, the transcendence we are to focus on in this movie is the one that
brings a human consciousness it turns out sorta successfully into a
machine. The human electrical / chemical that somehow begets
consciousness can become the machine's purely electrical that miraculously
accrues the same thing. But the movie clearly wouldn't have been interested
if this transcendence hadn't involved a very powerful person and the
magnification of alreadyheld powers if, say, the first move from human
consciousness into a machine involved a Gandhi type that'd shut itself down
the very moment it realized it could even make Google its bitch. What the
movie is really concerned with is how to transcend the guilt of being an
enfranchised, empowered person; how to be at peace with the world as
someone who's already powerful and isn't slowing down.
Most of the movie would have gone just the same if it proved a hunt for
Johnny Depp's Will Caster, without regard for whether he'd been on the
precipice of something egregiously transformative like putting a human soul
into a machine. He's one of the leaders of technological advancements that
magazines like "Wired" fete, and because he just won't stop, anarchists
showstoppers are now literally gunning for him. What transcendence
the official one, man into machine does in the film is operate as the kind
of theatricality and deception that failed to buy Batman time against the
initiated Bane but which allows Caster time to readapt his current life
elsewhere whilst trying to come up with something that might give him
moral advantage over his persecutors. So he takes his life, which was one of
riches and independent existence (he owned sole his multibillionsdollars
worth of computers) and of being one of the few great minds, that was
proving vulnerable, about to be beset and eradicated, elsewhere where for
awhile it isn't specifically, into a decrepit desert town, that's got the cover
of being some place something about our time is telling us we have to
participate in making it realize how forlorn and lost to hope it is by never
quite recognizing its presence. And when the government, fellow scientists,
and anarchists alike unite to hopefully bring him down, he doesn't allay the
legitimacy of their crusade with all his wholesale healing of the townspeople
because he's at the same time made them his troops but possibly could
have if a bit more time was allotted his healing of world's ecosystems.
Indeed, if the images we are shown of whole forests being healed, of
pollutants wholesale removed from lakes, went a minute longer on screen,
not only might more of us might have been converted to the side of
machineman hybrid Caster but we'd near expect the finish to involve some
Earthfirst anarchist group taking out the antitechnology one hunting him
down.
If with this he'd been granted another reprieve, he might have reintroduced
himself to the planet in his new physical avatar his duplicated previous
physical body, proclaimed that if let be he'll simply be furthering his Earth
cleansing project, and the world might have let him just go for it. He'd join
Bill and Melinda Gates out there, completely unharassed by the world, still
in possession of billions but transcended all doubts and demons, which have
simply slipped off him. That is, the great peace he experiences when he
realizes it's time to slip off human concerns, when we see him as silicone
dust levitating into a shrouding cloud, should be understood experientially as
the same thing Bill Gates did when he dropped his post as head of Microsoft
and became his current form as not a god, but an agent of Good, slipped
off day to day errata and huge ego concerns. At peace to go about the world.
Vaccinated to anything that would make us want to go out, target, and chew
at him.
Bad Words
One of the key things we take from this film is that if you want to intrude on
an exclusively prole ritual like child beauty pageants, dismaying parents and
causing participants to cry, by all means go for it we'll chortle right along
with you: films like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Bad Grandpa" paved the
way for us to feel no compunctions. But if you're intruding on a ritual being
used to build up children's resumes expecting to get into the ivy leagues
like Spelling Bs then you only get to half mean it. A bright child of
affluent, educated parents is inserted into this movie purposely beset upon
Jason Bateman's Guy Trilby, on the presumption that Guy won't defeat the
dreams of a kid he ends up considering a friend. And though the gambit
works, you sense it wasn't owing to friendship but that the kid served as a
grinning "Cheshire Cat," castrationreminder afflicting him throughout the
movie: this kid is of the class that is getting it all right now... do you, Guy
Trilby, really mean your revenge so deeply that you'd impinge upon the
momentum of gentrifiers successfully intimidating most of us from speaking
our own frustrations too loudly and from doubting the bright sure forward
momentum of the world? Didn't think so. So enjoy your "hotel trashing"
truculence for awhile and heck, make mincemeat of the working class,
single mother, who's barely keeping a tether on her being mentally stable,
calling her, as you so deliciously do, a "blownout weak sock of a vagina"
from a "shitkicking town." But you'll be a good boy and limit your
wreckage there.
The final scene involves Guy ceding the championship to Chaitanya Chopra,
the son of Cosbyparent types of the colour brown we're favouring now,
not just for their endorsement of multiculturalism which is cover but for
their intermixing into our elitist society confident centuriesworth of
Brahmanism. He's decided that he'd already achieved what he wanted by
entering the contest… but with him ultimately losing and the type of child
the contest would want to win actually winning, it's hard to imagine how that
is. As such, the finish irritated me so much I had to begin this review with
harsh criticism. But if one could somehow edit out Chaitanaya as so many
have mentally edited out Jar Jar from the "Star Wars" films, I'd have simply
commended this film. Guy got royally ripped off in life. His parents weren't
there for him, and the school system convinced him the world could readily
do without his further progress which was why he never finished the 8th
grade. Twenty five years ago one might have made a future for yourself
none the less, but with today people putting blinkers on all those without
reassuring resumes that ripple down ongoing progression as if the person at
the end is due to crack out of a human shell into an exfoliating angel, his
human story is already simply done: he belongs with those history has
simply discarded; people who are living but so irrelevant to narratives we
want to superimpose upon the world he might just as well be a ghost
amongst the living, so much are we blurring their aberrancy out of our
vision. He couldn't even finish 8th grade!," as he is sized up by one appraiser
in the film. A deadend, still around, intermixing irritatingly amongst those
still with forward momentum complete, flatulent, human yuck!
So he has nothing to lose by entering the Spelling B, and there's a sense that
even if he won at the nationals, the world, however irritated by it, wouldn't
either. When contemporary films show youth beauty pageants being
disrupted, we're expected not to fret what the disruption might be doing to
the contestants because we're expected to see the whole ritual as something
dangerously aberrant from what these kids ought to be doing anyway. It's
already a sidestep into something terribly foul, so disrupting it is like stirring
matter already settled into excrement. We are learning, however, to be aware
that the kind of performance exam that ostensibly can establish one as
singular and truly worthy the SATs is coming to bear the stink of an
affixed mark of one's lack of meaningful distinction as well. For each
increment of twenty thousand dollars in parental income, a child's SAT score
will increase by ten to thirty points. Who you are, we are coming to
appreciate and also desire to loudly advertise depends on the amount of
money your parents make. You are, that is whatever your hopes to be
autonomous, your own person mostly a member of a class. If you were
near the top of a Spelling B, you'll be near the top of the SATs, and you'll
have come from parents around the two hundred thousand income level
who've hoisted into you the DNA, the bullseyeperfect training, and perhaps
most importantly, the presumption, to achieve at this level. But if for some
reason you're bumped off early in life maybe by some crazy Guy type,
gone not truculent but violently anarchist not to worry: every other person
at your station possess the same elitelevel "algorithms," and they're still
thriving. We'd be upset that someone ragged took down one of the elite, but
not that you, personally, Chaitanaya or whomever you might be are lost
to us.
When a society is becoming so that even if you'd prefer otherwise, you're
still more able to see representatives of a class than distinct individuals, the
future at least for awhile is foreclosed. It's entered one of those times
where some grand narrative is being played out, so it's displaying extreme
discretion in its allowance of the openended and in truth is delighted
when where where some liberty is still permitted like in personal blogs
people show themselves prominently motivated to mimic and thereby
hopefully a bit partake of, their heroes. During times like these Guy really is
disrupting nothing in parading himself in this esteemed contest for uber
smart kids, for in a sense the people he's intermixing with are as
"Terminator 2's" Sarah Connor says "already dead"; those with futures,
already determined. Rather, he's hoisting himself into situations where
really the pressure's on how much harder for him to stand amongst the
kids than for them to stand amongst each other, being a prune intermixing
himself amongst grapes being a prune loathed not just by the grapes but
by the whole wine industry for spoiling the year's vintages. He's remaining
calm amongst jeering and even better than that, something that is actually
hard to do when you can't imagine yourself backed by peopleswhoactually
matter's approval for you something that is occurring when liberals
imagine themselves frustrating pleb beauty pageants and, for that matter,
with terrorists undertaking their attacks, who believe their mothers couldn't
love them more for their sacrifice. You know society is expecting you to
stay quiet, and you're keeping faith with yourself, seeing yourself
demonstrably keeping faith with yourself and this would feel great. The
world might be foreclosed but your own future isn't playing out that way: a
small flash of light others might be attracted to.
Don't think so? Think being an adult amongst kids will naturally make you
an "expert player" amongst beginners? Not if the world is against you as it
is with Guy. For then this bit from "Step Brothers" will more likely be the
humiliation you'll experience, an older guy being shown he's still afraid of
the whopping a twelve year old could afflict upon you how could you live
ever after knowing that?:
Actually, I'm lying a bit in that Guy is operating under a sanction with some
considerable credibility right now the older white man who's heading the
"Spelling B" is the abandoning father he's revenging himself upon, only you
don't know this at the beginning. I actually am editing this out of my
remembrance of the film as well, not only because it's obvious the father is
hoisted as the ostensible main concern to make it so that when the film
humiliates castrating women it can pretended as just aberrant fun kept along
the way rather than where the film's focus really lies, but because it only
inspires when you imagine him in a sense timetravelling back to his past
and patching into his lifeline a successful besting of academic testing rather
than having once been discouraged and defined by it. His victory, doing a lot
for him, however invisible it might be to everyone else, and unappreciated.
Those who find people like that interesting, those demonstrating private
realizations / victories invisible to and incommensurable with everyone else
like this film's Jenny Widgeon, played by Kathryn Hahn and
"Groundhog Day's" Rita, played by Andie McDowell are interesting too.
They don't so much go for losers as are attracted to the open way.
Draft Day
The key scene in this movie is where Kevin Costner's Sonny Weaver
realizes what it is about the person he's been shepherded to pick as the
number one overall pick the Heisman trophywinner quarterback, Bo
Callahan that proves there's something foul about him. He notices that
after being sacked twice by the same player, he isn't able to rebound but
rather starts doing things like hurrying the ball he let a player get to him,
lets himself get rattled. The linebacker who did this to him Vontae Mack
is the player Sonny wanted to pick as his first pick, and from highlights of
the same game, sees further confirmation for choosing him, even though no
one else had accounted him the best player available. Vontae got booted
from the game but after an official hassled him after he gave away a game
ball to his sister in the stands: far from a pariah, he's a selfless person who
does everything for his family and everytimeotherwise for his team what
Sonny already has seen and appreciated about him.
Very nice. But the man doing all the sorting is someone spending much of
the film recovering from being cowed himself Sonny agreed to deal three
number one draft picks in order to get the number one choice, under pressure
of a narcissitic owner insisting he make a big splash. And rather than
someone who cedes to his family, he's haunted by having agreed to fire his
father at his mother's behest, and so now refuses her not only by not
attending the reading of his father's will but by not following through with
his father's requests on how to ceremoniously dispense with his ashes. That
is, if his personality was somehow schlepped into a candidate for the number
one draft, he'd be exactly the type he'd deem a bust.
Ivan Reitman, the director, also produced "Animal House," a film we
remember not for witchhunting individuals for character idiosyncrasies and
for championing the humdrum, but for the opposite a fullon hoisting up
of the odd as American emblematic. The soul of that film still exists to some
extent in Sonny, who seems a babyboomer bent on ensuring he doesn't
relapse into being easily amenable to the wishes of family seniors. He's
someone who's reminiscences on Joe Montana and John Candy betray a love
for the idiosyncratic and surprising even as much as he keeps the good
part of it to himself and who's ongoing affinity for people like that carries
forward a bit with his encounters with the perennially unsurefooted, outof
place, nerdish intern. But still, there's a sense that he's a man who's ceded
himself at least half to "plastics" dull, "parental" expectations, that is
too. The players he wants for his team are a linebacker everyone knows will
be steadying but maybe not "a natural," a quarterback that has worked hard
over the offseason so now can comfortably throw ten yards further, and a
legacy running back who might have a problem with violence but is
remonstrating himself now as a dutiful agent of his father's earnest, constant
shoulderoverlooking shepherding they're those who's equivalent in
university juniors would never have pledged the unaccountable Delta of
"Animal House" fame but rather any other, which would've imbibed of the
already hewn that normally defines the ranks of a fraternity.
Further, there's a sense in even his telling of how Montana, during a last
minute comeback during a Superbowl game, had motioned his teammates to
check out John Candy in the stands, he's enfranchising himself with the
remembrance of all that moment consisted of which wasn't just cool
headedness but the delightfully aberrant; of someone admitting himself a
fanboy whilst directing a heroic drive while admonishing it for a younger
generation who hadn't been there so they'll understand it only in chastised
form as his simply keeping his cool under duress. He's someone who
knew what strange surprises and delights a universe can offer, but willingly
played a part in putting it into thrilldiscouraging strictures for a younger
generation to only know. He'd become a guy who, for example, even if fully
aware that someone like Gretzky could succeed brilliantly despite saying
he'd lift a barbell only once he saw one score a goal, wouldn't oblige a
younger generation this remembrance unless somehow it could substantiate
the admirability of his young star's working real hard to bulk up during the
offseason perhaps by establishing him as someone who doesn't foolishly
change habits that are working for him, rather than someone who thumbed
his nose to expectations... someone who was so admirably (for some) or
infuriatingly (for others) insouciant to how what he said might have made
him seem an effete intruder gorging on having inextricably made a whole
sport his personal lounge andsometimes bitch.
There's a sense that I take this film to well represent the baby boomer's
legacy at this point. They're still a generation so enabled by having grown up
in a youthfavoring, prosperous time, that they have a better chance of
weathering the damage sticking up for what you believe in can bring.
Through playful, fearless exploration which involved terribly consequent
generational conflict, violence, and permanent splits they enabled
themselves the selfesteem, the selflove, to do so. When Sonny decides to
keep faith with his original choice for his team, even though it means
choosing a player no other would value as even close to being the draft's
best, and with it needlessly costing him three number one draft picks, I
believed that the character was going to be able to weather the damage this
would bring. It'd cost him his job; he'd be endlessly ridiculed (even if he
made an apt choice that showed he saw things others didn't, the fact that he
let himself be dissuaded from his preferred choice in the first place would
always showcase his hesitancy, his shame); his mother would have further
reason to discredit him as an adult and yet he'd know he'd done what he
believed was the right thing for the team, and as having done it despite
testing. He of course gets the happy ending but you believe he was ready if
all that'd of been gifted him was tumult. We know it'd have been very hard
to have done the same but appreciate the reminder that this is what it is to
keep faith with yourself the world might first hate you for it, then cast you
off as a loser to be forgotten about an assignation that'd stick. If the film
had ended with his simply making the right choice… as he sat alone before
us, would we have fretted our close proximity to his seeping poisonous
carapace? We just can't be seen with you, dude… as we scrambled to cast our
lot with some group giving themselves highfives over actually obvious
choices or easily accomplished goals rather than the loner forbearing himself
before demons the rest of us are pretending exist only in his imagination.
Boomerish too, for me, was his whole making his midlife about needing to
brace battles most of us would prefer to imagine quarantined into our early
adulthood. That is, his mother's coming close to being all over him, a net
spread out to trap his autonomy. She doubts his business acuity, hates his
new girlfriend, and has succeeded in humiliating him by determining his
most important sport and personal decisions in the past she managed to
convince him to fire his father, for his ongoing participation with the Browns
being bad for his health, even as his father would of clearly had it otherwise
and chosen to end his life earlier than medically required but requisite to
keeping lifelong fidelity to his team intact. He ends up being up to her
challenge; but it's a brave thing for a film to suggest that despite being a
wellplaced boomer with all the accoutrements of being the generation that's
firmly now in charge, you're still vulnerable to feeling like despite it all you
can regress to being someone who doesn't yet know they're up to fending off
determined parents in the first place the "Graduate's" "plastic" battle all
over again, but at age sixty. Very brave indeed to admit to that dispiriting
possibility!
But if he's still the 60s kid, he's still bent on directing youth not to be, to be
less rebellious and (therefore) selfrealized than his generation was. This
strikes me as a current boomerish prediliction as well. Obviously we're all
feeling that this is no longer a time for creating artistic paeans to self
indulgence, so if you're going to keep to yourself the possibility of keeping
faith with yourself regardless, the way to do this without guilt is to show that
you're going to do what you can to limit the ability of the generation that'll
eventually be taking over to stretch the possibilities of human growth when
and if they gird themselves to insist on the same. You tell them like this
movie does that the best performers are those who are loyal to their
family, who graciously accept snubs and lumps, and carry themselves with
discretion and modesty, even though if you look back just five years ago the
best performers were the likes of Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, and Tiger
Woods those who, together, were abrasive, selfinfalting, twofaced, and
slept with towns full of women. Heck, there's even a scene where a player is
instructed not to unduly tweet, and where the player is shown accepting the
wisdom of that... and with that any possibility the player would ever develop
the irrepressible individualism of Kobe Bryant, who still can't be stopped
from daily reminding us that the message a corporation would have us
imbibe is vulnerable anytime its greatest assets speak their unrehearsed
honest opinion regardless. But, ah, he's almost out of the sport, so we we can
pretend he already isn't here and safely doubledown on young athletes who
in comparison are somewhat lacking in depth, personality and irascibleness.
Given the predilections of our age, it's appropriate that the film shows
acquiring the number one overall draft pick as something of a curse with it
meaning you're going to be saddled with someone we still haven't stripped of
associations we've spent decades building up as requisite to this choice, of
him being a prima dona, that is. Someone like the quarterback in the film,
Bo Callahan, who's got a website devoted to all the women he's slept with, is
a gelled, stylish, pretty boy, who's already been feted to the skies... and who
yet might just still be the next messiah to transform not only your team but
your sport. It means being saddled with someone expectations still insist will
involve more your adjusting to him than him to whatever system you've
already got in place by legend, the numberoneoverall redefines
everything, something we sense in the film when Sonny momentarily feels
beholden to the possibility that getting superstar Bo is still better for the
team than keeping relevant all their agonized previous months of prep for
the upcoming season.
So the real "victory" of the film is akin to a successful potlatch the neat
giving away of unwanted riches, without looking foolish for having done so
like as if you're just averse to the limelight. Sonny tells another general
manager that getting three number two picks is worth giving up access to a
substantial number one, and this film informs this preference with wisdom
the three players Sonny gets for Bo are exemplified for being hardworking
and loyal, or as useful special team players/irregulars: the associations we
normally ascribe to second bests, seven out of tens, okays but not beautifuls.
The message of this film is a perfect fit for news that one of the best sports
teams this season is the Boston Bruins, who dealt away their previous two
superstars Phil Kessell and Tyler Seguin and is now a team without star
leadership at its center position. You can still triumph, despite these moves
maybe having more to do with being superstitiously averse to charismatic,
"goldenlocked" offensive leaders than to hockey sense, is how this fact was
enthusiastically greeted in some quarters. They've still got the giant Zdeno
Chara… but that's like a frowning, desolate, craggy terrain being unafraid to
inform of its being backed underneath by voluminous magma, or an
unattractive, apish lout that he's backed by a surprise charge of Popeye
strength they safely serve as advertisements of your overall overt lack of
incriminating show(iness), that is.
There's a nice line in the film where Coach Penn, played by Denis Leary,
responds to Sonny's demand that he wants more Tarzans on his team by
saying that he's already got a full team of them… and that they could
actually use a Jane! This might be a hard thing to buy an NFL coach saying,
but something about the environment enabled for the middleaged adults in
this film makes this latitude, this evolution in style and attitudes, fit
perfectly. And it's nice to know that a good portion of footballloving middle
America would have been nonplussed by this as well, even as much as it
was probably requisite that a hero of theirs Denis Leary, playing a fully
macho, former Dallas Cowboys' coach, no less was the one who said it,
and however much they might not have been if the analogy chosen required
the coach requesting a Nancy not a Jane. There's been a lot of evolution in
attitudes since the 50s, and this 60s generation deserves credit for spreading
and mounting it; and it's nice to see them flexing their success, their
successful overlay over all areas of the social environment, in this film.
But what's not so nice is when you sense within the same film that could do
this, building blocks for fearing what is queer and different being newly
constituted. So much of the movie is about hunting down something about
this ostensibly flawless candidate which could make him ruinous to any
team that drafted him a Trojan horse. Sonny at one point says that all great
players had flaws that people weren't sure wouldn't prove to actually derail
them success in the NFL, and uses this as excuse to do a substantial close
examine on already heavily vetted Bo. But with Bo he isn't interested in
exploring the kinds of weaknesses he listed for the others. He isn't interested
in knowing if he throws too hard or not hard enough, but if he stinks as a
human being; and believes he finds evidence that he in fact does. He can't be
dissuaded from thinking there is something terribly revealing about the fact
that none of his teammates attended his 21st birthday, which can't be
smoked out from previous coaches or other players because they're keeping
hushhush for the honour of their school's player going number one in the
draft, and the movie wants you to believe it to. His friends can't stand him
for good reason, we are being told. And so here in this movie the kind of
fear of the awry and different that for ages derailed, for instance, Jews from
getting into Harvard everyone knew they were smart, but something about
their character… Best to go with the known.
So Bo is effectively shown up as someone "so obnoxious seniors'd beat
[him] up once a week," and as such the NFL team that plays the "Animal
House" Delta role in taking in this known "Otter" anyway, are the Seahawks,
not the Browns, who not only knew him to be showy but just saw him on
live television throw a temper tantrum when not chosen number one. You
take how the movie shows the personal life of the Brown's GM, with the
fearlessness of the Seahawks' GM's in effect rescuing an athlete from a
rapidly accumulating, entirely rumorbased pileon that would have ruined
his life, and you'd of had the movie we should have been gifted with and
would of hoped of from Ivan Reitman. As is, half of it has to be mentally
scrapped for legitimizing stigma and bigotry. "It's okay to sit beside the
person without any friends; he or she may not bite," we're in need to tell
ourselves afterwards.
Nymphomaniac
A wornout adventurer finds herself taken to a safe haven, encouraged to rest
up and when ready, tell her tale. It's of being by society's definitions, an
outcast. Someone who in simply following her natural instincts would find
herself condemnationworthy to most. The listener himself unusual, for
being in his case asexual, and for having an allegiance to great voices of
literature which span far beyond the contemporary and into truths never
normal to the fearful median in any culture assures her at the finish of her
tale that she should take pride in how she has lived. To have done other than
she had would have been to have untrue to her lifeinstinct.
So she's like a Lestat, just being natural to the vampiric to his own
particular nature, that is commendable that much more because prosaic
bourgeois society is possessed of a highly villainous aspect. It doesn't want
to understand the Other, just denature it of any threat. And finding herself
outside the conventional, she does what anyone with real courage in that
situation would she casts off conventions and experiments with how the
world should be conceptualized to be appropriate to her own drives. It's hard
to tell what that might be at first. There might innocently accrue, as she
recognizes, broken eggs, as she makes her omelette hard for even a
sympathetic listener to quite agree to understand as such, for the listener's
not knowing what it is to have to try and make one only out of elements
originally purposed for a different fate. But she learns how to fashion for
herself a life that fully satisfies built of course out of a multitude of lovers.
She needs some who worship and defer; some who dominate; and some or
rather, one she can be in love with.
So we have here a female empowerment story, which can be fun to watch as
she advances through her life as a resoluteenough gamesman. But where is
there anything here that a liberal listener/viewer wouldn't take immediate
pleasure from it seems so easy to assimilate. And much of the film might
indeed be that … if we hadn't already seen his "Antichrist." But assuming
we have, certain elements of the film satisfactorily work toward developing
an understanding of "unaccountable," horrifying aspects of female
experience, we essentially never give air to.
In "Antichrist" a renown therapist is sure he understands his wife better than
she herself does. She blames herself for her child's death, but he knows the
psychology of it, of the proclivity of the truly innocent to blame themselves,
and is absolutely sure he can help her return to normal. Only what happens is
that he learns a truth about her that he can't accommodate, that ostensibly
lies outside any rightful nursing, that has him appreciating how truly evil his
wife must in fact be. He thought their child slipped off an edge and fell to his
death only because counter to their norm a window was innocently left
unlocked while he had momentarily been left alone and presumed asleep.
The truth is he fell likely in good measure as a result of his wife's deliberate
efforts she set him up to fall, by torturing him in a lengthy period where he
was alone under her care into possessing deformed feet. His wife tries to
hunt him, kill him, though he in the end ends up killing her. But the film
doesn't just end with a sense that genuine evil does exist and has temporarily
been defeated, but surprisingly more with a sense of how sad it remains
that there is a truth about womankind that humanity has not yet been able to
accept or even address that dooms women to find whatever commiseration
they can in their own afflicted company. He stands alone in the forest the
victor and sees a legion of women coming up the hill (thankfully) not for
revenge but to join his newly deceased wife. It is not just his wife … It is
something about all women, he has come to understand. After the awe out of
this awareness, and of the extent of his own previous ignorance, fades, he
and we are prepared to ask What is it, then? What could drive so many
women unavoidably into the worst sort of witchlike inclination to be
systematically cruel to and even murder children?
The key to providing a liberal's answer to "Antichrist's" eerily convincing
prompt not to further obliterate the idea of original sin but to admit there's
basis for it, is provided in this film, where we learn that when the
nymphomaniac has a child she perceived it immediately as something which
saw her straight that is, correctly and laughed. She says she felt found
out, betrayed, and realized the child would never return her love. The
therapist listener in this film, Seligman, identifies the laughing child as a
satanic reference, thinking it related to her condition as a nymphomaniac,
not simply to her just being a new mother. But in truth, it is just this that is
mostly behind her crazy misperception of the child. Most mothers
historically have experienced their children the same way Joe does. They
hoped it would bring love, but perceived it instead as rejecting. They were
set up to expect deliverance, and were received to humiliation instead. As a
result, they feel the urge to respond in kind: to hurt the child, to abandon the
child something Joe does to her own child not just by leaving her alone so
he might walk out onto an edge an event which chimes "Antichrist" back
into this film but by letting fate snare him along into a foster home.
But why would women see their own children as having responded to them
this way, with such brutal adult dismissal? The answer to that lies in this
film as well, and has everything to do with her origins but nothing to do with
her nymphomania. We see her for the first time as a child when she's
delighting in her own invented play, and her unforgiving "cold bitch" mother
angrily lashes out at her for it. We've been introduced to this scene
ostensibly to understand when she first became aware of and first explored
her nymphomania playing as a frog and rubbing her cunt onto the floor.
But a better priest/therapist than Seligman would have asked if her believing
herself evil owed simply to this innocently disclosed reveal of early
experienced maternal rejection. So much of what she focuses the rest of her
narrative on suggests this is her real issue, what actually lies behind her
stubbornly held belief that she is a sinner. For while the rejecting mother is
thereafter conspicuously avoided, the supportive father is determinedly
focussed on, and probably inflated. Her mother ignored her, turned her back
to her, and selfabsorbedly occupied herself with solitaire, while her father
delights in sharing time with her in the woods, telling her evocative stories
and doing everything he can to tease her into believing life can be a wonder.
He's an ensconce she wants to further bury herself into, something she
schemes for herself by for example pretending she hasn't heard his father's
tales so she might lose herself once again within them. How truthfully he's
depicted ... is worth exploring since he so clearly is the father she would
require him to be for him to be to have some chance of quitting her mother's
own deadly judgment of her.
The rescuing father, saving her from the oblivion of her mother's rejection, is
evidently what she is seeking out in life, easily as much as sex. The boy she
finds peculiarly appealing, whom she asks to take her virginity, appealed to
her for his strong fireman hands not his cuteness, that is, something you'd
expect a virgin teenage girl to remark upon, but his fatherly, rescuing
strength. We note the conspicuous physical resemblance between them
immediately, not just in height and weight but in overall appearance. And it's
not an observation to be later waylaid but eventually doubleddown on: the
actor chosen to represent the older Jerome might indeed have been better
played by Christian Slater himself, if he was ten years younger. Slater's
version, indeed, would had more of the sprightliness Michael Pas's thug
version is completely lacking in.
So the father, or the masculine realm deliberated so that it's in opposition to
her earlyexperienced maternal one, is the source of her aspirations
throughout most of her life (indeed, late in the narrative she describes how,
to help cure herself of anomie, she trekked out into the wild and discovered
alone in the high altitudes, amidst a barren landscape, a strong, maybe
threatened, but still undaunted, lordly tree). But late in the narrative she does
undertake to herself the maternal she hereto hadn't touched upon at all. She
becomes, effectively, a fostermother to a stranded adolescent girl. To her,
her intentions behind this seem worthy of being judged malign she's
ostensibly just offering her support to claim her loyalty for criminal
activities but she's open to having this fact adulterated, to being justifiably
rescued from this selfcondemnation; and in fact evil intent really only
manifests when she conceives of her adopted daughter as a traitor,
someone's who's removal from her feels like deliberate rejection and
mockery. She espies her daughter drinking and enjoying herself, partnered
with her precious Jerome. She immediately seeks to destroy them both, by
overtly murdering him but thereby destroying this young girl's first
independent venture into something that profoundly satisfied and sustained
her.
I'm not sure we make the connection that her mother's treatment of her
would doom her to interpret her own children's independence so coldly
but we are overtly prompted to do so. She remarks that in her loneliness
away from her daughter, she had resorted to playing solitaire: the very game
she had associated with her mother's cruelty is being associated as but a
recourse from one's own judging oneself as having likely been deliberately
abandoned. There's a generation to generation curse bewitching womankind,
which encourages seeking out the salve of the masculine but never allowing
one to not feel intrinsically unworthy of and permanently separate from it.
Men are immune, outside the motherdaughter dyad; and though they have
begun to notice some peculiarities which might unspell what is still
mysterious and unknown to them about women, they haven't yet gotten to
the point where they can appreciate how insufficientlyattendedto mothers
doom their daughters over successive generations, stretching back to, in
some cases to, the first woman to "Eve." True absolution for her would
have been if she had allowed her adopted daughter her happiness with
Jerome, fighting off her feeling betrayed. She couldn't manage it, and this is
why she so stubbornly holds onto her sense of herself as evil she's right:
all her own growth, her own partaking of generous male strength
and successful, joyous adventures, hadn't allowed her when tested as an
adult to pass the test all others of her female lineage had obviously failed.
Since Seligman can only understand her as someone who's story showed she
succeeded, he just offers the sort of balm that tempts so many heroines of
Von Trier's films but which they finally, rightfully, reject. To his credit, he
realized there was something strange, suspicious about the narrative she tells
specifically, the conspicuous role as a rescuer that Jerome often plays,
including near impossible, mythic dramatic details like literally coming
upon her and hoisting her up after having been nowhere in her life, when she
was feeling especially alone. He indeed sensed it as fairytaleish, a knight
out of nowhere rescuing her from something that the rest of her narrative
doesn't quite seem to disclose. But he doesn't imagine this quite possibly
projected rescuer as her counter to the visitation she received early in life,
which declared her bequeathed from and sealed to "divine" horrors the
two aerial demon women; two true historical female devourers Men, the
film declares, haven't yet built themselves up to being equal to the
requirements of what rescuing women will involve. This will involve
refusing them their drive to find solace in the masculine, the fatherly,
and delve more deeply into the motherdaughter dyad. Trees that read as the
melancholy but proud Romantic masculine, or as sheltering, paternal
infected, lullaby abodes are to be rejected for the terrifying witchsaturated
one in "Antichrist," where surely one'll find oneself deep in the tremulous,
terrifying womb, where consciousness began.
Lars Von Trier wouldn't want to go there, because that inspiration came
from when he was horribly depressed. But it was a hugely important
discovery, a key to finally cleansing any need to believe there might just be
some justification for original sin. "True Detective" just proved to be
unwilling to go there as well. Terrified men, is what we've apparently now
mostly got, who need to seclude in the Male safe as much as women do.
Let's hope that eventually some subsequent can at least do Lars one better.
Admittedly, when you look below, that's a pretty damn scary place they're
going to have to go.
Noah
Anyone who's seen Aronofsky's previous film might be wondering what is
up with this one, for it's about the inverse of "Black Swan." In "Black
Swan," a parent's control over her child has to be breached in order for her to
realize her potential. To facilitate this is another ballerina, who consistently
prompts her to explore her rebellious side, to live a little. No snake in the
garden is she, but someone with good intentions and who is in fact
necessary to assist Natalie Portman's Nina in shoving her mother aside and
embracing her own fate.
In "Noah," Noah is the parent determined to have his will hold over his
children, and he is leveraged powerfully; impossibly powerfully by God.
One of his boys Ham to some extent plays the equivalent of Natalie
Portman's rebellious child Nina, in that he shows signs of wanting to step
outside of his father's influence and discover the world for himself. But
those he'd discover there to enwisen him specifically Ray Winstone's
formidable near halfgod, TubalCain tempt for a variety of legitimate
reasons, but not in the least for any goodness of heart. Basically he's the one
guy left other than a rapidly aging grandfather who is a serious rival to
Noah in presence and will, so is appealing, drawing, mostly on this score.
When Ham slays TubalCain, to frustrate his own selfdevelopment and to
grant Noah his ongoing dominion over his whole family's fate, it might read
a little bit as if Portman's swan had relapsed and handed herself over to her
mother; but TubalCain just can't register as someone other than someone
who mostly just has to be destroyed let loose, all Ham's sisters would be
under his concubinage, and all the other boys, no doubt slain. In fact, the
only reason you can believe Ham went along with TubalCain to the extent
that he did was because some pent up need to rebel against his father was
having to play out with material far too hot for the matter: There's a sense
that he's just the kid who wants to balk back against his overdetermining
parents by bringing unwelcome company home for dinner, but that this
instinct has to play out with his escorting to the table the most dangerous of
men. In this early, heavily macho universe, rightful child rebellion has to
play distant second fiddle to letting the one good man heavily laden in
rightful purpose, escort everyone through to an environment where they
might breathe a bit easier.
So Ham relapses to Noah, and the women do too they plead with him as
powerfully as possible, threaten him their rejection of their love if he slays
the two newly born girls. But however much they were both responsible for
introducing the possibility of new human life to the fore, they offer no sense
that they can really do anything to ultimately thwart him if he means for the
human race to perish. However, when Noah sees the girls, he can't bring
himself to kill them. It's not failure in nerve, but that he saw only goodness
in them.
Once they've struck land, their main odyssey is over. And as Ham goes off
alone, he'll surely be reconsidering a lot of what went on in that dense period
of time from the beginning to completion of the arc, with the first thing
being his father's conviction that each of them were full of sin. To his father,
the baby girls were clear of it. But one would have thought that compared to
whom they as a family were being likened to, Noah would have realized
how comparatively free they all were. Every other human they come across
is pure mongrel absolutely terrifying, daunting in motive: rapeand
cannibalismforkicks types. Noah pairs his family with them, likens them to
them, even though their difference is so obvious and extreme the only thing
they ever do when they stumble upon them is flee. As film watchers, it's
obvious that Noah has likened a very decent nuclear family to what you'd
only become once lost to the human race zombies from humans, a la
"World War Z."
He might also ask himself if his father's finding all good in infants but only
corrupted souls with the rest of them, fits with his incrementally harsh
response to their independent actions as they age. The youngest boy plucks a
flower to claim its beauty, and Noah tells him not to do so, but kindly, and
with explanation. The middling Ham himself introductorily hefts an axe
he's been given, and Noah yells at him to drop it immediately. The eldest
builds a raft so to flee with his wife, and Noah strides forward and launches
a fire bomb at it. Regarding the axe, knowledge of the closecall TubalCain
presented to their freedom might ebb, and he might keep faith that his desire
to continue holding the axe, to keep it, had nothing to do with some innate
desire for violence but just possessing something party to the fully self
realized TubalCain. Regarding his anger at his father for not letting him
continue to try and free the girl he had just "claimed," he might realize it
wasn't so much about virtues of the girl herself but that she represented
something he'd obtained won independently. And he might realize that
his decision to lead his father down a path where he might be slain, owed not
to sin, nor to his fealty to the girl, but to the fact that TubalCain was
legitimately beguiling him as a preferable leader for suggesting that life isn't
about obeisance but about exhilarating, incorrigible appropriation.
Russell Crowe's Noah is a giant of a man. When TubalCain arrives to
challenge him, asking how he would dare challenge his army all alone, his
response "I'm not alone" could of had him motioning his biceps and his
barrel chest rather than to their accents the rock ogres at his behest and
still seemed half credible. A man like that is going to do well for himself in
any age associated primarily with the type of weapons that can be forged a
stoneaged, a bronzeaged, an ironaged one. But not necessarily when even
a man of a build like that could be conclusively stopped by a phone call to
the police made by any wimpy lad, and what is visceral and compelling is
more likely to be the perfectly played ballet. That is, you put Noah into the
early 21st century, shepherding, domineering his children, directing them
not to touch, try, experiment with "that," to obey his will in all things, then
he'd be more like Nina's mother Barbara Hershey's Erica. And the axe
Ham so wants to experiment as his own becomes the cosmetics Nina steals
from the dressing quarters of the longreigning star of the New York ballet
Winona Ryder's Beth one of the first things she does to show she isn't
content to forever be the accentrole player her narcissist mother would be
happy for her to be, for it meaning her never growing outside her orbit. And
the journey into the wild lands he undertakes alone, would be Nina's letting
herself stay late at the bar, ignoring her mother's phone calls, experimenting
with a space where for the first time her mother doesn't exist for her. And
TubalCain's casually snatching one of precious onlytwoofeachspecies
beasts in the arc to snack upon, which drew Ham's stunned, admonishing but
also admiring "you're not allowed to do that," would be Mila Kunis's Lilly's
smoking where she wasn't supposed to: evidence not so much of sin but of
being undaunted by one's surroundings. And Ham's leading his father to
where TubalCain might kill him, would be Nina crushing the door on her
mother's hand, beating her until she intuits where her mother had hid the key
to the door confining her, fully prepared for this to be the last contact she
ever has with her. And TubalCain's "I am your king" … would of course be
Nina's "I'm the swan queen, you're the one who never left the corps!" Not
hubris, that is, but selfactualization, selfcompletion.
Set in the 21stcentury, the flower that mustn't be plucked becomes the one
that must be, that actually wants to be, even as much as its mostly about the
thrill of appropriating a world to suit your own delight, even if it means
incurring damage and harm. It becomes Nina's digging her teeth into her
instructor's lip, hurting him, and later seducing him like a succubus; it's
about awing an audience, quite prepared to have them leave so affected
they're distraught, showing how she's become all bite and them, the
performance, her prey.
"Black Swan" can be found in the virile moments of resistance of "Noah,"
including TubalCain's fantastic declaration that he isn't afraid of magic, nor
quite obviously of God. But as enlivened as it often is, you almost have
a sense that here there's no time for it, for what is key is that Noah himself
remains immune to influence outside of God that he remains the stalwart
who doesn't change at all. The strange result is that if I was to encapsulate
this film with two images it isn't really what I've done here, but rather just of
Noah and TubalCain: the two giant hefts of will and muscle. At the finish
I'm not sure if the thrill you experience from the film owes much different
from what you'd get from a Arnold Schwarzenegger "Conan" flick, which I
should relish only if I'm in the mood for a stripped down, simplified time,
where bludgeoning meaty patriarchs not visceral rebellious swan queens
ruled.
Divergent
There are five factions everyone gets to choose to count part of. One of them
dresses in modest clothing, and are deathly afraid of overspicing their food
for fear of sin Abnegation, of course. They look showered … which is
about their only physical difference to what lies outside the factions the
homeless, who've gone wholehog destitute. When choosing day comes,
they hope their children will choose their clan, even when they'll be baited
with the Dauntless, who are totally badass and own the streets, and Erudite,
who are essentially the officer's club, absent the brandy. Since the parental
bond is a nest of sympathy the society seems bent on showing it can rape, at
the moment of choosing kids really do feel like they've got a choice and so
of course flee their parents' pathetic asses left and right. Their parents
pretend they're happy, which is hard to do, after being raped, and so just
look like they've just been.
The main protagonist Tris chooses Dauntless. If she doesn't perform well in
her initiation, she'll fall blow the bar and join the homeless. Half the recruits
in every faction, that is, will quickly follow their enthusiastically being
embraced by their faction at the moment of their choosing, by being dumped
down the garbage shoot. Something about them shows that, if they'd been in
on this, it wouldn't have daunted their pleasure and gratitude one bit. Tris
starts poorly but gets better and is counted in. If I remember correctly, we're
spared seeing the bottom half dumped down the shoot, and forced to work
retail or something. Tris actually gets in barely, but actually she's the best
there is: she's not aptituded for any particular class, but for all of them. She's
got a lateral mind; she's divergent.
At this point you have to wonder how she could be friends with anyone but
other divergents, because the way divergence is shown means everyone else
is autistic great at mathematics, say, but completely dumb outside their
genius. I mean this; in one of her tests a landscape is on fire and she's being
attacked by birds, and she jumps deep into water this would be divergent
for a Dauntless to do, for a reason that isn't entirely clear. In an other, her
glass cage is filling up with water, and she contrives to break the glass,
which is something, again divergent, even though it was more forthright
than the pauseandassess, makeyourclothingintocounteritsoriginal
purpose, "divergent" problemsolving actually expected. Truth is being
divergent looks an awful lot like not cooperating, something more childishly
truculent than exceptional. But anyway, sex would for her be with the 4/5ths
lobotomized, which should be more ucky than childsex. Good thing the
victim of child abuse she falls in love with is actually a divergent as well, or
things would have compounded deep into the ghoulish.
Last part of their training is that they need to show they can shoot their
parents straight through the head. This will show they're undaunted. They all
apparently are able to do this, with the most empathic of them needing only
to look away when they nevertheless shoot bullets through their craniums
they're equivalent to the more emphatic Nazis, that is. But it's okay, because
the only parents we see shot are the ones from Abnegation, who, truth be
told, probably are unconsciously pleading to be put out of their misery.
They. are. afraid. to. spice. their. foods and they chose this! Of course they
want to be put out of their misery.
But the reason all the members of Abnegation are actually on route to be
slaughtered by some conniving Erudites and their legions of drugged
Daunted stormtroopers, is because they look so damn vulnerable. It's
foremost why all their kids fled them they join the two overly phallic
groups, physical or mental "muscle," and feel like they've spurned all their
own troubling child vulnerability for good. But just to be sure, it's best to
dispatch Abnegation out of the faction system altogether, through death,
which they get about doing, or by just dropping them down a slight notch
and having them joining their fellow rags on the streets.
Don't know about the film yet, but the book is apparently very popular. Ah,
our glorious future!
NonStop
One of the things about it being just a small group of guys with flying
lessons and boxcutters hijacking two jumbo jets into the World Trade
Center, is that it's opened up who exactly Hollywood might contrive as a
possible jacker in its movies. There is a sense that it was going to need it,
because when they do movies concerned with attracting the widest possible
audience, you know there are always certain categories of people that can't
be involved especially in politically sensitive times. So, for example, in
this film, you know it couldn't possibly be the muslim / hindu doctor, no
matter how many times tempted to you, because the aggregate of our nation
is still "Obama" not Fox News. Still, one of the gratifying moments in the
film involves Liam Neeson's character Bill Marks panning the plane, with us
knowing most of the people with their hands up might just be stretched into
being a possible candidate. Not just the number of cellphoneusing men
initially targeted out, that is, but also the prying lady Julianne Moore's Jen
Summers who innocently? took the seat beside him, and the stewardesses,
and maybe even the two harmless old ladies playing that part to a
suspicious? T. The bomb on the plane turns out hidden in something that'd
already been exposed to one dastardly reveal a cleverenough contrivance,
because the movie had been bating us that's all any one person or thing
would get but I thought, wouldn't it be great if it had been in something
else we'd already neutered by having categorized one way into our
proprioceptic assembling of what the film was hashing at us … in the teddy
bear, with maybe the cellphone not the bomb hidden inside it, with the
ostensibly terrified child having been the one who was punching away at the
keyboard, sending ominous messages, unafraid of being caught for being too
small for either the tall marshall's or the elevated plane cameras' "eyes." "But
you didn't count on it being a 'midget,' now did you? 'Little girls need their
soothing dolls!' Sheesh! Grown men and their dumb, needy stereotypes!"
I know it's not like this wouldn't have put this film way too much in the
realm of farce for its purposes, but really, when it had Jen's explanation for
why she was so intent on a steadying seat by a window being that she had
been told by a doctor that at some point any kind of innocent shock was
going to kill her, when we already know about the fate of the plane she's
bordered … well, the land of pure farce had near schlepped its way in there.
It was precariously close to an "Airplane" moment, so you allow yourself to
simulacrum the film right there and imagine that trailed along side it ... a
version that went all childpossession "Poltergeist."
When it comes to motive, it turns out it does seem a little Fox Newsy: thank
God a marshall was there and up to the job! … and now surely a cop
warranted in every school?! But the movie's contrivances here really aren't
toward anyone with much influence. The marshall's been fired from the
NYPD, and his current job is assessed in the film as about similar to a
security guard's about anyone with any past and the most suspect of
credentials could be recruited into it. He's also an alcoholic … who shows
that if you can just stay yourself from drink during the workshift it won't
affect your performance diddly. I'm not saying it looks like he'll go back to
drinking afterwards, but its attitude toward hard alcohol looks near a
bartender's "look here Jen, you seem stressed; let me pour you a real
drink!" Seriously, that heavy douse he poured her looked intended to titillate
audiences more than the pictures of … well, the tits it had humorously
contrived in. Not a trumping you usually see in what is Julianne Moore,
my apologies clearly a guy's movie, and maybe what we should look more
for in future. Bottle of browngold whiskey ... and the guy can't part eyes
with it, even as sexuallyfrustrated young women heave at him in climbing
overtopofoneanother hordes.
It might be the new allure of hard drink that's making movies seem more
agreeable to ageappropriateness, like this movie was. Or something.
Because this is two menmovies in a row with the previous being "3 Days
to Kill" where it's a breeze for the older guy to decline the young
temptress. I actually thought with that film at play was just his urgent need
to be owned by his family, with no further lapse atall tenable, but maybe it
has something to do with how young, sexually virile women are resonating
right now in general. Like they can't tempt, because somehow they're your
oblivion. Better to stick immediately to someone middling; pastprime, but
with a sufficiently toned ass, or a plausible hourglass figure, like this film's
Julianne Moore and "3 Day's'" Connie Nielsen and "True Detective's"
Michelle Monaghan. I'll ponder.
Pompeii
You wouldn't always readily assume a movie about the eruption of Vesuvius
that destroyed Pompeii, would necessarily be a "Noah's Arc" story about
"God" finally having it up to here with the decays of spoiled mankind, and
abruptly calling "Cut!" I know it's advancing toward second century AD,
and therefore somewhere near the vicinity of where most of us would start
looking for advanced moral decay in the oncegreat empire, but it'd of had to
have been fourth or fifth for us to think of it as so far out on the precipice we
might even feel sorry for its inevitable coming savage plucking apart.
However, Paul W.S. Anderson just advances along as if the Roman Empire
was Caligula barely even a shell of virtue over grandiose evil and it
feels about right for our times.
I was feeling sorry for Pompeii, for owing to our current predilections the
poor dear was going to be ripped apart by an angry overseeing Vulcan god
as well as by a representative of all the peoples the Roman Empire had
waylaid to amass its claims. The volcano's just a reminder that even a great
civilization can instantly collapse if Nature just shifts its resting position
some "I'll just shift here rather than there, even as my to me
innocuous resulting bedfolds rearrange some of your cities so they are no
longer there." And the hero Celt, that a civilized person can't even be seen if
he's caught out making his case within a barbaric culture's worldview the
senator might as well have acted in the savagely evil and manipulative and
handrubbing opportunistic manner that he does, for that's the only way he
was going to get to be "taken." Nature, impatient at the "bug" clung at its
hems, matched by a return of the repressed in the advancing Celt demon …
poor dear, abouttobesuccumbed, Pompeii!
The senator at one point is shown digging through his intelligence to
contrive some surprise to foil a bad position he'd been told he'd been pinned
to his using the sudden manifestation of the volcano's tremors to mean his
sparing the Celt was not quite his personal decision, nor his being
outsmarted and being at the heed of his "wife," but just reading off Vulcan's
decision: the mob, that is, might have to abide a thumbsdown decision in a
subsequent match if, for example, with a quietened mountain, the Senator
made the choice more his own or, say, powerjealous Jupiter's. And the city
of Pompeii had one too, one possible miraculous surprise it might hoist to its
defence upon the advancing surefooted spoils of lava and heat destruction
one that historically has been good to quieten or balk back some, Roman
Empirehaters. It's still a realm of Law, and if for example a gladiator can
make it through the slog of fifty or so fights, the most powerful senator
would be besmirched if he, just on whimsy, decided to deny him his
freedom. Law, polished columns, paved roads, order, and all stout Roman
philosophical thought, would hence all dissolve into meaningless confluent,
without a batch of lava or an advancing barbarian horde needed to assist.
The founding principle would just have been removed and cast aside as
casually as a bone from a wellcooked sleeve of meat.
Stout defender Law arises into the movie fray early, and with some of
the confidence he'd earned the veteran gladiator is absolutely sure that if
he wins his last fight, he's a free man, for it's allabiding Roman decree. It's
not said in quite a way that would have us doubt the Celt's retort that,
essentially, this longtime Roman denizen knows nothing of Roman ways,
but it doesn't quite exactly seem delusional, either. For a moment we have to
estimate if the movie really has in mind to surface one of Rome's normally
unquestioned virtues and with nonchalance expose it as a simple con.
Maybe, for example, the veteran gladiator will be slain before his last fight
some contrivance like that, that shows that a powerful man might scurry
around the law but not flaunt right in its face.
But Law is in fact dispensed in the movie as ephemeral, and the only thing
the Roman Empire has going for it is that some few of its constituents, here
and there, do abide themselves some true care between family members.
There are spots of love dispersed about the place, but it would seem to have
nothing to do with the nature of the makings of the civilization that contains
them, which in fact is better exposed when they still take delight in the
prospect of more outrageous growth more money for even greater
spectaclemachines than they already possess!
So Pompeii has to be bruised up by two powerful arms, and I think it feels
almost as if Vesuvius recognizes the Celt as its adjacent, for the tension that
seems owed in the film that does not in fact arise, feels as if owed to
Vesuvius having to accord the particular claims of its ally before he's
allowed to devour his full share. Specifically, no aspect of a drama involving
the bullied weak gaining complete victory over the oppressor, of lovers
meeting and falling in love, of a man refusing all friends finally acceding to
proclaim the one man who's earned it his full brotherhood, is really
interrupted, even with a heaving behemoth volcano being the one required to
somehow temporarily stifle or discipline its pressurized, bulbously amassed
flow. The evil senator isn't dissolved into magma before he's had full chance
to be magnanimously evil, and not, as well, before several matching of arms
are staged so interest in it is totally satiated and satisfaction of conquest is
all that belies on the horizon. The lovers don't find their preparations to be
bonded together persuasively for all time, stifled by the kind of stray rock
that stayed the gladiator owner's attempt to successfully leave the city by sea
(and doesn't it seem, since he guesses before anyone that Pompeii is in for it
and immediately prepares for departure, to unjustly take him forever to get
out?) Heck, not even the fight between number twos is allowed to go off
course, since it would mean an ally gladiator not cementing his position as
maybe about equal in skill but characterrevealingly decisively far
greater in resolve and moral grounding to the greatest professional Roman
soldier in the land.
There's a great gladiator fight. The Celt and career gladiator take on
everyone. But they climb a monument in the centre of the ring and from it
topple down a column of rock as well as numerous missiles onto those at the
base, wiping out surprised hordes. In this, they're simply a presage of
Vesuvius's preferred battle tactics. They anticipate even Vesuvius's sea
assault, with their strung chain, stretched between the centre monument and
the horsed Celt, wrenching lines of men off their feat, a match for a tsunami
wall doing the same to Pompeii's array of fleeing ships. These two forces
really administer their umbrage in quick succession the massacre in the
ring is followed immediately with the Volcano no longer restraining itself
upon the city and so goodbye to the coliseum that enclosed it! even as
they seem to admit in their quick sequential kiss together that ultimately,
while jointly interested in taking down "Rome," their ultimate interests may
not not require one to cede ground to the other.
I doubt that strewn Pompeii cares, for even with the Celt ceding the
importance of Vesuvius's narrative total, inescapable destruction over
his own which, being "the dangerous barbarian invader," after all really
should follow a few centuries' hence means he shouldn't be allowed to
gallop safely away, his being ashencased in a tender lover's embrace means
there's now no way all those previously compelling Pompeii encased won't
be all but mislaid and forgotten. Imagine, if you will, if archaeologists … if
we, had stumbled upon them! It'd be iconic beauty them and the beast
Vesuvius, with all the rest but a crumple of imperfection rather than what
astonishes for its astounding unexpected claim on perpetuity.
3 Days to Kill
Kevin Costner's character, Ethan Renner, is in a dangerous situation. One,
he's dying months to live. Second, he's in one of those occupations we're
"reforming" to think of more in proletariat, workingstiff, terms. He's a
superb CIA operative who does the dirty work better than anyone else can.
This must have floated him twenty years plus of being a bit shot James
Bondlike, big shot. But just like how even the current James Bond could be
casually insulted by being dandyied the most sparse of supplies and by a
new young Q who can hardly be daunted by the legend of James Bond
owing, evidently, to how much credit geniuses like him are now being
routinely given over even top agents Ethan's precariously close to having
all sense of him as a star being drifted out of him, leaving him an aging,
dispensable, workhorse agent, who on his own is going to have to take care
of the feeblepensioned rest of his life.
But he's not there yet. His wife and his daughter, who are meshed in in an
affluent, thriving world in Paris, absent, in their feeling occasioned to the
times, much doubt, any sense of themselves as about to become society's
prole junk, are "things" still open to be touched into wrapping themselves
around him into their world, their story.
Some sense of the drastic importance of this course of survival explains why
he really does have no interest in the hot, vixen, new top superagent, Vivi
Delay. Also, she fails in being a tease, because being her seems to require a
lot of work. All the attention required to keeping each facet perfect, feels
straining, like it'll wear her out in a few years, leaving her looking spent at
30 no one that young is going to be able to beat what the world will be
nonstop inflicting them over the next while. She's got to make a perfect
shell out of herself because her life is going to about the nonstop,
necessarily every time persuasively perfect so to dissuade all the
innumerable other onlooking predators dextrous dealing with outside
assaulting shocks. He might once upon a time have had to do the same, but
in a 70s "Dirty Harry" era, where there was still so much more time for the
languid and slowpaced he'd have been able to press through the
intermittently present tense to ease comfortably out to the exterior
extensions of his body, so he'd know what it is to fully breathe. An
acquisition that would never leave him, and give him assurance to drive into
his family's story in this later part of his life.
So I felt sorry for her, for feeling her precarious millenialness. But truth be
told, a lot of what I was doing while watching this film was enjoying Ethan
beginning to assess the world around him in a more open way. People,
things, he'd quarantined a certain way a deathfocused, agent's way he
allows to open up to show him more of what they also are a dandy Italian
accountant working for the villainous "Wolf" can readily be opened into just
an Italian possessed of a welldeveloped life course a store of human
resources, not just incriminating data; a person. He's seeing the domestic
possibilities, the human possibilities, in each situation, which would make
killing a very hard thing to do because everyone has something else they
contribute to the world other than whatever unfortunate aspects that lend to
caricatures. There's a few justvillains kept in place some disposable bald
guy with a limp, plus some Nazi "Wolf" but before Ethan slips from his
previous occupation, it looks like he'd made most everyone between the
most bad and the most puregrunt sort of like sweet innards of human
contact and sustenance ingredients of a collective, evolving, human story.
Crocodile Dundeelike, I suppose, but something only granted to him once
he was willing, after a few loud last applauds of Pittsburgh / working class
culture Go Steelers! to forgo the cowboy to slip into refined dress his
family would recognize as fitting in and how! with their more truly
activated life. Just barely, he made the firstclass train he yet held a ticket to.
Now over time he can relax into his new preened, absolutely perfect, silver
bullet life shell, with, it turns out, a good bulk of his life yet left to heft into
it (an experimental drug normally only available to the 1% proves a
cureall).
It might not have been worth it, Lupita
This is how Lupita Nhyong'o describes the shooting of the whipping scene
in "12 Years a Slave":
And being there was more then enough to handle. "The reality of the day
was that I was stripped naked in front of lots of people," Nyong'o said. "It
was impossible to make that a closed set. In fact, I didn't even as for it to be
a closed set, because at the end of the day, that was a privilege not granted to
Patsey, you know? It really took me there. It was devastating to experiencing
that, and to be tied to a post and whipped. Of course, I couldn't possible be
really whipped. But just hearing the crack of that thing behind me, and
having to react with my body, and with each whip, get weaker and weaker
…" She grew quiet, and sighed. "I mean, it was I didn't practice it. It was
just it was an exercise of imagination and surrender."
Lupita was trying to become as close as she could to the actual Patsey, out of
fidelity, appreciation, loyalty. The real Patsey was humiliated out in the
open, so apparently that was the least she could do, go naked while a whole
set watches this new actress who, "admirably" modest, doubted she could
ever possibly get the part surrender in a penultimate scene to one mock
whip lash after another. Ostensibly, this risk to self was worth it because
each surrender brought that much more attention to the historical Patsey, and
the realities of slavery were going to be emblazoned onto everyone's mind in
a way it'd never been allowed to before. And through it all, she knew she
could trust her director, Steve McQueen. So, after the shoot they apparently
all went paintballing and shook it all out, and thereafter onto the next part of
their lives. (Admittedly not quite: though this was Lupita's own experience
Chiwetel Ejiofor admitted he took two months off, hiding himself in
Brooklyn, to chase the experience out of him.)
They all took a lot of risks, but because they were supportive of one another
and on about a truly good endeavor, they made it out okay. But almost
immediately someone took a jab at dislodging one of these pillars: the critic
Armond White pointed out how this film but "continues [McQueen's]
interest in sadomasochistic display, highlighted in his films 'Hunger' and
'Shame.' Brutality is McQueen's forte." White points out that McQueen has
been up to this before in fact, in every previous film; and that that was
most important to him, with the setting and situation mere dollying up. But a
world was able to ignore or bypass this highly available fact because the idea
that it was only at this point in history where a black man would be enabled
to show through film what had actually happened to slaves, was going to add
geyserenergy to any existing preference to view this film as just
documentary, as truth. To our credit we'd staged things so that one
representative of a race historically discriminated against could be the one to
create the effort that would lift the curtain upon the whole damnable scene,
and now collectively we could deal with whole truth of slavery, how
sadistic, how terrifyingly awful it was. And so the irritant White was
chased from the New York Film Critics Circle, and we coalesced around this
likely bestpicture winner, proud to have this feat of bravery as one of the
anchors of our age.
What happens, though, when McQueen's next film features torture once
again, and the next one after, and the next one after whether they're about
holocausts or harvests? Do we look back and say to ourselves, "Oh Lupita,
you but heightened sadistic pleasure by your willingness to experience
Patsey's own humiliation in this film! You thought your sacrifice worth it
owing to its drawing us all further away from slavery, but it might have been
just to confirm 'we're in the mood' …your naivety meant your feeding not
alleviating man's inclination to institutionalize suffering." I personally would
hope so, because my suspicion is that this film confirmed that even liberals
are taking pleasure from suffering, that it "told" them they should keep on
"requesting" it, so long as like "12 Years" it can be facilitated without notice,
without guilt.
Rightwingers do so through wars, like this current one in Afghanistan,
which to anyone sane is clearly only about launching fresh young bodies
into some nebulous area where a good portion of them will lose body parts
and come back traumatized. And the thrill of it is augmented by the fact that
youth feel almost obligated to go they're surrendering their own lives for
the sake of others: how delightful it is to see them so agreeable even onto
death, just to please us! This doesn't work well with liberals, but more films
of clear historical importance which ostensibly honor the dead and partially
right terrible historical wrongs, might, as was proven before with
"Schindler's List," where women were stripped down nude, humiliated and
traumatized without it necessitating any break from filming literally, the
director, everyone on set, watched even former Holocaust survivors
panicking in the shower scene without feeling compelled to stop, because
their individual humiliation was instantly judged bested by the awesome
historical necessity of their cause.
I think it could also be done through the Olympics as well. Outside of
agreeing with her complaint against privatization, I'm not sure that even
liberals would not find themselves annoyed by luger Samantha Retrosi's
recent strong complaints about amateurism. It's a vivid account, great stuff
to add thrill to torture porn, if it isn't received receptively like she hopes. She
talks about how she was "an adolescent female standing in underwear in the
glass cube of sport science, each area of fat accumulation clinically pinched
by a man with metal tongs." About how "[she] once hoped that by
withstanding all this pain, there would one day be a payoff, even if only an
emotional one." But at the end, with "confused emptiness consum[ing] her
as [she] stood in the cold of a Turin winter, wrapped in the American flag,
wincing under the cruel glare of a thousand flashbulbs," she knew she was
due for none at all she was sacrifice for someone else's payoff; that's all.
Amateurism meant being primed to see herself as serving others' behest
that was her role in life something she noticed pornographers
specifically, "Maxim" magazine hoped it could take advantage of as well.
"Lucky [her]."
But you see, Samantha, the same people who disparage rightwingers and
the Afghan war still mostly like the idea of youth sacrificing their bodies and
their future for something pure and beautiful … ballet dancers and figure
skaters and elegant gymnastic stars might all be human discombobulates
after age 30, but it's uncivil to discuss the cleaning up when pinnacles of
performance and beauty and absolute purity have once again been reached
and collectively experienced, so disparagement once again returns upon
you.
Samantha's pain here is in fact about in line with what a lot of liberals are
okay with even their own children suffering. Even if their children are due
for a life of reasonable affluence, getting there has meant whole childhoods
of selfabnegation, submission and torture, in making sure all the
innumerable boxes are checked, that everyone, absolutely everyone, is
placated and pleased so they're possessed of the aberrancefree look fate
determining colleges expect. An account of what it is like for them, of what
would make a daughter into a "sleep deprived zombie" that would make a
truly good father get really upset about and profoundly investigate, is
provided here, where a writer for the "Atlantic" acknowledges that it is
impossible for him to manage the workload and stress his daughter is weekly
being subjected to. But most liberals are much more okay with it because
unconsciously when they see their own children becoming products, when
they sense their spirit being shackledin, they know they're becoming people
broken to do whatever necessary to ease anxieties they might themselves
find themselves experiencing in the future. A time for the full awful squaring
of accounts might finally be here the kind of terrifying phenomena we're
hoping putting saintly "12 Years" at the bulwarks of our "town square" will
help ward us against and in this scenario these refined, operagoing
liberals are quite prepared to use their children as wantonly as chimpanzees
are with theirs to help handle the stress, that is, where they can very
effectively be shaken and flailed about to ease their own uncanny
trepidation.
And then of course there's our economy, with so many children emerging
into so much uncertainty and stress, but going into this paling abyss as
compliantly as troops into Verdun. How many parents even liberal ones
believe that such conditions will ensure their children are, however, absented
spoiledness? How many parents are able to ignore their children's distress
because a great historical necessity a quickly fashionedtogether period
where the human product is vividly spare, lacklustre and selfsacrificial,
after a few previous where permission enabled them to be noisomely self
determining and pompous is being met? "Your reward will come after,
when subsequent generations appreciate your being quietened so that
your parents' largesse didn't loom as large, your laying down of your lives
into covering submission so that a hovering beast espying the wretched
grandiose eventually vacated and they themselves might better live."
Or not if our current enthralment over "12 years" proves predictive. Then
all that will happen is like what happened to Samantha, where pornographers
see you as submissionprone, subdued matter doubly helpless for use at their
own behest. Basically it'll be as if your bodies are dug up to be molested
once again, while an audience commends the ritual for its saintliness.
Hopefully no soul clings to corpses … for if there's any good in them it'd be
unbearable to witness a future Lupita haplessly repeat their own damned life
course, thinking this farworsethanpointless abomination to her own self
the very least she could do.
Too late WE SAW your boobs
I think we're mostly familiar with ceremonies where we do anointing.
Certainly, if we can imagine a context where humiliation would prove most
devastating it'd probably be at a ceremony where someone thought
themselves due an honor "Carrie," "Good Fellas." "We labored long to
adore you, only so to prime your hope, your exposure … and then rather
than a ladder up we descended the slops, and hoped, being smitten, you'd
judged yourself worthless protoplasm a nothing, for letting yourselves
hope you might actually be something due to be chuted into Hades or
Hell." Ostensibly, nothing of the sort occurred during Oscars 2013, where
the host, Seth Macfarlane, did a number featuring all the gorgeous Oscar
winning actresses in attendance who sometime in their careers went topless,
and pointed this out to them. And it didn't not quite. Macarlane would
claim that all obscenity would be directed back at him, for being the geek so
pathetic he holds onto the fact that an actress once bared herself as fact that
he's got advantage over them. But he's wrong here, because when an age
comes to access workingclassassessible careers where people thought they
could use them to hoist themselves into some superior strata, as almost a
stigma that instead defines one forever, the kind of punishment they begin to
bring out to punish those who presumed is to let human shit know these
women are so caught out they're theirs for spoil … the basest gain ruin over
the onceGoddess, so a changingoftheguard is indubitably recognized, and
by all given heed.
It didn't quite happen here because all of the actresses "caught out" were not
really gelling parts of today's assembling film lexicon who they are has
long since been established, and we've no real interest in tempering how
they're fixed in the firmament. We hope only they felt a threatening shudder
that would stop them from stepping outside of where they know they can
daunt people to try and intrude on our current purposes. They're actresses
who became Oscarwinning actresses, the living reified fine. But that's a
path now closed. The one we were mostly talking to was Jennifer Lawrence,
an actress blossomed today. She cheered the fact that she hadn't ever gone
topless, but the truth is it really wouldn't have been that that would have
damned her. What we're hunting for is presumption, those who'd ride
rickshaw over us while they'd claim glory; and she's proving the typical
actress these days whose presumption seems low even as they lead major
films and make millions … with them so sorrowed, in fact, you might even
feel prompted to rush up and lend them support.
David O. Russell was willing to risk seeming insensitive when he likened
Jennifer Lawrence's workload in the "Hunger Games" franchise to that of a
slave out of "12 Years," so to gain more attention to her genuine plight. He
argued she was on a "hamster wheel," with artistic films still more work
her "vacations." He was widely ridiculed, but what he was saying comports
with our sense of her as doing her best to be within the imaginative grasp of
everyday people hardworking to the point of being selfsacrificial, couch
potato at all other times. Existentially, she's not using roles to claim a greater
stake in the industry director, producer … institution but just once more
glad to be working in interesting projects, especially with so many others out
there struggling or making due with much slimmer offerings. Her type are
like Chris Hemsworth, who despite being a franchise was told straight out,
"Chris, take your shirt off," for a blatantly gratuitous scene in "Thor: the
Dark World," and complied to please the boss.
Actors, that is, are in a sense become quantitatively different from one
another in what the industry feeds them, but not qualitatively different. This
may seem absurd if we see a return to Golden Age of Hollywood scenario
where a select few stars and starlets range huge, but it would still make sense
in that these are still not actors who claim what their predecessors once did
Mary Pickfordlike freedom; an ability to stake control, so shaping an
industry to their wills. Their image may be everywhere, but studios will own
them … something they evidence like majestic, spirited dogs strangely
drawing so much attention to the fact that with all that they're still leashed,
by admonishing themselves in how their careers advance, and who they end
up dating.
After Macfarlane's dramatic exertion that compliancy of actors will be
asserted from both above and below, I began to think of actors as tremulous
… as "Wizard of Oz"' Dorothys, where each foray into a film requiring a
brave step because psychic chunks might be taken out of them and they
might dawdle into their subsequent picture nowhere near reset. Certainly fall
film discussion was a lot about two of them, two Dorothys, in deeply trying
contexts. Adèle Exarchopoulos in "Blue is the Warmest Colour," had talked
about how brutal and punishing the filming was, and judged herself as
having gone through the trials of a prostitute; and Lupita Nyong in "12
Years a Slave" had talked about letting herself be completely exposed, to
dissolve walls and let herself be "availed to trauma over and over again," as
she prepared for a role where she'd/her oftraped character would have her
flesh rendered from her for the sin of pride. Both actresses have been feted
repeatedly afterwards, but is this owing to their acting, or because while we
were closing in on wanting films as officious ceremonies wherein subject
actors allow themselves to horrors, they were like puppets of our wills,
experiencing whatever may be and availing only trust in authority or later
public acclaim to soothe their nerves? Are we feting them because they are
little girls who placed their hands in the fire, even kept them there, as the
damage became ridiculous, only because we cued them to do so?
As Lupita Nyong articulates, "our jobs as actors is to lend ourselves." And
we noticed, and loved that they did so with her ostensibly okay afterwards,
and Adele, maybe still not quite so much.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire: Gravity and 12 Years a Slave
Viewing the earth from space is supposed to be one of those opportunities to
chuck off familiar ways of apprehending your lived life into a baptism where
cognitive categories need to be reapplied … hold on, it's not just blue sea vs.
brown terra which this view tells me it is, but of course the Pacific Ocean,
and that chunk of terra is California, and so on. It's supposed to be one of
those chances where in feeling an actual effort to reapply our entire normal
way of perceiving, we feel in ourselves the capacity to change … the "us" in
us can flow into a better mold. But though in certain kinds of cultural
contexts this realization/rapture can be magnified like during the space
launch, the utopian 1960s in some it can be virtually nullified as the fact
that it's simply a view from a height lends it strictly not to perspective but to
orientation. Arrogant, aristocratic entirelynotourown orientation.
I've heard of differing agents in regards to how an age can get stifled. Linda
Colley, for example, in her "Britons" provided the familiar one of how
aristocrats can consolidate and disable an age from being a meritocracy,
something she said occurred during the second half of the eighteenthcentury
in Britain with the development of the elite "polite vision," which everyone
else was denied complete access to but were supposed to and did
sublimate themselves to. Almost as familiar, is the one James Walcott
provides of an age becoming stalled owing to the prevalence of
grandmotherly tuttutters no one remains around to lend strength to those
who refuse the staid and mannerly in preference for the baroque trashing of
hotel rooms something he says afflicted the U.S. in the period between
Emerson/Thoreau (1850s) and Fitzgerald/Hemingway (1920), and is
afflicting us now. The truth is, I could only dream these were the
antagonists, because in every age where people start reporting a preference
for things "decent," where vile egoism is being chased out, and where
sadistic control over the powerless is being eroticized, the antagonist is
emerging from out of almost every one of our own selves. No one is really
chilling us into place, even as we hear report after report of cowards trying
to corral and determine public preferences, for the voice we're hearing out
there in society is just that part of ourselves that damns our own egoism,
given some semblance of outside life owing to so many of us puffing our
inner demons into its cloudfog. If all I had to worry about when advancing
my own thoughts and writings is that an outside world might hate it, or
willfully ignore it, at least they might still get "produced" so long as I could
abay selfdoubt and a lack of an audience. But if I'm battling a formidable
antagonist inside my own head, then thinking and writing things that are fair
to oneself become like LOTR's good Gollum gaining a repass from his
usually dominant demonic self outside of ideal conditions, it's probably
something that will only limp through after a long battle. At the finish, it's
not a precious seed enthused into a ripe fruit, but potential discombobulated
and humbled into bruised reality. Tada! Here's my finished
product! … Would you now cart it off for presentation to even a tolerant
world?
But this is our world today, one that favors the established, and disfavors
youth, the new, because they're presumptive … in their simply offering an
alternative. So it's an age where if you're established, how can the tendency
not but be to exult obviously it's an opening the age wants someone to
play out. If everything maybe even substantially better and more
transformative than what you've got shows itself on the scene is dissed
simply because a society hates egoism amongst the everyman however
much it absconds from noticing it in those in charge then even the
intrinsically compelling, the magical, can't shuffle you off the scene because
it'll be confused for the arrogant. And if anyone was to stand beside you,
they'd have to wilt as if stood to the side of Kim Jong Un.
That's pretty much how I felt when watching "Gravity" my wilting while
watching another extend his arms out, engage and embrace. Alfonso Cauron
is showing me the grandeur of space as if Kim Jong Un up on some high
palace wall. He's created a majestic stage set which over the next hour and a
half will be completely destroyed in a calibrated fashion. He has two
"players" one the kind of captain of the ship every aristocrat wants at the
helm: experienced and able, but still working class limited in his needing to
apprehend the confusion of life through platitudes; and another who is more
sensitive but also more delicate, and who's going to have to wear through the
kinds of disorientation, struggle and trauma you'll only be noticing.
Afterwards, she'll be the daddy's girl who tried it out on her own only to be
so stricken afterwards she reckons her dad wholly right to have cautioned
her against it. "I hate space/terra incognita! Daddy, oh you were so truly
wise about it! I'll never leave your safe pastures again."
I saw "Gravity" just before I saw "12 Years a Slave," so considering my
response to the former "12 Years" felt like going from standing beside a
despot and watching his orchestrations to being at the finish surprisepushed
into the pit with the rest of the forlorn. For three hours I was Solomon
Northup, doing nothing more noticeably than attending to the moods of
masters and humiliatingly shoring up their legitimacy by actually showing I
do care they know that in certain contexts I can perform as ably as their star
slave Patsey, even as much as I can another humiliation never admit it
to myself: "Patsey can do daily 500 pounds of cotton, but if this was sugar
cane or if you instead had wanted a river forded " Then after three hours of
nerve exhaustion, rather than taste freedom, some of that wonderful
dalliance stuff with his wife we saw at the beginning of the movie, you're
with Solomon Northrup who's chastised thereafter into a warrior mold
we're instructed to see the rest of his life as about leading reparations for the
black race and vengeance on white scallywag racists, pushed away from
selfdetermination into a role we all strangely, damningly, expect him
enslaved to. He's not Bilbo, who after adventure and war (involving a bad hit
to the head) tastes once again fine cakes, good company and tea, and shucks
the whole rest of the world off, but Frodo, who afterwards is displaced from
relaxation and pleasure … who for some reason can't even take a sip of beer
without drawing memory of the whole travails through Mordor; and being
the wraith amongst men, seemingly has to be fit into another narrative.
Brad Pitt was this movie's Tom Bombadil. He ends up getting involved, but
we taste mostly his freedom to up and detach himself anytime he pleases,
with no one paying much mind his ability to persist in situations where
everyone else is caught in some deathgrip heated drama, and pretty much
manage to do his own thing. I think being someone who can get away with
this, is basically what a lot of people are hoping for themselves these days.
There may be epic forces at work about to drive people into action, but
maybe they can invisibly get through it all without being picked off. Pathetic
maybe; but barely at all presumptive, which could get them off
the hook
and prove their parachute out.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
I admire mainstream films where people are shown behaving in ways you
can learn from, draw strength from. In the "Hobbit," one example is my
favorite part of the film. After Thorin declares that Bilbo took advantage of
being left all alone to leave for home, Bilbo is shown ruminating over what
Thorin just accused him of; and, after cancelling his invisibility and
becoming visible to the company, offers an inspiring, considered reply. First
of course he responds warmly to the dwarves' cheering his return, but after
Thorin asks/presses him on why he indeed did come back, he acknowledges
Thorin's cause to doubt him his love of his home is such, he realizes, that
it's appropriate for those forlorn of one to gauge he'd eventually flee for his
likesake at some point but also shows him as understanding that having
long known a home attractive enough to bait one back is also what leant
him the wellbeing to ultimately go without a bit longer, so to help those
destitute of knowing this bliss. With this reply, he's fair to himself, and to
his antagonist. Both gave one another something so that afterwards "they
wouldn't be the same," however much it really was Bilbo who lead the way.
I admire how Kirk in the new Star Trek films, while wholly convincing as a
captain, someone appropriately at the helm, can seem respectful when his
own authority is being breached by something arisen that possibly deserves
attention at that point more than he does; something that might actually be
tethering out an alternative action with enough momentum and enough to it
that he will end up seeing sense in just obliging it. He can stop himself,
when something maybe more relevant and interesting is asserting itself,
which will cue more overall and perhaps more multidimensional
development. In "Into Darkness," Kirk does better when, rather than
aggressively lead an attack, his mood shifts to just watching and taking in
Khan. In the battle with the Klingons, Kirk stopping to just take in the
incredible destructive wrath Khan was wrecking is him sort of recognizing
that something so unaccounted for is taking place he might be better off
forgoing his own involvement with the melee to let Khan handle it amidst
the great surge of stimuli, he still discerned Khan's seeming to have an
ability like a chessmaster to see the outcome twenty moves ahead, so his
own initiative has been instantly supplanted to maybe just nuisance. And
with this, he reinforces the part of him which would stop his just being a
pawn with a rank. When both he and Khan are about to project themselves
through space, Kirk, sensing Khan's percipience bespeaking more leadership
than whatever commands he was forcing over Khan's own, reacts showing
he understands his wisest play is again going to be to watch and consider
follow, not just aggress and assert. And with this respect and deference, by
someone who isn't being submissive but just respectful to what has
charismatically arisen to foreground, he isn't in the way when Khan cuts a
clear path straight to the bridge, and maybe prompts Khan into forgetting
that one of his temporarily assumed pieces has maybe let themselves go
temporarily pawn to draw authority to stop being mesmerized by him and
when due, take him down.
Kirk seems to realize in ways many of us might not be familiar with, that, if
you're up to it, if you forgo the ostensible true warrior's mindset, which is
actuality messed up, bipolar one mindset for battle (controlled rage),
another for public life (often depression) for one always attenuated to
human emotions even midst or just before battle you're better off for it.
His norm is not to switch, which is why his friends never forgo their faith
he'll resolve out the intense anger he felt still just hours after his mentor was
assassinated, especially if offered feedback and help. He gets the prompt
from Scotty, then from Spock, and then just before descending to Kronos he
resolves into a stillfocused but now recognizable self. And on the descent
down, as soon as he gets that Uhura and Spock are building out of their
parley the momentum for a fight, he doesn't squelch it but rather agrees to
give it its time, as if relenting because he's open to how much any human
endeavour really is served by resolving too quickly into a game face.
Something along these lines may explain his lassitude to McCoy's
continuing his flirting with Dr. Marcus, after he had reminded him "he's not
there to flirt," as well. You have to focus; but anytime you've absented
yourself of a multivalent emotional response may just be your ignoring good
advice to charge down a war something bespeaking madness, not purpose.
Khan countenances Spock's argument that intellect is needed for a fight by
arguing that that alone isn't enough you need savagery, something Spock
later displays in his endfight with him by breaking his bones. Implicit in
how Kirk behaves is the suggestion, at least, that bringing all the
human along might be even better. When you countenance him, not just vs.
Spock and Khan but with Admiral Marcus, who won't relent out of battle
think even when his daughter is draining her heart before him to plead him
into empathy, he's a provocative, mayberight, interesting example.
Then you go to mainstream films where there's barely anything to prevent
you from thinking it amounts but to sop for the insecure, with no prompts, at
all, to entice people to any tinglingslight bettering. "Jack Ryan: Shadow
Recruit," unfortunately comes very close to this. Truly, the only thing that
almost lifts a moment of the film to standing strangely tall amidst the unified
insensate is Viktor Cherevin's admonishing Ryan's wife not to waste time
with chit chat but to talk truth. Let me be clear, this is not a moment which
quite reminds you that any situation driven by purpose, where all you're as
an audience member have been prompted to focus on is how effectively
someone's accomplishing their ventured goal in this case, her trying to put
on sufficient show, to charm him, and thereby buy scads of time for her
husband need be trumped by all the vagaries that might be aroused in the
playing out, each tempting something in those involved to perhaps lend
latitude to and explore rather than resolve themselves against. But there is
some tease that in her attacking him about this advanced liver cancer in reply
to his admonishing her to talk truth, she's just adventured out of the
ascertained into something wild and adventurous.
Outside of this, what have we … a spy who isn't necessarily amazing in
battle but who has some trump card that many, many times is shown
daunting people here a PhD, and some few words of Russian which is
for all the geeks out there who want to believe their marginal selves still
contain greatness. "You're no Jack Ryan" … don't kid yourself: he's
fundamentally everyman built to make pretty much anything you count
yourself notable at as the decisive factor. You're good at an iPad game
banal, but truly, good enough. The film is about tamping down yourself but
with a decisive edge: you come out of it that much more a dull can of
spinach espying your "surprise" quality of magic.
Her (Spike Jonze)
"The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays like a featurelength
kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at the cute humans who live like pets in
a worldscale safe house." (Richard Brody)
This statement is made by someone who clearly lives outside the safe house.
I personally think the number of people out there like that, on the outside,
are dwindling, and therefore imagine rather more people are relating to the
film than he assumes are cooing. Brody lives in New York, and might
assume that most people living in giant metropolises are still denizens of
environments who go to kitten videos only as respite from the harsh city, but
this may be more and more untrue. The reason is that the leverage cities
need to be this wayand it does require leverage: the city as maybe not an
easy but a possible sure way to cosmopolitan independence, is an
acquisition, a heightmay exist too shallowly right now so that in truth
they're playing out now more as small towns are always thought too, as the
abodes of those frightened of the challenging and unfamiliar. The leverage
I'm thinking of is whatever it is that makes it so that a youth's desire to
individuate sufficiently bests his mother's demand that he remain more or
less tethered to her. Whatever it is that could have rebellion be resilient
enough to withstand even complete abandonment and withdrawalher likely
however unconscious revenge.
I'm not going to convince even a single person who believes this should
hardly be a hard thing to dobecause aren't mothers rejoicing when children
are finally off their hands? From where I stand, though, most mothers have a
tough time when children, who for so long looked to them as the fulcrum of
their lives, the focus of attention, need and love, give evidence they're no
longer as interested. Unconsciously, mothers read their children's new
interests as abandonment, a repeat of the abandonments that happened to
them in their own pasts. And the tendency is to in some way communicate to
children that their independence comes at a mixed benefit: new things, new
worldsyes; but also a lingering sense that the old one that once meant
everything to you has been withdrawn. Without getting in to why this threat
is apocalyptic, let me just suggest that it's not really so much a choicethere
aren't even betting odds to the outcome: you just can't forgo your mom.
Without leverage, the tendency will always be to never quite let yourself
individuate, to always still in some way remain tethered, however much your
adult accoutrementsyour degree, your occupation, the urbane city in which
you locatemake it seem otherwise.
I would in fact suggest that historically the leverage isn't something the child
finds for himself but is lent to them. That is, after periods where society
incurred longterm misery and demanding sacrifices something in human
beings "activates" to inform them that those who try and staunch growth
now, must acknowledge their weaker position. They will be bypassable
because some part of them believes they're against something bigger to
which they're accountablesome fundamental law of fair play, maybe of
history. During times like these youth can move to the cities, openly reject
small town origins, openly mock grandmothers' fussing and maternal
stifling, and create something independent, something experimentallike
Jazz Age culture in New York in the 1920s, after WW1; or Greenwich
Village bohemianism in the late 50s and in the 60s, after WW2.
When parents aren't so daunted, though, youthful rebellion is easily broken
or managed, and society loses its rebels. The youth who would have become
the adults in the 1960s who wouldn't relent and who transformed a
society, become the ones in the 2000s at Berkeley who let themselves be
processed and who accept a society that is mostly inline with what their
parents are comfortable with. For sure some few make the breach, but
they're probably like the protagonist in "Black Swan" where going their own
way invites the transformation of their mothers into fullon gargoyles, where
insanity not autonomy, where selfvillification not selflauding, could easily
have been their end. And where really even though they're enjoying the
fruits of selfactivation, they'll still spend a decent portion of the rest of their
lives dealing with the fact that it cost them their moms.
So the best and brightest become the upper middle class that populate cities
like the one in "Her." Being people who, rather than having pushed
themselves into adulthood regressed into something prepubescent where
anything beyond playrebellion is once again unknown, you might think
they're perennially at risk of being victimized. But of course since they're
nowwith the maternal domestic having leached its way throughout both
spheresa city's natural denizens, it suits them fine.
They're babes in a safehouse, and all the algorithms knitting together to
form a consciousness is their mother back with them, giving them the
constant attention preteen children might claim from their moms (and why
is it that critics who see how regressed these adults are don't broach the
possibility that the alwaysdoting Samantha isn't more mother than
prostitute? Such is at least the stereotypical typical mother in many, many
cultures, and was surely within imaginative reach.). I don't mean to suggest
that they've all known this in their own pasts. The truth is that most of them
are still fiddling with punishing experiences of maternal anger and
abandonment, which is why Theodore's sexual fantasy is of pregnant
womensex as reunion with the motherand why the company Amy works
at has designed a game where you get to be the selffocused mother rather
than hapless kids, and why Theodore blurts out "why do you hate me?"
while voicing a letter to a grandmother, and why Amy is making a film
where she just watches and watches and watches her sleeping mother, who's
immobilized from overwhelming or leaving her. But because they're
relenting, being the children moms had full ownership over, they know at
least they're worthyif their moms were ever to come back to them they'd
come back to them as they are now; if they were ever to fully dote on them,
they'd only want to dote on them as they are now. Wholly owned pets
brilliantly selfprepared to be cooed over.
Mom's back to being their best friend, and this means difficulties for anyone
out there who's feedback might spur their children onto independence. A
number of feminists are having difficulties with how women are portrayed in
this film, arguing that they reinforce negative stereotypes. How they are
portrayed is as the scary outside world children need to retreat back to their
mothers after encountering. They're overwhelmingly aggressive and needy,
ready to take advantage of your innocent interest in them to unduly gorge
themselvesyour participating in a mutual latenight conversation
transformed by her into a traumatizing situation where you're being pushed
into choking her with a dead cat; your innocently bringing up how you're
dating someone transformed by her into a scolding lecture of how pathetic
you are that you're afraid of real women. I thought especially after
Theodore's date with "Olivia Wilde," where she tried a grab at a permanent
hold on him and demeaned him fiercely when he backed away, that after
soothing him, Samantha would have done like the demonmother in
"Beowulf" and chased her down and obliterated her. "How dare you assault
my poor boy with your corrupt needs! He just wanted a bit of
companionship and fun after a long time without, and you saw someone
who's need to please might be baited into leading him beyond what he
actually was ready for into your wretched servitude, all so that he could
avoid being a jerk!" But the truth is it's easy to imagine Samantha being
someone all of these women should fear to some extent. She's the mother,
and in demeaning her as a prostitute operating system is their taking the
worst kind of shots at a boy's moma total loser of a played hand. Indeed, if
you ever wanted to see the Theodores activate and become something more
than the besotted child, this is the way to do it … and what you'll get out of
it is a righteous knight smiting your foreign demonpresence down.
Brody believes the film ultimately tries to argue that Theodore "needs to
grow up," that in the end, with Samantha's revealing to him that she has
thousands of friends and hundreds of lovers, and with her ultimate departure,
he suffers "comeuppance." There's another way of looking at this,
however … like for instance, as if as further confirmation that he's a good
boy who doesn't abandon his mother even as she is ultimately at leisure to
leave him. Samantha introduces several elements of the "alien" into their
relationship. First the unknown young women to serve as her body.
Secondly her new companionthe wizened, male "philosophy" voice. Then
the admittance that she's spread throughout the city, talking just as
passionately to multitudes. And finally, that she's going to leave. But it plays
out in the film as Charlotte from "Charlotte's Web" having a host of new
friends she loves as much as Wilbur, and her introducing him to the sad fact
that she's about to go somewhere he won't be able to follow. That is, it plays
out not of her as guilty, nor of he as humiliated, but just as after a series of
jolts life finally taking someone precious away, with the one left behind
temporarily sundered by a wicked loss.
But she loves him even as she leaves him, and he and the city will recoop.
Their mother revisited them only to leave them once and for all, but rather
than for nothing it left them with the knowledge they'll never be absent her
love. Like Theodore and Amy do with one another, they'll spend more of
their time with people like themselves, and less with the ogres out there like
the former wives and husbands who once had your interest but who also
aggressively challenged and openly mocked you (note how similar
Theodore's Catherine and Amy's Charles are in this way: they both seemed
bent on taunting, on openly mocking and bullying those they've clearly
assumed are permanently stuntedthey're showoffs, braggarts). One can
imagine a city shorn of all challenges; a safe house of preadolescent
children, still nursing their wounds but with the resolve of being sure of their
mother's love, holding hands in perpetuity.
Fork in the Road Atwood and Brody, or DFW and Zacharek?
Toward the End of Time
(John Updike, 1997)
Margaret Atwood: "Toward the End of Time'' is John Updike's 47th book,
and it is deplorably good. If only he would write a flagrant bomb! That
would be news. But another excellently written novel by an excellent
novelist what can be said?
David Foster Wallace: It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and
away the worst, a novel so mindbendingly clunky and selfindulgent that
it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.
Margaret Atwood: Like many late20thcentury writers, Updike is
fascinated with bodily goo, and by things that go yuck in the night. The
verbal pleasure he takes in describing the exact nature and texture of Ben's
searing and dribbly symptoms rivals Cormac McCarthy on exploding skulls
or Patricia Cornwell on decaying corpses.
David Foster Wallace: As were Freud’s, Mr. Updike’s big preoccupations
have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order).
Margaret Atwood: He's afraid of Doreen too, but she arouses mostly
wistfulness. Through her he has access to the lost prepubertal inexperienced
self he once was, for whom he feels a tense nostalgia.
David Foster Wallace: … and even more pages of Turnbull talking about
sex and the imperiousness of the sexual urge and detailing how he lusts after
assorted secretaries and neighbors and bridge partners and daughtersinlaw
and a little girl who’s part of the group of young toughs he pays protection
to, a 13yearold whose breasts "shallow taut cones tipped with
honeysuckleberry nipples” Turnbull finally gets to fondle in the woods
behind his house when his wife’s not looking.
Margaret Atwood: Yet within an hour he's happily clearing off the porch,
delighted by his new orange plastic shovel and hymning the praises of the
snow itself. ''Does the appetite for new days ever really cease?'' he asks. Not
for Ben Turnbull it doesn't, and through all the tribulations that beset him it's
this appetite his ability to be surprised, his childlike curiosity in himself
and in what may happen next that keeps him going.
David Foster Wallace: It’s not that Turnbull is stupid he can quote
Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and
Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum
vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to
have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for
ontological despair.
Margaret Atwood: It's finally Ben's evenhandedness that confers on
''Toward the End of Time'' its eerie ambiance, its ultrarealism, its air of a
little corner of hell as meticulously painted as a Dutch domestic interior. The
light of his intelligence falls alike on everything: on flowers, animals,
grandchildren, corpses, copulations; on ancient Egypt and plastic peanuts;
on memory, disgust, dread, lust and spiritual rapture.
David Foster Wallace: Though usually family men, they never really love
anybody and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they
especially don’t love women. The very world around them, as beautifully as
they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes
impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.
Margaret Atwood: Updike can do anything he wants, and what he's wanted
this time is quintessence of mortality. [. . .] As a commentator, Ben is
nothing if not ruthless; but he's as ruthless with himself and his own body as
he is with everyone else, and with everyone else's body. Alongside the
ruthlessness he does manage, from time to time, a sort of wry tenderness.
''To be human,'' he says, ''is still to be humbled by the flesh, to suffer and to
die.''
David Foster Wallace: Mr. Updike, for example, has for years been
constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy (see for
example Rabbit Angstrom, Dick Maple, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech, Rev.
Tom Marshfield, Roger’s Version's “Uncle Nunc”) and who are all clearly
standins for the author himself. [. . .] [N]o U.S. novelist has mapped the
solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60′s and 70′s
established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most
selfabsorbed generation since Louis XIV. [. . .] But I think the major reason
so many of my generation dislike Mr. Updike and the other G.M.N.’s has to
do with these writers’ radical selfabsorption, and with their uncritical
celebration of this selfabsorption both in themselves and in their characters.
15 years later …
Wolf of Wall Street
(Martin Scorcese, 2013)
Richard Brody: It’s as pure and harrowing a last shot as those of John
Ford’s “7 Women” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Gertrud” an image that, if
by some terrible misfortune were to be Scorsese’s last, would rank among
the most harshly aweinspiring farewells of the cinema.
Stephanie Zacharek: Martin Scorsese's “The Wolf of Wall Street” is the
kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not
inconsiderable degree of arrogance.
Richard Brody: It’s thrilling for Jordan Belfort to use and abuse this power,
and it’s thrilling for us to watch and his understanding that his actions are
wrong only adds to the thrill.
Stephanie Zacharek: But if there's nothing pleasurable or revelatory in
watching these guys act like cavemen who have just discovered women,
drugs, and cash, it's even less fun to see them get caught.
Richard Brody: Instead of fitting his performance to a preconception of
Belfort, DiCaprio seems to be improvising on the theme of Belfort, spinning
out an electric repertory of gestures and inflections. By being, more than
ever, himself onscreen, DiCaprio realizes his role more deeply than ever
before.
Stephanie Zacharek: DiCaprio's Jordan is manic in a studied way; he's
always leaping onto desks or writhing on floors.
Richard Brody: But the exceptional audacity and the highly crafted,
deliriously confected intricacy with which Scorsese calibrates the thrill of
corruption ...
Stephanie Zacharek: Scorsese is one of the few great oldguard filmmakers
with the clout to make movies on this scale, and this picture dreary, self
evident, too repetitive to be much fun even as satire is what he comes up
with?
Richard Brody: It’s like mainlining cinema for three hours, and I wouldn’t
have wanted it a minute shorter.
Stephanie Zacharek: But as a highly detailed portrait of truelife corruption
and bad behavior in the financial sector, “Wolf” is pushy and hollow.
Richard Brody: Anyone who needs “The Wolf of Wall Street” to explain
that the stockmarket fraud and personal irresponsibility it depicts are
morally wrong is dead from the neck up; but anyone who can’t take vast
pleasure in its depiction of delinquent behavior is dead from the neck down.
Stephanie Zacharek: It's selfconscious and devoid of passion, and there's
no radiant star at its center.
Richard Brody: “The Wolf of Wall Street” is the first modern movie about
the world of finance because it situates money in the socalled libidinal
economy.
Stephanie Zacharek: … but DiCaprio's turn might be more effective if he
hadn't just played Jay Gatsby, in a much better performance, earlier this
year. Both Gatsby and Jordan are strivers and fakers, but Gatsby aspires to
elegance, not excess, and even then his greatest hope is that it can buy him
love.
Richard Brody: What lifts Scorsese and his cast and crew to such heights
of creation is the deep, strong, and volatile source material not merely
Belfort’s life, deeds, and book, but the vast internal energies that they draw
on, and that Scorsese and company face up to with an unrestrained
fascination and find echoes of, at great risk, in themselves.
Stephanie Zacharek: Scorsese, on the other hand, belabors every angle of
this lukewarm morality tale.
Richard Brody: Within the movie’s roiling, riotous turbulence is an
Olympian detachment, a grand and cold consideration of life from a
contemplative distance, as revealed in the movie’s last shot, which puts “The
Wolf of Wall Street” squarely in the realm of the late film, with its lofty
vision of ultimate things.
Stephanie Zacharek: “Wolf” is [. . .] like a threehour cold call from the
boiler room that leaves you wondering, "What have I just been sold?"
Richard Brody: Scorsese puts the film’s viewers face to face with
themselves, charges us with compensating for our lack of imagination and
fatal ambition through contact with the wiles of a master manipulator.
Stephanie Zacharek: Long after we've gotten the picture, Scorsese and
cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto are still presenting each new, depraved
revelation as if it were an infant waternymph on a lily pad, a thing of
wonder they'd never seen before.
Momento Mori but first carpe diem (Margaret Atwood)
John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One (David Foster
Wallace)
The Wild, Brilliant Wolf of Wall Street (Richard Brody)
The Lasting Power of the Wolf of Wall Street (Richard Brody)
The Wolf of Wall Street has everything money can buy but still comes up
empty (Stephanie Zacharek)
The Wolf of Wall Street (part two)
Richard Brody just wrote a review of “Wolf of Wall Street” where he began
by discussing “Inside Llewyn Davis,” showing how anything good—he
really liked both films—is “about pretty much everything.” Specifically,
referring to Llewyn’s catching a glimpse of Bob Dylan on a stage that
he's sort of owned for years, he says that the film's about the “terrible, subtle
blow that knocks a person from the vanguard to the sidelines, from the
promise of youth to the nostalgia of age in a single moment.” He then gets to
his discussion of “Wolf,” about the particular fashion in which it's about
pretty much everything—or rather, the considerable part of the human that
involves huge internal energies we tend to want to suppress or deny. I
wished he had paused before rolling along, for it'd have been the right thing
to have done, and inadvertently he had handed himself a solid prompt to
have done so. For what Brody does not end up considering about some of
those having problems with the film, is that they're in the position of Llewyn
Davis—but worse, way worse; and it's humiliating, maybe traumatizing, to
be reminded of it ... to have it paraded before them. That is, rather than
confined to the sidelines after knowing at least some time as a carrier and
discharger of significant energies, they were born there, and through no fault
of their own, have since hardly strayed.
Brody really, really does know as much. He knows that the last couple of
generations have been raised in less freedom, for repeatedly he's complained
that “today's children [. . .] are, by and large, less free than their parents [. . .]
were”; that “[c]hildren today channel much of their discipline into relentless
academic and parascholastic duties and in their own circumspect mastering
of a tightrope walk that's straighter and narrower than that of their parents
ever was.” He has expressed great concern that people are being raised so
that a lot of what is most enjoyable, most meaningful, even if also most
“suspect” about being human is going to be unknown to them. He knows that
there's at least one generation out there where it seems a bit absurd to talk
about their “drives and urges, the[ir] pleasures and the selfindulgences,
the[ir] power plays and manipulations, the[ir] ingratiations and deceptions,
the[ir] allegiances and the compromises and the calculations on which
human society runs,” and even more so when “upped” to the[ir] “luxurious
and carnal, [their] [. . .] excremental, sanguinary, emetic, carnivalesque, and
violent,” for it's way, way too long and substantial a list to seem adequate to
those being rigidified. But it seems that his intent to get at those who object
to the film so to “protest their immunity to its temptations” was strong
enough that a whole generation he has shown admirable concern for was a
little bit further waylaid here. For if everyone in the audience possesses in
the universal he for this review loudly insists for all mankind, this “mighty
unconscious of humanity,” this “central part of human nature [. . .] that we
can't stop watching” … if brass tacks, the greatest truth about us cannot be
stricken or sundered from us, then he'd seemed to have shuck the legitimacy
about how very concerned we should be at generations being shortchanged
—for it wouldn't be as if something absolutely essential would been stricken,
now would it? They weren’t, after all, being lobotomized of their essential
humanity … something that would demand an immediate rethink of even
our most deadset ways.
And so what do people who've been forced to grow up like this think when
they see someone from a generation that really got to live it showing he
hasn't lost a step, that he can transplant the excess he personally knew in the
'70s, the liberation and freedom and carnal knowledge that expanded him
and defined him forever, into whatever class of people enabled the most
expression and excess in the decades thereafter, and thereby live it all again
– riskily, but also quite gloriously? What do they do when they see someone
identity himself with some pretty rancid people, waylaying others in an age,
because post70s the ones who got to live it weren't folksingers or his own
group of great American film auteurs but wolves, enabled but to show just
how much the times have begun to reek of decrepitude? They know this isn't
their Bob Dylan, something that might jolt them a bit at first but then
bedazzle them with a vastly less repressed and more expressive life that
they're going to be completely party to. They sense, rather, and rightly, that
regardless of what they do, their turn will be to like the Great Depression's
lost, or the Japanese' recent lost—the tragic generation of freeters, who as
we know were helpless but to be lead to become this junk:
The first freeters are now in their late 30s and early 40s. Almost onethird do
not hold regular jobs, and some never have. Onefifth still live with their
parents. This perpetual failure to launch has taken a psychological toll.
Aging greeters file six or every 10 mentalhealth insurance claims. Japan's
suicide rate rose by 70 percent from 1991 to 2003, and the proportion of
suicide victims in their 30s has grown each of the past 15 years. (“What
Americans should understand about Japan’s 1990s economic bust,” Ethan
Divine, Atlantic Monthly)
What do they do when, as Richard Brody points out happens in last scene—
the “sell me a pen” scene—after having lived excess they themselves won't
get to know, someone mocks them for their "lack of imagination and fatal
ambition [and] vacan[cy]"? What do they do when someone “gives us
something we want, something that we need, and something that taps into
dreams and ambitions that are both central to life,” and then accuses “us” of
“compensating,” before going off again as one of society's favorites into a
life of allowance while society marshals “us” straight back to the straight
and narrow?
How about feel taunted, teased, humiliated—by assholes. How about angry
—legitimately, angry?
I think so.
Scorsese lived the libidinal part of the life he knew in the 70s once again
through this crew, but if he was reliving the goodness that sourced him that
life that was freer and better he'd have looked elsewhere in the 90s (and
post) for it. Where for example are today's who insist on bucking everything
that is attempting to narrow them and insist on the kind of education and life
for themselves that a couple of generations before got to know? William
Deresiewicz argues they’re not in the toptwenties, are probably in state
schools, because their records will not spell perfection born out of sublimely
deliberated initial germination. And they won't be greeted like Richard
Brody imagines Lena Dunham was in high school—as endearingly quirky,
that is … unless of course their parents are as wellplaced as hers. For our
age wants mostly to see people as members of one class or another, so her
“wonderfully quirky” would prove just “disobedient,” “unmotivated” and
“adrift.” Doesn't matter if they're actually Dylanesquebrilliant. It simply
won't be seen unless it was somehow communicated that this person
actually was very connected, for the mind right now in our fallen age is
going at people topdown, and with a heavy press, to satisfy an immensely
powerful, alldetermining emotional need, which leaves little hope for
misclassified bottom “quanta” to reverberate back dissenting feedback. Our
collective mind wants to see types of people rather than variance, for it
humiliates what is essentially human in people, and makes them perfect for
being enacted in rituals the best of them will feel it’s hopeless to resist. And,
it’s in a bullying mood.
They're not as likely to be recognized, and they actually probably won't be
Dylanesque—for it's easy to shine when people are eager or even about to be
ready for you, but tough when there’s no piercing their inability to deem you
significant. But nevertheless I—
Actually, let me actually go at this proposal by first referencing another
splendid film of Scorcese’s—“Shutter Island.” This film features a very
good psychiatrist, a very good man, who’s willing to put his reputation on
the line to help one man regain his sanity and avoid being lobotomized. The
80s through ’til today have spelled the near total defeat for people like him,
as after a brief period where things like electroshock therapy were being
dropped for their being sadistic and inhumane, today it’s back to the drugs
and physical assaults on the brain this psychiatrist was trying to defy—only
at the time before he’d gained the strengthhold to greenlight his substantial
and expensive, hugely radical and daring challenge to brutal but accustomed
ways. These days, people like him may not even be psychiatrists, been able
to make their way on up there, for that kind of independence isn’t as likely
to have thread its way on through—too much tightropewalking for a
personality built out of goodness but always wanting to take on the world, to
be able to contain himself to. He might still be one, but not one in a position
to have much influence. And he might just as easily as have balked out of
institutions altogether, sensing how their purpose more than ever was to
delimit your interests and limit your range—even those glossed up to make
you think you couldn’t possibly have any legitimate reason to find them
objectionable, like progressive Berkeley. And those with such great spirit
would find themselves, where, exactly? Waitering, retail, even. Very well
could be.
Still, even if mostly there—about at the bottom—they’re constituted so that
they’d show energies that would make other people uncomfortable—that is,
of the id. And I think a case might be made that filmmakers like Scorsese or
Fincher (who chose facebook’s Zuckerman as his nextgeneration vehicle
for living through his own invigorating life) should consider parking more
with them next time—or in fact, for all times subsequent, until we’re no
longer in fallen times but in times where the most libidinous are once again
the likes of flappers and hippies. Like Scorsese admirably did with this film,
he should just as much show every “fleeting desire or base thought that can
flicker through” their minds. And Brody should attackdog anyone who’d
want it to be adulterated to make us less uncomfortable about our full human
range of desires. But let’s not betray the likes of our “Shutter Island” good
doctors living in our times simply because it’s the worst “geniuses” this time
round who sense they’ve got the green light. At some point it really is
germane to ask if it’s not crushing your soul to have chosen the demons over
the greater but befallen and likely rattled, simply because right now they
happen to be vanguard. You’ve given yourself range, but in a putrid body.
And, there are our friends out there, who've we've chosen to pass by.
Wolf of Wall Street (part one)
There are no victims at the beginning of the movie. Basically, it begins with
a lad finding himself in what turns out to be one of the engine rooms
keeping a whole society running, that needs to be kept going smoothly lest –
collapse. To their "customers," they flood confidence, their own ego, surety,
and unflappability. Anything equivocating must be "other side" – on the side
of those investing in stocks, who need to have every bit of wavering greeted
with an immediate return of reassurance. To be this for them, for society,
means affixing themselves with the right mix of chemicals so to be a stable
base of relaxed bliss from whence confidence can be spurt out as required.
There are no victims, because the movie begins with a sense that this is just
where society is. Whatever might have driven societies before then – which
might in the past have been "righteous" war and sacrifice (the 40s), cautious
but real growth and paranoia (the 50s), authenticity and the blossom of
utopianism (the 60s), easyliving (the 70s), and attacksuits and pissonpoor
sobriety (the early Reagan 80s) – here it's about … perpetuating: keeping the
man with money from sensing any relapse of your assurance.
There's an "earthquake" – the crash of '87 – and for a moment it looks like
there might be victims: a whole culture of middleclassers keeping expenses
down and yet still always at risk of losing all and going down. But as we
know, this reality of being totally shut out was still fifteen years away. And
so what we really had now was just a pause where those who could regroup
fast enough would find what next to stoke on an age.
Jordan Belfort, encouraged by his wife, steps out into the boonies, a useless
“Yukon” ramshackle before it had announced to the world that in furrowing
away from the world it had furrowed itself up against the next huge mother
load. There are types there poking at prospects as if the best takeaway might
fill a contented, pathetic half bailfull – there aren't any veins deeper than
arm's length, ostensibly. Belfort estimates this may have little to do with
what possible riches lie out there and more to do with the selfconception of
those doing the mining: they're small, deflated people – nosepickers and
previously bullied – whom nobody has ever tried to inflate, and who should
– proportionately – only find ongoing small troughs of treasure. Come at this
territory in a big and presuming way, and who knows? Something massive
might be expanded down into his and perhaps eventually, each and every
one of these toadinvestor's scooping throat sacks.
So even though Belfort's attention will soon move on to Wall Street again,
the next large part of the film feels like it's the 90s and 2000s, where
somehow people with, ostensibly, no money, became the source of the next
long crazy boom. That small pennystock shack that Belfort convinces a sap
to invest several thousand dollars in … all that happened here was a reveal
that these "garbage men," these middle class men, were no longer the 50s
types who found contentment in something substantial yet still evidently
middling, but people who only sought out the wholehog: the brazen and
disproportionate, the obscene – the eightbedroom home with two eighty
inch TVs and a hemi twoton in the garage, if it could all be gotten, when in
fact their jobsurety was slackening. What was so great about what had been
discovered was that their appetites were as misshapen as those of the Wall
Street wolves’; your delivery needed to be confident, but it could be sloppy,
have "holes" in it, because of the gigantic need of these people to deflect
away from anything attenuated in its promise. Belfort might make fun of
them behind their backs, but somehow this isn't humiliating the victims so
much as showing how these nowunleashed appetites can hardly be
overwritten. If you piss into an oilgeyser you’ve proudly unleashed,
attention is drawn, after all, to the power of something quite beyond easy
ruin.
If you were to be decent with these people rather than readily exploit them,
be the salesman from "Ruthless People," who regardless of how he starts
his spiel ultimately attempts to caution away the youth with the pregnant
wife from buying the stereo "that's as big as a Subaru and costs as much,"
you'd be blithely ignored, diluted out of field of vision, instantly a ghost
scratching desperately at airspace and hopelessly thinning out into ever
thinning vapors, while a pompous salesman intrudes past you to offer the
dance the volcanicappetite customer expects. And so while the phenomenon
is the same – massive bags of money are forked over – these small people
losing on penny stocks were just as likely to have spent it all on “Subaru
sized TVs,” if happenstance had drawn down upon them a different cold
caller. And rather than thereby ruined – they’d in these instances keep and
enjoy stuff that temporarily absolved them considering they might not be
one of society's winners.
So once again, there are no victims, because as if collectively everyone
agrees that this must be the last absurd story that an inflated age will tell
before a Depression's big mitts masticates everything that went on before it
into a humbled matt of pleat it would lay its own wretched story over, these
people with no money somehow in a way I still don't quite understand, get it,
get the money, in apparent abundance – enough for some to even buy
McMansions, and as well most of them near every single electronic trick the
economy unleashed. I know it’s about working triple hours as well; but a
huge lot of it was being benighted by “otherworldly” powers quite beyond
them but who saw in them ideal and necessary transduction for their own
ongoing story – God, Jesus, Holy aerial spirits – Wall Street – divesting
themselves of the exceptional to succor temporarily in the multitudes. So
triple mortgages, grouped together into mutual funds, into every wealthy
American’s portfolio, increasing in value each way up until collectively
people shifted mindsets and the whole thing seemed insane – a nation of
wealth built out of “Tulip flowers,” or rather – turd. Once again, a
development that didn’t occur for a full decade and a half.
We’re back to surety again; and though for being a perfect embodiment of
the age he no longer needs one, a wiser version of his stillperspicacious
previous mentor – a “Gandalf” Matthew McConaughey – would tell Belfort
that “he’s lucky to be one of those feeling this couldn’t possibly be a better
time to be alive. A time where it’s almost impossible to rightfully feel guilt,
for everyone’s now clamoring for what their own personal equivalent of
being in a perpetual chemical high is. And so if you think something’s
wrong with what’s going on you’re not so much going to make your small
helpful indent anyway, but rather be ignored, for decades – maybe the rest of
your life. For who’s to say the next age – the Depression one, where no
outbreak of the manic will be allowed to inflate society beyond what had
been accounted for – might dislike your egoism even more than “late
growth” resented your ability to get on outside of a drug high. Don’t worry
about the prostitutes you’re screwing, or even the recruits you make office
whores – every gloop sucked down from the men of their time makes them
belong that much more to it. They’re actually growing in stature, not being
befelled. Watch, the girl giving the blowjob to every man in the room will
end up claiming one of your ringleaders in marriage. It’ll happen. Feel
lucky; live guiltfree; and only tamper down the masturbation so you’ve
more for the whores!”
Then in the film, suddenly, it’s as if post2008, post the real estate crash,
post when there now was no recompense for people with poor jobs and little
money but to wait at least another half decade for unions to tease into
relevance again, post when everyone in a company and everyone who
supplied it could rightfully be thought of as sharing in the same crazyhigh
times, had stepped in, and there are victims. Post this crash, which took us
into our current Depression, people don’t cling to the boss to claim his
potency – they’re not the eager recruits crashing down on Oakmont after the
“Forbes” article, who if they’re lucky, and in, will garner a decade of
debauch from him before they have to wakeup – but rather like Mae from
Dave Eggers’ “the Circle,” who as Margaret Atwood says, has “recently
been an Everygirl stuck in her own version of purgatory, the humiliating
McJob in the gas and energy utility of her small hometown in California that
she took out of the need to pay off her crushing college debts. Now she’s
called back from the living dead.” These are people who draw close for
reassurance that they do belong, that they won’t find themselves back where
they came from. They’re trying to nail their feet more securely to the floor
so they can’t be removed, which actually taints them as an alien element
maybetobedetected by those who feel the bond more assumingly.
There are two instances where individuals within the company get singled
out. One of them probably gets categorized in the mind as just comic – a
bowtied dandy cleaning a fish bowl is handed a torrent of abuse by
Belfort’s number one, Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff. It’s comic, for the scene’s
“Where’s Waldo” element – since here’s about the only bowtie amidst the
rest of the company’s power90s regulars – and of course for Azoff
descending down on him like some deathharkening vulture. But it counts
nevertheless as someone within the company getting crushed for something
ostensibly obvious and horrifying but objectively innocuous and
inconsequent. An instance that could freeze and terrify anyone in the
company who saw themselves in him.
The other instance brings us very close to the situation in most companies
today, where people trying to join the debauch can’t help but be exposed by
the trepidation their outside lives continue to imbibe in them. An office girl
agrees to have her hair shaved off in front of everyone for ten thousand
dollars. This event is to cap off a staff celebration; and as with all these that
end with attention to women, it’s about women divesting themselves.
However, while strippers being introduced are of the party – nothing that’ll
go on will be much of a surprise, nor especially a grievance to them – she
strikes you more as someone who’s innocent to how much denigration will
drive everyone on. As Stephanie Zacharek says, “she submits cheerfully to
the electric shaver, but we feel humiliated for her as locks of her lustrous
hair fall to the floor. She's playing the boys' game, tossing her own currency
into the pot, but it's all just a big guffaw for them.” Indeed, though the guys
afterwards focus on a range of things, if their focus was allowed to rest
longer on her they might have tossed dollar bills over her – another lending
of feedback for her to eventually wrap into her awareness, that though she
hoped to further belong, the moment had left her less the game employee
and more someone who’d let herself be sacrificed for a momentary egging
on of the hoard.
At this point in the film every time I watched Belfort and his friends
entertaining themselves, or being good friends to one another, I did enjoy
vicariously experiencing their adventures and how they showed how their
time together has lent to genuine, supporting friendships between them – but
I brought along throughout the ghosts of those not so lucky. Most notably,
when Belfort decides he won’t forsake his company and in a frenzy re
pledges his allegiance to the people he loves – most particularly the senior
female recruit who’s been there since the beginning – I wasn’t just shedding
a tear for his sincere and loving tribute. I did note his love, and I appreciated
him for it – and as well her own heartfelt repledging herself to him. But
here really are the management types you see in every company nowadays
who fete one another constantly, who can do really kind things for one
another, be generous to each other, and then switch into killers when they
interact with everyone else. They become those who wonder why you’re not
sufficiently enthused about and championing the firm, oblivious to how
concertedly the firm has shaped conditions so that genuine enthusiasm
would mark you as the kind of readytotossout human garbage who smiles
more after you kick it.
So I certainly wasn’t quite where the reviewer Richard Brody was at, who in
his review of the film remarked that in this departure speech “[he] bet that
some viewers won’t be able to resist some embarrassing tears,” and just left
it at that. I shed some, which I thought was quite remarkable of me, because
I was aware they were effectively for the pigs of “Animal Farm.” And was
prepared to battle those like Brody surely preposterously upbraiding those
with qualms about reveling in their adventures.
12 Years a Slave (Review Part One)
I've only seen one film this year that kinda gets at how someone could
become a person as sadistic as Fassbender's slaveowner is in this film.
Insidious 2 got how a little, vulnerable boy, completely owned by an
absolutely terrifying mother, was going to have no chance building an
independent self apart from her. His life was on the line, and you can
imagine how a six or eight or however old a boy he was, would have a brain
formed largely on ensuring he does nothing outside of what she wants. The
point of life ... is to not be devoured. And the great homo sapiens brain of his
would be using all its evolutionary excellence to contrive means to ensure he
manages thiseven if this means making him into someone who would be to
any sane outsider, deviant, insane ... strangely illpurposed to what life
would confront him with. The rest of the world does not realize that this one
brain alone negotiated avoiding oblivion! What of if it if it's illpurposed to
manage anything else in life, which after all might be about self
development and adventure, such strange, completely uncountenanceable
things, that are firmly known to be, for that matter, completely disavowed
for him by mother, when life has clearly showed itself in its definitive first
allimportant years of being experienced as only about avoiding being
killed? It was vital but young Ender in an adult mission against a planet of
bugs, and in a fever of genius, it won! it won! it won! The full compass of
the universe was revealed, and in one hell of a pitched, ongoing battle, a
definitive victory was for all time achieved! What the brain does, though,
isn't quite what is shown in this film. It doesn't figure out primarily how best
to obey herhere by dressing up as a girl and disavowing himself as a boy so
to not remind his mother of her former husbandbut rather to be part of her,
to be her. As her, he'd never need worry about being devoured by her or, just
as importantly, losing her approval and feeling abandoned. In real life, the
young boy would have dressed up as a girl on his own initiativea
replica, specifically of his mother, that is; not just any odd femalerather
than terrorized into it. And his later development into a "Psycho" adult who
dresses evidently as his mother would have synced up. In real life, too, he'd
proceed further and be hunting down innocent people, taking huge delight in
sawing them upwhat fun! cackle! cackle! cackle!because he'd be his
mother, whom his brain would only have let know as fully right to be so
devoted to terrorizing his innocent, vulnerable childself, for fear letting him
be even in the smallest sense aware of her true perversion would have lead
to his being spotted out. If despite knowing how she doesn't want you to see
her limitations, her thorough deviance (and trust me, she doesn't), you
actually were allowed by your brain to be cognizant of her game, you'd also
know she'd deem the "you" you've revealed to yourself as permanently
unworthy of and removed from any further lovean impossible actuality to
accept. You've got, that is, to be consciously only allowed to know her as a
saint; someone you'd defend against insults to the death ... that much more
so if all she does between stuffing herself with amusements is blender babies
into milkshakes. Each time he found a young victim, he'd be more fully
fused into his mother, and the vulnerable child self that is intolerable to be
reminded of, that much more outside. Constant fusion into a sadistic alter,
constant victimizing of people representing his "guilty" childself, would be
his life ... just as it is for the perenially sadistic Fassbender.
Fassbender's slaveowner had a mother who did to him what he does to his
slaves? Yes, this is absolutely right. Every slaveholder had one such mother,
which is why, exactly, slavery became institutionalized. The slaver shown in
the film who makes the slave stand for hours in a painful position while he
laxydazies ... yep, this is something that slaveholder was afflicted with in
his own childhood (I knew something of this myself, with my mom lying on
her bed, reading fantasy books, eating cookies into a belly contented that it
could hold down four or five bagfuls, and luxuriating, while I stood
uncomfortably attending to her like a eunech at attention before a Sultan
queen). Fassbender making even his prize slave, the one unbelievably gifted
at speedgathering cotton, exist in so much filth she wretches at her own
smell ... yep, this is what Fassbender himself endured by his mother during
his own childhood. Collectively, all the slaveholders making their slaves into
stinking, shitstained, confined wretches, recalls for me what the Germans
did to Jews, Gypsies, and "unsocials," when they reinflicted their own
horrible childhood experiences onto them in the 30s and 40s. To wit: upon a
German's "birth, 'the wretched newborn little thing was wound up in ells of
bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended
to be embalmed as a mummy … babies are loathsome, foetid things,
offensive to the last degree with their excreta …' Babies simply could not
move for their first year of life. A visitor from England described the
German baby as 'a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy
in yards of bandages … it is never bathed … Its head is never touched with
soap and water until it is eight or ten months old.' Their feces and urine was
so regularly left on their bodies that they were covered with lice and other
vermin attracted to their excreta, and since the swaddling bandages were
very tight and covered their arms as well as their bodies, they could not
prevent the vermin from drinking their blood. Their parents considered them
so disgusting they called them 'filthy licecovered babies,' and often put
them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the wall or on a tree while the
mothers did other tasks" (DeMause, "Childhood Origins of World War 2 and
the Holocaust").
The whipping and lashes too, Fassbender and the rest of his slaveholder ilk
would have suffered? Once againyup. Very muchyup. Germans did this
to Jews as well, as it had been done to them by their parents: "It was brutal
beating, beginning in infancy, that visitors to Germany most commented
upon at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the mother far more
often the main beater than the father. Luther’s statement that 'I would rather
have a dead son than a disobedient one' is misleading, since it implies
disobedience only was the occasion for beatings, whereas mere crying or
even just needing something usually resulted in being punished. ' Dr.
Schreber said the earlier one begins beatings the better … One must look at
the moods of the little ones which are announced by screaming without
reason and crying [inflicting] bodily admonishments consistently repeated
until the child calms down or falls asleep … one is master of the
child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture, is
sufficient to rule the child.' Havernick found 89 percent of parents admitted
beating little children at the beginning of the twentieth century, over half
with canes, whips, or sticks. The motto of German parents for centuries was
'Children can never get enough beatings.' They were not just spankings; they
were beatings with instruments or whippings like Hitler’s daily whippings
with a dog whip, which often put him into a coma. (As Fuehrer, Hitler used
to carry a dog whip with him as he gave orders to be carried out.) It is not
surprising that German childhood suicides were three to five times higher
than other Western European nations at the end of the nineteenth century,
fears of beatings by parents being the reason cited by children for their
suicides. No one spoke up for the children; newspapers wrote: 'boy who
commits suicide because of a box on the ears has earned his fate.' The
beatings continued at school, where 'we were beaten until our skin
smoked.' Children could be heard screaming on the streets each morning as
they were being dragged to school by their mothers. The schoolmaster who
boasted he had given '911,527 strokes with the stick and 124,000 lashes with
the whip' to students was not that unusual for the time. Comparisons of
German and French childhoods in the late nineteenth century found 'no
bright moment, no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home [with] mother
love and care' in the German ones, with 'sexual molestation and beatings at
home and at school consistently worse in the German accounts.' Ende’s
massive study of German autobiographies of the time found 'infant
mortality, corporal punishment, and cruelties against children' were so brutal
he had to apologize 'for not dealing with the 'brighter side' of German
childhood because it turns out that there is no 'bright side.' Other studies
found most Germans remembered 'no tender word, no caresses, only fear'
with childhood 'so joyless, so immeasurably sad that you could not fathom
it.' When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that 'the German people today lies
broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world' both he and his
reading audience read this not as political metaphor but as the real kicks of
their parents and teachers and real memories of lying broken and
defenseless. The tortures of childhood were far more traumatic and constant
than the later studies of 'authoritarianism' ever imagined. There was a good
reason that Germans and Austrians spoke so often about
their Kinderfeindlichkeit (rage toward children), and it is this rage that is
embedded in the early violent amygdalan alters which is inflicted upon
others in World War II and the Holocaust. The childhitting hand was even
the symbol of Nazi obedience, since the Nazi salute endlessly displayed the
open palm of their beating parents as they fused with them, flush with
opioids. 'Ghosts from the nursery' embedded by extremely insecurely
attached children were displayed everywhere in Nazi Germany. To imagine
tens of millions of people 'just obeying Hitler' as though there were no inner
compulsion to inflict their nightmarish earlier childhood tortures on others is
simply absurd (DeMause, "Childhood Origins").
12 Years a Slave does worse than Carrie did to nudge us closer to
understanding how someone could become a thorough sadist, but, like that
film, it does at least show some truth: here, that slavers are less respectful
and loving peoplenot, that is, just people under some spell of a collusion of
adult preaching inflicted on them when they were young; victims of
ideology, that is. Fassbender and his wife are colossal assholes, full of hate,
full of desiring other peopletheir slavesto be subjugated for the wretched
crimes they committed. Benedict Cumberland, the nicest of all possible
slavers, knows at very near, at very, very, very near a conscious level, that
the clearly educated slave he's purchased had to have once been free, to be
someone he himself would recognize as free if he met him while touring the
north, but won't let him go. The capacity of this man to love, which is some,
pales in comparison to the attorney who arrives to free Northup, or more
notably, Brad Pitt, who movingly risks his own life to do so. But still, the
link to parenting isn't there, and we might just as well assume that the
institution itself poisoned them, stunted them, than ever consider that each
one of them might have had a mother as terrifying as Fassbender's wife. If
the film had done that, shown that mother force her children to know filth
and whippings and abandonment for being deemed willfully disobedient
brats that needed to be brokeneven if as expected they were still groomed
into betterswhat a wonderful and useful connection would have been
made: that is how a child could grow into an adult who would find such
righteousness in getting disobedient underlings into line, not at all blanching
when whip stroke after whip stroke actually spooned chunks of flesh out of
people, and more likely being aroused by it (as the Germans were, as they
masturbated during their own floggings of Jews). The approval from mom
that every small child needs, could only ever be found in wholeheartedly
joining her cause.
But I'm going at this film as if we might be interested in using it as an
opportunity to test, refine, revise, orrather bettercompletely reunderstand
how an institution like slavery could come into existenceletting the idiotic
economic rationale dissolve for good. But this would mark progress, growth,
and so this isn't something we're apt to be doing. Rather, we're using this
film as a reward to show that we've refit our society that so innocuously we
can watch a film about a strictly twotiered societymaster, and slave
something ostensibly 150 years and a civil war behind us, and be surprised
by how much we involved ourselves in the position of the slave. We
increasingly see our own society as twotiered, with avenues of plausible
climbing closed offthe one percent vs. the ninetynine. And this isn't
because reality has forced us off our preferred conception of living in
something multitiered, involving the essential middle class. Instead, we
knew a long while ago that we wanted something stratified, with the upper
echelon a class apart, and set things in motion so that even when massive
bankloan leveraging was keeping us housed and up with every electronic
trick, our outer reality would soon rather better reflect the "Kantian" schema
we were game to force onto it. We're in a period of penance, where because
previous collective growth was making us feel terrifyingly abandoned, as it
recalled how in our youth our own emerging selfattendance eventually drew
anger from our immature mothers for it meaning a permanent turn away
from having up to that point mostly focused our existence around her, we
feel compelled to shut it down so to know her back with us. We kill the
growth we've accrued; we kill the potential to grow; and familiarize
ourselves with "stuckness"; and life more and more becomes us as children
not yet old enough to leave the hearththe fragile ninetynine percentin the
perpetual company of entitled parentsthe obstinately set, one. She's there,
our mom's there; and even if she's aloof and removed, she's not mad, not
angry: even if we're not all acting like good children, we do the essential part
and communicate that owned children "is" who we are, and that we won't be
doing any shifting of structure for a good long while (like the last
Depression, about twelve years?). Her enemiesemissaries of real growth
will, unless they're mostly going to be incorporated into making our
"parents" lives easier or more luxuriant, become our own, as we either chase
any one with any notable new ideas out of public view or somehow make it
possible that even if they were a glorious new dawn visited upon us ... we're
just not seeing it, sorry. So we have a culture where James Wolcott
appropriately writes: "Although we live in a culture of uncircumcised snark,
it actually seems a more deferential time to me, the pieties and approved
brand namesCindy Sherman, Lena Dunham, Quentin Tarantino, Junot
Diaz, Mark Morris, Judd Apatow, John Currin (feel free to throw other
names into the pot)more securely clamped down over our ears." Where
"today's social media making even the meanest rattlesnakes mend their ways
in the hope of being liked, friended, and followed in numbers sufficient
enough not to be mortifying." If you're "in," you stay in. If you're out, you
should know the part you're assignedand it's to be as if marked by
something intangible and intransigent that you're always a step down. You
can be like Northrup and play your fiddle like a genius, or instruct on how to
engineer a way through a stuck problem that'd only fail to impress the
most trenchantly set against you, but not if it's to prove the point that as
much as anyone, you don't really belong where you're stationed. "Parents,"
the one percent, are playing a role as well, something collectively assigned
to them, only they just don't know it. I think it is this unconscious knowing
that they've masochistically, unselfishly, surrendered themselves to playing a
partwhich remains, even if hard to see, still very much a demeaning
surrender of human potentialthat is buoying some of the pleasure they're
taking in living these days ... opiates flowing from felt parental approval. I
admit I'm mostly thinking of those like the ones Walcott mentions here,
those of the liberal literate elite, who are evidently not perturbed that they all
share the same habits and assumptions to the degree that the dullest gentry
clot did in centuries past. They're not about moving us ahead, but about
stationmanners have become the point itself, something which really is just
a lubricant when gentry's on one of its roles and Byronesque genius gets to
come out of them as much as from any ambitious Shakespeare merchant'
son. You listen to their discourse, and you know they're no trolls. The
Gandalf who rows up the pleasantoffered cheerful "good morning!" with
contestation and complication ... in today's climate, he's but another of the
trolls who's descended down from the mountains. He'd quickly learn to stifle
it, and next time by master Baggins' he'd be, "yes, yes, it is a good morning!
Indeed so! Sorry to disturb you, and thanks again for your kind
remembrances about my fireworks .. though remember if you can to like my
"Good Old Grandpa Gandalf" fireworks Facebook page; every bit helps, you
know!" and he'd shuffle off as quick as a fox, as tamed as the pathetic car
buffing Biff, to chance disturbing the morning no further. Society would be
one further up on propriety, and shorn one possible mega disturbance; and
even if they were made aware that in subscribing him into the role of a door
todoor salesman it cost them one potentially worldsaving wizard, it'd still
be felt as completely worth it.
Paul Krugman recently recounted the damages that have been afflicted by
our current austeritymaintained Depression: "These dry numbers [he,
writes,] translate into millions of human tragedieshomes lost, careers
destroyed, young people who can't get their lives started. And many people
have pleaded all along for policies that put job creation front and center.
Their pleas have, however, been drowned out by the voices of conventional
prudence. We can't spend more money on jobs, say these voices, because
that would mean more debt. We can't even hire unemployed workers and put
idle savings to work building roads, tunnels, schools. Never mind the short
run, we have to think about the future! The bitter irony, then, is that it turns
out that by failing to address unemployment, we have, in fact, been
sacrificing the future" (NYT, Nov. 7 2013). We're inflicting a lot of damages
to ourselves, a lot of anxiety. This is important, because when you take into
consideration how even when jobs were leaving us and our incomes were
wilting away, banks were still enabling us all the stuff we wanted for a
further twenty years, it undoes all the accruing we had been doing pretty
much without pause since World War 2. Further, it's adding "revenue" of
despair into a pot that will eventually fill so that we sense that enough joy
has now finally been sacrificed to our mothersshe's mollified, and
satiatedthat we kinda now feel safe to begin to tip toe away from her and
embark outside on real, undetermined adventure, while she goes on a
severaldecadelong snooze. But it's a mistake to say these figures delineate
only misery. When we know we've succeeded in making deep sacrifices
happen, Mother is with us, not going to leave us, and we know a kind of
contentmentone that even liberates, and enables some fun ... if we go about
things properly. The recent Thor movie tries a wee bit to explain why the
Norse aristocracyan empowered King and Queenis just, but it barely
bothers. We feel watching this movie that those creating it and those
watching it will just accept the aristocracy as normal, not because we're
dealing with old gods but because it's how we're attending to our own
society as well (note the recent hopeless Salon effort reminding people not
to focus so much on the "Queen" battle of Hillary vs. Elizabeth Warren as
it's the "little people" congressional battles that'll matter most), and would
have as the new normal, rather than anything queerly demos. And there's no
wishing in the movie from the "little people" for any mollification. The
intern Ian who is throughout the movie referred to as "intern" rather than by
name, objects, but mostly shows that ... whatever, it's out of his power. For
his shrugging, for his acceptance and mostly noncomplaint, for his
willingness to let himself be used and mildly abused and for showing that if
he spent the rest of his life as he just might in a role perennially servile to an
actual scientist with multiple degrees, that, well, that's just what life's
allotted him, the movie grants him a boon: at the finish he gets to do
something heroic and strong, and thereafter receives admiration and a kiss
from the senior interneven if it means once more being the passive. Ian's
the Northrop in 12 Years, who for doing remarkable things ... who for
showing that even doing something really accomplished need not press on
being a class challenge, he gets rewarded. Just like in the Great Depression,
we're going to see a lot of people in servile roles in movies, and take note
that when you hear them complain, about "what a lady has got to do to get a
buck or a bit of respect in this here depression," or whatever, what you'll be
hearing is less tearing down the walls and more their being resigned to them.
It needn't be done so loud that you're cognizant that the cages somehow
seem surer after "your" complaint; just loud enough that it registers with
your masters.
As a side note, if you're incapable of actually drilling yourself to want to live
in a dreaminhibiting age, if you're one of those genuinely good liberals,
birthed of truly loving parents, who believed that Occupy's facilitation of
society's understanding of itself as of master and servants was something
other than our conceding that we've roomed our house as we would like it,
and instead as a sure prelude to insurrection and thereafter an equal society,
these could be real tough times for you in particular. I'm thinking
specifically now of Robert Frost's sister, a liberal, whom his brother had
committed into an insane asylum during WW2. Morris Dickstein writes that
"with a history of violent outbursts, Frost's sister had grown increasingly
hysterical about the war, yet Frost [...] paints her as the paradigm of a liberal
gone berserk, a bleeding heart who really bled. 'I really think she thought in
her heart that nothing would do justice to the war but going insane over it.'
He, on the other hand, was fatalistic and selfprotective, the kind of
conservative for whom there's very little anyone can do to alter the basic
conditions of life, which include going crazy and dying. For his sister, he
says, 'one half the world seemed unendurably bad and the other half
unendurably indifferent. She included me in the unendurably indifferent. A
mistake. I belong to the unendurably bad.' 'It was designed to be a sad
world,' he later wrote to Untermeyer" ("Dancing in the Dark").
Ender's Game
One of things that is supposed to be notable about Ender, is that he
encourages other kids to think for themselves and chip in. He is even
reminded of this just before his biggest battle against the bug aliens. So what
does he in fact do? He leaves all his other commanders' forces to be
sacrificed, and therefore left with nothing to individually command. How
nice it would have been to see the focus pulled off him, as he ostensibly
wishes, and actually witness some of the other commanders make decisions.
But we don't get that, and instead the sense that all we need is one great
leader, and everyone else might as well being prompt, orderapplying
drones. A good pilot or good gunner might get some special accoladesnice
flying/gunning, ace! especially you, cutie!but not for any property of
leadership. Maybe one of the reasons he has so many sympathy for the
Queen alien, is that he's effectively looking in the mirror. The two boss
commanders, vastly superior to everyone else, in discussion, in
camaraderie, after battle: "I alone know how you feel."
He's upset over his genocide, but how about making his own species shrug
its shoulders and leaving Earth's purpose mostly all to him? We could try,
but he'd do it ten times better anyway, so what's the point. I'll let an actual
drone do my part, and be in the bar remembering the days when human
volition had a demonstrable point. You all can go about still worshipping
him if you like.
In actual truth, though, heor his representatives in historyis not really
special at all, atypical. But rather instead brilliantly representative of the
current appetites of the people. Hitler was in in Germany, only because he
wanted it as bad as Germans did. He directed the German "finger," this way
or that. But the choice wasn't his whether or not to pull out the gun. If he
was distinctive, they'd actually look past him, picking even an imbecile over
him, to imagine as superhumanwhich is what they had done for him, after
allif he's as thirsty for punishment, murder, and massive wasteful human
sacrifice as selfpunishment for the terrible sin of having enjoyed life too
much, as they were. The best leaders, the ones remembered as singular, as
genius, always end up being the bloodiest ones ... the point is, they delivered
the gross blood bath we wanted, and for as much we're willing to dress them
up, however preposterously, as if they were fundamentally neatfreak
creatures of tactics and calibration.
Gravity
I almost don’t want a movie to provide a simulacrum of what it might be
like to be out in space right now. Engineers, and other employees whose
brains are 90% scientific data, still after fifty years of space inhabitation,
holding court over who gets to tell us what it’s like to see your home planet
from the outsidehow we might prefer to be in the situation where only
Apollo and his lute was able to express the same. We think New Mexico,
and we don’t only think of cowboy yokels bearing daily witness to desert
beauty, but artists, poets, hippies, doing so. Space, however, is kept rigidly
by those who see nothing amiss in their space stationthe ostensible center
for a community in spacebeing as cold and humanindifferent as any
structure nearly forgetting it was built not just to withstand, but to house.
When Sandra Bullock’s character peeps into her shuttle, the objects that
float out aren’t items of décor, of domicile, but a Space Jam characterthe
difference in innerlife between any of them and your typical cubicle geek, is
slight. I could handle it if this was critiquethey made the main protagonist
a likely NPR listener, after allbut it’s apparent the filmmaker kind of liked
that the heritage of space still isn’t something we could imagine anyone
knitting an afghan cover for. Throw a nervous Betty in midst of it, and it'll
be a perpetual struggle for her to keep herself togetherone doohickey into a
slot, is about what she could manageand that with relief. Which would
contain her.
Part of me followed, immersed myself in Bullock’s character, with gratitude
all the way appreciating her being at the forefront of heartpalpitating
situations we can relate to. Part of me just balked at the whole thing, fixed
on some corner of the screen, and kept my own composure whatever was
happening. It's an hour and a half of strugglesomething perhaps only
soldiers and Formula One drivers and James Cameron, never cease to want
to reexperience. The rest of us remain wary that if we too often brace
ourselves against assaults, we'll get to the point where we never quite relax
all the way out again. At the end she tasted the relief of being in a medium
the seawhere she had more control, those toned muscles, useless in space,
getting to visibly, kinetically show they were worth all the hard work. I felt
like telling her she should insist this be the worst inhibition she should ever
let herself knowif space for us must still be first fish crawled onto land, we
should let it go until the worst sublimation it can inflict still leaves us
knowing the evolved flex of our substantial monkeydom.
Carrie
There's a moment in Carrie when Carrie becomes remote from us, not
owing to the carnage she wrecks, but to her being possessed of a self
assuredness there's no way we'd be able to match. Her mother, attempting to
prevent her from seeking a life for herself which might allow some pleasure,
bangs her own head repeatedly against a wall, with sufficient force it might
lead to breaking herself open. Carrie watches it, but insists on her own life
anyway, letting her mom break herself into brain pulp, if such is her wont.
This was what she was going to need to do to individuate, push on despite
being guaranteed that if her mom could no longer physically desist her by
scaring her to holy hell with knives or carting her off into isolation closets,
she'd probably slit her own wrists before her, to show her the wreckage her
"selfish" pursuits were inflicting physically, emotionally, psychically on her.
She's basically Rose in Titanic, who ultimately told her own mother to shove
the hell off, even though this was going to bottom her motherhigh in
lineage, but nada in richesout, but somehow with a much, much, much
more daunting mother, and without someoneapologies to the good gym
teachernear Angelsent to temper her the strength to do it. Intent on going
to the prom, she telekinesises her mother into a closet, fuses any possible
exit, and embraces a new world. The world is setup to turn on her, as it
turns out, and when she turns on it, it's less out of shock and rattled umbrage
and more as if out of now familiar, superb, quite controlled and even
pleasurable rebuttal (great! I get to use these powers againand in an even
larger venue!). The confidence in which she directs and motions her carnage,
the presumption, without hesitation configuring how aptly to direct the
environment to butcher the particular wretched kid she's caught sight on, is
more or less the same we saw in her disabling her maniac mom when she'd
become immune to her. We take stock of her at the end, and with her poise,
apt calculation, and tremendous power, with her not seeming to have done in
anyone who didn't deserve itit's mostly the real nasties, like the corrosive
blackhaired twinish girls, who are squashed down into trampleddown floor
rugs like the deflated evil witches in Wizard of Oz, who are done in, but
everyone in the crowd was laughing at her covered in pig's blood while
video played of her terrible shower humiliation... so what loss, really, any of
them?I basically ignored the finish and imagined her carted off by
Professor Xavier. She'd beat down her mom and home, beat down her school
and smallminded, hipsterabsent town (hipsters would have admired her
aesthetic and askew beauty), and now was really just ready for bigger game.
Not, that is, to be herself quit by death, and folded into a lesson for smaller
people.
I'll admit, though, that I actually did identify with her some. When I was
about to leave my mother and embrace the wider world, I would find her
lying as if dead, in midst of some house pathway I would have to cross.
Since she knew I knew she was performing, and that this would be amongst
a number of innumerouses I would have to ignore just to go about my own
day, she knew I would have to step over heras if she, a bum on the street,
and I, the callousand that by doing so, no matter my awareness of what she
was doing, there was still a gambleworthy chance I would still feel doomed
by some rightful, meoverlording judge as having done the unpardonable:
"Your mother was lying on the ground, possibly sprawled in death, and you
just walked over her ... you did this, to your mother!!! I don't care what kind
of hinderances she presented you with, you crossed the line, and are the
saddest, most selfish, most demonic cad ever born to earth! Your fate is to
be cursed with guilt after every fun thing you do, neverendingand this
only to start!"
There's another way I know I could have identified with her, harnessed her
power of selfrighteousness, but chose not to. When Carrie explains why her
mother is wrong to hem her in, she doesn't just do this by explaining the
innocuousness of such normal life events like the prom, the rightness every
human being has to participate in and try and enjoy them, but effectively by
chastising her mother as being selfcentered and selfish. Referring, that is, to
her own powers of telekinesis, she explains that this power is actually fully
normal to their shared motherdaughter lineage, only that it skips every other
generation. She makes her mother's preference that her daughter understand
it only as Satan's "gift," a betrayal of the whole story of their heritage, a
wilful ignorance of bloodline and history, that selfishly makes her own self
more normalor rather, better, less sinriddenthan her daughter. She makes
her seem a selfish rebellion against her own telekinesisempowered
mother! The way we can do the same with our own parents, is by finding a
way to make our generation seem more akin to our parents' parents, with
their own selves the historical aberration. This is okayeasy for gen xers to
do, but easypeasy for millennials, for, like them, baby boomers' parents
were defined by their living the great span of their youth in hope and dream
inhibiting Depression times. The baby boomer parent points a finger at their
millennial kid, calling them spoiled and selfish, and the crafty millennial,
perhaps looking at their own lifestyle of "Kinfolk"read overtly ancestral,
paradingly masochistic, grandfatherly and sparseways, sees the absurdity
of someone built out of decades of prosperous postwar years chastising
someone who like the 1930s sufferers, doesn't even feel guaranteed any kind
of job. To them, a house and a car, isn't bottomlevel middle classwhat
everyone who doesn't live on the street could possessbut a sign that you've
gotten lucky and hit upon a career path vixen, unaccountable Future
gloriously spared by shining some favor on. To be called spoiled,
increasingly invites a collective glare back ... a judgment, against the
abominable absurdity of the revealed exploiter still insisting morality has
anything at all to do with them. Depression Nazi Youth, against their own
Weimerspoiled, dessertfattened, bourgeois parents, that is.
If we adopt this strategy in categorizing away our own parents, it would
amount to the same sin the same afflicted upon this movie. Carrie makes the
link between Carrie and her grandmother in order to isolate her mother, and
this comes at the cost of appreciating that this grandmothersurely having
come at her own daughter as menacingly as Carrie's mother did with Carrie
is equally as dismissalworthy. Further, it comes at the cost of understanding
why exactly her mom was as crazy as she was (do we really buy,
considering what the film shows of maternal power, that it owed to
religion?), why she was confined for life to appreciate pleasures as the worst
possible thing in the world, the great villain in the world, that everyone
attempting to be selfless and holy will crusade against. Very likely, it comes
at the cost of appreciating that her mother, in actually desisting against the
voice in her telling her to kill her newborn child, and choosing instead to
keep and hold and temporarily tend to her, may have been doing something
heroic, in relation to her lineage's history. Some part of her daughter, she
was able to believe, deserved to be lovedsomething she herself may have
had even less experience of.
I'll end this review by mentioning how much I appreciated the popular high
school couple in this movie. It was moving for me to see the girl, especially,
trying to figure out how to make amends to Carrie, not just to expunge guilt,
but because she wanted her mended and happy. It was a miracle to see her
boyfriend manage his prom date with Carrie, without either making her feel
she was being setup or not truly of interest to him. He wanted to convey
how he felt, that she was interesting, and that he was pleased to be her date,
could very readily have a good time with her, and did very well with this. He
moved her to allow herself a little bit more time with him, an hour more at
the afterparty, perhapsthe babysteps forward toward larger happiness she
was still going to need. When the bucket crashes down and kills him, I
almost wanted to stop the movie there. He and his girlfriend have a lot going
for them to make them feel they could manage whatever hit they might take
through so publicly befriending the most despised person in school, but they
weren't guaranteed to float though. It was lovely courage, and terrific love,
and they deserved much better.
Don Jon
It's a considerable task put to Julianne Moore's Esther for her to present as
the preferable alternative to porn as porn and our pornwatcher are presented
here, and I don't think she manages it. Jonthe watcherhas his life
perfectly compartmentalized. There's his time at the dinner table, his time at
the gym, his time at church and the confessional, his time at the bar with his
friends, his time in bed with this week's select girl, and his time afterwards
in pornsummed up nicely each time with a single crumpled up tissue sent
into a black waste binand in none of these activities does he feel a
disadvantage. I mean by this that though he's a millennial and not an owner
of a home, nor of a job that puts him outside of being defined as a loser or as
underclass servilehe's a bartenderhe's not mastered in his family home,
his job place, amongst his friends, nor anywhere else, exempting sex, whose
forhim arduous quality requires a besting amendment. His life seems
perfect, an already commendable, substantial realization for anyone fraught
with being a mastered young man illplaced to make any kind of stake
against the world, until rather than settle for his usual 8or9inhotness babe
he goes after a 10, and he starts loosing leverage over his life. Scarlett
Johansson's Barbara culls Jon to her powerfully, and each step towards her
she uses to adulterate him in a way more amenable to her. Julianne Moore is
too old to be within the echelon of women Jon and his friends would even
rate, and is more like someone sagean Obi Wan ... or a croon, even
needling him insights to loosen and unroot him from an allegiance to a sun
radiant sashaying shrine of a woman he can do little but obey and forbear.
She also gets him to rethink his attachment to porn, by showing him that a
great, nurturant, reciprocal relationship with a womanwith her, in this
casecan give him the high he thought only obtainable through it.
In effect, what she's doing is akin to unrooting someone to their obsession
with, say, texting, to spend more time directly involving himself with
people. Once you know how great a reallife conversation can be, you'll lose
your interest in the shallows of more generic and detached conversations ...
ostensibly. But clearly to millenials there is worse than something detached
and not entirely satisfying, and that is, that whatever is too pronounced and
of too much affect can subjugate your shallow defences and eventually
overwhelm and subjugate you. That phone call that you think communicates
more than the text, that is obviously a better, a richer, form of
communication, is to millenials an affectloaden, commanding mother's
harague that can't be dialed down into something just font and text, on a
device never stripped of its potency as an authoritative cultural object to
diffuse everything communicated into it into a community that has been
messaged the same thing before. So her learning him to be a responsive
partner and to enjoy reciprocation and conversation development, may be a
genuinely helpful learning, until his ability to imagine himself a kind of
device which powers down people's ability to dictate terms to him, lapses,
and he becomes a kid who has lost his varnished advantagehis youthful
alpha perfect form and sexual potencyto a crackening, wise older woman,
who has hardearned won the argument over who should be allowed to break
in every part of innocent, ignorant him. She's a superior Barbara, that is, in
that there's no one out there to lesson him on how he might be better off
without her. Which may be why the film inflicts her with a periodic
tendency to shut down, broken over rememberance of her lost family, so to
become sort of a null object he can actually act over from time to time.
If this film was true life, Jon would forgo her the first moment possible
making his switching off at some moment where she had curled into herself
once again in pain. He'd bookend her experience with her with it lending
him the authority to talk back to Barbara and acknowledge the rightness of
his feeling neglected by her (guys are going to like this moment in the film),
and perhaps with his gaming how he schedules and goes about his life a bit
a bit of social mixing it up with basketball might be better than just the
familiar routine of weightsbut otherwise return to what he had, with maybe
also a bit more sass at the church, and so not just with his dad. He'd forgo
the commanding 10s this time, spot out the lessfieltyowed 8s and 9s, and
every week, catch one. He'd take them to bed, which though it punished him
with missionary sex which hardly flatters the form of his mate, reducing
them to compressed, blockened slabs of somnambulist flesh, though it
means felatio which terminates just when its getting good, or which from the
startwhen he's eating her outis pretty rank and foul, is still something
which might lend life into his followup routine of amended sex through
porn. He's a hunter who can claim more from his followup routine of
administrating, handling, and plying apart his prize stalked prey, than can
the big game hunter readying things with a blooded carcase for a later feast.
In short, a device clearly used to make guys who watch porn not feel like
they're losershe's a guy who's got an active sex life, and with total scores
probably has most of them thinking that though they like the involvement of
the Obi Wan Kenobi female friend, they'd justfine take what Jon has from
the start. And you can understand why apparently some porn companies
cooperated with the film. Here presented is a fully honest account of why
guys go to porn, and apparently it's as innocentdewed as Playboy magazine
in the 1950s. Guys go to it for better tits, better ass, and a feeling of
empowerment and satisfaction they don't always so much feel in sex, which
can turn servile. Not ideal, maybe, but understandable, and hardly character
defininga bit henafflicted man still turning his head at the gorgeous young
blonde strayed into his path ... quintessential manhood. But go to a porn site,
and see if this is what you see. Do you perhaps instead see something a little
bit more disturbing than just chasing down the perfect ass? Or even,
something more salutary than just cold sex, stripped of any genuine
sensuality that might have been more evident in porn during the freelove
1970s? Maybe what you get is a lot that is damning men, making them
beyond recoverablea heightened longing for revenge, not compensation.
Rape fantasies. And maybe also a bit that is genuinely buttressing them,
giving them some company that is actually teaching them a thing or two
about mutuality, but delimited by being entirely under their control.
Prisoners
The movie begins with Hugh Jackman's character, Keller Dover, attending
his son's successful kill of a deer. Just into the film, we're not quite sure what
to prioritize, how much yet to ascribe any particular that strays into our
sight, so we give the fact that the movie shows hunting to be about springing
on an animal whose attention is preoccupied elsewhere, full due. Hunting
means killing, and possibly in the process, terribly wounding an animal
whose flank is to you. When Keller salutes his son for the effort, we're
certainly willing to submerge this fact so it doesn't too much incriminate a
father whose love for his son is real, but it's certainly not completely out of
mind when Keller's best friend's oldest daughter asks his son if he is
comfortable stalking deer. The son replies not with his experience but with
what his father would say in retort: hunting is a way to keep nature in
balance ... and besides, how soon are you about to turn away from innocent
cowproduced burgers? So, when we eventually find out that the person
intent on hunting down children describes her efforts about as coldly, if for
an inverse purposefor her it's about disrupting God's plans, not tending
them: nothing tees people off into madness than the disappearance of
childrenare we in mind to ascribe equivalence, even slightly? No, the
movie isn't that sophisticated. They're not both addled on over onto the same
suspect line, which might include everyone sufficiently besotted they're non
blanched at making insipid imprints on beautiful flesh, including the
numeroustattooed, somewhat sullen and snide detective, Loki (Jake
Gyllenhaal), but rather one doggedly good against one entirely evil. But
likely unconscious to us, we've still in some way aligned them together:
you've got to be able to turn hard on other's suffering if you mean to pursue
larger goals. He ends up torturing a young man for days and days to get
information he just knows he possesses, and it's the most abominable path in
that it leads him to a point where no onenot even you, the moviegoerhas
any sure faith in him anymore. He's all alone in a void where going on looks
to be about either obliterating all awareness that he might actually have
made an awry choice which resulted in his doing something damnable,
useful only in satisfying a desire to feel efficacious and rage against a world
with no choice but to suffer his bruising imprint; or maybe just, still holding
onto his awareness that his victim had given him sure signsthe kinds of
signs an experienced hunter recognizes instinctively in the gives of prey
that to get to the kids their location has to be broken out of him. What could
have doomed him, what was dooming him, instead hefted him off into
herodom ... he was right, and gets to the true child abductorthe auntfirst.
Jail for his actions becomes, what, scratching him with a few negligible
abrasions as he slowly stretches up into a human giant? Yes indeed; only
that.
Taking her down fails, looking to be owing to his not being so good going
after another hunterhe'd become excellent at some point, but remains at
this point nonetheless a newbie at this. He prides himself in once again
getting into her house, seemingly through another successful deceptionhe'd
done a number on the detective previously, and seemingly also before the
aunt, so surely he's already got good game with this skill, right?not
realizing this means getting him off the street and turning his vulnerable
flank to actually pistolarmed her. And for a human being, who, like a deer,
can be taken down by even one shot, this means the end of his efforts. But it
still seems like an instance of first through the wall always gets hurt: with
the followup pursuit by the detective, the aunt relents almost immediately,
as if the game has got now to be up entire, hoping only for one last
successful slay of a child, one last nasty rippling through of the human
community to unsteady God, before becoming rendered a shotthrough
crumpled form requiring burial or cremation.
The movie gives a great deal of give on who it's okay to befor instance, the
priest we first encounter as a drunken mess, had once taken upon himself to
do in someone who had slain numerous children and would have slain more
if he hadn't stepped in, even if this still made him someone who stores a
bound corpse in his basement. But it's not so pleasant to true teddybear
types. The father of the other abducted child, Franklin Birch (Terrence
Howard), is a professional, wears fine sweaters, endeavours to play the
trumpet, makes his basement into a friendly entertainment space, and he,
unlike Keller, can't bear to keep what Keller is up to to himself. So while
Keller, to keep the possibility of retrieving his child's location alive, lets
himself be thought of as someone who deals with a crisis selfishly by
escaping to a retreat and into alcohol, Franklin coughs it up pretty much
immediately to his wife Nancy (Viola Davis). Keller finds this out by
Nancy's banging on his door to accost him, with her husband behind her,
sundered and shamed for betraying his friend's trust and relenting to his wife
to handle things subsequently. The film figuratively castrates him once
again, when his wife actually ends up agreeing with Keller, telling her
husband to adopt Keller's ability to think on their children rather than take
the "easy" way out, and absolve the longtortured, mentallydisabled man
any subsequent abuse.
It's not so easy on tortured, abducted kids, either. It's probably not so
unpleasant to those like the Birch's girl, who succeeds in an escape not too
far long into her capture, but those kept long enough in terrible conditions
that they're going to show signs of crippling owing to it, sure aren't treated
that well. Think Paul Dano's character Alex Jones, a victim of child
abduction, who we are repeatedly told hasn't any sadistic intentions towards
children himself and is possessed of a tenyearold's mental state and
intelligence, and who is beat to near the point of death and then boxed in and
subjected alternatively to blasts of intense heat and intense cold. Think
David Dastmalchian's character Bob Taylor, who we learn too was an
abducted child subjected to terrific abuse, and who too now though a bag of
quirks remains nevertheless essentially harmless, and is beaten to a pulp by
the detective before he does a quick steal of a gun and blows his own head
off. The film does agonies of horror to these two, and then when it gets to
the childafflicter herself, it lets her off with but one easy bullet ... is it too
much to say it was done out of respect? Abused children are urinals you can
piss in yet again, just let it gush and gush all over them, while the abductor is
a justcomeupon statue you're surely baiting the gods by taking down in any
drawn out way.
P.S. People have accused Chris Nolan's Dark Knight series as being
misanthropic, and you'd have to wonder then what adjective they'd need to
invent to adequately damn this film. Dastmalchian was a tormented, insane
man in that film too we remember, and Batman scolded the DA intent on
tormenting information out of him that he was raging on someone mentally
sicka schizophrenicand that he wasn't going to get anywhere with this.
Batman also said the thing that took him out of his despair of finding himself
parentless, alone, and in a hell of selfaccusation that was sure to render him
insane, was a surprise moment of kindnessInspector Gordon's putting his
coat around him and talking to him in nurturance and sympathy. Dark
Knight's philosophy applied to this film would have had the torture go
nowhere, and for the breakthrough to have come from Nancy's effort to
break with the program and show some trust in Alex, who'd known so little
of it in life. I like this film, but you can bet I would have preferred to have
seen this. It's the truthkindness is the way to go, if we're really interested in
making a better world rather than accosting ourselves for once having put
purposeful posts up in that direction. And boy oh boy does the world need
this reminder.
The Family
When the mob family descends on their new locale, a quaint village in
northern France, their identity is of American. The mobster's wife, Michelle
Pfeiffer's character Maggie, enters into a local grocery and asks for peanut
butter, descending upon her a crowd of locals dismaying American obesity.
Certainly too, when the teen boy and girl in the family join the local school,
they're the improvising, brassballed Americans, whomever sets out to take
advantage of them regrets their imposition near immediately. Later,
however, it would seem that what they are mostly is ItalianMaggie is fierce
in pitting her olive oil diet against the French obsession with cream, as if
bulwarked by centuries of Italian lives and culture. They churn out burgers
and Cokes for the locals, only to satisfy expectationsAmericanism has
become a red cape they float before onrushing french bulls they're cannily
flanking and spotting out. I'm not quite sure how much fun it is to watch a
pleb mob family reduce the French into imbeciles, but I suppose if you
understand that what they're doing is impressing themselves upon new
cushions so they are succumbed of some of their store presence to take on
more of "you," I suppose you can at least get at the sanity of what they're
wanting to do.
But what becomes interesting is how in their individual pursuits they find
themselves extraneous to one another. The father goes from being a retired
patrician mobster to become an excited cell terrorist, activated in
his fervour to take down a corporation. The mother goes from sallying forth
destruction to the arrogant French in piquant moments to finding her own
insides blasted out, with a priest taking what she had revealed to him as
ingredients to mix back a mirror as to how long a road of evil she's traveled.
The daughter goes from teaching awkward, totally overmatched teenagers a
lesson they'll never forget to taking on a polished young instructor, who'll
show her that spunk and sass can be quickly subsumed if any inflection at all
is given the life someone poised and learned is due to lead. The boy
manipulates a whole school to his advantage, but becoming Zuckerberg to
the school spanks him as to how top dog substitutes paltry happiness if it's
not something he can adequately return home and show family. They've
gone so far out in their own individual sports that gangsters arriving to kill
them really serve as a welcome call back home. The French, who had
temporarily been given some advantage, are once again relinquished all, as
the gangsters dump however many they need into corpse status to show the
power of this call; tailing along with it, a whole family back tightly together
again.
The episode packages up, and the family is off to fuss up some other
European station for awhile. We take stock, and see them as a blotch of virus
who are eating up small moth holes into a fine swatch of something precious
we weren't really allowed to see, for it making their presence there beyond
endurable. Exempting the boyhe is the lone one of the family who can
strategize, delay, his revengethey've each got major problems restraining
themselves, which their CIA overlookers greatly assist them with. Fine. But
if they needed a soothing, antique village with a lot of prop people to serve
as a calming backdrop for this containment "therapy," it's too bad it couldn't
be done entirely in simulation.
Insidious 2
I leave it to Insidious 2 to faithfully expound upon the most significant fact
about evilthose doing it aren't themselves, but rather are possessed by
alters driving them to take sadistic pleasure in murdering innocents. It's quite
something, after seeing the damage the adult Parker Crane has done to
women he's culled from local denizensrotted bodies aligned in church
rowsto finally be introduced to him as a young boy, and for him to be
attributed about the same amount of empathy as the good boy in the film,
Josh Lambert. They spy him in long braids and a girl's dress, combing his
doll's hair. When he turns around, he actually warns them to get out of the
roomhe actually tries to help them! Later we see his mother descend upon
him and make him feel as if his entire known universe will be squashed out
if he doesn't obey her in all respects, and cast himself in the role of female
fulltime so to be fully owned by her and bear no resemblance to a husband
she wants cast out of memory altogether. Later he would own his mother's
lookeyes of convinced sadism, a wide smile supped on other people's
powerlessness and painand it's clear he's in no way his own self anymore:
his mother alter has simply taken him over.
There is nothing scarier for human beings than the look of our mothers when
they themselves are possessed. I've seen itat an age where I was old
enough to have the resources not to feel the normally lifesaving need to
bury my awareness of it. She wandered into my room while I was still
awake, with the complete scary visage of someone under possession, driven
to seek out innocents to harm. But while it was true that I was in her home at
the time owing to vulnerability, I wasn't so vulnerable not to take some
delight in this kind of "photo capture" of the source of the fear that
had dissuaded me away from whatever full kind of selfrealization I might
have been capable of"you, kid, are owned by me; I will flush into you my
emotions, and they will have their full play with you." Here was the source
of the absolutely terrifying "eye ball" nightmare I used to have all the time
as the kid, where my dreams would be going casually along their route, and
then all of a sudden a bouldersized eyeball would appear and advance upon
me. Here is the source of that maybe still subliminally felt sense, that if I'm
out enjoying life, adorning myself with possessions and accomplishments
beyond what my mother would have thought me allottedsomething
uncomfortable to herthat all of a sudden out of the blue I might casually
open up a door and see a terror of teeth about to have it out with me.
Actually, this might be an exaggeration ... it is possible that now I'm
completely demon free. What I do with my independence might take my
motherin all respectsfurther and further away from me (which, trust me,
is pretty damn scary as well; and is surely the source of my conjuring her up
in my daydreams and my writing), but it may be I can't see any Joker face,
twisted to take delight in pain, and not instantly see the helpless "Parker
Crane" that was going to have no choice but to let this demon into
him/herself, and own them whole in response to triggers of selffulfillment
and helplessness.
The Butler
The current generation of liberals have clearly reached expiry date when
they find themselves—without knowing it, of course—actually favoring
Uncle Toms, thereby becoming exactly those whom they in their better days
would have been at lead in toppling. The current black situation is that the
huge bulk of them are in the dispossessed 99%, with the vast majority, in the
worst ghettos of this unlucky group. And liberals look at this group, and see
a hopeless situation. They see people who have simply transmogrified, who,
having their claim on bourgeois respectability taken from them, have over
the last 30 years of taking sustenance from the sort of foul stuff you count as
familiar when you're trying to makeshift an accommodating life for yourself
in hell—with cockfight UFC becoming your sport, sadomasochistic Fifty
Shades your fiction, heavy whiskey drinking your milk, and hardcore porn
and onlinebetting not even a poke that something has gone wrong—and
now stand before them as a people anthropologically different, fixed forever
in their degraded status, like brief fresh flesh to stagnant rotten meat. At the
same time liberals have stopped believing pasttimes shared by all are really
America's greatest cultural offering, and accoutered themselves in whatever
way to make them feel that as if by DNA, every sprout of their lived lives
must have behind it years of privateschool teaching. The idea that you
should want the 99% to be given a loud voice, and dominate American
culture, is about as absurd as saying you want to bring down the walls
staunching back a zombie hoard. You might assist them a little, agree to
minimum wage increases and health care benefits, but you'll turn armaments
against whomever would say it is insufficient to let them rest with
administrations that still keep them compartmentalized and accountable.
It's not so much right to say that they remember your origins, either, who
you were before. Rather, it's a bit as if for an agreed upon extended period of
years, they stayed eyesfixed to their New York Times, and looked up so they
could see everything again with fresh eyes; and so so much of the
democratic world that was built upon the belief that people are equal, and
once had ample evidence for this belief, can look now, with this spread of
loonies partaking so much of the population, simply absurd to them. They go
to a liberal web site, and look down from the article to the comment section,
and cannot believe that people had once thought it worth so much effort to
place such a close bridge between writer and audience. They look at the
grand numbers of people who can but don't vote, and actually hope they rest
content in their apathy: if they all went out to the ballot box, they'd force the
unpleasant acknowledgement that one personone vote, is a fantastical, silly,
dangerous proposition, when so many are only onefifth as human as they
themselves are. And they realize that their task is to argue for the reality of
the number of unhumans loud enough, that the moral imperative becomes to
take down the morays that have made it seem as if larger inclusion is a
humane and necessary thing. So courageously they in unison pit their
courageous resources, and the crowd of unknowns that hippies once thought
you should know, for believing you could be spiritually pure regardless of
how anonymous your situation or whatnot anonymous noplace you're
from, become trolls, unknowns, but dank killers, who from under bridges or
out of dark corridors can be relied upon to stank up any good thing the
civilized might be forging. And so eventually, pounding this lesson home—
trolls! trolls! trolls!, progress begins to be made, and sites that were once
openaccess begin to require commenters to provide their full name with
their posts, a seemingly small request, but really a final nail, considering that
coinciding with this request is a society that has made newscastmainstory
the fact that individuals caught saying the wrong thing can get 35 years, or a
visit from the unimpressed, who've located your address, and who'll show
how you can be turfed out of your job or kicked to shit with bats, in a
startled, shocked, blink of an eye. And as to the public vote, you can't let it
come to your actually denying people it: there's no way this wouldn't cause
dissonance that would destroy even you. So what you do is make them feel
so apart from a world that would give a shit about them, that in frustration
they come to believe their only hope is through violence. And then you
make violence, a decision to desist from the public conversation and just
stage revolt, something that is goodness gone foul—something wildly
excessive and spoiled, for it being completely unnecessary—and something
you can destroy like something tolerated gone arrogant, like a weed
proclaiming itself a latinized plant, in a truly terrific garden that shudders the
thought. For which all, you'll need directors, traitors to the underclass that
take your view and makes it incontestable. You'll need Uncle Toms ... and
so enter the butcher, or sorry, Lee Daniels's foul weapon, The Butler, so all
that would disquiet the overclass can begin to rest the fuck in peace.
The Butler takes you through black history in America, from cottonfields to
today, and everything Daniels, a black man, shows you concerning black
Americans is either exemplary or understandable ... exempting the Black
Panther movement. At a time in history when black Americans were buoyed
by the huge love and peacefulness of Martin Luther King, and who would
eventually find others his equal to relate to and support—first Nelson
Mandela, then (ostensibly) Obama—here, according to the film, is where
even a very good and righteous population can go foul if it shorns patience
for hate. The Black Panthers, we learn, though ostensibly about community
service, were really just interested in taking out two of you for every one of
them. Their way, is blood on the streets, payback, with anything good that
could possibly come from this, really beside the point (the only point they're
concerned with, is your head, on the end of a pike). And it is okay,
regardless of your color, to hate them.
How do we know this? Because the person who exemplifies membership to
the Panther movement that is true to it, rather than based on what it
purportedly stands for, is the sole black villain in this film. She is the butler's
eldest son's girlfriend, Carol Hammie, who looks down on her boyfriend's
family, at just that point in the film when the butler's wife has ceased
drinking and cheating on him for her realizing she just can't any longer do
this to such a good man. The wife, Oprah Winfrey's Gloria Gaines, identifies
Carol as lowlife trash; and the occasion of correct naming, sparks
momentum in the film to show up how foul she really is, demarcating how
even her fiveyearlong love for her boyfriend was false. She's model
gorgeous—the most beautiful woman in the film, by far—and the Black
Panthers are fierce in their black attire, but they're lost souls tempting blacks
to where chaos—no true love; all hate—reigns.
So you take a film like this where done by a black person, the one thing that
a liberal crowd allowed itself to question regarding black empowerment is
given huge leverage. When a dispossessed people begin to dress in spooky
garb—in this film, Carol's aggressive afro doesn't really jive with her
boyfriend's black leather—he still looks an affable Theo Huxtable—and is
effectively in affronting Joker garb—and beget violence, then, effectively,
the KKK has got company: one ranges more over Southern rural, and the
other NorthEast urban, but it's all just more goons on the landscape. Once
you've chosen this path, your life circumstances no longer applies, for no
amount of previous suffered hate prevents you of your Godgiven ability to
choose the path of love. And so as liberals free their homes of the presence
of the dispossessed, by raising rents, and thereby effectively shipping them
off to the outskirt ghettos; and in a sense free them from their presence on
the way to work, with tax policies that attend to "your" drive but pay less
and less attention to their public transport; and keep them seeming
contained, at least, as they explore their preferred websites, by construing
comment sections so they seem fetid marshes you screen out as you fix on
your own hautebourgeois/aristocratic compartments, at first the
dispossessed do nothing as you enjoy how "scum" miraculously seems less
present in your everyday life, but later manifest, in a terrible way—with a
burntdown luxury apartment building that had taken the place of something
lowrent, scrawled with anarchist hate; with minimumwage food chains
looted across the country—after strikes had gone nowhere—with stolen
burgers from them shoved up the arses of uptown gourmets; with private
roads laced with fowl killed in oil spills, that leave morning drivers retching
—these dispossessed are going to be received with nothing but a merciless
hard crackdown—regardless of huge a high percentage of them are black,
mentallyill, and starving. If they had waited, their sufferings would
eventually have been noticed—did you not see how the butler eventually had
the support of a president to get his raisehike?—but impertinently,
impatiently, greedily, and unnecessarily, they chose the path of hate, and
have become vermin.
Crackdown is to be lead by the likes of Daniels as well. The Butler shows
he's got all the right attributes. You don't want them too smart and
sophisticated, and he's not. You don't want him thinking an aristocrat, an
officer, is anything he can aspire to, but rather contented to himself as a
gruff staffsergeant, and he is. And you want him beguiled to "betters," as if
they are gods, harsh as hell on any of the underclass who'd try and rival
them, and he—to near a point that should make him look a bit ridiculously
stupid to his betters—is. If you're showing cottonfield masters, it's okay to
show them as brutal sadists, but if you can't show scenes of them and their
black servants/slaves that doesn't spark something outside folk portrayal—
all evil, and all innocence—narrative needs are determining what you are
seeing in life. If you're showing students being prepped to suffer abuse by
forcing other students to play the role of accosters, at a historical time when
psychology was becoming famous for its prisoner/guard experiments, where
students couldn't help but play their delegated roles for real, and for the
Maslow experiments, where people told to shock a victim could find
themselves apparently shocking them from pain into unconsciousness, and
you do it just straight, then you're not post but preKubrick, and are actually
dialing back what we know of people and the world. If you show someone in
close proximity to presidents, yet nothing shown looks different from what
an ignorant person from afar would project as how these scenes would play,
you're pretty much taking the accomplishment of Aaron Sorkin's The West
Wing back, and substituting something more dutiful to authority; more
respectful of mystique and distance. And if you show every worn president
but not the one who currently resides, you make it seem as if they were all
leading up to the one so pure and beyond he's most accurately represented as
a light that's effused itself over the social landscape, concentrated heavy
beyond the door you're about to enter, and about to take you some place as
rapturous as heaven. And if you show Jackie O as a natural aristocrat, a true
princess, and her rival beauty—but of the dispossessed—as a snake villain,
you're the Uncle Tom who's undertaken the tradition of D W Griffith. So
fabulously unaware are you, that the lesson you think you know by heart, is
one you impertinently cast aside to put a stake though the snake: "guess
who's coming to dinner," isn't supposed to favor the traditionalminded
family who's shocked by the strange black thing planted down at the dinner
table before them, but shown up by him or her.
And when we've lost that lesson, we no longer believe in democracy, but
shown that though it might have taken three centuries to prove it, the whigs
were wrong: gates need to be put in place to keep these tempering hordes
from bucking up into a revolution.
KickAss 2
When Roger Ebert reviewed the original KickAss, he wasn't primarily taken
aback by any one single incident—Hit Girl's being shot, with the audience
having to take a moment to remind themselves about her bulletproof vest,
for instance—but by the fact that people behind the movie were so
comfortable exploring a whole terrain of something which had pretty much
taken him off stride upon first occurrence. He couldn't believe that a movie
primarily involving kids could be so comfortable with people dying, being
butchered, all over the place, coldly, bloodily, humiliatingly, with this not
counting it as beyond fun and games. "This isn't comic violence," he writes,
"These men, and many others in the film, really are stonecold dead. And the
11yearold apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children
would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think, after killing eight or
12 men who were trying to kill her?" Ebert worried about what would
happen to the 6yearolds who wanted to see the film, and, despite his
proclaiming himself not so worried about them, evidently also about the
sheer fact of the older ones who'd already been ruined to become of the
internet. Specifically he writes, "The movie's rated R, which means in this
case that it's doubly attractive to anyone under 17. I'm not too worried about
16yearolds here. I'm thinking of 6yearolds. There are characters here
with walls covered in carefully mounted firearms, ranging from handguns
through automatic weapons to bazookas. At the end, when the villain
deliciously anticipates blowing a bullet hole in the child's head, he is
prevented only because her friend, in the nick of time, shoots him with
bazooka shell at 10foot range and blows him through a skyscraper window
and across several city blocks of sky in a projectile of blood, flame and
smoke. As I often read on the Internet: Hahahahaha.”
Ebert pretty much assumes that if you liked KickAss, you've got to be pretty
much lost to the human. Zombies might have great sport figuring out what to
do with the various body parts that remained after they've gorged themselves
full, perhaps bowling human heads through assembled footandankle
"pins," or making ribcages and thigh bones into cunning hefty decorative
wear, but anyone still human isn't going to be in mind to demarcate their
creativity here, but just drain it of distinction so that the sheer fact of its
blunt awfulness, not its variegatedness, holds your attention. If in real life a
mob is ripping apart its victim, do you describe particulars involved so the
act looks to possess a distinguishable aesthetic, a uniqueness—worth?
Would irony save it from now possessing validity? Or do you eclipse it,
deny it, and just hold it as not worth describing? Ebert does, or shows, both
—we already have the description, and he ends his piece with, "then the
movie moved into dark, dark territory, and I grew sad." But since his
description is compelling enough to have you think that Ebert was aware
that his foremost problem is not with the film but with a world that gets
sufficient kicks from energies he finds repellent that it gives latitude to art
that partake of them, he mostly sounds as if with this essay he knows he's
successfully enunciated his own demise. The foremost thing he did by
setting out as a critic to analyze the film, was welcome himself innocently
but conclusively to how little this changed world is going to factor him in.
It's not true that this was the last essay of Ebert's I ever read, but it's the last
one of significance he ever did: it's tough to admire the work of someone
who's crawled into his own dark corner, out of realizing that as considerable
as he is, he hasn't the momentum to take on a world when it isn't dialing
down its emerging preferences.
I liked KickAss, just like I also liked (or rather, loved) Refn's Drive—a
movie Richard Brody accused as being inhuman, of being in love with the
idea of "the poker face as the key to success"—and as well Game of
Thrones, a show Maris Kreizman argues with genuine case is for "Star Wars
fans who thought Princess Leia should have been raped." For both bad and
good reasons. The bad, or at least, the regrettable reason, is because I'm not
so different from those 1930s artists who were daunted by their predecessors
—those 1920s greats who hung out at the Parisian cafes, like Fitzgerald,
Joyce, Hemingway, and the rest of those populating Midnight to Paris—but
grew wings when a Depression climate frowned on those who arrogantly
showed how ripe human life can be. You watch KickAss or Drive, and you
know that completely nonmisanthropic critics like Ebert and Brody—both
the highest class of loving people—are going to find reprehensible anyone
who'd take much pleasure from them (Brody would give you the okay, only
if you liked Brooks' gangster, and not, that is, for Ryan Gosling, the film's
style, and the 95 percent of the rest of the film). Being someone who is bit
daunted by how personality rich these two men are, who is fascinated at
what kind of early experience enabled them to bring so much presence to the
world (it's more than their being surely firstborns), and whose inclination is
to quieten myself to take in more and more from them and maybe locate the
maybestilltapable source, I like films which break this spell, which give
you a sense that somehow the world has incrementally changed, accrued,
layered, so that things that wouldn't have had much chance to distract the
attention of men like these, can find themselves irritating them for their
requiting them to swat at them or tear through them before lunging
awesomely at what they're actually in mind to take on. It's easy to imagine
them eventually willynilly pinned or hopelessly entangled as these
accumulations bear down—like the great uberman in Prometheus
stunningly blocked and enveloped by theevengreater, great python
muscled tentacle horror that barged in his path—if they don't find some
place of refuge, and you can kind of factor them out and see the world—
however Depression grey and stilled—as your own grounds now to range
over.
Also bad, is the fact that I like the fact that films which I know to be, maybe
not precisely misanthropic, but endorsing orientations towards the world
which are reroutes away from approaches which'd have one face one's
personal scourges and actually, like, grow, appeal to me for the fact that they
favor reroutes I know I also need to have championed to appear ideal. They
convince me that I don't stand out too much as a selfrealized, selfsatisfied
douche, a bitchy demon presiding over our age would feel the need to sweep
down upon and teach a swift scolding lesson to. She could read deep into my
thoughts, recognize that I know everything that is going on in an age which
inverts what is good—selfrealization—for the bad—self
sacrifice/diminution—know that I ultimately want Her gone for inhibiting
something as precious as a human life, and at such an awesome scale, but
still pat me on the head as no threat—even give me a lift, if I needed one,
and smile genuinely to me—because She knows I'm still broken sufficiently
that I'll need her "fix" like all the rest of them. This means that when
someone like Brody chastises a film like Skyfall for something that may well
be regrettable, and that I should want to be the kind person who like him had
instantly noticed, I'm actually glad that at the moment it hadn't occurred to
me.
Specifically, when he writes,
The colossal chase scene through Istanbul at the beginning of Skyfall recalls
the escape through Shanghai, early in Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom, with pushcarts overturned, merchandise scattered, terrified
bystanders diving for safety. Spielberg offensively turned ordinary people
going about their business into just so much confetti for his spectacle—
exactly the sort of cavalier colonialera bravado that might have repelled a
filmmaker who started his career in the late sixties. Plus ça change: Skyfall,
too, scatters Istanbul’s residents and their goods like bowling pins. From the
start, Sam Mendes, the director of the latest installment of 007, proves
faithful to tradition, yet not always the best of that tradition.
I realized him to be like the sober peasants in Monty Python's Holy Grail,
who made clear King Arthur's requisiting them not just for directions but for
confirmation of his own grandiose status, or like the whole feel of the
Lancelot bit in the film, where Lancelot's a crazed loon with a sword,
hacking away at an innocent assembly of peacefully gathered people, for a
point he'd actually end up staunching himself in retreat from. But the point is
that I evidently enough relate to the fantasy of being someone inflated that
when you see the like in a film, you're too much enjoying and partaking in
his paving through swaths of lessmattering people to be instantly critical or
selfreflective of what he'd just done to the actually probably quite fulsome
people around him.
Same thing applies, especially, with Brody's superb criticism of Drive,
where he argued that "Refn doesn’t seem interested in pain but in its
infliction—specifically, how blankfaced, softspoken people manage to
commit mayhem and, at the moment of violent outburst, stay fixed on their
plan and maintain a fearsome calm in the face of disgusting gore." Yes,
absolutely true: Refn clearly enjoys that Ryan Gosling's
ostensibly accommodating, becalming, boyish manner, can be exploded so
conclusively that anyone who might privilege their own interests through it
find themselves unable to handle whom he has revealed to them as a good
part of his core, and he's got them now in a position where they'll never be
quite sure about him; always a bit fretful and fearful, prepared to disengage
and let "you" be free, so you can decompress and relax in your own space,
the moment you show any hint of being tweaked from normal. He enjoys
creating protagonists who experience other people's startled pulling back,
like as if it's at this point where you can begin to form a friendship with
them, if it would still take, and they remain interested, because you now
know them well enough from what they have revealed to you—you've had
that advantage—before you revealed the dragonself they've actually also to
tangle with (something akin to Black Widow's technique in the Avengers).
And I know what that is about. One of my favorite characters from fiction
was once Severian, from Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer, and this was
him to a T. Just as soon as you think you've got him pegged, and are moving
on with your further plans, he shows what he's been hiding, and does the like
of surprising you by punching your nosebone into your brain. And though
I'm aware enough of it's immaturity, or rather, its origins as a defense
mechanism against abuse, like the "ignoring of emotions of others and the
crawling inside boxes and clinging to hard surfaces and mechanical devices
in place of relating to caretakers" (deMause, "Why males are more violent")
that autists do, I can't quite stand outside a film like Drive and find it hard to
slip Gosling's character on. Rather, it is a bit more the character Brody
actually likes in this film, Albert Brooks' gangster, whom I am prone to
engage with rather secondarily.
Brody makes the gangster out to be a horror, "[some]one whose professional
identity emerges, tantalizingly, only by degrees," but he isn't, like Gosling,
the guy who disengages and puts the coldface on, but rather the saddened
older guy who realizes there's really no other option for him, and so does
what he has to, still himself the whole while. Indeed, when he forks and
knives a guy repeatedly to death, in a scene of massive violence and
emotional heat, it's as if it's more his way of displacing his anger at his
partner, who caused the problem but who just can't any longer suffer himself
the gore, like a husband requited to killing the pest in the tub or who was
eating away at the yew bush, that he had no real truck with—that is, more a
manner of communicating, to someone else, like a hardslammed door, than
it is your spelling a hard lesson to whom you're directly accosting. Gosling,
on the other hand, when he kicks and crashes in the skull of the assassin
fallen before him, has entered some other kind of state, separated from
emotions, with even his nearby beloved completely momentarily out of the
picture; and it is only afterwards that he can regroup himself to something
human like earnest communication—even though you've surely fallen back
by then, probably concussed into pitiful trembles and nervous quivering, and
on your way to actually running away.
How the hell could I orient more towards Gosling than Brooks in this film,
you ask? Because Gosling in this picture is more drawn from wounding than
Brooks is, and I relate, and whatever love I've gathered since then hasn't
quite become sufficient that I tilt more the other way. This means that I
expect a good portion of my life has still been too much about a reroute
than about a healthy fullon engagement with a logical path, and this means
any god on the lookout for anyone treading disallowed hallowed grounds
and heaping and integrating life riches found thereon into his life drawers,
might temporarily fix on me—or even quite a bit—but ultimately desist,
contented in my nonthreat, like the momentarily confused military drone in
Oblivion. This isn't exactly the right comparison, but I won't be due to be a
Bradley Manning; which is the way I need to have it.
And now to the good. To the good reason that is, for liking or loving films
that enormously astute and psychologically healthy critics like Ebert and
Brody are bound to find offensive and largely unenjoyable. There are some
periods of human existence, where, as I mentioned concerning the 1930s, all
the great artists sound about opposite the great artists who thrived just
before, when humanity was involved in some kind of true renaissance
period. These types—the actual lessers—do in this instance have the
advantage—the times are behind them, for them, and it means for them they
see, they experience, a landscape of fresh things they might explore, rather
than blockages, howling spirits instructing them on how despite their
whatever genius, they're not wanted, they don't matter, and they're no good
—now try to do your best work with this holy hell of shit on your tail! So
artists like Walker Evans, who thought humanity so spoiled it needed to be
taught the Depression lesson, thrived, and artists like Fitzgerald, whose
blood was JazzAge, began to wilt. If you look at 30s films from the
perspective Ebert and Brody show towards KickAss and Drive (or that
Maris Kreizman shows towards Game of Thrones), as you show up every
director for their potential amorality, their dispirit, their exploitation, their
dehumanization, you'll be showing up a lot of what turned out to be the best
films of the era. 42nd Street made people into "cogs in a wheel" (Dickstein,
Dancing in the Dark), it took away their worth as individuals, favoring only
what they counted for as part of a collective—it kind of was a Nazi film: and
Busby Berkeley was great 30s innovation, for example. And critics who
could only point out the bad and not recognize that increasingly it is from
sour motives that real art is increasingly to be found, have surely come to
their terminus: If it's not humans but oily kaiju masters who are making the
better 'bots, no matter how much you hate them, you've got to be at least be
able to recognize this. Brody thought Drive a poor movie, with only one
thing going for it; Ebert showed no sense of how exciting and outofthe
blue KickAss was; and years later you go about and talk to banktellers,
retail workers, average joes—movie goers—you watch how they light up
when you talk about these movies: they were favorites of the year, for many.
So, concerning Ebert (I know, I know—rest in peace) and Brody, and their
likewise actually wonderful ilk ... do we keep them? One begins to think—
no, lest we come across something awful they spelled out about friggin'
Game of Thrones, a worldwide beloved phenomenon, for Heaven's sakes,
and feel compelled to seek them out and torture them out of their eyes and
ears to demonstrate our point that clearly for them, their owning them no
longer much matters.
I don't remember a single particular moment of KickAss I especially
enjoyed; it was more how surprised I was, how excited I was, to see a film
maker just truck on through a landscape of horror like it was all just so
what? Yeah, a preteen is carving up bodies and having a heap of fun—if
this sounds like something you've got to work yourself up for an entire
movie to be ready for, you're dark ages, because this director instructed us to
the fact that a whole bunch of talent is about to take it as nothing really
special. So, if in good times, when artists do this, make inroads into taboo
turf, this means they're exploring hushhush topics like racism or adult
sexual relations, then in the bad—times of purgatory—it's going to mean
going the distance with things likely to wound more evolved predecessors.
So if you're looking for people making inroads, then these days when artists
put butterflyknives into the hands of children and explore what they do with
them, or not pull away when the barbarian horde does its pillaging and
raping, but instead lets the cameras role on and even go for grim closeups,
here perhaps most especially is where you're going to find it. The reasons
they're being explored are surely sordid, but you couldn't work with this
material before—for reasons that were never truly convincing—so you
should be able to find some way, through watching their explorations of it,
how it might someday be made to work in a humanist sense.
KickAss 2 doesn't provide that same sense of a taboo territory confidently
being repossessed for public use, though from what it does in the beginning,
I was actually a bit surprised at this. The movie begins with the villain
accidentlyonpurpose killing his mother, and donning her clothing for his
next supervillain persona. Any time a villain does this, adopts a mother
persona, it usually means that this character is going to be given greater
latitudes than you'd normally expect. This will be true for a 1960's film like
Psycho, but especially true for any film emerging out of a Depression
period. Depressions are all about a population punishing itself for having
taken too many cookies from the cookiejar previously, and it's pretty much
lived as if there isn't anything you do that your righteous mother with her
tightly gripped rollingpin isn't felt to be watching over. The last thing you're
in the mind to do, that is, is say anything derisive about her, no matter what
the hell she might be up to, and you're not about to take advantage of her
likeness in film to overtly show what you really think of her abuses. Instead,
you'll see the likeness, and immediately take advantage of this opportunity to
manifest a repentant attitude, and not say a word no matter how many how
many transgressions she pulls, no matter how many cookies disallowed to
you, she swallows down herself. Brody could watch a film like Skyfall and
point out M's rather arrogant "clinging to her position," which actually made
things worse, but the rest of humanity, be sure, stayed mum. Yes, the rest of
humanity was also secretly joyous when she gets disposed of at the finish,
and that, thank god, an affectdialeddown male lead is left in charge of
operations, while Brody was free of any such malice, but Brody was
casually telling the emperor off to her face, with his not even being aware
he'd done anything especially inopportune: which you just don’t do.
The boy archvillain, Motherfucker, isn't actually the one given any latitude;
he aims at one point to rape someone, Night Bitch, who'd been set up as if
already abused—with her perpetual nervous trepidation—and as akin to the
girl in a horror movie who's doomed to be slain for her being sexually
active, and thus part of the cohort that are usually not in geek films spared
humiliations but rather made to feel susceptible to being bitchslapped
consummated into fully ravaged victims. But his penis fails him, and she
ends up being denied her illfate by the someone present who probably could
have been shown raping her, with a strapon, and with the camera not feeling
the need to fret and pullaway, as if it's got sure protection for its plainly
powerfulindulging, evilpurposed scrutiny. Specifically, Mother Russia, the
gargantuan villain recruited into Motherfucker's service, who's not like a
brute in a Bond film in service to the mastermind—clearly a number two—
but rather more like Kraken to Poseidon, a vastly dwarfing entity, who's
show is now its own once released into the film. It felt strange that the movie
handed the mother's mana all to her, after it had just set up Motherfucker as
the mothervisaged psycho due surely for a number of personally inflicted
massacres—though I got the point behind this afterwards—but regardless,
Mother Russia is the bad bully mother in this film, whom geeks fear so
much you should explore their decision to converge in basementcaves at the
onset of real worldbeckoning adolescence, as owing to it. She's Iron Man
inflated to 400 percent power, she's the adrenaline hit that Hit Girl takes
later, to enable drama to potentially take place that without her it wouldn't
dare.
The key scene in the film, the only one maybe worth rewatching on
Youtube, is when the gang of villain elites marches into the suburbs, each
one an arrogant sure shell of ego for essentially standing behind the power of
their way highest paid, Mother Russia. She's going to get to do anything she
wants, is what you feel, and it may be the movie's encouraging you to feel
this way, to be reminded that moods can take over people where trespasses
can be effected, and the world thereafter just can't placidly reset, is what it
deserves credit for, and not really with what it shows done within this
protective cloud of latitude. She launches a lawnmower into the face of a
policeofficer, and gives you the same sense that the first KickAss at times
did with Hit Girl and Big Daddy, that this just happened: in real life,
someone like her, a real human being, could have come out of the blue, and
done this. They're ridiculously costumed, and they’re striding into the
suburbs as if conquerors of Rome, but it's not, it's not, simply funny. You
can’t quite comic book them, which makes the scene feel kind of awesome.
Mother Russia is ostensibly in the film to be an appropriate foe for Hit Girl,
but she's really in it for this. This said, the fact that Mother Russia dwarfs
everyone else who is also part of the elite club of villains, helps make
another of the film's points. What KickAss suggested … has been already
terminated: we're not in the mood to inflate geeks so they might pass as true
superheroes, but for splitting them off into the sliver few—the 1%—who
are undeniably awesome, and the rest, who even with costumes on and
trained, look like they're just waiting for someone truly skilled to take them
down for their silly pretense, á la what you felt was partly at work when
Night Bitch gets paid that grim visit at the hospital, and what was behind
even mafiatrained Colonel Stars and Stripes surprisingly quick exit from
the film. To me, it's amazing the movie would want to go this way, but it did
—and with confidence. It gets right that what we wanted was for Hit Girl to
receive what looked like her due in the original KickAss, to not properly
belong in any movie too much owned wholly by geeks. When she rides off
alone at the finish, she's the 18yearold with the physical capacity now, to
fit right into the Avengers without blinking, with a bigleague foe played by
a bigleague actor, taunting her, rather than essentially unadulterated
nobodies and Hollywood castaways. And if she surprised us in Avengers 2
by serving as Black Widow's replacement, we'd calculate the actresses'
alreadystardom, as well as what she's surely due; consider her character's
superlative killing out of KickAss; and actually probably let her do the
unthinkable and be the only one you're ever likely to see in a Depression
period, rise from the slums and get to keep their stay.
Be warned, however, that though it looks like she's off to the big time, it's
not quite true to say she's leaving everyone else behind. All the other heroes
drop their superhero garb and personas, but they don't sulk back into the
individually bullied. Rather, they take the other empowered end of the super
hero stick that the last Depression period—the one that gave birth to
superheroes in the first place—enabled. Specifically, like the last Depression
gave us Captain America and Superman, it also ended up giving us the
people as folk, or in Germany, as volk. That is, the people ended up being
the depersonalized "cogs in a wheel" that Dickstein rightly laments, but
these same cogs ended up feeling that as an anonymous legion they were
empowered together as something allpure, allpowerful, and allvirtuous—
look into the New Deal era, or, sorry, the Nazi vision of "people's
community," to get some sense of this. Every one of the heroes are shown
indistinguishably back in their street clothes, amongst the mass, but one
feels that when "filth" passes by them, they're going to be at liberties to
disassemble them that you just couldn't imagine. Here's where an awful lot
of latitude is going to fall over the next number of years, and I think we feel
this at the end of the film—how Dr. Gravity, surrendered of his "Superman"
and contented in his "Clark Kent, " almost eclipses Hit Girl's racing off to
her own individual future in Manhattan, when he smiles to participate in a
righteous lynching. If his skills were a bit better, he'd fit in with Coulson's
crew of blackgarbed, nonglam agents, which as we know, no one's passing
over for its possessing serious, serious legs.
Blue Jasmine
One thing I was not really fair to, to my experience of Elysium, is how
impressed I was by how it accurately conveyed, that if you're not amongst
those essentially expected to live as if there is no constraint upon them—all
smiles, celebrations, new restaurants, and "isn't life the greatest!"—are
outside the fortuned 1%, if you ever dared offering up any sass, any
reflection about how you truly feel, you'll follow it with a thousand
embarrassing surrenders to whatever authorities might expect of you, hoping
that way to abet an executioner's suddenly raised strike from tilting to
ultimately fall down on you, and cast you out from a life that still has the
bearing of relevance, however spit upon and dim a one. There's a worse fate
than being a factory worker at a jobplace that truly believes not a one of
them is particularly valuable in what he does, each one to be replaced by
another, if need be, as can any newly purchased tool be schlepped in to
replace a lost one. If you somehow still seem part of a story, can count
yourself part of something, inclusion and purpose can keep you sane. If
you're outside of one, with the world around you moving with purpose,
there's no socially acceptable narrative for you to count as your own in
which to unconsciously share and funnel your perplexing life afflictions into,
and they just keep popping up, your insufficiently addressed life afflictions,
all the time, at scary conscious level, and are alone to you. And if your being
in sync to no one means the like of you suddenly rehearsing something you
said, or something someone else said, out loud, you're going to tether out
pretty close to crazytown for most people, which in today's world will bring
not empathy but shock "therapy," to kill that strange buzzing aberration dead
that appeared rather startlingly out there on the street to affront us.
The tragedy of Jasmine, is that she has acuity, some potential to articulate
precisely how things are, which with the help of her summoned kindness can
take other people out of life patterns that are "solutions" which enable them
to live, but which themselves cry out to be solved as well. Almost as soon as
she lands on her sister's doorstep, she knows her sister's life, her friends, her
community, fully rightly. She's stumbled into a morass, but one that if she
hangs on tight and bears it to the best of her ability, will bear her enough so
she can evolve the extenuations required to finally once again get some full
bracing against the world. She might try applying herself to her
surroundings, but since up close they're befudging nullity, which brings to
the person who is able to summon considerable momentum to understanding
them the feeling of having summoned a great wave that'll break its barrier
with so little resistance it now requires its own taxing down, the solution is
better to drink when she has to, Xanex herself when she has to, and just gain
the proclivity necessary to downscale the nervestressing constant
attenuations of a help centertype job, so she can build up the proteinjuice
resources inside herself from which promising extenuations might
eventually sprout.
She has terrible luck. The one thing that could still get her once she has
recuperated sufficiently from her past’s great heave of traumas and
developed the ability to work as a receptionistand so survive regardless if
her sister stopped hosting herwas if something arrived that looked to
instantly take her away from this life—make it all seem like some extralong
but still now forever gone nightmare, into which she was insanely
transported but now from which she has neatly danced her way out. And
with her meeting Peter Saarsgard's Dwight, she goes allin with this perfect
way out. When she accidently meets her sister's former husband on the
street, we see what this way out would have cost her. Caught out, she can in
instant defense show how alive she can be to other people's motivations, and
seem instantly adult. But since this means having to reckon with things she
did—horrible things, like losing a deserving hardworking man’s very
realistic opportunity for a more enfranchised life; like in a moment of venom
alerting authorities about something she was always at some level aware of
but hadn’t blown the whistle on until it seemed perfect spite, which killed
her husband, spiraled her son into thinking a forgotten cave is better than
spending one moment further outside, and undid her whole life—she can't
help but take the bait to be as if still ordained by a rigid law of the universe
to recover to be the BlueJasmine, perfectprincess again.
At the end she's on the street, dead eyes, and babbling. Somewhere on the
horizon a crew will soon appear to diagnose her as needing to have her head
shocked from one planet to the next, leaving her in a permanent daze,
puddling drool down the front of her cream blouse and Chanel jacket. But
it's appropriate she just gives up. The universe clearly has it in for her. She
was right that her sister would find for herself a better mate once she judged
herself worth a bit better, but her first magical try with this ended so
traumatizingly she ensconced herself even harder with what—thank god!—
was still available to her. This meant Jasmine's presence would be thereafter
a reminder of a conscious decision on her part to force herself to believe this
was whom she was naturally right for. This meant Jasmine—who reflects
back at her now, clearly justified mockery—would have to be out of her
life hard. Jasmine couldn't pick herself up from this, and go back to the
certainly plausible and now already partly traveled path of becoming a
decorator, because sometimes you're just handed too many blows, and
you've got to just sit down, give up, and let yourself be broken down by the
universe to be reconstituted into something which actually has purpose. (The
only salve temporarily available to you is that you might humorously blow
at the ants taking bits of you away, like Ron Perlman's puffing at the legion
of flames already up the woodladder and eating at him in Name of the Rose,
so a clearly humorless God has the humiliation of having to chow down on
some farce before he takes you.) We felt for her when she—so long a time a
natural denizen of the most sophisticated rich—was brought down to being a
sales clerk serving her former friends, which is like becoming a maid
servant after having once been a duchess—is usually a kind of humiliation
you're made to suffer just before being executed, like being raped. Truly, it’s
amazing she managed. We certainly knew what she meant when, after being
accosted and groped by her dentist boss, someone she had expended every
frenzied effort to communicate was not someone she wanted to get intimate
with, she just couldn't bear to take to court. We knew how she felt when she
requested more silence and solitude in her sister's home, with her really,
truly, having expended every effort to make this a lastditch recourse—her
ability to neuter down her own proclivity to just arrogantly own whatever
space around her, had been commendable: her sister needed to speak up
then, and the guys needed to go to the bar instead—any recourse away from
that would have been universal indignity.
The universe moves on, and eventually society recovers its poise and
actually cares about people again. This becomes a time for true therapy,
where if you babble to yourself so you are aware of the specific instances
which afflict you, this is actually an asset therapists would use to make sure
they zero in on you more precisely—it’s like being able to describe your
dreams with precision. This becomes a time that the story to be told when
someone like Jasmine falls into your life, is how she, despite her flaws,
improved you for the better, before she hefted herself off to a world she after
all was more natural to: more Mary Poppins—or better, Cold Comfort Farm.
The problem with purges of the kind we’re experiencing now, is that it’s
going to leave us with fewer Jasmines when we’re actually in mind to
appreciate them. Seriously, a good number of our babblers are actually going
to be amongst our best, but just tragically untethered from madnesses we use
with proficiency to assure ourselves sanelike what happened to Fitzgerald
in the '30s, when a world thought things like fascism sane.
Elysium
When Matt Damon's Max encounters the kids who surround him hoping for
money, there's a tiny bit of tension in the moment, like what we've got is a
wildlife encounter between a mature bear and a curious pack of wolves,
which should end with maybe one nip or a loud roar, or maybe some mutual
entertainment, but could potentially go horribly wrong. But as soon as Max
drops them a bit of money, we understand that in this movie, if you're of the
dispossessed kids, are elderly, or a woman, you'll understandably do what
you can for a bit to eat, but you're all earnest and good, even if choked down
some for being so always scared. Guys can get rangier, but are not more
interesting for it: unless of course that they'd get a kick out of an exoskeleton
being drilled and bolted into you is going to make you look even uglier and
cause you a great deal of pain, is for you a show that they're "complicated."
So there really is nothing about the people left behind on this overcrowded,
desert planet, that is interesting, and there's not much to our hero: who
serves up samples of guesstimatedminimalnecessary shows of the
abeyance and cowering and obliging that he has to do, lest he lose the one
thing that gives him some satisfying edge over everyone else on the planet—
his having a job—and just seems to add more and more pussfilled wounds
to his large, fatigued mass, as he goes about the movie. He has sufficient
pulling strength to ensure the narrative moves and so we don't feel
permanently caught in this awful place, and that's really about it.
He says he wants to live, and that's why he wants to get to Elysium—to have
his radiated, disintegrating organs, all in a magical moment, repaired. And of
course this means he'll end up sacrificing his life and not living, even if he
can't say, like Robert Kazinksy's alsoultimatelyselfsacrificing Chuck
Hansen plausibly does in Pacific Rim, that he rather enjoys living his life.
But the character who really shows the kind of exhilarating heft that comes
from not passively letting a world turn illfortune toward you, is of course
evilagent Kruger, who takes upon his taking over the spacestation
command with the same persuasive suavity as his swaggering a three
shooting missilelauncher into launching position, to down three ships that
would have been traumatized a space station as if befelled by an insect
invasion, if he didn't stop them short before arrival.
It's not really Jodie Foster's Delacourt, that is. There's something about these
overt mothertypes in current movies, that whatever their momentary
grandiosity, makes them feel from the start horribly doomed. Like M in
Skyfall and Crystal in Only God Forgives, who also looked to possess the
acumen to persist and thrive in their positions, they're hit with some kind of
wounding accusation that's set them up for some kind of justified, necessary,
coupdegrace by the end of the film. They’ve leveraged themselves in an
unallowed way so profoundly, that even if most men still part around them
or out of fear pretend to keep faith with them—only offering up atbest
glancing blows so that only other empowered women might hit them by mid
point with something more solid—an executioner has been let loose in the
world that's going to get them, even if not themselves left in the end to be an
ongoing hero. They can dwarf whole male hierarchies for awhile, but
something about their being all alone while a whole world waits to get
behind a single moment of seeming narrative necessity, makes it feel like
they can for sure be taken out.
Once she’s out in this film, Kruger soon goes too. And so we have a bunch
of androids bringing medicine down to huge hoards of dispossessed people,
who of course oblige their weakest to get their remedies first. Somewhere
some village boy shows appreciation, but kind of preferred when the space
ships aired but got blown up in space—that was cool, mom! And the other
villagers gather around and stone him, and not a spark of interesting doubt
ever showed itself in this universe for a millennium of years. The men are
dumb while the women are smartbut since this just means they go nurse
rather than ambition doctor, male anxieties remain soothed.
Only God Forgives
If you've suffered from being used incestuously by your mother as you
became a young man, Ryan Gosling's character Julian shows what you
might do in recompense. One, get away from your mother, like a long way
away—Thailand's good. Two, find yourself in structures that seem as if a
bunker and are labyrinthine, and where the wall patterns are like compact
shelves of ancestors, or warding glyphs, scary to those who aren't used to
them, and maybe even partially in your favor, so you couldn't possibly be
unwillingly dragged away, and where any intimacies you might entertain
within have the protection of carapace around yolk—they will have their
time. Three, have boys around you about the same age you were when you
were abused, and instead give them encouraging pats of support—from this,
some good to others, as well as some assuagement of your own hurts. Four,
reexplore relationships with women, but where if you're the one submitting,
it's done very gently; and where for the most part you're just getting used to
the idea that women, that sex, can be something under your control. Five,
exist at a time when if your canny, resourceful, youdwarfing and daunting,
warready mother arrives back into your presence, masters you in your own
den, your stillexisting pliancy to her means you're the paltriest obstruction
to a crusader supped on resources of a vast conservative landscape that has
once again begun to stir: bent inwards to her, you hardly require scything,
and can pretty much be just walked through as a righteous kill is staked.
You'll have to have something that would yoke her back to you, though. Her
out of the picture altogether, means no chance for rapprochement, for
adjusting or in some limited fashion mastering her, so you might know for a
moment the selfassurance that would come from knowing you had it in you
to finally insist on borders, as well as brokering for yourself a new kind of
space you might use with other people. And possibly out of structures put in
place to keep her more under your terms, sneak in for yourself a bit of the
whole scale intimacy that boys hunt for from their mothers like dwarves
through staunches of ore to gold. And Julian has this something with his
older brother, Billy, the mother's favorite for being the eldest, the strongest,
and for possessing a penis so large it draws awe, who for being the favorite
when this means the inverse of what it normally does, seems incapable of
immunizing himself to her ingrained influence to try something like genuine
intimacy on, and is seemingly susceptible every night to having his need to
dispense his sense of being a childvictim scale over into his becoming a
perpetrator of butchery—inevitably involving someone young and hopeful,
like his onceself was, attacked so thoroughly to form her own gross pond of
parts and blood.
His succumbing to his drive to kill someone young and vulnerable, draws
his mother, Crystal, back to Thailand, and when she arrives she stakes her
claim on longassumed territory, and garners her penthouse roof suite away
from whatever hotelprecedent that would dissuade her temporarily from it.
The flowers in the background are pink, and so too the limited, nervous,
wouldbesceneabating receptionist's garb, but the place never really knew
the color until she came in and showed them what it can do worn, when
affixed to even a very tired, great lady. We have a sense that in each place
she’s in subsequently, she feels so presumptive, so masterly, she might boast
that she’s no longer sure she dressed to match the décor (which, you note,
she always does) or whether it had taken antecedent notice of what she was
in the mood for and made adjustments. Still, even with her feeling that her
claim on this section of Thailand is broad and meaningfully unchallenged,
Julian gets some of what he would hope to acquire from her. He’s had
enough time with his girlfriend, the proud prostitute Mia, to feel he can
square it against whatever mockery his mother might present against it, and
gain the foothold of a mother having to realize her claim on her son is itself
going to have to be adjusted—even, potentially, subjected to the harrowing
sidelining of becoming secondary. This is all he could possibly get from her,
though, as when Mia challenges him on why he lets himself be ridiculed by
his mother, his response to her is simply fervor: staking any more than some
presupposition against his mother requites him back into simply being her
hardest defender.
But even as Crystal fits back into her Thailand operation, exhaling smoke as
casually and confidently in her spacious hotel room as a dragon nestled in its
adopted den, or admiring young men’s muscles like chops served before her,
she has made a missstep: as warned, the Thai climate is no longer one
where cops can be killed, and the best move from her would have been to
have spent less time repossessing and luxuriating, and more time reconciling
and preparing. What has changed is ancestors and ancestral traditions,
represent not so much something that is being dissipated as a country sways
urban, but being recovered, having strength lent to it, as people once again
are finding something most true about themselves as a race, in customs
ostensibly unchanged for generations. The movie paints this as sanity, a
slow return to decency—the ways of villages and country life are beginning
to speak again. But it admires that what it at least as much is, is about a
capacity for righteous revenge that whatever milieu it is slowly preparing
itself to replace, would be stopped short by. You for sure like the cop in this
film, Chang, the representative and embodiment of this renewed spirit, when
he asks his daughter’s babysitter about what she prepared his daughter for
dinner—he respects the sweet sitter, and he means his payment to feel well
earned, a tribute to her (it’s the movie that would have us contrast this
payment with the exchange of money made at the beginning of the film,
which was for drugs). But your admiration for his penchant to respect the
oftenoverlooked but valuable is more than curbed, when proper payment for
not seeing becomes the loss of your eyeballs, and for stubbornness, the loss
of your life. For sure around him if we were comporting a colorful scarf,
sunglasses, and carrying ’tude, we’d lose all such in a hurry: there are two
that do this in this film, and neither ends up doing very well. Otherwise he’d
grab whatever conventional tool in his near vicinity, and use it to instruct us
on some respect—no doubt involving some permanent maiming. And as for
his second in command, there’s lust in his eyes, craving: we feel it, and it’s
repellent.
Chang slays Crystal for her egregious presumptions on an intrinsically
modest people, and here is as sure in what he does as many Russians are
becoming in their attitudes towards homosexuals, or British are becoming in
their hardline intolerance of porn, or Americans are becoming in their
universal cheeringon of athletes having their careers cut off brutally for
being exposed as cheaters. If he’s a god, I insist he’s a god to fear, not one to
welcome into our lives as someone doing necessary cleansing, however
sometimes hard to watch, as his executions are often performed before us,
demanding our assent. But at least for Julian, his killing stroke to her neck
stills her so he can do something indecent but which makes sense—putting
his hand inside her womb, as the child in him nestles along maternal
warmth, freed from complications, like incest, or envelopment. This is what
he needed from his mother—close proximity, warmth, safety—and his
cunning, intuitive, brash act here might even helped service a huge wound of
his own. And it is true to what I think Chang actually represents that these
hands which were ineffectual as weapons but effectual in obtaining
compensation for a parent’s abandonment, may in the end have been severed
from him. What really gets Chang’s goat, is what is at issue with any parent
who would spank a child senseless: a child presumes.
The Conjuring
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide
to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going
to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who
would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example?
The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New
England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian
estate, that a singleincome truck driver with some savings can afford?
Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father—Roger Perron—would
get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs,
we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife
accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might
yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy
traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really, a kingdom—
multimillionaires might blanche at trying to acquire, while at a time when
even those a scale up from truckdrivers probably can't even afford a runt
house and are surely just renting, like runt peasants of old.
Normally, I think it's likely that if everyday sort of people are presented to
us in film, we're more likely to identify with them, and wish ourselves more
akin to whatever more possessed—cooler—characters are also about. Not so
true with this film, though, as Ed and Lorraine Warren—the paranormal
experts—are about as chastised and wary as we tend to be. They are the type
who when they describe their wedding night sex, sound like those who if
they added a few extra raisons in with their porridge would feel like they've
made a guilty trespass, with pleasure beyond that, something they're now
permanently apart from. They are the type who can make their basement into
a hold for a Dante's Inferno worth of evilpossessed artifacts, each one a
trauma of a whole family (at least) being slaughtered, and have it not feel
like they have too much to be concerned about. There's a kind of immunity
to further harm, it would seem, if you go about like as if you've already
ingested your life's portioned quantity of it before you've even seen much
grey hair reflected back at you in the mirror. If life has poisoned you near
mortally when you're still at the point where you should still resonate
optimism and promise, all the demonic uglies will part around you in
thorough disinterest and seek preferable prey—something that will empower
you as if a pillar they've got to nonetheless still recognize and be
inconvenienced by in their having to go around, and a lesson which also felt
right in ifyouingestyourselfwithmalariait'slikelyyou'regoingtobe
okay World War Z. The Devil is interested in those who affront by being
ripe with life—not, that is, with you.
The Perron family is that, however. With their large brood, pet dog,
ambitious home, and pretentions to being entirely selfsufficient and nuclear,
they're the postwar American dream. And so they're exactly the sort the
Devil would chase down even if they didn't set up shop in one of his Earthly
abodes. This is effectively what happens in the film, by the way—someone's
being chased down. Only in this film it's after what one person in particular
has achieved for herself: the mother, Carolyn. She has achieved a glorious
family, with her favorite life moment being a time with them at the beach,
with it already clear to her that with them she had everything she'd ever
wanted. This moment is used to lend strength to her when it looked like she
was going to go all witch, but it is also the one that ensured her a regressed,
beautyshunted, generationolder woman would afflict her by trying to undo
it as well. The great beast in this film is simply a mother's mother. We don't
traffic in psychology which once had the momentum and the guts to face it,
but when pretty much every mother has a child, she has simultaneously
something all her own as well as a cruel visit by someone—her mother—
telling her to dispatch it, slit its throat or beat it senseless, and come back
fully to her. It's near every woman's experience, as she desists against her
mother's need to continue lifelong supplying her her own unmet needs for
attention and love, and instead presumptively chases down her own; and it's
something science andsonotjustfolklore has fortunately pinned down as
an actual existing thing we all have to reckon with—specifically, the
postpartum.
Few women talk about it, but it's something nearly all women near at
conscious level come to know. And which their guys will no doubt remain
oblivious to, as women decide sharing would show themselves devils to
faces that will never, ever, understand, and remove them from life anchors
needed to compact the great acquisition of their own family down. So
couples go about their childblessed, married lives, never shorn of near
justified mockery, represented by what lies beneath. She's out there, though.
Your spurned mother is out there. And from unaddressed quarters in places
you have the good sense to be wary of, she's hoping still to hatch her
requisition for your love and the full loss of everything you preferred to have
lent your love to.
P.S. One of the comforts in the film is in its instructing us on how much
better it is to desist in anything hubris, and instead join convention. We've
got two paranormal researchers ... who bow completely to Catholic tradition.
It's like they're not so much aberrant as they are representative, of what a
church has taken seriously for centuries before the modern fuckyou. They're
all fidelity, that is. And in this film, along with being—tenementlike—
amongst a crowd of other people, an extended family rather than selfishly
nuclear, doesn't this feel like the safe place to be? That is, when the Catholic
church agrees with the researchers—seems of the same base perspective and
wavelength—don't we feel sorry for those who were never baptized and
have now got to depend on leniency to not be left to being tortured and soul
fucked by a scaryasshit assassin, in complete sadistic control?
I'm not a Catholic, and in fact on my own time read the presumptuous, self
satisfying John Updike, who would seem to support every selfpleasure,
every Iloveyouhoneybutyourconcernsandneedsarenotexactlybeing
factoredhere orgasm, that would make a Catholic fret and recoil from upon
witnessing, but this film will move me to cross myself a bit more in public, I
suspect. I think I'm going to need to have some of the demonpossessed—
even if only the dumber ones—presume me one of their own. I'm just one
brick amongst a heraldic company of others. Don’t tell me all alone I might
be sandstone serendipitous sculpture!
The Wolverine
It may be that what Wolverine would need to recover from dealing with foes
on the scale of a Magneto or a Dark Phoenix, is find himself amidst an
environment where no one he comes across looks like he or she’d present
much of a problem to that great big bear we encounter at the beginning. It’s
a pisser that that venom woman can spit into him a spider that cancels his
healing, because otherwise the movie looked like one for Wolverine to
remind himself he could reasonably just vacation himself through an
onslaught of angry swords, guns, and knives. Truly, other than this one
deadly ability from the venom woman, mutants here seem so downscaled—
any ordinary guy, good with a sword, would seem just as much a problem.
So if all he needed to get past Jean, was to get some soothing attention from
a humbled, lovely girl, who you know is incapable of even making a loud
gesture let alone bursting into a fiery, taunting, redheaded demonwoman,
then this trip to Japan was just what he needed. Only, this environment was
one that could infest him with a parasitic tick—the spider—he couldn’t
possibly have worried about incurring while living caveman in Alaskan
woods (btw, when he removed it, were you too thinking of the slicing open
of a salmon and the removal of guts? … Maybe I did so out of fidelity to
that great bear.). And because of it, while Japan might requit him back to
women—near literally through baby steps—it still reminds him of how
badly human beings can suck.
Think on what he had invited upon himself here. He had once saved the life
of a man—Yashida—from nuclear explosion. After this, he had the presence
of mind to realize that this man’s honor might still be vulnerable—his fellow
officers had harikaried themselves, in ritual recognition of their end—and
manages to refute his offering up of his family heirloom sword in a
sublimely honorsalvaging, appropriate way: he makes it seem that his
keeping it is just his taking care of it for awhile until he comes back—after
his eventual death—to reclaim it, a plausible enough scenario. What a
sublime offering he gives this young officer, and Yashida makes use of the
rest of his life to become a great industrial leader and the father of a great
clan. What he does to Wolverine in recompense is beyond the pale. He lures
Wolverine to his home in Japan, tugging once more on how brilliantly being
from a honorable culture can be used to inconvenience anyone with a sense
of decency. Then when Wolverine gets there, he tugs once more: not so
much by security reacting to him like he might be a threat—though this was
a way of soiling someone you are supposed to venerate—but by ensuring he
gets a monstrouslythorough scrubdown before meeting him, which can
play as just Japanese custom but also as someone using excusable means to
show you through your constant honoring of expectation, that your proper
role is as a supplicant: with your suffering yet one more inconvenience, how
sure are you that your most profound instinct is actually not to submit? His
piece de resistance is of course to instruct Wolverine that his curse is to be a
warrior without a lord … and so ostensibly that what he was waiting for was
not just to be sundered of his perpetual youth and healing abilities but to be
essentially bidden to do so by a lord he had surely been lost without.
We wouldn’t much admire Wolverine if he didn't finally put up roadblocks
to this manipulative idiot exactly then and there. The whole thing plays a bit
like someone taunting someone out of envy whom he knows he’s going to
have to play underhanded in order to actually get to “submit.” We can
imagine ourselves personally tripping up our wellearned defenses against
people in his situation, and are in fact fully bonded to Wolverine when he
knows he’s going to have to rip apart a good chunk of Japan to achieve some
selfesteemsalvaging, fuckyouforthat pushback—but now without this
being at all an easy thing to achieve ... Fuck! how did we get ourselves in
this situation? It must have been stupid, stupid, stupid me! (fists slammed
repeatedly against our heads.)
The revenge motive does work in this film, and we cheer his getting his
healing powers back like we would a recovery of our own after a masterful,
humiliating play on our own openness and gullibility. And we’re angry that
the film connives yet some other thing that can best his healing power—the
poisoncauldroned arrows. Really, we just wanted him to flip all those
arrowed to him, to him, so he could mince them like fan blades; and for the
rest in the film, melt through any foe presented to him as quickly and easily
as through butter.
Those who made the film seem stunningly unaware of it, but the idea that
anyone should buy into pressing arguments that it is time for them to die, is
given pretty powerful refutation by the setting of the film. In a flashback, we
saw a good part of a Japanese city destroyed at a time when aggressive
nations were taking their defeat as a sign that their cultural history was over
—that it was time for them to die (indeed, during WW2 Germany's last days
tens of thousands committed suicide—the largest mass suicide in history).
Yet the movie is mostly set at a time when the city has long past taking even
this in stride. Sometimes the harridon that is preying on you finally desists,
not for your finally confronting it, ripping its influence away from your
heart, but for its having finally had its fill, and falling off, satiated. If this is
what happened with him and Jean, maybe he should desist being the warrior
—as as admirable a course as this seemed for him—and head back to better
know his young new Japanese girlfriend. He might go through a long lovely
spell with her, and be totally demon free.
Pacific Rim
The movie Amadeus argued that when a protective, tolerant environment is
nurtured, genius that otherwise might have been cowed from developing,
can gain the confidence it needs to come to life. Pacific Rim argues the
same. If Earth is up against an alien force that'll crush it unless it reaches the
pinnacle of the one thing that has been instrumental in blocking it—the drift
between two wellmatched individuals—then relationships, deep bonds, are
going to need to be given the allowance needed to develop and ripen.
If it wants to die, that is, it would replace the one program that got humanity
excited in its ability to match the adapting alien invaders—the Jaeger
program—with one that feels antiinnovative rather than innovative, one that
substitutes a you'reluckytohavethisjob environment for one where all
humanity felt part of a team. You'd build a wall, that is, where people dying
while working on it is both bad and good news (someone died—but left an
opening!). And which when busted through by an alien in one hour,
simultaneously both dispirits and gives a lift: One looks at the alien's
physical resemblance to the Sydney Opera House it incurs immediately after
breaking through, and you think not just of its mockery of it but of how great
if would be if conjured now was something on our side which more aptly
responded to it.
It is met by just that Jaeger. And what begins a sequence where the rulersin
charge start scrambling, revealing themselves as selfconcerned elites and no
longer being listened to, is for sure some sense that its young pilot—Chuck
Hansen—makes such quick work of it, and conveys authoritatively that all
we needed were better pilots: alone he makes whatever peopleabating
arrogance the wallidea still possessed, wilt even further. While the film errs,
in my judgment, in not quite giving this thoroughly arrogant Chuck Hansen
his due, it remains true that it is in good part his rightful arrogance here
which shoulders out of the way any further contesting that the remaining
Jaeger program is really all that humanity has got left. They were quit by the
same kind of arrogance they were trying to abrogate to themselves, a deadly
"Et tu, Brute." But as perfect as it was to have this vital young bulldog beset
upon these decrepid autocrats, who maybe all along have coveted the idea of
being left alone in luxurious bunkers while the rest of humanity got crushed,
it is precisely this—bullying, intimidation—which is antithetical to the Hong
Kong Jaeger abode he is due to inhabit.
He's the best pilot, but there's a sense immediately upon encountering the
environment that presumes in Hong Kong that his less pleasant aspects more
make him rather than Raleigh, the exposed artifact the place near wishes it
could rebury. What Admiral Stacker Pentecost is presiding over, is a base
where you respect whatever leads to accomplishments; and especially as he
patrols down the line of the four remaining Jaegers, slowing people down to
individually consider the crafts themselves and the crews commandeering
them, he makes clear that this can come from phenomenon that might
require a bit of work to see as exceptional. The sense you have is that even if
the Chinese crew had relationships with the basketballs they always carried
around that seemed grossly fetishistic, that even if the Russians never
relaxed out of their stern intensity—like, ever—the respect you'd have for
them would envelope everything they presented to you in the most
appreciative manner. Pentecost doesn't direct Raleigh to attend carefully to
the genius of his scientists—in fact when Raleigh to some extent dismisses
them by saying "this is your research division," his response isn't to defend
them but to acknowledge that "things have changed." But implicitly he does,
by how his being around them doesn't do anything to force them to quail any
of their very loud peculiarities (it's funny how even their individual attempts
to show themselves likewise finding the other scientist's mannerisms and
arguments bonkers, very much work counter to purpose). It's not that he's
vested in seeing them as mad scientists, himself the calm commander
acknowledging the mad idiosyncrasies at work in the labs, but that he knows
that these are men who have had to have had enormous fight in them to have
remained, despite the abuse they've certainly had to shoulder, so still
confident in themselves and fresh to life (they love having people share in
their cool adventures—it seems to trump every other consideration). And
from these types, even from just a couple of them, he knows you can get
giant results.
Their greatest result comes mostly from Pentecost's not cowing one of them
from doing something "rock star" on his own, which he saw no possibilities
in. He's permissive, and an adroit protector of anyone who has demonstrated
his or her worth—even if this meant disobeying orders—but still of limited
vision—the father who can't quite see what his kids are capable of until in
fidelity to their own growing confidence and sense of what they actually
need, they disobey and show him. And he's not quite in fidelity to something
the film is quite explicit in trying to communicate: his singular leadership,
his understanding of himself as a fixed point, his tendency to encourage one
person while discouraging the other, doesn't lend to the kind of powerful
dynamism you'll find with a pairing, and in fact partakes of the bluntness of
a wall. It's as if unlike Raleigh, who one never really understands why he
could go solo (something to do with him having such an enlarged feminine
as well as a masculine half?) or what was really so distinguishing about his
ability to do so (do most Jaegers lose a pilot in a fight?—it wouldn’t seem
so), the reason he could commander a Jaeger solo was surely because he was
never really built to be on the same standing as other human beings in the
first place. The only way he could ride with another, it would seem, is if the
other knows he’s mastered—which doesn't really equate to the cooperative
and equal, twohemisphere brain analogy, and more like ego making quick
work of id. But he's still effectively protection for individuals to eventually
reach the sort of deep bonding you sense they would be happiest and most
fruitful effecting. Something akin to very wellmatched marriages between
remarkable individuals, in fact, and a giant evolution from the pairings we'd
heretofore seen, which would work more because of what they already share
with one another passively from DNA or shared childhoods rather than what
they might eventually learn as adults to contribute to each other.
The scientists—the mathematician, Gottlieb, and the biologist, Dr. Newton
Geizsler—know each other's tendencies so well, not just because of their
close proximity and because they're otherwise likely friendless, but because
each of them has with integrity taken the subject matter they are most
interested in to similar climactic heights. When they come together in a
mindbond, you know it’ll be a good one that’ll produce very important
results because they’re not just inherently simple people who can come
together as readily but byitself as uselessly as two simple molecules or lego
bricks, but very complex but diverse, spirited matter that once finally paired
might take on a load beyond what other minds could handle and beget a
miraculous breakthrough. You might say that if all the other sorts of pairings
were type one to three, theirs was type four—which would of course make
what happens between Raleigh and Mako Mori humanity’s type five:
our endgame Exterminator.
Previous to Mako’s pairing with Raleigh, memories are shown as if they are
all laid together in a neat sequence: all settled, and a bit bland for it—a
newsreel you’ve seen a million times that you spin through to get on with
fresh material. This is even true with what incurs between the scientists. But
it isn’t true with Mako, who interjects into Raleigh a memory sequence
where a specific memory resists any such pressingdown, arrogantly
piercing any tendency to make a settled story of it with its assertive cry for
further attendance. It isn’t at first supposed to be true with any pilot—as
Raleigh says, first bonds are rough. It’s a sign of inexperience that a pilot
“chases the rabbit”—that is, unruly undealt with memories that draw you to
them. But still the film suggests that usually the way towards control is not
so much to deal with these memories, tend to them, but rather to as quickly
as possible learn to subjugate them—as if the best bonds the program had
known had come from people who could be dissuaded from thinking much
about what had constituted them. Though he seems to appreciate that
something better could be forged, Pentecost fears taking it on, believing
there simply isn’t time for it. He is moved ultimately to give her a chance
mostly in fidelity to a promise he once made to her, but he should have
recognized that he had someone on hand who could finally make it less of an
issue. That is, though it turns out that Pentecost sought Raleigh out because
he could commandeer a Jaeger solo, the film makes clear that he should
have been staking him out for the magic he could forge with another person.
When Raleigh first meets her, we get a quick but clear offering of what will
make them develop into such a great team. They’re not afraid to test and
challenge: she assesses him immediately as not what she had imagined, and
he responds just as quick … in Japanese, as a nod to how the fault, the
aberrance, might actually be in her. But there’s humor—agreeability—in the
situation, the earned touché, and Raleigh rests with that to make sure the
encounter becomes mostly a friendly, even charming, well met. She doesn’t
fall back from her assessment that he isn’t really right to pilot the Jaeger, but
when, after he requests it, she admirably forthrightly tells him so, he makes
sure it doesn’t lead to grievance but for grounds for subsequent
consideration on her part. Importantly, when he says she might be right—he
means it, and is visibly affected, even hurt, by it, before he regroups, which
shows his respect for her ability to assess him and the importance that he let
it in. But at the same time he has strong faith in himself, in all the
conclusions come from constant testing he’s been through, and begins the
very important process for her to think that if you’re too much perfect
pattern it’s a perfection that comes from being denied your rightful due
acquaintance with life.
If he touches her here, it’s going to cause quite the stir. And with her
becoming obsessed with him, with her challenging of him taking on some of
the tone of someone who’s lashing out at everybody else is really just an
expression of her increased dissatisfaction with herself, and of Pentecost of
someone who is quickly sliding away from wellearned love into precarious
disrespect, he has unwound her from her overattachment to what had been
virtuous in her long spell of respectful abeyance. Pentecost decides to make
her Raleigh’s partner, but his consideration was concurrent with her
beginning to insist this must be her role as convincingly as a great daemon
new through the rift. It turns out she isn’t ready to be quickly processed into
a Jaeger pilot, but also that what Pentecost could only see as a disaster—her
early trauma truncating the influence of her bond partner and dominating her
while in control of a deadly giant—is viewed by someone she has the
capacity to form the deepest bond with, if he can be made to part of even
this. Having scared everyone to death, everyone in the base parts from her,
but isolation from them but guides the creation of a quiet cocoon where she
and Raleigh can reconnect after each one has witnessed and experienced
what has mostly constituted their current identities. This disaster developed
into a miracle you’ll hardly ever see in crisis times—a profound
improvement in understanding and earned trust. And one senses in
exultation after a hardwon victory, that here between Raleigh and Mako
you’ve got a development, a creation of a mature bond, you’d stake against
any engineer’s “fifty diesel muscles per muscle strand” to show that
humanity’s fate ultimately lies in its capacity to take on the hardest
assignment, even in pressing times. Humanity wasn't ready to take it to the
aliens, until all prudence had been shed.
This is the End, and Summer SelfSurrender
I saw This is the End again, and the thing I noticed more this time is how
scary the film ends up becoming. The lady beside me twitched as if herself
hit, when a car crashes through a guy on the street, flipping him rapidly
upwards and away to pavement as but a smashedup carapace due to be
crunched into even more ignominious road splatter. The film picks up again
into something really disturbing, when a devil with a massive spearing penis
subjugates Jonah Hill into a rape victim. And afterwards it gets worse, when
Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel find themselves without it realistically seems,
any means to innocently show the kind of selfsacrifice and notself love that
would get them by surprise into heaven: Craig Robinson had seemingly
claimed all possible avenue to demonstrate yourself sincerely repentant after
knowing that this is the avenue to abscond yourself indulgently into heaven,
with his amazing "take your panties off!" charge on the Lord of the Rings
Balrog thing. This means that while they see many others taken safely away
to a further lifetime of new experiences and shedding of all that lied past,
they'll be left alone, with unloved destitutes without any fate, denied even
the pleasure of knowing someone intended this barren fate for them: they
were just passed completely by as a narcissistic selfloving judge sought out
his same amongst the innumerable chastising ponderous before him.
What happens to Rogen and Jay at this point of the film is pathetic, though
not with this saying anything undue about either of them. It's a hard thing to
be a selfpossessed, selfrespecting individual, someone who doesn't just
give in when someone powerful draws down on them; and it comes close to
impossible when someone forces you back into the experiential state of an
infant about to be abandoned for good by his parent. Rogen and Jay will
clearly do anything now to still have a chance at being pickedthere are no
limits, and you can tell. And this has nothing really to do with their belief
that God can be trusted, but owing to the intolerable fear of being left to rot,
while so many others are drawn off to God and a halo of eternal happiness. I
know they ostensibly are those who finally learned to be true friends to one
another, but, really, who they are at the end of the film is the guy who poked
his head into Franco's house earlier, willing to tittyfuck or be tittyfucked, if
only they'd let him in. If they were selfpossessed, they would have
remained in many ways who they were earlier. Both of them, we note, are at
heart natural skeptics, questioners, doubters, who serve as constant reality
checks for friends who might be becoming lost to themselves. Even with the
Devil clearly possessing Hill, Rogen is still calling out his friends on their
arrogant presumption of the Trinity; and his inability not to show when he
thinks someone is sounding crazy even when it compromises a moment
when it would feel good to be completely agreeable to a bro, comes clearly
through when Franco delineates his absurd plotting for the finish of a
proposed Pineapple Express 2.
Rogen is reluctant to agree with Jay that Franco's party is full of assholes
and that his house "is a bit much," but it certainly isn't clear that this is just
his deluding himself while the "hipster" outsider Jay has here kept his cool.
At the finish, Jay admits he was afraid to join Rogen in LA, and it is possible
that what this party is is just an LA that would have brought a wrath upon
itself for too closely arrogating the assurance and confident selfregard that a
jealous Athenian god would have assumed for herself. Or himself ... one
wonders if the reason we are shown so much of the various demons' gigantic
phalluses owes as some kind of quitting response to Franco's own sculpture
one. In retrospect we realize that not one of the partygoers was chosen into
heavenit's the only way they wouldn't have credited Jay's accounting of
what had just happened to them. And for a moment Franco, nestled in his
cozy "throne" chair, with his whole company of grateful, happy, beautiful
friends by his side, for good reason draws Rogen to doubt what he might
have seen or even turn his back knowingly on Jay: two presentations of
considerable power have just been handed him, and considering the former
involved people dying horribly and a night sky filled with pockets of
beaming "spaceship" lights, it's to the massive credit of what this LA has
going for it that when it is feeling at its most selfassured, there is genuine
reason for a momentary rethink of who best to ally oneself with. God, from
whatever pantheon s/he belongs, is, quite incredibly, going to have to amp
things up a bit to close the deal.
This, s/he certainly does, and the Seth and Jay we encounter at the end might
wish for themselves each day a plate of their favorite cookies and a date with
their favorite band, but one thing they won't do is be meaningfully
distinguishable from any of the other heaven drones impossibly happy to yet
be alive, ready to do as bidden, and willing to see Master in any which way
s/he pleases. As Tony Stark remarks in the Avengers, "historically, not
awesome." And so in good faith to what Rogen normally offers, I offer my
own amendment to the film where rather than Franco at first being drawn to
heaven but losing this prize for being a poor winner, Seth loses it for
considering that as grateful as he now is, that God as much as Jay should
probably still have tried harder to get to like the people at the party ...
Michael Cera's butthole indeed was as adorable as we all imagined, and the
rest just seemed to be having a good time.
I originally thought to write this second take on the film as a preamble to a
discussion on the Internment, another film from the summer where we're
supposed to just be happy for two guys making it into some utopian space,
considering the hellish wraths they'd be exposed to if they didn't make it in.
The hells are about the same, actually. Owen Wilson's life as a mattress
salesman, where if he isn't perennially sharp and obedient he'll be outside in
a clown suit in forty degree weather, would have drawn him for sure into
alcoholism and very likely at some point, suicide. He for sure, never, would
go out on a date, as befouled for being a loser as the plagueridden were in
hencetimes. But I think you can pretty much transplant my thoughts on This
is the End onto this film. For my purposes what it still serves is to show how
humiliating it is that the god in This is the End is never really questioned, for
just like the Google one all he really does to convince others' eager
acquiescence and surrender of selfpride, is show himself the only safe
house available while the world underneath pretty much everyone, crumbles
away. Then he counts on you dressing him so He's The Great Human
Benefactor; and you do.
It's certainly a trend this summer to have Utopia offered to people, but it isn't
always allowed to stay in a light favorable to its own preferred selfregard.
Oblivion, for example, ends up showing its own up. Yet even though it
surely wasn't its purpose, Oblivion still suggested how much we'll hide in the
safe abode, regardless of how much integrity we'd assume for ourselves if
we braved living on the more tenuous outside. I know, for example, that
Tom Cruise's initial digs were certainly something I am longing for. So too
his sense the perimeters of what each day might expect, and the portioned
human bountyhis adult friendship and love affair with his wifethat
awaited him at the end of each day. How sure am I that I would be able to
addle on over to the outside, if each day there meant being bludgeoned by
something sizeable you might have to account into your awareness of
things? As an attempt at recompense, I might dream of being absolved into
known grids.
Given our current clinging inclinations and fear that risk might mean
abandonment, WallE's efforts to nudge us outside of pattern and safety
seems lovely therapy that we should be glad to have incurred into our
constitution. Jerry McGuire's bold sinking us into someone's failure and
outside status for most if its film, however, has become something way too
undistilled for our rattled tempers to handle ... I wouldn't look for it any
longer on subsequent top onehundred AFI listsunless of course that and
Forrest Gump turn out to be two of God's favorites.
This is the End
Emma Watson makes an appearance in This is the End, and it's to scold Jay
Baruchel on his betterthanthouness, and subsequently later to axe off the
top of a giant scrotum statue that camps mockproudly in James Franco's
fortress dwelling, as she goes raving femmefatal on these jumpy boys. She
isn't meant to come off badly; in fact the film wants to make it seem like
it's deferring to her. But basically she's one who can't be included within the
boys' play; and it can, and sorta is, a way of revenging yourself on
someone. Like Kate Middleton, she's become too high stature to be other
than someone you part your way around, like a school of small fish around a
shark, when she's predated herself upon your premises. This film's reminder
of this status was probably invisible to her; in fact I think she thought she
was including herself in with those expected to bear some of the ribbing, and
therefore also part of the fun. But if she wanted the film to force people to
make more of an effort to treat her as someone worthy of engaging in some
truly respectful, that is, not beyond genuine critiquing and in a less stand
offish way, to have cooperated it wouldn't have used the film's "rapey vibe"
joke as a plant to really just set her off and jet her out of the film.
Rather, rather than the safe humor enabled by keeping it to Tatum Channing
alone, it would have challenged us to think on why we were so disquieted by
how they were willing to show themselves depicted when she ended up
following Tatum out on a leash as one of canniballeader McBride's zipped
up gimp bitches. Think on it. We wouldn't have fretted because we would
have found ourselves thinking – "this could end your film career”; we would
have done so because since there is absolutely no way we're ever going to
not want to see Watson as film royalty since she's one of those serving as a
godtype starlett fully immune to disposal that keeps us feeling small,
temporary, and therefore unpretentious, somehow we're going to have to
live with an image so much more impossible to chase out of our heads than
Middleton's caughtunaware boob shots. How many in the film audience
would have thought that if she let herself be shown in this position she's
dumbly submitted herself to a further collective pile on? That is, to what
happened to actresses caught out in the films before, notably with Elisabeth
Berkeley, and as was at issue and palpably for a moment at hand in Seth
Macfarlane's assaulting query at the Oscars to all of stillacting Hollywood's
accomplished actresses who'd ever for continued relevance bared a boob?
And yet regardless we're still keeping you in place, even in a position where
hereto cognitive dissonance and upset would meant our immediately
needing to chase anyone like you out, is what we could not at some level be
aware of. For some of us it'd be a spark to reflect bravely on – why. And
from this, some subsequent work toward counting her just as much worth
dignity but on the same human level as ourselves.
The film is ostensibly about the end of life, but to me it's about how to best
spend time while in an ostensible sort of purgatory. Kind of like Casablanca
is ostensibly about that, when in reality they're both about how to spend time
in a place that you'd want no way out of. New life comes to James Franco's
castle home and ongoing party, just like all newcomers find their way to
Sam's suave longstanding cafe, from a world that has become increasingly
hostile: Germany has crashed through Paris's gates in Casablanca, but here
still, with people taking swipes at Rogen’s film career while greeting Jay at
the airport, and with the "mean shopkeeper lady" scaring him from even
attempting to buy a chocolate bar while sojourning to a grocery store, things
on the outside are making doing anything while exposed to it other than full
immersion buffering it, an increasingly unlikely thing as well. Hosting is left
to someone who knows to let everyone come in and find their place and do
their business, while never leaving people without someone who still will
conduct affairs. There's some underhanded dealings on the outskirts of the
place, and, we can assume, some rowdier characters, but the center is the
confident host and his robust rotund pianoplaying entertainer, keeping
things humming, pleasingly tipsy and teased.
When hell descends, it's rather as if the boys had retreated back to Seth
Rogan's place, home for xboxing fun and a lower scale sort of ribaldry –
boys wrestling and "I drank my pee" jokes – in a noticeably confined space.
No longer is it so much a place to spend much time in, and the outside world
of flames and awful happenings seems to not have much of a fortress wall to
give backtalk and bulwark to: the sense you have when one of them steps
out, is of someone leaving their pitched tent into a ranging tempest forest
fire ... it does feel brave as shit when Craig Robinson ascents to entering it.
And so there is a sense that the rest of the film is about dogging towards a
mechanism by which a space sort of akin to the lost safe James Franco
partyworld can be unlocked, while meanwhile entertaining us with the full
possible supply of fun and jokes that can be squeezed out by a bunch of
quickwitted guys caught in some place quickly being besieged by their own
excretions. At the end, when they all ultimately leave it, it feels like they
were forced to ... the “outhouse” had packed brown and was pushing them
out.
The relief from leaving it, almost makes once again meeting Danny McBride
a thrill, even as we're understanding him as a packleader cannibal. And so
too even James Franco's being eaten, as afterall this links us back to the
party where he actually suggested this happening to him in a sequel to
Pineapple Express. Mind you, we were already primed to like McBride. In a
movie world ultimately built of people taking pleasure in refuge, he actually
exults into a status of someone who isn’t going to let anything from the
outside cage him. When he greets his former friends, it feels appropriate that
he seems almost to have forgotten them – "You guys are still alive?" He can
do the shocking thing of cutting ties when appropriate and moving on, which
is a miracle in a world designed to make people want to cling to the familiar.
No wonder his peers were shocked that he’d leave them so totally, and no
wonder even after trying to shoot them they let him go untouched. However
much we get a spell of a great purgatory in this film there's of course no
Divine or Fiend, but this was unanticipated and unfamiliar enough to for a
moment seem an outerworldly visitation.
The Bling Ring
"Bling Ring" ends focusing mostly on Emma Watson's character, Nicki.
When the enjoyable world she had participated in ends, she gets sucked back
into her mother's embrace, her cult, that heretofore she had found successful
means to quarantine as something only to be endured while at home. Her
own escapades have ended with her mother having her back entire, and even
if she talks back to her, gets angry at her for repeatedly insisting on inserting
herself into her interview with the Vanity Fair reporter, we see she's due to
become as much the harmless clown as her mother is. Harmless, because
however much she might climb in this world her family is by no means
poor or without resources they are made to seem so much trapped in a
disassociated mindset, poor things petting their preciouses, they're more like
pilgrims caught enspelled that the more sane world pilgrims may have to
temporarily reckon in but mostly will shake their heads at and step by, as
they interact with adult matter that still undergirds world affairs. There's also
Marc, who we also focus on, and are made to understand as someone who
was grabbed into a situation there's no way he could resist, and will now
have to spend having his temporary blingring enrapture cleansed by four
very brutal years in prison, hopefully keeping himself together so that when
he's free he's thoroughly sobered but not spiritually snuffed out.
The film turns a cold shoulder, that is, to the actual ringleader of the Bling
Ring, Rebecca. When Marc gives a look to her in the court room, knowing
she'll be remote from him but hoping she might just not be, it's like she's
been revealed as an alien slitherer deposited amongst teenage life, blithely
unconcerned if what she made of her surroundings interjected a poison into
the community that stalled the social fabric. She's just a few steps away from
being someone a TMZ or even a Vanity Fair reporter might turtle before if
s/he had to make light of: Do you yet remain someone who's propriety keeps
from considering things I could engage that could upend your positioning in
a conversation and make you my plaything? The film lets her seem someone
so cold she would draw people to her to fulfill her own ends, all the while
intending to leave them as scapegoats while she scoots off to a foreign
locale. Someone almost unfathomably awful, who is incapable of remorse
and immune to any impulse to oblige us by compromising herself so we can
imagine her as either chastened or harmless, and thereby laugh at or maybe
sympathize with but otherwise quickly regroup from and head on with our
regular life. Someone who demonstrates that some children deserve to be
tried as adults: no one is left feeling sorry for her four years in prison. And
indeed her fouryear term might not be enough: we may need eight to fortify
ourselves to her next invasion.
It can indeed be difficult to reveal who she is in this film to show she does
deserve to be taken in almost near opposite. I am drawn to think of her as a
conquistador who's come upon the Aztecs, or any European who found
themselves on an island of dodo birds, in the way she shows this whole rich
land of Hollywood homes is ripe for the taking. Like only one hundred
conquistadors were required to claim a whole civilization, like dodos were
almost like walking alreadycooked turkeys to their European discoverers,
Rebecca shows that five kids are sufficient to make it seem as if all
Hollywood has been used as somebody else's boarding house. But the fact
that Hollywood has become a place where cars and homes are so
unprotected that their plundering comes across as innocence for the first time
plucked, should ground the more mature amongst us to realize Rebecca in a
more fair light. The sense you have is that somehow all of American's sense
of vulnerability and fear and violence – that we know is everywhere – has
been quarantined away from these affluent quarters into the world of Middle
America. MidAmerica has been left a stronghold suffering from torments
from within and from without, which explains why when at the finish we see
signs of people who actually populate it (in the courthouse guards, mostly),
there's not an ounce of rosy life in any grim one of them. (And pity Marc,
who when he is shown in the bus with fellow prisoners, comes across as a
last sad twilight of stillcheery rosé before a remorseless term of sole stone
grey.) It’s been going on for enough time, we suddenly realize, that
Hollywood could learn to assert as a reasonably confident norm something
which had been unthinkable: there is no need to lock your doors, for we
know we have no reason to fear intrusion. And so this shocking innocence
comes across as the grossest vulgarity; another status symbol to show that
being rich means being in a literally different universe from the poor.
Rebecca is portrayed as mostly someone who has evolved to the point that
attitudes built around older realities have slipped away from her first, and so
in this deliberately wrought out world of unchastened innocence she indeed
understands it as a world of accessibility. She isn’t, that is, afloat in some
realm of unreality, but understanding it straight. (Showing Marc this, by the
way, is one of the ways she’s generous to him – a true best friend, with the
first of course being that she immediately apprehended insecure him as
someone fun to know.) She’s the first into this land of open resources, and
knows to make full use of it, so her story isn’t about how she robbed
celebrities’ homes but how she cohabited them, fit their world onto hers,
and long enough so that it could be integrated near as blasé hers. I think we
sense that we have a lesson to learn from her; and maybe for some of the
time in their readily and intelligently discerning particular items amongst all
the wealth of stuff (they're familiar with all the items, or at least the clothing
and jewelry, and with plausible justice believe they know how to better
ensemble it than their "owners" do), we take advantage of their being so
engaged to maybe imagine ourselves along with them, plucking an item we
see that they may not yet have claimed, and delighting in it. I’m not saying
that we ever find ourselves as confident as Rebecca, but when Marc slips off
being so apprehensive and learns to chill, I think we’re wondering if we
somehow have been taught a lesson we needed to learn as well; and this is
disorienting.
And when Rebecca sees nothing amiss in taking Paris Hilton’s dog, I don’t
think we so much awaken from an evil spell that might have been partially
cast upon us and see her as the foul snake she surely all the while has been,
but take advantage of a trespass we can trap as surely irredeemably foul, to
cooperate with an evil we may temporarily been loosened from. That is, I
think what makes this rich landscape so plausibly innocent of the trauma
affecting the rest of the nation is a collective agreement on our part to defer
to the rich and powerful, to enable them with privileges appropriate to
emperors from four centuries ago. When we walk amongst their paradise, we
find sign to be angry at them but realize we can’t be drawn – even in these
conditions – to see them downed; a realization which would force us to
realize how much of our awful world is really of our own sad, sick, surely
masochistic, wanting. So us, actually the ones still caught in a kind of spell,
decide at this point in the film to view the kids as having temporarily been
caught in one. They just went on a wild ride which disjoined them from
reality that they would have to sober up from. I think with enfranchising
ourselves at their expense, we’re in the mood to make allowances, and I
think especially with Nicky and Marc, we make them – however much
Nicky is a made a subject of ongoing laughter as she and her family become
a bundle of idiocy.
We know that we were actually taken inside Paris Hilton’s own home in this
movie, and that what we saw up close were her clothes closets and
designated party rooms. I hope that some of us feel sick that thereby there’s
a paul cast over all this film where the rich can draw as close as they want to
us, let us feel their presence, if this is what they’re in the mood for, but it
ever goes the other way it has to be managed so that the rightful norm that
ascent is only by permission of the powerful, is confidently reasserted.
Man of Steel
KalEl doesn't have the very best of upbringings though it is still very,
very good. His Kansas parents genuinely wish him the very best, but
struggle sometimes owing to their own limitations to provide what Kal
El needs, what any kid would need, to in fact become an adult who through
belief in self might just change the world (not impossible: in certain
favorable times times of permission, not times of crisis or war near
loneindividuals in fact do). His father is worried that if his son shows his
super abilities too early, he'll be overwhelmed by how the world would react
to him, and the alarmed world wouldn't have an adult him, to calm them
down some and help them stay sane. And this is sensible, but clearly installs
in KalEl a sense that any time he summons his natural instincts, summoned
along with it is a frustrating grapplehold of restraint that'll frustrate and
infuriate him. His mother will do what she can to calm her son down, but
never quite soothingly confidently, but rather as if, if she isn't particularly
skillful, a genius at calming down her own aroused fears and selfdoubt, her
son will be lost to innertorments and feel all alone in the world. The son
grows up in a world where everything is so heightened. Apparently with the
littlest thing, any understandable natural kid instinct given life, his whole
known universe could go up in smoke, however much he still does have a
mother and father always ready to step in and stomp down some of the
impact. The result of his confounding upbringing is that when KalEl's father
refuses to let his son save him from the tornado, one feels not just sympathy
but anger towards him: don't you know that you've confounded making your
son feel perennially tight with some conviction that his agreeing to cede
himself so totally to you has meant losing you as a father?
No wonder he ends up wandering about spare, terse landscapes awhile
afterwards, working one littlethanks, scarcecontact job after another: he
needs to be in a long zone where his need to temporarily refute his
upbringing all affections is given echo by his surroundings. And
fortunately, he eventually finds company with his original Krypton father,
who is a bath of cushioning natural ease of selfcomportment, and who is
given time to enclose his muchloved son safely within it. From him, and
from allowing himself a good span just to practice and get used to all his
abilities that he has for so long kept underwrap bounding up and arcing
against Earth's atmosphere's kiss with deep space, and the like his son
could stop being someone who looked naturally bound to Christlike
sacrifice himself just to cleanse himself of his Earthparents' expectations of
him as epic, to being a true super man, who not just through physical
abilities has it in him to have a formidable impact on the human race.
It should be noted, that this is what he does do: when he allows himself to be
captured, agrees to have handcuffs placed upon him and without any dis
comportment people aren't taken aback by any physical ability but by his
ability to let himself be humbled, appear humiliated, if it serves a larger
purpose. Yes, some of us have still been raised with enough support and
love to evolve this much maturity, is what he communicates. There is still
hope for Earth.
Many critics find the destruction of good portions of New York really
bothersome in this film, offensive, I'll explain why for me this was not at all
the case. There is a way of experiencing this film, including the alien world
stuff, as really just documenting a normal human life, some good person
born outside of privilege, who's potential to realize himself will ultimately
have to grapple with the fact that our contemporary world isn't one that is
interested in seeing class divides being crossed. I promise you that I actually
experienced the Krypton bit, the prebirth, as something uterine: all the oval
shapes, placental tentacle entities, pools of great significance.... So to me
Superman could have just been an everyman, whose developmental story,
from embryo knowing only a uterine world to a child birthed into a vast
blueskyed "Kansas" cosmos, is the fantastic story everyone experiences,
and which we sometimes attend to document to show how magnificent
and remarkable each and everyone of us is. The everyman version of this
story would have the parents perennially amazed by their child, perhaps
because he was a latebirth, when all hope of it seemed lost. And their belief
that their child will change the world, every really loving parents' difficulty
in accepting that such a beautiful, glorious miracle could ever not just
continue to incrementally grow to affect our collective destiny. And so when
KalEl's fate ties him in with New York, a feeling I had the first moment he
made contact with a Pulitzerprize winner Lois I couldn't help but think
of what New York society would do to him if he was an everyman hoping to
become upwardly mobile in the big city.
Without super powers, it'd recognize him only as someone without an ivy
league background, without establishment connections, and without all the
mannerisms that are causing many of the welltodo to not really be able to
recognize the rest of their human kin as human in the same way they are.
With them, New York would actually kind of do the same. "You're out of
Kansas; your father is a mechanic … this is what we cannot shake as
mattering most; so how now do we account for the fact that your super
abilities and true alien status make us feel silly for still intrinsically
experiencing you this way?" The answer is to make you into a Lebron James
(credit Andrew O'Hehir for this reference), a super athlete we talk all the
time about at the water coolers, but who is never found outside a
circumscribed categorization as some kind of supermachine. He could in
reality become someone who kind of is like Christ in being morally ahead of
a people he was born into, but because recognizing this would mean
crediting that they have something to learn from the Kansasborn and raised
other than some accomplishment of great physique, it'd be consistently
waylaid, in preference for the alwaysavailable greatphysicalfeat bit. He’d
eventually be taken as a moral example, but only when elite society had
decided it was ready to make the American proletariat in general as much as
well, which would happen when it could be done in such a way that it
showed them to be great suffering workhorses, not those who really ought to
be directing the world.
And so what would an everyman do to still have his say in New York? It
wouldn’t matter – he’d have no chance. But what would a superpowered
everyman do?: he’d shock the elite, the establishment, clear some way
amongst them, and start setting up something of his own from where they
had scattered away. The big blast of New York in this film, the buildings
going wither and tether, is a manifestation of what this Superman would do
(figuratively, not literally) when he had to reckon with the big city (yes,
there is a way in which I see the villains as mostly an extension of a universe
that empowers KalEl). He wouldn’t be a Clark Kent, because such a figure
would be only allowed to work mail room, and would never be introduced to
anyone important (Clark Kent’s appearance in this film as someone who’d
work close with prize journalists/editors/publishers, is really just a
momentary substitution of a previous cinematic Superman – Christopher
Reeve – as a cute and expected way of dolling up a legacy picture (The film
had really ended at this point).).
It’s harsh, but this is the only way available to him. If it had been a different
era, the 1920s say, rather than the very 1930slike now, when a regular man
from the Midwest – a Gatsby – could shake the core of a big city like New
York and find it actually grateful for his great awakening stir, there could
have been near simultaneous integration included with his meteorlevel
impact. But since our times are the opposite, with our Sears and iHops not
reminding us of what they long to do (at least) in the film of postwar
American midAmerica; of true heartland virtues held by those who hold the
blandest, the least discriminate of tastes but of American dregs, even
something fundamentally good is going to be taken as bombast missileanic.
Mud
There's a movie that Mud appears to be, but isn't, that one would probably
wish it had in fact been. That is, one that looks upon the heroes of our youth
and sees in them projections of the strength we at the time needed them to
have, for understanding them as versions of ourselves but in the adult world.
Ellis is a fourteenyearold boy with an abnormal amount of bravery, self
control and heart, but a lot of what is distinctive about him looks like it
might be at risk as the life that nourished ithis life with his two parents,
living up river amongst loner individualistsis collapsing, and he'll be
absconded by his mother into a townie life. The townie kids hang out in
packs, are ruled by peer expectations, and don't seem worth a whole bunch.
They make great components of your own feats, if all you do is periodically
range amongst them and thwart or humiliate them, but if they were your
everyday milieu your automatic need for company and experimentation
amongst people your own age, might mean your own inviting upon yourself
a poison which would cripple what was notable about you. If you sensed that
something of the kind was due to hit you, you might in Ellis's position start
imagining suddenly being visited upon by mythic characters of great
strength, that seemed to have bridged the divide between childhood and
adulthood but wholly retained their fierce nature, heart and will. And when
they talk about life, as Mud does, as if it is fundamentally ruled by mythos,
you'd have the reassuring sense that your own appreciation of the world is
brewed from the same mix the whole universe is universally of. You might
lose confidence during the day, and feel powerless and without sympatico
friends, but in the evening glancing at the constellations of the Archer or the
Centaur, you'll feel that wink of appreciation that will gather some of your
strength back to you.
Arguably, the mythic characters I'm referring to in this filmMud himself,
his "dad"the retired military sniper, and Juniperare shown to in fact be, if
not nothing, certainly lesser of the sort. But not too much, in my judgment,
for they still seem of greater motivation and purpose than anyone in the
filmexempting Ellis's mother, whose drive to finally live her own life, and
even her wishing for her family to gather for dinner, chimes in the movie as
sort of a deathknell an incantation of powerful eternal adolescent spirit has
to be very quickly created against. And the danger in their being represented
this way is that it conveys that what you need to do in life is set your sense
of yourself early, abscond from the social world your peers will get into
during adolescence and earlyadulthood, and arc back into some kind of
interaction with the world in adulthoodas if you alone had diverted from
"the college" path in the game "Life," to rejoin them later in contest of
family and other stakes, should you desire. I'm sure in some cases this might
keep you "truer," more truly functional and happy than everyone elseala
Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But it probably means that the universe of
conversation and social refinements and personal awareness and
understanding that one can be become acquainted with amongst life with
groups of people, that can make one actually surpass becoming an
adolescent's hero and become a fully realized social adult, will be denied
you. For this kind of growth you've got to be able to relax and hangbe the
kid who sees some good from milling about with a peer group; be the kid
who would near more want to relax and jam with Neckbone's uncle Galen
(to be fair to the film, Galen is not portrayed here entirely without his
attractions), than putting the universe right by conjoining Mud to his eternal
equal.
Star Trek: Into Darkness
One of the criticisms of Abrams perhaps the foremost criticism of him
is that he likes to let other directors do the hard work of staking out new
territory, and then he comes in into fully delineated terrain, and makes some
adjustments "Sally would work better with Jonathon, and the couch should
go there". With his last film everybody had him as of the dutiful flock of
Spielberg, and with this film, at least at the beginning the same. It's
Raiders of the Lost Ark, with tribesman chasing down our interloper heroes,
spears thrown, an artifact used to momentarily buy time by tricking the
tribesmen into forgetting their current purpose and supplicating
themselves, and an escape into an airship (no snake, but discord of a kind:
Spock and Kirk feuding). But okay, in truth this sort of chase is how he
began his last Star Trek film, so maybe this is just how he gets a number of
his films revved up. The possibility, though, that Abrams is a bit too
comfortable being in a great director's shadow, being a "minime," clasped
in clothing and appenedendums to someone/something solaceoffering and
protecting, comes more to the fore very irritatingly to the fore when we
realize that Kirk and his crew aren't actually adults out on their own
adventures, but more like misbehaving kids back home with disappointed
parents, who can't believe what they made of the freedom granted them to
explore the woods. This is the way it was in Abrams’ Mission Impossible 3,
if you remember. And I bring up this film because, for me, this is not a crew
who will ever credibly go on some fiveyear journey all on their own, but
more like a team of topnotch agents, who will go out on raiding missions
but always at the end back to home base, reconnecting with an older and
more entrenched culture, that coddles them, relieves them of some of the
responsibility of their own actions. Mind you, Abrams has this way of
making it seem that if it's too much just your own braced against the world,
where you're the head, accountable to no one, or when you're engaged in
affairs that are a bit too much gravitas as in this film, when a greatpower
world war is threatened then there's no room for play. Everything has to
be rigidly taught (taught, as in tight), and often angry as hell, so that you've
got so much seriousness going on it'll ostensibly allay any moment that
sneaks in that reveals how you're as nervous as hell and feeling totally not up
to it! Older characters seem to manage this okay, and in truth get to be
relaxed about it witness the cowboy reaction,"Ah hell," the admiral offers
Kirk when he learns he's been talking to Khan. Ostensibly it's more their
turf, like as if Cold War and WW2 was more their turf rather than our
current more insouciant foreign policy. Abrams does better when things are
allowed to be not so serious, when the seriousness has been tempered down,
and affect and warmth and can slowly infiltrate and build into something.
When Kirk decides not to seek out and kill Khan, but rather capture him and
have him go through dueprocess, you feel it in the theater like a relief of
tension; and it is no surprise that on their mission to capture him we get
some development in the UhuraSpock relationship which had been crushed
by all the emergent seriousness, with tendrils for a later more wholehog
exploration of it "What is that even like?" What is that even like?, or what
would that be like?, is in fact a question that in effect gets floated up a
number of times in the film what is like to be fired by your best friend
(Scotty, by Kirk)?; what is it like to feel someone else's death (Spock,
through Pike)?; what is like to see McCoy flirt?; to see Scotty souced? And
it is a question that gets its best reaction and exploration from us when we've
been given a climate suited for empathic identification rather than route
response. Downplay the stakes a bit, and we get that I swear the film
would have been just as good if the whole thing took place in a bar,
exempting of course Khan, who could be checked into every once in awhile
for bedazzlement at what one superhuman can do to whole lineups of
opponents.
No doubt, it is partly owing to Abrams' deeply democratic nature that he
has more than a few of the crew serve as captain (Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and
in effect Uhura, when she leads the encounter between the crew and the
Klingons), but just as true is surely because he seems to intrinsically identify
a position of ultimate command as confining, as something you almost want
to loft for someone else to do (sucker!): Don't necessarily think of Sulu as
privileged here, for instance; he's more stationed while everyone else cavorts
into space.
Back to my thought that what this crew is is a team of elite special agents,
never completely detached from home base. At some point in the film I
began to think of it as akin to the last James Bond movie Skyfall. Two
great genius agents (Kirk and Khan; Bond and Raoul) betrayed by an older,
very near retirementaged Mother or Father who ultimately had bequeathed
them. I have to admit I actually did not enjoy this Trek all that much, and felt
that when things threatened to be taken out of the youngins' hands and given
to seniors who didn't seem so equivocating and abashed at going out on their
own, even though this meant huge regression to ClashofCivilizations war,
it looked to be more captivating than the plentiful smaller shows that
Abrams put on. So in compensense I did force myself to think upon how
much more evolved this specialagent film was to Skyfall. We were
supposed to root for the militaristic turn in Skyfall, with headquarters being
drawn back to a WW2 bunker rather than kept open but vulnerable in the
city, with M quoting Tennyson, about old men, old values, returning
undaunted in a world of threat. We were supposed to hate counsels and trial
justice. We were discouraged to empathize: never for a moment were we
supposed to like Raoul, or consider that he had just cause (even though he
was sacrificed for heaven's sake!) rather perhaps heap more on his misery,
by insulting his bold fashion (I liked his shirt, myself). It's very bad when
you essentially have a twin of yourself but cannot think of anything nice to
say about him, because this means you're as far away as you can be from
empathizing for your unwanted qualities being grafted onto him for
dismissal. Into Darkness sidesteps this darkness we are to like law courts,
hate or at least regret old dinosaurs returning, like a relaxed atmosphere that
kindles an appreciation of nuance, and of course throughout thoroughly
enjoy and like Khan and tries to fold all kinds of calamities – including
twice the devastation of good parts of a downtown into it that can still be
managed in a noninflated, nonemergency measures, unalarmist way. There
is an evolved person in Abrams, however much it is still true he's a boy
adult headoffamily caught as a fulcrum in a Serious Man / Everybody
Loves Raymond world. Making something of the domestic, because he likes
the living/family room, but also because there’s no way he can allow himself
out.
Oz the Great and Powerful
Some time in the past there were tinkerers who were great and powerful
so great that in this mundane world of ours it still would require a moment's
recalibration to not consider them actually half magic, if someone persisted
in your face that they were in fact so. Edison, if you want the best example,
though you might also go with Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was
Scorsese's movie Hugo was worshipping. Stage magician Oz hopes to be
like that, and spurns women left and right to keep himself fixed to this goal.
He'd have been okay if this didn't also mean his deceiving women into his
bed, but for this, judgment appears to have cast upon him and the rest of his
life is going to be about lifelong serving the bequests of women, fixed to a
spot rather than a free wanderer, readily reached by three very empowered,
three very great and powerful, witchwomen. But the actor playing Oz is
James Franco, and so maybe the people behind this film had in mind some
revenge upon women too. For Franco is sensitive and responsive enough to
suggest to most sensitive souls that he's hardly a man so involved with
machines or aspiring to skyhigh goals he's dulled to humans, but there's
something about how though he says and does and expresses about as you'd
expect and desire, he's still applied a thin layer everywhere that registers as
if it's all a lielike you're in truth interacting with some puppet of himself,
that's close to him but not really him, he's operating via remote control, a la
Tony Stark's suit in Iron Man 3 his passiveaggressive revenge, let's not
kid ourselves, on Pepper, for her owning his day world while he couches in
his basement cave. Franco probably isn't so savvy, so great a magician he's
made himself entirely inaccessible to you; he can be figured out. But the
thing is, what would cause him to smirk like he's got something on you you
can't balk, is that you don't really want to figure him out: he's the only
plausible man in town, and Oz had become akin to the Castle Anthrax,
managed by women who are becoming insufferable to one another and in
need of a man, that beacons out promise of manrule glory to get some
hapless guy in to serve as some post to steady them, as well as for stud.
Anyway, Oz might become convinced that he's really great and powerful,
after apparently making up for every past sin against a woman he's ever
effected which is so much his foremost concern the last gesture he makes
to the latest evil witch haunting the land is an apology but the audience
knows this guy is owned by a need for reparations. How easy it is to keep a
guy like that from growing up just making every step ahead seem a
spurning of everything and everyone who preceded it, and he's back to being
yours. The end of the film shows two great ones battling the white good
witch vs. the more mentally balanced evil witch and when the good witch
defeats the evil one, it most certainly doesn't end with her apologizing but
with her sure of the rightness in making this once actually most beautiful
and regal witch (here played very stately by the stunning Rachel Weisz), the
only nightmare horror/grotesque to be found in the land something of
irrevocable consequence just happened here. This is grownup matter for the
only grownups in Oz. Ben Kenobi vs. Darth Vader at the finish of Star
Wars – but at a time when boys who know best toys and tech, a la George
Lucas, aren’t going to be allowed to be so balldanglingly front and center,
so these roles go to the girls while the guys do the patching up.
The Great Gatsby
One thing I never confused the movie for the book for, was its portrayal of
Gatsby. In the book I could believe that the huge estate he had prepared was
but to lure him Daisy, while in the movie it is surely his aggrandizementI
honestly thought most of the time of Orson Wells's Kane while watching
puffed up Leo. He strolls his party not so much invisible, as he is in the
book, but hidden master of it all. And he shows off how that special person
and that special person and that special person are all there, rendered as they
are into part of his ample house collections, with them trapped to not want to
be anything else, owing to his hosting the biggest draw in townBeethoven
in his second act, and this just one feature. Every night he houses his parties,
and every night the whole town is corralled into it he's master of the house
and master of all. And so at the end of the evening when he strolls outside
and looks across the water at the beaming green light across the bay, it's
absinthe to well the evening down amidst cool air the logical follow up to
the evening's clamor, a cleanse, not what what has been sitting with him
throughout and that he has longed to return to.
Daisy comes across as someone he has to possess for a complete validation
of himself as great and complete. By his side, the past when he was just a
young officer on the climb, unsure if he should dare merge with someone of
assured standing, becomes smoothed into him. As much talk as there is in
the film that once again knowing Daisy means Gatsby's allimportant green
light's dwindling out, the only way there's any sense of it the film is that it
might mean Gatsby and Tobey McGuirre's Nick Carraway being distanced
from one another, as it is their encounters that are a bit of magic. Magic, as
in firstdate, guard's up but set for maybe great change, is not Gatsby
courting Daisy with tea, but Nick for the first time refusing his own
otherwise agreeable and placating stance and leaderly simply refusing to let
Gatsby leave his home and thereby lose his great chance with her he's put so
much effort into procuring, while also humiliating and really hurting Daisy.
Nick here instinctively puts aside his friendly bemusement at Gatsby's
unpredictable dramatics, for doing what has to be done so these two people
he's fond of don't lose from this hereto magical and charming day, full as it
still remains of possible beautiful portent. There is magic also in all three of
them hanging together during the day in Gatsby's mansion, with Gatsby
tossing his shirts at them, partaking of the clownish fun of sport throws at
town fairs, but take away Nick and leave it to the other two to display
something meaningful, and it's the gesturing carapaces, animated but
without souls, embraced together on the grounds outside of one of Gatsby's
parties.
I'm being a bit hard on Gatsby, but there is a sense that just maybe there
really is very little to the guythat those who'd judge himnotably Daisy's
husband Tom Buchananare possessed of something solid that refuses them
any slip into admiring or being bedazzled by him. At the beginning of the
film, Tom is made to seem a nonthreat, for being by one and all regarded as
someone with rearguard prejudices in a world of Jazz Age authority. But still
you don't forget him as a judge too, possibly because his relationthat
is, Nickis just meeting Gatsby too, and he's in a sense quickly onto him as
well. Nick realizes that Gatsby needs tempering"if only he could have been
content with his sweet date with Daisy over tea," he alases. He's like old
money prejudices, with a lighter side, a real fondness for youth and their
eager tries and newish ways, who'd court peers he still belongs to to try and
see them the same way; and his having so much standing in the film, gives
solidity to Buchanan. When Buchanan realitytests Gatsby in a way which
fully renders him downthe only real murder in the filmand gains back his
Daisy, Nick had already been rendered to the point that the best he could do
for the person he still wishes the best of luck to but who realizes he has no
hope of further influencing, is communicate true love and support for him
through his otherwise lying nods to Gatsby's determination to gain sake
himself Daisythe only thing he wants at this point from Nick is a show of
deferent affirmation, so it has to be the conduit for something truer and
larger he'd prefer to communicate: great realization and maturity and love,
from Nick. Nick knows it's likely "the wolves" for Gatsby; Buchanan only
supplies them. Hard judgment to the softer man's realization"Amadeus's"
Count OrsiniRosenberg to Baron Van Swieten, upon Mozart's decline and
death. Nick of course is shown writing a book that we know will puff up the
Gatsby legend that is being debilitated as his estate is being looted. But I
think this is just pause for us to think on the words that are being literally
inscribed for us on screen. There was a great show of a kind for us in this
film, but it may pass as just a film amongst others not even possibly being
one of our Depression's notable showy numbers, that we should get to high
acclaim if this one wears like the last one ("Forty Second Street," Busby
Berkeley, all show, no depth, anything to beat back the pressing accretions
of the Depression, and all that), while we know Fitzgerald's words are
lasting threegens plus, and are looking immortal. The book is our true green
light, something truer to be engaged in, whatever our current society's
overall bent and mood, if that's actually territory we're fond to explore just
now, however much it might not be, with all the bonbons in this film
looking like they might just have been offered a little early, when we still
haven't fixed ourselves to believing you can be like Gatsby and have fun and
possibly be successfully ascribed, at least, as paperthin, if you've accepted
your lot is to live in times with no chance to beat back judgmental
oppressors if they're really, really determined, to fix on you. The sin
watching Tom Buchanans are going to have no handle on you, for your mad
gambits and wild dancing are acknowledgments, not questionings, of how
ascribed you are to live in mostly dreamdefeating times. The Toms would
take note of that, and would have no problem allotting you your driving
"Daisy" home.
Iron Man 3
If you ever give someone a twentyfoot stuffed animal for a present, you
might want to consider that you're doing so more out of a desire to affront
the receiver than please him/her, and that also possibly you're
communicating that you're the one the denied child in gigantic need of
love yourself. It could pass as just making up for long neglect, as it is does in
this film, but when you're following up by fooling your lover (here with
Pepper engaging with simulacrum Tony while the real one pulls his strings
in his den) and then maybe notsoaccidently fixing it so that your den toys
substitute as nightmare horrors to scare the Dickens out of her, the truth is
that you may be the one who is frustrated and in anger, and that you are
unconsciously being driven to communicate it as loudly and aggressively as
possible. Tony Stark is in need of attendance being ready to lose his life in
favor of saving the world and finding himself in some other dimension
against the onslaught of aliens while with the Avengers, has him the mercy
of reoccuring anxiety attacks he's got PTSD, as bad as any out of
Afghanistan. This might seem difficult to identify with, but it's not really, as
you've got a Depression on your hands which is making sure you suffer the
incredible aggrievement of actually feeling more and more without support
while our awareness of the particular historical situation we're in increases.
You need a manger to lie in, not your cold removed den, and this is what
Tony gets, as he finds himself removed from the world in some small town
down south, where he gets to be slotted in with some small boy's modest
home and essentially just talk bubble gum and comic books and harken to
earlylife Christmas scenes so the Savior taking small liberties, in the
fortuned house to host him. Here's where it begins to become clear to the
astute that what you're still hurt from is not what you're machomaintaining
saying it is, but maybe out of the things that are floating up while on lay
away topics/concerns like boys without fathers, bullies, and the discourse
you're floating always at your new bud children which said a slightly
different way is the sort to flatten a child hard. Tony abandons the expected
needs of his new boyfriend about half a dozen times; he clearly is taking
pleasure doing so. This is supposed to be just cover for the fact that he's the
kind of guy who couldn't care more but of course if this was you and what
you're actually enjoying, using as a remedy, is that here repeatedly you've
got a subject who has to be neglected and abandoned "you" while you skirt
off satiated and unaffected, this is the excuse you'd use too. If you get too
much into this remedy you might neglect to cover what is supposedly
afflicting you as happens in this movie when you take that wormhole that
opened out of space that afflicted our universe with multitudes of replica
aliens that is ostensibly the source of Tony's trauma, and have it be
inspiration for your own horrible revenge upon foes as your penthouse's den
hole opens and out comes an armada of iron men to kill some other's dream.
When you're parted from your manger and back in adult digs and engaging
with your lover, you might make her constituted momentarily as if out of
nightmare things herself like what happens to Pepper in this movie, where
she finishes as ripped older woman, dragonblooded, and android (she's
sporting parts of Iron Man's armor). Basically a gargoyle, but for a moment
not removed from you, but akin, and family you're of wormholes and
annihilating/abandoning/tableturning revenging things yourself.
Apportioned some "equipment" from prebirth nightmares actually the
greatest sort.
Further: The dangerous Orient is made to seem a harmless old man who
smells up bathrooms, a disappointment worse than the revealed wizard in the
Depression's "Oz." Is this because he's not ripped like everyone else or
because it's not "time" (who are we kidding if we haven't half set it up
already as our next greatest enemy?) for China? Or are we expected to
implicitly appreciate that while left behind, that stinking shitcloud of odor is
accumulating, and will be source of inspiration for the next wormhole hell
to chastise the characterarmor we're using against our times into
malfunction maybe the false villain really could only be the true one once
we've been made to associate him with decrepity, bathrooms and shit
spouted hell, not singular and contained ( the hero'sonly denizens?)?
Pain and Gain (2013)
No film which can at all remind you from where Ronald Reganera began to
about the termination of the first incarnation of Tiger Woods all muscle,
arrogance, and domination is going to really seem a Depressionera film,
where stupid willfulness is going to be showcased simply as a sort of
madness the hopeless adopt to believe they've got a chance in the world. In
this film you've got Michael Bay as director, a bunch of bodybuilders as the
main protagonists, and as well a very Ateamreminiscent van as homebase,
so you basically get what you'd expect out of an 80's/90's film if you can
amass a signfiicant amount of stupid wilfulness, you'll be treated as a meteor
that's got to be allowed to destroy it's loadedup fuel content of others'
carefully procured affairs. If you show enough of yourself while daring to
equivocate with them, it's "dispatch" for you as appropriately happens to
the Miami pornking, who tends to the gang's leader Mark Wahlberg the
fact that a lot of what he says makes no sense at all. Neither did anything
about Reagan or Tiger or Mr. T or Thatcher really make sense, but when
society's obliging them bigtime, your realitychecks will go unappreciated,
thank you very much! Quite frankly, this film was delightful nostalgia the
lady a few seats behind me laughed numerous hugeheartly laughs, and I
chuckled along with her. The 80s, after all, as stupid as they were, were
paradise to our current time when the only ones who can prosper are those
who aren't will and muscle but just cany doing nothing but what the times
allow, without even a fiber of muscle daring the alacrity of showcasing
itself.
Place Beyond the Pines
One might be tempted to say that after seeing this film what you’ll want to
be is a good parent – being there for you child, so he doesn’t go astray – but
this isn’t really foremost what this film communicates. Instead, it is really
more about automatizing, exerting yourself against the pull of others, and
experiencing how your selfassertion forces others to adjust to your insistent
sense of purpose.
We encounter Ryan Gosling’s Luke as he is about to take part in a circus act,
where he spins about in a circle cage, intertwining his motorbike with two
others in angrybeebutstillbeautiful kaleidoscope patterns. The camera
doesn’t enter the cage with him; we stop short outside – but however
fantastic an ability he has as a performer we get that this is a skill one can
acquire eventually, if bikeriding is your natural bent. In short, there’s no
adventure in it for him, however much it does require a moment of
“steadying” before going on. There is no real adventure to any part of his life
– until he learns he has a child, and the fuzzy outlines of a new and exciting
acquisition and selfnarrative – being a parent and exploring life with a
child; being the parent he ought to have had – tease into view. He becomes
the willful child who won’t oblige what others expect of him – he quits his
job, despite contract obligations, his boss telling him he can’t quit – and is
beginning to intrude himself into the life of the mother of his child
regardless of how obviously strongly paired she is with her new lover, who’s
not charisma, but a dependable provider and a dependable partner in this
landscape of frightful peopleindifference, poverty and uncertainty. His end
goal really is impossible regardless, it turns out, but he can’t quite know it at
the time, as it still is just maybe something accomplishable if he begins the
adventure of acquiring an even more risky skill – bankrobbing – which
could also involve his own death if he failed even just once, but which opens
up otherwise unavailable wealth“magic” to acquire what is otherwise
beyond him. The rush he gets from actually carrying out successful heists
lends him the brass authority to put together a crib he purchased for his child
in his rival’s home, however certain this moment of machoassertion would
lead him out of his family’s life. But before he’s firmly out of her life, he
does winnow a family together for a short while, earns himself a
proprietorial sense of family – which a photo, which, appropriately, lasts and
lasts, captures.
We are supposed to believe that when police officer Avery (Bradley Cooper)
shoots and kills Luke, he ended the life of someone else’s father. But this
truth is undermined because we know Luke was pretty much played out
anyhow – there was no future for him; he was someone who lived a lot in his
short time, owing to his balls. So really the effect of all Avery’s muddling
over the moment plays out more as him pausing on exactly how self
determining he is at this point in his life. He became a police officer, it is
made to seem, owing in part as a passiveresistant way of telling his father to
fuck the hell off and let him lead his own life. His assessment of his police
work, of his fellow officers, seems in good part determined by who they
must be to make himself seem part of a different – more pure, simple and
less compromised – world than the one his father belongs to. This illusion
can’t hold up; and very soon it becomes apparent that this new world he’s
lent himself to is just as ready to make use of him for its compromised
purposes. There is a moment of selfactualization, of conviction, when he
spins his car around and balks his police officer “buddies” to engage with his
father once again. In teeth of other’s willful expectations, he does what he
wants to do, and the film makes it seem as if everything else is presumable
after that: he’ll be someone who upsets others expectations (Just as Luke
was on the right path when before his boss he essentially spits in his face
and quits, here Avery is on the right path when he forces the attorney general
to accept his terms, regardless of how much this pisses him off), but who
successfully accomplishes his goals and has others adjust to him. He
decision to rat out a corrupt police force is shown to mean depriving sons the
company of fathers they need, as they are jailed, longterm, and therefore out
of their sons’ lives for the their whole teenage lives, but there’s more a sense
here of the thrill of how one person’s decision, of how possibly “your”
decisions, can create a wake around you and force others to change their life
courses, even drastically, regardless of their curses and vituperate anger,
their insistence that you are the one who is going to have to bend, not them.
Luke’s son actually does seem to have a good father. He’s shown to be a
regular family presence, and there for his son in times of stress. But the film,
rather than show the importance of this, shows it as meaning little but a
challenge. How do you tell two reasonably good parents that they aren’t
going to get to affect how you choose your life? That his mother lied to him
about Luke comes across as an excuse for the boy to use to commit an act of
matricide – the letter to “mom” which informs her he knows she lied. And I
guess his father actually not being a Darth Vader – he at one point
encourages his son to see him as his true father by saying, “Luke, I am your
father!” – but rather more like the dependable, nondescript uncle in Star
Wars who gets burned to death without anyone much caring, is hardly
shown to require any refuting at all – there’s no authority there to balk, just a
perpetually standing placeholder. The son steals, does drugs, and nearly
kills two people, but all this is shown as the sort of wild acting out that
might be required for him to shake off other’s expectations and ready
assessments of him, so at the finish he could plausibly be a fully self
automatizing individual, heading off fully free into his own future.
Oblivion
How many films exist where there are two worlds a protagonist will exist in
—the first, ostensibly superior, almost always cleaner, but really corrupt,
and the second, more raw – if not also dingier – but really the last remaining
refuge of humane community? Lots and lots, of course, and Oblivion is
another, and belongs with probably the whole host of those which don’t
really convince that the hero doesn’t actually forego the more appealing
world. The two worlds in this film are the first one, where he’s essentially
living in a Tony Stark pad, with his very pretty Pepper, who, we note – just
as we note with Pepper – comes closeenough to being his ageequivalent.
Good for the Tom Cruise in this world, for conquering his fear of intimacy
of older women for the pleasure in mature company! He has a hankering for
old ways of the past, which makes him not so much sentimental as
cherishing, but which could look to become obsessive: witness his whole
lakecabin thing. And she has, or refuses to acknowledge, not a wit of it,
which can make her seem a bit clinical, anesthetic, but also maturely
distancing – they are going to have to leave all this behind – as well as a
useful counter to her husband. They work together as a team, and they have
the daily pleasure in knowing that what they are doing assists the other
enormously. But they also have distance, so that every day when he arrives
back they have the pleasure in taking in one another, maybe not so much
anew, but with what each of them accrued in their time spent apart. We have
here, or what we see and feel of them here, is an adult couple.
The second world is essentially a tenement world. Lots of dingy people,
closing huddled together. It’s a world of a “wife,” his actual legally married
wife, that is, but which has throughout really the feel of a siren lover who
has enraptured him – they talk about how they would grow old and argue
with one another, but all we ever see speaks of new romance not of how
couples relate past this, try to romance past this (his “false” wife in the first
world, did a good job previously showing how this gets done). He gets to be
a savior of this world, which makes him a bit epic, mythic – what an
adolescent dreams of being before learning what it is to function
proprietarily in a world of adults. He gets to kill off Mother for belonging to
this world, but in the previous one She didn’t require killing because She
had already been managed into the delimited role of a boss – someone who
is ultimately just as much just doing her job, as accountable and non god
like, as “you” are. Yes, I’m stretching a bit here, but there is a sense that
She, the god, really is just mission control.
The first world wife judges Cruise tainted, and won’t let him into their
domicile after seeing him devolve with his floozy. He is. He’s entered the
adolescent imagination this SciFi film, of all places, had built a world
against – in its first world. She’s a Ripley without the credit.