Bipolar According to Silver Linings Playbook

I wanted to see Silver Linings Playbook because I thought it might be about manic depression in some way. The trailer wasn't encouraging, but everyone said it was good. In other words, improving--to use Jeeves' only adjective for a book he's reading. It's fine, but it has nothing to do with mental illness. "Bipolar" is code for "quirky and inappropriate."

It's not impossible for manic depression to have some thematic resonance. Homeland at least framed mania as a crisis of judgement. Carrie always seemed a bit nuts to her coworkers, but note that she was able to hide that she took medication for most of her career.

If we pretend Silver Linings is about a bipolar man, his mania is never in the least bit sneaky. He seems to be always manic, yet the script seems to actually believe him when he says he's getting better. And this constant hyperoptimism ("silver linings") and need to be doing shit is punctuated by "episodes" during which he wakes up his parents, yells about Hemmingway for the dumbest reason, and breaks things. I don't deny that this could happen, but watching the scene, you'd think mania is just a quirk, like not wearing underwear--not to everyone's taste, but with few serious repercussions. I guess this is an attempt to make it as much of cinematic spectacle as possible. I longed for Kay Redfield Jamison's narration of her manic explosions of thought. She convinces herself of her own genius in that state, of course, but she also might well be a genius.

Everything for Pat is on the surface. The only character that seems to have any interiority at all is the depressive, Tiffany, and the romance plot becomes his quest for it. Which is not exactly a revelation. Likewise that the proof of true love is sexuality supressed for friendship until the right moment (the end, when the whole room is shocked by the sexuality of their dance moves, inexplicably).

So if I want to believe the screenwriter isn't clueless, the only option as far as I can see is that it's a romance of two pathological liars who really like to be "weird," and so self-diagnose themselves bipolar and nymphomaniac. Because it makes them seem interesting.

Conversations with Dead Women

In the finale of Battlestar Galactica, father and son are abandoned by their respective loves. I would say “the women they love,” but in Battlestar that would be redundant. All sex ends up being about the survival of one species or another, and although one of sex’s enthusiastic practitioners says that “love has nothing to do with sex,” it seems only to occur between man and woman.

Then again, filial love is the strongest of all. Son weeps at father’s admission that he cares whether son lives or not. Mothers chase daughters across ship and dream, gorge their eyes out when torn away.

Only at the end do the show’s queen and princess in-spirit die, but from the beginning the men are haunted by dead women dear to them. One is a full-fledged character.

It’s a curious gender reversal of Dorothy Parker’s “Sentiment,” in which a woman melodramatically suffers through her memories of a man. In fits she realizes that many of her memories of him are probably counterfeits of her imagination. She wishes he were there to correct her imagination with his real presence, and then she imagines him there telling her “don’t sentimentalize.”

Battlestar’s hauntings are vertiginous in a much nerdier sense: the question is not are they true, but what classification of thing are they? Is she a figment of his imagination, a chip in his brain, her spirit, God, something else? Fans of the show were reportedly disappointed by the finale not because it flattened all complexity, but because it didn’t reveal the real mechanics behind the show’s mysteries. There’s something especially funny about interrogating the clockwork of a universe populated with religious machines.

These apparitions are so generous. Conversations with absent people sounds like a perfectly serviceable definition of consciousness to me, but these are not the insinuations of those you only later recognize, but hallucinatory. Embodied solidly enough that you might find yourself being “fracked” by them. Poe would find it terribly poetical, which worries me.

Watching some shows, I wish character’s minds weren’t so obscured. Watching Battlestar, I find myself wishing my own experience of consciousness felt so unequivocal.

Every year, the aforementioned father, Adama, summons his dead wife. They chat. Actually it’s more fraught than that. Like a good feminine principle, she undermines all of his clear-cut rules. Hence she must be put to rest at the end of the day/episode. Ultimately, her purpose is to reinvigorate the moral ground on which he stands by taking it apart and slipping cleanly away.

There are some entertaining fireworks--watch Baltar, whose interiority makes up about a quarter of the show, as his brows go from worried to unconsoleable--when these haunted men encounter the living women whose ghosts they banter with. It's especially upsetting to the drunk who sees his dead wife's face in the face of a Cylon woman he sees in the brig. (This show takes fantasy's role in love very literally.) She becomes pregnant and then, his wife returns.

This awfully intimate relationship with the deceased does not necessarily favor the living. When one man's wife dies, he remembers only what a dumbshit she was. Everything becomes to him a doomed, misguided fiction; he yells at Adama "you want to make a dead woman into an angel" and mocks "your precious ship." The ship is the only thing keeping them alive, but he's right--their attachment to living is pretty funny.

The show's tendency toward annihilation is perhaps its most pleasurable aspect. We go to blockbusters to confirm our lust for spectacular immortality (see e.g. Elysium and every superhero movie). We watch television to bask in the reflection of our own desire for life to stop.

An addiction to a lengthy serial drama has the happy effect of bringing life to a halt. It's no wonder that Battlestar, whose addictiveness is on par with Damages and Buffy, allegorizes the viewer's dependency on it.

The Galactica is on a journey to Earth, where humanity's struggles will end. I don't especially want them to find Earth; it would be the end of the show and I've have to step back out into the sunshine. The Cylons are the enemy and so a godsend (pun intended) for an addict: they keep making it very hard to arrive at the end of the story. Their constant interdictions are the lifeblood of the show's drama.

They find a shitty but hospitable planet before they find Earth. All the show's heroes don't want to stay there, but they do for a year (in the gap between seasons). Then the Cylons come back to conquer them. A relief! That planet was getting boring. It was even filmed in the drab colors of the everyday.

And before they find the Earth they'd hoped for, they find a planet called Earth that's been nuked into oblivion. It's all wrong, but it's an omen of things to come because a verdant Earth means a nuked supply of episodes.

An endearingly angry pilot named Starbuck is prophesied to lead them to Earth, and she hears through the Cylon grapevine "you will lead them to their end." She's devastated by this. What's the contradiction?

Her husband receives a bullet to the head, which is just short of lethal and gives him access to the memories of his past life--essentially, the backstory of the Cylons. It kills him to keep talking, but he's really excited about telling this story. The doctor has him wheeled away to remove the bullet and he screams at Starbuck: "don't take this away from me!" How can I not sympathize? Who wouldn't take a bullet to the brain for a tale?

When they finally do arrive at Earth (shit), Adama's son has a crazy idea: he wants everyone to settle on the surface without any technology, just some provisions to get started. Baltar says "I'm surprised how amenable everyone is to this plan" and Adama, "never underestimate people's desire for a clean slate." Given how this episode is taking shape, I couldn't agree more. Please, send the ships into the fucking sun. I never want to see another minute of this. The show exorcizes itself!

I don't have the newfound love of life that those who have neared death are rumored to gain, exactly. It's more of an aesthetic rejection of not-life. Which is exactly what the God(s) at the show's annoying Matrix-y close espouse regarding humanity. They think the 21st Century's technological renaissance (itself a questionable notion) is a sin that deserves a reboot of the species. I get the impression this is Ronald D. Moore's contention, too, which makes me want to ignore the nuance or at least ambiguity of the 60-some hours I watched. Moore apparently regards the entirety of human history as a fall from grace. Give me a break. (Ha.)

Papal Infallibility

Scandal could easily be a sword-and-sandal drama, because it's not about people so much as it is about flawed gods. (However, I don't mean to overstate how much people are like people.) Undoubtedly I have this image because one of these characters calls them "gladiators in suits"--the cheesiest line that ever was, as another acknowledges. Every character is remarkable and/or "weird" (and "weird is good"). Even their names seem ostenatiously legendary or fictional: Cyrus, Gideon, Pope, Huck. But greatness only lands on them like so many traumatic bricks; the rest they have to work at. The plane of infallibility is out of reach insofaras it is already within them.

While the writing begins with a bountiful antagonism reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin, it moves quickly toward forceful monologue. Olivia Pope executes takedowns not with elaborate ploys, as Gossip Girl's Blair Waldorf would, but with a single bomb of a speech made up on the spot.

Cyrus has the sarcastic version of her eloquence, and naturally becomes more her enemy throughout the course of the first season. There are reasons for this, but I'd like to entertain the possibility that Cyrus is untrustworthy simply because the mechanics, motives, and effects of his speech cannot be reconciled with Olivia's. Nobody really listens to him, so he is oblique. In one scene he tells the President how his life will be now that his dirty secret is out. He ends this acid prophecy with "but you just work on your speech, because that's important," and a little chuckle.

Olivia Pope is the clearest manifestation of greatness around. But if she were a stable element, it wouldn't be much of a show. The first episode reveals that her gut is never wrong and is wrong, that she doesn't believe in crying and cries. Yet this hadly diminishes our devotion, nor her employees. It seems to us that life's chaos can only be met with rash decision. Anything less is wallowing, or so we are convinced, watching her. With a little swallowed whine of discontent.

Her advice to her cohorts borders on patronizing aggression. She advises everyone to "get some normal," while she herself freely admits "I'm not normal." One of her worst moments is, to use the new employee's word, "demolishing" a girl who claims to have had sex with the president. And if she had not? For her, contemplation is done through action. Which is a fine thing for television. For someone who has made contemplation the only possible thing, it's also tempting, by way of sheer self-loathing, to say Olivia's knowledge through mistakes is the finest thing. Her attitude reminds me of a very defensive thing Michel Foucault wrote (if it were shorter, today it could be called a subtweet):

As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next--as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet.

It's at once inspiring and arrogant. He defends analytic thought from contemplative paralysis, which is nearly tantamount to giving himself a free pass to analyze whatever and however he wants. Olivia Pope means to move herself and everyone around her into such great motion that nobody will ever be stuck or lost ("giving up is not an option"), and her noble cause gives her justification to destroy or manipulate whoever stands in her way.

Also, Olivia Pope is not from the same planet.

Being from a different planet can inspire respect as much as it can eros. A funny thing, for her--she's mostly indifferent to it. But she does have desire. The president's romantic gesture is to ask her for "just one minute." Taking one minute to stand staring into each other's eyes could not be more alien to her nature. Inaction being under such a foreceful prohibition, perhaps for her it's better than sex. They do have sex, but annoying as it is to watch two people look into each other's eyes for this long, surely it's the pause that's apotheotic.

She trusts him; she hates how her trust blinds her. She loves him; she's at war with him. Lucy Snowe (Villette) says it best:

Reader, if in the course of this work, you find that my opinion of Dr. John undergoes modification, excuse the seeming inconsistency. I give the feeling as at the time I felt it; I describe the view of character as it appeared when discovered.

Maybe it's best not to think in terms of opinion. Yet it is so often solicited. The "gladiators" have a ritual of observing their clients from behind glass, before they take them on, but Olivia has always already decided. They're supposed to vote whether they believe the client's story, but the vote never matters. Why do this? Why have a minute of looking into each other's eyes? Any show with a bit of self-respect (or maybe vanity) is more interested in the eyes averted, glancing, or spying. Oddly, the cynical view of characters with cynical gazes gives a clearer picture, while Scandal's direct and sustained eye contact (tearing people apart, too, is done face-to-face) makes character more difficult to gauge. There is no one-way glass. The potential clients know they're being observed. In these open conditions Olivia sees clearly the "character as it appeared when discovered," while everyone, including us, are busy trying to get to the bottom of things.

If the show is so counter-voyeuristic, why this love of bevelled windows? At nearly every opportunity, the camera pans slowly across the edge, yielding a rainbow-tinged double of whoever's there that's always slipping in or out. It seems incongruous that the barrier of the window is necessary to introduce this nagging visual error. In the world of the show, all that is necessary is to pull down all barriers, and one senses a lie crawling away.

The Men In My Mind (In Theirs, Too)

Innovation is a gross word. It probably gives Evegeny Morozov hives and/or an erection (a critic's diptich of conditions). The same cake is on the stove as four months ago, on another stove. I persist writing mood pieces about cakes.

Has Mad Men ever changed the way it does what it does? I doubt it. It's just intensified. These days it's a series of Mad Men Moments and setups for Mad Men Moments. Is it slapstick? Arrange things so that characters stumble into saying something unwittingly wise or prophetic. Last episode, the poetic phrase (and image) was "Why are you being punished?" "Because the wallpaper doesn't line up."

It sounds like a Don line, but this MMM belongs to his son, and suddenly he loves him. He says so to Megan, and she hugs him because oh my god, a man is having an Emotional Experience. (Much like the show's spectacle of whites spectacularly emoting over MLK's death. I'll give you one guess what two colors the wallpaper was.)

Don is more interested in his son's emergent familiarity than how he might be different. The show couldn't care less about its subject, only that it's poetic. Don is in love with himself, and the show is in love with itself.

Why do I care if I make new cakes? This one's delicious. Are there fruit other than apples?

Once, MMMs were delicious. They sustained interest. (A much messier word.) I'm always trying to decipher what made one meal delicious and another unremarkable. Odd--delight in eating is a terrible index of delight in anything else. My latest theory is to eat well is to take interest. A meal of variety is exemplary (there's always one), but even a lone bowl of broth may hold interest.

Interest is as suspect to Rectify as thought is heroic. One of the first things Daniel says in public is that in prison he developed a routine intended to avoid thinking. When he wasn't trying to stamp out thinking with chants, he read books, and thoughtfully conversed with the man in the next cell.

His half-brother, Ted, is calculated to make us as uncomfortable as Daniel, suspected of rape and murder, makes everyone on the show. Ted's problem is that he's as thoughtless as he is self-interested. He distrusts Daniel because he assumes Daniel will take his job. He thinks Daniel is guilty because Daniel tells him about being raped in prison. Presumably, he feels raped by Daniel's story. That's his epistemology.

"Never seen so many dumb Georgia crackers descended upon egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken in your life," Ted says. "That's interesting," Daniel says. "I guess." Ted has too much interest to find anything interesting. Daniel finds everything interesting and tries self-flagellatingly hard to not be interested in himself. This impersonality embues him and his thinking with an aura of goodness.

Verlyn Klinkenborg posits interest to be a way of bargaining with abudance. Being interested is the thing he urges us to recover from underneath our education. The bargain he proposes is: trust in the abundance of your interest, and receive the abundance of your interest. If I say I'm not sure about this, he can say that's why. I'm not sure whose circular logic it is, but still, I'm not sure. I'm the sort of person who can be engrossed by a novel for hundreds of pages and never read the last fifty. (Or reverse those numbers.) I routinely commit Klinkenborg's sin of being anxious I'll lose interest in a piece of writing. Not because the piece is a terrible idea, not ultimately worthy of interest, but because I'll make cake, watch television, worry about those things that impetuously solicit worry. Thinking that I'll think about something in the future is pretty much meaningless. My calendar and to-do list are records of futile promises. This is so apparent that, like Alison Bechdel repeats "I think" in her diary, I append question marks to half of my tasks.

Actually, they're all terrible ideas. Given enough time to mull over anything, I'll come to the conclusion it's stupid. (Which, yes, is a stupid conclusion, but what can I do?) We would have nothing if this logic reigned. Robert Creeley's introductions to his own collections of work are graceful for letting their contents be. But they would never have been written if he always took the long view. Creation is a process of outrunning understanding, for me at least, I think.

Which is stupid. What's wrong with making a cake I'm not infatuated with? Klinkenborg critiques the notion of writerly genius, in which all writing comes in flashes and unstoppable flows. Because his is a self-help book and everything has to be about doing better, the problem with needing to be infatuated with what you're doing is that it's deterimental to doing. It's also a reaction to the danger of fantasy, to being in hot, precarious relation. Interest appears as an appealing alternative to infatuation because it's cooler, more reliable.

There are relations other than detached tepidness and compromising intimacy. I know that I placed those adjectives to show their misplacement, but the motive is dim.

What's that about cake?

Behavior

Vulture's review of Top of the Lake had me at "Jane Tennison" and "Elizabeth Moss." I would never have thought these names--one fictional, one not--would be in the same paragraph, but now that they were, it made sense.

At first the reviewer, Matt Zoller Seitz, sounds like someone "who's watched in dismay over the last 21 years as program after program tried to be the next Prime Suspect and failed miserably," and like someone who's watched Top of the Lake. But maybe he only skimmed it. Why else such confusion about the motives of a character whose frustration we are so often asked to share?

After watching the first two episodes, this sentence borders on unprofessional and nonsensical: "Robin’s behavior at first seems erratic, at times bordering on unprofessional and nonsensical, until you start learning her secrets and studying her interactions with the townspeople and with her mother, who’s suffering from cancer." Surely I am not so Sarah Lund-addled that her "behavior" (what is she, a case study?) only seems normal to me? Saying that "we" are asked to share Robin's frustration may be premature, of course, but the idea that the show speaks to me alone is absurd narcisism.

This sort of singling out is the atmosphere that Robin inhabits. The men of the local police force, and almost everyone else, for that matter, consider her a looney eccentric at best, and more often an irrational (tell me, what do "erratic," "unprofessional," and "nonsensical" add up to?) inconvenience--a pain in the ass. This is for the obvious "reason"; when the police chief hears she's a she, he says "oh, fuck, well, this is going to be a painful."

The trajectory of Seitz's view of Robin is exactly the police chief's: he tolerates her and then seems to soften once he finds her reasonable (in Seitz's terms, "learning her secrets"). But the way he communicates his newfound respect, praising the way she "handled that" (a briefing) when they sit down for coffee, makes you wonder. Patronizing sweet nothings come as easily as the sunlight through the windows in a cute coffee shop. You know he wouldn't take any of his boys here.

We learn that her mother is ill before we even meet her. Later, Robin asks her "why do I feel manipulated?" but it's clear in the first scene in her mother's house that manipulation is afoot. To someone on the phone (her fiance, I now assume) Robin says "Mum's doing well. She might even be happy finally." Finally, now that she has a reason to be unhappy, she can be happy. She can summon her daughter to take care of her--"I know, whatever she needs"--because who knows how much more time she has. The pull of love-cum-obligation is so strong that Robin has to ask her "can you spare me for the afternoon?" What exactly she can do for her mother the entire day, I couldn't say. The irony is, the reason Robin ends up brandishing as trump is "it's a child." She escapes the need of her mother--who, no longer needed by her daughter, has to settle for being needy--to be needed by a child. If doing so is Robin's "behavior," it's anything but "nonsensical."

If on the other hand the behavior in question is her restless investigatory tendencies, then it's less erratic than impulsive, in a genre way. That's what hard-boiled detectives do. Besides, down that road, along which characters are just collections of predictably crazy impulses, is "David Lynch-style characters," which the Sundance Channel bafflingly proclaims its own show has. What comes to mind of course is Twin Peaks, whose characters mindlessly repeat their particular compulsions. They're all "characters" in that sense of being both eccentric and utterly stuck in their eccentricity. Top of the Lake may operate in a psychosexually charged register, but the characters are not like Lynch's--they're more rational, they retain the capacity to surprise, and they're less cariacatured.

But this principle-of-chaos difference feminism doesn't stop with Robin. Seitz describes the landscape as "pregnant with narrative potential and buried secrets," and goes on to say that "Campion's narrative landscapes are as female in their imagery and concerns as Martin Scorsese's are male, utterly and unapologetically so." I do think that any account of the landscape's role in this show is bound to be clumsy (for instance, I felt like saying "mesmerizing"), but this sounds as lazy as "water = semiotic chora." I get the feminism he's going for, Campion being unapologetic about the femaleness her show, but I find the idea that there are female and male concerns a bit risable.

I'm reminded of Robin playing darts in the bar. The local men question her in a manner somewhere between curiosity and aggression. "Are you a feminist?" one asks. She doesn't answer. That a woman is considered a feminist because she acts human is a good reason to be a feminist.

White Noise in Nashville

Just noise

White noise

The "principled" guitarist plays a concert at the country club for the white mayoral candidate, even though he supports the black mayor, who is his sponsor. This makes "support" a funny word for him to use. He's "only doing it," he irritably stipulates, as a "favor" for star of the show and of the concert, who is also the candidate's wife.

Trouble was on my tail

He followed me like a hound

'Til I moved that one step on to glory

And off of that changing ground.

You pull my strings one by one

Until you get me onto one.

Pulling someone's strings until they get onto one is not a bad metaphor for the show. It's not a musical, and characters don't spill their guts in song, exactly. They do, but there is a tantalizing uncertainty in the relation between plot and song, character and performance. An uncertainty that is sometimes invoked by the performers themselves. ("It's acting, you idiot!") The drama is about whom is singing, writing, or touring with whom, all of which are heavily libidinal with varying levels of explicitness.

Although, while the equation is clearly chemistry = creativity, "libidinal" isn't specific enough. The basic musical element is the duet and songs come almost exclusively out of the sexual charge between a woman and a man. Which of course is why the two female stars (Rayna and Juliette, who are locked in a generational conflict) getting on stage together is "a big event," as the the head of their label puts it with exploitative relish.

To write is to sit together with a guitar between you, which is the man's. When the youngest musical couple first write, it is at his encouraging insistence. Encouragement requires a certain benevolent dementia. Of the poems she wrote he declares "these are songs!" Her book in his hand, he begins strumming chords--"tell me when it sounds like what you heard when you wrote it." Words between a woman with "heartache" and a man who wears snappy shirts are never just lyrical; they are always lyrics.

I’m hearing static

You’re like an automatic

You just wanna keep me on repeat and hear me crying

This genre origin story has an automation both productive and seductive, the two feeding each other, until they don't. It's not sex that "just happens"--it's music.

So when Rayna and Juliette write together, it's work. "Let's just be professional and get this done," says Rayna. Work in the sense that their writing is not leavened by heterosexual tension, and in the sense that this scene works on the gendered logic of the show's scenes of writing--scenes that have not had to do much work, like the characters who breeze along on waves of seduction.

However dramatic the relationship between a picking man and a singing woman can get, it's along romantic lines. When they don't get along, they don't write. Unlike Rayna and Juliette, who write "The Wrong Song" through what sounds like nothing but abrasion.

It's a long, long road to independence

But I'm leaving you for Tennessee

I got demons riding shotgun

Telling me not to go

But what they don't know

Is I'm already gone

These are the very first lyrics of the show, sung by a woman (Rayna) whose daughter just asked her dad "why does she have to go to work?"

Focus

Sarah Lund's new partner, Borch, is always telling her to focus, and, jarringly, he calls her Sarah. There was, if not onomatopoeia, a consonance of sound and emotion in the exasperated exclamation "Lund!" Her boss, Brix (a patronym that seems to encompass his whole character), still says "Lund." The trainee investigator has taken after Borch, as if he's he and Lund's child. This appears to be a role he enjoys, sitting in the back seat as the three of them drive off to The End of Civilization, aka Jutland. It must be because of this infectiousness of names that in some nuclear families the mother and father actually call each other "mom" and "dad."

Danish is full of what to an American ear are wonderfully curt expressions. Even "thanks," despite having only one syllable, is padded forgivingly with sound in comparison to "tak," and next to "tak for kaffe" (silent e), "thanks for the coffee" is a windy drawl fit only for a Western. However, "Sarah" uttered by a Dane is even windier than by an American--that short A is long.

As you're probably wanting to tell me by now, breathy sibilance is hardly the point. That Borch uses her first name shows his familiarity, or his presumption of familiarity, because they once knew each other. "In the academy. We were in the same year," Lund explains to the kid in the back seat, and happily does not get a chance to answer his next question: "was he your boyfriend?" They're interrupted by the "mand" in question waking up in the passenger seat.

Distracted focus has always been a theme of the show--it is about an obsessive detective, after all--but none of her previous male partners have been as explicit or taken her obsessiveness so personally. She has always run off and disobeyed orders to pursue the investigation (or as her frustrated boss and partner might call it, her investigation), but here it has become a problem of fate. The kidnapper keeps setting up payoffs, asking specifically for Lund to make the exchange, and she keeps disobeying what the kidnapper and the police department tell her to do, which are almost the same at this point. When the exchange fails, it appears that the kidnapper may not have intended it to succeed. Brix always insists, because he is beholden to higher offices and regulations, that if Lund hadn't interfered, everything would have gone as planned. Lund insists that her derailing of the exchange was the best hope of being a step ahead of the kidnapper. The second time this happens, she rushes off to get a woman's testimony before it's too late, which it is, because the kidnapper kills her before Lund gets there. If he was trying to distract her by scheduling the exchange, he must not know her very well. On the other hand, it worked because she went along with it up until the last minute. It worked because she is part of the department, not a free agent. She gets briefly distracted by what to the department is the focus.

Borch accuses her of pulling the same last-minute stunts emotionally. "When it comes to emotions, you tend to run away." His comment alludes to the end of their previous relationship, but he's also trying to provide the emotional intelligence (like a gross Mulder, as we always knew he was) to her relationship with her son, Mark (who may also, unbeknownst to him, be genetically his son). It's hard not to notice the conflation of "your emotions" with him, Borch. More generally, her emotions are conflated with prescriptions. It's unfortunate that she and her son are not full of loving kindness for each other, I guess, but Borch has a (common) notion that because she ought to demonstrate more love, she therefore has it inside of her, she just needs to find it.

This notion is confronted again and again in her interactions with others, most awkwardly in speaking with Mark's girlfriend, Eva, who might be said to be "full" of sociable talk in the same way Sarah is "full" of feeling for her son. Eva is in fact pregnant, which is what distracts Lund from making the first exchange with the kidnapper (she glimpses Eva and Mark in the subway station). When Eva meets her, Eva tries to include her in enthusiastic talk about how the baby (her grandchild) kicks. She doesn't respond to this, though it instills a nervousness that plays out on her face throughout the conversation. They're mutually bewildered. Eva doesn't know how to be sociable with a woman who can't say the things one says, and Sarah doesn't know how to convincingly simulate the expected response, or, indeed how to be "Sarah." Both are responding to an anxiety of responsiveness. One lets loose a stream of verbiage; the other says almost nothing. The former not only provides all the material, but sets up a solipsistically hopeful world in which the other's lack of response means only that the shape demanded by her conversational material is present in the other but unexpressed. While this is very much what Borch is doing, too, he angers when Lund does not conform to his imagination, whereas Eva never outwardly acknowledges it. Her difficulty in staying within either of these two frames is one explanation of the antisocial behavior of which her difficulty is supposedly a symptom.

She comes to the hospital with Eva for an ultrasound, and Eva turns to her and says "I'm really glad you're here with me. You might just be doing it for Mark, but I'm really glad you're here." This may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to her, while at the same time it expects her to be the person Eva is glad to have there. She smiles, weakly. Then, seeing the fetus on the ultrasound, goes out into the hall to cry.

Borch repeatedly chides her to focus, and ever since they slept together, he repeatedly tells her that "it meant something to me." This is an obvious vie for mirrored response ("oh yes, it meant something to me, too!"), but because it's a show of vulnerability, he thinks she's evading her emotions. His pushes for reciprocation eventually intensify to the point that he says "no, Sarah, I won't let you just run away again!" Which she responds to, or doesn't, by finding and going down the stairs into the basement of the warehouse they're checking out.

She goes down, and the girl they're searching for, Emilie, once had a habit of going up. Amid the show's process of dispersing evidence among its three dramatic arenas (the police, the politicians, and the family), Emilie's brother reveals to his mother that "when she got sick of hearing you and dad fighting, she went to the in-between room," which turns out to be the attic of her dad's mansion. An attic is less a room than an inevitable effect of a structure's roof and ceiling. Not to be inhabited, it is a necessary space mostly ignored by a house's inhabitants, designed to be outside the life layed out by the house's interior. In this context of a child escaping her parent's fights, "running away" takes on a valence of victimhood rather than frgidity. But what troubles Lund's talk and makes it impossible to respond to Borch seems in part to be the inevitability and limitedness of valences. Borch's wife comes to the police station to drop off her husband's stuff--"which I assume is your fault," she tells Lund. As the wife's fit of angry speech towards Lund builds, she stands there agitatedly not speaking. "What do you want from him?!" She has become a home wrecker. Frustrated, she says "I don't want any part of this," and walks off. Admittedly, it's even more troubling to be a something for a detective, for whom the world is ideally more detectable than the self.

In the eyes of everyone else, her investigation becomes distracted by an interest in what the kidnapper thinks he's avenging. Geographically, it takes the investigators all the way to what is apparently referred to as "peripheral Denmark" by Copenhagen politicians. The show itself forks into several distracting obsessions. The Prime Minister becomes distracted from his reelection campaign by an obsession with his dead son (for him Emilie is a proxy for this loss). Emilie's parents are obsessed with finding her, distracting the father from running the Zeeland corporation, and distracting the mother from her relationship with her boyfriend. Sarah Lund becomes obsessed with solving the murder of the kidnapper's daughter years ago. Which case is the distraction from the other is a matter of ideology. The police are predictably interested only in finding the kidnap victim and punishing the kidnapper. Lund's interest is, at least symbolically, in the cause of which the kidnapping is an effect.

Emilie's life is a token traded among politicians and their constituents. As well as the parallel to losing his son, the PM is interested in her fate because if she's not found alive before the election, people will blame him for it, lose faith in the government, and he'll lose. The country's feeling toward their government is invested in her: The police's competence in finding her reveals the government's decency, not its self-interest. What manifests as a sentimental issue is a political one. The PM finds himself on the negative side of this logic in the death of his son. When Lund and Borch question him about his son, they try to draw connections between his son's suicide and his trip to Jutland, where they suspect him of murdering the kidnapper's daughter. "No," he says, "they're not connected. He was depressed." His acceptance of his son's apparent feeling as the ultimate explanation ends up concealing the politics of his son's death, which was not suicide, but occurred because of a concealed effort to conceal the indicting evidence he saw while in Jutland. He is initially furious when he finds this out, but in the end, the PM accepts the lame explanation that his son died because of an accident--an explanation more meaningless than deceitful--and goes on politicking.

With similarly glazed eyes, the police has no interest in investigating the death of the kidnapper's daughter beyond appeasing him enough to lead them to Emilie. It would destroy, rather than bolster confidence. Because the murderer is the assistant of the CEO of a corporation that the the Danish economy is said to depend upon, uncovering him would be counterproductive in more than one sense.

The spectacular rescue of a female victim restores the government, the nation, the family, and the economy. The PM is no longer distracted from victory by his dead son, the nation is no longer distracted by the thought of sexual violence, Emilie's mother is no longer distracted by her problems with Emilie's father, and nobody is distracted anymore by the economically disastrous possibility of the Zeeland corporation leaving Denmark, nor by the coercion that such a union is bound by. In short, Emilie may now return to the attic.

As the kidnapper once did, the man who raped and murdered the kidnapper's daughter confidently dictates fate to Lund: he will never be held responsible. Lund kills him, gets on a plane, and leaves Denmark. Which is more than but also exactly what she has ever done--the most "distracted," the most "obsessive," the most "unfeeling" she has been, and the farthest she has "run."

Across the Living Room and Other Distances

Why does anyone watch anything? Sometimes I really don't know why I do. I watched this youtube video demonstrating a program that creates moveable, resizeable previews of windows. He was watching "Family Guy," which is unerringly awful, but the way he put a preview of it in the corner of his screen while doing other things was like leaving the TV on in the room, which was appealing, somehow.

I sometimes don't watch what I'm watching. If I say that I don't remember what I watch, it doesn't mean that I wasn't watching. It might point to a particular kind of watching, which is lost to the memory. It could also mean that the kinds of things that count as "memory of" do not include the things I do remember. For example, I might not remember what I watched, but it might still have had an effect on me, which may or may not be a kind of memory.

The obscurity of what I remember watching is related to the obscurity of why I watch something. Off-hand I remember very little of The Lord of the Rings, and I remembered even less--plot, images, characters--when I wanted to rewatch those movies a year ago. I didn't care much about the lore, the languages, or the CGI battles. In fact, I had amnesia about all of that. I remembered the feeling--the sense of doom. True, this memory had images associated with it--driving to the movie theater in a winter rainstorm, and driving back in the fog, or the other way around, or neither. There was a lot of moonlight, I think. The remembered feeling also had something to do with the introduction. Maybe just Cate Blanchett's voice, or the tone of it.

Peter Jackson at his most memorable

Maybe I just wanted the movie to give me foreboding strings to make the dark still rather than its usual restlessness. I couldn't say, exactly, but the movie didn't have whatever I wanted. That was apparent early on, but I kept watching. The movie neared what I had imagined, and I waited for it to near it again, which it did. I was in a kind of orbit. I was disappointed, but sometimes very close to not disappointed. Which might be close to the feeling the movie approached--of things falling away, of a destination infinitely far away. But then, unfortunately, things would come into grasp, and that heroism of having acheived things would return. Comic relief would butt in. Swinging swords would connect. Things not already dead would get in the way.

And if "excitement" did not interdict?

Reading(,) Faces

At the beginning of Temple Grandin, the eponymous addresses us to say that she isn't like other people--she thinks "in pictures." If thinking in pictures does not seem especially peculiar, the movie does not hold back in demonstrating. It does so with a kind of HUD of sketched diagrams animating over real objects, and by cutting to extradiegetic images--especially photographs and television and movie clips. One point of these brash cinematic maneuvers, I suppose, is that these are diegetic for her. Maybe I should be thankful that it did not treat her mind as a transcendental that may only be hinted at. It's also not strange that a filmmaker would display such gushing admiration for someone who thinks in pictures. It's not strange, though some would eroticize the strange rather than the familiar mind--a poet, a musician, a scientist, an idiot.

While pointing toward something grander than can be represented has been avoided, nonetheless, a kind of apotheosis occurs when montage tries to show all the images that run through her consciousness. There is a horse. It turns out she identifies with and loves large hoofed animals more than any human, projecting onto them all of her troubles and comforts. When this horse dies, she asks her closest friend (who happens to be her teacher) "where did it go?" He tells her that the dead live on in our memories. She proceeds to list all of her memories of the horse, which are pictures, which flash on the screen as rapidly as she speaks.

The movie seems to regard this as a supernatural ability. A french teacher asks her testily if she understood what she claims to have read by glancing down at the textbook page for a second. Grandin Glass brings up the image of the textbook page, and she reads aloud from it. There is one of those moments when the people in the movie see what the viewer has seen this whole time. The teacher and the rest of the class are agape.

For someone with such a capacious photographic memory, however, she reports difficulty interpreting images. For such a crassly representative film, its inadvertant representation of the filmic principle is exactly the opposite.

Her upbringing is a struggle between two mothers--­her mother who wants her to be normal, and her aunt who wants her to be happy. In frustration, she reports to her aunt that girls at school "say things like 'why are you so grumpy when I'm happy?' and I say 'but I'm happy!' and they say 'well you don't look happy' and they say 'can't you see I'm faking it? can't you see I'm sad?' I don't know what they're talkin about."

"What do you look like when you're happy?"

"Like this." She shows a blank face.

In response to this crisis of face-reading, her aunt gives her a pile of photographs of her face, which they use as flash cards. Her aunt tells her what emotion is on her face in each photo, and she writes it on the photo in permanent marker.

When the french teacher solicits her understanding, she responds with comprehension; rather than say what the passage says, she just says what the passage says. When the horse dies, she recalls all the images of the horse and reports what she sees, but says nothing of the horse. When she learns to read faces, she transposes one image (the name of the emotion, written in marker) onto another (the photograph of her face). This, I gather, is what is meant by thinking in pictures. But while its material might be peculiar, its referenciality is not. Reading faces is mundane and intuitive, but it depends upon referents. Grandin's autistic outsiderness to things usually taken for granted makes the character a screen on which to explore the philosophic anxieties of these automatic, learned fluencies. Can you tell if a face is faking? What is reading besides reciting the words on the page? Where do the dead go?

Of course, she's just as much used to tie these problems up neatly, sentimentally, and messily to the degree the solutions are neat: Yes Faces Contain Emotions That Can Be Read Right Off Them, The Dead Live On In Our Minds. (As for how reading does or does not become understanding, it's never addressed again, just hangs there.)

Despite not being able to interpret the nuances of others' faces, her face is transparent enough to compile the labelled photographic index of her expressions. This kind of transparency is what Claire Danes says she relies upon. In a recent interview she's asked

"Her face--your face--changes four or five times, smiling radiantly, and then she's frowning and anxious, and then she smiles again, and then she frowns again. It's happening so quickly. It's really impressive and I wonder did you consciously do that?"

"No, there's no way that I could be conscious of that. I focus on the intention of the character and whatever thoughts and feelings she's having, and they seem to kind of naturally communicate themselves on the face."

But for thoughts and feelings to naturally communicate themselves, she has to train herself. For her role as Carrie Mathison, she says she did a lot of ressearch--she watched "manic confessionals" on youtube. Only after consuming enough of these mannerisms, overlaying images upon images, does anything become natural. Implicitly she's denying that there is any theatricality in her reproductions of mannerisms. In the same interview she tells us how at an early age she didn't take a job acting in a soap, because "I didn't want to develop bad habits." Acting that relies on conventions to communicate emotion is second-grade for her, so she takes her material from non-actors. It's true that plenty of mannerisms do not make it to television, but I know my repertoire of mannerisms includes no small share of television characters.

Of course, Danes' mannerisms are as particular to her as they are to her sources, like speaking a second langauge with an accent. After long enough watching her--or anyone--her mannerisms begin to lose their import, and I'm back to a semblance of Grandin's assembled problem of assembly: what's behind a face?

Homeland's Lightning Rod

I've given up editing this. Writing demands that you believe in something which is ultimately flawed. This is a problem of time, of stretching the moment of first draft before it gives way to editing (as Teju Cole puts it, "writing lives or dies by what’s produced in that moment"), yes. But it is also a problem of reconciling mania and depression. Isn't it?

Ideas only sound like good ideas to someone who is out of touch with their own limitations and the limitations of the world. Indeed, the necessary belief in the communicative possibility of writing isn't quite on. I write this because I think a someone might read it and understand. It's a gambit for recognition.

Which surely is not always a delusional wish? It's hard to judge. The labelling of mental illnesses gives the appearance that distinctions between sanity and insanity can be clearly drawn--that one can judge. But if the afflicted's problem is conceived as one of judgement, only semantic hocus-pocus can be offered. As advice from one bipolar person to another, "there's good gut and there's bad gut; sometimes I really have to clean out the fridge and set it on fire--that's bad gut" is perfectly opaque. This is what Carrie's father tells her in Homeland when she's in the middle of a manic episode and she tells him something she really has to do. His advice seems to suggest she is capable of both precognitive retrospection and seeing herself from outside herself (which are basically the same thing).

She spends the worst of her mania holed up in her sister's house under constant supervision, away from messy stimuli and eyes who would see her craziness. While she's being reigned in, the boundaries blur. Her "condition" gets her fired; her employment depended upon the relative control medication offered her. Yet her brilliance as an intelligence operative is clearly related to her bipolarity. While she's manic she does some of her best work, albeit in a nearly incomprehensible manner. She becomes a kind of Cassandra, subject to bursts of insight that nobody believes. Her friend and father figure, Saul, though, is able to put it all together, to provide the translation. She idealizes their relationship as one might a family in an earlier era: a refuge of love in an unforgiving world (Langley, in this case). His complaint is that he does most of the foriving.

She is in general someone who lets her burdens fall on others. She uses her sister to provide her with the experimental drugs that allow her to function at her job, and falls back on her sister's care whenever she immediately needs it. There is therefore a perverse moralism in others' burdens being displaced onto her.

It strikes me that this characterizes well my relationship with myself in the process of writing, and that while depressed it's not that insight isn't possible, but that it always sounds like "bad gut." While my upswings are nowhere near Carrie's nor my mother's manias, they are productive to the same degree that they are foolish. While my decisions are less drastic than setting the fridge on fire or accusing someone of planning to blow up the vice president, they do nonetheless seem very wrong in retrospect. Which sounds, if you ask me, like the structure of consciousness, rather than a bipolar pathology.

When her dad tut-tuts her for staying up late working, she retorts "I feel pretty great." "Wired. There's a difference." It's hard to deny the distinction--there are different kinds of happiness--however, he's not distinguishing among a field, but putting the one above the rest. The one is that calm, enduring, enlightened happiness waiting at the end of therapeutic narratives. It's that much touted and aestheticized in-the-momentness. At the very least, this ideal state does not characterize American nationalism, whose Homeland Security overcompensates for the wrongness of 9/11. Carrie along with it, as we are reminded every episode by her saying "I missed something ten years ago, I can't let that happen again."

Where is the wrongness in the right and the rightness in the wrong? This is what Homeland is concerned with, and how interiority is so obsessively cultivated there as a mystery between contradictions.

The supreme contradiction is of course Brodie, the American soldier who is an impassioned anti-American terrorist. When he finally gets caught by the CIA, Carrie calls the eight years of torture and intimacy that created his passion "brainwashing," which means, as far as I can tell, "brainwashing that isn't ours." She uses this term despite knowing that the boy Brodie babysat for three years died in an American drone strike.

At the end of the first season of Homeland I wanted Brodie to blow up the vice president (who ordered said drone strike). This isn't just out of a need for violence, or even just a need for a break in the binds that Carrie and Brodie increasingly inhabit. The show puts us in this position because if Brodie suicide bombs himself, he vindicates Carrie's reasoning, which we know to be sound. If he doesn't go through with it, nobody will know that she's right. That he ultimately thinks better of it is crueler (and therefore more pleasurable) to the viewer than if he had gone through with it. Life, it turns out, is more demanding and more brutal than death. Its reproduction requires the repression of truth. For life to go on, Carrie and everyone else must believe that she's insane. In lieu of others' deaths, Carrie can only go on by consenting to electroshock therapy, which she admits will potentially cause some amnesia. "I can't go on like this," she says to Saul, "after all that's happened, it's probably better that I forget." And really this is what the vice president and Carrie's boss are asking of the world--to forget. "It's just a turd, leave it alone," says the VP. This puts the viewer in an excruciating position: she's atoning for something that we know wasn't wrong. Yes, she may be "a little intense," and "off," but her analysis is spot on.

The CIA in this show operates under the assumption that all policing does: that bad things are ultimately caused by bad people, and that bad things can be stopped by stopping bad people. Not to say there's really much of another option. To admit that the very life it's their job to protect is violent in its repression, and that the excesses of this repression have such fallouts as terrorism would be more or less to give up on this life. Part of protecting life, or at least national life, is to protect the illusion that others threaten it, rather than itself. When Carrie and Saul's investigation threatens to uncover the nation's (and the CIA's) complicity in an act of terrorism against it, this must be repressed. It is a threat not just to the CIA's ideology, but as Carrie's boss points out, to the nation itself. "You'd be handing the enemy the best recruitment tool since Abu Grabe."

But uncover that aptly labelled "turd" she did, and so she must bear its burden. By the end of the first season--which comes to a close with her running around making what sound like insane accusations--she is the mad woman in the attic. Her work doesn't save the world from itself, but becomes internalized as the sign of her madness. Her relationship to the world is not to be trusted.

Writing ultimately fails, in part because there is no Saul to translate the intimate workings of our minds to the world. More to the point, because neither the world nor the mind is fully equipped or inclined to articulate its own undoing. That's why writing, in the peculiar and irritating sense I have meant it here, is work--because inhabiting the negligable space between living and dying is an effort. One buries the death drive so far one becomes its rushing expression, or one lets it seep into consciousness and slows nearly to a halt. Between these is not stability or sanity, but normality. There's a difference.

Little Bags of Crisps

I just ran out of toast. There is the potential for "real food," I guess, but why properly cook when I can buy more snacks? Detectives, it seems, agree, but they are on the other side: They have no time for anything but snacks, and so they idolize meals. Watching them, and having plenty of time to cook meals, I lust for snacks.

I'm really just talking about one detective, though snacking is part of the genre. She crunches on little bags of crisps, and I salivate for all things snacky. Her face shocked me on the Hitchcock poster. I tried to emulate her haircut. This too was a grass-is-greener phenomenon.

Yesterday I had at my disposal an odd thing: a snack that I labored over for hours. I baked it because I ran out of topics that might interest a guest--ran out of talk altogether, actually--and turned the kitchen instead into a stage, where I performed Tarte Tatin. "Real pastry," he said, "good for you," and went back to reading coupons on newsprint.

When the morning came with its disappointment (consciousness) and relief (the guest gone), the previous night's labor allowed me to avoid one of morning's major groanings (cooking breakfast). All I had to do was coffee. Late afternoon came, and I ate more tart. It was not snacking in the way that chips provide an action for anxious cogitation. It was snacking in the I'm-too-lazy-to-cook way, and in its nutritional content: flour, butter, sugar (and a bit of fruit). Its rejection of all things "substantial."

One thinks one is allaying the passage of time by refusing to spend it cooking, and by lazing around with tart, coffee, book, and computer, but now it was already dark. It was time to go, and I had not eaten anything but tart all day. I ate another piece of tart, so that I wouldn't be hungry (I would be gone for three hours).

My guts undulated. I recalled an exchange with last night's guest. "Not much sugar you put in, did you?" "2/3 of a cup. Lots of butter though--a whole stick in the crust, and half a stick in the filling." (As if sugar and butter are interchangeable by virtue of being considered unhealthy.) There was a certain advantage, though, to filling the stomach with butter and coffee: I didn't want to put anything else in there. Guts had been inverted.

Those are the extremes of snacking's see-saw: I either don't want to eat anything, ever, or I want to eat ALL THE SNACKS (as Hyperbole and a Half would put it) and to never stop. Eating is either a bother or a never-complete transubstantiation. These might sound opposed, but both are attempts not to move forward--either through outright refusal or by the rapid lateral motions of a hermit crab. Detectives snack wen the case isn't going anywhere. When they're stuck. At a narrative level, an investigation consists of long periods of frustrated stuckness and desperate grasping punctuated by sudden leaps forward.

Meals punctuate. To eat a meal is to admit that one needs to eat, ergo to admit that time has passed since one last ate. It is especially difficult to admit that time has passed when one has done so little during that time now gone, and when one thinks that something has to be done with time, otherwise one does not deserve it.

Detectives who have not cracked the case eat "one of those frozen chili con carne things" one night and "one of those frozen chili con carne things" the next night. They do not appreciate someone butting in to cook "proper food" for them. Begrudgingly they will eat what is cooked for them, but they will not allow its punctuation. The cook will get angry and leave; the detective's problem with this meal (one of many) will thus be side-stepped.

I am endeavouring, ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.

Star Trek (the original) is nearly unwatchable. Thus it is populated with babes in costumes whose designer seems to grin lasciviously from behind the camera. When their bodies aren't giving relief from the creak of plastic gears--or if you prefer, the shouting of men--a particular kind of head shot is. The female guest star's face is in soft focus, and lit from a slightly oblique angle, so that her hair shines ethereally. Her face glows, and her glowing smile appears indeed from another planet.

While the rest of our heroes boldly go where no man has gone before--namely, portals--Uhura says "Captain, I'm afraid."

To a trekkie, it's already apparent that I'm really speaking of one episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever". (But that way of filming female faces holds throughout the series, I swear.) I began watching the episode because I know someone who is obsessed with the writer, Harlan Ellison. I was wikipediaing him, and discovered he wrote an episode of Star Trek. What really interested me, though, was that he hated the adaptation of his script so much that he went to court. I had to see what all the fuss was about.

Controversy could only bouy me so much against the sinking dullness of the show, however. I couldn't make it through the episode. It was one of those "travelling back in time screws up the present" plots. When it is revealed that what changes the future for the worse is the U.S. not going to war with Germany during World War Two, my cursor fled to the pause button. I longed for a non-butterfly-effect time travel concept, as in Kage Baker. At least when written history cannot be changed, jingoistic self-justification (whenever we feel national shame, it seems, we can always fall back on "but we saved the world!") isn't possible.

But anyway, I wasn't intending masturbate about taste. I haven't read Ellison's script, but I have a conjecture. When he wrote an episode for Star Trek, what was he expecting when it got aired? Star Trek is still Star Trek. Every writer has a rebellious streak of some sort--otherwise why write--but I think Ellison's was particularly strong. When he wrote an episode of Star Trek, he wanted it to exceed the bounds of what a Star Trek episode could be. He wanted to make something daring, perhaps with a bit of commentary on the show itself. He wanted to inject a bit of not-Star Trek into Star Trek, to give it a little life. So when he saw what ultimately made it to the screen, he was pissed. This wasn't the edgyness he had imagined.

I make fun, but it's perfectly understandable. (Although it does take a special kind of stubbornness to take Paramount to court four decades later for rewriting his script.) Even writing a piece for Bright Wall in a Dark Room, at least half my motivation was something along the lines of I'll show them! I felt that I was in some way shaking up the genre of BWDR. Such an attitude may be necessary, along with the idealizations that come with it.

There's something phallic about this conception of creativity in which one creates within confines but yearns to exceed those confines, and in so doing reveal one's idealized self in the difference. One pretends to want freedom from the confines, but without them one would not be able to create, nor would one want to. Ellison raged against the apparatus of his articulation. He saw too much of the apparatus, and not enough of himself. Despite the angelic face of its female guest star, the episode wasn't pornographic enough.

Date Night

It's the seed of the whole plot, but I'm sorry, this couple is not discontent. Which is to say I would have been quite content for them to continue lazily, guiltily going to the same dreary place for dinner every "date night", endlessly deferring sex for some other night, and becoming (god forbid) "excellent housemates". But for some reason or other--I'm guessing because there was a movie to be made--this was a nightmare scenario. You wouldn't know it, though, watching the two of them. They seem quite pleased with themselves engaged in what appears to be the foundational pleasure of their relationship: making up stories about the couples at the other tables. And I would be quite pleased to have such uproarious company. But no. There has to be a problem to fix.

There being to my mind no problem to fix, you can imagine that the build-up to its resolution was to me a declension. Everything, depressingly, slides into place: Carrel's character rediscovers his masculinity, and Fey's remembers how to supplicate. The comedians manage not to get subsumed into the genre action flick they poke fun at, but slip instead into the sad conventions of a romantic comedy. Their complaints against each other are just cliche mercenaries hired for their pointless arguments. He leaves drawers and toilet seats open. She does every domestic task because she doesn't trust he can do anything right. I find myself, unsurprisingly, on her side. When it turns out he's compotent at planning their escape from the criminal mess they stumbled into, I'm incredulous. He has to explain everything to her, twice, because "you know I've never been good with complicated plots." After his second explanation, I'm still lost.

It's noteworthy that the only way out of the ossification of marriage, in this film, is mortal danger. Their complaint is that their life together is too smooth, which is after all the advantage of having an income and a spouse, in theory. During the course of their crazy night, their motives get mixed up. They're trying to get out of danger, to "just go home", but they're trying to get in as many scrapes with death as possible to avoid the routine of their marriage. These two drives are crystalized in conflation when, after a half-frank, half-sappy discussion in which Fey's character says she doesn't dream of running off with another man, but of being alone, they pause at a window pane: "this will be our second time breaking and entering this evening, making us repeat offenders." "Better than excellent houesmates."

Oddest of all about this movie is its paradox: to reconstitute the dull, it must be shaken up. There are a lot of politically correct gender gestures in the shaking up (he's a better pole dancer, she has the balls to break into an office), but ultimately it's a shake-down. They go through all this so that their normativity might feel like it has more "panache." Which is the word the husband uses, comically, to describe the heroic drive to the city he's gonna--by god--take his wife on. They end up stuck in traffic.

Hackers

The Legacy of (Zero) Cool

Coolness has always slain me. (Who adds the awkward “ness” to cool but the uncool?) No matter how much older I am, unruffleable youths in sunglasses constitute a crisis of difference for me. Will they hurt me? How can they pull it off? How do they not betray their bluff? How dare they? The answer, of course, is quite simple, and quite impossible for me to understand more than notionally: they’re not me.

So it’s not surprising that in middle and high school, when the above crisis was a daily occurrence, I became attached to a film that integrated coolness with the identity I held at the time...

"Damages" Season 5 Episode 3

Every season of "Damages" fictionalizes some real-life scandal. This fifth season, the material is Wikileaks and the sexual charges against Julian Assange. My understanding of this material is, as with every other season's, limited. But it was the first season whose references I broadly understood, which had me giddy in the same way a birder identifies the bird in front of him. That is to say, cursorily.

The plot of this season combines Assange's sexuality and the functioning of WikiLeaks. That word, leak, echoes around as a kind of innuendo, until in the third episode it reaches a pitch of conflation. Sitting on the toilet taking a leak, I come to the depressing realization that all of my thoughts on the matter of leakage hinge on an Anne Carson essay--depressing not because, gosh, thoughts come from somewhere, but because I've come to the conclusion that every essay that uses Anne Carson's work does so in the manner of quoting gospel, and the effect upon the essay is invariably death. She is so unassailably cool in the eyes of certain people (of whom I'm one) that she cannot be quoted without taking over as sole purveyor of meaning. Which is why it is better here to instead cite a glaring plot point. The "whistleblower", as those who supply information to the Assange analog are called, is a woman whose leak, when it gets leaked onto his website, for some reason contains personal emails detailing her, as a newspaper puts it, sexcapade. The leak, ostensibly about the leakiness of her company, is also, through some unidentified leak, about her sexual leakiness.

If I say leak one more time, I'll kill myself. Which is what the "whistleblower" almost but did not do in response to hers. In the events leading up to her death, she and whatever his name is meet in a hotel room, against protocol, to discuss the information she is to supply. He assures her that it will be confidential, then comes onto her. She pushes him away, and then says that "I'm afraid this isn't something I can follow through on" "What isn't?" he asks, and she says "the leak" (saving me, happily), but in what comes out of his mouth immediately afterwards it is not clear what, or rather which: "You think I can't take what I want?", "I think this is what you wanted", "If I give you what you want will you give me what I want?" (As he unbuttons his pants and forces her onto the bed.) I believe I've made my point as clear and articulate as a blog post demands. As for the show, what exactly is being said is unclear to me, but it sure is bludgeoning it into us.

Chopped

In Magic: The Gathering there is a card called Meekstone. It makes life difficult for anything large. It manipulates the rules to privilege the small, the creatures you wouldn't expect to make it or to do much of anything. An oddly negative card for the righteous (it's white, the color of piety), it does so by punishing the bold player who puts down something quite clearly intended to win. Winning must be done cryptically, through a guise of defense.

In this cutthroat world some of us morally-inclined goody-goodies might wish for a Meekstone, something to make effective our agonizing qualms. We think, by way of self-justification, that the concept of humility is not still at work in the wider moral culture.

Nowhere is this more apparent than "Chopped". The show, I am fairly sure, encourages its contestants to boast on camera. Then they get chopped. There are gradations and flavors of vocal hubris. The first episode I watched had a young Boston chef whose cold eyes glowered out from deep eye sockets. At every moment he told us how confident he was of his cooking. While one of his competitors--a French woman with an earthy aesthetic--flipped out, vocalized her every worry and mistake, and thought out loud in French-accented English, he excercised a rigid, aspirational control. He was constantly saying he was in control. It was such pleasure to watch him get chopped.

Not every boaster is so clearly straining. Some really seem to believe their self-aggrandizements. These are the sort who tell us in the mandatory post-exile interview that they disagree with the choice to chop them. They tell us that they're the better chef. Usually these are older men, curmudgeonly and arrogant. I love to dislike them, and the show gives ample opportunity to ridicule them. A worthy chef does not say how great he or she is. A worthy chef is humble.

I can't decide whether my favorite winner is the taciturn lawyer-turned-chef whose poise was immaculate, neither boasting nor caving under pressure, maintaining a calm poker face, or the Hannah Horvath of chefs, who moved to New York penniless with culinary dreams, and lives with her friend. Of course, Hannah wouldn't burst into tears at everything and anything. This contestant was not shy about describing how her anxiety felt. She said she felt like "throwing up" or "crying in a corner" or "I was having a nervous breakdown." She cried in interviews, she cried when critiqued, she cried when she won.

Total Recall

I would totally recall the movie for this.

I have a friend, D., who has aspired all his life to be a stand-up comedian, though he has never said so, and indeed he may not think so. He's at his best impersonating. His impersonations are nothing groundbreaking, but they're infectious, and they do what they should: improve upon the source martial. So much so that the source material becomes completely lost, and the far more entertaining impersonation is all we remember. No one has become more lost and more improved by impersonation than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Thus watching any movie he's in is an excavation of the real Arnie, quickly thereafter forgotten. It's a disorienting thing--him and the activity of unearthing him. Imagine my shock at the first scene of "Total Recall", in which he is thrown into the Martian desert without a space suit, and he begins to scream. In a special effect that is unsettling as much for its gruesomeness as its cheesyness, his eyes bulge out of their sockets, and he emits the proto-Arnie-noise. You know, the one everyone does, from Dana Carvey to Dylan Moran to my D.: alwalwalwalwalw--a guttural vowel through jaws moving rhythmically up and down as if on an exercise machine. Undoubtedly that's how it began--as a jaw exercise. The amazing part about this is that even though I watched this only 24 hours ago, I have just described D.'s impression to you, not what I heard. Because I don't remember what I heard.

This is exactly the kind of tiresome mind-game that can sustain Phillip K. Dick's wonder. (He wrote the short story on which Total Recall was based, of course, as he did quite a few other fanboy-enshrined Sci-Fi films.) He subjects everything to the same kind of philosophical doubt, and so his work is a gold mine for film-makers aiming for the "let's smoke a bowl and watch something" crowd. The basic "whoa" in this film: Is the protagonist's experience a self-indulgent fantasy being synthetically pumped into him by--you guessed it--a sleazy corporation or is it real? It turns out that both his identity and his idealism are constructs intended to secure the corporation's monopoly. But oh no! It back-fires: He, the construct, fights to not be erased by his "true" identity, and triumphantly saves the world from the corporation's greed.

Among all this, there are innumerable funny Schwarzenegger noises, or action scenes as some call them. The unpathologized nonchalance with which he spins innocent bystanders into his heroic imperatives gave me pause. People who have barely met him sacrifice their lives for him, and then he uses their corpses as body shields. His role is comparable to one of the most gruesome weapons he wields in the film: an enormous hand-held drill. He uses it to drill all the way through the armor plating of a vehicle threatening to kill him and his sidekick/lover, and finally into the flesh of its operator. Ugh.

Let's talk about something else. How about that this heavily accented actor is supposed to pass for a white American everyman? At the film's start he and Sharon Stone flounce about their apartment like the married couple you want to murder every time they come over for dinner. When he wakes up, she hounds him for information about this other girl in his recurring dream. He sulks, and watches the news on their enormous flat screen. She bitchily turns it off with the most awful smile (this perhaps is Stone's talent). He sulks some more, and then goes to work. Apparently, he's a construction worker. Like his more recent job as governor, one is always thinking that surely he's actually a body builder, and surely he's just visiting from Austria. Maybe he's actually perfect for both this role and in politics because his accent and mannerisms form a kind of cognitive bomb. One sees and then, in a flash of bent diphthongs and flexing muscle, one does not.

The only part of all this worth watching as far as I'm concerned is Schwarzenegger being apathetic and sarcastic. It's a very brief scene, but unparalleled. He's watching a video of himself telling him what to do, because the one watching has contracted amnesia under duress. What he's watching, then, is the way back to himself. The route involves a lot of difficult, adventurous tasks, and he's depressed by this. "Yes, yes," he says, slouching, as if his wife just scolded him, and then, hearing the worst of it, "great," dripping with ennui. Captured on screen is the most honest reaction he's ever had to his life's work.

Dune

Let me tell you about something remarkable. A movie so impressed me that I’m dying to tell you about it. I’m positively giddy. How couldn’t I be? It’s the worst movie ever, and I’ve watched it somewhere in the realm of a dozen times. For me it’s one of those adolescent artifacts that nobody ever tells you is going to stubbornly stick with you like pencil lead under the skin, or that tiny red spot under my right eye. Actually, they’re like neither of those things, because the culture you haplessly consume in teenagerdom is infectious, ever aspiring to bring everyone else down to its level. For this reason I never stop quoting "The Simpsons", or--ugh--"Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Psychoanalysis gets it right, but misses the point: Yes, we're doomed to endlessly repeat our childhood traumas, but more importantly we're doomed to repeat the inane television we watched when we were twelve.

Of course, not every thing I gobbled back then comes back up tasting entirely of disease. For instance, The Far Side has left indelible bite-marks in my consciousness. I remember one strip quite clearly, in which two crocodiles, distended bellies up, are laying on a beach. In a smashed-up boat, the empty clothing and effects of two humans are at the happy crocodiles' feet. One crocodile says to the other: “wow, that was incredible--pink, soft all the way through, no bones, or nothin’.” Which is a perfect description of the movie in question, “Dune”. It really is an achievement--a movie this long without the slightest hint of tension or movement.

People talk about the intricately plotted political intrigue in Frank Herbert's book. Don't believe them. I've read it, and can say unequivocally that they're imagining things. Of course, I don't remember one word of the book, but that's not the point. I probably can't remember any of it either because I was too of a piece with Herbert’s version of eastern wisdom, or because I, like David Lynch, was reading only for atmosphere. The resulting movie is pure atmosphere--hazy, ridiculous, Lynchian atmosphere. Maybe he too read it ensconced in a canyon crevice in Utah, soaking up Desertness and the most stiltedly philosophical navel-gazers you’ve ever met. Of course I was--the characters were just as bad as me. (Okay, I take it back, I guess I remember something, after all.) In any case, all the movie can remember of the complex politics (if there ever were any) is one line: “I see plans within plans."

Personally, all I see, in close-up, is the fascinatingly not-quite vaginal animatronic monster mouth that utters this--a drooping, undulating thing that in all other parts of the movie spews orange at planets. Apparently, this is the effect of being mutated over a period of 4,000 years by an expensive substance. "But," you interject, "4,000 years seems a bit exaggerated. I've had mornings like that." But did your vomit fold space? That's what these entitled, pink whales do all day, floating around in amniotic fluid with their stubby t-rex arms stiffly outstretched: They're master origamists. I can still see these creatures clearly because I recall all the surreal imagery whose inexplicable, banal haunting is the hallmark of decent sci-fi (well, not entirely inexplicable, and not always decent--one doesn't need much of an imagination to explain how the Enterprise's shapely hull and ample nacelles compel as surely as a hot dog), and I recall the silly dialog, but I do not recall any of it adding up to anything.

“Hey!” 16-year-old me rebuts, “there’s a story!” Sure. I’ll recount it: Ambitious boy wants to impress father. Family goes on an adventure to this crazy-dry place (researching it on his 102nd-century iPad, the boy recites, with some concentration, “Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet,” and we wonder how a script of such breathtaking efficiency managed to fit so little in over two hours). There father and son make mega bank off of, err, spice (sound familiar?). Father’s fat, gross, homo, evil nemesis attacks. Father dies. Precocious boy finds way of impressing dead father by going Lawrence of Arabia on Father’s nemesis’ fat ass. Unlike Lawrence, boy is not crazy, and really is messiah. Montages of training his native army and blowing shit up. Together, boy, Patrick Stewart, and army of white Taoist Arabs storm the evil palace by shouting at it (the palace offers that much resistance). And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach! (Which is what? The most apparent--and aggravating--explanation offered is that “there is a place terrifying to us--to women--that we dare not go.” Gosh, thank god our hero dares to!)

There is no contingency in this series of events. Never are we led to believe that something else could happen. We never think "oh no! What if they fall off the back of that huge sandworm they're riding, and the whole evil palace takedown is a bust?" Well, okay, I did think that (man, riding sandworms looks precarious), but I never actually doubted that they would triumph. Which makes it not much of a triumph. Things just happen. Movies that seem to go on without me are not, it turns out, what thrill me, but rather movies that seem to play with my expectations, to be engaging with me, or--just as good if not better--manipulating me. Engagement with "Dune" is entirely unnecessary, because it doesn’t make the story any more interesting. Which is an odd coincidence, because intense, focused engagement appears to be the protagonist’s only attitude toward the world. It’s this universe’s whole shtick, really: the discipline of the mind. That’s why we’re always hearing everyone’s thoughts in voice-over, in imitation of the book’s endless italics. These are not, however, the thoughts of people engaged with any aspect of the world. For people allegedly possessed of precognition, they sound profoundly dimwitted. Often they just narrate what’s going on in the movie, because someone rightly guessed it would be too incoherent otherwise. At one point the boy and his mother are tied up in the back of an evil black hovercraft. His mother is gagged, because, playing out the misogynistic fears of men everywhere, their captors are afraid her voice will trick them. She’s a witch! Burn her! (I told you "The Holy Grail" could not be purged.) So, little omnisex god that he is, the boy decides to trick them with his witchy, reverbed voice. “He’s trying the voice!” we hear her think. Whoa now. Let’s not get too hasty.

When the characters' voluble thoughts aren’t stating the obvious, they're super-suspicious. Meeting someone new, the future messiah thinks “he’s hiding something.” Following a scene during which he stares at this someone intently, he astutely deduces “he's hiding many things.” He reminds me of myself at my worst, convinced that if I just look at someone hard enough, I will suddenly understand them whole. It’s as if the movie is full of Watsons--all aspiring to be Sherlocks, all falling short. However, rather than this condition of amateurism leaving them with an erotic longing for the real thing, they are all satisfied with their dead-end observations. Maybe when humanity expunged computers from the universe, Twitter took up permanent residence in their thoughts. On that note, snark seems to have gone the same way as the internet, leaving us with ingenuousness the likes of which God has never seen, and an interrogative that I suspect is directed through the fourth wall: “I have NO FEELINGS!! Why?”

Maybe this awarenessless awareness is what this movie has afflicted me with. I parrot its absurd, hyperbolic lines with as much mindfulness as a meme. Lynch and those other people involved in the movie (whom fans decry, as if waiting on the horizon of this movie is his untainted masterpiece) have unintentionally created a movie for postmodernist intellectuals to masturbate about: It obviates narrative entirely, leaving oddly memorable bits of speech to float without context and work their insidious way meaninglessly into the audience. Speaking of which, oh, fuck it, here you go:

“I will kill you!”

“I will bend like a reed in the wind.”

“Not in the mood? Mood is a thing for cattle, and loveplay, not fighting!”

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.”

“I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnan, will encompass their doom!”

“Tell me of your homeworld, usul.”

“Stop your speaking!”

“Give me spice!”

“They tried and failed?”
“No, they tried and died!”

Melancholia

I watched “Melancholia” on one of those streaming video websites. This one allowed comments. I have to admit that the predictably resulting sea of inanity determined my viewing to an alarming degree. I kept finding myself helplessly arguing with the comments.

Someone had commented “might as well jst watch part two of the film thats wen it starts to getin intresting.” So I eagerly awaited the second half of the movie, in part because as in all movies with a potential catastrophe, I wanted it to happen. As the planet Melancholia approached, I was filled with a mixture of dread and anticipation--a split melodramatically explored through the movie’s characters. When Part Two rolled around, it didn’t live up to the commenter’s contention.

Part One is a massive failure of a wedding reception; Part Two follows the bride's deep depression and her sister taking care of her. Watching Kristen Dunst’s transformation in the first part from ostensible happiness to agitated depression is more interesting than her journey to destruction in the second part. Perhaps this is because the former feels like consciousness brewing. This is something one prays for after the first non-slow-motion scene in which bride and groom try to maneauver the limo up the country road’s tight curve. For all of their post-marital giddiness and good humor, it is deliciously awkward.

Someone else commented that “this movie will haunt you for days or weeks.” Despite how exasperatingly heavy-handed it is at times, this seems true. It’s only been a day, but it’s hard to purge the image of the giant watery world crashing into our own. What are more memorable, though, are the violently honest outbursts. This is why I enjoyed Part One so thoroughly: The way the wedding reception falls apart is as delightful as it is uncomfortable. The best nasty shards of speech come from the bride Justine’s mother, Gaby (Charlotte Rampling, who has unfortunately limited screen time). At the beginning of the reception there’s a round of obligatory speeches. Gaby stands when she becomes too fed up with Justine's father (John Hurt) and can't keep quiet.

“I don’t believe in weddings,” she announces. “I just have one thing to say: enjoy it while it lasts.”

It's the most unnecessary speech ever, and pointlessly mean. I was charmed to the bone. Her other daughter, Claire, asks her "why did you even bother coming?" When it comes time to cut the cake and Gaby and Justine are missing, Claire's husband John gallantly (not really, he’s just pissed--they’re wasting his precious money he spent on the wedding, which he has so little of) goes up to fetch them.

“Gaby,” he says politely at the door to her bathroom, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s time to cut the cake.” Which is a sitting duck of a sentence.

“I wasn’t there when Justine took her first crap on the potty. I wasn't there when she had her first sexual intercourse. So give me a break please from your fucking rituals.”

This was an even more enjoyably spectacular lack of caring than Justine suddenly pushing a stranger to the ground and fucking him on the eighteen-hole golf course (eighteen, John keeps reminding everyone) that surrounds the mansion, merely because he happened to be there, or her subsequent monologue to her boss: “I hate you and your firm so deeply I couldn’t find the words to describe it. You are a despicable, power-hungry little man, Jack.”

The stranger was hired by Justine's boss to extract a tag line from her (she works in advertising). He proposes to her at the end of the night, and calls the sex they had "good" ("mechanical" would be accurate).

Another comment read: "Brilliant ending. Left me breathless." I thought this meant there was a twist. So I kept expecting that despite all indications to the contrary, including the beginning in which we see Melancholia crash into Earth, that the planet would pass them by anyway. But maybe they'd all kill themselves before that happened, and we could all laugh drily at the cruel irony. The trouble is that from Part One to Part Two, harsh bemusement gives way to fantastical brutality. This is true, too, of the utterances of the melancholic. Justine's black outlook expands from the personal (for example asking her husband "what did you expect?" when he tells her the wedding and their relationship could have gone differently) to the cosmic: "Life on earth is evil. Nobody will miss us." In the same scene she pronounces that she knows we're alone in the universe because "I know things." Deadly seriousness sounds silly, and the consciousness that melancholy has brought sounds like delusion.

Though the commenters on this website have a tendency to laud the movie's profundity if they're not telling us how boring it is, the blatantly metaphoric register that might pass for profundity gets tiresome quickly. By the third time someone repeated that Melancholia (the planet) was “hidden behind the sun,” I wanted it to crash into them, already. Yes, we get it. The planet is called Melancholia, for fuck’s sake.

While the grand metaphors often induced snickers ("it [Melancholia] looks friendly," Claire says wistfully, or how about the "Melancholia and the Dance of Death" diagram that Claire finds on the internet, showing how the planet will pass Earth and then turn around again and crash into it after all), the latter half the movie did terrify me. This is no doubt in part because I was watching it after midnight, and because the previous night I had been kept awake by a mysterious buzzing. It returned at irregular intervals, rattling the window like a subwoofer. Just when I thought it would go away, it came back. In the late hours with no one else to hear it, the unidentified noise gave me similarly apocalyptic feelings as the roaring of Melancholia as it grazes Earth's atmophere. As annoying as Claire is (of course, who isn't in this movie), I sympathized with her complete panic at the prospect of not just dying, but of the whole planet dying. It's the most radical aloneness possible. But Justine knows, I imagine, that we're just as alone already from the day we're born. Because she uh, knows things. The fact that I doubt her knowledge means, I suppose, that I'm attached to life. Or maybe that I'm not as much of an exhibitionist as Lars von Trier.