Thor: The Jumpy World

The main thing about Thor is: he jumps. Like a yellow lab tethered to a stick, he's flung as much as he flings his hammer--an object of which he "will try to be worthy." I have a sketchy feeling there's something reversed about that, but I'm certain that villains stop thrown objects. Hence the hero's motivating envy, because his life is all topsy-turvy. Thor hops between planets more impulsively than we hop between countries. He appears behind a woman with a magical umbrella to shelter her from the storm that follows him around (a bit troubling, I know). He, ahem, crosses stars to save the damsel he sneaks up on. His brother, the ur-trickster, is no help. It's not even clear the writers know what he wants.

Meanwhile, what kind of story is Thor in? At first I thought (with glee) he was in a princess plot. His stern, battle-scarred father (so stern he has to speak in tedious implicatives to say anything kind) wants him to have a practical marriage to the warrior princess (an obvious choice, as she appears to be the only female warrior in the nine realms, and indeed, one of two non-mortal females). But he doesn't love her, daddy. Sadly that is not the story. There is a kind of metaphorical rape-revenge plot, which seems totally thoughtless. Jane gets unwillingly invaded by a malevolent liquid called "the ether," which makes her faint, turns her eyes black, and violently dispatches anyone who tries to touch her other than Thor. For half the movie she's just wandering around asking "how do I get it out of me?" Once the evil elf man sucks it out of her, somehow it becomes power to wield instead of burden to bear. Hm.

Is that the story? There's also a caper. The gang of vaguely recognizable warrior-buddies rescue Jane, free Loki, and dash off through Loki's secret passage. On the way there, one of the gang turns it into a pirate movie for five seconds, swinging by rope from one ship to another. There's also a few minutes of Star Wars, all pwee-pwee dogfight and destructive sperm trying to enter a well-protected sphere. And some grave Peter Jacksonesque mythological backstory, complete with CGI battles with elves. By the way, about the ether, Thor tells power-hungry Loki "you cannot wield it."

Fittingly, the overarching plot becomes in the end about the colliding of worlds. Things fly wily-nilly in and out of portals. Thor is in his element, jumping around blind trying to stop bad things. In this case, he must stop the elf from bringing about that venerable standby of diabolic plots: the destruction of the universe. This vampirically pale man has plunged his dagger-like ship smack in the middle of Greenwich, like a burning cross, or a to-scale Google Earth pin. Because with a flourish lifted from Ancient Aliens wingnuttery, all the great wonders of the world point to Greenwich. All the portals float overhead there, variously inbibing and disgorging villain, henchmen, hero, sidekicks. It does seem the logical aesthetic climax of such a mishmash of tones and genres. It felt much like a firework: a bunch of sparkles and pops, accompanied by a concussive bang and a dispersal of glowy bits.

To be honest, I would prefer the barriers between worlds didn't collapse. Thor and Jane are more bearable when they can't reach each other. The pining shakes them up a bit, and for that short moment they have pathos, even if it can only be signified by a black cloak or a half-hearted date. When they meet, the instant affection runs an iron over them. I think this long distance thing is working just fine for them.

Enough Said

The title gives the impression of a movie fed up with speech. And its dialogue feels driven by pity for speaking. There are few lines whose comedy is seperable from the empathetic cringe they induce. But are words really the issue?

The warp of the movie is awkwardness, the weft, aggression. When Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) blurts something blunt, she gives a shot of color to a surprisingly drab California cloth of mildly painful fake warmth. The pain is nothing more fantastical than everyday interpersonal drain--that seemingly impossible rule that, contrary to Paul McCartney's maxim, the love you take is just a little bit less than the love you make. As a messuse, Eva gives the strength of her hands and in return she puts up with her clients' unwelcome intimacy. They babble, they groan, they have bad breath, they don't offer to help her with her massage table up two flights of stairs. The debt is repaid in money, as it tends to be. The math may not work, but it has to.

(One needs a hand massage to give a hand massage.)

More than a decade later, I still remember Ben Bova's Mars for the dust. It got into everything. Well-marinated in their own granular atmosphere, these are not characters that connect. The closeness of Eva and Albert's (James Gandolfini) dates is just close mutual scrutiny, with a bit of irony to make the lines they're drawing around each other bearably sketchy. Their flirting is somehow composed of anti-play, that substance that can be found in children's assessments of their peers.

Throw a few of these miserable couples together, and we get an exchange of cheery bile (a dinner party). Every pet peeve is aired; everyone lives up to their cariacature.

But Enough Said performs a jaw-dropping feat of instrumental delusion. I have too strong a desire for truth-telling, so I was revolted, but I have to congratulate the movie's one act of imagination. It might live, after all. Relationships are only hard because they can be "poisoned" by too much critical talk. It's true that once criticism gets rolling, it's hard to stop, but here there's a convenient scapegoat: Albert's ex wife, who has aired everything she couldn't stand about him. It's perfect for Eva. She gets an actual person on whom to offload all her negativity. She doesn't have to partition herself.

Good Interests

Last year, when he wasn't trying to emote from underneath several inches of wrinkley latex, Guy Pearce gave the biggest TED talk ever. It was a dytopian future of TED: on a tiny stage in a stadium, an entrepreneur peddled his "idea worth spreading" with grave tones and allusions to Greek mythology.

Now he pitches the idea that human DNA "is destined for an upgrade," shows off a room-sized hologram of his brain, and says things like "the next iteration." He drops "mimesis" and preens, as if this word alone just solved the universe.

These touches are of course intended to set him apart in sliminess. Robert Downey Jr.'s problem is that he came from the same slime. Back when he was a part of the "party scene," he said "you've basically hacked DNA!"

He has anxiety attacks because "nothing's been the same since New York," apparently not alluding to 2001. He confides to Gwyneth Paltrow, "I experience things, and then they're over." Yet he's not relieved when the fake terrorist interrupts a TV broadcast (again) to tell the world "don't worry, the final lesson is coming"?

Doomsday didn't deliver, but the DNA-hack he was so excited about offers a kind of solution for his malaise. He can't sleep, and all of his activity is side-stepping "tinkering."

Him being a man, confessing these problems to his mother-accountant-wife, Paltrow, is a Big Gesture. Not only does his small admission of vulnerability nullify their disagreements, it earns him a big cookie, like a baby who finally pooed in the right place.

In any case, for him, time doesn't really pass. "Extremis" punctuates by exploding people.

While it was him who ended up in the spotlight, it was the slimy idea-slinger around whom a network organized. But the whole thing gets a bit too hot.

This is how Downey Jr. describes Extremis: "You know when a girl's straddling you and she glows from the inside, kind of orange?" The troubling substance is emphatically tied up with an interrupted sexual encounter. His innuendo-y puns leading up to the inventor's bedroom and his insistence on her bedroom are relentless. When the stuff blows up in the next room, an even more blatant visual joke lands on top of him in the form of his concerned body guard.

For being immortal, the Extremis-ists are awfully precarious. Extremis doesn't always "take", and explodes you instead. Pearce insists on a rhetoric of purification, and the film insists that the Extremis makes one more oneself, contrasting bare bodies with metal suits. For all their bare drive, they're oddly decentered, their rengerative and destructive power emanating from Extremis.

The hero and the villain compete at first for Petter Pots' interest. Hence Pearce's schmoozey holopowerpoint in her office.

While Pearce was busy getting connected, Downey Jr. isolated himself.

Rebecca Hall describes the process of becoming interested: "first you're all wide-eyed, then...[you get compromised]". Being a scientist is for her an accumulation of compromises. Yet the thing her compromises unleashed, Extremis, is a reversal of wonder cooling into scientific interest. Rather than being in between anything, you are the thing. Your body generates enough heat to melt things. Extremis is a nightmare of overconnectedness. A destructive rather than productive network.

Morality in this movie is a matter of how to manage your interests. The hero is preoccupied with how his hobby is more like an addiction, taking him away from his relationship.

When he says he's renouncing his "cocoon" of hobbies, he's towing the burnt remnants of his workshop. Is it possible to read his self-reinvention as anything other than the very fantasy that draws him back to the workshop? His whole life was organized around the energy-producing contraption which made time stand still near his heart, to keep a piece of shrapnel from penetrating it. He's repaired his damaged heart, and renounced his distracting shell. Can anyone survive on only what they ought to be?

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?

Les Miserables

I was kindly given a vegan chocolate cup filled with raspberry sorbet. The chocolate had cayenne and cinnamon, and the whole thing tasted of freezer burn--two interchangeable statements, both to be expected from self-conscious vegan food. But I did eat it. I even ate it when its provider wasn't in the room.

Still, it rankled. Couldn't I just enjoy something? I had just fled faces that fill the screen, contort with feeling like a lemon being squeezed of every drop, and never look into the camera, and the only semblance of release I can get is an equally misdirected dessert? That's the trouble with leaving--it just haunts you. I wouldn't say that I kept thinking about it. More that the anxiety of Hugh Jackman or Russel Crowe's imminent and unrelenting voices would not let up. It was as if I might turn around, and there in the corridor one of them would be, warbling and belting the least lyrical lyrics. "My name is Javert and you will not forget me," barks Crowe, looking somewhere in the sky, is his chest bulgy as ever but seemingly not in the service of his vocal chords. If they're not not-singing flat exposition, they're unloading hyperbolic sentiments to a contextless plane of full-frame faces. Faces faces faces faces. Cinema could be regarded as an elaborate apparatus to facilitate our fascination with faces, so there may be something primal in all this--perhaps that is why it is so hard to actually look at the screen, at the actors exerting themselves so very hard. But the medium cannot support this anti-slyness.

Where is the voyeurism? I sometimes make fun of serial TV dramas for making a convention of implication, but whatever--at least it's fun to feel as if you're putting things together. All of this transparency makes it impossible to see anything. If parties consisted of people being politely given their turn to tell us their deepest (read: simplest) convictions, and cry their eyes out if they like, there would be no intrigue to mitigate the abjection and discomfort of parties.

This is the second movie I've walked out of in the past month, and I've only seen three movies in the theater in that time. I'm beginning in to get paranoid. Can I handle movies anymore? They didn't used to be things I had to recover from. Bad movies are generally still enjoyable to watch at some level. They at least go down the gullet. Some apparently managed to get Killing Them Softly and Les Miserables down without choking. I wonder if I should bother going to the movies anymore.

Killing Them Softly

Laura Mulvey once declared war on pleasure. She observed that criticism takes pleasure in what it critiques. Specifically, feminist criticism of phallocentric cinema, but it's no less true in general. Her call for the cinematic destruction of pleasure is a fascinating experiment, but takes a bit too seriously, I think, the psychoanalytic idea that there is one libido, and it is male. It's good for necessary apocalyptic pronouncements of the maleness of the universe, but I don't really think it's true. However, the notion that criticism is inherently complicit by virtue of the enjoyment that makes it possible, I've taken as a given until now. My writing on film has often been excessive in carrying out this principle, overprocessing pleasure into negative pleasure through denial. It is a kind of egomania. I anxiously sought anything I could eviscerate, but I enjoyed myself in the theater, for the most part.

Once I got past the initial dry chuckles of watching petty criminals carry out a completely idiotic robbery, and the sledgehammer-subtle snippits of Obama and Bush speeches on the financial crisis, there was nothing fun about Killing Them Softly. Nor was there anything passably benign; it became actively unpleasant to watch, and not in a meaningful way. It was at once the expression and antithesis of Mulvey's cinematic ideal: devoid of pleasure and unremittingly male. The latter is true literally (it fails the Bechdel test spectacularly), but also in that the attitude the film takes up in relation to the world is a very particular form of masculinity.

In Peep Show, David Mitchell's character describes porn as "dead eyed men fucking dead eyed women in a desperate world of pain." Killing Them Softly is dead eyed men killing dead eyed men in a desperate world of pain. Except--and here is its particularity--it's not desperate. There is no urgency. The pervasive, unwavering affect of this world is what would be the result of a social experiment: what if a group of straight men were stuck in a locked room together with no television or alcohol? All the characteristic defenses are here: this special kind of dullness, in which there is no emotional register, and in which visual phenomena, however gruesome, hold a numbing fascination.

To the camera, that is. I was either bored and fidgeting or uncomfortable and fidgeting. Uncomfortable when a man gets beaten half to death, and bored by everything else. These kinds of discomforts are exactly what the film's aesthetic defends against. Indeed, the men's reactions toward each other are boredom or discomfort. There is one loving relationship, between the two dunces that Pitt is after. One of them picks up the other at the airport, and upon seeing the Australian's characteristic grease and filth, he says "you dirty dog!" It's sweet, but the camera must view it from very far away, and they must die. Otherwise, only boredom and discomfort. When the robbers hold up a high-stakes card game, they're uncomfortable, and the jaded card players, bored. The men nonengage with each other in the same way the film nonengages with its subjects. In conversation they maintain such a disinterest in each other, filmed so disinterestedly, that I can't help but be disinterested.

What does hold interest to uncomfortable straight men trying not to look at each other is violence. The camera gives it to us unabridged, and because sometimes that's not enough, also in slow motion. The more intense, the more it is slowed, so that its newtonian characteristics may be seen, so that it may be aestheticized like nature photography--as arrangements of form and color. In this mechanism, which is characteristic of the film's gaze, disturbance is not dealt with by looking away or by feeling an emotional supplement, but deadened by looking so intensely that it cannot be seen.

Judging from the title's place in a line of dialogue--"I like to kill them softly, from a distance"--this distancing is probably the point, but after about an hour of it, I had to leave.

In part, it was the sound design. When Brad Pitt sat down with… hm, I actually didn't know what his role or name was--anyway they're in a restaurant with soft classical music with all the warmth taken out of it, and my fidgeting escalated to code red and I found it difficult to look at the screen or listen to the words coming out of their mouths. The theater was empty besides my dad and I, but I had to work up courage for a few minutes to ask him "do you want to stay?" He said no, not really, but he didn't get up and so neither did I, yet. We sat through five minutes of Pitt shooting someone in the head in slow motion, then we left.

At home I kept thinking "oh god," hopeful for some catharsis now that I wasn't stuck in that theater anymore. But instead everything remained dull. The movie's pointlessly bleak outlook seemed to have infected me. Nothing held any pleasure. I writhed around in bed trying to write about it, getting sick of thinking about it, and trying to distract myself from it, finally turning to My So-Called Life, which I had stayed up until 5 AM the previous night with. There, Brad Pitt was a hunk to fantasize about, rather than the kind of pretensious star who only stars in "important" movies like that which I had fled. But not even that show, which had mesmerized me for many hours before, could hold my attention or elicit any emotion. I had a headache. Things were happening on the screen, but it was as if somewhere in front of the screen, it was still dead-eyed men killing dead-eyed men. Everything was just visual phenomena. All that I could do was sit through it, until, eventually, it all began to mean something again.

Lincoln

Light and shadow (mostly shadow)

Painterly

Dust motes

Shawls

Liberal triumphalism

Boyish mischief

Monologues

Looking straight on

Irresponsible hysterical narcissistic woman not as verbose as a certain someone

Rooms

1 war scene

1 (important) death off screen

1 son

2 sons

Touch

Quiet talking

Physicality of politics

Pythagoras, abolitionist

Labor assets, moral assets

"The purest man in America"

Skyfall

"It's like Home Alone!" my friend said, just as I was about to say the same. It went from Bond movie to The Adventures of 007 and M (as they drive off to his acestral Scotland in an ancient car), and, finally, to Home Alone.

The man behind us made many things better. He teased the first sex scene: "oh, Bond." First? Only. I would say this is new, but we're not spared the flirtations of Bond and Moneypenny.

I was reminded of The Wrath of Khan by this dogged theme of mortality. Can such things survive in a Bond movie? The suggestion that 007 might be fallible and violable was new in Daniel Craig's first Bond movie, but it remains an anomaly--one which this plot aims to dispell. In the end it's less about death--however thickly the dialogue is ("bloody old warships," bla bla bla)--than it is about flaccidity. Jesus really failed to answer the burning question: after you're resurrected, can you maintain an erection? In Craig's case, the answer is of course--well, witness his gait.

The world is this genre's playground, but that's nothing new.

The sneaking scene of mirrors and neon in Shanghai was, however, beautiful. As is all of the scenery.

Speaking of which, action sequences in Bond are aesthetic flourishes more than they are locuses of tension. It's not exactly that there are no rules, but rather, the impossible is the most likely course of action. Survive getting shot and falling hundreds of feet into a river? Yes. Motorcycle on rooftops? Yes. Slide down the metal barrier between opposing escalators? Well, I guess that's neither aesthetic nor impossible.

The reboot is these days as obligatory as the dub step trailer. But self-consciously bringing hints of realism to Bond? (Q says to Bond something like "it's a tube train, I know you've never been in one.") Surely that's straining the genre. Which is the point, I guess. I find myself asking the question what's worse, the Bond movie tradition, or the recent attempts to shake it up?

I wasn't aware that old necessarily meant conservative, but I stand corrected. Apparently, the world is a scary, scary place that can only be saved by "a paragon of British fortitude." (If you like Judi Dench as M, you have to assume she was making fun of 007 by calling him this in his obit.)

She says that the villain is "from the same place Bond is, from the shadows." Sorry, Gandalf?

"All this running around, jumping and shooting, it's so exhausting," says Bardem, Assange, whatever his name is. So true.

007 takes up his father's old hunting rifle AT A FUCKING COUNTRY ESTATE.

Scotland = England, but "back in time" (oh god).

Bardem is lovely, unfortunately he's also here the specter of the "new" world's homosexuality, threatening to penetrate all things that like to think themselves unpenetrable (MI6, Bond). Oh no we must repair the leak in straightness.

The innuendos are really awful, as is all of the dialogue, but then, that's traditional. But then, this one wants to be taken seriously everywhere else.

Serious sillyness, silly seriousness.

If by the 50-year-old scotch and the equally old car it means to say that the Bond franchise is an artifact of the 1960s, then I agree.

Trauma narratives. At least the evil double (Bardem) laughs at his own.

The Gila monster scene was very Star Wars, my friend points out. Henchman picks up Bond's gun, which can only be fired by him, thanks to Q. He says "good luck with that"; henchman gets eaten by gila monster. I think it might even be George Lucas & Harrison Ford in general (it could be in Indiana Jones or Star Wars).

The finale really drags. But then, as Anthony Lane points out, it always does in Bond movies.

Cloud Atlas

In what universe is "our lives are bound with others" such a revelation that it's tantamount to revolution? These words are apparently so powerful in the fascist future of Neo Seoul, when society is divided into servers, consumers, seers, archivists, and other ominous-sounding, dystopian categories, that they start a religion, and the clone girl (a "server") who speaks these words becomes its martyr. What, do the people of New Seoul not have social media, where "friends" would spout such profundity daily? Do none of them have stoner friends to regale them with the mind-blowing philosophies they've worked out from the latest Wachowski film?

No, because this is not a universe that bothers with such quotidia. It's a universe in which every point in history is exactly the same, while appearing vastly different. Well, that's not quite true. It cannot be said that faces appear vastly different, from era to era. Makeup artists have been tasked with the contradictory work of this universe: they must make the same look different, while being reocognizable as the same. The same actors are recycled throughout all time by the addition of putty. The awkwardness of a Korean with freckles, a ginger frizz, green eyes, and a frock is considerable, but nothing compared to the awkwardness of equating a slave's emancipation in the 19th century with a sleazy publisher's escape from a retirement home. The nuances of such comparisons, however, are not within the scope of this universe, which is nonetheless considerable, at least by appearances.

Don't get me wrong, I am a hopeless enough postmodernist that I think it's cool to find the deep relation between historically disparate things. Far more specific things. The vision of the Wachowskis, or David Mitchell, or Tom Tykwer, or whoever (if we're "all connected" and the same so are they), is so grand that history is merely a colorful backdrop. The past and the far-future are the Orient. There can be no insight in these relationships between disparate points in time, because they aren't relationships; a relationship is necessarily between different entities. There are six stories here, all the same.

Let me be as clear as this film's vision is obscuring: the best part is the aging publisher's escape from the retirement home. (The best part is Jim Broadbent.) And I think, also, the most honest. One of my issues with the film, then, is a matter or hierarchy: all of these stories are just the publisher's amusing tale (which takes place in the present day) with different scenery, which is also the contention of matchcuts and smooth audio transitions that do more violence to time than Kubrick could have ever dreamed, but they also insist that all these tales are on an equal plane; I rather think the many all spring from one, here. As all these characters demostrate, we dream of mattering, and this is the filmmakers' way of mattering: spinning tales of consciousness-raising, of heroes using their privilege to save the underclass. Why must the universe always be saved by heroism? Why must heroes dodge bullets, perform acrobatics, vaunt peaks, and generally preen in their own transcendance?

What else is it, when an author chooses to disperse a story across eons, but to say "look, my imagation transcends time and space"? I do not mark anyone for imagination, nor do I ask that history be treated sanctimoniously as if it's "true-true," in this film's cutesy futuristic patois, but must imagination be so showy? A message does not get more profound through ventriloquism. When all the voices say exactly the same thing, why bother multiplying them?

The answer is embedded in the film's revolutionary praxis: The revolutioaries' mouthpiece must be one of the masses whose cause they champion. This is an erotic relationship, and the revolutionaries positively drool when they see Sonmi: an opportunity. Their message would not seem authentic if not spoken from the lips of its concern. Sure, diegetically these are her words, but her author needed her to say them.

But this is supposedly about the triumph of love, not of authorial fantasies. Love is apparently all the same at any and every historical moment, whether between a revolutionary and a clone slave in the future in Korea, two male interbellum English aesthetes, Halle Berry and Tom Hanks--I mean a journalist and a scientist in the 1970s, Halle Berry and Tom Hanks again but in costumes that seem already to be relics of imagining the future or maybe just second-hand Star Trek, or a black slave an English man of the cloth. Sure sounds to me like a definition of love peculiar to the present.

The gentle, warm-hearted Christian man asks the slave "how do you know I'm you're friend?" The slave replies by pointing at his own eyes and then at his friend's eyes and saying "it's all you need." I was quite taken by this simple truth when I saw it, but now I ask: really, is that all? And that difference between then and now is why I ask. In this universe, however, people are reliable, and most reliable in love, which is both the articulation and the constitution of their souls. Or should I say soul.

The conviction that self and other are interconnected could be profound, if it were troubled by the consequences of relationality, rather than lubricated by all those others it obscures and squashes under its zealous, revolutionary bootheel. There is a lot of anger here about people whose personhood has been and continues to be violently denied (slaves, women, homosexuals), but the heroic fight against this oppression involves no shortage of othering, and this gives nobody pause. Faceless black-visored police enforcers in the future, monotonic secret operatives who spew racist slurs in the 1970s, belligerent landowners in the 19th century. (The only intelligible bad guy is in the present, of course: the publisher's sadistic brother, who spites him for his financial dependence, and for sleeping with his wife.)

I wouldn't say the death of people our historical moment despises is inconsistent with Sonmi's philosophy, but neither is the mass murder that supposedly inspires it. If death is a "door" to another life, then why should we care about clones like her being farmed like chicken? If "boundaries are an illusion," then what does slaughter violate? It's hard to believe the fuzzy newagisms she broadcasts to the world inspired anything, much less a religion, and it's equally hard to believe that they are in any way connected to the ghastly circumstances of her life. I've heard people say similar things after merely enduring the line at the local coffee shop.

In this latest installment of the Wachowski's battle against The System, the thing to be brought down is "The Natural Order" (the point of this term being that it's only natural to those who privilege from it). But their issue does not appear to be that what is considered "natural" tends to work in this socially determined way. The thing that's supposed to break up The Natural Order is love. But if love is destiny, transcending time and space, determined before you were born, what is that but a consolidation of what is natural?

Argo

When the screen faded to black and Ben Affleck's name appeared, everyone clapped. Renata Adler notes in 1968 that clapping for a movie is a peculiar gesture, "quite different from what it means in live theater." Who are you applauding? Nobody is there to hear you clap except the rest of the audience, and you. This was quiet, as applause goes. This is Ashland; audiences are gentle folk with multicultural pretensions. We listen to NPR. For us, Mr. Affleck had moved in just the right ways in his turn on the stage; he affirmed our concerns, and successfully navigated our national shame to give us a patriotic happy ending that we could approve of. For that moment, the audience basked in the communal warmth of their shared appreciation. I'm in basically the same boat as far as qualms, but I'm one of those prideful people who can't bear to participate in a crowd. I felt at once superior and pathetic for getting up to leave--passing relaxed, vaguely postcoital smiles that I envied and reviled--as everyone else stayed for the rest of the credits.

I gather that Affleck feels a similar mixture of pride and shame about his country's involvement in Iran. His movie opens as a grave documentary, with footage of the Iranian Revolution. A voiceover narrates Iran's history up to 1979. The Shahs. The democratic election of a president. The period in which (the narrator tells us proudly) Iran's oil was their own. The U.S. installation of a new Shah (here the narrator's voice turns bitter). The 1979 uprising against this Shah. It's not that I disagree on any particular point (I'm not informed enough), but I have to wonder why this bit of exposition is here. This is the story of getting American "hostages" (actually they're just hiding out in the Canadian ambassador's house in Tehran) out of Iran. It's an American story. This five-minute introduction to a place that throughout the rest of the movie must at all costs be fled is the lefty equivalent of a hail-mary. Without it, the audience would not have clapped, but only enjoyed, somewhat guiltily. Affleck is atoning for his privileged Americanness in a popular style: by having fits of reaching for the experience of who he isn't.

The experience that the movie can't show becomes quite clear when the actual movie begins with a crowd of Iranian protesters storming the U.S. embasy. Affleck's direction in this scene exercises admirable control, but this I think is because he's straining to resolve it in a politically correct way. It flicks back and forth between the panicked Americans in the embasy, and the crowd. The crowd is a crowd: impossible to sympathize with, because this kind of sympathy has the individual as its basic unit. What can an American director who wants not to offend anyone do, when given Americans under a siege of foreign righteousness? I suppose you can push the onus of morality onto individual irrationality, which is to say you can do away with moral thought entirely. To protect the embassy there are some policemen of some sort or other, in full riot gear, with tear gas launders. Their commander tells them over the radio to "only use the tear gs a last resort--I repeat, as a last resort only." Cut immediately to tear gas canisters being launched into the crowd.

What is the point of a movie that on the one hand refuses to be overtly political, and on the other refuses to be a drama--something it seems to view as being of inadequate importance? One might equally ask what is the point of Affleck's taut montages, in which he smashes all the locuses of tension together? A man behind me during one of these breathtaking multiscenes said "interesting juxtaposition." It was. All at once, prisoners are sent to a firing squad and almost but not quite executed, a press event Hollywood party in which the actors read the terrible Argo script aloud proceeds gaily and vapidly along, and some other thing that I can't quite remember. I'm sure it was important. But that's the trouble. Shouldn't I remember, if this meticulously edited sequence--in which audio from all three scenes piles up into a cacophony-- really made an impact? I remember a similar, simpler technique in Lord of the Rings: while on the raging battlefield millions die at a king's strategically poor orders, this king eats cherry tomatoes alone. He makes quite a mess, spurting tomato juice with every bite. Cutting back and forth between these two things, the king's minstrel sings a plaintive song. It was memorable because its moralistic meaning was too unmistakeable. Affleck's crucibles of disparity are just the opposite. The justaposition is interesting, and not at all obvious in its intent, but all I can do is scratch my head, and feel inexplicably somewhat moved.

The script, likewise, aims away from the head toward the heart, but politely fires a very small calibur. Hearts pump with and are revealed by epistles, and this movie's heart is written on a postcard to Affleck's character's son as he goes to the airport. "Sorry I missed ya, buddy-man," he writes. He tried to call him for his birthday, but nobody picked up. His son's absent presence is the tiny looseness from which narrative flows. As the direction is restrainted, so is the world these characters inhabit. When Affleck's character is on the phone with his son (someone who is nerver on screen), there's a needful lapse. His son is telling him about school, but his voice mutes out as Affleck spaces out, staring at the television, on which Planet of the Apes is playing (his son is watching the same). He's listening, but all we get is emotional content. The idea to make a fake movie as a cover to rescue the Americans stranded in Iran comes to him during a swell of love for his son.

This particular brand of masculine sentimentality for the family holds throughout. Affleck's character and the fake filmmaker he hires (Alan Arkin) bond over the absence of their families, from whom they are both estranged ultimately, they think, because they're in "the bullshit business." In this movie, the bullshit business is lifesaving potential; the ability to create, believe, and convince others of narratives is survival out there in the public sphere. What they're saying is that their heroism tragically seperates them from domestic life. Which is nice for them because it's sad for them. How else to maintain such a sentimental attachment but absence? And how else to drive the creation of narrative but by this attachment? Besides, as Arkin's character says, "kids need the mother." One thing about a period piece based on a true story is that characters can say things like this without comment, cinematic or verbal.

I don't mean to suggest that the script or Affleck's direction are dumb. Rather, the movie's intelligence all goes into saying as little as possible.

Affleck is capable of trying to engage with the world. The Town wrapped its head around the phenomenon of how one becomes trapped in a place, a family, and a destiny, try as one might to escape it and its criminality. It's about a very particular place; I got the impression there was research involved in writing the script. Argo's script is too scary to direct because too potentially contentious. Affleck tries to tiptoe around Iran, however much time the camera spends there, because of how relevant the subject matter is right now, when two presidential candidates are debating about what to do or not to do about the country. He becomes much like the protagonist he plays--an escape artist.

He has a boyish face, with sharp rather than rough features--as angular as a young Bruce Willis, but open and gentle about the eyes somehow, especially in profile. Both can summon an immense, suffocating smugness, but Affleck has chosen to avoid doing so in this movie. Instead he is a man so conflicted he's taciturn, and rigorously maintains a neutral expression, just barely smiling when pleased. When their flight out of Tehran reaches altitude and the stewardesses begin serbing drinks, the six he's rescued cheer and embrace. He sits alone at a window seat and allows himself a tiny, sheepish, one-sided smile.

Elena

There is a horse. There is also a man, and his grandson in law. The first two die; the last lies on the ground so long after being beaten that it seems he dies, but he gets up. What else needs to be known? When the horse passes into view out the train window, a little boy cries "look!" Hitting it, presumably, was why the train came to a stop a few moments before, and why policemen hurried through the car. The eponymous Elena seemed to fidget when the uniforms clomped through, but then, she doesn't actually move much. I just know that she killed the aforementioned man, her husband, Vladimir, and therefore I imagine her pang of fear and guilt at the sight of the law. Anyway, in the extreme long view Elena--but not Elena--takes Vladimir may as well be the dead horse. Indeed, why does he die? For the sake of her grandson, who could die any day in a gang fight. Vladimir, who unapologetically cares for nothing but money, would have thought his own death a poor investment.

About perspective. The film begins and ends with a shot of winter tree limbs in front of Vladimir's house. The focus begins at the foremost branch, and very slowly shifts to the house's windows. Vladimir and Elena live in one of those brutally convenient modernist things that was once so outside the box, it became one. He sleeps in the worst part of it, she on a fold-out couch in the coziest room, truer to her class origins. The two of them met when she was nurse to him in the hospital, and it seems that as his wife she has carried on in this same capacity. Watching Elena go about her domestic duties is like a defanged version of Jeanne Dielman. She has less routine, and less time for her routine to explode, but explode it does.

When Vladimir tells her that he plans to write a will, that his daughter, Katya, will get almost everything, and that he has no intention of providing for her grandson, she takes his dishes (on a designer wooden tray) back to the kitchen and sets them down roughly, with a clang. The next day she furtively reads his draft; cut to her feeding carrots into a juicer, which sounds remarkably like paper shredding. It is alongside this frothy carrot juice that she serves him an excess of pills, popping extras into the cup with a kind of nervous whimsy.

Elena speaks, but she is understood through her actions, though the body language of her long, patient time on the screen. I fell in love with the head of this film, who does nothing but speak, and who happens to be Vladimir's pretty daughter. It seems not too shaky of a conjecture that Andrey Zvyagintsev, writer and director, fancied her, too. He imbued her with the whole of the truth-telling--and all the word play, to boot.

As the linguistic articulation of the film's cinematic distance, she, too, takes the long view. Her father accuses her of saying everything is pointless. She does. There is a bit of cheek, though, to her dire pronouncements. She's deadly serious, but so sometimes are the best comedians. Everything may be pointless, but people like Zvyagintsev would like to believe that there is a point in communicating why. I'm in the same boat.

One of the more memorable things she says is that one has children to suck the life from them. Of course, the opposite occurs--quite literally, if indirectly. Not that Elena's grandson wants the money that she goes to such ends to get for him.

As for Vladimir, he smiles and says that he's cheered up by his daughter's caustic words. So, I find, am I. These two scenes, in which with her tongue she first dispatches Elena and then Vladimir in his hospital bed following a heart attack, are the only clarity, and the only real mirth. Although, personally, I giggled at the bits of television that were chosen for the domestic scenes. After Elena kills Vladimir, she's watching people evaluate a new "sausage product." "I like No. 6. It's quite edible." "No 3 tastes very sausagey." Katya's verbal flaying, however, did more than elicit quiet giggles. I was warmed through.

"I barely see you, Katya," says Vladimir.

"That's because I'm standing against the light." (She's in front of the window.)

"I didn't mean it in that sense."

"Dad, you know that nothing like sense even exists."

"Looking at you, sometimes I think, that might even be true."

"So, it's OK that you barely see me."

Their dialogue goes on like this, full of puns and metaphor. Yes, this was the filmmaker's transparent philosophizing, yet its agile twists along words' axes thrilled me. I could've kissed her. Her father did. The consonance of these was, I admit, a little discomforting. Yet still my fervor is enough that I want to reprint just a bit more of the script here:

"You've always loved those word games."

"Games help children come to terms with the cruel laws of reality."

"Children?"

"Nope. Not going to happen. I'm not pregnant, if that's what you were asking."

"Too bad. It'd sort you out."

"I am sorted. Alcohol and drugs only on the weekends. It's clean living now. Of all the pleasures I'm still getting sex and food under control, but I'm working on myself, trust me."

Katya does nothing but express her interiority, however sarcastically; Elena becomes a sublime object, despite how much time there is to watch and get to know her. In part this is because Katya--who has the last word on everything--distrusts her performances. "Listen, Elena Anatolievna. You're playing the role of the worried wife. You do that very well. Congratulations." I therefore contracted the same paranoid reading of Elena's every facial movement. This both made her fascinating to watch, and is rather unforunate. Vladimir by contrast is highly readable. For a little while the camera follows him about his day. He goes to the gym; he ogles girls. The only perhaps mystifying thing about him is his rejection of pleasure, which is a fairly mundane bit of father psychology.

Defamiliarizing the feminine is rather familiar. But then, I already admitted the origin of this scrutiny. Isn't this just how the wealthy eye the poor: with the suspicion that the poor are out to take their money? In this case, it's true. By the end, Elena's family have taken over Vladimir's house. But while the hysterical search for the actor behind the act may have a sound cause, there's no sense in it. Which makes me wonder about having watched Elena, during which I looked endlessly for signs of Elena.

Do you prefer your movie-going sensible or senseless?

Beasts of the Southern Wild

That I would see "Beasts" (as everyone buying tickets called it) was not at all certain. The trailer had induced an exasperated groan. A child's voice said "The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If just one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted." At the words "get busted", it cuts to a shot of antarctic ice crashing into the ocean. Oh lord. Ecological fallacies for environmentalist campaigns are all well and good, but as a master narrative veiled as a child's wisdom, it grossed me out. Here was one more to add to my list of movies not to see, which has been growing unmanageably large lately.

But there I was in front of the Varsity (the sense of this name eludes me), looking at showing times. I had just sat in the cafe above Bloomsbury (a far less opaque name for a bookshop), poking laconically at my keyboard at about one sentence every five minutes. Two cups of coffee, somehow, had given me ennui rather than the characteristic ballooning of the ego. I kept blaming various things. It was one of those days. The coffee was bad. The thick smoke that turned the light yellow and the mountains charred and hazy made me tired. (That which claims things as parts of an identity protested with desperate confusion: but I like smoky days!) None of this changed the fact that I was undead, standing there in front of the theater. I saw that "Beasts" began in ten minutes. I looked at the other films. "Hope Springs", solely on the basis of its title--ew. "Moonrise Kingdom", STILL PLAYING--ew. "Savages", I'm not even sure what that is, but I guess Blake Lively's agent has found ways to try to keep her career from dying after the last season of Gossip Girl ends next year, although honestly I think it's the rest of the cast who might need to worry. Something with Jack Black--ew. I had not watched trailers for any of these. At least with "Beasts" I understood what kind of ew I was getting into. What the hell, I thought, I have a regular source of income for the time being, I'll spend $6.50 on ew. Who knows, maybe the trailer's barely obfuscated environmentalist moralizing totally misrepresented the film. Maybe I'd even like it.

There were some things to like. But my urgent need to urinate halfway through sent me to the bathroom, rather than willing myself to stay in my seat for the last 45 minutes. One thing I liked was the epigrammatic speech the fisherwoman cum voodoo practitioner cum mother to lost children gave to her little flock. She slaps a red mess of glistening red crayfish in front of the camera. "Animals are made of meat. You're meat. I'm meat." (She goes on to name a number of familiar farmyard animals.) The film is constantly daring the audience to be comfortable with their own fleshiness. This off-the-grid estuarine community appears to live solely on meat and booze. The ritual back at Hushpuppy's (the child star of the film, who I also liked) home is: Her father slaps a freshly slaughtered chicken on the grill, rings a bell and yells "feed up time!" She rushes off to eat, making her way among a chaos of chickens, goats, and pigs. In her voiceover narration she refers to everyone as an animal, not distinguishing humans. Actually, the voiceover is less narration than a collection of pithy, extremely general teachings, like a tiny, impractical Sun Tzu. She does, however, introduce her community in voiceover, known as The Bathtub. She says of this primitivist wet dream that "Daddy says The Bathtub celebrates more holidays than anywhere else," and we are given a montage of Bathtubians hollering from a parade float that could've been made at Burning Man, swilling booze, playing with fireworks. I was given the impression of people trying very hard to convince themselves they were having a good time, and I was not at all sure this was the intended effect. The music was joyful during these celebrations.

Despite the deliberate gross-out provocations of the camera (look at all this meat), I think The Bathtub is supposed to ultimately look like a noble alternative to late capitalism. This story divides the world in two: the people in the city, and the people in the Bathtub. The plot revolves around the city people constructing a levee that raises the water level and sinks The Bathtub. It is this artifice to which Hushpuppy refers when she says that something busts. (That shot of the ice crumbling gets carted at the same moment in the film as in the trailer, to my disappointment.) The trouble with the philosophy that Hushpuppy develops of a perfect universe that busts is that, honey, the universe is always already busted.

The film points to complications in the future rather than the past. As our drunken Bathtubians try to put the world back to the way it was, everything just keeps going more wrong. They blow a hole in the levee with dynamite, only to find that their home is half dead and muddy after all that time underwater. Then the city people forcibly evacuate them with helicopters to a hospital. The Bathtubians soon escape from this nightmare ward where sick people are "plugged into the wall", in what I guess is supposed to be a triumphant rebellion against a civilizing mission. The busting of their home is mirrored in Hushpuppy's father's health. "My blood," he says, in a rare moment of nondenial, "is eating itself." Which is a poetic way to talk about an autoimmune disorder, but that, ultimately, is what grates: the artifice of these voices posed as authentic alterity. It is the "Forrest Gump" problem: having someone simple speak your half-baked philosophies makes them sound profound.

That, and how distant these characters ultimately are to us. Chances are, the audience lives in the capitalist world this community so vehemently rejects. Like a Jean Jeunet film, we are entrated to love this band of misfits. They're rough, drunk, and scary, and yet they're drowning in cute. The problem is, we may all be animals, but animals have this thing planted in the animal: a mind. This is a film convinced that the solution to the mind-body problem, and to every other binary opposition, is to privilege the other side.

~
It has come to my attention, via an article in Film Comment that I spotted while waiting for my brother to finish reading Backpacker in the periodical section of the public library, that Benh Zeitlin (the filmmaker, who I'm sure would scrupulously reject this title) may not have fashioned all of the contours of Bathtubian speech in the image of his own romantic vision of how simple folk should live. (Incidentally, there are a number of backpackers about town this weekend. The herd of Pacific Crest Trail hikers, brought on, as my brother deduced, by the recent publication of Wild, are all at this point in their journey. Four of them entered the library in the twenty minutes we spent there. They generally come in what I assume are romantic pairs, with tiny packs carrying virtually nothing. Their food is cached at several points along the trail. I still wonder at the logistics of this, just as the gritty realism of "Beasts" makes me wonder where they get all their booze and breakfast cereal to feed the chickens. Maybe I just can't handle magical realism. In any case, trade does not exist in this film, but its artifacts seem to undergird the Bathtubians' alternative society. This turns their moralizing about The Big Bad City, to my mind, like the whiny urgings of dumpster divers to bring down The System.) In this article, in which he is interviewed in New Orleans, he says he had to "revise toward the people"--that is, revise his script to the actors' lives, mannerisms, etc. (He also says that the film came out of an epiphany he had in Europe that he "didn't want to be an expat", yet he moved to New Orleans. As much as the article declaims Hollywood tendencies to exoticize that city, I think it's safe to say that those "clichés about black magic and magical negroes" are precisely why Zeitlin has planted himself there, and what animates the fantastical in "Beasts".) He likes to think of the process as "organic". He says "I think it was hard for people, people who don’t know this city and this region, to understand how deep the roots go and how impossible it is to transplant what’s here to somewhere else."His film has failed to translate to "people who don't know this city" the deep roots of its characters, instead leaving them, well, floating. The mystery that drew Zeitlin to the Mississippi delta has been preserved, or missed entirely--your pick.

Yes yes, the beasts. There are in fact beasts, which occupy a parallel cinematic universe for most of the film, a bit like the hilariously nonsequitor dinosaurs in "The Tree of Life" (but then in that film, what isn't a nonsequitor). The Aurochs, tattooed on The Bathtub's resident earth mother goddess's arm, are said to eat people. They are, then, the animal that busts our supremacy over the animal world. They also look like pigs. Sort of cute, gentle-eyed pigs, with snuffling snouts. They have big tusks, yes, and they allegedly eat their kin (I know, I'm wading into a big pool of muck by selectively distrusting parts of the fictional world), as well as trample stuff. Anyway, they bow to Hushpuppy at the end. I guess we were expecting them to do something bad, seeing as they were loosed from the ice by the catastrophic storm (Katrina). I think I missed the point. I stopped following the metaphoric register about halfway though.

Batman The Third

I've always been lured into the pleasures of watching movies already made sense of by a piece of writing, but it's always folly. Whether it's the gentler stuff of movie reviews, or the cocaine of academia, either I'm miffed (because the movie failed to live up to the exemplarity it was made to be in writing), or I keep up the same irritatingly mimicking zeal that the article sent me to the theater with. Well, okay--usually it's a queasy cohabitation of the two. Any kind of synthesis is out of the question.

While I was sent off to "Brave" with the promise of a smile by an analysis that tied the whole movie together, I hung to Batman (I mean "The Dark Knight Rises", if you can swallow that) by the thread dangling off the end of Anthony Lane's review. (Unlike Batman himself, who, while perilously strung throughout the movie for dramatic effect, is that which wins, we know. Surviving a nuclear blast, as he does at the end of the film--appearing like an American Jesus of The Good Life to Michael Caine, who makes a good stand-in for Mary Magdalene--is surely confirmation of this definition.) Having since the second movie petulantly rolled my eyes at the high-falutin seriousness that plagues this trilogy, Lane had given me high expectations for Cat Woman as precisely that element of ridicule. She is fun, but it occurred to me about the time she straddles Batman's motorcycle in skin-tight black, that Lane's article simply needed a closing twist, and the movie needed female eye candy. However, Anne Hathaway is the most entertaining part of a movie that otherwise does little else but beat drums in your ears for two hours. She has the cleverest lines, for one thing--maybe the only speech that's even written to engage us. While every other muscle-bound orator drones on (or, as the case may be, whispers, or speaks into a malfunctioning loudspeaker) about souls, fear, privilege, and power, she's amused, and almost leaves the doomed little island that Gotham becomes to save herself. There, there's my imitative little fit.

It sounds vaguely believable, but honestly I couldn't even follow most what she was saying, either. The plot was hazy to me. I think there was some big twist toward the end, as Marion Cotillard's knife twisted in Christian Bale. Turns out it was her who as a child escaped the prison, instead of Bane, the gurgling, mouthless villain. Okay. So I guess her and Bruce Wayne's little fling was a farce, but we knew that, in different terms. In any case, what, after all the explosions, dystopia, growling (and did I mention the drumming?), was the denouement?

There is for the first half a thick sense of portent brewed around Bane, while he remains underground the city. I don't mean so much the bits of dialog in which everyone worries about that crazy man in the sewers, but how the movie seems to cinematically strain to build this man's threat to a mysterious extreme. His mission is occluded enough at first that some sort of event seems sure to come, as if Nolan is screaming at us "SOMETHIN' GONNA HAPPEN HERE!" What happens? He gets himself a nuclear bomb. Any emergence this movie's emergency may have had just vanished. It is as this point I lost interest.

The "darkest" part of the film, then, coincided with my lowest. Bane became a surface-dweller, and proceeded to tear shit up like an adolescent's fantasy of revolution (release the prisoners! kill the rich!). Indeed, beside me, my brother was aping all this. He giggled, I think, at the shots of torn-up American flags, as if this was some profound ideological statement. He acknowledged it was all silliness when the lights came on, but as it unfolded in the dark I could tell he was thinking like one of those people whose idol is Tyler Durden.

Meanwhile, the on-screen gunfire sent me into paranoiac imaginings of the sensation of a bullet entering my skull. When the lights were dimming and the movie began, the man in front of us turned conspicuously around, seeming to inspect the platform from which an Aurora imitator might target the theater. Perhaps this fear is why the movie's attempts at terror disconcertingly struck home.

So what's left? Should we look to the wisdom of Robin's take on all this? He resigns from the police, saying to the commissioner by way of explanation "you know what you said about structure becoming shackles? You're right--I mean, who's going to know who saved Gotham?" The trouble with the Law, apparently, is that it prevents (super) heroes from public recognition.

The only conclusion I can possibly come to is that "The Dark Knight Rises" has abandoned the project of adding up to anything. The noise, the darkness, the talk of class and privilege, the violence, the tests of mettle, the mushroom cloud, the resurrection: it doesn't mean anything. Stepping out of the theater, my brother said it was awesome.

Disorganized Thoughts on the Consumption of Cinema

My brother and I recently purchased Civilization V. What is your moneys worth in such a game, in which there is no single player campaign to mark completion? It's absurd to measure the duration of gaming you get out of Civilzation, because the transaction works the other way around: Civilization is a vessel into which you pour time. It has an incredible capacity, even a kind of suction. Play for eight hours and force yourself to stop, wanting only to continue playing. There's something monstrous about being taken, held, and never released. Isn't the most optimistic point of games to renew our sense of freedom, to be drawn in enough that being ejected feels like a beginning? Nearing the end of a movie, I feel a great excitement for leaving the theater. What I pay for is that exit.

There's another reason I wanted to play Civilization V, a reason I haven't quite used up yet, even though my brother is understandably fed up with the incredible time commitment a game of Civ requires, and refuses to play any more. (The game is on his computer and won't run on any other in the house.) Still hungering for more Civ, I searched the internet for free alternatives that would run on my dated computer. One of the clones, c-evo, has an ambitious mission statement. They contend that the problem with computer games is that they're not designed to be crystaline like chess, but instead are designed as baubles to be consumed for their novelty value and then discarded out of boredom with an imperfect game. I think they're overestimating the genre's potential, but the observation that computer games are played for their novelty is one I find irrefutable. Why, for instance, play Diablo III? New weapons, new items, new characters, new graphics. The game itself is still as blindingly dull and addictive as before. In fact, I'm not sure games have changed that much since the release of Quake, but novelty has eternally sprung.

And novelty has another draw: Before the game is ever finished, press releases hint at everything that's new and in so doing give it a utopian glint on the horizon. You begin thinking "if I could play it..." Like many other products, you buy them to fix your life. It can almost be better not to buy them at all, to never be disappointed or face reality, and instead to let the wished-for products sprout whole imagined kingdoms of better life. Almost.

Movie hype is not new, but its intensity has been able to ramp enormously with the many mediums the Internet has availed. And as updates of older films are made closer and closer to the last iteration's release date, movies are starting to be consumed a lot like video games.

A new Spider Man movie is made not even a decade after the previous, and we itch for its revitalizing potential. "Prometheus" is essentially "Alien", but with more glitz (both pseudophilosophical and visual). "Avatar" is just a rehash of every James Cameron trope, but with a shiny technology called 3D (yes, I am one of those grumpy old people who think 3D is a lame fad to sell tickets at a higher price).

People pay for that moment of hope, the ticket in their hand, the film not yet begun, full of anticipation, and they pay for afterwards, when the film becomes a conversational token. Watching the film gets happily syncopated away, leaving only desire and signification. "The Avengers" is, I hear, a wildly successful film, but does it bubble up into your life? Do you dream of Captain America gripping a trash can lid?

I don't know about you, but I take a perverse pleasure in not being surprised by a film. Walking in with an asernal of reviews to agree and disagree with, steeled with several lines of analysis to keep the film at bay. I may as well; I can't not read about it before going.

It's funny, I want to see "Prometheus", but the thought of actually sitting through it is unpallatable. This huge gap between the fantasy it promises to deliver and my imagination of how it would actually be to watch.

Which is to say our relationship to the cinema is essentially lust. Aroused by hype, our desire has nothing to do with spending time with or having ourselves in any way complicated by a movie. We simply have found a fresh locus for hope. We gape and think "if only I could have that, everything would be good again." Its contours become the articulations of our future. And we don't have to give anything to get it, we just have to pay for it. Wow, I've been watching too much "Mad Men".

Who is us and why is lust bad, again? I'm bad at sustaining a polemic (or even merely a line of thought) because I hardly begin articulating passion before I no longer believe it. It all rings false. A good polemic is neither a liar nor faithful, but simply does not see things as either true or untrue. You can push belief because you've given up. Yup, there's a romanticization of advertising if I ever heard one.

The Avengers

There are two scenes I remember from "The Avengers", and that's because I was trying to for the purpose of this blog.

Aliens are in the process of blowing up Manhattan. Captain America, in his regalia, jumps on top of a car and begins giving rapid-fire orders to two policemen. They look at him, a little perplexed (and why not, there's a man literally covered in stars and stripes--perhaps he is some sort of street performer). "Why should we take orders from you?" one asks. A few invading aliens are then upon Mr. America, and he dispatches them quickly with a flourish. The fight ends with him holding one of their severed cocks. I mean guns. Without another word, the policemen immediately get on the radio to relay his orders. Might makes right. The audience laughs.

Some of those in the way of salvation are a bit more prickly. Namely, the villain, a sickly-pale Tom Hiddleston. When the Hulk threatens him with smash, Loki has a hissy fit. The Hulk may be the "monster," but it's Loki who is feminized, who will lose because he "lacks conviction." Joss Whedon milks the moment for slapstick comedy. Loki stands there ranting that he's a god, and won't be pushed around by puny green creatures. But he gets what's coming to him. Watch the Hulk swatting him repeatedly into the ground like a cat breaking a mouse's neck. Force is so hilarious. The audience is in stitches.

They howl, they cheer, they clap at the end. It's like being at a party--loud, offensive, and full of the grotesque squeals of public pleasure. It's my worst nightmare, except, thankfully, I am not expected to participate. And the movie, well, what is it but dancing? Bloody, brutal, noisy dancing. Bumping and grinding escalated to coreographed hate sex. Which by the way is apparently all Whedon can imagine when faced with a female super hero. Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson in skin-tight black) has "too much red on her record." When asked "what did he [Loki] do to you?" (there's a leading question if I ever heard one), she says that she has been "compromised" and must make up for it. Her whole strategy as a spy hinges on manipulating people with her vulnerability. Original.

I found myself wondering at the perversity of me paying to watch this, something I didn't even want to enjoy. (Though I had hoped that it would be more of a distraction than it was.) There must be something sick about paying eleven dollars to stew in my own loathing and alienation--precisely what I wanted to do. What I didn't bargain for was a headache. I had never seen a movie in 3D before, and now I want never to do so again. The image has a niggling, pixelated, out-of-focus quality even with the glasses on. And for what? So that the film can look like a diorama? It's not a breathtaking addition of another dimension, but a transformation into cardboard cutouts. It's also a distancing irritant. Rather than immersed, I kept having to ask myself "what am I looking at?" Then again, this is not a film from which I should expect immersion.

The Deep Blue Sea

The walls are thin in the The Varsity and invariably I'm not in the loudest film there. If I were, the booms, crashes, and thuds of Shit Happening in my own theater would drown out the negligable voices and music of the adjacent. But I was watching a matinee of "The Deep Blue Sea", so instead subwoofers bled through the walls in a kind of sinister growl. The resulting soundscape wasn't unfitting. For at least the first quarter of the film I had no idea the foreboding rumblings were from another theater. I marvelled at the use of horror conventions in a period melodrama. Actually even without the extra sound effects, there's still a bit of that. It's put together in a way both thoroughly manipulative and modernist.

It's a noisy film, too, in its way: It begins with an orchestral piece so embarrassingly loud that the images on the screen are overpowered. There's something ugly, tactless about such dramatic music continuing to play. It's like someone yelling to himself in the corner of a room--everyone fidgets awkwardly, pretending not to notice. I think "oh god, what have I gone in for?" Face burning, I wonder if the whole film will play out in this tiresome "The Tree Of Life" mode: epic music trying to inject deep signifigance into short scenes of banality. Then something surprised me. I don't remember what, but the brutality of the sequence was replaced by intrigue. The music fades with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston interlocked, nude bodies spinning.

Someone I know avoided seeing it because it looked scary, and she's not wrong. The trailer, however, makes the film look like a belaboured, anachronistic shriek about adultery, which turns out not at all to be the fulcrum of its thrills. On IMDb the plot is summarized thus: "The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot." "Caught" is misleading. She isn't trying to hide her affair in the first place. After bitching out her husband's mother at tea, she nonchalantly goes up to the bedroom and phones her lover. What really grabs me is the rash unpredictability of Rachel Weisz in this role.

To use the title as a metaphor, Weisz as Hester is a slippery fish. It's some time before she ever speaks. In the memories that float up to us--their balast released by her suicide attempt--it's never she who speaks, it's whichever man she's looking at. Either her husband or her lover. I scrutinize her face, looking for a sure sign written there. Which I think is, in a way, to become her. When someone in her building wakes her up from her gas-induced suicidal slumber, she remains abstracted, self-posessed, looking intently for her cigarettes while a woman acquaintance solicits her emotional state.

"Are you sure you're alright?"

"Yes I'm fine, just feeling a bit dopey," her expression full of everything else. She lights her cigarette, and smoking it becomes the present to which we return from her reminisces. She leans back onto the couch, takes a drag, and the camera follows the smoke swirling away from her into the dark room. This is exactly like the memories feel--drifting slowly into form.

While she broods around her apartment, the orchestral score comes up again. Like her initial voicelessness, omission is used to great effect. Her lover, Freddie, comes in, and the shock is triple: The affair she was remembering is still going on, she's living with him, and he turns the radio from the melancholy score to "something livelier." How to revitalize a script from 1955? Make it a psychological thriller. Who and where is Hester? Even as voices explode, the film keeps a tense distance.

Hester holds very little back from her husband's mother. Over dinner and tea the next day the two have a barely veiled argument about attachment. The mother favors "a guarded enthusiasm" and advises Hester to "beware of passion, it always leads to something ugly." Hester could not be more disgusted by this worldview. A life of strict control and practicality to her is unbearable to imagine. So she boldly dives head-first into Eros, but then what?

There is something to the historical connotations of this love plot. For the boastful soldier home from the war won she has passion, but absolutely no connection. (At the suggestion that "there is more to love than physicality" she instantly rebuts "for me there isn't.") Her old judge of a husband, her connection to the prewar past, to wealth and culture, she rejects. Nothing but the brutally erotic relationship she has with Freddie will do. The kind of cold consistency of heart her husband's mother classically prescribes is too late, no longer responsive to the world that has spring up since she married.

But then under this film's cold gaze her oaths of passion for Freddie don't ring true either. The contradictions of her passion are thrown into a harsh light. Utterances echo in a queer glass chamber. To her husband she declares that Freddie is "my whole world." He rules her emotions (which he "didn't ask for," to him becoming her will to power over him), but the specificity of him is nothing to her. His ignorance about art is an annoyance, especially as his insolance about the pointlessness of art doesn't allow her to believe she's getting through to him. When he comes in after her experiment with using the gas for something other than fire, she's looking out the window, smoking. He enthusiastically tells her about his golf game.

"Are you aware you haven't looked at me this whole time?" he asks jovially.

"I know what you look like, Freddie."

The cause of her suicide is always presumed and never confirmed. Before he finds out she tried to kill herself, Freddie assumes she's angry at him because he forgot her birthday. It's unclear whether she cares at all or if she's just using this as a plausible reason for her mood. When he does find her suicide note, he assumes it's all because of him, for which he rages at her. On this subject she pleadingly yells back "I wasn't blaming you!"

Her husband, too, assumes that her relationship with Freddie drove her to suicide, and advises her, as you would expect, to get out of it (and to come back to him, of course). She tells him it wasn't that, which he ignores.

Hester and her suicide are, in other words, empty signifiers. Well, not are--I'm just too willing to see her in that tired way. I've fallen in love with her mystique, distrusted every word and every gesture. Even if she said why she wanted to die, it would be to someone. There would be an audience and therefore an agenda. I wouldn't believe it. Ugh.

Pina

In "Pina", nothing ever goes wrong. Dancers dance on a wet floor, on a precipice, in the road, and in a room full of chairs. None slip (without being choreographed to do so), fall (likewise), run into chairs, or get hit by cars. In these dances, the possibility of an accident is constantly thrown in my eyes like sublime sand.

There is a theme of women falling over to be caught by men. The gravitational potential of her body shoots invisibly through his anticipatory movements. He follows her like a grave, loving spotter, and when she falls forward, he catches her at the last moment before her nose hits the concrete. The audience doesn't quite know what to do with this. It's almost slapstick, but deadpan, modernist. Laughter flares uncertainly through the theater in short fits. Her face is never allowed to make contact with the ground. He saves her from it, but what kind of salvation is that?

A similar dance features a woman not falling face-first, but tipping to the side like a ship in a storm. As before, there is a man to keep her from going over. He keeps close and watches her intently, moving quickly to the perilous side when necessary and kneeling to catch her. She walks and looks forward, zombie-like. When at unpredictable intervals she falls to the side, her eyes do not move. He must keep her on track, keep her from haplessly deviating.

Each dancer in the troupe gives a short monologue. One of them explains lovingly how much Pina loved obstacles. In one of her productions, "Cafe Mueller", the floor is filled with chairs. There is, of course, a man whose role is to move chairs out of the way of dancers who, seeming not to notice the chairs underfoot, would otherwise trip. His work is frantic as the other dancers move wildly about the cluttered space. He makes no false move. He deprives them of clumsiness, their one avenue of expression. While moving chairs is anything but quiet, and the movements of the dancers are anything but understated, nonetheless a tense, kinetic hush settles over them.

There is one dance in which a dancer falls, so predetermined it stings with the caustic amusement of a pompous psychoanalyst. It made the audience so uncomfortable that they laughed sincerely. A man and a woman embrace firmly, both looking needy but on the brink of satiation. They don't move, but a man with the suit, hairstyle, and manner of Agent Smith comes over to them. He rearranges them into a flipbook of passion--their hands to each other's hips, their lips onto each other's, and then he lays her whole into the still man's outstretched arms, as if supposed to carry her to bed in a cliche. As soon as the stern arranger of limbs lets go, she slips out of the arms, and falls to the floor. It looks like it hurts. She picks herself up and again the two embrace, seeming to be rescuing each other from the trauma that just occurred. Sternness turns to anger in the superegoical overseer, and he repeats the whole thing over again, faster. It repeats over and over. Their breathing becomes loud and rapid. It ends with the two embraced. The angle of the camera reveals a bloody spot on her ankle.

The accident is routed back into itself. To my rapt frustration, nothing ever happens. I have never been more convinced that beauty and terror are the same thing.

The Iron Lady

A friend of mine was excited to see "The Iron Lady" because she admires Margaret Thatcher. My friend does not so much admire her policies, but rather the way she made her way in a government of men. My friend points out that people are usually unable to separate her politics from her sex. In all of this movie's cold pity, it also fails to do anything but reify an unexamined impression. Here her political decisions are not decisions, but the collateral damage of a psyche that demanded of its bearer to, as my brother says of Hilary Clinton, have a bigger penis than the men. (His view of Clinton as a woman so obsessed with one-upping male politicians that she ends up more monstrous is this script's view of Thatcher.)

The movie's crude psychoanalysis of Margaret starts early. Giggled at by girls her age (literally there is a scene in which they walk by her father's shop, glancing over at her and giggling as if we're in Constance and Margaret has just received a damning blast), teenaged Margaret becomes entrenched. After all, although nobody else does, her father loves her more for her ungirlish ambition. When she is accepted to Oxford, her father warmly congratulates her. Her mother, washing the dishes, says that her hands are still wet. She doesn't bother to dry them, turns back to the dishes, and the script has suddenly explained Margaret's life. Before Margaret agrees to become Thatcher she sums up her need to not become a housewife by telling her future husband "I do not want to die washing a teacup." (She does not, but there is one drawn out scene of her washing a teacup as a widow, during which I half expected her to keel over from the force of the movie's need for poetic resonance.)

Throughout the movie the lack of her mother's love is reiterated. She is shown hating every other woman who walks on screen. She ignores her daughter and swoons over her son. "I always have preferred the company of men."

The most egregious scene is in a meeting of the cabinet. She explodes at the president for a typo in the agenda. The men silently gape at her raving. The scene keeps cutting away to shots of her looking malevolently at the ceiling. Someone in the audience asked "is this real?" (The alternative being that it's in her head, like her dead husband.) Wrenching her body, she finally wails "you're all so weak! So weak." The body language of her outburst is about as subtle as a silent film. I would not have been surprised had she begun skulking around the government halls like an animal, hunched over, fingers clawed.

When she sends Britain off to get back the Falkland Islands, she has ceased being depicted as a person, and we are now only allowed to see madness. Why does she decide to go into the Falklands when, as the President (played by Anthony Head) tells her, the country can't afford it? Penis-envy gone wild, obviously. Cynicism about people's motives in politics is usually a gas, but this is lazy. The movie may as well have been titled "The Crazy Bitch". The effort to show her humanity has deprived her of it.

If I'm to watch an unyielding woman hell-bent on securing power at whatever cost, how about one who is judged insane by the other characters, not by the screenwriter. In other words, give me Patty Hewes in "Damages," not some old bullshit of a case-study served up as Margaret Thatcher.

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

I went into "Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy" with a humorless mood. This was embarrassing because it was sure to share my grim view. On my way out the door, my brother read me this quip from a review: "it’s a movie of chain smokers and whisperers, of grey skies and glum expressions, of rattling tea cups and rotary-dialed telephones," which once inside the theater gave me an uncomfortable sense of being in colusion with the movie. I was glum; it was glum. In an absurd flight of self-consciousness I imagined others rolling their eyes at me for taking this terribly serious movie so seriously.

It's so serious that even a little relief had the audience in stitches. Smiley, the retired spy who is investigating his former peers (because he has hero fantasies or because he's power hungry, take your pick) goes to talk to a woman who no longer works at The Circus, as they call the intelligence agency. It is implied that they were once romantically involved. They sit down to tea, and have a view into the kitchen where youths make out on the counter and then go upstairs. She says "I don't know about you George, but I'm feeling seriously under-fucked!"

George is not to be seen doing anything dirty, so that when we see him at the top of the Circus at the end of the movie, it's supposed to be like a coronation of the righteous king. The film dryly observes just as its spies do, so that this final  cut feels as if it, too, is under scrutiny. But there's nothing behind this habitual scrutiny. The spies in this movie analyze but are not insightful, are observant but not thoughtful. One could read the camera the same way.

To give everything away, when the villain is slain, it is Colin Firth. He's shot through cleanly the cheek. The gore in this film is gratuitious, but not in the campy way. It's not fireworks in slimy red for us to marvel at, but quick and terrible. This must be a singular moment in his career, getting shot.

Rising stars, on the other hand, get another sort of glamor. I'm convinced that Benedict Cumberbach's agent insists that he wear fabulous clothes ever since the success of "Sherlock" and its resulting coat and scarf sales. As Peter he's the peacock in the Circus, strutting about in his bright blue tie and handkerchief, doing Smiley's bidding. Who, in contrast, insists upon a protective shell of drab.

There's a kind of defensive criticism in which one faults the movie for the parts one didn't understand in it. Did you understand all the dialogue in this movie? Honestly I didn't understand what was going on half the time. The music swelled menacingly and I thought "um, what are you driving at?" It's a good device to put the audience in the position of an imperfect observer, doling us out little facts as the story unfolds in both directions. But sometimes it seemed as if we were expected to have already read Le Carre's book.

Personally, I found the only fun reading of this movie was as a psychodrama of purification. The corrupt Circus, who gives information to its professed enemy, is the mess of the psyche's attachments. Smiley, somehow standing outside of this is here to perform a superegoical audit. In the end the Circus is reconnected with itself, restored as, well, an agency. Its will will once again be carried out without turning against itself. In parallel to this is the purification of Smiley's marriage. Anne, who we never see, is a contested posession between Smiley and Bill Haydon (Colin Firth). "It was nothing personal, I hope you understand," Haydon tells Smiley, "I knew that if you saw me as Anne's lover, you couldn't see me straight on. It worked, up to a point." Apparently Smiley is the perfect spy, able to overcome the compromises that emotions allegedly wreak on objectivity. In the end he and his wife are reunited. Through a doorway we see him gently touching her shoulder. Order is restored; the scapegoat for the two mirroring plotlines is one person, and he is punished. Hooray.

Young Adult

What I should not do is review this movie. (Or any movie, really, but that’s another matter.)

This town is small enough that one of the audience came to the same coffee shop afterwards. “it’s not about a young adult writer,” she was saying emphatically to the barista, who was I suppose curious or pretending to be for the sake of small talk. It is about a young adult writer, but I was caught in the same identification that she was. “It’s not just high school” she said, eyes widening in confidence, “people--young people--really do get stuck like that, and they’re not psychotic.” Neither is Theron, despite the absurd character, Mavis, she is supposed to be playing. She knows better, but she does it all anyway: chases after her high school sweetheart, keeps but only loves her fluffy, purse-sized dog as much as she loves him, and drinks coca-cola every morning. It's supposed to be darkly funny, deadpan, but is instead depressingly real to people like me, and, apparently, someone else.

I imagined a crisis of imagination leading to this script. The author (”author,” Mavis always corrects anyone who calls her a “writer”) can’t write, as her protagonist cannot in the beginning. Fed up, the author decides to not filter anything, to do the authorial “fuck it” that her protagonist does with life. She sends Mavis off to do the least imaginitive thing possible, for her: get her high school boyfriend back. This is the author’s bare imaginitive act, while the rest is filled in with unhappy vignettes of mundanity: sending the dog out to feed from a plastic container that she never cleans up from the balcony (the camera shows us a pile), not connecting with but cynically sleeping with her date anyway, playing the same tired song on her mix tape over and over as she drives to her home town (which is tiresomely metaphoric). What was startling to me was the misery of interstate travel through small towns. Shot after shot of off-ramp chain eateries, mostly empty parking lots. This sort of imaginationlessness that Ashland, with its relative wealth, has relegated to the edges of town.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” I told her, “but then I don’t hate Ashland as much as she does Mercury.” Ashland sucks less than Mercury. It’s more bearable, and complicates the upward mobility narrative blackly played out in this movie. Even the terribly cruel and self-loathing probably wouldn’t say that only nothings live here, as one tragic and ignored character does to our blonde heroine. What I said to the other moviegoer was that there seem to be two endings: the conventional ending in which everything is wrapped up in the last ten minutes: She decides, somewhat bewilderingly, to move on with her life. She gets into her broken car, eyes sunken with makeup meant to amplify a lack of makeup, but changed for the better. What this neat ending doesn't deal with is what I called the other ending, but it's not really an ending: After sleeping with the self-described "fat geek," she comes upstairs in her wine-stained getup and sits at the kitchen table with his sister, who idolizes her. The sister gives her a pep talk that consists of Mavis being better than everyone in Mercury. She, after all, went to the city, and writes things. Everyone who lives in Mercury is meant to, because they are nothing. She eats this up, smiling, and is convinced to go back to Minneapolis. "Take me with you," the sister pleads. "You're good here, Sandra, you're good," Mavis says, and leaves.

It figures that I would think that it’s too bad that the “having a life” option in this movie is marriage. The lifeless are single; the living are married with children.

It was not the sort of movie during which you have to keep from peeing your pants because you laugh so hard. But then, thankfully, it was also not the sort of movie in which characters regularly pee their pants to make you laugh. The most it ever roused the audience to was a sharp chuckle. More often I breathed out loudly through my nose in that barely laugh that's like a whisper. We all began laughing because, I guess, we expected a comedy to be funny. At some point we stopped straining.