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Steven Soderbergh's CONTAGION: The Disease Thriller as Genre Movie

Contagion, the latest film from chameleonic director Steven Soderbergh, is many things: a so-called hyperlink movie (in its use of globally-interwoven plotlines and a vast ensemble cast à la Traffic), a post-Katrina indictment of bureaucratic ineptitude in dealing with disasters, a chronicle of Internet-fueled mass hysteria, and a chronicle of various disparate individuals struggling to make sense of their lives in the wake of a calamitous event. The calamitous event is a disturbingly fast-moving pandemic of international proportions -- dubbed the MEV-1 virus -- and the massive cast consists of afflicted patients, public health officials, and medical scientists working on a cure. As such, the film fits neatly into the genre of “medical thrillers” or “disease epics,” and it is this status as a genre movie that I want to explore here.

Though perhaps not as well-recognized as its cousins the mystery thriller or the disaster movie, the disease movie is a genre governed as much as any by conventions and codes. Contagion fuses these generic conventions with a subtler auteurist side, producing a strange little thriller that, all along its way, flirts with formula while suggesting a darker, odder, more human reality buried behind the sad eyes of the actors. I want to go through a few of the thematic elements of the genre, one by one, to reveal the myriad ways in which Soderbergh brings them to cinematic life. Here are a few:

Patient zero. The disease thriller is almost always what I would call a genealogical movie. It is concerned with tracing the origins and lifespan of a character, its morality, its habits. What makes these movies so unique is that the crucial character is the disease itself. We see the symptoms it causes, but what we are most concerned about is where it came from, and -- almost always -- what human flaw led to its devastating spread. This is where the archetype of the “patient zero” comes in --  the first human to get the disease, and -- for better or worse -- the one to blame for the millions of deaths that follow. My first exposure to the concept of “patient zero” was, quite tellingly, through a prime example of disease-movie filmmaking: the AIDS epic And the Band Played On, which, like Contagion, simultaneously traces the devastating effect of the disease on individuals and the ambitious and somewhat self-serving attempts of the medical establishment to identify and cure it. In that film -- which is admittedly imbued with a much more historical, humanistic spirit than Contagion -- the figure who acts as the patient zero for North America is Gaëtan Dugas, an extremely promiscuous French-Canadian flight attendant who travels the world, blithely spreading HIV through sordid sexual encounters. We are meant to judge him, to shake our heads at his unthinking vanity, to reframe AIDS not as the product of indifferent viral mutations, but rather as an extension of human hubris -- something we did to ourselves. That And the Band Played On is also deeply sympathetic to sufferers of AIDS is one of that film’s contradictions. Our sympathy for suffering is unbounded, provided we always have someone, somewhere, to blame. In Contagion, the patient zero figure is incarnated by Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a rich, adulterous wife who comes into contact with some dubious pig blood on a business trip to Hong Kong. Though she is never reduced to Fu Manchu levels of villainy, we in the audience come to resent her for her happy ignorance in spreading the disease. In this respect, Contagion perfectly incarnates the genre trope: it moves along as a detective story, with a morally flawed human being as the single perpetrator.

Panic. In the wake of the early outbreak of the disease, mass panic spreads. As in other disease movies, we witness the agitation of the hoi polloi as they feverishly squirrel away supplies and chase after dubious cures. In Contagion, though, this panic is mediated by, well, the media -- in particular Internet media such as blogs that disseminate (often dubious) information at lightning speeds.

Spread of the disease. The MEV-1 disease is quite nearly personified in this film; mutating to exploit our biological weaknesses, it careens through entire societies, reproducing and spreading like a morally-coded miasma. The spread of the disease is presented as an abstract force, a gravitational momentum quite poorly resisted by the human impulse towards control. In particular, it spreads through social contact -- interpersonal gestures like handshakes or touching of the face that the movie goes to great pains to stigmatize -- and as such the film is a thoroughly modern excavation of social networks. The disease spreads, but only because it is able to colonize the ways in which we are all already connected.

Spread of information. Acting as a foil to the spread of the disease, there is an ethically-righteous spread of accurate information about the disease, running from the very first clinicians on the front lines all the way to the highest levels of the military and the public health establishment. Like the disease, this information-pattern -- this web of medical knowledge that provides the only hope of a cure -- spreads via our social networks, jumping from one person to another. The disease is only controllable once this information is disseminated widely enough to counterbalance the parallel spread of the disease itself. When information fails to spread adequately, as in the case of bureaucratic/homophobic hurdles hindering awareness of AIDS, or in the case of misguided cures transmitted through the blogosphere, the disease spreads faster. In effect, these thrillers thematize the idea of a signal-to-noise ratio. The signal is comprised of medical benevolence, well-reasoned caution, scientific elan, and the will of common people to take care of each other. The noise is comprised of panic, greed, mob mentality, denial, and human miscalculation.

Dignity in death. For disease thrillers to truly instill fear in the viewer, someone important has to die. But there is little pathos in watching a craven wretch, coughing and bleeding and vomiting, keel over in the middle of a street. These films need a martyr, a person to die with dignity and grace, with full lucid awareness of their victimhood, and yet without an embrace of that victimhood. In Contagion (spoiler alert), that role is played by Kate Winslet, a saintly Epidemics Intelligence Agent, who, like a diligent detective, burrows towards the disease until she gets burnt by it. She is one of the few wholly innocent victims in a film that favors moral ambiguity and stigmatizes human social behavior as not just lowly and incompetent, but as an actual physical vector for the spread of the disease. Her last dying gesture -- stranded in a gymnasium with hundreds of other moribund souls, she tries and fails to pass a blanket to another patient -- is the ultimate stroke of pathos that seals our fear of the disease.

Ignorance. Yet another parallel spread is the spread of misinformation. Here, that is incarnated by Jude Law, playing a polemical blogger who claims -- mendaciously -- to have found his own cure for the disease, just so he can raise the price for a cabal of pharmaceutical investors. For a while, his scheme threatens to derail the countervailing efforts of doctors and scientists to control the disease.

The cure. This is the Holy Grail of disaster thrillers, the equivalent of a secret talisman to be found by an action hero, or the final clue to a murder mystery to be solved by a detective. It is the object of risk-taking, sacrifice, compromise, ambition, and holy recklessness. In Contagion, the cure is found by two scientists -- played by Elliott Gould and Jennifer Ehle -- who endanger their own health and the health of others in order to run dangerous experiments towards finding a vaccine. Their rashness is motivated more by personal self-interest -- the hope for a Nobel prize, say -- than by a desire to help the suffering millions, but the fact that their efforts are rewarded shows that the film is on their side. As in many disaster thrillers, doctors have to act like action heroes in order to have any hope of success.

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Photo courtesy of Jesus Perez, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Drab Men and Knotty Abstractions: The New TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY

We never get a head-on look at the main Russian antagonists in Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the latest adaptation of John le Carré's classic Cold War spy thriller of the same name. Instead, the Soviet agents insistently lurk just at the edges of the frame, visible -- if ever -- only as hollow silhouettes or passing shadows. Just as it is for the British intelligence agents who form the film's main corps of protagonists, we know these faraway schemers only by the ambiguous ripples they cast on the west side of the Iron Curtain. Nor can we or the main characters claim the easy privilege of vilifying these antagonists, for the film is imbued with the frightening suspicion that there is a moral equivalency -- or at least a behavioral symmetry -- uniting both sides of the Cold War. Each side uses the same cold-blooded methods (torture, extrajudicial surveillance, murder, sexual manipulation) and in any case, the spy class as depicted here are not capitalists or proletarians but rather civil servants whose motivations are personal and professional, not ideological. So if there are no Bondian action showdowns with Soviet megalomaniacs, no affirmations of the inherent goodness of free-market capitalism or the inherent corruption of communism, what then is at stake in this film -- morally, narratively, psychologically? What compels us -- and the characters -- to keep moving forward towards the resolution of the film's central mystery? And what do we hope to achieve when we get there?

Perhaps it's best to begin by tracing the contours of that central mystery, the ostensible destination of the film's journey through the psychological back-alleys of British intelligence, code-named "The Circus." Basically -- and I'm leaving out a lot of rich backstory here -- the film's plot is a classic whodunit: one of four top Circus officials is suspected of being a long-time Soviet mole, and it's up to semi-retired spymaster and recurrent le Carré character George Smiley to ferret him out. Smiley is an uncharismatic, perspicacious, largely silent man whose distinguishing features are his drabness and his misguided love for his cheating wife; in essence, he is the anti-Bond, and he is played with laconic self-effacement by Gary Oldman, replacing Alec Guiness, who played Smiley in a 1979 miniseries adaptation of the novel. Smiley's talent -- what elevates him from a meek nobody to a national-security genius -- is his ability to grasp the psychological realities hidden behind the espionage world's curtain of abstraction. Because that's what this film is about fundamentally: abstractions, and the ability to stictch them together into something meaningful. Smiley has no visible enemies, no tangible objects to find or identify, no murder mystery to solve. All he has, like the audience, is a series of facts put out before him, and his enterprise -- like that of the viewer -- is to rearrange the puzzle pieces into an image that makes sense.

On that level, what's at stake for Smiley is what's at stake for the audience: the chance to build a system of information that hopefully is the correct one out of many wrong ones. We witness a world bathed in hypnotic dread -- beneath the browns and grays of ‘70s London, beneath the drab machinations of drab men in a drab bureaucracy, we know that most un-drab things are afoot: national security, the fate of the free world, etc. But he film hardly ever speaks the name of these graver issues; instead, it is left to us to pick up the intimations behind the surface movements. If the film works at all -- and it does, excellently! -- it is because we are engaged in the same process as Smiley: making sense of a confused information-pattern, seeing events as proxies or stand-ins for other events. So this is a taciturn, chilly film, but it is also absorbingly rich, because for every gesture shown on the screen, there are a thousand unseen ones whose invisibility only serves to increase their portentousness. The fragmented structure of the movie -- with events depicted non-linearly or in flashbacks -- is the perfect mirror for the fragmented information-structure presented to Smiley. More than spies, we all become mathematicians.

Admittedly, Smiley is engaged in more than a dispassionate hunt for cold facts; even if he isn't deeply invested in the moral outcome of the Cold War, he cares about the sanctity of the organization he's worked for all his life. Ousted from the service in the wake of a botched mission in Budapest (a disaster caused by the mole and shown inexorably unfolding in the film's prologue) he is bereft of his vocation, bereft of the one thing he's good at. Finding the mole is his way back to power; it's a way of restoring the honor of his generation by applying his mind to the facts before him. That's all that he can achieve by finding the Soviet infiltrator, and that's all that we can hope for as viewers: a de-scrambled puzzle that we can all live with, that makes us all feel like we're where we belong...

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Photo courtesy of David Sickmiller, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Martin Scorsese's CASINO: A Post Mortem

This movie left a bad taste in my mouth. Why? Some theories:

1. Violence. Casino not only overaestheticizes it, not only views it as a cinematic end in itself, but also just takes a sort of futile glee in it. Martin Scorsese seems to possess a conviction that graphic bloodshed lends some credibility or verisimilitude to a film, whereas actually it contributes very little to any sort of transcendent artistic immersion, instead serving only to perpetually pull the viewer out of the movie, out of art into ethics.
2. Moralism. Is this film moralistic? Not exactly. Set in the bygone days of seedy, Mafia-controlled Las Vegas, it seems pretty sympathetic to the internal culture and self-contained law of the mob. At the very least, it presents the clans of criminal greed as no better and no worse than the cabals of local government and corporate interest. Nevertheless, there is a sort of teleological moral dimension to the film, where deceptive drug-using femmes fatales (i.e. Sharon Stone) meet an ignominious end, whereas wily yet honorable professionals (i.e. Robert De Niro), whatever their dubious careers might be, get to ride out the storm of history and survive to another day.
3. Formula. Casino starts off sparklingly unformulaic. Instead of establishing clear villains, conflicts or plot turns, the film begins as an archaeological survey of the Las Vegas criminal underground circa the late '70s. Dancing from shiny casino floors to filthy back rooms, it fills us in, with a mighty efficiency, on who's hustling who, who's on good terms with the bosses back East, who wants whose job, who gets which cut of the action. We are indoctrinated into the hierarchies and rituals of a mystery cult that we've never seen before, and it's thrilling -- especially since Scorsese presents it all with the same roller-coaster editing and lush tracking shots he perfected in Goodfellas, this movie's disturbingly similar predecessor and double. (If anything, Casino is a little more sophisticated and less theme-parky, though somewhat less vital, than Goodfellas.) From this ingenious and wholly original foundation, though, the film slips horribly into formula. Away from the forest we go, and onto the grand boulevard of narrative, whose landmarks and endpoint we can see coming from a mile away. Vain characters fall irrevocably into cocaine abuse and gradually destroy all their relationships; the narcissistic and cruel become victims of their own hubris; the FBI's vice gradually but inevitably closes in; the stupid reveal their stupidity and the smart their smarts. I won't reveal the ending to you, because the movie reveals it well enough about two hours into its three-hour run-time.

So in the end, I suppose Casino is a victim of its own early qualities. From anthropological beginnings, it ultimately become just a tragic, bloated romance between De Niro’s character and the sparkling city that temporarily offered him -- and countless others -- so much, before taking it all away, et cetera, et cetera. Beneath the gloss, beneath the nighttime cinematography and neon colors and general sense of almost overpolished smoothness, there is an oddly sentimental picture, nostalgic for the faded Las Vegas of years past, back when it was supposedly a Mafia savannah, before the corporations took over and turned it into a family resort. Scorsese starts off with a dense movie about peeling back layers, but ends up with a lightweight (yet overlong) film about watching a ball fall into a hoop...

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Image found here, usable in the public domain.

Multiple Cities and Multiple Films: Guy Maddin's MY WINNIPEG

Let’s start off with the title, what it contains and what it elides: My Winnipeg.

Winnipeg. This is indeed, and without a doubt, a film about Winnipeg, a large-ish town in central Canada situated at the fork of the Red and the Assiniboine rivers. This wintry Manitoban capital -- ensconced in stratified layers of snow and time, rocked to sleep by its own nostalgia, simultaneously the scheming writer and captive audience of boundless lore -- is the psychic prison Guy Maddin seeks to escape and the locus of his archaeological project. (That this “archaeological” project is just one of many -- alongside disparate “psychoanalytic” and more purely cinematic ventures -- is something that I shall return to later.) Insofar as the film tries to teach us unknown facts about an unknown place (I imagine that most viewers are, like me, ignorant of the real Winnipeg), it can claim to be a documentary -- and it is, indeed, presented by something called The Documentary Channel (a CBC outlet of sorts.) And at times the film hews too closely to its straight-documentary vision, providing us with quirky customs, eccentric faces, decrepit buildings: a whole cosmos of urban truth and myth that we have seen a thousand times before, in a thousand other places, from a thousand other creators, in a thousand tourist manuals, on the lips of a thousand other good-old-days-ers championing the moribund glory of the past. It is objectively fascinating stuff, but so soaked in sentimentality that it risks lulling you just as much as it has lulled multitudes of Winnipeggers. (And lulling is not so far from boring.) But at other times, My Winnipeg strays so far from what we could call documentary realism that it risks raising another sort of ire. None of Maddin’s Winnipeg stories are presented with even the slightest bit of historiographical clarity: no sources, no provenance, no interviews, not the slightest objective slant of verifiability or falsifiability. We are essentially being made privy to nifty nostalgia for an urban spirit-world that might never have existed. While there is undoubtedly something commendable and hyper-cinematic about this -- isn’t the dream-world always a more fertile subject than the real world? -- it becomes claustrophobic as the film progresses, rattling along episodically from one set piece to another. If this is indeed a documentary, what documents can we cling to? What information can we use as a reputable foundation for our own mental schema of Winnipeg? How can we -- or Maddin, for that matter -- ever escape from the Platonic cave of shadows and illusions? Without any third-party interviewees or voices, all we have is Maddin’s poetic stream of consciousness laced to spectral half-facts -- and that can begin to feel very solipsistic after a while. And this brings us to the next word of the title.

My. In addition to functioning as an archaeological excavation of the multiple cities contained in Winnipeg’s interstices -- parallel cities dislocated geographically, historically, socially, financially, erotically from the banal consensus reality of Wikipedia’s Winnipeg -- Maddin’s film paints itself as a psychoanalytic project in which the filmmaker seeks to “film his way out” of his hometown, escaping once and for all from “the heinous power of family and city.” That this heinous power -- the sickly grip of despair that lurks within the rigidity of childhood -- is never adequately shown is one of the film’s major problems, one of the things that sabotages its psychoanalytic aspirations and reduces it, ultimately, to the inoffensive folklorism described above. Not that Maddin doesn’t make a game effort. He hires actors to play his family members in reenactments of crucial formative moments and brings his domineering mother into the mix (played in an excellent turn -- not as one of the reenactors but as Maddin’s “real” mother, confusingly enough -- by ‘40s femme fatale Ann Savage.) Wending his way through memory on a highly-literalized “dream-train,” Maddin hardly shies from erotically-charged, even shameful remembrances, revealing the way that local history (a sexualized labor movement of tongue-in-cheek “Bolsehevik rapists” stalking a Catholic girls’ school), boyhood development (much affection is lavished on old arenas and the stately, nude athletes that showered there) and maternal influence (his mother’s naked lap is presented as a geological force comparable with the forking Red and Assiniboine) fuse to build a psychosexual tapestry all the more consumptive for being half-remembered (and half-memorable.) And yet, the dark latent strata of love and hate are never quite unearthed. I craved the bedrock of malaise that would not only show why Winnipeg seduced Maddin in the first place but also share a glimpse of what it is that now drives him to escape. This Winnipeg is his, but he never shares enough to make it ours…

What my breakdown of the title leaves out is just that thing that any Maddin-lover would most expect: style. And My Winnipeg isn’t lacking. All the Soviet-style montage, wry intertitles and silent melodrama we know so well from “The Heart of the World” and Brand Upon the Brain are brought to bear on little unassuming Winnipeg. There are sequences of unabashed visual splendor that might stand beautifully as self-contained episodes, but are only with great awkwardness shepherded into the documentary and psychoanalytic narratives that ostensibly make up the meat of the film. At one point, various Winnipeg elders gather for a sinister séance, in which a lovely ballet dancer dances out messages from the spirit world. It is a sparkling, romantic dialogue of images – a telegram from 1915 edited up with all the alacrity of a music video – and while it work tremendously as a three-minute short film, it leaves you wondering what it reveals about Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg, or any Winnipeg for that matter. At another point, a montage of the whirring beauty salon of Maddin’s mother is dynamically, discontinuously edited, with sprays, purses, gossiping mouths, dusty powders flying in every direction – a whole panoply of womanly signifiers that Maddin credits with building the feminine side of his psyche. And later, a mystical hockey arena in the process of demolition – and filled while a century’s worth of ghostly players playing one final match – presents the male side of Maddin’s upbringing. All of these scenes share the same dialectical montage style, the same back-and-forth volley of faces, fetishized objects, even intertitles. But those high-melodramatic interludes seem to exist on utterly a different plane from  the somewhat banal documentary paces or the fascinating – yet weirdly unfulfilled family reenactments. Like the city of its title, My Winnipeg seems to have uncountable maps for uncountable alleys. How do these alleys cohere into a single city, or a single film? This is a question that Guy Maddin doesn’t quite know how to answer.

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Photo courtesy of Martin Rankin, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Fireworks and Tears: The Play of Artifice and Subtlety in THE LEOPARD

There is a scene midway through The Leopard (recently shown, in digitally restored splendor, at the Charles Theatre), in which Burt Lancaster -- playing the aging but dignified Prince of Salina -- stands on a balcony as the results of a crucial plebiscite are read out. Though the drama and fanfare are great, the results are predetermined (rigged, in fact): Salina’s isolated Sicilian village is voting to join Giuseppe Garibaldi’s unified Italy. The old aristocratic order will be swept away, replaced by a new cosmos of democratic compromise, political greed, and populist sentiment. As a pompous local functionary reads out the results, Salina languidly, mournfully smokes a cigar, wearing an expression halfway between resignation and worry. All of a sudden, as the reading of results draws to a close, a massive torrent of fireworks explodes in the sky behind Salina’s head. The placid composition of a man in the center of a frame is suddenly turned into an opulent, colorful portrait of political fervor spectacularly unleashed for all to see. A lesser movie, or a lesser director, would have lingered on this exquisite shot until every ounce of wonder was wrung out of it. We would have seen the fireworks from many angles, we would have seen Salina’s face twist as he reacted to them, we would have seen people clamoring in the streets. But such is the assurance of Luchino Visconti’s direction, and such is the inherent expressiveness of Lancaster’s leonine face, that no such dwelling is required. We barely have time to register a shot that must have cost huge resources to realize, before Visconti cuts away, and we are back in the social comings and goings that make up the bulk of the film.

The reason I lavish so much description on that one shot -- beyond the fact that it has haunted me, in the best of ways, since seeing the movie -- is that it is emblematic of a fundamental and highly fruitful tension in The Leopard. Visconti’s film is rightly known as one of the most extravagant, maximalist productions of all time, but shots like the one described above reveal a dimension of subtlety, of sparseness and minimalism that forms the true emotional core of the film. Though huge amounts of money and beauty and power are constantly paraded before the frame, what we realize by the end of the film is the impermanence of it all, the way it pales in comparison to the drama of a single tear or a single kiss. The Leopard is defined by the play between putting everything out there for us to see and keeping everything beneath the surface.

Lancaster’s character -- meant to be construed as the noble but fading leopard of the title -- is the prime locus of this tension. He himself is a man with sharply delineated interior and exterior lives. On the outside, he is a paragon of all that was great about the old aristocratic order. With discipline and benevolence, he ushers his small Sicilian fiefdom into the modern age, relinquishing power here to gain it there, stating time and again that, “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything will have to change.” But underneath that surface of control, he is a man tortured by the thought of his own mortality, tortured by a sort of moral relativism that leads him to discern that no political order is better than any other, that both the leopards and lions of the past and the jackals and hyenas of the present think themselves “the salt of the earth” and that all are governed by basic human needs for affirmation, validation, sex, money and peace.

For the bulk of the movie, Salina -- not to mention Lancaster himself -- is an excellent actor, playing the dignified role that everyone requires of him, regulating the passions of his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon, playing a sort of vapid, opportunistic pretty boy) and Tancredi’s lusty flame Angelica (Claudia Cardinale, playing an equally vapid/opportunistic femme fatale of sorts.) But at the risk of spoiling the most transcendent moment of the movie (on par for me with the ship-in-a-tree moment in Aguirre, the Wrath of God), I want to close off this post by describing the single moment when the Prince of Salina’s poise unravels: By the end of the film, the flames of revolution have mostly extinguished themselves. A new political system is in place, but all the social functions of courting and entertaining and pleading remain the same. A huge ball is being held and all the characters convene in their lushest, most aristocratic vestments. But this occasion -- which formerly would have provided Salina with the quintessential stage for his lucid conversations, Machiavellian manipulations, and soothing reassurances -- becomes almost unbearable for him. Fleeing from this pageant of obsolete narcissism, Salina steps into a side room and gazes on a melancholy painting of a man dying. Analyzing the conditions of the man’s death in the painting -- who susurrounds him, how he is dressed, etc. -- Salina reflects aloud on the aesthetic shape of his own future death.

At first, he seems to be an archetypal aristocrat through and through: even as he ponders the extinction of his own élan on earth, he is fixated on appearances, protocol, the handing off of power. But as soon as he is left alone in the room, the camera focuses, statically, viciously, lovingly, on his weathered, once stately, now mournful face. Tears start to well in his eyes, slowly, imperceptibly -- and unlike at the scene with the fireworks, the camera does not move. It lets us see every detail of his crying, the way the tears gather at his eyelids and flow down the wrinkles and crevasses of his face. When it really matters, when the stakes are human, universal, and almost abstract in their timelessness, The Leopard becomes a film of the utmost sympathy and generosity.

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Scribbled in Blood: The Ghoulish ABC's of David Lynch's Short Film THE ALPHABET

I mentioned the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in my previous post (on the topic of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) and it seemed to go over well -- at least in the eyes of an approving commenter named Paul -- and so I've decided to do it again, this time in the service of David Lynch's 1968 experimental short "The Alphabet." In the epigraph to his philosophical fantasy "The Library of Babel" (go ahead, click the link, read it, you'll thank me), Borges cites the 17th-century Englishman Robert Burton:

"By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters..."

--- The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV

In "The Alphabet" -- created when Lynch was but a 22-year-old art student with a feverish imagination, not yet the grey-bouffanted eccentric of popular lore -- we witness the nightmarish exaltation of not just 23, but indeed all 26 letters of the English alphabet. But despite that arithmetic discrepancy, the game is roughly the same: Lynch takes a set of arbitrary, innocent symbols, and, through artful variation, sharpens them and loads them with miasmatic ill-will. The half-animated, half-live-action short (viewable on the web) superficially resembles an elementary-school instructional video of sorts -- sing-song voices chant the letters of the alphabet, which float onto the screen in various witty animations -- but it doesn't take long for those letters to transcend their communicative function and become, instead, the twisted talismans of some malicious intent. Like the falling droplets in an ancient Chinese water torture, the letters ignite a latent madness buried beneath the clean animated surface of the film's beginning. Abstract shapes embark on odd pilgrimages, fuse with other shapes, bristle with sickly restlessness, converse with a bare-breasted corpse-woman, and so, unmoored and queasy, we tumble into a world of live-action red-pierced monochrome. The film ends with a grotesque girl-creature writhing in bed, incanting the letters of the alphabet as if they were the pet names of the Devil himself, before finally vomiting forth a spattering of blood: the elements of speech transubstantiated into the particles of disease...

This typographical nightmare also marks the beginning of David Lynch's career-spanning obsession with sound design: bird-like yawps unsettlingly evoke both the vulnerability of birth and the anguish of death, while desolate wind (or machinery?) sounds imbue the flat animations with all the vastness of an uninhabited dystopia. But even as "The Alphabet" sees Lynch experimenting for the first time with sonic atmospherics (experiments which he continues to perform to this day), with dis-continuity editing, and with other temporally-encoded aspects of film language, the film also functions as a last hurrah of sorts for David Lynch the painter/collage artist. Educated as a visual artist of the pigment-on-canvas variety, Lynch was famously (or not-so-famously, I don't know, I'm a bit of a cultist) inspired to take up film when he saw one of his paintings flutter in the wind -- coming to cinematic life, as it were. This origin story -- one for the ages, I think -- is manifest in his very first film ("Six Men Getting Sick"), which come across, essentially, as an Abstract Expressionist sketch graced with the breath of life. "The Alphabet" retains much of this animated-collage aesthetic, but also -- significantly -- contains one of Lynch's first forays into live action, with all that that implies (mise en scène, editing, actors, cinematography, makeup...) As such, "The Alphabet" can be fruitfully read as a document of a young man in a state of aesthetic (and professional) transition, veering towards cinema, but refusing to accept its strictures point-blank, choosing instead to reshape the medium into something of his own making -- something morbid, something inscrutable, something darkly comic, in short, something Lynchian. 

Keep in mind, though, that this is neither the mid-career Lynch of macabre '50s-infused Americana (vide Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) nor the later Lynch of recursive Hollywood melodrama (Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire), but rather the early, flagrantly grotesque art-horror of Eraserhead -- all oozing secretions and bodily perversions and aimless torment and pancake makeup. As a disembodied, bloody-gummed, eyeless face aptly intones near the end of "The Alphabet": "Please remember that you are dealing with the human form." Indeed, this is one of Lynch's main preoccupations, addressed obliquely but relentlessly not just here but throughout his whole oeuvre. He probes the fragility of the human mind and body, its frail architecture, its mutations, its laughable deformities, its perpetual susceptibility to infection by foreign shapes, objects and dreams. Just as Betty/Diane is seduced, corrupted and ultimately driven to bodily madness by the Hollywood image-factory of Mulholland Drive, so too is the nameless bedridden girl in "The Alphabet" tormented to the point of blood-spewing hysteria by abstract letters that colonize her mental space like so many microbes. It is, after all, no accident that gruesome head wounds feature as a recurring trope in almost all of Lynch's films...!

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On the Doorstep of a Hidden World: Masks and Sacraments in Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT

A mask affords its wearer a rare privilege: he can ingest images from the outside world without projecting any back. He can nourish his imaginative life without letting anyone else register his thoughts, his reactions, or even his identity. He can become a different person with the mask on, then return to his same old self when he takes it off. In such a way, a mask acts as a sort of liminal device -- a portal that allows the Self to travel unscathed into secret worlds by concealing the face that would otherwise link that Self to its usual obligations, relations and consequences. But a mask is not innocent -- its privileges can tempt and corrupt, and its very presence often signals that a line has been crossed, that something has been done or seen that could not have been done or seen by an unmasked agent.

The Venetian mask that rests, cold and silent, on the pillow in this still from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut has its eyes wide open but sees nothing because it lacks a wearer -- it is an object welcoming to secret images but incapable of imagination. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman's character sleeps with eyes shut, swaddled in bland blankets, dressed in a conjugal nightie, ring-hand facing out. She is vulnerable and incapable of travelling into the outside world, but her mind is active, and the film dwells on the erotic dreams that occupy her sleep. Her epistemological quest is inward-driven; she investigates her inner desires. But the mask, which her husband picked up on a secret foray into New York's sexual underworld, speaks to a knowledge-seeking journey of an entirely different sort: a hunt for a secret world outside that bed, a world accessible only through the secrecy and deception of the mask's wearer. This still, with all its implied dichotomies between presence and absence, blindness and sight, warmth and coldness, sleep and wakefulness, passivity and activity, encapsulates both the thematic richness and the viewing experience of Kubrick's film. Everything is there if you just look for it, but you won't necessarily see more by staring straight ahead with eyes wide open. Commit to closing your eyes and wandering through Kubrick's dream-world and you will see plenty.

Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999 and based upon Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, is of course Kubrick’s final work,¹ released just months after his death. Grossly mismarketed as an "erotic thriller" ², enveloped in the real-life gossip-storm of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s (rumored) carnal dysfunction, weighted with the ambiguous expectations we reserve for the posthumous work of geniuses, and generally just derided for trying to confront sexuality in earnest, the film suffered, even and especially before its release, from unfortunate extratextual baggage. Thankfully though, all that baggage falls by the wayside once you actually watch the film. All that remains is cinema itself — the traces in time and space of a mind's probing, of its seductions, its frustrations, its dead-ending paths and unexpected acts of generosity. Whose probing, though? And whose mind? Do the film's obscure investigations belong to Kubrick, or to his characters, or to us, the viewers? The answer is both simple and complex: as in all detective stories -- and this is, despite the lack of guns/badges/detectives, a detective story -- the engines of narrative fuse our curiosity with that of the artist and with that of his creations. Eyes Wide Shut is a dream-universe that we are all citizens of; and all of us alike -- director, viewer, protagonist -- fast become consumed with finding the secret world that lies hidden within that world...

The film — which traces the nocturnal travails of the sexually malnourished and existentially unmoored Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise, in an elusive performance) — is 'problematic' in the best sense of the word. It refuses to be easily read — not in a wan Bartleby-esque fashion, but rather in a vaguely Borgesian way³, a way that multiplies symmetries and symbols and patterns, suggesting that meaning (whatever that means) is both ever-receding and ever-present, glimpsable but not inhabitable. As Bill begins to wander -- emotionally and geographically -- away from his wife Alice (played by Kidman as a woman with a rich erotic imagination and a barely-tapped reservoir of marital resentment), the film vacillates in tone between upper-class picaresque (Bill's wanderings as satirical voyage peppered with insinuating piano players, lascivious widows, gentle whores, and sleazy shopkeeps) and philosophical allegory (Bill's wanderings as subjective investigation into the darkest depths of desire, power and knowledge.) What the film is most emphatically not, though, is a sexy, straightforward jaunt through the sexual underworld of New York City. (Indeed, the city seen on screen is quite obviously not Manhattan; whether you want to call it "a dream-vision of the Upper East side" or just "London posing as such" is up to you.) And there is little in the way of linear story; instead, we follow in Bill's shadow as he circles -- like a blind but hungry falcon -- closer and closer to a hidden world of sex and death.

Gradually, the comedy-of-manners falls away, and we, like Bill, are drawn in, wide-eyed, by the pull of the sacred unknown, by the promise of a sexual unleashing accessible deep within the core of civilization. And so we arrive at the film's Gnostic centerpiece: the infamous orgy sequence, a mesmerizing scene where faces are hidden and skin is uncovered, where blue-bloods, capitalists and prostitutes don Venetian masks for oblique sacraments of sex and power. Sumptuous tracking shots follow Bill through a vast mansion as naked bodies thrust and writhe all around him in devotional silence; the soundtrack features an Orthodox liturgy played backwards to surreal effect; a high priest waves a censer; the blind and hungry falcon stops circling and alights at the center of his path and opens his eyes to see and eat. The formal virtuosity of the scene -- not to mention the heady brew of sex, power, wealth, revelation and mystery -- is enough to suck the air out of any room, enough to send cold tendrils of awe into any cinephile's brain, just as much as the similarly ornate final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As in 2001, there is a pervasive mystical ambiance, a sense of historical objects repurposed for timelessness, but -- and I really never though I would say this -- the orgy sequence of Eyes Wide Shut is perhaps even more ambiguous than the Louis XVI sequence of 2001. Are we witnessing a ritual of Dionysian wildness or rather an Apollonian intervention, the imposition of social and religious protocol onto the pre-social gestures of sex? What should we make of the utter lack of pleasure or emotion in the sex? Like Bill, we are left wondering what we have learned; reaching the secret world only leaves us with more questions: who is behind the masks? Is there another deeper secret world that orchestrated this one?

Eyes Wide Shut does not answer these questions, but neither does its narrative end with that morbid central sequence. The blind and hungry falcon -- having ever-so-briefly seen and tasted -- is cast back out into the world and finds himself circling outwards again, in concentric loops that return him, not without some melancholy, to the frustrations of the everyday. Bill re-acquaints himself with his professional and married lives but has to live with the corrupting and dangerous knowledge of what he has seen. And so the final third or so of the film traces the aftermath, the return to equilibrium, the frayed edges of Bill's consciousness stitching themselves back to reason, the compromises he must make to survive his brush with the sexual ineffable. Narrative circumstances force him to step away from the seductions of the secret world embedded in networks of power and wealth, and instead to focus on the secret world of married domesticity -- a different but no less mysterious type of sexual covenant. The return to this covenant will require a new set of maskings, unmaskings, sacramental rituals, and threshold-crossings, but perhaps I should save that for another post...!

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[1] His script contributions to A.I. Artificial Intelligence don't count; that film has Steven Spielberg’s grubby, sentimental fingerprints all over it — although it is occasionally possible to catch a glimpse of Kubrickian visual wit within the self-indulgent morass.

[2] A disreputable, not to mention inaccurate, genre christening that calls to mind Skinemax-y assignations much more than existential dream-longings.

[3] I am not referencing Jorge Luis Borges just for the fun of it. Aside from similarities in structure (an episodic, circling way of building narrative without ever quite building plot) and form (decadent, florid imagery dead-ending in banal obviousness, while the ineffable instead jumps out, in blunt and concise language, from the interstices of the everyday), there is also rich thematic overlap -- dare I say a shared metaphysics? -- between Borges's short stories and the world of Eyes Wide Shut. Both Kubrick and Borges fixate -- with trepidation and awe -- on the emergence of a raw, erotically-tinged secret world within the consensus reality of daily social functioning, a secret world that protagonists are pulled towards at great personal risk but can never quite understand. Both artists traffic in implication, in temptation, in that one glimpse of the infinite that barely lasts a second but that will perhaps haunt you forever. Consider, by way of an example, Borges's story "The Sect of the Phoenix," which describes a global mystery cult whose ominous secret, transmitted through the ages but never spoken aloud (nor even spelled-out in the pages of the story), is thought by many readers to be none other than the 'secret' of sexual intercourse. Here, as in Eyes Wide Shut, we see sex recast as a sub-world within the world, a secret society both obvious and unfathomable.

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