HopkinsCinemAddicts

What Does the Helper Need?

Why do we help others?

To feel happy? To feel needed? To conduct certain responsibility? To ease guilt? Or just out of self-interest?

After the success of Oldboy, Park Chan-wook made another film about revenge, Lady Vengeance, in 2005. Unlike the torturing love and hatred process in Oldboy, Lady Vengeance presents the entire process of the perfect revenge. The main character, Geum-ja, plans her revenge for over 13 years in prison on Mr Baek, who took her daughter and made her commit the kidnapping and murdering a 6-year-old boy.

The direct translation of the title is actually “The Kind-hearted Geum-ja,” because she acts like an angel in prison and helps almost everyone selflessly. Apparently, her kindness is not out of no reason. Everyone she helps is essential to her revenge, and she pays the price for her kindness.

In fact, Geum-ja doesn’t hide her dark side. She even purposefully makes herself an evil once she is released. She throws away the tofu in front of the prison, which is a Korean tradition representing that the prisoner will no longer be guilty and will be as clean and pure as the tofu. She puts on blood-red eye shadows. She wears a black dress and a leather jacket. And most importantly, the angel who used to smile at all criminals never smiles again once she gets out of prison. Every part of her, from in to out, is demonstrating her rage and displaying her determination to avenge. She is desperate to show everyone, and herself, that all her kindness is out of purpose, and now it is her time to achieve that only goal. 

However, Geum-ja does make an effort to separate herself from the rest of the people involved in her plan. She makes her revenge like a ritual event where she is the goddess who controls everything without being an actual part of it. Geum-ja gathers all the families of Mr Baek’s victims and asks them to kill Mr Baek together. In contrast, she doesn’t even touch Mr Baek during the entire murder process. More dramatically, Geum-ja provides identical raincoats for all the victims’ families to prevent getting blood on their bodies. With all the families sitting together in the raincoats, it looks like a uniform that unifies them and creates the bond of their shared crime. She then takes a group picture with all the families in the raincoat, with blood on their bodies, and brings everyone to a celebration with her hand-made black cake to keep enforcing the bond between the families. Again, she doesn’t eat that cake, but makes herself a white one in the shape of the tofu and throws her face into the cake at the end. As if immersing herself in that cake can wash her soul and cleans her guilt. It is Geum-ja’s revenge, but she makes it seem like she is helping the families to avenge instead of for her personal hatred. And it is a wise choice that gets her out of the cycle of revenge and eliminates any guilt she might have.

Geum-ja is not the only one who “fakes” kindness. The priest, who encourages Geum-ja the entire time she is in prison and gives the tofu to Geum-ja, is actually following Mr Baek’s order to keep an eye on Geum-ja in case she avenges. Typically, we judge the priest’s betrayal behavior immediately as he pretends to be a “good person.” But here, the priest is doing the same thing as Geum-ja, the protagonist whom we are directed to support, and it becomes a moral dilemma that we can’t tell who is doing the “right thing” or if there really is anyone who is doing the right thing.

To me, the film is definitely not portraying Geum-ja as an innocent figure, nor making anyone in her revenge plan naive. Geum-ja is also directly involved in kidnapping the boy in the first place for her own interest. The conflicting behaviors we see from her are just an unspoken consensus that people all act for self-benefits, whether we are being conscious about it or not.

Geum-ja presents how she selfishly helps someone to kill someone else morally. She made her hands dirty to help others in prison so she could keep herself clean when conducting her actual revenge. The difference between a kind-hearted evil and a brutal victim might just be what they choose to display at the moment, which depends on what maximizes their interest the most. And it is not a wrong thing. Because we all have to admit that, as human beings, our social behaviors are based on an invisible “cost-benefit” analysis where we maximize our self-interest according to the social exchange theory in psychology.

So, the next time you see someone helping another person, what do you think the helper could gain?

Sundown: Late May and the Chronicles of June

Pre-production for Sundown began in late May, a few weeks after the Spring semester ended. Looking ahead towards the summer, I had an internship, a part-time job, and a production for a short film lined up, so I knew I had to be efficient with my time. Before I left campus for the summer, I was able to get a head start on location scouting, visiting my then-Script Supervisor, Isabel Salas’ apartment. I learned a few things about location scouting, such as needing to note the location and quantity of outlets and windows, among other things. Isabel graciously allowed me to use their apartment during production, which was one of three locations successfully secured.

Once I got back home, I moved to build a concrete schedule for the entire summer. I held my first production meeting with my producer, John D’cruz on May 25. That same day, I got a fun little curveball thrown my way when my previous Assistant Camera emailed me notifying me that she would be transferring to Columbia in the Fall (now Harvard). Isabel then became my AC and everything was fine again. Before the month ended, I wanted a clear plan on how the rest of the summer was supposed to go. We began with creating a timeline that marked a plan for script revisions, crowdfunding, marketing, location scouting, casting, and ultimately, shooting.

However, plans are made to be changed, right?

Sticking to the plan was going well, that is, until we hit June. Before things went south, I was able to scratch a few things off the list, like sending in my second revision to Studio North, having pared the script down to a more manageable 13 pages. The much-needed Sundown (V3) finally existed and ultimately became the script I worked from for the rest of summer. That same day, I visited my grandmother’s apartment in Baltimore to location scout. Thankfully, she agreed to us using her apartment, so that was two out of three locations secured. I figured the rest of the locations could be created within the walls of the Film Centre (I was right, and this is what we did).

June 2022 - Location scouting, specifically, my main character's childhood home. The china closet needed to go (and it did!)

But back to plans changing and June being problematic. June was slated to be the heaviest month in terms of pre-production. The first task was to draft a script for and shoot the promotional video for the Seed and Spark crowdfunding platform. All I needed to do was create a compelling, well-written, unbelievably beautiful promo video and convince everyone I knew to donate to our project. Easy, right? Well, it could have been, but I became so paralyzed by my fear of failure that I fell down the rabbit hole of self-sabotage. The plan I had for my promo video quickly fell to bits.

Ideally, I would have cast a friend, shot footage that emulated the story, recorded a talking-head video talking about the film, edited it together, and moved on. However, being away from Baltimore (and everyone else I knew also being away from Baltimore) made it harder for my idea to become reality. Or, should I say, I thought it would make it harder. After watching so many other Seed & Spark videos, I convinced myself that there was no way I could create anything good in time and failed to do what was necessary to create a quality video.

May 2022 - Me attempting to shoot footage for the promo video. Not what I had in mind, and it was ultimately scrapped.

Issues with the video provoked more doubts about my project in general. Even writing the script for the video, I ran into challenges discussed elements of the story I still wasn’t sure of. I usually avoid moving forward on projects when all the details crystal clear; I couldn’t afford to do that with Sundown. The timeline I created forced me to keep moving—for better or for worse. This is when my self-doubt and inevitable burnout started to peak. Working 6/7 days per week and planning Sundown at the same time was emotionally draining. I asked myself “is this really going to happen?” nearly every day. My early summer burnout, mixed with a fear of failure and a splash of inexperience created a perfect self-sabotage cocktail. There’s a universe that exists where June 2022 was super productive and fulfilling for me. This isn’t that universe.

Pulling myself back to reality, I knew Sundown had to happen. Yes, because I made a commitment to Studio North, but mostly because I made a commitment to myself. I learned that had to lean on my crew members for external support since my well of internal motivation was running dry. John became my right-hand man and my biggest source of support in the early stages of the project. Aarushi Krishnan joined us as a co-producer early in the month, which I was extremely grateful for.

June 2022 - Aarushi joins 'Sundown' and I had more shoulders to cry on :)

June wasn’t a complete bust. We did set up the Seed & Spark project page without the video, highlighting the story, the crew, and some incentives for donation. June 6, we posted our first post to the Sundown Instagram, created by Nikki Ucheya, which received such positive feedback.

May/June 2022 - Our first marketing meeting and our first Instagram post. I was so overwhelmed with love.

June forced me to confront my deep-set insecurities about Sundown and about my abilities as a filmmaker in general. I am endlessly thankful for everyone I worked with in the early stages of Sundown. I (and my project) survived June, but the month was a lesson in knowing when to reach out for support. The month ended with us moving closer to casting, final script revisions, and of course, shooting. July threatened its own challenges, but after hitting the rock bottom in June, I had nowhere to go but up.

Can we manipulate who we actually hate, and who we truly love?

Oldboy (2003), is a South Korean neo-noir film directed by Park Chan-wook. The film starts with the main character, Oh Dae-su, being kidnapped on his daughter’s birthday and locked in a sealed hotel room for 15 years. It is undoubtedly that the story develops with Oh’s avenge of the person who kidnapped him, but the film is indeed more about love.  

While the film is shot from Oh’s perspective, I would like to interpret the love and hatred of the antagonist, Lee woo-jin’s view. Lee fell in love with his sister, and Oh accidentally saw their incest in their high school. After Oh told the story to his friends, rumors spread out in their neighborhood and eventually led to Lee’s sister’s suicide. As bystanders, we recognize his sister’s death as the tragedy of the judgment from society towards incest. However, for Lee, Oh is the only specific person he could possibly blame, especially deep inside his mind, he knows that his cowardness and weakness to protect the forbidden love is another determinant of his sister’s suicide. Lee’s sister’s photos are all over Lee’s wall in his penthouse, but outside his house, he almost never committed his love for her to anyone. Lee’s sister is his most valuable treasure but his deepest secret. The beginning of Lee’s hatred of Oh is the only solution that Lee could think of to make justice for his existence after his sister’s death. Lee can’t manipulate the world to accept their love, but at least he can manipulate Oh.

Therefore, Lee uses hypnosis to set Oh to fall in love with his daughter, Mi-do, after he is set free from the cell. For Lee, letting Oh experience incest is the best way to revenge and torture him. Nevertheless, at the climax of the film, when Lee reveals that Mi-do is Oh’s daughter, Lee doesn’t gain the excitement he has been expecting for 15 years. To prevent Lee from telling Mi-do the truth, Oh knees down and licks Lee’s shoes, begging him like a dog. Eventually, Oh uses the scissors to cut his tongue, using this extreme way to punish himself for saying Lee’s incest, even though it was supposed to be the moment that Oh avenges Lee for the 15 years of torture he had been through. Both of them know that Lee has complete control over Oh, but Oh’s desperate reaction to keep the secret convinces Lee of his love for Mi-do and also arouses Lee’s compunction for letting his sister suicided. His hatred becomes the respect he has for the man who is now experiencing the same torn for loving his blood family, and Oh’s valor to protect Mi-do is what Lee wished he could have had. While in terms of the mise-en-scene, the intense violence and distorting bloodiness in this sequence were disturbing to watch at first, while it also functions as a way to contradict the dirty world and pure love. No matter how much blood they get, there is a place in their heart that needs to be kept absolutely clean.

The love between the immediate blood family in the film is controversial, and we never know if the love between Oh and Mi-do is because of manipulation or not. But if we think about this, the concept of “incest” is also the product of social restraint, a cage that human beings build for ourselves. And when this uncontrollable feeling appears as how it is, shall we embrace it, forget it, or destroy it? Should we manipulate our minds and fight against the world to protect the purity of our love, like how Oh chooses to get hypnotized again and forget that Mi-do is his daughter? Or should we give up on our lives like Lee and his sister and try reaching another world where there are no interruptions from outside?

Instead of searching for the answer to who we love, it might be easier to just accept the feelings we have and do our best to protect this uncontrollable feeling that almost every human being has.

Sundown: A New Dawn (Beginnings)

Where do I begin talking about this project? Almost a year after its conception, I sit here reflecting on the journey of bringing my “coming of age thriller,” Sundown, to life. I’ll begin at the very beginning, eleven months ago when I wrote the pitch for my script.

 

October 2021 - Early October, when all 'Sundown' meant was the time of day. Little did I know what a turbulent semester this would be, so this is a moment of blissful ignorance, enjoying Hoptoberfest.

 

Fall 2021, the start of my sophomore year, I took Introduction to Screenwriting where I spent most of the term revising a script I grew to dislike by the end of the course. However, our final assignment was to write a new three-to-five-page script. In thinking about what to write, I searched for themes that attracted me. I thought back to a few months prior when I created a pitch for a five-page, no-dialogue film for Studio North’s production committee. In October, the committee was preparing to choose a short film to produce that semester, and I had yet to think of anything to pitch.

Around that time, my Intro class read the first few pages of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and I then decided to watch the full movie on Halloween. I resonated with the underlying theme of childhood trauma executed with a predominantly Black cast. Additionally, I thought about what kind of story works well with highly visual, extremely short formats. I needed a compelling exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution— all within five pages. With these elements put together, I settled on a thriller about a kid from Baltimore who experiences childhood trauma after he disobeys his mother one night. Intro Sundown.

 

October 2021 - Initial (and very messy) notes about the story in preparation for Studio North's production committee pitch session. Note the 4:21am edit time.

Writing the origin of the trauma and attempting to inject a semblance of Peele-esque cultural significance into my story, I thought about the phenomenon of “sundown towns” in America. The title alludes to the existence of towns and neighborhoods in the United States that implemented de facto segregation, using signage to usher people of color out of the town after sunset. While the story grew to abandon the idea of racial-based trauma, I enjoyed using “sundown” as a foundation to explore a story about a Black teenager who endures a unique trauma after staying out past sunset. This is where my main character, Mikey, comes in, and where the story of Sundown falls into place.

October-December 2021 - Cover slide for my 'Sundown' pitch deck. Excerpt from an early draft of 'Sundown.' So many lines to be cut in future revisions.

Though the production committee did not vote for my pitch, I decided to revisit Sundown for my final Intro assignment. I had only created a pitch for the committee, so I moved to write my first draft of Sundown in December. While writing the first draft, I had the idea to incorporate a time jump at the end. After Mikey disobeys his mother and gets caught by a “creature” after sundown, we see him ten years later, severely impacted by his childhood trauma. Though this pushed me slightly over the page limit, I was adamant that the reader (and eventually, the audience) should see the lasting impacts of Mikey’s childhood trauma on his mental health. Feeling confident in this addition, and tired after a long week of finals, I submitted Sundown the night of December 21.

December 2021 - The night I submitted 'Sundown' for my Intro to Screenwriting course; I made a last-minute solo trip to the last night of Christmas Village downtown. My COVID-conscious gloved hand holding a bratwurst. So cold, but so worth it.

After a tumultuous semester, I felt like Sundown was the victory I desperately needed, especially after weeks of working on other writing I had little passion for. In a way, I felt that the turmoil of my personal life catalyzed my decision to write about such a dark premise. I struggled with excess demands of my time, a less-than-comfortable living space, and the regular stress and sadness that comes with being a college student trying to do it all. Thankfully, I was able to channel my feelings into something productive: a story that I wanted to take further than a final assignment in an introductory screenwriting class. 

Our professor, Titus Burrell, encouraged all the Intro students to submit their pieces to the Baltimore Screenwriter’s Competition for the 2022 cycle. I knew I didn’t want to submit my main Intro piece, which I had grown to dislike for various reasons. After a bit of thought, and some (read: a lot of) external pressure from an impending January 21 deadline, I made yet another revision of Sundown, bumping it out from six pages to fifteen pages. With high hope (but low expectations), I submitted Sundown on the final day of the competition, emailing the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts at 8:00am and running downtown to drop off my script at 3:00pm since it was too late for snail mail. It would be another four months before I heard anything from the competition (spoiler: I only made it to the second round, which I am still proud of nonetheless!).

January 2022 - Flyer for the Baltimore Screenwriter's competition.

January 2022 - Results from the Screenwriter's Competition. Baby steps (or something like that)!

In the meantime, another opportunity presented itself: the Studio North 2022-2023 grant cycle. The Studio North grant was something I learned about as a freshman, and I always had prospects of applying to it—during my junior year. I had a lot of trepidation about applying to the grant this year, mainly due to my (perceived) lack of experience and absence of an idea to produce. At this point in time, it’s early April, and I had not thought about Sundown in months during the new semester. Contemplating the possibility of applying for the Studio North grant, I eventually found my way back to Sundown and ultimately wrote another revision for the application. Despite my many anxieties, I took a leap of faith and applied to the grant cycle in early May (after much encouragement from Film and Media friends and faculty). In the face of all my self-doubt, I was one of two students to win this year’s production grant— news I celebrated through more end-of-semester stress and a nagging cold.

May 2022 - The Studio North premiere for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 grant cycle films (left to right: Abena Ababio, Ruby Baden, Mary Yan, Ellie Rha, and Brian Song), the day before I pitched 'Sundown,' and two days before I was awarded one of two grants for the 2022-2023 cycle.

This news was as much to my excitement as it was to my chagrin: now, I had to somehow produce a short film. My self-doubts began to creep back in as I looked towards the next year with less-than-positive prospects. However, by this time, I had received coverage notes from the Screenwriter’s Competition, along with pitch notes from the Studio North executive board. Both sets of comments sent me well on my way to beginning a third revision, which I aimed to complete in early June, giving myself approximately one month. Looking at the summer ahead of me, I began to set things in motion to fundraise, cast, and ultimately film Sundown at the end of the summer. With a fast-approaching production timeline and a lot of work to do, I knew I would be dedicated to Sundown as if it were a full-time job. I had much to think about, such as where and how I’ll cast, logistics, budget, art direction, and much, much more. More than anything, I knew I had to trust myself if any of this was going to work, which was the hardest part. Taking yet another leap of faith, I took the first step towards a summer of preparation for my first short film. 

May 2022 - Back home, on a long walk I used to think through my plan for the rest of the summer. I couldn't possibly anticipate the kind of summer I was about to have, but I had my moment of peace before the craziness began.

Free Indirect Discourse as Artistic Marxism in Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows

In his 1966 film  The Hawks and the Sparrows, Pier Paolo Pasolini shows viewers a “narrative poem” concerning religion, Marxism and the various social strata present in Italy, here specifically in the outskirts of Rome. As in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, 1964), Pasolini utilizes religious imagery among other “stylemes” and “im-signs” in order to expound on the hypocrisy of capitalism and the shortcomings of religious as well as Marxist ideologies as they pertain to the “real world”. In the film’s second-act digression, a “left-wing intellectual” crow tells Totò and his son Ninetto a story about Franciscan friars tasked with teaching God’s message of love to the hawks and the sparrows. The story is a parable for the futility of religious dogma, as it is in the hawks’ nature to eat the sparrows, regardless of abstract concepts of love. The hawks respond, “we are all God, then”; the sparrows question the value of the friars’ message, as it does not solve their problems of hunger. These themes are repeated later in the film, when Totò and Ninetto travel to different homes in the countryside, further illustrating the presence of an inescapable social hierarchy for which the film proposes the solution of Marxist ideology—a solution that ultimately fails when applied to the characters’ social reality.

In his essay “The Cinema of Poetry”, Pasolini emphasizes the importance of what he terms “free indirect discourse” in poeticizing the medium of film. However, The Hawks and the Sparrows presents distinct points of view through interactions between characters, namely Totò and his son with the people they encounter along their journey. At first, this seems to present a lack of continuity in Pasolini’s argument—a flaw which is definitely present in his essay. But Pasolini’s use of people and animals to embody abstract ideologies turns these characters into semiotic markers rather than concrete personalities. 

This technique is augmented by the presence of the parable in the film, in which Totò and Ninetto also play the 13th-century friars who must spread the gospel to the birds. The crow’s role of ideological lecturer attributes these social lessons to the natural order of the world, and the film’s surrealist imagery and noticeable camera movement (e.g. jump cuts, montage sequences, etc.) fulfill Pasolini’s requirements for “poetic cinema”. 

The film concludes with a callback to the film’s first scene, in which Totò explains to Ninetto the influence of the moon on the tides: “It draws all the garbage to the shore.” Continuing their journey, Totò, Ninetto and the crow come upon a woman named Luna, the Italian for “moon”. Both men feign stomachaches and take turns “swimming” through a cornfield to reach Luna; they each have sex with Luna in the corn. Afterwards, finding the crow pedantic and boring, the two men kill and eat it, leaving its steaming remains on the side of the road and walking onward. This scene is the final, definitive instance of nature winning out over pure ideology: the humans are higher on the food chain than the crow, so they kill him, and the mission of the friars is once again a failure, now with humans proven to be no better than the animals the friars sought to lecture. The previous montage of footage from Italian Communist leader Palmiro Tagliotti’s funeral, the intellectual with whom the crow’s ideology is explicitly aligned, foreshadows this end for the crow. 

The Servant's Cold Comic Irony

Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) delves into class conflict with piercingly economical incisions. The most salacious elements of the story are shown from blocked vantage points; we hear the boring edges of conversations about potentially interesting things. The narrative unfolds along prescribed lines: Tony, a young member of the declining British upper crust, seeks to employ a manservant for his new home. Hugo Barrett is well-trained and seems to know his place. Tony impresses his girlfriend, Susan, with vague plans to “clear the jungle” and build a number of cities in Brazil to “fill with people from Asia Minor.” 

Harold Pinter’s script thus matter-of-factly reveals a system of poorly-conceived imperialist idealists nominally clinging to relevance, blissfully and pathetically unaware of the surrounding world’s changing conditions. Tony’s new house, supposedly a mere waystation between adolescence and foreign conquest, becomes with Barrett’s help a last stop on a road toward decadent irrelevance, a tastefully decorated funhouse-brothel-crypt. Pinter and Losey’s application of social conventions to a story about their breakdown emphasizes the irony of such conventions’ strict usage in a society that has largely outgrown the need for them. 

The film’s recurring song, “All Gone,” scores scenes of love and betrayal with mocking detachment: the soul-bearing drama of the lyrics, “can’t love without you, must love without you,” as characters struggle to express themselves beyond allusions to unsavory topics, underscores their repression to an almost comedic level. When Tony visits a beatnik bar, his incongruence with the environment is emphasized by the juxtaposition of Tony’s stiffness with the twangy guitar music. 

Similarly, a scene in which Tony and Susan visit a noble older couple’s manor (unclear whether they are Susan’s parents, Tony’s parents, some other distant relation, or just members of the couple’s milieu) starkly contrasts imposing mise-en-scene with tedious dialogue to point out the ridiculousness of the ruling class. Lady Mounset works at an embroidery hoop while Lord Mounset sips a highball, the two-shot buttressed by neo classical nude statues and spindly, baroque furniture. The high-culture aesthetics of ancient civilizations loom over the elderly couple while simultaneously being relegated to the background, a visual reminder of the imperial powers after which the British Empire models itself. The couple’s leisurely pastimes denote the privilege as well as the frivolity of their class position. Another discussion of Tony’s business prospects in Brazil leads to a disagreement about the meaning of the word “poncho”: Susan defines it as the article of clothing that “drapes down in the front and behind,” while Lady Mounset maintains that it is “what the cowboys are called” in “The Argentine.” Again, the wealthy display their ignorance in matters that extend beyond the drawing-room even as that parlor visually represents the seat of western imperial power. The ease with which Barrett monopolizes Tony’s home and assumes control over his life further exemplifies the paradoxical nature of the class structure in situations that would be comical if not for the overwhelmingly pathetic downfall of Tony; when he writhes on the floor in an alcoholic stupor, we can’t help but pity him.

The LA Times called The Servant “the coldest film ever made.” To me, this description is made accurate by the ice inherent in the film’s hints of warmth, by the penetrating winter snow that is almost always visible through the townhouse windows. Warmth emanates from the hearth, lit by a resentful servant in a display of false domesticity; it emanates from glasses of brown liquor and cigarette smoke, vices that pair with and substitute for “intimate” trysts coldly arranged by that same servant. The fickle warmth of the relationship between Barrett and Tony is tinged with cold, boyish competition petrified by stifling class designations. Susan and Tony fail to express their emotions while standing in a snowy field that accentuates their repression. The Servant coldly depicts a social structure in which authentic warmth is made impossible by outdated conventions. The imperial fantasy of developing the global south is an unreachable mirage in the declining era of the empire.

Anatomy of a Hustler: Capitalist Madness in Uncut Gems and American Psycho

“You wanna win by one point or fuckin’ 30 points, KG?” asks Adam Sandler as Howard, jeweler and gambling addict. The line cues in a feverish marimba on top of an ominous synth.

KG is Celtics star Kevin Garnett, playing himself. This moment comes after KG pays Howard $165,000 in cash for an uncut opal. With this cash, Howard is finally in a position to pay off his extensive debts — but there’s still 30 minutes left in the two-hour film.

Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems is a grueling experience for its characters and viewers alike. The film barrels forward, accumulating tension without stopping to catch its breath — akin to a roller coaster with a perpetual, rapid incline. The disorienting tone and pacing help immerse us in Howard’s world, and his singular obsession with money, as it drives him to ruin.

Howard, like many tragic figures, has his fair share of hubris. Rather than a prophecy deciding his fate, however, Uncut Gems demonstrates how American capitalism creates the ideal conditions for Howard’s particular brand of go-getter. A similar societal critique is advanced in Mary Harron’s turn-of-the-century cult classic American Psycho, though in the context of corporate finance. Taking distinct stylistic and tonal approaches, the two films portray capitalist logic as a narrative force of compulsive escalation.

Both Uncut Gems and American Psycho omit the starting and turning points of their protagonists’ unraveling, resulting in an unsettling narrative inertia. This choice allows the films to level their critiques beyond their protagonists at the environments that shape them.

Uncut Gems is set into motion with the delivery of an Ethiopian opal that Howard, deep in debt, plans to sell. KG, however, insists on borrowing the opal for good luck at his NBA game. From there, the film follows Howard, growing increasingly desperate, as he scrambles to get the opal back while evading loan sharks.

After Howard finally does sell the opal, our relief quickly evaporates when he decides to gamble the money. “This is how I win,” he explains, delivering a kind of manifesto as the marimba track intensifies. Both lucidity and madness might be read into his gaze, which is partly shielded behind black shades.

Howard does win, in a sense: His bet wins him over $1 million. And then a loan shark shoots him in the head. The final shot zooms into his serene, lifeless face; Howard is finally at rest. His death curbs the inertia of his gambling addiction, which incidentally ends on a high.

So ends a nuanced depiction of gambling addiction — not as a failure of personal responsibility, but as a powerful capitalist impetus. The incentive to “win” cannot be chalked up to pure greed: Howard’s obsession with chasing wealth far surpasses any desire for its rewards, and the camera takes no aesthetic pleasure in material glamor. As misguided as Howard may be, his glorification of wealth for wealth’s sake is a condemnation of the system that incentivizes it.

American Psycho’s serial murdering protagonist, meanwhile, is indisputably evil, but this characterization similarly serves a critique of his milieu. It owes its success to a stark tonal difference from Uncut Gems’ grittiness; eschewing subtlety, American Psycho hyperbolizes the archetypal Wall Street investor with the self-serious, image-conscious Patrick Bateman, who finds an outlet for his neuroses in brutal homicide.

In the iconic opening scene, Bateman briefly introduces himself before diving into a catalog of his morning routine. This voiceover accompanies a visual representation of his systematic inventory-taking, featuring close-ups on sculpted body parts and luxurious toiletries and long shots of his apartment in the vein of an interior design magazine. Bateman presents himself as a commodity, a sum of desirable objects. This eerie scene establishes Bateman’s storefront-esque sense of self, deliberately constructed so he may relate to coworkers at a reasonable distance.

Much as we meet Howard already in debt, American Psycho foregrounds Bateman’s psychopathy, later revealing that he’s killed before. In contrast with Howard’s nosedive into mania, however, is Bateman’s increasing detachment from the world around him. Diametrically opposed to Uncut Gems’ frenzy, the corporate environment serves as a backdrop for mundane conversations between coworkers. Petty status competitions have higher stakes than the work itself, which is essentially absent from the narrative. Physical violence is at least generative for Bateman, a reprieve from the stifling nothingness of corporate existence.

The escalating tension between Bateman’s personal and professional selves drives the film toward an uncertain climax; as his body count grows, so does the challenge of compartmentalizing his two lives. After a very public murder spree, Bateman calls his lawyer with a tearful confession, presumably ending his double life — but when Bateman confronts the lawyer at a company event, he’s met with a blank stare.

The lawyer’s unresponsiveness marks a striking role reversal for Bateman, whose uncharacteristically sincere expression fills the frame. Faced with this dead end, Bateman joins a table with the same coworkers as usual, though he sits tentatively. Their conversation is aimless; they talk at each other without really listening.

As one makes a passing comment — some guys are just born cool, I guess — a wide shot captures the table’s response: While the others stare off into various distances, Bateman looks at him and snorts, then points and laughs. It’s a bizarre shot with a slightly high angle, a stylistic break that goes out of its way to show the coworkers as an egalitarian group. The interaction also departs from the norm: Bateman, attentive to his surroundings, disrupts their aloof dynamic with a genuine reaction.

For the first time, Bateman seems to comprehend the people around him and his position among them. Their usual pretentiousness, something he’s always participated in, now strikes him as ridiculous. The others point this out; when they finally recognize something “off” about Bateman, it’s when he’s at his most human. In the end, nothing fundamentally changes, save for Bateman having a realization: He and his coworkers are unknowable to each other.

Bateman’s “true self” is made irrelevant, supplanted by his corporate self. Like Howard, Bateman “wins” in that he constructs a persuasive corporate identity, but he finds himself trapped in it.

Uncut Gems and American Psycho ask us to consider the nature of such wins. Both protagonists remain unsatisfied despite capitalist success; the thrilling momentum of these narratives, as it turns out, precludes real change and growth. We might start to wonder if madness, given its economic incentives, should come as any surprise.

Opening Night Re-examines and Refracts the "Aging Actress" Trope

“I’ll do just about anything to make my character more authentic. I always have.” 

John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) is about a woman whose life is dedicated to performance. Myrtle Gordon subsumes herself in her acting roles. She has no children; her romantic relationships are with her co-star and her director; she has no age to which she will admit, lest her aging jeopardize her career. In her latest play, she stars as Virginia, an aging actress. After a car accident takes place outside the theater after a performance and a young fan is killed, Myrtle begins to hallucinate the young girl as she herself descends further into alcoholism and unreality. Myrtle speaks, like Gena Rowlands’ characters in Cassavetes’ films often do and are, like a mad person who believes she is the only sane one in the room. 

She may be the only sane one in a room of occultists preparing for a seance led by the playwright’s psychic, but her proclamations of self-knowledge are as forthcoming and easy to comprehend as they are tragically revealing of Myrtle’s own blind spots. In sacrificing herself for roles - not sleeping enough, drinking, smoking, all to “get into character” - she indulges in the hedonistic pleasures afforded her by the vocation of inhabiting another person. In pursuit of a character’s authenticity, Myrtle has lost herself; she is unable to see the young woman she once was in Virginia, the “second woman.” Because she inhabits every character so fully, Myrtle’s loss of self impedes her acting. Thus, the straightforward trope of the aging actress is reflected back upon itself, exposing the discrepancies between the artistic rendering and the reality. 

Myrtle moves between stage sets and real-life locales constantly, and themes established in the outside world recur in the narrative of the play. In Virginia’s apartment, two enormous black-and-white photographs of an old woman in a headscarf adorn the walls. Her face is etched with wrinkles, the quintessential babushka; the domineering presence of the photographs beats the play’s audience over the head with its theme of aging womanhood while serving as a clear juxtaposition with Myrtle/Virginia, whose “old” age is less obvious, more well-preserved than “decrepit.” We see the fine lines on Myrtle’s face only when she winces as she knocks back a drink in a close-up, a donning of armor before facing the audience. 

Myrtle is not as old as Virginia, and she identifies this to Sarah Goode, the playwright (played by 1930s movie star Joan Blondell, whose own career imbues the casting with the connotation of the washed-up starlet archetype) as a major sticking point in her artistic process. “You have me up there having hot flashes - I don’t have hot flashes!” Myrtle refers to herself as her character, indicating her increasing difficulty with separating the two, and implicitly accuses Sarah of humiliating her by writing such an old woman for her to play. Myrtle’s worries seem vain and ridiculous, like those of so many vain, ridiculous actresses who care more about how they appear than how accurately they portray the character: a variation on Norma Desmond, the butt of the joke. It’s a culturally accepted phenomenon, and it largely lets Hollywood off the hook for the superficial standards of practice that drive women to such hysterics. Myrtle explains it all: if she plays this role convincingly, her fate is sealed as an old actress relegated to old-woman roles. No matter how good this play might be, no matter how complex and rich of a character Virginia is, she is not an ingenue in the traditional sense and Myrtle will never be such an ingenue again. 

The paradoxical lucidity with which Myrtle analyzes her relationship to Nancy, the young fan killed in an accident outside the theater, further distinguishes her from the crazy actress trope while confirming that she is sort of textbook “crazy,” hallucinating the dead girl as a paragon of desirable youth who says things like, “I like to fuck. I like when men look at me.” Unable to let go of this version of herself who probably never was - first eighteen, then seventeen, impossibly young and beautiful and scarily willing to be used by men in ways that many aspiring actresses rationalize to themselves again and again - Myrtle conjures her and tortures herself with the phantom. When Nancy confronts Myrtle, it is the confirmation of Myrtle’s worst fears about her aging self through the eyes of the younger woman she “killed,” perhaps so no one would rise up, All About Eve -style, in her place? 

In the manner of an experimental character study, Opening Night atomizes and comments on the wider tendency of the actress to make everything about herself, the solipsism required by the profession that dramatizes every aspect of life, encouraged and pilloried by the people who want her to perform, who write plays and direct her in them. The car accident has a lingering effect on Myrtle because it is an awful thing that she witnessed and subsequently internalized, but also because the people in the car with her (her husband, Manny, the play’s director; and her co-star and stage husband, played by Cassavetes) tell the chauffeur to keep driving.

Re-Evaluating Cruising: Indictment or Incitement of Anti-Gay Violence?

Cruising (dir. William Friedkin, 1980) is a controversial film. It earns this label more through audience and critical reactions than through its content. Content-wise, it’s a bit muddled, which of course facilitates reactionary interpretations. Its depictions of gay-bashing and homophobia are as pulpily violent as its wordless scenes of semi-nude male bodies writhing in underground bars are pulpily seductive, and the picture it paints of gay life in early 1980’s New York is grim and seedy and dangerous. Released at a time when representations of homosexuality in the mainstream media were sparse and often negative, it inevitably generated backlash from gay rights groups who viewed the film as yet another exploitative depiction of a “lifestyle” in which sex is inextricably tied to violence and homoerotic urges are a mark of shame and depravity.

Given its polemical history, I was surprised to see Cruising in the Criterion Channel’s collection of “taboo-breaking” queer cinema for Pride Month. I guess it fits the description: a lot is shown that is considered “taboo” by contemporary cultural standards, although whether the taboos are broken or enforced by the film is a slippery question the answer to which changes based on the viewing context. Friedkin himself remarked that the movie was “never” an “anti-gay screed,” but rather a glimpse into the specific S&M subculture of the gay experience based on a real-life serial murder case from the era. And from a modern-day viewpoint, seeing the film within the context of all the other cinematic depictions of queer life that came after, the culture it depicts seems less monolithic. 

 

 

 

The question of interpretation is complicated by the role of the police. Although the film is far from “copaganda” - the police fail to apprehend the killer, the killer is a police officer (in a last-minute reveal that sacrifices clear character motivation for shock value) - it positions the authorities as our window into the “regular” world. The opening scene, in which a beat cop delivers a Travis Bickle-style speech to his partner about cleaning up the filth from the streets, could go either way depending on whether or not you viewed Taxi Driver as a satire. 

Al Pacino’s George Burns, an undercover officer looking to make detective, bridges the divide between the film’s two worlds; the “everyman,” in an acceptable heterosexual pairing, ostensibly more interested in doing his job than in “working over” potential suspects. The audience is made to identify with Burns, and the casting of a likeable star who served a similar narrative purpose in one of the era’s biggest successes, The Godfather, facilitates this kinship between viewer and protagonist. 

However, Cruising’s subject matter is even more “taboo” than the Italian mafia, and the content dictates an inevitable lack of subtlety that can be ascribed more to a dearth of gay media representation than to the representation in this specific film. Club scenes, post-coital scenes, and murder scenes are often unaccompanied by score, and Friedkin allows action to unfold in long, silent takes that feel more voyeuristic than judgemental. The classical theme that plays when Burns is in bed with his girlfriend connotes propriety as well as stodginess.

The killer’s act of corrective penetration - stabbing to death the man he has just sexually dominated - is his indictment of his own behavior as well as his victim’s, a manifestation of self-hatred. Or it could be, anyway. Unlike in Psycho or Dressed to Kill, there is no psychologist to sweep in at the end and explain the murderer’s perverse motivations. As oversimplified and unsatisfying as the psychological explanation often is, the lack of such a convenient wrap-up leaves us with no prescribed point of view with which to agree or contend. But is it fair to expect a clear moral answer from a film simply because it deals with “controversial” subject matter? Does the filmmaker have a “responsibility” to lead the audience down the “right” path in their thinking? At a time when gay life was not in the public eye as it is today, media depictions such as Cruising were many people’s first and only foray into that world, and although it focuses on a small subculture, Burns ultimately does not restrict his violence to members of that subculture when he murders his neighbor, a gay man who does not participate in the “scene.” The film’s final twist is sticky because it traces this violence back to the authorities while acknowledging that elements of that same violence (the police costumes, the power dynamics) are also present in the subculture the authorities aim to attack. The film falls short of breaking the taboos it exposes, instead grimly reinforcing them.

Very Important Persons: Period Satire in The Death of Stalin and The Favourite

In the typical fashion of political satire, monarchies and oligarchies serve as wells of comedy in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (2018) and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017). Its subjects, however, are out of power; The Favourite depicts the court of Queen Anne of Great Britain in the early 18th century, and The Death of Stalin, while recent history, depicts the ruling committee of a now-dissolved nation. From score to costuming to set design, these films embrace period drama conventions and root themselves in history. This genre-melding provides a viewpoint of the human condition that neither contemporary satire nor straightforward historical accounts can access on their own.

Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, The Death of Stalin portrays the central committee’s response to their leader’s demise and their ensuing power struggle, which ends in one member’s execution and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power. The committee members are simultaneously old friends and bitter rivals, at times timid and other times ruthless. Comic actors play many of its essential roles, most notably Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev and Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov, Stalin’s gullible successor. This casting reflects the film’s irreverent approach to depicting historical figures, as it imagines comedic situations and banter within the context of high-stakes political turmoil.

As the audience witnesses mythic figures portrayed as fallible humans, the characters themselves experience the same with Stalin’s passing. The committee finds their leader’s dead body on the floor of his office, collapsed in a puddle of urine. They perform grief, and it’s not clear who the exaggeration is meant to convince — it could be Stalin, the other ministers, even themselves. The film finds humor in this grief; Malenkov proclaims that Stalin is irreplaceable, for example, before pointing out that he’s the successor. “Calamity, calamity,” Khrushchev laments as he casually takes off his coat. As the characters state their distress, the camera remains impersonally distant rather than capturing their faces in close-up as one might expect.

There’s also the running joke of the urine puddle: After his proclamation of grief, Malenkov steps on the wet spot and asks, “Is this?” as the camera tilts down to the puddle. The others make the same mistake and then warn the others, who shuffle around the spot. Each time, the grief is quickly interrupted and abandoned. These trivial asides often occur in long shots where Stalin’s horizontal body remains in frame, rendering him an afterthought, which further minimizes the gravity of death as an individual — what his death means commands much attention. The men then hoist the body off the ground together, shuffling and giving each other commands as though they were transporting furniture.

The levity of this scene seems dissonant with the historical significance of Stalin’s death; the committee’s reactions ask us to consider the difference between what Stalin represented versus Stalin as an individual. His physical body becomes an inconvenience in this scene, and as the ministers deal with the material reality of his death rather than its abstract meaning, the film convinces us of their status as human beings rather than historical concepts.

The Favourite takes a similarly candid approach in representing Queen Anne, its highest-ranking character. I say highest ranking because Anne, while the most powerful character in name, is vulnerable to other characters’ emotional power over her. The film sees Anne most often in a passive role, reacting to her surrounding circumstances. The central conflict occurs between Anne’s trusted confidant and lover Sarah Churchill and her cousin Abigail, whose arrival changes the court’s status quo. While Sarah’s influence over Anne allows her to influence her decision-making, Abigail develops a friendship with Anne that challenges Sarah’s political and emotional power over her.

The value of winning Anne’s favor means that the smallest actions, like a certain intonation or glance, can have significant consequences for the characters’ relationships. Anne’s power — or rather, her title — actually makes her more susceptible to manipulation. She expects to be catered to and cared for, surrendering agency as an exercise of privilege.

Early in the film, Abigail pours Anne hot chocolate, but Sarah stops her, telling Anne it’s unhealthy. Anne protests; the camera captures Abigail, confused, facing the other two on the couch as they argue. She stands with the cup in a low-angle shot, as though from Anne’s vantage point. Though low-angle shots often assign the subject power, this one seems unique. This angle exemplifies the bizarre power dynamic in Anne’s close relationships, as Anne requires her subordinates to dote on her. Sarah, for instance, regulates Anne’s diet to a comical extent; although she allows Anne to drink the hot chocolate, Anne lets the cup sit untouched, signaling her faith in Sarah’s judgment.

The absurdity of this exchange also results from its contrast with Sarah and Anne’s preceding political discussion. As we watch Abigail pour the hot chocolate, the other two talk offscreen about Anne’s raising property taxes to fund the war against France, at Sarah’s insistence. “Are the people really angry about the land tax?” Anne asks. These far-reaching policy decisions take place in the background, speaking to Anne’s limited regard for her actual governing power. Severely detached from the nation she rules, she treats politics as she does interpersonal relationships. Her fickleness and naivety speak to the isolating effect that power can have on a human being, warping their perspective.

As a result, the competition for Anne’s affection is also a competition for power. Her lopsided priorities fuel much of the film’s humor, producing situational irony as the characters assign grave importance to trivial interactions. In this way, The Favourite achieves a similar tone as The Death of Stalin, balancing humor and darkness, but by depicting exaggerated reverence rather than irreverence.

Essential for both The Death of Stalin and The Favourite and distinguishing them from standard cinematic accounts of history is their focus on interpersonal pettiness, which not only brings abstract historical figures to life but makes their humanity plainly visible. The films derive humor from how their neuroses and social blunders fuel political conflict. These foibles aren’t just entertaining, though; they have major consequences for society at large. The contrast between characters’ earthly concerns and their lofty titles and responsibility allows both films to tread a fine line between comedy and darkness. With their faults amplified by considerable power, the ruling class drags subordinates and the public into their internal conflicts, a dynamic neither film allows us to forget.

Saboteur: A Harbinger of Blacklist Paranoia

Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) predates the first official Hollywood blacklist by five years, but its themes of scapegoating, patriotism and paranoia reflect such a period of upheaval in which the seemingly trustworthy are found suspect, and vice versa, as “true Americans'' seek out disloyal enemies on home soil. Barry Kane, a California factory worker, becomes a fugitive from the law after authorities wrongfully peg him as the saboteur who set fire to an aircraft factory. The classic Hitchcock premise - a man falsely accused of a crime, pulled into a world of subterfuge and corruption that goes to the top, accompanied (often unwillingly) by a skeptical but ultimately acquiescent femme noir - takes on a topical meaning: the sabotage of which Barry has been accused is a crime against the war effort, against his fellow workers, against America itself.

Barry first takes off to find Frank Fry, a mysterious factory worker (played by Norman Lloyd, whose friendship with Elia Kazan notably ended after Kazan named him among other actors for the HUAC in 1952) who handed Barry a fire extinguisher containing gasoline when the blaze broke out. Evading the police after they come to question him at the home of his deceased friend, Mason, Barry follows an address he noted from a dropped envelope of Fry’s to an opulent ranch in High Desert. Charles Tobin, the ranch’s owner, lovingly plays with his infant granddaughter as he informs Barry that the police are on their way to arrest him in place of the real saboteur, Fry, a minion of Tobin’s. 

As Tobin has him arrested, Barry laments that “just because you have a big ranch with a pool, everyone will believe what you say.” Tobin agrees, smugly asking, “who are they going to believe? I am an upstanding member of this community.” The recognition of Tobin as such, while an innocent with lower socioeconomic standing is made to take the blame, suggests that the unfair conditions of this world are not unique to Barry’s situation.

When Barry takes refuge in a blind man’s home, he identifies himself as “Barry Mason.” This adoption of the dead worker and friend’s name signifies the working-class solidarity that makes men like Mason and Barry himself expendable in the eyes of the sabotage’s wealthy mastermind. The blind man’s niece, Patricia, is intent on turning Barry in as soon as she sees his handcuffs, claiming it is her “duty as an American” to do so. She remarks that Barry fits the character of a saboteur in a way that Tobin does not, again causing Barry to cite Tobin’s wealth as the source of this misconception. Kane’s primary helpers in his escape are a blind man and a caravan of circus freaks, people marginalized by society in the same way he is as a criminal. 

Saboteur ends with Barry chasing Fry to the top of the Statue of Liberty, where Fry falls to his death: the villain meets his demise, with a poetic nod to the national ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” But Tobin, the financier behind the sabotage, remains unpunished and free to live at his family ranch, suggesting that the trappings of wealth and good social standing are enough to grant one impunity even in a country based on values of justice and equality. Coincidentally, the screenplay was written by Dorothy Parker and Peter Viertel, both of whom were also named on the Hollywood blacklist. I watched this movie with my dad, who dismissed the dialogue as "weird" the way that dialogue in old movies just is weird to modern audiences. I think some of that comes from the need at that time for coded language to get around censors, as well as subversive subtext that exists in any film about a man wrongfully accused of a crime - a criticism of the government, of class, of the system writ large.