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The Return (2003): The Killing of a God-like Father

Green water ripples like a kaleidoscope, accompanied by a low, raspy melody that hints at the ocean's hidden secret. So begins Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return. Below the surface, the camera navigates the desolate seabed, revealing ancient coral reefs before settling on a sunken rowboat, its prow tied with a rope. Underwater, the boat is no longer visible to the world, yet the rope suggests its reachable presence, akin to the knowledge of God through faith. Built around days of the week, the film starts on Sunday, the weekly memorial of Jesus’s Resurrection. Two brothers, Andrei (14) and Ivan (12), alongside their friends, challenge each other to leap into the sea from a diving board. In an overhead shot, the two siblings stand on the board, their presence diminished by the vast ocean. Andrei follows suit, but Ivan steps back, fearing heights and the water suggestive of God. Likewise, when their father returns home after 12 years, the two brothers respond differently: Andrei is accepting while Ivan is skeptical, if not fearful, of this stranger’s appearance. So for Ivan, part of growing up is to come to terms with the unknown, whether the father, the ocean, or God.

Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, ca. 1483; Brera Gallery, Milan. Flickr, by Richard Mortel (2019).

In fact, the father is like God, appearing out of nowhere. When the mother announces the news, she simply says, “Your father’s sleeping,” as if his existence does not need to be confirmed. When Andrei gently pushes the door open, the two brothers see their father lying on the bed with the sheet covering him from the waist down, his head slightly tilted, similar to Andrea Mantegna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Andrei, like the mourners in the painting, is close to tears as Ivan hastily searches the attic, sifting through a dusty box. He discovers an illustrated Bible concealing an old photograph of his father. A close-up shot juxtaposes the foreground family photo with the sacrifice of Isaac, Ivan’s doubt overpowering faith. At dinner, after asking the mother to pour the brothers some wine, the father proposes a fishing trip with his sons. The Ichthys standing for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Our Savior” in ancient Greek further highlights the father’s God-like presence.

Church of the Most Holy Rosary, Tullow, County Carlow, Ireland. Wikimedia Commons, by Andreas F. Borchert (2013).

But the father, from forcing Ivan to call him “Dad” to engaging in street justice, is like Matthew’s Jesus, a violent revolutionary who supposes, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father (Matthew 10:34-36).” Without faith, Ivan is like the doubting Thomas who questions his father’s past and intentions. On the first night, Andrei and Ivan lie side by side in the tent. Andrei has his eyes closed when the still-awake Ivan initiates a conversation about their father's remark that he once had too many fish. “Where could that have happened?” Ivan asks. Andrei nonchalantly responds, “In the north, maybe.” Ivan shrugs off Andrei’s elbow as if to shake off his brother's faith. “He’s just lying,” Ivan concludes. “He could be a gangster. He could slit our throats.” As the father becomes more abusive and authoritarian, Ivan, in the next tent scene, promises that he will kill their father if he touches him. The frustrated Ivan then opens the journal and writes down his promise, foreshadowing its happening. Next to him, Andrei, head down, can only watch with concern like a helpless disciple.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Wikimedia Commons, by Sailko (2016).

In a fight with his father, Ivan, holding a knife, cries, “I could love you if you were different, but you’re terrible.” The father tries to approach and reason, but Ivan drops the knife and runs away. He climbs up to a watchtower and threatens to jump down if the father follows him. Close to executing his unrealized jump, Ivan, however, witnesses his father's fatal fall from the ladder. Echoing the diving scene, the film shows an overhead shot of the dead father on the ground, with a fallen log beside him. The doubting Thomas finally senses Jesus’s wounds. In the end, the two brothers witness their father's body descending into the ocean, along with all the rights and wrongs. The identity of the father, whether perceived as God or the Devil, becomes inconsequential when Ivan calls out, “Dad,” finally conquering his fear or lack of faith. But this achievement is not a result of taking a heroic leap but of enduring the agony that defines the adult world.

Simple Men (1992): Trouble and Desire in the Quest of an Anarchist Father

Early one morning at the loading dock, a fierce young woman (Vera) aims a gun at a blindfolded security guard. “Don't move,” she demands, but the guard remains unfazed. “My foot's asleep,” he replies, unclear if he is just being ready to surrender or if he is so detached that the fear doesn't register with him. In the background, a man (Frank) in shallow focus loads a truck with boxes. A robbery is in progress. Such is the opening shot of Hal Hartley’s Simple Men, where deadpan humor intertwines with troublesome desire. The protagonist Bill, in love with Vera, appears from the foreground taking charge of the guard when Vera and Frank board the truck. Bill is the gang's leader, yet unaware that Vera and Frank have plotted to betray him. Hidden desire has taken shape, but what interests Bill is the medallion that the guard wears: it bears the image of the Virgin Mary. “She’s good-looking, huh?” Bill asks the guard if he can have it, and only when Bill assures that the guard is not in danger does the guard agree to let it go. “Be good to her and she’ll be good to you,” the guard says. But what does “good” mean, whether to the people in the intimate circle or to the larger society? Bill, double-crossed by his partners, is on the lam for the crime, and morality is the last he would consider. Therefore, his following journey with his younger brother Dennis to find their father, himself on the run from the feds for an alleged bombing, is not so much to understand another person, but to piece together his destabilized character against the backdrop of good and evil.

Virgin Mary. Flickr, by iProzac (2009).

Such an attempt takes place on the first night of the quest, in an abandoned cafe, chairs tilted and collapsed, graffiti scattering the walls. The two brothers sit side by side sipping a bottle of scotch, their figures visible only with the few beams of light slicing through the windows at their backs. The darkness and chaos, along with the alcohol, foreshadow this failed attempt to become a better person. Bill insists, “The difference between Dad and me is that I just fuck with the law. He fucked with the government.” Bill feels no remorse for his criminal deeds, believing that as long as he does not get caught, it is fine to break the law. Dennis not wanting to argue with the unreasonable Bill shuts himself in a telephone booth, but Bill takes pride in his distorted philosophy, even hoping to lecture their father on criminality if they find him. “The old man’s a fool,” Bill says. Apart from his lack of guilt, Bill remains an immature child blaming his parent for familial neglect, refusing to acknowledge his own accountability. Dennis gives the final remark, “Nobody’s perfect,” leaving Bill at a loss of words. Instead of projecting anger and shame on the father, Dennis reminds Bill to first think of his own defect.

Bill then laments his “broken heart,” slouched in his chair, like a child acting out for attention. Walking out of the booth, Dennis tells Bill that he will get over it. Bill then transforms this despair into hatred as he says, “Women don’t want you to love them.” Again, Dennis is tired of Bill’s childish talk, takes off his glasses, and lies on the sofa. Bill faces the window, his figure completely in shadow, plotting to seduce “the first good-looking blonde woman” he sees tomorrow but not falling in love with her. He turns away from the window and walks closer to the camera, gradually entering the dimly lit space, with his reflection slowly manifesting in the window—a new persona starts to take shape. “Mysterious. Thoughtful. Deep. But modest.” This is what women are drawn to, and Bill intends to conform to this mold. Instead of seeking revenge on Vera or Frank, Bill goes further astray, harboring hatred for all women. Ironically, the next morning when Bill acquires a motorcycle from Ned, the cafe’s owner, to continue the journey, Bill gives Ned the medallion as a present and repeats what the guard tells him, “Be good to her and she’ll be good to you.” Bill has decided to distance himself from human goodness, but the guard’s teaching at least leaves an impression. And the displacement of the medallion does not indicate the ultimate failure of the quest, as a real Virgin-Mary-like figure—Kate—is about to enter the film and offer redemption to the morally troubled Bill.

The Pieta by Michelangelo. Flickr, by Dennis Jarvis (2011).

Bill meets Kate at a small town where the motorcycle breaks down on the way. Kate, the matriarch of the community, sent her ex-husband to jail because she stuck to the principle that she didn’t lie for anybody. Steadfast in her moral principles, well-loved by the men, Kate embodies virtues and beauty, akin to the Virgin Mary. Even the misogynistic Bill falls in love with Kate when she reiterates the four qualities that Bill mentions in his speech last night to describe her impression of Bill at a burnt-down house that the father’s address leads to. Embarrassed, Bill does not expect his scheming to be articulated in such a forthright manner, denying all the characters that Kate puts forth and suggesting leaving. Kate, however, wants to dig up and transplant a tree before returning, which further aligns her with the Virgin Mary as they both are givers of life. At night, Bill confesses to Kate. “Be good to her and she’ll be good to you,” Bill says to Kate after she laments, “All of those men have gone out of my life.” Now that he has found his love, Bill promises that he will be different from other men and will make Kate happy. To Dennis, Bill even expresses his wish to settle down and run a tree farm for Kate. “Crime isn’t a way of life for me,” he concludes.

However, Bill has to pay the price for what he did. The next morning, the police arrive, and Dennis encourages Bill to run away with their father. The father and the son meet at the dock. They stand afar. Neither attempts to bridge the physical gap, choosing to remain silent. Bill comes to his epiphany. He envisions the life he wants, unlike his father's fugitive existence, so he returns to Kate and embraces his imminent arrest. The quest of the father ends with Bill taking up his responsibility, mending the troubled past so as to welcome a better future. In the final shot, Bill leans on Kate’s chest when an off-screen officer says, “Don’t move,” mirroring the opening, only that we don’t feel any unsettlement. Kate is peaceful, like Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà, as she understands all the trouble that passion and desire have to bring.

 

Mon Oncle (1958): Dirty Freedom and Shiny Constraint in a Shifting City Landscape

Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle opens with credits designed as street signs positioned against a construction site, a crane in front of a white high-rise, a Paris so new it's still being built. The city is in the process of modernization. After the opening credit, the film cuts to the city’s old neighborhood consisting of crumbling stone buildings and narrow pathways, juxtaposing the new Paris with the old one. A few street dogs appear in the scene. The camera follows the movement of the dogs traveling from the old neighborhood to the new suburb until they stop in front of a villa of pure shapes and clean lines locked behind an iron gate. One dog crawls into the villa through a hole in the gate while the rest watch a woman, Mme. Arpel, carry it into the house with one hand, almost dropping it to the ground, visibly disgusted by its dirt.

Dog. Flickr, by gildas_f (2009).

The iron gate both physically and metaphorically separates house and inhabitants from the lower end. Outside the villa, the dogs run around freely and enjoy a diversified city landscape, whether impoverished or vibrant. As they reach the street corner, they stop to rummage through the trashcans. The camera, mimicking the frankness of such curiosity, shows a close-up shot of the Arpels’ dog getting a taste of an open can, unveiling the unfiltered delight of the primal instinct. This is something it cannot enjoy in the villa where the whooshing of the vacuum is as offbeat as the fish fountain in the garden. In fact, when Mon Oncle Monsieur Hulot first appears in the film, he wanders the flea market, with the head of a dead fish popping out of his tote. A dog of a food stall bares his teeth to the fish head, as if protesting against the controlling Arpels for their treatment of its peer. And it is in this space outside the villa can we see such lively interaction, which extends beyond human beings and involves the interplay between the living and the inanimate.

Hulot is like the dogs, from his estrangement from his sister Mme. Arpel and her husband to his love of the dirty freedom. He picks up his nine-year-old nephew, Gérard, from school and takes him back to the villa. Yet, halfway through the S-shaped path in the garden, he stops, watches Gérard get into the house, turns around, and leaves. When Mme. Arpel asks, “Are you not coming in?” Hulot doesn’t even bother answering. He simply waves his umbrella in the air gesturing an obvious no, not interested in this seemingly shiny lifestyle. Nor is he interested in the office work. When his brother-in-law tries to get him a job, in an effort to get him out of town and away from Gérard who adores him and is influenced by his nonconforming ways, he botches the job interview, removing his ill-fitting shoes to empty out the sand. He continues to bumble around when M. Arpel offers him a position in his own factory. Meanwhile, Mme. Arpel decides what the disordered and disruptive Hulot needs is a mate.

Replica of Villa Arpel at the Cent Quatre in Paris. Flickr, by Clem (2010).

Perhaps the most hilarious scene occurs when her matchmaking at the villa goes awry, leading to the eventual clash between the two battling forces: dirty freedom versus shiny constraint. Already disconcerted by the M. Arpel’s sudden job offering, Hulot is introduced to a neighbor by Mme. Arpel who hands him a modern gadget, a white stick designed to hold the drinks. “Stick this in the ground. Very practical,” said Mme. Arpel. However, it doesn’t stand, so Hulot has to push it into the sand farther from them while coughing from the smoke that the neighbor blows. It is then the accident occurs: the water stops flowing from the fish fountain and starts coming out from the hole created by the stick. Finally, the very product designed for this high-end life threatens its meticulously maintained orderliness. But the neighbor is still unaware of the scene and goes on rambling on how exceptional M. Arpel and Mme. Arpel are. Only Pichard, who works for M. Arpel, offers to fix the leak while the others move along the inconveniently paved pathway with their supplies, still engaging in ineffective exchange. Fortunately, Pichard, now covered in dirt, appears from the crack, successfully fixing the fountain. But when Mme. Arpel turns on the water, the fish fountain splashes mud all over the place until the water gradually becomes clean again. Hulot, also soaked and dirty, has already gone to the top of the house, and with the help of Gérard, Hulot drops more dirt to the ground, a more outright encroachment on the villa’s constrained orderliness. The villa is now taken over by rawness in a literal sense, ultimately celebrating the triumph of genuineness over affectation in the anxiety of transformation and modernization.

The Child in Cell - Lee Hwan-kyung's Miracle in Cell No.7

What would a prison be like if there are children in the cell?

The film Miracle in Cell No.7 (2013, dir. Lee Hwan-kyung) tells the story of Yong-gu and his six-year-old daughter Ye-sung’s experience in a prison cell with other criminals. Yong-gu is mentally disabled with only the intelligence of a six-year-old, and he is falsely accused of rape and murder of the police commissioner’s daughter. Although Yong-gu is charged with death penalty, he treats the desperate cell as a friendly environment as he used to do and saves the prison gang leader Yang-ho’s life when the prisoners in another cell attack Yang-ho. As a return, Yang-ho and other cellmates plan to sneak Yong-gu’s daughter into the cell for their reunion.

The first shot when Ye-sung arrives at the cell is the prisoners ripping off the tape of a large snack box. The aerial shot of the box fills the entire frame, and when it first opens, only her cloth is visible. When the camera pushes backwards, Ye-sung’s entire body is revealed. She lies as an infant, tightly confined in the box, and then sits up as a newborn. Ye-sung’s arrival is portrayed as the unboxing of a gift delivered in the cell, and Ye-sung indeed functions as a gift which brings the prisoners a new life in the cold, hopeless, and entrapped cell. When Yang-ho sees Ye-sung, he mispronounces her name as “Ye-su,” which means “Jesus” in Korean. This subtle line plants the idea that Ye-sung is the savior of the cell, gathering the prisoners and awakening their kindness beneath the crime. Then, Ye-sung sees her dad, but she is still in the box, like how Yong-gu is trapped in the cell. Yong-gu crawls to Ye-sung like a toddler, hugging her and taking her out of the box. Although both are confined in a small space, the camera follows his movement, presenting love’s power to break the claustrophobia in jail. It is also worth noting that the rest of the box is filled with bread and milk boxes, suggesting that Ye-sung uses the space they use to deliver food. Giving up the space for food to sneak Ye-sung in for a brief reunion with Yong-gu, the cell shows the first miracle that love and friendship outweigh the luxurious snacks for the prisoners, whom got caught in the jail because they broke the law for their self-interests.

Inspired by Ye-sung’s drawing of a hot air balloon, the prisoners decided to help Yong-gu escape the cell the day before his execution to avoid his death penalty, which is the day of the prison’s Christmas concert. Ye-sung performs with other kids, and each of them holds hands with a prisoner. Although the kids are surrounded by prisoners, there is no handcuff on the prisoners nor weapon on the prison guards. All we can see is the happiness on everyone’s face. The prisoners are in orange uniforms, the kids are wearing red ties, and the shot is layered with a warm filter, maximizing the feeling of warmth in the cold jail. Yong-gu’s cellmates clear a way for them to get into the hot air balloon among all other prisoners and release the rope to let it fly. All prisoners, including those that are their opponents, assist Yong-gu and Ye-sung to be the only people on the hot air balloon selflessly. None of them tries to take advantage of this possibility to escape, and all of them fight with the guards to ensure Yong-gu can leave. And when they are fighting, Ye-sung says that “everyone is dancing,” still perceiving the dangerous world in the most innocent way that only children have, further proving that the kindness in a child’s mind is what touches all the criminals. However, the fairy tale ends when the wire gate traps the rope. Unlike Yong-gu’s desperate cellmates, he appreciates the view with Ye-sung on the hot air balloon. The kids’ mindset filters the negative ideas, viewing this as a peaceful moment of reunion. The dreadful, dirty, hopeless prison traps the adults physically and mentally, but it can't trap the love of a father and a daughter and their purist love of the world. When the extreme long shot of Yong-gu and Ye-sung appreciating the sunset in the hot air balloon cuts to Ye-sung’s drawing of a hot air balloon above a castle in the cell, juxtaposes the world in and out of the cell. The warm and saturated colors of her painting cover the cold and plain wall, hiding the brutal reality with innocence and imagination. They failed to make Yong-gu escape from the cell, and Yong-gu's death penalty comes the next day, but he accepts his death peacefully.

Some critics view the plot of escaping the jail with a hot air balloon as highly inauthentic and overdramatic, but if we view this from a six-year-old kid’s perspective, it is just a beautiful resolution of a story. In a corrupted world that charges innocent people, a little fairy tale is the only comfort for other people in the dark. In the end, Ye-sung and Yong-gu’s cellmates, now living an ordinary life after their prison terms 20 years after Yong-gu's death, prove Yong-gu’s innocence at the court. There was no miracle when a six-year-old and a room of prisoners were trying to save Yong-gu’s life, and Yong-gu's death after Chrismas eve is irreversible. However, it is a miracle that Yong-gu and Ye-sung filled the cramped cell with love, support, and justice.

Sundown: Evening (Day Five)

After the roughest day in production, we had another break day. As always, I reflected on what happened the previous day and found silver linings. The day wasn’t all bad; the morning scene was successful, which featured Johns Hopkins’ own Dr. Jamie Young as our “psychiatrist” character. Furthermore, I was determined not to let one bad day of shooting ruin my energy for the rest of the shoot. I was especially excited for our final days as we planned to shoot all the scenes that were part of the original shorter script. The scenes that started it all.

The break was primarily used to take photos of my actors for “family photo” production design in the final location of the shoot, the main character’s childhood home. Here, I also got to talk more with my main actors and understand how they truly felt about the project—they were having a good time! Taking a relaxed moment to connect with my actors was vital for me and them to understand each other better, director to actor, and person to person. After the break day and a few conversations with my cast and crew, my attitude toward the remaining portion of the shoot improved. In my reflections, I understood (and continue to understand) that my mistakes and regrets about the film were lessons to learn from going forward.

Our final location was held at my paternal grandmother’s Baltimore apartment. She graciously let us invade her space for nearly twelve hours at a time, four days straight. The first day was focused on shooting the very first scene in the film, the opening conversation between the main character and his mother. Watching everything come together—the production design, the performance—I felt that my original artistic vision was genuinely coming to fruition. Later that night, we wrapped on one of my main actors. Directing him (and others) was a great push outside my comfort zone in working with non-student actors and adapting to various acting experience levels. Most importantly, my experience taught me many lessons in how to do what a good director does best: know what they want and how to get it.

Aug. 24 - “Young Mikey” and his mother

We began our fifth shooting day a bit later to get closer to the time of day we needed. We primarily focused on external shots that day, prompting us to move quickly with the ever-changing light. This day brought an obvious issue to my attention; the period my entire film centers around (sunset, or more aptly, sundown) lasts for a very short time. There was confusion on my part about what the lighting conditions would be at certain times and how long those conditions would last. As a result, we had to postpone filming one scene for over an hour since the reflection of the light outside at the story-accurate time of day was too strong. My Script Supervisor, Devin Andrada, was not happy with me regarding the continuity; but again, these are lessons learned for the future. Despite the issues, this shot was where my crew (specifically my camera and lighting team!) got to show off their skills with the setup and execution. Also, while waiting to shoot this scene, we got the quintessential sundown shot (not really, it was pre-sundown, early evening, but close enough).

Aug. 25 - Crew setting up for the window shot

The most exciting part of the day was starting work with my “Creature” actor for our one-shot scene. Here, the main character’s mother gets caught by the Creature, which we wanted to be able to execute creatively through a one-shot. Going through the prep for this was a challenge: clearing space for movement, blocking, framing, sound, and more. However, with each dry run and each take, the work began to pay off. We did about four or five runs of this scene, each with unique elements that could work well in the final film. This was our last shot of the night, which ended with us squealing over a take that worked, a shared success amongst the entire crew. More than any day before, I felt what I had been working to feel throughout the previous shoot days: a genuine sense of accomplishment that was validated by others’ enthusiasm.

Aug. 26 - Checking the front door, featuring my Sound Mixer, NIls

This sense of accomplishment carried me into the second-to-last day of production. The entire day was dedicated to the scene where the main character first encounters the Creature. The scene that started it all. We were staring down the barrel of an 8-hour day without much time for breaks; if we weren’t shooting, we were rehearsing, setting up for the next shot, or breaking down the previous one. I expected to be more stressed this day than on any of the others. I had anticipated it for so long. However, I felt more level-headed that day than I had felt on all the other days. I loved moving from shot to shot, setup to setup, as seamlessly as we did. The day ended with another one-shot where the main character meets the Creature for the first time. After 8 hours of work, the most significant part of our film was complete. I returned home well past midnight but felt more accomplished than ever. After three months of intense preparation and six days of shooting later, 80% of my short film was under my belt.

By this time, there was just one day left in our schedule. Approaching the end of production after an entire summer’s worth of work and anticipation was a bittersweet denouement. While I was eager to stop harboring self-doubts, finally get some rest, and generally move on, I also knew I would miss this experience for everything that it was. Sundown was coming to an end, and it was almost time for us to say goodbye.

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 cowardess 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.

Lost In America Embalms the New Hollywood Road Movie with 80s Cynicism

Lost In America (dir. Albert Brooks, 1985) tells the story of a married professional couple who “drop out” of society to roam the United States in an RV à la Easy Rider. The irony is inherent to the concept, but the narrative unfolds it to its full potential by prodding its characters incrementally toward their inevitable failure. Unlike its self serious predecessor’s approach of tragic irony, Lost In America handles the futility of the American dream with the deranged comedic detachment of resignation to the (admittedly comfortable, albeit monotonous) status quo in an arch eulogy for the New Hollywood road movie.

David and Linda Howard are quintessential yuppies. Their identity is defined by this era-specific term that denotes upward social and financial mobility. David quits his advertising job not on principle, but out of frustration after being denied a promotion. They liquefy all of their assets into a comfortable “nest egg” to live on for their remaining years: not exactly “free-spirited.” And their first stop is Las Vegas, the American mecca of consumerist debauchery. Again, every additional element heightens the film’s satirical premise.

In Vegas, soft-spoken Linda reveals herself to be a compulsive gambler and loses the entire nest egg in the middle of the night. David’s comically disgraceful attempt to convince the casino owner to refund the Howards their money, complete with a desperate advertising pitch featuring Santa Claus, establishes that his professional skills are unhelpful outside of an office and cannot help him in the “real world.” Linda, too, proves unadaptable to these non-yuppie environs through her inability to control herself at the blackjack table, thereby threatening a marriage built on stasis and responsibility and financial comfort.

Beside the Hoover Dam, the couple argue over the plot of Easy Rider. We never see the national landmark in all its glory; instead, we linger on the side of the road as the Howards bicker about whether Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper “dropped out with nothing” or “sold a ton of cocaine” at the beginning of the movie (they did the latter, a point which further tarnishes the ideological purity of both pairs’ endeavors).

Both David and Linda view the lifestyle depicted in that movie as exemplary in some way, even though the film itself is arguably about the disappointing “reality” of such a lifestyle. David and Linda bond with a police officer over their love of the film and he tears up their ticket as a result. That an officer of the law could adore a film with staunchly anti-establishment leanings indicates a misunderstanding and re-appropriation of an American cultural touchstone made possible by the superficial concerns of the “yuppie” era.

Linda and David’s decision to go to New York and “eat shit” for David to retain his old job, followed by a montage of the increasingly exhausted travelers driving across the country set to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” satirizes the couple’s renewed faith in the stifling yuppie lifestyle as euphorically positive, highlighting the romanticized nature of that vision with the use of the iconic song over less-optimistic footage of the RV merging with choked-up city traffic - a less visceral but more insidious final image than the explosion at the end of Easy Rider.

Nurikabe: The End of a Very Long Beginning

This is the end to a very long beginning. Looking back at the past three years, I don’t think there was a day I didn’t spend thinking about this project in one way or another. And as we move into production, I feel like it would be good to reflect a bit on some of the things we learned from the experience.

 

1. Motivation is not discipline: At the beginning of any creative endeavor you probably feel very motivated. After all, it takes enthusiasm and creative energy to come up with an idea for a project. And maybe that motivation will carry you through developing that idea into a workable outline. But eventually that motivation fades. It doesn’t fade forever, of course, resurfacing anytime. But it will inevitably fade. And the idea you’ve been excitedly working on? Well, the excitement is gone and the work remains. It is at times like this that discipline comes in handy. Motivation and the energy that comes with it is fickle and unreliable. Discipline is not. It’s an “either you do it or you don’t” mentality. So even when things were hard, frustrating, intimidating or felt impossible, we both knew that nothing was going to happen unless we made it so. 

 

2. Unique doesn’t always mean original: In our research, we read through many volumes of folklore and fairytales. And though no two stories were the same, some were more similar than others. In Japanese folklore many stories can be summed up as such: A spirit causes trouble, so a monk prays a lot and the spirit goes away. In Latin American folklore, we found quite a few stories that bore a striking resemblance to Cinderella. The Japanese character Momotarō is similar to Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, all of whom in their respective stories are children born in odd ways to childless parents. Since our project’s focus is adaptation and folklore, we knew our film wouldn’t be something entirely new. But in our research, we realized that the most interesting thing about adaptation is not how similar things are. It is the differences between each story that make them interesting. For something to be interesting and unique, it doesn’t have to be completely original, it just has to take the material in a new direction. 

 

3. It’s all on you until it isn’t: As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, this is our first large scale collaborative project. We are used to relying on ourselves for everything, from the first draft of the script to the final cut of the film. The weird thing about this project is it felt very much like everything we’d done before until it wasn’t. We had to create the story, write the script. It was up to us to find a cast and crew. As stated before, we understood from the beginning that nothing would move forward on the project unless we made it happen. But now it feels like something is about to change. Now, we have to pass our vision on to our cast and crew, relying on them to make this thing a reality. And while it does relieve some pressure on us, it can be scary to hand off almost three years of work to others and trust them to make it good. We have to stay on top of things, making sure everything is in control and moving along nicely. But we also have to let go a bit, letting everyone do their work. Ultimately, we can’t do this by ourselves, as film by its very nature is collaborative.

 

4. Caution and anxiety are two different things: We have taken a lot of care in planning for production. Making sure everything is ready, our contingencies and backup plans, that is the result of caution. Caution is good in pre-production as it makes you take a step back, consider possible obstacles or issues. Anxiety, on the other hand, has no place in filmmaking. It makes you doubt everything, throwing you into a swirling storm of what-if’s. It’s a paralyzing force that narrows your focus to only the problems without considering any solutions. If left unchecked, that anxiety turns to self-doubt, which affects the entire production. Because if you don’t believe in the project (or yourself), why should anyone else? In my experience, the best remedy to anxieties (other than good preplanning and backup plans) is a simple question: “And?” It switches the focus from the problem back to the solution. Worried about what happens if something goes wrong? And? If it happens, you’re going to have to deal with it anyway, so it doesn’t help to get worried about it. It’s an attitude that’s gotten us through many stressful periods in all sorts of environments. No matter what happens, at the end of the day you’ll likely get through it unscathed. It may not be fun, and it may not be perfect. But it will be done. 

 

5. Never forget why you love it: A little while ago, I saw someone give a talk about being successful. They said that you shouldn’t do what you love because one day you’ll be working hard and realize you aren’t enjoying it. They argued it was better to figure out what you’re good at and learn to be passionate about it. Personally, I find that a rather depressing way to live. For all I know, I only have one shot at life. Seems like a waste to give up on pursuing my passion without at least trying to follow it first. And yes, there have been times on this project where everything feels wrong. Times where it feels like it’s too much to handle, where frustration and challenge overwhelm any positivity. But in those times, it’s good to remember why you started. Because if those young Nishimoto brothers, who were so fascinated with the behind the scenes features on DVDs, could see what we are doing here today… their excitement would be enough to power us through this project ten times over. 

 

That flame of childhood excitement, it is still burning inside us. Sure, it might not be as easily accessible as it was back then. But it’s light has been with us every step of the way on this project, and it will continue to light our way ahead.

^{Photos By Amy Nishimoto}

We have been Thomas and Curtis Nishimoto. We’re making something that, for lack of a better term, is really cool. And we cannot wait to show you. - TC

 

Portraits of Nora Ephron and Joan Didion

The documentary, Everything is Copy, chronicles Nora Ephron’s life, focusing on her importance as an essayist and screenwriter, as well as the relationships that shaped her. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold similarly dives into the writer’s personal and professional life. Both of these documentaries focus on loss and question what it means to know another person, providing perspectives characterized both by intimacy and distance. 

Everything Is Copy is notable in how it works to explore Ephron’s life in spite of her not being alive at the time of filming. She died of leukemia in 2012, and her son, Jacob Bernstein, began working on the documentary in the years immediately afterward, ultimately releasing it in 2016. The film first opens solely with the sound of Ephron speaking, and a few seconds later, her image appears. This shift from the audio to video immediately emphasizes how film brings her to life. She looks not at the camera but at Charlie Rose, who is off-screen, as she recounts a story that results in laughter from the audience. This beginning doesn’t need context; her presence and humor are enough to establish her personality.

The subsequent ten minutes exhibit a combination of photographs, archival footage, and past and more recent interviews, exposing how film can break up time as well as extend it. In just a few minutes, we witness not just who Ephron was, but specifically the history that shaped her and her legacy into the future. The segment of her and Charlie Rose, for example, is followed by an oscillation between her present and the past. It cuts between home videos of her at nine years old, and an interview where she discusses her mother’s mantra that Bernstein chose as the title, “everything is copy.” The juxtaposition of the visuals of her as a child and her adult voice demonstrates the formative nature of this idea and how it has persisted throughout her life. Our understanding of her is immediate and personal. The film then moves from the past to the actual present, with a cut from her using a typewriter to one of Bernstein’s laptop. This technological gap marks the passage of time, while also illustrating Ephron’s impact on her son, who details how he too is a writer. Photographs of her punctuate throughout; although she is often joyous, these still images seemed to contain her and suggest that, without her alive, our understanding of her is ultimately limited.  

The documentary also points to the boundary between public and private identities, and explores the extent that such a boundary existed for Ephron. Bernstein interviews a large range of people, including David Remnick, Meryl Streep, Rob Reiner, Amy Pascal, Meg Ryan, and Rosie O’Donnell. Her demeanor in interviews with hosts like Charlie Rose matches the descriptions of those who personally knew her. Several speak of her in a way that suggests a closeness; there’s often a succession of them individually describing the same thing about her, adding to a cohesion in her portrayal. Yet many lament not knowing that she had been diagnosed with cancer. The documentary creates a parallel between the viewer and her friends; the film increasingly immerses us in her life, allowing us to get closer to her, and then it forces us to revisit the secrecy of her illness again at the end. Ephron is simultaneously knowable and elusive.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, like Everything is Copy, was directed by someone close to her, specifically her nephew, Griffin Dunne. The film's visual depiction of Didion’s loss of her husband, John Dunne, suggests its incomprehensibility for her. When Didion begins describing the night he died, we see part of their apartment in daylight, where no one is present. The tension from this absence is exacerbated by an off-center camera. As she progresses in recounting what happened, we get increasingly closer-up shots of a table, and then the piano on the side. Her words, “I remember the sense of the weight as he fell,” coincide with a cuts to a shot of trees outside, now at night and at a distance from what is presumably Didion’s window. The film conveys the emotion of this grief not through Didion’s words but in what is on screen. Another example of a key visual decision is when Dunne’s brother discusses how he and Didion went into John’s office after his death. As he talks about himself, the closet is in color, but as he talks about her, it shifts to black and white, signifying the impact of Dunne's death on her.

The documentary’s portrayal of Quintana, Didion’s daughter, is also of note. At one point, there is a shift in topics from Quintana to Didion’s journalism and political work, which centered on the El Salvadoran Civil War, as well as Dick Cheney. The documentary then returns to the topic of Quintana, and Didion discusses how her daughter had told her she was “remote” as a mother. This structure, where her political work gains prominence and is sandwiched by Quintana, seems to implicate it as creating a division between the two of them. Regarding the comment that she was “remote,” Didion insists: “I didn’t see it as possible because her father and I so clearly needed her.” There is an evident dissonance between their perspectives of her role as a mother, and there is no way for it to be reconciled.  

Next, a sequence of photographs of the three of them shifts from black and white to color; the passage in time is marked by this shift, as well as through John’s balding, and Quintana’s growth from a child to an adult. There’s a noticeable lack in what we know about Quintana from the film; photographs of her seem empty, as we don’t truly get a sense of their relationship. Soon afterward, there’s a description of how Quintana enters a coma and ultimately dies, with coincides with a photo of her smiling. Interestingly, after her death, a shot of hand-written notes from Quintana as a child is the only kind of personal evidence, other than photographs, that we get of her.

It may not be that Didion and Quintana had a uniquely distant relationship, but instead that the film specifically decided not to give the viewer a privileged perspective of them. What gets left out of such a documentary, though, is as interesting as what is put in.

Lady Bird's Coming-of-Age Journey

“I wish I could live through something,” states the protagonist of Lady Bird at the beginning of the film. As the titular heroine, Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, rides in the car with her mother, Marion, she expresses this desire to attach a grand meaning to her life. This meaning, we quickly learn, does not exist for her in Sacramento, her hometown. “I hate California. I want to go to the east coast,” she says, and a close-up shot of her looking out the car window emphasizes how she yearns to be across the country, far from the colleges that she and her mother have just taken a road trip to tour. The flat, dull and unchanging landscape that the car moves through helps frame her desire for escape. 

This desire of Lady Bird’s launches the first conflict in the film: an argument between her and her mother, who sees it as an example of her daughter’s selfishness and lack of gratitude. The addition of this conflict in the scene is subtly matched by Marion’s turning of the car; their previously straight path and corresponding fluidity have been disrupted. They begin talking over one another, and their eyes fail to meet for the rest of the scene, as the camera alternates between individual close-ups of each of them. These elements serve to establish their opposing points of view; in this conversation, they are not truly listening, but simply speaking, reacting, and revealing their frustrations with the other. To free herself from this fight, Lady Bird jumps out of the moving car — an action that both comically and strikingly encapsulates her feelings of confinement. Marion screams, and the film quickly cuts to a close-up of a hot pink cast on her arm, with the words “fuck you mom” written on top. The cast matches her dyed pink hair, and both serve as markers of her individuality throughout the film.

These initial few minutes set up a focus on mother-daughter conflict and an adolescent’s struggle for what they want, which is a central theme of the film. In the first part, we continue to see that Lady Bird feels her life is lacking in several ways, some small and others large. For example, she and her best friend, Julie, walk through a wealthy neighborhood after school, with quick cuts of them longingly looking at the grand, beautiful homes. Then she wants her mother to buy her a magazine, so she can read it in bed as “rich people do”, rather than having to borrow it from the library. It is this dissatisfaction with her environment, and her to desire to leave California, that most prominently ties her to her mother. The film uses their perceptions of Sacramento, and their movements through it, to distance them at the beginning and connect them at the end. 

Early on in the film, Marion drives home from work, and there are several small, simple but beautiful cuts of Sacramento on her ride home. Shots of Marion are interspersed, and John Hartford’s “This Eve of Parting” plays. Marion is constantly grounded in reality, and an abrupt cut from the song to a slamming of her car door, reminds us of this at the end of the sequence. Before that, though, there appears to be her peaceful, almost romantic admiration of setting. 

Lady Bird, on the other hand, is focused on escape. She constantly rejects Sacramento, an act which Marion ostensibly takes to be a rejection of everything she has tried to give her. These opposing perspectives of their home, and what Lady Bird’s place in the world can be, push them apart. However, the end of the film brings them back together by recalling Marion’s drive in a couple of ways. When Lady Bird receives her acceptance letter for a school in New York, “The Eve of Parting” plays again. Marion, angry that Lady Bird had secretly applied to east schools, has ceased speaking to her at this point. But the song functions as a poignant reminder of their bond, and how Marion has to come to terms with Lady Bird’s departure. At the very end, after Lady Bird has arrived in New York, she calls her parents. As she speaks, the film cuts to shots of the same drive in Sacramento, and then it alternates between Marion and Lady Bird each driving alone in the car. As Lady Bird looks out of her window, there is a clear appreciation of and comfort in Sacramento that she never held before. Here, there is finally a resolution where we become aware of Lady Bird’s growth and her connection with her mother.

What is also interesting to me about Lady Bird is how much of her identity is ill-defined. She isn’t particularly interested in or good at one thing, but she hopes to be, which makes her a more ordinary yet more dimensional character than typical coming-of-age protagonists. For example, it’s her senior year and she sits in the office of a nun at her Catholic school, where she says it’s her tradition to run for student government, but she knows she won’t win. Similarly, she says she’d like to join the math olympiad team, to which the nun says: “But math isn’t something you’re terribly strong in.” The nun also pushes her to audition for the theater group’s fall musical, which Lady Bird didn’t even know existed until now. She gets a minor role in the musical, but complains: “The part I got was basically not getting in.” Then she abandons the group in the spring, refusing to audition for the play. 

What we never doubt that she genuinely cares about, though, is the abstract idea of freedom and what her future could entail. Her desire for going to New York isn’t rooted in something specific, but just in her belief that it has “culture”. Lady Bird stands in contrast to Julie and Jenna, the “popular girl” that she befriends, who are both content to stay in Sacramento. She also doesn’t have proof that she deserves what she aspires to have, and is reminded of this at different instances, like when her counselor initially laughs at the idea of her applying to east coast schools. Lady Bird simply wants, and she shows us that that’s reason enough.

As Above, So Below: Us and Parasite

(Spoilers Ahead!) 

   Two recent films, Jordan Peele’s Us and Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite delve into exciting portrayals of oppression and classism.  The films have many overlapping concepts: class war, death, subterfuge, living underground, and the fact that both films center around two pairs of perfect nuclear families. The Wilsons and their doppelgangers (Us) and the Kims and the Parks (Parasite), all consist of four people: a mother, a father, a daughter, and a son. Of these paired families, one lives underground and is trying to claim a life above, while the other is explicitly privileged and defends their way of life. Each film could be considered a story about the entire family, but heavily leans on one character, especially toward the ending.  Peele’s Adelaide Wilson, and JoonHo’s Kim Ki-Taek are the principal characters at the center of the films' conflicts. They have very different roles, and end up in opposite scenarios, with Adelaide free and Ki-Taek trapped underground. In Us there is less subtlety in the motivation of the oppressed family, they are coming up from underground to kill the people they are tethered to so they can live in the sun.  In Parasite, as the title suggests, the Kim family becomes a parasitic force, siphoning wealth from the inattentive Park family. 

    Adelaide, played by Lupita Nyong’o is established as the main character of Us at the beginning, when she gets lost as a small girl. The rest of the film serves as a character study about her, even though her family gets a lot of screen-time. She is part of the privileged household (with a nasty secret) and fears the disruption of her way of life.  Us establishes a world where families like the Wilsons have everything they want, while doppelgangers called the Tethered live underground and eat raw rabbit.   In the world of Parasite, the Kim family lives in a sub-basement, which is small and dirty, while their employers, the Park family live in a mansion with a large yard.  The father of the Kim family, Ki-Taek, played by Kang-Ho Song, is not the first of his family to infiltrate the household of the Parks, but he becomes the main character over the course of the film as he is degraded  repeatedly by the Park family. The two characters make for an interesting comparison, because Ki-Taek struggles with his poverty and hatred for the rich, while Adelaide has already fought for her privileged life and now must fight to keep it. 

    Neither character entirely fits in with their family or the privileged lifestyle they try to adopt. Ki-Taek starts off Parasite as a strong head of family, the shot of him stoically folding pizza boxes while the rest of the family is coughing on insecticide establishes his character as someone with drive, even though he is unemployed and lower-class, he will do what needs to be done. But his drive is met with failure, and a foreshadowing comment that “One out of four” are rejects. As one of the early lines in the film it is immediately striking, considering there are four members of the Kim family, the reject is implied to be Ki-Taek. The line could easily have been in Us rather than Parasite, it applies to the Wilsons because Adelaide is not like the rest of her family. As an adult, Adelaide is never at ease, her family is relaxed and unafraid while on vacation, but there is not a moment in the movie, until the last shot of her, where Adelaide looks unafraid. As a child, Adelaide’s mother says “I just want my daughter back” when Adelaide stops talking after the incident with the Tethered, a reminder that she is not like other people on the surface (because she is the fake).

    Both of the characters’ oddness take the form of senses; Ki-Taek has a noticeable ‘smell’ that Mr. Park cannot stand. Ki-Jeong, his daughter, insists is from living in a sub-basement. The smell makes its first appearance when Da-Song smells both Ki-Taek and Choong-Sook, and comments that they are the same. Later, Mr. Park heavily insults the smell while Ki-Taek listens secretly. The insults begin to push him over the edge, the idea that the wealthy can mock the poor for how they cannot help smelling. When Mr. Park does not acknowledge Ki-Jeong’s mortal wound but does take time to acknowledge the stink of Moon-Gwang’s husband, Ki-Taek finds that it is the last straw. He fatally stabs Mr. Park and runs off. Adelaide’s give-away is sound, at the beginning of the movie she snaps her fingers off-beat, confusing her son. Sound is important throughout Us because none of the Tethered can speak, except for Red (the original Adelaide). Their ululating sounds are grippingly inhuman. The audience, and Jason, her son, are shocked to find that when Adelaide finally kills Red, she releases loud ululating sobs, like the Tethered do. Jason is left to wonder who the real monster was.

    Adelaide and Ki-Taek end their stories as dramatic opposites. After killing Red, Adelaide keeps her life above-ground, with her family intact. Her success is because of her desperation, and the brutality she displays in the final fight, and the ending flashback of the film. She has gotten away with climbing the social ladder, and she is happy about it, daring to smile at her suspicious son. Ki-Taek’s story ends in tragedy. Long-suffering and at the end of his rope, without a plan, he kills the cruel and indifferent Mr. Park, and takes the place of Moon-Gwang’s husband in the secret basement beneath the Parks’ house. He has descended even further, rather than finding a place in the sun. Ki-Taek must continue to live as a parasite, underground and with no hope of leaving. It is a tragic ending for the Kim family, showing the dire situation of the impoverished and what little chance there is to move up in the world.

Familial Sacrifice in Succession (Eric)

HBO’s comedy-drama series Succession features a host of selfish people making morally dubious decisions. Character actions are often related to personal standing within the global media conglomerate at the center of the show, Waystar Royco. In the Season 2 finale, titled “This Is Not for Tears,” the disregard for ethical concerns by many players in the company has led to a crisis. Someone of prominent position within the company will have to take the fall for decades of mishandled sexual abuse and wrongful death cases at Waystar Royco. As the patriarch of the Roy family and CEO of Waystar Royco, Logan Roy decides that it’s his own son Kendall who’s to be sacrificed. But in a twist ending, it’s Kendall who lands the last punch of the season when he places the guilt for the coverup squarely on his father’s shoulders. The dialogue at the climax of the episode sets up the possibility for this twist ending, and it also hints at some of the philosophy behind the two main characters of the show, Logan and Kendall.

The season finale takes place on a yacht. While supposedly a mini-vacation away from the congressional hearings that the family and company has been dealing with, the break effectively serves as a conference to debate who will be sacrificed for the company. Logan Roy rules both his family and his company with a Machiavellian fist, and in regards to his business dealings, this manifests itself in total disregard for the wellbeing of others. In the penultimate episode of Season 2, Logan’s brother equates him to Hitler in terms of the scale of human suffering he’s caused through his cutthroat capitalism. This sentiment is echoed throughout the finale, as the center of the crisis specifically involved the victims of Waystar Royco.

In the finale, Logan calls his son into a private room on the yacht to tell him personally why he’s been chosen as the scapegoat. He explains how the Incas, in times of crisis, used to sacrifice a child to the Sun. The implication here is that, if the situation called for it, Logan might literally sacrifice Kendall to make things right. While the present situation calls only for Kendall’s figurative death, Logan is reestablished in this scene as a brutal go-getter, someone wouldn’t hesitate to kill given the right circumstances. Kendall proceeds to ask his dad if he ever believed Kendall could one day take the reins as CEO, to which Logan replies, “You’re not a killer. You have to be a killer.” Importantly, part of the trouble Waystar finds itself in concerns the death and possible murders of migrant sex workers on the company’s cruise ships; during the coverup, these individuals were documented as NRPI: No Real Person Involved. The value of human life is not something that Logan Roy concerns himself with. Directly prior to their conversation, images are shown of the massive yacht towering over some local Mediterranean fishermen, a reminder of the distance between the Roys and the people they exploit.

Ultimately, Kendall does prove to possess the killer instinct necessary to survive in his dangerous environment. Kendall’s world is one in which his own father is willing to send him to prison for the good of the corporation, and he’s given the choice to either accept this fate or fight back. In the press conference at the end of the episode, Kendall shocks everyone by throwing his father under the bus. Logan Roy watches on the television, and in the final seconds of the season, we watch as his face turns into an almost imperceptible smile, a smile that seems to express a reluctant pride in his son for having finally learned how to kill.

 

Bob Belcher and Modern Fatherhood (Yaejin)

Bob Belcher of Fox's Bob's Burgers stands out as a man and a father. Although facing constant financial instability, he is content flipping burgers and cooking up punny names for them. His wife, Linda, also works behind the counter of the family restaurant while their three children, Tina, Gene, and Louise, help out after school. The premise is simple and the characters are realistic, but each episode is packed with such personality. The wild chemistry between the characters is partially attributed to the show's recording style; the voice actors record their lines together, allowing natural ad-libs and improvisation. In a chaotic household, Bob contributes as a guiding force. 

The Belcher make up a conventional nuclear family. Bob, Linda, and their three kids live above the burger restaurant. The children attend public school. Because there is nothing particularly unique or extravagant about his lifestyle, Bob is sort of an everyman. The content of his petty arguments with Jimmy Pesto, the handsome owner of the popular Italian restaurant across the street, is specific to them, but the antagonistic chemistry is very relatable. Your Jimmy Pesto could be the boy kicking your seat from behind during homeroom or the co-worker who sharpens his pencils whenever you are calling clients. As a man with very typical demographics, Bob Belcher could be your mailman, but with an especially lovable personality.  He gives his recipe ingredients voices and character; he has an odd adoration for patty-cake in Stomp style. He just has a fantastic disposition and he embodies an appealingly progressive kind of masculinity. 

He is flattered when a younger, attractive male butcher hits on him, mistakenly reading Bob's frequent turkey purchases as flirting. There is no comedic rush to prove his manliness, and he never engages in put-down humor to poke fun at the misunderstanding. Pleased with the compliment, Bob finishes the scene as the man he was before he walked into the deli. 

The word "father" has many traditional connotations. A father may be expected to be the head of the household and support the family. Fathers can be depicted as stern, hardworking, and stoic, adjectives that do describe Bob's own father. Bob is a more emotionally accessible, compassionate parental figure.

The hardships he faced growing up in his father's house drive him to give Tina, Gene, and Louise cheerier childhoods. Bob is more than a provider-protector; he is an empathetic guide.  He shares few common interests with his son Gene, but they attempt some coerced father-son bonding time, throwing a baseball back and forth in an American classic.  Ultimately, they're both too unathletic to enjoy catch, but their bond is affirmed as Bob supports Gene’s passion for cheerleading, cross-dressing, and music.  And when Tina feels insecure about her hairy legs, Bob takes her to a waxing salon and gets his legs waxed to help overcome her fear of the pain.  He fills in any role to support his kids regardless of how these roles are conventionally divided by gender.  Not only is Bob Belcher an awesome role model, he is a terrific father, redefining the role for his children and also for himself.

Web Therapy: Surprisingly Deep (Nita)

A friend recently recommended that I watch Web Therapy, an improvised comedy web series starring Lisa Kudrow. Kudrow plays Dr. Fiona Wallice, a narcissistic therapist who has created a new form of online therapy (web therapy) that consists of 3-minute online sessions. Her philosophy is that the traditional 50-minute sessions are unnecessary, since they allow people to explore too many irrelevant experiences and feelings. She believes 3 minutes is sufficient for breakthroughs. Fiona also strives to build her own franchise and tapes the sessions in hopes of attracting investors.

After my friend explained the premise of the series to me, I knew I had to watch it. So far I’ve seen three episodes, and I have not been disappointed. Though the episodes are lighthearted and ridiculous, they are also surprisingly insightful. Through dark comedy, the satirical web series touches on a variety of topics such as self-absorbed culture, the negative ramifications of technology, and marital/family issues. Essentially, the series is about failed human interaction and comically explores how technology contributes to this.

In the very first scene of the series, Fiona is showing her husband Kip what a typical web therapy session would entail by giving him a session. Kip is clearly unhappy with Fiona, as she moved some of his personal belongings to decorate the room she conducts sessions in. The entire series is shot from the perspective of Fiona’s computer screen, so all we see are Fiona and Kip in individual video chat boxes. They are visually separated from each other and contained within the virtual bounds of the iChat boxes. As the scene progresses and Fiona starts to roleplay a therapy session with Kip, Kip tries to look over at Fiona when answering her questions (since they are sitting in the same room). However, Fiona scolds Kip when he tries to do so and forces him to look at her through the webcam. The rest of the scene consists of Kip and Fiona bringing up issues they have with each other, revealing how bad their marriage is. This illustrates the lack of intimacy between Fiona and Kip, while conveying that technology may be acting as a barrier and fostering this decrease in human connection.

In episode 3, a similar failure in human connection is demonstrated by Fiona’s poor relationship with her mother. Fiona talks to her mother via video chat – a technological barrier once again – and it is clear that they have not talked to each other for a while. Fiona’s mother is cold, and the two’s interaction reveals that the mother wants Fiona to pay her back tuition money (even though she is clearly very wealthy and is just greedy). The mother is self-absorbed, a common theme within the series as Fiona is also a narcissist. This raises the question of how modern culture fosters narcissism. The series addresses how self-promotion is becoming more prominent within today’s society, given the Internet and social media. Through Fiona’s relationship with her mother, the series also shows how this self-absorption hinders human relationships and ultimately leads to isolation.

Episode 2 explores the extent of Fiona’s narcissism. From looking at herself in the video chat instead of her clients, to using her clients for the purpose of furthering her own business, Fiona is the epitome of how self-promotion and self-obsession leads to loss of humanity. For instance, in episode 2 Fiona holds a session with a couple who are having relationship issues. During the session, the couple get into a heated argument and start talking about their feelings towards each other. Fiona, clearly annoyed that the two are getting “bogged down” by discussing feelings, stops the conversation. She then asks whether the man received the release to record the sessions so that she can show investors. It’s a hilarious scene, but also has serious implications. Fiona exemplifies how self-interest prevents effective communication with others and hinders human connection. Since all of Fiona’s energy is going towards ensuring her personal success, she is unable to listen to others and be empathetic.

Web Therapy is a very ironic series. Therapy is essentially about human connection; however, the series repeatedly portrays failed human relationships. This is because Fiona strips the most essential part of therapy sessions (time) in hopes of increasing efficiency. This addresses a growing issue in our industrialized society: choosing quantity over quality. Though cutting down duration of therapy sessions from 50 minutes to 3 minutes may be efficient in terms of saving time, the quality of the sessions is clearly lost. The series does a great job of comically highlighting how our technological society encourages self-interest and discourages intimate human connection, which ultimately leads to the loss of quality relationships.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Killers Behind the Curve (Eric)

In keeping with the Halloween spirit, I recently watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), which has long been my favorite horror movie. The first image of the film is of a grisly scarecrow in a graveyard. It’s been made out of a dug-up corpse, and the radio reports news of grave vandalism. The news radio continues over the opening title sequence, reporting various violent and tragic events, acting as something of an appetizer to the stomach churning events that will unfold onscreen. The setting of this movie, Texas, is important in establishing the tone of the whole piece. The film presents a particular version of Texas: the oppressive summer heat, the cattle, the sense that this is truly the middle of nowhere. It’s the perfect backdrop for the horror that occurs. This is a lawless setting, one in which the Sheriff lies down in a graveyard, drunk and helpless to stop the crimes happening in his community. There appears to be only a handful of people per every square mile in this rural area, and “Things happen hereabout they don’t tell.” It is a forgotten American frontier, anarchic but, as we come to learn, not entirely untouched by "progress". However, the effects of modernization on this rural community as explored by the film have not brought about positive change so much as they have disrupted custom.

After checking on the grave site of their grandfather, the group of friends travels to the grandfather's old home. On the way, the paraplegic Franklin spots a slaughterhouse through the car window, and he starts explaining the gruesome practice of slaughtering cows, how “they would skin ‘em sometimes before they were even dead.” We see images of these cows, crowded and hiding in the shade, only a matter of time before they meet the airgun. This conversation about meat is essentially repeated when the group of friends picks up a hitchhiker, (who is later revealed to be one of the cannibalistic villains of the film). In fact, the cannibal family has a history of working at the slaughterhouse, (“My family’s always been in meat.”) The most sickening murder in the film comes when one of the friends is hung on a meat-hook. In this way, the film seems to draw a parallel between the friends, the humans, and those cows that they saw about to be slaughtered. Furthermore, the protagonists don't get murdered with guns but by chainsaws and hammers. They get placed in iceboxes and strung up on meat-hooks. They have become the new livestock for this family with a tradition of working in meats. The relationship between the human body and meat is developed through these details, and furthermore, the notion of the commodification of life. However, it's also implied by the film that the murderers are victims in their own right, (their home is the one that's being invaded, after all.) The killers seem to kill for fun, but this same manner of killing done on a different species was once a profession for the family, a part of its history. The modern world has not brought this family wealth or success, but it has destroyed a significant part of its tradition. 

When the friends get to the rundown home of their grandfather, they find it overgrown with vegetation, and the watering hole that they used to swim in is all dried up. Whatever past they were hoping to recapture on their excursion is long gone. What awaits them is not only a total isolation from sane society, but also a gruesome and totally feasible horror. These are humans killing humans in much the same way that they kill livestock; it’s nothing unheard of. Indeed, the news reports are already swamped with these sorts of stories. 

The idea that the past is lost and that the culture is in disarray is reflected in the state of the cannibal family. Despite the grotesque nature of the family's activities, the family itself still seems bound to certain traditions and cultural norms. There is a clear patriarchal hierarchy in this family, as well as an implied veneration for elders. When it comes time to kill the final victim, the family assigns the duties to the grandfather. The two brothers in the film ultimately defer authority to their father, who appears to be the main source of income for the family. Thus, there is a sense of order within the family, and through various dialogues in the film, it is implied that the increase in automation in the meat industry has generated economic stresses on the family. Their livelihood has been diminished through the effects of modernization. The region they inhabit is economically barren as much as it is lawless. It's a region that's been left behind by the rest of America, and the family's subscription to traditional values has not afforded them opportunities for social mobility. The horror they present is afforded by their "backwardness," their holding fast to rituals and mentalities that have been outgrown by the rest of the world. 

 

The Haunting Of Hill House and Non-Linear Narratives on Screen (Cristina)

Now that we're deep in the month of October and fully in the Halloween season, I find myself returning to my favorite ghostly pieces of media. Among them is the 2018 Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House, an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel, which follows the five Crain siblings (Steve, Shirly, Theo, Luke, and Nell) through two different timelines: the summer their mother died when they were children and the days surrounding Nell's suicide in the present. The show hops nonchronologically between these two timelines, showing various events at Hill House, the haunted mansion where they lived as children, and [narrating] the prelude and aftermath of Nell's death.

Most impressive is how the show visually transitions over the timelines, tying each sequence together through some physical, sonic, or thematic connection. In one scene, young Theo pushes through a door and reveals adult Theo opening a fridge in Shirley's kitchen. As a child, Luke hears the ghostly sounds of dogs barking outside his window in Hill House and in the present-day Luke listens to another group of dogs while sitting in a park. Shirley, the mortician, prepares Nell's body for her wake before the scene transitions to Nell's wedding where Shirley helps her apply her makeup.

Aside from being visually compelling and creating a flow to each hour-long episode, the inescapable connection between the past and the present is one of the show's driving themes. In the first episode, Steve explains his understanding of the supernatural: "A ghost can be a lot of things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Grief, anger, guilt. But, in my experience, most times they're just what we want to see." 

For the Crain family, ghosts are memories. They are haunted (sometimes literally) by their pasts, which we fade in and out of. For example, Shirley in the present day is haunted by a male ghost, sitting and raising a glass to her. Deep into the season, it's revealed that Shirley met the man at a conference and had an affair with him. Her guilt literally haunts her with his image. 

Furthermore, while telling the story non-linearly, the first five episodes are organized around the five siblings from oldest to youngest. Each sibling is given an episode documenting their chilling experiences in Hill House and their reactions to Nell's death. Dividing the story like this not only allows for some spectacular character development, but it also raises the question of perspective. Our understanding of each scene changes depending on whose story we're following and what context we're allowed.

In episode one, Steve's episode, Steve returns to his apartment to find a sick-looking Luke presumably robbing Steve for drug money. However, when we reach episode four, from Luke's perspective, we see the scene again with the understanding that Luke is trying to procure some money to help his friend from rehab get off the streets. In one haunting scene from Steve's point of view, he hides in his room with his father while something turns the doorknob on the other side. The scene takes on a new context, when in episode nine we follow their mother Liv and discover that she is on the other side of the door, crazed after the house has been slowly eating away at her sanity.

Each moment and each line is meticulous, carefully building mystery and intrigue, but ultimately fitting together neatly when the audience is able to reflect on the full timeline, slotting each scene into its perfect place with new understanding. 

In the final episode, the remaining Crain siblings return to Hill House and see Nell as a ghost, who says, "Everything's been out of order. Time, I mean. I thought for so long that time was like a line, that our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they fell, one into another... But I was wrong. It's not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain. Or snow. Or confetti." And ultimately this is how we see the Crains and their story, like confetti, flowing in and around their lives through time, through sounds and motions and ideas, each memory slowly settling around us.

Post-Grad Purgatory in The Graduate (Eric)

The Graduate (1967) begins with an opening credit scene in which Ben, played by Dustin Hoffman, floats through an airport terminal on a moving walkway with only a white wall behind him. He doesn’t take any physical action to move towards his destination; he simply drifts by. The film takes place during the summer after Ben’s college graduation, and it explores the sense of confusion that the protagonist faces. Many elements of the mise-en-scene help to inform the notion of Ben’s existential anxiety while also commenting on the rigid social forces with which he is made to contend with.

As he is forced by his parents to greet guests in his home immediately after coming back from college, Ben explains to his father that he’s worried about his future. Ben doesn’t know where he’s going. When he comes down to greet the guests, he is framed in a handheld closeup to illustrate his sense of discomfort and aimlessness as various friends of his parents approach him with questions and conversations that he clearly doesn’t want to engage with. Ben appears completely lost throughout this whole sequence, and like the opening credits, there is a heavy presence of the color white in both the set and costume design. Ben seems to be drifting through a sort of post-graduation purgatory.

When Ben escorts the predatory Mrs. Robinson to her home, he is greeted with the massive white façade of her suburban mansion. At the end of the film, he again journeys into a massive white building, a church, to disrupt his love interest’s wedding. In this way, the color white comes to symbolize both the institutions Ben must contend with as well as the sense of nothingness that currently pervades his life. The white is often in contrast with more vivid colors, specifically green and blue. Right before Ben has sex with Mrs. Robinson for the first time, (which takes place in a white hotel room on a white bed), a blinding white light shines out from the bathroom behind him. This is immediately juxtaposed with a sequence representing Ben’s post-coital bliss, in which he literally floats in a blue pool surrounded by green bushes. At the end of this sequence, he is rudely awakened from his daydream by his father, who stands directly in front of the blinding white sunlight. The dialogue here again supports Ben’s current meandering. When asked what he’s doing by his father, Ben replies, “Well, I would say that I’m just drifting.”

The drifting past a white wall from the opening credit sequence stands in contrast to Ben’s hectic action near the end of the film, in which he drives through the night in order to find Elaine, his love interest. He drives through the night, and past mountains and trees to get to Elaine, who is trapped inside the massive white church. In context with the Robinson’s large white house from the beginning of the film, the white buildings can be seen as seen as hostile arenas. In the Robinson mansion, Ben is cornered by Mrs. Robinson. In the Church, he is attacked by the wedding party. Ben must contend with the powerful forces of tradition and institution in order to achieve his freedom, to escape from his blank white rooms. Ultimately, Ben and Elaine escape the church and go out on the road, but the film ends in uncertainty as the two find themselves in a bus surrounded by the eyes of middle-aged bus-goers; Ben sits on the bus with the same lost face from the start of the film as he is confronted with an unknown future and the judgement of social convention and respectability.

 

Lights, Camera, Logistics (Vanessa)

Filmmaking (or documentary web series-making in the case of HOUSE) is a lot about looking for answers. How do you get from point A to point B with all the equipment? Who do you cast? Who will be part of the crew?

As the reality for creating a documentary web series shot in three different cities set in, some of those answers became relatively simple. “However you can (within the means of the budget)” and “whoever is willing to do so” quickly became the answers to a lot of questions starting with “how” and “who”.

The Chicago and Detroit episodes of HOUSE were shot over the course of six days: four days in Chicago, two days in Detroit. The crew (for these two episodes) consisted of the following: me, my friend and fellow film major Giovanna (HOUSE's fantastic cinematographer), my brother, my dad, and my mom.  My dad and brother accompanied Giovanna and me to Chicago and my mom and brother accompanied us to Detroit. So, for the summer at least, the crew was truly “whoever is willing to do so”.

Figuring out who was going to do what roles was an adventure in and of itself. Giovanna graciously volunteered to be director of photography, which was fantastic. I told myself I could direct, produce, and do sound mixing, which by some miracle sort of worked out, at least for a few days. In short, having an actual (and excellent!) crew in Baltimore gave me a completely new sense of appreciation for actually having enough people to do everything—that way you can avoid simultaneously asking interviewees questions, mixing sound, holding a boom pole, nervously watching the battery levels on the sound recording device die, communicating with your DP, and telling the part of your brain that keeps asking “WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING?” to quiet down all at the same time.

My brother helping me with the slate.

Casting was also an adventure, seeing as I had no idea how casting for a documentary worked prior to starting to work on HOUSE. The same “whoever is willing to do so” philosophy applied: phone calls, emails, and Facebook messages were sent to friends, family friends, friends of family friends, and friends of friends of family friends. Thus, the cast (aside from the tons of friendly strangers willing to talk to Giovanna and me at the Chosen Few Picnic) was created. Honestly, one of my favorite things about HOUSE and about all of the experiences I have had with filmmaking, and especially documentary filmmaking is all the kind strangers you meet along the way.

Somehow, it all worked out. And looking back, I couldn’t be prouder (and slightly in awe) that it did. Pre-production was, without a doubt, hard. I know I must have given the production chair for Studio North (JHU’s student run production company from which I received the grant to make HOUSE) at least one near heart-attack when we we’re working through how we were going to stretch the budget enough to get through all three cities.

Car travel between cities: 2,540 miles. Not including driving within/around the cities and Giovanna’s flight to Chicago, which was about another 790 miles.

 

As you can probably tell, shooting the Baltimore episode in the fall was a completely different game altogether: substantially less driving (all of the equipment for Chicago and Detroit came from Baltimore because that's where the JHU-MICA Film Center is located, which provides access to equipment rentals for JHU students), larger crew (shout out once again!), and cooler temperatures. Overall, still a great time with great people.

In short: the logistics of HOUSE felt a little on the wild side at times, but I couldn't be happier with the experience. One of my favorite things about HOUSE is that it has been such a learning experience from the very beginning, and getting to see how it all has started to come together throughout post-production (post about post coming soon!) is ridiculously exciting. 

Some more house music until the next post:

Like This, Chip E. Feat. K. Joy

You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), Byron Stingily

Deep Inside, Hardrive

 

What is HOUSE (and house music)? (Vanessa)

This web series would not be possible without my parents, who have always raised me and my siblings to love and respect music both as solace and as art.

My dad is a Navy man, which resulted in me living in eight states and attending a combined total of seven elementary, middle, and high schools before I attended college. The things that were stable in my childhood as a result: family road trips and discussions about music, a deep love for my parents and siblings, and a fascination with how people interact with the world around them.

HOUSE, in particular, comes from the stories of my dad. My parents attended undergrad and met at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the late 80s and early 90s. The Chicago house music scene has its roots in the early and mid-80s as radio personalities and club DJs mixed elements of disco, electro-pop, synthesizers and drum machines (such as the Roland TR-808, the Korg Poly-61 synthesizer, and the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer) and eventually hip-hop to create new sounds that were danceable and innovative. Thus, came the emergence of house music. By the time my parents would arrive in Chicago, house music had expanded to an international audience, included several sub-genres, and became a unique community with a plethora of stories about who exactly made up various house music scenes.

Never one to shy from a good story, my dad would both play house music and tell me stories of what it was like to witness the house scene as a young person living in Chicago during the late-80s. And from that, the inspiration for HOUSE was born as I wondered “what must it have been like to be immersed in something that sounds so vibrant?” and “what must have it felt like to create something like house music?”

If you are a beginner to the world of house music or even to the realm of film production (especially documentary film production), there are three things that I think are important to know for a better grasp on both of these worlds: (1) house music and film production are all about community and being supported by a community, (2) house music and film production are all about passion (for others, music, movies, art, etc.), and (3) house music and film production are all about expression.

Film and house music are both blends of other mediums from which a certain “language” has emerged. At least in my experience, the language of video media (film especially) and of house music is reliant on emotion and experience. With this in mind, I like to think that a documentary web-series about house music, and documentary storytelling of all kinds, is some sort of weird blend of the subjective and objective. You capture someone’s truth while acknowledging that yes, “truth” itself is sometimes informed by emotion, experience, and expression. What is a good story, really, aside from someone communicating what it means to embody an identity, be part of a community, or simply exist as someone experiencing the strangeness that is life?

HOUSE at its simplest, is a story of community and connection within the house music fan bases in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, told through the voices of fans and creators alike. It goes through all three cities and features interviews with those who consider themselves “house heads” or part of the house music community. HOUSE explores how a genre of music can be a sound and a feeling.

Just as importantly, HOUSE’s production is also a story of community and connection between people who love storytelling. Those people have ranged from my dad and my professors who have supported me and helped me create this project (shout outs especially to Meredith Ward, Matt Porterfield, and Lawrence Jackson!!!) to my friends and fellow students who have been a part of the production team, individuals who have been interviewed (and people who have offered tremendous amounts of help in pursuing people to interview), and everyone else who got roped into this ride. One of my friends (another film major) and I constantly joke about how any sort of film/tv/web-series/visual media effort is really just a massive group project. BECAUSE IT IS! And hopefully, to anyone reading this, you’ll get to see that through this blog!

Picture from Chosen Few Picnic and Festival, July 2018 (where we shot part of the Chicago episode!)

Next time: “Casting" a Documentary, Producing and Logistics, and Directing

Until then, some house music:

In The Beginning (There Was Jack)

Move Your Body

Hot Stuff (Ralphi Rosario And Erick Ibiza 2018 Rework)

 

Timing Is Everything: Creating The Real and Imagined Timescapes in Film (Mireille)

The passage of time for a character either to portray a “coming of age” or simply to recount the events of a life is a recurrent theme in many films. Unless the piece is a documentary that intentionally depicts the life of a single individual over time, such films most often use will cast actors of different ages to show the passage of time as a character matures. The exception to the rule is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), a feature length fictional film which uses the same actors over a twelve year span. Boyhood is unique in its manipulation of cinematic time. It is the only fictional film, which by virtue of using the same actors over an extended period of time, seamlessly meshes together the changes that the characters undergo as part of the script with the physical and emotional changes that the actors endure as a result of change in age and maturity.  

Though Boyhood follows the lives of all of the members of a dysfunctional family it focuses specifically on Mason Jr., the main character. As such, the film follows Mason Jr. from the time he is in elementary school until he starts college. The strength of Boyhood lies in its ability to capture the authenticity of the cultural trends of each of the moments in time in which the film is being shot without forfeiting continuity. The end result is that Boyhood proceeds linearly and seamlessly. Despite the dramatic changes in Mason Jr.’s appearance as well as that of those around him, there are no moments of hesitation, leaps of faith or incongruence. Rather than specifically indicating a change or switch in time, in this film long periods are condensed into fragments which can sometimes take the viewer by surprise. This approach to the depiction of time gives the film an almost mundane and banal feeling. The passing of time in Boyhood captures the normalcy and individual moments of the film's fictional family without a lot of emphasis and interjection from Linklater or even the characters.

Unlike in Boyhood in which the lives of the characters continue to play out regardless of the outcome and the film persists from year to year, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010) takes the five day experience of a single character and transforms it into an agonizing ninety minute film that provides no respite from anxiety for the audience. In 127 Hours, Boyle recounts the true story of Aron Ralston, a hiker who becomes stranded alone in a canyon after a boulder falls on top of him and traps his arm. Ralston’s suffering in the film is portrayed as a “neo-documentary” as he is able to record his ordeal due to the fact that he had a camera with him during his accident, creating a video diary as events unfolded in real time. In fact, the use of the camera in both films exacerbates the sense of time being manipulated. Although the long shots in Boyhood give the feeling that the camera is acting as an observer over stretches of time, in 127 Hours the camera truly observes Ralston’s attempt to free himself from his situation, and at times is also very intimate. The moments of re-enacted actual footage from Ralston’s personal camera are interspersed with flashbacks of his past memories, which have a hallucinatory feel and give the film a sense of time warping. 

Though Boyhood was shot in segments over a long period of time and is a fictional film, it is still able to provide a feeling of “real time” and authentic setting without so much as a hint of a lack of continuity. On the other hand 127 Hours, which is a true story that by virtue of relying on video documentation must be continuous, still manages to warp time and detach the audience from the “realistic” perception of time. This innovation and genius of manipulation of time in Boyhood, 127 Hours, and many other films rests firmly in the ability to have the audience feel its passage, real or imagined, without lulling us into boredom or disbelief.  

 

Great Things Come In Short Packages: Why A Film Does Not Have To Be Feature Length To Be Memorable (Mireille)

With the Academy Awards being presented this evening, social media and many news outlets are buzzing about the film nominations, and whether one film will sweep all of the awards. These debates are centered on those films that have gained the most notoriety, and one of the types of film that is all too often absent in these discussion and may not even be readily accessible for viewing, is the short film. I do not intend to overgeneralize and say that wide attention is never given to these films, but they rarely receive the spotlight that feature length Oscar nominated films bask in.

Shawn Christensen’s Academy Award winning short film Curfew (2012) is, in my opinion, an extraordinary piece that depicts the typically human struggles, namely one’s own mental health and the frequent dysfunction that exists in families. By packing each frame of the film with rich music, color, and geometry, Christensen successfully conveys the horror of an attempted suicide, the ravages of drug abuse and domestic abuse, the dysfunction of families and the power of the human spirit and enduring love/blood bond between family members. There are full length feature films that are less successful than this short at touching the audience to its very core with a range of emotions that are real and never trite or banal.

The opening sequence of Curfew immediately shocks the viewer and sets the dark psychological tone of the film. At the same time, the hyper pigmented colors and the composition of the frame nudges us to question the reality of the situation. The film begins with a bloodied hand reaching for an old fashioned rotary telephone, painted in the same color tones as the blood tainted hand. The use of high contrast lighting projected on the phone adds to a growing dystopic feel. Christensen, who also plays the principal character Richie, cuts to a high angle shot of himself submerged in a bloodied bathtub while he listens helplessly to the woman on the phone who is pleading with him to take care of her daughter. At this moment we have the confirmation that we are witnessing a suicide attempt. It is, however, depicted in almost a picturesque manner, thanks to Christensen’s specific color palette and positioning of his own body almost as if posing for a painting. To complete the sense of detachment and other worldliness, Christensen incorporates the famous Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé, a piece normally associated with joy.  

As the film progresses, the audience is introduced to the complex relationships between the characters in the film. Richie’s sister, Maggie, has a daughter named Sophia whom Richie does not know but is responsible for taking care of her. The initial dialogue between Richie and Sophia sets the tone for Sophia’s apathy and defiance towards Richie, which is emphasized by Christensen utilizing very strong geometry in many of the shots throughout his film. The characters are initially separated by harsh vertical or horizontal lines which emphasize the divide between Richie and Sophia. However, as the film progresses Sophia begins to cross these constructed cinematographic boundaries to join Richie. These subtle gestures show that Sophia, although a young girl caught in familial and custody troubles, begins to develop a greater understanding and compassion for the situation and is able to sense the longing within Richie. This understanding arrives as a result of incessant questions and answers as well as sequences in the film that lead us to believe one thing that turn out to be another. Christensen juxtaposes the violence and ugliness of the drug world with the innocence of a child and the inevitability of man who loves his sister and niece. He interjects the hallucination of a man on the edge of self-destruction with the whimsy of child’s play.

By the end of the film we have returned to Richie contemplating his suicide in the dystopic and removed setting of his bathroom. The phone, in the same cyclical and rhythmic pattern that drives the film, begins to ring once more as Richie submerges his body into the bloodied water of his bathtub. However this time Richie disconnects the phone in a symbolic move to disconnect himself from the family that has re-entered his life and yet rejected him once more. However, without any warning, Richie violently reconnects the phone, and the film comes full circle with a plea from his sister to watch Sophia except this time it is not a desperate demand, but a conciliatory offer for peace between them.

I would venture to guess that this beautifully crafted and well-acted film that has won multiple awards, including the Oscar, is not on everyone’s short list of favorite or must see films. Why is that? Certainly one reason has to do with its lack of big name producers and actors that wield sufficiently prominent name recognition that draws audience into the light that they effuse. Nevertheless, Curfew is no less worthy for not being a feature film. My challenge to you on the eve of this Oscar night is to give the “shorter guy” a chance. Watch the Academy Award nominees for the short film, whether live action, documentary, or animation, and if you find them worthy perhaps help spread the word by allowing them to ride the crest of the wave of social media that they hardly get swept up in.

Director to Watch: Taika Waititi (Faith)

New Zealand director Taika Waititi first appeared on American screens in 2004, when he received an Oscar nomination for his short film Two Cars, One Night. In his signature comedic style, the filmmaker made an impression on audiences by feigning sleep as the nominees were read. In the years following this auspicious start, Waititi’s career in New Zealand has exploded, with his films becoming some of the country’s most successful. This year, his work will be returning to the American film scene in a form I find as unlikely as it is dangerous: as the Marvel Studios blockbuster, Thor: Ragnarok. Waititi’s directorial style is strikingly unique, especially when compared to the typical American superhero flick. The stories Waititi tells are small and relatively simple, following short and meaningful episodes in the lives of ordinary people. His second feature film, Boy (2010, US release: 2012) is both the director’s most masterful film to date, and an embodiment of all these qualities that seem so incompatible with the Marvel model.

Boy is, at its core, a film about reconciliation. The story, set in 1984, follows 11 year-old “Boy” and his troubled relationship with a long-absent father who has returned to their home in the New Zealand countryside after serving a prison sentence. The coming-of-age story avoids cliché simply through its authenticity–something that comes in part from Waititi’s personal experiences growing up in New Zealand. The film finds the difficult meeting point of immaturity and maturity and presents this juncture in a way that feels wonderfully true; full of both pain and humor.

Through both plot and visuals, the film equates maturity with the acceptance of difficult truths and immaturity with fantasy. Truths press at the characters–and the audience–from every angle; among them, the truths that mothers will die, fathers will hit their children, and people will ostracize those who are different from them. Boy’s younger brother, Rocky, acts as the film’s personification of youthful innocence, and responds to these truths with the power of his imagination. Early in the film, we see him berated by schoolchildren on a passing bus, to which he responds by raising a hand, scowling, and channeling his supposed psychic abilities to challenge them. Interspersed in the shots are images of stop-motion children’s drawings–we see Rocky’s imagined powers come to life on the page, exploding the bus. This vignette is just one example of the film’s use of fantasy, which appears again in the form of Boy’s collages, his father’s sparklers, and a dream sequence depicting his father’s fistfight with a biker gang. In these moments, we see artistry in hidden places–a stylistic choice that removes us from the linear progression of the plot but doesn’t distract from the narrative and in fact, provides a richer picture of our characters’ psychologies.

The quiet and artistic genius of Boy is what initially endeared the film to me, and that’s exactly why I worry that Waititi’s collaboration with a studio like Marvel could be disastrous. Those with even a passing knowledge of modern blockbuster films likely know that Marvel’s level of oversight is far-reaching at best, and hegemonic at worst. How could a director like Waititi, known for his unique sense of humor and whimsical, heartfelt stories, be able to develop a film that fits his own vision in this kind of environment? While I have no doubt that this will be a challenge, I have managed to find some hope for his successful foray into the world of blockbusters in his most recent film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016).

When Hunt for the Wilderpeople was released last year, it quickly shattered the New Zealand box office record (a record that was being held at the time by Boy). This improvement in box office performance is just one the ways that Wilderpeople constitutes a transitional piece. In terms of content, the film balances many of Waititi’s classic characters while incorporating striking and new visual spectacle through action. The film follows its 13 year-old protagonist, Ricky, and his foster father as they traverse the New Zealand bush together, unintentionally sparking a nationwide manhunt. This synopsis reveals the most obvious similarities the film shares with Boy: both feature a young protagonist and his father figure as they grapple with the nature of their relationship. The two share thematic similarities as well, tackling issues of maturity, grief, and trauma–but it’s how these ideas are explored which leads to their stylistic differences, and, in the case of Wilderpeople, gives audiences a glimpse of how Waititi might craft an action film for a multi-billion dollar studio.

For the most part, Wilderpeople feels more fast-paced than Boy. In places where the earlier film would have made its points quietly, exploring the bittersweet truth of its deadpan humor, Wilderpeople presses forward in constant motion. This pace is paired with a sense of intensity, seen in the snappy dialogue, the skillful use of montage, and even the depth of color that characterizes the New Zealand wilderness. The film also explores this intensity through visual dynamism, constantly building tension between wide shots and close-ups of varying tone–violent, as Ricky applies mud to his face like war paint; flashy, as a young girl rides horseback in slow-motion; delightfully macabre, as childish handwriting composes a forged suicide note. The intensity and pacing, though they don’t allow for the same exploration of Waititi’s artistic abilities that audiences saw in Boy, work in service of both the nature of film’s themes on the search for family and emotional connection, as well as the narrative’s scope–this journey involves more than just a family or town, but pulls in the entire nation (and its police force). The stakes that have been built up throughout the film culminate–in typical Hollywood fashion–with a car chase. Waititi is able to use this scene for more than just its spectacle, however, and deftly weaves in crucial dialogue (both comedic and tragic), necessary characterization, and artful composition.

While Boy show the artistic height of Waititi’s abilities, Wilderpeople contains something equally exciting for his fans: a potential bridge with the world of the blockbusters. It would be foolish not to fear that Waititi’s creativity and spirit will ultimately be hidden behind the flash of big-name characters and in the overly-complex, intertwining plots of the Marvel universe. But for those more inclined to optimism, I present Hunt for the Wilderpeople as reason enough to hope that the director can overcome these obstacles and produce something genuine.

Who Rules This Domain? (Tori)

    

    Followers of my posts must be acutely aware, at this point, of my love of theatre in addition to my love of film.  So, unsurprisingly, when I saw a class offered this semester called “Stage and Screen,” I added it to my cart immediately.  We started the semester by diving into some Shakespeare, and a few weeks ago we watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, which is based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear.

    I could easily devote multiple blog posts to this one incredibly rich film.  In class we primarily discussed how an epic tale like King Lear can be adapted for the screen, taking into account factors like the storm, the madness of Lear, the massive-scale battles, etc.  What I was most interested in, however, was one particular character in the film whom we discussed briefly in class but whom I want to explore further.  What better place to do that than in a blog post?

    One of the most thought-provoking discrepancies between Ran and King Lear is a major gender-swap that occurs.  Instead of the king dividing up his kingdom amongst his three daughters as he does in the play, Hidetora divides his kingdom amongst his three sons in Ran.  When we initially discussed this modification before watching the film, I was apprehensive.  There is definitely some justification for making this choice.  Ran is set in Medieval Japan, in which men held immense power over women.  Yet I still found this choice problematic, as the daughters are so central to my vision of anything remotely based upon King Lear.  Additionally, the other Kurosawa films I’ve seen, Seven Samurai and Rashomon, are also both male-dominated, and I was frustrated by the fact that Ran, with this gender-swap, looked like it was moving in the same direction.  However, my frustration did not last long.  Ran definitely is dominated in quantity by male characters, but Kurosawa actually does give authority to women through his implementation of a female character who I would argue is an extremely powerful and intriguing character.

    Lady Kaede is the wife of Taro, Hidetora’s oldest son.  From her very first appearance in the film, we become aware of the extreme power she has with words.  It is after Taro has moved into the First Castle in the kingdom to assume his position as head of the house of Ichimonji that we first meet Lady Kaede.  Hidetora has just made the announcement that he will be dividing his land among his sons due to his old age, yet he will keep his title as king.  We encounter Lady Kaede sitting on the floor in the middle of the throne room, staring into space.  The different levels in this scene stand out immediately; Kaede’s positioning almost makes her look subservient in the presence of Taro, who stands.  She immediately inquires as to the whereabouts of a banner that used to hang in the throne room.  This banner is in the possession of Hidetora.  Taro explains that he gave the banner to his father’s men when Hidetora gave Taro the First Castle.  Lady Kaede says simply “My Lord, it belongs with the head of the house of Ichimonji.”  Taro responds: “But Father is keeping his title and insignia.”  Kaede explains: “Without [it], you are a shadow.”  Taro answers, confused: “What do you mean?  He made it clear that I am now in command.”  Kaede answers, “In that case, behave as if you are” and swiftly leaves the room without another word.  Taro remains, and it is clear that Kaede’s words have resonated deeply with him.  Upon Kaede's exit, he quickly stands up and runs from the room to give the order to his men to seize this banner from his father.  It does not seem as if Lady Kaede would have any authority in this scene.  She sits throughout and is thus situated in the very bottom corner of the frame; she takes up almost no space.  Additionally, she makes no eye contact with her husband at any point; she merely stares into space.  Yet, it is her words that set the entire story in motion.  It is only after this moment that Taro becomes power-hungry and begins to take away the little power Hidetora left for himself upon the division of his territory.  And this is only Kaede’s first scene. 

    In subsequent scenes, her masterful way with words only grows; she blackmails, maims, and seduces her husband’s brother and slowly usurps the entire Ichimonji family.  She functions as a sort of Lady Macbeth character within this King Lear narrative, yet I actually think her character is more fully developed than Lady Macbeth because of the clear motivation for the evil acts she enacts.  We learn throughout the film that Hidetora killed her entire family; thus, her motivation is to enact revenge.  Towards the end of the film, she is beheaded, but she has done what she set out to do.  Though again only occupying a small portion of the frame, she forcefully declares her final words: “My sole desire was to avenge my family by watching the house of Ichimonji fall and seeing this castle burn.”

    Ran is a very long film, and Kaede does not get very much screen-time as the trials of Hidetora are explored.  Then, when she is onscreen, she often takes up only a small portion of the frame, and she is almost always shown sitting.  She is even sitting when she is killed.  Yet she still manages to achieve immense power over the men in the film through her words.  As a general says at one point in the film to Taro’s brother: “Who rules this domain?  You or Lady Kaede?”  Though Ran is, once again, a male-dominated film in terms of quantity, this film proves that women are capable of being powerful, even in the immensely patriarchal society that is feudal Japan.

To Serve Man (Conor)

    The Servant (1963) is a cold, cruel film. Tony, the young aristocratic protagonist, is established as listless, confused, and prone to alcoholism. His house in the opening reflects this. It is totally bare, a fresh canvass waiting, like Tony, for someone or something to show up and provide it with some kind of direction. Tony choses to let Barret, his recently appointed manservant, model his home and by extension, his life. This threatens Tony’s girlfriend Susan, and Tony’s house becomes a battlefield for control of Tony’s life.

            No one treats Barret worse than Susan. She speaks to him brusquely, callously orders him around and enjoys mocking him and forcing him to demean himself in front of her. While this treatment is somewhat justified considering Barret’s ultimate motives, her treatment of him is still off-putting; she is needlessly cruel. Susan is a good aristocrat, she is aware of her place in society and constantly reminds the servants of theirs. We get a glimpse of the type of life she would lead with Tony during their stay at the Mountset estate. The Mountsets are parodies of the extremes of aristocratic life. They sit in stiff, unnatural positions in a house replete with extravagant and expensive decorations and talk about nothing that matters.  The sound design for their house is quite unlike any other scene in the film. The noise they make is extremely reverberant, suggesting a large and empty house that, like Xanadu in Citizen Kane (1941), sounds more like a tomb than a home.

            His life with Barret however is not seen as a useful alternative. Barret begins taking control over more and more aspects of Tony’s life, and even after Tony fires him he cannot break free from his influence. Barret ends up back in the house but the relationship between master and servant is all wrong. Barret is no longer the quiet and calculating manipulator but the bold and terrible tyrant. In an effort to retain his agency, Tony lashes out at Barret to pick up his tea dregs, but it is too little too late.  The two men play a ball game upon the stairs and Barret remarks “I’m in the inferior position, I’m playing uphill” but by the end of the sequence Barret stands victorious at the top of the stairs while Tony fetches him some brandy. The enormous and ominous shadows they cast on the wall betray the importance of this encounter, Barret has not only won the ball game but also the role of master.

            The film is obsessed with the pettier, crueler side of human nature. The mise-en-scène is covered with mirrors and the scenes themselves are constantly shot in reflection, giving the world of the film a cold, narcissistic quality. Mirrors also reverse the images they reflect, as they do in the bar scene where Barret apologizes. The scene starts in reflection and then switches to a normal point of view, deliberately switching the relative positions of Tony and Barret just as their positions as master and servant are being switched in the drama. One particularly ugly convex mirror constantly appears in the film, and the reflections inside it are twisted and pinched, suggesting that mirrors and reflections themselves have the ability to reveal the psychic state of the world. In this way the narcissism and materialism inherent to the mirrors also becomes the truth about the world.

    In The Servant, some things really are just skin deep. There is no deep revelation as to why Barret treats Tony the way that he does just like there is no deeper reason given for Susan’s treatment of Barret. The characters in the film are cold, stupid, and above all cruel. Their eventual slide into pure decadence–the movie does end in an orgy, after all–reflects only the parts of them that were already there. Tony’s boredom and laziness reduces him into a shadow of his former self while Barret’s cunning ambition turns him into a brute. Only Susan remains untouched by the corruption, but her ready acceptance of her place as an aristocrat suggests that she will end up like the Mountsets. There are no real survivors in the film and no better alternatives are given. The lethargy and apathy of the aristocratic life is taken to its extreme and it is horrifying to behold.

House of Madness (Conor)

Warning: this article contains spoilers for the film House of Usher and by extension, the story it is based on. However, the original story is old enough and has entered so deeply into our cultural consciousness that I see no problem with discussing the plot points here. 

    House of Usher (1960) is a special low budget horror movie. Directed by the great Roger Corman, the king of B-movies and a pioneer in the world of independent filmmaking, the film is truly unsettling. Corman faithfully adapts the original story by Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps not always in plot but in theme, and the sickly psychedelic visual style adds a unique and appropriate spin on Poe’s gothic horror classic.  

            Vincent Price masterfully depicts Rodrick Usher as a kind of supreme protestant fatalist: he is certain of his own family’s evil and of the deserved judgment coming to him. Following this a feeling of intense guilt pervades the entire film. Rodrick explains his family’s atrocious history to Philip Winthrop–-who is betrothed to Rodrick's sister Madeleine and takes the place of Poe's original nameless narrator–-with the help of wonderfully insane psychedelic portraits painted by the character.  The repeated visual allusions to and depictions of crucifixes create a clear sense of generational guilt.  The Ushers are suffering from a kind of original sin, only in the film there is no redemption for them.

            The most effective horror films amplify to the extreme anxieties and fears that are basic to humanity. The intense fatalism that permeates the film helps illustrate two of these major anxieties: the inevitability of death and the fear of mental illness. Death is everywhere in the Usher household. The land it is situated on is dead and the decay in the house mirrors that of a dead and rotting corpse. Even Rodrick’s affliction-–best described as an extreme sensitivity to the senses–-slowly forces him closer and closer to a corpse by taking away his enjoyment in using his own faculties, dooming him to a bland and dark existence closer to death than to life.

            There is an incredible dream sequence in which Philip sees all of the past and present Ushers–-usurers, prostitutes, assassins, and even mass murderers–-energetically beckon him towards an open casket with a decorated skeleton inside it. The whole of history seems to be beckoning towards death and the fatalism so obviously displayed in Rodrick has manifested in the outer world of the house as an intense meditation on the inevitability of death. Like the original short story, both Rodrick and Madeline die and in the end Rodrick’s fatalism wins out over Philip’s optimism. Death may be inevitable, the film says, but it should still be feared and if Rodrick is to be believed, it is no release from the suffering of life.

             The corruption and insanity of the film is wonderfully reflected in its mise-en-scène. The oversaturated colors that contrast so intensely with the run down house seem sickly, not vibrant and it is no mistake that the palette of the house perfectly matches the palette of Rodrick’s grotesque psychedelic portraits of the ancestral Ushers. The numerous high angles in the film suggest that the portraits look down on the characters like menacing predators waiting to pounce. The madness so evident in their twisted visages is too strong of a corrupting force, and in the end not even Phillip’s love can save Madeline. She goes mad and strangles Rodrick before the house collapses on them, killing them both. Madeline develops the same madness that influenced the ancestral Ushers’ evil acts. Despite her innocence, she belongs not to his world but to the world of the house, who’s enormous fissure reflects the fractured psyches of those that dwell within it.

            What makes House of Usher truly horrific is that it presents the problems of death and insanity as inescapable. There is no grand solution offered to these anxieties in the film; Instead they are validated and strengthened by the events and visual style of the film. In the end it is no longer clear that Rodrick was the antagonist, something the film appears to establish very early on. It is no longer clear if Rodrick was the ultimate cause of the corruption in the house or simply another victim of it but the film hints that the latter is true. The only thing that is clear at the end is that Philip failed; that love cannot conquer death and madness. This bleak view of the human condition is the essence of the horrifying, and House of Usher delivers not just cheap, spooky thrills but also a bleak and terrifying view of human existence and the nature of suffering.

Writer's Block in Movies, and Barton Fink as a Meta-Film (Jaeyoung)

 The author Charles Bukowski once wrote, “Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.” Therefore, I will write this blog about screenwriters experiencing writer’s block.

 There are actually many movies that feature this nightmare, including Stranger than Fiction, Ruby Sparks, Secret Window, Limitless, The Shining, Barton Fink, and Adaptation.

 In Limitless and Ruby Sparks, writer’s block is featured early in the plot. Both protagonists of these movies, Eddie Morra and Calvin Weir-Fields, stare at blank pages and become easily distracted, until drugs and romance cure them of their disease.

 Meanwhile, Steven King doesn’t let his characters move on from this debilitating syndrome; the Secret Window and The Shining were both adapted from his novels, and they both feature a struggling writer who slips into a murderous rampage. Perhaps murder is the answer to every writer’s frustration?

 These films portray the frustration of writer’s block creatively and artistically (the tantalizing flashing cursor in Limitless, the anxious blank page atop Calvin’s typewriter in Ruby Sparks, the repeated "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in The Shining). However, the two films that fully explore the malaise of their respective screenwriters are Barton Fink and Adaptation, and I will view these works as meta-films.

 In the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink, the eponymous screenplay novice struggles to write a B-movie about boxer Wallace Beery. Unlike Limitless, Ruby's Spark, and The Shining, there is considerable emphasis on Barton Fink's environment; Barton's dilapidated hotel room, not him, seems to receive the most focus in the Writer's Block scenes. The slimy, peeling walls, the mysterious beach portrait, the persistent buzzing of mosquitos: it's almost as though the room is preventing him from writing.

 What makes Barton Fink so brilliant is how it meshes fantastical elements to explore Barton's frustration and confusion. It almost seems like the Coen Brothers knew poor Barton's situation intimately well...

 ...and they did! They wrote the Barton Fink when they themselves experienced writer's block with Miller's Crossing screenplay. In fact, there are so many connections between Barton and the Coen Brothers that it is difficult not to view Barton as a projection of the brothers' frustrated selves. Here are a few similarities:

• They wear glasses
• They are Jewish
• They all call New York their home
• They are highly educated
• They struggle with their writing material

 The first three similarities are fairly straightforward, but the fourth and fifth comparisons could use elaboration. Joel Coen went to NYU and Ethan Coen went to Princeton, where he wrote a 41-page essay titled, “Two Views on Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.” If that title doesn’t scream “educated elite,” I don’t know what would. This characteristic is also found in Barton, when he talks to Charlie, the "common man."

                               CHARLIE

               And I could tell you some stories –

                               BARTON

               Sure you could!  And yet many writers

               do everything in their power to

               insulate themselves from the common

               man – from where they live, from

               where they trade, from where they

               fight and love and converse and –

               and – and... so naturally their work

               suffers, and regresses into empty

               formalism and – well, I'm spouting

               off again, but to put it in your

               language, the theater becomes as

               phony as a three dollar bill.

 

 I'm not sure if the Coen Brothers are pretentious; if they are, I would definitely draw another parallel there.

 I've written that they both struggle with their writing material, but the material they work with are very different; Coen Brothers had been having a difficult time with the highly convoluted plot of Miller’s Crossing, while Barton Fink was tasked to write a bio flick about a boxer. In addition, Barton and the Coen Brothers have different degrees of freedom. The Coen Brothers have almost complete control over their movies (they direct, produce, write, and edit all their major films; they later created their own production company, the Mike Ross Company), but Barton’s screenwriting was heavily scrutinized by Libnick, his boss (must have a lot of action, be fruity, but not too fruity, have the Barton Fink quality, etc.). This is why the brothers have stated that Barton's struggles were not meant to reflect their own experiences with the industry. It is rather their frustration as writers that they channel unto Barton.

 To summarize, the Coen Brothers created a less likable version of themselves and dragged him through hell.

 Charlie Kaufman, on the other hand, does the opposite in Adaptation; he splits himself into the sad, frustrated but sophisticated Charlie Kaufman and the happier, simpler fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman. In the movie (and in real life, apparently) Charlie struggles to write a film adaptation about the Orchid Thief, partly because it lacks a "filmable" plot, and mostly because he is extremely worried about not doing the book justice. On the contrary, Donald writes cliched psychological thrillers. With Donald's help, the movie about a mopey writer finally develops a faster-paced (and pulpy) plot, as they discover the author of Orchid Thief's secret and fight to survive her murderous rampage.

 What's interesting to note is that Kaufman treats both his characters with sympathy; how Charlie feels, thinks, acts is all laid out for the audience to observe, and Donald's unsophisticated (suggests that Flowers for Algernon is about flowers) and enthusiastic view of life is lovable. As works of meta-cinema, Barton Fink and Adaptation are the antithesis to each other; while the Coen Brothers are the smart-aleck bullies that make their character's life hard, Charlie Kaufman is the parent who asks, "Tell me what what's wrong."

Motherhood and Sacrifice (Helena C.)

A good mom is hard to find in film. I probably don’t need to tell you that the majority of films that feature mothers feature heterosexual white women. But even these on-screen mothers are two-dimensional at best (pick one: loving and anguished or evil and manipulative). So, in honor of my mother’s birthday (and Mother’s Day!) next month, I’ve decided to dedicate my last blog post to moms on the big screen, focusing on mother's who make sacrifices for their children.

 

The mothers I’ve chosen to examine are: Hana in Wolf Children (dir. Mamoru Hosoda, 2012), Jules and Nic in The Kids are All Right (dir. Lisa Cholodenko, 2010), Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1974), and Precious’s mother and Precious herself in Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (dir. Lee Daniels, 2009). I tried to choose films that celebrate mothers who are both diverse and complex, films that challenge ideas of motherhood, and hopefully make us appreciate and understand our mothers a little bit more.

* * *

Hana in Wolf Children is probably the most traditional mother character of all the ones I’ve decided to discuss today, despite the strange premise of the film. Following the death of her werewolf husband, Hana must raise her two werewolf children in the countryside. The story is about her unconditional love for her children, and her relentlessness in trying to make ends meet in order to provide for them. Though some may say that the movie is too idealistic, I think the unconditional kind of love that the film proposes is exactly what makes it so emotionally punching.

 

This is Hosoda’s ode to motherhood, he wants to show the viewers (through absolutely stunning animation, I might add) the sacrifices that mothers make to raise their children. In the end, we get so emotionally invested in these characters, but there’s no pay off. There is no fanfare, no celebration of her success in raising two very demanding and unusual children, not even a thank you. Instead, it’s just Hana, alone in the mountainside house she worked so hard to build into a home.

 

On the other side of the spectrum, Jules and Nic in The Kids are All Right are far from being traditional mothers, but they are equally willing to sacrifice for the sake of their family. The film follows a lesbian couple raising two kids they each had from the same sperm donor. The kids find their biological father, Paul, and chaos ensues between the couple when Jules has an affair with him. Moreover, the film does a good job of denying heteronormativity; Paul does not end up connecting with either of his children, and the couple resolves their differences. These mothers too, sacrifice, acting in ways that they do not necessarily want to act, because it is in the best interest of their families.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, complicates this idea that being a good mother means sacrifice. Alice follows Alice Hyatt a recent widow who searches across the southwest U.S. to find a better life for both herself and her eleven-year-old son. She gets a temporary job as a waitress in a diner, telling herself that this is a temporary stop in her plan to move to Monterey and pursue her life-long dream of singing. Although she never reaches in Monterey, she ends up pursuing her dreams while staying in Tuscon, where her son has found his niche.

 

 

In researching movies for this post, I had difficulty finding films that portrayed black mothers in a positive light. In fact, I had difficult finding films about black motherhood period. It seems ridiculous that there are no films that come to mind with a black mother who isn’t some combination of abusive, poverty-stricken, uneducated, and addicted to drugs. While I think that Precious is revolutionary in the way that it tackles issues of body image, Precious’s relationship with her mother, Mary, isn’t particularly radical (Though Mary’s hatred of her daughter is later revealed to be complex and deeply psychological).

What is refreshing about this film is Precious’s relationship with her own children. Precious really tries to be a good mother, but she doesn’t give up her education to do so. All of Precious’s moments of great motherhood are supplementary (maybe even secondary) to her individual journey in finding a place where she can get the love she knows she deserves. She continues her education and decides to raise all her children by herself. Unlike Hana, Precious is both a mother and a real person; her motherhood is not all that she is, but it is still an important part of her.

* * *

Good mothers are always underappreciated, both in film and in real life. So this mother’s day, I encourage you to sit down with your mother and watch one of these films. More than just entertainment, I think they all propose more complex and nuanced portraits of motherhood than what we’re used to seeing at the movies. Most importantly, I think these films show us the ways in which mothers can be defined and imagined as real people both through and outside of the sacrifices that they make for their children.

Bon Appetit! Food in Film (Madison)

Growing up, I lived ten minutes away from my Pop-pop, an Italian chef who built his career in Philadelphia, working in restaurants and hospital kitchens. He wore newsboy caps and had a hatred of undercooked pasta, microwave dinners, sauce from a jar… and, well, anything he hadn’t made himself. Every Sunday, my mother, father, brother, and I would go to Pop-pop’s house for dinner; or, at least, what we called dinner, although it usually started around 3 in the afternoon. I can still remember the way his house always smelled of cooking oil, bacon fat, tomato sauce: his beige carpet had turned black after years of spills and the footsteps of dinner guests and family.

I shudder to think what Pop-pop would have said had he seen me eating lukewarm ravioli out of a can as I watched the films I want to discuss today. I’ve chosen five films that place a focus on food and cooking, ranging from light-hearted comedies to magical realist dramas, to answer the questions that brought me to this project: why do people want to watch movies about food? Why do people make them? What is so attractive about watching someone prepare a meal that you will never taste, and what is it that makes film an effective instrument with which to examine food?

The following are the films I salivated through in preparation for this post: Like Water for Chocolate (1992), directed by Alfonso Arau; Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), directed by Ang Lee; Julie and Julia (2009), directed by Nora Ephron; Romantics Anonymous (2010), directed by Jean-Pierre Améris; and The Lunchbox (2013), directed by Ritesh Batra. Each of these films is in a different language, and each (with the partial exception of Julie and Julia and Romantics Anonymous, which are both concerned with French cuisine, though the former has as much to do with American cooks as it does French) are concerned with different styles of food and take place in different cultural contexts. By discussing an international sampling of films (although it is by no means exhaustive) I am hoping to demonstrate the universality of what food signifies; although the meals and the tables at which they are eaten may change, people from all over the world want to watch films about food for similar reasons.

***

So, let’s start where most great meals do: in the kitchen. A great deal of the appeal of these films is watching chefs at work: in Julie and Julia, a film about a woman making every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking,we see raspberry jam being folded into white cream, red beef patted down in paper towels and seared in an orange frying pan, a chicken perfectly browned and emerging from the oven; here we are reminded of how beautiful food is, the truly engaging and surprising ways in which food resembles art, resembles painting, how delicately and artfully each ingredient is paired to another, and the visual play between parts of a meal. 

In The Lunchbox—a film set in Mumbai about a man who accidentally receives another man’s lunch, and strikes up a relationship with his wife, Ila—we hear the sizzle of dough fried in oil, the clicking of a stove as it’s being turned on; we are invited aurally into a woman’s kitchen, hearing sounds that are familiar even to those of us who don’t cook (who, like me, don't even have an oven). Our senses are engaged in more than just a visual way; we hear the food as music and we think of how it would smell, the frying oil, the gas from the stove, the aromatic sauces and spices. We recall how food engages the entire body as we see Ila slowly stuffing peppers with rice, when we watch her eat with her hands or dip her palm into a sauce to test it. Sound serves to more fully immerse us in the musical, corporeal pursuit of cooking, reminds us that a film about food is more than a picture on a screen, it should be an experience that stimulates all of our senses. 

 

In Eat Drink Man Woman—a film set in Taipei, about an aging master chef living with his three adult daughters, all of whom are struggling to figure out what they want—we watch Mr. Chu carve warriors onto the skin of a watermelon, or break a fish’s neck and debone it so carefully that a perfect skeleton emerges, and we see the care it takes to prepare food, the precision that great cooking requires. There is something oddly life-affirming about watching a man slice tofu into millimeter thin strips, or chop a root vegetable into perfectly even segments; the kitchen is a place of control, detail, exactitude. It is beautiful to see a person work so carefully at a pursuit that is entirely nutritive, that will be shared with others, and that, although it will be eaten and digested and entirely gone soon, for the moment deserves complete attention.

 

In Romantics Anonymous Anglique, a woman with crippling social anxiety, spreads melted chocolate across a cool metal counter, and her colleague whittles a perfect Eiffel Tower out of a block of chocolate, and we understand more than just texture (another means of engaging the viewer’s bodies with a filmic experience), we understand how cooking is therapeutic, how precision in the kitchen is more than just carefulness: to Anglique, who is typically a nervous wreck, the care and exactness of her profession allow her to heal, to exert power and demonstrate competency. Cooking is more than just ‘feeding work’, more than supplying fuel for a body; its intentional nature also does the ‘emotion work’ of improving the chef’s internal condition.

In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita, a young woman from a conservative Mexian family, in love with her sister’s husband, kneels on the floor she grinds corn for a tortilla, and we see her bare shoulders, a flash of her breast, the sweat on her neck: the film is deeply erotic, and we see how cooking becomes a means for Tita to express her sensuality in a socially acceptable way. Although she lacks power and agency in her life, controlled as she is by her mother, when she cooks she is free to use her body, to be passionate; she engages with her body erotically, and cooking becomes a way to end not only literal, but also sexual hunger.

 

In all five films, among these other images and sounds, there is the perpetual billowing of steam from pots, an ethereal presence in the kitchen that reminds the viewer how ascendant the process of making a meal is. Steam is the closest any visual can get to the otherworldly: it is a literal, visual means of communicating the mystical, of indicating that something if not divine, then at least fantastic is happening.

 

And food does allow fantastic things to happen: in The Lunchbox, two strangers pass notes along with bowls of paneer and rice, and start to fall in love; as the man eats Ila’s food, his life and hers become more aligned. She swats a fly away from her face at the same moment he swats one from his; as he reads her description of a fan slowing down and stopping, the fan whirring above his head slows and stops.

  

 

Even in Julie and Julia, a fairly down-to-earth film, two women who are separated by a span of sixty years are brought together by Julie Powell’s project to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes: in the film, scenes of Julie’s modern life are woven in between scenes of Julia’s in late 1950s Paris (in one scene, a room Julie is looking at in a museum literally becomes a scene from Julia’s life, as the camera zooms in and the light changes, and Julia Child bustles into the kitchen with her husband), and Julie constantly talks about feeling Julia’s presence in the kitchen as she cooks. Although this is not precisely ghostly, there is something magical about one woman being so connected to another (who she will never meet) through her recipes.

 

Another important and related thread connecting these films is the idea that cooking is a way for women to claim power, to reassert control over their lives and become meaningful, contented people: and, although there is a part of me that wishes cooking was not the only way women in these films could prove themselves (after all, who isn’t tired of the phrase “get back in the kitchen!”), there is something empowering about them. Although cooking is seen as a feminine pursuit domestically, the professional world of food is still male-dominated: seeing women enter that space is actually quite radical and feminist.

 

Still, it should be noted that even when women aren’t entering cooking in a professional sphere, food allows them to connect to others, to express things that they are forbidden to in regular life: through the lunches Ila prepares in The Lunchbox, she connects to a man who appreciates her, and eventually gains such a feeling of self-worth that she leaves her unfaithful husband (and not for another man, but for herself!—she remains single at the end of the film); in Like Water for Chocolate Tita pours her emotions into her food, causing those who eat it to weep if she is sad, to kiss if she is feeling sexy, to throw up if she is angry: she becomes powerful in a very literal way.

 

Food, too, creates a network between women: Julie learns to cook from Julia Child, Tita learns from her nanny Nacha and cooks with her friend Chencha, Ila borrows ingredients and gets advice from her “Auntie” in the upstairs apartment: cooking connects people, connects women, in a way that empowers them, draws them together and gives them strength.

 

Food is such a meaningful part of our lives, whether our parents made us dinner, or our babysitters, or our Pop-pops did, whether we eat out every night or make mac and cheese in a microwave. It is important both as something we experience every day out of necessity, and as something we use to mark special occasions, to pass on cultural values, and to bridge distances (both personal and temporal) that might otherwise be insurmountable. Food is a lens through which to view female agency, sexual politics, romantic and filial love, and internationalism; and, most basically, it’s fun. People (or, most people I know) enjoy eating, especially when the food is good, just as people (at least, all the best people) enjoy good films. So, I invite you all to make yourself some popcorn (with extra butter!), and dig in to all of the movies in this post; I promise you, you’re in for a real treat.  

On Casting: Why Smiling Matters (Andrea)

There are many directors who love the casting process. I am not one of them.

I know from the first time that an actor speaks whether he or she will fit the role, and it’s rare that I can be convinced to change my mind. The headshots and resumes are pointless to me, because I can remember the faces of those I liked, and I forget the ones I didn’t––but sometimes it’s a little trickier than that. Someone who looks the part can have an awful reading, or someone who reads perfectly can have a hard-to-work-with personality or schedule––all of which are deal-breakers. Although you do eventually end up with your cast, it is a bit like a puzzle. This is because you need your cast to not only act, but also to work together. And it can be hard to jam all those pieces together.

Going into casting Bernard Died, our main problem was that we had to cast a family. This meant that once we found our dream actor for the character of Ray, it would decide everything else about the rest of the cast––the race, look, likability. Tony and I put out calls for all ages and races to see what we got. We had two casting dates: October 4 and October 25, with callbacks on November 1. It was a cold read, which meant that we gave the script pages to the actors when they got to the audition. In all, we had 66 auditions, and 15 people were called back. We recorded our auditions so we could re-watch them later (also: where all the stills in this post come from!), and set up an email account ([email protected]) to communicate with the actors who RSVP'd.

The graphic we used in our casting calls, featuring Tony's real-life goldfish.

Out of the 66, many were bad, American Idol-style. One kid was too scared to audition and ended up crying in the corner of the room. Another had a laminated crab claw-shaped resume. Women as old as thirty came in to audition for a 15-year-old’s part. Another kid repetitively emailed us asking whether we were also casting for Teen Beach Movie 2. Really, nothing was off-limits.

But still there were many auditions that weren’t bad––that were actually really good. And those are the people we cast. Here’s a breakdown of how we ended up casting each of our characters, the good and the bad.

Ray Goby: As the main character of the film, Ray was the most important, casting-wise. We decided that whomever we casted for Ray would determine the rest of the family––race, hair color, everything. The fourth little boy that we saw on the morning of our first open call was Zach. He was dressed in an adorable button-down checkered shirt, with his hair combed to the side. When we explained that Ray’s character was somber and serious, his mom said, “You’re not like that, are you, Zackie?” and he shook his head and started to laugh. His happy personality, along with a good reading, convinced us that he could be Ray.

Just to be safe, we called back two other boys alongside Zach to read for us. One of the little boys looked the part, but his voice was deep and shy––and didn’t smile at us once. The other kid, we quickly learned, would be miserable to work with. He got up in the middle of the callback and starting running around the room, drawing on the chalkboards and “mooing” like a cow. He wouldn’t listen to even his father, who was yelling at him to come sit down. Unfortunately, Zach never showed up that day, and Tony and I started panicking that we hadn’t found our Ray yet.

The next day, I got a call from Zach’s mom saying that they were at the audition but nobody was there. It turned out that they had misread the date in my email. I ran down to the Mattin Center and auditioned Zach, and I am so glad that I did. He was everything we were looking for. He also smiled a lot.

Zach, in his hastily-arranged callback.

Mom: I remembered Kara from her emails leading up to the audition. She was courteous, used proper grammar (which is rarer in casting than you think it would be), and asked questions about her potential character so she could come prepared. She struck me as a mother when she walked in the room and, as I soon learned, she had a young son in real life. Kara gave a terrific reading––but what really impressed me was her attitude. She was the calmest and kindest person in callbacks, just like we pictured our Mom character.

Kara, in her first audition. She was always smiling.

Uncle Nick: Todd was one of the first men that we saw in the morning of our first audition, and Tony and I looked to each other after his reading and said, “That’s Uncle Nick.” He was clearly a seasoned actor, but he warned us that his schedule may not allow him to film with us––he was in a play for the rest of 2014 and wouldn’t be free until January. He was one of the reasons that we rearranged our shooting schedule, pushing everything back to January in the hopes that he would be able to act. He did.

Uncle Reish and Priya: These characters were a challenge. Reish and Priya needed to be related and, as written, they were Indian. After our auditions, we had only seen one Indian girl for Priya and none for Reish. On the second date of auditions, Jose walked in––another person who had been very invested in our project since he saw our call for actors––and we knew he was Reish after his reading. However, he was Hispanic, and we had only seen one Hispanic girl for Priya’s role––and when I offered her the part, she never got back to me. We couldn’t lose Jose just because of Priya’s character. Last minute, Tony found the roommate of one of his Hopkins friends named Fatima, who we never auditioned for the sake of time but turned out to be an excellent actress. (Also, the names of the characters were ultimately changed to Uncle Diego and Mariana.)

Jose, with his relaxed leather jacket and beanie. His attitude was very chill.

Aunt Lis and Uncle Phil: Although Lis’ character was a principal in the script and Phil was more secondary, what really convinced us that Salwa and Dave came together as a pair was their callback. We had all five family members in the room together, and the two invented their whole back-story for us as we got the camera rolling––about their wedding night, honeymoon, and martial issues. It was hilarious, with so much personality. Salwa’s monologue in her private callback also convinced us that she was easily the best candidate for Lis that we had seen all day.

The family in callbacks: Todd, Dave, Salwa, Kara and Jose.

Grandma: Martha was a SAG-actress that I had picked out from our email exchanges from the start––courteous and invested in the script. She gave a very strong initial audition, and during our callbacks, she also worked well with our young Rays––which was a big factor for us, since Grandma’s character needed to have a good connection with the lead. In reality, we were torn between her and another actress, but when I gave the other actress direction, she butchered the performance. By default, the part went to Martha, and I’m glad that it did.

Martha, giving an animated first reading.

Uncle Elliott: Casting this character was a bit of a nightmare. After going through auditions and callbacks, we still hadn’t seen anyone we would like to consider for Elliott’s role. It was getting close to production in January when we casted another SAG-actor. The Tuesday before the first shoot day on Saturday, he was called in for acting on the TV show TURN on our most important shoot day, so I had to fire him. I spoke with another actor on Wednesday, who promised me he could fill the role, but I woke up to an email on Thursday saying he would also have to cancel. In a last-ditch effort, I called up a Hopkins friend named Jason who was flying back from Los Angeles on our first shoot day, and he agreed to play the part. We rearranged our shooting schedule a bit to fit him in, and he ended up being one of the best casting choices we made––even though also one of the most stressful.

It may seem like I loved every actor and had no regrets in my casting decisions––because it’s true. They learned from each other, taught me things about directing, formed friendships, and were a lot of fun to work with on-set––always surprising me with their kindness, patience and ability. Most of all, they really did become a big family at the end, just like their characters.

So, I guess I’m glad I sat through 66 auditions to get to the couple that mattered.

All the luck in casting,
Andrea

His Homecoming (Abby)

As much as I’ve written about the concept of “home” through my own experience, and what this place means to me, the space seems to have pervaded the entirety of my experience this year, including an infiltration into other projects.

For three years, fellow JHU student Michael Nakan and I have been working on a documentary based in Baltimore, which has served as our home during our education here; Mike is from London and I’m from Minnesota.

Originally the project was research-heavy, focusing on the juvenile system in Baltimore and Maryland as a whole. As it developed, we met two young men with experience in the juvenile system: Vernon Crowffey and Justin Felder. The film and project shifted focus to provide insight through their personal experiences, and their stories are now at the forefront of the piece.

As we wrapped up the project this year, most of our time was spent on editing (a very long process for documentaries, especially those with observational elements), and I spent most of my time in editing with Justin, pictured above, and his family. We’ve been in contact with Justin’s mother for several years, but I was only able to meet Justin once, in July of 2013.

Justin was on house arrest when I met him, after being shuffled through the juvenile justice system for nearly a year due to fights and other conflicts he had while in detention. In the juvenile system, sentences restart with each move to a new facility. Justin’s sentence was therefore much longer than expected, and as a result, he spent his 18^th birthday, along with several holidays, in detention.

I’ve had a very close relative face the sentence of house arrest, and I know that this experience can be a strange one; you are home, but your home becomes a place of confinement, only a place of comfort in that it is not jail or detention. Facing mental health issues simultaneously, it was clear that the transition was not an easy one for Justin. Only a few months after getting his ankle bracelet removed, he was arrested as an adult and convicted of first-degree assault over an incident involving a gifted tattoo gun, and is currently serving a ten-year sentence in the Baltimore County Detention Center. He’s due out on parole later this year.

My limited experience with Justin face-to-face serves to note how briefly he’s actually been out of detention and incarceration in the past few years; it has only been a few months over the past summer, which makes me wonder about how he thinks about his own home and family. Justin is an 18 year-old incarcerated in BCDC. When I was 18 I was also away from home, but for college, halfway across the country. He and I represent two very different experiences of what it means to come home, a strange thing to consider given that Justin is a subject of our documentary; being so close in age to him, seeing him as a subject has sometimes been difficult, and I connect with his story more than I might have thought. The connection may sprout from my experience with my relative, or from an idea as abstract (yet common) as coming home. My relationship with his story brings a whole slew of other questions to the forefront, but what I can take away from the experience of making both films is that coming home is oftentimes far from smooth, a displacement, even, but one that we might long for regardless, if for no other reason than as an escape from confinement into a more comfortable form of it.  

 

Spin-off is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: the Evolution of a Young Norman Bates in the TV series Bates Motel (Helen)

(image licesensed for use in accordance with WikiMedia Commons)

 

    A year ago A&E launched their ambitious television adaptation of film’s most notorious killer, Norman Bates. Fifty-three years after the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic thriller Psycho (1960), the concept of the television prequel was met with mixed reviews. The beloved film already suffered three sequels and one truly awful shot-for-shot remake, starring none other than Vince Vaughn. When I had first heard about this television adaptation I was reluctant to watch another ham-fisted attempt at tapping into the original thrill of unraveling the mystery of the Bates Motel. What these sequels failed to do was to get at the heart of what made Psycho interesting: Who/or what made Norman Bates kill? The real terror of the film that lingered long after the credits was not the murder, but the maddening question of the interrogation. Why?

 

    The series begins with a seventeen year old Norman Bates and his young attractive mother Norma, leaving their home in Arizona and Norman’s recently deceased father, for the sleepy town of White Pine Bay and the newly branded Bates Motel. The setting remains intentionally ambiguous in time in the beginning of the pilot, toying with our sensibilities opening on a black and white film on Norman’s television and later transitioning to Norma’s vintage Mercedes. Although it becomes a clear that it's a modern adaptation as soon as Norman takes out his IPhone at the bus stop. This was my first pause for concern. A modern adaptation that was also a prequel for Psycho seemed unnecessarily complex, and perhaps a forced attempt to distance this story from the inspiration. The show similarly has a love-hate relationship with references to the Hitchcock classic. From similar shot compositions, hiding the first casualty of the show behind the shower curtain, to an otherwise pointless dialogue about taxidermy, there seems to be a conflict between a transparent appreciation for the original film and the audience expectation for not-so-subtle homage. Although, that is a somewhat forgettable aside given the very uncomfortable and distasteful sexual assault that occurs between Norma and the disgruntled previous owner of the motel in the pilot. Norman is shaped in part by witnessing the event as well as participating in the murder and subsequent cover up. While I understand the intention of this story arc which drives the first season, the scene in question was one of the most horrific things I've seen on cable television.

 

    The storyline takes a very distinct turn from the film in the second episode when Norman’s older estranged brother Dylan is introduced. His abrupt hatred for his mother seems fairly unbelievable at first, but the complexity of his character and the tension between him and Norman builds as the show progresses.  The first episode struggles with its identity but it comes into its own by the third and develops into a Twin Peaks-esque thriller beyond the coupling of the Bates family to a greater mystery of a seemingly white-picket town with very dark secrets. The general idea of the show seems to be that Anthony Hopkins’ “Norman” as we know and love was not just a product of an overbearing mother and a violent sexual perversion, but of an entire community that indulges in a hidden sex trade among other transgressions. Violence towards young women is not an original motif in murder mysteries on television by any means, but it does add a logical stepping-stone to Norman's progression into the madness that is Norman Bates. Although a secret Chinese sex slave trade in a seaside Oregon town seems somewhat unbelievable, the frightening resonance of sex and violence within the walls of the Bates Motel works surprisingly well with Norman's story arc.

 

    The greatest strength of the series is the strange and often Oedipal relationship between Norman and his mother. While this is the main explanation given for Norman’s behavior in the film, the way it plays out in the series is wonderfully surprising at times. She is controlling and alluring, but also very warm and oddly reasonable most of the time. Perhaps, I like Norman, am easily manipulated by her charms, but I found myself never feeling entirely pulled out of the show by her behavior. Also the uncomfortable sexual chemistry between Norman and his mother is very subdued, which makes it almost creepier. Every time Norma dismissingly utters, "Norman, I'm your mother" in response to a mildly tense interaction between the two of them it makes me shudder. The show straddles the line between a closeness between mother and son that have suffered a mutual trauma, and a protective and possessive behavior mixed with a displaced sexual tension that both fascinates and repulses. The lurid town of White Pine Bay and its cast of unsavory characters ultimately pale in comparison to the engrossing Bates family drama in the center of it all.

The Bates Motel is finishing up its second season with the season finale premiering on A&E on May 5th, 2014.

 

 

Digging Out (Abby)

The end of classes and graduation are approaching, and the familiar anxiety of a big event also draws near, one that connects family, drama, and discomfort. As the title of a previous post suggests, though, there are happy things too. It’s a time for celebration.

Yet that stone of anticipation sitting in one’s stomach is far from easy to digest. Much like before winter break, when I chose to take on this film project, my brain continues to run through potential bad scenarios like an over-stylized melodrama on repeat. Who’s going to be where and what if they see them? How will I split my time evenly? Jesus, even writing this makes me want to slap myself; at some point you just have to throw your hands up and say, “who gives a shit?”

The mood of this anticipation is what brings me here, to this post. The very real anxieties and the very real disavowal of said anxieties are exactly why I suddenly rushed to put the logistics of the project together in the midst of finals last semester, and why I needed to do so.

In fact, as much as the film is about family, and about place – home and geography, and how such factors inform who we are – it’s about the individual’s experiences with these shaping forces. The hooded figure above is one of my sisters, who kindly agreed to help me by appearing in a few shots. Bringing a human into visual representations is vital to the felt experience of the film. The final product may fall into abstraction at points, in addition to being too personal and micro in scope for the audience to connect with (if it even ends up being shared with an audience), but at some level my sister may provide that small hint of universality through the personal, someone through whom an outsider might feel a connection.

And though her face isn’t visible in any of the shots, in the end, her persona has agency.  Though the shaping forces are important, they are not defining; the film is not about things being done to someone while that someone exists a passive blob of human matter, and that’s not what life is about.

It’s about digging out. It’s about saying “F you” to the things you can’t control, and doing your own thing. It’s about understanding where you came from and how that has shaped your view, picking out the things you like about it, and taking a shovel to the rest when you can. It’s about taking the time to say, “who gives a shit” while you try to enjoy something that’s supposed to be good. So, as much as I know I will seesaw back and forth from this claim, I say bring it on, graduation drama. Who gives a shit. 

Wait, There Are Happy Things Too? (Abby)

 

 

    Dwelling on the paradox of home, as I have been, I’ve been searching my footage for stills that I think best visualize its conflicting nature.  I’m not sure if what I’ve included above, comprising one tilt shot, is necessarily the best; it just had the unfortunate fate of being near the beginning of the footage, which ultimately became the criterion for inclusion. Originally I was planning on talking about the contrast of the visuals in these images, the beauty of the sky that evening that wouldn’t be possible without the biting cold that the snowy landscape represents, how this is a metaphor for simultaneous positive/negative connotations of where I'm from, how I wish the blacks of the image weren't so noisy (more visible when you see the video). But after having gone through each shot once again, I'm wandering in a different direction.

    The first time I saw my footage, my mind crept into a dark cave to hide. I didn’t think that any of it was anywhere near adequate, let alone good, and I beat myself up quite a bit about it. Besides a lack of quality I thought that there were so many more things I could have and should have shot. There was the night I was driving my mom and sister home from work during a snowstorm, and the flakes were the biggest I’ve ever seen, nearly half the size of a dollar bill. It was gorgeous, and I feel that the film stock I was using probably could’ve captured the flakes that flurried through the streetlights.  Of course by the time we were home, the storm was over. Or there was our sad little Christmas tree, a free item given to us by my aunt (free Christmas trees are somehow used to incentivize her work as a realtor) which is the closest I’ve seen a tree, in spirit, come to that of Charlie Brown’s:

    Or there was my parents faces, their physical features, and the material objects that make them who they are. I wish I had some of that, though in that case I would have had to explained what I was doing.

    Focusing on these things I don’t have, though, has made me realize what I do. There is some usable film footage to work with, but there’s also a whole swath of content that I’ve captured with my phone. Videos on my phone are not film, and they may not share the same quality, but it’s possible that I could incorporate some of what I captured with my phone over break. Whether this would be jarring for the viewer is unquestionable, but it has the possibility of being jarring in the right way.  While much of the audio I recorded is family drama, some of the videos I have reveal brief spurts of spontaneous happiness and joy, which is something I feel is missing from the project at the moment. As much as I drone on about family conflict and destruction of what is maybe too idyllic a vision of one’s origins, there are happy moments too. Moving forward, I hope to find some lighter moments to shake things up, lighten the tone at times, and provide a fuller picture of my winter break and experience at home.

 

Street in St. Paul, MN. iPhone still from video of dancing in the backseat.

 

Production Diary: Studying "Home" (Abby)

    The recent snowfall in Baltimore reminds me of home, as snow tends to do. It’s not an identical situation by any means (considering that snow typically stays on the ground where I’m from), but it’s something familiar to hold on to, even if the city’s drivers can’t say the same.

    I’ve been dwelling on the idea of home frequently. Winter break is a funny time for college students who attend a school far away from home. For me, going home meant a mix of familiarity and culture shock, which gradually developed into an event that was anticipated with dread.

    Coming from the background that I do - a Midwestern origin and modest means - I’m statistically a minority at Hopkins. It can often feel that way, too. In this regard, home was at first a welcome release from a school that often seems dominated by east-coasters and kids with money. But the idea of “home” takes on an entirely different meaning after living in a new place with new experiences for a long period of time. What was once so familiar to the point of being unconsciously normal is now strange, and a distant familiarity develops. Home is something you were once close to, but which you can never approach in the same way. Without realizing it, you’ve become a different person: holidays are now more chore than celebration, and living far away deepens hidden wounds that resurface at would-be merry gatherings.

    This is a phenomenon – that is, coming back to a family in decay - that I wanted to capture during winter break. I wanted to take a life snapshot, to document my feelings of coming home during my final winter break of my college career, but to also have something tangible that I could then use in the process of creating something new. This “tangible” thing would be represented through audio and visuals. I would try create something about my life at home through film. All of these thoughts came last minute, in the anticipation of going home for break. I was lucky enough to be able to take a 16MM Arri SRII camera and Zoom recorder home with me.

    The plan was loose. I was going to shoot at home, but knowing how camera-shy my family is, this would have to get creative. The audio recordings would be easier to pull off, I knew, because I could easily hide the recorder around my home, which I did. The terrifying part of the project is that I had no knowledge or control over what might happen, but I can tell you that what did unfold I couldn’t have expected, and that it was dramatic, to say the least. Whether I can skillfully edit this raw material into a polished final project is another question.

    What will follow this semester in future posts is a recounting of the process of shooting and recording for this film, as well as a diary of the editing process. The film, at this point, feels like a mix of documentary and fiction. It will be a restructuring of things that did happen (audio recorded with the Zoom and, at critical times, my iPhone) and of somewhat staged situations (visuals recorded on film) to make a hybrid of sorts. In the process, I’ll continue to explore what “home” means for me, especially relevant considering that I’m not quite sure where I’ll be living in a few months post-graduation. The idea of what “home” is and what it connotes will continue to fluctuate for me, I know, but in the end I think this film will represent a very specific time, place, and feeling in my life, especially as it relates to home; a very personal film indeed. 

From Mother to Monster: The Burden of Motherhood and the Perversion of a Household in An American Crime (Yasmine)

The film An American Crime (2007) portrays the horrific abuse of sixteen-year-old Sylvie Likens by her temporary caretaker Gertrude Baniszewski in a small Indiana town circa 1966. Although it dramatizes testimonies from the actual court case reflecting on the events leading up to Sylvie’s torture and murder, the depiction of Sylvie’s anguish, though potent, does not propel the story forward. Instead the film focuses its lens on the middle-aged Gertrude, examining her evolution from an overburdened mother to a monster. Though the 1960s “was a time of deep cultural changes altering the role of women in American society”^[1] the primary goal of a mother was to assume the role of caregiver to her children, cultivating an environment of emotional stability and security for the members of her household “amidst the pressures of modern life.^[2] Gertrude’s frustration with her deteriorating household and inability to escape the unfortunate circumstances of poverty and single-motherhood in her homebound life are evident in the film’s mise-en-scene and manifest themselves in her megalomania which ultimately leads to the captivity and degradation of a helpless girl.    

The confining atmosphere surrounding Gertrude throughout An American Crime illustrates her imprisonment within her role as a single mother and within the physical manifestation of the home sphere. In the midst of a chaotic and shallow living space—children running around, bills scattered next to bottles of pills and alcohol—Gertrude tirelessly irons in the corner of the room denoting an unstable home life as well as a constant struggle of working without the regular support of an archetypal male breadwinner. Whether she is managing her seven children, supporting her twenty-something-year old ex-lover, Andy, or doing menial housework to make a living, Gertrude rarely occupies the outside world, signifying the ways in which her daily routine binds her to the house. Even when outside the house, Gertrude’s presence often seems crowded by the multitude of children who tend to occupy more physical space in the composition than she does in several shots. Andy also serves as a contrast to Gertrude’s limited lifestyle as he seems able to traverse between home life and the freedoms of the outside world; though he may on rare occasion visit Gertrude’s world, his visits are brief, destructive, and lacking the responsibility indicative of an ideal father figure.

The tight framing of Gertrude’s close-up shots and the way in which her clothing blends in with the peeling wallpaper and dingy furniture further emphasizes her inseparable connection to her house, which has become central to her identity. A high-angle long shot in which Gertrude lies crying on the couch, partially consumed by darkness and dwarfed by the furnishings in her home, reveals the hopelessness of her situation. In essence, Gertrude has few options and her life does not belong to her; instead she belongs to her household, for which she sacrifices everything to keep her tentative home life from ruin. Though the house may be Gertrude’s prison, it is also the realm in which she can maintain an illusion of order and control.

 The ambiance inside the Baniszewski house darkens as Gertrude's fears of inadequacy and helplessness reach a peak. Gertrude’s monstrous transition becomes apparent as her face is increasingly obscured by the deep shadows and she transforms into a tyrannical, dark force.  Only after she percieves Sylvie to be a threat to her dysfunctional family and most importantly to her facade of control, does Gertrude makes it her mission to subdue Sylvie's agency.In a scene moments before she intensifies her abuse of Sylvie, Gertrude looms above her in a two-shot and asks her children “Who’s in charge?”—a rhetorical question meant to affirm her dominance. Gertrude is no longer the picture of frailty and despair, but rather the judge and jury of her household. The children prove their acquiescence to Gertrude's sovereignity in a reverse shot, with their undivided attention, staring unblinkingly at their mother. Whereas Gertrude limits the mobility of her children using verbal commands and intimidation, she treats Sylvie as little more than an object, pushing and pulling her about the house. By contrast Gertrude’s mobility increases as a previously static camera follows her about in a more loosely framed tracking shot, indicating that she draws strength from Sylvie's oppression and the children’s submission.

When Sylvie is tied up and confined to a dark room, where she endures a long process of dehumanization--literally becoming a fixture of the house--she loses posession of her life in the same way that Gertrude has. With every mark of Gertrude's discipline Sylvie's body becomes the canvas of  Gertrude's shame and failings as a mother.  Ironically, the violent and oppresive means by which Gertrude “[keeps] her family together” and “holding [their] heads high,” secretly shames and pervert her household with monstrosity unbefitting the ideal structure of family life. 

___________________________________________________________________________

[1] “The 1960s: A Decade of Change For Women” U.S. News 12 March 2010

[2] "Marriage and Family" American Decades: 1960-1969 Ed. Vincent Tompkins. Vol. 7. Gale Cengage 1994  eNotes.com 8 Sep, 2013 

"That's My Family, Kay. It's Not Me." (Natasha)

    I have a solitary qualm with The Godfather Parts I & II, one that has no effect on my intense obsession with the single greatest movie duo of all time.  Including the future.  The qualm is:  How did Vito end up with sons like Santino and Fredo?  The reality that Vito and his only remarkable son reject, and reject desperately, is that Mike, the youngest, is also the only son capable of replacing his father. But how did Vito, the sole surviving Andolini of Corleone, killer of tyrants and savior of Italian immigrants, get two such failed heirs before Michael could redeem the brood?

    I love James Caan’s Sonny as much as the next bridesmaid.  His entrapment and brutal assassination are devastating. For many reasons, Sonny is appealing despite his uncouthness. His anger inspires anger in us; his vengeance becomes our purpose, too. I remember the scene of Sonny's death as the most upsetting I've ever seen. (I always skip over it when I watch Part I.)  But he is doubtless an inapt successor to the omnipotent Corleone patriarch, especially after Robert DeNiro explains the Don’s beginnings in Part II (and really, whose genes brought forth those hirsute shoulders?).

    Vito claims he always expected Sonny would inherit the family business, the political connections, that whole underworld estate; yet at the height of the Don’s reign he is still silencing his kid in public, upbraiding him in private and rejecting his every plan, be it money-making or murderous.  Sonny is more than aggressive, he is warlike, but he lacks the tactical mind and self-control that would guide his vengeful passion. He is a soldier who can't take orders, a hitman doing a businessman's job.  When Sonny is gunned down on his way to enact a hasty and violent plan--which we are deeply invested in--we are reminded that his life, not his death, kept him from the head of the Five Families' table.

    Fredo is another matter entirely.  Vito can't even define what it is that's wrong with him. He has always been a problem, as evidenced by everything he has ever done. His troubling bout of pneumonia as an infant vaguely informs everything from his clumsy failure to shoot his father's assailants to his debasing vice addiction in Las Vegas. John Cazale imbues Vito's forgotten son with as much pathetic, alcoholic, high-pitched, balding insecurity as we can stand without making us really hate Fredo.  Rather, we disdain him. Respect will never be granted him, and it is sad to watch him demand it explicitly.

    At first, he is untrustworthy purely because he is incompetent--he cannot even grip a gun tight enough to fire it.  When the patriarch finally does fall, Fredo has no more patient relatives to "assist." He is sent away to Las Vegas, ostensibly to protect him from assassination attempts that really only threaten the real Corleone power, Mike. Moe Greene admittedly took him off the Corleone family's hands to alleviate the burden Fredo created.  In Nevada, he grows to be untrustworthy because he believes anyone who promises him a cut of their profits and he cannot stand up for himself against those who would challenge the Corleone family. Michael even warns him, "I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again.  Ever."

    Fredo cannot stand being Michael's underling and Michael cannot stand Fredo's inexplicable stupidity, his unbridled behavior or his dangerously fickle loyalty. Their relationship ends up so strained that Fredo starts aiding Michael's would-be assassins in plots against the new Don Corleone, the ultimate betrayal of the family and of familial connections altogether.  And he still wonders why he was "stepped over" for the role of head of the family, exclaiming, "I can handle things! I'm smart!  Not like everybody says!"  (My family quotes that line often, so any tragic quality in it has disappeared for me.)

    So how did the endearing and mysterious young Vito come to raise two boys so unfit for the task of being his sons? His orphan childhood and early immigration left him alone in a strange place. If he raised himself, why could he not raise Santino and Fredo better? Perhaps Michael had the benefit of Vito's previous failure.

    But still, what do you do about those first two?

 

 

~ Natasha Hirschfeld

Tokyo Sonata: A Happy Ending for a Middle Class Family, Maybe (Sam)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of Tokyo Sonata (2008), has no relation to that other great Japanese director by the name of Kurosawa, but if the skill he demonstrates in constructing this particular story is any indication, he is indeed great. Known for his horror films, this Kurosawa undertook something a littledifferent with Tokyo Sonata.

The film examines a middle class Japanese family and the tensions they each experience as their desires clash with external forces, such as the slumping economy and societal pressures. It primarily seems to be a critique of authority, how it's being undermined in Japan.

In the beginning of the film, the father of the family, Ryuhei, loses his job because of outsourcing – Chinese workers are apparently much cheaper. But he doesn't tell his family the news. Instead, he pretends to go to work every day in his suit – but then waits in line, looking for a new job while collecting unemployment checks. Eventually he takes a job as a janitor, cleaning bathrooms in a mall. Before going home, he changes back into a suit to keep up the appearance that he still has his old office job.

Meanwhile Kenji, his younger son, desperately wants to learn to play the piano. But Ryuhei sternly refuses to pay for lessons. So Kenji saves his lunch money and pays for them in secret, learning from his teacher that he has a talent for it. And Takashi, Kenji's older brother, joins the US military to fight in Iraq, also without Ryuhei's approval. And when Ryuhei finally discovers Kenji, he attacks him in a rage, causing him to fall down the stairs. Kenji suffers a minor concussion. It is Ryuhei's very powerlessness that causes him to so desperately want to assert his authority, but this is ineffective and only leads to his family's suffering. This is also implied to be true of Japan as a whole: the economy is currently slumping and there is no military. Japan is unable to protect itself from either economic threats, such as globalization, or military ones. So the country is similarly powerless, and similarly places arbitrary and overly restrictive boundaries on the behavior of its citizens.

After about this point in the story, the film begins to lose its realist edge. All the events seem driven by preceding events; events as they apply to all of Japan or segments of Japanese society logically lead to their consequences on the individuals in the family. But at this point in the story, not only do several things happen to each member of the family which were not only not at all set up from previous events in the story, but are implausible or surreal enough to merit skepticism.

For instance, Megumi, Ryuhei's wife, is kidnapped by a burglar but becomes willing after seeing Ryuhei in his janitor's uniform at the mall; she drives him to the beach, where they spend the night in a small house. That night she wakes up and sees a strange light over the ocean; the next morning, the burglar is gone. After Megumi sees Ryuhei at the mall, he wanders into the city and is knocked over by a car, unconscious and seemingly dead. Kenji, meanwhile, unsuccessfully helps a friend run away home. He is caught trying to sneak onto a bus to get out of town, and spends a night in jail after being uncooperative with the police.

The next night, all three members of the family return home and have a quiet meal together. Then, several months later, Kenji plays Claire de Lune at a piano audition and completely blows away the other competitors in a display of not only his technical skill, but his emotional competitiveness, his parents watching proudly in the background.

I think this final section of the film is highly ambiguous. Like a dream, it is left open to interpretation. It's possible all of it is a dream, or a fantasy – an overly rosy way for things to turn out that isn't entirely realistic. The point, I think, is to finally show how to escape the cycle of feelings of powerlessness and impotent displays of authority. And that is simply through tolerance of yourself, but of others. This is why Ryuhei wears plain clothes for the first time in the film in this final scene, and why we see that he now supports Kenji's piano playing.

 

The Trials and Tribulations of Being a Son on FX's Justified (Chris D)

The father-son relationship is, in some ways, the most important male relationship in existence. While it is ostensibly a nurturing bond, it is also inherently competitive. Fathers want to raise their sons to follow in their footsteps, but in doing so they make themselves obsolete. This past season of Justifiedmines this relationship in order to take its characters in new directions which are familiar, but also novel.

                This theme seems in retrospect to be an obvious one for the show to tackle, as Raylan Givens, the main character of the show, has had extremely troubled relations with his criminal father in the past. It was obvious that some form of conflict would eventually pop up between them. However, instead of taking the obvious path of bringing them together in a head on conflict, the show ended up taking the theme in a much more subtle route. Raylan and Arlo, his father, are almost never on screen together for the entire season until the very end. Instead, the theme of father and son is explored through the villain before being cast upon the more obvious subjects.

                Robert Quarles, the villain of the season, does not, upon first glance, seem to have anything to do with the theme of fathers and sons. As a fast talking drug lord come down from Detroit to tame the wilds of the Kentucky oxy trade, he seemed to embody the expansionist, a theme which is common in many Westerns. However, as the season goes on, the viewer learns that every action that he performs comes from his relationship with his father figures. He attempts to make his adopted father proud by earning money and influence through the drug trade, while at the same time reenacting the terrible things that his biological father did to him on gay men that he kidnaps and tortures throughout the season. Quarles never outgrows the shadow of either of his fathers, and ends up crashing and burning because of it. Even as he is being chased by the Marshall service through the hills of Kentucky, his first priority is to call the head of the Detroit mob, his adopted father, and say that he wants to come home.

                This theme is greatly enhanced through the performance of Neil McDonough. He plays Quarles as a cheerful smiling villain who is as funny as he is scary. He cracks jokes as he kills people, and is always polite. However, as the season goes on, it becomes more apparent that McDonough plays the character as an overgrown child. He constantly tries to show off his sleeve holster like a child with a new toy, and he struggles to be seen as better than his “father’s” biological son. All of this is done with the emotional openness of a child showing the stunted development of this man.

This issue of father and son drives Raylan as well. Timothy Oliphant plays Raylan as a very emotionally closed character as opposed to Quarles’s childlike openness. He constantly denies that he has any issues with his father, and does everything he can to ignore the issue at hand. However, Raylan’s drive to show his father that they have nothing in common is the baseline for everything that he does.

All of the troubles he has with his father come to a head in the season finale in which we are treated to a scene in which Arlo attempts to tell Raylan that he is proud of him. The scene is touching, especially owing to Timothy Oliphant’s performance as Raylan tries to pretend that he doesn’t care, but cannot stop himself from feeling glad that his father is finally acknowledging him. This only serves to set the viewer up for the crushing final moments of the season in which Raylan realizes that Arlo has killed a friend of his, thinking it was Raylan, in order to protect his adopted “son.” This realization that he has truly lost his father breaks Raylan in a way that the viewer has never seen. He isn’t angry or vengeful. He just seems defeated. His father has a new son, and he has been left with no one.

                Justified has always been about fathers and sons, even from the very beginning, but never before has it been such a central element to the plot. By exploring this tenuous male relationship, the show is able to explore the depths of its characters and bring them to their knees. It can be said that those who know us best can hurt us most, and that statement is never truer than in this past season.

Much thanks to Creative Commons and the public domain images used. Creative Commons in no way endoreses any opinions expressed in this blog. Any opinions, views, or ideas are soley of the poster.

 

 

From a Whisper to a Scream: On the Artaudian Cruelty of LA PIANISTE (Lisa)

Emerging from her “cage” at the Vienna Conservatory, Erika Kohut now enters a prison of a different make: the apartment she owns with her mother. They have a confrontation over what forty-something Erika has done earlier in the night – namely shopping for frivolous clothing – and hair-pulling and ugly histrionics ensue before mother and daughter reconcile to take their nightly place in the bed they share. In this title sequence, director Michael Haneke presents the microcosm of their relationship, bipolar and incestuous in all but deed. Adapted from the novel by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) carries the fragrance of an old novel, but the film's motifs of ritualized sexual violence and voyeurism come across as a contrarian gesture. Marrying the contemporary and classic in an incisive study of brutalized passions, Haneke explores man's urge to direct his own suffering.

Isabelle Huppert inhabits the eponymous part of Erika, a woman whose personal and professional lives are thoroughly dedicated to control and the pursuit of perfection. Huppert has a history of playing self-contained women and here she is in fine form as a Viennese specimen of severity whose transgressive desires seethe underneath a mask of icy poise. Operating on the principles of classical tragedy, Haneke paints two distinct and opposing artistic tendencies within her, worrying the tension between the chic and the abject.^[1]

The film chronicles her suffering, which begins with small acts of rebellion in the form of sexual compulsions. Erika's identity is fractured by disparate roles; At home, she simultaneously plays the infantilized daughter and the surrogate husband for her mother. Outside of her conservatory and home, she is a lurker, a voyeur with latent violence directed towards others and herself. Indeed, Erika is something rarely seen in cinema - a beautiful female pervert. This uncomfortable tension is acknowledged even within the film, at a sex shop on one of Erika's furtive excursions where her very presence disturbs and shames the male customers and breaks them out of the fantasy. Erika is seemingly repulsed by her femaleness, cutting her sex as a hobby. Thankfully Haneke doesn't predicate our empathy on the provision of backstory. One simply reacts to the shocking but plaintive truths of what she's doing and to the questions of why or why not. The character cannot be so easily consumed by the viewer, who must activate his or her fantasy in the detangling of her motivations. It is not clear, for example, whether Erika, the middle aged piano teacher, has fallen below expectations of fame and fortune because she lacks the talent or because she has purposely thwarted her ambitions out of spite for her mother. One does get the sense her artistic drive has curdled when she browbeats her admiring students. Her self-loathing in this respect perhaps manifests most clearly in a subplot where she sabotages the potential career of a female student with an equally domineering mother.

Haneke, in his infinite perversity, sets up the love triangle between Erika, her mother, and the rakish student, Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel). While Walter's eagerness provokes Erika, Freudian principles of transference help explain why Erika cannot feel or respond to the latter's conventional expressions of love.^[2] He even changes a public performance of a Schönberg piece to one of Schubert's just to impress her (and that is quite a difference – jumping from the Modern discordance to Romanticism).^[3] Walter pursues her ardently, initiating a game of seduction meanwhile failing to (or refusing to) recognize her bizarre symptoms of illness. For an instant he is a paragon of mythic muscularity, the white knight to liberate the repressed heroine but, alas, the film is decidedly anti-love.

For Erika has an uncompromising idea of love, in which art is to be confused with real life. Music is the predominant metaphor for love in the film, and the recurring scenes in which Erika gives rigorously precise note-by-note analysis of a piece of music serve as reminders of the fact. Walter, while attractive to her, is not the perfect lover because he does not play music they way she expects, which is to say with complete dedication to the art. Walter uses music to seduce Erika, who does not want to be seduced and possessed in the same way she is possessed by her mother. Her rigid rules for sexuality in turn convey the Romantic paradox of applying Apollonian order to Dionysian emotions. “Feelings won't defeat my intelligence,” Erika states to Walter after an unconsummated sexual encounter. Later she gives Walter explicit “instructions” by letter expressing her desires to be beaten and gagged. Alternatively infuriated and disgusted, Walter is curious enough to keep playing. Subtextually, Erika controls Walter's pleasure in the same way the director controls the emotions of the viewer. Haneke is a formalist and he shoots meticulously, so his presence is felt less in the stationary camerawork and more in the actions of the characters. Haneke identifies with Erika and projects those active, masculine characteristics onto her, but Haneke does not turn her into feminist statement. Erika is not so much aware of her behavior as she is reacting defensively to protect her selfhood.

When Erika's wishes are granted in the traumatic climax, the scene is devoid of sexual gratification. Walter's transformation from the precocious admirer to the abusive savage is shocking. “Not as you imagined?” Walter mercilessly posits, and with this statement Haneke seemingly implicates the viewer seeking vicarious thrills from a movie about sadomasochism.

In the end, life goes on and the contemptuous young man abandons the broken older woman as the viewer similarly walks away from the film. With Huppert's indelible parting look of agony and her final tragic gesture, Haneke draws back the curtain over his theatre of cruelty.

---

[1] Refer to the Apollonian-Dionysian axis. " Fredrich Nietsche, Raymond Guess, Nietsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

[2] Freud describes transference as "...re-experiencing emotional relations which had their origin in…earliest object-attachments during the repressed period of…childhood." Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

[3] For curious minds, the two pieces in question are Schönberg's Opus 33b and Schubert's Scherzo from the Sonata in A Major.

Image courtesy of the author.

Internal Landscapes in John Cassavetes' Shadows (Shauna)

America was in a state of disequilibrium and flux in 1959. Over the preceding decade, an uncontested post-war order had come to dominate, epitomized by suburban sprawl, escalating homeownership, conspicuous consumption and the primacy of the nuclear family. Yet, those values represented unrealistic, vacuous ideals for certain segments of the youth generation. At the close of the decade, new foci of social and cultural power began to coalesce: the nation’s discontents began to assert themselves.

Culturally, 1959 was a tremendous year. Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, Malcolm X articulated a radical racial politics of black “militant separatism,” and Lenny Bruce tackled lewd and taboo topics on primetime television.[1] Artists and independent thinkers were addressing the nation’s neuroses directly and unapologetically.

Allen Ginsberg observed in the summer of ’59 that “America [was] having a nervous breakdown…” but he also asserted that this was no cause for alarm, at least among artists and outsiders: “[T]here has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy, and public gaiety among the poets of the city.”[2] If anything, this was a cathartic moment for artists. The cultural shift threatened the immaculate, formulaic narrative of the 1950s —a narrative that pervaded television, Hollywood and, allegedly, mainstream daily life. But it also marked a renaissance for the culturally estranged, whether Bohemian, beatnik, or black male.

Amidst this turbulent culture, John Cassavetes offered Shadows (1959), a film shot on-location in New York’s Time Square, MoMA’s sculpture garden and Central Park, with improvisational elements infused into the script and the actors’ performances. Although the film was not improvised per se, it evokes the spirit of a neorealist picture or documentary. Whereas Hollywood narratives are structured around a masculine “coherent ego” whose equilibrium is temporarily disturbed, and subsequently “restored,” Cassavetes rejects such plot-driven devices [3]. Instead, he elaborates the worlds of characters whose names are shared by the actors who play them.

Internal dramas and peripheral conflicts converge on three siblings: Benny, a light-skinned deviant juvenile and musician; Hugh, his much darker older brother, who is unable to secure serious musical gigs due to his race; and their sister Leila, a coquettish girl who ultimately reveals her naiveté and vulnerability. Much of the conflict stems from Benny and Leila’s lighter complexions, which allow them to navigate the mainstream space of white America, internalize racial hatreds, and turn against people darker than themselves — even while they remain emotionally close to Hugh. But what is crucial about the film is its level of nuance, achieved through silent dialogues via close-ups, and idiosyncratic speech patterns. Cassavetes is “not afraid to create an inarticulate character,” and this lack of anxiety about conforming a character to an ideal persona is what sets his work apart as strikingly realist and distinct from mainstream Hollywood.

 

 

John Cassavetes’ film Shadows explores issues of race relations, familism, and gender equality through the intimate space of characters’ minds. Internal conflict and mental perturbation dominate the film, so that subtle indicators of psychic tension often take priority over blatant displays of conflict and violence. Indeed, aggression and passion, whether in the form of masculine roughhousing in an alleyway or Leila’s precocious advances toward Tony at the literary party, provide insights into each character's emotional instability.

On the narrative level, Ben accompanies Tom and Dennis in their perpetual and vacant pursuit of women in diners and clubs. The three men seek out ladies who are apparently equally disinterested in relationships. Tom implies that the females' behavior encourages superficial, short-lived romantic encounters: “You want to get picked up, don’t you?” But If Benny is portrayed as a transient cool cat, maneuvering the neon urban jungle and seeming to transcend racial identities (in different contexts he appears more or less African-American), Cassavetes suggests an overlooked level of depth to his persona. This complexity is especially evident on the level of form, as in the iconic composition in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art. The shot evokes Ben's introjective mind or spirit, eliciting our empathy for a character who habitually seeks physical intimacy with women prior to emotional discourse. Whereas Ben silently contemplates a single work, Tom dismisses the whole collection as a series of artifacts testifying to the hypocrisy of academia. For Tom, the artworks merely serve to reinforce inflated intellectual egos: the garden signifies a place “for a lot of creeps trying to show off what they know.” Yet, Tom morphs into a similarly detestable intellectual bigot when he accuses Dennis of knowing “nothing” and asserts his own mental superiority (“I went to college, Dennis”). Tom’s relentless belittling is visually accentuated by his dominant height. Though Dennis wears the trench coat, his small stature and strong New York accent endow him with a juvenile quality, as do his vague appraisals of the works (“He’s a statue”). Dennis at least comes to terms with his lack of insights, whereas Tom persists in his blind self-righteousness. The animosity persists until their moods spontaneously shift and harsh language is replaced with frenzied laughter and seemingly authentic bonding over the voluptuous "Standing Woman" by Gaston Lachaise.

A similarly sudden reconciliation is later enacted by Hugh and Benny, and ultimately by Hugh and Rupert; all three resolutions testify to the transient nature of conflict and moods in the film. Prior to the resolution between Tom and Dennis, tight compositions and the telephoto lens collapse the space of the sculpture garden, heightening the sense of antagonism. Two bronze sculptures (a nude and an abstract piece) in the mid-ground divide the frame roughly in two, momentarily allocating "territory" to each man. The nude leans forward slightly, as though enraptured with their conversation, and the diagonal slant of the abstract form mimics her curvature. Long shots in the sculpture garden inter-cut with the tight, low-angle shots of the men, optically diminish Dennis. He seems comically small when Tom scales the bridge, elevated just a few feet off the ground. Even in the least constrained shots (camera pans that punctuate the garden scene), looming trees and flat concrete building facades heighten the impression of enclosure.

During the altercation, Ben withdraws from the dynamic. He is subsequently shot in profile, in front of a carved stone face whose eye sockets, defined brows, and slightly frowning lips seem to represent rounded caricatures of his own features. Cassavetes provides a confrontation of graphic visages. A strange indigenous quality pervades the image of man and his nonliving alternate. It is made all the more bizarre by its modern environmental context — the apartment buildings, just behind the brick walls of the tranquil garden space. Tom’s berating voice (“You’re nothing but an ignorant slob”) further undercuts the sense of epiphany etched on Ben’s expressive features. The juxtaposition of the visually serene, introspective, daringly primordial image with Tom's antagonistic language, imparts an unsettling atmosphere. It's as though we've ventured into the intimate space between dialogues, a realm largely ignored by conventional Hollywood.

 

Conflict between people has traditionally served to forward the plot in narrative cinema. Yet, Cassavetes adopts a decidedly different goal in conveying the transient moods, clashes, and ritual battles between friends, relatives, and acquaintances in Shadows. Rather than exposing power dynamics, social structures, or discrimination, interpersonal conflict primarily functions to reveal what is inconsistent or inauthentic about the individual. Moreover, these clashes —even when they play out against the vivid, magnetic, and external landscapes of New York City— are fundamentally about intimate encounters. They range from vacuous, superficial, and fleeting (like the dates with countless women in restaurant booths) to genuine and nourishing (as in Hugh and Rupert’s conversation in Penn Station at the end of the film).

Whenever Ben and his crew meander through the city space, flattened anonymous figures, graphic signs, reflective windows, and vehicles constitute a dynamic background. The impression is wholly impersonal. For instance, the masher assault on Lelia occurs under a multiplicity of bright lights, movie posters, and shop windows. That is, it plays out in full view and elicits little response from the crowds. Aside from Cassavetes' chivalrous cameo, the assault goes largely unnoticed and unpunished. Though this urban landscape is neither overtly hostile nor strictly bifurcated along race, gender or generational lines, there is evidence of increasing atomization and loneliness amidst the crowds.

Taking this external landscape as the basis for his cinematic “improvisation,” Cassavetes might have encountered problems while addressing social inequality, hostility, housing discrimination, or miscegenation law. But Shadows never devolves into a didactic montage about victimized groups. Cassavetes refuses to demean his characters with pity. Instead, he explores universal problems of authenticity, agency, and identity, allowing Ben, his sister Lelia, and his brother Hugh to possess personalities neither completely wholesome nor wholly flawed. No single figure explicitly emerges as the dominant or "lead" role.

Ray Carney has observed that “[w]hile Hollywood melodramatically externalizes characters’ emotional states, writing them in ten-foot-high letters…to maximize their visibility, the drama in Cassavetes’ work is internalized to the point of being almost subliminal.”[4] The director’s capacity to evoke conflicted personas, ambiguous relationships, and dynamic psychological landscapes culminate in a brilliantly arresting visual spectacle. Cassavetes does not resort to the grotesque or the abnormal, yet there is something profoundly distinctive about the world he constructs. He manages to incorporate conventional spaces, conflicts, relationships, and roles in a completely unconventional, almost surreal manner. Temporal transitions and connections between characters seem smooth and convincing; yet, critics have widely acknowledged the episodic nature of film. It occurs almost as a series of vignettes, each extraordinarily pleasurable to watch and an exceedingly truthful portrayal of what it is like to be human. That is, to experience and to deny prejudices; to project an ingenuously constructed self-image (Leila); to feel isolated, undervalued, or exploited (Hugh and Ben); to share in the common renewal of laughter; to make oneself vulnerable to another.

---

[1] Fred Kaplan, “1959: Sex, Drugs and Datsuns,” New York, Vol. 42, No. 20 (8 June 2009), pp. 38-43.

[2] Ibid.

[3]  Maria Viera, "The Work of John Cassavetes: Script, Performance Style, and Improvisation." Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 42, No. 3, Problems in Screenwriting (Fall 1990), pp. 34-40.

[4] Carney, Raymond. The Films of John Cassavetes : Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

The Function of Dysfunction (Clare)

Perfect is boring. Even though this existence is something we seem to strive for as a society, this unreachable ideal really isn’t that interesting. Nobody wants to read a book, hear about, or see a movie about anyone or anything being perfect.  Perfection doesn’t breed conflict and that’s why we’re drawn towards things with discord, with problems, with issues.  That’s why the dysfunctional family has been a trope found in film:  it’s the perfect situation for conflict, and lots of it. There are the serious films dealing with family dysfunction, but a more unique breed is the comedic dysfunctional family. Two modern examples are The Royal Tenenbaums and Little Miss Sunshine, films that make us laugh at things that aren’t supposed to be funny. Though they’re both from the same family (forgive the pun), these two films address dysfunction in different ways, yet still make us laugh.

 

Family isn't a word...it's a sentence.¹

Nothing screams dysfunction more than the Tenenbaum family:  the interactions between Chas, Richie, Margot, Etheline, Royal, and the other cast of characters that make up their extended dysfunctional family can hardly be called average. We’re first introduced to the Tenenbaums as Royal is telling the children (Chas, Riche, Margot) that their mother (Etheline) is kicking him out and keeping the kids and the house. Already a broken family, each child is introduced as the prodigy they are:  Chas the businessman, Margo the playwright, Richie the tennis pro. Even though they’re a fragmented family this is the peak of the family’s success, and as the narrator says, “Virtually all brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.” Jumping ahead those two decades the Tenenbaum kids have grown up, but have only gone downhill in the years. And when Henry Sherman (friend and business manager) proposes to Eltheline, Royal isn’t too pleased she’s planning on getting married to someone else. So Royal takes matters into his own hands, and of course doesn’t handle things in a very deft manner. When he ambushes Etheline on the street to ask to spend more time with her and the kids she of course refuses, and instead of taking no for an answer he tells her he has cancer, that he’ll be dead in six weeks. Royal’s “illness” brings the family back together, and reunited under the same roof for the first time in seventeen years. The Tenenbaums’ dysfunction is only amplified as the film continues.

One of the most apparent ways the Tenenbaums are dysfunctional is their interactions together. Speaking on the collective whole, the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums have a skewed sense of right and wrong, and this results in inappropriate behavior-a lot of it. There’s the time Chas asks Richie inappropriate questions about his suicide attempt the first time he sees him after the incident, or how Margot’s cheating on her husband with childhood friend Eli, or any of Eli’s drug-induced actions (especially crashing into the house). Royal is by far the biggest culprit of them all:  from lying about his “illness,” his condemning Margot’s first play on her 11^th birthday, picking up half the flowers he just put on his mother’s grave to Chas so he can put them on his wife’s grave.  The root of the dysfunction comes not from the Tenenbaums behaving badly, but their honest belief that their actions are morally right.

The happy family. ²

Beyond just their actions amongst each other, the clearest way the Tenenbaums’ dysfunction shines through is in their dialogue.  Much like their physical actions, their communication is wrought with inappropriate moments.  Provocative, revealing statements and moments are often followed by lines that have nothing to do with the problem at hand, or speak to such an insignificant part they’re almost non sequiturs.  When Eli and Margot break off their “relationship,” at one point Eli says to Margot “You’re in love with Richie, which is sick and gross.” After a pause, all Margot answers with is, “Do you send my mother your clippings and your grades from college?” When Richie and Margot’s husband, Raleigh St. Clair, go to a private investigator to see if Margot’s having an affair, Margot’s secret past is revealed in a fast paced montage of her life. After discovering his wife smokes and the many, many, many people she has slept with, all Raleigh can say is, “she smokes?” These seemingly off base responses demonstrate how the Tenenbaums are unable to deal with confrontation, further heightening their dysfunction.

"Wait...so most families don't wear matching tracksuits?"³

Overall, the Tenenbaums aren’t an exemplary family: they lie, have affairs, keep secrets, abuse drugs, divorce, and generally behave badly. But despite all this, the reason we can laugh with and at the Tenenbaums is their world isn’t really the one we inhabit. Yes, they’re in New York. Yes, those are streets we could drive down. Yes, we too could own Chas and Co.’s red Adidas tracksuits or Etheline’s Hermés handbag. But the Tenenbaums’ reality is most definitely a surreal one. Their personal successes of epic proportions are improbable, even if they all are the prodigies they are presented as. Their social interactions cross the realm of probability:  yes, a coked out writer could drive his sporty convertible into a brownstone, but its unlikliness coupled with everyone else’s responses crosses the line into unrealistic. Even their home is a funhouse of extremely affluent proportions. Of course, their world is meant to exist in this realm of hyper reality. The Royal Tenenbaums is told as a story, complete with narration (Alec Baldwin, what a voice), chapters, the classic opening of a book (guess the title) as the first shot of the film. We’re meant to view this as a story, as a fable, as fiction.  By lifting our expectations of realism also lifts the societal expectations of appropriate behavior on both the character’s and our behalf. So it’s okay to laugh at the Tenenbaums, because we all know this really isn’t happening.

"Everyone just pretend to be normal." ⁴

Meet the ­­­Hoovers.  There’s Sheryl, mother and head wrangler of the ­­­Hoover clan.  There’s Richard, father and motivational speaker determined that his “Nine Step Program” is revolutionary, something that will raise his family out of the economic realm they’re in. And there’s Dwayne, the teen so dedicated to getting into flight school and Friedrich Nietzsche he doesn’t speak. At all. There’s Frank too, the second highest regarded Proust scholar in the world and the newest addition to the Hoover’s. He’s staying with his sister Sheryl fresh from the hospital after a suicide attempt. Oh, and he’s gay too. Grandpa, Richard’s father, lives with them as well and besides being a heroin addict, he's a very, very perverted old man as grandfathers are often portrayed, right?   And of course there’s seven-year old Olive, youngest daughter and the adorably bespeckled second runner up to in the regional Little Miss Sunshine pageant.  But, when the winner of the regional has to forfeit her crown (something about diet pills), Olive takes the title and with it the chance to compete at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in sunny California. So the gang all piles in the yellow Volkswagen bus for a southwestern adventure, and with all that dysfunction in one car, comedy ensues.

For the Hoovers their dysfunction lies within each character’s individual personalities. From the above synopsis above it’s easy to say no one character is even remotely like another, and we see a glimpse of how they all function in the early scenes of the movie. Around the dinner table, Dwayne sits mutely as Grandpa loudly curses the entrée. Sheryl bickers with Richard as he goes off on a rant about the Nine-Step-Program, and Olive keeps asking Frank why his wrists are all bandaged up. It’s clear there’s a level of tension between these people, a manifestation of their inability to interact with each other. Their differences and inability to accept these differences creates an incohesive family, a cornerstone of the dysfunctional family.  But Little Miss Sunshine amps up the Hoover’s dysfunction to a whole new level by sticking all six of them in the Volkswagen for an extended period of time. The proximity and length of their journey to California from New Mexico exponentially heightens their incapacity to relate and function together. Each person’s personality and characteristics becomes even more pronounced and apparent, conflicting and contrasting even more so with the others in the confines of the car. Grandpa’s inappropriate statements move to a sexual level when he advises Dwayne to “f*** a lot of women. Not just one woman. A lot of women.” Richard rants for an even more expended period about the “Nine Step Program” to his captive audience, prompting Frank to respond with the “refuge of losers,” aka sarcasm. And when Richard’s program doesn’t sell like it’s supposed to, he and Sheryl get into a full-blown screaming fight.  The Petri dish that is the yellow van intensifies the Hoover’s dysfunction, making their different personalities clash on entirely new levels.

The epitome of a happy family. ⁵

The Hoovers are no Tenenbaums. Their world is painstakingly realistic:  there’s no denying the setting of Little Miss Sunshine functions in our own world. So how come we can still laugh in the end? Little Miss Sunshine relies on situational, physical comedy much more than The Royal Tenenbaums, meaning many of our laughs come from the visual:  watching the Hoovers frantically drive back to the rest stop after they realize they’ve left Olive there, or seeing the policeman go to the back of the bus and uncover porn magazines rather than Grandpa’s dead body. While these laughs aren’t directly dysfunctional, it’s the Hoover’s dysfunction that creates these humorous situations. That’s not to say there aren’t moments that are funny because of their maladjusted nature. Objectively speaking, is sneaking Grandpa’s body out the hospital window and into the back of the car funny? Of course not:  it’s horribly morbid and a little disgusting. But the physical comedy and amplification of hyperrealism from the Hoover’s dysfunction allows some scenes, like this one, to teeter the line of believability, and their comedic aspects keep us laughing and buying the storyline. The root of Little Miss Sunshine’s comedy is in their dysfunction, but instead of us laughing at them, we laugh at the situations and reactions their maladjustment illicits.

Both the Tenenbaums and the Hovers are unquestionably dysfunctional, yet their issues and problems are vastly different so it seems they have little in common. The Tenenbaums are maladjusted in a moral sense, which causes them to act and interact in the ways they do.  The Hoover’s dysfunction comes from personality traits and their inability to connect because of their differences. Dysfunction is no laughing matter, yet both films find humor in this sadness through suspending reality, or using dysfunction as a device to create humorous situations. As Tolstoy said “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and that’s definitely the case with the Tenenbaums and the Hoovers.

 

Photo Credits:

 1. Photo from Vicky (Picasa)

2. Photo from OffOffOff

3. Photo from Photobucket

4. Photo from Beard Papa (Flickr)

5. Photo from Screenwriter's Corner