HopkinsCinemAddicts

An Unconventional Cut

Showing up to fourth grade picture day after a botched haircut and hearing, “What happened to your head?” from a classmate haunts me to this day, and likely will forever.  Even so, that experience pales in comparison to that of a man with no social experience and scissors for hands, thrust into a too small town of gossiping housewives and their unconcerned husbands.  Such is the fate of Edward Scissorhands.

Created in a lab, with his progenitor now deceased, Edward spends countless months alone in a gothic castle which looms over the nameless suburb.  As with many aspects of the film’s presentation, the contrast is stark and definite but not heavy handed. Completely unaware of the world outside of the castle and its beautiful gardens, tended to by Edward’s own blades, a hapless door-to-door saleswoman, Peg Boggs, stumbles in and brings him into town. 

The things which typify a suburban environment, such as pastel homes with near identical floor plans and freshly trimmed lawns, are so utterly homogenous that they only serve to unsettle.  The set design and cast of intrusive neighbors highlight societal norms which are often taken for granted, and become oppressive in their conformity.

Edward is clearly an outsider, and the nosy townsfolk take note before he can get settled.  Beyond the obvious, his face is pocked with scars from self-inflicted wounds.  In his first attempt to dress in civilian clothes, he tears them to shreds and slices clean through a pair of suspenders.  Edward is effectively an infant when it comes to etiquette and social matters, rarely speaking and often misunderstanding what is said to him.  He doesn’t even respond when referred to as Ed, likely because he fails to recognize it as a shortened version of his own name. 

In a town where your business is everyone’s business, Edward’s quirks quickly turn him into a novelty item.  He is constantly paraded around town, encouraged to give eccentric haircuts and coerced into handling the neighborhood’s gardening duties.  That is until the differences become too stark and the sheen begins to come off.  Outliers are only used as showpieces, not to be truly accepted into society.

The film doesn’t stop its critique at a community level, but brings it to a personal, familial level.  Seated around the Boggs’ family’s dinner table, Mr. Boggs poses an ethical question to Edward, concerning what he should do if he stumbled upon an unmarked briefcase full of money.  With childlike charm, Edward claims he would like to give it to his friends, but Mr. Boggs, is quick to remark that the proper thing to do is to take it straight to the authorities.  Kim, the family’s daughter and Edward’s crush, speaks up for Edward.  It is one of the many instances in which we see the personal good compared to the common good, and individual desires set against public expectations.

There are further questions prompted concerning spirituality, as well as the contrast between the organic and the artificial.  Edward is a manmade construct, and despite his stunted social nature, he possesses all interior aspects of a human.  He clearly feels love, sorrow, and shame, yet the religious zealot in town curses him and calls for a return from whence he came.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to say what defines a human, but it is a question which the film doesn’t hesitate to bring up.

Despite its weighty nature, the film does not take itself too seriously and is full of enchanting moments.  In a tender encounter between Edward and Kim, she tells him, “Hold me,” to which he replies, “I can’t.”  It is a dismal scene which highlights Edward’s own defects, but in a self-aware, lighthearted manner.  It is moments such as these, in which abnormality and empathy are married, that the film works best – and there are plenty.

As always, Tim Burton beautifully places the mad, strange, and misunderstood at the forefront of the story, doing so in his signature style, which despite its bright colors and eccentric costumes retains a peculiar authenticity.  Edward Scissorhands is far from your traditional heartwarming Christmas story, but it is an endearing tale which will resonate with the insecurities in all of us.

Confinement and Control: Being John Malkovich

Human existence is at once exhilarating, exhausting, and perplexing, and so it is common to wonder, and even believe, that life may be simpler and more clear if it were lived through the eyes of someone else. But those thoughts are merely wishful, and instead we are resigned to writing, acting, dreaming, and sharing stories in an effort to understand the perspectives of others – to obtain and experience something beyond ourselves.

Being John Malkovich takes this simple truth of existence and upends it, creating an eerie universe in which, for only a few minutes, you can embody and become one with someone else. In this world you do not become just anyone, but instead the enigmatic star John Malkovich. While it may sound like Mr. Malkovich is the primary actor and protagonist, he instead exists as a vessel through which a remarkably witty story, packed with hard-hitting questions concerning human interiority is delivered.

Set in the final decade of the 20^th century, we find ourselves in the near-vacant cellar of a New York City apartment. It is a dark, brooding scene in which we are greeted by the stiff facade of a wooden doll, masterfully contorted into a desperate and disturbed dance. However it is the puppeteer wielding the strings from above who we soon understand to be tormented. Craig Schwartz claims his sole purpose is as a performer – transcending himself and creating a new reality, one in which he is the sole master; but Craig has no audience, and what is a performer without an audience? He continues to be confined to his own mind, serving only himself.

Soon Craig is out on the city’s streets acting out a passionate puppet show in which forbidden lovers lust after one another. Here we see the development of his first audience; a young girl looks on as the puppets gyrate. Her father takes notice and pays Craig accordingly, with a fist to the face. A peculiar scene, whose absurdity leans towards comic. It is also the first of many scenes in which profound questions are posed in distinctive ways. We begin to question the roles and relationships of artist and audience; Craig’s suggestive show may have found a welcoming audience in a packed theater under the right circumstance, but instead a little girl stumbling by took a naïve interest in something unfit for her eyes. Where can such a show take place, who can see it, and what obligation does the artist have to adjust their work for a given, or even unknown, audience?

While Craig searches to escape from his own confinement via the contortion of inanimate objects, his wife Lotte searches for similar solace in her control over living beings. She tenderly cares for and supports Craig with a maternal instinct, just as she cares for the creatures that line the walls of her pet store. In their apartment, the couple are accompanied by an iguana, birds, a dog, and a chimpanzee. Through her care of these creatures, Lotte gains a sense of importance and meaning that cannot be attained internally. She treats each of these animals as well as she does Craig, if not better, clearly mapping out the differences, or lack thereof, between humans and other animals; the film too makes references to the chimpanzee’s consciousness, his lingering childhood trauma, and his visits to a shrink. It is at once lighthearted and thought-provoking.

Craig eventually takes on a temporary job as a filer, thanks to his rapid fingers. In the office he meets Maxine, a coy beauty who ceaselessly toys with him. It is here that Craig discovers the portal to Malkovich, which he then promptly shares with Maxine. Maxine, in conniving fashion, determines that the two must partner together and charge $200 per 15-minute trip into the mind of Malkovich; after all, who doesn’t want to experience the world through a different lens? We are again prompted by further questions of artist and audience: Malkovich as the unknowing artist, providing a show for all of those who pay to accompany him. Here the show provides great meaning to the audience, a miraculous glimpse into a consciousness beyond the one they have always known. Isn’t that the very essence which art attempts to capture?

In a similar sense, this expansion beyond the self is exactly what each character strives for. They each have a distinct way to achieve contentment, coming through varying methods of control over something or someone else. Simply put, a way to escape the confinement of their individual mode of perception. While Craig directs dolls and Lotte influences animals, Maxine finds meaning through the manipulation of other people and their emotions. Each character is looking for control and influence that reverberates outside of themselves.

Malkovich is no different on a surface level. He is an actor, exerting control over roles that are outside of himself, and prompting emotions and reactions from those around him. While Craig does so with no audience, no respect, and no understanding of himself beyond validation from others, Malkovich does so with total self-awareness. He is confident in who he is and has a complete understanding of his place in society. He knows himself to be John Malkovich. A man with an audience, a name, and plenty of respect.

However Malkovich’s sense of security becomes lost when Craig enters the portal, and with his own puppeteering skills is able to exercise complete control over Malkovich, eventually gaining the ability to inhabit him indefinitely. It is here that the aforementioned questions of audience and actor take on a twisted meaning. Craig, the possessor, becomes the actor, while Malkovich, the possessed, becomes the audience, bound to watch events play out on his very own stage.

Eventually Craig is forced to exit Malkovich’s shell. Upon doing so he cannot cope with his own existence and believes he must again embody Malkovich to be loved, so he rushes back to the portal at once. However a convoluted chain of events has turned Malkovich’s portal into a tunnel leading to the mind of a young girl. Here Craig finds himself imprisoned for eternity with no agency. Worse, this young girl is being raised by Lotte and Maxine, the two women that Craig once pined after. It is fantastical and maddening, as Craig finds himself the audience of his own tragedy; condemned to witness a happy existence in which he has no place.

Everyone seeks freedom from the infinite confinement of their own consciousness, and Being John Malkovich makes the case that art, as well as the relationship between art and artist, allows us this escape even if only for a moment. To do so, there must be an acceptance of the self and of our own consciousness as the one true mode of perception. Transcendence beyond the individual can be feigned for a moment to provide joy and relief, just as a 90-minute film serves as a valuable distraction from the pains of life, but dragging that brief moment into an indefinite reality can be destructive, as it is for Craig.  

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. 

 

LOVE DEATH & ROBOTS: What is Female Agency When the Female Body is Gone? Part 2 (Katie)

Two weeks ago I discussed the autonomy and survivability of women in the world of “SONNIE’S EDGE.” I’ve returned to discuss another episode in the action-packed anthology, one which puts a similar but new spin on the way women survive: “GOOD HUNTING.” As a story about a Chinese demon hunter, the colonization of Hong Kong, and the disappearance of old, natural magic in the world, there’s a lot to unpack. Spoilers ahead for the whole episode!

The first quarter of the episode opens with young son Liang, accompanying his father on a hunt to kill a húlijīng—a nine-tailed fox. Allegedly, the húlijīng has enchanted a merchant’s son, and the family hired Liang’s father, the demon hunter, to kill the húlijīng and get rid of the enchantment.

The father and son camp underneath the enchanted son’s bedroom window. His moans for the húlijīng ring out over the courtyard. Finally, the húlijīng comes. While Liang’s father and the húlijīng skirmish, Liang is momentarily entranced by the beauty of the húlijīng, and narrowly manages to throw dog’s piss over her body in time. The piss prevents the húlijīng from transforming completely into her fox form, leaving her in a half-fox, half-human state.

Liang’s father tracks the húlijīng to her den at a nearby temple. While they split up to scout for their quarry, Liang discovers one of the fox spirit’s hiding daughters: Yan. She is young, beautiful, and talks to him in her naked, snow-white fox form, emphatically inhuman. Liang is all eyes, even as he cowers, even as she leaps from rock to rock. And in a single argument, she changes Liang’s worldview.

YAN

Why are you hunting us? We did nothing to you.

LIANG

Your mother bewitched the merchant’s son. We were hired to save him.

YAN

Bewitched? He’s the one who wouldn’t leave her alone.

LIANG

That’s not true.

YAN

Once a man has set his heart on a huli jing, she can hear him, no matter how far apart they are. All that moaning and crying, she has to go to him every night just to keep him quiet.

LIANG

No, she lures men and feeds on them for her evil magic.

YAN

A man can fall in love with a huli jing just like he can with a human woman.

LIANG

It’s not the same!

YAN

Not the same? I saw how you looked at me. [4:26 - 5:12]

Immediately after this talk, Yan witnesses the graphic death of her own mother at the hands of Liang’s father.

The opening of “GOOD HUNTING” tells us immediately that this will be a subversive story. Here, the female húlijīng are not the evil, demonic witch-figures that men would paint them as; Yan is as sympathetic as she is inhuman. This is the first argument that “GOOD HUNTING” will make about the agency and power of women: the beauty of a húlijīng is a not a weapon used against men, but men will oppress her for it all the same. They will resent the way they feel about a beautiful húlijīng, and they will blame the feminine fox spirits to absolve themselves.

As the episode reaches its halfway point, Liang’s father passes away. Now a grown young man, Liang lives in a modernizing village: the first trains travel through the countryside, and the colonizing presence of the British Empire looms large over natives’ shoulders. For their last meeting in a long time, Liang and Yan commiserate about the state of the dying earth around them. Yan speculates that the magic is disappearing from the earth due to “iron roads” and “machines that breathe smoke” (6:46). As the magic leaves, so does her ability to change into her “true form” (6:52). Soon, she may lose the ability altogether.

The steampunk twist that “GOOD HUNTING” takes, a sharp veer from its fantastical origins, is another message about female oppression. It is, after all, mother nature that begins to be exploited and mutilated for arrogant white men. All the (literally) magical beauty of the earth, including that of the húlijīng, is slowly suffocated once ambitious men enter the picture.

Years pass. The episode continues to tell the story of Liang. He finds himself extremely skilled at engineering, specifically that of automata; even as a much-hated minority in Hong Kong, he makes himself useful to the British and has a decent living. On a chance encounter, he bumps into Yan. He rescues her from a group of overly eager British men who seek to have their way with her.

As they catch up, Yan tells Liang she has been permanently stuck in her human form: “no claws, no sharp teeth. I can’t even run very fast. All I have is my beauty. Now, I live by the very thing you accused my mother of: I bewitch men for money” (9:05). She laments the lack of power and control she has over her life in Hong Kong: “I dream of hunting in this jungle of metal and asphalt. I imagine my true form leaping from beam to ledge to terrace roof until I am at the top of this island. Until I can growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own me” (9:40).

The story that Yan presents is that of a loss of agency. When Yan grew up, she had both her human and fox form. Now, she is chained to her human form, and she is forced to use her beauty to survive. This is in direct contrast with how Yan and her mother were treated in China, where they were wrongly hunted for being too beautiful. The world of men has declawed the húlijīng. Not only did men take away her ability to transform into a being with sharp teeth and claws, they made safe the one thing they feared most about a húlijīng: her beauty. Yan’s beauty is now merely a tool for getting by, a plaything for rich, white, colonial masters.

So far, in every aspect of storytelling, “GOOD HUNTING” has depicted a universe in which women are hardy and survivable, but terribly oppressed. Unfortunately, things only get worse for Yan from here.

Yan’s long-time client, the Governor, was only sexually attracted to machines. Naturally, the Governor decided to drug Yan and strap her to an operating table. By the time they were finished, Yan was entirely a machine. The ultimate fantasy for men who lived and profited off automata.

Yan’s non-consensual body swap, and the complete and total murder of her autonomy, needs no explaining. But “GOOD HUNTING” is not without hope. Far from it.

When Yan comes to Liang and tells her his story, she reveals that she escaped the Governor by killing him. One night, she told him no, and it enraged him. He struck her. She struck back and realized how much strength she had gained with her metal limbs: “A terrible thing had been done to me. But I could also be terrible” (12:38).

Yan reassures Liang that she does not want to reverse what has been done to her body. She wants to make the best of it. How? By using what automata parts existed in her, and changing them to become something else entirely.

At the end of the episode, Liang has successfully changed Yan’s machine body—originally made for man’s sexual pleasure and subjugation—into one that, with the right amount of coal and fuel, transforms into a lithe, agile, and beautiful nine-tailed fox. Shimmering under moonlight and padding gracefully on the balcony of Liang’s house, the automata-fox-form of Yan is graceful, dangerous, and dazzlingly powerful. From then on, Yan does what she promised she would do: growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own her.

While the storyline of “GOOD HUNTING” is filled with hardship and oppression for both Liang and Yan, Yan’s story is ultimately optimistic—boldly, emphatically, and rebelliously optimistic. When Yan lost control and ownership of her entire body, she managed to make the best of it and, with the help of another oppressed party, become something closer to her original self. Even though she has been through hell, she persevered, and she was rewarded for it in the end.

But it’s true: Yan suffered terribly for being a beautiful woman, both as a child and an adult, and both in a rural village filled with magic, and a modernized world filled with steam-run automata. Yan had to lose all of her organic body in order to gain the ability to transform into her fox-form—to gain power—again.

Like “SONNIE’S EDGE,” “GOOD HUNTING” also seems to think that the only way for a woman to achieve anything close to true power is to not be a (biological) woman at all. And even then, there is something bleak and grim about that power. For Sonnie, it is having to fight for her life every time she enters that ring. For Yan, it is the complete loss of her actual body and true form before she could return to her fox form again. While women in these sci-fi worlds can survive through oppressive hells, it is entirely unclear whether what lays on the other side was better than what spawned those hells.

There’s still more I want to talk about. Why do Yan’s story and Sonnie’s story feel so similar? What does it mean that all the women in these sci-fi settings seem to get treated with ultra-violence? Why do increasing amounts of modern stories tell us that, when high-tech finds a throne in the world, oppressed groups get jailed into the low life? But these questions must be saved for another time.

Works cited in this text:

“GOOD HUNTING.” LOVE DEATH & ROBOTS. Netflix. March 15, 2019. Netflix.

LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS: What is Female Agency When the Female Body is Gone? (Katie)

I cannot lie: I love a good sci-fi story. When LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS released on Netflix, I made quick work of binging the animated anthology. The first episode I saw (although Netflix has apparently randomized episode orders for this series) was “Sonnie’s Edge,” which had me thrilled and shocked in multiple ways throughout its 17-minute duration. One of the questions the episode asks, at least in my opinion, is what female agency, victimization, or empowerment means when the female body no longer exists.

There are spoilers ahead in my discussion of the short’s plot and implications, and I’m also including a trigger warning for rape due to the episode’s nature. (Seriously, there will unfortunately be a lot of talk about rape in this post.)

Now, onto the plot of “Sonnie’s Edge.” In a futuristic and dystopian society where prize fighters compete in death matches for money, we follow a day in the life of one female “pilot” who is exceptionally skilled at controlling her “beastie.” The beasties are the gladiators in the arena; they are bioengineered monsters made for killing.

As the opening sequence cuts to introduce our main characters, a few things immediately stand out. A notably female-presenting companion, Ivrina, and a noticeably male-presenting companion, Wes, walk in with Sonnie—who looks androgynous, if not far more ambiguous in terms of gender presentation. Her name, “Sonnie,” also evokes a more masculine aura to her character, even though her slimmer and curvier frame denotes some presence of conventional femininity.

The first conflict Sonnie faces is with a rich and corrupt man, Dicko (great naming right there), who wants to rig the next prize fight. He will pay her hundreds of thousands for her to voluntarily lose the next round. When Sonnie tells him to screw off, Ivrina steps in to further defend her from the old man. It is in the exchange between Ivrina and Dicko that we learn of Sonnie’s backstory—and this is a noticeably exposition-y bit of dialogue. When I say noticeably exposition-y, I mean that anyone versed in a little bit of writing will realize just how shoehorned the dialogue feels.

Here’s my transcription of the bit of dialogue, taken from Netflix subtitles, plus screen directions.

IVRINA

[Exhales angrily] Fucking men. It’s cunts like you that fucked her up to begin with.

Bodyguards approach Ivrina threateningly.

IVRINA

[Sighs] Fuck. A year ago, Sonnie got snatched by an estate gang, and when they was done using her, they started cutting, slicing their marks into her flesh. Can you imagine that kind of pain, that kind of humiliation carved into her skin? A lifelong reminder of that day. So when Sonnie steps into the pit, she’s not fighting for pride or status and certainly not for your fucking money. She’s carving up the men who did this to her. [3:30 - 4:11]

See what I mean? At least to me, the dialogue felt like someone writing a background inspired by some erotic fantasy. It was put in purely for the benefit of the watcher, and it was done in a quick and dirty way that seemed to want to titillate or horrify rather than offer meaningful explanation. The exposition appears much like other incidents of rapes of female characters in media nowadays, many of which seem to be written in for no other reason than the shock factor.

I was unimpressed with this bit of writing, but the ending of “Sonnie’s Edge” actually did an impressive thematic reversal on this blatant—and even almost disrespectful—telling of Sonnie’s past.

Later, when Sonnie is having a discreet conversation with Dicko’s female consort, they flirt and talk about Sonnie’s past. (Their conversation is more like foreplay than anything else, with kisses and soft touches included.) Here’s the relevant excerpt:

DICKO’S CONSORT

But that night, the gang, the…

SONNIE

Rape. Yeah. It’s not that. They can’t see past it. No one can. But it ain’t what gives me my edge. Angry little girl, out for revenge. Dicko believes that shit…

Dicko’s consort lightly tugs one strap of Sonnie’s shirt off a shoulder.

SONNIE

… ‘cause he wants to. They all do.

Dicko’s consort slides her dress straps off her shoulders.

DICKO’S CONSORT

[Slowly raising her skirt] Everyone sees what they want to see.  [12:50 - 13:33]

I felt like “Sonnie’s Edge” was calling many of the audience members out, myself included. Once we heard Sonnie’s shocking backstory within the first five minutes of the episode, all we could think about was her history.

Not to mention the fight scene between Sonnie’s beastie, Khanivore, and her male opponent’s beastie, Turboraptor. There’s plenty of forced, penetrative imagery between the beasties that’s rendered a lot more noticeable once you remember Sonnie’s apparent origins—definitely an intended effect.

We only saw Sonnie in light of her rape. We all saw what we wanted to see, even if the episode does reinforce seeing Sonnie in this specific light.

But there’s more to discuss. The twist ending to “Sonnie’s Edge” includes more violence to the female body. It turns out that Dicko’s consort is a bioengineered servant made to execute Dicko’s commands, and she penetrates Sonnie’s skull with Wolverine-like claws from her knuckles right after a kiss. Dicko comes out of the shadows to gloat.

Sonnie is dropped to the floor, and her skull is bashed in by Dicko’s foot. When Sonnie’s voice does not falter, and she does not die, it’s revealed that Sonnie was Khanivore the entire time. Khanivore then kills both Dicko and his consort.

While the explicit logistics aren’t made clear, the gist of the reveal is as follows: Sonnie’s original body was lost after the gang attack; Ivrina and Wes linked her consciousness with Khanivore’s, and Sonnie lives solely in Khanivore. Her human body is just a bioengineered puppet from her uploaded brain, and when she is fighting in the pit as a beastie, she is fighting for her life. That is her “edge.”

There is a lot of complexity to this short episode’s plot. The episode seems to take on a feminist role at the surface, with Sonnie being a character like Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The episode also makes a big deal out of Sonnie being the only female pilot in the beastie ring.

But what about the writing itself? The writers wanted everyone in the audience to think about Sonnie’s rape origin story in every minute of the episode, up till the very end. Much like Sonnie says, we can’t see past it. References to the rape in imagery and small plot points keep the origin story fresh in our minds; clearly, writers want us to be thinking about Sonnie’s rape, even if only as a blind to the real twist.

I found myself asking this question by the end of the episode: if Sonnie survived the rape not as a human woman, but an uploaded consciousness linked to a beastie who literally fights to live, which is better?

As a beastie, Sonnie has unlimited power at her hands. Physically, she is superior to all the beasties in the ring so far; she is mentioned to being on a 17-count win streak. She is obviously superior to every human; she’s a bioengineered monster made for killing. But she has limited autonomy and limited friendship with even her closest apparent friends, Ivrina and Wes. Khanivore, or Sonnie, has to keep fighting in the pit to make a living, and she has an added stake of needing to stay alive while in the pit—unlike every other pilot, her consciousness is directly tied to her beastie’s. Additionally, the implication of Ivrina and Wes finding Sonnie’s broken body and uploading her consciousness into Khanivore means that, at worst, they only saved her as a means of profit, or, at best, out of a desperate lack of other measures.

The picture that “Sonnie’s Edge” paints of female power and agency, then, is bleak. Sonnie, even in her most powerful form as Khanivore, is still subjugated to other forces—whether or not the female body is still intact. These other forces can include the violence of men, or the oppressive difficulty of surviving in a dystopian society. This message is also reinforced in the character of Dicko’s consort. She is completely without autonomy: every one of her acts is in service to Dicko, regardless of her physical superiority to him. (She is a more subtle and organic-looking, but she can be a killing machine, too, as evidenced by her Wolverine-like claws.) There seems to be no hope: Sonnie was raped and apparently nearly killed by men as a human, and when she became Khanivore, her new physical powers were restricted only to the pit, where she faces a greater loss than her opponent if she loses.

Might we be able to say, then, that “Sonnie’s Edge” at least views female endurance and survivability with optimism? Even if there’s no autonomy for characters like Sonnie or Dicko’s consort, even if the only source of happiness for many characters is achieving violence against an opponent, can we at least say that the women in Sonnie’s world can stick through anything to see another day?

Yes, although the optimism is laced with grit. Sonnie’s “edge” is the real, omnipresent fear of losing her life in the ring. She claims she’s always afraid in her conversation with Dicko’s consort, and by the end of the episode, she openly cites her fear as the thing that keeps her alive. It’s admirable, how indomitable Sonnie’s will to live is, even if it may be depressing that she needs the fear to begin with.

Then the question becomes why the framing of Sonnie's backstory needed such a specific blind. Do women in the world of "Sonnie's Edge" require a digestible, plausible backstory in order to go unnoticed by men and the rest of society? Perhaps; Sonnie states that she keeps her story so that men like Dicko can believe it. But it doesn't keep her safe; what keeps her safe is the secret that she no longer has a human body. And that argument is even more bleak: the only way to stay safe as a woman in Sonnie's world is to not be a woman.

All in all, “Sonnie’s Edge” is a visually stunning science fiction piece that falls comfortably into the grim and cynical subgenre of cyberpunk. Besides the thrilling colors, fight sequences, and beautiful animation, I think it plays with storytelling expectations in interesting ways... even if the rape as a red herring may not have been totally necessary or respectful. That’s a question I’ll have to tackle another time.

Works cited in this text:

“SONNIE’S EDGE.” LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Netflix. March 15, 2019. Netflix.

Artificial Intelligence and the Screen: Modern Depictions of the Machine in Film (Katherine P.)

    Science Fiction has been a genre in the film almost since the beginning. From Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking 1927 film, Metropolis, to the Star Wars franchise, the proliferation of movies made in this area has seen an evolution as it changes with the times.  These films typically feature advanced gadgetry or machines, but leave the human element more or less the same.  More recently however, with the current rapid growth of modern software technology, more and more films are exploring the possibility of a future or a present where there are human-like automata. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina presents an in-depth view of a singular machine, while Alex Proyas’s film I, Robot offers a view of a hypothetical where machines are omni-present in society. Even though AI is generally viewed in an unfavorable light, the way films examine it is fascinating.

    Ex Machina is a meditation of the psychology of AI and it illustrates this though a detailed account of one machine, Ava. Artificial Intelligence is described as a type of awareness that is displayed by machines rather than an organic creature such as an animal or a human. The film, through detailed and emphatically scientific test sessions, raises a couple of possibilities when it comes to dealing with an entity that has the characteristics of a human being, but it in itself is clearly not human. Ava is shown to have an objective in the film of connecting and interacting with the person who is picked to test her, Caleb, but in the end, abandons this relationship in favor of escaping the confines of the testing facility she is kept in.  The idea of AI here is to for Ava to develop independent responses that match the main objective of connecting and interacting with Caleb.  Ava, however, appears to have another goal.  Although Ava’s objective is not explicitly stated in the film, but given Ava’s ultimate actions, it appears that Ava’s objective was to simply escape. Artificial Intelligence in Ex Machina is generally presented as having a specific programmed goal in mind, and to do the most possible to execute such goal. However, unless it was programmed to do so, AI should not change anything else in the outside world that is not necessary for the purposes of completion of its intentions. If we assume Ava’s goal is to escape and to integrate into the human social system, then the actions she does to get there are both logically and intrinsically necessary, and are not in contradiction to her core AI programming.   In hindsight, that the film does not make Ava’s intentions clear is a flaw since it is imperative in creating an AI being – that is, having a true AI being means having to accept the planned outcomes of the AI’s motivations.

    In contrast, I, Robot, ventures into the idea of an AI governing multiple machines and the consequences of such a hive mindset. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics drive the robots in this film. The Laws entail that a robot may not injure a human being or allow a human being to come into harm. Additionally, the robot must obey the orders given by a human except when it violates the first rule. Lastly, as long as it does not conflict with the first or second rule, a robot must value its own existence. In I, Robot, the instigating action is the murder of a human by the hand of a robot, which directly conflicts with the Three Laws. This anomaly is only allowed to come to be as a result of human volition to program the robots to oppose the Laws, and the fact that the robots are not individually controlled, but are under the control of an AI. As a result, a question this film raises is whether these rules, which are only in place for human protection and robot preservation, are actually flawed and unnecessary. However, in the film the NS-5 robot population are programmed with these rules in mind, and eventually their implementation is overridden by the anarchic plans of the master of their connected minds.   Like in Ex Machina, this movie also explores the inherent contradiction of trying to apply rules to AI.  The very nature of AI in both movies appears to preclude the notion of universal adherence to pre-programmed rules. This speaks to how even though the Laws were set in place for robots, they do not explicitly account for the possibility of an evolving AI controlling such robots. The introduction of an AI in the equation brings about countless confounds and variables that most certainly could lead to an unforeseen circumstance. The fact that the AI controlling the NS-5s is volatile and dangerous in that the objective it sought to complete is detrimental to the human race does not paint AI in an overall hopeful light insofar as this relates to the ability of humans to control the AI.

    While both Ex Machina and I, Robot appear to portray largely pessimistic views of the future of AI, it is made evident that they dive into different aspects of the nature of AI and the possible application of such advancement into society. As technology continues to advance further and at a faster rate, such concerns and potentialities become increasingly relevant.  The contradictory nature of AI makes control of AI almost impossible.  That film is a widely consumed medium makes it the ideal outlet for the exhibition of such prospects, and the warnings that both films appear to make hopefully will be heeded by those who advance the science behind AI. 

Undressing the Spectral Nature of Human Sexuality in Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl (Mireille)

As society comes to grips with the reality of the spectral nature of sexuality, more and more main stream movies and TV series are being created to depict the lives of individuals who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum. Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015) is a film that examines the sexual metamorphosis from man to woman of the principal character, Einar Wegener. Though the film focuses primarily on Einar, Hooper constantly reminds the audience of the fluidity of sexuality that exists for other characters, especially Einar’s wife, Gerda.

Throughout the entirety of The Danish Girl, Hooper reiterates the gender duality theme through carefully crafted mise-en-scène and frame composition. For example, Hooper creates an interplay between the human body and the surrounding geometry. The rigidity of the buildings as well as the harsh vertical and horizontal lines making up the geometry of the rooms in the home where Einar and Gerda live create a sense of restriction and harshness that confine the bodies of the characters in the manner in which the masculine dominated society of the 1920s restrained any attempt at sexual fluidity. At the same time, these geometric restrictions are juxtaposed by repeated shots which emulate impressionistic paintings and are full of the soft pastels of femininity. The resulting effect is a visual duality that mimics the duality of Einar’s experience: a woman trapped in a man’s body.

Perhaps the most powerful scene in the film occurs when Einar stands in front of a mirror and completely undresses himself. Hooper expertly wields the camera moving down the body, never fully showing the male genitalia, but following the path of Einar’s hand. When the hand reaches the location of Einar’s genitals at the same time that the camera does, Einar pushes his genitals out of sight and in between his legs, creating the illusion of female genitalia. The camera lingers on Einar’s full body while reflected in the mirror, and the deception of the form of a woman is compelling. Hooper uses reflection or “mirroring” in another powerful scene when Einar visits a brothel where he watches a prostitute through a glass window as she strips. Einar then begins to emulate her movements in an attempt to learn the female manner of seduction. The woman pauses in bewilderment, but then resumes her seductive poses; however, there is an exaggeration in her movement as she acts and simultaneously watches Einar, almost as if the prostitute knows that Einar’s intent is one of wanting to learn. As a result, rather than becoming an erotic moment it becomes one in which there is a woman to woman connection. 

Hooper also explores the inter-woman connection in terms of the complexity of the relationship between Einar and Gerda. Hooper often shows the couple in intricately framed shots, in which they are divided, but still have a lingering attachment. Hooper frequently uses combinations of shot reverse shots such that Einar and Gerda, despite being in the same film space, are portrayed separately. Even towards the end of the film when Gerda and Einar, who has now become Lili, are arguably closest emotionally, they are separated by a thin veil dividing their bed, yet still have their hands intertwined and enveloped by the same fabric that defined the moment that Einar first became fascinated with women’s clothing. This repetition of Einar and Gerda as separate, but still linked together, leaves the audience to wonder if it is just “love” or recognition of womanhood in each other. As Gerda says when explaining why she married Einar; “It was like kissing myself.”  

Hooper allows Gerda to explore her own uncertain sexuality by allowing her to engage in role reversal. Gerda creates opportunities for Einar and her to switch gender roles. Early in the film, even before it becomes clear that Einar is transgender, Gerda, who like Einar is a painter by profession, asks him to put on some female clothing to serve as a female model for a painting she needs to finish. Then she coaxes Einar into dressing up like a woman to play a joke during a society outing. In another very overtly roll reversing scene, Gerda is completely nude and standing over Einar’s form that is still dressed. Einar’s body image has a strangely feminine allure, and he is also trying to conceal the fact that he is wearing a woman’s nightgown underneath his masculine garments. Gerda takes on the male role of undressing Einar, who has clearly begun to adopt a feminine persona. At the same time, Einar accentuates his femininity by being coy and trying to keep covered up. Gerda’s role reversal does not happen only in Einar’s presence. Hooper utilizes a low angle camera angle or an eye line match with almost all of the male characters that Gerda encounters emphasizing the power position that she has over them. Finally, Gerda becomes successful only when she starts creating portraits of Einar as Lili, suggesting that she is able to express passion only through an expression of the feminine form.

The Danish Girl reminds the audience that the enigma of sexual identity is not a modern concept, but one that is an inextricable part of human nature. Hooper delivers a film that is not only beautiful to watch, but beautifully depicts the inexorable nature of love and human identity.   

The Perfect Electric Man (Conor)

    The fundamental question that Videodrome (1983 dir. David Cronenberg) is concerned with is a question that naturally arises from increased interaction between humans and machines: what are the limits of the human subject? Are the machines that human beings rely on effectively a part of humanity? In a world where the average American watches multiple hours of television a day is it fair to assume that the television has moved beyond simply being a source of entertainment and that it now can be considered a part of human beings no different from their own brains?

    Max Renn, the protagonist is representative of an archetypal film or television audience. His constant urge to observe reflect the voyeurism inherent in any film audience. The camera itself moves through the movie like an unseen stalker, forcing the actual audience to approach the film with the same perverted intensity that Renn does. By making the audience to respond to the film the same way Renn responds to Videodrome, Chronenberg is exploring how persuasive film and television really are.  The audience ironically considers how much of Renner’s thoughts are his own because of thoughts the film has planted in their minds.

    In this light, some of the fear that Videodrome inspires is based around the realiziation that there is no functional difference to Renn whether his thoughts are his own or not. As Jack Creley’s Brian O’Blivion himself says, “there is nothing real outside of our perception of reality”. Good science fiction should examine questions of how changing technology would affect humankind, and Cronenberg’s is no exception. He is taking a critical look at the relationships between modern media and the very idea of human identity. The TV, Cronenberg implies, may as well physically be a part of the human brain.

    The uncomfortable meshing of man and machine is expressed through the uncomfortable violation of Renn’s own body. The disgusting slit in his stomach that allows him to receive programming via VHS tapes is a physical representation of how television influences audiences.  The sometimes gratuitous special effects Cronenberg employs become physical representations of the anxiety of losing personal individuality that permeate the film. The constant deforming and violation of the human form represents the same ideological defilement that occurs when human beings allow machines to become such an integral part of their everyday lives.

    Ultimately Cronenberg’s film is both cautious and pessimistic. On one hand, he implores the audience to think critically about the effect of introducing media machines into such a large part of their lives but on the other hand he recognizes that it is pointless to attempt to differentiate the human and the machine. While the anxiety towards so drastically altering the human subject is well placed, it is pointless because there is absolutely nothing to be done to prevent the television from becoming an integral part of human thought. Videodrome is a rare film which uses the pure metaphysical pathos inherent to the medium of film to create a warning about how powerful that pathos really is.

Let the Games Begin! (Madison)

I spent the last several weeks of the summer in a small town in upstate New York called Lake Placid. Those of you who are familiar with the place know that it is hard to be there without being keenly aware of the specter of Olympic competition; the village hosted the winter games in both 1932 and 1980 (hockey fans will remember the "Miracle on Ice" from the 1980 games, where the underdog American team beat the Soviet Union in a surprising upset.) I have seen the silver cauldron where the Olympic torch burned; jogged on the clay colored track at its feet; walked long stretches of the old bobsledding run; and blanched at the top of the ski jumps that sit five minutes outside of town, and which are still used as a training facility for some of the world's best athletes today. I've done all of this not because I am a naturally athletic person, or even because I am a passionate follower of sport—in fact, the opposite is true—but rather because it is hard not to be excited by the relics of some of the greatest games on Earth. 

This year, though, I was not only thinking about the ghosts of those former, frigid Olympics; I was also, as I'm sure almost everyone was, tuning in to the summer games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The night of the opening ceremonies, I sat on the couch for nearly four hours (my computer struggling to connect to the slow, log-jammed wifi) as athletes from 206 countries--including two of our very own Blue Jays, Pilar Shimizu representing Guam and Ana Bogdanovski representing Macedonia--filed through the Maracaña Stadium to wild applause. During the course of the games, I was able to watch bits and pieces of my favorite events; swimming, diving, gymnastics, and volleyball, among others. 

It's hard to imagine a scenario more perfectly suited for the screen than the Olympic games. They have it all: high-budget camera equipment, beautiful scenery, unfathomably fit athletes, an audience of millions, and the weight of God and country to back it all up. The stakes at the games are undeniably high; taking home a medal is a matter of national pride, and losing can mean the frustration of a lifetime's worth of training. It surprised me, then, that there wasn't a glut of movies about the games. I did pick a few, though they do not by any means constitute a complete list, or even a well-rounded one (if anyone knows of a good place to watch non-Anglo Olympic films, let me know!) I started with Chariots of Fire (1981) dir. Hugh Hudson, moved on to the less critically acclaimed Stick It (2006) dir. Jessica Bendinger, followed by the charming Eddie the Eagle (2016) dir. Dexter Fletcher, and ended with the recently released Race (2016) dir. Stephen Hopkins. 

In watching these films I was interested in a few key elements: how does the gaze of the camera approach the body of the athlete, considering the games as the ultimate expression of physical perfection? How do these films handle the role of the press in Olympic competition, considering the experience of competing in the games as the experience of being watched by an audience of judges, peers, and fans? How much does the interior life of the athlete inform their sport, and how much does their national background, considering the games as being played on behalf of both the individual and their country? How have the games changed since the first modern Olympics in 1896, considering the current games as the seat of the latest in sports technology? Really, what I am asking is: how can these movies explain why we care so much about the Olympic games? Because this is somehow the greatest mystery of all, to me; what is it about this quadrennial competition that make sporting seem so noble, so much more than, well, games?

 A lot of these questions have to do with how the movies are shot. The three biopics, Chariots of Fire, Eddie the Eagle, and Race, featured male athletes (Harry Abrahams and Eric Liddell, Eddie Edwards, and Jesse Owens respectively); that is, they featured the type of body that is less often exploited onscreen than that of the female athlete (as Stick It seemed to corroborate.) I noticed, though, particularly in Hopkins' Race, a close attention to the athlete's body: in one scene, Jesse Owens (played by Stephan James) stands shirtless in the locker room, hips wrapped in a low slung white towel, as the camera leers at him from amongst a team of jeering football players; in another, as he stares down the track before his race begins, there is a slow pan up his legs before he bends to the start and fully enters the frame; often, the camera looks up at him as if perched on the ground, so that his proportions are exaggerated and he seems taller, stronger; and throughout, James glimmers with sweat, indelicate and emphatically physical. While it would be a bit of a reach to call this gaze sexual, it still seems a notable exception from most feature length films, which allow the body of their leading men to be quietly beautiful; here, the strength and grace of the male form at its physical prime is on full display.

One wonders if this close gaze is somehow permissible because the man in question is black (i.e. a more acceptable target for objectification and physical scrutiny), though to avoid being too contentious, I won't say much more about that. I will note, however, that compared to Race, the treatment of the body in Chariots of Fire seems almost chaste (though it would be unfair of me not to admit that this does seem to be in keeping with the historical period of the film, which is set in the 1920s.) The British team runs in a plain white (dare I say virginal?) costume of tee shirts and long shorts, sometimes even in suspenders, and rarely without a shirt on. Eric Liddell, the most moral character in the film, wears his brown overcoat over his running clothes until the very moment he has to kneel at the start.

Eddie the Eagle, the only film on my list that is about the winter Olympic games, treats its affable main character as something of a much-loved younger brother. Eddie (played by Taron Egerton) has an unassuming shape, with a slightly softened waist; he wears Fair Isle sweaters and neoprene ski suits, and carries a tin lunchbox. Indeed, the film uses the exposed male figure principally as a vessel for comedy; in one scene, Eddie finds himself in a sauna with the Norwegian ski jumping team, all of whom are nude. Egerton’s eyes shift nervously behind his fogging glasses as he sits swaddled in a white towel, trying to make polite conversation with men whose athletic prowess allows them an arrogance, here demonstrated by their proud nudity. Indeed, Eddie Edwards is so naïve as to be nearly asexual, standing in stark contrast to his troubled coach Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), who compares ski jumping to climaxing during sex (again, Eddie is unsure of how to react—the film seems to celebrate Edwards in spite of his body, not because of it.)

Stick It, a young adult comedy about a juvenile-delinquent-turned-elite-gymnast, is much less hesitant to flaunt the bodies of its athletic stars; the film is a bouquet of bright, sugary color, with a heaping serving of tan, toned muscle to boot. Most of the scenes take place in the gym, where a cast of young (mostly blonde) women flip around in skin-tight leotards or sports bras. The main character, Haley, enters in a baggy tee shirt and shorts to signal an attitude of non-conformity and defiance, but as the film progresses begins tying her shirts in knots to expose her stomach, and in the end, wears a bright orange leotard with a flame streaking up the side, exiting the gym in a close-fitting white tracksuit. The exposure of these women's bodies cannot be said to be merely the appreciation of peerless athletic physique; pieces of dialogue draw attention to the gymnast's body in a sexual light, as when Haley's sidekick says of another gymnast, "You don't think she's hot? I think she's hot... she has an apple butt"; or when Haley remarks, looking at a girl kissing her boyfriend, that the only thing that girl has that the gymnasts don't is "boobs." 

 

Setting aside concerns of the sexualization of female athletes, I will say that the film rejoices in the highly visual, artistic nature of gymnastics, with a series of kaleidoscopic overlays of the athletes performing their routines, all in different colored leotards. The movie takes an evident delight in the sport, spending minute-long stretches on the women’s routines in almost every scene; here, the body becomes as important as the plot, making the movie a whirlwind of kinetic energy.

Stick It gives its audience something else that the two more critically acclaimed films (Chariots and Race) don’t; we are invited to watch a woman in the process of becoming an athlete good enough to qualify for the Olympics. That is, we see her fall, and fall hard. We see wipe outs, bruises, and ice baths, while in the other two films, training is covered in a brief montage, with an upbeat soundtrack playing in the background. Stick It does what even the real Olympics can't quite manage; it depicts the painful, difficult process, not just the fantastic, medal-worthy results. 

With so much attention being paid to Haley’s journey towards the games, it might not be surprising that Stick It places a greater emphasis on the individual than on their home country, which cannot be so easily said of Chariots of Fire and Race. Although the place of the individual is paramount to all three stories, for the men, concerns of country seem equally urgent. Their games are used, respectively, to symbolize European values being upheld in the face modernization and professionalization of sport, and to protest the racial hatred propagated by Hitler’s regime; the male athletes in these films feel a pressure to prove something about their particular in-groups, be they national, ethnic, racial, or religious. To win a race is to justify the existence of whole populations, who are either persecuted (as in the case of Owens, and the Jewish racer Abrahams) or perceive themselves as dying out (as in the case of the conservative Liddell, and the deans of Cambridge University.)

In Chariots of Fire, a priest says to the runner Eric Liddell, trying to convince him to train for the Paris Olympics, “What we need now is a muscular Christian to make people sit up and take notice”; the head of the British Olympic Committee remarks that the games gather delegates “from every civilized nation on the face of the Earth.” The implication is clear: the ability to send athletes to the Olympics signifies a certain amount of class, wealth, and prestige; the ability to best those other countries in sport signifies the supremacy of one’s cultural and national values. This can be seen in Race, too, when an American builder petitions the United States Olympic Committee to allow athletes to participate in the Berlin games on the basis that, “the American people need champions to remind them what they’re capable of.”

Sport becomes a vessel for cultural dominance as well as cultural exchange. This becomes all the more clear as technology begins to play an important role in the games; the teams with the equipment, the professional coaches, the time and resources to devote to training full-time, have the advantage on the field, as well as a stage to promote themselves to millions of viewers. While watching the Rio games I was struck, particularly during the synchronized diving, by how many times and at how many angles one saw the dive; once in real-time, then again from the side, from a bird’s eye view, in slow motion, and once from a camera placed at the bottom of the pool. This seemed especially striking in comparison to the sports technology depicted in several of these films; Eric Liddell and Jesse Owens run on dirt tracks, where they use small silver trowels to dig out footholds for themselves. Jesse Owens’ family listens to his race on the radio; Liddell and his teammate Abrahams research other athletes by studying grainy, black and white photographs of them clipped out of newspapers; even in the 1988 games depicted in Eddie the Eagle, the crowds are smaller and the race footage blurrier, and Eddie’s jumps are recorded in a ledger with a ball point pen.

Race had the difficult task of depicting the first Olympics to be televised; the ’36 games, held in Berlin, were filmed by German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who pioneered many techniques in sports cinematography. On screen, Riefenstahl (played by Carice van Houten) remarks to a controlling Goebbels that “[These may be your games] but this is my film. Without it, your games will be forgotten in a year.” This line, perhaps more than any other, feels as if it is cutting to the heart of why we care so much about the Olympics; here, there is a film being made, carefully crafted and rehearsed (Riefenstahl has Owens return to the track to recreate his record-breaking long jump so she can catch it from several angles; she zooms in on his competitor, Luz, shaking Jesse’s hand in an act of political defiance), but with the reassuring guarantee of reality behind it, the human narrative that we find so compelling.

Although what we see of the Olympics is just as crafted as any film—and just as full of product placement—there is also the undeniable body in front of us, the real person who is accomplishing something that is, for most of us, unattainable. The experience is something close to uncanny; it seems both as if anything could happen, and as if the results could never have turned out differently once they are revealed. There is real risk, with all the editing, polish, and beauty of the television and films that we see day to day, and it’s all happening in real time.

With the 2016 summer games long over, and another two years to go until we can watch the winter Olympics in PyeongChang, I will have to content myself with the occasional inspirational sports film or biopic to get me through; still, I plan on going back to Lake Placid soon to get my fix. Even when the torch goes out and the cameras leave, something miraculous lingers on those old Olympic sites. I can’t quite help but get sucked in, every time.

How to Be a Villain (Treva)

As a junior in the middle of my spring semester, I’ve had to start thinking about my life after college recently. My career path. And, as a junior in my spring semester, at Johns Hopkins, I am very overworked and desperate to avoid anything actually resembling adulthood. So my thoughts have been turning, inevitably, to one ideal career: Disney Villain.

But how? How to set myself up as the perfect Villain(ess)? Well, I am a junior at Johns Hopkins University, and a humanities major to boot, so in order to answer that question, I set out on a research quest. Mostly through video clips of signature villain songs, because those are the best part of being a specifically Disney villain.*

My exhaustive research has led be to two basic conclusions: the strength and impressiveness of a true Villain, and their song, is based on power and social deviancy.

Also, darkness. All the best Villains have dark clothing and dim lighting. But that’s such basic analysis that I feel it almost goes without saying. Lower chords in the music also help, and minor keys.

In support of my claim, I shall compare two famous musical scenes: “Bibbidi-Bobbiti-Boo” from Cinderella (1950), and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from The Little Mermaid (1989). It’s an interesting comparison because they actually have a number of key points in common, including some notable Villainous qualities. In each, an older woman uses magic to manipulate the environment and transform a young woman—so, in fact, she can go meet and marry a prince.

The use or even just implication of supernatural forces is a hallmark of Villainy, falling under the category of social deviancy—this is the supernatural. It’s abnormal, and thus dangerous. In Little Mermaid, magic is actually a more neutral thing, used also—indeed, first!—by King Triton, an antagonist but not a villain. (Though he does use it for the purpose of destruction, of the human objects that approximately represent Ariel’s hopes, ambitions, and individuality.) Ultimately, however, he uses the same magic to give her the life she dreams of, on land with the humans. It’s much more common for Villains to either introduce or even be the only ones to call on the supernatural. Dr. Facilier, the villainous witch doctor, is the first to use magic in The Princess and the Frog (2009), explicitly evoked in his song “Friends on the Other Side.” In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), a movie otherwise completely without magic or occult effects—save the living gargoyles who provide comic relief, and whom I for one have never thought fit tonally with the rest of the film—Bishop Frollo’s “Hellfire” is full of supernatural effects. Red hooded figures appear from nowhere to chorus and shame him, and his imagination summons a dancing image of the gypsy Esmeralda in the fireplace. The sound effects suggest that his hand motions are manipulating the flames.

As suggested, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother actually follows the “only one affiliated with the supernatural” trope more than Ursula does. She not only uses magic, but she specifically affects the protagonist with it, spelling Cinderella into a dress and her mouse friends into horses and a footman. Such an overt exhibition of power and domination is reminiscent of when Ursula not only turns Ariel human but first gives the show of her abilities with the simulacrum: “This one longing to be thinner, that one wants to get the girl / and do I help them? Yes indeed.” Or when Scar (The Lion King, 1994) kicks the hyenas around in “Be Prepared”, or Dr. Facilier concludes his song by literally turning Prince Naveen into a frog. The power expressed in physically manipulating the environment and, better, the protagonist, is another key habit of true Villainy.

The Fairy Godmother, however, is not a Villain, or even an antagonist. Why? And not just as demonstrated in her motives, to help rather than hinder or entrap. How does the film, in animation and effects, express those motives?

For one thing, though they similarly use magic, the Gofmother conforms to society’s expectations in a way that Ursula does not. The Fairy Godmother resembles nothing so much as a kindly grandmother, while Ursula, though white-haired, acts the part of a sensual temptress. Her bright lipstick and eye-shadow pop out of her face, her tentacles are shaped like a low-bodiced, jet black evening gown—with attention drawn to the chest by a dangling gold locket—and she’s…on the plump side, debatably “fat” by model-standards of beauty, particularly relative to Ariel’s lithesome sixteen-year-old self. But she’s also curvaceous, and her body language—and that make-up—positively screams confidence and “look at me!” Remember the exaggerated undulation on, “And don’t underestimate the importance of body language!” Whereas the fairy godmother is covered head to toe in loose robes of pale blue and pink, including a hood and a large pink bow at her neck. She’s gently unfashionable, non-sexual, and the colors suggest calm and comfort. She’s even shorter than Cinderella: totally non-threatening. Ursula’s aggressive sexuality is startling to the point of scariness, particularly in an older woman who insists she’s being grandmotherly, helping “poor, unfortunate souls.” It’s arguably the “otherness” of it that makes her scary rather than the actual sexuality—she also has bruise-purple skin where all other mermaids are fairly pale, or at least human-colored, and octopus tentacles instead of a fish tale. It’s similar to how Scar is the only dark-furred lion (was Walt Disney racist? Well, probably) or Governor Radcliffe in Pocahontas is taller, broader, and more richly clothed than all the other settlers in Pocahontas (1995). Villains are those who don’t fit in.

Despite this deviancy—or perhaps because of it, and which of those options is scarier?—Ursula obviously has power. Supernatural power, and power expressed in blocking, and even in the tempo of the song. It’s fast. It’s aggressive. It actually picks up speed as the song goes on, and Ariel’s choice becomes more immediate. “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” has not only a slower tempo, but also significantly less range in its notes and energy in its delivery. Ursula belts notes low and high—though generally lower, menacingly. She moves around, often to literally above Ariel’s head—a simple indication of power by blocking. She draws the focus of the scene and demonstrates her sheer drive. A true Villainess isn’t afraid to commit real effort to her world domination plans. The Fairy Godmother stays on Cinderella’s ground level throughout her song, moving little more than to broadly wave her wand.

So what have I learned, if I want to pursue a career of Disney-style Villainy? Here are the big takeaways:

• Dark clothing
• Own my sexuality, particularly if I’m not expected to. Be unexpected, and confident in it!
• Move around. Speak loudly. Don’t necessarily pay attention to others’ implicit pleas for personal space.
• Try to acquire a unique talent.
• Above all, stand out and carpe diem!

…Or I could continue spending Friday and Saturday nights alone in my well-lit bedroom, wearing pajamas and watching Disney clips on YouTube. Yeah. I might do that. At least I have cool socks.

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* For reasons of copyright law, I can share neither screencaps nor links to where one might watch such clips. But I’ll admit that I, acting as a private citizen unaffiliated with JHU, have found several on the web. If you’re interested.

Reproductive Rights, Camera, Action: Abortion on the Big Screen (Madison)

Some of you may know that the Supreme Court will be hearing a landmark abortion case, Whole Women’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, this March, one that will consider the constitutionality of a Texas law imposing restrictions on abortions in that state.  I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to do a little research on this case, and lend your voice to the conversation. My own interest in it inspired me to write a post on movies featuring abortion; today’s list includes Juno (2007) dir. Jason Reitman, Vera Drake (2004) dir. Mike Leigh, Citizen Ruth (1996) dir. Alexander Payne, and Obvious Child (2014) dir. Gillian Robespierre.

It is not my intention to get too political on this site—after all, this is a film blog, and I’m here to talk to you about movies. Still, with this legal action pending, my mind has been very much on women: their bodies, their rights, and the way conversations about what they should or should not do are framed. Films provide a helpful and often critical lens with which to view our society; this, of course, includes the political issues that so sharply divide us.  

It occurred to me, watching these films, that there are two ways to make a movie about abortion: you can either make the audience cry, or make them laugh. Most of the films I watched in preparation for this post chose the latter. I wondered, why is it that these directors chose comedy to speak on such a serious topic? And what is different, cinematically, between a somber abortion film and a comedic one?

It might seem silly to even write the words “funny abortion film”; still, I can’t deny that I laughed out loud at these movies. In Obvious Child, Donna Stern, the main character, opens the movie with a joke about her panties “[looking] like they army crawled through cream cheese” by the end of the day; the punk-y receptionist at the Women Now clinic in Juno says “[these condoms] make my boyfriend’s junk smell like pie” with a deadpan sincerity; Ruth, in the eponymous Citizen Ruth, shrieks at a smiling nurse at an emergency pregnancy center “Are you people fucking deaf?! I want an abortion!”

These moments of humor are often, somewhat necessarily, uncomfortable—or at least, they deal with the realities of womanhood in a way that most movies shy away from; they are surprising simply by virtue of being presumed inappropriate. It is the candidness of these moments that makes them so funny. The women in these films speak with an almost alarming frankness that occasionally verges on un-likeableness (particularly in Citizen Ruth); it seems to me that, in this way, the women very much are the movie. That is to say, no film can successfully deal with abortion without being honest, and that honesty is almost always coming directly from the mouth of the woman whose body forms the contested political ground.

 

 

To briefly say more about the body: I noticed that the camera and its gaze had a complicated relationship with the female form in these films. In some, the women are put on display: Donna in Obvious Child dances in her underwear; in Citizen Ruth, Ruth bends over the sink as the camera pans over her bottom, landing on the thong peeking over the edge of her sweatpants. Of course, this gaze is fairly neatly subverted shortly after we are treated to it: we see the underwear Donna danced in crumpled up on a pillow, dirty now; the same night Ruth bends over the sink, she huffs spray paint and faces the audience with her mouth and chin covered in black pigment. The convention of objectifying the female form (through partial nudity, the segmenting of the body into sexualized parts, the slow pan that mimics the erotic gaze) is used, certainly, but also mocked and worked through; these films are fluent, it seems, in the cinematic technique of blockbusters, but repurpose them to tell women’s stories in a funny and revolutionary way.

On the other hand, films like Vera Drake don’t use or subvert the (normative, sexualizing) gaze of the camera at all; indeed, the main character in that film bustles around in housedresses, or else swathed in her green coat. It is made clear to us that power, for Vera Drake, does not come from anything close to nudity: in fact, one of the lowest points in the film takes place when Vera is symbolically disrobed, and asked to remove her wedding ring upon entering her jail cell. Perhaps this is one of the differences between a comedy about abortion and a drama about abortion: sex, in the former, is still on the table. The woman’s body, while the site of struggle and stress, is also a place for pleasure and levity.

It is interesting to note that the leading women in these films don’t look the way we necessarily expect our movie stars to look. One is a homeless woman, often shown onscreen with paint on her face, dazed and red nosed from getting high; another is a well worn, middle-aged, working class woman; one is unabashedly Jewish (and no, her main concern is not getting a nose job); and one, of course, is pregnant, with her belly button popping out and a 64 oz. blue slushie in her hand.

 

 

It would be unwise to ignore that these women are not necessarily part of the demographic that is deemed normatively attractive. This is not to insult the actresses, who are all beautiful; rather, I want to make the point that these movies, which aim to tell female stories, cast a wider variety of women than we see in most box office films. This is a space where the woman’s body cannot merely be a sex object; it has to be made real, seen, understood as vital to the plot, which often means it must be flawed, or at least rendered convincingly, with all its attending oddness.

I would also like to point out that these films create a unique opportunity to depict communities of women. I will take a moment here to say that the movies I watched for today are flawed in that they only represent the white, straight, cisgendered female experience; I was disappointed to see that there were so few women of color cast (indeed, I can only recall two: one, who goes unnamed in Vera Drake and appears only briefly, later referred to as a racial slur; the second, Su-Chin in Juno, is onscreen for all of thirty seconds and gives the impression of being rather stupid.) Still—and this is not to push away concerns of whitewashing, merely to say that there is a positive among the negative—the films did bring women together in convincing, moving ways.

 

 

Be it Donna climbing into her mother’s bed in tears to hear about the illegal abortion she had in the 60s; or Vanessa holding Juno’s stomach in the midst of a Midwestern mall; or Vera comforting a panicked young woman by telling her that she will be “right as rain”, it is clear that the women in these movies care for one another in an important, even radical way. They are not depicted as rivals, as is more typical in film, but as companions. The love they have for one another seems to be uniquely feminine, not by nature of their biological characteristics, but because of the deep sympathy and compassion they have for one another as people trying to make it in a world that can be at best androcentric, and at worst nakedly oppressive.

Truthfully, it is a little misleading to group these movies together and try to speak about all of them at once; even amongst the comedies there is a wide variation in style and message. This could be due to the directors; men directed three of the four films I watched for today (I’ll refrain from commenting further, and allow you to conduct your own analysis of this bit of trivia.) The fourth film, Obvious Child, directed by Gillian Robespierre, is the one that seems to me the most blatantly political of the comedies. It manages to be funny, but also informative; Donna asks if the procedure will hurt, if her friend regrets getting an abortion, how much it will cost, etc. The goal of that film, it seemed to me, was to allow abortion to appear in mainstream conversation, rather than be relegated to women’s bedrooms to be spoken of in shamed whispers.

 

 

The other comedies didn’t necessarily share that sentiment: in fact, Citizen Ruth casts an equally scathing gaze on both pro-life and pro-choice parties. Both become caricatures fighting what they call a “war”, which includes acts of elaborate costume and deception, armies of followers standing on opposite sides of a barbed wire fence, and expensive (dare I say military grade?) private transportation (see Jessica Weiss’ helicopter, Blaine Gibbons’ private jet.) That film concludes with Ruth escaping a women’s clinic through its bathroom window, walking right through a crowd that has gathered outside, ostensibly to speak with her. None of them see her, even as they shout her name and wave signs; both groups are rendered utterly ridiculous.

Juno, too, is funny without taking a firm political position. On the one hand, the women’s clinic Juno visits is a dark, dirty place with lazy employees, and Juno seems to find abortion immoral; on the other, she is able to speak freely and openly with her friends and parents about her reproductive health and planning, and the decision to have the baby then give it up for adoption is her own.

I will note one last, important detail before I conclude this post (I’m afraid I’ve gone on a bit long already); one of the greatest differences, in my opinion, between a funny abortion flick and a sad one is its relationship to place and setting. Vera Drake is shot almost entirely indoors: in bedrooms, hospital rooms, jail cells. The farthest outside we go is the tenement block. Films like Juno, Citizen Ruth, and Obvious Child, on the other hand, chose not to maintain that internal focus and brought the viewers out to face the landscape: Juno bikes under blue sky and flowering cherry trees; Donna walks through the bustle of New York city; Ruth drives down a snowy, unvariegated Midwestern plain.

 

 

The movies that refused to be sad were the movies that allowed their women out of doors and into the real world, that confronted the tradition of domesticity and broke their characters out of it. This isn’t to suggest that the women’s relationship to the outside world is uncomplicated, by any means; I merely want to bring attention to the physical space these women are allowed to inhabit.

I will leave my considerations there, for now. It is hard for me to conclude this post; to do so seems to suggest that I have said everything I wanted to say about abortion, and about the way it is pictorialized, which is not the case. Still, I can only hope that this post has encouraged at least some of you to find more: more films, more articles, more passion (and, probably, more arguments.) Abortion is something that, however uncomfortable, however political and divisive, needs to be spoken of, particularly in the weeks ahead. I hope you take a look at some of these movies; and then, I hope you take a look past them, and into the lives of real women. I think it will be an eye opening experience. 

The Cronenberg Body Horror (Bedram)

There is arguably no bigger name in body horror than David Cronenberg. The Canadian is often credited as one of the originators of the genre, with his notable works including Rabid, Scanners, and The Fly. One of his best explorations into the genre was the 1983 film, Videodrome. While his earlier work, Rabid for example, displayed scientists experimenting on human bodies and the subsequent effects on societal order, Videodrome focuses more on the effects on the individual, though the individual in question can be viewed as representative of the masses.

The film revolves around Max Renn, the president of a television station, who is looking for new material. He is introduced to Videodrome by the man who runs the station’s pirate satellite dish, a show displaying the torture and murder of random strangers. When he asks what the plot is, he is told that there is no plot. The mutilation and murder just goes on for an hour. “Absolutely brilliant” is his response.  He becomes increasingly obsessed with the show, even watching it with his date. She becomes sexually aroused, and the two have sex with it on.

On the surface, one might think that the film is arguing that exposure to sex and violence leads to desensitization. The film does not seem so interested in tackling this issue, however, focusing more on showing that television is a weapon itself rather than the contents that appear onscreen. Max eventually uncovers the secrets around Videodrome, which involves a shady organization (Spectacular Optical) wanting to use the broadcast to manipulate the masses. The head of the organization, Barry Convex, tells him that the violence in the show affects the nervous system, “opening receptors in the brain and the spine” which allows the signal to sink into people, permitting them to be turned into drones. This establishes the idea of television affecting the body, taking it to the extreme and having it go all the way down to our organs and nerves. Max himself becomes a drone, carrying out the will of the organization. If the theme of media being able to influence individuals was not clear enough, Cronenberg includes a scene in which Max has a videotape shoved inside him by Convex, allowing Spectacular Optical to program Max’s mind and control his life. While over-the-top, it gets its message across: television (mass media in particular) programs its viewers.

The film ends with Max taking directions from a television, one that seduces and even shows him how to kill himself. The television is a manipulative object, and once again Cronenberg takes it to the extreme. While sex and violence were the trigger of this entire conflict, they were only a means to a greater end, a vehicle to spread a message. As Max is told, “…it [Videodrome] has something that you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy, and that is what makes it dangerous.”

David Cronenberg’s foray into body horror is widely believed to have ended with his 1999 film, eXistenZ. His son, Brandon Cronenberg, however, has started from where his father left off. His directing debut, the 2012 film Antiviral, tackled the genre that his father had explored numerous times, taking a social and cultural issue (the power of celebrity culture) and exaggerating it to make a point.

Unlike his father’s films, Antiviral is clearly set in the future, one characterized as extremely sterile. Walls, chairs, clothes, and so forth are almost always stark white, adding to the biologically driven story. While some of David Cronenberg’s films were set in the near feature, they often felt like the present. The future in Antiviral does not feel that way, but at the same time, it does not appear too far away.

In this future, the celebrity-obsessed culture has escalated to unprecedented heights. In order to feel closer to the celebrities they love, people buy the viruses that plagued them, having it injected into their bodies. Syd March, the protagonist of the film, works for one of the companies that acquires and sells the viruses. To make extra money he pirates the illnesses, which involves injecting himself with it, his body serving as an incubator. The obsession over celebrities even carries over to an odd form of cannibalism, in which people can buy meat cultivated from the cells of certain celebrities.  

By combining celebrity culture with something as bodily as viruses, Cronenberg is able to explore the theme of celebrities as ideas and contrast it with the human beings behind those constructs. Syd injects himself with a virus from superstar Hannah Geist, but finds out soon after that she had died from that very disease. Syd is eventually contacted by Hannah’s family, and he learns that Hannah is not yet dead, though she is dying. Syd gets to meet her, and this is one of the very few times she is shown in person. She is simply a sick human being, bedridden and constantly coughing up blood. Her face is drained of its color, bearing no resemblance to the divine, pervading figure plastered on the news and ads across the city. Even when she is finally shown in person, she is emphatically human and not-human due to her ghostly figure.

Both Videodrome and Antiviral use the body horror genre to dissect a part of our culture, taking something already present in our society and exaggerating it. Videodrome is increasingly regarded as having been a couple decades ahead of its time, foreseeing the increasing impact of technology and media, especially with today’s Internet. As for Antiviral, it’s not difficult to imagine that celebrity obsession will continue. At times it appears that celebrity news already takes precedence over more pressing current events. Brandon Cronenberg does take a similar approach to satirical prediction as his father did in Videodrome, but despite his father’s rather grand status in the body horror genre, he manages to display his own unique vision. 

The Corruption of Nature and the Metamorphosis of the Human Body in American Horror Story:Coven (Yasmine)

    To experience horror is to be so overwhelmed by fear the feeling is almost painful. When experiencing empathic horror as members of an audience, the visceral aversion to monstrous predators such as beasts, ghosts, murderers and rapists committing heinously gory acts of violence and psychological torture can make our fear for the protagonists just as potent as the fear for our own lives. Horror films and television shows most successful at achieving this terrifying effect on its viewers employ formalistic techniques to create visually striking imagery that engages the viewers in such a way they are forced to undergo a plethora of emotions.

     American Horror Story is a television series that truly exemplifies the horror genre with the depth of its dark, twisted plot structures and characters whose moral depravity drives them to perform unspeakable atrocities. Each season of the show is an anthology of horrific events occurring in a single place: a murder house, an asylum, and a witch coven, portraying a cruel world in which evil always triumphs over good. The homicidal ghosts of Murder House, the sadistic caretakers of Asylum, the vengeful witches of Coven, and other morally ambiguous characters reflect only the worst aspects of humanity.

    While every season has thus far possessed paranormal inclinations, the most recent installment of American Horror Story, involving the practice of witchcraft and voodooism, focuses more intensely on the perversion of nature and the loss of humanity. Through the unconventional use of metric and intellectual montage as well as a frightening expressionistic style, the opening titles of American Horror Story: Coven utilizes an amalgamation of abstract visual motifs to eerily foreshadow its themes: the corruption of nature and the monstrous metamorphosis of the human body.

 Intercutting images of forebodingly dressed witches, with hauntingly bizarre forest imagery, the opening title sequence depicts a dark and colorless world in which the occultists have dominion over nature. By definition witchcraft entails the supernatural manipulation and defiance of the natural world. This is evident in the first of a series of jarringly quick jump cuts: a wide shot of witches entering a forest followed by a sudden burst of white mist overwhelming the frame in a similar shot. In this instance the witches’ presence seems to have a mystical and transformative effect on the forest as the grainy image of trees dirt paths become consumed by the blindingly white mist. Several shots later the witches’ slow procession brings a dark aura to a row of trees backlit by a gray mist. The darkness is so profound that the witches’ black robes blend in with their surroundings suggesting a stronger connection to the landscape. Bent at odd angles the tree silhouettes create eerie shapes, resembling gnarled fingers shooting up from the soil; the tree’s transformation from literal to abstract representation signifies the distortion of nature. The startling appearance of a horned, skeletal, winged, and disturbingly humanoid creature further represents the grotesque melding of nature and the occult.

 The composition and mis-en-scène of shots depicting unnaturally distorted human bodies suggest that the landscape is not the only aspect of nature altered by witchcraft. In fact, the witches’ strange costumes alter the form of their bodies. The long black robes have tall pointed hoods that cover their face except for small eye holes. The ambiguous shape produced by the robes’ formlessness and the bizarrely pointy hood obscures the women’s humanity and gives them an otherworldly appearance. Later an image of a backlit female standing in darkness, except for a halo of light around her body, emerges. Like the hood of the witches, the low key lighting conceals the woman’s human features. On the ceiling above, the woman’s body casts a shadow of a bull-like creature, which literally overshadows her smaller form with its size and position in the frame. The bull’s shadow and the ambiguity of the human imply a transition from human to beast. Immediately after an illustration of a large demon devouring humans signifies the annihilation of humanity and supremacy of evil. Between a close up of two slanted tree limbs a human with a mule’s head—an abomination of nature—ambles across the frame. While the human torso is somewhat hidden by the darkness of the forest, the comparatively brighter tones of the mule head serves as a dominant contrast drawing attention away from the human body. The number and speed of cuts increases close ups of the mule head, further emphasizing the bestial half of the hybrid until the metamorphosis is complete and not a trace of humanity remains. ________________________________________________________________________

The Opening Title Sequence of American Horror Story: Coven

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmRXT7w2C1s

All images licensed under CreativeCommons.

 

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The Male Gaze in Kill Bill (Ingrid)

    More recently, I’ve become increasingly aware of how my filmic interpretations are informed by my gender. As a female viewer, I often perceive the so-called, “male gaze,” in Hollywood films less from feelings of identification (as a male audience member would perhaps experience), but more so from literature I’ve read, films I’ve studied in class, and general societal observations I’ve made on my own. The topic of the “male gaze” in film is a sensitive one; but I think sometimes people are unnecessarily quick to condemn films for female objectification, subordination, and vulnerability. I also believe female objectification is often overemphasized or mischaracterized as being sexually demeaning; I do not think that is always the case. Moreover, the possibility for a “female gaze” is rarely touched upon.

    In re-watching Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003), I found that my understanding of the “male gaze” was complicated. The film follows the vindictive mission of a strong female lead, The Bride (played by Uma Thurman). After waking from a four-year coma caused by a bullet to the head on her wedding day, The Bride vows to find and kill every last member of the assassin squad that betrayed her. Though the cinematic portrayal of the Bride, particularly towards the beginning of the film, suggests male dominance with many tightly framed fetishistic shots, the narrative is one of female empowerment. The Bride also progressively achieves command of the camera.

    The film opens with the most disturbing of diegetic sounds—the uncontrollable panting of a female. Reminiscent of the start of Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), the heavy, ragged breathing of a petrified female protagonist is one of the most visceral and disarming sounds in cinema. Overlaid with the opening credits on black, the female protagonist, who we later realize is “The Bride,” is first introduced to us by her pained gasping. Faceless and voiceless, her character is diminished at the start of the film. The scene then cuts to a black and white shot of the Bride. The harsh, high contrast lighting in the close up of her agonized expression is unflattering. Her face is glistening with inky blood, beads of sweat, and streaks of tears. Following this is a tracking shot of cowboy boots, striding towards the wounded Bride; the Bride’s whimpering is ever-present in the background. When the shot switches back to the Bride, her close-up is intruded by Bill’s boot in the bottom-right corner. Cower as she may, we presume Bill is hovering over her sadistically, with locked eye contact, observing his violent work. He proceeds to patronizingly wipe the blood from her face while apathetically explaining the motives for what he is about to do—shoot her, point-blank, in the head. Pinned to the ground by her sustained injuries, the Bride is unwillingly but completely subject to Bill’s brutality.  

    However, as the film progresses, we encounter a divergence. Along with the developments in the narrative—the Bride has embarked on her vengeful mission—we also see a distinct change in the shooting style. As exemplified by many of the kung-fu sequences, the formidable Bride demands control of the camera, and engages the audience in an awe-inspiring way. The film, which focuses a great deal on professional violence, in particular that of the martial arts, becomes a celebration of the human body. In these blood-gushing, horrific fights sequences, the Bride is superhuman. Wearing a distinct yellow jumpsuit and armed with a lethal samurai sword, she is transformed into a weapon; her agility and rigor are unparalleled. After slaying O-Ren Ishii’s entire horde of protectors, she stands over them victoriously on the railing of the upper level. In a low-angle full shot, she pronounces, “Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives, take them with you! But leave the limbs you have lost. They belong to me now.” She is empowered by the shot; her stature is overbearing and omnipotent. Here, Tarantino shows us how there are instances where the spectacle of the female body is not sexualized, but revered.

    Kill Bill offers a fascinating take on the male gaze in cinema. While the Bride, especially towards the start of the film when she is injured or in a comatose state, is often confined to the pressuring rectangle of the frame, truncated and expressed as parts of her body, she retains control of the camera and restores her agency in many of the impressive kung-fu sequences. The male gaze is undeniably present in Kill Bill, but can be decoded to either uphold, contest, or qualify its standard interpretation.

Losing Self, Redefining Self (Ingrid)

    Rust and Bone (2012) is a penetrating meditation on the physical human body—what constitutes it and what it contributes to our psyche. The film consistently fixates on body parts: in a tightly framed extreme close-up of a woman's nape, in a truncated view of a man's muscular torso, in an all-exposing shot of a breasts, in an extreme close-up of battered fists. All these merciless truncations give us a consciousness of our bodies’ physical limitations. While our bodies’ are ours’, they are just as much subject to our environment.

    The first time we are introduced to the woman, Stéphanie (played by Marion Cotillard), she is lying on the concrete, the result of a bar fight. The high-angle shot is only of her legs, accentuated by her black, strappy heels. The scene then cuts to a close-up of her. Despite her bloody nose and dazed expression, she is undeniably attractive—a complete image of a sexy woman.

    That is, until an accident changes everything. She loses her legs, knees-down and embarks a wandering journey of acceptance, with the help of an unexpected friend, Ali (played by Matthias Schoenaerts). Prior to the accident, Stéphanie is emphatically physical. An orca trainer at an oceanarium, she spends her days commanding with hand signals and performing elaborate routines for visitors. From the impression we get when we first meet her, we can assume she spends her nights at clubs, dancing with strangers.

(Girl's Barefoot Legs. Licensed under Creative Commons at Flickr.)    

    The accident creeps up on us. In the middle of show, an orca hurls its six-ton body onto the stage. The stage crumbles and submerges into the water. Along with it, goes Stéphanie. In a horrifying underwater shot, wires and grates sink out of the frame. What’s left behind is a sole human body, eerily silhouetted, surrounded by unnaturally blue water and floating debris. From the angle it is shot, Stéphanie’s body is completely warped, her limbs appear alien and blood darkens the water around her. It’s a grisly and isolating shot.

    When Stéphanie awakes in the hospital, her realization is heart wrenching to watch. After frantically groping around for her missing legs and falling off her hospital bed, we see the overwhelming emotion in her twisted expression. It is an utter sadness that is terrifyingly out-of-body, a disbelief that is paralyzing. Her tragedy brings her back to infancy in a way, back to Lacan’s mirror stage. Her constitution of self is irrevocably altered. She has to redefine the boundaries of her body and accept a new set of physical possibilities. On top of that she has to learn how to move in her new condition, how to maneuver a wheelchair, and eventually, how to walk using prosthetic legs.

    The first time Ali and Stéphanie spend time together after the accident unravels into a beautifully transcendent scene. Up until Ali’s visit, Stéphanie has been cooping herself up in her apartment for weeks. After seeing her state, Ali insists they go outside. He takes her to the beach. Although Stéphanie is hesitant at first, she eventually enters the water with Ali’s help. The shot that follows is in striking contrast with the disturbing underwater shot from the accident. Here, the rippling water is dazzling in the sunset. Stéphanie is overjoyed, floating on her own, her leg stumps bobbing in water. This isolation has a completely different feel than the previous shot; it is a one of liberation and release. We see in her, a distinct transformation as she begins to gain an awareness of her body in another way.

     Rust and Bone takes us on a gritty, emotional ride as it tries to understand not just what it means to lose something but what it means to lose something that is so inherently, so biologically, yours. It is perhaps the hardest experience to go through. Stéphanie’s revival is definitely a struggle worth watching. 

Life is Cinema (Mina)

    Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012) is a film about a film. But what exactly is "film?" How can we define cinema? Carax tries to answer these questions by blurring the boundary line between real life and film, between the real and the imaginary through Holy Motors. When the two intersect we are able to realize that our life, our reality is essentially a performance.

    Carax believes the essence of film is acting and performing by using one's physical body. From 19th century Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotographic gun to today's ditigal technology, the cinema has been developing for over 130 years. The improvement of machinery enabled mass production in the film industry, makeing more films accessible to the society. The epilogue of Holy Motors starts with brief clips of a running man. Next we see a mysterious man waking up and discovering a secret door hidden in the wall in his apartment room. He enters a crowded, yet silent movie house. The eyes of the audience are closed, their bodies stiff; they almost look dead. The opening clips in the beginning of the epilogue belong to Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist who conducted numerous studies on human body and motion. His clips thus convey a tone of nostalgia of earlier days of the film industry. Unlike the passive, mechanical movements of the audience, the man in the clips carries out active physical performancs. The mystery man (played by Carax, the director himself) looks feeble, so small in front of the huge movie screen. In all, I believe the epilogue celebrates the development of the cinema, but simultaneously points out the lack of physical movement in today's digitalized films and the passiveness of the audience.

    Carax's affection for pure physical performance continues to be shown in the character named Oscar in the next nine episodes (divided into Act I and Act II). Act I of the episodes focuses on portraying the beauty of performing. Oscar comes out of his luxurious house, posing himself as a wealthy businessman. His assistant Céline is waiting for him in a limousine. She tells Oscar that he has nine "appointments" in that day. For his first appointment, Oscar dresses up as an old beggar in the streets. We directly see Oscar combing a wig and putting makeup on his face before he act. In the next sequence, he is a motion capture actor who vividly performs a simulated sex with an actress (which once again underlines the digitalized technology in film). The importance of the use of body constantly reappears in the sequences.

In Act II, acting starts to pervade the real life. Act II, the boundary line that differentiates the real world and the cinema fades away. In the fifth and sixth sequence, for example, Oscar "kills" people who look identical to him and Oscar himself also gets "murdered" by others. At the end, however, Oscar returns to the limousine, alive, and gets ready for his next appointment as if nothing happened. When we saw the sequences in Act I, where he assumes the role of a beggar or a motion capture actor, we were fairly certain that what Oscar is doing is “acting”; in other word, it is not real. Now, we are no longer certain if this is real or not. We now recall the first time Oscar we met in Holy Motors. We believed that when he walked out of his house, he was the true version of Oscar. Every role Oscar has appears looks real and unreal at the same time. The act of making distinction between reality and film becomes useless. The prologue of Holy Motors further completes the identification of the real world and the unreal world. Céline drives the limousine to the Holy Motors garage then she places a mask as if she readying herself for a performance. As soon as we believe this eventually might be the end of the fantasy, another fantasy appears. The reality is then inseparable from the cinema, the fantasy.

    Oscar transforms into a different person each time he gets out of his limousine; the limousine is the movie theater, and also the place where film is made. Moreover, at the end of the prologue, the limousines talks to one another, expressing their fears that they may be considered outdated and unwanted. As we hear the discription, "outdated", we might be able to think about the Lumière Brothers’ train. In the 19th century, the screening of a train itsef was an exciting spectacle for the audience. But now, trains are "outdated". They are old, bulky, just as the limousines. Ultimately the limousines represent the one of the earliest cameras, the earliest period of the cinema history. Taking Oscar from one place to another, the whole travel and distance indicates the passage of time in the film industry.

    Through the prologue and epilogue which starts and ends Holy Motors, we realize we are the lifeless audience from the prologue. We also realize life is a mask, a mask is an act, an act is a movement, and movement is the "motor" of cinema, the causation which makes film appear beautiful. Within this interconnection, we find deep awe and beauty. Life is cinema.

Maya Deren's first film (Nour)

Maya Deren is an Ukrainian-American filmmaker who died in 1961. She is often associated with avant-garde filmmaking and particularly the feminist avant-garde . Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was her first film. She was twenty six  years old when she made it, living in Los Angeles. She was married toAlexandr Hackenschmied. It is hard, if not impossible, to know exactly what was going on in Deren's mind when she made the film, yet there are some interesting historical developments from 1943.

Of course, WWII has not yet ended, and a number of battles took place in 1943. In early '43 bread is rationed in US. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto happens on January 19^th 1943, etc. Many developments are certainly meaningful in trying to reconstruct the socio-economic and political environment in which Maya Deren has worked. One development, though, is of particular relevance. The All-American Girls Softball League, then baseball league, came into existence in 1943. Among other similar developments in women's lives during the war, this type of expansion in women's engagement with society can only point toward a new social consciousness; particularly among young women at the time.

Several issues come to mind when thinking about Meshes of the Afternoon in relation to a newly discovered female consciousness toward the environment, society. Yet, I'll focus on just one: Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon  significantly blurs the line between the inner and the outer, the private and the public.

The film is a non-linear narrative about a woman who falls asleep in an armchair and dreams. She has a dream in which a character with a mirror as a face features repeatedly. Deren plays the role of the woman who falls asleep. The film repeats the act of entrance into the house again and again. Right before the woman enters for the second time, however, we see her observing her sleeping body, then looking outside the widow at the character with the mirror face, all dressed in black, and at herself speeding away from the house. The very famous Maya Deren portrait (below) comes from this scene.      

             MAYA DEREN. MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.1943.

(Right after the frame from which this still is taken, the film cuts to the woman herself running after the character with the mirror face. )

This scene is a good illustration of how Deren blurs the line between the inner and the outer and attempts to merge the two spheres. In this scene the woman is both inside the house sleeping,  and outside the house running. Of course the mantra for second wave feminism was "the personal is political" which also blurs the distinction between the political/ the public/the outer and the personal/ the private/ the inner. Deren does seem to engage with this public-private binary, while attempting to situate the female within it. The woman, in this scene, appears as if she is both looking at herself running outside and looking at herself sleeping inside. She knows. She is offered a frame of reference from which she could take a distance and theorize about her position. 

The claim that she  could theorize about her position is problematic though. Looking at the still above, Deren, on the threshold looks, arguably, like a  mime. She can only gesture but not speak. She is able to point but not use language. Her allusion to mime acting helps emphasize her deep involvement with, if not entrapment within, her  body. There lies a paradox. She can look at herself, but at the same time cannot distance herself from her body. It is hard for me to make sense of what this paradox might mean, yet perhaps it is only meaningful within the context of the fantasy or  dream. The film might be postulating that distancing herself from her body, which seems to be a hindrance, is a female dream.

The female body is here situated on the line between the inner and the outer, making it the site of the struggle, or negotiation, between these two spheres. Although something similar could be said about all bodies it is especially true of  the female body which is often considered a matter of public discourse as females are the mothers who are traditionally seen as responsible for the propagation of the species. One could argue, therefore, that the dream of running away from the house in the above referenced scene is in fact a dream of breaking free of her body—a position to which the ending of the film gives credence.

This movement  outside of the body might mean a movement into a plentitude that exists outside of it —a space similar to that which the film creates in which even the law of gravity can be broken . Or if one emphasizes the process of movement toward an outside,  instead of the destination, Deren seems to be deliberately  bringing the public and private (the political and the personal) into dialogue. She is ultimately, thus, a dialectician. Woman is a dialectician. Her capacity to create and inhabit between seeming opposites, merging them within herself, to allow for the synthesis of something in can account for why Deren ensures that the woman observes herself both sleeping and running.

Meshes of the Afternoon has been read and re-read in so many different ways. Partly, perhaps, because in the many years after it was made and till now people, and particularly women's, experiences changed and therefore people saw different meanings in the film. This is one of its particular strengths as a text of course—it ages well. So for example tying the reading to second wave feminism is not an attempt to say that Deren foresaw the movements mantra or whatever. Instead it is an attempt to situate Deren within a larger historical tragectory.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo courtesy of jvoves's Flickr. Cropped and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Russia, Mongolia and Hollywood: A Silent Hybrid in Storm Over Asia (Shauna)

 

 When it comes to Soviet Montage, at least from the American perspective, Eisenstein is the dominant figure, Vertov the experimental artist, and Pudovkin the peripheral character defined in terms of his relation to Eisenstein as friend and aesthetic rival. Perhaps this hierarchy reflects the paltry selection of modern English translations of works by Pudovkin and the comparative wealth of resources by Eisenstein. Or maybe it reflects Eisenstein’s deft capacity to theorize and simultaneously self-promote. In “The Fourth Dimension of Cinema,” he routinely cites his own works as “classic”[1] examples illustrative of all the most crucial formal elements of film art.

Eisenstein was not above criticizing, and occasionally dismissing, works by Pudovkin, particularly when he construed them as veering too far his own artistic vision of montage. Eisenstein cites Storm Over Asia (1928) as an example of metric montage gone awry. The technique, he argues, fails when it is paired with “complex rhythmic tasks.”[2] True, the religious procession to honor the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is highly complex and orchestrated, even prior to the added intricacies of cutting and splicing. The sequence is not Pudovkin’s most glorious in Storm. However, it is neither inherently flawed nor fruitless. The awkwardness, which Eisenstein describes as the “forcible application” of metric montage, suggests an inability to convey all of the nuances of this Mongolian ritual practice. We are inundated with visual information (compounded by the vigorous, ethnic score), yet the meaning of vast ceremony remains oblique. The best moments are those in which Pudovkin exercises restraint, for instance, when the static camera fixates on the exotic dancing bodies, filmed in horizontal and diagonal lines, and finally in a curve that snakes from background to foreground. The slightly jarring cuts, which juxtapose accelerating dancers with static musicians, suggest a level of uncertainty, as though meanings and symbols inevitably elude the westerner.

Pudovkin transplants the viewer to a space that is neither fully human nor divine, but rather exists on the threshold of both of these worlds. He does not impose a vision or attempt to contrive meaning from the indigenous dance and music. Rather, he allows the Mongolian masks and costumes, the formations and the dances, to speak on their own terms. The content is beautiful and enthralling, even if the metric montage is occasionally awkward. The sequence evokes the experience of an outsider far more than it characterizes the Mongolians. We empathize with the camera’s gaze, which is incapable of focusing on a single dancer or musician for long. Who is to fault Pudovkin for evoking the experience of walking in on a ceremony performed by a foreign people or culture — that is, the experience of witnessing but not belonging?

 

One of the reasons Storm Over Asia resonates so profoundly in the silent film canon is its thematic, if not contextual, connection to the Soviet heritage and worldview. Although the film does not address Soviet woes, routines, or spaces directly, it grapples with a powerful and pervasive question present in the Russian psyche: To what extent should Russia be construed as “West” or “East”? Pudovkin alludes to the historical debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers through cinematic language, rather than blatant, polemical statements. Few Russians appear in the film, with the exception of the partisans. But the Russians' naturalistic style creates a visual parallel with the seemingly ancient Mongols — suggesting deeper connections to the Mongolians than to continental Europeans.

Storm suggests an underlying ambivalence in terms of Russian identification with either the West or East, though the film tends to empathize with the Mongolians. The sentiment is conveyed through (1) landscapes that manifest an Asian aesthetic in their graphic simplicity and still depiction, (2) the intimacy and sensitivity with which the nuclear Mongol family and its prized ornaments are filmed prior to the son's departure, and (3) the implicit connection between Anglo characters and unnatural processes, including surgical repair of the body, the hygienic and materialistic "rituals" before the visitation to the Buddhist Temple, and the infiltration of technology into the primeval environs of the Steppes.

Throughout the film, the agrarian and uncultivated landscapes range from chillingly vacant, to tranquil, serene and sublime. Ultimately, though, the Steppes pulse with a voracious life force: a mysterious and aggressive wind decimates the British colonial presence. Pudovkin elevates and restores the dignity of the indigenous Mongols through this ostensibly natural (though seemingly supernatural) force. Pudovkin wrote that D.W. Griffith was highly influential in molding his cinematic consciousness. Indeed, the scale and graphic potency of Pudovkin’s landscapes do reveal parallels between the directors' works. But the shots in Storm overlooking the sand dunes, mountains and conifers of the Steppes, are also entirely unique. Prior to Storm, no one had ventured into the rural, nomadic domestic spaces of the Buriat-Mongolian Republic with a movie camera. Pudovkin had attended film school with Valeri Inkizhinov, the actor who played the protagonist, and thereby entered a world previously invisible to film. Had he employed a strictly Hollywood approach, the product would likely not have contained the languid series of stills, dissolving one into the next, forming subtle conflicts of plane and scale, which infuse Storm with a distinctively Eurasian atmosphere. The director complemented his Soviet montage technique with an awareness of Asian art, establishing graphically simple, yet emotionally stirring landscapes, with just the slightest degree of movement (shuddering leaves, shifting ice, or the slow, almost viscous flow of a river).

Storm constitutes an exquisite portrait of Mongolian life, integrating graphic landscapes (in which the individual is frequently subverted to the grandeur and scale of the natural environment) with humanizing close-ups of the native people and the indexical signs present in their lives, such as the amulet that had belonged to the lama, and the prized skin of the silver fox. The Mongolian hunter's family appears aged, crouched, tanned, and wrinkled, yet their faces embody a spirit and spontaneity that is totally absent from the visages of the British Army Commander and his bejeweled and powdered wife. The lighting in the interior of the Mongolian yurt is fascinating and quite beautiful. Whatever wrong Eisenstein perceived in terms of metric montage in the religious dance is fully compensated by the tonal complexity within the shot! The crisscrossing of cast shadows simultaneously gives the impression of individuals trapped within a colonial economic framework, and integrated with the natural space. The continuity between anatomy and environment suggests a higher level of authenticity. These individuals, bound by the complex of shadows, are close to the earth and to each other, in-tune with the seasons, the wildlife, and the hours. In contrast, the British delegate and his wife shroud themselves in unnatural pieces of finery: a long satin sheath wrapped around an obese male torso, the whale-bone corsette cinched unnaturally at the waist, and layers of lotion and powder set on the skin.

The naturalistic quality of the Mongolians makes the surgery performed on Inkizhinov's character all the more loathsome. The victim, after being bound and brutally shot, is essentially reawakened from the dead and brought out of the natural space of the sand dunes into the civilized Anglo interior. Sanctioned violence is followed by sanctioned medical penetration to revive the human form. The body, bound like a mummy, and restricted in its movements, constitutes a mannequin or dummy. It is the physical manifestation of the Mongolian's diplomatic function as a pawn of the British Empire's. The surgical repair is unnatural in that it is totally divested from any spiritual healing (i.e. the sort of healing presented in the earliest moments when the lama prays for the father's recovery).

The Mongolian is wholly castrated, unable to quench his thirst or articulate his thoughts. The moment when he attempts to drink from the fish tank, an action wholly outside the purview of civilized European decorum, is quite poetic: his head on the slick floor, surrounded by the thrashing fish, constitutes a visual metaphor for all the trauma and exploitation he has endured, and his inability to thrive within this world. Yet, like all of the images infused with pathos, it is neither sentimental nor contrived.

The closing scene is perhaps the most unambiguous example of Soviet montage. Pudovkin employs the fastest tempo, the wildest mise-en-scéne, and rapid inter-cutting between a savage, fully restored Mongolian hunter and the intertitles, producing negatives of the image that seem monstrous and supernatural. Yet, it is highly telling that the British defeat is staged without bloodshed: the wrath of the wilderness is the only outpouring of violence. The men fall back, rolling and somersaulting like weightless dolls blown down. It is as though this culminating struggle occurs outside the bounds of mortal life: it is no mere territorial dispute, but a recovery of the dignity and humanity that was lost.

 

 

 

---

[1] Sergei Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Reader, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell(London: BFI Publishing, 1998).

[2] Ibid.

Sex, Sexuality, and the Future of the Body in Film (Leela)

 

Sex sells. Everything. Period. So why should films be any different? Recently, popular films have taken an inventive approach on sex and sexuality.  However, how far is too far?

In the past ten years, several high profile films have explored the border between pornography, sexuality, and art.  Destricted (2006), for example, is a collection of seven short films with each director developing their own views on sex and pornography.

Another popular film directed by Lars Von Trier, AntiChrist (2009), after premiering at Cannes, split critics into two camps.  Some hailed it as a beautiful piece of art exploring fundamental issues of mankind while others called it needlessly graphic, a disgusting piece of work.  Every image of sex in AntiChrist is, however, tainted.  The film opens on the characters He and She having sexual intercourse while their son dies nearby. From there on, the film deals with female sexuality as the female character, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, becomes wild, primal, the unrestrained facet of female sexuality. Von Trier gives us shocking images of female genital mutilation, full on penetration, as well as extreme scenes of sexual violence from the female character to the male.  What makes both the violence as well as sexual scenes work in this film is that they lack the titillation or designer violence often scene in other films. They are simply there, integral to life.   

Perhaps one of the most explicit films, Shortbus (2006) follows the separated yet integrated stories of Sofia, James and Jamie, Severin, and Caleb.   Shortbus looks at human sexuality and its various forms, complexities and problems. Eventually, all of these characters make their way to Shortbus, an adult only playground. Even with copious amounts of sex, director John Cameron Mitchell’s film still holds an almost innocent and a happy idealism.  The characters use sex as a way for communication and healing.  Whether it’s Sofia finally reaching an orgasm or James struggling to let others in emotionally, sex becomes both a frustration and therapeutic.  The sex is imbedded within the narrative and sex is just the vehicle.  While pure might not be the best of words, sweet definitely fits the shoe.

With the popularity of exploring sexuality, it is only inevitable to see more and more films experimenting.  Movies like All About Anna, 9 Songs, Ken Park, and Anatomie de l’enfer pop up more and more every day. At the same time, the past leaves us plenty of films to check out too; Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Une vraie jeune fille, In the Realm of Senses, and The Idiots to name a few.  In the end, these films prove there can be no limits, no barriers to good films.  If the narrative is first and first most, then yes, sex is just another tool in the filmmaker’s toolbox.