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Mandragora (1997): An Innocent Boy in an Unforgiving World

In the mournful tunes of sustained notes, Wiktor Grodecki’s Mandragora begins with a long tracking shot of an average town before dawn. Under the violet-blue sky and a smattering of streetlights, a handful of run-down houses are barely distinguishable amidst the uneven twigs. A supposedly ordinary setting becomes an estranged view, a long-buried reality contrary to everything positive. Unsettling is not just the landscape, but the characters. Three boys run across an open field, their figures barely discernible from the darkness in the extreme long shot. And the camera does not track their path: as if an omniscient God well acquainted with human sinfulness, it knows its destination, passing the field and the crumbling stone houses, and resting at a shop window, ironically the brightest spot in the town. Through the window, twinkling lights and shimmering ornaments adorn Western clothing and shoes on display, with an image of the Manhattan skyline in the background, reminiscent of the holiday window displays on Fifth Avenue, an American dream that hardly fits into the town. Yet this grandeur is transient: a black shadow appears at the center of the frame, smashing the glass. The other boys quickly join, seizing whatever attracts them.

Manhattan Skyline Colors. Flickr, by Manu H (2008).

One of the boys is the 15-year-old protagonist, Marek, who with a one-way ticket to Prague, runs away from the small town, from the technical school, from his neglectful single father. Passing the barren grasslands, the train approaches the city. Marek, a tag still attached to the jacket he just steals, stares at the leaden sky. A close-up shot shows his attentive gaze at the foreign view—the organized buildings, the steel structures, the Vltava River—his lips slightly parted, reflecting the just realized freedom. Yet the next second, he frowns a bit, unprepared for the upcoming journey. An innocent boy versus a sinful world. His pursuit of freedom is destined to fail. On the first night, he loses all his money at the casinos and goes home with a pimp where he gets drugged and raped. From then on, only tragedy besets him. He becomes a male prostitute, abused by pimps, clients, and other prostitutes.

Perhaps what is miserable is the human inborn ability to swiftly dismantle the most uplifting. Finally saving some money with his prostitute best friend David, Marek dreams of buying a restaurant and traveling to Egypt. However, the more practical David decides to invest their shared money in the business of the exploitative pimp Sacha, who then introduces Marek to an English client. The man leads Marek to a splendid room with high ceilings and golden walls carved with intricate patterns. A collection of silver vessels is on display in a wood cabinet. “Make yourself at home,” the man says. But this is a high-end palace to be admired, not the world Marek is familiar with. Marek looks around the opulent house, plays with the CD rack, and from the table, carefully picks up a cigarette, only to come across an open photo album that shows genitals in tormented poses. Within the refined mask lies the darkness of the soul. The man brings out a candelabra. “We’ll make classic light for your classical body.” The meticulous pursuit of perfection and beauty tracing back to antiquity reduced to mere imitation in form, all those in between—the creativity, the revolutionary spirit, and more importantly, the reverence and love of the people and the world—denied.

Caravaggio Rest During the Flight From Egypt. Flickr, by Carulmare (2008).

“Chiaroscuro,” the man says. “Do you know Caravaggio?” Marek has no idea; the man is elated. “Sweet unconsciousness,” he says. When artists still imitated ancient sculptures, Caravaggio preferred the vulgar, modeling religious figures after street prostitutes, because the divinities were divine only if they understood human emotions. The man imagines himself as the great artist studying this innocent boy, lamenting how impossible it is to copy God’s proudest creation. But the man is not Caravaggio: he does not elevate Marek but reduces him to an object for his own pleasure. In his order, Marek takes off his clothes, stands on a rotating pedestal, and holds a sword, mimicking Donatello’s David. The man sits on the sofa, pours a drink, and expresses his appreciation of this live sculpture in front. The scene cuts between the excited man and the baffled Marek, with the camera moving toward the man as he slowly reaches orgasm while pulling away from Marek. Clearly, the man sees Marek exclusively as an object of sexual interest with no interiority. And Marek bears no resemblance to David who after defeating Goliath becomes a hero well-loved by the people. Disempowered, Marek turns into a mere victim of this consuming gaze which with almost no physical contact, already subverts the sanctity of beauty, courage, art, and the human body created in the image of God.

Donatellos David in the Bargello Museum. Flickr, by Peter Visser (2009).

In the end, Marek overdoses in a stall in the train station where his journey begins, hallucinating worms crawling on his body and slitting his leg with a knife. His father, after searching for his son in vain, also arrives at the station to take the train home. In the toilet, the camera slowly rises up, once again transforming into an all-knowing God. The father walks in, leans against the stall partition, and smokes, not knowing that his son is now free and pure as the blood drains. In this unforgiving world, only the omniscient camera indicates a sense of redemption, uniting the remorseful father and the anguished son. After all, he is just an innocent boy looking for freedom, if only the world could treat him kindly.

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

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

Virgin Mary. Flickr, by iProzac (2009).

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Price of Money: Boon Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite

A quote says, “there are some things that money can’t buy, like manners, morals, and integrity.” But will the opposite work? Can we “buy” money by giving up morals?

Boon Joon-ho’s film Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) explores this possibility by telling the story of an aspiring college professor, Ko Yun-ju, who struggles with his career and life. The film’s first shot is Yun-ju appreciating the nature view that his cheap apartment faces. He is unemployed because he despises the behavior of bribing the dean with $100,000 to get the professor’s position. Nevertheless, as a man with ambition and is desperate to prove himself in the society, this shortcut is undoubtedly appealing. When Yun-ju is torn between borrowing money to bribe the dean and keeping his meritoriousness, the barking dog that disturbs him whenever he thinks about his career path becomes the only issue he can control himself. Hence, he kills the dog – which does no harm but bark – to demonstrate that there is something in his life that he can make an immediate decision about and take action to achieve his goal. This is the first time Yun-ju gives up his morals to escape his incapability to fight the corrupted world. Yun-ju carries the vicious cycle of determining others’ life and death, just as what he experienced in the society.

Yun-ju eventually bribes the dean and gets his dream job. He gives up his morals and obtains the position. The film ends with him fading into darkness when his student covers the view of nature outside the window with the curtains before class. The nature outside becomes a luxury that Yun-ju can’t afford anymore as he used to have every day. Yun-ju shows that you can buy money with morals, but your freedom is an additional inevitable price. It is also ironic that the position Yun-ju commits in this dirty transaction is a college professor, who is supposed to represent and enforce social order and justice.

However, if we consider Yun-ju’s life from a realistic perspective, he has a job that can make more money to provide a higher living standard for his family. He won’t be ordered by his wife anymore but have her respect instead. More importantly, his social status as a college professor will also satisfy society’s expectations on males and solve his anxiety as a home husband. Isn’t this a win?

The film also presents the tradeoff between human’s desire for money and morality with other characters. Hyun-nam, the bookkeeper and custodian of the apartment that Yun-ju lives in, experiences the opposite situation. Although she has a stable job, she is unsatisfied with her life as she dreams about getting famous by being on television. Therefore, the story of the missing dogs excites her with the possibility of being a hero in the neighborhood. Hyun-nam’s dissatisfaction with her ordinary career leads to her desire for surprise and freedom in life. She represents the impossibility of people buying emotional achievements with money and shows the jejune lifestyle that people without money dream of. Eventually, she loses her job as she is not focusing on her work. When Yun-ju loses joy after he sacrifices his freedom for the job, Hyun-nam can go hiking with her friend, which she dreamed about when she was working. But again, if we take a step back, Hyun-nam’s freedom is only temporary. She cannot sustain her life without a job and has to give her freedom back in exchange for the money.

The homeless, who eats the dogs in the neighborhood, is another character Boon shows the conflicting costs and benefits of life. For the homeless, ethics is a luxury idea to consider. All that matters is being able to survive. By eating the dogs and secretly living in the apartment’s basement, which the vast majority find immoral, the homeless can have a great meal with meat and a safe place to live. Food and housing are the top priorities that people would buy when they have money. But when money is a scarcity, freedom, danger, and dignity are nothing but his only asset to trade for a higher quality of life. Although he ends up being caught, he explicitly says he is excited about his life in jail as he won’t worry about food and house anymore. The homeless carries the fundamental concern about which way to trade money and freedom is more beneficial and pushes the audience to think if keeping a moral standard is indeed helpful in a desperate life.

Boon made the film when he was 30, and this is his first feature film. The conflicting and torn perspective towards using unjustified ways to achieve one’s goals is also a display of Boon’s struggle with exploring justice in the world at that age. Boon shows compassion when criticizing the characters’ decisions, leaving it to us to judge if they have made a better deal between money and freedom.

When the world is dark, should we light up a fire, or should we just close our eyes and sink into part of the darkness? And when the immoral darkness is monetarily beneficial, should we accept it? Are we making the social codes and moral standards the lights or another unseen trap in the darkness?

What Does the Helper Need? Park Chan-Wook’s Lady Vengeance

Why do we help others?

To feel happy? To feel needed? To fulfill a certain responsibility? To ease guilt? Or out of self-interest?

These are questions explored in Park Chan-Wook’s 2005 Lady Vengeance.

The main character, Geum-ja has been imprisoned for 13 years after a wrongful conviction for the murder of a 6 year-old-boy. In fact, she was manipulated into a confession by the villainous Mr. Baek, who kidnapped and threatened her infant daughter. Baek has kidnapped many children from many families for ransom, and Geum-ja helped him kidnapping the boy so that Baek would help her and her daughter without knowing that Baek will ultimately murder the boy.

The direct translation of the title is actually “The Kind-hearted Geum-ja,” and indeed Geum-ja acts like an angel in prison and helps almost everyone selflessly. But Geum-ja kindness is not without reason. Everyone she helps is essential to her revenge, and her kindness in prison is what convinced other prisoners to help her.

In fact, Geum-ja doesn’t hide her dark side. Once she is released, she even purposefully reveals herself as evil. Korean has a tradition of giving the released prisoner a piece of tofu as a symbol of starting a new life that is pure and innocent as the color of the tofu. However, Geum-ja throws away the tofu in front of a group of people when she is released, ignoring, and even confronting this suggestion of guiltlessness. She also starts putting on blood-red eye shadow and wearing all-black outfits. Most importantly, the angel who used to smile at all criminals never smiles again once she gets out of prison. She is desperate to show everyone, and herself, that all her kindness is out of purpose, and now it is her time to achieve that only goal. Geum-ja completely wipes away her innocence and even loathes her past kindness. Because only doing so can this young and attractive woman be determined to fight a murderer. Geum-ja must hide any compassion she has to convince herself that she is stronger and more brutal than Baek to conduct her revenge. As human beings are conflicting figures, the best way to disguise our intentions is to present the opposite side, just as the revenge-motivated angel in prison and the desperate evil outside that Geum-ja shows.

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

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

To me, the film is definitely not portraying Geum-ja as an innocent figure, nor making anyone in her an absolute demon. Geum-ja conducted the kidnap in exchange of receiving help from Baek when she was pregnant, and she also murdered someone to help a prisoner whom she knows that she will need her help to revenge. She selfishly helps people but kills Baek morally. The conflicting behaviors we see from her are just an unspoken consensus that people all act for self-benefits, whether we are being conscious about it or not. This invisible cost-benefit analysis leads to whether we display ourselves as a kind-hearted evil or a brutal victim.

If there is no pure angel nor ultimate devil, what does the helper actually want?

To feel the kindness in their heart, or plan to receive help in the future?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

Duplicity and Darkness: Human Nature, According to Fargo

Spoilers for season 1 of Fargo.

“This is a true story.” The first episode of Fargo begins with these words, superimposed over a sweeping landscape whose few signs of civilization — a thin road, a telephone line — are overwhelmed by the wintry wilderness and shrouded by the night. The lights of some unknown city glimmer just over the horizon, barely visible. As the words fade — “true” the last one to disappear — and the haunting orchestration swells, a single car appears, dwarfed by the nature around it but inexorably driving towards its goal. Its headlights might seem like the light at the end of the tunnel, but its driver is far from a civilized presence here to illuminate the night.

This is our villain, Lorne Malvo, a coldblooded contract killer who leaves chaos in his wake wherever he goes. Malvo is no man, but an apex predator, a wolf, a comparison he himself enjoys making. He’s skilled at putting on a charming face when he wants to, whether playing a harmless pastor, a caddish dentist, or a quippy wanderer. Yet, the wolf lingers beneath, unsettling all who glimpse his true nature. Like the series itself, which is in fact completely fictional, this dissonance between exterior presentation and interior reality creates a sense of narrative distrust and suspense. Fargo itself is predatory in the way it preys on audiences’ fascination with truth. Nothing is what it seems, which makes Malvo and the show alike all the more dangerous and unpredictable.

Malvo’s duplicity and underlying malevolence are mirrored by the setting of Fargo. Most of the season takes place in the Minnesota cities of Bemidji and Duluth, whose wholesome, friendly Midwestern façade and pristine, snow–covered landscapes are undermined by the dysfunction which lies beneath. Fargo’s “antihero,” hapless insurance salesman Lester Nygaard, is similarly deceptive. A broken washing machine’s brutal thumping is our first sight and sound of the Nygaard household, before the camera tilts up from the basement to Lester and his wife Pearl in the kitchen, and it immediately foregrounds the dysfunction of their marriage and Lester’s capacity for malevolence — hidden underneath the floorboards, but violently pulsing, ready to explode.

Fargo presents a rather bleak outlook on human nature and fate. Frequent establishing shots of the Minnesotan wilderness signal that this is the animal kingdom, for all that its characters live in towns and work 9–to–5s. The camera often crouches animalistically behind objects, whether they be snowdrifts or steering wheels, giving the impression of a stalking predator or cowering prey. In the world of the show, doing good is often a pointless quest in futility and one chance encounter can loose the raw, animal savagery lurking beneath a veneer of civilized humanity. Lester and Malvo meet entirely by chance in the hospital and by the end of the pilot, Malvo’s sinister encouragement has driven Lester to kill his nagging, domineering wife, bashing her head in with a hammer after a fight. And so begins Lester’s move up the food chain. He is now both predator and prey, and struggles with this dual existence for the rest of the season.

At times, Lester is cold and calculating, tampering with crime scenes, evading the police, and eventually pinning Pearl’s murder on his brother. But he sometimes reverts to a bumbling coward who can never quite shake off the suspicions of Deputy Molly Solverson, the hero to Lester’s antihero and Malvo’s villain. Throughout the season, Lester wears a bright orange puffy coat, the lurid color resembling that worn by hunters to avoid shooting each other. It simultaneously marks him as both hunter and hunted, a predator and a sitting duck, with no hope of blending in with the stark, muted color palette.

By the season finale, Lester has seemingly transformed from failed salesman to successful alpha male. Following a one–year time skip in episode 8, he’s remarried to the adoring Linda, started his own insurance shop with a slick, masculine façade, and wears sharp blazers and dark–colored turtlenecks. But his past is inescapable and Malvo soon returns to Bemidji to murder Lester, setting in motion a sequence of events that ends in both their deaths. After Lester injures him with a bear trap, Malvo crawls away to his rented cabin to recover and is shot dead by a former police officer, Gus Grimly, who has been lying in wait there. Gus had previously tried to have Malvo arrested, only to have Malvo threaten his daughter Greta. His triumph over Malvo is a triumph of family man over callous killer, of law and order over a vicious predator. Yet Malvo dies as he lived, sowing mistrust and suspense. Neither his severely injured leg nor Gus’s initial hail of bullets are enough to do him in and it takes two bullets to the face to exterminate his threat once and for all.

Malvo’s death also unearths the truth of Pearl’s murder, sending Lester on the run. He dies two weeks later, after running onto the thin ice of a lake in Glacier National Park. In contrast to Minnesota’s flat open landscapes, Montana’s mountainous wilderness is claustrophobic, closing in on him. In truth, he has been on thin ice this whole season and his fall — shortsighted, self–inflicted, and accidental — is a thematically appropriate conclusion to his story. The natural swallows the human, in a trope oft–employed by the Coen brothers (creators of the 1996 movie the series is based on), warning the audience that compromising morality is a slippery slope.

Fargo’s ruthless message about the fragility of humanity is strengthened rather than softened by its seemingly paradoxical happy ending. In a nod to the original film, the show’s last shot frames a pregnant police chief, this time Molly Solverson, her husband Gus (the officer who defeated Malvo), and Gus’s daughter Greta. The only family to survive the season with every member alive, the camera lingers on them curled up together on the couch, watching TV — a happy family, a slice of Americana, a reassurance that at least some good guys have a happily ever after.

Redemption or Damnation in Bruges

Martin McDonagh’s first feature film, In Bruges, strikes a fine balance of morbidity and comedy. A creeping introduction acquaints the viewer with the town’s looming medieval structures, gothic figures, and moonlit canals. Characters often claim that “it is like a fairytale,” and they are not at all wrong. However, while Bruges makes for a fantastic setting, the film’s reason for taking place here is far from pleasant.

Two Irish hitmen have hunkered down in a local inn to keep a low profile after a job gone wrong. They await further instructions from their short-tempered boss, Harry. The first hitman, Ray, is a brash young man, juxtaposed against his more cultured and experienced colleague, Ken. While Ken is dead set on exploring the town’s cultural offerings, Ray is determined to do anything but; his head sits deep in the folds of his coat, arms crossed and fingers fidgeting, constantly looking for an excuse to be anything but sober. Ray’s first job had been a few days earlier and the way it plays out makes his demeanor understandable.

Having been sent to kill a priest, Ray sits in the confessional, outwardly proclaims his motives, and emerges with gun in hand. He then riddles the father’s body with a barrage of bullets. As the man collapses a young boy is revealed behind him, caught by a stray bullet. Scrawls on a bloodstained note reveal the boys sins, carefully prepared for confession: “1) Being moody / 2) Being bad at maths / 3) Being sad.” As with many scenarios in the film, McDonagh does well to deliver a distillation of humanity, complete with all of its absurdity and sorrow. There is an evocation of the near incomprehensible feeling which is the coupling of the comic and the hollow.

The separation of youth and age is clear throughout the film, beginning with the stark contrast in both demeanor and appearance of the two hitmen. The botched murder of the priest takes this idea a step further. Initially, it was simply the intentional killing of a man who had already selected his lot in life, with little room for progression. For the boy with a bullet in his head, the stakes are much different. A previously unknown but hopeful future has been erased, with no prospect for redemption.

It is in Bruges that Ray, must reconcile with his actions. It is a town whose storied past harkens back to the Crusades, with its monuments and culture suggesting the Christian ideals of righteousness, judgment, and repentance. As such, what could be a beautiful getaway for Ray becomes a place of harrowing reflection; the film becomes a search for a remedy for Ray’s guilt and a desire to understand what awaits beyond physical death. Ray must know, will this crushing guilt die along with him in this life?

Stepping back, it is clear from the first moment that these men are foreigners, unfamiliar with Belgian customs and conventions. It is also evident that Bruges is a place of sinners. We come across a corpulent American family and a snobbish Canadian couple, possibly representations of the cardinal sins of gluttony and wrath, respectively. Ken and Ray also stumble upon the shooting of a film, where they meet a racist dwarf from the States and a seemingly demure but potent local who sells drugs to the production crew. They are here shooting a dream sequence, lending an illusory sense of self-awareness to the film. Over time, we understand Bruges to be the den of imported miscreants, arrived to reconcile their vices.

Notably, not a single Belgian native dies during the entire film despite plenty of near death experiences. Instead, it is only the foreigners who come face to face with their mortality. As such, McDonagh is possibly framing the residents of Bruges as those who permanently reside in purgatory, pushing sinners towards their impending judgment. This is supported by the film’s final scene in which a mortally wounded Ray is ushered through a procession on the set of the film, surrounded by grotesque masked figures, along with the locals who he has met during his time in Belgium. It is a sequence eerily familiar to Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, “The Last Judgment,” which Ray and Ken mull over.

It is a wonderful tale of repentance and judgment, balanced against tight, oftentimes lighthearted, dialogue. We come to understand Bruges as Ray’s purgatory, a temporary stop on the path to eventual judgment, consistently marked by suffering and uncertainty.

The Deconstruction of the Horror Film

With October upon us, there is undoubtedly a seasonal resurgence of interest in one of cinema’s longest standing, most beloved genres: Horror. Despite its origins in the early 20^th century, the genre has seen little progression, especially in recent decades. Contemporary horror films continue to be stuffed with the same characters, creeps, and story conventions. Jocks, beauties, stoners, and goody two-shoes types who make troublingly poor decisions dominate the screen, often being felled by the same foes, from undying zombies to sweet talking vampires. The Cabin in the Woods directly acknowledges this stagnation and the industry’s continued fan-service and uses them as ammunition, aiming for the satirical deconstruction of this treasured genre, while still providing the scream inducing slaughter of innocents and gothic morbidity that we have come to know and love.

After an introductory montage of ancient murals depicting blood sacrifice, we abruptly find ourselves in a high-tech, labyrinth-like underground facility where we witness the conversation of two middle-aged men dressed professionally. They begin with a discussion of fertility and the risk of jinxing things by preemptively baby-proofing a home; it is an interesting topic that aligns with the film’s interest in fate, free will, and the supernatural, though unfortunately, the subject is never again touched upon. The men then shift to business. The nature of their work isn’t immediately clear, but as they weave through the massive complex, allusions to other countries undergoing similar endeavors are made, and we begin to understand that this is a high stakes, experimental operation.

Cut to the home of Dana, a college student preparing for a weekend trip with friends. Here we are introduced to our cast of all too common characters, as they prepare to embark on their weekend vacation. Apart from Dana, there is Curt, the handsome football player, and his beautiful girlfriend Jules. Rounding out the group are Marty, the rambling pothead, and Holden, a transfer student who plays football with Curt. Events then proceed as any fan of the genre would expect. The gang has an off-putting exchange with a freakish old man at a seemingly abandoned gas station who speaks bluntly, warning them not to proceed. We soon learn that this man is an integral part of the aforementioned experiment, serving as “the harbinger” of the group’s impending doom; this is one of the first of many instances in which a discussion concerning freewill is prompted. Is their doom imminent or is there potential for redemption? Was turning around and going home ever an option? At the same time, this interaction serves as a critique into the plotlines of typical horror films, in which foolish characters blatantly step into deathtraps despite glaring “STOP” signs.

Upon arrival at the cabin we begin to understand the film’s signature feature and main plot conceit; just as we were seconds ago, the aforementioned suits are watching the gang approach the old cabin. They sit in a control room chock-full of screens, buttons, and levers. It is from here that these men orchestrate the eventual, elaborate murder of the youthful pack. Deaths that we later learn are to fulfill a blood sacrifice to the “old gods” who will annihilate humanity if not properly appeased. The group proceeds into the cabin and begins to settle in, all the while our perspective alternates between viewing the events from the control room or directly from the cabin itself. The men in the control room manipulate the environment by locking doors, blasting pheromones into the home, and awakening a bloodthirsty undead family from the grave. It is an affectionate, but unrelenting ridicule of the heavy-handed writing which often results in blatant idiocy and inevitable death for many of the genre’s characters.

It is here that we begin to understand the film’s criticism of the genre, which is at once incisive and reflective. Those in the control room may represent the genre’s filmmakers and producers who all too often use every tool at their disposal to create pulpy, haunting pictures which are all too predictable. Further, viewers can be compared to the “old gods” who only seek gory, raunchy entertainment; the “old god’s” satisfaction determines the fate of the men in the control room, prompting thoughtful questions into the relationship between creator and audience.

The Cabin in the Woods does well in displaying all of the puzzle pieces which normally constitute a horror film, and while much is revealed in tearing apart this puzzle, the pieces are never put back together. We are left with only a sardonic critique in the form of a film whose entertainment value relies as heavily on the tropes and clichés it mocks, as anything else. As the world crumbles to pieces at the hands of omnipotent gods and the screen fades to black, a thoughtful viewer cannot help but say that it is marred by some sense of incompletion. So many complex issues and powerful metaphors are brought to the surface but never expanded upon, that one cannot help but feel teased. Further, while the film expertly and uniquely unravels and exposes the genre’s conventions, it still wholly relies on them in delivering its entertainment and lacks meaningful closure. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be anything more, and without a little bit of what may be considered mindless entertainment to pacify the masses, the world may very well fall apart.

Bringing Back The Cat

Stuart Gordon’s Reanimator and Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary—two horror films from the 1980’s with similar premises and wildly diverging tones. In both films, the protagonist is caught up with a method for resurrecting the dead. In both films, this method comes with a cost: the dead come back ‘different’, which is just the horror movie way of saying ‘evil’. But most the important similarity between these two films is that the protagonists are introduced to the realm of beyond-death in a very specific way… through the resurrection of a cat.

Yeah, I’m not sure if it was intellectual cross pollination, purposeful hat tipping, or just coincidence, but both movies contain the following ordered plot beats: Character A knows how to bring things back from the dead; Character B does not; Character B’s cat dies; Character A brings it back to life; Character B has an encounter with their newly reanimated cat and thus learns about the resurrection process.

I think it’s worth comparing the undead cat scenes in Reanimator and Pet Sematary because they both use the same ideas to accomplish the same goal (terrorizing the audience), but they do it in very different ways and therefore hit the audience in very different ways.

In Pet Sematary, it’s all about truth and realization. Louis, the main character, has to bury his cat after it was hit by a car. His neighbor Jud tells him that there’s a special place to bury it—a cursed and forgotten Indian burial ground out in the woods. Jud says anything buried there will return from the dead, and of course Louis doesn’t believe him, but they bury the cat there anyways. A few scenes later, Louis is working in his garage when who should show up to greet him…? The cat! But now the cat is acting different. Louis picks it up to see if he’s imagining things and immediately receives a nasty scratch across his face.

Compare this to Reanimator. Protagonist Dan’s cat just died (under mysterious circumstances), and his new roommate Herbert takes it down to the basement. Not long after, Dan hears strange cat-like sounds coming up through the floor boards. Dan goes down to investigate and finds Herbert frantically running around in circles with an angry zombie cat clinging to his back like one of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. Herbert rips off the cat and chucks it at a nearby cabinet, and just when you think it might be finished… It lunges out of the darkness at Dan! Dan frantically fights it back with a baseball bat and finally throws the cat so hard at a wall that its impact leaves a red stain. The cat is dead once again.

What do these two scenes want to accomplish? Well, they’re both trying to scare you, but the same general concept is being played for two completely different reactions. In Pet Sematary, horror is drawn from what is considered to be real in the universe of the movie. Like Louis, the audience (I’m assuming) doesn’t believe in revivification. It’s a myth, it’s fantasy. When Jud tells us about it, we shrug him off as some crazy old man. Maybe we know something spooky is going to happen because we’re watching a horror movie, but we remain skeptical because the main character is still skeptical and because we haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary yet… But then the dead cat actually comes home. The horror there is in the discovery. The realm of possibility in the movie has expanded into uncharted and unpleasant territories, and we don’t like being faced with something so unsettling being presented as now possible. It’s not that the cat is mean, per se, but really that the cat is there. Disbelief being disproven is scary. Being shown the impossible is scary. That’s how Pet Sematary tackles the cat scene: the movie isn’t trying to scare you with the imagery it presents on screen (it is, after all, just a cat), but with the implications it creates beyond the screen. Fear comes from the questions we start to ask about the film’s universe and from our own curiosity about this mysterious burial ground. The movie also wants to tap into our fears about death and what lies beyond death. It’s you, the audience member, that’s doing all the work here because you have to create terror through your own immediate thoughts about what’s presented on screen.

Reanimator is less interested in thoughts, more interested in what’s right in front of you. First of all, the movie has already established that the dead can be brought back to life. The process is shown to us before we even get the opening title sequence (followed by Jeffrey Comb’s awesome and cheesy delivery of the line “I gave him life!”). It’s not shocking when we see the cat brought back because, unlike the protagonist, we already know that reanimation is possible in the world of the film (it’s also in the title). The film is instead trying to shock us with absurdity and humor. Most of us know and love household cats, and now here’s one viciously leaping around in a dark basement and being relentlessly beaten with a baseball bat. It’s effective because it’s so unpleasant to look at. We don’t like watching a blood-covered cat being pitched at a wall, so the footage of it happening is outrageous, scary, and sadistically sort of funny. Reanimator isn’t all that interested in having you emotionally engage with the implications of what exists beyond the limits of our mortal existence. It would much rather gross you out with lots of blood and guts and uncomfortable nudity. The movie is well aware of the absurdity of its off-zombie premise, and it doesn’t want to convince you that this is reality. It’s perfectly comfortable with you remaining at a distance and cringing in your seat at the sight of a surgical saw ripping through a chest cavity.

So the difference between the two cat scenes is the difference between the implied and the explicit. Pet Sematary wants to suggest that the supernatural horror is possible and maybe just lurking right around the corner (‘curiosity killed the cat’), while Reanimator wants to take the goriest and most over-the-top manifestation of that horror and shove it right in your face (‘who let the cat out of the bag?’).

The Lighthouse, The VVitch, and the Wardrobe

Minor spoilers for The Witch and The Lighthouse

I watched Robert Egger’s film The Witch (The VVitch) a few weeks ago (I’ve been kicking myself since 2015 to rent it off Amazon, but then it popped up on Netflix) and dear lord what an amazing film.

So then I obviously went and rented Egger’s most recent film The Lighthouse, and honestly I’m not sure which one is better. They’re both so disturbing, so absorbing, so big, so boring (in a good way), so weirdly secretive, so silly for how serious they are.

I want to talk about one really stand-out aspect present in both films (and I know I’m not the first to point this out): the score and sound design in The Witch and The Lighthouse are incredible. All thanks goes to composer Mark Korven (both films) and sound designer Damian Volpe (The Lighthouse) for building so much suspense through a few key sound effects and two really crafty scores. There’s a few things that work so, so well: the jarring way in which the music shifts from whispering to screaming, the constant repetition of certain eerie sounds, and the combination of specific audio and imagery to create such uncomfortable atmospheres.

The Witch is limp without its music. The film is beautiful, but most of the emotion in the film is heard rather than seen. When the eponymous witch first appears on screen, we only see her back. She’s bent over a table, working at something, and even though we can’t see what she’s doing, WE KNOW what she’s doing (horror warning: it involves a baby and hammer). But the image is so dark (the film’s nighttime scenes were shot mostly using candlelight and moonlight) that you can barely make out anything beyond a suggestion of the events. What gets you is the music: a playfully hostile drumbeat paired with what sounds like a hacksaw carving through a block of wood. It’s the soundtrack of anxiety, the musical equivalent of passing a 14-wheeler on a two lane highway. It asks you to start biting your nails. Later in the film, we meet a very evil certain somebody who only speaks in whispers—whose dialogue sounds so physical that you can hear their tongue hitting their teeth as they pronounce the letter ‘t’. It sounds like someone is literally whispering in your ear. It’s unnerving. And the music isn’t afraid to build up to uncomfortable loudness for the sake of atmosphere. A lot of modern horror movies are incredibly lazy in the way they use loudness; when they want to make you jump in your seat, they let everything get really quiet and then they slap you across the face with a blaring sound cue. The Witch isn’t interested in wasting tension. It pulls you to the edge of your seat because it wants to drag you further into the film.

The Lighthouse does some really interesting things with sound (a reoccurring mermaid shrieks at the camera in such an unearthly, washed out way; the squawking of seagulls started to drive me up the wall). But one of the best parts of the whole film (next to Pattinson and Dafoe’s performances) is the constant blaring foghorn that sounds off every five minutes throughout the duration of the film. It’s such an otherworldly, bassy sound—you can’t really tell if it’s something you might actually hear coming from a lighthouse in the 1890’s, or if it’s a completely made up science-fiction noise. But it hits so well because the one sound says so much: its repetition makes you think of horror/insanity, the fact that it’s a foghorn makes you think of the ocean, and the singularity of it connotes isolation. Beyond that, it just sounds really, really cool.

Go watch The Lighthouse and The Witch.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex and the Domestic Sphere in Slasher Movies (Charlotte)

One of the most important elements of a slasher movie is its setting. Two of the most iconic slasher movies ever made, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), make great use of their settings, and are defined by their settings. Halloween takes place in suburbia, while Texas takes place in the middle of nowhere. While these two settings are very different, these filmmakers seem to be using these settings to communicate similar messages. Both movies seem to be warning the audience about the danger of disrupting the typical American domestic sphere and specifically the power of female sexuality to disrupt that sphere.

Halloween tells the story of a psychopath named Michael Myers, who kills his older sister, Judith, as a young boy. He escapes a mental hospital 15 years later and goes on a killing spree on Halloween night, targeting a group of babysitters.

Toward the end of Halloween Laurie finds the bodies of her friends in a bedroom. The majority of the movie takes place within suburban homes, and this is an obvious disruption of the domestic sphere—extreme violence in such an intimate space. Another theme that permeates the film is one of morality. Laurie, the only one of these teenagers to survive the film, is also the only one that is a virgin. The choice to put these young bodies in a space associated not only with love and domesticity, but also with sex, is a clear statement. Teen sexuality and premarital sexuality leads to the degradation of the traditional American home.

It is also crucial to mention that Annie is splayed out on the bed, dead and only partially clothed, with the stolen headstone of Judith Myers above her. Michael also killed Judith shortly after she engaged in sexual activity, and while she was still naked. Michael’s murder of Annie is a reenactment of his murder of his own sister fifteen years prior, which, it seems, was itself “punishment” for her teen sexuality. However, even though it seems that Michael is trying to punish these teenagers for engaging in sex, it also seems as though he is sexually fascinated by them. He kills them extremely intimately, and he moves their bodies after he kills them. The way that the bodies are arranged in the bedroom is carefully curated.

Michael then tries to stab Laurie, slashing the sleeve of her shirt. Given how close he was to her at the time it seems possible that he was not trying to stab her, but rather was trying to cut her clothes off. The ensuing struggle can be read as one for Laurie’s life or as one for Laurie’s body.

It is important to note that he uses a kitchen knife as his weapon. He is repurposing a tool from perhaps the most domestic part of the home, the kitchen, the hearth, and using it against the home. That points to how he is disrupting the domestic sphere throughout the film.

Laurie flees to the kitchen—the hearth, the supposed safest part of the home—and locks the door. She struggles to open an exterior door that’s blocked with a rake—yet another domestic tool. It is noteworthy that none of the weapons or obstacles used in the home (with the exception of the gun that Loomis uses) are from outside of the home. In every case, from Michael’s kitchen knife to the rake to the knitting needle and coat hanger that Laurie uses to defend herself, these are emphatically domestic items being turned against their natural environment. This is not a home invasion, but rather a home corruption.

Michael, using brute force, punches a hole through the kitchen door and steps inside. The shot of him entering the kitchen is disturbing. He looks so out of place not only because he’s a violent criminal in a mask, but also because he looks too big. He is taller than the refrigerator. He quite literally does not fit in this space.

Laurie narrowly escapes by breaking a window—by, in her own way, corrupting this domestic space—and we get a long shot of her fleeing the home. Suddenly, this warm, tight-knit neighborhood feels cavernous and abandoned. She screams for help, but no one comes to her aid. The shot is long and without cuts. The camera pans to follow her, but stays fairly still. This kind of camera movement turns the audience into yet another bystander, watching this unfold without helping her.

Their struggle continues. Laurie survives and for a moment it seems that Michael is dead. However, it is important that the movie does not end on this note. We cut back to see that Michael is no longer lying “dead” on the ground. This is followed by several shots of the interior of the house and the neighborhood, accompanied by Michael’s heavy, masked breathing. The implication is that he could be anywhere. These domestic spaces are not safe.

Texas tells the story of two siblings, Sally and Franklin, who travel with a group of friends to visit their grandfather’s grave. On their way back, they decide to stop by their grandparent’s old home and there encounter a psychopathic family of cannibals.

In many ways, Texas is a far more ham-fistedly told story. The corruption of the domestic sphere is obvious, with the cannibals’ home being covered in blood and innards, full of furniture made of human bones and skin, and the dried up, mummified remains of grandparents hidden in the attic. It is difficult to think of a more corrupt home environment. However, there is one less obvious and more subtle aspect of the home that is corrupted. There is no real female figure in the house. While their grandmother is technically present, she is dead and has no agency. This is a statement about what happens when women are absent from the home—men go insane.

The ending sequence of the film begins with Sally trapped in the cannibals’ home being tormented during a kind of “dinner party”. It is a confusing and disorienting series of close ups of the men cheering each other on as one tries to kill Sally with a hammer. This, too, is a weapon found inside the home, but it is more garage than kitchen. It is an emphatically more masculine tool than the knife in Halloween. This is a home that is devoid of the feminine. However, these men seem to be aware of that. During this sequence, Leatherface is dressed up as a woman, in make-up and a wig. He is play-acting the role of the “woman of the house”. It is also possible that the mask he wears is made of the skin of women specifically, in which case he is really trying to embody a woman in the most literal sense. This seems to stand in contrast with all of the anti-women language being used during the attack, such as, “Kill that bitch!” These men seem to have a real hatred for women as much as they have a fascination with them.

Like in so many horror films, the villain here is a visibly terrifying, ugly man who seeks to hurt a young, beautiful woman. It is possible that violence is the only way these men feel they can gain access to a woman’s body, and it is something of a replacement for sexual intimacy. This seems to be the case in Halloween, and certainly seems to be the case here as well. During the attack on Sally, one man holds her arms behind her back. They are crowded around her, physically intimidating her and physically forcing themselves on her. There is a close-up shot of her torn shirt and the bare skin of her back. It is terrifying, but there is a nod to the sexual. It can be read as a pseudo rape scene. It makes sense, though, that this takes place in a dining room rather than a bedroom, because, of course, once she is dead these men plan to eat her. At this dinner party, she is the dinner. This reversal, of turning women who theoretically should be warm, motherly creatures that make dinner into dinner is an ultimate corruption of the domestic sphere. A house without a woman, without a mother, becomes violent and disturbed.

Sally, like Laurie, escapes by smashing a window. She corrupts the domestic sphere further in order to escape it. We immediately get a shot of her hitting the ground, with open land in front of her and all around her. But, this gives the audience a sense of hope and freedom rather than a sense of helplessness. The suburban neighborhood in Halloween felt far more dangerous, because there exists a false sense of hope within it. Laurie is surrounded by people, people she knows, but none of them are willing to help her. Sally is alone, and yet she is the one who finds help.

Sally takes off running, and a truck driver stops and helps her to fight off Leatherface. A man in a pickup truck then lets her jump in the bed of his truck and helps her escape. It is odd that in such an isolated, desolate place, she manages to find help. The film may be arguing that it is best to not trust domestic spaces at all, for it is in a house that Sally is attacked, and it is out in the wild that she finds protection.

While Sally escapes with her life, the film ends on a similar note as Halloween. Sally watches from the truck, hysterical, as Leatherface waves his chainsaw around. He is not dead. He is still out there.

In conclusion, both of these examples of the slasher genre contain compelling commentary about the American home and about the role of sexuality within the home. Both seem to argue that the safety of the home is a myth, and that the domestic sphere is far easier to topple than we might like to believe, especially in the 70s, the age of women’s liberation. The changing role of women in this time scared people, and so it is fitting that scary movies would be made about it.

Beyond the Image: The Surrealistic Works of Luis Buñuel (Mireille)

Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel laments that the relationship between an audience and a text changes constantly, leading to individual interpretation of the artwork that often strays from the artist’s original intent. Buñuel argues that the audience should instead just accept the images in films without imposition of meaning or the passing of judgement. In other words, the real “duty” of the audience should be to simply “allow” what is being portrayed. Despite his assertions, Buñuel’s own surrealistic films are difficult to approach in this manner due to his stylistic choices, which are often shocking and unsettling. Woven throughout Buñuel’s work, which varies from abstract, almost nonsensical to more concrete, plot driven dramas, there are recurring themes such as the fragmentation and sexualization of body parts and the opinioned portrayal of certain sectors of society; precisely intended to jar the audience. Two films by Buñuel, L’Âge D’Or (1930) and The Exterminating Angel (1967), are emblematic of Buñuel’s style and as such his agenda of providing the audience with provocative fodder that defies interpretation and begs the audience to allow the purely visual experience.  

L’Âge D’Or is a surrealistic film in which Buñuel depicts the human primitive desperation to fulfill sexual desire even as social norms attempt to repress them. As such, the film is also a criticism, if not an outright attack on Bourgeois society. In this film, despite Buñuel’s argument for the “acceptance” of the image at hand, there are several sequences in which the use of shocking imagery taunts the audience to pass judgement and take sides. Buñuel chooses to highlight the sexual nature of humanity and puts sexual activity front and center from the introduction of the film. For example, a “couple” in the film is depicted as intertwined and wrestling in the mud while attending a religious ceremony. Buñuel shows them engaging in almost animalistic behaviors and completely oblivious that others are privy to their activity. In another instance, the same “couple” has been separated from the others attending the religious ceremony, and Buñuel cuts to a medium shot of the woman in a bathroom followed by a jump cut to what is seemingly volcanic rock, but strongly resembles feces. This filmic moment is quite possibly a nod to the Freudian influences of the time that argued that human beings are born with instinctual libido. However, this sequence also takes place in the fragment of the film that is introduced as “The Founding of Imperial Rome”, a not too subtle suggestion of what Buñuel thinks of society’s attempts to squelch the irrepressible desires of man and woman. Clearly, L’Âge D’Or does not provide the viewer with material that can be absorbed with impassivity. Rather, the film asserts the psychological and philosophical ideologies of the time while blatantly unveiling torrid human tendencies.

The Exterminating Angel also uses filmic juxtapositions to examine visual “obsessions” and repeated themes, but this time through a more linear narrative. In this film, Buñuel confounds the temporality of the film; blurring the lines between current reality and the dream state. Buñuel, constantly yet subtly, juxtaposes the images being viewed with the reaction of the characters as they observe the image of the reality at hand. He accomplishes this feat by alternating between high and low key lighting, switching between highly illuminated scenes and moments in which the characters are cloaked in shadow, rendering visible only certain features of their persona. The shots with high key lighting typically depict the periods in the film that are more “grounded” in reality. For example, Buñuel uses high key lighting when showing the group of protagonists imprisoned in a household for no rational reason going about their business and activities in a manner that an audience would accept as “normal”. However, Buñuel switches to low key lighting to underscore the dream-like almost psychotic state of some of the characters that are unable to leave the mansion. By using low key lighting, Buñuel is able to create more contrast and additional shadows to conceal portions of the frame, thus confounding and “un-grounding” the characters from their body and the setting, while also creating a feeling of dissociation for the audience. Buñuel’s use of cinematic lighting in this film is vastly different from L’Âge D’Or, which almost exclusively utilizes natural lighting; but both films are successful in their ability to separate and blend the current reality with a subconscious or dream state.

Finally, towards the culmination of The Exterminating Angel, the characters begin to laugh even when one of the couples has slit their wrists and died in a closet while engaging in a sexual act. This use of contrasting sound, namely a sound typically associated with joy, is combined with death and creates a lingering feeling of dissociation that displaces the viewer from a “normal” reality, not unlike the intimate scenes in L’Âge D’Or. This feeling of disquietude is no less strong even if one argues that rather than simply to create juxtaposition, Buñuel chose laughter in this scene to underscore that the characters are reaching a breaking point in their sanity as a result of the physical and psychological constraint within the household. In either case, Buñuel creates the very juxtaposition that he tries to avoid. In other words, he presents to the viewer too many possible venues to explore, which actually interfere with the ability to just let the images flood over the audience and work their magic.

Almost Like It Never Happened: Violence Contained By Film (Jin)

The moment we capture an event or person on film, they become unreal to us. They’ve become possessable objects, something to be replayed and thus controlled. Through this ownership, the spectator retains the power to watch without being held accountable for what is taking place on the screen. When the film is that of a real act of violence, the power dynamic becomes particularly apparent: though the spectator may sympathize with the people on the screen, he or she typically feels no sense of direct responsibility. What is happening on the screen remains on the screen. The film is a separate world altogether, one which can be turned off and forgotten, or even replayed again and again until it has lost its ability to shock. How many times have we watched bleeding victims and decimated cities on the news? It may be an evocative sight but not a lasting one.

Benny, the fourteen year old protagonist in Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video, is the archetype of someone lost in an illusionary, dream-world of the seen and the controlled. Born into a wealthy family obsessed with career and social reputation, he himself is lost in delusion, albeit one composed of television screens. Just as his parents’ are trapped in their fear of losing face to their coworkers and friends, Benny is trapped in a self-imposed, psychological landscape of his bedroom which feeds his obsession with videos. There is a video constantly playing in the background while he quietly works at his desk, along with a second television screen showing a live feed of his apartment building’s exterior and his own bedroom’s interior. It is a life of relentless observation, one in which Benny plays the role of stoic, cold spectator.

 

The extent of his psychotic containment reaches its peak when Benny invites a girl over to his home to watch a video he’d recorded of a pig being slaughtered at a relative’s farm. Their sparse dialogue alone reveals a sort of naivety and a disconnect between violence in reality and on film. When asked by the girl, “have you ever seen a dead person – a real one, I mean,” Benny replies, “No. I once saw a TV program about the tricks they use in action films. It’s all ketchup and plastic.” He remains unaware that actions in reality, unlike on video, have real consequences, and when he eventually discharges a slaughtering gun, the same one used in the pig video, on the girl’s chest, he is taken aback by the girl’s agonizing screams.

Proceeding the girl’s death, the greatest moment of horror is when we realize that, despite having murdered a human being, Benny still remains locked in his internal world. The real physical action of violence fail to raise any real emotional response from Benny, and like how the murder scene is shown solely on his television screen rather than being shown in real time, Benny has internalized the incident as an “unreal” event isolated within the video tape. Even when Benny’s parents discover his son’s crime, they show a similar lack of emotive response and immediately begin strategizing how to save their reputation. It becomes increasingly apparent that the absence of consequence is more noticeable than the absence of a life itself. The dead girl remains a stranger, and though she mentioned having a large family, nothing is to be known about the impact of her death. In fact, it is as though Benny’s murder tape carries a higher value than the girl herself and is almost more “real” due to its ability to prove the murder had occurred. Later on, the video tape is the only object capable of bearing any real consequence, by acting as legal evidence and resulting in the family’s arrest. Preceding this, however, the family remain in a strange limbo, spending a whole week vacationing in Egypt.

The loss of a human life could hardly be felt as “real,” when there are absolutely no repercussions against the murderer: how is it possible to dictate one’s actions as being real, if they hold no visible effect? The emotionless psychological vacuum of Benny’s mind is therefore all the more terrifying than any real physical damage he can cause. Ultimately, it is this lack of emotional and social consequence that is felt as being “more violent” than the actual murder itself.

Bresson's L'argent: A New Form of Passion (Jin)

When watching films, we are so often told exactly how to feel through the orchestral score and close-ups of waving hands and facial expressions, that we scarcely have space to perceive the characters’ emotions for ourselves. Bresson, in L’argent, creates this space for his audience in the form of distancing; we are no longer relayed the characters’ exact internal dialogue, nor are we obliged to witness any form of direct emotional outburst. Instead, there is a palpable distance between us and the film, bestowing us with the responsibility of interpreting the characters’ feelings through their actions. It is a retreat into the action of observation, a retreat away from theatricality and clichéd emotional symbols, and it is this retreat that allows L’argent to become an even keener portrayal of human passion.

On the surface, L’argent poses a relatively simple story. Yvon, a working-class man with a wife and young daughter, is wrongfully accused of producing counterfeit cash when he unknowingly uses counterfeit cash to pay his restaurant tab. He is exempt from jail time but loses his job, prompting him to agree in assisting a bank heist. When he is again caught, he is sentenced to prison, leading to a chain of increasingly tragic events. Yvon’s suffering is particularly tragic, because all his grievances can be traced back to the foolishness of two teenage boys, who decided to pay at a photo shop using a forged 500-franc note.

 

Because of the narrative simplicity and Bresson’s use of impassive dialogue and faces, it is easy to mistake the film for being emotionally detached. The actors themselves show incredible restraint, and Bresson’s use of perfect framing and very precise composition give a calculative impression. Both are particularly evident during the scene in which Elise discovers her husband, Yvon, is in jail. Given their scant living conditions and dependent child, we expect Yvon’s wife to feel a great degree of loss and display a look of shock or, at the least, a few sobs of grief. Instead, we are shown her sitting on a plain wooden bench, with her hands demurely folded on her lap and her face quietly bowed. Even when Yvon is sentenced to three years in prison, the only reaction shot that we see of Elise is of her similarly sitting on a bench at court, framed by the stark empty benches around her.

Within this short sequence, Elise’s emotional turmoil, deprived of any dialogue and accompanied only by diegetic sound, is thereby bound within her actions. It is this passive, silent action of sitting, followed only by the simple action of rising to leave the court room, that speaks louder than any verbalized language of grief. This is perhaps because we are invited to discover her emotion through her actions, much like the way we are obliged to do so in real life. Our intimate experiences of others’ intense traumas are never wholly spelt out for us via explanatory narration nor melancholy strings playing in the background. Rather, we are left to piece together their internal despair by quietly observing their actions and interpreting them as emotional symbols. Similarly, when watching Elise sitting down, we experience her grief the same way we experience others’ grievances in reality, constrained to using our imagination to fill in for absent information. Bresson gives us the space to discover her despair for ourselves, and her despair, then, becomes real to us.  

This personalized discovery of emotion is used throughout the entire film, creating an even stronger connection between the audience and the story. When Yvon murders the entire household towards the end of the film, we are informed of the murder through the actions of the dog, as the camera pans along his frenzied movement, up and down, past the corpses. By using the dog as an agent of information, we are given the chance to “discover” the murder, rather than being forthright informed of it, further allowing us to actively participate in the film’s emotional environment.

This discovery-type experience is also paired with an omission of the actual moment of violence. Bresson purposefully cuts straight from the building of tension to the consequences of the act of violence that the preceding shots had been building towards. For example, when Yvon attempts suicide, we see him hiding a mound of pills behind his prison bed before the film cuts immediately to an ambulance pulling away. Later, when Yvon murders the hotel keepers, we are again spared the details of the actual murder and see, instead, blood swirling down a bathroom sink. By sparing us these moments of climax, Bresson also spares us the risk of finding such moments unbelievable. Furthermore, the omissions isolate human action so that we become aware of their limitations: one simple scene of an ambulance driving away is forced to contain the full emotional significance of Yvon’s attempted suicide, just as the Elise’s mute sitting must contain her whole despair. Instead of limiting our emotional experience of the film, these tightly contained expressions heighten the film’s emotional impact. After all, the most difficult form of grief is one in which we are left to our imagination, forced to re-create scenes of death which we’ve never witnessed nor were fully informed of, compelled to guess the exact details as to how a loved one may have perished.

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.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a New God in Film (Jin)

 

 

The vampire movie genre has become so hopelessly imbued with the increasily cheesy image of Count Dracula and the overtly romanticized Twilight vampires, that it’d be a waste of time to argue that the film Let the Right One In could redeem the genre as a whole. When watching this film, it is best to forget the vampire context entirely and instead judge it with fresh expectations: not as a horror or romance movie, but as a film reframing human loneliness.

Oskar, the protagonist, with his elvish white hair and equally pale skin, is the perfect picture of adolescent frailty. Nothing conveys loneliness better than the spindly twelve-year old kid being viciously assaulted by school bullies. He is entirely defenseless against his tormentors, and when set against the stark landscape of Swedish winter, his despair is painfully palpable.

By the time his unlikely savior appears in the shape of a small scruffy girl, Eli, we’ve already grown a strong attachment to Oskar. Despite showing hints of nascent homicidal tendencies, such as collecting newspaper clippings of murder cases and habitually play-acting stabbing his bullies, Oskar and his alienation in his divorced home background and complete friendlessness stirs our own childhood memories of loneliness. He carries a deep-rooted longing for understanding that is seeded in each and every one of us, and watching Eli finally fulfilling Oskar’s aching need of a friend is nearly cathartic. The fact that she happens to be a centuries-old vampire and that she possesses a pedophilic, middle-aged caretaker, Håkan, fades away into the background when watching her and Oskar experience emotional intimacy for the first time. As they are lying in bed together, Eli playfully tapping her fingers along Oskar’s back, she is no longer a brutal murderer and he is no longer the troubled child. They are simply two children, bound by a keen longing for companionship.   

The film’s poignancy rises, not just from its ability to draw out our empathy, but on its contextual dissection of the human condition: isolation. Each character, such as the bullies, Håkan, and Oskar’s neighbors, are all marked by traces of loneliness, whether it be helplessly tormenting Oskar in fear of being bullied himself or living alone in a dim apartment broiling with cats. More importantly, each one has found themselves an object of worship: the schoolkid worships the bully leader, the isolated neighbor worships his cats, Håkan worships Eli, and more. Though the film does not rely heavily on religious references, Eli serves in clearly establishing the film’s existential worldview. Oskar, in his suffering, has created himself a religion. First, by poring over the murder-case newspaper clippings and recreating himself as a brutal avenger in his imagination, then by selecting Eli as his physical deity. Eli becomes his messiah, in a fitting reflection of her namesake, the Biblical prophet Eli.

Oskar’s obsessive reliance on this self-imposed religion, however, is not portrayed as a perversion, but rather, an innately human experience. It is a clear portrayal of carnal longing, the desire to fill an inner loneliness, that we, by nature, can fully identify with. Here, the real enemy is not violence nor the loss of morality, as many gore-ridden films are prone to depicting, but isolation. Isolation is the ultimate enemy that everyone fights individually, regardless of situation or social position. In other words, in the film (and perhaps in reality), isolation is humanity’s universal condition. Regardless of how much love one may receive or pour into another, the inner void can only be partially filled, and one is thereby forced to constantly seek objects of worship as temporary alleviation. Isolation is the greatest problem that remains unsolvable, and therefore, any attempt to solve it, no matter how destructive or morally ambiguous, is fully justifiable.

This worldview is further heightened by the film’s use of realism. Violence itself is presented as a natural act; it is an examination of human nature running its course, or rather, human nature given its chance to reveal itself. Stylistic choices, such as showing most of Eli’s attacks as long shots, having the massacre to take place off-screen, and avoiding the use of visual clichés such as jump-cuts and rapid cutting, allow for an objective consideration. Such assaults seem like a matter of survival: Eli finds no joy in killing her human victims, and when Håkan, her helper, murders for her sake, there’s an emphasis on his human clumsiness and horrifying matter-of-factness. Håkan is forced to drag a corpse on a red, plastic sleigh, comically grunting and slipping through the dense snow, and even shoos away a passerby’s poodle that starts lapping at a pool of blood. The violence becomes all the more understandable and relatable, because the film purposefully includes the messy, physical details that precedes or preludes the real killing of people.

The film surpasses most standard depictions of deity worship by redefining what is the ideal god. Eli has spent centuries in alienation, receiving one-sided love from a series of human servants. This indicates that Eli, despite possessing the incredible strength that Oskar needs in defeating his bullies, has equal need of Oskar and his love. This is the exact god we want for ourselves: a god who, despite possessing the greater power we desire, loves us because it needs us. It is not a god that only demands worship, but rather, returns our worship. Perhaps this is why this film so effectively draws us in– it is the depiction of an equivalent exchange, like an ideal human relationship, and of a god figure stunningly made sympathetic. 

Behind the Trigger: Gus Van Sant’s Depiction of Adolescent Violence in Elephant (Mireille)

Over and over we read, hear, and talk about yet another school shooting. In less than one month, two different high school students slaughtered their peers. A handful of films have been made to bring to light the horror of living through such an event often focusing on the psychological disturbance of the assassin. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) chronicles the events surrounding the massacre of students at a high school by two other students to capture the atrocity of the act and the trauma of the victims and shooters themselves. Though Van Sant provides a backstory for the motivation of the disturbed individuals responsible for the shootings, the film is not devoted to the psychological profile of the murderers. Rather, Van Sant uses cinematography, sound design, and editing to make horrifically real the experiences of the individuals victimized in such a tragedy.

Van Sant loosely based Elephant on the events that occurred during the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Elephant recounts the story of how two high school students plan the massacre of members of their school due to the fact that they have been bullied by other students and disenfranchised by the school administration. The film chronicles the events in a linear fashion by glimpsing at the perspectives of several students as they struggle within the school system. Throughout the film, Van Sant uses repetition not only to emphasize the different manner in which each character in the film interacts with his/her surroundings, but also to create suspense and a sense of chaos. One particular scene that Van Sant repeats again and again shows individual characters walking down a hallway. At first glance these individual hall scenes appear unconnected and do not seem to have any particular point. However, towards the end of the film Van Sant makes clear his intent for the repetition. The audience realizes that all of the characters filmed in the hallway are interconnected and have something in common, namely, they are all victimized by the shooters the film. Van Sant also uses unsettling long takes of the shots that are part of this sequence to accentuate the awkward insecurities of high school and to create an ominous feeling.

Elephant also utilizes an intriguing sound design. The majority of the film is mostly minimalistic diegetic sound that is eerily quiet. This state of “low sound” creates an unsettling mood, but also sets the tone for the banal and muted lifestyle of high school students trying to finish up their day. A few times throughout the film, Van Sant does use music, but not necessarily in a context one would expect. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which is a morose almost funereal lamentation, is heard during the introduction of one of the less prominent characters; however, the piece is muddied with traditional school setting sounds. The sonata lingers as Van Sant draws out an exceptionally long behind-the-shoulder take of this character until he begins interacting with other students. This same sonata makes a re-appearance, but this time one of the shooters is actually playing the piece on a piano.  The music is not competing with any other sound; however, the shooter makes frequent mistakes while playing. Van Sant’s choice of music creates conflict within the audience as the sonata does not remind us of high school, nor does it seem coherent that a student who is planning the assassination of his peers should be delicately playing the piano. Furthermore, the mistakes that the shooter makes while playing are not random errors from misplaced fingers. Instead, the errors themselves end up creating new chords that result in the piece being played in a completely different key, adding now auditory unease to the already visual tension that builds up in the film.

Van Sant ends Elephant in a particularly hair raising manner. The main shooter discovers two students hiding in a meat freezer in the cafeteria. One of the students is none other than the student was first associated with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. At that moment it becomes clear that Van Sant’s musical choice served as a premonitory tool.  In this final sequence, the frame is almost entirely filled by the placid face of the shooter, who is taunting his victims with a game to determine who he will shoot and is surrounded by hanging meats and carcasses. The audience does not see the two students cornered in this nightmare scenario, but solely hears their voices. The framing of the elements in the freezer creates a very claustrophobic feel that is, however, at once intimate and almost unrealistic. Elephant is brought to a close with Van Sant cutting from this last scene of the shooter in the freezer to the same shot that was utilized in the opening of the film: a neutral sky and benign power lines, a metaphor perhaps for the fact that the horror of gun violence has become almost ordinary in today’s society. Van Sant also does not show us who the shooter chose to kill. He prefers to leave the audience with the horror faced by the victim rather than to glorify the final act of the assassin. 

Who Rules This Domain? (Tori)

    

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fortunate Decision (Tori)

I know it’s always a bad idea to start watching a new TV show during the semester, particularly during a week riddled with midterms and essays.  Yet recently I started watching Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and I’m immensely grateful I made that unfortunate decision.  

The show, based on the popular children’s books of the same name, follows the trials of three siblings: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire.   After the death of their parents, they are taken in by the malicious Count Olaf—a man driven by greed as he attempts to usurp the Baudelaire fortune left to Violet when she comes of age.  I remember reading the first book in elementary school and then trying to check out the other 12 all at the same time because I was so eager to find out what would happen next to the three orphans.  So, of course, I was very interested in the Netflix television series when it was announced, and it did not let me down.  The show manages to be both hilarious and heinous simultaneously.  This juxtaposition is best seen through Neil Patrick Harris’ characterization of Count Olaf.  He is ridiculous and theatrical at some points and abusive and frightening at others.  The way this show is able to blend the scary and the silly is masterful. 

The show’s premise isn’t out of the ordinary: three children, mistreated by adults in their lives, must prevail in the face of adversity.  It reminds me of a Matilda vs. Miss Trunchbull or Annie vs. Miss Hannigan story; we are not strangers to the theme of children vs. oppressive adults in literature and film.  Yet I would argue that this show is still extraordinary due to the narrative and visual choices made to bring the series' pages to life.

The books themselves are narrated by their author, “Lemony Snicket,” who sets up the story at the very beginning and is consistently appearing and reappearing, offering everything from warnings to anecdotes to vocabulary lessons.  This feature poses the difficult and extremely important question of how to handle Lemony Snicket’s presence onscreen.  The decision made was to cast an actor as Lemony Snicket who would make frequent appearances onscreen in order to incorporate Snicket’s clever quips seamlessly throughout the episode.  Thus, like Lemony Snicket’s narration in the novels, he commences the story and is consistently popping up.  Using Lemony Snicket in this way, rather than employing some other technique like a voiceover narrator, was the only way to portray this function of the novel really accurately.  A voiceover, though it would function similarly, would take away from Lemony Snicket’s character by making him seem omniscient.  While that choice works for many films and TV shows, it is crucial to A Series of Unfortunate Events that Snicket is not just an all-knowing, nameless, invisible voice but a subjective character with thoughts, ideas, and motives. 

The design elements are just as key to the success of the show as the choice to portray Lemony Snicket as a narrator.  The design of the show is almost cartoon-like; for example, the contrast between Justice Strauss’ bright, colorful, welcoming, immaculate home that is the embodiment of good and Count Olaf’s dark, crumbling, haunted mansion that is the embodiment of evil right across the street could not be more stark.  In a show devoted to the power of children, this design is perfect because it gives the viewer a sense of unrestrained childlike wonder in which extremities are not avoided and something like a house can feel truly good or evil.            

As an English major and a life-long lover of reading, I sometimes get nervous when novels are adapted for the screen.  It can be frustrating to see a world you’ve envisioned in such detail in your head come to life in a way you did not imagine; then that film-world is what you see in your head every time you come back to the novel.  I was concerned about all of this when watching A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I shouldn’t have been.  Through the narrative and visual choices made, the world of the Netflix series was just what I imagined the Baudelaires' world would look like in my mind when reading the books in third grade.  So, maybe, in retrospect, I should have waited to start watching this show and avoided the late nights it spurred.  However, this is one of those shows that’s worth it.

When Tragedy Becomes Entertainment (Tori)

   

    When I first heard about the movie Patriots Day, I was shocked.  As a proud Bostonian, the horrific events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon have a personal effect on me, and I was appalled when I heard that a film recounting the attack and its aftermath was going to be made.  There were people who wanted to use those terrifying few days as entertainment?  Less than four years after the event took place?  Spectators re-living a real attack that took and changed lives forever?  I remember that day so clearly.  I remember thinking how unreal it seemed; how it was as if real life had become a film as my family watched the news and listened to sirens blazing and stayed locked down in our home as a manhunt took place.  I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't a movie.  It was real.  It was frightening and disturbing and actually happening.

    Now, it is important to note that I have not actually seen Patriots Day, nor do I know anybody who has seen it, and though I find the link between tragedy and entertainment interesting and thought-provoking, I will not watch this film.  That this painfully real event was turned into a movie so quickly doesn’t seem right to me.  It’s as if the creation of a film could diminish the actual event, as real people are made into characters, and horrifying actions are accompanied by background music and artistic cinematography.  But this is certainly not the first film to depict a tragedy.  In fact, this sort of thing happens all the time, and it is not something I always find so disturbing.  Why is this?  Is it just because of my more personal connection to the marathon bombing?  Is it ever okay to link tragic events with entertainment? 

    Over winter break, I saw a musical called The Scottsboro Boys at the SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston that raised many of these same questions.  The 2010 musical, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, composers and lyricsts of other renowned shows such as Chicago and Cabaret, tells the true story of nine black teenagers in Alabama who were sentenced to death in 1931 for the rape of two white women—a crime they did not commit.  I was actually unfamiliar with this particular story, something I now find appalling, as it is such an important one to know and is thought to have been a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement.  At the same time, the story is horrifically familiar, as it is reminiscent of modern day injustice for black men in the court of law.  I found it particularly evocative of the infamous Central Park Five/Central Park Jogger case of 1989.  I received tickets to this show as a Christmas present, and honestly, upon entering the theater, I was very unsure what I was about to see. 

    Musical theater does so many things.  It can provide a means of escape from everyday life.  It can capture you in nostalgia.  It can transport you to faraway places and it can be uplifting and poignant.  But I had never before seen a musical based entirely upon a horrific, disturbing, and, most importantly, true tragedy.  The musical is told through the medium of a minstrel show, a choice that is controversial and provocative given the long history of terrible racism against African-Americans in that particular genre of performance.  The show features big dance and song numbers and on paper sounds as though it could be extremely offensive and destined to be a massive failure.  But, in my opinion, it somehow works.  This musical punches you right in the stomach in the way that it confronts this tragedy in an extremely creative, thoughtful, and heartbreaking way.  It is consistently demands self-reflection.  It asks a plethora of questions—questions about the truth in regard to race (one chilling line that has stuck with me ever since I saw the show was when a lawyer states: “you’re guilty because of the way that you look”).  It asks questions about what it means to be free in the world and in your own mind.  It asks questions about ingrained prejudice and bias in each and every one of us.  This show is truly impossible to accurately convey in words because of the constantly conflicting emotions it incites in you.  The Scottsboro Boys  is so much more than a retelling of a tragic event.  It starts crucial conversations about the long history of racism present in our country.  The music is fantastic, and the choreography is stellar, but you are simultaneously loving it and hating it. 

    Those who know me are familiar with my adoration of musical theater.  Throughout my 19 years, I have managed to see and listen to a multitude of different musicals, and each one has affected me in its own, unique way.  But I can easily say that The Scottsboro Boys provided me with the most profound musical theater experience I have ever had.  However, it is true that what the Scottsboro boys went through is not something I ever have to or ever will have to worry about happening to me.  As a white woman, can I even decide that this musical is justified?  I’m not sure I can.  But I do think that condemning a show like The Scottsboro Boys would prevent crucial conversations from being held.  It would stop people from gaining a better understanding of the tragedy of racial injustice in America.

    So maybe I have misjudged Patriots Day.  It is certainly important to keep these types of stories alive through film and performance and to use these stories to better the world in which we live.  Often people forget what entertainment is capable of doing and how powerful it can really be.  It’s great to go see a film or a musical and forget about your life for a while, as you focus only on the characters and the fictionalized world you see in front of you.  But these types of art forms are capable of so much more.  They can make you think profoundly and painfully.  They can hold up a mirror to reveal the injustices in our world.  They can pose questions so poignant and powerful that you can’t stop thinking about them.  The Scottsboro Boys does all of this.  I’m not sure about Patriots Day, but perhaps it does, too.  The connection between tragedy and entertainment is always going to make me a bit uneasy, but if done right, it can provide a means of improving ourselves and our world.   

Whom Do You Trust? (Tori)

(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Whom do you trust?  Do you trust your friends?  Your family?  Classmates?  Professors?  Politicians?  How about the films you watch?  Do you think you can trust them?

The films Rashomon, The Usual Suspects, and Atonement each deal with this question of trust between the audience and the film in their own, unique way.  However, all three coincide in the way they force the realization that the audience is all too willing to trust what it sees.  Why is it that the camera is able to so easily convince us that we are witnessing the truth?

The great Akira Kurosawa's renowned 1950 film Rashomon provides the perfect jumping off point to delve into this question, as the film's impact is truly remarkable.  For example, it coined the term "the rashomon effect," which is a psychological concept used to describe the phenomenon when one occurrence is perceived in distinct ways by different witnesses.  The film follows three men: a woodcutter, a priest, and a commoner, as they discuss the case of a murdered samurai; the two men assert that they have never heard "such a strange story."  The woodcutter claims to have found the body of the murdered man, and the priest claims to have seen the samurai earlier walking with his wife in the woods.  Thus, the two were brought into court to testify.  There, they witness the testimonies of the particulars surrounding the murder, first from a "notorious bandit," Tajomaru, then from the wife of the samurai, and then from the samurai himself, speaking through a medium.  Each character introduces his or her story, and then the camera cuts to what initially seems like a flashback, but actually proves to just be a visual aid to the story they tell, accompanied by a voiceover narration of their testimony.  Eventually, the voiceover stops, and the audience becomes fully immersed in the world of their story.  As each testimony begins and ends, you find yourself believing whichever version of the story you are watching and hearing, yet they cannot all be true.  After the third testimony, the woodcutter reveals that his initial account of the discovery of the body was a lie; he claims that he actually saw the murder take place, as well, but pretended he did not in order to stay out of the situation.  An objective truth is never revealed; the audience remains lost at the end, unsure of which story is true, or if any of the stories are true.  Overall, this film provides the perfect introduction to understanding the power of the narrator, as the film suggests that stories depend wholly on the person telling them.  Thus, it is the narrator who has the ultimate power to determine the truth of the film for the audience.

The 1995 film The Usual Suspects, directed by Bryan Singer, plays brilliantly with this fact—that the narrator has an extraordinary power over the audience.  This film has a non-linear chronology, jumping around in time as the events of a bloody raid on a boat come to light.  This raid was carried out by five criminals, led by a former police officer named Dean Keaton, under the orders of a man named Keyser Söze, a criminal mastermind who is unknown to all.  The facts of the crime, and everything leading up to it, are all revealed to us in the present by one of these five criminals, Verbal Kint, one of the two survivors of the horrific battle.  The story is told to us through flashbacks and voiceover as we once again become fully immersed in the narrative.  It is difficult to describe in words exactly how brilliant the structure of this story is; the audience is constantly thrown back and forth in time, trying to piece together the different parts of the story being told.  After Kint concludes his story, his interrogator shocks him by proposing that Keaton himself was the mysterious Keyser Söze.  Kint is incredulous; he feels betrayed and pleads that Keaton was his friend.  As the story concludes, Kint leaves, and we feel sure it will not be long before he is killed by Söze for the part he played in the story and the information he knows.  Yet, it is moments after he leaves that his interrogator, sitting in his office thinking over the story he just heard, suddenly drops his mug of coffee.  The entire story comes flying across the screen in a matter of seconds through bits and pieces of the facts given by Kint, along with random words written on posters in the interrogation room that popped up in Kint’s story, and finally, a sketch done of Keyser Söze from the last remaining survivor of the boat raid that clearly resembles…Kint himself.  Kint, our narrator, has been lying to us the entire time.  Kint is Keyser Söze.  Singer, in the last couple minutes of the film, completely uproots everything you have come to take for granted throughout the film.  Just like Kurosawa, he asserts the insurmountable power of the narrator.  The entire story, as in almost everything we have seen and heard, has been delivered through Kint.  We somehow forget that Kint is a person with an agenda as we listen to his story.  We believe him to be telling us the objective truth of what happened without a second thought.  In every way, it seems that his story is true.  But each and every narrator has a subjective experience; there is no objective truth, and our forgetting of this crucial fact is catastrophic in the case of this film.

The final film I analyzed was the 2007 film, Atonement, directed by Joe Wright.  This film was based on the 2001 novel of the same name written by Ian McEwan.  This novel is one of the ultimate contemporary novels concerning the use of an unreliable narrator, and I was interested to see how it was dealt with in the film versus in the novel.  The story first follows Briony Tallis, an avid writer, at age 13, as she misinterprets an encounter she witnesses between her sister, Cecilia, and the son of a servant, Robbie Turner.  This misinterpretation spirals out of control as she further and further misconstrues who Robbie is and concludes he must be a sexually crazed criminal, where in reality, he and Cecilia are in love.  When Briony’s cousin Lola is raped, Briony tells the police Robbie committed the crime due to her firm conviction as to who Robbie is.  As she is the only witness, the police arrest Robbie, and he eventually enlists in the war in order to get out of prison.  The story then follows Robbie’s life in the war and finally his reunion with Cecilia.  It is the very end of the story, however, that is truly fascinating.  In the novel, the postscript is entitled “London 1999” and is written in the first person from Briony’s perspective, which is an abrupt change from the third person omniscient narrator to whom we had grown accustomed.  In this postscript, Briony reveals that she is a successful writer and is publishing this story as her final novel, for she is dying.  Thus, this third person omniscient narrator was, in fact, Briony, telling her own story.  But is it the true story?  Briony reveals that, though the characters of Cecilia and Robbie reunite in her story, the two actually both died right before the end of the war.  Thus, the happy ending we received was not true.  It was fiction.  Wright chose to frame this revelation in the film as a TV interview with Briony as she promotes this book.  As we are watching 18-year-old Briony leave Cecilia and Robbie, to whom she attempted to apologize for her wrongdoings, and suddenly the screen goes black.  We hear in a voiceover an older woman’s voice saying: “I’m sorry.  Could we stop for a moment?”  Numerous images of cameras are then shown, showing this woman on them, as we realize that it was this woman who had been telling the story we had been watching, though it seemed like we were watching an objective truth, or a factual telling of past events.  Thus, it is revealed that we were understanding this story through the perspective of an unreliable narrator who is telling a fictionalized version of the events of her past. 

All three of these films intelligently display the immense power of the narrator to truly determine what is real and what is not in a film.  What is more, in my opinion, films are able to even further convince an audience due to the connection between the camera and the story.  We see before our eyes the story that our narrator is telling us.  Thus, that old saying “you have to see it to believe it” comes into full play; we are seeing a story play out right in front of us in a fully believable way.  Yet each of these three films argues that, particularly in the world of film, seeing is not always believing.  Just because we are seeing something doesn’t mean it is the objective truth.  Stories you hear are always coming from somebody else’s subjective perspective.  Thus, it seems that there is no objective truth in the world.

However, these films seem to differ in their ultimate understanding of this fact of the impossibility of objective truth.  The Usual Suspects ends by instilling absolute shock in the viewer; you are left speechless, wondering how you could have possibly been so deceived throughout the film.  You are thus left with a very skeptical outlook on life: absolutely nobody can be trusted, for truly anybody can be deceiving you.  Rashomon seems like it might have a similarly bleak ending, but the final scene takes a surprising optimistic turn.  The priest says, close to the conclusion of the film, “maybe goodness is just make-believe.”  The conflicting stories have him upset and baffled, much like us as viewers, the witnesses are lying and there is no telling what the truth actually is.  He states: “If men don’t trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.”  Yet, upon the discovery of a crying, abandoned infant, the woodcutter decides to take the child and raise him or her with his family.  After seeing this incredible act of humanity and kindness, his bleak outlook on life shifts, and the priest says to the woodcutter: “Thanks to you, I think I can keep my faith in man.”  Thus, Kurosawa’s film suggests that mankind can still be good despite the inescapable culture of lies it has created.  Then, in Atonement, at the very conclusion, Briony Tallis explains why she lied in her novel: “But what sense of hope or satisfaction could the reader derive from an ending like that [in which Robbie and Cecilia both die and are never reunited]?  So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life.  I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness.  I gave them their happiness.”  Thus, lies are not all inherently evil, or done in order to confuse or hurt others.  Briony was an unreliable narrator for the sole purpose of achieving this final act of kindness that became impossible to accomplish in reality. 

So, perhaps there is no such thing as objective truth.  Perhaps we are being constantly deceived by unknown subjective experiences pretending to be utterly real.  But this may not mean that “this earth might as well be hell,” as the priest in Rashomon says.  It seems that there is still goodness to be found in mankind despite the untrustworthy nature of storytelling; furthermore, there is even a sort of kindness or beauty in deception itself.

To Serve Man (Conor)

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

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

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

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

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

House of Madness (Conor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise, Fall, and Re-Emergence of Gangster Films (Nick R.)

Power drives all of us. We desire, and we desire to control how we interact with those desires, and therefore, we want power. For some, this concept only serves as an accessory to their life. For others, the acquisition of power is all that there is, a lifestyle in and of itself. Gangsters are these types of people, and for this reason, they have been explored in film for decades.

In the 1930s, social and economic instability in America was at an all-time high due to the Great Depression. Honest hard work and careful investment of money was not being rewarded, leading to a distrust and disdain for the government that galvanized the organized crime subculture that existed in America. The most popular gangster films from this era were Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932). All of these films followed the main characters through a fast rise to the top, with an equally fast descent to their deaths. The abrupt and violent deaths served as a reminder of the consequences of crime, but viewers, suffering economically from the Great Depression and thirsty from Prohibition, were also able to identify with these charismatic anti-heroes. The gangster worked hard to earn his place in the world, only for it to be taken away in the blink of an eye.

                                                      

The appeal of gangster films grew over several years, but at such a critical time for regaining the nation’s stability, there were a great deal of efforts to combat the public’s infatuation with organized crime. This brought into play the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of moral guidelines in the film industry, established in 1930 and strictly enforced by 1934, that severely hindered the creative spirit of gangster films in their purest form. 1932 was the worst year of the Great Depression, and naturally, profits slid for Hollywood movies. Hollywood combatted this by increasing the sex and violence in gangster movies, which reached its peak with Scarface (1932). US capitalism was failing immensely, and Prohibition was being revealed as a failed social experiment on the already downtrodden common American, and the themes and depictions of violence that glorified crime in Scarface showed this. The film ended up being delayed over a year while director Howard Hawks toned down the incestuous overtones of the main character and his sister’s relationship. This film represented a new low for the public’s view of the conventional, law-abiding American dream, and how deep people would go into the psyche in order to analyze the desire for power which Americans now hungered for on so many levels. Now this exploration of power had proven to be about more than money, it was about love, it was about pride, it was about the exertion of anger. That was the core that gave gangster films life, but the powers that be saw how threatening an overarching acceptance of these themes and characters could be. The Production Code became increasingly more influential until the crime film in its original form was all but gone from theaters. Gangster films shifted towards the perspective of the law officers or criminals attempting to redeem themselves. The Motion Picture Production Code had a large amount of rules, which were particularly stringent on characteristics that were essential to depicting the criminal experience and the necessary themes behind it. Some of the rules you would expect to be included, while others really speak to the nature of the era. Some of the regulations included bans on profanity, suggestive nudity, illegal traffic of drugs, inferences of sexual perversion (i.e. the incestuous overtones of Scarface), as well as bans on white slavery, miscegenation (sexual relations between whites and blacks), and scenes of actual childbirth. Within these parameters, these movies didn’t get any less violent, but the subject matter focused on more clear cut protagonists and cast an inherently unflattering light on criminals.

In the 1950s, movies became threatened by the competition of a new technology, television. People no longer had to leave their house just to watch a moving picture. Television actually had more restrictive rules for censorship, but it’s widespread popularity and convenience forced Hollywood to make changes to offer people something they couldn’t see on TV. Another competitive threat came from foreign films, who were not required to follow the Production Code. Movies became more and more explicit, and by the late 1960s, enforcement was impossible. The Production Code was abandoned entirely and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) created the basis for the film rating system that we know today, allowing artists much more creative license as long as it was advertised appropriately. The door for gangster films had re-opened.

                                                     

It is impossible to talk about gangster films without acknowledging the immense role that The Godfather (1972) played in reinvigorating the genre. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and written by Mario Puzo, The Godfather gave the nation just what it needed, violence with a little class. The film was based on a wealthy Italian-American family that did business outside the law, but who held a great deal of respect and power within their area. There was a slight re-emergence of gangster films preceding The Godfather, but Coppola’s film provided a previously unprecedented look into Italian culture and stereotypes in America, along with the mobsters being presented as characters with psychological depth and complexity. The gangster film was able to return to its thematic roots of power, legacy, and pride, with much more intellectual and cinematic flare. Coppola made a sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), which was met with even more financial success and critical acclaim, opening the door for many more successful depictions of the Italian-American mobster. The successful gangster films that followed were able to look at a more gritty and realistic depiction of gangsters, such as Goodfellas (1990) which was based on the real life of Henry Hill, a former member of the Lucchese crime family in New York City.

Today, remakes and new adaptions of crime life in the 1930s through the 1970s remain, a glimpse into a unique time in American history, where lawlessness and desire blended together into a genre of depth and historical significance. If you enjoy watching movies, watch one of these incredible productions about the complexity of crime life. It’s an offer you can’t refuse!

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.

.

* 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.

It's Good to Be Bad (Ian)

Act I: Stay with me on this one:

Below I've included the link to one of my old curated Letterboxd list titled "10 Absolutely Despicable Characters (That I Still Sort of Love)".  I recommend you start by checking out that first (be sure to hit the "read notes" button at the top of the post), because I think it's an appropriate warm-up to what I'm about to suggest.  Okay, go ahead, read it.  I'll wait.

http://ow.ly/pfRKO

(Note: What is Letterboxd?  An interesting, if underutilized, community for cinephiles--excellent if you're trying to get the hang of programming film series, posting film reviews, or simply want to record the films you've been watching)

All finished reading?  Good, let’s get started.

Here's my proposal, in a nutshell: our knights in shining armors are dead and gone.  Increasingly our so-called "heroes" are only referred to as such because an audience may simply associate the protagonist with the idea of "the hero."  In truth, more often than not independent (and, increasingly, mainstream) film are churning out films that overlap "protagonist" and "antagonist."

“Ian, what you're suggesting is nothing revolutionary,” you might say, “cinema has always utilized the anti-hero."  Good point, but I think American cinema has moved even beyond the anti-hero.  The archetypal anti-hero redeems their flaws by the story's end.  Moreover, we rarely used the anti-hero as protagonist, rather employed them more as a supporting character, a deuteragonist, if you will. (Take Blue Velvet’s Isabella Rossellini, or even Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Zuko.)  The supporting anti-hero exists to temp and test our hero, before the hero restores balance and, ultimately, the anti-hero as well.

What I'm talking about goes one step beyond the anti-hero: we are now facing films where protagonists are flawed characters without redemption.  Last year’s effort from Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine, offers a prime example, and in fact points back to possible origins of this "villain-as-protagonist" trend.  If you haven't seen Jasmine yet, get off your hindquarters and do so.  Blanchett currently holds the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film, and for good reason.  Blachett is beyond superb as Jasmine, the alcoholic, delusional, nervous-wreck of a former socialite come to rely on her white-trash sister.  In a word, Jasmine is despicable: loveless towards her sister and her nephews, self-absorbed, superficial with her "friends", a compulsive-liar and an alcoholic.  And yet, Allen takes clear steps to make the audience sympathize with Jasmine (I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll try to be light on detail here: her husband screws her up BIG time).  Well, could it be that perhaps Allen wants us to sympathize with Jasmine so that we celebrate her imminent redemption?

Wrong.  Jasmine receives, nor earns, no such second chance.  Well then, you might ask, what was all of this for?  Why didn't the film focus on, say, Jasmine's well-meaning, hard-working sister?

And here we arrive at my point: we don’t focus on Jasmine’s sister Ginger because that nice, homely sister doesn't interest anyone anymore.  When we go to the movies, or read a book (Gone Girl is an awesome example; we’ll get to that more later), we want blood.  We want carnage.  We want ruin.  We want to follow a character that is so despicable we can triumph at their ultimate defeat and misery.  And yet, maybe there is an element of self-loathing in this ritual; after all, there were moments where we do sympathize with Jasmine.  And thus, her defeat is, in a lesser way, our defeat.  A way to keep our narcissism in check.  Yet, consider: perhaps, this trend isn’t as new as it seems: perhaps movies have always functioned this way.

Act II: “I told you I’d be back.”

Many critics are calling Jasmine a "spiritual successor" to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, but I say that's being generous to Allen: Blue Jasmine is Streetcar, simply updated to match contemporary vernacular and setting.  What does the update imply?  Well, it means that Blanchett's Jasmine, while a brilliant characterization for sure, simply stands as an updated version of Vivien Leigh's Blanchett Dubois.  Both are despicable; both are sympathetic; and both face horrible ends.

So let's recap: we've moved beyond the hero (who is, with the exception of some superhero movies, very out of place in today's culture), beyond the anti-hero (who is, if anything, today's version of a lightweight-hero), and have adopted the villain as our eyes in a film.  Certainly I can't say this is universally applicable (when can you say that about anything?), but I can say that the trend is undeniably growing:  in the past two years we’ve had Blue Jasmine, Only God Forgives, Behind the Candelabra, Side Effects, Seven Psychopaths, The Master, and most recently David Fincher’s Gone Girl.

In fact, let’s talk about Gone Girl for a moment, as the release of the film inspired me to revisit the topic of villainy as heroism in film.  I think that audiences (not critics, surprisingly) have unfairly reduced the novel as “airport fiction” due to its genre and rampant popularity, but the plain truth is that the work employs eloquent prose, images both ugly and delicately beautiful, and two protagonists with fully fleshed-out psyches.  It’s a peach of a piece.

Because of my love for the novel, I’ll admit I had concerns about a movie adaptation, especially due to the novel’s focus on the internal warfare within each character’s mind, arguably the one human thing film isn’t good at portraying.  Luckily, I can say that the movie nailed it--everyone in my party thought so, and only one other member had read the book (that’s America for you, folks).

Back to my point: Gone Girl’s leading lady, Rosamund Pike’s Amy Dunne, is perhaps the best example of my theory.  Amazing Amy is one vicious sociopath whose actions you don’t just take pleasure in watching, but that you can sympathize with--her motivations grow from a relatable hurt, the feeling of being cheated (again, no spoilers).  Equally, her husband is a shmuck, and the only “redemption” the two receive is mutual life-long entrapment.  Ultimately however, their games of cat-and-mouse prove hypnotic, both to read and to watch, because the chases are sensationalized--the two endanger each other for attention, tell their sides of the story with selfishness and unreliability, and alienate themselves from nearly every other person in their lives, and the entire time they remain muscled and beautiful. Amy and Nick Dunne make rotted ethical cores look attractive because they’re superficially a picture of the ideal all-American couple.

Ultimately then, I assert that audiences increasingly have appetites for villainy on screen, and recent film culture has been happy to satiate us.  Yet on second glance, audiences may have acquired the taste for bad earlier than in the past two decades: indeed, perhaps we’ve loved to live out our guiltiest pleasures and experience our ultimate destructions vicariously on screen all the way back to 1951 with Streetcar, and wait, even farther back to 1941 with the morally bankrupt, and ultimately alienated Charles Foster Kane.

And how does that define us?  As well-dressed savages with delusions of grandeur, bits of sadism, and hints of masochism?

Well, at least we’re well-dressed.

One last note: my key examples of Jasmine and Amy, may lead one to conclude that I have an agenda against women, or that my points only apply to this women.  This is simply untrue; I simply picked them because I thought they’d be fun to dissect (and recall that I also briefly looked at Nick Dunne as subject, as well).  If you’d like an example of male villains that I believe fall into my criteria: No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski, and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle.)

The Horror of 1960s America (Josh)

American Horror Story Asylum plays a master game of deception. While the narrative deceives the audience that they are going to witness a story about aliens and monsters set in an insane asylum, the show runners instead tell a tale where the supernatural elements are not the frightening element. In fact, the supernatural elements often only exist within the story as a savior against the horrors of the natural world.

    During one the first sequences in the story, the creators carefully frame the world as a place where people are more of a threat than any kind of supernatural being. The image the audience sees after Kit Walker, one of the protagonists of the series, pumps up gas into a customer’s car in a 1960’s town is of human evil. The customer complains to Kit about the price of gas while we see a child in the backseat pointing a fake gun at Kit. It is of course, a child at play, but they are explicitly starting with this image to establish man as violent and cruel. The first supernatural element of the series occurs shortly as alien invaders kidnap Kit’s wife. The audience only sees bright, blinding light. At first, one may interpret this as a terrifying image, but the white is far more reminiscent of a heavenly body versus one from traditional views of hell. The aliens later in the series become saviors of major characters, saving them from death, and creating children who have the ability to heal. This image is different than the ones presented when we first see Briarcliff, the church run insane asylum that serves as the setting for the majority of the story. 

    The first shot we see of Briarcliff in the series is a looming low angle from the outside. The old building looks terrifying and consumes the frame. As we are led inside, we hear screams of the patient. The light in Briarcliff is dim with only streaks of light coming from the outside forming harsh, unforgiving shadows. The common room is mostly grey with only a record that repeats a “comforting” song on repeat incessantly. Outside the patient dormitories are hanging fluorescent lights that barely illuminate the space, but flicker incessantly. These are all horrors created by man, not by any supernatural force.

     Lana Winters is an ambitious investigative journalist who originally enters Briarcliff in order to expose the institution and to interview, Kit, convicted of murdering his wife. Soon, in a horrific turn, Sister Jude, the ambitious nun who is the head o the facility, convinces Lana’s life partner to commit Lana into the asylum so she can be treated for her homosexuality. Sister Jude, as she exposes Lana’s fate, is shot from a low angle, exposing her power, while the high angle reverse of Lana shows a powerless victim. She is imprisoned by shackles around her skull and is bruised from the fight that led her to the asylum. The horror in this shot is one of purely human creation.

    In American Horror Story Asylum, the supernatural elements can come to the aid of the humans trapped in the world of the 1960’s. In the second half of the story, Sister Jude, through a turn of events, becomes a prisoner in her own institution. The institution has changed however. No longer run by the Church, Briarcliff is a state run institution featuring the overcrowding and violence associated with state mental health facilities of the time. The show creators use an interesting cinematic trick however to make this transition palatable for Sister Jude. Almost immediately after the audience learns that Briarcliff becomes a state institution, Sister Jude gains an enemy, the angel of death. The angel of death had previously functioned as a frightening dream for Sister Jude. She had large black wings and always offered Sister Jude a way out of her suffering. Now, the angel of death was appearing in the form of a new inmate in Briarcliff who would torture Jude. This distraction though, keeps Jude unaware of the changes happening to her and to the institution. Instead of dwelling on the overcrowding of the institution, the shots of the other inmates only occur in the background of Sister Jude’s conversation with her nemesis. There is no dwelling on the surroundings. Eventually, when Sister Jude attacks the angel of death, now her roommate, we see the reality of her situation. She had actually attacked another innocent women, and in a terrifying scene in the office of the  head of Briarcliff, we learn that years have passed without her knowledge. This scene is shot with wide-angle close-ups that distort reality. The light comes harshly from the side. In addition, the cross carved in the ceiling has begun to fade. Everything has changed and the angel of death was keeping Sister Jude in blissful ignorance of her world. At the end of her life, after she is freed from Briarcliff, Sister Jude gladly welcomes the kiss of the angel of death to bring her sweet relief.

     The most terrifying events within American Horror Story Asylum all base themselves on the realities of the 1960’s. Lana Winters, shot from a bird’s eye view in harsh light, must attempt a coat hanger abortion to save herself from giving birth to a child of rape. Later, newsreels expose the misery of state run institutions using a sepia toned image that creates the impression of being in that time. This same trope is used as the show uses the same color scheme to show the interaction between a husband and his now docile wife who he had lobotomized because of her memories of the Holocaust. As Sister Jude looks into Lana Winter’s eyes and warns her of the dangers of being a strong, independent woman in 1960’s society, and then warns her not to look in the face of evil, the camera moves directly into Lana’s face. The human being is capable of all evil. In the real world, there were no supernatural elements to save characters from the real life horrors presented in American Horror Story. The true horror of the story then is that these characters would never have been saved in the real world.

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

(image licesensed for use in accordance with WikiMedia Commons)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

Female Objects of Perversity in Phillip Kaufman's Quills (Yasmine)

Phillip Kaufman’s film Quills (2000) takes place in France during the Napoleonic Era in the early 19^th century and focuses on the activities of the Marquis de Sade, a historical figure infamous for his practice of sexual sadism. Having been committed to the Charenton asylum for his “sexual deviancy,” the Marquis publishes salacious pornographic literature to escape the sexual repression forced upon him by the kindly priest, Abbe de Coulmier, and the sadistic asylum physician, Dr. Royer Collard, who both represent a morally oppressive society. Despite depicting sexually liberal women in his books, the Marquis’ intends his female characters to be used and dominated. When describing the acts of sadomasochism, the women are on the receiving end of perversity—merely serving as a device to actualize the Marquis’ devious fantasies. Through his work the Marquis de Sade reveals “the great eternal truths that bind all mankind,” or what the Abbe de Coulmier calls the “worst of man’s nature,” in order to expose the underlying perversity of society and the woman’s role as the object of that perversity.

The opening of the film featuring the beheading of the female aristocrat juxtaposed with shots of the Marquis scribbling words on parchment indicates a correlation between society’s cruelty toward women and de Sade’s fictional works. In a succession of images, the blood of the beheaded aristocratic woman becomes the ink of the Marquis’ pen, indicating his exploitation of female suffering as he turns the aristocrat’s execution into an erotic fiction. The way the Marquis verbally abuses his wife, whom he thinks must “hold [her] tongue, hoist her skirts” and “put her mouth to its one pleasurable use,” further elucidates his own misogyny but also suggests that women must be silent and submit themselves to humiliation. The erotic tales depicting the abuse of women are an exaggerated reflection of the ways in which the Marquis’ society abuses women, binding them and depriving them of their dignity and freedom. In a similar fashion the Marquis’ impromptu play, “Crimes of Love,” intentionally sheds light on the cruel fate of women in a patriarchal society, by poking fun at Dr. Royer Collard’s scandalous marriage to Simone, a girl young enough to be his granddaughter.

The demonstration of Dr. Collard’s domineering behavior towards young Simone gives evidence to the objectification and marginalization of women in 18^th century France who, as the Marquis’ stories suggest, possess little sexual agency while at the disposal of men’s desires. When the film first introduces Simone, the picture of virginal purity in a white dress, her attention to the statue of the Madonna and her look of content suggest that she finds her life in the cloister gratifying. Dr. Royer Collard, a dark and foreboding figure in his black attire, corrupts this sacred and peaceful space with his imposing figure and requests to take his bride who “has not yet come of age.”  Simone’s desires are literally overshadowed by Royer Collard’s purpose for her. By asking the contractor to make Simone’s bedroom door lockable from the outside and to place bars outside her window, Dr. Royer Collard exercises his control of her—caging her like a pet. The following scene in which Collard rapes Simone, Collard forces his expectations on Simone to engage in sexual acts thereby reinforcing an aggressive stereotype of masculinity. Though the people gossip about Royer Collard “pretending to be a God fearing man” and the disturbing age gap between Simone and the Doctor, no one attempts to dispute the union, not the seemingly pious nuns who cared for her or even the Abbe de Coulmier himself. Given that Dr. Royer Collard symbolizes cultural values of restraint, his indiscretion regarding his lecherous and violent desire for Simone as wells as his apparent pleasure for the pain and torture of his patients’ exposes the deviance buried beneath cultural mores.

The Marquis’ play “Crimes of Love” satirizes the duality of societal customs and what he believes is the ineffectiveness and inanity of religious institutions. To play the part of the nun in his play, de Sade employs the acting talent one of the asylum’s most delusional and simple-witted occupants, which signifies the Marquis’ contempt for religious institutions. In the tale mirroring Simone’s journey from the nunnery to her new station with Dr. Royer Collard, the character representing the Doctor publicly violates the inmate playing Simone in numerous ways, and yet the sophisticated audience laughs without empathy. The levity with which the people view the facsimile of Simone’s humiliation contrasted with their eventual disgust again draws attention to the dichotomous nature of a society torn between an interest in depravity and the suppression of such interests. Dr. Royer Collard’s disruption of the performance denotes society’s reluctance to examine its flaws once brought to light—keeping them hidden to maintain a façade of unquestionable uprightness.

 

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Attack On Titan: The Preservation and Destruction of Social Order (Yasmine)

A society is typically formed by a group of individuals interconnected by shared values, norms, and culture.  Members of a society maintain social order by reinforcing established customs to keep its members in check and ensure stability.  In the emotionally charged Japanese anime, Attack on Titan, humanity struggles to keep its society in tact as humanoid giants called Titans relentlessly devour humans, forcing mankind to hide behind fifty-meter walls to save themselves from extinction. In the beginning of the series, the idealistic protagonist, Eren Yeager dreams of a free life outside the walls, contradicting the mores of his society which prefers a life of containment to certain death.  The barriers which humans have erected to escape annihilation become both a sanctuary and a prison for the kingdom, signifying society’s propensity toward social constraint and fear of that which disrupts social order.

The three walls: Wall Maria, Rose, and Sina exemplify the way in which societies rely on social structure for stability and containment of its members. The story’s narrator explains that since its creation not a single Titan has been able to infiltrate Wall Maria, thus inspiring social tranquility.  With its immense height and enduring structure made of solid stone, the one-hundred-year-old wall epitomizes permanence and security. An aerial view of the Zhiganshina District enclosed in Wall Maria reveals a somewhat medieval society with an organized collection of homes and markets.  The carefree social interactions amongst the townspeople, the trading of goods in the market, presence of families, children playing, and a laid back police force give evidence to the sense of peace and stability humanity experiences within the walls.  In contrast, the outside world and the Titans who rampage in it are equated with chaos and cultural genocide.

The Titans’ place on the fringe of society, their incomprehensibly monstrous behavior, as well as their unorthodox appearance makes them the antithesis of civilization and societal control. Though the Titans resemble bipedal humanoids, their gargantuan size, nudity, and deformity immediately sets them apart from the civilized humans inside the walls. Despite shambling about aimlessly in groups, the Titans do not conform to any preconception of a uniformly functioning community. The Titans’ zeal for devouring people and wiping out humanity for no discernable reason makes them a hideous blight on human progress and a potential disruption of social order. Since Titans do not need to consume people to sustain their own existence, humanity assumes the Titans’ singular motivation is the eradication of human life and culture. With Titans possessing neither a complex language system, nor a means of governing themselves their actions are unpredictable and symbolically anarchistic. In this sense Titans are more than just a threat to human lives; the terror they instill jeopardizes the social glue that keeps society from falling apart.  The Titans’ resemblance to humans makes their murderous actions more disturbing, suggesting that without social control and stability the illusion of peace would falter and humanity would succumb to an existence of endless conflict and violence amongst its own members. To spare society from the Titans’ negative influence, humanity heavily guards what is left of its customs, placing an exaggerated emphasis on the necessity for containment within the walls to keep curious members from the lawless world beyond.

Although the three walls surrounding this human civilization safeguard the communities from the uncivilized outside world, they also imprison them, limiting their perceptions. The dynamics of the insular kingdom demonstrate how the walls are heavily embedded within the social structure of humanity’s sequestered survivors. A priest travels the districts of Wall Rose shouting praises and personifying the wall as though it were a savior and a god, exhibiting the wall’s influence on the citizens’ religious and cultural life. It becomes evident that any mention of life beyond the wall is considered culturally taboo when Eren’s friend Armin expresses a desire for humanity to explore territories outside the wall and is consequently harassed by a group who accuses him of heresy. This shaming ritual and other methods of social correction: such as ridicule and shunning perpetuate an isolationist mentality, a fear of change, and a dangerously irrational optimism. As Eren says, humanity’s fear of the outside world has made it like “ignorant cattle” merely “surviving” but unable to live or control the terms of its existence.  Like cattle the inhabitants of Wall Maria were unprepared for the slaughter.

The sudden appearance of the first 60-meter “Colossal Titan” looming menacingly over the wall literally paralyzes society, as citizens of Wall Maria stand still and helpless beneath the Titan’s powerful gaze.  With a mighty kick, the Colossal Titan breaks the barrier, instantly mangling the carefully constructed society. As citizens scramble to escape the horde of Titans, homes, families, and social order are destroyed as Wall Maria crumbles. This indicates humanity's lack of control, the inevitability of change, and society’s need to adapt to it. Once again humans must flee the Titans; the “humiliation of being kept in a cage” intensifies as they retreat to the more confining inner walls, desperately seeking structure which, like Wall Maria, has fallen apart almost beyond repair. In order to save themselves, the people must learn to accept and face the threat of the Titans head on if they ever hope to reclaim what they have lost. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voyeurism in Cinema: Rear Window and The Conversation (Yeirim)

The term ‘voyeurism’ originally means an act of “[gaining] sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity (Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press) However, it is often used to indicate a general interest in spying at other people’s private activities or moments. Voyeurism has often been a subject in cinema. In fact, watching a movie itself may also be a voyeuristic activity in its nature in that the audience seeks pleasure in looking at lives of other people.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation are two of many films that talk about voyeurism. In Rear Window, its main character Jeffrey seeks pleasure in looking at his neighborhood while sitting still in a chair all day long with his broken leg. In The Conversation, the protagonist, Caul takes part in a voyeuristic activity with his job as a surveillance expert. However, voyeurism is dealt in a significantly different way in each of these two films.

In Rear Window, Jeffrey’s voyeuristic activity is mainly engaged with vision. His sight is the primary sense that is used. The story evolves from what he ‘sees’. This visual aspect of Jeffrey’s voyeuristic experience is effectively shared with the audience throughout the film. The audience sees the neighborhood only through Jeffrey’s window, binoculars, or lenses, purely from Jeffrey’s point of view. This way, they automatically take his position as a voyeur, and become part of his voyeurism. This sharing also draws parallel with their voyeurism with the experience with cinema itself, in that the audience peeps at his personal life through the screen just like Jeffrey peeps at his neighborhood through his window. 

By sharing this voyeuristic activity with the audience, Rear Window shows Hitchcock’s view on voyeurism that it is a universal pleasure that all human beings pursue. In the story of the film, Jeffrey’s spying of his neighborhood starts off as his private hobby, but it eventually becomes a shared experience with his fiancé, Lisa, and his nurse, Stella. They are wary of the ethical issue with peeping at first, but later, they become more enthusiastic with finding out about Mr. Thorwald’s murder case than Jeffrey has been. Through this sharing, Jeffrey and Lisa even develop a fonder feeling with each other. Outside the story, Hitchcock further expands this excitement onto the audience and makes their interest in watching a film also a kind of voyeurism. Therefore, in Rear Window, voyeurism is not as much as an unhealthy desire, but a very natural one that normal people also can possess.

While the voyeuristic activity in Rear Window is mostly carried out by vision, it is mostly carried out by sound in The Conversation. Instead of looking at other people, the main character, Caul, secretly ‘listens’ to them. Again with The Conversation, the audience goes through Caul’s experience purely from his point of view. They therefore share his voyeuristic activity but at the same time also his faulty interpretation of the situation. To eavesdrop, Caul relies on technology and he never doubts its accuracy. Since the audience accesses the story only through his perspective, they also take in the information without any doubt. Thus, when the truth is revealed and it is found that the technology actually hindered Caul from gaining the right knowledge, it is striking both for him and for the audience. Regarding this, voyeuristic activity in this film is not a powerful tool that can take advantage of other people by prying on their secrets. It is rather a flawed, one-sided information with which it is very dangerous to make judgments based on it.

Voyeurism in The Conversation is therefore not a pleasure. It is depicted rather as a violation that acts as a burden for the protagonist. As a surveillance expert, Caul has been continuously haunted by his guilt that he has put people whom he eavesdropped in danger.  The guilt that spurs from his past deeds as a voyeur, pushes him forward to rise up and stop the mischief, but eventually fails him by making him oblivious to the fact that the information may be completely different from what he is already expecting. Through this voyeuristic activity, Caul only discovers the presence of a huge power in the society that he, as an individual, cannot simply defy, as opposed to Jeffrey, who overcomes a dead-end in his relationship with his fiancé and renews it successfully through his voyeuristic experience. Thus, while voyeurism helps the characters escape from immobility in Rear Window, it only defeats the protagonist even more and deprives of his ability to move forward in The Conversation. 

Edward Scissorshands: The Meaning of Being Different (Yeirim)

When I tell people that I am a film major, one of the most frequently asked question is ‘what is your favorite film?’ The list of my favorite films changes from time to time, but at the very top of it always is Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorshands. To me, it is almost heartbreaking when someone so confidently says that Edward Scissorshands is a horror film. Well, it could be called a monster film, but surely not a horror film. A horror film generally makes use of the abnormality as a source of fear, but the abnormality in Edward Scissorshands is not necessarily something to fear. In fact, the film twists the meaning of ‘being different’ and tackle the concept itself: what is being ‘abnormal?’ How do we define it?

The fact that Edward is different from the people in the town is directly brought into play right away with his entrance to the story, but it is hinted from the very beginning of the film. The opening sequence of the film shows a series of images immersed in dark pale blue. These images which later are revealed to be components of Edward’s castle, are mostly eerie gothic figures such as a gargoyle statue and strange machines, or some things that are not actually eerie in their nature such as homemade cookies and human hands which appear distorted in the low-key lighting which emphasize the shadows and darkness greatly. After the opening sequence, we jump briefly into the warmly lit room of Kim who has now has become an old woman telling a story about Edward to her grand-daughter, but the overall atmosphere of the setting of the film at the moment is taken over by the dark, pale quality which stretches out from the previous images of the castle and returns to and ends at a shot of a window inside the hardly-lit castle, by which a man with pale skin, black hair and black cloth stands.

Therefore when the next shot immediately cuts to the sunlit town with houses painted in bright pastel colors standing on green lawn, a huge gap is automatically created between the world of darkness in which Edward stands, and the world of the town. Since the town is the environment where people are typically familiar with and since the town looks simply peaceful on the outside- the birds chirp and the people are leisurely doing simple tasks such as mowing the lawn, watering the grass, or fixing a roof- it may seem like a place that stays under the realm of ‘normal’. However, even though most of the story takes place in the town, the town is not necessarily described as a default normal setting of the film. As the townspeople are introduced more closely to the audience through the eyes of Peg, it is very much clearly suggested that the people of this town are not as normal as expected. A housewife who tries to seduce a plumber, a girl who tries every cosmetic on but actually does not even think of buying one, and a woman who is too absorbed in religion, all are not the kind of people who are categorized as ‘normal’ in our society. Such characters of the town therefore betray the seemingly happy and peaceful life of the town, and through them the film poses a question on the authenticity of the town as a normal setting. The fact that the dark, eerie world of Edward and his castle was in play from the very beginning of the film prior to the introduction of the town also casts a doubt about ‘what is the film’s true default setting?’

The main character, Edward heats up this debate about the concept of ‘being different’. When Peg first encounters him, Edward walks out of the shadow from the furthest corner of the attic, with his black outfit and hair completely merged into the shadow and only his blades from his scissorshands visible in a streak of light. In this very moment, his figure is very monstrous and horrific, but when Edward’s frightened face comes into the light and his fragile voice speaks two words, ‘Don’t go,’ his innocence and vulnerability that lies inside his terrifying appearance are revealed, just like his beautiful garden that lies inside the eerie exterior of the castle. With these two different setting, a seemingly ‘normal’ town with its people not very pleasant and a seemingly ‘abnormal’ castle with its owner not very terrifying or harmful, the film completely blurs the boundaries between the normal world and the abnormal world and tackles on the concept of abnormality itself.

Nonetheless, the film does not settle for blurring the concept of abnormality. It drives it further and asks what this abnormality means in the society we are living, and how the society treats the abnormality, or someone who is abnormal. Actually at first, the townspeople take Edward’s abnormality in, in a quite sensible way. They do not judge Edward by his appearance or by the fact that his hands are scissors from the first place. They first approach him with a careful curiosity, and then as they find out that Edward has remarkable ability with using his scissorshands, they all become greatly fond of him and treat him warm-heartedly as their good neighbor and friend. Upon this moment, Edward’s peculiarity is a gift and an object of admiration, which tells that the film is not simply complaining about ‘why can’t people admit someone who is different?’

The real issue that the film wants to talk about unveils when the problem starts to spur out as Edward gets blamed for trespassing instead of Jim. As soon as the news is heard, the people in the town begin to whisper about how Edward can be a possible danger to the neighborhood. They do not care for the real evidence, for Edward’s difference automatically becomes an evidence for them to believe that he is the evil one. At this point, Edward’s peculiarity immediately falls to the ground and becomes an object to be feared and to be destroyed. Nothing has changed inside Edward, but the altered point of view on him suddenly drags him down and all his actions are considered to be of evil intention. When Edward accidentally cuts Kim’s palm startled by Jim’s shout towards him, Jim accuses him of such action saying ‘now you’ve done it,’ implying that he is finally beginning to reveal his evil nature. Such blind accusation towards Edward accumulates and finally explodes within him. In the next shot, Edward walks down the neighborhood in extreme anger. He violently cuts all his clothes off in pieces which he has put on in order to be a part of the ‘normal’ people. As the torn pieces of clothes fall from him, Edward’s black, hard and rough armor-like outfit appears again. The townspeople who treated him as if he is a monster finally have brought his monstrosity to the surface. A great irony is created here as the pretty garden statues of the neighborhood are featured in the background all of which are the evidence of Edward’s favor for the people. Eventually, the townspeople have trampled his good nature down and raised his inner violence instead.

Finally, at the end of the film when Edward actually kills Jim by his own will, Edward eventually becomes a true monster to the townspeople. The change in the attitude of the townspeople not only made Edward possess the monstrous qualities such as anger, hatred, and violence, but at the same time also forced him to define himself as a dangerous monster which can even hurt his beloved one regardless of his intention. As soon as he realizes this, he says ‘goodbye’ to his most beloved, Kim, and for the rest of his lifetime, stays in his castle, completely isolating himself from the rest of the people. Through this heartbreaking story one who is ‘different’ had to go through, the film suggests that being different still is an object of great threat not because abnormality itself is dangerous, but because people so easily dismiss abnormality as monstrous. 

O Brother, Where Art Thou: Film as Comparative Mythology (Sophie)

O Brother, Where Art Thou, (2000) written and directed by the Coen Brothers, is, at its heart, a work of comparative mythology. The film overtly claims inspiration from Homer's Odyssey, opening with a title card with the epic poem's invocation of the muse. The plot and characters are all loosely drawn from the ancient Greek epic, but by setting the retelling in Mississippi during the Great Depression, the film places the mythology of the original text against the backdrop of a Christian mythos and Southern US folk traditions. The resultant braid is an exquisitely woven journey, primary a fiercely comical one, but at times just as spellbinding, powerful, and frightening.

The film stars George Clooney as the sly, fast talking, Ulysses Everett McGill, an escaped convict, first seen chained together with his less intelligent “crew,” Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson), as they make their way across the state in pursuit of a treasure. Like their mythological antecedents, they encounter many trials and tribulations on their way.

The trio's prophet comes in the form of an old, blind black man pushing a handcar. He is their Cassandra and their Tiresias, and foretells adventure, misfortune, and ultimate triumph in an unexpected form, as well as giving the escapees a specific image of a cow perched on a cotton barn. Though he is drawn from the blind prophet present in Greek tradition, he takes on qualities of Christian legend, the unnamed traveler, the poor man's prophet, and his language is biblical in diction with mentions of trials of the heart and salvation. His race is drawn from a standing (and unfortunately still present) association of wise old men of color with the mystic in the American folk tradition, especially in Southern narratives.

The prophet is an archetypical figure that serves as an obvious bridging point between three traditions, but the mastery of the film is in drawing on complimentary, rather than congruous elements. While hiding in the woods, the men come across a congregation dressed in white robes, heading to the nearby lake to be baptized. The choral musical number, 'Down to the River to Pray' was arranged by modern Country Folk singer Alison Krauss, who leads the rendition for the film. It is deeply religiously Christian, and is sung in gospel choirs.

The effect the performance and the scene has on the audience and on the characters in the film is hypnotic in it's beauty, and the trio find themselves at the water's edge. While crafty and rationalminded, Everett brushes off the idea of born-again salvation as desperation in hard times, Delmar, and after him Pete race down to the priest to be baptized. From a Christian standpoint, this is a positive scene, but in the narrative retelling of the Odyssey, this congregation stands in for the Lotus Eaters, a group of Islanders who takes in travelers and feeds them a drugged lotus leaf that makes them forget all their troubles, and thus their quest. By placing the Southern Evangelist rebirth scene in this light, the film forces a comparison of values, but also a rereading of both cultural "texts."

The movie later parallels this scene with three equally hypnotic singing women, also dressed in white who are referred to explicitly as the sirens. Mythological bird-women whose voice was meant to lure sailors to death, in the film they take on their post-Christian appearance: beautiful in body as much as in voice. After the encounter ends badly for one of the travelers, along with "siren" they are referred to as "the Whore of Babylon."

In the original Odyssey, Odysseus is pursued throughout his journey by the sea god Poseidon who he enrages through his actions. Poseidon himself does not have a strong moral connotation. The mythology is such that a hero can be the enemy of most any Olympian and in favor with another. With Ulysses Everett McGill and his crew being escaped convicts, his natural pursuant was a man of the law. Sheriff Cooley, thus, fills this role in the recasting of the epic. But the role of a law man in the story of a jail break has many different cultural implications. Daniel von Bargen's appearance and performance in the part were inspired by Boss Godfrey in Cool Hand Luke, but the fear and awe that surround him is an older cultural idea.

Here, the Christian and Southern Mythology combine to add an additional layer to his character. Early in the film, the trio stumble on Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King) named and based on the real man who also legendarily sold his soul at a crossroads in rural Mississippi for his skill on the guitar. When asked what the devil looks like, Everett describes the traditional "red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hay fork," and Tommy corrects him, describing Sheriff Cooley perfectly saying "He's white, as white as you folks, with empty eyes and a big hollow voice. He loves to travel around with a mean old hound." Every time the sheriff appears, even at night, he is wearing mirror sunglasses, and most of the time, their reflection contains a fire. Thus he becomes three characters in one - the law man, Poseidon, and the Devil. This triplicated role also comes into play in the presentation of the underworld. Odysseus pays a visit to the Greek underworld, which, above all, is depicted by its inhabitants as dark and boring, but with the Hellish Christian overlay, it becomes fiery, with moments of torture, and haunting forewarnings.

The allusions run throughout the film, many of which are only half-serious nods to one mythology or another. When betrayed by a family member, Pete calls him "Judas Iscariot Hogswollop. The biblical flood is both referred to and, in a way enacted. Along with Tommy Johnson, the crew runs into George "Baby-Face" Nelson, and gets a front row seat to depression era political corruption. There are dozens of quick references to the Odyssey and to Homer, including a Cyclops, a blind bard, and the naming of Ulysses Everett's wife Penny, short of Penelope. But it's the moments when the different cultural origins of the film run together that makes this lighthearted tribute also a work of comparative mythic analysis.

When I decided to write about O Brother, Where Art Thou, I knew I would have to choose what about the movie I was going to dedicate a post to. In talking about the use of myth and culture in the film, I am leaving out discussion of a soundtrack that won incredible amounts of recognition and awards, used found tracks from archives, pulled several artists out of retirement, and awarded a Grammy to a man who had led a chain gang in a song in 1959. I am overlooking the then novel technique of digital color correction that was used to give the film a sepia tint, and what good and horrible things Hollywood has since done with the technique pioneered in this movie. Hopefully, in time, someone will have a chance to revisit this film. It is, after all, a modern epic.

 

Once Upon a Time: Disney for the Ones Who Grew Up (Sophie)

I am not often a fan of giant media conglomerations, but for ABC's Once Upon a Time, I have to make an exception. The ABC network is owned by the Disney Corporation, and never has this relationship worked out better for the prime time viewer. The show was billed as a fantasy-drama based on classical fairy tales, but it takes much of it's core characters from Disney's animated features and borrows from them to an extent that would be difficult for anyone forced to navigate the "enchanted forest" that is Disney copyright law. The show is by no means made for children, and is often violent and heartbreaking. Still, it is mindful of the themes of the fairy tales (and is some cases Victorian children's stories or other story classics) it is based on. Family, the battle of good verses evil, and true love are not only paramount thematic issues, but actual forces of power, both magically and when enacted through character motivation. By keeping this fairy tale grounding, the show is free to morph the content and characters, enhance the nuance, and add complications, still while maintaining something that feels authentic at least to the versions of these stories we as viewers are most familiar with.

The result to anyone that grew up or raised children in the age of the Disney Renaissance (Late 1980's to 2000) is a show that seems like an updated, more mature version of these now classic animated films. Obviously, some things are different because of format - a television show demands a cast that is more interconnected and recurring than discrete films. It demands a new twist, a mystery or conflict that bridges the various individual stories and drives the characters, and thus the show, forward in a new way. The show accomplishes this in the form of a new curse put forward by the Evil Queen (from Snow White) to transport all the fairy tale characters to our world, oblivious to who they are, forced to live as she dictates: without their "happy endings." As the main narrative unfurls from this plot point, the show also reveals the actions of the past, in the realm of fairy tales. These stories, are focused on individual sets of characters and are paired up with relevant events in the forward flowing plot, so they are told out of order. Slowly, as the show progresses, the past gets woven together and drops hints as to the events of the future.

In this, the show succeeds wonderfully. The balance between hints that pay off and misdirections, for those readers bouncing theories around in their head, is very satisfying. The show never feels like it is fooling with you just for the sake of convolution, nor does it come off as predictable and boring. Similarly, the show doesn't become a detective puzzle that forces the viewer into hunting for clues, for those viewers who are content in letting the mysteries unfold without trying to guess which well known character might show up and what role they might play, or what betrayal or alliance might come to light next. The overall plotting, and the way the various fantasy stories interweave is done elegantly.

Unfortunately, the writing that is so stellar at the drawing board doesn't always translate into the dialogue. Some of the scenes fall into saccharine or maudlin sentiments, often at the same time sounding like generic and stilted dialogue for a scene of tension, revenge, passion, or some other standard story book fare. During scenes that take place in the fairy tale realm, the writers operate under the added complication of trying to use a kind of folktale mode of speaking. Fortunately, as season 2 progresses the kinks seem to be smoothing out.
 
Part of this fault may lie with the actors as well, especially because TV drama is a medium where the writer of each episode varies and the problems in the writing are much more apparent consistently in some characters than others. In television, the actor becomes more of a constant for the character than the writer, and they become vital in bringing the lines to life. In Once Upon a Time, it's the villains (primarily the Evil Queen Regina, played by Lana Parrilla, and Rumpelstiltskin, played by Robert Carlyle) that outshine their cast-mates.

But they have help from a story that does work hard to challenge the classical fairy tale ideas of evil, while maintaining that true good and true evil exist. It isn't moral ambiguity so much as a deep, pervading sense of sympathy. The show does not hesitate in illustrating true evil and then showing its tragic, sympathetic motivation. This is one way that Once Upon a Time updates its source material for an older audience. As adults, the flat evil-for-evil's sake villains that dominate the Disney canon don't pass for believable characters.

Another update of note the show made is to the roles and ideals of gender. Snow White is turned from the 1937 house-wife princess in distress to a survivalist-princess on the lam who rescues her prince as much as he rescues her. But it isn't just about de-feminizing her role. Snow, in her updated fairy-tale life and in her modern world is powerful as a mother, a lover, and a teacher as well as being one of the most capable fighters on the show. The core cast of Once Upon a Time is, in any given arc, at least half female, and though romance (what with the theme of true love) definitely plays a part in the show, it is far from the only driving motivation.

Briefly, no account of the show is complete without a comment on the aesthetic. As costume designer Eduardo Castro said “We didn’t want it to look like a Renaissance Faire, we wanted it to look like an Alexander McQueen show.” The costumes and styles, aside from certainly being grown up, provide insight into character, future plot points, and clues to morality and timeline. Above all else, they are exquisite.

For anyone familiar with Disney's Masterpiece Collection, Once Upon a Time is a wonderful chance to relive and re-meet childhood classics in a new, more age appropriate way. Even for those who haven't, it's a great way to get to know classic characters in an exciting, innovative way.

Evil, Inc. : The Institution in the Works of Joss Whedon (Sophie)

Before Joss Whedon's Avengers (2012) (reviewed here) rocketed him onto the main stage, he already had a core following of dedicated fans watching and analyzing his works. A lot of attention has been paid to the role of gender and language across Whedon's canon, but on the verge of a new series carrying his creator's seal, Marvel's S.H.I.E.L.D., to premier on ABC, there is another repeated element that deserves examining. Since the beginning of Whedon's television career, his main characters have been pushed and pulled by shadowy unseen organizations, and pitted against not just individual villains, but also entire evil institutions.

Angel (1999-2004) begins by introducing viewers to Los Angeles' literal darker side. The show is set up as a combination of a detective noir and horror/fantasy. The head of this grim side of LA, though, isn't organized crime, it's a law firm, Wolfram & Hart, that specializes in defending and protecting the worst of the worst, which in this universe, means vampires, demons, and genocidal maniacs. Though each season of the show has it's own arc and main villain, the law firm remains as the central embodiment of evil throughout the show.

It's an obvious joke, a firm of powerful lawyers that keeps the rich richer and the poor underpowered (“Evil white folks really do have a Mecca! … Oh, I get it, I get it. You all can cater to the demon, cater to the dead man, but what about the black man!” - Charles Gunn, Episode 1.21 Blind Date). Here, they are taken to the extreme, with demonic clients and bloody rituals. But Whedon uses the idea of evil lawyers beyond the humorous gag. They become an examination of evil, (often seen as wild and animalistic or demonic) as it is enacted through something so proscribed and systematic as law. Angel, a hero on a quest for good and personal redemption, is forced to face a world where evil is institutional, and intrinsically engrained. At one point, the former head lawyer of the LA branch tells him as much:

    "Our firm has always been here in one form or another. The Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge—we were here the first time a caveman clubbed his neighbor and watched in fascination as his brains oozed out in the dirt. We're in the hearts and minds of every living human being [...] The world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us."(Holland Manners 2.15 Reprise)

Wolfram & Hart, then, is about how evil is part of civilization from the beginning, because it is part of us from the beginning. Evil lawyers are in power, but isn't evil always?

Whedon's next evil corporation never got a chance to come out of the shadows. Much of what viewers know about Firefly (2002) and Serenity's (the 2005 movie sequel) mega corporation of Blue Sun comes from piecing things together from the 14 episode show, interviews, and official merchandise. What is clear is that Blue Sun is everywhere. The logo is all over the show, on products from food and clothes, to more luxury goods, to transport vehicles. But the company reaches much farther. On some planets, they are an exclusive monopoly. The show reveals (or would, but didn't have a chance to get that far, and instead does so on DVD commentary) that they have even begun human experiments for their medical and military contracting subdivisions, which have led to horrifying results. There are clearly implied ties to the government and it is not clear whether Blue Sun and the Alliance Government are even actually separately functioning entities. Unlike Wolfram & Hart, which operates inside a system as it's necessary or ever present evil, Blue Sun is the system. Our Heroes, in this show, are rebels against this system and in 14 episodes and one movie, we only see reasons to agree with them. But in an interview, Whedon elaborated on more nuance of the main character, Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds's politics:

“Mal’s politics are very reactionary and ‘Big government is bad’ and ‘Don’t interfere with my life. And sometimes he’s wrong — because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.”

If Wolfram & Hart is about evil inherent in the system, Blue Sun is about the dangers of an unbalanced system, of one company with too much power, and people with too little voice to change that.

Dollhouse (2009-2010), unlike his two previous shows, takes us inside a corporation, a biomedical firm, Rossum, that produces the most advanced neurological treatments, and also runs an underground elite network of “houses” of programmable humans, known as dolls. From the inside of one of these Dollhouses, the show depicts several characters moral struggles with the technologies that allow for the complete rewriting of the human mind. The dolls are people who have entered into a contract of slavery to do things they cannot imagine and will not remember, in exchange for financial compensation and being cured of whatever problems they may have had (often mental illnesses) or instead of prison sentences. As the end game for Rossum is revealed, and the stakes get higher, allegiances change and justifications fall away. Rossum has a lot of elements of Blue Sun, in that they are too powerful, and too long unchecked, but it also brings in some elements of Wolfram & Hart's message. The series tells us that the technology that Rossum possessed was so powerful that it would almost inevitably end all of civilization. Why? Because people seek power and control, and now they can have it.

In his non-TV shows, Whedon cannot seem to leave the institutional evil behind him. Though the main character of Dr. Horrible is technically supposed to be evil, the “Hero,” is clearly an absolutely terrible person. In the 45 minute web musical, Whedon makes sure to mention that this hero is a “Corporate TOOL.” Cabin in the Woods, (which this blog already touched on here, [spoiler warning]) toys with a corporation that seems quite evil, and well, turns out to have a more complicated purpose.

The reason all this is important to understand in the wake of The Avengers and the anticipation to S.H.I.E.L.D., is that in the source material,  S.H.I.E.L.D. is a very large, very powerful organization. Though technically under either US or UN control, in the recent Avengers, they are shown to be largely autonomous, and occasionally even act against the advice and order of these authorities. In the block buster superhero movie, of course,  S.H.I.E.L.D. is unambiguously the good guys, coming in and saving the day. But Whedon's fear of such institutional power survived even until filming, as a cut scene from the beginning shows. This scene would have framed the whole movie with the question of whether this agency is, in fact, reckless, dangerous, and too powerful.

With a whole series, more personal creative freedom and less big name super heroes, I for one, and anxious to see where Joss Whedon plan's to take this next large institutional power in the future.

Why Don't the Bad Guys All Look Different From Me?: Subverting Sterotypes on Homeland (Chris D)

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Showtime’s new series, Homeland, takes an enormous risk. In setting the show in the context of the contemporary War on Terror, the show could have easily ended up either completely jingoistic and/or incredibly racist. The topic of terrorism in this country is, at the moment, linked with the topic of racism towards Muslims. As Homeland seems to strive for realism, replacing Islamic radicals with a more politically correct villain would come off as hokey. The show instead attempts to subvert the viewer’s expectations creating a show that shows both sides of the conflict.

The show’s main conflict of a bipolar CIA agent, portrayed by Clare Danes, investigating a recently recovered POW, Nicholas Brody who is played by Damian Lewis, automatically removes some of the racial tension surrounding the issue by shifting the suspicion away from the Arabs and casting it onto a homespun white male. Damian Lewis is generally best known for playing Dick Winters in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and generally gives off the impression of an upstanding American. By placing the doubt and paranoia of the War on Terror onto such an upstanding looking war hero, the show immediately throws the audience for a loop and causes them to question the way that they think about the terrorism issue.

One way that the show maintains the suspicion on Brody is by revealing that he is secretly a Muslim. This revelation draws on the slight culture of fear that permeates America especially once the question of potential terrorism is brought up. The fact that Brody worships Allah automatically draws the viewer to question his loyalty. However, the show points out the ridiculousness of this suspicion when Brody is finally confronted about this practice. He replies that he found religion while being tortured as a POW and that Islam was the only religion in the area. By pointing out that there is a perfectly viable reason for Brody to be a Muslim without it meaning that he is a terrorist, the show pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet and makes them question what they have believed up until this point.

Once actual Middle Eastern terrorists are introduced, the show continues to make the viewer question what they believe about the racial identity of terrorism. A terrorist couple is introduced, a Middle Eastern man and a white woman. The makeup of this couple plays into the concept that different races are swooping in to corrupt the fair and innocent white women. Just by being shown this couple and being told that they are terrorists, the audience generally believes that the man is the diehard terrorist and that the woman has been talked into it. However, the show inverts the dynamic, and we find out that the woman is the true believer and the man is following her out of love. He is unnerved by the concept of violence and doesn’t truly believe in the cause, but wants to make his wife happy. This inversion subverts both general gender roles as well as racial stereotypes to create an atmosphere, much like reality, in which the characters cannot be judged immediately as they appear on screen.

The show gets a lot of mileage out of subverting the audience’s expectation. This allows them to create an extremely tense environment for the show in which no one can be trusted. The people who are supposed to look like terrorists are, in fact, just people, and the most destructive act on the show was committed by the US government in their hunt for terrorists. By playing with such a controversial topic, the show brings to light a lot of what we believe in this country and proves that much of it has no bearing on reality.

 

Clever Kids: The Depiction of Precocious Children in David Slade's Hard Candy. (Yasmine)

As a child I got a thrill out of watching movies that featured kids outsmarting adults. I could never forget the ingenuity of Macaulay Culkin’s character in Home Alone (1990) or how his spectacularly booby trapped house and quick thinking foiled the plans of two hardened (albeit dimwitted) criminals taking advantage of the Christmas season. I also loved watching Lindsay Lohan take on a dual role as twin sisters swapping lives and sabotaging their parents’ affairs in The Parent Trap to the point where I had to watch the movie almost every weekend.

With the exception of films like Home Alone and The Parent Trap—family friendly movies whose plot focuses on crafty children—most films give children a secondary role. Sometimes children bridge the emotional gap between two prospective lovers in romantic films; other times children are seen but not actually heard, serving no greater purpose than to be part of a family unit. For this reason, even now as an adult, I am still drawn to films that show children asserting their authority or even films that capture the brilliance and a child’s awareness of the world. A film that truly alters the balance of authority between child and adult is David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005).

Hard Candy, a film about a 14-year-old vigilante who confronts and psychologically tortures an unsuspecting man, whom she believes to be a pedophile, demonstrates a non-adult character taking charge and behaving in an atypically mature manner. The film plays on the audience’s preconceived notions about children being helpless without supervision. When I first watched the movie (having been completely clueless about Hard Candy’s premise), I assumed I was going to be sitting through a film about some unfortunate girl enduring a traumatic experience at the disposal of the villainous pedophile Jeff. The opening scene plays up the young girl Hayley’s supposed naiveté in order to make her control and maturity more effective later in the film.

The façade of Hayley Stark’s innocence begins with a close up of an inappropriate chat dialog between a 39-year-old photographer Jeff aka “lensman319” and Hayley. Neither character is seen but the nature of the conversation is cause for concern. Hayley’s suggestively promiscuous yet childish screen name, “thonggrrl14” coupled with her flirtatious comments make her seem like the stereotypical teenage girl who carelessly draws attention to her age while trusting a complete stranger with her inner thoughts and personal information. While reading  lensman319’s texts insisting that he and Hayley “finally hook up” and Hayley’s suggestion that he “film [her] with [his] vidoecamera” before “doing it,” I could not stop myself from wondering if she either had ever seen Primetime or was just plain stupid. Needless to say, after seeing Hayley’s character for the first time, I was thoroughly convinced that she would fall into the trap of

In the subsequent scene, the first meeting of Hayley and Jeff, Hayley is the epitome of puerility, and Jeff the calculating and personable pedophile.  If I wasn’t already disturbed by this little girl so eager to get in a stranger’s car and drive to the man’s house alone, the intimacy established with back-to-back close-ups of Hayley’s and Jeff’s faces made me extremely uncomfortable.  The first shot of Hayley is a close-up in which she turns around; her soft features, round face, round eyes as wide as a baby’s, and slightly confused expression as she asks, “Jeff?” give evidence to her apparent youth and naiveté. A close up of Jeff follows; his smiling face and open demeanor are inviting to Hayley even as he inspires suspicion in the viewer. Even though Jeff is rather attractive –with his stylish hair, chiseled face, and boyish charm— his predatory looks, the way he undresses Hayley with his eyes, and his wolfish grin make him seem like a lecherous old creep.

The cuts between Hayley and Jeff ‘s close-ups reveal the difference in their height since Hayley’s head is almost always tilted up and Jeff’s is always at a downward slant.  A long shot of Jeff’s tall figure is a startling contrast to Hayley’s petite frame and size.  This difference in stature symbolizes Jeff’s authority and draws more attention to Hayley’s childishness. Just as Jeff typically dominates the frame in his non-close-ups, he seems to be entirely in control of the situation. As is typical of his type, he engages Hayley in conversation making sure to only speak about topics that interest her, boy-bands and teen novels—things that would be trivial to any grown man. For a brief moment a flier with the face of a smiling girl and the word MISSING come into focus, standing out on the wall just opposite of where Hayley and Jeff decide to sit. The appearance of the missing girl’s photo led me to believe that a similar fate would befall Hayley. Everything suggested Hayley’s eventual demise, and I had no way of knowing how wrong I was until everything takes a strange turn at Jeff’s home.  

After Hayley manages to get Jeff drunk in his own home, her demeanor becomes sadistic. With Hayley’s childishness sentiment exchanged for a cold mask of indifference and sadism, Jeff becomes the target of the viewer’s sympathy.  While the close-ups are still a factor in this scene, Hayley’s eyes are no longer round and her mouth becomes a thin disapproving line, proof that she was putting on a face the entire time in the café. Having tied Jeff up in a chair she insults him for believing she would be dumb enough to “chase him to the next drink.” When Hayley says, "Just because a girl can pretend to be a woman doesn't mean she's ready to be a woman," she let's both Jeff and the viewer know that her logic is sound and she's aware of how things should be. Her verbiage becomes more complex and less moronic as she explains her true intention to discover what secrets Jeff may be hiding in his home.

 Hayley proves her intelligence as she admits to intentionally behaving like a trusting young girl, who would foolishly believe that “anyone could know so much about her.” The balance of power has clearly changed. The few long shots, show Jeff—his height stolen by the low position of the chair—now appearing shorter than Hayley who stands confidently before him with her hands on her hips.  This reversal of stature is also apparent in the close-ups with  a discombobulated Jeff, staring up at Hayley with a confused expression and Hayley looking down at Jeff.  Jeff’s growing uncertainty and anxiety comes out in his voice as he asks Hayley, “What are you going to do to me?” Overwhelmed by the drastic change in events, I couldn’t help but see the irony in Hayley’s response, “Anything I want!” With Hayley’s dubious nature revealed, and the ambiguity of Jeff’s involvement with the missing girl, Jeff becomes the prey and Hayley the predator. 

 

Revenge, Wrong that Appeals to a Sense of Right in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (Yasmine)

Through the use of exaggerated violence and blaringly eccentric characters Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds spawns a hypothetical world in which an American guerilla unit called the Basterds mercilessly executes WWII Nazis in retribution for their heinous acts against European Jews. If anyone watches Inglourious Basterds expecting to see a historical account of WWII and the Holocaust then they have missed the point of the film entirely. The purpose of this film is not to educate but instead to bring satisfaction to anyone who has ever been disturbed by the atrocities of the Holocaust—for anyone who would have liked members of the Nazi party to receive a punishment one thousand times more severe than the vile acts committed against the Jewish people. The film’s opening scene incurs the audience’s sympathy and disdain in order to draw the audience into an elaborate tale of revenge, which allows viewers to indulge themselves in a desire for violent retribution outweighing the moral ambiguity of the Basterd’s brutality, the viewers’ instinct to respect humanity, and their tendency to revile human mutilation.

In the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds the brutal murder of Shosanna’s family and Colonel Landa’s despicable attitude toward Jews demonstrate the cruelty of the Nazi regime, creating a basis for the film’s theme of violent retribution.A beautiful panoramic view of Monsieur LaPedite’s small dairy farm begins the scene. The wide open space, copious amount of vibrant green grass, and multitude of grazing dairy cows make this shot a picture of freedom, serenity, and prosperity. Though everything about this picture seems perfectly balanced, the dairy farmer’s dark stone house is out of place in such a bright setting; its gloomy walls and shadowy doorway break the optimistic mood of the image, foretelling the impending doom of its hidden inhabitants.

The arrival of Colonel Landa a.k.a. the “Jew Hunter” also disrupts the serenity of the shot, signifying an end to freedom and tranquility as well as a precursor to death. Col. Landa’s black coat and dark green Nazi uniform make his approaching figure ominous amidst the cheerful landscape. Although the film does not show the German occupation of France in detail, Col. Landa’s unannounced and unwelcome presence symbolizes the invasion and the abolished independence, peace, and opulence of its Jewish citizens. The cut away shot to Col. Landa and LaPedite’s handshake, with Landa’s hand positioned firmly above the farmer’s, displays Landa’s domineering nature and suggests that Landa’s courteousness is an act. The change in location, brought about by Landa’s desire to get into LaPedite’s home, completely destroys the vitality of the scene as the green pastures and light are left outside the dreary abode.  When Col. Landa speaks, his smile and seemingly gracious demeanor cannot fool the audience when he clearly asserts his “pride” in his success as a Jew murderer and agrees with propaganda linking Jews to rats. During Colonel Landa’s elaborate speech about the imprecise cause of Jewish repulsiveness, his hat, adorned with a black band and skull, sits on the table, looming in the background and forewarning his eventual discovery and murder of the Dreyfuses hiding beneath the floorboards.

When the camera view slides down to reveal Shosanna and the rest of her family forced to “abandon dignity” under the floor, the audience is able to sympathize with the Dreyfuses and despise Landa even more for his insensitivity. The shallow depth of field in this medium shot with Shosanna in the foreground brings her helpless form in focus while the rest of her family are nothing but blurs in the background. The tightness of the shot, shallow space, and the close proximity of the family demonstrates how the Dreyfuses are trapped in their situation like animals uncomfortably quartered in a cage. Since viewers cannot prevent the Dreyfus’ demise at the hands of Col. Landa, they are as helpless as Shosanna who silences herself with her hand for fear of discovery. The clear focus on Shosanna makes her the film’s protagonist and also initiates a connection between her and the audience. The distorted view of the remaining Dreyfuses foreshadows their imminent deaths. When Col. Landa brings in his men for a surprise attack, the ominous music builds to a crescendo as bullets from the Nazis’ guns create holes in the floorboards, and a billowing cloud of woodchips obscures the audience’s view of the Dreyfus’ tragic end. While a close up of Shosanna’s terror-stricken face covered in her family’s blood as she hastily escapes the dairy farm is the only concrete evidence of the carnage, the image is a prevalent reminder of the Nazis’ ruthlessness. The sight of Col. Landa’s smug face at the scene’s end incites a need for vengeance. The “murder, intimidation, and terror” exhibited in the opening scene support the Basterd Lt. Aldoe Raine’s subsequent claims of Nazi inhumanity, convincing the audience that the Nazis deserve no mercy and “need to be destroyed.”

Ultimately, Inglorious Basterds speaks to viewer who shares Lt. Aldo Raine’s sentiment—that a Nazi should never be allowed to “take off  [their] uniform,”—but rather remain easily identifiable so that they may neither be absolved from blame nor able to escape the repercussions of their actions. As the film trailer’s typography purports the film is a war movie like no other because it allows the audience to indulge in thoughts of violence while maintaining a clear conscience. This is not a film for people who want to see the honorable heroics of its protagonists, or for people who want to woefully reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust. Why should viewers continue to endure the pitiful sight of innocent people tortured and dehumanized in concentration camps, when they can see the perpetrators of these crimes struck down and exterminated in a similar fashion? If the Basterds were honorable, they wouldn’t be “inglourious,” nor would their unethical actions reflect the viewer’s appetite for bloody justice, a craving that Inglorious Basterds satisfies like no other war film could.

 

 

 

Fairytales of a Darker Nature: Slasher Films as Morality Tales (John)

In the early years of cinema, the horror genre was populated by monsters and mad scientists, and was set in the shadows of gothic castles, tombs, and other innately macabre locals.  It wasn’t until the 1970s when films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Black Christmas (1974) began to bring horror into the modern era.  Suddenly horror wasn’t looming in Eastern European crypts, but right in your backyard.  The protagonists weren’t scientists and explorers, but unsuspecting youths.  Horror films began directly targeting the fears of their target audience.  This culminated in John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween.

 

"Death has come to your little town, Sheriff." Creative Commons¹

Halloween was certainly not the first film of its kind; the cinematography borrows from Italian cinema and its plot was not remarkably different from other American horror movies like Black Christmas.  Yet most mark the film as the father of the modern slasher genre. Why?  The universal nature of the story and the mythology behind the film’s iconic killer Michael Myers.  John Carpenter’s Halloween exists in a world where sex and drugs equals death, the virgin can stop the killer, and evil never really dies; in essence, the film is a morality tale.  

These themes struck a chord with audiences and after its release in 1978, Halloween spawned dozens of cheap, forgettable attempts to cash in on the films success.  Films like New Year's Evil, Prom Night, Terror Train and April Fool's Day, were all attempts to do Halloween again.  There were, however, a few successful children of Carpenter's work, the most famous being Friday the 13th, directed by Sean S. Cunningham in 1981.  Friday the 13th functioned under the same moral code as Halloween but was far more overt, both in its message and its gore. While Michael Myers’ reasons for slaughtering teens remained terrifyingly unanswered, Pamela Voorhees, the killer in Cunningham’s picture, has a clear motive and back story to justify her murderous moral code: drunk teens having sex were responsible for the death of her son. 

  "Doomed! You're all doomed!" Creative Commons²

Cunningham insists that the film is not a morality tale, but instead a fairytale.  “As children we get fairytales, and the purpose of fairytales… is to take a child’s fears and put them in the safety of a story.” says Cunningham.¹  While the film was originally intended as a sort of stress release for a teenager’s fear of untimely death, Friday the 13th is insistent on presenting Voorhees’s deranged motives for revenge as we watch her slowly off a group of dissolute teenagers.  Playing the film as a revenge film against immoral teenagers makes the message difficult to miss and more understandable, or justifiable.  However, the film is ultimately less effective than Halloween.

 

John Carpenter’s film is so terrifying and iconic because of the anonymity of the setting, protagonist, and killer.  Halloween takes place in Haddonfield, Illinois, a town that is representative of a thousand just like it.  “It’s every town, it’s every place, it could be your town…”.²  The universality of the location creates a fear that is disturbingly close to home.  Laurie Strode and Michael’s other victims are also strikingly anonymous.  The idea of the babysitter is where the film becomes incredibly identifiable to a young audience.  Everyone has had a babysitting job or is friends with a babysitter, which is what makes the basic premise of the movie scary.  The entire movie was pitched to its executive producer, Moustapha Akkad, as “the babysitter to be killed by the boogeyman”.²  But what makes Halloween so terrifying is the boogeyman: Michael Myers.

 

Michael Myers is what makes Halloween work, and what makes Michael Myers work is his simplicity.  Unlike Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th, Michael has no real motive. In Carpenter’s original script he is referred to simply as The Shape, not a man, but a force.  The flatness of his character is incredibly effective in stripping the message down to its essentials.  Sex equals death.  Drugs and alcohol equal death.  Immorality of any kind equals death.  Any motive would dilute that potency. 

 

And, after the original 1978 masterpiece, the Halloween series has lost it’s potency, primarily due to decision Carpenter made while writing the sequel that he blames on “a late night and too much alcohol”: He made Laurie Strode Michael Myers’s sister.²  Laurie is the object of Michael’s obsession and suddenly the rest of humanity is safe.  The original was frightening because of the idea that it could happen to you, there was no reason for Michael choosing these kids and that was scary.  Now, there is a motive: to kill the sister.  The number of people with estranged psychopathic brothers is a lot smaller than the entire teenage population; the universality of the terror is gone.

 

The Friday the 13th sequels, on the other hand, retain some of that potency and build upon it with the character of Jason.  Jason, a deformed child who saw his mother murdered by one of the young camp counselors at the end of the first film, has vowed revenge on every drinking, drug-doing, sex having, teenager he can find.  The child-like simplicity with which Jason views humanity makes him dangerous.  Teenagers killed his mother, so they all should pay for it.  Suddenly, terror is universal again.  The problem with the series is that the terror becomes derivative and laughable over the ten sequels, making them more fun than frightening.

   "A curse on Crystal Lake, a death curse. Jason Voorhees' curse." Creative Commons³

For the past three decades, dozens if not hundreds of killers have stalked the silver screen, tearing a bloody hole into the culture of American youth.  While few are as terrifying as the man who, in 1978, changed the face of horror, all of them have come baring the same message: If you do bad things, I will do something worse to you.  This is what makes them fairytales, they are fun little stories that remind us to be good.  And as long as kids enjoy being bad, they will keep filling the seats.

Works Cited

1. The Friday the 13th Chronicles. Dir. Donald R. Beck. Paramount Pictures, 2004.

2. Halloween: 25 Years of Terror. Dir. Stefan Hutchinson. Paranormal Films, 2006.

Photo Credits

1. Photo from Chris (Picasa)

2. Photo from Double Feature Podcast (Flickr)

3. Photo from Darren (Flickr)

Watch Out for "The Watchmen" - the blue guy gets naked (Tyler)

            With the somewhat recent release of The Watchmen, a film based on the mid-eighties comic book series created by Alan Moore, I got to thinking about the evolution of films adapted from comic books and graphic novels. This film, the latest installment in a long and distinguished line, undoubtedly ranks among the best of its kind (in my opinion, the best so far – no question). Considering the content and the themes of the film, however, Superman would be spinning in his grave if only someone could figure out a way to kill him and make it stick; maybe make the grave out of kryptonite and just to let him spin around a bit - that’s how far this film pushes the envelope. It’s closest predecessor, Sin City, contains more violence and about the same amount of sex, maybe a little more, but, it comes no where near broaching the themes fundamental to Watchmen. The most recent in the extensive collection of Batman movies, The Dark Knight, also raises disturbing questions but, both it and Sin City consist essentially of a morbid look at the dark underbelly of fictionalized urban settings resulting in graphic, violent and, sexual scenarios which inevitably lead to a bleak reflection upon human nature and the state of humanity. Although crime-ridden city streets start out as the problem in Watchmen, things become infinitely more complicated.

With the creator, Moore, and his original illustrator signed on, the screenplay remains as true as possible to the original comics and graphic novels. The plot surrounds several retired superheroes following the unlikely murder of an old crewmember. Although super heroes have fought crime since the 40s, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation pose bigger problems (especially for heroes with limited capacities - the powers of incredible strength and masterful fighting abilities; basically Bruce Lee in a spandex jumpsuit). That is except for Dr. Manhattan, who may be a god. With almighty weapons and entities in the mix, themes of relativistic atheism and post-postmodern dread almost inevitably rise to the surface. What’s more, the all-too-human nature of several heroes shrouds the moral standards of the protagonists in an uneasy, unresolved ambiguity (it goes substantially further than the callous but noble stereotype exemplified by Batman or Hell Boy). Needless to say, it gets complicated.

Director Zack Snyder (300 and the remake of Dawn of the Dead), an apt director in light of the content noted above, continues his legacy of pristine, slow-motion-savvy filmmaking (i.e. 300) with incredibly dynamic shots - most notably, a montage of nearly still frame shots in which the contents move very slightly in slow motion. The effect of these shots is best described as the wet-dream of the Ken Burns effect (slowly zooming into photographs and documents in an attempt to animate an otherwise still frame); like the moving photos in Harry Potter but, much slower, more subtle, and aesthetically pleasing from a cinematic viewpoint. Unsurprisingly, Snyder makes further use of slow motion and airtight effects to impressively heighten important action sequences.

Everyone enjoys a good, solid super hero movie but, Superman, Spiderman, Ironman, Batman, the Punisher, and Daredevil (among many others) represent only the cheesy, goody-goody protagonists of the comic book world (that isn’t to say the Punisher is exactly nice). Even the Hulk, Ghost Rider, Spawn, and Hell Boy, who get into some difficult moral territory due to the nature of their superpowers (technically Spawn and Ghost Rider work for the devil and, to a certain extent, Hell Boy is the devil), still remain innately good characters. The X-Men series makes everything extremely complicated in that mutants change sides, political and military action causes riffs, new mutants foster new agendas, etc. but, for the most part, one side, headed by Professor Xavier, has generally good intentions, and the other side has intentions hinging upon the notion that the ends justify the means (bad intentions). The world in which the Watchmen live has good guys, the super heroes, and bad guys, the villains, but, after a decade of retirement, the lines begin to blur, their relatively sturdy moral foundation falters, and, all the while, the world sits on the brink of nuclear holocaust. The prospect of dynamic characters and compelling themes has only recently broached this sub-genre of films. The Watchmen makes a great deal of progress at raising the bar that much further, which is probably why it’s three hours long.

The New Frontier (Tyler)

About a year ago, the onlookers of the 80^th Academy Awards found themselves stricken with Cohen fever: a dusty, stirrup brandishing, blood soaked tale of moral complexity in the face of greed, woe, and duty (perhaps function serves as a better word) – No Country For Old Men. This film raises daunting questions about the present nature of humanity as the protagonist finds himself facing difficult decisions and inevitably grappling with the consequences. The setting of the “West,” alluding to a simpler way of life in an often rural but requisitely untamed, or unruly, environment, aptly accommodates these studies of human character and emotion.

The protagonist of No Country For Old Men, Llewellyn Moss, stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong during a hunting outing. Overcome by temptation, Moss takes a case full of $2 million dollars left among the bodies. When a mass murderer completely devoid of emotion, Anton Chigurh, begins to pursue him, Moss unsurprisingly regrets his misdeed but, rather than handing the money over to the authorities, he decides to go on the run in order to distance himself from and protect his wife. Amidst the ensuing pursuit, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a man of resolute convictions, attempts to resolve and make sense of the whole situation.

Although this film presents many unique themes, much of its premise prompts a look back at Sam Peckinpah’s controversial film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Bennie, a wandering piano player, encounters two bounty hunters in the employ of a rich and powerful Mexican landowner, who has recently given a large reward for the head of Alfred Garcia. Discovering that his girlfriend possesses the rare knowledge of Garcia’s resting place, Bennie decides to collect the head and the reward for himself. His and his girlfriend’s journey to do so leads down a wretched, bloody road.

Both films explore the pursuit of a difficult but rewarding goal, which requires the bending, or even breaking, of certain moral standards. Following a somewhat immoral and certainly greedy decision, the protagonist not only places himself in harms way but also those others who might also have benefitted from the success of his goal – mainly his loved ones. Those that would prevent him from achieving his ends do so under motives similar to his own: greed and ambition. The viewer considers these antagonists as such simply because their moral sense appears much more depraved than that of the protagonist’s though both parties represent complex and corrupted moral perspectives.

While Peckinpah’s legacy will forever remain his many dark and complicated Westerns, the Cohen brothers have only recently broached the genre (already old hands when it comes to the dark and complicated). In light of Peckinpah’s films, No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (the screen play of which Anderson evidently read quite often while writing There Will Be Blood) among several others, a subgenre with a focus differing from the standard, gun blazing, saddle slinging, tobacco spitting Western might be in order; it needs a name along the lines of Noir West or the Moody West – West should probably be in the name, that seems important. Blog on it.

Disquieting Truths: Jacques Tourneur’s "Night of the Demon" and the Logic of Evil (Colin)

“Well, the sense of being watched whenever one was alone was the most distressing thing to him. After a time I took to sleeping in his room, and he was the better for that: still, he talked a great deal in his sleep. What about? Is it wise to dwell on that, at least before things are straightened out?”

– “Casting the Runes,” M.R. James

 “There are sacraments of evil as well as good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.”

– “The Red Hand,” Arthur Machen

Dr. John Holden: I see you practice white magic as well as black.

Dr. Julian Karswell: Oh yes, I don't think it would be too amusing for the youngsters if I conjured up a demon from hell for them.

 

 

-- Night of the Demon (1957)

 

            The films of Jacques Tourneur are often typified by intricate plots set against shifting, illusionary atmospheres in which much of what seems obvious at first to both the protagonist and his audience is proven to be less straightforward than it first appeared and in which an apparent belief is often proven – often with terrible consequences – to be false. In the realm of the film noir, Tourneur demonstrated this sensibility with powerful effect in Out of the Past, creating the deadly Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) as the archetypal femme fatale who lures the half-willing protagonist (Robert Mitchum) to his death by allowing him to fall in love with what he imagines her character to be and disillusioning him with her true nature only when he is already under her spell. It is little surprise, then, that Tourneur made his name not so much as a director of noirs but as the talented helmsman of a number of subtly directed and imaginatively plotted horror films, many of them produced under the auspices of Val Lewton. Yet though Tourneur’s well-deserved fame lies in such classics as I Walked With a Zombie and Cat People, it is in the more obscure 1957 supernatural horror film Night of the Demon that the auteur not only equals his previous fame in the genre, but in many ways surpasses his own ability to invert established conventions and to surprise out of both his protagonist and his audience a sense of unease both fundamental to the horror experience and, in many ways, particular to the subgenre of supernatural terror.

            Based on a tale by English ghost story author M.R. James (1862-1936), Night of the Demon centers around the death of an eminent professor who, before his untimely death, was in the process of exposing a Satanic cult headed by a Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Fellow psychologist Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), determined to uncover a non-supernatural explanation for his colleague’s seemingly supernatural death, travels to England, interviewing several other colleagues as well as the murdered man’s niece Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins) in order to learn more about the details surrounding Harrington’s last days. Rather than uncovering evidence pointing to a “natural” murder, however, he begins to find clues that seem to point to black magic as the only solution. Naturally, he spends a good deal of the film as a stalwart skeptic, attempting to disregard this theory as implausible; it is only when he himself falls under a similar curse that he at last realizes that, if he wishes to survive, he must acknowledge the terrifying existence of the shadowy supernatural world that he had spent all of his life attempting to explain away in scientific terms. The film ends with the successful defeat of the sorcerer Karswell (he is, like every good Faustus, dismembered by the demon that he has been ritually summoning throughout the entire film) and with Holden’s realization that his formerly materialistic perspective is, of course, forever untenable in light of all that he has experienced.  

            The plot’s murder-mystery construction causes one to inevitably draw a comparison between the film’s premise and the school of “rational” supernatural horror emergent in the late eighteenth-century and officiated by the mistress of the Gothic, Anne Radcliffe (authoress of the infamous Mysteries of Udolpho). This comparison, however, would prove misleading. Members of the Radcliffean school crafted lengthy and elaborate plots hinging upon seemingly supernatural events – all of which would be explained away at the novel’s often vaguely bewildering and interminable conclusion as the charlatanry of duplicitous murderers and schemers. A product of Enlightenment thought, the Radcliffean “rationalist” supernatural authors stood in direct opposition to true supernatural horror authors who wrote Gothic novels at the same time: authors such as Matthew Lewis (The Monk), Charles Robert Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer, Fatal Revenge), and John Polidori (“The Vampyre”). Indeed, this unacknowledged war continued into the age of the Victorians –  Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and Stoker’s Dracula being the towering, representative legionaries from these two respective literary camps during the late nineteenth-century.

It would be a logical assumption to believe that with the rise of Darwinism and accelerated scientific discovery in the early twentieth-century, that the true supernatural horror tale would fall somewhat out of favor. Curiously enough, the opposite proved to be true; with the rise of materialism, Nietzschean thought, and Freudianism, there also rose some of Western culture's most infamous occultists such as Montague Summers, Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – all of them standing in direct opposition to the growing tide of skeptical thought that suffused much of Western philosophical thought at the time. Many members of occult orders such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were more famously known as supernatural horror authors and, though he was not himself an occultist, Professor M.R. James himself was a member of this self-same literary (and, in light of the rise of materialism, revolutionary) movement, crafting many fine ghostly tales besides “Casting the Runes,” all of them of the truest non-rational order.

Jacques Tourneur and screenwriter Charles Bennett faithfully follow the mood of James’ subtle masterpiece, deftly blending the gentle, Old World atmosphere of the English countryside with the ever omnipresent, hovering fear of a supernatural underworld existing beneath the surface and threatening to erupt upon the moors, into the mansions, or – and perhaps even more disquieting – into the conference rooms of materialist scientists at any moment. But more importantly, the film successfully maintains the original tale’s ploy of constructing a deceptively Radcliffean, murder-mystery-esque plot only to turn this plot on its head and show that the gruesome, masked figures are – terrifyingly – wearing no masks at all. To a practiced auteur such as Tourneur, such a horrific inversion of convention came all too naturally.

Much of the film’s subtly subversive supernaturalism is derived from the atypical characterizations of the hero Dr. Holden and his sinister opponent Karswell. In many horror films of the period, the psychologist was portrayed as a sort of materialist equivalent of the priestly Van Helsing: a character who understands the minds of men better than they themselves do and who can even use this knowledge for certain maleficent ends himself. Whether good or evil, it was characteristic of all psychologists to be portrayed in serious cinema as learned, wise, and usually the guiding influence or omnipresent antagonist of the hero. Likewise, Dana Andrews, famed for his portrayal of hard-boiled protagonists in films such as Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), was typically cast in the role of a reliable, intelligent hero whom the audience could trust to make the correct decisions in spite of his wily, witty villains. With these conventions in mind, nothing prepares us for the platitudinous, unimaginative Dr. Holden in Night of the Demon. Most protagonists in horror films must maintain a certain skepticism in order to remain believable; but in Dr. John Holden, skepticism is heightened to a nearly pathological pitch until the audience, rather than experiencing sympathy for his plight, is coerced into feeling a certain impatience instead. Conventionally handsome, well-educated, and American, his character’s presence in a film set in England with a British-heavy cast stands as the mascot of straightforward, scientific, rationalist, modern America – and the portrayal is hardly flattering.

 

Dr. John Holden: Joanna, let me tell you something about myself. When I was a kid, I used to walk down the street with the other kids and when we came to a ladder they'd all walk around it. I'd walk under it, just to see if anything would happen. Nothing ever did. When they'd see a black cat they'd run the other way to keep it from crossing their path. But I didn't. And all this ever did for me is make me wonder why – why people get so panicky about absolutely nothing at all. I've made a career studying it. Maybe just to prove one thing. That I'm not a superstitious sucker like ninety per cent of humanity.

 

Conversely, Karswell is portrayed as the exact antithesis of Holden in almost every way imaginable. Older, British, and (unsurprisingly) more supernaturally inclined, Karswell confesses at one point that he worked at one point as a stage-show magician: a most inauspicious beginning in comparison to Holden’s professorship. He is the living symbol of Old World, old-fashioned, “backward”-thinking. Yet, perversely, the film’s cinematography and screenplay – as well as the plot itself – force the audience to acknowledge Karswell as the wiser of the two: whilst Holden’s face in a number of shots is filmed in shadow, giving a visual emphasis to his doubts and uncertainties regarding his environment, Karswell is nearly always filmed in either broad daylight or in the clear, unbroken light of a parlor or drawing room. Likewise, while Holden merely parrots his tired arguments, Karswell’s dialogue is appropriately ambiguous and yet redolent of a certain secret knowledge:

 

Dr. Julian Karswell: Do I believe in witchcraft? What kind of witchcraft? The legendary witch that rides on the imaginary broom? The hex that tortures the thoughts of the victim? The pin stuck in the image that wastes away the mind and the body?

Dr. John Holden: Also imaginary.

Dr. Julian Karswell: But where does imagination end and reality begin? What is this twilight, this half world of the mind that you profess to know so much about? How can we differentiate between the powers of darkness and the powers of the mind?

 

The casting of Niall MacGinnis as the sinister conjuror was yet another stroke of calculated genius. Four years after playing Martin Luther in the eponymous film, MacGinnis maintains many of the mannerisms of the wise, knowledgeable visionary whilst subtly imbuing them with an added quality of underlying ruthlessness. Karswell is a man who at one moment may be innocuously hosting a Halloween party for the village children and the next moment setting a demon against one of his enemies. One has only to watch the scenes in which he calmly and pleasantly reminds Holden of Holden’s forthcoming curse-induced death, in order to witness Bennett’s fine screenwriting capabilities and the sadly underrated talents of one of England’s finest thespians.

The one scene in which science attempts to take some degree of control occurs towards the end of the film when Holden and his colleagues hypnotize one of Karswell’s cultists with the purpose of gaining some knowledge of the inner-workings of the cult. Ironically, this scientific triumph concludes in a further proof of the existence of the supernatural. When Professor O’Brien asks the man what the true “believer” in Karswell’s teachings must adhere to, the cultist replies that it is those “who blaspheme and desecrate. In the joy of sin will mankind that is lost, find itself again.” To Holden, who has been constantly avowing his disbelief in any sort of supernatural source for evil, this testimony is ridiculous. However, in the context of Tourneur’s cinematic nightmare, it is a terrifying and logical fact.

Indeed, the film’s conclusion magnificently encapsulates the collision of ancient, supernatural evil with modern materialism. As the demon descends to destroy Karswell, a train rushes past in the opposite direction so that the train and the monster seem to head towards each other at opposite ends of the horizon. The effect creates a visual parallel and visual contrast between the smoking train and the fiery demon – one an inhabitant of the so-called primitive shadowland of myth and the other the result of human technology. Unsettlingly, this parallel both asks and answers the question of which one of the two is the more powerful.

Though films such as The Exorcist are given well-deserved credit for portraying the encroachment of the supernatural into the world of ordinary, modern society, it may be argued after this general overview that Tourneur’s Night of the Demon is something of an earlier, drawing-room version of the same concept – a concept that has been propounded and explored by supernatural horror authors since the advent of the Gothic novel. Tourneur, with his brilliant casting decisions and faithfulness to M.R. James’ original concept, created a work of art out of this familiar idea that is certainly worth watching and studying for both its qualities as an excellent film and its achievements as a genuinely unsettling horror movie. 

Taboos: Religion in Film (Josh)

One of the biggest taboos in modern society is religion.  Along with politics, it’s one of those things you are advised to shy away from in conversation.  However, films have shown things that are both awe inspiring and controversial.  Films like the Bible Epics of Cecil B. DeMille including The Ten Commandments (1923, 1956) fit into the former category.  But since my theme is Taboos, I’ll be focusing on films that fit into the latter one. 

The Monty Python’s classic The Life of Brian (1979) is a lighthearted parody of the classic Bible story.  For those who aren’t familiar with the film, a Jewish man named Brian is mistaken for Jesus and antics ensue.  The Pythons make a mockery of organized religion that brought about many protests at the time of its release.  The dialogue shows that the idea of the film is to question religion and its practices.   For example, early on in the film the Three Wise Men mistakenly arrive at Brian’s manger.  They declare, “We were led by a star!”  To which Brian’s mother replies, “Led by a bottle, more like.”  One of the best lines of the film occurs in a sequence when Brian is being harassed by followers who believe him to be the Messiah.  He yells at them saying, “Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!”  The Crowd replies in unison, “Yes!  We’re all individuals!”  Most of the controversy surrounding the film stemmed from their portrayal of Brian on the cross.  The crucifixion is seen as a mildly uncomfortable form of punishment rather than the torturous mode of capital punishment that it really is.  Although they make light of the situation, it stresses the fact that crucifixion is not merely a Christian symbol, but a widespread system of capital punishment used by Romans.  Python’s controversial film struck a chord with many.  It was named as The Guardian’s “Greatest Comedy of All-Time”, BFI’s 28th Best British film of all time, and it has a 98% approval rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes showing that sometimes taboos can be hilarious.

The highly controversial 2004 Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ is one that would definitely be listed as taboo.  Entertainment Weekly named it #1 on its list of most controversial movies of all time, and it has garnered significant attention for its depiction of Jews.  Religion is always a touchy subject, but Mel Gibson brought it to the forefront with this film.  Many people criticized the film as anti-Semitic in its approach to the scriptures.  It emphasizes a corrupt group of Jewish officials who were blackmailed by Pontius Pilate to put Jesus to death.  This version of the story has been rejected by the Catholic Church at Vatican II and by most Protestant churches.  The Anti-Defamation League declared that the film is not overwhelmingly anti-Semitic but “For filmmakers to do justice to the biblical accounts of the passion, they must complement their artistic vision with sound scholarship, which includes knowledge of how the passion accounts have been used historically to disparage and attack Jews and Judaism.”  Basically, it emphasizes stereotypes of Jews and sparks anti-Jewish sentiments.  It polarizes “good Jews” and “bad Jews” by their appearances (models – like Monica Belluci who plays Mary Magdalene – vs. big noses, greasy, yellow toothed Jewish priests).  This is similar type of controversy that arose in regards to race with D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.  The cherry on the top of this argument for its anti-Semitic views is a line Gibson has said he debated including.  Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, states, “His blood [is] on us and on our children!”  The line was omitted from the text of the subtitles, but was included in the Aramaic dialogue.  No matter what your religious views may be, as always with a film like this, it must be seen through a critical eye.  And as usual, criticism brings controversy.

One of the most controversial religious films of all-time is Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary (1985).  It’s a modern retelling of the birth of Jesus Christ to Mary, a young basketball player and student, and Joseph, her boyfriend.  The angel Gabriel is portrayed as a taxi driver who comes to reveal Mary’s pregnancy and help Joseph accept the fact that his girlfriend, who doesn’t allow him to kiss her, became pregnant.  She visits her doctor who examines her hymen because of his disbelief in the virgin pregnancy.  She wears all white and experiences pain, ripping at her sheets.  There are also many scenes that contain full frontal nudity of Myriem Roussel who plays Mary.  There are others, such as a close up of her fingers brushing her pubic hair, to the point where the nudity seems excessive.  Godard philosophizes as always, this time he posits some religious questions about Christianity furthering the controversy.  Mary states, “God is a vampire who suffered me in Him because I suffered and He didn’t and He profited from my pain.”  Pope John Paul II had some harsh words for the film (or at least as harsh as a Pope can get).  Protesters showed up in droves on opening night to stop people from seeing the film.  And although it got mostly mixed reviews across the board for its portrayal of the story, it still remains a compelling example of filmmaking. 

Religion is at its core something personal.  Film takes that and brings it out into the public eye.  It’s a topic that will always draw controversy due to its highly private nature, but maybe putting the beliefs out in the open, with this and other taboos, will make people more aware of the views of those around them.  And film is the perfect medium to express these taboos.

See also: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Dogma (1999), Religulous (2008)

Anti-Epic - Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Carlos)

Imagine five weeks spent under the weight of heavy leather, steel chest plates and helmets, slogging through sludge and dodging volatile rapids in the dizzying heat and humidity of the Amazonian jungle. Writer-director Werner Herzog’s third feature, Aguirre: the Wrath of God is a well-lauded masterwork, its success due in part to Herzog’s unbridled approach to production. 

The film opens with a master shot of the Andes Mountains, small dots trickle down a lush green mountainside, and the camera zooms in to reveal a line of conquistadors and enslaved Indians struggling with every step as they descend from Quito into dense jungle. The shot overwhelms the viscera because what we observe is a documented event -- the film’s cast and crew relive the sweat and toil of the historical moment, and the result is astounding. 

 

“The story takes place in the Peruvian jungle – you have to go there, there’s no alternative to that.” 

 

With a budget of $360,000, a stolen camera, and a crew of no more than eight people at a time, Werner Herzog makes one of the most important and relevant works of recent history, committing images to celluloid that would eventually inspire Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and arguably Mallick’s entire oeuvre. Aguirre: the Wrath of God covers the tale of an ambitious and impossible Spanish expedition led by conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro in search of El Dorado, the lost city of gold. Convinced that they’ve veered off path, Pizarro puts together a small group of men, led by aristocrat Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra, an accomplished Brazilian filmmaker in his own right) with Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as second in command, to continue traveling along the river before the expedition is terminated for good. The group includes the asinine Fernando de Guzman, Padre Gaspar de Carvajal, and Aguirre’s beautiful daughter Inez, along with a handful of slaves and soldiers. Eventually Aguirre will undermine Ursua’s power and lead the group by force, threatening any dissidents with death. Handheld camera follows at eye level, observing the group as they fumble through thick foliage and muddy swampland. Four of the Indians are forced to carry (and balance) a ridiculous sedan chair housing the beautiful Flores (Helena Rojo), wife of Ursua. There is an immediate sense of disconnect between subject and setting that remains throughout the length of the film. 

 

Hardly anything is known about Lope de Aguirre. At most fifteen pages worth of material exist on the historical figure, giving Herzog enough room to create moments within which characters are developed filmically. Freed from the constraint of historicity, Herzog creates believable scenarios intended not to advance the storyline necessarily, but to convey an inner mood by testing the limits of physical and mental endurance against all odds. He admits to having done little to no research prior to writing the script (which in prose form was swiftly finished within two days), which is mind-boggling. The filmmaker entrusts location with the task of spurring undeniably authentic moments, the life of the film exists within the individual’s relationship to the surrounding environment. 

 

Furious nature gains an independent life in the close up. Herzog deviates from the narrative and closes on a raging river; the shot is held for about a minute. By slowly pulling into focus, cinematographer Thomas Mauch calls attention to the entropic movement of the murky, rolling waves. A mesmerizing and haunting soundtrack by long-time collaborators Popol Vuh links the landscape to the mindscape, and we begin to observe the group’s inevitable downward spiral as Aguirre loses his mind in favor of megalomania and delusions of grandeur. 

 

Camera as participant 

 

On a turbulent trip down a river, one of the large rafts gets stuck in an eddy. The rest of the group waits on shore for the cornering current to give way. Several shots are fired overnight and the following morning everyone on the raft is dead, while two native oarsmen are missing. This event as observed is never given a proper explanation; it remains as mysterious an occurrence to the viewer as it was for the rest of the group. 

 

Herzog advances the notion of the Unseen by deliberately keeping the enemy out of view. The Indians are present but never seen, and there is a sense that the spectator is also not safe. A soldier trekking through the forest steps into a trap and is swept up and out of frame. The only indication of murder is a sprinkle of arterial blood against a bright green leaf, as observed by another soldier who runs in a panic to warn the others. 

 

Pizarro’s men awake to find the river has risen fifteen feet overnight. The rafts they’ve built have drifted away. This was not staged – the river had indeed risen during the shoot and the rafts were lost. Herzog understood it was necessary to make this problem a part of the film. Having conflicts such as this arise organically results in sincere expressions of confusion and frustration as the men scrounge for iron with which to hold new rafts together. 

 

One of my favorite moments is when Aguirre stands against the edge of the frame opposite a slave playing a panpipe. Beside the music, everything is silent, Aguirre is thinking. This shot serves little purpose in the context of the story, but it is essential to advancing the inner mood. Klaus’ face in this respect is pivotal to the impact of the film. Often the camera stops to observe his expression, which becomes more and more unhinged as we move farther into the jungle.

 

Aguirre: the Wrath of God follows a doomed mission. When the men march down the steep mountainside they are descending into the depths of hell. Hunger, isolation, exhaustion and fear will soon drive them to death or madness. In the face of impossible odds, to the very end Aguirre’s eyes express an insatiable greed and want of power; he looks toward the horizon with confidence as everything crumbles. 

There will be a screening of Aguirre: the Wrath of God on Thursday, October 30 in Hodson 303. Don't miss it!

Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972). Written and directed by Werner Herzog. Starring Klaus Kinski, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra, and Helena Rojo. 100 minutes. Available on DVD, presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

M: Where do we fit in? (Chris M)

As I mentioned last week, film has the phenomenal ability to entangle the fates of its characters with the fates of its viewers.  These intimate connections can last beyond the length of the film, burrowing themselves deep in our subconscious only to sporadically reappear in our world despite our expectance.  Our connections to the characters can make or break a film; when we feel genuinely connected to a character, it’s a good film.  If we can’t connect to any of the characters; it’s a bad film.  (I use the word ‘connected’ in the since that when we are connected to a character, if they suffer a bad fate, we emotionally suffer, when they succeed, we are emotionally uplifted… at least a little.)
However, this is not always the case. 

“M” (Lang, 31) is a psychological thriller set in Germany in the 1920’s or 30’s.   In this film, a child-abducting serial killer, played by Peter Lorre, is on the loose and has the entire city in a frenzy.  Both the police force and criminal underworld work separately to track him down, the latter being ultimately successful.  Overall, the film is powerful, suspenseful, and cinematically beautiful. 

The first time I saw “M," I kept trying to pinpoint a protagonist, someone to attach to, someone to intertwine myself with.  Who was going to be the hero to emerge out of this dark thriller?  In a murder mystery, my first instinct for a protagonist is the detective.  Yet, the detectives in this film are far from brilliant, clever, or interesting.  The criminals that track down Hans Beckert (the murderer) aren’t exactly the heroic type either.  In fact, the closest thing to a protagonist in this film is the unyielding criminally appointed defense lawyer of Beckert, and he isn’t introduced until the final ten minutes of the film.

With no protagonist to attach to, I consider my other option.  Hans Beckert.  The poor defenseless child murder.  But something about that doesn’t sound right… While Beckert does make a very noble and powerful, though slightly pitiful, plea for his life at the end of “M,” I find it really difficult to truly attach myself to a child murderer.

Unattached as I may have felt after watching “M,” I still loved it.  Maybe it was the wonderfully cinematic quality of the entire film.  There were some beautifully twisted shots; Fritz Lang found an incredible way to draw us uncomfortably close to many of the characters while still keeping us separated.  There is a fantastic shot of Beckert as he takes two shots of hard liquor before preying on another young girl.  The camera is brought slowly towards the crossing wooden planks of the thin fence separating us from Beckert.  We peer through the holes of the fence and right into Beckert’s conflicted head.  The film is full of other cinematically tense moments.  This is certainly part of the reason the movie is so great.

Aside from how well shot and put together the film is, I still think there is something that keeps me emotionally connected, especially during the second half of the film.  I believe the emotional connection stems from a sense of justice.  Though I’m not attached to a character, I am attached to some moral obligation.  By the end of the movie, I wasn’t rooting for a particular character, I was rooting for the right thing to be done.  I wanted Beckert to get his fair trial.  I think it is why his defense lawyer comes off as such a hero.  At the end of the film, I think what the viewer hangs on to, is what monsters the citizens of the city had become.  The ‘innocent’ people of the city become an angry, dangerous mob completely opposed to the idea of giving Hans Beckert a fair trial.  In fact, throughout the film, we see many instances of injustices, and not just among criminals.  The police force wants to break into homes, invade the privacy of their citizens, in order to find the murderer.  The citizens want a killer, more correctly, a man who is severely ill, to suffer the treatment of a dog.  We see corruption among criminals, police, and citizens.  Thus, when justice ultimately wins out, barely, it is a sigh of relief. 

Connections happen all the time in film… not necessarily to characters.  Inevitably, we find something to cheer for.  In the case of “M,” we end up putting our fate in the hands of truth and fairness, and by the end, we are moderately satisfied.

“M” is wonderful film and offers much more to discuss.  Unfortunately, I’m out of room.

“M” was released in 1931. 117 minutes, 1.20:1 Aspect. Written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang and directed by Fritz Lang.