Koyaanisquatsi in a sentence

In fast motion the escalators vomit people, not one at a time as if it were first one person up and over then onto the next, but as a continuous stream, time dissolving people into a single organic mass—even as, outside, in the darkling night of the cityscape, this alchemical time transmutes automobiles into red streaks of headlights, the resultant plasma comprising no longer merely inert objects of technology, but objects of the same biology as those escalator-vomited people, part of a contiguous whole—and this fast-motion stream is infinite (without beginning or end, no offer of rest, but only life, connected, systematic and obscene), and it carries us, trembling and nauseous, up with it, as we see within it humans and technology as an organized mass, individuals as technologized life subsumed, mitochondrial, under the adumbrative biology of Humanity, a biological process proceeding in the streets and towers of the City, the biosphere of glistening glass and metal—one biosphere among many, among a multitude of worlds scattered bewondering over the surface of the Earth, but even as the film reveals these other worlds (jumping betwixt them, creating of them a melding of moonlight and music, ominous, oppressive and revelatory) the escalator and the streams of headlights in the night remain effervescent, inescapable, a question mark embedded in the triadic junction between humans and Humanity and the natural world, a junction the meaning and definition of which remains elusive as a Snark—and we are made to ponder the city of glistening glass and metal and the streams of people and streaks of red light it houses, and yes, this great organism of ours is overwhelming: we are not reassured of our place in it, nor of its place in the natural world; we are left only to wonder at this great spectacle we have wrought.

Montage as subjectivity in Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch

I sometimes think this might be my favorite film, and it demands a lengthy review. But instead I’ll offer a very brief one.

Peter Watkins, as always, uses a mix of narrative and documentation here, but to much greater effect than in his other movies (that I’ve seen, at least). The film is primarily a biography of Munch, but it also contains detailed analyses of his art and his social milieu. My favorite thing about it is its evocation of Munch’s subjectivity via a very dense use of montage and layers of sound. “Present-day” scenes are constantly intercut with pivotal moments from his past; the sound of sobbing continues over interviews and voiceovers about his art. The method is very reminiscent of Faulkner’s style in The Sound and the Fury, in the way that pivotal past moments anchor and define Munch’s ongoing experience, but the layers of sound and imagery are a denser, more textured style only possible in film. The film is also magnificently self-reflexive: Munch is fixated on capturing his experience in his art, and the movie is fixated on capturing his experience as well as his capturing his fixation on that experience. This self-reflexivity is aided by his stares toward the viewer, allowing the film to take on his subjectivity in multiple ways, not only as consciousness but as self-consciousness. But it goes still further by insisting on the subjectivity of everybody around him. It delves into their past and their own experience, and they too turn and look at the viewer. Furthermore, seemingly random contextualizing bits of history are related in voiceover. But all of this is related back to Munch; it is his experience as a contextualizing and contextualized subject, a subject in an intersubjective context.

On Sunset Blvd. and its depiction of Norma Desmond

Is Norma Desmond, the mad, washed-up actress of Sunset Blvd., a villain? This is something I wrote in response to someone who thought that not only is Norma the villain of the film, but that the film has a tone of general loathing for her. While the film obviously portrays her as a grotesque, I think the portrayal is both complex and sympathetic, relying on nuances of viewer-identification, and rooted in interesting ideas about Hollywood.

First, let me say something about the nature of first-person narratives. The protagonist and narrator of Sunset Blvd. is clearly Gillis, the young writer who is manipulated and eventually killed by Norma, and as such, the narrative is largely from his first-person perspective. However, in my mind, when a story is presented from a particular character’s perspective (either as a narrator or as a protagonist), that doesn’t mean that the audience is meant to stand in the character’s shoes; it merely means that the audience is standing alongside the character. The character is coloring events in a certain way, but the creator of the story has a lot of leeway in making us see things in a different way. And I’m not talking about really obvious unreliable narration. I’m just talking about things like the camera looking at Gillis’ cigarette case from the point of view of another character (Betty). That shot obviously requires the audience to momentarily adopt the other character’s point of view. Such a switch is predicated upon the creator’s knowledge that the audience does not completely identify with a single character, that the “identification” is, as I said, a standing-alongside in which the audience maintains its autonomy from the narrator. As another example, when Gillis first meets Norma and she rants about the downfall of silent cinema, she is shot in soft focus, the candles behind her blurred and smeared as if they were elements of her mad world. According to Gillis’ narration, he thinks of Norma as merely a rich old nut at this point, but the camera slightly alters this viewpoint by showing us a glimpse of the grandeur of her madness. As yet another example, Gillis’ petty anger toward his agent at the golf course is shot in a completely objective way, from medium distance and not favoring either character’s actions or reaction. The following scene gives us a very subjective voiceover somewhat justifying Gillis’ anger, but this comes as an addendum to the objective view that we were already given.

The fact that the narrator is known to be dead from the beginning encourages the audience to recognize this leeway. However, within this leeway, Gillis’ perspective is the dominant one, at least in the first act (which I assume is everything before the suicide attempt): the camerawork follows a consistent pattern of showing us some other character doing something, followed by Gillis’ reaction, and each scene is bookended by Gillis’ voice-over. But it’s equally obvious in Gillis’ narration that Gillis has some pity for Norma. When she first shows him her script, he says “it meant so much to her” and refers to her as “a bundle of raw nerves”. Later, he describes her as “afraid of the world”. These are hardly words of hatred. And the funeral for her chimp (which he first mocks by saying that the chimp must be “the grandson of King Kong” to deserve such solemnity) he describes as the “laying to rest of an only child,” and it makes him ask if Norma’s “life is as empty as that?” Even at the end, after Gillis has been shot, he expresses sympathy for her, referring to the newspeople swarming her as “heartless so-and-so’s” who will kill her with their headlines. I don’t see how one can infer pure hatred from such narration.

In any case, the film goes beyond this voice-over sympathy. When Max reveals that he writes Norma’s letters, there is no emphasis on the absurdity of maintaining Norma’s illusion: the context of the revelation is Norma’s despondency over her lost glory. Later, during the New Year’s dance scene, when Norma reveals her infatuation with Gillis—her “sad, embarrassing revelation,” as Gillis calls it—the mood is melancholy, and the camera focuses on her face, or at least her reactions, rather than on Gillis’. Her look is wistful, and Swanson brilliantly shows the latent despair and hope in her eyes. This scene is clearly intended to make us sympathize with Norma. The suicide attempt two scenes later only builds this sympathy. And following that, most of the focus in the second act is on Norma; Gillis, rather than getting constant reaction shots, merely lingers next to Norma looking pensive. In particular, during Norma’s beautifying treatments and her Chaplin impersonation (and her meeting with DeMille, which I’ll get back to), the focus is entirely on her and is entirely sympathetic. Gillis is completely excluded, even if we assume this pitying view of Norma to be his.

It’s only in the final act, after Max reveals that he was Norma’s first husband and thus reveals the extent of her narcissism, that the tone of the film becomes ntipathetic towards Norma. At this point the narrative shifts back toward Gillis, focusing on his attempts to escape from Norma. Things that previously made us sympathize with her now transform into sources of antipathy: for example, she now threatens suicide explicitly as a means of control. Indeed, this whole act leads up to Gillis giving Betty a tour of Norma’s mansion that completely decimates its mystique (and by extension, Norma’s entire world). Things such as the movie screen, which was previously shot in highly dramatic lighting and with no architectural context, are filmed in this scene as completely banal; the movie screen is shot from an angle dictated by Gillis movements, just like any other meaningless object in Norma’s house. And this scene itself leads to Gillis’ confrontation with a particularly haggard-looking Norma Desmond, shot at a low angle to accentuate her sagging chin, her face covered in “beautifying” oil. Norma begs Gillis to stay, while the camera sits by passively, and then, of course, Norma shoots Gillis in the back when he tries to leave. All of which makes Norma seem pretty pathetic.

I’m guessing that this last act is what might make one think the film hates Norma Desmond. But, given what has come before, and what comes in the denouement, I don’t think we should interpret the film so harshly. By the time that Norma’s worst behavior is revealed, we have already built up enough sympathy for her that we can’t be expected to suddenly despise her. Instead, the revelations of the magnitude of her narcissism and of the completely illusory nature of her life serves to reinforce our sympathy for Gillis. This complexifies the situation, amplifying the tragedy: we are aware of Norma’s faults, and we hope that Gillis can escape her grasp, but we also pity her. The audience can feel sad that Gillis dies, but can’t help pitying Norma at the same time—in the end, as Gillis says in his final voice-over, even life pities Norma.

And life pities Norma precisely because her life is made possible by Hollywood. In the scene when Norma visits DeMille, I’m pretty sure that DeMille is not meant to be a point of identification for the audience, since we are never given any reason to identify with him; rather, he is the voice of wisdom, as one who has survived within Hollywood. And he lays down the thesis of the whole film, which is that “press agents working over time can do terrible things to the human spirit.” (Note that this line immediately follows the one about Norma only becoming hard to work with towards the end of her career. DeMille is not saying that Norma is an old bitch, and so nobody wants to work with her; he’s saying that she was groomed to assume her role as a megalomaniac.) One might say that the film despises Norma for being old, and that it sympathizes with the young. This possible reading is based on the obviously positive portrayal of Gillis’ relationship with Betty, contrasted with his relationship with Norma, and by the liveliness of the youthful New Year’s party, contrasted with the lifelessness at Norma’s mansion. But I see the central contrast between young Betty and old Norma not as young versus old, but as real versus unreal. The life of the star is construed as an illusory construct of the Hollywood dream factory, while Betty’s path as a writer is a life outside the illusion (although abetting it). When Betty and Gillis walk through the studio sets, the contrast between their reality and the non-reality of the movies is emphasized. When Gillis goes from Norma’s party to Betty’s boyfriend’s party, the two are contrasted by how alive the attendees at the latter party are, how concerned with everyday difficulties and how involved with other people they are. Norma is isolated from this world because the nature of stardom has pushed her away from it.

Artifice in The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson’s films have an obvious artificiality about them, a very distinctive style sometimes verging on self-parody. This sense of artifice has often been criticized as twee, or simply as too artificial, and while I sympathize with the criticisms to some extent, I think Anderson’s signature style has sufficient formal strength to lift it out of its occasional plunge into cutesiness. I also think he utilizes his artifice to relate fiction and reality in some interesting ways.

In his films, the characters yearn for a kind of whimsical world of yesteryear; the films are bathed in nostalgia for a nonexistent past. This is true especially of Tenenbaums, where the characters are perpetually aware of their past glories and failures. But the form of the films insists that this wished-for world is the actual world that the characters live in. The symmetric compositions, the slow motion, the art direction littered with personal mementos, and the costumed characters all present the world as something contrived, something fictional; this effect is heightened in Tenenbaums by the narrator reading the story from a whimsical little book, and by presenting the story within an obviously fantastical version of New York. The world of Anderson’s style isn’t just any world: it has precisely the sense of a whimsical, ideal world that the characters yearn for (and which probably never existed for them); at the same time, all of the mementos and costumes encapsulate the characters—not in their entirety, but in their storybook dimensions. In a sense, the characters have secreted their desires and essences into the style of the film itself. Thus, the style surrounds the characters with the world that they are perpetually searching for, adding to the sense of pervasive bittersweet melancholy.

But the style is also extremely overt, drawing attention to itself. This ensures that we see the world not merely as it relates to the characters, but as it relates to Anderson himself. The world is presented as his creation as much as it is the ether of his characters’ wistful yearnings. But rather than the authorial voice taking precedence over the characters’ subjectivity, as in much of traditional pre-modern storytelling, here the authorial voice and the characters’ subjectivity meet in the film’s form and perpetually play off each other within it. This is exemplified by scenes like that in which Margot arrives on the bus. She comes toward the camera in slow motion, her arrival set to music; we see her as the idealized image that Richie wishes for. But the characters’ conversation (together with earlier and later events) ensures that we see this moment through a bittersweet lens; we know the characters are deeply unhappy, and that the film’s presentation of this moment is a reflection of their desires rather than a fulfillment of them. At the same time, the narration, the costumes, and the overt style insist that the entire scene is an artifice. But this artificiality is not ironic. It is not intended to distance us from the characters. It is the sincere authorial voice, which carries all the wistful melancholy of the characters themselves; it beckons us to sympathize, to wish for this artificial world even as we see it as an artifice. By making us aware of the artifice, rather than subverting the reality of the characters’ feelings, the film reinforces them.

This type of interplay between artifice and desire might not be sufficient in itself to justify the film’s twee leanings. But in addition to it, Anderson also inserts the occasional scene that breaks through the artifice. For example, in Rushmore there is the scene where Ms. Cross confronts Max with the reality of his sexual fantasies. In Tenenbaums, there is the scene of Richie’s attempted suicide. Of course, the scene is filled with an artifice of its own—it’s all blue-lighting, jump cuts, and Elliott Smith music—but the artifice is strikingly dissimilar from its surroundings, and the conveyed emotions are utterly raw. Pointedly, the scene largely consists of Richie removing his “costume”, discarding the artificial essence that tethers him to the past and the nostalgic world of the film. Scenes such as these offer a glimpse through the wall of artifice, into the emotional realities behind it; they form painfully real emotional cores around which the yearned-for world coalesces. And they make themselves felt within the artifice. They are always there, affording resonance to the whimsical melancholy of Anderson’s style.

A Lynchian Trilogy: Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire; or, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Buddha in the land of the movies

I tend to view Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire as retellings of the same story from different angles and with different philosophical implications. All three set up a dichotomy between the real world and the ideal world, the latter identified with or exemplified by movies in general and Hollywood (the Dream Factory) in particular. In the first two films, the ideal world is characterized as the world of love, in which the loved one embodies the lover’s ideals (and/or defines them) and the lover is the center of the loved one’s world; and in both cases the real world is one in which the loved one cheats on the lover and the jealous lover then kills the loved one. In the adulterous act the lover dissolves the ideal by removing herself from her assigned role as its embodiment; and by focusing her attentions on another, she casts the lover from his or her desired place at the center of the ideal world. Thus, the adultery acts as a perpetual rupture of the real into the ideal.

The two films have slightly different approaches to these themes. In Lost Highway, the ideal world is that of a cheesy “guy movie”, and the spurned/murderous lover idealizes himself as a virile young dude. From his masculine perspective, his loved one’s adultery has the connotation of emasculation and is intimately connected to his fear of impotence. In Mulholland Dr., the ideal world is more explicitly acknowledged as the dream world of Hollywood, and the spurned/murderous lover idealizes herself as a caring, talented woman who is the center of attention. (I don’t think it really makes much use of her “female” perspective, unlike Lost Highway’s depiction of the “male” perspective.)

The two films also arrive at opposite conclusions. In Lost Highway, the real and ideal merge in the end, with the movie-world and the real world colliding, and with the ideal, virile young dude merging with the real, emasculated older male.  This presents a sort of Hegelian picture in which the real disrupts the synthetic ideal, and then the two are  combined into  a new synthetic whole that contains the contradictory elements within itself. The story is also presented as a sort of eternal return: the synthetic whole ends up back at the starting point of the story. Hence, just as in the Hegelian dialectic, we can infer an endless repetition of synthetic wholes being ruptured by a contradictory element and then being synthesized into a new whole, of a reality being forced into a set of archetypes and then erupting those archetypes.  In Mulholland Dr., in contradistinction to this, the real and ideal are irreconcilable; their difference cannot be overcome, and the irreconcilability leads to the story having a definite end: the lover’s despairing self-destruction. It’s like a Kierkegaardian critique of the earlier film’s Hegelian dialectic.

What interests me most about Inland Empire is how it retells this same story from a very different and much larger perspective, and how its conclusions act as a commentary on the earlier films. The protagonist of Inland Empire is no longer the scorned lover, but the cheating loved one; this is an immediate upheaval of the earlier stories. It forces us to completely change our perspectives and sympathies. In this story, a conflation of the real and the ideal is actually what drives the cheater to cheat; she is so absorbed in the ideal world which she is cast into that she adopts her role in it as something real. Simultaneously, we see the story of male emasculation and female cheating retold again and again in many forms, setting it up as an archetypal tale, rather than “the real” that ruptures the ideal; we see how the ideal world acts as a perversion that makes the loved one a whore; and in Dern’s monologue, we see a story told by an embodiment of the problems that “real” women face as they are forced into the roles that men wish for them. All of these aspects continually comment upon one another, and put the earlier films in a broader context.

By far my favorite part of Inland Empire is the celebratory ending. When the camera pulls back from the scene of Dern’s height of misery, the film asserts a philosophical rejection of the earlier two films: it insists that there is no distinction between the real and ideal. The miserable “real” world that always threatens to rupture the ideal world is itself a construct of archetypes and ideals. I don’t know much about Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation beliefs, but I think the film’s ending is a profound and revelatory celebration of Mahayana Buddhism’s central tenet that “There is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and Nirvana” (in which case the earlier films can be seen in the light of Theravada Buddhism’s more pessimistic quest for self-annihilation). Being and non-being, sensuous and notional reality, are illusory. The distinction between them is the cause of suffering, the cause of the story of infidelity and murder endlessly repeating. Even the distinction between movie-reality and the viewer’s reality is broken down at multiple levels, as a woman who has been watching the movie meets Dern’s character, and as Lynch’s actors and characters have a wrap party set to a dancer lip-synching Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. As the Buddha said, “O what an awakening, all hail!”

Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986): society is a social construct, it’s all made of dreams, and we can’t stop the robin’s dancing

At the end of Blue Velvet, there’s a scene of suburban bliss with an obviously fake robin standing on the windowsill. I love that scene. There’s a great special feature (or maybe an easter egg) on the DVD, in which the cinematographer describes shooting it. He says they originally tried to get a real bird, but when they ended up using a fake one, he kept saying to Lynch, “We can’t shoot this; it looks ridiculous”, and Lynch responded, “Yeah, it’s perfect!”

The scene is played for irony, but its artificiality does not suggest that the characters’ happiness is a fleeting illusion. I think the whole point of the movie, which is emphasized by the hokey characters, the artificiality of the suburban setting, and the obvious fakeness of the bird, is that the happy everyday life that the characters briefly leave and then return to is an artificial construct. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less meaningful; the happiness that they find at the end is real, even if it is based on artifice. It’s like an extension of Rousseau’s description of the social contract: society is an expression of the general will. Blue Velvet extends that idea to the next level, in which the very reality of the everyday social world is a social construct. The robin is a fabrication, but it is a fabricated representation of social ideals; it is built from the ideals of the everyday people such as Dern. And as long as people live in terms of those ideals, they are real. They exist even if they are constructs.

Consider how that ties in with the role of blue velvet in the film. The blue velvet is vividly colored, but more importantly, it is textured, and Hopper pointedly feels it in the rape scene. It is a representative of the raw, visceral, tactile existence underlying the social construct. The robin, though a realization of Dern’s dreams, is artificial; the velvet you can feel between your fingers. Also consider the fact that the town is a logging town: it removes the wildness of the forest, uncovers the darkness hidden there (a theme returned to in Twin Peaks), and turns the trees into tools for human construction. The movie does a great job of setting up and showing the interactions and attractions of both worlds: the artificial world built of common ideals and phony robins, and the mysterious, raw world built of primal and personal deviance and populated by Frank Booths.

Also, the “In Dreams” scene is the greatest thing ever: a profound mixture of absurdity and melancholy, ideality and kitsch, propelling the film past the foundations of social reality and into the quagmires of the Self and the swooning horrors of obsessive love.

Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman, 2008): art and humanity, humanity and art

I have never before been so baffled by people’s responses to a movie. From the “it’s unbelievably weird” response to the “it’s relentlessly depressing” response to the “it’s so superficial” response, all the negative reactions make no sense at all to me. It’s not very weird: its basic story and themes are easy to follow. It’s not relentlessly depressing: it’s enormously funny (I was laughing pretty consistently throughout it) while remaining deeply sympathetic toward its protagonist’s unhappiness. And it’s not at all superficial: its endless self-reference and narrative contortions are not simply cute postmodern playfulness; they are woven together to create a very meaningful portrait of art and common human problems.

Of what does that portrait consist? The protagonist suffers from the same fundamental problems as most people, but he and the film focus relentlessly on them, trying to capture and refine them in art. Like all of us, he knows he is dying, but that fact is always in front of him, always prominent and defining (his name, Cotard, refers to Cotard Syndrome, a psychological disorder in which the sufferer believes himself to be decaying or dead); he is in a stasis because of this, losing his sense of time, always trying to capture life to avoid its end, always surprised by its movement forward. Like all of us, he knows that he exists as a corporeal body, that he acts in and as his body, but that his body is fundamentally beyond his control; this is emphasized by the pustules, raised veins, the other maladies that he suffers from, and the sycosis/psychosis pun that he tells his daughter about (the movie seems obsessed with medical terminology). Like all of us, he sees others as having fixed characters/characteristics, based on their relationship with us and on their previous behavior, and hence wishes them to have certain fixed, meaningful roles in his life story; but like all of us, he realizes that each person has a radically subjective existence, distinct from his view of them. Sometimes the realization of this is jarring, as when he sees the strange path that his daughter has taken in life. He tries to capture this radical subjectivity, this fact that every person is the center of their own life story, in his play, but of course this attempt to recreate true, intersubjective experience in his art also emphasizes his objectification of others, since he is casting people into their roles.

But furthermore, like all of us, he is self-aware, he sees even himself in certain terms, as having a certain well defined character, and he sees his experience as forming an evolving story. But he sees this in higher contrast than most people do: he sees himself on television and in ads, he is surrounded by the notion of himself as protagonist, and with each discontinuous jump in time, he is surprised by what has happened to his story (and hence made doubly aware of it as a story). Furthermore, he is followed by a double, someone always watching him and eventually recreating him. Thus, his life has an audience. But that audience is his double: it is him, a layer of his self-consciousness, while at the same time it is only a simulacrum of him, just as our self-conscious selves are always existentially displaced from the “selves” we are aware of, the selves-as-characters. So he tries to capture even this aspect of life in his art: he is a character in his play, a character that creates another such creator-character. And from that we get the most exhilarating scenes in the movie, the suggestions of an infinite recursion as each layer of the play creates another, each one slightly displaced from the last. For me, those scenes had the beauty of a Borges story, the sense of reality being stripped down in front of me.

The ending, while going a bit overboard in its sentimentality, carries these ideas to to their extreme, as Cotard gives up his role as creator and adopts a completely distinct role within his creation. In this sense he ends the recursion, ends the endless displacement of himself from himself, and takes up a fixed, well-defined role under somebody else’s direction. (Note that the apartment he cleans is being sublet from somebody named Capgras, which is the name of a syndrome in which the sufferer believes that somebody has been replaced by an impostor.)

Now what of the charges against the film? Perhaps the most puzzling criticism of the film is that it is just littered with oddities for oddness’ sake. But all the oddities, besides being humorous, have meaningful roles. Take Tom Noonan’s character, a bizarre not-quite-double who has been following Hoffman for years. In one sense, he serves the standard purpose of the double (see, e.g., Dostoevsky’s The Double), accomplishing what the original cannot. He acts as an emblem of Hoffman’s self-awareness as well as the limits of selfhood. But in the film’s structure, this takes on additional meaning, in that he also exemplifies the relationship between the audience and the artist, with Noonan studying Hoffman the way an audience studies an artist. But Noonan is not just any audience member: he is a stand-in for Hoffman’s own role as self-critic. Hoffman as creator and Hoffman as self-critic are at a distance from each other, they cannot be identified.  And Noonan’s actions, his divergences from Hoffman, act as a constant reminder of Hoffman’s inability to control his creation, even insomuch as he is a part of it.

Take another example: the burning house that one of the key characters lives in. It is largely played for laughs, the characters behaving perfectly normally even as their house is on fire. But it also works with the film’s themes. Hoffman, despite his relentless self-analysis, is always shocked by the events of life. Time passes him by without him really knowing what’s going on. The film presents all of life as something that is on fire, something obscure, always changing and uncertain (a very old idea: compare with Heraclitus and The Fire Sermon from Buddhism). The fire in the house exemplifies that: everything is always uncertain and decaying, and the characters cannot help but live in this burning world. But the fire also plays a dual role: there’s a scene where the fire takes on an almost comforting, romantic aspect, playing on the traditional iconography of the warm fireplace. That too, works with the film’s approach, which sees the warmth and comfort people can provide amidst the main character’s uncertainty and slow demise.

Lastly, consider the odd lesbian relationship between Hoffman’s daughter and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It’s not just an oddity, but the final exemplifier of how Hoffman experiences life, always surprised by what happens to him and the paths that others take. The fact that his daughter takes the strangest path is only fitting: even the person closest to him is completely alien to him. He cannot understand her, nor she him. That also plays into one of the film’s central themes, which is how people view others as supporting players in their life story. For Hoffman’s daughter, his identity is completely different, his story is completely different than the way he himself has experienced it.

Another criticism is that it is too depressing. Well,  the film is filled with sympathetic humor, so that charge seems off-base. But I also  don’t see a problem with the film’s focus on a depressed character. Why shouldn’t the film deal with a chronically unhappy individual? People often are lonely and depressed, sometimes chronically so; loneliness and depression are extremely common experiences, feelings that almost all people experience at some point and sometimes continuously throughout their lives. More importantly, for many people, art is a way of understanding their own unhappiness, of finding meaning in it, of placing it in a larger context of life, and of feeling commiseration or solidarity in its presentation of other people’s similar feelings. The movie allows the audience to accomplish this, but it simultaneously explores their desire to do so.

Other people have criticized the film by simply characterizing its meaning as  “art mirrors life”, which is absurdly reductive. Art doesn’t simply mirror life; it is a means of purposely constructing a mirror of life. But the mirror is always incomplete: all of life cannot be contained within art, which captures only fleeting images of life. That’s the most basic aspect of the film: the lead wants to capture all of life, he wants to move outside of himself and his own unhappiness to capture reality qua reality in his art. But he can’t really do that; he can only capture bits and pieces. At least, he can’t do that while he attempts to control the art–but when he abandons control, when he becomes a part of his creation, then the difference between art and life becomes somewhat ambiguous. But even then, as you say, he still ends up lonely and depressed. Art does not allow him to escape himself.

Also, life mirrors art, not just vice versa: it influences what it attempts to mirror. It becomes a lens through which one sees one’s own life, until one cannot tell which feelings and thoughts are “original” and which are derived from art. For example, when I first read Dostoevsky, I related to his depictions of psychology to the point where I felt that he could be describing my own mind: but now, it’s sometimes hard to tell how much of my view of the world he described and how much of it was actually inspired by his writings. This melding of art and reality goes well beyond mirroring—it is an endless recursion—and the film’s depiction of it is superb.

Capra’s visual strategies in The Bitter Tea of General Yen

Okay, I’m going to spout a lot of junk in here, but there are some pretty pictures to compensate, so bear with me.

I must say, based on what little I’ve seen from the era, I think this early Capra film is one of the finest of the ’30s. It revolves around the same themes that run through most of Capra’s work (that I’ve seen, at least): the existential and ethical foundations of social structure. The plot consists of a love affair of sorts between a Chinese general and a missionary’s soon-to-be-wife. They see one another as exotic and unfathomable, and they are attracted to one another because of that. They live their lives through two very different codes of ethics and general perspectives: in brief, the Chinese man views life through a lens of pragmatism and personal honor, while the American woman views it through one of “high ideals”. Over the course of the film, the confrontation between the views leads both to crumble. Each of the lovers is overcome by the other. In trying to bridge the gap between them, they end up falling into it. Of course, the whole things is rather racist toward Chinese people, but I don’t think that really affects the underlying ideas, and I find those ideas fascinating both on their own and in relation to the rest of Capra’s oeuvre.

But instead of writing about that, I’m going to focus on visuals. A conversation I recently had with a man named Qrazy made me focus on the film’s formal approach more than I normally would have. And I found it to be superb. I’ve seen very few (maybe 60 or 70) films from the 1930s, so anything I say about the era is wildly speculative. But it seems to me that Capra was one of the most formally invigorating directors of the time. Hawks and Von Sternberg are the only others who come to mind as being on the same level as him. In a time when so many American films looked far too much like filmed plays, Capra was shooting for maximum involvement: getting objects right up in the camera’s face; blocking and shooting to emphasize the depth and richness of the space of a scene, with the camera exploring multiple planes of people and objects; mixing things up by using more than one visual style; getting rid of dissolves and needless visual exposition; and letting dialogue breathe and overlap naturally. Capra’s style strikes me as much more dynamic and engaging than that of most other films of the time.

I’m confident that many people will disagree with that assessment, and I really don’t have the requisite knowledge to properly back it up. But given my closer-than-usual observation of this particular film’s style, I thought I might as well go into some detail in my praise of it. So, here follows a description of at least some aspects that I thought worked like gangbusters. Everything I say might be horribly obvious…but I’m going to say it anyway. First off, the film is filled with gorgeous shots, typically characterized by shimmering or glowing lighting. Here are some prime examples:

But it’s more specific techniques that interest me.

In the film’s first two scenes, Capra uses two starkly differing visual schemes to immediately and viscerally convey two states: one associated with the well-understood, homely state of being in one’s own cultural milieu; and the other associated with an unknown, exotic state of being in an alien milieu. The first scene begins with wide shots of the streets of Shanghai in chaos. It then cuts to a shot looking out through the doorway of a house, showing well-to-do Westerners coming in off the street:

Next, it cuts to a shot from the same angle but further back in the hallway:

In this shot, the space of the hallway is divided by two well-defined planes. Combined with the previous shot, it gives us the sense of a very orderly, organized, well-understood space. The people enter in single file, folding their umbrellas as they do so, are greeted, and then proceed to the next segment of space, where they doff their coats. This sense of a well-organized space in which everybody moves in well-understood ways is emphasized throughout the scene, in shots such as the following:

As the scene draws to a close, a missionary relates a tale of how he told a group of Mongolians the story of Christ’s crucifixion. He was pleased to find them keenly interested. But the Mongolians did not take his intended message from the story: instead, the next day they crucified their own prisoners. As a segue into the next scene, rather than using a simple cut or dissolve, Capra rapidly whirls the camera 180 degrees, beginning on the missionary and ending on this:

The man’s face is inscrutable, and that inscrutability drives home the point of the missionary’s tale.

The following scene takes place back in the streets. Out there, the clearly defined space is gone. Instead, there is only a hazy mass of motion:

The visuals take on an extremely gauzy texture, contrasting with the relatively sharp focus of the preceding scene. In addition, everything seems to be aglow and sparkling:

There is a sense of the unknown in the gauze, of the uncanny in the sparkles. They evoke a feeling of uncertainty and the exoticity: anything can happen here, and everything is deeply strange.

We then cut back to the house, where again, the space is clearly organized:

In this case, the space is divide between Chinese people in the foreground and Westerners in the background, with the hostess navigating the space in between. The next shot proceeds with the same strong slicing of space, and it’s very striking regardless of its role in that overall visual scheme:

Despite their sense of definite spatial organization, the scenes inside the house never feel cold or rigid. In the above shot, the bodies are constantly moving, and people frequently pass immediately in front of the camera, ensuring that the space feels alive despite its organization; the organization is organic rather than mechanical, in a way.

In a later scene, the gauzy, shimmering textures of the streets are again contrasted with the interior of a house. This time it’s an orphanage barely weathering the external chaos. Now the visual scheme changes again, to high contrasts and foreboding physical obstructions, providing a sense of desolate desperation:

Outside on the streets, in a beautiful shot, the gauze renders hurled torches as amorphous glowing balls:

(It looks better in motion.)

These aspects of the film’s style are the most striking, but there are plenty of details to admire. Frequently, Capra (or his DP) frames his shots with diegetic materials:

These shots create a sense of a full, rich space, and I find them quite appealing. The storytelling in each shot is also very strong. Consider the following shot, for example:

The woman’s figure is mostly visible, and her face is central, such that the viewer focuses on her actions and on trying to read her thoughts on her face. But the figure at the left is imposing, hovering over the woman, providing a constant sense of unease, always lingering, almost lurking there as we focus on the woman’s face. The shot comes shortly after the woman as a dream that reveals both her xenophobic distrust and her erotic fixation on the man. And the shot works off our knowledge of that dream, ensuring that we view the woman’s pensive face in terms of it, and loading the man’s hovering presence with its meanings.

So, anyway, I really liked this movie.

Emak-Bakia: Man Ray’s Surrealist masterpiece

“Emak Bakia” means leave me alone. You can’t ask for a better title, even if it seems unrelated to the film at hand. That film being Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece, a kaleidoscope of images, transfixing and astoundingly beautiful. In it, two things stand out:

The first is the way the film blurs the distinction between non-representation and representation. It begins with a shot of abstract, fuzzy lights that were presumably created directly on the film; it then cuts to a shot of a flower-filled field. The use of a match-cut rather than a dissolve maintains a sufficient difference between the two shots to distinguish the ontological roles of the images, but there is such a striking similarity between them that those roles are made ambiguous. Later, there’s a shot of a metallic object standing on a rotating disk, such that the object appears periodically in the frame. When the object isn’t present, the frame contains only an abstract play of light and shadow, but when the object appears, it is obvious that we are viewing a physical scene. The shot hence periodically morphs between non-representation and representation, such that each is contained in the other.

Shots and sequences like these appear throughout the film, purposefully dissolving or muddying the distinction between layers of “reality” and “representation”. Similarly, the difference between human life and abstract, representative notions of it is distorted by shots showing things such as a human figure motion being mirrored by a representative, simplified set of lines. In another shot, human eyes are related to a car’s headlights, ambiguating other distinctions: between life and inanimate objects, light going in and light coming out, the perceiver and the perceived—though it’s worth noting that early philosophers thought that light was emitted by the eyes.

The second thing that struck me is the capture of immediate experience. Certainly the shots of pure light, free of any objects, give the sense of pure sensory perception: not perception of something, but just the feeling of perceiving, the raw, undifferentiated sense. But even other shots—shots of blurred or skewed objects; shots of a sign in the darkness; shots of flowing water, both from above it and from within it—capture the feeling of just being there. They evoke those moments when one is just drifting in the feeling of one’s surroundings, acutely aware of the sights and sounds rather than viewing them in terms of their constituent objects, with their objective uses and definitions. And repeated shots of a woman opening her eyes directly link the images to the idea of the perception of them.

In conjunction, these two aspects of the film create a dreamlike sense of ambiguous reality. I’d go so far as to say that it comes the closest of any work of art to achieving the surrealist’s goal of directly capturing the unheralded, spontaneous movements of the mind, free of all the overlying structure of symbolism and rational thinking. And with the final shot, in which a woman slowly, repeatedly opens and closes her eyes, with her eyelids painted to look like her eyes, the film continues its process of dissolution by mixing the waking state with the dreaming one. The spontaneous, disconnected dream-state is an inextricable part of the rational waking state, and vice versa.

The Good Girl (Arteta, 2002): existentialism, love, and comedy; or, why pitiful characters are the bestest

Though it seems to be largely ignored by critics and audiences alike, this has long been one of my favorite films. The foremost thing I love about it is the way it finds the humor in the serious and vice versa. That’s especially true of its treatment of its characters: it sees the humor in their ridiculous and pitiful natures even as it sympathizes with them (the creators actually talk about that in their DVD commentary). All the characters are tragically comic and comically tragic, and the actors do a superb job of capturing that. In particular, I love the character of Holden. He’s a caricature of the romantic, alienated youth yearning for a love that goes beyond the everyday. That description describes me pretty well too, and one of the reasons I love the film is that it perfectly captures some of my own traits and experiences in this character and then exaggerates them until they become hilarious, while maintaining great sympathy for the character’s real suffering. It does what good comedy should: puts a fun-house mirror up to my own faults and troubles and lets me see the humor in them.

I also think it does a pretty good job of exploring a pretty fundamental existential issue: how human existence consists of the engagement with others and with the concrete facts of life, and the ideal of absolute freedom, the running away into the unknown frontier and making of oneself whatsoever one desires, is a falsehood; absolute freedom is nonexistence, because one is perpetually bound to the facticity of one’s existence. The romantic (or maybe Romantic) ideal of love largely revolves around this issue, because in it, the lovers exist only for one another, free from all other entanglements. The Good Girl captures this issue beautifully near its conclusion, when the protagonist arrives at a crossroads (literally) representing the entanglements of the everyday and the ideal of absolute freedom, and says

How it all came down to this, only the Devil knows. Retail Rodeo is at the corner on my left. The motel is down the road to my right. I close my eyes and try to peer into the future. On my left, I saw days upon days of lipstick and ticking clocks, dirty looks and quiet whisperings. And burning secrets that just won’t ever die away. And on my right, what could I picture? The blue sky, the desert earth, stretching out into the eerie infinity. A beautiful never-ending nothing.

The one choice is ugly and frightening, but it is the real, the fullness of existence; the other option is an alluring emptiness.

Lastly, it has some of the sharpest dialogue around. It’s funny as hell, and it captures the essences of the characters and sets the tone for the film deftly and precisely:

Holden: I’ve never wanted anything so bad, and I have wanted many things. I’d given up long ago on being gotten by someone else, and then you came along. The idea that I could be gotten but because of circumstances never get got is the worst feeling I’ve ever felt, and I have felt many bad feelings.

Jack Field, Your Store Manager: Holden was a thief and a disturbed young man and what happened was a sad thing. Perhaps we can learn a lesson from this tragedy, like don’t steal and don’t be disturbed.

And perhaps my favorite bit of dialogue in any film:

Holden: I’m starting to think…that you don’t get me.
Justine: maybe I don’t get you.
Holden: You do! You do get me! You just don’t wanna get me because I’m too intensified for you!

“Too intensified.” Ha!