Parabasis

Adrian Chen is Outraged by Fact Checking

By Isaac Butler

Over at Gawker, Adrian Chen has the scoop on the CIA's involvement with the making of Zero Dark Thirty and it turns out-- get the smelling salts ready-- that screenwriter Mark Boal ran some things in the screenplay by them to see if they were factually accurate. Propaganda! Fascism! Joseph Goebbles!

Now look, whether or not you'd trust the CIA to tell you if these moments were accurate or not is fair game, but... well... let's roll the tape:

The much-discussed opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty features the main character Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, observing a detainee at a CIA black site as he is water-boarded and shoved into a tiny box during an interrogation. It appears that an early version had Maya participating in the torture. But during their conference calls, the CIA told Boal that this was not true to life. The memo reads: "For this scene we emphasized that substantive debriefers [i.e. Maya] did not administer [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] because in this scene he had a non-interrogator, substantive debriefer assisting in a dosing technique."

According to the memo, "Boal said he would fix this." Indeed, in the final film Maya doesn't touch the prisoner during this scene. The decision to have Maya abstain from the torture was as significant artistically as it was factually. Her ambivalence was a key part of her character, and critics picked over every detail of the torture scenes, including Maya's status as an observer rather than a participant, for meaning in the debate over torture that the movie sparked.

Wired's Spencer Ackerman, for example, interpreted Maya's complex relationship to on-screen torture as a sign of a complex inner life: "Maya is... a cipher: she is shown coming close to puking when observing the torture. But she also doesn’t object to it." Of course, the scene reads a bit differently if the choice was dictated by a CIA propaganda officer.

Once you strip out the register this is written in here's what you get:

The original screenplay had a scene in which two CIA officers are shown torturing a detainee. The CIA objected to this and asked that it be changed (purpotedly for accuracy reasons) to one CIA officer torturing a detainee while another looks on without registering any explicit objections ever. This lead many people  (the example he uses is Spencer Ackerman, another was Andrew Sullivan) to claim that the movie was at least tacitly anti-torture. They were, in my opinion, wrong about this, but that's less relevant here. 

So the claim here is that, thanks to CIA involvement, Zero Dark Thirty contains material that lead some people to think that the film (not the CIA, but the film) was less pro-torture. Sullivan, meanwhile, thinks this change makes the agency look better. But this seems, well, weird. The character who commits  torture begins the film as its most compelling character and ends it at a high level desk job where he faces no punishment for his actions.  The other character, played by Jessica Chastain, goes on to participate in the torture of other detainees. 

There were two other major changes. In the first, a scene where a detainee was menaced by a dog was cut, as the CIA claimed it was not part of that interrogation process. This is more troubling. As Chen notes, the U.S. routinely threatened detainees with dogs at Guantanamo and Abu Graihb and since the interrogation sequence at the beginning of the film has a kind of symbolic weight to it, including dog-menacing would make some sense. At the same time, given how "journalistic" the film was attempting to be, I can see why they would cut the scene if they were told it didn't happen. The third change (cutting a party that CIA officers throw) seems like small beer.

Do I think the extent of the government's invovlement in Hollywood is creepy? Yes. But ZD30 is hardly unique on this front. What you're left with here is that a film that was trying to pride itself on being  factually accurate e did some fact checking with a source and made changes to accomodate what the source told them. In order for this to really be the CIA "approving" of the film, there would have to be consequences to the film not being approved. 

More on Zero Dark Thirty...

By Isaac Butler

Jane Mayer, who has forgotten more about the Bush torture regime than most of us will ever know, has a lengthy piece on Zero Dark Thrity, which she believes is pro-torture,, or at the very least, failing its moral duty by not condemning torture. Unlike Glenn Greenwald, she's actually seen the film. 

I have to say, I find this whole debate very challenging to my own thoughts and convictions about politics and art. It seems to be asking for a simpler, less rich world to demand that art that covers a particular subject take a particular stand on that subject. Yet is torture so odious that it deserves to be exempt from that? Does portraying torture without explicit (or maybe even implicit) condemnation mean a work of art has failed its duty in some way? I'd like to say no. But I wonder if in this case, with a work of art whose creators advertise it as being quasi-journalistic, the contract with society has changed. And yet, I can't fully bring myself to believe that.

The Brewing Controversy over "Zero Dark Thirty"

By Isaac Butler

Arguments about arguments about arguments can grow tiresome right quick, so I'll keep this short:

Friend of the room Freddie DeBoer has an odd post up about Zero Dark Thirty today. He weighs in to defend Glenn Greenwald's writing about Zero Dark Thirty, a film neither man has seen:

Based on his Twitter feed, it seems he has caused a conflagration for daring to criticize the movie. The typical, and typically cheap, response is that he has no right to judge the movie without having seen it. Which would be true, were he commenting on its quality or its perspective. Instead Greenwald has a very basic point, one that is being roundly ignored: a film that has repeatedly and proudly been sold as "documentary" and "journalistic" contains a lie of profound importance. The movie, by all accounts, shows torture as being an indispensable part of the capture of bin Laden, an idea that has been roundly debunked and specifically denied by many people on the inside of the government. (Adam Serwer, with typical thoroughness and fairness, has the run-down.) To say that your movie is "a hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic," as the writer of the film did, when your movie depicts the use of torture as essential to captuing bin Laden is to tell a lie. And in a country of vitriolic anti-Muslim hatred, a dangerous lie. Whether you've seen the film or not.

(emphasis mine)

Here's the thing. I would agree with Freddie here... except, well, whether or not the film "depicts the use of torture as essential to caputring bin Laden" is not a sure thing "by all accounts". Some early reports, most notably from NYTimes Opinion writer Frank Bruni, claims that it does. 

But it turns out that torture's place within the movie (beyond that it takes up the film's first 45 minutes) is up for some debate.  Spencer Ackerman, who has seen the movie, recently weighed in with a more detailed reading than Bruni's that makes the case the film isn't pro-torture at all, that Bigelow is getting "a  bum rap." Freddie dismisses Ackerman's writing in the same post thusly:

 I think liberals want to be forced to support torture. ... That's why writers like Spencer Ackerman exist, to present the proper level of squeamishness and showy moral grappling-- to say that these scenes "can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American"-- before the torture happens anyway. The key is to go through the moral indigestion but to eventually get to the all-American pride. There's a whole cottage industry, like that, for fretting liberals who want to get to the tough guy routine in the end.

As if that's the argument Ackerman is making. Which it isn't (the argument he's actually making is "The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden’s downfall occurs after the torture has ended.") Or as if Spencer Ackerman didn't have a multi-year history of documenting and condemning the Bush torture regime. 

This seems very strange. Given a choice between a critic who has seen the work in question and one who hasn't, one should always take the former more seriously. Freddie says this distinction doesn't matter because aesthetic quality isn't being discussed.  But meaning is. And meaning is often open to interpretation, and thus requires actual engagement with the materials to discern. Freddie seems absolutely positive that Greenwald has the correct interpretation and that, sans evidence, Ackerman is acting in bad faith. These both seem curious leaps in judgment. 

I have some issuees with Ackerman's piece. He doesn't grapple with the positioning of 9/11 within the narrative, or counter Bruni's problems with same. Nor does he really talk about whether or not torture's failure within the narrative should've been makde more overt. I'm also not sure I'm going to see Zero Dark Thirty. I like Bigelow as a director but have no interest in watching someone get waterboarded. Or 45 minutes of back to back torture scenes. And, as someone who was there, I'm really really fucking sick of 9/11 and it's place in our culture and I thought once Bin Laden was dead, we'd be able to move on. How very, very wrong I was. 

But should I choose to not see the film, I also know that I am limiting my ability to talk about it. I can talk about how it is being interpreted by other people who have seen the movie, but I can't actually weigh in substantively on it. I haven't seen it, and in choosing not to see it, I've given up that right. 

UPDATE: Another lefty who has actually seen Zero Dark Thirty weighs in on the film and explains why, in his opinion, it is definitely not pro-torture.

"Cloud Atlas" and its sources

By Isaac Butler

Much has been made over the debt that the Sloosha's Crossin' seciton of Cloud Atlas owes to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.  Less has been made over the debt the Robert Frobisher sections owes to the life of real-life composer Frederick Delius. In the final years of his life, as he wasted away from syphilis, Delius took on the young Eric Fenby as an amenuensis. Delius was too ill to write, but could remember and sing out melodies. 

It turns out that Ken Russell made a biographical drama about their relationship for the BBC, all of which is available on Youtube. It makes for some fascinating Sunday afternoon viewing. Here's part one:

 

You can find part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here. 

 

 

 

Declassified

by 99 Seats

I have been crazy-super-busy of late, but I did have time to see ARGO. Which is a pretty fine film, all told, despite the very bizarre choice of casting Ben Affleck as a man named Tony Mendez (it's funny watching the movie hold back his last name as long as it possibly can). Affleck is a confident, assured director, the movie looks good and the story is pretty compelling. It also fits in the sweet spot for "based on a true story" type deals: the story is new and unknown enough that the outcome is in doubt the whole time, even if you kind of know that it's not in doubt at all. The supporting cast, particular John Goodman, Alan Arkin and Scoot McNairy, is all grand. So...yay, good movie!

But, of course, during the movie, I couldn't get the other spectacle of the week out of my head: Mitt Romney's attempt to "gotcha" President Obama during the town hall debate over the administration's shifting rationales for the attack on the embassy in Benghazi. It was clearly one of the most compelling moments of the debate and, even the campaign. And, ahead of the "foreign policy" debate on Monday, it's looking to loom large in the rest of the campaign.

The moment was interesting not just for the failed gotcha, or the live fact-checking, but also because it offered a quick glimpse into the fevered world of the far right. Romney was caught completely flat-footed by the facts. He was totally convinced that President Obama hadn't used the phrase "act of terror." This is a shibboleth on the right, something that, over the last few months, has become an article of faith. Except for the fact that not only is not true, it's easy to show that it's objectively not true. And yet, conservatives believe it. In fact, it's so important to their beliefs that they're now engaged in semantic hair-splitting to back up their larger point: for some nefarious reason, the administration is invested in covering up the circumstances of the Benghazi's attack.

Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo have done really great work following this line of thinking on the right. They also note that, in the WaPo, David Ignatius is reporting that the CIA supports the "smoking gun" of the Benghazi myth: Susan Rice's description of the attack as at least partially springing from protests over the much-reviled Innocence of Muslims video, hastily arranged and not professionally carried out. Of course, there remains an ongoing investigation, so it's likely more facts will come to light.

But, after seeing ARGO, I think there's a larger point about how government works, especially in regards to national security, to consider. Because this isn't the first time the charge of "shifting narratives" has come into play for the Obama administration: similar charges were made about the story of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. I think it's easy to lapse into cynicism and paranoia about all of this, especially after the Bush years and their vast politicization of the national security infrastructure (threat level Orange, anyone?), but, beyond that, there's the very real question of how much honesty does our government owe us, particularly about actions outside of our borders.

For those who don't know, Argo tells the story of the rescue of six US embassy workers and diplomats from Tehran after the fall of the Shah and the taking of the US embassy there, when 52 hostages were taken. The film does a great job of capturing the chaos and unpredictability of that time, both here in the US and in Iran. Revolutions are messy, sometimes scary things, as we all know, and the Iranian revolution was no different (for another great take on it, you simply must read/see Persepolis, if you haven't). At any time, the US diplomats in Tehran could be captured, killed, tortured. A CIA agent develops a just-crazy-enough-to-work plan to get the 6 diplomats, who are hiding in the residence of the Canadian ambassador, out: have them pretend to be a film crew, complete with a whole fake movie. The play is indeed just crazy enough to work and so it does...at great personal and professional risk for all of the CIA agents involved. And when it does work, their great job is celebrated in their office for a few seconds and then classified and buried. In the film, that indignity is compounded by the official cover story: that the Canadians (CANADIANS!) pulled it all off on their own. (In addition to the casting issue, there does seem to be some legit controversy about the portrayal of the Canadian ambassador who is mostly seen nobly cowering in fear.) It's grimly noted that, if the CIA had taken credit, the remaining hostages would have paid the price. So no credit was given, an award was given in a secret, private ceremony and then immediately taken back and not conferred until the '90s. There's a great, stiff-upper-lip, all-for-country feel to the latter part of the movie. They don't do it for the glory, these CIA agents.

I'm kidding a bit, but it does raise the obvious question about current events: is it really so implausible that the CIA (and the FBI, which is investigating the Benghazi attack) would want a false story about our working theory of the attack to be the "official" word? Let's say you're the person who pulled off a successful, well-planned and coordinated attack and you hear that we're looking at a disorganized spontaneous attack. Maybe you'd lower your guard a little bit and not expect to get caught. I mean, I just watch a whole lot of cop shows and this is a pretty common ploy. Let's remember that this is still the investigation of a crime.

But there is also the larger picture. A lot of the current dissatisifaction with the administration from the left comes in the realm of "national security," how wars are prosecuted and how the government decribes it. I'm not arguing that the government has complete latitude to tell its people untruths (again, see the Bush years for the worst of that), but...isn't there some room for, well, less than truthiness, in service of larger goals, that may not be obvious to us here? I can see how attractive the charges of "liar" are, especially to the GOP, whose standard bearer has, shall we say, a bit of a problem with that. But I can also see how compelling the desire to "get to the bottom" of things is. It's just not always appropriate. Argo hasn't really entered the political conversation (and it shouldn't...it's a pretty apolitical movie), but it does reflect our time. Carter lost the 1980, in no small part, because of his perceived weakness on the Iran hostage crisis. Having the Canadians take credit for a major coup must have added fuel to the fire, but still, they took the hit. I'm glad that the Obama administration is standing up with some passion (I don't think he needed an anger translator for that section of the debate), but I'd also like them to articulate a little more clearly how it fits into his vision of how government works.

Nine Thoughts On Tiny Furniture

By Isaac Butler

(1) Damn. That Lena Dunham can frame a shot. There are very few stills on the internet that really do this skill justice, as part of what's impressive about Tiny Furniture is the length of its takes and how long each shot holds up, but you can tell that she pays pretty careful attention to staging, camera placement, design, etc.  This sets this early film apart from the Whit Stillman of Metropolitan or anything by Noah Baumbach, who both seem to me (along with Nicole Holofcener) her clearest influences. It is also far, far better directed than anything made by Judd Apatow, who is, of course, the Godfather of her television show. 

(2) It seems to me that the biggest difference between Girls (or what I've seen of it-- the first two episodes-- and read about it, which is way too much) and Tiny Furniture is the level of sympathy for its protagonist. Hannah-- and please, readers, correct me if I'm wrong here-- is largely painted as delusional about her abilities and potential as a writer. Her artistic ambitions are held up for ridicule, as a kind of Millenial (ach how I hate that word) "I'm A Precious Little Snowflake" pretention waiting to be taken down. Hannah, for example, has a twitter account in the show where almost no one followers her, despite her incessant tweeting, and she absurdly calls herself the "voice of a generation" in the first ep.  Aura-- Dunham's character in Tiny Furniture-- is actually talented.  While we see little of her work, everyone who has encountered it likes it and compliments it, and the one piece we see some of (The Fountain Video) is an actual early YouTube video by Dunham herself. 

The end result of this is that we feel a bit more for Aura, and for what clearly seems to be the acute depression she's going through. Hannah is an intense mix of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, Aura on the other hand seems to think she's worthless, as demonstrated by a number of increasingly despearate acts performend simply to get people-- including her own mother and sister-- to notice her. These acts, particularly a tantrum that hilariously, horribly, seems to stretch forever as Aura's sister tries to surpress laughter, are not viewed uncritically within the film, but we are still invited to sympathize with her.

(Of course I also worry that the first couple of episodes of Girls are setting up the Apatow formula that i find so exhausting and that ends up being the outline of pretty much every film he's involved in from The 40 Year Old Virgin through Bridesmaids where a character's problems are painted in such an extreme light early on the film that the redemption at the end feels tacked on, unearned and, in Knocked Up's case, actually impossible (quick refresher: Seth Rogan's character is established as an illegal immigrant early in the film yet easily finds an office job and rents an apartment large enough for him to live in with his girlfriend and their child during a thrity second montage) but I'll have to watch the rest of the season and the next when it airs to see if my worries are unfounded or not.)

(3) Or maybe I sympathize with her because I had a girlfriend named Aura in high school and we're no longer on speaking terms and she was kind of depressed. Or maybe because I too come from privilege and had a horrible first year out of college, which included 9/11, getting married to my first wife too early, and getting so depressed that leaving the house felt like a victory, as did getting through a day without crying. I wouldn't mention these autobiographical factors except that everything about Dunham's work feels oddly connected to autobiography, both hers and that of her viewers, whether they be admirers or detractors. The work feels-- and is received in a fashion that is undeniably-- deeply personal, which might explain (along with our economic moment, it's all-white cast and, you know, sexism) some of the bewildering vitriol that greeted Girls after its premiere. 

(4) Autobiography is a tricky beast. There is something in us that yearns to know the "real life story" behind the shows we watch, the books we read, the plays we attend, the films at which we stare. That real life story could simply be how the thing was made, or on-set gossip, but our desire for an autobiographical truth reaches past the work-- or rather through the work-- and slips towards its creator. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of biographical readings of works, a suspicion that has only deepened as I've come to know more artists and been able to spot, in ways that the public cannot, where their life and their work intersect. In general, biographical readings of books, paintings, films, television shows, tend to shrink rather than enlarge the subject. It does not matter that our protagonist's two week bout of stomach flu was written right after a novelist had a week long struggle with the same illness, what matters is what the illness means within the text.

Dunham courts this kind of biographical fallacy with such abandon that it might not, in her case, be called a fallacy. Tiny Furniture is filmed in her parents' apartment (where, until recently, she lives, and I am almost angry that I know that and angirer that I wanted to). Her real life mother plays her mother in the film, and her real life sister plays her sister. Tiny Furniture and Girls have nearly identical premises (after college, a smart woman who is good at talking and terrible at life tries to sponge off her parents rather than enter the real world) that feel autobiographical, even if they are not. Dunham, of course, has a hit show on HBO which I have to imagine is a fairly full-time job and, given her show runner/director/co-producer/star role, is far more capable than either of the women she writes or portrays. And Dunham has proven-- and I mean this as a compliment-- naturally gifted at courting and charming the press, who in turn deliver to us the delicious autobiographical nuggets that in part sub in for actual evaluation of a work's intrinsic quality or interestingness. (This is not a slam on either Girls or Tiny Furniture; I'm quite taken with both).

(5)  In other words, it's actually hard to watch anything Lena Dunham does on its own terms and within the context of itself. It's hard to treat Tiny Furniture-- which, despite the similar premises and casts and concerns, actually is quite different from Girls-- as anything other than a rough draft for the tv show, much the way that The American President feels like a rough draft for The West Wing. It's hard to just talk about the movie as a movie.   But it's not a rough draft for a TV show. It's a movie, goddamnit.  And it's a pretty good one. 

(6) I found myself most fascinated by Aura's relationship with her mother. The biggest surprise for me in the film is that the mother is kind of a jerk-- distant and secretly as needy as her daughter-- without being painted as a monster.  There are real moments of tenderness between Aura and her mother, but there's also a door there that's been slammed shut, that Aura's constant entireties for verbal recognition and physical affection cannot breach.  Aura comes home from college and her mother barely notices, she gets a job and her mother barely seems to care until prodded to such a point that nothing she says  could possibly suffice. Most of the times we see her, she is not so much repremanding Aura-- which she has plenty good cause to do-- as denigrating her.

And yet we also get sequences where Aura reads her mother's diary and discovers that at her own age her mother was just as fucked up, just as depressed and strange and vulnerable and striving and depressed as she.  The real insight of the film is its recognition that, despite Aura's similarities to the discarded, earlier self of the mother, the possibilities for connection between the two women are limited. That past is a country that can only be recalled; return is impossible. Yet within that recolleciton lies the one extended moment of real tenderness between the two women.

(6) The film's other big moment is the aforementioned tantrum sequence, where Aura begins by getting upset with her mother and sister for reasons  that are completely valid, but as the scene goes on (and, hilariously, on and on) it slips into utter absurdity. It's a complicated moment with deft tonal shifts that relies in part on its length to work.  It reminds me most of the work of Alexander Payne, who is a master of stretching moments until their emotional texture changes, generally from serious to comic, but sometimes in the other direction.  Think here of Judy Greer's hospital bedside monologue from The Descendants. 

(7) I am less confidant in Dunham's abilities as a director to coach meaningful performances from actors. She's quite good at writing people roles that play to people's strengths but in Girls the scenes between the four leads often feel like the characters might be in two or three different styles of television show simultaneously. Dunham's hyper-real deadpan, for example, does not feel of the same world as Zosia Mamet's more sitcommish overindication. In both projects, Dunham's own performance is at its weakest when we see reaction shots of her during other people's dialogue. She has what in rehearsal I call the "I'm Listening" face, which is where you do a little something with your forehead that feels attentive while acutally speaking your scene partner's lines in your head. I don't know if she's really doing that or not, but were I both writing and directing the scene that I was in, I'd probably do that, and since autobiography is, again, a perfectly valid-- maybe even the only valid-- way to watch or critique anything anymore, I feel comfortable asserting that I'm right. 

(8) The men in Tiny Furniture are total assholes in a way that feels both individuated for each character are true. I double checked this with my wife who has been, at an earlier time in her life, a single woman in her twenties in a cool part of New York (Williamsburg, specifically) and she verified this. 

(9) Of course, another question presents itself: Is Aura deserving of, worthy of, our sympathy? Given her privilege-- which is immense-- should we care about her struggles or that she's depressed or in pain? Well, I suppose to me the question is this: Do we want to grant a work its fundmental premise or not? Because one of Tiny Furniture's fundamental premises is that Aura is a worthy protagonist, just as, say, in A Midsummer Night's Dream fairies are real. If you can't accept that, there's sort of no point in your watching the thing.

(This, btw, is why I don't see biographical features about the Royal Family. I am incapable of granting these films their premises, of taking as a given that the struggles of this particular group of people are worthy of documenting or sympathizing with. Fictional royals I have no beef with. But if you really want to enrage me, strap me down in that Clockwork Orange eye dropper torture chair and force me to watch The Queen on a loop. (Oh my God! The Queen's approval rating has slipped five percentage points! THE HORROR!!!!!!))

And this returns us to our economic moment. It's a moment in which middle and working class people are struggling, and struggling in particular ways, and in which their stories are not really being told. They're not being told much in our big theaters or on television and they seem totally absent from the multiplex.  In fact, the only major release about the struggles of working people to come out this summer is Magic Mike, which is essentially about a man who must turn himself into an object so that he can accrue enough capital to control the means of production in the age of mechanical reproduction but is constantly thwarted by management. It sits in theaters alongside Beasts of the Southern Wild, which appears to be the high-quality art-house rural poverty film of this year, as Winter's Bone was before it. But still, we're talking two movies here.

This is a really big problem.  In the peculiar way that responses to Dunahm's work seem to be about anything other than the work itself, there's been a certain amount of anger at Girls (and, to a lesser extent, Tiny Furnture) for existing in the first place. I guess I'm with Ta-Nehesi, writing about Girls and race, on this one:

There has been a lot of talk, this week about Lena Dunham's responsibility, but significantly less about the the people who sign her checks. My question is not "Why are there no black women on Girls," but "How many black show-runners are employed by HBO?" This is about systemic change, not individual attacks. 

It is not so wrong to craft an exclusively white world--certainly a significant portion of America lives in one. What is wrong is for power-brokers to pretend that no other worlds exists. Across the country there are black writers and black directors toiling to bring those worlds to the screen. If HBO does not see fit to have a relationship with those writers, then those of us concerned should assess our relationship with HBO. 

Dunham is a talented storyteller with an interesting, complex, and artful take on her subject. Her subject happens to be (for the foreseeable future) the lives of young white female New Yorkers who come from money. That subject is neither more nor less valid than other subjects. The problem is that the lives of fairly well off white folks are the only story our culture at large treats as valid. I think it's possible to both find things of merit in Tiny Furniture and also wish that, say, Ballast had garnered Lance Hammer an HBO deal or that someone was throwing thirty million at Kelly Reichardt to develop a project. 

Of course, given my own background, I'm a terrible, obviously compromised person to be making this argument. But I do believe it. The need for a wider variety of stories does not invalidate a specific story being told. It might raise the bar for quality of those stories--certainly, an upper middle class dramedy set in a living room at a LORT theater is going to have to be really, really good for me to like it--but frequency doesn't invalidate subjet matter. 

"Caught" In A World of Men

By Isaac Butler

Anne and I have sporatically been making our way through Netflix's catalogue of varous classic films. It all started when we were in France and caught a screening of the Fritz Lang film Clash by Night (adapted from the play by Clifford Odetts) which put us on a Lang kick that took us to The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street and The Big Heat. Somehow, we digressed to Carol Reed's Night Train To Munich and Hitchcock's Notorious and films featuring the late, great Robert Ryan (who was in Clash by Night). So... in other words, now we're on a Robert Ryan kick, and this is how we wound up seeing Caught, starring Ryan and James Mason, written by Arthur Laurents (!!) and directed by Max Ophuls, which is instantable at this very moment.

Caught is fascinating and dated in equal measure.  It falls into the long list of movies from the period that contain as their central anxieties questions having to do with women's changing place in society, with what happens when the roles get so prescribed that all one's choices are bad. In Caught's case, Barbara Bel Geddes plays Leonora Eames, a kind of Lily Bart without money, a woman whose sole ambition is to marry for money and be kept by a wealthy, powerful man. To that end, she works as a floor model at a department store and takes charm classes by night.  She meets and winds up marrying Robert Ryan's Smith Ohlrig, a multi-millionaire tycoon who marries her in a fit of pique induced by his therapist advising him against it. he then proceeds to neglect and emotionally abuse her until she leaves him to go work for James Mason's Larry Quinada, a pediatrician working in the immigranty slums of Broome street. She disguises her identity, Larry falls in love with her and she with him, but it tunrs out she's pregnant with Ohlrig's child, the result of a short-lived reconciliation caused by his (false) promise to change his ways.

All this is the standard stuff of domestic melodrama, except that the two male leads are two of the best actors of their generaiton and Max Ophuls shoots it like a fucking wizard. It's what happens to resolve the plot that's so fascinating. So here come the spoilers:

Leonora ends up having to return to Smith due to her pregnancy. She begs him for a divorce, which he says he'll grant her, so long as he gets the kid.  She refuses and winds up trapped in her bedroom, constantly tormented by him awakening her at all hours of the night for psychological torture.  Eventually, Smith almost dies in a freak pinball-machine-angina-incident (I'm totally serious) and then she escapes him with Quintana via the baby dying after which it is implied they'll live happily ever after.

I cannot imagine a movie being made today in which a baby being born prematurely and dying is celebrated.  And Caught actively celebrates it.  When James Mason, tears welling in his eyes, tells Leonora that "sure, the babies going to die, but now you can be free!" we're meant to take this at face value. The score swells, she begins in smile, they embrace and press cheek to cheek and sob to celebrate their tragic good fortune.  The film ends with Quintana's obstetrician-partner telling him in the most tossed off way that the baby died as Quintana goes into Leonora's hospital room to start his new life with her.

Of course, one of the reasons why such a film could not be made today is that abortion is legal and no-fault divorce exists, even in New York. Caught is a film that demands a world in which women are fully subject to the whims of men. Absent that, it feels preposterous. Whether or not this makes the film feminist or not I cannot really parse without more coffee, but, given that the Republican VP nominee supported a personhood amendment that would grant zygotes full human rights, it's a fascinating reminder of the kind of world the GOP wants to return us to. 

Saving the Superhero Movie

by Isaac Butler

Exhaustion. That's the response I've been hearing most often from friends and colleagues of mine when we talk about superhero films, particularly The Dark Knight Rises. Whether they liked the film or not, most people I know are just worn out by the prospect of "having" to see another 1-3 of these films a year for the foreseeable future. It seems that, for many, it was a nice run while it lasted, from the first X-Men film to the last Nolan Batman but it just feels played out.  Too many origin stories, too many seemingly fresh tropes that have now calcified, too many shitty roles for women, thundering exposition, hints at large themes without really exploring them. Too much money spent, too many talented actors tied up for months on end, too much wondering Is this the best we can do?

A.O. Scott's now-needlessly-infamous review of The Avengers captures this feeling well: 

 It is not as if the number of movies featuring troubled guys wearing costumes and fighting evil has diminished since then. Quite the contrary. But the genre, though it is still in a period of commercial ascendancy, has also entered a phase of imaginative decadence. 

Scott pinpoints The Dark Knight as "peak superhero," but the summer of 2008 already showed the crow's feet in the aging genre. Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk seemed to herald an age in which every superhero film would end with its eponymous stars facing off against larger, more grotesque versions of themselves and we were already a year past Spider-Man 3, the less said about which, the better. Since then, the lack of good ideas in the superhero movie as a genre has become apparent.  This summer saw a new origin story for your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Next summer will see a new origin story for Superman.  

Today, superhero movies are facing a similar crisis to the one that mainstream comics have had to face again and again, and I think therein lies an answer for reinventing the Superhero film and making it more interesting.  

When DC and Marvel faced similar creative crises over the last twenty years, they responded in three different major ways. One of them was to hire big name writers from other mediums to script comic book stories. This had some positive results (Joss Whedon's first Astonishing X-Men plotline) and some negative results (Brad Meltzer).  The second was to embrace a kind of pop postmodernism as exemplified by Grant Morrison. The third was to hire a bunch of writers who worked in other genres-- most famously crime and thriller writers Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker-- and have them work on superhero titles.

Those writers went on to pen some of the more interesting projects in recent mainstream comics. Bendis made Powers, which is a great idea (it's a police precdural with an office that investigates superhero related crimes lead by a detective who is a depowered superhero) with poor execution. Bendis also developed the much better Alias about a minor Marvel character who becomes a Private Eye. Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker then improved on the Powers idea with Gotham Central, which might as well be called "Homicide: Capes On The Street" and follows a homicide division that is trying to solve cases before Batman gets involved and shows them up.  Darwyn Cooke and Ed Brubaker also collaborated on "Selina's Big Score," which plugs Catwoman into a classic hard boiled heist plotline straight out of the 1960s and features Batman in exactly one panel.  

Herein lies a possibility for the fixing of the Superhero film.  For the studios have always been trying strategy #1 with mixed results. Ang Lee, Sam Raimi, Christopher Nolan, Joss Whedon, Joe Johnston and Shane Black were all hired for their individual sensibilities but often these amounted to putting grace notes on a formulaic facade. Option #2, the pop-postmodernism approach would likely be an artistic disaster, although if David O. Russell or Soderbergh want to try their hands at an experimental meta-Superhero movie, I'd be all eyes.

But plugging the Superhero into other film genres-- particularly crime ones--and seeing what new territory can be mined seems to me an exciting direction for the films to take. Maybe we could Batman, the "world's greatest detective" actually do some detective work. Or watch Catwoman pull off a heist. Or see Hawkeye or Black Widow do some espionage. Or plug Power Man and Iron Fist into Lethal Weapon's multiracial buddy cop dynamics and see what happens. Or put Daredevil into a legal thriller. The guy is a lawyer for superheroes after all. 

There are hints in these directions, of course. Joe Johnston clearly really wanted to make a WWII movie with Captain America, which made for some interesting tensions when he started replacing action sequences with montages. I doubt Edgar Wright's forthcoming Ant Man is going to be a straightforward Superhero origin film.

There's also a question of whether the Superhero Movie (a) is in any kind of trouble (financially it isn't) and (b) is something worth investing energy in trying to reinvent. But if we're going to have a handful of these things open every year and if they're the only kind of movies that can greenlit with substantial budgets and A-list casts these days, I'd like them to be a bit more interesting. 

The Adolescence Issue: The Case For Hannah Horvath And Bella Swan

By Monika Bartyzel

(We close out the adolescence issue with this great essay by M. Bartyzel on what our expectations are of our young protagonists and what this says about us.  

Monika Bartyzel is a freelance writer and creator of Girls on Film, a weekly look at femme-centric film news and concerns, currently residing at Movies.com. Her work has appeared in the likes of The Atlantic, Moviefone, Collider, Splice Today, Hooded Utilitarian, Toronto Screenshots, and the now-defunct Cinematical, where she was a lead writer and assignment editor.)

Children’s literature has a very specific purpose: It’s a creative form of instruction. Little tykes sit down and learn about objects, sounds, and letters. They learn good and bad ways of interaction, and are taught how to poop. Even their wildest fantasies hold some lesson – respect your elders, do your chores, and of course, don’t cry wolf.

Adult literature, on the other hand, runs the gamut of experience. If I close my eyes and reach out to my book shelf, I might pull a book about race, time-traveling, performance art, pen pal romance, extra-terrestrial rock stars, feminism, World War II, gastroenterologists, shipwrecked sailors, crime… Though we might learn through the experience, education is not a priority (in fiction). Entertainment and/or art is key. A book might simply take us into another world, or it might delight in the careful placement of every single letter, word, sentence, and paragraph.

The idea applies to other forms of media as well. Children’s songs and films seek to please the eyes and ears whilst teaching a lesson, and alternatively, adult entertainment mixes fluff and thought on the whim of the creator. Once we’re set up in the world, adult media allows us to choose whether we want to be educated and/or entertained.

Young Adult fare, however, is the creative limbo resting between the extremes. On a basic level, editor Cheryl Klein’s summation is apt: “A YA novel is centrally interested in the experience and growth of its teenage protagonist(s), whose dramatized choices, actions, and concerns drive the story, and it is narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective.”

Outside of structural restraints, the function of YA is muddied.  We chastise much of it and its silliness – especially when adults begin to admire it (Harry Potter, Twilight). We also place wildly high expectations upon it. Young people, who have been instructed in the ways of the world, are now on a long quest to discover themselves. We expect their reading to help them discover positive role models and continue learning about life. We fear the irresistible pulp fare and the impact it might have. The form is further complicated by sex; YA is generally seen as a creative haven for young women, therefore feminist concerns are always applied.

In recent years, these concerns have led to a cacophonous roar against problematically popular protagonists. It started with one Bella Swan, a girl so swept up in lust and love with her sparkly vampire boyfriend that she let it run her life. Her saga is so fervently polarizing that the world was quickly split in two – the Twi-hards gushing undying adoration and the Twi-nots condemning her. Just as the roar began to subside, Hannah Horvath arrived, Lena Dunham’s identity-confused heroine in Girls (admittedly a bit outside YA, but invoking a similar spirit due to Hannah’s immaturity). Once again the lines were drawn to define two camps – the fans who instantly related to Hannah’s idiosyncratic life and the detractors who believe she “and her friends are a bunch of racist fucking untalented hipster assholes.”

These heroines haven’t just invoked stern criticism; they’ve courted downright damnation. Their problematic, imperfect selves have hit an apparent soft-spot in the media psyche with their mere existence. Two aspects seem to be at play. First and foremost, these are young women bearing the weight of historically shallow female characterizations that feminism is trying to fight against. Secondly, they’re uber-awkward characters that bite their thumb at the struggling heroines who always manage to be at least partially idyllic. (Think Rory Gilmore and her financial hardships matched with top-notch smarts and an uncanny ability to flawlessly banter, or Katniss Everdeen who must play in The Hunger Games, but is inhumanly skilled at archery and wildly charismatic.)

The whole brouhaha reminds me of my own youth. For years I had free literary reign. My parents loved that I loved reading and let me amass a small mountain of first children’s reads and then young adult fare. But then I discovered Fear Street, and subsequently, Christopher Pike. Horror/crime/mystery/otherworldly menaces were my literary crack. I began to love vampires and the vamp/werewolf drama that came long before Twilight – L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (an entirely different beast than the show and the current sequels).

Presumably due to fears that I’d turn into a deranged killer or occult conspiracy theorist, my intake started to be highly regulated. My beloved pulp was restricted and mandatorily peppered with classics that bored my escapist-yearning self to tears, as well as fictional tales set during historical circumstances. (Of course, the Sunflower series of romantic histories led me directly into the arms of Danielle Steele, which wasn’t exactly a great literary leap forward. [Damn you, Message from Nam.])

However, even restricted, there was a freedom in my fandom. No one was mocking my love of Stefan Salvatore, or the absolutely ridiculous things Elena would do for her love. My whims and heroines weren’t repeatedly labeled moronic, and I loved my novel escapes. Incidentally, I grew up to be an English grad who spends much of her time writing about feminist issues in film and loving essays by Henry Miller and authors like Joan Didion, Graham Greene, and Voltaire – a far cry from vampires, murderers, and ghosts.

While my parents’ concern was understandable, what I took out of the books wasn’t a critical reading of the text, but the parts that resonated. I read all of Agatha Christie’s work, but all that sticks out is the charisma of Tuppence Beresford and how an old spinster (Miss Marple) could live a wildly entertaining life on her own. I remember the best heroines and little of the questionable material and questionable literary merit (of which there was much), because that’s what I was subconsciously drawn to and looking for.

As I once wrote about Twilight: “Reading The Twilight Saga is like revisiting your old diaries rife with catty rants and condemnations, emotional explosions and angst, where what was once live-or-die is now embarrassingly hormonal. Bella is an unencumbered look into an adolescent mind that’s not over-polished.” No, she’s not a stellar role model young girls should model themselves after – in any way. She’s too introverted, too easily swept into romance, too disinterested in the world that exists for her outside of Edward. But she’s is relatable.

Bella isn’t completely devoid as some Twi-nots describe her. She’s a sarcastic girl who escapes into classic novels and caring for her parents because she feels out of step with the world – so clumsy and accident-prone that she feels like an alien in her own body – an extreme manifestation of the awkwardness of the teen body. She likes a cute boy, obsesses on his minute qualities, and is so thrown by his adoration that she doesn’t trust it. The novels are her inner monologue, essentially her “diary” of romantic teenage obsession.

There’s a truth to Bella. She might make terrible choices, but they ring true for many young women – as evidenced by the books’ wild popularity, the many fan-centric accounts, and by my own remembrances of teen life. Bella’s depression in New Moon is often cited as one of the most damning aspects to her personality, which certainly throws her out of the running for strong role model, but also points to a very real phenomenon. Kids get depressed by circumstances adults find ridiculous. Many need counseling, medication, and other forms of aid to hopefully get through it, if they don’t decide to take their lives instead. If we consider how fervently we’d mourn, hurt, or obsess over something in our teens that was ultimately inconsequential, we can’t deny that losing a boyfriend who had saved your life, multiple times, would be traumatic.

As a role model, the condemnation fits. As a teen girl with wildly fluctuating hormones, who is trying to find her place in the world, the condemnation becomes problematic. By condemning her, what are we saying to the massive group of young women who relate to her? Twi-hards feel a very visceral attachment to the novels, a result of what many describe as Stephenie Meyer’s uncanny ability to invoke the essence of young desire. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a part of this vitriolic backlash that stems from embarrassment – a disinterest in recognizing (or admitting) how ridiculous we all were during our YA limbo.

Girls’ Hannah certainly plucks at the awkward, embarrassing parts of life. Lena Dunham unabashedly reveals every perk and flaw to Hannah. She’s a goddess of stupid actions, a young woman wildly self-absorbed to the point that she doesn’t see other people’s problems. She expects her parents to support her, and when they refuse, she doesn’t take the responsibility upon herself, she shunts it over to her best friend. She chases after seemingly unavailable men, jumps from job to job, and has an uncanny ability to assert ridiculous beliefs. Dunham’s primary focus seems to be Hannah’s flaws – both literal and perceived.

She acts as a kindred soul to some, and a mirror of bad qualities to others, as Jill York wrote for Nerve:

“I still don't like Hannah Horvath, and I certainly don't like that I see so many of my own negative qualities in her, but I like that she and her cohorts force me to see them. And I think that's why Girls has resonated so strongly with us spoiled, lazy types: it takes these uglier truths about ourselves and how the rest of the world sees us and it spits them back in our faces, leaving us to think about whether we'll choose to stay on the Dark Side or take our first steps toward the light.”

Are, perhaps, flaws and stupidity just as relevant to young adults as heroes and role models? Some may relate to a piece, as York does, because they recognize their own inadequacies. Questionable characters become warning signs for the audience’s personal failures, which may or may not inspire improvement. Other audiences might be adolescents in that messy limbo who relate to the uber-emotional turmoil of a sparkly, fantastical modern fairy tale – flaws attract flaws.

The above focuses on young heroines, but the idea applies universally. Though often framed by heroic means, comics consistently pluck at inadequacies and trauma raised by bullies and angst. Before the superhero renaissance, comics were obsessive pulp that thrived because the audience could relate and subsequently escape into fantasy. Even The Dark Knight Rises takes a Twilight turn (though much more skillfully crafted) with overwrought romance-induced depression.

On a theoretical level, I think of the fear I invoked with my teenage book collection, of how many teens have already written about how they’ve moved beyond Twilight, and I think the mechanical definition leads to a bigger truth: Popular Young Adult fare reveals the “Dark Side” of both adolescence and adulthood – the questionable and problematic worlds that ultimately appeal to the youth, and the fear that such portrayals invoke in the adults, because as one old pop song asserted: “children are our future; teach them well and let them lead the way.”

The Adolescence Issue: Here Comes The Fear Again

By Ben Owen

(Frequent Parabasis contributor Ben Owen needs no introductions around these parts, but I'm still very happy to have him as part of the adolescence issue.  Here, he talks about addiction and the movies.)

There’s a bit early in Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead where he writes about how, when gearing up for battle prior to the 1990-91 Gulf War, the marines watched Vietnam movies—Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. He makes the point that although these films might seem to most viewers, and probably even to their directors, to be anti-war statements, to American soldiers they read only as pro-war, as celebrations of “the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills.”

Recently my girlfriend watched Trainspotting. She found it upsetting. I understood what she meant—there’s that dead baby crawling on the ceiling—but wanted to find out whether she’d felt any of the same thrill seeing it as I had 16 years ago, when I was 16. She hadn’t. In an attempt to explain why I’d felt that way, I began, as I sometimes do, to talk about the mid-to-late-90s in a quasi-mystical way. My girlfriend is eight years younger than me and grew up in a household that believed solidly in public television, and so with some regularity I take it upon myself to educate her about the fine cultural weave of 90s pop culture, when surface was depth. She bears this risible codger-hippy act with even humor, as I rant on about how music attained mathematical perfection in the 20 or so days between the release of This Is Hardcore and Mezzanine.

But I realized as I spoke that, while the various Hornbyisms I was reciting were true enough, if only of possible interest to other people who had personal attachment to all this crap, I was avoiding saying the main reason I’d liked Trainspotting, which was that it made addiction seem cool. Not that you could construe Trainspotting’s narrative as unambiguously pro-drug. Danny Boyle and the writer John Hodge show you the nasty costs of heroin addiction in the film’s slow, formless second half, when all the manic energy built up in the opening “Lust for Life” montage gets lost in overdose, Aids, and withdrawal. But like Swofford’s marines, I didn’t read it that way.

Not that I ever did heroin. I was generally too anxious, too dorky, and too rule-abiding to manage the complex set of codes required to buy drugs on the street (when I was 22 and briefly living in London, I went out with friends round Camden Lock and successfully negotiated the exchanged of £20 for what turned out to be a very tightly wrapped piece of cardboard). Alcohol was my first and my last. But at 16, the part of me that liked the clarifying warmth of a beer before my first class of the day found justifying myths where it could. The death and depravity in Trainspotting, the aggressive disillusion in Hunter Thompson, and the paranoid gloom in Tricky’s first couple of records helped, actually. Alcoholics and drug addicts obviously tend towards the self-annihilating, and in the first blush of love with alcohol, death seemed kind of romantic, a metaphor for the loss of self-consciousness that I, like most teenagers, longed for.

Things went the way they do. The metaphor didn’t remain enough of a metaphor, and the romance flaked away. I saw the way things were headed a bunch of times, in flashes, before they got bad. One flash came during that other heroin movie, Requiem for a Dream. I saw it on holiday in Buenos Aires in 2001. I can’t remember what I said about it at the time, but as a movie I don’t much like it. It’s honking, obvious, and relies on stereotypes. It plays like a nightmare PSA, but without the humor that might make that interesting. And yet, as a PSA, it was devastatingly effective. I left the theater feeling that I’d been told, directly, that I was going to die if I continued living my life the way I had been. The film’s logic was dumb cliché and, like some of the dumb cliché things that I would have to recognize about myself later, when I was forced to do so, true. It took me several drinks to feel okay with the warmth of the night.

The Adolescence Issue: The Voice Of A Generation

By Danny Bowes

(Editor's Note: As a second installment in our revisiting-old-totems, we have the wonderful Danny Bowes stepping up to bat, with a piece about discovering that one of his favorite films might not hold up as well as he had hoped:)

There is a sense, between the ages of 13 and 19, that all of human history has led to this, to now, that the present is the fulcrum between what was and what shall be. The future is alternately vague, ignored, or terrifying. Even the past is of interest only for having led to the now, which is all there is, because even more than other times in one's life, the teenage years are a time of extreme focus on present-tense self. The development of adult-level cognitive abilities coincide with being slammed by an array of hormones leads to everything being at times unbearably vivid. On top of the basic physiological chaos, my own teenage years were complicated by the (fairly standard) matter of my parents having divorced, as well as some (somewhat less standard) complications with regards to sexual orientation; nothing so simple as “gay” or “straight” over here. (That particular ship eventually ran aground somewhere in the suburbs of the latter, but as any city-dweller will tell you, the suburbs are not the city.) Topping the whole mess off was a natural tendency toward hyper-ratiocinative brooding. All of this is why, for a considerable portion of my teenage years, Pump Up The Volume was one of my favorite movies.

Canadian writer-director Allan Moyle's breakthrough feature, Pump Up The Volume is a jittery, brooding younger first cousin to John Hughes' iconic cycle of suburban teen movies, with a far better record collection. The soundtrack is an extremely important element in Pump Up The Volume,   not simply because it's a movie about a pirate radio DJ, but because it consists in great part of formally challenging songs, many of which feature EXPLICIT LYRICS (a huge hot-button issue in 1990). This mirrors the movie's theme of finding the courage to speak, and to speak truth. Obviously there isn't a universal one-to-one relationship between telling the truth and cursing, but to quote hip-hop don Redman, speaking indirectly but perfectly to this issue some years later, “If you say 'fuck me,' I'ma say 'fuck you.'”

In the movie itself, protagonist Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) takes inspiration from Lenny Bruce's memoir How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. That inspiration ends up being a bit on the nose, as that's literally how Mark spends his evenings: having recently been forcibly relocated from the East Coast by his father taking a job in suburban Arizona, Mark uses the ham radio equipment his parents bought him so he could communicate with his friends back home (even by these pre-Internet standards, a dumb idea) to set up shop on an unused FM radio frequency, whereupon Mark adopts the persona of “Happy Harry Hard-on” and every night at 10 pm alternates between holding forth philosophically, making sex and masturbation jokes, reading listener letters, and spinning (mostly) obscure records. Mark, so painfully shy he can barely speak to anyone face to face, becomes an inspiration to his similarly inhibited classmates, developing (even before the movie starts) a devoted cult following. In the grand tradition of sticking it to The Man, Mark pilfers an internal memo from his school administrator father and reads it out to his listeners, going as far as calling the guidance counselor who sent the (rather sanctimonious) memo at his home. This gets the attention of the school's authoritarian principal (Annie Ross), whose crackdown on any student caught with taped recordings of “Harry”'s show or spray-painting quotes from it on the walls ends up provoking a full-scale rebellion.

What's more, the story has Mark inadvertently stumble on actual criminal practices at the school. In order to maintain elite average test scores, the principal has been quietly expelling students whose scores would bring down that average. To a teenager, this is catnip. “Not only does school suck, but it's actually a criminal conspiracy? I KNEW IT!” Add a cool but relatable hero, a quirky-but-gorgeous erotica-writing love interest (Samantha Mathis), and that terrific soundtrack and it's pretty much the perfect movie for a teenager in the early 90s.

Around the 15^th anniversary of its release, I revisited Pump Up The Volume and absolutely hated it. Clunky direction, on-the-nose dialogue delivered awkwardly, very young people being very certain that they're right about everything, the unearned supremacy of self....and oh the fucking whining. This was, to clarify, as much an emotional, uncritical reaction to the movie as my initial love for it. My associations with Pump Up The Volume were were more with who I was when watching it than they were the movie itself. And who I was, toward my later teenage years, was a shithead who drank every day and gobbled whatever drugs he could get his hands on. This lasted throughout college, where the number of days I was sober(ish) were so few and far between I can point to an exact reason for nearly every one (that I can remember, that is). Now, it should be noted that Pump Up The Volume is hardly an endorsement of drugs and booze, aside from its casual, normal-for-its-time portrayal of smoking as fashion statement. It is, however, a movie sympathetic to the idea of escape from the bewilderment and frustration of being young. Having only just (and not very securely) slammed the door shut on my drug taking, I was a bit unfairly angry at my teenage self for not immediately being able to deal with emotional pain, and for not buckling down and being exactly the kind of responsible dorky aspirant to mainstream society I'd despised in my teenage years. I was, in effect, LARPing the Faces' single “Ooh La La” (you know, “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger,” that one). And that's bullshit. The whole point of being young is not knowing anything. That's how you learn stuff.

When it was time to write this piece, I watched  Pump Up The Volume again, with no small amount of dread from the lingering memory of the last time. It was thus a bit of a surprise that it actually isn't nearly that bad. It finally dawned on me that it wasn't that I realized I'd been wrong about the movie the previous time, it was re-directed overly harsh self-criticism. To put it another way, I can wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger all I like, but that wish can only ever be a wish. Time is the great educator.

As for the movie itself, it's a sincere piece of work that takes the concerns of its teenaged target audience very, very seriously. It uses music—both Cliff Martinez's tres-late 80s score and the terrific songs—to excellent effect. Christian Slater's performance in the leads doesn't connect emotional extremes convincingly, but his teenage Lenny Bruce act on the radio and his near-mute bespectacled public persona are effective on their own. The other performances are at the mercy of underwritten or painfully subtext-free dialogue, and the script half-asses the school corruption business (shifting the blame for institutional corruption onto renegade individuals is, after all, how institutions solidify their power and calcify into uselessness; on the other hand, over-simplifying problems is something young people do all the time, so there's that). It is, on its technical merits, not a great movie.

But there's one brief passage that is absolutely perfect. For background, Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis end up becoming romantically involved, being, after all, the leads. One night Samantha Mathis goes over to Christian Slater's house (where, of course, he hosts his radio show) and they both end up topless, a cross-gender/orientation delight. Fun as it is though, that's not the perfect bit. The next day, when they run into each other at school, is. The previous night's boldness and nudity (both physicial and emotional) is gone, and for a minute or so the camera simply lingers on what's almost literally a dance sequence, of two young people just being OMG holy shit into each other. That particular thing is so specifically of the teenage years, where attraction and sex and romance are exhilarating and new and everything is so intense it becomes all of existence and all there is is now. It's not that that feeling goes away when you grow up, it just happens less often, and it never quite feels as OMG holy shit amazing as it does when it's brand new and you have no perspective on it yet.

That's why, to borrow the grandiose melodrama of teenage pronouncements on culture, Pump Up The Volume, for all its dated signifiers and artistic shortcomings, is adolescence: sometimes it's great, sometimes it sucks, it's consumed by music and sex, and it's an intensely personal thing not everyone's going to get. Pump Up The Volume, its very existence beholden to the pre-Internet era, is a thing of the past, like adolescence to people my age. But the movie and the memories both are always there to revisit. 

---

Danny Bowes is an actor, playwright, filmmaker, and film critic whose work has appeared in Premiere, Indiewire, and The Atlantic; he reviews new science-fiction/fantasy releases at Tor.com and blogs at Movies By Bowes.

Narrative Illogic in "The Dark Knight Rises" (The Only Spoilers Below Are For The First Five Minutes)

By Isaac Butler

I just want to quickly double down on a point I made yesterday about how important the frame of a piece is to the audience's acceptance of narrative illogic.  Yesterday, I saw the new Batman film. I was not a fan. I don't want to belabor this point, actually. I have no desire to ruin the fun of the many friends of mine who enjoyed it. And I didn't hate it. And I didn't find it hateful. And there's good stuff in there (it actually gets Catwoman right, for example).

But in amongst all the stuff are a lot of things that make no sense. Actually, most of the movie doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense. Most of what the characters do is done to support the plot, but the plot also has some really really huge holes in it. Again, i don't want to belabor this point, although if people wanna argue it in the comments, I'll get into it there. 

I'm pretty sure that there are all sorts of things in The Dark Knight that similarly wouldn't make sense if I stopped and thought about it, but I was so swept up by TDK that up until the prison boat scene, I didn't really question it.  Similarly with Louie, the frame that CK has created both supports the illogic of the show and actively takes advantage of it.

I think, therefore, one of the reasons why I so disliked-- and didn't buy-- The Dark Knight Rises has to do with some of its framing.  First, one of the things we always learned in directing school is that one of the most important tasks of a director is to ensure the audience that they are in good hands. Even when you are tricking them or keeping them off balance, you want the audience to know that someone is in control so that they can relax and actually view the thing you're seeing. In literature, of course, we talk about the "contract with the reader" and establishing it quickly at the outset and violating that contract only with good purpose. 

The Dark Knight Rises fails to do this. In fact, it puts its worst foot forward.  The opener on the plane with Aiden Gillen might be the weakest (on both a writing and filmmaking level) five minutes of Christopher Nolan's career. And I say this as a booster of and apologist for Nolan's work. Each beat rings falser and weirder than the one before it, from Gillen introducing himself as "CIA" to no one thinking that the dude with the super-amplified voice might be Bane to Bane's voice sounding the same whether the hood is on or off and not appearing to come from anywhere to the utter incomprehensibility of the action sequence. Gillen's performance is also very bizarre. Like many actors who are exquisite at playing a blank slate, he's awful when he has to go large.

This is too bad because there's a lot of great stuff in the first act of the film that comes immediately afterward.  There's lots of problems with that section too, but there's so much panache and things of genuine interest that I ended up forgiving them, but the problem is the broken first few minutes really primed me as a viewer to look for things that weren't working and by the New York Stock Exchange section, they had mounted up enough that I stopped engaging with the film.

Beyond that, the film's overt claims to realism undercut it's ability to get this stuff past me as well. The first film is so heavily embued with allegory and Joseph Campbell and montages that that stuff didn't bother me. The second film has such a larger than life presense in the Joker and takes place in a Gotham that's so extremely cartoonish in its Gothamness that whatever problems there were didn't bother me. The third film is set more firmly in our world than the other two. In the third, Gotham is squarely New York City. The day to day realities of the city are overtly more aligned with the day to day realities of NYC. By setting it in a more real world it becomes harder to overlook the stuff in it that doesn't feel real.

We're All Fucked: The "Election" Films, The Wire and The Future of Democracy

By Isaac Butler

I wrote a thing for the good folks at Hooded Utilitarian about the Hong Kong gangster saga Election/Triad Election, The Wire, and democracy.  The essay is completely spoiler free about the Election films, which, taken together are one of my favorite films of the aughts and are both available on Netflix Instant for the first time in awhile:

Many pixels have been spilled documenting David Simon’s perspective on our crumbling institutions of government.  As he told The Believer, societal institutions are like the Gods in Greek Tragedy, inexorable, powerful forces that undermine individual agency.  The truth teller in a Simon piece is always the head that’s eventually going to be on the block. Attempts to improve the overall situation are doomed to succeed only on a small level, and only for a brief period of time, but are still noble and worthwhile.  Simon believes in individuals. Individuals may, in fact, be the only thing in which he’ll invest his faith. This forms a tension with his Democratic Socialist political leanings and this tension is part of what makes his work so electric and alive when it is at its best.

The perspective of the Election films inverts this equation. In To’s Universe, individuals are the problem and institutional tradition’s bulwark against individual will is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The problem in the Election films is that post-Millenial capitalism, with its empowering of individual will, embrace of selfishness, and temptations of money has eroded these institutions to the point where they are a hollow, symbolic shell...

You can read the whole thing here. 

Danny Bowes on the End of Nolan's Batman

By Isaac Butler

Friend of the room Danny Bowes has a piece up in the motherfucking Atlantic!!!1!!!11! about the end of Nolan's Batman trilogy and how this is good for the character.  Read it here!

I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Batman, so long as his origin story isn't a significant part of it. We get it already!

Pulling Out Of Here To Win

by 99 Seats

Man, this post is way, way, way overdue. I actually meant to write about this stuff on the blog about a month ago, but events kept getting in the way. And then I meant to write it last week, but there was too much stuff going on. And then I meant to write it yesterday, but by then, I was tired from everything else. Today, though, today is quiet and relatively peaceful and I have some time to myself. So here it is.

I've left New York City.

On Tuesday morning, I got on a plane for Los Angeles. I'm writing this from my sublet in central L.A., sort of Thai-town, sort of Little Armenia, sort of Los Feliz, if any of those words mean anything to you. They mean only a little bit to me right now. But mostly they mean "home."

So how the hell did this happen? Like Hemingway's quote about going broke, gradually and then suddenly. I've been kicking around making this move for a while now. My reasons are about one-third professional, one-third personal and one-third that place where the personal and the professional overlap and become the spiritual.

On the professional tip, I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that I've felt fairly frustrated by the NYC theatre scene. I've been banging my head against its doors and ceilings for nearly two decades now and, honestly, I'm tired. I'm tired of busting my ass, gathering resources, calling in favors, stretching fifty-cents to make a dollar and then at the end of it, having a lot of bubkis to show for it. That's overly harsh. Let me soften it a bit: I don't know what else to do. One of the reasons I've been largely absent on this blog for the last few months has been an absolute torrent of work. I stepped down from the leadership of The New Black Fest and basically did project after project. Between about last November and this spring, I wrote two full-length plays (one a three-act bear), a longish one-act and two ten-minute plays. One of the ten-minute plays received a full production and three week run. The other ten minute play had a quick and dirty production for one night in a bar. The longish one-act got about a week of rehearsal, then a one-night presentation. About a month later, we got another whack at it, with another week's rehearsal and three performances, in a semi-staged manner. The two new plays got a few hours of rehearsal and then one-off readings. I also got a workshop presentation of another full-length play, a week or so of rehearsal for that, two performances, semi-staged. Oh, and a friend of mine who runs a community theatre in Rochester put together a reading of a group of my short plays. I think I'm even leaving some things out...Wait, I am. I also wrote a short holiday-themed piece for a reading series and two short pieces that I read myself, one at another reading series and one at a special event honoring a friend and colleague. Basically, from November until May, I had a deadline every week. Most of the work I did I consider some of my best. I grew as a writer. And many of these events were well-attended and well-received. All of which is, and should be, satifying enough. I'm doing better than a great number of writers I know and I am blessed for the opportunities I have. But.

My disdain for soccer is well-known amongst my friends. In particular, I'm dismissive of soccer because of the possibility of a 0-0 tie. That can't be a satisfactory result, no matter how brilliant your defensive plays are. As I joke (and I may have even stolen this joke from someone), those guys ran around for 90 minutes and I scored as many goals as they did. And I just sat here drinking a beer.

By the same logic, the guy at my local bar who sat there, every night for the last seven months, drinking cranberry and vodkas had as many productions as I did. I was just more winded.

At a certain point, you start thinking it's you. I can say all I want about structural this and structural that, and none of this doesn't mean those imbalances aren't true, but there's a certain point where you have to consider that nobody here really wants you. Or you don't know how to make them want you. And if that's the case, why keep digging this hole? I'm careening into my late thirties. If there's time to make a change, it's now.

I've always tried to be honest about my skills and abilities: I can write some pretty good dialogue, turn a good phrase here and there, and make a pretty decent joke. I prefer naturalism and realism to experimental theatre. I like contemporary stories, usually with a "ripped-from-the-headlines" feel. I'm attracted to the worlds of genre fiction, but I like tweaking it ever so slightly. The current trends in theatre run pretty much counter to all of that, unless you're a big enough name or can land a big enough name to make it to Broadway. I don't come with the kind of pedigree that opens doors on its own. I've felt stuck in a limbo. And sometimes, even my closest friends and colleagues have basically said, "You should be writing for television, not theatre." Generally in nicer terms than that. So...I may not actually be a playwright.

And if not, well, then, why not try my hand at another medium? At another city? So, to paraphrase the single worst phrase in modern sports history, I'm taking my talents to Venice Beach.

Please don't see this as "taking my toys and going home" or slinking out of town away from a trail of failure. I don't. I see it as a moment of clarity. I think I know what I'm doing, maybe for the first time in a decade. That's a good thing.

Personally...I've never lived more than an hour and a half from New York City. While those kind of roots are comforting, they can also hold you back. I wanted to see who I was without the back-drop of New York around me. Especially before I could never get out, never live anywhere else.

And thus and so, Flight 1691 brought me here, to a neighborhood that is really nothing like anything I've known. The closest equivalent is the farthest reaches of Queens, but that doesn't cover it. It's all just so slightly foreign. Mostly in good ways. I'm starting to like it.

A few nights before I left, I got some friends together at a bar and one of my closest friends and colleagues came by. The bar was in my old neighborhood of Inwood and he came all the way from the depths of Brooklyn, and so had to leave on the early side for the two hour ride back home. Right before he left, someone played Bruce Springsteen's gorgeous anthem "Thunder Road." And we belted it out lustily. This song fit my spirit and the time just perfectly. New York isn't exactly full of losers, but the feeling of breaking the bonds that hold you back and leaping out into the free air, that is what I felt. What I'm still feeling. I want to leave you with that. Even though I'm not leaving you at all. I'll still be sending dispatches from L.A. I do plan to take a whack at theatre out here and I know you're all just dying to hear more about TV writing. But for right now, close your eyes, listen to The Boss and think about driving down a sunlit road, the top down and a bright clear sky above you...

The "Brave"ry of Keeping Mom Alive

By Dorothy Fortenberry

(Editor's Note: Playwright, teacher and overall badass Dorothy Fortenberry sent me this great piece on Pixar's new film Brave. I know we're not doing an issue right now, but I thought it'd be nice to have some other voices on here from time to time.  Anyway, hope you enjoy it. )

Over a post-movie cupcake last week, through more than a few tears, I said to my husband, “The thing about Brave is that the mom is there. She's THERE.” In a world where Disney has seen fit to dispatch with the mothers of Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, Pocahontas, and Bambi, there is something revolutionary about a film where the mother not only lives, but behaves like a real character – making choices, making mistakes, and fighting bad guys. It's not as formally inventive as Wall-E or as elegant as Up, but for pure politics, Brave is truly something special. I also think it can't be a coincidence that Brave opened the same week that the Atlantic published Anne-Marie Slaughter's article “Why Women Can't Have it All.” (Or, apparently, as she wishes it were called, “Why Working Mothers Need Better Choices to Be Able to Stay in the Pool and Make It to the Top.”) 

Both the movie and the article say things that shouldn't be surprising, in fact, that should barely be interesting, but we live how we live, so they are.

To address concerns that both have provoked:  yes, they are totally and unapologetically about elites. Slaughter is working in a tiny, rarefied slice of the world, and she acknowledges it: “I am writing for my demographic – high-educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. . . We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.” Brave is a movie about a princess, and her mom is, as expected a queen. They don't really challenge their privilege and if there are repercussions for women farther down the ladder than Merida, those are way beyond the scope of the film. And, look, I certainly hope we'll soon see Pixar release a movie whose main character is a female marmoset or geologist or spatula, but I don't think it's an accident that they went traditional on this one. When you've made twelve movies in a row with male protags, you take your change where you can, and I would bet that the American families consuming Brave in their air-conditioned movie theaters have more in common with a medieval princess than they do with dirt-eating serfs. I think Slaughter might be both too optimistic and too pessimistic about the power of elites when she says that “We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart.” But I will say that the one person I know with an important, high-powered job who also telecommutes regularly in an environment that supports family-related flexibility works for a bunch of women at Planned Parenthood. Whose CEO is a woman and a mother and the daughter of a powerful woman, so, maybe, there you go.

Beyond merely portraying life of elite women, Brave and Slaughter demonstrate a central truth parenthood that is, like, the most obvious thing ever, but yet, we never see it in fiction: this stuff takes time. The actions of parenting can be pushed and squeezed somewhat, and if you have a job you can do at 8pm, maybe you can take your kid to the pediatrician's at 2, but, all of it takes time, and time is a finite resource. Slaughter's prescriptions for pushing back at the barriers mostly sound great to me – especially undercutting the culture of “time macho” in which people work late hours at the office because people work late hours at the office. I'd love to live in a world in which family time was respected for both men and women, and where we videoconferenced and teleconferenced and worked (sometimes) from home. But if we define “having it all” (a phrase that Slaughter now admits she never want to hear again) as “never having to worry or make any compromises,” then no one, male or female, will never have it all, and Brave shows why.

The story begins and was deftly marketed as a classic hero's story in which the spunky, rebellious, and brave Princess Merida defies her parents' wishes that she marry a prince and goes off on her own. But the strange and wonderful thing about the movie is that she never goes more than a day's journey from her castle. Instead, to undo the curse that she unwittingly placed on her mother, she stays put and teaches her mother how to adjust and adapt to her new form: showing her how to eat, helping her with her changed body . . . I don't think it's too much to say that the main action of this hero's quest is PARENTING. And it takes time, it's laborious and funny and surprising and physical and, above all, time-consuming. There is a certain amount of sheer labor that goes along with parenthood that cannot be outsourced or scaled back, even as there is much that can, and Merida's plans to, dare I say it, have it all are disrupted by this unexpected need to care-take. She thought (and we thought) she was riding off into the sunset for adventure, but instead she is nurturing someone she loves, because adventures are better if you have someone to share them with. My hope, of course, is that by the time Merida reaches the age for considering kids of her own, the kingdom will have instituted family-friendly leave policies and she'll be able to take a few years off before re-joining the adventure track.

It makes me hopeful that Slaughter's piece is stirring up conversation, and I want to believe it will stir up actual change on the part of employers. It makes me even more hopeful to have an action heroine who is also a compassion heroine, in a fairy tale where personal fulfillment and family commitments are reconciled. Now, I only have two more desires: that men's struggles to be equal parents are shown honestly and not bumblingly, and that someone re-release Nora Ephron's first film This Is My Life -- the other best depiction of the challenges of working motherhood, adolescent girls, and what happens when your mom turns into a completely different beast.

Bernie

By Isaac Butler

            What are we to make of the films of Richard Linklater? In his low-key Austinite way, Linklater has somehow assembled as diverse a film career as anyone outside of his good friend Steven Soderbergh.  Just think about it, the guy’s done everything from rotoscoped philosophical treatises to darkly comic science fiction to a bank heist movie, two classic romantic dramedies, two studio comedies (one excellent, one execrable), adaptations of plays by Eric Bogosian and Stephen Belber, and a bit of historical myth making about Orson Welles. His films don’t always work, but when they do they weave a particular kind of magic, one in which character and theme prove so fascinating that his disinterest in (or inability to manage) narrative all but disappears and you’re just happy hanging out, listening to these folks talk and interact.

            And, indeed, folks talkin’ is the primary reason to see Bernie, his new film, based on the true story of a murder in the sleepy town of Carthage, Texas.  Bernie is a curious film, equally influenced by Reds and The Thin Blue Line, in which actors (most notably Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey) reenact a story told through interviews with a mixture of actors and the real life people of Carthage, Texas, who in turn begin showing up in the narrative portions of the film. The interviews themselves are delightful. The subjects are colorful and charming, their speech peppered with the particular colloquialisms of East Texas.  Even as the film bogs down, you sense that it is doing so simply because Linklater loves his subjects too much to edit them.

            The film does bog down, however, largely because as a viewer it’s impossible not to get ahead of its story. You know as soon as Jack Black’s assistant funeral director Bernie meets Shirley MacLaine’s wealthy embittered widow Marjorie Nugent at her husband’s funeral, he will become her close friend and confidant, begin spending her money, murder her and be tried for it. What keeps you going through this journey is that, for the most part, it’s laugh out loud funny. The interview/reenactment scheme creates a healthy barrier of irony between the viewer and the story, and Linklater’s editing rhythms and musical choices keep reinforcing humor on a tonal level, even after Bernie turns into a murderer.

            The problem with Bernie is that its various parts don’t really go together.  What works about each component undermines something else in the film. The interview segments in the first half of the movie attempt to set up some kind of ambiguity about the kind of person Bernie actually is. Some interviewees claim he was a saint while others claim that he was, essentially, a gay con man who suckered widows out of their money. An actor’s job, however, is to create coherence and make specific choices. You cannot make the choice in a linear realistic film to play two different conflicting visions of a character.  

            It will perhaps shock no one that the take Black has on Bernie is heavily ironic, a bit self-mocking and lightly stylized. Jack Black is an explosive talent with limited range, and a tendency to break the films he is in simply through the outsized nature of his enthusiasms. Linklater has already directed School of Rock, one of the handful of films to properly contain Black. As stylized performances go, Black delivers a solid turn in Bernie, but it’s a performance that keeps you always distant from the film’s central character and the town’s love of him.

This becomes increasingly problematic in the second half of the film, where the project’s intent appears to shift again.  After Marjorie is murdered and Bernie starts spending her money on charity projects and improvements for the city of Carthage, the film tries to become probe questions about whether all the good someone does should be erased by one titanic act of evil.  But this is far too serious a concern for Linklater’s light hearted chillaxed approach, and neither Black nor McConaughey are up for suffusing their performances with philosophical inquiry.

What keeps the film watchable is Linklater’s obvious affection for the characters (portrayed and real-life) that dot the film, an affection made overt in the closing credits as we watch a performance of a pro-Bernie folk song and see footage of Jack Black meeting the real life figure he plays in the film.  But I wondered watching it with my wife and a friend—both of whom are Southerners— in a movie theater in suburban Minneapolis whether that affection will translate.  We laughed with recognition, as the people in the film reminded us of our families and their friends and all seem to be having such a good time being on camera talking about the roly-poly funeral director they loved. But there’s another way to read the film, as a zoo where you can go look at all the funny little rednecks, as a mean-spirited lampoon of the simpletons in rural America, a Waiting for Guffman but with real-life suckers playing themselves. I don’t think that’s what Linklater’s after—if anything animates his diverse oeuvre, it’s decency—but what an artist intends is not always what’s received.

Like the conflicted, contradictory impulses within the film, I find my own feelings about it refusing to cohere.  Bernie doesn’t work, but it’s quite enjoyable, and while the parts don’t add up to anything like a convincing sum, taken on their own they’re good. You might find yourself wishing that a more fastidious craftsman, someone like Bernie himself, say, had taken a gander at the screenplay before the film was made, but then again, fastidious craftsmen tend to cut everything out of movies like Linklater’s that make them so beguiling to begin with.

Gay British Androids Monitor Your Dreams: Some Thoughts on Prometheus

By Ben Owen

If you haven’t seen Prometheus, this post contains SPOILERS pretty much from the get-go.

I didn’t much like Prometheus. There were a few reasons. They’re a little difficult to parse, because some of them are critical in the manner of a film critic, while others have to do with my fannish fascination with the Alien franchise, and still others are to do with my bodily revulsion towards horror movies, particularly those that deal with disease, contamination, and parasites. It’s particularly complicated because that revulsion is also a large part of the reason that I love Alien and Aliens in the first place. I saw Aliens when I was ten and it fucked me up worse than any other film I’ve ever seen (including Snowbeast, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Labyrinth). It’s true to say that I love the Alien franchise so much because it made me feel so terrible.

So it seems somewhat perverse to say that I didn’t like Prometheus because it was so icky. But I think I may be annoyed at it because I experienced some of the same visceral shudder watching it that I experienced watching Alien and Aliens (or more properly in the nights after I watched them), and yet it wasn’t nearly as good as either of those films.

Its dialogue was stodgy and its symbolism cack-handed. Having your characters talk constantly about whether they have faith or not doesn’t mean your film has anything interesting to say about theology. It’s possible, though it seems unlikely, that the film’s ideas will come to seem more interesting as the franchise progresses, but the very fact that Prometheus is so obviously a franchise film in the contemporary mold is another reason for me not to like it. The original Alien gave us a brief glimpse of a much larger, more complicated story and then refused to tell it, which in turn gave its smaller main story a sense of life and depth—the knowledge that it existed at the fringes of weirder territory about which the viewer was invited to speculate (much as Alien’s kid-friendly contemporary, Star Wars, provided its audience with toy replicas of every extra in the movie, and made its fortune by inviting everyone to play out the stories not told within the limited confines of the film’s plot). My principle gripe with Prometheus is that it seems to suggest that everything will be revealed in plodding, expository sequence. The franchise has the quality of policing audience participation by tying it into expectations about what comes next, rather than open speculation about what already could be. My schema here is too simplistic—franchises obviously do give fans ways to speculate, but they’re different ways. Allow me my grumpiness, particularly because there’s no sense that the ideas or spectacles revealed will be worth the wait. Prometheus’s whole “we all come from alien gods” thesis has been done to death. It was done better in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was done with equal sophistication and less portentous nonsense in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Battlestar Galactica already spun it out into a complicated speculation about… uh… stuff, and despite Battlestar’s camptastic ending, it generally did so with an ambiguity and sophistication that Prometheus shows no sign of matching.

All that said, I liked Michael Fassbender, who comes close to redeeming the film. He plays the film’s only real character, a Gay British Android (GBA) named David. He belongs to a small but proud tradition of GBAs including Anthony Daniels’s C-3P0 and Jude Law’s robo-gigolo from A.I. Their gayness is encrypted, having less to do with homosexual desire, and instead subsisting at the level of their hyper-insistent artifice: their punctilious style, physical perfection, and status as not-quite human. In each, too, there is an absence of sexual desire that suggests the confirmed bachelorhood of the well-wrought closet (in the case of Law this gets emphasized precisely because his android sexbot routine is always just a show for women customers). We see their queerness in the shininess of all three, the radioactive hotness of Law and Fassbender, and the general fruitiness of their Received Pronunciation British accents.

I can’t quite figure out the valence of the GBA generally, what specific kind of politics or cultural work it’s doing. It has presumably changed over time, though it’s difficult to tell how much. Daniels’s C-3P0’s sissiness is played for comedy (a joke brilliantly but perhaps cruelly summarized by a brief sequence in Futurama, where Farnsworth creates a C-3P0 lookalike who, upon activation, asks, “Might I favor master with a tender kiss on the forehead?” and then gets crushed like the Terminator). There’s little comedy in Prometheus, and Fassbender’s David seems to be trying to annihilate humanity because humanity’s goals in creating him were disappointingly shoddy. In this way we might read David simply as a regressive stereotype of an evil queer, trying to wreak revenge on the world that excludes him from the plots of marriage and reproduction.

But David is also quite plainly the film’s antihero. Evil or not, his motivations seem much more interesting than the other characters’. In the third scene of the film Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth, the film’s final girl, gets a backstory that involves a gauzy and dull flashback of her father delivering a lecture on comparative religion. But the delightfully creepy plot mechanism that allows the viewer to see the flashback is that David has access to holographic visions of the human characters’ dreams while they are in suspended animation. David watches Elizabeth’s boring dream with the same detachment we do, searching it for her obvious character traits, just as we do. David himself doesn’t sleep because he’s an android, and so doesn’t dream. But he’s free to go watch Lawrence of Arabia during the long empty hours in space, and we see him particularly entranced by the moment where Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence lets the match burn out between his fingers. The metaphor is as heavy as any other in Prometheus, and yet there is something genuinely cool about its nesting of artifice—an artificial man (an android) watching another artificial man (a recording of an actor) delivering an aphorism about how to be an artificial man. The moment is particularly satisfying because the scene in Lawrence of Arabia can also be read as a cryptic meditation on Lawrence’s own queer sexuality—asexual and/or homosexual and/or masochist.

I fell for a similar device in WALL-E, watching the main character tentatively try out dance moves while watching Hello, Dolly! It’s nothing new to say that we rely upon androids to evoke a deeper identification than human characters (Data in Star Trek, everyone in Blade Runner, etc.) because their ability to perform as humans is always flawed, and we, as flawed humans, understand that. I may be talking myself into liking Prometheus more than it deserves. But Ridley Scott is best when telling the stories of androids. My favorite GBA is of course Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien, predecessor and successor to David. When he tells Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley that he admires the alien’s purity, he’s praising its style. Stylistic purity is—as DA Miller argues of Jane Austen’s free indirect discourse—the compensation for human weakness. Performing a perfect style allows the aesthete, the android, and the alien to stand outside of the weakness of actually having a fallible human body. It means, as O’Toole says in Lawrence of Arabia, not minding that it hurts.

In Prometheus it is David’s quality of committed, martyred style that made me root for him and his murderous scheme. I understand something of his motives, but I’d also like to see the world he would create. If humanity were as dull as the humanity on display in the film, then giving way to something more dynamic and interesting would make sense—aliens, x-men, cylons, Fassbenders. His apparent rapprochement with Elizabeth at the end of the film is a disappointment, and I kind of hope that in the next film it turns out to be another of his artifices—that he’ll carry on with his dream of an alien-bio-weapon Armageddon, and bring about a more stylish world.

EDITOR'S NOTE: There's a really absurd comment thread of IMBD that claims that this post "proves" that David betrays the crew of the Prometheus because he is gay and lusts after the Engineer's rock hard physique.  I hope it is very, very clear that that is not what the above post is arguing, as Ben is talking about ideas of gayness and artifice and how they interact with our portraits of artifical intelligence. He's also trying to identify a trope here, the Gay British Android and explore what that trope's meaning might be. 

Zombie Theories That Never Die

By Isaac Butler

Freddie DeBoer reminds us that, just as Barack Obama was born in the United States, Ferris Bueller is not a figment of Cameron Frye's imagination. 

This is a theory I was heretofore unaware of, but man is it stupid. 

Roman Polanski is not Alfred Dreyfus

By Isaac Butler

Since I happen to be in France right now, and since this issue appears to have come up once again in the Times... Roman Polanski is not Captain Alfred Dreyfus.  A comparison between the two would be insulting were it not absurd.  Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish French army officer wrongly accused of and framed for treason who was given two sham trials before finally being pardoned and then eventually fully exonerated so that he could continue to serve in the military of a country that despised him for being a Jew. It was a horrible episode in French history that revealed the anti-semetic undercurrents of European nationalism, currents which would then explode in France as the collaborationist government and every day citizens helped deport and exterminate tens of thousands of Jews living in France. 

Roman Polanski anally raped a drugged thirteen year old girl and fled the country rather than serving the very minor sentence he was given of ninety days of psychiatric evaluation at Chino State Prison. There's no equivalence here. But now that Polanski is making a film about Dreyfus, I have a feeling we'll be reading a lot of bullshit comparing the two of them. 

Oh, and note to the press: Can we stop referring to what Polanski did as "having sex with" a teenaged girl?