Every race has a dark horse, running at long odds. In this year's race for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, the dark horse may be GasLand (2010), a film by Josh Fox that takes on almost everyone in the Oil and Gas Industry, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton over the use of "fracking" -- hydraulic fracturing -- to extract natural gas from vast deposits all over the United States.
While he was Vice President, Dick Cheney forced a bill through Congress that exempts fracking from the reporting requirements of the Clean Air and Water Act. The drillers don't have to tell the public what's in the fracking liquid they mix with water and shoot into gas deposits where it can seep into the water supply or return to the surface, either to evaporate or to be carried off and dumped.
Fox makes the case that fracking injects dangerous chemicals deep underground to break up rock and shale, releasing vast quantities of natural gas, while polluting the water supplies of homes and towns near the wells, which, if natural gas drilling proceeds as planned, will be just about every home and town in America. The industry denies the charge that fracking poisons the environment and the people and animals who depend on the environment for clean water.
Formally, GasLand is about as simple as documentary film gets. Maybe a Ken Burns special, cobbled together from old photos, with voice over and dramatic music, requires less of the film maker, but not much less. The subject of GasLand is Fox and his quest for information about what fracking is and what it is doing to people and the environment. We tag along, learning as we go. The form will be familiar to anyone who has seen Supersize Me (2004), Religulous (2008), or any of Michael Moore's films. GasLand adheres closely to the form. We take a road trip, talk to people who have had their water poisoned by the frackers, see some drinking water catching fire right out of the tap, animals losing their fur, sick people describing their symptoms, big names in the oil and gas industry, including Boone Pickens, refusing to be interviewed, politicians ducking and obfuscating.
Fox has a personal stake in the issue. He owns 14 acres of unspoiled land in Pennsylvania -- his boyhood home -- that the gas industry is trying to lease for $100,000. Fox doesn't try to make the industry's offer into a will he lease or won't he lease cliff hanger. We find out he won't early in the film. The element of suspense in GasLand is situational. The issue of fracking is far from settled. Legislation to undo Cheney's exemption of natural gas drilling from the reporting requirements of the Clean Air and Water Act is still working its way through Congress, and Pennsylvania and New York are struggling with the problem of how to protect their water supplies from the frackers. All of that counts in GasLand's favor. Timeliness is a plus for documentaries.
Fox is immensely likable. His rap is pleasant, his voice easy on the ears. Strangely enough -- and maybe it's the landscape he's traveling through -- he reminds me of Don Johnson in A Boy And His Dog (1975). That Fox is able to conjure up an apocalyptic premonition of the future, using video of natural gas drillers at work in people's backyards and tap water catching fire, is a sign of his considerable talent.
Nevertheless, GasLand is a dark horse in the Oscar sweepstakes, because it's ahead of its time. To work as exposé, it has to make fracking relevant and build some outrage against the natural gas industry. Two of its competitors, Inside Job (2010) and Restrepo (2010) just have to tap into the outrage over the global financial meltdown and the war in Afghanistan that already exists.
GasLand is available on YouTube here.
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)
Whether or not Exit Through The Gift Shop wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary, British artist Banksy's light-hearted romp through the world of underground street art is shaping up as a win for Banksy, for his fellow street artists, and even for the collectors who, according to Banksy, bought $1 million worth of kitsch, conceived and produced with Banksy's help by the documentary filmmaker turned street artist: Thierry Guetta, a.k.a. "Mr. Brainwash." If the eBay value of the work the L.A. art geeks bought at Mr. Brainwash's massive 2008 Life Is Beautiful show is rising and falling with his fame, the geeks should be in better shape now than they were before Banksy released his chronicle of MBW's rise to stardom. MBW himself has made out quite well. In addition to the cash from his 2008 show, he landed a Madonna CD cover -- thereby meeting the minimum requirement for consideration as a serious graphic artist -- and he treated himself to a NYC show last year. But the biggest winner of all is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' mysterious "demopol", the nominating system that filled the Academy's hand in the category of Best Documentary by including Banksy's comedy among the five contenders.
Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) Trailer banksyfilms
As the voting draws to a close, Academy members can choose from a list of documentaries that includes exposés of the global financial system and the natural gas industry, a film portrait of a rifle platoon on the ground in Afghanistan, and, remarkably, two documentaries about artists and the impact art has on people's lives. One of them is Waste Land (2010), Lucy Walker's sensitive study of Brazilian-born artist Vik Munoz and the catadores who separate recyclables from garbage at Rio's Jardim Gramacho, the biggest landfill in the world. Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is the other one. It is, at the same time, an entertaining recollection and an "exposé" of the art scene. Lucy Walker had to walk a thin line between portraying her subjects and exploiting them. Banksy never had that problem. He just had to have fun.
Exploitation and expropriation is the main -- if not the only -- point to street art, formerly known as graffiti. The streets are the canvas, and, in Banksyland at night, they belong to art and to artists in search of a perfect wall. Exit Through The Gift Shop puts Banksy's permanent mark on street art and the L.A. art scene. It's a clever expropriation of underground street art and the artists who make it, especially Mr. Brainwash, who set out to document Banksy and got documented himself. The streets and street art belong to whomever can control them, and, in Exit Through the Gift Shop at least, Banksy is in full control.
Artists synthesize experience. The successful ones also manage to create self-sustaining systems in which the sale of their work fuels the creation of more work until the balance tips in their favor and they are making enough money to expand the scope of their work. They become a brand. Banksy, of course, is there. He's able to sustain his own work, run an art factory, finance the work of other artists, and move out into new forms. And, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, Banksy has a flair for film.
Exit Through The Gift Shop is the most personal of the documentaries up for an Academy Award this year. It's cinema verité that is exceptionally well done, and it neatly demonstrates the power of narrative to structure time and to entertain.
Banksy has the conventions of the exposé film down pat: the hooded sweatshirt, the pixilated faces, the voice-over that ties fragments of film together. He understands the use of foreshadowing as well as he understands what Tom Wolfe called "le monde", the insular little world of art makers, art dealers and art collectors. The first time we meet Mr. Brainwash, he's pawning off cheap clothes with unusual stitching as expensive designer clothes. The last time we see him, he's just sold a million bucks worth of art that's as questionable, from Banksy's point of view, as the money Banksy forged -- with Princess Di's face in place of the Queen's -- but was afraid to distribute. There is no law against the sale of bad art. As Wolfe famously noticed, le monde is very small, and collectors have always been driven to get in on the ground floor, running the risk of buying bargain basement clothes at designer prices, or near art -- the equivalent of the peripheral junk you pick up when you exit a museum through the gift shop.
But it is the brilliance of his editing, the way he alters reality by juxtaposing events, sequencing and resequencing time and space to sculpt a reality that never was or could be in the so-called real world, that finally sets Banksy apart. Somehow, from fragments of experience, recorded on hundreds of tapes, Banksy pulls together a complete narrative that, really, could not be any other narrative and still fit together so well. What's real and what isn't? Does it matter? I doubt there are two viewers anywhere who would agree on how much of Banksy's documentary is "made up" to provide continuity and context, or just to make a point. (Personally, I doubt Mr. Brainwash's grilling at the hands of Disneyland security after Banksy -- in one of the film's funniest scenes -- inserts a life-size, blow-up doll, wearing a black hood and orange Gitmo jumpsuit, into the Disney landscape. But I enjoy the Disneyland footage anyway.)
If Exit Through The Gift Shop -- and Banksy's work in general -- has a weakness, it's that his work is political. Banksy has a message. It's a cool message, but a message nevertheless, and Banksy has to lock it down. He can't leave room for the viewer to miss the point. He can't chance the kind of complexity that would make his art polyreferential, the kind of work that points to a multitude of things at once. Maybe that kind of work -- work that empowers the viewer to participate more in making the art -- would require Banksy to give up more control of his turf than he's willing to do right now.
And, finally, there is this. The Life Is Beautiful show's success is all the more remarkable, because it occurs in 2008 when the American economy was already in free fall and the fault line, separating rich America and poor America -- a fissure conservatives had been hammering on since Reagan -- finally split, sending the two Americas drifting apart, though not so far apart that the poor Americans can't still see rich America and the American dream sailing away, forever out of reach. Will the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences be able to ignore that coincidence and judge Banksy's work on its artistic merits alone?
Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is available from Netflix and Amazon.
Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) Trailer banksyfilms
As the voting draws to a close, Academy members can choose from a list of documentaries that includes exposés of the global financial system and the natural gas industry, a film portrait of a rifle platoon on the ground in Afghanistan, and, remarkably, two documentaries about artists and the impact art has on people's lives. One of them is Waste Land (2010), Lucy Walker's sensitive study of Brazilian-born artist Vik Munoz and the catadores who separate recyclables from garbage at Rio's Jardim Gramacho, the biggest landfill in the world. Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is the other one. It is, at the same time, an entertaining recollection and an "exposé" of the art scene. Lucy Walker had to walk a thin line between portraying her subjects and exploiting them. Banksy never had that problem. He just had to have fun.
Exploitation and expropriation is the main -- if not the only -- point to street art, formerly known as graffiti. The streets are the canvas, and, in Banksyland at night, they belong to art and to artists in search of a perfect wall. Exit Through The Gift Shop puts Banksy's permanent mark on street art and the L.A. art scene. It's a clever expropriation of underground street art and the artists who make it, especially Mr. Brainwash, who set out to document Banksy and got documented himself. The streets and street art belong to whomever can control them, and, in Exit Through the Gift Shop at least, Banksy is in full control.
Artists synthesize experience. The successful ones also manage to create self-sustaining systems in which the sale of their work fuels the creation of more work until the balance tips in their favor and they are making enough money to expand the scope of their work. They become a brand. Banksy, of course, is there. He's able to sustain his own work, run an art factory, finance the work of other artists, and move out into new forms. And, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, Banksy has a flair for film.
Exit Through The Gift Shop is the most personal of the documentaries up for an Academy Award this year. It's cinema verité that is exceptionally well done, and it neatly demonstrates the power of narrative to structure time and to entertain.
Banksy has the conventions of the exposé film down pat: the hooded sweatshirt, the pixilated faces, the voice-over that ties fragments of film together. He understands the use of foreshadowing as well as he understands what Tom Wolfe called "le monde", the insular little world of art makers, art dealers and art collectors. The first time we meet Mr. Brainwash, he's pawning off cheap clothes with unusual stitching as expensive designer clothes. The last time we see him, he's just sold a million bucks worth of art that's as questionable, from Banksy's point of view, as the money Banksy forged -- with Princess Di's face in place of the Queen's -- but was afraid to distribute. There is no law against the sale of bad art. As Wolfe famously noticed, le monde is very small, and collectors have always been driven to get in on the ground floor, running the risk of buying bargain basement clothes at designer prices, or near art -- the equivalent of the peripheral junk you pick up when you exit a museum through the gift shop.
But it is the brilliance of his editing, the way he alters reality by juxtaposing events, sequencing and resequencing time and space to sculpt a reality that never was or could be in the so-called real world, that finally sets Banksy apart. Somehow, from fragments of experience, recorded on hundreds of tapes, Banksy pulls together a complete narrative that, really, could not be any other narrative and still fit together so well. What's real and what isn't? Does it matter? I doubt there are two viewers anywhere who would agree on how much of Banksy's documentary is "made up" to provide continuity and context, or just to make a point. (Personally, I doubt Mr. Brainwash's grilling at the hands of Disneyland security after Banksy -- in one of the film's funniest scenes -- inserts a life-size, blow-up doll, wearing a black hood and orange Gitmo jumpsuit, into the Disney landscape. But I enjoy the Disneyland footage anyway.)
If Exit Through The Gift Shop -- and Banksy's work in general -- has a weakness, it's that his work is political. Banksy has a message. It's a cool message, but a message nevertheless, and Banksy has to lock it down. He can't leave room for the viewer to miss the point. He can't chance the kind of complexity that would make his art polyreferential, the kind of work that points to a multitude of things at once. Maybe that kind of work -- work that empowers the viewer to participate more in making the art -- would require Banksy to give up more control of his turf than he's willing to do right now.
And, finally, there is this. The Life Is Beautiful show's success is all the more remarkable, because it occurs in 2008 when the American economy was already in free fall and the fault line, separating rich America and poor America -- a fissure conservatives had been hammering on since Reagan -- finally split, sending the two Americas drifting apart, though not so far apart that the poor Americans can't still see rich America and the American dream sailing away, forever out of reach. Will the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences be able to ignore that coincidence and judge Banksy's work on its artistic merits alone?
Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is available from Netflix and Amazon.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Restrepo (2010)
View Larger Map
As you zoom in, the arrow points to the opening of Afghanistan's Korengal Valley at the Pech River, northwest of Asadabad, near the Pakistan border. The Korengal valley is the location of what has been, arguably, the most documented engagement between U.S. forces and the local Taliban and their allied foreign fighters in Afghanistan. The fight for control of the Korengal Valley has been recorded in award-winning photographs, a long article in the New York Times Magazine, and, of particular interest, in Restrepo, a direct cinema film by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger that's available for sale or rental as a DVD and as streaming video from Netflix and Amazon. The film won an award at Sundance last year, and it's been nominated for an Academy Award. There is not a lot of direct cinema around anymore, and this one deals with a serious subject, with life and death decisions. On top of that, it must have been an exceptionally hard film to make.
The Hetherington-Junger documentary illustrates the difference between documentary film on the one hand and photographs and print on the other for practioners of the art and for viewers of documentary films as well. The challenges the film makers face in Restrepo are the same challenges direct cinema and cinéma vérité film makers always face: telling a story without narration, tying episodes together seamlessly, slapping on enough detail to make the film come to life and give viewers a sense of being there. In addition, they had to stay alive.
OP Restrepo as it appears in the film. Whoever shot this scene is outside the outpost, exposed to enemy fire. (Update: Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in Misrata, Libya, 4/20/2011.)
The efforts of the film makers and the film's subjects, the professional soldiers of the Second Platoon of Battle Company, are exceptional, but, as film, Restrepo is not exceptional. As document, it fills some gaps that photography and print can't fill, and, for a few minutes, it achieves brilliance, but it relies too much on photography, print and a viewer's personal memories to fill the gaps in its incarnation as a 90-minute feature film. I suspect there is an exceptional 30-minute film buried in Restrepo, but, if it's there, Junger and Hetherington didn't find it.
The experience of art is a collaboration between the artist and the audience, and fragmented videos like Restrepo require viewers to participate to an unusual extent. The more we know about combat, the more gaps we can fill and the more complete and convincing Restrepo seems, especially as we recall the film a couple of days later, after the images have sunk in.
Restrepo was brought to my attention by a Marine who thought it captured the essence of combat better than any film he'd seen. He and I are both aware of the movie's many shortcomings, its lack of a central theme beyond the notion that war is hell, its episodic and elliptical nature, the absence of a point-of-view that reveals what the GIs are shooting at -- we see bombs, rockets and mortars going off in the valley, but most of the time the soldiers could be firing their own weapons into thin air for all we know -- but, for him, the personalities of the soldiers make the film worthwhile. For me, it's the greasy grill in the snack bar, the cramped bunks, the mysterious spotting device that looks like it was covered up to keep us from seeing what it is. More cerebral than my Marine friend, I admire the idea of OP Restrepo, the gesture, while he admires the spirit of the men who manned the post.
For others, the appeal of Restrepo may lie in the irony of viewing a film about combat in the Korengal Valley, knowing that American troops withdrew from that valley in April of 2010, after entering it 5 years earlier specifically to pick a fight with the Taliban and the foreign fighters there. America did not stay the course in the Korengal Valley. Some might say the soldiers and Marines who died there died in vain. And some might say that the valley is a metaphor for America's war in Afghanistan, a war that is sure to end in some kind of stalemate, with neither the United Nations nor the Taliban winning a clearcut victory.
Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger were embedded with U.S. troops in the Korengal Valley off and on during 2007 and 2008. Other reporters were there at the same time, notably, Elizabeth Rubin. Her story for the New York Times Magazine, Battle Company Is Out There, with photos by Lynsey Addario, fills most of Restrepo's gaps. Indeed, Restrepo works best for me when I think of it as video that illustrates Rubin's article.
Restrepo The Movie, a web site devoted to promoting the film and Junger's book version of the fight for the Korengal Valley, War, has photos of the 2nd Platoon, video interviews, some outcuts from the film and some Hetherington pictures. A little blog at the site has an entry that reminds us that Juan Restrepo was a real person who died in combat and is remembered and mourned by his family.
Reading the Rubin article and spending some time at the Restrepo web site before you watch the film -- or reading Rubin and visiting the film's web site, then viewing the film again if you've already seen it -- may add to the depth of your viewing experience. It's something I'd recommend you do.
The web site tells us that Restrepo is "an entirely experiential film: the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 90-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you." And, describing their film -- in all modesty I suppose, --- the directors themselves assure us that: "This is reality."
But the reality is that Junger and Hetherington's cameras do leave the valley. They go to Italy with Battle Company when the company redeploys, and the film makers take the soldiers of Battle Company into a studio and interview them there. Ironically, those interviews, those remembrances of combat, provide the glue that holds the video fragments Junger and Hetherington recorded on the ground in Afghanistan together. And it is the interviews that come just before some fragments of video shot in the middle of operation Rock Avalanche, a six-day fight around the village of Yaka China, that -- for a few minutes -- lift Restrepo to the level of brilliant documentary.
Like Junger's documentary book, A Perfect Storm, Junger and Hetherington's Restrepo is about death, even to the extent that, if nobody had been killed during the year they spent making the film, it's doubtful Restrepo would have been distributed. But American soldiers did die in the Korengal Valley that year, and, as he did in A Perfect Storm, although he does not attend their deaths, Junger recreates their dying. To be sure, Junger does not presume to tell us how it feels to die in combat the way he told us how it feels to drown in A Perfect Storm. We learn from the soldiers that "Doc" Restrepo, the medic for whom outpost Restrepo and the film are named, was wounded soon after he arrived in the valley and bled to death in a medevac helicopter on the way to a field hospital. We're not there when Restrepo dies. But when another soldier, Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle, is killed, we're as close to the action and to the emotions of his comrades as it's possible to get without being there.
There is something uncomfortable -- disrespectful maybe --about deconstructing a film that shows an American soldier dying in a war that is, for some of us, morally, strategically and even tactically ambiguous. After five years of fighting for the valley, the battleground turned out to be of no strategic value. The tactic of seizing the high ground and setting up an outpost -- OP Restrepo -- to draw the enemy in did not work. The attack on the outpost never came, and Battle Company's CO, Dan Kearney, was forced to take his soldiers down the valley to engage the Taliban in Operation Rock Avalanche, a long battle that is the climax of the film and the low point of Battle Company's deployment in the Korangel Valley.
Veteran combat photographers used to advise rookies to use fast film, a fast shutter, stop down, focus at 10 meters and shoot anything that moves. That works to illustrate a story, but to tell a story with pictures, especially one that unfolds over months of fighting, much of it at night, needs a better plan.
Elizabeth Rubin says she went to Afghanistan with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? After a few days, that question sparked others. Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? Why were more American troops being killed every year?
Those questions led Rubin to focus her article on the life and death decisions being made every day in the Korengal Valley and on the man making most of them: Dan Kearney, the lord of the Korengal Valley. She follows Kearney through a fire fight that ends with him killing a woman and a child when he destroys a house with armor-piercing missiles, and on into Operation Rock Avalanche, a mission Rubin says many thought insane. It's during Rock Avalanche that Rubin's rendition of the battle for the Korengal Valley syncs up with Junger's and Hetherington's in her account of the action that cost Staff Sergeant Rougle his life.
I followed Piosa through the brush toward the ridge. We came upon Rice and Specialist Carl Vandenberge behind some trees. Vandenberge was drenched in blood. The shot to his arm had hit an artery. Rice was shot in the stomach. A soldier was using the heating chemicals from a Meal Ready to Eat to warm Vandenberge and keep him from going into shock.It may be that some day someone like Sebastian Junger or Elizabeth Rubin will write a book, and the electronic version of that book will include hyperlinks to video clips that illustrate the author's prose. The words and images and sounds will all come together in the same work, a new kind of art that combines the best of narrative, video, photography and sound.
Piosa moved on to the hill where the men had been overrun. I saw big blue-eyed John Clinard, a sergeant from North Carolina, falling to pieces. He worshiped Rougle. “Sergeant Rougle is dying. It’s my fault. . . . I’m sorry. . . . I tried to get up the hill. . . .” Sergeant Rougle was lying behind him. Someone had already covered him with a blanket. Only the soles of his boots were visible.
“There’s nothing you could do,” Piosa said, grabbing Clinard’s shoulder. “You got to be the man now. You can do it. I need you to get down to Rice and Vandenberge and get them to the medevac.” Clinard wiped his face, seemed to snap to and headed off through the trees.
Or maybe we'll have to keep pulling that kind of work together ourselves, creating cathedrals of our own imagining like my recollection of Restrepo, with chapels by Rubin and Junger, stained glass windows by Hetherington and Addario, statues of Restrepo, Rougle, Kearney and Sal Giunta, the first living Medal of Honor recipient since the Vietnam War, clips from YouTube put up there by GIs -- and high up on a back roof a little gargoyle fashioned from these thoughts.
Restrepo is available from Netflix and Amazon.
Friday, December 4, 2015
Combat Obscura (2019)
When she finished reading Into The Wild, my
daughter wrote "one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered
experience" on her full-length mirror in greasy, red lipstick from
Lasting Finish's Kate Moss collection.
In the age of streamers and
unlimited bandwidth, the World Wide Web offers more than its share of
unfiltered viewing experiences to eat up the bandwidth of the Web and of people
the center of whose lives the Web has become.
Of the two best known streamers, Netflix seems to be streaming better video than Amazon Prime these days. Both The Keepers and Roma, a film that probably should have been a series, were worth watching. But Amazon has streamed Combat Obscura (2019), distributed and promoted by Oscilloscope Labs, a viewing experience that may turn out to be more iconic and important than anything Netflix has come up with yet.
Combat Obscura is episodic, elliptical and, yes, unfiltered by anything except the time and bandwidth allotted to it by Amazon. Taped by Miles Lagoze, a Marine Corps videographer assigned to Helmand Province in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012, shortly after Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger were nominated for an Academy Award for Restrepo (2010), Combat Obscura is a fragmented and blurred view of combat, obscured not so much by the fog of war as by the videographer's tunnel vision, his shaky camera and his inability to decide what if anything is important. It's a restless, no point, no center, no grasp, searching but not finding kind of video. We never know where we are or when we are. Restlessness and indecision worry and finally defeat the entire video. Even video of a fire fight and a Marine with a head wound, the best combat footage in the video, fails to satisfy. The camera moves away from the wounded Marine just as the realization that he has been shot begins to sink in. Institutions like the Marine Corps imprint themselves on people like bulldog tattoos. Lagoze has a chance to mine that vein. He lets the moment pass him by.
I don't doubt there are viewers who will find Lagoze's tapes hard hitting and revealing. But for others they will be a collection of tropes. We've seen Marines and soldiers smoking dope so many times it would be surprising if they didn't smoke in front of Lagoze. And we've seen things far worse on YouTube than the body of Lagoze's dead shopkeeper, an Afghan apparently shot by mistake. Even the Marine Corps finally decided the stolen tapes weren't worth worrying about.
It's amazing how little we see that is new in the 68 minutes Combat Obscura takes up in our lives. Except for a few scenes and images whose promises are unfulfilled, most of the content is uninspired. The form of the video may be worth talking about, however, if we can find a way to do that.
Since the footage is only structured by the videographer's tour of duty and what he could steal of his own and other videographers' work when his tour ended, deconstructing it ("unpacking" is the current buzzword) would do more harm than good. Although you might think that deconstruction would lighten the load a film or video carries, the opposite is true. Deconstruction lays on a heavy burden of significance that a little video like Combat Obscura would never bear up under. We should settle for describing it if we can. What we need is something to compare it to.
But it's not that easy to say what Combat Obscura is like. Is it a Marine videographer's journey from youth to manhood? A coming of age story, a personal odyssey as Lagoze claims? We would have to take his word for that. There is no evidence of growth in the video itself. Even the fact that the videography seems to improve over time might be explained by the fact that Lagoze didn't shoot those segments. Is it a "home movie" then? It seems too intentional for that. And the aim is negative. Most of us don't shoot video of our friends and family to embarrass them. There is an urban myth that demonstrators spat on soldiers and Marines returning from Vietnam. That never happened. But Lagoze appears to have something like that in mind. "Stop looking at these kids as heroes," he told Stars and Stripes during a phone interview before the video's release.
As a "war film" Combat Obscura begs to be compared to Restrepo. Lagoze actually told The Daily Beast that he thought he was up to something "Restrepoesque" when he was on assignment in Afghanistan. If he was, he failed to pull it off. Unlike Combat Obscura, Restrepo has a focal point. We know where we are, when we are and why we are there. Operation Rock Avalanche, a long battle at the climax of Restrepo, fixes the action of that film in time and space. Nothing in Combat Obscura even comes close. The creators of Combat Obscura ask us to buy the idea that narrative and structure are unnecessary to film and video, even undesirable, but Lagoze and Oscilloscope Labs haven't closed that sale with me.
What Combat Obscura is most like is the information leaks that WikiLeaks dumps into the blogosphere now and then for the media to amplify. And in a world where journalism professors call leaks the lifeblood of journalism, that may be the future of streaming video. If that's the case, distributors like Oscilloscope Labs should give up the idea that the leaks have to be feature length and bundle short videos like tranches of sub-prime mortgages or collections of lipsticks. And beyond that, maybe the way of the future is to cut out middle men like WikiLeaks and Oscilloscope Labs and stream video from drones, satellites, surveillance cameras and videographers like Miles Lagoze in real time to pump a constant intravenous fix of unfiltered experience directly into our bruised and swollen brains.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Equus
A child is born into a world of phenomena, all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes over the whole, uncountable range. Suddenly, one strikes. Then another. Then another. Why? Moments snap together, like magnets forging a chain of shackles. Why?” -- Equus (1977) United Artists
Equus is art that manages to be about violence without adding to the culture of violence. Neither the Peter Shaffer play nor the 1977 film adaptation by Sidney Lumet are likely to provoke copycats to act out the violence that is the subject of their art. Alan Strang, the boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike, doesn't inspire admiration or contempt, only pity. His cruel attack on demigods of his own creation is a desperate act, performed in the midst of despair and excruciating mental pain.
Alan Strang's parents are unable to explain their son's madness and they're not willing to shoulder any responsibility for Strang. While Shaffer hints at the roles Strang's mother's religiosity and repressed sexuality and his father's hypocrisy may have played in Alan's descent into a secret world, ruled by improbable gods, ultimately, Shaffer lets the parents and society off the hook. The connections are just too complex.
Self-flagellation. Equus (1977) United Artists Peter Firth as Alan Strang
One of the reasons Equus works is that it grounds itself in antiquity and refers to fundamentally important things like the struggle between reason and emotion, the Appollonian versus the Dyonesian in culture. The role of psychiatry in Shaffer's Equus is to civilize the child, to bend the individual's will, even his grasp of reality, to the demands of society, even if the unique and creative individual is destroyed in the process.
Equus distances us from the violence it portrays by beginning and ending with: "Why?"
As a play, Equus naturally involves the viewer as spectator more than participant. And, being a British play by a British playwright, it lacks the cultural references to the Westward Expansion that are so readily available to American artists. But even the film version by American director Sidney Lumet, though it occasionally adopts a subjective point of view and graphically depicts the blinding of the horses, manages balance. It doesn't just dramatize the struggle between nature and civilization -- between what Levi-Strauss called the raw and the cooked -- it honestly wrestles with the dilemma and achieves, if not a solution, at least a resolution to the conflict between freedom and conformity. It wraps the action of the film up in literate and reasonable discourse about a difficult subject. For better or for worse, it is a cerebral film. And it's an honest one, because the author doesn't pretend to answer the unanswerable. He -- and we -- must settle for stasis -- as painful as that may be.
Ultimately, of course, it is not Alan Strang but Martin Dysart, the child psychiatrist appointed by a British court to ease Alan's pain -- and the one person in the film who has a moral dilemma -- who ends up in chains.
Account for me, Equus demands.
Dysart can no more account for Equus than I can rule out the possibility that some word of mine, some thought, floating loose in the blogosphere where everything is connected to everything else, will forge the last link in a lethal chain some sad day.
Equus is art that manages to be about violence without adding to the culture of violence. Neither the Peter Shaffer play nor the 1977 film adaptation by Sidney Lumet are likely to provoke copycats to act out the violence that is the subject of their art. Alan Strang, the boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike, doesn't inspire admiration or contempt, only pity. His cruel attack on demigods of his own creation is a desperate act, performed in the midst of despair and excruciating mental pain.
Alan Strang's parents are unable to explain their son's madness and they're not willing to shoulder any responsibility for Strang. While Shaffer hints at the roles Strang's mother's religiosity and repressed sexuality and his father's hypocrisy may have played in Alan's descent into a secret world, ruled by improbable gods, ultimately, Shaffer lets the parents and society off the hook. The connections are just too complex.
Equus distances us from the violence it portrays by beginning and ending with: "Why?"
As a play, Equus naturally involves the viewer as spectator more than participant. And, being a British play by a British playwright, it lacks the cultural references to the Westward Expansion that are so readily available to American artists. But even the film version by American director Sidney Lumet, though it occasionally adopts a subjective point of view and graphically depicts the blinding of the horses, manages balance. It doesn't just dramatize the struggle between nature and civilization -- between what Levi-Strauss called the raw and the cooked -- it honestly wrestles with the dilemma and achieves, if not a solution, at least a resolution to the conflict between freedom and conformity. It wraps the action of the film up in literate and reasonable discourse about a difficult subject. For better or for worse, it is a cerebral film. And it's an honest one, because the author doesn't pretend to answer the unanswerable. He -- and we -- must settle for stasis -- as painful as that may be.
Richard Burton as Martin Dysart Equus (1977) United Artists
Ultimately, of course, it is not Alan Strang but Martin Dysart, the child psychiatrist appointed by a British court to ease Alan's pain -- and the one person in the film who has a moral dilemma -- who ends up in chains.
Account for me, Equus demands.
Dysart can no more account for Equus than I can rule out the possibility that some word of mine, some thought, floating loose in the blogosphere where everything is connected to everything else, will forge the last link in a lethal chain some sad day.
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011)
The tide of popular culture turns amazingly fast. The rise of one myth flows in over the ebb of another, wiping out all traces of the receding myth, until that myth returns to lap even farther up the beach than before. So it goes with pop culture versions of the fall of man. They keep coming back.
In the Fifties, the French writer Romain Gary raised the issue of mankind's survival in The Roots of Heaven. Gary's protagonist is Morel, an ordinary French dentist who goes over to the elephants in French Equatorial Africa. Morel is a misanthrope, but Gary, it turns out, is not. The ending of the novel is a tribute to the human spirit. The Fifties were the time of the beat generation, of cool, of jazz, grass, the Korean War, the rise and fall of McCarthy, the presidency of Eisenhower, the post-war boom, the poetry of Patchen and Ginsberg, the death of Robert Capa, the fall of Dien Bien Phu and Brown v. Board of Education.
Just seven years later, Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, contemplated the extinction of mankind and the rise of the ape as the torchbearer of civilization throughout the universe. The Sixties were the time of the hippies, the Cold War ascendent, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, the Civil Rights movement, acid and acid rock, the Vietnam War, the fall of Lyndon Johnson and the rise of Nixon. Alan Ginsberg lived to see Chicago cops riot against the sons and daughters of America's middle class who had tuned in, turned on, dropped out and come back swinging against the war and the draft. I was just back from Germany where I had put in my two years as a medic at an Army hospital, getting high and shooting up Thorazine to improve my tan, so I passed on Chicago myself, but I did show my younger brother how to curl up into a ball to protect his nuts when the cops started beating him. I sent him off to Chicago with a bright red bandana to cover his nose and mouth when the tear gas began to fly.
Boulle's Planet of the Apes didn't speculate about the causes of the rise of the apes as the dominant species in the far reaches of the galaxy, or about the extinction of man and the rise of the apes on our own planet. Boulle simply presented the success of ape culture and the failure of mankind as a fact. For some unknown reason, man was just not good enough.
When Twentieth Century Fox produced the film version of Boulle's book, they apparently thought they owed the viewer an explanation. The plot of Planet of the Apes (1968) hangs on a malfunctioning starship that plunges back to Earth instead of landing on a planet at the far end of the galaxy, and on a nuclear war that wipes out the human race, letting apes take over the planet while the starship and its astronauts are gone.
In Fox's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), the human race is wiped out -- probably -- by a virus. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody takes seriously the idea that man will be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. And we're not worried about rogue computers turning on the human race anymore. The peril now is biological. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a virus that makes apes smart enough to talk and to break out of an ape jail in San Francisco is deadly to humans and highly contagious to boot. Good thing for the apes, of course, since, without the intervention of the virus they would have had one good day of beating up on the cops before the bombs started to fall.
The idea that apes can beat up cops is as silly as the notion that hippies can beat up cops. It's just more Hollywood eyewash in the style of the Na'vi beating down the guns and machines of corporate America to liberate Pandora in Fox's Avatar (2009). But there is a strong odor of misanthropy and self-hatred about the idea that resonates with establishment critics like David Denby of The New Yorker.
Here's Denby, waxing poetic over scenes of apes, invading a research facility. "When the apes, like water bursting through a dam, pour through the building's glass walls at different levels," Denby exults, "the image is a pop epiphany of freedom."
Something like ice breaking up and cascading down a raging river as a metaphor for revolution I suppose.
The high water mark is definitely creeping up the sand.
In the Fifties, the French writer Romain Gary raised the issue of mankind's survival in The Roots of Heaven. Gary's protagonist is Morel, an ordinary French dentist who goes over to the elephants in French Equatorial Africa. Morel is a misanthrope, but Gary, it turns out, is not. The ending of the novel is a tribute to the human spirit. The Fifties were the time of the beat generation, of cool, of jazz, grass, the Korean War, the rise and fall of McCarthy, the presidency of Eisenhower, the post-war boom, the poetry of Patchen and Ginsberg, the death of Robert Capa, the fall of Dien Bien Phu and Brown v. Board of Education.
Just seven years later, Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, contemplated the extinction of mankind and the rise of the ape as the torchbearer of civilization throughout the universe. The Sixties were the time of the hippies, the Cold War ascendent, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, the Civil Rights movement, acid and acid rock, the Vietnam War, the fall of Lyndon Johnson and the rise of Nixon. Alan Ginsberg lived to see Chicago cops riot against the sons and daughters of America's middle class who had tuned in, turned on, dropped out and come back swinging against the war and the draft. I was just back from Germany where I had put in my two years as a medic at an Army hospital, getting high and shooting up Thorazine to improve my tan, so I passed on Chicago myself, but I did show my younger brother how to curl up into a ball to protect his nuts when the cops started beating him. I sent him off to Chicago with a bright red bandana to cover his nose and mouth when the tear gas began to fly.
Boulle's Planet of the Apes didn't speculate about the causes of the rise of the apes as the dominant species in the far reaches of the galaxy, or about the extinction of man and the rise of the apes on our own planet. Boulle simply presented the success of ape culture and the failure of mankind as a fact. For some unknown reason, man was just not good enough.
When Twentieth Century Fox produced the film version of Boulle's book, they apparently thought they owed the viewer an explanation. The plot of Planet of the Apes (1968) hangs on a malfunctioning starship that plunges back to Earth instead of landing on a planet at the far end of the galaxy, and on a nuclear war that wipes out the human race, letting apes take over the planet while the starship and its astronauts are gone.
In Fox's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), the human race is wiped out -- probably -- by a virus. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody takes seriously the idea that man will be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. And we're not worried about rogue computers turning on the human race anymore. The peril now is biological. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a virus that makes apes smart enough to talk and to break out of an ape jail in San Francisco is deadly to humans and highly contagious to boot. Good thing for the apes, of course, since, without the intervention of the virus they would have had one good day of beating up on the cops before the bombs started to fall.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox
The idea that apes can beat up cops is as silly as the notion that hippies can beat up cops. It's just more Hollywood eyewash in the style of the Na'vi beating down the guns and machines of corporate America to liberate Pandora in Fox's Avatar (2009). But there is a strong odor of misanthropy and self-hatred about the idea that resonates with establishment critics like David Denby of The New Yorker.
Here's Denby, waxing poetic over scenes of apes, invading a research facility. "When the apes, like water bursting through a dam, pour through the building's glass walls at different levels," Denby exults, "the image is a pop epiphany of freedom."
Something like ice breaking up and cascading down a raging river as a metaphor for revolution I suppose.
The high water mark is definitely creeping up the sand.
The Hunger Games (2012)
Apparently, somebody convinced Suzanne Collins that the narrative of The Hunger Games, her teeny-bopper dystopian novel, needed some "fixing" for the film version of the book. So Collins, whose millions of avid readers turned out for the opening of The Hunger Games (2012) last weekend, tinkered with the story to explain why the "game maker" -- the fellow charged with making the gladiatorial Hunger Games of a future, Fascist America entertaining and instructive for the survivors of a failed rebellion -- would change the games' rules of engagement on the fly. And she destroyed the focus that was crucial to the success of her novel.
Why Collins would agree to fix something that wasn't broken is a mystery to me. I'm guessing some of the money men and women behind the film were too dull to understand the overarching importance of young love, star-crossed lovers and love triangles to Collins' readers. That a cynical game maker would play up the love angle for a sappy and spoiled audience and then sadistically pull the rug out from under the lovers didn't require any explanation at all. Neither did the fact that the idea of the lovers committing suicide -- the ultimate symbol of rebellion against a dystopia -- would panic the game maker.
Certainly, there is no reason why a film should conform slavishly to the novel it's based on. The novel is one thing and the film quite another. But these are not trivial changes. They go beyond "tweaks." They are irritating shifts in the narrative that complicate rather than clarify the story. They distort the story's point of view and diminish the story's heroine, young Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence.
And Jennifer Lawrence is exactly what The Hunger Games (2012) has going for it. She is immensely likable; someone an audience can care about. She moves well, and her face is large enough and smooth enough for the camera to linger on, to turn into the kind of landscape that's missing from most of the film. Simply put, The Hunger Games doesn't need a single scene that doesn't have Jennifer Lawrence in it.
Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games (2012)
If anybody deserves a poison berry for the The Hunger Games (2012), it's Gary Ross. His direction was even worse than the script. He never found the right mix of action and contemplation to make his film work. Ross never catches the power of nature, violence and unreason that drives the book. What master made the lash, Yeats asked.
Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
Gary Ross doesn't have a clue.
It's hard to get from a first-person novel to a third-person film. That may explain why the producers of The Hunger Games (2012) ended up with a second-rate director. Maybe the good directors shied away from the script. What Katniss is thinking dominates the book, and, when you take that away, an enormous weight is placed on Lawrence's delivery and body language to communicate what's going on in her mind. In the novel, Katniss Everdeen makes a dangerous passage from a young girl to a woman, from a huntress to a warrior, and, at the end, back to a teenage girl. If The Hunger Games team had pulled that off, they would have had a great movie. All of that teenage energy, confusion and drama, dropped into the middle of gladiatorial training and combat. My god!
It turns out, of course, that a PG-13 rating was more important. The bad news is the team planning the sequel may be just as inept. The producers couldn't get Tony Scott, whose Man On Fire (2004) had exactly what The Hunger Games films so badly need. The buzz is they'll soon sign music video director Francis Lawrence who made I Am Legend (2007), a boring remake of The Omega Man (1971). The one ray of hope is that someone on the project has signaled by dumping Ross that they think there is more at stake here than a massive boxoffice that's already a dead hog cinch. There are moments in popular culture when great myths finally crystalize. Maybe somebody understands that The Hunger Games novels and films could be that kind of moment. It's a damn shame if they're not holding out for a director and writers who are equal to the task.
Why Collins would agree to fix something that wasn't broken is a mystery to me. I'm guessing some of the money men and women behind the film were too dull to understand the overarching importance of young love, star-crossed lovers and love triangles to Collins' readers. That a cynical game maker would play up the love angle for a sappy and spoiled audience and then sadistically pull the rug out from under the lovers didn't require any explanation at all. Neither did the fact that the idea of the lovers committing suicide -- the ultimate symbol of rebellion against a dystopia -- would panic the game maker.
Certainly, there is no reason why a film should conform slavishly to the novel it's based on. The novel is one thing and the film quite another. But these are not trivial changes. They go beyond "tweaks." They are irritating shifts in the narrative that complicate rather than clarify the story. They distort the story's point of view and diminish the story's heroine, young Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence.
And Jennifer Lawrence is exactly what The Hunger Games (2012) has going for it. She is immensely likable; someone an audience can care about. She moves well, and her face is large enough and smooth enough for the camera to linger on, to turn into the kind of landscape that's missing from most of the film. Simply put, The Hunger Games doesn't need a single scene that doesn't have Jennifer Lawrence in it.
Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games (2012)
If anybody deserves a poison berry for the The Hunger Games (2012), it's Gary Ross. His direction was even worse than the script. He never found the right mix of action and contemplation to make his film work. Ross never catches the power of nature, violence and unreason that drives the book. What master made the lash, Yeats asked.
Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
Gary Ross doesn't have a clue.
It's hard to get from a first-person novel to a third-person film. That may explain why the producers of The Hunger Games (2012) ended up with a second-rate director. Maybe the good directors shied away from the script. What Katniss is thinking dominates the book, and, when you take that away, an enormous weight is placed on Lawrence's delivery and body language to communicate what's going on in her mind. In the novel, Katniss Everdeen makes a dangerous passage from a young girl to a woman, from a huntress to a warrior, and, at the end, back to a teenage girl. If The Hunger Games team had pulled that off, they would have had a great movie. All of that teenage energy, confusion and drama, dropped into the middle of gladiatorial training and combat. My god!
It turns out, of course, that a PG-13 rating was more important. The bad news is the team planning the sequel may be just as inept. The producers couldn't get Tony Scott, whose Man On Fire (2004) had exactly what The Hunger Games films so badly need. The buzz is they'll soon sign music video director Francis Lawrence who made I Am Legend (2007), a boring remake of The Omega Man (1971). The one ray of hope is that someone on the project has signaled by dumping Ross that they think there is more at stake here than a massive boxoffice that's already a dead hog cinch. There are moments in popular culture when great myths finally crystalize. Maybe somebody understands that The Hunger Games novels and films could be that kind of moment. It's a damn shame if they're not holding out for a director and writers who are equal to the task.
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Passion Play (2010)
A long time ago, I figured out the only reason to create anything is that no one else has. The books I want to write are the books I want to read, but nobody has written them yet. The films I want to make are the films I want to see, but nobody has made them yet.
My wife used to drive me crazy by starting to fix films the minute we left the theater. I don't think we've seen more than one or two films over the years she didn't have ideas about ways to make them better. I wrote it off to her politics. Well, hell, I'd say. Go make your own film if you don't like that one. Go make a film that fits your politics or your aesthetics or whatever.
Lately, I've come around to her way of thinking. Why not fix broken films? Why not start with the idea that what's missing in the world is a better version of a film somebody made or a book somebody wrote? Where does it say you have to start from scratch?
Now you take Passion Play (2010), a first film by screenwriter Mitch Glazer, for example. That's a gorgeous little film that never comes together. It has two pretty people: Mickey Rourke all broken down and Megan Fox just coming into womanhood. It has Bill Murray, reprising the gangster he created for Mad Dog and Glory (1993), jazz, the desert, a freak show, LA, a woman with wings. What's not to like? The realization of the script for one thing. And, ironically, the script itself for another.
Rent the movie and come back. We're going to make it clear that for most of the movie Mickey is dying or dead, and that the entire film, from the moment that Mickey is improbably rescued by Native American sharpshooters, takes place on the plane between life and death.
As a comedy writer, Glazer has never had to trouble himself with thoughts about what is real and what is not. In fact, the unexpected is an essential element of comedy. But in a movie that mixes comedy with surrealism, allegory and film noir, keeping things orderly--keeping images, characters and events on their proper plane--is what distinguishes the work of filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman from gutsy but unfinished efforts like Passion Play. The problem with Passion Play is that everything exists on the same plane. The viewer is forced to process everything in the movie--winged women who learn to fly, broken down musicians, miraculous rescues by Native American warriors, ironic dialogue, cool humor, incongruous locations--all on a plane that represents a gritty, slightly droll reality, in spite of the fact that the beat up, beat down, booze and drug-whacked brain of the Mickey Rourke anti-hero who rescues the winged girl and, in turn, is rescued himself, though not redeemed, seems perfect for processing alternate realities.
At the end of the film, Rourke is being transported in the arms of an angel. He looks down and, in a wide shot, sees his dead body, lying in a ravine and his murderer driving away. Glazer intends for us to realize at that moment that the film has been Rourke's experience of his transition from life to death, a dying hallucination that calls to mind the last scenes of Terry Gilliam's brilliant Brazil (1985). What I need right then is a close shot of Rourke's body as he leaves it behind to nail that moment of realization down in memory.
Passion Play (2010), Annapurna Productions and Rebecca Wang Entertainment
Glazer doesn't get close enough to Rourke's dead body to make that scene work. I need to see Rourke's dead face. And it would help to fade out on the Native Americans and fade in on Rourke, walking in the desert, to mark the transition to the dying hallucination earlier in the movie, too. I'd cut the rest of the film in half. (The arbitrary length of "feature" films has done in more than one first film.) I'd get Fox past the idea that she won't be taken seriously as an actress if she does nude scenes. I'm dying and I imagine Fox with her clothes on? Please.
That's the quick fix. A complete makeover of Glazer's beautiful but personal film would require too much work. The problem is that Rourke dies so early in the film that the revelation at the end of the film that the action has taken place on some spiritual plane feels like a clever gimmick. Frankly, I'm not sure I care enough about the Rourke character for it to make a difference to me whether he's dead or not. And does it really matter if the film is taken literally or not? Would anyone care if Glazer left out the shot of Rourke's dead body altogether? Is Passion Play some kind of filmic Book Of The Dead, full of hidden images and code words scholars could spend years discovering?
It could be that the best news about Passion Play is that a film as personal and esoteric as Passion Play can even get produced.
Or maybe it's that Megan Fox can act. I have to wonder how smart Spielberg and Bay feel after seeing Fox in this little film.
My wife used to drive me crazy by starting to fix films the minute we left the theater. I don't think we've seen more than one or two films over the years she didn't have ideas about ways to make them better. I wrote it off to her politics. Well, hell, I'd say. Go make your own film if you don't like that one. Go make a film that fits your politics or your aesthetics or whatever.
Lately, I've come around to her way of thinking. Why not fix broken films? Why not start with the idea that what's missing in the world is a better version of a film somebody made or a book somebody wrote? Where does it say you have to start from scratch?
Now you take Passion Play (2010), a first film by screenwriter Mitch Glazer, for example. That's a gorgeous little film that never comes together. It has two pretty people: Mickey Rourke all broken down and Megan Fox just coming into womanhood. It has Bill Murray, reprising the gangster he created for Mad Dog and Glory (1993), jazz, the desert, a freak show, LA, a woman with wings. What's not to like? The realization of the script for one thing. And, ironically, the script itself for another.
Rent the movie and come back. We're going to make it clear that for most of the movie Mickey is dying or dead, and that the entire film, from the moment that Mickey is improbably rescued by Native American sharpshooters, takes place on the plane between life and death.
As a comedy writer, Glazer has never had to trouble himself with thoughts about what is real and what is not. In fact, the unexpected is an essential element of comedy. But in a movie that mixes comedy with surrealism, allegory and film noir, keeping things orderly--keeping images, characters and events on their proper plane--is what distinguishes the work of filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman from gutsy but unfinished efforts like Passion Play. The problem with Passion Play is that everything exists on the same plane. The viewer is forced to process everything in the movie--winged women who learn to fly, broken down musicians, miraculous rescues by Native American warriors, ironic dialogue, cool humor, incongruous locations--all on a plane that represents a gritty, slightly droll reality, in spite of the fact that the beat up, beat down, booze and drug-whacked brain of the Mickey Rourke anti-hero who rescues the winged girl and, in turn, is rescued himself, though not redeemed, seems perfect for processing alternate realities.
At the end of the film, Rourke is being transported in the arms of an angel. He looks down and, in a wide shot, sees his dead body, lying in a ravine and his murderer driving away. Glazer intends for us to realize at that moment that the film has been Rourke's experience of his transition from life to death, a dying hallucination that calls to mind the last scenes of Terry Gilliam's brilliant Brazil (1985). What I need right then is a close shot of Rourke's body as he leaves it behind to nail that moment of realization down in memory.
Passion Play (2010), Annapurna Productions and Rebecca Wang Entertainment
Glazer doesn't get close enough to Rourke's dead body to make that scene work. I need to see Rourke's dead face. And it would help to fade out on the Native Americans and fade in on Rourke, walking in the desert, to mark the transition to the dying hallucination earlier in the movie, too. I'd cut the rest of the film in half. (The arbitrary length of "feature" films has done in more than one first film.) I'd get Fox past the idea that she won't be taken seriously as an actress if she does nude scenes. I'm dying and I imagine Fox with her clothes on? Please.
That's the quick fix. A complete makeover of Glazer's beautiful but personal film would require too much work. The problem is that Rourke dies so early in the film that the revelation at the end of the film that the action has taken place on some spiritual plane feels like a clever gimmick. Frankly, I'm not sure I care enough about the Rourke character for it to make a difference to me whether he's dead or not. And does it really matter if the film is taken literally or not? Would anyone care if Glazer left out the shot of Rourke's dead body altogether? Is Passion Play some kind of filmic Book Of The Dead, full of hidden images and code words scholars could spend years discovering?
It could be that the best news about Passion Play is that a film as personal and esoteric as Passion Play can even get produced.
Or maybe it's that Megan Fox can act. I have to wonder how smart Spielberg and Bay feel after seeing Fox in this little film.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
The September Issue (2009)
The 83rd Academy Award nominations for documentary film were announced last week. Collectively, this year's nominees documented the global financial meltdown, fracking for natural gas, edgy street art, dumpster diving on a massive scale, and war on the ground in Afghanistan.
More than other genres, documentary films tend to be political and, sometimes, combative. It's hard, if not impossible, to separate the importance of what they document from the skill with which they document it. One suspects that Restrepo, an important film that's not particularly well made, is the odds on favorite this year, especially because the first living GI to win the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War fought in the combat operation Restrepo documents. (I jotted down some thoughts about Restrepo earlier this year.) But it's entirely possible that the Academy will decide that the global financial crisis or what natural gas producers are doing to the environment outweighs the war in Afghanistan, or even that the artistry of Waste Land or Exit Through The Gift Shop deserves the Best Documentary award. The Academy often surprises me. Last year, when I commented on Hollywood's Real Glass Ceiling, I was convinced the Academy would hand Kathryn Bigelow the Best Director Oscar, but wouldn't -- couldn't afford to, really -- give the Best Picture award to The Hurt Locker in the face of Avatar's overwhelming box office and the massive build-out in 3D venues that was going on all over the world. The Academy proved me wrong. They showed me they did "have the heart to take on the real world." (Unless, of course, it was those pesky Palestinians who did Avatar in by painting themselves blue in Bil'in -- a case of bad timing for James Cameron.)
Documentary films about current events and living people are very much about timing. In the Sixties, Fred W. Friendly and Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame ran an hour and was considered gutsy journalism. Fifty years later, a CBS follow-up on migrant farm workers merited only 5 minutes of air time.
The September Issue (2009), directed by R.J. Cutler and filmed by Robert Richman, is a documentary film that illustrates the importance of -- and the surreal nature of -- timing. The film is a portrait of Anna Wintour, Vogue's U.S. editor-in-chief, and Grace Coddington, her creative director, shot in the context of the roll-out of Vogue's colossal September 2007 Fall fashion issue.
The September Issue is an examination of power and manipulation, and, especially, of power in the hands of a competent and confident woman. Most film portraits of women executives show embattled women, under fire and hanging on by their fingernails. In 2007, Anna Wintour was firmly entrenched and riding the wave of a booming economy and fashion industry. The sub-text of The September Issue is an examination of a successful collaboration, of the way editors and artists work in the real world, and of the way auteurs like Wintour and Coddington make signature art out of the work of creative people. And it is, finally, a comment on relevance, satisfaction, and the underlying insecurity that saps joy from even the most successful celebrities.
Formally, The September Issue is an example of cinema verité in its simplest, least challenging form. It mixes more or less coherent shots of live action with interviews. The problem with that approach is that it turns the film into a contest of sorts. The film maker tries to get at the truth, the subjects of the film try to hide it — or, at least, to slant the truth. Interviews are like testimony, the characters tell you what they want you to know.
Not surprisingly, the live action scenes tell us more about Anna Wintour than she tells us about herself. Her center stage seat at shows and the nervous fawning of the designers she visits deliver a convincing picture of her position atop the world of design in 2007, just before the beginning of the global financial meltdown and the Great Recession.
More than other genres, documentary films tend to be political and, sometimes, combative. It's hard, if not impossible, to separate the importance of what they document from the skill with which they document it. One suspects that Restrepo, an important film that's not particularly well made, is the odds on favorite this year, especially because the first living GI to win the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War fought in the combat operation Restrepo documents. (I jotted down some thoughts about Restrepo earlier this year.) But it's entirely possible that the Academy will decide that the global financial crisis or what natural gas producers are doing to the environment outweighs the war in Afghanistan, or even that the artistry of Waste Land or Exit Through The Gift Shop deserves the Best Documentary award. The Academy often surprises me. Last year, when I commented on Hollywood's Real Glass Ceiling, I was convinced the Academy would hand Kathryn Bigelow the Best Director Oscar, but wouldn't -- couldn't afford to, really -- give the Best Picture award to The Hurt Locker in the face of Avatar's overwhelming box office and the massive build-out in 3D venues that was going on all over the world. The Academy proved me wrong. They showed me they did "have the heart to take on the real world." (Unless, of course, it was those pesky Palestinians who did Avatar in by painting themselves blue in Bil'in -- a case of bad timing for James Cameron.)
Documentary films about current events and living people are very much about timing. In the Sixties, Fred W. Friendly and Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame ran an hour and was considered gutsy journalism. Fifty years later, a CBS follow-up on migrant farm workers merited only 5 minutes of air time.
The September Issue (2009), directed by R.J. Cutler and filmed by Robert Richman, is a documentary film that illustrates the importance of -- and the surreal nature of -- timing. The film is a portrait of Anna Wintour, Vogue's U.S. editor-in-chief, and Grace Coddington, her creative director, shot in the context of the roll-out of Vogue's colossal September 2007 Fall fashion issue.
Vogue Cover, September 2007
Low Resolution Fair Use Image
The September Issue is an examination of power and manipulation, and, especially, of power in the hands of a competent and confident woman. Most film portraits of women executives show embattled women, under fire and hanging on by their fingernails. In 2007, Anna Wintour was firmly entrenched and riding the wave of a booming economy and fashion industry. The sub-text of The September Issue is an examination of a successful collaboration, of the way editors and artists work in the real world, and of the way auteurs like Wintour and Coddington make signature art out of the work of creative people. And it is, finally, a comment on relevance, satisfaction, and the underlying insecurity that saps joy from even the most successful celebrities.
Formally, The September Issue is an example of cinema verité in its simplest, least challenging form. It mixes more or less coherent shots of live action with interviews. The problem with that approach is that it turns the film into a contest of sorts. The film maker tries to get at the truth, the subjects of the film try to hide it — or, at least, to slant the truth. Interviews are like testimony, the characters tell you what they want you to know.
Not surprisingly, the live action scenes tell us more about Anna Wintour than she tells us about herself. Her center stage seat at shows and the nervous fawning of the designers she visits deliver a convincing picture of her position atop the world of design in 2007, just before the beginning of the global financial meltdown and the Great Recession.
If the world's business cycle were depicted as a giant rollercoaster, the lift sweeping up to dizzying heights, the first drop plunging down at the steepest angle the human body can tolerate without blacking out, Anna Wintour and Vogue were, in September of 2007, poised on the brink of the fall. The September issue of Vogue, essentially an extravagantly produced catalog of designer clothes and accessories, ran 840 pages. The issue has become a collector's item, selling on ebay for as much as $500 a copy. In 2007, it was a celebration of the fashion industry, a self-congratulatory revel in wealth reminiscent of Versailles with one important difference: the world of fashion and the incomes that sustain it have barely taken a hit from what has been, for the ordinary men and women who used to pick up Vogue on their way out of the supermarket, a devastating recession. To be sure, Vogue's advertising revenues are down from 2007, when one of Vogue's advertisers, Burton Tansky of Neiman Marcus implored Anna Wintour to pressure the designers she had under her thumb to deliver their creations faster. But the drop in ad revenue may be more a reflection of a general feeling of discontent in an industry whose players were personally bilked by money managers than a reflection of specific worries about the global demand for designer clothes or the bang for the buck of advertising dollars. After all, weren't most of those ads in the September issue a display of plumage, a demonstration of the wealth and importance of the advertiser?
Last night, ploughing through a copy of Vogue's September issue I brought home from my public library, I was struck by the fact that I had to wade through 313 pages of ads before I encountered the first snippet of text pretending not to be advertising.
Then, in a typical pop culture collision, I found a Rebecca Johnson profile of Michelle Obama, complete with gorgeous photographs by Annie Leibovitz, sandwiched between a Grace Coddington fashion spread and a charming essay about life at the top of the New York scene in a Greenwich Village townhouse whose decor, according to the article, was inspired by the Barbara Streisand remake of A Star Is Born.
Was Hillary Clinton not fashionable enough for her party's elite? Is Michelle Obama as perfect as the Vogue interview and Liebovitz photographs make her seem? Or were the images of Michelle Obama manipulated like the images of the models in the Coddington photoshoots with their interchangeable heads, bodies and air-brushed skin, photoshopped to perfection? Did Vogue prepare the small town Iowa battleground for an Obama victory? Did a media empire help bring down Hillary Clinton because she was no longer chic, no longer the face of the future toward which fashion -- at least in the mind of Anna Wintour -- must incline. I suppose that's a stretch, more the stuff of fiction than of some documentary that might have been made. But I think it's self-evident that the Obamas' style is rather neatly tuned to the style of Conde Naste publications like Vogue, The New Yorker and Wired.
Of course, there are no scenes of the Michelle Obama interview in Cutler and Richman's documentary film. Successful politicians learned as far back as the Kennedy era to keep documentary film makers at a distance.
The people who get scrutinized in The September Issue are Wintour and Coddington, and the element of suspense that holds the film together -- even documentaries require some kind of glue -- is Grace Coddington's struggle to get her art, intact, into the issue, even though it is often at odds with Wintour's vision. In the end, Grace gets most of her work in -- at one point she observes that she nearly has the entire issue to herself -- because she can do what artists do: synthesize experience. Everything is grist for Coddington's mill and her imagination, even the documentary film makers themselves. Before the film is over, she has Richman jumping -- if not through hoops -- at least up and down.
Coddington may be the resident genius at Vogue, but she doesn't get the cover. For that job, Wintour brings in Italian photographer Mario Testino. And, to my eye, it is Testino, not Coddington, who, in homage to Fellini, manages to produce the only images that are distinguishable from and rise above the pages and pages of ads.
The September Issue A&E IndieFilms and Actual Reality Pictures
Not that I'm completely surprised.
Maybe it was the faint scent of expensive perfume still lingering on the pages of my library copy of Vogue or maybe I overdosed on the images of beautiful women, but, watching The September Issue and Anna Wintour, I suddenly remembered filming an interview with Lady Bird Johnson -- a woman I had not thought of as particularly attractive -- at her television station in Austin. After the interview, I rode down in an elevator with her, and I was shocked to find myself suddenly overwhelmed by her perfume, her dark red lipstick, perfect make-up and luxuriant fur coat, her obvious wealth and power. Maybe it was pheromones. I could barely breathe, and, when we got off of the elevator, my hands were shaking and I was feeling weak in the knees.
The September Issue is available from Amazon and Netflix.
Last night, ploughing through a copy of Vogue's September issue I brought home from my public library, I was struck by the fact that I had to wade through 313 pages of ads before I encountered the first snippet of text pretending not to be advertising.
Then, in a typical pop culture collision, I found a Rebecca Johnson profile of Michelle Obama, complete with gorgeous photographs by Annie Leibovitz, sandwiched between a Grace Coddington fashion spread and a charming essay about life at the top of the New York scene in a Greenwich Village townhouse whose decor, according to the article, was inspired by the Barbara Streisand remake of A Star Is Born.
Vogue September 2007, pp 774,775
Photograph: Michelle Obama by Annie Liebovitz
Low Resolution Fair Use Image
Was Hillary Clinton not fashionable enough for her party's elite? Is Michelle Obama as perfect as the Vogue interview and Liebovitz photographs make her seem? Or were the images of Michelle Obama manipulated like the images of the models in the Coddington photoshoots with their interchangeable heads, bodies and air-brushed skin, photoshopped to perfection? Did Vogue prepare the small town Iowa battleground for an Obama victory? Did a media empire help bring down Hillary Clinton because she was no longer chic, no longer the face of the future toward which fashion -- at least in the mind of Anna Wintour -- must incline. I suppose that's a stretch, more the stuff of fiction than of some documentary that might have been made. But I think it's self-evident that the Obamas' style is rather neatly tuned to the style of Conde Naste publications like Vogue, The New Yorker and Wired.
Of course, there are no scenes of the Michelle Obama interview in Cutler and Richman's documentary film. Successful politicians learned as far back as the Kennedy era to keep documentary film makers at a distance.
The people who get scrutinized in The September Issue are Wintour and Coddington, and the element of suspense that holds the film together -- even documentaries require some kind of glue -- is Grace Coddington's struggle to get her art, intact, into the issue, even though it is often at odds with Wintour's vision. In the end, Grace gets most of her work in -- at one point she observes that she nearly has the entire issue to herself -- because she can do what artists do: synthesize experience. Everything is grist for Coddington's mill and her imagination, even the documentary film makers themselves. Before the film is over, she has Richman jumping -- if not through hoops -- at least up and down.
Coddington may be the resident genius at Vogue, but she doesn't get the cover. For that job, Wintour brings in Italian photographer Mario Testino. And, to my eye, it is Testino, not Coddington, who, in homage to Fellini, manages to produce the only images that are distinguishable from and rise above the pages and pages of ads.
Vogue September 2007 Photograph by Mario Testino
Low Resolution Fair Use Image
The real winner in The September Issue is, of course, Anna Wintour. After living for four years with the rumor -- or the fact -- that she was the inspiration for the The Devil Wears Prada, The September Issue gave Wintour an opportunity of create her own image. She comes across as determined and opinionated, without seeming abusive, a far cry from the editor in The Devil Wears Prada. If anything, Wintour manages, as improbable as it seems, to portray herself as quite vulnerable. She appears to have gotten what she wanted from the film.
The September Issue A&E IndieFilms and Actual Reality Pictures
Not that I'm completely surprised.
Maybe it was the faint scent of expensive perfume still lingering on the pages of my library copy of Vogue or maybe I overdosed on the images of beautiful women, but, watching The September Issue and Anna Wintour, I suddenly remembered filming an interview with Lady Bird Johnson -- a woman I had not thought of as particularly attractive -- at her television station in Austin. After the interview, I rode down in an elevator with her, and I was shocked to find myself suddenly overwhelmed by her perfume, her dark red lipstick, perfect make-up and luxuriant fur coat, her obvious wealth and power. Maybe it was pheromones. I could barely breathe, and, when we got off of the elevator, my hands were shaking and I was feeling weak in the knees.
The September Issue is available from Amazon and Netflix.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
The Legacy Of Fred W. Friendly And Edward R. Murrow
In 1960, Fred W. Friendly and Edward R. Murrow teamed up to make Harvest of Shame. The film was Murrow's last television documentary before he left CBS to head up John F. Kennedy's United States Information Agency and the Voice of America. Ironically, as a U.S.I.A bureaucrat, Murrow tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress a B.B.C. broadcast of Harvest of Shame.
Harvest of Shame documented the living conditions of American migrant farm workers, and recorded the prevailing attitude of big business, lobbiests and government officials toward the farm workers and their living conditions.
Edward R. Murrow has had many imitators, but none of them has managed to channel Murrow's combination of serious journalism and real concern for people who were unable to manage in any way the oppressive political and economic culture that impinged on their lives.
Harvest of Shame is one of television's most respected documentaries, not because it was especially effective, but because of its intention and style.
Harvest of Shame originally aired just after Thanksgiving Day in November 1960. A follow-up report by CBS last year -- a 5 minute segment, compared to the 50 minutes of the original -- found that the migrants' pauper wages were a little better and the workers were mostly poor Hispanics now instead of poor blacks and whites, but the working conditions and daily lives of migrant farm workers have not much changed.
Harvest of Shame gave a face to the faceless, advocated for the powerless, and created a lasting example of how television documentaries -- and journalism in general -- can engage important issues without bias or polemics, with compassion instead of passion, and with respect for its subjects.
The shots of workers, voicing their frustration about trying to make a living at the bottom of the American economy, and the shots of a corporate lobbiest, reducing and explaining away the tragedy of people permanently abandoned to poverty, could, in these times of massive, permanent unemployment and under-employment -- especially of the undereducated and people over 50 -- be filmed today. We only lack the film makers, journalists, and the subjects who -- like the migrant farm workers of the 60's -- convincingly demonstrate the flaws in American society, the disjunction between our basic values and the way we allow some of our fellow Americans to live.
Harvest of Shame, for the most part, let's the workers and bureaucrats speak for themselves, admittedly in the context of Murrow's narration. But the film manages to balance Murrow's narration with the true faces and voices of the workers, captured by David Lowe, in a way that never overpowers the workers and their story. Typically, Murrow closed the show with a comment that conveys his belief that words — and reason — matter, that it is possible to talk about occasions for anger, without histrionics and without acting anger out.
Are there real barriers to producing documentaries like Harvest of Shame these days? In many ways, they should be easier to do. The cost of video equipment is more affordable than it's ever been, and venues like YouTube let documentary film makers "self publish." The problem, if there is one, lies in finding subjects.
Harvest of Shame can be purchased on DVD at Amazon, or, with a leading commercial, be viewed for free at YouTube or CBS News.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
What's Wrong With Avatar?
James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is a significant motion picture event, designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release has been accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. It’s probably the first of many 3D blockbusters Hollywood will crank out over the next couple of years, and, in that sense at least, it represents the future of the industry. Unfortunately, it’s a bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills. Worst of all, the film consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them. James Cameron of all people should know better.
One of the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us is through myths. In the telling and re-telling of myths, we attempt to resolve conflicts between concepts like human and machine, life and death, and good and evil by reconciling and uniting the opposing concepts within the fabric of the myth. The struggle of human against machine, which had been the subject of myth since the Industrial Revolution, came close to being resolved by the Science Fiction genre's myth of The Cyborg, a creation that is part human and part machine. The myth of The Cyborg unites human and machine, or, more precisely, it re-unites humans with characteristics we projected onto the world of machines and set ourselves in opposition to. Machines are cold, dead and hard, but living human beings are warm and, compared to machines, very soft. The fragility of human beings is revealed in war, murders, car wrecks and plane crashes, the art of Schwarzkogler, Burden and Mark Pauline, the reproductions of Andy Warhol, and the films of motion picture directors whose forte is the action sequence, and, piling action sequence upon action sequence and genre upon genre, the Action Adventure Science Fiction Fantasy film.
It happens that two of the best known and most successful renditions of the myth of The Cyborg are Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd’s The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). What is particularly interesting about T2 is that it marked a significant shift in our attitudes toward machines. In 1984, The Terminator still reflects the ambivalence and caution that had characterized our attitudes toward machines for hundreds of years and informed the Science Fiction genre film since Fritz Lang created the evil robot, Maria (the original material girl), in Metropolis (1926). In 1991, just seven years after The Terminator, Cameron and Hurd's Terminator 2: Judgment Day creates a world in which an out of control machine with an Austrian accent saves the human race. If we didn’t notice anything strange about this particular rendering of the human versus machine myth, it's because we had already made the mental leap to the other side of the chasm separating men and women from machines. After struggling with the issue for a few hundred years, we had finally made up our minds about computers, robots and ourselves, and we had decided to come down on the side of the machines.
The distinction between humans and machines began to blur in the 1980’s. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), more physical damage is sustained by replicants than by people, the replicants have pitifully short life spans, and, in fact, all of the women in the film are replicants. In Robocop (1987) the cyborg (a true cyborg, compared to the Terminator, whose humanity is only skin deep) sustains massive injuries in his first encounter with a killer robot. And, in Cameron and Hurd's Aliens (1986), their sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), the robot or "artificial person" is ripped in half by WATCH OUT! A XENOMORPH! Cameron and Hurd's word for a non-human life form. By this time, Cameron and Hurd’s view of machines is already softening. The humans and the machines are on the same side, and, at the film's climax, it is the badly damaged "artificial person" -- his legless torso resembling a broken, plastic doll -- who saves the human child from being sucked into space.
We define ourselves in terms of what we are not. As the distinction between humans and machines begins to blur, our image of ourselves begins to blur with it. In a futile attempt to maintain the distinction, we work hard to come up with things people can do better than machines. It is our hope that we are different from and, on some level, better than the machines we create. But the truth is that machines can do most things better than people can. Machines can't paint as well as Jackson Pollock, say, but most people can't either. Generally, where we choose to employ them, machines outstrip people easily, and they force us to redefine concepts like intelligence. We fall back on our last line of defense: the capacity to feel. Can machines feel? Can they appreciate art and music? Are they alive? In the Science Fiction film they are.
Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner, stands Philip K. Dicks 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, on its head. Dicks’ novel is about a bounty hunter who is so human he is capable of empathizing with the ruthless machines he hunts down and destroys. That capacity almost destroys him. Fourteen years later, in Blade Runner, the machines are more human and compassionate than the humans. It's the machines who recite poetry and philosophy and who have "seen things you people wouldn't believe," and it's pain that keeps Roy Baty alive long enough to redeem the bounty hunter, Rick Deckard.
The struggle of human against machine, as it has played out in our best myths, has two main variations. In the first variation, machines are evil. In the second variation, machines are just dangerous, and it's the "mad scientists" who create or use them who are evil or insane. Machines have a potential for evil, but they usually include a built-in safety mechanism to protect people -- the first law of Robotics is not to harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm -- but, of course, the safety mechanism doesn't always work.
In masterful renditions of the myth like Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, both the evil machine and the mad scientist versions of the struggle between human and machine resonate at once. Dangerous men are caught up in dangerous machines. We can see the Strategic Air Command as a machine out of control, we can see it as a machine in the hands of a mad general, or we can see SAC as a cog in the menacing machine we used to call the Cold War, a concept that comes close to what the hindus mean by karma. One big machine. A clockwork. No choice. Exactly the opposite of what we hope to be.
Forbidden Planet (1956) is an especially bleak rendering of the mad scientist myth. After thousands of years of rationality, with the assistance of a machine to end all machines, the Krell are destroyed by monsters from the id. Morbius, in his pursuit of the knowledge and power of the Krell, is transformed into a monster who, subconsiously, seeks to destroy anyone who opposes him.
Most Science Fiction films, however, and in particular the ones in which the machine is a robot, cyborg, or some combination of human and machine, favor, like Lang's Metropolis, the evil machine story. These films include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969), Westworld (1973), The Demon Seed (1977), Alien (1979), and, finally, The Terminator (1984), the genre's last rendition of a truly evil machine. The machine in T1 is bad to its alloy bone.
Cameron and Hurd's two Terminator films demonstrate our changing attitudes toward machines with great clarity. Both films are set within the context of an apocalyptic war between humans and machines that follows a 1997 nuclear war between the United States and Russia. As you recall, the nuclear war begins when Skynet, the U.S.A.'s computer-based defense system, achieves self-awareness and attacks the Russians, hoping the human race will be destroyed in the nuclear holocaust that follows. In this, both films are consistent with each other, and with Dr. Strangelove, Colossus: The Forbin Project and other films of the Cold War era.
The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, have the same basic plot. Skynet sends a Terminator from the future to kill Sarah Connor or her son John before John can be born, grow up, and lead the humans in their war against the machines. In both films, the humans send a warrior back through time to protect John and his mother. It is at this point that T1 and T2 diverge. In The Terminator, the protector is a human being, and the Terminator is a machine. In T2, the protector is a machine, and the Terminator is neither human nor machine. He is something else.
In film, what you see and hear is what you get. And what you get in The Terminator are brilliant special effects, muscles, big trucks and bikes, shiny pistols, machine guns, shotguns and other hardware, and a solid rendition of the evil machine myth. What you get in Terminator 2: Judgement Day are even more extravagant special effects, including the "fluid" effects Cameron and Hurd used in The Abyss (1989), and a solid rendition of the mad scientist myth as the three heroes, John Connor, his mom, and John's cyborg protector hustle to stop the mad scientist before he can invent the basic technology that leads to Skynet. To stay alive, they have to stay out of the clutches of a new kind of Terminator who, though Cameron and Hurd call him a machine, is depicted, especially in his grotesque death throes, as essentially organic or worse. Unlike the Terminator in T1, who is a machine disguised as a man, the Terminator in T2 is an organic whole, not an assemblage of parts, and, although it's possible to read "machine" into his strength, agility and relentless focus, when he's consigned to a caldron of molten steel at the climax of the film, he shape shifts, writhes and bellows in agony like a monstrous animal or demon.
T2 is remarkably misanthropic and predictably iconoclastic in its assault on the usual people and institutions, including Ma Bell, bank machines, cops, bikers, foster parents and the city of Los Angeles, which is flattened by a hydrogen bomb. But, in contrast, T2’s rendition of the cyborg who is sent back through time to protect John Connor is heroic. And, just in case we can't follow the sub-text, T2 spells it out for us in a voice-over by Sarah Connor. Watching the cyborg and her kid, Sarah says: "Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."
In the film's Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the caldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron and Hurd use a series of close-ups to create a beautiful portrait of The Cyborg. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.
In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron and Gayle Anne Hurd gave us our first glimpse of a new, still unformed technology that might have replaced the machine as the not-us adversary upon which we projected our worst fears. Having united human and machine through the myth of The Cyborg, having accepted the machine model of human intelligence and anatomy to the extent that we understood ourselves better as machines than as animals, having realized that we are evolving, not into angels but into machines, we might have joined with The Cyborg to face the uncertain, and, because our paranoia stays one step ahead of us, always dangerous natural and supernatural worlds. The myth of the evil machine is dead. We are ready to confront, in myth and in art, the potential of bioengineering and of our own over-heated subconscious minds.
Instead, James Cameron invites us to a boring reprise of The Mission (1986) and the vicarious thrill of watching alien natives defeat well-armed corporate mercenaries. Cameron seems to have lost his faith in machines, people and cyborgs as well.
Somebody get Gale Anne Hurd on the phone. T3 without Cameron was a waste of her time. Avatar without Hurd was a waste of Cameron’s time. Cameron and Hurd should get back together and do something worthy of 3D CGI. Almost a hundred years of science fiction film is out there waiting to be mashed up into something new and actually mythic.
One of the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us is through myths. In the telling and re-telling of myths, we attempt to resolve conflicts between concepts like human and machine, life and death, and good and evil by reconciling and uniting the opposing concepts within the fabric of the myth. The struggle of human against machine, which had been the subject of myth since the Industrial Revolution, came close to being resolved by the Science Fiction genre's myth of The Cyborg, a creation that is part human and part machine. The myth of The Cyborg unites human and machine, or, more precisely, it re-unites humans with characteristics we projected onto the world of machines and set ourselves in opposition to. Machines are cold, dead and hard, but living human beings are warm and, compared to machines, very soft. The fragility of human beings is revealed in war, murders, car wrecks and plane crashes, the art of Schwarzkogler, Burden and Mark Pauline, the reproductions of Andy Warhol, and the films of motion picture directors whose forte is the action sequence, and, piling action sequence upon action sequence and genre upon genre, the Action Adventure Science Fiction Fantasy film.
It happens that two of the best known and most successful renditions of the myth of The Cyborg are Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd’s The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). What is particularly interesting about T2 is that it marked a significant shift in our attitudes toward machines. In 1984, The Terminator still reflects the ambivalence and caution that had characterized our attitudes toward machines for hundreds of years and informed the Science Fiction genre film since Fritz Lang created the evil robot, Maria (the original material girl), in Metropolis (1926). In 1991, just seven years after The Terminator, Cameron and Hurd's Terminator 2: Judgment Day creates a world in which an out of control machine with an Austrian accent saves the human race. If we didn’t notice anything strange about this particular rendering of the human versus machine myth, it's because we had already made the mental leap to the other side of the chasm separating men and women from machines. After struggling with the issue for a few hundred years, we had finally made up our minds about computers, robots and ourselves, and we had decided to come down on the side of the machines.
The distinction between humans and machines began to blur in the 1980’s. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), more physical damage is sustained by replicants than by people, the replicants have pitifully short life spans, and, in fact, all of the women in the film are replicants. In Robocop (1987) the cyborg (a true cyborg, compared to the Terminator, whose humanity is only skin deep) sustains massive injuries in his first encounter with a killer robot. And, in Cameron and Hurd's Aliens (1986), their sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), the robot or "artificial person" is ripped in half by WATCH OUT! A XENOMORPH! Cameron and Hurd's word for a non-human life form. By this time, Cameron and Hurd’s view of machines is already softening. The humans and the machines are on the same side, and, at the film's climax, it is the badly damaged "artificial person" -- his legless torso resembling a broken, plastic doll -- who saves the human child from being sucked into space.
We define ourselves in terms of what we are not. As the distinction between humans and machines begins to blur, our image of ourselves begins to blur with it. In a futile attempt to maintain the distinction, we work hard to come up with things people can do better than machines. It is our hope that we are different from and, on some level, better than the machines we create. But the truth is that machines can do most things better than people can. Machines can't paint as well as Jackson Pollock, say, but most people can't either. Generally, where we choose to employ them, machines outstrip people easily, and they force us to redefine concepts like intelligence. We fall back on our last line of defense: the capacity to feel. Can machines feel? Can they appreciate art and music? Are they alive? In the Science Fiction film they are.
Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner, stands Philip K. Dicks 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, on its head. Dicks’ novel is about a bounty hunter who is so human he is capable of empathizing with the ruthless machines he hunts down and destroys. That capacity almost destroys him. Fourteen years later, in Blade Runner, the machines are more human and compassionate than the humans. It's the machines who recite poetry and philosophy and who have "seen things you people wouldn't believe," and it's pain that keeps Roy Baty alive long enough to redeem the bounty hunter, Rick Deckard.
The struggle of human against machine, as it has played out in our best myths, has two main variations. In the first variation, machines are evil. In the second variation, machines are just dangerous, and it's the "mad scientists" who create or use them who are evil or insane. Machines have a potential for evil, but they usually include a built-in safety mechanism to protect people -- the first law of Robotics is not to harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm -- but, of course, the safety mechanism doesn't always work.
In masterful renditions of the myth like Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, both the evil machine and the mad scientist versions of the struggle between human and machine resonate at once. Dangerous men are caught up in dangerous machines. We can see the Strategic Air Command as a machine out of control, we can see it as a machine in the hands of a mad general, or we can see SAC as a cog in the menacing machine we used to call the Cold War, a concept that comes close to what the hindus mean by karma. One big machine. A clockwork. No choice. Exactly the opposite of what we hope to be.
Forbidden Planet (1956) is an especially bleak rendering of the mad scientist myth. After thousands of years of rationality, with the assistance of a machine to end all machines, the Krell are destroyed by monsters from the id. Morbius, in his pursuit of the knowledge and power of the Krell, is transformed into a monster who, subconsiously, seeks to destroy anyone who opposes him.
Most Science Fiction films, however, and in particular the ones in which the machine is a robot, cyborg, or some combination of human and machine, favor, like Lang's Metropolis, the evil machine story. These films include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969), Westworld (1973), The Demon Seed (1977), Alien (1979), and, finally, The Terminator (1984), the genre's last rendition of a truly evil machine. The machine in T1 is bad to its alloy bone.
Cameron and Hurd's two Terminator films demonstrate our changing attitudes toward machines with great clarity. Both films are set within the context of an apocalyptic war between humans and machines that follows a 1997 nuclear war between the United States and Russia. As you recall, the nuclear war begins when Skynet, the U.S.A.'s computer-based defense system, achieves self-awareness and attacks the Russians, hoping the human race will be destroyed in the nuclear holocaust that follows. In this, both films are consistent with each other, and with Dr. Strangelove, Colossus: The Forbin Project and other films of the Cold War era.
The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, have the same basic plot. Skynet sends a Terminator from the future to kill Sarah Connor or her son John before John can be born, grow up, and lead the humans in their war against the machines. In both films, the humans send a warrior back through time to protect John and his mother. It is at this point that T1 and T2 diverge. In The Terminator, the protector is a human being, and the Terminator is a machine. In T2, the protector is a machine, and the Terminator is neither human nor machine. He is something else.
In film, what you see and hear is what you get. And what you get in The Terminator are brilliant special effects, muscles, big trucks and bikes, shiny pistols, machine guns, shotguns and other hardware, and a solid rendition of the evil machine myth. What you get in Terminator 2: Judgement Day are even more extravagant special effects, including the "fluid" effects Cameron and Hurd used in The Abyss (1989), and a solid rendition of the mad scientist myth as the three heroes, John Connor, his mom, and John's cyborg protector hustle to stop the mad scientist before he can invent the basic technology that leads to Skynet. To stay alive, they have to stay out of the clutches of a new kind of Terminator who, though Cameron and Hurd call him a machine, is depicted, especially in his grotesque death throes, as essentially organic or worse. Unlike the Terminator in T1, who is a machine disguised as a man, the Terminator in T2 is an organic whole, not an assemblage of parts, and, although it's possible to read "machine" into his strength, agility and relentless focus, when he's consigned to a caldron of molten steel at the climax of the film, he shape shifts, writhes and bellows in agony like a monstrous animal or demon.
T2 is remarkably misanthropic and predictably iconoclastic in its assault on the usual people and institutions, including Ma Bell, bank machines, cops, bikers, foster parents and the city of Los Angeles, which is flattened by a hydrogen bomb. But, in contrast, T2’s rendition of the cyborg who is sent back through time to protect John Connor is heroic. And, just in case we can't follow the sub-text, T2 spells it out for us in a voice-over by Sarah Connor. Watching the cyborg and her kid, Sarah says: "Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."
In the film's Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the caldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron and Hurd use a series of close-ups to create a beautiful portrait of The Cyborg. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.
In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron and Gayle Anne Hurd gave us our first glimpse of a new, still unformed technology that might have replaced the machine as the not-us adversary upon which we projected our worst fears. Having united human and machine through the myth of The Cyborg, having accepted the machine model of human intelligence and anatomy to the extent that we understood ourselves better as machines than as animals, having realized that we are evolving, not into angels but into machines, we might have joined with The Cyborg to face the uncertain, and, because our paranoia stays one step ahead of us, always dangerous natural and supernatural worlds. The myth of the evil machine is dead. We are ready to confront, in myth and in art, the potential of bioengineering and of our own over-heated subconscious minds.
Instead, James Cameron invites us to a boring reprise of The Mission (1986) and the vicarious thrill of watching alien natives defeat well-armed corporate mercenaries. Cameron seems to have lost his faith in machines, people and cyborgs as well.
Somebody get Gale Anne Hurd on the phone. T3 without Cameron was a waste of her time. Avatar without Hurd was a waste of Cameron’s time. Cameron and Hurd should get back together and do something worthy of 3D CGI. Almost a hundred years of science fiction film is out there waiting to be mashed up into something new and actually mythic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
