Laura Mulvey argues that there are three different looks associated with cinema: “that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion." Mulvey’s definition is not just about looks associated with cinema but implies an association of looks both guided by and guided towards film audiences. Certain looks are scopohilic in nature and use another person or image as an object of sexual stimulation. Any scopophilia in cinema is an association of a series of looks arranged for and by the audience. Other looks are narcissistic and require the viewer to identify with the person or image on the screen. Characters and audience members relate through a series of implicit and explicit occurrences of looks with the goal of recognition and identification.
Mulvey’s exploration and arguments about the use of women as objects to stimulate not only pleasure but the process of the gaze in film seem accurate. Woman is image in film for the sexual pleasure of men and women and the definition of woman in general. It is not that men are not objectified by the technology of looking in cinema; it is that women are used specifically to grease the technological gears and to re-enforce cultural norms. I find troubling that we have a tendency to overlook sound, for example, and super-focus on sight. Nevertheless, I am interested in using the accepted engendering of film equipment, roles, audiences, and technique to discuss how complex looking in cinematic productions is—how the production is as much defined by the audience as the producers.
I will begin with the association of three looks that Mulvey’s rhetoric requires. In only the third look is illusion mentioned as an essential characteristic. The first look deals specifically with materials and technology—tools for making the film itself, for producing a “profilmic event.” Mulvey’s second look shows rather than produces and depends upon people who buy tickets, an audience that watches the screen rather than other audience members, and technology that projects rather than records. Whereas the first look deals with the association of looks from the point-of-view of the camera, the second look deals with the association of looks between an engaged audience and cinema itself. The third look, then, deals with the characters on the screen or in the film and the illusion that they are looking at each other. The third look is crucial for cinema to work, to be allowed to work. Mulvey correctly implies that cinema is a set-up, a gag, a trick, an illusion. Actors pretend to be people who talk to and care for each other in ways that writers, directors, and producers have learned audiences will comprehend. Comprehension in this case does not refer to taking in but being taken in. However, the illusion of cinema is not a screened illusion. Audiences know that filmic events aren’t real. While a screen illusion as such exists, I believe that illusion is important between the character and the audience looking for (and frequently at) one another rather than characters looking at each other.
Certainly, directors have toyed with this idea explicitly. Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo is a good example: the characters in a film and the members of an audience carry on a romance that is not real but very effective, a romance that is illusion yet feels right. Audience openly criticize the looks characters give each other and very often elide the looks that characters and audiences share. Such looks are uncomfortable and exploit both character and audience. In Lars Von Triers’s Breaking the Waves, Triers leaves his camera running well after a scene is finished. Emily Watson is drawn out of character and Watson-as-Bess looks into the camera. Her looks are exploited by the director to implicate the technology. After all, while not an official entry into Dogma, Breaking the Waves is a film that calls attention to itself. The truth Dogma aims at lies in a look shared between producer and audience that develops a techno-awareness. Yet such a look, as critical as it intends to be, does nothing to examine the look between characters/actors and audience. An audience buys tickets hence an illusion; Triers’s experiment in uncovering the brutality of truth-filmed and woman-degraded implicates the audience not the film and filmmakers. Even with all of Dogma’s honesty, Bess’s public humiliations, rape, and death lift the audience to a state of emotional self-awareness to promote a catharsis through her and then sends them home resituated in the symbolic order.
We should try the following contrast: looks between characters and the audience are illusions while looks between characters in a film are real. Jeff Daniels steps out of the screen to be with Mia Farrow yet he looks like he is still in the film. Emily Watson looks to the camera exhausted from her emotional portrayal and appears to look at the audience. Relying on a structure to justify the reading of a masculinist symbolic order—a feminist reading of film technology and economy—may oversimplify a detailed discussion of the association of looks in cinema. I think of Valie Export’s film The Practice of Love. We often think of how the male gaze, in this case men looking at women, dismembers the female body as it focuses on specific erotic parts. Plenty of film out there cuts women into pieces through angling and editing. A scene in Export’s film problematizes this construction of the look of the male gaze. From inside a sex-worker’s enclosed space, a woman strips. Men observe her body through a wall that distinctly separates the men from the woman, the spectator from the object of the gaze. The masculine gaze that the camera constructs is destabilized outside this look—not because we return the gaze but because the gaze is used to watch the men looking. Over or through the woman’s body, we see parts of men watching. The gaze is de-gendered (not neutered) because it refuses to comment on the look. I could argue that this is because a woman is directing the look, but that would in itself re-enforce the masculine structure before allowing a critical inquiry to begin. This is not a Godard moment where we hear commentary. This isn’t like Cordelia’s silence in King Lear either where the father chokes on his order as it unravels because this is not a decision by a man directing but a woman practicing… .
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
James Stewart 100th Birthday on TCM
Great films all day and night on TCM in celebration of James Stewart.
especially excited about Vertigo, Rear Window, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
especially excited about Vertigo, Rear Window, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Notes On an American Genre: Tough Guy Cinema
(Death Sentence, dir. James Wan, 2007 & The Brave One, dir. Neil Jordan, 2007.)
James Wan’s Death Sentence is strict genre fair. The plot, setting, and general narrative borrow from the tough guy genre, specifically revenge narratives in that genre, that have been popularized first in American mass market literature and second in American film. Death Sentence’s gleaning is pretty straightforward at that, featuring an idealist white middle-class man who loses his morals when confronted with extremely unsettling circumstances. In these stories, the initial critique of American society is as generic as the characters. Any innovations an author makes usually derive from style or from character. In other words, the look of a film or its tone permits a director some room to innovate while a character and his or her settings permit an actor room to innovate.
From Death Sentence: After his journey from naive, middle-class, white guy to instinctive, outsider, angry white guy, Kevin Bacon's Nick Hume removes a bandage from his head revealing a large vaginal wound. He has been castrated, symbolically feminized through a systematic stripping of all the visible signs of his middle-class masculinity. He has been graphically beaten down. Hume has already decided that he must make the world right again on his own, thus transgressing Law and Order. He has become an outsider. He proceeds to haphazardly shave his scalp. We know he's going to kill people in cruel acts of amoral and primal revenge. In many ways, we are watching Death Sentence to see Kevin Bacon kick some ass. More significantly, we watch films like Death Sentence to witness characters immersed in the everyday safety of suburban living emerge from sensational circumstances as outsider anti-heroes who will do absolutely anything to return Home to Safety. The generic tales are journey narratives.
So, a few of the significant genre conventions in the tough guy genres are as follows:
Death Sentence is littered with dated notions of American masculinity that many lower-budget films with worse technique have more intelligently handled. In this film a guy is bad-bad guy if he has a husky voice and a shaved head and tribal tattoos. As a result, John Goodman’s bad-daddy is a poorly developed foil to Bacon’s well-meaning and fallen good-daddy gone bad. I haven’t read the script, but I think it’s clear the screenwriter had used John Goodman--a grotesque desk man--as a foil for Kevin Bacon’s Nick Hume. Never mind, the missed opportunity to explore class consciousness. Never mind, the missed opportunity to observe how social class cultivates a very concrete geography in the American landscape. Genre films often offer viewers creative maps of the social landscape super-imposed on known locations.
In Death Sentence, we have a good-daddy with a good son as well as a surplus son. Good daddy loses the good son and fails to recognize his dedicated second son. Good daddy fails to see his relative abundance in spite of horrific tragedy. If Wan had invested some minutes to developing the bad-daddy’s relationship with his good son, then we could have had some development and innovation in the revenge genre concerning how fathers transmit false consciousness to sons via real acts in society. Something along the lines of “It’s a family affair.” After all, bad-daddy and his son are the head of a roving gang of violent, petty thieves and drug dealers. These working class misfits had no choice but to steal according to the determinism of their class consciousness. Their fatalism is inherited while Nick Hume has a choice. As we know: Aisha Tyler’s cop character pleads with Nick to stop causing trouble. Or, Nick Hume and family could have struck out against Joe Darley and family.
How could Wan have let these opportunity pass him by? Wan is much more interested in the fetishes and window-dressing of genre film making, all its superficialities. So, Death Sentence has its moments. It certainly provides a popular actor with the ability to encase himself in the genre lore. Bacon is fun to watch. He had to enjoy the opportunity to play a fallen man seeking revenge. Wan spends much footage visualizing goth postures, tribal tattoos. The tattoos are ridiculous and unnecessary. The digital blood and blood-spatter scenes are unnecessary. The music, lighting, art direction, and photography attempt to recall the chiaroscuro and surreal qualities of Italian Giallo fare one moment and then borrow DIY innovations from Barry Sonnenfeld/Sam Raimi work the next. Even John Woo's The Killer receives an homage near the end. I am all for loading a genre film with references and quotations, but the homage is pointless and bankrupt if innovation is absent. (Maybe Wan is still a film student, not yet a filmmaker.)
Death Sentence is so very literal, at times taking itself far too seriously. At the end, the bad-bad guy looks at the good-bad guy and says, “Look what I made you.” Huh? Random gang violence leads to the death of a son whose father, a risk management man for an insurance corporation, instantly loses his fragile idealism in the utilitarian logic of capitalist society and forgetting his responsibility to his living family members, decides to become a violent vigilante, a loner. He loses everything because he actively give it all up. And the audience is supposed to buy that line tacked onto the end of the film?
The throw away line is supposed to carry weight. In other words, a question for the audience: Who is responsible for all this mess? Why ask that question? That question is a cop out. The genre itself is based on one man throwing it all away to serve an individual purpose by any means necessary; in other words, a grotesque version of American Individualism. The genre itself is based on a strict adherence to the presence of a chaotic natural element in society that is part of the social organizing force that we utilize everyday in the market; in other words, an accurate version of a real condition of existence regardless of our Ethics as a culture. The genre toys with themes of Destiny, Determinism, and Free Will. And the genre is firmly rooted in the critique of bourgeois culture. We all know that in narratives like Death Sentence the roving gangs out wilding and killing are a natural and necessary force the author will use to examine the behavior of the unsettled bourgeois protagonist.
Why sentimentalize the antagonist (a hollow character the audience doesn’t care about) when the protagonist is the man with the plan and, thus, the man we are examining and relating to?
Death Sentence, then, pays mere lip service to a rich genre in order to fetishize the violence and fashion of the genre. Death Sentence has the look of a film that we never get to see.
Neil Jordan’s The Brave One is an innovative entry in tough guy cinema. Where James Wan offers a one-dimensional narrative that pays lip service to a miscellany of his favorite genre films (he even cites himself,) Jordan takes advantage of the genre itself to examine its conventions and characters. In addition, Jordan resists using classic sociological conventions--race, class, and gender. Jordan, addressing theme and character, purposefully conflates tough guy, superhero, and serial killer genres. All three are focused on the acts of alienated individuals.
Jodie Foster’s character Erica Bain has to address several consequences of her behavior after she purchases a gun and uses it to exact retributive justice. After being beaten nearly to death and witnessing her lover’s violent death, Erica Bain awakes after three weeks in a hospital bed without her sense of safety. She copes with her post-traumatic stress by purchasing a gun.
Bain is a pseudo-journalist and cultural anthropologist. She is also a bit of a local celebrity in New York City who records the sounds of the city as she walks the city streets. As an author and radio personality, she shares her observations and recordings with her listeners.
Jordan’s first innovation to the genre is the obvious one: this tough guy is a tough woman. But it is much more complex than a simple alteration of a character’s gender. Bain copes with a complex sense of absence after her fiance is murdered. She copes with both the violence of his loss but also comes to terms with her dependence on him. She doesn’t want to be alone. In a very concrete manner, she needs a partner. This need does not make Bain weak. In Death Sentence, Nick Hume is undone by the loss of his wife and second son. He returns to his home at the end of the film, but it is vacant and destroyed and he is utterly transformed, unable to cope with his radical transformation the result of his violent transgressions.
Erica Bain returns to her home and job and attempts to come to terms with the absence of her future husband. Her sense of self is not wholly tied to her partner. His loss encourages her to think about what she does and who she does it for. The what for and who for reflections lead Bain to address her sense of justice. She, like Nick Hume, will seek retribution, but unlike Nick Hume, Bain attempts to apply justice in a distributive manner. Bain functions as an outsider: she works on her sense of justice at night. Nevertheless, she returns to home in the morning, after work so to speak.
(Foster as)Bain resists action hero status in critical appraisals of her vigilante behavior. She insists that there are “plenty of ways to dies” and “you have to figure out a way to live.” Bain is aware that even though she acts as an outsider, she is still a part of her community in New York City. As a result, she admits that “it is horrible to fear the place you once loved.” Bain admits something complex: she fears New York and that fear prohibits her to love it. This loss of love permits her to transgress the law and to murder others as a vigilante. This loss of love is also a sign of hope’s frail presence. Bain may be capable of being saved. More significantly, Jordan’s direction and Foster’s performance seem to indicate that she is worth being saved.
Bain is troubled. She sits, stone-faced on the subway. She is armed. She is recording. She silently witness two acts of violent harassment. When she is finally confronted, after being left alone with the thugs, she kills both in a violent and covert rage and sneaks away. Jordan expertly insinuates scopophilia into Bain’s narrative. And Foster’s performance encourages this critique. The subway scene insinuates the audience in the transgressive acts of violence of both the thugs harassment of passengers and Bain’s killing the thugs. Bain is so skilled at observation even the thugs don’t take notice of her until the other passengers escape from the subway car. The audience is encouraged to associate with Bain. After all, we have experienced along with her the awful events that have led to her sitting in that subway car. We also know something the thugs do not know. She is armed and she is willing to kill. As Bain must come to terms with her behavior, we are encouraged to address our reaction to her behavior. This scene exploits our gender conventions--for example, women are nurturers and when confronted with stress, they are irrational--to address the pleasure we derive out of observing the pain of others.
Jordan earlier has set the stage for such a critique when after Bain and fiance are brutally beaten, he cuts into the medical examination of her bruised and battered naked body, as she is undressed for surgery, images of her lover examining her naked body as they make love. The comparison of the bedroom and the emergency room, bed and operating table, is unsettling.
Tough Guy films like Walking Tall, Death Wish, Rambo, and Die Hard involve men stepping outside of society to exact their own sense of justice on bad guys in a society that permits the bad guy to exist, sometimes with retribution. Viewers are always encouraged to address the contradictions that exist in the lives of such “heroes.” We are always encouraged to consider “Are they really good guys?” On the other hand, we are often encouraged to enjoy scenes of graphic violence without being asked to address where we derive such pleasure from. The genre exploits something we have repressed and exploits the tenuous nature we have with Social Contracts.
Jordan includes references to two other genres that cope with outsiders who operate in society: the Super Hero and Serial Killer genres. It’s worth consideration, I think, as an innovation for tough guy films. Bain narrates her nighttime journeys through New York explaining to the audience, her listeners, that she walks alone at night through the streets of her city. OK, Spidey. The Brave One offers an interesting contrast to the journey of such heroes as Peter Parker; after all, we have endured three Spiderman films recently. In addition, Bain is a killer who makes phone calls to the cop on her trail, dropping him clues to her identity. This is a citation (a sample, if you will,) from the serial killer genre.
If we are to consider the pleasure we derive watching Bain take out thugs and eventually enact retribution on the men who killed her fiance, and we accept that Bain is acting on a plane of existence that includes heroes and villains who both kill to achieve order in society, then we can confront Bain’s narrative of her fall from safety in bourgeois society as a cautionary tale that resists giving its audience a moral in an effort to invite participation in the journey. In the end, we are left to ponder just what Bain has achieved.
I haven’t addressed Terrence Howard’s detective. He sanctions the revenge in the end, of course. The cop is important. He is a member of Bain’s audience.
Worth Considering: Acts of vengeance in The Brave One are carried out in public places but out of sight of surveillance. The characters know what they are doing is wrong, yet are willing to transgress laws when they know they are not being observed. In addition, we have tough guys, called tough guys because they are neither good guys nor bad guys. And this explains part of the draw to the genre, I think, as tough guys are capable of transgressing our social order. They can exist outside of society while operating inside society. The are both inbetween and liminal. Interestingly, they operate like Emerson's Poets. (I think Jordan's vision of Erica Bain develops this sense of the wandering poet into her transgressive journey as a vigilante.)
James Wan’s Death Sentence is strict genre fair. The plot, setting, and general narrative borrow from the tough guy genre, specifically revenge narratives in that genre, that have been popularized first in American mass market literature and second in American film. Death Sentence’s gleaning is pretty straightforward at that, featuring an idealist white middle-class man who loses his morals when confronted with extremely unsettling circumstances. In these stories, the initial critique of American society is as generic as the characters. Any innovations an author makes usually derive from style or from character. In other words, the look of a film or its tone permits a director some room to innovate while a character and his or her settings permit an actor room to innovate.
From Death Sentence: After his journey from naive, middle-class, white guy to instinctive, outsider, angry white guy, Kevin Bacon's Nick Hume removes a bandage from his head revealing a large vaginal wound. He has been castrated, symbolically feminized through a systematic stripping of all the visible signs of his middle-class masculinity. He has been graphically beaten down. Hume has already decided that he must make the world right again on his own, thus transgressing Law and Order. He has become an outsider. He proceeds to haphazardly shave his scalp. We know he's going to kill people in cruel acts of amoral and primal revenge. In many ways, we are watching Death Sentence to see Kevin Bacon kick some ass. More significantly, we watch films like Death Sentence to witness characters immersed in the everyday safety of suburban living emerge from sensational circumstances as outsider anti-heroes who will do absolutely anything to return Home to Safety. The generic tales are journey narratives.
So, a few of the significant genre conventions in the tough guy genres are as follows:
- Justice: Retributive vs. Distributive Justice. Nick Hume like many Americans has a very naive understanding of how justice works in everyday life. Hume has invested his character and habit (ethos) in the apparently natural distributive justice of the utilitarian market that ideally rewards good behavior and hard work with profit and the potential to move upward along the vertically aligned social class scale. He takes few risks because that is an acceptable sign of mature and responsible living in middle-class culture. He talks the talk and walks the walk of middle-class American men. When confronted with extreme injustice, Nick Hume finds his unexamined lifestyle meaningless and discovers he is incapable of handling unfairness in a just society. Hume jettisons his middle-class values and finds comfort in more primal activity of retributive justice. Retribution makes sense to Hume because it satisfies his need for fairness and permits him to engage his utilitarian mathematics.
- Class: Middle Class. Nick Hume does not examine his own position in society because he is a member of the class that aspires to be the ruling class. He uncritically sees himself in everything that he experiences--he has a sense of destiny; he is fulfilling a plan that he believes he has designed yet believes is natural. From private life to social life, he finds justification for everything he does. Nick Hume, in as much as he is supposed to represent a bourgeois everyman, responds to each critique of his class with false consciousness. He does not think for himself. And his failure to think for himself permits his psychic and social break from his real conditions of existence when he is confronted with a terrifying and abrupt change in his everyday life. In addition, his bourgeois existence permits space for his falling down. When Nick Hume decides to act without regard of consequences, he must face a horizontal reality of everyman for himself. This is the fear of every upwardly mobile, middle-class individual. Their relative wealth offers them no power as individuals. They are entirely dependent on cultural, social, political, and economic conventions to maintain their status as citizens. The vertical realities of a culture vertically aligned through mechanisms of distributive justice permit relative wealth and power to as many citizens as is possible. Our culture is aristocratic in this sense. We depend upon others as long as they are neighborly. And if we step outside of society, then we may find ourselves cut out of the overall plan. This is the problem with Freedom.
- Whiteness, Masculinity, and Heterosexuality are also examined. Not thoroughly in Death Sentence. Unfortunately. Wan’s film seems to simply accept the conventions without intellect.
Death Sentence is littered with dated notions of American masculinity that many lower-budget films with worse technique have more intelligently handled. In this film a guy is bad-bad guy if he has a husky voice and a shaved head and tribal tattoos. As a result, John Goodman’s bad-daddy is a poorly developed foil to Bacon’s well-meaning and fallen good-daddy gone bad. I haven’t read the script, but I think it’s clear the screenwriter had used John Goodman--a grotesque desk man--as a foil for Kevin Bacon’s Nick Hume. Never mind, the missed opportunity to explore class consciousness. Never mind, the missed opportunity to observe how social class cultivates a very concrete geography in the American landscape. Genre films often offer viewers creative maps of the social landscape super-imposed on known locations.
In Death Sentence, we have a good-daddy with a good son as well as a surplus son. Good daddy loses the good son and fails to recognize his dedicated second son. Good daddy fails to see his relative abundance in spite of horrific tragedy. If Wan had invested some minutes to developing the bad-daddy’s relationship with his good son, then we could have had some development and innovation in the revenge genre concerning how fathers transmit false consciousness to sons via real acts in society. Something along the lines of “It’s a family affair.” After all, bad-daddy and his son are the head of a roving gang of violent, petty thieves and drug dealers. These working class misfits had no choice but to steal according to the determinism of their class consciousness. Their fatalism is inherited while Nick Hume has a choice. As we know: Aisha Tyler’s cop character pleads with Nick to stop causing trouble. Or, Nick Hume and family could have struck out against Joe Darley and family.
How could Wan have let these opportunity pass him by? Wan is much more interested in the fetishes and window-dressing of genre film making, all its superficialities. So, Death Sentence has its moments. It certainly provides a popular actor with the ability to encase himself in the genre lore. Bacon is fun to watch. He had to enjoy the opportunity to play a fallen man seeking revenge. Wan spends much footage visualizing goth postures, tribal tattoos. The tattoos are ridiculous and unnecessary. The digital blood and blood-spatter scenes are unnecessary. The music, lighting, art direction, and photography attempt to recall the chiaroscuro and surreal qualities of Italian Giallo fare one moment and then borrow DIY innovations from Barry Sonnenfeld/Sam Raimi work the next. Even John Woo's The Killer receives an homage near the end. I am all for loading a genre film with references and quotations, but the homage is pointless and bankrupt if innovation is absent. (Maybe Wan is still a film student, not yet a filmmaker.)
Death Sentence is so very literal, at times taking itself far too seriously. At the end, the bad-bad guy looks at the good-bad guy and says, “Look what I made you.” Huh? Random gang violence leads to the death of a son whose father, a risk management man for an insurance corporation, instantly loses his fragile idealism in the utilitarian logic of capitalist society and forgetting his responsibility to his living family members, decides to become a violent vigilante, a loner. He loses everything because he actively give it all up. And the audience is supposed to buy that line tacked onto the end of the film?
The throw away line is supposed to carry weight. In other words, a question for the audience: Who is responsible for all this mess? Why ask that question? That question is a cop out. The genre itself is based on one man throwing it all away to serve an individual purpose by any means necessary; in other words, a grotesque version of American Individualism. The genre itself is based on a strict adherence to the presence of a chaotic natural element in society that is part of the social organizing force that we utilize everyday in the market; in other words, an accurate version of a real condition of existence regardless of our Ethics as a culture. The genre toys with themes of Destiny, Determinism, and Free Will. And the genre is firmly rooted in the critique of bourgeois culture. We all know that in narratives like Death Sentence the roving gangs out wilding and killing are a natural and necessary force the author will use to examine the behavior of the unsettled bourgeois protagonist.
Why sentimentalize the antagonist (a hollow character the audience doesn’t care about) when the protagonist is the man with the plan and, thus, the man we are examining and relating to?
Death Sentence, then, pays mere lip service to a rich genre in order to fetishize the violence and fashion of the genre. Death Sentence has the look of a film that we never get to see.
Neil Jordan’s The Brave One is an innovative entry in tough guy cinema. Where James Wan offers a one-dimensional narrative that pays lip service to a miscellany of his favorite genre films (he even cites himself,) Jordan takes advantage of the genre itself to examine its conventions and characters. In addition, Jordan resists using classic sociological conventions--race, class, and gender. Jordan, addressing theme and character, purposefully conflates tough guy, superhero, and serial killer genres. All three are focused on the acts of alienated individuals.
Jodie Foster’s character Erica Bain has to address several consequences of her behavior after she purchases a gun and uses it to exact retributive justice. After being beaten nearly to death and witnessing her lover’s violent death, Erica Bain awakes after three weeks in a hospital bed without her sense of safety. She copes with her post-traumatic stress by purchasing a gun.
Bain is a pseudo-journalist and cultural anthropologist. She is also a bit of a local celebrity in New York City who records the sounds of the city as she walks the city streets. As an author and radio personality, she shares her observations and recordings with her listeners.
Jordan’s first innovation to the genre is the obvious one: this tough guy is a tough woman. But it is much more complex than a simple alteration of a character’s gender. Bain copes with a complex sense of absence after her fiance is murdered. She copes with both the violence of his loss but also comes to terms with her dependence on him. She doesn’t want to be alone. In a very concrete manner, she needs a partner. This need does not make Bain weak. In Death Sentence, Nick Hume is undone by the loss of his wife and second son. He returns to his home at the end of the film, but it is vacant and destroyed and he is utterly transformed, unable to cope with his radical transformation the result of his violent transgressions.
Erica Bain returns to her home and job and attempts to come to terms with the absence of her future husband. Her sense of self is not wholly tied to her partner. His loss encourages her to think about what she does and who she does it for. The what for and who for reflections lead Bain to address her sense of justice. She, like Nick Hume, will seek retribution, but unlike Nick Hume, Bain attempts to apply justice in a distributive manner. Bain functions as an outsider: she works on her sense of justice at night. Nevertheless, she returns to home in the morning, after work so to speak.
(Foster as)Bain resists action hero status in critical appraisals of her vigilante behavior. She insists that there are “plenty of ways to dies” and “you have to figure out a way to live.” Bain is aware that even though she acts as an outsider, she is still a part of her community in New York City. As a result, she admits that “it is horrible to fear the place you once loved.” Bain admits something complex: she fears New York and that fear prohibits her to love it. This loss of love permits her to transgress the law and to murder others as a vigilante. This loss of love is also a sign of hope’s frail presence. Bain may be capable of being saved. More significantly, Jordan’s direction and Foster’s performance seem to indicate that she is worth being saved.
Bain is troubled. She sits, stone-faced on the subway. She is armed. She is recording. She silently witness two acts of violent harassment. When she is finally confronted, after being left alone with the thugs, she kills both in a violent and covert rage and sneaks away. Jordan expertly insinuates scopophilia into Bain’s narrative. And Foster’s performance encourages this critique. The subway scene insinuates the audience in the transgressive acts of violence of both the thugs harassment of passengers and Bain’s killing the thugs. Bain is so skilled at observation even the thugs don’t take notice of her until the other passengers escape from the subway car. The audience is encouraged to associate with Bain. After all, we have experienced along with her the awful events that have led to her sitting in that subway car. We also know something the thugs do not know. She is armed and she is willing to kill. As Bain must come to terms with her behavior, we are encouraged to address our reaction to her behavior. This scene exploits our gender conventions--for example, women are nurturers and when confronted with stress, they are irrational--to address the pleasure we derive out of observing the pain of others.
Jordan earlier has set the stage for such a critique when after Bain and fiance are brutally beaten, he cuts into the medical examination of her bruised and battered naked body, as she is undressed for surgery, images of her lover examining her naked body as they make love. The comparison of the bedroom and the emergency room, bed and operating table, is unsettling.
Tough Guy films like Walking Tall, Death Wish, Rambo, and Die Hard involve men stepping outside of society to exact their own sense of justice on bad guys in a society that permits the bad guy to exist, sometimes with retribution. Viewers are always encouraged to address the contradictions that exist in the lives of such “heroes.” We are always encouraged to consider “Are they really good guys?” On the other hand, we are often encouraged to enjoy scenes of graphic violence without being asked to address where we derive such pleasure from. The genre exploits something we have repressed and exploits the tenuous nature we have with Social Contracts.
Jordan includes references to two other genres that cope with outsiders who operate in society: the Super Hero and Serial Killer genres. It’s worth consideration, I think, as an innovation for tough guy films. Bain narrates her nighttime journeys through New York explaining to the audience, her listeners, that she walks alone at night through the streets of her city. OK, Spidey. The Brave One offers an interesting contrast to the journey of such heroes as Peter Parker; after all, we have endured three Spiderman films recently. In addition, Bain is a killer who makes phone calls to the cop on her trail, dropping him clues to her identity. This is a citation (a sample, if you will,) from the serial killer genre.
If we are to consider the pleasure we derive watching Bain take out thugs and eventually enact retribution on the men who killed her fiance, and we accept that Bain is acting on a plane of existence that includes heroes and villains who both kill to achieve order in society, then we can confront Bain’s narrative of her fall from safety in bourgeois society as a cautionary tale that resists giving its audience a moral in an effort to invite participation in the journey. In the end, we are left to ponder just what Bain has achieved.
I haven’t addressed Terrence Howard’s detective. He sanctions the revenge in the end, of course. The cop is important. He is a member of Bain’s audience.
Worth Considering: Acts of vengeance in The Brave One are carried out in public places but out of sight of surveillance. The characters know what they are doing is wrong, yet are willing to transgress laws when they know they are not being observed. In addition, we have tough guys, called tough guys because they are neither good guys nor bad guys. And this explains part of the draw to the genre, I think, as tough guys are capable of transgressing our social order. They can exist outside of society while operating inside society. The are both inbetween and liminal. Interestingly, they operate like Emerson's Poets. (I think Jordan's vision of Erica Bain develops this sense of the wandering poet into her transgressive journey as a vigilante.)
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Blogging while Screening: Jiri Menzel
Closely Watched Trains, 1966
on the czech new wave.
on the czech new wave.
a very upbeat opening. marching music. reminds me of altman.
all about ejaculations.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Blogging while Screening: Buster Keaton
The idea here, as with most of my blogging, is to capture how I am thinking. Usually, I am blogging while reading & writing.
Tonight, I am trying blogging while screening. I'll update the page with each new note.
I'll be watching Turner Classic Movies from 10pm-4am, Eastern: The General, Our Hospitality, and Closely Watched Trains.
I am a big Buster Keaton fan. TCM has had a day of Charlie Chaplin films. They played some rare ones; Monsieur Verdoux and A King in New York are my favorites. Limelight is always a treat. I do really think Chaplin is my favorite anti-objectivist, anti-Rand filmmaker. He also subverts the bourgeois image of the flaneur and radicalizes both the wanderer and the ragpicker. He is lost in the crowd and forever heading away from the Metropolis: see Georg Simmel. Will write about these ideas later.
Buster Keaton's The General, 1927.
Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality, 1923:
Tonight, I am trying blogging while screening. I'll update the page with each new note.
I'll be watching Turner Classic Movies from 10pm-4am, Eastern: The General, Our Hospitality, and Closely Watched Trains.
I am a big Buster Keaton fan. TCM has had a day of Charlie Chaplin films. They played some rare ones; Monsieur Verdoux and A King in New York are my favorites. Limelight is always a treat. I do really think Chaplin is my favorite anti-objectivist, anti-Rand filmmaker. He also subverts the bourgeois image of the flaneur and radicalizes both the wanderer and the ragpicker. He is lost in the crowd and forever heading away from the Metropolis: see Georg Simmel. Will write about these ideas later.
Buster Keaton's The General, 1927.
Was not a box office success. Huge failure. Of course, Keaton was not playing the clown anymore: he was attempting to get us to identify with him rather than playing for laughs.
WORK: the stone face, the working, the physical act of constructing the character as he moves through the space-time of the film disrupts the rhythm we might have come to expect if we were his contemporary audience. One need not identify with the man one laughs at. Like Chaplin, Keaton's clown is thoroughly modern, self-aware, cynical/fatalistic at times, knowing. the stone face for Keaton is like a mirror and an indictment--for us, his audience. Chaplin and Keaton stand out from the crowd as individuals, and as individuals they typically pay a price for their difference. And that difference is an identification with their audience. The others are always unaware of the audience and, hence, we are unaware of them.
Self-examination is Entertainment. Self-awareness is comedic.
"I don't want to see you again until you are in uniform." The ridiculous demands we make for our lovers & partners.
"Charlie's tramp was a bum with a bum's philosophy...lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman, and honest.''
A famous passage from Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, comes to mind:
For example, consider Keaton's work to keep his train moving, on the tracks, on the right tracks, in the right direction as a metaphor for an individual's relationship with the market in everyday life. In other words, one's real conditions of existence. Why continue? Keaton's The General is supposedly based on a real event and he obviously wanted the film to be authentic. He had a love for trains, any machines and gadgets, really. So, my metaphor may be a stretch for the task of completing a film about an event from the Civil War as imagined by an actor; nevertheless, the plot and setting aside, Keaton's predicaments are common to almost all of his films. He is the clown with "sober senses," see his Stone Face.
Keaton makes use of the ready-at-hand...come to think of it, I really see with Keaton, Chaplin too, the makings of a director like Werner Herzog. A director who is so physically, viscerally, involved with the making of film. Herzog's films take place in the wilderness, for the most part. The General is a film set in the wilderness, the American Wilderness.
Once again see Lawrence's Spirit of Place.
On cultivation: from props to sets to story. Moving Pictures.
On the Aesthetic: Aristotle linked comedy to the ugly; Keaton links comedy to the beautiful, or the aesthetic. Chaplin did this as well. This is the mark of modernity maybe. The Actor v The Machines: Keaton's body is differentiated from the trains and the work his body accomplishes is individual, singular, free, when compared to the trains working on their tracks. This is Hegelian, possibly, since the working of the body is art for Keaton and Chaplin. And art is the expression of the Absolute Mind. Art illustrates thinking, the work of the intellect, and permits thinking to be perceived. This again has to do with AIR and all that is solid melting into AIR. When the body's work, such as Keaton's work/acting, is used to illustrate thinking, that does something to the objectivity of work and bodies working in the marketplace. Through Keaton's acting, we/viewers are encouraged to think about our relation with History, in the case of the General, as well our relationship with our everyday conditions of existence. This is also made possible by transforming everyday or mundane objects into specialized tools of/for the moment.
Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality, 1923:
One of my favorite scenes, Keaton playing with hats. On a train ride into the mountains he attempts to place his large, period hat on inside the train car. It is too tall a hat for the cramped space. He removes it and replaces it with his smaller hat that we have all come to know as part of his uniform. There is a uniformity to the actor, the artist, throughout Keaton's oeuvre: he is most comfortable in his uniform. The joke is a nice reminder that he is the artist not the character and we are again reminded of his work and his place within it and for it.
This appearance of Keaton within the narrative also serves to reflect the story's authenticity. The objects--trains, carriages, homes, guns, outfits--are all authentic and part of the time of the story. Keaton in his porkpie hat is distinguished enough from the other characters, and as other he represents a certain thinking, or coming-to-be. This coming-to-be is a modern character displaced in time--20th Century Keaton in the 19th Century--his exchanging hats, or coming out of costume and betraying himself as other is one way, negatively albeit, to be able to critically assess his situation, to be able to think, to freely think, about his situation. And Keaton's audience is encouraged to identify with him, the outsider, and become engaged more thoroughly with the tale through his difference.
Friday, April 11, 2008
The Economy of Making It (to Sell)
I guess there is a DVD market for sequels to popular films that really need no sequel. Films produced purely for the market. Films that are simply tied to the labor that produces them and representing nothing else. When you're in a corner store and there are shelves of items placed beneath and around the cash register: products for you to purchase, relatively cheap, that you are meant to consume or throw away. These straight to DVD sequel-films are like that 5th Avenue bar that catches your eye. You know what it tastes like. You're not really interested in it. But you pick it up and eat in while walking to the bus and throw the wrapper in the trash next to your stop and then you forget about it.
For example, we have War Games 2: The Dead Code.
Candy. Fluff. Made to make you fat, happy, dumb, and numb.
Now, you want to sell poetry and prose in a market that is almost impossible to break into in an intellectual, scholarly, artistic, dedicated, thoughtful, and meaningful manner. You could write contract novels, you could ghost write, you could become a consultant and write technical manuals. You could do all this and write you're earnest text on the sly, out of the market, on the side, so to speak.
But let's say all you really want to do is make some bread. Well. Make a sequel. And find somebody to place it on a shelf where people can see it as they browse for their mass market fare. Sure, some serious text can be gleaned in the mass shelves of shit that sell thousands. But you want that shopper as well as the mainstream shopper who reads simply to pass the time. You want everybody to buy your book. Make it a sequel.
Maybe you could create a market for poetry. Finally. After all these years. You have been a student of Whitman. And Ginsberg. And now your poetry, your lines, have the flavor of the great wanderer but you are firmly planted in the contemporary. And people simply won't take the time to read what you have seen and observed and pointed to and nobody is engaged by what has been revealed to you, nobody knows what you behold.
Well, sequel-ize it. Leaves of Grass 2: Sidewalks and Cul-de-Sacs Or Howl 2: Gotta Walk Against the Flow of Traffic.
Or, maybe you're like me and trying to learn how to write a great American novel that is both thoughtful and provacative. Maybe you want people to read your terse prose verse. Your working with Williams, Creeley, Olson, Stein, and Pound: your working these poets and critics into your prose and attempt to bring poetics into play as a philosophy of fiction. But maybe nobody cares.
Well, that's ok. You can write that great book. Put all your effort into it. And simply make it a sequel. You'll call it Moby Dick 2: The Ishmael Papers or Huckleberry Finn 2: The Meth Years.
Oh you'd sell some books.
For example, we have War Games 2: The Dead Code.
Candy. Fluff. Made to make you fat, happy, dumb, and numb.
Now, you want to sell poetry and prose in a market that is almost impossible to break into in an intellectual, scholarly, artistic, dedicated, thoughtful, and meaningful manner. You could write contract novels, you could ghost write, you could become a consultant and write technical manuals. You could do all this and write you're earnest text on the sly, out of the market, on the side, so to speak.
But let's say all you really want to do is make some bread. Well. Make a sequel. And find somebody to place it on a shelf where people can see it as they browse for their mass market fare. Sure, some serious text can be gleaned in the mass shelves of shit that sell thousands. But you want that shopper as well as the mainstream shopper who reads simply to pass the time. You want everybody to buy your book. Make it a sequel.
Maybe you could create a market for poetry. Finally. After all these years. You have been a student of Whitman. And Ginsberg. And now your poetry, your lines, have the flavor of the great wanderer but you are firmly planted in the contemporary. And people simply won't take the time to read what you have seen and observed and pointed to and nobody is engaged by what has been revealed to you, nobody knows what you behold.
Well, sequel-ize it. Leaves of Grass 2: Sidewalks and Cul-de-Sacs Or Howl 2: Gotta Walk Against the Flow of Traffic.
Or, maybe you're like me and trying to learn how to write a great American novel that is both thoughtful and provacative. Maybe you want people to read your terse prose verse. Your working with Williams, Creeley, Olson, Stein, and Pound: your working these poets and critics into your prose and attempt to bring poetics into play as a philosophy of fiction. But maybe nobody cares.
Well, that's ok. You can write that great book. Put all your effort into it. And simply make it a sequel. You'll call it Moby Dick 2: The Ishmael Papers or Huckleberry Finn 2: The Meth Years.
Oh you'd sell some books.
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