Continue reading “Foxy Brown”

The trick to making a good film adaptation is to ignore all other considerations and make a good movie by any means necessary, even arson, and then sit back and watch the people who love your good movie squint really hard at the good movie that you’ve made and convince themselves that they can see a flawlessly-rendered solution to the question what is the proper way to translate from word to image with no information loss of any kind inherent in the goodness of your very good movie and that you the filmmaker were both clearly aware of and following this æther-kept secret throughout the entire hallowed filming process even though you were as stated above just doing whatever the fuck popped into your head and were therefore concerned only with the countless other and more practical concerns that present themselves during the making of a movie like my actors, why are all of my actors so dumb. Life is a con, and the accidental idols onto which we’ve desperately projected our desire for a logical and safely-yoked universe are just as confused as we are, except maybe taller, and with better hair. For we are naught but dust, cold space dust forever exiled from the origins of time and dreaming beyond ourselves a comforting lie called sentience, this winnowing window during which we spend most of our time thinking about food, and nutting. I am fine with all of this, for I am unable to conceive of an alternative, and I like both of those things anyway.

What’s the Best Way to Adapt a Book to the Screen?

I decided to preface this post with the disclaimer that none of this matters because 1) I should probably preface all of my posts with that disclaimer and 2) it frees me up from any narcissistic delusion that I can be “right” about any of this, that a deep enough dip into stodgy self-seriousness will make my completely arbitrary opinions sound scientific. They’re not. They’re brain worms! But it’s fun to parse these things, because thinking is like exercising, but with pictures.

Sure is a messy topic, though! The examples we can find of quality film adaptations are manifest, and happy to be here, but are also defined by their refusal to align conveniently, or even comfortably, into anything resembling a solid and usable map of the mostly impressionistic nega-zone that lies between words and images. Inherent Vice and American Psycho are both good film adaptations of books, but the former pays loving, dedicated tribute to its source material while the latter basically mocks the book it’s based off of. A Clockwork Orange changes the ending of its source material, and changes it fucking hard, and by doing so turns the entire thing from an arc to a commentary. The Mist may seem at a glance to follow this approach, because its ending differs from the book as well, but the changes made don’t undermine the tone or the ideas present in the original medium – quite the fucking contrary, actually, as the alterations made to the text if anything serve to make a louder, even Stephen King-ier version of the ending. So what’s a person to do?

Well, for starters, let’s look at some of the rules (ha!) that have at one point or another been written down for what makes a good film adaptation of a book, probably in a list that has the word OFFICIAL hovering paternally somewhere in its upper third, because everybody knows you make something official by writing in capital letters, and then after acknowledging these supposed rules we’ll immediately point to a movie that proves, no, that’s wrong, and probably also stupid.

Off to the dumb races!

“You have to replace the narrative prerogatives of words, which are a cold medium, with the narrative prerogatives of film, which is a hot medium.”

Inherent Vice, in all of its literary glory, says eat me!

“You simply have to do justice to the ideas of the source material.”

Nope! Paul Verhoeven made Starship Troopers out of spite because he hated the fucking book so much! American Psycho cheekily undermines – correctly, and justly, with the nodding and infallible assent of God himself – the dumb, edge-lordy book that it is based off of!

“You have to believe what the book believes, regardless of what story you tell, or how you tell it. Just see through the original author’s eyes, and embrace their faith.”

Ahaha, you rake, tell me another one! Stanley Kubrick adapted a ghost story to the screen, and he didn’t even believe in ghosts! He believed in alcoholism!

“You have to surprise the audience, because they’ve already read the book.”

Watchmen is basically a shot-for-shot remake of the comic that it’s based off of!

“This is all business and entertainment, so be practical: a film adaptation should try to reach the largest possible audience, ideally by being less challenging than the book.”

The Mist, motherfuckers. And Suspiria is a remake but it’s such a glorious middle finger to audience expectations that I’m calling it an adaptation anyway. Motherfuckers.

“Just don’t change the genre, I guess.”

V for Vendetta is an action movie that basically just licensed some character names from Alan Moore.

As you can see, everybody is wrong about everything, always. I now want to run through different types of adaptations, because I am earnestly curious about how many I can think of, and also because I love naming things. But first, another disclaimer, because this post is apparently more dangerous than driving an American-made car:

The key to this whole exercise isn’t to conclude what the best way to adapt a book to the screen is, because that’s like asking what the best month of the year to get a handjob is, but rather to draw a distinction between a good movie and a good adaptation. A good movie is easy to define. It’s a movie that isn’t bad. But what about a good adaptation? That’s a little trickier. The simplest definition of a good adaptation is one that presents its source material visually instead of through words. When viewed in this context an adaptation can better be called a translation. Like going from Japanese to French or Old English to Modern English, you’re attempting to keep intact as much direct, literal meaning as possible as you move from one language to another. You want to have the story, tone, themes, characterization, dialogue, even the specific descriptions be as close as possible on one end of the equation as the other, just with different squiggly lines on the page. It’s like a game of telephone; you want the person at each terminal point on the line to come away with the same sentence, same meaning, every time.

This is a fine intellectual undertaking, and certainly doesn’t result in bad movies – it has, in fact, resulted in many good ones! – but in its intense studiousness is kind of like Norman Bates wearing his mother’s clothes – technically impressive, but with a getup that hard going on someone is absolutely going to fucking die. This comparison is dope twice over, because Psycho is pretty much the exact type of adaptation we’re describing right now. So we’ll call this type of adaptation Mother, and have it be the stealth-start to our list. Next!

The Director’s Throbbing Ego. A personal favorite, and the house special. Assume the audience would rather see a film from the mind of you, the director, rather than the author, whose work you adapt mostly as a matrix onto which you can graft your own style. Examples of this include every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made, including his final one, where he essentially did this to himself. The Shining and A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon were rejiggered to be, well, Stanley Kubrick movies, like he enjoyed their stories and appreciated their structure well enough but like a madman adjusting the contrast and blackness levels on his television was obsessed with making the colors more Kubrick. This is, of course, pure ego, because you’re looking at someone else’s work and believing there’s something better lurking unrealized in the words, either not knowing or not caring that the something so relentlessly teasing its nubile and beguiling presence from the darkness beyond expression is you, and your opinions, facedown and nude on a bearskin rug. You fucking weirdo. This entire approach brings to mind an anecdote from David Sedaris: one time he was listening to an audiobook of South African folk tales, and upon delving into the no-doubt rich emotions and complexly-accessible moralizing thought to himself, “I can do better than this.”

So the source material isn’t nothing in the Director’s Throbbing Ego approach – if nothing else it gives the filmmaker a unique structure onto which they can go about implanting their own ideas, which by definition makes the final product at least shaped differently than it would otherwise be if it had sprung, wholesale, from the parochial womb of their own mind – but, let’s face it, wanky wank wank all the same.

(Stanley Kubrick movies are awesome because watching all or most of them consecutively is probably the closest a sane person will ever come to seeing the panoply of life through the eyes of a serial killer who also has a tremendous understanding of lighting and narrative pacing.)

The Realist. Another approach would be to set the standard that some things simply aren’t visual, or that some ideas are too distasteful for general audiences, so you should only focus only on bringing to the screen those things that flow smoothly and don’t offend. Ever read the Hans Christian Andersen story on which Disney’s The Little Mermaid is based? It’s fucking depressing, and weird as shit! The mermaid in that story loses out on everything, and becomes like a purgatory ghost or something, forced to watch her man bone someone else for eternity? I don’t remember exactly what happens because every time I try to recall the original tale Under the Sea starts blasting in my brain to save me from the discomfort of brimstone sanctimony being hurled at my face from the vengeful recesses of the nineteenth century.

And as regards the visual part: how about all of those Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow adaptations that are just sitting right there atop the list of highest-grossing movies of all time? Oh, right, they’re not there, or anywhere, because a faithful adaptation to Ulysses would be a romantically-bland Irishman sitting in a room and thinking about kidney pie and his wife’s legs for twenty straight hours while his erection slowly comes and goes, the only task left to the viewer being to decide if twelve o’clock hard coincides with the lady or the pie.

The Facelift, or: Art is Challenging, You Putz. In this inspired but also unrelentingly artistic approach you maintain the themes, tone, ideas, impressions, lollygags, joie de vivre, bon vivant, cul-de-sac, and fromage of the original story but replace everything else that is literal. The main point you’re trying to convey through this flensing off of all things surface is that the only part of a story that matters is its je ne sais quoi, and that the details are just, well, details. Take I’m Not There or Michael Winterbottom’s version of Tristram Shandy – they both self-consciously avoid retelling the actual, literal story upon which they are based (I’m Not There isn’t based on one book in particular, but rather the life of Bob Dylan, but given his life’s length and similarity to the kind of book you’d get assigned in high-school and SparkNotes the hell out of, the judges are scoring it as a book) in order to better focus on the ideas behind those books. This approach is designed to appeal mostly to people so pretentious they plan to one day publish their diary as a novel, and who spell theater theatre even though they were born in Idaho. Needless to say, I adore it.

(All jokes aside, this approach is pretty dope. Showing how ideas are only tangentially related to their obvious containers and can instead inhabit any number of physical forms while still conveying the same thoughts and feelings across time and space is riveting. My novel-diary is going to be called The Clown Who Wept, and will not be available in paperback.)

The Book, but Harder. Call it the SportsCenter highlight reel while you’re at it. The formula is simple: take what people like about the book, cut out what you deem superfluous or simply distastefully unvisual, and then crank up the volume on what you have left. Frank Darabont’s The Mist is a great example of this. The Mist Stephen King-ses its material even harder than Stephen King did, which by definition means that someone gets eaten by a squid from another dimension.

(A weird wrinkle to this one is that, technically, you’re chopping up the book, same as the Facelift approach, but instead of replacing the literal events with wildly different ones to prove some artistic point about the ubiquity of life you’re simply condensing and distilling the story into more of what it literally already was – like if someone scheduled a facelift and told the surgeon that they wanted to look more like themselves, which is both terrifying and probably a subplot in a David Lynch movie.)

Licensed Genre Picture, or: There’s a Reason Alan Moore Hates Us. Let’s face it: ideas are boring. Know what’s not boring? Titties! And throwing knives! And dollar-store philosophies that only seem deep because you’re fourteen and the Guy Fawkes mask is the coolest thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life, and why would I bother actually reading about the real Guy Fawkes, I’m sure he was also a poetry-quoting vigilante who knew kung-fu! I’m being entertained and learning!

Basically, you just make a genre movie but license the use of character names from some compelling work of fiction so that when your actors make the rounds on the talk-show circuit they can pontificate (waaaaaanky wank wank) about politics and philosophy and all the challenging notions contained in this upcoming movie that for a work of art destined to overthrow the current political regime seems to stick suspiciously close to the beats of a standard action film, just with the word ideology thrown in from time to time in the same way you’d yell “sex!” to get someone’s attention.

Anyway, the actors get to feel smart, the audience gets to feel smart, the studio makes bank while also pretending they’re making art, and Alan Moore gets a check in the mail. Everybody wins.

The Ironic Adaptation, or: We Don’t Deserve Paul Verhoeven. Another favorite, because I drink irony like a Thomas Pynchon character chugging dandelion wine. Starship Troopers and American Psycho were made by people who (correctly) thought that the book they were tasked with bringing to the screen kind of sucked. They maybe liked some of the ideas, but (correctly) resented the way in which those ideas were expounded upon, which were, in order: fascism and fascism, but lazier. So these two heroes of cinema who were tasked with directing these movies (Paul Verhoeven and Mary Harron, respectively) bravely decided that the best course of action was to swindle a studio into footing the bill for what is essentially a million-dollar shit being taken on the book they were supposed to lovingly shepherd into the Hollywood canon. You could call this a subset of the Director’s Ego approach, but I think of the ego approach as being motivated by the director simply wanting to see themselves in the final product. In the ironic approach the director is greatly subverting the source material, yes, but doing so in service of pointing out how much the source material fucking blows, rather than indulging the whims of their own imagination, or their own image. Call it a social responsibility to remind people that Starship Troopers is a shitty fascist handbook (which it is) or that American Psycho was written by a bland sociopath with nothing interesting to say (also true). I like this one a lot because it involves being a huge dick, and somehow getting a major studio to finance said huge dickishness, and then just kind of waving that dick around, unconcerned about the proximity or well-being of children. Give Verhoeven and Harron Nobel Peace Prizes, because they are the best of us.

The Inherent Vice. Surprise, motherfuckers, this was a secret Inherent Vice review the entire time! Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice gets its own entry because it is wonderful and underappreciated and it adapts a book to the screen in my favorite (and therefore, mathematically, best) way possible: it maintains an overtly literary structure (no real ticking clock, narrative detours galore, internalizing everything, more characters than is practical or kind to the audience’s memory) while threading visually, silent, and concurrently into that structure an entirely parallel tonal story that does all the shit movies are supposed to do, just quieter. It’s brilliant! There are sequences in Inherent Vice where the literary components are playing out in all of their glorious, meandering, Thomas Pynchon-y glory, while Paul Thomas Anderson’s Siamese twin of a narrative keeps rolling portentously along, sometimes if it must doing so entirely under the auspices of ambient-fucking-noise! This is magnificent! And people hate this movie, because they think it is boring! What a bunch of assholes! It’s two stories in one, which are actually the same story! It’s like light refracted through Icelandic feldspar and showing you two versions of a life, one as it actually is and the other how it could be! That was an Against the Day reference! I have gone completely insane!

The End

I’m supposed to end this post by concluding somberly, but with an ameliorating wisp of whimsy, that there is no “best” way to adapt a book to the screen, because the experiences and prerogatives and source material and zeitgeist and audience expectations are a living ambrosia of artistic potential and alchemical wonder whose precise formula will never be known, can never be known, and even if they could be known, would you want to know? But fuck that noise. Inherent Vice wins. It is the best, and has defeated all of the others. Watch Phantom Thread, too. Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is named Woodcock, which is like being named Bonerwang.

I didn’t have any interest in The Hustler at first because I am a stupid, stupid man. Then I watched The Hustler and, although I remain a stupid, stupid man, I now have a new movie for the pantheon. I also got treated to the image of George C. Scott in a skinny tie, which is like finding out that the meanest teacher at your high-school moonlights as a drag queen, which is awesome.

One Handsome Loser – Codependent Characters in The Hustler

No need for a review – spoilers, The Hustler is a good movie. I daresay it’s wonderful, the kind of film that reminds you through the sublimity of its performances and confidence in its own storytelling how the cool detachment of moving pictures can also somehow maintain a searing sense of urgency, keep its sunglassed gaze undaunted towards the worst and most violently lonely parts of human nature. But none of this is news to you, you who are erudite and strong, whose legs still contain much youthful vigor. So we’re going full essay with this motherfucker instead. Sorry, but I just can’t watch a movie with a screenplay this good – steeped in themes without being obvious – and not write something analytical about it. I don’t even care if the analysis I’m about to provide is butt-dumb, TV Guide-levels of obvious, and everybody who has ever watched this movie, including babies – including stupid babies, who are bad at math – has figured out everything I’m about to say in the first ten seconds of viewing! I do it for me.

The Hustler, a movie ostensibly about pool and the indefatigability of Paul Newman’s chin dimple, is not actually a sports movie. It’s a character study, with emphasis on the many, many meanings of the world character – a grim investigation into the folly of thinking that you can only achieve happiness through the gratification of some false self, who by definition you must value more than your true self, who you must eventually aspire to replace your disowned true self with. Forget about booze – these people are addicted to escape from themselves (they are also addicted to booze). And in tribute to this movie’s absolutely fine-ass script, which I imagine as wearing a dress far too tight for its parents to be comfortable with, I am going to replace my usual ironic section titles with quotes from the film, because all must be awash in this movie’s wonderful writing – always, at all times, at all locations temporal and physical.

“Jeez, that old fat man. Look at the way he moves. Like a dancer… like he’s playing a violin or something.”

To prove right away that The Hustler has no interest in being a sports movie and is instead about the insipid and destructive ways in which we cling to fantasy, let us appreciate a simple but devastatingly effective structural decision in this absolute sugarplum of a movie: the flipping of the first and second meetings of our protagonist and the Guy-He-Needs-to-Beat-at-Sports-to-Complete-his-Arc. In a sports movie, like a real sports movie, the first meeting would be the quick and devastating ass-kicking dished out by The Guy that boots our protagonist into his hero’s journey, a journey that will of course, as it must, culminate in said protagonist returning for another round with The Guy, which will be an absolute slugfest, a grind in which protagonist-boy Applies What He Has Learned over the course of the film to, sure as sunshine, emerge victorious. For examples of this see every movie ever made.

But in The Hustler it’s the opening meeting that goes on forever, in which everything is laid bare and our protagonist is forced to face his inner demons. He just doesn’t fucking want to! Hell, even from a superficial, material standpoint it’s all inverted – our hero Fast Eddy is up big, and can call the game whenever he wants. You don’t start your Mighty Ducks movie with the Ducks lighting up the Team That Wears Black and Also Their Coach is a Serial Killer Because We Have to Make Sure the Audience Hates Him by a score of like 13-1, so what’s up? This is the movie showing that the outcome of the game is irrelevant, although the game itself, taking up more than twenty minutes of early-story runtime, is an essential vector by which to understand both Eddy and what this movie is really about.

In fact the much, much more interesting question, the one that delivers us into the heart of this movie, which is a treasure, is one that multiple characters attempt to answer over the course of the story: why doesn’t Fast Eddy Felson just stop playing when he’s beaten Minnesota Fats enough, made enough money to buy everyone at poolhall a majestic chin dimple? The answer is because Fast Eddy Felson, a fictional character worn by Eddy Felson with the same helplessness as David Foster Wallace wearing a bandana, has not outperformed Minnesota Fats, also a character. Because this is not a movie about a likeable scamp trying to win a match against the best in town – he does that a few minutes into the movie – it’s about a miserable, self-hating and co-dependent pretender trying to prove that his persona – Fast Eddy Felson, Womanizing Pool Shark – is more perfectly realized than Minnesota Fats’ character – The Best There Is, But Not Necessarily At Pool.

“Even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”

That Eddy Felson claims the above quote during his match with Fats is both completely nonsensical and the clearest indication of the obsequious of his character to his character’s character that you’re ever going to find. Notice how he says nothing about being the best at pool – just the best, maybe in a kind of bon vivant way, I suppose. Eddy is flatly saying that the literal outcome of their game means nothing to him, because he will still believe with religious dedication in his false self, Fast Eddy Felson, a crutch that Regular Speed Eddy Felson cannot live without. Eddy can’t fathom enjoying success as Eddy – all he can derive pleasure from is catching the reflected glory of Fast Eddy, who he views as the real winner in their relationship. Just look at what Eddy prioritizes during the match with Fats:

“The curly hair,” he says at one point to his partner Charlie, of Fats’ appearance. “And them diamond rings. And that carnation.”

Eddy is obsessing over the superficial image of Fats, because that what he’s really come to claim. Eddy is not a pool player looking to prove that he’s the best at pool – he’s an actor looking to prove that he’s the best at hiding himself inside of his character. Just look at the use of booze in this scene! Eddy gets shitfaced because his character is faltering in the late-game against Fats. How will getting drunk help him? It won’t, if his goal is to win the game. But if he’s trying to out-perform Fats, well, then he’s using bourbon to go full De Niro, to method act his way back into character! Eddie isn’t upset that he lost at pool, because he didn’t fucking lose at fucking pool. He’s upset that Minnesota Fats proved to be a more resilient and cooler character than Fast Eddy Felson.

Need more evidence? Coming right the fuck up! At the critical point of their match – hour one-million, when Fast Eddy has consumed all of the bourbon east of Pittsburg and Minnesota Fats all the ham west of it – what do the players do? They redo their fucking makeup! Minnesota goes to the bathroom, gussies himself up, and puts his jacket back on. Fast Eddy sees this, sees how cheap he looks compared to Fats, and sheepishly puts his coat on. It is a ratty coat, compared to Fats’, and all the handsome Paul Newman-ness in the world can’t hide that fact. At this point the match is over, and Fats wins, because it is now fully a matchup of their characters, and Eddy simply can’t keep up with Minnesota Fats’ style and easy self-actualization.

Alright, let’s put a few more nails in the sports movie coffin. The obligatory “hero gets a new mentor, and they set off on a journey of redemption” thing would typically happen right after the inaugural ass-kicking at the hands of the main villain. But in this film it’s an afterthought, and also the mentor is a crazed sociopath who is just using Eddy because the desperate loser represents good “action” to him. The entire Louisville sequence, aside from happening far too late in the movie for it to follow the sports film structure is also deeply insidious and depressing, when we discover just how depraved Bert Gordon, Eddy’s new “mentor,” really is. Nothing about this follows the sports-movie formula because, brother, it ain’t a sports movie.

I mean, in a sports movie Minnesota Fats would be the main villain, but in this movie he’s almost entirely an afterthought, with the protagonist’s fight against himself (and to a lesser extent, Gordon) providing the real emotional fireworks. And there are a thousand other ways this film deviates from the vile and loathsome Sports Formula, like how in a real sports movie whatever our character learned along the way would help him win, or at least lose respectfully. He finally pulls off that trick shot some paraplegic veteran showed him all those years ago, and calls out “this one’s for no-legs Mahoney!” when he does it, or whatever. But Eddy can already win, which we see in the opening match when he, uh, wins. What Eddie learns over the course of this movie has nothing to do with Rising Above and Winning the Big One – his is on a journey of discovering just how craven Fast Eddy Felson is, and how he – regular Eddy Felson – won’t be short of his desperate creation until he reaches a point where he hopes, really hopes, that his idealized self gets offed by some bookie he wronged along the way, because Eddy’s tired of being suffocated by his own miserable neediness.

And lastly: in a real sports movie the final confrontation between our hero and the ostensible antagonist wouldn’t be so joyless. The second match between Eddy and Minnesota lasts for, like, thirty seconds! And that’s the point! Fast Eddy is just Eddy now, miserable but accepting, taking no joy in either winning the match or having a cooler character than Fats, because those things are all sickening to him now! In a real sports movie Eddy would, like, take out the family pool cue that his dad gave him sometime during the film’s second act, the part where we find out that Eddy is a loner because his dad was withholding blah blah blah who cares. I am brain-vomiting over how trite that all sounds, and how it absolutely is going to be added in for the inevitable remake of this movie, which is going to star Chris Pratt, because the world is a toilet that sings out of key.

“You know, that’s real sweet music in there. You can almost smell the action and the money.”

Thrilling observation that only I, a professional haver of opinions, can make, because my game is robust, and my senses keen: this movie has a soundtrack. What, let me pretend I have a graduate degree: this movie has a soundtrack that is good. It’s all jazzy! Jazz is cool. Sometimes I pretend I’m wearing sunglasses when I listen to jazz music, although I do not actually wear sunglasses when I listen to jazz music, for I lack the confidence to pull it off. We can’t all be manspreading like George C. Scott, bold as love, acting as if our balls were Helios, responsible for both sunrise and sunset by dint of our thunderous penis-chariot.

But we’re not here to reference the soundtrack in The Hustler, nor are we here to compare George C. Scott’s man-basket to figures of antiquity (stay tuned for my Patton review!). We’re here to observe the movie’s masterful use of no soundtrack, which is like using a soundtrack, but no. Really, though: the hardest parts of The Hustler to watch are the parts where there’s no music playing. These characters are characters – they are all acting, and they want to act to a beat. During Fast Eddy’s moments of superficial accomplishment we get that chili jazz score going, but when Fast Eddy has been momentarily shut out and Eddy is forced to exist as, well, himself, that’s when the soundtrack cuts and we are left with the harrowing and wincing image of only the real self, echoing pathetically and humiliated in this cavernous nothing of the real world, stumbling in the void where affection is supposed to be, confronted with his disowned self and clearly choking on the misery of that reality. Eddy is an actor, and a desperate, mediocre one. He needs someone or something to play off of at all times – his “partner” Charlie could better be described as his costar – and when you take the music away he is left with no resource around which he can structure his performance, and he is stuck interacting with the most reviled thing in his life – himself.

“So what beat me?”

“Character.”

And if you think that Fast Eddy is the only vile concoction inside of which a miserable human hides, do I have several thousand more words for you! Everybody in this movie is a character. Some are so sublimely their character that we don’t notice or care, and they seem fine with it, too (ever find out Minnesota Fats’ real name? That would be a nooope), some use their character as a place to hide, even though they know the air supply in there is dwindling (Sarah), others are hellbent on using sheer force of will to make people believe in their character more than their reviled self (Eddy, take a bow), and some use a character as a vehicle by which to dissect and manipulate other characters, in kind of a parasitic second-order derivative of horseshit. That would be Gordon.

Bert Gordon doesn’t have a character. That’s his character. He’s the one who pretends to be outside of the whole scene (we’re introduced to him during the initial match just watching, now aren’t we) and drinking his milk while everybody else gets shitfaced and tries to bullshit each other. It’s from this privileged position of detachment that he purports to be able to comment so intelligently on the people around him, their characters and their follies. This is fuckery. Like everybody else Bert Gordon uses a character to interact with the world at large, one he is pathologically obsessed with gratifying at all times. He’s just better at it than everybody else. He makes this point explicit in Louisville when he says to Sarah, of Eddy, that the younger man simply represents “action” to him. Daddy needs his juice, and his character is how he gets it!

One Handsome Loser

But the character we really came here to see, hate, and root for the demise of is Fast Eddy Felson. And the domineering nature of this character explains so much of the self-destructive behavior of his underlying and worm-like creator. Eddy Felson wants to lose. He forces himself to lose, whenever the stakes are high enough, or low enough, or moderate enough, or he’s just bored. This is because the perpetual loser-dom of Eddy Felson will allow Fast Eddy to float, aspirational, just outside Eddy Felson’s grasp, and give the more human and therefore despised man something to forever chase in vain, something to make him feel better about how he has shuttered his vision against all of those insufferably human people around him. This is why Eddy keeps Sarah drunk; this is why he keeps going back to the pool hall. If the character of Fast Eddy is ever fully satisfied, if he can be put aside, or even integrated with Eddy and in doing so allow both of them to be satisfied, then what? Eddy lives for the character he has created, and everybody else is a resource by which to propagate and idolize that character.

All Eddy cares about is this false self. He demands that Charlie give him more money to take on Fats again (ostensibly in pool, but in reality – well, you know) and screams at Charlie to “lay down and die by yourself” when his former partner refuses. Gordon comes closest to identifying this pathology when he explains why Fast Eddy lost to Minnesota Fats that night: “He has character, and you don’t.” This is only partially true. Minnesota Fats has a better character than Fast Eddy. Yes, there’s the carnation, the nickname, the sense of style, but there’s also the perfect integration of man and image. Minnesota Fats is effortlessly Minnesota Fats (again, notice how we never get his real name?) in a way that Fast Eddy can never truly be Fast Eddy, because Eddy Felson and Fast Eddy Felson have far too antagonistic a relationship, are too predicated on never getting along to be able to compete with Minnesota Fats. Minnesota’s character moves in perfect synchronicity with whatever the fuck his real name is, but Eddy Felson can only idolize Fast Eddy Felson if the former is getting his ass handed to him constantly. Eddy Felson specializes in toxic, codependent relationships, and his most robust and psychologically complex one is with himself, because of course in being a sad-sack loser he also manages to be hilariously masturbatory about it.

All of this comes to a head when Eddy monologues about the nature of greatness. During his picnic with Sarah he ignores the wondrously expectation-free milieu she is trying to inculcate and instead talks about how much he wants to show people greatness. It’s in this monologue that he also admits that pool is just an activity – he claims even a manual laborer can achieve the kind of greatness he is talking about, a kind of greatness during which the practitioner just “just knows, just feels…” These are not the words of a dedicated athlete, they’re the words of an actor who doesn’t understand why people keep laughing at his performances. That Sarah just sits there and accepts this shows that she’s still unsure how to deal with this ragingly incomplete human, and how co-dependent her relationships with both Eddy and Fast Eddy really are.

“Why not? We already know each other’s secrets.”

Which brings us to the relationship between Eddy and Sarah, which aside from further proving my point is also one of the best-realized and most believably toxic relationships I’ve ever seen in a movie (not even Top Ten material in real life, though), specifically because it is two codependent pretenders just fucking smashing their false selves noisily and ceaselessly and helplessly against each other like two emotional kaiju. Just look at how their relationship even starts – Eddy keeps trying to buy Sarah a drink, apparently oblivious to the fact that she is obviously an alcoholic because he is in Fast Eddy mode, and needs a score, a reaffirming of his character after Fats so thoroughly defeated him on stage the night before. So here he is essentially trying to poison her during their first meeting, because the alternative would be to meet her on more egalitarian ground. But that’s not the lesson Fast Eddy learned after losing to Fats – his takeaway was that he needed to redouble the character, practice it on some stooge, and that is – tragically – where Sarah comes in. And when they meet again at the bar – at eight in the morning, with Fast Eddy’s inability to see the glug-glug obvious is nearly impressive at this point – he ends up luring her back to her place with the promise of more booze, because fuck.

And this dynamic is expressed with flawless visuals! When Sarah is limping up to Fast Eddy the day after their first meeting and each of them is too tired to keep their respective characters up, we see a fleeting moment of them being real to each other – and it is harrowing to watch. Sarah is framed waaay to the side of the shot, nearly microscopic against the vast emptiness above and around her. This is her when she’s not in character, pretending to be a novelist and a college girl and a Woman of a Discerning Eye. Just like Eddy being surrounded by silence during his most despised human moments Sarah is surrounded by empty space during hers.  And in the reverse shot we get the exact same thing for Eddy. This is how they feel when showing their true self to someone, even someone who can relate, even someone they should be showing it to – instead of a warm and close framing we get their opinions on their true selves visually rendered as these pathetic, small, helpless creatures nearly invisible against the cavernous nothing taking up most of the frame. They are only framed traditionally, in the middle-third, at the very end of the scene, when Eddy has bribed Sarah with another bottle of booze (Jesus) and they leave awkwardly arm-in-arm, in a shot conspicuously devoid of romance, but just bursting at the seams with codependency.

And it continues, this lilting in and out of their characters, always timed with seeming mathematical precision to make sure they eternally miss each and every opportunity for relief and understanding. Sarah is sober and vulnerable when Eddy is yearning for the hustle, and during the brief moments when Eddy seems to be reconsidering the character he plays Sarah has reverted to being drunk and aloof. Each of them has as their primary goal the satisfaction of their false selves, with absolutely no interest in being there for each other each other, and the result is this cacophonous collision of their mismatched and completely toxic selves. A roiling, unstable sense of identity – supported by a selfishness that is never entirely sure which self it is dedicated to – is the only thing that they have in common, and it is not a good thing to have in common.

“We have a contract of depravity. All we have to do is turn the blinds down.”

And it’s Fast Eddy who’s the instigator of the most toxic elements of their relationship. When his thumbs are broken and he can’t play pool Sarah sees this as an opportunity to connect with Eddy Felson, to see him outside of his performance. She wants something different, finally. This is great! But Eddy sees this happening, too, and desperately tries to steer them back to their toxic selves, the ground on which he feels more comfortably miserable. Sarah wants to get rid of her toxic identity, and to help Eddy get rid of his, but all he wants is the character, which he loves more than her, or himself. She asks the thumb-busted Eddy if he wants “to go out for a while. To a movie?” and he immediately responds with “you want a drink?” He’s trying to keep her firmly in character, which will allow him to stay in character. He doesn’t love Sarah – he loves a sounding board by which to continue indulging in the escapist fantasy of Fast Eddy Felson. “Aren’t you gonna have one?” he says at one point, taunting her into drinking some more. “C’mere,” he says. “C’mere.” He’s trying to force her into being the chump that he needs to satisfy his need for chaos, even if it kills her.

Or how about that picnic scene! Because when a movie like this gives you a picnic scene it’s going to be like if Jeffry Dahmer invited you to dinner. Sarah, who has been working admirably towards destroying her false self and has taken advantage of Eddy’s downtime to show him a life outside of performative misery, tells him she loves him. He responds by taking her in his arms, dipping her low, and saying, “And I you, mon amour.” That is a fucking joke! He actually responds by immediately telling her that she’s going to marry someone else, but that she will write a book about him, Fast Eddy Felson. That’s all he cares about: immortalizing, lionizing Fast Eddy Felson. No one else means anything to him. When he sees Sarah passed the fuck out in their room in Louisville later on, having completely reverted to her false self and destructive ways – almost entirely because of him – he just leaves her there, and only goes back when he needs more money for his billiards game. He doesn’t check to see if she’s OK.

“To you, Eddy,” Sarah says at their final dinner before going to Louisville. Man, fuck that codependency!

“What’re you writing?”

“Oh, it’s a story. A story I’m making up.”

The lifeblood of the character is the storytelling, and this movie has it in spades. Sarah is a fucking novelist, if you didn’t notice, and the other characters like to tell stories, too. Sarah says at one point “I made you up, didn’t I, Eddy?” which shows her finally accepting the superficiality of the character she has created – and the one he’s created, too – and trying to bring them both back to a more human place. She pours out the truth at this point: the rich lover in her life that she has been claiming pays her bills in return for trysts is in actuality her father who abandoned her, and writes her weekly checks to feel better about being out of her life; she was never an actress; her limp didn’t come from a car accident, she had polio. And during this entire pouring out sequence we don’t even get a reverse angle on Fast Eddy’s response, the scene just kind of ends, because this story, unimpressively human and vulnerable as it is, does nothing for him. There’s only one story he’s interested in, and it has nothing to do with her, or anyone but himself.

And there are the monologues from other characters, too. Charlie – you know, Fast Eddy’s acting partner, who never even bothers to learn Sarah’s name – spiels at her about the gooey and emotional backstory he has with Fast Eddy, the person he cares so much about that he hesitates – like, hesitates, like the kind of gap that occurs between the moment someone you’re planning on dumping asks if you love them and the moment you say “sure?” – before calling him “like a son.” Charlie does the whole schtick of pretending to be there for Eddy, trying to manipulate Sarah by telling her that “I’ve known this boy since he was sixteen. The first time I saw him, back in Oakland, I said, ‘This is a talented boy. This is a smart boy.’” This is all horseshit, and is really Charlie just playing up his character – concerned father who is this close to remembering his son’s name – in order to get back in on the hustle. These people are scum!

There’s also a moment when Eddy is walking into a pool hall to hustle some more and the sign reads “Arthur’s Pool Hall,” and Arthur is homophonous with author. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock represents the American Dream, and man is the real monster in King Kong.

“Hey, mister.”

“The name’s Gordon. Bert Gordon.”

“Mister.”

Names are a currency in a world where everyone is a character. In the header quote to this section Eddy, who has no idea who Bert Gordon is, and doesn’t care, keeps insisting to the other man that he is simply “mister” – someone without a character to which they dedicate themselves, and therefore unimportant.

That same Bert Gordon, ironically, understands this better than most, and uses it against people. He keeps “forgetting” Sarah’s name, which seems improbable because as multiple characters point out at multiple points in the movie, he knows literally everyone. With his smiling, backchanneling, “always takes me a little while to get a name fixed in my mind” he is telling Sarah that her character means nothing to him, which means that he’s pretty much announcing to her on the way to Louisville that she won’t be coming back. And this monstrous dismissal of Sarah comes from other characters, too. When Eddy introduces Charlie to Sarah, Eddy says “that’s my girl,” to which Charlie responds, uninterested: “Hello, Eddy’s girl.” If you want to break a character – and everybody wants to break Sarah, the only person in the movie with the flickering of a soul – you deny them a name, the place from which the rest of the character springs.

When they first meet Sarah asks Fast Eddy the most important question of their relationship: “what should my name be?” She then, later on in that same conversation, tells him that her name is biblical, and asks if he knows what it means.

We never find out what it means, because Eddy never asks, because he doesn’t care.

The End

It must be a hell of an experience to hate yourself but love a version of yourself that is tantalizingly close to the person that you hate. Is it narcissism that makes you do it? A perverse but well-meaning motivational tactic, because that fake-you is technically achievable? Do you keep tweaking little details about yourself to make it work, or do you deliberately keep that other you out of reach – but so fucking close to being in reach – because you can’t think of any reason to get out of bed otherwise? Winning a pool match doesn’t seem like it could possibly put a dent in any of these questions, but unfathomable loss seems to pay some morbid dividends, which is all Fast Eddy really deserves, I suppose. Eddy Felson? I’m not so sure.

I just watched the most harrowing war movie of the year.

Shiva Baby

Plot is fine, if you need it. The best filmmakers know how much is needed to get their story safely off the ground, and the rest – well, the rest is inertia, baby. An American kaiju movie, for instance, doesn’t really need any impetus more thoughtful or bespoke than “someone gave King Ghidorah the ol’ stink-eye, and he was already having a bad day” to get to the juice, which is a three-headed lizard god murdering an entire city with yelling and lasers. And from there you can just kind of Katamari Damacy it, rolling into the chaos whatever flammable components you happen to have on hand – maybe a Mothra sighting here, Godzilla being extremely not alright with having been woken up from a midafternoon nap there, skyscrapers uprooted and wielded with the same ease and carelessness as a Wiffle ball bat at a family cookout where your least favorite uncle showed up already half in the bag, grown men being stomped on with the kind of ker-splat-y indifference you deserve for being dumb enough to be a human in a U.S.-made kaiju movie, etc. Get a story off on the right foot, is what I’m saying, give the characters even vaguely plausible goals and neuroses, and the rest will basically sort itself out.

I use as my example seemingly unkillable monsters and the choreography of their ancient conflicts, the grimly ironic way in which their ritualistic destruction resolves nothing as far as the towering ghouls themselves are concerned yet causes unimaginable pain for everyone and everything around them, victims all of this limbic and terrifyingly primal renewal of the only motif the cruel beasts can remember, this uncurable violence deep in the genetic memory of their war-ruined bodies, because I recently watched Shiva Baby, a movie about an extended Jewish family and their close friends spending an afternoon together. The film is, I’m happy to say, an absolute delight, and for much the same reason the best American kaiju movies are: the chaos is come by naturally. This really isn’t snark – “messy” is one of the highest compliments you can pay a deliberately plotless film about family and culture and the minefield that is attempting to maneuver either one – it’s the standard against, if not the medium in which, stories like this are told, and it only takes the slightest amount of overwriting or overacting or overanything to render a deliciously messy drama unnatural, and suddenly everyone in the movie is Acting™, and we’re instantly plucked out of a good, scuffed-up narrative and deposited instead into an insufferably artificial milieu. But that fate never befalls my wonderful Shiva Baby. Shiva Baby is a great movie for a lot of reasons, not least of which is because it doesn’t try to force its characters into a narrative – it simply tears the lid off their culture with one hand while forcing your face into it with the other, deep into the thick and chunky chili of their crazy, all the while screaming, “eat it! eat it all! every last bite! I hope it kills you!”

Such is the power of movies.

Don’t Trust That Woman; She’s Me From Five Minutes Ago

A lot of commentary on this movie will probably orient itself around the nature of identity, particularly the difficulty that our protagonist Danielle has in claiming and maintaining a unique sense of self against the backdrop of a culture almost comically unreceptive to new interpretations of, or outright subversions against, entrenched behaviors and ideas. And that’s fine, and true. But I don’t want to just list the different Danielle’s – some of whom our leading lady is proud of, others she’s appalled people can still remember – and call it a day because that would be doing the movie a disservice: one of the slickest things about Shiva Baby isn’t just the total number of alternate Danielle’s but what the film does with the them, how the story presents and intertwines and cohabitates and bashes together like cheap action figures the many hers that she feels must exist as a counterpoint to the equally uncountable judgments and aggressions and cruelties both deliberate and accidental being thrown at her by the never-ending carousel of stone-stupid dialogues that comprises her cultural life. Oftentimes a scene will start, for instance, with the fallout from some decision in her past, or the consequences of an entire previous identity, and we’ll be shown how that decision or identity is still seeping into her present, how years later it can still sour the foundation of whatever new her she’s attempting to fabricate on the fly, all before it’s even explained who she was during that past, or what exactly happened that was so bad it’s still to this day kneecapping any attempt to build a new Danielle. This is a wonderfully disorienting approach that with sneaky-brilliance allows us to understand our protagonist in the aggregate, be confused about her in the details, sympathize with her frustration at constantly being bombarded with reminders of past indiscretions – assuming we even agree that they were indiscretions – and even be a little pissed at her, as if we were down there on the ground with her, for not telling us about that past event beforehand, and instead letting it come out from some family member whose name we don’t even know. I thought we were friends, Danielle.

And it’s all done in a way that could be mistaken for rushed or careless writing, if writer/director Emma Seligman wasn’t always nudging the action towards organic and logical developments like a parent assiduously redirecting their dumbass kid away from traffic. Danielle’s frosty relationship with the only other girl at the shiva her own age isn’t just shown but given context – there isn’t just a placard held up with the nature of their past written on it so we can compartmentalize and then move on, checking off some box on a list labeled “Conflicts,” but rather the nature of their fallout is presented in such a way so as to allow that past to become part of the present, contort it into the beginnings of some kind of a future, hold the entire recovering thing fraught against the contrary interpretations each of them have about what happened, and for added style points subject the whole damn thing to the sniping of bypassing supporting characters, unwanted commentaries that add so many dings to the hull of their returning friendship that you’re holding your breath and waiting for the breach.

So Help Me God, I Will Nut My Way Out of This

So we’ve proven mathematically that there are, in fact, a shitload of Danielle’s, and that Emma Seligman handles them masterfully. This is unambiguous. But one of the subtler points and great accomplishments of the movie is how it manages to connect these Danielle’s. There are plenty of through-lines we could trace between them, sure, but probably the most striking is a passionate interest in sex – sex as in gender, but especially sex as in fucking – and this fascination, which easily could come across as sensationalism or mindless salaciousness is actually incredibly well-realized and beautifully applied in a way that makes sense for her character and the cultural context in which she lives. We can be aided in our understanding of why sex of all things with the use of this quote from The Great Gatsby – that’s right, you fuckers, even in the context of a sub-ninety minute film that takes place almost entirely in one location and filmed on a microbudget and steeped impenetrably in the spoken and unspoken languages of Jewish culture I still found a way to sneak in a Gatsby reference! Fuck all of you! I could work a Gatsby reference into home movie footage of a gerbil dying! – in which Nick says of Daisy and her inability to understand the appeal that Gatsby’s parties have: “the rest offended her – and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg… by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.” Danielle, bless her angry heart, is pretty much the opposite of this. It’s the gestures that drive her crazy – not because she fails to understand them – because she’s not nearly as vapid or as sheltered or as ignorant as Daisy – but because their intricate and ancient choreographies appropriate more processing power in her brain than she can stand, juice that she’d rather apply to anything other than mindlessly tracing the outlines for proper social behavior that have been reflexively practiced by so many generations for so long that they’ve been grinded down to total meaninglessness, empty noise generated by the supposedly smarter class as they move along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. Say what you want about fucking, but it’s all kinds of vivacious.

And this escape from the parameters of her culture through sex can be used to explain a lot of Danielle’s, uh, stranger behavior. The spicy pictures she takes of herself in the bathroom, offering her sugar daddy a blowjob in another bathroom – these moments seem inexplicable in a vacuum, like Seligman is struggling to tell her story and can only facilitate more drama by turning her protagonist’s brain off and having her do something stupid for the sake of more narrative kindling, but these behaviors actually make perfect sense when you place them in context, and remember what sex means to Danielle. These steamy/awkward moments occur after stretches in the movie in which Danielle gets her ass good and thoroughly kicked, has been rendered helpless against the indefatigable whips of her culture’s constant rules and expectations, or just plain made to look stupid. So she does something blunt as hell – titties! blowjobs! – to cut through all these insufferable gestures that, taken individually, should be nothing more than meaningless movements and talk but in the aggregate always seem able to go full Voltron and knock her around with depressing ease. Danielle isn’t just a thirsty, thirsty, girl – she needs a weapon, and one as direct as humanly possible, almost offensively to-the-point, as blunt as everybody else around her is infuriatingly obtuse, and it’s a testament to how well Seligman understands and realizes her character that we the audience can follow this logic intuitively.

I Understand Where You’re Coming From, But if I Let You Breathe You Might not Die. You can see My Conundrum.

All of this is facilitated beautifully by Seligman’s direction. Notice that I didn’t say the direction itself is beautiful – it’s not, it’s workmanlike as fuck – but what it accomplishes is beautiful. This isn’t Citizen Kane or Tree of Life – we don’t need resplendently heartbreaking visuals reminding us of the overpoweringly visceral nature of film and how the actions of the characters are forever subordinate to the auspices of images, and we don’t need the conflict rendered on the scale of the stars themselves. It’s a bunch of Jews locked in a house together for an afternoon, undercutting one another mostly out of habit. And by making the camera eternally squat, close, and unflattering Seligman gives the movie exactly what it needs visually – a claustrophobic conveyance of what it must feel like to be in that situation, to never not be withering under the eyes of yet another person who has judged you before even talking to you, to not have even a square foot of space to yourself to think in, to breathe in. Oftentimes the edges and corners of the frame are obstructed by the profiled heads – literal talking heads – of gossiping family members, with Danielle sandwiched between them in an ever-shrinking bubble of air, until it gets to the point where she goes outside to catch her breath and in that small space between two houses she might as well be backpacking across fucking Greenland for all the real estate she suddenly has to play in. Seligman clearly wasn’t given much to work with for the shoot (honestly, the movie doesn’t just take place almost entirely in one house, but only a few rooms in that house) but instead of just packing it in and filming everything industrial-style she managed to brilliantly turn technical limitations into a creative asset.

Oh, No, Everybody is Just as Dumb as Me

So it’s great and all that Danielle is a intractable ball of discombobulated crazy, but all the fire in the world doesn’t amount to any noise or heat unless it’s got a sounding board to play off of, and this is where the supporting characters are masterfully incorporated. And I really want to stress that in this context we are talking simply about how they are applied to the telling of the story: Seligman may let her non-featured performers, you know, act, on a scene-by-scene basis but in the aggregate they are also presented as a collective, an entire other supporting character altogether that comes together like a gabby Jewish Voltron called Context or perhaps Inevitability, similar to one of the personifications from the old English morality plays except instead of abandoning Danielle as she prepares for her final judgement Jewish Identity actually insists on coming with her and talking, and talking, and talking, and are you really going to crawl into your grave with your hair looking like that, bubala, and oh, look at Mr. Good Deeds here, always has to make the other personifications look bad, he’s just like his mother… it’s yet another brilliant creative choice that aside from managing to technically squeeze another character into the already limited space of the film also stresses the suffocating nature of Danielle’s culture and why she fears it so – you become faceless, assimilated, judged and shamed relentlessly into a form of personality paralysis, with all of your future actions already anticipated and delineated by a monolithic wall of expectation that prides itself on being completely unbending, unchallenging, and unsurprising.

But, hey, actual people play these supporting parts, and they’re great too.  The non-featured actors clearly understand that they are essentially talkative wallpaper against which our lead will be contextualizing her anxieties and they lean into that sidekick obligation beautifully, like a team of Jewish Scottie Pippinses. And while having the wherewithal to play a part contained and unobtrusive is skill enough the actors also manage to elevate what limited moments of relieving individuality and heartbreak they are given, through these brief flourishes giving us glimpses of the people that have come to compose the collective. They do a phenomenal job of walking a line between being caricatures in Danielle’s eyes but people in their own – one older woman clearly is struggling to adjust to the fact that her husband has died (it’s not specified if it was recently or years ago) and Danielle’s mom reacting with an “oh, who gives a fuck” when the latter asks her if it’s alright that they’re using the cleansing water to wash a stain off of her shirt constantly ribs you into not just accepting Danielle’s conception of them as a faceless collective, even if they do seem to trend in that direction. The supporting actors know exactly what role they’re playing, and know that they’re more powerful in helping to tell the story by maintaining a kind of microwave background radiation of conflict for Danielle to deal with, striking that balance between stealing scenes and allowing themselves to be elided completely from the frame.

The Shiva Baby

Which brings us to the Shiva Baby herself. As a character Danielle succeeds because she isn’t what so many filmmakers accidentally create with their protagonists – a walking commentary whose near clairvoyance granted to her by her status as an insert character sucks all the potential for drama and humanity out of the story, turgidly and indulgently spending the entire runtime of the film dunking on essentially everybody with improbable if not impossible levels of insight, all while her writer/creator sits back and enjoys doling out the abuse from the smug and safe remove of hindsight and authorship. Seligman never comes close to falling into this trap, because Danielle’s a human through-and-through: she smashes into self-inflicted debilitations and swamp-like social mires with wonderful, Daffy Duck-esque inarticulacy. She lies constantly and awkwardly in order to elevate herself in the eyes of others, not so much because she’s being forced to by the cruel standards of the people around her (just like Danielle is never rendered too perfect, her extended family and friends are never rendered as cartoonishly vain or unreasonable) but because she is just that insecure, all by her lonesome. And instead of making her the ultimate badass rebel, her attempts to spite her own culture are oftentimes superficial and lazy and rely on the assistance of the very same people she claims to have contempt for – a degree in gender studies that her parents are paying for, an apartment that her parents are also paying for, a faux-progressive sugar daddy the likes of which Danielle has probably written at least one play about – and show someone who is of an insurgent mind but not so much a comparable spirit. It’s that conflict that tortures her as much as the milieu she is forced to dance for, and by having her blow her own foot off on the regular with a gun she was convinced she had trained on an enemy labeled “My Culture” elevates her above what could have been a generic and obnoxiously indulgent author surrogate character.

Oh, and I should probably mention that Rachel Sennott smashes the fuck out of the title role. She’s playing basically a walking bricolage of failed identities constantly wrinkling and folding into and out of one another like Linklater’s version of A Scanner Darkly except powered by non-stop anxiety and self-loathing, but also high on this completely unjustified belief that she’s going to flip the script at a moment’s notice and turn this whole “being Jewish” thing on its head, and somehow she plays it flawlessly. In any given scene Sennott can serve up a facial pizza whose toppings include the half-hooded eyes of someone trying just as hard as she can to telegraph that she doesn’t give a fuck but also carrying inherent in its affect the incipient light of self-doubt always ready to be triggered by the right – or wrong – word, with earnest confusion over how to interact with some of her, uh, more ancient family members also thrown in for added challenge. Honestly, she’s playing so many different angles at once I’m surprised Sennott doesn’t pull any fucking muscles in her face. And her plunges in and out of going big (multiple crying scenes!) and just dryly cutting away at everyone around her could have been a bumblefuck of a performance if handled too self-consciously but Sennott sublimates the many rises and falls of Danielle’s ego with uncanny ease. Overacting is coolly avoided, and instead we get someone whose many personalities are presented as a constantly-developing picture, always mixing more emotions and responses into that initially sarcastically-detached palette until by the end of the movie we are looking in at someone more richly realized than we could have anticipated when we first met her.

I’d Be Remiss if I Didn’t Bitch About Something

There are a couple of little imperfections in the otherwise masterfully dense lattice of interpersonal conflict this movie cooks up – moments that, given the deliberately messy nature of the narrative, actually stand out for being too parameterized. For instance, as much as I like Danielle absorbing a constant stream of physical misfortune during her quest to somehow thwart the expectations of each individual person at the shiva – accumulating so much damage to her outfit that by the end of the movie she looks like John McClane at the end of fucking Die Hard – it’s kind of deflatingly improbably that she gets into so many heated exchanges that all climax in something getting knocked over (in all fairness, some quick Googling tells me that washing and purification are integral parts to the shiva, so the process of making Danielle dirtier as the day goes on could be an ironic inversion of that. But it could have be done a little more organically, is what I’m saying. Making every new spillage the culmination of an argument too often comes across as an artificial accent, the kind of overly cinematic coda that is taught in screenwriting classes and if applied too often makes it feel like it was, well, learned in a screenwriting class).

And with regards to the ending (oh, no, spoilers for an entirely plotless movie, cover your little baby eyes when you read the next sentence, I’m totally about to tell you which Avenger gets teased for the sequel): while I appreciate the constant effort by the film to avoid including anything in its narrative that could come across as improbably cathartic it almost feels like we go a little too far in the opposite direction, with kind of a shrug, family – am I right? ending that doesn’t convey the impossibility of resolving so many conflicts neatly and in the course of one afternoon so much as it feels like the script just wasn’t sure how to present where all these interpersonal dynamics now lay, irrespective of their proximity to resolution. Having some fallout from what happened during the course of what was a, uh, spicy day for everyone doesn’t automatically tip the film into melodrama territory. Melodrama is when a response is disproportionate to the event that precipitated it (“you spelled my name with an extra ‘t’– my resolve, she wanes!”) and given the whole ‘lotta something that went down it would only be natural for the characters to reflect upon things a little bit. The hand-holding moment was a delight, don’t get me wrong, and damn near redeems the entire sequence, and I suppose the unchanged nature of the family is supposed to remind us that families, well, don’t change, but unless the collapse of multiple decades worth of social façades is something that happens at every shiva (“Oh, no, Trudy is vomiting out of her eyes and denouncing God again – pass the latke, dear”) it just seems weird that everybody just kind of shrugs and moves on.

The End

I don’t know if you’re glad that I didn’t become convinced halfway through watching this movie that there was a second secret narrative that only I could see, and that I needed to expose the truth before the Illuminati realized what I was up to and recalibrated their mind control rays to a more unescapable frequency, or whatever, but getting 78 minutes of unbroken engagement with the actual, presented part of a story sure was a tall glass of pink lemonade for the jumpier parts of my brain. And that’s one of the many joys of a movie like Shiva Baby: you’re thrown in, you’re awash in anxieties and aggressions and catharses and issues catastrophic and petty and moments only ever approximating grace, and humor you take solace in and humor you want no part of and all these things too unwieldy in their simultaneously hectic and hopelessly discombobulated flight from one end of the room to the other, from one moment to the other, to ever fully make sense of, and even when you think you’ve managed to at least succeed in the much humbler task of getting one foot on solid ground whammo! it’s all over. Drive-by emotionality is some of the hardest to pull off, but yields the realest results. Honestly, the whole movie is such a beautiful stew of lo-fi verisimilitude that it achieves one of the loftiest goals a plotless character piece can ever hope for: it delivers itself by virtue of its gloriously uncooperative realness from any kind of reductive “in literature, as in life…” conclusion, and instead just kind of exists as an experience, a deliberate incompleteness so complete unto itself it almost makes me think that instead of trying to put one of my snarky/smart capstones on the whole damned post I should just kind of quit while I’m ahea

Once in every great while a movie comes along that speaks to you in a language you didn’t know you knew, easily and without any visible effort twisting into stylish torsions whatever expectations you had for the rhythm and timbre of the presented story and leaving in its wake a new kind of knowing that was either there the whole time, waiting to be excavated from the bloat of the parent narrative, or so masterfully bullshitted on the fly that it only seems that way. If you’re incredibly lucky this movie will also have a vampire riding a skateboard and a cast of characters who take turns threatening a small child because he just has one of those fucking faces. This is one of those movies.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Kurt Douglas once said, in regards to the craft of filmmaking and the artist’s obligation to their audience, “you can make a statement, you can say something, but [the movie] must be entertaining.” Kurt Douglas lived longer than Methuselah and sported a chin on loan from God so I’m not going to say he was wrong, but I do have a question: is there an acceptable, or even expected, relationship between statement and entertainment? Because the two don’t necessarily have to settle into some kind of cool equilibrium on opposite ends of the frame, or take turns dominating the moment, each one turning over the steering wheel to the other when they feel they might be starting to grate on everyone’s nerves. It’s possible that the commentary might be inherent in the entertainment, or vice versa, sure, but even that dynamic carries with it the understanding that the two will rise together, fall together, with positive returns on entertainment – of emotional engagement – making the audience more receptive to positive commentary of some kind. But what if the two, through a whole host of cinematic tricks, not least of which is a masterful and Möbius strip-esque application of irony, end up playing off of each other in such a way that the more you’re enjoying yourself the more you’re proving another point altogether?

I ask this because Spartacus’s quote always reminds me of Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a movie that I feel is dunking on me every time it thrills and delights and tickles my brain with its coolly-weighed effusion of irony and style. Every smile confirms that I’m an asshole, and every proud internal claim of I get it is confirmation that I, in fact, didn’t and don’t get it, that I missed something larger and quieter and nested deep in the bespoke, Old Hollywood framing. This is a movie that on one level is fashioned almost entirely out of iconographic kitsch from Western – overwhelmingly American – popular culture, but the various elements of the pastiche are presented in a way – spotted under such cold and unnerving light, punctuated by such still and patient framing, swelled with music that seems to have been so chosen as to be completely incongruous with the action onscreen – that the invocation of the culture isn’t quite as, uh, Yakov Smirnoff as you’d think. But the shadowed rendition of Hollywood Boulevard still keeps coming at you, and at you, and at you, with blows so alternatingly precise and blunt that it can’t be accidental. Amirpour has something to say, and it can apparently only be expressed through a medium that, paradoxically, fails to properly say it.

A Girl Misses Home Alone at Night

I sat down – or, I guess, leaned across a bench that had my laptop on it; I’m weird – to rewatch this movie with the intention of writing a review to be posted for the enjoyment of, according to my site’s analytics, exactly one person from Ecuador (Hi, Sebastian!). Since I had seen the movie before I knew it was going to be a positive review because Amirpour’s Jarmuschian vampire tale was fly as hell. And a hundred minutes later I still thought it was fly as hell. But something I became more cognizant of during this second viewing made me uncomfortable leaving it at that; to simply remark upon the hell-ness of the fly, to provide some examples of the sublime direction, the equal-parts campy and miserable characters, the wonderfully out-of-place soundtrack, and then to slap my hands together and call it a day would be like commenting on what beautifully manicured lawns the Stepford Wives all have. Something sinister was propping up all that immaculately-crafted chic, and I felt like by only acknowledging the style itself I’d be complicit in some kind of movie-crime, if not – I am nothing if not a drama queen – a real one.

So what actually changed during this apparently red-letter second viewing, and changed enough for me to scrap my initial review and replace it with this bonky-ass cinematic detective story? It ended up being one of those things you only process and contextualize later, like walking past Vin Diesel in a grocery store. Hunched over my bench and plunging into Viewing the Second: Squint Harder I saw scenes that were no longer the low-stakes tour through a performance piece labeled “Hollywood, A Vampire-Centric Tone Poem” that I remembered from my first go-around – like a good trip breaking bad the same transporting and internally-logical fumes of this Hollywood fever dream now housed something shadowed and waaaay too human for my liking, a faceless presence that seemed to derive what little form it had from the awkward junctions where Amirpour’s casual irreverence was (possibly intentionally) not wielded with quite enough virtuosity to carry us unperturbed and unreflective from one stylish beat to another, to make one reference synthesize quite right with its neighbors; moments where the film’s supposed chill-nothing philosophy failed to maintain its plausibly-deniable vapidity and instead radiated some obvious meaning from behind its otherwise ironclad cool. Remember that part in The Crying of Lot 49 when Oedipa goes to see The Courier’s Tragedy and there are those weird spots when all of the actors just kind of stop acting and look directly at the audience in an eerie and conspicuous silence, only resuming the play when they’ve gotten across that they’ve just gotten something across? I’m talking about a feeling like that, but instead of oblique and taunting references to a deeper truth than you would ever be able to fully unravel it felt more like an invitation to try.

So, armed with the knowledge that if you’re ever comparing yourself to a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel you’ve probably gone insane, I spent the next week thinking more about this movie than was probably healthy. I do it all for you, Sebastian.

A Second Song, Played Entirely on the Backbeats

Something I tend to notice right away in a movie is the dialogue. This is mostly because dialogue is people talking and therefore difficult not to notice, but also because how the characters talk to one another functions as a quick barometer for the prerogatives of the filmmaker behind them, from the blowtorch passions of a Scorsese picture to the outsized impact of quiet moments in a Greta Gerwig flick to the “what if a toaster tried to write a screenplay” vibe exuded from M. Night Shyamalan’s latest travesty of basic emotional coherence. And the same schema can be applied to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, with illuminating effect. On its surface the dialogue is as icy-brusque as its images are apocalyptically cool; there are no real monologues, no statement-response interplays ratcheting upwards in tension or passion – the language of Bad City seems to be exchanges so terse and distracted it almost feels like everybody is talking to themselves. This serves to facilitate a lot of elements of the movie’s style, but crucially it also facilitates its purpose: the dialogue is almost like a deliberate misdirection, with its nearly solipsistic vagaries disarming the audience enough for moments of indirect commentary to be slipped in right under their nose, escaping conscious notice by virtue of being shepherded forward in a obfuscating herd of otherwise cool irreverence. When Arash and The Girl meet at the power station he offers her a hamburger, and upon her passing on it says “I never met someone who didn’t like hamburgers”; when Hossein has been kicked out of his house and tries to find comfort in Atti’s purchased arms he says that he wants her, more than anything, to “dance for me, like the old days”; and when a drugged Arash bumps into The Girl after a party he says of Bad City, “it’s not familiar.” At a glance these lines don’t seem particularly different from the usual wisps of escaped internal monologuing that pass for exchanges in Amirpour’s eternally distracted world, but taken in the aggregate they show a second current running alongside of, possibly underneath, the more obvious and superficially stylish one.

The direction – which is so fucking good – follows a similar trajectory of near-camp refracting into something formless but achingly tangible, and always at these conspicuously quiet junctions. This can be seen right from the jump. We open on Arash – done up so much like a 1950’s tough that we fear we may be watching the wrong movie – just kind of being cool and then, after snagging himself a cat, taking off down the road, in the process walking us through not just the opening credits or the layout of Bad City but a sly pop-culture montage as well, a slick panorama of all the culturally invasive species that have been introduced to the ecosystem of what was presumably once an un-put-upon Iranian town, now caught both stylishly and grotesquely halfway through its forced metamorphosis into another Southern California dreamscape. We get Dutch angles, a Sergio Leone-esque hard closeup sandwiched between a couple of wides, invocations of Universal monster movies, with the capstone to the whole surrealist beat being our man Arash walking past a spillway that will serve as a visual coda for the film; a spillway which is, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, full of fucking corpses (this shot is also where we linger for the movie’s title to appear – which is, uh, telling). Less subtle than the dialogue but still compacted so much into the movie’s easy lean that it takes a second to notice, the dead bodies – as well as the towering industrial structures featured in the wide shots earlier in the montage – are another sliding of the quiet voice into the small space behind the loud one, a deliberate incongruity in the cool that is supposed to throw all of the, let’s call it audience-pleasing panache, into a strikingly different and uncomfortable light.

And if you think that this opening sequence is the only example of the kitsch reorganizing itself into silent screams of the oppressed and then back again – like putting on the sunglasses in They Live or using the magic mirror in Link to the Past – then, brother, strap in, because we’ve got some frames to talk about. How about when The Girl takes Arash back to her place after they’ve bumped into each other outside, and she’s still deciding whether or not to kill him? On the surface level we’re treated to an unexpectedly (or, expectedly, if you’ve watched a movie before) romantic moment, as she finds this harmless goof-dummy to be interesting, if nothing else, and for a couple-three moments the two just share the closest thing this city seems to have to peace. But look at how the incipient strands of romance are framed. A disco ball is spun and covers the two in campy, dotted light. The walls are awash in posters of American music icons from the 80’s. And most importantly Arash, still dressed as Dracula from an earlier party, approaches The Girl from the far side of a wide frame, in the same way she normally stalks up behind her victims. The make-believe movie vampire is now exerting more domination of the frame than the only one between the two of them who is actually a vampire. This is not accidental, or merely a cute inversion for the sake of their burgeoning relationship: the incongruity is birthing that presence again, the grim aggregate of dozens of otherwise individually pleasing moments, stalking around the edge and rear of the frame, eternally on the verge of visibility but either afraid of being seen or contemptuous of the notion, so antagonistic to the very cool that birthed it, telling a different story but with the same words.

Or how about another meeting between the two? Here Arash and The Girl have just found each other at the foot of a power station, a power station that is shot to resemble something more from a Fritz Lang expressionist hellscape than something as quotidian as an industrial building (an aside: Arash invites The Girl to meet him there with a note that simply mentions “the power station,” showing this monstrous contraption to be ubiquitous enough that he doesn’t need to specify which industrial building, or where. And, fuck, speaking of industrial buildings, I haven’t even mentioned the reoccurring shots of oil derricks dipping their teeth into the land again and again and again, in doing so appearing more vampiric than the actual vampire in the story. This movie is calorically-rich, gang. Like, cashew-levels of the fattening stuff). They talk with the smoky and blown-out monster of a building dominating the frame behind and above them, and you’ll notice that when Arash asks The Girl a question that serves as the culmination and thesis statement of their entire conversation – if she ever feels completely helpless – we jump back to a wide shot of the power station, just as otherworldly and terrifying as ever, as if to say, “why, yes, that is the feeling I’m trying to inculcate in you all, thank you for noticing, my boy. Nice pompadour, by the way.” Hey, I thought the vampire was supposed to be the featured creature, here? Watch this movie without your They Live glasses on and it might seem that way, but this shot is about a close as we come visually to pulling back the veneer and just straight-up showing the audience the real monster. It doesn’t have to stalk up behind anyone because it has achieved such a voluminous presence that it’s always behind you, and it doesn’t ever move in for the kill because it has more use for you alive, or as alive as it ever needs its host to be.

This othering of the native under the auspices of some foreign presence’s desire for slick entertainment can be heard in the soundtrack, too. This movie plays some real boppers to help guide us from one silent uncanny hellscream to another, and if you’re just along for the ride (and I wouldn’t blame you; we’re talking some tight tracks here, people) you wouldn’t notice how inverted things appear to be. The actual track listing is a combination of American and Iranian songs, but it’s the latter that can be heard during the more incongruous moments. When Arash takes ecstasy at a party and starts to trip the fuck out and the entire assemblage of bodies starts to pulse with uncanny rhythms, like striations on the back of a strobe-lit beasts, it’s Iranian music that is blasted to violently that it seems to take on unnervingly alien qualities. This happens when Arash takes off for his montage strut in the movie’s opener, too – it is his native music that washes the scene in what could almost be called stylish portent, keeping us vaguely on edge even when the shots are static and wide and superficially unthreatening. Good as fuck in a vacuum, the Iranian portion of the soundtrack is almost always contrasted with some quality on the screen – it doesn’t matter if it’s sweating bodies or empty streets – to contort its parameters into something less pop and more like an incantation – an invocation towards, or perhaps voice of, the unseen monster itself.

Eagle-eyed viewers of this movie will notice that it is shot in black and white. While this serves the purpose of being basically catnip for cinephiles and hipsters it also acts as a kind of universal solvent for all that Amirpour is trying to mix into this movie, both from an entertainment standpoint and the subtler underlying prerogatives, too. Keeping the film awash in Hollywood cool serves as yet another somnambulant sleight-of-hand, so that while you’re busy admiring the gorgeously-lit landscapes you barely take note of what, exactly, comprises that landscape. How else could you align 1950’s cool, ironic Dracula references, the terrifying indefatigability of oil derricks, and a spillway full of corpses into the same milieu without audience members raising their hand during a screening and saying, “I have many questions”? We’re being entertained into accepting the apparently necessary intermingling of our entertainment and the suffering of the characters, a relationship that isn’t quite golden handcuffs but maybe could be called a velvet prison, because even if the characters turned directly towards the audience, The Courier’s Tragedy-style, and pleaded their case there’d still be that part of your brain ignoring them and indulging in the rich depth of the cinematography – these people have to endure their suffering being shot in a way that’s so damn cool it’s easy to forget that they’re suffering. Even in the cinematography Amirpour has her characters choking on caviar, to the immense delight – or at least fatal indifference – of the audience.

Girl, You Are Wearing That Chador

In a town that seems to be suffering stylishly through the unseen aftermath of an alien invasion, where everybody has a slightly different cultural parasite wrapped around their brainstem, influencing their behavior and forcing them to terraform their home into a weird little homunculus-man recreation of some distant and incompatible planet, The Girl is clearly the most aware of what’s going on. She stalks the city at night, doling out her own take on justice, keeps herself at a conspicuous remove from everybody else, and generally seems to have the same distaste for others that you’d expect society at large to have for her, a fucking vampire. Instead of the invading culture controlling her – like it seems to be doing with everybody else – she and she alone seems to be retaining the dignity of her displaced culture, at least to some extent. One of the most telling examples of this is when she’s talking to Atti back at the latter’s place – The Girl’s statements during this exchange are just that, statements, objective and empirical observations of Atti’s fall from grace, her lost opportunities in life, the ways in which she has disappointed her people. The Girl doesn’t even seem like a character in this moment, but with the unwavering belief in the rightness of what she’s saying (and a great performance by Sheila Vand) almost seems to be channeling figures from Atti’s past, from their shared cultural past, chastising the older woman for losing her way. The Girl is cool, there’s no doubt – she rides a fucking skateboard! – but that badass detachment is applied in ways that further this notion of cool being a vehicle for something deeper.

Oh, hey, let’s talk about that same skateboard for a moment. The Girl’s dope ride is also evidence that even she isn’t beyond the cultural impregnating that has apparently infected every single person in town. Arash was infected with James Dean genes, and she got the vampire ones – pieces of foreign pop-culture just kind of injected at random into denizens of this town who were probably just, well, denizens of the town before the invasion happened. And while her takeaway from the encounter was probably the most empowering of the bunch, immortality isn’t infallibility, and even she starts dipping into the same depersonalizing sea that made her eternal in the first place. Examples aren’t hard to come by. Her vampiric lair? Like we noticed before, decked out in posters of 80’s American bands. How about getting her ears pierced? Our stalwart holdout against the rising tide of indifferent cool elects to join this outsider culture in order to – possibly – impress a boy, or maybe just because she’s tired of being alone, of fighting against the only creature in town even more dynamic than herself. And when she’s laying in the tub and listening to music we get the impression that she knows she probably shouldn’t be doing it, but there’s something so intoxicating – so paradoxically charming in its terrifying inevitability – that even she can’t help but partake a little. No matter where we go, no matter what character we check in on, there’s a sublimation happening into the larger and faceless currents of style, a process even our badass vampire lady can’t fully resist.

But it’s all so damned fun to watch, even as it harrows your soul! So like Linda Perry once sang, what’s going on?

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, but I Also Have Bills to Pay

I only emptied out a fraction of the trash bag upon which I scrawled “EVIDENCE” with a magic marker like a fucking crazy person but I think that’s enough to get us all into the same headspace on this one. The seemingly inexplicable choices made to entertain through the dialogue, direction, cinematography and soundtrack become a hell of a lot more explicable when taken in the aggregate: Amirpour wants to tell a story of a culture invaded and bastardized by outside influences, eventually losing their own identity in the process as they are retconned – there’s a character in the story, Shaydah, who I haven’t even mentioned yet, who is first seen with a bandage on from a fucking nose job! I mean, come on! – into being the Mini-Me’s of another society altogether. Theft and displacement and helplessness and the dissolution of agency and the pointlessness in trying to ever get it back are manifest and infect every character, regardless of whether or not they’ve leaned into the happenings around them. The real vampire in the story isn’t even The Girl, it’s the doofy bro dressed up as Dracula; it’s the oil derricks outside of town; it’s the Sergio Leone soundtrack displacing the native Iranian tunes. Hell, you can even forget vampires entirely for a moment: this is more of a sci-fi movie than a horror flick – it’s Invasion of the Fucking Body Snatchers, but Everybody Gets a Leather Jacket. But it’s that same leather jacket that adds to the brilliant nature of the narrative as compatriot to the insidious nature of the invasion – it’s so damn cool and fun to watch, and it’s our culture doing the invading that we don’t see anything wrong with it, and in fact find it pretty damned entertaining.

But all of this also begs the question: why? Why use the same othering force you’re trying to wave the red flag against to help you wave said flag? If you want people to see a certain language for the insidious influence that it is why communicate in that language, and do it so lovingly and enjoyably? “Satire!” isn’t enough of an explanation for me. That word makes me think of delicious bluntness, like Blazing Saddles or RoboCop or Starship Troopers – films that comingle their commentary and entertainment but do so by going big – by going fucking huge – to make the satire obvious. Those films blow out the very parameters of their internal reality to show the absurdity of trying to apply the rules of whatever you’re trying to spoof to life itself, and they’re funnier the more you understand what they’re making fun of. But Amirpour has given us a movie that is so butter-fucking-smooth in its application of its more subversive elements that it’s more enjoyable the less you understand what she’s commenting on. This is too smart of a movie to explain away the incongruity with her having simply fumbled the execution, so another approach is needed.

Here’s my hypothesis, which I’m going to assume is correct because performative narcissism helps my anxiety: Amirpour couches her truer meaning in seemingly-empty style because she’s caught in the same trap her characters are. Blazing Saddles and RoboCop and Starship Troopers were big fucking movies with a whole lot of money and cultural goodwill behind them. Whatever difficulties they may have had in getting made almost certainly pale in comparison to the moon-high hurdles one has to surmount in order to secure funding for a Farsi-language feminist self-consciously indie vampire Hollywood-pastiche ironic-romantic genre-spoof. Those are a lot of words, perilously few of them marketable to the 18-35 demo!

Amirpour couldn’t afford to be as blunt as some other movies might be able to get away with, so she had to give the audience more-or-less what they wanted in order to get the film out there in any context. Like the characters in the movie she had no choice to express herself in this deliberately-debilitating cultural voice if she wanted to be heard at all. Her only recourse, the only method to get across what she really wanted to say, was to keep everything as slightly off-kilter as she could get away with to in order to instill some discomfort in the eyes of her viewers. It’s the best way to placate the same culture she’s trying to be heard by – granting them the meal they want but placing a personalized placard on the table, or working some ethnic ingredients into the otherwise generically-trendy dish, to hopefully awaken some subtle sense-memory in their palate without them realizing it. So maybe they’ll hear Hossein’s line about Atti dancing for him and recognize a man lamenting the loss of his native culture, or hear Arash’s comment about hamburgers and realize how much of local native society has been washed away by generic and indifferent ubiquity, or see the pile of corpses at the end of the Hollywood Hits montage and realize that those bodies are as much a part of the culture that has descended upon Amirpour’s home as disco and James Dean, or wonder why it’s Iranian music that appears alien in its own fucking country, or why The Girl feels more comfortable expressing herself through foreign music than her own. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is as much a warning about the cost of broadly-exported culture from a dominant society to a more vulnerable one as it is a celebration of some of the former’s objectively-fun and addictive elements, and the necessarily-complex intermingling of the two are fascinatingly sad enough, are internally justified enough, to maybe make Kirk Douglas, if he’s watching from up there in the section of Heaven reserved for people with strong chins, want to modify his quote to something more like: “you can make a statement, you can say something, but [the movie] must be entertaining – with the definition of “entertainment” becoming all kinds of wobbly the farther we go, because if entertainment is the very same anesthesia being used to numb both the audience and the host culture into accepting an evisceration then, well, you’ve got some work to do.”

The End

This sure was a strange one! Hopefully framing the entire post as a me-centric exploration/journey of discovery didn’t come across as completely and totally vain – it just felt inadequate to present my takeaways as a traditional essay, and having some dumb vector (me, hi, right here) by which to explore the slow realization of the movie’s second voice seemed appropriately organic, given that the movie itself (rather brilliantly!) presents both its entertainments and subversions therein with similar fluidity. Oh, and also: I don’t mean to imply that the entire experience is ironic: there’s too much love in Amirpour’s craft for the film to be nothing more than a bitter diatribe, and it’s not against the rules for someone to enjoy the same culture they wish wasn’t quite so destructively wanton – The Girl really does seem to dig that skateboard, and hamburgers are objectively delicious. But it’s not at all unreasonable to want your audience to know the price their culture extracts from the places it’s being exported to. The uncanny turnings from camp to pathos are unmistakable, and in the eyes of the people losing their culture to a seemingly unstoppable outside influence it must be a terror more haunting than a vengeful vampire-lady  stalking the night – it’s the suffocation of expression, the loss of cultural identity into a newer and invasive milieu absent all the subtleties and comforts and hope for grace that you once found in the mother tongue.

When I found out that the director of A Ghost Story was making an adaptation of an epic English poem to be released by A24 I wasn’t suddenly just nude, I had never not been nude, and in this glorious state of wizened penile advancement began traveling the now-trivial corridors of time and space, where I visited history’s greatest thinkers at their precise moment of enlightenment like some kind of flailing homunculus, shepherding them with loud balls and harrowing thoughts onto the ferry of their own necessary expiration, holding their hand and watching with them the flowering of their culminating contribution to the collective consciousness, their brain-baby now so complete in its sensate ubiquity that it no longer required – no longer could fit inside of, no longer had any memory of – their incubating mind, leaving them behind as a child does the nest, a moth the cocoon.

“Thank you, nude and vaguely Jewish weirdo,” they called to me, at peace with their own smallness next to the thing they had created while I, their Charon, let the universe’s song summon me to begin work on another incipient and vital thread in the tableau.

“You’re welcome,” I called back to them, my children, who could all see my dick and balls, for they were uncovered to the fullest extent of the nude. “You’re welcome.”

The Green Knight

Death is, among other things, a mechanical failure. What’s that, your body suddenly can’t perform the same Podunk biological processes it had been pounding out for decades? What are you, an idiot? How hard is it to just keep breathing forever? Here’s a tip: instead of no longer doing the thing that you’ve been doing and that you need to keep doing in order to continue not dying, just keep doing the thing you’ve been doing. Bang, immortality. You’re welcome.

The above sentiment is incredibly stupid, and therefore, predictably, manifest to the point of scripture among our culture’s foremost connoisseurs of stupid, the young. But those useless and vile dumbasses have a point – death is so much scarier, so much more deeply steeped in a kind of primal foreboding, if you can only conceive of it from a purely physical standpoint, a pantsed-in-front-of-the-entire-class level of embarrassment during which the vital version of you is forever reduced to something approximating a potato, except somehow invited to even less parties. And this denial of agency, of meaning, to the big silly scythe-guy waiting for you somewhere down the line under a sign labeled The End doesn’t just grant that inevitable moment of dead-ness a pants-shitting unknowability, it also has consequences that reverberate within the walls of whatever life you try to lead before it’s all over. After all, how is the stuff before the buzzer goes off supposed to have any meaning when that clarion blast reduces everything to the null set, not just going forward, but backwards, too? The shedding of this benighted yoke is pretty much what puberty is for: the end of that squeaky-voiced, easily-forgiven and innocent version of you in order to make way for the cynical and probably hairy weirdo that you will shamble, increasingly bald and disillusioned, throughout the rest of your life as is like a death practice run.

Which brings us to David Lowery, and his masterful a-lot-of-movies-at-once-but-really-only-about-one-thing, The Green Knight. Lowery understands that mortality and coming-of-age are pretty much the same thing, even as one by definition means death and the other strongly implies some kind of birth. The squaring of this circle (and we’re going to be talking a fucking lot about fucking circles) comes in the interplay: the realization – and, more importantly, the acceptance – that neither of these things can be achieved without the other, and that both, even the being-dead one, are essential to a life not just well-lived but well-finished. Drawing upon his already-extensive history of saddling death alongside some selected component of the human experience, “American Gothic”-style, and stepping back to see how one side of the tableau recontextualizes the other, Lowery once again wills to the surface elements of life typically unseen, ones that range from a sad kind of song to a dumb kind of yearning, all thrown into sudden and lucid relief by virtue of being by placed in the milieu of something incalculably larger than they could ever hope to be.

Thanks for Explaining to Me in Excruciating Detail Your Opinions on Death and Mortality and the Fleeting Nature of Existence; I Don’t Suppose You Have a Second Hobby?

Some background on indie filmmaker and America’s leading Wyatt Earp cosplayer David Lowery would probably be useful. I won’t say that Mr. Lowery is obsessed with mortality, but he’s definitely figured out that one day he’s going to stop breathing forever and that the delicate homeostasis of his body will respond negatively to this development. The towering, silent, guiding and indeterminate meaningfulness of the big period at the end of the sentence can be felt through multiple movies in his filmography, oftentimes going scenes-long stretches in which it is never directly acknowledged, but sure as shit is there all the same. Essential, though, is that Lowery never seem too interested in pontificating on death itself but rather on investigating how the various components of the human experience can be thrown into different and more elucidating relief when viewed in immediate proximity to the big no-breathy-no-more moment (this is kind of like John McLean’s approach in Slow West, which I have reviewed before!). When you look at Lowery’s work it’s not so much death, death, death as it is love and consciousness and time as viewed against the backdrop of death (A Ghost Story), enjoying the simple things in life even more as you approach death (The Old Man and the Gun), the realization that changes in time and milieu are unreturnable and thereby represent a certain type of death (Pete’s Dragon). Lowery is (thankfully) not some nihilist but more like a photographer taking pictures of his favorite things in life and developing them in different solutions of mortality to see how the composition is changed in the subsequent reaction – which details fade to irrelevance, which ones dominate the frame.

And the examples of this preoccupation are many. As the opening shot of the movie pulls back from that grimy street we hear – and then pass by – water dropping from an unseen crack in the ceiling with a tattoo that borders on impatience. It’s a sign that we’re in a cheap-o building, sure, but it’s also our first instance of a pendulum hurriedly counting the seconds, of sand falling from an hourglass. And it’s not just falling, it’s falling fast, trying in vain to remind our snoozing whore-connoisseur Gawain that he has perilously little time to add meaning, narrative to his otherwise forgettable existence. Continuing the water theme, Gawain is also constantly splashing pretty much any liquid he can find on his face – from a practical standpoint, it’s because he’s usually either shitfaced or fresh from an ass-kicking, but with Lowery’s focus in this movie being what it is it’s hard to not see this as a play on purification, of preparing yourself for your material end, when you sure as shit better have some cleaner part of you that will survive your mostly-meaningless physical finale and keep on keeping on after your body falls useless to the ground. Right from the jump in this delightfully-focused-even-as-it-seemingly-includes-every-idea-anyone-has-ever-had feature film we see the “death” side of Lowery’s go-to equation written as loudly as those deliciously ostentatious title cards.

I Don’t Want the Fact That a Forest Spirit is Going to Cut Your Fucking Head off Next Christmas to Stop You From Enjoying Your High School Years

Alright, so we’ve got the death part down (it’s everywhere, really, just look at all the skulls and corpses), so what’s the thing being butted against it, the part of the human experience being thrown into both scathing and sensitive relief by virtue of death’s constant presence on its borders? Well, I didn’t mention the dumb young a few paragraphs ago by accident: it’s coming-of-age, and a specific age-coming at that. As we see throughout the movie Lowery defines growing up as accepting both the relative unimportance of the part of you that physically lived your story and the newfound primacy of the story itself, left ghost-like and honest in your body’s wake. The two can’t continue concurrently forever, and a sunderin’ is a comin’ regardless of if or how you try to run. All you can hope to do is transfer all dignity to the memory of your actions and be cool with the fact that the imprints of the actions themselves are going to be grown over, quite dispassionately, with moss and time. That’s easier said than done, and bumps in this process come from exactly where you would expect them to come, especially when our focus is young people: by liking the physical so much – because the physical can whore it up, skateboard, speculate about different kinds of pie, jump really high, try on cool shirts, eat roast beef for breakfast, sing along to “Mambo #5” even though “The Sound of Silence” is playing on the radio, and other things, too – that they try to preserve that more materially delicious part of their existence at the expense of the far more esoteric “they’ll write poems about me one day, which I guess is cool.”

And this is where Gawain comes in. Lowery, as well as the anonymous poet who presumably wrote the story as a subtle reminder to his kids that they were all a bunch of selfish pricks, wants Gawain – out of all the possible knights in Camelot – as his protagonist for a reason. Just look at him. He’s a putz! It’s played up more in this movie than in the poem itself, which given Lowery’s prerogatives makes perfect sense, but the details are manifest either way. Let’s look at all the impressive feats performed by our big, strong movie lad. His journey consists of no less than: getting tricked by Barry Keoghan, a man who only exists in movies to be suspicious; losing all of his shit and responding to this conflict by screaming like a sociopathic toddler; being a dick to a fox; encountering a restless spirit who desperately needs him to put her to rest and immediately asking what’s in it for him; almost drowning in multiple puddles; falling down a hill; falling down a second hill, but this time while tripping balls; entering into a competition in which all he must do to be declared victor is not accept a handy from some guy’s wife and then immediately accepting the handy (while grandma is watching, no less); having a forest spirit lay down arms before him and instead of realizing the fairly obvious point being made about desperation and cooling his hot blood instead goes full Mel Gibson on the fucker, doing everything short of screaming “Wu-Tang!” before cutting Jolly Green’s head off. This is not knightly – sorry, squirely – behavior, it’s the action of a dumb fucking kid! And that’s fucking great, because by having such a solid lattice of stupid, oftentimes contemptible behavior already laid down Lowery can embellish – just as he embellishes the coming-of-age aspects of the original poem – the more esoteric commentaries on death, narrative, flight, and acceptance with ease and aplomb. But while these esoteric commentaries on death, narrative, flight, and acceptance are fascinating in their own right I will not expound upon them for fear of wasting too much time and getting too far up my own ass in analysis.

The More Esoteric Commentaries on Death, Narrative, Flight, and Acceptance

Fucking sike! Of course we’re going to talk about those things in stupid, obnoxious amounts of detail. Concerned about getting too far up my own ass? I live inside of my own ass. I have an entire paragraph outlined about circles, you assholes. See, here it is:

Circles in this story are pretty much a middle finger to the concept of agency. Circles, you’ll be interested to hear, travel exclusively in a circle, always delivering you somewhere predictable, circumscribing your movement and, most importantly, stressing the finite nature of your journey. When you squirm, then crawl, then walk, then hobble your way away from the oblivion you came from you’re just moving right back towards that oblivion again. Unlike our friend the ray, who just shoots off into eternity, a circle is a submission to the fallibility of your movement, which of course dovetails nicely with Lowery’s conception of coming-of-age, and his choice of Gawain’s story to elucidate that conception. And boy-fucking-howdy do those roundy-round images bedeck this movie: Arthur’s crown is a circle; he and his silly boys meet about the round table; when Arthur is performing his Christmas-day grandpa ramble about the fleeting nature of time he looks up at a round window in the ceiling, filled with light because the legendary king himself is nearing the end of his revolution; the puppet show illustrates the changing of the seasons with a rotating wheel; the camera work has multiple 360° movements; sometimes the camera rotates about another axis 180° to show the inversion of Gawain’s reality compared to the story he would prefer to leave behind… these aren’t the idle observations of a man reduced to eggplant-levels of cognizance during his viewing of the movie and just kind of pointing at the screen while yelling, “look! shapes!” and then clapping his hands – much like water and purification, Lowery makes sure to steep his telling of the story in reminders that the physical is always approaching its end, that one end of the circle will always collide with its origin. It’s the terminable nature of the physical that must be acknowledged in order to continue on in any capacity when the end has met with the beginning again, when you can finally see if you really did manage to come of age in time to turn that end into a different kind of beginning, even if your fucking head still gets chopped off, regardless.

So what’s the counterpoint to all this hot round-boy action? Well, I hope you like your insurgence infinitely thin, because it’s lines (isn’t old English literature fun, you get to engage in debates over whether or not the author was prioritizing circles or lines in their imagery and then WHERE ARE YOU GOING). Because both Lowery and the anonymous poet whom I proved early in this essay hated his children are both scamps, “lines” in this context means both the actual, geometric line and lines from a story. Lines are shuttered space – manipulatable, filled with the promise of control and escape even though they offer nothing of the sort. At the beginning of Gawain’s journey, for instance, during that nifty camera pull back through the window and into the brothel we pass through a narrow slit, losing in our passage context and continuity and settling in on a snoozing Gawain dominating the frame. Anyone who has ever watched any movie starring a teenage since the invention of film knows this as the classic introduction to our endearingly-lazy hero, but that particular framing also stresses Lowery’s take on this category of film: Gawain is introduced after having passed through a vector that elides everything from view except for sweet, glorious him, awash in the deliciously-sweaty aftermath of all those physical indulgences he loves so much. He is dumb, indulgent, completely obsessed with himself, incapable of viewing life as anything more than a series of physical pleasures, and will require the entirety of the story, a hero’s journey worth of watching lines bend into circles, to appreciate that he needs to offer something else up at the end of it all, something that will endure when he will invariably fall.

And later, when that kinky seductress sets in on Gawain she tries to tempt him to break his pledge in more obvious ways (two tugs and a sparkling green sash, am I right, fellas) but her much cleverer attempt comes in the library, that glorious House of Lines. It’s there that she shows him all the stories he could possible hide in to better escape his destiny, his turning from flesh to memory, even telling him that she sometimes improves upon a story, actually rewrites a book in her own library when she sees the opportunity. And Gawain takes the opportunity, feverishly trying to escape into a linear narrative of immortality when kneeling before the Green Knight at the end, but the fantasy fades as his dreams of grandeur crack under reality’s undilutable presence. He really goes full Masterpiece Theatre with his desperate head-canon, telling himself that he’ll be king, that the round crown somehow won’t look silly, that he’ll age like Clooney, but the linear narrative being penned by his own hand falls apart all the same. And what’s one of the final camera movements in that long escape sequence, the one culminating in Gawain realizing he has escaped nothing, that even after hiding for decades as the king he is still destined to be head-circumcised by the Green Knight? A fucking circle.

Your Argument Isn’t Bad, but Could You Make it Again With Fingerpaint?

And there are even more visual cues that illustrate Lowery’s intentions. Let’s take his use of color, for instance. Colors are just shapes for people who are bad at math, but they still fit into the same schema as the circle/line dynamic. Repping Team Circle is green, which makes sense and I could probably just point to the fucking title of the movie and call it a day but we’re stroking, here, so let’s go a little deeper: if Lowery’s conception of coming-of-age is predicated on the end of the physical and the submission to forces greater than yourself, ones that are – and this is pretty important – so much larger than you as to be apathetic to your entire journey, just viewing you as another thing to grow over, then green is pretty much the “the light at the end of Daisy’s dock represents the American Dream” of choices, here. Your falling into myth and physical ruin as the price paid to unloose the eternal version of yourself is green as hell: the chapel in which Gawain is undergoing his own transformation is materially falling apart but doing just fine as far as growth, nature, and green are concerned because they have the run of the place. The Green Knight’s own axe causes the spontaneous growth of moss wherever it is laid, an almost anthropomorphizing of eternity’s hunger, as it climbs over and dominates whatever it is allowed to touch. And remember Gawain’s ‘shroom trip? Hand got a little fungus-y there, didn’t it, which unless that scene was trying to tease a Swamp Thing spinoff was almost certainly Gawain’s sub-conscious brain trying to warn his much stupider waking brain about what is going to happen to his beloved physical existence upon offering up his head at the chapel.

And in the other corner we have blue, the color of artifice and pretension and superficial safety. Lady Two-Pumps, One Sash is always seen decked out in resplendent, immaculate blues, and the library-seduction scene is characterized by a blue-dominated frame. And when Gawain is dreaming of fleeing his destiny we see images of him marrying someone from his own social class, a subconscious storytelling choice that he of course thinks will build up even more classy artifice and protect him from the realities of life. What colors are he and his entourage, as well as the new bride and her entourage, wearing? Blue, baby. Organic colors of growth and nature and inevitability are thrown out in favor of desperately grasping at the apparent safety of, well, bullshitting yourself with placating stories. Oh, and as long as I am drilling threes from half-court, here, what’s the last thing that Gawain does in this same final dream sequence before being forced to accept that he is always going to be offered up to the Green Knight’s axe, one way or the other, either now or decades from now (this is right after the 360° I mentioned earlier in the steamy-hot circle/line section)? He pulls out the green sash, which is the first time we’ve seen that color in quite some time. Don’t worry about congratulating me on noticing things, I am never not congratulating myself on noticing things.

The flawless capstone to all of this use of color is King Arthur’s perpetual appearance in saintly whites. Played by Sean Harris, who you order from a catalogue whenever you want a character’s dialogue to flex with gravitas even as nobody has any idea what the fuck he’s saying, this version of the king is decrepit, liver-spotted, dark around the eyes for lost sleep that can never be recovered, and comporting himself with what little grace his failing body still has the fight to show out in. It is of course a massive and deliberate irony that in this story about stories and their immortalizing qualities that the greatest legend of them all is the most physically human, worn down to the brink of physical ruin and mental helplessness by the very same adventures that have rendered him eternal in the eyes of those who will never see him. But this is also the source of his grace: Arthur does not hide in his stories, doesn’t wrap them about his waist like a green sash. His stories are, rather, the preserving medium of what he believed in, and by making that distinction between two different kinds of survival – in understanding that the cleaving of the body and memory into two unreturnable entities is only to be feared if the body is valued that much more than the memory – he approaches (really slowly, while constantly pronouncing “Gawain” like a drunk) his material end without fear. That he’d be draped by the director in angelic whites as a reward should be a hint to Gawain (sorry, I mean gERRRwIn) and the audience of what their prerogatives should be in life.

Kill My Evil Twin, Everybody Hates That Guy!

Hey, when you combine circles and lines and colors together what do you get? Alright, you get a lot of things, but one of those a lot of things that you get are paintings. Paintings in this movie might be the ultimate physical representation of artifice and the necessity of accepting the truth of your story. They’re so direct, in fact, that the two relevant paintings are only shown once each, because any more than that would be like if Lowery just placed a laminated copy of his director’s notes on each seat in every theatre in the world showing the film. First up is the painting that Gawain commissions before leaving on his adventure-but-it’s-more-like-the-Griswalds-going-on-vacation-than-anything-worth-writing-a-poem-about: it is monolithic, stately, incurious and rote – basically ye olde version of Photoshop, with all the blemishes (and that motherfucker Gawain is pretty much nothing but blemishes) airbrushed out and replaced with a generic and undeniable ubiquity. This makes sense given it’s the beginning of his journey. Gawain wants a flawlessly heroic image of himself immortalized somewhere, some lie of a story that he can endure the ravages of time with, martini in hand, while everybody else falls to shit and loam and is grown over by time’s indefatigable need for more things over which to consume. And when Lord Man-Smooch and Lady Doublepump provide him with a real portrait of himself later in the movie, upside down and steeped in darkness, an image about as far away from Arthur’s perfect white as humanly possible, isn’t an accident (there are no accidents in fiction, except casting Clint Howard in anything). We’re seeing what they see, why the feel the need to test and educate him – someone who is so ass-backwards from the chivalric ideal that he needs to be portrayed the wrong fucking side up, just to stress that he’s really bad at this.

The End

“Is this all there is?”

“Oh, get fucked.”

This approximation of pre-acceptance Gawain’s final encounter with the Green Knight is about as explicit as Lowery’s editorial voice ever gets. Gawain, who apparently hasn’t noticed all the fucking green circles everywhere, still doesn’t understand the schema that is body and memory are subject to, and that there’s no way to save the former, so he should be far more concerned with the latter. He’s still a kid. It’s only after the elaborate dream sequence, in which Gawain reveals his continued ignorance by thinking he can make himself an adult by simply imagining himself as an older and fancier Gawain, only to still see everything fall to shit around him, that he finally comes of age, realizing that it is a moment, a choice, and an acceptance that brings about adulthood, and not just living for a really long fucking time. Obviously it’s a bummer that he’ll never be able to get freaky with pixie-cut Tomb Raider again, but rules are rules, time is time, and if you have to become an adult the hard way, which is apparently the only way, you might as well have your luggage ready, and at least do something that makes that romanticized portrait of yourself back at the castle have some claim of having been drawn from life.

Ultimately, I view this space unto which I post interminable screeds about issues only occasionally and tangentially having to do with movie reviews and more often than not being little more than the gory scribblings of a man in decline, a rainbird of neurosis soaking the children like a grim Shamu at my own personal Sea World, the mind-frownies loosed by some puncture in my unripe psyche by an indifferent and eternally encroaching universe, to be a feel-good wellness blog. I aspire to sooth, and to get us to a kinder, gentler place, brain-wise. But I can’t help you realize that better and more Scandinavian version of yourself until I, with the same parochial steadfastness of a farmer harvesting a man-sized potato from the dirt and loam of his own formative emotional crises, have dug out a better version of me, first. So instead of further stultifying us all by doing the usual this week (reviewing a movie from the austere remove of my superciliousness, only even beginning to approach it intellectually after having reduced it through the same emotional withholding you’d expect from a personality-disordered parent to some neatly parameterized and coldly inert thing, taking all of these empathy precautions so the work will be rendered unspectacular to me and therefore more easily accosted by my various sarcasms) I’m going to analyze/opinionate about a film in real time. I think the kids call this blogging. Or live-Tweeting. Or eating Tide Pods. I’m going to write a review/analysis/whatever while watching the movie in question, is what I’m saying, so my takes will be a little less curated, a little more guts-and-nuts-based. That’s why this preamble is so hilariously overwritten – I’m trying to get all of the haughtiness out of my system before I start, so I can be reborn fresh as a newborn babe, a veritable Star Child of reconstituted purpose and form, freed from the violent constraints of evolutionary necessity after getting all Close Encounter’d by pure unfathomable unconstraint, just kind of rotating all naked and weird in the embryonic sac/spaceship of my second crack at existence. It’s going to be great.

(Also, to further deny myself the snark-inducing benefit of pre-knowledge I’m even going to specifically choose a movie that comes to us from some larger media entity, which I will also in no way familiarize myself with before watching the film. Goodbye, Cody? More like Goodbye, Pretensions. Let’s fucking boogie.)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

(I’m not even doing my usual theme/silly name-based organizational schema for this one – just plowing through this mother from start to finish. Also, I’m going to talk about things as they come with the assumption that you’ve already seen the movie.)

Opening Credits

This is some deliciously lo-fi shit, right here! If I didn’t already know what year Fire Walk came out in I wouldn’t even have to look it up because this is like if River of Grass had a headwound it refused to seek medical treatment for. It’s like jazz kitsch. It’s great! We’re getting this classy yet vaguely mournful arrangement over what I’m assuming is static, or as static always seems to represent in the other David Lynch works I’ve seen, the collected weight of all creation shitting itself in horror at the uselessness of its own being, indifferent in its loud decline to the lives caught in the riptide of its cosmological mourning, the whole haunting thing inevitably resolving into a scream that will never be heard in its fullest meaning because the impetus of its unloosed madness is the very same unending space through which it now tries in vain to escape from. So we’re off to a cheerful start. But really, that simple use of image and sound is so beautifully direct. It’s high art and banality not just blandly placed next to one another with a dinky title card that says “Postmodernism!” like a school project thrown together the morning it was due but rather informing one another, letting you know that one is not just a direct consequence of the other, but its own dark sister simply viewed through another lens. It’s like a balletic dip into hamburger grease. It’s like a student film but without the sweaty desperation of someone trying to justify film school. “Cerebral-and-searching-without-being-pretentious” is one of my favorite things. It’s so damn effective! The loss and longing of a borked television screen is like artisanal PB&J. Lynch, you’ve got me so far. Keep it coming, you big-haired freaky weirdo.

(Also, random aside: the cast for this movie apparently consists of every human who has ever lived or ever will live. A24 movies and their standard cast size of “the remaining survivors of a plane crash two weeks after landing in the Andes and one week after resorting to cannibalism” makes for the kind of lean and vicious fare we expect from everybody’s favorite budget-conscious doom-distributor, but there’s always something so appetizing about being teased a huge cast, because you get to go through the movie with the promise that every new scene might introduce a new character, or relationship, or just send the story in a direction you never expected. Unwieldy, or at least the appearance of the unwieldy, is fun.)

Opening Scenes

What the fuck. The film just delivered on the portent of its opening image with more urgency than a parent chasing their not-too-bright child into traffic. That salvo of image and sound was like a Mormon farmer’s nightmare guest-edited by Margaret Sixel. But this is also a perfect vertical slice of Lynchian horror: we get a television being smashed, a murder, a body floating in a river, an arrest being made on some idyllic countryside road but shot from a creepy dream-like low angle, children lining the windows of a school bus in the background and all of them just fucking wailing, and while all that is happening the frame is dominated by the incongruity of a prostitute placed against all of this surreal provincialism. The cruelty of the world is shown to you so unabashedly in the company of the hokey that it tickles even as it terrifies. All of it – the rapid-fire editing culminating in a cavernously-still wide-shot, the rot at the heart of Americana, the nightmare-logic of the blocking, the way in which darkness is constructed almost entirely from wholesome images, just rearranged into a milieu you never would have expected – is such a damned brilliant and unique way to unnerve the audience and plunge them immediately into your world. And there are people out there that don’t like David Lynch movies. Those barbarians.

(I want to say this introduction of Agent Desmond is like someone filmed the dream of, like, a mid-Westerner who knows what crime is intuitively but has never actually attempted to visualize it before so he’s only capable of generating images of iniquity through the building blocks of his charmingly pastoral life and the result is a conception of horror so superficially innocent but pulsating at the seams with implied meaning that it’s funny even as it terrifies with an uncanny kind of portent. Right off the bat Lynch is making me wonder about the relationship between what is supposed to be taken seriously and what isn’t. Like, I know what is serious and what isn’t, but how the two are supposed to relate, or if they’re just two parallel paths along what seems to be shaping up to be a supremely fucked up journey, is what is keeping my brain on its brain-toes.)

The Town, The Investigation

See, this is what confidence can do for you. We’re only a few minutes in but the descent into increasing weirdness is matched perfectly by an unerring confidence in the necessity of that weirdness. The girl in the red dress, the seemingly-doped-up police officer and secretary as they harass agents Desmond and Stanley – any of this could set off my “ugh, quirk-for-the-sake-of-quirk” alarm, but it all fits so well into the fabric of a world that’s already asserting itself as surreal and darkly humorous but also deadly serious in its human implications. After a completely random introduction, for instance, that girl in the red dress is explained (with perfect reasoning!) to be a vital instrument to solving the case. And the behavior of the almost drunkenly and certainly unnecessarily belligerent weirdos in the police station stresses how strange and difficult this town is probably going to be. It’s like Lynch crafts his worlds by just opening up the sense-memory part of his brain and letting it pour across the frame, but then – and this is the vital part – is brilliant enough to know when to redirect it, if only gently, towards the obligations of plot and tone and character. Characters originate as pools of feeling, but instead of being left that way in the name of lazy-indulgent “artistry” are built up into actual people who make perfect sense in context of the story he is telling.

Also, the low-budget aesthetic of this film is great. I don’t think I’ve seen a single establishing shot yet. Characters are just kind of in mid-conversation when we first see them; nobody ever walks in anywhere, they’re just kind of there, and on the rare occasion when someone does walk through a fucking door they step directly into their side of the master, which in turn almost always plunges immediately into shot-reverse-shot, with almost no frame-sharing. It’s like the whole movie could’ve been filmed industrial-style. And it’s not just the framing – even the script makes it ambiguous as to whether or not the lo-fi approach is due to budgetary constraints or is a stylistic choice. Agent Desmond demands all pertinent information on Theresa and the sheriff just immediately hands him a box, because apparently he has a container labeled “all pertinent information on Theresa” just sitting under his desk. It’s like something from a comedy sketch, but it’s all played so straight it just makes it seem like we’re descending deeper and deeper into dream logic, which of course is the precursor to nightmare logic. I don’t even know the name of this town yet but Lynch has managed to fully realize it in just a few scenes through a masterful weaving of the materially improbable but the psychologically consistent.

And everybody has such a practical and nonchalant response to the surreal, which only tightens up and makes even more credulous the otherwise insane parameters of this world. When we get to the diner (where we as usual just kind of are, without any of the walk-up establishing stuff) Jack (whoever the fuck that is!) tells Desmond and Stanley to ignore the electricity and go eat some damn food, all while blue-white terror lightning flashes around them. And then he turns to some guy fixing a lamp and tells him to hurry up, all while suddenly framed in this weird, nearly Dutch-angle shot while a homeless guy (whoever the fuck that is!) is randomly introduced into the scene and looks on wordlessly. And that waitress! She notes all these suspicious and grotesque things about Theresa the same way you’d note what her favorite color was or something. (Here’s the hackneyed version of this scene: we push in on Agents Desmond and Stanley on one side of a booth and the waitress on the other while she recounts the month Theresa worked there, getting choked up, being reluctant to talk, having to be gently encouraged by the boys to keep going. They thank her for her time and being willing to open herself up to such a traumatic memory while she nods, gulps down tears. But in Lynch-ville? Fucking nooooope. In Lynch-ville the waitress just sports a smug and almost supercilious smirk – like she is intimately familiar with the terror that haunts this town, and likes it more than she does the agents – as she matter-of-fact-ly describes yet another instance of reality decaying to madness.) This whole sequence reminds me of the scene in Drive when Ryan Gosling’s character marches into the dressing room of a strip club and threatens to hammer a bullet into some dude’s skull. Instead of giving us the response we expect from the various assembled strippers – ugly naked chaos as the girls run screaming for the exit, the obligatory handheld shaky-cam in case the whole thing wasn’t blandly visceral enough for you – we just get the girls staying put in the background, silent and awkward, like they’ve seen this kind of shit before and understand that it’s better to just wait it out. The emotion of the scene in both cases veers in a direction you’d never expect but makes perfect sense in the context of the film’s tone. I love this movie.

(Random aside: who the fuck was that French girl next to the old dude in the diner? I know that “random quirk!” will be a popular explanation but with what we’ve seen from Lynch’s imagination so far, how it teems with logical weirdness, he probably had a whole canon fleshed out for them. Like how in Tarantino’s screenplays he gives names and elaborate descriptions to throwaway henchmen. Love of characters, flavor of the world, I can dig it!)

Well, we’re finally getting establishing shots, and they’re creepy as hell. And equally as important, they do nothing to alleviate the tremendous feeling of being hermetically sealed off from reality, grace, redemption, anything not actively trying to worm its way into your skull and feast upon your dendrites if not your memories, etc. If anything, by showing that outside of the characters’ immediate unease there is only more unease these wider shots increase the feeling of isolation. There’s nothing out there except more of the same nothing. No pickup shots of people piling into the stands for a Friday night football game, no old timers sitting on folding chairs in front of the gas station… space is being meekly presented to highlight confinement, and to remind us that what the town is represents a steeper intellectual hill to climb than the quotidian things it may contain. This place is way beyond housing people. It’s set its sights higher, or maybe lower.

(Random aside: Harry Dean Stanton’s face acting is honestly the best I’ve ever seen. That moment where his whole grizzled gizzard warbles unattractively before he starts explaining himself to Agent Desmond is so expressive they probably could have just cut the part where he starts talking because everything that needs to be conveyed has already been gotten across courtesy of that weathered jelly-mug of his.)

(Bonus random aside: David Lynch checking his watch after Kyle MacLachlan tells him the time and date might be my favorite visual gag in a while, from this, a movie about people investigating a coke addict whose skull got bashed in and also hell is probably real. It’s just such a perfect moment of quiet comedy that has literally no reason to be included but just works with the established tone. But even this seeming irreverence helps to illustrate a deeper point: Lynch (the director) is operating with, like, the quantum version of the Homer Simpson Sliding Scale of Intelligence. Lynch (the actor) is comic relief in the first scenes we see him in, but now he is yielding the uncanny baton to Kyle MacLachlan, who barrels into the film for the first time acting even stranger. Now, this would normally be a, let’s say Newtonian example of the Sliding Scale, except that Lynch’s character keeps slipping, like a contrapuntal bass player, these goofy affectations of his into the beats between Kyle MacLachlan’s own stream of strangeness. So instead of Lynch’s character simply getting smarter as necessary and becoming the straight man to accommodate MacLachlan’s wag – which he does to some extent – he also continues to exist on a parallel plane in which he has remained the comic relief. Lynch can bend even a basic comedy formula to the will of his vision.

(Also-also, this scene further establishes that to work at Lynch’s version of the FBI on Lynch’s version of planet Earth it’s pretty much mandatory that you be fucking nuts, which of course like all of his other seemingly-random weirdness has beautifully satisfying logic and justification behind it, because you need that oblique approach forever kicking your vision and perception out of the comforts of the usual context and into the realm of the uncanny in order to make sense of the kind of horror you’ll be investigating. This is masterful tonal balance and world-building. Oops, my aside became a paragraph-and-a-half. Sue me, it’s Silly Sunday and I have two hours to get this done!)

(Actual aside: I like how the FBI’s response to Agent Desmond disappearing is to send an even stranger agent out there, like maybe his brain might be able to withstand the concentrated waves of pure creepiness coming off the town better than the guy before him.)

One Year Later

Let’s take a minute to appreciate how masterful cultivation of tone and place can elevate even quotidian storytelling devices into the hell-flushed glare of narrative urgency. This introduction of a new town in which the grim is going to grow once more into a material and hungry darkness obviously apes the opening credits from the first murder-town, as we are once again introduced to a location in the story via heartbreaking music played incongruously over seemingly meh imagery. But instead of this being a mindless and eye-roll-inducing application of Storytelling 101 principles (“it’s like poetry, it rhymes!”) it feels more like we’re turning to another chapter in an anthology on the collapse of reality, one in which the decaying bits of the first story, so overwhelmingly monolithic in their own context, will barely register as more than some flavor and context sprinkled into this, the main course. There’s no “oh, they’re doing a thing, how cute” moment because the film has done such a great job cultivating feelings of doom in its opening act that this repetition just feels like another revolution down the spiral staircase to whatever hellzone Lynch is taking us to. Things don’t exist in a vacuum, is what I’m saying; they are informed by the quality of the material around them. Flank a standard storytelling device with pitch-perfect tone and rich characterization and that storytelling device just feels better by virtue of its august-ass company.

(Another huge aside: I love how Lynch doesn’t just throw some inarguable conception of grim and evil at you, but rather shows the rot forever present at the corners of our chosen and safer reality manifesting itself in ways that seem at times so far afield that you can’t help but laugh even as the sadness and longing inherent in that strangeness break your heart; so many exchanges in this movie feel like a conquered people trying to commiserate but are only able to do so through some demeaning language forced upon them by their new foreign sovereign – you may laugh at the dumb lilt of how they’re talking but some deeper and more human part of your mind can’t stop lamenting the tragedy of what they’re trying to say, and how they continue failing to say it. Case in point: the conversation between Laura and her man-friend who has possibly the blankest expression I’ve ever seen on anything that wasn’t about to be thrown down on my plate next to a side of asparagus and a baked potato. Their conversation includes multiple turkey references, with Dead-Eyes informing Laura, as if this information were vital to know and steeped in romantic necessity, that turkeys are dumb as hell, to which Laura, who I’m pretty sure gets fucking murdered, responds by tearfully gobbling. And, oh yeah, this constitutes the most heartfelt exchange seen at any point in the movie so far. We are being reminded of the surreal logic that governs these conversations, laughing at the characters’ terribly stupid attempts to express themselves against a creeping horror that defies explanation, and also getting our hearts broken at how helpless but still yearning they all are. Honestly, David Lynch’s understanding of tone is some of the best I’ve ever seen. He weaves in so many different affectations into a scene without ever disrupting the arc of the through-line, giving you multiple ways to appreciate what is being rendered and prioritizing none of them.)

Dinner at the Palmer’s

 All of these performances are great. It’s not just Lynch’s direction or the script but the amazing corral of actors he’s assembled that makes this film so compelling. The helplessness of Laura Palmer’s mom but the uniquely-her way in which she responds to that helplessness – how she never looks directly at what’s happening, and has this narrowness to her gaze that superficially resembles disapproval until you realize it’s her trying to shutter her vision against cruelties both domestic and otherworldly. Then there’s the psychotic faux-concern of the abusive father, who is terrifying, but who softens and laments believably during those moments of clarity when I assume he’s not being possessed (huge The Shining vibes, here); the best friend character (Donna? let’s go with Donna) and her attempts to combat the increasing insanity (Laura’s drug use, hell-demons) around town with nearly weaponized earnestness, even as she herself is clearly overwhelmed and terrified at what is going on. Really, every time the movie introduces another benchmark of crazy it seems to always masterfully match it with an equally human response, and in doing so keeps the film from spiraling off into too much indulgent, unevocative weirdness. It kind of reminds me of that scene in The Wolf of Wall Street when Belfort and his wife are arguing and it’s all cocaine pillows and butt candles and tee-hee aren’t the rich boorish and tiresome and then Belfort just punches her in the stomach and drops her to the ground and whatever incipient grin was working its way across your features now seems like evidence that you’re complicit in Belfort’s crimes and you feel terrible that you’ve been exposed as no better than him.

(Basically, this: complete dedication to a bit on behalf of actors, in large parts and small, allow everything from rapid to gradual transitions of tone to happen butter-smooth and completely explicable. Just like Jacques seeming to be little more than some fat dude who runs the local roadhouse until he’s talking to Bobby on the phone and the camera just keeps pushing in on him in direct relation to how his affect is changing to something nearly mad. It’s done with such unwavering confidence by both the actor and the director that whatever impulse you may have to giggle at fat man gettin’ weird is washed away and replaced with terrified incredulousness at what you’re seeing.)

Sound and Structure

(An actual aside: Going back to Eraserhead Lynch’s sound design has always been fantastic. During moments of rising tension the use of sound isn’t just for stingers – although it’s definitely used for that, too – it’s to give form to something that he seems to feel can’t be captured in images, like a difficult emotion or the presence of something too otherworldly to be reduced to simple material form. It’s goddamn creepy as hell, and might be my favorite part of the David Lynch Film Terror Experience.)

Also, I want to talk structure. Commentary on the actual, physical form of this movie has been barking around the gooier parts of my brain from the first couple of scenes but I have enough ammunition now to write about it with something vaguely approximating intelligence: so I know that Fire Walk comes from a TV show, a medium which tends to be bigger on subplots and details than features because, well, they have the time. Typically a film adaptation of a television show (like, say, Serenity, or really any of the Star Trek movies) simply drops the various accoutrements of serialized storytelling and reorganizes itself into a monolithic rendition of Movie, not so much because it’s ashamed of its small-screen origins but because it can’t think of any way to include those uniquely-television details in the scope of a large-screen version of the story. But this movie really synthesizes the prerogatives of TV (more subplots, more characters, less urgency) with the prerogatives of film (lean and focused, go, go, go, titties and explosions) better than I’ve ever seen. We keep getting glorified (and massively-appreciated) flavor text in the form of the characters who populate Twin Peaks, whose actions and responses to the events around them help to contextualize and enrich Laura’s plight but aren’t really essential to progressing the story – but whenever we’ve spent enough time with them and might be starting to impede the tick-tick-tick obligations of cinematic storytelling we jump right back to the focused horror of Laura’s descent into the grips of the creature that’s stalking her. Just like his use of tone and sound design Lynch can walk right up to a cliff labeled “indulgence” and just kind of soft-shoe on the edge without falling over.

(An aside: just like Laura’s turkey conversation with Very-Handsome-Man-It’s-Just-Too-Bad-His-Eyes-Are-The-Expressway-To-Hell is the most unabashedly human interaction in the movie, her walking into the roadhouse is the most unabashed acknowledgement of how the real world and the monstrous one exist concurrently in this town. That blue sourceless light against the red curtain background separates the singer from not just the rest of the roadhouse but fucking reality itself and makes you wonder if anyone besides Laura can see or hear her. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking moment of pure isolation rendered in striking visuals and sound, like redemption and grace do exist but are at this point in the story so far out of Laura’s grasp that she can never return to their comforts no matter how hard she swims against the tide. The angels aren’t singing her tribute, they’re singing her swan song and she knows it. And then to have Donna there to bear witness to the whole thing, to understand simply through the bonds of friendship what is happening even if she can’t see what Laura can see, and to try to, so loyally and stubbornly, pull her friend out of it… a masterclass in how overwhelmed humanity, action in the face of insurmountable odds, is beautiful because of how pathetic it ultimately is.)

Gettin’ Towards the End

We shouldn’t do this movie the injustice of getting bogged down in the obvious “this all represents the rot at the center of the idyllic, white, mid-Western existence!” analysis. I mean, sure, that works just fine as far as thesis statements go, and lord knows I’d over-analyze oatmeal if someone would pay me to, but it’s the texture of how this story is unfolding that’s more important than some vague “what it all means” approach. It’s the classical horror elements (like the point-of-view camera angle of Laura investigating her house for signs of Bob, a trick that’s repeated when she ventures into the dream room later in the film); the way in which a roadhouse just transforms from one end to the other, through perfect dream logic, into a rendition of hell whose lo-fi nature would both tickle and terrify Rudy Ray Moore; the way in which the actors know exactly where the dial should be set at any given moment – a bland and hokey mid-Westerner, or literal demon, or mid-Westerner who isn’t a demon but is still kind of a dick – and exactly how to calibrate mid-scene or mid-monologue to maximize the feeling of dread, or of just plain sadness at how there’s no escape from this town; those moments of clarity when the evil disappears and suddenly they’re all just people again (Laura snapping out of her fugue state when she sees Donna getting undressed and yelling at Jacques to rescue her and suddenly even Jacques has returned to earth and is a desperate and helpless human again). It’s these discreet moments that give the movie its impact, not trying to gauge from their collective inclusion what the thrust of the movie is “supposed” to be. I’d rather enjoy the moments then try to sew them together, Human Centipede-style, into some kind of easily-digested one-sentence summation. A story isn’t what it’s about so much as it’s about how it’s about it (Ebert!) and this movie knows exactly how it’s about what it’s about.

(An aside: Bob looks like if an elderly Adam Driver was extremely proud of the fact that he was a pedophile. Maybe a dash of Waluigi in there, too.)

Gasp! A complaint! It’s fairly minor but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bitch about something over the course of several thousand words. Also, I’m going to draw a parallel to my Ten Things I Hate About You essay in order to facilitate said bitching, because I paid good money for this website and I can do whatever I want with it. In the latter parts of both films, the silly teen comedy and the demon-sexed nightmare-hellscape, as we focus more and more on our main narratives the story loses a little bit of steam. This isn’t because the storytelling gets noticeably worse (Ray Wise is still phenomenal in what is essentially a dual role, and Laura’s descent certainly deserves the focus that it receives) but because we lose what has been established at this point to be an essential facet of each film: community. When I saw Laura’s mom smoking apathetically and staring into the middle distance the morning after Leland tried to rape his own daughter I thought to myself “oh, right, the fascinating supporting characters whose responses to the chaos adds so much more texture to the film and who themselves have been caught in the vortex that is pulling Laura under, thereby constituting a significant part of the movie’s impact. I remember them.” Just like in Ten Things it’s like Lynch did such a good job establishing the world in question that when he hones in on our primaries for the home stretch there’s some momentum-by-association that feels drained from the narrative. At the point where most films are heating up it almost feels like both this movie and Ten Things slow down and become, it pains me to say, fairly rote. Now there’s still so much goodwill built up by this point, so much, let’s call it narrative inertia, that we get across the finish line safely and satisfactorily, but it’s interesting how much a movie can lean on its supporting structure to give its main story greater momentum.

(Final aside: forget demons for a second, it’s so damn sad how everybody in town just uses everybody else. Laura is cheating on Bobby and only wants him for the drugs, Laura’s mom is completely apathetic as her husband abuses their daughter, Laura goes out with Potato Eyes (whose name is James I guess, but he’ll always be Potato Buster, Charisma Failure to me) because she wants protection from Bob. The rot at the center of Americana is Lynch’s focus in a lot of his movies, but he’s too smart to always render it as a slow zoom towards insects in the grass like in Blue Velvet. In this movie we get the visceral stuff (drugs, rape, backroom demon dancing), sure, but just as horrifying is how pretty much everybody (except for Donna, who is a treasure) is in it entirely for themselves, and can’t even fathom not selfishly sacrificing someone else to achieve their own end. Horror comes in a lot of different forms, eh?)

One last bitchy bitch: the only part of the story that doesn’t really work for me are the emotional moments with Laura, which is unfortunate because 1) she’s the main fucking character and 2) those moments become increasingly frequent as we go along. This could of course be Lynch trying to make his protagonist’s impending death as moving as possible by redoubling her moments of humanity, to stress that she’s fighting like hell to remain herself as all of this vileness rises to her neck, and then above her head, and that these moments of unabashed, teenage-drama-esque emotionality are deliberately-placed to, if only momentarily, break through the challenging and unrelatable elements of the story and bring us all back to a more human place, to be reminded that a life is at stake, but it just seems incongruous. In fact, going back to how I said Lynch dances on the edge of tonal inconsistency and always makes it work, this seems like the only part of the movie where it doesn’t. I’m all for giving Laura as much humanity as possible, unburdened by the director’s love of the ironic, but it just doesn’t seem to quite fit with what he’s going for. There are multiple moments when I expected her to yell “you just don’t understand me, dad!” and then run away while the theme song to Dawson’s Creek starts to play.

(OK, one more aside: after a certain point in the movie pretty much every scene between Leland and Laura is just them both screaming and making crazy faces. On the one hand, he’s a demon now so, sure, but on the other I’d be lying if I didn’t giggle a little at their relationship devolving into them trying to out roar each other.)

The End

I imagine that room with the little dude would have more relevance if I knew anything about the television show this movie comes from. All I know is that it sucks that Laura is apparently stuck there now (hell, purgatory?) and I’m not going to let little details like the inclusion of fairly inexplicable characters (who was that dude trying to save Laura at the very end? Why is Kyle McLachlan also in low-budget hell?) stop me from loving the hell out of this movie. Maybe I’ll check out the show, because damn.

After conducting extensive market research I now know that my reviews are too long, and also technically not reviews. But I ask you, how many of the greats allowed finicky details like the fact that the thing that they were selling was not actually the thing that it was supposed to be stop them from achieving the impossible dream? Budweiser is just the juice that comes out of frogs when they get run over on the highway; Nickelback’s music is a recording played backwards of a bunch of people in a room slowly filling with blood, Saw-style, begging for help; Kesha’s music is that same recording played forward; Nicholas Cage died in 1996; Ben Affleck is a collective societal hallucination over what it would look like if the only good part of the id, charisma, was absent – and yet heroes all, and legends of capitalism. But I will try, I guess, to achieve things like “basic coherence” and “sentences that end eventually” in this upcoming post, but only this one: if the results are anything less than spectacular then my next post is going to be a deep dive into that studio-mandated hell-bird intended to squawk the audience awake in Citizen Kane – the post will be written in Aramaic, and I will never stop updating it so technically it will be infinity pages long. I am worse than a hipster, I am a spiteful old man. This is already the longest intro I’ve ever written. God dammit.

I Did Not Expect That Basic Bitch to Be the One the Legend Spoke of: Subversiveness in Ten Things I Hate About You

Rebellion is a funny thing, and creativity stranger still, because they invoke images of a stallion galloping free across the Great Plains, being guided only by the winds, doing that amazing thing that horses do where they shit without having to stop moving, simply following instinct and achieving the fullest extent of their strength in the process. But you can’t really live like that in the real world because you’ll lose all of your money and then die, which is bad. So instead these images of Unbridled Living must take the form of picking your spots against various considerations – basic survival instinct, the comforts of the familiar, the fact that a corporation probably somehow owns the rights to whatever it is you’re making even though you’ve never actually signed anything before, fear of failure, even greater fear of success because if you overthrow the system then you just denied a lot of people their meal ticket and they’re looking to you now for the daily sandwich, buddy – that collectively are pretty much the Eye of Sauron, staring at you from across the infinite distance, planning your destruction, sending out the Nazgûl, etc. It’s a lot. So when you do encounter someone or something that has managed to carve out some little form of rebellion realize and appreciate that it’s not so little after all, and only appears that way, dwarfed in size as it is by this motherfucker called entropy that we’re all basically flies on the windshield of.

That uplifting sentiment brings us – I’m serious, it really does – to Ten Things I Hate About You, the towering victor of the 90’s Teen Comedy Wars, whose success on that surreal battlefield of even lighting and Barenaked Ladies songs was only appreciated retroactively, like the Battle of Thermopylae, if the Battle of Thermopylae had Larry Miller and pregnancy suits. Ten Things is a perfect case study in the humble-but-large form of rebellion – that magical way in which you can carve out some little sovereign space against The Man while still somberly acknowledging that you will always be forced to live on His property and pay Him His rent, outrageous though the rates may be. Gil Junger’s film carves said space through what at first appears to be acquiescence to The System, but in reality is an eschewing of the panderingly sleazy forms of studio-approved non-conformity (think late 90’s “punk” rock, with its focus-group-tested haircuts) and replacing that hokey type of corporate art with its own genuine, infinitely-more-clever form of subversion.

So what is this better kind of subversion? See, this is the smart part, and probably the reason why Ten Thing’s critical adoration came by way of a slow burn, not achieving cult status until well into the 2000’s: Ten Things I Hate About You marches to its own beat by not even pretending to throw off the yoke of studio control; it embraces its identity as a corporate product, and dutifully moves from plot-point to plot-point as the piece of disposable popcorn entertainment it was always designed to be. And this is actually brilliant! No movie is getting made without at least a little corporate ass-pampering (hey, remember that Kane reference in the intro?) and Ten Things simply acknowledges that, and then, after being mailed by a relieved studio a giant box labeled “Dumb Things That Incompetent Studio Executives Are Mandating Be In This Movie Because The Last Film They Saw Was Produced By The Fucking Lumière Brothers,” asks itself how it could have fun with that box. Instead of insulting our intelligence with some insufferably performative form of rebellion – like, taking some outfit from the aforementioned box and putting it on wrong with such impish irreverence, glossing over the fact that the outfit has “costume to be worn incorrectly by ironic character so that film may achieve hipster cred” written on it – the film takes its studio-mandated dumbness and weaves a beautiful tapestry out of the lameness and garbage. It is practically spite-fucking the studio with deliberately-overshot obsequiousness, a magical decision that finds the tools and methods of insurgency hiding in plain sight.

A Castle Immaculate, Built Entirely From Trash

Alright, we need some examples, but to appreciate the examples we need to ground this movie in a certain time and place so that we might understand what the studio was almost certainly asking of it. So, some context: the wacky aesthetic was all the rage in the 90’s. By the time Ten Things came out The Simpsons had already completed its own pivot into the surreal with ground-breaking success, Austin Powers – after a meek initial theatrical showing – was slowly gathering steam into a franchise, the country hadn’t been in a large-scale war in a while, the darkest scandal in politics was just the President getting laid, and nobody realized yet that the housing market was basically one of those Bob-ombs from Super Mario with “THIS IS BAD” written on it. People were, at least relative to today, feelin’ fine. So of course studios were hellbent on capitalizing on this aesthetic and mood, leading to an almost weaponized form of bubblegum innocence. Think the Spice Girls, the endless deluge of Saved By The Bell knockoffs, etc. This craven obsession with the wacky did not escape teen comedies, either – it was practically the æther from which they were wrought – and Ten Things I Hate About You pretty much had “make it more 90’s! The decade is almost over, you should know exactly what that entails” plastered on its fucking forehead. But instead of providing a few meager sops to this mandate the film leans into it with almost sarcastic glee and turns the constraints of the parent studio’s complete lack of creativity into good world-building.

In one of the opening scenes, for instance, when Michael is taking Cameron on a tour of the school, we can see this concept in action. A few things are happening during this walkthrough sequence: we’re getting basic exposition out of the way, we’re learning that Michael and now basically by extension Cameron are not popular (got to have that down-on-his-luck protagonist!) and we’re also getting an overview of the school’s various cliques. And this is where the movie carves an identity for itself through the very beats you’d think it’d have to avoid in order to have a voice. The screenwriters (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) give the studio their desired “this is a teen comedy movie, look at all of those teens!” moment, showing us all of the different social groups and castes in the school, but then they just kind of keep going with it, quietly piling on the weirdness until we’ve reached a point where Michael is introducing the fucking cowboy clique. The slow, Kids in the Hall-esque descent into unblinking weirdness is butter-smooth and maintained throughout the movie – later on in that very scene the camera does a nice 360° pan during which the cowboys can be seen again, completely irrelevant to the moment but now part of the movie’s logic and therefore required to be there, just kind of existing against all odds and co-mingled with the school’s more, uh, explicable students.

And these weird little middle fingers to the studio’s expectations for a teen comedy are constantly looped back into the story, showing a movie building its own internal logic entirely from sarcastic hyper-dedication to a dumb aesthetic. Oh, the movie needs that scene, the one where there’s a Large Party at a character’s house and Important Revelations are had? Fine, studio, we’ll do that, but it’ll be held at the house of the young professionals clique (introduced during the film’s earlier clever walkthrough segment) and you know who’s going to show up? The fucking cowboy clique, because they are a thing that exists in this universe. And maybe a cameo by the white Rastas, too.

Or how about the gym teacher that gets shot in the ass halfway through the movie during archery class, and then later on in the film goes to sit down without thinking only to spasm from his seat in pain when he remembers “oh, right, I have an arrow wound there”? In a world where George Lucas can’t be bothered to remember if the Jedi have been the guardians of peace in the galaxy for a thousand years or a thousand generations this qualifies as quality world building. The gym teacher even steals weed from a stoner kid during that same sequence, from which it can be implied he is going to choom the pain away. That is a delight! A man whose entire function in the film is borne from abject stupidity is allowed to treat said stupidity with such consistency and seriousness that he somehow morphs into a bizarrely well-realized character in the process. This is more than just fishing for a gag: the movie treats its dumb, throwaway ass-humor with more TLC than epic franchises treat their plot continuity, creating this weird and delightful Simpsons-esque parallel narrative in the process, and it deserves endless respect for that.

All of these details make for a movie that exists in its best parts primarily on the margins – spiraling off every expected and basic comedy vein into something so viable in its fully-realized weirdness that it almost becomes its own little autonomous country against the larger space of the movie proper. This yields for the audience a bevy of delightful, completely unnecessary and yet somehow totally essential supporting characters (Allison Janney as the horny guidance counselor eternally searching for a meatier word for “penis,” Larry Miller’s as the Stratford patriarch so gripped with the fear of his daughters getting pregnant he is driven nearly to madness) whose collective existence practically subordinates the beats of the story to their own delightful internal weirdness. The movie can take entire moments off from the plot (though it rarely does; it’s a surprisingly lean and focused script in spite of all this delightful irreverence) and simply coast on the strangeness of its world. It even uses the Homer Simpson sliding scale of intelligence to make sure that a character will be shrewd enough when they need to be in order to advance the plot, but then settle back down into borderline-labradoodle levels of intelligence otherwise, like when Joey is calculating and craven during his interactions with Michael and Patrick but then struggles to understand the difference between the words pensive and thoughtful (there is none). In fact, the movie is probably at its worst during the obligatory low-point end-of-the-second-act-beginning-of-the-third, when all of the weirdness is swept away and the movie forces every character to become normal in a mostly bland attempt to court catharsis. While this is understandable (even Homer comes back to earth during the moralizing sections of a Simpsons episode) it also hinders the movie’s bizarre and charming form of on-the-margins-based momentum. But it also proves a point! So much storytelling is derived from Ten Things’ brilliant decision to lean into its own studio blandness that when that earnestness-to-the-point-of-being-surreal is taken away the film actually falters a little bit on a basic narrative level, showing how essential its pet subversiveness is and how integral it has become by that point into the basic functioning of the plot.

The End

Ultimately, it is not any one characteristic of a movie but rather the sincerity with which it is – fuck I’m over 2,000 words! Pretend I wrote something snarky but vaguely wistful here!

This is kind of a review, but it’s also an overview, and a re-view, and a speculative view, and a pontification on trends I’m probably not qualified to write about. It’s a lot of things. I guess the movie itself is a vector by which to investigate interesting ideas? A familiar terminal from which we can safely jut off down some historical or analytical vein and perform the necessary work to better understand where stories come from and how they change over time while simultaneously finding reassurance in the knowledge that we’ll be able to return home whenever we want to, to find respite in the familiar, to pull our heads out of the disorienting and vaporous world of details that can be so onerous in the collective and reset ourselves with the restoring air only ever found back at the higher, clearer, more equanimous plateaus? Sure. Those were words. John McClane drops an SUV on someone in this movie. That’s what you came here for. That’s what I came here for. I’ll mention the SUV thing again, because it rules.

Die Hard 4 Review

Die Hard 4 is the story of an illiterate potato being thrown through a series of metrosexual windows by someone who hates people but also craves their approval. Conflict arises when some of the windows prove to be more resilient to unprompted potato-death than others for any number of reasons – tempered glass, thicker material, the window knows karate, etc. There is only ever one possible solution when these problems arise and that is to throw the potato harder and with even more pent-up sexual frustration. This works every time, and could never not work, because failure of the potato-rage paradigm under any circumstance would obliterate the logic, the very reality, on which this film is constructed, the result being something on par with Wile E. Coyote ever catching the Road Runner, or SpongeBob finally just telling everyone in Bikini Bottom to fuck off and then doing a whole bunch of blow with Gary. Die Hard 4 is a temple built in reverence of its own incuriousness, an endeavor whose final product is so startlingly on-brand that they forgot to give it doors or windows, and the entire thing is made of beef.

Actually, we need a decent foundation from which to start if we’re going to use DH4 as a jumping-off point to talk about some stuff, so while everything written above is completely accurate and should be provided without hesitation as a handy primer to anyone considering viewing this movie for the first time, it should also be noted that Die Hard 4 is actually a good film. Moreover, it is a fascinating and historically important one. It is in many ways a kind of beautifully idiotic peroration of the epoch that birthed it, like the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech if King Henry V had been kicked in the head by a horse before giving it, was drunk off his ass anyway, but also truly believed every word he said, even if most of them came out slurred and incomprehensible. That’s the real magic of the movie: its virtuosity in a paleo-to-the-point-of-being-feral sub-language of the larger cinematic discourse, honed by decades of entries so well-informed by one another as each one stripped away more superfluous language, amalgamated more parts into wordlessly-efficient alloys, in an almost caveman-scholarly competition that I’m not sure any of them ever actually realized they were in. We’re talking, like, West-African talking drums levels of efficiency, here, and pared down to that breathless exchange mostly by incidental, moronic competitive instinct. And to hear the movie traffic so fluidly in this timbre and tone while the New Language of action movies, one that somehow would manage to be considered significantly smarter while also being unquestionably louder, twinkled incipient and ambitious on the horizon further embellishes this dynamic with even more accoutrements to consider. It’s so exciting! Let’s do another section name.

The Cinematic Language of Pretending to be so Tough That You Can Bench a Fucking Helicopter  

So what do I mean about this fascinating, sublimated sub-language? Let me try to give the formless thing form, hoist it for a moment from its place down there greasing the wheels of the story and make its time-honed magic explicit, and let me do so with a simple question: what’s the name of that woman in Murdoch’s inner circle? The one in the FBI’s Cyber Security Division? That vaguely Asian lady who is always around whenever the Pointy-Headed Useless People are reminding us of their inability to solve problems while McClane is out ending terrorism and probably also curing scoliosis, both feats somehow involving headbutting a boiled ham, or driving an ice-cream truck full of dynamite into a building full of men who all agree that the crying is a viable form of expression? Trick question, motherfucker! Forget that lady’s name; there isn’t even a character named Murdoch in this movie; the head dude at the Cyber Security Division is named Bowman! But you see, that’s the point. That’s the language made explicit. You knew exactly who I was talking about before I even started offering more specific details about the lady in question, and more importantly you knew exactly where this woman and Burdoch/Murbman stood in the film – literally and figuratively – relative to McClane (Burdochmurb is just the grizzled police chief character – “Dammit, McClane, you’re a loose cannon but you get results!” – being given a slightly different job title, but functioning in the exact same capacity). In fact, you probably couldn’t even conceive of their personalities outside of any sentence that begins with “Well, when McClane…” followed by something about him, not them. I know I can’t! Their entire existence is defined in terms of where they stand relative to McClane. It’s nuts! The language of cinema – or in this case, the sub-language of the ego-driven action movie – reached such a level of butter-smooth sublimity by this point in cinema history that, like when SpongeBob goes into the future and finds everything is made of chrome, the invisible language of this type of film has been polished to a point where characters don’t even have to be given names, backstories, or personalities – all of this is filled in instantaneously based off of what we’ve seen before, and how they respond to our hero. I don’t even think that’s lazy or bad writing! In a drama, sure, it would be bad, because you want a world that exists in depth as well as in breadth, but in a movie that is more-or-less the extension of a single man’s ego? That’s called trimming the fat; making the story a leaner and purer slice of narcissistic hedonism. There is a clarity to the vision of these movies that oftentimes is obscured by how sirloin-stupid they are; almost every review of a movie like Die Hard 4, even positive ones, will mention something about the inherent dumbness of it all. Please don’t fall for that, because in the context of what the movie is trying to do – and we’ll get to the overall thrust of things soon – this type of writing is actually enviably efficient.

And how about those set pieces? Those, too, tip the hand of the psychological state that births a movie like this and those, too, represent a kind of culmination of a process designed to strip away anything that distracts us from the unquestioned point of focus and orientation in this movie’s universe, our hero’s throbbing and kingly crotch-bulge. To examine this let’s do away with the weird pop-quiz thing I did above and instead ask a less dumb question: what is the organizing principle of the set pieces in a movie like this? Everything needs some kind of organizing principle behind it, movie or otherwise. The decision-making process behind some new flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, which member of N*Sync you think about when you’re having sex with your girlfriend – all chosen based off of some invisible value system. So what can we deduce are the values underlying the choice of set pieces in this movie? They get bigger on a literal scale, sure, but that can be considered a consequence of big-budget film-making in general. But I’d like to propose another unifying principle behind the escalation of violence in Die Hard 4, and the entire cultural growth it is proudly a member of and metonymy (this is improper use of the word metonymy) for: Bruce Willis’s unplacatable fear that people might not be taking him seriously anymore. This has the benefit of also escalating the level of absurdity and violence, which appeases the suits (this is the proper use of the word metonymy) who sign the checks, but it also further makes the entire movie seem like a figment of our hero’s imagination, like he’s actually a middle-aged dad who fell asleep on the bus and is dreaming about how much more awesome life would be if he owned a Thunderbird. Much like the supporting characters only really being rendered visible when radiation from McClane’s weapons-grade machismo bounces off of them like some kind of virility-powered sonar, the set pieces also contribute to a cinematic language honed down to the sole purpose of make this man’s dreams manifest, subordinate the rest to his cause. And it makes perfect sense! Just like how the “dumb” screenplay and its paper-thin supporting (and, uh, main) characters are actually signs of the driving force behind an action blockbuster (narcissism!) honed to enviable focus, there is actually a fascinating amount of honesty and humanity in these increasingly-absurd set pieces. Think about it – you know what, you’re tired, it’s the end of the week, I’ll think about it for you: if I reached middle age and somehow still managed to be balanced, however precariously, atop the flaming pile of failed careers that is Hollywood, was still getting invited on the Tonight Show to remind everyone how the happy half live, you bet your ass I would take no comfort from any of my supposed accomplishments and in my anxiety over possible impending irrelevance insist that Goodbye, Cody 4: Cody 4 U (stylized either GC4:C4U or just a stencil of a massive penis) feature a scene in which I punch God so hard all religions are now retroactively based around the life-giving quality of my testicles. The scripts to these movies aren’t dumb, they’re ego flawlessly unfettered by considerations of other people, and the set pieces aren’t cartoonishly stupid, they are fascinating glimpses into the lengths a man will go to in order to convince himself he is actually, literally invincible, even though he knows he’s not, and it’s driving him mad.

Do Man-Droids Dream of Electric Peeps?

(I know I haven’t, actually, reviewed Die Hard 4 yet, or really mentioned anything specific about it. But this is the point I really wanted to get to, and I needed to run through the bizarre way in which visual storytelling and screenplay writing function in movies like DH4 so this section would make sense. So, to quickly reiterate: I like this movie, and I like it specifically for the traits I am describing. All forms of expression are just windows into the person and people who made them, and it’s fascinating to see where their head was at when they were making it, and how the evolution of their chosen form in-formed and shaped what they felt comfortable expressing and how they felt comfortable expressing it. You could portray your machismo quietly, and with great dignity and restraint, but that’s just not how the business of movies and the behavior of people allowed things to shake out. It’s a fascinating vein to follow, historically and psychologically.)

Now that we’re done setting the table, this is what I’ve been trying to get at: the part I find most interesting about pre-2008 action movies, the thing that makes all these supposed flaws or bone-headed stupidities actually riveting and fun to delve into from any number of perspectives: these movies are a collective exercise in fucking solipsism. Nothing is real outside of the massive, desperate ego of the person (McClane, Willis, take your pick, they’re essentially interchangeable from the standpoint of this analysis) around which the entire thing is oriented. In other genres (or in newer action movies) there is a compulsion to add something approximating an egalitarian worldview – or at least a willingness to share the formation of reality with someone else. But in these older movies it’s like we’re strapping on a VR helmet and finding out what it’s like to be a potato with huge biceps and no fear of anything past, present or future and that is also probably God. Movies like this are often called escapism, because it’s fun to pretend you’re John McClane, not taking shit, dishing out disproportionate amounts of your own shit, always having a dick-ish comeback that isn’t clever so much as a terse reminder that you simply cannot be troubled to donate a fuck to the conversation at hand, dropping some lady to her death in an SUV because she kicked you too hard and hurt your feelings (told you I’d mention that again! It was dope!) but I think that is only a surface-level analysis that doesn’t do the real, magnetic appeal of these movies justice: there is also the fascinating and bizarrely surreal feeling that you’re watching someone else’s dream, presented mostly unfettered, with the exact same psychological signposts and betrayals of deeper emotional states that the person having the dream can see, and probably wishes wasn’t so obvious in its deeper meaning – even with all the studio mandates, the beveling of the edges, the sheer artificiality of huge-budget film-making, there is something so human about these otherwise gargantuan, clunky, exercises in cinematic excess. I feel like I found a Monet painted on the side of a bathroom stall whenever I watch one. Or, like, the scribblings of a madman that, owing to some deeper, genetic-memory level of insight, actually contain a properly-structured haiku nestled somewhere in between the line “the babies, I must eat the babies,” and countless pictures of bleeding penises. These movies are a place you simply wouldn’t expect depth to be. I don’t even think they (those burly men making those movies) even planned to put depth there. That’s probably the thing that makes action flicks constructed in such a manner so human and relatable: the people attempting to make these movies rock-dumb testaments to their own enviable lack of self-reflection or capacity for doubt have actually seeded the entire thing with evidence of their own fragile humanity. It’s like writing a book entitled Reasons Why I’m Definitely Not Gay – you’ve only, in your fervor to make irrefutable one side of the argument, contributed evidence to the counter-argument! It’s a sham, basically, a weird crystal palace constructed by the mind of a man (not just Willis, but the power-players who live vicariously through him by making these movies) who probably never thought they’d achieve the level of cultural relevance they currently enjoy. These movies may not aspire to (or come anywhere close to achieving) Citizen Kane-levels of depth or complexity, but the psychological primordial ooze from which they used to so often spring had more than a little Kane to it: the sincerity, the ego, the embellishment, the hell-bent determination to live in a world crafted entirely by your own hand, sharing nothing, not even reality itself, with anyone else, the tragically-fleeting and necessarily-incomplete flashes of self-awareness and regret, reflexively subsumed back into a drive that feels it has gone too far, sacrificed too much to hesitate now. If someone were to edit the final stand-off in this movie with McClane whispering “Rosebud” before shooting Gabriel instead of yelling “yippee-ki-yay” I honestly think the scene would make exactly as much sense.

You Cannot Face-Punch That Which Has No Face to Face-Punch, or: When Dumb Has No Meat to Eat

I was on the fence about this section, because I wanted to focus on Die Hard 4 and Die Hard 4-adjacent phenomena. But to acknowledge these types of movies is to acknowledge that they are mostly dead (except for Tom Cruise movies, but those don’t count because of his exceptional thetan levels) and it only makes sense to touch, at least briefly, on what killed them, and how. OK, take a second to consider – yeah, you’re right, it was Marvel movies. I don’t want to talk at huge length (or, like, any length) about the merits of Marvel’s cultural ubiquity. There are so many articles about that. But what I do want to do is contrast Marvel’s approach to action movies with that of its Die Hard forerunners, and see how the older action movie was displaced, and what form, if any, that Die Hard DNA has taken in the modern context. 

With respect to writing, the entire sublimation process, the rendering of supporting characters into our protagonist’s ego-wallpaper, has mostly been replaced with a more egalitarian approach. This is a fancy way to say that something approximating real writing, with characters and arcs and what-have-you, are the order of the day. This is due mostly to the nature of shared universes: Burmurdobroch and his co-worker Asian lady would be given backstories and possibly sub-plots in the MCU simply because Marvel would want to be prepared in case one of the actors became a viral sensation on Twitter and in doing so primed their character for a standalone movie, or at least a larger role in subsequent films. But this whole process rings hollow for me: the turgid-levels of stupid from earlier movies, the almost sociopathic refusal to admit that people besides our ego-fueled hero even exist make for a compelling subtextual reading. The rote applications of “real” writing, conversely – you’ll never guess it, but the Avengers need to learn to work as a team, and also we’re a family, and families stick together, fart, fart, wheeze – to me actually come across as more artificial in many ways. It’s like one of those faux-woke companies that purports to put out locally sourced, humanely-produced organic ice cream, and the owner of the company has a beard and everybody at the company gets Kwanza off or whatever, but then you do some research and find out that all of the healthy, “superior” ingredients are just the company using some legal loophole to rename the same usual garbage that you find in older ice creams, and also that guy’s beard is fake. At least the older ice creams acknowledged that they were trying to kill you! It’s a weird inversion: older action movies promised you they were about nothing more than machismo and incuriousness even as they laid bare the insecurities of the men behind them, whereas newer action movies insist that it’s OK to cry sometimes even as their screenplays are written by logical computer programs that only even bother to mix in 2% character development because that’s what the algorithm calls for.

Even the set pieces of newer action movies have that algorithmic quality to them. There’s no Bruce Willis whispering in the director’s ear while the latter is trying to frame a shot, “a Harrier jet! I need to fight a fucking Harrier! I’m not getting any younger!” The set pieces in the MCU, and so many other modern franchises – Fast and the Furious and, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, the fucking Conjuring movies – all have this meticulously-focused-grouped dynamic at play, this constant effort to make everything, let’s call it generically stylish. Outside of Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible movies (again, the lone surviving Man-Ego Franchise) where our favorite try-hard cooks up set-pieces specifically to remind you what a fit and powerful lad he is there just doesn’t seem to be any room in the landscape for anything other than set pieces designed to make sure everybody can “oww” and “aww” at demographically-appropriate times, like watching fireworks or something. And those MCU set pieces are still undeniably well-done! But for someone like me who obsessively tries to mine whatever I’m seeing and hearing on screen for evidence of the mentalities of the people making those images all I can picture is an assembly line worker being fed notes about what is trending on social media and then slightly altering the product accordingly.

This all adds up to a certain type of narcissism on the part of MCU movies and their ilk, but it is a fundamentally different narcissism than the endearingly oafish self-love that typifies the Die Hard crowd. Those movies were the result of a man finding himself in an inexplicable and unrepeatable situation – if a massive studio was willing to finance your ego, and the public was willing to watch you masturbate to pictures of yourself working out, what would you do, and how nervous would you be that this dream condition would eventually collapse, and how would that anxiety creep into the otherwise innocent milieu of you sitting on the edge of your bed slapping the salami to pictures of yourself sitting on the edge of a bench at the gym pounding the peperoni? There’s a lot a play, psychologically, and I am extremely fascinated by it all. But Marvel movies are typified by what I’m going to call brand narcissism – a Cluster B personality disorder for the age of analytics, meticulously-researched, self-aware enough to, however insincerely, undercut its own metastasizing share of the cultural air with performative modesty. There aren’t really any individuals shaping the events to fit their own ego because the spectacle, or the brand, is bigger than all of them. So instead we get this colorless and therefore apparently invincible narcissism that uses cold, beautiful math to avoid the same pitfalls that doom all traditional action vehicles eventually. It’s basically the difference between watching an aging Kobe go 4-26 but refusing to not keep shooting in a 20-point Lakers loss versus watching James Harden shoot 32 free throws in a Rockets/Nets win: the latter might be the result of space-age technology and lead to materially spectacular results but there’s something so human about the former, about the failure inherent in the ego, about how the staunchest of Real Men are driven by nearly catastrophic levels of fear and anxiety. It might be the only thing us norms have in common with them.

The End

I should like modern action movies more than those clunky big-boys from before the formula was cracked. They are, after all, made by people like me, far more than their predecessors, which were probably produced by dozens of men with matching Grim Reaper tattoos flexing as hard as possible until a blank canister of film placed in the center of a pentagram on the floor suddenly and instantaneously was filled with images of a man in a state of constant arousal over himself. But as I walk those high-walled marble halls of New Action Movies, with music from unseen sources always programmed to be playing one of my favorite songs in perfect synergy with my emotional state, the experience is more uncanny than a thrilling homecoming, like I’m watching the result of all of my personal information being stolen and crafted into some weird playpen for me to wander around in. The sheer intensity with which I am being made welcome makes me think the whole thing is a trap, or at least a scam. Conversely, the fact that older action movies like Die Hard 4 seem more intent on staring, transfixed, at their own genitals than even acknowledging my existence, seem to only see me to whatever extent they can use me to confirm their own existence by bouncing loud things off of my pale and inadequate form, is the kind of weird shit I can get behind. New action movies are wonderful in many ways, but they’re just too damn accommodating, too insistent that I should never notice anything strange when I’m watching them. I want to get that chance to see the world as it apparently plays out in front of the eyes of a supremely confident baked potato. I want the disorienting but inexplicably-Zen feeling of having the first few bars of any given AC/DC song – it doesn’t matter which one – blasted into my ears on endless loop, while I enjoy a level of idiot confidence rarely experienced by someone who looks up metonymy to make sure he’s using it right in a sentence and then makes a reference that only he will get about the fact that he used it wrong the first time. The momentary escape soothes me and the freedom of rolling around in my fleeting potato-form replenishes my very soul. So check out Die Hard 4, and its bumbling, kaiju-sized siblings, as they stomp around the downtown of your grey matter doing a baby’s impression of an adult; you just might glean some insight as to why they feel compelled to do this, which should instantly make you feel better about why you don’t.

No traumatic event precipitated the following post, which is good. No distasteful opinions burrowing, rodent-like, into the warm and innocent folds of my grey matter, ripping out axons longer than a baby’s arm in the effort, causing a rapidly-deteriorating me to somehow drool electricity while my level of control over basic motor function plunges steadily from “human” to “corn-on-the-cobb,” the entire process observed impassively by the only part of my mind worth preserving, my Movie Opinions, as they sip chamomile from the safety of a panic room that I constructed years ago in the part of the brain typically reserved for generating feelings of happiness. Nope, just writing about a criminally underseen movie in the hope that other people might want to see it, too. It’s a good flick!

Slow West 

I don’t know if you know this but the American frontier circa the mid-to-late nineteenth century was a Hard Place, a land pockmarked exclusively with Grim Poetry and stories constructed solely to remind listeners that stories have no purpose, showing out in this miserable fashion like the face of a syphilis-ravaged harlot on her way for another night of degradation and humiliation at the saloon, a never-ending carousel of nightly offenses and namelessly identical badmen popping in and out with clockwork regularity and no interest in her outside of how they can depress her spirits to depths matching her form, because you see war, war never changes, and a man must accept the harrowing reality of it all, how life’s pleasures and the capacity to weave events into meaningful narrative are nothing more than a weak delusion shielding you, a child, from the simple truth that your entire existence boils down to being either alive or dead with absolutely nothing in between, and how under a particularly unrelenting afternoon heat generated by that bastard the sun – the sick warden of this borderless prison, but at least he’s fair – the two conditions don’t seem so different after all, while the marrow of your very bones sublimates into a grosser kind of poison still, the kind that cripples a man in ways far worse than the physical, until he stalks these dunes as vile as the nature that birthed him.

The above sentiment is incredibly stupid and nearly turgid at the very thought of itself, so of course it has wormed its way into cultural ubiquity, rocketing like a top prospect in a minor league farm system from some vague image of “toughness, graduate student edition” that might flash half-formed across your mind after watching a John Wayne movie to a bronze-cast statue standing astride a castle built from semi-erect and easily-confused penises labeled “male insecurity.” Not all Westerns are like this, of course. Warlock approaches the difficulty of finding meaning against the towering indifference of it all with a soft and empathetic touch, and the True Grit remake grounds the usual Cohen Brothers’ nihilism against an engaging story of a haggard old lawman and a young woman who might be the only person alive as stubborn as he is. But it is, for the most part, a whole lot of wank, wank. It’s like seeing the sun-bleached skeletal remains of a steer touches something in the most primal part of a person’s brain, confirming some long-held (and I’m talking genetic memory, here, people) belief that nothing actually matters, that we’re all just here to eat, fuck, die, and be used as compost to grow another meaningless automaton of a meat bag with, and any argument to the contrary – one that posits, oh, I don’t know, the existence of literally anything other than the above offered – is just weakness and delusion. I guess there’s a whole opportunity for study latent in how universal this opinion sometimes seems to be but, try as I might to delve into it, to extricate some meaning, even for the purposes of a movie review, wank, wank. I think that might be the point.

John Maclean’s Slow West – which was his first fucking feature, the precocious scamp! – is brilliant not for charging with self-congratulatory heroism towards the glorious House of Dumb I have described above, aiming to destroy it penis-shaped-brick-by-cock-molded-mortar, one clever revisionist take at a time, but for just kind of shrugging, accepting that, well, maybe it was like that, who am I to say, and then, and this is the important part, still refusing to stare, hypnotized, at the insipid bog of Hard Truths that enraptures so many other writers of Westerns and instead asking himself what kind of story would spring from this nihilistic armpit, how would people respond and how would it inform their experience to be in a world built upon a canvas so imperfectly reclaimed from death and silence that even an origin story can’t help but be an elegy, and even the most meaningful moment is seemingly only ever allowed life to the extent that it can be used as a punchline by a comically indifferent universe. Instead of stopping at “well, I guess life sucks,” and rhapsodizing over that boring and unchallenging observation Maclean wonders aloud what kind of house you would build – what kind of house could you build – when the only material available is designed to collapse in on itself. The result is something that only seems subversive because the clarity of its conclusion is so contrary to the steaming piles of confused man-logic that have come before it, but in reality it is a vision admirably true to itself and looking to prove itself to no one.

You Zag All You Want, Big Guy, I’m Gonna Zig

Alright, so what does that last sentence of the previous section mean? I’m glad I asked. The usual conclusion arrived at when considering how to decide structure and form in a Western, how to depict a land steeped so in death and emptiness is basically, and it really does seem to boil down only to this, grimness in different flavors. You have your aggressively unromantic (Bone Tomahawk), your dignified insignificance (3:10 to Yuma), your elegiac (Unforgiven, making its second appearance in my first three posts; good job, Clint), etc. But Maclean’s approach is to acknowledge that this experience, one of constantly being butted up against sudden, unromantic, mean-spirited, blunt-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-funny death would actually create a feeling of the uncanny more so than the grr grim-nuggins mcgoo. And this is fucking brilliant! We as the creators and consumers of stories alight upon the grim as our preferred vector of understanding the West because we’re not in any real danger when we do it. It’s the perfect dodge! It’s like the guy who rambles about his hypothetical behavior in bizarrely-specific situations. “If I was ever in a park and some guy showed up and started through knives at people I’d take him down with karate.” This is very dumb, and the conclusion to this weird scenario – “I would do something manly because men do manly things” – is borne from, among other probably more pronounced pathologies, the realization that said situation will never happen. But imagine if it actually did! Some jerkoff throwing a knife into your hand while you’re squinting at him from thirty paces and thinking to yourself “is that dude holding a throwing knife?” That’s not grim, it’s fucking surreal! Maclean realizes, wonderfully, that a life spent in the immediate company of death has more in common with the works of Hans Christian Andersen, or maybe Kafka, than John Wayne. And it’s not just satire, or irreverence, or an inability to understand the grimness of the word that causes him to reach this conclusion. The perpetual squint of John Wayne is the inability to understand the grimness of the world because portraying unrelenting death as a tough but reliable friend is fucking stupid. Death is depressing, and it destabilizes you and your perception of the environment in ways that would absolutely sometimes be funny and weird to other people, and even yourself! The uncanny can be more indicative of tragedy than the performatively miserable, or the indulgently austere.

I Specialize in Landscapes

The discontinuous nature of the environments visited in the story helps to prove this point. There’s usually a unifying visual theme in Westerns, that of sparsely-populated-but-overwhelmingly-massive-indifference, that reminds us of the ubiquity of death in this world, this place, and how it stretches to every visible border and beyond. Wide shots, is what I’m saying. And the more yellows and browns the better; remember, there’s nothing out here except your meaningless demise. But Slow West, that big playful pig, instead marches Silas and Jay through a series of tightly-framed and visually-diverse environs. We have the ashen-forest in which they meet, the purple fields they ride through early on in their time together, the forest surrounding Rose’s farm, the supply store in the middle of nowhere, and on, and on, like the turning of pages in a storybook. In almost all of these places people die, just like in a “normal” Western; hard and horrible they go, because Maclean doesn’t deny the fucking rudeness of the world. But it’s in the response, how the physical landscape is perceived by the characters that Slow West does its best work. To drift from one instance of pointless and easily-avoided death to another doesn’t put hair on Jay and Silas’s chests, it puts them in a fucking fugue state, each instance of life snatched so cruelly and so suddenly away that it would be insane and inhuman to treat these instances like some welcome organic whole, some confirmation of Life’s Hard Truth, so instead they are hermetically-sealed into their own tragic micro-story by a brain totally not ready for this shit, desperately and for its own sanity compartmentalizing all this otherwise overwhelming sadness into a series of storybook-framed murder dioramas, where the bodies will remain, somehow excised from our continuing world and their ghosts locked safely away (hey, remember the very end of the movie, when we visit the corpses of those who died along the way? Almost like we’re flipping back through the pages of the book, isn’t it, like being reminded of the sad evolutionary chain that brought us here, sure, but also being reminded that, there they are, the dead, still preserved in their isolated storybook pages) from the more impressionable elements of our minds. What may seem like irreverence is anything but; it’s a truer representation to how a person would respond to a world carved from death than anything generated by a salty and weathered protagonist squinting emptily into a meaningless sun. And talking about the landscape is only part of the story, because the people who populate these pages derive sanctuary this way, too.

Of Course It’s a Fairy Tale

Let’s go back to that supply store for a second. Physically it’s storybook-esque, but let’s look at the guy who runs it. He specifically points out to the man robbing him, whom he will shoot dead in a few moments, and whose wife will shoot him dead shortly thereafter, that robbing the store is pointless because it’s the only place for miles where money can even be spent. This could be considered just an irreverent commentary on the undeveloped nature of the territory they’re in but it also stresses that the supply store owner himself is preserving his own mind in a kind of insular storybook logic; he’s the Merchant, doing Merchant Things, even if those things don’t in any way link up to, oh, I don’t know, an economy or society or anything even vaguely practical. He’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, setting up shop in a place where money is completely useless! But he takes some solace in it; it allows him to have a Role in all of this, and speak empathetically, even kindly, to people who are robbing him, one of whom will kill him soon, one of whom he will kill. The saddest moment of the whole sequence, to me, isn’t even when they all exchange lead and die, Tarantino-style, it’s the exact moment when the store owner pulls his rifle out, because that’s when he accepts the futility of his own narrative against the ubiquity of a hard death, acknowledges that his protected and personable status of Merchant has now been rendered a wafer-thin joke of a shield by the inevitable arrival of the real law ‘round these parts, the presence that really came through that door when all the audience saw was two incompetent thieves. There’s no waxing moronic about this like you’d see in other Westerns, no monologues about the hardness of life, as if the state of being dead was the real character being studied, the real and necessary target of our empathy or, stranger still, our admiration; Maclean makes sure the characters are our eternal focus and the things that happen to them are understood as being thrown into sharper relief by the omnipresent nature of death, with death itself never being granted the honor of receiving a focused or empathetic cinematic gaze.

And how about the story told towards the end of the movie – and this is one of my favorite sequences in the whole film – by one of the posse members? His recollection of trying to convince his riding partner that he’s a wanted man to satisfy the young man’s idiot ego (itself an entire kind of sub-storybook storybook moment that further illustrates just how pervasive this preserving logic really is) is another example of a person being so broken by the nonstop fascination with death swirling all about him that he attempts compartmentalize it in the form of a story. He’s sad about the young man’s outlook on life, sad about what happened in his own attempts to quell the boy’s bloodlust, even if the other bounty hunters just think the point of the story is nothing more than a cheap laugh. He’s structuring his grief and regret and his own mental unwinding at living in this awful world in the form of a story irreverently told and presented because it’s not just the physical landscape that takes flight to the uncanny to protect itself it’s also the minds of the people who live there. Once again, Maclean doesn’t avoid painting his frame with nihilism; he accepts that as a consequence of the genre. But he uses those brush-strokes to throw the human element of the story into sharper and oftentimes surreal relief, always stressing what death means to them, rather than just obsequiously rendering loving portrait after loving portrait of loss and misery, some weird cult-like worship of a thing you’re typically not supposed to be a fan of.

A Grim and Inevitable Marriage

So what does this all lead to, this weird footrace between Death and How We Respond to It, Seriously Someone Help Me Preserve My Humanity? Well, it’s a movie, so, a climax. And while Slow West doesn’t disappoint from a traditional standpoint of bringing all our through-lines together into a shooty-bang-bang finale it also excels spectacularly at bringing together fully, for the first time, its own conception of the consequences of life lived against an indifferent death and the takeaway that pretty much everybody else has. So while we can be entertained by the final shootout (and we should be! It’s really good!) we can also appreciate the salt in the wound, the moment when the preserving power of whimsy and the unrelenting hand of death have been commingling for so long that they’ve finally just decided to join narrative forces, like each one has just confessed that if they were a woman the one man they would have sex with would be John Stamos, and then they ran off to do karate together in the basement. The brutality of the final sequence (Rose’s dad just unceremoniously shot without a word in his own defense, Jay’s mortal wound coming courtesy of his distracted and, yes, as a result momentarily indifferent, lady) is butted up against how surreally beautiful the farm is, the startling yellows of the field around the house almost hard to make out under a sky nearly impossibly blue. I mean, when Kotori fires that arrow into the corn field to smoke out/hopefully murder their assailants we get a shot of the projectile flying through the air that looks like it’s something out of a fucking Wes Anderson movie. And what about when Ben Mendelsohn shoots the other bounty hunter, emerging from behind the scarecrow to do it? That shot is so damned blue-sky-gorgeous that it takes a second to fully process that murder is happening. We’re seeing in these moments the sanctifying unreality that these people have been forced to alight upon for the purposes of self-preservation locked in a dead heat with that ever-present fatalism that will be good-and-goddamned if it’s giving up the narrative steering-wheel that easy. There are two (well, three) interests at stake in the final shootout from a plot standpoint, but we’re also watching the human desire for some kind of narrative outside the auspices of death locked in mortal heat with old Dead-y himself, and that fight is just as interesting, and told with masterful simultaneity.

The End

I want this stinky Leroy in under ten-ish pages, so we’re keeping this part short: So Jay is a moron, I guess, and each step he took in his fantasy of seeing Rose again was only another purchase made on the ledger of life’s eternal bookie, an account forever culminating in an interest payment that takes the form of your own moment of inglorious kersplat-ness. But, fuck, he still made it to that house, didn’t he, borne more than a little bit on the currents of some clearer kind of water than the tepid stuff all the other Western protagonists more-or-less slosh around in, never too bothered by how brown it all is? Hell was coming for the kid either way; at least being a delusional weenie helped him stay ahead of it for a little longer than someone insufferably looking forward to their own demise.