The Exploding Kinetoscope

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 2 — 2001

2009-11-26T13:19:00.000-08:00

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2001

10. All About Lily Chou-Chou (dir, scr. Shunji Iwai, adapted from his Internet novel)

An expose of the secret, violent lives of Japan’s depressed and dyspathetic high schoolers, All About Lily Chou-Chou is about extreme cases of bullying and social pressure, and its horrors are, indeed horrific. But it is not alarmist, scolding or exploitive in tone, and nothing like a Japanese equivalent of Kids (1995), Thirteen (2003) or their blood relatives, Reefer Madness (1936) or She Shoulda Said 'No'!(1949) . Without drawing explicit causal relationships, adolescent crime and suffering seems to flow into these lives as a natural evolution of crashing hormonal tsunamis, willfully clueless failed parenting, and old-fashioned universal postmodern alienation. The subplot of the title — or perhaps it is the axis around which this brutality whirls — is the fandom of J-pop star Lily Chou-Chou (voiced by real pop star Salyu). The children of Lily Chou-Chou inhabit an Internet message board for Lily fanatics, their pseudonymous postings celebrating the music, obsessing over minutia, and expanding, exploring the philosophy of The Ether.

Like the mystical fifth element, Aether, the Ether is the source of Lily’s music and something it conveys; the music rides on the Ether and possesses it. Lily is barely glimpsed on a concert viewscreen late in the picture, the Ether is untouchable but touches the listeners, and the fan discussions take place in the Internet’s nonphysical other-world, a not-place where the teens of All About Lily Chou-Chou express unfiltered passions and experience something like community. Lily Chou-Chou herself and her fansite occupy the absent center of the film, and the beatings, pimping and gang-rape are pushed to the outer edges, Lily spinning in the Ether.

These are not really ironies driven home with any emphasis, that the numbing daily miseries of these disaffected children are less immediate and vital to them than Internet pop music discussion, or that classmate Shiori is forced into prostitution but cannot tell protagonist Yuichi that she like-likes him, or that the unique acts of violence haunting this overgrown field of teen angst occur, for the most part, in missing-time narrative ellipses. Shot on digital video, Lily Chou-Chou embraces the nature of its medium, fits its impressionistic narrative to its form. The image slips in and out of focus, by design or because the camera cannot keep up with movement, or even shifting light. Colors are over or under saturated, always unstable. Detail goes fuzzy or is too sharp, and light plays weirdly with depth and texture. The achronological structure and narrative disruptions by Lily-chat sessions do not serve to impart information in order of maximum effectiveness, but to dislocate, to set audience and characters alike awash on the mournful tides of the Ether.

9. Little Otik (dir., scr. Jan Švankmajer)

Each of Jan Švankmajer’s features is more sophisticated and focused than the last. Otesánek (Little Otik) retells the European folk tale in a modern, dreary Czech apartment building, and in a world where the Otesánek story still exists as a story. The childless Horáks long for a baby, and so (joking? Mocking? Indulgent?) husband Karel digs up a tree stump, carves it into rudimentary baby-shape and presents it to doting Božena as surrogate offspring. Little Otik springs to squalling, flailing life. The stump baby’s appetite and size grow at alarming rate, forcing Karel to haul dripping sacks of meat home from the butcher until the postman’s flesh-stripped skeleton appears beside Otik’s crib.

Working from the same set of primal symbols as the human subconscious, Little Otik is driven by food, sex, drink, death, plants, meat, knives, money, dirt, animals, and body parts (the central and loaded ones: mouths, teeth, tongues, bones, butts and genitals). Švankmajer’s trademark stop motion animation appears in Otik to realize the infant (mercifully, Otik’s scary, animal tongued mouth is the only animated orifice; his knothole anus remains inert, though in the mind’s eye it is not), to illustrate a neighbor’s revulsion to his wife’s cooking (insectoid nails skittering through viscous glop), the subjective view of Alžbětka, the little girl next door, as she is ogled by the neighborhood pedophile (a frenzied appendage unbuttons his pants from the inside as she goggles in disgust), and as blunt-edged television adverts seeped in sex and power fantasy (the funniest is for the Inferno robotic iron, an affectless announcer deadpanning “Inferno Inferno. The rest are rusty pieces of junk”).

Parallels are drawn between a mother’s longing for a child, the baby’s infantile oralism, advertising, sexual lust and hunger. The commonality is desire and consumption. When the Horáks box up Otik in the basement, trying to sublimate and conceal the devouring force, Alžbětka takes pity on the monster baby and tries to mother and domesticate it, but to no avail. Out of options, she does the rational thing and starts drawing straws for which tenant to feed to her ward. But this is no time for rational thinking. True to his card-carrying surrealist ethos, Švankmajer does not trade in messages, morals, lessons or slogans. In Little Otik, to hunger and desire is to ultimately consume and destroy. We are insatiable.

8. Wet Hot American Summer (dir. David Wain, scr. Wain, Michael Showalter)

An edgy next-generation comedy, Wet Hot American Summer flew like a Concorde over the heads of the nation’s middle-aged critical establishment, or perhaps directly into them. The pile-up of critics of fine taste and sophistication explaining why Wet Hot is dumb and not funny (frequently citing gags strong enough that they can’t be killed even in derisive summary; I recall Salon’s reviewer complaining that David Hyde-Pierce is made to exclaim “Fuck my dick!” in surprise) was probably last seen walking out of Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996).

In the post-ironic comedy scene populated by geek chic hipsters and amiable smarty-pants slobs, the heritage of idiot comedy has been reevaluated, and nothing is funnier than very smart people telling very dumb jokes. The highest aim is jokes so dumb, crude, meticulously mistimed that they deconstruct the idea of a Joke itself. WHAS trades in meta/non/and genius material like Paul Rudd as a man so dumb he pronounces the J in “journal” as a hard G, and sentient canned goods defiantly confessing to autofellatio (a lot). What is this stuff doing in a spoof of the summer camp and teen sex comedy cycle of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s? Who has even seen these movies, and do they need sending-up? Are WHAS’s jokes within spitting distance of the cracker-n-condoms barrel comedy of G.O.R.P. (1980) or Computer Beach Party (1985) or whatever it is that is being satirized?

Shifting frame of reference and intention, stream-of-consciousness movement in which one gag’s payoff becomes the setup for the next, faith in the power of extremely specific non sequitur: the rules of comedy for alumni of The State, especially in their purest experiments, WHAS, Stella and The Ten (2007). Stripped of the rock star ‘tude of too many fourth generation sketch and improv specialists, devoid of both sarcasm and sincerity, the basic attitude toward comedy is that if it is funny, it is worthwhile. There are no sacred cows on this plane, and that includes the performer’s perceived intelligence, the dramaturgical soundness of a scene, the tone and “reality” of the entire film. Sometimes WHAS is a parody of summer camp comedies, sometimes a parody of parodies, sometimes just a for-reals summer camp comedy. A passionate, prolonged and relatively explicit gay sex scene exists simultaneously on about 20 levels — as an upending of the heterosexual lechery that pervades teen comedies and their presumed audience, as goofy slapstick, as a straightforward dirty joke, as part of a lengthy runner in which the lovers get married. The stroke of wet hot brilliance is that it is absurd and discordant for a teen sex romp to suddenly lapse into passionate, sincere anything, let alone explore an irrelevant subplot about the romantic lives of gay camp councilors.

In a simpler time, we called this “silly.” Which, fuck my dick, to a comedian ought to be a compliment.

7. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (dir. John Cameron Mitchell, scr. Mitchell, Stephen Trask, from the musical, book by Mitchell, songs by Trask)

A queer theory primer with sing-alongs, Hedwig and the Angry Inch celebrates the heady, scary rush of freedom symptomatic of being stranded high and dry on the rocks of identity discourse, trapped between the Scylla and Carbides of false dichotomies, and forced to make your own place in the world or be rent apart. Our hero is East German expat Hedwig (née Hansel), come to America with a botched sex change operation and a headfull of glam rock dreams, a sort of genius songwriter whose music is swiped and is reduced to playing salad bar joints. Like much LGBT literature, Hedwig is largely a memory and identity piece, the bulk of the (slim but eventful) narrative tracing the rocky path to the rocker’s current gig, trailing superstar/ex-lover/musical thief Tommy Gnosis on national tour, Hedwig playing at Bilgewaters restaurants while Tommy sells out stadiums. Hedwig can’t — or won’t— be torn between or shuffled into normative categories of gender, biological sex, nationality, musical genre (her performance seesaws between showtune revue and ferocious riot grrrl punk), even success and utter failure.

Form following content, writer-director-shooting star John Cameron Mitchell’s original stage show is itself a narrative musical presented in the form of a rock n’ roll performance piece, the story relayed primarily through monologue, neither a traditional musical nor a concept album played on stage. His film dramatizes the plot, and even on miniscule budget bounces around the globe, Berlin Wall to inside an oven to anonymous American motels to mounds of discarded tires to animated fantasia to dreamy symbolic netherworld, with cinematic verve and excitement. The structure itself is queered, refusing movie parade blitz or to betray its stage roots; it is inaccurate to call the film stagey or to deny that it feels very much like songs stitched together by character monologue, and the final reels refuse camp spectacle or comic melodrama and warp into abstracted Jarmanesque symbol-drama.

Ferociously, bottomlessly funny, angry and poignant, Hedwig’s quest for identity, self-knowledge, acknowledgement and love are tinged with overlapping mysticism and religious philosophy, speeding past roadsigns to Gnosticism, Taoism, Surrealism, and, famously, Aristophanes in the Symposium, in syncretic blur. The hunt for the other half of a fractured self, for completeness, is itself spectacularly blown apart if not abandoned by the film’s end. Hedwig stands stripped bare and resplendent before an invisible audience in the void-as-theatre, identity as eternal succession and cycle of event, incident and crisis, sawed and nailed together in endless construction project. Hedwig ends on her own terms and no more incomplete than any creature in the universe.

6. Hannibal (dir. Ridley Scott, scr. David Mamet, Steven Zaillian, from the novel by Thomas Harris)

A medievalist comedy of manners, a grotesque romance and a fairy tale black comedy about corruption, Hannibal is lush, florid and extremely perverted, through and through. After ten years, the entire world hunts Hannibal Lecter, but he flits through fingers, cities, nations with ease, the planet’s population simply too dumb and slow to catch him. Every other character dreams up elaborate, intertwining schemes to catch the mad doctor, but his only worthy adversary is Clarice Starling: she knows him. And so it goes, each manhunter compelled by personal sins and revealing even more, each and every corrupt by nature or circumstance, a network of rot and compromise circling the Earth's crust. And so it goes that Starling is ‘buked and scorned, tested and tried, used and abused by this gallery of venal gargoyles, until only two beasts of unyielding personal integrity are left standing: Lecter and Starling.

Ridley Scott’s eye for opulence and grime provide rich and rotting stage dressing for this operatic manhunt thriller, but his sense of jittery action and peekaboo scares do not capture the elegant air of Thomas Harris’ source novel. Harris writes like he is organizing blocks of time and space into a labyrinthine invisible castle, his characters move through the story as if guided down glass corridors of a maze criss-crossing the globe, linked to some burning, ancient meaning as if pursued by a minotaur. Scott’s film has little of Harris’ fated, antique majesty, and is forced to rework the novel’s cut-crystal, uniformly lunatic plot (hinging as it does on details like Lecter’s sixth finger, excised from Silence of the Lambs). But the state of constant hysteria is alive, and the trade-off is that Scott’s film is funnier.

It was very difficult for an admirer of Harris’ weirdo vision to walk out of Hannibal in 2001 and feel much besides that the most special elements were missing. To streamline the story seems to be to miss the point of the novel’s baroque ornamentation, and absent are some of the more outrageous, exotic tangents — Hannibal’s childhood reminisces of eating his beloved sister, Inspector Giannini’s investigation of the Monster of Florence — and loveliest grace notes — in the book’s best scene, Lecter orders Starling, by letter, to contemplate the cast iron skillet that he just knows she has hanging on the wall. The novel’s finale is its masterstroke of delirium, the romantic union of Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling. It is practically a defiant slap in Hollywood’s face. Naturally, it had to go, lest Hannibal cause riots and/or wild, unrestrained cheering. The film would be infinitely more audacious if built straight off Harris' blueprint.

As the initial butt-slap sting of adaptation fades, it is truly remarkable how much of Hannibal is still in Hannibal. If there is a scene which does little to further the plot but embroiders it beautifully, it is Lecter’s art history lecture on Dante and medieval depictions of Judas figures: “easy” to cut, and impossible to lose. Hannibal picks and chooses wisely, still bizarre enough to repel more than 50% of critics, still so extravagant and strange that it is not of the same genre as the genre as Silence of the Lambs. It is barely a sequel. Scott does find some ingenious cinematic means of capturing the magnetized sensation of the twin protagonists drawn to one another from across the globe. In a dizzying sequence original to the film, Lecter guides Starling by cell phone through the chaotic carnival of Washington’s Union Station, and with deft cajoling, the quarry points the hunter in the wrong direction. He averts her gaze just long enough to spin past on a carousel, just that he may brush his hand against her hair for a split second. The carousel keeps moving.

5. The Man Who Wasn’t There (dir., scr. Joel and Ethan Coen)

In Film Noir Land, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Ed Crane, The Man Who Wasn't There, mostly doesn’t. Postwar malaise is the topic of the day, the same kind that fueled The Twilight Zone. Billy Bob Thornton’s motionless disappearing act performance as the bewildered barber is a marvel of underplaying. It is hard to say if Ed is disaffected or bored, repressed or sorrowful, or just a nitwit. Given his constant internal monologue narration, we are tempted to lean toward the last. Enmeshed in a life-destroying crime plot that covers pretty much every legal transgression, all Ed lifts a finger to do is consider investing in a dry cleaning company because he’s tired of being a barber. For the rest of his sins, Ed’s greatest crime is to fail to speak up while blackmail and murder spiral around him, whether his wife is being railroaded for a murder she didn’t commit, or he is being railroaded for a murder he didn’t commit. Mostly, Ed just watches, but as his slick attorney, Freddy Reidenschneider, speechifies: “There is no ‘what happened. Not in any sense that we can grasp with our puny minds. Because our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the "Uncertainty Principle". Well, they actually call that “the observer effect,” and whether it is applicable outside of physics is debatable. Though it is Reidenschneider’s bullshit-baffle defense for Ed’s wife, it pegs Ed’s crimes exactly. Ed, just being there, smoking, looking —just being alive — mucked everything up.

The visual touchstone that haunts TMWWT is a spinning silver disc. Sometimes it’s a flying saucer; sometimes it’s a dislocated hubcap. The UFO motif (the film is set in 1949, two years after the Roswell incident) infects Ed’s imagination — in the final moments of his Death Row stay, his execution is configured as alien abduction— but he doesn’t seem to know it, not any more than he understands why he is calmed by teenage pianist Birdy’s playing mathematically ordered Beethoven. Ed cannot make heads or tails of what anything means, how he feels, or what’s happening to him, so signs and wonders, though all around him, are lost. He’s the strong silent type minus the strong, history’s most passive protagonist, a man whose spiraling Chesterfield smoke constitutes most of his body language.

4. Spirited Away (dir., scr. Hayao Miyazaki)

An interesting factor in stories about children who (literally or figuratively) dream up (literal or figurative) fantasy lands, enter, adventure, and exit as (literal or figurative) young adults, is that the protagonist generates the Wonderland, Oz, chocolate factory or bathhouse as a form of escapism, but finds that, as Ms. Gale put it, “some of it wasn’t very nice.” Dreams are like that; they turn on you. Hayao Miyazaki’s universally beloved Spirited Away is certainly of this school, as slightly petulant ten-year-old Chihiro wanders into the carnival of the gods, and winds up robbed of her name and employed at a bathhouse for folk spirits. Which means, of course, that all other world animation of the last 50 years has been left in the dust.

Chihiro’s coming-of-age story rests in the shadow of the film’s larger and more abstract theme, a yearning for an older, faraway Japan, less industrialized, war damaged, polluted, and more vitally connected with its roots and terrain. The longing is both justified and too nostalgic, and Spirited Away does not let itself get away with simple answers, pat solution or bitter-heartedness. The towering and impossible bathhouse on the threshold where Chihiro takes residency is a place of ritual purification, but her journey into the heart of native Japanese tradition is riddled with danger, fearsome manifestations, ancient and powerful weirdness. The physical sensations that come with true awe are not so different from mortal terror. The deeper you go, the longer you stay, the more you learn, the more apparent it becomes that the universe’s reservoir of kami is bottomless.

3. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dir. Peter Jackson, scr. Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien)

In which an Oxford linguistics professor and a low-budget splatter director are tapped to create a worldwide smash popcorn-selling effects spectacle. The effect is that Tolkien’s peculiar conglomeration of Norse myth, religious philosophy and Germanic language deep structure inside baseball is stripped down by Peter Jackson and his invaluable screenwriting partners to a vast and accessible adventure story and its specifically-wrought, human-scale characters. Art directed to the teeth, every New Zealand location is made the subject of a massive art installation, villages of elves and hobbits, towers and more towers all laboriously designed to appear to have sprung out of the dirt. For its look and aura, the Rings films shift wizard-and-dragon fantasy away from heavy metal and airbrush and into the territory of New Age inspirational music and misty watercolor. Totally unaware and/or unrepentant that it is steeped in kitsch, the entire trilogy goes for broke with sincerity.

Tolkein’s technique and structure make a letter-perfect Rings impossible. The exciting events are related in conversation, the narrative flow mired in offstage action, and key ideas at the heart of the story are non-visual... including the effects of, oh, the Ring. The screenplay chooses not to strip-mine the novel but bring it into a more contemporary focus, action oriented, and obsessed with the internal conflicts and emotional arcs of characters. This entails some discerning narrative compression and inflation, but above all requires slight psychological expansion and coloring of Tolkien’s myth-people. The Middle-earth of the novel is here, in vainglorious swooshy tourism film helicopter shots of sparkling New Zealand vistas and in noodling details like carved wood decorations in public houses. Each orc in every pulsating battalion has its own particularized ugly sword.

Jackson’s consistent style has always been subcutaneous cartooning — on the beat cutting, slightly bug-eyed cinematography, emotion pitched larger than life. The attitude is to treat the cinematic apparatus as slight of hand, a Mélièsian magic trick, even when there are no special effects. Despite an elephantine budget and protracted shooting schedule, the production realities are too huge, and the occasional rough and tumble second (third, fifth) unit footage announces itself gracelessly and the post-production panel must make do. The spots where Fellowship is improvisational and the seams show are excellent demonstration of the innate showoffy cleverness underlying the technique, the same bratty intelligence as Orson Welles. Jackson uses everything a camera and a cut can and cannot do, its biases and blindspots, the misdirection and slippery fingers of the device to build an image flow out of a thousand things that are not what they seem. The whole of the Rings cycle contains nearly every picture-making trick in cinema, and creates many new ones. For hours on end, any lapse into clichéd setup, framing, or editing pattern is negated by an overriding dedication to visual invention. As every scene is lavished with attention, as if holy text were being illuminated, the films are emphatic about every moment; it is all equally important, whether a building-sized demon made of glowing charcoal briquettes is attacking or a fat kid in a cornfield weighs his decision to take one step further from home than he’s ever been. The drive to perfectionism means the films get a lot of things perfect... and thus bound to become the standard visual language for filming similar scenes. Lord of the Rings is a wellspring for the movie clichés of the future.

Straight out of the gate in 2001, Fellowship was treated as an instant classic. It has grown into the real thing, a wildly successful film that does something more than spawn catchphrases for a summer. Its dialogue begins to embroider daily speech, the actors’ cadences familiar as a pop singer’s phrasing, providing in-jokes and little wisdoms for a generation. Its plot dilemmas become mental touchstones for our own crises, its images, grandiose and understated, appear on illustrated cards in internal Rolodexes. When one has imbibed too much, stood up too fast, or is feeling powerfully swayed and helpless in the face of a seductive bad choice, consider this picture: Elija Woods’ stubby digits, nails painfully bitten to the quick, compulsively finger the Ring. Head drained of blood, his eyes flutter and his stomach rapidly drops to his hairy rubber feet.

2. The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, scr. Anderson, Owen Wilson)

“There's a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast.” – Tom Waits

Wes Anderson is the freshest and finest voice in American comedy to emerge since the heyday of The Simpsons. There is a lot of dazzling filmmaking on display in The Royal Tenenbaums, quite apart from Anderson’s most notorious trademarks. That showy deadpan style, if one has forgotten, includes the detailed shoebox diorama art direction, symmetrical dead-center framing, super-slow motion elongating moments of emotional overload and making time for long snatches of British Invasion folk rock, and elaborately choreographed wide shots in which a dozen actors have to hit marks and enact business to be precisely captured by a slow dollying camera. This hangdog narcotic haze is regularly broken up by the cockeyed syntax of the rule-breaking editing, the axis of action breeched here, a New Wave jump cut there, scenes of physical violence and exuberance barge in with handheld camerawork. These details and strategies do not quite add up to Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.

“No one in the world ever gets what they want/
And that is beautiful.”
-John Linnell, “Don’t Let’s Start”

In this story of the Tenenbaum family, rich New York intellectuals fallen into various shades of melancholy, everyone's situational details and singular turmoil are first presented as amusing alien artifacts, then like cherished heirlooms. The Tenenbaum children, morose ex-child prodigies become exquisite adult losers, trace their miseries to their father Royal, irresponsible and irrepressible scoundrel. The core cast is stunted but coping with adult emotions, as if surprised to find they have grown up, and have been grown up for a long time. Radiating out from the nuclear family are those extended relationships, friends and lovers, employees and hangers on, all tinted with pastel variants of the Tenenbaum blues. The film is not sapped of joy, the characters are not all despairing. But it is a miniature portrait gallery of extremely specific eccentrics all going through a rough patch, with some particularized, previously unarticulated quality to admire, empathize with or simply recognize at every turn. Whether that is lovelorn Richie Tenenbaum driven to do violence to himself over inappropriate affection (you don’t have to be in love with your sister, nor suicidal), or Royal, seeing himself as brash and impassioned, realizing that he is also an asshole, and it is too too late in life to correct the damage. There is a disparity between who we wanted to be —who we want to be right now— and who we have become. Even the very happy and successful cannot deny it, though it may not haunt us all to the same degree.

A personal aside then, though I don’t do this often, the first time I saw The Royal Tenenbaums its distancing techniques and shadowbox styling must have worked. All I could think was that it was very funny, lovely, and that the characters were fascinating caricatures of types of people I had never seen and doubted actually exist.

But the snowballed structure of the film gives equal weight to throwaway detail (look, Chas Tenenbaum invented his own breed of mice) and shattering expression of emotion. Every other viewing has been different, and some new previously buried moment makes me burst into tears. Last time it was gentlemanly family accountant Henry Sherman, soon to be married into the family as Royal’s successor and opposite, who spends the entire film falling in holes and bearing the brunt of Royal’s verbal abuse. He bursts into the ER after Richie’s suicide attempt, and his only question is: “How can I help?” The Royal Tenenbaums has become one of those special films whose portrait of humanity is so accurate, so emotionally raw that it is becoming too painful to watch.

1. Mulholland Dr. (dir., scr. David Lynch)

The second film director we meet in Mulholland Dr., Wayne Grace (who yes, also shared an X-Files with Michael J. Anderson) as Bob Brooker, instructs Betty Elms during an audition. Established as an industry joke on the downward slope of his career arc, Brooker’s prompting is vague and emphatic (and, reportedly, not unlike the direction David Lynch gives actors). Naomi Watts as Betty pulls an indescribable expression that indicates this is a comic beat about the inscrutable techniques of pretentious directors. But it is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.:

“It’s not a contest. The two of them, with themselves. Don’t play it for real until it gets real.”

David Lynch produces at least one era-defining/defying/best film per decade, triumphs of personal vision made in the margins of the industry production machine, previously unclassified film creatures which appear as singular anomalies and proceed to disrupt the cinema ecosystem for years after. The pervasive legacy and influence begins with Eraserhead in the late ‘70s, continues through Blue Velvet in the ‘80s, Twin Peaks in the ‘90s (and, less adored but just as seminal, Wild at Heart... can one imagine Kalifornia, True Romance, Natural Born Killers without Wild at Heart?). The Designated Lynch Classic of the ‘00s is Mulholland Dr., the single goddamnedest thing ever to earn its filmmaker an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

The many entranced by Mulholland Dr. found that the spell lasts long after the final reel. Indeed, the hypnotism virtually begins with Betty Elms’ arrival at LAX, as she steps out of the terminal and soaks up her first rays of Southern California’s peculiar, brilliant sunshine. David Lynch has related a telling anecdote of being a new resident of the city, similarly enthralled by the unreal clarity of Los Angeles’ white gold light, its blasting, color-enhancing quality a beautiful-eerie contrast to the choked grime of Philadelphia. No, with this film that introduces its lead with a burst of sun, stepping out of the theater into the light (sunlight, marquee glow or street lights) does not dissipate the mystery.

For lovers of mystery, the problem with detective fiction is that it does not love mysteries back. It seeks to obliterate mystery; its pleasures are in rendering secrets legible. The sad fact with mystery stories is that they end with no mystery left. Lynch has gradually developed solutions to this conundrum, stories that preserve the pleasures of mystery itself while retaining basic of the shape of rational detective fiction. The feat is greater than simply paying off whodunits without reducing a film to an equation or riddle. The situation is not unlike Lynch’s entire relationship with narrative cinema itself. Narrative trades in the articulated, while Lynch comes to film as an abstract expressionist, mistrustful of over-articulation.

Many admirers of Mulholland Dr. spent 2001 making notes and timelines, sorting clues and developing elaborate theories, seeking to sort the chronology, explain the symbols and solve the mysteries of the film. The quest that fuels its first two acts, as we follow Betty and her amnesiac houseguest Rita as they try to track Rita’s identity, is derailed when the women find a dead body, attend a show at Club Silencio and promptly disappear, leaving behind a mysterious blue box. The game becomes something else, the locating of connections between the story up to this point and the third act, where names, personalities, relationships and circumstances have scrambled. Prevalent theories, in descending order of popularity — sadly, not necessarily in increasing order of outlandishness — include explaining the split between the Betty and Rita Mystery Solvers! section and that in which the leads have transmuted into Diane and Camilla as dream, psychotic delusion, masturbatory fantasy, deathbed reverie, fugue state, repressed memory of sexual abuse or parallel dimensions.

The film encourages these approaches with one beckoning finger, and bats them back with a flyswatter with the other hand. Mulholland Dr. is a rich environment in which to play games, but the single-mindedness of clue-sorting theories is literalist and reductive. Too many readings seek to iron out the curves and illuminate the shadows of Mulholland Dr., but even a literalist approach requires the puzzle-solver to evaluate what the film is about, to read it on multiple levels. Conversely, to read the film is to begin positing a theory of its narrative.

Listening to someone else’s Mulholland Dr. theory is like hearing a recounting of their dreams. Fascinating to the dreamer, and no one else really needs to hear it but a therapist. It is also a non sequitur to say it is “wrong.” And though Betty and Diane’s stories call and echo to one another through the blue box (“one chants out between two worlds...”), and signs and signals both underlined and parenthetical fly through the frame, when Diane has her coffee refilled by a waitress whose nametag reads “Betty,” (and here is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.), no one needs to grope in the dark for meaning and clarity. The sensation of spooky, electric frisson flow directly out of Betty’s nametag and into the theatre.

Like a birdwatcher’s diary, the Mulholland Dr. theorist’s list of clues spotted and jotted is just a record. Besides imposing data that is not there onto the lopsided halves of the narrative, these threads are not knitted up into a holistic view of the film. In a film very much about the dark dazzle of the film image, to say Betty’s story is Diane’s dream, full stop, quite misses that Diane’s reality is no realer than Betty’s or Henry Spencer’s, Norma Desmond’s or Cruella DeVille’s. They dream each other. If Special Agent Dale Cooper famously woke from a dream to declare “my dream is a code: crack the code, solve the crime,” he eventually learns that the dream was something far more. In forwards-backwards-simultaneous time, the wised-up Agent Jeffries would mutter in Fire Walk With Me: “We live inside a dream.” It’s not a contest. The two of them, with themselves.

Betty and Diane do not live in Twin Peaks, they live in Los Angeles. Most often understood as a fable of a would-be starlet’s Hollywood dreams shattered by grim reality, Mulholland Dr. is certainly a bitterly funny portrait of the film industry as Kafka nightmare-fable, but it is not so one-sided nor so acrimonious about the artform itself. At Club Silencio, the emcee tells the audience that though we hear a band, there is no band. Rebekah Del Rio performs a captivating rendition of a Roy Orbison number, and collapses midway as the singing continues, revealing: No hay banda. There is no band. Why the shock and awe, when we have just been told, no hay banda? Why, when standard film production reality is that musical numbers are customarily lipsynched? Was it any less involving a performance? Coming shortly before the film’s splashiest narrative fracture, this is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.

“Hollywood” is vernacular for the American entertainment industry, and talismanic shorthand for the dream of studio system era Movie Stardom, the whole of the art, business and legend in one monolithic word, as if Hollywood were a single organization, collective mind, and symbol at once. But Hollywood is really a place, and you can go there — live there, even— and discover how strange it is, how wrong it feels, to actually walk on Hollywood Blvd. A clogged-by-day, abandoned-by-night tourist attraction with no attractions, the street is composed of approximately 300 tattoo parlors, smoking paraphernalia shops and stores that sell platform shoes to sex industry workers. The majority of the real, literal, physical Hollywood is a collection of neighborhoods where people walk dogs and eat fish tacos and sit in traffic. That big white sign is a leftover advertisement for a housing development.

There are still post-production houses, DVD mastering companies and film equipment and prop rental houses in the neighborhood. The Paramount backlot is the only remaining major studio production facility in the area (unless, as district zoning would have it, one includes Universal City, which makes no sense). There are television soundstages and landmark movie theatres, none of which do or “mean” what they did when Hollywood was “Hollywood.” It is not accurate to say that Hollywood does not make movies, but neither is it proper to imply that it produces a majority of what we casually designate “Hollywood” product. “Hollywood” is not in Hollywood.

Mulholland Dr. is about both of those Hollywoods. One of those Hollywoods does not exist anywhere. That doesn’t make it less real.

Here is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.: it is very much like the experience of driving Mulholland Drive at night. The meandering road looks a little wiggly but more-or-less straight on a map, and connects two stretches of US 101 (which, confusingly, shifts alignment and starts running east-west just to be contrary). Mulholland twists up through the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, providing a spectacular Olympian view of both L.A. proper and the Valley, the city glowing below like a gilded lava spill. The road runs along a precipitous drop, occasionally shielded by scrape-covered guardrails. It is so wracked with tight turns and blessed with so few streetlights that one can inch along for an hour and barely get anywhere. Meanwhile, traffic is thin, but residents familiar with the curves will rush by at terrorizing, reckless speed. By night, Mulholland Drive is dark, it is dangerous, and it is extremely pretty.

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 1 — 2000

2009-11-15T05:09:00.000-08:00

Preamble

The end of a decade comes but once every ten years! Arbitrary and traditional as Top Ten lists are, the division of history’s ebb and flow into ten-year cycles is even more pervasive and less meaningful. What we collectively imagine as The Sixties or The Eighties are no such thing. History does not wait for round numbers. Nonetheless, here we are. 2000 through 2009.

Historians form a master narrative through an ideological lens. The most persistent shape for film history narratives is a teleological model explaining how film art and film culture has arrived at its present state. When Roger Ebert laments of Transformers 2 that it marks the “end of an era,” he envisions film history piling up to the circumstances where Transformers 2 is possible, a series of manipulations and accidents that add up in backward view to explain how we got to this moment. First the highway is built, then the cars are set in motion, somebody doesn’t brake fast enough, and the dominoes topple until the ambulances arrive. This construction is intended to locate root causes and pivotal events, and also cooks up an aroma of inevitability. Most of us build casual causal arguments about film culture in this fashion, even if we know it involves cynicism or naïveté, simplification and received wisdom.

Consider a familiar case: the present-day event picture. They do exist, and without even bothering with a specific title, imagine a summer release action-fantasy, calibrated for maximum width of appeal and depth of box office receipts, and oiled up with cutting edge technology. One or two of these pictures, though extraordinarily expensive, prop up a studio’s entire fiscal year. Consider how frequently one is presented with the idea that this is the legacy of Star Wars, that lavish effects extravaganzas, shopworn goodie/baddie conflict and juvenile exuberance makes the most money. If we are expressing a bellyache, this is framed as: this is Star Wars' fault. Shade that outline, detail it, change the resolution, whatever. Maybe we want to say it was the one-two punch of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) that dumbed down studio product into a stream of mass-appeal blockbusters. Maybe we want to make it a flurry of increasingly powerful jabs with The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1975), Jaws and Star Wars, the Coppola film additionally accounting for the contemporary model of awards-bait prestige title epics, the Friedkin for the sure-bet adaptation of any national bestseller, no matter how trashy. Maybe we want to point out that the Movie Brats once celebrated as artistic insurgents during the death throes of the studio system proper ended up establishing the template for the modern blockbuster-as-genre. Maybe we want to complain that things used to be better or different... or that they are roughly the same, that Gone With the Wind was 1939, and The Sound of Music was 1965, or that the meaningful difference is the breaking of block booking and studio production... the pivotal event being the outcome of the Paramount antitrust case in 1948.

Maybe we want to fawn over Casablanca (1942) as the finest example of the studio system’s ability to produce magically slick, universally beloved entertainment. Maybe we want to remember that our greatest film critic, Mr. Manny Farber, thought it was a corny junkyard of spare parts that worked better in other movies. Could be that the demise of RKO is ultimately as responsible for Revenge of the Fallen as anything else.

Each citizen in a world of moviegoers builds a little history of film for themselves, complete with private pantheons, household classics, the unjustly dismissed, overpraised or overlooked. These histories are influenced by our selective blind spots, parents and gurus, taste economies, social engineering and pure dumb chance. List-making is an act of criticism all by itself. It winnows and excludes, reveals and conceals, and for the list-maker causes at least cursory examination of critical values and assumptions.

It is not the most insightful critical practice. List-making is also rife with problems and begs a lot of questions, particularly of the apple/orange variety, and can easily slip into attempt to stratify and quantify the unquantifiable. As much as an awards show, the building of lists can transform art appreciation into a sporting event. When it comes to matters of “Greatest” and “Best,” what we’re really talking about is “Favorites” perfumed with false objectivity. We don’t cotton to objectivity at Exploding Kinetoscope. An objective observation on a movie would read something like “the film was projected onto a screen at a rate of 24 frames per second.” Farber also said in interview that the last thing that matters is whether a writer “liked” the movie or not. Point taken to heart, but it is also the inevitable starting point for all that follows, all critical arguments and observations proceed from preference.

In a series of ten lists of ten, Exploding Kinetoscope will present my ten favorite films from each year of the decade, 2000 through 2009, with a brief appreciation of each of the 100 (or so) films. The brave and bold may wish to read “favorite” as “the best,” but I make no concessions but that they are favorites. Were the project to identify the 100 most influential films of the decade, or most revolutionary, zeitgeist-capturing, popular — “important” in some way — films, the titles would be different. A list-maker might even be forced to include Transformers 2.

The only qualities I am making conscious effort to project are honesty and a degree of eclecticism. The lists were not built with an eye to looking smart, sophisticated, worldly, populist or contrarian. If they end up that way, so be it.

The project begins two months before the end of the year because I take forever to write pieces. This will allow the year to actually end before the 2009 list is unveiled to thunderous silence and boredom. I take forever to write pieces because I am lazy.

HOW THIS WORKS: Practical Matters (AKA – Boring. Skip.)

Like any responsible blogger, I normally contribute an annual favorite films list at the end of each calendar year. The films considered for inclusion in those lists are any new releases first available for viewing in my geographical area during the year in question. As I am located in Los Angeles, this allows inclusion of limited releases — generally for small films, dumped films, and those special December films funneled in for awards season consideration before wide release. It also includes pictures from exotic foreign lands on their first American release.

When I make lists for years gone by, foreign films slip back into proper alignment by their release date in country of origin. If this sounds arbitrary, it sort of is. The reasoning is that year-end lists are built with the intention of pointing readers to recent releases and celebrating personal viewing experience of that year; the purpose of retrospective lists is to weigh recent history after some cooling-off time. So, for example, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance appeared on my original 2006 Favorites list, but now has to contend with 2005 releases — which actually improves its ranking. As to whether festival screenings, non-US limited releases, etc. influence the determination of year of release, I confess the entire system is built on whim and fancy. I have tried to iron out major defects with cursory Internet-based “research,” but feel free to notify the manager of any errors.

Speaking of cooling off, heating up, the dispassionate eye and the seduction of novelty... well, that’s why I am doing this. Things look different in the long view, and I’m more confident in the lists from 2000 to around 2006 than recent years, simply because I’ve had time to see more of 2000’s films than 2008’s, and more time to think about them.

Documentaries, experimental film, art video and genres not yet named all compete for space with narrative features. Features are defined by Academy rules — 40 minutes minimum — and do not vie for position against short subjects... except in one(?) rare (arbitrary) case below, in which a short was just too goddamned good.

Do keep in mind that the completed set of ten lists would not necessarily represent a set of top 100 favorites of the decade. One year’s unranked #13 could be better than another year’s #1. For the bean counters, at the end the individual lists will be shuffled into a weigh-distributed master list of 50 titles.

Favorites of the Two Zero Zeroes, Pt. I — 2000

10. Final Destination (dir. James Wong, scr. Wong, Glen Morgan, Jeffrey Reddick)

Jeffrey Reddick’s repurposed X-Files spec script (that’s fine, it wouldn’t have jibed with what we see in “Tithonus”) was repurposed and rewritten into a feature by Files first stringers Glen Morgan and James Wong. The hook is irresistibly silly, a slasher movie with no slasher, and in a stroke of bold, unapologetic redundancy, “death” itself is the killer. Boring teenager Alex (the boring Devon Sawa) has an unexplained precognitive vision and convinces a handful of passengers not to board a doomed 747. Thus thrown off-track, Death is forced to work overtime to burn, decapitate and smush all escapees. Imagined as an implacable force of nature and visualized as shit falling over and blowing up, Final Destination’s vision of mortality is the most fatalistic in all pop horror cinema. The first great horror franchise of the brink of the new century, the Destinations are loud, rude, pitiless black comedies with one single-minded two-fisted joke to tell.

Director James Wong moves through the hollow space between death setpieces at an acceptable clip. The characters are bound to be little but Reaper-feed, but the first installment doesn’t even bother to sketch its people as types or caricatures (however, everyone is distractingly, pointlessly named after historical horror film figures). Sequels would reach grander heights of invention, comedy and ludicrosity, but Final Destination is the first wicked hammer drop in death’s Rube Goldberg machine. The joke is on everything with a beating heart.

9. The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (dir. Peter Segal, scr. Steve Oedenkerk, Barry W. Blaustein, David Sheffeild, Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz, whew!)

Here is a happy thing. The comedy of Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor films rises from the ways different people are uniquely silly, interesting, and funny. Our bodies and their differing shapes and shades are not inherently funny; they can, indeed, be a great source of pain. But to the gifted character comedian who studies the way we move, the way our bodies shape our attitudes and opinions, and personalities affect our forms, human diversity is a veritable candy shop. This is roughly true every time a sketch comic puts on a fake mustache, but Murphy’s tour de force eight-piece-one-man-band performance is all about fully loading his characters with character. Much of that is Murphy’s mimicry and invention, and the rest is Rick Baker’s meticulous, beautiful makeup work.

Because everyone’s body IS funny, or can be, and should anyone forget, the aim of caricature is to point this out. A good caricature is specific and detail-oriented. The rotund Klump family is jolly and vibrant, comfortable with their frames — proud, even— and their earthy brand of good-natured humor is a double joke, and they aim to loosen up the scraps of self-loathing clinging to sensitive and shy Professor Sherman Klump. There is possibly no funnier material than the unfurled egoism of Buddy Love, though, the nasty and gleeful spirit whose greatest pleasure is simply cavorting in a thin, muscular body and causing embarrassment to others. Murphy is not only playing all these characters but the dynamics between them. The Professor films take their critical lumps for being a string of fat jokes and fart gags. But the villain is a parody of body perfection, and the fart jokes are the best possible sort: of happy people, delighted to be passing gas because it says their bodies are alive and hilarious.

The Klumps is a bit convoluted and Janet Jackson makes a dull, inoffensive love interest, not that she is asked to do anything particularly funny. It is perhaps not as rousing or straightforward (or, okay, hilarious; nothing here is so perfect as Buddy Love in aerobics class) as the 1996 Nutty Professor, but as the balance is shifted toward the other Klumps, the sequel actually satisfies a legitimate desire: to spend more time with the family!

8. Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, scr. C. Nolan from short story by Jonathan Nolan)

Pity poor Leonard (Guy Pearce, looking like a battered, blown-out half-developed Polaroid) who cannot form new memories since his injury, whose brain self-purges approximately every ten minutes and whose body constantly snaps awake while in perilous situations. Pity the audience of all sloppily written and edited pop cinema product, for we possess attention spans, allowing us to track plot holes, oversights and fudge-ups, recognize clichés and retain information without being condescended to. Presupposing capable viewership, Memento runs backwards, requiring that its revenge thriller clockwork not only be tooled with precision but fully reversible. The film’s thrumming ontological malaise and show-off structure tend to overshadow its pleasures as a terse and chewy crime picture, but these concerns are bound up together. As metafiction on the art of narrative filmmaking, Memento reconfigures the steady, regulated information leak of storytelling, applying its full smarts to suspense and mystery genres in which the shielding of the dealer’s cards matters the most.

If Memento says nothing more profound than that reality is simply the state in which we find ourselves second to second, that is enough. Leonard has lost the illusion that he is the sum total of experience, that a life lives provides anything but consequence and circumstance, that history conspired to make him the man he is today. He loses that when his head smashed into a mirror: self-perception shattered, slate wiped, scars permanent. Those who charge forth with confidence that we know who we are, know where we’re going, know where we’ve been labor under a very practical delusion. Those who wonder in anguish over who they are may be asking a question that does not make sense: you are the man looking in the mirror and asking who you are. Memento makes over Camus’ The Stranger as sunbleached California noir, in which perception is slippery, but it is all we have. The pictures lie. You must remember this.

7. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (dir., scr. Joel and Ethan Coen)

A rangy, meandering tall tale of the Depression era Deep South, Joel and Ethan Coen’s sole musical is also an amiably stoned ramble through screwball comedy, self-serious social issue films, and cornepone rural comedy. After 15 years of Coen films, the temptation is strong as ever to create run-on lists of every genre and text being pastiched, lampooned and paid homage, then marvel that the resultant film does not really resemble any of that parentage.

A swiped Preston Sturges title is applied to the sort of goofy crowd-pleaser that it was meant to stand in contrast to in Sullivan's Travels, and recalls some contradictions that Sturges shares with the Coens. These are, namely, ambivalence about characters, swinging between affection and distain, and incontrovertible authorial smarts playing push-pull with the desire to be taken Seriously. As Sullivan alludes in the broadest ways to Gulliver's Travels, O Brother purports to adapt Homer’s Odyssey. And it does, with cute, unceremonious parallels and offhand references, but the important thing is its purpose and spirit. O Brother is a period piece set not in a real historical era but in the accumulated imagined American past, populated by icons and legends, historical whitewashing and spooky folktales. Like the Odyssey, it is the historical epic romance of a nation as it wants to see itself. In the case of America, that is with much contradiction, truth and wishful thinking. O Brother presents the American hero as scrappy but upright, resourceful but hardscrabble, charming and clever but not too clever, rugged and handsome, wise-ass and silly, wandering but family-obsessed, lazy and hard-working. Above all, the very shape and subject of this comic myth celebrates and satirizes in the American character an incompatible desire to be an impossibly lucky winner and still possess hard-luck simple-value “Authenticity.” Witness, as Ulysses Everett McGill, proud and indignant that he is Bona Fide, makes a big success by recording that timeless ode to American shit luck, “Man of Constant Sorrow”. Adopting the Greek Pantheon sure makes it a lot easier to reconcile that that some days your manifest destiny is to roam, and some days it’s nothing but depression.

6. Mission to Mars (dir. Brian De Palma, scr. Jim Thomas, John Thomas, Graham Yost)

“Drifting through eternity will ruin your whole day.” So goes some wisdom from Brian De Palma’s marvelous spaceman thriller. Mission to Mars is practically a humanist retort to 2001: A Space Odyssey, its climactic moments dedicated to a pretty and inspiring filmstrip on biological evolution on Earth. Containing something to bewilder or sour nearly ever viewer, even the film’s final statement of wonder is marred by one badly designed transitional era CG alien effect. But all De Palma films have a little of this wonder, and no small amount of dread, as starry-eyed humans are ricocheted around a cosmic pool table along networks too daft to make sense of, dragged by forces they cannot see. Mission does, in its finale, marvel at nature, but until then it is variously spooked and awe-struck.

The climax of physical action occurs in the black void, of course, stranded between heaven and earth (well... between spaceship and Mars), safe home and unknown adventure, chilly womb and blazing death. The suspense device is of properly calibrating jet pack thrusters and conserving limited fuel supplies; the moral questions are of the same stuff: applied force, inertia, impossible choice and aiming carefully while navigating through space.

One zero G setpiece alone sees the director pushing the cinematic apparatus’ ability to organize space and time to a new plane: it is a De Palma Future. As the ship is about to enter orbit around Mars, a micrometeorite barrage perforates the hull, one space suit helmet, and one astronaut’s hand: bam, bam, bam, these are the crises in poetic simplicity, tiny rocks hurtling through infinity just to fuck up four heroes. The ensuing repair effort is a suspense scene of elaborate construction without parallel... except in the De Palma canon. Beginning with the image of atomized blood globules swirling lazily about the pristine ship, the sequence expands and flows into airless abstract 3D museum diorama. As four crewmembers undertake separate tasks in different locations and the atmosphere rapidly suctions out of the craft, their work unites the action, a seamless vignette about punctured seams. The source of the first leak is detected via the floating blood droplets, the second by a serendipitous packet of Dr. Pepper. The pieces and particles flocking in one direction to create a whole, the scene snakes through space, inside and outside, perfectly oriented in a place where up and down do not apply and time is the crucial dimension. Linked in purpose, discrete no longer, like the chromosomes sent to a blue planet from a red one, like the astronaut’s DNA model built of M&M’s, like the Dr. Pepper and the blood, like the clouds of Martian dust. Like pictures threaded in sequence, moving in time together to tell a story.

5. Dancer in the Dark (dir., scr. Lars von Trier, songs by Björk)

Old-time women’s picture hokum, nothing in Lars von Trier’s musical extravaganza holds any water or makes any sense, except that melodrama tells its own sort of truth. When the indignities and cruelties upon the innocent are piled high enough, any weeper turns into a dark comedy; tell a horror joke from the inside out, and with enough sincerity and it becomes a tragedy.

This joke is about a girl who gave and gave and a world that took and took, until she had nothing left. Von Trier has told this one before, would tell it again, and the challenge this time around must have been to test the limits of weepy excess while purging every semblance of reality: how far can either fundamental component of the film be pushed before it undoes the other? The martyr heroine is not only impoverished, abused, wrongfully persecuted and slowly going blind, but apparently suffering some intellectual disability, her every interaction and behavior exactly the kind of thing no one would do. Björk plays Selma as a walking Sacred Heart, a lived-in, humanity-stinking performance, a matted waif that one might feel compelled to slap for her own good, if she were not constantly being slapped already. The music is exuberant, aching and achey, and bitterly ironic in context. Björk’s own records thrive on a similar tension, as dance music that cannot be danced to, soaring pop as intimate and uncomfortable as crawling through the singer’s throat. As a victim/collaborator in Von Trier’s campaign, Björk adds another layer of contradiction and mystique to both the film and the art project of her public persona. For in Von Trierland, it is possible to become confused as to what is sincere or put-on, sophisticated or juvenile. Dancer in the Dark is both, of course. The kind of emotional rawness and thoughtful technique on display are simply too much work to muster up for a derisive chuckle. Dancer in the Dark is Passion play as escapist Mamoulian musical, and vice versa.

4. American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron, scr. Harron, Guinevere Turner)

Brett Easton Ellis’s gasbag novel is punctured, drained and distilled into an elegantly mean and hilarious feminist tract by director Mary Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner. While Ellis’s method literary of satire is to stand in one place, bare-knuckled, and punch the same spot over and over and over, Harron and Turner feint and bind, slice and dice with a thin, exacting blade. The subject is manly competition and conspicuous consumption in the world of late-1980s Wall Street investment banking, the case study one Patrick Bateman and the crimes engendered by boundless privilege and ridiculous amounts of money: disconnect from humanity, ennui, failure of taste and serial murder. As a period piece takedown of extreme yuppiedom, American Psycho picks an easy target, but courtesy of Ellis there exists a graceless, hammering take on the same material, proof that this is not as easy as it looks. Whether one finds the ‘80s stage dressing deft and funny or irrelevant nearly a decade after the fact, the thesis is tied to no one time and place, a hysterical burlesque of late period capitalism careening into a barbaric dead-end, the human body made ultimate disposable luxury commodity.

The excesses of Ellis’ novel are the point, but it is more excruciating than funny or horrifying, ideas more interesting to discuss than to read. Harron and Turner’s choice to clean up the grue, besides making the book filmable, eliminate Ellis’ habit of rubbing an audience’s nose in the material. The only lamentable cuts are of Bateman’s most far-out hallucinations — being pursued by a park bench, and witnessing a Cheerio being interviewed on television — that might have strained credulity even with this most unreliable narrator. The psycho himself is alternately locked in a human skin sarcophagus, and on berserk nude chainsaw rampage. While the film is largely lodged inside Bateman’s head, crucial space is made for the voices of the women of American Psycho. Turner is tellingly cast as the only woman who laughs in the protagonist’s face. In a moment like a clear, mournful bell amidst the cacophony, Bateman’s secretary, Jean (Chloë Sevigny, earnest and breakable, good as gold), steals a peek at the boss’ diary, and finds only primitive childish doodles of mutilated women. The film still closes with Ellis’ bleak jabber (and portentous inscription: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT), Bateman’s final embrace of nihilistic abandon, brain-snapped and sweat-drenched. But the summary of Harron’s Psycho is in the eloquent, beautifully composed scene of Jean alone, confronted with the swarming, dehumanizing rage of Bateman’s notebook. Whether the crimes of the book are “real” or not, the disease behind the symptoms is the same, and lost, confused, and hurt, Jean weeps.

Bonus points for a credits sequence that prefigures Dexter's opening by 6 years.

3. In the Mood for Love (dir., scr. Wong Kar-wai)

This is a film about extraordinarily beautiful people smoking cigarettes, which make extraordinarily beautiful smoke, and looking moody, sexy and tragic while they do it.

The story of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) lovers-never-to-be, neighbors united because their own spouses are cheating on them with each other, is both emotionally complicated, poetically pared-down. It is speaks to many things inside those prone to heartsickness, romantic longing and indolence. Like a series of lugubrious interlocking etudes, In the Mood for Love is vague and elliptical enough, repeats variants on its own themes with such seductive rhythm as to encompass its own themes in forward and reverse. It is a story about how a mutual case of blue balls prolonged over the better part of a decade, combined with a propensity for melancholy, can cause the afflicted to inflate intimacy and longing into having mistimed meeting one’s one and only Soulmate. In more sympathetic light, the opposite spin: love and connection flit through our lives, prolonging defining moments with an aching sustain, and sex just has nothing to do with romance. Chow and Su torture themselves into increasingly lovely emotional and-or sexual starvation, their stated motives may be to maintain the moral rectitude and dignity that their spouses could not. Of course, this just makes their anguish more perverse, their behavior creepier and damaged.

Should you remove the mud, and let the whispered secrets float out like scribbled plumes of cigarette smoke, there is every chance that the voice of a broken heart has nothing to say but “Oh my God, oh my God. I should have fucked her.”

In the Mood for Love is truly and deeply about how gorgeous movie stars can look while smoking cigarettes in the rain.

2. “The Heart of the World” (scr., dir. Guy Maddin)
“Heart of the World” IS:
-Six minutes and some few seconds long.
-An erotic montage-edited frenzy about the erotic frenzy of montage editing.
-A romantic evocation of the spasmic lovemaking of silent Soviet sci-fi, Fleischer brothers shorts, experimental Marxist documentary and many other sorts of popular entertainments currently in vogue with audiences the world over.
-A loving, meticulous recreation of German Expressionism and Soviet montage that looks precisely like no Expressionism or montage that ever existed.
-Absurdist redemptive melodrama about the redemption of melodrama!
-A full history of passion, love, death, resurrection, erection, economics, religion, science, sacrifice and birth conveyed in such bold, decisive strokes that it takes place entirely in hyperspace!
-KINO KINO KINO KINO!

1. Battle Royale (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, scr. Kenta Fukasaku, from the novel by Koushun Takami)

Directed by the 70-year-old Fukasku, the last great film of the millennium closes with an imperative to the young: RUN.

Japan of the undefined near future finds its economy collapsed, unemployment rates soaring and youth in rebellion. The implied fascist government instates the Battle Royale program: each year, a ninth grade class is abducted, shipped to a small island, and made to participate by slaughtering each other until one child remains standing. From this high concept, equal parts compelling and appalling, proceeds Battle Royale. The giggly, angry, black satire plot reads, on paper anyway, like a premise John Waters might have imagined, had he been born some thirty years later. Its barely-science-fiction kill-or-be-killed tale meditates on universalist themes common to Lord of the Flies, The Most Dangerous Game, and Stephen King from Roadwork to Under the Dome: the scary speed with which the body’s survival instinct kicks in when under duress, the fascinating and varied ways in which civility disintegrates and societies break down.

Battle Royale is bitterly funny to be sure; its political bite sinks deep into the luxury culture, unhealed generation gap and entertainment tastes of postwar Japan, teeth scraping bone. Its premise is enough, an overstated, ferocious lampoon of conservative social politics, and their bad ends for defenseless and innocent. The BR program is ostensibly created to quell the rising tide of youth discontent, but is motivated by adult failure, fear, and anger scapegoated onto the nation’s teens.

But Battle Royale does not play out as a bad taste splatterpunk comedy, a sadistic action movie or, really, in any way expected at all. The film’s main modes inside its pointed, complicated satire are rich, novelistic storytelling and quiet, sensitive poetry. The strong backbone allows Fukasku to check in with the 42 students in various combinations all over the island, and on their mysterious teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano, also malevolent and weary), in quick sketch intertwining vignettes. Comically blunt intertitles punctuate the deaths, but the survival game is not the heart of this story, and the rest unfolds in the oblique, haunted tone of flipping through a high school yearbook with a headfull of psilocybin.

In careful, spare strokes, the film marks out miniature portraits of its dozens of 15-year-olds. The emotionally intense reality of adolescence is so vivid that Battle Royale seems willed into existence by the resentments, heartache and irrational impulses of the ninth grade class. Still, somehow the film stands at a contemplative distance from this hormonal miasma, those love stories that are really crush stories, bullying that is really dismemberment. The abject nastiness, adorable naïveté and poignancy of teenage social interaction is observed with empathy — respect, even— and on their own terms.

In the greatest movie scene of 2000, fierce and beautiful class track star Chigusa (Chiaki Kuriyama, blood type: A) is dying. Her friend Hiroki (Sousuke Takaoka) finds her, and though freaked out, picks up the dying girl and sits with her ask dusk falls. And what can she want in those final moments? What is important right then? She asks Hiroki if he is in love. And yes, he is. She asks: but not with me, right? And no, not her. Hiroki can barely stand to look. But he will stay with her. Still nervous, even with nothing to lose, Chigusa musters everything she has and... tells Hiroki that he looks cool. Hiroki gives his friend the most beautiful last moment possible, as her heart simultaneously breaks and slows and stops. He tells her: “You’re the coolest girl in the world.”

What does it mean, then, to tell a generation to “RUN”? Contemporary as its other concerns may be, Battle Royale is not an anthropological exposé on the slang, savagery and mating habits of modern Japanese youth. It is about what it is always like to be 15, what it has always been like to be 15, and what 15-years-old means to a 70-year-old man. There is nothing sweeter than catching the extremely jaded in a moment of wistful reverie.

Secret Test!: A SERIOUS MAN (2009)

2009-10-30T03:39:00.001-07:00

NOTE: As always, please see A Serious Man before proceeding.

"As long as I learn I will make mistakes
What do I want? What do I need?
Why do I want it? What's in it for me?
It's the imagery of technology
Is what you get is what you see
Don't worry your mind
When you give it your best
One two one two this is just a test"
- Beastie Boys, "Just a Test"

A barrage of questions, then: Why is this happening? What does it mean? What are the rules? How do I behave properly? What choices are available? Which options should I take? And they culminate, really, in the one central mystery: What the fuck is going on?

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, looking and acting like an ideal live-action Opus the penguin) stands on his suburban roof under slate skies and adjusts the television aerial. Signals from the aether flow into the antenna, and the man hears garbled, incomprehensible messages from the heavens. Something is coming through, and he will continue to adjust the apparatus, strain to listen and see. The mystery of existence continues, and all Larry can get in reply is blurry broadcasts of F Troop.

Negative Theology

Like a Lenny Bruce retelling of a lost Ingmar Bergman script for The Book of Job: The Movie, A Serious Man is both nightclub sick joke style riff on Jewish identity crisis in postwar suburbia and a humane and silver-filigreed parable about the reasons and methods by which we derive spiritual and philosophical nourishment through hermeneutic process; it is about the relative value of lessons relayed by allegory, of the midrash of all things, from Torah to F Troop, Surrealistic Pillow to dreams, physics to kook literature, weather patterns to collections agency calls.

Myriad troubles compounding troubles begin swarming Larry until one day, without warning, his life is falling down around him. His protesting refrain is: "I didn't do anything!/ I haven't done anything!/ What did I do?" When his wife (Sari Lennick) demands a divorce, he asks what he did, and she tells him "You haven't 'done' anything. I haven't 'done' anything." When his impending tenure is threatened by an anonymous letters to the board, he can think of no reason they should have been written. When harassed by the Columbia Record Club, which he did not join, he yelps "I didn't ask for Santana Abraxas!... I haven't done anything!" The indignities and calamities come swirling up from nowhere Larry can perceive, and his only conclusion can be that God is doing this to him. Or not.

And indeed, Larry is a good man, in the best way he knows how. He is intelligent and gentle, sensitive and responsible and unassuming. What he is not is demonstrative, confrontational, brash and headstrong, those qualities that pass for heroism in contemporary protagonists. He prides himself as a rational man, a fine thing for a physics professor to be. But his rigid framing of a cause-and-effect universe makes him indignant about lack of apparent cause when his wife and her boyfriend, the sympathy-oozing, pious Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) kick him out of his own home to live at the Jolly Roger Motel. As a teacher, Larry is accustomed to the use of stories to illustrate complex ideas. He explains as much to Korean student Clive (David Kang), who insists he understands the Schrödinger's Cat paradox; Larry counters that the "cat" is just a device for communicating a mathematical idea, and the math is the lesson. "They're like fables. To give you a picture... The math is how it really works." But as Clive tries to simultaneously bribe the professor for a passing grade and/or blackmail him for accepting the bribe (or perhaps does neither, the unmarked face of the envelope a blank screen of possibility), he seems to have grasped "dead cat" after all. Though he is familiar with the uncertainty principle and quantum superposition, Larry cannot see through the torment to apply chaos theory to his own situation (to be fair, it being the late '60s/early '70s, he'd have to be keeping ahead of the curve on his physics publications reading). The rational man is caught in a tangle; he uses the rhetorical technique, but does not do well when left to divine the lesson beneath the many signs, signals and allegories offered him. "I mean, even I don't understand the dead cat," he gasps to Clive.

The story being bent through the lens of Larry's perspective, the motivations of others are largely veiled, their intersections with Larry effectively blindsiding him. There are three exceptions, in sections of the film which swap perspective. The second most frequent point of view offered is Larry's son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), budding stoner and F Troop enthusiast who drowns out Hebrew school lessons with his transistor radio blaring Jefferson Airplane's secret message through his headphones. The Gopnik story proper begins here, inside Danny's ear canal, pulling outward into the light as "Somebody to Love" roars in the darkness, the film's leitmotif of alienation and thirst for simple salvation.

In the only other Minnesota moment entirely outside Larry's perspective, Sy Ableman drives to the golf course (even when no one is around, he drips self-satisfaction). Intercut synchronous car accidents befall both men, as Larry screams in impotent rage at the bicycling Clive and bangs up his auto, and Sy grows impatient waiting for a left-hand turn and is killed. Though (surprisingly) no one offers Larry the cold comfort that "it could've been you!," the value and meaninglessness of the sentiment that things could be worse is illustrated. Danny's life is not without problems — his aggravations include a harpy older sister, he owes his pot dealer twenty bucks, and dude, F Troop is coming in fuzzy — but he's not as bad off as his dad. And Larry does not quite recognize it, but his life is not so shambolic as his own destitute brother Arthur's (lovable gargoyle Richard Kind).

An extreme magnification of Larry, Arthur is crashing on his brother's couch, plagued by a cyst in constant need of draining, can neither hold a job nor appears to want one. That Arthur may be suffering serious psychological dysfunction becomes an increasingly likely possibility as he asks Larry's professional opinion of The Mentaculus, which he identifies as "a probability map," a Theory of Everything of his own devising. When Larry examines the little notebook, the pages roar with the white noise of madness, scribbles and equations cover every surface in mandalas of incomprehensible mathematics. Larry cannot make heads or tails of the Mentaculus. We might guess that it makes no sense, but Arthur's "system" apparently "works" as intended, and he applies it to winning at back room card games. And still, Arthur is hounded by police for gambling and solicitation and sodomy in seedy bars. Arthur understands the math and it solves none of his problems. The possibility exists that understanding the math has prompted Arthur's mental snap. While the Mentaculus appears to perfectly outline probabilities of limited stochastic systems like card games, perhaps Arthur does not think to apply its output to his personal life, or perhaps its wisdom holds no bearing when contemplating the nature of God.

Whether plagued by profoundly connected events or a designless swarm of fluke locusts, Larry cannot say. But even the shaggiest of shaggy dog stories has a structure, and the fundament of mathematical chaos is not disorder, but ungraspably complex determinist systems that can only look like pandemonium to the unaided eye. Larry may be haunted by a void of meaning, or by a surplus.

Maimonides tells us that the only statements we can make about the nature of God are statements of negation: all we may affirm is what God is not.

At the Mixer with Rambam and Rabad I: Of Advisors and Stories

Arthur does come closest to telling Larry what he may need to hear, wailing in the night at a hotel poolside freak out: "Look at everything Hashem has given you! And what do I get?! I get fucking shit!" Larry can't hear it, counters: "Arthur. What do I have? I live at the Jolly Roger."

In attempt to resolve his crisis of meaning, Larry visits three rabbis. Junior Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg, nerve-wracked and befuddled, as if he can't believe he's a holy man) proposes that Larry has lost his perspective, and advises looking at the world with refreshed vision. Rabbi Scott is sympathetic but his empathy is stunted, and his illustration ends and begins with the temple parking lot: "... imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn't familiar with these autos and such. Somebody still with a capacity for wonder. Someone with a fresh... perspective. That's what it is, Larry!... Because with the right perspective you can see Hashem, you know, reaching into the world!" Larry already believes that one potential of his situation is God's presence, the other is God's non-presence, and the difference is stacking up as a narrow one. The first rabbi's advice is sound, but he does not adequately connect the dots to Larry's circumstance for the idea to get through. "Just look at that parking lot."

To put his divorce proceedings in order, Larry consults his lawyer, Don Milgram (Adam Arkin). The principles of Judaic faith and practice are philosophically framed in legalistic terms, and Larry's trips to his lawyers are conferences with moral advisors as much as those with the rabbis. Though he visits Milgram to sort out the divorce and clarify a property line issue, Jewish law — Halakhah, the path on which one walks — informs all of Larry's choices. He sees the possibility and feels the weight of every day as a series of choices, large and small, to greet seriously or ignore. Should he grant a do-over "secret test," as Clive requests? Should the family wait for Arthur to finish in the bathroom before eating dinner? Should he pay for Sy's funeral?

A gruff, monosyllabic gentile neighbor (Peter Breitmayer) begins asserting ownership of what Larry believes to be part of the Gopnik yard. Mr. Brandt asserts that the property line ends at the poplar tree. Larry doesn't, apparently, but has no counter-evidence. On neighboring, possibly overlapping territory, a blurred boundry becomes matter of interpretation, one the self-assured gentile is going to win by default. Both satirizing the degree to which these suburban Jews have and have not become integrated, and addressing Larry's concern that he is correctly interpreting the law, the matter of the Gropnik yard is never resolved: the property lawyer (Michael Lerner) up and dies before Larry's eyes without uttering a word of his strategy.

And so to the second rabbi, Nachtner (hilarious character actor superpower George Wyner), who provides two critical lessons, one in comic council with Larry and one while presiding over Sy Ableman's funeral. To Larry, Nachtner relates the half-joke half-object lesson story of The Goy's Teeth, revealed as the rabbi's one-size-fits-all anecdote for any occasion. In brief, a dentist finds the words "Help Me" engraved? grown? into a patient's lower incisors. The riddle haunts the doctor, no answers are forthcoming, and he eventually stops worrying about it and finds peace. Larry stares and gapes, aghast at what he takes to be a shaggy dog story. Though he strains to hear the essence the advice, the rabbi refuses to elaborate.

Nachtner's timing is off and Larry isn't communicating his needs. Gopnik is seeking comfort and the rabbi provides an intellectual explanation to a theological question. The answer is sound — God neither provides nor owes any explanations — but the advice is misplaced. It is not what Larry wants to hear, so he does not.

Through all Larry hears is an irrelevant, anticlimactic joke, the Goy's Teeth is, in essence, a story about unknowable mystery, its presence and purpose in our lives. In the story, Sussman the dentist guesses at a moral — should he help others? Nachtner neither confirms nor denises: couldn't hurt. There is a disconnect between this conclusion and the questions. Helping people is an action to take in this world, a way to conduct oneself which, sure, couldn't hurt. It has not much to do with the nature of God or the question Sussman and Gopnik share with Job:

If this is sign, what does it mean?,
and: Why me?

The Goy's Teeth is linked to Schrödinger's Cat and the invented folktale prologue to Larry's story. In that miniature Yiddish comedy sketch of A Serious Man, a man and wife are visited one dark and snowy eve by a Torah scholar (Fyvush Finkle) who may (or may not) be a dead man inhabited by a dybbuk. Surely not, chuckles the rational husband. Obviously so, says his deadly serious wife, and stabs the guest in the heart. But Schrödinger's dybbuk shuffles off into the night, wounded and insulted. Doomed or saved or maybe neither, the couple never learns. The snow falls on the just and unjust.

At Ableman's funeral, Rabbi Nachtner gives a stirring and warm hesped in honor of the deceased and to guide the bereaved. He explains the Jewish concept of the afterlife, L'olam Ha-Ba, the World to Come. "It is not a geographic place like Canada..." (pause for laughter), it is not about a reward of riches and physical comforts, not entirely analogous to a Christian concept of an individual dividend Heaven. Nachtner outlines at length what the afterlife is not, and offers that L'olam Ha-Ba "is in the soul of this community which nurtured Sy Ableman and to which Sy Ableman now returns."

As for the third rabbi, Marshak refuses to see Larry at all. The old man devotes his time only to religious study and briefly advising the new Bar Mitzvahs. As Larry moves up the chain of wisdom, the advice becomes more succinct and cuts to the heart of the matter, while the comfort grows slim. Marshak does allow conference with Danny Gopnik, who triumphs through his Torah reading while righteously stoned. The ancient man stares across his empty desk, quotes Jefferson Airplane and advises Danny: "Be a good boy."

Perhaps the most concise version of these esteemed commentators is Clive Park's father. As Larry protests that either Clive is bribing him or not, and he cannot be blackmailed for a bribe he isn't accepting, Mr. Park's zen reply: "Please. Accept mystery."

Job Didn't Ask for Santana Abraxas: Five-Minute Exegesis

Joel and Ethan Coen tend to favor noir and screwball comedy, genres which may be played as farce or thriller, and that take as their base the dogpiling of misery and accident onto hapless protagonists. In its way, A Serious Man is a small primer on how to read the moral philosophy of the entire Coen oeuvre. We should not mistake a portrait of an absurdist universe for nihilism. The only self-identified nihilists the Coens have placed onscreen are in The Big Lebowski, and they are dismissed as buffoons, if slightly more dangerous than the rest of a cast of buffoons.

The real point of The Goy's Teeth, Nachtner simply hands to Larry. Eventually, these nagging questions will go away, in the face of small, everyday happiness, or at least the business of living life while cosmic mystery roars in the background. The point of Rabbi Scott's advice is similarly to marvel at what portion of the universe one does understand, and to tend personal relationships and behavior in that context. Marshak to Larry: following this line of questioning ends with a life of devoted, serious Torah study, and furthermore, when you get to the top of the chain, you may find deafening silence.

In a dream — the only Coen films with no dream sequences are Fargo and Burn After Reading — Larry tells his class that the Uncertainty Principle "proves we can never really know what's going on. So it shouldn't bother you, not knowing what's going on." While it sounds good and ominous, the Uncertainty Principle does not quite say that. Sy Ableman appears and says that he does know what's going on. Though in this anxiety dream, Ableman is overstating the case, this unshaken confidence is part of why Nachtner had deemed Sy "a serious man." And they debate. Larry goggles that mathematics is proof, and the principle applies. Sy says that what happens in the afterlife, the cosmic balance of justice, is not the issue, and Larry need concern himself with present life. He says that "mathematics is the art of the possible." Otto von Bismarck said that was politics, of course: "... the attainable, the art of the next-best." Sy is talking about a place where the math cannot go.

A Simple Man opens with an epigram from Rabbi Shlomo Itzchaki, vital and most influential Tanakh and Talmud commentator: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." Rashi was writing on Deuteronomy, instructing that we trust in God's plan and not strain to predict the unseeable future. Larry is not too far off in evaluating this — and The Goy's Teeth, and the Example of the Parking Lot, and Marshak's silence, and Mr. Park's koan — as "it shouldn't bother you, not knowing what's going on." It can only cause us further consternation to be ordered stop there, though, because that is a pitiless interpretation. On the other hand, one is not sure who told Larry Gopnik that Judaism involved easy answers.

So to Job.

The Book of Job shares a structure roughly in common with A Serious Man. As protagonist, a good man by most standards, a man of some prosperity, a man of solid faith, and a man to whom atrocious things happen in unceasing barrage. He kvetches and questions why, but maintains that he did not do anything to merit the treatment. At the end, a whirlwind, out of which appears a voice both frightening and soothing. In Job, God does answer. In A Serious Man, the voice is Grace Slick's.

There is a key difference between the horrors that befall Job and those experienced by Larry Gopnik. Job is bedeviled by Acts of God. Until the grand finale, Larry's problems are the result of the behaviors of other people, or his interaction with other people. The reverse implication of Deuteronomy 18:13 and Rashi's note is that while God should be received wholeheartedly, other people may be suspect. So be a good boy. You will be responsible for this on the midterm.

The climax in which God responds to Job contains one of history's most burning, beautiful and profound answers to the problem of evil and the myriad uncertainties that come part and parcel with being a living human. No hero of these books speaks to God the way Job does without being rebuked. Few of them are given such visions — and be sure, God's defense/questioning of Job is so vivid that Job sees the words from the storm.

God answers the charges against him by pummeling Job with a series of questions. "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?..." That is just the beginning, as God provides a stirring account of the marvel of creation. God holds forth on the perfect system of the natural world in such poetic fashion that it sounds like even God is impressed with the intricacy of ecosystem and solar system. God speaks of a vast planet and a vastness in which it whirls, physical and abstract: "Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?" God plumbs the symbol-myths of human imagination: would you tangle with Behemoth, go fishing for Leviathan?

A number of points are being made and woven together in awesome rhetorical display. The universe's design is too complex for the human eye to take in at once, and what looks like hellish disorder is part of an incomprehensible system. For some of this, we may devise maths and sciences for prediction and explanation. There are those places where the math cannot reach, the place where position and momentum may be known at once, where the cat is alive and dead, we call those "God". Most vitally, the human beast lives in an amoral, unsympathetic world that is crammed with wonders, and any system of moral judgment, any divination of meaning belongs to the peculiar needs and inventions of the human mind. God's justice is not man's justice. Nature needs no justice or meaning: it is its own law and purpose.

These are majestic ideas and uncomfortable ones. Job retracts his accusations and embraces the freedom of being a creature of dust and ashes. This is not about milk and honey. Accept mystery? Good luck with that, though you don't have much choice. Here is what Larry has that Arthur does not: "You've got a family. You've got a job." As Marge Gunderson said, "There's more to life than a little bit of money, don't you know that? And here you are. And it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it." God answers Job by explaining exactly why he will get no answers: not only are the questions ill-formed, but the answer is immeasurably vast and all around him. Popular shorthand would have it that God "tests" Job, but the game is always stacked — God's playing with a Mentaculus in his back pocket and knows the outcome. Job suffers torment and vision so that we will have this story, this poem, this song about man's yearning. So you have it, I have it, Larry Gopnik has it. This is a far cry from "it shouldn't bother you, not knowing what's going on."

We need these stories, because it is hard to just remember the math parts of the lesson during the test. "...[T]hey're illustrative. They're like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model." One can even walk away from a story about persistent inscrutability, only to be frustrated by how life makes no sense. The vision God gives Job is powerful enough to affect the man's spiritual refinement, but it too is an imperfect model, the totality being an infinity that cannot be squashed into language. Believing he can master the math and evacuate all secrets, Larry does not hear the voice. As Dick Dutton of Columbia Record Club says, "we can't make you listen to the records, sir."

Danny listens to the records, and stepping out of Marshak's office, onto the path of the serious man, he faces down the Whirlwind. The awesome, fearful black chaos of a tornado — or does it just look like chaos to us? — rips through darkening skies, the Airplane jangles and bellows. In the moment of pain and fear, philosophical and theological argument dissolve into abstracts and human yearning takes over. You want to know why it picked you? If you're being tested? Want to know what it means? Want answers? Or... don't you want somebody to love?

In a universe lacking in inherent, built-in meaning, our task is to forge our own meaning. A Serious Man is the world as a terrible, beautiful parking lot. Just look at that parking lot!

Active Engagement: Dollhouse 2.3 - "Belle Chose"

2009-10-23T21:19:00.000-07:00

Being a regular collection of notes, intrusive fragments and episodic memories regarding each installment of the FOX teledrama Dollhouse (J. Whedon, creator).

The Engagement: A weird professor (Arye Gross of "These Friends of Mine") teaches Echo about Chaucer (he is played by Arye Gross of The Opposite Sex and How to Live with Them). Meanwhile, Terry Karrens, serial kidnapper, budding murderer and nephew of a major Rossum backer (whew!) arrives at the Dollhouse in a coma. That Ballard may better question Terry, the killer's mind is dumped into Victor's brain, and he promptly escapes. With all these creepos wandering around, DeWitt has Topher improvise a remote Wipe, which accidentally swaps Vic and Ech's Imprints. Terry-Echo neck-stabs Prof. Weirdo (Arye Gross of Hexed!). Ballard intercepts club dancing, Kiki-headed Victor, causing civilians to believe Paul is gay.

Janani: So, a little background to get started: “Belle Chose”, in addition to being the shortest English sentence to feature any individual named “Belle," is a French phrase used by Chaucer's randiest character, The Wife of Bath, in the Prologue to her section of the Canterbury Tales. “Belle chose” means “pretty thing,” as in “that pretty thing you got between your legs, lady.” The Wife of Bath, who has been married five times (and is usually scouting for the next husband while waiting for the current one to die) does enjoy sex for its own sake, but is even more interested in what her “belle chose” can obtain for her in the way of bargaining power — she does Roma Klar one better with her absolute, openly self-serving, rather refreshing unsentimentality about sex. The Wife refers to sex often and pragmatically as her husband’s “debt” — the more he fucks her, and the more she ensures that he fucks her, the more he must yield to her in the way of household authority, victory in argument, and the all-important SWAG (she is a clotheshorse!). Hence her diligence in banging the brains out of several “good,” “rich,” “old,” barely erectile elderly husbands (Victor/Kiki’s line to the club boys, “As help my God, I laughe whan I thinke/How pitously a-night I made hem swinke,” refers to those exact men, who probably died of heart attacks induced by the Wife’s enthusiastic debt-collection. Victor/Kiki, of course, just wants them to buy a girl a drink).

What does this have to do with Echo/Kiki and her quest for an A? Her professor’s wish to educate a preprogrammed Active about sexual “power” is ironic on its face, also wretched and poignant: the roleplay is ultimately a simple trade of sex for a grade, but he doesn’t want it to feel that way. He wants the seduction to appear to be Kiki's own idea. He wants the experience of falling into her debt, of owing her the grade. He doesn't just want to get off; he wants to feel benevolent while doing it. He is more complicated than your average R client, as well as a natural and interesting successor to Joel Mynor from “Man on the Street”, who set up a reverse transaction, wanting his wife Rebecca to fall into his sexual and emotional debt at the sight of her beautiful new house. Clients who try to manipulate Actives into semblances of autonomous behavior are a step forward for the show; perhaps Terry Karrens' absurd games (structured around women who owe him no sexual debt at all) are an exaggeration-for-arguments' sake, an airing of our very worst fears about R Clients, in fact a writerly response to those fears: not every R client wants a tranquilized husk. in a couple weeks we’ll meet the monster who is contented to make Sierra his slave, but not everyone wants a slave — or at least to be reminded that he’s paying for one; once again Season 2 has opted against a SPY!COP!NINJA! Engagement in favor of an Engagement that complicates client-Active relationships and our own notions of what it means to purchase a "romantic" experience. There’s a reason that the more expensive forms of prostitution, throughout history, have been as much about mental connection, conversation, and ambience as they’ve been about anyone’s “belle chose.”

Lastly, Kiki may have gotten an F for a paper on "The Economics of Marriage," but what are the funniest sexonomics of this episode in general? Probably Ballard getting a bunch of clothes for Kiki, acting out the role of henpecked partner, and getting absolutely nothing in return…sexually, that is. He does get his salary from Adelle, which might make him another kind of whore. Time will tell.

Chris: We're interested, then, in the Prof's reading of the prologue to the Wife's tale. A quick jaunt through the archives confirmed what I suspicioned: it takes a scholar of narrow agenda and wishful thinking to interpret the prologue as an undiluted story of female power. The relationship between Kiki and Gossen hints at the hoops one must jump through to get there (you cant be brainwashed into empowerment), but he's pitching a twisted Foucauldian version of "power" at best, while Chaucer actually wrote a ribald satire of gender authority, marriage customs and medieval sexual politics. The goofy fantasy at work is also of enlightening someone into wanting to have sex with you, of being such a good teacher that you awaken that inspiration. The professor schools Kiki in a rather shifty interpretation of a jaundiced text, essentially emphasizing the qualities of the story that sound good and appealing to a modern college girl and inspire imitative behavior, thus, ironically, canceling out today's Chaucer lesson. A funny bit that Gossen skips over is that among the Wife's talents is the ability to quote Scripture to her own ends, which is not unlike the game Gossen is up to. As always: doesn't matter, she's programmed to be convinced by any argument he makes; the belle's got no choice.

Conversely: who knows how self-aware a lit teacher can get, but the convoluted lesson plan and fantasy framing the professor's Engagement are just a gilt lily version of what is already inherent in the Active/ R Client relationship. He's getting sex, she's getting paid. He "needs" her to be there, just as much as the Dollhouse needs a cash flow.

The A plot, of wretched Terry Karrens and his problems with the ladies, strongly resembles the shape of Tim Minear's great Angel episode "Billy". That black beauty was also about a serial killer of women, protected by the money and influence of powerful relatives, and whose psychosis proved frighteningly infectious (I mention this as esoteric Mutant Enemy lore more than as a discussion point — I don't wanna spoil that episode for you). The pop culture serial killer is a difficult monster, named after the real world species but possessing little psychology in common. While they are fascinating creatures, for example, I think we learn precious little about serial killers from Hannibal Lecter or Dexter Morgan (whose program used to be haunted by Liza Lapira, our own Ivy!); they have other functions to serve, are too valuable to waste on the banal and repulsive realities of serial killers. Among Terry's functions in "Belle Chose", perhaps the most interesting is the climax as Terry-Echo is placed in control of the psycho's victims, mini-Dollhouse (wait, dollhouses are already miniatures... aw, forget it). She flickers in and out of Caroline-ness, trying to sacrifice herself to set everyone free, effectively playing out a fractal repetition of her larger story yet again.

JS: Gossen also leaves out the long section where the Wife's tedious fifth husband reads aloud, for "teaching" purposes, a catalog of "wicked wives" — dozens of misbehaving and man-scourging women from history and literature. The Wife gets so mad that she tears up the book, and then husband and Wife punch each other out! It's better than Springer! I bring this up not only to hook into your point about Gossen's self-serving interpretation of the Tale (any discussion of the Wife's power games must also address her handicaps), but to recall the other Dollhouse character and Tim Minear creation who interpreted an ancient text to his own ends - Jonas Sparrow of "True Believer". In both stories, the Doll who is supposed to yield to the pedant's authority ends up malfunctioning, going bananas, and destroying his painstakingly developed world.

It's a variation on what seems to happen to Topher every single week — and a metaphor for Caroline's weekly emergence — but it also made me think about the Dollhouse's own apparent lack of a creed or guiding "text." A manual of persuasion, to get people to do their jobs correctly, even to make them respect their jobs. Adelle glides without a hitch from one apparent revelation of policy — "We are working to reunite a desperate family with a wayward loved one" — to another — "Bradley Karrens is a major shareholder in our parent organization." The Dollhouse is a moneymaker, but per Adelle it's also a do-gooding organization, per Topher it's an R&D playground, and aside from the soothing words spoken to Actives, there's no sense of a pervading ideology or "party line" that must be taken in order to work there. No indoctrination. No totalitarian dread. Little tyranny to speak of (unless you're Lawrence Dominic, who I hope comes back to settle with Adelle). Langton reads on the job. When I think back to my expectations at the very beginning of the show, I can't believe how loosely the place is run. Imagine if Terry Karrens ran the joint! That's the whole point of him and his ilk, though...he'd do a terrible job.

So what'd you think of Victor? Not only has another common Tech barrier broken down, bringing us closer to the world of "Epitaph One" (Topher can now do remote Imprint switches as well as Wipes, across genders, treating the collective Active mind as one unified field), but we got a prancing Enver Gjokaj. The show owes this fella a debt of its own. He needs to get a hell of a lot more storylines.

CS: The "Epitaph One" Tech does seem to be in place, all that is missing is a compact version of the Chair and an iPhone app version of Topher's Imprint building software. The blanket signal "the Chinese" laid down by telephone (in, a pal reminds me, not-so-veiled echo of Stephen King's novel Cell) doesn't even require a hardware interface in this case. Frankly, I'm kind of skeptical of that one -- I'll buy the the biometrics readouts, but that they can relay a signal impulse should be an obvious danger zone.

Dushku does bubbly coed and jaded wiseass very well, but we are treated in "Belle Chose" to further demonstration of inability to be subsumed by a character. As in the hero/foil body-swap Buffy episode "Who Are You", Dushku and a stronger actor (Gellar there, Gjokaj here) are both asked to play the same character, and Dushku flattens her characterization while the gifted mimic soars. There is none of Terry's posture or inflection emitting from Echo, while Victor is a spot-on recreation of the killer's tics and clench-jawed glower. And maybe, just maybe, this works to Dollhouse's advantage: Caroline cannot be submerged.

The shell game at work in "Belle" is of playing with human dolls, its final shuffle I've already touched on. The show is always about this, but the episode is explicitly about playing dress up with object-people. If "Belle" understands one thing about serial killer psychology, it is this, the void of empathy, inability to see people as anything but things (Dexter's failure and masterstroke being that its Everyman/Killer thinks he is emotionless but understands people's feelings disarmingly well). Echo's Engagement begins with a hilarious round of dolling up the Dolls. The Handlers, tough and serious boys — and the staff most likely to bond with the Dolls — want nothing to do with picking out clothes and doing makeup, though the gay Dollhouse fashionista repeats Topher's declaration that his works is "art". Prof. Gossen only wants to perform if his dolly has thoughts and feelings and the ability to interpret medieval literature, counterpoint to Terry who is equally deluded but can only perform if he can pose and speak for his dolls entirely. Are these men opposites, or flip-sides of the same principal? If we are tipped to believe that Gossen's feminist reading of Chaucer is ironic at best, bullshit at worst, then Terry's games are the argument against, an extreme form of patriarchal domination in which the dominated subject has no latitude for resistance. His victims are exerting power only in that their very bodies make Terry feel helpless... a pretty useless "power" they would hold even if they were dead.

I missed him this week, but last seen, Senator Perrin was concerned that murder may be among the Dollhouse's crimes. In "Belle Chose", DeWitt is particularly concerned that Victor is being used as a vessel for violence. Guess she's only okay with murder if she gets to pick the target.

JS: Bring on the serial-killer knowledges. Does Terry even qualify - yet - as a serial killer, rather than a simple kidnapper? He did murder one woman, but murder doesn't seem to be a fetish or a carefully thought-out part of his ritual; it's more like a kid pulling the head off a doll. Even Ballard didn't think he'd go so far as to kill even one Aunt Sheila. I had trouble with his sudden transition from simple misogynist (as Victor) to rampaging loon (as Echo) - why did he stab the professor? Was he so far gone as to believe his devious dolls had actually turned him into a woman? (That would make Aunt Sheila even more powerful dead than alive.) It's quite weird to watch Terry and Kiki settle so quickly and unquestioningly into their foreign bodies - Ballard hints at possible gender dysphoria with the klutzy line "Is any part of [Terry Marion Karrens] a boy's name?" but Terry is pretty clearly attracted to women, and his instant comfort with becoming one is probably just plot magic - and begs the question of when we'll see more cross-gender Imprintations.

Meanwhile, I did not buy Dushku as a bubblehead; she was not written at a consistent level of stupidity. Women like that are often a lot shrewder than they appear, performing stupidity to their advantage, but Dushku seemed to recite the lines without having decided whether she was playing self-aware or not. Little microseconds of Faith-ful knowingness kept flashing through. She was less cartoony in the office hours scenes, but overall I have to condemn both Gossen and Ballard for their extremely bad taste in female objects (Ballard, rendered jellylike by schoolgirl knee socks, must have already forgotten the much sexier and more grown-up Roma Klar!) I take your point about the indelibility of Caroline, though. Caroline has already had her intro to Evil and her brush with advanced Evil; she's too attuned to its presence to crack convincing jokes about it. Dushku - in career history and persona - is too established as ass-kicker and female action icon to pull off even one second of that clichéd, curdled femininity. Once again, she puts a rusty archetype in quotation marks.

Speaking of which, we haven't yet mentioned the actual tale told by the Wife of Bath - the tale of a knight sent to determine "that which women desire most." He ends up forced into marriage with a hideous old woman who asks whether he would prefer a wife ugly by day and beautiful by night, or vice versa. He answers, correctly, that the choice belongs to the woman alone: "I put me in your wyse governance; cheseth yourself which may be most plesance, and most honour to yow and me also." As you've pointed out, the story was later retold featuring Sir Gawain, one of the knights of the Round Table. "Belle Chose" doesn't explicitly refer to this Wifely contribution, but myriad plot nuggets - from the (forced) beautification of Echo, to the schemes of Gossen and Terry, to the sufferings of Terry's victims - outrage the original story and make the events of "Belle Chose" more bitter inversion than tribute to the Wife's empowering yarn. I'm especially interested in how Ballard (whom you've tagged as a potential Gawain-figure) intrudes on the choices of the women in his care; restoring Madeline's ability to "choose" effectively deprived Mellie of hers (by terminating her); Madeline has no reason to know who he is. And when Caroline's power of choice is restored, she may not choose him either. But as Echo gradually realizes her sexual power over him, she may start to using it...to surprising ends.

Maybe she will force him to go dancing!

CS: Terry may or may not fit an FBI profiler's definition of a serial killer yet. Ballard's judgment aside (it's Ballard, after all), and discounting any unconfirmed killing Terry may have done in the past, we see him kill twice in "Belle Chose" with a requisite cooling off period and in the end is on his way to massacre the remaining girls. Third time's a charm. Some killers we know full well fit the profile and think of as serial killers don't actually qualify. Topher's brain scan, while dubious evidence should Terry have been brought to trial, is presented as a way of confirming the shorthand for the audience without going into gruesome detail: this is a serial killer. Ballard should have pegged him as a mixed organized/disorganized killer type. Appropriately for Dollhouse, the abduction and abuse ritual is about control for Terry, while the murder occurs in a frenzy when the center, inevitably, does not hold.

Various things ring false about Terry, but for me it is mainly the outrageously silly, colorfully weird but still TV friendly staging of his afternoon croquet fantasy and his baby talk dialogue. If I haven't mentioned it before, Mutant Enemy's writing voices for crazy people are kind of grating and off key, though Terry is spared from one of their favorite cringey tropes, the lunatic who speaks in poetic non sequitur koan. It is not a blanket requirement, but killer's of roughly Terry's profile nearly always rape their victims to enact physical dominance, which I have no interest in seeing on Dollhouse but would have unified Terry's story with the matter of the Wife's tale. (If you are interested in horrible crimes, visit your local library to learn more! Of the one billion books available on the subject, Dr. Eric W. Hickey's Serial Murderers and Their Victims is the most valuable, well researched, becalmed and, er, expensive) The Wife also includes a discussion on the reality that men born of high station have no inherent predilection to moral virtue, so maybe someone should mail Terry's uncle a copy.

The knight in the Wife's tale is a rapist whose quest is a weird form of test to determine his punishment. I never saw that movie What Women Want, but I can only assume it plays out exactly like the Wife's tale. Just for comparison laffs, the version of the Wife's tale as retold in "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle", the quest is a challenge to Arthur, who sends Gawain out for recon on ladies' desires, with no inciting incident of sexual violence. Though his zealous virtue and devotion to the good guys is pretty funny in "Ragnelle" (the knight marries the hag not to save his own neck, but his BFF, Arthur's!), Gawain's intense honor and apparent purity get in the way of his effectiveness across several tales, and (it is dangerous to psychoanalyze medieval literature) mask his hang-ups and illusions about women. That's why I think he's a good match with Ballard. Anyway, in Chaucer the knight is unnamed, and in "Belle Chose", it's actually Topher (on DeWitt's orders) whose screw up gives the women in the narrative their "choice": will Echo be Kiki or Terry or a blank Doll? Thanks for the options, but she will be Caroline.

Like Prof. Gossen, as the Wife is telling her story, to support her argument, she pulls in aphorisms and anecdotes from other literature (Juvenal, Dante, etc.), or has her characters do it. The lengthiest sidetrack is supposed to illustrate that women can't keep secrets, she invokes Ovid and retells the end of a King Midas story. Having had the bad judgement to play Simon Cowell at a music contest between Apollo and Pan, Midas is punished with ass ears by Apollo. As the Wife would have it, Midas tells his embarrassing secret only to his wife, who tells it to the water... and if you want the rest, the Wife of Bath tells us to go to Ovid. So, though none of our models plays out in perfect parallel, I don't know that we're chasing our tails here. If you do check Ovid, you'll find that the Wife is stacking the deck. As Ovid has it, Midas' affliction is known only to his barber slave, not his wife. Wanna know how it ends? The barber digs a hole in which to tell his story, reeds grow in the dirt, and the secret is scattered to the wind. A preview of sorts for both how the Dollhouse falls and the consciousness of Dolls may survive (The X-Files may have kept it in mind, with a motif that the Truth refuses to stay buried).

Between this episode and "Spy in the House of Love", Dollhouse's idea of literary allusion is stacking up as damned bizarre.

JS: And they know we will Google those allusions to the ends of the Internet. Don't forget "Briar Rose" in the list of shout-outs. TV fictions are always mining the news for crime and doctor stories, but it seems rarer for them to engage with other fictions in the way Dollhouse does (unless they have clearly literary roots, e.g. Merlin, which has a huge cache of satellite stories to work with) From the meta tower, it looks awfully as though Dollhouse's ghost-themes of storytelling/plotting/showrunning are in fact solid enough to take on the creative theme of adapting and reinventing source material, making "Belle Chose" and other "literary" episodes stories about telling stories about how we tell stories about stories. You said something similar regarding the narrative nesting in Inglourious Basterds (whose very title is a shout-out to an earlier story!), and maybe Dollhouse can be seen as the expanded serial-drama version of that experiment. All Whedon needs to do is change the series name to "A Doull's Hoose" and we're set.

(And speaking of adaptation, Terry's delivery of those croquet lines was just self-conscious enough that he, too, seemed as though he were channeling a story he'd seen elsewhere...perhaps on TV, perhaps onstage in some comedy of manners. He was clearly taking pleasure in imitating someone, repeating a script he'd heard and deemed appropriate for his family outing. And even if he was improvising, I find that many improvisers do this too - the family scenes they act out are often more like reruns of fifties sitcoms than of contemporary life. Even more interesting an improvisation was Echo's lapse into storytelling as, freed briefly of Terry, privy to his "source material" (memories) yet able to refer to him in the third person, she narrated the stalking of Robin.)

Basta! Enough of this episode! It's almost 9PM and I hear that Topher's match is finally here. I have to go and meet her.

CS: Y'know, the old calypso standard "Ugly Woman"/"If You Want to be Happy" is probably the most succinct and hilarious retelling of the punchline of the Wife's tale proper. The narrator in that number knows that even when you give a pretty girl a chance to be faithful, even if she chooses not to be Kiki, the world is full of Prof. Gossens and Terries, and man, it just ain't worth the grief.

Active Engagement: Dollhouse 2.2 - "Instinct"

2009-10-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

Being a regular collection of notes, intrusive fragments and episodic memories regarding each installment of the FOX teledrama Dollhouse (J. Whedon, creator).

The Engagement: Echo is imprinted as a young mother. Topher is thrilled at his own work on this project, having physically altered a bunch of glands. The rush of mom-hormones causes Echo to flip out, and she steals the baby, believing she is protecting her child. Then she gives it back when the dad changes his mind about having an Active au pair/wet nurse. Meanwhile, Madeline Costley doesn't want to go back to the Dollhouse for a medical exam. But then she does. She tells Paul she is "not sad" and he may or may not believe it.

Janani: Upfront, I gotta say...that was one fug baby. I'm sorry, baby. You looked like plastic. But I still believed in Echo's devotion to you, as I did in the obligingly stormy weather in her final scene with Nate - everyone knows that angry mothers go Q'ABOOM!

Madeline's baby must have been made of plastic, though, for her to be so completely over its demise. The two parallel Ballard/bereaved mother conversations undermine her claims that she's fine - if, as the episode argues, (synthetic) maternal devotion is so powerful, even unWipeable, no Dollhouse emo-modifications, let alone the "Needs" cemetery expedition from last season, will heal maternal grief completely. Madeline's a zombie, asleep-er than Echo herself, though I'm surprised that the Dollhouse provides outpatient services and something more along the lines of an anesthetization than a total memory-wipe - Madeline witnessing the Echo-freakout was pretty damn compromising. Madeline and Echo will surely experience a parallel reawakening this season, Echo within the Dollhouse, Madeline without...and that Paul and Madeline are not finished by a longish shot. This would confirm and elaborate on a suspicion we've had for awhile now - that you're never completely done with the Dollhouse, and it's never completely done with you. The decision to enter it remains an indelible entry in your mortal itinerary.

(We can discuss in a bit the wisdom of using generic "maternal instinct" as a plot device, as for more unfortunate babies the instinct [instinct for what?] can swing other ways. All they're trying to argue that the homo sapiens body is and always will be more powerful than Topher's gland-handing, and this could have been demonstrated using any number of commonly accepted "drives".)

Chris: Besides just returning Madeline to the fold of this story, "Instinct" begins to go several places we've specifically wanted Dollhouse to go. What Topher does in the upstairs room is fiddle with body chemistry. Though the writers have not put the words in anyone's mouth, it always has been this way, so it is rather silly that the reality has not occurred to Topher until just now -- particularly since he affected Echo with hysterical blindness in "True Believer". Senator Perrin is quicker on the uptake than the boy genius, and immediately upon skimming the Dollhouse dossier, he recognizes that Rossum Corp. could have cured his mother's Alzheimer's disease. If the chair allows full synapse control, Topher should, yes, be able to cure cancer, cure Apserger syndrome, epilepsy and migraines. The troubling/fascinating Buffyverse tendency to discuss body/mind/soul as discrete units is being rapidly demolished by Dollhouse.

The episode features a client who not only questions the effectiveness of employing an Active after a disturbing glitch in the plan, but realizes the entire Engagement was a terrible idea. Poor Daddy Nate also breaks what one assumes is client protocol #1, and tells Echo directly that she is not who she thinks she is, a conversation starter that, given human nature, should be irresistible to every client every week. When paired with an earlier scene of Emily-Echo discovering family photos of Nate's deceased wife, the feasibility of the Dollhouse program is called into question in another way. There are reasons Engagements are short-term affairs, linked to Dollhouse's self-imposed limitations on fantasy science. While other nefarious person manufacturing conspiracies of vaster resource, like Tyrell Corporation or the Machine society of The Matrix, set up watertight backstories and plant physical traces of the imaginary life lived, the Dollhouse just plugs the personality data into the brain and hopes for the best. Again, very trusting of the Dollhouse to count on clients not blowing their cover and short circuiting the Active hardware, but the methods tell us something about the epistemic strategies and assumptions of the Dollhouse, and maybe of Dollhouse. Though the episode is about "instinct," the plot swings on Emily receiving information from outside herself -- observation of Nate's interaction with the baby, the cache of photos, the overheard phone call, etc. Feelings, self-knowledge and body-memory aren't the sum of reality, we also rely on external data to confirm our reality. And sure enough, though Echo necessarily has misinterpreted all that information, the inborn (well, Imprinted) drives win out.

On the slapstick ethics lesson front, the knee-slapper scene in "Instinct" is bloody-nosed Topher marveling that "I outplayed myself! It's like chess!," and Paul countering that it is "not 'like chess,' like 'Echo is in pain and may be in danger.'" Delight with his own skill is par for course with this kid, as is framing a situation gone impressively awry as an achievement (an experiment with results is of vital interest, even if the result is not as predicted). We've seen Topher here before in another way, back when he "corrected" Ballard that the human brain is, indeed, "like a computer." Maybe he did not get proper closure on the Whiskey situation, but certain lessons about mad science's consequences for the human soul have not gotten through to the supposed genius.

"Instinct" is also proof that the foundation of the Dollhouse concept is not inherently unsound. It is an engaging, rich Engagement of the Week story, even if it hinges on the Baby in Peril, a suspense device older than D.W. Griffith and Edison put together.

JS: In general it is a good idea to come to the aid of Imperiled Babies, and thank goodness we still lack the technology to confirm whether a baby will grow up to be [insert notorious jackass]. (Although some benign variant might have helped predict the Alpha-slashings.)

It's a good thing you went on vacation, because it took me time to warm up to this episode. Emily’s sprinted, oxytocin-fueled arc through Los Angeles cut the most spectacular swath, but I've been thinking more about how space-heart-time was lacerated in the process of bringing her back at all. To add to your point about the necessary short-termness of Engagements, almost all the Engagements we've been privy to before Season 2 have required little to no social orchestration. Actives are often out and about in public, but they've mostly interacted directly with clients (Richard Connell, Joel Mynor, Adelle) or with those they're programmed to beat up or intimidate in the line of duty. We've mostly been shown 100% romance or 100% work. To the world at large they are anonymous faces, corps of NSA agents or other aloof professionals (though this does beg the question of whether Dolls' friends and families ever see them on the street and, if so, how the hell they react). If they do have to penetrate a social world, make friends and allies, they can begin from scratch, introducing themselves as strangers (Esther, Margaret, Mellie). Kellies - conveniently placed best friends, social buffers/safeguards - haven't really been necessary.

"Vows", where Roma Klar waited out a courtship and engagement of at least a few months' duration, floated the question of friendship and social networks - were all those "relatives" at the wedding Dolls too? But “Instinct”’s Emily is being reintroduced, if not exactly reintegrated, into a world which has already mourned her and moved on. (At least ghost-Margaret knew to watch her step; to jump to another show for a minute, resurrected Buffy was luckier to live in a world with a more flexible definition of “death.”) The puzzle of Emily's re-incorporation draws attention to something that may thwart the Dollhouse as surely as Perrin or a rival lab or any limitation of physics: the resiliency of human webs, whose nodes and spokes usually grow out of shared history, accretions of interactions, small judgments, minute gestures of trust - hard to build, hard to destroy, hardest to repair after a node is ripped out. You can’t just plop people back into the world – they have to be woven back in. In Nate's case, leave aside the macro problem of concealing a recently dead woman from her neighbors; even leave aside the problem of bonding her with a strange baby, which Topher sort-of solved. By the time you bring Rebecca or Margaret or Emily or Buffy back from the dead, their survivors, no matter how hard they try, are no longer the same people who mourned at graveside.

Non-Imprinted brains are beyond Topher’s sphere of control, and the show’s fresh acknowledgement of this, via Nate, feels like a clear transition to larger ambitions. Season 1 dealt largely with the adventures of atomized individuals in the field, people who could be Engaged briefly, retrieved, and made to disappear without baffling and wounding more than one or two people. Just two episodes into season 2, I think we're on the road to more complicated enmeshments, impostors at higher social tiers with far more people to deceive, Imprints whose actions affect not only paying clients but the tilt and rotation of their social spheres. Surely we’ll soon see artists resurrected to complete unfinished lifework and guarantee grander legacies, or heads of state temporarily impersonated to avert political meltdown. We’re already seeing this on the antagonist-front too - last season we had lone cats Ballard/Alpha as antagonists/infiltrators, and now Perrin, with all the glory that’s his to lose.

And what about the epilogue that wasn't: Mellie’s seamless withdrawal, now Madeline’s ambivalent return? Things look good on the material end, but otherwise her reintegration looks like a soulless flop. Don’t her friends have a few questions for her about where she's been, or where all the money came from? One of the pleasures of this show is watching its almost limitless latitude strain against these mundane concerns. If the writers are near-omnipotent Tophers and Adelles, churning out spies and scientists and singers and Dushkubots at will, realworld logic keeps throwing a lot of interesting obstacles their way.

Speaking of Adelle. That speech to Nate about parenting was interesting. The woman is so full of melodious reassurances! I mean, she of all people should know what happens when a baby grows up without a mother. Sometimes he tries boldly to go where no baby should go:

CS: First things first, there does seem to be a story problem with the company policy of keeping Actives in the area from which they were recruited. It is baffling that Echo would have been sent to Caroline's alma matter in "Echoes" (an idea that flits through the episode but is not addressed as a plot hole) or that Mellie lived a virtual 9-to-5 on the city streets where she used to walk as Madeline. Los Angeles is big and relatively impersonal, but it is nothing like anonymous -- on a day out, I'm bound to bump into five people I know by name, two dozen I recognize by face.

Perhaps the terrible pull of Instinct itself, rather than the client, is closer to being a villain in this story. Papa Nate is both the catalyst for the problem, having commissioned the perpetual baddie, the Dollhouse -- their sin this time out being the gall to toy with the forces of maternal instinct -- and the solution. Refreshingly, "Instinct" doesn't make a case for that instinct as either the noblest quality of the species or a primitive, animalistic drive mucking up human logic. It is just a fact of parenthood, one among several elements that cause us to be effective parents. In a lengthy teardown of Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (dude, with a title like that, you're asking for it!), Pauline Kael touched an idea pertinent here (she was using it to combat film theorists' reductivist tendencies):

"It is like the old nonsense that man is what differentiates him from the other animals -- which is usually said to be his soul or his mind or his ability to transmit information from one generation to the other, etc. But man is also what he shares with the other animals. And if you try to reduce him to some supposed quality that he alone has, you get an absurdly distorted view of man. And the truth is, as we learn more about animals and about man, the less we are sure what differentiates him from other animals, or if it's so very important."

At Adelle's tea party with Nate her duty is to placate him and steer him away from blaming the Dollhouse for their errors (numero uno of which might have been, yet again, taking this job at all). Among the techniques are simultaneous guilt tripping and flattery of the client, and comparison of adoption to kidnapping. Between Emily and Adelle, Nate does recover his capacity to parent his child, and discusses it rationally in the denouement, a climax that is all conversation (albeit with a baby held at knifepoint) and no kickboxing. Perhaps his "instinct" kicks in when the child is in danger, but that is not what it sounds like. Nate expresses disgust and regret at his own selfishness, a temporary failure of nerve via grief-induced blindness, and seems to realize he can love and care for his son just fine. The episode is structured as such that in the first half Emily's maternal drive is the finer thing than Nate's awful logic (i.e. I can't love this baby + the baby needs love = make a fake mom! and this isn't working --> get rid of them both), while in the second half Nate's better judgment rules while Echo's berserk biochemistry places the kid at hazard. Rather than make a Nature or Nurture argument about proper parenting, "Instinct" would indicate that we cannot be so schematic, and, really the answer is "Both."

Though the guest star story is about a dad accepting his role, it is largely about mothers, and not really a "Dad" episode. "Instinct" does not make obvious parallels (maybe Mutant Enemy is sick of them already) to Dollhouse's inbuilt father metaphors: Handler/Active relationshps (the Bear Father), Topher (the creator father, the father who frames your morality and belief systems) or Clive Ambrose (the Founding Father, the tyrant, the destroyer). It may, however, offer Adelle as flip-side to Emily's rampaging instincts. Master smooth talker and keeper of the house rules, we see her mother Madeline, convincing her to get a check-up, and nudge Nate into accepting his parental duties through cajoling, reassurance and (that powerful tool of salespeople and moms alike) making it seem like it's his idea. After meeting resistance, Adelle practically gets Madeline into the office by saying "I'm the mom, that's why."

JS: It may be that every interaction between two people of unequal status, where the more powerful one takes an intense interest in the less powerful/experienced one, can be tagged as "parenting." We touched on this in our discussion of "Echoes", but at root parenting is about influencing another creature's progress, whether as a remote navigator or a hands-on coach or a saboteur (roles available to both genders). (And the mothering models of good cop, cajoler and/or diplomat are just a few of many alternatives to going feral.) I'll go ahead and say it, and welcome criticism/testimony from any EK readers with children: Emily doesn't yet qualify as a parent, just a guardian. Her baby is still an extension of herself. The episode puts "instinct" and "young motherhood" in its own version of quotation marks, hugely exaggerating and perhaps even satirizing the feelings glibly predicted for young mothers and endlessly rehashed in Not-Without-My-Baby narratives (where young men are mostly left to map their own rituals, ethics, and emotional parameters of fatherhood, reweaving and reintegrating themselves into the family web). We're disturbed when fictional or real women can do without their babies, but I've known women as ambivalent about their infant children as Nate is, and Emily is a cartoon in a (tragically) cartoonish story; as such, her story is not about the true challenges of parenting but about the enormity of Topher's design miscalculation. At root, he Imprinted her with an attachment and drive that made her run like hell to save an unfathomably precious object. What she doesn't know is that she's run this course before.

There are many chase and pursuit scenes in Dollhouse, but I can recall two times that Echo ran that fast or far or singlemindedly to save a human "life": a) in "Omega", to save her wedge and b) in "The Target", to save her own skin from Richard Connell. (That forest run, though, is probably the only one where she experienced anything like Emily's level of anguish and fear). "The Target" could have been titled "Instinct" to different effect - the survival instinct of Caroline overcoming the girlfriend Imprint of Jock Girl. Not Nate, not Instinct, but Topher is the villain of this week, but I still have to wonder whose "nature" intervened at the moment when Emily decided to return the child. (Which would also be the moment in which, making the best decision for a child not her own, she truly became a parent.) If implanted "instinct" is too strong for Topher to control, and too indelible to Wipe, what is strong enough to neutralize it?...is it the equanimity and altruism of Caroline, at last identifying a situation where it's better for her to back off? Caroline is not known for her restraint, and her Rescue Mania is as strong as any drive we've seen on the show. But maybe it's being tempered by an increasing (unconscious) awareness of when to let go.

(Just don’t let go when wheels are involved!!!).

CS: Agh, don't show me things like that. I didn't like seeing Dushku waving a prop knife around a baby's head, either! It must be some kind of... INSTINCT!!

Vacation With Manny

2009-10-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

The flow of posts through Exploding Kinetoscope is mercifully thin and irregular during normal months. Adding to the October blockage, I am currently on vacation and far away from Movie City, U.S.A. So I will be spread thin-to-gone for another week.

I still feel compelled to remind readers that October 1 saw the first publication of The Library of America's Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Certainly this hardcover treasure-slab is the film book event of the year, and it is highly unlikely that even the most diehard Farber scholar or fan has tracked down all of the represented material before. It is suggested that you stop reading blogs until you are done reading Farber on Film. It will teach you how to write about movies like a real man!

Here I am being transfixed by the book in Lawrence, Kansas!

Active Engagement: Dollhouse 2.1 - "Vows"

2009-10-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

Being a regular collection of notes, intrusive fragments and episodic memories regarding each installment of the FOX teledrama Dollhouse (J. Whedon, creator).

The Engagement: In convoluted and marginally effective plan, Paul Ballard has Echo imprinted as an undercover FBI agent to help him bust an arms dealer that he could never catch through official channels. To pull it off, Echo has to get married! Also she has to get beaten up by both the bad guy and the good guy, but Ballard succeeds in pummeling Echo into glitching... kung-fu glitching, that is! Back at the ranch, Dr. Saunders torments Topher in symbolic ways like showing him film clips of Elsa Lanchester and flooding his office with lab rats, finally breaching his most sensitive personal boundary with inappropriate touching. In the end, identity crisising Whiskey heads out of town, while Paul and Echo decide to team up and locate the brains of all the Dolls.

Chris: Vow: You will not notice Dollhouse budget cuts when there are exploding cars and Elliot Smith songs.

Vow: Topher's lab assistant, Ivy, who we may be worried was off hanging out with Judy Winsow, is alive, well, and gainfully employed at the Dollhouse.

Vow: The oath taken by "Epitaph One" stands solid. Amidst all the vows being taken and broken, the known future hangs like a vulture over a playground. Whatever Senator Perrin is crusading for or against, he's not likely to expose the Dollhouse. Whatever Paul and Echo-mega have brewing, we know it doesn't succeed anytime soon. Wherever Doc Whiskey escapes to, we know she's coming back.

Vow: Alexis Denisof!

Hey Janani, why is this episode really called "Vows"?

Janani: …because Vows come after Engagements?

Hey Chris,

How: did Saunders come up with those weird ideas for expressing her sorrow to Topher, and which one was the most successful? How much did she remind you of Dawn Summers lashing out after learning about the Key? How much did she not? How will she generate meaning now, and will the world outside the Dollhouse provide her the adequate raw materials -- social, intellectual, emotional -- to make it stick? What will drive her back, and will it be related to the fact that what enabled her to leave (free will, ability to oppose) is what brings people to the DH in the first place?

How: Is the show going to survive Amy Ackerless? Until she drove off, I didn't realize how much better she emotes than anybody else on the show! Saunders, please succumb to your phobias and come back!

How: does Whisky’s theory about the fulfillment of rising to a challenge -- working for love, for anything at all really -- sound to an adult baby like Topher? In fact, how do the staff, especially the young ones like Topher and Ivy, reconcile to the fact that, unlike Actives, they’re probably going to be working underground for life? (At the same time -- having worked in there, where would you go from there? Is there life outside the Dollhouse at all, for anyone, Active or not?)

How: are they still allowing glitchety-witchety Echo to still go out on assignments ever? Why was it necessary to create an intermediary detective persona rather than simply Imprint an innocent woman’s mind and then program her to obtain the needed information? How much of a liquid mess was that Marriage Engagement? Even if the title "Vows" frames all wishful attempts to predict and codify our future behavior -- in love and other endeavors -- I thought the show had quit (as BtVS eventually quit) using the Engagements as parallel prosceniums to clumsily flesh out metaphors that would better be treated inside the Dollhouse itself (a la "Spy" or "Needs"). In our "Briar Rose" discuss, you described the 'House as "a fairy tale castle, the castle turned dungeon, a self-contained ecosystem, and finally an invisible place where one can walk and yet not be walking... womb, nursery, cemetary, cult compound, haven, Eden, home and prison in one episode"; by this point has the 'House itself become the equivalent of an all-purpose black box theater where every human drama from birth to rebirth will be played out? And how does this jive with William's comment (on 1.13) that Topher himself -= a proto-Whedon?

How: does Tempura Joe make human tempura without harming the ingredients? And how has Mutant Enemy not outgrown its nervous-middle-school-giggly approach to even minor sexual eccentricities? They ought to be spanked!

(Very lightly, of course.)

CS: Somewhere in there was a straight answer! Among developing plot tangles, there is a theme, that one of the ways we attempt to Imprint ourselves is to take vows, state intentions, make the plans for our own Engagements, out loud and with solemn promise. That is an apt topic for a season premiere, where in arc-shaped narrative the storyteller is normally setting up the board, foreshadowing and establishing expectations to pay off or defy. Every writer surely understands this act, but Mutant Enemy casts it in the form of a Covenant of the Story-Maker: here are the people and their world, we will not betray a certain integrity of the fiction, this is what the story is about, and we will make it as well as we are able. They try to be their best.

I do feel some of the divide between Engagement stories and behind-the-curtain Dollhouse drama has been healed. They will always parallel, double, rhyme with or invert one another in some way, which is the way Mutant Enemy tells its multitracked tales (to be honest, it is the way most ensemble cast, arc-oriented drama operates, ME is just makes more elegant television than Desperate Housewives). I don't know that the characteristic is a weakness at all, and late period Buffy the Vampire Slayer like "Same Time, Same Place", "Sleeper", "The Killer in Me", etc. continue using fantasy conflicts as enlargements of Inner Character Drama (gag! and yes, I picked three junked-up episodes on purpose!).

"Vows" makes a particularly good fitted join between Ballard and Klar, a right angle with Echo at the corner. Most pointedly, Klar is fake-bound in a desecration of marriage while Ballard ends up taking the sacred oath of the Handler. Railroad-switch studies in men for whom ends justify means, their pivot points are scenes in which they bash Echo in the face. We can't possibly feel unconflicted just because Ballard has his version of noble intentions. His arrangement with the Dollhouse is already failing Ballard. There is no way to use the resources without serious ethical compromise, and Ballard, in roughly increasing transgression, enacts vigilante justice, slugs a girl in the head, brainwashes a person, and pimps her to a criminal, leading to violence on her person (and, depending on our charitability, cooperates with slavers). He does not even catch Klar himself. You can't make a golem without getting some clay on your hands. Among the highlights of smooth construction: that ending in which Whiskey exits, in New Age parlance, to Find Herself, while Ballard and Echo bond and agree to find everyone else.

Ballard and Klar meet in the middle. The story on the opposite side is Topher and Whiskey. Along their edge, Topher makes a vow of negation: they will not know each other. He swears off knowing Whiskey, but they move uncomfortably close together, meanwhile Ballard and EchOmega swear to team up to fight the good fight, while he essentially talks himself into the value of forcing her to be someone else.

A bloodstain which it is nice to see Topher forced to recognize on his hands via Whiskey, though the idea hardest for him to choke out is that her Imprint is designed to disagree with him because -- gasp! -- he might be wrong.

A few nicely mingled related topics, then, of plot contrivances and ways those holes may be filled. It should seem equally easy for Topher to strap Whiskey in the chair and hose her down with an upgraded Saunders 2.1. Related, is Adelle's explanation that she is indeed interested in the unique case of Echo, and that observing Active behavior is as much about research (for Ambrose, surely R&D) as it is the current service. While collecting the data is proving harrowing for young Master Brink (and he's probably going to be deep double stuff with DeWitt after the doctor bugs out), he is observing Whiskey in a similar way. There are finely motivated reasons why he isn't simply fixing her Imprint, namely that as Topher talks Whiskey through the act of losing and reconfiguring herself, she's forcing him to do the same. The crucial exchange is when Whiskey says she feels like shit, Brink explains/brags: "You're human," and she shoots back a skunkeyed "Don't flatter yourself." Topher's right in essence, but so is Whiskey, insofar as she means/can mean that her humanity is not Topher's accomplishment to boast about.

I'm glad it is relevant this week, because I intended to bring it up regarding "Epitaph One", and it moves straight into the tease about Senator Daniel Perrin: are there reasonable, positive, beneficial applications of this technology? It does seem that Dollhouse policy expressly forbids what I imagine would be the most popular uses -- a Rain Man Active for defrauding casinos, an immortality vessel (model in development stages!), and any variation on Lacuna Inc. services. The closest to unconflicted use of Topher's lab that I can come up with is that he should be able to eliminate severe mental and behavioral disorder (I still find this pretty problematic). Unless I miss my bullshit-guess about how the equipment works, Rossum should be able to cure Alzheimer's disease (that, I do not find problematic).

Naturally, in this episode about everyone becoming the things they hate, the Chair is for making Sierra gripe that she's uncomfortable with Asians. Meanwhile, Paul Ballard finds the most convenient tool for helping Caroline help herself is to punch her over and over.

I'll tell you how the show can survive with minimized Amy Acker: Alexis Denisof!

JS: I heard Rossum has a clearance on Alexis Denisof Imprinted with Winona Horowitz ca. 1988, if you’re interested.

So let’s talk about how we like to punch Ballard over and over. Anybody who has followed this essay series from the beginning (HI JORDAN) will have noted that Ballard gets a straight-up pants-down whipping from us almost every week! Reasons why: the show sets him as an Everyman whose obliviousness to his own moral inconsistencies becomes a fairly regular teaching point; unlike the Dollhouse, he has no secrets from us (his surprise and ours are synched up); and it’s honestly just really fun. But maybe it’s time to give him a hand up.

A guy or gal turns off the flashlight, tucks it in a waistband, and ventures into the unknown. Does every such explorer of the dark sport a tissue graft from Agent Mulder? Ballard is not as smart or intuitive as that fella, and he has a patent distaste for mystery for its own sake -- as we saw during his skirmishes with Topher in "Omega", he attacks intricate moral dilemma with simple, cloddish tools. "Man on the Street" and "Briar Rose" have exposed his save-the-girl quest as a cliché, but intimate comments and jealousy push-ups aside, this isn't really about the girl anymore, and I wonder if it really ever was. I watch Ballard struggle to translate murky urges and fantasies of effectiveness (heroism? gallantry? world-healing potency?) into a sequence of fruitful acts on a timeline, I laugh at him for jogging after arms dealers (while you nabbed him, Paul, another dozen are preparing to set up shop in his place), and yet... his arc seems irreversible, even forgivable. There's no returning aboveground (you could argue, even, that life's arc is itself an irreversible odyssey underground). Where else is he supposed to go? What's more exciting, provoking, or subconscious-engaging than the place he's in right now? "Man on the Street" also framed the Dollhouse as a mirror of one's own deepest needs, an abyss staring back into you with an occasional morbid wink; you learn a lot about children from how they treat their dolls, whether they serve them tea and cookies, saw them in half, scream for more dolls, embark on a quest to visit the doll manufacturer and demand an end to sweatshop sweatin’. In the case of Paul Ballard, he puts them in a chair, turns out the light, and waits for them to speak. For hours. Days. Months.

I think a part of him likes the silence.

I think a part of him likes the blindness.

He's not a Dominic, not a Mynor, not a Klar, a Brink... no, not even a Langton. He is more interesting than Langton. And anyway, he’s here; he’s trying to get something done with his hours. He’s a motherfucking masochist for placing himself near the woman-body he’s attracted to, in situations where she’s going to be romancing others -– I enjoyed watching Roma sass him about that and give us a different female take than the conventional one -- and it's telling that a romantic Echo Engagement, over and above a sexual one, one in which the Imprint herself is feigning emotions, is the one that ruins his evenings. But it's still not a love story. In an echo of "Where's Kepler" -- where's Caroline? Where is the Caroline you hope to know? Do you really want to find out? Will living in possibilities for so long enable you to restore her unified, ineradicable personality when the time comes? Flash to the parallel situation with Whiskey and Topher, Topher’s words…”You don’t know me. That’s the contract. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. Not fully, not ever.”

In the CONTRACT? Does this mean Topher is contractually required to program in some uncertainty? Does it hold only for Whisky, or for everyone, even his birthday-friend Sierra, even Echo herself? What does go on in the dead of night at Topher’s console -- do principles seep into his work at first recreationally or aesthetically (“this would make a better character, a better work of art”) or did he bring those to the table when he began -– in which case I’ll have to reconsider the manchild from his very first scene?

I wonder, too, about Topher's relationship with uncertainty.

CS: It looks like Topher's private quarters are... in the heart of the computer hardware? It looks like he sleeps inside HAL 9000's brain. Jimi Hendrix used to sleep with his guitar. Having lived in one-room apartments with nothing but a mattress, a computer and a drafting table, I can attest to the romance and benefits of this kind of living situation for an artist. For other sorts of work, I imagine this would be claustrophobic and torturous, but for the creative person the sort of sloppy, perverse variant asceticism forces you to get intimate with your equipment.

Surely everyone's favorite chuckle of the episode is Whiskey's lament that "my whole existence was constructed by a sociopath in a sweater vest." But the scene is about how this dilemma is and has been forcing Topher to empathize with her. His entire job being to understand human nature as well as possible, Topher may be an asshole, is certainly a twerp, and his default setting (or, depending on one's sympathy, his coping mechanism) is glib amorality. But he's not a sociopath.

Another goat-getting accusation comes from DeWitt, who suggests that Ballard's choice to free November is a form of throwing her away after he's used her up. Likely this is easy for Paul to brush off as a gross cast in ugly light his decision to work against the Dollhouse from inside. But it does emphasize that with his choice, Paul continues to use Echo, and subjects her to no small indignity and abuse in the process. He's long ago become uninterested in simply returning Caroline to her civilian life. He could just walk out the door with her and hold a press conference. The Vow they make in the end is not "Paul swears to help Caroline escape" but to work together to "find them all." So he has a self-flagellating pedestal-placing crush on Echo? Well duh, but one can imagine worse partial motivations. While the staff likes to rib Ballard about what they perceive as futile sexual obsession with Echo, the funnier joke is that Paul-as-Client lives out multiple want/needs at once. His private Engagement is set up so he can pretend to be a heroic G-man, and finally close a case! DeWitt may or may not recognize how sharply Ballard is feeling the pain of his compromised posture, but the richest irony of the agreement is that when DeWitt explains she is allowing Ballard these crime fighting Engagements in the name of scientific observation, they are both doing research on how to best annihilate one another.

Speaking of contracts and vows, those mutating refrains, the scripts between Imprinter and Doll, Handler and Doll, etc., have the empty vessel quality of Beckett dialogue, the simplicity of pop culture catchphrase and a primal viscerality like "Mommy and I are one." Front-loaded with meaning, they also mean something different every time they are repeated -- what about a "Hush"-like experimental episode in which the only spoken dialogue is variants on Imprint scripts?

JS: That would be terrific, although I wonder also if every Dollhouse season will insist on taking some time to settle into its morose, Engagement-of-the-Week routine before bringing on the variants.

I'd also love to see:

-an episode exclusively from a blank-Active POV
-an episode with non-omniscient voice-overs, either as punctuation or as full-on braided monologues
-an episode where every Active is mobilized a la "Echoes" (maybe they were already in "Vows"? is that how they filled out Echo!Roma's wedding party at her fake wedding?)
-an episode where we watch the process of Imprint harvesting and creation (way past due)
-an episode featuring the role-scrambling and -redistribution BtVS did on a regular basis. In "Echoes" we already got a sneak peek of this, but don't tell me you wouldn't die to see an Adelle-Imprinted Topher or a Topher-Imprinted Echo! Or even the thing that every lead on BtVs got to deal with, and that we saw briefly in "Grey Hour" -- a double! Topher vs. Topher! Caroline v. Caroline! Caroline vs. several Carolines! Get me three tofu dogs and a nacho trough, I wanna settle in for this one!
-in the same vein, an episode where Paul Ballard meets Paul Ballard, gets confused, gets in his own way, beats up his own self, and cocks up another brilliant plan... again.

In fact, that seems like a natural next phase of complication and storybuilding: computerizing and liberating the minds of the current staff from their own bodies. Topher has probably backed his precious self up somewhere, at the very least to take over for him on days he's sick. I'd be surprised if Rossum hadn't required it of him, or at the very least insured his skull for millionbillions.

That's a question we've never really gotten into: how does Young Master view this technology in relation to himself and his prospects? We're beginning to sense his self-demarcated limits, the places he won't go, the things he won't do or regrets doing, and we've seen his lack of enthusiasm in the face of Clive Ambrose. Regardless of how that scene did play out, maybe Topher is not and will never be the type to download himself into ten bodies and be happy about it.* That could be rich material to explore - the likelihood that, left to himself, the perfector of this technology is himself too attached to the idea of the One Topher, the One genius, to create a wedge for himself.

In terms of other applications, a lot seems to turn on the issue that it is dangerous to Imprint a non-Wiped mind. All these minds need bodies to walk around in, like that beastie on Angel who leaps from host to host, but they have to drive out the existing consciousness first. That could lead to exploitation of naturally Wiped minds; I could see more unfortunate Alzheimer's and Huntington's patients -- or even people in coma states - becoming commodities for Wiping and recruitment into an Active corps, unless they were considered too old or damaged. Also, regarding the issue of labor and manpower: the Tech can create the perfect person for a job, and it can make as many of them as are required. Were the technology to become widely available and affordable, companies would never need to do job interviews again; they could just create specs for an "ideal" employee and keep recycling it through several bodies' worth of hirings. (I'm behind, though -- this has already happened, in terms of the amount of human work that can now be done through computer magics).

There could be recreational applications: spend a week as a guy! spend a week as a Nobel Laureate! Great Minds could be kept around forever for their input (creating a natural caste system of those-worth-backing-up vs. those-unworthy), but they'd still be confused when they woke up into a strange world. We might see the works of authors who had hundreds of years to complete their oeuvres rather than a few decades. I could go on.

Anyway. I wanted to return briefly to the issue of Dollhouse stage-ness. Haven't we talked before about the possibilities of adapting Dollhouse for live performance? Maybe I thought about it but forgot to bring it up. Truly, the show is so little about the big Engagement/field trips that go KABOOM, and so much about those intra-Dollhouse dynamics; the Dollhouse interior itself is practically a two-tier stage. I can easily see the different zones onstage: the Chair, the Office, the Attic, The Outside, scenes rotating between each setting; nothing about it would be naturalistic, of course, it would have to rely on the motifs, refrains, and choruses you mention, perhaps even incorporating a chorus. What do you think?

Finally, an aside on the performances of that odd, flat in-House dialogue: I used to have a disease where no dialogue sounded sufficiently serious unless voiced by someone several decades older than me with many garlands of theatrical training (preferably the likes of Sir Ian or Sivaji Ganesan [an elder of Indian cinema]). That is some serious age- and class-based chauvinism on my part, but it was still weird for me to watch American-accented people our own age -- Amy Acker is a couple years older than you, Fran Kranz a couple months younger than me -- throwing themselves into that wrenching "don't flatter yourself" exchange. To my ears, Acker totally owned it -- she always has, and has been a grave ballast for the story for quite some time. Kranz, I think, continues to go belly-up like a kid in a student play. This surely requires not only better and subtler acting on his part, but my outgrowing my fuddy-duddy notion of who gets to play a Beckett-esque role - which faces and personae can convincingly interpret those Classics of moral anguish + mystification + existential bafflement.

*Yes, I am sure I will be proven wrong about this. My physics class in college was full of them!

CS: Since we're early in the season, speculating and the writers are taking their vows, the material I would really like to see -- the most glaring gap in the show -- is any kind of personal history and extracurricular lives of the non-Doll cast. No one of taste and distinction likes the word "backstory," but that is what was missing in Season One. Backstory doesn't need to be Origin Story and Full Biography, but some further context for any of these people would be useful. I believe the first season used this eerie lack of character exposition to murky-clean establish of the Dollhouse staff (Ballard's story was eased into more traditionally), allowing the audience to discover them without history or outside lives, facing the characters like a newly Wiped mind rising from the chair.

Whaddya know, the one week they show us a clip from a Frankenstein movie is the only week I don't talk about Frankenstein

As for the actors, well, I guess you're not invited to Shakespeare reading night at the Whedon homestead. I wonder if Charisma Carpenter ever played the real Cordelia...

While Fran Kranz is busy gesticulating, Tahmoh Penikett is, mathematically, twice as hilarious by playing a man with no sense of humor and no reason to smile whatsoever. Acker's (surely temporary) departure is a huge loss, and if the image of Whiskey driving off to wherever the road takes her is affecting, it is at least partially because we will miss the performer.

But don't worry!...

A Murder of Crows - Tonight

2009-10-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

Reader persons who are lucky enough to live in Los Angeles (as seen in many film and television productions) may be interested in attending this fine art show, which opens this very Saturday, October 3 at 6 PM. The show features many luminaries of contemporary art and comics.

The show has nothing to do with the art of the moving picture, of course, but among tangential reasons to post it here, the collection is curated by Linda Pine, and one of the participants is world-class Criterion Collection designer Eric Skillman (who has a rad picture of some unfortunate goldfish).

Also, I have pieces representing the esteemed letters F and Y, but I hope that is not too strong a deterrent. There is booze, if that makes up for it.

More informations at Gallery Meltdown and Meltdown Comics.

Active Engagement: Dollhouse 1.13 - "Epitaph One"

2009-09-27T10:43:00.000-07:00

Being a regular collection of notes, intrusive fragments and episodic memories regarding each installment of the FOX teledrama Dollhouse (J. Whedon, creator).

The Engagement: In the not-too-distant future, 2019 AD, the world has turned into 1990: The Bronx Warriors, but plagued by rampant and malicious Imprinting, and Wiping. A raggedy-taggedy group of survivalists find the abandoned Dollhouse facilities, and plan to hole up like it was the Monroeville Mall. The ~~hitlist of horror clichés~~ post-apocalyptic thrills and spills come fast and furious with stalk-n-slash shower murders and evil-cute little girls. The "Actuals" follow a breadcrumb trail of flashbacky-Imprints left by Caroline, providing glimpses of the Doll-'verse between 2009 and 2019. In these tantalizing peeks, Dr. W. Saunders is scarless, Topher has gone bazonka, Caroline and Paul are friends, and Paul is all smug about it. At the end, a Caroline backup copy is squirted into a prepubescent girl and everyone leaves!

DALLAS 1.13: "EPITAPH ONE"

Janani: Just in time for all of its mysteries to be undermined by the arrival of Season 2... it's your hastily considered review of "Epitaph One"!

Last season I made a mental petition to Joss Whedon to blow up the physical Dollhouse, like he did Sunnydale High.

When I reflect back on that wish, I see that what I wanted wasn't so much a destroyed building as a chance to see everything within the building -- bodies, ideas, technologies, privileged knowledge -- escape, breach security, flee the tight artificial complacent confines of The Chair and The Lab and The Handlers, burst barriers, surge and sprawl out and hyperextend. Order unravelling to disorder: nature's course, in concert with the body-brain games played in "Omega" that demolish the security of terms like "you," "me," "ours," "them," "not-me," "not-you." All systems are down: security protocols, law and order, the assurance of discrete consciousness and sanctuary inside your own mind! All of which seems to beg that immortal question:

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THE FENCES AREN'T ELECTRIFIED?

I keep returning to your thought about sci-fi stories defining high concepts as "failures" based on disastrous outcomes rather than shakiness - logistical or moral - in the concepts themselves. Even before the various breakdowns in Season 1, we (and every other viewer of the show) approached the Dollhouse as Inherently Problematic (as did the writers). As such, the terrors of Epitaph One - the instant Imprinting, Active armies - don't come from left field, and aren't the central or most important Revelations of the episode. They're logical extensions, expansions, enlargements, reapplications of the Tech applied by Topher, in more contained ways, in 2009.

What fascinated me most, in the end, were not the many too-late, too-weak expressions of regret (Topher, Adelle, etc.), nor the feeble attempts at resisting Tech and retaining discrete identity (birthmarks). Nor was it the interesting use of several genres' worth of tropes (madwoman in the house, demon child, woman offed in the shower). Nope -- I keep returning to the glee of Ambrose, embodied in Victor, chomping delicious food and describing, reveling in, the future of Imprintation. So much to chew on (ahem) there: the Tech didn't really escape like a raptor, it was showed the door; we get an additional sense of Adelle's restraint, how deeply the fate of Tech varies according to who holds the reins and authorization; we get literal appetite conflated with an appetite for development, action, evolution, the Next Inevitable Thing. Tech isn't a villain, a Butcher, in its own right. That would be us and us alone.

Of course, the Ambrose nosh scene is a memory! So we have a couple seasons to see how it all really played out. For now, the thought of endless copies of imprint-immune Caroline, the show's chosen Indestructible Element, distributed throughout the world until time immemorial, is giving me the beginnings of a headache. What about you?

Chris: Ambrose is utterly unconvincing, of course, and the technology seems to fall into the wrong (wronger?) hands because it was always, inevitably a bad idea. His motivation, not that he needs to make explanations, sounds like what it is: greed. He doesn't play straight to an all-but-universal fear of mortality, or our collective suckerdom for Great Man stories. He pays them lip service with the the bent that immortals get more of everything. His sales pitch preys on elitism and extolls the cash-making virtue. Very rich people will be able to afford to jump bodies forever. That can't possibly sound good to anybody but very rich people, and nobody likes them.

The curious elements in that scene are DeWitt's and Brink's reactions, uneasy, appalled, protesting. I am reminded of Sierra's former handler, spitting back at Adelle: "Did you thing this wouldn't happen?" The contracts signed by incoming Dolls mean nothing. Never did. The care and well-being of the workers was always a vital cog only to keep the machine of industry running. Rossum doesn't "care" about souls or what people "need." These aren't shocking developments, they're plain-faced scrubbings of the L.A. office's best intentions. Adelle and Topher have their jobs because their extraordinary dedication and talents are useful to Rossum, as are their fuzzed-up morals and deluded rationale; they are manipulated and exploited as surely as Dolls are useful because they are young and pretty and healthy. (By the by, Season 5 of Angel explores these themes with remarkable depth and detail -- the damage done to one's heart and mind when attempting to redirect the stride of the beast from from within its belly.)

And the scene's masterstroke is that Ambrose isn't there. His body is not in the L.A. Dollhouse, and his mind is not confined to one Wipeable, shootable, smashable brain. If you criticized the not-quite-panopticon design of the Dollhouse a ways back, how's this one?: Ambrose exerts power over his captive employees while not being anywhere. Adelle and Topher (and elsewhere Saunders and Langton) look pretty helpless here. How do you reconfigure the game when you can't see or touch or get at the pieces ("We've always been above the law... only now we're also writing it"... who needs both?!)? How do you punch through thin air? You can't fight a ghost. We might actually look back to Episode One, "Ghost", for a parallel, as Eleanor-Echo faced a similar quandary and found a similar solution. You fight a ghost by being a ghost. And a Caroline ends "Epitaph One" in the place where Ambrose starts all this trouble: they're disembodied and many-embodied. Indestructible like biologically immortal hydrozoans. It isn't underlined like a Twilight Zone zapper, but the irony is that the very ab/use of the Tech that Ambrose demands is the same technique that allows the resistance fighter Caroline to survive.

There's also a poignant catch to the Hydra Imprint scheme, and it isn't much mentioned until the end of the episode (though it formed some of "Haunted" and "Gray Hour"). None of the copies of yourself are in synch with one another. "I hope we find me alive": Caroline still wants, instinctually, bone-deep, for there to be A Real Caroline. The Ambrose-Victor who ate that crab may go back to DH Central and be debriefed. Maybe he gets Wiped. Maybe Ambrose Prime "had" the experience of eating the crab, maybe not, but it can't mean as much as it does to those with of us with the brief lives Ambrose mocks and dismisses.

So yes, there is an inevitability to "Epitaph One", and at the same time, in a neat writer's trick, the whole thing dissolves into thin air. It's a series finale and and it's not. It's a season finale and it's not. It's a glimpse of the narrative timeline's future, and it's not. Whedon has hinted in interviews that since the flashback scenes are memories, they may be imperfect. But something far more clever is built into "Epitaph": the flashbacks are all blessed with ambiguous entry and exit points (did Adelle "reclaim" Victor from Ambrose? Does Caroline shoot Adelle? No and no, but you see what I mean), and furthermore, they are "memories" in a story about constructing false memories. Nothing in "Epitaph One"'s flashbacks has to be written into the official history of the Dollhouse, but everything could be.

JS: If "Epitaph One" had been released at the chronological end of Dollhouse's run, in 2012 or whenever Whedon concludes the show, and ended on Caroline's sanctimonious "Kids playing with matches, burned down the house," I would have responded by burning down my TV. But as it's placed now, we get to watch exactly how the matches were scattered, how they were lit, in what order, on whose orders, who hesitated, who abstained, and whose hands trembled in the lighting. And if the writers approach this right, we'll be reminded of the pleasures of heat and flame as well. I'm no scientist, venture capitalist, or influential steward of resources, but I do understand greed and its justifications -- though I relate more to Topher's intellectual greed than Ambrose's decadence. I'm not denying that material greed is part of Topher's makeup -- get this man a refrigerator! -- but the impulse behind statements like "That's so brilliant...why didn't I think of that?" runs deeper.

The placement and design of this character are beginning to make much more sense to me - if he had more of the characteristics of, say, Langton, he just wouldn't function as well as he does, subvert the role of Mad Scientist/Evil Genius/Scientific Sinner as well as he does. Ambrose approaches the world with a sort of suave voracity, a willingness to consume; Topher matches that with a determinedly grubby, unsuave, child's hunger to know, to improve, to revolutionize, to realize visions -- to bring Imprint time down from 2 hours to 5 minutes to instantaneous, to enable remote Wiping, to act on the world, mark it, impress it, because, dammit, that would just be so cool. These are traits and aspirations we encourage in children, even demand of them, yet suddenly fear and condemn when we see them in adults. His sobbed question, "If I can figure things out, is that curiosity or arrogance?" has no easy answer. He thinks he is the shit, but only when he succeeds; failure undoes him. In his match play, he is ultimately more concerned with whether curtains burn faster than ottomans, and with how awesome the eventual explosion will be*, than with going down in history. Iris!Caroline's huffy remark will, I hope, be revealed for what it is -- a particularly strident, honking, uncomplicated point of view that is merely one among an ensemble of motivations and arcs.

Speaking of "Caroline" -- you make a terrific point about the hordes of Carolines and Ambroses out there, unsync-ed, having un-identical experiences. Taking this just a step further: the "Caroline" stored at the Dollhouse is already obsolete. Check me if I'm missing something, but unless any of the daughter-Carolines return to store their minds at the Dollhouse for future generations to upload -- or unless Safe Haven has backup technology -- their experiences and accumulated wisdom will never be replicated, correct? It's a bizarre reversal of the arc we traced all through Season 1 -- the Compositing of Echo/Esther/Taffy/Margaret/et al. into PolyEcho, reflecting either the writers' desires or (perhaps?) our own viewerly desires to extract a narrative of an Inviolable Self - a Self that matures and acquires additional facets over time, sure, but with some hardy core element that withstands any and all erosion.

Chris, what the hell is that element? Does Whisky's phrase about "dying as you were born" even make any sense? No human in the history of the world has "died as she was born"! Obviously I'm stretching Whisky's meaning -- she means "to die unmeddled with, unimprinted, unmanipulated" -- but even that is so poignant and hopeless a wish. Aging, social life, consciousness itself make this impossible. The solution -- as is usually the solution associated with phantoms in white gowns -- seem to lie toward purity, pristineness, quasi-religious seclusion from the dirty, fucked-up world. Must an intact Mind be an isolated Mind, shuttered away in a Safe Haven? And (as per the multiple Carolines) must an intact Mind be ONE, SINGLE, DISCRETE mind with one brainstem, one brainpan, one train of thought -- or might a collective consciousness evolve with a collective immunity to Imprintation?

We say these things, of course, as viewers with precisely that sort of mind -- individually encased brains staring at individual screens, as mortal and temporary as the faces in the photos on the Dollhouse Memory Wall. "Remember us," it says. I say (a little coldly, but not to the writers, just to the faces and what they symbolize): why? Among all the other stories it enfolds, "Epitaph One" is an archaeological narrative. It's about the sweep of history and a few of its vignettes that we are pausing to explore. If S1 (and the coming seasons) concentrate on the urgency of these individual lives, 2019 places them in perspective. Besides - Caroline "reproduced." It's what we're on earth to do. It's all we can hope for - to make something that endures after our bodies are gone.

*Said as someone who has set things ablaze in the spirit of purest inquiry. Caroline could have said the same thing about people who dangle paper towels over lit gas stoves "to see what will happen."

CS: Pff. That li'l Caroline! "They tampered in God's Domain!," she might as well be tut-tutting. It sums up the folly, but doesn't tell us anything, save that Caroline doesn't understand other peoples' motivations. Kids playing with matches do not have a goal in mind, have no ambition and cannot profit from their dangerous recreation.

For a girl who has multiple personalities pumped into her brain on a weekly basis, Caroline has a tough time getting into other people's heads. We might note that Buffy Summers and Angel both find their quests hindered in early seasons by narrow worldviews and moral dualism.

But she may have pegged Topher. I don't think he subverts our genre fave mad science types at all, but he is a modern variant and thoughtfully constructed character. (On a side note, and I fall into this trap constantly, the hip modern critic tends to place extraordinary value in the Subversion of any and everything. Sometimes this indicates a genuinely radical turn in the text; often it is just coded flag-planting that we find Tradition and Conservatism dirty words. In this case, maybe we just need more convincing, fresh and science-sympathetic takes on mad scientists.) Of all Rossum or Dollhouse employees, Topher is the one who most loves the task because the science is blazing and sexy and dangerous. Strike that; he's the only one. The specific task of poking around peoples' neurons suits him because of particular social inadequacies and personal anxieties; Victor Frankenstein is psychologically right for his scientific matchbook because of anger at his society's model of God that is really a fear of death. Victor and Topher are rather different men, but both stunted adolescents who are excited/enchanted that they can hold the glowing stick in hand.

This is troubling to us because: science is awesome. Curiosity and deeper understanding of nature lead to the kind of improvement and invention that represent the species' finest achievements. We aren't people who want to see scientists punished for pushing at boundaries. No one wants to see NASA chided because Reagan wants to build an X-ray laser. And still, it is disconcerting to consider Oppenheimer denouncing his naughty leftist politics so he has the thrilling opportunity to work on the Manhattan Project: the very! biggest! match! ever! was just too cool and fun to pass up. But this is what cautionary tales and Science Amok! stories do. They bitch-slap the guilty after the fact. So the scientist succumbs to madness and curls up in a Doll Pod, or dies of pneumonia in the Arctic or stares into the flame of the Trinity test and thinks "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." When the Modern Prometheii get riled up and chant "Fire! Fire!," they could use a Butt-Head to tell them "Settle down, Beavis." That Butt-Head is going to have to come from inside themselves.

Financiers, corruptors and enablers are often punished as well, chained to a rock and eaten by their own procompsognathus for all eternity. Regarding the ark Ambrose spoke of in the kitchen, we can be sure everyone -- DH staff and audience alike -- is thinking the same thing, that it's bound to turn out to be a death ship. That's Topher's fault for building it, Adelle's fault for captaining it, Ambrose's fault for commissioning it. It's Caroline's fault for volunteering for the crew. It's everyone's fault tolerating the ship's existence, even Ahabian Paul Ballard. And that's reborn Caroline's mistake in her evaluation. This wasn't a couple of idiots ruining it for everybody, but a lot of kids and a lot of matches. In this story everyone fucked up, so in the apocalypse everyone suffers.

Know what else I'd like to see go bananas with Ambrose's fleshy Ark of Immortality? I'd like to see a perma-body client who has gone insane from the process but keeps being provided with pretty new skin. I'd like to see a neurotic 200-year old psyche trapped in a studly young body, but forever unable to leap his inner hurdles: eternal and eternally miserable. I'd like to see a violent monster locked in beautiful bones carving a chaotic swath through history, brilliant and dangerous but unable to forge meaningful connections with other people.

Wait a minute, I was thinking of Drusilla, Angel and Spike. Moving on!

So the story is over with two more-or-less simultaneous images:
-Child-Symbol-of-Humanity's-Salvation Caroline leading survivors out of the Dollhouse. The scene resonates off "Needs" and "True Believer" (here she's leading them back into a compound!) and the earlier "Epitaph" flashback of Dushku-Bodied Caroline evacuating the 'House. It is an image of hope and salvation but also loss and struggle; the story is not ended.

-The barely human Whiskey as a white angel of destruction gassing everyone left on the stage. An act of erasure and mercy. She wipes the slate and the story is ended.

One beat is about remembering and continuing, one about forgetting and fading. Do they contradict each other? Work in harmony? What I'm seeing is the pattern of "Epitaph One", something like closure but without locking the door behind you.

JS: I guess someone didn't lock that door securely enough, because "Vows" is about to come strolling through it. I'd debate Topher's novelty with you a little more, but I'm inching ever closer to the TV! See you in a bits.

CS: Well, I think the man with the Tech would fit in nicely with the cast of The Big Bang Theory, but we can worry about that for the next four months. Before I sign off, one fast note, a hope for Season Two:

The Eros/Todestrieb tensions of the finale's intercutting is strongly reminiscent of the end of Dawn of the Dead (1978)... as is the entire set-up of the post-apocalyptic survivors holing up in a Xanadu for the brain-dead. This is an interesting parallel more than a rip-off (I hate saying that and leaving it unsupported, but hey), but makes me wonder why Dollhouse has not been mining its premise's potential for satire, indeed why Whedon rarely heads to those sniper towers. Perhaps the results of his relatively broad script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) dampened his interest, perhaps the desire to wrench hearts is too overwhelming. But Whedon is so funny and astute at the art of subversion -- and he's written one great satire in "Once More With Feeling" -- that it seems like a natural fit.

ONWARD!

For Bravery: Das Unheimliche and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

2009-09-03T04:53:00.000-07:00

ACHTUNG!: You are not stepping into a movie review. Readers proceeding beyond this point should have already seen Inglourious Basterds, expect no plot summary, and require no protective gear for the RAMPANT, CONSTANT SPOILERS AHEAD
* * * * *
"A tinker, a tailor
A soldier's things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
And this one is for bravery
And this one is for me
And everything's a dollar in this box"
-Tom Waits, "Soldier's Things"

In 1941, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon decided that the cover of Captain America #1 would be Cap coldcocking Adolf Hitler. Like so many Golden Age comics luminaries, Kirby was Jewish. Joe Simon is Jewish. They wanted to see Hitler's face smashed in. And if not, they correctly guessed that their audience wanted to see the Nazi leader cracked in the mouth.

A plot strand in the tapestry of Inglourious Basterds directly concerns the exploits of a mini-platoon of Jewish-American soldiers on a secret mission through the European Theater of Operations: to cause as much havoc as possible behind enemy lines by brutally murdering and desecrating the corpses of as many German soldiers as possible. All its stories eventually converge in a blazing, startling, shrieking climax of Nazi-immolating carnage.

This material -- the adventures of Captain America and the Inglourious Basterds alike -- in its simplest reading taps a nearly universal vein of desire to see modern history's designated greatest villains met with violent pretend retribution. Arguments to the contrary are probably futile. We never see the Basterds or Shosanna Dreyfus behave or react to the world in any particular way reflective of the Jewish experience, but their ethnicity is fuel for the plot engines and bolsters the righteousness of the murders and mutilations that serve as the only twisted justice of the Inglourious Basterds universe. Whether the world Jewish community does or should savor this with any relish is likewise up for grabs.

Whether there is ever such a thing as an uncomplicated, cathartic and healthy revenge fantasy is an eternal mystery.

Inglourious Basterds crams into a punishingly short 153 minutes nearly every family, genus and species of narrative possible in the order of World War II films. All that is noticeably missing are hand-wringing Holocaust melodrama and the large-scale battle epic -- in other words, the predominant subgenres still being made in our era. But they are there too. Both are hover over Basterds in subverted, negated spirit, conspicuous in their absence (the home front drama is accounted for in a particularly wonderful and, sadly, deleted scene, three minutes of backstory on the trademark baseball bat of one Donny Donowitz). The battalion of misfits adventure tale ("men-on-a-mission" says Tarantino: The Dirty Dozen, The Dam Busters, and yes, Inglorious Bastards), to stories of artists engaged in ideological resistance fighting (The Last Metro, To Be or Not to Be, Cabaret), every kind of WWII movie is there in turn or at once. Some stake a claim to major plot points and concrete screen time like the espionage thrillers (Foreign Correspondent, Notorious) that inform the spygames of the La Louisiane sequence...

Some WWII-themed subgenres merely flash by in an off-hand visual or verbal reference, but some infect/inform/form the very heart of the film without speaking their name. A comic horror insert shot reveals Josef Goebbels banging his translator, and the majority of "Chapter Five" drips with decadent Third Reich taste in arts and decoration, as Goebbels commandeers Dreyfus' theater for a film premiere. From the wincingly confused purpose of cheapjack sexploitation films like Love Camp 7 to their arthouse grandfather in Visconti's The Damned to (maybe most of all?) Tinto Brass' line-straddling, conundrum Salon Kitty, the least reputable strain of WWII drama holds its own peculiar power, and Tarantino wields it handily in his own war epic. The unique gift of Nazisploitation is the efficacy of a perverse moral bewilderment. The chromosomal anomaly of Nazisploitation films slowly mutates the genetic makeup of Inglorious Basterds, warping its form into a great mad, startling beast. As Inglourious Bastards' final chapter escalates, its plot convergences become inevitable as surely as they become unpredictable, as it makes definitive, unashamed break with historical record -- the movie will not hide in an imaginary unspoken pocket of history -- and it erupts with a black, irrational tone of hysteria and hallucination.

With Jonathan Rosenbaum accusing the film of being tantamount to Holocaust revisionism and other critics rendered helpless with inarticulate rage, difficult questions are posed: why do these strong reactions from detractors proceed from a viewing experience entirely alien to those who admire the film? The semi-approving assert that a kind of shallowness and movie-headed retardation of vision are the core and limit of Tarantino's purpose.

The gripe springs eternal:

"Those who like this film do so because it doesn't seem to have anything to say and renders the cinematic experience as pure play. Those who dislike it dislike it for the very same reasons, seeing the deliberate cool superficiality of Pulp Fiction as a symptom of the empty post-modernity of our age."

"Like the allusions in the film, Pulp Fiction itself is either a film you get or you don't. Some people luxuriate in its meaninglessness, some people find its meaninglessness to be the symptom if not the origin of major social ills, others find a meaningfulness in a message of redemption"
-Dana Polan, BFI Modern Classics: Pulp Fiction

With nearly sixty years of fiction devoted to how very much Nazis have it coming, why single out Tarantino's film? If it is because his stories crackle with aestheticized kick and poppy frisson, what do the same critics make of Basterds-inspiring tough guy fantasia The Dirty Dozen itself? Certainly it is just as difficult to argue the moral rectitude of The Great Escape, to say nothing of a sitting duck like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Jim Emerson makes the agreeable but problematic comparison to Warner Bros. cartoons about Bugs Bunny tormenting Axis powers with Brooklynite pluck -- implication being, if it is all a cartoon, not to take it seriously... even while he takes the movie pretty seriously. It's the reading method of the Dana Polan BFI volume above: "Those who like this film do so because it doesn't seem to have anything to say and renders the cinematic experience as pure play." This hardly accounts for any viewers deeply moved in the heart or powerfully stimulated in the head by Basterds (or Pulp-- I guess, given Polan's two options, we don't exist or are mentally unsound?), but also ignores that the men of Termite Terrace were living through the historical moment. They worked out their own concerns through their art form and were tasked too with boosting homefront and battlefield morale. Little entertainments can shoulder big responsibilities.

Why pick on Tarantino? is a good question indeed, when after six features the complaints hardly waver. On one hand, Tarantino invites it, on the other hand, clasped with the first, the critical establishment has a stubborn unwillingness to budge. The paradigm is set as to What to Do with Quentin Tarantino and has hardly been revised.

Top dirty names to call Quentin Tarantino: Nostalgia Hound, Magpie, Trainspotter, Sadist... Cinephile.
This, although his view of cultural history is neither as blinkered and sentimental as Spielberg at his most nostalgic or cynical as Spielberg at his grumpiest. Tarantino's bricolage is nowhere near as pervasive, disruptive and dizzying as Joe Dante's -- indeed Dante's major theme is the hollow, brain-numbing echo chamber of disposable culture bouncing off itself, while Tarantino's is, simply, not. We all speak daily, openly and actively about popular culture and our experience with it. Many of us do so more than Tarantino characters. Why should Movie People be deprived of a cultural frame of reference? In Basterds it is particularly fun to watch the scope of direct dialogue references narrow with a 1941/45 cut-off point, even if a joke about Lilian Harvey is greeted in packed theaters with exactly one laugh. In-jokery is, of course, free to associate across time at whim, and name-dropping Emmanuelle, and the real world Hugo Stiglitz and Antonio Margheriti tints the picture gently, it indicates the company Inglourious Basterds wants to keep, names its secret gods.

And there it is again, again, that perpetual bugbear, The Violence. So why single out this filmmaker, who's made nothing so bloodthirsty as Rambo III or City of the Dead? He courts it. Asks for it. Engages when provoked, and seems to argue back on film. An apologist would, after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, make the realistic case that the violence of those films is substantially less graphic than its liminally felt impact -- a strong case in point of the filmmaker's prowess (and the Psycho Shower Scene Argument) -- only to be greeted by the 1-2 punch replies of the relatively bloodless Jackie Brown and unmatched mayhem of Kill Bill - Vol. 1. The critic's hand is forced. Either deal with Tarantino seriously or be doomed to rehash the same complaints endlessly.

That the living tissue of his cinema is a successful graft of 10,000 movie donors should be particularly appealing to film critics, who more than any of us live with perpetual projector bulb tan and a Geneva Drive tattoo over the heart. What Tarantino does by crafting the fabric of cinema history into fully wearable new garments is not dissimilar to the life's work of Brian De Palma and Jean-Luc Godard. Tarantino is less black-hearted than De Palma, less politicized than Godard, less schematic than either. To single him out for ridicule as a filmmaker with film itself as a ruling thematic concern is bizarre. Most of Generation X's directors don't even have ruling thematic concerns.

Tarantino is not without his authorial tics. He punctuates suspense with hyperfocused extreme close-ups of food, feet, arcane detail, peers out of car trunks incessantly, frames characters in doorways and crams metatextual declaration into dialogue. But his technique possesses no faddishness. In an age where most directors flatten their visual field magazine cover thin and alternate between big head TV close-ups and impotent camera flailing, Tarantino composes for the entire frame, constructs screen geography by holding shots as long as possible and, in Basterds in particular, uses deep focus to impart as much information as possible in a shot. Take some time with the scene in which Zoller pesters Shosanna in a cafe. She just wants to smoke, sip coffee and read, but the soldier tries his damnedest to chat her up, fending off her rebukes and disruptions from ardent fans, then recognizes the opportunity to impress the girl with his celebrity. Tarantino places Shosanna by the storefront window and keeps everything mostly in focus from the woman in the foreground to the buildings across the street. Sidewalk pedestrians recognizing Zoller are fully visible as they move from exterior to interior space, and several interlocking stories are being told at once.

Inglourious Basterds luxurates in the pleasures and pains of the movies and meditates on film as a force shaping our lives, interior identities and human history. That second clause is the writer-director's great step forward in his sixth feature, though his concerns have not changed, they are articulated with emphatic force in Basterds. The breadth and depth of reference is impressive by its own right, but less canny filmmakes pull similar, less encyclopedic stunts all the time: naïve accumulation of a hundred years of film cliché may also cause the sensation of a thousand films overlapping on one screen.

A headspace is established for the film: that we are in Movieland, in Movie History where Movie People operate on Movie Rules. This is not the same as saying the film operates with weightless unreality, that situations are not serious in any way. Inglorious Basterds then does a service to all war films -- indeed, all films -- from the earnest propaganda documentary modes of Why We Fight to the studio-slick entertainments of Casablanca. All movies are movies. That Tarantino is not embarrassed to say so does not make his films shallow exceptions to any rule or inherently frivolous, but exceptionally honest, generous, grateful for the cinema, grateful to be of the cinema. The notion does not strip art of importance but return it in kind, separates art from the stifling, impossible, dishonest illusion that its function is/should be/can be to duplicate reality. And of all words in the above that should be bracketed by a good post-modernist's set of quotation marks, it is "reality." When we're at the movies, regardless of how naturalistic the performers or fantastical the scenario, every movie is equally unreal. And every movie is real in and of itself.

Rosenbaum's complaint, once he deigned to (sort of) elaborate, seems (?) to be that Basterds makes the Holocaust "less real". Putting aside that it is not a Holocaust film (nary a concentration or extermination camp is seen or mentioned), and that the purpose of the film may not be to deepen an audience's understand of historical fact -- and do note, those are large, potentially crucial blocks to "set aside" -- the opposite may be true, even if Bastards is read as puerile revenge fantasy. The film does not establish Hitler's Final Solution in any exposition, and depicts persecution of occupied Europe's Jews mainly to set up Shosanna's plight. Basterds requires foreknowledge of history, presumes an audience understands facts of the Holocaust. The rage of its characters, the machinations of the plot, the purpose that fuels the film's passions all operate on the assumption of an audience for whom the the Holocaust and a war against fascist, antisemitic enemies are very real, and that a basic set of feelings are shared on the subject.

There are stories of violent revenge, retribution and score-settling, professional and private, in all Tarantino's features as a director, and most of his screenwriting. One of the basic reasons we go to the movies is their bottomless capacity for wish fulfillment fantasy. It is a shade of escapism, or perhaps vice versa. These wishes and their cinematic granting may be base, unhealthy, cathartic, pathetic, unarticulated, mysterious or unhealthy. The movies provide a potentially powerful and relatively safe arena for working it out.

One of the fascinating things about The Parent Trap, for example, is its bizarrely naked fulfillment of a fantasy harbored by children of divorce, that Mom and Dad will reconcile -- that they can be forced to reconcile. When given some thought, surely no one would want their own children clinging to the desperate, futile hope, wallowing in the stunted, immature understanding of relationships, or the practicing the conniving and cruel schemes of Sharon and Susan to reunite their parents. And yet adults made the film. It is irresistibly sunny and extremely incorrect at the same time, with no hope for the faithless to say it is charmless or unfunny or the faithful to untangle it.

Genre cinema's most basic scenarios all run on this principle, a chance to experience the romantic comedy courtship ideal, to explore and adventure beyond one's backyard, to be a cowboy, a fireman, an astronaut. But it's always more complicated than that, and where there's tension, things get interesting. Horror films are particularly good at this: genre theorists are constantly telling us that we attend to identify with a murderer or monster, to sate some primal bloodlust, to vent some dark steam pushing against our interior walls. Even more basic, though, deeper, stranger and unsayable, we get to watch ourselves killed, over and over, to die a thousand make-believe deaths that we may understand our own.

A principle pleasure of Tarantino's films is the shape of their stories ( and say, then, if we speak of "content" or its "form"? The form of a movie is its content). His wooly-souled tales are electrifyng because truly anything can happen and we're aware that the storyteller holds no fear of Going There. Anywhere -- to the pawnshop basement, into Mia Wallace's heart, or to loop back into its own first scene. Pulp Fiction's scheme is that each sequence will end up 1000 miles fom where it began. Reservoir Dogs and (the original screenplay for) True Romance rupture the tail end of each sequence with sudden violence and/or surprise revelation, carefully parcelling out information by jumbling chronology. Jackie Brown is a series of games in which characters outsmart one another, cards held against chest so the audience cannot know who will win each match or if it will end in a flagrant foul. Kill Bill, Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds are structured as strings of conflict with nearly self-evident resolution, giving off an unbearable heat of suspense because we know they will end but cannot tell when.

Basterds is specifically a series of interrogation scenes. It is practically a field guide to variations on human conversation as interrogation: police questioning (Landa and LePedite), meet-cute flirting (Zoller and Dreyfus), job interview (Goebbels and Dreyfus --> Dreyfus and Landa), briefing (Churchill, Fenech and Hicox), debriefing (Hitler and Butz).

In the structural tour-de-force second Chapter, "Inglourious Basterds", Tarantino loads all his storytelling guns. In nested scenes of characters telling stories to one another, the chronology gradually burrows at least four layers deep, then claws back through to the other side. Hitler meets with Pvt. Butz --> who recounts his platoon's encounter with the Basterds --> which pauses for the backstory of Hugo Stiglitz --> which begins with a newspaper photo of the thirteen Gestapo he killed --> which leads to mini-vignettes highlighting the killings and Stiglitz's Basterd recruitment - at which point we are four levels down. The film is artfully, breathlessly driven to distraction by the infinite possibilities of story itself. The chronology then collapses back into position, all efforts focusing for impact as Butz raises his cap to reveal his swastika scarification. Then, a signature flourish: how'd Tarantino get so good at this? Same way as Aldo Raine. "Practice!"

All of Tarantino's films have been about the way identity is little but accumulation of stories about ourselves: the stories we tell about (and to) ourselves, the stories we tell about each other, the stories the world tells about us, the stories that are us. Reservoir Dogs is about scumbags and weasels playing at being men of honor and lions. Natural Born Killers and True Romance play out as mirrored halves (and were, in long ago drafts, likely retrograde counterpoints). In True Romance Clarence and Alabama bluff their way into legend, pretend to be Bonnie and Clyde until it comes true, while in Natural Born Killers Mickey and Mallory abandon all civilization for primal violent impulse, and marvel as the media inflates their atrocities into the American myth of individual freedom and integrity; the same thing happens to both couples, but inside-out. You can't help but end up a story. Jackie Brown is endless circles of everyone duping one other, which, naturally, involves nigh constant subterfuge and reading of other players' strategies. In Kill Bill everyone truly is the badass world-shaking giant they appear to be, but also rifle through indices of identity until they find the person they need to be. Vol. 1 establishes their legends, Vol. 2 deconstructs them, the vital layer being that the story The Bride tells herself of a mission of revenge melts away to reveal the story of Beatrix Kiddo's rebirth and redemption. Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds alike reconfigure and take hard looks at the purpose and meaning of exploitation film iconography. And in Pulp Fiction everyone is telling stories all the time, projecting and revealing themselves, bulding the world with talk, rumor, joke and anecdote, their constant chatter a meticulous network of meaning.

Espionage and fugitive drama being Inglourious Basterds' orders of the day, everyone is lying, acting, or hiding something, every character both themselves and a story about themselves. It is a film very much about mythmaking and performance. In the schematic marvel of the La Louisiane sequence, multiple layers of playacting converge and quarrel as a frivolous bar game variant on What's My Line? endangers the deadly serious acting of undercover agents impersonating German officers attempting to rendezvous with a double agent -- herself an actress and the scene's fulcrum of teetering make-believe.

Even Aldo Raine and his Basterds, who cannot abide that Nazis may escape anonymous into history and make it their mission to brand the living enemy and desecrate the dead, in their primary function as a guerilla terror unit are spreading a story. The Basterds constitute a bogeyman legend to ripple through the psyche of the German ranks. Until conscripted into Operation Kino, their usefulness as a story is understood to be larger than the mayhem they could cause by hand. Meanwhile, "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa's tactics include two powerful weapons which do most of the work for him: the reputation which precedes him, and the air of confidence that implies he already knows your secrets. These are sharpened and on display even when in non-detective mode, as when discussing theatre security issues with a petrified Shosanna.

Landa and Raine both open their major introductory dialogues by asking the interviewee what they know about the dangerous reputations of the interrogators. This paralleling gives a good indication of what Tarantino is up to at the heart of his vengeance stories.

There are only two setpieces in Inglourious Basterds focused on the violent destruction of Nazis, and both are complicated, designed to be more felt on a phenomenal level than understood intellectually. Because here it is: What Inglourious Basterds does spectacularly well is imbue its adrenalized violence with a feeling that is utterly weird. It is uncanny. Something feels panicked and wrong and it is difficult to pinpoint what or why. Tarantino's last two films periodically shifted into similar discordant tones, and such sustained irrational dread is only matched onscreen by Dario Argento's heyday run of films from 1975-1985 and David Lynch whenever he feels like working.

In the first of these setpieces, the Basterds question then beat to death one Sgt. Rachtman. It is giddy and sweat-beaded as a suspense sequence, for the same reasons as the needle-to-the-heart climax of "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife": a dire situation played as slapstick sick joke, a surrogate audience laughing themselves queasy with anticipation, a poised weapon completely apropos as metaphor for the physical sensation of the scene itself. The scene is inherently conflicting, but in the key exchange, Sgt. Donowitz demands of Rachtman: "How'd you get that medal on your chest? Killing Jews?" And the answer: "Bravery." And when Rachtman's head caves in, we know he had this one virtue at least, and that he died wearing a Nazi uniform. Brett: "I'm sorry things got so fucked between us and Mr. Wallace." Mr. Pink: "I'm acting like a professional!" Sgt. Werner Rachtman: "Bravery." Bang. Bang. Bang.

Chapter Five - "Revenge of the Giant Face" grows increasingly unsettling as it shifts into the Salon Kitty-styled décor of Shosanna's violated movie palace, but the sensation that something is off begins earlier, as David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" throbs and laments over a Suiting Up montage in which the weapons are film reels and the warpaint and uniform are the gowns and makeup required for a movie premier. The bold musical selection is proving to be a sore spot with some viewers, but even those who admire the audacity of the loud intrusion of a 1982 goth-glam track into the audio space of a period film might consider that a) by this point either Basterds has one in its grip or does not, and b) the Bowie track is not any more or less anachronistic than the repurposed Morricone cues that score the rest of the film. Or more "fair" or "correct" than the Billy Preston music, or any of the music, for that matter -- little to none of the score is authentic in period, instrumentation or style.

An omniscient, or at least very informed narrator provides expositional assistance once in awhile. In a neat trick straight out of Suspiria, that narrator is never identified, and eventually disappears altogether (Argento's version is even scarier: his narrator only speaks once and provides no particularly useful information). Innocuous (and cool, because it's Samuel L. Jackson's voice) while on the soundtrack, but ultimately ominous, because at any point in the film we may remember that extra-dimensional layer, that voice from inside-outside the Story, and realize we have been completely abandoned.

Shosanna and the Basterds blow it up, the pretend reflections of Reich leaders and Nation's Pride, the pretend film within this film, some stories just too evil to be allowed to walk the earth, and this is not an anti-revenge story. Most of the baddies aren't in uniform, but evening wear. They aren't currently ranting and spouting arguments for eugenics and totalitarian politics but screaming in fear and scrambling for their lives. If we desired a horrible, spectacular demise for these villains, this is certainly a horrible, spectacular demise. The climax graphically echos an extermination camp gas chamber but the crucial referent is the finale of Carrie.

The moment Carrie goes PK-A-bomb is a dozen climaxes at once, and De Palma's film multiple orgasms all the way to the credits. In disorienting, crashing waves the outsider's revenge story culminates, a tidal force of cleansing female power washes through, and everything goes completely berserk. Carrie White is transformed, an inhuman avenging angel, out of (self) control and channeling a righteous flame. She is a supernatural wrath straight out of Revelation. And we want to see this, want the dipshits who tormented Carrie to burn, but it is also the film's apex of horror. Carrie's prom sequence is satisfying, scary, brutal, several other adjectives and exhilarating all at once, and those are not incompatible feelings. They don't cancel each other out, and this is a secret to the film's spooky power. No one should walk out of the film feeling guilty or complacent.

A swastika Zoller whittles into his sniper's perch in Nation's Pride rhymes with the Basterds' nickname carved into a rifle butt, and of course, Raine's handiwork across the foreheads of surviving Nazis. These echoes draw disconcerting parallels, connect ideas to be compared, but do not necessarily imply coequals. Continually complicating matters are glimpses of common human experience peeping through holes in Nazi uniforms: the one-word story of Rachtman's Iron Cross, an off-duty soldier celebrating his child's birth, Landa's disarming dorkiness beneath his hard, smooth legend. In the person of Pvt. Zoller, this stinging theme is distilled. He thinks he and Shosanna are in a romantic comedy, plays his role with much charm and confidence. At the Nation's Pride screening then, what is it that makes him flinch, avert his eyes, abandon his seat? Embarrassment at his performance? Pain at the memory of taking hundreds of lives (his explanation)? Pain that it took the power of cinema to make him feel the weight of those deaths; that his favorite art form had turned on him? Or the crushing realization that he is not in the movie he thought he was in? In Zoller's defining moment, he disrupts Shosanna in the projection booth, tries to play romantic lead one last time, is pushed too far, and threatens to assault her. He feels entitled, as occupying force. Human, certainly, and a G.W. Pabst fan to boot, but the equation is unbalanced: he's a human being that has irrevocably chosen to throw in with the Nazi Party. There are, in the end, those things Nazis believed, things they did, which cannot be made up for by doses of charm, frailty and circumstance. Things get complicated, Inglourious Basterds admits, but some of identities we flicker through stick with us and muck up all the others. And Zoller's a Nazi.

Rachtman and Landa are both indignant that the Basterds do not play by War Rules, that they hold their enemy in contempt. They're right, as far as it goes, and as far their indignation is not coupled with oblivious arrogance. Rachtman is unrepentant to the last, thinks he is going down with dignity and a soldier's honor. Things get complicated, but ultimately, Sgt. Rachtman goes down as a Nazi with his head caved in by a baseball bat.

Landa is so amoral as to edge into anti-moral. During a boast that he does not hate Jews, and is possessed of the amazing ability to "think like a Jew," it may never cross his mind that if he could truly think like a Jew, he would not hunt them down for the Party. It is just part of a story: he's the Jew Hunter. He's a master detective. He's an SS Standartenführer, a multilinguist, a saboteur, a turncoat and a war hero... and oops. One of the stories Landa has chosen to occupy drowns out the others. And as Landa is the last Nazi standing, Lt. Raine has one final piece to sign before the gallery hanging at Nuremberg. In a film about faking it until it's real, about verbal sleight-of-hand, and the ability of a great storyteller to be anyone he or she wants to be, what Aldo Raine has done is decide Hans Landa's story for him.

As Operation Kino bursts into bloom, Inglourious Basterds makes its most startling connection. The association is self-critical and self-congratulatory, it's funny and scary, it's honest and false, it's everything Tarantino's critics hate in his work and everything they see missing, it is the surface and it is the core. Adolf Hitler is at the movies, a violence-saturated piece of propaganda about the romantic legend of a tough guy bringing down an abstracted enemy for the audience's satisfaction. Hitler laughs and rollicks and he gets really into it.

Before anyone could reasonably begin processing what this means, that Tarantino has willingly drawn connection between his imagined audience and a theater full of Nazis, and thereby implicated himself, Sgt. Donowitz steps in, grim triumph, revulsion and deep psychosis spilling out of his eyes, and demolishes Hitler's skull with a machine gun. Pulped. Things are complicated, ethical ideologies are diced, stirred, simmered and in the critical moment, a choice is made. A fantasy of vengeance is not the same as a wish for justice, as moral instruction, as poetic justice, as a prescription for behavior. It may be weird, it may not be the voice of our better angels, but it is a real human impulse. Choose your stories wisely.

The final German Night in Paris is a similar brand of unsettling as Carrie's last stand: the phantasmagoric theater of destruction is presided over by Shosanna's manically laughing giant face. She is made of smoke and light, wreathed in flame, a cinematic godhead. She shapes history. She demolishes history. She is producer, screenwriter, actor, director, editor, distributor, exhibitor, projectionist and projection.

And Shosanna is a film critic. She programs her theater with her heart, sneers at Riefenstahl's politics, counter-programs with Le Courbeau, and cannot abide smears on G.W. Pabst's art even in the face of what she has been through. Because she's from France, and perhaps it is a France of the cinephile imagination, but in her country, they respect directors. In France, things are different. They got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

Ripped Up, Wiped Out, Battered, Shattered, Creamed, and Reamed!

2009-08-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

The 1976 Exidy arcade game Death Race caused sufficient controversy to fuel the first public protests against a video game, which in turn assured the primitive game's place in history. While not an official adaptation, it was surely inspired by the previous year's outrageous, jaundiced drive-in action satire Death Race 2000, probably director Paul Bartel's funniest film, and one of the most fun-packed produced by Roger Corman in this period. The object of the race in question, in both arcade game and movie, is to run down as many people as possible. Death Race pretends that its blocky stick-figures are "Gremlins," but this is parent placating hair-splitting.

Because Death Race is built on transistor-transistor logic, it is one among a handful of early games that cannot be truly emulated on a modern home computer. The only way to play Death Race is on an original Death Race cabinet. Between the game's controversy and low production numbers, cabinets are hard to come by.

The Musée Mécanique, currently located on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, houses a massive collection of vintage coin-operated arcade devices. The majority of these are turn of the century mechanized dioramas, where one may drop a coin and watch tiny robotic puppets act out morality plays (an opium addict hallucinates dragons, skeletons, Satan; a criminal is decapitated by guillotine), or musical performances (monkey orchestras, dog orchestras, etc.), or both (skeleton orchestras). The Musée have a small but tastefully curated collection of coin-op devices of more recent vintage: early video games.

The Musée Mécanique has a Death Race machine. And, like all the displays, you are allowed to play it.

The cabinet graphics are lurid and wonderful, looking like morbid '60s hot rod cartoons. The game graphics are black and white, blocky certainly, but more clearly representative than the Pong machine nearby. They look approximately as good as the cowboy dueller Gun Fight (1975).

Death Race is a driving game, plain and simple, the play area an empty black field with scattered obstacles piling up wherever one has slaughtered a Gremlin. The longer you keep your car from cracking up, the better your score, the more clogged the road becomes. The steering wheel is stiff in comparison with the game's descendants, but it is very responsive. Controls are either over-sensitive or the game is over-clocked. Death Race is a spazzy game, and, like all classic arcade games, designed to be over in a matter of seconds.

Completely, cheerfully tasteless and a hilarious way to spend two minutes, Death Race is, in that regard, exactly what one would want from a Death Race 2000 game in 1976. Which also puts it slightly above par for video game adaptations of movies. Should you be lucky enough to locate a cabinet, do not hesitate to join the Death Race. It's 25 cents of hit and fun!

Yikes... Nothing to See Here...

2009-08-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

Images down, I see.

The problem is being addressed, and I apologize for any inconvenience.

Actually, I'm probably more embarrassed than anything, as the inconvenience is all mine. It is rather flattering that the crash was caused by sudden massive traffic influx (special thanks to Whedonesque!). Guess I should return to my habit of posting one 50-page essay every two months...

Joyous Update: Looks like everything around here is back to normal, but slightly more expensive.
In celebration of this liberating lack of bandwidth restrictions, I'll be sharing exciting glimpses of the ExKin collection of movie and TV ephemera. In the meantime, feel free to look at...

Astounding DVD Covers #3!: Dark Secrets of Magick

Thanks Curtis Eugene! Now get back inside that giant top hat while you're wearing a smaller top hat.

A Troubling of Goldfish: Notes on PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE SEA (2008)

2009-08-12T02:07:00.000-07:00

Quick-n-dirty first-viewing notes on Hayao Miyazaki's beautiful Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea follow. The film opens in North America on August 14, in English dubbed form. While the Disney-produced dubs of Studio Ghibli films have been relatively respectful, they have frequently suffered from tasteless American stunt casting; anyone who suffered through Billy Crystal in Howl's Moving Castle is likely to agree. The value of the Ghibli vocal track cannot be overstated in this case, as the original beguiling, earnest child performances have been replaced by polished and cornball Kid Disney stars, and one particularly Japanese character type -- the shrieking, androgynous fop -- is filled in and manned-up with Liam Neeson's deep, stern purring. The necessity of dubbing a film intended for small children is acknowledged, but anyone old enough to read subtitles is strongly encouraged to pick up the R2 DVD, rather than wait for the inevitably overpriced Disney disc.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea rides on waves of matter-of-fact folktale logic, its plot all bargains and deals, loaded choices and mystical, half-explained rules. An overzealous young goldfish falls in love with preschooler Sōsuke, a sea captain's son who names her "Ponyo". Rejecting the name "Brünnhilde" and defying her sorcerer father, Ponyo transforms into a rambunctious human girl by means of magic elixir, a drop of human blood, and sheer force of will.

A contemplative child-view take on Hans Christian Andersen's troubling and haunting "The Little Mermaid", Ponyo plays out against a modern rural backdrop and its focus is not Andersen's fatalistic sexual politics and outsider angst, but animistic Shinto spirituality, the kami-electrified world, and island culture's relationship with the sea. In this fishing community, everyone's lives are tied directly to the ocean, their concerns and fortunes bound up in the swells and storms of the sea. Besides the anthropomorphic creatures passing as goldfish, who are the product of magical union of man and ocean goddess, the sea creatures all behave like fish and much of Ponyo is devoted to the spectacle of great clusters of marine life moving gracefully, impassively through the water. As Ponyo's rebellion against natural order begins manifesting, the town floods and Sōsuke and the fish-girl name, with casual awe, the species of massive Devonian creatures they observe gliding beneath the surface. They are not made pals or villains; they are animals, they are there, they are awesome.

This is Ponyo's simple, reverential strategy and philosophy throughout, an attitude toward simple wonders of man and nature and unfathomable chaos alike. A bowl of ramen takes three minutes to cook. So wait, smell it cooking, consider the process, which is both mundane and cosmic, but in any case takes three minutes. Consider that gifting a mother with a Thermos of soup makes milk for a baby, a convoluted route to calming a grumpy infant, but: that's how it works, that simple, that complicated. We spy the realistic problems of adult lives through Ponyo and Sōsuke's eyes -- Sōsuke's mother, Lisa, fumes about her husband's working all night, Ponyo is likewise snared in her father's obsession with the ocean -- and from this low-to-the-ground vantage these troubles seem bottomless and straightforward at the same time. Everyone is yearning, everyone finds happiness in their simple pleasures, everyone's gaze is cast at the sea.

Ponyo vs. Ham: Cinematic Battle of the Year!
Hayao Miyazaki's pinpointable pet themes are encouraging concerns to begin with, whether the project is pessimistic or sunny: female rebellion and independence, the futile, banal horrors of war, human impact on the environment. Ponyo certainly runs through the checklist, but depicts a universe operating on pushing and pulling forces, vacuums and spillovers, action and reaction. One of the senior center regulars in Lisa's care warns, when Sōsuke introduces her to the little fish in a bucket, that fish with faces always bring tsunamis: those are the rules, laid out in old stories. And the tsunami comes. It's Ponyo who brings the tsunami, of course, she brings it practically on purpose, blasting up from the ocean floor on a water spout; attempting to rejoin Sōsuke, she nearly capsizes his father's boat in the process. Sprinting joyfully along the waves, great crashing gouts of water in the form of massive, grinning fish, Ponyo runs, red hair streaming in the dark breeze. It is an exhilarating sight, the maniacal little girl's screaming laugh, as she gallops in pursuit of Lisa's tiny, careening automobile. They race along an oceanside road, Ponyo chasing her friend, Lisa and Sōsuke attempting to speed to ahead of the weather. The enthusiasm of Ponyo's pursuit could kill them in the process. They race away from each other, they race towards each other. They race on the cliff by the sea.

WATCHERS' COUNCIL: Rough Draft - The Original of Buffy

2009-08-06T02:27:00.000-07:00

"The pattern of the thing precedes the thing."
-Vladimir Nabokov

Into the Alley

So this blonde girl walks into a dark alley...

That's how it starts, right? It always starts this way.

This girl walks into an alley, and a vampire appears. It menaces her, attacks. She kicks its ass. This blonde girl walks into a dark alley and that's the premise, the inspirational flash that spawns all incarnations and cross-media franchise that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet somehow it never actually plays out that way. It is not how the TV series opens, nor the original film, nor Joss Whedon's shooting draft of the screenplay. They all begin with variants on the girl menaced, the alley, the monster, the switcheroo.

This girl would not even walk into an alley in the first place.
A mission statement is coded into this imagined scene, the conceptual spark that summarizes Joss Whedon's Buffy concept. The moment actually does play out roughly one hundred million times in the course of BtVS. Over and over, Buffy will combat monsters in dark alleys. Though this beat plays out in a hundred variations, we never hear the main theme. Each time through, we know the turnabout, know the reveal that Buffy is the Vampire Slayer. The dynamic only plays out with the surprise intact once: the first time one reads the title. Buffy... Buffy? THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. Her pattern precedes her.

Arches symbolize the heavens, eternity. Windows= portals, passages. Grids= structure, order. Cheerleaders= hot.
The 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer has all but been receded into those infinitely deep filing cabinets at Wolfram & Hart; absorbed into the tissue of Buffyverse mythos like a vanishing twin, failed and dissolved before birth. Comparisons are bound to favor the experience of the series for dozens of reasons, central among them that only enthusiasts of the television series would make such a comparison in any detail. The lens is warped, and it is nigh impossible to watch the movie (hereafter Buffy the Vampire Slayer) without the reference television version (hereafter Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no italics), and as the BtVS fan is nearly universally in the thrall of the creator's cult of personality, the very public grumblings of creator and executive producer Joss Whedon.

In interview with IGN, Whedon explains: "...it was right around the time when Revenge of the Bimbos, or Attack of the Killer Bimbos or something – there were a lot of movies coming out that were proto-silly '50s style titles. They were on the video store shelves. I worked at a video store. I would watch them, and I'd be like, 'You know what? This is just another bimbo movie. These women aren't empowered at all. They just made up a funny title.'..." The specific film he is thinking of is probably Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988), but video stores were awash with pseudo-(and-genuine)-Troma pictures like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988). The way Whedon tells it, the title plays out as a third-gen exploitation movie fan-artist's workbook exercise; like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), part of the goal is to deliver what other films promised but could/would not fulfill. In Buffy's case, actual empowered-girl turnabout. The title is a throwback -- "proto-silly"? I suspect "pseudo-silly" is intended? -- to pulp-tradition fantasy that reads as naive, kitschy or campy to modern audiences, regardless of the imagination or sophistication in the actual work.

Buffy aims to reconfigure a tradition that may or may not exist in reality. Conventional wisdom has it that women are persistently victimized in horror movies, that fictional monsters supernatural and human alike prey primarily on women, that the genre itself always sacrifices the blonde girl. It is not exactly true, as some more astute scholars like Carol J. Clover (Men, Women and Chainsaws) and Maitland McDonagh (Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds) have pointed out, horror cinema has a complicated attitude toward gender. But in plainspeak, no statistical studies exist to back up the anecdotal wisdom that female/ feminized victims are the victims of male monsters. It is just one of those things you Know To Be True, despite that Frankenstein's monster and Freddy Kreuger alike have studious interest in doing violence to men, and have been foiled by women who are not particularly masculinized. An equally convincing argument can be built that this most subversive genre has a rich tradition of female protagonists who escape and defeat the demons through specifical female virtue and strength, a tradition too of the untamed feminine which survives pulsing through subterranean tunnels of folklore and pop culture.

Party Decorations: The Lite Ages

In any case, art and interpretation are not strictly a matter of statistic. These assumptions that an innate misogyny and single-minded viciousness toward women are universal in horror reveal a fairly naive reading of the function of horror genres. Horror's purpose is to horrify; to provide a frightening hyperbolic vision of the Way Things Are, the Way Things Might Be, our real world fears made metaphor, a bleak critique of our species' shortcomings. Thus, horror films from The Wolf Man (1941) to American Psycho (2000), whether as subtext or (with post-modern self-awareness) part of their agenda, examine the outer reaches of brutal male drives by depicting frightening appetites in extremis. If it is upsetting, it is supposed to be. Were it Whedon's project to undermine the gender politics of Gothic horror, we might rightfully ask if it is a useful, necessary or relevant goal. But that is not quite what the screenwriter is up to (thought for another day: a majority of scholarly work agrees that BtVS tends to reject and reenforce Gothic fiction tropes in equal measure).

All genre pieces are multi-genre pieces. It is foolish to insist (in example/strawman argument with which you may be familiar) that Alien is "not science-fiction but horror". It is, of course, science-fiction and horror. Specifically it's Ten Little Indians in the future on a spaceship with a creature-feature beast, and follows the same plot structure as a slasher picture. The relevant question is not "what genre is it 'really'?" but "to which familial genres does the film belong?" and "what cogent argument can be made when viewing the film as a member of a particular genre family?" BtVS, by Whedon's account above, was only partly designed to undermine various horror conventions and assumptions, but belongs to a small family of (supposedly) cheeky, campy post-modern satires of exploitation films. In effort to not simply turn horror tropes on their ear but provide correctives, BtVS inevitably spends more time being a superhero story than a horror story. It is partly a comic horror film, but more to the point, all incarnations of the "Buffy" mythos are superhero stories with Gothic trappings. Interesting, surely, and in this way -- whether any embodiment of "Buffy" has adopted ideas from her sisters or not -- part of yet another lineage: Doctor Strange (1963), Swamp Thing (1971), Marvel Comics' Werewolf by Night (1972) and Tomb of Dracula (1973), Jack Kirby's The Demon (1972), Blade (1973), Vampire Hunter D (1983), Todd McFarlane's Spawn (1992) all the way to Van Helsing (2004).

This extended sidetrack is relevant because we are at the sensitive spot of the "Buffy" concept's origin. Whedon's screenplay works with a rich stew of blended genres. When approaching and reworking the screenplay (variously in further drafts, preproduction, on the set or in post) Kuzui necessarily made decisions about the attitude and concerns of the piece; that is, with a concept working on so many levels, she had to choose which paths the film would hew to most closely. It is perfectly possible that BtVS could veer into the spirit of magical girl manga, or Elizabethan comedy or supernatural martial arts comedy. Those possibilities are all written into the screenplay, and should we forget the wide genre potentials built into the Buffyverse, Angel starts out as a vampiric noir detective yarn and evolves into Arthurian quest and high fantasy. Kuzui opts to cast BtVS as a very broad comic horror film, farcical cousin to An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Gremlins (1984). This is perfectly noble tradition in itself and a valid choice, but not the only possibility provided by the script. More pointedly, it is not the direction Whedon would take when revising his concept for the television series.

Whedon has done a fair amount of public grousing about the realization of his screenplay by director Fran Rubel Kuzui. Any number of screenwriters could make similar complaints, of course, and may even release their unsullied screenplays for comparison, but few also have 240 hours of a fleshed-out personalized version of their vision to underline the point. The existence of an alternate take on the concept which -- let us just say it -- is richer, more ambitious, and frankly superior, tends to shift the authorship over to Whedon. It also puts the writer in position for constant questioning about what went wrong with the movie. The very question implies that Whedon's screenplay is wildly different, indeed better than, more than the film. A quick read confirms a less confused plot and more fully realized mythos were written than play out on screen. A closer study reveals the script is painted impasto-thick with theme and motif which have been excised from the fim or survive only with a variation intact, a song with a chorus that arrives only once. These alterations, it must be said, do not serve to streamline the running time, strengthen the narrative backbone, or constrain the running time or budget. So the Whedon sympathizer is prone to speculate that Kuzui did not understand the story she was telling.

A running gag about the school dance's halfhearted environmental theme is entirely lacking in punchline ("What do we do with all these decorations?" "Throw them away!") and its link to Slayer-as-Savior/Protector in the larger scope. The Earth Day jokes in present day link to a Black Plague motif in the History of the Slayer flashback scenes -- it's gone, so the link's gone, so the point is, well, it's gone. The relationship between villain and protagonist is muddled to the point of nonsense (more later). Another runner about a coveted yellow leather jacket misses its climax when Buffy is no longer interested in high fashion window shopping, but gazes with desire at a hardware store chainsaw display.

The screenplay begins with a carefully schematized comic action setpiece. In generically dirty Monty Python medieval times Italy, a knight errant enters an inn tended by a disinterested barmaid. A vampire attacks, the knight is helpless, but the barmaid leaps into action. There is a vital layer in this sequence which bolsters the intent of the legendary Girl Walks Into an Alley scene: the knight. The clear-cut reversal is written into the scene, and the knight's comparative weakness is crucial in establishing an expectation to subvert. The finished film reworks the scene to simply establish a far-reaching lineage of Slayers, shows one in action, but does not set up the Slayer as a counter-tradition to male heroism. The film never offers a viable decoy male champion, thus cannot illustrate a reversal with any evidence but an imagined audience's presumed sexism. It does set up the Dark Ages Slayer in juxtaposition with Buffy, via sarcastic match cut between a triumpantly hoisted stake and a thrusting pom-pon -- effective enough narrative shorthand. Though the shape of the story looks the same, the details pile up or don't pile up and deform the tale's purpose.

There is more to the Joss Whedon writing voice than grammatically inventive pithy teen slang, but that notorious sort of dialogue is, of course, a BtVS hallmark (the beloved "What's the sitch?" is one of the first lines). As with choice Whedon witticisms in Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000), Kuzui does not seem to comprehend the language layers built into the jokes, or at least doesn't choose takes in which her teen performers really nail the lines. This matters because besides stepping on the toes of comedy, it underlines that the actors have a nigh-impossible task. When granted creative control, Whedon's stories take their world, fantasy rules and characters seriously, providing the jokes a context that is, if not relentlessly sober, at least sincere. Kuzui vacillates between cartoonish comedy and action and comparatively overwrought Gothic horror and melodrama. Whedon's vision is an elegant blend of genres, Kuzui's is schizoid and tonally inconsistent.

In metaseries which retell roughly the same tale across multiple media (M*A*S*H to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Transformers), we often expect the major motion picture incarnation to represent the "ultimate" version of the story. The scale, budget, compacted running time, and inflated expectations of a movie lend themselves to a version playing out as pop myth writ large. In big screen scope, even intimate character stories like The X-Files, or sparely staged idea-dramas like Star Trek tend to inflate their scenarios into legends, characters into IconGods. We might expect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to play out as the concise, focused, distilled but grandest vision of Buffy Summers' story, and the TV show to be the more textured, detailed but smaller-scaled version. Instead the film is the miniature reenactment, the series the epic. The movie is a rinky-dink thumbnail sketch, compared even to the screenplay. The temptation to consider the film a rough draft for the TV show is too great...

The Chain, Take One

If a rough draft, then, we should be able to discern the outlines of the more developed product. The basics of Slayer mythos are here: the Chosen One, the Watcher, the vampires. The general shape of Buffy's arc are in place: resistance to the calling, initiation, lifestyle conflict, despair over choicelessness, the forging of choice in the face of bad faith, finally integration, paradigm busting. The Girl and the Slayer make peace.

The eye starts to rove... are embryonic versions of major BtVS character dynamics present, coiled and waiting to pop? Certainly the shifting father figure/codependent pal relationship between Buffy and Giles is established early in the Buffy/Merrick relationship. Everything being large-writ, designed for one-time use, Giles' stuffiness, British gentility and etc. etc. manifest as Merrick's complete disconnect from the modern world -- he is immortal, his soul born repeatedly into new bodies but (plausibility iffy here) social skills never upgraded. Giles is Old World, but Merrick is Really Old World. This "immortal Watcher" device is a nascent version of the Council of Watchers standing in for patriarchal tradition. Buffy constantly quarrels with Merrick, but the Giles and Council figures being rolled into one, she never really rebuffs him, never breaks ties as spectacularly as with the Council.

The series' full relationship with the film is complex. Mutant Enemy does not wipe the slate entirely, nor are they shy about making bold alterations. Certain elements work in the tightened elbow room of a feature film, and pushing back the heroine's age from senior to sophomore, jettisoning Buffy's caricatured L.A. socialite mom, and the Slayer's abdominal cramping vamp detection system (a wonderful, perfect, audacious touch) provide space for workable long-term replacements. Simultaneously retaining the Movie-Buffy in continuity allows Mutant Enemy to avoid pedantic restaging of the origin story, and to piggyback on the character arc experienced in the film. Movie-Buffy begins as a true Valley Girl, mired in privileged L.A. mall culture, at the top of the high school social food chain, and exceptionally mean, catty, shallow and stupid. Her dumbness and cruelty are gradually revealed as a sort of choice. Buffy does not need to be smart or empathetic and these qualities are not valued by her peer group. They won't get her anywhere, so she sees no need to develop them. Simply put, being forced into the position of protector of humanity forces Buffy to examine her own humanity. Though nowhere near as bright or perceptive, Buffy starts her arc in roughly the same place as Cordelia Chase (Cordy is shallow, Movie-Buffy is vapid), and is given a similar social clique chorus of followers. As the television show is constructed, partially acknowledging that the film's events "happened," Mutant Enemy gets to have it both ways: Cordelia can play foil to Buffy, and Buffy can endure a steeper change in character for those who recall the film.

An Exchange of Butts.
Buffy's major internal conflict is rather solved in the finale, though not nearly as gloriously as on the series, where the battle between The Slayer and The Girl is a series of negotiations and metaphor-charged blowouts. Movie-Buffy does integrate headstrong Modern Gal-ness with the warrior tradition on her own terms, but as it is in shorthand, the transformation is neither so big nor so complex. Movie-Buffy does in her final crisis arrive at the school dance both stag and attempting to ditch The Slayer: she shows up in a bosom-boosting white dress and sans weapons. Scruff-ball love interest Pike gives her the final nudge, accepting both Buffy and the Vampire Slayer -- the boy arrives with a kiss and a bag of stakes. It's not so much that Buffy needs final a final seal of male approval so much as that she is encouraged by Pike's receptivity. This would not be a proper climax for the TV show, where Buffy has varied and complicated relationships with the men in her life, and the narrative space to explore them. Pike, in certain light, bundles Buffy's relationships with key series characters Spike, Xander, Riley, and parts of Angel and Giles into one figure, later exploded out into five men's arcs in full. All these fellows are/become comfortable with a woman fighting at their side, most of them to accept that she is stronger. This is not, of course, all they have to offer Buffy, but a vital function of Pike in the film. Pike stands in direct contrast to the rest of the boys and vampire-boys of his peer group who can only objectify the cheerleader.

Butt Exchange: Resolution.
The extremely game Luke Perry plays Pike with bad boy appeal -- he's an unkempt slacker (Xander), on the fashion fringe and comfortable with a degree of camp in his DNA (Spike; the rest of the comic rough trade swagger is funneled into/out of Paul Reubens as the vampire Amilyn) and gives good mysterious brood while masking insecurities (Angel) -- while also being knocked on his ass a dozen times. Had BtVS more bite (sshh) and Beverly Hills 90210 been a larger cultural force, Perry would deserve some kind of award for cheerfully subverting his own pouty teen hearthtrob image. The movie is not as toothsome, the actor not as funny, but for project selection Perry is rather besting the trick Johnny Depp did with Cry-Baby (1990). The screenwriter and Perry are thwarted, but the actor seems to grasp Whedon's intentions. In the vintage EPK preserved on the DVD, Perry gives the only remarkable soundbite, enthusing that his job in the film is to play damsel in distress. In the film's motivating joke, the reversal and demolition of horror tropes, Perry's assessment dead-on. Best gag example: while vamp fighting, Pike and Buffy end up rolling on the ground, stop, girl on top - and did he save her butt? Did she save his butt? "Well. There was sort of an exchange of butts," concedes Pike. He's got it. They've swapped. To this end, Perry plays Pike's coolness and slack-appeal as genuine and his respect for Buffy straight.

Giles would probably not throw a knife at Buffy's head this early in the relationship.
The film's notion that Slayer and Watcher are eternally reincarnated souls (obviously stricken from the TV record) does not seem to originate with Whedon, for the screenplay describes something aligned with television Buffyverse rules. It is problematic, for the Slayer remembers nothing but dream impressions of past lives, while the Watcher retains everything, self-awareness included. Some of Whedon's conflicts with Donald Sutherland revolve around the star rewriting his own dialogue at whim and in ways the writer believed made no sense. This element of the Watcher backstory is very likely a prime example. This inconsistency in logistics may be read another way. Hypothetically, were the Slayer reincarnated with full knowledge and ability, there would be no need for a Watcher. The film provides no origin myth for the Slayer, but the very inclusion of a male Watcher who wields authority over the Slayer implies that the Powers That Be of this world have rigged the game to keep the Slayer in check. Pity that Whedon cannot enjoy it, for Sutherland's performance as Merrick is the film's best. He makes the hoary wise man stuff natural, the fish out of water material funny. Like Perry, Sutherland has a finger on the pulse of his character, even if he found the mythology uninteresting.

She Kicks Its Ass

In the Universe's carnival, the squirrels wear tutus.
The grandest muddle of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is at the center of the plot, as globetrotting, centuries-old Vampire King Lothos arrives in L.A. to menace the latest Slayer. Kuzui's choice to have Kristy Swanson play all versions of the Slayer gives this element of the story a slight boost, lending the feeling that the whole cast is just reciting the latest verse of a song that never ends. Rutger Hauer looks puffed and tired in Halloween cape, costume jewelry and unflattering mustache, but acts at full bore, as if his dialogue about linked destinies, inexplicable violin playing, and one-sided romantic link to the Slayer make any damn kind of sense.

JOINED?
There will be exploration in the TV mythos of power dynamics which echo through the halls of eternity. But the film offers nothing so elegant as Spike's poetic episode-long monologue on the hunter-beast waltz in "Fool for Love" or Holland Manners' discourse with Angel on Existentialist ethics in an elevator in "Reprise". A best guess is that BtVS is shooting for something like this, and either Whedon aims too high or Kuzui too low. Lothos' forever-task being to confront, confound, and destroy the Slayer, he goes to enormous lengths to throw himself in Buffy's path. He works overtime to orchestrate their face to face meeting, preps to eat her, then changes his mind for no discernible reason. The excuse that "she's not ready" is intriguing, but goes nowhere. Lothos forestalls the conflict until later, again insists they are "joined" (even Buffy doesn't know what to make of this, and with grossed-out face: "Joined?")... and gives utterly baffling speeches in which he fights Buffy with a sword then announces "I could never hurt you... I'm gonna send you to the pits of Hell!" (... Joined?) Again a guess -- has Lothos been killing Slayers so long that he simply feels obligated? Or gone mad and believes he is fulfilling a cosmic role? Or in communion with greater forces confirming this duty? No telling. Lothos lacks any apparent motivation beyond vaguely indicated pattern of repetition. Rather than potent subtext, this can only read as storytelling contrivance. Metafictionalists from Resnais to Antonioni to De Palma might make this a theme unto itself but... nah, it's just sloppy storytelling.

The Master, Angel and Spike X 2, First Pass. Includes bonus/confused multiple Christ symbols.
In the rearview, Lothos obviously contains the seeds of Season One villain The Master, a vampire cult leader who appears in prophecy and whose presence forces Buffy to fulfill her role in the same (see under: "Prophecy Girl", no less); The Master is locked beneath Sunnydale for a century, as if waiting to synch up with Buffy's stride. Their fates are bound like Lothos and Movie-Buffy's are implied to be "joined." Lothos appears in Buffy's dreams as potential lover. In the film's only eerie sequence, Buffy's vulnerable, nightgown'd dream self leans back in bed, not noticing that she is snuggling into the Vampire King's embrace. Lothos is, then, also proto-Angel, star-aligned lover (metaphorically on film, literally on TV) whose darkness gives Buffy a brutal push into the light and ultimately provides some strength and motivation in breaking the Slayer paradigm. We may see a pinch of Spike, too, in Lothos' otherwise nonsensical obsession with the linked fates of Slayer and Vampire. If Spike called it a dance, then Lothos plays the tune on his fiddle.

Amazon. Jungle. Keen fashion sense.
And there is a Buffy at the center of this whirl, golden, health-glowing Kristy Swanson. Gaspingly funny when deadpanning "What a homeless!" at her first glimpse of Merrick, and affecting when mourning her Watcher's death, Swanson makes a bold and vigorous Buffy. This is Movie-Buffy as written. Of all the inevitable comparison, Swanson to Sarah Michelle Gellar is the least fair. Swanson's Buffy has neither Gellar's wrenching vulnerability, petite frame, or sparkly, wiry verve, but she needs none of it: that's TV-Buffy. What Swanson does have is a completely different comic bounce, and in her few opportunities to plumb for tenderness and pathos, she wrings as much out of the scenes as is possible. Here is a genre satire about those blonde sexpots that walk into alleys and are punished for being blonde girls in alleys. The television series will rotate this concept in every possible direction, but for this straightforward inversion of tradition, Swanson is the more intuitively correct Buffy. Had the film gone for the mythic, fated tone of the screenplay -- and even in its final, compromised state -- Swanson's take makes perfect sense. Athletic, strong-boned, sexed-up and sweaty, she is a goddess-Buffy, idealized and ideal.

Once upon a time, a blonde girl walked into an alley... It always starts this way.

Who Is the Coolest?: Lee Marvin’s Shirttails in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955)

2009-07-29T01:31:00.000-07:00

The geography for the stage of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, set in 1945) is a massive barbell, choked in the middle by the single street of Black Rock, opening at either end into dusty orange desert vistas. John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) arrives by ghost train at one end of the street, wanders back and forth to solve a mystery that resides somewhere in the wasteland at the other end. There is a story of the hard, bitter little city, the sins of all one-dozen-or-so residents, and the status of a missing Japanese farmer given the improbable name “Komoko”; this is the narrative meat proper, but the skeleton of Black Rock is filled out -- or picked away and revealed -- as the camera approaches each of these desert lizard-people as mysteries unto themselves. Macreedy is the town’s first visitor in four years, and the locals hate him before he steps into town, eyeing the slowing train with silent panic and confusion. Once they have to interact with him, every conversation is an exercise in concealing data, lying, talking circles around the topic. Getting information out of these people is like pulling teeth, and even the small talk is a particularly harsh enamel scraping.

So this is the shape of the Bad Day, Macreedy pacing and studying the land, everyone engaged in a game of Who Is the Coolest?, until all players crack and all secrets are outed. Each piece of character backstory or nugget of truth about their universe is hard won -- by Macreedy in most rounds, though sometimes he has to give some ground in the short view so an opponent will lower his guard. Who he is and what he wants, being the question actively playing on every set of lips in Black Rock, are the cards Macreedy won’t show until absolutely necessary. The allegorical wireframe about quiet, stoic heroism and insulated communities who poison their own wells is overlaid with the paper-mâché skin of its residents and weather-blasted buildings. The Bad Day is about a lot of things, macro and micro: the interment of Japanese-Americans during the second World War, the Hollywood blacklist, American racism, mob violence, the myth of the American West and various untenable molds of masculinity. The story in whole chews on these thoughts, the scenes are of people chewing on each other. So after a fashion, Bad Day’s scenes are driven by a question which is not “What Happened to Komoko?” but: “Who Is the Coolest?” This death match is determined through the gradual accumulation of curious details, actorly peculiarities; the Bad Day is the process of grit settling into grooves.

Macreedy keeps one -- presumably useless -- arm stiff at his side, fist shoved deep into jacket pocket. Unseasonable black off-the-rack suit adhering to his torso, Macreedy’s sweat soaks through the fabric as he ambles about in the blazing sun; Tracy looks like a baked potato seeping butter through aluminum foil wrapping as he rolls about on a very large grill. He makes some kind of point of remaining uncomfortable in the heat, ordering hot coffee at lunch to accompany a bowl of chili, and later claims he is the kind of man who has “never thought much” about lemonade. In that particular competition, Macreedy wins against a nerve-jangled telegraph operator in just a few moves, and the poor fellow is starry-eyed in terror that he has met a man who has never even thought about lemonade.

Pete Wirth (John Ericson who later teamed up with Anne Francis again for Honey West on TV), the dumbbell hotel clerk seems to want to deny Macreedy a room because he makes a visual rhyme with the “one-armed bandit” slot machine in the corner. In an entrancing bit of business, Tracy opens a fresh pack of cigarettes with one hand. There is dialogue, perhaps it is even plot-related, but the whole picture is suddenly about the tension and marvel of Macreedy popping the wrapper and biting off confetti strips of the inner foil, spitting the paper to the floor.

The back of Lee Marvin’s shirt refuses to stay tucked into his pants throughout the day. He fixes it at least twice, and it flaps around like a lazy flag. It is not really a wonder, since Marvin keeps covertly maneuvering his big log-limbed scarecrow body into contorted positions. Here his angry idiot ranch hand, called Hector, sprawls half-propped-up across Macreedy’s rented bed. James Dean strikes a similar pose in Giant, lazily stretching across the width of the screen, a little house on the horizon appearing to plop into his lap; Hector has climbed inside that building, legs poking out the windows like a cowpoke Alice in Wonderland, as Macreedy studies him, a sedated Bill the lizard. In another interesting shot, Hector leans his elbow against a wall some four feet away from his torso, surely providing more stress on his frame than relief. Hector picks postures for maximum silhouette impact. Hector has the moves and spirit of intimidation down flat, his signature feint being to act weird and simmer with vaguely motivated violence. But he gets flummoxed fast, mainly by Macreedy’s technique of questioning the literal logic of any insinuated threat. Long enough to look like he’s going to bow the hotel bed, boots surely ruining the bedspread, and glowering intently at his burning cigarette, Hector’s materialization in Macreedy’s room is a calculated intrusion of lanky non sequitur. In this match, Hector loses, unable to be more startling than an old man in a bathrobe who refuses to act the least bit surprised.

Meanwhile, Ernest Borgnine as Coley chortles and bounces about like a fleshy rubber ball with a grinning, google-eyed goblin face painted on it. He is giggly with delight over the opportunity to bully anyone, as if he has been deprived of opportunity for years. Macreedy stares at Coley, memorizes his opponent’s malevolent hop-about, until Coley dances to the end of his chain, and lashes out in a vehicular attack on a desert road, and in a perhaps even greater violation, dumps a whole bunch of ketchup all over Macreedy's chili. Macreedy seems to endure the outbursts only to gather facts and figures, place the violence in a diagram of Coley’s attack pattern. Next time the issue is raised, Macreedy swats Coley out of the way like a slow-pitch softball. It's one-armed judo precision against an inept berserker telegraphing his moves.

John J. Macreedy makes his way to the outskirts of Black Rock, to the ruins of Komoko’s farm at Adobe Flats. He paces. He crouches. He studies the depth of a well, the composition of the dirt, the flora of the area. It takes three minutes, and he has sized up the situation. Adobe Flats gives up all the backstory that the citizens will not; the dirt and plants and rocks and holes do not care who is coolest.

“I believe a man is as big as what'll make him mad,” Reno Smith tells Macreedy. The town heavy is Robert Ryan, whose career-long refinement of tough-souled goodies and baddies suppressing a psychotic streak is distilled into this pared-away Big Boss tyrant. Reno holds the town in hand by virtue of a few more IQ points, and at least understands the game they are playing. Do not flinch, do not back away, do not break eye contact first: Who is the Coolest? He is actually “mad” all the time, constantly fuming at flunkies Coley and Hector, and the entire colony of Black Rock. What he really means, though, is that man-size is determined by what makes a fellow completely lose his shit. For Reno, and by his own account, it took Pearl Harbor. So he’s at least as big a man as the entire country. And what’s bigger than that? For Macreedy, it takes the whole of the species’ fears, cowardice, inhumanity and intolerance.

Both men have already erupted in loud preaching, but only one lost an arm fighting for the country; the other incited a mob to murder. Reno gives a flame-eyed speech about desire to protect the Western country he knows, while Macreedy’s righteous rant is truly about personal bravery and individuality, his breaking point breached when the nitwit hotel clerk is too chickenshit to stand up for himself. When these symbolmen finally duke it out, it’s Reno the enraged, irrational, indignant going nuts with a gun, while Macreedy, beleaguered and persecuted, defends himself with methodical Molotov cocktails. All speechifying becomes irrelevant. Everything they mean and stand for is observable in how they fight, defined by their combat in the last round of Who is the Coolest? If Reno is the Big Boss of Black Rock, Macreedy has him beat. He’s bigger than the whole damned town.

Meanwhile, Hector’s shirttails flop out again, and billow in the hot breeze.

Active Engagement: Dollhouse 1.12 - "Omega"

2009-07-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

Dollhouse Season One debuts on DVD and Blu-Ray disc in one week. In celebration, Exploding Kinetoscope presents the season-finale-proper installment of "Active Engagement" (held back to artificially create excitement and demand!)...

Being a regular collection of notes, intrusive fragments and episodic memories regarding each installment of the FOX teledrama Dollhouse (J. Whedon, creator).

The Engagement: Get out your knotcraft manual. Alpha has left with an Echo Imprinted with an old Whiskey personality. They play Mickey and Mallory Knox, kidnap a girl called Wendy, and retire to Alpha's lair. Alpha pumps Caroline into Wendy's head, causes a Composite Event in Echo by cramming in all her Imprints at once. Knighting the composite as "Omega", Alpha's convoluted Nietzschean plan is supposed to end with Omega blasting brain out of Wendy-cum-Caroline: Echo has to kill her weak former self to ascend to godhood. Meanwhile, Agent Ballard grudgingly assists the Dollhouse in locating the escapees, and the 'House grudgingly explains Alpha's backstory (quick: he was insane prior to Doll-ing, remains insane), and Dr. Saunders has, like, the shittiest day of all. In the end, Ballard sort-of triumphs in saving a girl, but mostly sells his soul. Whatcha' gonna do?

DUTCHOVEN 1.12 - "Oh My God --"

Janani: -- because we have a Hawaiian president...

because that Beck song enhances memory retrieval no matter which story you are in...

because 38 personalities blended together = a) Faith? and b) a new self and a new life, no matter what Echo says, and the Caroline-wedge should have shattered on the pavement...

because man, that was some silly acting all around except for ...

Whiskey,

who walks off with the entire show in her lab coat pocket,

not because she knows who she is,

but because she's decided it.

for now.

Chris: Yes, I say... Bravo.

And I am delighted that Mutant Enemy spent so much of their music budget on a Beck song. They usually only spring for unsigned and indie artists (usually, yes. BtVS highlights were Cibo Matto, Aimee Mann, er, Sarah McLachlan). "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime" was, pointedly, last heard on the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack.

Knowing full well that the season would end with slow gliding pans across each character in isolation and pondering what we have all just been through -- a Whedon classic, though given the producers' better taste in music, The Sopranos may trump our boy on this one -- I'd been hoping for weeks that the song for this inevitable montage would be:

Actually, readers should just keep playing this as they skim this conversation and shrug their shoulders.

JS: Nobody will shrug once they see this graphic for the ages!

Echo may reset at zero each week, but every imprint interacts with the previous ones in ways unknowable, every imprint represents an irreversible enlargement of the world, every imprint strays beyond the boundaries expected by the Dollhouse and, later, by Alpha. And at the end we have this seashell-like aggregate - an abstract (also "crapstract") rendering of the brain of PolyEcho.

You hoped long back that Echo would learn from her various personalities, that she wouldn't shed them but carry them with her and find them useful. Looking at this, I realize that PolyEcho is wrong when she says, "none of these is me." Individually none may be, but collectively they are her -- and they're no less legitimate than the single Caroline lifeline preceding them! Of course, in the blending of imprints, the more brash and athletically inclined ones won out (didja see Esther in there anywhere? or Alice? even Margaret? oops) -- but, after all this, how can one return to being a mere Caroline? I was creeped by the sight of Madeline Costley returning to her "life" minus a clue, and Caroline should not do the same. What struck me most about Ballard rescuing the Caroline-wedge was the fact that that wedge now seems... impoverished. Seeing Ballard save it was like watching someone lunge for an old cassette -- sentimental value, sure. But the songs are dated and it's time for something new.

CS: The Dollhouse "self" is a mystery on par with the Buffyverse "soul". And too, this central philosophical question is used as a nearly identical plot device. Angel's detachable soul, like Caroline's wedge of consciousness in "Omega", gets waved around and endangered as a truly strange and disconcerting suspense device all the time. Topher sneers at Ballard's accusation that "you steal their souls": "Yeah. And then we put 'em in a glass jar with our fireflies." (Mutant Enemy has, in fact, captured souls in jars, and what is Firefly but nine souls in a jar hurtling through space?) But... but...

We've back and forthed about the degree to which Echo's Imprints are in/valid experiences. We seem to have our ladders against the same wall on that one. The show is even more preoccupied with their authenticity, but concedes to no definitive answers. We weren't in Echo's Imprint-glutted head, nor Alpha's, so it is impossible to say what that felt like -- were they all of those composited people? None of them? Their self-selves with added fighting prowess and radio static? An all-one super-empathetic creature or a sucking void of identity: Universal Mother or Nowhere Man? As Alpha is nuts and Caroline is overwhelmed, I doubt their testimony is fully trustworthy.

Dollhouse also seems to believe strongly in an unshakable Core Self, alterable perhaps through life experiences but untouchable by Topher's Twinkie-smeared fingers. Ballard calls it a soul and says that it can't go away, Topher says "their whaaat?" and that he can erase that, DeWitt says it is "not relevant." I'm not sure I am inclined to agree with Ballard, Topher or Mutant Enemy on the matter of where consciousness stems from. It seems to me that consciousness is such a specific byproduct of how ones personal synapses fire, individual body-chemistry, the accidents and choice-chains, the developmental history that leads us to the moment... you can't stick a developed personality in another brain for the same reason you can't replace a Chevy Vega engine with a baboon heart. The hardware can't process that information, right? This isn't me being unwilling to suspend disbelief -- it's that the fantastic premise diverges from the stem in such a way that it may not be able to provide answers to its own question. Yet in the end I get the feeling that perhaps Dollhouse knows this, and hints at such.

In the moment, 1000-Imprint-Echo is wrong -- the voice saying "none of these is me" is being generated by the "me"s, but she's right, none, nor the composite girl is Caroline as she existed before entering the Dollhouse... and the wrong-embodied Caroline is now altered by witnessing the events.

Topher and Ballard's arguments are particularly wonderful, and I love the way Tim Minear writes them not so much in disagreement with one another but talking past each other; they aren't defining their terms or listening. Ballard insists "I still don't believe you can wipe away a person's soul" but means "who they are at their core." All Topher hears is a traditionally spiritual/mystical term and shoots back "good luck with that God thing," though no one has mentioned God at all. Topher scoffs, but only because he does not call those things "souls." The Buffyverse Soul is a physical aspect which can be captured in glass jars and sent to Heaven and Hell, but that wispy glowing thing is just a metaphor for (an aspect of?) consciousness. Its function is never fully explicated but seems to be some gut-level instincts of humanity, specifically a tendency to feel remorse and empathize with emotional pain. The soul Ballard is talking about seems to simply mean the incorruptible spark of Self, and Topher does worry about those -- he stores them on circuit boards. He knows/believes they can be eradicated, both by Chair (and death?), but can't force himself to admit that if he needs equipment and process to make it go away, that means it is there.

There is a problem with much speculative fiction that prods at its own What If? for moral lessons, in that they often do not follow through. Two Spielbergian examples: Minority Report asks what is dangerous about preemptively punishing crimes which have not yet occurred but will occur. Answer: the system might be wrong, misinterpreted, or sabotaged. BZZT. Wrong. The question was supposed to be "what's dangerous when it works perfectly?" Jurassic Park tries to adapt Crichton's allegory about what happens when human minds try to grapple with chaotic systems and come up short; instead of a black comic allegory of the limits of an ambitious species to intervene in the complexity of nature, we just wonder if the park would've worked if a jerk hadn't sabotaged it. JP The Movie still delivers a fine story about the sanctity of death and robust vengeance of nature, but the What If? is off balance.

Dollhouse and "Omega" give forum to a lot of loudmouthed opinions and perspectives, but the final say is given to the quietest voice, whispering to herself, unheard by others but curious and confident: Dolled Echo in bed tells herself "Caroline." Nobody else was 100% right, and it seems acknowledgment that the premise is not possible and that consciousness is existence's central mystery. What If you could erase a personality from a body and give it a new one? Well you can't, because the personality is a function of the specific brain and therefore reliant on its specific body, the body a product of experiences accumulated by the mind. We have witnessed many brainwashings, deaths of minds and bodies, backups of selves placed on disc, and Imprints gone without incident... yet the last moment of the season resists postulation of a mind-body duality, and the hour is absurd existential brain-in-jar slapstick that may/may not agree. Third option, too, and my favorite, least tied to politic, theology or science, is Dr. Saunders 2.0, who looks at her cards, grimaces at the hand dealt, and plays it as best she can: "I know who I am." She's not whoever-she-was-before, she's not Whiskey, she's not Crystal, can't even be nice Dr. Saunders. Her past circumstances washed away, simply by being made aware of them: the first step in navigating a maze is knowing you are in a maze. Given no solid foundations, Whiskey is free to rebuild how ever she damn well pleases.

"I know who I am"? Sure, Whiskey. But consider that the proper chaser -- for anyone at any time -- may be "I know who I am... Whoever that is."

JS: For me this episode was not only about "whoever" but about “wherever," ringing vividly in Ballard’s question

WHERE’S KEPLER?

which is really a metaphysical question:

WHERE IS THE KEPLER I KNOW?

Gone, Paulie, gone. Untraceable and irretrievable not only in physical coordinates, but temporally too. Time swallows identity; again and again we feel the flush and satisfaction of certainty about how we are, who our fellows are -- and, just as reliably, its fade (even Echo's whispered "Caroline" seems like a brief flare to me, no more). Ballard's “you can’t wipe away who someone is at their core…” talk dissolves in the air -- which someone and when? whose is theirs? can someone have multiple cores? And by the time we watch Omega/Echo/Caroline face off against Alpha/Alpha/Carl vs. Carolined Wendy, the usually helpful markers of "me," "you," "us," "ours," "mine," "yours," "not yours" have been exposed for what they are: the weakest of struck matches, the rottenest of basement steps in the dark. The episode cracks several great severed-mind jokes ("baby, meet yourself" and "I'll blow your brain out" and "your head...which is my head" being among my favorites) and by the climactic lair-battle has blown to bitsy pieces the promise of a secure, uniform, integrated, indivisible, monadic Self -- hey, what if a self is a crowd? You mean a man is not an island but an...archipelago?

One of your great loves in Buffy and in JW storytelling in general seems to be the practice, the discipline, indeed the ethic of immediately problematizing any idea or motto that has become too stable and comfortable. Dollhouse blows raspberries at "I have control of my body," it confounds "I belong to my body," it stomps all over "I belong to my brain and my brain belongs to me and I alone control my brain"...it even recognizes the overemphasis on Wendy's body as the repository of Caroline's Self and, before Omega gets too confident in that correspondence, the show puts a bullet in Wendy's throat. As fast as a certainty can begin to form, it gets shot down. (Note of appreciation: while watching I had to pause every 15-20 seconds for notes, and just to keep track of all the former strands being woven and hyperbraided, threads pulled from everywhere, all the ends tucked back in.) In the end I'm left thinking -- even if Omega + Wendy + a wedge = a problem of three minds and two bodies, even if nobody's parts are stuck where they should be... are we really worse off than we were before?

So... this is what the famous Composite Event is all about. We've seen Dominic fret about Echo resembling Alpha before his Composite Event -- whether occurring naturally or by wild teevee coincidence/SYENCE MISHAP, Compositing presents something to fear, something creepy and unmanageable. But Dominic needn't have feared Echo cutting up a bunch of people (it seems that you have to hone the knifework before you get Dolled). Nor does it seem strictly necessary to have 30+ voices roaring in your head. To have truly Composited you need to comprehend 100% that you are a Doll, in the Dollhouse, who receives Imprints -- a creature with history who acts, will act, and has been acted upon; you need to grasp that you have not only a present but a past, a future. You also need to experience a definite separation from, breakage from, confrontation with your past-self - how you conduct yourself toward that self, that person who is no longer you, says worlds about how you're going to tackle the future; and so Alpha smashes Carl, Omega tries (maybe too hard) to save Caroline. It's especially interesting to me that Omega revives from her Composition in extreme rage, waking up on the wrong side of the chair, so to speak. How did the anger kick in so quickly -- how did she know, almost with an infant's basic animal intuition of distress, that Alpha "wanted her to kill herself," translated to "YOU WISHED ME HARM?" Does Composition rejuvenate the emotions as well as the intelligence and pipe-handling skills? ("Omega, you hit me with a pipe!" is probably my favorite line of the episode...)

But WAIT! Alpha's "I understand hell now" and Echo's "Now I understand everything" are not the only wakeup utterances, they are not the only ones aware and observant of the people swarming through them and the complexities of their newly crowded "selves." As you hinted, Whiskey's "I know who I am" is also the rueful footnote to a successful natural Composite Event. Maybe not according to Topher's specs -- she may not be in conscious dialogue with a million other Imprints, she hasn't handled and destroyed her own wedge, she hasn't gotten to stand face to face with her "self" and wipe her "own" mascara-loused cheeks... but wait, she sort of has. On a computer screen. And it makes her ask: WHERE IS THE SAUNDERS I KNOW? The answer is: right here. Topher and Langton are both righter than they knew -- the transformations they effect are childbirth and dying rolled into one, one self dying to make way for a new. There is no going back to being Pure Carl, to Pure Caroline, or Pure Amy Acker. Ballard may have been partly right -- "you can't wipe away who someone is" -- but he was also partly wrong -- you also can't wipe away EVERYONE ELSE THEY ARE AND HAVE BEEN. “I can slip into them... they slip into me… they hollowed me out… there’s no me. I’m just a container," says Omega... but it's not true. Omega's not just-a-container any more than Saunders II, handing out lollipops like her "father" before her. These new selves may not be superior, but they are, in fact, larger and ampler than the selves that preceded them.

Returning to Alpha, I did wish for more coherence in his story and in the ongoing murmurs about "being one's best." Really, what do the Dolls mean when they say this? Do they even have the ability not to try their best, to sabotage themselves? What does not-best mean to them, and if they don't experience jealousy or self-loathing or the basic ability to compare themselves to others, does it even matter? Are they kept on a sort of gentle cruise control, urged mildly to use all their capabilities, to Keep Trying? In the end, the BESTEST ECHO also seems to be Alpha's creation, a fantasy as thin as Lars's or any other Dollhouse customer's; in a way he's the last customer of the season, although he grabbed her for free and does his Imprinting in-house. (It's also not a long step from Alpha and his penchant for "art"work to Topher and his wedges -- when you think about it, those represent hundreds of hours of careful crafting.) And so the artist raves at his muse, "I thought you were exceptional..." an exceptional what? Exceptionalism is its own reward, it seems. When he lectures Omega about Ascending and Perfecting, he's pretty much ceased to see her at all, and by the time he's threatening endless clonings and killings of Carolines, he seems to be improvising madly, or at least considerably off his intended script. I wish he hadn't unravelled so, but he didn't know that he gets thirteen more episodes to torment Adelle and Co., so maybe he'll roar back next season saner and more lethal.

CS: Like the man says, "Wherever you go, there you are." You "are" who you are in the microsecond of self-evaluation, in whatever chamber you make that stock check. Even when the history that leads you there includes passages of not behaving "like yourself" or, say, total memory wipes. Whether we like the circumstances or not, choose to move the ball by hand or alter the landscaping, the game is always, as the golfers know, to play it where it lays. That can sound nice, can serve as a center from which to muster strength, but as Dr. Saunders Mark II demonstrates, it can be awfully cold comfort. Except...

Except -- as we rotate the board -- you may be frozen in place in someone else's perception, memory... conception. The on-screen evidence is that November gets her pre-Dollhouse self back, unscathed. She gets to go back. Who's to say if her "who they are at their core" ever went away, but she is evidently unscathed and unchanged by the experience; time will tell if that sticks. Whiskey/Saunders begins to understand this too, in her shell-shocked confrontation with Topher. He built her not only as a reflection/repository of his self-loathing, but with the talent via computer skills and psychiatric training to eventually throw it back in his face. It is not so odd as Whiskey supposes that Topher's means of coping with the moral struggles of the job is to unload his doubt and pain into an Active. What is odd is that he builds her as a self-untying knot.

And too, many convoluted logical hoops are conjured, set aflame and leapt through to illustrate that, for all his multi-'Print megalomania, Alpha is still Carl At Heart. His belief in a core self "soul" belittled at every turn, Ballard is rather validated in the sickest, least reassuring way. Once a mentally ill face-slasher, forever a mentally ill face-slasher. Which, of course, begs a question you have also begged for: "soul" means "who they are, at their core"... so what does that mean? Carl's psychosis is his core? Echo's is the spirit of resistance? What's Topher's? Wait, I know:

We may both be falling into some logical and emotional traps, avoiding others. Any potential homily (at worst) or grand, definitive statement (at best) is given a counterweight, contradiction or, yes, stomping, smushing, tearing. Dollhouse thwarts deterministic message-seeking critics and, thus far, the more didactic tendencies of the artists themselves. I admit to erring in that direction sometimes. On an auto-reactive level we may want to agree with the ultimate conclusions of the work, but that does not always happen, and Dollhouse sets everybody up for a perpetual fall. I mean, who thought they could walk right in, when everybody knows the Dollhouse is invisible? We are both normally high minded about this, but Dollhouse is designed not just to baffle our assumptions about from whence identity stems, but to unsettle. No matter one's pet philosophies, favored neuroscience reports or abiding faith, Dollhouse has something to flap your unflappables. It is a Voight-Kampff test designed to get you to flinch and blush. Moving into the flinch and blush, then...

It only now occurs to me that one of the spooky ideas floating around in Dollhouse is that any of us could have signed up for a five-year mission and no longer remember it. What may have happened to or been committed by any of us in those pockets of life we do not recall? Plot fact acknowledged: Actives apparently do remember the act of signing their contract. Which, gut-level again, I would suppose makes matters far worse. Associated Horrors, Inc.! Imagine waking with this knowledge. I admit, pushing aside all theory and politic, the first unshakable question would be "who had sex with me?" We cannot pretend in some abstract realm that this does not matter -- we would not dare tell the Active's real-life equivalent that the experience does not matter because she blacked out. And yet, this one might fade, with the larger, if less traumatic, issue: what did I do in this world, and am I responsible?

It is difficult as well to reconcile the problems of Caroline The Ideal, the Body, the Wedge and the Omega. We can intellectualize it, but the girl should by all rights fight for her mind back if it is available. Whatever silliness, useless protest rally and Phish concerts may be stored in that wedge, Caroline worked hard to accumulate that collection. She oughtta be attached to it. And whether I think it is "possible," I rather like uberEcho and disembodied-Caroline's attachment to Caroline's body, beyond just the obvious, "soul"-deep and likely near universal desire for your consciousness to remain united with its body while still alive and on the planet. Contrast with Margaret of "Haunted", who was all to happy to be shed of her body, never sinking in that her identity was being damaged, bent or just changed by Echo's shell. Not in a biochemical sense -- Dollhouse hasn't yet gone there, though I would love for them to take that trip -- but in every social interaction. Topher doesn't make Dr. Saunders out of Whiskey. There is Old Doc Saunders in there. There is a community of Dolls in need that make her a "doctor". There is the circumstance of Adelle's approval of inmates as Actives, and Whiskey's scarring by Alpha that put her on in-house duty. It takes everyone's help to make a You!

Ooh, Alpha's plan. I'll 'fess up to what was either a bad call or a reaction to a strange set-up. It looked all season like Alpha's plan was to aid Caroline in self-actualization. Not totally off-base, but a little to the left. Alpha wants Echo to Become. More to the point, rather than Dollhouse becoming a cautionary tale of how all this brain-futzing leads to the inevitable creation of a terrifying Übermensch, it leads to the creation of a beast too nutzo to predict. Alpha's plan looks less like a season-long perfect storm than a series of jabs and dodges. He's definitely playing Xanatos Speed Chess by the middle of "Omega", if not all season. This makes Alpha's approach to Dollhouse-infiltration and Caroline-rescue not unlike Ballard's, though Alpha lands blows while Ballard lands only on his face.

But look at that. Agent Ballard saved the Girl. Not through punching. Not through good police work. His biggest action hero success of the season is standing beneath Echo and catching a circuit board. In that moment, he is receptive. Oh, he is dogged, persistent, strives to be noble -- and by these standards does rather well, the rescue even less impressive than refusing to interfere in the life of Madeleine Costley*. So note again, Agent Ballard saved the Girl. Not by busting in, gun blazing, badge flashing, no prince with sword drawn.

He makes a deal with the Dollhouse.

*er, this is not gonna go well for Maddy.

JS: He'll have the summer to think about that. As will we. Until July 28th and "Epitaph One"! Thanks for letting me blog with you, Topher.

AND ME TOO

AND ME

DON'T FORGET ME

Uh...all of them say thanks too.

The Darkest Art: HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (2005)

2009-07-16T22:11:00.000-07:00

Written in November 2005. Four years of distance has not made Mike Newell's Potter film any more coherent or compelling. Side-by-side comparison with the maddening Order of the Phoenix, however, might gain Goblet of Fire some points. In any case, feel free to wince all over again, as now-irrelevant notes evaluate how well Goblet does or does not set up Phoenix. End result was: it didn't matter.

These notes were written for a small audience of friends already familiar with the novels. So they buzz through information that readers know, take the form of pro/con checklists, and are aimed to evaluating the success of the adaptation process.

Plotio: Harry Potter, Magical Childe, just wants to get a date to the dance, and make it through the Tri-Wizard Tournament international witch contest without getting smashed by a dragon. But his nemesis Lord Voldemort (previously a face stuck to the back of a head) has a scrawny little body now, and is grumpier than ever!

Every-Favor Spoilers ahead! Books! Movies! Unwritten books and unfilmed movies! ALL SPOILED!

In an early scene of Goblet of Fire the Weasleys, Diggorys, and Harry trudge of a hill in the British countryside at sun up. Director Mike Newell's camera speeds up the scrubby terrain and swings around a lone discarded boot, perched at the top. Newell finds a distinct and fitting look for the film, shooting everything with a sad autumnal golden haze. That dirty boot, back-lit by the cold orange morning sun, revealed like it's the most important, beautiful thing in the world, is the best part of the film.

It's not just a great moment: it's mostly downhill from there.

Look guys, it's the fan-favorite novel. It's 734 pages long. Something was bound to snap. Voldemort's eyes are not red in this movie. But Daniel Radcliffe's aren't green, so whatcha gonna do?

If Chris Columbus' Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets are middling movies and acceptable (and plodding, and rote) adaptations, and Alfonso Cuarón's Azkaban is a great film and decent adaptation, Goblet of Fire is a confused, uneven movie and a singularly poor adaptation. That is the short of it.

The trouble doesn't lie in the inner disgruntled fan of all Rowling readers ("oooh, I wanted to see Charlie Weasley!" "What!? Both Patil twins in Gryffindor?"). The trouble is that the artless gutting of the book consists of lopping out large sections of story, even when they are relevant to the plot. It's a grand story badly told.

Azkaban, in its breathless rush not to be as stodgy as the first two pictures, fumbled a couple opportunities. For example, that notoriously unscratched itch, the plot hiccup in which Harry never learns that the Marauder's Map was created by his father and friends. It's a detail that could have been handled with a single throwaway line of dialogue, and greatly cements a number of story elements. Most importantly it strengthens Harry's bond with his father. It is one thing to long for and idolize an absent father, and another to feel connected because he was just like you and would approve of your specific mischief. It is also a concrete moment of James assisting Harry from "beyond the grave" before the finale when Harry's Patronus takes the form of his dead father. It's variation and theme moment of some power in the novel, lost in the film.

But you ain't seen nothin' compared to Goblet of Fire.

At their core the Harry Potter novels are classical gothic mysteries, and this is a primary gear that makes them go tick-tock. Mike Newell grasps the basics of character relationships, handles the soap opera of the romances well, and understands (if only occasionally demonstrates) the humor of the universe. What he cannot do in any way, and what Rowling excels at, is lay out clues, tease with red herrings, show people investigating, and satisfyingly solve a mystery. The mystery in Goblet of Fire is so hopelessly botched it doesn't register as intrigue.

The trio doesn't solve the mystery of weird-ass new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Mad-Eye Moody's real identity, as they do in the book. Instead, they are helplessly yanked along through the story -- giving Ron and Hermione zero function in the Tri-Wizard or mystery plots -- until the Polyjuice Potion just happens to run out at an inopportune moment and the villain spills his guts. It's a Big Lebowski gag: you didn't solve the mystery, someone just explained it to you.

In the smart and subtle Azkaban, Cuarón could throw out clues you didn't notice until you needed them. In a personal favorite scene, Harry stood in the school clock tower, glowering down over the grounds, foreshadowing the revelation of the Time Turner. In Goblet we are treated to Mad-Eye Moody swigging out of a red-flagged MYSTERIOUS flask after SUSPICIOUSLY making sure no one is watching, and Harry wondering aloud what it could contain, all replete with seemingly unmotivated musical stings and conspiratorial close-ups.

Severus SnapeIt is one thing to streamline a detail-crammed novel for the screen, and it's another to end up with an undercooked chop suey of a screenplay in the process. No audience needs a 10-hour Harry Potter movie (though we may "want" one), but this script bears a whiff of "Uh... We Don't Have Time for This." I'll leave it to the unappeasable literalists to complain about what they missed, but here's what does and does not work for me in the film:

Though the opening at the Dursley's is one of the funniest of such episodes in the books, the visits to Privet Drive have begun to feel like chores in the films. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Bypassing the Dursleys seems harmless, but causes unseen damage to Order of the Phoenix, which offers answers to "why would Harry go home every summer?"

Mercifully, the book's weakest subplot -- Hermione's crusading House Elf liberation society, SPEW -- is excised. Along with it, some assistance offered to Harry by House Elves is gone. This is pretty seamless story-repair in Goblet, but a regrettable result that none of the novels' cumulative thoughts about race issues are going to bear out properly. This through-line climaxes in Phoenix, where Harry understands the true meaning of the fountain in the Ministry of Magic, depicting all the magical races in a Free to Be You and Me pose: the wizarding world is riddled with hypocrisy, fear and denial. [Note: Hey, what'dya know, the SPEW plot truly pays off in Deathly Hallows - good luck to Mr. Kloves, who one presumes is kicking himself right about now. ] A long list of great Potter moments involve these themes -- from Dobby's Emancipation Sock-lamation, to Firenze the centaur's arc in Phoenix -- and the films' inability to plumb these depths is beginning to show. Beyond that, they're simply going to need Winky the Elf in Order of the Phoenix. They're going to need Percy Weasley as well, but hey, thank God we had time for six minutes of Moaning Myrtle looking at Harry's balls in the bathtub.

Rita Skeeter (here: Miranda Richardson) as Rowling writes her, is not a particularly funny character -- apart from the Dursleys and Gilderoy Lockhart, most of her broader caricatures are grating and off-key -- but in the novel Skeeter serves a story function. In the film, she's been deprived of her ultimate fate and most of her power to get under Harry's skin: she's neither punished (literally, or in a meaningful dramatic sense), nor revealed as an animagus. This might be fine, but her storyline is meticulously set up even as the character has been rendered totally superfluous.

Extremely long build-up to the Quidditch World Cup, including fully animated fireworks... and then a smash cut away the second before we can see any of the match. The World Cup itself may not be vital to this tale, but it's doubtful there's an argument why dancing leprechaun fireworks are more important than the pleasure value of finally seeing pro-level Quidditch.

Remus LupinThe Tri-Wizard Tournament tasks are mostly well-mounted special effects sequences, and the movie's penchant for showing off is appropriate here. But Rowling uses the tasks as far more than just action set pieces, filling them with drama both psychological and symbolic. It is fair to wonder if we're so very short on time why in the first task (dragon egg-stealing) Harry and the Horntail end up clawing along the edge of the Hogwarts roof. The rooftop fingernail-hanging chase is the hack screenwriter's go-to idea of big excitement, and this truth is not diluted by integrating a dragon. Ponder also why in the second task (underwater friend-rescuing), Harry seems more interested in saving a little girl he doesn't know than Hermione. Certainly the thrilling third task, a maze full of Blast-Ended Skrewts and... wait, no, it's a maze full of wind. Wind. I shit you not, friends. Mike Newell and Steve Kloves thought it would be cooler to have wind blow through the maze than a sphinx.

Hey, don't shoot the owl. I just deliver the parchment.

Perhaps it's for the best though. The series has always had creature-design issues (see under Troll), but the beautiful work on the Azkaban hippogriff set a bar so high it looks like even Peter Jackson's King Kong is going to have its work cut out for it. QwikList: beginning with a dodgy CGI snake, the dragons are acceptable and unimaginative, the mermaids are weird, Desiccated Voldemort is cute, and grown-up Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) looks like Modulock from Masters of the Universe.

The Courtship of James Potter & Lily Evans
All wand-carriers, be prepared to explain most, if not all, of the Voldemort plot to your friends. Why does Harry find Barty Crouch knocked out or maybe dead or maybe drunk in the woods? Why is Hagrid taking the kids into the woods in that scene anyway? Why do we cut from finding an important government official dead in the forest to an unrelated scene with no further mention of the incident? What's prior incantatum? If there's no way to bring back the dead, why did Harry see and communicate with his dead parents? What is Crouch Jr.'s fate? Oh, and as long as the movie is called Goblet of Fire, any textual evidence of how Harry's name got in that rascally flame-cup? No? Sorry folks, get a library card.

Story trouble aside -- it's mostly Steve Kloves' Swiss cheese screenplay's fault -- Mike Newell has no affinity for or personal take on this material. Far surpassing even Four Weddings and a Funeral's cheek-pinching preciousness, Goblet of Fire is so whimsical you can feel the sweat-beads, it's whimsying so hard.

Painfully unfunny visual buttons, one-liners and slapstick blows punctuate literally dozens of scenes. The worst offender is probably an otherwise well-tuned scene about George and Fred giving Harry and Ron pointers on getting Yule Ball dates, as Prof. Snape (Alan Rickman) is overseeing a Potions exam (uh, what class is this where fourth-years and sixth-years are sharing tables?). Rickman spends the scene rolling his eyes, huffing, and, in total out-of-character lack of decorum, smacking the boys over the heads. The punchline for this scene is too much of a dud to recount. Snape is too busy hitting students to remember that he can take House points from them. Awkward and beat-too-long too, is an uncomfortable scene with Moaning Myrtle in the prefect's bathtub (Merlin's beard, why did Chris Columbus let Shirley Henderson use that voice? Now we're stuck with it for seven movies!). The film's approach to comedy violates the performers' natural, easy charm and runs counter to the sense of humor already integral to the books.

None of this holds a candle to the moment when the Weird Sisters appear. The wizard rock band, portrayed by Jarvis Cocker, members of Pulp, Radiohead and others, play original pop songs at the Yule Ball. The Ball, Prof. McGonagall has just assured us, is a long-standing formal tradition, to be taken seriously. Don't believe it for a second. The embarrassing songs couldn't be more inappropriate or rupture this fantasy world more if the Weird Sisters were "Weird Al" Yankovic. In this pivotal moment, Newell strip-mines the series' integrity.

Newell just doesn't seem to get the wizarding world. He unveils every magical event with a flourish and a trilling musical sting and someone's jaw dropping in glass-eyed wonder. Harry himself can barely believe that -- get this -- the inside of a tent is larger than it appears outside. Not only was Dr. Who not allowed at the Dursley's, but Harry has apparently forgotten that he is a wizard, has been for four years, and that most of the people he knows are wizards. Demonstrating again that Azkaban was a special gift that may not be repeated, recall how Cuarón's camera would pan past throw-away magical gags (moving photos, self-pouring teakettles, the Leaky Cauldron being invisibly tidied-up) like they were no big deal. In this world of everyday magic, they aren't a big deal.

That Newell blows it so very badly most of the time makes it surprising and more frustrating when he gets it right. The new magical device of portkeys is set up with confidence (though in action they look like standard CG squish-n-swirl). The mechanics of the pensieve are a little muddy in explanation, but play out well. A marvelous scene in the DADA classroom gracefully explains the Unforgivable Curses. What could be a confusing or encyclopedia-entry exposition scene -- recall the Rules of Quidditch sequence in Sorcerer's Stone -- explores not just the rules of the curses, but their allure and moral complications, investigates Moody's character, and has a chilling turn in tone from laughter to horror as the class realizes the implications of the Imperius Curse.

There are a couple of smart detail shifts away from the text, like Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) giving Harry the gillyweed he needs to compete in the second task. Neville is one of Rowling's most elegantly written characters, and his increased role in Goblet is welcome and will make his growth in Phoenix even more profound. But the impact of revelations about the Longbottom family are nil here, another miscalculation so gross your muggle friends won't even notice the plot point unless you tell them. Kudos to Mr. Lewis anyway on his sweet performance. Neville's preparations and late return from the Yule Ball are the first time a supporting Hogwarts student has registered as a complex human being. Now if only he didn't have those horrid fake teeth.

Daniel Radcliffe is a superb Harry, sincere and churning, conjuring up with conviction any number of nameless emotions. Another of the God-they-nailed-it scenes takes place in the empty owlery, as Harry asks out Cho Chang (Katie Leung). It's perfectly staged, and beautifully played. It's not just a scene about having a crush on someone and being turned down. From Harry, through rejection, there's that slightest twinge of creeping arrogance: what do you mean someone's asked you? I'm Harry Potter. And from Cho that great response: sorry. Really and truly sorry, but... sorry. This lays exciting groundwork for the characters' heart-rending and painful scenes in Phoenix.

Cho's selection of enormous leg-warmers in the film is a startling character choice.
Radcliffe and Rupert Grint are both improving vastly, giving funny and nuanced performances. It's Ron's indignation in his fight with Harry that brings his family's underdog fire back into the story. It's Harry's reaction on returning from Hell with another child's body at the end of the Tournament that literally brings tragedy home. Emma Watson mostly overacts, wriggling her eyebrows around and stuttering like Newell thinks he's directing Hugh Grant. She redeems herself thoroughly in the Yule Ball scenes, as Hermione finally cracks her nerd-chic facade and tells Ron the worst thing he can hear. And really, it's not her fault Hermione has nothing to do in this movie.

Fred and George Weasley (James and Oliver Phelps) are hysterical this go-round, though Kloves has missed something key about the characters: their inventiveness and ambition. They are self-confident and anti-authoritarian jokers, but the film makes them out as total goofs, and there is no indication that they can become triumphant self-made men. Anyway, it's nice to see them register as people.

For the rest of the cast: Robbie Coltrane is still a pitch perfect Hagrid (sadly his relationship with Madame Maxime is robbed of its dimension of racial self-acceptance by the whitewashing screenplay). Michael Gambon continues to surpass to Richard Harris' perfectly acceptable but uncomplicated take on Dumbledore. Gambon plays more to the flickering benevolent madness in those reassuring eyes. You can't be the most powerful wizard in the world without being a little scary.

Clémence Poésy as Fleur Delacour is a lovely non-entity, and so, far as the movie is concerned, entirely human. The entrance of the ladies of Beauxbatons is fine enough (uh, where'd the boys go? No matter), but again, Ron's infatuation Fleur goes nowhere but fizzling punchline. David Tennant as Barty Crouch Jr. is godawful, his spastic, performance tipping off the solution to the final mystery in the stroke of one mannered facial tic repeated ad nauseum. He gives Timothy Spall as Wormtail a run for most obnoxious overstated acting.

Ralph Fiennes does the best under the circumstances that he possibly can. Voldemort as he appears in this story, while sadistic and gross is not scary. The dialogue is arch; the motivations are puerile and uninteresting. The character remains this way after Half-Blood Prince, where his damaged soul is out in the open air, but in the meantime, we must deal with this cardboard boogeyman.

Brendan Gleeson's take on Mad-Eye Moody is miles away from the potential locked in the part, and plays cartoonish and dopey. Rowling's Moody is scary and gruff, undomesticated and dangerous, but commanding of respect: he's smarter, tougher and worldlier than you. The part is begging for Tom Waits or Ron Pealman. Gleeson is certainly dirty-looking, but there's no hint that he's the roughest toughest meanest hombre in the aurer biz. The costume, however, is top-notch!

Costume design has always been remarkable in the Potter films, and it's one of the areas where Goblet is still distinguished. However, the continued decrease in school uniforms is distressing. The set decoration is suffering here too. These films have never been particularly good at conveying the feeling that Hogwarts is a functioning school, but in Goblet the House colors are almost nowhere to be seen.

The movie ends on a flat note with the trio promising not to write each other over the summer. The Durmstrang and Beauxbatons transports depart in pretty special-effects ways. And we may realize that the best part was a kid getting turned down for a date in a dung-covered owl roost. The best part was a raggedy boot sitting on a hill. Rowling's is a dingy, battered, rainy, foggy, sooty, sad and beautiful world. And Mike Newell only gets it in his muggle-grip for a few moments.

Sirius Black

The Boy with the Thorn in his Side Who Lived : HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004)

2009-07-15T16:43:00.001-07:00

This review of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was written in June 2004. My opinion of Cuarón's filmmaking in Azkaban has grown even higher in the wake of the dull-spirited films following the third entry, and stance on the screenplay remains up in the air. The Azkaban script is certainly full of holes and missteps, but can only look like a masterpiece next to the slash-and-burn nonsense of Goblet and Phoenix. Either way, it remains a wrestling match between this and A Little Princess as Cuarón's best film.

I also note how very much I used to love parenthetical asides.

This school year Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe, hair finally as unruly as it should be), boy-wizard, is troubled by further ramifications of his parents' death at the hands of magic-Hitler Voldemort. Suspected You-Know-Who henchman and convicted murderer Sirius Black (Gary Oldman, dressed as Charles Mansion) is escaped from Azkaban prison, and certainly zeroing in on destiny-confounded Potter. Little will play out as expected from there.

Alfonso Cuarón has eyes that do not see like yours, and the skill to make you see with them. What has carried Cuarón's films through their uniformly shaky narratives, is remarkable visual invention and sensitivity. This is not the same gift possessed by Tim Burton or Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Terry Gilliam, whose hand-crafted cartoonish visuals that proles call "eye-candy" match their cockeyed storytelling, cramming beautiful sets full of interesting design— though Prisoner of Azkaban is beautifully designed, to be sure. I mean that Cuarón has Werner Herzog eyes. Nic Roeg eyes. Every shot is infused with a sense of poetry that doesn't have a lot to do with special effects. He's right for this material because he finds a graceful cinematic language for exploring the material.

It is in the silent-picture style fuzzy iris-in that Cuarón uses as his main transitional device. It is in the observant light-play pre-title scene (the qualities of light under a white sheet) that turns into a giggly dirty joke (Harry furtively practicing magic under his covers). It is in the hyperventilating motion-blur of the film's closing scene, that puts one in mind of Zero for Conduct or young Godard: while the special effect of a flying broomstick was likely expensive, the decision to end with on a blurry close-up freeze-frame was not. Chris Columbus' charming but thuddingly literal films seem like expository bludgers as Azkaban speeds past them like a joyful Golden Snitch.

Cuarón's film is interested in weather above all, and for the first time Hogwarts and environs seem to be set in a hidden outback of the English countryside. Every form of precipitation and cloud-cover known to man are lovingly detailed. A whole suspense sequence is built out of Ron Weasley's hand against a pane of fogging glass. The late autumnal chill pervades and the schoolchildren's pasty white faces glow out of a murk that finally fits J.K. Rowling's melancholic vision. Rowling is an avowed fan of comic mope-rockers The Smiths: like Morrissey, her strongest storytelling tools are English gloom, ironic self-effacement and outsider's pain. Her wizarding world is rife with murder mysteries, ghost stories, and her hero's tale is primarily about coping with and growing up in the wake of the death of one's parents. To be fair, Columbus managed some of the atmospherics necessary for a cracking Gothic mystery, but here the entire landscape is depressed.

A Man Escaped II: Escape from Wizard Island!
The energy that binds the film together is about this feeling of confidence. Cuarón trusts that background details work better when left in the background (those Mexican candy skulls in Honeydukes, Lupin's spinal cord candles, or even the Headless Hunt), or perfect little cameos (the boy's dormitory consuming novelty animal-roar candies instead of having belching contests). Trusts that we can join a Quidditch match mid-game. Trusts us to keep track of throw-away clues with little reiteration. Likewise, the at-first baffling relocation of the Whomping Willow is to be forgiven by it's slight design overhaul (it's more sinewy than the ugly knob it resembled in Chamber of Secrets), and that it just works better there. The thematic maturation is in the source material, the storytelling confidence is heartening.

But... for every plot detail the film wisely streamlines, it botches another two.

Avoiding turning this into a book review, Rowling has set up an unbelievably complex narrative structure for her novels, in which every book follows the same rough patterns: starting at the Dursley's, a wild journey to the school, trouble with the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, with the Quidditch season, and House Cup competition, and an honest-to-God clues-and-suspects mystery as the guiding structural beams in each book. But the over-arch of the entire seven-novel story has to cohere. And we arre also, at least in our lifetime, caught up in the soap opera serial romances and political intrigues. This sometimes works, though in Books 4 and 5, Rowling's lumpy untrained writer's narrative sense is more charming than useful.

Rowling's far better at constructing a satisfying mystery than Cuarón (if there is further doubt, see every plot revelation in his Great Expectations) and screenwriter Steve Kloves. You might not get much sense of exactly how terrified the wizarding world is, of the Prisoner of Azkaban himself. Or the nature of how he "betrayed" the Potters. And you'll be hard-pressed to figure how he escaped from Azkaban. And you may be confused as to why Prof. Lupin recognizes the Marauder's Map, why there seem to be no ghosts in the Shreiking Shack, though it has been driven home that it is "the most haunted building in Britain," or why Harry's patronus is suddenly in the form of a white stag. It is also jarring that there is no mention of the House Cup competition, which was a compelling narrative through-line in the first two films, and that the Quidditch season apparently ends because Gryffindor's seeker wrecks his broom.

Rowling's strengths are story and character, but the movie's design team's got her whipped, hands-down for visual invention. It is her admittedly ace idea that Azkaban's guards, the Dementors, are clinical depression made manifest. The Dementors are realized looking like pale, rotting pumpkins wrapped in robes of moldering black burlap, swirling through the skies like koi tails gliding through water. Hogwarts itself, while fundamentally the same design, is exploited far better, both visually and thematically; the castle is certainly lit and shot to look older, used, and as if it could actually house a Chamber of Secrets. Constant revisitation of a giant clock built into the castle is a recurring motif that reminds one that Sirius Black draws ever near, prefigures a third-act timepiece-related revelation, and provides an unexpected visual quote from The Shining, as Harry, in black, glowers through the glass face of the clock tower like Jack Torrance over the Overlook's hedge maze. Azkaban also makes more use of the living paintings decorating the castle halls, a grazing giraffe wandering through dozens of frames finally leads us to the end of a sequence, just as a rolling crystal ball, escaped from the Divination classroom, unites another.

Speaking of that Divination class, Emma Thompson's turn as Prof. Sybill Trelawney may look cartoonish, but it's a one-joke character (how can she see the future when she can barely make out the present?), comic relief by design. And be assured, her moments will come. She's funny and grotesque, and the staff member that seems to share Dumbledore's daft and intuitive nature, and it is right that she clash with Hermione (the trio's intellect) and shine to Ron (the heart).

The entire cast seems to have upped their game as if to compensate for shorter screen-time. The Boy Who Lived mostly has the job of feeling increasingly persecuted, what with this the fourth major attempt on his life. Fear and anger pervade, as they will for some time, and Radcliffe gets to hide some of his anguish under an invisibility cloak, but certainly sells his most challenging scene, in which Harry vows to get revenge on Sirius. Perhaps inspired by his personal hero, Gary Oldman, or maybe just having practiced his craft, it's Radcliffe's best performance, and if his fine readings in the final showdown with Peter Pettigrew are any indication, he will be up to the challenges ahead.

Emma Watson has always been talented enough to play Hermione as not just smart and capable, but compensating for her mixed-blood background. Here she colors the part additionally with stressed-out overachiever snippiness, and the awkwardness with romance that all adolescents feel... but nerds feel more deeply. She's more attractive than Rowling's Hermione, which is happy for Emma Watson, but unfortunately undermines some wonderful moments in Goblet of Fire.

Rupert Grint's Ron Weasley is mostly wasted in the film as comic relief, and is waylaid in the medical wing for the third act. The character has more depth than has been explored -- his readiness to make sacrifices for friends, and his impoverished roots are critical to the continuing story. But his slighting in this chapter is only fair given that Hermione spends half of Chamber of Secrets in a state of petrification.

Michael Gambon's Dumbledore seems less grandfatherly and more like the most powerful wizard of his age, albeit gone slightly mad. I prefer his take on the character: Hogwarts now seems less like a project he oversees because he loves children, and more like a home for his fellow headcases of all ages.

It's time for 3rd Year Potions!
Gary Oldman takes a character that's a bit of a cipher in the novels, and makes the problems of Sirius Black's contradictions work for him. He's been tortured to the brink of madness by Dementors, guilt and vengeful rage. But when he does that difficult about-face in your heart, he's both lovable and still dangerous. It's the title role, but the Prisoner is off-stage for most of the show, so his furious charisma has to pervade the film.

Fellow new cast member David Thewlis, as mysteriously-facial-scarred new Defense teacher, Prof. Lupin, also does a great trick: he's not the Lupin we may have imagined, but delivers something finer. Too many tragedies have swirled around Lupin: his own, the Potter's, Black's, and now the younger Potter's... and he's exhausted. While Harry's met scads of people who knew his parents, this is the first inner-circle dear friend of his father's he has known . Their scenes together could have played like an uncomfortable Meatballs retread, but feel instead like two outsiders reaching out to each other. The previous films' depiction of the school feels like no learning is ever going on, and is rectified by Lupin, obviously the best teacher the class has ever had.

As any Harry Potter fan, I've got my own pet fidelity gripes. Two of my favorite characters have been slighted by the narrative compression. I missed that Snape, upon confronting Black, was both exacting petty revenge and taking a genuine, touching risk for Harry. Alan Rickman, looking so dour he's nearly monochromatic, still gets the best laugh in the film, when he slams all the classroom window shutters on a sunny day (for that matter, he presents my second favorite gag, a hilarious Grecian urn depicting a werewolf attack). The pumped up black levels in Cuarón's color palate have served Snape beautifully. Rickman's is still the best performance in the series, not painting Snape as a violent menace, but giving one long slow brood. But part of Snape's complexity is that he saves Harry in nearly every book, but they never go soft on each other. For all Snape's sneering condescension, he makes consistently moral decisions. I don’t believe these are fine points; I think that one of the story's great themes is that one shouldn't judge people by their appearance or immediate demeanor: the Houses will have to work together in the end.

I missed also the slow-build to Harry's eventual confused relationship with Ravenclaw Cho Chang, by forgoing any early glimpses of her. Cho has no compelling moments in the book, but why leave Cho out but bother casting a girl as Parvati Patil? Like Percy Weasley's brick-by-brick corruption, Cho's arc is supposed to run parallel to Harry's, and is about the nature of mourning and recovery. It will simply not be as effective for Harry to start noticing Cho in Goblet of Fire.

Yay for Cho Chang, the girl with the worst excuse
for a pretend Chinese name in pop fiction!
But I can't gripe for long. The director simply has an affinity with the material. One wishes Cuarón could stick around for upcoming chapters, in which Ron's class-struggle angst and Hermione's mixed-race indignation become increasingly important. His sad, up-all-night-crying Great Expectations, visually built in equal measure of Victorian decay and morning-light spring greens turned Dickens into a coming-of-age class parable. And his ode to storytelling, A Little Princess is a fantasy about finding personal strength while growing up without parents or being racially oppressed. Both prefigure Azkaban and the next two Potter chapters nicely.

However... the Chris Columbus films' obsession with canon detail might have done away with the unfortunate courtyard fountain, depicting an eagle fighting a snake. While Mr. Cuarón no doubt intends it as a nod to the Mexican flag, on Hogwart's grounds it would depict Ravenclaw House mauling Slytherin. Talk about your Unforgivable Curses...

Avada: Thoughts on J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (2005)

2009-07-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Exploding Kinetoscope -- In preparation for the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, ExKin is posting a series of archival essays on Harry Potter media. Basically, here are some old pieces I wrote elsewhere, years ago, which am reprinting (and slightly revising). While my occasional predictions of future Potter Universe events is sometimes (self-)satisfyingly accurate, I assure readers that I was once fully convinced that Ron Weasley's death had been meticulously foreshadowed since the first novel, and would tell anyone who cared to listen. Though this is primarily a film and television blog, on this eve of the Half-Blood Prince film, I was revisiting my notes on the novel, and find them a fine celebration of exactly those elements in Rowling's books that were lacking in the last two film adaptations.

These notes were written in July, 2005.

Like the rest of you I devoured HBP in two days, but then I stewed for a week writing the below. I will be ironing out the typos and grammar errors and elaborating a few points over the next few days. Enjoyus!

WARNING: I solemnly swear I am up to no good
This post is predicated on spoilers, contains spoilers in every paragraph, and spoils every single Harry Potter novel. This is not a review proper, but closer to "first thoughts on Half-Blood Prince."

Every Flavor

You're doing something right when hours after your novel is published, fans are speculating on the next book and obsessively combing 3365 pages of past volumes for clues.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is about how Harry Potter, adolescent boy-witch, learns the origin story of fascist newly-embodied black mage Lord Voldemort (silent T, says J.K.R.!), investigates a string of assassination attempts at school, falls for a little red-haired girl, and learns to disdain celebrity hangers-on. In the end, Mr. Potter is set up for a black future, largely by his own personal problems.

I've heard of House Elves, but this is a baby!
It's a wild ride, Half-Blood, the mile-a-minute plot developments betray Rowling breaking into determined sprint, her finish line finally in sight. The Potter novels are lovable, scruffy books for several reasons, most heartbreakingly because they try their damnedest to be all things for all readers. Not in a Spielbergian broadest-common-denominator sense, but instead by cramming the books full of something for every disparate genre interest: global politics, race wars, teen romance, Gothic horror, British humo(u)r, high abstract fantasy, nerdy alternate-world fantasy, frothy Jane Austen comedy of romantic manners, young adult persecuted orphan tearjerker, red-herring-and-secret-passage Agatha Christie page-turner. So say what you will about her increasingly scatterbrained plotting: J.K. Rowling is an overflowing font of story.

Popular reports have it that Prince is a breezier, funnier, more taut adventure and return to form after the impenetrable, overlong Order of the Phoenix. That's slightly accurate, in that it's a shorter novel, with more tangible plot developments, but with the need to report on the ever-swelling ranks of cast and geography of magical Europe, and diverse expectations of a planet of fans, Rowling will never write a Harry Potter mystery as meticulously plotted and coolly perfect as Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban. But this not a problem, so much, of a garden grown out of bounds, but necessary expansion: Books IV-VI are not as hermetically sealed as I-III, but Prince's developments in the seven-novel arc are inventive, earned and feel fated.

Vanishing Cabinet

Subverted expectations are the only certain rule in Harry Potter, and the longer an assumption is held, the more likely it is to be undone. Genre tropes will be inverted, stereotypes will be strongly implied then shattered, history has always been distorted by misinterpretation, and every, every story has two sides. If you didn't become wary when supposed uber-nerd Neville exhibits the toughest kind of bravery in the first book, well fair enough. If you didn't learn your lesson when escaped ex-con Sirius Black, wizarding's Charles Whitman, turned out to be Harry's dear-heart godfather, shame on you triple. If you thought Chamber of Secrets seemed a curiously stand-alone volume, Half-Blood Prince brings it home.

The title mystery ("who is the Half-Blood Prince who previously owned Harry's loaner Potions textbook?") is a bit recycled. If Mr. Potter is seriously trusting the advice of magical used books after Ginny Weasly was nearly killed by one in Chamber of Secrets, well, ten points from Gryffindor for being a dumbass. The ultimate revelations about the brilliant annotations in the Prince's Potions book are perhaps not world-shaking. The identity of the Half-Blood Prince seems set-up as the centerpiece mystery, but as usual what appeared as the B-plot is the real key: what is Draco Malfoy up to? Rowling's a master of diversion because her red herrings have payoffs. And if you haven't learned your lesson about Rowling's skill for planting information to yield a jaw-dropping crop later, so much the better. Ever since Harry talked to a snake in Philosophercerer's Stone only to find out what that predisposed bilingualism Really Meant in Chamber, and that the Parselmouth plot thread continues to pay-off through the subsequent books, the astute reader may be convinced that every cute detail is a story unto itself.

But metaphorically, the title is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because the book is a grand summary of Harry and Professor Snape's relationship. Throughout the books, Harry reaps the benefits of Snape's begrudging assistance and protection but ultimately never trusts him. That is both of their faults, through personal prejudice to family history to personality incompatibility, and the finale is the ne plus ultra of Snape taking an extreme risk and Harry subsequently misinterpreting and condemning Snape's actions.

Oh you may not think I’m pretty,
But don’t judge on what you see

What House do YOU belong in? Probably Hufflepuff, you dork.
Half-Blood Prince concludes by having compromised some of Rowling's great humanitarian themes, and not setting them right.

A key idea in these books is not to judge people by physical appearance, and not to let personal prejudice or circumstantial evidence outweigh a person's deeds. And I'm talking about Severus Snape here. That human cumulonimbus, Snape, is Rowling's most fascinating and complex creation besides Harry himself. And if you think for a second that Snape's loyalties aren't to the Order of the Phoenix, you're not paying attention to these books' plot, sensitivity to dynamic characters, or morality. In the same scene that Snape is forced to take Dumbledore's life, he saves a child from becoming a murderer and/or a murder victim. In the same scene he kills his savior (for it was Dumbledore who gave Snape a shot at redemption), Snape is under complex possession by the devil (for he's under Unbreakable Vow, and almost certainly on Dumbledore's orders). Judas figures are complicated and tragic: they're not merely backstabbing sell-outs but Agents of God. History remembers them as monsters, when they're necessary factors in equations of messianic sacrifice.

Do you see the parallels between Hermione and Snape? Both are braniac outcasts of impure stock, driven to overcompensating to protect their secret, yearning hearts. The difference is Hermione has good friends who care about her. When you are the cleverest witch of your age, persecution for nerdiness and parentage beyond your control, in spite of your merits, is likely to drive you inward. Being smarter than everyone else is a dangerous and lonely talent. The greatest tour de force moments in Phoenix are Harry's illicit trip into Snape's Pensieve, the only glimpse we have gotten -- and given the ex-Potions Master's acumen at Occlulmency, probably the only one we'll get -- at Snape's injured soul. One only hopes when the Dark Lord's veil is lifted that Severus gets to grieve. Snape is Dumbledore's man, through and through.

The P is His Scar!

Where is the Famous Harry Potter in this mess? It is good for the world that Harry has been forced to grow up fast, no longer wallowing in the guilt, anger and adolescent outbursts that define him in Phoenix. Phoenix is an angry, black political fable, difficult to look at because our hero is such a mess and behaves like an ass throughout.

At the beginning of Prince, he's still grappling with his avoidance issues in situations where his insensitivity hurts others. He still owes Cho Chang a serious apology, still needs to recognize the humanity of people he doesn't like, still needs to recognize his terrifying capacity for corruption, and still needs to work out anger and grief without letting them force his hand to violence. A key moment in Stone is the Sorting Hat nearly placing Harry in Slytherin. It has nothing to do with being "evil," Slytherin House, it has to do with cunning, and willingness to achieve goals and gain power through any means at your disposal. We've seen Harry lie, steal, sneak, spy, use violence both physical and magical, and in Prince nearly kill Malfoy. What makes Harry a Gryffindor is a surplus of bravery. One by one Harry confronts these problems. Dumbledore has been supplying advice all along, but now Harry is given object lessons in these ideals.

In Percy Weasly's seduction into heartless bureaucratic tool, Harry sees how idealism and inflexibility can be manipulated and corrupted, no matter the intentions. Percy loses sight of the essential human dimension at the core of wars and political conflict. Harry learns your lot in life is not improved if your friends are lost. Harry has been handed through inheritance the celebrity and socioeconomic relief that Percy pursues and that tortures Ron. When offered Percy's life by Rufus Scrimgeour, the new Minister of Magic, it's the example of Ron's and Arthur's integrity which gives him pause.

Harry heeds another dark mirror of his own life in Draco Malfoy, previously the most gleeful and willfully cruel character, now led into a life-threatening, inescapable assignment by an extremist Order once joined by his father. If Mr. Potter can't relate to that, then no one can. Harry can draw a hard line when it comes to sympathy, but when he spies on Draco crying alone in the bathroom, it jars Harry as much as the dive into Snape's Pensieve: everybody has their reasons. Malfoy is a scared boy trying to save his imperfect dad, agent of apocalyptic evil or no. And what he lacks is an excess of bravery.

Harry's ability to empathize with the enemy must be important. It is essentially Dumbledore's last school-room lesson to show Harry every available scrap of humanizing memory of Voldemort that he can locate. The Dark Lord is probably the most frustrating, faceless lead villain in the series, because he has been merely abstractly Evil. For several books, this looks like a mis-step of Rowling's, but now now the design becomes clear. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is an abstract repository for all of society's fears and a scapegoat excuse for oppressive behavior by other authorities. It's always been Dumbledore's special talent to counter that: it's Dumbledore that encourages Harry to use Voldemort's name. So when Dumbledore gives Harry a crash-course in Tom Riddle back-story, is it any surprise how many biographical details mirror Harry's?

Ginny Weasley: Her orange hair steals our hero's heart!
The stand-up-and-cheer moment is Harry and Ginny's triumphant first kiss. Like George and Fred's exit from Hogwarts, it's one of those soaring scenes that are the pop fic equivalent of a big power chord sing along chorus. But what makes the scene deeper and greater, is the tempering memory of Harry's heartbreaking, confusing real first kiss. Harry will probably never recognize it is survivor's guilt that bound him to Cho Chang. But in Ginny, he finds the strong-willed, resilient woman he will need to stand by him. Cho and Giny can both relate to his pain, but only the unflappable redhead is fighter enough to deal with Harry's constant mortal peril.

Which brings us inevitably back to...

Kadevra

Exclusive costume design drawing for GoF movie.
I'm obsessing over Snape, I know, because he's pivotal to the series beyond previous indications. Snape is the second title character of Half-Blood Prince for the reasons above. Just as the anguished, complex and epic Order of the Phoenix in many ways was the definitive statement on Harry's relationship with Dumbledore. There's a sea-change moment in Phoenix where Dumbledore confesses his failure of judgment, and weeps. The scene humanizes Harry's idol for him. A lot of Half-Blood Prince is given to private briefings between Dumbledore and Harry, and finally they go on one grand, scary adventure. After all this time, the master and apprentice are side-by-side in battle. It's a final reminder of why we love Dumbledore -- from his daft gentility to ferocious power -- right before he is taken from us. It is both a gift and makes his death hurt all the more.

He could turn into a deer.
In some ways, Harry has never appreciated James and Lily Potter's sacrifice. When he learns in Snape's Pensieve that the Potions master wasn't lying about James' flaws, part of the blow is realizing how he has deified his father. Harry's never known his parents so they were guardian angels. Dumbledore has made sure this boy he loves most knows him as fallible man and a personal friend. So Dumbledore's is the sacrifice that may resonate the most deeply. The final scenes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince show Harry finally purposeful and full of clear-eyed resolve. The Boy Who Lived (Again) is the Man Who Lived. They grow up so fast! Good trick.

Note: Special thanks to Hannah, who drew the Sorting Hat, James Potter and Snape pictures. Though her website from which I swiped the drawings is long gone, her art lives eternal.

Ghost Train: The Lost Pauline Kael Review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

2009-07-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

This post is in participation with Cinemastyles’ Spirit of Ed Wood Blog-A-Thon, organized in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Plan 9 From Outer Space, but covering any and everything remotely related to Mr. Wood... or that exudes that rare Ed Wood Feeling. Put a bookmark in your copy of Death of a Transvestite, pour a glass of Imperial whiskey and get busy reading! Most of the articles are along the lines of re-(re)-evaluating Wood’s life and work, but Exploding Kinetoscope offers a special history-making report.

* * * * *
Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies, the 1965 book spanning her pre-New Yorker work from 1954-1965, is generally understood to be the critic’s first collected volume. Following Kael’s death in 2001, references were found in personal papers to a small press volume predating the publication of I Lost It, though no copy was located in Kael’s personal collection. After several years of scrambling and red herring sniffing by film historians, Kael obsessives, and rare book collectors, only a handful of copies (three in total, two complete, none in better than VG condition) have surfaced. Going Down On the Movies, (according to indicia) published by Trap Street Press, 1960, collects various Kael juvenilia, scattered previously published reviews from KPFA radio broadcasts and pieces from magazines (City Lights, Holiday, McCall's, etc.) not represented in I Lost It – even a small collection of screening notes and capsule reviews handed out to patrons of the Berkeley Cinema Guild in the late ‘50s.

The two copies of Going Down to enter the marketplace were snatched up at four-figure prices (on AbeBooks for $1200 and a tense eBay auction closing at $3650). Luckily, one fell into the hands of a rare bookseller in Los Angeles, who has graciously allowed a digital scan of the cover, and photocopying of the following excerpt. Special thanks to Blue Room Books of Los Angeles.

The Exploding Kinetoscope proudly presents Pauline Kael’s review of Plan 9 From Outer Space, reprinted for the first time since 1960.

* * * * *
GHOST TRAIN

With the unfancy plainness of a nightmare being reported by The March of Time, anything goes in "Plan 9 From Outer Space", so long as it is weird, shuddery, sexed-up and antisocial. Martians [sic] with a taste for the sensual (they wear satin pajamas, their space-aircraft carrier shaped like a mammary gland... one is named “Eros”) and distaste for Earthly violence, resolve to end the arms race. Along for the ride, and part of that Ninth Plan, are marching ghouls who handle the dirty work – they’re freak-cartoon parodies of lives no one ever lived: a vampy wastrel beatnikess, a rasping butterball Swede cop, and Bela Lugosi.

“Plan 9 From Outer Space” is set and shot in the corners of Los Angeles where most movies would not be caught dead — the far-ends of choked boulevards where traffic wears out, the dollhouse suburbs of Burbank, and subterranean studios which house pateboard sets, painted cloth backdrops indicating skies and lumpy rugs serving as grass. The matter-of-fact presentational style of director Edward Wood is so honest an unglamorous that the homemade anonymity of the sets seems to be a point unto itself. Wood also wrote the swozzled script, which keeps throwing out corkers until they finally pile up into something like thematic unity. There’s a satirist’s glee in the movie’s conundrum about violence and military secrets, and before you know it the American heroes and the hostile spacemen have swapped places; the visitors have come to halt the progress of advanced weapons before we blow ourselves away, but their deadly Plan 9 is like beating a dog for chasing squirrels. Everybody’s wrong, but it’s hard to hate them for it. It’s an evolutionary and political stalemate. A little scaredy-cat cop rolls up his sleeves, climbs into a grave and groans “why do I always get hooked up with these spook details?” — Hamlet, gravedigger, and Stan Laurel rolled into one. The human scale is always dragged back into it. A compassionate colonel tells us “Then they attacked a town. A small town, I’ll admit, but nevertheless a town of people. People who died.” We're all eventually hooked up on spook detail. One hopes that future doomsday comedies will have the guts not to hammer the jokes to the wall, sophistication not to drown the horror in cynicism or sheer scale. Whenever the movie paints itself into a political corner it drops the brush and levitates over the wet floor: a square-jaw reacts to a (hypocritical) pacifistic alien’s speech by popping his opponent in the mouth.

The kitsch has handily been drained out of the material in advance thanks to the spare, rawboned style. In a brainstorm of flying saucers, misty cemeteries, walking corpses, plastic skeletons, and cadaverous vampires, Wood keeps piling up the spook show gimmicks until they achieve a kind of loony grandeur. The picture isn’t overly fat (and it runs 79 minutes), but it’s maybe a little crazy. Wood is like a carnival barker doing a last push before closing time, but when you climb into this ghost train, the insides aren’t all hype, but crisp, chilly, and fresh. The spirit of Nouvelle Vague hangs about this spookhouse. Though the camerawork offers no pyrotechnics, Wood slices Lugosi’s death scene short — when the old fellow is splattered by a speeding auto, the shot cuts off with his consciousness, a life compacted into ten seconds of smelling a flower and being creamed by an unseen Packard. In the middle of languid scenes, the jump cuts bounce us to unexpected perspectives. With clever miniatures and a bizarre but striking eye for stock footage, Wood places his spaceships over freeways and television studios. Nowhere particularly photogenic, just someplace real.

“Plan 9” also merges the threadbare, daily life reality of Hollywood (the neighborhood, not the fairyland) and Burbank with the wooziest, spookiest dreamworld since “The Mummy”. In that film, Karl Freund’s camera caressed every crease in Boris Karloff’s makeup, as if his cadaverous cheeks were dusted with fragments of ancient broken hearts. Edward Wood slides into a similar thick, fever-dream pool for all the spook stuff. His ghouls shuffle toward us out of a black velvet void, or appear in their weird Gothic glory in the middle of tatty suburban bedrooms. And like in so many very bad dreams, everyone screams and flinches and motions to escape, but doesn’t seem able to run. The way the young lady playing Lugosi’s wife (“Vampira” the film hostess from television, and a sex kitten, sure, but with a dead rat in her mouth) moves her body, we can’t be sure she was alive in the first place. In the clammiest scene, a rotund police detective rises from his grave, and the darkness swirling around the hole makes his whitened visage into a morbid, grimacing moon.

Burly Tor Johnson plays Inspector Clay as a giant in body and spirit. He’s one of those fellows that was built for underlings to scurry beneath and hang by their fingernails from his every word. The big man gives off erotic energy like an oil drum on fire, even when no women are around. When he laughs off danger, chuckling to a pal “I’m a big boy now, Johnny!,” we half expect Johnny to sigh “don’t I know it!” Johnson looks so fierce among a cast of scrawny beat cops that we imagine no force in the rest of the movie could tangle with him: this guy could eat two of those flying saucers for breakfast. So when the most magnetic character in the picture does, in fact, meet his match, nothing could be tenser. Maybe no death on the screen has had such emotional wallop since “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. Thankfully, Johnson isn’t entirely out of the picture after this — his white-eyed creep is a walking case of the heebie-jeebies.

“Plan 9” never loses that sexiness, though it admittedly decreases once Inspector Clay goes mute (he becomes less a villain than a beautiful, melancholy bear, befuddled and forced by captors to maim enemies). When appealing hero Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott, who shone for a brief moment as an MP in the dismal “Mister Roberts”) heads off on military mission and says goodbye to his wife, Paula. We start to roll our eyes, because it’s the sappiest of scenarios, lovers parted, the warrior going off to battle. We’re expecting fake feelings, false nobility, unwarranted nobility, maybe all three. But the music starts purring strange lazy draubs of Martin Denny style jazz, Paula coos to Jeff that she’s intending to maul his pillow as a substitute lover. It’s very probably the wiggiest, earthiest expression of libidinal heat between married people ever put on screen. The Trents job in any other movie would be as bloodless good citizens; Wood and his actors make Jeff burn at his center with righteous indignation (at anyone, everything), and Paula is flush with good humor. Between the Trents, Insepctor Clay and the shouty little monkey cop, the Earthlings are a rowdy, worthy crew to go up against the wacked out spacemen and, for that matter, their haunted, soulless dead slaves. The movie is a whole funfair midway full of interesting folks. Among the aliens, Dudley Manlove plays the funniest, Eros, as a big soft baby, always raging, petulant, or sleepy. When he rants about the logical conclusion of the human arms race— a hair-raising vision of a sun-exploding bomb — Manlove's apoplexy blows off the screen, making the whole idea of 3D movies look superfluous. As Eros' boss, John Breckenridge marshals a queenly regality — he’s somehow swishy and sinister and a lot of fun. As he explains the science of how the dead will be animated, the details are authentic sounding, but The Ruler yawns through it like the caterpillar in “Alice in Wonderland”.

Presiding over the other characters, famous TV personality Criswell narrates, sometimes on screen, and he sounds mournful and despairing, his eyes look off into the netherworld distance. He warns of Death the Proud Brother, of time and fate and doom locked in confusing dance, and even insinuates that some of these screen devils may follow us out of the theater. "Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it... for they will be from outer space,” he says, the perfect parody embodiment of this age’s anxieties — Space Race, invisible agents, privacy violation. Almost all of Cris’s speeches have some knockout idea buried in the poetry. Wood the screenwriter uses him like a Biblical prophet coming down from Mount Lee, to articulate his most lyrical themes.

“Plan 9”’s greatest trick is one I don’t think we’ve ever seen on a movie screen. Edward Wood turns hokey kid’s Poverty Row stuff into something freaky; he doesn’t try for glitz and fail, neither does he wallow. It’s easier to say what “Plan 9” is not than what it is. The movie spins like a Hula Hoop, gyrating between slightly stoned slice-of-life skits, the inspired blood-curdling stuff, grungy reality and, we may as well go ahead and say it, the strangest dreams expressed on film since Dreyer, or maybe Méliès. Waking up from a dream — and so with “Plan 9 From Outer Space” — we’re stupefied for a second. What just happened? Criswell asks us the impossible question: “Can you prove it didn’t happen?”

The X-Files: Three Smokes at the Jazz Bar

2009-06-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

The season 5 X-Files finale, "The End", offers many memorable images --from a tiny psychic nerd-boy playing championship chess in a crowd of faceless thousands to Scully and Mulder silently embracing in their blackened, melting, dripping office after a symbolic act of arson, red and blue emergency lights strobing over them-- and some remarkable moments from the performers (the best: Scully spots Mulder privately conferring with his previous X-Files partner, Diana Fowley, retreats to her car and silently fumes with jealousy, then frets over what she's feeling, and a few other nameless emotional beats, before Gillian Anderson even speaks a word).

But one exterior shot on the mean streets of Vancouver provides a fleeting delight most viewers will never notice.

Cigarette Smoking Man exits Jazz Bar, en route to some dirty business. When suddenly... here comes trouble!

William B. Davis goes about his business, and looks so smoothy malevolent that we pick him out instantly in this wide shot. But look out, CSM: Two cool dudes are cruising up the sidewalk!
Let us move in for a closer look.

Sporting identical big sneakers, caps, windbreakers, mustaches, they are the kind of men who enjoy cigarettes on a fine Vancouver day. And on this day, they have worked up a mutual appetite for either some B.C.-style jazz, a bar, or, as luck would have it, both.

These local boys likely do not know or care for anything involving mind-reading alien-human hybrids, intergalactic colonization, or shadow government assassins!

But they should look out, as they are about to run into at least one of those.

CSM stops and looks around, and our mustache buddy in shades nearly runs into him. But this cool customer just stops short of plowing into Bill Davis, sees that his friend has turned to enter Jazz Bar, and does a hitch step to catch up!

It remains unclear if the fellows in hats had any idea an X-Files scene was shooting. ...if they were supposed to nearly mow down one of the stars on the sidewalk. ...if William Davis noticed this run-in.

Such are the mysteries of The X-Files.

Astounding DVD Covers! #2: Combat Training

2009-05-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

LITTLE SHOP Handbook: Visual Strategies in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

2009-05-22T16:48:00.000-07:00

Visual Strategies in Little Shop of Horrors

Director Frank Oz blocks the Little Shop of Horrors actors in stylized tableaux in every scene, usually for the duration of each separate shot. While actors are given free reign to emote in unrestrained fashion, their location and movements within the shots in dialogue scenes are always as precisely choreographed as the dance numbers. This rarely occurs as normalized two-shots or singles, except as pushed into extreme image through rack focus revealing further visual information, off-center angle or sundry weird technique.

There are no "normal" (or "boring"/expected) shots in this studio-bound film, nor any naturalistic ones. In the loosest-feeling sequences dominated by actors given over to manic ad-libbing — those in which Arthur Denton (Bill Murray) visits Dr. Scrivello's (Steve Martin) office, and Wink Wilkinson (John Candy) conducts a radio interview — Oz allows the performers to roam a bit more, and his camera to follow some minor wanderings. There are also a few scenes with actors pacing within limited space (Rick Moranis as Seymour is prone to this, as is James Belushi as marketing pitchman Patrick Martin), but all these counter-examples are shot and blocked to diagram power relationships and create popping, graphic images as well. The Denton/Scrivello scene is loose inside a few nervous pans to follow Murray, but these shots work toward punctuation marks formed by actors' postures, the location of bodies within the frame. No character prowls the space purposelessly, or occupies uncomposed space in the frame.

The staging of Little Shop of Horrors is perpetually "stagy." It is not stagy, however, in the sense of being only suited to the stage. Oz may have lifted/transfered some of the blocking from the off-Broadway production (should anyone be in possession of tapes made of the original production, please contact this writer), with "musical staging" by Edie Cowan. This is natural for an adaptation of a stage production, and it is unremarkable for a musical film to adapt the stylized techniques of classical Hollywood forerunners; our purpose is simply to catalog some of Oz's strategies for organizing the film. Though the source is a theatrical production and the original 1960 film —respectively bound to the diorama of the stage and Roger Corman's grungy hemmed-in sets and catch-as-catch-can location shots — the show has been reconfigured, the story retold in aggressively cinematic language. Little Shop of Horrors is stylized, and it is stylized for the movies.

I - Paired Profiles

The placement and posture of bodies within compositions always looms large among directorial concerns; Little Shop of Horrors always arranges its performers for both dramatic purposes and graphic impact. Among the visual body-prop motifs in Little Shop of Horrors are a large number of shots in which two performers face one another in full profile. While not an uncommon viewing angle of conversing persons in real life, it is not a common blocking for stage performers, particularly in musicals, as it tends to swallow the voice and cut off actors from an audience. It is also uncommon for a film to block and shoot so many scenes in this fashion. Shooting eye contact from the side throws up a proscenium between the screen and audience; the angle cuts off an audience from looking into an actor's eyes and sharing the gaze available in an over-the-shoulder shot or face-forward angle. Freeze-framing a dialogue scene in more naturalistic films may capture moments of actors in face-off profile, and certainly similar shots occur in other films, but Little Shop of Horrors uses the image in a pattern of frequent and prolonged shots. Though a "weak" stage position for actors, it is graphically bold in a visual medium.

A majority of these dual profile shots are used while charting the progress of Seymour's burgeoning relationship with Audrey. The second largest number of these shots document the verso: Seymour's destructive relationship with Audrey's dark twin, Audrey II. A handful of others feature other characters paired with Seymour, and one — literally striking — example does not feature Seymour at all. Below are screencaps of ten prominent examples of this shot.

a) Audrey and Seymour consider a friendly shopping excursion to spruce up the nerd's wardrobe. Both brighten at the prospect of socializing outside the workplace, and excitement blooms. They have just bonded over a rush-job floral arrangement for Mrs. Shiva, the bouquet (augmented with glued-on glitter) appears between them, signals the positive outcome of their teamwork. In their small world, with the limited expectations of Skid Row, and narrow set of personal standards, depending on one's empathy levels, they are either good at what they do, or simply sympathetic to one another — i.e., Seymour thinks Audrey has good aesthetic sense. The moment she is encouraged by Seymour's attention, feels herself valued by a kind man, she remembers she has a date with her current abusive paramour and wilts. The flowers become a funeral bouquet once more, and Audrey turns from Seymour, breaking the dual profile composition.

b) Audrey II exhibits its first signs of sentience as Seymour serenades the plant during the "Grow For Me" number. A Seymour-POV shot of the plant making kissy-suction movements with its lips and a low angle nearly from Audrey II's perspective as Seymour squeezes blood drops into its open pod surround this shot of dual profiles. These angles confirm plot information — Seymour's gives visual confirmation that the plant is moving, Audrey II's that it has a "perspective" equal to a human character — and intersect with another motif, that of unexpected POV shots. The profiles, as before, highlight a change in one of Seymour's principle relationships, as the plant and the horticulturist study one another in a new light and from this angle we may survey the tensions in both gazes.

c) "Does this look inanimate to you, punk?" growls Audrey II and, sliding a chair under Seymour, yanks him forward into an echo of their first shared profile shot. In each of the profile moments, Seymour comes face to face with new information about other characters. Here, the power dynamic shifts dramatically, as Seymour begins his move from caretaker to slave. This is a seduction scene, Audrey II displaying physical threat and prowess, appealing to both Seymour's base material lusts ("money... girls") and need to be loved ("one particular girl? How 'bout that Audrey?"). Twined up in this, the domineering plant begins to act as a parental figure, replacing the inadequate Mushnik. Audrey II begins life an orphan like Seymour, onto which the boy-man projects the love he did not receive, until the plant essentially enslaves him in the same way Mushnik forces Seymour to work in the shop to earn his keep (this is strengthened in the stage show via a subplot in which Mushnik legally adopts Seymour only after it becomes a lucrative proposition). In this profile shot leading up to "Feed Me", Audrey II begins a sales pitch in which it threatens and begs, works Seymour's empathy and selfishness, and thus thwarts Seymour's attempts to come out of his shell by twisting his nurturing instincts back upon him.

d) Seymour and Audrey II, through the shop's display window, watch Dr. Scrivello and Audrey. This paired profile as Orin slaps Audrey, punctuates a shot in which they enter her apartment building and exchange rhythmic dialogue while striking silhouetted poses a through a lighted window. It is not properly part of a song and dance, but functions as a loose middle eight to tie together the Audrey II/Seymour duet occurring across the street. Scrivello berates Audrey for minor perceived slights then sweeps her into the above pose and belts her across the face. Besides the abuses occurring in his dental office, this is the worst on-screen act that Dr. Scrivello commits in the film, and is impetus for Seymour's eventual murder of Scrivello via reckless endangerment. Prior two-shot profiles with Audrey and Audrey II have established this as a Seymour-centric motif, and this moment, which spurs to action a man defined by inaction, is about watching; it also intersects with several other LSOH motifs: silhouettes, shots through glass, scenes viewed from across a street, voyeuristic POV shots of characters secretly watching one another, and shots through or in front of frames -- mostly doors and windows.

e) The "Suddenly, Seymour" sequence is bookended with dual profile shots. The song cements the Audrey/Seymour romantic relationship by its final notes, but it does not begin there. Rather than a time-out declaration of love, the number contains key narrative information and character drama. As the lead-in dialogue begins, Audrey and Seymour are emotionally and visually separated. She is distant and distraught, having just learned that Orin has been killed, and Seymour is nerve-wracked and guilt-ridden over having murdered the dentist. Audrey explains that her tears are not of sorrow but relief (and, we infer, caused by no small trauma, as well as a guilty conscience over that same relief), and her confusion and confessions repeatedly cause her to pull away from comfort, look away from Seymour's sympathetic gaze. When the pain reaches its apex, and the players are at their greatest physical distance, they turn to face one another. This early verse of the song begins in the widest dual profile shot of the film. The couple tentatively expresses their feelings and Audrey lays out her backstory of personal damage, they step nearer one another and the camera pushes in on them.

f) "Suddenly, Seymour" ends by echoing the earlier wide shot, the physical distance now bridged with a lovers embrace. Triumphant as the final sustained notes of the song are, exhilarating as the rush of positive emotion seems, it is not the resolution of all troubles in Seymour's story. Rather, the declaration of devoted couplehood deepens the conflicts inherent in Seymour's other problems. The workplace romance and Seymour's increased confidence cause a panic in Mushnik, who would exploit his unadopted son's success. The vow to look after Audrey worsens Seymour's transgressions in his pact with Audrey II. Though it is not tinged with particularly pointed irony -- and the relationship, while problematic, eventually provides Seymour the inspiration to rise above -- the golden artificial sunset-kissed bliss of "Suddenly, Seymour" is an ignorant bliss.

This key sequence in the Audrey/Seymour romance contains a good deal of detail-packing beyond the scope of these notes. It does end with the couple framed before another window, this one in the half-demolished ruins of a Skid Row building. "Suddenly, Seymour" begins as the characters believe they have hit bottom, emotionally wrecked, and mulling about among the building's rubble. As they reveal their feelings, in their mutual uplift Seymour and Audrey dart up a crumbling staircase that seems to lead nowhere -- but they are indeed rising up above the ruins together. In the reverse of the above shot, the Greek chorus of Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon is perched on a ledge as heavenly chorus. The yellow sun -- last seen fully eclipsed in the backstory flashback number "Dah-Doo" (the story, thus, begins in sunlessness; the narrative opens in the vacuum of space) -- from this vantage seems to glow so warmly that it burns away the mesh (chain-link? safety-glass reenforcement?) covering the window behind Audrey and Seymour.

This double profile bursts into a comically frantic kiss the moment the characters have finished their vocal duties, which melts into the mellow ripples of afternoon light: actually a dissolve to the textured glass of Audrey's apartment building's front door. This transition is part of another visual system running through the film, one of dissolves between abstract patterns of texture and color found and revealed in mundane or unpleasant details of prop, costume and set dressing.

g) Mushnik's power games come to a head. He corners Seymour with the information that he witnessed the dismemberment of Scrivello's body, and at gunpoint insists that Seymour turn himself over to the police. In the above shot, Mushnik does an about-face, feigning sympathy to blackmail his slave/son in order to get his hands on Audrey II. Rather than taking the moral high ground, Mushnik simply believes he has the upper hand. He believes he holds the more powerful weapon (physical mass and firearm; Seymour is unarmed), the more valuable information (that Seymour murdered Orin to get to or protect Audrey; that Seymour does not know Mushnik has designs on the plant) and the greater insight into his opponent's character (he preys upon Seymour's cowardice, gentleness, meekness; Seymour holds no sympathetic sway over Mushnik). In geometric growth patterns, Mushnik's capitalist ownership increases with insatiable appetite -- he thus mirrors the destructive hunger, expansive growth and viral encroachment upon Seymour's psyche as embodied in Audrey II. Mushnik will turn to face this dark green mirror and be destroyed in a scant few screen moments, which Seymour anticipates visually and mentally. Both physically and informationally, Seymour is packing the bigger gun. In this irony-charged shot, Mushnik takes the power position, holding the center of the frame and looming over Seymour, backing the smaller man against the door.

The shot is of two men, though, and through Little Shop of Horrors, Seymour allows his mingled hollow success/doom to occur through inaction. Scrivello and Mushnik are not killed by Seymour's hand, but neither does Seymour intervene. They are destroyed by Seymour's externalized rampaging Id, in the form of Audrey II -- a point made manifest in different ways by Corman's film, the stage show and LSOH's own scrapped ending -- but also undone by their own foibles and Seymour's very meekness. LSOH positions Seymour's timidity as the central obstacle he needs to overcome. He is passive to the extreme, wallowing in socioeconomic despair on Skid Row, hoping for "someone [to] tell Lady Luck that I'm stuck here," shy around women, parental figure, customers, and thus a target for a dozen breeds of bully. This inaction is underlined as parodic parallel of Christian martyrdom and cheek-turning ethos in the number "The Meek Shall Inherit" (the aphorism given cynical twist into "the meek are gonna get what's coming to them...") The paradigm for human interaction in LSOH is one of bullying and cowering, showboats and wallflowers. Under Mushnik's threat of bullet, blackmail, losing his shot at public adoration, release from poverty, and his romance with Audrey, Seymour puts up his hands and lets the universe chomp on the bigger sinner first. Everybody gets what's coming to them, by and by.

h) The finished film allows Seymour to transform via late-game assertiveness, Audrey's affection providing his inspiration. In this profile shot, Seymour proposes marriage to Audrey and they excitedly discuss plans for elopement. As in the shot it most resembles -- (a) above -- the tableau is broken by flooding recollection of a violent personal relationship parallel to the Audrey and Seymour couple. In (a) Audrey plans to go shopping with Seymour on a borderline date, but is reminded of her abusive relationship with Orin. In (b) Seymour plans a life with Audrey but slips into ranting that there must be "no plants, I promise: no plants at all!"

Just as the prior shot marked the first evidence of Audrey and Seymour's dawning connection, and those in "Suddenly Seymour" allow them to openly express mutual feelings, this one depicts them entering a new phase. Having just caused two deaths and signed away his soul, Seymour hits bottom in the prior scene, a public meltdown at his television taping. Proposing to Audrey is certainly a progressive step, but even more proactive is Seymour's determination that they move out of town and begin a new life. Seymour's journey with Audrey II serves also as answer to his plea for "Lady Luck"'s assistance. Through dumb luck, the plant zaps through the cosmos and lands in his lap, alters his life but to no good end: Audrey II uses Seymour. In counterpoint, Seymour's transformation thanks to Audrey and learning to take control of his own life. With this profile shot, Seymour realizes he must choose between the Audreys.

An evolution to be sure, but not complete.

i) This dual profile visually quotes the staging of "Suddenly, Seymour" for a comic thwarting. "Suddenly, Seymour (Reprise)" is immediately interrupted by the sales pitch of Patrick Martin (Jim Belushi). Though brief and undercut by the disruption of Seymour's sins catching up with him, the shot and song represent the full flowering of Seymour and Audrey's romance. Having just rescued Audrey from psychic seduction and physical assault by Audrey II, Seymour's secret life is now entirely in the open. "Suddenly, Seymour" begins with Audrey's full disclosure of her dark life; the reprise is Seymour's. She accepts him despite the fears, failures and transgressions he has been concealing. Immediately after, Seymour will make his final, greatest transformation, now empowered enough to do battle with Audrey II. Seymour heads back into the shop to confront his demon and its offspring and correct his crimes. He chooses not to run or cower but solve the problems he has created. Seymour chooses responsibility and positive action. He does it because of the moments captured in these profile shots.

j) A grace note here, after Seymour has dispatched Audrey II. In some ways, the system of profile shots has been building to this moment.

After the above shot, there is only one more in the film proper, before the credit roll. The next is truly a coda, with Audrey and Seymour running away from the camera, out of Skid Row and into a suburban fantasia, and final unsettling punchline as the Greek chorus presents a small reminder of the eternal dangers of what Audrey II represents. But this, the penultimate shot of Little Shop of Horrors, closes the narrative and includes a dual profile.

In unbroken shot: Audrey cries and laughs silently, overjoyed at Seymour's emergence from the rubble of the demolished shop. Tracking left in a circle around Audrey, the shot reveals Seymour, who moves toward his proud, elated fiancée --Seymour comes to Audrey -- and the camera continues a full 360-degree track around them as the lovers embrace. The hug breaks, the tracking ceases. As Audrey and Seymour gaze at one another, the motif is invoked for just a moment, this moment. They turn and run directly into the fourth wall. Audrey runs past the camera, screen left. Seymour runs straight at the lens. The shot ends on blurry frames of Seymour's chest. It ends on his heart.

Sweet Caroline: DOLLHOUSE Renewed!

2009-05-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

"... Oh, I've been inclined to believe it never would."

Active Engagement: Dollhouse 1.11 - "Briar Rose"

2009-05-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

Being a regular collection of notes, intrusive fragments and episodic memories regarding each installment of the FOX teledrama Dollhouse (J. Whedon, creator).

The Engagement: On a charitable Engagement, Echo hangs out at a group home for wayward youth, and assists a traumatized girl with her personal life, using a storybook of "Sleeping Beauty", which frames and informs the episode. Paul Ballard seeks out Steven Kepler, the man who designed Dollhouse, and Ballard forces the agoraphobic architect to help him break into the secret facility. Adelle and Topher drag Mr. Dominic out of the Attic and into Victor's head, to investigate the contents of a spooky flash drive... which reveals that Alpha is posing as Kepler. With Alpha as his guide, the unwitting Ballard finally makes it into the Dollhouse, where he is promptly emotionally shattered, beaten up... and finds that Echo has no interest in being rescued by him.

JS: Saturday morning: check.
COFFEE FROM HELL: check.
Medicinal carrots germinating on windowsill: if only!

CS: Don't put that on the windowsill, unless you want someone to see it.

Here are some people who score bonus points in "Briar Rose".

a) Jane Espenson, here flying solo and sparkling, where "Haunted" contained dull bits possibly the doing of Joss Whedon's brother and sister-in-law.

b) I like Alan Tudyk as much as the next guy but the standout performance is the few minutes of Enver Gojokaj playing Victor imprinted as Mr Dominic. Gojokaj was just on best-supporting fire in these moments, channelling Reed Diamond so well it was like watching Dominic wearing a Victor mask.

c) the entire writer's room and their attitude toward Paul Ballard. Through much of "Briar Rose" I increasingly grew concerned that the world's most screwed-over detective was actually making some sort of progress, the greatest coup of the last act being that Ballard has fucked up worse than ever before.

JS: Victor waking up as Mr. Demonic was one of my top moments of the entire series, a) structurally, since we're so used to the image of the peaceful or Activated wakeups and b) topo-emotionally, because how often do moments like this erupt through the show's slick surface? We've seen the next worst thing -- Ballard watching his own betrayal unfold in the form of Mellie's message -- and now the worst thing, a creature in pain, aware of his pain, powerless in his pain. Mr. Volcanic indeed.

Speaking of waking up (and this episode is full of wakeups), did you know that that this episode is a shoutout to Sleeping Beauty? I hope you didn't miss that.

CS: Ha. Oh, okay, we'll go straight There.

ANGEL: This isn't some fairy tale. When I kiss you, you don't wake up from a deep sleep and live happily ever after.
BUFFY: No. When you kiss me I want to die.
-BtVS, "Reptile Boy"

There are ways in which to invoke folk tale, myth and fairy story which simply draw parallels, underline various points, or imbue proceedings with a fated, classical feel. This, whether you are Joyce writing Ulysses or Chris Carter writing The X-Files episode "Post-Modern Prometheus", may be done gracefully or in hackneyed fashion. It is not inherently a tacky technique. It is value-neutral. Grabbing randomly from my brain files, compare the cornball jagoffery of A.I.'s invocation of Pinocchio and Hard Candy's Little Red Riding Hood motif to, say, Suspiria's loose Snow White model, and the subtle accumulation of references to Arthurian legend in Twin Peaks. "Briar Rose" does not invoke a fairy tale once and let the issue slide, leaving us to suss out analogues with the Sleeping Beauty story, but increasingly draws graphic parallels, illustrating with match-cuts between book illustrations and characters, locations, uses the fairy tale to narrate external events via voice over. The cross-cut commentary makes no overtures to subtlety...

... yet I don't think it is all that's going on. In "True Believer" several Biblical stories are invoked, and as I proposed, actually mulled over and given sympathetic/subversive readings that differ from dominant culture's readings of the same. "Briar Rose" does something similar, and openly discusses the issue of interpretation and purpose. We watch "Briar Rose" talk through the problem with Briar Rose. First, Echo as "Susan, Too" provides an unadorned read-through of Sleeping Beauty, then we listen to the protests of the young girl Susan, a hard luck case and abuse victim who finds the story's wait-to-be-rescued scenario disempowering. Echo then proposes a more sophisticated reading of the story, based less on literal plot events than meditation on genre structure. The episode has a built-in critical analyst in Echo, but another in Espenson and director Dwight Little. Susan and Susan2's discussion is spread out enough that it allows Ballard's mission, homing in on the location of the Dollhouse, to unfold beneath the auspice of the Sleeping Beauty deconstruction; while the story initially provides analogues for the prince and cursed princess in Echo and Ballard, it is the criticism which provides the stronger throughline. The easy parts of this game are obvious as soon as Susan2 reads a line from the story. The complications begin when the first match-cut is between a torn and crumpled illustration of the storybook prince and the emotionally damaged Ballard. The reality and positivity of Ballard's mission falls under indirect fire through Susan's criticism. While we want to be free, its value and meaning is directly linked to our own agency in the matter of freeing ourselves. Susan2's rebuttal is complex. She begins by stating aloud the biographical parallels that Susan is reading in the story, and, unawares, paints her Echo-self as Briar Rose:

SUSAN2: You really hate that she didn't save herself, don't you?... Of course, she was 15. That's pretty big. If she was littler, say six or seven or eight--
SUSAN: You can always run away.
SUSAN2: Really? I couldn't. [...}

Simple enough, as she uses the drama of the story as a therapeutic tool. But here is the transcendent power of criticism, as Echo spins straw into gold:

SUSAN2: Hey, you know this story? Read it again, okay? But this time think of yourself as the prince.
SUSAN: I didn't save anyone.
SUSAN2: Hey, remember what you said. Prince shows up at the end, takes all the credit. That means that Briar Rose was trapped all that time, sleeping and dreaming of getting out. The prince was her dream. She made him. She made him fight to get her out.

Sounds to me like Echo was also imprinted with a couple classes in feminist lit, comparative mythology and narratology. She proposes that Sleeping Beauty calls out in a secret feminine language, that birthing ones savior makes one a savior too, that female resourcefulness and the manifestation of will are acts of important agency. We still are not discouraged from paralleling Ballard and the prince, but he is removed of some self-possession. Ballard is still brave and persistent, but so is Echo, though one swings fists and guns and one lays prone in a box; we're invited to understand that just as Ballard has had his personal life and professional mission manipulated by invisible hands in an invisible building, so is his personal, deeply-felt quest directed by Echo.

Here is a vital sidetrack: this idea of Echo's is not new. I've previously placed Ballard in the company of Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dale Cooper, all FBI men hearing the siren call of a victim, all feeling it lead them in bizarre, mystical directions. While Ballard spends most of his time as a Mulder -- driven paranoiac being spun about in investigative Blind Man's Buff -- "Briar Rose" borrows one of the more esoteric and poetic threads of Twin Peaks. (Everyone may feel free to space out on this, if inclined!) The deceased Laura Palmer seems to begin the series as a MacGuffin for drawing together the cast, but this most voiceless of Sleeping Beauties has called out from beyond the divide and summoned forth Agent Cooper as her avenger; a fated couple who, through temporal fluke cannot be united on this plane. Laura is fully re-empowered in Fire Walk With Me, exploiting the time and space wonkiness behind the curtain of the cosmos to find unite herself with Cooper. The world takes her angels away, so Laura summons one to her side herself.

Ballard, of course, is not the shining and brilliant Dale Cooper. Further into the thorns, the possibility is mounted that Boyd Langton is the prince Echo needs... and in the fireworks spectacular finale, of course, the nasty, delightful revelation that none of these would-be alpha males is the summoned prince at all.

JS: I also found those cross-cuts a little basic and bombastic, and wondered what was up. It was the same feeling I had early in "Gingerbread" another Espenson story from BtVS S3. I knew a classic story was being rewired -- here, Prince Ballard was obviously headed for trouble -- but why did the wiring have to be so explicit? In retrospect, the clunky cross-cuts -- "behold the hero's ascent to yonder tower!" -- are an ironic prelude to the total self-destruction of the clunky Sleeping Beauty narrative itself; it turns out that they wired that shit to explode, and I couldn't be gladder. If anything needs to be blown to pieces, it's this most odious of fairy tales... but it's also insubstantial enough that when the pieces are picked up, storytelling magics can reconfigure them for any occasion.

"Sleeping Beauty" is full of possible, yawn-worthy morals: all good things come to those who wait, it is darkest before the dawn, hold out for the Right Guy, the spindle prick of original sin is absolved by a Redeemer's kiss. (Or, if you're the princess in the original Italian tale, "Sun, Moon, and Talia" -- lock your door). But Susan/Echo shoves that sleeper awake -- "think of yourself as the prince." Be your own rescuer. What if you are literally powerless, can't physically break the lock or climb out the window? The advice still holds: Be your own rescuer... by protecting and nourishing the dream of rescue, for sleep gives birth to dreams, dreams are the last stronghold of desire, and desire helps us endure the next moment, and the next. Other trapped heroines have extra recourse (Rapunzel has her 'do, for instance), but Sleeping Beauties, tied to their beds, have no option but to conjure, to commit imaginative fraud, to forge angels out of the air itself... to make fiction their weapon. And so in Susan2's hands, "Sleeping Beauty" becomes a consolation for the powerless, those for whom the only movement possible is mental travel -- it's fictionmaking as a means to stay fit in captivity, ready for the door to swing open. (Surely someone has tweaked this tale into a narrative told, or dreamed, by the S.B. herself, during her 100 years of uninterrupted writing time).

As for the idea of a summons, I don't quite understand your suggestion that Sleeping Beauty "calls out in a secret feminine language" to her prince -- the idea that a trapped and victimized creature can "summon" an outside party seems dangerous -- how do you distinguish her will from the claims of the rescuer himself? And who is the right rescuer, pray tell? Ballard, too, may need a lecture from Maleficent, a reminder that "Sleeping Beauty" is, above all, a cautionary tale for princes (of any gender) and their susceptibility to illusion, hubris, to projecting their fantasies onto distant princesses (of any gender), to following their obsessions every last inch to their dreadful conclusions. (Aside: Princesssss Aurora kinda looks like a goldilocks Eliza Dushku!) Joel Mynor already pointed most of this out to Ballard in "Man on the Street", but forgot to add that "Sleeping Beauty"-like rescue-stories are not about one captive and one rescuer... they're about one captive and hundreds of rescuers... after all, how many princes died in the thorns before the Man of the Century came along and hacked his way through? Juliet doesn't always receive one Romeo, or Madeline one Porphyro. How many guys have heard the "siren call" and proceeded independently and autonomously toward their goal, and how much misguided heroism/other endeavor has been based on the thought, "because she wants me to"? "Briar Rose" actually undermines the idea of the summons, because in the end, as you pointed out, there is a princely pile-up of every last idiot-child who thinks Echo/Caroline needs him. The Sleeping Beauty narrative implodes beautifully by driving the concept to its logical conclusion -- too many princes show up, the princess is unsure of her loyalties (and sabotages Ballard), her previous SOS (Caroline's phone call) goes forgotten! And everyone's most cherished illusion -- Ballard's quest, Langton's paternal affection, Topher's creator-power (he is, after all, the first face most Dolls see when they wake up, a parody of the hovering prince) -- goes down the shitter. Not every girl (or Dominic!) taking a nap wants to be woken up.

Question for you, which will probably be answered in "Omega" -- does Alpha win it all? If anyone summoned anyone, it seems like Alpha summoned Ballard to the scene, heaven knows why. Seems like it would have been faster to get Caroline out himself. Alpha certainly gets the girl, but it's because he's smart, strategic, and methodical, not because he's a Prince or Hero. At least some"one" in the Dollhouse -- or at least one very specific Imprint -- was waiting for him... to say nothing of "W is for Whiskey" Saunders (thanks to cleverer viewers than I for pointing that one out). (In a sadder twist, little Susan is probably now waiting for Susan2 to come back, which she never will).

But no one was waiting for Ballard... because nobody ever is.

CS: Man, they tricked us into talking about the fairy tale frosting on the cake, which I suspect we both "get" anyway. You're free to take Susan's side re: Sleeping Beauty. As much as I enjoy subversive argument, the Perrault version was written to endorse specifically the values that Susan is complaining about.

But you're still taking a literalist stance to Echo's interpretation of the story, though we are, to a degree, both putting words in Echo's mouth. I don't necessarily buy Susan2's reading either, because like Joseph Campbell's monomyth, it is a porous, widely applicable idea, not specific to the text in hand. By way of elaborating the subtle voices we use while imprisoned: the theory being that Briar Rose calls a man through the power of dreams -- intuition, psychic linkage and mind-control being historically female-linked. This is all Echo's reading, not my own. Though the real-world result may be the same, there is a difference in dreaming someone into being, wishing, praying, and begging to the wall: Echo says "she made him". Dollhouse means these things figuratively, though as for Twin Peaks, I meant it literally: Laura Palmer and Agent Cooper have access to a trans-temporal conduit, via the mystical Lodges in the woods outside Twin Peaks. She can call her own rescuer -- they even psychically intuit one another before her murder -- and when he doesn't arrive in time, she even finds a complicated way for them to be together anyway.

Echo is not piecing together textual clues that Briar Rose literally "made" a prince materialize. She is not articulate enough to say it, but the way we write stories is this: the presence of a rescuer is necessitated by the existence of a damsel in distress. He cannot Be unless she Is first. This meditation on meta-tations is what I was mostly getting at. The argument here is that all characters in narrative fiction have good reason to feel that the freeway of their existence goes in one direction, one lane, no exits. But don't sweat it. Neither Susan1, nor 2 has final say on Sleeping Beauty. Neither Ballard, Boyd or Alpha have arrived as mechanical effect of Echo's having dreamt, called forth, summoned or prayed for. There aren't gods, psychics or supernatural entities in this hard s-f world.

So hmm, does Alpha win? The whole of the Grimm and Perrault fairy story collections remain socio-normative and gender-politik straightjacketed. They also retain something of the weird Old World power of their source stories; however diluted, it cannot be washed away. That weirdness and tingly sanguinity gushed forth when Alpha emerged. I have made very few guesses at Mr. Alpha (or Mr. Whedon's) master plan, but damned if his outbreak of confident strutting, slashing, and expressiveness didn't bring a sudden jolt of joie de vivre noir to the Dollhouse world of repressed, tortured, injured and sleeping souls. We only saw him being "him" for a minute, but he was alive, and he knew what he was doing, and it looked like it felt good.

JS: It's a good pointo about perhaps taking Echo/Susan too literally. I was just digging into that specific, very plausible situation of an adult mentor trying to help this kid find some refuge -- even a role model -- in what is basically a very demoralizing story. If, figuratively, her misfortune and distress are what birth the rescuer -- if his birth is simply a consequence, a domino's fall -- then how do her agency, resourcefulness, or positive manifestation of will matter at all? They are probably only to be found in hindsight, as Echo helps Susan "edit" the book of the past, endowing past-Susan with a more active/generative role in the chain of events. It's still a compassionate deception, and I am droning. Anyway, we lose track of Susan halfway into the episode, so perhaps she's less important in and of herself, more important in terms of serving as another educational encounter on Echo's Grand Tour.

I am reasonably sure that the tingly sanguinity unleashed by Alpha signals the rush of blood to a thousand fangroins.

CS: I hope more than 1000 people are watching! The groins say "Hooray, the Arch Enemy showed up, with only an episode and 1/5 to go!" This is a new and interesting build for M.E. story structure. It has been very happily doling out dozens of unsolved plot mysteries while answering a few at a time, but unlike mythology teases Lost and The X-Files, Dollhouse maintains forward propulsion. It hints and foreshadows but does not spin its wheels. I don't even feel the need to guess at the big hot questions --Dollhouse's "Who killed Laura Palmer?," "What is the island?," "What is the goal of the secret government conspiracy" is "What is the Dollhouse's purpose?" -- because it is plain that the show has a better answer than we can come up with.

Yet, regarding that question, and back to the Susans in a more general sense, I kept waiting for the explanation of who contracted this Engagement, kept wondering where the money was. The answer came all right, but it seems to be a charity mission initiated by Topher. Whether this was just an opportunity for the labmaster to try out strange new twist on Imprinting technique (Echo as Susan "if" she grows up healthy and strong -- this begs the question of how Topher got a brain scan of Susan), it appears that the Dollhouse is willing to do pro bono work for the purpose of... what? Making the world a better place? Testing their limits and skills to provide a wider variety of paid services? As Angel would put it, helping the helpless? Notice that DeWitt constantly maintains the company line, that the Dollhouse provides a beneficial service, even when speaking internally to employees who she has no reason to snow. Misguided perhaps, conflicted, certainly, but is it possible that like the X-Files' evil Machavellian Consortium, they do have benevolent or survivalist intention and believe the importance of the work outweighs and justifies the vileness of the means?

"Briar Rose" climaxes with so much information that the cliffhang feels like a two-parter -- perhaps why we're drawn to analyze a fairy tale instead of the episode. I did get two scenes that I've been dying to see for weeks, and they are not action events but emotional beats, personal revelations. That the finale is a week away may have made us timid about jumping on these things [NOTE TO READERS: Janani and Chris actually refrain from watching new episodes until discussions have been completed, if you can believe that! - Ed.]:

-Ballard wide-eyed with horror to discover Victor in the Dollhouse, and an audible clunk as his stomach hits his pelvic bone. Could not be better timed that a few moments later, Echo herself pulls Pauls feet out from under him.
-Let us assume that Dominic-in-Victor's exclamation at Saunders means what we know it means. Let us assume that Alpha's taunt that she didn't "always want to be a doctor" means the same. Whiskey! That poor scarred Whiskey is shuffled into behind-the-scenes duty recalls the way Disneyland employees with acne or large bodies are kept in maintenance and janitorial duties. Topher's enigmatic contemplation of the doe-eyed doctor in "Ghost" becomes so much more aching and wistful in retrospect. Let us hope that Victor's mirrored face-slashing by Alpha does not mean we will see less of my favorite of Echo's bunkmates.

And: That Dr. Saunders is not required to shower frequently and behind plexiglass is a total rip-off.

JS: Amy Acker is a one-woman heat wave, frying my Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As Snakes on a Jackson said in Do the Right Thing: "Children, this is the cool-out corner."

Among other things, the Susan imprint hinted to me that Dollhouse writers are designing the one-shot plots backward, starting with a provocative concept -- "what if an older self could literally counsel a younger self?" -- and filling in the gaps. (As opposed to, "I loved Black Beauty - can we have horses please?" Wait, you mean shows aren't written that way?) Starting at the end is fine, as Topher's science is always served with a side of fudge brownies. My own curiosity about the larger story structure is leading me to think of the whole thing not as a linear story so much as a story cycle or a grab bag of interrelated fables, almost half of which can be appreciated out of order. To me the the forward propulsion hasn't felt as urgent; Ballard's quest is the only straight line, perhaps the axis around which every other story forms, just as (fudge alert) an electric current generates a magnetic force field around its axis:

The only Echo assignments that seem to have a fixed place in the chronology involve Echo-Ballard intersections, as in "True Believer", "Man on the Street" (because of her warning to Ballard), "Needs" (a response to several weeks' worth of glitching and with Caroline's call to Ballard) and "Spy" because of the Dominic business. Every other piece is movable, a little independently functioning unit (and not unlike a folk tale in terms of its turning a young person out of doors to try her luck in the world). So does this mean... oh my gawd... does this mean that the Engagements and soul/personality dithering were auxiliary concerns, and that all this time the real core story has been Dollhouse: The True Hollywood Story of Paul Ballard? Alpha is Paul's fellow saboteur, but, as you say, he's not so much an individual as an elemental force blowing the doors off the place. In any case, maybe the contrivance of the Dollhouse is just an excuse to talk about human response to Dollhouses (presaged in "Man on the Street"); in Paul's case the doomed curiosity of an outsider, in Alpha's case the treachery of an insider...

"Briar Rose" represents another death blow to the script idea I told you about last week, about a rival organization that smuggles out a Doll for observation. The idea grew much like the victim/rescuer symbiosis you suggested, the Dollhouse by virtue of its very existence sprouting a nemesis -- but how sick and wonderful is it that the enemy turns out to be one of their own? That the seeds of the Dollhouse's destruction lie in its very origins, in the very setup that was supposed to work perfectly? Has all of season 1 really been about the End Times of the Dollhouse, its last act, the calm before the storm, the impossibly intricate fractal proliferation that precedes the last act of Jurassic Park (the novel)? Is the Dollhouse under siege by this guy?

I've read mentioned that JW planned a complete one-season story arc in case of cancellation, and from what little Whedon storytelling I've seen I wouldn't put it past him to blow the place to bits (like he did Sunnydale High!) and start season 2 on a completely different footing... which would put even more topspin on Adelle's delicious line to Ballard -- "You think you can walk into the Dollhouse when it doesn't even exist?" This wouldn't be such a misfit with the True Hollywood Story, because... it doesn't really. And it does. It's everywhere, and it's nowhere.

(No, wait, I've got it: Dollhouse deals in fantasy, but its purpose is to get Chris's blog updating regularly again after a certain comic abducted him for a year! We're all Dollhouse pawns, every last one of us...)

CS: DeWitt's taunt to Ballard is suitably sinister and suggestive (perhaps not as bad-ass as Cigarette Smoking Man's rejoinder to the first time Mulder shoves a gun in his face: "Don't try and threaten me, Mulder. I've watched presidents die."-- truly one for the ages). Secret hideouts are one thing. The base of operations with official policy that This Location Is Not Here is another. The Dollhouse is in the real world subterranean sub rosa company of Mount Weather, Area 51, Bohemian Grove, the DARPA facility that may not be photographed. If architecture is frozen music, then the Dollhouse is a see-through crystallization of a shortwave numbers station. I'm interested, as metaphor-plumber and story hacker, in the way Dollhouse allows meaning to flow through its core elements. In "Briar Rose" the Dollhouse is compared to the fairy tale castle, the castle turned dungeon, a self-contained ecosystem, and finally an invisible place where one can walk and yet not be walking. It has been womb, nursery, cemetery, cult compound, haven, Eden, home and prison in one episode. The same multiperspective applies to all characters, relationships, missions and struggles, always. Mutant Enemy sets up the board and, as the game progresses, turns the pieces and board itself around in its hands, every vantage equally possible. Dollhouse's symbols are empty pitchers as eager to be filled with water as whiskey or Great Bluedini Kool-Aid: you can put anything in these people.

DeWitt is also reminding Ballard that the the conspiracy of denial is so deep and elaborate, the smokescreen so thick that there is truly nothing behind the screen but more smoke. There are no first-hand sources for urban legends, no central hub in the web of paper and string on Ballard's wall, no license plates for vehicles from the State of Mind. The Sleeping Beauty Castle that lies at another vital hub?

Know what was inside this one in 1955? Nothing. It's a facade.*

What if we get into the sewer and find a giant alligator? What if you locate the subterranean city of mole people in abandoned NYC subway tunnels? What if you get into the Dollhouse? What are you gonna do about it? Ballard's "truth" (like, well, Mulder's) is not going to give him any comfort, any real confirmation: "It is real!" he nods and pats himself on the back-- then spots Victor and... Poof. He can't arrest anyone, couldn't even if he were still an acting FBI agent. If he had any proof, anyway, he's trumped by the NSA. And what is the crime? What is the legal crime that Ballard believes is being committed, and which he can bring to legal justice? We know of a few, all easily whitewashed, and of which Ballard has no proof. Engagements of dubious legality (repossession of stolen property, meddling with law-enforcement, prostitution), violence by Dollhouse security staff (potentially defensible), and the non-consensual violations of The Attic. The Dollhouse is in constant, bizarre violation of the Nuremberg Code, and it appears very much that staff and Doll alike have come aboard under ulterior coercion.

But they all signed contracts. Why are there contracts? What is in this contract? In a hard-line, legal sense, are these contracts binding?

I am hesitant to map out the structure of a Mutant Enemy show that is not complete. What looks like stalling, dead end or tangent on a Whedon show often turns out to be the engine going about its quiet work. If there's one thing this team is good at (I can think of a dozen things, but...) it is complex structure. I found this notebook attempt at diagraming the surface structure of BtVS and Angel as a series of nested and knitted arcs, abandoned when I realized it required supplemental rings, mirrors, helices. Cannot do on paper. May have done better by photocopying the dragon fractals out of the J-Park. Star Trek may be the show that has 3D chess, but Mutant Enemy shows actually play 3D chess.

That might be one to ask me after "Omega". The shape of the season is likely being determined by exactly what kind of gambit Alpha has been running -- whether he stacked the deck, or played his hand exceptionally well.

*(There are things in it now, but for most of history and in grand park metaphor, the Disneyland castle is a shell).

JS: That diagram looks like a berserko version of my AP Physics notes ca. 1999, speaking of which -- my remote is starting to look irresistible.

Shall we Ω?

CS: Oh my multitude of gods, yes, onward to the finale, please. My DVR box is doing a shuffling jig like it has to urinate.