Black Narcissus (1947)

WHY NOT?

by Evan Bryson

In another life, I would have joined a monastery. Instead I’m saddled with 70K in student loan debt and follow a masturbatory regime that seems lately to have crossed the high curve of its parabola, to borrow a phrase from John McPhee. No one bothered to explain to me the nature of dialectical materialism until after I’d signed the promissory notes. In fact, in the four years I actively studied and the one year I malingered until finishing my degree, the word dialectic, if it came up at all, pertained only to the realm of aesthetics, where it seemed to rinse conflicting avant-gardes of their ruddy political thrusts in a manner similar to washing potatoes before baking. In the realm of aesthetics, the manufacture of meaning using any dialectically-fronted aperçus is worthless, especially if you care about a credit rating, and if you are attempting to consolidate said continent of student loan debt you must care about your credit rating. (If you are under the age of eighteen, you should remedy this ignorance before you too indenture yourself to the liberal arts. There are people who can help you. I cannot. See a career counselor in phlebotomy post haste to learn where lay the golden tickets of petit bourgeois blood-drawing, mostly in the streets; snatch them up, save yourselves, I beg you. You’ll have health insurance and everything.)

I read more books now than I have sex, and I check my email more than I read books, and I sext message from the agricultural plane of Indiana. In this sequence virility is not an index of ardor but one of reckoning; my very organ for sensing the epiphanic in this life is a little bored, a little tired. I’m beginning to doubt that sex is epiphanic. Did I ever believe it was? Was it related to the amount of books I read? This is the twilight of my youth, the onset of generational fears. I fight the darkness back by waving a stick dipped in pitch and ignited, to use a confused metaphor. I think my ideas are pathetic.

In regard to the above, there is a scene half-way through Black Narcissus where the sisters sing Christmas carols sequestered atop a snow-peaked mountain in their Himalayan convent. In the cold dark outside the lattice windows of the modest chapel, flecks of snow whet the edges of the night, deflected somehow by the miracle of clear sharp English voices. The nuns’ faces are luminous, inner-lit by passion. Some of this passion seems spent on appreciating Christ’s birth, but a greater reserve is burned through deviousness: each woman of the holy order sings of her own elating secret. Kieślowski stages a similar scene in The Double Life of Véronique four decades later, near the beginning of his film. Nubile Weronika, a spiritual woman divested of habit, sings in a thunder shower, ecstatic, orgasmic. I had been thinking about the sexual rancor of Black Narcissus and my living in penury, impotent, lying sick in my mentor’s house not too far from my alma mater, when the image of Irène Jakobson’s warm breasts superimposed on the proceedings. Her strong arpeggio stroked my ears, her eyes flashed in the rain shower; her mouth was full with water. Between my belly-aching, geltabs of fever-reducer, impressions of Véronique, and the sly spiritual immolation of the caroling nuns, I felt a vaguely religious thrill, purely pagan, stirring. In another life, I would have joined a monastery, I thought. The prospect remains hallucinatory.

Is it obvious that the enormous bell Sister Clodagh pulls every morning is a homolog of God’s mighty genitals? Of course pointing out Black Narcissus’ eroticism is de rigueur and, perhaps, beside the point. Has enough been said about Jack Cardiff’s radiant cinematography, how its complement in Brian Easdale’s film score situates its mystery and its lushness squarely between The Wizard of Oz and Vertigo for sheer swooning? It’s rude to pant in the theater—in the darkness, alone, it suggests inappropriate behavior—but this is what happens to me when any measure of real beauty, real vastness, appeals to my senses for extended scenes. I grow breathless at delight; passages of Avatar had this effect on me too, and it’s the same feeling as having spent a Sunday service singing hymns, mouth dry and lungs heaving. (What do I feel about singing hymns? I feel good about it. I like to sing and they’re easy to memorize. In high school, I was president of the United Methodist Youth Group in town. I did this for 1. organizing ski trips and 2. community service hours, of which I was required to fulfill 80 before graduation, and 3. lit studies, that is scanning the Bible for the AP exams in the spring. I’m not proud that I was UMYF president and agnostic, but I take some satisfaction in my Methodist peers having well-organized and amply-funded trips to Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom, and all the raking we did of old people’s lawns, and all the games of hide-n-seek we played in the massive church.)

Maybe it’s like kissing, or more like necking, really playing mouth monsters, shirts off, loudly coming up for air. I’ll say that the mastery of set-design contributes to this bliss. Championing Black Narcissus’ visual splendor feels quixotic because effectively it is championing the counterfeit: no part of the film was shot on location in India or in the mountains. But the visuals are overwhelming. Majestic mother-of-pearl peaks, orange-rimmed sunsets, cobalt skies so blue at the apex almost black, and the flowers of the gardens with their magical names (forget-me-nots, sweet pea, daffodil, Japanese peony), and the sweet murals of the harem life ironically adorning the interior of the convent. So there’s that. Watching some movies is to me as pleasant as swimming. You feel yourself in a current, cold or warm, and you can physicalize this comparison in terms of actively watching or passively watching, the way you can breaststroke or ring yourself in an inner tube and simply drift. I want to impress on readers the flu, my fragility and sickliness, and the darkness therein, of which these reflections passed and Black Narcissus shot through.

A construction half-formed in my head throughout the movie, the phrase Brazilian wax. I thought this several times throughout Black Narcissus and not because the crutch of this essay is provocative anatomizing. I was thinking this because of all the other nun fashion I’ve inventoried, we’ve all inventoried, collectively, over the years. There’s the chaste habits of Doubt and both Sister Act films, somber black, and Sally Field’s flying nun with her attenuated apron and mantel acting as rudder and wings, and darkly have we Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking wearing dowdy sweaters and a portentous necklace, gold filigree and a cross striking in its stressed arms, a truss for bloodletting, leering toward the Italian or Nicaraguan or Rwandan nuns, photographed in political atrocities, wearing black or white habits, usually strings, some beads, and either bleeding or dead, crushed, impaled, bullet-ridden maybe raped, or lingering among the dead, traipsing over the burnt members of their communities. All this iconography seeps into us and flattens our spiritual mores, disciplines us to look at these ladies’ good works, at their hands, at their cunning eyes. The living nuns are apogees of human filth—I mean they seem the furthest from what is sordid, corporeal, and immediate, in that they appear upright and stern and eternal; but also they live among the destitute, broken and ruined. When we remember Mother Theresa we think of her merry wrinkled face, her arthritic fingers shelling grains, and her blue knees in a game of kickball with orphans. I don’t think I’m making any of this up—I remember Roland Barthes appearing bored while looking at Koen Wessing’s picture of soldiers and nuns in Nicaragua during the rebellion in 1979, that dumb prick. Oh. I nearly forgot Nunsense.

Brazilian wax came into my head because of Hein Heckroth’s costuming. The faces of the nuns of Black Narcissus are set into the pure white habits, thickly yawning folds of soft creams, the creamiest, dramatizing the red of their lips. These nuns are lustral in the supremely naked way of having no coverage whatsoever, no pubis, no secrets, but dense shame. The irony of this—need I point out—is that these women have only their faces to show us. Near the end of the movie, when Sister Ruth slinks down the mountain path in her rouges and rabbit boots, the shock of brazen carnality on display is damped by the surge of suggestion that came before it. Her hips reveal only that she is curvy, if a bit narrow. Under all of Heckroth’s cloth she was entirely one big bare walking delirious vagina.

-

Shame is inexpensive but long-lasting. I remember only two or three times lividly cursing my best friend, and once was after he had referred me to Freedom Debt Relief and my free consultation had gone quickly sour. I didn’t curse him to his face. I threw a tantrum alone. I never told him about it, though he phoned afterward. I was brittle with him. I know now that no one manages oppressive student load debt, especially debt to mega-creditors like the government or Sallie Mae, thanks to pernicious legislators exercising power against new lawyers in the 1980s. A crop of otherwise affluent young white assholes would graduate from law school and declare bankruptcy, because that’s what any 25-year-old with 150K in debt essentially is—this cleverness was quickly suppressed.

Anyway, my friend had 12K in credit card debt, accrued mostly, I unfairly suspect, in fraternity dues (again: for those under-eighteen readers, take note), and he had some success in whittling this trouble down to something manageable by talking on the phone to a patriotic debt relief counselor. It seems strange when I think about it. He joined the army for good measure. Being gay I had no such luck, but also my character is marked by unique striae, namely a ridge of terror transversing meekness and pacifism, a border that more or less repulses me from holding a gun. At a berserk low-point I called the relief agency and in short order was told they could do nothing and no one could do anything. This is universally known by all about student loan debt. I was in my father’s white work-van (on loan to me this difficult summer), and I sat amongst my paints and canvases and said Fuck until the capillaries in my eyes burst. I didn’t need eyes anymore. I wasn’t going to paint anymore and be poor and owe America everything. Fuck eyes. I filled out applications for entry-level civilian gigs in the Department of Defense. Though no job materialized from this madness, my shame remains.

What else was happening? I don’t mean to expose the undiluted triviality of my circumstances, which were more rustic than balls-out crippling by any stretch of the imagination—I live on a farm. I don’t have internet. When my boyfriend calls—he did just now—to ask if I’ve seen the new Lady Gaga video (“A lot of birthing, all manner of it, and bloody,” is his report)—inevitably the answer is No. But intellectual marginalization has attendant pain and is very specific to this moment in history, especially for the creative class, hemmed in by the internet. There are too many of us being nice to each other. We are the new boring lumpenproletariat. There’s no avant-garde because the avant-garde is not very nice, and not being very nice interferes with the hiring practice. Getting hired is a thing. At any moment, one of our connections—you know, someone we’ve networked with—could secure for us employment or a gig if only we don’t piss them off. For comparison, pithy Félix Fénéon is presumed to have pipe-bombed rivals at the Hôtel Foyot. (Ironically, the explosion’s sole casualty was Fénéon’s friend, the poet Laurent Tailhade.)

Where was I?

That summer I was Home Again. What happened next amounts to Tall Tales. I began a fitness program that occasionally slipped into exercise bulimia. I ran 4 miles every day in the evenings along the same course my twin brother had run in high school, in his attempt to shed off weight before wrestling meets. I was ghosting the physical ambitions of my brother, haunting his trek, stripping away the micro layers of fat for lack of a salaried job. His junior year, my brother cut 20 pounds, possibly more, running this circuit through the cornfields of my home. If you touched his cheek, it stayed indented. He was ashen and starved and automatically surly, prone to bursting into tears around food. (Wrestling season coincides with the most gluttonous of holidays, what with practices beginning around Halloween, and tournaments surrounding Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. A lot of wrestlers are criers; it’s kind of endearing.) I felt caught up in the same cycle, in all of July into August and beyond. I worked three part-time jobs in three different counties, hauling my work clothes and work apparatuses in my dad’s giant, gas-guzzling white van, which I nicknamed Moby-Dick. I was a slim morsel in the mouth of the whale! When I got off from these jobs—Gallery Attendant, Video Rentalist, Host—I went on long runs and wept. I tottered into bed unable to hold books, the sinews of my body crackling, like I had spent the day spit-roasting. A lot of things were happening then—things with my boyfriend, for instance, who was in Texas, in the gaping maw of Teach for America—but mostly I was lost in Symbolism. That, and Tall Tales about the economy and artists, privation and shame, and other dichotomies of inertness.

Other films featuring nuns take a long view of describing the bureaucracy of the order—the narrative suffers under documentary injunction, so that viewers can experience a richly felt “day in the life” quality to the proceedings. The structural motifs of these films are composed of scenes in which nuns are seen submitting, singing, weeding, praying, hobbling, whispering, disciplining, and usually failing, or stalling in their sacraments before a satanic impasse. (Nunsense not excepted.) Black Narcissus seems unconcerned with doctrinal faith, or imagining the fulsomeness of pious deeds. The sisters stand along their earthen works bereft of a coherent tradition. They are mesmerized under the infinite vault of cold mountain air. The sky is too close. They are close enough to the sky to see angels, and yet none are there. When the nuns lose their sense of vocation, other senses are amplified, arousing memory and reverie.

Writers, producers and directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger acknowledge Black Narcissus’ eroticism. I’m not going to move beyond the film’s seductions. Here is a brief summary with spoilers: Several nuns are sent to a convent in the Himalayan steeps, so as to provide schooling and medicine for the village of pagans below. Probably they get altitude sickness—a slow burning sickness that makes all the nuns a little crazy. Though they win over the peasantry and find time to do needle-point, they hardly ever eat and do even less in the way of converting. Where crops should have been sowed, instead, flowers are planted. Reading the Bible doesn’t help and eventually the sisters despair. One night one of the nuns goes bat shit, she is jealous and horny, and in the morning she tries to push her sister superior off a cliff!

The man between them is David Farrar’s Mr. Dean. Occasionally he uses the Lord’s name in vain, a transgression that titillates the younger nuns to no end. He has chest hair you could scour pots with, a bronze voice, strong nose—a nose that steers the expressions of his face like a keel—and powerful jowls with kind sea water eyes and greasy hair coiffed heroic-casual, in the vein of Robin Hood. He wears kit shorts draw-stringed above his navel with the fabric over his ass shaped into a potato sac. The hyper-masculine textures are off-set by these infantilizing wardrobe choices—strappy sandals and loose salmon-colored tunics, and Mr. Dean always rides around on a listing grey pony, his knees up to his ears. Golden knees, white thighs.

I think the aesthetics of jungle sex are always abortive, in that every winging thing in the environment tries to put white people off procreating there. Mosquitos, malaria, cholera, dysentery, typhus; all the leaves on the ground trembling with insects, fatty insects with tentacles, mandibles, stingers and a millions legs; the monkeys observing from nearby look and act like pre-sexual kids, hooting and pointing—all to say if Mr. Dean and Sister Clodagh’s pas de deux had evolved beyond playground teasing, they had even more censure coming from the diabolically sensuous environs. Merchant and Ivory never fared well in humidity, either. When bejeweled Kanchi (a carotene Jean Simmons, pulsing, ravishing, a mauve cobra princess) charms the young general (fey Sabu, sweetly perfumed in the scent of the film’s title, a dandy who enjoys the London cut of suits), I sense the filmmakers conceding to the natives’ heathen purity, rarified and mystical. The Eastern boy and girl can elope and fornicate: Western encyclicals are so much dross to their fauvist afternoon lovemaking. Just what does Black Narcissus cologne smell like?

Some movies scramble you like an egg. They have this power over you once, in one blue hour of winter twilight, when you’re sick. I guess. There I was beside my pile of tissues, mucus glossing the beard around my nose and mouth, degrees away from assuming the figure of a Mater dolorosa, wondering what the hell I had seen. Black Narcissus’ inner mechanism is Hitchcockian but when its spring releases, the outpouring is Matisse—papaya sunlight drenching brimstone. The monsoon washes away remaining psychic turmoil quaffing hot breath with cold rain.

Is it a particularly post-grad thing to listen to electronic music and theorize its relevance? My friend took a seminar devoted to analyzing Pet Shop Boys. One of his research papers was titled “Organica” and it was a historiographic overview of the evolution of intelligent dance music—Autechre and Squarepusher were his controls, I think—in relation to advances in biotechnology, such as mapping the human genome. He established a relationship between descriptions of exons in the structure of DNA and the allophones of Digital Performer and Pro Tools editing software, and the Ableton Live interface. Most of this existed in the realm of metaphor. His essential argument still seems very meaningful to me—that at the point when humankind could describe itself down to its constitutive chemical bits, the songs we sang of ourselves became wordless clicks and drones. The liturgical corollary may not be evident. In so much as we may know more of our own making, the means of describing this material become more obtuse and irrelevant to lay people. The essay was the preface to a larger defense of Auto-Tune.

I picked up a little Oxygen 8 MIDI controller to practice, I guess, what I preach. Making music that you’re not embarrassed to show other people takes even longer than painting pictures that you’re not embarrassed to show other people—thankfully songs are easier to hide than canvases as large as mattresses. Writing about film takes very little time indeed.

In fact I’ve not seen nuns in documentaries. No, that’s not entirely accurate: I have seen Sister Wendy Beckett discuss art on PBS. She seems lovely. The tendency remains to assume familiarity with the lifestyle (I say “lifestyle” en lieu of evoking the delicate wiles of Consecrated Virginity, or Anchoritic Life), if only by conflating poverty, education, and alone-time, which so many of us have. But just because you’re poor and consumed by questions of meaning, doesn’t mean you’re a nun, or a monk, as the case may be. Reading The Name of the Rose doesn’t make you a semiotician. Still, we embrace certain aesthetic/ethical convictions and imbue them with the ardor of religious doctrine, thus the scholastic tradition. This is consoling. Living an acetic lifestyle is consoling too, because it saves you the indignity of living off food stamps while tightening your quads. Listening upright in chairs to electronic music is not the same as attending Mass. But I think it’s what we’re left with. We need to make it mean something. And, like the nuns in Black Narcissus, we need to know when to leave off our meaning making. I need more ibuprofen. I need to be more gracious about defeat.

Evan Bryson is a writer living in Indiana. He tumbls here.

Source Code (2011)

8 MINUTES OF JAKE GYLLENHAAL 8 MINUTES AGO

by Chris Cantoni

Spoiler Alert: There are spoilers in the review of this relatively new movie.  Not the giving-away-the-ending kind, but it might sully your experience a little bit to go into a movie knowing that Vader is Luke’s father.  It’s not that type of spoiler.  It’s more like finding out that in the middle of the original Star Wars a planet is blown up by a giant space station, which if someone had told me I’d be like “Aww man, come on!” but it wouldn’t be such a detriment to my enjoyment of the movie that I wouldn’t bother to see Star Wars at all.  Then again, one man’s Alderaan is another man’s Obi-Wan Kenobi being killed by Darth Vader, so take heed.

12 hours after Source Code: Man, what a fun movie, but…  There is always a but.  Source Code somehow works at the same time that it doesn’t work.  If you don’t already know, it’s about a guy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who has to relive 8 minutes aboard a Chicago commuter train over and over again in order to figure out who bombed said train (because, you see, these 8 minutes happened in the past, to a person on said train.  Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Captain Colter Stevens was never on the train, but he’s being put into the body of someone who was, Sean Fentress. The preceding sentence probably helps you understand why not a lot of people are eager to go see Source Code.)

The great news is that reliving the 8 minutes allows some degree of Groundhog Day to occur, which is pretty fun.  The first half of the film is incredibly tense.  When, for instance, Stevens is examining the bomb you are seriously worried his 8 minutes are up and it is going to explode in his face.  On the other side of the 8 minutes, in the real world timeline, Stevens is in a capsule communicating with an Air Force soldier (Vera Farmiga) and if they don’t discover the identity of the train bomber, the whole city of Chicago will be threatened later that same day by a dirty bomb (Remember those?).

So, cool.  We’ve got a whole lot of tension, and there’s the girl Stevens is sitting across from when he jumps in as Ventress (See how hard this is?!  I’m the person writing this out and I can barely keep it straight.  I have no idea what this must be like for you) and there’s like a love story there, sort of, and a surprising amount of comedic moments that are all kept in balance and feel really great together. BUT (Like I said, there’s always a but), without giving away too much of the film, it peters out a bit toward the end.  Once your A-story is wrapped up, it’s hard to transfer that weight to your B-story with much success because we have so little invested.  I think that’s an inherent problem with a script where your protagonist is sort of stuck as someone else all the time, but there are multiple subplots that make you really emotionally connect to Gyllenhaal’s character even if we are no longer on the edge of our seats.  The filmmakers make a valiant effort in trying to put forth something that is both popcorn and brain tease.

Director Duncan Jones was also behind the incredible Moon, which is on Netflix Instant so I suggest you go enjoy it (Rockwell deserved the Oscar for that film above any other contender, I promise you).  But there too I felt a certain hesitancy on the part of the story, as if we are not quite going to get to that dark place.  The dark place, however seedy it may sound, is a necessary part of stories, because it gives us a place to come back from.  I get the feeling that Jones needs a slap in the face, he needs to fight, truly fight for something in his life (like love or something equally inspiring) and he’ll be able to make a movie that goes to that place and back.  This is only his second film, true, but in both of them there was ample space to push the envelope and he failed to grasp the opportunity. The thought that keeps coming back to me is that he is trying to make Stanley Kubrick quality pictures, but doesn’t quite know what made them so Kubrickian. His films have a wonderful hopefulness to them that I find quite refreshing, but they lack the heft and weight to give them their fully deserved meaning.

18 Hours after Source Code: Man, Jake Gyllenhaal just has a fantastic beard.  I bet it looks great at any length.

24 Hours after Source Code: Ok, so halfway through the movie, Captain Stevens finds out that he’s (spoiler alert!) actually dead, which if you hadn’t guessed before he finds out you have never seen a movie EVER.  The weakness of Source Code is that there isn’t enough tension throughout.  Once you realize he’s dead, it’s not like you suddenly find yourself rooting for him to survive, because you know he can’t, because he’s dead.  Fortunately, the strength of the rest of the film comes from the emotional connections.  When Stevens suspects he’s dead, he asks Vera Farmiga by saying “One soldier to another, am I dead?” because of course they’re not going to tell him because he’ll flip out.  But I liked that because it’s nice to think there’s a special unspoken code between soldiers about telling each other the truth.  Especially if it is whether or not you are dead, which is a pretty serious situation.

Another great emotional connection happens between Stevens on the train (who is not Stevens but Sean Fentress) and the girl across from him, Christina.  Sean clearly liked Christina and she’s a “good person” so Stevens gets a bit sweet on her too.  In short order, their relationship becomes the crux of the film anyway, so it’s good that throughout you’re already rooting for the once shy guy to finally tell the girl how he feels.  Only he’s not shy anymore because he’s being played by Captain Jake Gyllenhaal so of course Jake Gyllenhaal can just be like “Oh by the way, I’m charming and sexy even if I am acting crazy and beating people up.”  It’s not like Jake has to try, but it still means a lot because the old Sean (the one who wasn’t Jake) DID have to try, and now they can have a romance and there is plenty of emotional heft because every 8 minutes they are blowing up and dying, which makes their time together that much more meaningful, at least for Captain Stevens, because he knows what’s about to happen.  Whew!  Still here?

The film also has a nice subplot about Stevens and his dad.  They of course had some terrible argument before Stevens shipped out to Afghanistan and now he’s “dead” and didn’t get a chance to tell his father he loves him.  A great touch was how well Gyllenhaal plays a soldier, because it’s not like he’s gung-ho or crazy, he just consistently does his duty and calls everyone Sir or Ma’am and seems very respectful of his superiors, even his dad.  So that part of the movie feels very authentic and also like since the bomb on the train technically already happened, here’s a way our character has conflict and emotions in the real world, not just the source code world.

36 Hours after Source Code: There’s a moment in the film when someone finally says “source code” and I’ll be honest, that moment sparked giddiness inside me.  Not for any reason other than you are waiting for someone to say something about some kind of source code before the movie even starts and when it finally happens it’s kind of like your ticket price was all worth it for that one moment.

The movie still feels slightly off the mark.  There’s a certain amount of wiggle room when it comes to “movie logic” whereby if they say something is true you can just accept it as being true, but the problem in Source Code is that the explanation given for how the source code works doesn’t exactly match up with what actually happens.  Which doesn’t bother me that much, but I feel like it’s worth mentioning because I think a lot of people will be shaking their heads at that one.

I suppose the bottom line (well, my bottom line) is that I want a movie with a complex time narrative to make me think, to make me go hmm!  A movie that will push me to eavesdrop on other people’s conversation and jump in to endlessly discuss it.  Remember how last summer we all couldn’t stop talking about Inception and whether or not the top would stop spinning at the end?  Source Code is like the popcorn shrimp version of that.  You’re pleased, but there’s a definite sense of lost opportunity for brain wrinkling.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Jones had made a movie where Stevens, from having to relive the same 8 minutes over and over again, goes crazy and the crazy leads him to planting a bomb on a train that he subsequently has to go back in time over and over again to stop?!  Cause and effect never ending in a loop?  No, that wouldn’t be cool?  Well fine then.  Nevermind.

48 Hours after Source Code: Seriously, Jake Gyllenhaal has the best beard I have ever seen. How does it look so good on his face?  I want to see what a Jake Gyllenhaal Jeremiah Johnson would look like.  Probably still amazing.  I’m going to go back 8 minutes and relive it.

Chris Cantoni is a beardless writer living in Los Angeles.  He last wrote about Good Will Hunting in these pages.

Sucker Punch (2011)

I AM SO FUCKING MAD AT ZACK SNYDER

by Andrew Root

Last week, I wrote a critique of the director’s first original feature before the film had been released. I expressed my concerns over the underlying sexism of the to-date released footage, and questioned the validity of the girl power marketing tactics. Believe me when I tell you that the situation is so much more dire than I suspected.

I will not mince words; this film is an affront to women on multiple levels. If given an additional viewing, I’m sure I could produce examples further to the four I will present here, though I have no desire to endure such a thing. These are the things which jumped out at me on a purely surface level. I will be setting aside the fact that this film sacrifices characterization in favour of endless up-skirt shots. I will not be discussing how zingy one-liners are put to such strenuous work that they delve the film into the territory of an episodic video game. I will be trying, via venting my spleen, to understand how a film can hate women so much.

1) “Some of them want to be abused.”

On March 31st, Warner Brothers released the first six minutes of Sucker Punch online. You can watch it here. This footage introduces us to Emily Browning’s Babydoll (real name never given) and her troubled home life. Her mother dies, her step-father is abusive, and in an attempt to fight him off and save her little sister from guaranteed sexual abuse, Babydoll accidentally kills her sibling and is trundled off to the loony bin. In true Snyder fashion, the entire episode - intended to give the central character and main storyline some context - pulses in and out of slow motion and is set to a throbbing industrial soundtrack. The song itself is a cover version of the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams” sung by Browning herself. She also covers the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” turning this film almost into a musical, although it is not the character who is singing, rather the performer. The line between the two is tenuous at best though, and brings up one of the more uncomfortable moments I’ve ever had in a movie theatre. As her step-father drunkenly advances on her, forcing his way into her bedroom after having ripped her blouse in a struggle to be kept out, Browning’s voice sings out “Some of them want to be abused.” The effect is chilling and sickening, implying that Babydoll - the victim - is an active and willing participant in this attack; in fact, it goes so far as to suggest that she initiated it, desiring the uncontrolled invasion from her previously trusted guardian. Seconds (literally seconds) after Babydoll’s mother is pronounced dead, the step-father is loosening his tie and leering at the protagonist’s blond pigtails, practically salivating over the prospect of plucking a ripe cherry from the tree. This characterization is unsettling enough, but to actually imply that Babydoll invited the attack is obscene, nauseating, and deeply troubling. How dare Snyder imply that any woman under any circumstances be a party to sexual assault? I wish this was the only parallel to rape that the film presents (as though only one were acceptable), but it is not.

2) “Did you see the look in her eyes? Almost like she wanted me to do it.”

Spoiler alert: Babydoll gets lobotomized. The process of lobotomization is the insertion of a long, unendurably phallic needle into the patient’s eye, thus instantly and magically curing her of her hysteria. This process is - predictably - performed by a man (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm). At this point in the film, we have seen Babydoll lead a rebellion of the prisoners, setting fire to the hospital, stabbing an orderly, and allowing another prisoner to escape (though we see the highly fantasized versions of these events). The hospital’s solution to her wildness is to have a male specialist insert something into her body, and tame her. It is a blatant cinematic parallel to the drunk, stupid, and misogynistic spouting which too often follows an encounter with an aggressive (or even simply assertive) woman: “A good fuckin’ll settle her down.” Making matters worse (unsettlingly worse) is that Hamm’s character seems to view his actions as a necessary evil, as though if there were some other way to calm the stormy female psyche he would take that route, but welp! Gotta penetrate this woman’s body in order to teach her who is boss!

Once the procedure is completed, Hamm seems shaken that the look in Babydoll’s eyes seemed to suggest that she defiantly welcomed the procedure. Again this places the blame on the victim of the procedure, and makes the specialist almost appear as the noble, wronged party. Poor guy! Here he is, just doing his duty to restore structure and boundaries to this wayward girl (who is strapped to a chair, by the way), and she gave him a dirty look! She invited him to penetrate her body! She wanted it to happen! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! Does it really bear explaining that women do not want things forced inside their bodies? Apparently it does. This is unacceptable. This is ridiculous. This is only number two on the list of problems I have with this movie.

3) “You’re not the same!”

This point piggybacks on the previous scenario. Following her lobotomy, Babydoll is led to a secluded room where the head orderly apparently does terrible things to the newly comatose patients. He seems to particularly relish his upcoming encounter with Babydoll after she stabbed him in the shoulder with a kitchen knife. He has his thugs put her in a chair and leave them alone in the room, where he utters a few preliminary remarks, and then kisses Babydoll. He recoils in tears, declaring that she is no longer as she was, an unbelievably obvious remark as she’s just had her frontal lobe violated by needle and hammer. Carrying on with the rape allegory, the victim is again blamed. Post-violation, her behaviour has changed; she’s become withdrawn, emotionless, “cold.” She has lost the fire and energy that made her an individual and forced her to retreat from outside stimulus. We learn that the head orderly orchestrated Babydoll’s lobotomy by forging paperwork; an act of retribution for the aforementioned kitchen knife attack. Are we meant to feel for him? At best, this scene is unclear in its intentions. At worst, it is a clumsy attempt at generating sympathy for a rapist. The majority of the audience squirmed in their seats, and with good reason.

4) “Everyone here does a dance.”

The majority of the film does not occur in the “real world.” In an Inception-like motif, many layers of reality exist in the world of Sucker Punch. The “real world” is the one in which Babydoll is attacked by her step-father, put in the asylum, and eventually lobotomized (she never speaks in this world). The second layer of reality, where we spend the bulk of our time, takes place in a Cabaret-esque cat house in which Babydoll and her cohorts are dancers/prostitutes. Here they plan their escape via a set of tasks which require them to obtain four items of questionable importance. The scheme requires Babydoll to distract the men in power while her cadre of unimaginably hot inmates steal the necessary items. Babydoll apparently has a talent for dance, (described as “raw,” and a series of “gyrating and moaning”) though we the audience never see more than a few seconds of awkward swaying because whenever Babydoll begins to dance, she is transported into the third level of reality - the one with all the guns, monsters, and cleavage.

Her dancing literally puts men in trances, allowing a lighter to be stolen from a breast pocket, or a map from a nearby office. There is no question that Babydoll’s dancing is sexually charged. She is immediately recognized as a commodity for the club, and set up to perform for the mayor, and a mysterious character called “The High Roller.” Since power on the third level is represented by weaponry and fighting skills, and since Babydoll’s sexuality is the gateway to that power, Snyder equivocates the two; combat and sex, both as representations of female empowerment. I made this point in the pre-review, but this is an image of male power, ham-fistedly applied to female characters, and it doesn’t necessarily fit. There is no question that singlehandedly vanquishing three giant samurai monsters (one with a gatling gun. Since when do samurai have gatling guns?) makes you a badass, but does it make you powerful? And if the access point to that skill set is an exploitative sexual display, is it worth it?

As I entered the theatre, pre-show music was playing. The two songs which played back-to-back before the film began were Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch,” and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” (aka the “Rick Roll” video). This mash-up of the myriad roles of women, and the deliberate upsetting of expectations can’t have been intentional, but it was certainly rattling given what I was about to see. Film is a painstakingly exact medium, which is why a movie suffers when a director settles for less than perfection. Zack Snyder takes great care with his visuals, and put a great deal of effort into the training of his cast, so I refuse to believe that he didn’t know what he was doing. This is upsetting and frustrating because this film holds a lot of power. The pack of 13 year old boys who were sitting behind me in the theatre were held captive by the action sequences, snickered, threw popcorn, and made sexually charged remarks during the dialogue, and exited the theatre before the credits rolled. Even if there were a redeeming message to be heard, they weren’t interested. They will buy this film when it comes out on DVD. They will watch it again and again, and they will come to believe that women are only powerful if they are physically strong, or sexually available. This is incredibly dangerous, especially at a time when carefully considered opinions seem to be becoming rarer and rarer, and knee-jerk reactions based on shaky principals are given heed. Giving money to a project like Sucker Punch only ensures that more films of its ilk will be made, and that is not okay. Snyder stated gleefully that he tried not to intellectualize his film “too hard.” Well, he should have. This film is deeply offensive. Don’t go see it.

Andrew Root is a teacher living in England. He tried to keep this review on a professional level. To see what he really thinks of Zack Snyder, click here.

Elizabeth Taylor, In Memoriam: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1966)

MAGGIE THE CAT IS ALIVE!

by Garland Grey

At the start of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) and Brick (Paul Newman) are staying at the estate of Brick’s parents, Big Daddy (Burl Ives) and Big Mama (Dame Judith Anderson). Brick’s older brother Gooper, his wife Mae, and all of their children are staying in the same house. Everyone is gathered for news about Big Daddy’s health and to fight for their own piece of the estate.

In the first scene Brick, alcoholic, ex-football player, former sport announcer, rakish failure, is jumping hurdles at night at the local stadium and breaks his leg. The next day, while the whole family waits for Big Daddy to get back from the clinic, Maggie follows Brick around their bedroom, coming on to him, being rejected, and trying to convince Brick to fight for a share of his father’s estate. Maggie has agreed to an arrangement, an agreement, a deal, that involves leaving Brick alone and not trying to have sex with him. Newman is very good at drinking and being sarcastic in this scene, but Taylor’s part is so much larger. Maggie tries everything she can think of to engage him. She tells him that she loves him, she needs him, that if she thought she’d never have sex with him again she’d take a knife and stick it into her own heart, gives him a very distinct “When I come back from the airport we’re going to make a baby” look through the screen door and then leaves.

Mae and Gooper’s clan arrives at the airport with instruments and a bland repertoire of loud, annoying music. Maggie shows up in a convertible and they all snipe at each other in a polite, Southern way that reveals information about the characters and moves the plot forward. When the plane lands Big Mama announces Big Daddy is going to live and only has a spastic colon. Big Daddy rides home with Maggie and starts creeping on her. Maggie looks embarrassed.

Back at the house, Maggie tries to convince Brick to leave the room, to come to his father’s birthday party, to make any effort at all. When he has an outburst, she takes that as her cue to start locking doors and putting the moves on him. “Don’t make a fool of yourself, Maggie.” Brick says as Maggie crosses the room to close and lock the doors to the balcony. She pauses in front of the sheer white curtains, and speaks over her shoulder. “I don’t mind making a fool of myself over you.” “Well I mind.” He says, walking across the room to open the other door. “I feel embarrassed for you.” “Feel embarrassed!” She shouts, crossing to him. “But I can’t live on this way!” “Now you agreed to accept that condition!” “I know I did but I can’t! I just can’t!” she says, embracing him. He tells her to let go, retreats into the bathroom, and then smells the hell out of a negligee she has hanging on the door. 

Big Mama barges into Brick and Maggie’s room asking why doors are locked, starts interrogating Maggie about Brick’s drinking and blaming her for her marital problems. At one point she pats the bed with her hand and basically calls Maggie a bad wife for withholding sex. You know, because that is such an accurate portrayal of how things are shaking out, with Liz dropping sex bombs like Tom Jones and Paul’s shields still at full capacity, that assessment seems fair. Now is a good time to mention that Brick started drinking after his very, very close “friend” Skipper committed suicide. Skipper and Brick were a great team, and Maggie was so jealous of the time they spent together that she tried to seduce Skipper to cut him out of the picture. Which explains why all Brick wants to do is be left alone to drink and mourn his poor dead boyfriend. For years I assumed that this was made explicit in the movie, but it was cut out because of the Hays Code. But there is a moment, when Brick is on the floor and his father is hulking over him and he’s shouting about Big Daddy dragging Skipper’s name through the mud, that you just know. Without knowing this Brick’s long speeches about lies and mendacity don’t make sense. He can’t tell his father why he drinks because it just simply isn’t an option. You get married, you have children, and you work until you are dead.

Of course, just because Brick loved Skipper doesn’t mean he also doesn’t love Maggie. There is a wonderful scene where Maggie is sitting patiently at the birthday table, and Mae is chattering on and on about her children. Maggie is disco smiling her way through the whole thing and you can tell she just wants to pick up an aluminum folding chair and just start smashing shit, but she doesn’t because she is pure stealth. She sits there. Listening to it. Until Mae makes an oblique reference to Big Daddy’s mortality and having grandchildren to “take over” and Maggie strikes. “Why that’s no way to talk.” Maggie says, her voice faux shocked and cotton candy sweet, as if she is actually shocked she’s having this conversation right now but is willing to be patient with Mae. “What way?” Mae asks, rightfully frightened. “Take over.” Maggie says. “Well I just meant-” “When we all know Big Daddy’s going to live to be at least a hundred.” Maggie says, glancing quickly at Big Daddy and then sitting back with a look on her face like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. This is why Brick fell in love with Maggie. Because she is not to be fucked with. 

When she gets back to the room Brick is packing to leave, having found out from the doctor Big Daddy is going to die. When Maggie finds out, she drops the sultry, seductive angle and starts scheming. “They got a plan baby.” She says, pacing the room. Making calculations. She wants Brick to love her. She wants to protect both their interests. And she needs to tell him how Skipper died. When she tries to tell him and he invites the entire family up to their room to stop her. She starts getting loud. Brick swings at her with his crutch, falls, there is an appearance by one of the children - who were my least favorite part of the movie - and the family members start trickling in. Most of the rest of the film is Maggie using her knowledge that Big Daddy is going to die to align herself with Big Mama and Brick and Big Daddy working their shit out and making peace with his impending death while talking about what life means. I never understood why Brick seems so eager to go back to Maggie at the end of the movie, until I watched it after Elizabeth Taylor passed away last week. Maggie is a survivor, a conniver, a schemer, and that is what Brick loves about her. They belong together because they understand each other. When he finally realizes he has to protect his interests he finds Maggie’s already set everything up and he loves her for it. He loves her exactly as she is. 

The last scene I’d like to discuss is a scene that takes place upstairs in Brick and Maggie’s room. Big Mama is carrying a large birthday cake covered with lit candles, trying to stop Brick and Big Daddy from fighting by having him blow out his candles. Big Daddy starts telling his wife what he thinks of her, as her face slowly collapses and becomes vacant. He commands her to blow out the candles. She does not move. The camera holds just their two faces, him angry and her retreating into sadness. The camera shifts to just outside the bedroom door, as he stands over her and she is seated. “Oh Big Daddy.” She starts, weak and weary and defeated. “In all these years you never believed I loved you.” She does not look at him.. She stands and slowly walks out the door, still carrying the cake. “And i did. I did, so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate. And your hardness.” Big Mama, like everyone in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, loves someone without being loved in return. And even though most of the characters learn to love and be loved by the end of the movie, the sight of her carrying that cake through the doorway, with the candles briefly illuminating her face as it slides into darkness, will always be my favorite part of any viewing.

Garland Grey is a writer from Texas. He is a contributor to Tiger Beatdown and tumbls here.

Elizabeth Taylor, In Memoriam: A Place in the Sun (1951)

DO I MAKE YOU NERVOUS?

by Erika Schmidt

“She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud.… She was unquestionably gorgeous … She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much….”

                                          - Richard Burton, on Elizabeth Taylor in 1952

The thing about Elizabeth Taylor in A Place In The Sun is that she is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. She is so beautiful it makes you sad, so lovely you want to look at her forever, so dangerously gorgeous that she begins to represent not just physical charm but all the good things in life that people who don’t look like that probably won’t ever have.

And so, with this aching beauty, Taylor is perfectly cast as Angela Vickers. Of course every dream and hope George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) has for his bright American future resides in her violet eyes. It is not really relevant to comment on whether her beauty distracts us from accurately judging her acting in this film – it’s the rare occasion in which the “too bloody much” quality is the character, and that very distraction is essential to our understanding of George and his actions. We are complicit, bewitched right along with him.

Somehow, Angela is not irritating in her perfection. Even when she probably should seem like a spoiled little rich girl –when she chirps, “It’s ME, Mama!” into the phone to George’s concerned and rigid mother; or when she responds to George asking her why she invited him to a party with, “Because of my reasons” – she doesn’t. There is a persistent breathless innocence about her that actually makes her more interesting and sympathetic instead of less. And there is a darkness in her somewhere that draws her to George. Angela’s certainty about her love for George is tragic in itself; she is a very young woman making ridiculously absolute statements about life and love when we see all along she’s headed for trauma and grief. Only a child could, with so little information, believe as steadfastly as she does.

This innocence exists alongside an intense sexuality that is evident in the still teenage Angela (and Elizabeth). This is ultimate chemistry onscreen, and it’s irresistible. In the famous “Tell Mama all” scene, director George Stevens shoots Taylor from over Clift’s shoulder, so close that at times most of her face is obscured. You can’t help but be a little preoccupied by her mouth and how it moves when she talks – even her speech is different, special, “lavish.” How does one make lines like, “You’ll be my pickup,” and, “Tell Mama; tell Mama all” this exciting? I ask you.

Of course Shelley Winters’ poor Alice Tripp doesn’t stand a chance. Watching the film, an understanding of George’s position comes all too naturally. Alice is the painfully normal girl, and Angela is the normal girl’s nightmare. George and Alice’s courtship is characterized by the kind of painfully awkward adolescent interactions we all try to forget once we grow out of them – George is consistently the ashamed pursuer, with Alice reluctantly taking part in increasingly intimate behavior. Once Angela turns up on the scene, things turn exciting and fast. Instead of necking in the back of his car with Alice, he’s swaying cheek to cheek with Angela in a sea of balloons and tinsel. Instead of hiding from the cops and from “fierce” landladies, he’s being greeted by the adoring adults in Angela’s life. Angela is in the driver’s seat – literally. Angela is above board, perfect, vivacious, popular, clean. Alice is shameful, dull, a brick.

Poor George.

In the film’s final scene, as he awaits his execution, George tells the priest that, still, he truly doesn’t know if he is guilty or not. The priest asks him to recall the moment the boat tipped over and he and Alice hit the water. That was the moment he could either save Alice or not save Alice. Who was he thinking of at that instant? Alice? Or “the other girl”? George doesn’t reply, but the answer is obvious. Angela, Angela, Angela.

Erika Schmidt asked you out because of her reasons. She lives in Chicago and can currently be seen here.

Elizabeth Taylor, In Memoriam: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

by Sarah Malone

You may have known couples like George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor). You may have gotten similar invitations, unwisely offered, imprudently accepted—a few drinks after the party. Come over; we’d love to have you. It’s no imposition. We’re happy to have guests. You only met the couple tonight. You’re new in town; you seize the invitation like it’s a life preserver. And one of you, you or your partner, wouldn’t mind getting to know one-half of the other couple better.

For a while the couple seem to trust and confide in you more than in each other. In fact, it takes you a few drinks to stop feeling like their awkward, unwitting audience—a few drinks, a few jokes, mutually appreciated barbs.

The second act of the evening. The couples split up; the halves pair off. You’re trading stories with a near stranger—painful, intimate stories, the inadequacies you spend your sober daylight hours pretending not to be affected by and secretly nourishing and being sustained by, and that, somehow, now, you want to release into the still darkness under the thick trees of the town’s fading summer. In the wee small whiskey-warmed hours, insults, secrets and rants seem honest, and your newfound bond with this insulting, difficult stranger seems more real and profound for its instantaneousness.

And you feel superior the entire time. These middle-aged sad sacks clearly see themselves and each other as failures. That won’t befall you.

You even become…. intimate.

Then one of them—George or Martha—turns his or her fire on you, betraying your confidence, and you begin to realize your naiveté. George and Martha have years of history. If they haven’t split up yet, are they really going to split up for you? They don’t need you or your partner as soul mates. They need you for a game that long precedes you. They know how to play you. You thought you’d happened into a play about an alcoholic marriage, a couple that hates each other. You thought you might find some kind of escape with one of them. But George and Martha move expertly between hate and love, from one line to the next. Both hate and love bring pain, both bring solace; both are only aspects of their terrible intimacy. They have muddled out a way to survive or at least to continue. Would you—will you—do as well?

* * *

Elizabeth Taylor gets top billing in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, ahead of Richard Burton. With its release only a few years after their affair on the set of Cleopatra, it may have been difficult from the first not to regard it as being about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; as a stormy through-the-looking-glass portrayal of the tabloid versions of them, demonstrating some mismatch of proper, middle-class America and the willfulness, cocktail party wit, indulgence, and failure expected of Hollywood stars (George and Martha, the farthest things from stars, argue about a picture they have trouble remembering).

Forty-five years may have dulled Who’s Afraid’s salacious luster, but knowing about the notoriety, along with its acclaim, that the stage production had already achieved for its language and sexual frankness, plus the salaries Taylor and Burton commanded and the negotiations required for the film to be released with a Motion Picture Association recommendation, one might approach it expecting something perhaps cripplingly serious about being a Big Thing—until the film rolls and we follow Taylor and Burton, walking home into the small town night (the exterior scenes were filmed at and around Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts) in the way that couples walk when drunk and either of the pair might at any moment need to be the support or supported.

Re-watching the film, I’m astonished by the line-by-line shifts in power from Taylor to Burton and back, condemnations that turn into flirtation, the obsessions shading every comment, at times mordantly, at times elusively.

Taylor gained thirty pounds for a role envisioned for an actress twenty years her senior. Her voice is brassy, smoke-brittled, alternately angry, whiny, and derisive, her full mouth rarely at rest and often in close-up, sneering, smoking, yelling, laughing, crying.

Her celebrity would endure undiminished, but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is Taylor at the peak of her box office draw.

* * *

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won five Oscars, with eight further Oscar nominations and numerous other awards, but, watching it, it’s the playwright’s toolkit I’m aware of, the tonal shifts of extended real-time scenes. Just when you think George or Martha really want to hurt each other, one of them laughs, appreciating the other’s wit—briefly, before insults fly again. No one is safe. She is the obviously dangerous one, but I kept waiting for him to be really scary. He is too accommodating for too long; and, sure enough, he harbors potentially killing rage.

“Violence!” cheers the young professor’s wife, drunkenly clapping.

The film doesn’t unfold in strict real-time—it begins before last call at the bar they detour to about an hour in, and the last scene is at first light, after only two hours of screen-time—but it feels close to real-time, much more so than most scripts originally written for the screen. Watching it, I never had the sense of losing myself in movie-time, jumping through months and years, only touching ground as needed. Instead, George and Martha broke out of the screen and demanded, persuaded, cajoled, and mesmerized me into watching them unravel, and we arrived at first light together.

Screenwriting instructors advise getting into scenes as late as possible, only when something crucial is about to happen or be said. In fiction, characters entering and exiting cars and rooms quickly leads to a sense that the writer has no more idea where things are headed than we do, or doesn’t trust us to follow. In Who’s Afraid, George and Martha enter and leave rooms so distinctively (usually drink in hand), that it’s vital we stay with them. While their agony is driven by overarching facts—inability to have children, George’s (relative) career failure—they live it with a creeping ugliness moment-by-moment, and moment-by-moment is how we appreciate it.

We get fifteen minutes of them before the younger couple enters, enough time to learn everything and nothing: nothing about career failure and infertility, but all we need to understand about their pattern of tearing each other down and smiling at the last minute. I’m reminded of an anecdote about Stalin saying that if you plucked a chicken of all its feathers, it would cower at your feet instead of running away. George and Martha each play at dictator.

I wonder at their symbiosis: is it really only their misfortunes that make them snipe? Can you picture them content? Lives are of a piece. If their way of being in the world is not what defeated them, it is at least an adaptation to defeat.

We leave them at dawn. They’re tender, at rest. He touches her shoulder hesitatingly. Is it a new point in their contest, or one that they’ve arrived at before, and will again? The script doesn’t tell us, nor, I think, does it support one conclusion over the other. George and Martha seem simultaneously sure and unable to help themselves.

Sarah Malone writes fiction, and tumbls here.

Good Will Hunting (1997)

WHO WE CHOOSE TO BE.

by Chris Cantoni

Will Hunting is smarter than me. His intellect is staggering. And yet he is uncomfortably relatable. When I first saw Good Will Hunting I was 16 or 17, only a few years younger than the main character and, at the time, he was everything we could hope to be. He wasn’t just smart but strong. Loyal to his friends and a “local boy,” something that every one of us, no matter where we come from, hopes to be. Watching it now, some twelve years later, I can finally see Will for who he is. Like me then, like any male in his early twenties, good Will Hunting is trying to find himself, a lost little boy in an ever expanding world.

We are all Will, even if we don’t care to admit it too often. We are wandering blindly in an effort to grasp what great purpose might lead us forward into becoming men, husbands, fathers, mentors, or in our deepest dreams, heroes. We, cocky in an effort to hide our uncertainty, waiting for someone to pull us aside and whisper in our ear, “you passed, you’re a man now.”

Sometimes my thoughts drift to when someone will tell me I am a man. I wonder if Will Hunting ever had such thoughts.

We try to protect our hearts the best we can. We close ourselves off with a wall of steel, and if we can’t manage steel, iron will do. Once our fathers are found to be fallible, we have no choice but to protect ourselves from future disappointment. We construct our mechanisms of defense.

For example Will, despite demonstratively caring about his own friends, rarely, if ever, allows anyone to care about him. For his twenty plus years on this earth, he has been aloof, the frenzy of his kinetic brain energy walled off in a high castle built up long ago. Allowing someone to love you means allowing them to hurt you, which is why he so fiercely confronts Skylar when she finally tells him she loves him. All the lies he had told her, the secrets he had kept, they are all useless at that point. She is inside the castle. And letting someone into that castle means they will find the dark dungeons of your past and the many kinks in your walls, swinging a sledgehammer all the while.

Each male in Good Will Hunting is a different archetype. Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skaarsgard) is ambition, too obsessed with furthering his field to attend his friend’s funeral. He is loyal to the next step, not anyone taking it with him. Sean MacGuire (Robin Williams) is patience and wisdom, though in many ways has a decided lack of ambition. He gave up his friends and his career for his wife, and after she died he simply stopped moving forward at all. But he has a kindness and gentleness that allows him to connect with others. Chuckie, Will’s best friend, is masculinity, loyalty, but also ignorance. He originally hit on Skylar, but could never be as good to her as Will. And then there is Will himself. Will is the amalgam of them all, or at least he is trying to be. He is a template for our own selves. And sure, most of us will never be as smart as Will, but he, like us, is caught up trying to determine the man he will become.

Even the way the men relate to each other carries so much weight through the film. Sean is the only therapist who “breaks through” to Will, willing to be honest and frank about being poor in South Boston. Surely a man who worked his way up through poverty to devote his life to teaching at Bunker Hill Community College is someone open and willing to relate to the only side of the tracks he ever felt comfortable on.

Or perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie, when Will and his friends seek out a Harvard bar and Will cruelly but justifiably dresses down a Harvard grad student, not in any attempt to show off, but to protect his friend. We are always in competition, conscious or not, alpha males are just louder about it.

Will doesn’t want to alienate his friends with his intelligence because they are the only loyalty he’s ever known. He is the complete opposite of Professor Lambeau, whose main concern with Will isn’t being his friend but pushing him into unearthing his talent and find success. Lambeau wants to be a father to the fatherless boy and take some credit for his brilliance.

I’ve been experiencing a certain amount of synchronicity in my life lately. At the moment I’m reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs. That great book, combined with this film which is in so many ways about growing up, have me thinking about the responsibility concept. And then recently This Recording featured an interesting essay (on being a woman in a boys club) that included this particularly striking passage: “All I ever witness is straight men showing me how miserable they are with the expectations placed on them as men, how much they hate trying to live up to this impossible standard and how unhappy they still are if they manage to succeed.”

I don’t know why the passage strikes me so, but it does. Men on the whole and white men specifically have never had a rough time in our society. We have no right to be miserable, but here we are, wanting to be good men and having no idea what the hell that means. Will Hunting is smart and tough and can easily eviscerate any intellectual opponent, but he doesn’t know the first thing about how to act like a man, and Sean says as much: about having your best friend die in your arms, about loving a woman, about the things that really matter.

We are hunting, the film tells us from the start. We are hunting for the Good Will, yearning for who he should be, the deep down fire of certainty and strength. No one is taught how to be a good father, to be a good husband. Without instruction, can we hope to be the right amount of gentle mixed with the right amount of stern?

We look inside ourselves for courage, loyalty, conviction, for a demand to stand fast against a world that is weighted against each one of us. I confess, reader, I do not know how to reach such great heights. It is some sort of impossible standard. GK Chesterton once wrote “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Maybe manhood is what he meant. We are drawn to Good Will Hunting because that troubled man in the film, inside us all, has someone to point the way. But no one really knows what the hell they’re doing. No man, no woman, no grandfather or grandmother or cocky teenager. We’re all just fumbling around trying to find that elusive thing to hold onto, when the only things we have are each other.

We can’t choose our parents. We can’t choose how smart we are or what we look like. They are, as Sean puts it in Good Will Hunting’s other well-known scene, “not your fault.” But we do get to choose the people we love and more importantly how we love them. We make mistakes and we try again and we try to repair the damage we’ve done. We take the things we’ve been given and we run with them. Will has to take advantage of his intellect. Not to do so, to forgo his talents, is to insult and dishonor the bricklayer and the construction worker and the friends he will leave behind. You don’t push yourself because it’s easy, but because it’s right. You don’t chase the girl to “not be miserable,” you chase her because you love her. You act like a man long enough, maybe eventually you become one.

Chris Cantoni is a writer living in Los Angeles.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

SING YOUR LIFE.

by Brianna Ashby

Oh, love. The story always begins the same way; you meet someone and suddenly there are glittery explosions in the sky, butterflies everywhere, and string quartets around every corner. You see only light and color, vibrating and rosy as if you had stared into the rising sun just a moment too long. You waltz instead of walk, gliding through the streets hand in hand following the lilting melody of the cooing birds overhead. Then, a few weeks, or months, or years later, you wake up expecting blue skies only to find that itʼs raining. It has to rain some time. As you stare blankly out into the grey you notice the cadence of the drops splattering against the glass; the rain is singing the blues, your blues. In every relationship all of the ups and downs have a rhythm, and every moment, no matter how mundane, has its own soundtrack.

Few movies have captured the music of ordinary life quite like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  Under the direction of legendary composer Michel Legrand (uncle of Beach House chanteuse Victoria Legrand), Jacques Demyʼs cinematic operetta has a natural quality that escapes the majority of musicals. (Personally, I generally find musicals distasteful. They are kitschy, saccharine, ostentatious, and overwrought - breaking into song and heavily choreographed dance numbers to emphasize a major plot point is not only completely unnecessary, itʼs awful. I digress.) With the entire film set to music and all of the dialogue sung (or lip synched, really) by the actors,the grace of the simple love story could have been lost completely, but Demyʼs vision is clear and Legrandʼs compositions pristine; darling and sweeping and perfect. This marriage of thoughtful composition, with particular attention paid to color, and the virtuosity of the score, make the dialogue itself essentially irrelevant to the telling of the charming yet poignant tale of garcon meets fille.

Cherbourg, France, 1964. Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), an impossibly adorable gas station attendanthas won the heart of Geneviéve (Catherine Deneuve), an impossibly gorgeous shop girl peddling umbrellas at her motherʼs store. They are young, impetuous, possibly foolish, and hopelessly (but secretly) in love, determined to be married. Naturally, when Geneviéveʼs mother gets wind of their plans, sheʼs disapproving. You know the rest. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall head over heels. Boy is drafted into the war in Algeria. Boy and girl consummate their relationship before boy departs. Girl becomes pregnant. Girl is pushed into marrying a wealthy, handsome, terribly earnest diamond dealer. Boy returns and is heartbroken to find that girl has given up. Boy bucks up and marries his departed auntʼs sweet and steadfast caregiver. Chance brings them together one last time. So much is left unsaid. Fin.

While the particulars of the story are particular to this story, the basic ingredients have served as the foundation for countless romantic comedies, dramas, dramadies, and musicals that have fallen flat. The skeleton of a love story cannot a movie make; the heartbreaking stuff, the real stuff lies in the details. The way that two people look at each other will always mean infinitely more than anything they say to one another, no matter how touching or eloquent. Subtlety is not lost on all filmmakers, and the sheer number of these “candid” moments between characters that have been committed to celluloid over the years has yielded a cache of visual clichés that are used to represent love, lust, longing and all of the feelings in between. Intentionally keeping the dialogue light and avoiding these tired visual metaphors allows Demy to draw our attention elsewhere, to new metaphors, to the story behind the story.

The film opens at Aubinʼs garage, Guyʼs place of employ. Red neon signs glow warmly in thenight, and the garage is bright, the cars shiny, and the mood jovial. Both the walls of the locker room and Guy himself are resplendent in teal, the azure collar of his shirt peeking out beneath a gaily patterned sweater. He hops onto a bright yellow bicycle and rides off to meet Geneviéve, who bounds out of her motherʼs shop in a matching bright yellow cardigan. These opening scenes, saturated in brilliant color, are a dazzling introduction into Demyʼs Cherbourg, where hue and tone are the storytellers.

When we next see the pair they are on their way to see Carmen, and Geneviéve is stunning in a coral shift and matching coat, and Guy in a matching shirt beneath his smart pinstriped suit. They are the picture of youth and vibrancy looking almost candy-coated with their matching clothes and bicycles, and as their story unfolds before us, they are peacock blue and blushing pink, bold and beautiful young love. What Demy hinted at with wardrobe he shouted with the sets. Guy parks his bicycle against an apple green wall that leads to the apartment that he shares with his aunt, Madame Emeryʼs shop is full of the warm colorful plumage of the umbrellas she is peddling, and the apartment that she and Geneviéve share is swathed in luscious patterned wallpapers and dotted with vases of kaleidoscopic flowers and waxen piles of fresh fruits and vegetables. Accentuated by Legrandʼs restrained but hopelessly romantic compositions, these vignettes pop with an unnatural brightness that can only be perceived by the blissfully in love.

As the story progresses, the music and visuals follow suit, expressing the nuances of the ever changing relationship between the lovers. When Guy is called into duty, the train station that serves as the site of his departure is colorless; grey and cold and ruthless. Standing on the dingy train platform, Geneviéve clings to her robinʼs egg blue scarf, the only bit of color in the dreadful landscape. Desperately grasping that scarf as Guy moves further and further away, she is really clinging to him, the father of her child, to their love, to the life they dreamt of leading as they walked together nights by the pier.

In his absence, Geneviéve changes considerably. Her golden bouffant and jaunty bows are replaced by a more modest style, and her clothes blend in with the fabrics and colors of the apartment as she begins to disappear little by little, settling into grief and letting go of the bright future she and Guy once shared. Absence does strange things to people, even the most resilient. After staring at the same photo of Guy day after day, he becomes static, just a moment frozen in time. She begins to forget what he really looks like and who he really is, and with her burgeoning belly growing larger by the day, Geneviéve realizes that a photograph cannot fill the void. With a heavy heart, she knows she must move on, and finally gives in to diamond dealer Roland Cassardʼs (Marc Michel) marriage proposal.

With her fate decided, Geneviéve completes her transformation from radiant teenager to something of a mannequin, gorgeous as ever, but cold and absent. At their wedding ceremony the music is not joyous, but somber and slightly ominous, a funeral dirge for a great love. Having been injured and discharged early, Guy returns to Cherbourg only to find the umbrella shop shuttered, and the love of his life gone, raising his child with another man as her husband. Guy returns to work at Aubinʼs garage,the warm glow of the red neon replaced by a harsh, sterile light, and his signature teal collar and loud sweater discarded in favor of a plain white shirt and drab brown suit.

They are lost without each other.

Guy is at rock bottom, haggard, disinterested, and angry, drinking and sleeping with prostitutes. It is only after the death of his dear Aunt Elise that he sees a way to climb out of his hell: her longtime caretaker, Madeline. While she is not as beautiful or charming or bubbly as Geneviéve, Madeline is loyal, the one thing Geneviéve was not. When we first see them together as a couple they are sitting outside a café, she in a delicious orange suit, and he in a pink shirt, his uniform of despair gone by the wayside. The color returns. Guy finds the strength to move on and start a new life, a life that he chose not a life that happened to him.

Years later when Guy and Geneviéve meet again, she is still aching, trapped in her life of luxury, pining for what was. She never could let go and forgive herself for her weakness the way that Guy had forgiven her a lifetime before. Geneviéve doomed herself to a life of grey because, as we often fail to realize, sometimes the symphony is in letting go.

Brianna Ashby may be a terrible singer but she knows a thing or two about the color wheel.

Sucker Punch (2011): A pre-review

by Andrew Root

I have not seen this film. It hasn’t been released yet. Therefore, many of the following statements will not hold water. That being said… 

How can this film not be sexist? I don’t claim to be an expert in feminist theory, but I have taken a few courses on the subject, and I have to say that I have my doubts about Sucker Punch.

The plot (as near as I can piece together) is an amped up twist of the Alice in Wonderland formula, in which the protagonists’ imagination becomes literalized as a way of coping with trying circumstances. Emily Browning’s Babydoll has been abused (sexually, as that flying shirt button hints at in the trailer) and locked away unjustly. She and her fellow inmates (lookers, all) use the fantastic powers of their brains to complete a quest which will allow them to escape from their asylum-prison. It’s equal parts Pan’s Labyrinth and Lewis Carroll fever dream.

The press junket is quick to point out the strength of the fierce fighting female quintet, both inner and outer, but I can’t ignore the fact that these women (women? girls?) are the product of a man’s imagination. If it wasn’t clear from the posters and trailers which tout this film as the first original work from Zack Snyder, director of 300 and Watchmen, the girl’s costumes are put together in a way that touches on the mainstays of male fantasies; the school girl, the medieval warrior woman, the saucy mechanic, the nurse (albeit a black leather clad nurse), the sexy soldier. My pulse races just writing this down. When you take into account the precise way that Snyder films his movies, you can’t help but notice that he’s dressed up these young women exactly how he wants them, and that’s kind of creepy. 

Hollywood has always been forgiving of directors exorcising their sexual demons on screen. Think of Tarantino’s famous foot fetish; in any other context, that would be entirely disturbing and creepy, but for some reason, it’s perfectly alright to let this fast-talking lunatic point a camera at a pair of women’s feet (an exercise he had completed in every film he’s shot). He gets off on it, but for some reason it’s ok. We are watching the masturbatory fantasy of a 48 year old man, and we’re all just sort of ok with it. Why?

No one has made the effort to investigate the skeletons in Snyder’s sexual closet, but I’d be willing to bet that there’s a few copies of Through the Looking Glass and Sailor Moon in there. I mean, just look at this production shot, and tell me that it’s about female empowerment:

That’s Emily Browning as Babydoll (that name… UGH) in her corset, high heels, and thigh-high fishnets, her waist cinched, her make-up heavy, and her bleach blond hair pulled into pubescent pigtails, placed in the spotlight as she looks downwards in what can be construed as shame or discomfort. And this is in her fantasy world. What is Snyder trying to say? 

I read an interview in which the director said that he “tried to avoid intellectualizing the film too much” while he was making it. Does this mean that his portrayal of the girls was just a huge blind spot? Did it not occur to him that having five highly sexualized young women acting out very male ideals of power (shootin’ guns and kickin’ stuff), and taking advice from a character named “Wiseman” might not be as empowering as he intended? Or worse, what if he had no intentions at all and was acting purely on instinct? Doesn’t that speak to a wider problem of latent societal sexism? 

I’d be foolish if I thought that Hollywood made female empowerment movies every day (or every year, for that matter - see if you can name 5 female directors. GO!), but the upsetting part is that these uber-male fantasies which define female empowerment by male standards are being marketed as straight-up girl power films. Time will tell, because like I said, I haven’t seen the film yet. I mean, I’m going to see the film because I want to be proved wrong. I want to see if this movie is able to deliver a solid story with an uplifting message about defying those things which constrain us, but I can’t say that I have high hopes for gender equality. 

I’ll leave you with two thoughts. The first is that if the girl with the short, spiky hair turns out to be a lesbian, I will pitch a goddamn fit. 

The second is a joke by comedian Bill Bailey: 

Three women walk into a bar. The first woman goes up to the bartender and says “Hooray! We’ve colonized a male-dominated joke format!” The second woman says “Ooo, look at the arse on that one! Get the pints in!” because she’s a 90’s woman; aggressive and highly politicized. The third woman says “I’ll have a campari and soda. Look at my big tits!” And the first woman says “We shall never escape the fact that it’s a bloke telling this joke.”

Andrew Root is a writer and teacher living in England.  He promises to let you know what he thinks after he actually sees the film.