DEAR BROADWAY, I MISS YOU

by Kate Wood 

For as long as I can remember, my experiences of movies and the cinema have been tied up with Broadway. For as long as I can remember, I have been tied up with Broadway. 

 

My Broadway is a small independent cinema in the middle of the East Midlands in England. It is where I was taken on my first cinema trip (with a friend, when we were about five years old): The Wizard of Oz, shown on the big screen. I had no issues with them, but my friend had to leave early because of the flying monkeys. I can’t judge him—those monkeys are tough.  

I remember being eight and going to Broadway to see The Railway Children. I remember being nine and going with my Granny for lunch in the café, and eating grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. I remember thinking they were just about the best. 

Then I remember leaving it for a few years, when I thought the red velvet sofas in the bar—bald in patches, and covered with incriminating cigarette burns—were shabby and that the multiplex was much cooler. The multiplex was where everyone else went. (That small betrayal sums up those years where being different surely means the end of the world.) But after wrestling my teen identity into submission and making some friends who shared my (in hindsight, horribly saccharine) 15-year-old romantic and sentimental nature, I returned. We spent every day after school there; once we left school for college, we spent our lunch breaks there. We were dedicated, we were committed. While others idly smoked, we drank hot chocolates covered in cream and marshmallows—pretty much the height of cool, I assure you. 

The Christmas I was sixteen, my best friend and I got memberships. We endeavoured to educate ourselves in independent cinema, sighing over Sofia Coppola, musing over Wes Anderson. Surely the opening night of Marie Antoinette was one of the most exciting moments of my cinema-going life up to that point. Then, only one week after my eighteenth birthday, Broadway gave me a job. The most perfect first job for a some what lazy, film-obsessed teen: open the doors, rip the tickets, wait for the film to finish. From that point on, my memory of film would be intrinsically linked with screens and shifts, with projectionists. With the hours spent in the projection box while films play out below, the audiences unaware of your presence just behind the whirring projectors. It is connected with timing, ‘usher maths,’ as we named it: working out at what time to time to open the doors at the end. My memories are angry with henry hoovers and popcorn explosions. 

For the three years I have worked there I can date films based on who I saw them with, and when and what was going on in my life at the time. I remember which films were flops and which were surprise runaway hits. I remember useless information about run times. I remember the week of 127 Hours with seven fainters in six days. (The same week, incidentally, as The King’s Speech, for which we sold every seat in every screen: the entire house.) 

I sometimes feel that ushering is one of those jobs people see as a novelty. A toy job. Friends who come to visit at work ask to put on the staff badge, beg to be allowed to rip a ticket. Sitting alone outside the screen in chairs from IKEA, reading during the film, customers will tell you what a cushy job it is. Don’t worry, I know.  

There is still a thrill of excitement that runs through me when I sit in a sold-out cinema screen. Going to the cinema continues to be my favourite thing to do. Still waiting for the novelty to wear off, I revel in smell of popcorn, the enjoyment of a printed programme. I weigh the pros and cons of a new cinema seat, the trailers. Oh, the trailers. I would pay £6.50 to watch 90 minutes of trailers. 

The cinema is where I feel at home, waiting for the audience to arrive, listening to the pre-show chatter of 300 people filing into a packed auditorium as Frank Sinatra plays. (There was a long-lasting six month period in 2008 where the only CD in one screen was Frank Sinatra. I still can’t think of “Luck Be A Lady” without associating it with ripping tickets.) Then left alone in the theater at the end of the show; an empty cinema screen can suddenly become a very spooky place. 

There have been late-night screenings, Dario Argento double bills, Breakfast at Tiffany’s every Valentine’s Day and It’s A Wonderful Life every Christmas. There have been previews, directors, a Paul Schrader appearance, Metropolis, satellite, 3D, Vertigo at least twice, midnight Harry Potter screenings, festivals. Japanese films, Jewish films, Truffaut seasons. There was the time I got tickets for my date to see An Education, and he turned to me at the end and said, “Well, thanks anyway.” There was True Grit on Valentine’s day with my best friend, a box of popcorn each. There was Inglourious Basterds two days in a row. There was that fateful nineteenth birthday spent watching Antichrist. And there was having the screen almost entirely to myself, watching Grease on a Saturday afternoon with a pint of Coke while working and thinking about how bloody good my job was. There have been two to three cinema visits a week for three years. 

And now they’ve come to an end. I have spent a long time at Broadway trying to figure out what I like. My friends like to tell me that I never enjoy films but that’s not true. It is simply that I know what I want. I want Election, Swingers, Withnail and I, Cry-Baby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I left Broadway last Autumn to study film in Brighton. To try and educate myself properly this time. And while I went back at Christmas for a couple of shifts, and will probably always be at least honorary Broadway staff, it’s not the same. For the most part I am the customer now and I am having to get used the concept that people expect you to pay for movies. Pay for movies. To take a gamble on what you think you may enjoy and go with that hunch. Also, what do people do on a Sunday afternoon? I have worked every Sunday afternoon for what feels like forever. 

At a loss, I go to the cinema and mourn ripping tickets. 

Kate Wood studies film in Brighton, England. She tumbls here.

Contagion (2011)

AWAITING THE INEVITABLE

by Matt Moore

In your standard horror movie, there’s actually a lot of hope. You hope the main character survives. It’s a driving function of the character, regardless of their background, because we all have one thing in common: we don’t want to be dead. So whether you’re being chased by Leatherface, battling Freddy in dreams, making it through the hellish traps in Saw, or unraveling the mystery of The Ring, there’s this objective. Live through this, and you get to enjoy life.  

Even the best horror film from my frame of reference, Jaws, features a mortal enemy. (Furthermore, Jaws is a lot easier to survive; don’t go in the fucking water.) Eventually Linda’s not going to be possessed anymore, you don’t have to go chasing the Blair Witch, and Rosemary’s Baby requires a belief in the occult, or at least the spiritual.  

But Contagion? Contagion’s best feature is that not only is it plausible, not only is it cunning, cold, and calculating, but it leaves you with this reminder: The world is out to kill you—and eventually, it wins.

The obvious line of comparison for Contagion is Outbreak, but there’s a stark difference put right up front in Contagion. There is no inflated sense of drama, nor any singular organism to pin the disease on. While a central plot line of the film involves the hunt for the source of the virus, you walk away with the oh-so-comforting knowledge that this could have been anything. There are a million ways the virus could have come into existence, a million ways it could have spread, a million ways you could contract it. The payoff in discovering the source of the virus is meant to leave you with a “huh” and instead leaves you feeling like the entire world is out to get you.  

There’s also a distinct lack of sentimentalism in Contagion to put it further away from Outbreak. Not supposed to kill kids in horrifying, sad ways? Infection cluster in an elementary school! Getting attached to that main character? Of course he/she is dead, what did you think was going to happen? 

Most thrillers are meant to entertain and let you walk away satisfied that the hero saved the girl and disaster was averted. Even disaster films are meant to reinforce the value of life and why good people fight for others. Contagion is more in line with the idea of inevitability. The numbers play out that there will be deaths, and lots of them, and the unavoidable logistics of reality interfere with the “we’re saved!” aspect. 

Contagion is a thoroughly unsentimental film that still manages to make you care about the fate of its characters (re: every other Sodherbergh flick you’ve seen). Its moments of tension aren’t heightened by unrealistic reactions, nor, hyper-dramatic circumstances. When Matt Damon’s character’s daughter goes on the all-too-expected escape, it again speaks of inevitability, not the dalliances of the young. Of course she left the house. That’s what teenage girls, what people, do.  

There’s also always a nice reminder that this isn’t some extra-special event. There are an extensive series of discussions meant to show how many times in the past pandemics and epidemics have wiped out massive portions of the human race. This isn’t a new problem; it’s just big and fast. In fact, one of Contagion’s strong points is that it doesn’t overdo it on the panic aspect. It’s not immediate nor is it overnight. In fact, most people are unaware of the severity of the problem, even after it’s become a full-fledged epidemic for two weeks. Typically I’d scoff at a viewpoint like that, not because I think so much of people, but because too often filmmakers leap to make people dumber than they actually are. But the reality of a mid-western mom being unaware of the chaos enveloping the major metropolitan city that isn’t actually hers which lies six hours north isn’t just conceivable, it’s understandable. How many stories of mass death do you hear about in passing daily, and how easily do they slip through the cracks of your neural net? 

The macro approach to the problem of the virus is critical. So often a virus is considered on the micro level, and while Damon’s character among others clearly exists to give that micro viewpoint and experiences, to drive emotion and feeling out of the glass cubicle the script constructs, the macro is the point. This is happening everywhere and simultaneously and in many different ways and in many different environments and by the way you’re dead.  

The approach is very similar to Traffic in that many of the stories are both interconnected and yet the characters seem desperately alone. Damon’s Mitch Emhoff by his widowing and the world unraveling around him, Fishburne’s Cheever by the complex and difficult tightrope walk he has to do as a public figure and leader in the crisis, Winslet’s Mears by the moral weight of being the first line of contact for the sick and dying. It’s like Babel, only somehow bleaker (which says something).  

That’s what you have to respect about Contagion. There’s no bright happy adventure. People get really sick and die but before they do they get someone else really sick and they die. People aren’t inherently good or bad though some are worse than others (especially bloggers, apparently. Who whizzed in Steven’s cereal then made it a meme?). The randomness of events that leads to the spread of the contagion isn’t some shockingly unlikely scenario. It’s just something that happens like the next thing will be something that happens.  

Maybe the film’s best put into perspective by its soundtrack: The cold techno thump driving the virus from cell to cell, as you sit back and hope that the next sequence isn’t the rest of your life falling apart around you.  

The world is out to kill you and it won’t stop until it succeeds. 

Matt Moore is an NBA blogger who scribbles at CBSSports.com, NBCSports.com, and ESPN-affiliate Hardwood Paroxysm. He reminds you that when some eight-foot tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall and asks if you have paid your dues, the correct response is “Yes sir, the check is in the mail.” (HT: Jack Burton)

Can’t Hardly Wait (1998)

CLASS OR SEX? WHAT SHALL I DO?

by Michelle Said
 
My high school years were not all that special. I fell into a group of girls on the first day of school that would be my friends for the following four years. Two of those girls were my best friend for three years and then my worst enemies for one year, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here (we are still not friends). So, I was kind of stuck in a rut. I wasn’t cool, but I wasn’t a geek. I was a Quiet Girl, who was in a group of Quiet Girls, placed in the smart kid classes who tended to monitor classmates with a scowl. (I would later come to realize was a product of the chronic bitchface that was partially a result of my natural, unabashed skepticism, partially a result of bitchface genes, passed down from generations of bitchfaced Saids.)

I didn’t like most people in my high school. And yet, I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to put my mark on the school. And, most importantly, I wanted to have something on my college application that was more accomplished than, “Can recite in order every TRL #1 hit from the year 1998,” or “Has seen every episode of Daria more than five times,” or “Obscene knowledge of the Back to the Future trilogy.”

And so, bizarrely, I became editor of my high school yearbook.

 

This did not make me become loved, or recognized at all, actually. When I would interview people for the book, they would squint at me before saying, “Oh, we have Spanish together, right?” But it did allow me to become prematurely nostalgic for the ‘90s, a trait that has fully evolved into my current obsession.

When you are editor of your high school yearbook, it is, at the very least, your responsibility to include every single one of the two thousand odd people who have gone to your high school over the past school year. Every face should shine from glossy pages; every team, every club, every teacher must be featured. If you are somewhat more ambitious, you might be creative and try to distill every memory into an easily digestible form. You might condense personalities into superlatives, make sure there are enough pages at the end of the book for people to autograph, dab in a joke or two to make people laugh, but be prescient enough to make them not so obscure that you will know what they mean when you are in your middle age and can’t see your toes.

So when I rewatched Can’t Hardly Wait for this essay, the heavens opened up, I gazed up into the space above and I came upon an epiphany, which was, “Can’t Hardly Wait is better than any yearbook I could have ever made.” Maybe people who went to high school in the ’80s felt that way about John Hughes movies, or maybe that’s just the thing about Can’t Hardly Wait because everything is time capsuled so perfectly for me personally as a person who went to high school in the ‘90s. The fashions (chunky black heels, baby tees, fitted leather jackets, Seth Green’s entire wannabe boy band get-up), the music (I counted two Eve 6 songs in the first 15 minutes), the actors themselves (Jennifer Love Hewitt is the hottest girl in school, because of course she is, it’s the ‘90s).

The movie came and went pretty innocuously. Critics who couldn’t relate didn’t give it much of a second glance. It was sandwiched between a bunch of teen horror movies (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer) and updated Shakespearean classics (which was really a thing in the ‘90s: Romeo + Juliet, 10 Things I Hate About You). But it held a special place in my heart for its inclusiveness: if American Pie was for the dudes and She’s All That was for the chicks, Can’t Hardly Wait was for everybody.

Like The Breakfast Club, the movie deals in stereotypes. There’s the lovable, bookish nerd Preston (Ethan Embry, who has those puppy dog eyes that just kill me every time) who has the unrequited crush on high school princess Amanda (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who just got dumped by the school football star Mike Dexter (Peter Facinelli), a douche so powerful that he goes by two names all the time. Preston whines to his best friend, Denise (Lauren Ambrose), who is the Daria of the film, that he has gone four years without declaring his love for the object of his affection and staunchly declares that it will all change! That night! So of course it will! Oh, and there’s a Revenge of the Nerds plot headed by the school valedictorian. And we can’t forget the irrepressible Kenny (Seth Green) whose mission is to get laid before he starts college at UCLA in the fall.

They say here ninety-two percent of the honeys at UCLA are sexually active. Ninety-two percent of the women in Los Angeles at UCLA walking around going, “Class… or sex? What shall I do?” Ninety-two percent, yo! Hey, you know what that means? It means I gots a ninety-two percent chance of embarrassing myself. I roll up on that shorty be like, “What’s up yo?” she be like, “You don’t know 20 different ways to make me call you Big Poppa” cuz I don’t yo. 

Kenny’s subplot became a movie on its own a year later, co-starring a warm apple pie.

The characters interact over the course of the film in separate but equal plotlines, with a single thread that is Preston’s crush on Amanda to lead us through. It’s like if Dubliners were placed in some generic American suburb and was also dumbed down a whole heckuva lot.

Did I just compare Can’t Hardly Wait to Dubliners?

Yes.

These are the strereotypes that come naturally to the viewer because they’ve been pounded into our head for decades. Which came first? John Hughes movies or the “nerd, outcast, rebel, princess, jock” quintet? It’s a chicken-or-the-egg debate that would take a lot of research on my part to solve finally once-and-for-all, so I won’t. I’ll just say that we’ve been dealing in these characters for ages now. 

When I watched Can’t Hardly Wait, it was like I was reliving my own final night of high school. Well, kind of. Actually, not at all. I had nothing to equal that kind of party at all, in that I didn’t go to a party. My family was moving a few days after I graduated so I had to go home to pack up my room. Unlike Preston, there was no Vonnegut class for me to take, no train to hop onto, no Yaz soundtrack or blossoming romance, only a six hour drive away to a new home and a new town due to my dad’s new job. I don’t remember anything about the night of graduation. I don’t remember anything at all.

For a former Keeper of Memories (read: yearbook editor), my memory is obscenely weak and ineffectual. I am notorious for receiving Facebook friend requests from profiles that tell me that we have 23 mutual friends in common and graduated from the same high school in the same year and drawing a blank. (I get updates from a dude named TJ that I am pretty much convinced is fooling everybody else in my high school but I’m too embarrassed to ask any of my friends.) High school now comes to me as a blur;  I only remember snapshots.  I remember climbing into the back of my friend’s truck and going off-roading in the hills by our high school, clinging on to the sides of the bed. I remember ditching class for the first time ever my senior year to go to the beach and digging my toes into the sand as I sipped a cherry lemonade from Hot Dog on a Stick. I remember playing Never Have I Ever on ten fingers and struggling to defeat my equally prudish friend. The cool air on our cheeks as we walked up and down the green suburban hills. I remember these moments of my past, but only briefly, like a whisper in my ear.

In comparison to my hazy memories, watching Can’t Hardly Wait is akin to entering a time machine. The weird thing is, the movie utilizes actors that sparked feelings of nostalgia even for audiences who saw it in theaters when it was released. Ethan Embry, our lead, was the wide-eyed kid in Empire Records, Melissa Joan Hart in her cameo as Yearbook Girl had everybody gasping that Clarissa, Explainer of it All was being shoved around at a drunken party, Jerry O’Connell, who at that point was known simply as being the fat kid from Stand By Me (and also Sliders, if you’re a sci-fi geek like me), is plopped down as a has-been jock, and Donald Faison embodies Clueless by just standing there and grinning. Can’t Hardly Wait is a film released in 1998 that was already nostalgic for the ‘90s. 

Does this make it a “good” movie? No. I guess not. It’s not a “good” movie — there’s no message to take away, there’s no deeper meaning. There’s no symbolism and the stories are kind of mushed up in a haze. The good guy gets the girl, the jock and the nerd find a drunken truce together, the two misfits “work out their differences” (read: bone). So if someone were to ask me what Can’t Hardly Wait is about, I would say, “It’s a movie about a party on the last night of high school.” But that’s not what it’s really about. It’s really about me. Or it’s about what I didn’t have. To this day, I remember Can’t Hardly Wait more clearly than I remember any party I went to in high school. I could start a whole other essay on how pop culture is ruining us, obfuscating our memories and killing our brain cells, but, truth be told, I like it better this way.

Michelle Said did not write “Denise Fleming is a tampon” on your locker.

On Attending The Telluride Film Festival, part 1

by Edward Montgomery

One should not travel to Telluride reading about geology.   

On my daily gondola ride into the town, I found myself staring at the striated ridges and ancient domes around me like a child in wonder at seeing the world for the first time. The gondola itself rises quickly out of Mountain Village (Telluride’s bastard, ski-town child) and hits an elevation of over 12,000’ before dropping sharply into the valley where Telluride itself is found, three thousand feet below. I found myself reeling in the knowledge that the layers of iron ferrate in the exposed ridge, red lines of rock like angry scars, were probably over 200 million years in the making. While the pulleys overhead moved me down the mountain in a controlled fall, I mouthed phrases of John McPhee (“chaotic, concatenated shards of time”), phrases more amplified the further I fell. 

For the first part of the festival, this daily perspective of solitude paired with descent ended up being the appropriate one.  I found myself confronted with silent films and restorations, some over a century old, and watching other films that owed so much to their ancestral history that I felt this year’s festival recourse for a degree in film studies. What was formed from these conflations of art and time was a realization of the true role of image and music in film.  

While image may seem obvious, the reliance upon visual explanations in silent films and its different metamorphoses can be surprisingly subtle and delicate (see our previous article on Five Perfect Camera Shots).  Should we try to prove the importance of image through its negative, an opposite of subtle and delicate images may be found in modern incarnations such as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.  Silent film produced some of the most horrid overacting in the history of film, but it also created some of the most honest and touching—the ability for a perfectly timed smile to tell an entire character’s secrets is still a skill most actors have not mastered. And though music has existed in film from the start, music contains the unique property of being both time-stamped at its creation and yet, perpetually judged by its ability to ride the cultural crest of modernity—Bach sounds, and can be described as, baroque; but Bach played by Glenn Gould has an ethereal and enduring quality that has made it forever necessary, unhinged from time.  

The idea, then, in practice. Try an image from 1902: Georges Méliès’s infamous A Trip to the Moon, a moon with a rocket in the eye. This film (of which I was unaware until my first trip to Telluride) was described as a “Holy Grail for film preservationists”, and had been only available in tattered black and white film prints until this year. Still, A Trip to the Moon had long been known for its remarkable special effects and strange science fiction, and was now being presented to Telluride as fully restored (or as restored as a 109 year-old film can be).

Its image was as close to the original color version as possible, but in an imaginative triumph, its score was completely rewritten and re-imagined by Sofia Coppola’s pet-band, Air. All cheekiness aside, Air’s score invigorates this new version of A Trip to the Moon, the old image being enlightened more by the music than its own restored color. The result was an old film feeling young, ancient bedrock of film exposed and shining again. 

Another recipe, the role of image and music reversed: Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet, Opus 84, Dance of the Knights, and a shot inside of a refrigerator: fresh food being placed precariously close to the rotting detritus near the back. Of course, as far as plots go, there must be war. Zergüt, a short by Alisa Lapidus and Natasha Subramaniam, was shot using high-speed filmmaking and stop-motion animation in what the directors perfectly describe as a “contemporary day Fantasia”.  The splashes of color, the explosions of fruit, and an ever-present orchestral score morphing and playing in concert with the gastronomical fusion onscreen: all of this led to a complete infatuation with the film playing before me. 

Official Zergüt trailer

But beyond experimental and ancient shorts lay the great, modern films, indebted to the rich histories of film from the very start. What many would argue was the eventual coup de grâce of the festival, The Artist was a surprise for us all. Director Michel Hazanavicius found both the courage and funding to film a fully re-imagined and authentic silent film in our modern day. The Artist’s hero is George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent-film era star facing his own extinction with the industrial evolution of the talkies.

The film itself is a comedy turned tragedy: Valentin’s efforts to hold onto the past ultimately fail him and his estate is brought to ruin by both his obsolescence and the Great Depression. Unlike other mock-silent films of the modern day (I’m looking at you Three Times), Hazanavicius was wise enough to allow the actors to speak for themselves, to ignore the modern, unnerving feeling that too little is being said by the acting itself. The dialogue shots were enough for the wit to shine through and moments to be clarified, but they were happily in rare supply, and whatever was missing in the acting could be easily found in the film’s score (Ludovic Bourse).

The film’s masterful balance of sound and image resulted in everyone being sucked into Valentin’s fear of words themselves. The nightmare scene itself was perfectly timed to ease the audience’s misgivings about a “new” silent-film (and containing the first sound-effect you’ll hear the entire film), as were multiple homage scenes to film’s origins (keep an eye out for a beautiful nod to Metropolis). Still, it was the final allowance of sound in the conclusion that drove home all the humanity of the characters, revealing their graciousness at being allowed to move forward into a new world. 

Sadly, not all filmmakers have Hazanavicius’ kind of talent. Passerby, a new film by Brazilian filmmaker Eryk Rocha, could also be described as an ancestral pastiche, except that it was more interested in the noise of a city drowning out any words we might choose to say rather than any new interpretation of image and sound. In fact, noise is Rocha’s score. A nearly silent film (especially as it was left un-translated from its original Portuguese—as an aside, I do wonder how I would have reacted if I could have understood the little that was said), Passerby wanders for two hours, searching for a personal subject in the everyman character of Expedito.

Expedito, a 65-year-old man who lives alone, visits his mother’s grave, stares wistfully at women on the street, and gapes uncomprehendingly at the construction site across the street from his apartment.  Eventually, he begins to attend a karaoke nightclub. And that’s it.

Rocha was too interested in the image and noise of a chaotic city, so much so that any pathos we were supposed to feel for Expedito’s postmodern confusion disappears into boredom. The unfolding of sound, the weight of our single voice in a city of noise, the construction of the unimaginable even as our world bobs without meaning—these are strong messages in a film bogged down by the weight of its own ambivalence. Here is art house cinema for all those who use that term disparagingly. 

Geological pressure and time; the basin and range of quality, both in the mountainous new, and the eroded and forgotten valleys of old. Image and sound repeated as accented notes, the very melody of film for this tiny pocket of art. Our modern iterations may follow and change slightly, but all the tools that make us gasp and burst into laughter, that make us sink lower into our seats out of fear for the characters—these have not changed. 

Another quote of McPhee’s that stuck in my head: “Mountains are not somehow created whole and subsequently worn away.  They wear down as they come up, and these mountains have been rising and eroding in fairly even ratio for millions of years—rising and shredding sediment steadily through time, always the same, never the same, like row upon row of fountains.”  Who are we to argue that films do not act as mountains do, all of us chained to the changing land through which we move?

Edward Montgomery is a writer who has promised all of us (including his editors) that part two of his adventures at this year’s Telluride Film Festival are shortly forthcoming. He tumbls here.

Five Things, part 2

5 PERFECT CAMERA MOVES

by Andrew Root

(Editor’s note: This article is the second part of a semi-regular series Andrew has agreed to write for this site. The first part (“5 Perfectly Delievered Lines”) can be found here.)

Some artists have made their mark simply by expressing themselves differently than their peers. Jackson Pollock springs to mind; he was not the first artist to express the type of energy, passion, and intensity that he did, but no one else had done it in Pollock’s definitive “drip” style. 

Hendrix played with his teeth. Ernest Vincent Wright wrote an entire novel without using the letter ‘e.’ Daniel Day Lewis lived in a cave for eight months subsisting on hunted deer, berries, and honey in preparation for voicing a cartoon bear (probably). 

Given that motion pictures literally couldn’t exist without them, surprisingly few filmmakers make creative uses of their cameras. When a piece of equipment is bottom-line essential to a creative process, it’s easy to forget that the equipment itself can be used for creative expression. 

This article is focused (har!) on perfect uses of the camera. It was difficult to pare the list down to include only creative elements which are purely camera driven. The most prominent feature which continually cropped up was when the camera pans, tilts, or zooms to reveal something which was not in the frame previously. This is called a reveal, and while effective, is more about directorial staging than the camera itself. Edgar Wright’s filmography, for example, contains many excellent examples of the reveal. Robert Altman makes masterful use of long tracking shots, following characters in and out of locales, jumping between conversations and giving an overall picture of a sprawling setting, but this approach is designed to reveal what has been happening off screen. It is a collaborative technique between the director, actors, set designers, and everyone else on location, not purely a camera move. See George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind for many excellent tracking shots and other assorted in-camera tricks. M. Night Shaymalan, for all his deriders, is masterful at framing his shots, while Sofia Coppola and the Coen Brothers have their actors move subtly within carefully constructed settings—but again, these shots are examples of directorial skill. 

What I was interested in were instances in which the camera itself reveals the emotional subtext of a scene without help from the actor, director, or soundtrack. Here are five instances of superbly executed creative uses of the motion picture camera…

1) The Graduate (1967) – dir. Mike Nichols, DOP. Robert Surtees (nominated for an Oscar for this film) 

Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) has been seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and is now—somewhat impossibly—carrying on a relationship with both the older woman and her daughter, Elaine (Katherine Ross). The affair must out, and Mrs. Robinson threatens to expose her relationship with Benjamin in order to stop him from seeing her daughter (JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!). Benjamin races to Elaine, hoping to tell her the whole truth—he had previously hinted at an affair with an unnamed older woman—before she hears the news in what is conceivably the worst way possible. As he is about to reveal the torrid truth, Mrs. Robinson appears in the ajar door behind Elaine. Benjamin spots her, and Elaine turns, seeing her mother who promptly flees in despair. When Elaine turns back to Benjamin, the scene slowly pulls into focus succulently mirroring Elaine’s dawning realization that her boyfriend is balling her mother. The timing is exquisite, and requires nothing from Ross to sublimely reveal her inner thoughts. 

Watch the scene here. 

2) Vertigo (1953) – dir. Alfred Hitchcock, DOP. Robert Burks 

Hitchcock once said that his camera was “absolute.” The man knew how to manipulate his equipment in order to produce harrowing effects, wringing anxious excitement out of every scene. James Stewart’s John “Scottie” Ferguson is a private detective who suffers from acrophobia, so it’s inconvenient when the anxiety-riddled Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) rushes up a tall bell tower in a fit of disquiet. As Scottie does his best to climb the wooden stairs, he can’t help but look down. The staircase expands and contracts, the floor rising up and falling away simultaneously, subjecting the viewer to the same dizzying fear of heights that Scottie can’t control. Hitchcock achieves this effect by facing the camera directly downwards in the centre of the stairwell, then zooming in while the camera moves backwards, effectively fluctuating every fixed point, shredding perspective and creating an acrophobic nightmare. It’s possible that the infamous zoom-in/track-out bell tower is the first cinematographic technique that is more identifiable than the actual condition it is trying to emulate.  

Watch the scene here.

 
3) The Shining (1980) – dir. Stanley Kubrick, DOP. John Alcott 

It’s a bold move to disorient your audience in the opening seconds of your film, but Kubrick is nothing if not a bold filmmaker. As the film begins to unspool, a small, lonely island moves towards the camera on a pristine mountain lake. Immediately (and I mean immediately) after the viewer takes in the setting, the camera tilts sickeningly which - somehow – allows every aspect of the scenery to move in a different direction. Is the lake rising upwards? Is the island sinking? Are the mountains rushing towards you unnaturally quickly? Yes. All three. The camera – mounted on a helicopter – moving along the surface of the lake coupled with the very specific rotation exemplifies the elegant, psychologically subversive modus operandi of this most famous of horror films. What is right in front of your eyes will turn on you, much sooner than you are comfortable with. 

Watch the scene here.

4) Serenity (2005) – dir. Joss Whedon, DOP. Jack N. Green 

In X-Men: First Class, by putting his first two fingers to his temple and cocking an eyebrow, James McAvoy succeeded in making telepathy kind of boring. It was an effect that was added in post; intense music, a sound effect or two, and a slow zoom all gave the effect that McAvoy’s Professor X was looking directly into your mind’s eye. The filmmakers required the audience to buy in to the effect, or all was lost. In a different sci-fi film, the much simpler cinematic device of rotating the camera along a silky movement path communicates the same telepathic effect without all the post-production effort. In Joss Whedon’s Serenity, Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and his crew are robbing a vault, but the vault is locked up tight. Enter their secret weapon, stepping nimbly over hostages on her delicate dancer’s feet; Summer Glau’s River Tam scans the room, hearing snatches of nervous conversation from the frightened crowd until the camera pans, rotates and floats over the room, coming to rest on the man who has the codes (and a gun). The deft camera rotation momentarily upsets the equilibrium of the viewer, but adroitly informs the audience of what it must feel like to have your consciousness drift out of your body and wander fluidly around the room. 

Watch the scene here.

 
5) Punch Drunk Love (2002) – dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, DOP Robert Elswit 

Barry Egan is an awkward guy. Director Paul Thomas Anderson puts actor Adam Sandler into some very uncomfortable situations, then zooms in slowly, teasing out the pathologically gauche nature of the central character. Getting up close and personal (and staying there) is a technique which puts the viewer inside the character’s head, whether we want to be there or not. When Barry calls a phone sex line, he paces around his apartment, the camera following intently as he feverishly tries to avoid his own personality. He gives a false name, and is reticent to reveal anything personal about himself to the operator. When the girl on the other end finally backs him into a corner, Barry lies (poorly) about having a girlfriend who is out of town. At the exact moment that he fabricates an absentee companion, the camera lurches to the left before settling back into the strained conversation. Apparently, the camera move was accidental at first (the result of the steady cam knocking into a table), but Anderson loved the effect so much that he kept it in the film, and rightly so. It perfectly captures the character’s aching earnestness. He is ill at ease with his natural personality, but he is clumsy and maladroit when he has to lie about himself. The reeling of the camera is the tightening of Barry’s chest, the falling sensation in his stomach, and the fresh beads of sweat on his forehead. 

Watch the scene here (camera move at 8:45) 

*For more images of directors using their cameras, I highly recommend checking out Directors Behind Cameras. 

 

Andrew Root is an unemployed but very employable teacher living near Lake Ontario. If you want to hire him, you totally can.

Time Travel Week: 12 Monkeys

WE DON’T USE THE TERM ‘CRAZY’, MR. COLE

by Evan Bryson

Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys is full of things I find repulsive, most of them textural. If Gilliam has an aesthetic program I would call it “scab chic.” He lards his frames with the romantic textures of civilization in decline, like peeling wallpaper, water-rotten stucco, or decades of dust caked on neatly-arranged shoes in a department store. He populates scenes with homeless people and garbage. The homeless people wheeze; the garbage flutters. 

In one exciting episode of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a merry band of rebels land themselves in the bowels of a giant fish, where the guts are scaly and farty and acidy. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a hotel bar fills up with screaming reptiles. Bodies with festering sores redound (more textures—bodies decaying), in contradistinction to the pointy industry of hygiene also prominently featured in Gilliam’s films. The witch queen in The Brothers Grimm seeks immortality—failing that, she crumbles into pieces with her tower and her magic mirror. In 12 Monkeys, Gilliam insists on displaying James Cole’s baby-smooth ass to highlight brutal showers meant to pressure-wash the man’s flesh free of germs, or simply to show Bruce Willis’ physique in a tidy black thong as he lies prone on a gyrating table (à la Tetsuo in Akira). As in Tideland, the implements of drug culture are repeatedly invoked—syringes, pills, swill, smokes—as are toothless crazies. Drool dangles from Cole’s mouth when he first meets Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). He is chained up, on sedatives, and wearing soiled briefs. Bloodied soldiers with missing limbs appear. 

Gilliam picks at these textures. For 12 Monkeys’ final sequence, he dresses Willis and Stowe in campy vacation wear—a vaguely Carmen San Diego ensemble for the Dr. and for her patient a Jimmy Buffet floral print with ’70s porn-stash. In disguises our heroes look ludicrous. Gilliam likes to flick off pleasant surfaces, to scratch them until something ugly oozes from beneath. Even beautiful Brad Pitt is reduced to pajama bottoms and a loose crewcut with bald patches. You want to rub his bat-shit crazy head. His hair looks soft. 

A man imprisoned in a below-sewers life is coerced to work for fascist scientists. He is sent back in time to explore the surface of the earth, in the years before an apocalyptic event pushed humankind to the brink of extinction. Though 12 Monkeys shares the plot of Chris Marker’s experimental film La Jetée, Gilliam obliterates the cool tidiness of his inspiration source. La Jetée has room only for a central tragic love story, and all other curiosities ping against its melancholic lovers, to gather a spark. 

The use of still photography to fill the twenty-seven minutes of La Jetée’s runtime possibly necessitated a reduced mise en scène. Stillness, compositional verve, intensity of sound to enhance grace of image—the components of La Jetée make experiencing it a vision. Every frame is singular, haunting. Marker’s short masterpiece may make today’s viewers feel nostalgic for black and white boulevards, for the eternal wash of a hipstamic reverie; but this is not because the material is dated. Rather, La Jetée’s themes of memory and desire have been cleaving to our psyches at least since their significance was embellished in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. This nostalgia also deals with a false construction of love, flowering in the ahistorical present and dislodged past in the world of La Jetée. Though Marker’s lovers signal their affections in the architectonic hinterlands of a shadowy Paris, the city seems clean, even magisterial. If humans were to leave its streets the world would truly seem broken. We would miss the beautiful world, Marker’s film seems to whisper. Well, the sadness seems to me that no one would be around to miss the beautiful world. 

12 Monkeys is clogged with the detritus of the New World Order and so resists melancholia. More than 15 years after the film’s release, the most we have to be nostalgic for is 12 Monkeys’ depiction of easy-peasy luggage check. The virologist who poisons the world with his synthetically concocted virus wafts an open vial of the draft under a security guard’s nose. This macabre scene makes me miss traveling with combo shampoo-conditioner.  

Gilliam’s focus on thugs, stinking bums, biotech conspiracies, caged animals, warfare and trash suggests an end of space on this planet for humans to suitably articulate to one another a common cause, to gesture towards love. It is a cynical move but not an underserved one, though at times it edges on bathos (I think the winged horse in Brazil is bathetic, too). The U.S.A. of 12 Monkeys has all the surface effects of a wound, material, intellectual, social; the academic and corporate elite are endlessly paired with incarcerated men and women—psychotics, criminals—and these meetings are the sites of gashes. The world of 12 Monkeys limps along, carrying its human overpopulation ever closer to an abyss. Gilliam shows us things we might find in a drain, a tight place full of matted hair. As James Cole is blasted backwards in time we want him to land, maybe, closer to Dr. Railly so that the two may resume their budding romance. But his love is doomed! More so, we want Cole to wind up on a grasslands, in some outland sanctuary for birdlife, where he can bathe in the sea. Naturally he dies catching a flight to Key West. 

Like those time travel movies that take their stars to pristine lands crowded by dinosaurs, an ethos of ecological conservation underpins 12 Monkeys. A leftist politics pervades much of Gilliam’s work, usually towards satirical ends, and here the left message begins in the dank darkness of the gulag and ends more or less exactly where it began. The face of a boy, his innocent eyes wide with terror and wonder, stares at a man shot down. “The Child is father of the Man,” all of that, and the dying man will wake up all too soon back in his cell, again, down in the dank darkness of his gulag, to dream about the boy who watched him die.  

The nightmare is a cage and a cycle of caging. One of Gilliam’s surest marks of genius in 12 Monkeys is his imaginative conflation of the prison, of incarcerated bodies, as a product of our dying planet. Cole moves from his cage beneath the ground to a cage that moves as he moves: a plastic suit, like a spacesuit, deployed so he may explore the uninhabited world above. But this winter-world is a cage, too, though much larger, for he cannot wander about it freely—the world’s air is contaminated. Cole is accosted by police officers when he is sent back in time. They bind him in shackles and place him in a jail cell. He is moved from there to the mental ward of a city hospital. The size of Cole’s prison expands and contracts as he moves through time. When he is most free, having kidnapped Dr. Railly and forcing her to drive from Baltimore to Philadelphia, still the two are trapped in her car, speeding across the interstate, keeping the radio turned away from police blotters. Cole eats the air, the pure fresh air of November 1996, he laps it at, cries into it. He’d forgotten how sweet air is.

The world is almost enough without us, I think is what Gilliam is saying. He shows us giraffes galavanting across an overpass and a rash of pink flamingos against silver skyscrapers. If we do not trap ourselves first, bury our kind first, then the world may do it for us. The lower animals will oversee our crumbling thoroughfares. The ugliness of 12 Monkeys may be its textures and, yes, its heinous Kafka-like reticulation of bad dreams nestled in painful love affairs. The beauty of 12 Monkeys is in Gilliam’s hesitation, in his exploration of “almost.”

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

Time Travel Week: Back to the Future II (1989)

BROADCASTING BEAUTIFUL VIEWS 24 HOURS A DAY: YOU’RE TUNED TO THE SCENERY CHANNEL

by Michelle Said

When I was 15 years old, my best friend Melissa and I wrote letters to our future selves at 25. Would we be married, would we have children? Where would we live? At that point in our lives, 25 seemed like it was forever away. After all, ten years prior, we were only five years old. So, we figured, ten years hence we ought to have been pretty much completely established as people.  

“I think you were over optimistic,” she teased me before she opened the letters. On the eve of 25 I was living in Atlanta on a whim and had absolutely no clue what to do with my life. We tried to guess what we had written to ourselves in the future and vaguely recollected that I was hoping to be an editor of a magazine and happily married, or something like that. My parents had gotten married at 23, so I thought that 25 was an accurate estimate. This wasn’t based on anything else other than what I knew, which was what my parents had done. They were my model for success. If I wanted to have a happy, productive life, then I could use them as a guideline. One extra thing, though: I wanted to live in New York. This had been a dream of mine ever since I saw Oliver & Company and An American Tail. According to cartoons, New York was where you could perform dance numbers on suspended pianos if you wanted to. It seemed like my kind of place.

My ideal life.

At 25, Melissa lived in Los Angeles not far from the suburbs where we grew up. She had kept the letters in a box at her parents house and called me one night between our August birthdays. As she opened one of the letters, I cringed, waiting for the naive 15 year-old me to make itself, myself!, apparent. Journalism? Yeah, not exactly. Married? You’ve gotta be kidding me. I was sitting in a house in East Atlanta. How could I have ever predicted Atlanta? Where was New York? Where were the Billy Joel songs?

She opened one of the letters. I heard the crinkle of paper over the phone line.
 
“Nevermind,” she said.

“What do you mean? Nevermind what?”

“I mean, nevermind! I thought it was 25, but the letters are for when we’re 35.”

I sighed and felt a massive weight rise off of my shoulders. Of course! We had given ourselves two decades to become real people, not just one. Thank god, I thought. Thank god, thank god, thank god. The thought of having to face my 15 year-old self so early in the game was terrifying.

But imagine if you had to actually come face-to-face with your expectations of your future versus the reality? What if you could spy on yourself 30 years down the line?

Can you even imagine? The horror of it all! Seeing yourself when you’re in your late 40s and, instead of being a specimen of awesomeness, you are broken down, a nobody that has been worn down by life, expectation, gravity.

It’s scary as hell.

Which brings me to Back to the Future II.

Watching Back to the Future II in my late 20s gives me same sort of feeling that a torture porn would. However, when I was in my teens I thought it was quite obviously the greatest movie ever made. The dream of this new and improved 2015 enchanted me with its flying cars, hoverboards and holograms. And hey, they got a lot right! I mean, Miami didn’t even have a baseball team in 1989! And, as tiny Elijah Wood complains, video games wherein you have to use your hands are for babies. Let’s talk about the XBox Kinect, amirite?

Back to the Future II’s vision of the future was surprisingly accurate in many ways, from the obsession with plastic surgery (even Doc undergoes the knife — or some futuristic approximation… botox, maybe?) to wide screen televisions to videoconferencing. With so many “future” technologies having come to pass, it feels a bit silly to share in Marty’s Dorothy Gale sense of wonder, but we do. He is a stranger in an even stranger land—a version of his own hometown he could have never predicted, much more bizarre than the one he found in 1955. This Hill Valley is dazzling and Technicolor, filled with candy-colored plastics every shade of the rainbow.

Some of the most impressive and interesting technology is contained in Marty Jr’s outfit: he wears a hat that is lenticular and glossy, sneakers that autolace and a jacket that self-dries and adjusts to fit. But the true masterpiece is the hoverboard, a skateboard that glides on air (not water, you bojo!). It’s a Jetsons sort of world where almost everything floats. I imagine audiences of 1989 must have gasped at the special effects, fantasizing and then eventually scoffing at the potential of this reality. The entire 2015 section feels like one of those AT&T “You Will” commercials from the early 1990s. Ever want to have your family fixated on little screens at all hours of the day? YOU WILL.

These nuggets of futuristic wonder are so tantalizing and the humor that accompanies them is so light and enjoyable that I proclaimed Back to the Future II my favorite movie of all time for years. I couldn’t wait for all of this possibility to become a reality. But as I got older and more and more of these gadgets and computers and fabrics slowly came into my life (the iPhone is one of the most amazing feats of technology I have ever owned, aside from the Tomagotchi I serial-murdered over and over again in high school), I watched the movie with new eyes. And what I found was a terribly dark and twisted story, one that depresses me every time. “Oh no,” you’re saying (maybe). “Oh no, it’s not that bad.”

It is.

Back to the Future II deals with a simple (?) premise. Doc decides that it is necessary for Marty to fix the life of his son in the future because his son is too much of a wimp and gets into trouble with a gang led by doofus-villain Biff’s progeny that leads to serious jail time. Or something. It’s a stretch. If this story were being workshopped, I think most people would say that they didn’t really “buy” Doc insisting on changing these events so fervently due to the fact that he was so against having Marty alter the past on his behalf, but, maybe narrowly escaping a round of bullets changed his view on the matter. Moving on.

Also – and I think this is really important and the reason why the second two movies differ so dramatically in tone from the first – Marty seems to add a new dimension to his personality, one that wasn’t quite as apparent before. In the first Back to the Future, Marty is brave when his father is not. To put it another way, Marty is a Gryffindor and his dad is a Ravenclaw – possibly Hufflepuff, but I think more Ravenclaw in the tradition of Luna Lovegood (and Lorraine is a Hufflepuff and Biff is a Slytherin and Doc is also a Ravenclaw – don’t worry, I have a chart of all of these if you’re interested). But in the second movie, this boldness and bravery transforms into hubris. He is plagued (plagued! utterly plagued!) by the idea of being thought of as a wuss. But he also carries with him the perceived invincibility of youth. He barks,  “Nobody calls me chicken!” as often as he might say hello. Zemeckis and Gale sort of include this facet of his personality as retcon as it is the thread that ties together Parts II and III. Marty is too brave. He cannot stand to be thought of as anything less than a noble hero. And yet, it is that hubris that is his fatal flaw.

Well, that, and his greed. As he spots a sports almanac chronicling 1950 to 2000 (a surprisingly lithe and lean book), he gets the idea to bring it back with him to the ‘80s to make some extra money on the side. “I can’t lose!” he exclaims as he gazes upon his new purchase. As soon as we see it, we recognize the almanac as the Chekhov’s gun of Hill Valley. Marty’s avarice quickly gets the best of him. Biff steals the almanac and the time machine and creates what seems like irrevocable havoc on the past. He becomes the richest man in America, kills George and blackmails Lorraine into marriage (and a truly terrible boob job).

And while that alternate reality is appalling on several levels (not the least of which is confronting the death of a parent, a grisly detail that makes the movie even more dark, a byproduct of Crispin Glover’s refusal to be part of the sequels), it’s the future of 2015 that struck me as more frightening than the alternate 1985.

When Marty spies on his future family (including his future daughter and son, both brilliantly played by the genius that is my husband Michael J. Fox) what he sees gives him pause. Future Marty’s disenchantment wafts off of the walls. He lives in what was once a nice suburban community in a bored suburban existence. He is almost 50 years old with graying hair and a terrible suit in a life that can be best described in this day and age as Giamatti-esque. Sure, his marriage seems fine, if a bit stale. His kids seem fine, if a bit spoiled and disaffected. But this future is not what Marty, an aspiring rock star teenage boy, had planned for himself. The ultimate indignity comes via video conference as he is fired with loud, caps lock YOU’RE FIRED faxes spewing from every orifice in the house.

How often have we thought of our future like this? Never? When you are a teenager and you see the disappointment that seeps out of the pores of  your elders, they seem as if they are a different species. What would it be like to confront your own middle-age defeat and malaise as a teenager? To come to terms with the mistakes you make now that will impact you for decades to come?

To be young is to be full of hope, we are constantly told, and to be old is to lose that hope, like a balloon slowly letting out air. Teenagers never believe that they will become the people they disrespect. But they do, they do, and then they have their own children and the cycle continues. It is this chain that never ends, one that we hope will never happen to us. But when we are young we pretend like it does not exist. We tell ourselves that we will not become those people. We tell ourselves won’t break down, we won’t settle for anything less than the best and, most importantly, we will never stop trying.

What Back to the Future II tells us is that we will.

At the end of the first Back to the Future, we thought Marty had fixed everything. His parents had a more satisfying life due to the changes and hope he had instilled in them as teenagers. But Marty was full of that hope, Marty had, we thought, the power to not lose it. But there he is, a middle aged man filled with bitter disappointment in 2015 nevertheless. It’s heartbreaking. And so even if he does end up rescuing his family and bringing his father back to life and getting a lesson about his hubris and pride, who is to say that he doesn’t wind up back where he was in 2015? Getting married at the Chapel O’ Love to his high school sweetheart. Becoming a sad sack adult. There’s nothing in this to tell us he won’t. He has to go back and fix the past, but what can he do about the future?

I suppose this is why there is a third Back to the Future, in which he does get to make new choices and try to become the man who does the right thing.

But what of us who don’t get a second chance? What about us who don’t have a time machine? We all have our vices, after all. What Marty endures in the second Back to the Future is a nightmare landscape marketed as a futuristic lark. It is filled with elements of humor and wit to keep us from thinking about the implications of its message.

As for me, I am going to confront the person I was at 15 in only a matter of years. I think she’ll be cool with me, with us. At least I hope so.

Michelle Said lives in New York. She tap dances on her fire escape almost every day. 

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.