Film criticism
Underworld: it’s no Æon Flux, is it.
You don’t have to live in Wyoming
I went to see Brokeback Mountain last night. The positive buzz around the film had succeeded in convincing me I wouldn’t like it, but it turns out that none of the reviews I’d seen actually get to what the film is, I think, really about, and so miss what makes it, in fact, such a marvellous film.
The most common reponse has been to praise the film as a universal love story, and it was this that provoked my initial hostility. I have no time for films about characters sacrificing their happiness in the face of social convention. I can’t stand The Remains of the Day, for instance — there’s nothing honorable about being the victim of pointless social norms, still less in suffering in silence. If that were all Brokeback Mountain were portraying, it would be at best banal, at worst pernicious. This universalizing interpretation has been challenged for the way it effaces homosexuality from the film, either as a criticism of mainstream responses to the film, or as a criticism of the film itself. However, inciteful as both of these essays are, I think they finally make the same mistake as the position they oppose; they read the film solely through the central relationship, thereby missing the
broader concerns which this relationship illuminates.
I’ve yet to see a review which properly addressed the specificity of the setting of the film. 1960s Wyoming has been assumed to simply represent A Place That Doesn’t Like Fags, and nothing more. But that’s untenable as an explanation of the very precise moment which is beautifully rendered in the film’s design. Far from being either universal or a love story, the film is both more specific in its location and broader in its concerns: its theme is, fundamentally, the gender dynamics of late fordism. Looking at it this way also helps explain a number of scenes which would otherwise be distinctly troubling.
There are three scenes which particularly emphasize this aspect, and against which we can then interpret the rest of the film. Shortly after Ennis gets married, we see him and his wife in their little house out on a ranch somewhere, where Alma is attempting to coax Ennis to move to live in the nearby town. This scene concened me; Alma’s pleading and wheedling portrays a prennial female stereotype, one that is doubly worrying in the context of Ennis’s attraction to the wilderness which is bound up with his love of Jack. But why accept this moralizing interpretation? We’re prepared to take Ennis’s behavior as conditioned by his social circumstances, and implicit in the film is the suggestion that we extend this perspective. Alma is no happier with the gender role she has been assigned than Ennis or Jack, or any of the other characters.
Skip forward to Ennis and Alma living in town. Ennis rushes into the supermarket where Alma works, dumping the kids with her so that he can head off to work out on the ranch. Throughout the film, Ennis uses the nominal responsibilities of his employment to assert what he thinks is some kind of agency. But is it really? At this point, is it possible to construe the wage laborer’s freedom to enter the workforce as liberation (if it ever was)? This sets up the later scene where Ennis berates Alma for leaving the house at dinner time to take on an extra shift at the supermarket. What happens to the idea of work as liberation when waged work can no longer be construed as freedom through a gendered opposition? This is not a transhistorical question, but one which arose in the specific time and place in which the film is set.
This set of issues, once seen, can be located throughout the film. We can see the complex of class and gender identities in the middle-aged and middle-class Jack’s paunch and moustache in the later part of the film; we can see it right at the beginning, when Jack and Ennis confront the power of their employer, both of them already damaged by the society they were born into (and these early scenes make it clear that the film is not about the consequences of the chance event that happens up in the mountains). This is also what makes the film so powerful as a story of class struggle (in John Holloway’s sense, as a struggle against classification). The central role of structure is made most explicit in what I think is the last scene in which we see Jack and Ennis together. Jack raises again the possibility that the two of them could live together; Ennis’s response is hyperbolic: Jack, he say, might as well imagine that the river would flow with whiskey. On one level, this looks like a simple instance of bad faith, like Ennis’s continued insistence that he can’t leave the life he knows because he needs to keep his job. But, just as the need to sell one’s labor is very real under capitalism, what Ennis’s response reveals is that, in the face of overdetermined social structures, any better future will appear to be not only contingently unattainable, but necessarily, structurally, impossible (and does Jack, finally, really believe that his utopia is any more possible?).
There is much more in the film than a love story, or even a gay love story. But it’s also worth saying that the situation which Jack, Alma, Lureen and Ennis are forced to negotiate, is not the situation we confront today.
“Zombie movies about Bush’s ‘presidency’ are the kind of social realism art that I can get behind”
> What can I say? Except that it was the best thing ever. Few things are as satisfying as
> seeing your own deepest beliefs adapted for a pop culture medium and featuring
> zombies. I am going to tell you the plot because it’s not like I can ruin it, because
> it’s just the narrative of the first Bush “presidency,” I mean, I guess if you were
> hybernating from March 2003 through the electoral fiasco last year, beware of the
> “spoilers.” Other than that, it’s all Allegory, except that Ze Semiotic Collapse of Ze
> Zeitgeist pretty much ensures that allegory is verite now.
And she’s right, it’s pretty damn good. It’s interesting that the form of a horror film, in licensing a certain amount of gore, also appears to license a suprisingly long scene of Karl Rove’s head getting beaten to a pulp, and Anne Coulter getting shot in the back of the head.
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The year was 1920…
… and it was a dark and stormy night. The lightning flashed and the rain lashed the mysterious old house where Nikola Tesla was putting the finishing touches to his greatest invention, the tele-time-ceiver. Surpassing even his triumphant detection of extra-terrestrial radio signals, his new device would allow him to pierce the very veil of time itself! The final screw was connected, the final wire tightened; the mad genius flipped the final contact and the machine hummed into life. Slowly, as vast energies accumulated within the apparatus, it began to pick up signals never yet broadcast; the rumbles of war in 1939; of revolution in 1968. As it approached the limits of its powers, the signals began to be overcome by interference. Tesla halted the machine at the year 2005, and gazed at the flickering, disjointed images of another age. As he stared, rapt in wonder, an idea formed in his head; he grabbed pen and paper and began to write: not scientific invention this time, but _a movie script_.
That, at least, is how I like to imagine the script of Shopgirl coming about. It’s an odd film; clearly set in the present day, but just as clearly animated by an archaic sensibility. Sometimes, this just leads to surface incoherence. Steve Martin is humorously unaware of what ‘jerk chicken’ is, presumably demonstrating that he is an old man, out of touch with the wild food habits of the modern age. But a few scenes later, we see Martin deftly wielding chopsticks, as suave, cosmopolitan dot-com millionaire. More seriously, it makes it difficult to figure out the narrative: are we supposed to take seriously the broad strokes that delineate Claire Danes’s character (Mirabelle) as A Lonely Young Woman (she sleeps alone in a double bed; she has a cat)? Shouldn’t we be more troubled than the film appears to be by the power relations in her relationship with rich old Steve Martin? I’m not saying the film has to forthrightly condemn old men shagging young women; but the _assumption_ that seems to be implicit, that his is an appropriate mode of courtship, seems like it should have been untenable for about 50 years.
There’s also the strangely unsure tone of the film. There’s a lot of broad comedy around Claire Danes’s other suitor (and I mean BBC sitcom broad, that is to say, unfunny); are similarly uncomfortable moments in her relationship with Martin also supposed to be funny? It seems not. How, then, to understand the resolution of the film, in which Jeremy’s transformation by yoga self-help tapes makes him a suitable partner for Mirabelle in contrast to Ray (Martin’s character)? Though “resolution” is a slightly odd word to use of the end of a film which entirely lacks narrative momentum. That lack is not necessarily a problem — In The Mood For Love is the same, and I love it in part _for_ that — but there seems no obvious reason other than the plot for this film to exist at all.
Still, anthrochica liked it, so maybe I’m missing something. And Claire Danes is both an excellent actor and consistently wears lovely clothes throughout, so the film’s not a total waste of time.
Marx, Abi Titmuss and sensuous existence
I happened to re-read the bit in the Communist Manifesto about the bourgeoisie holding wives in common. It gives you good reason to think, anyway, that Marx would have enjoyed Celebrity Love Island. So Rod Liddle here is just showing his ignorance, as Infinite Thought says.
I was looking at Marx to try and find a line I vaguely remember about materialists starting by considering people in their real, sensuous existence. I suppose I was thinking of this from the German Ideology, although it doesn’t match up exactly with what I remember:
> The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises
> from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals,
> their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they
> find already existing and those produced by their activity.
Meanwhile, I was watching Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. It’s a bit hyperactive, particularly the attempt by Joel to ‘hide’ his memories as they are being erased, which seems like evidence of the incorrect assumption that the film needed to have some sort of plot. My dad objected that we never find out anything but the most superficial generalities about the central relationship of the film. I think that’s true, and a better film would have shown us the specifics of a relationship which nonetheless remained genuinely universal (that would have been a good use of the time taken up by chase scenes). Still, it’s not a fatal flaw, because the film is about relationships in general (the form rather than the content, if you like), or, even more generally, the idea that k-punk has mentioned a few times recently, that the fundamental structure of belief is not simply belief without evidence, but belief _in spite of_ evidence.
A too-quick subordination of the rational to the empirical is a surrender in favour of how things are, not how they could be. In that sense, what appears to be the most arbitrary plot convenience in the film turns out to be a representation, simply, of the general form of love: starting a new relationship depends on the conviction that, though we are still the same people as we always were, _this_ time it’s going to be different.
This is, not coincidentally, analogous to the form of political practice, a reminder of Žižek’s point about anti-communism as objective pro-fascism, and a sufficient rejoinder to harrumphing like Liddle’s about continuing affection for Marx. The true defence of Marxism is not to deny that Mao, or Stalin, or Lenin, where Marxists — of course they were. The point, though, is to deny the relevance of this. Yes, yes, we know about the purges and the gulags. But this time, things will be different.
“Like those natural nuclear reactors they found in Africa, only more so”
On my way to and from Berkeley, I read Ken MacLeod’s latest book, Newton’s Wake. Although it maybe doesn’t have the superficial charms of his earlier books (the leftist transpotter element, you might call it), it’s very enjoyable nonetheless. In part, perhaps, because it returns to some of his earlier preoccupations (artificial intelligence, extropians vs. humanists), but from a slightly different angle. The background of the book seems like an excellent metaphor for our current political situation (since 1917, or 1989) — cast adrift in a world once inhabited by giants, scavenging among their sometimes seductive, sometimes deadly detritus (I suspect Ken would consider the copy of Prairie Fire: The politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism Geo gave me would be an example of both, but more of that later). Apart from which, it includes at least one spectacular image:
> A woman with long silver hair leaned against an outward overhang of the window-wall, palms and forehed pressed against it, as though contemplating a jump that the diamond plate denied her. Her face too was silver, as though coated with aluminium powder.
>
> ‘Morag Higgins,’ she introduced herself, shaking hands and smiling. Teeth like steel. She sat down and helped herself to the single malt.
>
> ‘Last mission I was on, I wandered off on my own.’ She tossed her silver hair back; it made a hissing noise as it settled. ‘I got … infected. Optic-nerve hack, absolute classic, should never have fallen for … Anyway. Then it makes me open up, some kind of needle gets in, right. Hours later I wander back sounding very strange. Team leader … she blows my fucking head off. End of story. Except it isn’t. Whatever it was had taken a back-up of me and stored it outside my head. Which it also had a memory of.’ She tapped her face with the glass. It rang. ‘_This_ grows back. It’s a crawling mass of steel nanobots.’
The time I wasn’t reading Newton’s wake I was mostly watching two terrible films, Are we there yet? (Ice Cube as a hip batchelor on a journey with his girlfriend’s children) and In good company. The bizarre thing about both films was that although actually made recently, they make much more sense if you imagine them being made 10-15 years ago, particularly In good company, which is based on the topical ideas that management consultancy is bullshit and ‘downsizing’ is, like, bad for the people who get fired. It’s wierd to see a film made in 2004 in which characters express surprise that they no longer have a job for life (besides which, is there a more horrifying idea than a corporate life sentence? Our campaigns against precarious employment should not be campaigns for more secure _employment_).
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“There’s a deep moral seriousness to the work”
Of course Tom Paulin on Star Wars Episode 3. Not much moral seriousness in The Phantom Menace, meanwhile, which appears to be an attempt by George Lucas to see how many racial stereotypes he can get into a film by hiding them as ‘alien’ races. One character (Ja-Ja Binks) could be forgiven as coincidence or a mistake, but what’s with the trade federation (untrustworthy Japanese) or the scrap dealer (grasping Jew — a CGI alien with a prominent semitic nose)? Even if Lucas is just a massive racist, who unconsciously imagines characters in stereotypical terms, how did no-one else notice during the whole course of the film’s production?
Žižek solves an enigma
I only saw the end of Enigma when it was on TV last weekend, but the dénoument was interesting. Basically, to make the villain sympathetic, we discover that his betrayal of the war effort is motivated by outrage at a massacre of Poles committed by the USSR early on in the war. That is to say, the attrocities committed by the Stalinism are held to count as at least some sort of justification for what is, objectively, siding with Naziism. This is an interesting example of Žižek’s point that comparing actually existing socialism with fascism tends to end up as apologetics for fascism.
I think Žižek’s basically right, although he slightly weakens his point by suggeting that it is wrong to say that “it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms.” His real point is, I think, slightly more limited in that it is “the ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’” which is a-priori false. This liberal attitude sides (as liberalism inevitably does) with the actually existing (as Badiou would say, the situation) rather than with the possible (or, even better, the apparently _impossible_ — the void, in Badiou’s Lacanian terminology). So the liberal position compares the _effects_ of the two totalitarianisms and so in the last instance sides with fascism which, and this is not coincidental, presents the lesser threat to the established order.
What Žižek thinks is essential for radical politics is to compare positions in terms of their _possibilities_. This, incidentally, is what I mean when I (probably far too often) rant about ‘moralism’. A moral evaluation of an event concentrates on its effects in the contingent circumstances in which it happened to come about; a political evaluation is precisely the opposite, opening up consideration of the consequences if an event is repeated in current or future circumstances.
Charlotte Street explains what Žižek is getting at and also points out Clive James’s attempted ‘response’ to Žižek. I particularly love how it completely passes him by that Žižek might actually be arguing against liberalism. Incidentally, I think my comment about moralism above explains the quotation marks that so enrage Clive James.
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“Du, du-du, da-du, du-du-duh”
The Rock is disappointingly less than the sum of its parts, I think. The dramatic tension is all constructed around a communal concept of honour, unlike the Hong Kong films it visually resemble (which work with a confucian idea that honour is something the wise man can ‘roll up’ close to his chest). This leads to too much strong-jawed military angst interfering with the blowing up. On the other hand, it also leads to the sombrely martial soundtrack, which allowed Timbaland to find a sample for Brandy’s ‘I walked away’, so it’s not all bad.