Film School Rejects » Julian Dean Shapiro

Commentary Track: Is King Kong a Realist or Surrealist Text?

Julian Dean Shapiro — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:41:13 +0000

In King Kong (1933), protagonist Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) proclaims to an eager audience that “seeing is believing.” Denham, however, is wrong—seeing is only part of believing, as knowing also plays a key part. Surrealist cinema often blends what is seen and what is known into a synthesis of dream and reality, altogether ignoring the cultural and scientific notions of causality and reason. Realist cinema, on the other hand, stresses knowing in order to further the plausibility—and thus the narrative absorption—of seeing. Although King Kong’s narrative blends the fantastic and the real, I will argue that it is nonetheless a realist text, as it reasons with the fantastic by virtue of reality—namely, by scientific knowledge of the pre-historic and by the penetrating power of the ethnographic gaze.

Although King Kong is a realist text, it nonetheless contains a noteworthy argument for its potential as a surrealist one: the visual jerkiness of early cinema’s stop-motion live-action; the jarring technical limitations of Kong’s hand-guided animation calls attention to the unrealistic, dream-like premise of a giant ape existing in an otherwise plausible universe—a cinematic universe supported by verisimilar acting and clear causality (Denham captures Kong in hopes of increasing his fortune and fame). Consequently, a surrealist tension surfaces between the stop-motioned Kong and his modern world. However, this tension is dual-edged: the jerkiness creates such a stark contrast to an otherwise seamlessly-moving universe (of a twenty-four frames-per-second reality) that the presence of the enunciator becomes highly exaggerated—the film is foregrounded as a realist spectacle, à la cinema of attractions. Ultimately, the viewer’s awareness of Kong’s animation being the result of a diligent extra-diegetic animator’s work calls attention to the fact that King Kong is also a celebration of technology and of cinema’s constant search for novelty. In the context of Gunning’s writings then, King Kong’s use of stop-motion would be an example of “an aesthetic [that] runs counter to an illusionistic absorption”—thus, King Kong simultaneously acknowledging the presence of its audience, thereby disavowing an isolated synthesis of dream and reality; the blatant presence of the enunciator overwhelmingly interrupts the narrative and literally blocks absorption.

King Kong is further rendered realist by its plotting of Carl Denham’s ethnographic pursuit, in which Denham aims to capitalize on the modern desire to see the foreign, the strange, and the primitive—all of which is embodied in Kong. The fantastical nature of Kong—his size and Other-world mysticism—is ultimately rendered rational, and thus realistic, by the ethnographic gaze of Denham’s camera and crew; the ethnography of Skull Island helps to mask the irrational fear and desire of a giant and pre-historic gorilla. Essentially, the impurity and dangerousness of Kong’s bodily disruption is marginalized by the rationalizing ethnographic gaze of the film camera—the camera gathers information on the foreign and the strange, then renders its subjects as controllable and tamed. Conversely, if King Kong were, in fact, a surrealist text, any notions of rationalization and scientific justification—as per the ethnographic gaze—would instead be rendered utterly irrelevant, as the dream-like and fantastical nature of Kong would instead be unapologetically integrated into the film’s ‘narrative.’

Beyond the film’s ethnographic rationalization is its meta-narrative’s rationalization of Kong. Specifically, Kong’s existence is scientifically-justified as the result of isolation from modernity—Kong has lived on an island so far removed from technological development and disaster that pre-historic life has successfully been preserved. Hence, when Denham captures Skull Island and its animals with his camera, he is not capturing an uncanny blend of the surreal with the real, but simply the real alone.

Ultimately, King Kong adheres to the realist text’s binary of dream and reality, and it makes no outright attempt to blur those boundaries; King Kong may be a creature of fantastical proportions, but he is no dream—he is the scientifically-rationalized anomaly of countless years of isolation. Hence, on-screen instances of ‘real world’ implausibility do not draw attention to the dream-like power of illusion, they instead affirm seemingly pseudo-scientific folk myths of lost worlds—both Carl Denham’s audience and the real-world audience knows the reasoning behind the giant ape they see. This affirmation, combined with the jarring jerkiness of stop-motion animation, presents a resoundingly realist text to the audience—a text that is realistically grounded not only as a narrative with significant potential for absorption, but also as a spectacle of seeing, in the tradition of the cinema of attractions.

Commentary Track: Three Trends Poisoning Hollywood for True Movie Lovers

Julian Dean Shapiro — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:23:10 +0000

There are three trends that stick out to me when I try to pinpoint what’s glaringly wrong with Hollywood. But, before I discuss them, I’d like to address the following question: But, who cares? Oh, dimwitted plebeian, there are many reasons to care—primarily the fact that Hollywood outputs the highest-budgeted films in the world (and, consequently, films with the greatest potential for quality.) Further, Hollywood is home to some of the most talented cast and crew around.

When you go out to see that film whose trailers caught your attention a couple weeks back, then you wind up severely disappointed by it, you’ve not only lost your money and time, but you’ve also lost a little faith in Hollywood. And, with a decreasing faith comes a decreasing likelihood for movie expenditures in the future. Consequently, films will then be produced with increasingly smaller budgets. Granted, people go away, forget things, then die after a while, but there’s still a significant distaste left in moviegoers’ mouths after they’ve been repeatedly disappointed, and I intend to pinpoint three of the most pertinent trends that lead to such disappointment.

1. Bored, Naive and Tasteless Audiences

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer movies. Tyler Perry movies. Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Are you foaming at the mouth yet? Well, you should be. These films performed spectacularly at the box office thanks to audiences who were either too naive or too ignorant to take the slightest peek at critics’ opinion beforehand, or even compare said films to similar films in the past to get a feel for what to expect in terms of quality. American moviegoing audiences seem to jump at most theatrical releases as if what’s being put out will be new, hilarious, and entertaining every single time–as if any one of those qualities were considered more important than the film’s actual financial returns.

But, moreso than simply being unaware, I believe that being bored is the key proponent to audiences flocking towards horrible films–Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans are fantastic examples. After Date Movie, audiences–for the most part–knew what to expect from another Movie movie, but they went in droves regardless. This trend is likely the result of moviegoers’ desires to simply shut their brains off for a solid 80 minutes in hopes of being passively entertained. I, along with almost anyone else, can certainly sympathize with such a trend–who hasn’t sat down and watched a terrible action movie strictly to kill a couple of hours after a long day’s work? But, the essential problem here is that audiences entertain their boredom at movie theaters.

When audiences flock to horrible films at the theaters, those films are consequently seen as financially viable to producers, and are therefore replicated down the road. Hence, the trick is to wait for these bad films to wind up on cable or Hulu; audiences should watch horrible films without paying for them–this way, producers aren’t artificially enticed into the production of such films down the line. I’m certainly not advocating piracy here, I’m simply advocating skipping the DVD rental phase and instead waiting a few months until these movies can be legitimately watched for free.

2. Misinterpreting What Works

Before we continue with discussing producers, we should first level with what exactly it is that producers are: businessmen who are not ultimately concerned with a project’s integrity, but instead with the project’s bottom line. And, you definitely cannot blame them for it–after all, Hollywood is a business. The problem, however, is the producers’ near-sightedness and their inability to interpret trends correctly over the long run: producers will often notice that a Jack Black or a Will Ferrell starred in a hit movie, then they will incorrectly hinge a significant part of that film’s financial success upon such a casting correlation. This then not only leads to the casting of incredibly annoying ‘actors’ in films that they have no business being in, but–in the minds of influential Hollywood executives–it leads to a vast misconception of what audiences are truly looking for. Ultimately, producers will spot these trends, then naively “capitalize” on them with subsequent films that exploit whatever seemed to have worked the first time around–raunchy teen films, parody films, and adaptations of television shows are all good examples.

3. The Ruining of Franchises

This third trend actually ties up the first two. The aforementioned problem of wasting time and money on a bad movie (and thus trust in Hollywood) is actually superseded (in the minds of many movie lovers) by an altogether different problem: the ruining of quality franchises. Dragonball, Twilight, Mortal Kombat, X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four, and innumerous adaptations of best-selling books, are all such examples. And, when a franchise is ruined, it’s generally ruined–as in, you’re waiting 10-20 years before you see a sequel or a “re-imagining.” The Hulk and The Punisher, for one reason or another, are two notable exceptions (although their remakes still managed to fail financially.) And, in truth, sometimes there may never even be a reboot.

When a studio dumps millions upon millions of dollars into a highly-valued production, then said production flops, franchise-uninitiated moviegoers will take note and fail to express demand for subsequent films of that franchise. Further, other studios and producers will also take note, and they’ll assume that any subsequent films in that franchise will be high-risks financially. But, there’s also another factor–sometimes it is the marketing departments that are at fault for a film’s financial failure–in such a situation, you may have a franchise that has been adapted into a fantastic first film, but its box-office numbers were so poor due to a weak or a misguided marketing effort, that the franchise is dead regardless.

Conclusion

Will things get better? Will these trends go away any time soon? I’m almost completely positive that they won’t–at least not until enough moviegoers become couch-sitters that producers begin scrambling for fresh answers and start taking a serious look at the garbage that they continually spew out–but, I highly doubt that this will happen any time soon. But, who knows, perhaps a few people will read this article, then spread some afterthought around, and a few producers will ultimately take note. One can always hope.

An Unnecessary Inquiry: Nietzsche and Superhero Films

Julian Dean Shapiro — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:35:16 +0000

After reading Audrey Anton’s The Nietzschean Influence in The Incredibles and the Sidekick Revolt (found within “The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television”), it has become incredibly clear that being super in a Hollywood blockbuster certainly does not entail possessing super powers. Rather, as Friedrich Nietzsche would argue, being super is the byproduct of class stratification—the inherent relation between those who are superior and those who are not. Nietzsche entitled these superior people the noblemen and the non-superior peoples the commoners, or the slaves. Nietzsche claimed that the noblemen possessed significant abilities and talents that the commoners did not, and that they were ordained with a relatively strong “will to power,” which Nietzsche believed was what partitioned the two classes. Without this partition, he argued, society would descend into widespread mediocrity. I aim to apply these views in the context of Brad Bird’s 2004 The Incredibles (and, I will then urge you to do the same to your own favorite superhero film): In The Incredibles, the superior humans—or the “supers”—are those who possess the ability to do fantastic, unnatural things—such as infinitely stretching their bodies, lifting up cars high in the air, and running fast enough to glide above water. Meanwhile, the commoners appear to be those who do not possess such super powers.

In The Incredibles, the supers are in an interesting predicament. In “the old days,” they were revered by all and were an active part of society—performing good deeds and helping those in need. Soon after, however, the commoners turned and labeled the supers as unwanted showoffs. The supers became the embodiments of the commoners’ own shortcomings. As Anton points out, “originally, superheroes provided ideals to live up to…now [the commoners] resent such greatness.” In effect, the commoners’ ceasing to celebrate the “superheroic nobility” of the superiors is what forced the supers to cease celebrating it as well. This “slave revolt,” according to Nietzsche, was absolutely inevitable. Once publicly using super powers was outlawed by the (The Incredibles’) government, the supers were forced to blend seamlessly into society. This blending forced these noblemen to descend down to the commoners’ level, and behave and think in a similar, slavish manner; Elastigirl’s (Mr. Incredible’s super-stretchy wife) suppression of her desire to do heroic things is paralleled in her conversation with her disenchanted son, Dash: “the world just wants us to fit in.” In contrast to the Nietzschean ideal of embracing all that makes one noble, these supers—in light of the revolt—decide to forgo what makes them superior in order to avoid distinction. Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, for example, refuse to let Dash (who can achieve super-human speeds) run track at school for fear of him being too much better than his competitors. This dumbing down of the noblemen is what Nietzsche argued would be the one and only path to mediocrity—since, conversely, the slaves would never be able to rise up to the level of the noblemen.

It is important to note that the super-powered humans in The Incredibles are entitled “supers,” and not “superheroes.” The lack of “hero” makes it easier for the commoners to view the supers as their own kin—they are just like them except for they happen to be ordained with the absurdity of wielding super powers. In this light, the supers are not necessarily heroic and therefore are not necessarily any more morally-sound than the commoners. With the facilitation of such a view, mediocrity becomes all that more achievable; “when everyone is super,” states The Incredibles’ baddy, Syndrome, “no one is.” Nietzsche believed that society could only behave smoothly when people acted within their birth-given roles and that it is a bad thing when just anyone believes that they, too, can be noble—or super. Thus, Syndrome attempting to be super, without birth-given super powers, is not only an embodiment of the slave revolt but also a foreshadowing of the mediocrity to come.

In the Incredibles’ fictional world, the first comprehensive step towards mediocrity was the Superhero Relocation Program. This was a federal attempt at suppressing those who were superior in order to tame the resentment felt by those who were not. As Anton states, either “[the] resentment or the will to power will win this fight.” Nietzsche postulated that it is the resentment—a characteristic of the weak—felt by the slaves that spurs the revolts. Syndrome’s resentment of his aspirations to be like Mr. Incredible is a prime example of this in action. At the heart of The Incredibles, resentment ultimately won while the will to power was subdued. In order for the shackles of mediocrity to be broken and greatness to be restored, the noblemen’s will to power would need to be fully embraced. Explicitly, the supers would have to fully embrace their super abilities and use them to achieve greatness for themselves. Nietzsche believed that the cornerstone of the nobleman-and-slave societal structure was the exploitation of the commoners for the growth of the noblemen; he believed that the nobles should use the slaves to attain greatness, not to help them attain their own greatness. Otherwise, mediocrity would ensue.

In an attempt to relive the “glory days,” Mr. Incredible thrust himself back into superheroic escapades. In doing so, he began to exercise his will to power and, consequently, to greatness. Then, after defeating the film’s villain, Syndrome, his family emerges as a super ensemble. In the film’s conclusion, some form of greatness has, in fact, returned from the depths of mediocrity that was instilled partially by the Superhero Relocation Program. But, not necessarily the type that Nietzsche had in mind. The film begins with the supers newly suppressing their abilities and talents from the world to ultimately wind up—once again—exercising these abilities (by publicly overpowering Syndrome and his robot, Kronos, in the streets of Metroville.) This defeat, however, could easily be interpreted as an assistance to the cause and existence of the commoners (in which their lives and city are saved) and not necessarily assistance to the superior supers themselves. For this reason, what was displayed was likely not Nietzschean greatness. Nietzsche would undoubtedly argue that the pseudo-greatness exercised at the end of The Incredibles would set society back up for repeated revolts and thus future relapses into mediocrity.

In order for class stratification and nobility to be properly instilled, the supers need to exploit the commoners for their own gain. On the flip side, however, it could be interpreted that instead of simply intending to save Metroville, the Incredibles aimed to cleverly thrust themselves back into the spotlight instead (in hopes of reclaiming superheroic greatness.) Thus, The Incredibles presents a very murky conclusion to the Nietzschean dichotomy that they had originally established in act one: it showed that it is possible to return to pseudo-greatness—or perhaps even Nietzschean greatness itself—after the birth of mediocrity, but it did not attempt to establish how permanent this form of greatness would be, nor how Nietzschean of a form it took; superheroic nobility was implied to once again be celebrated but there was no suggestion that the commoners had learned their lesson and accepted Nietzsche’s ideal of a “natural” society—one in which class stratification is strict and the growth of the noblemen is the outcome of a self-centered will to power. Hence, The Incredibles’ narrative coming full circle seems to suggest that the superhero is permanently compromised by the slave revolt.

How does Nietzschean class philosophy apply to your favorite superhero film?

A Much Closer Look: A-List Actors and Box Office Performance

Julian Dean Shapiro — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:43:04 +0000

For the sake of consistency, and to keep my points relevant, I’m going to restrain my argument to the American box office’s last eight years or so.

Before Seven Pounds, Will Smith was on a gold-streak in which he was widely considered a consistent $100M+ box office star regardless of genre. Even when he took a short break from exclaiming “awww, hell nawwww”and turned toward the sappy (The Pursuit of Happyness), audiences still flocked in the millions to see his work. And, for the most part, the same went for Tom Cruise before Lions for Lambs; when Cruise played against type (Collateral) or happened to be in the media’s hot-seat for extreme bouts of kookiness during a major release (Mission: Impossible III), his work still managed to perform well. The two of them seemed genuinely bankable. Now, cut to modern day, and the reverse is in effect: Smith hits a relative dud with Seven Pounds, which now stands at the $62M mark after three weeks and is not poised to take in much more than $80M domestically. Meanwhile, Cruise is pulling in nearly identical figures with his own recent release, Valkyrie. And, going back just a year, Cruise’s Lions for Lambs bombed with a paltry domestic cumulative total of $15M. To throw one last “A-lister” into the mix, Tom Hanks has followed the exact same trend: a phenomenal string of around seven $100M+ and $200M+ blockbusters concluded by a contemporary (relative) bomb—in his case, Charlie Wilson’s War. These numbers, among several other factors, support the notion that American box office performance does not directly hinge upon a film’s A-list cast—and, that any correlation therein is more likely the result of studios sweetening already buzz-worthy films with some seemingly buzz-worthy actors for the sake of selling DVD’s to the uninitiated elderly and foreign markets. However, when it comes to $100M+ films, there is one prominent exception: Adam Sandler. For the most part, when you see a Sandler film, you know exactly what you’re getting—and that expectation has been reinforced so strongly by his steady resumé of moderately-appraised releases that his films have almost never deviated from cumulative domestic totals of $100M.

At this point, you’re probably thinking: “So what? Isn’t it obvious that films sometimes perform poorly regardless of whom they star—likely due to poor timing combined with an off-key marketing campaign? End of story.” Fortunately for an editorial’s sake, there’s a lot more to it than that—a lot of interesting things are at work here. Let us first begin by taking a look at the poster for Smith’s recent Seven Pounds: The studios were so extremely confident, primarily due to the success of the similarly-toned Happyness, that his name alone would sell tickets that they literally decided to put him, and just him, on the film’s posters—seriously, just him wearing a suit and staring at you. They didn’t even bother properly pitching it (beyond highlight a few vague words in the background)—instead, they wrote “From the director of The Pursuit of Happyness.” Studio executives were so confident in the movie’s ability to parallel the success of Happyness that they didn’t even bother traditionally marketing it to potential audiences. They simply reduced their campaign to: “Hey, it’s like that other film—no, really—now go out and see it.” And, let’s not even start with the offensive ambiguity of the film’s trailers… What this anecdote does, at minimum, is help to affirm the wide-spread belief that studios genuinely believe that A-list stars, more often than not, are the driving force behind big-budget vehicles. As fellow FSR writer Kevin Carr so concisely put it: “It seems that the folks covering the Hollywood inside think that people are so stupid that they don’t know a good movie from a bad movie. They also assume that people instantly react to star power, regardless of the movie being a turd bigger than a cocker spaniel.” Carr’s spot-on.

So Smith, Cruise, and Hanks have recently had relative box office bombs, and the folks behind Seven Pounds (namely, the marketing crew at Columbia Pictures) believe little in your ability to think for yourself. But, so what? Well, here’s where things get interesting: Recently, a director has emerged so harshly against the grain with his obscure casting choices, and has been met with such a great degree success regardless of those choices, that he has—arguably single-handedly—lead the redefinition of the blockbuster. That man is none other than Zack Snyder. Now, I know that it is a little presumptuous to assume that the currently-pending Watchmen will be a blockbuster, but I really don’t think that I’m going out on much of a limb when I throw that assumption out there—the film’s current fanfare, particularly that which has been so passionately vocalized online, speaks for itself. His already-released blockbuster, 300, however, elucidates my point quite nicely: It starred a somewhat-known Gerard Butler, whose most financially successful film before 300 was 2003’s $65M-grossing Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. But, more importantly, Butler was among a cast comprised of the truly obscure: Lena Headey, David Wenham, Rodrigo Santoro, and Dominic West.

Now, before I continue, please remember that “obscure” doesn’t mean “unknown.” Instead, think of it more as a producer’s term meaning “this person doesn’t look particularly tested—they have neither a particularly large fan base nor a particularly large body of work to make them notably marketable.” On that note, I highly doubt that the aforementioned cast was ringing any bells for the average moviegoer when they first went in to see 300. I’d also wager that, to this day, those actors still don’t rank high in any of those moviegoers’ mental celebrity registrars. But, now for the numbers: Against a reported budget of a mere $65M, 300 went on to pull in an impressive $210M domestically and an additional whopping $245M overseas. Warner Bros., the film’s distributor, clearly learned a thing or two from 300’s financial success and decided to green-light Snyder’s follow-up feature, Watchmen, with a slightly-expanded budget of $100M but with an equally as obscure cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Billy Crudup, and Carla Gugino. Granted, Crudup and Gugino might have a subtle and respectable body of work behind them, but they are a far cry from what anyone would currently consider a “blockbuster property.”

Clearly, Warner Bros. realized how much money they could save on their tentpoles’ budgets by not paying A-listers (or anyone close to an A-lister) after the box office success of 300, and consequently exercised that option with Watchmen. There is, of course, more to such a decision than merely reducing budget—Zack Snyder and his casting directors quite likely found the utmost suitable actors to play their respective parts. And, in all honesty, this is how every movie should be cast: forsake the big names for a better casted—and, consequently, a better acted—film. If an A-lister happens to perfectly fit the bill for a certain role, then by all means go ahead budget him or her in, but certainly do not consistently resort to $20M A-listers in hopes of guaranteeing some sort of a box office success. That’s just crazy talk. I strongly believe that some kudos should be sent the way of Snyder and WB for going with narrative-appropriate casting choices instead of marketing-appropriate casting choices.

With Watchmen seemingly poised to be met with a box office success similar to that of 300, the other major studios will soon have some very hard-hitting facts on their hands to finally confront—that is, if they have any desire to stop releasing expensive bombs (with inflated budgets that pay out $10M+ stars), then naïvely blaming those financial failures on innocent scapegoats (ie. hard-working directors and writers). Once Watchmen is released, and it proves itself financially viable, I’m quite certain that the industry will take that success—combined with 300’s—as enough evidence to finally start rethinking casting, as a whole, for their blockbusters down the line. I have a good feeling that the epic blockbuster as we know it is about to change for the better; casting budgets will be reduced, thus resulting in more money for greater and more realistic story-telling, and films will finally be casted for the right reasons.

A Much Closer Look: The Wrestler

Julian Dean Shapiro — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:44:21 +0000

For those of you living under a rock for the past month, here’s a plot synopsis of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler: Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), a retired professional wrestler, searches for the love of the two women (Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood) closest to him—yet also the most inaccessible to him—after living a life in which the only love he chose to embrace came from paying audiences. As he comes to terms with his aging physique, The Ram’s struggle to grasp and define these fragile relationships causes him to reevaluate love outside of the physically-demanding sport of professional wrestling.

The performances in this film are mesmerizingly on-target. And, without ever diving too deeply into the redundancy of melodrama, The Wrestler manages to exude just the right amount of sentimentality to come across as whole-heartedly genuine while intimately evaluating the relationships that The Ram chooses to confront. On an intriguing side-note, Rourke’s real-life, fifty-six-year-old nipped/tucked face substructures his physical performance quite well—he seems remarkably incapable of facial animation. This surgical side-effect played its part ingeniously when it came time for him to shed a few tears in a scene in which he pours his battered heart out to his estranged daughter, Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). Those tears contrasted his wooden face so starkly that his performance veritably paralleled his self-description as a “broken-down piece of meat.” Wood’s performance, along with Marisa Tomei’s turn as an aging, parent-by-day, stripper-by-night, love interest of The Ram’s is every bit as welcomingly raw as Rourke’s; every word is as elegantly spoken as it should be and every gesture is as genuine as the life The Ram so badly wants to claim. Anything else that I could write about this film would not only be redundant in a journalistic sense, but has undoubtedly been written far more in-depth in innumerable other reviews—the vast majority of which praise the film as much as I. So, I’ll do you a favor and summarize nearly every single review on this film: go out and see it.

It’s clear that The Wrestler is nearly universally appraised as one of the near-perfect films of the year. And, now that that’s out of the way, I can draw attention to its inadvertent tangent to a much broader issue within contemporary cinema—and within the circle of critics by which cinema is both routinely dignified and appraised. To explain my forthcoming point, let us first take a moment to obverse the similarities between Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading: they are both incredibly well-acted, directed to an absolute tee, paced deliberately slowly (sometimes a little too slowly for my tastes), and they conclude with a significant lack of closure (which is completely fine, but it’s a similarity that I want to point out). Essentially, The Wrestler left me with the feeling that Aronofsky took a huge chapter out of the Coen book before he began production on what is now considered to be his best film, and one of this year’s best as well. The parallel between these two films elucidates my point: Both films could have inarguably benefited from more excitement—a bit more of a punch, if you will. The Wrestler spends so much of its time intimately relating the audience to The Ram’s tolling profession as a wrestler, and to his dejected life as a solitary man, that the film ultimately hinges upon the supposition that The Ram’s career and personal life are sufficiently interesting to warrant such an extremely introspective look (fortunately, they are.) Burn After Reading, on the other hand, hinges upon its plot’s darkly comedic aspects combined with its bold casting choices (namely Pitt as a complete idiot). In short, both of these films forsake traditional narrative structure (read: suspense) for an egotistical “look at how well I put this together” self-back-patting.

The truth, however, is that sometimes a film needs to be more than a finely-crafted assemblage; sometimes inventive cinematography, flawless performances, and convincing dialogue are not enough to truly make a film entertaining for someone who isn’t an industry insider, a die-hard film fanatic, or a critic. Uninterested action fanboys and romance fangirls aside, I would argue that there is still a significant amount of adult moviegoers who look at a film like Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading and think to themselves: “Great, that was a very well done film. It’s hard to critique it based on its artistic merit—but, the truth is, it really wasn’t that fun to watch. It was no ‘Dark Knight.’” I’d further argue that when the average moviegoer comes to this conclusion, they subsequently feel that to articulate such a critique would be to go against the grain so sharply that their credibility as a critic would be nullified. And, that is the catch-22 of a film as emotionally beautiful and as true to life as The Wrestler or as ingeniously acted and as perfectly casted as Burn After Reading; to critique an otherwise perfectly-crafted film for a lack of the oft-expected cinematic gravity and white-knuckled suspense is to be considered immature, naïve, simple-minded, or simply disrespectful as a film critic. How unfortunate this is—yet, intriguingly, such a response is still never truly enough to earn these films a low grade from almost any critic.

Ultimately, I’m left with the following questions: Am I essentially lying to myself that these films are masterpieces simply because of the pleasure I receive from watching their traditional cinematic cogs work together so seamlessly in an industry in which dirt (read: Friedberg and Seltzer) runs free? Is it merely by a contrast that I enjoy these films? Put another way, if every Hollywood movie were—at the bare minimum—as well-crafted as The Wrestler or Burn After Reading, would these two particular films be in the “IMDB Bottom 100” list of that hypothetical heap (due to their aforementioned lack of traditional suspense)? Would they be the Disaster Movies of their time? Or is all of this merely petty sensationalist talk resulting from an innate, childish impatience? In the end, that’s for you—the viewer—to truly decide.

Film School Rejects » Julian Dean Shapiro

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