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Culture Warrior: What is Hitchcockian Suspense?

Landon Palmer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:30:00 +0000

In a conversation with Dr. Cole Abaius while he was formulating his thoughts on spoiling and The Fourth Kind, he assessed the effectiveness of the scare tactics within the recent trend of found footage filmmaking in the horror genre. This past September when I reviewed Paranormal Activity at Fantastic Fest, I praised the film for ascribing to the “Hitchcock 101 School of Filmmaking” in that it achieves its frightening effect through revealing as little as possible. Having recently reassessed Psycho in my “Horror 1960″ post and while being surrounded by this continuously popular new brand of horror filmmaking, Cole brought up the idea that found footage horror filmmaking might not actually be employing Hitchcockian suspense at all—or, if it does, it’s a filtered, cheaper, and simpler definition of the term that’s come to be accepted when discussing horror and suspense.

Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense (not the Master of Horror, as they guy technically only made two horror films—Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963)) certainly advocated a faith in audience imagination, allowing a moment to potentially make any film far scarier through imagined, anticipated fears rather than the potential disappointment of something less terrifying being manifested on screen. He implied more than he exhibited, and this was central to the chilling effectiveness of many of his films. Hitchcock gave us a detail here and there, and our minds filled in the rest.

Not only was this style a product of shrewd directorial restraint, but it was part and parcel of the times as well. Hitchcock’s films existed before the ratings system, and thus were subject to the censorial force of the Production Code Administration (also known as the Hays Code). Movies could be released without a Code seal, but through the stigma this caused such films would often have trouble finding theaters which would be willing to show them. It was also understood that the big studio films with big stars that often characterized Hitchcock’s work had far too much riding on them not to be released with Production Code approval. So Hitchcock articulated stories of obsession, murder, and sexual frustration with innuendo and implication rather than blatant exhibition of content. Not that Hitchcock wouldn’t have employed such restraint and trust in audience imagination regardless, but such factors help make his films so rich and enduring. And several of his films seem even more subversive as a result—movies like Vertigo (1958), which chronicled the obsession of a misogynistic stalker, and in the process subverting the nice-guy everyman persona of Jimmy Stewart, or Rope (1948), whose central protagonists are read today as being a homosexual couple.

The point here is that restraint wasn’t a tactic Hitchcock used only to create suspense, but permeated many aspects of his filmmaking and was determined by factors both creative (interior) and social (exterior). But is restraint the central aspect to the effectiveness of his type of suspense? Is the act of letting audience imagination take the reigns all it takes to be characterized as Hitchcockian? If this was the case, found footage horror films like Paranormal Activity can very accurately be called successors of Hitchcockian suspense, as they no doubt rely on the audience’s ability to infer what they don’t show rather than in an exhibition of horrifying images that they do show. The demon is terrifying because he’s never revealed. Same with the witch in The Blair Witch Project, or only seeing bits and pieces of the alien beast in the first half of Cloverfield.

This is the definition we as a filmgoing culture have, for the most part, arrived at a consensus on when it comes to Hitchcockian suspense. There’s good reason for this, as the man himself discussed at length this restrained aspect of his process, and such stylistic choices are easily identifiable within much of his canon. But this definition does in fact reduce and simplify how Hitchcock achieved suspense in most of his filmmaking.

Restraint implies minimalism, and Hitchcock was hardly a minimalist, and not every horror film or thriller that uses restraint comes across as Hitchcockian. What we think of as Hitchcockian suspense today, in which fear is induced through minimal revelation and an ambiguity allowing for audience interpretation, was something only occasionally practiced by Hitchcock himself. I can’t think of a Hitchcock film besides The Birds that ends on a note of ambiguity or contains a mystery that isn’t revealed. Rather, what Hitchcock was talking about can be illustrated best in a scene from his early British film Sabotage (1936, you can watch it here starting at 5:50 and continuing here) in which a boy is assigned to deliver a reel of film from one location to another, and he doesn’t know—while the audience does know—that a bomb exists in the film can. So we watch him go through his lengthy, banal commute while we are being totally suspended waiting for the bomb to go off. (An excerpt on this scene is featured in the nitrate film explanation montage in Inglourious Basterds, and QT also homages this scene through the iris reveal of the bomb under Eli Roth’s chair in the movie theater at the end).

Hitchcockian suspense can’t be defined as mere restraint of audience knowledge, but a careful, intricate management of the differentiation between what the audience knows and the characters know (for more information about this practice, consult his lengthy interview on Sabotage in Hitchcock/Truffaut). If we know there’s a bomb and the character doesn’t, it’s suspense; but if neither the audience nor the characters know, it’s surprise (or, to put more relevantly, a jump scare). Ambiguity and audience imagination takes a surprisingly small role in this process. It’s more about audience control. It all sounds so simple, it takes a masterful filmmaker to really pull it off. Yet these found footage horror films are released and critics like me take the bait by calling them Hitchcockian, which simply isn’t true.

I get excited when any new horror film employs restraint and trusts audience imagination, and the success of Paranormal Activity should display the powerful effectiveness of movies that do this well. It’s a welcome relief and a return to classical form after torture porn’s many manifestations of the mistaken idea that the more you show, the more terrifying it is. But Hitchcokian suspense is called Hitchcockian suspense for a reason: because it’s a means to an end that the man himself achieved and perfected time and again, one that very few other filmmakers have accomplished.

Of course, the man himself explains it better than I ever could:

What do you think?

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Culture Warrior: Slow Isn’t Boring

Landon Palmer — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:27:47 +0000

Pacing is a tricky thing to pull off in movies. It takes a truly talented filmmaker (and editor) to maintain a rate of movement, events, or forward-moving plotting that sustains audience interest while avoiding the potential to overwhelm. In an era where ADHD music video editing has become a decades-worn norm (with, admittedly, a great deal of its own unique artistic merit), a fast pace can become a fruitful means for audience engagement or an all-too-evident handicap trying to cover up a film’s inadequacies through distraction—in other words, it could run the gamut between Trainspotting and Crank 2, or from Martin Scorsese to recent Tony Scott, or…well, you get the picture.

But what’s even harder to pull off is the effective slow-paced film. It’s not something that comes around very often, but when it works it can result in some magnificent cinematic revelations.

I’ve been guilty of this just as much as anybody, but lately the use of the word “slow”—by critics and everyday filmgoers—to negatively characterize a film has started to bother me, because “slow” is so often used simply as a substitute for “boring.” The word slow as a descriptive term for a film’s pacing has no inherent qualitative distinction; it’s simply a description with no judgment call immediately attached to it. But slow has instead evolved into a stigma, as if the presence of slow pacing at any point in a film is automatically a disparaging element to the quality of the film as a whole. This implies—through, I’m sure, no intention of the orator or writer using the word—that fast-paced (or even moderately-paced) films warrant superior merit simply by the very structure of their pacing, regardless of strengths and weaknesses contained in the film overall. To use slow disparagingly ignores the quite apparent reality that cinema potentially embodies an endless variety of approaches to pacing and, more importantly, that some films are (*gasp*) meant to be slow.

Okay, I’ll step back a little at this point. Depending on the context, “slow” can be an appropriate means of descriptive criticism. If a slow pace stunts the film as a whole, isn’t appropriate to its tone or story, or evidently doesn’t work as intended, “slow” can be a more accurate delineation than “boring” with knowledge of the filmmaker’s intent in mind. But this knowledge is the deciding factor. If a movie is intended to be slowly paced, and comes across as such, then this is a sign of success on the filmmaker’s part, not failure. To dismiss a movie constructed in slow pace through intent deliberation becomes self-defeating from the outset, for if this intended pacing is dismissed and the spectator/critic can’t even meet this intention halfway, what the filmmaker is attempting to achieve with such a pace, or any other merits of the film therein, are rendered impossible to broach. It’s also stating the obvious and sounds dumb. To criticize a deliberately slow movie for being such is like criticizing a horror movie for being scary—it becomes a delineation of what a film isn’t rather than what it is, and ultimately filters down to matters of personal taste rather than qualitative, informed criticism. Upon closer examination, it’s evident that there are many merits of slow-paced filmmaking.

I recently Netflix’d Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (2007), a film about the philandering patriarch of a Mennonite family living in Mexico. With rural Mexico beautifully captured in the film’s setting and the laborious Amish-lite lifestyle typical of the Mennonites accurately portrayed here, it makes sense that a fast pace would be a disservice to the subject matter at hand. So Reygadas here employs a pacing that matches the lifestyle of the characters, taking in the sounds and slow-moving reality of nature that stands in stark contrast to the metropolitan lifestyle of the filmgoer that would most likely see this film because of its limited theatrical release. The end result is an honest complementary style to the film’s story and a rare look into a way of life unfamiliar to most audiences. The slow pace allows one to be immersed in a time and place to such an extent that the honking of car horns and the noise of intrusive technology will come as a shock when leaving the theater, or a welcome contrast when entering it. To use a more familiar example, many of my friends who have come to love AMC’s Mad Men initially had a cautious or even negative reaction to the show’s deliberate pacing until giving in. Being a television show that contains an attractive, even cinematic approach to visuals, the slow pace allows audiences to take in the illustrious scenery as well as establish the slower pace of life of the early 1960s (portraying the slower pace of life existing even in the metropolitan areas of the past).

In addition to helping portray a time and place or subculture accurately, the slow pace also allows for a potentially hypnotic tone through the framing of beautiful images when the right filmmaker is taking the reigns. Kubrick was probably best at this, staging prolonged shots that came across more as photographs than moving images, and I struggle to think of a director who incorporated more stunning imagery in every single shot than the perfectionist that was Kubrick. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) and Gus Van Sant’s recent work before Milk (his “return” to indie in Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005), and Paranoid Park (2007)) contained pacing that not only slowed, but sometimes came to a halt, which allowed for some rare, unique cinematic moments and, if for nothing else, surmount whatever other flaws exist (i.e., Van Sant’s sometimes suffocating pretension) with an intricate depiction of sustained, arrestingly photographed imagery. This allows the frame to become like a piece of art displayed in a museum in that we are allowed to examine its details at our will and on our own watch rather than fall to the dictation of the director/editor. There’s a reason that the most stunning of these slow-paced works were photographed in 2.35:1—the CinemaScope ratio is a perfectly epic means to contain such artful filmmaking.

But besides setting-appropriate pacing and the potential for manifesting beautiful imagery, the most important asset of the slow-paced film is its ability to manipulate time in a way that only cinema can. Say what you want about the patience-testing pace of a film like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), cinema’s ability to make a two-hour film that takes place over several decades actually feel like it takes place over several decades is an impressive and underutilized feat, unavailable in any other art form. Cinema’s ability to speed up time and manipulate chronology (e.g., Goodfellas) is complemented by its equally potent potential to slow moments down to an even more measured pace than reality (and I’m not just talking about the use of slow-motion). Without doubt the king of this style of filmmaking was Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, who with films like Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) had an uncanny ability to meticulously slow time down, as time itself stopped—and our lives, in turn, halted—while experiencing one of his films (indicated by his appropriately-titled autobiography Sculpting in Time). The end result contained an observation of details usually ignored by most films and overshadowed by the faster pace of reality. Many are turned off by Tarkovsky’s films, but I believe that those giving his films, and other slow films like these, a chance can embolden an experience truly unique and exclusive to cinema, one in which the moving image can be so immersive to the degree that we get lost in it, and thus encounter details—and even, sometimes, revelations—which are hardly apparent elsewhere.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Horror 1960

Landon Palmer — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:34:33 +0000

Although Halloween has come and gone, the FSR universe of readers and contributors alike have hardly satiated their horror fix, so this week’s Culture Warrior presents three movies that were major game-changers for the genre.

1960 saw the horror film, and filmgoing at large, change dramatically and permanently. Long gone was the horror of the literary monster that characterized 1930s Universal classics personified by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and the dawn of a new decade in turn also said goodbye to the 1950s B-movie creature features. In 1960 horror switched its gaze to a far more terrifying direction: inward. Horror now focused on the horrific capacities of the human being, on the grotesque monster potentially inside all of us. No longer would horror be relegated to B-movie status, instead enabled with the capacity, through depiction of psychological trauma and inner monstrosity, for a unique kind of profundity that other genres couldn’t even come close to. Three different films from three different countries, all released in 1960, manifested the new brand of horror in fascinating ways. The following films are, without a doubt, essentials of modern horror.

USA: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)

Hitchcock’s magnum opus was a game-changer on many levels. Within the horror genre itself, it challenged expectations by removing villainy from a one-dimensional locale of pure evil and replaced it with all the vulnerability and nuance entailed in being human. Like the still-reverberating horrors of WWII, Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates embodied an evil so banal that it couldn’t be ignored or dismissed by the one-dimensionality implied by the “evil” label. Bates represented something different: the evil made possible through insecurity, through a fear that projected more fear onto those who encounter him. What’s so horrifying about Bates’s evil is that it’s hardly evil at all. His actions, rather, seem something, given the right conditioning and abuse, that any impressionable mind is capable of embodying. Evil in Psycho is not a brute force that can be wiped out without further concern, it’s instead an unstoppable presence that moves its way through people and culture. Bates proves that being meek or (seemingly) sincere is not antithetical to manifesting horrible actions, that the villain can simultaneously be the victim of devices far beyond himself. The world of Psycho is the world of the grey, refusing the simplistic, irrelevant delineation implied in a perceived war between the opposing Biblical forces of good and evil.

Psycho also changed the course of filmmaking narratively, articulating its confusion of good/evil movie logic by getting rid of its perceived protagonist shortly after the first act break, thus establishing a no-rules brand of mainstream horror. This extended to a drastic change in film spectatorship, as venues which previously allowed patrons to come and go as they please (audiences often bought tickets at any time of day and would walk into the middle of a movie to wait for the movie to end, start over, and come back around to where they began) were now forced to make audiences come exclusively as the movie started, refusing latecomers so as to not ruin the shock value of the film’s well-kept secret. Every serious moviegoer that appreciates a quiet, orderly theater is in Mr. Hitchcock’s debt for this.

UK: Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)

Sure, while Hitchcock explored voyeurism to disturbing degrees with Rear Window, Vertigo (anybody that can make Jimmy Stewart a creepster is doing something right) and even Psycho, nobody had the brass balls Michael Powell had to depict a sexual obsession and psychosis as troubling as this. I’ll defend any day of the week Psycho’s stance as a classic, but one has to admit that its scares have become so iconic that it’s lost a great deal of its shock value. Powell (this time without his directing cohort Emeric Pressburger), however, made Peeping Tom fifty years ago and the film is still as discomfiting as it ever was in its exhibition of a film production assistant who captures his murders of women on film, complete with a mirror beside the camera so that his victims may witness their own final moments of life. The psychology of obsession, misogyny, and sexual inadequacy aside, Peeping Tom is at its most confrontational when it frames these murders from the first-person perspective of the eye of the camera, thus making this film the forerunner for the recent trend of found footage horror filmmaking as established by Paranormal Activity and [Rec].

Seeing murders through the camera’s eye, of course, is not the same as seeing it from the murderer’s, so the focalization of the frame makes the camera itself as complicit in the act of violence as the murderer. Enjoying this film can be a complex and troubling experience, as Peeping Tom’s audience was one of the firsts to ever be confronted with their own desire to witness violence on behalf of genre, and seeing death face-to-face (despite the fact that it’s staged) implicitly makes us and the murderer one in the same. Added interpretive value comes from the tripod-knife he uses to kill his victims, making for quite the penetrating phallic symbol (read feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” for more on the typically masculine complicit violence of the audience found in films like these). Although I’d be wary of a remake, I’d honestly be interested in what Peeping Tom would look like with an update to the seriously invasive DIY culture of voyeurism through digital technology/media, YouTube, and social networking sites.

France: Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju)

Where Psycho and Peeping Tom make the monster human, Eyes Without a Face turns the human into a monster. In an innovative spin on the classic mad scientist formula, Franju’s film finds a surgeon routinely hunting down beautiful women so that their faces can serve as sources of surgical transplant for his daughter’s face, which was disfigured in a tragic automobile accident. The film serves as a scathing critique of the lengths people will go to achieve allegedly objective standards of beauty, but its real enduring appeal lies in Franju’s eclectic filmmaking which finds him altering between slick, elegant, assured style and gritty, visceral gore. It’s a beautiful contradiction that prevents its spectator from ever getting too comfortable in their seat, priming them for the inevitable squirming that entails the narrative trajectory of this film.

So many horror films are indebted to Eyes Without a Face that it’s impossible to name them all, but it’s undeniable that the disquieting surgery scene stands the predecessor for visceral horror at large (see, at your own risk, Franju’s short “Blood of the Beasts” (1949) for a primer on his relentless depiction of violence (it’s possibly a Holocaust allegory, but it’s undeniably his unique brand of horror)) and David Cronenberg’s visceral style especially (e.g., Dead Ringers). Also, the mask Christiane wears allegedly inspired Michael Meyers’s immortal façade. But what places Eyes Without a Face thematically alongside Psycho and Peeping Tom is that it employs the mad scientist and takes away the madness. Of course the surgeon’s actions are unforgivable, but he is never depicted as psychotic, and, through his daughter’s tragedy, the film even approaches empathy for the motive of his actions, if not approval. The true protagonist and antagonist of this film, like the delineation of good and evil between the three of these films, is made indistinguishable, even irrelevant, as no real understanding can be attained through dismissing society’s agents of horror as evil.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Good and Bad Biopics

Landon Palmer — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:42:16 +0000

The successful biopic is something that takes a truly masterful hand to accomplish. A lifetime, like history itself, contains no inherent narrative—no arc or three-act structure—yet, like in studying history, we narratavize the exceptional human life in order to better understand it. In biopics this involves a lot of condensing, creative liberties, and difficult executive decision, requiring delicate filmmakers to execute properly and convincingly.

Biopic is also sometimes an elusive definition, as not every movie based on a true story should be considered a biopic of its lead character, and it’s often difficult to distinguish the two. Capote, for instance, despite the title, is hardly a biopic of Truman Capote, but specifically portrays the writing of In Cold Blood. Yet one could argue that it is a biopic because it covers one of the most significant, or at least the most notorious, event in that author’s life, and many of the best biopics often cover such significant events rather than focus on the life as a whole (Ed Wood comes to mind).

But a fascinating life story does not necessarily make a good biopic. This weekend’s new release, Mira Nair’s Amelia—an inevitable biopic of Amelia Earhart and a clunky mess of a film disguised as Oscar bait—shows that the interest of the subject does not entail a successful telling of the story; just because we find her fascinating does not mean the filmmakers should suppose we will find her narrativized life story fascinating from the get-go. Too often the formula of the biopic is to cram as many important life incidents as possible into the running time while treading on the appeal of the character, which is why these films are so often better-known for the oft-recognized embodiments of the individual by the lead performers rather than the merits of the films themselves, a conundrum that often allows for incredible performances within weak, directionless movies (e.g., Jamie Foxx in Ray). Too often do biopics do no more than tread on the magnetism of the life portrayed and equally, if not more so, on the performer portraying that figure. This practice is especially prevalent in the musical biopic, a genre all its own that has made recognizable some of the genre’s most apparent clichés: overcoming a tragic event/adversity/poverty in childhood to achieve recognized musical talent and fame until an addiction (drug, sex, alcohol) is fought and (sometimes) overcome. It’s funny that a single unique, exceptional life story can be told in the exact same way time and again.

When a biopic succumbs in total to these clichés, often enough these true stories don’t ring true at all. Some filmmakers don’t realize that a movie based on fact is not enough, that a “based on a true story” title card can’t be expected to be all that is required to suspend disbelief. All movies—be they based on fact or works of pure fiction—need some degree of conviction in order to come off convincingly. Don’t just tell us your story is true, make us feel the truth, the reality, the immediacy of an allegedly important life story. Convince us that we have something to learn and gain from observing this person.

We deserve better biopics, and several trends need to be wiped off the map for that to happen.

First of all, don’t try to contain an entire life in your movie. This is the first big misstep, thinking that a life story can be successfully and adequately told in the running time of a film. This brings with it inherent contradictions, as any life story usually necessitates creative liberties for narrative focus, so trying to fit as much information into a life story while condensing that story usually results in people nitpicking your facts. Admit from the outset that you can’t fit an entire life in your film, and the story that truly needs to be told becomes a lot easier to recognize. Usually biopics portray famous people, so it should be assumed that the audience knows about the person portrayed to some degree going in, so under that assumption, there’s a lot of groundwork that really doesn’t need to be laid. We don’t need to know these characters from birth to death—some biopics manage to tell us a lot about a person’s youth without portraying it through subtlety and inference. Bronson, Milk, and Control are three recent, and three very different, biopics which focused on a small portion of their characters’ lives, and as a result they gave us coherent, compelling stories and convincing cases of the importance of the figures portrayed. They were self-sustaining, not overwhelming.

Second to this, embrace creative liberties. Filmmaking has an inherent fiction. Putting Will Smith in front of a camera and calling him Muhammad Ali is a lie in of itself, so let go of any loyalties you feel to each little detail and work on telling the best story possible. Sometimes making a fiction out of a real person approaches an essential truth about them that a strict-to-the-details story can’t achieve, like the meandering psychedelic mosaic that is I’m Not There, a film that admits from the outset that some famous lives elude understanding the more one investigates, and that one person can in fact be an amalgamation of many.

Next, don’t be afraid of making your figure an asshole. Everybody’s human, and most often even the most beloved public figures (or, rather, especially the most beloved public figures) make shitty decisions. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and even Amelia Earhart did things in their lives that justifiably made them, at least temporarily, assholes. Because the story is so often meant to be inspirational, we hold the lives of these famous people (especially if they have passed on, silenced from expressing counterpoint to their cinematic double) to such a high regard that we become timid to shed any negative light on them at all. If you want to portray a life, don’t make them a saint, a figure so pure and unapproachable that even their shortcomings are framed as virtues. Show us the true life, warts and all. Instead these movies deal with issues of infidelity, irresponsibility, and drug abuse with kids’ gloves, diving in briefly and then emerging as if there are no long-term consequences when famous people commit such acts.

Lastly, lose the destiny crap. Nobody is destined to become the world’s greatest country singer or the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. It takes a great deal of hard work, failure, compromise, ass-kissing, and most of all, sheer coincidence for infamy to happen. But ever since John Ford’s The Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) biopics have framed their characters solely through hindsight, as if every event of their life was a preordained essential step towards their inevitable achievement of success. Nobody is famous solely because of their talent. These figures rose about at a time when masses needed something that in turn made such a figure magnetic, larger-than-life, turning Amelia Earhart into Amelia Earhart. Timing is essential to cultural resonance, and it’s a process more complex and more significant than some connect-the-dots achievement towards notoriety—there’s a reason it happened at this particular place and at this specific time and that’s what makes it interesting.

The central flaw and contradiction of Amelia is that it shows, through Richard Gere’s character, how celebrity is manufactured through media manipulation and commerce, yet the movie itself succumbs to the same clouding mythology that enables such a cult of the celebrity in the first place, elevating the figure being filmed to a status above the flawed, mortal human being while simultaneously relegating them to nothing more than an icon of delicately constructed significance rather than a fallible, imperfect, multidimensional personality. We don’t go to a biopic to see a famous person in the same way we’ve seen them everywhere else in media—we expect and deserve something more intimate and real.

What do you think? What are some biopics that you think work well and why?

Culture Warrior: Through a Child’s Eyes

Landon Palmer — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:16:59 +0000

I try to avoid getting all autobiographical in my posts, but when discussing Where the Wild Things Are I really can’t avoid it. When I was around fourteen years old I was certain I wanted to become a filmmaker (that certainty has since changed), and my childhood is basically the reason for this. Like many children, I lived largely in my own head, preoccupying myself with the peculiar adventures and creatures of my imagination that manifested an immediate reality that seemed to make so much more sense and feel far more profoundly real than gazing onto my playroom through the objective eyes of adulthood. With the accompaniment of toys, costumes, and the occasional friend, the power of youthful imagination enabled an improvised, lucid creation of characters and narratives that could seem to go on forever. This practice, of course, is better known as playing, but it often felt more like storytelling.

Filmmaking in many ways seems like a natural extension of storytelling during playtime. As a child you use the development of characters and narratives to visualize and act out specific scenarios appealing to you. Filmmaking is this same practice, or at least this same vague idea, applied with time, deliberation, structure, and knowledge. Some of cinema’s most famous filmmakers have cited childhood as an inspiration for their eventual careers. Spielberg, who made amateur films as a kid and often uses childhood as a major theme in his films, has repeatedly stated in so many words that his career is an attempt to recapture the imagination of childhood, or at least make good on that imaginative potential.

Manifesting the unlimited imaginative potential of childhood is, of course, simply one of many ways to utilize the moving image, but the head-in-the-clouds ideal of cinema as an object that has the ability to bring dreams to life draws to mind the boundless directions the creative mind particular to childhood can reach. As a kid I had images and stories in my head, and later in life filmmaking seemed to be a way that could make those images real. Of course, it’s never that easy. Filmmaking is bound by restraints that can often limit creativity as much as it has the potential to enliven it. The boundaries of budget, time, collaboration, work hours, practicality, responsibility, and rationality don’t exactly preserve the spontaneous creative urge of youth. Perhaps the essential difference is the development of critical thinking in adulthood. Even when indulging in creative ventures, we adults question the intent and execution of our projects of imagination with skepticism and criticism, and even the most abstract and spontaneous forms of art are intent with meaning. This, of course, is a necessary practice that makes for a better artist, but it is distinctly different from the comparatively lucid, spontaneous, uncritical, and often purely emotion-driven “works of art” made throughout childhood. So attempting a film career to manifest the imagination of childhood is something of a contradiction and an impossibility, as cinema as a technical achievement involves the necessary critical capabilities of adulthood with the fueling creativity of childhood that grownup modes of thinking naturally inhibit.

It is in this context that Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s infamous children’s book achieves something truly unique, even remarkable. This is the first film in quite some time that shows how telling a story from the logical perspective of a child is not the same thing as telling a dumb story. Jonze here outlines, from the motives and actions of the characters to the larger structural perspective of the film itself, the emotional logic of childhood. The film is structured episodically—there is no specific goal or achievement outlined for the characters, rather the film is strung together with episodes of events naturally tied to instances of conflict. This is exactly the structure of childhood play, moving from one preoccupation to the next at the pace of a young attention span; here games abruptly end, and massive projects are abandoned in favor of arising conflicts or newly inspired ventures. Where the Wild Things Are presents a world that needs little explanation—from the nature of Max’s real ties to that world to details in the arrangement of the wild things’ society—for through child’s eyes the unexplained and improvised act is the one that most naturally makes sense. Childhood logic here is never illogical, and to act as a child is not the same thing as being childish.

Jonze also thankfully captures a child’s perspective without submitting to the sentimental trappings of idealizing childhood. From the outset, childhood is never presented in this film as innocent, blissful, or enviable. While childhood has potential for great joy, it has equal potential for loneliness and sorrow. The nature of play as presented in the film—especially in the war of the mud clots—involves some heavy emotional bruises and an all-too-familiar capacity for cruelty. Childhood can be a relentless and discouraging place, and (as they are, depending on interpretation, objects of Max’s imagination) the wild things act and interact with the same emotional logic of a child Max’s age, equally as prone to spontaneous bursts of positive energy as they are to overwhelming frustration with no outlet. That they are larger than life, intimidating characters with an equal capacity for compassion and cruelty makes all the more apparent the potential constructive and destructive behavior of childhood and the consequences therein (just as there are repercussions for Max biting his mother, Carol’s violent behavior amongst his brethren has sustaining negative effects). The physical breadth of the wild things accompanied with their childlike behavior reminds us that as a kid, nothing seems innocent, pure, or inconsequential. We can get weary and hurt by the world long before we even have the cognitive capability to attempt understanding it. The wild things embody (quite literally) writ large all that is embroiled inside Max’s tiny stature.

Jonze here simply achieves something I’ve never seen before. He manages to capture the spontaneous lack of logic in childhood within an art form that, by contrast, requires a careful, deliberate process of logic every tiny step of the way (especially with a movie of this scale). It’s difficult to encapsulate exactly what Jonze here has achieved, as he seems to have tapped into something essential, something beyond cognition, something the critical capabilities of adulthood prevent me from fully coming to terms with. If anything, it was these critical adult attributes (as both movie critic and grownup) that prevented me from enjoying the film even more than I did. While many parts of this movie had me emotionally enraptured, I could never quite reach where my emotions seemed to be headed, constantly being pulled away from an emotional apex (and WTWTA is a film far more rooted in emotion than, say, rationality (which is not to be confused with plausibility)). It felt like the adult in me kept getting in the way. Never have I envied more the movie-viewing eyes of my single-digit self.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Found Footage Filmmaking

Landon Palmer — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:25:57 +0000

If there is ever a sleeper hit in 2009, Paranormal Activity is it. Accompanied with a lackluster visual marketing campaign (lame poster, lamer trailer), the years-long shelved film is now encountering success by an intense and calculated word-of-mouth, demanding a wider release through online petitions and an exponentially increasing per-theater average to an astonishing total this weekend in the #5 spot with $7 million in only 160 theaters. The film works with its rather simple, straightforward idea of amping up the creepiness slowly and with as minimal revealing material possible (rarely these days do horror films get so much out of so little). The device this movie uses to achieve its creepiness is also simple and is becoming an increasingly familiar way to make horror films, framing the film as an archive of home-video footage made by the victims themselves.

This approach to horror arguably started with The Blair Witch Project and has been since reawakened with more recent films like Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, [Rec], its US remake Quarantine, [Rec] 2, and now Paranormal. Blair Witch ten years ago (yes, it really is ten years old) relied on a shrewd marketing campaign taking place on both the grassroots (it takes the disputed title as the first movie hyped up by the Internet) and professional levels (its trailer did accompany The Phantom Menace, after all). It also used the hype of its notoriously creepy Sundance screening to bankroll into its mainstream success. This, however, occurred when there was still a conversation going on regarding whether or not the footage was real, a conversation that ended shortly after the film’s commercial release. Inevitably, a huge backlash occurred, as many attested that believing the footage was real was integral to its effectiveness as a horror movie—without that, all you had left was nauseating camerawork and an ineffective gimmick of a concept.

As with many sleeper hits, a similar backlash will no doubt occur with Paranormal Activity, but the film seems to operate effectively as a scary movie whether or not one is duped into thinking it’s real, and it seems nobody involved with this film is trying to sell it as found footage. This I believe is indicative of a significant change in how we view fictional media objects posing as nonfiction, evidential, or found footage, and why a movie like Paranormal Activity can be released ten years after Blair Witch and use the same conceit to a much better effect.

While Blair Witch may represent progressive DIY marketing as much as it does clever (if still gimmicky) DIY filmmaking, its use of 16mm and home video footage is indicative of its status as part and parcel of a dial-up era still making the transition to the digital global neighborhood we know today. Blair Witch was part of Web 1.0, existing before YouTube, blogging and vlogging, or the many social networking sites that we use every day, enabling us to potentially express our random thoughts to people all around the globe.

Leading up to 2009 we’ve seen the collapse of grassroots and corporate worlds, lines blurred between amateur and professional sources of web content as the professionals have become able to convincingly imitate the amateurs, or the fake and staged being able to imitate what we previously accepted as real (e.g., lonelygirl15). We’re used to seeing talking heads on websites spouting varied opinions on subjects ranging from the Iran elections to Obama’s birthplace to whether or not Britney should be left alone. This remains a culture in which we’ve felt invited to turn the camera on ourselves, where our daily thoughts are worthy of dissemination as long as they don’t exceed 140 characters. Occasionally we take interest in the rare people out there documenting themselves who either have something important to say or say nothing in a compelling way—the problem is, we can’t always know where they’re coming from. Is this the puppet of a lobbyist, or is this a normal Joe just feeling the need to put his words in the ether of cyberspace? Am I being friended or followed by a person or a robot? At some point it simply doesn’t matter, as the compelling degree of the content trumps the validity or merits of the source.

We’ve done the same with documentaries, interrogating every detail and being aware of how the camera (both ideologically and aesthetically) frames an issue or the way a filmmaker stages events. Where audiences simply took the benefit of the doubt in decades before, blindly assuming that documentaries were objective documents of reality, audiences now are far keener (in healthy and in nitpicking ways) to question every little detail and seek out the documentarian’s agenda. Even Errol Morris—the anti-Michael Moore—was accused of agenda-driven filmmaking when admitting that he paid his interview subjects for last year’s Standard Operating Procedure, which is actually common practice in nonfiction filmmaking. On the other hand, we also consume narratives that are obviously fiction existing in the guise of nonfiction, as faux-doc shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation structure their laughs through shaky-camera immediacy and direct address, a format which would have been distracting for the sitcom format fifteen years ago.

There’s no way Blair Witch would have been successful today. The film would have been dismissed as fake immediately, or its veracity would have been so questioned or debated over as to render it irrelevant or label it untrustworthy. Telling a 21^st century audience “this is real” simply won’t work anymore. Why Paranormal Activity works is that it remains an effective piece of filmmaking whether or not one believes it to be a document. The “San Diego Police Dept.” header at the film’s beginning does not serve as forged evidence trying to convince the audience that the film is something it’s not (unlike the forged evidence on Blair Witch’s website), rather it simply exists to be consistent with the overall aesthetic. Paranormal Activity plugs into our culture’s acceptance that effectively pulling off the illusion of the real is not the same thing as passively accepting something as real. This film works off the notion that we’re used to normal people around the world turning the camera onto their own faces while we don’t know nor care whether or not it’s real or fake—the aesthetic is now so familiar and the content so compelling that it’s effective nonetheless. And the requirement of compelling content is probably why this approach has been so popular recently in the horror genre—there’s something exciting about the extraordinary posing as the mundane.

Culture Warrior: Responsible Film Criticism and the Case of ‘Antichrist’

Landon Palmer — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:39:16 +0000

Warning: In the interest of discussing the problem of spoilers, this article discusses the act of spoiling in criticism of the film Antichrist, a discussion which necessitates revealing spoilers. Confused, yet? So am I. Anywho, if you’re planning on seeing Antichrist, don’t read the fifth paragraph of this post.

Everybody gripes about how movie trailers reveal almost everything one would want to not know about a movie going in, sometimes spoiling plot details that occur well into the second and third act. It’s a rare and special experience to go into a movie with little to no expectations—that is not to say low expectations, but without expectations strategically shaped by advertising and materials written about films—to the point that such an experience has become an absolute anomaly. Even if one avoids press, advertising, and tweets about a film, buzz emanating from unintentionally overheard conversations, or simply shaping the atmosphere going in, is probably that hardest thing of all to avoid. I wish as much as anybody that trailers revealed less, or that I didn’t often spend the entirety of a film silently, unintentionally notifying those moments seen in the trailer and anticipating those other moments from the trailer yet to come. Nevertheless, I choose to watch trailers—sometimes multiple times—before seeing a movie. I simply enjoy watching them and believe trailers to be (like the music video) a cinematic art form all their own (e.g., the recent trailers for A Serious Man and Up in the Air). However, I’ve made the habit in recent years not to read reviews, articles, or even press kits before seeing a film, because in my own experience these can be the most potentially spoiling of a given film’s many outlets for analysis or advertisement.

Of course, it is ultimately the responsibility of the filmgoer to shape the framing of their viewing experience through an active, informed method of choosing whether or not to consume trailers or reviews before seeing a film, but this doesn’t remove the responsibility from the trailer editor or the film critic when it comes to potentially revealing too much. For movie critics in particular, revealing some plot detail is par for the course. Often occurring in the second paragraph of a review, a plot overview is often necessary to shape and qualify the criticisms and praises within the review at large. But sometimes movie critics overstep their bounds, and it remains vital, no matter the critic’s particular opinion of the film, that the review not reveal anything that may spoil essential surprises or take away from the film’s intended weight and effect beyond the simple, restrained, typical plot synopsis we’ve come to expect (spoilers are more acceptable, of course, accompanied with a warning like the one at the top of this page). Although some of us actively choose to avoid reviews or related articles until after we’ve seen the film in question, it must always be safe for a moviegoer to read everyday film criticism before deciding to venture out to the theater and spend their hard-earned cash.

The peculiar example of Antichrist seems to me a compelling case study because it represents a special situation where movie critics by and large have felt justified in revealing certain plot points within the body of their reviews that should not be known going into this film simply because their very opinion (often negative) of this film makes it seem okay.

Take Todd McCarthy’s Cannes review of the film in Variety from May. Though Variety is an industry publication often concerned with the bottom line, their early reviews sometimes set the stage for later critical consensus. For many reasons McCarthy’s review is one of the most appalling pieces of film criticism I have ever read (it must be noted that I’ve felt rather neutral about McCarthy’s criticism up to this point). Though I am not the biggest proponent of Lars von Trier’s latest provaca-film, my opinion on its merits differs from McCarthy’s significantly (particularly with his first-sentence dismissal of Antichrist as an ‘art-film fart’—jeez, with language like that you’d think he works for a movie blog or something). But my problem in this case isn’t with his particular take on the film (just as valid as anybody else’s) or his unfortunate rhetorical approach, but rather his warning-free revelations of the specifics of Antichrist.

The Spoilery Fifth Paragraph: One of my problems with this write-up is McCarthy’s detailed partial revelation of Dafoe’s character’s fate and Gainsbourg’s character’s incapacitating him through some sort of abuse of his genitals, before not-so-cryptically mentioning a violent act Gainsbourg performs on her own genitalia. To McCarthy’s credit, he doesn’t explicitly state what happens, but mentioning these occurrences at all creates an aura of expectation not intended or made available through the film’s advertising and promotion. Combined with similar revelations made in reviews by other major publications, the new Lars von Trier film suddenly became the “genital mutilation” movie or, somewhat inaccurately in its voyage through the rumormill, the “castration” movie. McCarthy even reveals the source of the film’s now-famous line “Chaos Reigns,” a line that only works as an in-joke to those that have seen it, and a polarizing moment indicative of the larger polarized response this film has received. Laughable or not, the “Chaos Reigns” moment (a line which could potentially come this year’s “I drink your milkshake”) is only effective (forcibly taking the spectator out of the movie or leaving them curiously, if not firmly, in their seats) if it is unanticipated.

Those of us hearing or reading such reviews and gaining such knowledge with or without seeking now can’t help but see the film under this rubric, helplessly anticipating what is to come in a way that inevitably and unavoidably hinders our perspective of what comes before the film’s climax, framing our expectations in a way the filmmaker never intended. Yes, what happens in Antichrist is gruesome, but the particulars of this challenging material should remain hidden in reviews like McCarthy’s so as to give this film the chance to play to its full, intended effect. Film critics, regardless of or despite their own take on a film, have an essential responsibility to write in such a way that still allows the film experience to still potentially belong to the reader when they see it for themselves.

I get it, Antichrist is an extreme film, and it’s human nature to share the witnessing of something as demanding, graphic, unusual, challenging, pretentious, ham-fisted and even unintentionally funny as Antichrist with others. In a social setting, the sharing of such details would be acceptable, but in legitimate film criticism it is never acceptable. Even if a given critic thinks this film is an abomination, it doesn’t give them the right to spoil, as if there was an accepted philosophy somewhere that deemed it okay to spoil “bad” films but not “good” ones (a meaningless designation, of course, as all art is subjective, and some art can find worth outside the limitations of its own autonomous merit).

Film criticism is never meant to take the place of a spectator’s eventual opinion or experience. Good, effective, responsible film criticism contextualizes a film’s existence, gives an informed and reasoned argument on its merit and value, and sometimes even initiates or participates in an ongoing discourse on various subjects related to the film. It even, to a degree, is expected to frame the film with a set of expectations necessary to properly consume it (what so-and-so film is, what it isn’t). Responsible film criticism should not, however, replace the potential experience of the spectator. It should never look at itself as an ultimate, discussion-halting end-all opinion justifying the discussion of such details to help its case. The cinematic experience of the reader of film criticism is just as valid as that of the informed critic, and the potential of their experience should be handled with great care and respect above all else. Anybody can write a plot synopsis or a list of spoiling details. The successful film critic stands out in their ability to frame and discuss with authority filmic experience for the reader while allowing (even enabling) their readers the autonomy of the cinematic experience that they are always entitled to.

What do you think?

Culture Warrior: Cinemetropolis

Landon Palmer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:37:45 +0000

Austin is now the third major US city I’ve lived in since officially leaving the nest of my parents’ home in central Texas six years ago. After spending several years in both Los Angeles and New York before my current settlement in Weird City, I’ve had the fortunate chance of getting exposed to three very distinct cultures of cinephilia. In preparation for and anticipation of a week of sleeping, eating, and living exclusively in Austin’s uniquely cinephilic Alamo Drafthouse and Paramount Theater for the upcoming Fantastic Fest, this week’s Culture Warrior takes a look at three great American cities and their equally great movie theaters.

Los Angeles

The home of infamous movie palaces like Mann’s Chinese, Mann’s Egyptian, the ArcLight Cinerama Dome, and gigantic one-screens in Westwood frequently used to house major west coast premieres, Los Angeles is a city known for a particular type of celebration of the theatrical moviegoing experience. As evidenced by the Cinerama Dome (and the city’s many IMAX screens and various outlets for digital projection), LA is a place where innovation and the cutting-edge are par for the course in spectatorship, and bigger is always better. Since LA is the home of Hollywood, this unapologetically grandiose embrace of the event movie makes perfect sense, making every movie an experience through the very immensity of the exhibition outlets offered. LA convinces the serious moviegoer that it is criminal to not see any remotely big movie on anything less than the most intimidating screen possible. But moviegoing in LA can be an expensive hobby, so for more modest films (indies, docs, and foreign films), the city offers some smaller independent (and notably cheaper) movie theaters like Leammle’s Sunset 5 or—my personal favorite—the Los Feliz 3.

But the movie culture of LA—both in filmmaking and in filmgoing—is far too preoccupied with forward-thinking innovation and the next big “event” to have any sort of tangible long-term memory when it comes to cinema. Sure, the walls surrounding Mann’s Chinese have the names of every Best Picture winner, but this reads more as a celebration of the institution of Hollywood than an appreciation for today’s films in the context of film history. Sure, the city houses the UCLA archives and the Silent Movie Theater, but these act more as museums and artifacts of movie culture rather than serious evidence that Angeleno cinephiles are interested in retrospectives (as further evidence of this, LACMA is in the process of likely shutting down its retrospective film series). Sure, the ArcLight and the Egyptian show the occasional old movie, but they are often obvious choices with a guaranteed audience (La Dolce Vita at the ArcLight, Lawrence of Arabia at the Egytian). Overall, LA is a great place for the modern day movie event, but it is a city whose moviegoing culture, like Hollywood nearby, is too concerned with today and tomorrow to give a shit about yesterday.

New York

New York City’s cinephilic culture is the opposite of Los Angeles in so many ways, filled to the brim with retrospectives and small screens. NYC is clearly a place where film history matters, and where filmgoing is taken very seriously (the 2002 documentary Cinemania evidences this, as we are introduced to four cinephiles in Gotham who treat the movie theater as a sanctuary to an amusing but sometimes frightening degree). In New York the big screen is a treat (the Ziegfeld, AMC at Lincoln Center’s IMAX), but it is hardly essential to seeing any movie old or new. The theaters that probably house the biggest movie geeks are often the ones with remarkably small screens, while the event movie experience is often left aside for the larger populace of moviegoers. After moving to LA, I found this a bit troublesome, as I couldn’t fathom seeing any movie in Film Forum’s David Lean marathon last year on such a small screen (and the “purity” of the movie event is also not taken so seriously, as Gothamites visiting the Angelika—one of NYC’s major limited release outlets—have to condition themselves to battle or ignore the sound of subway trains passing by). But NYC has more to offer than any city in America when it comes to revisiting all facets of film history, canonized classics under every disparate definition of the term, with competing retrospectives constantly going on at the IFC, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Museum of the Moving Image, Museum of Modern Art, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives (the veritable home of American experimental filmmaking), and, most importantly, Film Forum.

Film Forum sums up NYC moviegoing culture in a nutshell, as cinema in the Big Apple is seen as part and parcel of the city’s major artistic tradition, a worthy competitor with the other forms of art that make up the city’s dense creative history. While housing the best in new independent and foreign filmmaking often weeks before such films go anywhere else in the US, Film Forum perhaps more famously houses ongoing retrospective series containing an astounding amount of films rarely exhibited on the big screen today, centered around an actor (e.g., Tatsuya Nakadai, James Mason), director (Nicholas Ray, Jules Dassin), or a country and trend (French crime wave, US Depression-era films)—and the choices are thankfully not always obvious. The Forum is also famous for first-time showings of historic films in their intended form—like the first-ever American exhibition of Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969) in 2006 or Tarkovsky’s Russian cut of Solaris (1972) in the early 90s.

New York City has its own unique canon of films deemed important that stretch across its filmmaking, filmgoing, critical, and academic communities, and the ongoing emphasis of this canon (through published work like Film Comment and The Village Voice) further influence the both static and evolving tastes of this community. New York is a city that contains no wall between the archive and the movie theater. It’s a serious film nerd’s dream.

Austin

I feel as if I’ve lived in these three cities in perfect sequence, for each has torn down something I assumed about what moviegoing is supposed to be in the previous city. Where LA touted the large and immersive film event experience, NYC emphasized the quality of the canon over the need for a big screen or perfect sound. Then Austin flipped everything I assumed from the NYC filmgoing experience on its head. While Austin does notably contain an impressive film archive at the University of Texas as well as a summer retrospective series at the Paramount, the epicenter of Austin’s cinephilic culture is undoubtedly the Alamo Drafthouse. Sure, the Drafthouse is a great fun place to have a meal and some beer while watching the latest anything, but this is hardly the reason why this theater is so revolutionary. For me, it’s the Alamo’s ongoing event series that makes it one of the most important and unique moviegoing experiences in the US.

First of all, the Alamo is reflective of a larger culture within Austin that seems to rail against any active canonization of film history. Where cities like New York promote an “essential cinema,” those movies that are too important for the serious moviegoer to miss, the Alamo revels—sincerely, not ironically—in an appreciation of movies below the radar. Weekly events like Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday celebrate often obscure and forgotten cinematic oddities not for their obscurity alone, but for their own merit and value as cinematic objects and pieces of entertainment, collapsing the lowbrow and the highbrow into a serious-though-always-fun veneration of the populist art form that cinema really is. Movie nerd Austinites are well-aware of the cinematic canon, but do not give it reverence simply for its existence, as they seem to see value in almost any film, whether its been dismissed or embraced by fellow filmgoers or by film history itself. This is why at Terror Tuesday you won’t see “essential” horror classics like Halloween (1978), but rather a revival of the often-dismissed Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

Secondly, the Alamo transforms the experience of the movie theater itself, replacing the often solitary spectatorship of NYC theaters with a collective community experience. Although the Alamo strictly (and thankfully) employs noise rules, they often host events that encourage audience participation, like quote-a-longs and sing-a-longs (the Alamo may not be the first theater to have done this, but they’ve certainly pioneered it). Events like Master Pancake Theater (a live version of MST3K) or Foleyvision (where a group provides a full live soundtrack for the accompanying film) transform the theater from a place of passive spectatorship to a locale of live performance and participation, taking the film away from its bounds by the filmmakers and making it truly belong to the audience, thus removing any reverent “film as holy” approach and letting the participants make the film their own. It’s an innovative idea of what moviegoing is and what moviegoing should be, and this rejection of the canon and embrace of audience participation I think makes the Alamo one of the most progressive filmgoing experiences in American cinephilic culture, and I’m very much looking forward to practically living there during Fantastic Fest.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: History, Nostalgia, and ‘Mad Men’

Landon Palmer — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:06:21 +0000

Not many popular television shows are also period pieces. When dealing with a period narrative that only takes place within the running time of a feature film, the temporal limitations therein can help the filmmaker sustain a consistent approach to that history—even making that history their own, like in Inglourious Basterds—because their preoccupation with such history has a definite end point as the credits roll. However, with a television show, which inundates itself with intertwining narratives and characters for a more enduring span of time, and does not always contain a foreseeable endpoint, a consistent approach to a historical period must carefully remain in check. Some quality period shows have avoided potential inconsistencies and anachronisms through overt, indulgent stylization, history be damned (like HBO’s Deadwood) or immerse themselves in fantastical narratives that allow deviations from reality (the same network’s Carnivàle). These trends stand in dark contrast to AMC’s Mad Men, a show that attempts a straightforward, realistic retelling of recent history stratified with detailed historical accuracy.

The 1950s have played a hugely influential role in American popular culture, both in shaping and motivating the questioning of American value systems. The Reagan administration was famous for championing a return to the “simpler times” of this era, bouncing off the squeaky-clean impression of the 50s popularized in media through the Cleavers and the accepted idea of the white picket fence and the flourishing of suburbia as essential ingredients of the American Dream. But a counter-movement immediately spurred in response to this interpretation, pointing out that behind the whitewashed picket fence of the 1950s lived an era of social repression and oppressive conformism characterized by racism, sexism, political paranoia, and a constant fear of annihilation and otherness. To interpret the 1950s as an ideal era of American purity, then, would be to disregard the important social progress made since; and this image of the 1950s no longer stands as a historically accurate description, but rather a façade framed by the haze of nostalgia—an era that never actually existed the way it was remembered. From TV shows like The Twilight Zone to films like Far From Heaven, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Revolutionary Road, media objects have radically demystified the Reagan interpretation of the era to the point of parody. Blanket demystification works for the limited running time of movies, but for a television show to last, it needs to tell us more than what we already know. Rather than endorse the façade or tear the skeletons from the suburban walls of this era, Mad Men’s success can be credited in part with how it adeptly explores layers of the era itself and our fascination with it in profound and revealing ways that avoid the myth-demystification pendulum.

Mad Men thus far takes place in those first few years of the 1960s, the time when the white picket fence gradually gave way to the seeds predicting the radical social upheaval that would bring American culture into how we know the late years of that decade today. Though Mad Men goes to great lengths to preserve the details of its place and time, the creators seem to acknowledge that it’s impossible to watch such a show without the perspective of hindsight. It’s impossible not to acknowledge the fact that we know more than the characters regarding the impending changes to their social surroundings when Pete Campbell asks the African-American elevator operator about the brand of his television set and ignores the response “We have more important things to do than watch television” (Episode 3.5, “The Fog”) or when Roger Sterling’s daughter announces her wedding date as November 23, 1963, the day after JFK’s assassination (Episode 3.2, “Love Among the Ruins”)

Yet Mad Men doesn’t handle the iconic events and struggles of the decade ham-fistedly. It never feels like there’s a checklist of historical events the show goes through, which would potentially reduce its larger narrative trajectory to “Hey, remember when that Cuban missile crisis happened? That was crazy!”-type historical-nostalgic winking. The events shape the periphery of the narrative and character struggles—like the paranoia of the Cuban missile crisis permeating the Madison Avenue office as Don Draper’s personal life breaks down at the end of season 2—but it never simplistically defines them and their surrounding culture in a unidirectional manner. It resonates in the background, making a slow and unseen influence only acknowledgeable over time, just as many major tragic world events or social changes do in our lives. They also, more importantly, reflect and reveal dominant cultural priorities of the time, like Marilyn Monroe’s death and its effect on the women of Sterling/Cooper (Episode 2.9, “Six Month Leave”)

I’ve found particularly interesting how the show handles the minor events of the early 1960s, those occurrences that not thought of as defining moments of that tumultuous decade; events that were certainly a big deal in their day and time, but have not remained apparent to those not alive at the time. A great example of this is “Flight 1,” (Episode 2.2), which used the American Airlines Flight 1 crash to allow Pete to reassess his personal and professional priorities, thus enriching the character. In this season’s “The Arrangements,” (Episode 3.4) the death of Betty’s father and its loss-of-innocence affect on Sally Draper is complemented by news coverage of the infamous photograph of Thích Qu?ng ??c’s self-immolation. This iconic image has played so many roles within popular culture that for some it was never associated with a specific place and time, and its use in the show simultaneously restores the temporal reality of the event, insinuates its social significance, and uses it to further characterize the personal struggles of the characters in Mad Men.

Unlike films that seek to reveal the many myths of mid-twentieth century America, Mad Men doesn’t view popular interpretation of this era as a huge façade hiding racist and sexist skeletons in its closet ripe for the outing, but instead sees the white picket fence as equally relevant to the reality ignored around it—they exist mutually. The ignorance of the eponymous “mad men” to the impending social changes that will surround them stand as a result of thoroughly implemented social structures that the white men of the show, yes, enforce and embody, but just as equally follow and conform per the standards and social expectations of their fellow men—a process posited as essential to success in the personal and professional culture of early-60s Manhattan. And these social structures are not wholly demonized, demystified, and dismissed as a façade nor are they celebrated as the best in American values. My personal friend and colleague Linde Murugan, as a research project, is examining the social politics explored in Mad Men through its use of women’s fashion: what the women of the show wear and the expectations therein are part of the process of their limited and subordinate social role in a man’s world, but fashion is something that can simultaneously—and without contradiction—be admired and valued on its own aesthetic merits. The oppressive social systems and misguided value structures of the era may have stagnated progress and given birth to the polarizing, violent culture wars later in the decade, but this doesn’t mean they weren’t reflective of very real value structures that permeate in American society even to this day. (This is why admiration and disgust are often simultaneous emotions with which we approach the characters of Mad Men, centralized in the walking contradiction that is Don Draper.) The façade, then, sometimes reveals itself to be just as strikingly real as the reality that it clouds.

Perhaps Mad Men’s best contribution to the duel interpretations of the era is its ongoing illustration of the essential role of the media in manufacturing this façade. From his admiration of Antonioni’s La Notte (1961) (Episode 2.5, “The New Girl”) to his directorial instruction of Salvatore regarding the shooting of a commercial (“The Arrangements”), Don Draper displays an intricate, complex, almost cinephilic knowledge of how visual media operates and influences spectators throughout. In one of the series’ most famous moments (Episode 1.13, “The Wheel”), Don lays out the processes of nostalgia and the painful power of memory, but in the best interest of his pitch, doesn’t discuss how nostalgia distorts memory, how it makes us recall things not exactly how they were (like Reagan’s white picket fence), for nostalgia isn’t a recollection of history, but a memory tainted through the haze of the ideal—which is essentially what nostalgia is. The haze of the ideal is where the men of Sterling/Cooper live every day, too preoccupied by how they perceive reality and its “natural” power structures (not actively enforcing oppression, but simply acting in a way consistent with the rest of the culture around them) to predict or prepare for the total dismantling of everything they’ve come to know to be true by the end of the decade. It’s continually fascinating to see the subtle process of this inevitability play out week in and week out. As Don Draper knows so well to the point of fault, reality is only what we need people to believe it to be.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Digital Creatures

Landon Palmer — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:31:18 +0000

It seems that every year we’re introduced to some film that proposes itself to display the newest advancements in digital imaging technology. Occasionally these films even use the term revolutionary to describe how forward-moving their implementation of such technology is—not only revolutionary within the history of digital image creation, but revolutionary in its transformative potential of the medium of cinema itself. Such manufactured buzz has, of course, been attached to James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar, and this buzz predictably came to a halt with the release of the film’s trailer. If the trailer had been witnessed by audiences without the context of buzz so thoroughly propagated by Fox—if it were released, for instance, without Comic-Con, “Avatar Day,” or months upon months of non-teasing teaser photographs and footage—the trailer would have came across simply as an ad for an entertaining-looking sci-fi blockbuster popcorn flick from a highly respected and reliable filmmaker. But with hyperbolic language like “revolutionary” attached to the film for quite some time, the seemingly standard—if not sometimes unconvincing—quality digital effects of the trailer could not have made the trailer anything but disappointing.

I think the source of inevitable disappointment with digital imaging technology attempting to move forward, “revolutionize,” or simply be something more has a great deal to do with how permeating such imaging is throughout all forms of cinema today (big-budget and small-budget, mainstream and independent, foreign and domestic), how accustomed audiences have become to seeing such images, and how aware they now are of the processes of such image-creation. Cameron has quite the track record when it comes to digital imaging. He might not be the first director to use such technology in mainstream filmmaking, but he certainly popularized it with the landmark uses of digital imaging in The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991). When Cameron says the technology in his film is “revolutionary,” people listen intently, and for good reason. But twenty years of digital imaging have passed since then, so it simply takes a lot more to impress audiences these days, and the expectations from such intended uses of the technology may indeed be impossible to achieve at this point.

The central issue at stake here is that of indexicality. A term with several arguable and often vague definitions in its employment within film analysis, indexicality for me has come to mean either of two things. The first definition is the relationship of an object filmed with its signified object in reality—as in, the way we recognize something as simple as a table to something as iconographic as the Eiffel Tower as it is shown within the framed, constructed image of a film to the way we know and understand it in our real-life experience. The way we perceive objects and beings in cinema, of course, can be deceiving and manipulative (e.g., a repeated trick of zooming out from the landscape of a city to the revelation of that city being a tiny model), which is why this first definition of indexicality takes a pertinent role. The second definition of indexicality pertains to the relationship of what was filmed to the image as it is ultimately projected on screen. Those tangible objects recognized as having been filmed in front of the camera are indexical, as they are rooted in a form of immediate reality captured by the moving image. Those objects not filmed in front of the camera alongside the indexical objects in the same shot that ultimately end up in the finished product are not indexical. Digitally animated creatures, as they are mostly a product of post-production and do not exist in the final product in the same way they initially appear in front of the camera (like motion capture vs. the image ultimately created from this process), are very clearly not indexical.

My first definition of indexicality is particularly pertinent to how audiences receive and interpret the existence of digital creatures onscreen because films often employ objects and creatures, especially in big-budget sci-fi and fantasy, that have absolutely no analogous relationship to our daily, lived reality (e.g., dinosaurs, aliens, Orcs, transforming robots). It is the filmmaker’s job, then, to make these objects and creatures seem to exist alongside tangible signifiers of reality (cars, people) in a way that is believable. Why does such a relationship only sometimes come across successfully onscreen? Why do we get wrapped up in the suspense of an impossible situation like a dinosaur chasing Jeff Goldblum, yet when we see Sam Worthington’s blue-skinned avatar wake up amongst a crew of human doctors, it rings false and unconvincing?

When we watch a Pixar movie, for instance, we allow our suspense of disbelief to act in full force as we observe three-dimensionally digitally animated creatures take on an impossible force of life (i.e., talking, cooking rats) because the digital landscape surrounding these creatures is consistent with the creatures themselves. However, when digital creatures occupy the same living, indexical landscape of tangible objects and humans—especially when they interact with recognizable actors—the level of believability becomes more complicated and problematic.

Audiences seem to have been so inundated with digital imagery in almost every major film released today, and are so aware of the process of creating these images through DVD special features and related press, that while they can be impressed with the level of detail digital creatures possess and the spectacle therein, digital creatures may never be fully believable onscreen in the same way as indexical humans or objects. No matter how impressive these images are, we simply know that digital creatures never existed in front of the camera during the time of filming. No matter how lifelike they are, they will never convincingly possess life (which is why Robert Zemeckis’ attempts at lifelike digital people continually look like creepy dead souls).

Digital imaging also contains a self-defeating temporal quality. While such imaging does possess the ability to revolutionize image creation and even reformulate how we experience cinema, it doesn’t age well. It’s probable that audiences flock to films that contain extensive use of digital imaging not to engage in suspending their disbelief, or expecting some sort of believable interaction between indexical characters and digital ones, but to witness the spectacle of the newest technology on display. Recent popular films like Transformers 2 can be argued as successful in part because of a spectacular lack of believability throughout (as the interaction between humans are just as robotic and lifeless as the interaction between robots). Because showing off the technology may be the goal over believability, what was “revolutionary” in the recent past can look almost silly now, thus taking any potential attempt at timelessness away from such films (look at Cameron’s work twenty years ago or the “revolutionary” bullet-time technology of The Matrix ten years ago). Such films only survive their retrospective technological limitations through another enduring factor, like the resonance of the story.

This beings me to the Yoda factor. Yoda is a character evident of the many changes in how filmmakers have used special effects technology, moving from puppet in the first Star Wars trilogy to digital creature in the second. Besides the nostalgia and superior storytelling of the original trilogy, puppet Yoda remains more convincing for many because he contains an indexical relationship with what was originally filmed. Despite that he was a lifeless puppet, he existed in some tangible form in front of the camera similar to how he ultimately showed up on film. Digital Yoda, however, doesn’t exist in the material world. While digital Yoda could move and do more than puppet Yoda, he simply didn’t seem as real. This I think rings true of most well-executed animatronics and puppetry vs. digital special effects. To this day we are still equally impressed and fixated by the many incarnations of “the thing” in The Thing (1982), the animatronic space creatures of the first two Alien films, and the selective use of animatronics in Jurassic Park (1993), yet many more recent digital creatures are nowhere near as convincing. Sure, animatronics and puppetry have their limits, but they forced a different kind of creativity (like only seeing parts of the creature in Alien, which made its horror that much more effective) than the imagination-only-limited-by-money of digital special effects, and isn’t restraint the true mark of a great artist? Limitless imagination needs limitation.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems by the trailer of Where the Wild Things Are that Spike Jonze’s film uses a combination of digital effects, animatronics, and puppetry, making the fictitious creatures featured in that trailer seem far more believable than the fully digital ones in Avatar. I long for a return to the believability of animatronics and puppetry, or at least a realization by filmmakers that if they are going to implement digital technology in the creation of their fantastic creatures, realism and believability should not be a tenable goal. The façade is all too apparent.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Independent Music/Independent Film

Landon Palmer — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:26:33 +0000

The relationship between pop music and popular film has been a fruitful one. When popular tracks started to accompany the soundtrack of mainstream films regularly in the mid-late 1960s, the music was often used in the context of the film to reflect the aural preferences particular to a specific counterculture. Movies like The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider and A Hard Day’s Night integrated top 40 hits or artists into their film not only to help sell the film to a broad or specific audience (which proved especially effective when marketing to young people), but to tie that film’s narrative and themes to the counterculture that such music allegedly speaks for.

Songs featured in The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy were written specifically for their films, but by artists already associated with these social and aural movements (Simon and Garfunkel and Harry Nilsson, respectively). The existence of Top 40 radio made it rather easy to identify which songs were most popular, and therefore easy to identify the specific songs most broadly indicative of a given moment of popular culture (at least in the logic of marketers, music supervisors, and some filmmakers). This formula proved to be an occasionally potent combination, as the song, sounds, and artists deemed as spokespersons for a counterculture associated itself with a popular film whose narrative (if successfully intertwined with the music) became by turn also associated, if not rendered broadly representative of, that same culture. This enabled moments like in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock’s race to stop Mrs. Robinson’s daughter from getting married became a weighted iconographic moment not only for 1960s cinema, but for the 60s at large, due in no small part to the sequence’s association with S&G’s “Mrs. Robinson.”

The music video has had a similarly productive relationship with film, as many videos appropriated the plotting and visual strategies of popular films (even recruiting filmmakers as music video directors), and music videos in turn influenced film (creating the music video aesthetic through rhythm-based editing strategies). Music videos also proved to be an important promotional tool for films, thereby merging the sound of a specific popular song with the iconography of a popular film before said film is even released (e.g., Coolio’s “Gangster Paradise” and Dangerous Minds).

However, with the prominence of Internet-based distribution and song-by-song downloading, Top 40 radio and the music video have become weakened in their ability to promote and establish popular tastes. The slow, painful death of record companies is indicative of this move from CD-based to MP3-based music, and is reflected in the tastes of a certain set of consumers who, without a unified set of songs on a radio station or a popular single and music video to bow down to, have largely particularized their preferences rather than associated themselves with the active molding of a broad musical trend. What I mean to say is that because so few trendsetting young people now participate in the collective experience of the radio, and have carefully selected their personal favorite songs through MP3-based distribution outlets like the iTunes store, any currently existing subculture or counterculture no longer has its easily identifiable musical movement or artists that represent it to the degree that all participants are familiar with their sound. In short, Beatlemania is hardly possible today. There is no longer a Woodstock collective of artists that a counterculture at large can consent as representative of them.

The music of today’s various counter- and subcultures is labeled under the umbrella term indie music, a term that is not so much indicative of a particular sound, genre, means of distribution, or degree of popularity, but a label vaguely associated with some idea of credibility with a culture of young people in mind. This poses an interesting situation for newer films that aim to reflect or advertise to a particular subculture or counterculture by appropriating their music. Since there is no longer an easily identifiable set of songs representing a culture, these films basically choose songs that aim to be molded into active representation of that culture. Indie music is most often tied with independent film, particularly the recent trend/brand of quirky, hip indie dramedies (e.g., Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Garden State, Away We Go, any Wes Anderson movie, etc.). But because indie music is so segmented among listeners (as a seemingly infinite number of musicians exist under this label), indie films choose songs that are molded into an association with its reflected culture (with varying degrees of success) rather than choosing a song or artist already deemed as directly or popularly associated with it (as indie music’s alleged credibility depends on it not being hugely popular). For example, the core audience of The Graduate was probably already familiar with Simon and Garfunkel, but the same can’t necessarily be said of The Shins and Garden State (as degrees of familiarity are more complex in indie music consumption: “I haven’t heard them but I’ve heard of them”) and The Shins’ association with that film certainly didn’t have the same impact of Simon and Garfunkel’s role in The Graduate.

Popular music in film also used to contain a temporal dimension in that certain songs could easily identify a place and time within culture (this is why Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” is so often used to represent psychedelic hippy culture). This utility of popular music and time proved especially potent for period pieces about young cultures, like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused, which used the music of the early sixties and mid-seventies respectively to delineate the time of the film’s setting. Indie music in indie film, however, does not necessarily hold songs to such associations, as music of the past is often just as actively associated with today’s “indie standard” as are contemporaneous bands, further enabled through their use in movies; like 70s artist Nick Drake for Garden State or 80s New Wave band The Smiths for (500) Days of Summer. Away We Go embodies this conflation of old music and new indie tastes as its soundtrack is dominated by new artist Alexi Murdoch, who sounds exactly like Nick Drake, coupled with music by Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and The Velvet Underground.

But there are even stronger parallels between indie film and its use of indie music. As previously stated, indie music is not a term that delineates a particular sound, rather a range of different, even opposing sounds exist under this label. The types of indie music artists and songs typically chosen for film are by far the most conventional and accessible, or the least potentially disruptive of the storyline it is integrated within. Critics and fans allege that artists like Feist, Regina Spektor, or The Shins promote a new, progressive brand of music, but the basics of their sound are indicative of decades of pop music structuring. Popular indie bands like Animal Collective or The Dirty Projectors, whose sounds are truly disruptive, confrontational, and musically progressive, have yet to be successfully adapted to film, despite the fact that such musicians are just as representative of this musical trend as the more accessible artists. This aspect of indie music takes place equivalently in independent film, as films like Garden State and (500) Days of Summer allege themselves to be new, even groundbreaking, approaches to filmic storytelling, but are revealed ultimately to be nothing more than shiny new iterations of something all too familiar. Indicative of this contradiction is the evidence that those who have praised these films as original also use films of the past to qualify such praise, as when some critics (rather misleadingly) called Garden State this generation’s The Graduate, thereby unknowingly acknowledging how truly indebted to the past these supposedly “original” films are (and Garden State in particular seems to equally owe its existence to other stunted adolescence films of New Hollywood like Harold and Maude).

(500) Days proves to be an interesting case of taking the old and making it seem new, as its narration self-consciously announces the film as something you’ve never seen before—a non-love story love story—but the film, like the music in it, remains undeniably indebted to past products, thus throwing its “originality” into question. In particular, the film seems little more than an update of Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s quirky, hip romantic dramedy that also features a central couple breaking up, a nonlinear and often anecdotal narrative structure, the walking contradiction of a cynical and romantic protagonist, the liberal oscillation between moments of reality and fantasy, and even a brief animated sequence. (500) Days is simply another cultural product stamped with an “indie” label that makes the old seem new.

“Indie” suggests independent. In the case of independent film, it suggests independence from big studios, and in the case of independent music, it suggests independence from major record labels. However, these terms have become more like labels that a film or musician aspires to in order to attain a credibility by association to a larger group of films or musicians rather than an accurate indicator of production or distribution strategies. Indie films are often produced by studio subsidaries like Focus Features or Fox Searchlight, which enforce the indie label while the source of funding is frequently no different. Likewise, indie artists often sign up with major labels and become part of the mainstream, using the label itself to maintain their credibility (how else could Feist advertise for Apple and still be considered “indie” unless there was no real meaning to this term?). Indie music will continue to be used in indie film, but with their associations with major labels and indebtedness to the past, there remains hardly anything independent about either.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: ‘Inglourious Basterds’ and the Political Movie Theater

Landon Palmer — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:04:19 +0000

Cinema itself, specifically the movie theater, has played a significant role within the narratives of a few of this summer’s most notable releases. Up perceives the movie theater as a place where dreams are born, encapsulated in a movie made by a studio that continues to progress cinema at large. Public Enemies contained its climactic moments around a movie theater while simultaneously displaying how Hollywood filmmaking has remained the same but different (even when it has abandoned the material of film itself). (500) Days of Summer, between its winking acknowledgment of frequent misinterpretations of the ending of The Graduate to its heartbreak articulated through homage to French New Wave and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and The Seventh Seal, is a movie that shows how cinema shapes specific ideas of love and heartbreak within the cultural psyche. But with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, we have been bestowed a major late-summer release that not only frames its entire narrative trajectory around this popular social venue (and the potential power of this experience), but imbues every frame of its very being with an indebtedness to the sacred experience of the movie theater.

With his latest, QT has moved beyond his trademark superficial borrowing from and homage to a given canon of films, he has grown and matured from constructing mere collages of selected film history that revealed little more than his enjoyment of the medium, and has instead—through a highly entertaining, often silly, and, yes, even original film—made a lasting and successful tribute not just to his love of cinema itself, but presents a convincing testament to the essential importance of the medium within modern western culture, displaying in full force its equal ability to manipulate, entertain, inspire, persuade, and even revolutionize. Here we have found Tarantino becoming, for the first time in his career, a political filmmaker of sorts, not in that his film (consciously) endorses or pursues an active political agenda of its own, but that Inglourious Basterds exhibits the powerful political role cinema has played throughout the twentieth century.

Though the perspective that currently dominates mainstream views of cinema is regarding the medium as primarily a vehicle for entertainment (as if entertainment value was somehow contradictory to film’s ability to resonate, influence, persuade, and even actively inspire change) competing with other sources of similar entertainment value, such was simply one of many possible views of cinema in pre-WWII Europe. The first half of the twentieth century was a time in which cinema was bestowed an enormous amount of power (at least rhetorically) through creative experimentation, collective artistic movements, and, perhaps most importantly, the appropriation of cinema’s persuasive utilities through political movements and organized propagandists.

Cinema’s very importance and power is evidenced by its recognition via politicians and dictators as having both the equal ability to embolden a cause as it does to destroy it. Hitler and the Third Reich understood this all too well, and the rise in power and degree of success of the Nazi party can no doubt be partly attributed to the effectiveness of their propaganda, and essential to this effectiveness is an understanding of the potential power of the moving image. The Nazis notoriously collected, destroyed, and preserved certain works of art depending on whether or not it fell in line with their ideological objectives, and specific films were part of this interrogation. Films like Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1939)—both now considered essentials to any basic historical exposure to world filmmaking—only survived the efforts of the Third Reich by careful hiding and happenstance, and it remains nothing less than a miracle that these films exist for our viewing pleasure today.

But if some films are important enough to be viewed as harmful by a state and thus deemed necessary for obliteration, other films likewise are important enough to be exposed to the masses for the opposite purpose: active persuasion and manipulation. Joseph Goebbels understood how the control of the press and the published word was essential in establishing and continuing political domination and the successful promotion of an agenda, but the extent of his power an influence has to also be credited to his understanding of how art played an equally important influential role (both Goebbels and Hitler were artists at earlier points in their lives). Cinema, conveniently enough, fell into the realms of both art and popular media, and was thus doubly capable of such potential for manipulation. Cinema has been viewed by scholars as the technology that ushered in the era of modernity, as it possessed an ability greater than any train, automobile, or telegraph to condense time and space into a single immediate moment. And as the Third Reich perpetuated the first modern form of genocide (enacting the intended extermination of a culture through cold bureaucratic processes rather than hot-blooded hatred), it’s appropriate that their ideology was articulated through the most modern form of media at the time, that of cinema, through powerful works of propaganda like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).

The climax of Inglourious Basterds effectively depicts cinema’s ability to subvert and persuade, as the illustrious premiere of a piece of nationalist propaganda (the film-within-the-film Stolz der Nation) is swiftly interrupted by images containing meaning in stark contradiction to those presented before. The fire behind the screen and eventually burning up the screen and making its way out into the crowd literalizes cinema’s ability to take a decisive, immediate role in reality. For QT, and western culture at large, the role of cinema is never isolated to the screen itself, but permeates outward. Cinema here also shows its ability to manifest a legacy and distort reality, as the filmmaker commanding the inferno of the movie theater has not lived to see her film projected, but survives through her presence onscreen. The fiery hell that envelops the movie theater is in a way a literalized interpretation of a death of cinema at large, as the burning of the nitrate film and the destruction of the movie theater manifest cinema’s last hurrah in its old form as a powerful, imposing, and influential force on society, decades before it had to compete for attention through other forms of moving image dissemination (television, the Internet) and find itself dismissed as mere entertainment by the masses (my only major complain is that I wish Emmanuelle Mimieux/Shosanna Dreyfus’s film-within-the-film was more radical in form than a simple direct address to the audience, perhaps something akin to experimental French films that induced riotous reactions in the past).

Vietnam may have been the first televised war, but WWII remains the first war inundated with moving imagery, from Riefenstahl’s films to American newsreels (which were, in their own right, a form of propaganda) to 8mm and 16mm documentary evidence of concentration camps to the innumerable films since that have recounted every conceivable subject related to the war and the Holocaust since. WWII undeniably remains cinema’s favorite war to depict. Tarantino’s vision of the war, however, has come under criticism by organizations like the National Jewish Daily Forum who dismiss the film as “Jewish revenge porn.” Yet Inglourious Basterds, as indebted as it is to cinema history, feels like a refreshingly new take on the subject (and isn’t that what QT does best, appropriating the old and making it seem new?) because it doesn’t fall in line with the tired heroics and obvious moralizing of most films that deal with the war.

Sure, those canonized as the best of the genre, like Saving Private Ryan (1998), may introduce a gritty new realist approach to the material, but they don’t really explore anything that hasn’t been stated in film since The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). What came across to me—even though it’s probably far from what QT intended—was that the Basterds seemed so brutal and inhumane in their acts to gain notoriety and success in the war that they no longer held great moral authority over the allegedly evil enemy they were combating—that they became evil in order to fight evil. This line of which characters held the moral high ground (as codes of ethics rarely play a decisive role for characters of any QT film) becomes further muddled in the climactic scene where the image of a maniacally laughing Mimieux/Dreyfus reflected onto the smoke emanating from the movie theater’s burning floors takes on an Orwellian quality, as if she has become a dictator all her own; and this fictional, fantastical Jewish resistance is further mirrored with the Third Reich as the trapped German people shot down amongst the smoke and fire of the movie theater echoes the extermination of masses of people through the gas chambers and ovens of the concentration camps. Tarantino’s interpretation of the war flies in the face of the common depiction in Hollywood of WWII as the “just war,” one of few wars containing an unquestionable evil that had to be eliminated through any means possible, and instead depicts the meeting of evil acts with evil acts in a manner more reflective of current wars in which our nation’s own moral codes have been compromised in order to meet an objective (but of course, on the other hand, the commonly unquestioned evil of the Third Reich makes the intentionally entertaining violence of the film more enjoyable and less problematic).

But even more importantly, Inglourious Basterds spits in the face of the “realism” commonly utilized for WWII films, showing how potentially manipulative cinema itself can be within the narrative and thus arguing that QT’s deliberately anachronistic and historically inaccurate depiction of the war contains no more of a direct relationship to reality or true events than films like Saving Private Ryan or Downfall (2004). I would further suggest that QT’s film reveals those WWII films rooted in historical accuracy and filled with stylized realism to be even more dangerous than films like Inglourious Basterds because of the very fact that they allege themselves to be authoritative documents of reality, and are therefore more susceptible to frame, persuade, and manipulate how we perceive that reality. With cinema, it is often the more overtly fictional works—as they align themselves more readily with the fabricated nature of the medium—that potentially reveal with more potency and profundity the way we perceive history as a culture. Or, as Hans Landa put it, “Facts can be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing.”

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: ‘District 9′ and the Legacy of Highbrow Sci-Fi

Landon Palmer — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:50:01 +0000

Editor’s Warning: The following in-depth discussion about District 9 may contain spoilers, depending on your definition of a spoiler. You’ve been warned.

As many critics and fans who have sung the praises of Neill Blomkamp’s innovative debut feature have already pointed out, District 9 works simultaneously on multiple levels: at once an original and engaging action drama exhibiting the best entertainment qualities of the science-fiction genre as well as a chilling ongoing commentary about human treatment of those deemed not “like them,” in this case echoing the oppressive politics of apartheid in D9’s South African setting. While no mainstream sci-fi feature has approached the genre quite this way (with the film’s unique documentary realism and portrayal of a fragile alien race), the ability to simultaneously produce a piece of entertainment with insightful and revealing but never preachy social commentary has been par for the course for the best of highbrow science-fiction on the silver screen.

Because of the fantastic and imaginative nature of the genre, sci-fi has been able to get away with providing simultaneous socio-cultural commentary and entertainment value far more successfully than films of other genres. Many dramas deliberately aiming to convey a progressive or revealing social message—think of any film about race relations from Sidney Poitier movies up to Crash, or any war film from Coming Home to Lions for Lambs—even the best ones, often resort to desperate monologuing, a cheap way of transcribing the intended message of the filmmaker onto the very mouth of the character, as if the messages portrayed throughout the rest of the film weren’t strong enough for the filmmaker to trust what exactly the audience takes with them when they leave the theater. This is both disrespectful of audience intelligence—thinking that they won’t “get” the message unless it’s spelled out for them, also thereby leaving little room for alternative interpretations of the movie’s meaning—and also something of an abandonment of the particular utilities of cinematic expression as filmmakers forego the medium’s unique audiovisual storytelling nature in favor of dense written words delivered by an actor as if they were on stage (in other words, such preachy moments often also come across as bland and uncinematic). The great relevant works of science-fiction, however, rarely run into such problems, and thankfully so.

It is the mark of the great piece of art that works on multiple levels, and can be interpreted differently depending on one’s point in life and the circumstances under which they may experience that art; and the simultaneous delivery of entertainment value and social commentary (though because these films often allow audiences to draw their own conclusions, maybe social observation is a more apropos term) works particularly well in sci-fi as it is able to engage both the imaginative and intellectual sides of film spectatorship. A fourteen-year-old, for instance, may view District 9 as a fun venture akin to other summer blockbuster entertainment, while somebody only a few years older, or somebody from a different country or social background, can come away from the same film with a more layered experience. Not only do such films often overtly intend for such a depth of experience to occur (as Blomkamp has made it clear that D9 was inspired by his witnessing of the horrors of apartheid as a child), but thoughtful films such as these enable multiple interpretations and emotional reactions coming out, even those that the filmmaker may never have intended, which are just as valid. Such films allow the very possibility of absolutely nobody coming out of the theater having seen the exactly the same film.

While sci-fi does deal with the fantastic, it is distinct from fantasy. Where fantasy is often a genre that deals wholly with a fabricated universe in a time and place that has little analogy to, or correlation with, our own (Tolkien, for instance, often defended LOTR as non-allegorical to happenings in Western culture at the time, thus attempting to preserve the timelessness of fantasy), science fiction is usually grounded in some level of reality (where fantasy is timeless, sci-fi is often time-specific). What most science fiction offers is not a radically different view of the world, but one that retains a great deal of familiarity with only slight changes. These changes are often manifested through major leaps and bounds in technology or an encounter with an alien life form. But great science fiction is rarely about the slight but significant differences from the natural world therein, but rather how such change causes humans to act differently amongst each other. Great science fiction doesn’t suggest that these changes bring about major alterations in human behavior, but rather shows how such changes amplify or enable manifestation of certain aspects innate to human nature that had not been previously expressed to such an extent. This is why so much science-fiction is dystopian, showing how changes in technology or man’s relationship with the universe can bring out the very worst in human behavior. Thus, while much of sci-fi takes place in the near future or in a world slightly different than our own, they often speak volumes to the time and place in which they were produced.

Using sci-fi as a means for social commentary has had a noble tradition in literature, from the terrifying portrayals of tyranny and fascism run amok in the works of Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury to the cautionary tales of Philip K. Dick. Probably the first revolutionary use of sci-fi in this manner on the silver screen was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a film that cultural critics like Seigfried Kracauer argued predicted the rise of fascism in Germany. In the US, the tradition of using sci-fi in this manner grew to distinction in the second half of the 1950s and early 60s, when the genre was used as a thinly-veiled allegorical combatant to the McCarthy witch hunts in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and after-the-fact in TV shows like The Twilight Zone.

Because of the strict censorship of the Hays Code under the leadership of Joseph L. Breen, films of the 50s were rarely permitted to overtly comment on relevant social issues like race relations or the red scare, but true artists have always been quicker than the censors, and manage to find subversive ways to get a challenging message across to audiences (such practices were common in art produced in Soviet Russia, like the anti-Stalinist compositions of Shostakovich or the films of Eisenstein), and in McCarthyist America the easiest way to deliver such a message was through the guise of genre. Sci-fi was a particularly effective tool for this effort because at this time it was dismissed as pulp, B-level entertainment, thus the censors didn’t engage with it seriously enough in order to see its underlying message. This, of course, came at the risk of audiences not receiving such a message as well, but the general wisdom followed that such interpretations would come across to spectators keen enough to think about movies seriously. In later sci-fi, pre-Star Wars products of the genre (e.g., Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973)) were critical of modern practice seen as detrimental to both nature and humanity, while 80s sci-fi like James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) aimed to be a response to the terrors of the Vietnam War.

Of course, many culturally relevant readings of these films came across by critics and scholars long after these movies left theaters, thus bringing about the possibility that no such allegories were originally intended by the filmmakers. For instance, the popular reading of Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) and Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) as the cinematic equivalent of the space race, a veritable battle between Apollo and Sputnik taking place on the big screen, is an observation only made possible through the advantage of hindsight. However, this possibility does not render interpreting films in such a way as irrelevant, because films can reflect the culture in which they were made both consciously and unconsciously.

With District 9, however, we have a film that, unlike previous films of the genre, held the overt intention of exploroing multiple levels, and it does so successfully. As Blomkamp intended to portray despicable human practices upon the aliens in a way reflective of South African apartheid, for American audiences the images of alien abuse also bring forth the resonant iconography of immigration controversies as well as violent memories of the Jim Crow South. Through Wilkus van der Merwe’s transformation throughout the film, Blomkamp seems to be stating that humanity isn’t a term exclusive to humans, that similarities between beings aren’t exclusive to race or species. However, the balance between entertainment and commentary can often be rocky and uneven, and while District 9 is most often simultaneously engaging in both respects, its stance as part of the genre often comes at the expense of exploring its fascinating themes any further. And the potential for misinterpretation still exists within the guise of genre, as the evidenced by a couple viewing the film next to me who seemed a little too amused by the struggles of the aliens in D9. Sure, the film is supposed to be amusing, but how does one who disturbingly sees the actions of the aliens as mere silly antics react to the later horrifying image of an innocent alien being assassinated by his species’ own weapon for purely scientific purposes? Delivering a serious message can often be rough terrain when some still view sci-fi as a silly genre.

I’m willing to go with the risk of misinterpretation if it prevents a movie from preaching at me. Allowing audiences to think without telling them what to think is rare these days, and the many conversations that can come away from a movie like District 9 not only attests to the undervalued and underexplored intelligence of most audiences, but evidences the thoughtfulness of the film itself. Like the restrained ending of this summer’s other sci-fi gem Moon (a film that displays a literalized dehumanization of corporate influence), which only hints at rather than overtly states its message, the interpretations that audiences fill in the gaps with can often be far more profound and interesting than any message bluntly stated by the filmmaker.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: The Triumph of John Hughes

Landon Palmer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:24:12 +0000

For somebody associated with making some of the most resonant teen comedies in modern cinema history, John Hughes still doesn’t receive enough credit—mainly because, before John Hughes, there really was no such thing as the teen comedy.

Teens have controlled the marketplace for quite some , so it’s hard to believe that before the early 1980s only a marginal selection of films were directed specifically at this audience. By the late 1950s, teen taste had become the largest, most marketable, and most potentially profitable controlling factor in setting music industry trends, cemented by Beatlemania in the mid-60s. The film industry, however, possessed no equivalent. The only films directed specifically and exclusively toward teens around this time were beach party movies like Where the Boys Are (1960), which were nothing more than forgettable, silly, squeaky-clean romps that sold tickets based on the appeal of bikinis and the then-popular subgenre of beach rock, but said absolutely nothing insightful about life as a teen.

On the other end were juvenile delinquent films like Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Such films have become more resonant for moviegoers of later generations than the beach party movies, and served as ham-fisted cautionary tales for a young generation that parents saw as spiraling out of control with their affinity for fast cars, leather jackets, and knife fights. While Rebel is without doubt an essential American classic, the smothering atmosphere of tragedy within which the teen rebellion is framed can be read as a staunch message from the establishment urging for conformity despite the contradictory romanticism within the iconography of James Dean associated with that rebellion. Nicholas Ray’s serious approach to the material (coupled with Dean’s method performance), in contrast to the numbing silliness of beach party films, suggests that Rebel and the many lesser films like it were made largely for adults rather than teens, and were little more than a more polished and layered extension of past propagandistic cautionary tales for teens like Reefer Madness (1936). And, of course, unlike John Hughes’s films, Rebel is nowhere close to being funny, thus creating two polarities in mid-century American teen cinema: dumb beach “comedies” that don’t treat teen life in the least bit seriously and serious, humorless melodramas that focus on only the potential tragedy and none of the joy of the teen years.

The late 1970s offered mainly slasher films for teens after the release of Halloween (1978). Besides that, there was George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), which was more a work of nostalgia for the early 1960s, and thus a film, like Rebel, made about teens rather than for teens.

The films of John Hughes, however, can be seen as the perfect hybrid between the beach party films and the tragic melodramas of decades before, concocting a necessary balance between silly comedy and profound drama resulting in a portrayal of teen life as the most fascinating of dramedies.

First of all, the silliness factor cannot be emphasized enough. In a culture that jeers as the 1980s just as liberally as it appropriates trends of the same era, Hughes’s movies are certainly enjoyed ironically today. Determined by the popular culture of the decade, certain aspects of taste (from music to hairdon’ts) within these films haven’t aged well, but this is often complemented by Hughes’s trademark (and often abrupt) silliness of tone (e.g., just about everything in Weird Science). But at the center of these movies is a genuine heart that beats for teen life—one that, probably for the first time, respects the intelligence and everyday struggles of its core audience without resorting to tragic melodrama or viewing teen life as an inconsequential moment before adulthood. Thus, Hughes’s teen films remain firmly and unavoidably entrenched in their decade of origin, yet continue to speak volumes to later generations through the obvious respect for teens that Hughes imbues within his films. While his movies adeptly approached some serious territory, they never treated themselves too seriously (there’s a reason Ferris Bueller has outlived St. Elmo’s Fire). This rare combination allows us to love these movies while simultaneously laughing at them when we weren’t being directed to laugh with them, even in encountering the filmmaker’s notable slip-ups in attempting to create an accurate portrait of teen life (e.g., Emilio Estevez’s bizarre and inaccurate reaction to trying marijuana for the first time in The Breakfast Club).

Hughes can be credited as largely responsible for popularizing—if not creating—a great deal of archetypes and clichés that may, at first, suggest his portrayal of teen life wasn’t all that accurate, from the army of clique representatives of The Breakfast Club—the nerd, the jock, the burnout loner, the quiet goth chick, and the princess virgin—to the alcoholic or unemployed father, the oppressive figure of authority (most often in the form of the high school principal), the mysteriously wise white-collar worker (e.g., Breakfast Club’s janitor), and finally (articulated most fully through Duckie in Pretty in Pink), Hughes established one of the most enduring teen character types: the goofy but reliable best friend. Hughes was also famous for following Hollywood’s tendency to use actors well into (or past) their twenties to portray highschoolers. Such characteristics of Hughes’s filmmaking have been bastardized, filtered, and lampooned in teen films since, from the carbon copying of the Hughes formula in the late 90s Freddie Prinze-Matthew Lillard movies to cynical sex comedies like the American Pie series to empty parodies like Not Another Teen Movie. On the other end, some filmmakers have tried to transcend these formulas (to varying degrees of success) by creating allegedly more realist (rather than realistic) portrayals of teen life in everything from Dazed and Confused to American Teen, but such films often ended up unintentionally reinforcing established archetypes and clichés through promoting their narratives as analogous to reality.

So it seems that Hughes’s films can hardly be credited as realistic portrayals of teen life in the strictest sense. A certain degree of suspense of disbelief is absolutely necessary to enjoy any of his films (e.g., once again, Weird Science). However, there’s a significant difference between realism and honesty. The films of John Hughes may not be objective documents of teen life (as if such a thing exists), so while moments of his films may reverberate as false or silly, the heart and feeling behind them is undeniably honest and sincere. While Hughes’s characters may have occasionally been (or become) exaggerated clichés, they still contained enough multidimensionality to be immediately relatable. Hughes’s films can never be accused of emptiness, even if the sentimentality came off as forced time and again. Hughes got incredibly right the feeling of teenhood: the alienation, the pressure, the struggle for status and respect, and the absurdity of living life every day in high school. This is why Hughes’s films have outlived the 80s while other films from the decade fell by the wayside; they were accessible yet profound. Hughes, to me, can be best summed up in the scene of Pretty in Pink where Duckie serenades Molly Ringwald to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness”: it may be over-the-top, but you know all too well where Duckie is coming from.

Hughes only directed eight films within eight short years, but he had so thoroughly established a brand of American comedy in his career that it’s often shocking when one sees the long list of films he wrote but didn’t direct, like Pretty in Pink and The Great Outdoors. Besides his teen comedies, Hughes extended his influence with some of the best comedies geared towards an older or broader audience involving John Candy, Chevy Chase, and Steve Martin. In the 1990s he switched to primarily writing movies geared towards kids, like Home Alone and Beethoven. So, if you were born anywhere from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, chances are you’ve been impacted by a John Hughes movie. But the name John Hughes has been most thoroughly cemented in association with his often imitated but never surpassed brand of teen comedy. He’s responsible for the best of the genre, and for elevating teen films to a higher standard. In this day and age where it seems that every cultural product is marketed towards tweens, we need the cinema of John Hughes more than ever.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Not-so-Funny People

Landon Palmer — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:29:08 +0000

Despite the rather obvious title of this post, I have to admit that I did actually enjoy Judd Apatow’s third venture as writer/director. I think the filmmaker was probably a bit overambitious with what he was trying to accomplish here, and certainly extended himself beyond his reach, ultimately not fully succeeding with his initial intent. But I believe that what he was attempting to achieve is noble and refreshing for mainstream film comedy, and his efforts succeed just enough to make Funny People a pretty-good-but-not-great movie. The title of this post thus does not refer to some sort of immense dissatisfaction with the film, but instead to Apatow’s ballsy management of expectations here, surprising us with a movie about funny people that is very often deliberately unfunny. One thing’s for sure, Apatow for better or worse is pursuing more the avenue of artistic storytelling in the vein of the auteur (with arguable degrees of success here) in an attempt to extend himself beyond the simple comedic name brand that is by now associated with his films to the point of parody. Before his appearance on The Daily Show this last week, Jon Stewart joked that, while he doesn’t know what the new Judd Apatow film is about (and I’m paraphrasing here), “I bet it’s about some Jewish schlubs dating way out of their league.” Funny People, refreshingly enough, seems to be his first film that doesn’t explore this conceit previously associated with the films he’s been tied to both as writer/director and as producer.

Since his breakthrough in 2005 in his feature writing/directing debut The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow has been celebrated for creating a new heartfelt brand of sex comedy, mixing raunchy but rarely over-the-top humor with sincere and heartfelt storytelling and likable characters. He is credited for restoring faith in the R-rated comedy and pushing it away from both its fratty Vince Vaughn-plus-a-Wilson-brother trend and from the direction the increasingly cynical one-upsmanship of the gross-out sex comedy (e.g., the latter American Pie films). He also changed the face of the movie star, replacing the traditional attractive photogenie associated with the leading men of romantic comedies with the aforementioned schlubs, and audiences seemed to take a liking to seeing rather normal-looking dudes like Seth Rogen and Jason Segel becoming the silver screen’s new leading men and movie stars.

Through his role as producer, Apatow shepherded similarly plotted films, thus creating (intentionally or not) the Apatow brand of comedy, giving audiences the false impression that he has held the director’s chair for far more films than he actually has, and this brand has permeated to such an extent that this particular comedic aesthetic (and its handful of repeated actors usually involved) has come to be associated with films that he had no involvement in whatsoever (e.g., I Love You, Man).

Along the way, however, the Apatow brand has received criticism for appropriating the schlub-dating-out-of-his-league device as unrealistic wish fulfillment rather than a sincere and even cute approach to a new type of resonating romantic comedy. This criticism has most often occurred regarding the representation of female characters in his films, most famously with Katherine Heigl’s notorious criticism of Knocked Up as sexist (Apatow himself takes a winking stab at these criticism’s when Leslie Mann’s character, a former actress, tells Seth Rogen’s Ira that she “usually got cast as the bitch”).

With Funny People, Apatow avoids these criticisms altogether by finally making a movie that doesn’t conform itself to this repeated, and even exhausted, narrative approach, instead choosing to give a rare backstage look into the nature of comedy and what it is like to be a funny person. Of course, all his previous films have concerned protagonists attempting to overcome various inceptions of stunted adolescence, but Apatow takes this conceit to its most confrontational extreme thus far with his character George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a multimillionaire movie star who once had a knack for comedy but now has lost his love for it after years of carbon-copied dumb comedies, a love that he rekindles when jumping back into standup with Ira’s significantly younger community of comedians.

As Cole adeptly pointed out in his review, Simmons has obvious parallels with Sandler’s own career doing silly, dumb comedies that seem less and less funny with each go ‘round, and while Sandler seems bored with movies like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Don’t Mess with the Zohan (which makes his turn in Funny People a relieving departure, showing range as an actor unexplored since Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and reminding us all why we thought he was funny in the first place), he probably doesn’t possess the existential angst Simmons does.

Funny People is very much about the unfunny business of being funny, forwarding the long-held belief that comedy often comes from a dark and insecure place, as the posters of Richard Pryor and Peter Sellers decorating the walls of Ira’s apartment not only remind us of comedy’s greatest icons, but also serve as signposts for the troublesome personal lives behind their comedy, a characteristic Simmons fully embodies if not even represents. As many have said, Funny People is more a drama with funny characters than a comedy all its own. Where the comic bickering between the roommates of Knocked Up simply felt like funny actors playing funny characters and given room to riff off each other under the guidance of a director who loves improvisation and who seems to be no fan of editing, the similar bickering between Ira and his roommates in Funny People reads more as a defense mechanism for characters for whom comedy is an essential part of coping with an unforgiving everyday reality. Thus, even when the movie is funny, there is a dark truth lying behind that comedy.

I like what Apatow has tried to do here, and I appreciate that he has stepped beyond the bounds of his brand to give us a serious look at comedy that only a serious comedian can give. Of course, his previous two films had their share of heartfelt moments, but neither attempted to be as rooted with envisioning a portrayal of the complexity and difficulty of reality than Funny People. Apatow, however, does not always balance the drama and comedy so effectively, as moments that would be part and parcel of the hilarity of his other films—like Leslie Mann’s character (inexplicably) yelling at Eric Bana’s character (her husband) in a mocking Australian accent, or Apatow’s affinity for clever celebrity cameos—feel more like an avoidance on the part of the director to deal fully with the emotions he’s attempting to put on display or like a sign of desperate insecurity at making an alleged comedy without too many laughs, thus inserting them awkwardly into the narrative.

But with Funny People, Apatow has successfully grown beyond just being a reliable comic label and instead approaches the genre with more assuredness, freshness, and sincere emotional intent than any director of comedies working in mainstream filmmaking today. I would even venture to say Funny People marks a move echoing that of the career of John Cassavetes. While Cassavetes arguably never successfully worked in comedy, Funny People often reminded me of what the late filmmaker attempted to do with his seventies dramas. Like Apatow, Cassavetes had a stock group of actors he worked with in each film, and the natural closeness of actors familiar with one another allowed for effectively captured improvisation and a rare, often spontaneous naturalism of performance in films like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence. As a result of this unifying affinity for improvisation, both filmmakers are often characterized by scenes (and films) that run significantly long (sometimes too long) in a sign of respect for the performers, allowing their characters to play out scenes to their fullest extent. Interestingly enough, both Cassavetes and Apatow also enjoy casting members of their families in their films (though Leslie Mann is no Gena Rowlands).

Cassavetes’s landmark approach to improvisational filmmaking has been nothing foreign to drama since, but this respect for performers and character development is something rarely seen in American comedies. While Apatow may never achieve (or even seek) the naturalism of Cassavetes, he undeniably gives his performers far denser and layered characterization than comedy characters are usually permitted to possess, which results in an often surprisingly touching, challenging, and humanistic approach to comedy as well as impressive performances like that of Sandler’s. I’m not quite sure if all this works in the favor of Funny People, but I hope Apatow continues to develop this wholly unique approach to comedy in the future, and never be satisfied with the limitations of the Apatow label.

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