Month: October 2025

A House of Dynamite

One thing that most people have failed to notice about Kathryn Bigelow is that she is an ultra-formalist. Admittedly, this is something she never talks about in any of the interviews with her that I have seen or read. But it is a big reason why she is one of my favorite filmmakers, across a wide variety of genres and themes. I fell in love with her work when I first saw her revisionist vampire film Near Dark in 1987; and in subsequent years and decades she has never disappointed me — not even when a lot of people on the left whose opinions, and in some cases friendships, I value highly, criticized Zero Dark Thirty (2012) for its depiction (without overt critique) of CIA torture of political prisoners. Bigelow, despite being the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, has made far fewer films than I would wish; and this is in part due to the fact that she has had a much harder time raising money for her projects than male directors at the same level of accomplishment do.

In any case, her new film A House of Dynamite is as brilliant and powerful as anything she has done, and this is at least partly the case for formalist reasons. The film is about an apparent nuclear attack on the United States: a single nuclear missile incoming, launched from somewhere in the North Pacific, and headed for Chicago; the American Armed Forces are unable to stop it. The film gives us the same time sequence, the twenty minutes or so between when the missile is first detected and when it is about to hit its target, three times from three different locations and perspectives. First we see the command center where threats are evaluated and recommendations are made; second, we see the military command center which is responsible for execution; and third we see the President of the United States, who must decide whether and how to respond. The President is played, quite convincingly, by Idris Elba. The role is sui generis, reminding us of neither of Obama nor Trump. This President is not a superman, he is clearly unsure about what to do. We see him first in the White House and then traveling through the streets of Washington DC in a car under the protection of the Secret Service. His shifting location contrasts with the two bunkers, or securitized command centers, in the previous segments of the film.

Importantly, nobody knows the source of the missile, and no country or force has claimed responsibility. Russia denies involvement, and vouches for China’s non-involvement as well. This leaves North Korea as the obvious suspect, but this is never confirmed. The film concludes, in all three iterations, with the missile about to hit, in just a single second. But the film withholds what then happens from us. Is there catastrophic destruction? Or does the bomb fail to explode? And in any case, what will the President decide to do? Bigelow quite deliberately leaves us at the threshold, in a non-cathartic suspension. I think that this was absolutely the right decision; any conclusion would diminish the film’s intensity, and seem to partly answer or foreclose the questions it leaves us with.

I should also mention that each of the three segments is well over twenty minutes in duration; in other words, film time is dilated, rather than compressed, in comparison to the time of the story being recounted. This is quite unusual for any Hollywood film; it only happens in movies where a time limit is a central feature of the narrative. (I believe that High Noon is supposed to take place in a single hour, although that film is 85 minutes long; but examples of this sort of time dilation are quite rare).

I started by calling Bigelow an ultra-formalist. One sees this in all of her films, expressed in different ways. It certainly includes her nigh-perfect sense for camera movement and editing, but it goes beyond that. I have written in the past about how many of her earlier films are structured around a richly depicted milieu (nighttime in the rural Southwest for Near Dark; the beach for Point Break, even the desert for The Hurt Locker). We have some of that here, in the vast in size but nonetheless claustrophobic bunkers of the two command centers. These spaces are both vast and claustrophobically enclosed; and somehow Bigelow is able to communicate both of these feelings at once. We get a few establishing shots, but they are not enough to orient us visually within spaces that are bureaucratically organized into identical cubicles or identical rows or chairs facing computer screens. We get a kind of allover space, but without a link between micro and macro levels. There are a lot of tight closeups, but also ubiquitous links which are not spatial but telecommunicational. I haven’t seen another film that depicts this new organization of space (as far beyond the postmodern space of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel that Fredric Jameson wrote about in the 1980s, as that space was beyond the older and more linear space of cities in the age of modernism). There was some depiction of military and security command space in Zero Dark Thirty, but Bigelow pushes her vision of this spatial configuration much further in A House of Dynamite.

But there is more. The formal organization of A House of Dynamite, reflecting the formal organization of the security apparatus that it depicts, is a matter of time as well as one of space. Not only are most of the conversations in the film conducted through microphones and screens, we also have a sort of syncopation of events. We will see and hear one side of a conversation in one segment, and the other side in a different segment; for instance, when people communicate with the President in the first two sections of the film, we hear his voice, but his face does not appear on any of the screens that the people in the two command centers can see. We learn in the third segment that this is because the President is not in his office but on the move. A similar effect at a lesser level occurs when the Deputy Security Director Jake Baerington, played by Gabriel Basso, is speaking with people in the bunker while he is still on the way over — so that he communicates by mobile phone while walking quickly, leading to a shaky image that the people already in the bunker complain about.

Since nearly all the discussions that would be depicted via shot-reverse shot structures in an ordinary film are now between people located in different physical spaces, as well as the fact that we so often see one side of a conversation in one segment, while the other side is given us in a later segment, the structures that ordinarily suture a movie together are here divided up: precisely calibrated, but yet diffused over different segments of the film as we are watching it. This may just slip by as we are watching the film, but it is a mind-boggling formal feat for everything to be calibrated so carefully, and yet dispersed into different segments of the movie. It is both that everything is very nearly simultaneous, and also that there is no synoptic point of view that can grasp this simultaneity all at once. Everything is funneled through the apparatuses of capture and comprehension to the President and other top officials. This is conveyed in another way when we meet the Secretary of Defense, who cannot rescue his estranged daughter in Chicago from the impending holocaust, nor tell her about it, but who nonetheless futilely calls her to say somewhat lamely that he loves her. This is only one of several personal touches that the movie inserts, in order to give us some sense of the characters’ lives outside their jobs and procedural duties. But part of the point here is that these asides are all quite brief; Bigelow refuses the temptation to sentimentalize them in a way that would ‘humanize’ the film and detract from its insistence on the bureaucratic and procedural nature of everything that is otherwise depicted.

Let me try to bring this to a conclusion, though there are lots of other features of the movie that I could discuss. But the crucial point for me is that, though Bigelow is an ultra-formalist, she is a hot one rather than a cool one (to use the distinction promoted by Marshall McLuhan). Most formalisms are cool and distanced; think of, for instance, of Alain Resnais’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad. My claim is that A House of Dynamite is in a real way every bit as much a structured formalist work as that film is; but at the same time, Bigelow pushes us into an intimacy and urgency that most formalist movies, in the manner of Marienbad, entirely refuse us. I now realize that the combination of intimacy and affective intensity with an otherwise anti-subjective formalism is precisely what sets Kathryn Bigelow’s films apart from nearly everything else in the entire history of the movies. And this aesthetico-affective approach (if it is at all acceptable for me to use such a verbally infelicitous expression) is what makes the experience of Bigelow’s films so important and indeed overwhelming for me. Most of the reviews I have seen of A House of Dynamite focus on the film’s warning to us about the danger, still today, decades after the end of the Cold War, of a nuclear catastrophe. And of course I am not in any sense denying this. (Other discussions have similarly criticized Zero Dark Thirty for its ‘war on terror’ content, and Detroit for not sufficiently digging into the Black sensibilities that fueled the 1967 rebellion). I have no answer to such comments; I can only say that, aside from them, what thrills and moves me so much about Bigelow is that her films are perhaps the closest I have come to an experience of what (decades ago) we cinephiles used to call (despite the phrase seeming out of date today) pure cinema.

Philip Pullman

I first encountered the writing of Philip Pullman in 1979 or 1980. My friend Barry Schwabsky had discovered Pullman’s novel Galatea (1978) on the new books shelf in the library; after reading it, he passed it on to me. I read it too, and found it utterly remarkable. Galatea was (and still is) is sui generis, not much like anything else I have ever read. It’s a fantasy novel for adults, but very different from Tolkien or any other fantasy that I know of. At the start of the book, the narrator’s wife leaves him, and in order to find her again — though he never does — he embarks on a strange journey that takes him to Amazonia, where he encounters strange ruined or unfinished cities, and strange beings, some of whom have supernatural powers, and much of the time whose gender and sexuality do not fit into our usual binaries. Magic and imagination seem to be tied up with money (or more properly I should say with capital), and vicarious experience — the sort you get through literature and music — is just as vivid and present as ‘real’ experience. The narrator is evidently quite naive, but the beauty of the book comes in great measure from the way that, although most of what happens exceeds the scope of the narrator’s own abilities to perceive and understand, his initial naivete itself is never destroyed, mocked, or overthrown. It is something entirely refreshing, although, but also because, it offers such a weird perspective on our actual world of (what had not yet been called) capitalist realism.

I was delighted with Galatea, and I passed it off to other people just as Barry had passed it off to me. For a good while, I never encountered anybody who had read the novel, or even heard of Pullman, independently of the route of occasions, or the thread of acquaintances, that had started with Barry’s discovery of the book. Evidently Galatea did not sell very well; in the early 1980s, there were stacks of remaindered copies, available for a dollar or two, at used bookstores (such as, I most remember, The Strand in lower Manhattan). I would buy extra copies just to give them to people. I wrote about Galatea in my 1990 book Doom Patrols, though I fear I failed to do the book justice, because it was shoehorned into my own tendentious assertions that unfortunately characterize that book.

It took me a while to hear anything more about Philip Pullman. He had in fact written a novel prior to Galatea, but it was hard to find and turned out to be nowhere near as good. He subsequently, through the 1980s and early 1990s, wrote and published a good number of young adult novels, as well as short works for very young children. It took me a good while to find out about these (I did not have children of my own at the time). But I endeavored to read whatever I could find by him. I had read enough science fiction and fantasy pitched to younger readers, that the non-adult categorizations did not bother me.

Pullman became world-famous with the trilogy His Dark Materials, the first volume of which (The Golden Compass) was published in the United States in 1996. I was excited by these volumes, which constituted Pullman’s most ambitious work — the most complexly articulated and developed since Galatea, and far more ambitious in scope, since they constituted an epic spread across multiple worlds, including our own as well as the alternative Earth where most of the action takes place. [Sidenote: I have no liking for the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, which seems to me to make dubious and arbitrary metaphysical postulations in a futile attempt to conciliate quantum randomness with physical determinism; but many worlds has been a gift of inestimable value to science fiction and fantasy writing]. His Dark Materials deals with questions of freedom and tyranny, good and evil, and the relations between parents and children; it mounts a Blakean and Shelleyan defense of the imagination, of sexual liberation, and of moral autonomy, in opposition to the reductive Christian moralism of, most notoriously, C S Lewis. I note that Pullman published a scathing critique of Lewis at one point, accusing him of religious bigotry, misogyny, and narrow moralism. I find Puillman’s criticisms to be entirely justified, but the article caused enough controversy that he was forced to backpedal his assertions a bit. Pullman is no naive idealist about human character and human agency, but he always pushes against the assumptions of our contemporary hyper-atomized capitalist culture.

His Dark Materials came out at around the same time as J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which overshadowed them but which at the same time made the literary world in general more open to “young adult” fiction, which as a result became increasingly legitimated for adults as well. I was living in Seattle at the time Pullman’s books came out, and he made American book tours for all three volumes, which allowed me both to meet him and to see the growth of his audience. He gave a reading from The Golden Compass at Elliot Bay Bookstore; there were barely a dozen people in the audience, and I was the only person there who was neither a child nor an adult accompanying a child. His reading from The Subtle Knife was held in the University Bookstore, with an audience of fifty or sixty. For The Amber Spyglass, they had to move the reading from the bookstore to a larger auditorium (ironically enough, given the novel’s opposition to traditional Christianity, a church down the street from the University Bookstore), which accommodated several hundred people, with more not able to get in.

At all three of these readings, Pullman signed my copies of his books, but I didn’t get the chance to talk with him for more than a couple of minutes. That was enough to give me the sense that he was a genuinely kind and generous human being. My personal impression of him somehow synergized with my love of his novels; somehow his personal warmth (behind a level of entirely justified reserve) goes along with the psychological insights of his novels, which range from Galatea‘s chamber of wonders to his depictions of the ways that people interact with their daemons, or embodied souls, in His Dark Materials and related works. I have come to consider Pullman one of the rare sources of wisdom in our age, even if I do not always agree with him, and even though I much of the time lack his faith in the redemptive possibilities of storytelling. (I should note that he has supported the rights of trans people, in opposition to the bigotry of his better-known contemporary J K Rowling).

Pullman wrote several other books after completing the trilogy of His Dark Materials, in addition to a few short pieces set in the world of the trilogy. But he only returned to the world of those novels in a big way two decades later, with a new trilogy, The Book of Dust. The first volume, La Belle Sauvage, came out in 2017. The second volume, The Secret Commonwealth, was published in 2019. And the third and final volume, The Rose Field, just came out today — which is what has occasioned my discussion here. Pullman has now published six volumes concerning his heroine Lyra Belacqua, aka Lyra Silvertonge. At age 11 or 12, she was the protagonist of His Dark Materials. In the new trilogy, the first volume went back to her infancy, while the second and third volumes re-introduce her to us as a college student, age 20. I am now about to start The Rose Field, which begins just where The Secret Commonwealth left off, with its cliffhanger ending.

I know that I have not said very much here about the intricate details of Pullman’s vision, which brings the Romanticism and radicalism of poets like Blake and Shelley into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And I still have to start reading The Rose Field, which I pre-ordered and which showed up on my Kindle this morning. Philip Pullman is not the only contemporary author whose writing I love — I just completed reading Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful new short novel, for instance. But there is a way that, unlike any of my other favorites or fan obsessions, Pullman has seemed to me to be like a companion, a wise guide, someone whom I have had the privilege of walking alongside of, ever since I first encountered Galatea forty-five years ago: which is to say for more than half of my life. Pullman is seven and a half years older than me — he recently turned 79 — but I hope that he will continue to write more books, and I will get the opportunity to read more of his words, in the years to come. Nonetheless, the publication of The Rose Field, the sixth and probably last of the volumes featuring Lyra, feels like a culmination of some sort, a stopping-point (even if not the ultimate end) of the journey I have taken with Philip Pullman for all these many years. Which is why I felt impelled to write about him today.

Johanna Isaacson on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, has always been controversial and divisive. It has been praised as High Camp, and denounced as misogynistic caricature. Even for those of us who love it (myself included), the film is excruciating: it consists in more than two hours of aging, dueling divas Davis and Crawford tormenting and indeed torturing one another. Though it had some precursors, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? pretty much invented the “hagssploitation” subgenre. It renewed the careers of both stars, but did this by portraying them as delusional and violent, pretty much erasing their earlier accomplishments as glamorous stars and Oscar-winning actors. While male Hollywood stars are presented in such a way that allows them to preserve their allure into middle age and even beyond, female stars are considered to br washed up and devalued once they hit the age of 35 or so. They can only continue developing their personas by resigning their sexuality and vigor, and instead embracing monstrosity. In this respect, Davis and Crawford were preceded by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950); the pattern continues even today, as witness Demi Moore in The Substance (2024).

Johanna Isaacson renews our understanding of all this with her brilliant short book on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. She deals head-on with the film itself, in terms of both content and form, as well as with the dilemma faced by women who are no longer young –a kind of entrapment that the movie at once dramatizes, exploits, and exemplifies. In Isaacson’s account, Baby Jane indeed “registers older women’s devaluation”; however, “instead of responding with dejection or grim realism,” it “retaliates with fabulousness, excess, and pitch-black humor”. The film, she cogently argues, is “a bold manifesto on how to fight back with theatrical flair rather than meek apology”.

Isaacson’s book is wonderful for several reasons. Most importantly, for me, is how powerfully it gets at a level of aesthetic feeling, or aesthetic response, that is very difficult to put into words. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? overtly invokes sensations of disgust, as well as self-reflexive shame at one’s own implication in enjoying such disgust at the expense of others. The movie even invokes a sort of hilarity, as we cannot help laughing as well as grimacing at the over-the-top absurdity of what is happening on screen. But beyond all this, the film draws us into a mood, or an atmosphere, that doesn’t fit neatly into any of our descriptive categories: a kind of ferocious partial identification with, and partial enjoyment at a detached distance of, the very wrongness of everything that is happening on screen, and everything that the protagonists are doing. Isaacson conveys this sensation that is almost impossible to pin down: a complicated feeling of complicity, distance, and anger, one that can partly be situated in the terms of ideology critique (the feminist analysis of how older women are mistreated and devalued), but that somehow pushes beyond such terms in order to express a kind of joyous but oxymoronic intensity.

Isaacson evokes this mood throughout, but her discussion is anything but vague. She analyzes the film in exquisite depth, both going through the action scene by scene, and also considering its various informing contexts. There are careful discussions of what was happening in Hollywood at the time Baby Jane was made — the collapse of the old Hollywood studio system with which both actresses were identified — as well as of the overall careers of Aldrich, Crawford, and Davis, and even of the infamous Davis/Crawford feud (which may have actually existed to a certain extent, but which was grossly inflated and exaggerated in the press and in other venues in order to help sell the film).

If you are in any sense a fan of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, you certainly need to read this book. But even if you are not particularly attached to the film, you will learn a lot from it about American popular culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and about how the position of women (and in particular of privileged, but still discriminated-against, white women) is both refracted though, and to an extent produced by, the Hollywood dream factory and the mainstream media more generally.