Category: Film

Caveh Zahedi‘s I Am A Sex Addict is a brilliant film. (It’s playing in several cities across the country, but not in Detroit; I saw it on Comcast cable pay-per-view).The set-up is simple: Zahedi, playing himself, recounts the story of his sex addiction — specifically, his obsession with prostitutes — and how this addiction/obsession wreaked havoc on his various relationships over the years. All of Zahedi’s films are autobiographical; most of them involve (as this one does) re-enactments of real incidents in Zahedi’s life. Sex Addict brings these techniques to a new level; I think it is his best work to date.

What’s great about the film is the way it balances honesty and artifice, directness and reflection. Zahedi, wearing a tuxedo and about to get married, addresses the camera, addresses us. His tone is wry and somewhat detached; which is probably the only way anyone could recount something as potentially embarrassing and self-discrediting as the story Zahedi has to tell. Amidst a wealth of digressions, asides, and self-reflective comments, we hear about compulsive encounters with prostitutes, about struggles against compulsion and moments of giving into it, about ecstatic and spiritual moments, about honesty that wounds, about jealousy and depression and botched communication. The direct narration is mixed with re-enactments in a number of styles, including jump cuts, freeze-frames and low-res footage and animation. Actresses stand in for the women in Zahedi’s life; but we also get home-movie footage of the actual women in question, as well as asides on who the actresses themselves are. The re-enactments are not naturalistic; they employ various sorts of repetition (e.g. different prostitutes giving Zahedi what seems like the same blow job), sets that call attention to their own inauthenticity (San Francisco standing in for Paris, for instance), and various sorts of stylization in the acting (Zahedi’s screams as he is being pleasured, for instance).

We have a kind of cliche sense that confessional honesty needs to be delivered in a tone of wrenching anguish. One of the most noteworthy things about I Am A Sex Addict is the way that it demolishes this cliche. Has there ever been a film that is so raw in its self-revelations, and at the same time, not only so wry in the telling, but so highly mediated? The point, I think, is that there is no contradiction here, no opposition between truth and artifice. We live in a hypermediated world, and the media are part of the reality of that world. Godard said somewhere that film is not an image of reality, but rather the reality of that image. And that’s precisely what’s happening in Zahedi’s film. His relation with the video camera is as much a part of his subjectivity as any of the obsessions that he recounts and reenacts onscreen. The story of how he made the film, and of the divergence between the actresses on screen and the real people they portray, cannot be disentangled from the story of his addiction and how he overcame it.

There’s a beautiful moment near the end of the film where Zahedi recounts (and shows via animation) a Greek myth that I ididn’t know. It’s the story of the Sirens. These were singers whose beautiful songs lured sailors to their destruction. The familiar story, in the Odyssey, is about how Odysseus manages to outwit the Sirens, by putting wax in his sailors’ ears so they can’t hear the song, and having himself tied to the mast of the ship so that he cannot suicidally throw himself into the ocean when he hears them. But Zahedi tells a less familiar story: Jason and the Argonauts also escaped the Sirens; they did this by having Orpheus on board with them. Orpheus played a song that was so beautiful that it simply overwhelmed the poisonous beauty of the Sirens’ song. Zahedi is referring to his own (third and current) marriage, with which the film ends; the music of his current love, he tells us, has overwhelmed his prostitute obsession. But I Am A Sex Addict is itself also this more beautiful song, the transmogrification of pain and anguish into an art noteworthy for its clarity, distance, and lightness of touch.

I finally saw V for Vendetta, and I thought it was quite good. Despite Alan Moore’s rejection of the film, and his removal of his name from the credits, I thought the film was more faithful to his vision that I could have expected. (Though admittedly it has been a good while since I read the comic).

In any case, V for Vendetta pulls no punches: it doesn’t draw back from its more dangerous initial implications in the ways that high-budget adaptations of comics so often do. The destruction of the British Parliament at the end of the film is the most emphatic such endorsement of subversive terrorist action since Fight Club. More generally, V for Vendetta‘s depiction of a future fascist government is unambiguous: rather than trying to please all demographics, it identifies a deeply religious, homophobic, ultra-“patriotic,” imperialistic surveillance state as the source of oppression. (There is really no discussion of the power of Capital, which probably marks the limits of the film’s vision; but in our current sanctimonious, neocon circumstances, what we are shown will do. The film mediates cleverly between the very British setting — it was originally written by Moore during the Thatcher era — and its deliberate resonances with the current American situation).

Jodi has already written about some of the ways that V for Vendetta actually embodies “key elements of Zizek’s political theory” (even though Zizek isn’t cited here the way Baudrillard was in The Matrix). I think the film does maintain a surprisingly radical stance for a Hollywood movie; but the politics needs to be framed in terms of the formal conceits of the film. I was especially fascinated by the contrast between the ubiquitous face of the dictator (many times larger than life size on an enormous video monitor as he gives orders to his flunkies) and the facelessness of V., always wearing his creepily smiling Guy Fawkes mask (with the implication that there is no face even behind the mask, but only flayed flesh, muscles, etc., as a result of the biological experiments he endured, and his searing in the fire when he destroyed the laboratory/prison and escaped). This opposition is also one of voice: as the dictator speaks in hectoring tones to his flunkies, or condescendingly on gigantic public video screens to the public, his voice tends towards the hysterical, while the obscenely magnified opening and closing of his mouth, together with his far-from-perfect teeth command our visual attention. Meanwhile, we can never see V.’s mouth moving behind his mask; and his pronouncements, often filled with literary allusions, elaborate metaphors, over-polite diction from past centuries, and frequent alliteration, seem to be coming from nowhere on the screen; it’s more like a dispassionate voiceover narration. The unlocatability of V.’s voice, and the never-changing expression of his mask, are in fact the most disquieting things about the film.

I couldn’t help thinking of Mladen Dolar’s recent brilliant discussion of the ambiguities of the “object-voice” (I hope to write about this book in more detail shortly). The voice, Dolar says, perturbs the opposition between physicality (or the body) on the one hand, and disembodied language on the other, since it seems to belong to both and neither. This duality is also expressed in the way that the voice both inaugurates authority (the superego, conscience) and subverts it (an uncanny alterity, a voice that seems to come from elsewhere). Dolar writes about the role of the voice in politics (the fascist dictator on the radio, the deliberate colorlessness of the Communist leader’s voice, etc.) in ways that would seem relevant for V for Vendetta. V. opposes the lies of official authority (the voices of news commentators as well as of the dictator) with the truths enunciated in his own self-consciously distanced and alienated voice; but his facelessness and voice-from-elsewhere also put him in the same uncanny category as that of the centers of power.

This is part of the reason why, at the end of the film, V. abdicates his own (counter-)authority, leaving the political stage open for Evie (Natalie Portman), who must make the decision to destroy Parliament (symbolically challenge the system of power) on her own, as well as for the masses, who come together in order to confront the troops, and to witness the destruction of Parliament, in their own Guy Fawkes masks — and then take them off, revealing a sea of different, but all anticipatory and hopeful, faces. Despite Jodi’s Zizekian reading, this mass action seemed to me rather to figure the Hardt/Negri multitude, singularities unreconciled with one another, yet drawn together in the affirmation of what is common. It is perhaps one of the virtues of V for Vendetta to dramatize, and argue for, this commonness — in sharp contrast to Zizekian/Badiouian universality.

This is crucial, because V. has many of the characteristics of a comic-book superhero: close-to-invulnerability, a secret and impregnable hideout, the uncanny ability to do things singlehandedly (make bombs and plant them in locations that are under high security; send hundreds of thousands of packages all over the country without being traced; break into the heavily guarded locations to assassinate powerful individuals; etc) that it is hard to imagine even a well-financed guerrilla group accomplishing. The experiments of which V. was the victim presumably gave him these powers, along with providing him with the motive for his “vendetta” — personal revenge, which needs to be disentangled from the justice, and resistance to fascist oppression, for which he ostensibly stands. From a political point of view it is therefore crucial to move away from V.’s personalistic approach to resistance (this is, I think, what Jodi meant by the “messianic” aspects of the movie) in order to involve the people/the mass/the multitude — of whom Evie becomes the representative, not in the electoral sense, but in the sense that she is not irreplacable as V. seems to be, but could be anybody (even if she is unique by having become the one to be — accidentally, at first — chosen by V.). V.’s quasi superpowers are an impossible, comforting fantasy; in Zizek’s terms this means they are what covers up the horror of the Real, and substitutes in its place a bearable “reality.” But — as per Alan Moore’s repeated “deconstruction” of superhero fantasy — the image of V. needs itself to be somehow undone.

All of this leads to the crucial, and disturbing, sequence in which Evie is apparently captured by the authorities, her head shaven, tortured, pressured to confess or reveal information about V., and then sentenced to be shot by a firing squad when she refuses — but then we discover that this has been entirely staged by V. himself. This is the process of what Jodi (following Zizek) calls “subjective destitution” as a precondition for revolutionary action. When Evie no longer fears death, when she rates the cause of overthrowing the dictatorship as higher than her own life, she has conquered fear and (as V. tells her) is (for the first time in her life) free. Presumably, then, V. subjects Evie to so horrific a process for her own good (as well as for the good of the cause). Indeed, one can never will one’s own subjective destitution, it has to come somehow from outside. And, despite her initial anger, Evie does come to accept the whole process as vital and necessary, and this means both that she is indeed dedicated to the revolution as she hadn’t been before, and that she loves V. All this is quite difficult to take, and such difficulty is responsible for much of the power of the film.

Doesn’t it come down to the question of power and responsibility? Although V. describes himself as an artist, like Shakespeare or the great novelists, who uses lies in order to get at the truth (in contrast to ruling politicians and their media flunkies, who use lies in order to conceal the truth), the cynicism, or coldness, of the whole sequence of Evie’s imprisonment and torture leaves a bitter aftertaste. What authorizes V. to inhabit the superior perspective from which he is able, indeed, to torture Evie for her own good? It is precisely his superhero status, the fantasy that needs to be demystified, that grants him this authority. And I’m inclined to argue that this is what is wrong with Zizek’s Leninism, his glorification of the revolutionary act, as well. It’s precisely a fantasy, but the one that Zizek himself is not willing to traverse and to give up (or recognize the meaningless contingency of). (I am not sure I am getting the Lacanian/Zizekian terms right here, but I hope my basic point is getting through anyway). I think that V for Vendetta exposes the deadlock behind the romanticization of “subjective destitution” (perhaps achieved by subordinating one’s own opinions and desires to the dictates of a revolutionary party?) as being the precondition for revolutionary action (not to mention the psychoanalytic cure).

In any case, it is hard to reconcile this process of (imposed) “subjective destitution” with V.’s later (unacknowledged) quote from Emma Goldman about needing a revolution in which one can dance. The latter, I guess, would be more the Hardtian/Negrian revolution of the multitude, that takes place with Spinozian joy rather than Lacanian sacrifice. Not that I really believe the latter is a tenable process in our current environment either. But perhaps V for Vendetta does a better job than either Hardt/Negri or Zizek of focusing on the impasse of radical action today, of rejecting (as k-punk always puts it) the tale told us by Capitalist Realism that “there is no alternative.”

This is perhaps a place where Bataille is still relevant. We cannot do without positing some position of sovereignty, but the sovereignty must “expiate itself” (which is what V. does at the end of the movie). I take “subjective destitution” seriously, but I feel squeamish about the dialectic in which Zizek places it, and in which V. enacts it for Evie. Can sovereignty expiate itself in a way that rejects both Leninist/Zizekian universality and the deconstructionist cheap shot according to which everything is merely “undecidable”?

I still have a lot to think about with regard to this movie. Since I seem to be only getting more and more confused, I will leave my comments here for now.

Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, from the novel by Scott Heim, is an overwhelming, absolutely devastating film: not because, but in spite of, the fact that it is about the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Araki treats the subject without the demonization (of the abuser) or martyrology (of the victims) that have become such cliches in the last ten or twenty years.

The movie tells the intertwined stories of Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Brian (Brady Corbet), both of whom were abused by their Little League coach when they were eight years old. In the present time of the film (1991), they have had no contact with one another since that time; they are now both nineteen. Brian has repressed the experience: he only knows that something important happened to him at age 8; he suspects that he was abducted by aliens, and he wants to find out what really happened. He’s nerdy, touchingly sympathetic in his confusion, extremely nervous, and seemingly asexual. Neil, on the other hand, remembers everything perfectly. At eight, he already knew that he was gay. He felt wounded by the coach’s seduction, but also sexually excited by it, and grateful for the attention. In retrospect, the coach has become Neil’s erotic ideal, his lost love object. At nineteen, Neil is broodingly narcissistic, emotionally hard and closed off and withdrawn into himself. He has become a hustler, compulsively turning tricks with older men who remind him of the coach, turned on by the impersonality (and occasional abuse) of these encounters, and seemingly indifferent to their dangers (AIDS, and sometimes direct physical harm). Both actors (and the supporting cast as well) give amazing performances, sensitive and finely nuanced, attuned both to their characters’ vulnerabilities, and — most importantly — to what these characters are unable to understand, or articulate, about themselves. Gordon-Levitt and Corbet make the gaps and absences present, as it were, in their performances.

In the course of the film, Brian endeavors to work through his own awkwardness and discover what really happened to him; and Neil has a series of sexual encounters, some quite moving (a guy with Karposi’s sarcoma scars who just wants Neil to rub his back), and others downright horrific (especially an encounter with a brutal top). At the end, Brian finally finds Neil, who fills him in on what happened to them both a decade earlier. Brian learns the truth, and Neil realizes for the first time how great was the emotional cost of what happened. That’s really all there is in terms of plot.

But the genius and beauty of Araki’s film is that it doesn’t really abide by the terms of this schematically therapeutic narrative. There’s no past recovered, no redemption, and nothing inspirational. The abuse itself is troublingly ambiguous: though it unquestionably did harm to both boys (the film is in no way an apologia for sex with minors), this harm cannot be separated from who they are and what they have become. The coach is not presented as a monster; for all his creepiness, we can see what Neil loved in him. The film as a whole is bathed in something of an erotic glow. Even the older Neil’s harshest tricks are lit up by a kind of suffusing intensity that coexists with their overt emotional coldness. (The way the camera lingers lovingly or fetishistically on Neil, as it did on similar youthful male bodies in Araki’s earlier films, is part of the reason for this). And Brian is empathetic, not because we are made to feel sorry for him, in a condescending way, as a helpless victim, but precisely because of his will to refuse such a role, and his stumbling efforts to do something about it. As I’ve already mentioned, Araki elicits extraordinary performances from his actors, who are (if I can put it this way) expressive without emoting. There’s also a tightness of framing and editing, a kind of formal concision that — precisely because it is so unindulgent — works as a kind of affective intensifier, whether we are looking at a seedy gay bar, a seeming UFO passing over Brian’s house, or the giant empty screen of a closed-down drive-in, in front of which Neil and his best friend Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg of Buffy fame) are standing and brooding. Not to mention the concluding shot of the film, which I will not describe here.

But I don’t feel like anything I’ve written so far — not the plot summary, nor the stabs at formal analysis — gets at what’s really at stake in the film. Mysterious Skin is a hauntological movie, about irreparability and ghostly presences. The trauma around which it turns is something that you can’t ever represent (to yourself, much less to others), can’t understand, whether you idealize and cling to it (as Neil does) or (mis)conceive it as radically alien (as Brian does). But it’s also something you can’t ever get away from, since everything you experience and feel, everything you are, is woven around it and through it, permeated by its residual presence. So it’s never there, but it’s also never absent. It can’t really be recalled, but it can’t be expelled either. If Neil and Brian learn anything in the course of the film, it isn’t some therapeutic lesson about “healing,” but rather how to be sensitive to a fatality that they cannot will (cannot ever have willed), but that they also cannot escape, and must “assume.” And that is what is so desolating about the ending of the film, and which remains so when you think about it afterwards. When I say “desolating,” I don’t mean “hopeless,” exactly — the feeling we are left with is not that change is impossible or futile. Indeed, I think we are left with the sense — the hope — that both boys will be able to change their lives somewhat, and for the better. But this change cannot ever be put under the rubric of “moving on” or “coming to terms” or “forgiving” or any of the other therapeutic, psychobabble phrases we tend to use for situations like this. Even the possibility of change is predicated on the fact that (contra Hegel) the wounds of the spirit never heal, and always leave scars behind. If Neil and Brian (not to mention we the viewers) learn anything in the course of the film, it is that.

At first I thought of writing a proper review of Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) but I don’t feel up to it. What’s great about the film is that it produces affective blockage on every level. It doesn’t offer the viewer (or the characters) any way out. The protagonists, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), are intellectual yuppies just like the target audience of the film, just like me. Indeed, whenever I saw their Parisian apartment — in which much of the film takes place, and which is presented to us (like everything else in the film) largely in long shot — I felt a bit of sadness and envy and guilt, because everything is so perfect: meticulously neat and clean, with lots of space, sleekly minimal furniture, enormous entirely filled bookcases, a roomy kitchen with lovely appliances doubtless purchased at the French equivalent of Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel, and up-to-date technology including an enormous TV/video screen. They give perfectly tasteful dinner parties in the dining room, and work comfortably in the large central space. It’s just like what my home is supposed to look like, if only I were ever to grow up (which, considering that I am in my early 50s, i.e. just about the same age as Auteuil and his character, I evidently never will). Of course, the camera eye is so distanced, so cooly observant, that it makes this ideal bourgeois space feel utterly oppressive (as undoubtedly it would feel to me if I actually had it — which doesn’t stop me from guiltily feeling that I ought to have it).

Caché is about the invasion, the porousness, of this seemingly perfect space. Georges starts to receive videotapes, from an anonymous source, they are left on his doorstep, which show him that his house is under surveillance. Nothing really happens on the tapes — we just see people walking by the street outside, as well as Georges and Anne leaving the house in the morning, or coming back in the evening. But their mere existence is disturbing. The long shots from the surveillance footage are indistinguishable from the long shots that Haneke himself uses throughout the film; indeed, in the opening shot, and several additional sequences throughout, what we think first is the camera’s “objective” viewpoint turns out to be that of the videotapes: we only discover this when one of the shots that fills the screen is suddenly paused, or put into fast forward or rewind. There is no ontological difference between the diegetic space — yuppified Paris — we are seeing as viewers of the film, and the video/surveillance space that is captured on tape within the diegesis. Indeed, there is no ontological difference between the spaces of the film and the video, and the space that we, the viewers of the film, ourselves live in. We never discover who sent the tapes: indeed, the narrative is so constructed as to make the question of “who sent them?” impossible to answer. It’s not just that we are not given enough information to find out the culprit; it is rather that, from within the film’s own premises, in terms of the naturalistic world the film sets up, it is utterly impossible for the tapes to have been made at all — there is no way anyone could have done it. This impossibility (combined with the almost complete accordance between the tapes and Haneke’s own cinematic style) suggests that the condition of being under surveillance — indeed, the whole condition of liberal complicity and guilt that the film explores — is not an empirical matter, so much as it is a transcendental condition of late-capitalist social life.

I have no desire to rehearse the plot of Caché here. Let’s just say that things escalate, as the tapes go on to show Georges his childhood home, and eventually lead him into a confrontation — no, let’s say rather a failed confrontation, a refusal of confrontation — with his past. This “missed encounter” raises a maelstrom of issues involving class, race, and hypocritical liberal guilt and denial of guilt. Georges’ bourgeois comfort is entirely connected with, and directly based upon, class privilege and racism. This is the case both structurally and personally, both cognitively and affectively, both socially in general and psychologically in the deepest levels of Georges’ own inner life. Georges’ personal guilt and complicity might seem at first to be just an allegory for the more general social condition; except that it is worked through so intimately, with such rigor and depth, that it becomes simply inescapable. Haneke, with his camera’s cool surveillant distance, takes a sadistic pleasure in the spectacle of Georges’ squirming — and the viewers’ squirming-by-involuntary-identification — through a series of denials, evasions, lies, and semi-confessions (both to others and to himself). Georges’ and Anne’s perfect bourgeois marriage decays into (or is revealed to have always been) a venomous battle of wills and egos, just barely hidden beneath the glittering surfaces of perfection. Georges’ and Anne’s relationship to their 12-year-old son Pierrot is also savaged: he is sullenly indifferent to them, and they are utterly clueless and uncomprehending about him. The bourgeois nuclear family is a nasty affair, though its relationship to the social world outside it is even nastier. Georges is implicated (emotionally and morally, though not legally) in another person’s (a working-class Arab man’s) miserable life and eventual (on-camera, in the single most horrific scene of the film) suicide, and we see him getting more and more panicky and self-righteous as he denies the guilt which is his objectively, and which he evidently does feel on some level (as his increasing desperation to escape it indicates to us). The film leaves Georges wallowing in his guilt and misery, but also hunkering down in the class and race privilege, which he so reflexively takes for granted that he never once questions it, nor even has the ghost of a suspicion that it exists.

And Georges’ position is also that of the viewer (who is structurally, a priori, an affluent white male, regardless of who is actually watching the film). We are made to feel guilty and complicitous, while at the same time we are given no way out from this position, and no release even from our own being safe because of the unquestioned privileges that people less fortunate than us do not have. Indeed, we are shielded from consequences because we are, after all, watching a film, this is not happening directly to us in “real life.” Despite the fact that “real life” itself is revealed by Caché to be no more (as well as no less) “real” than a video. Which means that, whatever we understand intellectually, on the affective level we end up sharing Georges’ self-protective sense of unquestioned privilege, as well as his sense of guilt.

In this way, Caché simultaneously abuses and flatters its audience. And I think that the flattery (rather than the abuse) is the nastiest thing about the film. From a political point of view, after all, guilt is just about the most worthless and useless affect/emotion there is. Nobody has ever questioned their privilege, or even done anything decent, out of guilt. Oh, lots of white people “identify” with “minorities” out of guilt, or give to charity (Live 8, anyone?), or mutter pious platitudes and express their support for “identity politics” of various sorts, which allows them to be self-congratulatory about how radical they are, when in fact they aren’t. Indeed, many people of power and privilege positively get off on being made to feel guilty, whether it is the oft-repeated apocryphal story of wealthy CEOs getting release by being abused by a dominatrix, or the more common everyday spectacle of white suburbanites feeling cleansed after getting a good scolding (followed by absolution) from Oprah (or white people with more intellectual/political pretensions getting a good scolding from bell hooks). I do not claim to be exempt from this whole process.

And this is exactly what Caché does to/for its viewers. Or better, it indeed exposes this mechanism of flattery-through-guilt; but without offering any escape from it, and even without quite criticizing or critiquing it. As if that were just the way it is: which indeed, it is. This is what the obvious question about Haneke’s own position comes down to. (Is he claiming exemption from the condition that he otherwise shows to be universal among people of privilege? Well, yes and no. That’s an evasion, of course, but the evasion itself is the point). What’s most powerful about the film is that it not only decrees guilt, but cranks the guilt up to a self-reflexive level: the guilt is reduced or managed by the flattery and privilege that we retain while observing all this; but such a meta-understanding itself creates a new, higher-order sense of guilt, which in turn is cushioned by a new, higher-order sense of self-congratulation as to our superior insight, which in turn is an unquestioned privilege that, when comprehended, leads to a yet-higher-level meta-sense of guilt, and so on ad infinitum. There’s complete blockage, no escape from this unending cycle. The experience of the film is one both of self-disgust and of a liberation, through aestheticization, from this self-disgust. The latter is what makes Caché truly insidious, in an almost Bataillean way.

There’s a long shot/long take at the very end of the film, in which — foregrounded in no way, so it is easy to miss — amidst a whole crowd of people doing all sorts of things, we see some sort of contact between two of the minor characters (as far as I could tell, it was Georges’ son Pierrot and the son of the Algerian suicide) that suggests even new levels of complicity and uncertainty. I think that this only reinforces the film’s overall coldly delirious deadlock. The more explaining we need to do, the more we are trapped in the film’s (and society’s) self-reflexive spiral of guilt and privilege. The film offers no way out, because it never breaks with its sense of privilege, no matter how unwarranted it shows that privilege to be. The creepiness of finding oneself under surveillance, the creepiness of seeing a marriage break down into mutual vicious recriminations, is nothing compared to the creepiness of realizing that one still has one’s shield of privilege despite these intrusions, and that the facade of bourgeois marriage will survive everything that’s going on underneath.

Footnote: I think that some sense of this ethico-political mise en abime is what explains Armond White’s otherwise bizarre review of the film, in which he blames Haneke for exploiting the Third World yet again under the guise of supporting it, and for lacking the alleged “complexity and brilliance” and moral clarity of Spielberg’s Munich. White’s adoration of Spielberg is reprehensible and unconscionable, but the reasons he hates Haneke are pretty much identical to the reasons I consider Haneke is one of the best and most important European directors working today.

I watched Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon because of Jodi’s recommendation. She’s right. It’s a great film. It’s set in 1973-74. Sean Penn plays Samuel Bicke, a failed salesman and would-be small businessman who resolves to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House to kill President Nixon (described early in the film as the world’s greatest salesman, because he sold himself to the American people twice, simply by having such a Norman Vincent Peale positive attitude that he believed in himself, believed his own lies). Of course, Sam’s plan fails miserably, as does everything he tries to do throughout the entire movie. It’s excruciating to watch Penn-as-Bicke slip ever more deeply into his own delusions. Except they aren’t delusions, exactly. Sam simply believes in what we are all taught to believe in: decency, honesty, and the American way. He thinks that if he’s only earnest and forthright enough, everything will go his way and he will be a success. This faith leads, of course, to one humiliation after another.

Sam approaches everybody, whether in his personal life or in sales, with a Dale Carnegie upbeat attitude that invariably comes off as totally forced and phony, precisely because he means it sincerely and as a result he isn’t manipulative enough to be good at making it seem convincing. He can’t hold a job, because he’s actually offended at all the demeaning and dishonest things one must do in order to satisfy the tyrannical whims and business plans of one’s bosses: how can people do such things as wear a stupid uniform (as his ex-wife does) for a job as a cocktail waitress? or lie to the customers in order to make a sale? or take abuse from a disgruntled, and probably racist client (as his black friend, played by the great Don Cheadle, does in his auto repair shop)? or shave off his mustache so that he will have the right “look” for the office? He can’t accept everyone else’s common-sense observations that you do these things because you’ve got to make a living.

Similarly, Sam can’t accept that his ex-wife (Naomi Watts) has dumped him, because he believes so strongly in the nuclear-family-with-suburban-home-and-three-kids-and-a-dog myth that he’s unable to conceive that anything could ever possibly go wrong with it. Sam even admires the Black Panthers, because they are standing up for the human decency and respect that everybody ought to have (in one great scene, he visits the local Panther headquarters in order to contribute some money, and urge them to transform themselves into the “Zebras,” so that they could admit to their ranks downtrodden white guys such as himself). In short, Sam believes in the petit-bourgeois values that we Americans all cannot help believing in — and that Nixon himself embodied more than anybody (as my friend Carl Freedman’s forthcoming book on Nixon makes abundantly clear) — except that Sam somehow lacks the hypocrisy that allows the rest of us (from Nixon on down) actually to function in the world despite holding such ideals, and that allows the ideals to function ideologically despite their hollowness and falsity. We all “know” that of course the American vision of equal opportunity doesn’t really mean that the Black Panthers’ protests were entirely justified; only Sam can’t see this. Zizek would say that Sam undermines the ideology that he believes in by overidentifying with it. Sam’s lack of hypocrisy, his true belief, is what makes him clinically crazy and delusional.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon works largely on the basis of Penn’s brilliant performance: it’s rare to see a star so unreservedly taking on a role that is so utterly unredemptive and painfully abject. The script also has the courage and tenacity to pursue its cringe-worthy vision to the bitter end. Several reviews I’ve read have depicted the film as a lesser imitation of Taxi Driver; but such a comparison seems to me to be totally off the mark. Though both films narrate the story of a deranged white guy (whose name starts with “Bick..”) who tries to solve his personal traumas through political assassination, Penn-as-Bicke has none of DeNiro-as-Bickle’s grandiosity or messianic drive or quasi-fascist obsession with purity and moral decay; and Mueller has none of Scorsese’s obsessions about masculinity (or Paul Schraeder’s about sin and redemption). The Assassination of Richard Nixon is political in a way that Taxi Driver is not. And it doesn’t offer its audience a way out from its abject vision; Taxi Driver comes off as downright comforting in comparison.

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, a fictionalized account of the last days of Kurt Cobain, is a gorgeous downer of a movie. The whole film, — like its protagonist Blake (Michael Pitt), the Cobain analogue: beuatiful, androgynous, and at once impassive and vulnerable, hardened and fragile, just like Kurt himself seemed to be, and like Nirvana’s music actually was, in its expression — has a blankness that haunts you afterwards. The film is composed almost entirely of long shots; the camera stays at a distance as Blake shuffles through the woods, mumbling to himself; or carefully pours himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen (and then puts the cereal box, instead of the milk, into the refrigerator); or nods out in his enormous living room while the TV plays a Boyz II Men video; or ducks out the back door of his mansion as somebody he doesn’t want to see comes in the front; or (the one time he shows any energy) plays his guitar. There’s one scene where the camera views him from outside, through the windows of the mansion, as he plays first one guitar, then another, then drums… and even though he continually drops one instrument for another, the dropped instruments continue to play on the soundtrack, until we hear the sound of an entire band. There are all sorts of odd sounds on the soundtrack: not just non-diegetic music (religious music, mostly) but also seemingly ambient, diegetic sounds — like loud nature sounds (a stream, the wind, etc) — that don’t rightly correspond to the scene we are watching. Time becomes flexible, as well: there are repetitions, jumps in continuity, returns to scenes that had passed earlier, even an entire sequence that happens a second time, with the camera located elsewhere than it was the first… We don’t see Blake shoot up, and we don’t see him die; everything is suspended, before and after, the center (the events themselves) missing. It’s easy to say that the cinematography is in this way providing a mimesis of Blake’s largely absent mental state; but that is an oversimplification, because we are also getting other people’s POVs: a bunch of people who are somehow staying in Blake’s house, although they don’t seem to know him very well; a private investigator who has been hired to find him (but doesn’t); even the gardener who discovers his corpse, and sees his soul ascending to heaven. So in this way the film isn’t psychological (or mimetic of a single consciousness) at all, though it is affective, and powerfully so: we get, not the central character’s absence of affect or negative affect, but precisely the (strong) affectivity of that absence, that blankness. Which means, of course, impersonal affect, affect that isn’t the property of a self at all, that’s floating and impalpable and acausal (is that the right word? I mean that can’t be tied down in terms of psychological cause and effect: it operates on a level that is apart from things like motives and consequences. This is how (and why) Last Days doesn’t explain anything, and how it is thereby absolutely unjudgmental about Blake’s (or for that matter Kurt’s) drug use, detachment from others, and suicide. We are in a place, or at a level, where “responsibility” (or its opposite) simply isn’t a relevant category any longer. Which means that Last Days is entirely aesthetic in attitude, rather than ethical. And I see this aestheticism as subversive: in our “late capitalist” world where absolutely everything is aestheticized, where aestheticization and commodification are always the same thing, where even the production of basic necessities is part of the “culture industry,” — something gets shaken up, a hole or a rupture appears, when aestheticism is pushed to an impossible extreme, when it reaches this absurd, impersonal, purely affective point. It’s a tear in the fabric of our consumerist reality; a tear that is immediately repaired, or covered over, but that nonetheless suggests, for a moment, a different “distribution of the sensible” (Ranciere) and especially of the general and the particular, the universal and the singular. (In the preceding sentence, I wrote “tear” in the sense of ripping; but it strikes me now that “tear” in the sense of weeping would be equally appropriate). Of course, Last Days is still a commodity (even as Nirvana was and is, on a much higher level of commercial success); but its blankness, its hyperbolic affect, its refusal of presence still haunts and lingers.

I’ve now seen two of Kim Ki-Duk‘s films — 3-Iron and The Isle — and they are both so astonishing that I want to see everything he’s made. Kim’s films are not like those of any other Korean director I’ve encountered. They are visually beautiful: quite static, with a precision of framing and crispness of editing that prevents them from being merely picturesque or postcard-pretty. They are very slow-moving and contemplative, but they also feel compressed and concise: a paradox I can’t explain except to say that, while little overtly happens, and more action is inferred than actually shown, there is no sense of lingering, and Kim eschews that sort of extended temporality that we get in the works of directors as diverse as Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Antonioni (with all of whom Kim might otherwise be compared in terms of composition and pace). Kim’s films do have their moments of violence, when everything comes to a head in a single movement; this would seem to contradict, but actually makes a powerful synthesis with, their stillness. (Nothing too explicit in 3-Iron, although it has its troubling violent moments; but The Isle contains, among other things, two extremely visceral scenes of self-mutilation, which, while not quite as explicitly presented as the violent scenes in, say, Tarantino or Miike, are far more disturbing, because of their emotional intensity, and because we can’t dismiss them as being over-the-top to the point of absurdity). In both films, there is very little dialogue; and in both, the main character does not speak at all. Both films are tales of extreme sexual passion, indeed of passion pushed to a point of transcendent craziness; yet at the same time this passion does not take the (by now all too familiar) form of amour fou, but instead seems reined in by an odd kind of restraint (fairly gentle in 3-Iron, and all the more extreme for being so unexpressive in The Isle). This passion is both otherworldly, and yet too carnal to be called “spiritual” (at least in whatever Western terms I am able to understand). And the passion occurs between two protagonists, moves from one of them to the other, in a way that cannot be reduced either to one-sided erotic obsession (like Vertigo) on the one hand, or folie à deux on the other. Both films are organized around the encounter of a heterosexual couple, in which one of the partners transforms (it would be too crude to say “liberates”) the other: in 3-Iron it is the man who inspires and changes the woman, while in The Isle it is the woman who moves and changes the man. I can’t say much more without going into plot detail about the two films, and obviously I need to see more of Kim’s films before I generalize further as to what he is about. But 3-Iron and The Isle are beautiful in their intensity, and both of them convey something I have never encountered before in film (and only rarely in writing): what I can only call (for want of any better phrase to describe it) trans-subjective affect in motion, on a level that can only be shown, not explicitly said or conventionally expressed.

Alex Cox‘s most recently completed film is I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me!, a short (about 40 minutes) made for the BBC, on which it was shown, amazingly, as a children’s show. The DVD is available for purchase direct from Cox’s website.

I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me! is a sardonic little parable about the rise and fall of a “reality show” in which a bunch of juveniles commit crimes (vandalism, robbery, etc) on camera. We move outward from the show itself, to the people creating the show, to “on-the-street” interviews with viewers, to the larger forces (media, police, government, etc.) that determine the show’s success and faillure. The show’s hosts/presenters/producers are a pair of obnoxious frat-boy types (or whatever the British equivalent is); they exploit the kids featured in the program, but get into trouble themselves over questions of the show’s “morality,” until they come up with the brilliant, “competitive” solution of a final episode in which four of the show’s five juvenile delinquents are sent to jail, while the fifth one gets a shot at pop stardom. And it spirals out from there, to involve the entire British pomp-and-circumstance class structure, with rapacious American corporations waiting in the wings.

What’s really brilliant about I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me! is the way that the entire film (and not just the show-within-the-film) is shot in a trash-TV exploitative style, with lots of closeups, wobbly cameras, quick transitions, cheapo digital effects, bits from blurry surveillance footage, etc. There is no distinction between the “reality show” itself and the surrounding footage narrating its history. So we get the sense of how the entire society has become televisualized. Video is more real than anything else; it is conterminous with all of social space. And the critique of television — at one point there is even a scene of (the real) George Galloway denouncing the (fictional) reality show — is itself folded back into television. There is no moral high ground, and there is no Outside. A grim conclusion, but an all too accurate one.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Alex Cox is one of the best and most interesting — and also one of the most underappreciated and underrated — film directors currently working. I just saw his 1998 film Three Businessmen, which was quite wonderful (even if not quite reaching the sublime heights of Revengers Tragedy).

Three Businessmen is about two businessmen — a loud and vulgar, obnoxiously extroverted American (Miguel Sandoval) and a dour, depressive, introverted Brit (played by Cox himself) — who wander through (initially) Liverpool one night, looking for (and never quite finding) a meal. (The third businessman doesn’t show up until nearly the end). The movie mostly consists of their conversation (banter, argument, pontification, etc.) on subjects ranging from the virtues of different drinks, to the loyalty of dogs, to how the new electronic media are changing commerce. The cinematography is almost entirely long shots — though occasionally the camera tracks in towards the protagonists. The effect is mostly comic and absurdist, but in an extremely dry, distanced, and understated way. Subtle incongruities abound. At one early point, the protagonists are wandering through what is evidently a depressed, broken-down, impoverished neighborhood, when they suddenly stumble upon a large and brightly-lit Mercedes showroom. They go to a bar and ask about this. The woman behind the bar tells them that it’s for drug dealers. But they prefer to believe a fellow drinker who assures them that the city is being revitalized, thanks to miles and miles of fiber-optic cable, and the Mercedes showroom is due to the new business activity pouring in. As they continue to wander, things become stranger: every time our protagonists take public transportation (a bus, a subway, a ferry, a taxi, etc) they find themselves in a different world city (Rotterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc). Watching the film, it took me a while to realize how something was amiss (i.e. there couldn’t be that large a Japanese restaurant district in Liverpool…).

The film could be seen as an exploration of opposed, American vs. British, character types: a deconstruction of the cliches of both nationalities. But in addition, our protagonists — not corporate management types, but small, independent businessmen (both currently art dealers, but previously involved in real estate and other ventures) — are in fact wandering through the “space of flows” of postmodern, transnational finance capital: something that neither they, nor we the viewers, are entirely able to grasp or understand — it’s a space, as Fredric Jameson wrote, that can’t be “represented” in conventional ways, and needs a new form of “cognitive mapping.” Except that, at the very end of the movie — no, I won’t give this largely plotless film’s one plot twist away. I’ll just say that the film starts with the grandiose, faux-classical architecture of central Liverpool, a heritage from the 19th century, when Britain ruled the world, and the city was one of the world’s major ports and industrial centers — in sharp contrast to its present depressed squalor; and it ends in the deserts of Mexico, with a vague hope of redemption from the infernal cycles of capital…

Joe Dante’s Homecoming, shown tonight on Showtime as part of their current Masters of Horror series, is a great zombie B-movie, and a wonderful little bit of agitprop about the Iraq War. When a Cindy Sheehan-like mother of a soldier dead in the War asks what her son died for, a sanctimonious White House speechwriter responds that if he had one wish, it would be that her son could come back to tell her of the importance of the cause for which he gave his life. And the speechwriter gets his wish: all the soldiers dead in the war awaken as zombies… only they’ve come back, not to bless the President’s policies, but to vote him out of office. And though all the dead soldiers want is to express their opinions through the ballot box, the situation escalates after the President wins re-election by fixing the results in Ohio and Florida…

There’s not that much, really, to say about the movie. Homecoming doesn’t go for subtlety. It is tight, direct, on the mark, and well focused in all its details. There are some good zombie scenes, and I especially enjoyed the satirical sequences involving sleazy characters who are obvious analogues of Karl Rove and Ann Coulter. It’s great that a movie like this was able to get on the air (albeit only on premium cable). It’s an emotionally satisfying revenge fantasy, a neat reversal of the propaganda that we are usually fed about the war.