Platform

Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform is a difficult, but ultimately powerful and haunting film. It’s two and a half hours long (the director’s original cut, apparently, went to over three hours). The film follows the members of a performance troupe (musicians, singers, and dancers) in a provincial Chinese town over the period from 1979 to 1990. It’s challenging, and often hard to follow, because the narrative is so elliptical. The style is mostly long takes and static long shots, beautiful in a kind of spare way. It is hard to get intimate with the characters, because they are so often distant from the camera, and dwarfed by their alienating surroundings (towns with crumbling old buildings or ugly new ones; and in between, as they wander from town to town, there are lots of dusty or desert landscapes). Also, characters appear and disappear without much explanation, over the course of the decade that the film follows. Often we get cuts from one situation to another, seemingly continuous because the same music is playing over the cut, and without any explicit indication of how much time has passed — only gradually do we realize that the new scene is months, or even years, after the previous one, and that important events have happened in the interim, which are not shown but only alluded to. The characters’ lives are desultory and ineffectual — nobody really achieves anything or gets anywhere, either personally or professionally. All their relationships fall apart, more from disinterest than acrimoniousness. They never make it to the big cities, which was their goal from the very beginning. Indeed, they are never successful as performers: nobody has much use for their Maoist morality plays in 1979, and nobody has much use for their lame simulations of hard rocking and disco dancing in 1990. The real drama of the film is precisely this change, or rather the social change of which their stylistic changes are an example: China’s movement from Maoist isolation and totalitarian purism to full-fledged capitalism and international connections. At the start of the film, the small town the troupe comes from has crumbling ruins and only a few Party-owned motor vehicles. In the middle, the troupe is privatized — along with just about everything else we see. By the end, there are traffic jams and all sorts of new construction; money is being made, and society has new groups of winners and losers. The film’s subtlety is that these changes are never directly called attention to; it remains in the background (or literally, as the scenic background). The characters remain too mired in their small personal dilemmas to ever explicitly register how much their own lives have changed, together with the world around them. Everything is conveyed by small references: in the opening sequences, for instance, they flub a performance of a train ride to Chairman Mao’s birthplace, because (it turns out) none of them has ever even seen, much less ridden a train. Years later, and halfway through the movie, they are mired in the middle of nowhere when their truck has broken down; they hear a train coming and run wildly toward the tracks, in the hope that it will stop and pick them up — but they make it to the tracks just too late. (It’s a gorgeous scene, because of the hilly scenery, and because of the pop song “Platform” that gives the film its name — apparently it was a big Chinese hit in the 1980s — it is playing on the truck’s radio for the entire scene). We similarly see the characters’ wardrobes change over the course of the film; they stop wearing Maoist uniforms and gradually discover fashions arriving in their small town from the rest of the world. And we move from scenes where Maoist propaganda music is already playing on the town’s public loudspeakers, to ones where people are casually watching Bollywood films on TV in their own homes. And so, for a large portion of the film, I watched the scenes pass, only vaguely being able to parse what was going on; the film’s larger themes and social commentary sneaked up on me, as it were, and only towards the end did I retrospectively realize how brilliant and meaningful was so much of what had come before. All in all, Platform is a rather depressing film; the characters’ lives, as I’ve already said, go nowhere despite the immense social change that is happening within them as well as all around them. And Jia doesn’t see free-wheeling capitalism as much of an improvement over totalitarian Maoism: a few people get rich, but most of them remain downtrodden victims; and the new freedom they have is mostly just the freedom to be a consumer — to the extent that one’s means allow — and to sample the wares from a larger world which thereby penetrates their village, but which otherwise they will never see. This is what happens, Jia suggests, when his country moves from insularity to globalization, and from socialist poverty (both material and spiritual) to capitalist inequality. At the end of the film, I was left with an immense sense of sadness and loss — despite the fact that nothing tragic has happened, and that the film doesn’t accord its characters anything that they could have lost. It’s just a tale of ordinary depression and oppression, in both socialist and capitalist varieties.

Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform is a difficult, but ultimately powerful and haunting film. It’s two and a half hours long (the director’s original cut, apparently, went to over three hours). The film follows the members of a performance troupe (musicians, singers, and dancers) in a provincial Chinese town over the period from 1979 to 1990. It’s challenging, and often hard to follow, because the narrative is so elliptical. The style is mostly long takes and static long shots, beautiful in a kind of spare way. It is hard to get intimate with the characters, because they are so often distant from the camera, and dwarfed by their alienating surroundings (towns with crumbling old buildings or ugly new ones; and in between, as they wander from town to town, there are lots of dusty or desert landscapes). Also, characters appear and disappear without much explanation, over the course of the decade that the film follows. Often we get cuts from one situation to another, seemingly continuous because the same music is playing over the cut, and without any explicit indication of how much time has passed — only gradually do we realize that the new scene is months, or even years, after the previous one, and that important events have happened in the interim, which are not shown but only alluded to. The characters’ lives are desultory and ineffectual — nobody really achieves anything or gets anywhere, either personally or professionally. All their relationships fall apart, more from disinterest than acrimoniousness. They never make it to the big cities, which was their goal from the very beginning. Indeed, they are never successful as performers: nobody has much use for their Maoist morality plays in 1979, and nobody has much use for their lame simulations of hard rocking and disco dancing in 1990. The real drama of the film is precisely this change, or rather the social change of which their stylistic changes are an example: China’s movement from Maoist isolation and totalitarian purism to full-fledged capitalism and international connections. At the start of the film, the small town the troupe comes from has crumbling ruins and only a few Party-owned motor vehicles. In the middle, the troupe is privatized — along with just about everything else we see. By the end, there are traffic jams and all sorts of new construction; money is being made, and society has new groups of winners and losers. The film’s subtlety is that these changes are never directly called attention to; it remains in the background (or literally, as the scenic background). The characters remain too mired in their small personal dilemmas to ever explicitly register how much their own lives have changed, together with the world around them. Everything is conveyed by small references: in the opening sequences, for instance, they flub a performance of a train ride to Chairman Mao’s birthplace, because (it turns out) none of them has ever even seen, much less ridden a train. Years later, and halfway through the movie, they are mired in the middle of nowhere when their truck has broken down; they hear a train coming and run wildly toward the tracks, in the hope that it will stop and pick them up — but they make it to the tracks just too late. (It’s a gorgeous scene, because of the hilly scenery, and because of the pop song “Platform” that gives the film its name — apparently it was a big Chinese hit in the 1980s — it is playing on the truck’s radio for the entire scene). We similarly see the characters’ wardrobes change over the course of the film; they stop wearing Maoist uniforms and gradually discover fashions arriving in their small town from the rest of the world. And we move from scenes where Maoist propaganda music is already playing on the town’s public loudspeakers, to ones where people are casually watching Bollywood films on TV in their own homes. And so, for a large portion of the film, I watched the scenes pass, only vaguely being able to parse what was going on; the film’s larger themes and social commentary sneaked up on me, as it were, and only towards the end did I retrospectively realize how brilliant and meaningful was so much of what had come before. All in all, Platform is a rather depressing film; the characters’ lives, as I’ve already said, go nowhere despite the immense social change that is happening within them as well as all around them. And Jia doesn’t see free-wheeling capitalism as much of an improvement over totalitarian Maoism: a few people get rich, but most of them remain downtrodden victims; and the new freedom they have is mostly just the freedom to be a consumer — to the extent that one’s means allow — and to sample the wares from a larger world which thereby penetrates their village, but which otherwise they will never see. This is what happens, Jia suggests, when his country moves from insularity to globalization, and from socialist poverty (both material and spiritual) to capitalist inequality. At the end of the film, I was left with an immense sense of sadness and loss — despite the fact that nothing tragic has happened, and that the film doesn’t accord its characters anything that they could have lost. It’s just a tale of ordinary depression and oppression, in both socialist and capitalist varieties.

Tropical Malady

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, one of the most talked-about films of the new Thai cinema, is a beautifully opaque film. The first half is a low-key love story between two young men, one a soldier and the other not. The camerawork here seems almost documentary-like (restlessly moving handheld camera, ambient sound that often drowns out the dialogue, naturalistic shots that often seem carelessly framed and composed), until you notice all the strange discordancies (jump cuts; extreme jumps in time over a continuing soundtrack, so that it seems as if the same scene is continuing although the actors are wearing different clothes and it has changed from day to night, or it has clearly become the next day; extreme long shots when a fairly intimate scene is in progress). The result is less to distance us from the characters and their feelings, than to emphasize, rather sweetly, how the feelings themselves are tentative and uncertain, as these lovers are still just starting to get to know one another.

But around the middle of the film, everything suddenly changes. Now we have very self-consciously artful cinematography, with continuity rules mostly observed. A soldier (I couldn’t tell for sure if it was the same actor as in the first half), in the jungle and mostly at night, is tracking some sort of ghost or spirit. There is almost no dialogue. We have titles, superimposed on what looks like an ancient painting, telling us of a shaman who takes on the form of a tiger; there are also ghosts and other apparitions, not to mention a talking monkey (who tells the soldier that he must either kill the shaman/tiger, or be devoured by him). The screen is mostly dark; we barely see shapes emerging out of the shadows, it feels like we are on the edge of hallucination. The sound is ambient noises of the jungle. The pace is slow; there’s a lot of waiting. (Also, the soldier often pauses to peel off leeches from his legs and arms). The ending is ambiguous: the soldier confronts the tiger/shaman, and the scene turns back into the ancient painting.

Can we take this second part of the film as an allegory of desire? of its delays, its intense demands, its engulfing depths? That’s the best idea I have for understanding how the second part might relate to the first. But I think it’s more a matter of rhythms of affect, than it is of making literal sense of the narrative. Love starts in the everyday; but at some point it turns into an abyss (or, more accurately, it has already turned into an abyss: for the point at which it metamorphoses is something that we can only apprehend retrospectively). (Also, “abyss” is not precisely the word I want here; for what I am conceiving as the “abyss” of passion is something that, in Tropical Malady at least, unfolds horizontally, in the jungle at night: a slow movement through a menacing and marvelous labyrinth, perhaps, rather than a descent into the depths). In any case, we move from the everyday to a kind of giving, or willed loss, that can only be represented obliquely (that is only obliquely). It’s sort of like melodrama without any of the twists and turns, or ups and downs, that usually make up melodrama: a plotless and incidentless melodrama, which is of course an oxymoron, but in this case a necessary one.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, one of the most talked-about films of the new Thai cinema, is a beautifully opaque film. The first half is a low-key love story between two young men, one a soldier and the other not. The camerawork here seems almost documentary-like (restlessly moving handheld camera, ambient sound that often drowns out the dialogue, naturalistic shots that often seem carelessly framed and composed), until you notice all the strange discordancies (jump cuts; extreme jumps in time over a continuing soundtrack, so that it seems as if the same scene is continuing although the actors are wearing different clothes and it has changed from day to night, or it has clearly become the next day; extreme long shots when a fairly intimate scene is in progress). The result is less to distance us from the characters and their feelings, than to emphasize, rather sweetly, how the feelings themselves are tentative and uncertain, as these lovers are still just starting to get to know one another.

But around the middle of the film, everything suddenly changes. Now we have very self-consciously artful cinematography, with continuity rules mostly observed. A soldier (I couldn’t tell for sure if it was the same actor as in the first half), in the jungle and mostly at night, is tracking some sort of ghost or spirit. There is almost no dialogue. We have titles, superimposed on what looks like an ancient painting, telling us of a shaman who takes on the form of a tiger; there are also ghosts and other apparitions, not to mention a talking monkey (who tells the soldier that he must either kill the shaman/tiger, or be devoured by him). The screen is mostly dark; we barely see shapes emerging out of the shadows, it feels like we are on the edge of hallucination. The sound is ambient noises of the jungle. The pace is slow; there’s a lot of waiting. (Also, the soldier often pauses to peel off leeches from his legs and arms). The ending is ambiguous: the soldier confronts the tiger/shaman, and the scene turns back into the ancient painting.

Can we take this second part of the film as an allegory of desire? of its delays, its intense demands, its engulfing depths? That’s the best idea I have for understanding how the second part might relate to the first. But I think it’s more a matter of rhythms of affect, than it is of making literal sense of the narrative. Love starts in the everyday; but at some point it turns into an abyss (or, more accurately, it has already turned into an abyss: for the point at which it metamorphoses is something that we can only apprehend retrospectively). (Also, “abyss” is not precisely the word I want here; for what I am conceiving as the “abyss” of passion is something that, in Tropical Malady at least, unfolds horizontally, in the jungle at night: a slow movement through a menacing and marvelous labyrinth, perhaps, rather than a descent into the depths). In any case, we move from the everyday to a kind of giving, or willed loss, that can only be represented obliquely (that is only obliquely). It’s sort of like melodrama without any of the twists and turns, or ups and downs, that usually make up melodrama: a plotless and incidentless melodrama, which is of course an oxymoron, but in this case a necessary one.

A History of Violence

I’m not sure how much I can add, belatedly, to what k-punk, girish twice, Chuck, Jodi — followed by k-punk’s reply and Jodi’s counter-replyJonathan Rosenbaum, and others have already said about A History of Violence. But I do think that it is David Cronenberg’s best film since at least Dead Ringers (1988). Quite some time ago, I wrote extensively about the body horror in Cronenberg’s early films: which meant a lot, and still means a lot, to me. I was a bit disappointed, however, about the way that Cronenberg’s distancing himself from genre, in order to embrace “art film,” got in the way of his adaptations of writers with whom he shared a sensibility (William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard). And I was still more disappointed, when, in his more recent films, even though sometimes with increased artistic power, Cronenberg moved away from that explosive sensibility altogether, and towards an implosive concern with the anguish of wounded white male interiority — a subject with which I have little sympathy, as I think that we (since I have to be included as part of that “we”) need to get over it, and go on to more important things than whining over our supposed (more fantasmatic than actually real) loss of privilege. (In fairness, I should note that my friend Bill Beard, in his excellent book on Cronenberg, not only gives a far less pejorative account of this progress, but also argues that such a process was in fact already the real concern of Cronenberg’s earlier films as well, despite all the posthuman exploration that I, among others, have read into them).

The editing of A History of Violence is very tight and powerful, like that of Spider. But the important thing is that A History of Violence for me is that the film is not psychological, not about interiority, in the way Spider definitely still was (and the way many of the Cronenberg films of the last fifteen years or so have been). By “not psychological”, I don’t mean not affective, but that the affect in some way is impersonal or transpersonal. In Spider, dread was tied in to the protagonist’s point of view: a POV that we know is distorted and fantasmatic, but which we cannot escape from, or get an independent perspective on, despite this knowledge. The epistemological deadlock — or better, prison — that is at the heart of that film was reinforced by the way in which the adult protagonist (Ralph Fiennes) appears in the frame as a silent observer of his own psychotically distorted childhood memories.

The editing and pacing of A History of Violence create a similar sense of dread, even when what is explicitly going on (the members of a picture-perfect nuclear family eating breakfast, pouring the dry cereal, etc.) is entirely “normal” and banal. But Viggo Mortensen, playing the protagonist, is so closed off and opaque that we can’t really read (or more accurately: feel) what he’s going through as subjective anguish. (I’m assuming anyone who has read this far has seen the movie, or at least knows the basic premise: Tom Stall, exemplary small-town family man, turns out to have a dark past as Joey Cusack, psychotic mob hit man). As Tom, Mortensen is simply too blank to “identify” with; as Joey, he doesn’t display any of the self-congratulatory feeling that even Clint Eastwood (wonderfully minimal in expression as he is) does ultimately allow himself when he is in vengeful mode. In an email exchange, Bill Beard suggested to me that Cronenberg and Mortensen are operating by subtraction: “A History of Violence produces something radical simply by subtracting standard conduits of viewer empathy from what is unmistakably a mainstream-movie framework.” So we get, for instance, generic small-town Americana such as is found in the paintings of Norman Rockwell, and in the films of Frank Capra and (more recently) Steven Spielberg; everything is literally as it is supposed to be, but some dimension of warmth (or smarminess) is unaccountably missing, and this makes it all rather creepy. I’d only add to Beard’s account that the greatness of Mortensen’s acting, in particular, lies in the way he switches from one to the other of his two ‘characters’ or personalities, so that ultimately he seems to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between them. He’s a man without qualities, which is why both of his personas seem unpsychological. The conventional way to tell this story would be to make one of the personas more basic, more in depth, revealing the other persona to be just a mask; but this is precisely what Cronenberg refuses to do.

All this is even more evident in the two extraordinary sex scenes between Mortensen’s character and his wife Edie (Maria Bello), which are at the heart of the movie. The first involves playacting, as Edie drags Mortensen-as-Tom off to a secret tryst in the course of which she dresses as a cheerleader, and they pretend to be making out while their (whose? hers, I think) parents are sleeping in the next room. The second is when Mortensen-as-Joey drags Edie down the stairs and brutally fucks her in what is at least a near-rape (she ultimately seems to consent, though it’s clear that she continues to feel loathing as much as desire). What unites these two opposed scenes is that they both seem similarly distanced and performative, except that there is no sense of any realer or truer self behind the mask of the performance. The first scene is a parody of what adolescence is supposed to be like; the second is a parody of what maturity or adulthood all too often turns out to be like. This is why I felt a bit queasy during the first scene, and found it almost as disturbing as the second one. Both scenes suggest a kind of void, and a failure of contact: the two people never really come together. (Is this what Lacan meant by declaring that “there is no sexual relation”?). It’s not a void that one can feel anguished about, however; for the selfhood, or sense of “thrownness” at least, that would allow one to feel anguish is precisely what is missing, what has been replaced by a void.

All this is to say that the split or doubling in A History of Violence is ontological, rather than existential or psychological. The split between Tom and Joey, and between the two sex scenes, of course corresponds to the two worlds of the film, both of which are themselves cinematic — and thereby social — fantasies: the wholesome, Capraesque or Spielbergesque small town (Ronald Reagan’s America, or George W. Bush’s red states) on the one hand, and the big-city-at-nighttime on the other. (I initially thought of film noir for these scenes; but on further reflection I’m reminded more of the big city in violent-revenge-fantasy films like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish, or, more recently, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City — it’s not irrelevant that A History of Violence, like Sin City, is an adaptation of material that first appeared in comic book form).

The result is that A History of Violence offers us a kind of spookily abstract modeling of cultural formations: of American fantasies about family, the good life, violence, empowerment, and self-reinvention: and in particular of how these participate in the construction of masculinity. This is very different from exploring the disintegration of masculinity — or of American culture, for that matter — from the inside. I call this ‘abstract modeling’ not just because Cronenberg’s presentation is so distanced and subtractive, but also because in a very real sense the abstraction is all that there is: the “inside” — something more personal and subjective, that would give the abstraction existential density and individual quirkiness and variability — simply doesn’t exist. This is Cronenberg’s version of postmodern flatness: the depths do not exist, everything is visible and apparent. This also explains the title of the film: this move really is a “history,” in the sense that it tracks the emergence of violence, and the different forms it takes at different times and in different circumstances. Violence is generated — almost as a autonomic effect — out of tiny rifts in the social fabric, or in the fabric of social myth (I mean, in the myth of noir as much as in the myth of wholesome “we take care of our own” Americana). This is why we get the story of Jack (Ashton Holmes), Tom’s teenage son, who erupts with violence in a parallel way to his father: as if what came back out of the past in the father’s case were generated as it were spontaneously, out of his very need to struggle, as an adolescent, with the (entirely stereotypical) problems of autonomy from the father and coming to terms with normative formations of masculinity. (I think that Jodi’s reading of the film as the son’s fantasy is valuable in the way it works out the son’s perspective; but I don’t accept it as an overall reading of the film, because it overly psychologizes the film and privileges the son’s perspective more than the film itself does, and thereby gives that perspective too much existential weight, ignoring how the film suggests it is just another social cliche, another purely superficial mode of articulating an otherwise blank subjectivity).

To say that A History of Violence is ontological and historical, rather than existential and psychological; and to say that it shows violence to be itself a surface or superficial effect of a structure or abstract model that is itself all surfaces (I’m calling it a “structure”, but the point of this is precisely that there is no underlying “deep structure” in any sense of the term): to say all this is also to say that the dichotomy or structural opposition that the film presents us with is false, and that the film ‘deconstructs’ the opposition, rather than affirming it. In other words, A History of Violence is like a Moebius strip. At any given point, it seems to have two sides; but the two sides are really the same side, each is continuous with the other, and slides imperceptibly into the other. There is no way to separate the Capra/Spielberg side from the noir/revenge nocturnal side. The common interpretive tendency in cases like this is to see the ‘dark’ side as the deep, hidden underside of the ‘bright’ side, the depths beneath the seemingly cheerful surface. But in A History of Violence, everything is what it seems. Both sides, both identities, are surfaces; both are ‘superficial’; and they blends into one other almost without our noticing. The small town, with its overly ostentatious friendliness, is a vision of the good life; but brother Richie’s enormous mansion, furnished with a nouveau-riche vulgarity that almost recalls Donald Trump’s penthouse, is also a vision of the good life. In their odd vacancy, they are both quintessentially American (this could be, as Cronenberg has hinted, an allegory of America’s current cultural divide: blue states and red states, which actually are more continuous with one another than anyone on either side recognizes… this is something, perhaps, that only a Canadian could see, as it is invisible both to us Americans, who are too caught up in it, and to people from outside North America, who are too far away).

The Moebius strip would be Cronenberg’s version of the postmodern idea that there are no depths, only surfaces. Or (the same thing, to me) that there are affects, but not identities to be owners of those affects. And this two-sides-as-one would be why/how Cronenberg can be so unrelentingly grim, instead of having to resort to camp, in the ways that David Lynch and Guy Maddin both do (in the ways, I would say, that they are both forced to do, because of the extremities of their visions). K-Punk is right to assert that, for both Cronenberg and Lynch, it’s wrong to explain away the dualities and dichotomies of their films by saying that one side is the dream or fantasy or underside of the other. Rather, we have to grasp the total congruence of the film’s two halves (this comment would apply to Mulholland Drive as much as to A History of Violence. The difference is that where Lynch marks the two sides in the form of manic camp on the one hand and depressive bitterness and paranoia on the other, Cronenberg flattens both of them out, empties them both out. Lynch is thus a maximalist, Cronenberg a minimalist).

To say that Cronenberg’s vision in this film is ontological is also to say that he recognizes no hierarchy of levels. A History of Violence isn’t a film about existential male anguish, precisely because it works equally well, without privileging any one of these, as a study of the vacancy of the isolated inidividual, of the bourgeois nuclear family, of America as a fantasmatic formation or imaginary community, and of the “human condition” in the most general terms. But if it works most bitingly and corrosively on the level of family, this is because the Spielberg/revenge dichotomy-that-isn’t-one, which is Cronenberg’s largest cinematic reference point, tends to play out most overtly in terms of Family. The small town, of course, is grounded on the nuclear family, and its “family values”; Joey became Tom, in large part, by becoming a family man (which is why Edie worries, when she discovers the hidden identity, what the family really is, what their name is or could be). In Philadelphia, Richie makes a speech to Joey/Tom about why and how he never married & would never marry: it ties you down, makes difficulties, if you are married, then when you have a fling with somebody else (as you will inevitably want to do) you will have to do it with elaborate secrecy, etc. All this is a prelude to Richie’s trying to kill Joey, not in spite of, but precisely because of the fact that they are brothers (Richie never got as far in the mob as he wanted to, he says, because his family tie to his crazy brother held him back, just like getting married would). But by the end of the film — the last scene — being a married husband/father/family man is just as hollow as Richie’s life was — and retrospectively, it always was this hollow. Cronenberg rejects and undermines what is to me the one most absolutely offensive thing about all of Spielberg’s films (and about all of Spike Lee’s films too, for that matter): the absolute insistence on taking on the responsibilities of fatherhood, and thus restoration of a 1950s nuclear family, as an unquestionable and totally redemptive gesture. I hated that insistence before I had children; and now that I am a father, I hate it even more. The hollowness of the final scene of A History of Violence — the son getting out a setting for the place of the now-returned father at the dinner table — is devastating in its absolute oppressive rightness.

I’m not sure how much I can add, belatedly, to what k-punk, girish twice, Chuck, Jodi — followed by k-punk’s reply and Jodi’s counter-replyJonathan Rosenbaum, and others have already said about A History of Violence. But I do think that it is David Cronenberg’s best film since at least Dead Ringers (1988). Quite some time ago, I wrote extensively about the body horror in Cronenberg’s early films: which meant a lot, and still means a lot, to me. I was a bit disappointed, however, about the way that Cronenberg’s distancing himself from genre, in order to embrace “art film,” got in the way of his adaptations of writers with whom he shared a sensibility (William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard). And I was still more disappointed, when, in his more recent films, even though sometimes with increased artistic power, Cronenberg moved away from that explosive sensibility altogether, and towards an implosive concern with the anguish of wounded white male interiority — a subject with which I have little sympathy, as I think that we (since I have to be included as part of that “we”) need to get over it, and go on to more important things than whining over our supposed (more fantasmatic than actually real) loss of privilege. (In fairness, I should note that my friend Bill Beard, in his excellent book on Cronenberg, not only gives a far less pejorative account of this progress, but also argues that such a process was in fact already the real concern of Cronenberg’s earlier films as well, despite all the posthuman exploration that I, among others, have read into them).

The editing of A History of Violence is very tight and powerful, like that of Spider. But the important thing is that A History of Violence for me is that the film is not psychological, not about interiority, in the way Spider definitely still was (and the way many of the Cronenberg films of the last fifteen years or so have been). By “not psychological”, I don’t mean not affective, but that the affect in some way is impersonal or transpersonal. In Spider, dread was tied in to the protagonist’s point of view: a POV that we know is distorted and fantasmatic, but which we cannot escape from, or get an independent perspective on, despite this knowledge. The epistemological deadlock — or better, prison — that is at the heart of that film was reinforced by the way in which the adult protagonist (Ralph Fiennes) appears in the frame as a silent observer of his own psychotically distorted childhood memories.

The editing and pacing of A History of Violence create a similar sense of dread, even when what is explicitly going on (the members of a picture-perfect nuclear family eating breakfast, pouring the dry cereal, etc.) is entirely “normal” and banal. But Viggo Mortensen, playing the protagonist, is so closed off and opaque that we can’t really read (or more accurately: feel) what he’s going through as subjective anguish. (I’m assuming anyone who has read this far has seen the movie, or at least knows the basic premise: Tom Stall, exemplary small-town family man, turns out to have a dark past as Joey Cusack, psychotic mob hit man). As Tom, Mortensen is simply too blank to “identify” with; as Joey, he doesn’t display any of the self-congratulatory feeling that even Clint Eastwood (wonderfully minimal in expression as he is) does ultimately allow himself when he is in vengeful mode. In an email exchange, Bill Beard suggested to me that Cronenberg and Mortensen are operating by subtraction: “A History of Violence produces something radical simply by subtracting standard conduits of viewer empathy from what is unmistakably a mainstream-movie framework.” So we get, for instance, generic small-town Americana such as is found in the paintings of Norman Rockwell, and in the films of Frank Capra and (more recently) Steven Spielberg; everything is literally as it is supposed to be, but some dimension of warmth (or smarminess) is unaccountably missing, and this makes it all rather creepy. I’d only add to Beard’s account that the greatness of Mortensen’s acting, in particular, lies in the way he switches from one to the other of his two ‘characters’ or personalities, so that ultimately he seems to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between them. He’s a man without qualities, which is why both of his personas seem unpsychological. The conventional way to tell this story would be to make one of the personas more basic, more in depth, revealing the other persona to be just a mask; but this is precisely what Cronenberg refuses to do.

All this is even more evident in the two extraordinary sex scenes between Mortensen’s character and his wife Edie (Maria Bello), which are at the heart of the movie. The first involves playacting, as Edie drags Mortensen-as-Tom off to a secret tryst in the course of which she dresses as a cheerleader, and they pretend to be making out while their (whose? hers, I think) parents are sleeping in the next room. The second is when Mortensen-as-Joey drags Edie down the stairs and brutally fucks her in what is at least a near-rape (she ultimately seems to consent, though it’s clear that she continues to feel loathing as much as desire). What unites these two opposed scenes is that they both seem similarly distanced and performative, except that there is no sense of any realer or truer self behind the mask of the performance. The first scene is a parody of what adolescence is supposed to be like; the second is a parody of what maturity or adulthood all too often turns out to be like. This is why I felt a bit queasy during the first scene, and found it almost as disturbing as the second one. Both scenes suggest a kind of void, and a failure of contact: the two people never really come together. (Is this what Lacan meant by declaring that “there is no sexual relation”?). It’s not a void that one can feel anguished about, however; for the selfhood, or sense of “thrownness” at least, that would allow one to feel anguish is precisely what is missing, what has been replaced by a void.

All this is to say that the split or doubling in A History of Violence is ontological, rather than existential or psychological. The split between Tom and Joey, and between the two sex scenes, of course corresponds to the two worlds of the film, both of which are themselves cinematic — and thereby social — fantasies: the wholesome, Capraesque or Spielbergesque small town (Ronald Reagan’s America, or George W. Bush’s red states) on the one hand, and the big-city-at-nighttime on the other. (I initially thought of film noir for these scenes; but on further reflection I’m reminded more of the big city in violent-revenge-fantasy films like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish, or, more recently, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City — it’s not irrelevant that A History of Violence, like Sin City, is an adaptation of material that first appeared in comic book form).

The result is that A History of Violence offers us a kind of spookily abstract modeling of cultural formations: of American fantasies about family, the good life, violence, empowerment, and self-reinvention: and in particular of how these participate in the construction of masculinity. This is very different from exploring the disintegration of masculinity — or of American culture, for that matter — from the inside. I call this ‘abstract modeling’ not just because Cronenberg’s presentation is so distanced and subtractive, but also because in a very real sense the abstraction is all that there is: the “inside” — something more personal and subjective, that would give the abstraction existential density and individual quirkiness and variability — simply doesn’t exist. This is Cronenberg’s version of postmodern flatness: the depths do not exist, everything is visible and apparent. This also explains the title of the film: this move really is a “history,” in the sense that it tracks the emergence of violence, and the different forms it takes at different times and in different circumstances. Violence is generated — almost as a autonomic effect — out of tiny rifts in the social fabric, or in the fabric of social myth (I mean, in the myth of noir as much as in the myth of wholesome “we take care of our own” Americana). This is why we get the story of Jack (Ashton Holmes), Tom’s teenage son, who erupts with violence in a parallel way to his father: as if what came back out of the past in the father’s case were generated as it were spontaneously, out of his very need to struggle, as an adolescent, with the (entirely stereotypical) problems of autonomy from the father and coming to terms with normative formations of masculinity. (I think that Jodi’s reading of the film as the son’s fantasy is valuable in the way it works out the son’s perspective; but I don’t accept it as an overall reading of the film, because it overly psychologizes the film and privileges the son’s perspective more than the film itself does, and thereby gives that perspective too much existential weight, ignoring how the film suggests it is just another social cliche, another purely superficial mode of articulating an otherwise blank subjectivity).

To say that A History of Violence is ontological and historical, rather than existential and psychological; and to say that it shows violence to be itself a surface or superficial effect of a structure or abstract model that is itself all surfaces (I’m calling it a “structure”, but the point of this is precisely that there is no underlying “deep structure” in any sense of the term): to say all this is also to say that the dichotomy or structural opposition that the film presents us with is false, and that the film ‘deconstructs’ the opposition, rather than affirming it. In other words, A History of Violence is like a Moebius strip. At any given point, it seems to have two sides; but the two sides are really the same side, each is continuous with the other, and slides imperceptibly into the other. There is no way to separate the Capra/Spielberg side from the noir/revenge nocturnal side. The common interpretive tendency in cases like this is to see the ‘dark’ side as the deep, hidden underside of the ‘bright’ side, the depths beneath the seemingly cheerful surface. But in A History of Violence, everything is what it seems. Both sides, both identities, are surfaces; both are ‘superficial’; and they blends into one other almost without our noticing. The small town, with its overly ostentatious friendliness, is a vision of the good life; but brother Richie’s enormous mansion, furnished with a nouveau-riche vulgarity that almost recalls Donald Trump’s penthouse, is also a vision of the good life. In their odd vacancy, they are both quintessentially American (this could be, as Cronenberg has hinted, an allegory of America’s current cultural divide: blue states and red states, which actually are more continuous with one another than anyone on either side recognizes… this is something, perhaps, that only a Canadian could see, as it is invisible both to us Americans, who are too caught up in it, and to people from outside North America, who are too far away).

The Moebius strip would be Cronenberg’s version of the postmodern idea that there are no depths, only surfaces. Or (the same thing, to me) that there are affects, but not identities to be owners of those affects. And this two-sides-as-one would be why/how Cronenberg can be so unrelentingly grim, instead of having to resort to camp, in the ways that David Lynch and Guy Maddin both do (in the ways, I would say, that they are both forced to do, because of the extremities of their visions). K-Punk is right to assert that, for both Cronenberg and Lynch, it’s wrong to explain away the dualities and dichotomies of their films by saying that one side is the dream or fantasy or underside of the other. Rather, we have to grasp the total congruence of the film’s two halves (this comment would apply to Mulholland Drive as much as to A History of Violence. The difference is that where Lynch marks the two sides in the form of manic camp on the one hand and depressive bitterness and paranoia on the other, Cronenberg flattens both of them out, empties them both out. Lynch is thus a maximalist, Cronenberg a minimalist).

To say that Cronenberg’s vision in this film is ontological is also to say that he recognizes no hierarchy of levels. A History of Violence isn’t a film about existential male anguish, precisely because it works equally well, without privileging any one of these, as a study of the vacancy of the isolated inidividual, of the bourgeois nuclear family, of America as a fantasmatic formation or imaginary community, and of the “human condition” in the most general terms. But if it works most bitingly and corrosively on the level of family, this is because the Spielberg/revenge dichotomy-that-isn’t-one, which is Cronenberg’s largest cinematic reference point, tends to play out most overtly in terms of Family. The small town, of course, is grounded on the nuclear family, and its “family values”; Joey became Tom, in large part, by becoming a family man (which is why Edie worries, when she discovers the hidden identity, what the family really is, what their name is or could be). In Philadelphia, Richie makes a speech to Joey/Tom about why and how he never married & would never marry: it ties you down, makes difficulties, if you are married, then when you have a fling with somebody else (as you will inevitably want to do) you will have to do it with elaborate secrecy, etc. All this is a prelude to Richie’s trying to kill Joey, not in spite of, but precisely because of the fact that they are brothers (Richie never got as far in the mob as he wanted to, he says, because his family tie to his crazy brother held him back, just like getting married would). But by the end of the film — the last scene — being a married husband/father/family man is just as hollow as Richie’s life was — and retrospectively, it always was this hollow. Cronenberg rejects and undermines what is to me the one most absolutely offensive thing about all of Spielberg’s films (and about all of Spike Lee’s films too, for that matter): the absolute insistence on taking on the responsibilities of fatherhood, and thus restoration of a 1950s nuclear family, as an unquestionable and totally redemptive gesture. I hated that insistence before I had children; and now that I am a father, I hate it even more. The hollowness of the final scene of A History of Violence — the son getting out a setting for the place of the now-returned father at the dinner table — is devastating in its absolute oppressive rightness.

The Girl From Monday

Hal Hartley, once a darling of independent film, has fallen from critical and popular favor as his films have become weirder and more abstract. Not many people besides me liked his 2001 film No Such Thing; and his most recent feature, The Girl From Monday (premiered at Sundance last winter, and currently distributed on DVD by Netflix — see the trailer here), seems to be even less popular. But it’s a strong film, haunting and at the same time deliberately frustrating and insubstantial.

The Girl From Monday was evidently made on an extremely low budget, and shot on digital video. In this respect, it somewhat resembles Hartley’s pre-millennium short The Book of Life, with which it shares many stylistic traits, notably the exploitation of the video for stop action, strange light diffusion, motion blur, and so on. The Girl From Monday adds to this mix desaturation (so that scenes shot in color look washed out, almost black and white) and lots of jump cuts and unexpected close-ups. The result is a film that is gorgeous in its relentlessly kinetic and fractured cinematography, although (or precisely because) its spare look is diametrically opposed to the photographic lushness that is commonly described as “gorgeous.”

In terms of genre, The Girl From Monday is a science fiction story, focusing on commodities and commodification (which is a sub-genre I’ve been especially paying attention to recently). But it’s also, this being Hal Hartley, a Godardian, highly self-conscious auteurist film. It doesn’t exactly have a straightforward plot, and it works more by digression and intense focusing on (seemingly irrelevant) details, than on conventional narrative momentum.

In any case, the movie takes place in a slightly-future New York (the look is entirely contemporary, and not at all “futuristic” — the only special effects are those of Hartley’s video cinematography) in which a “revolution” has given supreme power to an advertising agency. Everything is based on commodity acquisition; instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we have “the Dictatorship of the Consumer.” People receive exactly what they desire (assuming they can afford it); their desires are incited by advertising campaigns, which in turn are directed by focus-group surveys, whose choices are in turn circumscribed by corporate sales agendas… It’s a solipsistic closed loop, so that everyone is by definition maximally satisfied, while at the same time people’s ability to act is extremely circumscribed. High-tech police stand on alert on every street corner, and everyone has a bar code permanently tattooed on their wrist.

Everything in the world of The Girl From Monday is sexualized, and sexuality itself is entirely commodified. As the description of the film on Hartley’s website puts it, “Citizens are now public offerings on the stock exchange; each time they have sex and remain unattached their value increases depending on the current state of the market.” In contrast, any sexual act unaccompanied by market valuation (like fucking either for love, or simply for pleasure and enjoyment) is considered (at best) a shameful perversion (sort of like how masturbation was regarded in the 19th century).

Of course, there is an underground rebellion against this state of affairs, and Hartley’s male protagonist, Jack Bell (played by Bill Sage, who in both looks and affect is quite similar to Martin Donovan, the male lead in a number of Hartley’s earlier movies) is both an advertising executive responsible for the commodification of sex, and the secret leader of the underground. Jack is involved in typically Hartleyesque romantic situations (missed encounters, confused signals, discontents that fail ever to be articulated clearly) with two women, his co-worker Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd) who eventually joins the underground and gets sent to prison, and the Girl From Monday (Tatiana Abracos), an alien (from, we are told, “Star 147X in the constellation Monday”) who emerges naked from the sea in front of Jack’s eyes (despite the fact that he has seemingly committed suicide several scenes earlier).

Confused? The plot and background, as I am trying to recount them here, are in fact not a big part of the movie: they are presupposed by it more than they are narrated by it; they come out mostly as throwaways in Jack’s voiceover narration. Bear with me; as I’ll try to explain, it’s all pretext. What does matter is the aliens — or “immigrants,” as they are called in official euphemism — and apparently there are many of them; all acts of the underground are attributed to them, and by the end of the film we even discover that Jack himself is one, though he has apparently forgotten it. The aliens come from a planet where they don’t have individual identities, being all parts of one another; which means, also, that they don’t have bodies — they only incarnate themselves when they come to Earth. Some of the most beautiful scenes in the movie involve the nameless Girl From Monday learning how to use and to understand her body: how to eat and drink and piss and shit, how to have sex, even what it means to cry. From the official point of view, only such an alien — devoid of the endless commodity cravings of consumer capitalism — could possibly be opposed to the atomistic self-empowerment that is the watchword of the Dictatorship of the Consumer.

So on one hand, we have citizens obsessed with their own bodies and body-images, consumed by insatiable desires whose only expression comes in the form of commodities, and whose main activity is at once conspicuous consumption and relentless self-valorization — so that the consumer is identical with the capitalist, or better with Capital itself. On the other, we have aliens who are beautiful precisely because they seem so self-sufficient, which is because they do not know desire or need, which is in turn because they do not know separation (except in the shock of reification that occurs when they fall to Earth) which in its turn is because they don’t have bodies (though, interestingly, there is no suggestion of anything spiritual or mental or dualistic in this bodylessness; without a body simply seems to mean without lack, without deficiency or desire, which makes the definition of the alien into another closed circle).

What this all means is that the film is structured around a sort of Gnosticism — albeit (this being Hartley) a particularly wry and unapocalyptic one. We have fallen, not into materiality (the classical Gnostic lament), nor even into instrumental reason (the modernist paradigm) than into commodification itself (which makes for a postmodern Gnosticism). The only salvation would seem to come from a sort of slipping away, dissolving away, back into the non-personhood of the aliens. We are told that an alien can return home by re-immersing him/herself into the ocean from which he/she initially emerged; but also, that once you have become too caught up in the body, and in the desires of this world (of consumer capitalism), such a return becomes impossible. Jack says he is unable ever to return — the waves reject him (this is perhaps why his suicide early in the film leaves him untouched?), and at the end of the film, when the Girl From Monday does go back under the waves, Jack’s narration states that he will never know whether she made it back home, or just drowned. In any case, active resistance seems futile — it turns out that rebellion, sabotage, and the like, just as much as conformity and enthusiastic shopping, is good for business and serves only to increase sales.

Consumerism requires discontent; thereby, it also inevitably breeds a discontent with this very discontent. But no such “negation of the negation” will get us out of the consumerist trap. For such a move only breeds still more commodified desire. If you fail to be a properly self-valorizing subject, your punishment is to be commodified instead as an object (selling your labor as a commodity). Offenses against the spirit of the marketplace are punished by “hard labor” teaching high school; repeated offenses get you sent to the moon to do low-level service-sector work in a DisneyWorld-like theme park.

The one thing that “redeems” this unredeemable situation is the formal (visual and sonic) structure of the film. (Though “structure” is probably not quite the right word, for something so willfully fragmentary and impalpable). It’s not just the jump cuts and washed-out colors and self-referential-reminding-us-that-this-is-just-a-video-moments that do this — although these features do, as Adorno might put it, rupture any sense of formal closure, destroy the possibility of any “false totalization.” It’s also the way that Hartley’s camerawork and editing remain anchored in a sort of everydayness. Though we hear a lot about ultra-commodification, what we see on the screen is not Starbucks, but 89-cent cups of rotgut coffee from the local streetcorner bodega; and not interiors expensively set out with lavish but suitably minimal yuppie furniture, but ratty couches, fire escapes, and bookcases filled with random volumes. (One of the negative reviews I found complains, not just that the camerawork seems “cheap” and “grating” — which to my mind is precisely what is right about it — but also that “Hartley shot the movie in haphazard locations, nodding to the future with just a few elements of costume and prop design. So, for instance, the hero’s office features a copy of “The Beatles Anthology” on a shelf. Huh?” — which again, to my mind, is precisely the point).

There’s a beauty in this casual rundownness, just as there’s a beauty in Hartley’s characteristically precise blocking of speech, gestures, and movement, so that every statement seems to be said with a well of ironic reserve, if not actually put into “quotation marks”; and the actors’ gestures and movements are (not robotic, but) too clipped and carefully articulated to be expressive (they cannot be imagined as expressions of deeper inner mental states, but instead reinforce the principle of what-you-see-is-what-you-get, or “nothing is hidden”). This sort of beautiful reserve and distance in both the actors and the decors — and also in the perpetual incompletion of what the movie shows us, as editing and camera movement are similarly clipped and curt, never lingering in the “right” places (which is one reason why there is so much voiceover narration, since we need to be told what Hartley declines to show directly) — all this restraint and distance, which yet stubbornly remains within the ordinary (however extraordinary the science fiction premises of the whole film), serves, in its understated beauty, as the counter-instance both to the meretricious yuppie- and Donald Trump- beauty of the Dictatorship of the Consumer, and to the absolutely unrepresentable, sublime otherness of Star 147X. What the film actually shows us (and I ought to include in this, if I could write better about it, Hartley’s techno-y soundtrack) is what escapes the otherwise ubiquitous pressure and solipsistic closure of what it tells us, or narrates. Which means, I suppose, that The Girl From Monday succeeds precisely to the extent that it makes itself unmarketable — which in itself might be thought of as a classic high-modernist strategy; and also that (unlike a high modernist work) it seems to slip through one’s fingers, so that I cannot hold on to it, cannot find it memorable (since that would re-commodify it); so that — for all of Hal Hartley’s tics and idiosyncrasies — it seems almost anonymous.

Hal Hartley, once a darling of independent film, has fallen from critical and popular favor as his films have become weirder and more abstract. Not many people besides me liked his 2001 film No Such Thing; and his most recent feature, The Girl From Monday (premiered at Sundance last winter, and currently distributed on DVD by Netflix — see the trailer here), seems to be even less popular. But it’s a strong film, haunting and at the same time deliberately frustrating and insubstantial.

The Girl From Monday was evidently made on an extremely low budget, and shot on digital video. In this respect, it somewhat resembles Hartley’s pre-millennium short The Book of Life, with which it shares many stylistic traits, notably the exploitation of the video for stop action, strange light diffusion, motion blur, and so on. The Girl From Monday adds to this mix desaturation (so that scenes shot in color look washed out, almost black and white) and lots of jump cuts and unexpected close-ups. The result is a film that is gorgeous in its relentlessly kinetic and fractured cinematography, although (or precisely because) its spare look is diametrically opposed to the photographic lushness that is commonly described as “gorgeous.”

In terms of genre, The Girl From Monday is a science fiction story, focusing on commodities and commodification (which is a sub-genre I’ve been especially paying attention to recently). But it’s also, this being Hal Hartley, a Godardian, highly self-conscious auteurist film. It doesn’t exactly have a straightforward plot, and it works more by digression and intense focusing on (seemingly irrelevant) details, than on conventional narrative momentum.

In any case, the movie takes place in a slightly-future New York (the look is entirely contemporary, and not at all “futuristic” — the only special effects are those of Hartley’s video cinematography) in which a “revolution” has given supreme power to an advertising agency. Everything is based on commodity acquisition; instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we have “the Dictatorship of the Consumer.” People receive exactly what they desire (assuming they can afford it); their desires are incited by advertising campaigns, which in turn are directed by focus-group surveys, whose choices are in turn circumscribed by corporate sales agendas… It’s a solipsistic closed loop, so that everyone is by definition maximally satisfied, while at the same time people’s ability to act is extremely circumscribed. High-tech police stand on alert on every street corner, and everyone has a bar code permanently tattooed on their wrist.

Everything in the world of The Girl From Monday is sexualized, and sexuality itself is entirely commodified. As the description of the film on Hartley’s website puts it, “Citizens are now public offerings on the stock exchange; each time they have sex and remain unattached their value increases depending on the current state of the market.” In contrast, any sexual act unaccompanied by market valuation (like fucking either for love, or simply for pleasure and enjoyment) is considered (at best) a shameful perversion (sort of like how masturbation was regarded in the 19th century).

Of course, there is an underground rebellion against this state of affairs, and Hartley’s male protagonist, Jack Bell (played by Bill Sage, who in both looks and affect is quite similar to Martin Donovan, the male lead in a number of Hartley’s earlier movies) is both an advertising executive responsible for the commodification of sex, and the secret leader of the underground. Jack is involved in typically Hartleyesque romantic situations (missed encounters, confused signals, discontents that fail ever to be articulated clearly) with two women, his co-worker Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd) who eventually joins the underground and gets sent to prison, and the Girl From Monday (Tatiana Abracos), an alien (from, we are told, “Star 147X in the constellation Monday”) who emerges naked from the sea in front of Jack’s eyes (despite the fact that he has seemingly committed suicide several scenes earlier).

Confused? The plot and background, as I am trying to recount them here, are in fact not a big part of the movie: they are presupposed by it more than they are narrated by it; they come out mostly as throwaways in Jack’s voiceover narration. Bear with me; as I’ll try to explain, it’s all pretext. What does matter is the aliens — or “immigrants,” as they are called in official euphemism — and apparently there are many of them; all acts of the underground are attributed to them, and by the end of the film we even discover that Jack himself is one, though he has apparently forgotten it. The aliens come from a planet where they don’t have individual identities, being all parts of one another; which means, also, that they don’t have bodies — they only incarnate themselves when they come to Earth. Some of the most beautiful scenes in the movie involve the nameless Girl From Monday learning how to use and to understand her body: how to eat and drink and piss and shit, how to have sex, even what it means to cry. From the official point of view, only such an alien — devoid of the endless commodity cravings of consumer capitalism — could possibly be opposed to the atomistic self-empowerment that is the watchword of the Dictatorship of the Consumer.

So on one hand, we have citizens obsessed with their own bodies and body-images, consumed by insatiable desires whose only expression comes in the form of commodities, and whose main activity is at once conspicuous consumption and relentless self-valorization — so that the consumer is identical with the capitalist, or better with Capital itself. On the other, we have aliens who are beautiful precisely because they seem so self-sufficient, which is because they do not know desire or need, which is in turn because they do not know separation (except in the shock of reification that occurs when they fall to Earth) which in its turn is because they don’t have bodies (though, interestingly, there is no suggestion of anything spiritual or mental or dualistic in this bodylessness; without a body simply seems to mean without lack, without deficiency or desire, which makes the definition of the alien into another closed circle).

What this all means is that the film is structured around a sort of Gnosticism — albeit (this being Hartley) a particularly wry and unapocalyptic one. We have fallen, not into materiality (the classical Gnostic lament), nor even into instrumental reason (the modernist paradigm) than into commodification itself (which makes for a postmodern Gnosticism). The only salvation would seem to come from a sort of slipping away, dissolving away, back into the non-personhood of the aliens. We are told that an alien can return home by re-immersing him/herself into the ocean from which he/she initially emerged; but also, that once you have become too caught up in the body, and in the desires of this world (of consumer capitalism), such a return becomes impossible. Jack says he is unable ever to return — the waves reject him (this is perhaps why his suicide early in the film leaves him untouched?), and at the end of the film, when the Girl From Monday does go back under the waves, Jack’s narration states that he will never know whether she made it back home, or just drowned. In any case, active resistance seems futile — it turns out that rebellion, sabotage, and the like, just as much as conformity and enthusiastic shopping, is good for business and serves only to increase sales.

Consumerism requires discontent; thereby, it also inevitably breeds a discontent with this very discontent. But no such “negation of the negation” will get us out of the consumerist trap. For such a move only breeds still more commodified desire. If you fail to be a properly self-valorizing subject, your punishment is to be commodified instead as an object (selling your labor as a commodity). Offenses against the spirit of the marketplace are punished by “hard labor” teaching high school; repeated offenses get you sent to the moon to do low-level service-sector work in a DisneyWorld-like theme park.

The one thing that “redeems” this unredeemable situation is the formal (visual and sonic) structure of the film. (Though “structure” is probably not quite the right word, for something so willfully fragmentary and impalpable). It’s not just the jump cuts and washed-out colors and self-referential-reminding-us-that-this-is-just-a-video-moments that do this — although these features do, as Adorno might put it, rupture any sense of formal closure, destroy the possibility of any “false totalization.” It’s also the way that Hartley’s camerawork and editing remain anchored in a sort of everydayness. Though we hear a lot about ultra-commodification, what we see on the screen is not Starbucks, but 89-cent cups of rotgut coffee from the local streetcorner bodega; and not interiors expensively set out with lavish but suitably minimal yuppie furniture, but ratty couches, fire escapes, and bookcases filled with random volumes. (One of the negative reviews I found complains, not just that the camerawork seems “cheap” and “grating” — which to my mind is precisely what is right about it — but also that “Hartley shot the movie in haphazard locations, nodding to the future with just a few elements of costume and prop design. So, for instance, the hero’s office features a copy of “The Beatles Anthology” on a shelf. Huh?” — which again, to my mind, is precisely the point).

There’s a beauty in this casual rundownness, just as there’s a beauty in Hartley’s characteristically precise blocking of speech, gestures, and movement, so that every statement seems to be said with a well of ironic reserve, if not actually put into “quotation marks”; and the actors’ gestures and movements are (not robotic, but) too clipped and carefully articulated to be expressive (they cannot be imagined as expressions of deeper inner mental states, but instead reinforce the principle of what-you-see-is-what-you-get, or “nothing is hidden”). This sort of beautiful reserve and distance in both the actors and the decors — and also in the perpetual incompletion of what the movie shows us, as editing and camera movement are similarly clipped and curt, never lingering in the “right” places (which is one reason why there is so much voiceover narration, since we need to be told what Hartley declines to show directly) — all this restraint and distance, which yet stubbornly remains within the ordinary (however extraordinary the science fiction premises of the whole film), serves, in its understated beauty, as the counter-instance both to the meretricious yuppie- and Donald Trump- beauty of the Dictatorship of the Consumer, and to the absolutely unrepresentable, sublime otherness of Star 147X. What the film actually shows us (and I ought to include in this, if I could write better about it, Hartley’s techno-y soundtrack) is what escapes the otherwise ubiquitous pressure and solipsistic closure of what it tells us, or narrates. Which means, I suppose, that The Girl From Monday succeeds precisely to the extent that it makes itself unmarketable — which in itself might be thought of as a classic high-modernist strategy; and also that (unlike a high modernist work) it seems to slip through one’s fingers, so that I cannot hold on to it, cannot find it memorable (since that would re-commodify it); so that — for all of Hal Hartley’s tics and idiosyncrasies — it seems almost anonymous.

Broken Flowers

Jim Jarmusch’s latest movie, Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, is absolutely lovely, and perhaps my favorite thing Jarmusch has ever done. A big part of the reason is Bill Murray. I feel like I could watch Murray for hours, just sitting on the living room couch as he often does in this film. It’s hard to describe, or do full justice to, the persona Murray has evolved in his recent work for Wes Anderson, and especially for Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), and now Jarmusch. He’s moody and melancholic, in contrast to the manic comedy that first made him famous. But of course there was already a kind of silent, intense yearning behind the frantic hysteria of Murray’s characters in films like the great What About Bob?. In Broken Flowers, a kind of mournful passivity is all that’s left of this yearning; Murray’s Don Johnston is (as the character’s name suggests) a sort of Don Juan, who has found no lasting satisfaction in any of his erotic conquests, and now, in a financially comfortable middle age, has no ambitions and nothing to look forward to. To call Murray’s acting style here minimalist and deadpan would be accurate, but inadequate. Don Johnston isn’t really a blank slate; he’s weary but goes on anyway; he understates all his emotional reactions, but he is far from affectless. Murray’s pauses are eloquent in their suggestiveness; he fully expresses feelings and responses with the tiniest, slowest gestures and facial tics. But that’s not quite an accurate description either; it isn’t that Murray suggests and expresses a lot with a little; it’s rather that this “little” is what he is expressing, quite accurately and fully proportionally. Don Johnston is somebody who has found life to be disappointing; but he doesn’t feel betrayed or outraged by this disappointment, he merely takes it in stride, because he knows that it is all that anyone can reasonably expect — or better, that it is all that anyone will ever get, no matter what they expect). It’s a kind of weary, melancholy stoicism that is nonetheless as far from despair as it is from exhilaration and joie de vivre. I’m reminded of Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, or of Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

(I should add also that the long-ago lovers whom Don Johnston contacts 20 years later, in a vain attempt to discover whether he has a son, are wonderfully acted also, especially the performances of Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange. There’s also the great manic supporting peformance of the always-brilliant — and always underrated — Jeffrey Wright).

All this makes Murray a perfect leading man for Jim Jarmusch, whose films are always about missed connections, disappointments and misunderstandings, and (excuse the metaphor) pregnant pauses that end only in miscarriages. At his worst, Jarmusch can be snide, irritatingly self-congratulatory, and quite sappy beneath all the hipster posturing. At his best, however, as here, he is very nearly sublime. I admired Jarmusch’s last two real features, the deconstructed Western Dead Man, with Johnny Depp, and the colder-than-ice gangster/samurai Ghost Dog, with Forest Whitaker, both of which made brilliant use of their leading men; but I think that in Broken Flowers, and with Murray, Jarmusch has outdone himself. His visual style, with long pauses, elliptical cuts, and an emphasis on journeys rather than destinations, is perfectly pitched for this inconclusive story about a man who sort-of confronts his past, but has no epiphanies, revelations, or moments of Proustian recollection. Jarmusch’s films are slow, but their tempo is never simply drawn-out or undifferentiated; Broken Flowers is perfectly paced in its evocation of reluctant retrospection. Jarmusch has always juxtaposed moments of (understated, but genuine) feeling with moments of absurdist deadpan humor; in some films, the effect is deliberately jarring and deconstructive, but here there’s an almost seamless blending of these modes, so that nearly all the incidents in the film seem ludicrous and touching at the same time. All in all, Broken Flowers is a very nearly impalpable film, slipping through one’s grasp, but leaving the ghosts of decayed emotions behind to haunt you.

Jim Jarmusch’s latest movie, Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, is absolutely lovely, and perhaps my favorite thing Jarmusch has ever done. A big part of the reason is Bill Murray. I feel like I could watch Murray for hours, just sitting on the living room couch as he often does in this film. It’s hard to describe, or do full justice to, the persona Murray has evolved in his recent work for Wes Anderson, and especially for Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), and now Jarmusch. He’s moody and melancholic, in contrast to the manic comedy that first made him famous. But of course there was already a kind of silent, intense yearning behind the frantic hysteria of Murray’s characters in films like the great What About Bob?. In Broken Flowers, a kind of mournful passivity is all that’s left of this yearning; Murray’s Don Johnston is (as the character’s name suggests) a sort of Don Juan, who has found no lasting satisfaction in any of his erotic conquests, and now, in a financially comfortable middle age, has no ambitions and nothing to look forward to. To call Murray’s acting style here minimalist and deadpan would be accurate, but inadequate. Don Johnston isn’t really a blank slate; he’s weary but goes on anyway; he understates all his emotional reactions, but he is far from affectless. Murray’s pauses are eloquent in their suggestiveness; he fully expresses feelings and responses with the tiniest, slowest gestures and facial tics. But that’s not quite an accurate description either; it isn’t that Murray suggests and expresses a lot with a little; it’s rather that this “little” is what he is expressing, quite accurately and fully proportionally. Don Johnston is somebody who has found life to be disappointing; but he doesn’t feel betrayed or outraged by this disappointment, he merely takes it in stride, because he knows that it is all that anyone can reasonably expect — or better, that it is all that anyone will ever get, no matter what they expect). It’s a kind of weary, melancholy stoicism that is nonetheless as far from despair as it is from exhilaration and joie de vivre. I’m reminded of Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, or of Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

(I should add also that the long-ago lovers whom Don Johnston contacts 20 years later, in a vain attempt to discover whether he has a son, are wonderfully acted also, especially the performances of Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange. There’s also the great manic supporting peformance of the always-brilliant — and always underrated — Jeffrey Wright).

All this makes Murray a perfect leading man for Jim Jarmusch, whose films are always about missed connections, disappointments and misunderstandings, and (excuse the metaphor) pregnant pauses that end only in miscarriages. At his worst, Jarmusch can be snide, irritatingly self-congratulatory, and quite sappy beneath all the hipster posturing. At his best, however, as here, he is very nearly sublime. I admired Jarmusch’s last two real features, the deconstructed Western Dead Man, with Johnny Depp, and the colder-than-ice gangster/samurai Ghost Dog, with Forest Whitaker, both of which made brilliant use of their leading men; but I think that in Broken Flowers, and with Murray, Jarmusch has outdone himself. His visual style, with long pauses, elliptical cuts, and an emphasis on journeys rather than destinations, is perfectly pitched for this inconclusive story about a man who sort-of confronts his past, but has no epiphanies, revelations, or moments of Proustian recollection. Jarmusch’s films are slow, but their tempo is never simply drawn-out or undifferentiated; Broken Flowers is perfectly paced in its evocation of reluctant retrospection. Jarmusch has always juxtaposed moments of (understated, but genuine) feeling with moments of absurdist deadpan humor; in some films, the effect is deliberately jarring and deconstructive, but here there’s an almost seamless blending of these modes, so that nearly all the incidents in the film seem ludicrous and touching at the same time. All in all, Broken Flowers is a very nearly impalpable film, slipping through one’s grasp, but leaving the ghosts of decayed emotions behind to haunt you.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

I’ve been a fan of Miranda July for some time now: I have heard her CDs, and seen several of her multimedia performances. Her work always (what is the best way to say this?) obsesses me, but in a mild way: her oblique stories/comments/pictures and words/impersonations draw me in and make me want to figure out more, since they seem meaningful and not merely nonsensical, and since they continually imply depths that they resolutely refuse to articulate. July’s work is very “postmodern”, in that it is (in a sense) all about surfaces; but some of the surfaces are folded and dark and inaccessible, which makes me want to unfold them somehow, but I can’t. It is hard to describe them more specifically than this: I’d say that everything July does is affectively charged (with a certain degree of pain and awkwardness “behind” what seems “quirky” and “cute”), but (as my use of quotation marks indicates) it is impossible to pin down just what the affects are. Defensiveness? disappointment? embarrassment? shyness? an oxymoronically low-key hysteria? disillusionment? rejection? mild satisfaction?

July’s new film, her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, is (as reviews and interviews have suggested) more “accessible” than her earlier work in other media, but this doesn’t mean that it waters down or compromises any of the qualities of her previous work. In genre terms, Me and You is a romantic comedy; but it’s so continually surprising and original that the genre marker doesn’t really say very much. It’s a film about the tentative, fragile, and often mishandled and misunderstood connections between people: romantic connections, sexual connections, family connections, friendship connections. The ages of the characters range (literally) from 7 to 70, although the main characters (played by July herself and by John Hawkes, whom I didn’t know before but who is apparently best known for his role in the TV series “Deadwood,” which I still unfortunately haven’t seen) are single or divorced 30-somethings. The awkwardness with regards to sexuality of the under-the-age-of-consent characters is beautifully portrayed (actually I am surprised that, in these puritanical times, July hasn’t gotten more flak for this), but so is the awkwardness, when it comes to expressing feelings (or even recognizing feelings in oneself) of the adult characters. I really don’t know how to describe the changing moods of the film, from humor to despair, without negatives: it’s so off-kilter that its gloom and fatalism is never morbid or even sentimental; so wry and dry and deadpan that its fundamental sweetness often passes by barely perceived; it walks a line between outrageousness and silliness so deftly that it is never in the least bit transgressive (not even when the 7-year-old boy is exchanging fantasies about poop with another screen persona who turns out to be an uptight woman in her 40s, and not even when the subject of teenage fellatio comes up, as it does several times) — but not transgressive precisely because there is never anything the least bit normative in the film, hence nothing against which one could transgress.

Me and You and Everyone We Know also abounds with images that are lovely and ridiculous at the same time. I think of an almost-excrucating sequence involving a goldfish in a bag of water precariously perched on the roof of a car weaving through traffic; of a pair of pink shoes that comes up several times; of the 7-year-old using cut and paste to overcome the problem of his uncertain spelling as he writes in a chat room; of a bird on a branch at the start of the film that is transformed at the end to a hokey painting of a bird stuck in some bushes. Me and You and Everyone We Know is a film of small moments that are (again, how do I say this?) utterly everyday, and at the same time transformative — but only slightly, tentatively transformative. It’s appropriate, perhaps, that a film so beautifully undemonstrative and undeclarative should leave me tongue-tied as I endeavor to describe it.

I’ve been a fan of Miranda July for some time now: I have heard her CDs, and seen several of her multimedia performances. Her work always (what is the best way to say this?) obsesses me, but in a mild way: her oblique stories/comments/pictures and words/impersonations draw me in and make me want to figure out more, since they seem meaningful and not merely nonsensical, and since they continually imply depths that they resolutely refuse to articulate. July’s work is very “postmodern”, in that it is (in a sense) all about surfaces; but some of the surfaces are folded and dark and inaccessible, which makes me want to unfold them somehow, but I can’t. It is hard to describe them more specifically than this: I’d say that everything July does is affectively charged (with a certain degree of pain and awkwardness “behind” what seems “quirky” and “cute”), but (as my use of quotation marks indicates) it is impossible to pin down just what the affects are. Defensiveness? disappointment? embarrassment? shyness? an oxymoronically low-key hysteria? disillusionment? rejection? mild satisfaction?

July’s new film, her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, is (as reviews and interviews have suggested) more “accessible” than her earlier work in other media, but this doesn’t mean that it waters down or compromises any of the qualities of her previous work. In genre terms, Me and You is a romantic comedy; but it’s so continually surprising and original that the genre marker doesn’t really say very much. It’s a film about the tentative, fragile, and often mishandled and misunderstood connections between people: romantic connections, sexual connections, family connections, friendship connections. The ages of the characters range (literally) from 7 to 70, although the main characters (played by July herself and by John Hawkes, whom I didn’t know before but who is apparently best known for his role in the TV series “Deadwood,” which I still unfortunately haven’t seen) are single or divorced 30-somethings. The awkwardness with regards to sexuality of the under-the-age-of-consent characters is beautifully portrayed (actually I am surprised that, in these puritanical times, July hasn’t gotten more flak for this), but so is the awkwardness, when it comes to expressing feelings (or even recognizing feelings in oneself) of the adult characters. I really don’t know how to describe the changing moods of the film, from humor to despair, without negatives: it’s so off-kilter that its gloom and fatalism is never morbid or even sentimental; so wry and dry and deadpan that its fundamental sweetness often passes by barely perceived; it walks a line between outrageousness and silliness so deftly that it is never in the least bit transgressive (not even when the 7-year-old boy is exchanging fantasies about poop with another screen persona who turns out to be an uptight woman in her 40s, and not even when the subject of teenage fellatio comes up, as it does several times) — but not transgressive precisely because there is never anything the least bit normative in the film, hence nothing against which one could transgress.

Me and You and Everyone We Know also abounds with images that are lovely and ridiculous at the same time. I think of an almost-excrucating sequence involving a goldfish in a bag of water precariously perched on the roof of a car weaving through traffic; of a pair of pink shoes that comes up several times; of the 7-year-old using cut and paste to overcome the problem of his uncertain spelling as he writes in a chat room; of a bird on a branch at the start of the film that is transformed at the end to a hokey painting of a bird stuck in some bushes. Me and You and Everyone We Know is a film of small moments that are (again, how do I say this?) utterly everyday, and at the same time transformative — but only slightly, tentatively transformative. It’s appropriate, perhaps, that a film so beautifully undemonstrative and undeclarative should leave me tongue-tied as I endeavor to describe it.

In My Skin

Last week I had some essential dental work done — something that I had been putting off for years. In the aftermath, the new bridge that covers the spot where teeth are missing or defective is fine. But my gums are awfully sore, even today, a week later. The pain is slight in amplitude, just barely above the threshold of awareness — which is just enough to be annoying. I’m taking acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen (not simultaneously, but one after the other) to dull the pain. But I also have this incessant compulsion to probe the sore spots, with my tongue and with my fingers. Doing so actually makes the gums hurt more; but I can’t get rid of the feeling that this constant probing is also in some sort of way a cure, or a solution, as if stimulating the pain in this manner was a way to make the feeling active instead of passive, to claim it for myself, to incorporate it, so it would no longer be something that’s just happening to me, no longer something from which I suffer.

It is through this experience — and others like it in the past — that I relate to Marina de Van’s extraordinary film In My Skin. A thirty-something woman (played by de Van, who stars in the film as well as being the director and screenwriter) injures herself at a party: she goes out to the back lawn for some fresh air, and in the dark she stumbles over some sort of tool (we never get to see it) that tears up her leg, leaving some ugly gashes. Although she is bleeding, she goes back to the party as if nothing had happened, and doesn’t bring herself to go to the emergency room until hours later. In the days to come, she develops a fascination with her wound, tearing off the bandages so she can feel and trace the cuts, and then cutting herself to extend the network of bloody lines. As the film proceeds, she grows more and more obsessive. All this plays out against the background of her life as a Parisian yuppie, moving up the corporate ladder as an advertising consultant, and alternately arguing with and making up with her boyfriend (who’s a self-centered asshole). At one point, during a dinner meeting with a client, she hallucinates that her left arm has been replaced by a prosthesis and has started to act in alien ways, out of her control; she starts furtively cutting it under the table, with a steak knife. Later that evening, she fakes an auto accident so that her boyfriend won’t know that the wounds were deliberately self-inflicted. And it escalates from there: she eventually holes up in a hotel room, lying in fetal position while she cuts off rectangles of her skin, licking up the blood and putting the skin fragments aside for later preservation via tanning.

What’s remarkable about In My Skin is not just the presentation of an obsession, but the affective tone and mode of presentation. Though the film is definitely visceral in impact, it’s also psychologically muted — which makes it all the more intense. No explanation, either psychological or sociological, is ever given for the main character’s obsession. It’s just a brute fact of her being, something that defines and dominates her very existence. At the same time, though we see some of the cutting, the cutting scenes are dominated by close-ups of her face. This leads us to identify with her emotional reactions, which range from dread to blankness to nearly orgasmic bliss — without our being able to ground these emotions, because (in the absence of any causal explanation) we cannot relate them intelligibly to what she is actually doing to her body. The result is a ferocious intensity that is at the same time very nearly abstract. Towards the end of the film, instead of these facial shots de Van splits the screen and gives us two different angles, both in extreme close-up, on the same few inches of skin, knife, and surrounding objects: the effect, again, is one of visceralness and abstraction at the same time. The more intimately the film reduces its focus to just the consciousness of its protagonist, the more oddly impersonal it becomes. (I can’t help thinking, at this point, of Maurice Blanchot, the author who — aside from Proust — has demonstrated most profoundly how intimacy is tied to impersonality: for the deeper you go, the more you explore interiority and the precognitive desires and feelings that drive us, the more everything that we know as “personality” and “psychology” falls away, and the more we discover an impersonality that is tied to otherness, to the Outside).

The emotional tone of In My Skin, to the extent that it can be pinned down at all, is closer to horror than to any other genre. I was reminded a bit of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day. Except that in Monique de Van’s film, the vampire/cannibal and the victim are the same person. Monstrosity cannot be projected outward; it becomes a sort of auto-affection, and thereby an of self-love, a way of fashioning and relating to oneself. (As Foucault taught us, it’s precisely because the “self” doesn’t exist a priori, because there is no pregiven phenomenological subject, because “the given” is prepersonal or impersonal, that “care of the self” or “self-fashioning” becomes the most crucial existential and political issue).

In vampire stories, the vampire’s insatiable desire often wins our sympathy: because of the allure of shadows; or because the vampire suffers and endures more than his victims; or because such infinite longing can never be resolved in satisfaction; or because the inextricable intermingling of life and death is something we cannot conceive and yet know in our hearts; or because such desire, however cruel, seems more authentic (more alive, ironically) than the repression and coldness of the society in which the vampire’s victims live. In My Skin goes further than any other vampire story in exploring these dimensions, and in excavating the strange, impersonal intimacy at the heart of vampiric terror. In other words, In My Skin is the tenderest of all horror films.

Last week I had some essential dental work done — something that I had been putting off for years. In the aftermath, the new bridge that covers the spot where teeth are missing or defective is fine. But my gums are awfully sore, even today, a week later. The pain is slight in amplitude, just barely above the threshold of awareness — which is just enough to be annoying. I’m taking acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen (not simultaneously, but one after the other) to dull the pain. But I also have this incessant compulsion to probe the sore spots, with my tongue and with my fingers. Doing so actually makes the gums hurt more; but I can’t get rid of the feeling that this constant probing is also in some sort of way a cure, or a solution, as if stimulating the pain in this manner was a way to make the feeling active instead of passive, to claim it for myself, to incorporate it, so it would no longer be something that’s just happening to me, no longer something from which I suffer.

It is through this experience — and others like it in the past — that I relate to Marina de Van’s extraordinary film In My Skin. A thirty-something woman (played by de Van, who stars in the film as well as being the director and screenwriter) injures herself at a party: she goes out to the back lawn for some fresh air, and in the dark she stumbles over some sort of tool (we never get to see it) that tears up her leg, leaving some ugly gashes. Although she is bleeding, she goes back to the party as if nothing had happened, and doesn’t bring herself to go to the emergency room until hours later. In the days to come, she develops a fascination with her wound, tearing off the bandages so she can feel and trace the cuts, and then cutting herself to extend the network of bloody lines. As the film proceeds, she grows more and more obsessive. All this plays out against the background of her life as a Parisian yuppie, moving up the corporate ladder as an advertising consultant, and alternately arguing with and making up with her boyfriend (who’s a self-centered asshole). At one point, during a dinner meeting with a client, she hallucinates that her left arm has been replaced by a prosthesis and has started to act in alien ways, out of her control; she starts furtively cutting it under the table, with a steak knife. Later that evening, she fakes an auto accident so that her boyfriend won’t know that the wounds were deliberately self-inflicted. And it escalates from there: she eventually holes up in a hotel room, lying in fetal position while she cuts off rectangles of her skin, licking up the blood and putting the skin fragments aside for later preservation via tanning.

What’s remarkable about In My Skin is not just the presentation of an obsession, but the affective tone and mode of presentation. Though the film is definitely visceral in impact, it’s also psychologically muted — which makes it all the more intense. No explanation, either psychological or sociological, is ever given for the main character’s obsession. It’s just a brute fact of her being, something that defines and dominates her very existence. At the same time, though we see some of the cutting, the cutting scenes are dominated by close-ups of her face. This leads us to identify with her emotional reactions, which range from dread to blankness to nearly orgasmic bliss — without our being able to ground these emotions, because (in the absence of any causal explanation) we cannot relate them intelligibly to what she is actually doing to her body. The result is a ferocious intensity that is at the same time very nearly abstract. Towards the end of the film, instead of these facial shots de Van splits the screen and gives us two different angles, both in extreme close-up, on the same few inches of skin, knife, and surrounding objects: the effect, again, is one of visceralness and abstraction at the same time. The more intimately the film reduces its focus to just the consciousness of its protagonist, the more oddly impersonal it becomes. (I can’t help thinking, at this point, of Maurice Blanchot, the author who — aside from Proust — has demonstrated most profoundly how intimacy is tied to impersonality: for the deeper you go, the more you explore interiority and the precognitive desires and feelings that drive us, the more everything that we know as “personality” and “psychology” falls away, and the more we discover an impersonality that is tied to otherness, to the Outside).

The emotional tone of In My Skin, to the extent that it can be pinned down at all, is closer to horror than to any other genre. I was reminded a bit of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day. Except that in Monique de Van’s film, the vampire/cannibal and the victim are the same person. Monstrosity cannot be projected outward; it becomes a sort of auto-affection, and thereby an of self-love, a way of fashioning and relating to oneself. (As Foucault taught us, it’s precisely because the “self” doesn’t exist a priori, because there is no pregiven phenomenological subject, because “the given” is prepersonal or impersonal, that “care of the self” or “self-fashioning” becomes the most crucial existential and political issue).

In vampire stories, the vampire’s insatiable desire often wins our sympathy: because of the allure of shadows; or because the vampire suffers and endures more than his victims; or because such infinite longing can never be resolved in satisfaction; or because the inextricable intermingling of life and death is something we cannot conceive and yet know in our hearts; or because such desire, however cruel, seems more authentic (more alive, ironically) than the repression and coldness of the society in which the vampire’s victims live. In My Skin goes further than any other vampire story in exploring these dimensions, and in excavating the strange, impersonal intimacy at the heart of vampiric terror. In other words, In My Skin is the tenderest of all horror films.

Land of the Dead

We’ve had to wait something like twenty years for George Romero’s Land of the Dead; but now it’s finally here, and I couldn’t be happier. The film is a worthy successor to Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985) (which three films I wrote about, long ago, in my book The Cinematic Body).

Though the “living dead” films take place in chronological order — each seems to take place a few months or years after the previous one — they explore different realms of social experience. Night is about the implosion of the American (white, middle class) nuclear family; its crude, low-budget visceral shocks (which revolutionized horror filmmaking in general) are grounded in the collapse of patriarchal authority into a kind of grovelling hysteria. The sexual and social “revolutions” of the 1960s were not so much rebellions against a tyrannical paternal despot, or against the rigid repressions of suburban family life, as they were carnivalesque revelations that the emperor had no clothes, that the patriarchal tyrants were toothless, and the suburban hypocrisies nothing more than a thin veneer of stage decor. So the nuclear family holed up in the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead collapses under the weight of its own stupidity, until the child-turned-zombie avidly consumes her parents; the impotence of the father is echoed by the clownishness and impotence of the larger-scale authority figures viewed on television during the zombie siege. Meanwhile, the ravaging zombies outside present a darkly humorous vision of hippie communalism (the preferred refuge of the children of the white middle class). And the movie’s ostensible theme of survivalism is totally undermined by the cynical conclusion, when the film’s only sympathetic character — a black man who has managed to make it through the night unharmed by the zombies — is shot dead by a redneck sheriff’s posse.

Of course the “rebellions” of the 1960s went nowhere — though they are still the object of vilification by the far right and the fundamentalists to this day. But hippies and campus radicals from middle-class backgrounds grew up to be yuppies, and their influence on the larger culture was mostly a matter of an easily saleable “lifestyle.” Once the social upheavals of the 60s had passed, consumerism turned out to be the real winner. So it’s entirely appropriate that Dawn of the Dead takes place largely in a shopping mall: which the zombies are attracted to because it was the place of their happiest moments when they were alive, while the four living characters who hole up inside it alleviate their sense of being besieged by living a fantasy of commodity abundance and frictionless shopping and consuming. The invasion of a paramilitary bikers’ gang looking for loot puts an end to this bourgeois idyll, but not before the exorbitant lust for commodities has been established as the ruling passion of living and dead alike.

Many fans of the earlier films found Day of the Dead disappointing, but to my mind it’s as brilliant and as vital (if that’s the right word for a film about the dead) as the rest of the series. Day is the most philosophical of the “living dead” films, which is part of what I love about it, but which may be part of what turned many viewers off. As befits a film from the Reagan 1980s, the focus shifts from consumerism to the military/scientific complex; it takes place, not in a brightly lit mall, but in a hellishly claustrophobic underground bunker. Pathologically macho soldiers try to keep the zombies at bay, while scientists futilely try to discover the cause of the zombie plague, or else try to “tame” the zombies. The film is relentless in its deconstruction of military authoritarianism and scientific claims to supreme authority (indeed, Danny Boyle’s excellent 28 Days Later is entirely indebted to Day in its latter half, when — just as in Romero’s film — the military saviors of civilization come off as worse than the monsters they are trying to fight). Day of the Dead ends up combining a kind of Stoic fatalism (as the few sympathetic living characters do escape the zombies, but in a way that is pointedly fragile and contingent) with a greater sympathy for the zombies than ever before, as they embody a kind of inchoate, but plaintive and oddly innocuous desire, in contrast to the twisted viciousness of the characters who stand for social order.

Land of the Dead is both simpler and more expressionistic than Day: it takes place almost entirely at night, and both the cinematography and the gory special effects have an elegance that goes beyond anything Romero has done before. In Land, as befits our globalized, post-9/11 world (though Romero’s screenplay was apparently mostly finished before 9/11), social class, and indeed class warfare, comes to the foreground, after having been an implicit subtext in the earlier films. Romero’s hometown of Pittsburgh is a bastion of humanity against the zombie hordes — just as America today paranoiacally imagines itself as a fortress of “freedom” barred against the Muslims and Mexicans who are always trying to batter their way in. Internally, post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh is almost a parody of rapacious capitalism (though it must be said that “actually existing capitalism” in America is rapidly approaching this terminal parodic state): the ruling class live lives of elegance in the exclusive gated high-rise of “Fiddler’s Green”, while the masses outside scrape by day to day, more or less at a subsistence level, with sex, drugs, violence, and gambling as their only amusments. Add to this a psychotic Bushite dictator (played, inevitably, by Dennis Hopper) whose two main passions are an all-out drive to make the rich richer, and a refusal ever to negotiate with “terrorists”; and the muscle he uses, a cadre of mercenaries who have no ties or loyalties, except (to a limited extent) to one another. Meanwhile, the zombies are treated more sympathetically in Land than they even were in Day: they start to evolve, and develop a sort of memory and intelligence, an ability to plan and to coordinate their actions. They become, in fact, a spontaneously self-organized swarm (they have a sort of leader, but his role is exemplary and inspirational, rather than having any sort of authority). And when they break into the city, it’s as if the proletariat — or more accurately, Negri’s “multitude” — had finally arisen to demand restitution and justice. This zombie invasion is intercut with infighting among the city’s cadres: John Leguizamo starts a self-serving rebellion, because he’s pissed of at not being amply enough rewarded for doing Dennis Hopper’s dirty work. (Hopper will never allow Leguizamo into Fiddler’s Green, because he’s “street,” and even worse, Latino). Simon Baker, the film’s nominal hero, is sent by Hopper to squelch Leguizamo (it’s sort of an offer Baker can’t refuse, though he plans to hijack the process for his own selfish ends anyway). (The fabulous Asia Argento also plays a small but key role). Not to give too much away, or get involved in the minutiae of the plot, but the various strands merge in brilliantly satisfying ways. What makes Land noteworthy, aside from the tightness of its construction and (as I’ve already said) the delights of its (dare I call them understated?) gross-out special effects, is the way that class comes to play a central role — and other oppositions, particularly that between the living and the dead, tend to dissolve or fall away. Is there any American filmmaker working today who is as politically cogent as Romero, and at the same time as affectively powerful, and as committed to pulp/”low” culture values?

We’ve had to wait something like twenty years for George Romero’s Land of the Dead; but now it’s finally here, and I couldn’t be happier. The film is a worthy successor to Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985) (which three films I wrote about, long ago, in my book The Cinematic Body).

Though the “living dead” films take place in chronological order — each seems to take place a few months or years after the previous one — they explore different realms of social experience. Night is about the implosion of the American (white, middle class) nuclear family; its crude, low-budget visceral shocks (which revolutionized horror filmmaking in general) are grounded in the collapse of patriarchal authority into a kind of grovelling hysteria. The sexual and social “revolutions” of the 1960s were not so much rebellions against a tyrannical paternal despot, or against the rigid repressions of suburban family life, as they were carnivalesque revelations that the emperor had no clothes, that the patriarchal tyrants were toothless, and the suburban hypocrisies nothing more than a thin veneer of stage decor. So the nuclear family holed up in the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead collapses under the weight of its own stupidity, until the child-turned-zombie avidly consumes her parents; the impotence of the father is echoed by the clownishness and impotence of the larger-scale authority figures viewed on television during the zombie siege. Meanwhile, the ravaging zombies outside present a darkly humorous vision of hippie communalism (the preferred refuge of the children of the white middle class). And the movie’s ostensible theme of survivalism is totally undermined by the cynical conclusion, when the film’s only sympathetic character — a black man who has managed to make it through the night unharmed by the zombies — is shot dead by a redneck sheriff’s posse.

Of course the “rebellions” of the 1960s went nowhere — though they are still the object of vilification by the far right and the fundamentalists to this day. But hippies and campus radicals from middle-class backgrounds grew up to be yuppies, and their influence on the larger culture was mostly a matter of an easily saleable “lifestyle.” Once the social upheavals of the 60s had passed, consumerism turned out to be the real winner. So it’s entirely appropriate that Dawn of the Dead takes place largely in a shopping mall: which the zombies are attracted to because it was the place of their happiest moments when they were alive, while the four living characters who hole up inside it alleviate their sense of being besieged by living a fantasy of commodity abundance and frictionless shopping and consuming. The invasion of a paramilitary bikers’ gang looking for loot puts an end to this bourgeois idyll, but not before the exorbitant lust for commodities has been established as the ruling passion of living and dead alike.

Many fans of the earlier films found Day of the Dead disappointing, but to my mind it’s as brilliant and as vital (if that’s the right word for a film about the dead) as the rest of the series. Day is the most philosophical of the “living dead” films, which is part of what I love about it, but which may be part of what turned many viewers off. As befits a film from the Reagan 1980s, the focus shifts from consumerism to the military/scientific complex; it takes place, not in a brightly lit mall, but in a hellishly claustrophobic underground bunker. Pathologically macho soldiers try to keep the zombies at bay, while scientists futilely try to discover the cause of the zombie plague, or else try to “tame” the zombies. The film is relentless in its deconstruction of military authoritarianism and scientific claims to supreme authority (indeed, Danny Boyle’s excellent 28 Days Later is entirely indebted to Day in its latter half, when — just as in Romero’s film — the military saviors of civilization come off as worse than the monsters they are trying to fight). Day of the Dead ends up combining a kind of Stoic fatalism (as the few sympathetic living characters do escape the zombies, but in a way that is pointedly fragile and contingent) with a greater sympathy for the zombies than ever before, as they embody a kind of inchoate, but plaintive and oddly innocuous desire, in contrast to the twisted viciousness of the characters who stand for social order.

Land of the Dead is both simpler and more expressionistic than Day: it takes place almost entirely at night, and both the cinematography and the gory special effects have an elegance that goes beyond anything Romero has done before. In Land, as befits our globalized, post-9/11 world (though Romero’s screenplay was apparently mostly finished before 9/11), social class, and indeed class warfare, comes to the foreground, after having been an implicit subtext in the earlier films. Romero’s hometown of Pittsburgh is a bastion of humanity against the zombie hordes — just as America today paranoiacally imagines itself as a fortress of “freedom” barred against the Muslims and Mexicans who are always trying to batter their way in. Internally, post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh is almost a parody of rapacious capitalism (though it must be said that “actually existing capitalism” in America is rapidly approaching this terminal parodic state): the ruling class live lives of elegance in the exclusive gated high-rise of “Fiddler’s Green”, while the masses outside scrape by day to day, more or less at a subsistence level, with sex, drugs, violence, and gambling as their only amusments. Add to this a psychotic Bushite dictator (played, inevitably, by Dennis Hopper) whose two main passions are an all-out drive to make the rich richer, and a refusal ever to negotiate with “terrorists”; and the muscle he uses, a cadre of mercenaries who have no ties or loyalties, except (to a limited extent) to one another. Meanwhile, the zombies are treated more sympathetically in Land than they even were in Day: they start to evolve, and develop a sort of memory and intelligence, an ability to plan and to coordinate their actions. They become, in fact, a spontaneously self-organized swarm (they have a sort of leader, but his role is exemplary and inspirational, rather than having any sort of authority). And when they break into the city, it’s as if the proletariat — or more accurately, Negri’s “multitude” — had finally arisen to demand restitution and justice. This zombie invasion is intercut with infighting among the city’s cadres: John Leguizamo starts a self-serving rebellion, because he’s pissed of at not being amply enough rewarded for doing Dennis Hopper’s dirty work. (Hopper will never allow Leguizamo into Fiddler’s Green, because he’s “street,” and even worse, Latino). Simon Baker, the film’s nominal hero, is sent by Hopper to squelch Leguizamo (it’s sort of an offer Baker can’t refuse, though he plans to hijack the process for his own selfish ends anyway). (The fabulous Asia Argento also plays a small but key role). Not to give too much away, or get involved in the minutiae of the plot, but the various strands merge in brilliantly satisfying ways. What makes Land noteworthy, aside from the tightness of its construction and (as I’ve already said) the delights of its (dare I call them understated?) gross-out special effects, is the way that class comes to play a central role — and other oppositions, particularly that between the living and the dead, tend to dissolve or fall away. Is there any American filmmaker working today who is as politically cogent as Romero, and at the same time as affectively powerful, and as committed to pulp/”low” culture values?

She Hate Me

Spike Lee’s She Hate Me is a total mess of a film. It’s sprawling and digressive, all over the place; and its main plot line (black man serves as superstud to impregnate lesbians who want to have babies) is too over-the-top to be taken seriously, but not over-the-top enough to work as satire. The film seems to be an attempt to address homophobia, but its ostensible message of tolerance is overlain with smug condescension, in precisely the same way that the anti-racist messages of “liberal” Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s (like Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) were compromised by their ultimately racist and condescending portrayal of black people (see James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work for the ultimate analysis of these latter). And She Hate Me concludes with a reaffirmation of bourgeois family values — the restoration of a “kinder, gentler” patriarchy — that is the obnoxious ideological message of so many of Spike Lee’s films.

And yet, and yet… As with nearly everything Spike Lee has ever done, I loved nearly every minute of the film. Should I call it the triumph of form, or technique, over content? In part; though I don’t think form and content can really be separated. It is more a question of the way Lee’s cinematography and editing create a sort of counterplot, running underneath, and in dialectical tension with, the often didactic intentions of the screenplay.

The best comparison here might be to Scorsese — another great director whose camera never falters, even though he has frittered away most of his later career on pretentious, unconvincing, and utterly pointless projects. And the comparison, I think, goes entirely in Lee’s favor: his bad films, like She Hate Me, are a hundred times more interesting, emotionally moving, and thought-provoking than such Scorsese white elephants as The Age of Innocence, Kundun, and Gangs of New York. Lee is simply the more inventive and formally adventurous filmmaker of the two. Scorsese and Lee both have highly individual, auteurist styles. But whereas Scorsese uses his style to embalm his material, Lee’s style is a flexible instrument that he will bend to any purpose: he is willing to try almost anything once, and he is continually turning out extreme experiments, that don’t always work but that always show a cinematic intelligence and exuberance, no matter how dubious the material. This is the sense in which, as I’ve said before, Lee — for all his fame — is actually the most underrated of American directors.

In She Hate Me, the counterplot — and Lee’s exuberant inventiveness — come out in the way he moves the camera, the way his framings (indoors) and tracking shots (outdoors) always lead to a sense of space as psychologically charged with the psychological demands and ambivalences of the characters, and in the hysterical rush and overload of the montage sequences (most notably, one in which the protagonist — played with understated elegance by Anthony Mackie — impregnates a series of hyper-stereotypical glam lesbians, and a later one in which said lesbians all give birth, with much groaning and screaming). There’s also a series of bizarre, almost surreal digressions: like the animations of Mackie’s character’s sperm racing up the vagina and into the uterus, or the sequence where John Turturro, playing a Mafia don, does an impression of Brando in The Godfather, or — best of all, perhaps — the sequences that take on the story of Frank Wills, the night watchman who discovered the Watergate burglary, but who sank into despair, poverty, and an early death after his service to democracy went unrecognized (there is one scene especially where Wills is taunted by Haldeman, Erlichman, Gordon Liddy, etc., plus Nixon himself, or an actor wearing a grotesque Nixon mask).There’s also a climactic scene, where Mackie does his Jimmy Stewart impression (think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) before a US Senate hearing where he’s being bullied by Brian Dennehy as an old, corrupt committee chairman. (I think I forgot to mention that the film is not just about impregnating lesbians, but also about corporate corruption and greed, with Woody Harrelson doing a turn as a Ken Lay-style sleazeball CEO). Not to mention the German mad scientist who gives Mackie’s character cornball advice and then kills himself in the movie’s first five minutes. And so on and so on….

These scenes are all utterly bonkers: they detract from any hope of making a coherent and convincing film; but they are what makes the movie come alive. She Hate Me is a completely crazy potpourri of stereotypes, non sequiturs, stylistic affectations, and random observations. Almost every five minutes I found myself shaking my head in disbelief and wondering: what the hell did Spike Lee think he was doing? But this is precisely what makes She Hate Me into such a fascinating, and (for me, at least) compulsively watchable film.

Spike Lee’s She Hate Me is a total mess of a film. It’s sprawling and digressive, all over the place; and its main plot line (black man serves as superstud to impregnate lesbians who want to have babies) is too over-the-top to be taken seriously, but not over-the-top enough to work as satire. The film seems to be an attempt to address homophobia, but its ostensible message of tolerance is overlain with smug condescension, in precisely the same way that the anti-racist messages of “liberal” Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s (like Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) were compromised by their ultimately racist and condescending portrayal of black people (see James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work for the ultimate analysis of these latter). And She Hate Me concludes with a reaffirmation of bourgeois family values — the restoration of a “kinder, gentler” patriarchy — that is the obnoxious ideological message of so many of Spike Lee’s films.

And yet, and yet… As with nearly everything Spike Lee has ever done, I loved nearly every minute of the film. Should I call it the triumph of form, or technique, over content? In part; though I don’t think form and content can really be separated. It is more a question of the way Lee’s cinematography and editing create a sort of counterplot, running underneath, and in dialectical tension with, the often didactic intentions of the screenplay.

The best comparison here might be to Scorsese — another great director whose camera never falters, even though he has frittered away most of his later career on pretentious, unconvincing, and utterly pointless projects. And the comparison, I think, goes entirely in Lee’s favor: his bad films, like She Hate Me, are a hundred times more interesting, emotionally moving, and thought-provoking than such Scorsese white elephants as The Age of Innocence, Kundun, and Gangs of New York. Lee is simply the more inventive and formally adventurous filmmaker of the two. Scorsese and Lee both have highly individual, auteurist styles. But whereas Scorsese uses his style to embalm his material, Lee’s style is a flexible instrument that he will bend to any purpose: he is willing to try almost anything once, and he is continually turning out extreme experiments, that don’t always work but that always show a cinematic intelligence and exuberance, no matter how dubious the material. This is the sense in which, as I’ve said before, Lee — for all his fame — is actually the most underrated of American directors.

In She Hate Me, the counterplot — and Lee’s exuberant inventiveness — come out in the way he moves the camera, the way his framings (indoors) and tracking shots (outdoors) always lead to a sense of space as psychologically charged with the psychological demands and ambivalences of the characters, and in the hysterical rush and overload of the montage sequences (most notably, one in which the protagonist — played with understated elegance by Anthony Mackie — impregnates a series of hyper-stereotypical glam lesbians, and a later one in which said lesbians all give birth, with much groaning and screaming). There’s also a series of bizarre, almost surreal digressions: like the animations of Mackie’s character’s sperm racing up the vagina and into the uterus, or the sequence where John Turturro, playing a Mafia don, does an impression of Brando in The Godfather, or — best of all, perhaps — the sequences that take on the story of Frank Wills, the night watchman who discovered the Watergate burglary, but who sank into despair, poverty, and an early death after his service to democracy went unrecognized (there is one scene especially where Wills is taunted by Haldeman, Erlichman, Gordon Liddy, etc., plus Nixon himself, or an actor wearing a grotesque Nixon mask).There’s also a climactic scene, where Mackie does his Jimmy Stewart impression (think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) before a US Senate hearing where he’s being bullied by Brian Dennehy as an old, corrupt committee chairman. (I think I forgot to mention that the film is not just about impregnating lesbians, but also about corporate corruption and greed, with Woody Harrelson doing a turn as a Ken Lay-style sleazeball CEO). Not to mention the German mad scientist who gives Mackie’s character cornball advice and then kills himself in the movie’s first five minutes. And so on and so on….

These scenes are all utterly bonkers: they detract from any hope of making a coherent and convincing film; but they are what makes the movie come alive. She Hate Me is a completely crazy potpourri of stereotypes, non sequiturs, stylistic affectations, and random observations. Almost every five minutes I found myself shaking my head in disbelief and wondering: what the hell did Spike Lee think he was doing? But this is precisely what makes She Hate Me into such a fascinating, and (for me, at least) compulsively watchable film.