By N.P. Thompson
[I Served the King of England is now playing in New York and Los Angeles.]
There are two things that I especially cannot stand in movies: one of them consists of having men and women establish their sexual friskiness by leaping fully-clothed into a fountain; the other involves smashing every kitchen plate within reach to express bottled-up inner rage. I Served the King of England, Czech filmmaker Jiří Menzel’s return to the cinema after fifteen years of directing theatre, drags both of my pet peeves to the forefront, and then some.
The setting is Europe in the early 1930s; we all know where the time and place are headed, and so we wait and wait, through the supposedly merry frolics of an impish, mischievous, revoltingly amoral clown named Jan Dítě (Ivan Barnev, whose nimble physicality evokes Nureyev, but whose neutered persona and silent movie techniques are straight out of Chaplin). We wait for the Nazis to arrive and put an end to such quirky summer idylls as call girls and their rich, elderly johns pelting one another with cream puffs, squealing with joy, as a rigid, immobile attendant holds aloft a silver tray piled high with an endless supply of pastries for the combatants to grab. Menzel scores this outdoor romp to a jaunty, syncopated piano, much as the fountain leap, with the suits chasing the diaphanous frocks after one of the latter dabs a tablespoon of whipped cream on the nose of one of the former, played out to the strains of tuba and banjo on the soundtrack. The instrumentation reinforces that we are having such a wonderful time—or are we?
Even without our foreknowledge of the Nazis’ rise to power, the Holocaust, the Second World War, there’s something curdled from the get-go about Menzel’s adaptation of Bohumil Hrabal’s 1974 novel. Like the atrocious The Lives of Others, I Served the King of England sentimentalizes evil; furthermore, Menzel’s movie so neutrally presents the central character’s complicity in evil—that is to say, the movie cultivates a tone of wide-eyed, nostalgic innocence for the most questionable acts—that I, without virtue of having read Hrabal’s book, cannot quite tell what Menzel’s aiming for. In one sequence (the movie’s saddest and most outrageous), the director crosscuts between Jan’s failed attempts to masturbate into a hospital specimen tube (while listening to the Führer give a speech on the radio) and the scene that’s unfurling outside the clinic. A cluster of rifle-toting German soldiers in occupied Prague stand opposite a young man in his late teens or early twenties, dressed up in suit and tie. Adjacent to them, there’s a small tent out from which peaks a fresh, wholesome face; a young man peers through the flap, then pops out, and then another and another, so many that one wonders how a tent of such modest size could have held them all, these cleanly scrubbed flowers of Czech youth in their Sunday best. Menzel has some taste—he doesn’t show the actual gunning down of these local boys by the Nazi mob, nor are there sound effects of the killings. He makes the point with refreshing obliqueness. Yet what must the director have had in mind by juxtaposing this horror with his clown-hero’s inability to jack off? Could this be Menzel’s rebuttal to Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful? The Czech auteur appears to tell us that, in wartime, we cannot have it both ways; one can be a victim or one can be a pawn, but that resourcefulness of any kind is out.
Then again, given the emphasis on procreation, on the engineering of an Aryan super-race, in the movie’s second half (Jan marries a devout Nazi girl who can’t get it on unless her bed faces a framed portrait of Hitler—it’s the Führer she’s responding to as her fair-haired husband mechanically screws), I realize it’s the impotence of the German fixation on “pure blood” that Menzel’s underlining, that the rigged-up rigors of their breeding experiments may not produce anyone like the Prague youths who were so casually squandered.
For most of the film’s 120-minute length, however, there’s the long “carefree,” slapstick build-up toward the inevitable, and all that, despite the handsome production values and rapturously good editing by Jiří Brožek, proves truly insufferable.
The movie begins with a whirling, waltz-like orchestral score, flourishy, bouncy, cuckoo clock music filled with bassoons and whistles and an escalating rhythmic attack reminiscent, in its circularity, of marching around and around the aisles of a toy factory, à la the boom and pomp trash classics of Leopold Mozart. Menzel divides the film between an older version of Jan (Oldřich Kaiser), just getting out of prison, ruefully setting up housekeeping within a dilapidated farmhouse in a fog-shrouded wood (“I rejoiced to see such devastation,” his voice-over admits) and Jan the younger (Barnev). The two physically match so well that I was never aware of watching different actors: the conceptions are seamless, so that their work appears to be a single performance, abetted by extraordinarily savvy make-up artists and wigmakers. Menzel, however, lets us in on the post-war Jan’s point-of-view, while revealing nothing of young Jan’s thoughts or even if Barnev’s dopey schnook with the carrot-blond shock of wavy hair and perennially twinkling smile of self-possession is, in fact, capable of thought. We’re meant to love him, in the midst of deeply unfunny gags, the way we might be in sympathy to Chaplin or Buster Keaton. The sepia-tinted silent comedy homage that introduces Barnev’s Jan selling hot dogs by the side of railroad tracks, then chasing the locomotive (unsuccessfully, of course) to give a customer his change, tries to tap directly into those automated wellsprings, but what a cynical joker we’re asked to consider endearing. In an ongoing, ugly commentary, Jan, whether on the street or in any of the beer halls/cafés/hotels where he works as a waiter, repeatedly tosses out coins—he throws them when no one is looking, then watches to see who scurries to nab the loose change and how fast they scavenge for it. Invariably, Jan’s pleased that rich men will grovel for these small amounts, but again, why? What’s the point, and why must it be flung at us over and over? Surely it isn’t to substantiate the clown’s moral superiority? Only a bastard would keep trotting out this same old coin trick.
In his white waiter’s uniform, making the rounds from table to table in balletic pantomime, Jan, whose eyes resemble a pair of gray marbles, doesn’t seem to be entirely there. His saucy impudence feels well rehearsed and when he gazes in a mirror at work, practicing his deranged non-expression, his cartoonish employer slaps him on the back of his head. The extremes of physical humor don’t make sense within the movie’s context. When Jan’s favorite prostitute visits the bar, she avenges Jan against his boss (or so she imagines) by idiotically pouring glass after glass of raspberry grenadine over herself, then letting the empty pints drop and shatter. It’s supposed to be a statement on control, I guess, of the sort that would register in the hearts of service industry professionals, yet walking out and down the street, all sticky and sweet, she’s in danger of being stung to death by swarming bees.
Unlike Keaton or Chaplin, Barnev’s clown gets to be a sexual conquistador, and while the movie’s blend of whimsy and erotica greatly appealed to a woman friend of mine, it struck me as insipid. I might have felt otherwise, if Jan weren’t so quick to beam at his own cleverness in bed and if the hookers and chambermaids he entertains weren’t so ostentatiously congratulating him in their delight. The ideas are good ones—he decorates their nude forms with white flower petals, with dollar bills and, yes, coins, and with (if I recall correctly) some yummy, dessert-like substance (but not before he’s stepped in chocolate-covered strawberry goop in his haste to make love on the dining room table). (Seen leaping into bed in one shot, the diminutive Barnev has, in spite of his impossible face, an impressively toned, athletic physique.)
In one of Brožek’s most skillful edits, Jan’s face radiates pleasure as a prostitute goes down on him; the scene imperceptibly begins in one bed and elides into another, the cold bed of the elder Jan who lies awake dreaming of this memory, the glow of candles providing the only source of warmth. In another sublime moment, Jan, having risen to the staff of an elaborate, Art Nouveau restaurant in Prague, listens as the maître d' (a fine, no-nonsense turn by Martin Huba) recalls that he once served the King of England. Jan swoons, and we anticipate him hitting the floor, yet as his body begins to tilt, the camera breaks into it with a smooth, gliding motion that tracks another waiter carrying a large tray. The expected pratfall (thank God) never occurs.
Menzel unfortunately compensates for this a scene or two later with one of the most protracted and contrived stagings. A waiter accidentally drops a dish in front of the patrons; he stares at the broken china and spoiled dinner for a small eternity, then goes berserk, deliberating smashing plates to smithereens, yanking cloths off the tables he proceeds to overturn, etc. Jan, naturally, replaces him. The movie, with its episodic procession of bigger and better jobs for the protagonist, becomes a kind of study (like Pierre Salvadori’s swifter and vastly more charming Priceless) in inadvertent social climbing. The opaque dandy here never sets out to advance—it simply happens through no fault of his own, just as his unlikely romance with a Nazi girl operates outside the sphere of even connect-the-dots rationality. In Menzel’s best-known work Closely Watched Trains (which I don’t care for either), the small town hick dullard at its center achieved self-actualization through losing his virginity, only to be shot dead by a sniper minutes into his voluptuous morning after. The killing was a kind of blessing: it violated the movie’s ironic cutesy-ness. There’s nothing quite like that in I Served the King of England, wherein ironies continue uninterruptedly. In the most heinous of these, Menzel returns to the image of Jan running after a moving train that’s just pulled out of the station—it’s a metaphor for the development of his consciousness, don’t you see—and that same hot dog customer from years ago is once again riding the train that Jan cannot quite catch up to. Except that this time, the businessman Jan short-changed isn’t an ordinary traveler. He’s in a cattle car en route to a concentration camp. We can’t possibly miss the neat symmetry of it, a symmetry that’s infinitely too neat.
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N.P. Thompson lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Plant Smile on Face, Then Await Nazi Invasion: I Served the King of England
Links for the Day (August 31st, 2008)
1. GreenCine gathers first reactions to Abbas Kiarostami's latest, Shirin.
["From Variety: Though his name continues to pop up regularly as writer or story man on a good chunk of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami himself has not filmed anything even vaguely commercial since 2002's "Ten." The maestro has disappeared into making more abstract, experimental installations, theater pieces and films ("Five"). His latest, "Shirin," wherein 112 Iranian actresses and Juliette Binoche are shot watching a 12th-century Persian play, with the play's performance itself kept entirely offscreen, is unlikely to pack 'em in. Yet "Shirin" offers a feast for the bedazzled eye and a crash course in narrative obsession for the benumbed mind."]
2. "Letter from Patricia Patterson to John Powers": Jonathan Rosenbaum highlights a letter from Manny Farber's wife and collaborator to NPR contributor John Powers, setting a few things straight. (I'd also be remiss to not include this Rosenbaum post from a few weeks ago, which captions the wonderful picture above.)
["Manny was not a “Conservative,” a “Libertarian,” a “Republican,” an anything. In his early twenties he tried to join the Communist Party but they didn’t want him. During WWII he tried to enlist in the army but they rejected him. After inviting him to join, it took just one meeting for the New York Film Critics Circle to ask him to leave. He came home that night saying, “They fired me.” He also told me that even a therapist in Washington had “fired him” for not working hard enough. Manny was not a Republican because he never knew any. He didn’t quarrel with them because he was never around them. He quarreled with the people he knew: artists, writers, teachers, carpenters. When he saw smugness, complacency, and superiority — and often those qualities went together — then he would get going, and separate himself from them. He did not vote for Bush twice. I know, because for ten years I was the family driver, and he didn’t want to go to the polls. (His license had been taken away for reckless driving.) I don’t know about Bush once because I was in another booth. But I do know how much he revered FDR, that he voted for Jimmy Carter, for Bill Clinton twice, even had a Jesse Jackson moment, and loved Mario Cuomo and Barack Obama."]
3. At Time Out New York, Joshua Rothkopf talks with John Carpenter on occasion of his four-film BAM retrospective.
["I got into movies because of a passion for cinema. But after finishing my last film [2001’s Ghosts of Mars], I found myself as having no passion whatsoever: total burnout. By the time I got to the scoring stage, I looked like a zombie. Who knows why? I didn’t take enough of a rest. Also, the country was attacked—and I watched. My eyes were opened; I hadn’t observed anything for years. I needed to get away from the moviemaking process for a while. I’m slowly putting my feet in the water again, with a new perspective. Is there room for more movies like Escape from New York? I don’t know. You have to be subtle about that stuff, because people don’t like to be preached to. But there may be. We’ll see."]
4. "Warners and The James Dean Cult --- Part One": Tons of pictures and history at Greenbriar Picture Shows, where John McElwee explores the cult of James Dean.
["Two-thirds of James Dean’s starring work in films was yet to be released when he died on September 30, 1955. The only evidence of his stardom was East Of Eden, and the success of that led to one-sheets prepared for Rebel Without A Cause in which Dean was tagged Overnight Sensation with a future assured playing leads. Never before had a star departed so prematurely. Rudolph Valentino rose, peaked, and began his decline before death intervened and conferred immortality. Son Of The Sheik followed and became rallying point for fans bereaved. Youth snuffed out was (is and always will be) the stuff of morbid fascination for the young surviving. They’ll not be denied a last glimpse."]
5. "Some highlights of the Kawakita Series": The Film Society of Lincoln Center Kawakita series as seen by David Phelps at The Auteurs' Notebook.
["Violence at Noon (Oshima Nagisa, 1966)—A film of trashy dialogue (nearly starting with “I still remember how you tasted—that’s why I risked coming here”) and a methodical series of collapsed thematic binaries: two transgressive couples; love and hate; love and death; the mistress and the schoolmistress (mother); stable reality and fluctuating memory; society and nature; reason and instinct. All of which just adds up to the stereotypically Japanese (or Catholic) sentiment that society’s repressions make us want to lash out, which in turn makes us feel guilty, which in turn makes us want to lash in; the prototypically pornographic story has to do with a guy only capable of emotion—love and hate—when he rapes and murders or tries to kill himself, and women only capable of emotion—love and hate—when raped. But what is sado-masochism but the greatest binary of them all?"]
Quote of the Day: Arthur Godfrey
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): NOAA image of Hurricane Gustav as it moves through Cuba. Landfall predicted in the states on Monday afternoon.
Clip of the Day: How come I'm the last to know about Spaghetti Cat?
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Links for the Day (August 30th, 2008)
1. "Hollywood Takes on the Left": A Weekly Standard article from earlier this month. Stephen F. Hayes visits the set of An American Carol and roundtables with the cast and crew. RELATED: The Washington Times (from July) on the "Friends of Abe," which is mentioned in the Standard piece. The trailer for An American Carol is here.
["And Kelsey Grammer plays General George S. Patton, Malone's guide to American history and the mouthpiece of the film's writers. I chatted with Grammer on the set at Warner Brothers studios. "I'm glad some of the bigger guys jumped in--Dennis Hopper, Jon Voight, James Woods." Grammer has been out as a conservative for several years and has publicly mused about running for office. His name comes up periodically when California Republicans are brainstorming about candidates to take on Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein for their Senate seats. It's not hard to see why. He is passionate about the issues that matter most to conservatives and extraordinarily articulate. "The accepted way to speak about America is in the voice that disrespects it. And the voice that's unacceptable is the one that loves America," he says, wearing the uniform of an Army general and sipping from a bottle of pomegranate juice. "How did we get here?" Over the course of two hours, we are joined by several others working on the movie and talk about everything from taxes--"the rich in this country are being criminalized"--to Iraq. "Petraeus has to couch every bit of optimism in some convoluted formulation to avoid the promised rush of disrespect," Grammer says. Eventually, the conversation turns from policy to punditry. Grammer, who is friends with Ann Coulter, says he quoted her once to some of the young people who work for him. "'Ann Coulter,'" he says, recalling their horror and assuming their voice. "'She's the antichrist.' And I said: 'What the f-- do you know about the antichrist? You don't even believe in Christ.'""]
2. "Production Lines": At Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy, Owen Hatherley ruminates on the Eurostar/Somers Town team-up.
["Before Somers Town, there was the industrial film unit British Transport Films, whose excellence suggests that a film made entirely to promote the buying of train tickets can be as interesting, if not more, than someone's untrammelled creative vision. Somers Town tries to have it both ways. It certainly doesn't announce itself as A Eurostar Film or anything so vulgar. Nonetheless, it's all pretty obvious. The new terminal is contantly mentioned, and the final scenes in Paris - in glorious technicolour! - lay it on very thick. As an argument for travel, it works very well, and is a rare statement against anti-East European racism (about a third of the film is in Polish), and for a British cosmopolitanism. It's funny, sweet and very slight, and by far the most irritating thing about it is the appalling David Gray/Mike and the Mechanics-esque soundtrack, all soulful heartwarming crooning over the over-signposted 'epiphanies'. Oh for a British film that doesn't aspire to warming the sodding cockles."]
3. Busy publishing day at pigs and battleships, all by Ryan Wu: "A Cornered Animal" (on John McCain's VP pick); "Hitting the Big Shot" (on Barack Obama's DNC acceptance speech); and "Palin and the Tire Gauge" (more on Sarah Palin).
["This sort of Animal House as political campaign is probably the only aspect of McCain's operation that's close in spirit to McCain's appealing 2000 run (there's a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace in Consider the Lobster that captures the freewheeling, insurgent vibe of the Straight Talk Express; read it and weep at what's become of Mr. Maverick). And this impulsiveness speaks to McCain himself, a man of many virtues but whose disqualifying personal flaw is that he makes decisions on the fly, often as a gut reaction to a provocation. The choice of Sarah Palin, it seems, is another product of McCain's impulsive, reactive decision-making and the thinking of a campaign that's effective in staying afloat primarily by being good at feeding the news media. McCain surely punk'd Obama for a news cycle or two, and he'll succeed in generating some excitement leading up to next week. But for what?"]
4. "No End in Sight on YouTube": Via The Chutry Experiment and Todd Holmes, news that Charles Ferguson's documentary will be available in its entirety on YouTube from September 1st through November 5th.
["One of the more devastating documentaries about the Bush administration was Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, which provided a scathing analysis of the Washington insiders who planned the war in Iraq, diagnosing an unbelievable amount of incompetence and hubris in a war that was sold as a “cakewalk.”"]
5. The latest Famous First from Ferdy on Films: THX-1138 by Roderick Heath.
["It’s easy to call THX 1138 an adult film, and the Star Wars films juvenile, but they’re built from the same nuts and bolts of parable. Star Wars was bent on being accessible and thrilling, where THX 1138 is allusive and mysterious. If THX 1138 is ragged in places, it’s also one of the best science fiction films of its time. Its influence is undeniable. Scifi dystopias arrived by the bushel in its wake, but the likes of Soylent Green (1971), Logan’s Run (1974), and Rollerball (1975) lacked its rigor of style and mise-en-scène, and I doubt Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1981), or The Matrix (1999) would have happened without its example. Lucas occasionally talks about returning to experimental projects like this. I doubt he will. And it’s a shame."]
Quote of the Day: W.S. Merwin
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Ms. Palin, it seems, is a VPilf.
Clip of the Day: George and Laura hit it off...
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Requiem for Kong: "My Funny Valentine"
By Matt Zoller Seitz
The Economy of Visual Language: Neon Genesis Evangelion
By Michael Peterson
I was fortunate enough, recently, to view Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0: You Are Not Alone, the first in a series of four films by director Hideaki Anno and GAINAX Company, Ltd. that remake the acclaimed anime program Neon Genesis Evangelion. The new film is a fascinating entity, and I'm not yet sure that I have the critical faculties necessary to fully articulate my impressions: this new Evangelion varies between being a shot-by-shot remake in the Gus Van Sant Psycho vein (adjusted to widescreen), a Star Wars-like Special Edition with updated effects, and a full-on rework of the original series' plot fundamentals that, with each additional entry, promises to differ more and more from the original source.
What I do feel immediately confident saying is that the film is a visual masterpiece. Every shot in Rebuild of Evangelion is striking, both in the brutally violent action setpieces and in the emotionally agonizing periods in-between battles. Impressively, the film's strength comes not from what's been changed, but in what's been kept—every shot that worked in the original source remains as-is, and every shot that did not work is improved. Little improvement was required, really, as one of the unsung strengths of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion is its masterful sense of visual composition. While it was not until the End of Evangelion film that Anno's visual strengths as a director really stood out, one of the series' greatest successes is in finding great beauty (often in horror) with very limited resources
In brief, then, and without spoiling the plot, as it's hardly necessary here: Neon Genesis Evangelion is about a young man named Shinji Ikari, called to the fortress city of New Tokyo-3 by his estranged father Gendo. The city—the world, really—is under siege by monstrous creatures called "Angels," or "Messengers," that attack one after another, though they only ever strike at New Tokyo-3 (for reasons the show gets into later on). The only thing that can hold off the Angels, who are protected by an "AT Field," is a group called NERV and their Eva series—massive robots piloted by teenagers. Shinji has been selected to pilot the fearsome-looking Eva Unit-01 and is essentially press-ganged into working for NERV against his (decidedly weak) will.
What should be a mild genre piece in the vein of Gundam or Macross becomes something decidedly more mature as the story goes forward and we see the darkness underlying these genre conventions—a rather relentless psychodrama that builds until the series finale (and/or accompanying film) in which Shinji is asked to make a choice that will govern the world's fate. It is the unflinching look at the desperation and despair buried within all of the series' major characters that makes Shinji's ultimate choice so powerful.
Hideaki Anno is a remarkable animation director with a keen visual eye. Before Evangelion, he worked on a series called Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (alternatively Nadia and the Mysterious Seas), which was based on a story outline by internationally-known anime wunderkind Hayao Miyazaki. It's easy to see why Miyazaki trusted Anno, as Miyazaki is deservedly praised for his absolutely lush visuals. In Anno, he saw a kindred spirit, a man who took the visual possibilities of anime seriously in a way that most do not (Otomo's work, for instance, has a kinetic energy, but his design work, while iconic, does not have a capacity for subtlety; and Satoshi Kon's work, while incredibly strong in the writing department, is only recently maturing to the level of these other directors—though he certainly has the potential to surpass them in time).
While Miyazaki's dense visuals pulse with life and vitality, and are always strikingly original, Anno surpasses him in at least one respect: Anno, like David Lynch, possesses a skill at framing his shots, and using the attendant color, to create visual compositions that stand out not only as beautiful in the story's context, but also as individual images, a painterly quality that he then applies back to the work. When Anno frames an image, the power of that specific image becomes a tool that he can later refer back to for an instantaneous emotional and intellectual response.
It is incredibly difficult to create a solid visual that then serves as a metaphor within the work itself, as the visual has to be potent in its initial incarnation without disrupting the flow of the story, and then must recur in a natural way. The latter criteria is easy in a work like Evangelion, which features numerous sequences that exist solely as representations of the internal struggle within a major character—psychic battling, dissolution of ego, nightmares, and the Human Instrumentality Project that closes the series all serve Anno's attempts to travel within by using the visuals acquired without. It's notable, however, that many of the series' aforementioned internal struggles are in fact a practical choice as well as an artistic one—the series' visual language was often prompted by budgetary concerns.
As Wikipedia reports, GAINAX was, at the time, not a wealthy production studio. Evangelion was begun after a film project was dropped due to lack of money and the studio was dropping various parts of their business to stay afloat. The complicated mech designs of the Eva series were originally deemed to be too complicated for merchandising, the accompanying manga was initially viewed poorly, and funding sources pulled out one after another while the series aired. As the show became too expensive to animate from episode to episode, more and more earlier footage was re-used. This should have been a disastrous choice, but the way the re-used footage was incorporated into the internal struggle episodes is a large part of what has made Evangelion so memorable.
"Being Economical" has, of course, two meanings. One is to save money, and one is to be spare and eliminate waste. Evangelion, by necessity, subscribes to both meanings, but it's the latter one that is most interesting to consider. Anno's compositions are very often "economical" to a fault, to the extent that they recall an Ernie Bushmiller comic strip. The bare minimum of information is conveyed, as in two separate instances where Eva Unit-01 holds a human figure in its hand with virtually no background, framed from just above the waist and within the opposite shoulder, leaving the figure in its grasp just off-center and dwarfed. Or as when the character of Asuka is viewed low and from behind as her Eva Unit-02 lowers in front of her (in our background) with a strip of caution tape in the foreground—this image benefits from the subsequent cut, which melds, in a small puddle, the blood-red of both Asuka's uniform and her Eva with Shinji's blue-clad leg.
Yet Anno is not averse to using detail when the moment requires it. Aside from the detail poured into scenes of shocking violence, which the series is more known for, Anno will frequently capture perfectly realistic images of Tokyo life—an early image of a payphone, first seen in the pilot episode, lends verisimilitude to a city that often had to be sparsely depicted due to budget. The payphone is used twice in the first half of the series as a means to illustrate Shinji's disconnect from his father, and so that image later appears in his internal struggle sequences with the attendant emotional attachment—the phone becomes a failed means of communication with the outside world, with all of the characters voicing their hatred of Shinji as he imagines them.
Another example that stands out comes from the End of Evangelion film. In a pivotal scene in the final travel inwards, Shinji appears as a child on a playground of his imagining, with two young girls in attendance. As the layers of Shinji's mind peel back, more and more "backstage" imagery appears, and the scene is lit by two theatrical spotlights in place of the sun. The hills in the background and the square of the playground sandbox provide deliberately sexual imagery—young Shinji is either within the womb or trapped in a vagina, depending on your point of view—and as Shinji builds a "sand castle" with the girls, a swing moves back and forth like a pendulum, indicating the passage of time.
The girls leave him, as all women appear to leave Shinji, and he stands over his creation—a pyramid that represents the headquarters of NERV, which brings complicated feelings of both home and a prison, and serves as a phallic image that stands in counterpoint to the vaginal imagery. But Shinji can't bear the pain of it, and the young boy crushes the "castle" with his foot. As he destroys it, the swing slows to a stop, signaling death. But then Shinji begins building the pyramid all over again. The image is perfectly framed, and uses only the bare minimum of visual detail—except in the faces of the girls, who are revealed to be grotesque parodies of the show's primary female characters. The swing, in the hazy light, is barely more than a shadow—and in a live action sequence further on, a real life swing is captured in similar framing, evoking the same concepts (it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between the actual and the animated).
This penchant for implicative visual language is also used to convey information that clears up central mysteries to the series. In the climax of End of Evangelion, one character performs a shocking act against another, and there has been some audience speculation, based on the abstract and internal nature of said finale, whether the incident actually occurs in the "real world" of the narrative. However, in one of the last television episodes, a series of brief, near still images of a disrupted kitchen (in particular, a lingering shot of an over-turned coffee pot lying partially out of frame) imply heavily that the incident truly happens, and thus makes it all the more devastating. In the final moments of the film, the incident is all but reenacted, and while the setting has changed, the animation returns to a similar series of still images (detailing the state of the world) to recall that moment. Although now, they're the most beautiful and evocative images of the entire series: a streak of blood across the moon, a cross nailed to a scrap of wood, dead creatures impaled and splayed in crucifixion poses, and something horrible and beautiful looking out from the water at figures on a nearby beach.
One of the primary concerns in any visual composition is the treatment of space. Many of the quieter scenes of Evangelion gain their power through such spatial relations. In an early episode, when Shinji is riding alone on a train, the grouping of other passengers is carefully arranged so as not to overburden or overcomplicate the image, all the while conveying Shinji's feelings of isolation in a crowd. A man next to him, who falls asleep while the rest of the train slowly empties, angles in further and further until he's completely crowded out Shinji's already-limited personal space. Then he as well vanishes, leaving the boy alone—in fact as well as feeling.
Other examples: Ritsuko, deep within the bowels of the MAGI computer system that (very literally) represents her mother is a small fleck of white in a dark and barely defined space, with only a series of scrawled papers pointing towards her like an arrow. And when Asuka and Rei share an elevator in an interminably long silent take (another daring move for a television anime, provoked at least in part by budgetary concerns), their body posture is succeeded only by their position in the shot, with Rei in the far foreground looking forward as Asuka, posed defensively, stands in the background to one side, at a distance, and looking away. This elevator scene is later used briefly, with its original meaning intact, to jab at Asuka during a psychic battle.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out one last aspect: other themes of the series are also delivered in this fashion, in particular the various religious aspects of the overlying plot. The Kabbalah's Tree of Life is consistently evoked, and at times the positioning of characters in relation to that symbol adds an additional layer to the scene. In Gendo Ikari's office, the image of the Tree of Life is painted or carved into his ceiling, and his position at the desk is in relation to the Godhead symbol on the tree. Similarly, in End of Evangelion, Shinji is seen at the position of the "Tiphereth" sphere—the sphere which corresponds to Christ on the cross, and thus also where the holy meets the profane—at the moment of his "sacrifice." This is as good a summation of Anno's visual style as you're likely to find.
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Michael Peterson is the publisher of the blog & portfolio site Patchwork Earth.
Day of Wrath, Church of Cinema
By Steven Boone
[Day of Wrath opens today for a one-week run at Manhattan's IFC Center. Click here for screening information.]
Like the esteemed film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, I discovered Day of Wrath in my teens. One of the local PBS stations was showing Carl Theodor Dreyer's film about 17th century Danish witch trials (adapted from Anne Pedersdotter by Norwegian playwright Han Wiers Jenssen) late at night. I stumbled across the film already in progress as elderly Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) was being stripped and tortured in order to force a confession: Was she or was she not in league with Satan? Could she name other servants of evil? An hour or so later, I was still riveted to my seat, watching another, younger woman accused of witchcraft stare out at nothing as she contemplated the tortures awaiting her and the image dissolved to a blunt final condemnation written on a scroll. I was all messed up. What kind of inhuman order could put a harmless old woman and a vivacious young one on such a senseless conveyor belt to doom? Shortly thereafter I saw Schindler's List, and these two very different films about persecution fused in my mind.
Watching Day of Wrath for the second time at age 35 (in a crisp new digitally restored print at IFC Center), I now see much more E.T. than Schindler's List: There are no villains, no evil—just weak and fearful individuals either hiding from or within a system that provides the cruel certainty and definition of wrathful law pretending to justice. Everyone in Day of Wrath is only trying to be as human and honorable as he/she can be within the limits of a paranoiac theocracy. What appeared to my 19-year-old eyes to be a dour, cold-eyed vision of corrupt power destroying innocents in the name of God now appears as delicate and wise about human drives as that scene in E.T. where Elliot, so used to having no one to really talk to or play with, shows off his toys to the extra-terrestrial and prattles on like no tomorrow. As in the scene of the old woman's torture, the toy reverie is lit from above and behind. The torture episode doesn't sport the aggressive shafts of backlight in E.T., but in both cases the light approaches from somewhere north of God; bounces back onto the subjects timidly, empathetically—a light that understands. The shadow areas are just as wise. This lighting describes not only a torture chamber's grim oppressiveness, but also the torturers' suffering and soldierly purposefulness.
They're all more or less attempting to do the right thing—even the influential pastor Absalon (Thorkild Roose), who remains silent with evidence that could save the woman. Despite his power and rank, his silence is not malevolent. It is cowardly. The corrupt priest fears losing Anne (Lisbeth Movin), his beautiful wife half his age, because he once saved her mother from the witch trials. He never revealed that his young bride's mother, in fact, practiced what their society considers witchcraft. The mother lived out her life and went to her grave with the secret. But given the opportunity to intervene similarly for Herlofs Marte (who also kept mum about the former subterfuge), he remains silent. The remorse is in every line on his face.
In a scene where Herlofs Marte begs Absalon for her life, the light strikes her peasant garb but falls away somewhere below her face. This "negative fill" conveys her desperation better than any jump cut, snap zoom, music cue, or handheld camera spasm contemporary filmmakers use to mask their lack of film sense. After Marte's trial, torture, and ritual burning at the stake, the film's balance deals with the folks who betrayed her and their attempts to co-exist despite crisscrossing fear and resentments that refuse to rest. Again, at 19, I couldn't see the moments of grace for all the intimations of doom. If Pauline Kael called Day of Wrath a fusion of Hawthorne and Kafka, I guess my fight-the-power mentality was stuck on the Kafka. Now it's impossible to miss the love that flows between Absalon, his mother (Sigrid Neiiendam's bulldog mug resembling a vicious Laurence Tierney one moment, radiating motherly concern the next), and his returning adult son Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye); and (scandalously) between Anne and Martin. Herlofs Marte cursed Absalon and Anne just before her death on the pyre, and now their impossible domestic situation comes to resemble the devil's handiwork.
When Anne openly seduces Martin (with the intense gaze and fluid gestures a porn starlet could learn from) she's exercising a natural female freedom long denied, ever since she was forced to be Absalon's child bride. She is breaking free. But in an atmosphere where urges and frustrations condense into mists the shape of gods and monsters, she starts to look exactly like her mother's daughter—a witch.
Dreyer's camera tracks interior and exterior spaces to convey his characters' sensitivity to this nightmarish climate as well as what I take to be his own sense of the divine. In billowing fabrics and whispering winds, God or Satan or the dead menace the living, yet the way the light falls on suffering and ecstatic faces suggests a higher, more clement power. But far more chilling than this spooky expressionism are the simple pans down scrolls invoking God's word and the state's judgments. It's as if Dreyer was at war with words, answering their punishing certainties and limitations with the humanism of light and shadow delicately applied. Dreyer invites you to find in his flesh and blood friezes something a lot closer to God than those murderous texts. It's the only religion I ever wanted to join: the church of cinema.
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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of Big Media Vandalism.
Links for the Day (August 29th, 2008)
1. "Because You Can Never Have Enough...": At The Criterion Collection blog On Five, Kim Hendrickson explores the history (and mystery) of a missing scene from Pasolini's Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. (Above screencap from DVDBeaver.)
["A few months back, after we announced our upcoming release of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, we received a note from a viewer asking us which version of the film we would be releasing, noting that a 2001 British Film Institute (BFI) release featured a brief scene not contained in the original Criterion DVD. Dealing with various versions of a film is a common situation for us, and as a producer it’s one of the first issues I address. The scene in question occurs at the end of the wedding sequence, approximately forty-four minutes into the film. In the Criterion master, the scene cuts just after the magistrate shuffles the wedding guests out the door and down the stairs. In the 2001 BFI release, this scene extends to include the magistrate reading a short poem."]
2. "Film Audio: The Pauline Factor, '68": Tom Sutpen links to a 1968 audio seminar with Pauline Kael. (Hattip: Aaron Aradillas)
["How much provocation can one speaker pack into just 54 minutes? In this recording of a talk given at UC Berkeley on April 26, 1968, the then-newly-hired film critic for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, goes a great distance toward answering that question as she brutalizes Underground cinema, Arthur Penn, and the institutional imperatives of mass-market film criticism. And those are but three of the targets upon which she opens fire."]
3. A week in the film life of Steven Carlson.
["ON FRENZY: Everywhere I look, there's a darkness... Alfred Hitchcock's darkest joke is also one of his grandest, an iconic wrong-man thriller given a contemporary viciousness and pumped up to Kafkaesque levels of persecution, and Jon Finch is in his own way the perfect protagonist, so beaten down by life that a murder rap is just another thing for him to impotently defy. But here's the thing: While a good deal of the film (especially the ride in the potato truck) is sick squirmy fun, there's something that most people miss or at least don't feel like discussing. Hitchcock beats Michael Haneke to the punch a good 25 years prior to the latter's ascendancy in indicting his audience for what they're not walking out on."]
4. "Coming soon: 'Facebook: The Movie'?": From the Los Angeles Times. Sorkin's Facebook page is here.
["Is Aaron Sorkin getting his geek on? The famous technophobe and Hollywood scribe is trading the "West Wing" and "Studio 60" corridors for the graffiti-scrawled, software-developer-mobbed corridors of social networking upstart Facebook Inc. The Palo Alto company says it has not signed on to a Sorkin film about its inception, but Sorkin has started a Facebook group (well, he says, his assistant did that) to gather color for a Facebook film he is writing for Sony and producer Scott Rudin. A Sony Pictures spokesman confirmed the project but wouldn't discuss details. Through a publicist, Sorkin declined to comment."]
5. "Duchovny enters rehab for sex addiction": Foxxx Mulder? Wha???
["“Californication” and “X-Files” star David Duchovny has checked into rehab for sex addiction, his lawyer Stanton “Larry” Stein confirmed to Access Hollywood. “I have voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction,” the actor said in a statement released to Access. “I ask for respect and privacy for my wife and children as we deal with this situation as a family.” David married actress Téa Leoni in 1997. They have two children, daughter Madelaine West, 9, and son Kyd, 6."]
Quote of the Day: David Reisman
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Mike Connors in Mannix; lead image to the Moving Image Source article "Lone Justice" by Mark Holcomb.
Clip of the Day: "I wish I were like Siskel & Ebert"
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Links for the Day (August 28th, 2008)
1. An online only exclusive from The New Yorker: Any questions for David Denby?
["This summer, David Denby has reviewed “I Served the King of England,” “Traitor,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” “Elegy,” “The Dark Knight,” and “WALL-E.” If you’d like to talk about movies with Denby, submit a question online; his answers will be posted here later in the week."]
2. "Louisiana Eyes Gustav, Activates Guard Troops: Three years after Katrina, nervous New Orleans watches another storm brewing in Caribbean": From ABCNews.com.
["On the eve of Hurricane Katrina's third anniversary, a nervous New Orleans watched Wednesday as another storm threatened to test everything the city has rebuilt, and officials made preliminary plans to evacuate people, pets and hospitals in an attempt to avoid a Katrina-style chaos. Forecasters warned that Gustav could grow into a dangerous Category 3 hurricane in the next several days and hit somewhere along a swath of the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle to Texas — with New Orleans smack in the middle."]
3. "Georgia War Shows 'Weak' Russia, U.S. Official Says." Presumably a bit of reverse psychology to which a Russian official might reply, "I know you are, but what am I?" See Glenn Kessler's article in The Washington Post for more.
["Russia's conflict with Georgia is the sign of a 'weak' Russian nation, not a newly assertive one, and Moscow now has put its place in the world order at risk, the top U.S. diplomat for relations with the country said in an interview yesterday. 'There is a Russia narrative that 'we were weak in the '90s, but now we are back and we are not going to take it anymore.' But being angry and seeking revanchist victory is not the sign of a strong nation. It is the sign of a weak one,' said Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. 'Russia is going to have to come to terms with the reality it can either integrate with the world or it can be a self-isolated bully. But it can't be both. And that's a choice Russia has to have,' Fried said."]
4. "The Seventh Art and the Eighth Wonder of the World": What does King Kong owe to Busby Berkeley? The Listening Ear knows.
["King Kong the movie is, from start to finish, built around cinema - it’s designed to look good as a film; it’s conceived around the technology of film. And revels in it - the stop motion animation, the elaborate mattes and models and process shots. It's set up to look right on screen. They aren't trying to hide these things - they are presenting us with an amazing spectacle, and expect us to marvel in it, all of it. The planning, the formal properties of the film, are made more explicit by being prepared by Denham's talk. His attempts to film on the island, his attempts to stage-manage the villagers or the fights with Kong, etc., set up the formal structure of the rest of the film - the parallel imagery on the island and in NY (the wall on the island serving as stage and curtain, that recurs in the second half; the parallels in how Ann and Kong are staked out for display; the parallel battles on Kong's mountain and the empire state building, complete with dangerous birds. Even details like the several scenes in both parts of the film of Kong fishing around caves/apartments for people.) The depiction of the act of making a film sets you up to wonder at the artistry of the story proper when it gets going. It's reminiscent of one of the other outstanding figures of cinema of the period - Warner Brothers' musicals, especially Busby Berkeley's parts. Berkeley’s numbers are almost parables for the shift from stage to screen. Their placement in the films (in 42nd Street, at least), and their overall structure, almost always enacts the shift from stage to screen. The numbers usually follow that pattern - starting on something like a real stage, then opening up toward film. First (usually) by shooting them from impossible places (the flies, through the floor), but eventually abandoning all sense of the spatial unity and integrity of the stage. The space in “42nd Street” (the song) or “By a Waterfall” or “Shanghai Lil” is pure cinematic space - much of it designed explicitly for the camera (and for editing), certainly constructing the three dimensional space of film. Interestingly, while this abandons the "real" space of the theater, it moves toward a "real" space of films - itself referring to the "real" space of, um - reality."]
5. "Of Time and the City": Doug Cummings of Filmjourney.org on Terence Davies' documentary, and his first feature in eight years, shown as part of Los Angeles' DocuWeek. [Hattip: GreenCine.]
["Of Time and the City is Davies’ first documentary, and it’s a brooding, passionate, and often sardonic essay film that tributes the working class Liverpool of his childhood, and charts–with rueful adult hindsight–its cultural milieu. The film is largely comprised of archival footage from the era (Davies was born in 1945 and left Liverpool in ‘72) that is layered together with a supremely evocative soundtrack that includes broadcasts, classical music, pop tunes, and atmospheric sound effects with Davies’ own narration. His raspy, effusive delivery oscillates between his memories, musings, and quotations from the likes of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. (Much like his absorbing DVD commentaries.) The latter poet is no surprise for those familiar with Davies’ autobiographical films: his trilogy of shorts, Distant Voices Still Lives (1988), and The Long Day Closes (1992) are all constructed as overlapping, circular memory films, snatches of scenes that fluidly merge in time and space, visually expressing Eliot’s idea that 'Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.'"]
Quote of the Day: Ernest Hemingway
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The poster for the Coen bros.' Burn After Reading. Links to reviews gathered at GreenCine.
Clip of the Day: Patton Oswalt wants a steak (with illustrations). (Hattip: Kevin Seaman)
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Notes on the DNC: #1 & #2
By Max Winter
[Note: The following is a series of emails about TV coverage of the Democratic National Convention sent to House founder Matt Zoller Seitz by his friend Max Winter, a New York City-based poet and a poetry editor for the literary magazine Fence.]
As I dig into these notes, I feel it's important to say I'm an outsider, politically; there are probably many people who, if awakened at 5 AM and splashed with ice cold water, could talk me under the table about politics, roll over, and go back to sleep. However, I've been interested in politics this year, in a way that I haven't been in some time. Part of it has obviously been the clash between the two leading Democratic candidates--one African American, one female, both complex, both viable. But beyond that, think about the timing. After 8 years of an administration about whom no amount of negative adjectives would be sufficient, whose previous lambasting has been so elaborate and so comprehensive that adding to it would be sheer redundancy, we find that the two leading Democratic candidates for President are a woman and an African-American man. Good work, Americans--where the heck have you been? The dialogue becomes, rather than who's the lesser of two or three mediocrities, as it was in 2000 and 2004, something else. Who do you trust? Who's more interesting to you? Who seems like they could win, not just in our imagination but in reality? Which is an interesting switch, to me at least--and will doubtless affect future elections.The notes I've made below are spontaneous and sporadic--I tried to respond to events and comments that pushed buttons for me. If I sound a little dour, it's because I am a little dour. This is an important year for Democrats, and my standards for performance at this convention are high.
7:00 p.m.: On CNN, Wolf Blitzer is announcing that Ted Kennedy will speak tonight--given the comparisons the media and others have made between Obama and JFK, the appearance is being presented as poignant before it occurs. Why? Can't its poignancy stand on its own? I'm also hearing, now, dribs and drabs about the Michelle Obama speech--she plans to speak about her husband's personality, rather than his political potential. The rhetoric about her speech, on CNN and elsewhere, is tempered with caution, as if everyone were nervous about what she might say. Republican strategists, I'm sure, are awaiting the speech like a sort of gift basket of gaffes.
On MSNBC, a table full of commentators has just showed up on the screen. They're all smiling, and probably not just for the cameras. I've been struck, this election year, by the dominance of commentators. Everyone but everyone--me, even!--has something to say. The blogs are humming with energy, MSNBC is more sensitive to stimuli than the most sensitive amoeba, the newspapers bring out the bold caps every time Obama looks serious during a speech. These reporters know they are going to be talking plenty tonight, and they're very, very happy. I tend to stray towards CNN on big political nights because the events seem somehow less filtered. Granted, Wolf Blitzer is antagonistic, but the anxiety of the commentators to speak on MSNBC is practically bursting out of the screen--is this a good thing or a bad thing? The amount of talk has resulted in some very firey monologues (cf. Keith Olbermann), but I can’t help but fear that these commentators, who some look to for moral fortitude, are more weathervanes than compasses, excited by whomever happens to be ahead. They like to pretend, the Olbermanns and the Maddows and the Matthews, that they are shaping the consciences of their viewers, but I always suspect they're on the spiritual "take."One interesting result, this election year, is that the media has hung on language more than at any time I can remember. As a writer, I respond to Obama's language because it's generally used very well. Obama has gotten plenty of praise for his poetic speeches, and more power to him for them. One could question their construction--their repetition, their occasional vagueness--and yet they often make me a little misty-eyed. Originally I thought I was just being sentimental, that maybe I'd gotten Obama fever. God forbid--I'm a lifelong anti-sentimentalist--but no, actually, the real reason was that I was moved to see a public figure using language effectively for the first time in my not-so-short life.
When statements become news events -- for instance, Obama's comments about gun-clinging rural Americans in San Francisco, or his wife's "proud of my country" remarks -- I tend to perk up. Sure, the attention paid to word choice is an indication that the commentators aren't inclined to find much else to talk about, but on the other hand, perhaps paying more attention to the way our politicians speak might be a way of improving them (as politicians); in the long run it might ratchet up public expectations of leaders, or at least of the words that come out of their mouths.
7:58 p.m. Bill Maher says, with characteristic good humor, and perhaps not in precisely these words: "The American people get stupider and stupider every election year...The American people get the leaders they deserve, and they don't deserve very good leaders." Although he's a smart-aleck, I always enjoy what Maher has to say, and I frequently agree with him. When asked if there was room for cynicism at this election, he managed to stump both Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews by replying, "Yes." He's not wrong about the Americans, really, and he's not really wrong about our right to look askance at events like this one. Poets William Butler Yeats and Delmore Schwartz tell us, "in dreams begin responsibilities," and this election year, we have quite a few dreams--with no lasting guarantee that the responsibilities will be carried out. It's all very well for the Democrats to congratulate themselves--what else is a convention for? But after the convention, what lies beyond that sort of self-congratulation?
8:30 p.m. : Nancy Pelosi: It was admirable to begin with the House speaker's salute to Hillary Clinton--and somehow proper. Though Clinton was reviled and scorned throughout much of her race against Obama for "divisiveness," her complicated relationship with the truth, her stiff manner, et al., her lack of cool set an example, opened up the possibility that there might someday be more important things than a candidate's image. Fat chance, I know, but...
Ah, would that Nancy Pelosi's speech had showed as much strength as her praise-ee.
This seemed a strange start to an event expected by many to be full of energy. Her delivery was wooden, and at times seemed almost half-hearted. There were moments, particularly towards its opening, where she seemed to be rattling off a list of stock phrases rather than expressing anything of any importance to her. Additionally, the list of accomplishments of Senate Democrats--a bill ending the import of toxic toys, improvements to the GI Bill, an act guaranteeing protection after 9/11--seemed paltry and negligible, only pointing up, to this listener, the much larger issues about which the Senate has done nothing satisfactory: FISA, the impeachment of Bush, the investigation of illegal firings of U.S. attorneys, ending the war...? Also, it was an oddly defensive move, a little like a letter you might send out at Christmas updating friends and relatives on events in your family. I ask again: what about Iraq?Her sound byte, "Barack Obama is right and John McCain is wrong," was an oddly simple statement, almost childlike, that seemed to be the main evidence of backbone in her speech. She didn't say it, however, with what seemed to me enough conviction--could she be unaware that her own political future depends, in a sense, on the Democrats' performance in the convention? As faith in their party among Democrats over 24 evaporates, wouldn't it behoove the party leaders to show a little more passion, or excitement?
9:30 p.m.: Ted Kennedy: Although left-wing U.S. history smiles crookedly on the Kennedy clan, it's admirable that the Massachusetts senator had the gumption, despite the fact that he was probably in a great deal of pain, to come on stage and express himself as forcefully as he did. The difference between him and those surrounding him is most likely that he has a clear idea of his beliefs. Can we say that about any of the other Democrats in Washington currently? If we could, wouldn't things be different?
The question the commentators have pounced on is whether the speech signifies a passing of a baton/torch/hot potato from one important family to another. It's important to remember that the baton is a little dirty, the torch has sputtered over time, and the potato has cooled. The legacy being passed on is questionable--and so I'm wary of reveling in metaphorical afterglow. Obama's techniques--the 50-state strategy, his use of the Internet--are unique to him, as is his image, which is, despite similarities to the Kennedy image, distinctive as well. Kennedy gives a cheek-smacker of a speech; if it doesn't satisfy the expectations one would have of such a family, he gives a nicely poetic delivery, drawing on the moon voyage and succinctly deploying other images of travel (such as a compass set "true"). Short as it is, it adds a note of sincerity and dignity to the night. These are impressive achievements, and for me, they’re sufficient.
10:30 p.m. : Michelle Obama: A strong speech, all told. The pressure on her must have been great indeed, given her impassive, some say grim demeanor at other times. I understand that--for years, I was the guy told to "smile" even when I was thinking perfectly happy thoughts. The world isn’t kind to people who look too serious (as The Dark Knight taught us).Like Pelosi, she smartly begins with a reference to Clinton--she must recognize, as would anyone, the accomplishments there. And in the narrative she gives, of getting to know her husband, of going out for ice cream with him, of the basketball game with her brother, as familiar as it might be to anyone who reads the papers, there is a sense of two individuals, two people, and in fact two families getting to know each other. The characterization of the Mister seems to fit what we've seen of him on stage. Sure he's a little cocky--that's okay. Cocky and winning (or at least holding his own) is ultimately better than humble and losing, a familiar scenario for past Democratic candidates.
Whatever degree of skepticism one might have about the all-too-good Obamas, part of their job is to represent themselves well, to present a good and likable face to the public. And that is accomplished here, by a long shot. There's host of issues lying beneath the speech--our familiarity with the story she was telling, our worries about her presence, and what's up with the kids? Although they are cute, and the family is likable, and this is all perfectly legitimate and within range of normal convention activities, I can't help but wonder if this is the year to ramp up the cuteness. I won’t tarnish the image with too much skepticism--because after all, the message here is about intimacy, and warmth, and, to a certain extent, the imperfection that comes with being human. I find myself liking her after the speech--she seems sincere, energized, communicative, and most importantly, awake. Presidents' wives, in my lifetime, have seemed v