Indelible Ink: Paul Newman

By Sheila O'Malley

This is not meant to be an overview of Paul Newman's career, or even a list of favorite performances. A life as long as Newman's is inevitably filled with many dips, valleys, peaks, and missteps. I have really enjoyed reading the tribute pieces about him, which have served to deepen my understanding of what it was that made Newman so special. His is a story of endurance, certainly, but also one of tenacity. His early work in the 50s can have an over-studied feel to it (albeit engaging, and boy, was he beautiful)—it's like he's being a "good Method student" trying to get an A in class. Marlon Brando so dominated the atmosphere at that time that Newman (whose resemblance to Brando in his youth was always irritating to him) struggled to find a way to separate, to stand out. But it was in the 60s and 70s when Newman took off, in unexpected singular ways—sinking into his persona, inhabiting it like a well-worn sweater ... and by then nobody would think to hold him up next to Brando because his work was so, well, his own. This was not an easy journey for Newman, and it's sometimes easy to forget that because of his many successes. But he made his mark. Indelible ink.

There's so much to say about him, so many great roles: Hud, Cool Hand Luke, The Hustler, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Nobody's Fool, The Color of Money. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is a detailed, exquisite examination of a cold bottled-up man, one of his best performances in my opinion. There's also Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Fort Apache, the Bronx, Blaze (I love him in that), Slap Shot (Hallelujah!), Sometimes a Great Notion. And I can't forget his beautiful, sensitive work as a director. He directed his wife Joanne Woodward in two of her most searing performances: The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-the-Moon Marigolds—an almost unbearably intense performance—and The Glass Menagerie.

Playing failed southern Belle Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie, Woodward has said that Newman gave her one piece of direction: "Don't cry." If she ever shed a tear, he'd ask for another take. Having seen many a tear-drenched, maudlin Amanda Wingfield in my day, I can say that Newman was a genius for understanding that it is the surface of Amanda—her flouncing, pretentious surface—that will make the audience ache for her, not any tears that she might shed, which would, necessarily, come off as self-pitying. Tennessee Williams was always ferociously specific in his stage directions and notes for actors—to play the survival of these characters, not their victimization. He said that he had never written a "victim." (Words to live by for performers approaching those great parts.)

I'm a bit overwhelmed right now, but I want to hone in on three specific roles (or moments) of Newman's because, first of all, they span his career (beginning, middle, end), and, second of all, they illuminate the Newman-ness of Paul Newman, that indefinable thing that makes a good actor specific, memorable, and alive under imaginary circumstances.

***

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)

Paul Newman originated the role of Chance Wayne, the washed-up stud in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, on Broadway, and reprised his role in the 1962 film with Geraldine Page (who also played her role on Broadway). I sometimes think that the later Paul Newman, the more grizzled tough guy of the 70s and 80s, would have been even better in this part. Newman still has the glow of youth about him, and the truly corrupt nature of this character (a tragic corruption) is soft-pedaled in the film, which weakens it. Regardless, Newman is wonderful here: riveting, sexy (that dive off the diving board!). You ache to touch him.

There's a moment when Geraldine Page, as the pot-smoking crazy washed-up movie actress, pulls back his shirt to stare at his chest, and the expression on her face is like she's looking at a scrumptious piece of key lime pie. It's a startling moment of objectification, and Newman, lying on his back on the bed, is so "over" her in that moment, so ashamed of who he has become, so taken up with his dreams of failed glory and the love he has ruined that he barely notices her voracious eye. Perfect Tennessee Williams moment of missed connection. The male offered up to the fading female as eye candy, as comfort in her mania and loneliness ... but at what price to the male? What echoes are in his head? What does he want? Newman, in an unselfconscious unself-important way (he never seemed all that interested in how beautiful he was, although he knew how to use it to great effect), manages to suggest all of that torment in his characterization. We forgive him. Steve Vineberg writes in his book Method Actors (which has a whole section on Newman):

"There's an old-fashioned Hollywood moralism at work in both the touchingly well played The Hustler and the vastly entertaining Hud that keeps threatening to dampen the proceedings. This is the stage in Newman's career when he's expected to pay for his good looks and easy charm—for making everyone fall in love with him when he flashes those bedroom eyes ... The ending [of The Hustler], a mixed triumph for Eddie, makes it possible for us to live with the fact that the movie has used the very qualities we love Newman for to score points against him."

In Sweet Bird of Youth, Newman's beauty is an undeniable fact of nature, like a rainstorm or a sunset. You can't dispute it, you just have to deal with the reality of it. And in the context of that play, his beauty is seen as somehow dangerous, disingenuous, hinting at a shallowness of character. Perhaps if Chance hadn't been so damn good-looking he might have, you know, developed into a better man.

Newman does not have the crazy, cocky charm in Sweet Bird of Youth that characterized his later roles, but there is one moment which, for me, movingly illustrates Newman's interest in the craft of acting, in imbuing it with a natural dignity:

He's in the bar in the hotel, and, naturally, all caught up in the moment-to-moment reality of his situation. He's back in town where he's enemy number one, he's playing stud to a failed movie actress, he's hoping against hope that he will have a reunion with Heavenly—the local girl whom he ruined by giving a venereal disease. So he's got a lot going on. Not to mention the fact that Newman is also creating the drunkenness (Chance always has a flask in his pocket) and the "high" that accompanies the pills he pops. Chance is polluted. Perhaps he needs to pollute himself after polluting the once-pure body of his girlfriend. Newman's work here does have what I would call a "workmanlike" quality to it. He came out of the Actors Studio where "sensory" work was paramount: creating heat, drunkenness, headache, a head cold, horniness ... whatever it was. So you can see Newman doing all of that, obligating himself to the demands of the script.

And there's a moment where suddenly, in the midst of all the activity going on in the bar, he hears a scrap of music from the next room, or maybe it's from the bandstand by the lake ... and it stops him in his tracks. You know how sometimes you hear a bit of music and it is not as though you are transported back in time, you really feel you are back in time: when your mother sang you that song as a toddler; when you heard that song on the radio the moment before you got the news your father had died; when you had your first kiss to that song ... whatever it is ... and that is what Newman plays here. It's startlingly good. It's what sensory work should look like.

The best part about it is that it is not done in closeup, which would have meant that the director would have had to cut (then Newman would have had a chance to privately create the moment for himself). No, it's all done in one take. He's babbling, drinking, laughing ... and then, in the same take, he stops, head cocked, and you watch him flow back in time. There's sadness there, a wistful quality that is quintessential Tennessee Williams ... and it is Newman's freedom with his own process, his own imagination, his craft, that I remember. It's not easy to act a moment like that. The traps are all over the place—it could seem mawkish, sentimental, or, worse, fake. Newman also had to do it within the larger context of the scene, so it had to actually happen to him—which makes it more like something you would see on the stage, rather than on the screen. It is why so many film actors fail when they try to do a play. They are used to having prep time for their big scenes. They are used to the cutting and interrupted flow of storytelling. To use their imagination in the moment is difficult. Newman, with all his stage work, and his devotion to the craft of acting, had none of those problems. He knew how to do it. It's a true piece of poetry!

***

THE STING (1973)

The second thing that came to mind when I heard of Newman's passing was his raucous, campy performance as Henry Gondorff, the con man in The Sting. It's a mere 11 years after Sweet Bird of Youth and the transformation is so startling that you can't believe it's the same actor. Newman has none of that studied quality anymore, none of that "let me show you my sensory work" Method-type acting from earlier in his career. He has, to put it mildly, arrived. This is an example of perfect casting, as well, and I think that Newman, because of his looks, took hits harder when he was miscast. There's an Adonis-like quality to his younger face which, naturally, led him to be cast in certain kinds of roles. He was in Picnic on Broadway, his debut, where he played Alan Seymour, the preppy college boy whom Madge throws over for Hal, the sexy drifter. It's interesting to consider that Newman's actual personality was far more suited to the Hal part: the wild-boy ways, his undomesticated charm, and the fact that every woman—married homemakers, spinsters, intellectual bookworms, or high school beauty queens—looks at him and can't help but think: "That man knows how to fuck." Mrs. Potts, the hard-working Kansas woman who has hired Hal to work on her house, has a monologue in the last couple of moments in the play where she admits the effect Hal had on her:

"With just Mama and me in the house, I'd get so used to things as they were, everything so prim, occasionally a hairpin on the floor, the geranium in the window, the smell of Mama's medicines ... He walked through the door and suddenly everything was different. He clomped through the tiny rooms like he was still in the great outdoors, he talked in a booming voice that shook the ceiling. Everything he did reminded me there was a man in the house, and it seemed good ... And that reminded me ... I'm a woman, and that seemed good, too."

If that doesn't describe who Paul Newman was in his best roles, then I don't know what does! But Newman's natural devilishness had not yet gotten a chance to express itself. The 60s freed him up. The Yale-educated preppy boy faded and the rakish "man who knows how to fuck" persona ascended.

The reason I bring up The Sting is personal. When I was a little kid, my parents let my brother and me stay up late (on school nights, no less) only two times. Once was to see What's Up, Doc?, and I still remember my brother, probably 8 years old at the time, hunched over on the ottoman, holding his stomach he was laughing so hard at the Chinese dragon flying through the streets of San Francisco. The other time was to watch The Sting. I was probably 9 years old when I first saw it, and to this day it has the glow around it—a personal glow—that my parents wanted my brother and me to see it. They thought we would love it, and that we were ready for it. I do remember being shocked by the strip club scene with the dancer twirling her tassels (this on primetime!), and I also remember being utterly gobsmacked by the last "sting" in the film—the one where the film itself "stings" the audience. I didn't get it. My parents had to explain it to me: "See, that FBI office wasn't real ...."

Paul Newman's performance in The Sting was probably a walk in the park for him. This was not new territory for him, neither was working with Redford, but one of the things I love so much about it is how much of a kick HE is getting out of the entire thing. Newman took acting seriously. He was the president of the Actors Studio, after all. He had worked hard at his craft. He has said that he felt that his wife was actually a genius ... a natural talent, and he was the one who really had to work at it. But by the time he did The Sting, you rarely catch him "working." He is fearless, funny, campy, crotchety, sexy in a mischievous (yet always friendly) way, never soft. He is behaving in front of the camera. All moments feel "caught" rather than "performed." He is having a blast. That translated to me as a small child. Even though he was a grown man, I related to him. He behaved inappropriately. He had fun for the sake of fun. He messed with people. He burped. You know. That was all in the day of a life for me as a child!

Again, to imagine that Newman got his start playing Alan, the upstanding domesticated waiting-for-marriage good boy of Picnic is just indicative of how hard Newman really worked, and how he seemed to understand very early on that it would be his acting that got him ahead, not just his looks. If he skated on his looks, then he would never have played Henry Gondorff in the way that he did. Newman's relationship with his beauty was always an interesting element in his career, and it just got more interesting the less interested he was in it. It's not that he grew into his face. It's that life did a number on him, as it does a number on all of us, and his experiences showed. His became one of the most lived-in faces in movies, and in The Sting we are starting to see the veneer crack. What comes out is a helluva lot of fun.

***

OUR TOWN (2003)

Lastly, I must mention Paul Newman's performance as The Stage Manager in the televised production of Our Town (2003), which he had also played on Broadway. I have seen Our Town more times than I can say. I have seen all kinds of Stage Managers. It's the kind of role that lends itself to pretty much any energy. I saw it at Trinity Rep in 1986, and Richard Kneeland, the actor playing the part, inhabited it with a kind of folksy gentle humor. He strolled through the audience, you'd suddenly realize that he was sitting right next to you on the stairs, nudging you and grinning about the action going on onstage. He was compassionate towards the poor mortals in the play, who had no understanding of their own mortality. You got the sense that he once lived in Grover's Corners.

I saw Spalding Gray do it on Broadway, with Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller as George and Emily—and Gray was much more of a modern presence. That guy never lived in Grover's Corners. He represented the universal eye, the omniscient consciousness. The production, with its completely empty stage and its stunning poster (a picture of the globe from outer space) had a distance to it, as though all of us in the audience were circling the earth via satellite, staring down at the puny problems of the invisible masses below. Gray dressed in unobtrusive gray (the other characters wore period-appropriate costumes, but he was in modern dress), and really did nothing more than be himself, saying Wilder's words. It fit. While he wasn't warm, you also got the sense that he "got" it. You knew that he looked on George and Emily's blossoming romance, thinking, "Yes. Yes. Life sometimes can be like that. I do remember." Penelope Ann Miller spent the entire third act shrieking at the decibel-level of a Greek-tragedy (please leave some space for ME to cry, Penelope, don't take up all the tears for yourself!), but Gray emerged as the real tragic figure. He was us ... and I realized that the poster was from his perspective, and that was what made him so quietly sad.

Now we come to Newman. The televised production is so worth seeing with many wonderful performances (Jane Curtin, especially), but Newman, looking at the action over his glasses, with a rather forbidding expression on his face, his presence a stern, still reminder of mortality, is truly haunting. I've never seen the Stage Manager played the way he played it. Emily looks around for comfort, reassurance, but she'll find none of it from him. He acts mainly as a tour guide, but the way Newman does it makes it seem like a tour of Pompeii, as opposed to something in the more recent past. Our Town is performed so frequently that I sometimes forget its power. It becomes diluted. Not so here. The set is shadowed, Newman stands silhouetted in the background, and there are times when he seems almost tired in his role. Life wearies him. He's over it. It's so effective. He too, to quote James Joyce, is becoming a "shade." And so Emily's new-found grief is nothing to him, because his concentration is already starting to turn to the end, his own end.

Patricia Neal tells a chilling story in her autobiography about one of her first conversations with Paul Newman, when they began working on Hud. Her daughter Olivia had died the year before. Neal had not recovered. Neal writes:

"We had not yet played a major scene together. In fact, we may have been discussing the work to come. Suddenly, I found myself not talking about the picture at all. I was telling him about Olivia. I went on about her loveliness and talent and her fragility and how much I loved her ...

""My sisters-in-law took charge of everything. They did not let me do a thing. I didn't even see Olivia." I found myself admitting. "Do you think that's right?"

"Paul didn't answer.

""I just saw that damned closed coffin. I should have taken a stand at the time, don't you think? I was her mother. I had a right to see her."

"Paul finally looked at me. For a long moment, he just stared through me with those blue eyes. Then he got up and said quietly, "Tough," and walked away."

Neal was crushed. Maybe Newman felt like she was over-sharing, maybe he was uncomfortable, or maybe he felt that whatever dynamic they developed had to be expressed onscreen, not off ... and in this vein, Neal writes:

"I began to realize that although I had poured out my heart to Paul Newman, it was Hud Bannon who had responded."

I bring this episode up because Newman's blunt "Tough" in response to Neal's story is what I see him capturing in the Stage Manager, and his performance highlights, in a very unusual way, the true brutality at the heart of that American classic.

In the last moments of the play, Emily turns to the Stage Manager and says:

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?"

The Stage Manager replies: "No," before softening it a bit with, "The saints, poets, maybe—they do some." Richard Kneeland, at Trinity, said it in a sorrowful way, feeling Emily's grief as his own. Spalding Gray had more of an existential shrug in the line, he had to tell her the truth, but he was so used to it that there was no sense getting sad about it!

Paul Newman is ruthless in the moment. She barely gets the line out before he fires back, "No." Total shut-down. Total rejection of her concerns, and her sadness. Truth: unvarnished. Don't bother kidding yourself, sweetheart. This is the reality. Get used to it ... and stop sniveling. His elaboration of "saints, poets, maybe," then, comes off as a careless afterthought, relatively meaningless. Instead of being a contemplative moment of acknowledgment that yes, some people do "get it," it feels more like he's throwing her a bone. Brilliant. Devastating.

"No." I can see the entire trajectory of Paul Newman's diverse career in that one ruthless line-reading.

***

There was always a cool-ness to Newman in his best roles. He didn't cheapen himself by giving it all away. He did not make a commodity out of his own emotions, like so many actors do. He worked. He knew what he was good at, and yet when he needed help he took it.

Sidney Lumet, in his book Making Movies, shares a very moving anecdote about Paul Newman, when starting work on The Verdict:

"He is an honorable man. He is also a very private man. We had worked together in television in the early fifties and done a brief scene together in a Martin Luther King documentary, so when we got together on The Verdict, we were immediately comfortable with each other. At the end of two weeks of rehearsal, I had a run-through of the script ... There were no major problems. In fact, it seemed quite good. But somehow it seemed rather flat. When we broke for the day I asked Paul to stay a moment. I told him that while things looked promising, we really hadn't hit the emotional level we both knew was there in David Mamet's screenplay. I said that his characterization was fine but hadn't yet evolved into a living, breathing person. Was there a problem? Paul said that he didn't have the lines memorized yet and that when he did, it would all flow better. I told him I didn't think it was the lines. I said that there was a certain aspect of Frank Galvin's character that was missing so far. I told him that I wouldn't invade his privacy, but only he could choose whether or not to reveal that part of the character and therefore that aspect of himself. I couldn't help him with the decision. We lived near each other and rode home together. The ride that evening was silent. Paul was thinking. On Monday, Paul came in to rehearsal and sparks flew. He was superb. His character and the picture took on life.

"I know that decision to reveal the part of himself that the character required was painful for him. But he's a dedicated actor as well as a dedicated man. And ... yes, Paul is a shy man. And a wonderful actor. And race car driver. And gorgeous."

The 20th century is marked by his work. Gorgeous, indeed. Gorgeous, indelible ink.

________________________
House contributor Sheila O'Malley blogs about film, literature, photography and life at The Sheila Variations.

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 3 (21), "Ar Ar Ar—The New York Film Festival"

By John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Keith Uhlich, Glenn Kenny, and Andrew O'Hehir

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Hello, and welcome back you crazy kids.

Episode 3 marks the first time we've started recording under our new name, and just in time! Andrew O'Hehir (Salon's Beyond the Multiplex) and Glenn Kenny (Some Came Running, That Other Film Magazine That Used To Be Good) return to Grassroots to give us their thoughts on what should be a surprise at this year's New York Film Festival (which began this past Friday evening).

We go over the hit-making process, Glenn's recent delve into the newly released Godfather collection (the first two films are now playing at Film Forum) and O'Hehir defends his loving takedowns of Burn After Reading and Towelhead.

So listen on, and join us next time as Keith Uhlich, Steven Boone and Lauren Wissot take our place at the bar while Vadim goes across the country in search of himself and I look for work in Manhattan.

As always, thanks to our guests, and if you see Vadim or me at the bar, buy us a drink and employ us. (JL)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 01 hour, 07 minutes, 02 seconds)

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PODCAST



_________________________________________________
John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

Glenn Kenny is the man, the myth, the legend.

Andrew O'Hehir is former mentor of the Andy Kaufman of journalism (three guesses).

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 1 (19), "Summer Sátátangó, Part 3"

By John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Keith Uhlich, Jeremiah Kipp, Kevin B. Lee, Preston Miller, and S.T. VanAirsdale (in absentia)

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

By this point, I think we could be discussing Godard for all I remember. (Ed note to John: You predicted the death of Paul Newman, you callous son of a hamster!) Let's listen together faithful non-listener. (JL)

***
PODCAST

Embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 22 minutes, 52 seconds)




_________________________________________________
John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

Jeremiah Kipp sees no evil.

Kevin B. Lee walks in the shoes of many a great man before.

Preston Miller is taken. Hands off ladies!

S.T. VanAirsdale had to run.

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Links for the Day (September 30th, 2008)

1. Had the great pleasure of meeting GreenCine's David Hudson yesterday (sorry I didn't see you after the Che screening, and safe flight home today), so lead link to him: the first NYFF podcast (direct audio link here) by Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant, recorded after the Film Criticism in Crisis panel at Lincoln Center, featuring Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Gavin Smith.

["Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant begin this year's series of podcasts from the New York Film Festival by talking with a few of the participants in Saturday's panel, Film Criticism in Crisis? I blather a bit, but things get interesting when Jonathan Rosenbaum and Film Comment editor (and panel moderator) Gavin Smith exchange views on the current state of things."]

***
2. "New DVDs": Dave Kehr's latest NYTimes column looks at Early British Cinema.

["On this side of the Atlantic it’s easy to get the impression that filmmaking in Britain began in the late 1940s, with the first big-budget films of David Lean (“Brief Encounter,” “Great Expectations”) and Carol Reed (“The Fallen Idol,” “The Third Man”). With few exceptions, like the science-fiction epic “Things to Come” in 1936 and a handful of Alfred Hitchcock films, the prewar British cinema remains a blur. The standard histories maintain that there wasn’t much worth seeing: this was, after all, the era of the “quota quickie,” cheap little movies made solely to fulfill the demands of the 1927 Cinematographic Film Act, which required that 5 percent of the movies on British screens actually be British. (That figure was raised to 20 percent in 1935.) But now, thanks largely to the efforts of the British Film Institute, some of those quota quickies have slipped back into distribution, and it seems that something might have been going on there after all. Two recently issued collections offer strong evidence of life: “Classic British Thrillers” from MPI Home Video (mpihomevideo.com) has two quota quickies by the great Michael Powell, “Red Ensign” (1934) and “The Phantom Light” (1935), as well as a compelling postwar curiosity, Lawrence Huntington’s ingeniously constructed “The Upturned Glass” (1947)."]

***

3. "Bush: ‘Painful and lasting’ economic damage": A report and video from MSNBC on the bailout situation.

["President Bush said Tuesday that the economic damage to the nation will be “painful and lasting” if Congress fails to pass a $700 billion bailout bill. Bush said Tuesday that “Congress must act” and said the economy is depending on “decisive action on the part of our government.” He spoke before the U.S. stock market opened for trading Tuesday and one day after the House voted narrowly to defeat the massive relief measure that his administration and leading members of Congress had agreed was necessary. Bush said he wanted to “assure our citizens and citizens around the world that this is not the end of the legislative process.”"]

***
4. Ebert on Newman, thrice over: "Paul Newman: In memory"; "Campaigning with Paul Newman"; and "You wild, beautiful thing. You crazy handful of nothin'".

["After she read my obituary of Paul Newman, my wife Chaz asked me, "Why didn't you write more about his acting?" She was right. Why didn't I? I've been asking myself that. Maybe I was trying to tell myself something. I think it was this: I never really thought of him as an actor. I regarded him more as an embodiment, an evocation, of something. And I think that something was himself. He seemed above all a deeply good man, who freed himself to live life fully and joyfully, and used his success as a way to follow his own path, and to help others. If Newman was that kind of person, so, too, was his wife of more than 50 years, Joanne Woodward. Too little attention was paid to her in the appreciations. They grew old and fine together. None of us can ever know the truth of another life. But to the degree that we can guess it, I believe that Joanne and Paul shone upon each other, agreed on the fundamentals, expressed the same fusion with acting, did good, were happy in a way that brings contentment."]

***
5. Catching up with two posts at The Pinocchio Theory: 1) "More electoral ruminations" (excerpted below), the response to which inspired 2) "A Note on Evil."

["In recent years, and especially in the weeks following McCain’s selection of Palin, conservatives have excoriated liberals for, basically, thinking that conservatives are stupid, and that stupidity is the only explanation for why anybody would, say, be enthusiastic about Palin. And I think that the conservatives who argue in this manner are somewhat correct — at least to the extent that, as I’ve said before, many liberals’ scorn for Palin has prevented them from seeing the great appeal she has, affectively, to large segments of the electorate. We shouldn’t argue the election on the grounds that Palin is “unqualified” or that she is “trashy.” Rather, we should make it clear that even the most minimal sense of human dignity requires us to throw the Republicans out of power. It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes. And not in spite of the Democrats’ hypocrisy, but rather precisely because of this — because their hypocrisy is, as it were, the compliment that vice pays to virtue — the moral thing to do in this election is to vote for Obama."]

***
Quote of the Day: Wendell Phillips

"What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better."

***
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Can't go wrong with Kinski. (From Jahsonic, who reminds us that 120 years ago today...)



***
Clip of the Day: Lichman's right, Dancing Bananas are great in times of crisis (and even better when joined by Pedo Bears).

_____________________________________________________
"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.

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 1 (19), "Summer Sátátangó, Part 2"

By John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Keith Uhlich, Jeremiah Kipp, Kevin B. Lee, Preston Miller, and S.T. VanAirsdale

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

The drinking continues. The arguments get louder. We get worse. Sigh. (JL)

***
PODCAST

Embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 45 minutes, 53 seconds)




_________________________________________________
John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

Jeremiah Kipp ... what can one say?

Kevin B. Lee is also like life.

Preston Miller can drink Vadim Rizov and John Lichman under more than a table.

S.T. VanAirsdale will de-FAME yo' ass!

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The First Presidential Debate: To Have The Room

By Max Winter

I have to admit that I began watching the first presidential debate with a considerable number of preconceptions, so the notes below are more a record of slow evolution of opinions rather than up-to-the minute observations.

What were my opinions? That McCain, by virtue of being a Republican, is better at this stuff than Obama, "this stuff" being the nitty-gritty, the mud-slinging, the toughness, the way you win elections. Obama is a talker, not a fighter; his hope must be that through deluges of sheer verbiage he can drown out his opposition. That technique is interesting, in his case, because he's a good talker, but it doesn't work. Or hasn't, yet. The opposition is floating on a comfortable swimming pool raft, maybe even the kind with a drink holder.

As I turn on the TV, having promised myself I wouldn't listen to that much commentary, I hear Keith Olbermann saying that McCain has to be at the "top of his game," and then I hear Chris Matthews saying, on the one hand, that Obama "better have some set pieces," and then comparing John McCain to Admiral Queeg on the other. I understand the need of our commentators to frame these debates, conventions, and the like, but why must the framing always be so aggressive, so over-caffeinated, so quintessentially male? The intent is always to ramp up excitement and anticipation, but the effect for me, always, is one of deflation.

As the debate starts, I'm thankful that Jim Lehrer is moderating. He's always been a comforting presence to me. He might also lend a note of maturity to the proceedings. And from the outset, he seems very gentlemanly, relaxed, aware of the urgency of the economic backdrop, but not nervous about it, or at all interested in promoting the tabloid fervor that's filled the airwaves recently. To look at him, you would think nothing was wrong, almost—his professionalism could stem from the fact that he comes from an era when there was actual news to report, and public/political affairs were not so … meta. Where the circumstances surrounding an event, the ephemera, become more important than the event itself, and, further, where any sort of event might stir commentary—a New Yorker cover, a fist bump, whatever's available. What about the suicide bombers? What about the tensions with Iran, with Pakistan…?

The first question, about the recent economic problems we've been having, fills me with relief. I was hoping it wouldn't be avoided or skimmed over, and it certainly wasn't. And yet the response I get is not heartening. I want to hear an explanation of what happened, exactly, in 20 words or less, but I don't get it; I wanted to be educated, as FDR might have done during the Depression. The candidates' responses, here and elsewhere, seem to clash in a muffled way—no one candidate's attitudes ring loudly enough to resound. I find myself pleasantly surprised, overall, by Obama's performance. While his remarks carry their trademark low-key tone, they are also very simple and very direct; he makes the 5-6 points of his plan very clear, which I rarely see in campaign speeches, his or others.

McCain, like Obama, though few people give him credit for it, has a command of language, or at least stands for the valorization of language in his speeches. I can't say I believe in the purpose his lengthy lines are intended for, but I do respect their general complexity. In this debate, though, his sentences seem often disconnected, unrelated to the question at hand. He wastes valuable seconds thanking his hosts and expressing concern about Ted Kennedy, then addressing the toll on "Main Street." But there's no connection to be had here—it's all the traditional platitudes, mixed into a goulash of social and economic risk.

Once the conversational part of the response begins, in which the candidates are allowed to talk to each other, the pettiness begins on both sides. They both flash their angry smiles: McCain's stiff and somewhat surprising, every time it happens, Obama's with a little too much dimple. So I haven't gotten my summary, they haven't made their positions on the crisis overly clear (in addition to not discussing how they felt about being part of the conversation), and yet they still seem to be arguing. Over what? Is it that they feel obliged to argue?

On the question of sacrifices necessary in their plans due to the economic crisis, neither is terribly succinct. Obama wins on clarity this time, but not on memorability; here and elsewhere, his words drift into your ear, you like them, and then they drift out. Because I've listened to a lot of his speeches, I remember them, and so I suppose his approach is working with me, but I wish I had some sense of the passion that's driven him to this point. McCain aims directly at the question, and he is quite direct on spending, if his message at times seems too simple. Simplicity, as I often say to my hopeful friends, wins. Or has a chance at it.

As the focus shifts to the war, things get more interesting, and more aggressive, at least relatively. The candidates' positions on the current war, and on future wars, should be evident to anyone who reads the newspapers or has some ability to predict liberal vs. conservative thinking, and so their responses to the various questions raised tend to bleed together. I find myself unsettled, at various points during their discussion, by sides I have not seen before and by sides I have.

McCain fully displays his stale grandfatherly side, the voice filled with the impulse to reassure, to quiet doubts of him, even at a time when his listeners need more reassurance than he could ever offer, and also at a time when they could not be more doubtful. He also uses a tone I haven't heard before, but one which is apparently quite common with him: the angry tone. It comes out with each of his oft-cited statements of Obama's inexperience, it comes out when he talks about Ahmadinejad's anti-Israel statements (even turning into a stage whisper, somewhat Reagan-esque, when you consider that he named Reagan his favorite statesman), and it comes out, oddly enough, when he doesn't say anything at all. I don't mind seeing anger in political candidates, but if that's the emotion that comes through strongest on the night of a debate, rather than compassion or, at a time such as this, concern, then I feel misgivings. Is it best to make anger at an opponent your most distinguishing characteristic at such an event?

I was unsettled, on the contrary, to see Obama give a similar performance to the ones he's given before. He added nothing new to his anti-war rhetoric outside of the bracelet moment (when he matched his veteran's bracelet with McCain's), or in the series of "You were wrong" reproaches of McCain, or in the citing of McCain's "Bomb Iran" song. He states the facts as they are and as 90% of his voters must know them. But can we say he lost? Or McCain won?

In watching this debate, a viewer would have to fight against the temptation to award brownie points based on political bias. Obama has been praised widely for looking at his opponent when his opponent did not look at him. I'm not sure if, in balance, this matters much. It matters as an expression of attitude, but certainly not as a matter of presidential qualifications. Anyone can pivot their trunk. The aim should be, for such a candidate, to control the conversation, to have the room. And neither did.

We also have to avoid giving points to either candidate based on our sense of experience. Obama's praise always carries with it, like a silent letter in a word, the understanding that he's never done this before; McCain's praise, when he receives it, always carries with it the understanding that he's a seasoned Washingtonian. Moral aspirations are more important than anyone's experience, or lack thereof, at this historical moment.
_________________________________________
Max Winter is a New York City-based poet, critic and editor. His poems are collected in the volume The Pictures and have been published in the Denver Quarterly, Volt, The Yale Review, Octopus, The Paris Review, Boulevard and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor of Fence.

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Altman and Coppola in the Seventies: Power and the People

By Robert C. Cumbow

[Publication Note: This article is being cross-published with Parallax View.]

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 11/26/2005, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

(Caricature Zone)
Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola, arguably the two pivotal figures of American cinema in the 1970s, both rose from the turmoil of the transition from studio-based to independent production, to emerge as leading forces in film production as well as film style. Each eventually formed his own production company—Altman’s Lion’s Gate, Coppola’s American Zoetrope—and patronized the work of aspiring young film-makers (such as Altman’s nurturing of Alan Rudolph and Coppola’s of Caleb Deschanel).

Though Altman’s films compare with Coppola’s as chamber music does with grand opera, their work in the 1970s exemplifies what ultimately became the prevailing style of American film direction in that era: maverick resistance to studio-imposed time and budget constraints, insistence on directorial authorship, reliance on location shooting, use of improvisational acting, an emphasis on ensemble playing rather than star performances, Fordian gatherings—weddings, church services, parties, dinners—as exponents of group character (both Altman and Coppola had Catholic upbringings), and a revisionist approach to the mythic archetypes of the Hollywood genre film.

Each in his own way overhauls, even debunks, the generic conventions of the war film, road film, crime film, screwball comedy, and private eye film established in the heyday of the moguls. An important part of that overhaul is the rejection of the star system, and the consistent suppression of the very notion of “star”—and often of the star himself: Altman’s radical alteration of Paul Newman’s screen image is as crucial as Coppola’s of Brando’s. Moreover, more so than most of their contemporaries, both directors rely on supporting characters and unknown actors to carry the burden of a film. Altman distributes attention among so many players that there is no clear “star;” or he discredits the very idea of stardom or screen heroism (The Long Goodbye, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians). Coppola acts directly on the star to evoke a self-effacing, even self-abusive performance (most memorably Gene Hackman in The Conversation and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now).

The relation of star to supporting players, of mythic hero to the community, and, of course, of the artist to his public is manifest in Altman’s and Coppola’s abiding concern with the workings of power. In each director’s films of the 1970s, character is defined in terms of the individual’s response to the temptations and demands of power. Altman is interested in the relation between power and performance. For him, power imposes, as in Greek tragedy, the dilemma of a choice between equally painful courses of action (the forced service of the doctors of M*A*S*H, the sell-or-die option offered John McCabe by Harrison Shaughnessy); but the choice carries with it the opportunity to assert a higher kind of freedom (the doctors of the 4077th save lives and subvert military authority; McCabe founds a community as much through resistance and death as through entrepreneurism). Coppola is more concerned with the struggle between power and traditional morality. In his world, the free man is nothing (Michael Corleone at the beginning of The Godfather, Harry Caul throughout The Conversation, Captain Willard at the opening of Apocalypse Now) until he adapts to the demands of power, even embraces power for its own sake.

What happened in the world of movie-making between the Hollywood of the 1950s and that of the 1970s was not a weakening but a redistribution of power. Not coincidentally, the redistribution of power is exactly what Altman and Coppola, in different ways, made their most enduring films about.

"I wonder how such a degenerate man ever attained a position of responsibility in the Army Medical Corps?"

"He was drafted."

—Conversation between a military nurse and a military chaplain, M*A*S*H—

For the theatre full of GIs with whom I first saw M*A*S*H in 1970, that reference to the draft was the high point of the film. This was clearly a Vietnam-era movie, the dilemma of the surgeons a neat metaphor for the one each 1970 draftee had faced. The draft is the moral basis of M*A*S*H: It is the arbitrary, faceless intrusion of power that forces the free man to choose between undesirable alternatives (in 1970, prison, expatriation, or forced service and the face of death). The surgeons’ assertion of freedom and humanistic values in the Korean War of M*A*S*H parallels what happened in the Vietnam era when a like-minded generation of draftees, pressed into service of a cause most of them opposed, forced the military to adapt to them.

At the height of anti-Vietnam protest from within the ranks, a dissenting army psychiatrist wrote that military psychiatry is a contradiction in terms, since psychiatry aims to help the individual realize himself, while the military depends upon conforming him to the group. The same kind of collision makes rebels of the doctors and nurses of M*A*S*H. Stealing a jeep turns military structure against itself: When everything is “issued,” what is theft? Where war itself is justified, anything can be justified.

Religious values are crudely perverted (the self-defeating fanaticism of Major Frank Burns) or utterly lost (the charming ineffectuality of “Dago Red” Mulcahy). “Military chaplain” is also a contradiction in terms, and Father Mulcahy seems to realize it. The Last Supper parody, from Buñuel out of Da Vinci, stresses the absence of substantive religious values in the formalized wasteland of the military at war.

Altman has peppered M*A*S*H with reminders of the popular “snafu” war-comedy films of the 1940s and 1950s. This is very much to the point, for in its revision of the prevailing trend of Hollywood comedy, away from plot contrivance and toward the spontaneous, improvisational comedy of individual assertiveness, M*A*S*H attacks that worn genre and the values that created it. “War comedy” is the biggest contradiction of all.

"I don’t make deals."

—Dog Butler, bearhunter, McCabe and Mrs. Miller—

Contempt for authority and embrace of moral absurdism color all of Altman’s films of the 1970s. Subjectivism is the only reality in such internalized fantasies as That Cold Day in the Park, Brewster McCloud, Images, 3 Women, and Quintet. In the pre-civilized world of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a primitive ethic prevails. Kathleen Murphy perceptively noted that there is no need of law, lawyers, or enforcers until the faceless, relentless firm of Harrison Shaughnessy enters the film. In California Split, a post-civilization film, the exemplar of power is money, and once its mystique fades, so does the whole complex structure of contemporary American values. Ultimately, nothing matters: The staggering amount Bill owes, his job, the women, his overwhelming winning streak, his friendship with Charlie—all conventional cares give way to the apocalyptic anarchy of M*A*S*H and the elevated liberation of Nashville’s “It Don’t Worry Me.”

"I got poetry in me! I do!"

—John McCabe, businessman—

There is a peculiarly Joycean sensibility in much of Altman’s work. Nashville’s satirical optimism, from “We must be doin’ somethin’ right” and “Yes, I do” to “It Don’t Worry Me,” is an ironic but joyous refrain like Molly Bloom’s “yes i will yes.” Nashville is, in fact, remarkably reminiscent of Ulysses: Witness the long, episodic design; the mixture of the satirical with the nightmarishly painful; the layering of mythic archetypes over the comings and goings of small characters through a real city over a well-defined period of time; the revelry in the possibilities of cinematic style (like Joyce’s festival of literary parody and typographical experimentation); and the celebration of human frailty over the strictures of society.

If Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus evokes Daedalus the designer of the labyrinth, Brewster McCloud evokes Daedalus the builder of wings. But Brewster fails as Daedalus, and is destroyed like Icarus because he reached too high. A quieter variation on the same idea is the visual metamorphosis of Sueleen Gaye into a caryatid on the stage of Nashville’s Parthenon.

Altman’s best examination of the tension between spiritual ideal and fleshly reality that informs all myth is McCabe and Mrs. Miller. John McCabe and Constance Miller build their business on appeal to the flesh: whoring, drinking, gambling. The ironically-named town of Presbyterian Church grows around their industriousness, while its namesake remains unfinished and empty. The church’s outer shell is completed with the placement of a spire by the preacher, while McCabe’s chippies arrive to the tune of “Sisters of Mercy.” As long as McCabe and Mrs. Miller flourish, the church stands empty. Constance cautions John not to give his whores time to relax or they’ll surely turn to religion. The preacher is placed in tacit opposition to McCabe—an opposition that becomes explicit when McCabe seeks shelter in the church during the climactic gun battle: The preacher drives him out at gunpoint.

A moment later, Dog Butler, gunning for McCabe, shoots the preacher instead, and a dropped oil lamp sets the church ablaze. The fire, fought by the villagers, is extinguished only after the three hunters and their prey—McCabe—are dead. Mrs. Miller, who has seen the futility of McCabe’s stand and has failed to comprehend his self-image (perhaps because she does not understand America), loses herself in a deeper commitment to opium.

Brewster McCloud, John McCabe, and Nashville’s Barbara Jean are pioneers of the human spirit, transcending and transforming the society around them. They represent the best the human race has to offer.

"Freezin’ my soul, that’s what you’re doin’, just freezin’ my soul."

—John McCabe, poet—

Power in Altman’s films tends to destroy people or turn them into symbols—or both. Even in their raucous assertion of freedom, the surgeons of M*A*S*H become symbols of defiance. Their distance from their own identities is slammed home in the shock-cut of a docking troopship and cheering crowd inserted into the silence following the announcement of Hawkeye’s and Duke’s transfer home. The significance of Brewster McCloud and of John McCabe is more enduring than the men themselves. Quintet transforms the ice-world of McCabe and Mrs. Miller into a frozen world-soul, proposing a quietly violent parlor game, with a name from chamber music, as a metaphor for life. On one level, 3 Women is about people who make symbols of themselves: Millie is the archetypal American consumer, Pinky turns herself into an image of Millie, Willie is the kind of mystery-creature she paints, and Edgar’s studied adoption of the trappings of the B-western gunman indirectly authors his own demise. The progress of Nashville is a process whereby its characters, objects, and events contrive to become symbols.

"You don’t belong in Nashville!"

—Haven Hamilton, country star—

For his mythic statement, Brewster McCloud usurps the Astrodome, home of football. Nashville’s Opryland is a forum for the musical equivalent of football, and its Parthenon a metaphor for both the endurance of America and its overhaul of the Athenian principles of democracy. When Barbara Jean sings “My Idaho Home,” a paean to what she—and America—have lost, singer, song, and stage are metamorphosed before our eyes and those of the kid with the gun. Kenny fires not at an individual but at a symbol—and thereby steals the scene. He’s a performer, too, with a gun in his fiddle case.

"Do you want to go see Nine to Five?"

"Who’s in it?"

"Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton."

"No."

"But I thought you liked those people."

"I liked them when they were entertainers. I don’t like them now they’ve become Statements."

—Conversation with my wife—

How do the people, the mass, the audience deal with the power inherent in their heroes? What are real heroes (as opposed to “stars”) like? Altman is always asking these questions. His most direct approaches to the tension between person and symbol—his 1970s “showbiz” movies Brewster McCloud, Nashville, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians—deal with the difference between person and star, between entertainer and statement. Casting Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill, the living lie who is always more comfortable with made-up history than with real identity and responsibility, Altman attempted a definitive statement about show people that, unfortunately, mixes uneasily with Arthur Kopit’s definitive statement about the American Indians.

In the Nashville airport there’s a poster of singer Connie White, and someone has slapped a Hal Phillip Walker campaign sticker across it. Tom, Bill and Mary hurry past, but Bill stops long enough to observe, “Wait a minute! Hal Phillip Walker looks exactly like Connie White!” This mock-confusion of star with politician is an early preparation for the grimmer confusion of star with politician that climaxes the film.

Since the Romantic revolution, western society has increasingly placed the mantle of priest on the shoulders of either the politician or the performer, and in the 1970s, Altman was already commenting on this cultural confusion. In true Altmanesque fashion, at the end of the decade the United States would elect a former movie star to the presidency.

In Nashville, Barbara Jean’s importance as both celebrant and victim of a ritual sacrifice is prepared by the film’s methodical use of religious imagery. Altman cuts from Mary’s quiet adoration of Tom in bed to a stained-glass Christ; her upward glance echoed by the upward angle from which the camera begins a slow descent along the church window. The cut contrasts the contemporary mythos of Saturday Night with the Christian mythos of Sunday Morning, while comparing two kinds of worship and love. The montage continues through three different church services, ending with a humble tableau of wheelchaired Barbara Jean in the hospital chapel, singing, “He walks with me and He talks with me …”

She’s an unlikely Christ, but a Christ nonetheless, with a Palm Sunday processional (the airport), an Agony in the Garden (the outdoor concert), a public crucifixion, and an exuberant resurrection. Less appreciated is Brewster McCloud, a pagan priest who falls because he has given up his virginity. Brewster is an unacceptable offering to the gods.

"When it’s over, it gets real sad."

—The end of a wedding, and a marriage, in A Wedding—

The title sequence of Brewster McCloud is a tilt-down from blue sky to band and singers rehearsing the national anthem. At the end of the film, the movement is echoed in a fast downward swish-pan to Brewster’s crumpled body, almost under the feet of the circus parade. Nashville, by contrast, begins with the camera still as the door of the Walker-Talker-sleeper rises; and ends with the world holding still as the camera rises, lifting us for the first time above those singers and that massive flag, then stopping-down to bring blue sky into proper exposure before fade-out. The two films, in all their remarkable imagistic similarity, describe a fall from the divine to the depths of fleshly failure, and an ascent through Purgatory to Paradise regained.

Too often Nashville is discussed in terms of Altman’s “bleak view” of America at the Bicentennial. For all his cynical satire, Altman infuses the film with much that is positive about Americans, and climaxes with an exhilarating reaffirmation of life in the face of death and despair. Both Brewster and Barbara Jean become symbols of the aspirations, struggles, successes and failures of the American Dream, and are destroyed at the peak of their identification with all that is most typically American. Society destroys its heroes? Perhaps. Maybe the People participate vicariously in the fall of the hero, then revel in the passing of the myth. Celebration of the enduring community is the province of the People, not of individuals. Altman’s is a Fordian sort of populism: Brewster McCloud’s circus parade and Nashville’s “It Don’t Worry Me” both evoke resurrection, but of the community, not of the fallen hero.

The people of Presbyterian Church put out the fire while McCabe dies: The moment of the little guy’s destruction is again the moment of reaffirmation of the community spirit. Insofar as the community survives the hero, it may be said to participate in his destruction. Yet this is not a matter for mourning, for the hero’s legacy makes survival of the community possible, and that is worth celebrating.

The central conceit of Nashville, and of all Altman’s work in the 1970s, is to blur, even obliterate, the distinction between performers and their audiences; between entertainers and their statements about the community; between individuals and society; and, of course, between movie-images and movie-goers. In Nashville, Altman picks his characters out of crowds, and puts them back there; follows one, then another; watches them or leaves them alone (a conceit that he would later exaggerate in the self-satirical and Welles-lampooning opening shot of The Player). They attract our attention from within the frame more often than they conspicuously enter it. In A Wedding there are twice as many characters to keep track of in the same way, too many of whom, in mid-shot, look like too many of the others—which is of course part of the point of both A Wedding (as it is, much later, of Gosford Park).

Altman’s use of a resident stock company of actors, à la Bergman, gives his world a hermetic, mythic property, while stressing his underlying populism. Every time an Altman hero is ritualistically destroyed, like the Fisher King (Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville), or punctured and debunked (The Long Goodbye, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Quintet), or dispersed among so many characters that no more distinction exists between lead and supporting player (M*A*S*H, Nashville, A Wedding, Health), the star system and “old Hollywood” are subverted, along with the top-down capitalistic hierarchy that created them.

"We’re not supposed to be in Cambodia."

—GIs confront the limitation on human behavior, and imperceptibly cross the line, Apocalypse Now—

The Fisher-King is celebrated and destroyed. The individual is replaced by the community, just as families and friendships are replaced by alliances in Quintet (and, by the way, in The Godfather). Power is transformed, redefined, redistributed; the People survive; and it remains for the Poet to chronicle the passing of the Hero. The centrality of this timeless mythic experience to contemporary life and art is insisted upon in Apocalypse Now, where we see conspicuously displayed copies of the poems of T.S. Eliot, Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, and the omnipresent spectre, however disturbed, of Joseph Conrad. Altman’s world borders, and minutely overlaps, that of Francis Ford Coppola.

"Michael, we’re bigger than U. S. Steel!"

—Hyman Roth, The Godfather, Part II—

The two Godfather films of the 1970s form a sweeping parable about the decline of the family in America. They are built on a series of formalized, family-based rituals central to the Italian-Catholic mythos: Baptism, First Communion, wedding, feast, festival, funeral. The “family”-centered world of organized crime is a metaphor—perhaps an equation—for the ruthless, dehumanizing practice of American capitalism (of which the making of movies is inescapably a part). Based first on family structure and the need to protect interests closest to home and heart (Vito), corporate enterprise ends by dehumanizing (Sonny), denying (Fredo), and alienating (Michael) its own foundation.

Yet that top-down capitalistic hierarchy, in whose face Altman continually flies, enjoys a less assailable position in Coppola’s world. It is the preeminent reality by which all individuals are defined. Throughout the Godfather films we are reminded of the close connections among the business of crime, the workings of government, and the protective role of the military. The emphasis placed on Michael’s uniform, and on the important day he enlisted in the army, speaks as much to the military’s place in the overall capitalist picture as to the impossibility of true heroic gesture in the world of The Godfather.

"Save me, Don Corleone. Pull a few strings."

—Consigliere Cenco on his deathbed, The Godfather—

The absence of heroes—even artificial ones—distinguishes Coppola’s world from Altman’s. Genco’s plea to Vito Corleone to save him from death illustrates the limitations of temporal power, even as it reflects human unwillingness to recognize those limitations. Instead of heroes ritualistically sacrificed to the betterment of the community, Coppola presents power gods, in whom all authority is vested and all trust placed by the mass. Unlike Altman, Coppola eschews close shots in crowd scenes. The wedding party in The Godfather is shot without close-ups, contrasting starkly with the ferocious ECUs of the intercut scenes in the Don’s office. Close-ups in Coppola’s films are reserved for the dark confessional zone where power meets morality head-on. Chiaroscuro cinematography clashes shadowy half-light with the blinding glare from windows to the outside world—a brightness that intensifies the interior dark with which it collides, while blurring the outlines of the characters themselves, who melt into light when not hidden in shadow. They become their milieu.

"We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, Senator. But never think that it applies to my family."

—Don Michael Corleone, The Godfather, Part II—

Michael’s willful separation of himself from his family signals the collapse of family altogether—inevitable in a world where the word “family” has become a euphemism. Michael is as cool and as capable an administrator as Vito, unlike the hot-headed and impulsive Sonny. Yet Michael differs crucially from Vito: The all-consuming love and family feeling that inform Vito’s actions are paid mere lip-service by Michael. Vito’s empire is built not on money, fear, or force, but on favors. “Just remember I did you a favor” is the Don’s appeal to personal honor, whose bond builds him a vast network of loyal supporters. Vito’s approach is to Michael’s as barter is to corporate commerce. Michael, not Vito, is the herald of big business and its dehumanizing objectivity.

Michael’s rejection of his family to Kay at his sister’s wedding (“That’s my family, Kay—it’s not me”) betrays his lack of the kind of love-inspired solidarity that Vito and Sonny have in spades. For that reason, Michael’s later acts must be seen as a drive for power, his love and protection of his family a mere posture, even as Senator Geary says it is.

"By being strong for his family, can he lose it?"

"You can never lose your family."

"Times are changing."

—Conversation between Michael and Mama, The Godfather, Part II—

At the end of The Godfather Michael condescends “this one time” to let Kay ask about his affairs, then lies to her. The gap between the Don and his family widens, stressed by lens distances and the repeated motif of closing doors and gates. By the end of The Godfather, Part II, Kay has become something like a good Sicilian wife, kneeling at prayer and lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness.

"You can kill anyone."

—A lesson from history, The Godfather, Part II—

Michael, meanwhile, in an almost Hays Code justice, ends up alone, bitter, cautious, unhappy, his “plans for my future” irrevocably altered, the ranks of friends and family decimated along with those of enemies. Yet he remains an imposing power: He owns a senator, commands the loyalty of a few good men, and has a son, to whom will pass hereditary leadership of the family, or what’s left of it—and therein lies the rub. Coppola, the individualist, in many ways the anti-Altman, stresses Michael’s lost soul and underplays the survival of his empire. And he does this not only to moralize but also to alert us to his real interest: not the achievements of power, but power itself. Coppola in the 1970s is already the man who would make Tucker, The Godfather, Part III, and Dracula.

"You’re not supposed to get involved."

—Credo of a wiretap and a prostitute, The Conversation—

Michael Corleone’s coolness epitomizes the suppression of emotion and personal involvement in the face of the naked brutality of power. In The Conversation, wiretap Harry Caul is as alone as Michael, but at the other end of the scale: powerless. “I don’t have any personal property,” he says, “nothing of value.” Moran calls him “Lonely and Anonymous.” He tells Meredith, the hooker, “I don’t need anyone.” Michael postures love to mask its absence; Harry boasts of professional detachment (“I don’t care what they’re talking about; I just want a nice, fat recording”) to hide the depth of his sensitivity (“I’m not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder.”). To a huge ear, glimpsed dimly through a screen, Harry gives the confession of his life, then quickly disclaims, “But I’m not responsible…”

Concluding on the face of the evidence that he is once again an accessory to a murder he is powerless to stop, Harry hides from the act, and from his own guilt, by covering himself with blankets and turning the television up full-volume. His freedom is increasingly limited by moral compunction and the spectre of his own responsibility. He is Kurtz before the horror.

"Have you ever considered that the greatest freedom is freedom from the opinions of others, and from your own opinions?"

—Colonel Walter E. Kurtz—

Through the transference of power from Harry Caul to his tormentors, and the transition of Harry from bugger to buggee, tool to victim, Coppola’s sympathies seem to be with him, and against the cold-blooded practitioners of power who, like Michael Corleone, survive only by emptying out the world. Yet The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II betray a growing fascination with the process whereby conventional morality, and even private morality, is totally suppressed. Coppola begins to take a certain delight in witnessing the corruption of the incorruptible, seeing the embrace of power as liberation from responsibility for men like Michael Corleone, Kurtz, and Willard. The offer is made to Harry Caul, who becomes instead an eternal victim because of his inability to renounce guilt. Michael and Willard are more willing wearers of the mantle of power. Even though the theatrical release and the redux version of Apocalypse Now no longer end, as originally planned, with Willard’s accession to Kurtz’s profane throne, both Willard and Coppola are irrevocably impressed with the denial of moral responsibility that Kurtz’s vision of freedom-as-power offers. A significant change from Conrad is Coppola’s emphasis on Kurtz’s son as the proposed recipient of his jungle reminiscences, replacing the quite different implication of Kurtz’s references to his “intended” in Heart of Darkness.

"Never get out of the boat."

—What a crewman learns from a tiger, Apocalypse Now—

Coppola takes a back door into the war, and uses it as metaphor and milieu, never as subject. In reiterating Conrad’s long, slow, relentless journey from the bustling center of civilization to the primitive limits of human experience, Coppola has recourse to one of the most often-remarked and psychologically shattering aspects of Vietnam: the high speed with which men were taken in and out of the war, from safety to harm’s way in minutes—almost as if “the war” were a place. “Disneyland,” Lance Johnson calls it.

At one end of Captain Willard’s mission to the primitive is a roast beef dinner, where a comically grotesque, self-important G-2 type maps out the strategy of passing food around the table, while another spills a top secret file and mutters “Shit!” At the other end is Cambodia, the arbitrary but emphatic limit to acceptable behavior (“We’re not supposed to be in Cambodia”). Cuing off the kaleidoscopic shifts from civilization to primitivism that scarred so many Vietnam veterans, from tape decks and Playboy bunnies to elemental confrontation with violence, atrocity and death, Coppola adopts a surreal approach to his subject. No titles open the film, and the first words heard are “This is the end,” a joke that signals both the apocalyptic intent and the disorientation of the film to come. A burning helicopter in a tree is not the only reminder of Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, another long river-trip in which the primitive swallows the civilized and reality fades into its own denial.

But Coppola employs his surrealism inconsistently. The uncompromising realism of his depiction of atrocity and violence strikes a discordant note with the farcical portrayal of the perpetrators of outrage—the cardboard Colonel Kilgore, the motley riverboat crew, the wild-eyed photojournalist, the larger-than-life Kurtz. The atrocities seem real, but the people who commit them are cartoons. It is as if Coppola—the man who wrote Patton—wants to indict atrocity, but not to assign (or accept) responsibility for it.

"Don’t look at the camera! Keep moving ahead, like you’re fighting!"

—A movie director, Apocalypse Now—

Coppola’s cameo in Apocalypse Now as an agitated film director determined to get good footage whether anything is happening or not is a nod to the role of the news media as a controlling force in the war. But it’s also a telling metaphor: the film director as general. Coppola first seems to identify himself with Willard, who says in voice-over, “To tell his story is to tell my own, and if his is a confession, I guess mine is, too.” But Coppola is more Kurtz than Willard, and finally more Kilgore than Kurtz.

“It is judgment that defeats us,” says Kurtz. “You have the right to kill me, but not to judge me.”—Coppola to his critics? Kurtz is less like Chef’s judgment of him (“He’s worse’n crazy—he’s evil!”) than like Nietzsche, struggling to live beyond good and evil. To violate one’s own moral sensitivity out of sheer will—that is what Kurtz stands for here, a rather more explicit “horror” than Conrad was willing to present. Kurtz confronts and accepts the savage in himself, bows to the “genius” of primitive, violent willpower. “He is clear in his mind,” says the photojournalist, in a line straight from Conrad, “but his soul is mad.”

In a land and an experience from which there is never any real going back, Kurtz alone has gone all the way. For both Coppola and Conrad—but in distinctly different ways—the height of madness, and of power, is to make oneself a god. Apocalypse Now is Coppola’s most personal and stark confrontation with the question that has obsessed him all along: What dark vision makes a man abandon his moral ideals and embrace power for its own sake? The departure from customary morality—both that imposed by social norms and that dictated from within—is seen by Coppola not as a degeneration but as a liberation, freedom as unabashed flirtation with raw manipulative power—the kind of power that, at its worst, is marked by arrogance and contempt; the power once wielded by the Hollywood moguls, and was now, in the Zoetrope 1970s, wielded by Coppola’s own production system over his actors, his investors, and his public.

When Apocalypse Now first appeared, a friend remarked to me that the film’s voyage into the heart of darkness is less intense than the novel’s because Coppola, unlike Conrad, had not made that voyage in himself. I agreed then. Today I think differently: Coppola did make the voyage; but unlike Conrad he had not returned.

Where Robert Altman—cynical but hopeful populist who rose from television to become a new voice—insists upon the rejuvenation of the people through a ritual death signifying the redefinition and redistribution of power, Francis Ford Coppola—cynical despairing realist who rose through the studio system to become a new mogul himself—is very nearly his opposite, reasserting the solidification of power in the individual. If, in this backward glance, Altman and Coppola seem to emerge the Trotsky and Stalin of Hollywood in the 1970s, it only emphasizes, in that crucial decade, both how much and how little the business of making movies had changed.
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Robert C. Cumbow has been writing about film for nearly 40 years. His work has appeared in Film Comment, Film Quarterly, the Seattle Film Society journals Movietone News and The Informer, and in numerous newspapers. He is the author of Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone and Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter, both available from Scarecrow Press. He is especially proud of his liner notes for the Rhino Records/Turner Classic Movies edition of the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bob is a trademark/copyright lawyer, heads the intellectual property practice at Graham & Dunn, Seattle, and teaches Trademark Law and Advertising Law at Seattle University School of Law.

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Mad Men Mondays: Season Two, Episode 8, "A Night to Remember" and Episode 9, "Six Months' Leave"

By Andrew Johnston

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was my shock and grief over the suicide of David Foster Wallace, Mad Men Mondays just didn’t happen two weeks ago. When Matt Seitz suggested recapping “A Night to Remember” and “Six Months’ Leave” together in one column, I realized that the two flow together relatively seamlessly in a way very few Mad Men episodes do: Betty’s depression in “Six Months' Leave” follows her long-simmering anger over Don’s affair, which erupted earlier and further crystallized when she threw out Don after seeing one of Jimmy Barrett’s Utz commercials during a rerun of Make Room For Daddy. On top of all this, the hour contrasts Betty, who is depressed about something immediate and personal, against the Sterling Cooper women mourning the death of Marilyn Monroe. The episodes' presentation of the challenges faced by American women in 1962 invites a tandem consideration.

Ironically, I watched “Six Months' Leave” for the second time the night before I learned of Wallace's death. The contrast between the fictional reactions to Monroe’s demise and the fresh reactions to Wallace’s passing was fascinating. I’ve always been one of those who think that people who say American pop culture is more fragmented than ever are just exaggerating--but while almost everyone in my circle of friends was affected by Wallace’s death to some degree, upon hard reflection I realized that his passing really probably had an impact on only a few hundred thousand people in the U.S., while Monroe’s death united millions, perhaps more, in grief. Although women were more deeply affected by it, her passing was a blow to men, too, Roger and Don’s hard-shell reactions nothwithstanding. (It would have been nice to get a glimpse of Sal’s response.) And it’s not every day that a news story would lead to Don, Peggy and the elevator operator speaking freely with each other. If Mad Men sticks to schedule, the timeline will sail right by the Kennedy assassination; lacking an opportunity to present one of the few 20th century events shocking enough to unite the whole country, the creative staff may have settled on Monroe’s death as the next best thing (and it also creates the intriguing historical argument that Monroe’s death, even as a simple suicide, was the herald of all that would follow in the ‘60s, as each successive death of a politician or rock star was seen as evidence of a giant conspiracy whose motives were too complex for mere mortals to understand).

Fancy sociological BS aside, though, in many respects the divergent responses to Monroe’s death are a perfect metaphor for the gulf between men and women on Mad Men. When Betty makes it to the riding club halfway through the episode, it starts to seem as if she’s escaped her squalor (Betty doesn’t need Carla or even Don to keep the house clean, but when she decides to let go, she doesn’t fuck around). It’s soon apparent that her true motive was to let Sarah Beth have lunch alone with Arthur. Consciously or not, Betty just closed off her safest avenue for a revenge-affair with which to torture Don. Still, as we learned in the season-opening “For Those Who Think Young,” Betty has other avenues for expressing her sexuality.

“Night”’s title, of course, evokes that of Walter Lord’s 1955 nonfiction book about the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic, which leads one to expect a much bigger crisis than Betty’s embarrassment at the dinner party (I’m inclined to think that, per Don, it’s the drunken antics of Mrs. Colson that the guests are more likely to remember than anything). The title might have been a better fit for “Leave,” where it could have applied to either the death of Marilyn Monroe or Don and Roger’s night out with Freddie, which ends disastrously for two of the three of them.

We never got to see how Don and Betty patched things up after “The Wheel” (or how long it took them to do so), but the opening scene of “Night”, in which Betty exerts herself riding like never before, makes it clear that she’s building up a strong head of steam and is ready to blow. She returns from the ride before Don has even woken, and we’re soon treated to another example of the domestic laziness that always drives Betty bananas. (Don doesn’t seem to mind breaking out the tools on Sally’s behalf, as in “Marriage of Figaro”, but whenever Betty asks him to do something, his first response is always, “Why can’t we call a repairman?”) This time, however, Betty’s frustrated response is further evidence that her knowledge of Don’s affair has turned her into a ticking bomb.

Betty’s passive-aggressive insistence on perfection--we get a doozy of an example when she destroys that chair--comes to an end after she searches Don’s desk for evidence to prove Jimmy’s allegations of the Don-Bobbie affair (at first, I thought she’d find something Dick Whitman-related instead) and then completely falls apart after she gets her annoyance about the Heineken gambit off her chest and throws Don out, creating the circumstances necessary for the house to slide into chaos. Neatness, as we’ve always seen, is a point of pride for Betty, but all of us, at some point, arrive at a place where we just don’t have the strength.

If I had written this recap on schedule, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to look at Paramount’s amazing new Blu-ray discs of the Godfather films (using the same restoration being shown at Film Forum as its source material), and thereby wouldn’t be in a position to compare Don and Betty’s final conversations to some of the great (if somewhat overly hysterical, thanks to Diane Keaton’s acting) shouting matches between Michael Corleone and Kay Adams. Because we know Don and Betty will presumably get back together (it’s too early for a permanent split if the series is aiming for a long run), nothing in the scene at the end of “Night” has the chilling force of the door being shut in Kay’s face after she sees a parade of soldiers kissing his hand, proving the falsehood of his answer a moment earlier when he let her ask one question--only one--about the family business, which he pledges to answer honestly.

Using similar terms and language, Don baits Betty into asking him about the affair with Bobbie, which he promptly denies. He’s as convincing a liar as ever, but Betty doesn’t buy it for a second. After this, the terms of the confrontation change--now, Betty is Kay at the end of Godfather II, telling Michael that if he doesn’t really put his money where mouth as far as Corleone legitimacy goes, he’ll be looking at a lonely life indeed. Despite having strayed, the Don Draper of Season Two really does seem intent on being a better man, but he’s still screwed up enough to think he can achieve this by hiding information from Betty. As rough a spot as their relationship is in at the end of “Leave”, you can’t deny that his relationships with Sally and Bobby have strengthened significantly this season -- a fact that should have some interesting effects on the separation-in-progress.

Once Don’s Betty-targeting marketing technique was in play, he was thereafter a victim of bad luck: The dinner party seems coincidental--I don’t think Don needed Duck as a witness to prove the trick worked, and he never seemed completely comfortable having Duck there. Duck’s presence was pretty clearly requested by Roger, who, within the context of the business world, is star-struck by Crab’s gig with Rogers & Cowan and eager to form an alliance between SC and the public relations giant. The gambit may have succeeded because of how well Don knows Betty; the flipside of that--even though she’s forever complaining about his inscrutability and refusal to discuss his past--is that she knows Don pretty darn well, too. Under the circumstances, the poor guy didn’t stand a chance

Peggy’s continued rise at Sterling Cooper may seem like no more than fallout from the heart-rending story of Freddie Rumsen’s departure from the agency that drives “Six Months' Leave," but in fact it’s the reverse of Joan’s plot line in “A Night to Remember." Peggy ascends into Freddie Rumsen’s job because, despite his drinking, he was a clear-eyed judge of talent who saw the wisdom of giving her a break long ago. In "Night," Joan proves ideally suited to the requirements of Harry’s new TV department via her skill as a pitchwoman and her knack for insight into soap opera-caliber TV; third on the list of assets are her looks, to which clients are as vulnerable as anyone else. Yet it's important to note that the clients, having no prior impression of Joan, soak in her skills alongside the va-va-voom factor; for the lads at SC who are used to seeing Joan flaunt her body daily, her looks would seem to cancel out any possibility of talent.

Because Peggy has always had a touch of the librarian to her, clients have generally been inclined to look at her work first and pay attention to her sex appeal second. In the case of Father Gill, even if he was attracted to Peggy (an issue that’s open for debate), he couldn’t do anything about it (at least not with having to, oh, throw his entire life down the toilet for a woman who clearly has no interest in him). Because of this, Peggy is pretty offended--and rightly so--when the little old ladies running the CYO dance don’t realize that they’re in the clients’ role here, and fail to show due respect for her job. Petty takes a shot at reminding Father Gill of her authority by bringing the padre to the office so he can see her in action. Unbeknownst to her, Gill has a second agenda--getting Peggy to come clean about secretly being a single mother. He brings with him enough bait to catch half the fish in the North Atlantic, but she doesn’t take any of it.

Peggy’s rise from the steno pool to senior writer in just over two years is the kind of feat that would earn a male ad man the label "prodigy." But as far as the men of SC are concerned, poor Peggy’s accomplishments will (for the time being, anyway) come with an asterisk attached. To Pete, she only made it so far because of the patronage of Freddie. To Don, her success is entirely his responsibility, a means of saying “Fuck you!” to Pete and Duck after they “ambushed” Don in Roger’s office, making it impossible for him to mount a coordinated defense of Freddie.

Freddie Rumsen’s story line is, to my mind, one of the most tragic and heart-rending the series has given us. Part of is is because I really love Freddie as a character--until Duck came along, he was the only guy at SC who really seemed like an “old advertising hand.” Roger has never looked at the industry from anything but an ivy-tower perspective, and most of his gnomic insights into the field sound like they were cribbed from a book, and while Bert Cooper’s knowledge of the field is deep and nuanced, he plays the game at an Olympian level nobody else at SC can access. Freddie is the only one who seemed like an industry lifer -- a trench veteran who entered the field with natural instincts that sharpened over the years; a man inclined to party with junior execs half his age not because everyone his cohort has cleaned up or died, but because he has a true zeal for the business that other old-timers lost long ago.

Freddie’s story is long overdue vis-à-vis the depiction of alcoholism on Mad Men: It’s the first time the show has argued that there are alcoholics and there are alcoholics. There are those who can keep a bottle in their office and celebrate a win the way, say, Don or Ken might, and there are those incapable of getting out of bed without taking a drink, and who use alcohol as a means of pushing the rest of the world away from them. If you’re unfortunate enough to have had much experience with that kind of alcoholic, Freddie’s last night on the town is truly painful to watch: At one level, like Peggy, you might think that in light of all the forgiveness that gets thrown around SC, Freddie deserves another chance. On the other hand, though, it’s fairly indisputable that it’s just a matter of time until the Freddie-style alcoholic pisses himself again (or does something worse) as part of a long, slow slide into self-destruction.

Clearly, Freddie’s final scene with Don and Roger faintly hints that, lacking any direction in life without his job, he might take his own life. I’d much rather see him dry out and land at another agency, but one of the problems when one develops an affection for this kind of alcoholic is that one tends to root for unlikely or improbable outcomes when the dry facts make the likeliest outcome all too evident. I’m told that there’s an AA saying to the effect of “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.” The statement is equally relevant to alcoholics and to people who care for them.

It's fascinating how easily the drinkers jumped to the conclusion that it only made sense for Duck, as a (supposed) teetotaler, to bear a serious animus toward Freddie. People today don’t often jump to the automatic conclusion that everybody who doesn’t smoke weed has an ipso facto hatred of stoners or that all vegans have it in for carnivores. Mad Men takes place just three decades after the end of prohibition, meaning Roger, Duck and Freddie were all adults (perhaps albeit just barely) when the 21st amendment was ratified, making it possible for them to drink (legally) for the first time in their lives). Is it possible that kneejerk anti-alcoholism, or anti-teetotalerism among social drinkers as well as addicts, were more common when America’s greatest failed social experiment was still part of living memory?

Equally interesting (in a way much more specific to how the season is playing out) was the revelation of Pete’s particular contempt for alcoholics like Freddie, who he sneeringly refers to as “those people." We haven’t gotten many details about the late Andrew Campbell’s drinking habits (other than the mere fact that he was a WASP, which brings with it baggage and preconceptions galore), but it’s obvious that at some point Pete was severely traumatized by a full-on, binge-drinking, pants-pissing, can’t-stand-up-for-falling-down alcoholic, and that had a huge negative influence on the development of his personality and worldview. We’ve only seen Duck slide off the wagon once thus far, but if he continues to drink, and if his drinking gains momentum, whatever respect and regard Pete might have for him would turn to ash the moment Pete caught wind of it.

After Don and Roger bid Freddie adieu, they go out for a nightcap, and Don gives Roger a pep talk which doubles as an explanation of his desire to improve himself. Roger, unfortunately, misunderstands Don, and, in a bombshell move, he tells his wife Mona that he wants a divorce. Roger suggested the possibility of running off together to Joan more than once in Season One, but he never seemed too serious about it. His general attitude--extending to his wife and daughter as well as his mistresses--is that if you pay another man to handle your women problems, everything will take care of itself. After slowly backsliding toward his S1 level of decadence, Roger has reached escape velocity from his own life and making a mistake he’s sure to regret (and for which Bert Cooper is sure to crucify him) given the importance his profession places on appearances.

The episode ends on a note of slight unclarity: Whom, exactly, is Roger dumping Mona for? If it’s Jane, then things between them must have gotten much more serious off-camera than we realized; having the relationship reach that level without much to tip the audience off feels like a bit of a cheat, given the way Mad Men has tended to dole out info to the audience. If it’s Joan for whom he’s getting a divorce, the move is clearly intended to take her by surprise as much as Mona or anyone else. If Joan won’t accept his flirtatious entreaties to get back together, Roger thinks, I may as well break out my nuclear option while I still have the time. The facts will be revealed (or cleared up) soon enough; in the meantime, I expect a lot of interesting discussion from fans arguing both sides.

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Miscellaneous Notes: TV shows set in New York have a long history of giving out bogus addresses for the buildings characters live in, but that’s been happening less and less of late, probably because HDTV makes it a lot easier to toss in “easter eggs” that viewers can actually pick up on (and because obsessive TV nerds just love looking that stuff up on the Internet). 30 Rock in particular has been jammed full of actual NYC addresses used in contexts where writers would once break out the geographical equivalent of a “555” phone number. The point? Any serious 30 Rock fan knows that Liz Lemon’s address is 160 Riverside Dr., a very nice-looking building which has its entrance on W. 88th St. Freddie Rumsen, we learn tonight, lives at 152 Riverside, which is just around the corner, between 87th and 88th. Freddie’s building doesn’t look quite as nice as Liz’s -- at least not today -- but being on the avenue itself gives him a better shot at a nice view. I bet Liz’s building is already part of one Upper West Side walking tour or another; the inclusion (or not) of Freddie’s will make for a pretty interesting index to the “market penetration” (as it were) of Mad Men.

Since my footnotes have come to seem a little repetitive of late when discussing historical facts (“Weiner and the researchers got this right...”, “Weiner & co. got that right...”), I’m going to take a different tack and remind them that historical accuracy shouldn’t come at the expense of continuity, as “Six Months' Leave” takes what seemed like a timeline that was pretty meticulously developed over the course of S1 and then smashes it it pieces.

I’m referring, of course, to the reference to Freddie having known Roger’s father. It was fairly definitively established in the first season that Sterling Sr. perished in World War I, after he’d co-founded the agency and sired Roger but before the agency had become much of a success. For Freddie to have realistically worked at SC while Sterling Sr. was there, he’d need to have been born circa 1897 (making him a 20-year-old newbie in 1917, just before Sterling’s enlistment) and 65 years old in “Six Months’ Leave”. Joel Murray is 45 in real life, and I doubt I could accept Freddie as being any older than 52 or so without major cosmetic makeup being brought into play. The Signal Corps position that Roger says Freddie held would be believable for someone in their mid-late 30s, the age Freddie would have been during WWII if born in 1897, but it leaves unanswered the question of why Freddie wouldn’t have enlisted (or been drafted) for WWI at an age when he was a much more appropriate candidate for military service. The issue of how Roger, who was in the Navy in the Pacific, would have known Freddie in the war if the latter was in the Army and in Europe may seem like another bumble, but it can be easily fanwanked by Freddie being a prewar employee of SC. Some people may not have a problem with any of this, but having Freddie be 60+ is something I can’t easily swallow.

On a lighter note, via a New York Times blog which in turn linked to a blog run by one of my best friend’s closest college pals which in turn linked to a Flickr collection, I found this incredible collection of Mad Men-themed illustrations on Flickr by a woman who uses the alias “Dyna Moe”. Apparently Rich Somer came across Dyna’s unrelated art last year and commissioned her to do the Christmas card he planned to give other cast members. The experience turned her into a Mad Man fanatic, and she now illustrates each episode with an image conveniently sized to serve as computer desktop wallpaper (some have also been resized for use as iPhone wallpapers). The illustrations (another of which opens this week's notes section, above) are just cooler than hell, and I can’t urge you strongly enough to check them out.

Finally, allow me to extend my congratulations to Matthew Weiner and his crackerjack cast and crew for their stunning success at the Emmys last week. Sure, it sucks that none of the acting nominees won, but as John Slattery’s knowing and gracious nod to richly deserving winner Zeljko Ivanek--both of whom have spent years in the trenches--reminds us, individual recognition often tastes sweeter the longer one has been working for it. The basic cable drama explosion has been a godsend for actors like Slattery and Ivanek, brilliant guys who work mostly on the stage or on East Coast-based TV shows and have been semi-anonymously racking up Tony nominations, Ben Brantley raves and Drama Desk awards over the years. This year, it was just Ivanek’s turn (his terrific work in John Adams and In Bruges didn’t hurt things either). Slattery and Hamm are sure to be recognized by the academy in the future; this year, the awards Mad Men received--Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series and the big magilla itself, Outstanding Drama Series,are the ones the show needed to win to establish itself. As one of the few first-year shows in history to successfully grab the brass ring, it seems almost certain now that Matthew Weiner will have the freedom to do what he wants with the show and its overall direction. Based on Aaron Staton’s beard at the ceremony, I assume S2 has officially wrapped; when production begins on the third season, I’m hopeful that it’ll do so with a new sense of confidence that takes this brilliant series even further into the stratosphere than ever.
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Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.

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What Would A Real Director Do?: Choke

By Lauren Wissot

[Choke is now playing in limited release. Click here to read Lauren's Spout Blog interview with source novel author Chuck Palahniuk.]

Choke—Clark Gregg’s film adaptation of the book by literary darling Chuck Palahniuk—is, according to the press notes, “the subversively comedic tale of Victor Mancini, con artist, sex addict, Colonial village re-enactor, angst-filled son, serial restaurant choker … and unsuspecting romantic antihero for our unsettling times.” This jam-packed one-liner should give some indication as to what Gregg was up against in attempting to translate Palahniuk’s prose to the screen. David Fincher had an equally difficult challenge with the author’s Fight Club, but unlike Fincher, Gregg is an actor and first-time filmmaker hailing from the theater world (a founding member and former artistic director of the Atlantic Theater Company) whose only qualifications to script-write and direct the cult novel seem to be friends with money, a love of the book, and Palahniuk’s blessing. Well, sometimes love and money and a pat on the head just ain’t enough.

In other words, Clark Gregg is in way over his head. Choke reminded me of what happened when wunderkind playwright Martin McDonagh took to the lens with In Bruges and ended up with something resembling a pale imitation of The Lieutenant of Inishmore—though at least McDonagh had the good sense to direct his own original material and to attempt a short film, the Academy Award-winning Six Shooter, before even presuming to tackle a feature. Gregg’s film is simply an exercise in self-defeating hubris (the press notes even quote him as saying, “In retrospect, I didn’t realize how difficult a balancing act it would be to make it work on those trenchant dramatic levels and still have it be funny”—ya think?).

Palahniuk’s dense novels require as delicate a tightrope walk as Terry Southern’s books. As in Southern’s Candy—though unlike David Duchovny—the sex addict characters in Choke aren’t supposed to be sexy (it’s satire after all), which makes this a project perfectly suited to John Waters (though he’s already tread similar sex territory a thousand times more skillfully in A Dirty Shame) to Gus Van Sant (see To Die For) or to Todd Haynes (who managed to pull off the comparably loony Velvet Goldmine). Any of these directors plus Fincher or Cronenberg or even Alex Cox—see Repo Man—could have gotten the job artfully done. Instead, with Gregg at the helm, Choke becomes a wishy-washy mess. The first-timer is indecisive, has no idea if he’s going for black humor or light drama, his balancing act leading to a Victor Mancini-like refusal to commit to anything instead of fully committing to all opposing forces. His default mode is an over-reliance on Palahniuk’s own words, rendering the film pointless (I’ll just read the book and get more of the good stuff!)

Surprisingly, even with talented Tim Orr as DP, the camerawork is grating. Poor Orr seems rather bored, merely panning back and forth between the characters as they speak, slowly zooming in for a close up or pulling back every once in awhile. The editing is equally predictable—and jarring in its choppiness and near warp speed. As sex addict and maybe messiah Victor, Sam Rockwell makes an earnest attempt not to overact, but ends up doing just that. “I saw Victor as a kind of an amalgam of all the great movie anti-heroes,” Rockwell claims in the press notes. “I was thinking of Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke and Albert Finney in Tom Jones—and even John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa.” (As Victor’s chronic masturbator buddy Denny would say, “Dude, what are you talking about?”)

Anjelica Huston—the sexiest character of all when she appears as the younger version of Victor’s mom Ida—looks fab in gritty black, like a chic reject from the Velvet Underground. (Too bad she didn’t direct.) The downright distracting music, which has no feel for the film, comes courtesy of “composer Nathan Larson (the former lead guitarist of the influential band Shudder to Think)—who collaborated entirely by phone and e-mail with Clark Gregg from his private studio without ever meeting in person.” (Yes, the press notes even mention this misstep—along with the kismet coincidence of both Palahniuk and Gregg listening to Radiohead as they worked on their separate versions of Choke, as if they’d both been tuned to the same obscure Tuvan throat singer—as a point of pride!)

But most unforgivably, the material is played 100% straight—which is absolutely wrong! If Gregg wants to do social satire like Choke he’d be well advised to check out Dr. Strangelove or any of Southern’s work, in which the performances and production design are anything but realistic. In fact, Gregg’s straightforward storytelling actually emphasizes the many black holes in the plot that require us to make magnificent leaps of faith—which is easy to do while reading, but rendered impossible by Gregg’s tonal inconsistency. Let’s just say the characters in Palahniuk’s novels, as was equally apparent in Fincher’s Fight Club, get away with a lot of wrongdoing that would only be possible in an alternate reality. Fincher understood this, which is why Fight Club oftentimes feels as surreal as a Dali painting. But Gregg chooses to ground even the most fantastic occurrences in absolute reality, much like his own character in the film, Lord High Charlie, who demands exacting attention to detail in the fake Colonial village where Victor is employed as a “re-enactor.”

Case in point: Rockwell chose to swallow slices of watermelon to simulate Victor’s choking—to make it more believable. Yet the minute Victor starts choking in a restaurant, he stands up and starts swerving from table to table looking for his mark, the rich person who will “save” him, take him under his/her wing and send him money for the rest of his life—none of which is even remotely believable. So why on earth is it so important to Gregg for the choking itself to appear realistic? And wouldn’t it be funnier, more consistent—and, yes, more to the point of the novel!—if Victor’s choking didn’t look remotely real? One of Palahniuk’s running themes is that people will believe what they want to believe, that fantasies and delusions are necessary tools for survival. Yet in his headlong rush towards “believability,” Gregg never thought to question that very quest in the first place.

Yes, Choke is still funny—but the movie actually diminishes the humor of the book by trying too hard to be both hilarious and warm and fuzzy. The audience I saw it with laughed out loud during several scenes—but with Palahniuk you should be rolling in the aisles! And every giggly morsel came courtesy of a flashing red signal such as Rockwell rolling his eyes as if to say, “Get ready, this next line’s gonna be a doozy!” Indeed, it comes as no surprise that, according to Gregg (yup, those damning press notes again), Rockwell “was listening to the book on tape on an endless loop, over and over, throughout the entire production. Later when I watched dailies I realized that his ‘improvs’ often contained his favorite lines from the novel.” Bingo! Oftentimes I did feel like I was watching a book on tape.

The entire film seems contained in quotation marks. Not only did I half-expect to hear canned laughter, but I found myself wishing for it if only to drown out the onslaught of hipster music (producer/musician Dave Matthews obviously didn’t want to leave any of his indie friends off the soundtrack), cuing me in to each character’s emotion. The flashback sequences and Victor’s overabundant narration are heavy-handed, painfully conventional—the exact opposite of Palahniuk’s novel. It’s as if the uncomfortable nervousness and eagerness of a first time director (“I really, really want you to like me!”) has seeped right into the frame.

Even Gregg’s producer Johnathan Dorfman admits in the notes, “The film was a very intense crash course in filmmaking for him, but he is very astute and we were right behind him the whole way.” This is after Dorfman himself discloses that he and his fellow producers “each took home the script and the very next day we were all on the phone saying we’ve got to do this … None of us had read the book. We all came to it fresh and thought it was extremely good.” Alas, perhaps they should have read the book—or at least the press kit’s opening quote from Palahniuk’s Choke. It quite adequately sums up my thoughts on the film. “If you are going to read this, don’t bother. After a couple pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece. Save yourself.” The movie version of Choke is bitter proof of what can happen when wise warnings go unheeded.

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Brooklyn-based writer Lauren Wissot is the publisher of the blog Beyond the Green Door, the author of the memoir Under My Master's Wings, and a columnist for Spout Blog.

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Links for the Day (September 28th, 2008)

1. "New Dylan album to stream on NPR.com": From MSNBC.

["Bob Dylan’s new album shall be released one week early as a free online stream on National Public Radio’s Web site. NPR Music will stream the entire two-CD, “Tell Tale Signs,” beginning at 12:01 a.m. EDT Tuesday. It will be available for listening at least until Oct. 7, when the album is officially released by Columbia Records. “Tell Tale Signs” is the eighth volume of Dylan’s ongoing rarities compilations, titled the “Bootleg Series.” This edition includes out-takes and rare cuts from the last two decades. An alternate version of “Mississippi” — a song from 2001’s “Love and Theft” — was earlier made available as a free download at Amazon.com."]

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2. Some reaction to the "Film Criticism in Crisis" panel held yesterday at Lincoln Center: From MGJR, James van Maanen, and Alison Willmore (Twittering).

["Pascual Espiritu, who blogs -- and beautifully: thoughtful, informative -- as Acquarello at Strictly Film School, told us how she (and we) ought to think of her blog; Cahiers du cinema editor Emmanuel Burdeau was perhaps the hit of the panel, offering lengthy tales of the how and why of Cahiers' current crisis, as well as telling us how very good and underrated was the film Cloverfield (I fully agree with the gentilhomme on that one); finally GreenCine's own go-to guy for what, filmwise, is worth reading on the web, David Hudson, acted (as he does on the GreenCine Daily Blog) as a connector, linking and commenting on what his co-panelists had just told us."]

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3. "Moral and Immoral Tales": Fernando F. Croce on The Romance of Astréa and Celadon, Lakeview Terrace, Burn After Reading, and The Women.

["Rohmer is reportedly Neil LaBute's favorite director, though, to judge from the hammy way he metes out his would-be provocations, William Castle would seem a much more logical candidate for his personal pantheon."]

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4. At The Evening Class, Michael Guillén interviews composer John Turner.

["Back in late June 2007 at Frameline31, one of my favorite films was Sam Zalutsky's first feature You Belong To Me, a suspenseful Polanski-style thriller with dark Hitchcockian overtones. As Pam Grady wrote for the Frameline program, this tale of gay obsession morphed into something quite unexpected as the protagonist Jeffrey (Daniel Sauli)—smitten with a one-night stand—stalks the fellow to his apartment building and rents a vacant unit in the building in hopes of getting closer to him. That's creepy enough in itself; but, it soon becomes apparent that "the rot eating at his hardwood floors is symbolic of an evil infecting the entire address." With classic indirection, the film starts off with one story and skillfully warps into another. ... What really made the movie work for me, however—along with Zalutsky's writing and direction, and Sauli and D'Arbanville's restrained performances—was composer John Turner's tense score, which held me in a Hermannesque grip. Though Turner graciously consented to an interview shortly after Frameline, I never got around to transcribing our conversation. Recently, however, he forwarded me the film's soundtrack on CD and I was reminded all over again of how commendable his contribution was to the project so—albeit belatedly—here's the transcript of our talk."]

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5. New trailers for The Spirit, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and W.

["You may find yourself in a beautiful house."]

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Quote of the Day: Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

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Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): Three more pictures from the "Film Criticism in Crisis" panel. Top to bottom: Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Hudson, and Pascual Espiritu



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Clip of the Day: The "Obama Llama Song," many times over.

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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.

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The First Presidential Debate: The Components of Attitude

By Matt Maul

Just as a hurricane threatened to halt the RNC a month ago, the drama surrounding the U.S. financial crisis, precipitated by the failure of AIG and Merrill Lynch, looked like it was going to prevent the first presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama from occurring Friday night.

In The Candidate (1972), Bill McKay (Robert Redford), a left-wing lawyer, agrees to run a hopeless Senate campaign in California against strong Republican incumbent Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter). Early on in the contest, both candidates race to the scene of a wildfire to capitalize on the PR value of consoling property damage victims on camera. However, Jarmon's take-charge persona totally overshadows McKay and relegates him to weak, second-banana status.

I think that's what McCain tried to do with his gimmicky pledge to freeze all campaign operations until a bailout bill was passed. The elder senator would race to Washington and spearhead some sort of solution to the current financial crisis, leaving Obama the Hobson's choice of impotently tagging along or staying in Mississippi to debate with himself.

It's clear to me why the McCain team did it. A perception that McCain ads dishonestly sling mud, Sarah Palin's poor performance during the Katie Couric interview, and the senator’s contradictory statements about the "fundamental soundness" of the economy while calling for the head of SEC chairman Christopher Cox had all taken their toll on his campaign. When you're in a hole, quit digging. So this "time-out," in my opinion, was designed to stop the bleeding and change the subject.

Not to be outdone in playing politics, after what was reportedly a heated debate at the White House, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank claimed that instead of helping the process, McCain actually derailed an already agreed upon bailout package.

I'd counter that the zeal of President Bush and Congress to hurriedly pass the $700 billion package is eerily similar to the haste with which now-defaulting mortgage holders signed on for seemingly attractive sub-prime loans before reading the fine print. Also, if the supposed bailout package is so great, then the Democrat-controlled Congress and an equally supportive president should be able to pass whatever they want without ONE Republican vote.

I'd submit that the real reason nothing happened on Friday is because lawmakers sensed that voters aren't fully onboard the bailout bandwagon. As reported by David Goldman in CNNMoney, "Americans think the cost of the $700 billion plan being debated in Congress is too high. Though 55% said they favor the proposed bailout, 65% said it would probably treat taxpayers unfairly."

With no deal in sight and his bluff called, McCain changed course one more time and decided to show up at Ole Miss. It was like that Seinfeld episode where Costanza angrily announces that he's quitting his job only to report for work the next day pretending that it was all a joke (heh, heh).

Stating that he was opposed to Friday's debate before he was for it (or is that the other way around?) made McCain seem a bit erratic. Dare I say, ahem, crazy?

Yet in a weird, counter-intuitive, “New Coke” kind of way, McCain’s goofy last minute decision might have actually helped rather then hurt him on Friday. Since this was the “foreign policy” debate—McCain’s wheelhouse—expectations for him to mop the floor with his opponent were high. Anything short of a bloodbath could have been perceived as a “win” for Obama. So McCain’s behavior before the event may have effectively lowered the bar for HIM.

Let me say, first off: as political theater, I really enjoyed the debate. Many talking heads are lamenting the fact that it lacked any “catch phrases” or “memorable moments.” I’m frankly tired of hearing about Reagan’s “there he goes again” or Bentsen’s “you’re no Jack Kennedy” lines. Political debates have become glorified press conferences where the participants have a very narrow window of opportunity to score some sound bite points and get out. These small moments may appeal to our Thunderdome mentality, but I’m not so sure are very instructive. Though neither McCain nor Obama gave a perfect performance, it was one of the most interesting presidential debates I’ve seen in years. Who won? That’s a tough one. I’m inclined to give it to McCain. But that’s probably because, as a supporter, I’m philosophically more in line with him.

When judging these sorts of events, the marketing major in me constantly thinks back to the “Components of Attitudes” model, which describes how an “attitude” actually consists of three basic elements: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. A cognitive element is a fact or piece of information that one knows or believes to be true about a given subject. The affective component is how an individual viscerally responds to that subject. And the behavioral piece is what someone actually does about it. If all three of these elements are not in harmony, an internal discomfort, referred to as “cognitive dissonance,” occurs. Individuals, knowingly or not, seek to avoid dissonance and attain harmony. Thus, for example, if someone reads statistics that purportedly show the death penalty being unfairly applied, then that person will most likely feel bad AND vote against proposals to expand the practice.

Of course, emotions can attach to a topic before any facts are known. I HATE Michael Moore. Therefore, I’d be inclined to disbelieve him if he claimed the sun rose in the east and set in the west. And behavior may be the driving factor. People who have voted Democrat or Republican their entire life generally end up liking the candidate their party nominates. If that candidate holds a position on an issue they disagree with (say illegal immigration, NAFTA, or abortion), it’s mentally discounted for the sake of internal harmony.

As a result, I usually take most of the post-debate polls with a grain of salt. They nearly always fall along party lines that, while perhaps accurately reflecting people’s honestly held opinions, still have to be considered in light of the CoA model. With this in mind, here’s a quick summary of my reaction to different aspects of the debate.

Style and Aesthetics

In terms of style, I have to give it to Obama. Despite starting off a bit stiffly, his mannerisms were relaxed and he seemed more polished. McCain never looks comfortable in his own skin. Between questions, he fidgeted with his notes, blinked constantly, and wore curiously random expressions. Temperamentally, Obama was the “friendlier” of the two. McCain adopted a more confrontational demeanor and often questioned Obama’s credentials (just as Biden and Clinton had during the primary debates).

Visually, Obama’s solid red tie, white shirt, and dark suit worked better than the striped red tie and light blue shirt that McCain’s people had curiously outfitted him in.

Financial Recovery, National Security, and Free Form

Lehrer started things off by square pegging an economic question into the round foreign policy template of the debate based on President Eisenhower's observation that "the foundation of military strength is economic strength." Surprisingly, Obama didn’t take McCain to task for impeding the progress of the financial recovery plan as the Democratic leaders had done earlier that day. True or not, this would have served to remind people about McCain’s vacillating behavior. Also, Obama is sometimes a little too intellectual for his own good with unintentional laugh lines like “uh, seven hundred billion dollars is, uh, potentially a lot of money” (that's a direct quote).

The debate format allocated “free form” time where the participants could spontaneously engage each other. However, both men seemed reluctant to do so. Lehrer implored Obama and McCain to address each other directly as if they were two shy boys standing in the corner at a junior high school dance.

Whose Facts?

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously said during a heated argument that “You’re entitled to your own opinions—but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

Here’s where one has to ask whose facts are right. Numbers were tossed back and forth freely. The U.S. has a business tax of thirty-five percent, while Ireland’s is only eleven percent. But wait, don’t U.S. businesses have all kinds of loopholes. Is $250,000 a year rich if you’re a private business owner? Did Henry Kissinger really say that an American president should meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions? McCain and Obama both presented nuanced versions of their own respective truths.

Right, But What Would You Cut?

Both men were asked to list what they would give up to accommodate the cost of the impending 700 billion dollar bailout package. I got a chuckle out of the fact that, even though Lehrer gave him a few tries, Obama presented a spending wish list instead of outlining what he would cut. Ever the Republican, McCain was able to actually list things he’d cut, and carefully pointed out a number of times that he’d protect veterans. McCain meandered off topic to talk about nuclear reactors. To which Obama responded by drifting into the equally radioactive topic of health care reform.

The Lessons of Iraq

This was where I thought McCain was really at his strongest. I know, Obama was always against the decision to launch military operations in Iraq. And once Bush made that decision, his administration botched its implementation. Trust me, MOST of the Republicans I talk to are just as disgusted with that fact as anyone else. However, harping about how wrongly it was handled in 2003 doesn’t change the realities of 2008. In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Blanche gripes to her sister that she wouldn't be able to treat her so awfully if she wasn’t confined to a wheelchair. To which Jane replies, “But you ARE, Blanche! You ARE in that chair!”

While Obama’s gotten a lot of traction (and arguably the nomination) out of always being opposed to the war, for me he’s never clearly delineated a vision for Iraq that’s much different from McCain’s. Or, to put it another way, Obama has never substantively answered the question that Redford’s McKay, after winning an upset victory over Jarmon, posed at the end of The Candidate: “What do we do now?”
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Matt Maul is author of the blog Maul of America.

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The First Presidential Debate: McCain vs. Obama: Round I

By Sal Cinquemani

As evidenced by the repugnant "tribute" to the victims of 9/11 at their national convention earlier this month, exploitation has become a cornerstone of the Republican platform in the last seven years. Evoking U.S. troops and claiming that theirs is the party of patriotism has become the standard Republican tack when faced with any kind of political adversity, and John McCain continued that tradition at the first presidential debate last night. When Barack Obama questioned McCain's temperament, lambasting the Republican nominee for cavalierly singing about bombing Iran and threatening the extinction of North Korea, McCain's immediate response was a thinly veiled anecdote about being given a bracelet from the mother of a fallen U.S. soldier. Democrats have routinely failed to deflect or challenge these manipulative appeals to voters' emotions and fears—that is, until Obama rebutted with the grace and skill of a prizefighter: "I have a bracelet too." It was a proud declaration that was a whole lot more than just a statement about who has the fancier bling; it was a direct disavowal of one of the vilest, most cynical political tactics.
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To read the rest of the article at Slant Magazine, click here.

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Links for the Day (September 27th, 2008)

1. A sampling of post-debate linkage: Japhy Grant at Flaming Politics; a New York Times report by Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleney; Conor Clarke in The Atlantic; Report from The Wall Street Journal with video and other interactive materials; Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. Please feel free to link other debate articles and opinion pieces in the comments section. In other, breaking news... (UPDATE: An appreciation from Edward Copeland.)

[" Winning isn't enough. To gain from a presidential debate, there must be sound bites that appear on TV day after day and show your opponent in an unfavorable or embarrassing light. John McCain was better than Barack Obama in their first presidential debate last night. But the debate produced no knockout sound bites--none I noticed anyway--that might harm Obama's campaign. So McCain's win isn't likely to affect the presidential race. That's unfair, but politics is often unfair. McCain was far more forceful and aggressive than expected. And he had Obama on the defensive for roughly an hour of the 90-minute debate. But that doesn't matter much since Obama was never rattled and made no obvious blunders."]

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2. "Storytelling": House contributor Andrew Chan reviews Jia Zhangke's 24 City for Reverse Shot.

["To follow Jia Zhangke’s career closely is to witness a great, restless artist wriggle out of a number of our film culture’s pigeonholes. Despite his reputation as a master in the school of austerity—that art-house mode which has encouraged artistic complacency and political indifference in several of his peers—Jia’s aesthetics remain under construction and open to the full range of cinematic possibilities. At a time when the other leading figures of Chinese-language cinema, including Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang, seem fully committed to (or, in a few cases, trapped by) the styles and themes that made them famous, with each new film Jia is adding new tools to his art in order to renegotiate his relationship to realism, and to make the quest for personal and national truth ever-renewing rather than predictable and monolithic. His latest, 24 City, is a blend of documentary and fiction that omits some of the main tropes we associate with those genres, aspiring to neither vérité nor conventional plotting. Performed by both nonprofessionals and established actors, the film gathers stories across three generations of workers connected to a state-owned factory in Chengdu, now being converted into a luxury apartment complex. Their revelations range from devastating memories of long-lost family members to bittersweet recollections of puppy love, and the common struggle of all the interviewees seems to be (as one woman puts it) to “smile through one’s tears,” at least on camera—an attitude that lends the film its schizophrenic sense of boundless hope and suppressed tragedy. But what begins as a straightforward oral-history project results in a rocky marriage between seemingly irreconcilable impulses, and a disorienting provocation on the sacredness of truth in the documentary form."]

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3. "Regrets Only": Louis Menand on Lionel Trilling for The New Yorker. (Hattip: Kevin Seaman)

["Lionel Trilling was not completely happy about being Lionel Trilling. “I have one of the great reputations in the academic world,” he wrote in his journal after being promoted to full professor in the Columbia English Department, in 1948. “This thought makes me retch.” Two years later, he published “The Liberal Imagination,” a book that sold more than seventy thousand copies in hardcover and more than a hundred thousand in paperback, and that made Trilling a figure, a model of the intellectual in Cold War America. He represented, for many people, the life of the mind. Trilling was baffled by the attention. “I hear on all sides of the extent of my reputation—which some even call ‘fame,’ ” he wrote in the journal. “It is the thing I have most wanted from childhood—although of course in much greater degree—and now that I seem to have it I have no understanding whatever of its basis—of what it is that makes people respond to what I say, for I think of it as of a simplicity and of a naivety almost extreme.”"]

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4. "Am I a Criminal?": The continuing travails of Sita Sings The Blues filmmaker Nina Paley. Check the main page of her blog for continued updates. See this page for our own N.P. Thompson's review of Sita.

["Let’s see, I have 5 prints, 6 exhibition tapes, and dozens of DVDs circulating among festivals and journalists: that’s well over 10 copies. Corporations can value the 11 compositions in Sita at anything they want, which is why they’re demanding $220,000; surely they’ll value them at over $2,500. And it’s been over 180 days. The corporations do offer “Festival License” contracts. In my case (the generous “low end” of their arbitrary scale) these require I pay $500 a song for “non-profit, non-commercial purposes” limited to film festivals. So far I’ve only received one contract (5 different corporations are involved) but I actually read it for the first time yesterday. You’d think that since the contract expressly forbids me to make any profit from festivals, they wouldn’t charge $500 a pop for that privilege, but it gets worse: the contract has lots of other little details like I agree to forfeit my right to make a soundtrack. The Warner-Chappell festival contract is unsignable; I assume the others are too, since their terms are exactly the same. Folks, I may be a felon. The Entertainment Industry need only snap its fingers, and the Feds can come get me."]

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5. "5 Questions With: Stan Lee": From Moviefone.com.

["Behind every great superhero, there's a great writer, and in the case of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four and Iron Man, that scribe is Stan Lee. With his trademark dark glasses and grandiose cadence, the former Marvel Comics chairman has become as iconic as the characters he helped create, thanks in part to his amusing movie cameos, like his two-minute turn as a Hugh Hefner wannabe in 'Iron Man.' On the occasion of that hit flick's DVD release, Moviefone chatted with the comic book giant about the 'Iron Man' sequel, which stars we can expect to see in 2011's 'The Avengers' and how he felt about one of the few superhero flicks he had nothing to do with."]

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Quote of the Day: Walter Bagehot

"The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): A moment of silence...



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Clip of the Day: "Bruno" wreaks havoc in Milan. More from The Sun.

_____________________________________________________
"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.

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"Music Video Round-Up": The Videos of M83

By Brandon Soderberg

Nicolas Fromegeau—one half of M83—split after the group’s reputation-making 2003 album Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghost and a couple of singles in 2004, and left Anthony Gonzalez to go at it alone. Rather than freak-out or give up, Gonzalez dove further into the warm, emotional side of the French group’s electronica for 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us, and ran screaming from the mannered aspects of electronic music not made for dancing. Dead Cities won accolades, in part, because it was warm and emotional, but it was relatively emotional; a group of sincere songs in a genre known for squeaks and squeals that, for awhile there, proudly wore the label “IDM” (Intelligent Dance Music).

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Before eschewed any “IDM” trappings and was instead filled with breathy vocals, Michael Mann-movie soundscapes, and gleefully adolescent emotions that were an equal mix of idealism and depression. Intro track has a teenage-sounding girl exclaiming “raise your arms the highest they can/So the whole universe will glow,” while other tracks are tellingly titled “Teen Angst” and “Lower Your Eyelids So You Can Die With the Sun,” a title purposefully poetic in a ripped-out-of-a-smart-but-still-fifteen-year-old-girl’s-journal kind of way. The choice was clearly conscious—and arguably as mannered a position as the sterile roboticism of most electronic music—but Gonzalez totally sold it and went beyond any sense of irony or trying too hard anti-irony.

One of the most palpable examples of this shift are the videos for Before’s “Don’t Save Us From the Flames” and “Teen Angst,” both directed by Matthew Frost. Frost, a London-born photographer, music video, and commercial director, who also got a story credit for Larry Clark’s sorta slept-on Wassup Rockers, compassionately follows the subjects of these videos (both vaguely unhappy teenage girls connected by a dreamboat guy with a car) with hand-held cameras and sun-baked cinematography as both reach their own rarified sense of epiphany.

In screenwriter terms, the “inciting incident” of this pair of videos is the first few moments of “Don’t Save Us,” quickly recapped at the beginning of “Angst” too: The dark-haired girl politely waves back to the boyfriend of the blonde girl, who spots the wave. The “incident,” however, doesn’t spark any kind of overt drama; rather, each girl’s mind wanders and their minor psychological turmoil’s given its own video.

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"Don't Save Us From the Flames," Directed by Matthew Frost (2005)


Too often, especially in movies that grossly misread the classic 80s Hughes films—to which all these videos owe a debt—the “outsider” is either a kind of “diamond in the rough” who just needs to meet the right people or a decided outsider who is “better” than those around them. It’s not so simple here, where Frost and Gonzalez expertly illustrate the dark-haired girl’s ennui without totally justifying it. She’s clearly more interesting than the average kid, and there’s something affecting about her biking around in her soccer uniform, but she’s a bit much.

The actress is perfect because she’s pretty enough, but insular and awkward enough too, and that’s what sort of makes her life suck. She’s the kind of girl who after a few years in college or in “the real world” won’t be an outsider at all, but for the time being is weird because she’s quiet and draws pictures and daydreams. It’s more affecting because her life isn’t completely hopeless; she’s not Martha Dumptruck.

Notice how much of the video is the girl alone. Most of the video bounces between hand-held, in-too-close close-ups of her, or wide images of her riding her bike or sitting, with little interest, in her surroundings. This fits the nature of loneliness—obsessive focus on one’s self or expansive, palpable isolation—and the music of M83 as well, which often hovers in quiet whisper before exploding for the chorus.
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"Teen Angst," Directed by Matthew Frost (2005)


The beginning of “Teen Angst” is a connector to “Don’t Save Us” and, through it, establishes some weird psychological connection between the girls. It’s unclear whether the glorious ghost bike ride of “Don’t Save Us” is a dream or real or what (and it really doesn’t matter), but here the blonde girl’s somehow experienced what occurred in the final part of that video and awakes still upset about her boyfriend waving to another girl; this is high-school stuff with a straight-face.

The video’s essentially a journey toward empathy. While the in-the-library context of poetry and history bores the girl and does little to distract from her concern that her boyfriend didn’t answer his phone, the firsthand experience of life softens and broadens her. The rapid series of gravestones and death-dates culminates in a visit to Robert Frost’s grave to imply an understanding of the world’s suffering beyond her own boyfriend troubles. Leaving the cemetery, she spots two LARPers and, right before they’re about to strike one another, her face squishes-up, concerned for the pain they’re about to inflict on one another.

Particularly striking—and oddly affecting—is her viewing of Revolutionary War dioramas and brief shots of her in uniform, an image of her literally walking in someone else’s shoes. The video’s final sequence is purposefully understated and simple. The blonde girl sees a loving couple, is kindly waved to by the girl, and smiles in acceptance, not bitter or ready to project their romance onto her apparent lack thereof. While the song continues to soar, with a whirl of wordless vocals, heavy drumming, and thick washes of synthesizer, Frost’s camera holds on the girl’s face, sloppily zooming in and out.

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Saturdays=Youth, this year’s proper follow-up to Before—last year saw the minor release of an ambient work called Digital Shades—brought the pop appeal and emotionality even further upfront. Before’s 80s futurist menace is pretty much gone and replaced with a reliance on the ambient pop of that same decade. The sound’s similar but a little more optimistic and that finds its way into the videos—“Graveyard Girl” and the more recent, “Kim & Jessie”—too.

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"Graveyard Girl," Directed by Matthew Frost (2008)


The documentary-like images of high school that begin “Graveyard Girl” suggest a shift away from the interiority of the videos of Before. More in-line with the 80s drama-comedies M83 clearly love—and following the rules of melodrama in general—“Graveyard Girl”s conceit is rooted in outside forces like the very-real, social strata that exists when you’re fifteen. It’s very John Hughes-ian—outsider girl has crush on insider Jock—but actually ends even more optimistically than those 80s classics; the girl gets the guy and it’s joyous, nothing bittersweet about their pet cemetery embrace (except the fact that it happens in a pet cemetery).

Although it ends happily and without ambiguity, there’s still a fascinating tension between the Hollywood ending, the idealized, out-of-time high school Graveyard Girl attends (she’s Molly Ringwald by way of NYLON Magazine, the Jock wears a old-school Varsity jacket, students are allowed to smoke on the premises, a student’s shown chatting on a cell-phone), and the way Frost captures it, with one eye still on the ugly realities of life.

That the two incongruous lovers connect through a weird, implicit mourning for their pets, that the “cool” party which Graveyard Girl attends just results in her getting felt up by a creep, and the very funny—and very honest—detail that, early on, she obsessively swipes the Jock’s photo off the grave of his dead pet, maintain some of the darker aspects of Before’s videos. The happy ending, though, fits the music of Saturdays, an album Gonzalez dedicates in the liner-notes to “all the friends, music, movies, joints, and crazy teachers that made my teenage years so great!”

***
"Kim & Jessie," Directed by Eva Husson (2008)


Calling Husson’s “Kim & Jessie” video “experimental” would be a jump, but it strays away from the conventional narrative of Frost’s videos while retaining that emotional teenage core. It begins the same as Frost’s trilogy of teenage longing with the same hazy imagery and naturalism, but things get increasingly surreal in a video that’s basically an adolescent, lesbian fever dream.

Like “Graveyard Girl,” it ends with the outsider—or in this case, outsiders—getting the guy(s), but their video-ending make-out session with dread-locked roller-bladers is an age and community acceptable transference for the characters’ love for one another. The parents-acceptable culmination of the homoeroticism and doubling hinted at in the first scene, where the girls change in front of one another, intercuts with tight close-ups of each of them, making their bodies indistinguishable.

For all that Film Studies stuff though, Husson makes the same statement in other parts of the video in more playful ways. The appearance of the Siren-like skaters turns into an absurd Big Lebowski homage, which makes way for a brilliant and inexplicable cut to the girls downhill skating, perfectly matched to the song’s airy bridge. It doesn’t make conventional sense, but it’s perfect.

A lesser director may have ended “Kim & Jessie” with a transcendent make-out between the two girls and, in some ways, that might better match the teenage idealism of Gonzalez’s latest album, but Husson’s choice to do that in subtler ways takes the girls’ love more seriously—it doesn’t reduce it to shock value or politicize it into the trangression of youth—and maintains M83’s underlying sense of sadness and longing.
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Brandon Soderberg is author of the sites No Trivia, The Biographical Dictionary of Rap, and Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader?.

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"Indie 500": Sparks, Lil Wayne, Belle and Sebastian

By Vadim Rizov

I remember a friend telling me once about how, in some dreadful class where they purport to teach how to structure scripts properly or something equally proscriptive, he had to defend Scream. The charge was that Scream lacks emotion, to which he reasonably responded that sarcasm does have an emotional component. Flash-forward to "Strange Animal," the second song on Sparks' 21st album, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep, where auto-critique leads the brothers Mael (Russell and Ron) to spit back one of their most common criticisms (lots of snark, not much depth) unadulterated: "This song lacks a heart ... an emotional core/Isn't that what songs are for?" Answer: not necessarily. Songs can be emotions, but they can also just be musical ideas worked out, or they can be satire, or they can be jokes on how long an inane pun can be developed.

I've been waving the flag for Sparks a good five years now, which is a good way to annoy people quickly, even people who tolerate seemingly more-abrasive acts like The Fiery Furnaces. Two years ago, when Hello Young Lovers came out, my prose was much more excitable: "I honestly believe that Sparks are the most hateful band in pop music today," I wrote (and sorry to quote myself, but this is better than any intro I've been working on for a few days now).

"They seem to hate the very medium they're working in, having been engaged this entire millennium in a project to actively annoy any remaining rockists by working pretty much solely without a drum kit or any of the conventional staples of a rock band, concentrating instead on tape loops, repetition, and operatic multi-tracked vocals. Their lyrics are almost uniformly snide and dismissive, particularly towards women, who the Mael brothers seem to regard solely as succubi. And it's the fact that they're brothers who've worked together for 36 years now that's creepiest of all: they're siblings who seemingly turned their back on the world a long time ago, preferring to concentrate on their own insular jokes and obsessions."

I'd like to stress the music more now: jokes get old, but just because the Maels are funny (unless, again, you think they're just annoying) doesn't mean they're not making some of the most compelling, sophisticated music around.

For what it's worth, Exotic Creatures is a return to the kind of songwriting that involves verses and choruses, and hence presumably a little easier to stomach; Sparks no longer sounds like Philip Glass arranging a hysterical Queen tribute band. (And yes, I know that Queen allegedly ripped Sparks off whole-sale. I'm not even qualified to weigh in on that.) A mock-ethereal intro declares "I don't care if you love me/just so you like me," tackling the problem head-on: I've never met anyone who did anything but despise Sparks from the moment I put them on, and Sparks seem acutely aware that they only have cultists, not moderate fans. "Good Morning" picks up where the last album's closer, "As I Sit Down To Play The Organ At The Notre Dame Cathedral," left off: in that surprisingly epic song, a church organist expressed his anger that his exceptional playing was overshadowed by everyone coming to genuflect to God instead. Nothing here comes close to that kind of narrative complexity, which is OK. Here, the Maels are much peppier after a one-night stand: "Thank you God, for something rare as this/what must have been a holy night of bliss." Har har, though it all falls apart once she leaves: "Does 'dohsvedanya' really mean good morning?"

Sparks aren't a joke: they're a walking referendum on the current state of pop music, where it is and isn't going. Sometimes the joke is a simple one while the music is complicated: "(She Got Me) Pregnant," which is exactly what it sounds like, or "I've Never Been High," whose gothic swells and overwrought choruses make the mock-tragedy a madrigal of sorts. Sparks' guitarist for a while now has been Dean Menta, ex-Faith No More, who hasn't changed his ways one damn bit: his jagged bits of metal sound exactly as anachronistic in one context as another (and given that he's worked with arch-weirdo Mike Patton, I doubt Menta is sweating the Maels one bit). So they're fusing Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics, four-part harmony, keyboard loops and, uh, metal guitar solos. Works for me.

***
As a friend of mine pointed out, having an opinion about the quality of Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III (especially at this late date) is pretty much beside the point: it's a bona-fide phenomenon, once again briefly saving the rap industry from sinking into a permanent morass of declining sales. How and why are pretty much irrelevant. There's some obvious answers that have nothing to do with quality (which is never the right answer): he's been around for a while, he's sold fairly well in the past (though never this well as a solo artist), he's busted his ass as a guest on umpteen otherwise unmemorable tracks, his persona combines the "hardness" of thug rappers with a fashion sense that's somewhat iconoclastic (tight jeans! No matter how many times he says "no homo," that's gonna piss people off). The release of Tha Carter III, which was threatening to turn into a mini-Detox situation, qualifies as a relief to people who wondered if he'd ever get it together.

Mostly, what Tha Carter III makes me realize is that I'll never be a mixtape kind of guy, no matter how I try. Da Drought III has lots of brilliance, but I'm just not that interested in hearing jacked beats that have long worn out their groove in my head, much less for two hours in succession. Tha Carter III is the finest, most cohesive 70+ minutes of rap music I've heard that doesn't come from a single source (i.e., not Kanye or the all-Neptunes triumphs of Clipse). The usual high-paid all-stars are all here. Here's Kanye with "Comfortable," doing what comes most naturally to him, i.e. arranging lush strings into patterns where you can't see the seams, five minutes of bliss. Here's David Banner being a complete fucking weirdo on "La La," arranging a kids' glockenspiel and random infantile chanting into a strangely insinuating mixture. And here's Swizz Beatz ... wait, that's not a rev-'em-up song. "Dr. Carter," my pick of the litter, finds Wayne attempting to restore to health nothing less than hip-hop itself (no surprise, he pulls it off, and with half the self-righteous tongue-clicking of Common). To get there, he has to keep going, building up steam and energy while a David Axelrod sample builds into a majestic orchestral swell; very Aaron Copland, with sunrise deferred twice as Wayne loses two patients, then saves the third. And don't even get me started on ridiculously unlikely single "A Milli," which takes Steve Reich festishization further than Timbaland ever dared. This is one musically meaty album.

Wayne's voice makes him (I've said this before, and I'll say it again) the Stephen Malkmus of hip-hop. It quivers, screams hysterically, stretches out in a nearly incomprehensible drawl, flirts with patois, and never for a moment becomes predictable. The voice is arguably more important than the content. With some notable exceptions ("Dr. Carter" among them), Wayne's rapping style is roughly equivalent to the analogies portion of the SAT, only the links of association never stop. Sometimes they're clever, sometimes they're stupid: "Mrs. Officer," probably the dumbest track, keeps spinning lame puns on sex with a lady cop (her number's 911!). I'll confess to a soft spot for "Lollipop," where Wayne keeps insisting a young lady wants to " lick the (w)rapper" with all the glee of a terrible old-school "Muppet Show" pun. (File it alongside "Flashing Lights" and "Blinded By The Lights" as surprisingly effective club songs that replicate strobe lights musically—except Wayne's are obviously slowed down by drink—even though only Wayne loses his hyper-verbal nature fully. Figuring out that the man with hip-hop's voice should take it one step further with a vocoder is pretty genius.) The one mode Wayne can't adopt is strident confidence: "Mr. Carter" is cool and everything, but saying "I am him and he is me" is the kind of empty assertion that depends entirely on cadence and intonation. Fortunately, Jay-Z shows up to deliver this otherwise worthless line the way it should be. My only real caveat: dear sir, please stop comparing yourself to shit ("I'm the shit nigga get the fuck out of my toilet" is one of the less gag-worthy lines). Then again, if we tolerated a scatalogical fixation in Dave Chappelle, I suppose Wayne can get a pass as well. Rap album of the year? We'll wait and see—the release calendar for the rest of the year is crowded with heavy contenders—but it's certainly a worthy candidate.

***
Part of the column slow-down on my end has a lot to do with something that generally happens around this time of year if it's been a weak year musically (and yes, from where I sit, it has): I start listening to old favorites and older albums that fill in the gaps of my fandom. Example: Belle and Sebastian's 1996 debut Tigermilk. I came late to B&S; if you've been reading this column for a while, I guess it's a bit weird that someone as musically wimpy as me could have avoided them. My excuse: a dear friend played "Seeing Other People" every time we got in a car together one summer. This was about 150 fucking times. After that, I refused to listen to B&S for a year. Then there was NYU: freshman year, it seemed no party was complete without someone blasting "Lazy Line Painter Jane." Again, fine, but really? Also, Belle & Sebastian fans are even more deranged than, say, They Might Be Giants cultists: on the page for opening track "The State I Am In," there's Talmudic comments like "your point is (of course) only correct if you are talking about the version from Tigermilk. The lyrics are correct for the superior version from the Dog on Wheels EP." Frightening stuff, though of course this is nothing new; surely being a Smiths fan in the '80s was much the same, only without the sense of community.

I've come around on B&S's charms, of course; they were also one of those bands who I mistakenly assumed that every one of their songs sounded the same, which is both true in a macro way (though not so much of late, but in Phase I up to Dear Catastrophe Waitress anyway) and irrelevant on the micro level, because they do so much within their boundaries. (See also: Of Montreal, The Strokes.) Tigermilk pretty much maps out all the lyrical territory Stuart Murdoch's been plowing ever since: Catholic guilt, crippling bookishness, sexual confusion. I can't help but noting "The State I Am In" declares "I was happy for a day in 1975." This would make Murdoch happy for one day when he was seven years old (and no, I don't care that he writes the songs "in character"; the band's image and their songs are, at a certain level, the same damn thing). Tigermilk has aged well—especially for a limited-pressing album that was just supposed to be a project for a music business university course—aside from "Electric Renaissance," a would-be rave commentary that timestamped itself; stick with Pulp's "Sorted For E's And Wizz." Listening to the album is one of those happy experiences that reinforces everything you liked about a band while filling in some of the gaps about where they came from. Not much more to say, except serving notice that—for reasons that will eventually become clear—this column may be a little anachronistically heavy on Britpop for a while. It's either that or writing about The Strokes over and over, because that's been getting way too much play in my house. It never dies.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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NYFF 46 (2008): Gomorrah, Afterschool

By Vadim Rizov

[The 46th New York Film Festival begins September 26th, 2008 and runs through October 12th, 2008. Screening information for Gomorrah can be found here; screening information for Afterschool can be found here.]

There's not much to say about Gomorrah that hasn't already been said (the price of engaging with Cannes' Grand Prix winner months later, based on a hot-topic book no less), so let's be brief. David Simon has apparently ruined life for everyone because this is the second film in NYFF's line-up (though the complaints date back to Cannes) to be compared, unfavorably, to The Wire. The complaint is roughly of the same nature in both cases (the other being Laurent Cantet's The Class): too much ground to cover, not enough time to cover it, better explored on the show. Gomorrah has two shots that almost inevitably jerk you back towards the series if you've seen it—drug distribution on the stairwells, albeit different terrace layout; and a sequence on the docks, multi-colored crates piled high in near avant-garde formations—so I understand where this is coming from. Is this the first time a TV show has ruined so many otherwise sure-fire critical successes?

Nonetheless: the problem with Gomorrah isn't that it feels incomplete or underdeveloped. Or, alternately, that's not precisely the problem, insofar as the comparison implies that if director Matteo Garrone had 13 hours to work himself out, the overall effect would be more satisfying. I'm not so sure: Gomorrah is a straightforward indictment of the Camorra mafia in Naples, and by touching on many things at once and never really resolving any of them, Garrone suggests the unfathomable scope of the problem far more effectively than by exploring every nook and cranny. Both Garrone and Simon are aiming for something similar yet different; Simon is fascinated by the ultimate futility of the war on drugs, while Garrone is dealing with a problem so large it seems equally ineradicable. Both are digging deep into fields that have been somewhat well-documented, yet not nearly as well as they should be. Digging stuff up to the light of day is the first step. Ultimately, though, Garrone's vision is more despairing: humor is rare, despair the order of the day.

The problem with Gomorrah is that it could start and end anywhere. The Wire runs full arcs, tying social problems to well-developed characters; the war never ends, but the characters move on. Gomorrah is representative types running through a loop: today's Scarface-emulating young sociopaths are tomorrow's dead meat, but there'll always be someone to replace them. All five stories in Gomorrah's hydra-headed monster have rough conclusions, but anyone expecting a movie about mob life to end in any kind of upbeat fashion a) needs to watch more movies b) needs, indeed, to read up a bit more. Gomorrah is exactly what I thought it would be, which means there's no surprises. It's superbly made: director Matteo Garrone has a fantastic eye, frequently establishing power relations by whoever's in foreground focus, the entire rest of the world often reduced to a shadowy background blur. He has a feel for huge architectural spaces, giving admirable and equal depth to a limestone quarry as to the huge bulk of the buildings where much of the violence goes down. There's little grace notes all along the way—check out e.g. the little victory salute a man gives after two killings have been pulled off towards the end—and the whole thing suggests the tip of an iceberg. What's not to love? Just the feeling that what's here is, simultaneously, too much of one thing and not enough of the other. Still well worth seeing—when it comes out, at a reduced expense.

***
Good morning, my generation! How're we feeling today, the monolithic little bundle that we are? Is Generation Y still a leading name for my fellow young twentysomethings? Will Douglas Coupland come back to save us with another accidentally coined label (or misnomer)? The "Post-Echo Generation," perhaps? Will we all have to settle, finally, for being the "YouTube Generation"? I ask because Antonio Campos' Afterschool is clearly the opening volley of a campaign that's sure to play out for at least the next ten years: people roughly my age (Campos is 24) trying to sum up the zeitgeist in two hours or less. With the self-conscious limitations imposed by those of the "mumblecore" gang, up to now little more has been suggested beyond the presence of a lot of nice, shy people with communication problems, free-floating in a moneyed, apolitical climate.

According to Afterschool, we all live on YouTube. An opening montage juxtaposes the web's greatest hits: a cat ostensibly playing piano and Saddam Hussein being hung sit snugly next to each other, in a different window from young Rob's (Ezra Miller) porn window. All of these things, Campos bluntly suggests, can be processed the same way: the Internet creates its own realities, where something's moral weight and reality doesn't mean as much as the perception of reality (in stupid teen vernacular, the kind that claims you like people who "aren't fake"). I was lost from this very opening: no matter how image-junkied out we're supposed to be, I have trouble believing that someone's stupid homemade gimmick and the execution of an international figure have exactly the same kind of presence online.

Rob's the target of every overgrown, entitled, rich young jock at his upstate campus, which brings up the theme of class. At least it does for me: either the film is incredibly specific (in which case I'm not sure why the heavy insistence on viral video as the zeitgeist), or the boarding school is a generic location which doesn't change much. Neither seems true. I'm sure there's jocks all over America who taunt their smaller and more poorly-endowed classmates with gibes about the relative wetness of their sister's pussy in unbelievably crude cafeteria-lunch monologues that go unanswered. I'm equally willing to believe in feckless headmasters who value their image and the school's wealth over the actual education and safety of the students. As far as my public-school alumni self can tell, Campos is probably right on the money.

But these things matter, for two reasons:

1) It's personally a big turn-off for me to watch the extremely naturalistic adventures of a bunch of more-or-less worthless kids—callow, privileged without being aware of it, beginning to grasp the connection between sex and power and exploiting the hell out of it. It's especially problematic because Campos arrives, in his first feature, as a major visual talent: Afterschool is a showpiece of widescreen frames that veer from the immaculately symmetrical to the purposefully skewed (e.g., a kiss taking place with two heads at the bottom right of the screen, their mouths invisible, suggesting all that's needed). Campos combats the blurry cell-phone anarchy of the Internet with rigor. Comparisons to Elephant are, in this respect, accurate: the clash between Campos' extreme formalism and the kids' unstudied naturalism is invigorating. (Comparisons to Larry Clark are less so; Campos purposefully restages the infamous Bijou Phillips crotch shot from Bully not once but twice, but without the blatant vagina.) An A/V club teacher is named Mr. Wiseman, in homage to Frederick, and Campos clearly wants the fruit of Wiseman's incredible ability to seemingly circumvent the Heisenberg principal, but to tack some eloquence on top of it. He gets what he wants, even though it's unpleasant.

2) Class matters. It really does; it affects your leisure time, your ability to dick around on the Internet, your ability to spend outrageous amounts of cash without blinking on high-grade narcotics. All of these things play into Campos' vision, but he seems completely unaware of them. There's a normative assumption about the environment that strikes me as dead-wrong, and even mildly offensive.

There's another reason for my discontent; if the above seems incoherent, let's be honest. YouTube is great when you're trying to find Muppet Show episodes and commercial ephemera; as a pop cultural index, it's invaluable. But there's this whole other side of it—the stupid pet videos, the viral celebrities et al.—that I've never been interested in and have no knowledge of. With the odd blip, it really doesn't affect my life in the slightest. So either I'm out of the zeitgeist, an unintentional Luddite, or Campos' diagnosis—never stated in so many words, but his ambition suffuses every scene—is, in its own way, as half-assed as the utopian visions of liberal politics resurgent through TEH INTERWEBZ in Diary Of The Dead. Whatever it is, I'm not convinced. I neither learned from nor recognized anything in this movie. How it resonates with others remains to be seen.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 1 (19), "Summer Sátántangó, Part 1"

By John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Keith Uhlich, Jeremiah Kipp, Kevin B. Lee, Preston Miller, and S.T. VanAirsdale

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Hello and welcome back to the brand new season faithful non-listeners! We figured that since everyone claims to hate the long episodes, we'd have an epic three-parter that begins well and winds up as a booze-soaked brawl of cinephiles, Crystal Skulls, and forgetting to mention Wall-E at all!

Also—you note the subtle name change. This comes from a minor discussion where we realized—much like Kevin's video reviews—that the podcast should be open to everyone and anyone when it comes to showing up at Grassroots and discussing film. Besides, if you haven't heard, Vadim now writes for nearly every newspaper in Salt Lake City and I myself am the district regional manager of an Arby's that I run out of my bedroom.

But before all that, we got together in late August with one goal in mind: to discuss the summer that was. From superhero films proving they've finally got legs to stand on, to subtle surprises, to Keith's ever-lasting defense of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that should make Spielberg proud. We go over it all.

Except for Wall-E. That we just forgot.

Joining us for this spectacular event are the "Grassroots All-Stars:" S.T. VanAirsdale (The Reeler, Defamer), Kevin B. Lee (Shooting Down Pictures, THND), Jeremiah Kipp (Slant, Fangoria, THND) and Preston Miller (Jones).

We start off with the Superhero question and me being unable to separate Slant Magazine (sorry Ed) from Reverse Shot. It only gets darker from there.

So enjoy part one of "Summer Sátátangó" ! And if you ever see Vadim or myself at the bar, buy us drinks and give us jobs! (JL)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 44 minutes, 59 seconds)

***
PODCAST



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John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for Cinema-Scope, The Chicago Reader, Senses of Cinema and Slant. His website is www.alsolikelife.com.

Preston Miller is the writer/director of Jones.

S.T. VanAirsdale is editor of The Reeler and a contributor to Defamer and The Huffington Post.

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Links for the Day (September 24th, 2008)

1. "In Search of Lost Time," or "Who's Afraid of Hou Hsiao-hsien?": A Reverse Shot symposium on the great Taiwanese filmmaker. Link above takes you to the introduction by RS editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert. Here is the main contents page. Among the House contributors involved: Andrew Chan on Cute Girl; Cheerful Wind; & The Green, Green Grass of Home (also The Sandwich Man); Kevin B. Lee on City of Sadness; and Travis Mackenzie Hoover on The Puppetmaster.

["In 1988 a group of international critics voted Hou “one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema,” and in another survey completed by Film Comment and the Village Voice at the end of the Nineties, he was named "director of the decade." It’s worth questioning, however, what his admittedly rarefied brand of art cinema means to filmmaking and film history—even history itself —if he's not selling tickets anywhere but on the festival circuit. Just how can we support such grand claims for his importance, when he’s preaching to a ready choir and largely empty pews? Easy: Wedding political filmmaking with a technique at once naturalistic and highly aestheticized, Hou has made films that wrestle, variously, and either directly or metaphorically, with personal and national histories, the struggles between Taiwan and Chinese nationalism, the encroachment of capital on an ever-evolving way of life, and, most recently, the legacy of cinema itself. “Essential viewing” couldn’t be more aptly applied to the works of any other living director, and even if Hou’s cascading histories may be consigned solely to posthumous recuperation, we’re happy to stand up now and plant a signpost along the way."]

***
2. "NYFF46": The first of Jamie Stuart's New York Film Festival video essays is up at Filmmaker Magazine. In this first part of four, Jamie faces off with a razor-wielding assassin and attends press conferences with Laurent Cantet and Kelly Reichardt.

["This is what's going to happen."]

***
3. "Ahmadinejad: 'American empire' nearing its end": From CNN.

["In a blistering speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed "a few bullying powers" for creating the world's problems and said the "American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road." And while he insisted Iran's nuclear activities are peaceful, Ahmadinejad blamed the same powers for seeking to hinder it "by exerting political and economic pressures on Iran, and threatening and pressuring" the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those powers, meanwhile, are building or maintaining nuclear stockpiles themselves, unchecked by anyone, he said. As Ahmadinejad spoke, the only person at the United States table was a note-taker; no U.S. diplomat was present. When President Bush spoke earlier Tuesday, however, Ahmadinejad was in the room."]

***
4. Dave Kehr on The Godfather restoration, at The Times and on his blog.

["Many of Francis Ford Coppola’s films, including the recent “Youth Without Youth,” have been haunted by the passing of time and an acute awareness of its destructive handiwork — the sense that once a treasured moment has been lost, nothing can be done to recover it. But now a piece of Mr. Coppola’s own youth, which also happens to be one of the greatest works in American film, has been recovered, and spectacularly so. On Tuesday Paramount Home Entertainment is issuing the three films that make up Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather” saga, miraculously rejuvenated by a team of digital restoration experts under the supervision of the film preservationist Robert A. Harris. Offered both in high-definition Blu-ray and standard DVD editions, Mr. Coppola’s three films seem to have reclaimed the golden glow of their original theatrical screenings — a glow that has been dimmed and all but extinguished over the years through a series of disappointing home video editions."]

***
5. Two recent posts from filmjourney.org: Doug Cummings on the Lola Montès restoration and the documentary Proteus.

["In case you’ve only seen Max Ophüls’ last and only widescreen, color film on the abysmal Fox Lorber DVD that refuses to go away, you might check out this comparison I’ve made between a direct screengrab of the DVD versus a still courtesy of Rialto Pictures from the new restoration. I just saw the new print today, and I can vouch that it looks just as good–or even better–than the still provided here. Note that in addition to the fact that the DVD doesn’t include the full 2.55×1 early CinemaScope frame, it also horizontally compresses the image, which suffers from pink-faded colors, less contrast, less resolution, and a darker tone. In short, it’s unwatchable."]

***
Quote of the Day: Edith Sitwell

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."

***
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Clay Aiken: I'm a Gay Dad



***
Clip of the Day: The Hamm boys and Shawn Johnson like tacos that pop! Directed by Robert Bresson. (Hattip: Ryland Walker Knight)

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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.

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TONIGHT: Film Park Slope at Congregation Beth Elohim

By Keith Uhlich

For all of you New York-based cinephiles: I'm helping to run a film society in my Brooklyn neighborhood, based out of Congregation Beth Elohim. Our new season begins tonight with a screening (from DVD projector) of Married Life, a favorite of mine from last year (click here for my review). See after the break (or click here) for venue information (if you're a Facebook member, go here to join our group).

Co-writer/director Ira Sachs will join us for a post-screening discussion. Hope to see some of you there.

***
Our new season begins Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 when we proudly present Married Life, starring Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, and Rachel McAdams. A post-screening discussion will be held with director/co-writer Ira Sachs.

ADDRESS: 271 Garfield Place (at 8th Avenue); Brooklyn, NY 11215
DOORS OPEN: 7:15 pm
SCREENING START TIME: 7:30 pm
SUGGESTED DONATION: $5.00

FILM DESCRIPTION: Harry Allen (Chris Cooper) is a suburban businessman intent on leaving his adoring wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) for his bleach-blonde mistress Kay (Rachel McAdams). But rather than put Pat through the humiliation of a divorce, he thinks it more humane to poison her. Harry's friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan) narrates this 1940s-set black comedy/character study, adapted from John Bingham's 1953 novel "Five Roundabouts to Heaven" by co-writer/director Ira Sachs.

DIRECTIONS:

SUBWAY:

a) Brooklyn-bound 'Q' or 'B' Train to "7th Avenue" stop in Park Slope. Exit at Flatbush Avenue. Walk around the block to 7th Avenue. Go down 7th Avenue past various name streets to Garfield Place. Make a left. Walk up Garfield Place to 8th Avenue. Temple and entrance is directly in front of you.

b) Brooklyn-bound '2' or '3' Train to "Grand Army Plaza" stop in Park Slope. Exit at Flatbush. Walk around the corner to 8th Avenue. Walk down 8th Avenue to Garfield Place. Temple and entrance are on your left.

c) Brooklyn-bound 'F' train to "7th Avenue" stop in Park Slope. Exit at 8th Avenue and 9th Street (stay towards the front of the train to do so). Walk up 8th Avenue, numbers descending (e.g.: 9th Street, 8th Street, etc...) until you come to Garfield Place. Temple Beth Elohim and entrance will be on your right.

BUS:

M69 along 8th Avenue to Garfield Place.
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Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

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Links for the Day (September 23rd, 2008)

1. Mike D'Angelo's New York Film Festival page, just updated with his (at the moment) best movie of the year, Afterschool. A prior Cannes wrap-up of Antonio Campos' film at GreenCine.

["Remember in Mulholland Dr. when that creepy dude points at the headshot and says, flatly, "This is the girl"? Try to imagine me heavier and much more intimidating as I tell you with equally unshakable certitude: This is the film."]

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2. "My Gal": Saunders on Palin in The New Yorker. (Hattip: Stephen Cone)

["How does the moose feel about it? Who knows? Probably not great. But do you know what the difference is between a dead moose with lipstick on and a dead moose without lipstick? Lipstick. Think about it. Moose are, truth be told, Élites. They are big and fast and sort of rule the forest. Sarah took that one down a notch. Who’s Élite now, Bullwinkle? Not Sarah. She’s just Regular as heck."]

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3. The second episode of Vinyl is Podcast, with House contributor Ryland Walker Knight, Mark Haslam, and Brian Darr.

["RWK here. This episode: we're joined by local hero and blogging buddy Brian Darr, of Hell on Frisco Bay, to talk the upcoming rep calendar. Of course, any talk about movies, especially a talk meant to cover so much, will spill over into other topics and other films other than the films and film series at hand. We even divert into a talk about Cut Copy and their upcoming, sold-out show in San Francisco on Sunday, October 5th, as well as Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke, among other things, including my trip to Telluride, again, of course. Speaking of: a big apology to Howie Movshovitz, one of the real cool pair of moderators/hosts for our Student Symposium (the other: Linda Williams), whose name I totally blanked on during our recording session. If you make it that far, you'll hear me grasping, failing, griping -- and coming up with Harvey. The reason I didn't follow Brian's "on air" advice and splice in some kind of edit correction is because I just want to let the tape run. As I say at one point, this is not planned. I like it that way. I did a better job of projecting my voice this week, I think, which might make it easier to listen to, but I still dig how un-NPR we are on these experiments. Thanks for indulging us. We're still trying to make this mic work, but it's tough. I've got a (pretty cheap) directional mic so it really needs you to talk at it -- it doesn't record the space of the room all that well -- and, as is natural, Brian and Mark turned towards me to talk, to perform our conversation, so their voices are a little lower than mine in the mix. So turn it up."]

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4. Catching up with Alan Sepinwall's Emmy coverage, at The Star-Ledger and his blog.

["It was hard to imagine anyone finding a way to make the show worse than it was last year, with the clumsy theater-in-the-round layout and Ryan Seacrest stumbling his way through one bad joke after another, but this year's producers managed. They did away with the round theater, but brought back Seacrest and teamed him with fellow Outstanding Reality Show Host nominees Jeff Probst (who won that category), Tom Bergeron, Howie Mandel and Heidi Klum (the latter of whom should never be allowed on live TV again). Their opening bit, in which they rambled on forever about having nothing interesting planned, was so disastrous that various winners and presenters referred to it contemptuously throughout the rest of the evening."]

***
5. "Spielberg gives $100,000 to back gay marriage": Possible punchlines: a) Catch (or pitch) me if you can. b) Saving Ryan's privates. c) Amistud.

["Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, are the latest celebrity donors to the fight against California’s November ballot initiative that would overturn the state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Spielberg and Capshaw have donated $100,000 to fight Proposition 8, they announced in a statement Monday. “By writing discrimination into our state constitution, Proposition 8 seeks to eliminate the right of each and every citizen in our state to marry regardless of sexual orientation,” the statement said. “Such discrimination has NO place in California’s constitution, or any other.”"]

***
Quote of the Day: Adelle Davis

"As I see it, every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself."

***
Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): Three views of Shakezula, the mic rula. (Hattip: Robert Humanick)



***
Clip of the Day: Longest fingernails in the world

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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.

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Eclipse Series 12: Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy

By Dan Callahan

[Eclipse Series 12: Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy streets today on DVD. Click here for more information. This review is also housed at The Criterion Collection Database.]

So, a “proletariat trilogy” from the eighties by a Finnish director? It doesn’t sound too delightful, does it? But the three Aki Kaurismäki films collected in this Criterion release from their Eclipse line are delightful, on some level. They all involve people who work at low-level jobs: garbage-men, factory workers of all kinds, shop girls. In the second film, Ariel (1988), the heroine (Susanna Haavisto) begins as a meter maid giving out tickets, then progresses to jobs where she always seems to be cutting up disgustingly large sides of beef. Yet these movies don’t feel like drudgery, maybe because they aren’t in any way realistic; they take place in a tightly controlled world of their own. I’ve never been to Finland, but I’d be surprised to find even a vestige of Kaurismäki’s grim, deadpan cuteness.

These three films are unusual in several ways. Notably, they all run around an hour and ten minutes, as if Kaurismäki knew that a little of his particular sensibility went a long way. They all use music inventively, either to provide emotion where there is none, or to act as counterpoint to the comically drab lives of the protagonists. The funniest thing about the first film, Shadows in Paradise (1986), is the title: Kaurismäki’s vision of the Finnish city Helsinki is about as far from paradise as you can get, and you can’t imagine anything in this city that could cause a shadow, either physically or psychically.

There never seems to be anybody on the pleasantly lonely streets of Shadows in Paradise, and there’s no street noise, either; as garbage men go to work in the film’s first shots, none of them says a word to each other. When one of the garbage men, Nikander (Matti Pellonpää) takes his girl Illona (Kati Outinen) to a restaurant, the maître d' tells them that it’s full (earlier in the film, Ilona asks for a hotel room, and has to wait quite a while to find out that it’s full, too). Kaurismäki’s comic timing is slightly off in these scenes, but Outinen lands a huge laugh when she defends Nikander to a girl she works with, then languidly runs down the guys this girl goes out with. Outinen gets the laugh by effecting an “I couldn’t care less, but why not keep going?” mood, and Kaurismäki is smart enough to keep the camera on her as she does this.

The resolution of the slight story in Shadows in Paradise is fun, but it has a whiff of wish fulfillment, and this wish fulfillment takes over in Ariel, the weakest of the three films. It begins again with men going to work, this time in a mine, and it quickly sketches in another droll love story. There is a very funny series of scenes set in an eerily genteel flophouse, a place where men put up framed photos and silently read their papers, but Ariel flounders when it takes up a crime plot that concludes in an absurdly unconvincing prison escape. Kaurismäki’s distinctive brand of unreality can’t handle the mechanics of a standard story like this. A stay in prison isn’t at all different in Ariel from life on the outside, but this joke isn’t particularly pointed; what’s needed is a touch more outrage, a bit of wildness. As it is, the film just dribbles nicely along to a silly conclusion scored to a Finnish version of “Over the Rainbow.”

But the third film in the set, The Match Factory Girl (1990), is a small masterpiece where Kaurismäki hones a savage story to such a fine edge that it wouldn’t be embarrassing to compare it to the best of Bresson. At its center is Kati Outinen, who played the girlfriend in Shadows in Paradise. Here she plays Iris, a sullen girl who works in a factory and lives at home with her mother and stepfather. We see her cooking a homely meal for them; afterwards, Kaurismäki juxtaposes TV coverage of the massacre in Tiananmen Square with Iris making herself up to go out dancing. When he cuts to a kitschy, time-warp sort of dance hall, the contrast with the violence we’ve just seen on television is shocking, and funny, too; it signals that The Match Factory Girl is going to be in a much darker key than the first two films. Iris just sits by herself at the dance hall, sipping an orange drink. Finishing it, she puts it down next to a row of empty bottles, which lets us know that she’s been consuming the same orange drink in one spot for a very long time. It’s the kind of pitiful detail that makes you want to laugh at Iris, but the laugh catches in your throat.

Poor, glowering Iris meets a man (Vesa Vierikko) at another dance hall, and she actually dances with him; the morning after, he puts some money on her dresser and leaves, another moment where you don’t know whether to laugh or cringe. There’s almost no dialogue in The Match Factory Girl, and when there is, it’s usually a man telling Iris something awful, or insulting, or both. Increasingly hopeless, Iris sits in a movie theater with tears running down her face; gradually, we hear the soundtrack and realize that she’s at a Marx Brothers movie! Clearly, Iris is an inconsolable girl who is inching closer and closer to the edge, and it’s easy to get transfixed by her sour pout, her accusatory blue eyes and the pink scrunchie that holds her blond hair in a tragic ponytail. The last third of the movie, where Iris takes definitive action, is swift, merciless, hilarious and perfectly judged. Outinen does no “acting” whatsoever, yet this is a truly exceptional performance. In its abstract terms, The Match Factory Girl makes you understand why some people are driven to unconscionable deeds, and the whole movie is a triumph for Kaurismäki and his minimalist methods.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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Mad Men Mondays: Season 2, Episode 8 "A Night to Remember" and Episode 9 "Six Months' Leave": An Update

For a variety of reasons, not the least being my grief over the death of David Foster Wallace, which left me in no mood to do any writing, my column on "A Night to Remember"kind of fell through the cracks. After last night's rerun, Mad Men will return on September 28, and that evening or the following morning you'll be able to read an extra-long Mad Men Mondays which will take on both "Night" and "Six Months' Leave", with a particular emphasis on what the episodes say and reveal about the status of Mad Men's women.

In the meantime, congratulations to Matthew Weiner, the cast, writers and producers for their richly-deserved success at last night's Emmys. I know I can't be the only one who was doing some major fist pumping with a three-meter smile on my face at the sight of the whole gang assembled on stage at the end of the night...

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Philip Roth's Indignation

By Andrew Schenker

Over the course of Philip Roth's last three novels, death has moved from the thematic margins where it’s long resided to the central place we might expect it to take in the now 75-year-old writer's oeuvre. In 2006’s Everyman, mortality is present from the very beginning, as the book opens with the funeral of the central character whose story is narrated (his life reflected back on) in terms of the bodily decay that inevitably comes with aging. Bodily decay marks the starting point of that book's follow-up, the appropriately titled (if hugely disappointing) Exit Ghost. The last novel in the ongoing chronicle of Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, Ghost finds the aging protagonist, long in retreat from the world following a prostrate surgery that has left him incontinent, returning to New York to consult with doctors about his condition and being everywhere besieged with signs of decay and mortality from his past. In his latest novel, Indignation—easily his best work in at least ten years—Roth confines himself to the college career of his young protagonist, Marcus Messner, but despite its youth-oriented setting, the book is no less concerned with mortality than the AARP milieu of his last two books.

In fact, the specter of death, with which every page of Indignation is thoroughly blotted, has never been more present in the author's work. Caught between the twin poles of fear and anger, 19-year-old Marcus Messner's college life is predicated on avoiding the Korean War (then raging in the book's 1951 backdrop) at all costs, but when those costs mean adhering to the absurdities of chapel attendance and four semesters of ROTC in order to avoid being thrown out of school and losing his college deferment, Messner has some difficulty staying the course. Something of an existential hero—as much for our age as for the 1950s—Messner finds himself incapable of adhering to the inherent absurdity of the collegiate regulations. Attending fictional Winesburg College in Ohio (one of several allusions to Sherwood Anderson's classic novel), an institution with a strong Christian bent and a stated goal of shaping moral character, Messner challenges the hypocrisy and narrowmindedness of the institution through a series of exchanges with an intimidatingly authoritative dean, even enlisting then recent Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell to his cause.

But after the challenge comes the fear: the fear of expulsion and, its corollary, the fear of death. As with Camus’ Meursault, when Messner is finally condemned it is not for any actual crime, but for a tangential formality. As Meursault refuses to feign grief at his mother's funeral, so Messner refuses to affect a false piety by attending chapel. And so both men are sentenced for their inability to suffer the conventional lies that allow the smooth functioning of society. In Roth's case that society—then as now—is constituted around a repressive, authoritarian ruling party that uses so-called Christian values and a series of scare tactics to justify destructive and unnecessary warfare. Though Vietnam represents the obvious parallel with Iraq, Roth here substitutes Korea, allowing him to set his novel in the more socially restrictive 1950s and to explore in greater detail the sexual repression that was more pronounced in the campus life of that era, but which continues to assert a baleful influence today, stemming from the same authoritative inclination that leads to the perpetuation of armed conflict.

But such are the prevailing mores of Marcus’ time that only after receiving a surprise round of fellatio from a happily willing young woman does the shocked 19-year-old learn that women can take a positive interest in sex. His prior understanding of Eisenhower-era sexual politics, which indeed seems to hold true for the majority of the college’s female students, is that women want nothing more than "to reestablish with a reliable young wage earner the very sort of family life from which they had temporarily been separated by attending college, and to do so as rapidly as possible." Roth makes clear the ways in which this predominant conception of female non-sexuality and general passivity is shown to have enormously devastating effects. For the young woman who embraces her sexuality and gives freely of herself, the penalty is the vicious labeling and gossip of undersexed young men, and, in the case of Marcus' girlfriend, the final results are alcoholism, suicide attempts, electroshock and an unwanted pregnancy. For the men, the pent-up sexual repression leads to a campus-wide panty raid marked by vandalism and a massive spread of ejaculate, an event which leads to serious repercussions for the campus community and, indirectly, to the expulsion and death of Messner.

Yes, Messner meets his fate in Korea, but I'm not giving anything away by saying so. Roth lets us know pretty early on of his hero's eventual demise by introducing an odd, but effective device in which Marcus speaks to us from a hazy netherworld. In this imperfectly defined afterlife, he is denied human contact and has nothing to do except remember, endlessly mulling over the events of his brief terrestrial existence. This sense of inevitability marks the novel with a certain hovering sadness, granting a retrospective view of youthful life from the vantage point of a final knowledge. But even without this knowledge, the omnipresence of war that fills the novel's margins renders Roth's conception of childhood as one in which innocence is entirely absent, even as Marcus' classmates frolic around in blithe complacency. In the end, the only way to escape death is to play by the rules, but for Roth's young hero, a man for whom indignation is the natural reaction to the false, absurd formalities that are granted a disproportionate importance by the ruling powers, it's only fitting that he winds up dead on one more battlefield, staining the ground with the blood of one more anonymous U.S. soldier. Being a Roth hero, at least he doesn't go without a fight. The final words he speaks are addressed to the dean of men, but they can be equally well applied to the college, the country, and all the other lies that have come to constitute contemporary American life. "What choice did Marcus have," Roth writes, "what else could he do but, like the Messner that he was, like the student of Bertrand Russell's that he was, bang down his fist on the dean's desk and tell him for a second time, 'Fuck you'?"
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Andrew Schenker is a freelance writer based in New York. His work can be accessed at The Cine File.

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Love Costs: Rescuing Se7en From Nihilism

By Michael K. Crowley

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 04/29/2004, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

[Stylistic Note: I haven't yet figured out how to do clickable footnote citations in Blogger. For the moment, you'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to access them. Hope to remedy this in the near future. Thanks for your understanding.]

"So what were you doing? Biding your time, toying with me, allowing five innocent people to die until you felt like springing your trap?"

—John Doe—

The adjective "nihilistic" and its vague synonyms are all too frequently attached to opinions of David Fincher's extraordinary Se7en. "Nihilistic" often appears in descriptions as an afterthought, a convenient substitute for the expression of a complex emotional reaction induced by a powerful work of art that leaves viewers feeling confused, depressed and devoid of hope. Used as such, it suggests that Se7en does not exist for any worthwhile purpose.¹

The difficulty I have with the attachment of this label to Se7en is that Se7en is not nihilistic but a concertedly structured, almost mathematically precise exercise in moral calculus that argues people must abandon apathy as a private solution to the problem of pandemic human suffering. If an incorrect view of a valuable work is perpetuated it tarnishes the reputation of that work and those who created it, and obscures the ability of viewers to engage that work as it is intended to be engaged. Language activates a conceptual understanding, a presupposition. "Nihilistic" is an especially toxic word that suggests far more than merely that a film has a downbeat ending. It suggests a work is immoral, amoral, and that, by imputation, the filmmakers, director and writer have willfully conspired to create art whose intent is to hurt viewers and disparage our collective confidence that our lives are meaningful. Thus, one who believes Se7en is an cynical exercise in torturing an audience may conclude, "Se7en is a nihilistic work; therefore, it doesn't mean anything. It does not exist for any purpose other than to shock and depress people like me." This is unfortunate, because I believe the meaning of Se7en is immutably clear, brilliantly argued and vitally important.

Se7en may leave viewers upset, confused and devoid of hope; however, to label it nihilistic—or to suggest that its meaning is that there is no meaning—is nonsense. Se7en does not promote the idea that our lives are meaningless, that existence is meaningless, or that we should engage the suffering of others impartially. It does not shrug its shoulders at serial murder and a degenerated society. It does not seek to punish it characters and audience for no purpose, but for an important purpose.

The ongoing discourse between Detectives David Mills (Brad Pitt) and William Somerset (a brilliant Morgan Freeman) that simmers at the film's core is a vigorous presentation of two opposing and irreconcilable philosophies. Each man believes his philosophy makes the world a safer rather than a more dangerous place. Over the course of the narrative, Se7en explores, challenges and ruthlessly demolishes the intellectual integrity of the appealing but pernicious philosophy advocated by William Somerset.

Confusion arises because, as the film answers this question of whose philosophy is best, it answers it through the catharsis of bloodshed and loss. Like Somerset, viewers become attached to Mills, Tracy and the conceptual innocence of their unborn child, and feel betrayed by what befalls these characters. It's natural that some spectators will leave a viewing of this film feeling dismayed, repulsed, and never wanting to see or think about the film again. The climax leaves many with the feeling that nothing positive has been affirmed or accomplished. But something has been accomplished, albeit at an unusually high price for what pretends to be a genre picture: Se7en negates a flawed philosophy—one held not only by William Somerset but a great many people—and this negation corrects Somerset's derisive opinion of human beings and his moral neutrality with respect to their suffering. The character who, because of his seniority and aptitudes, is in the position to do the most good if motivated to do so changes a core value. Somerset concludes that it is better to fight against evil than to amass excuses why he cannot and should not bother. This he learns directly from David Mills, who is the film's antagonist. The film's message is a repudiation, rather than an endorsement, of nihilism.

The argument against nihilism

Any argument that seeks to demonstrate that Se7en is not nihilistic must grapple with the design of its themes, while answering the objections that are bound to arise in response to the assertions in contention. A refutation of the nihilism charge rests on five pillars:

1. The "authority of the film" presents, negotiates and transcends the individual, disparate belief systems of Somerset, Mills and serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) to construct an argument that neither apathy nor nihilism are viable moral philosophies with which to engage human society.


2. Somerset's apathy is not arrived at by enlightened or sincere philosophical thinking, but rather is a coping mechanism he favors because it shields him from emotional turmoil and ethical responsibility. Therefore, his world view is not genuinely nihilistic but a rational response to his fear of suffering and the feelings they provoke.


3. A common misunderstanding is that John Doe and David Mills are the mirrored characters in Se7en. When it is understood that John Doe and William Somerset are in fact the mirrored characters, confusion regarding what the authority of the film endeavors to prove about Somerset's beliefs is more easily resolved.


4. A common misunderstanding is that John Doe is the antagonist in Se7en. When it is understood that Mills, rather than John Doe, is Somerset's antagonist, the central argument of Se7en becomes more accessible.


5. The climax of Se7en directly dramatizes the consequences of Somerset's belief system. The catastrophic consequences lead to Somerset's transformation, and the coda is the primary vehicle by which the authority of the film coveys its meaning to the spectator.

Authority of the film

The "authority of the film" is here defined as the creative, guiding intelligence that constructs its essential argument; it structures a narrative based on a premise that strives to illustrate a point by demonstrating transformation in a protagonist. It manifests most clearly when it clarifies what message or belief a viewer is to take away from the experience of watching the film. The belief the filmmakers wish to impart can be said to be "endorsed" by the authority of the film; the film exists to make this point. The authority is no single element but the aggregation of many constituents that strive to impart this meaning to a spectator and may include everything from the sequence in which conflicts are organized to where emphasis is placed in cinematic compositions and the way in which pivotal scenes are choreographed. The authority conveys meaning systematically, intuitively and, in the case of Se7en, explicitly.

Se7en is meticulously constructed to convince the spectator that one set of beliefs is superior to another. This is more easily established by examining the conclusion the film arrives at contingent upon its premise. Se7en does not depart radically from structural conventions, so it is proper to examine it the same way we examine traditional cinematic narratives—in terms of its "A leads to B" premise, and in consideration of how the protagonist, Somerset, is transformed by direct engagement with an antagonist, Mills.

In the film's coda, Somerset suggests his change to the Captain and then directly communicates it to the audience. First, he implies to the Captain that he is reconsidering his retirement, something to which he has looked desperately forward. Then, in a crucial, direct transmission to the audience, Somerset recants his previously established belief that it is safer to do nothing than something to combat the societal degeneracy that confounds him. He now believes the world is "worth fighting for." This philosophy does not fall out of a tree; it is the philosophy advocated by Mills, and one Somerset has disputed for the entirety of the narrative.

Se7en arrives at Somerset's epiphany after strenuously arguing that a belief system that justifies indifference is not beneficial because it "leads to" enormous suffering, not only for Mills, Tracy, and their unborn child, but even for the man who clings to this philosophy. Beliefs that exonerate apathy are demonstrated within the narrative to be more harmful than beneficial to society. The film shows us this is so, and in the coda Somerset articulates that he recognizes this is so.

The entire film is structured to arrive at this conclusion. In Act I, the spectator is shown that Somerset favors a philosophy of apathy and that by holding it he derives peace of mind. He suffers less because he adopts a conceptual rather than visceral relationship to human suffering. He does not struggle to explain the injustice in the world but accepts it as the inherent nature of a society over which he has no control. This belief attenuates the effort he exerts to capture John Doe, who embodies Somerset's generalized view of a depraved humanity. Somerset also discourages the impulse of Mills to judge, label and combat this representation of evil.

In Act II, Somerset comes into repeated conflict with Mills over ideological beliefs. Mills believes the opposite of what Somerset believes and questions the value of adopting apathy as a world view. Somerset continues to retain his beliefs and to criticize Mills' idealistic, "naïve" view that with diligence and effort they can apprehend Doe before the pattern is complete.

Late in Act II, Mills assertively confronts Somerset on the origin and authenticity of his beliefs that justify apathy, and Somerset confesses that he holds these beliefs but cannot defend them as a philosophy. Somerset does not believe what he believes as a result of deep theoretical rumination, but because to hold these beliefs is emotionally less costly to him. The beliefs are constructed as a wall between himself and a painful experience of human suffering. Additionally, something quite interesting happens to Somerset: by his own admission a "disagreeable" man with few or no friends, he violates one of his precepts and involuntarily develops emotional attachments to Mills and his wife, Tracy. If harm were to come to these individuals, it would activate in Somerset more emotional pain than he ordinarily experiences when exposed to human suffering.

In the climax of Se7en, Somerset consciously or unconsciously facilitates the completion of Doe's design and suffers when Mills, Tracy and their unborn child are irrevocably injured by John Doe. As a direct result of realizations produced by these excruciating events, Somerset renounces the indifference he has previously justified, then adopts Mills' view that he bears a direct duty to attempt to ameliorate human suffering.

This can be restated as an "A leads to B" premise, where A is a set of causes and conditions that give rise to B, where B is an epiphany, realization or change of a core belief by the protagonist. A film can be about many things, but the "A leads to B" equation describes what a film argues. Based on how Se7en is structured and how the protagonist, Somerset, is changed as a direct result of causes and conditions he encounters, the premise of Se7en could be said to be "An apathetic detective's partnership with a highly motivated detective who opposes his apathy, as they attempt to apprehend a serial killer, leads the apathetic detective to repudiate apathy as a proper response to the problem of evil and suffering."

That Somerset is the protagonist of Se7en is one point upon which the writer, director and actors agree. The film opens and closes with Somerset. As a direct result of causes set into motion by his collision with Mills, in conjunction with exacerbating constituents, Somerset renounces the core belief he symbolically embodies. Although Mills can be said to "be changed" by causes and conditions present in the narrative, his core beliefs do not change, nor does he choose his change voluntarily; his transformation is forced upon him against his will.

People sometimes ask rhetorically why there has to be so much destruction in Se7en; why must Tracy, Mills and their unborn child suffer horribly for this film to complete its argument? The answer is implicit in the temperament of its protagonist. Somerset is not motivated to rethink this philosophy by generalized suffering because his philosophy is designed to interpret suffering as an affirmation rather than a negation of his philosophy. But when he becomes emotionally attached to Mills and Tracy, and they suffer, and he suffers because they suffer, his relationship to suffering is altered. He must ask himself the question, "What if any responsibility do I bear for this outcome?" Somerset's change is contingent upon the magnitude of damage done to people he cares about in the context of circumstances he is in the power to change; no lesser calamity could possibly activate so momentous a change in a man this attached to the philosophy that the authority of the film indicts.

The origins and dissection of Somerset's philosophy

If Se7en appears to contains traces of nihilism, it is because it explores a belief system that champions apathy and indifference. One of Se7en's most ingenious deceptions is to present Somerset's philosophy as an appealing set of beliefs held by an impressive and cerebral man. Somerset is so intelligent that he knows how to disguise a fear of psychic pain as a philosophy so enlightened, thoroughly considered, impartial and alluring that Mills appears primitive, simplistic and ignorant by comparison for holding the opposite view. Se7en is Kubrickesque in that when it lies, it lies as truthfully as it possibly can, without the barest hint of a smirk. It could be said that the authority of the film defers to Somerset for almost two complete acts before it reveals it's true intention. Until the pivotal reversal occurs and Mills unveils Somerset's philosophy as a coping mechanism of no benefit to any human being but Somerset, there are few clues that it is Somerset's philosophy that is under scrutiny. Then we see that the philosophy itself is rather ugly. Somerset believes that society is so debased that it is senseless to care about human beings or fight the evils that plague them. He clings to these beliefs because disengagement spares him the dual burdens of pain and moral obligation.

When discussing Somerset's philosophy, it's important to draw a distinction between the philosophy he propounds and the underlying fears upon which the philosophy is predicated. He proclaims that he holds certain beliefs because they are enlightened, but it is gradually revealed that he holds them because the world frightens him.

Until late in Act II, Somerset continues to defend his existential apathy. Because Somerset is more eloquent than Mills, there is an appearance created in Acts I and II that the authority of the film may favor Somerset's perspective of human beings as hopelessly confused and unworthy. However, evidence in the film suggests Somerset does not believe in moral relativism out of conviction but rather because proclaiming such beliefs abdicates him of the obligation to expose himself to harm in the course of fulfilling his ethical obligation to fight against what is wrong. Somerset is highly intelligent and uses the best means at his disposal to exonerate his apathy—in this case, a philosophy that appears rigorously considered and self-effacing.

Somerset's repeated requests to be excused from the case are one signal that his preference for apathy is a byproduct of self-preservation. We learn from the Captain that Somerset has a reputation for leaving "unfinished business." Further crevices appear in Somerset's belief system when we are exposed to John Doe's diaries, and hear Somerset read aloud words authored by a misanthrope that appear, on the surface, to express Somerset's own contempt for humanity.

Whether Somerset holds these beliefs out of conviction or convenience is important. By revealing that Somerset promotes this philosophy for a reason other than the one he states, the authority of the film sheds doubt on the presumed motivation for much of Somerset's speech and behavior. He is no longer a conscientious objector or nihilist, but a scared human being. His philosophy is not a byproduct of enlightenment. He adopts it in pursuit of an objective: to absolve himself of guilt and ethical obligation. Somerset wants to be happy, and detachment is his strategic mechanism. The true consequences to himself and others of holding these beliefs are the subject of Act III.

The mirroring of Somerset and John Doe

A common response to a first viewing of Se7en is to conclude that Mills and John Doe are similar (i.e., doubles), and that Somerset is distinguished from either by his wisdom, elegance and ruthless clarity about human nature.² The meaning of the film will be lost on people who misunderstand this to be the case. Somerset and John Doe are the mirrored characters.

What in fact does John Doe believe? He believes humans are "sick, ridiculous puppets," immoral, irredeemable and all alike. In his mind there is "a sin on every street corner." He claims to believe he too has a purpose: to act on God's behalf to punish sinners in such a spectacular way that he will become famous and his efforts reproduced by others. But in Doe's lair and during Mills' interrogation of Doe we are provided evidence of less lofty motives. Doe derives gratification from inflicting and documenting pain. He is a narcissistic psychopath who craves recognition and remembrance, ostensibly from the human masses he disdains. Doe's contradictions are ubiquitous; nevertheless, they are still beliefs—selfish desires disguised as a philosophy of Divine Intervention. We also realize that his selection of victims is capricious and symbolic, rather than particularized and coherent. He doesn't "turn each sin against the sinner" but targets victims whose superficial features evoke a sin and, in the case of Mills, chooses a victim for extremely private reasons. He will also murder people—Tracy and her unborn child—whose sinfulness is not established because his infatuation with the ingenuity of "the whole complete act" takes precedence over moral cohesion. He believes the ends justify the means.

Proponents of the Doe/Mills theory³ argue that they are mirrored because they believe that which they believe fanatically, believe the ends justify the means, are dichotomous and simplistic in their determination of what is right and wrong, and resort to violence to achieve their goals. Mills is a manifestation of the same disease and discounted as a serious moral force because two wrongs don't make a right. Somerset, in this interpretation, is singled out as evolved and ethically superior because he condemns and avoids displaying the destructive emotions that ultimately destroy Mills and Doe.

This argument is itself nihilistic because it makes no credible distinction between John Doe's crimes and Mills' efforts to stop them, nor even between John Doe's status as a killer who preys on innocent strangers and Mills status as a police detective whose vocation is to incarcerate killers and prevent killings. There follows the implied assumption that the spectator and society as depicted in the film lack the moral capital to declare that Doe's crimes are wrong, and that Mills has no legitimate right to label them evil and no duty to attempt to avert more killings by the means he employs. In order to make this case, the magnitude of Mills' anger must be exaggerated, as Doe proposes, to "wrath" so it can shoulder the burden this tenuous argument places on Mills to embody an evil commensurate with Doe's. Advocates of this theory draw a theoretical analogy between Mills' aggression and Doe's crimes which are both assumed to be seeds of the same spore and an affront to the enlightened civility Somerset represents. The idea we are not entitled to state outright that Doe's murders are wrong, or even worse than Mills' attempts to stop them, is to dispense with assumptions we are wholly entitled to make lest we permit moral relativism to reach comedic proportions. No moral equivalence can be convincingly drawn between Mills' pursuit of John Doe and John Doe's persecution of innocents. To suggest no human being is "innocent" is to adopt Doe's psychopathic codification of human beings as inherently sinful and deserving of punishment.⁴ Also, this interpretation conveniently disregards Somerset's admission that—although he would never kill anyone to make this point—he has a similar distaste for human beings.

In order for Se7en to make its case, it is necessary that Mills elicit Doe's anger by deconstructing the grandiosity of the murders to redefine them properly as the private expressions of a mediocrity desperate for renown rather than components in a divinely inspired sermon. The vehicle he uses to unveil Doe is moral outrage, not "wrath." This is the only expression of condemnation Doe receives in the film, and it is this expression that provokes Doe to reveal the contradictions that unravel the philosophical foundation for his Grand Design. In accomplishing this feat, Mills eradicates any basis Somerset has to be impressed by Doe's "philosophy." This important contrast between Mills' moral exasperation and Somerset's silence on Doe's motivation ("It's dismissive to call him a lunatic") illustrates how the detectives are different—a difference that would indicate it is a deception to believe, as proponents of the Mills/Doe theory seem to, that Somerset is morally superior to Mills; Somerset never condemns, even in private, that which merits condemnation. Therefore, any display of anger, when viewed in contrast to Somerset's ethical passivity, will appear to be excessive.

Nor is there any basis to argue that Mills' anger is disproportionate to the events that provoke it or, specifically, that Mills can be said to embody "wrath."⁵ That John Doe is able to induce "wrath" in Mills by slaughtering his wife and child is not convincing evidence that Mills is inherently wrathful; it suggests only that he is not extraordinary. We can't say Mills is pathologically angry; all we can say is that he is more aggressive than Somerset wishes him to be, while keeping in mind that Somerset disapproves of nearly any expression of emotion, and has a personal motive to portray Mills as more violent than he is to self-validate private beliefs and consciously discourage Mills from engaging in behaviors that may expose Somerset, or his philosophy, to jeopardy. That Somerset and Doe both have an aversion to Mills because of the threat he poses to the moral credibility of their beliefs would tend to suggest they share insecurities.

It also presumes too much to suppose that Mills' emotionalism is presented exclusively as a negative trait. Somerset may believe so, but the authority of the film suggests otherwise. Mills exhibits anger but that anger is produced by empathy for Doe's past victims and a desire to prevent future homicides. We assess Mills' conduct through the filter of Somerset's evaluation, so his traits are deemed to be negative by a man predisposed to define them in this way ("We have to divorce ourselves of emotion no matter what" and, scornfully, "It's impressive to see a man feed off his emotions"). Somerset discourages expressions that would make Mills seem fully contoured and is surprised to learn, for example, that he relates to animals and is, according to Tracy, "the funniest man I ever met." Mills is the only character in the film who sustains and intimate relationship with another human being, or utters the word "love" without mockery. Mills is not purely anger but a blend of positive and negative emotions. Contrarily, the film suggests that Somerset's lack of emotional literacy has cost him. By his own admission, people do not like him. He colleagues "can't wait" until he is gone. His cold description of a relationship with a woman is divested of any sense of remorse or nostalgia. His advice to Tracy about whether to abort a pregnancy is poignant yet strangely lacking in empathy—it attempts not to comfort but frighten her. Se7en does not argue that emotional stoicism is a virtue; only Somerset does.

Furthermore, there are grounds to doubt that Doe targets Mills because he suspects Mills to be "wrathful". Doe targets Mills before he knows anything more than that Mills is voracious to capture him. An ancillary benefit, from Somerset's perspective, of adopting an attitude of indifference, is that he does not risk making enemies with a man like John Doe, to whom Somerset is apparently unthreatening because he does not overtly oppose Doe's will. Somerset, free of personal attachments that can be destroyed in order to induce wrath, cannot be hurt in the same way as Mills. Somerset is called upon to play a different role in the culmination of the Grand Design, because Doe requires the passive cooperation of someone who is more intellectually curious to see how Doe will complete his "masterpiece" than humane in his drive to avert further suffering.

There is a gigantic distinction between Mills' anger and John Doe's anger, so it cannot be argued they are enjoined by their anger. Mills is emotional in the sense he knows what he is feeling at any given moment and is not afraid to express it—he expresses emotions other than anger. His anger is not fused, as it is in Doe, to entrenched, ideological rage produced by a disordered mind craving notoriety. Mills is emotionally diverse and responsive to circumstance, whereas Doe's intellectualized misanthropy is showcased only through calculated violence he controls in private, and that is a metaphoric manifestation of Somerset's fatalism and detached contempt for humans. The assumptions that affirm Somerset's apathy bear underlying resemblance to Doe's beliefs—that human beings are inadequate and contaminated by ignorance because they permit emotion and transitory desire to overrule reason and civility. This point is important: Although Doe and Somerset differ in mechanism of expression, they both believe human beings are morally indistinguishable from one another and collectively guilty:

Mills: "We are talking about people who are mentally ill [and] fucking crazy."

Somerset: "No, no. We are talking about everyday life here..."

Mills: "You say 'the problem with people is that they don't care, so I don't care about people.'"

Doe sees all human beings as sinful, and Somerset sees all human beings as selfish, ignorant, and lacking inherent value; he believes they punish themselves and is content to allow them to do so. Somerset finds it fascinating to observe, but not to prevent. His job is to "pick up the pieces."

In the climax of the film, the belief systems endorsed by Doe and Somerset are revealed to be subjective preferences rather than authentic philosophies. Both men have disguised preferences as enlightened belief systems. John Doe purports to know and implement God's will. Somerset professes to have transcended the messiness of human emotion. Just as the wholly unjustifiable murders of Tracy and the unborn child serve to coruscate any delusion that John Doe's Grand Design is credibly predicated on an intelligible fundamentalist philosophy, to the extent Somerset and Doe are mirrored, any notion that their respective philosophies are anything other than manifestations of private desires implodes simultaneously.

It is more fruitful to hypothesize that what distinguishes Somerset from Doe is a conscience rather than to argue, as some have attempted, that the only thing that separates Doe from Mills is a police badge. Mills is not misanthropic, nor does he believe that human beings are morally indistinguishable from one another. He makes a distinction between those who are innocent, those who are mentally ill, and those who are evil. When Mills says he "cares", he means that he cares enough to draw this distinction and, on the basis of making this distinction, form an opinion of who to fight against and who to fight for. Somerset believes, like John Doe, that there is no need to make this distinction because everyone is uniformly guilty.

Additionally, although it is true that for both Doe and Mills the ends justify the means, this is true—though less obviously so—of Somerset as well. His philosophy is predicated on the belief that indifference towards the suffering of others—the means—is a legitimate mechanism to repel emotional pain—the ends. Somerset, like Doe, demonstrates contradiction. Although he derides Mills for violating protocol, Somerset carries an illegal switchblade and bribes an FBI agent to procure Doe's library records. When Mills questions its legality, Somerset justifies it in this way: "Legal, illegal—these terms don't apply."

If Somerset is indeed the character whose views are to be embraced, why when questioned is he embarrassed to defend and explain why he holds them? He admits that he holds one set of beliefs because to hold another set of beliefs would provoke emotional pain. Although we may empathize with Somerset's humility and despair, is this a sound basis for adopting and perpetuating a philosophy? Individuals spellbound by Somerset may be enraptured not by his beliefs but his presence and aptitudes. He produces valuable results when pressured to do so, most notably dislodging the identity of the killer. What is under scrutiny is not his skillfulness but a philosophy that undermines its usefulness, and a core belief that serves neither him, his partner, Tracy, nor the other victims of John Doe.

David Mills is the antagonist

Once it is understood that Somerset and Doe are the mirrored characters, it becomes easier to see that Mills is the antagonist of Se7en. This conclusion rests on a recognition of the film's premise in conjunction with an understanding of which character is directly responsible for Somerset's transformation.

Somerset only changes because specific causes and conditions set into motion in Acts I and II prepare him for a change that is brought to fruition in Act III. These conditions are all produced by David Mills. Absent Mills, there could be no change in Somerset.

Against Somerset's wishes, he is partnered with David Mills. Mills is a detective who asks questions and states opinions. Mills questions Somerset's beliefs, and this requires Somerset to contemplate and explain them. Once they are explained, Mills "cannot agree" that they are sincerely held beliefs that constitute a viable, worthwhile philosophy. On the contrary, Mills believes that his life has a purpose and that homicide investigation fulfils this purpose. He fights to get reassigned to an undesirable city because this affords him a greater opportunity to "do some good." When he recognizes that Doe's murders constitute an emerging pattern, he expresses a belief that the crimes are malevolent and that the killer must be apprehended to spare future lives. He believes that in some instances the ends justify the means. His violation of procedures brings him into conflict with Somerset. Eventually, Mills accumulates negative beliefs about Somerset's apathy and indifference. Mills represents the moral contrast to the nihilism that is an involuntary byproduct of actualizing a philosophy of apathy.

Then, late in Act II, there arrives the critical inversion during which Somerset's philosophy is attacked by Mills and exposed to be a psychological coping mechanism rooted in confusion and fear. Mills challenges Somerset's indifference directly and speculates that Somerset has adopted beliefs that justify apathy as a convenience to insure his emotional tranquility and rationalize his withdrawal from the world. Somerset can neither deny this is true nor adequately defend his beliefs to Mills.

Somerset: "This isn't going to have a happy ending. It's not possible…"

Mills: "You know, you bitch and you complain and you tell me these things. If you think you're preparing me for hard times, thank you, but—"

Somerset: "But you're going to be a hero. You want to be a champion. Well let me tell you: people don't want a champion. They want to each cheeseburgers, play the Lotto and watch television."

Mills: "…You're no different. You're no better."

Somerset: "I didn't say I was different or better. I'm not. Hell, I sympathize. I sympathize completely. Apathy is a solution. I mean, it's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It's easier to steal what you love than to earn it. It's easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs, takes effort, and work…"

Mills: "See, you should listen to yourself. You say 'the problem with people is that they don't care, so I don't care about people.' That makes no sense… The point is, that I don't think you're quitting because you believe these things you say. I don't. I think you want to believe them because you're quitting."

Prior to this encounter Somerset creates an impression that his philosophy is grounded in reason, but the opposing view, expressed by Mills and which Somerset does not even attempt to dispute, is that these beliefs do not constitute an authentic philosophy. Somerset does not hold these beliefs out of conviction but to protect himself; the cost of not holding these beliefs would be emotional discomfort he cannot bear.

Following the inversion, we are shown that Somerset is upset by the things Mills has said to him. Mills is the only character in the film to challenge the core belief that Somerset ultimately repudiates. Furthermore, Mills not only indicts the beliefs as fraudulent, but embodies a philosophy in direct opposition to that proclaimed by Somerset. Contiguously, Somerset violates his philosophical code by forming an emotional attachment to Mills and his wife. Then, still clinging to his philosophy of indifference, Somerset participates in a sequence of events that leads to the destruction of people he has grown to respect.

That Mills is Somerset's antagonist can also be established by a process of elimination. Who other than Mills can be said to be responsible for Somerset's change? John Doe? Certainly not. For William Somerset, John Doe is nothing more than the physical manifestation of the degeneration that he already presumes to be the intrinsic nature of humankind; over the course of his career, Somerset has met thousands of John Does. As a result of people like John Doe, Somerset adopted his philosophy to begin with—Doe is not the antidote to, or refutation of, Somerset's belief system but its cause and affirmation. Somerset interprets John Doe as living evidence that his core belief is correct! Does John Doe even once challenge, or give Somerset cause to challenge himself, the core belief that Somerset ultimately repudiates? Not only does Doe never challenge it, but it is in Doe's best interest that Somerset practice apathy. Doe neither targets nor views Somerset as a threat to his design for this very reason—Somerset's frigid intellectualism is an asset to John Doe. John Doe specifically exploits Somerset's apathy to complete his design. Even if one were to fantastically argue that Somerset recognizes a distorted version of his own philosophy in Doe's articulations, an equally strong counter-argument can be made that, if this is indeed the case, recognition only becomes possible because Mills has indirectly pointed this similarity out to Somerset.

If we were to remake Se7en and change only David Mills—rewrite him as a detective who never challenges Somerset's core beliefs, does not embody a diametrically opposed strategy for synthesizing emotional pain and engaging human suffering, and make him such a sycophant that he does not cultivate Somerset's admiration or affection—there could be no change in William Somerset. Somerset is changed as a result of his collision with Mills. He renounces his philosophy because he has experienced excruciating pain and guilt. He does not feel pain because of harm done to John Doe but because of harm done to Mills and Tracy, and worries that his apathy was a contributory factor. He experiences guilt, because Mills showed him a better set of beliefs and he failed to adopt them in time for them to be of benefit to David and Tracy Mills. Somerset adopts another philosophy only because he has been directly exposed to it—by Mills.

The clarification of the argument in the climax and coda

Acts I and II establish the philosophical issue in contention. In Act III the dogmatism is set aside and the consequences of Somerset's beliefs are tested and explicitly rendered. As a result of the destruction they directly or indirectly produce, Somerset is transformed. By imputation, and in dependence upon all that has come before, the authority of the film endorses the transformation. The filmmakers have chosen to leave the audience with a very specific message; this message is the meaning of Se7en and reveals that this film exists for the purpose of persuasion.

By the arrival of the climax it is firmly established that Somerset's philosophy of apathy is so entrenched that in order for it to be changed he will have to suffer onerously. He has spent seven days defending his beliefs, arguing why they are accurate perceptions of reality that constitute a well considered philosophy. For seven days he has justified disengagement from the suffering of the first five victims; because he has no emotional investment in the decedents, they remain in his mind symbolic "others." For seven days he has expressed a desire to be excused from the case, and for seven days he has expressed curiosity and encrypted reverence for the fastidious ingenuity of these particular homicides. Tumbling into an existential syllogism, Somerset argues the schema will be completed because it must be completed—there is nothing he or Mills can do to stop it. Therefore, he is in the paradoxical position of having been entrusted, like Mills, to terminate a sequence of homicides that he believes are mythopoetic, larger than life, and inevitable: "This will go on and on and on"; "He's two murders away from completing his masterpiece"; "This isn't going to have a happy ending."

The conflicts that arise between Somerset and Mills all revolve around the question of whether Doe's cycle can be interrupted. Somerset's insistence there is nothing they can do to prevent these crimes or capture this killer is both a byproduct of and pretext for apathy and ethical laxity. This belief also explains his censure of Mills for behaving as if the opposite is true. If Mills were to successfully avert the schematic before it is complete, this would constitute a refutation of the philosophy Somerset has used all along to justify his passive indifference.

When Somerset and Mills dispute this investigation, on the surface they are disputing core beliefs about the culpability of human beings, and whether evil is omnipresent and ubiquitous, or sporadic, mediocre and conquerable. Beneath the surface, however, they are disputing whether or not Somerset, in the context of his vocation, has the right to adopt apathy as a philosophy and still consider himself a decent human being.

If one accepts that Somerset is emotionally invested in the completion of the crimes because he has yoked the validity of entrenched beliefs to the idea that all seven homicides must occur, and that Mills is naïve for believing otherwise, then it's possible to say that Somerset has a vested interest in the completion of Doe's design because this will affirm beliefs, attacked by Mills, that Somerset is reluctant to abandon. Because the murders are reconstituted as symbolic validation or negation of opposing philosophies, whether they are completed or not will affirm or contravene private beliefs these men dispute which are diametrically opposed. If John Doe is stopped, this imperils the credibility of beliefs Somerset uses to rationalize his failure to try harder to prevent the killings in particular, and apathy in general. Because Mills has attacked Somerset personally for holding these beliefs, and because Somerset cannot defend them, the existential proof of his philosophy becomes contradictorily hinged to whether or not Doe can complete his design.

In the finale, Somerset's beliefs cease to be mere abstractions and produce damaging real world consequences. Because he believes that which he believes, he consciously or unconsciously assists John Doe in the completion of the design. Somerset has every reason to presume there are two murders yet to occur, that Mills has been personally targeted (i.e., the photos discovered of Mills in Doe's lair, in the company of photos of prior and future victims, Doe's phone conversation with Mills), and that the trip to the field is a set-up. Earlier in the film, Doe issues a personal warning to Mills: "I feel like saying more but I don't want to ruin the surprise." Prior to the car ride Somerset expresses doubt that Doe is merely leading them to "two more dead." Note the epigraph that opens this essay, in which Doe slips up by confessing that he has so far murdered only five. Doe flagrantly admits that they are riding into a trap and insinuates that one or both detectives may die:

Mills: "We aren't just going to pick up two more bodies, are we, John? That wouldn't be shocking enough."

Doe: "Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. When this is over, you're going to be remembered…"

When no bodies are discovered in the field, and when the box arrives, promptly at seven p.m., there is no explanation other than that the Design is in progress. Many spectators initially speculate the box contains a bomb. Somerset does not fear this, or he would not approach and open the box. Although it is not possible to predict what is inside the box, it is reasonable to assume that it is a catalyst for finalization of "the whole complete act." Yet, Somerset plays precisely the role that Doe asks of him, turning his prediction of an unhappy ending into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One reason Fincher (the filmic authority) blocks the finale as he does is to place Somerset in the excruciating position of having to choose whether or not to open the box, and what to do after he does. Mills would certainly open the box; however, because Somerset is wiser, there is a question of whether he will or won't. Fincher shows us the deliberation—not fear—on Somerset's face before he opens it. By situating the protagonist in this predicament Fincher crystallizes the conflict between Somerset's investment in a tenuous philosophy and his suppressed humanity. The completion or failure of the design rests in Somerset's hands, and he complies with Doe's instructions.

What happens next is well known.

Objections

Certain objections are bound to arise at this juncture. Some may argue that because Mills fails to escape fulfilling John Doe's purpose for him that the authority of the film cannot be said to endorse the idea that Mills is superior to Somerset for believing apathy is not a solution, evil must be judged, and that he has a purpose he wishes to fulfill.

A response to this objection is to point out how the narrative strongly suggests it is the failure of Somerset that leads Mills into this violent paradox—and that Somerset actually recognizes this is so. Somerset's repudiation of a core value, arriving as it does immediately after tragic events, signals not merely that he has casually decided to change his mind, but demonstrates an actual consciousness of guilt that he is partially to blame for what has transpired. One conclusion that may be inferred from the coda is that Somerset recognizes that things might have turned out differently if he held Mills' philosophy of moral vigilance instead of his own. Secondly, it is not credible to theorize that Mills "fails" because he does not fail alone; Somerset fails as well, and plays a pivotal role in this outcome—not merely because of his behavior in the field but his behavior all along. Because Mills' philosophy is predicated on the obligation of mutual cooperation, Somerset must cooperate with Mills in order for Mills to succeed. Mills is dependent upon Somerset to behave, in the climax, as if he too has the same purpose as Mills and as much at stake, and Somerset fails in this obligation.

Viewers who interpret the moment when Mills shoots Doe as a cataclysmic failure of Mills' beliefs alone, independent of Somerset's influence over the avalanche of events that lead Mills to this abyss, are compartmentalizing this scene as if it is not directly produced by the thematic continuum of causes that is its antecedent. Somerset, not Mills, is the film's protagonist. When the three men set out for the field, Mills ceases to be an agent in shaping the course of events and becomes part of the outcome Somerset has predicted and inadvertently sanctions. The climax is fixated exclusively on the sincerity of these philosophies and the consequences of holding them. Somerset's experience is greater, so his moral responsibility is significant and he is apportioned, by the filmmaking itself, a greater degree of authority over, and responsibility for, the outcome of events.

From a structural standpoint, it cannot fall to Mills, the antagonist, to unify the film's themes in the resolution. Nor, were Mills to spare Doe's life, would it negate or affirm the question at issue, since Mills' immediate dilemma must negotiate the possibility of personal restraint in the face of violence so personally devastating that his response to it can be nothing other than emotional. Se7en does not attempt to argue Mills is superhuman; merely that his view is more likely to positively shape society than Somerset's belief that the solution to private turmoil is moral abdication and escape. Mills' failure to spare Doe's life is not a new evolution in the film's theme, merely a dire consequence of the film's construction upon a single theme established at the outset and developed continuously. Although Mills pulls the trigger, Somerset cocks the gun.

It is not necessary that Mills spare Doe's life in order for it to be fundamentally true that Mills is correct to believe apathy is not a solution and that his life has a purpose. Somerset is less damaged by the outcome than Mills, but there is no basis to conclude that this represents the triumph of one belief system over another. Somerset's beliefs are predicated on a wish that he not come to physical or emotional harm and they have served the first purpose, but he is not happy that they have; he is not content with the results of holding his beliefs and rejects them for this very reason. He has learned not merely that apathy can lead to suffering but that the suffering of others can cause suffering to himself. Somerset's philosophy does not even serve Somerset.

Finally, why is Se7en constructed to convince the spectator that Somerset is mistaken to hold the philosophy he propitiates and is improved by revoking and substituting it with a belief adequately defended by Mills if, as proponents of the Mills/Doe theory believe, what the filmmakers actually seek to convey is that Somerset and the beliefs he personifies are an antidote to the deterioration of society portrayed in the film? It makes no sense that Somerset would voluntarily adopt views Mills acclaims if the perspective of the filmmakers, and this protagonist, is that Mills and Doe are byproducts of the same pestilence. If Somerset, in the film's coda, is still sincerely convinced that indifference is preferable to tenacious engagement he would not repudiate it on the spot. Se7en is not structured to argue that Somerset holds superior beliefs; it argues that he holds morally problematic beliefs and is improved by recognizing they are deficient. It argues that Somerset's intellectual detachment is a trait to be disavowed rather than an attribute to be celebrated and adopted by society at large.

Another objection may be that in spite of Somerset's self-confessed apathy, intellectual infatuation with Doe's crimes and apparent knowledge he and Mills are being ambushed, it presumes too much to assert that he can or should do anything other than he does in the climax or that, even if he did, he could not avert the outcome. To wit, even if he does not open the box, John Doe can still procure the same results by verbally relaying to Mills what is in the box; he can still induce wrath.

Somerset's actions in the finale of Se7en must fairly be judged as components of an entrenched belief system, which is to say he is habituated by pre-existing beliefs to react in a limited way and cannot be expected to demonstrate spontaneous ingenuity in how he copes with fantastically unpredictable circumstances. The authority of the film does not indict Somerset for an inability to change in the climax; rather, it takes a diagnostic approach in its examination of why he has constructed such beliefs and how their influence over his behavior reaps unanticipated consequences. Se7en unfolds in seven days, and its purpose is ruthless in that it is not interested in changing Somerset in time to save David Mills; on the contrary, it is designed so that transformation of Somerset is contingent upon the sacrifice of its likeable characters.

Showdown in the field

Rather than speculate what Somerset might do differently in the climax, let's examine what he does.

One byproduct of Somerset's apathy is that he sees the murders as an existential proof of his own belief system rather than individual acts of violence he relates to with compassion. It is established that he is curious about how the scheme will end, and believes there is nothing he can do to avert its completion. He has reason to suspect that the culmination of the design rests on two murders yet to occur that will take place in this field where only three men stand. He knows this information before they reach the field. As the senior detective on the scene, he has the authority to abort the excursion. He does not have an obligation to act in accord with John Doe's wishes. In spite of this, he indulges John Doe. In spite of all this, Somerset takes custody of, and opens, the box. John Doe doesn't "have the upper hand"; Somerset permits him to have the upper hand. Even though Somerset does not convey to Mills what is inside the box, his behavior after opening attests to the veracity of what Doe claims is in the box. Somerset's appeal to Mills to exercise restraint—"Give me the gun, David. David, if you kill him, he will win"—is an intellectual plea that unwittingly honors the legitimacy of Doe's design rather than functions as a heartfelt identification with Mills' torment; therefore, it is unlikely to prove persuasive to Mills in circumstances that transcend rationalism.

The outcome is not "inevitable" but Somerset, in accord with his beliefs, behaves as if it is inevitable even though he has ample cause and reasonable opportunity to avert, or attempt to avert, completion. He does not discourage the outcome. He cannot later deny that he possessed important information that something terrible would happen in the field involving him or Mills. Nor can he later assert that he took actions to prevent harm that he reasonably presumed could come to himself or to Mills. Somerset's behavior in the climax is a direct result of disengagement and curiosity produced by apathy and a general lack of consideration for cause and effect where human life is at stake, characterized earlier in the film by Mills as an indifference towards human suffering.

It's quite interesting that when Mills aims his gun at John Doe, Somerset does not remain silent because the outcome is, as he has maintained all along, inevitable, and there is nothing he can do to prevent Mills from firing. On the contrary, he urges Mills not to shoot because he believes the outcome can be averted. Somerset recognizes that Mills has the choice to kill or not to kill, just as Somerset has had choices all along, responsibility for which he abdicated on the grounds that his drug of choice is apathy. He has, for example, a choice to encourage or discourage Mills' tenacity, a choice to help or not help Mills chase and capture John Doe, a choice to obey or disobey John Doe's instructions, a choice to open or not open the box. Suddenly, he confesses a belief that what human beings do can alter the outcome of atrocious events.

It's irrelevant that in theory the identical outcome might be brought about by means other than Somerset's participation, because Se7en's fascination is that they are in fact brought about with the protagonist's complicity, lubricated by an apathy whose consequences Somerset appears to comprehend immediately after opening the box. Somerset is the protagonist and it is his beliefs, and their influence over his behavior and the welfare of other characters, that is the subject of the movie.

One intriguing way of interpreting the climactic scene is as an allegorical passion play performed exclusively for Somerset in which his darkest impulses and demons are revealed in the starkest possible terms. Just as Mills cannot be said to embody Wrath, it's not believable that Doe's sin is Envy or that he is telling the truth when he confesses it and requests atonement. Doe, who is "independently wealthy", does not express any desire other than post-mortem infamy; this complete lack of desire is why he does not fear death. John Doe's sin, in the context of how he defines sin, is Pride. But in the finale, John Doe arises as an exteriorized manifestation of Somerset's suppressed jealousy of Mills, pleading for Mills—who arises as a symbolic manifestation of Somerset's suppressed self-hatred and rage at Everyman (thus, "John Doe")—to put him out of his misery. Somerset is forced to witness this as retribution, because he is largely responsible for this escalation. Somerset brings this play into existence and it speaks to him directly. Like a mirror, it reflects his innermost self. Envy begs Wrath for euthanasia. Wrath complies and, like a subject without an object, self-annihilates. Once Somerset's anger and jealousy are expunged, Somerset is resurrected with self-knowledge and a clearer sense of purpose. He is able to adopt Mills' philosophy because envy and anger no longer separate him from his innate wisdom. This explication rhymes with earlier scenes in which it is inferred Somerset suppresses both emotions. Se7en deals with the synthesis of feelings and each of the seven deadly sins is, or is directly dependent upon, a distorted emotion related either to desire or it's opposite, aversion. Envy and Wrath are directly opposing delusions that, when residing within a single individual, create excruciating anxiety and confusion that might tempt one to produce precisely the type of coping mechanism Somerset invents for himself: one that pretends to have transcended emotion. Apathy is emotion in denial. A man who is terrified of his own emotions has an obvious incentive to concoct a philosophy that forbids their expression and discourages behavior that might provoke them to arise.

Somerset maintains this mechanism until he is personally injured by holding it, and this only occurs when people he is attached to become victims of the evil he is indifferent towards. An extreme interpretation is that Mills is martyred by the eighth sin of apathy. Se7en argues that indifference only appears to be a harmless doctrine; it is easily held until it hurts so much it must be dropped. For this reason much suffering must occur in the climax of Se7en; Somerset will continue to hold these beliefs until holding them causes more pain than pleasure. This pain triggers the recognition that his philosophy is no longer harmless but morally indefensible.

Somerset's repudiation of his philosophy in the coda is his change, and his change reveals the purpose of the film. Se7en argues that it is a moral failure to disguise indifference as a rational philosophy for the purpose of private contentment because of the harm to everyone else. Thus, Se7en affirms a conventional moral ideal—the call to action against that which society, by consensus, has deemed wrong. Caring is preferable to not caring. The reason John Doe prefers Somerset to Mills is because Somerset doesn't care. Men like William Somerset make it easier for men like John Doe.

Fortunately, because Somerset is equipped with many attributes, the importance of his transformation is exponential. His renunciation of apathy indicates the potential for a true, rather than artificial, enlightenment that is less clearly present in Mills. Mills understands the concept of moral obligation but his wisdom is obscured by youth, inexperience, impatience and immaturity. Mills may one day have made a great detective. Somerset once held the incorrect view but now, holding the correct view, is in a position to accomplish more with the realization Mills has bestowed upon him.

Conclusion

In defense of the spectator, although Se7en argues a universal idea, it does so intellectually and by imputation. Schindler's List argues the same point—once suffering is recognized by an individual in a position to assuage it, neutrality as a personal refuge is morally untenable—and argues it in such a way that a young child can perceive the message. Schindler's transformation occurs early, rather than in the dénouement; cause and effect is clearly established and the remainder of the film is devoted to examining the positive results produced by Schindler's change. This is not true of Se7en, where, although the message is clear, the link between a cause and its effect is abstract, and the visceral excruciation the climax produces partially obscures an intellectual insight articulated by the protagonist in the final five seconds of the film. For this reason the coda must be, and is, definitive in its identification of Somerset's transformation. There is no room left in Se7en to illustrate the consequences of Somerset's change. For this reason it is difficult for many people to understand that something of value has been accomplished.

Because Se7en attempts to persuade the viewer that apathy, indifference, and the nihilism they produce are terrible for society, it's not proper to call it a nihilistic work, a movie with no discernible purpose, or a celebration of meaninglessness. It means something very specific. The film is constructed to convince spectators of one thing and one thing only. Se7en does not contain a single scene, sound or image that is not germane to its central debate about whether or not human beings have a duty to fight for the rights of other human beings to live free from prejudice, ignorance, oppression and violence. Mills believes he has this obligation; Somerset believes he has no such obligation. The authority of the film then demonstrates that Somerset's apathy contributes to the destruction of decent people and results in psychological pain to the individual who is apathetic. Somerset, recognizing that his philosophy poses a disproportionate hazard to human welfare and, therefore, cannot be justified by the peace of mind it may once have brought to himself, repudiates his philosophy and endorses another—perpetuated and forcefully argued by Mills—that opposes nihilism.

If Se7en were to argue that people should adopt Somerset's philosophy because an individual purged of emotional attachments and moral outrage cannot be wounded or disappointed as easily as one who engages the world intimately, and have a right to do so regardless of the consequences, Se7en would be a nihilistic film propitiating a nihilistic set of beliefs. But Se7en argues that apathy, however fancifully philosophized, is antithetical to the rights and interests of society and must, for the welfare of self and others, be abandoned.

My deepest thanks to James Moran and Peter Gelderblom for their valuable insights, encouragement and helpful advice.
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<sup>1 A sampling of opinions from amateur and professional critics discussing the film: "Putrid, disgusting, formless, meaningless and needlessly excessive" (Amazon.com); "Stylish but nihilistic in the extreme" (Epinions.com); "Cynical and nihilistic" (movieforums.com); "I felt dirty when I left the theater… I don't have to see that movie to know that this world is totally out of whack. Seeing the movie simply made me feel sick… It's not good for our brains or our hearts." (hollywoodjesus.com); "The bottom line is a cliched script that manages to be both pretentious and ultimately meaningless at the same time… just plain mean" (movies.nush.net). Reviewers, even in the context of largely positive critiques, expressed similar concerns: "[Screenwriter] Walker's finale…feels like an act of treachery against the viewer. It undoes the limited faith we've invested in the story" (Desson Howe); "Ugly, derivative, pointless… There is nothing behind [it]… this is pathology of the ugliest kind" (Phil John); "…the ending and its epilogue are breathtakingly nihilistic and take away the will to live" (John Barker); "Its director is an aesthetician of rot and entropy" (Amy Taubin); "…don't look for a lot of deep social commentary" (Christopher Null); "But still, the question that always arises from a film that seems to offer no hope: Why did they make it?" (D. K. Holm, who does attempt to answer this question).

2 This idea that Somerset is a morally transcendent contrast to Mills, and that Somerset earnestly seeks to capture John Doe, is proposed by many reviewers, often in nearly identical terms: "Mills is all brawn and little brain. Somerset, on the other hand, spends long hours in the library researching Dante and Chaucer, looking for clues that will enable him to prevent the next killing" (James Bernardinelli); "Mills is a cocky hothead who needs tempering, while Somerset is a bookworm and every bit as methodical in his own way as the killer they are tracking" (Chris Hicks); Writer Rob Lund, in the process of comparing the film with 8mm, refers to Somerset as Se7en's "moral anchor." Stephen Farber writes of Freeman's "crucial" "moral presence" and comments, "What Freeman brings to the movie is humanity at the heart of a nightmare…. Freeman convinces us that Somerset still cares deeply about the atrocities he's witnessed. That sense of sadness and concern makes the movie something more than a freak show."

3 For an example, see Anne Marie Olesen's thoughtful piece "Film as Metaphor: Cannibalism and the Serial killer as Metaphors for Transgression" in P.O.V. She writes, "The bar scene anticipates the final scene with a tragic resonance, but it also stresses the dominant figure or structure of the film: the mirroring of David Mills and John Doe." Her argument is based on the spatial arrangements of climactic compositions. However, often when a reviewer suggests Somerset is the film's moral compass, that Mills is out of control, and that John Doe may have a point or succeeds as a result of Mills' wrath, the Mills/Doe modality is subtly proposed.

4 In critiques, this idea that Somerset is enlightened is sometimes paradoxically coupled with the suggestion John Doe's crimes may somehow be legitimate: "The more we get to know [John Doe] through the eyes of Detective Sommerset [sic] and Mills, the more morbidly sensible he becomes though" (Rob Lund). Of particular fascination is some of the Christian-based criticism of the film. Seth Studer, who has an online column called "Christian Cinema," writes: "Mills is thick-headed, unwilling to hear Doe's explanation…. Somerset, on the other hand, is quiet and attentive as Doe explains himself…. He cannot get past the possibility that Doe is right. Is Doe right? Is his message true? Are his horrible fruits good fruits? I don't want to answer those questions… but go read the Book of Judges, read of those prophets, and decide for yourself. Christ said to judge them by their fruits, and John Doe's fruits seem awful. But if a wolf can wear sheep's clothing, can a sheep hide beneath wolf-skin?" One comment at hollywoodjesus.com reads: "Some people need the movie's reminder"; another: "The people [Doe] killed, for the most part, may be the scum of the earth. However, he didn't have any right to do what he did."

5 Although mainstream critics were generally cautious not to draw too many ideological conclusions from the climax of the film, the ideas that Mills is wrathful, is punished for his wrathfulness, and that his execution of Doe illustrates that Somerset is essentially correct are widespread among spectators discussing the film. An unsigned but passionate commentary at "Hierarchy" reads: "I came to the observation that this film is about a total loss of control… Mills…did indeed commit wrath… Mills [is] seeking retribution for the murdered and silently enjoying the suffering of the murderer… The light is shown in Somerset, the darkness in John Doe, and Mills is the middle ground… When asked to become wrath, it was more like a declaration of that which was already there. Often it is overlooked that the murderer is the winner." From a review at CineFile: "…the fundamental opposition between emotion/faith (Mills) and logic/despair (Somerset/John Doe) is apparently resolved in favour of the latter when Mills in an act of wrath kills Doe." Lucia Bozzola, reviewing the film at movies.nush.net writes, "Circumspect old-timer Morgan Freeman's dedication and tyro Brad Pitt's fury both mirror the telling responses of their characters, and reveal signs of how tenuous the line is between cop and killer." At a Web site called Tokyo Tales a blogger weighs in on the meaning of the climax, arguing that by enacting the sin of wrath Mills "[validates] Doe's commentary on the wickedness of man." Reviewer Rob Gonsalves writes that the film is not "so much about catching the killer as about how one cop's worldview is validated, to the despair of his partner." Students can even purchase a term paper online that argues Mills is "brash, full of anger" and succumbs to a killer who is "trying to send out a message of how despicable and ugly mankind has become." In a complex and impressive examination of the film's ideology, Steve Ferrier interprets Se7en as a "right wing" examination of "a world full of sin": "Se7en however is a film that basically marginalizes everyone except for those with intellect. This is shown in the characterization of Somerset… By refusing to listen to other perspectives, Mills is punished by the film's ideology at the end when he is compelled to end Doe's sermon by killing him and thus committing the sin of wrath…. Characters such as Mills are punished by Se7en's prevailing ideology as they show no intellectual rigor towards common values that society bases its traditions on. " Ferrier interprets the ending as "overtly dark and pessimistic," "presenting us with no real hope for the future."</sup>
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Michael Crowley is a graduate of the Cinema/Television School at the University of Southern California. He held a miscellany of film-related internships and jobs (can you say gopher?) before working as a writer and screenwriter for about ten years. His non-fiction has appeared online and in magazines, including American Cinematographer. In 2000 he collaborated with Robert H. Smith on the non-fiction book Dead Bank Walking: One Gutsy Bank and the Merger that Changed Banking Forever. He is currently writing a novel and serving as executive producer for an independent feature—a ghost story—entitled Spectres. Mike lives in Payson, Arizona, where he is co-owner of a family-run investment management firm.

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NYFF 46 (2008): The Headless Woman and Tony Manero

By Vadim Rizov

[The 46th New York Film Festival begins September 26th, 2008 and runs through October 12th, 2008. Screening information for The Headless Woman can be found here; screening information for Tony Manero can be found here.]

Thursday was NYFF's day of South American cinema. The morning brought Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman, the afternoon Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero. Both are staggering in different ways. Let's start with the harder one. I've never been a fan of Martel—arguably the most prominent Argentinian director this side of the millennium (exactly the kind of description that can drive people crazy, but whatever). Martel is obviously a sophisticated filmmaker, but she alienated me greatly in La Cienaga and The Holy Girl with her shaky-cam—not to be confused with the Michael Mann school of trying to catch gorgeous momentary accidents or the Assayas school of nervous energy, but far more thematically related. Cienaga's camera is part of the humid irritability, The Holy Girl's connected with the film's general interest in touching and not touching bodies, things always being just this close but impossible to connect with. Martel's cinema is fundamentally one of misdirection and missed connections; all of these things make sense, but they set my teeth on edge. This kind of camera is why it took me a good three or four movies to come around on Olivier Assayas. I'm an idiot.

It would appear, to some extent, that Martel's been fucking with me. I doubt I'll see a single more staggering movie, frame-by-frame, than The Headless Woman all year. The camera is nailed-down and the maximalist widescreen compositions are astonishing in every direction—range of color, geometry (both horizontal and in depth), any trait you'd care to pick up on. Description is useless: this deserves large, glossy reproductions in ArtForum or something. The function stays the same: people stare into mirrors that disorient you as to where others are coming from, glass doors get in the way, every visual is an exercise in ambiguity. And Martel doesn't do formalist master shots: she cuts often enough that you're disoriented from one overwhelming frame to the next.

I hated every minute of it.

Martel's interest in misdirection isn't simply following the Antonioni path of alienation and anomie; it's class-based. As in her past two films, Argentina's lower classes (darker-skinned, treated as the most casual of helpmeets and servants) are always present but never seen by the ostensible protagonists. In this case, anti-protagonist being Verónica (María Onetto), the kind of crows-feet middle-aged sexy à la Julie Christie who you sense must have been staggeringly gorgeous in her prime. In a concise opening scene, Martel offers up the last minutes of an afternoon picnic, singling out no one person more than any other: Verónica and mothers chatting, trading gossip and stories, packing the cars, calling the kids back. It's only when Verónica began driving alone that I realized she might be special, that this wasn't just a group portrait. What happens next is strangely inevitable: having established what Verónica's daily adult routine might have been like every day up to now, Martel blows it up. Verónica's phone rings, she foolishly leans over for it on a tricky curve and hits something. Martel holds the shot, a side profile from the passenger seat: the car stops and Verónica's implacable calm changes to the quietest kind of freak-out and meltdown. She steps out, the door stays open, we focus on the empty out-of-focus space, it starts raining, Verónica gets back in and drives away. A shot out the rear window reveals a dead dog. Over and done with? Hardly.

What happens to Verónica over the first half of the film is supremely, utterly irritating: seemingly unable to do anything more than smile enigmatically and avoid questions and requests others unofficially step in to deal with, she's trapped in her own world of guilt and paranoia. What she thinks she's actually done (not revealed til halfway through) is, based on what we've seen, completely impossible, which doesn't make her feel one bit better. Domestics pad around quietly; an obnoxious sister, Josefina (Claudia Cantero), makes occasional appearances, bullying her young daughter. (I think; everything's quite confusing.) Things happen, yet nothing changes.

On the one hand, the film's logic is impenetrable. An example of why I am occasionally a supremely useless viewer: I had no idea, til I was cruising the reviews, that Verónica was suffering from amnesia. I just thought she was being the usual coy festival-movie enigmatic bitch. So that's my fault, though I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes. As for the rest: continuous with Martel's last two films, water is everywhere, flooding the canals, in endless hair-washing, raining down upon the unseen who don't have the luxury of ignoring it. Fair enough; it goes with the dread. But what's with the obsession with hair-washing? That's actually the least puzzling question I could raise, yet the one that most obscurely irritated me. The big question, increasingly, becomes what the hell Martel is playing at. Yet there are basic crudenesses here that make me question whether her ideas are up to her newly dazzling style: no sooner does she run the dog over than her husband brings home a dead deer—only the first of many over-the-top coincidences and echoes that seem designed to pummel Verónica at every turn. There's also my past experience of Martel's work, where I knew exactly what she was doing and still didn't like it. And yet, part of me wonders if I'm not writing her off, the way Ray Carney describes how he hated Cassavetes' work the first time round for not cuing him how to react, then gradually immersing himself and discovering his own inadequacy as a viewer. But that doubt's a very small part of my reaction. See The Headless Woman when Focus Features puts it out (with a bizarre, chunky new font for subtitles to boot), but don't expect an easy ride by any means.

***
Tony Manero is, barring something exceptional, the strangest, scuzziest film of the year. The only point of comparison I can find that remotely fits is Frownland, just because that's another film heavy on film-grain and a protagonist who offers absolutely no point of entrance. The other thing the two films have in common is a tone where the line between menace and black comedy is never clearly demarcated. One of the weird side-effects of going through the NYFF gauntlet is that the "festival movie" par excellence begins to seem kind of generic; you get used to long, blurry, seemingly non-narrative shots following people down streets, lengthy silences, all the rest of it. For the first 20 minutes, Tony Manero seems to be one of those, and I settled down into a pleasant torpor, wondering if it was going anyplace different. I needn't have wondered.

Tony Manero is actually one Raul Peralto Parades O (Alfredo Castro), a 52-year-old loser in Pinochet's Chile. Raul's only goal in life is to be Tony, John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. Never mind that Raul is hilariously missing the point of the movie—that Travolta's character is a working-class stiff with little to idolize, that disco is an escape rather than a goal to strive toward. Vis-a-vis the all-brown, all-bad landscape he moves through, it's surely vastly preferable. Raul's so single-minded that when people impede his way—a junkyard dealer trying to scalp him for glass tiles for an ersatz-dance-floor, say—he kills them. He's mirroring Travolta's character to an extreme degree.

The point of Tony Manero is a relatively facile one, even though it's the most subtle political indictment in years; it gradually becomes clear that, however sociopathic he may be, Raul's an angel compared to the random round-ups and executions of Pinochet's army. But director Pablo Sorrain sets this up so subtly that it's never troublesome; it's surely a legitimate point, just one well-worn by cliche. What's important is the texture, which could be straight 1978. Grain prevails; everything exists in the same fucked-up analog patina as Manero's well-worn tapes, the subtitled prints playing at the local theater, the dirt and brown of everything, the overall beigeness of the damn film. Overt jokes trade with nervous laughs and provocations so outrageous they stop being offensive and start being pure jaw-droppers. Better to say too little than too much: we're a long way from Costa-Gavras' Missing, and perhaps better off for it.

Incidentally, the shorts committee (whoever these mystery people are) have stepped up big-time from the normally horrendous openers. Tony Manero is preceded by the thematically apposite Love You More, a rare dose of sentimentality from the normally acerbic Patrick Marber (author of Closer et al). If the title's ringing bells, good job fellow Buzzcocks fan; if not, better brush up before you come, because this tiny vignette of a boy and a girl getting together over the single, while pitch-perfect in its period recreation, believable teen awkwardness and horniness, and feel for old-school record-store culture (complete with a perfect B-side joke), is probably completely insufferable if you're not a fan of the song. Directed by Sam Taylor Wood, who presumably one of these days will stop messing about with shorts and music videos and blow everyone away, this is a toss-off from people who can aim higher, and it's delightful.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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Links for the Day (September 20th & 21st, 2008)

1. Jim Emerson points us to two pieces of note about the critical profession: "Criticizing the Critics" by Kathleen Murphy & ""Critic" is a four-letter word" by Roger Ebert.

["Criticism is a destructive activity. If I like something and the critics didn't, they can't see what's right there before their eyes because they're in love with some theory. They don't have feelings; they have systems. They think they know better than creators. They praise what they would have done, instead of what an artist has done. They use foreign words to show off. They're terrified of being exposed as the empty poseurs they are. They are leeches on the skin of art."]

***
2. "Weekend Miscellany": Art Fag City gives us some weekend to-dos, New York-based and otherwise.

["Marsha Pels’ Dead Mother Dead Cowboy at Schroeder Romero isn’t really my bag — too many candles and skulls for my taste — but it gets a nod regardless, due to the above sculpture. I’m not sure I like that one either, but I don’t think you can cast a tomb like that, wrap it in fur, adorn it with a handbag, and not have a sense of humor. As my friend aptly decreed earlier this week, “That sculpture is bitch’n”."]

***
3. A three-part (so far) feature by Vince Keenan on The Whistler films: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

["Amidst multiple deadlines, I’ve been making my way through the offbeat movies based on the radio program The Whistler. The opportunity comes courtesy of Ed Gorman – friend of the site, damn fine writer, and all-around good guy. Thanks again, Ed. The Whistler ran on radio for 13 years, beginning in 1942. The film series, which started two years later, is essentially a noir grab bag. All the elements are here, recombined in various ways: amnesia, blackmail, femme fatales, shady shamuses. And lingering over it all, a pervasive sense of doom, of fate reaching out from the darkness. The title character, glimpsed only in silhouette, narrates each tale. (“I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night.”) Purple prose read in a fulsome voice. Something tells me Ed Wood was a big Whistler fan. Richard Dix starred in the film series. He’s given a different name in each movie, but he’s playing the same type: a man hounded by life no matter how successful he is. As Ed put it, “Dix is awkward but somehow right as a down and outer. Even when he’s supposed to be up he’s down and out, sort of his spiritual DNA I suspect.” Snappy, B-movie pacing is the order of the day; the longest of the eight films clocks in at just over an hour. Each could use another three or four minutes to smooth out the plotting, but they’re still marvels of economical storytelling."]

***
4. "Communication goes beyond language in Wang film": House contributor N.P. Thompson on A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

["Filmed in Spokane, Wash., Wayne Wang's new film "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" marks the director's return both to independent filmmaking and to telling stories about the Chinese experience in America. Wang made a name for himself with "Chan is Missing" in 1982, a low-budget feature about a couple of Asian American cabbies circling San Francisco's Chinatown in search of the mutual friend who robbed them. For the next decade, culminating in a 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan's novel "The Joy Luck Club," Wang brought Asian-themed domestic chronicles from art houses to the mainstream. In recent years, however, he drifted into ill-received commercial ventures (among them, the Queen Latifah remake of the ‘50s British comedy "Last Holiday") but now comes full circle with this small-scale study of an estranged father and daughter reuniting."]

***
5. "World's shortest man meets leggiest woman": From MSNBC.

["Trafalgar Square routinely serves as a stage for mimes, jugglers and other acts, but the tourist attraction drew an exceptionally curious crowd Tuesday when the shortest man who can walk met the woman with the longest legs. He Pingping of China stands precisely 2 feet 5.37 inches tall. The 20-year-old was born with a type of dwarfism. He called Svetlana Pankratova's legs "very beautiful.""]

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Quote of the Day: Mike Royko

"It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Tony Takitani. R.I.P. to its director Jun Ichikawa.



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Clip of the Day: NIN kinda mood this mornin'.

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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.

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Links for the Day (September 19th, 2008)

1. "Mad Women": House contributor Matt Maul on the ladies of Men.

["One of my minor nits with Mad Men is how often its female characters are depicted as the downtrodden, helpless victims of a male dominated 1960s world. Often, plot elements over exaggerate the plight of these women for the sake of drama and Mad Men’s more “progressive” contemporary audience. Despite living in a world of ubiquitous sexism that makes us cringe today, the majority of real women I know from that era managed to live happy, fulfilling lives. And, this happiness, I submit, wasn’t a manifestation of some sort of sociological Stockholm Syndrome. Truth be told, these women were as much A PART of the mores of that time as they were its victims. That’s why I got a charge out of “A Night to Remember,” Mad Men’s eighth outing for Season 2. It finally allowed two of the more oppressed characters, Betty and Peggy, to push back. Don’t get me wrong; it's still very much a man’s world. But this time, these women don’t submissively acquiesce to the testosterone induced flogging that society has been dishing out for them on a weekly basis. In fact, a theme running through this episode concerns the power that females, knowingly or not, can wield in that world BECAUSE of their gender."]

***
2. "Darker Blue": J.R. Jones praises Lakeview Terrace. Walter Chaw also sees some value. Scott Tobias, Nick Schager, and myself, not so much.

["Lakeview Terrace isn’t literally about the riots, but it’s still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down—much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis’s hand-wringing Oscar winner Crash. Its masterstroke is reversing the racial polarity of the King beating, making the cop black and the victim of his abuse white. At first glance this might seem like the ultimate dodge, relieving white viewers of any lingering guilt and lending credence to the Rush Limbaughs of the world. But by scrambling the typical power relationship Lakeview Terrace focuses our attention on power itself, and by plunging into the subject of black bigotry, still relatively taboo in mainstream movies, it gets us closer to the truth of bigotry in all its forms than we’re liable to get watching another pious exercise in white atonement."]

***
3. "Pick the best Asian films of all time": One of those lists. Noel Vera takes issue.

["Asia: Spread over one third of the world's surface, it is home to something like four billion people in 70 countries. It also produces half of the world's film. Bollywood, India's film industry, alone produces around 1,000 films each year -- almost two times as many as Hollywood. This vast continent doesn't just come out on top when it comes to output, it has also sired many influential directors, actors and film-genres. Ang Lee's 2000 homage to Chinese fantasy martial arts genre, Wuxia, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and Japan's unique take on horror, typified by films like Takashi Shimizu's "Ju-on: The Grudge" are just two examples of Asia's recent contribution to world film culture. We have included films by Japan's Akira Kurosawa, China's Wong Kar-Wai and India's Mehboob Khan in our provisional list of the best of Asian cinema but we want to hear from Web site users. What are your favorites? Have we missed one? Perhaps you don't agree with our choices. Let us know in the Sound Off box below."]

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4. "Baltic Cinema Conference: Riga, September 2008": Dina Iordanova reports on the Baltic Cinema Conference at her site DinaView.

["The conference brought together scholars involved in the study of film from the three Baltic republics and the United States. There were sociologists, as well as film, cultural, and media studies people, who gave presentations highlighting different aspects of cinema in the region. Some looked into the work of the Baltic documentary school, analyzing the work of such important directors like Juris Podnieks (Maruta Vitols) as well as various films related to memory representations (Violeta Davoliute, Olga Proskurova, Aune Unt). Others explored the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, looking at issues of memory, nationalism, narrative and space in these cinemas (Aija Rozensteine, Eva Naripea, Irina Novikova)."]

***
5. "Cell phones can affect sperm quality, researcher says": Now we know what the "i" in "iPhone" stands for.

["Keeping a cell phone on talk mode in a pocket can decrease sperm quality, according to new research from the Cleveland Clinic. "We believe that these devices are used because we consider them very safe, but it could cause harmful effects due to the proximity of the phones and the exposure that they are causing to the gonads," says lead researcher Ashok Agarwal, the Director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine."]

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Quote of the Day: Arthur Honegger

"There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): A moment from The Man From London, of which Ed Gonzalez is not enamored.



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Clip of the Day: High School Musical 3, non-partisan participation mode.



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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.

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NYFF 46 (2008): The Class, Wendy and Lucy, The Windmill Movie, shorts, housekeeping

By Vadim Rizov

[The 46th New York Film Festival begins September 26th, 2008 and runs through October 12th, 2008. Screening information for The Class can be found here; screening information for Wendy and Lucy can be found here; screening information for The Windmill Movie can be found here.]

Traditionally, the opening night film of NYFF should be a fairly prominent title that can drag in the middlebrows and not alienate an audience coming as much to be part of an "event" as to see a movie. It should also be well-crafted enough that no one could really object to it. (Kind of backfired last year with the idiosyncracies of The Darjeeling Limited, but the string of films before—Look At Me, The Queen, Good Night, And Good Luck—is an immaculate chain.) This year it's Laurent Cantet's The Class. Step back and think about that for a second. Cantet's upward career trajectory has been odd enough: one of his major themes is negotiating capitalism while trying to maintain ethical integrity (which, admittedly, would probably be an easier sell right now, but still not all that sexy). It's strangely inevitable that Cantet would get around to a macrocosmic portrait of contemporary French society's startlingly diverse ethnic composition and try to report back on the state of the nation; he's nothing if not an earnestly liberal, political filmmaker. In that sense, The Class is his most ambitious film, even as it feels like one of his most modest. 2001's Time Out had the magisterial chilliness and formalism that pleasingly dominates much of the contemporary festival circuit. The follow-up, unfortunately, was 2005's atrocious Heading South, which attempted to explore Haiti's post-colonial economic exploitation by having middle-aged women deliver monologues straight to the screen with lines like "I put two fingers down his swimming trunks and felt his cock." This is not the way to make anyone think about anything, except maybe walking out.

Cantet's best work may be his debut short, 1994's Tous A La Manif. The sadly underseen film takes in the obnoxious prating of students on strike from the viewpoint of a cafe worker who doesn't have the option of schooling; he works for his dad, serving Godard's demon spawn while they natter on about class consciousness. Cantet manages to show both sides in the ongoing legacy of France's protest culture and "the student" post-'68. The Class has a similar dialectic, in that what's supposed to be happening—revolution in Tous A La Manif, the kind of comprehensive public school education that'll help integrate disparate elements into French society and helps kids make it out of the French equivalent of the "hood" (not, in this case, the banlieue proper, rather Paris's 19th district)—isn't actually happening, but an interaction that's enlightening for both sides is still taking place, even if no one's aware of it.

François Bégaudeau plays a teacher with the same name; The Class is based on his book, a memoir of teaching. Everyone's credits here are in order, with a classroom of rowdy kids playing themselves flawlessly; not a single moment strains belief. Cantet's embraced on-set improvisation for the first time in his career, and the result is flawless pseudo-documentary (Cantet doesn't even cut away from a few moments where people look directly into the camera). Cannily saving the plot until well over an hour in, The Class never leaves the school: it's all rowdy and tense lessons (delightful and frequently hilarious to watch), staff meetings, disciplinary committee meetings and the like. Everything that can happen in French society can happen here: students with roots in Mali and the Caribbean coming to blows over soccer teams, worries about creeping Americanization, and questions, over and over again, about whether or not French society proper is still hostile and racist to its immigrants. Because it's worked out through an especially conscientious and earnest teacher who never seems to stop scrutinizing himself while presenting a workable and humane worldview to the kids—and instantly checked by the often immovable reality of the kids—The Class isn't remotely didactic. It works through its problems in a day-to-day manner.

There's been a lot of talk about how The Class doesn't measure up to season 4 of The Wire. I wouldn't know (I'm still working through season 2), but surely that's just not fair; the option of duration and methodical unweaving just isn't available. What Cantet has is a cross-section of all the components of the public school's academic year. It's zippy, it's funny, it's compelling and it's vaguely stunted, which it acknowledges by leaving about 70% of the plot threads unresolved. Everyone should have a fine time.

***
I think Kelly Reichardt is a great filmmaker formally; I'm not sure about her politics, but Wendy And Lucy is so strong I don't really care. I was skeptical about Old Joy, simply because I could really care less about sylvan oases of introspection; Wendy And Lucy, also filmed in Portland but set in the least populated, most suburban dead-end parts, takes place someplace I recognize. Suburbia, they say, looks the same everywhere—which is true in a lot of ways, but that doesn't mean life isn't taking place in the Walgreen's parking lot.

Wendy (Michelle Williams) is stuck in Oregon, trying to make it to Alaska to earn some money to get back on her feet; the cause of her destitution is unknown and irrelevant. Lucy is her dog and only companion; when she calls her brother, he's too distracted to hear anything she's saying, and his shrew of a girlfriend won't get off the line. Wendy, it must be said, is superficially every bit as stupid as Chris McCandless, the feckless protagonist of Into The Wild, but where McCandless threw everything away to pursue his stupidly romanticized vision of poor planning as "life," he also had a streak of luck getting minimum-wage jobs to pay his way down the line. That was 1992; traveling this side of the millennium, Wendy has no phone or address. She's off the map and in deep shit. It's no longer morning in America, huh?

Here's the deterministic part. When Wendy tries to steal from a grocery store to save some money, she doesn't just get arrested: she gets arrested by a blond all-American teen with a cross necklace who lectures her on the proprieties of capitalism. America's stacked the deck in a bad, bad way in Wendy And Lucy; as pointed out extensively elsewhere, but most eloquently by Scott Tobias, "Shades of Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D., which also revealed societal ills through a poignant dog-owner relationship." Reichardt's an unhappy liberal; when Wendy's in a coffee shop, there's a cutaway to a guy reading Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion, which I suspect isn't supposed to be funny (the characteristically stoic press corps couldn't resist some sporadic guffaws at that one). But Reichardt's artistry outweighs (or at least sufficiently counterbalances) her ambition to Say Something About Amerika. Reichardt's style clears the mind: dialogue is minimal—not artificially, just leaving Williams on her own—framings elegant and magisterial. I didn't realize how much I liked it until 20 minutes after it was over. The world Reichardt explores—the flat parking lots so close to the woods—is one I recognize. Reichardt's political ideas are easy to translate into words, and not necessarily good ones; what makes her film haunting is mostly ineffable.

(Wendy And Lucy is preceded by a new 20-minute short by Jia Zhangke, Cry Me A River. It's basically more footage of towns flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, topped off with a little upper-class bourgeois drama. It's a decent enough dose to satiate Jia fanatics, but those who've never encountered his work shouldn't start here, or draw any conclusions about the overall quality thereof.)

***
Richard P. Rogers was a member of an experimental group of filmmakers loosely clustered around CalArts; 'til today, I had no idea who he was because the avant-garde is a weak point for me. Alex Olch (a former student of Rogers, and—surprisingly enough—a respected necktie designer) rectifies the balance with The Windmill Movie, a profile constructed from the footage for an unrealized autobiographical masterwork. But what really makes the case is the Rogers short (his first) Lincoln Center is showing beforehand: 1970's Quarry. Filmed in Quincy, Massachusetts in the summer of 1967, Quarry says more in 14 minutes about the American climate in the late '60s then all the Summer Of Love montages set to "White Rabbit" combined. Rogers begins with a black-and-white abstract formalism anticipating the work of Peter Hutton—or at least the dazzling silvery textures of last year's At Sea, of which I wrote that a "desaturated shot of black-and-white waves forming patterns so dense and shimmery ... seems like if you stared long enough, a secret 3D image might pop out." Where Hutton holds the shots, Rogers gives you time to just start appreciating the ripples of slightly disturbed water before it's on to the next shot: sensory overload. Then the familiar strains of Tommy James and the Shondells' "I Think We're Alone Now" kick in, and suddenly kids are jumping in. In 14 minutes, we get all the gorgeous shots you could hope for: kids jumping from great heights into the water, crawling down the crags past stones tagged with all the summer's names and memories, a slow-mo shot from above of two guys walking on a log in the water. But the sound is an equally exciting jumble of radio hits and mumbling voices: sometimes inaudible, sometimes clearly addressing free love, Vietnam and all the other culturally defining events since simplified into simple nostalgic talking points. It's present-tense history, and it's gorgeous.

After watching The Windmill Movie, try not to retroactively downgrade Quarry. Rogers' own life was the kind of mess you get when a blue-blood from upstate has the talent to work in experimental film and reject a proper WASP career, then starts questioning his own privilege, obsessing neurotically over sex, and increasingly fearing that his family's history of insanity will catch up with him. It would've made a fine John Irving novel; instead, Olch has constructed a life portrait from over 200 hours of footage from all over the place: home movies by Rogers' father, 16mm from the '70s, exponential amounts of video footage from the '80s to the present, much of which can charitably be termed as video diary outtakes. Rogers feared to make the film because he didn't want to be solipsistic; Windmill doesn't really solve the problem. Quarry is mentioned for all of three seconds, as a set-up to a mention of the premiere party. Much of Windmill are Rogers' musings on juggling his girlfriends and incessant guilt about privilege; initially it's charming that he's so self-conscious. After 20 minutes of this, it's less so. Watching the film, you'd never guess how influential Rogers was in certain documentary circles and think he hardly did any work at Harvard. Olch doesn't help matters anyway by mirroring Rogers' uncertainty about how (or even if) to represent himself on-screen with a battery of self-conscious devices: loads of header footage separating segments, lots of people wondering if the camera's on, endless false starts. The point becomes obvious quickly. And for a man who constantly questioned his own privilege, Olch plays remarkably coy when introducing some "friends"—Wally and Bob—coming back to the house after his death to look around. Those would be Wallace Shawn and Bob Balaban; no false modesty please.

What's left, then, is the gorgeous footage Rogers himself shot. And most of it is indeed knock-out level. Even on video, many of his shots gleam with a strange luminosity, the surroundings emanating light from nowhere in particular. There's also the small matter that Rogers' life—even aside from his self-imposed romantic dilemmas—is quite sad. Shooting for the "elegiac" is almost always begging the question; nevertheless, anyone whose fear of death is as morbid as my own will be hard-pressed not to have a reaction as Rogers moves painfully towards the inevitable. It's a mixed bag, but anything introducing me to Rogers is probably a good thing.

***
Brief bit of housekeeping (har) here, which is probably only relevant to a few, but which personally nags at me. A few weeks ago I was contacted by Simon Abrams (a contributor to the New York Press, among other outlets, and a former colleague from the student newspaper days) with questions relating to "any thoughts you may have on the following venues and film festival: -BAM; -Film Forum; -Walter Reade; -NYFF; -MoMA." A follow-up question about "What do you like and dislike about [NYFF]'s programming that would you make you want to avoid them as a member of the public?" later, and Simon was on his way. What I didn't know was that Simon was preparing a vigorous quasi-attack on NYFF. So I'm quoted accurately as not being a fan of semi-expensive tickets and the "event" feel the festival gives in its public screenings, but hey: those are staples of many festivals. Simon might as well have asked what I thought of the festival situation right now in general. Which is: it's always been easier to attend if you're accredited, industry, or loaded. Also, organizing festivals is an expensive business, and some trade-offs are always going to occur. Some things are constant. Had I known the thrust of Simon's piece (which is provocative, surely, but which I largely disagree with), I wouldn't have responded the way I did; the festival is a good thing. Even when you're a member of the general public, the huge screen is an anomaly for catching films that will be later relegated, out of financial necessity, to much smaller venues (and without them, I'd certainly never have seen The 10th District Court: Moments Of Trial, which would have been tragic). Like Bruce Wayne on Harvey Dent, I believe in NYFF (not to mention the always cooperative, helpful and friendly people at Lincoln Center), and I want to make that clear.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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Links for the Day (September 18th, 2008)

1. "Time for Showdown or Shutdown at The Star-Ledger": From The New York Post. More at The Wall Street Journal and the Ledger itself.

["THE Newhouse family said that it doesn't expect to get the amount of cost-saving concessions it needs to save the Star-Ledger, the largest daily in New Jersey, and said it will issue notices to all employees later this week saying that the paper will be sold or - failing that - closed on Jan. 5. Back on July 31, the company said it needed to get 200 people to accept voluntary severance packages at the Star-Ledger and another 25 buyouts at the Trenton Times, plus concessions from the pressmen, mailers and drivers. While it has reached a tentative pact with mailers and pressmen, the company said negotiations with the drivers have stalled. "Since it is doubtful that the drivers will ratify an agreement by Oct. 8, 2008, we will be sending formal notices to all employees this week. . . advising [them] that the company will be sold or failing that, that it will close operation on Jan. 5, 2009," said Star-Ledger Publisher George Arwady."]

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2. "The White Negro (2008 Remix)": By Michael Joshua Rowin for The L Magazine.

["Dissecting a joke always kills it, but when contemporary comedy’s ubiquitous white-boys-gone-gangsta spectacle is placed under the microscope, a strange cultural phenomenon is necessarily revealed. Yes, the shameful American institution of the minstrel show is alive and well, barely hidden behind a mask of self-deprecation. A product of the ascendance of hip-hop as the dominant cultural currency in a youth-driven consumer society (dating from the early 90s suburban breakthrough of gangsta rap), modern minstrelsy has been slowly forming around a basic set of punchlines and sight gags — the most common involving a white person busting a move or rhyming along to something like ‘Baby Got Back’. The bait and switch? Afraid of being perceived as racist but unable to resist appropriating the hardcore street cred of hip-hop culture, whites effectively neuter that same culture by copping superficial style over subversive content, their self-conscious guilt over the act obscuring any deeper consideration of its history or roots."]

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3. "TIFF Roundtable": A good number of my Toronto International Film Festival compadres gather for a six-part post-fest video wrap-up.

["For the last word on TIFF, EYE WEEKLY's Jason Anderson and Adam Nayman host a salon with Variety's Robert Koehler, The Village Voice/L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas and Cinema Scope's Mark Peranson and Andrew Tracy."]

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4. "RIP Norman Whitfield": From Forward to Yesterday.

["Unless you’re a fairly serious pop music lover, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of songwriter and producer Norman Whitfield, but even so, if you have half a heart you’ve probably been moved by his work. His awe inspiring collaboration with co-writer Barrett Strong ranged from the wistfully bittersweet “Just My Imagination” for the Temptations, to the joyful “Thinking About My Baby” for Marvin Gaye, to their honest and righteously indignant political/sociological masterpieces for performers like Edwin Starr, the Temps, and the Four Tops:” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “War”, “Ball of Confusion,” and, best of all, “Cloud 9.”"]

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5. "Riding out Ike on an island, with a lion": From Yahoo News. (Hattip: Lauren Wissot)

["Many years from now, a small group of Hurricane Ike survivors will probably still be telling the story of how, on the night the storm flattened their island, they took sanctuary in a church — with a lion. The full-grown lion was from a local zoo, and the owner was trying to drive to safety with the animal when he saw cars and trucks stranded in the rising floodwaters. He knew he and the lion were in trouble. He headed for the church and was met by a group of residents who helped the lion wade inside, where they locked it in a sanctuary as the storm raged. The water crept up to their waists, and two-by-fours came floating through broken windows. But the lion was as calm as a kitten. When daylight came, everyone was still alive."]

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Quote of the Day: Gerd de Ley

"There are three kinds of men: those who are preceded by their shadow, those who are pursued by it, and those who have never seen the sun."

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Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): Three of Juliette, perhaps by, but most certainly because of Kiarostami. (Hattip: Jonathan Rosenbaum)





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Clip of the Day: Sweet Jesus, I BELIEVE!!!! Just stop singing!!!!! (Hattip: The Cinefamily)

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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.

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Comics Column #1: Windows on the Other Art

By Michael Peterson

The old saw about how many words an image speaks—do you add or multiply when there's a few of them in a row?

Keith has been gracious enough to invite me to crash the party every two weeks and talk about the comic medium. I don't know, I guess maybe it's come up here once or twice lately. In the last few years, the relationship between movies and comics—graphic novels, sequential art, choose your buzzwords and tap gloves—has gotten pretty complicated, at least in comparison to what it had been. And while I've been for many years a vocal advocate for the argument that comics have won the "fight" that many fans seem to think they're having with the rest of polite society, there's still some critical discussion regarding what is and is not possible with comics, and its nature as an occasional (or, as it seems these days, very frequent) source material for other media.

I study comics, and I have for over ten years. This is not the same as being a comic fan, although I most certainly am that as well—I've been reading comics since before I could walk; I study comics, or at least I try to, the way that many people here at The House Next Door study film (something that, obviously, I also do, though I'm still more of an exuberant freshman in that particular curriculum). This is an ongoing column about comics of all kinds, how they work, their relationship to their audiences, and other subjects. In keeping with the primary nature of this site, oftentimes it will be about comics and their relationship to film, though the link will wax and wane as the subject dictates. But I hope I'll keep things interesting.

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I. "Who Are These People? Where Do They Come From? What Do They Do?"

For my money, the greatest film adaptation of a comic book is not only not a superhero film, it's not even really a work of fiction. American Splendor, the story of underground comic writer and pioneering autobiographical cartoonist Harvey Pekar, captured everything that the original work was about, everything that it meant, its historical context, and its unique style—and yet it changed everything in terms of presentation; right down to the chronology, as the first story is moved to close to the end of the film, where it's given a resonance that it didn't once have.

There are a lot of sequences in the film that could be used to illustrate how the language of comics was adapted for the very different medium of cinema—the opening Halloween costume gag, or the scene when Joyce awaits her first meeting with Harvey and envisions him in the different styles of the underground cartoonists who had drawn his book—but perhaps the clearest is the one mentioned above: Harvey is on the edge of life and death, battling cancer, and we cut to his musings on the other "Harvey Pekars" that he'd seen in the phone book, the other lives they must have led. In actuality, this is the first "American Splendor" comic story, the Robert Crumb-drawn monologue that began his frustrating comics career. Here, it is used as a meditation both on Harvey's life slipping away, but also the many forms that his story has taken over the course of the film. We've seen him as drawings, as portrayed by Paul Giamatti, as re-enacted on stage, and as Pekar himself, begrudgingly appearing in his own film. "Who is Harvey Pekar?" he asks, and he might as well be asking the film itself. As Giamatti delivers the monologue, transitioning back and forth from re-creations of Crumb's linework and a real world exterior, he actually steps through a window towards the audience. A more potent metaphor would be difficult to find.

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II. "The vanishing point moves in relation to the observer."

There have been so many attempts to define the term "comics" that most of the creators who are innovating the medium have largely bowed out of the subject entirely. Visionaries like Eddie ("From Hell," "Alec," "Bacchus") Campbell and Dylan ("Hicksville," "Atlas") Horrocks once rushed in with swords drawn and now largely rub at their brows and get back to work. Even independent of content entirely, there are as many frameworks for discussing the medium as there are people studying it. Comics as language, comics as history, comics as storyboard, comics as art object, comics as collectible, comics as map (a personal favorite line of inquiry), comics as illustrated prose, as pictorial poetry, as unmoving film. Of course, it's all of these and none of them. Film can be viewed through its static images, its sound, its screenplay, its acting, etc, and each of these views can help expand the understanding of that medium and its works, but the final product is a synthesis, just as in comics it is not only the words and the images, but the sequence of those elements, how they relate to each other on the page (or on a screen), as well as the elements deliberately absent, working fully in conjunction with one another.

One lens through which both comics and film can be viewed is the concept of the "window." Both the field of view of the camera and the framing of the comic panel are deliberate choices that the creators use to relate messages to their audiences.

I'm reminded, a little absurdly, of an obscure program from my youth: Joel Hodgson, creator of the cult classic Mystery Science Theatre 3000, briefly aired a pilot for a bizarre experimental program that he called The TV Wheel. It was a sketch comedy program, but the concept was that all of the sets were on a giant wheel that rotated around a motionless camera and was filmed live, providing a strangely fascinating look at what was largely an unremarkable group of sketches, lending it a carnival game atmosphere and evoking a vaudeville spirit rarely found in on-screen performance. It's a strange animal to describe, really, but watching that pilot in the age when I was still very much a "comic fanboy" in the traditional sense changed a bit of how I watched film and read comics both...

As regards the concept of the "window," the best example is a very literal one. In the first volume of Jason Lutes's monumental "Berlin" trilogy, an art professor is explaining perspective to his students and motions to three windows, each captured in a separate comic panel (see image at right, click to enlarge). The windows are individually different views of the same subject. It's easy to compare this to separate frames of film, but film is not to be viewed frame by frame, but rather in motion, so fast that only a single image exists at a time. This one window pans over that subject and gives us a typically "naturalistic" view—that is, how we would view this subject in person, moving ourselves around to see its sides. However, when the camera has panned right in film, you can no longer see what was to the left. In comics, all panels on a page exist simultaneously—while you may still focus on one window at a time, those moments before and after, those various views of the same subject, still exist.

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III. "Less eloquent in my language of choice, however."

This is a relevant difference, and the seemingly superfluous scene described above stands as the thesis statement for all of "Berlin," the second volume of which was just released last month. "Berlin" is the story of the German city and its people in the time between the two world wars, an ambitious project with the goal of viewing the time period and a city trapped in the midst of change through every conceivable eye at once, through points of view in every culture and strata. As the art professor continues his lecture, he states:

"Perhaps the most interesting feature of perspectival drawing for the artist involves a sort of reverse vanishing point—an 'appearing point,' if you will—which is fixed in the eye of the observer ... a thread taut between various edge points of an object and a fixed point on the wall, which represents the artist's eye. And the end result, when the intersection points are connected to one another, is a perfect perspectival representation of [the subject]!"

The professor is trying to convey his excitement at applying scientific principles to art in the modern era, but Lutes is laying out his plan, to take each individual he portrays in Berlin and add them together to make a full portrait of the city itself. The story captures not only dozens of major characters of various complexity, but also pauses to look into the ephemeral thoughts of people on the street, in the trains, and on the march. In an early sequence, the window pulls back one frame at a time from two major characters to listen to a lonely man operating the traffic lights, anxious for the lunch his wife packed for him.

Anticipating his critics, Lutes has the cynical art students argue over the lecture, with one student saying the technique "presumes a one-eyed view of the world" (Lutes's own) and another stating that "you have to work within the limitations of the discipline to reproduce what you see"—only for a third to rebut that if faithful reproduction is the goal, perhaps a better medium might be in order. But Lutes clearly has no entrenched doubts about his chosen medium, as evidenced by his choice of protagonists—a writer (a journalist, no less!) and an artist (who draws in her notebooks and writes in her sketchbooks!) whose relationship waxes and wanes over the course of the story. They introduce themselves to each other on a moving train—behind them is a window, showing only the barest motion, because for these two people time has slowed to a near stop.

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IV. "Confused?" "Blind!"

An individual comic panel is static only when viewed on its own—comics, by nature, are to be read panel to panel. It is what the reader's mind creates between those panels, what creator and theorist Scott ("Zot!," "Understanding Comics") McCloud calls "Closure," that provides the movement. Similarly, characterization in comics relies as much upon what isn't shown as what is. While, as McCloud explains in his formative text on the medium, abstractions lend themselves to audience identification (and as he doesn't say which follows as corollary, they lend themselves to archetypes), similarly, the decisions on what to show and not to show—not only in the window of the comic panel, but in the level of detail from image to image—can flesh out a character and make them real.

With a book like "Berlin," which is designed to capture the varied attitudes of an entire city, a certain amount of abstraction and use of stereotypes and archetypes is to be expected. Some characters can be immediately identified in their design as "the traditionally-observant Jew" or "the proletariat worker," and the protagonists, Kurt Severing (the journalist) and Marthe Muller (the artist), slip back and forth from their prescribed roles to complex portraits, based on context and based on their relationship to each other. Severing is at the height of his jaded journalist archetype when he gives the first volume the title, "City of Stones," pondering the writer's role in Berlin's troubled present as the view pulls back to observe him from outside the window of his apartment, and further out to the city itself. But when Marthe drops by his apartment unexpectedly, his depiction shifts back and forth from the abstraction of a sparse few lines to a more detailed close-up and back as he flounders, as Marthe doesn't represent something which fits into his then-limited worldview (earlier, the art students laugh about the perspective lecture and exclude him). In a later scene, Marthe removes his hat and glasses and tries them on, as a flirtation. Wearing the trappings of his archetype, Marthe fades to abstraction, and Severing is creased with age lines that had previously gone unseen, a sign of his vulnerability as well as a casting off of what he's supposed to represent. Moments later, she confesses her love for him and the couple both fade to the abstract, taking new archetype roles—"the lovers"—even as the window separates them from the nature that they'd been enjoying, a setting rich in detail and atmosphere that they are no longer part of.

***
V. "Bad science, maybe, but personally gratifying."

Some filmmakers have experimented with different uses of the camera as window in order to convey the feeling of reading a comic book. Two of them are fascinating in how they approach the idea so differently without full success.

In Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan frames nearly every shot with foreground obstructions in an intentional bid to evoke comic panels for his largely-ponderous take on the superhero story. It's uncomfortable viewing, in this respect—everything feel