The House Next Door

By Matt Maul

When District 9 came out, I was geeked to see it opening weekend. My older daughters wanted to go but my wife was busy. So, finding a babysitter for my ten-year-old twins remained the only obstacle. Unsuccessful, I would not to be deterred. Why not just take them with me? Because of its "R" rating I was nervous that it might be too intense. Of course, they balked at any such notion. After some due diligence (don’t judge me), I determined that D9 earned its rating based on violent content. I (correctly, it turns out) assumed that the carnage was of the sci-fi/video game variety as opposed to the more visceral gore (pun intended) presented in the Hostel/Saw genre. Nonetheless, as the movie unfolded, I kept a close watch on their reaction (like I said, don’t judge me). Every fifteen minutes I’d ask if they were “doing okay.” Each time, they assured me that they were. After my fifth such inquiry, one of the twins looked up a bit irritated and whispered, “Aliens aren’t scary dad…sheesh.”

And they really weren’t scared. People and “prawns” were getting blasted right and left. Yet my youngest kids were unmoved (my oldest too, for that matter). My guess is that the subject matter seemed so far removed from their own reality that it didn’t have the desired effect. That got me to thinking about what scared me as a child. As laid out in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the horror icons of my youth in the late '60s and early '70s were represented by Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman (both Lon Chaney Jr AND Oliver Reed) or the creature from the Black Lagoon. In their day, I suppose they had scared a lot of adults. But as a ten-year-old they left me unfazed. In fact, I thought they were kinda cool. As it turns out, MY kids think that the title character in Ridley Scott’s Alien is kinda cool too.

So WHAT did frighten me as a kid? Here’s a list of "scary" moments that stayed with me for a LONG time. The employment of a naturalistic approach seems to be a common thread running through all of these examples and may illuminate my child’s comment.

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1. The War of the Worlds (1938): Okay, you may ask, why is a radio broadcast about an alien invasion included in a list that’s labeled “Aliens Aren’t Scary?” Fair question. Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre dramatization of the H.G. Wells novel employed a “faux documentary” approach (if you can apply that to term to radio) sixty years before The Blair Witch Project. There’s been some disagreement over whether Welles knew that using simulations of actual radio broadcasts would result in the panic that ensued. However, even thirty-five years later, and knowing that it wasn’t real, I got spooked listening to an LP record of the show. The highlight for me is when reporter Carl Phillips describes a Martian ray gun rising out of the ship and firing on a surrounding crowd whose horrific screams can be heard in the background. Phillips hurriedly notes an exploding gas tank nearby. Then nothing. It works because we all instinctively know that “dead air” is anathema to mass media outlets. So when it does occurs, it’s just as disarmingly eerie as the cries of people being set ablaze.

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2. The Birds (1963): Jessica Tandy discovering the eyeless body of Dan Fawcett is still troubling to watch even today. This is Alfred Hitchcock at his best. I dare say it rivals the shower scene in Psycho for evoking pure terror. To be sure, the attack on Marion Crane deserves its status as a classic filmmaking moment. But its technical achievements scream to be noticed and, to today’s audiences, almost detract from the horror of what it depicts. However, the scene from The Birds at the Fawcett farm is disarmingly understated. There’s no music and very little sound. A series of odd observations, like the broken tea cups still hanging on a rack by their handles, add to the menace as Tandy makes her way down a hall to Fawcett’s ransacked bedroom and the shocking discovery that time has yet to rob of its impact.

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3. Night of the Living Dead (1968): Late in The Birds, Mitch (Rod Taylor) gets an update on the attacks from a car radio. This was partly the inspiration for George Romero’s use of a similar device in Night of the Living Dead (a lack of a budget being another). The group of people trapped in the now famous farmhouse, and the audience, get most of their information on the zombie situation from local television news reports. Then, as now, I find these bits among the most compelling scenes in the movie. They certainly play better in 2009 than the quick snippets of ghouls fighting over intestines and leg bones. Because of guidelines resulting from the Welles Martian broadcast, whenever Night of the Living Dead played on late night television in my area, the station flashed a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen proclaiming that “This Is A Dramatization” during the newscast segments. For my brother and I, this only added to the feeling that we were watching something very different than the garden variety horror flick.

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4. Rosemary’s Baby (1968): While I’ve since come to appreciate it, most of the action in Roman Polanski’s adaption of the Ira Levin novel didn’t really seem all that scary on first viewing. However, there was one moment that really did spook me. Rosemary (Mia Farrow) has a chilling phone conversation with Donald Baumgart (the voice of Tony Curtis in possibly the world’s greatest cameo), an actor whose sudden and mysterious blindness benefits her own would-be actor husband (John Cassavetes). Baumgart is understandably impatient with Rosemary’s call and unmoved by her offer of condolences. There are no specific references to witches or the Devil in what they’re saying. But the way these few pieces of what would become a frightening puzzle were dropped in at that moment was inspired.

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5. The Exorcist (1973): Whether or not I realized it then, when I finally did get to see The Exorcist, some three years after its initial release, I was mostly affected by the matter-of-fact approach it employed to depict supernatural subject matter. This was in direct contrast to its much less subtle cousin, 1976’s The Omen. As a young teenager, seeing Regan’s head spinning was more a curiosity than something to be feared. Like the shower scene in Psycho, I was distracted by the mechanics of the effect rather than the sheer terror of it. But The Exorcist's real strength was how it sets up many of the shocking moments against the backdrop of familiar (and presumably safe) settings such as a doctor's office, a house party, a park, a child's bedroom. Back then, seeing a film character, like the priest from The Omen, being impaled by a falling spike while surrounded by demonically induced weather patterns might have struck me as a neat thing. It just wasn’t scary.
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Matt Maul is author of the blog Maul of America.

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Happy Halloween, Housers! Our Editor Emeritus, Matt Zoller Seitz, is just one of the contributors to IFC's Halloween-themed (but not) Top 25. Here's the introduction:

"When you sit down to a horror film, you know, at least on a basic level, what you're getting into. Whether or not the movie delivers, what you've been promised, and what you're braced for or looking forward to, are scares. Which is why, when we look back on those truly traumatic movie memories, the titles that come to mind often are not horror films at all.

The most frightening movie moments can arrive out of nowhere, in the midst of where they shouldn't belong, catching you when you're vulnerable -- which is why there are a few alleged children's films on this list. But they can also creep up on you, working a different kind of dread, which is where some of the documentaries included below fit in. Fear is a funny thing. It comes in different varieties, it can work its way on you in unanticipated, and, as our collection here proves, it definitely doesn't always stem from things that go bump in the night."

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

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Matt Zoller Seitz is a filmmaker and the founder of The House Next Door. To watch this video at The L Magazine's web site and read L Magazine film section editor Mark Asch's written introduction to it, click here.

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By Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

ED HOWARD: Claire Denis has always been a fascinating and elusive director, making strange, ambiguous movies where meanings are inscribed between the lines, in images and charged silences rather than in the minimal dialogue. Trouble Every Day is quite possibly her most challenging and unsettling film, both utterly typical of her approach—quiet, patiently paced, enigmatic in its characterization and plotting—and yet also a true outlier in her career. For one thing, in terms of genre it's a horror film, and one of the reasons I was interested in talking about it with you, Jason, is that you've previously expressed a general disinterest in horror as a genre. Of course, this is not a genre that one would have intuitively attributed to Denis based on the films she made before (1999's Billy Budd parable Beau travail) and after (2002's poetic ode to a one-night stand, Vendredi soir). And her approach to horror is very unusual and idiosyncratic, even though she does eventually deliver enough gore and viscera to sate even the most jaded Saw franchise junkie.

As Andrew O'Hehir described it, "Watching Trouble Every Day, at least if you don't know what's coming, is like biting into what looks like a juicy, delicious plum on a hot summer day and coming away with your mouth full of rotten pulp and living worms." That's a lurid image, and an appropriate one for a movie whose own most potent, unforgettable images are also gustatory. That Salon review was from the film's original US release in 2002, and it's possible that anyone seeing the film for the first time now has more of an idea about what's coming. So before rewatching the film for this conversation, I had wondered if some of the impact of Denis' film came from the element of surprise, from being taken unaware by the film's bloody sexual horror.

However, upon revisiting it I found myself as entranced as ever by its haunting imagery and slow build-up, and as repulsed and affected by its shocking outbursts of violence. I'm curious, though, since you hadn't seen the film before, both how much you knew about it beforehand and what your initial (visceral) reaction was.

JASON BELLAMY: I hope I don't have to turn in my movie lover's card for this, but I wasn't even aware of Trouble Every Day before you proposed it for this conversation. As you know, I like going into movies unawares, so beyond the title and the director all I knew about the movie was that it in some way applied to the one word that jumped out at me in the Netflix blurb: "cannibalism." That's it. Thankfully, the cannibalism element is the first thing to arrive—we recognize it before we even recognize the characters involved—so it's not like watching Citizen Kane and knowing the meaning of Rosebud. For almost everyone, I presume, the portrayal of cannibalism in a modern-day, first-world setting is shocking to behold whether you're expecting it or not. To put it another way: I'm not sure one can ever be fully prepared for the sight of humans feasting on one another with sexual delight, especially when it's portrayed as straightforwardly and soberly (without camp) as it is here.

You called Trouble Every Day a horror film, but is it? I mean, yes, it has horrific imagery. Yes, at times it's bathed in blood. Yes, there is suggestion of a kind of otherworldly, demonic possession. No, I can't deny that it feels like something close to "traditional horror," whatever that means these days. But, even as I was watching it for the first time, Trouble Every Day seemed closer to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut than to, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The principal reason for that, I believe, is that the movie invites us to experience its horrors through the urges of the characters inflicting the damage. Most horror films, it seems to me, align us with the fear of the potential victims (slasher movies) or attempt to titillate us with the massiveness of their ghastly spectacles ("torture porn" movies). That said, I don't want to undersell the significance of the grotesqueries here, because the extremeness of cannibalism is as fundamental to the root themes of Trouble Every Day as the extremeness of the sex is fundamental to Eyes Wide Shut. Cannibalism isn't what this movie is about, per se, but that doesn't mean it's some simple window dressing that could be easily removed or swapped out for something else. It seems to me that Trouble Every Day must shock us, must genuinely unsettle us, in order to be effective.

So, to answer your question, yes, I was unsettled and viscerally disturbed. I'm not sure I want to meet the person who can watch Trouble Every Day without being repulsed in some way. And yet sickened though I was by some of the images, I was never offended, and that's significant. I never found the gore of Denis' film to be cheap or empty, and in that way the film is very watchable, even though it forced me to close my eyes more than once. I won't pretend that I fully understand the purpose of all the horror in this film, and yet it all feels specifically purposeful, putting it in stark contrast to the comparatively broad and random repulsiveness of a film by Lars von Trier, who has always struck me as kind of the Johnny Strabler of cinema provocateurs. ("What are you rebelling against, Lars?" "Whaddya got?") So my first response is that the film is compelling. However, I'm already beginning to wonder if I'll continue to feel that way once the vibrations of that initial viewing have left my system.

EH: I'm glad you were able to experience this film for the first time with such minimal preconceptions; I agree with you that that's always the best way to approach any film, but it's especially the case here. Denis is deliberately playing with expectations and looking to shock the audience. And yes, one of the ways she achieves this is by engaging with the conventions of the horror genre. I did call Trouble Every Day a horror movie, and I think it is one by all but the most restrictive of definitions. Not only because it's gory and violent, though at times it is, and not only because it features a pair of human (or superhuman?) monsters stalking and killing their prey. It's a horror movie because Denis deliberately set out to make a horror movie, to bring her characteristic style—moody, slow-paced, elliptical—to bear on the conventions of a genre far from her seeming natural territory.

She also draws on a very specific kind of horror. I do not see in Trouble Every Day anything like a "demonic possession," which would imply an external, non-human force supplanting human responsibility. I think that idea would be uninteresting to Denis, who's always been drawn to human actions and their repercussions: Beau travail and L'intrus are all about guilt, betrayal and the weight of the past, just as Trouble Every Day is about infidelity and lust. This film is more in the tradition of "mad science" horror fiction like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its many descendants: the horror arises because science has unleashed the terrible impulses already latent within humanity. Mr. Hyde is terrifying because his existence suggests that he was present within the kindly Dr. Jekyll all along; by the same token, the sexualized cannibalism of Coré (Beatrice Dalle) and Shane (Vincent Gallo) is an extreme relative of the gestures and emotions at the heart of "normal" sexual relations. (Think of the scene where Coré, after mutilating a young man she's seduced, cradles him in her arms and tenderly kisses his bloody, torn-apart mouth. In her outré way, she's actually quite loving and passionate.)

At the same time, you're certainly right that the film reverses and subverts many mainstays of the horror genre, at least as it's currently conceived. Trouble Every Day does in general follow the story of the "monsters" rather than the victims, though not entirely: the hotel maid Christelle (Florence Loiret) is a traditional horror movie victim and audience surrogate, which Denis reinforces with the frequent shots of the back of her neck, as though the camera were a stalker perched just over the poor girl's shoulder, dogging her towards her inevitable gory end. Actually, though, I'm not even sure that horror movies always align us with the fears of the victims. Some horror films, it's true, rely entirely on our fear of being killed in gruesome ways, but for me the most interesting horror is about unleashing exaggerated versions of the horrible forces lying dormant within us all. David Cronenberg's early "body horror" films are variations on this theme, and Denis' horror is a descendant of his work. She's also consciously referencing a much older horror tradition, the ultra-familiar Hollywood classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. Denis signals her alignment with such early forebears by having her own two "monsters" strike poses straight from the Universal horror catalog: Coré standing by a roadside, lifting her coat up around her like batwings (and in some ways she is a vampire), and the hulking Shane playfully lumbering at his young bride June (Tricia Vessey) with his arms outstretched like Frankenstein's monster or the Mummy.

JB: OK. I dig what you're saying in relation to the "older horror tradition." Along those lines, I agree with you; Trouble Every Day is of that ilk. That said, I think your dismissal of the "demonic possession" idea contrasts with your suggestion that this follows the "mad science" tradition. Sure, I realize that one influencer is spiritual and the other is elemental, but either way these monsters are made monstrous by an outside force. Is an impulse really an impulse if it requires a potion to unleash it? I ask not to be generally argumentative but because I'm not convinced this is a movie about "infidelity and lust." I wouldn't argue those elements aren't part of the story, but I don't see them at the center. If that's the case, what is the movie trying to tell us, that deep inside we covet people with such ferocity that we want to devour them? I could buy that reading if Coré only coveted people she knew, but she'll eat anyone she can get her hands on. Her lust seems to be a byproduct of a need for human flesh as sustenance rather than the other way around. Coré isn't acting on a fetish or an emotional impulse but on a chemically-induced biological urge.

If I'm properly connecting the film's vague dots (and I might not be), Coré and Shane are essentially infected. They are diseased. Without this infection, they wouldn't have these perverse needs and thus wouldn't act this way, and without the mysterious drug that caused this whole mess they wouldn't be infected. As a result, I don't look at Coré and Shane as portals to our dormant demons. I see nothing that reflects my own soul. What I do see in Trouble Every Day is a chilling portrait of addiction. Coré and Shane aren't addicted to the drug that made them want blood but to the blood itself. Same difference. Now infected, they want to do nothing but "use." Coré's husband looks out for her, tries to protect her from herself, hopes to cure her and over and over again gets stuck cleaning up her messes. Shane, meanwhile, sleepwalks through his daily life, unable to connect with anyone outside of his addiction. If I wanted to pick a film that would exemplify the disease model for addiction, it would be hard to do better than Trouble Every Day, which shows how chemical imbalances in the brain obliterate normal rational thought so that ethics are meaningless. Coré and Shane never engage in any should-I or shouldn't-I bargaining, because they can't get that far. They just act, unable to imagine a world without their "drug."

Is that a plausible reading? Or did I miss something?

EH: I think that's a great reading, actually. One of the things I love about this film is how open it is, how receptive it is to alternative interpretations of its ambiguous chain of events. So I'd agree with your reading while also suggesting that it's not necessarily mutually exclusive with my own. Literally speaking, of course you're right, both Coré and Shane are driven by urges beyond their control, unleashed by a science experiment gone wrong.

On another level, though, this film, like many of its ancestors in the "mad science" genre, is symbolic more than literal. It's almost misleading to talk about the film's story, since the actual experience of the film is not of a linear plot; the story has to be pieced together from minimal clues, while the relationships and motivations of the characters are hinted at rather than spelled out directly. I think this suggests that the literal story—an experiment that turned its test subjects into voracious sexual cannibals—is perhaps secondary to the metaphorical implications, the treatment of Coré and Shane's "disease" as an outlandish mutation of human sexuality. What I meant by rejecting the "demonic possession" interpretation of the film is that whatever happened to Coré and Shane was not merely an external imposition. Not only because they were experimenting on themselves à la Dr. Jekyll, either. It's more like the monstrousness brought out in them by a drug is an extension or warping of ordinary humanity.

You say that you see nothing in these characters that reflects your own soul, to which I can only say, "I hope not!" At the same time, I think Coré and Shane's urges are related, however distantly, to more familiar sexual feelings. One of the film's most uncomfortable scenes is the one where Shane interrupts sex with June by going to the bathroom to masturbate instead, violently and joylessly, while June cries against the door outside. Sure, in terms of the plot the meaning of this scene is obvious, at least once one grasps that Shane is struggling with urges that link his sexuality to murderous inclinations. But it's also a potent depiction of disconnection and solipsism, of the tension between the selfish, lustful desire for release and the more romantic personal connections of love.

For me, the film is about exploring human behavior as a network of primal urges and biological imperatives: the "potion" that transforms Coré and Shane into killers doesn't impose something foreign on them, it simply strips their behavior to a hard core of pure, overpowering impulse. I think the movie suggests, not that deep down we want to devour those we covet, but that deep down we are creatures of impulse, driven by mysterious and powerful biological forces of survival and reproduction. The "disease" of Coré and Shane is a reminder that sexuality is evolutionary and instinctive, that what we call love and desire are actually imprinted in our genome; sexuality is always a loss of control. This is why Denis keeps returning to the scientists in their lab, and at one point focuses on a closeup of a brain as it's dissected. She's probing the mysterious forces at work within the human brain, the compulsions and instinctive behaviors that drive us even when we think we're moving of our own free will. She's wondering if it's possible to ever truly know another person's mind, no matter how close we are to them, as June begins to wonder if she knows her own husband, beginning to be afraid of what might be lurking behind his pale blue eyes. I don't think Denis is saying that people, if stripped of self-control, would behave as Coré and Shane do; but she is suggesting that our behaviors and thoughts are to some extent beyond our control, that our minds contain primitive and perhaps frightening corners beneath the veneer of civilization and convention.

JB: Or maybe the repeated brain shots—there's one in the cellar of Coré's home, too—are there to reinforce the absolutism with which brains define who we are. Logically we know this to be true, but it's hard to shake the romantic notions of "heart" and "soul." There's something cold and dispassionate about attributing feelings of love to the same organ that controls our general functionality. People say all the time, "My head tells me this, but my heart tells me that," when the truth is that our brains tell us everything. Thus, once our brain becomes damaged, we are rewritten—similar but not the same. That's what happens here.

Again, this works well as a metaphor for the disease model of addiction, because it shows how futile it is to reason with addiction. The brain controls the person, and so if the disease controls the brain then the disease is running the show. In that sense it doesn't really matter whether the science experiment gone wrong enabled something dormant in the brains of Coré and Shane or instead created something that wasn't there to begin with, just like it ultimately doesn't matter whether an alcoholic is hereditarily predisposed to the addiction or is the first of his/her family to find the bottle. Addicted is addicted. Diseased is diseased. The root is irrelevant.

But is the root irrelevant within Denis' art? I'm not so sure. Trouble Every Day is significantly more challenging and unsettling if it's meant to reveal our innate hidden horrors, as you're suggesting. If the science experiment gone wrong turned Coré and Shane into monsters, then we can dismiss their monstrousness by blaming the drug that stimulated the disease. At that point Trouble Every Day becomes a depiction of "them," the sick, instead of "us." Maybe that's why I couldn't identify with Coré and Shane, because their actions didn't seem instinctive so much as involuntary. The disease aspect gives us a convenient out. Doesn't it?

EH: That's a good point, and it's maybe why I'm so resistant to simply writing off this film's horror as merely a "disease," something outside of its human characters. If you're right that this is just a story of addiction, of people irrevocably changed into monsters by forces beyond their control, then it becomes a significantly less rich and complicated film. I think what Denis is after here is much more interesting than that. For one thing, Shane, contrary to your earlier assertion that the film's "monsters" never struggle with morality, does not entirely lose control of his actions. He does struggle with his impulses and seems aware of what's going on within him. There's that wonderful scene where, lying in bed, watching his sleeping wife, he whispers, "I would never hurt you." We of course know this to be untrue—he harbors powerful fantasies about killing her and the evidence of his violence keeps turning up on her body in the form of bruises and bite marks—but it's nevertheless obvious that he's struggling with his urges, trying to divert or stifle them, trying to uphold this heartfelt promise.

Scenes like this make the film at least partly about the damaging cycle of an unhealthy love affair, about a man who knows he's no good for the woman he loves but keeps trying to convince himself that he's going to do better, that he's not going to hurt her anymore. But we always hurt the ones we love, right? In some ways the film is about an abusive and often absent spouse, perhaps in contrast to the perverse loyalty of the marriage between Coré and Léo (Alex Descas). We feel June's confusion and pain when she waits out in the rain, desperate for some sign of her missing man, or when she goes to visit one of his old friends, hoping for some explanation for his inconstant behavior but getting only nostalgia and vague comforting words. This theme is expressed most forcefully in the ambiguous final scene, with its piercing closeups of June as she looks at her husband. We're left to wonder what she's thinking: Did she or didn't she see the single drop of another woman's blood streaming down the shower curtain?

I think you're right that the film is about the tyranny of the brain, about the way we're controlled by mysterious electrical impulses pulsing through our nervous system. But for Denis, this theme isn't about removing responsibility and agency from the equation, merely questioning and investigating what they mean when so much of human behavior originates beneath the level of consciousness. As you said, however uncomfortable we are with the idea that even love originates in the brain rather than the heart, the fact remains that in many ways we're as dominated by our brains, by our biology, as Coré and Shane are. In that respect, the film is definitely about "us," not just "them."

Denis is also interested in examining how we can form bonds when we're locked within our individual consciousnesses, unable to know what others are thinking and feeling. There's a coldness and emptiness to the gaze in this film; seldom have there been so many closeups that reveal so little, and in this respect Denis picked her actors well. Gallo's icy blue eyes in particular betray no feeling: his deadpan stare and flat affect come across the same whether he's imagining a gruesome murder, locking eyes with a cute, affectionate puppy, or clinically admiring his wife's naked body as she soaks in a bath tub. At the core of the film is the question, what's behind the eyes of the people we know and love? It's about a primal frustration, the fact that no matter how intimate we are with another person, the consciousness of the other will always remain alien and unknowable, just as our minds are for other people.

JB: That's very well argued, but your last point is best applicable to the relationship between Shane and June. Léo knows perfectly well how Coré's mind works. In fact, you could argue that he understands Coré's impulses better than she does, first because he helped create the monster living inside her and second because he's a sober observer of her unhinged condition. June, on the other hand, knows only that there's something about Shane that she doesn't know. She's an outsider in their relationship. In fact, one could argue that Denis allows June to be too much of an outsider, with some scenes playing as if June and Shane have just met rather than just married. Then again, with only a little imagination we can fill in the elliptical gaps in the story: we can assume that Shane has become increasingly distant, and that June hoped marriage would somehow cure him and that the change of scenery provided by their honeymoon couldn't hurt. You can sense that the distance between them has been growing, and the scene in which Shane must masturbate to get himself off is truly heartbreaking because he so easily and completely surrenders to his own needs while literally shutting out June. The loneliness of these characters is palpable. Same for Léo and Coré.

Indeed, these are doomed relationships long past the point of no return. Earlier you mentioned the scene in which Shane is seen "clinically admiring his wife's naked body," but that's not quite right. As the camera pans across June's body in the tub, letting us see June through Shane's eyes, Denis lingers an extra moment over June's crotch. At first, Shane's gaze suggests some kind of naïve fascination, but by the end of the shot we know that the sight of June's exposed crotch triggers Shane's abnormal urges. To stick with the addiction metaphor: an exposed crotch is never just a crotch to Shane, just as a razor blade is never just a razor blade to the cocaine addict. In that moment, Shane doesn't see his wife. He sees the potential for his next fix.

All of this leads me to a question: This film is tragic in many different directions, but which of these characters inspires the greatest amount of your sympathy?

EH: That's an interesting question, because on the surface you wouldn't really expect that any of these characters would arouse much sympathy, and not just because they're so unlikable in various ways. Denis' approach to characterization, here as in most of her work, is deliberately vague, keeping the characters' internal turmoil at a bit of a distance. And yet it's undeniable that the film is powerfully felt and emotionally intense, not to mention incredibly tragic. On some level, all of these characters are sympathetic, even (or especially) the "monsters." In fact, I'd say that of all the characters in this film, the one who moves me the most is probably Coré, who seems to have been totally consumed by the urges just beginning to affect Shane. There's a deep sadness in her character, and in the way Denis presents her. Initially, we don't see her murders, only the aftermath, presented in such poetic imagery that even the sight of a murder being cleaned up is beautiful: the dark blood glistening in the moonlight, dripping heavily off stalks of tall grass; Léo lovingly sponging the blood off his wife's naked torso; Coré sitting alone in an empty field, curled up into a ball, staring emptily into the night.

There's something ineffably haunting about Coré, about whom we learn so little. On one level, Denis presents her as a kind of abstracted horror movie monster: Dracula spreading his wings, a seductive black widow luring men to their doom, a B-movie killer calmly destroying her room with the chainsaw she keeps hidden beneath the bed. But there's also something almost childlike and serene in her, as well as that overwhelming sadness. Recognizable human emotions keep percolating up to the surface from beneath her chilly façade, like the expression of annoyance and rejection that flashes across her face when Léo cuts short some foreplay when she becomes too aroused. He's doing it out of self-preservation, knowing he's about to trigger her murderous impulses, but just because she's a killer doesn't mean she's not also a woman, and she feels hurt and rejected.

There's also the later scene where she stares with fascination at a lit match—which after our last conversation I now can't help but compare to WALL-E's EVE, awed by a cigarette lighter—and the dancing flame brings her cool green eyes alive for perhaps the first time. That's another of those "what is she thinking" moments, scenes where we look into a character's eyes and still have to wonder what's going on behind them. Denis is subverting the conventional thinking about the closeup, the idea that such intimacy with the camera allows the audience to get closer to a character. Maybe the eyes aren't really the window to anything. Here, we look into Coré's eyes and find that all we see is the illusion of life and activity, the lively sparkle of a flame reflected in this woman's otherwise impenetrable eyes. She's fascinating, and dangerous, and yes, in spite of everything, I really feel for her.

JB: I feel for Coré, too, a little more than I feel for Shane. The difference, I think, is that Coré is so consumed by her disease that she appears to have lost all control. Thus, she's innocent by reasons of insanity. Meanwhile, Shane's actions are more distasteful because at times he exhibits some measure of self-control. For that virtue he is punished, even though he and Coré suffer from the same disease. It's a familiar contradiction that pops up in society all the time: The more helpless a person becomes, the more leeway we tend to give them. At some point, the monster becomes the victim, and even though the ghastliness of their actions and the pain and suffering caused by them haven't changed in the least, somehow we accept their sins a bit more, which isn't to say we endorse them.

I also have a great deal of sympathy for June (Léo, too, but his screen time is unfortunately brief). In pondering this film, I keep asking myself: In that final scene, when June embraces Shane and maybe sees that droplet of blood running down the shower curtain, which reading is more tragic? Is it more heartbreaking if June remains clueless about Shane's addiction or if she recognizes that the only reason her husband is looking at her with comparative lucidity is because he's unleashed the beast inside of him to horrific ends? In that moment, as well as a handful of others, the ambiguity of this film enhances its richness. But there are also times when the film's inscrutableness isn't as rewarding, times when I struggled to find any satisfying rationale for what I was seeing. Chief among those offending scenes is the one just after Coré gazes into the flame of the match. Her reunion with Shane is what, exactly? A murder? An accident? Revenge? Insanity? How do you read that scene?

EH: I read it as something like an act of mercy, and maybe also a suicide. Certainly, when Coré was staring at the match, one of the thoughts that flashed through my mind was that she was contemplating ending it all, that she wanted this cycle of misery and gore to be over. So when Shane shows up not long after, it seems like Coré is to some degree embracing him as the instrument of her destruction, as a way to gain the freedom that her husband, who loves her too much, could never give her. For Shane, it's complicated: he's been looking for this woman he once had an affair with, knowing that since they were both exposed to the same process, she's likely feeling the same things he is. And maybe he doesn't want her to suffer through that. And maybe he also sees this as an opportunity to give in, without guilt, to his own murderous impulses, to kill someone and still be able to feel like he's doing something merciful. I think it's a little of both, probably.

So I see what you mean about the film's inscrutability occasionally being frustrating rather than rewarding, but for me scenes like this are rich in possible interpretations, and therefore interesting even if I can't settle on one or two satisfying readings in particular. I like that Denis seldom spells things out directly, that she allows her films to have these mysterious moments where we have to find the meaning or meanings for ourselves, often without a clear roadmap. Beau travail, which is probably my favorite of her films, ends with what can only be called an utter non-sequitur, a non-verbal scene with so little tangible connection to what came before it that it's impossible to settle on a definitive interpretation. Not that that's stopped people from trying, and I've seen many compelling readings of that scene, but I prefer moments like that to retain their mysterious aura, their potential for branching out in multiple different directions at once. There's nothing quite so destabilizing in Trouble Every Day, but there are definitely scenes where the vagueness of the storytelling allows the film to lose its linear track, to branch off down hydra-headed multiple roads. At these points, it's almost as though Denis is asking us to spin out several different films in our heads, to follow the characters along several different tracks of motivation and emotion.

JB: I enjoy a mysterious aura, too, both in theory and even in practice for most of Trouble Every Day. For whatever reason, many independent and foreign films manage to come off as almost egotistically inscrutable, as if abstraction increases depth, as if straightforwardness is the path to simplemindedness, but I don't sense that here. Nor do I sense that Denis is engaging in the kind of random mind-fucking that I've suggested David Lynch resorts to on occasion—moments wherein numerous non-sequiturs are thrown together so that the audience can be conned into giving them a deeper meaning than they deserve. (To be clear, before I'm attacked by a Lynch mob, I'm not saying all of Lynch's films are like that all of the time. I'm simply reiterating my contention that sometimes we give Lynch's work more significance and richness than it earns.) When ambiguousness is done right I think it's is usually more honest than not. Life is full of doubt and contradiction. Life is full of action taken without a plan or without an understanding of the result. It's only right that art should reflect that with ambiguousness. So in that sense I love most of what I don't know or can't quite define about Trouble Every Day. But…

Coré's death scene is unsatisfying for me because Shane's behavior seems explainable but not convincing. I can justify his actions, but in that moment Shane doesn't seem authentic: First he seeks out Coré, then he hides in the shadows. Then he confronts her and then he embraces her. Then he I-don't-know-whats her and leaves her on the floor to burn. Is she dead yet? I don't know. Is he happy? I don't know. Was this the plan all along? I don't know. But it's not the not-knowing that bothers me. It's that Shane doesn't obsess over Coré in that scene the way he does when he looks at June, the hotel maid or the woman on the train. It seems he's come to France specifically to track down Coré, and he badgers people for information as to her whereabouts, but then their meeting is swift and mostly empty. It just doesn't feel like Shane. It's not a huge flaw in the film, but it does feel like a crack in an otherwise remarkably believable world.

EH: Fair enough. The scene works for me as an anticlimactic non-confrontation between the two leads, but I understand your problems with it.

Anyway, while we're talking about Gallo, I think his casting and performance is one of the more interesting aspects of the film, and adds a certain metafictional frisson to it. Denis obviously likes working with him, since he also appeared in her short film US Go Home and as an American ex-sailor in Nénette and Boni. In all his appearances in Denis' films—as well as in his own semi-autobiographical directorial debut Buffalo '66—his character has the last name Brown, which creates a kind of connection between various incarnations of his onscreen character and his real persona. Trouble Every Day was filmed a few years before The Brown Bunny made Gallo's name synonymous with seedy onscreen sexual shenanigans, but Denis still seems to be exploiting the weird vibes the actor gives off: the contrast between his hulking, Frankensteinian body and his reedy, surprisingly high voice; the eerie, unreadable pale blue eyes. Of course, seen now, the scene where he masturbates and releases a stream of sticky white fluid onto a bath tub can only be read in relation to the infamous Chloe Sevigny blowjob scene from The Brown Bunny. Gallo seems to relish these unflinching depictions of male sexuality.

He also provides Denis with a strange, off-kilter acting presence. The first scene between Shane and June, on an airplane as they fly into Paris, has the same kind of stilted, artificial quality as much of David Lynch's dialogue in Mulholland Dr., and it's used to the same effect. These scenes play out like a movie ideal, like the stereotypical 50s sitcom vision of the happy newlywed couple: exchanging cheerful banalities, never seeming to connect, playing at love even though it's obvious that their words are flying past one another. This scene, so visually graceful and romantic with gauzy tufts of cloud floating by the airplane windows in front of the surreally happy couple, comes after we've already seen the bloody menace of Coré and right before we get a flash of Shane's own abnormal fantasy life. So Denis is positioning the movie clichés about romance and marriage sandwiched right in between her own much darker visions of sexual predation and unhealthy desires.

JB: That's an interesting observation. As for Gallo, I haven't seen all of his films, but his portrayal of Shane is my favorite performance of his career. In this film Gallo has a bit of Brandoness to him. I'm not putting the actors on the same level, but Gallo comes as close as anyone I can think of to approximating Brando's blend of square-jawed masculinity and feminine vulnerability. The scene of Gallo holding the puppy recalls Brando stroking the cat in The Godfather. Shane's mixture of menace and softness is similar to that of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. And then there are the disturbing sex scenes, which resemble Last Tango in Paris with their combination of tenderness, desperation and brutality.

Speaking of Last Tango in Paris: In Pauline Kael's famous rave of the Bernardo Bertolucci film, she wrote that it possesses "hypnotic excitement," "primitive force" and "thrusting, jabbing eroticism." "Exploitation films have been supplying mechanized sex—sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence," Kael said. "The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters' drives." I presume you'd agree with me that those descriptions of Last Tango in Paris could just as easily be used to describe Trouble Every Day, but maybe not. Certainly this is a film filled with eroticism, but is it erotic? Kael called Last Tango in Paris "the most powerfully erotic movie ever made" and perhaps "the most liberating movie ever made." But while the frankness of Last Tango's sex scenes were designed to shock, there's a huge difference between sex acts involving fingernail trimmers and butter and those depicted in Trouble Every Day, right? Or wrong? Should we be horrified by what we see here? Aroused? Disgusted?

EH: Horrified, aroused, disgusted: probably a little of all three. I wouldn't go so far as to call Trouble Every Day an "erotic" film, and certainly not a "liberating" one, but at the same time there are scenes and moments here that, viewed in isolation, are erotic. The film seethes with the kind of unrestrained, uncensored sexual energy that Kael would have appreciated—sex as a physical manifestation of inner states, inner turmoil. The scene where Léo comes up behind Coré and begins kissing and caressing her is remarkably tender and erotic, which is not surprising since it's a traditional love scene right up until the point where Coré's arousal begins shading into bloodlust. What's more surprising is that Denis is also able to locate tenderness and eroticism in the scene where Léo towels off his wife's naked body after she's killed yet another innocent victim. Sure, it's horrifying, but it's also a demonstration of marital devotion, of having such overpowering love and affection for another person that one is able to tolerate even the worst aspects of the loved one. This moment echoes in the final scene between Shane and June. When they embrace, and we wonder if June saw the truth about her husband, we also wonder if their relationship could ever get to the same place as Coré and Léo's relationship.

So, yes, there is some of the eroticism that Kael is describing in this film. Disgust and horror are the obvious reactions, particularly when Coré is tearing apart that boy she lures to her bedroom, or when Shane is devouring the crotch of the hotel maid. But for every scene like that, there's another where Denis explores the sensuality and romance of love and sex. It should be said that Denis does not, in general, have a negative attitude towards sexuality; it might be easy to walk away from this film thinking it's all about the darkness and ugliness of sex, and to some degree it is, but it's also about the deep emotions and sensations at the core of human sexuality. It's a film that says: sex is powerful, it's dangerous, it's something outside of the ordinary. The same deep-rooted impulses that are the wellspring for the film's most viscerally disturbing images are also the source for the more sensual and erotic moments here. It's surely no coincidence that Denis followed up Trouble Every Day with Vendredi soir, a restrained and quiet film about a one-night stand. Like its predecessor, Vendredi soir is dialogue-free for long stretches, telling its story in sensual, atmospheric imagery, and exploring the textures of human skin and the electric possibilities opened up by sexual contact. It's as though she wanted to suggest, after making a film about the darker corners of human sexuality, that this wasn't the whole story, that this kind of passion and sensuality could as easily be redemptive as destructive. The seeds of that redemption, however, are already present in the more erotic moments of Trouble Every Day itself.

JB: That's beautifully articulated, and I think I agree with every word. Thus the only thing left for me to add would be this: I think Trouble Every Day is an erotic film, but I don't think it's trying to turn us on. In fact, Denis' willingness to allow some people to see nothing but brutality or perversion here is the very quality that allows the movie to arouse. There's no agenda here. Denis doesn't judge these characters. She doesn't moralize. As I suggested before, Coré and Shane are monsters and victims—both at the same time. Yes, Denis is trying to shock us, to make us cringe, but she's not trying to get us to fall in love with the depravity on screen or even to get us to accept it. There is room to be angered and turned off and to be touched and aroused (emotionally as well as sexually). That's rare. Again, Trouble Every Day isn't ambiguous in the way we usually define that word so much as it's honestly indistinct. The violent sex acts are like something out of a vampire movie, and yet Trouble Every Day provides "sex without phoniness," to use another Kael description of Last Tango that is entirely appropriate here.

Speaking of vampires, by the way, it's interesting to see this 2001 film for the first time in 2009, now that we're smack dab in the middle of a vampire craze headlined by the Twilight and True Blood series. If Trouble Every Day reminds me of anything it's this year's Chan-wook Park film Thirst (Bakjwi), another film that manages to balance viscera with romance. And yet despite the similarities, Trouble Every Day is more compelling to me the less it feels like horror. Maybe I've just seen the wrong kinds of horror movies over the years (Thirst is certainly an exception to the rule), but my experience has been that in all too many horror films the blood and violence aren't metaphorical so much as straightforward. It's not meant to be "real," per se, but rarely does it seem to be a path to anything deeper. I don't want to sound judgmental here, because I can relate to the cathartic rush of a fright fest. But for me, if I'm going to watch a woman bite into the throat of her lover, I prefer for there to be some significance to the gesture.

EH: I agree with you about Trouble Every Day, but I can only say that perhaps you have seen the wrong horror films. You seem to be defining horror in a rather limited way—as a visceral "fright fest" with no depth—and then praising Trouble Every Day for transcending that low threshold, becoming something more than mere horror. It reminds me of a recent post over at Bill R.'s blog, where he talks about the horror writer Peter Straub and the low reputation that horror fiction, both in print and on film, has with many critics. Bill quotes Straub: "Claiming that a work transcends its genre is almost exactly like saying, as people once were wont to do, that an accomplished African-American gentleman, someone say like John Conyers or Denzel Washington, is a credit to his race—the unstated assumption of course being that the race in question needs all the help it can get." Leaving aside Straub's questionable implication that anti-horror bias is like racism (ha!), I think he has a point. People tend to treat horror as though the worst examples of it are all the genre has to offer, while praising the best examples as though they're somehow not horror, that they're too good to be horror.

Are there plenty of lousy, formulaic horror movies that don't deliver much besides empty shocks? Sure, and as you say, they have their place. But the genre was built on deeper material. The seminal inspirational works of the genre—classic stuff like Dracula, Frankenstein, the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, etc.—aren't just empty scares; they're substantial works that present allegorical ideas or probe the human condition. A lot of horror cinema has done the same thing. In 50s Hollywood or post-war Japan, horror often expressed nuclear age angst, while people like producer Val Lewton used horror stories as vehicles for explorations of sexuality, psychology and spirituality. Lewton's great Cat People is even an antecedent for Trouble Every Day, a meditation on the destructiveness of lust and the turmoil awakened by sexual feelings. More recent examples of substantial horror also abound: Cronenberg's early films, Marina de Van's In My Skin (a close cousin of Denis' film, made the same year), the deconstructive horror of Todd Haynes' Safe, The Shining, Carrie, etc.

I'm starting to go off on a bit of a tangent, so I'll reiterate my point: I don't think it's remotely true that horror, as a genre, rarely provides "a path to anything deeper." I could see arguing that the last few decades have seen a shift in horror away from substance and towards empty slash-fests, and that the genre's high point lasted from roughly the 30s through the 50s. That's a different thing from saying that horror films are predisposed towards shallowness, or suggesting that Trouble Every Day isn't quite horror because it's too deep. The fact is, a lot of genres have been degraded over the years, not just horror. Romantic comedies used to be the territory for people like Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks, and, well, now look at them. I think a genre should be a fairly neutral container: it can express whatever a filmmaker wants to express. In that sense, Trouble Every Day deserves to be considered a great horror film, an exemplar of what the genre can and should be.

JB: Maybe, but I'm conflicted. I certainly agree that I've probably seen the wrong kind of horror films, as being scared in the theater isn't one of my favorite experiences, so I rarely seek it out. On top of that, perhaps I've disparaged the genre unfairly by having a too limited view of what "horror" is; maybe I've incorrectly applied that handle to the kinds of films I don't find all that interesting (slasher films, for example) while attributing works I do enjoy to some other genre, like "suspense" (Psycho, for instance). Straub's argument is a compelling one, if perhaps a touch extreme, and it echoes Armond White's criticism of the way Pixar is credited for transcending the low expectations of its genre. But as much as Straub's argument works from one angle, there is a problem with it: If something meets several of the criteria belonging to a certain genre and yet somehow surpasses the popular understanding of that genre, then it does. For example, if I tell you that for lunch we should just grab "fast-food," you're likely to think I mean something like McDonalds. You probably won't think I mean we should stop off at a local deli and buy a sandwich, even though that's food prepared quickly. Point being, if popularly the word "horror" now defines a narrow type of movie, then it does, and not necessarily just in my own mind.

So I think it's a worthwhile question: What constitutes "horror" in this day and age? Does blood alone make something horror? If so, would M*A*S*H apply? Do monstrous characters make something horror? If so, does No Country For Old Men apply? Are terrifying behavior and mental illness criteria? If so I'd like to suggest, only half jokingly, that Happy-Go-Lucky is horror. (It sure was for me.) But if I told you that we were going to go see a horror movie and then sat you down in front of one of the above films, you'd think I was out of my mind. I don't think this is an empty debate on semantics because, yes, maybe I'm unfairly narrowing what horror is by refusing to allow more complicated, deeper films into that bucket, but couldn't I just as easily argue that the horror bucket is meaninglessly large and uselessly indistinct if it could be used to describe, say, There Will Be Blood? We don't consider war movies part of the horror genre, even though those are often filled with violence and bloodshed, so why should we be so quick to call Trouble Every Day horror based on the same surface details (which isn't to say I'm blind to its classic horror allusions)?

For me, in modern cinematic terms, "horror" describes movies that have scaring the audience (eliciting genuine fright) as their primary intent. That's a narrow view, I admit (and it's sure to piss some people off), but it also creates a pretty big (but not too big) bucket. Once a film transcends that fright focus, yes, I tend to place it in some other genre, regardless of how gothic or bloody it might be. I'll probably call it drama or suspense, and that will feel more to the point for me. But all of that said, you've got me with Poe, because it's hard to argue that he didn't write horror, and yet his horror isn't anywhere close to my working definition of the word. And I suspect I'm not alone.

EH: I must admit, it is kind of hard to come up with a satisfying working definition of horror that encompasses the breadth of the genre without becoming so broad that No Country For Old Men could just as easily be tossed in the bucket. (There Will Be Blood is another story, though: maybe you disagree, but I think Daniel Plainview is something of a horror movie villain in the same way that Norma Desmond becomes Nosferatu-like in Sunset Boulevard. Neither film is horror, per se, but both at least make nods in that direction.) That said, I think it's obvious that defining horror as a film with the "primary intent" to scare people is too limiting, and also makes room for a great deal of ambiguity about filmmakers' intentions, always a tricky area. For instance, was creating audience fear really Stanley Kubrick's "primary intent" with The Shining, to name just one touchstone of the genre? What about Sam Raimi's Evil Dead sequels, which have always been more about making audiences laugh than about making them scream?

Maybe a less stringent definition of horror is in order, one that makes room for films that don't really intend to scare audiences so much as to explore the nature of fear, of what horrifies and disturbs us. What would a film like that be called, if not a horror film? Fear is central to horror, there's no doubt about that, but just because a lot of modern horror movies have taken a reductive approach to fear—I'm thinking especially of the prevalence of the mindless "jump scare"—doesn't mean that this is all there is to horror. Fear in the broader sense is at the heart of Trouble Every Day: not only the fear of being stalked and killed by a predator, but also the fear of hurting those we love, the fear of losing control, fears stemming from anxiety about sexuality and relationships. I think any definition of horror that excludes this kind of more nuanced exploration of fear and violence is essentially consigning the genre to a ghetto with no potential for producing lasting work.

JB: Kind of. I mean, yes, it's true that if we limited the horror genre to stuff closer to the "jump scare" model that it would eliminate films like Trouble Every Day from that classification, but that wouldn't rule out the possibility of making or appreciating great art within that more limited understanding of the genre. For example, I adore The Descent, and if that film isn't horror it could only be considered action-adventure. The Descent wants to gross you out and freak you out, and anyone looking for allegory or some other deeper meaning is wasting their time. That is horror to me, and I bloody love it. It's awesome. And when I call that "great horror," I'm not placing an asterisk on the film saying it's "less than" something else, I'm just describing the way it works. I'm succinctly articulating the impact of the movie and the way that it stimulates the audience.

That's why I don't want to call Trouble Every Day horror, because, no, fear isn't the heart of this film. I disagree with you on that. I do see Trouble Every Day as an allegory for addiction. I do see it as an examination of relationships and trust and lies. Again, as much as anything it reminds me of Eyes Wide Shut. I worry that by calling Trouble Every Day "horror," I'm limiting the film at least to being about fear by your broader definition, and yet I still think that would be too limiting, too far away from what I think are more central and more significant themes. To go back to There Will Be Blood, Daniel Plainview is something of a classic horror villain, yes. I agree with you there. But Paul Thomas Anderson's film isn't horror. We're meant to look deeper into Daniel Plainview, to try and understand his tortured mind, not to recoil from him in fear (at least not primarily). To approach the film as horror is to see less of what's there, not more. A movie like The Descent is bolstered by the horror label, because it defines its parameters for success and sharpens our focus. A movie like Trouble Every Day is reduced by the label even if the horror tag is placed on it without malice or bias, as you have done, because it misdirects our focus.

I respect your wish that, as with the gothic works of Poe, cinema horror should be able to stand for something more than blood and fear. The problem is that blood and fear are the elements that horror serves up that other genres don't. Jenna Jameson could learn to act like Meryl Streep and write like Charlie Kaufman, but if the primary intent of her next film is to arouse us with graphic sex, then it's porn. It's that simple. Thus, once a film becomes intent on doing something deeper than arousing the audience with graphic sex, whether that sex is real (Brown Bunny) or convincingly simulated (Lust, Caution), it's no longer porn. And so you can mourn that Poe's work would now be considered too complex to fit within the horror genre, but where would be the loss? We'd still have Poe. We'd still have horror (and people who love it for what it is). The loss would be if folks read The Tell-Tale Heart and reduced it to a creepy story about a heart that wouldn't stop beating or watch Trouble Every Day and think Coré is a sexy zombie.

EH: In some ways, you're right, and you make a good case for your position. Certainly, no matter how we classify Trouble Every Day or Poe, they're still great, so there's no loss there. The loss, in my opinion, is if horror is consigned more and more to a ghetto, deemed a genre without depth or complexity, then artists could be discouraged from engaging with horror in substantial ways. A work like Trouble Every Day exists because Claire Denis saw something in the horror genre; she wanted to engage with that tradition, with the conventions and ideas of the genre, bringing her own sensibility to it. I think that's the important thing: whether you agree with me or not that the final film is a horror film, Denis obviously set out to deal with horror on some level. I see your point that we should be happy with horror for what it is and not ask it to be other things, but at the same time I think genre should be more of an open concept than that. There needs to be room to stretch and experiment, to push at the boundaries of the genre without entirely shattering them. If our understanding of what horror is has changed since the days of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, then why can't it change again? I think Trouble Every Day is a great example of that: it expands and challenges the popular conception of horror while retaining enough of the genre's essential elements that it doesn't completely abandon its roots.

Of course, horror is not the only prism through which Trouble Every Day can be viewed and understood. One reading we haven't discussed yet that I want to at least throw out there is the feminist slant on it. Now don't worry, I'm not going to posit Coré as a man-eating feminist icon. The film's feminism asserts itself in more subtle ways, on the one hand playing off of male fears about female sexuality, and on the other dealing with the violence and antagonism implicit in sexuality. Coré may not be a "sexy zombie," but she is a sexy/scary archetype, an exaggerated vision of the kind of unapproachable woman who would be so simultaneously appealing and intimidating to men (like the eager young guy she lures into her room and devours). In that sense, Denis is tweaking male sexuality, giving a concrete form to male fears about female sexuality—also one of the central themes of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which I think you were right to identify as a similar film. Denis is also dealing with voyeurism and predatory sexuality by frequently putting the audience in the position of Shane or another imagined observer, watching the maids dress and undress in the locker room, peeking around corners or lingering just behind a woman's neck, close enough to see the wispy hairs falling out of her ponytail.

As I said, I'm just putting that out there as one more way of reading the film, one more set of concerns that Denis is bringing to bear on this story. What do you think?

JB: Actually, I'm glad you brought that up, because one thing that occurred to me is what a significantly different message this film would seem to be sending if it didn't have male and female predators to offset one another. Without Coré ruthlessly devouring men, one can easily imagine the knee-jerk feminist outrage that this film might inspire (and not just in women, to be clear) if this addiction metaphor was seen only through Shane's growing inability to see women as anything more than figures in or victims of his sexual fantasies and urges. For example, that scene near the end when Shane attacks—and some would say rapes—the maid would be much more repugnant if we hadn't already seen Coré's three kills. (Just to clarify the "some would say rapes" part: That scene is confusing to me. The woman seems to consent to sex in the first place, but then she begins screaming as if in pain, as if Shane is biting at her neck, though there's no evidence of that when he pulls away. So I'm unclear as to when or if Shane truly forces himself on an unwilling partner prior to performing his gruesome version of cunnilingus. But I digress.) Likewise, the feminist revenge angle would be stronger if Shane wasn't there reducing women to objects of his perversion. In a sense, by presenting the female as both the conqueror and the conquered, those opposing readings cancel one another out. We can't know for sure, but perhaps that was a purposeful choice. Perhaps Denis is making it clear that we should ignore the stereotypical gender roles that we inevitably assign to sexual power struggles. Perhaps she's saying we should see the predatory sex here as a comment on the monstrousness of the characters rather than a comment on their female and male sexuality.

Furthermore, any feminist reading is on slippery ground. Yes, Coré is a sexy archetype, an exaggeration of the unapproachable woman who is both appealing and intimidating to men. But while Coré is a sexual predator, thus taking on the role usually assigned to men, she is also—much more than Shane—reduced to her sexual urges. Her husband locks her in her room, for example, because if he doesn't Coré is going to go in search of sex; she can't control herself. Shane at least has some kind of willpower, and at his stage of the addiction cycle his actions seem more voluntary, as if his sexual urges are a vice or a fetish that he can control. Coré has devolved far beyond that point. She must feed on men, which involves having sex with men. When she's not attacking men, she wants to die. There's no in-between for Coré. So, just as easily as you could argue that Coré is the strong female devouring men, you could argue that she is exactly what feminists hate: a woman reduced to her sexual desires who cannot control herself. This is all before we consider Shane's wife, who could be seen as a woman who resigns herself to a loveless, sexless marriage and a cheating husband. She's hardly an icon for female strength and individuality.

EH: All good points. I pretty much agree with everything you say. The ambivalence in the presentation of Coré and the contrast with Shane prevents the film from being read as anything like a feminist tract, even though Denis clearly intends us to think about these issues of sexuality, archetypes and predation. It goes back to the film's essential ambiguity, its refusal to settle on any one interpretation, any one "message." You suggested earlier that Denis "doesn't moralize," and that's why I would never say that any one reading dominates; she wants us to reach our own conclusions. This ambiguity makes the film something of a Rorschach blot: Is it a horror film or not? Is it a commentary on gender roles? Is it about addiction? Sexual desire? Troubled relationships? The role of the brain in defining consciousness? All of the above? To some extent, anyone can see what they want in a film like this, and that's the beauty of it.

Of course, this is not to suggest that Denis offers up no ideas of her own, or that the film is utterly vague or aimless. In fact, Denis' style is nothing if not precise, and though she never pins the film down to any one interpretation, there's little doubt about the emotional effects she wants to elicit in her audience. She has a real control of mood that extends also to the perfect choice of the soundtrack by great British band Tindersticks, who had previously scored Nénette and Boni and have gone on to score Denis' recent 35 Rhums as well. Their distinctive jazzy, mournful sound—particularly on the title song—is a perfect fit for Denis' atmospheric visuals. Their contributions here remind me of Neil Young's spacious guitar and organ solos for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, atmospherically filling in some white space with gauzy smears of sound, buttressing the overall mood of the piece. Of course, Denis' recurring use of Tindersticks' music is consistent with her loyalty to other members of her crew, notably her cinematographer Agnès Godard and her frequent editor Nelly Quettier, whose presence here reinforces this film's continuity with her other work.

I opened this piece by saying that I had previously thought of Trouble Every Day as characterized primarily by its startling violence, which is perhaps understandable: there's no doubt that the film possesses unforgettable images like Coré nibbling at the loose, bloody skin on a victim's face, her gritted teeth stained red. Now that I've revisited the film, however, I find that I can more easily think of it in relation to Denis' career as a whole, as one more elegiac and enigmatic piece of visual poetry, defined by its unusual quietness and its even tempo. Yes, it's a film about a sensational subject—as you said at the outset, the word "cannibalism" tends to leap out at one—but it's not treated sensationally. Instead, Trouble Every Day is patient and introspective, probing into the nuanced emotions and ideas at the heart of this sanguine story.

JB: I presume you use sanguine in reference to the blood, and not as a suggestion of cheerful optimism. If so, I agree. But you say it best above when you compare it to a Rorschach blot. I usually cringe at that comparison, because it often manages to give the artist too much credit, as if as a rule abstraction and genius rise and fall together on parallel rails, but here it's true. This is going to seem like a crazy leap, but at times during the film I found myself recalling a scene in Danny Boyle's Sunshine when a character is about to get swallowed up by the sun and Cliff Curtis' character breathlessly barks in to the radio: "What do you see?! What do you see!?" I think Denis is working with a plan in Trouble Every Day, but she's also leading us to these moments where we have to stare into the light and wrestle with the undefined, both mentally and emotionally. Denis wants to provoke us, but I get the sense that she's utterly unconcerned with prescribing our reactions so long as we've engaged with the material. That's rare.

Trouble Every Day is one of those films that is fun to discover and yet richer to know. In other words, as interesting as it is to try to grapple with the movie as it unfolds, it takes getting to the end and seeing the complete view to really understand what you saw in the first place—and I don't mean in some comparatively shallow M. Night Shyamalan kind of way. Lynch makes films like that. The Coens make films like that. Per everything we've talked about here, I'm not sure how I'd even begin to encapsulate the film to someone who'd never seen it. It is, for me, a portrait of addiction, but it's not just that. It is, of course, a movie about cannibals, and yet as incomplete as any encapsulation would be without that word, that's the word that's most misleading. It is bloody and disturbing but, for me, not horror. Trouble Every Day defies any neat categorization. That alone doesn't make it great, but it's part of the allure. It would be easy now to fall back on that old cliché that "it's not for everyone," but if Trouble Every Day isn't for everyone, who is it for? If it wasn't a struggle to watch, it wouldn't be so interesting to behold.

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Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler. Follow his updates on Twitter.

Ed Howard chronicles his film viewing at Only the Cinema.

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House reader Todd Ford sends along this essay, which he wrote for his site Cinema 100 Film Society on low-budget blockbuster Paranormal Activity. An excerpt:

"So, consider this proposition: Paranormal Activity is in one sense a nice, scary little demon-possession story about a guy who is a bit of an immature jerk sharing a haunted house with his girlfriend. And it is also an allegory representing a case study in domestic violence."

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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Today's link takes you to the latest interview by Collectors Weekly contributors Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis. Their subject this time out is movie prop supplier Jim Elyea, who's outfitted everything and everyone from the Titanic to the Transformers.

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz


“You know, I don't think I've got it in me to shoot my flatmate, my mum, and my girlfriend all in the same night,” says Shaun, one of the beleaguered non-ghouls in Shaun of the Dead. That 2004 film is a send-up of zombie movies, but you know what they say about every joke containing truth. Ever since director George A. Romero released his 1968 shocker Night of the Living Dead—which reimagined zombies, the dark magic-entranced slaves of voodoo folklore, as shambling fiends that crave warm flesh and can only be offed with a head shot—the zombie genre has displaced the western as cinema’s most popular and durable morality play. As the video essay “Zombie 101” demonstrates, while the genre’s superficial appeal is the spectacle of torn and mangled flesh—living and dead—its deeper resonance lies in its portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in extreme circumstances.

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Matt Zoller Seitz is a filmmaker and the founder of The House Next Door. To read the rest of the written introduction, or to view this video at the web site of Moving Image Source, click here.

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By Tom Stempel

In the spring of 1972 I was teaching a course in the history of motion pictures at Los Angeles City College. Rick Stanton, the head of the Cinema Division, asked me to write a proposal for a course on the history of documentary film, which he hoped to add to the curriculum. I did, putting the entire sum of my knowledge of documentary film into it. The course was approved and, two days before the course began in the fall of 1972, I was hired to teach it. One slight problem. That proposal, with the entire sum of my knowledge of documentary film, was one page long.

Obviously, I was not going to be able to lecture a lot. Just as well, since the varying lengths of documentary film made standard one-hour lectures impossible. So I decided to let the students tell me what they thought of the films. I would give a little introductory material about the film, show it and then we would discuss it. It turned out to be the way to teach the course. Now, 37 years later and knowing a lot more about documentaries, I still teach it the same way—although a few years back I had students complain that I let other people talk too much. Imagine that: students wanted the teacher to talk more. I started talking more, but the focus of the class is still on what the students have to say. What all these years have given me is a front row seat on how people respond to documentaries. Not what I think about the films, or what historians and critics think about the films, but what a wide variety of people think and feel about them.

A word about our students. What makes teaching at LACC so much fun is that you never know who or what is going to walk in the door. I have had students ranging in age from the late teens to the seventies and eighties. We have students from every continent except Antarctica, and representatives of all five major sexual orientations and several minor ones. Needless to say, their responses run the gamut.

I generally start the course with a reel of early actuality films from the late 1890s and the early 1900s. The reel includes a couple of staged recreations from the Spanish-American War and the students are shocked, shocked to discover that documentaries were staged from the very beginning, but at least this prepares them for Robert Flaherty. We usually show Nanook of the North (1922), which charms today as much as it did then. Students are surprised at the nudity in the film, and I have to explain that the film is a demonstration of the double-whammy of American sexism and racism: in those days nudity in film was socially acceptable as long as it was a) female and b) non-white.

Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934) often splits the class down the middle. Half love Wright’s poetic images and his equally poetic cutting. The other half hate the film because it is non-linear, i.e., does not tell a story, or focus on a single character. The complexity of the structure makes for an interesting discussion, which sets up a context for them to deal with later non-linear films. The exoticism of the film appeals, and not just to western students. I had an Indian student who on his summer vacation went over to Sri Lanka, as Ceylon is now called, and did a video documentary on the temples Wright had photographed. And once I had a student from Sri Lanka who left the screening with tears welling up in her eyes. She said, “It makes me so homesick.”

Wright and Harry Watt’s Night Mail (1936) works better, at least partially because it is a very linear film: the train goes from London to Scotland. W.H. Auden’s poetry in the narration of the last section usually leads to someone commenting that they did not know England had rap music back in the thirties. The poetry in Pare Lorentz’s narration for The River (1937), on the other hand, just seems too much, and only those who paid attention in English class recognize the imitation of Whitman. As overbearing as the narration seems, at least it cements firmly in their minds the concept of Voice of God narration.

I shift the chronological order and show Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) before Triumph of the Will (1935). Although every ten years or so I show both parts of Olympia, usually I just show Part II, since it has the most cinematically inventive sequences (the diving sequences, the gymnastics, the bicycle races). Students are dazzled by her techniques and style, and those who have watched a lot of sports on television recognize where it all started. Those who are familiar with Riefenstahl’s reputation are amazed that there does not seem to be any propaganda at all in Olympia. Once I get them to admit that, I tell them I have them right where I want them to spring Triumph of the Will on them the next week. I show the complete 110-minute version and they stagger out of it at the end, often thinking what one student said to me at the door on the way out, “How did the Germans ever lose the war?” Riefenstahl’s images and sound are so overpowering that one afternoon when there was a small earthquake during the long parade sequence at the end, the class just thought it was part of the film. It takes a full two-hour discussion to sort out all the ways the film works, both as a film and as propaganda.

The next week they get the American response, in the form of two of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942-45) documentaries. I generally have found that I have to start with Prelude to War (1942), since the younger students often have no idea who was fighting whom in World War II. Once I had an older gentleman in the class who had been a junior officer during the war. He had the job of delivering the lecture series that the films supplanted. He brought in his copy of the lecture notes. Looking them over, one could easily understand why General George C. Marshall wanted the film series instead.

One issue that comes up first with Riefenstahl, if not sooner, and then gets a thorough airing with Capra, is the question of the moral responsibility of the documentary filmmaker. Not surprisingly, when you look at some of Capra’s more obvious manipulations and his occasional racism (referring to the Japanese as Hitler’s “buck-toothed pals” always gives students a start, and not just those who are Japanese or Japanese-American), some students end up thinking Capra was less morally responsible than Riefenstahl. (And then there was the student who tried to do a parody of Hitler before the screening of Triumph of the Will and managed to offend both the Jewish people in the class and any neo-Nazis who might have been enrolled. I am still not sure how he did that.) Needless to say, there are those students who criticize Capra’s films for not being more critical of American society. This is especially true when I show The Negro Soldier (1944), which seems incredibly naïve and evasive today (check out how Capra whisks through the Civil War with a shot of the Lincoln Memorial, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the sound track and no mention of slavery). Part of my job, of course, is to help them understand the historical context of the films and the attitudes in them. Sometimes it helps. And sometimes it is unneeded. When I ran the World War II films, including the ones listed below, in the Spring 2003 semester, they happened to fall right at the beginning of the Iraq War. History provided the context.

We show two of the John Huston documentaries, San Pietro (1943-45) and Let There Be Light (1945-80). The first works better than the second, since it seems more modern in style, a forerunner of the Direct Cinema filmmaking of the sixties and later. The staged quality of Light, particularly the artificial Hollywood lighting of cinematographer Stanley Cortez, dates the film, as does the simplicity of the cures. Contemporary audiences know a lot more about psychiatry and that it is just not as easy as the film shows. World War II ends with Night and Fog (1955), still the most devastating film about the Holocaust. The students are so drained by the end of that half-hour film that I have to arrange a short break afterwards, since I have found that people are unable to say anything coherent for about ten minutes.

After the horrors of war, we take a break with a week of Walt Disney documentaries from the late forties and early fifties. Often these are films students have grown up with and seen either in school or on television, so it takes them a while to get into discussing them in any depth. Once it is clear that it’s open season on Uncle Walt and the middle-class messages in the films, students examine them with great glee. Why does the lost baby seal in Seal Island (1948) look different in every shot? Why is the “suitor” of the beautiful female beaver that the boy beaver in Beaver Valley (1950) runs off with not the “husband” of the female? Where did the female beaver’s babies come from? Is she a single mom? A divorcee from Encino? How can nature possibly have squeezed all that into half an acre in Nature’s Half Acre (1951)? What were the animators smoking when they came up with the vision of what life on Mars might be like in Mars and Beyond (1957)? (According to Ward Kimball, the producer of the film who was a guest in class once, they were not smoking, but drinking: stingers.)

Contemporary students are astonished to discover that once upon a time, the commercial television networks actually produced hour-long documentaries. Nightmare in Red (1955) is a history of communism in Russia that is a particular favorite of my students who escaped communist regimes in the seventies and eighties. Harvest of Shame (1960) can’t be the sixties, can it?: there’s no rock-and-roll on the soundtrack. Hunger in America (1968) raises the question of why doesn’t somebody do something to eliminate hunger; Congress did, and then discovered it was not all that easy. Black History: Lost Stolen or Strayed (1968) shows that Bill Cosby was once actually angry about something other than what he has been angry about lately.

The textbook I used for the course until recently was Erik Barnouw’s Documentary (Oxford University Press). Before that I used to use Richard Barsam’s Nonfiction Film (Dutton), which is a little more straightforward, but one day a student came up to me, waving Barnouw’s book in my face and saying, “Mr. Stempel, you ought to use this book. He writes just like you talk.” I read the book again and could see her point: both Barnouw and I are willing to stop for an interesting anecdote or two. I also like the distinction he makes between "Direct Cinema" (using the lighter weight camera and sound systems to follow the action) and "Cinema Verité" (using them to interview people). I have recently moved to the more up-to-date A New History of the Documentary Film by Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, which retains that distinction.

We begin our section on Direct Cinema with Primary (1960), which I used to describe as “the first time most of the new equipment was working most of the time.” After talking to Richard Leacock, one of the filmmakers, a few years ago I had to amend that to “some of the equipment was working some of the time.” For students who have grown to love the visual beauties of Song of Ceylon, The River, and Olympia, the rough-hewn quality of Primary is a shock. Others feel this is the first modern documentary we see. Because producer Robert Drew and his filmmakers have made an effort to be fair to both John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, the two candidates in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Presidential Primary, the class often splits on who they think the film favors most. The preponderance of the students feel it favors Kennedy, but after Humphrey’s death in 1978, the next class or two felt it favored Humphrey. For younger students, who know Kennedy only as the president who slept with Marilyn Monroe and was shot by one or more people, it is a surprise to see how charismatic he was. For older students, the film brings back memories, sometimes very painful ones.

The same is true, only more so, for the companion piece to Primary, the same filmmakers’ 1963 Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment. That film deals with the Kennedys’ (John and Attorney General Robert) attempt to integrate the University of Alabama in the face of George Wallace’s announcement that he would “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent it. For older black students, the film brings back memories of why their families had pictures of the Kennedys on their walls. For younger students, black and white, there is the shock that less than forty years ago, black students were not allowed in some colleges. When I showed the film in the Fall 2008 semester, it was the day after Obama’s election. The night section of the class, mostly older students, were moved, some almost to tears. The day section, mostly younger students, followed the lead of a foreign student who spoke up first. He thought it was “silly.” By that he meant it was silly that the federal government had to go to all that trouble just to enroll two black students. Well, yes, but that is part of this country’s history. And very much on the other hand, there was the black student several years ago who agreed with Wallace: he thought there ought to be separation of the races. I have only had that reaction once.

What is also a shock about Crisis is the sheer intimacy of the film: Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and James Lipscomb shooting in the White House, in Bobby Kennedy’s home, in the Governor’s mansion. Seeing the film in an era in which non-government filmmakers would not be allowed within miles of any of those places makes students mourn the loss of that kind of access. Especially given the level of political discourse in the Oval Office scenes, which was particularly awe-inspiring after the release of the Nixon Watergate tapes.

Intimacy with the subjects is one of the hallmarks of both Direct Cinema and Cinema Verité, and audiences can have mixed feelings about it. Crisis, Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Tom Cohen’s Family Business (1982: from the PBS Middletown series), and Keva Rosenfeld’s All-American High (1986) all introduced the audiences to characters they loved. On the other hand, Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’s Seventeen (1982: the film in the Middletown series that PBS and Xerox declined to run), split the audience. The first time I showed it, in the mid-eighties, the class loved Lynn, the smart-mouthed “heroine” of the film. I last showed it a few years ago and one section of the class just hated the whole white trash bunch, including Lynn. I am a big fan of Jill Godmilow and Judy Collins’s 1974 Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, a film about Antonia Brico, the woman orchestra conductor who was denied conducting opportunities for many years, but some students, especially the men, have not liked her or the film.

And then, as it must to all documentary students, comes a Frederick Wiseman film. I rotate the Wiseman films, having shown nearly all of them over the years (except for the REALLY LONG ones). The discussions of Wiseman film usually begin with ten minutes of students ranting. There are six standard objections they raise. Some classes raise only a few, some all of them. The are: 1) It’s too long; 2) It needs narration; 3) It’s boring; 4) It does not tell a story; 5) It does not follow a character; and, inevitably, 6) Why did you show us this? Once they are done venting, and get curious about my saying “That’s number two” as I check something off a list they cannot see, I quote the line from the end of the first part of the play Angels in America: “And now the great work begins.” And we get down to the serious business of figuring out what Wiseman is up to, how he goes about it, what the themes are in his work, how they relate to other themes in his other films, how the films are structured (thematically rather than narratively, among other ways), and finally, why weren’t you all laughing? Wiseman’s ear for the absurdities of American life and behavior is astonishing, and a lot of it goes right by first-time viewers. Wiseman is one of the few filmmakers I show whom former students, now in advanced filmmaking classes, come back to look at in following semesters. Sometimes they help me get the current classes laughing. Sometimes it does not help: once I had a former student come to see Racetrack (1985) and he and I cracked up at the shot near the beginning of Metropolitan Hospital, the location of Wiseman’s previous Hospital (1970), but there is no way Wiseman virgins would get the joke.

Not getting the jokes is a problem with my students, who have grown up, as we all have, with the idea that documentaries are serious films about serious subjects. The fact is, the best documentaries, like Wiseman’s, can be hysterically funny, but that is not part of the conventional wisdom about documentaries. In 1990, when every magazine was making up ten-best lists of the 1980s, I wrote an article on the ten funniest documentaries of the 1980s. Needless to say, only one of the ten was nominated for an Academy Award, and I think Marcel Ophuls’s Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) won in spite of the dark humor Ophuls found in the former OSS and CIA personnel’s explanations of why it was really in the best interests of the country to let Barbie escape. It may not surprise you to learn that I could not get the article published anywhere.

In the latter part of the course, I often run “theme weeks,” where I combine films on a single or related subjects. One area is music, which can mean anything from a paring of the Pennebaker-Leacock Company: Original Cast Album (1970: I have to remind Sondheim fans not to sing along) and Charles Braverman’s The Making of a Live TV Show (1971: the Goldiggers are musically not quite up to Sondheim’s standards) to the Maysles’s Gimme Shelter (1970) and what I announced simply as “another documentary about a rock group,” This is Spinal Tap (1984: some people knew the joke, some got it as the film progressed, and some had to have it explained to them afterwards, so good was the filmmakers’ imitation of rock documentary style).

Since we tend to have a fair number of women students, I often have a week or more of films by and about women. Partly this is payback (no, not for the nudity in Nanook; the payback for that comes from the nude men in the sauna at the beginning of Olympia Part II) for the World War II and Vietnam documentaries. One semester I had some women complain about the amount of blood and gore I showed in the World War II section. The reactions of the guys in the class were, snap, “Hey, that’s reality. Get used to it.” Later that semester I showed Claudia Weill and Joyce Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (1972) which begins with a very explicit birth scene. Now the guys were complaining and the women did not miss the opportunity to go, snap, “Hey, that’s reality. Get used to it.” Documentaries are not for wimps.

As we have seen, context can be crucial in terms of reaction to a film. A film I often show is Nick Broomfield and Sandi Sissel’s Chicken Ranch (1982) about a legal bordello in Nevada. It is the best of several documentaries about prostitution because it lets the women speak for themselves, and their nasty put-downs of men in general and young men in particular is a much-needed shock to young male students who grew up with the likes of Pretty Woman (1990). From time to time I have run it with Ted Reed’s 1989 film Coming Out. On its own, it’s a moderately interesting film about the annual Debutante Cotillion in Washington, D.C. Seen after Chicken Ranch, it immediately provokes a discussion about who is more honest about selling young women to men.

Toward the end of the semester I usually run documentaries that are “self-reflexive,” that is, call attention to the fact that they are films, and raise questions about the nature of documentary. One of my favorites is Robert Stone’s Radio Bikini (1987), where he uses not simply footage taken by the Navy at atomic tests in 1946, but the outtakes and multiple takes of that footage to show how “constructed” the earlier documentaries were. An audience seeing that in the context of the history of documentary film can understand without much prompting what Stone is up to.

Given the amount of war and other evils that a semester of documentary films shows, I try to end on an upbeat note. One film I have used as a closer is John Korty’s Who Are the Debolts? And Where Did They Get 19 Kids? (1977). If seeing the Debolts deal with all their adopted kids and their medical problems with robust good humor does not warm the cockles of your heart, your heart needs a new set of cockles. Another ending series of films begins with Lois Shelton’s Ernie Andrews: Blues for Central Avenue (1986). This look at the jazz scene on Central Avenue in Los Angeles was begun as a student film at LACC and is an encouragement to our students. I follow this with Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss’s International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1986), about a 1940s interracial all-woman jazz band, and the same filmmakers’ closer look at one of the members of the band and her companion, Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women (1988). One time I had shown a documentary on an abortion clinic and one of the women in the class had said that I should also show a film about a mother. I decided that Tiny Davis, singer, trumpeter, mother, lesbian and grandmother was the greatest mother of them all. And my classes, even the homophobes, seem to agree.

In early 2002 I heard about a film on George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign called Journeys with George. It was playing the liberal salon circuit in Washington and the word was that it really showed Bush to be an idiot. When I saw it at a sparsely attended, hardly advertised screening the film knocked me out. It not only showed that Bush was a fairly likable guy, but that he was not an idiot. Journeys with George vividly demonstrated how the media completely, and I mean completely, geeked their coverage of the campaign. When its filmmaker, Alexandra Pelosi, was on Charlie Rose a few months later, promoting the HBO showings of the film, she tried to convince Rose that the film did expose the media coverage as terrible. Rose, who also works for CBS, simply found it impossible to believe. As the years have gone by, more and more people not only realize the film did this, but that it was the first of many, many documentaries that picked up on all the stories the mainstream media were geeking: the campaign and the Supreme Court decisions afterward, the run-up to the Iraq War, the war itself, and on and on and on. I have shown Journeys with George almost every semester since, and students have had the same reactions I did to that first screening: Bush is personally likable and the media did geek the campaign. I usually pair it with a film like Gunner Palace (2004) or Baghdad ER (2006) to show the outcome of that 2000 campaign. I realized after the Obama election, I never have to show Journeys with George ever again.

Even with the Bush and Iraq documentaries, I still try to end on an upbeat note, as difficult as that may be to do. One film that works, especially if there are a number of foreign students in the class is Marlo Poras’s Mai’s America (2002), about a teenaged Vietnamese girl named Mai, who comes to this country as an exchange student. We not only see what she goes through, but get her perceptions on the people she meets and on America in general. Mai is charming and funny and smart, and she is the best I can do after Bush and Iraq.

I am planning on retiring from teaching in 2011, which should give me enough time to run what I am sure are going to be some very interesting documentaries about the Obama years. All I am waiting on is for people to make them.

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Tom Stempel, in addition to teaching at Los Angeles City College, writes the “Understanding Screenwriting” column for The House Next Door.

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