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Mystery in OBLIVION (2013)

In Oblivion, screenwriters Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn work hard to keep the audience engaged. But, in order to accomplish this goal, they don't make their characters nuanced or provide the audience with a complicated interpersonal relationship to navigate. On the contrary, Jack Harper and Vika Olsen are immediately comprehensible character types with a clearly defined dramatic tension between them that seems latent in the opening act so that it can predictably emerge with the arrival of Julia Harper in the second. Jack is daring, curious and already nostalgic about the world that he and Vika will have to leave behind in two weeks--a time limit that serves little purpose beyond heightening Vika's contrasting traits. Vika is calculating, cautious and eager to get through her last two weeks on Earth strictly by the book lest she risk her chance to leave earth for the apparently edenic Titan, where the rest of humanity appears to be living. In other words, Jack wants answers and he wants to stay on Earth, while Vika wants only to keep her nose to the grindstone so that she can leave Earth for Titan as soon as possible.

Keeping the characters two-dimensional and their relationship simplistic allows Gajdusek and DeBruyn to focus the audience's attention solely on the unfolding mystery plot surrounding the disappearing drones and the attempts on the part of the "Scavs" to capture rather than kill Jack. What's happening to the drones? And what do the aliens want? These questions aren't particularly interesting, but Gajdusek and DeBruyn construct Jack as a character who increasingly needs to know the answers. Why he needs to know the answers now isn't clear. The fully realized world of the film that presumably existed prior to the story's beginning doesn't matter to the writers so much as the immediate desire for withheld exposition that the film sets forth shortly after an obligatory status quo period in which the basic terms of the narrative world are explained, largely in voice-over by Jack. Jack exists to direct the audience into a focused consideration of the questions set forth by the screenwriters as mysterious. He is, in this sense, more a tool for audience engagement than a portrait of humanity, even though allusions to basic human emotional needs strive to manipulate and engage the audience emotionally in the final act. 

Although a few periodically unfolding mystery seres like Twin Peaks and Lost have played with the idea that audience engagement with mystery doesn't actually require predetermined answers in order to keep the audience engaged, Gajdusek and DeBruyn are operating here within a mode closer to the Twilight Zone, where audience engagement is assumed to depend largely on the audience's faith that the writers do have logical explanations for anything mysterious that happens in the story. In such stories, small gaps in logic are inevitable and forgivable, because what matters in the end is the overall effect of the expected surprise provided by any answers. Particularly when revealed mysteries force the audience to reconsider the significance of prior events in the story (The Sixth Sense is the obvious cultural reference here), the fittingness of the twist to the narrative that has been built up prior to the revelation matters more than airtight logic.

Because the protagonist and audience undergo similar feelings of surprise and a similar revaluation of past events, the revelation superficially aligns the audience with the protagonist. Gajdusek and DeBruyn make the effective, standard choice to take advantage of this alignment between audience and character understanding by combining the expositional revelation with an emotionally charged experience for the protagonist--namely, in this case, the "reunion" between Jack and his wife Julia, who, for uncertain reasons that are less important to the screenwriters than this moment's impact, has kept her identity secret from Jack despite spending considerable amounts of time alone with him and despite, presumably, having no awareness of the fact that he is a clone. Similarly, the human survivors decide not to tell Jack about the "Tet," even though revealing this fact would be the simplest, most obvious way to convert him to their cause, because Gajdusek and DeBruyn want to extend the mystery as long as it can hold audience engagement and so that they can combine the revelation about the "Tet" with Jack's discovery of Julia's identity. Again, the fact that clones would not logically have the same exact appearance much less any memories of their genetic predecessors matters less to the writers than the expositional and emotional effect on the audience of this moment. The story, characters and narrative world are, in part, constructed and sometimes subdued to serve this plot twist.

This simultaneous revelation mimics the basic mystery machinations of Oedipus Rex, in which the protagonist learns the identity of his wife and the significance of his past actions at the same time. Partly because of the influence of Aristotle's Poetics on contemporary industrial theories about dramatic structure, Oedipus Rex is a similarly influential text for American screenwriters. In characteristic fashion, for instance, Robert Towne even claimed in his commentary for the Chinatown BluRay release that all mystery plots are derived from Oedipus Rex (an echo of the monomyth theory popularized by the other godfather of industrial narrative theory, Joseph Campbell) in that the protagonist has the answers to his needling questions right under his nose from the very start but cannot recognize them--Gajdusek and DeBruyn do not wholly embrace this particular narrative challenge, but the persistent dreams that Jack has about Julia (one of which opens the film) are a substitute and similar form of seeding into the beginning of the narrative the revelation that will conclude the story. 

But whereas the revelation in Oedipux Rex concludes the play, the most dramatic revelation in Oblivion takes place little more than halfway through the film. The simplistic character types and relationships made this early twist necessary for Gajdusek and DeBruyn to maintain audience in engagement in acquiring expositional answers to unresolved questions about the narrative world, the primary form of engagement the screenwriters developed. There's not much to mine in the relationship between Jack and Vika, for instance, since both are clearly established and predictable types (we know from the start that they won't work together and we know exactly why). The characters, however, do not seem to recognize this fact, not only because they are in denial about their situation (a convenient explanation that serves the plot rather than builds into character development), but because they are not allowed the psychological dimension to reflect on and then react to their own situations. Jack can only divorce himself from Vika when Julia is revealed to him, and not before, when a more complex character might reflect on and respond to his emotional distance from his partner. While Gajdusek and DeBruyn allow Jack and Vika just enough emotional nuance to make them recognizably human, their roles are not primarily humanistic but instead subsidiary to the expositional machinations of the mystery plot--as soon as the mystery is revealed, Vika does not continue to complicate Jack's relationshiop with his wife; she dies, no longer necessary. 

Gajdusek and DeBruyn maintain audience engagement post-revelation largely by building a new, concrete sense of story purpose (Jack has to destroy the "Tet") and by continuing to throw in periodic after-shock twists (Jack and Vika are clones, Vika was Jack's copilot, Jack did not in fact bring Julia along with him into the "Tet," etc.). In other words, Gajdusek and DeBruyn have effectively conjoined two hourlong narratives (a mystery plot and a sci-fi action plot), resolving the distancing issues created by flat characterization by separating the feature-length film into two segments short enough that a lack of verisimilitude and logic are negligible threats to the audience's continued engagement in the story. For better or worse, this reliance on exposition to maintain audience engagement (particularly in the form of plot twists) seems to dominate much of the product offered to American production companies. Although the causes of this trend are no doubt complex and various, one possible reason for the weakness of characterization, the lack of psychological complexity and the reliance on plot shifts in contemporary American screenwriting may be that twist-driven stories are simply more immediately effective reading experiences. Whereas emotional impact and complex characterizations depend greatly on performance (among other audio-visual elements), the immersive impact of plot twists is largely the same for those who watch a film and those who read a screenplay. There's also something to be said for the creative immediacy of inventing an intriguing twist or plot concept, as opposed to the constant, daily struggle required to maintain emotional logic and verisimilitude throughout a script.

If the industrial screenwriter's goal is to maintain audience engagement, what types of engagement are lost by focusing so purely on the reading experience? The answer here depends in part on what a screenwriter hopes ultimately to achieve. Engagement is always a means to an end, even when writers treat it as the end--what do we want stories to do?

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The Caretaker (1963), Detailed Narrative Analysis: Scene 1

Since Pinter does not draw clear narrative distinctions between plot points in his plays, if they can be said to have plot points at all, we must examine the dialogue in each long scene both piece-meal and altogether from a distance. 

The homeless wanderer Davies (Donald Pleasence), who does most of the talking, begins anecdotally, explaining what has just happened from his own perspective, giving certain facts to Aston (Robert Shaw) but making no effort to conceal his moral and ethical opinions about what happened. Davies is angry because he wanted his employer, a cafe owner, to treat him with deference and respect, although one gains the sense as the play progresses that his indignation may be delusional--in other words, that he may deceive himself into believing that the deference he wants is also what he deserves and has "a right to." He seeks affirmation of his indignation from Aston, demanding approval with very weak authority, and thus appearing right off to be utterly pathetic. Davies invites Aston to participate in his indignation, as if this would give his fantasy a more objective reality, and demonstrating to the viewer that Davies is largely constructing his outrage as he describes it, retrospectively building his own world to suit his absurd vanity, absurd because he is so clearly repulsive. Davies is thus necessarily verbose in order to draw out every possible angle of moral indignation and horror through which he can paint the sins of his former employer. In order, he starts by claiming that his employer improperly told him to "take out the buckets," which was not his job. He then asserts his rights to do only his prescribed job, going on to suggest with broader moral outrage that him taking out the buckets simply wouldn't have been fair, and finally he notes that he might have ended up in the hospital if Aston hadn't stopped the boss from beating him. Here, we come to what Davies may be trying really to say, which is a simple word of thanks to Aston. But Davies is so neurotically obsessed with protecting his own vision of himself as blameless that he must work through a diatribe before he can comfortably express his feelings. Compulsively, Davies attempts a cubist sort of verbal picture of his fantastical reality, reinforcing his delusional vision from every available perspective at once and occasionally throwing in undeniable facts (Davies refused to take out the buckets; he was fired; Aston saved him from a beating) in order to maintain his narrative's objective weight as history. The anecdote-diatribe would not work, either for Davies or for the play, if Davies did not a few times throughout his speech note what in fact did happen next. Reshaping the actual events of the recent past is beyond the scope and design of Davies' delusions. Instead, he reshapes their meaning.

Incidentally, only after Davies has described the danger that Aston saved him from, Aston first offers a response, suggesting that Davies "ought to sit down for a few minutes." Aston is at this point a fairly obscure figure whose motivations are unclear. We don't know why he is helping Davies, but his patience with Davies' diatribe suggests one of two possibilities: either Aston means Davies some perverse harm, or he is (or wants to be) an angelic figure of altruism, helping Davies simply to help him. Although the subsequent scenes suggest the latter, at the moment of seeing the scene for the first time, the two possibilities are equally fulfilled. 

Now, the next moment is beautiful, because Davies continues his diatribe briefly as though Aston had never spoken, going on to note that he's been left for dead many times before. In a naturalist stroke of genius, Pinter shows us that Davies cannot help working himself up into moral outrage, that the anger is real even if it is not justified, and that Davies is pitiably and regrettably trapped in a hell of his own creation. Brought back gradually to the present moment, Davies turns his attention to his immediate future by asking where he and Aston have arrived. Aston, with characteristic directness, answers that he lives in the building. Davies broadens his delusion, implying that he would be doing Aston a favor somehow by visiting his building, deigning to grace Aston's flat with his presence for a few minutes, or suggesting perhaps that he has somewhere else he ought to be that would be more important than Aston's kindness. In this way, Davies, while he desperately needs Aston's kindness, attempts to preserve primarily for himself the illusion that other people rely on him, that he is necessary in some way to the world. Even in his subsequent comment about the "bastard ice," Davies suggests that the ice on the pavement is mostly a burden to the world, a nuisance that ought to go away as soon as possible, in contrast with himself and Aston as (purely by Davies' decree) necessary aspects of the world.

If we can separate this introductory exchange from the subsequent moment, as Donner does in his adaptation, there are in fact narrative progressions to be identified: Davies, in his roundabout way, expresses gratitude to Aston for saving him from a potentially serious beating; Aston invites Davies into his flat and Davies accepts the invitation. Nothing remarkable, but there is a narrative here nonetheless, a beginning that has echoes of a romantic melodrama (a man saves a damsel in distress and then invites her into his home). More important for Pinter and the audience are Aston's oppressive silence and Davies' involuntary delusional fantasies, both expressions of dysfunctional communication resulting from physical damage and neurosis, respectively. The theme of troubled and impotent communication, explored throughout Pinter's body of work, will emerge as central to the play. Davies' dramatic action is essentially expressive, even if what he expresses most strongly--his delusions about his place in the world--is unconscious. This differs from normative film narrative in that most narrative filmmakers attempt to make the viewer identify with their characters, while Davies' neurosis is distancing. Nevertheless, at heart, Pinter seems to want to engender an understanding of Davies in the audience, maybe simply an intuitive sense of his humanity. Questions remain, however: how does this understanding evolve over the course of the play, and is there a coherent cumulative meaning ascribed to Davies' overall character arc?

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Elements of Fictional Cinema

Story -- does the movie's representative fiction invest the viewer in finding meaning, consciously or unconsciously? (includes character, plot, and relationships, however they are conveyed)

Poignance -- does the movie engage the viewer emotionally? (includes all elements, but particularly character, relationships, elements of aural music, and performance)

Exposition -- do the facts and events of the fictional world maintain the viewer's interest? (includes any visual or aural cues, including dialogue and action, that provide the viewer with information)

Visual Music -- does the movie possess compelling visual rhythms, dissonances and harmonies? (includes montage, performance, camera movement, and mise-en-scene)

Aural Music -- does the movie possess compelling aural rhythms, dissonances and harmonies? (includes dialogue as music, scoring, sound design as music) 

Immersiveness -- does the movie convince the viewer that its world is honest, either in a subjective or a realist sense? (includes all elements)

Extra-narrative associations -- does the movie engage a recognizable culture? (includes tone, allusion, political and social relevance, and genre)

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An Argument for The Empire Strikes Back over Star Wars, and against the worship of the story purpose

On particular and personal grounds, of course... 

To cut to the chase: I'm more invested in the love story between Han Solo and Leia than I am in Luke Skywalker's hero quest. For much of Star Wars, yes, Luke has a defined story purpose--to rescue Leia from the Empire's clutches and then to destroy the Death Star--but I think writers and story analysts too often focus on the mere existence and clarity of a story purpose when a clear story purpose is really only one element of many vital to a great story (and maybe not the most important). Obviously, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are both immensely entertaining films with engaging storylines, but, to be perfectly honest, I don't much care about Leia's rescue in Star Wars, because she's a faraway princess we barely know until she's rescued, and, more importantly, because Luke doesn't know her at all. Luke is chasing a principle, that saving the damsel in distress will make him the man he hopes to be. But what's more engaging in Star Wars is Luke's introduction to an adventurous universe. No one has capitalized on the world-building potential of cinema more than Lucas. The second most engaging element of the story is the developing friendship between Luke and Han, but their relationship is too distanced to truly captivate. Essentially, Luke represents principled heroism and Han is the cynical pragmatist who's concealing the idealist within, even to himself. Han's lack of self-awareness, his gradual development, and his ultimate self-revelation make him far more engaging than Luke, and one can't help but wish (not unpleasantly) that there were more scenes for Han to steal.

Luke, while iconically idealistic and courageous, lacks the complexity and moral ambiguity of the archetypal heroes who precede him, including (but not limited to) Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Jason, not to mention religious heroes like Jesus and Muhammad. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that Han Solo should have replaced Luke Skywalker as protagonist of Star Wars, however, because I think there's a convincing claim to be made that Luke's pure moral virtues provide young viewers with a necessarily simple portrait of goodness, a la Bettelheim's vision of fairy tales. In this interpretation of Star Wars, gathered from some source I can't remember now, Lucas managed to tell both a fairy tale and a mythic quest in the same story. Of course, Star Wars isn't quite a myth because it doesn't attempt ever to bridge the gap between fiction and scripture, and it's not a fairy tale for any number of reasons, but the resonances between the Star Wars saga and those historical modes of storytelling give the series a convincing quality of timelessness. 

Now, back to the story. Consider the fact that both Luke and the Han/Leia party in The Empire Strikes Back lack clear story purposes. Luke meanders through different story purposes during the film, moving from his training to the rescue of his friends halfway through the story. And Han and Leia, while active, spend the entire film responding to Darth Vader's provocations rather than pursuing their own goals. Speaking in terms of story purpose, then, Darth Vader is a second protagonist in The Empire Strikes Back, even if Luke makes the key decisions to leave his jedi training and then to refuse Vader's offer to join the Dark Side. 

Irrespective of the larger adventure plot, however, what drives The Empire Strikes Back emotionally and makes its story more engaging than that of Star Wars is the romantic tension between Han and Leia. Aside from the film's climactic revelation (with Darth Vader again active), the two most compelling scenes in the film are between Han and Leia: the first when Han overcomes Leia's hesitance with a kiss, and the second when Leia admits her love for Han just before he is frozen into carbonite. Leia's resistance, unexplained but intuitively expressed as a sort of romantic foreplay, gives her character a complexity unparalleled by any other figure any either of the other two original Star Wars films (unfortunately, Leia's character in The Return of the Jedi is sadly empty).

Is she intimidated by Han's love or by her own, or is she afraid, somewhat like Juliet, that Han's love will prove too fickle in comparison with her own? Does she really believe that she likes "nice men" more than scoundrels? As with Han Solo in Star Wars, Leia in The Empire Strikes Back steals the show with her initial lack of self-awareness, her development and her ultimate revelation of love. The personal chemistry and potential for mutual happiness between Han and Leia, however, makes Leia's arc in The Empire Strikes Back more engaging than Han's in Star Wars. Han discovers his own altruism in Star Wars, but, for whatever reason, character developments that impact relationships tend to be more affecting than those that simply shape the way characters view themselves. In my experience, at least, this is true. While Han strengthens his friendship with Luke by returning to save him from Darth Vader in Star Wars, Han's self-revelation concerns his own nature primarily and does not otherwise affect his relationship with Luke. In addition, there's no clear sense in Star Wars of what causes Han's transformation, other than a sudden concern for Luke's well being and Han's own opinion of himself. By contrast, Han's insistence that "there aren't enough scoundrels" in Leia's life, combined with his impending potential death when he's frozen into carbonite, provide the audience with a convincing portrait of Leia's gradual emotional transformation. 

Then where does the story purpose lie in all these speculations? Does Han Solo not have a secondary story purpose (the first being to escape the Empire's clutches) to convince Leia to admit her love? Yes and no. Han Solo pursues Leia, without a doubt, and partially forces her hand when he kisses her on the Millennium Falcon, but Leia has to make the ultimate decision to embrace or rebuff Leia's advances, and her definitive acknowledgement of her love for Han comes only when he faces death, a situation beyond the scope of Han's designs. While Luke and Vader's dual concrete desires (to become a jedi/to save Han and Leia, and to convince Luke to join the Dark Side, respectively) drive the larger plot of the Empire Strikes Back, what makes the story truly engaging is Leia's gradual recognition and acknowledgement of her love for Han Solo. Luke glimpses the potential for the Dark Side within himself (first when he sees himself as Vader in his dream vision on Dagobah and then when Vader reveals himself to be Luke's father), but he rejects the Dark Side absolutely until the climactic light-saber battle in The Return of the Jedi and thus does not develop much during The Empire Strikes Back. Although Luke's decision to leave his jedi training early has serious consequences for the rest of the story, it does not seem inconsistent with his character in Star Wars and in fact prevents him from developing into the sort of jedi who has the humility to recognize his own limitations in the face of the Dark Side. 

Anyway, that's the idea. Story purposes are important for some of the same reasons that exposition is important: to give the audience a sense of the significance of a given scene within the larger structure of the story and to provide characters with catalysts for change. But it is that change, the development of characters who experience some distance between their present natures and a fuller realization of themselves, that makes a story emotionally engaging, particularly when characters develop in relation to one another and not simply in relation to themselves. While Luke may recognize the power of the Force in Star Wars, for instance, this development is motivated by his own desire to succeed and comes too suddenly in the end to outweigh Han's more compelling arc. So, if there's any semblance of wisdom to these ideas, storytellers ought to consider not simply what their characters want and need, but also why the audience would ever care, and therefore whether or not that want has any emotional hold over the reader. Does the protagonist merely want to be self-satisfied, as with Luke in Star Wars, or is there something interpersonal and previously unknown to be grasped and then realized?

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2013 Q&A for The Master in Melbourne, Australia:

Interviewer: "Another great quote I read of yours is that, 'film school is a con, and you can learn more from listening to the commentary track on Bad Day at Black Rock than you can from twenty years of film school.' Is this an accurate quote?"

PTA: "Well... The only problem with giving an interview, ever, is not being misquoted, but being quoted exactly. You know?" 

Interviewer: "Okay, well, if you're the professor and this is your class--"

PTA: "And what did you say when you were twenty-four years old?"

Interviewer: "I dread to think."

Happy Birthday, PTA! Keep rockin' and rollin' and makin' better movies, man! 

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Cinematic henchmen preying upon rural folk get their comeuppance by drowning in torrents of grain.

Vampyr (1932) and Witness (1985)

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Cinema's tattooed men of the sea.

L'Atalante (1934) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

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Five Favorite Films of 2012

Zero Dark Thirty

Relentless and demanding, like its protagonist, who strives and strives as all protagonists do, but discovers for herself in the end that the end can never really be the end, even if the credits are rolling. Fearlessly conventional, the film is a paean and critique both of the terrifying, possibly narrow-minded force of American intelligence and of the procedural film's traditional hero. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have turned the uncompromising ambivalence of neorealism onto the insular, secretive community of intelligence agents who shape and uncover the forces that threaten and safeguard American lives. With a darkened ballet, the rightfully lauded final act of the film encapsulates and concludes the ruthless thoroughness of the previous two hours. All of the films on this list are exceptionally acted, intricately written, beautifully shot, complexly scored and vividly strange in some way. None are so relevant or so committed to a communicable vision of the truth, in all its terror and splendor, as this film. 

Lincoln

Plausible visions of greatness, particularly when it comes to portrayals of American politics, are so rare on the screen that they have become, perhaps rightfully, sacred. It is the religion and intelligence which Daniel Day-Lewis brings to his performances, and the historical rigor and theatrical eloquence which Tony Kushner brings to his scripts, and the visual inventiveness and narrative persistence which Steven Spielberg brings to his films that, together, have built this magisterial house of cards, a confluence of carefully pursued ambitions which have, for a precious moment, allowed us to brush past the faces and lives of the dead portrayed, Lincoln foremost and centrally placed among them. Greatness pursued and fleetingly achieved for the continued good of those to come, both the virtue and narrative theme of this rarely ham-handed but ultimately justified dramatization of history. Together with Zero Dark Thirty, this film may come to represent the turning of a new page in historical fiction.

The Master

Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd are two volatile bodies in motion, spinning through the hesitant rise of Dodd's pseudo-scientific religion, The Cause. The closer they come to each other, the more the sparks fly between their contact points; when Freddie and Lancaster share an unblinking confessional session of "Time Hole" work, it is a wonder the 70mm film doesn't catch fire. Because their relationship is so irrational, the film is aimless and narratively lopsided--but without this organic disorganization, the primal pull of true romance which fuels the film would lack that very same spontaneity which occasionally pushes this doomed love affair onto truly original narrative ground. With Hoffman as his first mate and writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson as his navigator, Phoenix cum Columbus has landed--that nobody knows precisely what he's reached hardly makes any difference. 

Cosmopolis

Pulsating with life-taken-for-granted, the film-limo glides through Manhattan like a funeral barge drifting out to sea. Director David Cronenberg adapts from novelist Don DeLillo and to the twenty-first century, exploring the inevitability of irrationality not simply in humanity but in all things, an endorsement of chaos theory and a warning against hubris that reminds us all that we will never be in a position where such a warning should be anything but obvious. An interesting potential double feature with Lincoln, this film imagines the greatness of its central figure Eric Packer as an impossibility, a radioactive element made increasingly unstable when mixed with capitalist ambitions in the information age. Greed is good... for a while, but what is it that DeLillo has someone say that someone else has said (Chaplin, it seems): the logical extension of business is murder? This convincing film is the physics of that fable.

Holy Motors

Like watching a sporting event: aimless but compelling, a mix of extreme highs and pedestrian lulls with little in between. A series of vignettes, my favorite of which remains the beauty and beast retelling pictured above, both for its refreshing narrative consistency and for the pleasurable malevolence of the leprechaun-esque beast figure. Other highlights include the accordion-based intermission and an introductory dream sequence featuring the director Leos Carax himself, the former exceptional for the drive of its music and the latter for its hypnotically irrational imagery. The greatest virtue on first viewing comes from the abnormality of the work, a daring brought to life and held together by the unselfconsciously chameleonic star and lodestar, Denis Lavant. Would be higher on the list, perhaps, if I were less of a narrative Philistine still clinging to the pleasures and comforts of home. Well, as they say, tomorrow is another day.

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The undying theme of unrequited love.

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David Denby bewails the supposed death of movies, and, of course, the villainous "Hollywood" holds the bloody knife. Only once--not even in a sentence, in a clause--does Denby even slightly acknowledge the massive part critics have had to play in deciding what films get seen by whom, that film magazines and newspapers make an active decision to promote and sustain the culture of blockbusters.

It would be amusing if it weren't so depressing that Denby, without a hint of irony, can condemn the abandonment of traditional traditional editing techniques at the same time that he promotes Terrence Malick and the action montages of Paul Greengrass as paragons of film aesthetics! The disintegration of the continuous, easily understood filmic space isn't a sign of the apocalypse--it's just a new stylistic trend (not that new, really), with new ways to express, and new things to teach us. The editors working today, many of whom learned their craft from the previous generation of editors Denby glorifies, aren't stupid; they're just trying something new.

Read this nonsense from Denby's article:

"You could say, I suppose, that [Inception] is about different levels of representation, and then refine that observation and observe that the differences between fiction and reality, between subjective and objective, no longer exist—that what Nolan created is somehow analogous to our life in a postmodernist society in which the image and the real, the simulacrum and the original, have assumed, for many people, equal weight. (The literary and media theorist Fredric Jameson has made such a case for the movie.) You can say all of that, but you still haven’t established why such an academic-spectacular exercise is worth looking at as a work of narrative art, or why any of it matters emotionally."

Look at the way Denby acknowledges the complex critical interests blockbuster films like Inception have inspired in academics and popular critics alike, and then in the next breath claims that none of this matters because he doesn't get it. In other words, Denby argues, 'Inception may be interesting to the stuffy postmodern academic, but what about the stuff that really matters? Like the stuff that I was interested in when I first encountered film theories decades ago?' If this article were written by a college freshman, it might be interesting. In Denby's hands, it's infuriating. Why should we have to prove to Denby why a film is "worthy" of being looked at as a work of narrative art? To add insult to injury, Denby nostalgically recalls Bazin. But it was Bazin who was able to look past the High Art blinders of his contemporaries and see the virtues and aesthetic values of popular films. What Denby doesn't seem to realize is: if he were writing about film in the 1950s, he would be exactly the type of critic Bazin would be reacting against.

Worst of all, Denby hypocritically bloats the scope of his article--he really spends the entire article discussing the action blockbuster, ignoring the rest of Hollywood's output--in order to create an apocalyptic spectacle that will draw the most readers, playing into the same sensationalism he purports to rail against. His allusion to critics and studios past are a slipshod mockery of the rhetorical rigor and precision of the critics and filmmakers he invokes. Denby references a statement made by Bazin that sound films of the 1930s and 1940s reached a classical purity, as if Bazin believed this period to be a pinnacle in American film history (like Denby), but Denby completely ignores the fact that these introductory statements were part of a larger essay by Bazin written in the 1950s and about the fact that, despite the technical mastery of films like Jezebel and Stagecoach, the Neorealist films and American auteur masterpieces like Citizen Kane were actually superior.  Denby whines about the fact that many film directors are coming out of music video production rather than an old-school studio hierarchy, but then praises David Fincher as a bastion of the dying art of filmmaking. He praises TV as a new site of brilliant characterization, and then paradoxically suggests in a baffling display of aesthetic conservatism that, for reasons undisclosed, truly nuanced characterization would just feel "awkward" on a TV show. 

The more I hear aging critics proclaim that film is dead, the less bashful I get about proclaiming them fools. It's not that great films are no longer there to be seen; it's just that these proselytizers have gone blind.

Let me leave you with a quote from a calmer, more eloquent party, the ever-prescient Whitman:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Or, in my words: movies are, and will be, fine.

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It's wonderful that Bong-Joon Ho selected Zodiac (2007) as one of his ten favorites, because the shared virtues between the film and his own Memories of Murder (2003) are manifold and fascinating, especially since this influential film for Bong-Joon Ho came out years after his own. Do you think Fincher thought of Bong-Joon Ho's film while making Zodiac? Both films are about the obsessive, extensive, disheartening investigation of a serial killer who announces his murders in some way. Both cased involve a series of promising suspects who have to be turned aside because of purely circumstantial evidence. Both turn from violence to humor, from obsession to melancholy and back again. A great double-bill!

Additionally, Bong-Joon Ho's selection of Fargo (1995) draws out further pleasant cross-cultural pollinations in cinema. Perhaps Detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) is a strange conflation of Marge Gunderson and Jerry Lundegaard, the simple hard-working detective, but one who bungles everything and puts on airs of competency?

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Okay. Thanks, directors, this one makes a little more sense.

Critics: In the Mood For Love over Rashomon and The Godfather Part II? Mulholland Drive over The General and Taxi Driver? What is going on?? 

[cinemadiscipula-blog]

[cinemadiscipula-blog]

[cinemadiscipula-blog]

[cinemadiscipula-blog]

[cinemadiscipula-blog]

Citizen Kane ousted from number one? Awwwww snap, it's marketing ploy time. Still, always fun.