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Monthly Archives: January 2016

The Look of Silence, a Review

29 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies, Narrative VIolence, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Communism, Documentaries, Film, Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer, Movies, The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence, Violence

MV5BOTMwMjI4MjQ3MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjkwOTM2NTE@._V1_SY317_CR0,0,214,317_AL_It’s easy to think of silence as the auditory equivalent to a blank page, a kind of nothing that fits in between the sounds where we actually expect to find meaning. At times, though, silence conveys more than we can hope to cram into the sounds we call words. Joshua Oppenheimer is one person who clearly understands this. His latest film, The Look of Silence explores this topic in one of its more sinister forms. This film is a companion piece to The Act of Killing. Both movies deal with a genocide carried out in 1965 after the government of Indonesia had been taken over by the nation’s military. In the aftermath of this coup anywhere from half a million to a million people were killed. Victims included communists, ethnic Chinese, and those openly critical of the new government. The Act of Killing explored these events through the narratives of killers themselves and the stories they tell about their own actions. In The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer explores the lives of those who survived the massacre, those who lost loved ones in the killings and have since then had to live their lives among those who carried out the killings.

Whatever else silence conveys in this film, it clearly conveys a strong sense of terror, both because the stories it relates are as terrifying as they are real, and because the film-makers exposed themselves to danger in order to get those very stories.

Time and again, we see the main protagonist of the film, Adi Rukun, staring in silence as he listens to the killers of 1965 describing in great detail the horrors they themselves perpetrated in 1965. Sometimes Adi watches the killers telling their stories in video clips. Sometimes, he interviews them himself. Adi’s older brother was one of those killed in 1965. The story of his brother’s killing is among those he learns about over the course of this film.

If there is a plot to The Look of Silence, it is generated from Adi’s own decision to confront the killers, to speak to them himself, to risk engagement on a subject about which he is expected to remain silent. Adi is an Optometrist, and his subjects are aging. An eye exam thus becomes the pretext for one interview after another, each one an opportunity to breach the subject of past horrors. The resulting story is filled with this tension between silence and speech. The possibility that events discussed in the narratives of the killers could well happen again haunts one throughout the film. More to the point, one cannot escape the sense that Adi’s efforts could well make subject him and his own family to such violence. Those he interviews remind him of this frequently over the course of the film. The hints are subtle, but they are real, and they are horrifying.

It seems trite to suggest this, but the silent moments occurring in each interview are as interesting as the words themselves. We learn so much from the killers in this film. They tell us so many things about their past actions and their motivations, and yet each tries to withhold some part of their own stories from Adi and from us. Oppenheimer lets the camera linger in the awkward moments wherein they reconsider their stories and adjust their narratives to new questions and uncomfortable revelations. Always there is Audi, sitting there quietly, courageously choosing his words and listening to their responses. At times he is inscrutable. At others, one can almost feel the tears rising within him. …or the rage. Most often I cannot help thinking it is shame that I see in his face, a kind of deep-seated embarrassment for the murderers and for their inability to face the truth of their own actions.

If this is a story of silence, it isn’t merely the silence of Indonesians that unfolds in this story. American foreign policy is all over the events described in the movie, its long-term significance pervasive not merely in the lives of Indonesians themselves, but also in the consumer culture of Americans.

…in products we’ve all enjoyed in our own lives.

…without every knowing their cost.

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Okay, ….the Full Lemmy Story!

22 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Music

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Alice Cooper, Amusing, Blood, Concerts, Lemmy, Lemmy Kilmister, Music, Nostalgia, Rock Music

Imissmyhair

Me with less fat and more hair. (Apparently, someone had gotten a karaoke machine for Christmas that year.)

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the most famous person ever to speak to me was Lemmy from Motorhead. I didn’t explain the situation, cause I’m a bad man, but a few of you have asked. So, here it is.

The story takes place at an Alice Cooper concert in Vegas. This was my 3rd time seeing Cooper in concert, but this time it was from the 3rd row very near the center. Motorhead was one of two warm-up bands. I think the other was Faster Pussycat, but I can’t remember exactly. I do remember Motorhead. I wasn’t really a fan at the time, but I remember they came out and Lemmy says; “Good evening!”

…and the audience roars a bit. Lemmy wasn’t happy with this, so he says; “I said fucking good evening!”

…which kinda scared me.

This time the audience gave a respectable cheer. I always thought it was at least partially out of fear, cause that raspy voice and Lemmy’s demeanor suggested we all better say ‘good evening’ or he’d come out into the audience and teach us good manners one at a time. Anyway, he got his response and the band commenced rockitation.

…which was the first time I began to think I might like their music.

The other band was meh.

Along comes Cooper, and I love Alice Cooper. It had been a long time since Cooper had done an album I liked, but no matter! I love his early stuff enough to sit through a dozen Teenage Frankensteins if it means I get to hear just one Generation Landslide. So, I’m diggin’ it, and I’m especially diggin’ the good seats.

The thing is, I’m not real physically demonstrative, so I just stood there. I was loving it, but I just stood there, as did a friend of mine, also a big fan of Cooper. Now this is a problem because Alice likes to rally the fans and get them pumping their fists. He would come along with his cane and get everyone in the front seats cheering and pumping away. Then he’d move down a bit and do the same to the nearby seats. I’m pretty sure that he noticed my friend and I just standing there, and I could swear he spent a few extra moments in our area trying to get us to join the action. Nuthin doin’. We were enjoying the show. We just didn’t do the fist pumping thing.

No, I don’t dance either.

So anyway, as the Cooper show is ending he brings out two great big black balloons and floats them out over the audience. The audience grabs them and rips them apart. Confetti spills out all over everyone. I’m thinking I’ve seen him do this before, and sure enough, he does a second round of black balloons. These produce a kind of smoke effect when people tear them apart. Now, I know there is a third round of balloons coming, but I can’t remember what’s in the balloons this time. I’m still trying to remember it when Alice comes right to the edge of the stage just in front of my section. He shouts something; “who wants…” I couldn’t hear the last word, but no matter. I was quite surprised to find my stick-in-the-mud self shouting ‘yeah’ at the top of my lungs and lunging my fists forward with enthusiasm. I swear Cooper looked at me and I could practically hear him thinking; “I finally got that lazy fucker in the 3rd row to do something.” He looks right at me and floats the balloon straight to me. I grab it. People on every side of me grab it. And I’m still trying to remember what it was that was in the third round of balloons as everyone rips the damn thing apart.

As soon as the warm liquid splattered all over my face I remembered that it was blood, fake blood to be sure, but close enough to make me look good and frightful. I was thoroughly drenched in the stuff.

…and loved it!

I was still hanging out after the show when Lemmy walks by with a couple guys, looks at me and says; “covered in fucking blood eh?”

🙂

***

The hardest part of the whole evening was sneaking into the house without giving my mother a heart attack.

 

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Leo Gets Mauled By a Bear; My Readers Get Mauled By a Spoiler.

14 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies, Native American Themes

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

American Indians, Film, Hugh Glass, Leonardo DiCaprio, Movie Reviews, Movies, Native Americans, The Frontier, The Revenant

220px-The_Revenant_2015_film_posterThe Revenant was cool. In fact it was damned cool!

By ‘damned cool’ I might mean ‘damned hard to watch,’ but then again damned hard to watch can be damned cool. Tastes vary, of course, but watching a CGI brown bear maul Leonardo DiCaprio was well worth the price of admission.

No, I don’t hate DiCaprio. Quite the contrary. It takes some skill to sell that kind of suffering, and he does it damned well.

This is the story of Hugh Glass, a mountain man most famous for surviving an attack by a bear, and (more impressive still) for surviving his subsequent predicament. Left for dead, the man somehow made it roughly 200 miles to safety (mostly by crawling, as I understand it). The real story of Glass is impressive enough as it is, which is one reason writers and movie-makers keep coming back to it. The Revenant weaves its own narratives around the tale of Glass and his trials.

This movie is every bit as bleak and terrible as you might have thought. Images of human suffering abound, and of course the central story here is one about perseverance in the face of tremendous adversity. By perseverance I of course mean suffering. I might even have to write ‘suffering’ in this review a few more times, just to make sure you get the point. There is a lot of suffering in this film. But what does all the suffering add up to?

Therein lies the nitpickery point!

It’s a vision of the frontier as a place filled with violence and pain. That frontier has very little in the way of love, stability, family, or community. The things that connect human beings to one another in meaningful ways have been all but removed from the world of this story. When such connections do appear in this film, they appear to be fragmenting …painfully. Glass, for example, has already lost his Indian wife as the story begins. He will lose his son midway through the story, and he will end the film quite alone.

It isn’t the bear that sets off all this tragedy. It is the leader of an Arikara party who keeps attacking Glass and his companions. This character, we learn, is actually seeking his own daughter, whom he believes to have been captured by Glass’ party. Glass’ doomed wife and son as well as the daughter of the Arikara leader are the only bonds of kinship that I recall from the film, and each is unraveling even as the film begins. We are left with a world in which love itself comes into focus only through the medium of pain.

It’s worth considering for a moment that this kind of world cannot exist over the long duration. There are no births in this world, nor are there the means of nurturing future generations. These are men operating on the fringes of their own communities and/or in the wilderness emerging between them. It comes close to a Hobbesian time of war, or perhaps more appropriately to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier as the meeting place between savagery and civilization. Even the Native Americans in this film seem unable to keep a family together. This is the myth of the west taken to 11. It’s a world that must pass, either to complete destruction or eventually into some semblance of social order. It is the latter of course to which this sort of frontier narrative points us, as the frontier anticipates the coming of civilization. For now, we are left to contemplate a world in which few (if any) are born and a good many die every third or fourth scene.

I can’t help but think many will imagine this is the world frontiersman found when they entered the American wilderness, though I’m more inclined to think of it as a world they made by that very entry.

If there is a truly objectionable feature to this narrative theme, it would be the role played by friendly Natives. Some readers may be familiar with the phrase ‘magic negro’, which is usually taken to refer to a stock character used in all-to-many Hollywood films. The magic negro is usually gifted with some mystical power, often a sort of impossible wisdom which he will use to aid the white protagonist in a given story. Just as often, the magic negro will die before the end of the narrative, leaving the great white protagonist to resolve matters using whatever gifts his friend left behind. Suffice to say the magic negro needn’t really be a negro, though it does seem rather commonly to be a minority of some kind. In The Revenant, Glass enjoys the help of not one, not two, but three magic minorities, all Native Americans.

The First (and oddly enough also the last) of these supernatural mentors would be Glass’ wife. Having been slain in a prior event, she continually returns in the form of visions which inspire Glass to continue. Whether these are meant to be real or simply features of his own imagination isn’t really very important. The bottom line is that she is long gone, but she continues to serve as an inspiration to him. She appears at the very end of the film as well, seeming to say goodbye.

The second of these characters would be Glass’ son who remains loyal to him even as his injuries appear to leave Glass without hope of recovery. This loyalty will cost Glass’ son his life, but that in turn will provide Glass with the motivation to survive, to avenge the death of his son.

The third of these magic Indians appears in the form of Pawnee who shares food with Glass, travels with him, and cures him when Glass is overcome with infections. Glass will awaken to find himself well on the road to recovery even as he discovers his Pawnee friend hanging from a tree, leaving him to face yet another terrible challenge quite alone.

Time and again, Glass benefits from Native characters even as they themselves pass away. The death of the magic minority is that much more fitting here insofar as it perpetuates the narratives of western conquest. Native characters may hamper the frontiersman as does the Arikara leader, or they may aid him, as do each of the magic Indians in this film, but it is simply no coincidence that the white protagonist finishes the story on his own.

Does this work? Yes. It’s a Hell of story, and I plan to watch it again. And perhaps it works partly because of the very tropes that have me griping about the story right now. Some may find them extraordinarily compelling even as I find them terribly disappointing. I can’t help but think more interesting stories await the film-maker who learns to take Native characters a bit more seriously.

 

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The Man With No Game!

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Gaming, Movies, Narrative VIolence

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Ambiguity, Ambivalence, Clint Eastwood, Morality, Narratives, Role Pllaying games, Stories, Story-Telling, The Man With No Name

Who could forget the man with no name? It’s easily the most memorable character in Clint Eastwood’s acting career. After generations of protagonists so apple-pie obvious in white hats and chaps, always doing the right thing, and always winning in the end, there was something especially compelling about this antihero. You never quite knew what he was going to do. He might save the town, or he might kill everyone. You didn’t really know until right about the same time you learned the outcome of the conflict itself. This vision of moral ambiguity was a wonderful contribution to film.

As a character in a role-playing game, he totally sucks!

To be a little more specific, he makes a terrible player character in an ongoing campaign. The Man With No Name has some potential as an Non Player Character, if the guy running the game uses him well, but in the hands of a player this sort of character can be a terrible buzzkill. That doesn’t stop players from creating characters with similar personae. Time and again players bring such characters to the game table only to they aren’t nearly as interesting as their cinematic counterparts. The difference illustrates a little about storytelling, I think. But of course the issue is larger than the man with no-name. It extends to any number of morally ambiguous characters, characters who inspire fear and hope in roughly equal amounts.

What makes such characters work is the extra tension they provide to the narrative. Instead of just wondering if the hero will beat the bad guys, a morally ambiguous protagonist leaves you wondering if he will even take up the right side of the fight. He might just as easily prove to be the biggest nightmare of the narrative. Done well, such personalities will leave you on the edge of your seat well into the third act, but of course resolution will come in the end. Sooner or later these characters do the right thing, even if reluctantly so, and perhaps with a trace of wrong mixed in with it for bad measure, but they will step up to the challenge and save the day.

The audience needn’t do anything but soak up the story.

And therein lies the difference. Role playing games (or at least the pen&paper variation thereof) are an inherently cooperative enterprise. The players must come to a series of agreements in order to make it work. At minimum this means coming to an understanding of the game rules, but it also requires some agreement on the essential features of the setting as well. Ultimately, the players will need to come to a shared understanding of the plot-line for a campaign. Failing that, an rpg can easily descend into an endless session of bickering over one tiny detail after another. Were things going right, these very details would be the icing on the cake, the features of the story that make it so much more vivid. But when the players aren’t on the same page, such details instead provide fodder for a series of arguments about imaginary things, and being imaginary, those things don’t admit easily of resolution by rational argument. This is of course what makes the old Summoner Geeks parody so brilliant. Most of us who game have been there at one time or another. ….A story that isn’t quite happening, its every detail becoming an excruciating source of pointless conflict.

The morally ambivalent character is just one more variation on this problem. It poses the dilemma of a character who may or may not accept the central plot-lines of the story. More to the point, it poses the challenge of a player who may or may not accept the central challenge of the story. Unlike a movie viewer, the other players must then actively contend with the possibility that his ambiguous loyalties will undermine their own efforts to resolve the central story line. They have to worry if the dark and mysterious character will piss off the one great side character whose help they really need; if he will start a random fight in a bar where they hoped to meet an important contact; or if he might simply wander off when the big battle is about to go down. The possibilities are as countless as they are frustrating. It’s a bit like watching a side-plot to a movie take-over the entire narrative. …except that you’re not simply watching that happen. You are actively trying to resolve the central problem for the storyline and the player running the ambiguous character has just derailed the whole project!

Of course a player running a morally ambivalent character needn’t do this. He can do as the writer of a movie or a book might and choose to let his character do the right thing, so to speak, perhaps grumbling a bit in the process or adopting an ironic reason for doing so. That can be fun. It can actually work.

For about a game or two.

What makes such characters really frustrating is the prospect of dealing with their ambivalence three, four, even ten games into an ongoing campaign. It can actually be kind of fun to figure out a mysterious character in the early stages of a campaign when the story-line is just beginning to emerge. If you are still worried about his likely course of action well into the campaign, and long after the central challenge of the plot has taken shape, the whole act is going to get damned old. Ironically, such characters eventually lose their bad-ass quality and start to seem more like pampered children or special snowflakes.

It isn’t just that such characters are frustrating (though they are). The problem is that the sense of mystery – the dramatic tension that makes them tick – fails over time and they simply become tedious, just one more detail that cannot be settled. Part of what makes ambivalent characters interesting to begin with is a sense of anticipation. What will he do? It’s an interesting question, but this question must eventually be answered to provide a satisfactory theme in a story. If a player leaves his or her character sitting on the fence umpteen plot twists into a narrative, that in itself starts to become the answer to this very question. He’ll stay on that damned fence and make you beg him to help out every damned time something needs doing.

It’s all a bit like watching unrequited love in a sit-com. It’s kinda fun for an episode or three, but it’s a bit old by the second season. By season three it’s a distraction from the cool parts of the series, and by season four it’s the reason you’ve decided to watch something else.

Ultimately, the mystery that makes such characters tick resides in a moment within a plot line, but that moment must eventually pass. A character who doesn’t know what side he’s on well into an ongoing plot becomes a source of irritation. When a player tries to make moral ambiguity a lasting feature of his character, he or she may well end up as a the buzz-kill that ended the campaign.

And the man with no name thus acquires one after all.

It just isn’t a good one.

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