Tag Archives: Film

Language in Schizopolis

14 Tuesday Sep 2021

Posted by in Movies

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For me, Schizopolis is nearly entirely a personal pleasure. Almost nobody I know has seen it, and still fewer people seem to have liked it. Still it’s my all-time favorite Soderbergh film.

What is it about?

Well, I could tell you, but that’s hardly in keeping with the spirit of the whole thing. Really, Soderbergh says it all quite clearly at the beginning of the film; if you don’t understand it, you must watch the film over and over until you do, and you must pay full price for the ticket at a genuine movie theater. Nothing else will do!

Suffice to say that the movie is well-named.

What I do want to talk about here, for a paragraph or two anyway, is some of the language games Soderbergh plays around with in this film. At first these games appear to be just so much nonsense, part of the chaos at which the name of the film barely hints. In time, though, I can’t help thinking that Soderbergh managed to say something interesting through these games, something about the relationship between the meaning of words and the nature of human human relationships.

What do I mean?

One of my favorite sequences consists of an assignment given to the main character at work. He is to write a speech for a motivational speaker. The instructions for this speech would be a great take-down of the entire genre. What should be red flags in view of basic critical thinking skills turns out to be the very means by which some of these people will make connections to an audience full of vulnerable people. The next time someone asks me why I hate motivational speakers so much I should just link them to this video.

My favorite language games from this movie are those involving romantic connections, or the lack thereof. There are two main story-lines for this theme; one involving a womanizing exterminator, named Elmo Oxygen, and other another involving a couple whose marriage has clearly taken a turn for the worse.

Elmo Oxygen is an id in a jump suit. He does what he wants in people’s houses, and for the most part he does who he wants as well, because all the housewives seem to fall for him. (Really, it’s why they call for him in the first place.) What Elmo doesn’t do is speak in meaningful sentences, not for most of the film anyway. His flirtations always take place in a kind of code. He knows the code. The women know the code. We the audience, don’t even recognize that it is a code for a little while. It just sounds like nonsense, and then we start piecing it together. As I recall “Nose army” means “yes.” (Elmo hears this phrase a lot.) About the time, we can start to follow these conversations the story-line takes us someplace else, someplace just as odd, I can assure you. For a time anyway, the Elmo Oxygen story-line treats us to a delicious jumble of utter nonsense which actually turns out to make perfect sense. What is said in flirtation between Elmo and his lust-interests never really amounts to anything but the flirtation, and if that’s going well, one may as well say ‘nose army” as ‘yes.”

…the same goes, if it’s not.

For their part, the couple spend much of the film speaking in metapragmatic descriptors. Instead of using normal words to communicate; they describe what they are doing in the conversation. Instead of saying ‘hello’, they greet each other with words like “generic greeting.” Instead of saying “I’m sorry,” they say “sincere apology.” Their communication is always meta-communication, and that meta-communication remains disingenuous throughout their first few scenes in the movie. The only exception to this occurs when the husband turns to his daughter and suddenly speaks to her like a normal father would. When he turns back to his wife, he is once again going through the motions, or rather calling out his motions, because the content no longer means anything anyway. He and his wife do this for awhile.

…and then one of them starts speaking a foreign language.

This word-play alone was enough to sell me on the film. It’s an excellent commentary on the nature of romance, or the lack of it. What the Elmo Oxygen story-line and that of the couple have in common is the absence of substance in communication. What’s different is the reason for it. Elmo and his lovely companions don’t really say anything because they don’t have to. Whatever they have between them is working and the words themselves just don’t matter. Of course e could ask whether or not the shallow code that works so well for Elmo might also be devoid of substance because he really isn’t connecting after all, not in any meaningful sense, but he would surely be unimpressed with such vapid nonsense. In fact, the character would probably be off to some new conquest before we could finish asking the question. For their part, the couple no longer have anything to say to one another, and so they call out their moves instead of talking to each other, because these empty moves are the only thing that matters at that stage in their relationship.

Or in their break-up, anyway.

Oh yeah, …spoilers!

Tom Horn Died for Your Sins

10 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by in History, Movies

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That’s right!

Tom Horn died for your sins

I know, Custer died for your sins.

I’m not so sure about Jesus.

But Tom Horn and George Armstrong Custer definitely died for your sins.

If you are American anyway.

Tom Horn definitely died for your sins.

SPOILER ALERT!

I am, of course, talking about an old Steve McQueen movie. I might also be talking about the real Tom Horn whose life and death inspired the movie, but I’m definitely talking about the Tom Horn of that movie.

This is one of the last films that Steve McQueen did. He was reportedly short of breath during filming, a symptom of the cancer that would soon take his life. It’s hard to escape the parallel between this story about the final days of a frontier legend and the final days of a Hollywood legend. It may be hindsight, but something of the tone of this film suggests a sadness not entirely contained within the plot of the film itself.

The real Tom Horn was tried in 1902 and sentenced to death for the murder of a Willie Nickell, the 14-year old son of a sheep rancher. Questioned while drunk, Horn reportedly confessed to the murder, saying; “(it was) best shot that (he) ever made and the dirtiest trick that (he) had ever done.” Suffice to say that many have questioned the validity of the trial, and of Horn’s drunken confession. Suffice it also to say, that few have questioned whether or not Tom Horn was guilty of murder, but many do question whether or not Horn was guilty of THIS murder.

In his life, Horn had served as a scout in the Apache wars. An ill-fated attempt at ranching afterwards had left him broke and bitter. Cattle thieves had taken the bulk of his stock. Horn spent the much of his life in subsequent years serving as a cattle detective. By all accounts, his ‘detective work’ was often a cover for the hired murder. Whether or not Horn’s murders were restricted to cattle thieves or other criminals, we will never really know. The range wars of the old west claimed the lives of innocent and guilty alike, and Tom Horn had been a willing participant in several of them, yet THIS trial and THIS killing is still a controversy.

The question of whether or not Willie Nickell was one of those murdered by Horn is one of the great legends of the old west. That this question is framed in relation to the final days of the old western period (or perhaps even a little after that period had ended) makes the story a bit more poignant. It makes the story about Tom Horn’s execution for what may or may not have been his final crime a question about what the old west actually means in American history. It makes of his trial an occasion to ponder the significance of the frontier in American history.

(Apologies to Frederick Jackson Turner!)

McQueen’s version of Tom Horn has the confession reading a little different. He has Horn saying that IF, he had shot the McNickell boy, that WOULD HAVE BEEN the best shot he ever made, and the dirtiest trick he had ever done. The account provided in court is, according to this version of the story, a sleazy twist his actual words, one arranged in an effort to railroad Horn to the gallows. Like the actual controversy itself, however, McQueen’s Horn stops well short of saying he had never committed a murder.

McQueen’s Horn refuses to defend himself from the actual charge at the trial. Asked whether or not he committed the murder in question, Horn replies that he won’t give the court the satisfaction of a direct answer. He knows the fix is in, arranged by the same people who who had arranged for his services as a cattle detective, and he simply will not humor the court by pretending his answer matters.

Now, whether you shoot me, or hang me, or take my horse and rifle, one reason is as good as another. I believe that, I really do. That’s my last word on this matter.

The problem from the perspective of McQueen’s Horn isn’t whether or not he actually killed the child. It is that his trial is no more about justice for the murder sheep-herder’s son than the murder of the sheep-herder’s son had been in the first place. Both are about the needs of the cattle industry, and in a larger sense, the needs of the establishment now growing in the frontier he had once known. Horn’s coming execution is as much a function of financial interests as any of the killings he had carried out in the name of those very same interests. His killings had once been effective in removing obstacles to big ranchers, and now they were an embarrassment, even a scandal. In the larger story of the American west, by 1902, so had all the killings carried out by men like Horn.

Just as the sheep-herder’s son, Horn himself had to go. Whether he had killed the boy or not, his own execution was, in effect, a murder arranged by cattle interests.

Horn understood murder.

He was fine with murder.

Even his own.

In this account, Tom Horn, and so many like him, are the civilizing agents of the west. Their rough lives, their conflicts, even their outright murders, all committed on the mythic frontier, are what made present-day American society possible. We in the present-day share in their crimes to the extent that we enjoy the fruits of their violence, and while we may balk at this or that terrible act, we are who we are now and live how we live now because of those very acts. America is what it is because of murderers like him.

Horn’s execution is thus a kind of final, necessary crime, one carried out by faceless men, acting in concert to erase the violence which made their success possible, the violence which made America possible. Professional killers like Horn, once the rock-stars of their day, were now an uncomfortable presence, and a reminder of uncomfortable truths. Like Jesus going to the cross voluntarily, Horn accepts his hanging, because that is how it must be. His crimes were necessary, so to speak, but so is his execution.

We cannot have the likes of Tom Horn living on into the modern era, reminding us every day that cruel men once killed children on behalf of the upright citizens of our great country.

I know it seems odd to think of a hired murderer as a Christ-like figure, to think of him as the savior of the American people, but to me it seems a bit more fitting than the Prince of Peace. Time and again, it’s been murderers that saved our nation. They have saved us from real enemies, to be sure, and they have saved us from innocent people who merely stood in our way. We don’t always know the difference, because we really don’t want to, and that is why the Tom Horn of this movie has to die.

Confined to the frontiers of our nation, men like Tom Horn even save us from thinking too much about the whole thing.

A Machine for Satan?

22 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by in Movie Villainy, Movies

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Denver Villainy

We’ve all heard the ‘deus ex machina,’ right? Everyone knows that little story about how the folks in ancient Greek theater used to end a play by hoisting a God out over the stage at the end of a play to resolve the major problems in the story line. We all know that the phrase is now used derisively to describe any device in which an author solves problems by means of an external resolution. When the protagonists of the story can’t solve their own problems, we consider it cheating to have the cavalry ride in at the end or cut to the central character waking up to find it was all a dream, or find out the protagonists were really faking the audience out right along with their villain. (Supernatural, I’m looking at you!) I cringe when a hero pinned down by bad guys with automatic weapons manages to run across and open field without getting hit, and I have long since grown tired of engines that are supposed to blow up at warp-factor 10, but somehow manage warp factor 12 for a minute or so as Captain Kirk looks at us with that special mixture of fear and confidence, and possibly without his shirt. It’s also bad when the hero somehow gets through all the guards without any explanation as to how she got there to confront the big-bad-evil Night King and win the most important battle of the whole series two full episodes before its over, and now we have to wonder why we should watch the last two episodes at all when this was supposed to be the biggest conflict of the whole story? Why!?! WHY!?!

…okay I get a little carried away, sometimes.

I do.

Anyway, the point is that it’s cheating to impose a solution on the end of a story without forcing the protagonists solve the problems for themselves. If they can’t solve their problems, then they can end tragically. Sometimes that works too, but when the problem is solved magically, it feels like a cheat. We call that sort of ending a ‘deus ex machina’, and when we use that phrase it is not used in praise.

So what about a Satanus ex machina?

I’m probably botching the grammar in that phrase, but in my defense, the Devil Made me do it.

I personally find it no less irritating when the central problems to be resolved in a story are unmotivated by any reasonable sense of how the world works or what a villain wants. Oh, I can suspend belief for a central premise or two, but there is a point at which the story should begin to follow a logic of it’s own. Once those premises are established, the actions of the characters in question, including those of the major antagonist of the story ought to make sense within the universe in which they live. If this isn’t the case, then how do we understand the protagonists own responses to the difficulties at hand? What do they need to do to solve those problems? Unless the problems facing our main characters present them with some meaningful choices, they are just as deprotagonized as they would be if someone else solved their problems for them, and the problems posed by the story do not have a meaningful logic of their own, then they impose no meaningful choices on the protagonists.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the villain who is doing villainous things just to be a villain? Worse yet, I am talking about the villain who has a clear rationale for their actions, but whose actions leave that rationale aside as the story approaches its climax. We knew why he did this, but why is he doing that? Why would a bad guy who steals a ton of money, for example, wish to cause havoc with the global economy on his way out the door? (Sorry, Die hard. It’s a sticking point.)

I’m talking about a supernatural power that kills people right and left, and does so without any clear explanation.

I’m talking about any sort of fight in which supernaturally powerful characters pound away at each other with no effect until the writer finally decides to show us mercy and let one of them actually get hurt and/or die. (Alright, this may not be entirely a problem of villain construction, but it’s damned irritating and all-too damned common.)

I’m talking about a world in which the rules are frequently rewritten to undo whatever resolution our protagonists come up with. If “It was a dream” makes for a cheap resolution to a story, then so does; “You only beat the bad guy in a dream and now you are back in the battle again.” You may even get by with that one if I can be seduced into believing the next solution will actually matter. Do it enough times, and I am ready to surrender the hero to his nightmares.

In all of these cases, the villain, the monster, the mysterious force or natural disaster, all seem to emerge from out of nowhere, being imposed upon the plot almost as if hoisted in on a machine themselves. Think of the wolves from The Grey. They don’t really make sense in themselves; they are just there to make the characters miserable and kick off a plot point there never really rises above the implausibility of its central villains.

I get the fact that a certain degree of mystery can help drive a story and pose interesting questions for us at its start, but somewhere along the line, we need to get a sense for what is happening and what can be done to stop it? We can even be mislead about that sense of a possible resolution, providing the revelation that our hero’s strategy won’t work after all makes sense when we come to it. If mystery persists, however, the central characters need some plausible course of action to pursue, at least a hope that this or that stratagem could help to resolve their problems. Otherwise, they are just thrashing around. Hell, they can even thrash mindlessly for a scene or two, but if we don’t develop a meaningful sense of the problem and a meaningful response to that problem at some point, then I for one start to lose interest.

This is the central damage done by villains that are just their to be villainous; they often leave us with no sense of how the heroes are to engage them at all, no ideas about what could possibly work. An apparently infallible villain renders the actions of a protagonist pointless. A pointlessly evil villain deprives the conflicts they create of depth and richness, and a one dimensional villain tends all-too-often to set us up for a one-dimensional hero. If the events that kick off a story have no motivation behind them, it is unlikely that the responses to them will have much more depth to them in the end.

I think writers sometimes leave the villain undeveloped to convey a sense of mystery; they sometimes leave a natural disaster or a mysterious force unexplained in order to convey a sense of hopelessness. This approach can certainly be interesting, for a moment anyway. If that hopelessness persists throughout the whole story line, then, I for one start to say; “let the bad guy’s have them!” (Even monsters gotta eat,)

A villain, a monster, or even a natural disaster must have some logic to it in order to give the protagonists a meaningful chance of beating the challenge. Letting us wonder about them works early in a story line, but if the answer to our questions comes too late (and by ‘too late’, I mean after the central strategies of the protagonists are put into play), then this doesn’t help the story. Generating a problem with no central rationale to it is a lot like solving one without addressing the problems posed in the opening scenes. In the latter case, the heroes do not engage the problem; in the former, they cannot. The effect is the same. It makes us care less about the main characters.

As with any kind of writing, I’m sure there are times when all of this works anyway, but in most cases, the kind of narrative I am talking about just seems lazy. You won’t get an interesting answer if you ask a stupid question. Likewise, you will not get an interesting hero out o a conflict with a poorly written villain, and you will not get an interesting 3rd act out of a story whose first act is just literary vandalism. A villain too has to make sense. Her actions must be part of the story. They must fit in the story.

And by ‘fit in the story’ I do not mean that we should learn all about the true nature of the villain or mysterious force in the last pages of a novel or the final minutes of a movie as we also learn why some strategy we could never have imagined from the story-line actually works after all. In such moments, we get both Satan and a god on a machine.

It’s a wedding of sorts!

They make a happy couple!

Us and Our Spoiler Alerts

18 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by in Justice, Movies, Politics

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Us_(2019)_theatrical_posterSeriously, if you ever plan to watch the movie, Us, give this post a skip, because I’m about to drop the mother of all spoilers.

…

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No really!

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…

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Go away!

If you ever plan to watch the movie, go away!

…

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I’m doing this for your own good, go away!

…er, I mean; Get Out!

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…

Okay, so this movie packs a whole lotta creepy into one punch. That’s no surprise of course. Anybody who’d seen Get Out should have known what was coming. Us, seemed oddly more subtle to me. Oh it wasn’t hard to see the social commentary encoded in the plot, but the specific details of the message didn’t map quite so easily onto those of the plot, at least not for me.

…until the very end.

I watched this film quite shortly after it came out, and the final moments are still under my skin. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. That final reveal does change everything.It’s all kind of disturbing.

…and it leaves me with this one question; which is more disturbing?

The thought that a young girl could be stolen from her life with all its wonderful possibilities and thrown into a living Hell?

or

The thought that somebody might have come to enjoy a rich and full life by throwing another little girl into that very Hell?

Because we do the latter every day.

We all do.

Black k Klansman

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Justice, Movies, Politics, Uncategorized

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BlacKkKlansman.pngThere are moments (mostly the innocent ones) in Black Klansman where the movie seems to be telling us something about the 70s. There are other moments (as in references to “America First” or allusions to the Trump administration) when the movie is clearly telling us something about today. Most of the time, however, the movie seems to be telling us about both at the same time. What’s missing from this movie is the period in between, a good three or four decades, depending on how you count them, when many of us might have thought race relations were getting better. Perhaps that thought was never more than naiveté, a mere fantasy, but if so the fantasy was certainly a part of the world erased in this film. I’d like to think Spike Lee is wrong to erase those years in this film, but he isn’t.

That erasure, it seems, is precisely the point.

The hope of those intervening years between the end of segregation in America and the present rise of white nationaism is in fact well well represented in Black Klansman. It’s repreented by Ron Stalworth (played by John David Washington), the central character in Black Klansman, a story inspired by events in the career of a real life police officer. We meet Stalworth as he becomes the first black officer on the Colorado Springs police force. It’s a step forward, some might have said back in the day. “Selling out” might be how others would have put it. Stalworth lives in the tension between these two ways of looking at his career, one which envisions police authority as consistent, at least in theory with the possibility or racial justice, and one which sees it as an explicit tool of white supremacy. For his own part, Stalworth is clearly trying to make the former outlook work, but he’s torn from all sides, both by racism within the police force and by those who see police as an essentially racist institution.

To hear him talk, Stalworth could pass for white, which probably says as much about those in the movie (and those of us watching it) who think he sounds white as it does about the man himself. Whatever the reason, this feature of Stalworth’s character has an obvious utility; it will enable him to pass, at least on the phone. Stalworth is also willing to cut his fro if the Police Chief wants him to, but no, that’s not necessary, The Chief likes it. At the same time, Stalworth fights a never ending battle against the casual racism of his fellow officers. What to do about the overt bigots whose racism is far from casual, he isn’t sure, at least not at the outset of the film. Stalworth is picking his battles. Fair enough! But is the trade-off equitable? One gets the impression no-one is quite happy with the arrangement, least of all Stalworth himself.

It’s this awkward effort to find an acceptable accommodation between social justice and institutions which have historically enforced racism that makes Stalworth a great symbol for the intervening years between the seventies and the modern era. He is a back man trying to make America work. for his own people along with the rest of us. Some might consider that a fools errand, but Stalworth lived in an era when it seemed almost possible.

The Police Chief takes Stalworth’s discomfort up a notch by asking him to go undercover to attend a speech by Stokely Carmichael so he can keep track of the radical students who sponsored the event. There Carmichael is known by his new name of Kwame Ture. Ture speaks of police abuse, even the murder of African-Americans. He also urges his audience to prepare for violent revolution. Stalworth is surprised to find that he likes Ture’s speech, and the fact that he likes the speech is a big problem. It’s a problem because Stalwort is there to spy on the man and the black radicals listening to him. From the snadpoint of the police department, he’s not supposed to like the speech at all. From the standpoint of the student radicals, he isn’t supposed to be there at all, at least not for the reasons he has come.

…and certainly not wearing a mic.

It doesn’t help matters that Stalworth knows people in his own police department guilty of the very racism Ture was talking about. It also doesn’t help that he is falling rapidly in love with Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), President of the Black Student Union. She is arguably the main subject of his investigation, and she herself certainly would not approve of his undercover work. It REALLY doesn’t help that she was pulled over by racist police officers after the speech and sexually assaulted during the stop, confirming everything Ture said in his speech while underscoring Stalworth’s inability to do anything about it.

So, how is he going to explain Ture’s promotion of revolution to the Police Chief? How will he explain his role in the police department to the love interest who sees police as the enemy? It’s a problem.

All of this comes before Stalworth’s infiltration into the Ku Klux Klan.

If there is any ray of hope to found in these initial scenes, it comes in the form of a night spent dancing in the wake of Ture’s presentation. Whatever Ture’s rhetoric, the radicals who brought him were content to spend the evening peacefully enjoying themselves on the dance floor. This gives Stalworth an angle, so to speak. He decides that these radicals are just talking about the violent revolution. They aren’t actually planning to kill anybody. It’s not the easiest message to sell. The Police Chief doesn’t buy it any more than Patrice and her companions buy the notion that police are meant to serve the community.

If there is a way to make police-work consistent with racial justice, Stalworth hasn’t found it when the larger plot kicks off, when Stalworth stumbles upon the opportunity to open up an investigation into the Klan with the help of Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). If the black radicals he’d been investigating at the start of this film weren’t really violent, the Klansman certainly were, at least enough of them to pose a threat. Of course this investigation is the real focus on the film. It’s also where the film departs most from the actual events of the real events in question. The real investigation led to the transfer of Klansmen within the military away from sensitive security positions; the movie investigation leads to a real crime.

What interests me about the story most is the larger racial politics of the film itself, and of the society it comments upon. One gets the impression Stalworth isn’t in the most tenable position to begin with. He knows very well the laws he is charged with enforcing hurt his own people, and he also knows anyone seeking to change that poses a real threat to the institutions he represents. Stalworth is caught in the middle of many forces he cannot controle; he has set himself up for a life-time of pushing back in all directions. The main plot seems almost to rescue him from the ambivalence of his position at the outset of the film.

…which brings us back to the political history of the film. Its final moments aren’t about the tricky life Stalworth has set up for himself so much as the rise of violent white nationalism with the advent of the Trump administration. Here Spike Lee drops the fictional story-line entirely and shows us real footage of  real white nationalists at work today. It’s a fitting shift, of course. Like the Klan in this story, Trump’s America has fallen on the nation like a great big old boot stomp on the many conflicts that used to plague our politics, conflicts that now seem subtle by comparison. Like the Klansmen in this film, the present administration and its supporters aren’t really all that interested in figuring out the details of social justice; they are happy to promote a clear and obvious vision of white supremacy. If the crime Stalworth thwarts in this move is fictional, the threats posed by a political regime wedded to the likes of the Klan is real. If justice eludes us, the present regime certainly ought to inject a degree of clarity into political questions of our own day.

If it isn’t entirely clear how we should handle racism in police practice, the sort of problem Stalworth is dealing with at the beginning of this film, it ought to be very clear that the present President couldn’t care less. Neither could those who support him. If it isn’t entirely clear how the rest of us should live together, it ought to be very clear that a good number of Americans no longer mean to do so at all, and that they have help at the highest levels, help they are using to undermine every means at our disposal for forking out any equitable solutions to the nations problems. The nation as a whole seems ripped away, like Stalworth, from the tricky problems about racial justice. What we have now is a problem much like that he faced in this film; how to stop those consciously working to ensure no such answers will ever be found.

 

A Very Soylent Spoiler Alert

16 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by in Movies, Politics

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51E+WFShw9L._SY445_Soylent Green is people!

Yeah we all know that.

Or do we?

I’m sorry, I meant to say; “spoiler alert!”

Anyway, yeah, Soylent Green is people, but the thing is that’s not really what the movie is about, is it? The Movie, Soylent Green, is about the death of the oceans. It’s about the end of life as we know it, or rather the moment in history just before the end of life as we know it. In that moment, as the food sources dwindle down to nothing, human beings begin to cannibalize each other on a scale never before seen in human history.

By ‘human beings’, I of course mean, the powers that be. It is a murky blend of corporate and government power that begins to market human flesh in the form of flavorless green protein wafers. Some might have found it odd to see cannibalism playing out under the auspices of capitalism. The former is a quintessentially primitive practice; the latter is all about of progress.

Right?

When Charleston Heston ends the film screaming “Soylent Green is people,” at least a little of the horror in that moment has always been the realization that the engines of progress have somehow brought humanity to embrace one of the greatest horrors of the primitive world.

It’s fiction, of course, but then again so is the story of progress, and so are a lot of those stories about ‘primitive’ cannibals.

Still it’s a little disconcerting to think that we are already in the timeline of Soylent Green. Yes, that’s right. Way back in 1973, 2018 was the very distant future, distant enough to project upon it all the dystopian horrors you might care to imagine.

For those who haven’t seen this old gem, the main plot has us following a police investigation in a world wracked by overcrowding, starvation, and of course food riots. People live on the streets or the staircases of apartment buildings, guarded by armed men, and…

…and seriously, SPOILER ALERT!!!

…and all these people rely upon one corporation (The Soylent Corporation) for food in the form of artificial wafers, color coded for different kinds of nutritional value. As the story begins to take shape, Soylent has just brought a new wafer into its product line, and yes, it’s green.

…but that’s not too important yet.

The main story-line has us following a murder mystery as Police Detective, Frank Thorn (played by Charlton Heston) investigates the murder of a wealthy and powerful man with the assistance of an aging police analyst named Sol Roth (played by Edward G. Robinson). It turned out the victim had in his possession a report, a large tomb purporting to be an oceanographic survey conducted by the Soylent Corporation over the years 2015-2019. Through careful study and corroboration with his own colleagues, Sol comes to realize the report contains a bombshell. The oceans are dying, irrevocably losing the capacity to produce even the algae used in Soylent wafers. This knowledge is what got the wealthy victim murdered in the first place, but not before he lost all hope and gave up living in the first place. The man, so we are told, was not himself in those final days.

Realizing himself that humanity is doomed, and nearing the end of his own life in this miserable world, Sol himself elects to ‘go home’, which is to say that he reports to a facility where people assist him in committing suicide, treating him to a lovely planetarium display featuring all the sights and sounds of nature as he drifts off into oblivion. Thorn arrives too late to save Sol, but not too late to force his way into the facility and watch the display while speaking with Sol in his last moments. Thorn is shocked by the sight of fields and trees, and animals, even as he learns about the end of the world’s food supply, such as it is. He learns of earth’s former glory even as he comes to grips with its coming end. It’s a maddening thought.

But what to do about it?

Thorn begins by trying to learn a little more about the operations at Soylent. After sneaking into the vehicles transporting Sol and the other dead away the facility, Heston comes to realize the bodies are being processed into the creation of green wafers, thus explaining how the Soylent corporation could come up with a brand new and improved food staple even as humanity’s food supply runs out once and for all. Thus, the infamous line, “Soylent Green is people.”

…oh yeah, there are fights and shootings along the way.

So, yes, Soylent Green is people, but there is a reason it’s people. It’s people because people are the only edible resource left.

Faced with diminishing resources, the powers that be have turned to their own population to reproduce their world, at least for whatever time they may be able to keep this up.

I remember watching this as a kid. Those final moments were pretty shocking back in the early seventies. I remember wondering what would happen in the wake of the credits Would people respond to Heston’s character and shut down the Soylent factories? And if they did, what next? This was a story about the end of everything, and the great crime that echoes through its final moments isn’t going to change that. Perhaps the cannibalism could be stopped, but not the disaster that produced it. It’s a maddening thought, the end of humanity, one next to which the crimes of the Soylent corporation seem to pale in comparison.

What shocks me about the whole story-line now is just how much it pales in comparison to the reality in which we live. We’ve already got our own Soylent report, a whole bunch of them in fact. Scientists have been delivering news quite comparable to that of the Soylent Oceanographic Survey for decades now. Most seem to hold out at least some hope that the disaster in question could be averted, but the scale of tragedy envisioned in climate change is quite comparable to that envisioned in the movie Soylent Green. What is the result? Life goes on.

Somehow, the possibility that all life as we know it could be about to end hasn’t generated sufficient public resolve even to attempt a serious solution. Some folks, such as our Tang-Colored Denialist-in-Chief, seem Hell-bent on making sure the whole disaster comes sooner rather than later, even hiding the facts by suppressing scientific findings on the subject, but the fact is that we are all implicated in this story-line. We are all contributing to the disaster. We can point to certain villains who don’t even want us thinking about this issue, much less attempting to tackle it, but in the end, it is humanity as a whole (or at least the more developed nations within it) that is proceeding full steam ahead.

It’s as though Heston’s cries didn’t even lead to an investigation of the Soylent factories. We all heard him, and then we just kept munching away at the quaint little green wafers that give us so much more energy than the red ones or the white ones and even the purple ones.

It’s one of the things that fascinates me about climate change. Somehow this real-world threat to life as we know it carries with it far less force than the comparable horrors of fiction. We can can appreciate the threat of The Thing or the Body-Snatchers. We can even hope that somehow Heston’s cries will bring an end to the Soylent factories. We can pull for the good guys to save the day in these stories, But when credible sources tell us that all life as we know it could come about as a result of our own actions, we ponder it while and then drive to the store.

Don’t get me wrong. Far from being an exception, I count myself among the worst offenders.

This is perhaps one of the interesting features of story-telling, that it enables us to envision solutions which would escape us in real life. Indeed, stories enable us to conceptualize problems we might not even acknowledge in real life. Our world may not contain vampires, for example, at least in the sense that we cannot find real creatures who suck the blood of others in order to sustain immortal life, but we can certainly find people whose success came at the expense of those around them. We can even find people who seem inexplicably to relish the experience of wasting other peoples time and energy in sundry ways. Deal with someone like that long enough, and you might just be tempted to see in vampire stories a real truth about real people. It wouldn’t be unfair to say of such people, I think, that they prosper, much as vampires do, by draining the life energy of those around them. In the real world, one resolves such problems (if possible) by getting such people out of your life (a peoplectomy as one of my old friends used to put it), but of course this is difficult and messy and the people in question simply move on to screw up other people’s lives when we finally get them out of our own. In a story? In story, you can drive a stake through the heart of the damned vampire. You can actually destroy them in the third act. Ironically enough, the vampires of stories may be easier to defeat than some of the bastards we meet in real life. We can’t drive a stake through the heart of toxic people in the real world, but we an sure as Hell do it with the ones we find in our stories.

Perhaps it is the same with the prospect of an anthropogenic apocalypse. It really is a systemic problem. We all know what we do that contributes to that problem, but refraining as an individual from consumption of oil products is like taking your own drop out of a crashing wave. Well it would be if you could even do it, but most of us really can’t. Most of us couldn’t even eat were it not for the fossil fuels that bring our future meals to the grocery stores. Even if we walked to our breakfast cereal, we would find that or cereal flew and trucked its way to us. The problem is simply too big for any one person to resolve on his own. But what are the odds of finding a collective resolution to the matter? The horror is beyond our reckoning. So, we enjoy zombie stories or watch Bruce Willis save us from an asteroid. (That was him, wasn’t it?) We can hope Will Smith’s blood will save mankind or we can grip our seats and wait quietly in the hopes that John Krasinski figures out how to beat those new sound-killing creatures. The end of the world is just easier to beat in a story.

…except, in Soylent Green, it really isn’t.

Perhaps, this is because the source of the apocalypse in Soylent Green isn’t a monster; it’s us, which is a little too close to the realities already taking shape in 1973. (They are more real now.) Either way the real tragedy coming for those characters is still coming for them regardless of the results of Thorn’s final revelation. This horror is closer to that of Cthulhu than it is to the simple zombies or mean-spirited sound-sniffers. This horror is a certain doom. The people in Thorn’s world may or may not be able to stop Soylent from serving other folks up in bite-sized snacks, but (at least in the terms of the story-line) they are not going to solve the problem of hunger. They are all doomed.

To appreciate the doom one has only to consider the death of Sol at the end of the film. This, it turns out, would be the last scene ever shot with Edward G. Robinson. He died of cancer a short time after shooting wrapped on Soylent Green, giving his death scene an odd real-life significance for those involved in production. Watching this film, or any other apocalyptic fantasy, I can’t help wondering if humanity itself doesn’t find itself experiencing a similar sort of parallelism. We can appreciate all manner of stories about the end of life as we know it, but more and more, I at least watch such stories with a faint sense that they are a little less far fetched than I’d prefer to imagine.

We can wonder if the characters in Soylent Green will heed Thorn’s warning.

But that is missing the point.

 

Film Festival?

01 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Alaska, Movies, Uncategorized

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Motif Film FreewaySo, a couple of friends and I are putting together a film festival, scheduled for August 3-5 in Fairbanks.  We are interested in all manner of independent submissions, but we are particularly interested in just about anything with a social consciousness, so to speak. If you happen to make films, please consider submitting to the festival. And if you happen to like independent films, then please consider watching a few with us in August.

…and if you don’t know, and haven’t been, yes, Fairbanks is gorgeous in August.

We have the following to say for ourselves…

Films from everywhere and of all genres are welcome. MôTif strives to turn our festival into a platform and outlet for voices fighting to be heard. We also encourage submissions from indigenous filmmakers, filmmakers of color, filmmakers with different abilities, LGBTQQIA filmmakers, female-identified filmmakers, and filmmakers from any other underrepresented group. Please help us spread the word and share this with filmmakers from around the world. You can submit your film through FilmFreeway.

MôTif is a multimedia production company that supports and creates art projects, focusing on the underrepresented and the environment.

We have no limits on how to use art to show untold stories and make ideas come true. Our core goal is to explore solutions and help in the fight to decimate racism, bigotry, poverty, sexism, and climate change through art.

We collaborate with masterly artists to offer innovative services for communities, individuals, and organizations including workshops, event development, performing arts, film, photography and design.

With our mission in mind we want to offer the first ever MôTif Film Festival. We are committed to discover new and diverse voices, with 97% of the films coming directly from the submissions we receive. We strive to turn our festival into a platform of voices that still fight to be heard, that need support, and is an outlet for their stories.

Awards & Prizes

The winners of each category will receive an exclusive handmade trophy created by a local Alaskan artist and business owner of The Monolith Project as well as a certificate.

Total Prize Value (USD): Priceless

Rules & Terms

All submitted films must comply with the Submissions Guidelines including deadlines, exhibition format, entry material, etc.

We do not pay screener fees.

Entrants are responsible for obtaining any necessary licenses, royalties, release forms, clearances, permits necessary to present their work. MôTif Film Festival is not responsible for any claim involving copyright, trademark, credits, or royalty infringement related to the work.

 

Interested parties can find out more here:

https://filmfreeway.com/MoTifFilmFestival

Shhhhhhh…

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Movies

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MV5BMjI0MDMzNTQ0M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMTM5NzM3NDM@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,674,1000_AL_You learn pretty quickly how things work in A Quiet Place. Make a sound and you just may die of it.

Why?

For reasons left largely unexplained, the world has been overrun by creatures that quickly chase down anything making a sound and kill it. They are quick, powerful, seemingly indestructible, and completely without mercy. To survive in this world, one must be utterly silent, at nearly all times. A momentary lapse of discipline will bring a swift and cruel death.

The best part of this premise is that it reaches right through the screen and into the movie theater. Watching a family struggle to survive on screen in this world shaped by monsters, the audience itself struggles to maintain its own silence. It’s difficult. It’s especially difficult for a room full of people still settling into their seats and trying to enjoy their concessions. But we learn the cost of noise early in this film, and nobody wants to be the one who spoils the soundscape for the rest of us. The silence on screen demands silence from its audience. Every candy wrapper threatens to ruin the experience. Every sip from a soda pop  threatens to bring the monsters pouncing. So, we all try to be quiet, and we fail miserably. The whole theater is filled with sound, and with people trying desperately not to make those sounds.

As we all adjust to the need for silence, the restlessness of the audience comes excruciating. The teenagers in the row beside me keep moving about in their seats. They are trying to hold still, but they just haven’t found a comfortable position yet, and the results are excruciating. The sound of a straw sliding through a plastic lid somewhere in the room echoes through the whole theater. We can all hear that straw push through the ice and into the corner of the cup. Lacking a straw, myself, I quickly come to realize how much the ice in my own cup shifts with every drink I take. Taking those final gulps, I feel almost as though I’ve betrayed the whole back section of the theater. Someone down in the front is arguing with his neighbor. His words are soft, but we can all hear him; “No, you watch it!” I amazed this idiot hasn’t gotten us all killed. A woman behind me is extra startled by events on screen. She can’t help but vocalize her distress to her companions. It’s risky, or at least annoying, but who could blame her? That much drama demands an outlet! It’s an outlet that would get her killed up on the screen, but it’s understandable in itself, if also more than a little distressing to a room full of people trying desperately to be quiet.

…which is the genius behind this film. The premise doesn’t just threaten us with monsters; it transforms our own nature into a source of terror. It turns the focus of horror onto the very human quality that is our own noisy nature. We all make sounds. We bang on stuff. We cause our seats to creak, and the ground crackles beneath our feet as we walk. Every once in awhile, we want to say something, even to say it loudly. All of this is perfectly normal until you walk into a theater to watch THIS movie. Then it becomes terrifying. Most anybody can be quiet for little awhile, but can you live your whole life in silence? I know a theater in Anchorage full of people who didn’t manage it for an hour and a half. Oh sure, we achieved a modicum of silence at about the half way point, but not the kind of silence it would have taken to survive in the world up on that screen. Had these monsters entered our own world, I’m not sure any of us would have made it to the third act.

The woman behind me at least would have been toast!

It’s tempting to see political analogies in this story-line. Some have seen it as direct commentary on the present state of American politics. Both John Krasinski (who directed and star in the film) and his costar Emily Blunt have denied that was the original idea. Instead, they suggest the point was to say something about families.

Whatever messages the film-makers might have intended to bundle-up in this movie, it seems easy enough to understand why people would see this film in political terms. The pressure to remain silent is something just about everyone has experienced in one form or another. For most of us, that pressure has been limited to fears of looking foolish, losing friends, or perhaps some reasonable fear that one could lose a job. Others have lived through the very real terror that speaking up could cost them their lives. Perhaps, their loved ones too! The premise here thus has the power to resonate with all manner of audiences well across the political spectrum. Whether the threat was trivial or genuinely hazardous, most (perhaps all) of us can recall the experience of stifling our own voice because of someone out there. In A Quiet Place that message becomes any sound whatsoever and that someone out there becomes a monster ready to rip us apart. It’s a metaphor easily mapped onto all manner of real world problems.

You can really feel the power of this theme in the rare moments when character do speak in A Quiet Place. The transgression of actual sound is shocking; the sense of liberation is powerful. When someone actually does shout in this film, it comes across as a  supreme act of defiance. The character may have been shouting at a monster; but any one of us could well imagine the freedom to finally shout something at somebody or something in our lives.

…preferably without being ripped apart as a result.

Okay, so yes, I liked this movie

***

Also, the ending? The very last moment of this film?

Fucking brilliant!

 

Poe Appropriates a Proposal

07 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Movies, Native American Themes

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I will admit that I enjoyed the Proposal, but I’m not so sure I liked it.

Well that makes sense to me at any rate. So anyway…

There is one scene in this movie that sits in my memory like a stone in my shoe. I just don’t know what to make of it. It’s this one:

Don’t get me wrong, it ain’t no hangin’ matter as far as I’m concerned, but I have to wonder. Didn’t anybody involved in this production question the wisdom of having two women perform other people’s music and dance? First Betty White pretends to carry out a Haida ritual, adopting the stilted speech patterns of native movie characters for the entire scene. Tasked with joining her in the performance, Sandra Bullock ends up channeling Lil Jon and the East Side Boys. So, one of these women engages in faux native spirituality and the other effectively turns in a rap performance. It’s all at least a little appropriative.

It’s also more than a little cringe-worthy.

To me anyway.

I am admittedly prone to cringitude.

It’s a light comedy anyway, so I guess I shouldn’t expect them to take these issues any more seriously than the rest of the subject matter appearing in the movie. Still, I can’t help but shake my head at the apparent cluelessness.

…but then I wonder!

I come back to my original question; didn’t somebody question the wisdom of this scene? Wasn’t somebody aware that it’s more than a little odd to have two white women finding their bliss in the performance of other people’s music, dance, and ceremony. Wasn’t someone on set at least cognizant of the issue?

And then I wonder, what if someone was?

Could that have been the point?

Quite unexpectedly, the spirit of Nathan Poe haunts this scene!

The whole performance is so completely over the top, I find myself wondering if it isn’t an intentional parody of precisely the kind appropriation I’ve been talking about. Which would make it kinda cool after all.

…I still cringe.

***

I’ve looked around a bit to see if some movie reviewers can shed light on the scene, and I can’t say that I’ve found much. Newspaper Rock comments on the matter pretty directly, but he doesn’t seem to have any extra information on the production itself. The late Roger Ebert seemed perplexed by the scene, particularly insofar as it related to the Alaskan sunrise. Most reviewers seemed to skip the subject altogether. Here is an interesting blog post on the house where they filmed the movie. (I know, that’s a little left of the actual topic here, but it’s just kinda cool.) The Orlando Sentinel quotes Betty White as saying that she had to learn an ‘Eskimo’ song for the film. The Daily News has her explaining that the language was actually Tlingit. I can’t say that any of this sheds much light on the matter, but that’s about enough of this.

Ah well!

My girlfriend will be calling me ‘Danno Downer” after she reads this.

Guilty as charged.

Beatriz Spoilers for Supper

27 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in Movies, Politics

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Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a selfless healer barely making ends meet. When her vehicle breaks down at the home of a wealthy client, Kathy (Connie Britton), she is invited to stay the evening. Kathy and her husband, Grant (David Warshofsky), are holding a dinner party with several rich associates. One of the guests, Douglas Strutt (John Lithgow) turns out to be as insensitive as he is wealthy, which is to say a lot. The plot thickens when Beatriz begins to suspect Strutt may have been the developer who wrecked her home town back in Mexico, thus scattering her family and ultimately triggering her own immigration into the United States. Is she right about Strutt? And if so, what will she do about it?

…especially after she’s had another glass of wine?

I’m supposed to like Beatriz at Dinner. This film has liberal politics written all over it. It expresses views much like my own, and it raises concerns I take very seriously. So, why don’ I Like it?

First and foremost, I don’t like being pandered to. Beatriz might be good politics (which is debatable), but it’s terrible story-telling. The film contains one and only one sympathetic character, Beatriz. The rest of the central characters in this film are there to be despised. Virtually every line they utter is offered, not to help us understand their point of view, but to give us another reason to hate them. Even Kathy’s kind invitation is riddled with hypocrisy. It is less an expression of generosity or friendship than a kind of pretense, one soon blown apart by events unfolding over the course of the evening. Her feigned friendship notwithstanding, Kathy isn’t really prepared to treat Beatriz as an equal, a fact driven home time and again during the film. The other characters never even come that far. They are simply aweful, from beginning to end.

It’s not just that the characters in this film are one dimensional. The entire story is one-dimensional, showing us only enough of the rich white characters to know that they are contemptible. I don’t need to think of capitalists as terrible people to oppose their impact on the global economy. My concerns over the issue do not depend on moral caricatures, and I’m not at all interested in promoting such caricatures, not even in the furtherance of a liberal agenda.

It’s not that I find anything implausible in the notion that an immigrant woman struggling to pay her own bills could be more thoughtful and interesting than a group of rich white people. I just don’t need to be reminded that that is how I am supposed to feel about these characters with virtually every line of the film. Good characters have depth, even those we might regard as villains. They surprise us. They present us with novel thoughts and feelings. This just doesn’t happen at the dinner Beatriz attends. She is decent, perhaps even a little odd at times. The rest are uniformly terrible people, a fact driven home with virtually everything they do.

It would have been nice if Lithgow’s character actually had an insight or two, perhaps even a trace of moral character however flawed it might have been. Instead, he is relentlessly crass, unfeeling, and utterly incapable of compassion. I want to think of this character as over-the-top and completely unrealistic. But of course, the current President of the United States appears to have been written with same pen. So, I guess we can’t dismiss him as completely unrealistic.

Likely, the comparison with Trump is the real point of Lithgow’s character, but if he is Trump, then this is why the movie fails. It fails because its villain isn’t really at all interesting. Just like Trump, Strutt isn’t impressive in any way. He doesn’t have any style. He’s just an ass with more power than he deserves or really knows what to do with. Such people may exist in real life (and apparently they do), but they don’t make particularly good stories. Whether Strutt is an straw man or an accurate portrayal of mindset we can encounter in real life, he is a consistent disappointment. We engage him through Beatriz only to find that there is nothing to him, that there is no there there in his personality. The man has power and wealth and little else to say for himself or his life choices. He’s a bit like the weather, something to be survived, not reasoned with.

But can one survive Strutt? If a men with that kind of power cannot be reasoned with, then how are we to survive them? This I think is the question trying to make its way through the film to its audience. It is an interesting question. Suffice to say that I am not impressed with the film’s own answer to this question.

Strutt poses a threat to humanity itself, at least in the abstract, and more immediately to Beatriz. It isn’t just that his development projects wreck communities and threaten endangered species. Rather, he represents the worst in modern capitalism, complete with all its current threats to the environment and life as we know it. This is clearly how Beatriz sees him. Strutt himself seems aware enough that his actions create hardship for others, but he also regards the decline of life on this planet as a natural process, one which will occur with or without him. Everything is dying, or so he tells Beatriz. There is nothing to be done about it, so one ought to enjoy himself so long as he can. This, he suggests, is precisely what Beatriz herself should do. With that, Strutt reveals the depths of his own depravity and the conflict between Strutt and Beatriz comes to symbolize a conflict between nihilism and the value of life itself.

It’s in this last twist that Beatriz at Dinner nearly becomes interesting. It is established early on that she has a tremendous sense of empathy. She can feel others’ pain. So Strutt’s complete disregard for every living thing thus poses a kind of existential threat to her. She can feel the harm he causes in others, and if there is nothing she can do about it, then what use are her own efforts? She cannot accept Strutt’s crass hedonism as a way of life, but if he and others like him are setting the course of history, then her own values demand a confrontation.

To heal the world, must Beatriz not defeat people like Strutt, and if he (and others like him) cannot be persuaded, is there any alternative but violence? To fall short of that, as the film seems to suggest, is to accept the end of life as we know it. It is to give up on life itself. At least that seems to be the conclusion Beatriz draws from her encounter with Strutt.

Thus we are left with an ending every bit as dismal as the central villain of the film.