Shoot the Projectionist

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2011-09-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of great, strongly iconic new posters for old posters by a young Polish design team, Joanna Gorska and Jerzy Skakun.

24 Words Per Film (#77)

2011-09-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

Jesse Eisenberg has a tendency to match his performance quality to that of the material; both are mediocre here. Michael Pena is a revelation!

30 Minutes or Less (2011); directed by Ruben Fleischer.

24 Words Per Film (#76)

2011-09-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

The many scenes lacking ambient sound propelled the plot beautifully but leaves our relationship to many of the characters (Marion Cotillard's, Dmitri Martin's) undernourished.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2010-06-25T13:12:00.001-07:00

Just thought everyone would enjoy this hilarious--and oddly literal--take on The Big Lebowski. It was done in 2008 by Andrzej Krajewski. The practice of making limited edition posters for cult movies well after their productions is thriving in Poland. Below is one from last year for The Blues Brothers by the same artist. Krajewski is one of the old masters of Polish film posters--I've previously posted one of his pieces from 1968--and he's been working in variations on bright, bold, and cartoony styles for all those years.

24 Words Per Film #75

2010-06-24T11:44:00.001-07:00

Whatever Works: Woody has lost the ability to elicit even slightly naturalistic performances from his actors--who chain themselves to reproducing a mediocre script.

24 Words Per Film #74

2010-06-24T11:38:00.001-07:00

The Lovely Bones: How could a movie about the impact of a young girl's murder on her family be so goddamned beautifully life affirming?

24 Words Per Film #73

2010-06-21T14:17:00.001-07:00

Killer eff'ing soundtrack! But Pirate Radio just floats by. Even when the boat sinks, the pot haze doesn't clear to form an actual plot.

24 Words Per Film #72

2010-06-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

Brilliant! Greenberg is often so true it hurts. Was I the only one who was disgusted to find himself identifying with the title character?

24 Words Per Film #71

2010-06-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

Spanglish is better than As Good as it Gets, and Tea Leoni's brilliantly manic performance is light years beyond any of her other work.

24 Words Per Film #70

2010-06-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

Greta Gerwig almost as charming here as in Greenberg, though often needlessly naked. Mostly boring as a home movie with an occasional transcendent realism.

Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007); dir. Joe Swanberg. Writer/actors: Greta Gerwig, Kent Osborne, Andrew Bujalski.

24 Words Per Film #69

2010-06-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

Paper Heart isn't funny: it's an impassioned plea for privacy in relationships amongst the young and famous. Nice human moments in interview segments, too.

24 Words Per Film #68

2010-06-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

Get Him to the Greek: P. Diddy is a revelation, bringing totally different energy than I've seen before. Elisabeth Moss shows some chops, too.

24 Words Per Film #67

2010-06-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

Prince of Persia gives us some great images straight out of the videogame early on. Oh and there's a plot. And a pretty girl.

24 Words Per Film #66

2010-06-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

Hot Tub Time Machine: Cusack is wasted amidst the bodily function jokes. Chevy Chase still sucks, but Clark Duke might be great one day.

24 Words Per Film #65

2010-06-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

The lesbian kiss might be why they made it, but Michael Shannon's performance as the legendary Kim Fowley is worth the price of admission.

The Runaways (2010); written & directed by Floria Sigismondi, starring Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, and Michael Shannon.

24 Words Per Film #64

2010-06-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

Premise: old-fashioned fright flick with two powerhouse actors delivering great performances. Execution: Benicio del Toro & Anthony Hopkins sleeping onscreen. We're talkin' bout Wolfman.

24 Words Per Film #63

2010-06-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

I heard Clash of the Titans was even crappier with the post application of 3D. The pretty people would be even closer to you, though.

Andy Warhol Performs the Golden Monica

2010-01-27T12:23:00.000-08:00

To perform a Golden Monica: a public act of self-negation that serves to mobilize a portion of the audience. By completely emptying the self, or replacing it with an overorthodox simulation of contemporary values, the public persona can act as a societal mirror which critiques the culture he or she is a part of and incites movement within the audience. The concept of “The Golden Monica,” and the term itself, is extrapolated from a story of the same name in Ben Marcus’ book of short stories The Age of Wire and String, described in its promotional material as “part fiction, part handbook.” The story is two-and-a-half pages of cryptic beauty in which, as Rick Moody writes of the book, “Ben Marcus immolates American notions about family, culture, and the domestic drama.” The choice of the word immolate is apt: it denotes sacrifice and often connotes fire. The American Heritage dictionary gives its second definition as “To kill (oneself) by fire.” Marcus’ story offers a demonstration of this definition of immolation, as well as building into the self-sacrifice the notion of an audience who is both forced to watch and moved to act. Allow me to quote it at length:

“There exists in some precincts the phenomena of the intruder or mad invader, who enters the American house in order to extinguish himself in the presence of the mister, the female, the children, whomever. The man powers in, arranges a prison… [for] the members of the shelter, and settles… to attain a posture of attention to his own body that will render its demise. They are forced to watch, the family. He lights a fire, this man. …[T]hey are bound such… that they are forced to acquire the status of audience to this act, and then further to the self-created corpse…

What is interesting, as always, is the aftermath. The body, as such, lies often coiled on the floor. Whosoever sits bound at the perimeter must witness its stillness. …[A] single figure from the bound hostages… manages to delimit himself from his lashed state and escape the site. …The acts of doing and watching are interchangeable here. It is the genius of the perpetrator of the monica to shift volition onto his audience. The spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing. The audience is deceived into a sense of creation for the act it has witnessed. …

The act is called a monica because a suicide is forced into the purview of an audience of hostages. The American areas, in constituency, collaborate to intrude and invade, looting the body of what it does not require, fortifying it with the American medicine of the final home. …This body will no longer heal itself, feign wellness, posture some possession of any type of solution. Indeed, where air or light does not exist, it will fashion its own, at whatever cost, whatever pain, extracting that tonic from its own ravaged materials. The witness to this body… will be transfixed at once by the style of death that each man achieves, rightly paralyzed in the beauty of a new mode of exit. And then ultimately, always, by necessity, he will feel certain that he has caused this disappearance, through some still stillness or silence of his own.

…Where a house is, this man will maul it with noise and steam, scouring what is stuck and stubborn therein with a lather of golden light, producing an exit of life that is marked by the inception of a shadow. And the shadow takes up residence inside the world. And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off.” (Marcus, 47-49)

The “perpetrator of the monica” pushes their way into the American household, creates their own audience, then forces that audience to watch the dissolution of the self. With their “own ravaged materials” the artist performing the Golden Monica reflects an America back to itself that is already engaged in “looting” the corpse, “fortifying it with the American medicine” to absorb it back into the mainstream. But “What is

interesting, as always, is the aftermath” in which a segment of the audience “delimit[s]” itself from its “lashed state and escape[s] the site.” Some portion of the audience that was bound to watch is now inspired to move, to respond to the questions about society raised by the mirror “the perpetrator of the monica” has made of him-or-herself. This portion of the audience carries the memory of that self-negation within it, feeling “certain that [it] has caused this disappearance, through some stillness or silence of [its] own,” and perhaps the resolution to reverse that stillness and silence with action and voice.

The chapter of Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body called “Warhol’s Bodies” will serve as a theoretical framework for exploring the concept of the Golden Monica through the career of Andy Warhol. Shaviro writes, “Warhol’s greatest work of art was himself; he transformed himself into a blank and glamorous—and hence charismatic—figure of pure appearance.” (Shaviro, 206) Warhol drained any trace of identity from his public persona, wearing a rock star’s uniform of black sunglasses, black leather jacket, and an expressionless face. His own image was as simplistically iconic, repetitive, and full of the self-renewing light of celebrity as the subjects of his paintings. Shaviro quotes Warhol as saying, “People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” (Shaviro, 204)

Warhol’s persona and his artwork reflected the superficial American celebrity-driven culture back to itself but, as he points out, a mirror lacks any content of its own, is completely blank and selfless. Warhol turned his canvases into the shelves of supermarkets and the covers of gossip magazines. He erased the evidence of his hand in his work, and removed his identity from his public persona, giving society back only what it gave him. His stated goal was to “completely remove all the hand gestures from art and become noncommittal, anonymous,” as Shaviro quotes. (Shaviro, 207) He “entered the American house in order to extinguish himself” and once the negation was complete, the persona left would “no longer heal itself, feign wellness, posture some possession of any type of solution.” (Marcus, 47, 48) Warhol’s work and lifestyle may “continually confound boundaries and erase conventional distinctions,” but “they do this in the name of a bland acceptance of things as they are, rather than any utopian transcendence of the real.” (Shaviro, 202) To read an interview with Andy Warhol or look at one of his artworks was only to see an embrace of the society you already lived in. Shaviro quotes Warhol as saying, “The world fascinates me. It’s so nice, whatever it is. I approve of what everybody does.” (Shaviro, 232)

Warhol’s genius was in recognizing that fame itself was capital. He projected his public persona not only through the exhibition of his artwork and the attendant media, but through his ubiquitous presence on the New York party scene, his t.v. show on MTV, and his magazine. This most vapid and banal of all interview subjects founded a magazine called Interview whose mission statement was to give voice to celebrities yapping pointlessly to each other. America, liking nothing more than to look in the mirror at its own image, rapturously watched Warhol’s self-negation, “transfixed at once by the style of death… rightly paralyzed in the beauty of a new mode of exit.” (Marcus, 49)

Notice, though, that “the perpetrator of the monica” first watches himself, before being viewed by his audience. It is “a posture of attention to his own body that will render its demise.” (Marcus, 47) Warhol rigorously recorded and documented his life, disappearing behind reproductions of himself. Shaviro writes, “Recording devices aren’t just a screen or a buffer between Andy and the outside world; they actually transform the nature of what is ‘real.’” This is because once you’ve placed yourself under surveillance, “self-expression is radically compromised… it always implies the artificiality of the performance, the priority of display for others, something that is staged before the mechanical ear of the tape recorder or the mechanical eye of the camera.” (Shaviro, 213) Shaviro quotes Warhol as saying, “I didn’t get married until 1964 when I got my first tape recorder.” (Shaviro, 213) Being observed, recorded, became a constant companion to Warhol’s life, investing it with meaning.

Every act is an observable one, or else it doesn’t exist. Marcus writes in “The Golden Monica” that, “The acts of doing and watching are interchangeable here.” (Marcus, 48) Warhol watches himself, and the watching is coterminous with the doing. The shape of fame is an ouroboros—eternally circling back around to feed on itself. Shaviro writes that “the mysterious quality revealed by the movie camera is something that the camera itself has first brought into being… Warhol’s films give people their beauty by confronting them with the camera. If the only beautiful people are those in the movies, then for Warhol the inverse is also true: that anyone who appears in the movies is automatically made beautiful.” (Shaviro, 222) For Warhol, the only people who exist are the beautiful ones—the observed, the watched. Warhol watched himself and in doing so created his audience. “The spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing.” (Marcus, 48) This refers to both the “perpetrator of the monica” and to the portion of the audience who “delimit [themselves] from [their] lashed state and escape.” Warhol watched himself, but the only ‘self’ he had left was a blank mirror of American society—which marveled at “the beauty of a new mode of exit.” Bearing witness to his negation is the “seeing” and “the first form of doing” for the portion of the audience moved to action.

This public act of self-negation has been “an exit of life that is marked by the inception of a shadow. …And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off.” (Marcus, 49) Much of the audience will remain paralyzed in the face of the mirror, but others “will feel certain that [they have] caused this disappearance, through some still stillness or silence of [their] own.” (Marcus, 49) Warhol critiqued society by effacing his identity and simulating the dominant modes of that society. He reflected the blank and superficial nature of American culture back to itself. If he “approve[d] of what everybody does,” as he claimed, then it was up to his audience to disapprove. Not only to disapprove, but to believe it is their own idea to do so: “The audience is deceived into a sense of creation for the act it has witnessed.” (Marcus, 48) In Warhol’s wake, many artists were able to “delimit [themselves] from [their] lashed state and escape” to a use of the modes of Warhol’s work to achieve radically different kinds of cultural critique—and true political engagement.

Works cited.

Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String. Dalkey Archive Press, Normal, IL: 1995.

Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1993.

Photographs are from "Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger," in Denmark, 1981.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2010-01-24T13:11:00.000-08:00

Michal Ksiazek has been making some wild, iconic designs for films from throughout cinema history, like this one from last year for Fight Club, or the one below for Breakfast at Tiffany's, from 2006. This represents a new trend in Polish poster design. Posters are being made stricly for sale in the art market now, rather than specifically for the promotion of a film.

Like Ionesco Doing Stand-Up: Andy Kaufman & Eugene Ionesco

2010-01-23T15:34:00.000-08:00

Richard Lewis is often quoted as having said Andy Kaufman’s act was “almost like Ionesco doing stand-up.” This notion is dismissed as misguidedly connecting the very American Kaufman with the European avant-garde in Florian Keller’s study Wrestling with the American Dream, and is chalked up to his contemporaries “struggling to come to terms with his perplexing performances.” (Keller, xii) Bill Zehme, in his Kaufman biography Lost in the Funhouse, introduces the quote with similar connotations of overintellectualization, calling Richard Lewis the “chief intellectual neurotic” of the comedy milieu. (Zehme, 139) Neither seem to seriously consider that Andy Kaufman’s work may actually resemble that of the playwright Eugene Ionesco. Using Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd—the book that coined that term and put Ionesco in league with the likes of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter—I will track some of the similarities between Ionesco and Kaufman.

Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano, sprung from his attempt to learn English. In transcribing “the clichés and truisms of the conversation primer” in which “two married couples solemnly inform… each other of things that must have been obvious to them all along,” Ionesco saw society’s manner of communicating disintegrate “into wild caricature and parody, and in the end language itself disintegrated into disjointed fragments of words.” (Esslin, 110) In reading the sentences from his English primer not for what they could teach him about the language, but for their actual content, the horror and absurdity of modern life was laid bare in front of him. The resulting play that he sculpted from these scraps of “pseudo-clichés and pseudo-truisms” Ionesco called “a parody of a play, a comedy of comedy.” (Esslin, 110) The Bald Soprano is a first step towards what Ionesco sees as “The need to break down the language of society, which ‘is nothing but clichés, empty formulas and slogans.’” (Esslin, 101-102)

Several of Andy Kaufman’s routines similarly reproduce clichés in order to point out their societal effects. His obnoxious ‘Tony Clifton’ character always thanks the audience and producers of the show with standard showbiz platitudes while insulting the former until the latter forces him to leave. That even the cruelest, most grotesque parody of an entertainer still says things like, “I’m really happy to be here,” “You’ve been a great audience,” etc., serves to highlight just how empty such sentiments are—even when they’re coming from the mouth of an apparently sincere and much more likeable, entertainer.

Kaufman’s ‘Foreign Man’ character is a study in the reproduction of stereotypes, a character that wants to fit in so badly that he too closely replicates the standard way of behaving and is thus rendered pitiful. The jokes that he tells are all outdated stand-up standards, but by reproducing them bare and without colorful details, he shows that all such jokes can only ever be variations on cliché. “My wife’s cooking is so bad… it’s terrible” is not a joke, but the stereotypical skeleton upon which the joke is supposed to be hung. When Foreign Man complains that the traffic was so bad it took him an hour and a half to get here, but doesn’t further elaborate, he points out how banal a joke about the traffic would be even if it were funny. Foreign Man’s imitations work in much the same manner. Florian Keller writes, “He does not actually mimic his objects of ridicule, but what he imitates are the very gestures of imitations, that is, he mimics the routine of stand-up ‘impressions.’” (Keller, 101) He is ‘a comedian telling a joke,’ ‘an impressionist,’ in the same way that Tony Clifton is ‘a lounge singer,’ and each character in The Bald Soprano is “the personification of accepted ideas and slogans, the ubiquitous conformist.” (Ionesco qtd. in Esslin, 115)

Some of the other routines performed by the Foreign Man character go even further towards Ionesco’s goal of “breaking down the language of society.” In Limits and Laughter: The Comedy of Lenny Bruce & Andy Kaufman, Victoria Beyer discusses a performance wherein Foreign Man starts the show in hackneyed showbiz fashion by walking through the audience and talking with people here and there on his way to the stage. She remarks, “The absurdity is… the contrast between Kaufman’s standard way of dressing, gesturing and casually chatting with the audience (even his intonation seems familiar, though his words are incomprehensible) on the one hand and the childish gibberish he speaks on the other.” (Beyer, 139) It’s unnecessary for Foreign Man to actually say anything intelligible because this simulation of social niceties and entertainer/audience rapport is as equally empty—and equally sincere—as any actual communication would be in this context. Kaufman once again alludes to the essential ridiculousness of a situation by performing it in a ridiculous manner. Ionesco wrote, “To feel the absurdity of the commonplace and of language—its falseness—is already to have gone beyond it. To go beyond it we must first bury ourselves in it.” (qtd in Esslin, 115) Kaufman’s characters bury themselves in the cliché of social interaction and the blank repetition of stereotype, in order to suggest the possibility of a way out. As Ionesco wrote, “To attack the absurdity (of the human condition) is a way of stating the possibility of non-absurdity. …For where else would there be a point of reference?” (qtd. in Esslin, 164)

In another demonstration of the communicative possibilities of dismantling language, Foreign Man often broke down into tears because he forgot what he was supposed to do next, or because of his expressed confusion over whether the audience was laughing with or at him. His crying would intensify into a hysterical bleating, heightened to maximum effect. It would then become rhythmic as he moved to the conga drum, making music of the overperformed shame of failing to entertain. These emotional histrionics resemble the latter portions of The Bald Soprano, when the parody of our already artificially performed social interactions has reached a melodramatic frenzy.

Ionesco’s original solution for ending the play after it had reached this hysterical pitch was a very Kaufmanesque turn: “Ionesco had planned to let the maid, at the height of the quarrel, announce ‘the Author,’ after which the author would appear, the actors would respectfully step aside and applaud him while the author would approach the footlights with sprightly steps, but suddenly raise his fists and shout at the audience, ‘You bunch of crooks! I’ll get you!’” (Esslin, 112) Kaufman used a variety of means to directly confront the audience—the examples are almost too numerous to cite. His goal often seemed to be to provoke, confront, incite. He almost certainly would have agreed with Ionesco’s assertion that, “An artistic creation is by its very novelty aggressive, spontaneously aggressive; it is directed against the public, against the bulk of the public; it causes indignation by its unusualness, which is itself a form of indignation.” (qtd. in Esslin, 138) Even when he wasn’t telling them they were idiots as Tony Clifton, pulling the rug out from under them with his many tricks and reversals, challenging them to wrestle, etc., Kaufman’s audiences were often left in a state of indignation. What other responses—besides profound befuddlement and anger—could an audience have after paying for the privilege of watching a man silently making carrot juice, displaying a cyst on his neck, or lying perfectly still inside a zipped-up sleeping bag? One stage direction in Ionesco’s play Jack, or the Submission, reads: “All this must produce in the audience a feeling of embarrassment, awkwardness, and shame.” (qtd. in Esslin, 121) Esslin quotes one critic saying Ionesco fails because his work is “unbearable nervously as well as aesthetically,” and rebuts the notion thus: “Yes this is precisely what [it] is supposed to be—unbearable. For in spite of its being laced with a bitter, farcically tragic humor, Ionesco’s is a far harsher convention of the theatre than one based on mere pleasantness.” (Esslin, 148) If one sure thing could be said of Kaufman’s work, it is that is was never meant to be simply a nice way to spend a night at a comedy club. The variety of responses, beyond laughter, intended and elicited by Kaufman is the reason so many feel uncomfortable labeling him as a comedian and continue to seek an alternative way to contextualize his work (a process that continues, of course, even with this article).

The ending Ionesco settled on for The Bald Soprano—after his producers rejected his proposal to storm the stage and scream at the audience—was to reset the play back to the beginning, a move also used in plays by Beckett, Pinter, and Genet, and used again by Ionesco in his second play, The Lesson. Esslin writes that the characteristic plays of the Theatre of the Absurd “have a circular shape, returning to the initial situation, a zero from which the preceding action is seen to be futile, so that it would have made no difference if it had never happened.” (Esslin, 156) This is the formula, too, for that most famous of Foreign Man’s performances: turning into Elvis Presley. After doing a series of non-imitations—which Victoria Beyer points out are only repetitions of the announcement of the imitation—Foreign Man would transform into Elvis. He would sing an entire song, do some characteristic stage patter, throw portions of his clothes into the audience—he would mimic an entire performance, until the audience had forgotten the caterpillar and were fully invested in the butterfly. Then, in an instant, he would revert back to his original state, and as Foreign Man deliver what was both his and Elvis’s catchphrase, “Thank you very much.”

The concept of transformation, and of opposites containing each other’s identities, was an important one to Ionesco. He said that the subject of his play The Picture is “metamorphosis, treated… parodistically to disguise, out of bashfulness, its serious significance.” (qtd. in Esslin, 137) While at university, Ionesco wrote two essays, one lambasting and the other praising the same school of authors. He published them, “side by side, under the title No!, to prove the possibility of holding opposite views on the same subject, and the identity of contraries.” (Esslin, 107) A monologue from another of his plays, Victims of Duty, seems to sum up Ionesco’s thoughts on the subject: “We are not ourselves. Personality doesn’t exist. Within us are only forces that are either contradictory or not contradictory… The characters lose their forms in the formlessness of becoming. Each character is not so much himself as another.” (qtd. in Esslin, 127)

Not only does Kaufman’s work on stage and television continually operate under the assumption of this thesis—the Foreign Man/Elvis performance discussed above, Kaufman’s continual transformations and announcements that “This is the real me”—but he lived his life in much the same way. The vegetarian, Transcendental Meditation-dedicated Andy Kaufman would sublimate his identity into that of the meat-eating, smoking, drinking, Tony Clifton for days at a time, replacing his innocent speech patterns and quiet nature with a gruff, profanity-inflected loudmouth. Kaufman needed Clifton: each proved the existence of the other. Ionesco wrote, “Two fundamental states of consciousness are at the root of all my plays. …These two basic feelings are those of evanescence on the one hand, and heaviness on the other; of emptiness and of an overabundance of presence; of the unreal transparency of the world, and of its opaqueness.” (qtd. in Esslin, 128) One state of being isn’t enough—only when an identity is coupled with its antithesis can we glimpse the true state of being. Esslin puts it simply: “For Ionesco, the author of No!, that early essay on the identity of opposites, it would not be difficult to hold a belief and to parody it at the same time.” (Esslin, 128)

Kaufman’s and Ionesco’s conception of the comic are both rooted in an essential conflation of comedy and the horrors produced by modern life. Ionesco wrote, “I have never been able to understand the difference between the comic and the tragic. As the comic is the intuition of the absurd, it seems to me more conducive to despair than the tragic.” (qtd. in Esslin, 158) Over and over in Zehme’s biography, as well as in Bob Zmuda’s insider portrait Andy Kaufman Revealed!, Kaufman is quoted as saying that he didn’t understand why people laughed at a lot of the things he did. He famously asserted that he never told a joke in his professional life and insisted he was a “song and dance man.” The truth of the matter is that he did want people to laugh—amongst many other responses. Victoria Beyer wrote that, “Kaufman’s strategies of humor are meant to have the audiences experience a variety of emotions, ranging from delight and feeling deeply moved, to boredom, pity, feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed, or even angry, ashamed and insulted.” (Beyer, 138) One of the funniest things about his material is that the issues he was confronting are dead serious. The same holds true for Ionesco, to whom I shall give the last word: “Humor makes us conscious, with a free lucidity, of the tragic or desultory condition of man. …To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying.” (qtd. in Esslin,158)

Works cited.

Beyer, Victoria. Limits and Laughter: The Comedy of Lenny Bruce and Kaufman. Doctoral thesis, University of Duisberg-Essen: 2007.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd, revised edition. Anchor Books, New York: 1969.
Keller, Florian. Andy Kaufman: Wrestling with the American Dream. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 2005.
Zehme, Bill. Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman. Delacorte Press, New York: 1999.

24 Words Per Film (#62)

2010-01-22T16:27:00.001-08:00

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Visually less interesting than Wes Anderson's last three films, but just as heartbreaking, hilarious, and true, as anything he's ever done.

24 Words Per Film (#61)

2010-01-22T16:24:00.000-08:00

Robert Downey became my personal deity after adlibbing "What the hell in a hootenanny?" in both Wonder Boys and Scanner Darkly. Bow down, mortals!

24 Words Per Film (#60)

2010-01-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

Avatar is the hands down prettiest movie anybody has made lately, but every movie Cameron's ever made could've used a screenwriter. Poor Giovanni Ribisi!

24 Words Per Film (#59)

2010-01-22T16:17:00.001-08:00

A bi-plane dodging a subway train made me as gleeful as any of my youthful cinematic epiphanies--and sometimes that's what it's all about.

24 Words Per Film (#58)

2010-01-22T16:14:00.001-08:00

Whereas the Coens deftly attached images to No Country's blank description, Hillcoat turns in a less visual film than the book it's based on.

24 Words Per Film (#57)

2010-01-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

The Hangover: Is it the film or my projections that make Galifianakis' "Alan" the spiritual center here, somehow grounding the immaturity through greater absurdity.

Man Ray #3

2009-08-18T16:25:00.001-07:00

Shepard Fairey & the Obama/Joker/Socialism Poster

2009-08-17T13:32:00.000-07:00

Shepard Fairey’s infamous “Obey” series was interesting because it juxtaposed several streams from different parts of the pop. cultural landscape and left it for the viewer to impose meaning on the resulting image. His original “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker morphed into the Andre “Obey” icon that was then used as the basis for a thousand new pieces, each incorporating either the image or word from the generative original. Each also developed the skateboard/punk aesthetic of the sticker by adding more stylistic markers (most obviously the Russian Constructivism that has dominated much of his recent work).

Fairey’s work has often seemed to claim for itself some political message: vague, but invariably left-skewing. What made it so powerful as a meme, though, was its openness and infinite reproducibility. When Fairey decided to endorse Obama’s presidential bid with the almost self-parodying “Hope” campaign, all of the tension that resulted in the juxtaposition of the earlier work was drained out, leaving only one possible signification. As I’m sure has been said before, the images didn’t parody propaganda, like much of the earlier work had, they were propaganda.

The aforementioned openness and reproducibility of Fairey’s work makes it particularly potent material for further parody and recombination. Two examples are below. The first takes a shot of Obama and superimposes it on the original “Andre has a Posse” sticker, keeping Andre’s measurements in the corner but replacing the text with Obama’s name.

The other is a spot-on parody of the “Hope” posters which replaces Obama with Heath-Ledger-as-the-Joker and changes the text to read “Joke.”

This image, as far as I can tell, received none of the outcry of a very similar image popping up all over the place in the last two weeks that also combines Obama’s image with that of the Joker from The Dark Knight. (see top of the article)

All sorts of trumped-up claims have been made about the Obama-Joker-socialism poster by those on either side of the political divide, according to a piece written by Whitney Phillips
on Henry Jenkins blog. On my trolls through the comments sections of various blogs I found (amongst other hyperbole) people calling the poster racist for all sorts of different reasons. Some said that it was making fun of Obama for being whitewashed, while others claimed it was a plea for Obama to become more “white.” One said it was impossible to look at the image without thinking of black-face and minstrelsy. The LA Weekly said, “all that’s missing is the noose.”

In an article headlined “Shepard Fairey has ‘doubts’ about intelligence of Obama Joker artist,” the LA Times blog interviews Fairey. First he claims that the one-word text in the poster (“socialism”) is grammatically incorrect—which, since grammar is defined as “the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed” makes me somewhat doubt Fairey’s intelligence. When he goes on to say that his “frustration with Bush was fueled by a very clear understanding of what's going on,” but that his artwork depicting Bush as a vampire was nonetheless a “one-dimensional presentation,” my doubts are pretty much confirmed.

Fairey’s analysis of the Obama-Joker-socialism poster—in which he says, “I don’t agree with the political content of the poster”—falls victim to the same assumptions that many other analyses of the poster have. They assume two things: that the poster is meant to imply that Obama is a socialist, and that this is meant to portray him as evil. Maybe the maker of the poster thinks that socialism is good. Maybe the maker of the poster is ironically mocking other people’s appraisal of Obama as a socialist, and using the Joker imagery to suggest that he’s more complex or misunderstood than all that. Maybe…

In the LA Times article, Fairey says that the poster “gets a point across very quickly” because "The Joker is a sinister, evil character.” Perhaps the Joker is sinister and evil, but the fascination with the Heath Ledger incarnation of the character goes deeper than that. He may be a badguy, but he also screws over all of the other badguys, burns the money he makes from the caper, and explicitly states that his goal is to subvert the dominant paradigm and reject all “scheming” and “planning” since some of the people in power’s idea of things going “according to plan” involves trucks full of soldiers being blown up. And he’s most certainly not a socialist: besides having in common some of the romantic surface aura of the Marxist radical, the Joker is very obviously an anarchist.

What most disappoints about Fairey’s assumption that he very quickly gets the point of the Obama-Joker-socialism poster is that he doesn’t afford it the same transformative space that his own (pre-“Hope”) work operated in. The maker of the poster is relying on our familiarity with a whole range of concepts and pop. cultural images. It trusts us to bring our own feelings to the table about Obama, socialism, the Joker, Heath Ledger, the Dark Knight, and any other signs the viewer may perceive as being referenced (minstrelsy included). It has an openness that precludes our ability to apprehend “a point… very quickly.”

Just as Fairey’s “Obey” series would have often prompted the response, “Obey what (or who)?,” the Obama-Joker-socialism poster may very likely prompt us to say, “What about Obama, the Joker, and socialism?” The LA Times backs up Fairey’s elitist response that it’s probably not even made by an artist with the assertion that it could have been created by so lowly a figure as “a kid with a pirated copy of Photoshop or a middle-aged guy looking to spread a message.” For me, that message is: think about what the images the world bombards you with mean; about how they interact with each other, and about what different combinations of them might signify. I always thought that’s what Shepard Fairey’s art was supposed to do, too.

24 Words Per Film (#56)

2009-08-13T11:20:00.001-07:00

Carrie Fisher’s short performance is brilliant. Not sure I buy the political stuff, but it still serves to give the romance oriented plot resonance.

Shampoo (1975); dir. Hal Ashby, written by Robert Towne & Warren Beatty.

Kluth Von Reuter

2009-07-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

Two of my most brilliant friends, the multi-talented Bay Area artists Mary Anne Kluth & Bryan Von Reuter make up just about the most culturally perceptive couple around, sponging up all that is interesting, thought-provoking, annoying, or plain amusing in the world. When they tell me about something, I usually want to hear about it. For the past several months they have been offering this service to the world at large on their blog Kluth Von Reuter which they describe as "what we looked at on the internet today." It's a worthy perch to rest an elbow on during your daily travels on the internet: go check it out.

One of today's entries was on the try-outs for a (possibly) upcoming Bravo reality show--like Project Runway for art kids. My "Best postironic conceptual gambit in under a minute?": call the show "15 Minutes" and literally give every contestant fifteen minutes of screentime with which to do whatever they wish. No competitions, no prizes, just FAME.

Images: top by Kluth, above by Von Reuter

Man Ray (#2)

2009-07-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

24 Words Per Film (#55)

2009-07-27T20:56:00.000-07:00

A certain ambiguity of emotion deepens the slowburn plot of Down in the Valley. The wonderful cast holds its own amidst much visual symbolism.

Down in the Valley (2005); written&directed by David Jacobson; starring Edward Norton with Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin, Kat Dennings, Bruce Dern, et al.

Man Ray (#1)

2009-07-25T17:11:00.000-07:00

For no other reason than that your humble Projectionist is in awe of the Man (and has the necessary access), I will be presenting a Man Ray photo every so often, on the same haphazard schedule as the Polish Film Poster of the Moment.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2009-07-24T22:53:00.001-07:00

Saddle the Wind (1965); artist: Maria Syska

Below: another poster by the artist from the same year, for the Cary Grant film Monkey Business.

24 Words Per Film (#54)

2009-07-24T19:17:00.000-07:00

Contempt’s characters aren’t much like real people. Bardot’s not as captivating as Karina. However, these are some of Godard’s boldest images. Viva Jack Palance!

24 Words Per Film (#53)

2009-07-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

Using Rowlands as his surrogate generally delimited Cassavetes’ mysogyny. Chinese Bookie has no Rowlands, no female p.o.v., much fragmentation/objectification of the female body.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/1978); written/directed by John Cassavetes; starring Ben Gazzara, with Timothy Carey and Seymour Cassel.

24 Words Per Film (#52)

2009-07-20T19:29:00.001-07:00

A defense of the D&D/Ren. Faire lifestyle--with Paul Rudd, children cursing, State cast cameos, jokes about Kiss galore, and a climactic swordfight.

24 Words Per Film (#51)

2009-07-18T14:04:00.001-07:00

Sublime moments amidst (somehow adorably) bleak romantic comedy: from a heart-attack, cut to a stray dog running; and Ilona’s smile after Nikander’s darkest comment.

Shadows in Paradise (1986); written/directed by Aki Kaurismaki; starring Matti Pellonpaa, Kati Outinen.

24 Words Per Film (#50)

2009-07-17T01:04:00.000-07:00

To great effect, the darkest—and most focused on romance—of the series. (And, Harry, I would’ve taken Luna Lovegood to the party, too.)

24 Words Per Film (#49)

2009-07-17T00:47:00.001-07:00

Perfectly illustrates Eve Sedgwick’s triangle: Thurman is capital in an exchange of male friendship. Deniro balks, resorting to ‘chivalrous’ fistfighting to win the girl.

24 Words Per Film (#48)

2009-07-16T14:47:00.001-07:00

Match Factory Girl: Wonderfully concise compositions depict world's quietest revenge fantasy, punctuated by a total lack of conversation, great tunes, and some ink-black comedy.

Interpreting Foucault's Author Function through "House of Leaves"

2009-06-29T11:11:00.001-07:00

House of Leaves¹ is a novel that constantly reminds us it is being written, and, further, constantly reminding us of “who” is doing the writing. It presents a document called “The Navidson Record,” a critical commentary on a documentary film with the same title, which we are told was written by Zampanò. This Zampanò has died, and the manuscript was found by a fellow named Johnny Truant, who includes his own introduction and notes—which are mainly concerned with his inability to finish reading/stop being obsessed with the book. A final level of mediation is that of “the Editors,” who make occasional comments in a neutral tone. The limit point of the mediation—the essential story that we are being told—is that of the Navidson family, the characters in the “documentary” made by the family’s patriarch who move into a new house and find that it is infinitely larger inside than outside. But there are three authorial mediators between that story and us.

Foucault begins and ends his discussion of the author function, “What is an Author?,” by quoting Beckett: “What does it matter who is speaking?” (Foucault 101) Considering the proliferation of names authorizing portions of the text in House of Leaves, we are evidently meant to consider this question in relation to it. The title page is traditionally where one would go to find author information. The one in this book is spread across two pages, pgs. ii-iii. Pg. ii has the words “Mark Z. Danielewski’s” and nothing else. The following page features the information “House of Leaves by Zampanò with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant.” (Danielewski, iii) The author’s identity has become multiple before we’ve even entered the book. This multiplicity of voices serves to constantly make us consider “who is speaking” as we’re reading.

House of Leaves differs from a conventional novel with multiple first-person narrators in the way it attempts to have its fictions intrude on “our reality.” As I Lay Dying, for instance, is credited to William Faulkner; its title page doesn’t read “by Darl, with additional material by Dewey Dell, Vardaman, et al.” Additionally, the various styles in House of Leaves aren’t meant to replicate voices but texts; but this differs still from a classic epistolary novel. In, say, Dracula, the collection of letters, journal entries, and newspaper clippings are all presented on the same level of fictional discourse. But the texts in House of Leaves are layered in a chain of associations, each referring back to another.

We know which “author” is responsible for which text simply from the look of the words, before we’ve even parsed them for content, because each is presented in its own font, making explicit and literal Foucault’s observation that “the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text…” (Foucault 107) The text insists, visually and otherwise, that we constantly consider which of the fictional authors’ discourses we’re currently experiencing. “Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality.” (Foucault 102) The author puts on mask after mask. This book is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but is by one of its fictional characters (Zampanò), with remarks by another (Johnny Truant). It is precisely not Danielewski’s

identity that undersigns each constituent part of the text.

However, turning from the title page to the copyright info on the following one,² we see that Mark Z. Danielewski holds the copyright to this novel. This proper name/historical personage, then, is performing the first of the “characteristic traits of the author function” pointed out by Foucault: “the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.” (Foucault 113) Danielewski is legally responsible for the text, he owns the intellectual rights to it, and it is he who will take the

blame for its transgressions. In a process that “one might call penal appropriation,” Foucault writes, texts “really began to have authors… to the extent that authors became subject to punishment.” (Foucault 108) But this cuts two ways: the author both “owns” and can be “blamed” for the text. Foucault argues that, in rejection of “a system of ownership for texts”—and the rights and privileges being an “author” afford—transgression became “an imperative peculiar to literature. It as if the author… compensated for the status that he thus acquired by systematically… practicing transgression and thereby restoring danger to a writing which was now guaranteed the benefits of ownership.” (Foucault 108-109)

One of the transgressions Danielewski attempts to enact is the dissolving of his identity behind a multiplicity of fictional mediators. Foucault writes that “today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression… it is a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.” (Foucault 102) Danielewski’s book is made up of parodies of other types of discourses, each performing different characteristics of the author function at different times, and the relationship between them serving to illuminate that “in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly either to the writer or to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work.” (Foucault 112) Zampanò’s voice is a parody of critical discourse, and we can see him acting on Navidson, the protagonist/maker of “The Navidson Record,” in the role of critic described by Foucault: “try[ing] to give this intelligible being a realistic status…a ‘deep’ motive, a ‘creative’ power…” (Foucault 110) That we see this role performed is important, as it highlights the normally obscured fact that “these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection… of the operations that we force texts to undergo.” (Foucault 110) Johnny Truant, as well as narrating his own story in a freewheeling grammar-challenged parody of first-person narrative, also performs a readership of Zampanò’s text, and in this he is closer to the example Foucault gives of “the self that speaks in the preface to a treatise on mathematics… one that speaks to tell the work’s meaning, the obstacles encountered, and the remaining problems.” (Foucault 112)

The final level of mediation, “the Editors,” enacts an even deeper form of connection to critical discourse than Zampanò does—to criticism as an institution. Foucault discusses “the four modalities according to which modern criticism brings the author function into play,” defining the author as, variously, “a constant level of value,” “conceptual or theoretical coherence,” “stylistic unity,” and “a historical figure.” (Foucault 111) By organizing the text, marking out different portions of it to be authorized by different voices, even stamping the voices visually, the Editors are performing as modern criticism, fixing the author in place. That they ultimately fail to unify the texts they present, to “neutralize thecontradictions,” demonstrates Foucault’s point that modern criticism needs to move beyond “Saint Jerome’s four criteria of authenticity.” (Foucault 111)

The Editors fail because the contradictions built into “The Navidson Record” are impossible to rectify. They’re more like paradoxes—trying to make sense of them would make you crazy. Johnny Truant is put in this position as he tries to read it, just as the main character in it, Navidson himself, is driven crazy trying to make sense of the spatial anomaly in his house. As readers we wallow in the interpretation of the text. Truant points out that Zampanò has the position of the anomalous hallway in the Navidson house changing: “Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe there’s some underlying logic to the shift. Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.” (Danielewski 57) This lackadaisical approach to the material seems to be endorsed by Zampanò as a defense against the obsessive need to reconcile paradox. He offers the Navidson children’s response to the anomalous hallway haunting their parents as a positive example: “The children, however, just accepted it. They raced through the closet. They played in it. They inhabited it. They denied the paradox by swallowing it whole. …children do not know the laws of the world well enough yet to fear the ramifications of the irreconcilable. There are certainly no primal associations with spatial anomalies.” (Danielewski 39) This fear is new. It’s a product of the desire to unify everything, a product of rational thought. Paradox disappears if we “swallow it whole”; attempting to take it apart and reconcile the parts with each other is how to let the text devour you. Each of the “four modalities by which modern criticism brings the author function into play” is concerned with wholeness: it conceives of the author as a totality that “serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge…” (Foucault 111) I believe that Foucault is arguing that because criticism is still based on these criteria, the same old questions will continue to proliferate: “Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?” (Foucault 119) Danielewski’s multi-layered text serves to illustrate assorted characteristics of the author function, his consistent attempt to disappear into his text perhaps helping to point the way towards Foucault’s “form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author.” (Foucault 119)

Foucault writes that “manifested in the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics” is a “relationship between writing and death…” (Foucault 102) Even the fictional creators within the world of House of Leaves are put into the position described by Foucault: “reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.” (Foucault 102-103) Both versions of “The Navidson Record”—Zampanò’s book and Navidson’s film—are left behind by dead men, but they are not

representative of the “old tradition exemplified by the Greek epic, which was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero.” (Foucault 102) These records do not make their creators immortal. Navidson dies shooting his film, and it is one of the central paradoxes of the text that there is no way for the tapes to have been edited by him or indeed recovered at all; Zampanò includes a note to possible publishers of his work implying that only if readers “dismiss this enterprise out of hand” will you “know… you truly are prosperous” (Danielewski xix); an unattributed note rendered in Truant’s font which is placed between the foreword and introduction reads “This is not for you,” on an otherwise blank page. (Danielewski ix) On every level we are told to turn away from the text; part of the game is daring you not to play it.

“Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its own limits.” (Foucault 102) House of Leaves’ multiple texts are layered: each author is also a reader of a prior version of the text and thus performs a readership by presenting and commenting on that prior text. The Editors are telling us not to trust Truant: “we have never actually met Mr. Truant…” (Danielewski 4). Truant is constantly telling us that Zampanò is making all this up—after all, how could a blind man write so descriptively about a film?; Zampanò is merely describing a supposedly documentary film he says might be “a hoax of exceptional quality.” (Danielewski 3) Each narrator in turn is pointing to another more primary text.³ This hallway being endless, though, the chain eventually stretches all the way back around: Navidson, who we have understood as the fictional limit point at the end of the chain, is revealed to be in possession of a book called House of Leaves. (Danielewski 465) He burns it, first for reading light, then just for light. Navidson’s burning of the book—which is both the book we’re reading and a book-within-a-film-within-the-text that makes up that book—represents the final transgression of Danielewski’s game. He attempts to burn the text itself, to negate it, make it disappear. Navidson says, “I have nothing left… I’m no longer sitting on anything… whatever it was is gone. I’m floating or falling or I don’t know what.” (Danielewski 468) This text is printed upside down. All foundations have been removed. All limits transgressed. Navidson soon dies, making the recovery of his tapes, and thus the existence of our text, impossible.

The major irony in using House of Leaves to illustrate the ideas in “What is an Author?” is that I’ve had to construct the authors of those texts in order to discuss them. I have frequently used the name “Foucault” to represent the concepts discussed in “What is an Author?” and have painstakingly unified the multiplicity of texts in House of Leaves under the sign “Danielewski.” I have seemingly done just what Foucault accuses modern criticism of doing, falling back on the fact that “the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions and diverse modifications…” (Foucault 111) I have used the name Foucault to represent “a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence” and the name Danielewski to “neutralize the contradictions that…emerge in a series of texts.” (Foucault 111) These names, though, are only representations of the texts, just as within House of Leaves Johnny Truant and Zampanò are only personas constructed to mobilize different forms of discourse. We must remember that: “It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance.” (Foucault 112) I would like to consider my inability to move outside the deployment of the author function not a failure, but only an illustration of how imperative the message in “What is an Author?” still is. We obviously still do not have a form of culture in which fiction is not limited by the figure of the author.

¹ All references are to Random House’s ISBN 0-375-70376-4 (paperback) 2-Color edition of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Pantheon Books, New York: 2000.

² The copyright page contains another example of the fictional world intruding into the real one. Just as the title page features the names of fictional characters, the standard warning about the fictional contents of the text is highly personalized and signed by “the Editors,” one of the fictional voices in the text.

³ In fact, this may be true of the book as a whole. The sales pitch on the inside front-cover flap begins: “Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the internet.”

Acknowledgement to Laura Yim at SFSU, in whose Theory of Lit. course I was prompted to use a work of art to elucidate an aspect of critical theory.

Please comment on the savage inaccuracy of my ideas, my overall lack of intellectual rigor, fundamental misunderstanding of Foucault's ideas, etc.

24 Words Per Film (#47)

2009-06-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

If "melodramas" packed this much punch, the genre'd be ripe for resurrection. Alas, Lumet's use of the term merely seems old-fashioned--howzabout "family thriller"?

24 Words Per Film (#46)

2009-06-18T14:26:00.000-07:00

Some of Peckinpah's attempts at comedy are, frankly, ridiculous, but some very likable performances are to be found before a strange and beautiful ending.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2009-06-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

This time: Elephant Man (2009); artist: Lezsek Zebrowski

Ed Says: I've generally shied away from posting new posters for old films: they smack a little too much of trying to to create an objet d'art, rather than an advertisement for a film that accidentally becomes art. But this one, for David Lynch's classic film, was too beautiful to pass up. (Note the use of Polish Film Poster technique #1: obscuring the eyes.) Below is the same artist's take on Amelie, also from this year.

24 Words Per Film (#45)

2009-06-14T18:17:00.001-07:00

If it's called Taken, the half hour before the kidnapping isn't foreshadowing, only wasting time. However, Neeson is utterly convincing as the ass-kicking retiree.

24 Word Per Film (#44)

2009-06-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

One killer action sequence and limited expansion to the Terminator mythology can't save Salvation from Bale's phoned-in performance; nor can weird "Young Arnold" cameo.

24 Words Per Film (#43)

2009-04-11T14:04:00.000-07:00

Sunshine Cleaning's terrific script, and two subtly powerful lead actresses, anchor a family story refreshingly devoid of cutesiness or melodrama. And absolutely no pie.

24 Words Per Film (#42)

2009-01-01T23:55:00.000-08:00

88 Minutes too many. I haven't enjoyed a Pacino performance since he started SCREAMING...BETWEEN.... PAUSES! Whatever happened to understated Al of Godfather I?

24 Words Per Film (#41)

2009-01-01T23:31:00.000-08:00

Wiggappropriation of 'gangsta culture'; teenage lesbian homoerotica; gang initiation gangbang; faux-documentary lameness: audience agreement with Anne Hathaway's repeated sentiment: "We are totally fucking bored."

Havoc (2005); dir. Barbara Kopple; written by Steven Gaghan; starring Anne Hathaway, Bijou Phillips, Freddy Rodriguez

24 Words Per Film (#40)

2009-01-01T22:52:00.000-08:00

A rape victim blames herself for the perpetrator's repeat offenses amidst jump-cuts/disorienting series of pans proving early Oshima's reputation as "the Japanese Godard."

Violence at Noon (1966); dir. Nagisa Oshima; d.p.: Akira Takada; starring Akiko Koyama, Ryoko Takahara, Kei Sato

24 Words Per Film (#39)

2009-01-01T22:22:00.000-08:00

Dramatizes the suffocating, incestuous, struggle to break free from familial duty through series of ceremonies; the primal scene as viewed from a baseball mound.

The Ceremony (1971); dir.: Nagisa Oshima; d.p.: Tsutomu Narushima.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2008-12-19T14:16:00.000-08:00

This time: The Bachelor Party (1960); artist: Wojciech Wenzel

Ed says: This is a poster for the 1957 film The Bachelor Party, made in 1960 by Mr. Wenzel. Below is a poster for a Polish film made in 1957 by the same artist. Confused? Enjoy!

Earbuds, the Shuffle, and thousands & thousands of songs: the iPod's impact on culture

2008-12-19T13:24:00.000-08:00

The question of whether technological devices structure the nature of society, or are merely a representation of pre-existing societal forces, is one that is fraught with ambiguity and complications. Those very same aspects of culture that seem to be amplified by society’s embrace of a certain technological device were often present in a less prevalent form at that device’s creation. In the case of the iPod, we have the added issue of intending to examine the culture we are immersed in, and discussing a specific device that almost no one of my generation hasn’t at least tried out. For many of us, use of the iPod has become completely naturalized. The ubiquity of headphone-wearing, the ease of access to a vast library of song, and the schizophrenic mode of listening defined by the shuffle function, have all become such common aspects of our experience of music that we have stopped thinking about them. Each of these cultural trends existed before the iPod—and each of them has been significantly impacted by it. I intend to discuss each of these topics in turn, tracking their development independent of the iPod, then looking at how their use by the iPod has affected them, and culture in turn.

1. Headphones & Earbuds

One trend of modern urban society that we can decidedly say was not birthed by the iPod itself is the ubiquity of headphones in public places, especially commute situations. But, we can assert with equal assurance that the look and flavor of the ‘headphone revolution’ has been indicated by the iPod. In fact, I should have probably used the phrase ‘earbud revolution’ a moment ago, as the sight of the white, Apple-issued earbuds is a sure sign that the wearer is listening to an iPod—and about ninety percent of headphones worn in public are earbuds. (Figure estimated from my own experience as a daily public transit traveler.) The mid-80s popularity of the Sony Walkman first detached headphones from their cultural position as the exclusive province of the audiophile subculture. Headphones had long been used professionally, of course, but had only been used in the amateur realm by those interested in deeper immersion into the music, or the technical intricacies of recording (and by a drug-influenced subset of same). This use took place in the home, and headphones were much bigger and designed to provide a direct and accurate representation of the music without the distortion inherent in amplification and the physical fact of your ears’ distance from the source of the sound. But the Walkman took headphone usage out of the home, while vastly reducing both their size and the quality of sound they were capable of producing.

With the introduction of the Sony Discman in the 90s, headphone use continued to grow, and quality was brought into the low-end of the market due to consumer desire to hear CDs with more clarity than they had heard their old cassette tapes. The earbud style of headphone, too, had been experimented with before the advent of the iPod, but there is no doubt that their intense popularity in the last several years is due to their being packaged with each new iPod sale. The recognizability of the white earbud was one of many brilliant marketing tools Apple used in the launch of their product. Since the iPod is designed to be easily tucked away and hidden on your person, the conspicuousness of your consumption of it is questionable. However, as I look out at a sea of white earbuds on the BART train in the morning commute, I have no doubt about how many iPods are currently in use in my immediate community.

I doubt I am the first to point out the social disconnect that follows from a large segment of the population isolating themselves in personal sound environments. People passing each other on the street are much less likely to say hello, or even smile at each other, if they are closed off behind headphones. They are probably less likely to react to an emergency, or the non-urgent needs of the people around them. It also seems to me that by wearing headphones we are enacting less participation in the public realm, in the shared social experience, than those who are using all five of their senses to take in the particular space and time they happen to find themselves in that moment. I don’t mean to suggest that these basically negative effects are absolutes. I have observed people wearing headphones being courteous to those around them—indeed, paying extra attention to their surroundings and to the needs of those in their immediate environments, because they knew they were handicapping themselves from the social situation in some way. When I am wearing headphones myself I often try to maintain some level of contact and connection with the world.

In “The Aural Walk,” Iain Chambers discusses the impact of the Walkman on culture. Insofar as the iPod is a contemporary equivalent of Sony’s 80’s innovation, his comments are rather useful. He writes that, “the Walkman has offered access to a portable soundtrack that… is, above all, an intensely private experience. However, such a refusal of public exchange and apparent regression to individual solitude also involves an unsuspected series of extensions. With the Walkman there is simultaneously a concentration of the auditory environment and an extension of our individual bodies.” (99) So when we are wearing our headphones in the public realm, we are immersing ourselves in a private space, but not closing our physical bodies off from the world. On the contrary, we are bringing our private selves into the public realm by existing as one inside the other—“concentration of the auditory environment and an extension of our individual bodies.” Chambers is arguing that the essential nature of listening to music through headphones in public is not cutting yourself off from the world, but pushing a new, personal vision into it: “For the meaning of the Walkman does not necessarily lie in itself… but in the extension of perceptive potential. …the apparent vacuity of the Walkman opens up the prospect of a passage in which we discover… those other cities that exist inside the city.” (99) A private—even secret—world is made visible to us as we encase ourselves in headphones and begin to see with new ears.

“In the manifest refusal of sociability the Walkman nevertheless reaffirms participation in a shared environment.” (99) Replace the “Walkman” in Chambers’ sentence with “iPod,” then look, again, out onto that sea of white earbuds in the ears of so many of your fellow commuters. Age, ethnicity, even social class, seem to be null issues: anybody might have an iPod. The “shared environment” is, it seems, simply modernity itself. We are all breathing the same air, occupying the same space, living publicly, yet we are doing something private—“the inner secret it brazenly displays in public (what is s/he listening to?)” as Chambers puts it. (100) This seems to indicate that far from being a practice of isolating yourself from the world and closing yourself off from it, by doing something so private in public you are rather opening yourself out to it.

2. my iTunes library has 11,505 songs

The mp3 digital file format gained more and more popularity as the 90s drew to a close. The ‘digital downloading’ epidemic spread far and wide, until there was rarely a citizen of the culture that hadn’t heard of Napster and formed an opinion on its legality, ethics, and (probably even) logistics. People began to talk about how much music they had on their computer instead of how many CDs they owned. Then, when the price of CD burners began to drop, CDs were more and more often homemade mixes, rather than factory produced sale items—just as cassette tapes had been in the recent past. Before digital downloading (the free, illegal kind), having a few hundred CDs, cassettes, or albums was a big deal. The monetary investment alone was huge, which lead to discriminating buying practices, and thus ‘collections’ of music. Where three hundred CDs would have been a whole lot of music before, those CDs represented around 3000-4500 songs. Even an older iPod can hold more than twice that much, which has lead to a practice of music accumulation unmatched in previous generations. Music is being gathered, stored, and traded at extraordinary levels. Digesting a whole album’s worth of music isn’t bothered with that much anymore. Pop singles—and the whole culture of disposability, replaceability, and short attention spans that come with them—are reasserting their dominance in that early-60s AM radio way. It’s my opinion that soon the ease of availability of all recorded music, the massive amounts of it being newly recorded, and the even more massive storage capacities coming in the near future, will all lead to a reversal of the swagger and collector mentality currently associated with the ‘my hard drive has 600456 songs’ phenomenon. Perhaps we’ll stop talking about how much music we own, in a consumer sense, and just start talking about which songs and bands we like again.

If we turn to Chambers again, we can see that his discussion of the Walkman predicted a shift of this kind, a shift in the cultural mindset: "The Walkman encourages us to think inside [a] new organisation of time and space. …The technology of space has been supplemented and increasingly eroded by the technology of time: the ‘real time,’ the ‘nanoseconds’ of computer chips and monitor blips, of transitory information on a screen, of sounds snatched in the headphones. It leads to a further dimension. “Speed suddenly returns to become a primitive force beyond the measure of both time and space.” (100) I would argue that the iPod has only intensified this phenomenon. It once again takes a pre-existing cultural condition and magnifies it. Music used to literally take up space: to own it meant to store it in the physical sense. The only storage space necessary for a music collection now is that of the harddrive—what it really takes up is time. Filling up an iPod is easy; listening to all that music is the hard part. The speed that Chambers talks about is always exponentially speeding up, the “technology of time” ever more dominant, the new model iPod always able to store even more music. At some point that number will become so large as to render itself meaningless. All the music will be accessible, and it will be the level of attention that we afford a song that will cause us to count it among ‘our music.’

In his piece “The Future of Music: Credo,” John Cage uses the phrase “organization of sound” to describe a new, modern variation on “music.” (26) I would extend Cage’s idea of including noise and other sound-detritus of the modern world within a musical composition to include everything that a listener experiences concurrent to the act of listening. As many have pointed out, we no longer listen to music as an activity of its own anymore. We use it to supplement life. The iPod allows us to become our own ‘organizers of sound,’ composers of our own modern symphonies. It is an important tool of liberation against media hegemony that allows the individual to consume whatever cultural products he or she desires. Quite contrary to the “nervous” condition of “aberration and drama” that R. Murray Schafer intended when he coined the term “schizophonia,” I embrace the fact that “[s]ounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence.” (34) In his 1973 piece “The Musical Environment,” Schafer writes that “the quadraphonic sound system… provides for the complete portability of acoustic space”—apparently bemoaning this fact. (34) The iPod has obviously upped the ante in acoustic portability considerably, and I believe this is a cause for nothing but celebration for all of the potential ‘organizers of sound’ who were once merely ‘listeners.’

3. Shuffle, personified

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the iPod’s shuffle function is an act of technopomorphism, or the imbuing of human qualities on a machine. I have often heard a new iPod user excitedly testifying about shuffle’s ability to play exactly what they want to hear at the right moment, or about shuffle’s bold choices in musical juxtaposition, as if the shuffle function were a living, breathing DJ who was gauging your reactions and making artistic choices. Of course, it’s all random. Or, rather, it’s all a mathematical algorithm applied in such a manner as to imply chance randomness.

Shuffle functions existed on the six or twelve (or however-many) disc changers that became popular near the end of the CDs reign as the most popular delivery format for recorded music. But because only that limited amount of albums could be mixed together at any given time, the ‘choices’ that the shuffle could make were much more closely based on the decisions of the user. Those particular CDs were loaded into the machine before the shuffle button was pushed. With an iPod, all of the music in the library was, of course, at one point chosen by the user and loaded into the iPod, but the library is exponentially bigger, so the shuffle function has much more material with which to create the illusion of randomness.

Within this large capacity to create the illusion of randomness, the iPod can often give the impression that it has moods. This is another common remark made by the recent iPod convert. They’ll say their iPod shuffle was “in a quiet mood today” or is “really into the Cure lately,” the commonalities between the songs played being imbued by the listener with the emotional resonance or rational decision making of a human being. But is the shuffle actually taking away agency and the possibility of artistic construction through the musical choices we make—making us give away our capacity to be ‘organizers of sound’? Chambers wrote that the Walkman was “the ultimate musical means in mediating the ambient. For it permits the possibility… of imposing your soundscape on the aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment it can be all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FORWARD, PAUSE, and REWIND buttons.” (100) If we give up the freewill associated with all of these functions, and allow the shuffle to dictate to us what we will listen to, are we giving something up? Do we stop ‘imposing our soundscapes on the aural environment,’ instead settling for a soundscape composed for us by the function of a machine which, despite our best efforts to convince ourselves otherwise, has no personality and does not base its choices on aesthetics?

There’s no doubt that the iPod has made a significant impact on culture. It also seems certain that the iPod is not the origin of the trends it illuminates and solidifies in culture, but merely synergized extant technological functions into a highly convenient and marketable package. Its popularity intensified and made more widespread such cultural affectations as public headphone usage, massive song-file accumulation, and ‘the shuffle.’

Works cited.

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. ed.: Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2007.
Cage, John. “The Future of Music: Credo,” pgs. 25-28.
Chambers, Iain. “The Aural Walk,” pgs. 98-101.
Schafer, R. Murray. “The Music of the Environment,” pgs. 29-39.

Thanks to Dr. Steve Savage of SFSU in whose class "Music, Ideas & Culture" I was prompted to respond to the question "How has the iPod impacted culture?"

Synecdoche, New York: this post is a part that reprensents a whole

2008-11-30T15:01:00.000-08:00

“So people can look up ‘synecdoche’ if they want. And if they do, they might think about some things it might correspond to in the movie, and if it opens up another understanding of the film for them, that would be great.”
--Charlie Kaufman in the press kit for Synecdoche, New York

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, synecdoche is a noun which means, “a figure in which a part stands in for the whole; the whole for the part.” There is an argument that certainly could be made that the part that this whole movie stands in for is the moment just before Caden wakes up on that first morning. The film begins with the time on the alarm clock, and as it is nearing its end, a clock is painted on a wall bearing the same time. Other clues abound. The fact that everything in the film adheres to the same solipsistic logic that Caden’s play does would seem to suggest that it was all happening in his mind if the same couldn’t be said for the protagonist of almost every other Kaufman script. That Kaufman specifically rejects the idea in the press kit—“Let me make it very clear that this film is not a dream”—doesn’t necessarily make it true; I just happen to agree with him.

The metaphor that I believe to be at play with the use of the word synecdoche in the title is that every moment in a person’s life contains within it the entirety of that life. Whether the body of the film “really” takes place in a dream—or in Caden’s mind as he reads the newspaper that morning (giving everything that takes place later resonsance with the world events and medical difficulties he is thinking about right then), or is supposed to be read as an “actual” description of his entire life, or is all a fantasy in the mind of Millicent Weems as she looks out the window and contemplates her own depressing life, or is a metaphoric representation of Caden’s secret life as a homosexual (a theory posited by at least one blogger), or stands in for Caden's suffering from Cotard's Delusion, the syndrome which bears his last name—is inconsequential to me. What matters is that each individual, brilliantly polished scene represents the whole story, just as each moment in our lives is also our entire life in miniature. Paradoxically, that’s why Caden’s play has to have everything in it. Every aspect of life has to be represented, or else none of it can be. Caden doesn’t get the essential lesson that the film is teaching. Each moment is its own meaning. Each specific is the universal. Kaufman says of Caden, “He has a difficult time being present in any situation,” because he is always trying to step back from it and see the big picture, not realizing that those moments he’s missing are the big picture.

It would take a serious amount of critical gymnastics to justify my assertion above that every scene in the film is representative of its whole, but here are a few of the examples that spring readily to mind:

--The art show of Adele’s that Caden attends (“Women I Love”) has paintings of all the women in her life. That they are tiny representations of entire people—they have to be viewed through a microscope—is not a coincidence. Adele has even done a portrait of Millicent Weems, the women Caden hired to play the role of Ellen, Adele’s cleaning woman (a role that Caden plays in real life).

--On her deathbed, Olive does what many do in that situation: look back on their entire life and try to make it adhere to one throughline, one narrative. It is her own life’s retrospective, just as that particular art show was for Adele. And the conversation Caden has with her as she is dying is on the topic of their entire relationship. What is at issue is the essential nature of the betrayal that took place in their family, the moment that has irreperably scarred both of them, and come to represent the entire family history in Caden’s mind.

--Hazel’s house is burning down even before she buys it because “the end is built into the beginning.” The real estate woman advises her that choosing how you’re going to die is an important decision in a person’s life. Both moments, the dying in the fire and the buying the house, are both little portraits of Hazel’s entire life. It burns down for the whole movie because buying then house and dying in that fire defined her.

Please weigh in with your opinions on this one—and point out any factual innacuracies that my single viewing of the film may have caused.

24 Words Per Film (#38)

2008-11-19T15:58:00.000-08:00

"Getting it" is quite beside the point in Synecdoche, New York. Simply marvel at the brave, bold emotions--and the cavalcade of brilliant actresses.

24 Words Per Film (#37)

2008-10-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

Michael Cera hilariously plays himself—again. Despite the sap and teen movie trappings, Nick & Norah’s a fairly delightful love letter to indie rock.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2008-10-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

This Time: Last Year at Marienbad (1992); artist: Wiktor Sadowski

Ed Says: A later-period poster than most of the stuff I've displayed here, but absolutely as gorgeous and enigmatic as Resnais's film--and it uses my favorite recurring motif of the Polish poster, the obscured human face. Sadowski has mostly done theater and opera posters from what I can tell, but below is another beautiful one, for Ken Loach's Riff-Raff.

24 Words Per Film (#36)

2008-10-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

Zellwegger gamely keeps up with director Clooney, who has become a modern master of screwball. And his Leatherheads uses slapstick sparingly, and exceedingly well.

24 Words Per Film (#35)

2008-09-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

Clooney puts his mannered style to manic good use; McDormand/Pitt/Malkovich operate at similarly absurd levels. Simmons/Jenkins/Swinton shine in understated smolder.

24 Words Per Film (#34)

2008-09-16T17:32:00.001-07:00

Smart when focusing on the quirks in its characters; less smart when flubbing cultural references. Maybe it would’ve been better as a period piece.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2008-08-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

This week: Midway (1977); artist: Andrzej Krajewski

Ed Says: I love the bright primary poppiness of this piece--for a war film. Krajewski did a whole bunch of great stuff in this style. Witness The World of Thrills from almost ten years before (1968, below).

24 Words Per Film (#33)

2008-08-10T11:05:00.001-07:00

In Bruges was a rare "holy shit!" experience. The plotline is so tragic that the film's ability to elicit constant laughs is utterly remarkable.

Polish Film Poster of the Moment

2008-08-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

This time: Smokey and the Bandit (1979); artist: Maciej Zbikowski

Ed Says: All of Zbikowki's designs were pretty similar--bright, childish colors and cartoony depictions of the figure--but I love this one for one simple reason: the two cops poking around the sides of Burt's hat. Yee-haw!

"FasTrak" at the Lobot Gallery

2008-08-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

Saturday at Oakland’s Lobot Gallery (1800 Campbell St.) a fine group show called “FasTrak” opened. The show, curated by Daniel Healey & Mary Anne Kluth, displays the work of over a dozen Bay Area artists and will be up through Aug. 23.

The eclectic selection of visual pieces on the wall (their materials lists so often reading “mixed media” that I hesitate to refer to them as simply ‘paintings’) were ably supported by a delightful collection of sculptures and a smattering of other types of work: two videos, a sound loop, and two very different types of installation.

A certain whimsy characterized all of the work, and the feeling swept through even those pieces that I found less personally appealling or fully conceptualized, making even these lesser works integral elements of the overall experience of the show. This whimsical tone—combined with the obsessive attention to our local art community’s regional character that motivated the show’s creation in the first place—is set right at the entrance, where a visitor comes upon a BART system map, a tray a multi-colored pins, and the suggestion to “locate yourself on the map.”

The strongest first impression “FasTrak” made on me was with its array of sculpture. John Casey’s “Cletus” and “Otis” pair of figures loom across the room from each other, reminding some at the opening of more phallic, brightly colored Blue Meanies in jeans and rubber boots.

Darren Hawk’s “Machine,” a weird amalgam of household appliances made entirely of cardboard, juts out from the wall, inviting investigation into its many details.

Another pair of sculptures spreading their limbs across the space are Liz Maher’s “Giving Trees.” Each are freestanding and made of fabric as well as sturdier materials, but it is the differences between them that provides the meaning of the piece. Another viewer described Maher’s work here as “message-heavy,” and I couldn’t disagree—but far from being turned off by its intent, I was impressed that the “Giving Trees” were able to be so charming while carrying such a load. One tree has only artificial goods to offer: Skittles, Fruity Pebbles, gummi worms. Tears at the base ooze white and grow bulbous mushrooms. Its leaves are made from the pages of trash celebrity magazines. The other tree is the organic antithesis of the first. Baskets filled with wheat, beans, and puffs of rice are labelled things like “I am fruitful,” “I am whole,” or “I am surrendering.” Its leaves are made from hearty material, too: science texts, full of charts and information.

But my favorite sculptures on display were the small, soft “Specimens” from Martha Sue Harris, made of “fleece, acrylic, burlap and wood.” I found these pieces fantastically cutesy, their colors and presentation as soft as their materials.

The worldview put forward by the “Specimens” and the slightly less successful “Invader Species (Passing Through)” is nicely filled out by Harris’ two works of acrylic on paper also on display nearby. (Here's one):

The sense of child’s-eye wonderment at the world is also inherant in the abstractions dominating co-curator Mary Anne Kluth’s offering “We Only Preserve What We Love.”

The figures depicted near the bottom left of the composition seem to be tourists at some unimaginably beautiful sight. That they are sight-seeing there does not render the scene banal—it renders the figures ridiculous.

Nearby are two “digital prints” by Leticia Ramirez that combine that innocent eye with intense loneliness and dread. The photographs depict a sad little sculptured man in front of drawn backgrounds. Figure and ground are all in grayscale. In one shot, the man is alone in a room, looking out the window.

In the other, he has seeminly just descended the stairs from a house. It is impossible to view these two pieces together without attaching a narrative to them.

Across the gallery is Michael Cutlip’s messier approach at getting loose and child-like, “Bullies.” Full of scrawled lines, doodled figures, and collaged images, the rather large panel has much of interest and, like much that “FasTrak” has to offer, has a somewhat busy nature that rewards long-term viewing. (Here are a few details):

The most laugh out loud amusing things at the show were the pair of video pieces by Dickson Schneider. Both consist of old t.v. sets with simple images painted on their screens and a “single channel DVD loop” playing on them.

“Car” has a painting of a car driven by a figure and the ground beneath it. The video behind it was apparently shot with a camera fixed to an actual car as it travels around in the East Bay, going down mostly residential streets, stopping at stop signs and, at one point, even getting gas. The other video, “UFO,” has an even simpler painting on it: a small flying saucer in the upper portion of the screen. The video images behind it wave back and forth, simulating the movement of a UFO over familiar East Bay locations (cranes and factories, etc.) Occasionally, the UFO will hover over something for an extended period of time and then shoot out lightning bolts whatever it below it. This never fails to be greeted with giggles.

Other sights and sounds at “FasTrak”:

Mark Edwards’ sound piece “Lobot Loop” gives the opportunity to sit down on a mat on the floor in a public place and isolate yourself from the room with an endless and subtly changing loop of acoustic guitar and computer bleeps.

A crowd of viewers surrounded co-curator Daniel Healey’s two pieces, conversation constantly returning to the nature of the images. Is it painted? The images seem collaged in, but they certainly don’t look like collage. Is it an image transfer? If so, by what means? Take a look for yourself:

The group of John Writer’s child-like multi-media works on display (a lot of marker and stickers) perhaps weren’t as compositionally strong as some of the many similar works I’ve seen on his website.

“I like looking at it but I have no idea what it is about,” I heard someone say about Alexis Amann’s acrylic gouache on cut paper piece “Azazel and the Bearded Ladies.” I feel much the same way. Here are some shots of it I took:

A few of the images I didn't shoot myself came from a Flickr page for the Lobot, and
from John Casey's blog. My thanks to them for using the images without permission. Both sites have more great shots from the show as well. There's also an interview with co-curators Daniel Healey and Mary Anne Kluth at Libby's Niche.

Recuperating Frankenstein's Creature as a Drag Icon

2008-07-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

(Note: This essay discusses the text of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus as it was revised by Mary Shelley in 1831 and published by Random House in 1993. It does not consider other versions of the story, filmed or otherwise.)

Immediately after the moment of his ‘birth,’ Frankenstein’s Creature is abandoned by his creator. The Creature wanders about, attempting to make his way in the world with no education or socialization save that which is stored in the recycled human tissue used to construct his body. He observes the daily activities of a family living at a cottage in the forest, but is able to make little sense of their comings and goings until he finds “on the ground a leathern portmanteau, containing… some books. …They consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter” (Shelley 167). From these few texts—and from his purely specular fascination with the cottagers—Frankenstein’s Creature culls his entire personality. In this way he is like the modern day drag queens that, in Juan A. Suárez’s words, “…acquire their identity through mimesis of pre-existent images and icons, emerging from the already-seen, the already-read, the already-done” (Suárez 192). (See footnote 1.)

Frankenstein made his creature out of disparate parts, and so it contains within its physique multiple identities. It was then assigned a gender, though it was provided no corresponding partner, no completion to the binary implied by the designation of Frankenstein’s Creature as a ‘he.’ Perhaps these attributes suggest a more appropriate comparison with transgender or transsexual individuals. I don’t reject the potency of this metaphor; however, it is the performativity of the Creature’s identity assumption that holds the greater interest for me, and leads me to situate him within the same cultural space as the drag queen.

The books Frankenstein’s Creature finds in the portmanteau (an interesting word choice in retrospect, now that the term has come to mean a fusing together of two words to create something new) teach him everything he comes to know of humanity’s vices, virtues, and laws, its passions, emotions, and customs. “I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom: but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections to admire and love the heroes of past ages” (Shelley 169). The Creature begins to conduct himself in what he imagines to be the manner of these “heroes of past ages” in order to become closer to humans because “I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener” (Shelley 168). He characterizes himself as “miserable beyond all living things” (126) and learns from Paradise Lost that “I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence” (170). Finding himself to be in limbo—a border-crosser, between life and death, between identities— and thus an outcast of the first order, he begins to simulate humanity, finding a role and playing it.

Steven Shaviro calls the body “a flat surface of inscription and reflection, comprising all the image layers that are incised or overlaid upon it” (Shaviro 227). This is true of the body of Frankenstein’s Creature both metaphorically and, in the literal sense, it refers to Victor Frankenstein’s intentions at the act of creating this body. Victor says, “I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organisation… I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make a being of gigantic stature” (Shelley 61). Victor seems to equate the complexity of the being’s physical organization with it’s greatness—the comparison hinging on the double meaning of the word ‘stature.’ He rejects the notion of making a being equal or lesser to himself, instead planning to make one greater. His creature’s body thus serves as Victor Frankenstein’s commentary on humanity, “a flat surface of inscription and reflection.” But it is the Creature himself who uses his identity to reflect—or attempt to mirror—humanity.

Severo Sarduy writes, “The transvestite does not imitate woman… [he] does not copy; he simulates, since there is no norm to invite and magnetize his transformation, to determine his metaphor; instead it is the non-existence of the worshipped being that constitutes… the support of his simulation…” (Sarduy 93). The relationship between the drag queen and womanhood is analogous to that of Frankenstein’s Creature and humanity. The personality he constructs for himself is derived from textual sources and distant observation. He seeks to assume the persona of the “heroes of past ages” just as the drag queen enacts a perpetual recycling of “quotes and images that most often emanate from the stock of Hollywood fantasies” (Suárez 192). Even the original source is a fantasy, a romanticization. Goethe’s (sort of) romance may be of different conception than classic Hollywood’s, but as utopian representatives of lost ideals, their effects are similar. (See note 2.) Meanwhile, Plutarch and Milton dramatize everything from the historical to the spiritual in terms of great battles.

Frankenstein’s Creature is himself somewhat aware of his position as an identity-under-construction. Like “drag queens [who] grasp the fictiveness of this ‘want to be’… [who] understand the constructivist nature of the body better than anybody else,” Frankenstein’s Creature is conscious of himself as a simulacrum (Shaviro 227). He knows that humans consider him other than themselves, so he investigates further into the meaning of humanity. He is deeply disillusioned when the actual actions of men don’t match up to his impressions of “peaceable lawgivers, [like] Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus” (Shelley 170). He mocks humanity, though he ultimately desires to participate in it: “You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!” (Shelley 129). It is not only his manner, and his words here, that mock humanity—it is the Creature’s mere existence.

Because he has ‘played God,’ and brought about something new and somehow unintended, even the Creature’s creator views him as somehow outside of nature, an abomination. When Victor Frankenstein contemplates the possibility of his creature’s ‘species’ populating the earth, he is repulsed and driven to violence. His response strikes me as similar to the conservative viewpoint of transsexual or transgender people, where one is paradoxically repelled by the ‘unnatural’ space occupied by a supposedly non-procreating human and terrified that they will somehow multiply and spread across the world. Drag queens, for all their presumption of femininity, leave out of their interpretation the intrinsic element of womanhood: the ability to bear a child. Thus, they mock child-bearers by their very existence, just as Frankenstein’s Creature mocks humanity.

Drag queens are all too aware that, as Judith Butler says, gender—and thus human—“reality is created through sustained social performances.” Butler has written that drag “imitate[s] the myth of originality itself” and “dramatize[s] the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established” (qtd. in Storey 125). The assumption of a ‘human’ identity by Frankenstein’s creature similarly dramatizes the way that “Personality… is a pure image, the most transitory and superficial layer of the body: it is something that needs to be put on each day, just like clothing and make-up” (Shaviro 226). Physically, the Creature is essentially an outsized, over-the-top human, and his assumption of a gentlemanly manner is equally grotesque. His response to the old blind cottager’s extension of simple hospitality is thus: “You raise me from the dust by this kindness; and I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow-creatures” (Shelley 170). The drag queen affects the manner and being of a woman in the way Frankenstein’s Creature here acts the gentleman: too much, too big, too in-your-face, over-the-top. Perhaps his formality would have seemed less exaggerated in the era the novel was written, but there is something theatrical and unnatural in his performance of normality which is detected by both the blind cottager and the reader.

“Drag is so spectacular and so immediate that it cannot pretend to the authenticity of a ‘true’ representation: it ruins the very notion of representation” (Shaviro 226). A human confronted with the exaggerated display of supposed humanity enacted by Frankenstein’s Creature sees himself in a funhouse mirror. The only possible reactions are bemusement or horror. It is not his distance from us that so terrifies: it is his closeness. Besides the obviously larger amount of self-consciousness about his physical form, the only difference between Frankenstein’s Creature and most of us is that he is conscious of his performance. Of Judith Butler’s ideas, John Storey writes, “Gender performativity is not a voluntary practice, it is a continual process of almost disciplinary reiteration” (Storey 125). Both the drag queen and Frankenstein’s Creature are intensely aware of this “continual process,” but the former turns it into play and camp, while the latter is exhausted by it and comes to see it as futile.

Much like Frankenstein’s Creature, “drag queens… carry the logic of pure appearance, of self-hood as artifice…” (Shaviro 226). They ‘put on’ a persona, using the external elements interpolated into their images as icons of nostalgia and for their value as cultural referents. This act is conscious, apparent, and dramatic, and it disrupts “the very notion of representation.” Because of their seeming inability to play the roles assigned to them, or even to inconspicuously play the ones they have chosen for themselves, drag queens and other transgender or transsexual people are set apart from a society divided by a traditional binary gender code. The performative processes of identity (in general) and gender (in particular) made apparent by the textual and cultural recycling enacted by the drag queen are the same ones illuminated when humanity is confronted with the specter of Frankenstein’s Creature. The drag identity that Frankenstein’s Creature assumes is that of a human being. The conscious attempt on the part of the drag queen or the Creature to play these roles shows us what it might be like every day as we play them.

Notes

1 Credit must be given to Suárez, in whose Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars I initially found the juxtaposition of Frankenstein/drag queen: “…they are collages made up, like Frankenstein’s body, of pre-existing fragments…” (192)

2 Extratextual note on Goethe and Shelley: The Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as a collection of letters, similar to the construction of Frankenstein, so Shelley’s use of it in the novel is somewhat cheeky. Also, the use of Werther continues the chain of associations related to the fusing together of different parts to make a new whole. Werther contains Goethe’s translations of the “Ossian” poems contemporarily popularized by James Macpherson. It was soon revealed that Macpherson hadn’t discovered and translated an ancient text, as he had claimed—he had found fragments of an epic poem and adapted it into his own work.

Works Cited.

Sarduy, Severo. Written on a Body, Trans. Carol Meier. New York: Lumen, 1992.

Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Random House, 1993.

Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

Suárez, Juan A. Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960’s Underground Cinema. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Special thanks to Dr. Ellen Peel, Ph.D., whose course at SFSU, "The Constructed Body," was the venue for the first draft of this paper and whose notes were invaluable.

All images by Nan Goldin.

24 Words Per Film (#32)

2008-07-09T13:47:00.000-07:00

The Fall: Movie of the year! Tarsem harnesses his visual extravagance to a heartbreakingly human tale. All for a love-letter to silent cinema stunts.

24 Words Per Film (#31)

2008-07-09T13:44:00.001-07:00

Robert Downey, Jr. as a hard-drinking superhero is a dream come true. John Favreau may have finally found his niche behind the camera.

24 Words Per Film (#30)

2008-07-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

Wanted's star searches for dramatic tension/relevance, and finds his down to earth, comic performance adrift amongst absurdly amazing action scenes and supercool co-stars.

24 Words Per Film (#29)

2008-07-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

I was the Nick Nolte/mutant poodle version of The Hulk's only fan--but it's trumped by Norton's performance and the awesome action set-pieces.

24 Words Per Film (#28)

2008-07-06T22:03:00.000-07:00

My 14-year-old nephew says Hancock was okay. Funny at the beginning, but too serious near the end. Who am I to disagree?

Polish Poster of the Moment

2008-07-06T21:56:00.001-07:00

This time: Mystic Pizza (1988); artist: Jan Mlodozeniec

Ed Says: Let's welcome Jan Mlodozeniec to our pantheon of poster artists.

Repetitionalism: a stylistic analysis of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”

2008-06-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

One cannot discuss the style of a Raymond Carver story without confronting the issue of minimalism. Carver was a perhaps unwitting poster boy for the literary school when it was first hyped by editors and publishers in the late 70’s. In Marshall Gentry and William L. Stull’s Conversations with Raymond Carver, Carver credits his editor Gordon Lish with instilling in him “that if you could say it in five words instead of fifteen, use five words.” (183) “Cathedral,” as it is anthologized in the Norton Introduction to Literature, is certainly pared down in certain ways. It has been pruned of nearly any introspection, psychological motivation, or extraneous detail. But what remains doesn’t bear out the idea that Carver has chosen to say what he has to say in five rather than fifteen words. In fact, a good deal of repetition is taking place here.

Consider the following passage:

“She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man about her husband and about their life together in the military.” (21)

Carver repeats words such as “tape” throughout—it’s used five more times in this paragraph and at one point on the following page it appears no less than eleven times in one paragraph—and juxtaposes short sentences with recurring words: “She wanted to talk. They talked.” He also describes the same action in several ways: “She did this. She sent the tape.” In addition, the next three sentences all begin with the clause “she told the blind man,” a phrase already introduced in the preceding sentence. This is but one of many uses in the story of anaphora—a scheme based on repetition. Surely if Carver’s intent was “to say what I wanted to say… us[ing] the minimum number of words to do so” (32)—as he claims in the title essay of his book Fires—he would eschew this repetition and yoke some of his short sentences together with conjunctions. Using significantly less words, the last three sentences of the above quoted passage could be rendered as, “She did this, telling him about her husband and their life together in the military.”

I’m not trying to suggest that the tendency towards minimal representation of events isn’t present in the style Carver employs in “Cathedral.” For instance, other than the blind man, whose exotic quality elicits a bit of commentary, we’re never told what anything or anybody looks like. We know that there is a man, his wife, their house, and a television set. Even the slightest descriptive detail about the household—the fact that it’s a color T.V.—is revealed only in the dialogue, where it serves to strike a colorful, bizarre note: “‘This is a color TV,’ the blind man said. ‘Don’t ask me how. But I can tell.’” (25) Ellipsis is an oft-used tactic in service of brevity throughout “Cathedral.” And at other times the descriptive shortcutting is done in a totally blatant manner: twice on pg. 21 “etc.” is inserted in lieu of finishing a thought, once at the end of a sentence describing the clichéd beginnings of a love affair, and the other time here: “I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle.” Here the “etc.” is used, apparently, to replace but a single word—an example of Carver using a technique that appears to lean towards minimalism, but is actually stylistically idiosyncratic. The finely tuned narrative that Carver has trimmed all the fat from is overwhelmed by instances of repetition and it, not minimalism, seems to be the organizing principle at work here. Call it “repetitionalism.”

Repetition of a single word in successive sentences is taken to absurd heights on page 21, where the word “poem” appears in seven straight sentences. The repetition employed in the narration seeps into the story itself, as well. The character of the wife has the tic of habitually repeating herself, using mostly different words to express the same sentiment two or three times consecutively: “‘Same here,’ she said. ‘Ditto. Me too.’” (26) “Are you crazy? … Have you just flipped or something? … What’s wrong with you? … Are you drunk?” (22) Strangely, when his wife falls asleep, the narrator starts to exhibit the same speech pattern: “Are you tired? Do you want me to make up your bed? Are you ready to hit the hay?” (27) The repetition of bland, mundane sentiments serves to reinforce the banality of the domestic scene—but it also creates a rhythm, a rhythm that is nicely in sync with the attitude of our narrator and erstwhile protagonist.

Emphasizing and maintaining this rhythm in another way is the scheme of anaphora. In addition to the example of anaphora on pg. 21 previously alluded to, it appears in a pure form, with the phrase “A woman who…” repeated three times at the beginning of successive clauses, on pg. 23. Many other times throughout “Cathedral,” two successive sentences begin with the same phrase (some interesting ones: “Now and then,” pg. 27, “In those olden days,” pg. 29.) And even more frequently, groups of sentences will all begin with the same pronoun. Five sentences in a row on pg. 21 begin with “She,” four in a row on pg. 23 begin with “I,” eight in a row on pg. 25 begin with “We,” and so on.

Another scheme, frequently employed in the first half of the story, is parenthesis. It is most often used between two sets of dashes to slightly modify or throw a different angle on the main clause. Occasionally, though, it used for increased emphasis—and more repetition—as on pg. 25: “They talked of things that had happened to them—to them!—these past ten years.” Taking advantage of the opportunity to use extra punctuation is typical of the way parenthesis is used throughout “Cathedral,” as on pg. 22: “It was a little wedding—who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them…” The same type of structure is used a page earlier in this wondrous sentence: “Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance.” (21) Interestingly, the use of parenthesis is curtailed once the thrust of the story switches from backstory to exposition of action. This is, perhaps, indicative of a narrator’s tendency to double back and spiral into further explanation when trying to represent the intricacies of the past, while charging forward and giving mostly external, action-oriented details for the present.

The story is divided into two parts in another much more obvious way as well. At the bottom of the seventh of ten pages, the structure is interrupted by a section break. Carver wants us to know that what comes below that break is different than what comes above it, but he isn’t willing to sacrifice any of the rhythmic momentum he’s built up throughout the first section, so the actual narrative flow isn’t disturbed in the slightest. Although the first seven pages have been full of digressions into backstory and slight shifts in time and location, this new section begins on the same scene the other one ended on. The first two sentences after the break are both in service of continuity with the scene of the two men watching T.V. that has come directly before: “We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set.” (27) Because of this total continuity with what has immediately preceded it, and the extraordinary rhythmic movement of the writing, the break between the two sections is barely noticeable on first read. It isn’t until closer inspection that its obvious that Carver is signaling to us that there is to be a shift in the narrative. The stark banality of what has come before is going to give way to an epiphanic profundity at the conclusion.

One final reason for the repetition Carver insists on in “Cathedral” is the theme of learning that runs through it. Repetition is a fundamental tool used in teaching, and this fact sometimes comes into play in narratives—although these are most often aimed towards children (think Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer.) But “Cathedral” doesn’t aim to teach as these children’s entertainments do. It, instead, takes learning as a theme. The last few sentences before the section break introduce the idea, and the entirety of the second section is dependent on it. Here are those last few sentences:

"Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV… I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either… “Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning
never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight.” … (27)

And this, of course, is what our narrator learns from the blind man in the end.

Works cited.

Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989.

Gentry, Marshall and William L. Stull. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

Norton Introduction to Literature, 9th edition, ed.’s: Allison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

Polish Film Poster (By Request)

2008-06-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

This week: The Birds (1965); artist: Bronislaw Zelek

Ed Says: This was in Film Comment recently, in an ongoing and excellent series about international film posters. It is presented here on request.

Slow or Fast, Undead & In Limbo: Zombies in Western Pop Culture

2008-06-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

In October of 2007 I conducted a poll here at Shoot the Projectionist. As a sideline to the main question, I asked the respondents for a list of their five favorite examples of the hybrid film genre of horror comedy. 7 of the 10 films that received the most votes were zombie movies and the other three were variations on the Frankenstein story, itself about the negotiation between life and death. A bunch of popular movies of late have mined the same territory (28 Days Later, 2002; the recent installments/remakes of George Romero’s Dead series) many of them done in a humorous vein (Shaun of the Dead, 2004; Fido, 2006). Zombies have begun to make their appearance in the real world, as well, in the form of the internet-organized ‘zombie flash mobs,’ where a group of strangers dressed like zombies congregate at the same public location. The apex of this zombie fetish may be the book The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks (published in 2003), in which the reader is instructed on what to do in the event of the zombie holocaust. The tone of this work—tongue in cheek but absolutely scientific in its discussion of the subject—is similar not only to the films it is indebted to, but to the ironic way people have begun to talk about popular culture and express themselves within it. Why are we so entranced with zombies? What elements of our own cultural character do we see in the zombie? How does the figure of the zombie point to a particular structure of feeling within our culture?

The zombie exists on the border between life and death: It is undead, in limbo. The zombie transgresses boundaries by its very existence. It blurs the line between states of existence. Modern society, too, has enacted a program of line-blurring and boundary-crossing since the Baby Boomers came to age. Societal roles have been broken down; workplace gender stereotypes have been challenged; traditional lines between masculine and feminine, between personal and private, and between technology and humanity have been blurred. These social developments have left many feeling uncertain and undefined. With traditions being deconstructed all around us and societal institutions such as churches and public schools holding less sway, the questions of who we are and what to do with our lives are no longer easily answerable. It’s no longer suitable simply to follow in your father’s professional footsteps or become a housewife—popular rhetoric now tells us that we are unique individuals and that we must find the great contribution to society that we are destined to make. Perhaps it is this limbo state—the seeking but never finding of purpose and identity—that compels us to see ourselves in the glazed-over eyes of the zombie. Today’s world-traveling-bisexual-
androgynous-tattooed-pierced-24-hour-a-day-user-of-technology youth culture finds itself crossing so many cultural/national/societal borders daily that the idea of a fixed state seems somewhat absurd. But how does this restless questing translate to the essentially mindless, non-life of the zombie? In one sense, we are seeing ourselves in the undead, limbo-loving zombie—but in another we see what’s wrong with everyone else around us in its drone-like existence.

In the late 60’s George Romero, himself born on the cusp of WWII, directed the film that introduced our modern American filmic conception of the zombie: Night of the Living Dead. Then, in 1978, when the horrors of the Vietnam War were finally over and much of American culture had begun to atrophy into solipsism and drug use, he released the first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, set almost entirely inside the ultimate symbol of American-style capitalism: The Mall. Steven Shaviro writes in Connected, or what it means to live in the network society, “[T]he zombies converge on a huge indoor shopping mall because that is where they were happiest when they were alive. Even in death, they continue to enact the rituals of a rapacious, yet basically aimless, consumerism.” (172) The zombie has no drive but hunger. He consumes but is never satisfied. Truly, for the zombie—in Althusser’s famous phrase—“the lonely hour of the last instance never comes.” He lurches ever forward, desiring more and wasting what he has. Shaviro points out that our American conception of the zombie is different from the classic Haitian one in one critical respect: the Voudoun priest goes about the business of resurrecting someone in order to turn him into a working slave, whereas our zombies are created for no purpose whatsoever and “squander and destroy wealth rather than produce it.” (172) Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was remade in 2004 and its themes are still so relevant that no significant updates needed to be made to the concept. However, the image of a mindless mass of useless consumers shuffling towards the mall in a somewhat narcotized state is replaced with one of crazed, mindless lunatics running towards the mall.

Above I credited Night of the Living Dead with popularizing the modern conception of the zombie, which was characterized as slow moving, moaning, and mindlessly hungry. But recently a different conception of the zombie has dominated. Films such as Resident Evil (2002), 28 Days Later and last year’s I am Legend (based on the same novella that Romero drew inspiration from for his Dead series) all present a savage, aggressive vision of the zombie. The somewhat directionless hunger of the previous model has transformed into insatiable blind lust. The so-called “fast zombie” phenomenon has incited much debate among fanboys, but what implications does this development have for society’s vision of its own character? Are we more aggressive and violent in our mindless consumerism than the previous generation—or do we just see it that way?

Raymond Williams believed that by looking at the texts of a culture, it is possible to diagnose a particular structure of feeling—or the way that a culture sees itself and lives its life. The proliferation of stories about zombies being told in Western culture since the Vietnam War points to a specific disconnection of purpose from daily life. The figure of the zombie presented in films in the last thirty years—whether slow or fast, but always undead and in limbo—has been a literalization of the obsessive consumerism of much of Western culture. When Romero made the original Dawn of the Dead in the late ‘70’s the prevailing image of the consumer was a slightly dazed and overwhelmed figure shuffling endlessly through the shopping mall, unsatisfied by the empty act of buying and always returning, again and again, to the food court to fatten up between shopping binges. But today, with images of mothers in Christmas shopping frenzies ripping each other’s hair out over the last Tickle Me Elmo still fresh in our heads, the crazed barbarism of the zombies Will Smith battled in I am Legend looks a lot more familiar. People have begun to express themselves solely through their wallet, and feel a lack of purpose and a disconnection from life because of it. By personifying our own consumerist impulses in the form of mindless, brain-craving zombies and then filming endless scenes of them being killed in all manner of creative ways, perhaps we are trying to kill off the consumers within us.

Works cited.

Shaviro, Steven. Connected, or what it means to live in the network society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2003.

All images are of a zombie flash mob descending upon San Francisco.

Some Words about 24 Words

2008-04-20T12:35:00.001-07:00

Often over the past months, your humble Projectionist has resorted to writing only 24 words about a film instead of giving it the deeper thought required for a more serious analysis of the type I'd like to think I was known for. The upside of this is a proliferation of entries into the 24 Words per Film series. Here are links to the last ten:

#25: Less than Zero, #24: Helvetica, #23: Shoot 'em Up, #22: Eastern Promises, #21: A History of Violence, #20: There Will Be Blood, #19: In the Land of Womeng, #18: Mr. Brooks, #17: The Great Outdoors, #16: Juno

Polish Poster of the Moment

2008-04-19T13:20:00.000-07:00

This time: Scarecrow (1974); artist: Waldemar Swierzy

The Grid: Televisual Culture in ROBOCOP

2008-04-19T12:59:00.000-07:00

Robocop is a study of how television infiltrates culture and structures our way of looking. Director Paul Verhoeven develops a visual strategy throughout Robocop that incorporates each of the film’s characters and the viewer into a continuous televisual grid. Several different methods are employed to constitute the metaphor of The Grid. Not all of these techniques are visual in nature. Some are woven into the fabric of the narrative, such as the insistent interjection of the vulgar sitcom whose main character repeats “I’d buy that for a dollar!” Others are almost metatextual, as the form of the film itself is altered so that it comes to resemble, and present itself as, television.

The film begins in just such a manner. After an initial track over the skyline of the urban center that will be our setting, and the sudden, forceful display of the title, Robocop takes on the form of a television evening newscast. We are immediately introduced to the central visual motif to be repeated in different ways throughout the film. The screen is divided into squares or boxes of equal area by intersecting series of horizontal and vertical lines, creating a grid. In each of the squares (each a miniature t.v. screen unto itself) is an image of some war, disaster, or political scenario typically covered by a national news broadcast. We are told that if we give this television program just a moment of our attention, it will give us the entire world—all of reality is contained within The Grid. Each image of death and disaster is replaced, one by one, by the empty smiles of the somewhat stereotypical news team. Television news is both ‘television’—images that are wholly manufactured—and ‘news,’ which is how society refers to the recent movement of history. The viewer of the evening news takes it as both true (as news) and as produced (as television). By presenting the introduction to his film as a mock version of a news broadcast, and having the “newscasters” reporting on slightly futuristic events, Verhoeven highlights the fictive nature of any television news program and announces that what follows will contain some measure of satire. The insertion of a parody commercial between news stories about dying cops and Presidents in zero gravity draws each of the big topics Robocop satirizes together: media, business, politics, and law enforcement.

The conference room at OMNIcorp where the Robocop project is pushed into production is dominated by a large bank of television screens; another appearance of The Grid. In order to demonstrate the company’s success in turning a profit in traditionally non-profit industries (healthcare, law enforcement, national defense) a video is shown. Each screen is filled with the same types of images shown at the beginning of the newscast, but given a positive spin. Sick people, victims of crimes, police officers and soldiers—all of these are no longer icons of the world’s ills, but potential customers. Again we are presented with the conflagration of media, business, politics, and law enforcement. With the product pitch session for ED-209 culminating in gruesome bloodshed, the satirical juxtaposition of commerce and violence that will act as an organizing principle of the text is immediately foregrounded here as well. After this failure, the Robocop program is posited as a replacement. This is a plan that is rooted in bloodshed in order to create its product: a cop must be killed in the line of duty in order for Robocop to be created.

Murphy’s death is the opening OMNIcorp needs to turn a human being into a product. Even before his death, though, Murphy’s life as a police officer is mediated by televisual references. He is learning how to spin his gun around on his finger in order to impress his kid, because the kid saw t.v. cop “T.J. Lazer” do it and thinks that’s what good cops do. So Murphy is literally practicing to become more like a fictional representation of his actual profession. But as Robocop, he is reborn as a physical manifestation of television—as our collective obsession with television in human form. But at the same time, he is us, the viewer, looking at the world through The Grid: whatever Robocop sees becomes television. As soon as Murphy dies, and his transformation into Robocop begins, we stop looking at the character and begin to look with him. The equation of the viewer with the protagonist is easily accomplished by the use of the point-of-view shot. In a p.o.v. shot, we see what the character sees; our eyes are his eyes. It is not so much that we become more sympathetic to him, but that our entire worldview is interpellated by his. Robocop and the viewer are one, and the way television sees is the way Robocop sees.

All of this is achieved in the Murphy death/Robocop birth sequence. After Murphy’s death, Robocop is switched on and off like a t.v.—in fact, the same graphic used to illustrate the end of the evening newscast and the segue into the film proper is used here to signify the waxing and waning of Robocop’s consciousness. We see through his eyes as the scientists working on him activate his mind at their whim. It’s like flipping through channels as he wakes up in different places, in different contexts, with the flicker and fade of video accompanying each cut. In case we haven’t gotten the point, Verhoeven inserts one final visual clue that Robocop, in essence, is television, by giving us our first glimpse of him on a television screen. Upon his birth, the only thing we know about him is the way he sees. This is further foregrounded by the scene of the scientists putting him through a series of tests. As the scientist commands him to target the pen in her hand and follow it around the room, we are made aware that Robocop has picture-in-picture capabilities: he breaks the world down into boxes of visual components, i.e., a grid.

Later, when he is resting after his day on duty, Robocop is monitored by the scientists on another video grid, a series of screens. As he begins to violate his programming by doing that most human of things—dreaming—his dreams flicker on the monitors for a split second. In this moment, he regains his agency and transcends his existence as a “product.” This second transformation is represented by Robocop actually producing television images. The citizens of this world are depicted as the faceless ‘television audience,’ rapt, powerless in the face of the t.v. broadcast. They are made one through the repeated appearances of the “I’d buy that for a dollar!” sitcom. It is watched by criminal and victim alike, stick-up man and storeowner. Nor is the ubiquity of the program contained within the lower class—the young executives at OMNIcorp quote its capitalist catchphrase to each other as they walk into the bathroom. Everyone is equal in the face of this onslaught. Only Robocop has true agency, accomplishing this by his use of the technology itself, becoming like it and even creating it—not only with his dreams, but also by recording incriminating evidence and playing it back on that same bank of video screens at OMNIcorp.

There are several points at which the equation of humanity with the televised image is pushed into a depiction of the replacement of humanity with pre-recorded, produced videos attempting to have meaningful communication with a live person. In each case, the pallor of death hangs over the scene. When Robocop returns to the home he lived in, as Murphy, with his family, he finds only an empty house with a t.v. on a stand in each room, repeating an endless series of sales pitches as he walks from room to room. Before his death and transformation, these rooms were filled with his family. Now they are occupied only by chattering televisions on eternal loops. Another time a video image successfully attempts to communicate the message that the viewer of the tape will soon meet his own death. This event, and others like it, shows how the televisual image begins to have primacy over reality in the world presented in Robocop.

In order to satirize the way that television has infiltrated culture and structured our way of looking, Paul Verhoeven establishes the visual metaphor of The Grid at the outset of Robocop, and elaborates it in many ways throughout the film. In addition, the film presents television news—all the world’s events—as existing on the same plane as science fiction. It shows the members of the police force themselves equating their jobs with television representations of that job. It depicts a large majority of society as being captivated by vulgarities of the lowest sort in their entertainment choices. With the houses filled with talking television screens, it shows how other professions can literally be replaced by video images. And it gives us an image of an anthropomorphized t.v. set—Robocop is a walking, talking projection of the television image. But Robocop himself is not criticized along with the cultural institutions that create a world in which he can exist. Robocop has the ability to use the technology of the dominant culture against it, capturing the world as video imagery and replaying it in order to achieve his greatest victory. At the end of the film, Robocop proves who the bad guy really is by acting as a television—broadcasting a previously recorded image on a giant video grid. But does Paul Verhoeven’s vision offer a way out of The Grid for the normal citizen, rapt in front of the television screen?

Polish Film Poster of the Week

2008-02-28T09:17:00.000-08:00

This Week: The Lost Man (1971); artist: Jerzy Treutler

Ed Says: In the beginning I focused on interesting images for American films I'd seen. In lieu of running uninteresting images, I've recently started running any interesting image for an American film, whether I've even heard of the film or not. Soon, the films may not even be American any more. But by God, they'll still be Polish posters!

Celebrity Stalkers of the Old West: On THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

2008-02-23T20:45:00.000-08:00

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a Western and, as such, includes as one of its central thematic concerns the opposition of myth vs. truth. This binary formulation has always been implicit in the genre, and has been a foregrounded subject since, at the latest, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which—in a line often attributed to director John Ford rather than to one of his characters—a newspaperman says, “When truth becomes legend, print the legend.” The nickel-books read by Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) are full of such printed legend, and it is through his obsession with them that he comes to know everything there is to know about the (in)famous Jesse James. This film takes a classic Western trope and extends it into our modern world by depicting its titular assassination as the first celebrity stalker murder.

Famously, Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht said, “Good or bad, a play always includes an image of the world.” Further, despite the historical setting of the particular text, it is an image of the world contemporary to the artist, even more than that of the characters. So when P.T. Anderson makes a movie set in the early 20th century about megalomaniacal Americans making violent plays for land in order to suck out the oil from underneath it, we can see that it paints a portrait of not only that time period, but ours as well. As Joseph Natoli wrote, “The stories the present spins and films about the past tell us more about the present than they do of the past.” The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is one such recent piece that is firmly rooted in its historical and genre origins, but speaks even stronger about the modern world. Director Andrew Dominik is giving us a vision of our modern celebrity-obsessed society by casting former People Magazine Sexiest Man Alive Brad Pitt as one of America’s first superstars, an outlaw whose existence is detailed by its own tabloid, the nickel-book.

Bob Ford’s knowledge of Jesse James is mediated by the reality of the nickel-books he’s collected since his boyhood. He professes to be “an expert on the James boys.” Such is his connection to the Jesse James of myth that even when the man himself tells him that the stories in the books are all lies, he persists in his beliefs. Jesse allows him to recount a list of their supposed similarities, never revealing how he feels about himself in relation to the myth of ‘Jesse James.’ After the original James Gang dissipates, and even his older brother leaves him, Jesse is left with a pack of sycophants. This is the moment at which the superstar loses his boyhood friends—the pop idol goes solo—and surrounds himself with an entourage. It’s not just Bob Ford that wants to ride with Jesse because he’s a famous man. Although they ridicule him for it, Bob’s older brother (played by Sam Rockwell) and the other guys who hang around want to be there as badly as he does. They’ve just probably long put away the boyish icons of their idolatry, while Bob cherishes his old nickel-books, keeping them in a box under his bed—along with newspaper clippings and some items from his actual adventure with Jesse, fantasy and reality once again entwining themselves around each other.

After Bob kills Jesse, he not only rockets to fame himself, but the legend of Jesse James, in which he has invested so much emotion, is bolstered as well. This parallels the historical rise to fame of Mark David Chapman, or Valerie Solanis, whose names we would never have known had they not committed heinous acts, and who also made their targets (John Lennon and Andy Warhol, respectively) even more legendary. Bob travels the country re-enacting the murder, a grotesquerie analogous to the media coverage attendant almost any modern day tragedy (Geraldo interviewing Manson, etc.) The event spreads into folk culture, with picture postcards of Jesse James’ corpse on ice on sale at every drugstore. When a wandering minstrel (Nick Cave) sings a tale of the murder of Jesse James at a bar where Bob Ford is drinking, he erupts at the man, correcting his interpretation of the event. But he doesn’t object to the songsmith’s characterizing him as a coward, only to the factual inaccuracy in a line about how many children Jesse had.

Dominik and his cinematographer Roger Deakins use several visual strategies to express the threading together of myth and reality in a story that is, after all, ‘based on true events’ (albeit mediated further by its direct source, the 1983 novel by Ron Hansen.) Often the image will go ‘soft’ around the edges, unable to keep focus on anything but the central figure, reflecting the look of contemporary photographs, attempting to connote period authenticity. A montage device borrowed from documentary films is employed as well, in which footage of the sky, or a landscape, is drastically sped up to reflect the passage of time. Both of these visual techniques are often paired with the voiceover that is constantly telling the story.

This voiceover is delivered by a seemingly omniscient narrator, speaking from some historical standpoint well after the events transpired, and using diction that is more modern than the flowery-cowboy dialogue of the characters. The narrator is sure of himself, and since we as viewers know that a person named Jesse James lived in this milieu, we are almost ready to believe anything we are told by him. The images that accompany his words, as demonstrated above, are loaded with notions of truth. But if we believe what he tells us, don’t we become so many more Bob Fords, taking the nickel-books as gospel, buying into printed legend?

Your Projectionist Interviewed

2008-02-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

This week's Friday Screen Test at Adam Ross's DVD Panache features yours truly, Ed Hardy, Jr., answering a bevy of interesting questions. If you want to find out more about me, click here.

Thanks, Adam!

Polish Film Poster of the Week

2008-02-21T09:58:00.000-08:00

This week: Tom Horn (1982); artist: Wlodzimierz Terechowicz.

Ed says: One of the more beautiful examples of the classic Polish poster technique of obscuring the eyes (and sometimes whole face) of the central figure.

Bonus: A more a lighthearted take on the Western genre, Jan Mlodozeniec's poster for Judge Roy Bean from 1975.

24 WORDS PER FILM (#27)

2008-02-16T15:37:00.001-08:00

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is somehow homophobic, misogynist, racist, broad, sappy, and progressive at the same time. And pretty funny sometimes.

24 WORDS PER FILM (#26)

2008-02-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

Persepolis manages to cram one girl’s entire coming of age and decades of Iran’s history into 100 sublime minutes. Touching, and beautiful to behold.

Polish Film Poster of the Week

2008-02-13T20:45:00.000-08:00

This Week: The Great Gatsby (197?); artist: Jerzy Flisak

Ed Says: The Polish film poster of the week will now be published on Wednesdays or Thursdays. I could go into the logic of why this is actually the beginning of my week but, really, who cares? I present this image in honor Valentine's Day.

Bonus: Another simple, strong and absurd image from the same artist.

Reproduced w/out comment

2008-02-08T22:18:00.000-08:00

from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983). Screencaps courtesy Nostalgia Party No. 2. (Click to view in full-screen glory.)

LOOK AT THESE ASSHOLES: American Directors Who Mattered in 2007

2008-02-07T22:03:00.000-08:00

In 2007 a whole bunch of directors that I care about made plays for “maturity.” David Fincher, in direct contrast to the triviality of his last film Panic Room (2002), turned in what Film Comment deemed the film of the year, Zodiac. Another director who hadn’t put out a film in five years was Paul Thomas Anderson, following up the left turn into zaniness that was Punch-Drunk Love with another left turn, finally finding a proper milieu for his penchant for melodrama in the historical setting of There Will Be Blood. Perhaps most spectacularly, the Coens rebounded from the only slump thus far in their career (two duds in a row by my count) with what may turn out to be their masterpiece, No Country for Old Men. David Cronenberg continued what he started with A History of Violence (2005)—although less successfully—in Eastern Promises. (Although I suppose you could argue that Cronenberg’s true bid for respectability was Spider, back in 2002.) In utter opposition to this trend was the double-shot of celebratory B-movieness that was Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, and yet another installment of Steven Soderbergh’s totally superfluous Ocean’s series.

Where did Projectionist house favorite Wes Anderson fit into this spectrum? Did Wes intend for The Darjeeling Limited to be a departure? With that many slow-motion-Kinks-montages being thrown around, I can’t imagine Wes could’ve believed he was turning away from his signature style. Perhaps by returning his characters to the road he meant to return his filmmaking to the less precious and refined style of his first feature, Bottle Rocket (1996). Darjeeling is clearly a transitional picture for Wes. He brought on new co-writers and attempted to address issues of mortality and spirituality in a much more serious manner than his previous feature The Life Aquatic—or anything that came before it. On the other hand, almost everyone involved is a former collaborator on at least one other project.

The other Anderson, P.T., ditched all of his previous onscreen collaborators for a cast with period-looking faces and a chance in hell of keeping up with Daniel Day-Lewis. (For the record, I don’t believe Paul Dano really holds his own against the big guy, especially in that already-infamous last scene.) He also turned in just about all of his cartoony affectations without sacrificing his love of over-the-top performance and powerful sequences set to music. There is no doubt that the visions of violence in There Will Be Blood are more real, more in touch with physical reality and designed to be taken more seriously (for better or worse) than any depictions to be found previously in P.T.’s filmography. This then emerges as a common theme throughout the films of all of the directors under discussion here.

Where death may have been a joke in previous films by these directors, it is no longer so in these new ones. In Punch-Drunk Love, Barry Egan’s psychotic rages are disturbing, but still funny in a weird way, and the reality of the film is so skewed that his violence is accepted as part of a cartoon-like universe. In There Will Be Blood, when Daniel Plainview hurts someone—or someone is hurt by the mechanisms of industry under his control—we feel it. It hurts us. In The Life Aquatic, when Esteban is eaten by that shark, it’s hilarious. When the kid drowns in the river in Darjeeling Limited, it’s unbearably sad. The Coen Bros., too, participate in this trend. Pretty much the only thing their previous effort, 2004’s The Ladykillers, had going for it was a running joke about the cheapness of life. Every time somebody else would die, they’d just toss 'em over the bridge. No matter how many people Anton Suger kills in No Country for Old Men, you never stop feeling their deaths. David Fincher’s Zodiac took that inability to stop feeling past tragedies as its very theme, and it, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were all period pieces set in earlier times of strife and transition in America. The Coens also populated their cast with actors they’d never worked with before.

What does it mean that the filmmakers whose work I have come of age watching are all attempting to grow up and address those issues common to all humanity— mortality and spirituality? Probably only that I am getting older.

24 WORDS PER FILM (#25)

2008-02-07T21:07:00.000-08:00

Choose your own adventure.

version A: Less than Zero grafts a moral onto the decidedly amoral source novel, throws in some great tunes and occasionally employs weirdly expressive visual sequences.

version B: In 1987, with this performance and The Pick-Up Artist, Robert Downey, Jr. laid the groundwork for the persona he has been mining ever since.

25 times 24 words per film equals...

2008-02-07T13:08:00.001-08:00

I'll soon be posting the 25th entry in the 24 words per film series and I'm interested to know if anybody out there has any thoughts, suggestions, complaints or hyperbolic praise about the series in general. Toss me a comment if you have anything to say.

Also, here are links to the 6th-15th entries in the series, for you archivists.

#15: Reign On Me, #14: The Last Winter, #13: The Lookout, #12: Brothers in the Head,
#11: Disturbia, #10: Halloween (2007), #9: Mutual Appreciation, #8: The Astronaut Farmer,
#7: Greedy, #6: The Hamiltons.

24 Words Per Film (#24)

2008-02-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

Helvetica: neutral or fascist? Modernism, globalization and the politics of design are discussed through the history of our ubiquitous font in this excellent doc.

Movies About Movies: THE BIG PICTURE (1989)

2008-02-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

My viewing notes on Christopher Guest’s 1989 directorial debut The Big Picture include the line, “Thank God he started making those mockumentaries” and (scribbled about 1/3 of the way through) “I have yet to laugh once.”

I did eventually laugh. There is too much talent in the room not to occasionally land in the endzone. Even Guest’s dreadful other non-mockumentary, Almost Heroes, can induce laughter due to the presence of Chris Farley, Eugene Levy, et al. Some of the punchlines here are undeniable—like the premise of the sexy stewardess slash ghost story flick pitched as “ghosts by night, stews by day”—but much of the proceedings are hampered by Kevin Bacon’s inability to get out of aw-shucks mode. The jokes about Hollywood and L.A. are all so easy and seemingly cliché. There’s often no way to tell in hindsight if a joke was fresh at the time of its inception: I was 8 years old when this film was released, so I have limited context for its satire. There is a world of difference, though, between a joke that feels outdated and one that feels merely tired. Viewing the Big Picture, you have to wonder if it was ever funny simply to give Teri Hatcher big hair or have the protagonist drive a very, very small car or make all the extras at the party scenes grotesquely tanned.

What is most vexing about the film though—what makes me continue to mull it over instead of just consigning it 24 words of “not funny”—is that conceptually, this thing WORKS. The project that Bacon’s young, student-film-award-winning, wannabe director is attempting to get made in Hollywood is visualized as an organic, living thing. Whenever Bacon talks about it, we see on the screen exactly what he’s picturing. As the studio execs give him their creative input and he bends under pressure, we see the changes literally being made to his ‘film.’ Roles are recast with younger actors, settings are changed, etc. We see it happen, and we see its effect on Bacon’s character. It’s brilliantly done, but not, you know… FUNNY. Not really.

As the head studio exec subjecting the project to his own whims and tastes, the always wonderful J.T. Walsh gives one of the film’s two impeccable performances. Walsh was a man who was always cast as a slimeball kind of a guy, but he himself was such a loving man that some degree of humanity always shone through these sleazy characters. You even kind of rooted for him as the evil truckdriver menacing Kurt Russell in Breakdown. And so it is here. Walsh’s studio exec achieves a sort of George Costanza mystique: you know the character is a fundamentally bad, but the actor playing him is so sweet that the two merge and you end up loving a bastard. He and his assistant, played by Don Franklin, do a pretty good double act.

Another near-great performance—albeit one filled with annoying tics of the early-Nicholas-Cage-roles type—is given by Jennifer Jason Leigh as an eccentric fellow film student. The Big Picture is full of parodies, and it opens with four(!) faux student films. Leigh’s character’s “Afterbirth of a Notion” is the most spot-on, an imitation of surrealism, 80’s style. When asked if she’s working on any new films she says, “Nah, I’ve given up video. I’m into ham radio performance art now.”

The Big Picture is tonally inconsistent and spends most of its time existing in a lame, 50’s-filtered, studio bound nonreality. By the end credits, the ‘quirky’ ‘comedy music’ main theme and the mere sight of Bacon’s tiny car caused me to cringe. However, one actor stands tall and stays totally REAL amongst it all: Michael McKean.

Polish Film Poster of...Right Now

2008-02-06T10:23:00.000-08:00

This week: Carnal Knowledge (1974); artist: Maria Ihnatowicz

Ed Says: A significant departure from the creepier style I have mostly presented in the series thus far. As a bonus, I'm including this unbelievably funky poster of one of my favorite films by the same artist.

24 WORDS PER FILM (#23)

2008-02-06T10:16:00.001-08:00

Shoot ‘em Up gleefully buries good taste and subtlety beneath a mountain of bodies. Each setpiece is somehow more gloriously over-the-top than the last.

24 Words Per Film (#22)

2008-02-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

The Hitchcockian shots of Naomi Watts riding her motorcycle are out of place, yet oddly more interesting than almost anything else in Eastern Promises.

24 Words Per Film (#21)

2008-02-06T10:01:00.000-08:00

A History of Violence is held back from greatness only by an abominable score and Cronenberg’s newly-acquired tendency towards sentimentalization. Mortensen is quietly brilliant.

Polish Film Poster of the...

2008-01-24T12:09:00.000-08:00

This time: Rosemary's Baby (1984); artist: Wieslaw Walkuski.

Ed Says: The chief reason for this post is to prove that I'm still among the living. I don't usually burden my readers with personal information, but many have sent along friendly inquiries so I don't feel it's too inappropriate. Poverty has forced me to find a Wi-Fi connection down the hill in the cafe at Whole Foods, to cancel my Netflix membership and cut down on theater visits. Personal turmoil, preparations for my first semester at university, and a commitment to acting in and helping out with the production of a film has reduced my energy for criticism to none. Happily, San Francisco State has a reputedly massive film library and enrollment in at least one cinema class will keep me writing about film. And I'll continue to post 24 Words Per Film on anything I see--The Bucket List and Eastern Promises are up next--which will hopefully include a large amount of movies from the '30's and '40's, eras I have mostly ignored until now.

The other reason for this post is because I'm sure those of you who are still checking back in hopes of an update are as tired of the Pollyanna poster as I am. To remedy this, I offer this fascinating take on Rosemary's Baby by the same artist who did that creepy Tootsie poster I put up a while back.

Two recently learned (by me) fun facts on the subject of Polish film posters: a.) Paul Verhoeven got his start in poster design. b.) Richard Linklater has been building a large collection of Polish film posters since before anyone had ever heard of him.

24 Words Per Film #20

2008-01-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

Dano's preacher and religion is slightly hokey, but Day-Lewis and Anderson almost make There Will Be Blood as powerful as it wants to be.

24 Words Per Film #19

2008-01-05T15:34:00.000-08:00

A perhaps cruel and somewhat off-topic comment: Meg Ryan's plastic surgery is downright distracting. Adam Brody is rather charming In the Land of Women.

24 Words Per Film #18

2008-01-05T15:21:00.000-08:00

William Hurt kills as Mr. Brooks' imaginary friend. Kevin Costner tells Dane Cook he is neither funny nor charming, which sums up both performances.

24 Words Per Film #17

2008-01-05T15:03:00.001-08:00

Great Outdoors: Hughes' script is strangely devoid of insight into teens. Akroyd's comic power can't undermine Candy's singular hilarity--makes you really miss them.