Thelma & Louise 20th Anniversary Tribute, Part 2 (Or: How I Learned to Have Far Greater Respect for Angelina Jolie)

Published on January 24, 2012

Sadly, my original intention to post a Part 2 on the historical importance of Thelma & Louise got left on the side of the road some months back when I got sick of talking about a 20-year-old film. Oh, Lord, is this really all there is?

Happily, now that I have seen In the Land of Blood and Honey I am re-inspired. The dramatized discussion on the realities of sexual violence is not, after all, dead. But in this showing, the glamorous, ass-kicking, newly empowered female is not an eponymous fiction on screen. She is, rather, in the director’s chair.  What does appear on screen is a visually spare, verbally muted, blue-grey toned Bosnian war drama that shines a light on rape as a military weapon as it explores what happens when two people in love find themselves on opposing sides of a conflict.

I confess, I might have passed on the film under the influence of its many skewering critics. But my partner, Ed, unbeknownst to me, got us free tickets to a preview. Words like “predictable” “ludicrous” “sanctimonious” and “vanity project” had me bracing for the worst. But after five minutes, I had forgotten the critics’ venom. By ten minutes, I had forgotten the director’s name (which, in case you don’t know, is Angelina Jolie, who also wrote the screenplay).

Now I wonder why so many critics can’t find it within themselves to uphold this well-considered and compassionate work. Few of them seem able to discuss the film apart from the person who made it, which brings up an unfortunate Catch 22 of beauty, glamor, sex appeal, wealth and fame: Jolie’s film might have been judged more fairly had she kept her authorship under wraps, but then no one would have bothered to see it.

I don’t want to dwell too much on these critic ravings, but I do have to muse aloud on two of their frequent slurs: that the film is, on the one hand, an “activist film” and, on the other, a “vanity project.” These strike me as somewhat mutually exclusive, although there was one critic who cleverly managed to bypass that contradiction by accusing Jolie of being motivated by a desire to serve her vanity as an activist.

What I’d like to know is: When did it become a sin to hope your film will have an impact on society? And, how did being behind the camera of a film with no stars, in a foreign culture and a foreign language, confronting the viewer with uncomfortable truths become part of the definition of a vanity project?

Here’s what I have to say about In the Land of Blood and Honey: It is not only a very good film, it is a remarkably good directorial debut, as well as an impressive first-time screenwriting effort. And the critics, whatever their motivations, are missing the point. [Note: There are no spoilers in the following discussion.]

Here’s the point, as I see it: Having, by now, in her humanitarian work, witnessed untold horrors around the world, Jolie became gripped by an impulse to tell a story reflecting some fraction of the totality of what she has seen. She could have chosen the story of child warriors in Africa, or Pol Pot survivors in Cambodia, or women living under the Taliban in Afghanistan or any number of other human tragedies she has visited. But she chose the systematic rape and ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian War.

This was a sensible choice for two reasons: one, given that the audience she most wants to impact with a revealing picture of aggressive conflict is the comfortable, sheltered western audience, to focus on a European tragedy brings it sufficiently close to home for those viewers to connect with. And, two, being that she is, herself, female, choosing to focus on the use of rape as a weapon in these conflicts makes it personal, which is the strongest place from which to undertake the telling of a story. These are the kinds of responsible choices any mature writer would make who feels compelled to say something meaningful in their creative work.

However, given who Jolie is in the world, her creative work is bound to attract a percentage of viewers who are simply the wrong ones for it. “Our favorite bombshell action star has directed a war film? Oh boy! Can’t wait! Katherine Bigelow, watch out!” But this is not a war film. The Bosnian War is raging somewhere in the background. What is being foregrounded here are the civilian by-products of war: the persecution of ethnic muslims, the massacre of men suspected to be soldiers and, most of all, the systematic rape of women. That last one is key because, when endeavoring to gain dominance over a population, it actually isn’t necessary to kill all the women. Rape will do the trick just fine. This is what makes it such an effective weapon of war. And this is the statement Jolie felt compelled to put forth.

But how does one do that in a filmed drama? Do you show the literal experience of a Bosnian muslim woman being taken hostage, put in an encampment and raped over and over again? That would be kind of hard to watch. And, more important, how do you end that story? The war ends. She goes back to her husband (if he’s still alive) who, entrenched in cultural prejudice, can’t help seeing her as tainted and therefore rejects her. As much as this may be the truth, such a harsh delivery doesn’t help the audience take it in. A compassionate storyteller must have a certain amount of compassion for the viewer, as well.

Okay, so how bout if all the women in the encampment band together and carry out a plan to poison their persecutors through the food they are forced to cook them everyday? With the men writhing in pain on the floor, the women grab their guns and form a guerilla force not to be reckoned with, ultimately winning the day. Hooray! Hooray! But, wait,  . . . that’s not what we’re trying to say here. We’re trying to shed light on an under-acknowledged crime that persists all over the world, to this day. The reality is that women don’t win in this fight and won’t win until both men and women acknowledge it enough to want to stop it. To end with an outlandish Hollywood triumph is only to support our collective denial of how unending the problem still is (see my Thelma & Louise tribute, part 1, below).

So, if these options are unworkable, how do we tell a story that is grounded in devastating literal truth while also pointing to a larger human Truth? One way this is done is by making the main character’s plight both individual and universal, which then allows it a metaphoric resonance. Okay, so let’s try placing in the middle of this rape-as-a-weapon-of-war story two people from opposing sides who are in love. What does that do? It takes the extreme broken end of human connection, second only to murder (or, arguably, equal to it), which is rape, and puts it up against the far other end of human connection, from which rape is so horribly disconnected, which is love. To specify our characters as experiencing romantic love is simply giving them the most intensified manifestation of the greater universal love that has reached complete breakdown in any state of war.

This is what Jolie chose to do, and to great effect. As the relationship between Danijel, a Serbian military officer, and Ajla, a Bosnian muslim civilian, progresses, in the midst of surrounding horror, we see the potential that exists between them while also seeing the obstacles they are up against. The emotions they feel are reflective of all human connection and provide a fuller picture of how much is being lost in the perpetuation of brutality, rape and war.

Their story also reminds us that, where sex is concerned, context is everything. The wartime context brings us right up to that delicate edge between lovemaking and rape. On the one hand, violent aggression fosters sexual aggression. But, on the other, being surrounded with death triggers a need for life affirming sex. How can all these opposing impulses be resolved? Jolie takes a light touch as she endeavors to do so, very much in the European filmmaking tradition, but perhaps too light for some of her American viewing public.

A post-script to the film offers a supporting fact: In the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnian Muslims, an estimated 50,000 women were raped. Fifty thousand? Statistics of this magnitude are too often a side note in news reports on war. I encountered a similar example just the other day when a headline caught my eye, “Active-Duty Army Suicides Reach Record High.” My concern for veterans drew me in and I learned that, indeed, there were two more suicides in 2011 than in the previous years’ high. Then, well into the article, I read that 2011 showed a 30% increase in reported rapes among the ranks. Thirty percent? Why was that not the headline? Our own society is still a long way from showing an appropriate moral outrage about sexual violence.

That Jolie is clearly ahead of her society on this subject makes me think of the popular 19th century British actress Fanny Kemble who left her southern slave-owning husband because she couldn’t stomach her complicity as a slave-owner’s wife. Kemble already knew that which her society would stay determinedly blind to for a while yet — slavery is a crime against humanity. Nothing forced her to give up her comfortable life other than a grinding moral discomfort.

Likewise, Jolie used her position to speak out loud about the horrifying reality of sexual violence perpetrated against women in war, another crime against humanity. Nothing in her surroundings demanded that she do this. Only her grinding moral discomfort. I think she deserves high praise for making this film. And I hope to God she makes another one.

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Thelma & Louise 20th Anniversary Tribute, Part I

Published on June 6, 2011

First, I must address the much misunderstood ending, which, of course, requires starting at the beginning, meaning the origins of writer Callie Khouri’s impulse to tell this story.

Khouri has said in interviews that her original idea was “two women on a crime spree.” No doubt this image appealed to her for its challenge to conventional notions of what women can and should do. She toiled with it for a while, going down some dead end paths (at one point Louise was an oil company executive from Dallas), but nothing was quite clicking, until she had a chance encounter:

“One day I was walking down the street,” says Khouri, “minding my business, when this old guy in a car starts talking to me. He’s old enough to be my grandfather. I’m ignoring him, which is what you’re supposed to do in that situation; you know, I can’t hear you, I can’t see you, you can say whatever you want, I’m not a human being. Then he said, ‘I’d like to see you suck my dick,’ and I just lost it for a second. I pulled my sunglasses off and I walked over to the car and said, ‘and I’d like to shoot you in the fucking face.’”

Thus was born Thelma & Louise.

Khouri knew that she would never really shoot the man in the face. For two reasons. One, her internal moral code does not allow her to go around killing people for insulting her. And, two, even if her moral code did allow it, she knew that her society would not consider a lifetime’s build up of verbal assaults a valid justification for violent retribution against a last-straw incident.

Nonetheless, the anger behind her impulse was real. It needed to be expressed, which brings up the question, How does a woman channel her anger without hurting someone or getting herself in trouble? As all women know, in such a situation, there is no protection. The old man is free to verbally assault her and never be held to account for it. No police officer would arrest him. Neither is it likely another man in earshot would take action in her defense. And to take action in her own defense entails risk. She could have unleashed a far worse attack from the old man by confronting him the way she did.

She was already seeking expression of her anger in her story of two women on a crime spree. But that was about what it means, more generally, to be a woman in this world. This incident zeroed in on a much more specific anger, sparking an Aha! moment. I got it! The two women are on the lam because they killed a man for assaulting them! Now we have Louise shooting Harlan in the roadhouse parking lot as a perfect metaphoric outlet for Khouri’s anger at the old man in the car, giving her a much better revenge than actually shooting him in the face.

But that’s not all. If Khouri had actually shot the man in the face, she would have been villified. She wants people to know this, too. So with her two-women-on-the-lam story, she is also saying: Men are allowed to act out all their base impulses towards women, whether verbally or physically, with little to no accountability. If, on the other hand, a woman were to lose control and assault a man in response, there would be no mercy. This is the picture she wants to portray. As if she is saying, If I actually did this, they would hunt me from here to the Grand Canyon and then call out an army to make sure I didn’t get away.

Which brings us to that ending at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

First, let’s take a look at a couple of possible alternate endings. Here’s one: Trapped at the edge of the canyon, they give themselves up and are taken into custody, and we know they are sure to go to jail. In drama, this is a time-honored tragic ending that confronts the viewer with a stark social reality to open their blindered eyes, as was done to great effect in The Bicycle Thief. But for Khouri’s purposes, this choice would have been too dispiriting and disempowering.

Another option is seeing them simply gunned down at the edge of the Grand Canyon by an overwhelming disproportion of force, as was indicated by the freeze frame at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But there is an element of fate in Butch and Sundance’s demise. It’s actually a classic life-of-crime comeuppace ending. In Thelma and Louise, we are not falling in league with a couple of crime professionals. Rather, we are swept along with average citizens through previously unknown fields of power imbalance and injustice. This would have made such a violent ending unbearably harsh to witness.

Besides, Khouri wasn’t out to tell a story of victimhood, whether of fate or social blightedness. She wanted her women to be empowered by their experiences. And they were. Thelma, especially, undergoes a complete transformation from a ditzy dependent housewife to a self-directed woman. And this liberating process of transformation is triggered, so to speak, by Louise’s empowering act of revenge. So why, with so much positive transformation and empowerment going on, do they have to die in the end? Why not just have them escape to Mexico with a last shot on a beach drinking Margaritas?

When questioned about the ending, Khouri says this: “Women who are completely free from all the shackles that restrain them have no place in this world. The world is not big enough to support them. They will be brought down if they stay here.” Note that Khouri is describing individual empowerment (women who are free from shackles) in the midst of social oppression (a world not big enough for them). (Note also that she says such women have “no place in this world.” She doesn’t say “no place in the U.S., but they could have a nice life in Mexico.”) These are the two images that Khouri wants to leave you with. She wants you to feel the thrill of liberation, but she also wants to make sure you understand that such liberation cannot survive in the world as it currently exists.

Khouri is acutely aware that in this world (even these 20 years later), Thelma and Louise would have no hope of escape because the male-powered system is so overwhelmingly stacked against them, having both the motive (we can’t let women get away with this sort of behavior) and the means (the technology, the man power, the global reach). Then they would be put through the criminal justice system, which would simply chew them up and spit them out to a hostile, sensationalizing media, with neither showing any particular interest in uncovering actual Truth, despite their reputed purpose.

Thus, while this film is often referred to as a revenge fantasy, this is not quite accurate. A revenge fantasy is just that – a fantasy, like Inglourious Basterds. Khouri is not interested in that kind of fantasy. She knows too well there is no happy ending (in this world) to a story of female retribution, no matter how justified, or trauma-based, or just plain human that impulse is. So she has carefully avoided the margheritas-by-the-sea ending, although she makes reference to it in dialogue a few scenes earlier.

However, she still wants them to have at least some kind of triumph. “After all they went through,” she says, “I didn’t want anybody to be able to touch them.” So she had them soar off into heaven. “They flew away, out of this world and into the mass unconscious,” she says. This is a fantasy ending of another kind. One that requires a degree of imagination and the ability to read onscreen events as metaphor.

Khouri points out that people who complain about the ending being a suicide are reading the film very literally. I would like to add that they are also looking for a revenge fantasy that ends with a literal, real world triumph. They want the smug, self-satisfied margheritas-by-the-sea ending. Khouri’s choice is more sophisticated than that. She is effectively saying, “The way things are now, there is no chance at real world triumph for these women and I don’t want to sugar coat that reality. But neither do I want them brought down by this unjust world. I want them to achieve a higher triumph.” So she gives them the only triumph avaiable to them, in the form of transcendance to a purely spiritual realm, what she calls flying into the mass unconscious.

Indeed, the passing of time has shown her words were apt. It seems the film did fly into our mass unconscious, because now, 20 years later, the spirit of Thelma and Louise yet lives, urging us to keep at the task of making a world big enough to support women who are free.

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Year 20 and Counting

Published on May 16, 2011

In the reports coming out of the Cannes Film Festival the last few days, much has been made of the four films directed by women among the 19 films in competition there. I congratulate these directors and eagerly look forward to seeing their films in a theater near me (given the opportunity).

Apparently, this is “record-breaking” in the festival’s 64-year history. It also stands in stark contrast to last year’s competition, which tallied zero films in this category. Although I’m all for recognizing progress, I feel the need to note that, taken together, these stats add up to a pretty poor record. One might be tempted to think this year’s festival programmers were going out of their way to atone for past sins. I’m all for that, too. Progress should be welcomed, regardless of the motivation that prompts it.

Let’s keep in mind though that the larger goal in this accounting is to bring more women’s voices into the cultural conversation, both for the empowerment of women and for achieving greater balance in the world overall. Progress in this is not measured by percentages of women directors alone. Even films directed by men can be positively influenced in this regard by women producers, women editors, cinematographers, composers, and, not the least among these, women writers.

In that light, this year’s festival would have been a perfect opportunity to celebrate the longevity of a loud and lively female-generated film that remains unsurpassed in its cultural impact. It was 20 years ago this week at Cannes that Thelma & Louise first unspooled before audiences. Next week, May 24th, marks the 20th anniversary of its theatrical release in the United States.

Of course, for the festival programmers to gain points from this against their female director shut out last year, they would have to recognize the female screenwriter, Callie Khouri, as the primary creative force behind its vision, rather than the male director, Ridley Scott. And we know how those French love their “Auteur Theory.” (Sorry for the grousing tone here, but the Auteur Theory is a sore point among screenwriters.)

This film – Thelma & Louise – represents a breed unto itself on so many levels. Let’s pretend for a moment that it was written by a man. Let’s say this young man is a novice screenwriter with a burning statement he wants to make about his place in this world. His message is out-of-the-box of conventional thinking and challenging to comfortable assumptions. He promotes his screenplay to a few contacts in the industry and ultimately finds himself with Ridley Scott and two A-list actors who “get” his message and treat it with utmost respect. In short, this is a screenplay by a first time screenwriter with a socially startling message that was manifested as a big budget film almost exactly as written. How often does that happen? That’s the first thing.

Then the film goes out into the world and gains both critical and commercial success. But the success is not from having an A-list director and stars, an exciting story with good production values, or sufficient helpings of sex and violence served up to distract from whatever substance might be buried underneath. The success of this film is exactly because people can’t stop talking about its deeply felt and furious message. That’s the second thing.

Then this first-time screenwriter of the film with the irate point of view wins an Academy Award. That’s the third thing.

And then, for one more thing, 20 years later, this angry film is still being talked about and written about. As recently as 2007, two entire books were published still examining the film’s cultural impact (Thelma & Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film and Thelma & Louise and Women in Hollywood). It’s the film that won’t die, despite what happened to the characters in it.

Now add to all the aforementioned the fact that this shocking, challenging message was the singular vision of a female first-time screenwriter pouring out her feelings about what it means to be a woman in this world and you have, as far as I’m concerned, a film of nearly unparalleled historical import. Especially because it’s not just all about the message. In screenwriting terms, the film has great artistic significance as well.

Oh, how I lament the lack of notice this 20th anniversary is being given. All I’ve seen on the internet so far is a new edition of the DVD and a screening with Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Toronto. To do my part in filling this void, I’m going to devote my next few posts to the artistic significance of the Thelma & Louise screenplay. Stay tuned.

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In Search of a Balanced World

Published on May 11, 2011

Lately, I have come to rely on feature documentaries to tell me what’s really going on in the world. In the last year or so, I have learned disturbing truths about the financial crisis (Inside Job), the housing crisis (American Casino), the education crisis (Waiting for Superman) and, just recently, the civil justice crisis (Hot Coffee). Of course, these are simply addendums to those big crises we’ve known about for some time in the healthcare system (Sicko) and the environment (An Inconvenient Truth).

One reason I make sure not to miss these films is that I’m a big-picture person (I like to find the larger meaning in things) and this is where one can get the big picture on an issue as it has developed over time. Otherwise, at best I’m only getting fragments flying out at me in isolation amidst all the other noise I must integrate in the course of a day.

Sometimes these films tell me what I already kinda know but don’t want to think about. And sometimes they reveal heinous abuses I had no idea of, and that the great majority of decent, thoughtful people would not stand for if only they knew about them, too.

The latest issue-oriented feature documentary to expand my worldview is about two subjects very close to me: women and the media. It is aptly called Miss Representation. The big picture this film presents gives much context to inform the Christine Vachon/Miranda July discussion I recounted a couple of posts back.

Basically, it all boils down to this: the media has two objectives in its portrayals of women. One, to pose their worth entirely as a measure of physical appearance. And, two, to abuse and discredit any woman in a position of power or leadership. This second objective appears to be paying off quite well since the U.S. is way down the list of industrialized nations when it comes to female representation in elected positions.

Here are a few bare statistics I learned. Among the 250 top-grossing films last year, 16% of the protagonists were female. (One of the film’s commentators had a catchy name for such “girl power” protagonists as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. She called them, “the fighting fuck toy.”). Among writers of those top-250 films, 10% were female and among directors, 7% were female. The power continues to diminish the further up you go. Among film industry executives with any kind of clout, 3% were women. You’ve come a long way, baby.

The big picture I saw emerging from this film is of an issue that goes beyond being simply a grievance about equal rights for women. The apparently deliberate and calculated misrepresentation of women in the media is a crisis for humanity. It is well known by now among reasonably informed people that the world has devolved to a place of tremendous imbalance in the economic, humanitarian and environmental spheres. This film tells us that gender imbalance must be taken very seriously as a critical ingredient for maintaining all other imbalances. If we want more balance in the world, we must begin with balanced gender representation.

The film urges viewers to take action. Here’s an action I will take: until further notice, I am offering my story consultation services to women for half my usual fee. Actually, I think I’ll take this another step: I am also offering my services to men telling a woman’s story for three-quarters my usual fee. (My usual fee is $200 per hour.)

See the film. Here’s the trailer:

watch?v=W2UZZV3xU6Q&feature=channel_video_title

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Art Play

Published on May 9, 2011

I’d like to devote a few blog inches to my aunt, the artist Lanny Lasky, who died this weekend. A small homage to pay for a highly influential and productive life.

Lanny made collages, boxes and sculptures out of cast off materials and found objects. Her work can be seen at lannylasky.com. She was also an arts educator, serving as the head of education at the Museum of Modern Art for many years. I look at her life and it suddenly seems no accident that I became a creative educator with a focus on art over commerce.

The memories flooding back are filled with subtle mentoring. Watercolor outings sitting by a woodland brook capturing the form of the rocks and the light of the rushing water over and around them. Art viewing outings at MoMA standing in front of Matisse’s The Back I, II, III and IV examining their progression from figurative to abstract. And every family gathering at our house beginning with Lanny wanting to see my lastest creative project, weather it be a woven belt made on a crude hand-built wooden loom or a four foot square mural on butcher paper of my cat sitting in front of a fireplace.

My three cousins, Mike, Andy and Alan, always had dirty faces, but when we would show up at their house for Christmas, the tree would be heavily laden with the most outlandish child-crafted ornaments you’ve ever seen. I have a later memory of a Christmas at her vacation home in Vermont when all us grown up kids, some with kids of our own, spent many peaceful hours at the dining table cutting snowflakes out of folded paper to hang from a wire traversing above us. Lanny had a way of just putting a few pieces of paper and a couple of scissors out on the table and then waiting to see what happens. Soon we’re pawing through the backs of drawers looking for more scissors cause everyone wants to join in.

If I may presume to sum up her philosophy, I would say that, for her, art was play infused with deep thinking. You can see it in her work. I’ll miss her.

Ancient Manuscript Series, 8" X 20", paper, wood, 1998

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F-centricity

Published on May 4, 2011

The other day, I inadvertently provoked a little tussle between the producer Christine Vachon (Poison, Safe, Kids, Boys Don’t Cry, One Hour Photo, I’m Not There, Cairo Time), and the writer/director Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know and the soon-to-be-released The Future). It was at the San Francisco International Film Festival, during the Q & A after Vachon had delivered the annual State of Cinema address.*

Vachon, who I had been peripherally acquainted with back when she was producing, and I was writing articles about, Todd Haynes and Tom Kalin’s first films, had come to the festival fresh from producing the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce, also directed by Todd Haynes.  She was quite upbeat about her first experience working in television, and aptly optimistic about all the new platforms filmmakers are exploiting these days, even saying at one point, “The name of this address should be The State of Cinema is Not Necessarily Taking Place in the Cinema.”

I was expecting her to speak to these changes and had specifically come to hear her perspective on them.  But among her ruminations on the subject, she offered one view that I was not expecting.

Recounting the origins of Mildred Pierce, she said, “When [Todd] finished I’m Not There, we had a discussion about what he was going to do next. I said, ‘You know what, Todd, maybe you should think about doing something for TV.’ Because I knew he was probably going to want to make a female-centric story, and I knew how hard that would be to do theatrically.”

That last sentence landed on me with a jarring dissonance. Had she said, “I knew he was going to want to make,” for example, an experimental film or an art documentary, or a radical polemic on American foreign policy, and then followed it with, “and I knew how hard that would be to do theatrically,” I would have thought little of it.  But to hear her say “female-centric story” took me by surprise.

So, a little later, when the opportunity presented itself, I raised my hand. “You said earlier that you knew making a female-centric story would be pretty challenging theatrically, which is kind of a sad comment on the state of cinema today . . . “

She interjected, “Or a positive comment on the state of television today.”

“Could you say more on this topic from your experience and perspective in the industry?” I asked.

“Making female driven films is tough,” she said. “So what’s happening more and more is people are turning to TV.  Look, TV is a lot less risk averse in so many ways. For content that is driven by women, particularly women in their 30s or 40s, I have a hard time as a film producer figuring out how to get those movies made theatrically. I don’t know what else to say about it. Theatrically, those films are difficult to make. On Television, they are not only not as difficult, but they get embraced. It’s where people go to see those stories. And why is that bad?”

I was disappointed by her answer. I certainly share her delight at seeing more female-centric stories being embraced by the TV industry, but I was kind of hoping to hear her share my concern about writers and directors finding their female-centric stories largely shut out of wide theatrical distribution. That’s what she means when she says those films are too hard to make theatrically. They are too hard to get financed because there is so little prospect of a wide release. And that’s what she means when she refers to the theatrical industry being risk averse. Female-centric stories are considered too great a risk to put money behind.

The difficulty of getting women’s stories produced is pretty well known in the film industry by now. I didn’t need her to educate me on that point. I asked the question because it sounded to me like she had declared them dead altogether. And I couldn’t just let that go by. I guess I would have liked to hear some personal ire at their unjust death, or at least be extended some words of comfort about their passing, or perhaps even a little hope that they might someday rise again. But apparently she’s not that sentimental. They’re dead. Let’s move on to greener pastures.

About three or four questions later, as I sat in my aisle seat, elbow on the armrest, chin on my palm, cheek mashed into my knuckles, I heard a female voice coming from the back of the theater way on the other side.  “I just have to respond,” she began, “to the woman who asked about the difficulty of making woman-driven movies and your response saying especially those movies about women 30 to 40 years old.” My guardian angel had alighted.

“As a 37-year-old filmmaker whose movie is playing right now just up the street,” she went on, “I get it about being nimble and going where it’s actually possible to go. But when you say what’s bad about that, I do think there’s something bad about it. That’s such a disheartening answer for her. And it’s not a good thing. I mean it’s good that TV is supporting these stories. But there’s a lot that’s bad about [not having these films in theaters].”

I found out later that this 37-year-old filmmaker was Miranda July, who made an extremely respectable theatrical showing with her first feature Me and You and Everyone We Know and is now gaining significant attention for her second outing The Future, which I knew was playing at the festival.  When I checked the schedule, I saw that, indeed, her film was showing exactly during the time of Vachon’s talk.

Vachon must have realized this was July speaking because she responded with respect, while also sticking to her position. “I’m not sure that I agree with you. Honestly, I feel like I’ve made a tremendous number of female driven stories and I’ve always figured out ways to make them and get them to the public. Look, I think nostalgia is the most dangerous emotion in the world. I really do. And I think nostalgia for a certain kind of filmmaking and distribution . . .  “

July swooped down on this, “I’m not talking about the medium changing. I’m talking about the woman part of it.”

Then, like two celestial beings speaking over my head, Vachon countered with a comforting note. “Why not just focus on what is possible?” she said. “I don’t think it’s a bad time at all. Look at cable television right now. It’s pretty much all women-driven stories  –  Weeds and United States of Tara and Nurse Jackie and The C Word and all that stuff. It’s all female stories. That’s pretty amazing.”

July didn’t pursue the discussion further, perhaps out of her knowledge of how dog-on-a-bone persistent producers can be. Besides, her point had been made.

Producers are put on this earth to be nothing if not pragmatic. It is exactly that quality that makes them a good creative mate for a director, who is put on this earth to be visionary.  Only by consummating producer pragmatism with director vision will a squirming, squalling beautiful new film ever be birthed.

Nonetheless, I’d like to call for a moment of silence to commemorate the death of the female-centric theatrically released film. While I am happy to be watching female-centric stories on the small screen at home, I still love the big screen movie-going experience, too. To have to accept dwindling opportunities to see them when I engage in that time-honored social ritual . . . well . . . I just hope it doesn’t stay that way. A moment of silence, please.

[An appropriately respectful moment passes.]

All together now:

Long live female-centric theatrically released films!

*******

* To hear a podcast of Christine Vachon’s State of Cinema address in its entirety, go to http://fest11.sffs.org.

Filed in Female Centric Films | One reply

Read It Here! Uncut and Uncensored!

Published on April 30, 2011

Last week, I submitted a Reader Comment to The New York Times in response to a think piece on Thelma & Louise. This morning I suddenly remembered this and decided to go on the site to see if it ever got posted. I discovered that it did not.

What’s up with that? I thought it was a perfectly reasonable comment, certainly more deeply considered than most, and definitely bringing a distinctive point of view into the discussion. But who can fathom the vicissitudes of the New York Times. Okay, so maybe it was a little long and a little academic in tone. But maybe, also, it was a little too true.

I sat here wondering, “So that nice little piece I wrote just goes nowhere? Stuck on the desktop of my computer, never to be seen?” Then I remembered I have a blog, which, granted, has suffered some neglect lately. More on that later. But it’s in times like these that having a back-burnered blog can be the very thing that saves the day.

The think piece I was responding to was “Thelma, Louise and All the Pretty Women,” by Carina Chocano. You might want to search it out and read it. But in case you can’t be bothered, I’ll do my best to capsulate it here.

Chocano writes a very engaging and well-thought account of her perspective on the films Thelma & Louise and Pretty Woman from the literary and feminist theory viewpoint she gained in college, which was right around the time the two films came out. Pretty Woman appeared first, just before she graduated, presenting an image of femaleness as utterly dependent on bartering sexuality, and inherently naïve, thus, needing to be taught. A year later, as Chocano grappled with finding her place in the so-called real world, Thelma & Louise provided welcome counter-programming, giving expression to female alienation and anger in a transgressive yet mainstream form.

She then applies the character archetype of the “ingenue” to both Geena Davis’ Thelma and Julia Roberts’ Vivian, saying: “Whereas both of them start out childlike and cloistered – Thelma by her repressive marriage to the chauvinistic Darryl; Vivian by her rather alarming denial – and both embark on a jouney of transformation, only Thelma transitions into a new, more independent self, while Vivian finds a way to be preserved as a wide-eyed child-bride forever.”

Later, she says: “For the few years after the release of “Thelma and Louise,” the culture seemed unusually and (in hindsight) unbelievably receptive to the plaintive howls of a generation of girls who, as I did, felt exiled from the culture. Within a few more years, though, the whole thing would be supplanted by a far more chipper, more palatable, more profitable version of itself. It’s now nearly impossible to imagine . . . a cultural moment in which girls could become iconic for airing their grievances and not simply their dirty laundry.” Finally, she concludes: “Revisiting ‘Thelma and Louise’ recently, I was struck by how dated it seemed, how much a product of its time. And ‘Pretty Woman,’ it turns out, wasn’t a throwback at all. It was the future.”

I wondered how this disheartened perspective on Thelma & Louise would be landing with readers. So I clicked on the comments and started perusing. Among the many thoughtful expressions, there were, of course, a few of the usual snipes about that “controversial” ending. I saw some grasping at straws going on, so I thought I’d weigh in from my own perspective of having studied the film in some depth. Here’s what I posted:

Let’s not forget that Thelma & Louise, while describing Thelma’s trajectory from submissive ingenue to self-directed woman, is using as its triggering backdrop Louise’s trauma-inspired reaction to a threatened rape. When I lecture on this film in my screenwriting classes, I like to close with my own comparative study with the film Monster, which was based on the true story of Aileen Wuoronos, the so-called first female serial killer. Wuoronos had been raped over and over again in childhood and became a prostitute at age 13. As an adult, she wasn’t able to rise above her circumstances and finally lost control, killing several of her Johns. Her first victim was, in fact, brutalizing her. But her subsequent targets simply made a wrong move, triggering a post-traumatic stress reaction that caused her to kill them, too. She finally got caught and eventually was put to death by society.

When Monster came out, I called it “Thelma & Louise’s Evil Twin” due to its much harsher depiction of how things are for women who are raped. It shows the dark, gritty reality that Thelma & Louise writer Callie Khouri is only hinting at. As if Thelma & Louise is the clarion call and Monster is the truth manifested among us. In the courtroom scene that Monster ends with (taken directly from court documents), Wuoronos is defiantly unapologetic for what she did and rageful at the system that condemns her. “May you rot in hell!” she yells at the judge and the jury. “Sending a raped woman to death! You’re a bunch of scum, that’s what you are!” By contrast, Thelma & Louise, despite the controversy it generated, is dainty, polite and sweet.

These films paint corresponding pictures of how society vilifies women who respond to male aggression with aggression of their own. On the one hand, it is done through a faithful reportage of real life events and, on the other, through an artful use of metaphor. The biggest difference is in Khouri’s choice not to have the victim/aggressors killed by the powers that be, as Wuoronos was, but to have them instead claim a degree of power, against the odds, by enacting their own fate. It is the metaphoric nature of the story that gives the author the opportunity for this kind of dramatic license to make her point.

When asked in an interview why the film had to end in suicide, Khouri responded, “To me, the ending was symbolic, not literal. I mean, come on, read a book. We did everything possible to make sure you didn’t see a literal death. That you didn’t see the car land, you didn’t see a big puff of smoke come up out of the canyon. You were left with the image of them flying. They flew away, out of this world and into the mass unconscious. Women who are completely free from all the shackles that restrain them have no place in this world. The world is not big enough to support them. . . . I loved that ending and I loved the imagery. After all they went through, I didn’t want anybody to be able to touch them.”

The biggest difference between Thelma & Louise and Pretty Woman, as I see it, is that one was by a writer with a burning need to say something. The other was not. But Khouri doesn’t pretend to provide an easy answer to the world’s problems. She is simply showing us a hard reality as she perceives it, which may not be palatable to everyone. You can accept it or you can argue against it. You can also be grateful, as I am, that someone, once upon a time, put forth a strong statement that, 20 years later, is still provoking discussion among its viewers.

At the end of her essay, Chocano asserts that the Riot Grrrl culture of her youth has, by now, been supplanted by the more socially safe Girl Power ethic, pointing out that Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City “stands pretty clearly as a descendant of Vivan, not of Thelma or Louise.” I would add that, unfortunately, if we want to look for descendants of Thelma or Louise, we have to acknowledge the likes of Aileen Wuornos.

And I can’t help wondering if this might have something to do with why The New York Times didn’t post my comment.

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Once Upon a Time in Italy

Published on September 14, 2010

Yea! Hooray! Yippie-eyo-kay-yay! The spaghetti western is back! Well, not the spaghetti western exactly, but . . .  but what? The spaghetti spy thriller? The spaghetti assassin film? Whatever. You know the one I’m talking about. I’m talking about . . . The American.

After I saw it, I burst through the exit door and exclaimed, “That was FAN-TAS-TIC!” To which Ed, trailing behind me, rolled his eyes and grumbled, “You’ve gotta be kidding.” I turned in surprise. “You didn’t like it?” “It was so boooorrrrrriinngg!” he said.

The ironic thing is, he was the one who dragged me to see it. “Come on! I really wanna see this film! It starts in 20 minutes. We can just make it!” Not that I didn’t want to see it. Just that it wasn’t at the top of my list. I kinda wanted to see Eat Pray Love, cause, after all, I’m a girl, and it’s a girl film, and I wanted to see what we’re managing to do with girl films these days. And I thought the book was pretty funny.

But I haven’t been able to get Ed on board with that one. He keeps mumbling about the girl film thing. (Do guys have any idea how many macho films women end up seeing just cause they’re very nearly all that’s out there? C’mon! It won’t kill ya to see a chick film once in a while!) On the other hand, it’s lucky for me that Ed’s pick won out since I got to see a refreshing reiteration of an old beloved genre from back in the days when men were men and movies were movies. And Ed was bored. Ha! A cosmic justice.

Despite it’s title, The American is a distinctly un-American film. Hence, all the shock and surprise that it topped the Labor Day weekend box office charts. It has far more resemblance to a European film, especially harkening back to those of the 60s and 70s. As we all know, or we should know if we don’t, European film has its own aesthetic. And it is an aesthetic that is somewhat antithetical to the American action film. Where one is fast and furious, the other is slow and deliberate. Where one is direct and concrete, the other is poetic and nuanced. Where one is saturated and raucous, the other is muted and quiet. Where one zooms along on the surface, the other takes the time to delve into psychological depth. Sadly, the former has been winning out in the international box office for decades now, and the latter has been doggedly trying to find a way to elbow its way into that market share.

A case in point: Lately, people have been asking me if I liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. “Ummm . . . no, I didn’t,” I keep having to say. “Why not?” they then ask. And I have to search my memory a bit since it was a few months ago and I liked it so little I kinda put it out of my mind. Then pieces of it come back and I give my two-sentence wrap up: “I thought it was just another clumsy European attempt to emulate the American action film. Kind of a worst of both worlds thing.” (Not that I anticipate the American remake is likely to be much better. Kind of a worst of the worst is what I expect.)

This was the beautiful thing about the spaghetti western. It managed to achieve an integration of American and European film aesthetics that drew upon the best of both worlds. Despite what some may have said at the time, the Italians were not just doing a cheap imitation of an American winner. They were taking a tried-and-true story context and adapting it to their own style. Quiet, moody, scenes of psychological showdown were punctuated by bursts of action while subtle detail stood in for expansive landscape. Okay, so the dialogue tended to be a bit clunky. That’s what gave them their cheap imitation rep. But ultimately, it didn’t detract from the overall effect. The Europeans had found a way to toil in American territory on their own terms.

The American is not strictly made of spaghetti (i.e., only the locations and actors appear to be Italian) and neither is it a western. But, for my money, it employs the same amalgamation of European and American story and style as the spaghetti western (complete with moments of clunky dialogue) and is, thus, far superior to all those European misfires at producing American-grade action fare. As for its pedigree, it seems to come from a pretty well-balanced mix of European and American creative principles and producers. Maybe that’s it’s secret formula.

Here’s what I especially loved about the film – it didn’t get bogged down in plot. Neither did it stop at character. And, in so doing, it rose to the level of metaphor. Finally! A functional metaphor! (If you haven’t seen the film, you might want to stop reading here.)

A young friend of mine, having only seen the preview, dismissively summed up the story thus: “Looks like just another Guy-trying-to-give-up-his-wayward-life-but-must-overcome-one-last-obstacle kind of story.”  This is, on one level, an apt description because this is the nature of a plot-driven story – it’s all about overcoming external obstacles and conflicts. When Jack takes on one more job, presumably to make one last pile of money to retire on, he is keeping himself engaged with and vulnerable to all the deviant elements that he wants to get away from. He’s trying to have his cake and eat it, too. He then has to learn, through hard experience, that if he’s going to get out of this life, he’s going to have to make a clean break, meaning he can no longer gain income from the dirty money that building weapons brings. But it’s only by prevailing at his game one more time that he can come to that understanding. In this version, he beats the external obstacle, so he can then let go and move on.

But that’s just the plot story. There’s more. The film makes clear at the beginning that Jack’s reason for wanting to stop being a hit man is so he can stop living in isolation. His “associate” Pavel, who he goes to for protection, chastises him for making friends. “You should know better,” says Pavel. Hearing this tells us how badly Jack wants that human connection. Badly enough to engage in a risk that he should know better than to take. This provides a character challenge that helps drive the external events of the film. As he continues his one-foot-in-one-foot-out relationship to this nasty business, is he going to manage not to endanger other innocents simply by associating with them?

He seems to take Pavel’s words to heart when he throws away the cell phone that Pavel gave him and hides out in another town. If he’s not supposed to make friends, then he can’t assume Pavel is his friend either. In his new town, the first person he encounters is a priest. Jack must be broadcasting, through his aura or something, how badly he wants connection and company because the priest zeroes right in on him and Jack readily accepts his invitation to dinner. Well, that’s probably safe enough, the priest being under the protection of God and all. And, who knows, maybe some of that protection will rub off on Jack.

Jack then goes to a prostitute to satisfy his earth-bound need for physical intimacy. Shouldn’t be difficult to keep a prostitute at a careful distance.  But – uh oh! – he likes her, as we find out when, returning to the brothel again and learning it’s Clara’s night off, he refuses to take any other. Indeed, the next time he is with her, he makes love to her so ardently that, apparently, she enjoys it. Bad move. Now Clara’s kinda stuck on him, to the point of inviting herself out on a date with him when she runs into him in town. Dining and bedding her outside of the safe container of the brothel triggers his trust issues and he interprets the gun in her purse as evidence of conspiracy, even though it’s a very lady-like .22 caliber, more typical of a woman concerned with self-protection than aggression.

Jack’s trust issues come up again after he tells Pavel that he’s out of the business. Apparently, a part of him still wants to trust Pavel by telling him this, like he wants Pavel’s blessing as he departs. But, objectively speaking, Jack has plenty of reason to assume that Pavel must, therefore, kill him because Jack knows too much about what Pavel does. Like when Jack had to kill his lover because she got a glimpse of the truth of his life. It goes both ways. Jack soon comes around to this conclusion and, having his instinct confirmed by his final confrontation with the “Black Widow” who is Pavel’s messenger, he rushes back to Clara and asks her to go away with him. And we see that he has finally figured out who he can and cannot, or should and should not, trust in order to truly break free of this destructive life. But not soon enough to dodge a fatal bullet, so to speak.

It was when Jack was rushing back to Clara that I got my first glimpse of a potential allegorical layer to this story. I found myself praying to the film’s creators, “Please don’t give this film a happy ending! Please don’t have him dodge the Black Widow’s bullet so that he can go off and be happy with Clara!” See, if it were a purely plot-based film, this triumph would be required. If it were a purely character-based film, this personal redemption and cosmic reward would be, if not required, then highly permissible. But, in this film, either of these choices would have come across as simplistic and shallow, and would have made for a not very satisfying ending. By steering away from them, another, more resonant, option opens up. This is when I excitedly began wondering if there was some metaphorical intention behind the film.

At first, I was disappointed when Jack did “dodge” the Black Widow’s bullet, even if it was through his own strategic thinking (and ruthlessness, I might add). But then I saw that this was just the film playing with me, a little narrative sleight of hand. And a nice touch because it provided an opportunity to once again show Jack’s own killer nature. Besides, to have him gunned down in the street – Just like that! [sound of snapping fingers] – would have been a tad anti-climactic. So we got in one more shoot out and chase scene – always good for building more tension – and then Jack got to pay his cosmic dues. Needless to say, I was elated.

See, with the downer ending, The American gains a metaphorical meaning far greater than just external obstacles and inner conflicts. It is, on the one hand, a story about an assassin and arms maker who wants to get out of the business and have a normal life, but whose history is bound to come back to him. But, within that story, there is also a greater meaning, one that then becomes a lesson to all Americans: Those who trade in weapons cannot, ultimately, escape becoming targets.

While the film’s minimalist style is the reason why a triumphant or redemptive ending would have appeared simplistic and shallow (not enough tension is built throughout to support those resolutions), it is this same minimalism that substantially contributes to the film’s ability to function on a metaphorical level. The characters are so iconic – the hit man, the priest, the prostitute — they are almost mythic, not in the sense of having grandeur, but in the sense of contributing to a larger meaning.

So how is it that minimalistic, iconic elements manage to elevate the story to greater levels of thematic significance rather than just making it vapid and dull? One way is that they resonate into larger meanings, but those larger meanings also have to go somewhere. The secret, therefore, to having a film transcend its superficial story is in having a thematic progression from beginning to end.

In our identification with the main character,  and in the most big picture terms, we begin the film as the victim of a dangerous, relentless and unreasonable adversary. All we want to do is get away from the adversary and have a normal life. What did we do wrong? Why do we deserve this?

But by the end of the film, we learn that we are unwittingly contributing to our own downfall by building the weapon that will destroy us. This means, by extension, that we have also created the adversary who is so determined to do us in. We are responsible for all of it, and we can’t seem to get out of it without continuing to endanger innocent people.

Let’s just take a closer look at some of the elements that resonate beyond the surface of the story: Jack is “the American” of the title, and just about the only American character in the film. He is a former assassin who wants to get out of the business, but has now become a target (his past is coming back at him) which is making it more difficult to transcend his assassin nature (after all, he must now defend himself against the past that is haunting him). Unfortunately, all he knows how to do, besides kill people, is make guns to sell for lots of money. So he’s also kind of economically locked into the business he’s trying to get out of. He takes one more job on the assurance that he doesn’t have to be the one to “pull the trigger,” like that somehow makes a difference.

Jack is wanting to be a better person, but whenever a “friend” finds out about his past, he has to kill them. He does it quite easily and naturally, without a moment’s hesitation, even though he also appears to have some feeling for such friend. Is it possible it has become his nature to destroy? This puts him in a bind when it comes to coming out of his isolation and developing normal relationships. Along the way, he meets a priest, who confronts him with his soul and urges him to come to God, and a prostitute, who turns out not to be the cheap whore of her profession’s reputation, but rather a caring, feeling individual. And then he has this other so-called “friend,” who is at some remove, barely accessible, but is also in a way his boss, sort of a benefactor/protector. Turns out in the end that this “protector” was likely the source of the problem all along (come to think of it, Pavel looks a little Swedish).

Is any of this resonating for you? It does for me, but I don’t want to start further spelling out potential metaphorical meanings cause that tends to have the effect of throwing a wet rag on the imagistic poetry of the thing.

For those who may have left the theater thinking Jack is still alive, I have this to say: Is it really so hard to read the director’s intention behind having the camera pan into the trees? It is a sad comment on our level of viewership if only a very literally described death can have definitive credibility.

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Thank You, George

Published on September 13, 2010

Last night I went to see the documentary It Came From Kuchar at the Rafael Film Center with George Kuchar and the film’s director Jennifer M. Kroot in attendance. George Kuchar, for those who aren’t familiar with him, started as an underground filmmaker, along with his brother Mike, in New York in the 60s with Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and the like, although his style stood markedly apart from his more aloof, intellectual counterparts. Nurtured on 1950s Hollywood melodramas, George’s work features garish colors, lurid subject matter and frequently pushes the limits of commonly agreed-upon decency. What also sets George apart from his peers is that, to this day, despite prodigious and ongoing output, he remains largely under the radar.

Here’s why I went to see the film: George was my very first film teacher. I couldn’t not go. A student must pay homage to the teachers who most influenced her whenever the opportunity arises. George’s influence reaches far and wide, having taught for almost 40 years now at my alma mater, the San Francisco Art Institute. In that small sphere, he is revered and beloved. (And I must commend Ms. Kroot, another former student, for doing such justice to him in her film.)

The reason George is so loved by his students, aside from the fact that he’s a creative genius, is his unbounded can-do-ism. There is no production problem that can’t be solved and all “mistakes” immediately become assets. He is completely empowering and implicitly permission-giving for whatever creative motivation you have brewing in you. I don’t remember him ever showing any negativity or judgment. And his lack of self-consciousness is freeing to be around. Reflecting back, I think one of the biggest messages I, personally, came away with is that it’s okay to love melodrama.

When the screening ended, I told Ed I wanted to say hi to George, and then said, “But I doubt he’ll remember me.” It has been, after all, something like 30 years since I was in his class. To my astonishment, though, as I sidled up to him, still surrounded by other admirers, he turned to me and said, “Oh! Hi, Jennine!” Then, surprising me further, he said, “Symphony for a Sinner!”

Among George’s various oeuvres – his underground films, his weather films, his video diaries – is a category known as the “class films.” These are the class projects he made using school equipment and student actors in the school’s sound-studio classroom. I had the honor of appearing in Symphony for a Sinner, which I have always assumed was just one among the many class films he’s made. But I learned from George last night it is considered something of a pinnacle in its genre. This morning I found this about it on the internet:

“Symphony for a Sinner (1979) was a long, lavishly photographed color film generally considered the magnum opus of the class productions. New York critic and coauthor of Midnight Movies  J. Hoberman would rank it as one of the ten best films of the year, while Stan Brakhage would call it “the ultimate class picture.” John Waters, who now visited George regularly whenever he passed through San Francisco, envied the lurid color photography and wanted George to shoot his next picture (which would have been Polyester and didn’t happen). Symphony, Waters said, had the look he craved for Desperate Living (1977).”   (www.brightlightsfilm.com/26/kuchar1.html)

When I lived in New York I had an upstairs neighbor who starred in an early Brian DePalma film Murder a la Mod. That was the only film she ever appeared in and by the time I knew her she was a receptionist in an art gallery and lived in a tiny Greenwich Village garret with her photographer husband. But she was very proud of her contribution to DePalma’s early career and would often bring out a book to show featuring a publicity still of her in the film.

So that’s going to be me someday. George’s star will rise to the recognition he deserves as a major American filmmaker of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and I will ride his coattails to posterity for having played a back up singer in a nightclub scene doing a disco version of “Can’t Get Started With You” in his seminal film Symphony for a Sinner. I would love it if it were so (even though I’m sure if I were to view my performance today I would find it utterly embarrassing).

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Awakenings

Published on August 4, 2010

Here’s Ed and I after I got home from seeing Inception last night:

Me: (grumpily) When are you going to get rid of that junk in the garage! I can barely get my car in.

Ed: I guess you didn’t like the movie.

Me: No, I guess I didn’t.

. . . A few minutes later, after I’ve cooled down . . .

Ed: You want to tell me what you did like about it?

Me: I liked the big climax when everything’s blowing up. Well, not really blowing up. Kind of this domino effect thing happening that was pretty cool. But I can’t explain it. You’d have to see it.

Ed: Why should I go see it if it’s such a bad film?

Me: I didn’t say it was bad. I said I didn’t like it. There’s a difference.

The film was perfectly well made, very intricately plotted, and beautifully executed. It creates its own internal system and then plays it out to the nth degree. This is a point I often emphasize about dramatic structure – in a way, it doesn’t matter what structural system you use, as long as you have a system, one that is thorough and consistent. So I have admiration for the film’s beautifully complex internal system that naturally leads to a solid dramatic structure.

But the story was just a big brain exercise. For all it’s wanting to talk about “What is real?” it wasn’t actually about anything real, as far as I could tell. For all it’s diving deep into the subconscious, I didn’t find any of the psychology particularly meaningful or convincing. And for all of it’s wanting to challenge our minds (or fuck with our minds, as I have heard some describe it), I kept having this feeling I was being spoon fed a ton of background exposition.

A little later that evening . . .

Ed: What are you doing tomorrow?

Me: Well, I was going to write something about this film. But I didn’t like it, so now I’m not so sure.

However, despite my trepidation, poor Ed got woken up at 6:30 this morning by the sound of a pencil scratching across a yellow pad of paper. I had put that pad and pencil next to my bed just in case. And sure enough as my consciousness was coming out of its dream state, my subconscious started coughing up all sorts of vitriol about the film. Here are a couple of samples:

“Who was that stewardess/dream technician lady? I guess her big scene got left on the cutting room floor.”

“That van charging through the streets with the driver shooting backwards out the window was almost like a running joke they kept going back to.”

And: “I’m just getting so sick of all this bang, bang, bang in the movies.”  (I don’t mind exploding things. That’s always fun. But all these people endlessly shooting each other gets old after a while.)

Then, as my consciousness slowly came into focus, my internal discussion began to attain more sophistication and nuance. I started thinking the big thoughts about art and drama and catharsis and tragedy. (And I should say at this point – Spoiler Alert! The following discussion assumes you’ve seen the film.)

I’m sure Christopher Nolan would like to think of himself as an artist. And I understand that he is wanting to push the medium in directions it has not been taken before. I have respect for that. That is certainly one of the jobs of the artist. I firmly believe that a primary function of art is to show us something new. However, this expansion of our consciousness through art needs to be applied not only to the nature of the art form (as in pushing the bounds of film), but also to our own human nature. In fact, this is possibly what we want from art most of all – to gain some new insight about ourselves, our lives or our world.

What is it that makes the Mona Lisa the most revered painting in history? Certainly, precision execution is a big part of it. But where the painting transcends is in that look that Da Vinci was able to capture. All the human ambiguity, the implied thought and emotion, the direct confrontation with a confounding  mystery. In so doing, the painting articulates for us much of the ambiguity, contradiction and mystery we feel about our own lives. So it is showing us something new about the medium of painting –  that it can communicate to that depth – but it is also showing us something new about ourselves – we are pretty complex, contradictory beings.  (Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa in person? I have. I wandered the galleries of the Louvre, searching, searching, searching for it. Then, having finally come upon it, I wondered why I worried so much that I might miss it. It is tiny, it’s true, but it reaches out and grabs you, pulls you in and captivates you. At least that’s what it did to me.)

Apologies to Mr. Nolan for putting  his work up against such a high standard. It’s just my way of musing on the components of art to help myself articulate what I lacked in this film. I guess Da Vinci pops to mind since he, too, is a brainy, expert technician. But he achieves this little something extra that makes all the difference.

So back to Inception. As I watched the film, I was aware of a few things bugging me. One, as already mentioned, was all that exposition, continually bonking me on the head with information I had to keep track of. But even more bothersome was that I never really felt Cobb’s losses. First, his loss of his children. This is important to the film’s structure because it is supplying his motivation for taking all those huge risks that are driving the plot forward, forward, forward. But it was used as such a dramatic device, almost cynically. “Let’s just put in a scene of him on the phone with the kids, trying to communicate with them and getting cut off by their grandmother. This’ll tell the audience that he misses them and wants to get back to them. Okay, that’s done. Now we can get on to all the fun stuff we have planned.” I’m sorry, but it just didn’t create the needed emotional impact to support his motivation.

Then there’s the loss of his wife. Now, I understand that, at the beginning, Nolan is intentionally leading us away from feeling Cobb’s heartbreak over his wife. Or I assume he is, because she was so clearly set up as a bad guy. We first meet her in a “What are you doing here?” encounter in which she’s intruding and must be “dealt with.” Yeah, yeah, I know. This is just one of his dreams, we learn later, and her intrusion is a projection that his subconscious has coughed up. It makes perfect – logical – sense.

The next time we see her, he announces that he doesn’t trust her any longer and then we find out why – cause she walked away when he asked her to hold a rope he was dangling from. On the one hand, this image is a beautiful metaphor for a relationship gone bad. “I’m going out on a limb here and I’m counting on you to keep me safe. Whoops! You failed me intentionally! Well, then, that’s a deal breaker. I can’t count on you to watch out for me so the relationship is over.” And, indeed, it is not presented in any story context, so, likely, it was intended as simply a metaphoric representation of their marriage.

But it’s so mixed up. She’s clearly pissed at him. He’s asking about the kids, so he’s clearly separated from them, implying that he’s separated from her. So, we deduce, she’s a bitter, resentful ex-wife. That’s why she keeps intruding and messing things up. And we get the message that we’re not supposed to like her. But then, as the story plays out, we’re supposed to gradually learn the truth about his feelings for her and, ultimately, we are supposed to be in sympathy with his guilt and pain. But the way in which we are learning of this is all cerebral. There is no emotional reality to it. It is being reported to us. We are not experiencing it with him. Thus, we are not feeling it.

So why do we need to feel it? There is a reason. And its not just that I’m a sap for gooey emotional stories. I’m not. Stories that are all emotion and no intellect are just as onerous. You need them both because they serve each other in important ways.

Nolan has his characters talk about catharsis, but, based on how the story plays out, I don’t think he fully understands what that means. Catharsis is an awakening, yes. But it doesn’t mean simply understanding something rationally that you didn’t understand before. To be a complete catharsis, there must be an element of emotional awakening as well.

Catharsis is a tunnel of pain the character must traverse to come out into the sun of both rational and emotional understanding. Othello experiences the pain of having destroyed Desdemona in order to know how much he loved her. King Lear destroys his family to learn how much his daughter loved him. Romeo and Juliet meet their end for their families to witness a great love lost to their petty fighting. But, most importantly in drama, the point is for the viewer to experience the catharsis, too, by feeling it along with the character.  This is what makes the ending in a drama more resonant and satisfying than simply succeeding or failing against a generic enemy. You can do that if you want – just have your story be plot-driven toward triumph – but I think Nolan was trying to do something more. In fact, I know he was because his character didn’t triumph. Well, did or didn’t, depending on how you interpret the ending.

In a way, you could say the film has three possible endings: For viewers who want a happy ending, it appears to be a happy ending. “Welcome home, Mr. Cobb,” says the customs official. And we’re into Cobb’s dream for what he’d like to have happen. He is reunited with his children.

But for the viewers who want to stay in the contained system that the film has created – they’re all dead. “Welcome home, Mr. Cobb,” means home as in the afterlife. Hence, he’s dead. And we already saw the others being washed up on a shore – maybe the shore of the river or maybe the shore of their subconscious (or somebody’s), in which case, they’re all dead.

Then there are the viewers who get caught in Purgatory, doomed to spend the rest of their lives saying to themselves over and over again – What the fuck was that about?

What I’m getting at here is that, while the film resembles a tragedy – in the sense that Cobb fails at his quest and everyone dies – the intended ambiguity prevents it from doing the job that tragedy is designed to do in drama. Even the exasperatingly passive and screwy Hamlet is finally forced to face what he doesn’t want to face – that his uncle killed his father – and then rises to the occasion to exact revenge before succumbing to poison. Thus, we fully feel how much was lost and how much was wasted as a result of his equivocating.

Cobb, too, has something he doesn’t want to face – his feelings of guilt around the circumstances of his wife’s death. He, too, makes a terrible mistake that loses him the one he loves. If we’re going to explore the area of “What is real?” it is the emotions that go along with these events that, ultimately, are what is real. The failure to communicate those emotions holds the film back from achieving its full communicative potential.

My guess is Nolan deemphasized the emotional impact because his goal was to make the ending logically ambiguous. So the film makes an interesting brain exercise. But, in so doing, it falls significantly short of giving us any kind of new insight into ourselves, our lives or our world.

I’m on vacation the next couple of weeks, so may not be posting again til later in August. Enjoy the end of your summer!

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