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Gonna fly now, or not: Rocky (I)

November 17, 2009

"Rocky" is one of those words that looks unwordlike if you see it once too often.

It’s difficult to hear the name ‘Rocky’ and not picture cheesy training montages and patriotically homoerotic boxing clinches, with the grimacing visage of Reagan forever looming over the spectacle.  They were the Sunday-afternoon staples of an 80s childhood, famous lines interspersed with commercials urging parents to Buy American every fifteen minutes.  They were live-action cartoons for grownups who needed a little pro-USA comfort as the junk-bond moguls…er, I mean Commies…gobbled up and excreted the small companies that offered Middle American providers stable, lifelong employment.  Until recently, I’d never seen and entire Rocky movie in one sitting, and that was Rocky 4, the most painfully jingoistic of the bunch.

But before Rocky became an unironic Real American Hero in the 80s, he was born in a small guerrilla-style film of the same name that was firmly rooted in the gloomy American Dream Denied tradition of 70s cinema.  There’s a triumphant sports story in Rocky, and its name is Apollo Creed – a member of the oppressed minority group throughout United States history who’s risen through brains, ability, and sheer guts to the pinnacle of success.  In his triumphant career high, he claims the nation’s bicentennial for himself, staging a show fight on New Years’ Day and entering as the embodiment of America in stars-and-stripes shorts and a George Washington wig, throwing money to the mostly white spectators.  And he’s cheered for this, accepted as the new king signifier of the country that’s a bare generation away from regular lynchings of other black men who got above their allowed station.  Apollo Creed is at the forefront of the nation’s new ascendant force – and how painful it is now to see that confidence, before the crack epidemic and mass exodus of semi-skilled jobs to come all but gutted the civil rights advancements of those decades!

But this isn’t Creed’s movie.  As fleshed out as he is, given limited screen time, and clearly the traditional A-story, the narrative focuses on the B-thread, the ethnic white population painfully transitioning from the disappearing ‘working class’ identity to simply ‘poor.’  Rocky, a never-was prizefighter eking out a living as a loan shark’s muscle, clings to the lowest rung of this strata, sharing that humiliating space with the painfully shy pet shop clerk on whom he nurses an inarticulate crush.  They also share the crippling disadvantage of minimal self-awareness, unable to effectively shield themselves against and with the continual stream of insults each neighbour neurotically spews in a social scene as bleak as the post-industrial waste it resides in.

Far from the caricatures of the sequels, these characters are sensitively observed, all struggling under the same basic character arc – the need to keep up a reputation, usually when everything else is lost – but in individual ways.  Rocky provides the film’s thesis in a rambling stream-of-consciousness lecture to a neighbourhood girl.  He doesn’t speak of her potential for a happy future or successful career if she doesn’t waste her youth committing misdemeanours on the mean streets; all she can hope for is to not be remembered as a whore, or a bum.  Once safely deposited on her doorstep, she blows him off: ‘Screw you, creep-o!’

True connection, or even basic politeness, is impossible in a shifting cultural scene with no wholly respectable positions to occupy.  Nearby people are only comparisons to measure oneself against and a target to lower the bar on that competition.  The loan shark’s out-of-shape driver compulsively berates the muscle-bound prizefighter from behind the shield of their boss; the boss humiliates Rocky for not breaking a debtor’s thumbs because not carrying out threats hurts a loan shark’s reputation, calling Rocky an idiot for offering a reasonable explanation: if he ruined the labourer’s hands, he’d be laid off, and unable to earn the money to pay him back.  The shark takes a hit from an inhaler mid-rant, the show of weakness inspiring an angrier finish as cover.  Rocky’s humiliated again in the gym, losing his locker for being, as the owner announces to the young fighters surrounding them, a bum who’s wasted his talent as hired muscle.  In fact, no one has a civil word for Rocky; perhaps his longing for the clerk comes from the fact that she only freezes when he attempts conversation.

The breakthrough in Rocky’s inertia comes from two completely external sources haphazardly shoring up their own implied worth.  He gets a date with Adrian because her brother Paulie, who hopes Rocky will set him up as muscle with the loan shark and liberate him from the drudgery of the meat-packing plant, wants to do him a favour while making his sister a little less visibly weird.  It’s assumed she’s a virgin, a safe reputation in a world that’s yet to hear of that Sexual Revolution craic, but that means she’s also a dried-up spinster, a dangerous stereotype in any culture.  (Later, unable to admit his jealousy at her unexpected happiness and confidence, he rejects her as ‘busted,’ a theoretically ruined reputation rather than potentially the contented spouse of a suddenly successful local boy.)

At the same time, Rocky is plucked from obscurity by the media-savvy Creed solely for his nickname, the ‘Italian Stallion.’  Creed’s opponent in his career-crowning show bout has dropped out, and he knows he needs a white boy in the ring with him, ideally one with a clear ethnic identity.  If he fought one of the boxers in his class, who are all black, he risked his big event being rejected by the majority of working-class fans, but given someone they could identify with who had a golden-ticket shot at the title, Creed knew the fans would love him more than ever.

Rocky, pathetically, is keenly aware that both of these are set-ups most likely doomed to failure, and attempts to duck out of each.  He’s shepherded back into line, and begins to go through the motions, dully anticipating humiliating failure.  First, with Adrian, he stumbles through the least smooth first date committed to film, culminating in a problematic seduction scene.  To the script’s credit, it knows this is a horrible situation and neither character is coming off well, but it’s the only, shamefully inadequate, script their culture gives two people to come together.  I experienced this myself many times, growing up 80 miles west of Philly – the guy is expected to push, wheedle, guilt, and subtly threaten the girl to come inside, to sit close, to kiss, to submit to sex; the woman, if she is worth anything, is to appeasingly resist with all her might, but not escape.

(What a difference a generation makes; I was able to leave, to drive or walk home on my own with confidence the fella could – and would – slander me in retaliation, and no one would give a damn.)

Both characters look ill as Rocky bars her way out and announces he’s going to kiss her, and she doesn’t have to kiss him back if she doesn’t want it (it probably didn’t hurt that Talia Shire was fighting the flu as they filmed the scene).  Then, relief, they are suddenly both on the same passionate page, breaking through mutual incomprehension!  But the spectre of how horribly wrong it would have gone if they weren’t lingers through their new relationship even as Adrian begins to flourish under the genuine affection.

There’s no such connection anywhere else in Rocky’s life.  He’s suddenly got friends, all of whom want a bit of the shine (and payday) he’ll have in the ring with Apollo.  Rocky knows they’d still consider him a worthless bum otherwise, they know he knows, and it’s horribly awkward all around how they suddenly grovel for his stamp of approval on their worth.  Lunk that he is, Rocky can’t even properly reject any of them, and accepts the cut-rate friendship on offer.  By the end of the movie, with a genuine connection to Adrian counterbalancing the sub-par Machiavellian efforts of the others, Rocky is able to forget the embarrassment of being used and claim them as friends who happen to be deeply flawed.  One of the few benefits of the sequels is to show that this attitude has fruit, forging meaningful relationships on both sides.

What the sequels get desperately wrong is that they make winning the climactic fight Rocky’s high point.  In the original, though, Rocky’s triumph is when he loses himself in his training, like Albert Camus’ Sisyphus happily pushing his rock uphill, the overwhelming effort freeing him from the torture of thought.  No longer tormented by the potentially brilliant athletic career now that he’s finally putting his heart into the attempt, Rocky is both joyful and high on endorphins.  Here, he escapes from the paradigm that allows only a few winners and many losers.  Despite the heady hopes of those close to him, he knows he’s terminally outclassed.  With no chance of winning, he can only lose if he doesn’t make Creed work for it.

Through sheer ‘heart’ (a boxing term that seems to mean ‘too desperate and stupid to fall down before permanent brain damage sets in’), Rocky denies Creed a clean victory, losing by points rather than a KO.  Even as the tv cameras clamour for the image and quote that will cement his reputation, he seeks only Adrian, who’s travelled a parallel path of realising she doesn’t have to live down to her brother’s insults when she’d rather be someone’s beloved tomboy in a kicky beret.  Rocky’s won not because he’s beaten Creed, Mr T, or a monosyllabic slab of Russian beef to the mat but because, with his new self-esteem and life partner, his success will be a contented little life with nothing to prove ever again.

At least until the sequels.  Dammit.

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Midichlorian-free: The Men Who Stare At Goats

November 12, 2009

ewan mcgregor tries to make his skull pop out his eye sockets

As a kid I was a sucker for the patriotic or counterculture fist-pump, the humanised enemy representative who receives a grand rescue by White America Man, who is raging against the machine of Evil White Men Who Won’t Listen To Humanistic Reason And Probably Smirk A Lot, thus signifying that White America in the audience was ok after all – because they’re certainly represented by the good guy, not the suits, right?  Didn’t our soulful proxy just save the doe-eyed enemy, making us realise we’re really One World, Together?

Unfortunately, I grew out of that happy fuzziness into retching at smug self-effacement and wishing we were following the enemy’s story instead, getting into their head.  And I can’t help but wonder that these portrayals aren’t salt in the wounds of real individuals represented, first abused and then symbolically rescued by the dominant culture attempting to wipe out theirs.  So, based solely on a triumphant rescue scene that liberates starving, tortured, orange jumpsuit-clad Iraqi prisoners to the desert with no supplies, I can’t entirely recommend The Men Who Stare At Goats, despite this being what supposedly happened to journalist Jon Ronson in the course of investigating the US military’s experiments with New Age techniques well after the most credulous hippies had abandoned them.

Aside from this problematic thread, The Men Who Stare At Goats is an often fascinating black comedy exploring a (somewhat true) recent iteration of humanity’s continual need for mythic superhumans, those whose mental and physical abilities breech – just slightly – the limits of human possibility.  It’s satisfying to hear of warriors and sages who can, after years of esoteric study, leap great distances or see beyond the range of their eyes.  This superman defines the human by providing both a clear dividing line and the inspiration to achieve full potential by trying to leap beyond it.

The needful human relationship to myths officially goes skew-wiff, though, when people start believing they’ve achieved magic abilities themselves.

Goats brings together people of two modern eras when Americans en masse felt they’d lost the national narrative and were susceptible to magical thinking, the beginnings of the 1980s and 2000s.  Based on the real-life First Earth Battalion and the Stargate Project, which ultimately only contributed to the psychological warfare tactics of the US military, the film follows a man rocked primarily by divorce and obligatorily by the cultural turmoil following the 2001 terrorist attacks who connects with a former Jedi Warrior / test subject who believes he’s been reactivated.  Like many young adults in September’s immediate aftermath, Bob feels his personal problems should be taking a back seat to those in the larger world he’s suddenly aware of.  Unlike most of them, who attended protests and blogged furiously and ultimately realised that horrific world events went on whether they paid attention or not, Bob went to Kuwait and tried to get imbedded with troops in Iraq.

Instead, he meets Lyn – a name he knows from interviewing a local crazy / former First-Earther who claimed to have psychic abilities – and plunges into two decades of flashbacks detailing a Vietnam War vet’s immersion in post-sixties counterculture and his attempt to forge “Jedi Warriors” out of soldiers.  The soldiers themselves are mostly the typical waifs and strays that drift into military life, looking for connection, discipline, and meaning, and one spoon-bending huckster.  It’s an obvious train wreck waiting to happen, with surprising moments of sweetness along the way.  Bob tags along, unsure whether he’s uncovering a tale of classified governmental insanity or true superhumans, but sure either will establish him as a serious journalist and impress his ex-wife.

There’s a core of sadness running through the dark comedy, and the film itself would fail if it was merely a Dr Strangelove-style satire.  Only the awareness that this is based on real madness, that the potential for paranormal warfare was embraced by two presidents – one enamoured with astrology and the Star Wars movies, the other drawing strength from a mystical evangelic tradition – provides the stranger-than-fiction hilarity.  Underneath the self-delusions, however, are lonely people looking for an explanation that forces some sense onto the randomness of life.  Bill Django, severely wounded by a single foe his troop of green soldiers fail to hit, has the revelation that even trained soldiers, new to the battlefield, will avoid killing another human being.  Revering this ‘gentleness,’ he doesn’t leave the army but instead counter-intuitively seeks to bring it into the military paradigm as a combat advantage.  It’s as if being part of that system is imperative to his identity, even as his values move in direct opposition to the business of killing.

The soldiers brought into the program embrace the warmfuzzy self-actualisation exercises, despite the divergence from their military training.  They also prove to be mentally flexible enough to encompass both the military setting that has given them a recognised niche in life and the silly activities that feel good and garner them praise from authority.  There’s a snake in this doomed garden, of course, the huckster mentioned above who might believe in his own advertised powers but is far better at cynically manipulating his superiors using real-world leverage.  After a series of embarrassments, he stages a coup and pushes the old guard out of the program, which he changes to focus on practical methods of undermining and killing the enemy.

Here lies the film’s most simple and genuine journey – the mildly brainwashed Lyn, leaving the military, is ‘cursed’ by his enemy.  He feels he left himself open to that by impulsively using his powers to kill an innocent being (the stared-at goat of the title), thus perverting the life-affirming philosophies on which his new identity of a Jedi Warrior are based.  Years later, dying of exposure in the Iraqi desert, he’s saved by a goat who leads him first to an oasis, then to rescue.  He repays this implied forgiveness by rescuing a flock of military goats destined for painful experimentation (and, in the process, the tortured prisoners mentioned above, but they are a conceptual afterthought), and is able to face the end of his life in peace, with his mentor at his side.

These are men sifting through their lives for a core, heroic narrative, as evidenced by unironically taking on the identity of fictional space samurai.  They attempt to take the occasional flashes of brilliance that make mundane life interesting or just bearable and force them to become something controllable and permanent.  The constant tease of the movie is whether they’ve managed to do so, in any way, or if their belief that they have supernatural powers merely allows them to sometimes pull off impressive stunts attainable by meat and nerves.  Perhaps Lyn and Bill have, taking the long way, attained a sort of wu wei, accepting that where they are is where they are meant to be at that moment, and accomplish what anyone could without the cloud of pointless anxiety fogging their decisions (instead of a massive dose of psychotomimetics, which apparently fixes all ills).

The film ends anticlimactically, with Bob’s exposé of cruel and unusual prisoner torture and military experimentation receiving only the smallest, pettiest media coverage (that prisoners were forced to listen to Barney the Dinosaur).  Inspired by the First Earth principles, however, Bob vows to soldier on and achieves the trick all others had failed, phasing through an office wall.  Or, retreats into a hallucination of doing so while he actually smacks himself unconscious.  (Why, exactly, must they keep attempting this at work, with witnesses?)  Whether they actually succeed is a moot point; only that the potential they might have becomes a fantasy-sustaining myth for the rest.

the men who stare at goats

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He, She, and it: Antichrist

August 18, 2009

Antichrist - Eden

Antichrist is not an enjoyable experience, but it does make a small and permanent place in your brain afterward.  Lars von Trier wrote the script in the middle of a profound depression, and I’d comfortably wager much of the audience response splits between those who’ve gone through depression or intense mourning and those who’ve yet to have the pleasure.

In the interpretation that makes sense to me, much of the film comes down to the struggle between the Lacanian/Zizekian Symbolic and the Real.  The Real in this definition (as least what I’ve grasped of it) is impenetrable, only perceived as chaos.  We experience it as traumatic kernels hiding within the symbolic order – think of a basic life definition, which this film plays with like a feral cat with a dead mouse: Man and Woman.  Individuals with male genitalia are Men, defined by a set of attributes and (more importantly) their lack of another set of attributes that have been assigned to those with female genitalia, who are Women because they lack the male-assigned attributes.

These gendered definitions usually work well enough, as most people don’t encounter many others who don’t make the effort to fit them.  But picture their discomfort and even disgust at meeting a male or female transvestite, or outright horror if they were to learn someone they were close to had been born of the opposite gender or hermaphroditic.  Hello, traumatic kernel.

The general response – the psychologically healthy one, you could argue – to one of these kernels is to either reject them out of hand as something perverse and thus unworthy of attention, or to examine the sense of disquiet and eventually incorporate the disturbing thing into a more complicated definition of life’s essential truths.  Neither approach gets a person closer to the Real, of course, but the Real is made of madness and should be avoided.  That space is left blank on purpose, as the form tells us.

The fact that the laws of physics we experience on Earth seem to be consistent across as much of the universe as we’ve been able to observe convinces me that there’s probably some overarching logic or meaning to the universe (thank you, Carl Sagan).  What that meaning might be, no human has any hope of grasping.  It’s too big, and too impersonal, and frankly as terrifying as it is comforting.  So, for my own sanity, I generally stop at ‘there’s some order out there.’

The film, like nearly all organised religions since a breed of sociopathic prehistoric apes lost some body hair, takes on reproduction and death, two forces in human existence that shred the boundaries between the relatively comfortable Symbolic order and the Real.  It seems that whoever can take those living nightmares and trap them in a logical order will win the big prize, but no one’s claimed it yet.  The Antichrist of the title, a couple’s very young son, escapes from his crib and falls to his death while his parents are distracted with passionate lovemaking, plunging the two of them into intolerable torment.  Sex and Death, Freud’s chocolate and peanut butter, in beautiful slow-motion.

He seeks to escape his grief by focusing on that of his wife.  He’s a medication-hating psychiatrist, the embodiment of order imposed upon the chaos of human experience.  She’s younger and an academic, already half driven mad by her own intense study of witch hunts.  Her grief is mostly insanity, directly staring into the Real, and her guilt doesn’t allow her to contextualise that ugliness back into the Symbolic’s order without some crushing punishment.  She’s probably wise to accept her doctor’s deadening medication, providing the only reprieve possible, but accepts her husband’s judgement that he can fix her with words, instead.

Her state of mind was familiar to me.  When I was a teenager, my only sibling committed suicide.  Already struggling with many of the same issues that drove him to it, I was simultaneously thrust into a terrifying adult world in which anyone can die at any time and suddenly expected to live up to every family expectation in order to make up for his death – my resounding success in every area (and production of grandchildren) would make his suicide, and the inherent rebuke to their parenting, symbolically nullified.

By which I’m saying, people respond to grief with varying levels of insanity, and I believe the way that Death is removed from ordinary life in the modern world, something to be shoved aside and spoken of in hushed, almost ashamed tones, has only made those responses crazier.

He looks for ways to bring her away from the terror of loss and the absence of any mental safety by imposing a Symbolic order, represented by a pyramid of words – at the top will be her true fear, which he will force her to confront, and then, badda bing, she’ll be back in the orderly land with him.  It’s quite likely he’s aware on some level that this is an impossible task, and hopes it’ll be a lifelong quest that keeps him safely in the role of carer, not grieving father.

She confesses her nightmares of their rustic cabin and the woods surrounding it, so he takes her there.  Even as he sees the harshness she justifiably fears (a beautiful deer which turns to reveal a malformed, stillborn fawn still half-trapped inside, a fox consuming itself which informs him that “chaos reigns”), he insists more stridently on his sense of order, seeing her as the chaos she confronts.

In a key moment, she tells him that the acorns constantly raining down on the tin roof make her unbearably sad, because an oak tree only needs one of these in a hundred years to germinate in order to propagate itself.  The abundance of acorns, except for that one in a billion, exist solely to be consumed by other life, by the other ones in a billion that were able to go from potential to actual.  It’s obvious she sees her son, and herself, as those extraneous acorns.  In my experience, the only way to get through this state of mind – which is not inaccurate, just impossible to sustain while retaining sanity – is to stay away from sharp things while looking at the chaos until it loses all meaning, until the inadequate descriptive words allow the Symbolic to mercifully creep up over it.

Her husband, instead, tells her that’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard, and tries to make her accept nature by walking in the tall grass outside the cabin.  His desperate need to save his shattered wife and unacknowledged bruised ego (after all, as the older and more educated partner, he’s right, she should listen and accept his view) merge into a disastrous effort to force order onto grief, even as he loses his own grip.

Unfortunately, it soon comes out that she had started to lose her sanity several months before their son’s death, in that cabin, confronting the Real more distantly: the hysteria that drove entire communities to torture and murder their own neighbors.  She began with the assertion that it was “gynocide,” the killing of women, the attempt to destroy subversive femininity via the symbolic murder of these real women and leave behind only the cowed and controlled.  In isolation, with only her pre-verbal son and these images for company, her view began to shift – if these men were evil, because humanity is at its dark heart a nasty brutal thing, are not woman, as human beings, equally evil?  In that sense, didn’t those tortured women deserve death, as things equally evil to the men putting them to death?

Thus we get our second example of why it’s a Very Bad Thing to try to contextualise the harsh chaos of the Real into a neat philosophical context.  Logic is just as brutal, in its own way, as nature.

For instance, it might be logical to move from this discussion of the sad but sane-ish chapters to the brutal one Antichrist is infamous for by defining the maiming and murder as the abandonment of the Symbolic order for the immediate physical experience, a closer approximation of the Real.  I’d argue, however, that the torture and murder only go deeper into the Symbolic order, to the depths of the human soul that believe in sacrifice to appease forces beyond their control.

Destroying part, perhaps the best part, of what a person valued was a way to let destructive chaos into the small area of imposed order in the hopes that this would fill some cosmic chaos quota, and leave the rest of the life untouched.  When this impulse provokes more psychopathic impulses, like the torture or ritual murder of a chosen victim, the meaning behind it was more direct, simply an attempt to provoke a reaction from the indifferent beyond by violating the consciously and unconsciously held rules: look what we’ve done, respond to us, even if it’s to fry us all with lightening.  Don’t withhold meaning any longer.

This new level begins as she seems to have turned a corner, begun to reconstruct a sense of life and her place in it that keeps the terror of reality at bay.  He turns spiteful, from lack of control over this breakthrough and from the fear that he’ll now have to face his own grief, and viciously attacks her with words.  This escalates quickly, from forced sexual intercourse (her on him, as many of their sexual encounters have been throughout the grieving process) to torture, to attempted murder and actual murder.  They visit horrors on each other, and hers in particular spiral as each act, so terrible and transgressive it must force a response from the powers that be and end her torment, provokes nothing.  No punishment and thus no meaning falls from the sky or crawls up from the earth.

In the end, all reproductive possibilities brutally destroyed in both, there is only survival.  The final scene, his vision of a crowd of faceless women streaming past him to Eden, has been decried as misogyny, of admittance that she was right, that women are evil and will return to a primal horror that lives in their base souls if men push too close.  Putting aside the question of big-E Evil, I think it’s more interesting that this is his vision, women like his wife who he can not only not save but now not even comprehend simple facial expressions.

He’s a man who’s dedicated his life to penetrating the human psyche, a grief-stricken father who felt confident he could not only understand but fix his wife’s internal workings.  Here, he emerges as a broken person who has walked into and – barely – out of his own and his wife’s hearts of darkness.  The truly crushing realisation: he has gained no understanding of deeper truths, only new grief, and has lost the ordered structure that gave life any meaning at all.

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Dollhouse 1.01, Ghost: welcome to the

February 16, 2009
Eliza Dushku in Dollhouse

Eliza Dushku in Dollhouse

Dollhouse 1.01: Ghost

Every new Joss Whedon show will be evaluated first and foremost on its feminist merits, which may be exactly how Whedon likes it. That’s difficult going, however, as feminism has as many different definitions as there are feminists and misogynists. That single question alone could be debated without end without touching any other quality, with tea break to deride Eliza Dushku’s lack of range.

(Which, by the way, is getting so old it’s drawing a pension. I’ve generally agreed with that assessment, but hearing it repeated with every mention of the show has made me re-evaluate its fairness. Why exactly do we condemn young actors, comparing them with those who didn’t get their breakout roles until their thirties with an additional decade of experience behind them? My judgement on the actress is based on only two roles, neither of which particularly interested me as written or called for a range broader than appearing young, inexperienced, and clinging to bravado – exactly what many young actors would be feeling in their first major roles. Give her a chance to do something interesting with a meatier role.)

My particular bias in judging fictional feminist cred is toward equality across individuality, ie male and female characters have an equal shot at characteristics without them being processed through a ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’ scale. Buffy Summers, for instance, has never passed on my criteria (as much as I and was affected enjoyed the show) because he character is built around the shockhorror! of a young woman being physically strong and tasked with the mission to save the world. The times she revelled in her strength or was proud of ability to save people were paltry compared to the moments she worried her strength made her too unfeminine to be attractive (as opposed to the garden-variety teenage insecurities that made her a good audience identification figure). Angel wasn’t the best for non-stereotypical adult women, but Firefly provided three adult women who were comfortable with their balance of skills and femininity. Even the Companion (Fox’s requested ‘hooker with a heart of gold’) drew confidence in uncivilised surroundings from both her charismatic sex appeal and her skill with a sword.

The glimpse of a traditional geisha in the first episode’s teaser heading out on assignment recalls both Inara, Whedon’s most problematic character so far, and the Japanese figure often misidentified in Western culture as a simple prostitute. The question is the same, but amplified: where is the liberation in prettily presented human trafficking?

To partially address this issue: Whedon is expanding on a concept from William Gibson’s technological dystopia, the “meat puppet.” Two of his characters, Molly Millions in Neuromancer and Rikki in Burning Chrome worked as prostitutes to finance their dream enhancements, a specialised subset in which they would be put into a planned trance while they acted out their clients’ pre-programmed orders. Their designer orgasms would be real, but unfelt; the entire process was to occur without their awareness, but unsettling images inevitably began to slip into their dreams…

The narrative doesn’t follow the women into the brothel. Instead, this employment is discovered by the male protagonists, and the focus in on their shock and confusion that someone they see as an individual had been working as someone they consider a non-person. Both women slip out of the men’s lives without resolving their lovers’ uncertainty, and thus out of the story.

In Dollhouse, the workers are the story, and the men who hire them and sleep with them are the ones who leave the narrative. The focus is on the Actives who have had their own personalities removed (and hopefully stored on several back-up servers) and are implanted with the ordered personalities as needed. Much like the artificial humans in Blade Runner (this show certainly has deep sci-fi roots), the central tragedy is that the most intense human experiences are pushed from ordinary lives to non-people, and the memories and character built are flushed away. The losses of the trafficked victims are the focus, not the reactions of those who use them.

In any case, it’s far too soon to make any judgements. The exact nature of the titular Dollhouse and those who run it is still a mystery. Exposition tells us it is extremely illegal and, if discovered, would put all employees in prison for a very long time, but the FBI agent assigned to the trafficking investigation is several credibility rungs below “Spooky” Mulder. The Dollhouse staff exhibit varying levels of commitment and unease with their jobs. One exposits that those in charge feel they are serving a humanitarian purpose, and he pushes them to briefly live up to this with a little risky pro bono work (which is quite profitable in the end). There’s apparently a large enough pool of super-rich folk aware of and willing to work with an extremely illegal service to at least cover the extensive spa overhead. No Blue Sun branding has been in view thus far.

They do something to the Actives to make them so strong, and it looks like it hurts.

The dolls themselves are possibly volunteers, or else coerced. Central character Echo’s obviously among the coerced, by some mysterious means, which may involve a charismatic professor who inspired her to save the world. Her work often involves sex, which, given her programmed state, can be defined as both prostitution and rape. This week’s first client clearly wanted the full meat puppet experience, ordering a three-day weekend of excitement and adventure complete with growing emotional attachment along with his vanilla-kinky bondage workout.

Yet the bulk of the episode was given over to a different job, in which Echo is implanted with the intellectual gifts and physical weaknesses of a crack negotiator. As this character, there’s no nurturing for the male client, no emotional interactions she isn’t being paid for. She only has to be smart and in control. When she does invest, facing down the demon that drove the originator of her borrowed personality to suicide, she saves the day as that professional, being both brave and very good at her job. Then, like a ghost, she is exorcized, and I missed that character.

I hope to see more grown women like that as the show goes on.

Hopefully Fox doesn’t cancel this one before I can decide if I like it or not.

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forget the butterflies: Lost Season Five

February 11, 2009
Daniel Faraday and Jughead

Daniel Faraday and Jughead

Lost Season 5: Jughead and The Little Prince

It’s almost starting to seem normal to have the A- and B-plots separated by thousands of miles, three years, and uncountable metaphysical planes.

Like a polar bear let loose from its training cage, the action continues to galumph in great strides in both LA and back on the island. The Island 6 are far more compelling than the adventures of the Oceanic 6, although the action in LA will certainly be interesting in retrospect and there are scattered moments of brilliance – particularly the evolution of Sun into corporate shark and vengeful assassin. Ben’s use of human chess pieces is always entertaining as well, especially now that the moves are revealed within the same episode.

(Who could be challenging Kate’s custody of the narcoleptic turniphead? Maybe we’ll find out by the end of the season or – oh, it’s Ben. Hmmm. Oh, oh, but his lawyer – what’s that guy’s story, huh? Is he Kelvin’s secret lovechild half-brother, or what? Ah Lost, never really answers it’s true mysteries…)

Still, these moments are rationed throughout the LA plotline, crammed in the spaces between plot gears. The island 6 are encountering nothing but great chunks of interesting backstory, and – in between being attacked and bewildered and nearly dead, which is any given day on the island – developing an almost warm group cohesion. Juliet abandons her self-imposed isolation to stabilise Sawyer’s shaky emotional state; John begins to explain his motivations, and their lack of solid evidence, rather than clinging to his deluded mystical-John Wayne image. Faraday jumps to protect the group – and Charlotte – from gun-toting hardliners with only his wits and scientific background. Sawyer – who 100 or so days ago was an amoral conman preying on fellow survivors – immediately launches a rescue ambush when he sees Faraday at gunpoint, berating John for looking out for his personal interests.

Even Miles asks for help when he admits he’s joined the nosebleed club.

No wonder I spend the LA times wanting to get back to the island, where the group is pulling together and investigating immediate mysteries, instead of going on with Lost’s business as usual – a loose collection of deeply flawed characters continually compromising their few principles, who each may or may not be plotting to kill the rest, with the world possibly at stake and not nearly enough information to make these decisions.

I’ll probably be fascinated by it in a few episodes, but for now…

Lost uses the interesting form of time travel, in which the timeline is resilient. Someone who goes back in time has always been there at that time, and unless they did a thing with a key and a magnetic field no one’s ever quite figured out, they can’t do a thing to change the future. Stomp on all the butterflies you want, kill all four grandparents, rip open the box with the alive-dead cat – none of it can change a thing. You were always there in the past and you always did exactly as you are going to do, as time and space are far too powerful to be inconvenienced by mere paradox.

This form still allows for character pitfalls. For instance, Faraday, confronted by a leaking hydrogen bomb, tells the 1950’s-era Others to simply bury it in cement and forget about it – after all, he knows the island didn’t blow up. His knowledge of the future makes him ignore its limitations. After all, in 2004 the bomb hasn’t gone off, but what about 2005? And what effect could the loose radiation from a shoddy containment job have had on the mysterious power course behind the donkey wheel? And, now that he knows there’s a powerful, if dangerous and unstable, weapon, will Faraday ever be tempted to dig it up to face off some seemingly greater threat?

There are also pitfalls of a bootstrap nature, the undermining of one’s personal (assumed) causality. John Locke is a particular demonstration of this. He grows up feeling there is some destiny he’s meant for that he’s always just failing to grasp. Arriving on a mystical island that heals his spine and gives him an outlet for his aborted Walkabout studies, then joining the locals as their leader, John feels he has finally achieved his true place. He is King of the Others for all of five minutes before he’s sent reeling into the past, given a compass that will somehow prove his identity (an item that seems trapped in its own closed time loop, eternally passing between John and Richard across fifty years). There he tells the (somewhat) younger Richard that he will be their leader in the future, casually giving them his upcoming birthdate and location before disappearing in a flash of light, leaving behind a prophesy. Based on this, the Others attempt to groom young John for leadership from a distance, eventually culminating in his five minutes in charge.

One mystery solved: does John Locke really have a mystical connection to the island? No. Does he have a destiny? Only the one he’s created for himself – always seeking leadership and validation, and always just overshooting it.

Thus, it’s really worrisome to discover that the origin of the ‘Return the O6 to the Island’ world-saver came from our Mr Locke.

Is it too late for him to embrace the advice of his high school guidance councillor and see if Faraday won’t take him on as an apprentice jack-of-all-sciences?

Where are Rose and Bernard, and, if alive, have they joined the nosebleed club as well?

What other sleeping time bombs lie Cthuhlu-like beneath the innocent jungle?

How did Jin not only survive but get caught up in the island’s time warp? Oh, I don’t even care. I’m just happy he made it. There’s nothing like a bitter vengeance arc undercut by the lost object’s inconvenient existence. This could fill the Desmond/Penny gap left by their reunion – lovers whose relationship is defined by absence, with enough remembered sweetness to leave viewers illogically anticipating an unlikely happy ending.

Not to mention – the poor fellow – he finally learns enough English to communicate with the rest of the group, and now is back in the situation of having only one other person who can understand him! And by the time he’s picked up enough French to ask for a drink of water, he’ll be lifted away to another group, probably one that only speaks Norwegian. By next season, he’ll be the island’s official interpreter.

Speaking of sweetness, there is Jin’s new friend: Danielle Rousseau, marooned with her research team. Assuming the actress’ availability, it would have been easy enough to youth-inize Mira Furlan by 16 years with little more than some conditioner and lip gloss. But with the new actress, Melissa Farman, the young Danielle’s softness and vulnerability is painfully obvious – her rounder face and sunless complexion, with a ready smile and unguarded expression. Furlan has been the paranoid and pared-down survivor from her first appearance – both crazy and hot, as I and everyone else with eyes have noted – and it does require the jolt of a different actress to illustrate the character’s change. Somehow this sweet young woman will have the inner strength – or psychotic break – to murder her dangerously ill teammates, give birth unassisted, and survive 16 years of constant warfare with those who know every inch of the Island.

I can’t wait to see how that happens.

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men in high castles

January 31, 2009
Frost/Nixon Interview

Frost/Nixon Interview

Frost/Nixon, 2008

“That poor poor man,” I said once to my wife, with tears in my eyes. “Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what’s to come.” For God’s sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men—”all the President’s men,” as it’s put—had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.

Philip K Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart in Two Days

Nixon just doesn’t seem so bad any more. Not after the last eight years, and not when he is up against the lightweight avatar of politics’ television-ruled future, trying to convince himself this is a worthy adversary.

Frost/Nixon is an uncomfortable experience. Our “hero” is a placeholder protagonist – the promo materials promise a flawed white knight who stalks, fights, and eventually slays the mighty beast, but it gives us a fluffy chancer who is driven only by a vague entrepreneurial greed and the petulant desire to have his face on telly. The devil himself is a miserable man in poor health who dreads the inactivity of early and ignoble retirement, who would trade anything for a return to the challenge, excitement, and stress of politics.

Is the dichotomy of cultural meta-narrative against the worth of characters purposeful? The infinitely annoying framing device – faux documentary cutscenes, with the actors still playing the roles – continually provide exposition and character motivation that has usually been imparted quite well by the actors (and if it wasn’t, it damn well should’ve been) or blandly trot out the well known myth.

(Seriously, Ron? Either leave it for the audience to learn on wikipedia later or directly stage it in an engaging manner. If all else fails, at least get in the actual people to have the stage, describing their place in history!)

The “interviews” tell us one thing – Nixon ruined America, man! – but the action presents a more complicated story, one that doesn’t exonerate Nixon but does kind of hate Frost-the-cipher and the men who passionately want to pillory the ex-president.

Of the characters presented, Nixon is a much better fit for a hero story: the disgraced and beaten former champion seeking redemption while battling the internal demons that ruined him. He is compelling in a way the other characters aren’t, a self-loathing and charmless intellectual who brutally forced his way into the one field that absolutely requires charm and bulletproof confidence. He’s fixated on his finances – after all, he can hardly count on the high-paying speaking and consulting milk runs an ex-president can usually expect. He envies the happiness and hedonism of his political and cultural enemies desperately, but can’t identify with it. His eyes may linger on the lovely body of Frost’s girl-of-the-moment, but when he tells Frost to marry her, it’s not so he can vicariously keep her nubile charms close but secure his fiscal future: she lives in Monte Carlo, where they pay no income tax.

Most painfully, this Nixon is intensely conscious of his flaws and their permanence. He muses with Frost that perhaps they should have lived each others’ lives: Nixon the brilliant, incisive interviewer and Frost the motivating, emotive politician. This character, though, could never have been happy with a career path that would leave him happy; he needs an outward doomed struggle to mirror his internal self-hatred in order to simply function.

This Nixon defends himself: every other president has done exactly the same things, but (it’s implied) had the savvy to delegate the dirty work. How much of Latin America was covered in Nixon’s fingerprints during his vice-presidency in Eisenhower ‘do-nothing’ era? He not only got caught masterminding the amateurish mess, but couldn’t bring himself to confess or deflect the fallout before this had eclipsed all other political matters in the country, as well as wiping his earlier accomplishments from the nation’s memory.

This is the Nixon that even Philip K Dick, author of VALIS and occasional Nixonian arch-enemy, could feel some compassion for.

His opponent, David Frost, is a man whose main talent in life is knowing what will bring the maximum number of eyes to television sets. He has talk shows in the UK and Australia and once had a third in the US, which he recalls as a fairyland celebrating his specialness. Frost wants to interview Nixon because it will draw a large audience, which would give him the chance to pitch another US show, which would allow him to once again get good tables in exclusive restaurants. He assembles a two-man research team, who are bent on taking down the devil, to provide him with information and strategy – and then ignores them. They pull endless material from obscure archives, pore over the details, and roleplay scenarios, gleefully embodying Nixon’s larger-then-life persona, while Frost chases advertisers and races to the opening of every envelope in LA.

It is difficult to root for this hero. Frost has no great goal, nothing he is burning to prove – when his team asks what he hopes to achieve in the interview, his face is blank with surprise. The thought hadn’t occurred to him; he had Nixon, they’d fill time, and people would watch. The end. He didn’t even review the material his team had painstakingly gathered until the final hours before the last recording session, and even that was only motivated by a shot of Nixon’s poisonous vitality in the form of a midnight drunk dial.

Even this montage is de-motivating for the audience. He’s gambled his career and savings on this one event, and he’s never glanced at the research he commissioned? It’s as if Rocky consisted of a somewhat successful boxer who’d been briefly on top, who spends all the time leading up to final his title fight gorging on KFC and chasing endorsement deals, finally hitting the gym during a break between rounds.

He could have put the slightest bit of effort into this interview, and all 8 hours would have been brilliant.

In many ways, to continue to film’s overt boxing metaphor, the final fight is before the last interview. Nixon, having uneasily accepting the premature praise from his staff at how well he’d managed the interviews, has a few drinks and calls Frost at his hotel room. He may be winning, but it’s against a pitifully overmatched opponent with whom he has no connection. There’s no satisfaction, no real struggle. He convinces himself he’s dealing with a worthy adversary based on a history of succeeding beyond the situations they were born into and because they both want to return to past success – wilfully ignoring the fact that he wants to wield real power again, while Frost just wants the warm glow of the limelight and better party invitations.

At least the call does level the playing field. Frost does his research, allowing Nixon to take a longed-for dive with some dignity.

This last interview session could be seen as the moment Nixon began to move out of the dark. True, he would never hold office again, and he would be forced to fill his time with inane retirement activities. But he did go on to give more interviews, write more books, and was even quietly consulted as an elder politician, allowing him some measure of influence. More importantly, though, it allowed him to take his place in the American pantheon as a timeless personality, like Elvis or his great rival, Kennedy. Years after his death, Nixon (…er, his preserved cranium) became a popular recurring character on Futurama, making a successful grab at the President of Earth slot, a position that suited his Machiavellian schemes.

David Frost reads the Sunday papers on television every week.

Futurama's Earth-President Nixon

Futurama's Earth-President Nixon

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an inconstant island – Lost Season Five

January 25, 2009

Lost Season 5.1 – 2: Because You Left / The Lie

Faith and science continue to tango in issues surrounding the island. We’re given shiny new pseudo-science chewtoys to work on – the “nearly infinite power source,” the survivors bouncing Billy Pilgrim-style through the island’s past, return of the universal bloody nose of time-sickness, the resilience of the timeline that refuses to allow the past to be changed, and the resistance of Desmond to that inertia by virtue of his timey-wimey key-turning specialness – but issues of faith carry the plot.

Faith is one step removed from the island’s miracles; here, characters need their loved ones and enemies to have faith in their unbelievable truths, to save the world, serve their own ends, or just rest their consciences. Ben needs to convince the group that knows he’s a compulsive liar and manipulator to return to their exile – while not breaking his inner imperative to never give a provable reason to support his demands. His poor wee skull would apparently break if he did that. Locke has to accept he is no longer King of the Others and rejoin the group that needs his skills and intuition – and somehow convince them to accept him, yet again.

Hurley, despite his stated intentions to screw over Sayid at the soonest opportunity, continues to be the dependable hero and finds relief in telling his mother the insane-sounding truth of his survival. Hurley, as well as being the audience identification figure and occasional Greek chorus, is often the overlooked centre of the cast and plot. He has a set of morals that it makes him sick to violate, and at the core of these is the simple “don’t hurt people.” The hatred of lying is a newly introduced mental foundation – that is a callback (and more suited) to the first season’s thematic establishment – but it fits with his character. In a twisted, multilayered situation, he follows his rules instead of believing his intended outcome with justify his means. Hurley connects and, to the best of his ability, protects; thus when he is in needs, others pull him through. The rest could do worse than follow his example. Not lead, as leadership is obviously not what he’s skilled or comfortable with – see Juliet and Sawyer, below for the opposite state.

Late and perhaps most interesting: Sun. Sun is playing her own game, connecting with those she will work with and those she plans to use in gaining revenge – but who is the former, and who the latter?

Juliet and Sawyer, the perpetual second-stringers step up to the role of leaders, and so far at least have slightly more success at it then Jack. Sawyer still attacks any situation with blunt force, but he turns that force on the people with information he needs to make even basic decisions that will affect the group’s survival. Juliet, finding herself more or less accepted into the group given their much larger problems than her origin, integrates her insider knowledge of the island with Faraday’s hypotheses and generally pushes the others to think instead of fight. Neither of them is hung up by Jack’s desperate need to prove himself, which helps.

Slate’s Chadwick Matlin posits convincingly that every season of Lost is entirely set up in the first five minutes of a season – otherwise knows as the “What the fuck…?” and “Do we have this on the right channel?” sections. If that holds true this season, we are in for:

Þ Island backstory, particularly in terms of the 1970s-era Dharma initiative. (yay!) Already popping up in the unstuck-in-time daytrips through successive waves of invaders, most recently the WWII-era mercenaries with a limb-chopping hello. More importantly, this paves the way for the return of crazy hot Delenn…er, Mira Furlan.

Þ Mind-breaking pseudo-quantum-theory time-travel shenanigans. (woo hoo! And may I add: God love wikipedia’s very short introductions to things no one will understand without 12 years of higher education!)

Þ Family issues, neglectful daddies, and babies on the island. (Sigh.) As excellent as Pierre Chang – the man of a thousand candle-related aliases – is in cheesy orientation films, I can’t take another emotionally distant father as a grown son’s sole motivation. Really, Whedon’s caught me up on that pretty much for the rest of my life.

o Also, enough cooing over baybees that miraculously lack sniffles and various jungle rashes brought on by reclaimed canvas diapers. Really. Though I do admit to being interested in whether little Miles – can we safely assume that’s little chubby-cheeked Miles in the Dharma bassinet? – was brought to the island or born there, if the toxic pregnancies are a new tropical feature.

Þ Time-sickness and the infinite power that causes it (hmmmm). I was embarrassingly moved by the sickness and resolution of The Constant, and fear continuing to play with the concept will weaken it, a la the Turok-Han vampires of Season 7 Buffy.  But the infinite power that cannot be safely harnessed, that powerful people will continually attempt to harness? Accessed by a donkey wheel? Interesting.

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Supes and Bats in Bowling Shirts: Dexter’s Dark Avenger

January 6, 2009
the Dark Defender

the Dark Defender

Dexter, Season 2

Dexter’s season one self-image begins with the smug self-loathing of a monster, aware that only his conditioning allows him any place in society outside a jail cell. Confronted with two like-minded sociopaths he was unable to force into his mold, he began to see himself as a different and better breed of monster, one who may someday be able to genuinely connect with others as he is. He sees the crowd of curious onlookers as cheering fans, with Deb at his side, smiling and sharing in his applause:

Everyone else would probably thank me if they knew I was the one who drained [the ice truck killer] of his life. Deep down, I’m pretty sure they’d appreciate a lot of my work. This is what it must feel like to walk in full sunlight, my shadow self embraced.

While this is a mixed sign in terms of real progress – retreating into fantasy rather than approaching the issues that the second season will stagger through – the immediate effect is to question the modern heroic archetype: the vigilante superhero.

The show does suffer the requisite sophomore slump, abandoning some of the best first-season elements while deepening the concept’s reach and mythology. While the first season mined and transcended a pulpy beach novel, the second too often lived down to the potboiler source material. One plot thread is painfully predictable: OMG Crazy Hot Girl Is The Only One Who Understands Me And Thus We Must Fuck, which segues into OMG Crazy Hot Chick Is Crazy And Hot, In The Sense That She’s Really Into Emotionally Strategic Arson!

Urgh. Even Dexter’s long delayed leap into sexual puberty can’t justify the stretching of this from its one-episode premise through three-quarters of the short season.

A larger issue was the too-convenient resolution of Dexter’s various cliffhangers. Too often, he is a cipher serving only to bring together the awkward thesis and antithesis that independently resolve his crisis. The long-awaited confrontation with Rita about the real reason her abusive ex-husband was found with a heroin needle sticking from his arm (leading to his re-incarceration and fatal shanking) is derailed after Dexter has been forced to confess – when Rita conveniently jumps to the conclusion he must be an addict himself, apparently forgiving him. This leads Dexter to Narcotics Anon, where he is presented with the season arcs of aforementioned batshit insane hot chick and the addiction filter through which to explore his compulsions. The investigation into the Bay Harbor Butcher (ie Dexter) and the personal persecution of Sgt Doakes crash together, leaving Doakes the top suspect with Dexter’s blood sample trophies in his trunk. Doakes again, stashed in a remote cabin that’s about to be found by the FBI’s great white hunter – not to mention made a connection with Dex and nearly convinced him to turn himself in – is found and spontaneously killed by Batshit Crazy Hot Chick. Who then ties off her own loose end by very publicly demonstrating her insanity and fleeing the country, to be killed by Dexter at his leisure.

Dexter’s contribution to his crises and moral quandaries is little more than ethically facile mopping up. Following the insane woman’s version of the NA programme, he spends months attempting to quit his addiction – allowing Rita, Doakes, and Batshit Crazy Woman to believe he is struggling with heroin – and delve into his shadowed past, particularly the grimier aspects of his formerly sainted foster father. He reaches a breaking point when Doakes witnesses him murdering, and Doakes’ sickened reaction forces him to put together two memories he’d previously managed to keep separate: his father’s horror at witnessing Dexter happily dismember a victim picked according to “Harry’s code” and his father’s suicide soon after.

Dexter’s guilt and misery evaporate soon after when he realises God must approve of his actions, having rescued him from capture via a complicated spiderweb of contrivances; sadly, Dexter lacks to self-awareness to consider the possibility of showrunners sparing his viewers from having to make a real judgement on his actions and their own complicity in his actions, their attention literally continuing his existence.

The hints at superhero traits offered in the first season are laid out without subtlety. One local graphic artist has literally made a comic hero of the Bay Harbor Butcher: the Dark Avenger. (Dexter is fascinated by the image but only notes that dark leather would be completely impractical for Miami.) He enters the season thinking that ordinary people would cheer him on and indeed they do, as an abstract concept. When a face – Sgt Doakes’ – is put to the killer, the acclaim disappears.

As Dexter-the-killer, he exposes the childish morality of superheroes who get the bad guys without killing them. Batman and Superman are condoned by the police in their world, delivering criminals to Headquarter’s front door – although you have to wonder how their cases ever went to trial. Much like Dexter, their verdict of ‘guilty’ is the only law. The criminals who have to die for plotty goodness or the satisfaction of a network’s moral code generally cause their own doom, usually by refusing to grab the hand of the person who’s been whaling the life – nearly – out of them for the past several minutes and plunging to their comic-book death.

The show itself resolves the irresolvable in a similar slight of hand, having Lila (a self-deluding murderer-by-arson who seeks out vulnerable new victims) do the dirty work of killing Doakes (a self-confessed monster who admits to isolating himself for others’ safety). Dexter’s ‘code’ remains intact through others’ actions; while Doakes got a raw deal at the end, his obsessive bullying directly led there.

Dexter’s backstory riffs on two of the oldest comic book heroes, recognisable in any part of the world with any access to visual media. He is a superman hiding in plain sight – like Clark Kent, he is physically and intellectually stronger than most; like Bruce Wayne, he builds his ‘true’ persona with technological preparation and stringent training. His motivations…they are something of a different story, but not from a distant shelf. The motivations of the hero and the serial murderer may only be chapters of the same book.

The foundling is raised by a foster father who knows his beloved son is not like other children, who instils a rigid code and the need to hide his difference above all else. Ostensibly on the side of the angels – he wants his strange son to have something of a normal life, unmolested by authority, while using his abilities to make the world a better, safer place – the impotent father conditions him into a black-and-white worldview to further his own agenda. Isolated from other influences – to keep the dangerous secret of his difference secret, of course – the son sees his father as the ultimate, unquestioned authority and is kept from developing an independent personality and the ability to truly take responsibility for his own actions. When the father has died and the son begins a long-delayed maturation process, he’s initially faced with an either/or: continue following the father’s law to the letter, or reject all morality in favour of showy self destruction.

Or: the boy is orphaned by a gruesome murder that will haunt his psyche through adulthood. As a nemesis could later observe,  he had a bad day, and everything changed – he became a vicious freak, avenging that long-ago trauma on present individuals who are innocent of that crime, if not others. Only a personally enforced code keeps him morally separate from those he hunts.

Unlike Clark or Bruce, Dexter actively reminds himself that he is a monster – usually forcing himself into an emotionless archetype he doesn’t actually fit – despite his code. Those other American heroes cling to their codes as the thing that makes them the opposite of the criminals they use violence and intimidation to apprehend. Dexter knows he would still kill without the veneer of justice. The abilities and the need to use them precede any thirst for justice.

Would Bats and Supes do the same in a more realistic world? Where society – or at least its legal system – demanded that only the police force, with its flawed systems of oversight and restraint, use physical force to “protect” society and remove its worst elements?

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in the blood

November 18, 2008
Myrin / Jar City

Myrin / Jar City

Mýrin (Jar City)

2006

Unusual for noir, this atmospheric film opens with a good death: comfortably medicated in a hospital bed, surrounded by family to sooth fears, and finally buried with respect. Unfortunately, the deceased is a five-year-old girl, struck down by a rare heredity condition. Her grief-stricken father, Örn, applies on the eve of her death to work in Iceland’s massive genetic research database, but is he driven to fight similar diseases in her memory, or desperate to prove his DNA is not the cause of her suffering?

Elsewhere, an old man named Holsborg dies badly: bludgeoned with an ashtray and left to rot, despised by those who knew him, child pornography still glowing on his monitor. The only possible witness – a pilot, one of his long-suffering neighbors who despised the old man for the stench of his unit that filtered through the entire building – displays no regret that he was too drunk to recall anything about the shady character he saw outside the man’s apartment. Erlendur, the senior detective, finds only one useful clue (and sole hint of the man’s humanity) amid the squalor: a Holga photograph of a child’s gravestone, buried in 1974.

The action takes place in the cruellest last-winter month, a time that can only be endured while the promise of spring’s new life seems ever farther away instead of mere weeks. It’s appropriate for a film that turns around the ambiguity of new life, the pure innocence and potential an infant represents set against both the hypocritical social mores that condemn the female desire that conceives them and the chance the infant’s life could be painful and brief.

The chance inherent to recombinant DNA reproduction becomes a morality play, the sins of the father literally passing on to the son. In a society that cleaves without irony to the virgin/whore complex, arrest and prosecution for rape is very difficult; one flirtatious young woman left badly beaten is treated terribly by a bent cop, who refuses to pursue her case and destroys the only evidence. A mother allows her grown son to believe he is the product of rape instead of adultery, because to admit that she made the wrong decision when isolated, lonely, and teetering into alcoholism would destroy her family. Both encounters produce children who carry a DNA mutation that can cause fatal brain tumors, both leading to the death of beloved young daughters. Sex itself becomes an enemy, as if the children they produced could have been separated from that process somehow, and thus been healthy.

Holsborg is not killed for raping a woman but for passing his self-destructive DNA on to his daughter and granddaughter, both referred to as “angels” – women too young to be caught in the virgin/whore trap. His murderer loathes himself not as the biological child of a rapist but as a carrier of this dead-end genetic material. Where the clear-headed response would be to get a vasectomy, he executes the gene – himself and Holsborg – as punishment for the “murders” of his daughter and half-sister.

With one exception, the mothers here experience only heartbreak. Their children are the result of rape, adultery, or prostitution; they die cruelly young or grow into degenerate criminals. Next to this, the film presents three father figures, easily sorted into good, bad, and ugly.

The bad father is Holsborg, obviously, a feckless criminal who fathers offspring thoughtlessly and sometimes forcibly. The hidden picture of his daughter’s grave hints at a sense of loss, or at least sentimentality, toward the child he knew of, but he certainly provided no support. And while learning of another child when the grown man has broken into your house to threaten your life isn’t likely to provoke a Hallmark moment, he proves to be exactly the monster his son expects, albeit an aged and broken-down grotesque. The son, Örn, is the ugly father figure, who has been twisted by grief and comes to an end his daughter surely would not have wanted.

The good father, however, is the best dad since Atticus Finch (albeit from a very different culture). As the film begins, the detective Erlendur has lost his grown daughter to drug addition and prostitution. The photos he still displays show she was once his angel, young and innocent, but is now just a weapon for criminals to taunt him with. There’s a certain comfortable savagery in his nature, expressed in the way he rips into his dietary staple (boiled sheep heads, an Icelandic delicacy), but little else slips past his impenetrable iciness. He reflects some of nature’s harshness, tearing down his cocky and incompetent young partner, who will either learn and grow into the role or be forced out of police work entirely. The team of police is a microcosm of the nature’s grand experiment: what will thrive and reproduce, and what will die on the vine?

As a father, he manages to provide both tough and unconditional love. He refuses to fund his daughter’s drug habit even when she confesses that she’s pregnant with no idea who the father may be. But once she’s decided to get clean and asked to move back in with him to have and raise the baby, he repeatedly rescues her without judgement. He is the ultimate protector, strong enough to beat any monster – first, the brutal serial killer who insults her, then her own addiction and the young thugs sent to collect her debt, and finally negotiating a payment plan with her dealer. Instead of simply escalating the violence, he ends it – refusing to respond to taunts and give her enemies that power and, after he’s broken one of the thugs’ legs and left him crippled in a stairwell, calling an ambulance and putting a pillow under his shattered knee while they wait together for it to arrive. While the viewer expects her to end as a victim by the third act, he instead creates a truly safe space for her.

When the resolution of the case has finally broken his heart, Erlendur turns to his daughter for comfort and understanding, letting them both be more fully human. He lets her in to his fallible side, to admit to both of them that he is not always strong and not always right, while she steps into the responsible role she’ll need to move from sheltered daughter to adult and parent. Far from Jar City’s raw genetic material, this damaged mother and this damaged child will survive and thrive, by chance and a father’s love.

Erlunder and Eva

Erlunder and Eva

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sound and silence

October 11, 2008

Anny Ondra in Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929)

Blackmail

1929

Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie picture (actually a brilliant make-do compromise between studio-mandated sound and previously filmed silent footage) hasn’t aged particularly well, but is an interesting portrait of both the time and the early development of his trademark style. Adapted from a talky stage play, Hitchcock shoehorns in some revolutionary staging of uneasy liminal spaces (particularly his favourites of stairs, family spaces in the public eye, and super-real landmarks). This staging hints at the complicated Freudian underpinnings of desire that push the four main characters through a predictable morality play of guilt and punishment, society’s law and karmic fate, against a backdrop of universal entrapment.

The film opens up with a raucous silent segment of dignified Keystone Kops careening about the streets in a Model T in pursuit of justice. Sound begins with the arrival of a policeman’s girlfriend, who seems like a bubbly goodtime girl, a flirtatious flapper all men are drawn to. Later on, we discover young Alice White is also a meek, dutiful, and conservatively dressed shopgirl amid the aspirational furnishings of the family’s combined home and business. Her social bubbles are the only expression possible of her desire for excitement and new experiences; she’s all to aware that this dull courtship is to be the brief highlight of her youth before settling into a staid domestic and business routine, and that only if she plays her cards well. Her carelessness with small but pricey garments turns her gloves, left behind first on a café table and then at the murder scene, in the object petit a Zizek identified as Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, the lack or loss of a thing that sets the plot in motion and stands in for desire – in Alice’s case, to step back from her life and be forced into a new one. Note that she immediately sends her man to reclaim it, however; she makes her loved ones into the jailors that keep her safely barred from her fantasies.

Alice does desire the handsome stranger who flirts with her behind her boyfriend’s back. She wants to be an exotic muse, have a passionate affair, but it is never a real possibility. Inside the moralistic threat and anxiety of her gradual assenting to the artist’s manoeuvrings is one constant stance: I want this, but I won’t have it.

Here, her veneer of sophistication first begins to crack – if she was really a liberated flapper, Alice would not expect the kind of man who picks up strange women in bars to respect her boundary while she revelled like a child in the atmosphere of sensuality and erotic potential. In another Zizekian construct, she tries to live her fantasy courtship only for it to be nightmarish brutality when realised.

Women in Hitchcock films are usually the most interesting characters. They are already tormented beings underneath a coy or brittle façade, by their own unfulfilled desires and the conflicting demands of the era – be both virginal mother figure and inflamer of male passions. The cool Hitchcock blonde has responded by disavowing all passion, maintaining visual beauty, but impenetrable. The plots dovetail with the breakdown of her repression and struggle with these forces, the outcomes defined as happy or melancholy with her resulting autonomy or destruction.

Blackmail ends with Alice escaping the electric chair only by enforced silence. She would confess to expiate her guilt (and escape the now intolerable confines of a dreamless middle-class life), in some sense bringing together her two lives: the everyday bland obedience and dangerous bohemian wildchild. Even after she has escaped from her own actions back into her safe life, that life has lost the fantasy underpinnings that made it bearable.

Not that the three men fare much better. The artist – a trust-fund dilettante, judging by his opulent loft studio – has simple animal desires and a spoiled heir’s expectation that whatever he wants is already his. He’s punished directly and immediately for his assault, killed by his victim as the only means of escape. It’s easy to forget in the action that follows that the artist was himself being blackmailed by a man who made a living witnessing crimes; most likely, he made a habit out of breaking the law, and the karmic punishment covers more sins than we see on screen.

The blackmailer desires money, obviously, but even more he desires the humiliation of his “betters.” Beyond the potential for financial stability, which he could achieve in any number of legal or illicit ways, he desires payback from the world that has shown him no respect, from those who are respected. His punishment is obvious, and somewhat appropriate given his chosen profession of wrongly punishing others – he is hounded to death in the centre of British imperialist wealth by the policeman who has wrongly accused him of the murder. He is in an immediate sense both guilty and innocent – literally living off others’ guilt and innocent of this particular murder – but his punishment is appropriate according to the natural selection of the criminal sphere.

The blackmailer chose to enmesh himself in the crimes of others, and in this case was not quick enough to escape his own trap. He wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, and his victims weren’t as wholesomely naïve as he thought they were. The white knight he looked forward to degrading was willing to leap into the mud with him first, use his own methods to entrap him, and to take the same satisfaction in the blackmailer’s grovelling ruination. Like Hulda in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find, he was done in not by his own immorality but by his expectation of integrity in the upstanding citizen he’d use.

Frank Webber, the boyfriend and, coincidentally, the detective assigned to investigate the artist’s murder, staidly desires advancement: promotion in work and marriage to the well-to-do shopkeeper’s daughter. Unfortunately, he lacks the maturity to earn either. The fates of himself, his girlfriend, and the blackmailer turn entirely on Frank’s connections and quick thinking, twisting the blackmailer’s evidence to implicate him instead of Alice. Frank is directly implicated in the blackmailer’s death, pushing the chase to reckless extremes; after all, isn’t it easier to tie up the loose end of the blackmailer and his tales of the real murderess than arrest him? He ruthlessly pushes back the other possible loose end, his girlfriend’s guilty conscience and the confession that would end his career, by bullying her into silence and preserving his future – both career and unincarcerated future spouse.

Nevertheless, Frank is punished by getting exactly what he wants, after destroying the fantasies about himself and Alice that made his dreams desirable.

The justice system is absent from this morality tale except as a tool. Instead, fate dispenses with a hard-boiled but right-wing conservatively just hand. Of the four criminals (rapist, murderer, blackmailer, and corrupt cop), two receive the death penalty and two get life in prison. Intentions cannot affect fate’s judgement, but impulsive actions can twist it to reflect one’s secret true character.

Class is the only other factor that can move fate’s hand in Blackmail: the dissolute rich man and the lower-class criminal are both punished by death. Although Frank uses the blackmailer’s methods and Alice revels in the artist’s sensual lifestyle, both are solidly middle-class but remain silent, disavowing their desires and crimes. They embrace and are rewarded with respectable middle-class futures.

The big! twist! of that, however, is the ‘true’ tragedy: while a successful match as the universal signifier for a happy ending was a cliché in Shakespeare’s time, these two will be punished for the rest of their shared lives by it; not a love match but partners in a perfect crime trapped in a mockery of marriage, only together to ensure the other keeps the secret that would destroy them.

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