Shit Sandwich

50/50 vs. Ikiru

2012-02-06T20:14:00.002-05:00

I love Church, and Hate Religion.

2012-02-03T15:37:00.000-05:00

Seems counter-intuitive right? Let me explain.

To me, if you subtract religion from church, this what you are left with: all members of a community coming together, once a week, to be social, to connect and have discussions, and listen to a cultural leader share an insight, an idea, a thought that he or she had. The insight can be about politics, art, spirituality – anything. There is room for disagreement, dialogue, and debate. That, to me, sounds like a phenomenal tool of social cohesion, of intelligent dialogue, and community building. I, for one, would feel far less alienated, and would probably have a higher opinion of most people, if we regularly met, got to know each other, and had intelligent discussions.

When you add religion to this mix, suddenly much of that changes: it’s no longer an idea that can be debated, it is a truth that you are told. You can disagree slightly, but not in principle. You can disagree with the finer points of a sermon, but you can't call the faith itself into question. And you certainly can’t voice your disagreement publicly! And the topic of discussion is always in some way related to religion: superstition, dogma, scripture. The community is built upon specific set of beliefs, not upon any other common denominator, their proximity, their belief in freedom of thought, their being human. Their search for truth.

Often you’ll hear a religious person say, “I hate church, but I love religion.” Sometimes, they go further and say, “I hate religion, but love God.” Well, that’s great, but I think you're moving in the wrong direction. I love church and hate religion. You make it seem like the most important part of religion is the dogma. Wrong. The most important part of religion is the community, the identity that it gives you. I want to keep that community and lose the stone-age superstition.

Free Tuition For All

2012-02-03T15:17:00.002-05:00

Why should University Tuition be Free?

In Canada, health care is “free” insofar as it is free at the moment of delivery. It’s paid for by taxation. And tuition should be the same, and at the very least radically reduced. We pay more in tuition than the US does. Yet, the Americans say the exact same counterarguments in regards to health care “it’s too expensive, it’s impossible, the world doesn’t work like that.” Americans aren’t talking about raising tuition. Why? Because it’s not about the money, it’s about where our PRIORITIES are. There is always money, even in a deficit/recession combo. Taxes are being collected, money is being spent. The question is where is the right place to put the money. And whether you’re looking for a cure for the economy, a cure for cancer, or whether you just want better fiction authors, the answer is schools. You may think that to make Universities free we’d have to raise taxes, but you wouldn’t necessarily. As it is, loads of tax dollars are spent needlessly on things like billion dollars stealth jets. The problem is Harper’s administration has the complete wrong priorities.

To quote a Communist Party leaflet: “Canada is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Despite the economic crisis, Canadian corporate profits are increasing. The Harper Conservative government is spending billions on the military and war. Yet there is no money for education. It would take approximately $6 billion to pay for all the undergraduates’ tuition, while Harper is now spending over $20 billion (and rising) on the military each year.” Suddenly, free tuition doesn’t seem so crazy, does it?

But regardless of your political affiliation, giving someone an education is an investment – one that will keep paying off forever. Solutions to problems, like curing diseases, curbing climate change, or fixing a failing economy, don’t just spontaneously happen. Smart people make them happen. The smarter the people are in the world, the better the world gets. It’s a direct correlation. I’m not being a romantic. I’m being a realist. And loads of brilliant people don’t go to school largely because of the price. We are losing geniuses in every generation.

People aren’t looking for a “free ride”. They just don’t want to have to commit years of their life to what amounts to wage slavery to pay off a ready-made debt. The system has us in its pocket that way, it’s a perfect set-up, and it doesn’t want us to fight back. And those who oppose movements to lower tuition are helping the system when you tell us not to fight back. You should be seeing these student movements as heroes, not loafers. To make picket signs, miss class for a day, and actually go out and march, that is NOT a free ride.

Saying things like “You want something, you work for it” is just disseminating ideology. That’s the logic of this zeitgeist, this system. But the system is made by people, and people can change it. We don’t have to live in THIS “real world out there” we want a new “real world out there”. What if, in light of the possibility of another recession soon, you lost your pension plan, or your free health care? Someone could say the exact same thing to you. “It’s part of the real world, get used to it.” Instead, you should be saying “This world sucks, let’s change it.”

Weed will Save the World.

2012-02-03T15:06:00.005-05:00

Weed will save the world.

There are a thousand and one more arguments to be made, but this isn't an overview of all the arguments. I’m keeping this short so people actually read (and spread) this.

I’m not being facetious, abstract, or dramatic. Weed will save the world. Especially Canada. I’ve literally made a blueprint:

Legalize:

Tax it.

The government will make millions (at least) in tax revenue. Our Canadian weed will be renown, shipped across the world. It will be a new icon of national pride, if it isn’t already. Which it is. This benefits everyone. Drug dealers, this is good for you, too! You can start a legitimate business, selling your own custom bud, and you won’t have any risk of going to jail. And, as for users, the product could be regulated and checked, to make sure you aren’t buying dirty drugs, and you aren’t getting ripped off.

Decriminalize.

Although it’s way worse in the US and elsewhere than Canada, millions of dollars are wasted every year on housing prisoners who committed a victimless crime. Drug dealers will become business owners, and drug addicts will be put in hospitals not cells. Legalizing this single plant will release thousands of innocent people from behind bars, and will seriously cut down on the paranoia of potheads nationwide.

Stop the violence.

There is only one group of people that legalization would be bad for. That is drug gangs. Sorry! You guys will have to disband, stop selling unclean drugs, fighting for monopolies over cities, and killing scores of innocent victims. Sorry! (Honestly, though, look up the stats. In Mexico alone it's absurd how many people are killed. This one reason should be enough to convince anyone.)

Benefit:

Culturally.

Can you imagine a world where you went out to the bar, and instead of killing brain cells, getting into fights, and mumbling nonsense with booze, we got stoned and had deep philosophical (if giggly) discussions? That would foster a much safer, community-oriented, healthier, and smarter society. Legalizing weed is a big step in our cultural evolution.

Economically.

From jails, to taxes, to new business opportunities, and our worldwide renown exports, legalizing weed will bring billions of dollars to country, and would single-handedly pull us out of the recession. This is not an exaggeration. In the Depression, it was war-spending that pulled us out. This time, it will be grass.

Morally.

Seeing drug addicts as sick people who belong in a hospital is a no-brainer. Why are they behind bars? Drugs are not a criminal issue, they are a health issue. This is a sick and unethical society we live in when that needs to be pointed out. Not to mention the epic numbers of casualties from gang-warfare across the world. Al Capone was created by the Prohibition, remember. Not only that, it should be in the hands of the individual, not the State, to determine what is good for us.

Honesty.

And to conclude, I want to make the point that legalizing weed is not about the health risks. The purported risks to health are controversial at best, and even then, they are incredibly minimal compared to alcohol or cigarettes. Or McDonalds. Or guns. Meth is prescribed to kids with ADHD. People kill themselves on prescription drugs every day. But these are all legal. It is not about health. It's about control. Once a pill of THC can be patented by Big Pharmaceutical companies, it will be legal. Why? Because it is centralized, controlled, administered, sterile, and prescribed. Essentially, weed is illegal because its decentralized, thought-stimulating, and counter-cultural aspects are against the dominant ideology. Up yours, capitalism. Legalize.

P.s. -

There's one argument I need to dispel right away. Even though there are tons of stupid arguments, this one is the worst. It goes like this: "If it was legal, everyone will do it. Even kids, and doctors."

1. All the experts say this isn't true, but just ask yourself. How many people do you think there are in the world who say: "I want to do weed so bad, but I can't because it's illegal. Oh well." Probably a total of 0 people. People who want to do it will do it anyway. Always. Legalizing just means those people won't go to jail. Besides, if heroin was illegal, would you do it? I didn't think so.

2. I don't care. It's weed. It's not like it's alcohol, one of the most widely-abused and harmful drugs on the entire planet. Kids, doctors, and drivers are all drunk. That doesn't mean alcohol should be illegal. I'd be fine if my kids smoked weed. I'd also be fine if my doctor smoked weed, as long as it wasn't during an operation. Which, seriously, he can do anyway. Legalizing weed won't give him any reason to do something he can already do. IT'S FUCKING WEED, WHO CARES.

Links:

Interested in learning more? Here's some links (but always be skeptical and read the fine print!):

An important article with lot of good points:
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Hallelujah+Canadians+agree+time+legalize+marijuana/6013181/story.html

An overview of a number of recent studies:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/13/is-pot-good-for-lungs-new-marijuana-study-adds-to-health-effects-debate.html

A list of the medical benefits of weed:

http://www.medical-marijuana-hut.com/positive-effects-of-marijuana.html

A documentary on drugs in the UK:

http://youtu.be/onsq09bXdi4

The Importance of being Offensive

2012-02-03T14:44:00.000-05:00

Be Offended.

Too often we hear a public outcry of “That’s offensive!” Apparently if even one person decides to call in to a radio/TV station and complain “I am offended,” then a flurry of media apologies have to be immediately issued. Things are censored or banned for being distasteful, inappropriate: “offensive”. Every mainstream movie doesn’t just treat controversial issues with a neutral stance, they ignore them altogether. Yet, at the same time, and sometimes from the same people, we hear a war cry against being “Politically correct”. What a fantastic means of social control - to dissuade people from actually being offensive, and then make them think that they're in favor being a little offensive.

I’m not going to tackle the issue of “offensive material” from the viewpoint of politics (freedom of speech), or theory (the power of hegemonic discourse to create “accepted channels” of subversion), or even economics (consumer capitalism’s unending pursuit of profit inherently appeals to the lowest common denominator, thus necessitating a social stigma against “offensive material”). Instead I’d like to look at it culturally, and why “offensive material” isn’t just a fun way to get out frustration. Being offensive is actually a deeply productive act.

Recently I had the privilege of attending a live performance by Crispin Glover, followed by a screening of his film “It is Fine. Everything is Fine.” In his film, the writer/star Steven C. Stewart has Multiple Sclerosis. The script necessitated the embodiment of his sexual fantasies. And, to my and the theater’s shock, there was in fact a scene of actual, non-simulated, sex with Stewart and an actress. Afterwards, at the Q&A, Glover spoke about how important extreme scenes like this are. He claimed that they disallowed the audience to be passive. It forces us to think about whether or not we think the director should have done that, it forces us to think about what should be “acceptable”. And, to Glover, this thought is an educational activity.

The truth of this is obvious. If you were never offended, you’d never really think hard about anything. All the best discussions I’ve ever had have been started by a “troll”, if you will, some simple generalization intended to get attention and alienate people and start a discussion. The day after a student march, a friend’s facebook status reads: “Reduce tuition fees? Are you serious right now? Shut up, all of you, education is a privilege, not a right, goddammit.” And 50 comments later, I’ve heard some new arguments pro and against reducing tuition fees, and I have a clearer idea of where I stand on the issue.

Or when a friend says, “You know, I can’t really imagine how someone can’t believe in God, it's just so obvious.” It’s moments like that, where what you really feel surfaces (regardless of the social censors you are supposed to internalize) where real discussions happen. Small talk, the surface appearances, the social niceties: these disappear, and suddenly you’re actually saying something meaningful. Without that initial, jarring moment of offense, that jolted you out of complacency, those discussions would never happen.

Be offensive, don’t hide your real opinion, and don’t apologize until you change your opinion. Otherwise, you might as well not have any opinions.

Best of 2011: Music

2012-01-12T23:50:00.001-05:00

I know your favourite album isn't here. I know the formatting looks like a celebrity without make-up on. Blah blah, no one cares what I think, blah blah, I haven't heard every album from 2011, blah blah, run on sentence, blah blah blah. Here we go.

Best EP:

4. Colin Stetson - Those Who Didn't Run

Pulsating, swirling, psychedelic saxophone.

3. Samaritan - Don't Try Love

She's playing mind-games, with synthesizers made on dreamstuff.

2. Bongripper - Sex Tape/Snuff Film

A mature headbanger's sexy tunes.

1. How to Dress Well - Just Once

Sounds like the final thoughts before a suicide. Cautious, slow, fragile. Melancholic.

Best ambient:

7. Golden Retriever - Light Cones

Mayan Fripp & Eno.

6. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

A little slow t'night, innit Lloyd?

5. Motion Sickness Of Time Travel - Luminaries & Synastry

Sex on shrooms.

4. Myrmyr - Fire Star

The world is burning, and everything is alright.

3. SUNN 0))) Meets Nurse With Wound - The Iron Soul of Nothing

Evil, and empty.

2. Asva - Presense of Absences

Abrasive, evil, and serene.

1. Grouper - A I A

Guitar chords and amped reverb, turns to arhythmic atonal drone, which turns to Heaven.

Best classical:

6. Nico Muhly - Seeing is Believing

The voices of the universe doing math.

5. Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason - SÓLARIS

The soundtrack to a movie I desperately want to see.

4. Steve Reich - WTC 9/11

Just as powerful as it promises to be. Needs 2 listens. Nay, 3.

3. A Winged Victory for the Sullen - S/T

The first song is awe-inspiring. Makes you feel...buoyant. Wading through clouds, over rural Nepal.

2. Jóhann Jóhannsson - The Miners' Hymns

Communism meets minimalism. Ligeti meets Brian Eno. You can hear the tyrants toil; serfs suffer.

1. NOW Ensemble - Awake

Up and down, both at once, and then alternating. Rhythm, is, mis, leading. Really open space. You can swim in it. It goes on forever; always changing.

Best rock/pop/metal:

13. Esben and the Witch - Violent Cries

It's girl music. No apologies. Great voice.

12. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Carnivalesque hipster shit, and I love it.

11. Battles - Gloss Drop

Plastic funk, electronic math-rock. Rhythmically challenging. Check out "Wall Street".

10. Disma - Towards The Megalith

Ancient evil beneath the earth. Doomy death metal.

9. Hella - Trippy

Bring an extra pair of sticks. Face-melting and hella trippy.

8. Boris - Heavy Rocks (2011)

Fuzzy hair headbanging. Either too Japanese, or not Japanese enough.

7. Cat's Eyes - S/t

Involuntary smiling is guaranteed. Big smiles.

6. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare

The real sexy sax man.

5. The Wounded Kings - In the Chapel of the Black Hand

Slowly dying, Satan calling. Soon to cross the Styx. Virgil is near, the 9 circles await.

4. Washed Out - Within and Without

Music to have sex to.

3. Earth - Angels of Light, Demons of Darkness Vol. 1

Neil Young in slow motion. On LSD. And no singing.

2. Barn Owl - Lost in the Glare

Divine desert-wandering music. Mellow acoustic jams, ambient droning murmuring. Dehydration miracles.

1. YOB - Atma

Wake your mom up at 2 am, and don't even care. Just turn it up. Slick doom metal with Alan Watts lyrics. Eugh, yeah. Louder.

Other highlights that somehow didn't make it on any of the other lists:

Tank 86 - Rise

Bjork - Biophilia

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

The Gates of Slumber - The Wretch

Autopsy - Macabre Eternal

Boris - New Album

Omega Massif - Karpatia

Samsara Blues Experiment - Revelation and Mystery

Zoom-on-a-Kill - ‡L∆‡Lol₡ᴓ

P.S., mediafire links available upon request.

Why It's Important to Tell Your Children About Santa

2012-01-12T23:20:00.001-05:00

Since we’re coming out of the holidays, I thought I’d share a minor insight I had recently. I was thinking about something I heard comedian Doug Stanhope say about religion: that your parents need to jam it into your head while you’re still at the “Santa susceptible” age. And then it occurred to me.

Santa is awesome.

Is "North Pole" really a valid mailing address?

The idea of Santa Claus is a really important one that I wouldn’t sacrifice. For a while I thought I would raise my children telling them Santa is a lie (that is, if I ever somehow got tricked into having children). But I changed my mind in an instant. I would wind the most wonderful yarn about Father Christmas for my kids.

Why would I do that? Why would I lie to my children? Not because it’s fun, or it’s festive, or it’s just a tradition I’m mindlessly passing down from previous generations. I will tell my children about Santa because I want to train them. I want to train my children to think. I want to train my children to look me in the face and say, “Daddy, you’re full of shit. This Santa business is nonsense.” That is the day I will pat my son/daughter on the shoulder and say, “Welcome to the club. You passed the test.”

See, I got to thinking about my earliest memory. The earliest memory I can think of was a discussion I had with my mom. She was telling me about God, and I asked, “How long did God wait before he made the Universe?” Basically, I was asking where God came from. And her response, which is perfectly reasonable to a kid my age, was, “Well Josh, you’ll have to ask God when you get to Heaven.” And I said, “Ok” but it wasn’t Ok. It was totally not Ok. I needed to know the answer, damnit, and if God wouldn’t tell me and my mother wouldn’t tell me I would have to figure it out on my own. Of course, I didn’t figure it out, I’m not Buddha reincarnated, but it doesn’t matter. What matters was that I was thinking.

Seriously, who comes up with this shit

That is my first memory. The first time I ever sat down and consciously, critically, rationally, thought. I tried to figure out where God came from. And it’s possible that I am an inquisitive and critical person now because of that early training. (Or maybe it was in me from the start? Nature vs. nurture? Who knows.) Regardless, the point is I have that memory because in that moment, I was aware. The brain is a muscle, and I started exercising it young.

What the Santa myth does, is it challenges kids to start exercising their minds early. Another early memory of mine was getting in a heated debate with one of my day-care leaders about Santa. I was telling her how silly the whole idea was, how Santa can’t exist, elves don’t exist, how no man could fit down a chimney, or make it to every house in the world in a single night. And what about people who don’t have chimneys (like my house)? Or people who don’t have houses? Why do I get $100 dollars worth of toys but my rich friends get $500 dollars worth? Does Santa like them more? Do peasants in Haiti get presents? Did people in history do christmas? Why do only Western/christian families get presents? Why am I getting presents I see in the grocery store if elves made them in the north pole? I didn’t need to uncover the hidden presents in the closet or catch my mom putting them under the tree to figure it out. The whole thing smelt fishy.

Never mind, I loooove Santa

What Santa does is it presents children with something so utterly outlandish, so hard to believe, yet makes it believable. If your parents are telling you it exists, then it must. Right? No. Santa is a giant pile of utter bullshit and no one seriously believes it. A smart kid will figure this out. But, without this opportunity to let them figure it out, they’ll never grow.

Ever since I rejected Santa, I've been paranoid about being wrong. Whenever I take an opinion on an issue, I want to hear my opposition's point of view. I never want to have that feeling again - that feeling of being an idiot that big people are secretly laughing at.

What Santa taught me was how to reject something I once believed. When I realized the error of my ways, I had no problem rejecting Santa. This was before my mom admitted that Santa doesn’t exist. Santa teaches rationalism: the ability to put thought before tradition, the ability to toss out old ideas without a second thought if they are incorrect. My instantaneous rejection of Santa paved the way for my instantaneous rejection of religion, of the consumer-takeover of this once-innocent pagan ritual, of our general corporate social order, of my prejudice against rap, of my close-mindedness towards broccoli, of my love for the Backstreet Boys. Santa made me a better person.

The best part about this writing article was searching "Santa Babe"

And now, to somehow relate this to film:

P.s. the Spice Girls beat Backstreet Boys any day of the goddamn week.

The Tree of Life Review/Analysis

2012-01-11T01:05:00.002-05:00

The Tree of History

(No Spoilers.)

I was going to do a best of 2011 list. But all I want to do, really, is talk about the Tree of Life. I didn’t outline for this. This is a heartfelt appeal; my sales pitch for your consideration. See this movie. All you need 2.5 hours, a very open mind, and a sincere desire to see life for what it really is.

Never have I been so moved by a movie. I can honestly say this is my favourite movie (having seen it 5 times). At the end of the day, though, I don’t think it’s a movie for everybody. Not because it’s a dense, difficult, intellectual movie; not at all, I think it’s a populist movie at heart. But because it is the only movie I’ve ever seen that I can seriously say needs (honestly, requisites) at least two viewings. Three if possible. And I know that the average viewer isn’t willing to give a 2.5 hour art house movie enough time for one viewing, let alone three.

But why multiple viewings?

The first viewing you will be taken aback by the plotless, beautiful (stunning, really) string of images, and collage of emotional and mundane scenes from life. The seemingly random inserts of nature, the big bang, evolution, etc, will mesmerize and give context, but we don’t know what it has to do with anything. It’s just there. And because of its ultimate nonlinearity, you will be putting the plot together in your mind. The movie doesn’t tell you a story – you observe scenes in a life and it’s up to YOU to put it all together. You tell the story. This is what Barthes calls the “Writerly text”, which is a pretentious way of saying it’s a “Choose your own adventure” story where you don’t influence the outcome of the story, but its framing. Like history itself, the Tree of Life is nothing but images and events. It is calling out for us to make it make sense.

The second viewing, you have already put the pieces together, and you probably understand the plot. It feels like a weird movie of a story you already know well. And by arranging it in this way, and by juxtaposing images from outside the story, it tells a new story. For there are two stories being told in the Tree of Life: the story of Jack, and the story of the cosmos of which Jack is a part. These stories come together, ultimately, but it’s up to you to make the connection, and decide what that connection means. And it’s this, the cosmic perspective, which makes the movie more than enjoyable: it makes it divine. I’m tempted to say that watching the Tree of Life is akin to having a religious experience. The universe around Jack at once dulls the emotional impact of the human story (the death, the life; the sorrow and the joys of childhood) and yet elevates them into the realm of myth, which somehow makes them all the more emotional. If I sound like I’m rambling nonsense, just see the movie. Hopefully you will understand what I mean.

This is a one of a kind movie. It touched me, emotionally, so much deeper than any movie I have ever seen before, and in such a profoundly personal way. In most emotional movies, we cry because we identify with a character’s sorrow. In the Tree of Life, that happens too (at the sudden display of extreme emotion in the opening). But as the movie progresses, it will make you weep not by having you identify with anybody, but by being so beautifully profound. Somehow, by seeing cosmic juxtapositions of creation/apocalypse and family drama: the traumas and tribulations melt from the center to the margin, yet simultaneous maintain their significance. It’s difficult to put into words. What you feel, and I mean feel (for this isn’t really an intellectual movie) is the sensation that the world itself (its history and future) is a single movement which encompasses both heartbreak and joy.

An interpretation of this movie is probably impossible to share fully. The way I see it, this film was conceived as a prism through which viewers are meant to see their own personal insights (maybe all movies are like that). However, by sharing my own view, perhaps you can see this as an example of what this movie allows you to do. I don’t expect you to buy my interpretation necessarily (and it ignores plenty of things worth analyzing in the movie), but it will give you an idea of what I mean.

This is my story. My Tree of Life.

(Spoilers start now.)

Sean Penn’s Jack wakes up. He’s been having a hard time coping with life lately: he is disillusioned and fed up with the world. “The world’s greedy and getting worse…” He has recently had some sort of fight with his father, an elderly Brad Pitt. He is haunted by thoughts of his beloved younger brother, who died years ago at age 19 (presumably in Vietnam). But today, when he wakes up, he is profoundly shaken by a disturbing but unforgettable dream. All day at work, he stumbles around like a zombie, carrying out the actions without any feeling. His mind is elsewhere. He can’t get the dream out of his head. It’s all he thinks about. This is his dream:

A desert. Jack wanders the desolate landscape, accompanied only by what seems to be an angel. He wanders endlessly, unsure where he is. Then he sees himself. Not a reflection: but a memory. His childhood self. He follows it towards a beach. There, he stumbles into a reunion of sorts: a collision of past, present, and future. He meets his mother; his father. His brothers, as he remembers them. Childhood friends. Angels, sand, water. The sun, always the sun. And he witnesses a moment of extreme beauty. His mother seeing her dead child, alive again. The son who died at 19, reunited, as child. And yet, this empowers her to give him up. To come to peace with the loss of that son. The end of mourning. “I give you my son.” He goes out, into that mysterious endless plain of sand; of death. The same plain which we all will someday go out into: like the mother, wandering alone, basking in the sun.

This leads Jack to the memory of his past. His recollections flood back, and he relives his childhood, looking for answers. What he finds is a flowing sea: a complicated life that can’t be summarized easily or moralized. There are crests and there are valleys, there are traumas and there are victories.

But the film isn’t just told from Jack’s perspective. We get the trademark Malick-thing of intersubjectivity: of overlapping perspectives and multiple voiceovers. So Jack’s story collides with the mother’s, who takes refuge in simple dichotomies (Nature, Grace) and almost-New Age-y wisdom, like “If you don’t love, your life will flash by.” That’s not to discount them: that is the truth that liberates her. It’s truth for her. And that’s also not to say that these themes don’t tie into the rest of the film. Like I said, the movie is a prism.

Another perspective we get is Brad Pitt’s father, Mr. O’Brian. His story is one that, in short, follows the faith in a worldview of manifest destiny, material success, and strictness. (He is Grace; when he leaves, discipline falls apart in the house). This worldview eventually collapses, and he gives one of the most revealing pieces of dialogue in the film (I can’t find the exact quote, it’s something about “I lost sight of the glory of it all.”) This is accompanied by a reuniting with Jack, after they fell apart.

The last, and most important, perspective is that of the all-seeing. The closest thing to secular objectivity. Perhaps we can say this is Malick’s perspective. This ties into the opening quotation from Job, which is one of the best-placed opening quotations ever. We don’t get a moralizing message or a step-by-step guide to avoid sadness. Instead, Malick takes the voice of God. See, the characters are addressing God with their voiceover. This is most obvious in the aftermath of the son’s death, with the mother’s cry echoing in space: “Where were you? What are we to you?” Regardless of your beliefs, these questions hit home for everyone. Well, Malick gives the same answer God does to Job. Where am I? he says. Where are YOU? Look around. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” You exist. Realize that. There is not eternal void at this moment. The world is. Things are. Triumphant opera (Preisner’s Lacrimosa) echo out over images of the glory of the cosmos - the glory of existence itself. (If I was more pretentious than I was, I would talk about Heidegger and his "the first question" of existence.) This scene is perhaps the most awe-inspiring pieces of film I’ve ever seen. This is a life-affirming conclusion, and not one that promises an afterlife. Remember, Jack’s dream saw his mother reunite with her son and immediately give him up – they didn’t live happily ever after on that beach.

And the key to all of this is here: the characters they are addressing us, the audience too. The recurring images of the waves gain significance in this context. We are the wave: we go up, and down. But we are not separate from the sea itself. We are continuous with history, we are one with the big bang. We are God. We are giving the answer to ourselves. This is the true meaning of Karma: you did it. Everything that happens was you. Recall the Thin Red Line, which suggested: “Maybe there’s one big soul, and everybody’s a part of it.”

At the end of the day Jack wanders out of the sterile, alienating skyscraper. Stumbling, still in shock by his vision of peace, staring around at all the faces he sees around him, a tiny smile manifests on his face. He has learned something.

Hugo Review/Analysis

2012-01-03T15:35:00.001-05:00

The following is (Mostly) SPOILER FREE (like, 95%)

Hugo is the greatest movie ever.

Okay, not really, not at all, but it is amazing. In so many ways. Not only in a kind of regular sense (as in, it has good characters, good acting, good cinematography, good writing, good jokes, good this, good that), but it’s also a kind of first for a lot of things. Obviously it’s Scorsese’s first 3D movie, but it’s also the first 3D movie (that I’ve yet to see), which really exploits 3Dness. Instead of that bullet-in-the-camera/I'm-reaching-into-the-audience trick we’ve seen a hundred times (even from people like Tim Burton who should know better), Scorsese actually plays with the medium, using it for creative ends. In a similar way to what George Méliès did with the early medium of film, Scorsese has done with 3D. From the autonomous, swirling, never-ending, free-roaming shots through clockwork, tunnels, smoke and crowds – to the multiple layers of action, where falling snow feels like its on your nose, juxtaposed with ticking hands of a clock shooting away into the depths of the screen. But what Scorsese really did magically with 3D, and I think everyone who sees this movie notices it, was what he did to the human face. His close-ups in this movie are fucking something. Somehow, characters’ faces exit the film world, and address the viewer personally. It seems like you’re very close and intimate with the characters, and the rest of the world (filmic, and your own) has melted away – you can see wrinkles, hairs, imperfections: nuances that you could never see before.

But the real achievement of this film lies under the surface. Film, more than any other artistic medium, is narcissistic. It’s obsessed with itself. So, knowing Hugo was about George Méliès (one of the most important early filmmakers – nay, filmmakers period), I expected some rampant self-referential imagery. And my expectations were met in the opening scenes. The same common metaphors arise: trains (they look like filmstrips!), clocks (film is a temporal art!), voyeurism (cameras look!), and my favourite, the orphan motif (apparently film sees itself as some carni-orphan desperately trying to prove itself and find its place). It also highlights what film borrows from the other arts: escapism and story from novels, for example. The movie also has some clever references to other movies (the juvenile cage from the 400 Blows; actors from another magical film, Harry Potter, hanging out together in a train station; Sasha Baron Cohen, lookin’ a hell of a lot like Borat; and I'm sure there's more). There are more obvious ones too (those moments of silent films, like the dude dangling from the clock in Safety Last!, that Hugo reenacts in his own life). All these references, and the story itself, make Hugo seem like Scorsese's love letter to the cinema.

But, similar to Inglourious Basterds, Adaptation, or Get Shorty, this trend seeps out of subtext and into the text. The film constantly reminds us, openly, that we are watching a movie. From the overt impossibilities (the wind-up mouse suddenly dancing, for example), to the inserts of newsreels and silent films. But Hugo does something with these themes that I’ve never seen a movie do so well.

In one scene, someone mentions how George Méliès was the first filmmaker to realize that you could use film to capture dreams. Obviously, this is a metaphor for creativity, but Hugo takes it literally. Shortly thereafter, Hugo wakes up from a dream (a dream which actually directly quotes a Lumières brothers film). Then, this reality turns out to be a dream. For a second, we apprehensively ask ourselves, “Wait, is it still a dream?” Then laugh it off and go “Ha, this isn’t Inception!”

Oh. How naïve.

BRAW! BRAW!

What it took Inception a whole movie to develop, Hugo manages in one single scene. Of course, this is still a dream. It’s a movie.

Therein lies the coup de grace. And I’ll compare it to another Christopher Nolan movie: The Prestige. The main motif in the Prestige was the magic trick. To illustrate, I quote Michael Caine: “Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it, because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.” You! Yes, you! You sitting in those comfy seats munching on that salty popcorn. So what’s the trick?

Well, if The Prestige slyly hinted at it, Hugo just comes out and tells you. The trick is film. It’s the cinema. The magician himself calls it a trick! Scorsese goes so far as to literally show you the process of editing - the specific mechanism of the trick. And yet, unlike a traditional magic trick, we can still enjoy a movie knowing the secret. We can work it out, and be fooled. The pleasure is actually multiplied by this knowledge.

One of the most hilarious illustrations of this was in the scene where all the confused women scream at the image of the train coming towards the camera. The train is about to pass the edge of the film screen and everyone yells! Oh my god! The train! It's going to hit us! (If you’ve ever taken a film class, you’ve heard this anecdote about a million times). And, around you in the theater, everyone is laughing at these simpletons. They don’t even realize it’s just a trick! How silly, they think it’s real.

Two minutes later, everyone gasps when Hugo is about to get hit by a train.

Those simpletons? Those women screaming, thinking the train is about to come out of the screen and hit them? That’s you. That's what you look like everytime you watch a movie. You know it’s a trick, and you don’t care. You sit on the edge of your seat, you get sweaty palms, you grab the person next to you. You might even cry. But it’s just light, flickering at the rate of 24 frames per second on a white screen. That’s the real magic – that you can be aware of the trick and be fooled anyway. And that's a first.

In the same way Wizard of Oz is remembered as the first colour film (although it wasn’t by any means), or The Jazz Singer is remembered as the first sound film (it was no such thing), my hope is that we can believe our own lies, and remember Hugo as the first 3D film. Just promise me it's not Avatar. I can settle on Tintin.

Now do yourself a favour and watch this.

Also, this is pretty funny. I found it on my own.

Film vs. Digital Cinema

2011-09-19T20:29:00.019-04:00

Or:

The Cinephiles vs. The Videodrones

Last edited: September 21, 2011

If you don't feel like reading this entire thing, at least read the conclusion.

INTRODUCTION

From Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making us Stupid? :

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The Film vs. Digital debate has been raging for over a decade, though there has been little consensus in that time. At least in the film (as in movie) community it’s been about a decade. The same (or a similar) argument in music and photography circles has more or less raged and subsided, leaving digital as king of the hill. Film (as in movies) hasn’t yet completed its conversion to digital, though the slope is slippery and we’re a few steps from the precipice. I’m sorry to speak in apocalyptic tones, but it is a type of apocalypse we are nearing. Maybe not the kind of 2012 end-of-the-world destructo-gasm that Roland Emmerich gets of to, but perhaps it’ll be something closer to a Terrence McKenna timewave-zero sort of “global shift in consciousness.” But enough preamble. Well, just a bit more: I can’t promise anything in my article is totally new, but I think I have a handful of novel arguments. In any case, my overview of (almost) all the arguments and counterarguments is, if not enlightening, at least systematic.

I’d like to start my overview of the question of digital cinema by looking at our current (that is, late in the year 2011) cinematic environment. Today, multiplex cinemas across the world are replacing their film projectors with digital light bulbs, which are, all said and done, only a few steps away from glorified TV screens. The amount of films produced with digital cameras is skyrocketing, and will grow with the recent success of Avatar and 3D digital cinema. The number of auteurs who have switched from film to digital (Steven Soderbergh, Peter Jackson, Michael Mann, Francis Ford Coppola, Danny Boyle, Lars von Trier, the list goes on) is multiplying by the year. Is there any hope for those purists who cling to the old technology (which is measured in millimeters, not pixels)? Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes and no. Longer answer elaborated below.

Let’s ask why these directors are switching to digital. Well, unfortunately I can’t interview every single one of them, and my intuition is that they will all give different answers. Studio pressure, budget restraints, and other practical reasons will probably be foremost in these answers. But I can imagine precious few directors would say they prefer the look. Well, always the exception that proves the rule is good ol’ David Lynch. The reasons Lynch has switched to digital are numerous (he says he finds the colour grading process easier, and likes small cameras that allow longer takes and smaller crews: i.e., the practical reasons), but chief among them is his dislike for clarity. He bemoans modern film stocks for being too crisp, and pines for the 1930s when there was a softness and loss of detail. It’s important to know that David Lynch shoots on (relatively) cheap camcorders in less-than-HD quality. He likes, what André Bazin may have called, a ‘cinematic ambiguity’. David Lynch has unwittingly just made a compelling argument against, not for, digital cinema. For if it’s crispness and a lack of “room to dream” that Lynch eschews, then what could he dislike more than the cirsp, ultra-clean, geometric clarity of modern HD digital movies? Certainly not film, organic and chemical as it is.

And with this last paragraph, I expose my prejudice. I don’t mean to hide it: I’m a film purist through and through. So take my arguments with a grain of salt. And I’m no Luddite, and I'm no puritan (who thinks because digital is more convenient that it must be sinful) and I’m no nostalgic (since most of my film experience has been through a TV), and I’m definitely no dogmatic reactionary who wants digital cinema to die a thousand deaths etc etc, but film cinema will always remain the medium of choice for me, and I refuse to believe that it will die, and I think I have some compelling arguments why.

Also take note that at some points in this article I may equate digital filming, digital projection, and digital distribution (TVs, DVDs, etc). I distinguish these three categories where it is necessary, but largely I do conflate them.

LEGITIMACY: Imprint vs. Construction

Central to the debate of film vs. digital (though not as common as others) is the question of digital’s legitimacy. Film is more than a century old. The history, conventions, and practice of filmmaking has been exclusively developed by film for the better part of that century. Is digital even the same thing? I argue it isn’t. Like other technologies that produce moving images (the zoetrope, the flipbook), digital video is a distinct technology, and a distinct medium, if closely related. The fact that digital masquerades as film signifies nothing more than their superficial similarity – they’re still discrete. They have altogether different processes: the digital camera records a series of 0s and 1s to construct what a photograph would have looked like in such a circumstance, whereas the film camera facilitates a specific and magical chemical reaction between light and celluloid. In this sense, digital is a hypothetical photograph. One is geometric, and other is organic, but make no mistake: that both are mechanical. They both rely on sophisticated technology.

Analog film is an imprint: a physical memory that you can see laid out in front of you all at once. Digital video is a file whose virtual nature means that it only surfaces beyond the 0s and 1s during its viewing, as a computer translates the binary code into a image, into a finite number of pixels. And I argue that because every time it is watched, a digital movie does not recal (like the imprint of film), but is constructed from the code (as though for the first time, every time), digital cinema is almost a type of animation. But does that make one “better” than the other? No, for whether a sculptor works in clay or in plastic, she is an artist nonetheless. But does that make “digital” illegitimate in some way? Not necessarily, but it’s beyond debate that they are essentially different mediums. And the medium is always important, as we all know, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan's catchphrase is never more clear as in the example I opened this article with. Nietzsche's writing style changed when he used a different writing technology. The movies made using a different technology will indubitably influence the product.

Can you imagine the Godfather filmed on a digital camera? I certainly can’t. At least, the film I can imagine isn’t the Godfather I know. Viewers should always be aware what they are consuming, and be wary when one (digital) attempts to imitate the other (film). Digital is the medium of Youtube, of home videos, of security cameras: a playful, democratized, amateur, and practical medium. Film is the territory of Fritz Lang, of Akira Kurosawa, of Charlie Chaplin, of Stanley Kubrick. Yes, film is also the realm of the cinema of Attractions and low art kitsch, but not every novel is War and Peace (contrarily, not every youtube video is crap). But when the medium of security cameras is used for artistic purposes, I think of it as a novel idea (one that is in fact legitimately art, but I wouldn’t like to see it commonplace). It's something Marcel Duchamp might have done to stir people up.

The difference between these two mediums isn’t the same as the difference between a book written by hand and a book written by type, or a paperback and an ebook. It’s closer to the difference between the Mona Lisa and a poster of the Mona Lisa. And when it comes to digital distribution, this analogy becomes even more true. I see laser-discs, VHS, DVD and Bluray, as a necessarily evil, the same way 'posters of the Mona Lisa' are a necessary evil. Yes, of course, DVDs aren't nearly as good or even as legitimate as a proper theater screening with a proper film print, but we wouldn't have the study of Art History if we couldn't show anyone the paintings.

QUALITY: Shadows vs. Pixels

Probably the most contested topic of debate is the difference in quality between the two mediums. Both sides claim they can achieve a higher quality, and both use flawed arguments. But before jumping into these arguments, we should remember the example of David Lynch, who switched to digital because he desired a lower quality that reminded him of the cinema of the '30s. Quality is not a deciding factor. Otherwise, painters would always paint on the biggest canvases they could find. If we take film as an artform, which we must (and that’s an article for another day), then what we call "quality," (when we really mean “density”) cannot be the alpha and omega. Recall the character played by Catherine Keener in Synecdoche, New York, who paints miniature paintings that require a magnifying glass to see: form is itself part of the artistic product, and to assume “higher quality (density)” automatically means “better quality (artistic)” is a fallacy. Regardless, this is an interesting area for discussion, especially considering that the image quality/image density has been an important part of the mechanical nature of this artform.

The usual argument cinephiles make is that 35mm film stock can hold the equivalent of 4K resolution (which essentially means it’s roughly four times higher than standard 1080p HD resolution). This isn’t altogether true. Of course, a number of variables (lighting, lens, and stock combination), as well as degradation through copies, transfers (especially if digital), and projection make it result in significantly less than that (it's somewhere between 1.5 and 2K when it finally hits the screen, from what I can research).

The videodrones claim that digital is a new medium that is contingent on the present level of technological advancement, and that in principle digital cinema can be upgraded infinitely. This is one terrible (and frankly, terrifying) argument that I want to dispel. Not only is pointless to pack more and more pixels into a space after a while (because the human eye can only pick up so much detail, and who wants or needs so many pixels?), but it’s also a terrifying display of ideology. What is it that makes someone think that the denser the amount of pixels in an image the better? This is the zeitgeist of our ultra-rationalist, numerical, and hierarchical world. We want quality to be quantitative, to be measurable and objective, expressed in a number ending in ‘p’ or ‘K’ (as in 1080p or 4K). It is only ideology that would blur the word resolution with quality.

However, beyond the ontological insinuation there, there is one question that is often neglected in this debate. We are asking “How much,” as in, “How much information can I fit on the screen?” when we should be asking “What,” as in, “What is the type of storage technology?” We are looking at the capacity instead of the nature of these two mediums. Film records an imprint of shadows: the chemical reaction between light and celluloid that is organic and beautiful. Digital records a code: which is only later, at the time of viewing, virtually translated into a series of pixels. Pixels are specific; they are aligned in rows and columns, and are finite.

Recently I had the pleasure of watching two very old films in one sitting, one on an ancient 16mm and the other a digital transfer on a digital projector. This comparison was illuminating. I could almost see individual dots on the screen with the digital projection: it was visibly and grotesquely digital. It looked like a blown-up TV. The 16mm looked better than bluray, despite its scratches and imperfections. Anyone who has seen both a digital projector and a film projector knows there is a difference. The digital is cold, hollow, and ‘too clean’ (despite the pixels being slightly smoothed over), and the 35mm is full, flowing, and bright. Herein there is subjectivity of course, so don’t take that as the strongest argument. Additionally, the 35mm will likely have scratches, emulsion, grain, etc, but personally I find these imperfections warm and charming, lending to the organic quality of the medium. Metaphorically, digital projection is like a robot’s joints, stiff and conform, and film is like the mane of a lion, flowing and indefinite. Okay, okay, you get it, I’m a film fanboy.

STYLE: Painting vs. mapping

I’ve already talked much about the style, the look, of the two mediums. Digital is often noticeably digital: by that I mean, overly clean, precise, or at worst pixilated. It is mapping single points of light, arranging them in a field. Whereas film has a certain look and feel that is closer to the flowing and interconnectedness of a painting. Film can achieve all sorts of subtle quirks, like the curving at the corners of the frame, the specific look of an overexposed or underexposed patch (and the effect that has on the rest of the image). There is a specific kind of look to lens flares that are unachievable on a digital camera (I’m thinking of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies). The counterargument to this is that, with advanced editing software, you can imitate anything analog can create using digital. You can edit your footage to the point that no one could tell it was even filmed on digital. Well, I’m not going to claim I’m an expert on either analog or digital, but I greet this claim with sincere skepticism. And why don’t digital movies look that good now, then? But even if you could map every particle of paint onto a canvas in exactly the same placement as a Starry Night, would it be the same thing? I contend that there is a fundamental difference between the two, even if the latter were edited so radically that I couldn’t tell if it was painting or a mapped construct.

DIRECTOR'S CHOICE: Malick vs. Mann

No matter what arguments I or anyone else makes, the fact remains that influential and talented directors are consistently using digital cameras. I offered a (nowhere near exhaustive) list in the introduction of this article of some of those names. So does it mean that, by arguing on the side of the cinephiles, I am dismissing the works of these directors? No. I may think that film is superior, but that doesn’t mean that digital movies are worthless. I am a huge fan of many digital directors, and I love what they're doing. And I even admit that what a lot of directors are doing with digital would feel wrong on film. Some movies are made for digital cameras. The same way that directors in the past have used newsreel stock to get grittier, muddier images for artistic effect, digital, too, can be used positively in this way. Lars von Trier’s ultra slow-mo would be impossible on anything but the Phantom digital camera. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later has a homemade feel that makes the horror even more pressing, as though ‘digital’ has become ‘more real’ to us. The same with Cloverfield, the Blair Witch Project, or 127 Hours. These movies are diegetically digital. And even if they weren’t, stylistically they almost demand to be digital. I don’t think this applies to all digital movies: for example, Steven Soderbergh’s Che, the first movie entirely filmed on the Red One, would’ve been even more beautiful on analog. But I imagine, for example, a neonoir cyberpunk action movie would fit digital cinematography – although Blade Runner is just that and its beautiful imagery (especially the way those spotlights scatter through windows) is unimaginable in digital. The point here is that the medium determines the content (and vice versa, too), and if a director chooses to film in digital for artistic purposes, that is her artistic prerogative. But that has nothing to do with the rest of these arguments.

PRACTICALITY: Elephant vs. Chihuahua

Here is the heart of the debate. These are the arguments that “really matter” in the game. And it’s only here that there is a clear winner. With film, you need training. You need to go to school (or at least have a mentor, a co-op, or an 8-disc DVD program to get some basic techniques). You need to have lots and lots of film available, and have mags ready to reload (since they only roll for 10 minutes usually). You need to have special equipment to move the heavy bastards (that means giant tripods, cranes, those giant dolly tracks, or whatever else). You need a person just to work the focus, while another movies the camera, etc. And don’t even mention editing: the easiest way is to scan the film into a digital program and edit it that way. God help those poor people who edit in analog. In a nutshell, film from start to end is more expensive, more laborious, and more time consuming. It’s true. Don’t underestimate how expensive digital editing can get, though, but film will still beat it 9 out of 10 times. Well, my response to this is that, again, the arguments are somewhat ideological. They come from an ultra-rationalist, profit-centric capitalist worldview. The assumption is that if something saves money and time, it must be better, regardless. We prioritize values like efficiency, speed, and profit. We don’t prioritize artistic qualities, that je ne sais quois, that cinematic look (nor tradition, although tradition on its own is never a valid reason for anything). I’m not saying that seeing efficiency as a good thing is a social construct (because it isn't), I’m just saying that prioritizing efficiency over artistry is an industrial-capitalist construct.

There is also the question of durability, which I think is a moot point. There are many organizations today that go great lengths to preserve and restore as many films as possible, and digital filmmakers go to great lengths to protect their precious 0s and 1s. It’s true there are horror stories on both sides. Digital horror stories: tales of ‘dropped frames’ from the set of Che, cameras malfunctioning or failing under harsh conditions, or files corrupting before backups could be made. Analog horror stories: lest we forget the scores of silent films that have been completely lost to history; famously all negatives from the shoot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker were lost in a fire and he had to reshoot the entire film from scratch. The point here is that both technologies run the risk that, despite all efforts to shield against it, contingency will find a way to mess up their work.

Lastly on the topic of practicality is the question of documentaries. Documentaries have been significantly changed by digital innovations, with their lightweight and portable cameras. This is of course permissible. Related to this is the question of the low-budget independent (Shane Carruth). When the rapid directness of the vision (the case for documentaries), or monetary limits (the case for the indies [Primer had a budget of $7,000) restrain a director from choosing analog, this is without a doubt forgivable. It’s not ideal, or in some cases, it's the only choice. But again, this doesn’t affect the arguments that one is superior to the other.

DEMOCRATIZATION & IMITATION: Cannes vs. Youtube

Everybody has a camcorder. Everybody has a youtube account. Everyone has become a filmmaker. Sure, I’m lobbing myself into that category. But democratization is not always a good thing. Before the proliferation of video technology, you needed training and specialization to be a filmmaker, and lots of time, money, and planning to make a film. On average, that produced finer products and more skilled artists (although it also produced industry, monopoly, convention). Now your mom can make a shortfilm in a single afternoon, only knowing what the “record” button does on her camera. The obvious retort is “If you don’t like youtube short films, then don’t watch them!” But the problem here, just like the problem with “If you don’t like torture, don’t torture anyone!” is that the medium is trivialized just by the existence of such fare. I’m like Woody Allen in regard to torture: “I can't enjoy anything unless everybody is. If one guy is starving someplace, that puts a crimp in my evening.” And yes, your mom’s short film is torture.

On a similar note to the “Youtube shorts” is, again, the question of imitation. Paul Thomas Anderson argues that with film and digital we have two “wonderful mediums,” and what he doesn’t like is when one pretends it’s the other. I can’t help but feel I’m being cheated, like Tarantino says, when I see a digital movie, or see a movie on a digital projector in a theater. It’s not quite the same thing. Some people can’t tell the difference. Maybe it’s just the purist cinephile in me. But videodrones disagree that video is imitating film. The argument, dramatized, is as follows.

CINEPHILE: Film is the original medium, digital is a cheap imitation. A re-construction.

VIDEODRONE: Film isn’t the real thing either. Both are imitations of real life, both are just representation.

CINEPHILE: Of course, I’m not mistaking a two-dimensional film print as reality. It’s a reproduction of life, but in so doing it becomes a unique artifact distinct from reality: it has its own reality.

VIDEODRONE: Digital is exactly the same.

CINEPHILE: Not quite. Digital film is a strange simulacrum. It is a representation of representation. It is a different technology that ‘stands in’ for the technology of film, but it is not film.

VIDEODRONE: No, digital doesn’t ‘stand in’ for film, it is unique.

CINEPHILE: Then why is it framed in the same aspect ratios as film? Why does it run at 24 FPS? Why does it carry over the same techniques, conventions, and traditions of film? To be a unique artistic medium, it must have unique artistic forms.

VIDEODRONE: If digital cameras were invented first, the same argument would be applied to film cameras today as they ‘stood in’ for digital. If digital had come first, and had decided to film in 30 FPS, and film came second also filming in 30 FPS, that would be the same kind of imitation.

CINEPHILE: Most likely, but the way history worked out, it isn’t so.

When we talk about digital transfers, unless they are significantly cleaned up (ex. The Red Shoes bluray), they are but one version of the movie. Many digital transfers retain the scratches and blips of the individual print they were made from: scratches and blips that are unique to that one print and no other. Meditating on this fact, you can see what I mean when I say "Film becomes a unique artifact." The film print is a not like a poster of the Mona Lisa, despite being a copy. It is a digital transfer which is like a poster of the Mona Lisa.

POSSIBILITIES & FUTURE: Elitism vs. Populism

There are two claims Videodrones make. “Film is a dead end,” and “Film is dead.”

The first one assumes that film has been exhausted of possibilities. It cannot be advanced as a technology, nothing new can be achieved with it, and no new uses of the old technology will progress it out of this ditch. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Digital is capable of more, its possibilities are endless, and it can contain limitless quality. False, false, false. Demonstrably false. Film can do just about anything digital can (since analog film can still be edited digitally!), and more. You can’t experiment with different types of stock, for one thing. You can’t do any sort of direct animation, scratching, or emulsion effects. Stan Brakhage and Norman McLaren wouldn’t exist if we only had digital. Besides, you can keep increasing the size of the film cell if you want. There's just no point in going any bigger than (the relatively new) IMAX size (which Christopher Nolan is now working in).

As for that second claim, “Film is dead,” we still have directors who are pushing the artistic and technical limits of what is possible with film (three recent examples: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Terrence Malick’s the Tree of Life). We still have scores of fantastic directors working with analog. The only reason we lost Jim Jarmusch to digital was because of the money question. There is a future for film, which I regrettably do admit is sinking in popularity (despite a populist resurgence or interest in it). I mean, we lost Jean-Luc Godard to digital, the same guy who made Breathless (if I can imagine one film that would be impossible on digital cameras, it wouldn't be the Godfather, it would be Breathless). But there is a future. And Rich Lackey nails it in his own (much shorter) blog entry on the topic:

“Film is not going anywhere. I believe it’s use will shift from the commercial mainstream to the artistic niche. There is already a backlash by some against the digital revolution, and I would argue this may produce some of the best work that has ever been shot on film. So I do not believe film will die, I love the medium, and there are far too many who will refuse to let it go. This is fantastic news. The masses will go digital, creating an artistic elite who will love and cherish film more than ever.”

We can already see this elite taking form. I earlier named Anderson, Tarantino, and Malick, who are at the top of my ‘reel film elite dream team’. (I'd also consider adding Gaspar Noé to that list - an independent filmmaker who still shoots in film.) Anderson (with Boogie Nights) and Tarantino (with Death Proof...well, with his entire career, really) have already made movies that thematically tackle the questions of democratization of video replacing the elite of film, and explored visually the things film can do that digital cannot. A lot of people don’t like elitism. Personally, I’d prefer to see a movie by ‘an elite’ who is far more talented than me, or read an essay by ‘an elite’ who is far smarter than me.

There will be blood, metaphorically, in this film industry. Things are going to turn upside, and we’re already at least halfway there. But rest assured, videodrones be damned, the 7^th art is a century old and going strong, and it ain’t going anywhere.

SPIRIT: Light vs. Code

I never cared much about the preservation of film. I always thought digital was just as good (or maybe a bit worse, but who cares), and would in a couple of years replace film entirely. Then, one day about a year ago, I was given the opportunity to project a few single reel 16mm short films for a class at my university. You can make all the rational arguments you’d like, but nothing can beat the magic of the atmosphere in the room at that time. The subtle clicking, the sound of the celluloid spinning, the way the projector shines when the lights are off. Watching those reels turn on their own: it was almost a religious experience. Some “elitists” like to listen to vinyl records instead of mp3s, claiming that the clicks and crackle is just part of the charm, and the “warmth” of vinyl can’t be replicated digitally. I feel the same way about movies. The spirit of celluloid flickering through light at 24 frames per second cannot be replicated. This might make me a romanticist, but hell, we’re talking about art here, aren’t we? If that’s not the place for romantic arguments, then there’s no place for them.

CONCLUSION:

Largely this article has argued why film is a superior medium than digital, in both pragmatic (quality) and philosophical (legitimacy, imitation, and spirit) ways. I do retain that film is, by and large, the better form. However, to make things clear, I want to go over the concessions I have made.

1. Digital films can still be art.

Just because something is filmed in digital, it doesn't mean it is worthless. It may have less direct aesthetic appeal, it may lack a distinct style/look/spirit of real film, and it may compromise when it comes to quality/resolution. But directors around the world are doing new and unique things with the digital medium, from serious and art house auteurs like Lars von Trier, to the Hollywood big names like Steven Soderbergh. And digital movies can still be visually pleasing (see Che). It comes down to a director's choice, his artistic freedom, the look he wants, etc, etc. I concede some movies are 'made for digital'. And, of course, we should never penalize independent directors whose budgetary restraints or inexperience makes film an impossible choice. Digital is inferior, but gets the job done.

2. There is a difference between digital projection, distribution, and production.

Throughout the article I didn't make this clear, but there certainly is. Different analogies express it differently. Comparing the digital debate to the "vinyl vs. mp3" debate in music is illuminating for digital projection (and, I think, for a visual culture, even more pertinent). Comparing the digital debate to "Posters of the Mona Lisa vs. The Actual Mona Lisa" is useful for digital distribution (DVDs are not nearly as good, but without the "inferior copy" no one gets to see the movie). And, the best analogy of them all, comparing the digital debate to "digital vs. analog drums" works for digital production. This I didn't talk about at all. But the same way digital drums "get the job done," and have some added bonuses (like further control, regularity, compactness, price, etc), they totally lose the feeling of playing the drums, but also the full, resonant, organic quality that makes the instrument so great. Also, the "imitation" argument works here.

3. In some categories, digital wins.

Without a doubt. I do not give in to the 'quality' argument (because 1. we can just keep making the film strip bigger if we wanted to, but what's the point? and 2. 'quality' is relative, 'resolution' is different), but I recognize that digital cameras win with flying colours when it comes to practicality. It can also make certain techniques (ex. ridiculous slowmo) easier, or in some cases, possible.

4. Digital is not film.

Art can be digital. Movies can be digital. But film cannot. This is a confusion in terms. To make this simpler, I propose a change in our vocabulary. Digital and film are words that will refer to our two technologies, whereas the word "movies" or "cinema" will refer to the experience, the umbrella. We can talk about digital cinema, but not digital film, which is an oxymoron. Film and video are two completely distinct categories.

5. Digital is the future.

I can't argue this. It's coming. Digital cinema will become the industry standard in a short amount of time. But film isn't going away, either. Film will never die, and we have to support our "elite" filmmakers who continue to use the real thing. I mean it, "have to." We have an obligation to them - to the medium. Anderson, Tarantino, Malick...save us.

This also means digital distribution is the future. And feel free, as the new film Contagion might slyly warn, to explore the terrifying possibilities that means. Entertainment and information spread like viruses in our world. We are nearing the day where a movie will be released and in the same day be watched in a theater, on a TV, and on a cell phone. This change will increase the schism that is developing: between a purist experience of film, to an instantly-gratified electronic experience. But, remember, when considering whether you will watch a new movie in the theater or on your MP3 player on the bus: the medium is the message.

Terrence Malick Spotlight

2011-09-05T20:58:00.010-04:00

Terrence Malick: The Obscurantist

Legendary as much for being a filmmaker as being a reclusive philosopher, Terrence Malick is one of the least prolific but most talked-about American directors in the last decade. Little is known about the man, who hides from photographers and reporters, who dodges award ceremonies and press conferences. He’s almost as much an obscure obscurantist in real life as he in is movies: the elliptical, experimental, and unconventional big-budget productions would be, in anyone else’s hands, historical action movies. Malick has many recurring images and themes in his films, above all a reverence (almost a religious fervor) for nature. His films usually play with philosophical notions, both metaphysical and moral, and are always historically set. They are some of the most beautiful films put to celluloid, and their strange pace, jumping chronology, unusual editing patterns, and whispered voiceovers gives them a hallucinatory and pious quality. It’s tempting to see the cinema of Terry Malick as his personal philosophical treatise, told in esoteric and ambiguous hushed tones, and to see Terry himself as more of a genius philosopher than a filmmaker. And, guess what, not only is Terry already finished making his next movie (coming out 2012) but he’s already in post-production for the one after that (2013). Busy for a man who has only made 5 films in 40 years, and is in his late 60s.

The best starting place with Malick is Days of Heaven, followed by The Thin Red Line.

Badlands (1973)

Definitely his weakest film, Badlands is also Malick’s most conventional. At least, technically. The movie does kind of laugh in the face of average crime-love-road movies, the same way Scary Movie does to the horror genre. But, a lot is missing here to make it a Malick movie. It’s not a bad movie at all, though. It’s a lot of fun, and interesting, and has some pretty scenery, but it’s really Malick’s trial run: his basic training. It feels like his fascination with nature, in its physical and philosophical forms, is only first discovered, as if accidentally. The ending is fantastic. The acting is wonderful.

Days of Heaven (1978)

This is where Terry really found his voice, and held on tight. The beautiful photography of Badlands explodes into new and breathtaking heights. The religious imagery, the infatuation with nature, the moral ambiguity all find their home in Terry’s eye. A familiar relationship between leading woman and leading man structures the acting dynamics, and this is the only time he is anything close to political. As much a complicated period romance as it is a portrait of labour. As far as Malick goes, the story is quite predominant, but compared to standard Hollywood fare, it takes the backseat. The focus of the film is the moral implications, and above all the imagery and cinematography that frame them.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

The 5 years between debut and sophomore effort was already highly above average for a new auteur fresh on the scene, but it pales next to the next wait. For the space between Terry’s second and third pieces was 20 years, which is unheard of. Although, The Thin Red Line is such a beautiful masterpiece that it was probably worth the wait. The cooperation between subtext and form that Days of Heaven exhibited explodes in the Thin Red Line, a movie which simultaneously displays the horrors of war, and the beauty of existence. It takes a Heideggerean awe of the universe and transposes it on the most unlikely place: the Guadocanal conflict of WWII. The film, and it’s swirling sea of intersecting whispered voiceovers, plays with concepts of morality, existentialism, metaphysics, and religion, and ties them all together. At the end of the day, The Thin Red Line’s thesis cannot be summarized concisely, or even coherently. It is without a doubt one of the best war movies just in terms of scale, spectacle, cinematography, acting, casting, but primarily because it is the most existential movie that deals with the fear of death in the most implicit but powerful way. It’s a war movie that isn’t even about war.

The New World (2005)

7 years suddenly doesn’t seem too long to wait between movies. The New World was what you get when you combine Days of Heaven with Pocahontas, though gritty and more emotional than both. Even though it's not a bad movie, it feels like a huge disappointment, squished between two far superior masterpieces. The cinematography is still gorgeous, and the ferocious editing that begun in the Thin Red Line carries over here, and will climax in...

The Tree of Life (2011)

I almost have no words for this one. Every time I think I have it worked out, I tried to vocalize what it is I felt I had inside, and it’s gibberish. Here’s the best I can do: A sea of visual metaphors, it opens with the quote from God himself: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38: 4,7.)” This will at first prepare you for the tragedy of the opening, and disguise the film as a retelling of the Job story. And in a way it is. But Malick focuses on the metaphysical implications of this quote. Malick’s characters don’t learn to be humble before the power of God, but they learn to be humble before the awe of the cosmos. By juxtaposing small events in a single family’s life with the great moments of the creation of the universe, Malick is laying the foundations of a coherent and compelling metaphysical vision. But it’s so more than a philosophical movie. It’s one of the most emotionally engaging, visually stunning, and coherent movies (despite its massive time-leaps, anti-chronological form, and dream-like metaphorical imagery). The final act of the film is the most esoteric of his entire career, and consequently the most beautiful and emotional. It may be difficult to understand, but it’s very easy to feel. The Tree of Life is the climax of Malick’s intuitive, flowery style, and one of the best films ever made.

The 5 Most Disturbing Movies Ever Made

2011-09-05T20:44:00.004-04:00

For obvious reasons, I’ll try to keep this one short. No, I haven’t seen Cannibal Holocaust, or a Serbian Film, and they would likely take the #1 and #2 slots if I had. But I have to draw the line somewhere I guess. And, like always, these sorts of things are subjective.

5. Eraserhead

Disturbing less because of any visual grossness, overindulgence in gore, or perverse sexuality (though it has all of these), Eraserhead is disturbing mostly because it has such a surrealistic evil atmosphere, full of unexplainable and offputting images that will terrify your rationality more than your survival instinct. Squishy giant sperm are gross, but what’s even stranger is the smile on the chipmunk girl’s face as she violently squishes and kills them. There is no why “in Heaven”…

4. The Fly

Cronenberg has plenty of gore in his movies, but the Fly is the most disturbing of them all. Mostly because its horror derives from the undermining of what we are, what humanity is. The grossness comes from the foreign invasion and destruction of our discreet identity, our autonomy. That, and that scene in the hospital where…oh god…

3. Irreversible

Irreversible hit me hard. I had no idea it was going to be so vile. The inaudible low bass drone, the swirling nausea-inducing camera work, the pulsing and spinning music, the sexual perversion that we are not permitted to look away from. And, don’t forget the brutal, unapologetic, realistic violence. A nine minute, unedited rape sequence with some of the most convincing acting I’ve ever seen…and a CGI penis. Yum yum.

2. Antichrist

The guilt, the isolation, the uninterrupted seriousness of the treatment, the heavy and phenomenal acting, and the incredible visual and musical atmosphere: they all pull you in deep, and then assail you with disgusting imagery. You will be holding your breath for the last half hour of the movie. Two words. Genital. Mutilation.

1. Salo

Because it includes a political and philosophical core, which attacks the (corrupt and passive-participant) masses (of capitalist society) unapologetically via the film itself, Salo wins the slot as the most disturbing. It’s not gore for gore’s sake, but holy fuck Pasolini you could have pulled it back a little bit. Because it exhibits the cruelest torture: mental, sexual, physical, and spiritual, imaginable, Salo makes the perfect couple-movie for that first date. Two thumbs up!

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

2011-09-04T10:53:00.007-04:00

Why Amnesia is Awesome:

6 Reasons you Should Play this Game (Right Now)

Amnesia: The Dark Descent has made a bit of a reputation for itself. As only the second effort by an independent developer, Frictional, its pre-release advertising was minimal, but by the wonders of citizen media (by that I mean youtube videos of kids screaming in mortal fear of cosmic terrors) pushed Amnesia into its own marginal limelight. In case you haven't heard of this phenomenal game, here's the basics:

1. It's scary as hell.

Scary games have always been a lot of fun. The success of the horror movie genre is, if nothing else, proof people like to scare themselves every once and a while (and you can have the discussion about the philosophical or psychological reason why). Horror games do movies one up. You aren't a mere passive observer, capable of closing your eyes or leaving the theater for a couple seconds until the scene is over. You are in control. You can't leave and wait for the scary part to end. If you leave and return, you'll find your virtual self in the same place you left him.

So, scary video games aren't only scarier, but they're also far more immersive. When you enter the poorly lit, decaying, once-regal labyrinth of a library, you can choose which rooms to explore and which to run like a bitch from. Not only that, but to a degree the ...ahem... encounters, let's call them, are only scripted about half the time. The rest of the time, they're randomized, spawning a something on your way back from an area you had already explored, where you thought you were safe. The experience is personalized and always different, keeping you on your toes, and really really sucking you in to its darkly beautiful and atmospheric world.

2. It's unique.

I mean, it isn't revolutionizing the medium, and it isn't an experimental departure from the conventions of video gaming, but it sure isn't derivative. Even compared to other scary games, like BioShock (whose enemies become as scary as grunts in Halo after the first half hour), or Dead Space (whose enemies became as scary as teammates in Halo after the first half hour), or Condemned (whose enemies were never very scary: it just had awesome atmosphere), Amnesia stays scarier for longer. Why? Because it doesn't show you anything. Well, it shows you as much as you want to see, but if you're sane you'll be running like the shameless bitch you are with tears streaming down your face and crap running down your pant legs at the first sign of one of them. It works out so well, because every encounter you survive makes you even more terrified of the next. Even when you do die, you probably won't see a thing because your killer probably got you from behind (heh) as you fumbled with the handle of a closed door. Thus, you still don't see the it, and you start again at the last checkpoint still as frightened of them as you were before.

Not only are their encounters scarier for being modest and hidden, but they're scary because you are totally defenseless. Completely and utterly defenseless. There are only two things to save you during an encounter: the sprint button and the darkness. Doom didn't even try to be scary giving you the BFG, and in Dead Space it was scarier to run out of ammo than to encounter an enemy. Amnesia focuses on the 'survival' aspect of 'horror survival'. This isn't a shooter-horror like BioShock, or a Halo with the lights off like Dead Space.

But Amnesia's coup de grace that makes it really unique is the fact that it's minimalist. You can explore for 20 minutes before actually facing any danger. The music is just enough to imply terror, but not enough to actually kill the mood and draw attention to itself. The design of the castle is dynamic, yet really gorgeously empty. And, owing to the fact that there's no self-defense, your controls usually revolving around walking, looking, and occasionally moving things. It's very simple, and the minimalist approach really makes your mind create most of the terror.

3. It's beautiful.

As I hinted previously, this is actually a really gorgeous game. Yes, it's not overly polished, and certain specific objects need makeovers desperately. But the technical shortcomings can be forgiven due to its independent origins. Instead of looking at the cartoonish quality of your character's hand holding a lantern, gawk at the Caravaggio-esque sparse lighting, the design of the castle's sprawling dungeons, the serious and brutal treatment of the corpses you stumble upon, the cloudy and dimmed colours of a once-great palace. The look of it, combined with the moody soundtrack, create an atmosphere that repels you and inescapably reels you in simultaneously.

3. It has a story.

Sure, it's not a Heavy Rain melodrama, or a Final Fantasy X world-saving journey, or a BioShock shocking twist, or a Mass Effect open-ended emotional epic, but it's not a full feature length game, either. The story is perfect for what it is: it increases the atmosphere, it complements the action, and it gives vague hints at the mysterious history of the world you glimpse in the gameplay. It is told in a way similar to BioShock, in notes that you find along your way written by the amnesia-plagued protagonist, as well as occasional flashbacks. Playing it through a second time actually gives you much more insight into their meaning, and your interpretation and judgment of characters. In the end, it's a wee bit disappointing, for the gameplay gives way to story completely, but it does have interesting implications (and lets you make a judgment on the nature of morality). It's reminiscent of Portal, not because it's funny (I hope you figured that out by now) but because it's very minimal, vaguely hinted at, and isn't told at you: rather, you live it.

4. It's influenced by H.P. Lovecraft.

And, come on, who doesn't love a game with an insanity gauge.

5. It's indie.

Which means your money isn't going to some Activision or EA CEOs who decide to re-release the same game every year with a different roster and slight facelift and a new name. This means were are moving into a new era of video gaming, where it will move from a 'geeky time-killer' to the new, and possibly dominant, artform. Am I overly optimistic? Maybe. But regardless, put your money where your mouth is, buy games like Amnesia, and sooner or later independent developers like Frictional willing to take risks, move the medium in new directions, and experiment will be commonplace. Hell, if we all buy these marginal and unique games, even Activision and EA will start churning them out.

It's not to say this game is perfect. It isn't. Its puzzles are simplistic, a lot of the areas are monotonous and indistinguishable, and it doesn't quite have an emotional attachment to make the story really great. But these are minor imperfections in an otherwise shining example of inventive video gaming art.

Oh, and:

6. It's short.

But that doesn't mean much since you can probably only play a couple minutes in one sitting before having a heartattack.

So go buy it, turn out the lights, plug in your headphones, and lock yourself in your basement for a fun, terrifying, 15 minutes.

Post Script: It's available on Steam for like 10 bucks.

Post Post Script: Watch the Zero Punctuation review for lols (and to realize how much I just plagiarized him).

And now...

A Mini-analysis of the Ending

(Spoiler Warning)

The conclusion of the game, where you are given the option of 3 distinct ending scenarios, isn't like most "choose-your-own-ending" games by being a simple shallow confirmation of free will. Instead of asking you to choose, it asks you to judge. We are being asked a question, not "if you were here, what would you do?" the question is, "now that you've heard the full story, what do you think of yourself?" Should we let our protagonist die, suffering as a "sacrifice" for Alexander? Or should we send a Agrippa through, making both men (Daniel and Alexander) suffer for their sins (although in this one, Daniel finds a cosmic redemption...). Or, lastly, should we destroy the portal and Alexander, and return to the world feeling as though we'd "paid our tribute." Do you think killing Alexander excuses Daniel for his own crimes?

For, in finding and reading all the journal entries, flashbacks, and exploring those dark torture chambers, we have implicitly discovered the heinous evil that our surrogate self, the protagonist Daniel, has committed in the past. In a normal circumstance, anyone who, like Daniel, had tortured and killed prisoners for years, all towards an ultimately selfish end, would be considered a criminal psychopath. (I mean, fuck, did you see some of those torture devices?) But, the game introduces a novel twist on this moral judgment, by having the protagonist (ourselves in game-world) lose all his memories at the beginning of the game. Since that's where we step in, and considering there are no jumps in time or objective cut-scenes, and it is in first-person, this game is offering us a totally subjective view of the (game) world. Daniel is the persona that we ourselves wear in the Amnesia world. We have amnesia, not Daniel. We even see his own hallucinations. This, in affect, puts two twists onto the moral judgment: 1) we are literally judging ourselves, not someone outside of us, and would feel, exactly like Daniel would in this situation, "But I haven't done anything! I'm innocent!". but 2) by having the crimes committed before the memory loss (and thus before the beginning of the game), it asks a philosophical question that basically goes "How does memory relate to culpability?" and by extension, it asks "How does memory relate to identity?" And, the answer I think to that last question, is underscored by the subjectivity. Memory and identity are so closely related that when Daniel lost his memory, he didn't just forget who he was; he was reborn anew. And that new person he became reborn as is you - the player.

This is the funniest thing I've ever seen:

Cronos Review

2011-08-26T14:34:00.007-04:00

Cronos and the Importance of First-Films

I’m always fascinated by first-films. Usually they’re pretty bad, and interest only extreme cinephiles, other filmmakers, and the scholarship. Debut movies by well-known directors’ are especially frustrating because you know what the filmmaker is actually capable of. But they do demonstrating an almost adolescent awkwardness: an auteur breaking out of his shell, fumbling and grasping for his voice. Sometimes it’s a fulfilling, almost inspirational thing to witness, and other times it’s just damn depressing.

Of course there are exceptions. Some directors, by providence, shattered out of their shell and entered the world dancing. Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky triumphed with the divine Ivan’s Childhood, Orson Welles with the canonical Citizen Kane, Spike Jonze with his and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, David Lynch with his Eraserhead, Lynne Ramsay with her Ratcatcher, Steve McQueen with his masterpiece Hunger. The French New Wave exploded with three consecutive first-film-masterpieces, Truffaut with the 400 Blows, Resnais with his Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and, of course, the game-changing and ever-youthful Breathless by the master himself, Jean-Luc Godard.

Though not quite worth being classified with these above “exceptions”, though neither really a bad movie (something Kubrick’s Fear and Desire was, which he pulled from circulation), Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos is an almost perfect example of a half-baked auteur. It’s actually a pretty good movie truth be said, but having only watched Pan’s Labyrinth days beforehand, it was difficult not to be a wee bit disappointed.

Del Toro himself expresses the importance of first-films in the special features of Criterion’s release. Beyond the importance to a career arc, of "getting your name out there", it also carves out a creative path and aesthetic niche that the author will likely tread the rest of his career. First-films often encompass an entire career in one way or another; a microcosm of the future. Especially with Cronos, the first-film may be missing some (or many) director trademarks, but it's distinctly an auteur's output. Along with an early short film, Geometria (in the special features of the Criterion version) it’s clear that these are del Toro's handiwork.

Yeah, there’s no one wearing a rubber monster suit, but there are extensive and gruesome bodily practical effects. Though not anything close to the protagonist, a child plays an important role and we are shown the hideous through her innocent perspective. The shots within the Cronos device, and the sparse cases of insects, are familiar with the rest of Guillermo’s corpus. Though it does seem to grope at something vaguely heroic, it’s laughable if you watch Blade II or Hellboy, and the stylish action of those movies. The camerawork and lighting are not nearly as stylized as his later output would be, but the colour palette is almost spot on. But above all, the most recognizable trademark present in this film is probably Ron Perlman.

In retrospect, it’s a really charming movie. The kind of charming that is compatible with the grotesque. It’s quaint, relatively small in scale (though being Mexico’s biggest budgeted movie of the time). Poor acting is something that many first-films suffer from, and Guillermo del Toro has sidestepped that issue totally. Most of the credit, perhaps, should be given to the two leading men, who both did excellent jobs. Federico Luppi gives an A-list performance to the B-movie, and Ron Perlman is…well, he’s Ron Perlman. Who can’t love him?

Overall, Cronos is one of those first-films worth seeing (even for those outside of scholarship and a niche of pathological cinephilia), and can be enjoyed by the most casual viewers. I think it’s hard to dislike Cronos, but simultaneously probably impossible to love it.

The 5 Funniest Movies Ever Made

2011-08-22T19:13:00.006-04:00

Lest I become a bit too serious and pretentious, I thought I'd introduce some pulp, low-brow humour around these parts. Thus I have come to prepare this list. It’s quite a statement to say these are the top 5 funniest movies ever made. Humour is subjective, of course, and I haven’t seen every comedy ever made. So consider my omniscient and arrogant title more of an attention-grabber than a real statement. It should probably read: the Hardest I’ve Ever Laughed was Watching These 5 Movies.

5. In The Loop (2009)

A little known, but much loved and well-received, English comedy from 2009. Bitingly critical political satire, and high-brow rapid-paced references don’t stand in the way of anyone enjoying this movie. Even though half of the references will whizz right by you, and the fact that it’s based on a TV show you’ve probably never heard of (The Thick of It) by the same director, Armando Ianucci (someone you’ve probably never heard of), it doesn’t matter. You’ll still die laughing. Some of the most creative cussing, intelligent parody, and furious yelling between American and English politicians will floor you. Picture an episode of The Office, if filled with black, dry British humour, and instead of an office environment, it was played on the stage of world politics. Do yourself a favor and see this movie.

4. Hot Rod (2007)

If you haven’t seen Hot Rod, you may remember seeing the trailer when it was coming out. If you were anything like me you probably wrote it off as your middle-of the-road common SNL-crewed stupid comedy. Well hell was I wrong. Hot Rod is a masterpiece of the stupid comedy genre. The jokes are a million times better than your average Super Bad teen comedy or Will Ferrell family comedy. The movie itself is actually pretty amazing, making references and parodies of other films alongside its own self-contained sense of humour. Sometimes the editing or camerawork are actually part of the joke, making this a cut above all other stupid comedies.

3. The Room (2003)

This one is actually in a league of its own, and maybe it wasn’t even fair putting it on a list like this. For in fact, The Room is not a comedy at all. It is a melodrama. There is so much to be said about this wonderful, mind numbing soap opera. The drama is so real and the emotion is so incredibly sincere…the acting is outstanding. I’ve watching this movie four times in one day, and cried like a baby every single time. Pfff, I’m sorry, that was unfair. The Room is the most absurdly awful, dismally acted, amateur filmed movie I have ever seen. Its narrative is nonsensical and disappears for large portions of the short movie. I can’t even talk about it as seriously as I am right now without my mind imploding: the camerawork, the line delivery, the writing. Eugh! It’s impossible to take this movie seriously without committing suicide. I think it’s a survival mechanism to see this movie as a comedy. We can’t psychologically afford to watch this piece of shit without laughing. And for that reason, you will laugh yourself to tears. This is one movie you can watch again and again and, if you're not careful, you may find yourself joining the cult of The Room.

2. Sex Drive (2008)

The critical reception on the box art of this movie states: “This isn’t an imitator, it is, in fact, the real deal. A hilarious, original sex comedy that you really must seek out.” And it’s absolutely true. Sex Drive is not afraid to be what it is: a stupid, mindless, sex-fueled, teen comedy. And for that reason it is the absolute best of its breed. The king of all teen comedies, sex drive delivers where most of its ilk shies away from the full experience. Sex Drive has unbelievably funny moments, but it’s the unrated director’s cut that will blow you away. Sex Drive is almost a caricature of the usual unrated DVD release of a movie, where an extra set of breasts or an extra 2-minute scene of jokes is added. Sex Drive’s unrated version is so much more than that. Edited completely different, the style of the movies itself is filled with the playful and over-the-top sense of humour of the content. Watching Sex Drive was the only time I ever laughed so hard that I was told to shut up.

1. Black Dynamite (2009)

There is nothing that can be said about this neo-Blacksploitation, faux-70s, low budget, kung-fu action romp that will prepare you for its unrivaled majesty. There is absolutely no way to understand how side-splittingly, unapologetically, authentically black this movie is. This, without a doubt, is the funniest movie ever made.

Honourable Mentions:

The Big Lebowski

House

Dr. Strangelove

Spinal Tap

The Jerk

Zoolander

Supertroopers

Troll 2

And anything bearing the name Monty Python

Galaxy Quest Analysis

2011-08-13T02:53:00.012-04:00

For What’s a Commander Without his Crew?

(Before I can begin the analysis, I need to lay down some groundwork. Those of you well versed in auteurist analysis, feel free to skim or skip the first two paragraphs.)

The auteur theory, as it’s referred to, is such a predominate way of organizing, marketing, and thinking about cinema that it has gone n' done that old ideological trick (that Zizek likes to point out to us): it has been assimilated so widely that we have ceased to see it: it has become the lens on the spectacles we forgot we are wearing. It has become the norm for Christopher Nolan's newest trailer to begin with "From the director of The Dark Knight." Though the stuff behind the theory is older than this, its mythologized origins lies with Francois Truffaut’s famous essay, for the famous French journal cahiers du cinema, entitled “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français.” (Yes, it's famous. You'll have to trust me on this one.) Although previous to this article, in Europe and especially France, the 'film' as a unique creation by a singular artist (the director) was a commonly held view. (Think to Tarantino’s latest where Shoshanna states, “I’m French. We respect directors in our country.”) To us now, the theory of seeing the director as the artistic progenitor of the work is laughably pedestrian.

However, in the Hollywood monopolized, industrially organized and dogmatically capitalist American film scene (which is how the Hollywood machine can be described without challenge until the late 50s), this was not the way one spoke or thought of a 'movie'. And it is here that some of the Frenchman’s most respected studio-auteurs emerge. Howard Hawks, John Ford, Orson Welles, and above all Alfred Hitchcock lived and breathed under studio power, running from meddling producers, and thinking about the bottom line. Yet, despite these pressures, there were a handful of directors whose films all carried recurring artistic and thematic tendencies. It’s important to remember this isn’t the norm in early Hollywood. Sure it’s easy to talk about the Spielbergs and Coppolas in the 70s, or the Tarantinos or Nolans now, but the average moviegoer in the 40s has no idea who directed Casablanca. Without google, would you? And probably you shouldn’t. Casablanca is classic studio output, a factory-made product, and not an auteur’s personal vision. Truffaut’s essay praised the ability of studio directors to maintain a personal vision amid the machine.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “What does this have to do with Galaxy Quest?”

Well, my dear, and shall I add, oh so patient, reader(s), I was coming right to that. Well, as mentioned above, Truffaut’s essay popularized “la politique des Auteurs” in France, but precious few Americans read French film journals. One man, however, by the name of Andrew Sarris, did. He imported the theory to America in his own essay, “Notes on the Auteur Theory.” Coining the term, and spreading the idea like wildfire through an early 60s film landscape where Stanley Kubricks, Woody Allens, and Martin Scorseses were coming onto the scene. New Hollywood exploded in the wake of Sarris, and movies were never the same.

The last time I was watching Galaxy Quest I remember finding it funny that the villain, Sarris (a scaly, green alien) spoke perfect English. (If you think your immigrant neighbor has a strong accent, try teaching an alien your language.) Then it occurred to me. Sarris, the tyrannical alien commander who demands loyalty, is a kind of stand-in for Andrew Sarris’ breed of auteur cinema. He speaks English, not French.

The first thing to notice is that (Andrew) Sarris, and by extension auteur theory, is made a villain in Galaxy Quest. And therein lies Galaxy Quest’s simple statement on film-politics. It is best explained in the quote from early in the film:

“... on one hand, if I had moved an inch, the beast would have killed me. On the other hand, my crew was in danger...”

“How did you know what to do?”

“Come on! Without a crew, I'm not a Commander.”

It’s not necessarily an anti-Sarris/Truffaut message, but it is at the very least a call for the film community (which includes audiences) to extend its appreciation beyond the director himself. In the film’s opening, the pompous commander gets the climatic welcome onstage and, literally, the spotlight. We are shown the rest of the crew sympathetically as their roles are outshined by the director – erm, that is, commander’s. In fact, the members of the crew have roles on the ship reflecting roles of a film production: Alexander/Dr. Lazarus’s acting prowess, Fred/Tech Sgt. Chen’s background presence akin to post-production or editor, Gwen/Tawny Madison’s communicative and superficial job close to production manager or perhaps producer, Tommy/Laredo as the direct, hands-on cameraman, mic-operator or gaffer, and Guy/Crewman #6 as a stand in for all the other extras and lesser crewmembers who, so to speak, “have no last names.” The film even goes so far as to admit the importance of fans (in the Justin Long/Brandon character).

The ending of the film highlights its emphasis on the communal nature of film, in how Tim Allen didn’t receive the applause alone, but called his crew up with him for the final bow. I mean, yeah, the Commander was still calling the shots by the end, he was still the main attraction at the convention, and the importance of the crew accepting their roles and subservience to the commander was stressed. But it still remains that the crew members each contributed their own assets to the struggles of making the film – erm, that is, defeating the enemy – and without any one of them it would have been impossible to make this film – erm, I mean, survive. And when the Omega 13 is activated (which amounts to a cosmic rewind button, which may hint at the digital home-video era of film we have entered, which some believed would destroy film – erm, I mean, erase all matter in the universe), the film hints at a new post-Sarris future for Hollywood. The film does an excellent job of keeping these ideas consistent throughout, and it bears a repeat viewing with these thoughts in mind.

These themes are amplified by rampant self-reflexive visuals (tell me those windows don’t look like filmstrips), the blurring of real world and film-logic (such as the actual existence of Byrillium spheres in the universe outside of the TV show where they were invented, or Guy's anxiety about dying in life because he died on the show), and countless scenes like the one where Alan Rickman/Alexander/Dr. Lazarus saves the barracks from death, and when he is about to receive his well-deserved moment of glory, all the praise is given to the commander. Perhaps we give directors too much credit. After all, no one knows who directed Casablanca. Do you know who directed Galaxy Quest?

[Addendum: I also noticed that, contrary to Hollywood tradition, the director was not the first name at the start of the credit roll.]

As for life imitating art...

The Red Shoes Analysis & Review

2011-08-08T00:44:00.003-04:00

You Cannot Escape the Shoes

The Second World War is finished. The world is tired and weary, people are weighed down by misery and loss. To the cinema they flock, where escape awaits them more than ever in the new technology called technicolour. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were two artists at this time, contrary to the wave of pulp filmmakers who used the advent of colour to attract greater viewership (similar to what 3D is being used for in our time), whose technicolour feats were of the highest artistic caliber. And withholding an element of pure spectacle (even the best writers can be a little flowery), Powell and Pressburger used colour for expressive, atmospheric and inventive flourishes, rather than the shock of deeper realism. However, their films together are celebrated for more than merely their early use of colour. The team collaborated on countless gems together, but perhaps best known, most remembered, and most refined is the impeccable masterpiece from 1948, only their second fully colour film, The Red Shoes.

Though of course it isn’t the duo’s only film of note, nor their first colour masterpiece (preceded by the equally spectacular Black Narcissus a year before), The Red Shoes has proven to be the more influential and most remembered of their career. And I would say, expectedly so. Not only has it been an overt reference point for films like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, but has influenced directors as varied as Dario Argento, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch and Wes Anderson. And especially now, with the Criterion Collection and Scorsese’s Film Foundation’s immaculate restoration and digital transfer, the film is able to appreciated in its original glory, garnering a revival of interest. (As a side note, the Criterion bluray is absolutely stunning, and makes it even clearer still to me that this is one of the best shot films of all time. Jack Cardiff is truly legendary.)

Like Kubrick’s 2001, the Red Shoes seems to be simply timeless: more than 60 years later, this masterpiece is still able to dazzle viewers, like yours truly, raised on big budget 3D (nevermind colour) spectacles. It’s impossible to understate the overwhelming beauty of the film’s formalism, its surrealistic use of imagery, scenery and movement in the dance centerpiece, its passionate and even prophetic use of colour accented by expressive lighting, the early experiments in layering images (decades predating greenscreens) the powerful and otherworldly score. Even the performances (especially by first-time actress, full-time dancer Moira Shearer) are stellar, though overlooked because of the majestic all-pervasive presence of the visual and aural feast. And because Shearer is a real dancer, as all the dancers are, there is an inimitable effortlessness in the performance, and an authenticity to the film that films like Black Swan simply can’t achieve. All the pieces in this brilliant jigsaw fit so wonderfully it would be a crime to call it anything short of a masterpiece.

It’s unfeasible to do justice in words the visual-aural beauty and the thick atmosphere of this film world. Some films simply create their own universes. The Red Shoes fills its viewers with the joy and mystery of experiencing life for the first time. Perhaps the characters are undeveloped, the drama abrupt and hurried, the style of acting slightly archaic and grossly formalistic, but it does nothing to subdue the glory of the craft.

Upon reflection, it may be easy to fall into the trap of assuming The Red Shoes is in fact nothing more than a visual-aural feast, a spectacle, with little more than the routine “story within a story” strategy in the way of depth worth probing. Although it’s no Matrix or 2001, ripe for decades of writing and interpretation, it does offer more than this shallow (although I would say clever) self-reflexive stroke.

After a first viewing I attributed Vicky’s downfall to the love triangle she found herself trapped between, which was the surface implication. However, I was wrong in thinking the love triangle was between two men. In fact, it was between her husband, Craster, and her passion, dance, as personified in the man Lermentov. The film, not three years out from the Second World War, was released to a Britain still inhabited by the tattered remains of wartime propaganda shouting “Die for your Country!” Here was a film that shouted “Die for your Passions! Die for Art!” Vicky stumbled upon her own “red shoes”: dance itself (as the metaphor of the folktale goes). The Red Shoes is not a story of a pair of possessed slippers, it’s a tragedy about a girl who cannot but pursue her artistic passion to death. This is the ideology Lermentov spouts at every turn, pleading his dance troupe to devote their entire lives to their work. This is the unshakable philosophy which forces him to be such an impossible perfectionist, to continually do nothing but improve. This is also why he abandons his lead dancer when she announced her plans to marry. One must devote oneself totally to the art; there is no part-time dancer, no part-time artist. These are Lermentov’s demands, and if you for a moment show a sign of devoting part of your life to something else, like a husband, you’re out.

“Why do you want to dance?”

“Why do you want to live?”

“Well I don't know exactly why, but I must.”

“That’s my answer too.”

The implication of the self-reflexivity inherent in the story-within-a-story trick is that this exchange applies to film, not just dance, and indeed to all arts and labours of passion. Sacrifices must be made, husbands must be left, and lives must be lost in the pursuit of that which gives our lives meaning. The Red Shoes is a rallying call to all men and women of the artistic disposition to truly devote our lives to our dance. Or, is it instead a warning of what awaits us should we chose to put on the proverbial red shoes? No, I think it is neither a warning nor a call to battle, but instead a study. It has no didactic quality, no lesson to impart or warning to heed, but instead dramatizes for us what the fate of all true artists is. The sacrifice of life itself for the creative act. That is the Red Shoes.

Twin Peaks

2011-07-16T16:35:00.006-04:00

Why You Should Watch Twin Peaks (Right Now)

Starting with a TV show seems, to me at least, a daunting and unthinkable task. The effort required to hunt down entire seasons of a television series, the sheer amount of time the medium demands devoted, and the pervading prejudice film people like me have against the form the medium demands: the dramatic breaks for commercials that keep you from changing the channel, the dramatic episode endings that always make you want to come back next week, and the dramatic season finales that make you come back in a few months. The commercial, immediate, widespread, and serial nature of the medium disallows vignette, tangential, or slow development. It does not lend itself well to experimentation, to emphasis on visual beauty, nor to a director’s final cut or unique voice. Nor does it expect much from the audience. Television seems to downplay the intelligence and analytic ability of its viewers, and probably rightly so. It taps in to the dominant zeitgeist, produces more of what gains viewership, and suppresses stragglers. These are all sweeping, unfair generalizations of course, and much has changed in the last few years with the Internet, the rise of the long tail business model, and networks like HBO, which allow a level of artistic purity in their programming. But still, there is a reason television directors aren’t discussed in auteur terms, why television series don’t appear at prestigious awards shows like the Oscars or Cannes, and why it’s not yet the topic of a respected academic discourse like film.

My obvious disdain for the tube does not restrain me from keeping an open mind and renting a season of John from Cincinnati, or downloading the whole run of Patrick McGoohan’s the Prisoner, or buying the criterion release of Fishing with John. And my limited explorations of the television medium, combined with my prejudiced-yet open-minded attitude, have only allowed me to stumble upon one series I would readily call a masterpiece. I am the first to admit my exploration of television is embarrassingly minimal, so I kindly ask television purists not crucify me when I say there is but one television work of art, flawed as it is, I would christen the holy grail of television art. Despite that moniker I proudly bestow, I want to emphasize again the flawed, restrained, and criminally short-lived nature of this victory.

For those of you who haven’t read the title of this article, that television show is called Twin Peaks. I’ll save you the effort of reading yet again a lengthy synopsis of the premise, or a list of character biographies, and just tell you why this show is worth watching, whether you’re a TV enthusiast or a fellow prejudiced film-snob (or whether you’re neither). The main man behind the artistry of Twin Peaks, director David Lynch, has said that he intends Twin Peaks to create a fully realized world that viewers can feel enveloped in and will want to return to. And in that endeavor he has succeeded with shining colours.

Though I think the series is restrained by the conventions demanded by the medium, it has only sunk from an A+ to, even at its weakest moments, an A-. Like Lynch intended, Twin Peaks’ foremost quality is its ability to remove the viewer from our everyday reality and sink us in a thick, unique, beautiful and simultaneously tragic atmosphere, out in the rural northwest. But it’s more than the feeling of living in lumberland smalltown USA that you experience – it’s the sinister undertones that slowly rise to the surface as the show progresses, the slightly surreal and (maybe) supernatural flourishes that appear every few episodes, the dreamy logic, pace, and visuals. The instantly nostalgic resonating drama, the absurd and unique sense of humour. Even in the middle of the second season where Lynch was largely absent, it’s the consistency of vision that dominates every episode. It’s the Badalamenti music, the gorgeous use of colour, the memorable (sometimes) layered characters, the ambiguous Lychian flares. All of it is felt rather than understood or even remembered. It's as intuitive and illogical as Dale Cooper's techniques.

Now to defend Twin Peaks from its usual criticism.

Yes, it is cheesy. It is cheesy as hell. But there are two reasons this is okay. First of all, the often painful cheesiness is all part of its idiosyncratic charm. After a few episodes, you learn the flow of the cheesiness, and you understand that it’s simply part of the show; just like that part of you that speaks an octave higher while talking to your boss. It's like surface psychology that comes across as a joke when you probe the lower depths of desire. You may even begin to like it, simultaneously ironically and unironically. At once you are able to laugh at the characters' strained seriousness, and feel for their overacted miseries. Secondly, however, the cheesiness is deliberate. It’s part of the show’s brilliant subtext which satirizes itself in the process of revealing to you its own seams. The self-reflexive, mock-soap opera even has its own mock-soap opera within the show, which in the first season acts as a mirror for the characters’ own lives, a decision which implies television belongs with the other great artforms. Above all, if you are able to push through the first episodes and try to gain a taste for the bizarre, subtly self-defacing, melodramatic scenes, then the coming episodes will reward you for it.

Yes, the show is also nonsensical. It is absurd, it is pretentious, it leaves most of its questions unanswered in the frustrating finale, and its prequel film Fire Walk With Me does not even begin to satisfy the itch that the finale left us with. My defense for these complaints is the same I would use to defend Lynch’s films, or the paintings of Salvador Dali, or Alice in Wonderland, or any number of intuitive, abstract, and ambiguous works of art. Art is not about satisfying the urges of the surface mind. Art must be ambiguous to resonate beyond daily existence. Some artists choose aesthetic, symbolic, or dream logic over the linear conventions of storytelling. As for the pretentiousness, there is no apology.

And if that’s not enough for you, then the show has a grand total of 30 episodes and a prequel film. That’s it. So if you’re wary about finding all 110 episodes of Angel or 10 seasons of Friends, then there’s another reason to go for Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks is proof that auteurship, integrity, and thought can exist in the commercial medium of television. It brings along with those benefits their mirror flaws, but that is reason to celebrate them. An FBI murder-investigation show like no other, it has become a powerful piece of pop culture even 20-some years on, receiving the Simpsons' treatment, heavily influencing recent video games like Deadly Premonition and Alan Wake. Hell, there's even rap songs about it. So, grab a coffee, pull up a slice of pie, and enter the incomplete and obscure world of television's crowning masterpiece.

P.S.

If you do start Twin Peaks' pilot and first few episodes, and find you aren’t blown away, then keep with it knowing that every few episodes something like this happens:

http://youtu.be/36_vlZha7bg

House (1977) Review

2011-06-26T12:33:00.004-04:00

In Praise of Shallowness

Reflections on Nobuhiko Obayashi's House

A schizophrenic mosaic, House is a film less sure of what it wants to be than I am sure of what it ended up being. At one moment, it’s a happy-go-lucky folk-music-soundtrack, teen comedy/family drama, with one-dimensional characters and a bright palette. Seconds later the film turns into a comedy-horror that, short of some vulgarity and nudity (and pop culture references), nearly precludes things like the Waynes’ brothers Scary Movie. The whole time the movie shapes its own twisted postmodern ludicrous sense of humour, and acts as an encyclopedic collection of in-camera special affects and a gallery of experiments in post-production. A melting pot of influences, Nobuhiko Obayashi fashioned his avant-garde-kindergarten style by pulling from lessons learned in his career as a TV advertisement filmmaker (quick edits, quick pace, shallow and to-the-point acting, and a range of technical cues), his infatuation with experimental art-house short films (the underground attitude, the desire to be unique, acceptance of the unpretentious low art cloud, low budgets), and the childhood images his young daughter dreamed up (lending the film its resonating childlike fairy-tale vibe).

It’s almost as hard to decide how good the film is objectively as it is to pin down what exactly it is. Even the folks at criterion had a hard time summing it up: “How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava?” It certainly has the deliberately campy horror of Scooby-Doo, as well as the Mario Bava aesthetic. But it’s not as consistent or self-contained as either. If Scooby-Doo occasionally exploded into live-action without warning, switched art-directors every ten minutes, changed its tone from cheerful to sincerely disturbing scene to scene, and employed an even more broken sense of logic in its plot, then the comparison would be appropriate. This playful colourful low-art dreamscape is a wonderful antidote to the bleak, gritty realism of the CSI generation. It’s like Alice in Wonderland was intercut with alternating scenes from Saw and Blues Clues.

It certainly is a shallow movie, with no ideological or intellectual depth worth probing. But that’s all part of its unique underground charm. Like an early scene in the film Black Dynamite, which has the title character hit his head on the boom mic, then look right at the microphone as he continues his lines with a pornstar’s acting ability, House just doesn’t care. If Quentin Tarantino was an unskilled filmmaker who couldn’t smoothly pull off the techniques he uses, but sloppily used those techniques anyway, yet accepted the sloppiness and the guilelessness that his endeavors parade, that would be House. Obayashi is a serious artist who willfully and shamelessly made a shallow, silly, schizophrenic family/comedy/horror/experimental film, not only aware – but even proud that it was low-art trash doomed to nothing more than a lean cult following. House is a phenomenal piece of unpretentious experimental cinema that pretends to be nothing more than it is: hilarious, silly, schizophrenic, and madly entertaining.

One Sentence Analyses

2011-05-09T21:00:00.007-04:00

The name of this blog seems to have become counter-intuitive. I named it after the famous two-word review of Spinal Tap's album "Shark Sandiwch". Yet, I've been pumping out long and sometimes convoluted analyses and reviews of obscure movies. So I've decided to make a non-pretentious post dedicated to reversing this, or at least making a compromise. I give you the one sentence analysis:

Alien: Reflections of birth trauma; overcoming oppressive phallus

Unusual Suspects: The audience = the investigator

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The American Dream is an acid hallucination

Stalker: Stalker = Bodhisattva

Top Gun: Tom Cruise = Gay

War of the Worlds: Tripods and digital cameras; Tom Cruise = Gay

Pierrot le fou: Counter-intuitive gen(d)re coding; colour, crime, and film

Cronos: Jesus is a vampire; eternal life sucks

Last Metro: This movie is an act; this life is an act

American Psycho: Murders and Executions = Wall Street

The Shining: Ghosts of an expansionist past haunting the television age; Oedipal impulse passed to the next generation

Enter the Void: Death drive and Oedipal-sister; bad trip = Nietzsche's eternal recurrence; Sea of cause and affect

3 Women: 1 woman

McCabe and Mrs. Miller: Ain’t no hero no more

Solaris: Ideas made flesh, flesh made ideas; unreachable God; the guilt of being a woman

The Room: I’m fed up with this weurld

Psycho: Narcissistic Oedipal, self-reflexive Freudian psychology

Rear Window: It's just a movie

Star Wars: Darth Vader = Animus, Jungian journey of the hero

Pan’s Labyrinth: Childhood formalism vs. adult 'real world' realism

Coffee and Cigarettes: Deconstruction in personal relationships

Mulholland Drive: Fantasy becomes as unbearable as real world; pre-suicide masturbatory dreamscapes; remake of Persona

Persona: 'Identity' exists not; self-reflexive spiritualism

Why Video Games Can Be Art, but Aren't Always

2011-05-04T14:02:00.007-04:00

Authorship in Video Games:

The Next Great Artform?

Videogames are extremely diverse. To say the medium is capable of being art is not to say that every game that has ever been released is a work of art, or even that every moment of a game is art. Doing so would be akin to calling TV commercials art as a result of calling The Godfather or Seventh Seal art. The question is not ‘is this game art’ or ‘is that game art’ but rather whether or not the medium is capable of supporting artists and meaningfully carrying their visions and ideas to an audience. It’s also key to keep in mind that art is just a word that we as humans have invented. We may define it as we wish. It is not some objective ‘out there’ handed down to us by aliens or by God. It is our word.

It’s strange that it’s a lot of “film people” who push this debate. Granted, plenty of video game people do too, but you don't see many poets or painters getting vocal about it. Maybe the Goliath (film) is threatened by a new David (videogames). Are they afraid it could be the next big artform, pushing them into the margins that poetry or (largely) painting occupy now? Roger Ebert being most outspoken in his position that “Videogames can never be art,” leads the film-peoples' arguments. Ebert, like usual, is not totally wrong, but he comes to questionable conclusions and has some flawed preconceptions he can’t shake off. Outside of dismissing two works of phenomenal artistry and imagination, Braid and Flower, he does make one mistake I’d like to point out: video games are not games. To be fair, actually, I should say video games don’t have to be games. Repeatedly playing matchmaking online in Call of Duty of Halo Reach I concede is playing a game. There are winners and losers, goals, and rules. But one difference worth noting is the adherence to rules: in chess, the rules are not absolute. If you can cheat without your opponent catching on, that’s it. In videogames, the programming is your limit. Therefore, it's less of a mutually agreed rule (a type of flowing language) then it is a whole new digital paradigm with its own natural laws, and within that paradigm there is art. The paradigm itself (that is, the gameplay) is probably not a work of art.

However, if we look at online versus games like Halo 3 merely as one instance of games, or one type of gaming, then Ebert’s comparisons of video games to chess and mahjong are completely unfair. Mahjong is a game: it has rules players must follow, it has a clear goal of beating your opponent sitting across from you, and has a distinct winner. Everytime you play mahjong, you may play a different game (i.e. a different arrangement of cards, a different outcome), this is true. But everytime you play a videogame (depending on the game, because the medium allows such a massive deviation) you can play different games within one game. Games like chess and mahjong are one dimensional, but video gaming has the capacity to be so much more. You can continue the same story, continue in the same world, or you can play again and again the king of the hill, capture the flag, or team deathmatch. To make this distinction right away: I’m not convinced that team deathmatch in BioShock 2, for example, is art. However, it is an analog/offshoot of a world that is art, namely, BioShock 2’s story campaign. Online versus is closer to chess than to art, but at the very least the character, sound, and level design in the online arenas is art. Think of it as a really entertaining digital art gallery.

Videogames, however, do not have to be games. This seems contradictory, and is why I think we should rename Videogames to something (more eloquent than) interactive media or digital/kinetic image-making. Take a look at Heavy Rain, or a cutscene in Mass Effect, or a puzzle in Portal, or scene of exploration in Oblivion. There is little to be compared with chess in these instances. These are a new type of storytelling, a type of digital sculpture, a type of total design, a type of experience that some auteur developer has created for you to experience. To read, you must know the code of language. To watch a film, you must possess eyes with persistence of vision and understand the spoken language. To play videogames, you must learn to be savvy with the interface. But once you know how to use that controller, you are transported to another world that the developers have made for you. It might be an open world of post apocalyptic wonders à la Fallout 3, or it might be linear and small, à la Portal. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is a place created for us to experience through eyes, ears, and hand-input. So when a non-gamer talks about gaming, it's akin someone who is illiterate talking about books.

When Andrew Sarris imported Stateside François Truffaut’s essay coining auteur theory it was primarily to help usher film out of its disposable, fairground, entertainment roots, and into the realm of high art. In Truffaut’s France, and elsewhere in Europe, film was already considered art. This was not the same in America, where it was considered a childish novelty item and a business interest. The writers at cahiers du cinema considered the great American studio directors (John Ford and his westerns, Alfred Hitchcock and his horrors) to be individual figures who wrote the text that is film – they were not merely organizers setting up a commercial property. Auteur theory points to recurring images and ideas in a director’s career, in his personal style and vision, making films turn into paintings or poems by a single visionary painter or writer. You look at a writer's career, a painter’s portfolio, in relation to that artist, not just individually. We are beginning to do the same with video games.

How can you not apply auteur theory to video games? How can you not see the clash of the grim and the childish throughout all of Team Ico’s games? How can you not feel the technological dramas and the distinct accurate design of all of Valve’s games? How can you not indulge in a fantasy crime lifestyle in the open worlds of Rockstar’s games? How can you not explore the massive worlds of Bethesda, the emotional RPGs of Square, the story/character driven dramas and dialogue-trees of BioWare, the exploratory hellish nightmares of Frictional, the minimalist and beautiful realms of That Game Studio? These studios are the painters, are the writers, are the directors. Even the most childish, oblivious gamer, who plays nothing but online matchmaking, will unwittingly discuss Call of Duty from an auteurist perspective: by comparing the two alternating developers of the franchise: Infinity Ward and Treyarch.

A traceable source of the vision, and a recurring palette of images and ideas, however, is not enough to an art form make. I mean, serial killers can do both, but is murder an artform? However, if instead of human bodies, the same person were to set up dolls in such a position and take a photograph or called it installation art: that would become art. Why? Probably has to do with our disdain for murder, but there is also something about photography (or just calling something 'art') which mediates and filters the natural world, makes it human and thus art. However, video games (which are more like painting that photography or even film) is not a mediated version of the real world. It is total creation: it begins from scratch and creates a world. That sort of creation can only belong to art.

Is the comparison of video games to film fair? Many have raised issue with this practice, but I can’t say it's wrong to compare the two. Yes, video games possess their own historical trajectory, their own artistic and technical conventions, business, marketing, and so on and so forth. But all different mediums of art not distinct totally. Never can we erect walls of segregation between these seemingly disparate strands of design and expression. Generally with ‘art’ I mean things like words (poetry and writing at large), visual art (painting and print and sculpture and photography), performance (acting, what is called ‘performance art’, stage and theater, live music) sound art (music and sometimes radio shows), and moving images (film and sometimes television). To this we should add a category of interactive media (sometimes video games, interactive film, and rarely interactive literature). None of these medias are discreet; instead all have become converged, bouncing off each other, quoting, remaking, and taking inspiration from each other.

Film, by nature, includes ghosts of its ancestors: photography, as well as painting, and music and sound recording in general. When the medium is used in the way it normally is, what we call ‘movies’, it additionally pulls from theater, on literature, and any number of other mediums. So comparing the camerawork of Kubrick to the compositions of Beethoven, or the imagery of Tarkovsky to the great literary geniuses, is fair. That is their inspiration.

Videogames often have cutscenes, (which are themselves miniature animated films) original soundtracks, extensive and detailed level design, character design, story writing, voice acting, and so on. These, all taken discreetly, would be considered art. Why is it that when they are converged, the synergy produces not a greater art but trivial disposable entertainment? I’ll tell you why: because the idea of gaming itself is incompatible with classical ideas of art. Because even in fantastic, majestic, emotional, philosophical pieces of game art, there are often button mashing battle sequences; even within the art there is the game.

But this also raises the question: does a single 'work of art' have to be artistic from start to end? Does 'art' come and go? Can you quantify art in some way? I mean, if we agree that the battle sections of, say BioShock or Jade Empire, are not really in themselves works of art, yet we can agree that the design of the world, the characters, the music, and so on are artful creations, then it seems we can’t call it one or the other, unless we allow some sort of ‘on’ and ‘off’ switch on ‘art’ within a single text.

I tried and I couldn't find any way to defend things like online matchmaking, versus modes, and shallow simple games for their artistry. Ebert is right that they’re more like chess than an interactive film or painting. So my conclusion is basically that the medium is capable, and a lot of great games do it by either dropping you in a world they've created for you to interact with (interactive painting; Bethesda), or setting you down a linear story-road to run you through an experience they’ve designed for you (interactive film; Square). But the medium isn't always art because capture the flag in Halo 3 is just disposable entertainment, as fun as it is, let's face it.

It's a little like comparing sports on TV to There Will Be Blood. They're both the same (or a close) medium, moving images on a screen, but sports simply don’t contain the level of design, the intention of creation, the ideas, or the auteurist power behind the production of the images. And the goals of both mediums are totally different, aside from the main one which they achieve in different ways to different audiences: ‘to entertain.’ Video games do moving images one up by converging things equatable to sports on TV and There Will Be Blood in the same text. It confuses us, because artistry like Paul Thomas Anderson’s can occur right next to couch-potato popular entertainment like sports. The name of the medium, video games, is misleading too, because ‘video gaming’ is only one part of the story. Sometimes it’s just ‘digital storytelling.’ That’s why I think the medium should be renamed to something like ‘interactive media,' as clunky and unrealistic as that is.

So why are there so many games that are not art, and don't even attempt to be? Well there’s a bunch of different reasons. For one thing, there are a lot of casual or shallow gamers. They just want to sit down for 20 minutes before school and play a game of virtual soccer or shoot some terrorists. These people should definitely not be looked down upon, and by ‘casual or shallow’ I didn’t mean it in a patronizing way. But they should be considered a different category altogether than people who play video games for a unique visual-kinetic experience, for a unique style of storytelling. The ‘casual’ gamer is as similar to the integral, artful gamer as a grandpa watching the superbowl is to a theater full of critics and enthusiasts at the Cannes festival (but even film critics have their favourite football team). The only thing that creates confusion between these two distinct versions of gaming is that they can both exist within the same game. Moving images benefit from having two separate categories (and above all, names) that divide TV and film. I think the easiest way to cure this misconception about videogames is create a similar distinction. That’s one way to do it, and another is vote with your dollar. In an industry so run by large corporations and capitalist interests, it’s vital to do this by purchasing (not illegally downloading) integral, artful, unique games.

Just to give a list of some of my personal picks for your consideration as 'art': Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Amnesia, BioShock, Flower, The Orange Box (mostly), Oblivion, Mass Effect, and of course many installments in the stellar Final Fantasy series.

Antichrist Analysis

2011-05-03T03:11:00.004-04:00

The Christian legacy Inverted:

Gender and Theology in Lars von Trier's Antichrist

What is the sign of the Satanist or the Antichrist? The inverted cross. The inversion of the entire Christian story is a motif of the film Antichrist, though not for the reasons we’d first assume. Despite director Lars von Trier’s atheism (at least the atheism in him at the time he wrote Antichrist), he is not in the least Satanic, and certainly did not name his film for its literal or spiritual implications. To think of this film as Satanic – or misogynist for that matter, is to make the same perilous mistake that the protagonist “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) made while researching her thesis on gynocide. Instead of reading her historical texts on violence against women critically, she lost the intellectual distance and embraced the teachings of her enemies. In the same way, a reading of this movie as a celebration of violence against women or immorality would release the critical distance from the text we as readers must uphold: or at least, it would be to confuse subject matter with its treatment or subtext. (After all, movies about gangsters are not movies promoting gangsterism.)

In the case of von Trier’s tale of fantastical disturbia, the subtext is one that bridges two subjects of modern and prehistoric concern: theology and gender, the title itself encapsulating the first, and the masterfully placed female symbol on the ‘T’ in the logo representing the second. In fact, the simple naming of the characters as “He” and “She” reveals the two of them not as individuals, but instead as archetypes for their sexes. Dafoe as the rational, ruling, arrogant, goal-driven male; Gainsbourg as the nebulous, emotional, dependent female. Of course, these are absurdly unfair caricatures, but von Trier did not leave it simply at that.

As another surrealist filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, once said: “Eroticism is a diabolical pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.” This type of inversion of regular logic is present in Antichrist as well. From the film’s prologue, sex is instantly associated with death instead of birth (as it is in the sex scene at the dead tree littered with pale corpses). And unlike the Christ myth, the child is not conceived without sex, but instead dies as a result of sex. The inversion of the Christian myth appears to work backwards chronologically, beginning with the death of the Son and returning and focusing on an upside down Genesis tale in, of all places, Eden. However, this inverted Christian paradigm is not clean cut, and the child as well as “She” both resemble an ‘antichrist’ in their own right. “She” is even crucified in her own way, burnt like a witch. The child, however, is seen playing in a shed with wood, like a young carpenter in the making.

The film is imbued with cases of reversed images, some as simple and yet as haunting as the child’s backwards shoes. Von Trier replaces the “three kings” of the nativity story bringing gifts to a newborn messiah with the “three beggars” who have come to a grieving couple demanding a sacrifice. Instead of walking on water, “She” walks on burning earth – making the return to Eden not a redemption and reunification with God, but a descent into the subconscious symbolized by Hell. The trajectory of death is clearly attached closely to life and reproduction in the curious falling acorns. As “She” says, scores of them will fall, but only one every hundred years needs to grow for the tree to perpetuate itself. Death is present throughout Satan’s church of nature, the falling baby bird; the dead deer still attached to its mother; the fox who directs its violence inward; the crow who continuously dies. These last three animals, known as the Three Beggars, are of particular interest, and perhaps underscore the third theme in von Trier’s film: modern psychology. Grief, pain, and despair represent the three parts of the mind in their disrupted state of depression. The ego, the deer, carrying the surface tragedy of the child’s death, is skittish and flees confronting the true problem. The superego, the fox, associated with speech, destroys itself and cannot converse rationally. And finally, the dark raven, hidden in the dark cave, is the disturbed subconscious, which cannot be pounded out of existence, and will draw the attention of danger.

The Antichrist title may reflect another of the films themes: antifeminism. This may, by a large stretch I’m unsure was intentional, justify the odd dedication of the film to the late great Andrei Tarkovsky. In his 1972 science fiction masterpiece Solyaris, Tarkovsky gives form a specific idea of radical antifeminism. By having the protagonist’s dead wife in Solaris be resurrected out of his memory of her, she comes to represent an idea of women merely as “man’s guilt manifest.” (This is not to imply that Tarkovsky, or author of the source text Stanislaw Lem, are antifeminists, which is a discussion for another article.) This thread is picked up by von Trier in that between the two (“He” and “She”) it is “She” that carries all the of the guilt, it is her that needs psychotherapy, and it is she who comes to symbolize an entire aspect of humanity itself associated with sexual guilt by removing her source of pleasure with a pair of scissors. The film picks up on a number of antifeminist threads, from Nietzsche’s claim that “When a woman has scholarly inclinations, there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.” The ties to the film with this quote are obvious enough, but it may be coincidence that Nietzsche also wrote a book entitled “The Antichrist.”

All of this antifeminism results in the film’s anti-thesis that, as Aristotle says, “The female is, as it were, a mutilated male.” (Oh, what poor choice of words…) That man is the natural, and that woman is the secondary, the anti-man, the mistake, is the thesis that von Trier confronts, not promotes. Nature is, in this view, female, but women are not natural.

The ending attests to this. “He” is haunted by the ghosts of women who died at the hands of male irrationality: the same irrationality men project onto women. Although we are unsure whether the faceless crowd is coming at him with malice, for revenge, or if they are simply prowling around throughout nature, where they belong. This ambiguity gives rise to a second conclusion.

When “He” frees himself of the shackles of his proverbial “ball and chain”, or his literal weight drilled into his leg, the rationality that characterized his type vanishes. He sharply looks up with disgust at the monster before him and lets his inner chaos reign. His adrenaline is cued, triggering his fight or flight response, and he destroys “She”. The inner chaotic nature of women explodes within himself. Nature wins, and von Trier reveals to us that men are in fact mutilated women and not the other way around. And as the film concludes with a sea of faceless femininity floating across nature, we can see that this vision represents the triumph of unreason and chaos in nature. Yes, “He” lived and “She” died, but it was the spirit of “She” who reigns victorious. Despite His struggle to keep nature out, to remove the fungi that grows on him in his dreams, it exists within him too. It’s no wonder in the final shot, Dafoe is nearly impossible to spot among the faceless sea of femininity: he belongs to that sea, too.

If the film is indeed the Christian mythology running backwards, then the death of "She" was God's creation of her from Adam's body. And, the conclusion, is the Oneness with God which existed in Genesis. However the twist here is that God is female.

Videodrome Analysis

2011-05-01T15:36:00.007-04:00

The retina of the mind’s eye:

Television as the collective subconscious in Videodrome

As well as a raunchy, low-budget, splatterhouse, videotape-sploitation film imbued with the ghosts of many a B-horror flick, Videodrome is simultaneously an insightful and intelligent meditation by a rare breed of artists whose horrific creations reflect concerns and ideas of leading thinkers – in its own, and even in our, time. David Cronenberg has revealed himself to be something of a prophet in this regard. Pulling tortured visuals from the visions and nightmares of his subconscious, Cronenberg has built a remarkable world of ideas in Videodrome.

A vestige for these ideas, the character of Brian O’Blivion, whom David Cronenberg has disclosed as being based on Marshall McCluhan, curiously never even appears on film in the movie. His is the video realm, the video arena: the videodrome. O’Bilivion delivers his haunting monologues through several layers: into the video camera/out into the film world/out of the film camera/into our world. The movie almost paints a picture reminiscent of Dante’s Comedy, where the separate realms are organized vertically, hierarchically, and our protagonist descends down the levels of illusion.

O’Blivion’s central monologue contains the following logic:

“The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality. And reality is less than television.”

O’Blivion is an interesting character whose thoughts almost parallel those of a thinker far older than video. The repeated maxim, “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” appears to be a modern, updated form of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Running parallel with Cronenberg’s oeuvre, the allegory holds that our daily perceptions are limited to a false illusory world of shadows, when reality indeed exists outside the cave and is within our reach. In Plato’s ancient world, the allegory tells of men in restraints forced to stare at a cave wall whereupon shadows land and are mistaken for true forms. In Cronenberg’s hypermodern cityscape, his allegory replaces the cave wall with the television screen. And instead of having the protagonist a hero who escapes the confines of the cave to reality, Cronenberg has his protagonist be one of the first victims of the illusion. However, the connection to Plato is not totally fair, as Plato’s belief in an objective reality outside of our personal perceptions is nowhere to be found in Cronenberg’s ethos. Instead, we have a much more ominous world, akin maybe to Baudrillard’s Simulacrum where we have mistaken the map (the screen/the sign) with the land it was meant to represent - comparing pornography to, say, eating a menu. And to Baudrillard, like Cronenberg, there is no escape.

O’Blivion’s contemporary proverb hinges on the view that reality does not exist objectively of human perception. “After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality,” O’Blivion states. Thus when O’Blivion calls television “raw experience,” we can understand what the hallucinations that plague Max represent. Once television is seamlessly registered as sense data, it becomes our reality. As she watches women being whipped in the pirated S&M pornography in the movie, Nicki Brand says, “I can take it,” as if it were her being whipped. In this way, the technology takes over our perception, and thus our subjective realities, which gives the creators total control over the viewers.

Cronenberg appears to be hinting at some sort of extended mind theory in this quote from O’Blivion. “Extended mind theory”, take note, is a term coined, and an idea fleshed out, in 1998, not but 15 years after Videodrome’s release. In his article about Google and extended mind theory, Carl Zimmer explains the mind as “a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.” This retroactive connection, when combined with Cronenberg’s own position that “the human body is the first fact of human existence,” it’s easy to see how a symbiosis of these two ideas resulted in the catchphrase “Long live the new flesh,” and the gruesome imagery of video/flesh married. We can now understand what Brian O’Blivion’s brain tumour actually was: video itself, manifesting as an extension of his physical brain.

For those skeptical of the extended mind connection, revisit the scene of Bianca O’Blivion introducing Max to her father. As they walk through the shelves of videocassettes, it appears as though we are waltzing through the very fabric of a person’s mind: as if we have entered a skull and are witnessing the indexes of knowledge and memory, not registered in flesh and chemicals and neurons, but instead in plastic and tape and label. This is the mind the Brian O’blivion. “The brain problem?” Max asks in this scene. “The Videodrome problem,” Bianca corrects. Other bits of dialogue have similar undertones, but one visual cue worth noting is the colour palette of the scene. Max wears a dark grey and off white suit identical in hue to the shades of the room and the shelves and the tapes. Clothing is an external occurrence of identity: just like videocassettes are an external case of mind.

This film may at first appear to present an instance of direct effects theory (a communications theory that posits that the effects of media are direct, immediate, and strong: essentially, that media has the power inherently to brainwash). However, we should look at Max’s violence on behalf of Videodrome’s programmers (notice the double meaning – they are his programmers too) not from the simplistic “magic bullet” standpoint of “they make a video, it brainwashes him, he kills people,” but instead from a more nuanced view that, “they make a video, the video becomes his reality, they control his reality.” What is at stake in the conspiracy on cassette that surrounds Max is not only his own sovereignty over his actions and thus his body, but rather his own sovereignty over his perceptions, and thus, his experience of reality itself. And it’s Max’s reality, which breaks down all around him as he begins to hallucinate, which we too, as viewers, are subject to. (It should also be remembered that late in the film a character reveals that Videodrome signals can be infused to any program, not only sadistic brutal pornography. Therefore it is not direct effects which causes Max to act violently, but rather the grim fact of living inside another person’s fabricated reality.)

The hallucinatory world Max experiences in Videodrome is, to a certain extent, only a distorted caricature of the real world. To a certain extent, the horrific imagery that plagues Max is but an earthly manifestation of a clash between technology and the subconscious. On his art, Cronenberg says, “part of the process is to … censor nothing in yourself.” Max Renn’s fixation with sexuality, in both his waking life and his uncontrollable subconscious hallucinations, is mirrored by Cronenberg’s fixation on the subconscious itself. Sexuality is a structural part of human subconscious, and thus humanity itself, and by extension, our subjective experience of reality. This may seem nebulous, but in the film sexual lust is both what lures Videodrome’s watchers/victims initially to it, as well as what its hallucinations embody. The programmer of Civic TV’s late-night pornography channel knows all too well that sexuality can be experienced discreetly, alone at night in your apartment with your right hand. Video technology becomes a surrogate for the warmth of a lover in the waking world, and in the bizarre skewed hallucination-world Videodrome produces, items of technology become objects of sexuality.

The first lines of dialogue in the film, spoken by a television, are “Civic TV: the one you take to bed with you.” These lines are accompanied by a cartoon of a sleazy overweight man (presumably the type who would require the services of a pornography channel regularly) in bed with a television. From the onset, Cronenberg presupposes the television screen, which was the main road for pornography to the mind (or is it part of the mind itself…?) in the 80s, as the main object of sexuality. Even women are not the main objects of desire in the film. Nicki Brand (who appears only after his first encounter with Videodrome; whose name is a fake pornstar name if I’ve ever heard one; who we see penetrated by knives and pins, not by Max), becomes synonymous with the television itself as the film moves on, and the only other female characters are either puritan and conservative (Bianca), utilitarian and professional (his secretary Friday James, who jokes that she is a “vision of loveliness” to laughter) or elderly and a little creepy (Masha). Instead, Max is drawn to mediated images on a screen for his gratification, watching pornography even when he has a Nicki Brand in his house. Early in his hallucinations, Max literally penetrates the TV, caressing its veiny throbbing body. The videocassette pulsates erotically, with its two white plastic reels almost resembling breasts. As his visions become increasingly violent, Max reenacts a scene of torturous pornography by whipping – not a woman, but a woman on television. The television is turned into a siren, at first wanting to be desired, calling Max in. “Don’t keep me waiting.” This is how the mind is sucked into the video world: how Videodrome attracts its victims.

The second stage, after Videodrome has acquired its prey, sees the television not as a lustrous woman, but as a domineering man. Instead of penetrating the screen, in its third act a phallic hand-gun extends out of the screen at Max. The polarity is reversed and Max is turned into the passive receiver, and the technology has become a commanding sender. With his vaginal chest cavity where tapes are inserted, Max is the casualty of technological mind-rape.

Through a self-reflexive attitude, Cronenberg expresses these same concerns with his own medium: film. Cronenberg litters his cityscape with constant reference to the film screen. He constantly reminds us that what we are watching is framed, like the glasses the videodrome producers also manufacture. And, also like the glasses, our framed experience with this film is seen through a certain lens. He even has the fictional technology of manipulation, videodrome, share a name with the movie itself. “Why would anybody watch a scumshow like Videodrome?” Barry Convex asks Max. Or is he asking us, the audience? This reminds us the camera is a subjective tool, and that we are watching a construction. We, the film audience, are too watching shadows on a cave wall, made by one “Barry Convex” or another.

As Cronenberg rightly says “Any artist worth his salt has his radar very finely honed on what’s in the stratosphere. And in Videodrome I think I did anticipate a few things that are now fairly well understood and common but at the time were not.” Videodrome, in many respects, was ahead of its time. One can imagine how videodrome, if unleashed not upon a single person, but an entire mass population, would resemble the hive-mind called the internet, with its nasty pornography existing in its fringes, like the most disturbing corners of our collective unconscious. At the end of the film, when Max is alone in the hull of a boat with the flame and the cave wall, we fly back through the layers of the Inferno. First the object within video destroys itself, resulting in the destruction of video. Then, resulting from that, the object of film destroys itself, resulting in the end of the movie. Cronneberg’s film is, in part, a warning of what happens when you allow someone else to control your right hand, whether for masturbation or for violence. However it would appear the ending suggested that the real solution is simply to turn it off. Or, in the case of film, the cure is within the poison from the start: the end of the movie. A real pharmakon.

Bibliography:

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/15-how-google-is-making-us-smarter/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/directors/article2568132.ece

http://youtu.be/-zCZMjWuNY0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypodermic_needle_model

Punch-Drunk Love Analysis

2011-03-07T17:07:00.006-05:00

A Man is a Man:

Genre-Satire in Punch-Drunk Love

Punch-Drunk Love is a fascinating work of genre study. It first appears to be a schizophrenic movie, unsure what its emotional palette is. Gleeful music plays over scenes of awkwardness. It jumps from emotional breakdowns to phone-sex and back to a Heavenly romantic Hawaii vacation. The cameraman seems to think he’s filming an arthouse flick, the actors a comedy, and the sound designer jumps from horror hues to romantic orchestration.

The key to understanding it lies in one important reference, which goes unnoticed not because it’s coded (it actually stands right in front of you waving its arms), but because it’s relatively obscure.

French New Waver and political avant-garde maestro Jean-Luc Godard seems to have dedicated his filmmaking career to challenging authority, reveling in the unexpected, and subverting conventions (whether they be technical or artistic). In his 1961 film, Une Femme Est Une Femme, one of the protagonists wears a curiously familiar blue suit throughout the entire film. Just like Adam Sandler’s character.

Why is this reference important? It’s not like Paul Thomas Anderson was making any kind of political statement with his movie like Godard often does (or was he…?). The reason this is important is when you look at what A Woman is a Woman was really doing. You could watch Godard’s movie without even realizing what genre the film was. It is a subverted musical, with, yes, only one song in it. And it isn’t much of a song. The rest of the film has music that rises as though the actors about to sing, but it is abruptly cut, chasing away our expectations.

How does this relate to Punch-Drunk Love? Well think about my description of the movie in the opening paragraph. Despite its bursts of the avant-garde, its musical identity crisis, and its emotional variation, this is a romantic comedy at its core. It does to romcoms what films like McCabe & Mrs Miller did to the western genre. It picks out the genre’s most vital characteristics, hangs them up for all to see, then squeezes them into absurd and extreme shapes before they burst. In McCabe & Mrs Miller, the Western ‘hero’ who is supposed to follow his code of honour ends up desperately fighting for his own inglorious survival. In Une Femme Est Une Femme, the glamour of the musical explodes in odd ways, resulting in the subversion of that glamour: the singer is a stripper who wants to get pregnant.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s version of this tradition, the romantic comedy turns into a monster. The romantic interest doesn’t even come to the foreground until a third into the movie, and that’s not after a mental breakdown, phone-sex, attempted fraud, and a disastrous car accident that (strangely) is never talked about again. In any other romcom, the protagonist would rush in and save a cute girl’s dog from the car accident. Instead, our protagonist steals a harmonium from the side of the street. Our hero Barry is anti-social and reclusive to the point that we question his mental health, contrary to the usual man’s man romcom protagonist. The film is full of such contradictions.

But sometimes it doesn’t just subvert the genre’s conventions: it often epitomizes them, shooting them into the sky in dramatic proportions. Barry’s spontaneous decision to go to Hawaii is one such situation, and it is portrayed as a momentous life-changing decision. The most obvious case of this is the climax, when Barry heroically confronts the danger to his romance (personified by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and delivers a monologue we’ve probably heard in some variation in every romcom ever.

But my favourite, and probably the most concise example of genre-satire in Punch-Drunk Love is when Barry is running around Lena’s apartment floor looking for her room before suddenly and heroically exploding, jumping and kicking, out of a closed door to land right in front of her room, swinging the door open and kissing her. In one short scene it breaks genre convention, before embracing it so fully that it comes across as a spoof.

Further reading: Here's a phenomenal review of the movie.

Final Fantasy X Analysis

2011-03-07T16:27:00.010-05:00

Visiting the Farplane:

Eastern Religion in Final Fantasy X

The Final Fantasy series has continuously delivered fodder for philosophical thinking. Whether in the political or ideological clashes of Tactics and XII, the identity crises of VII, or the existential crises of XIII, every installment in the series has at its core a philosophical subtext. Final Fantasy X is not the only of its ilk to have several different philosophical themes under the crust. On its surface it explores an existential problem of the meaning of life in a world engulfed in death. Summoners can sacrifice themselves for a temporary peace, but is the sacrifice worth it? Those who fall in love with summoners certainly don’t think so, but everyone else does. Final Fantasy X is also a case study of the Hero’s Journey as outlined by Jung. It goes so far as to name characters after Jung’s philosophy, to use his own metaphors and images. And lastly, it is a Nietzsche-esque critique of the meekness of flock following devoutly the theocracy that is Yevon.

However, if you peel back its layers of convoluted subplots, perplexing mythology, copious characters, and questionable translation, Final Fantasy X is not only a theocratic nightmare, nor only a jungle of Jungian symbolism, nor only an existential dilemma story, but it is also an exploration of questions that run deeper. It transcends existentialism, ethics, even epistemology. It is a game that poetically muses on the nature of existence itself. In the Asian tradition, it does so abstractly, allegorically, and artistically. Of course, as in any text with multiple subtexts, not all pieces fit perfectly. But like the buzzowords that give the Jungian subtext away, Final Fantasy X also contains its share of direct allusions to, among other schools of thought, Hinduism.

Final Fantasy X’s largest giveaway to this theme occurs near the end of the game. The third and final great reveal in the plot tells us that our protagonist Tidus, and his beloved home world Zanarkand, are fantasy. Tidus himself is immaterial, called into existence by the magic of the Fayth. And, like the Aeons the Summoners call from the Fayth, he is merely the stuff dreams are made on. This is not in itself a deeply philosophical notion. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Like the children’s song, and like the children’s game, however, there may be more to it than just that.

Beyond the outlandish, convoluted, and allegorical mythology of Hinduism, it paints an image of existence not much different than Final Fantasy X’s. At its apex (as we can’t say inception, as the Hindus see time as cyclical and eternal) all existence was harmoniously one. All was one singular and all-encompassing Self, and the Self is perfect and self-knowing. But the Self gets tired of the monotony and static existence of self-knowledge. So the Self decides to get lost, to trick himself into forgetting what existence is and what he is, and he begins his dream. What is the dream? Life is. The illusion the Self plays on itself is called the dream of being many. The one fractures itself: it becomes us all. [As a side note, the creators of Final Fantasy might be drawing a parallel between Jungian philosophy and Hindu philosophy, as both center around a concept of a 'Self', though the Hindu's in a metaphysical reality-encompassing way, and Jung in an individual psychological sense. Is the macrocosm in the microcosm?]

So perhaps having the protagonist come to terms with his own non-existence may be a reference to the non-existence of everything. But this analogy can be taken further.

After the Self enters his dream, he naturally begins in a Heavenly utopia: Eden, or as it is called in Final Fantasy X, Zanarkand. Pleasure is constantly at our fingertips (“Zanarkand never sleeps”), we live without labor (the machina does all the work for us), and we enjoy nothing but leisure (sport is our protagonist’s profession). However, the Self grows tired of this game of Heaven, and desires a little excitement. He introduces the unseen, the surprise, and with it comes suffering. The destruction of Eden in this narrative is the literal arrival of Sin, and with it comes the departure (or maybe the expulsion) of the protagonist from the garden. [Another side note, if you’re seeing parallels between these two dominant creation myths, you aren’t alone.]

The Self’s existence continues in this dream-world. He forgets he is the all, he forgets he is one, and he forgets he is dreaming. As time goes on, the struggle and the suffering increases, Sin's power grows, and evil begins to outweigh good. When the final aeon (not to be mistaken with the Final Aeon) arrives, so does the the god(dess) named Shiva (not to be mistaken with the ice Aeon Shiva). In this period, suffering eclipses pleasure totally and the world is destroyed. The self wakes up, remembers who he is and that his suffering was all a dream. And thus the cycle continues to infinite, as time is cyclical and eternal. [In the same way that when you die in the game you are encountered with a video-game convention, the 'Game Over' screen, when Shiva appears she always has one hand which is flat and palm outward, as though saying to us 'relax, it's just a dream.']

A microcosm of the cycle motif is in the Summoner’s journey. A Summoner reaches the Final Aeon and destroys both the suffering embodied by Sin as well as herself (metaphorically, the world). Yet the peace is temporary, and Sin returns after the Self is tired of the Calm. The name of this period itself calls to mind the popular metaphor of “the calm before the storm.”

The ending of the game is itself a Zen-like koan, a double-edged solution like Buddha’s own problematic starting point: if desire is the cause of all suffering, how do you exterminate all suffering without desiring to be without it? In order to destroy Sin and save the world, you must destroy yourself in the process. In order to be without suffering, you must eradicate all desire, including the desire to be without suffering. In fulfilling your goal, your own ego dies. This, in a way, also reflects the united opposites of Taoism, which is a theme which also crops up sporadically throughout the game, particularly in its treatment of death.

An example of more Zen koan-like logic and united opposites in Seymour's plans to save Spira by destroying it. Seymour himself seems to plan to embody Shiva [interesting then that he chooses to associate himself with the womanly Anima] by destroying the world. Spira truly is a spiral of death. They are ruled by Sin, who exists only to destroy, who was created by death, who can only be killed with a sacrifice, and in so doing is replaced by a another more powerful incarnation. The only way to end the cycle of death and redeath is, essentially, the death of the protagonist: ego death.

There is, of course, a lot more to be said regarding Final Fantasy X (or other Final Fantasy titles) and Eastern Philosophy, but being such a massive game with so many hours of dialogue, cutscenes, gameplay, hidden secrets, etc, it would be exhaustive to try to cover it all. But I encourage anyone planning on playing or replaying this or other Final Fantasy games to do so with a eye out for mentions of Hinduism, Buddhism (Zen or otherwise), and Taoism.

Paul Thomas Anderson Spotlight

2011-02-15T09:51:00.007-05:00

Paul Thomas Anderson: The New Kid

P.T.A. is a super cool kid. He drives with Adam Sandler and eats candy on a friday night, eats pizza casually during interviews, and was on the Henry Rollins show. P.T.A. hasn't even heard of a tripod. "Your options," he (probably) told his crew, "are crane shots or steadicam." And it works. He's an auteur in every sense, being fully self-taught, writing and directing his own films, using familiar actors, and having a recognizable look and thematic dictionary. His movies are emotional in extremes (and may have you laughing and crying only moments apart). All his movies are hilarious and gorgeous. Except for There Will be Blood which is hilarious, gorgeous, and terrifying. Again, with the exception of There Will be Blood, his movies usually star Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Julian Moore, Luis Guzman, and others. Anyone who has seen a couple of his movies (or don't mind a few spoilers) check this phenomenal montage/tribute out.

Boogie Nights (1997)

I saw this movie on TV at like 1 in the morning as a kid and I thought it was a porno. How silly of me, it's a movie about porno. Mark Whalberg is a well-endowed newcomer to the cocaine-partying late 70s eccentric porn industry. His rise is swift and he becomes a star (as he repeats to himself as a prayer). He takes his "acting" career gravely serious. It's hilarious and really emotionally layered and looks beautiful. There's also some commentary about 80s America and materialism and the results of constant instant gratification, but I don't know, I was just looking at the tits the whole time. you see Heather Graham nekkid what else do you want.

Magnolia (1999)

1999 was probably Tom Cruise's best year. This and Eyes Wide Shut were probably his two best performances. Magnolia is a super cool, extremely layered and complex web of events with no protagonist. Basically a tale of chance, fate, intertwining lives, etc. It starts hilarious and as the film goes on your smile slowly dims until the end when you are staring into the face of oblivion. Okay not quite. But it's awesome. Probably P.T.A.'s most emotionally varied and powerful movie.

Punch Drunk Love (2002)

I totally thought this was a stupid, cookie-cutter romcom when it came out. In fact, it's actually the most unique and unorthodox romcom ever made! It's phenomenal. It could almost be a horror movie the way it's paced and shot. Adam Sandler is probably the most awkward and socially reclusive protagonist in any movie ever. I thought he had autism for most of the movie (I'm still not sure). The music and the humour and the awkwardness and the camerawork and everything comes together and I fucking loved this movie.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

This is a huge departure from his other movies: way moodier, darker, and more emotional. The performance by Daniel-Day Lewis is probably one of the best film performances...ever. It's unbelievable. The atmosphere, style, and music choices are unbelievable. It's intense and exhilarating and tells a compelling story about capitalism and religion battling over the world. Sort of. Watch it and be amazed. Bring a milkshake.

3D: The Future of Cinema?

2011-01-26T22:48:00.008-05:00

3D: The Next Logical Step?

Is 3D to film what sculpture is to painting?

The recent revival (or perhaps is better put, resurrection) of 3D cinema is a direction for Hollywood that has been met with widespread disapproval and dismissal. 3D, in this view, is used by an increasingly commercialized Hollywood to reel in the bucks from a gullible and gimmick-attracted populace of moviegoers. Roger Ebert is a leading voice, though is not alone, in criticizing 3D. Most of his complaints are legitimate, but still can be overcome, I think, by the creative use of the technology.

3D cinema is not unique in being a technical development met with criticism and dismissal. One is reminded of an early scene in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), wherein an early experiment in sound-film was demonstrated for a party of wealthy showbiz elites, who uniformly dismiss it. They predict the Jazz Singer (1927) to be a flop after its opening week of novelty wears off. Given the 20/20 of hindsight, we are able to chuckle at how wrong they ended up being. Similar criticism of colour film surfaced when it was first revealed: even legendary filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky dismissed colour as a passing fad. It appears as though he reversed that opinion, as he made a number of films in colour (and, in fact, has made some of the most creative use of combining colour with sepia and black and white footage within the same film, thus helping move the advent of colour out of gimmick into the purview of film’s artistry).

As you read my abbreviated history of the two major advents in cinema since editing (sound, colour), you may assume that I’m drawing an image of 3D as the next step in film’s progression, the next major advent in cinema. It’s seen as a gimmick today, but tomorrow may be commonplace, may be part of film’s artistry. Well, I’m not exactly arguing that, but it may be true. I don’t believe 3D will ever become the standard as colour and sound are now, nor do I see 3D as a progression forward. It’s merely a new step, not necessarily forward as James Cameron believes, or backward as Roger Ebert believes. It is a tool which I think some directors can make creative use of, and others will have no interest in. Let both parties thrive, I say. As illustrated by The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), Eraserhead (1976), or Dead Man (1995), colour has not completely killed black and white (though the same can’t be said of sound), and 3D will never kill what is now being referred to as 2D (though is really only another kind of 3D).

First of all, 3D is an advent to film that is quite distinct from sound and colour. Unlike sound and colour, which require nothing more than the working hearing and seeing apparatuses attached to your head, 3D requires something more. The 3D glasses physically filter your perception of the film in a very literal way, getting between the viewer and the screen. It could be seen as something of a perversion of the purity of cinema: it isn’t just light, a screen, and yourself: there is now a lense that manipulates the image before it enters your eyes.

However, this difference is superficial. Yes, the 3D glasses may mediate the image, but wouldn’t regular eyeglasses do the same thing for the three quarters of the world who need them? Do regular eyeglasses do to real life what 3D glasses do to film? Furthermore, technical innovations were required for the advents of sound and colour, and these expenses were in no time unilaterally instituted and became the norm. The 3D glasses may even end up being a positive arrival: it forcefully draws the ADD sufferers and the wandering minds out of the nebula and into the theater. There are likely less cell phone texters, less chatters, and less people waiting by the entrance of a film if the 3D glasses are required. But there is something more legitimate that separates 3D from sound and colour.

3D is not new. In its earliest incarnations, it predates sound. It never really took off, and the moviegoing public was, at best, not sold on the idea of 3D, and at worst, intolerant of it. It all but died out in the last few decades, existing only in the margins of low art, in abysmal films like Spy Kids 3 (2003). But in the past year or so, it’s made a comeback (with no thanks due to James Cameron and the blue-skinned elves of Pandora). Part of the reason the old 3D died out may have been its technical failure: the red/blue eye filters were ridiculous accessories that (literally) got between you and movie in a more noticeable way than 3D’s new incarnation. In that archaic use of 3D, it was routine for a film to misuse the effects, having the red and blue outlines of the images horribly unsynchronized, and visible as two separate images even while wearing the goofy glasses. With Real 3D and Avatar, however, these technical frustrations have been mounted, and it has matured and been refined to the point of being taken seriously (that is, if nauseating post-produced 3D effects such as those in The Last Airbender (2010) or Clash of the Titans (2010) don’t threaten to kill public optimism in the technology).

3D has already had a first go at it, so to speak, and if this second generation of 3D doesn’t stick, I think it’s fair to guess that 3D will never evolve further than the margins of cinema, or in the mainstream as a gimmick to sell tickets. Already its rise is slow and met with widespread criticism and disinterest, thus it wouldn’t be hard to argue that 3D is already condemned to nothing more than the marginal and gimmicky.

However, in the same way a new language needs a generation born immersed in it before it develops a full working grammar, 3D may be a technical advent just waiting for filmmakers to take it seriously. Those of you who take James Cameron seriously may already be convinced, but personally it wasn’t until I heard my film idols talk about 3D that I did. Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter the Void) has suggested that his next film may be a 3D erotic film – and he seems to be serious. Surrealist master David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive) has given and optimistic view of the future of 3D, and called Alioscopy TVs beautiful.

When I heard these artsy directors speak with excitement and seriousness about 3D, I began to think what Stan Brakhage would have done (or will do?) with 3D. I began to picture Enter the Void’s dizzying vivid mystical illusions in 3D, or Lynch’s demented imagery floating in and out of depth between flashes of a strobe light. What if a director decided to film a scene where only one object or character is subjects to 3D effects, or only part of his body jumps out of the flat background? What beautiful tricks of the eye would M.C. Escher have made had he been a filmmaker working in the 3D era?

Can you imagine how mesmerizing and beautiful the Stargate LSD ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) would have been if that kaleidoscope array of colour was seeping out of the screen, shooting right into your face, after a full film of standard 2D?

It dawned on me that with a new major advent in cinema, hundreds of new possibilities open up. It wasn’t until sound was introduced had the musical made its way into film: and elaborate systems of symbolism had developed around use of colour alone, giving filmmakers a channel of expression and creativity unavailable before. Could 3D usher in new forms of symbolism, channels of expression, or even totally new genres as other inventions have before? Maybe.

However, one thing I’m certain that 3D will do is it will return the medium into a state of experimentation characteristic of early cinema, a new kind of ‘cinema of attractions’. There are no conventions in place for the new medium, thus adventurous and unique uses of the technology will emerge. Yes, it began with Avatar and Tron: movies that are basically 2D films shot in 3D. Sound also began similarly: the Jazz Singer was essentially a silent film, with all the conventions of the Silent era in place (even with widespread title cards to boot). Colour is a little different in that it did not recreate the previous generation’s conventions in the new medium, but débuted with a willingness to be different. (Even if you include early forays into colour such as The Great Train Robbery, this holds up.) The Wizard of Oz (1939), though not technically the first colour film, did expertly fuse colour with black and white sequences in a creative way, illustrating the difference between the real and the imaginary. The Wizard of Oz exploited bright garish colours in a way that may be comparable to the gimmicky 3D jumpouts we see in movie like Alice in Wonderland (2010). However, we dismiss 3D jumpouts as stupid tricks, and the overwhelming colour of Oz as beautiful and artistic. I would actually argue that this is a fair judgment (since 3D effects could be used in ways I would call beautiful and artistic without resorting to gimmicks).

However, it isn’t hard to imagine why 3D is confronting so much criticism. You can imagine that those of us immersed in film with deep-seeded personal connections to the artform, who have spent years enjoying, studying, or creating films under a certain conception of what the medium is (and is not) would be at least somewhat skeptical when we have those conceptions flipped upside down. Directors who are planning 3 or 4 movies in the future would have their ideas undermined, and filmgoers who go to films for a familiar and comfortable means of escape would have to cope with cold unfamiliarity. It would, thus, be unfair to categorize all those opposed to 3D as conservative and fearful of change.

As a medium on the brink of adulthood, it has been (and likely will continue to be) misused as a tool of greater realism than a tool for greater formalism. However, these faults are not inherent in the technology itself, and therefore it is the duty of integral, adventurous, and daring filmmakers to push this medium out of its attention-seeking adolescence, and into a new era of greater filmic depth.

Ghost Dog Analysis

2010-12-14T20:11:00.018-05:00

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Analysis

When two things become one

Disclaimer: Do not read beyond the introduction before seeing the film. It 1) is full of spoilers and 2) won’t make any sense to you.

Introduction

“It is bad when one thing becomes two.”

There is a lot going on this movie. And even when we can agree what is the topic of the subtext, there are lots of different ways to interpret what is being said about it. As Pearline comments on the book Rashomon, "It's like a story, but each person in it sees a completely different story." In this sense, Ghost Dog is a modern telling of Rashomon, however the difference is that the event in question isn’t an offscreen murder, but the film itself: something we, the audience, all just witnessed ourselves. There are many comparisons to Jim Jarmusch’s previous film, Dead Man (1995) and the most obvious connection is the appearance of Gary Farmer playing what is credited as being the same character from Dead Man: Nobody. However, the largest difference between the two films is that Dead Man is about two loners who are alienated from their own cultures, whereas Ghost Dog is about two cultures alienated from their time. As Ghost Dog says about himself and Louie, his Italian mobster counterpart, his “Reclaimer,” as he calls him: “We're from different ancient tribes. Now we're both almost extinct." Dead Man is about two cultural-outsiders banding together; Ghost Dog is about two outsider-cultures battling it out.

The Code

What is Ghost Dog?

People like to know who and what they are. People define themselves, usually, by what they are not – we need to put something outside of us in order to give ourselves context, a point of reference. We instinctively desire Brave New World’s motto: community, stability, and identity. We must divide the world into like me, and unlike me. Into us and them. Into insiders and outsiders. If we don’t know who we are, we have no ground to stand on, no basis to form our lives and identities. This is the origin of contemporary gangs: a shared identity, a sense of belonging. Once we do acquire a knowledge of who we are and who are not us, we’ve formed an exclusive club: a clan: a code: the society. The society, with shared goals, culture, or language, is the lens through which we understand our reality: without it we are lost amid a storm of incertitude, in constant flux. Or maybe, as linguist James Paul Gee (1990) puts it:

“What is important is not language, and surely not grammar, but saying (writing)-doing-valuing-believing-combinations. These combinations I will refer to as ‘Discourses’, with a capital ‘D' (‘discourse' with a little 'd', I will use for connected stretches of language that make sense, like conversations, stories, reports, arguments, essays; 'discourse' is part of 'Discourse' — 'Discourse' with a big 'D' is always more than just language).”

Gee’s take, and one director Jim Jarmusch is obviously sympathetic to, is that language itself (and not only the words of language, but the doing-valuing-believing-combinations that comprise larger experiences of language) are central to our identities in a given social context. (Gee and his emphasis on Discourse with a capital D. Gee D. GD. Ghost Dog.) What is Ghost Dog? What society (Discourse, Way, Code) does he belong to? The obvious answer can be found by looking at the second half of the film’s title: The Way of the Samurai. The Way of the Samurai is a code. It is a code that Ghost Dog, the character, follows and lives by. But it is not the only code in his life. Ghost Dog, the character, is an in-between. He belongs to and employs a variety of codes in his life. Like the magic device he uses to open locked cars, Ghost Dog effortlessly enters societies and employs their codes. Ghost Dog is a shape shifter with no original form: a social chameleon. He is the wedge in the center of a Venn diagram between America, Africa, Japan. A hit man, a gangster, a samurai. He is a grey area between East and West. He is fluent in many other codes: he can take the form of Bob Solo, he can take the form of baby-sitting-book-lover with Pearline, he can take the form of Chess-buddy with Raymond, he can take the form of a gangster willing to steal your car or mug you for your clothes, he can take the form of loving caretaker for the pigeons.

Ghost Dog is many things, but first and foremost he is a chameleon. Ghost Dog is also a pigeon, in the sense that he is a pidgin (a hybrid of two languages that came into contact). Since, essentially, a language is, in a way, the practical state of a code, (and a Nation-State is, in a way, the geographical state of a code) Ghost Dog is the pidgin between the codes that surround him. He is the center hub of an expanding network of codes – the center of the ancient Japanese flag, the Rising Sun, shining off in all directions.

The References

Ghost Dog, the film, is also the center of a massive network of references. It’s not unlikely that one of them is to the film Network. Referring to his grandson who is sticking his head out of an apartment window, Louie says, “…Now he’s mad as hell.” And he’s not gonna take it any more? (See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ELleCQvew) An important reference, obviously, the Japanese film Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Another Kurosawa film parallels Ghost Dog: the samurai film Yojimbo. Tishoru Mifune plays the stoic, emotionless, Ghost Dog-like Sanjuro the samurai. Mifune enters a town as the stranger, he steps in between a feud involving two houses, and aligns with neither. Mifune’s character, like Ghost Dog, is the wedge in the Venn diagram between them. Belonging to neither, but going in and out of both. Ghost Dog does this with the street gangsters. In the film a red-clad gang greet him as he exits the Birdland store where he buys his bird food. They greet him with reverence, saying, “Knowledge to knowledge.” An all blue-clad gang rap about him with as much reverence. But Ghost Dog does not hesitate to rob a blue car with blue headlights from a blue parking garage. He doesn’t think twice about robbing the red convertible. Ghost Dog is, in some ways, very unlike a loyal dog.

It’s interesting, then, that a musical motif from one of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western’s surfaces in one of the rap songs on Ghost Dog’s stereo. The same theme Ennio Morricone wrote for For a Few Dollars More, it being the middle (in-between) film in a trilogy inspired by Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. (Compare 1:45 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqpEXI5C3Ck to 1:22 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFtmdorQG-U) These Leone films were what won now legendary Clint Eastwood his first success. The references loop around through the network back to Ghost Dog through Bird, a film directed by Eastwood starring Forest Whitaker as titular role Charlie Parker. Jarmusch paints a swirling circle of references around Ghost Dog, by having the chameleon buy his bird food at, yes, Birdland – the same name of the club Charlie Parker played in. More references surround Ghost Dog bilaterally: the actor who plays Handsome Frank bears an uncanny resemblance to Salvador Dali, surrealist artist who worked with Luis Bunuel on another Dog movie, Un Chien Andalou. Un Chien Andalou is renowned for its cut between the moon and an eye: both being sliced horizontally, by a cloud and a knife, respectively. Ghost Dog features a number of shots the moon, and a number of Whitaker’s lazy eye – very much like the eyes of a chameleon. Neither is being sliced, but the moon is halved, and the eyes are not synchronized.

There is possibly, also, a sly Godfather reference, which undoubtedly is an icon in the Italian mobster’s mythos. When Ghost Dog climbs up to his roof and finds the pigeons all murdered, there are orange lights in the background, and even an orange (the fruit) lying on the ground, which may be a reference to the Francis Ford Coppola’s use of the colour orange to symbolize death in his gangster epic. A more broad and important reference is to Le Samouraï (1967), a French film by Jean-Pierre Melville. These two films connect in a number of ways. Jef Costello, in Le Samouraï, is a loner, who takes care of a bird, and kills people for money. The two films follow almost identical plots, and even have some similar characters, props, costumes, techniques, and dialogue. Jef Costello has a giant ring of keys, allowing him to penetrate and use any car, similar to Ghost Dog’s updated, electronic version. It appears Ghost Dog is a (post)modern remake of Le Samouraï.

The film references French, American, Italian and Japanese films: all the importance languages and cultures in the film. There are likely far more references than these such as the stare-off from Do the Right Thing, also a film about racial ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, the name Bob Solo, a combination of Harrison Ford names from Star Wars/American Graffiti (remember, it is bad when one thing becomes two, but good when two things become one [also note the emphasis on language in Star Wars and culture in American Graffiti]).

Whether or not the references are intentional, they form an outward circular Rising Sun, or a protective moat surrounding the film, a lot like the circular, insular, protective qualities of a society striving to maintain their collective identity. Like a group of people protecting their code.

The Visions

Ghost Dog is not as protective of his code as the circular, insular members of more defensive clans: the Italian gangsters and their racist dismissal of all “others” as the same. “Indians, niggers, same thing,” croaks a near-deaf senior. Their insular nature only goes so far – they fail to catch the punchline of their own joke, and their guilt of applying strange nicknames to their members just like the “others”. Ghost Dog carries an inner-dissonance, best shown in a scene where he witnesses a black gangster (someone he can identify with) trying to mug an elderly Asian man (someone, too, he can identify with). Before he can decide which team to cheer for, the Asian team wins the game, and Ghost Dog is left with a haunted facial expression, as though he doesn’t know who he is. This scene, I believe, is a surreal vision: Ghost Dog is actually looking into a mirror. He sees inside himself the New Way, personified by the young black gangster, confronting the Old Way of the samurai, personified by the elderly Asian man. The Old Way wins out – for now – but there is a yearning inside Ghost Dog to belong to a society that may eventually chip away at the Old Way. The catalyst for the vision is without a doubt the friendly reception from the red-clad gangsters outside of Birdland seconds early. “Knowledge to knowledge.”

This isn’t the only surreal vision Ghost Dog encounters. He later parks his stolen Lexus near two camouflaged hillbilly hunters, whom he kills. These bigoted hunters are the only southerners in the movie, and dressed in camouflage for hunting – a practice normally carried out in bright orange vests. This, too, is a self-reflexive vision. Ghost Dog, in his mirror, sees a version of himself. He is camouflaged, like the chameleon, and he is eliminating an almost-extinct group of people. Ghost Dog is killing off the gangsters, eliminating the old and irrelevant Way of the Italian mobsters. In the inverted vision, he, the bear, also a subscriber to an old and irrelevant Way, is being hunted down. This vision, like the first, exposes a dissonance inside Ghost Dog: he is eliminating an Old Way, though he himself is an Old Way. Ghost Dog and his target are inseparable. Ghost Dog is shooting into a mirror, and committing seppuku. This is why Ghost Dog’s death was inevitable: it was part of his own designs: inherit in his project.

A Network

Like the film’s many references, and like the character’s many identities, Ghost Dog has a number of subtexts: a network of messages. And they all converge; they all share an overlap. It emphasizes communication (conveyance), language (what is conveyed), semiotics (the system of conveyance), culture (the context of conveyance), and film itself (the medium of conveyance). Where to they converge? Well, obviously, in the theme of conveyance itself: but in a deeper, more philosophical sense, they overlap on meaning. Ghost Dog is a sincerely existential movie, for what is existence itself but raw meaning? (There wouldn’t be any reality if you didn’t have anyone to share it with. [Self/other…]) Some of the ideas connected here are not explicitly or even implicitly connected to the film: they happen to discuss topics in the film, and I am using them to expand on themes therein.

Ghost Dog the Silencer

What is communication? Simplified, it is “Knowledge to knowledge.” Like the suppressor for his guns he himself builds, Ghost Dog is a silencer. He breaks communications. Not only literally, cutting the television connection of Valerio’s house, but metaphorically. The film emphasized communication, and the lack of it. Pigeons carrying messages fly past telephone wires (old/new means of conveyance). People are clarifying things for each, even the nearly deaf elderly mobster who echoes what was just said: “He said ‘Ghost Dog!’”

There may also be a more deeply coded reference to communication, namely the reference to two opposing theories in communication studies. The transmission model, plots a simple linear path of knowledge from a source to a receiver (similar to the path of the television broadcast into your living room). The transmission model overvalues its effects, overdetermines its influence, overstates change, paints the receiver as powerless. There is also the ritual model (or the cultural model), which recognizes a society’s communication as a reaffirmation of the culture, recognizing all communication as a symbolic process representing shared conceptions in order to maintain a society. Jarmusch undoubtedly takes the side of the ritual model in Ghost Dog, not only for its emphasis on the attempts of cultures to maintain themselves, but also on its emphasis on symbolic representation. Think of the cartoon TV shows: cartoons are pure representation, reaffirming cultural values like fighting death (Woody the Woodpecker having a laugh-off with Death), dominating nature (Betty Bop directing the pigeons), or the need for a climax to a film (Itchy and Scratchy’s battles escalating into the sun). Cultures have existed that did not demonize death as we do, did not lord over nature as we do, and certainly the medium of Film does not naturally result in the cultural form of ‘a movie’ with a climaxing plot structure. But these cultural values are not being created by the symbolic representation of communication (in this case, cartoons) and inserted into us, as the transmission model would suggest, but they already exist in the culture and are just being reaffirmed for greater solidarity, as the ritual model suggests.

The fact that the cartoons breach their fourth wall internal to the film by referencing what has just happened further emphasizes 1) the impact of symbolic representation on real life, 2) the fact that this film is also just as much symbolic representation as the cartoons are (even though cartoons are easier to recognize as such), and 3) the values represented in the cartoons already exist in the culture.

Another way in which the film touches on communication studies is in Stuart Hall’s theory of Encoding/Decoding as a scheme of how meaning occurs. There are producers, like the writers of Pearline’s books, like the broadcasters of the radio show that say ice cream is good, or like Jarmusch himself. The producers encode meaning into their creations. However, what the audience understands is not necessarily the same as the producers. The audience’s decoded meaning is not always what the producer encoded. Therefore meaning occurs in the audience’s reading. Thus, like Rashomon, there is not necessarily one ultimate truth, one meaning to a text. Meaning does not occur in speaking, but in hearing: ergo self and other, for if we were all truly one, there would be no one to make meaning. (A relevant aside: Jarmusch is fond of the quote, ‘You can understand the poem without knowing what it means.’)

The film may depict a progression from interpersonal media (message from one sender to one receiver: one to one speech, telephone calls, the pigeons) to mass media (one to many: the radio talking about ice cream, the television cartoons, the mass-print books Pearline carries around) to network media (many to many: internet is the prime example, and though the film is lacking such a concrete image, it does seem to emphasize networks and non-hierarchical systems).

The film itself appears to some sort of narrative from how language is established, succeeds in conveying meaning, and then is no longer relevant, falls apart, ceases to convey meaningfully. Like the Italian mobsters, who can only convey meaningfully to others clinging to their Old Way, to their group, their language has failed. (As Louie says, “Nothing seems to make sense any more.”) Conversely, Ghost Dog, who is open and floating freely on the river of meaning, clinging to nothing and moving in flux with the tides, can understand even those speaking another language altogether. His job is to silence those would rather cling than float freely. However, in the end Ghost Dog himself clings to the notion of floating freely, and undermines his own efforts. As he says near the end of the film, “Everything around us seems to be changing, huh, Louie?” He can identify with the mobster’s struggle to cling to a Way, to a certain meaning, amid changing times.

Ghost Dog the Pidgin

Something central to all of Jarmusch’s films is the theme of language, and the interaction between different languages. I’ve already mentioned the parallel between the pidgin language Ghost Dog operates within and the pigeons he cares for. (It may also be worth noting the Haitian French is sort of a pigeon [a Creole, actually], as is Jamaican: both of these cultures are mentioned, if briefly, in the film.) But there’s more in the realm of (applied) linguistics (and Discourse studies) that relates to this film: particularly in how language and identity interact. Gee’s notion of the identity kit and its relationship to language is also key to Ghost Dog:

“A Discourse is a sort of 'identity kit' which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize. Imagine what an identity kit to play the role of Sherlock Holmes would involve: certain clothes, certain ways of using language (oral language and print), certain attitudes and beliefs, allegiance to a certain life style, and certain ways of interacting with others.”

Ghost Dog’s magic (identity) kit, carried in his saxophone case, is full of tools that allow him to penetrate other ‘hoods’ (that is, vehicles), to listen in on other people’s language, to blend in. Like Felix the cat’s magic bag that can change into anything that the context needs, Ghost Dog’s identity kit is ever changing – is actually many identity kits.

Ghost Dog is also wealthy in what sociologists and applied linguists call cultural capital. If applied cultural know-how and the ability to have a flexible changing identity were a commodity, essentially, Ghost Dog would be swimming in it (contrary to his low-class portrayal). His knowledge of different cultural contexts and ability to apply that knowledge in different contexts (at many different levels of group membership) is what gives him the capacity to contain multiple identities. As an aside, the inclusion of Gary Farmer as ‘Nobody’ (the character he plays in Jarmusch’s previous black and white western, Dead Man) may be a reference to Gee’s notion of the ‘real Indian’ (simplified and in short, a ‘real Indian’ is someone who isn’t acting a role, but naturally is the role, who fits the context he or she is put in, unlike a Barbie in a biker bar).

There is also mention of the internalization of language in two important ways. One, when Ghost Dog eats (consumes) Louie’s message from the pigeon (thus literally internalizing the words). The second example of this is when Ghost Dog asks Pearline what’s inside her lunch box, and she reveals it to be books. Books are substituting food in this case: ready for consumption and internalization. Why is this important? Well it likely relates to Lev Vygotsky’s notion of a, “verbally organized world schema.” That our world is the one inside our minds: the world of internal language. “The world we respond to is the world as we represent it to ourselves.” (Janna Fox, 2010). It’s the language inside of us that defines how we experience the universe, how we understand and perceive reality, and even how we react to that reality. Yes, our experiences shape our identity, but our language shapes our experience. This may be one justification for the Rashomon reference – an emphasis on the subjectivity of perception, caused by different kinds of internal languages.

This also relates to Jarmusch’s own philosophies as he has expressed them in interviews. After a showing of his films in Iceland, he told a story from his childhood, when his father chastised him and told him, “how the world really works.” Jarmusch then concluded that others couldn’t tell him how the world really is, because the world is inside himself: he is the interpreter and thus creator of the world. (He says it somewhere in here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbiWN-RdXuc) This is also reflected in the lyrics to the song Lies to Live By from Jarmusch’s band The Del-Byzantines, which go, “If I only have one life, let me live it as a lie.” The only difference between then and now is that Jarmusch no longer calls it a lie, but believes that a subjective experience of the world is all there is, and is equal to all others. It isn’t a lie: it’s the truth.

Ghost Dog the Sign Killer

There is an important scene towards the beginning of the film, where Ghost Dog walks around a street corner, and as he appears (seemingly unnoticed by the men on the street, like a real ghost) the signs in the shop windows go out. The presence of Ghost Dog ensures the absence of the signs. Ghost Dog is also a murderer, but on screen those aren’t real people being murdered, just light arranged to signify a person: a sign. Ghost Dog is a sign killer.

For those who are unfamiliar with the basics of semiotics, essentially it’s the science of signs or the language of language. Its building blocks are a trinity: the sign, the signifier, and the signified. In this context, the sign is the complete meaning: a signifier and a signified interlocked. The signifier is the tangible, physical aspect of the sign: for example the word “dog,” whether written or spoken. The signified is the intangible concept that a signifier refers to, gives rise to, or intelligibly evokes in our minds: for example our mental picture of a dog. The signified and the signifier must coexist together and must remain together, otherwise meaning will vanish. But that’s not all that’s required for meaning to occur: the sign must exist in a code that a number of people use. A fully-fledged sign (signifier/signified together in harmony) is useless if the user is speaking to a mirror. There must be a society surrounding and using the code.

This duality of meaning (signifier/signified) surfaces throughout the film. Even the name Ghost Dog conjures an image of a both worldly tangible (dog) and an intangible concept (ghost). But it’s also reflected in the Samurai relationship between the Reclaimer and the Samurai, the latter who must at all costs remain loyal (like a dog?) to its Master. It is also reflected in the Hagakure quote,

“It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything that is called a Way. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all ways and be more and more in accord with his own.”

A prime example of semiotics occurs during Ghost Dog’s encounter with Handsome Frank. Shortly before plugging him, Handsome Frank asks Ghost Dog, “What do you want? My Rolex?” There is a lot of semiotics at work here. First of all, Handsome Frank sees a black man in his house uninvited and reads the sign as though he’s a burglar. Secondly, Handsome Frank asks if he wants the Rolex of all things. What he really meant was, “Do you want my possessions?” Why did he choose the Rolex specifically to embody all possessions: to embody possessionness? Because the Rolex is the signifier, and wealth is the signified. The watch itself holds no monetary value: is not wealth in itself, but he assumes this burglar is after the signifier of wealth: in pursuit of the appearance of meaning within the semiotic code of the society. But Ghost Dog’s project is to dismantle their society’s code, not to operate within its boundaries. Handsome Frank did not realize that this was a true “other,” outside of even the mainstream society Frank’s mobster-kind rejects.

But the code doesn’t work perfectly just like that. There are problems. There are misreadings, showing the innate unreliability of signs. As is written in Introducing Postmodernism (on a section about philosopher Jacques Derrida), “Against the essentialist notion of certainty of meaning, Derrida mobilizes the central insight of structuralism – that meaning is not inherit in signs, nor in what they refer to, but results purely from the relationships between them.” (page 79)

There are straight misreadings: the elderly Asian man is misread as weak and vulnerable, and turns out to be agile and powerful. There are also split-signifiers (a signifier that doesn’t neatly refer to one signified, but to two: one word referring to two concepts. Things like the signifier “Gangster.” Is it referring to the Italian mobsters, à la Godfather, or the street-rappers à la Wu-Tang? What about the word hood? In the (street) gangster terminology (or code) it means (neighbor)hood. In the idiom of everyday English users, a hood is something you put up on your head. Interesting, then, that Jarmusch has Ghost Dog put on his own personal hood as he drives the stolen car out of his (neighbor)hood. Or if you take the example of the second stolen car (the convertible) Ghost Dog raises the car’s hood. Other misreadings arise in the confusion between English and French. For example, the pigeons end their flight at the bird coup. The word coup is French for cut (‘cutting’ is important for its samurai as well as filmic properties). One meaning: two words.

But the misreadings can go the other way: split-signifieds: a signified that isn’t neatly referred to by one signifier, but by two different signifiers. One concept being referred to: two different words referring to it. In an early scene when Louie is being interrogated by Vargo and Valerio, Louie refers to the same person in two different ways. “The girl,” and then corrects himself, looking at Vargo, “…mister Vargo’s daughter.” Later, Louie tells a dying Vinnie “You just shot a broad.” Vinnie corrects him, “I shot a cop.” Or, again bringing up the English/French conflict, as Louie stands waiting, ready for the final shootout, Raymond tells Ghost Dog, “C’est louis.” In English, meaning “It’s him.” However, “louis,” and “Louie” are pronounced identically. Two words: one meaning.

Ghost Dog also emphasizes the empty gesture: a sign out of context, in the wrong code, signifying no meaning. The most glaring example is Ghost Dog’s ritualistic swoosh of his blade as he sheathes it. This swinging (which also makes the ∞ infinite shape) originally had a very practical worldly use: to sweep off the blood from the blade. But it has become a ritual, and Ghost Dog performs the motion when sheathing his guns (in no need of cleaning). The gesture, once removed form its context, holds no meaning.

The final case of semiotics in Ghost Dog is the notion of the floating signifier: a signifier without a signified attached. A word that has no specific meaning. David Chandler describes it as, “a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified.” This notion is capitalized by the postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida, who suggests there is a “freeplay” of signifiers, emphasizing the tenuousness, the artificiality, the cultural construction of the signifier/signified relationship, and that signifiers are not tied to their single signified (with the loyalty of a dog, you could say). What a perfect image to represent this notion of a “floating signified,” but the opening shot: one of a pigeon floating freely, with nothing behind it but empty skies – nothing to compare it to, nothing to give it context or meaning outside of itself. The bird flies remaining within the center of the frame – moving but not going anywhere.

If we take the image of the floating pigeon as a representation of the “floating signifier,” ready to be painted with any meaning we project onto it, it’s important then that that opening shot is superimposed over Ghost Dog’s face as he reminisces on his past: specifically on the day Louie saved his life, the event remembered differently by him than by Louie. Rashomon: the narrative of an ancient “floating signifier,” of the evasion of objective truth; of one single signifier referring to one single signified.

Ghost Dog the Bear

There are insiders and there are outsiders. We see people huddle together, dressed alike, talking alike, or having a shared goal. We see people in the fringes of the screen, huddled in close-knit circle, at picnic tables eating, around chess sets playing, in the park rapping. The insider-outsider scheme is important; it shows what happens when different Codes or Ways rub up against each other. Sometimes, in the case of an inclusive or expansive vessel, the Codes overlap and coexist, as is the case with Ghost Dog. Sometimes, the Codes are insular or violent, and this leads to the Old Ways of Italian mobsters’ racist remarks, lobbing all “others,” into one inferior category. As is said, “It is bad when one thing becomes two.” Ghost Dog is many things becoming one. He contains a number of identities, and may even thus personify America’s dismissal of such a character. As Gee explains,

“The individual instantiates, gives body to, a Discourse every time he or she acts or speaks, and thus carries it, and ultimately changes it, through time. Americans tend to be very focused on the individual, and thus often miss the fact that the individual is simply the meeting point of many, sometimes conflicting, socially and historically defined Discourses.”

This insider-outside scheme leads to escalation, like the Itchy and Scratchy battle in the final cartoon. It seems to be Ghost Dog’s purpose to stop the escalation, to wipe out the groups that practice the insider-outsider-identity. But in so doing, Ghost Dog is himself guilty of the same crime, making an “other” of those who practice bigotry, making an “outsider,” of all those who see the world differently than him. He makes a “them” out of those who divide the world into “us and them”. His end was necessary, was part of his own designs, was his seppuku.

Film: The New Old Way

Ghost Dog is killing Italian mobsters. Italy was the cultural center of the Renaissance, where the art of painting famously flourished, and reigned as a central cultural form. There is a sly reference to a Caravaggio painting in the framing of the above screenshot, but the Old Way of painting is growing stale (as can be seen by the tacky, electric-lit Italian painting in Louie’s apartment). Even experimental modern painters like Salvador Dali (Handsome Bob) have to go. They are being replaced by the New Way, film. Ghost Dog, in this subtext, represents film itself. He is a walking collection of movie clichés: he’s a samurai, he’s a hitman, and he’s a gangster. His saxophone case (a reference to Bird) contains filmic objects: an audio device for listening in, a gun for shooting, his knives for cutting, etc. And at the climax he plays out another film cliché: the Western gunslinger showdown at High Noon, with church bell tolling and all, and the death of the hero. (Also note the layered wordplay: Ghost Dog is unarmed, Louie is also unarmed but in a different way. He’s literally a gunslinger.) In this light, Ghost Dog was removing the Old Way, painting, from prominence to replace it with film as the society’s major artistic medium. But even afterwards Ghost Dog dies. Film is destined to some day fall to same fate as painting. As filmmaker Gaspar Noé says, “Cinema is going to get old quickly.” (See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxmHmcyOtKM) Film is now over a hundred years old: it is the New Old Way.

Two

Ghost Dog is referred to as a Bear, as a Cat, as a Pigeon, as a Chameleon, and, of course, as a Dog. Where do you find all these animals? Well Noah’s ark, of course, where a certain Way will survive the flood, where two of each animal is assembled. Two appears to be an important number to the film. Binary oppositions dot it: vanilla and chocolate, black and white (skin, chess), English and French, signifier and signified, the double meanings of words: pigeon/pidgin, hood/hood, gangster/gangster. The double loop of the infinity sign. Two is an important number to meaning, too, since without contrast, meaning cannot occur. “If everything was red, there would be no word for the colour red,” (Michael Goodson, 2010). The study of semiotics lists a number of key things for meaning to occur, and one of them is that a sign is unique to all other signs. Contrast is required.

And for all its eastern philosophy, Jarmusch resists the urge to paint a yin-yang symbol anywhere within his film (though perhaps multiple shots of the moon is the closest thing to it [a white dot on a black sphere]). Instead, he shapes the canvas of the film itself as a yin-yang. A network of opposites united. Ghost Dog is the space between the binary, perhaps personifying Jacques Derrida’s notion of freeplay between opposites. Yet, this seemingly transcendence of a Way is itself a Way, and in the true tradition of the samurai, it must commit seppuku. It is caught in the contradiction of postmodernism, which makes a grand overarching transcending statement of truth in saying, “there are no grand overarching transcending truths.” What is Ghost Dog? He is the fairy-tale hero for the 21st century. He is postmodernism personified.

Bibliography list:

Gee, J.P. “Social Linguistics and Literacies” (1990) / www.curricublog.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/gee-discourses-1990.pdf

Thiltges, A. "The Semiotics of Alienation and Emptiness in the Films of Jim Jarmusch" (2002) / http://www.jim-jarmusch.net/biblio/online/amy_thiltges_the_semiotics_.html

David Chandler. “Semiotics for Beginners.” (2001) / http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02a.html

Richard Appignanesi, Chris Garratt, Ziauddin Sardar & Patrick Curry. “Introducing Postmodernism” (2007). / http://www.introducingbooks.com/book/view/postmodernism

Heaton, Dave. “"Almost Extinct" Spirits of the Ages Meet: Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog under partial study” (2001) / http://www.erasingclouds.com/06ghostdog.html

Janna Fox, power point slides + class notes from ALDS 1101, Carleton University, 2010

Michael Goodson, class notes, Film/Video, John McCrae Secondary School, 2010