Video – Page 38 – Press Play Video Blog

VIDEO ESSAY: Women in the Works of Martin Scorsese

The first time I saw After
Hours (the first of 9 or 10), I was 15, and I had no idea who Martin
Scorsese was, or even that he had directed the movie. I saw it in a shopping
mall in north Dallas, an unlikely place, perhaps. I was surprised, as a 15-year-old boy, to discover a
man had directed it; I had assumed it was directed by a woman.
Why? Because women ruled the show. The female characters in the film—Catherine
O’Hara’s manipulative Samaritan, Rosanna Arquette’s vulnerable and elusive
temptress, Linda Fiorentino’s frequently topless sculptor, Teri Garr’s
threatening sociopath with a beehive—lorded it over the men. Who represents
“the stronger sex” in this film? Griffin Dunne’s hapless wanderer, John Heard’s
sad-sack bartender, and, two pieces de
resistance, Cheech and Chong’s local burglars. The film chronicles a trip
into the New York demimonde, as such a place ruled by women. And how does the
journey end? Dunne is sealed in a plaster statue—by a woman. He manages to
break free, but still. Such it is with many of Scorsese’s films: while we
cannot call these works matriarchal, by any means, in the struggle between men
and women, everyone gets punished. No one comes out on top. Scorsese rolls out
dramas for us to behold, in which men act badly towards women, women are
aggrieved, men charge off in a cloud of exhaust, and there is no indication that
the director, in the background, has chosen a side.

And so it is with many of Scorsese’s films. When Lorraine
Bracco’s Karen chews out Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill for standing her up in Goodfellas, she doesn’t do it privately:
she does it publicly, in front of a rapt crowd, the most rapt audience member
being Hill himself, half-smiling as his future wife screams at him. Even the
ever-so-famous restaurant tracking shot, in which Hill leads his girlfriend
into a mobster-hangout restaurant through the back way, showing his knowledge
of the place off to her and then showing her off to his friends, presents as a
grand, performative display, too over-the-top to be believable as anything but
a subtle critique of the way men may place women on pedestals in an effort to
cripple them. In Scorsese’s films, this doesn’t work, or at least not smoothly;
most of the men in Goodfellas,
indeed, end up either dead or emasculated. Scorsese pulls an even grander stunt
in Taxi Driver; the two main female
characters in the film, Jodie Foster’s teen prostitute and Cybill Shepard’s politician,
serve little other purpose than to cast Travis Bickle’s tremendous personality
problems into relief. He views these women as icons of purity, figures of worship,
points of escape—but in reality his interactions with them only drive him
further downwards by reminding him of how far upwards he has to climb.

And yet throughout these films, Scorsese watches: he does
not opinionate. In one of the most seemingly humiliating scenes from Wolf of Wall Street, a woman is covered
in money, quite literally, but she notably remains standing and even banters
with her sleazy Wall Street assailants during the process. When DiCaprio’s
Belfort dares his wife to throw a glass of water on him, the moment is
near-comic: Belfort is scared, genuinely scared, of a glass of water. Could he,
despite his success, be powerless in this arena, in some sense? Yes, he could. And
when his wife states that the skirtage around the house is going to be “really
short” after a heated argument, it’s no joke, rather a statement of power, an
assertion of privilege.

Regardless of how raffish, aggressive, or un-controlled
Scorsese’s characters may be at times (and Wolf
of Wall Street has come under heavy criticism for just this quality), his
dramas take place on a grand scale, in which largeness is the point. When
Sharon Stone’s Ginger struts through Casino, she knows all eyes are on her, and
Scorsese knows it, too, and yet his camera is not objectifying her: he’s
showing our objectification to us. Her collapse, similarly, is immense, and
theatrical, and threatens to swallow the movie at moments—and yet this fall
from grace is a stage in a story, not a stage in a director’s thought process.
It is appropriate that the film that put Scorsese on the map, or at least
pushed him towards it, was Alice Doesn’t
Live Here Anymore, the tale of a woman’s slow journey towards self-respect. Viewed this way, historically, we come to a surprising conclusion: that a man whose films have largely been about a male-dominated world might have been showing us that world only to reflect women’s views of it.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: The Coen Canon

Simply put, fear is funny. More clearly put, fear is at the root of much of what we consider humorous in films, even though we might not recognize it as such. We call it by different names—confusion, precariousness, coincidence—but the fear that something, whether it’s a job, a relationship, or some larger dramatic situation, might go wrong is always present in cinematic humor. This tendency goes back to the earliest comic films. In one famous scene in Modern Times, Chaplin’s factory worker is supplied with an eating machine intended to feed him while he works, but he can’t eat and work at the same time, and so he’s bombarded by hot dogs and corn on the cob. We laugh a lot at this—not only because of Chaplin’s droll presentation, but because we fear the machine might never stop. In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, we laugh at Alvy Singer’s caustic observations on his surroundings partially because of Allen’s cleverness but also partially because it spooks us, momentarily, that someone noticed the same thing about other humans that we did. In Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, we laugh because we envision a future in which Steve Martin and John Candy might never return home, but also because we know they will eventually return, in one form or another. When we watch Groundhog Day, we fear that Bill Murray will never wake up—but we also, in some small, quiet part of ourselves know that he will, so it’s okay to laugh. Fear and comedy are linked in the Coen brothers’ films as well—and more directly. This connection is a large part of what gives the films their power: we come to expect humor borne out of despair from these two minds, and we wonder what variation will arise next.

From their earliest films onwards, the Coens have used and exploited varying shapes and forms of the horrific for their comic potential. In Barton Fink, our first glimpse of the titular character (John Turturrro) shows him with a mortified expression on his face. Why is he mortified? Because, while watching his play being performed, he is scared of becoming second-rate. It would be easy enough, as well, to read the film’s conclusion, resounding with Charlie Meadows’ (John Goodman) near-immortal “I’ll show you the life of the mind,” as a suggestion that to truly look into the mind would be more terrifying than any of Fink’s visions of mediocrity; even so, the tone of the statement has a slightly leering quality to it, as if the very idea were a joke. In Raising Arizona, what do H.I.’s escaped con pals (John Goodman and William Forsythe) do when they realize they’ve lost Nathan, Jr,? They scream, loudly and comically. Why? Because they’re scared of what the baby might be feeling, the baby’s sense of terror being as far from their experience as they can imagine. This exploration continues as the Coens’ films progress. Fargo is memorable not so much as a crime story as for its interweaving of the violent and the comic. When silent, brooding Gaer Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) blows a police officer’s head off from his car seat, the action is horrifying but also delivered with semi-comic timing; when Grimsrud feeds Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) into a wood chipper, we’re repulsed, of course, but we also giggle, a little, as we do when Jean Lundegaard, after being tied up in a kidnapping staged by her husband and having a hood thrown over her head, rolls helplessly around in the snow. The comedy here is a strong mix of terror and slapstick, made all the more dramatic by the flat, relaxed quality of its characters’ Midwestern accents. The Big Lebowski balances its share of fear and comedy, as well—the precariousness we witness here is the upending of the daily assumptions by which The Dude (Jeff Bridges) lives, on a daily basis. First his rug is stolen, then he’s attacked, then he’s drugged by a porn king—the obvious question, and the big question, is: what next? And the tumbleweed at the end of the film provides an answer, of sorts: because we don’t know, the best answer is to drift, and to take things lightly if we can. There are many darkly comic moments in No Country for Old Men, which flash by us like bullets, but the brothers slow down to present us with one scene which is pure Coeniana, as well as comic, as well as connected, one one level, to fear: a scene in which a black dog chases Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). The dog runs after him, leaps after him, and, perhaps most memorably, swims after him, through rapids and waterfalls, across fields, over fences. Moss runs, of course, because, despite his courage in some ways, he is in some way scared of the dog, and beyond that, scared of being pinned down. Fear is all over A Serious Man, primarily fear of the future, and what grim events it might hold—and yet the Coens, by their own testimony, considered the torture of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) to be central to its comedy, right up to the tornado in its conclusion. Fear lurks in Inside Llewyn Davis too, when viewed from the right perspective. There’s the much-chronicled runaway cat scene, in which Davis could be said to be scared of losing a part of himself, maudlin as the chase might be; but there’s also the fear that goes into any sort of performance, the fear that accompanies any launch of self into the void of an audience’s ears or eyes or minds, a fear empowered and increased by the great, great risk of failure. or rejection.

This is not to say that this is the only thing driving the Coen brothers’ movies. It’s certainly not. Their love of interiors, of drowning us in a certain period, along with the mood of that period; or their love of language (from Miller’s Crossing’s “What’s the rumpus?” to “He’s givin’ me the high hat!” to the outlandishly long sentences of True Grit, largely taken from Charles Portis’s book but doubtless part of what attracted them to the project; or their fascination with dream logic, cf. the progress of Barton Fink from a stiff stage play to a burning hotel—all of these things are part of the mixture as well. But without their humor, and without its (ironically) fearless push to the brink of disaster, their work might not be as compelling. The blazing, wild humor in their films serves as the mystery factor, the invisible keystone in an arch of energized idiosyncrasy. — Max Winter

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: Dragons in Movies

HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS
by Matthew Cheney

In Siegfried’s Death, the first part of Fritz Lang’s 1924 epic Die Nibelungen, Siegfried slays a dragon and bathes in its blood, making himself invincible (except for a spot of skin that was covered by a leaf). The dragon is a lizard-like creature, more dinosaur than mythic god. Siegfried’s triumph is the triumph of a human over the ancient, bestial powers of Nature; it is a short-lived triumph, though, for as the title of the episode states, Lang’s film is a story of death.

In confronting dragons, humans confront an ancient, alien Nature. Unlike the other popular fantasy figures these days—vampires and zombies—dragons are not transmuted humans, but rather something beyond us, other than us. Often, they are represented as deeply greedy, and this is their fatal flaw (e.g. Smaug in The Hobbit). They guard, hoard, and covet. Within most fantasy stories, they’re part of a medieval environment and their greed stands in contrast to the commons. The triumph of the little human against the dragon is a heroic reappropriation of resources and a signal of the human ability to triumph over the hoard of Nature—the dragon must die for civilization to advance. Sometimes, as with Die Nibelungen, that triumph and advancement is questioned, but most stories of good little warriors triumphing over inherently unknowable, evil dragons are stories of hard-won triumph, with nary a glance to the dark satanic mills ahead. The unspoken truth is that such dragons never die, but instead finds their revenge in human progress, their fire diffused through factory furnaces, their smoke blotting out the sky, as the smog of Smaug chokes and cancers the descendants of the triumphant hero.

And yet there is beauty and wonder in the figure of the dragon, particularly when the dragon flies. This is another dragon story, the story of the improbably lithe creature casting off gravity. Cinema loves to soar, and it is no surprise to see so many cinematic dragons shooting through the sky. In flight, the dragon gains a kind of freedom from the greed that holds it to a single place or particular hoard. Often, humans then can become not the enemies of dragons, but their riders—not equals, perhaps, but partners, a new force greater than either individual. As common as the story of the hero who defeats the dragon is the story of the rider who either tames it or is chosen. The elemental, alien forces of Nature can be turned into a tool and even, perhaps, a friend. The dragon’s power can be harnessed.

Power, indeed. There’s a certain industrial-warriorness to most dragons—flying, armor-scaled, fire-breathing dragons suggest the terror of early aerial warfare. (What is the Blitz but an attack of dragons?) In the sky, dragons move from being Nature to being Gods: the loving, helpful, or at least vaguely friendly God that is the dragon and its rider; the inscrutable, punishing God that is the fire-breather descending from the night. Unless tamed, this power must be destroyed. Controlled, it can be wielded.

As terrifying, elemental, and alien as they are, dragons are not always represented as nightmares. There are countless dragons for children, whether Puff or Pete’s. We seem to have a roughly equal number of scary/archetypal dragons as cute/cuddly dragons. There’s more than one way to tame, and train, your dragon. Taming nature, after all, sometimes just requires a kid to wield a lawn mower.

Because the dragon is so obviously Not Human, it can easily be misunderstood as evil, but sometimes dragons are, as Hagrid tells Harry Potter, just misunderstood. Sometimes, as Disney offered in 1941, they’re a Reluctant Dragon. And then there’s 1996’s Dragonheart, in which a dragonslayer and the last remaining dragon join forces. These are parables of tolerance, of overcoming animosities, of looking beyond the myths. We can learn to love and cherish dragons. We can come to see them as human. But the relationship is never equal. Taming them into our humanity, we dominate them, and, once again, win. (We must trick the scary dragons and tame the cute dragons. If we join forces, it is the dragon that must die, not the human hero.)

In cinema, the dragon must be an effect, its otherness unavoidable because it is a machine or an animation or a computer program rather than a person in a costume. Fritz Lang’s dragon was a giant puppet requiring a dozen operators to push and pull and twist and turn its mechanisms. The result only adds to the alien effect. The same is true of the stop-motion dragons of the mid-20th century films—no matter how careful and accomplished the motion, it is still clearly somehow off, and thus the dragon of ancient Nature is rendered unnatural, odd, scary, funny, wrong. The cute dragons get created in drawn animation so that their colors can be bright, their movement fluid. Their absolute otherness is made obvious, though, when, as in Pete’s Dragon, the dragon is drawn and the humans are live.

Regardless of the level of technical achievement—whether the primitive puppet-machine of Die Nibelungen or the advanced CGI of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—the dragon is always clearly not a human actor. The alien must stay alien. Even today, when the dragons have achieved unprecedented realism on the screen, their only human quality is their voice. Whatever the result of our encounter with the dragon, what we know is that it will not, it cannot, ever be us. No matter how close, the dragon will always be at a distance. No matter the here, the dragon must always be there.

Leigh Singer is a freelance film journalist, filmmaker and screenwriter.
Leigh studied Film and Literature at Warwick University, where he
directed and adapted the world stage premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s
‘sex, lies and videotape’. He has written or made video essays on fllm for The Guardian, The Independent, BBCi, Dazed & Confused, Total Film, RogerEbert.com
and others, has appeared on TV and radio as a film critic and is a
programmer with the London Film Festival. You can reach him on Twitter
@Leigh_Singer

Matthew Cheney’s work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Site, among other places, and he is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy. He is currently a student in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire.

VIDEO ESSAY: Monsters Are a Child’s Best Friend

Most responsible parents will tell you that using the
television as a surrogate nanny is bad for kids. My own experience as a child
would argue against this. My parents knew that they couldn’t raise me
alone, and the only reliable guides were creatures of the night.

This first became clear to me on Halloween night, 1971, when
my mom promised my sister and me a very special evening’s entertainment. As the clock ticked towards 8:00 the lights
were dimmed in our basement rec room, the jack o’lanterns were lit, and the
popcorn was popped. Though I’d probably
seen programs in black and white before, what soon appeared on the TV screen
would surprise me: these images seemed to come from a different world than the
Technicolor landscapes I had known.

The sense of drama was heightened by a creepy old man coming
onto a dimly lit theater stage, offering viewers a “friendly warning” about the
frights to come. As the credits rolled,
my anticipation intensified. Soon the first unforgettable images of James
Whale’s Frankenstein rolled across my
five-year old eyes and plunged me into a realm I have never entirely escaped.

In subsequent years I would revisit this world with greater
frequency. Frankenstein opens with a
marvelously constructed graveyard set. The mourners are surrounded by looming
grey sky, skeletal trees, and morbid gravestone figures. The clanging church bell and quiet sobs of
the grievers sound as if they were recorded in a dank well.

The looming angles and impossibly long staircases of
Frankenstein’s castle draw from the nightmarish qualities of the
Expressionistic German horror cinema of the 1920s. When I watched UFA productions like Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Vampyr years later, I would experience these angular horrors in
their purest form.

What struck me as a child watching these old Universal films
for the first time, and what still amazes me, is the concentrated power of their
characters. The dead stare, wild arm
movements, and disconcerting forward lurch of Boris Karloff’s Creature have
become iconic. They are easy to imitate, as I would come to learn by donning a
“Frankenstein’s Monster” costume the following year. However, there is nothing
quite as compelling as the real thing.

In the days before VCR, one could experience the most
arresting images of horror classics repeatedly through grainy photographic
reproductions. Magazines like Famous
Monsters of Filmland, Creepy, and
Fangoria were the pulps of my youth. Their
garish covers splattered across drugstore and supermarket magazine racks across
suburbia. The amount of time I spent
gazing at still images of movie monsters dwarfs the time spent watching moving
images on the television screen.

Yet the classic Universal monsters also offered a more
profound attraction: compassion. The
Monster of Whale’s Frankenstein is a
creature more sinned against than sinning.
He appeals to children because he is a child himself, his momentary joys
pathetic against a background of perpetual torment and tantrums. In the famous scene in which he throws a
trusting little girl into the stream moments after tossing daisy petals with
her, his regret and shame is as poignant as the horrific senselessness of the
act.

Monsters, like children, can be cruel. However, the tragic
fate of figures like Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and King Kong taught me
something essential about human behavior. Where strangeness and difference
tread, the torches and pitchforks aren’t far behind. Classic monster movies don’t just depict the
monstrous. They convey what it feels like to be monstrous.

Since my first encounter with them on that Halloween night
long ago, monsters have helped me cope with feelings of alienation and anxiety,
teaching me a valuable lesson: friends may come and go, but monsters are
forever.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Jeffrey Canino grew up editing video on stacked VCRs. He holds a
Master’s in English Literature from the State University of New York at
New Paltz, and he blogs about horror cinema at his website, Nessun
timore: http://nessuntimore.com

A Video Essay on THE X-FILES: Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head

What is the American Dream?

Is it wealth? Power? Or it is something more existential like raising a family with a particular set of values?

By season 4, the X-Files was already considered one of the sickest, most graphic expressions of pop culture ever to be featured on a major network. That reputation could only have encouraged writers Glen Morgan and James Wong to craft “Home,” with imagery so disgusting that it transcends its place in X-Files lore and stands next to the classics of the horror genre.

In October of 1996, 18 million viewers watched their favorite paranormal FBI investigators, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, enter the realm of The Peacocks, a mysterious family living in an isolated village called Home, Pennsylvania.

A grotesquely disfigured baby has been discovered near the Peacock house, buried at home plate on a baseball diamond frequented by young boys.

But what the writers of this story really want you to know is that this traditional American town is really . . . . Mayberry.

Yep, that Mayberry. And Mulder can’t help but lose himself to the allure of Main street America, its nostalgia proving too strong to resist.

Sure the town of Home has baseball, cadillacs, a sheriff named Andy Taylor, a deputy named Barney and the traditional small-town architecture. But, don’t be fooled. If this represents the pinnacle of traditional small town American values, then what we see portrayed in “Home” are the rat-infested ruins of those same ideals. But, like Mulder in the opening scenes, Sheriff Taylor doesn’t see the rotting corpse.

An examination of the dead baby’s body reveals the Peacock’s are somehow breeding with each other, producing offspring with serious physical and health defects.

It is at this moment in the episode where Scully and Mulder make the fateful decision to invade the Peacock’s homestead with guns drawn.

Do the Peacocks deserve to be invaded this way? There doesn’t seem to be authentic evil shrouded beneath their lifestyle choices. For certain, an investigation into the baby’s death is warranted. But, is this an FBI matter? When you consider that incest law varies from state to state–in New Jersey, for example, there are no criminal penalties if both partners are over 18–Mulder and Scully’s case looks weak. They are entering this house under false assumptions. One can argue this is an out-of-control government provoking a confrontation. No one is in danger — that is . . . until Mulder utters this single sentence:

“The mother of the dead baby is listening. She’s not only having sex with her grown boys, but she is also out to protect her children. And that threat to arrest her children leads to this :

The Peacocks remind us that baseball bats have many uses.

Under what circumstances does the government have the power to abridge the civil liberties and personal freedoms of American citizens?

The town of Home had few problems.

Until the FBI got involved.

And besides . . . .

Scully is flat wrong.

And the sheriff and his wife would be alive had the government handled this case differently.

“Home” is beautifully directed by the late Kim Manners, who packs this episode with unforgettable images, all of which contribute to the horror.

In the end, it is Mulder who finally comes to understand the Peacocks. Morally speaking, they are less like humans and more like wild animals.

And as everyone knows, if you do something stupid or dangerous to a wild animal, you might get killed. [cut to Mulder and Scully pulling a screaming Mrs. Peacock out from under the bed.] This is not their finest moment. Agent Scully is the first to realize the case against the Peacocks isn’t open and shut.

With this simple ending, the writers of this episode remind us that with in every cherished axiom — there exists the very opposite of that truth. The Peacocks may not look like your family, but the love and fierce loyalty they have for each other is not hard to understand. Besides, when was the last time you told your mother how much you love her.

There’s always tomorrow. The Peacock’s future is just an American dream away.

Ken Cancelosi is the Publisher and Co-Founder of Press Play.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

VIDEO ESSAY: Rob Zombie and the Cinema of Cruelty

CINEMAS OF CRUELTY!

The
feature films that Rob Zombie has made between 2000 and 2013 create new
styles of emotional and perceptual disturbance from the corpses of
cultural products past. True to his name, Zombie reanimates dead tropes,
turns, and troubles into powerful attacks on our expectations and
desires.

By
summoning the spirit of previous movies, particularly, Zombie
encourages us to think we are watching a familiar pattern of story and
character. We think we know how and where to be shocked or repulsed,
whom to put our faith, trust, and hope in. We let down our guard.

Into the gap between our expectations and the reality of the film in front of us, Zombie sets traps to shred our desires.

It
was sort of like Ken Russell films or like Polanski or some Argento
films or Kubrick. There’s only certain filmmakers who really do this –
and David Lynch does it—where just the vibe of the movie is odd all
the way through. A David Lynch movie is just odd even when people are
doing normal things. You’re like, “Why does this feel so weird? What’s
happening here?”

—Rob Zombie, The Playlist interview with Drew Taylor, 29 April 2013

Zombie’s
movies are explicitly, extravagantly, and defiantly products of low
culture. The only sort of filmmaking less reputable than gory horror
movies is porn. Both traffic in sensation and exploitation. This is why
we need them. They’re all that’s left to break through the cool surface
of protective irony and oh-so-earnest, respectable emotionalism that so
many of us perform and parade and reward every day — to break through
into some part of our selves that few of us want to share with the rest
of the world. Such movies are the antidote to mumblecore and emo and
Oscar bait. We should watch these movies in seedy theatres where the
floors are covered with entire archaeologies of dirt, grime, rot, and
petrified bodily fluids. We should stare down at those floors and look
for our reflection, for it is there that we will find ourselves best
preserved.

Which
is why I thought of Antonin Artaud when I was putting together this
video essay. I want us to reclaim Artaud from the high cult of goodness,
where so many academics and critics have made excuses for him, tried to
tame him, tried to make him fit the higher cults. Those of us with some
academic persuasions need more shit in our systems.

I go to the library and grab a book off the shelf: Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader, edited by Edward Scheer, where, in an essay titled “Cinemas of Cruelty?”, Francis Vanoye writes:

If
we want to stay close to Artaud while betraying him, as we must, since
we are trying to promote a cinema of cruelty, we must exclude all pure
and simple representations of cruelty (Sergio Leone?), all reductions of
cruelty to violence, crude sadism and blood, we must therefore exclude a
good part of the cinematic production of the past and especially the
present. Quentin Tarantino, for example, and his emulators, French or
American, who make of cruelty an object of representation and of
spectatorial pleasure.

Maybe
such a betrayal of Artaud is necessary in France, but it sure isn’t
necessary for me, an American, someone whose tax dollars have funded
atrocities throughout the world, whose political system is nothing if
not cruel, whose economic system is designed to strengthen the powerful
and marginalize the weak. No no no, we need a cinema of cruelty that
matches the cruelty of our hearts and citizenship. We need
representations that show us ourselves. We need images that make us want
to look away at the same time they make us want to watch. The Devil’s Rejects
shows us, for instance, sadists we at first fear and detest, and then
it shows us that these are our heroes, and it gives us just enough of
the necessary tropes to make us want them to suceed in what we know is
sadistic. These, the film says to us, THESE are your heroes. They could be tour guides at Abu Ghraib.

What Zombie recognized in his Halloween movies is that our slasher films are character studies in disguise. The 2007 remake of Halloween
tempts us to learn to love Michael Myers, tempts us to recognize him
within the realm of child psychology, tempts us to recognize him as our
child or ourselves. He is no mere cypher, no flat archetype, but rather a
black hole of desire to attract our matter. Halloween II
is another world altogether, the beginning of a new (more explicitly
Lynchian) direction in Zombie’s work, an oneiric trap. Real and unreal
don’t exist in such a world: they are each other. We seek realities, but
Halloween II and The Lords of Salem refuse to give in to that desire, and instead show us that our need for the real is a need for comfort.

We
want our movies to be respectable, we want the feelings they give us to
be ones we don’t mind exalting to our families and friends. Those are
the movies we’ll give Oscars to, those are the movies we’ll assign our
students to watch, those are the movies we will proudly display in our
living rooms, those are the movies we’ll invite our friends to. Movies
that confirm our respectability. Movies that help us feel good about who
we are.

In
the practice of cruelty there is a kind of higher determinism, to which
the executioner-tormenter himself is subjected and which he must be determined
to endure when the time comes. Cruelty is above all lucid, a kind of
rigid control and submission to necessity. There is no cruelty without
consciousness and without the application of consciousness. It is
consciousness that gives to the exercise of every act of life its
blood-red color, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is
always someone’s death.

—Antonin Artaud, “First Letter on Cruelty”, trans. Mary Caroline Richards

If Rob Zombie’s movies understand nothing else, they understand that life is always someone’s death.

Why
does this feel so weird? What’s happening here? Our perspective is
being readjusted, our shame exposed. We have not earned the comfort we
desire. For a moment, we must recognize what perhaps we have
unconsciously known, the horrid truth we have repressed: that we are not
the innocent victims, but rather the executioner-tormenters. And deep
down, that’s what we’d rather be.

Matthew Cheney’s work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Site, among other places, and he is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy. He is currently a student in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire.

VIDEO ESSAY: Alfonso Cuarón’s Cinematic Canvas

Alfonso Cuarón and
the Prisoner of Azkaban

The following is an
appreciation of my personal favorite film by Alfonso Cuarón, which I fear has
been somewhat critically neglected. But for more on the man’s impressive career
as a whole, see Nelson Carvajal’s video “Alfonso
Cuarón’s Cinematic Canvas.”

People sometimes ask me whether I think “the kids today” are
all right. That always seems to me a strange question and perhaps a rhetorical
one where the speaker is really suggesting that there’s something wrong with
anyone younger than us. The logic, inasmuch as I follow it, is that
thirty-somethings had the privilege of growing up with movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and Time Bandits, and those movies fucked us up, and made us the clever
intelligent beautiful sophisticates we are today. Well, I’m not so sure it
works like that, and for every subversive film by Gilliam and Henson, there
were many more popular flicks like The
Karate Kid, Teen Wolf, and Short Circuit. But, sure, I always
respond, “the kids today” should be totally fine, because they had Pokémon—surely
one of the strangest cartoons I’ve ever witnessed—and what’s more, they had Alfonso
Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban.

I disliked the
first two Potter films, though I also wasn’t fond of the first two books. But
with Prisoner of Azkaban, J. K.
Rowling started hitting her stride, complicating Harry’s bright happy world with
more intricate plotting and morally ambiguous characters, the prime example of
which was the titular prisoner himself, Sirius Black. And can you imagine what
Chris Columbus would have done with that character? But Columbus bowed out of
the franchise, allowing Cuarón to inherit it—and totally redesign it.

Casting
Gary Oldman as Black was a bit of genius—this is the guy who previously played Sid
Vicious, Dracula, Lee Harvey Oswald, Guildenstern (I mean Rosencrantz), Mason
Verger, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, and that deranged cop determined to kill the
pubescent Natalie Portman and her kindly middle-aged French hit man boyfriend.
(Although come to think about it, had Stansfield succeeded, might we have been
spared the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy?) Oldman’s mere presence—recall those
initial glimpses of the man, howling in rage in those animated wanted
posters—made Black feel genuinely dangerous, and made the Potterverse feel suddenly
dangerous. Adding David Thewlis to the mix, as the reluctant, melancholy
werewolf Remus Lupin (he’s rather Hulk-like), pushed that fictional world even
further into some dark corner of the crooked Diagon Alley. Think about it: Azkaban’s the movie where Harry Potter’s
stable of mentors swelled to include not just Oldman, but Johnny from Naked (and were we meant to sense in
Thewlis’s presence a hint of the Verlaine / Rimbaud relationship in Total Eclipse?).

More
importantly, with Azkaban, the Potter
films went from something with the look and feel of an after-school special to the
look and feel of cinema. If you’re
shaky on the details, just compare any scene in Columbus’s version with any
from Cuarón’s—for instance, these two classroom bits:

Note, in that Azkaban
scene, the wide variety of techniques on display—long gliding takes and dramatic
insert shots—as well as the inventive staging. (I particularly like the moment
when Harry steps up to the boggart, and the camera affixes itself momentarily to
the bobbing jack-in-the-box.) Azkaban
was also the movie where Hogwarts—until now a stable, horizontal, and above all
else comfortable boarding school—went
all cockeyed, becoming in Cuarón’s hands someplace sprawling and ancient, a
place with enormous swinging clock pendulums that could kill an unwary kid, and
perched precariously amidst crags and ravines. Here’s what Cuaron did: when
Columbus left the project, the producers initially turned to Guillermo del
Toro. But del Toro declined, having found Columbus’s first two installments “so
bright and happy and full of light.” But a few years later, he
expressed interest in helming a later installment:

“After seeing the last few films,
however, the director famed for a shadowy imagination and morally ambiguous
characters has begun to reconsider. ‘They seem to be getting eerie and darker
… If they come back to me, I’ll think about it.’”

Thank Cuarón for that eeriness, that darkness (though to be
fair, the books do get more complex with that installment).

He departed
after Azkaban, but he left his mark
on the franchise: successors Mike Newell and David Yates kept the basics of his
approach, even if their direction never matched Cuarón’s. With the exception of
Bruno Delbonnel, who provided the cinematography for Half-Blood
Prince, no one else ever came across as having as much fun with Rowling’s
sprawling world as Cuarón.

For
my own part, I saw The Prisoner of
Azkaban three times in the theater. And whenever anyone asked me what I
thought of it, I said, “It’s great. It’s this generation’s Time Bandits.”

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: “Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System.” You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

A.D Jameson is the author
of the prose collection Amazing
Adult Fantasy (Mutable Sound, 2011), in
which he tries to come to terms with having been raised on ’80s pop culture, and the novel
Giant
Slugs (Lawrence
and Gibson, 2011), an absurdist retelling of the Epic of
Gilgamesh. He’s taught
classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lake Forest College,
DePaul University, Facets Multimedia, and StoryStudio Chicago. He’s also the
nonfiction / reviews editor of the online journal Requited. He recently
started the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. In his spare
time, he contributes to the group blogs Big
Other and HTMLGIANT. Follow him on Twitter at @adjameson.

VIDEO ESSAY: Gliding Over All: The Cinematography of BREAKING BAD, Season 5.2

This video essay is a co-production of Press Play and RogerEbert.com.

Because
He Wanted To

The final episode of Breaking Bad was a tender goodbye. I’ve watched
the entire series with my heart firmly planted in my mouth, but watching the
last moments of Walt’s life, his look of contentment as he sees the gas mask he
used to wear when cooking, that smear of his blood on metal as he finally
collapses to the ground, felt gentle. The great Heisenberg went out with a sigh
of contentment, rather than a roar of pride.

For five seasons critics have debated just what about Breaking Bad
has captured the American zeitgeist. In some ways, the show is surely
emblematic of some pressing cultural concerns—the desperation of the working
class and the changing face of American masculinity, for example. But ultimately,
the heart of Breaking Bad is not a public service announcement about the
dangers of meth, the need for better health care or the importance of family. Breaking
Bad is about existential terror. It’s about the choices we make when
confronted with death and the disintegration of our own very identity. It’s
about the limits of free will and the recognition that we have minimal control
over our own destiny. And it’s about how we all push for some kind of a
high, even though we know everything we do eventually has an expiration date.

In the end, Walt is a hero and a villain in equal measure. The same Walt who
murders his enemies in cold blood is the one who ties his wedding ring to a
string around his neck when his fingers become too thin to wear it, just as the
same Walt who kidnaps Holly is the one who touches her tenderly in her crib in
a final farewell.

Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Walter
White rewrote his story in order to survive. In the final episode we see Walt
claiming this story, owning his responsibility in the chaotic landscape that
nourished and destroyed him. In the end, Walt’s relationships with the people
who meant the most to him were faded fragments from a time when Walt was living
a different story, a time when he truly believed that he was making moral
choices to protect the family he loved. Nowhere is this clearer than in the
final showdown, where Walt is forced to look at the life to which he condemned
his former friend and partner Jesse. Even after respect and trust are long gone
between Walt and Jesse, there always remains the weight of a sad, long dead
love.

I cried watching that last moment of Walt wandering around what, at this point
in his life, had become his natural habitat—a meth lab littered with bodies and
blood. Walt died very alone, in every sense of the word. His meticulously
planned out last hurrah to set things right was, certainly, a suicide mission.
In the final episode of the series we see Walt, who had always resisted death at
every turn, finally resign himself to it, even though, in true Heisenberg
fashion, he went out in his own terms.

The final episode of Breaking Bad gives the illusion of closure, as
if the entire world will fade away now that Heisenberg and Walter White are one
and gone. In reality, there were things that Walt did that will never be
healed. Walt was proud of letting Jane die and poisoning Brock, both decisions
which he felt were made out of necessity. But this same Walt was terribly
ashamed of his betrayals—leading Hank to his death and losing the love and
trust of his only son. Walt’s confession to Skyler, where he says he did it all
for himself, that he liked it, he was good at it and it made him feel alive,
betrays the weight of his tremendous guilt, but doesn’t necessarily give us the
whole truth to his story. In earlier episodes one can clearly see a man who is
struggling to make moral choices; somewhere along the way his motivations
changed. The difficulty in pinpointing that catalyst is what makes Breaking
Bad great art and it is what makes this touching, quiet finale emotionally
wrenching.

For me, Walt’s guilt tempers those last moments of Breaking Bad,
where we see Heisenberg wandering about the meth lab—his reflection beaming
back at him, all stretched and misshapen. Walt’s tremendous pride in his
creation, his love for his “baby blue” is palpable in that moment, but so is
the image of his bloodied hand, tarnishing a space that requires cleanliness in
order to make a dirty product a signature product: it got close, but was never
100% pure.

To read a wonderful essay by Scott Eric Kaufman about the season finale at RogerEbert.com, click here:

http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/the-cinematography-of-breaking-bad-season-5-part-2

To watch the entire series on Press Play, go here:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/tag/dave-bunting-jr

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed three times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book. She is Associate
Book Reviews Editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

Dave Bunting, Jr. is the co-owner (with his sister and fellow Press Play contributor, Sarah D. Bunting) of King Killer Studios, a popular music rehearsal and performance space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He plays guitar and sings in his band, The Stink,
and dabbles in photography, video editing, french press coffee, and
real estate. Dave lives in Brooklyn with his wife, son, and sister.

VIDEO ESSAY: My Life as a Chick Flick

That’s me up there.
See? That nine-year-old boy cheering
on Lexie Winston to victory?

No, actually I can’t see me up there either. But I was
there, along with hundreds of other lucky people who managed to get spots as
extras on the set of Ice Castles. Starring a promising unknown, Lynn Holly
Johnson, playing next to Robbie Benson, heartthrob of all the girls at my
school, I’m still not sure why I was so excited when a friend gave me a pass to
be on the set of this movie.

Growing up in Minnesota during the 70s, one didn’t have too
many opportunities to rub shoulders with fame, so I guess I was excited at the
possibility of maybe seeing myself in a movie filmed in my own home state. Like Lexie Winston, I was a small town kid
hungry for a taste of fame.

When the film was finally released several months later, I
was a little disappointed not to see my face up there in the crowd. But something else happened to me while I was
watching Ice Castles, the kind of
movie I wouldn’t have been caught dead seeing under normal circumstances. As I sat there, watching Lexie’s triumph
against adversity, as she wins a regional competition despite being blind, I
started to get a strange feeling inside me.
By the time she started to trip over the roses thrown by her adoring
fans, thus revealing her secret disability to the public, something happened to
me that hadn’t happened since I was a child watching Dorothy trapped by the Wicked
Witch: I found myself crying at a movie.

At some point during the picture I had come to identify with
this plucky gal from the Midwest, and later came to realize, hey, maybe I did
see a little of myself in that movie.
Maybe, just maybe, a kid who watched only horror and science fiction
movies had learned to watch movies in a different way. Maybe, like Lexie, I’d learned to see through
the eyes of love.

As I secretly wiped away my tears on a napkin greasy with
popcorn butter, I was anxious to forget about the incident, and I might have,
until a few weeks later, when, bored on a Sunday night, I decided to watch the
NBC movie of the week with the rest of the family. The feature turned out to be The Other Side of the Mountain, based on
the true story of ski racing champion Jill Kinmont, who suffers a terrible
accident during a race and becomes a quadriplegic. As soon as I heard Olivia Newton John singing
the maudlin theme song I should have known what I was getting myself into, but
some part of me couldn’t turn away. Not
only was I drawn in to the story of Kinmont’s heroic struggle against
adversity, but I also realized some part of me wanted to be made to cry. Some part of me was tired of trying to act
like the guys I hung out with at school.
Something in these movies allowed me to be a different kind of viewer
than I was used to being. When I watched
these films, I could be one of the girls.

Yeah, I know it’s sexist to associate getting emotional with
being female, but that’s the way Hollywood tends to divvy up its demographics,
and the movies I had been most obsessed with before what I have come to call “my
Ice Castles experience” didn’t offer
a lot of emotional range. But the more I
watched these female-centered stories, the more I came to realize it wasn’t
just tears I was after. I wanted to hang
out with a different crowd. Bored with
my male friends, I wanted to see how the other half lived. And the only place I felt I could be one of
the girls was at the movies.

I would have given anything to have friends like this. When my friends hung out together, we
pretended we weren’t really having fun, we didn’t care too much about each
other, and that there wasn’t anything worth talking about besides music and
movies. But I bet Annabeth Gish would
have understood my secret hopes and dreams.
And I’m sure Lili Taylor would have accepted all my adolescent sexual
hangups, and maybe have had some good advice for me. And if only I could work at a place like
Mystic Pizza, with a tough but lovable owner who would act as a kind of
surrogate mother… In my naïve mind, this
is what I thought life for women was like, and I wanted to be a part of
it. And for two hours, I could.

In the movie Satisfaction
I found the best of all possible worlds, female camaraderie and rocking
out, kicking ass, taking names, and then having a good cry together.

What more could anyone ask for?

There’s even a male character in the film who gets to live
out my dream, allowed into the secret world of women!

He says it’s his own private hell, but I knew what he really
meant: it was heaven.

These kinds of films are derisively referred to as
chick-flicks, but for many viewers they hold a significance that exceeds this
condescending marketing niche. People
who have favorite movies in common, especially those we wouldn’t admit to just
anyone, are like members of a secret community, connected despite differences
of age, gender, or taste. And what
happens when we start looking outside of the confines of our gender roles?

Even though the stories of many so-called chick flicks tend
to be conservative—I mean, most of these movies end with marriage—the experience
of watching them might be seen as more transgressive.

Though you might not admit to it in the presence of certain
people, I bet you secretly love Dirty Dancing. And once you get past the inane title, it’s
actually a pretty good story. In it’s
own daffy way, it’s also quietly subversive: it’s hard to imagine the Hollywood
of today portraying a girl helping someone get an abortion in a positive
light. By establishing a strong sense of
identification between the viewer and the character of Baby, the film takes us
through a narrative rite of passage in which we move from being Daddy’s innocent
little girl to an abortion facilitator and a dirty dancer. And at the end, she makes everyone dance
along.

Chick flick as agit prop?
Maybe not, but for a girl watching this film it offers a rather racy
path to maturity. And what about when a boy watches Dirty Dancing?
Speaking for myself, I certainly don’t identify with Patrick Swayze: I
connect with Baby. And this kind
of connection can be liberating.
At least, it certainly has been for me. I can’t imagine my life without
chick flicks. Just don’t tell anyone I love this movie,
alright?

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

VIDEO ESSAY: Female Sexual Agency in a World of Blurred Lines

VIDEO ESSAY: Female Sexual Agency in a World of Blurred LInes

We live in a culture where female
bodies are constantly on display. However, most images of female sexuality we
see are passive and two-dimensional.

For the past two weeks Miley Cyrus’s MTV
VMA performance has been decried by parents’ groups and feminists alike. The
response to Cyrus’s performance is more interesting than Cyrus’s performance
itself. It hit on every cultural nerve about what is appropriate and inappropriate
for a young woman to do with her body. Of course, this dialogue has been going
on for years. Female artists from Madonna to Lady Gaga to Rihanna to Nicki
Minaj all have used sexuality to express themselves.

The main reason that Cyrus’s
performance stood out is twofold. Cyrus grew up in the public eye. Like Britney
Spears, Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez and other child stars, Cyrus’s sexual
display is not seen as a natural transition to adulthood. Instead, critics are
concerned to see a coveted virginal
starlet transforming into just another sexual object.

We are still uncomfortable with the
idea that young women have sexual agency. In general, our media depicts
powerful women as direct and aggressive on the streets or on the battlefield. In
the bedroom, however, they are still prizes to be won over. The trope of the
strong female who needs the male lead to work extra hard to win her over is
commonplace. The theme here is that strong women don’t put it out for just
anybody, and sexual and romantic longing make a woman weak.

This can be seen in any range of shows,
such as Daria and 30Rock, where the smart, savvy female seems
patently disinterested or not good at garnering male attention. In the film Bridesmaids, Annie Walker puts up with
male bad behavior until a sweet guy she initially pushes away wins her heart. In
Iron Man we root for Pepper Potts, a
higher quality woman than the types Tony Stark bangs early on.

Today, strength and sexuality are
perceived as mutually exclusive. This trend became even more readily apparent
this past summer. Look at songs like “Blurred Lines,” for instance, or our
obsession with the female submission narrative 50 Shades of Grey, which is less about a sexually secure woman
exploring her own kinks (a la Secretary)
than a genuinely meek young woman submitting to a man’s control.

Lena Dunham’s Girls has been lauded and reviled
for its focus on young women’s unhappy sexual encounters, which are perceived
as being more authentic than those of Samantha in Sex in the City. Indeed sex is different for young women in 2013
than it was in the late 90s. What is public and private space has changed and
the risks associated with getting naked have increased. In this culture, a
woman’s body can easily become shared public property, whether or not she wants
it.

To me, what is most shocking about Miley
Cyrus’s performance is that it is devoid of pleasure. Cyrus looks gawky and
uncomfortable, her tongue sticks out cheekily, rather than sensually, her
twerking looks like something she practiced in the mirror for a few hours. If
Cyrus was offensively appropriating symbols of “blackness” in her act,
she was also appropriating elements of raunch culture. When Madonna and Lady
Gaga present sexual displays they own it, while Cyrus seems to be figuring out
how she feels about her own sexual awakening.

Most displays of female desire are so
prescriptive that it is hard to differentiate between raw want and
commercialized longing. In many ways the pre-packaged version of sexuality is
less threatening than the unscripted version. We question whether or not
Rihanna really loves S&M, or whether Madonna’s sexually provocative videos
were merely about capturing attention.

Women can rarely be seen as sexual
beings without being reduced to objects or otherwise exploited. This is part of
what keeps women from being viewed as whole people, capable of intellectual bravado,
as well as great desire.

Of course, opening up this kind of
dialogue means listening to women. Films such as Easy A and The To-Do List attempt
to dismantle the stereotype that young women cannot be in control of their
sexuality, but the idea that young women can be sexual agents is still not
mainstream. We believe that young women cannot possibly be sexual agents, and that
sexuality for young women is about display and attention, rather than desire.

Allowing women the space to be sexual,
either in pop culture or in society at large, matters. When female sexuality is
most commonly depicted as either incredibly dangerous or incredibly vulnerable,
the narrative that coming-of-age for a girl is a time of loss needs to change. Girls
and young women deserve to be offered the possibility that their sexual
awakening could signal that a world is opening up.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed three times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book. She is Associate
Book Reviews Editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.