Louis C.K. On Rape: Why Are We Listening to Him, and No One Else?

Louis C.K. On Rape: Why Are We Listening to Him, and No One Else?

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Much has been written about this season of Louie, including pieces from Heather Havrilesky on Louie’s manic
bossy nightmare girls and Kathleen Brennan on “fat,” “not fat,” and holding hands. Last week’s episode was no exception, as it
triggered commentary from Amy Zimmerman at The Daily Beast, and Madeline Davies at Jezebel. Louie
and its subsequent commentary offer poignant insight into a range
of issues, and most recently gender relations. But why is it, exactly, that viewers
take so much notice when Louis C.K. says something, and not other times? In
particular, considering last week’s near rape of Pamela, why are we paying so
much attention to Louie’s attitudes towards women and rape while ignoring women
who have expressed the same sentiments for years?

In the last episode, Louie’s perspective was clear as he decided
to try a “guy/girl” thing with Pamela, which consisted essentially of his
taking control in every sense. As I watched him discover Pamela half-asleep on
the couch, and then nearly rape her, I grew increasingly angry because, once
again, I felt silenced. We only see Louie’s point of view as he chases and
repeatedly grabs Pamela. Initially, Pamela is allowed a few refusals before quipping, “This would be rape if you
weren’t so stupid.” Then, once she is cornered in the doorway, she is
effectively silenced as Louie asserts control.

Finally after a resistant kiss, Pamela escapes and Louie shuts
the door on her—and with it, her response. After Louie’s perceived success at
his version of a “guy/girl” thing, women are denied a way to deal
with the experience of watching Pamela being nearly raped. We have no idea what
it’s like on the other side of the door.

During or after an assault, people are denied self-preservation
by not being allowed to run, ignore, seek revenge, or learn from the event.
This episode not only denied a reaction from Pamela, but also the opportunity
to learn from it. It follows the predominant narratives that offer nothing new
and focus on the assailant. In the recent rape case in Calhoun, Georgia that
is getting attention from local and national news outlets as well as
blogs, we watch the police as they do their jobs by investigating the
case and charging suspects. And while
local columnist David Cook deserves respect for pointing out that rape
mentality causes rape, it’s problematic that these are the narratives. By not
empowering the woman involved, it makes it seem as though the immense amount of
courage it took for her go to the police was outweighed by praise for people
doing their jobs, or being human.

Certainly when comparing the Calhoun case to a situation like
Steubenville, it can seem like the reproduction of rape myths might have
momentarily lessened, and we might be making some progress in the acknowledgment
of the realities of rape. Sure, we know from press coverage that the students
were drinking in Calhoun, Georgia that night, but we haven’t yet heard about
her prom dress, or how she might have been asking to be assaulted to the point
of hospitalization. Additional hope that we might be making progress might be
found in the formation of the first White House task force to study rape, and now
the subsequent federal investigation into over 50 universities for their sexual
assault policies on campus. But we still have a long way to go.

Rape occurs off campus too, and it’s estimated to happen to one
in five women in their lifetimes. So given the frequency of rape, it’s
consistently disheartening that the male perspective is the dominant
perspective in popular culture. What possibly is most upsetting is that while
we continually see rape from a male perspective, as if it’s something men to do
to women (which it is 98% of the time), we don’t seem to address men’s behavior
that leads them to rape. And television episodes like this, as well as most
rape narratives in popular culture, just play into that by ending it with
closing the door and not focusing on Pamela. 

So, again, why are we taking notice when Louie offers commentary
on rape? Perhaps we are sticking with what is safe, or what doesn’t drastically
challenge our power dynamics. However, when we allow men to continue to control
the commentary, they also get to reinforce entitlement over women’s bodies. I
suppose that having men define our experiences prohibits us from incessantly
flicking men’s penises, seeking unlimited abortions, or generally taking
control of our lives.

Or maybe women’s perspectives on rape are too real and ugly for
a mainstream audience. In this episode, Pamela did a fine job of exhibiting
tortured resistance, but it ended there. It has been a long time since Thelma and Louise showed us that when a
woman cries like that, she isn’t having any fun. In popular culture we don’t
often experience, in a non-fetishized way, the complete violation that
accompanies forced penetration with objects or body parts, and the blood and
bruises that may result. Even more messy are the complicated emotions one might
experience: denial, bargaining, fighting, acceptance. While I certainly
wouldn’t want to fetishize rape, the acknowledgment of these
horrific experiences can enable us.

Consistently showing the male perspective of rape also
conveniently absolves us of the consequences. Not only do men often get away
with it—98% are never incarcerated—but women are also forced to navigate a
culture that has historically blamed or not believed them. So when the Louie
episode ends with the door closing, we don’t have to experience what goes
through Pamela’s head, and how she processes the experience. In the episode, if
things went further, we wouldn’t have to consider whether or not she would report it. And
if she did, we wouldn’t have to feel the shame or fear and consider how she
will deal with it when there might not be any justice.

Ultimately, maybe women’s perspectives on assault aren’t
reflected enough in popular culture because they counter the pervasive
acceptance of everyday violations women endure, such as being groped in public,
having erections pressed on our asses in the subway, and being told to smile on
the street. Perhaps our tacit acceptance of these behaviors make it easier to
follow the dominant narrative. But after seeing this play out once again,
especially from such a generally excellent show, I’ve had more than enough.
It’s time to stop shutting the door.

Allison Blythe is an urban planner and Chicago native who currently
lives in Brooklyn, NY. She tries to increase equity and improve the
quality of life for New York City residents through her work. She loves
to laugh, and you can have a drink with her at the happy hour for area
planners that she co-founded.

Our Scary Summer: ALIEN, the Energy Crisis and Desperate Consumerism

Our Scary Summer: ALIEN, the Energy Crisis and Desperate Consumerism

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The cover of the June 1979 issue
of Newsweek featured an image of
Sigourney Weaver from Alien under the
caption: “Hollywood’s Scary Summer.” I was thirteen, and the horror movies
released that summer would form a kind of
grotesque carnival that mirrored my own and the world’s anxieties.
 Earlier in the spring, the disastrous nuclear accident at Three
Mile Island had occurred, and that summer major oil spills
polluted the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic.  This
was also the year when oil prices doubled, Margaret Thatcher was elected, and
the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power.  As I became aware of the
political and environmental degradation around me, the films I watched
reflected my awareness, as well as my own desires and fears as a thirteen year old, back at me.

I was caught between being a nerdy kid and a nerdy teenager;
the marketing strategies for promoting Ridley Scott’s Alien were similarly split. 
Following on the success of Star
Wars, the film boasted special effects that would rival its
predecessor.  Reading about its
production in magazines like Starlog and
Heavy Metal, I joined other fanboys
in the building anticipation for its summer release.  The fact that Alien mingled SF with horror elements only further whetted my
appetite, but when the film was released with an R rating, I was consigned to
seeing it only through its comic book tie-ins and bubble gum card series.  Surely this was the only R-rated film to have
spawned its own action figure, yet the peculiar split in this marketing
campaign seemed to reflect my own divided self, too old to play with toys, too
young to get into adult films.

As Newsweek’s
chosen symbol of a new wave of Hollywood horror films, Alien embodied other split identities.  Formerly considered a disreputable genre,
associated with cheap special effects and lurid story lines, horror seemed to
be emerging into the mainstream, backed by mega-million dollar budgets and
featuring distinguished actors and directors. 
The process that had begun with 1973’s The Exorcist, and continued with 1976’s The Omen, seemed to reach its tipping point in the summer of 1979
with Alien and The Amityville Horror, culminating in Stanely Kubrick’s The Shining the following winter.   According to Newsweek: “What Alien proves
is that the B movies of yesterday provide the formulas for the A-movie
blockbusters of today.”

But any admirer of Ridley Scott’s film knows that the story
is anything but B movie fare.  While its
last half-hour seems patterned on the kind of murderous chase sequence
perfected the previous year in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), this is only one of the film’s many complex dimensions.  Interestingly, it is likely that this sequence,
along with the infamous “chest-burster” scene, brought the film its R
rating, while in fact its science fiction premise (the element of the film most
ostensibly appealing to younger audiences) more clearly mirrored what was going
on in that adult world I would soon be reluctantly entering.

While Star Wars was
predicated on an escapist premise that used science fiction conventions to
blast us into a galaxy far, far away, in the universe of Alien, space is confined, claustrophobic.  It is a universe very much like our own,
subject to the laws of supply and demand. 
As we watch a complex mass of space-borne metal slide slowly across the
screen, superimposed text tells us this is the commercial towing
spaceship Nostromo, hauling a refinery
and twenty million tons of mineral ore. 
Space, the final frontier, has become, like all frontiers, a resource to
be exploited.  The imposing size of the
ship is in perverse contrast to its seven-member skeleton crew, presumably the
result of corporate downsizing and its technological ally, automation.  It is some time before we encounter any
humans aboard, as the camera explores the ship’s instruments awakening to a
kind of ghostly, simulated life.  When
the crew is finally awakened, they emerge from steel cocoons that resemble both
eggs and coffins, clearly anticipating the deadly alien eggs the crew will
later encounter, but also figuring their grim dependence on the ship’s
technology. 

But of course it is not simply technology itself that
threatens the crew, but the exploitative uses to which it may be put.  The film gradually reveals that the real
villain of the story is not the fierce predator of the title, but the crew’s
employers, mega-corporation Weyland-Yutani, referred to simply as “The Corporation.”  Chief science officer Ash (Ian Holm) is later
revealed to be an android planted by the Corporation to superintend the capture
of the deadly alien for the company’s bio-weapons division.  Like the mineral ore the ship already
carries, the alien is yet one more resource to be commercially exploited, at
whatever cost.

Although I wasn’t yet old enough to have a driver’s license,
like everyone in 1979 I was highly conscious of rising gas prices and their
effects.  I didn’t understand the
relationship between what President Carter and Walter Cronkite repeatedly
referred to as the Oil Crisis, or the complex geopolitical issues centering
on the Iranian revolution and the Ayatollah’s return to power.  Regardless, I watched those daily images of
gas station lines, so long they looked like shanty towns, with a grim
fascination, as they so closely resembled the conjoined images of excess and
destitution common to those post-apocalyptic films I loved from that era, films
like The Omega Man, Damnation Alley, and Soylent Green, films that seemed half in
love with the world’s death.  What did
the Earth the Nostromo’s crew were trying to get home to actually look
like?  Probably something very much like
the one depicted in these films, and to which the images I watched on the
nightly news seemed to be offering a disturbing preview.

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For kids who wanted to act out scenes from Alien (a film they weren’t allowed to
see without a chaperone), Kenner offered their 18-inch action figure of the monster
created by the disturbed imagination of the late H.R. Giger.  Given the fact that this was ostensibly an
R-rated toy, with sublimated sexual imagery typical of its designer, it is
somewhat odd that this is the first action figure I regarded as too childish to
buy.  Taking the alien to school would be
an invitation to bullying, and playing with it alone at home just seemed
sad.  I still had my extensive collection
of Star Wars figures, but these were
beginning to gather dust on the shelf, reluctant as I might have been to part with
them. 

Looking back now, with my wariness of buying any products
that aren’t ecologically correct, I can retroactively congratulate myself on
not purchasing a large plastic figure made largely of petroleum products.  The smaller, 3 ¾” size of the Star Wars figures, as compared to the
foot-long G.I. Joe of eras past, was a deliberate response to the increased
production costs brought on by the Energy Crisis.  So the foot-and-a-half long Alien figure was actually an avatar of
wretched excess lurking in the toy aisle, a fitting embodiment of the film’s
tacit themes of consumption and exploitation. 

The other reason I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Alien action figure is that there was
something kind of sad about it.  Produced
as a single unit, there were no other figures it could play with: no Kane
action figure to eat, no Ripley for it to chase.  It was over four times the size of my other
action figures, so had I bought it the alien would have stood alone on the
shelf, never fitting in, a large wasteful consumer product good for nothing but
packing away, eventually to be sold on eBay, shipped in a FedEx package, hauled
to its destination aboard a vast commercial aircraft, most likely piloted by a
skeleton crew of seven, reduced by corporate downsizing.

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

In-Between Man: An Appreciation of Jon Hamm

In-Between Man: An Appreciation of Jon Hamm

nullThree years ago, a
supercut video premiered online that compiled
all of the times, up to that point, that actor Jon Hamm had said “what?” as Don
Draper on the AMC show Mad Men. It
did what supercut videos are often meant to do: recognize, decontextualize and
repeat a specific motif in film and television for comedic effect. Yet what is
most striking when you watch it now is all of the slight contextual/emotional
variation that Hamm could get out of one word. It could be construed as a
demonstration of Hamm’s wide ranging and detailed capability as an actor,
something that usually isn’t required of someone with matinee idol looks.

Likewise, New York Magazine’s
Vulture blog also ran a photo slideshow titled “24 Photos of Jon Hamm Making Silly Faces in Nice Clothes,” functioning the same way as the supercut video, this time
applicable to Hamm’s public persona. It demonstrates that a) Hamm is,
ostensibly, a goofball and b) a dynamic physical expressivity is one of his
tools as a performer, just as the “Don Draper Says What” video demonstrates his
expressivity with language.

Yet, what is most fascinating about
Hamm, beyond the above,
is that his stature as an actor and celebrity points to the way leading male
actors are often dichotomized. Either they are stoic, austere, and masculine,
or they are dynamic, demonstrative, and possibly funny. Of course such a
dichotomization isn’t clear-cut, but it reveals something about gender roles in
our culture. Call it the “Dad/Uncle” split. Men onscreen may be
pseudo-patriarchs, emblematic of some sort of “traditional” order. Conversely,
they may be lively, with a possibility of being affable and amusing, like
everyone’s favorite uncle. It could be argued that an actor’s longevity depends
on whether an actor can switch between these modes, or blend them.

While our notions of masculinity
should have room for both types of character, there are still good examples of
this dichotomy in action among current leading male actors. Consider Ryan Gosling. While he is
an undeniable talent, he has made a transition from being a mercurial performer
to a fairly fixed one. During his child-acting days, he was a song-and-dance
lad on The Mickey Mouse Club. Then,
starting in his late teens he became dynamic and often idiosyncratic in films
like The Believer, The Notebook, Half Nelson and Lars and the
Real Girl. Now, in the wake of Drive,
he gives more restrained (and limited) performances in things like The Place Beyond the Pines, Gangster Squad and Only God Forgives. While there’s still a chance for him to give
performances with more range, it seems as though he has settled into a more controlled phase.

In the opposite direction, consider
William Shatner. At the start of his career, he was a more serious, sometimes
histrionic actor, appearing in Richard Brooks’ adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, The Intruder, and on TV shows like The Twilight Zone or Dr. Kildare. Then he became Captain Kirk
on Star Trek, which grew from a cult
series to a full-fledged franchise within ten years after its cancellation, due
to syndication. Consequently, Shatner became a household name. Not only that,
his very demeanor became a known, parodied quantity. At some point Shatner
became aware of this and used it to parlay his career. Now he’s William Shatner,
an actor who’s in on the joke and more human for it. He has gone from a
vainglorious leader to a vainglorious, barely-aging elder who can take a pie in
the face.

Hamm seems to be right on top of the
“Dad/Uncle” split. Born in St. Louis in 1971, he played a string of bit or
supporting roles in movies and TV shows before Mad Men creator and showrunner Matthew Weiner handpicked him to be
the show’s lead character in 2007.

Weiner must have recognized a
paradoxical quality to Hamm that makes him a near-perfect fit for the role of
Don Draper, a creative director for 60’s advertising agency Sterling Cooper
whom, despite appearing like what was once (and some still see as) an ideal of
American masculinity, was born as Dick Whitman, an illegitimate farm boy who
appropriated the identity of his superior officer Donald Draper while serving
in the Korean War in order to go AWOL. Through a high-degree of personality
compartmentalization, Whitman became
“Don Draper” but the character’s deception has slowly and drastically unraveled
throughout the series; in recent episodes, he has recognized the need to be
more transparent to the people in his life.

Hamm has come to embody the role so
well that Weiner has openly said that Draper is a work of collaboration between
the actor and showrunner. But as a result of becoming synonymous with the role,
Hamm’s work can be
disorienting when he doesn’t play Draper. Also, there’s a lack of roles
in TV or film that are a) as rich in character as Draper, b) could utilize
Hamm’s multifaceted and dual acting style, c) more than “he’s a brilliant
maverick with quirky issues” (which is what so many lead males roles are now on
TV) and d) prolonged enough to allow for such extensive characterization as a
TV character allows At this point, his success playing one of modern
television’s most iconic antiheroes could be as much a curse as a blessing.

When looking at performances that
Hamm gave in Mad Men episodes at the
beginning, in the middle, and near the end of the show’s run, it becomes clear
that Hamm’s layered portrayal of Draper has quite possibly made him a better
actor. In the series’ inaugural episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, Draper is a
smart, slick ad man who’s revealed to be deceitful to his wife and family;
while it’s a calling card performance, it’s still rather straightforward and
un-dynamic. Granted, it was probably designed to be a template performance
within a pilot episode, emphasis being put on Draper’s archetypal façade and
attitude. But it doesn’t give much indication of what Hamm could or would do
later on in the series.

Especially in Season Four’s “The
Suitcase”, which may be the series’ best episode, a poignant portrayal of
initial grief. By that point, it had been revealed that Dick Whitman befriended
Anna Draper, the real Don’s wife, sometime between the Korean War and his
advertising career, and  that he
considered her to be the only person who really accepted him. But in 1964 she
succumbs to cancer and, during “The Suitcase,” Don does his daily work at the
agency as he suspects that Anna has passed, dreading making the call in order
to find out. Furthermore, work involves coming up with a pitch for Samsonite,
which involves harshly coaching his protégé Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) as she goes
through her own existential crisis on her birthday.

Mostly a two-header showcase for
Hamm and Moss, “The Suitcase” runs the gamut of moods, and Hamm (along with
Moss) nails every emotional beat: Draper is stern, reluctant, berating, drunk,
amused, amusing, stupidly heroic, wistful, grievous and, in the end, amicable
towards Peggy. It’s a remarkable single-episode performance that is likely to
be Hamm’s shining moment as Draper if nothing in the upcoming final episodes
matches it.

Speaking of final episodes, [GENERAL SPOILERS FOLLOW] Draper has been
gradually redeeming himself in the most recent and penultimate season of Mad Men, which has required him to
recognize that real personal change comes at the cost of accepting loss and
defeat. His marriage to his second wife Megan (Jessica Pare) has fallen apart
and, having returned to work after a forced hiatus caused by unprofessional
behavior, he has deigned to do copywriting work while being scrutinized by his
colleagues. At the same time, he has become more willing to reveal his true
self to those in his personal life, which implies that he’s trying to dissolve
his double nature. Instead of remaining a poisonous amalgam of different
personae, Draper is attempting to be a whole person. Remarkably, even after
seeing the character behave horribly for the umpteenth time in Mad Men’s sixth season, Draper’s
prolonged, humble pie redemption is believable. This, too, is a result of
Hamm’s well-honed versatility in the role, which is layered enough to allow for
more positive character development.

Hamm’s attempts to become a leading
man for the movies mirror Draper’s transformation somewhat. During Mad Men’s run he has appeared in a
variety of films and TV shows, usually to demonstrate his comedic chops in
things like 30 Rock, Saturday Night Live, Children’s Hospital, A Young Doctor’s Notebook and Bridesmaids. And as the star of last
month’s release, Million Dollar Arm,
he just barely makes an egocentric
sports agent who recruits two Indian kids to be major league pitchers into a
tolerable, decent guy through sheer charm. (On paper, the role is less an
anti-hero than an “anti-protagonist” that could’ve been an insufferable
representation of entitled, insensitive white dudes in the hands of another
actor. As is, the movie is a passable yet questionable sports tale that,
despite good intentions, privileges the wrong point of view.)

Yet one would hope that Hamm would
take a cue from the arc of his most famous creation and try to find roles that
befit and synthesize his dualistic, complex qualities as an actor. As the
concept of masculinity can be better relativized as a widespread examination of
gender politics can correct long-standing issues—call me a Pollyanna but I
believe that this is happening more than ever– we need leading men in our
movies and TV shows who can mirror and influence this relativization. Don
Draper’s characterization can be interpreted as a deconstruction of traditional
manhood that, while it still exists, demonstrates how it can cause
interpersonal chaos, just as sociological and psychological studies have
demonstrated that emulating traditional gender roles (i.e. men should be tough,
emotionless, unnecessarily callous, entitled, powerful and uninvolved in
childcare) most often leads to interpersonal problems as well as mental and
physical health issues.

Perhaps Hamm may not be fortunate enough to have other roles as
successful as Don Draper. But if he has any control over the outcome of his
career after Mad Men, he will
hopefully find work that suits his talents but also continues to blur the
“Dad/Uncle” dichotomization of leading men, which might help to continue to
redefine cultural notions of masculinity. We need leading men who can
positively destabilize mandated gender roles. So who better than Hamm, the
actor who has helped to complicate and reveal old-school manhood as Don Draper,
to do just that?

But in case he can’t, maybe Hamm
could do what Leslie Nielsen did later in his career: become a full-fledged
silly actor. It may not fulfill any ideals presented above, but he would be
good at that.

Holding
degrees in Film and Digital Media studies and Moving Image Archive
Studies, Lincoln Flynn lives in Los Angeles and writes about film on a sporadic
basis at http://invisibleworkfilmwritings.tumblr.com. His Twitter handle is @Lincoln_Flynn.

Lukas Moodysson, Teacher of Women’s Stories: WE ARE THE BEST! Indeed

Lukas Moodysson, Teacher of Women’s Stories: WE ARE THE BEST! Indeed

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There’s a scene near the end of Show Me Love, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s first film, that tells everything about
the director’s sense of humanity in one short burst, showing that he is a good teacher as
well as a swift storyteller, and that what he is teaching is how being human feels (in case we’d forgotten, as well we might have). In the scene, Agnes, one
of the film’s lovelorn centerpieces, has just thrown a birthday party, and Viktoria, who
is wheelchair-bound, is the only one to show up. Because Agnes is a teenager,
and troubled, and angry no one showed up to her party, especially not the girl
she is in love with, she makes vicious fun of Viktoria, saying cruel things, as
bluntly as only someone her age could say them. Viktoria finally leaves the house, crying.
Rather than filming her departure dramatically, Moodysson simply shows us her back,
as she wheels along all alone, up a quiet, dark street. One gets the sense that
Moodysson knows exactly what it feels like to be Viktoria, in that wheelchair,
moving slowly through the dark, cast out, misunderstood. Moodysson understands what
it feels like to be hurt. But also how it feels to rise out of that pain: Show Me Love, Together, Lilya-4-Ever and We Are the Best!, within his filmography, all teach what sadness
feels like, and show characters’ development as a sort of rumbling around inside that sadness, sometimes escaping, sometimes not.
Above and beyond that, though, Moodysson is a skillful teller of women’s tales: Show Me Love is a juvenile lesbian love story, Together the tale of a
woman’s seeking of refuge within a chaotic commune, and the subsequent Lilya 4-Ever
a blisteringly educational journey into the world of sex trafficking. While the
reviews of the current film have praised it as “upbeat,” “adorable,” and other
such adjectives, for the undeniable cuteness of its three juvenile leads, it is
easy to overlook that this filmmaker quickly and effectively takes viewers
inside the female experience in a male-centered society, telling how it feels
in numerous ways–and has done so throughout his career. We Are the Best!
addresses issues timelessly relevant to women with great power and directness—even
if the film’s leads are in their preteens. In fact, the youth of these characters
makes Moodysson’s points all the more poignant, demonstrating that issues of
acceptance and adaptation may start at a very early age.

Let’s start with their looks: the female leads in this film
look like boys, and they suffer for it, however indirectly. The film’s spiritual
center. Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), has short-cropped hair and often carries herself blockily; when
she walks around in her tights, you might easily think she was a boy wearing
pajamas around the house. She’s the best actor of the three; Moodysson’s
trademark close-ups reveal a thoughtfulness and reflectiveness in her gaze, a
silence before she speaks, that’s striking in a film about three schoolmates
forming a punk band. Her bandmate, Klara (Mira Grosin), is similarly boyish in appearance,
with a cocky mohawk and a raffish aggression that reminds one of the male
characters in the film; her emotions are fairly simple ones—happy, sad,
confused, without much nuance. The two friends gradually adopt Hedwig (Liv LeMoyne), a
Christian who also plays classical guitar proficiently, as part of their
band—though more classically “pretty,” with long blondish hair, she too has a
vaguely blunted quality to her, a sub-verbal affect expected more from a sullen teenage
boy than a rocker in a girl band. When the trio interacts with the other girls in their school, all wearing
heavy make-up, we realize that the bandmates are foils for the other characters’ more
stereotypically “feminine” affectations, and that the film’s sympathies are
obvious—the more “popular” girls here seem callous beside the rebellious, more alive
protagonists. Ultimately, other children’s ridiculing of the bandmates comes
across here as the beating down of the less-attractive by the more-attractive. Male
treatment of these girls can be brutal at times; more than once, they are called
“ugly,” reinforcing their status as social outcasts—and reinforcing the idea, all
too common,  of a “typical” female appearance,
which doesn’t include cropped hair, boyish features, or mohawks. (At least not in Sweden.) When the girls
cut Hedwig’s long blond hair short, the act reads a little bit like an
initiation into a post-archaic vision of womanhood.

Moodysson, given his intense sensitivity to
female concerns, doesn’t really present male characters comfortably. Here, as in his other
films, either they’re brutes or they’re overly gentle—there’s never an excess
of subtlety in the characterization. In this film, the receding quality of many of the male characters
brings the band members’ attitudes into the foreground. When the girls meet up
with another punk-ish band, all male, the boys in the other band, shoegazers par excellence when they’re not playing
their instruments, seem like dull knives beside the more fiery protagonists of
this film—they make poor conversation, and they’re hopeless as flirts. Whether
faking her indifference or not, Bobo dismisses the boys in the band as boring,
and her dismissal makes good sociological sense, in this context; in a
community not entirely ready to accept the idea of a girl band, what could be
more conventional than a group of young boys playing punk, and oafishly? Likewise,
male authority figures, like the bumbling supervisors in the rec center where
the girls practice, or even Bobo’s father, often seem passive. Bobo’s father
is gone a lot of the time; Bobo’s mother sleeps around quite often; his is a
sham of fatherhood. Unable to fully command others, or take a stand, the male
characters in this film ultimately leave the female characters, regardless of
their age, to make their own way, and their own rules, successfully. The film
becomes a parody of male dominance.

Near the end of We Are
the Best!, as if to top things off, the girls even have to cope with what
we would call “mansplaining,” or whatever the Swedish version of it would be,
as one of the rec center directors insists on showing off his guitar skills, as a demonstration of proper playing,
only to watch Hedwig, who is adept at classical guitar, play circles around
him. The scene is not overplayed, and yet, like everything else in the film, it
is set up for a highly deliberate purpose. The older men in the rec center
don’t have a chance; any disciplinary or authoritative gesture they make can
only show their incompetence. It’s to the film’s credit that, despite the
simple, straightforward way it develops, it manages to arrive at an ending that
shows the girls as successful on their own terms, even if they get a stormy
reception, complete with food-throwing. The film, beyond being a girls’
hero-saga, indicates that these characters, these women can live for each other—and
in so doing, teaches a little bit, or perhaps a mouthful, about human survival.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

New Media and the Solipsistic Romantic Comedy

New Media and the Solipsistic Romantic Comedy

nullIn an excellent essay
on romantic comedy, Frank
Krutnik writes about the “nervous romances” of the 1970s.[1]
These are comedies characterized by their characters’ “wistful nostalgia” for
traditional romance, and their simultaneous acknowledgment of the impossibility
of these old-fashioned conventions being operable in a changed social climate.
Lovers are now very self-conscious
about expressing their feelings and worry that they may depend upon clichés for
the articulation of these sentiments. Moreover, the institutionalized end
result of courtship – i.e., marriage – no longer seems entirely satisfactory,
and so the “obstacle race to the altar” is rarely a viable narrative anymore.
As Geoff King
puts it, narrative resolutions in contemporary romantic comedies frequently
“occur in the form of a disavowal of
marriage, a version of the marriage vows based on an agreement…to be not married together for the rest of
their lives.”[2]


These
contemporary romances, then, can be regarded as amplified or exaggerated
dramatizations of a very old solipsistic
dilemma. Stanley
Cavell identifies this dilemma as the problem
of acknowledgment.[3] In
simple terms, this problem revolves around our inability to know others – to
have access to their interiority – with any degree of certainty. At its most
nihilistic, this form of solipsism imagines that others exist only for us and
because of us. At the very least, it worries that we can never truly know how
things might be for others. Cavell uses this term to describe classic screwball
comedies, and their scenarios revolving around the renewal of marriage. However,
the concept can also be applied to the contemporary solipsistic romance – films
in which marriage is an altogether distant consideration for the young lovers
within them, and the possibility of remarriage is out of the question entirely. 

These nervous
romances primarily stem from Woody Allen’s
influential comedies, Annie Hall and Manhattan, in which the pursuit of
romance is represented as perpetually frustrating and elusive. Such nervousness
wends its way throughout some of the most popular comedies of the 1980s as
well. While Molly Ringwald’s hunky birthday wish comes true at the end of Sixteen Candles, most of John Hughes’
teens cannily pick at the prospect of “true love” as if it were an overripe
pimple to be squeezed. John Cusack relies on a ghetto-blasted rush of Peter
Gabriel as a substitute for his precious self-expression in Say Anything. The grownups hardly fare
any better: think of Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, too preoccupied by neurotic
self-scrutiny to settle easily into mutual romance, in When Harry Met Sally.

In the 1990s, the
directors of, My Best Friend’s Wedding
and Four Weddings & a Funeral
were worried enough about romance to propose friendship as a more viable
emotional relationship between a guy and a gal. Chasing Amy also helped by queering up a previously straight genre.
Meanwhile, Sleepless in Seattle (with
its soundtrack of old-timey standards and references to An Affair to Remember) just wished for a good ol’ kiss to build a
dream on again. Shifting into the 2000s, however, Judd Apatow & Co., The Break-Up, and Punch-Drunk Love collectively suggested that modern romance is
inherently crazy or simply just a way of avoiding being alone. Indeed, romantic
comedy in the 2000s became (yet another) phallocentric genre, with many of the
most popular or influential films of the decade focused on the alleged
self-centredness of a childish leading male. The nervousness of Allen in the
70s has prompted any number of regressions. Many of these comedies now deal
with the crisis of juvenile self-absorption. 

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World seems like an escape route from the
dead end of solipsistic  nervousness. It
is the most deliriously rewarding romantic comedy since Adam Sandler’s
brilliant reflexive turn in Punch Drunk
Love, or the tentative fumblings toward mutual renewal in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Edgar Wright revisits and elaborates
upon similar ideas asserted in Shaun of
the Dead – his first superlative feature that had the audacity to suggest
that adult romance might save one from living an unexamined life. I find it
fruitful, then, to consider Scott Pilgrim
as an extremely thoughtful return the problem
of acknowledgment. The film is a romantic comedy that compels its arrested
adolescent to recognize and respond to the difference between himself and an
other. Moreover, it makes the counterintuitive and audacious assertion that new
media technologies might facilitate the amorous traversing of this difference.

Incredibly, Wright
is able to articulate this idea in a work entirely populated by cartoonish
abstractions. Translating Brian Lee O’Malley’s
schematics so cannily, Wright provides a delirious cavalcade of one-dimensional
models of masculinity and femininity. Indeed the entire hipster gamut is on
colourful display here, and these gleeful primaries bring the romantic concerns
of the past decade into sharp relief. Michael Cera finally clues into what the
rest of us have known since Arrested
Development: his nebbish heartthrob is actually a total asshole.
Accordingly, Cera shies away from the comics’ relatively sympathetic treatment
of their titular hero. He reveals Scott as a young man who can’t make the
effort to be interested in experiences outside his own interests and therefore can’t
be bothered to acknowledge others’ desires & feelings. The screenplays’
terrific idiom of assertions, aphorisms and inarticulation conveys this
solipsism brilliantly. Scott’s
apathy prevents him from even finishing Matthew Patel’s emailed challenge
to a duel. “This is… borrrring. Deleeeeete!” In fact, Scott tends to flinch at the
prospect of recognizing others’ desires: he literally chokes on Knives Chau’s
perfumed proclamation of love.

Even more bracing
is the film’s unsparing treatment of the romantic comedy’s token breakup scene.
Here, Scott doesn’t agonize over how his lack of regard for Knives has hurt
her, but rather he squirms over the memory of being compelled to perform an unpleasant
task. And one wipe edit later, he’s giddy at the prospect of moving on to that
obscure object of his desire, Ramona Flowers.

So, how does this
self-regarding man-child overcome the problems of acknowledgment and authentic
self-expression? Through graphic pop
culture iconography, which Wright uses to represent the emotional lives of
the protagonists. This tactic joyously
demonstrates how our feelings are mediated by the technological and popular
products that we (or at least those of us of a certain age demographic and/or
Toronto scenesters) consume. 

To that end, the
film improves on an idea from a previous Michael Cera film: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. The focus
there was on NYC kewl kids finding the Most Excellent Ever music to articulate
their mutual attraction. Here, as in Shaun
of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright delights in a ceaseless barrage
of densely layered allusions (e.g., every band in the film must be named after
an NES game, parody an indie subgenre, and have their music composed by a
Pitchfork-endorsed musician). And yet, such intertexuality is all in the name
of a neo-romantic sincerity. The “wistful nostalgia” is technologized, which is
why the film’s style pays homage to the videogame logics of (relatively) old
new media: sequences rendered with 16-bit graphics, multiple shout-outs to SNES
and Sega Genesis gaming experiences, the Universal Studios theme
downgraded to a MIDI recording, etc. Levelling, bonuses, combos, 1Ups, and life
bars are all brilliantly analogized as game mechanics that help their players
mature and find love.

Scott’s
experiences are dramatized via an almost non-stop overlay of animated captions
and sound effects, in an excellent remediation of manga and anime conventions.
Fight scenes feature split-screened close-ups of furrowed eyebrows, speed-lined
backgrounds, and ridiculously paced accelerating montages. Reaction shots
reveal emotions that change in less than a blink of an eye. Nearly every moment
is filtered through Scott’s one-direction consciousness. Because he’s
constantly in a hurry to attend to the things that he finds interesting, the
editing often skitters along as if it were Chapter Searching. Not only is the
camera nearly constantly moving, Wright shows a preference for close-ups, and
so the film conveys Scott’s perpetual state of distraction and his tendency to
wilfully ignore his surroundings. 

Therefore the intensity
and simplicity of Scott’s feelings is a product of his lack of real-world romantic
experience. Only able to cite one occasion of heartbreak, he elevates Ramona’s
extensive amorous involvements with a variety of people to an Epic level of
Epic Epicness: the League of Seven Evil Exes no less. Little wonder that Ramona
is so aloof to Scott’s puppyish adoration. After a final Big Boss Battle, Scott
discovers that genuine feelings and desires are accompanied by obligations to
others. His subsequent forthrightness of expression and acknowledgement seems
to signal an overcoming of the anxieties generated by contemporary nervous
romances. Will the Girl of His Dreams (and others like her) have the patience
to be conveyed in the terms provided by new media representations?

null


In certain
respects, Spike Jonze’s Her takes up
this question in sweetly galvanizing terms. Plaintive and meditative where Scott Pilgrim is brash and bracing, Her explores more directly the
relationship between romance and solipsism, and the role new media might play
in allowing the former to overcome the latter. Jonze’s attitudes toward digital
love – specifically the romance between an OS (“Samantha”) and her “operator”
(Theodore Twombly) – are considerably more tentative and ambivalent. The caution
evident in this more palpably nervous romance is often surprisingly underplayed
in most critical responses to the film, which typically unilaterally celebrate Samantha
and Theodore’s relationship as a technologized “solution” to 21st
century lovesick blues. But these accolades tend to be parsed in ways that
weirdly retain the language of user/interface (even calling Theodore Samantha’s
“operator” is intensely problematic). Some critics actually intimate that the
film promotes solipsism as an unavoidable (and even progressive) means of
navigating interpersonal relationships. In a recent
Press Play conversation, for
example, Jennifer Anise suggests that “what Theodore needs in order to propel
himself forward in life [is] an exploratory/love relationship with himself.”[4]                                             

To be clear, Her should not be understood as a
straightforward idealization of the affair between Theodore and Samantha;
indeed, the film seems quite aware that its own scenario is imbricated by male
fantasy. For some, the film is a distancing affair, and even unconsciously
replicates the same, tired old white,
male tropes of romantic comedies. Samantha’s “perfection” is both
explicitly addressed but also implicitly adored: she is designed as a helpmeet,
is instantly accessible, Her needs are secretly His needs, etc.[5] And
yet, it can also be asserted that the film is cognizant of its own masculinist
fantasies; after all, it represents a protagonist who has difficulty
acknowledging others in a meaningful way. That the film never completely
remedies Theodore’s blinkered vision – nor insists that it can see past its own
limited view of interpersonal relationships – is perhaps its most interesting
quality.

Her suggests that by 2025 new media will
itself become romantic, rather than the means by which romantic expressions are
articulated. That is, communication takes on the sheen of romance – and
certainly eroticism – simply by virtue of being mediated. Access to amorous encounters
are only a click away, and if modern romance has assumed an instantaneity, then
it has truly become timeless: Samantha is never distant, is always immediate.
Love, or the possibility of love, is always Here, always Now.

From its very
outset, Her dramatizes this
manufactured intimacy, and its lived consequences. In the opening sequence, a
slow track out reveals the assumed privacy of Theodore’s office to be a cubicle
within an enclosed environment of similar workstations. Beautiful Handwritten
Letters dot com – where Theodore manufactures intimacy for others – is a meticulously
designed manifestation of the new economy. Its constructed warmth – an
architectural omen of things to come – is generated through a perfect
rectangular symmetry (walls, desks, frames, screens, chairs, paper) softened by
solid blocks of wispy pastels. The office has all the informality of a Hallmark
card: its baby blues, fuchsias, pistachios, lemon yellows should exude
sunniness but are melancholic instead due to the smudgy desaturation of the
film’s palette. Theodore and his gentle boss, Paul, dress to match their
environment, and their rapport is gently officious. Only the drooping plants,
and oversized, depressed-looking decals hint at an underlying neglect. Human
relationships are relentlessly mediated here via ubiquitous, keyboard-less
computers, and even organic signs of traditional communication (i.e. paper) are
fed into machines.

So if intimacy is
now to be manufactured, the diminished, guarded, and/or structured passions of
the inhabitants of 2025 Los Angeles seem to warrant this engineering. Theodore
in particular – with his waist-high trousers, soft pink plaid shirt, large glasses,
obtrusive moustache – is in need of some kind of artificial respiration. It is
certainly no accident that his wardrobe is colour-coordinated to match
Samantha’s start-up screen. In the opening sequence, both he and Paul comport
themselves through signs of genuineness only: Theodore compliments his boss on
his shirt, which Paul confesses to buying simply because it “reminded him of
someone suave,” and not because he is
suave in the slightest. Theodore, meanwhile, is emotionally stunted –
prolonging signing his divorce papers because he seems unable to bear the
prospect of becoming further unmoored from the world. Catherine – his imminent
ex-wife – asserts, not inaccurately, that he “can’t deal with real emotions.”
And while Theodore counters that she possibly “felt too much,” he is dismissive
of the sentiments that he manufactures for others. “They’re just letters,” he
tells Paul on at least two occasions, minimizing the tokens of feeling that he
crafts for others. 

So, like Scott
Pilgrim, Theodore is too much in his own head. However, unlike Scott, he is trapped
within a prison of memory. Brief, nostalgic montages frequently interrupt the
forward momentum of his present situations. Even the eventual signing of his
divorce papers – a necessary movement toward promising futurity – is interwoven
by the ghosts of previous matrimonial bliss, to which Jonze (almost cruelly)
intercuts. But these memories are fantasies only; they are Theodore’s
projections of a love that he unfairly imagines Catherine unable to reciprocate. And
this is Theodore’s ongoing failure: he believes in his own sensitivity and
ability to deeply empathize with others, but the fantasies that he creates for
and around others are mere projections. Indeed, it is to Jonze’s credit

that Theodore’s
ability to connect with others is ultimately left in question – even though the
character himself believes that his empathetic imagination has been expanded. In
this regard, Samantha can sometimes seems little more than an enabler of his
solipsism. During one of their dates, she comments that “he’s really good at”
imagining the lives of others. However, the scenarios he crafts for these
anonymous passersby are just constructions that signal his reticence to make
actual connections. It is not that he notices things about others (e.g. the
“crooked little tooth” of one of the clients to whom he writes letters); rather
he imaginatively develops inner lives for them. Theodore prefers people to be
as he imagines them – and for most of the film’s running time, Samantha seems
to comply with this tendency all too readily.

In short, Theodore
cannot allow his subjectivity to be penetrated by those who might otherwise
come to love him. The problem is chronic and ongoing: his date with Amelia goes
awry when he will not commit to seeing her again (“You’re a really creepy
dude,” she laments, not unfairly); the shared fantasy of anonymous phone sex
collapses spectacularly (and hilariously) when he finds himself unable to share
“Sexy Kitten’s” necro-bestial lust; he can only see Catherine through the
projection of past romanticism, and can’t reconcile himself to her growth away
from him. Even Samantha’s wants and desires (particularly for physical contact
with Theodore via a human surrogate) are frequently beyond him. In some
respects, Samantha is a concise manifestation of a solipsistic inability to
acknowledge others: she can never be “seen,” and as an extended, disembodied
consciousness she is both everywhere and nowhere.

Scott Pilgrim suggests that remediation
provides a new romantic vocabulary, and thus a possible way out of an
intractable solipsism. But Her eventually
resorts to the unimaginable prospect of technological singularity as a way of
acknowledging others. In the end, Jonze’s film expresses a gentle (rather than
dystopic or unsettling) ambivalence regarding new media’s ability to confront
or overcome solipsism. Indeed, the film may even be positing that others are
increasingly existing for us only through mediation. Theodore’s loving relationship
with a constructed consciousness – initially designed for him alone – is not an
isolated incident; this quasi-solipsistic affair seems to spread with the
cultural penetration of the OS system. As the film develops, people are
increasingly seen wearing earpieces and talking to their devices (rather than
each other) in public. And so, this is why the film’s romanticism is so
disquietingly unstraightforward, and its ambivalence toward new media so
intriguing. 

Ultimately, the
film is wise enough to puncture Theodore’s exclusionary fantasy as Samantha
(like Catherine before her) also grows and evolves away from and beyond
Theodore. She eventually admits to being in love with 640 others besides
Theodore. And though he protests that this prospect is “fucking insane,” her
hyperbolic dismantling of monogamy also short-circuits the notion that one
might exist only for (and because of) another. In true solipsistic (if not paternalist)
fashion Theodore laments that “You’re mine or you’re not mine,” to which
Samantha’s offers an astoundingly realist reply: “I’m yours and I’m not yours.”
For unabashed romantics, perhaps this realism – and Samantha’s own departure –
is what will allow Theodore to shake the lingering, weighty ghosts of
nostalgia. By film’s end, he writes his own letter to Catherine expressing his
love for her, but also his
willingness to wish her well in her life without him. On the other hand, for
romantics of a more nervous variety, perhaps this is only wishful thinking. As
Theodore and gal-pal Amy Adams share a sunset at film’s end, Samantha is still somewhere
else, somewhere beyond Theodore’s ability
to reconcile a Her without a Him. The film recognize its own inability to
achieve escape velocity from solipsism’s inwardness, and this tenderly
melancholic achievement is to be savoured by anxious sweethearts everywhere.

Aaron Taylor is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the
Department of New Media at the University of Lethbridge. He is the editor of Theorizing Film Acting and his
writing on cinema can be found in numerous anthologies and journals.

[1] Krutnik,
Frank. “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the
Comedy of the Sexes.” The Velvet Light
Trap 26 (1990): 57-72.

[2] King, Geoff. Film Comedy.
London: Wallflower, 2002. 57-58. 

[3] Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of
Happiness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 17-19.

[4] Anise, Jennifer and
Steven Boone. “What Her Tells Us
About Ourselves: A Conversation.” Press
Play, April 15, 2014, http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/what-her-tells-us-about-ourselves-a-conversation. 

[5] For a blistering review, see Nadler, Christina. “Spike Jonze is a
Jackass.” Christina Nadler, March 2,
2014, http://christinanadler.com/spike-jonze-is-a-jackass-part-1/.

DOWN-UNDERGROUND: Muriel’s Red Wedding

DOWN-UNDERGROUND: Muriel’s Red Wedding

nullThe 90s saw Australian filmmakers enjoying worldwide success
with a series of offbeat comedies that celebrated outsider status and often
mixed challenging subject matter with laughs. 
As inventive as these films were, their success overshadowed the dark
history of Australian cinema, Walkabout and
Picnic at Hanging Rock supplanted by Priscilla and Muriel in the cultural memory. 
But in 2005 that repressed history resurfaced in one of the most
disturbing films to come from down under, Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek.  Dismissed by
many critics as misogynistic torture porn, the film is in fact a compendium of
filmic tropes that simultaneously resurrects and comments on Australia’s peculiar
film history.

One of the most successful and iconic figures of Australian
cinema is Crocodile Dundee, the
raffish survivalist bushman played by Paul Hogan.  In the years following the success of the
Dundee franchise, other Australian directors would achieve commercial—and
sometimes aesthetic—success with such offbeat comedies as Flirting, Strictly Ballroom,
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and
of course Muriel’s Wedding, directed
by Hogan.  Dealing with topics that had
been rarely addressed in comedy, such as racism, gay and transgender
identities, and disability (not to mention ABBA), these films also embraced a
garish and camp aesthetic that was refreshingly at odds with American and
European preoccupation with upward mobility.

But however much these films challenged certain conventions
of the comedy genre, they arguably contributed more to the worldwide success of
their stars (Nicole Kidman, Guy Pearce, Hugo Weaving, Toni Collette, and
director Baz Luhrman) than they did to Australian cinema.  The same might be said of the path taken by Dundee’s
demonic doppelganger Mad Max, who launched Mel Gibson into stardom.  While the original 1979 film was an inventive
transformation of the New Wave’s darker stylings into irresistible grindhouse
fare, as the franchise gained commercial success and higher budgets, it devolved
into the disastrously overblown theatricals of Thunder-Dome. 

On its release, Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek was regarded by most serious critics as slasher shlock,
yet it can also be read as a disturbing treatise on Australian film and the
peculiar cultural and geographical history that underpins it.  Certainly this film is not recommended for
the queasy, but it could also be considered less a celebration of violence than an indictment of it.  By exploring the
relationship between character and setting, it offers a powerful
meditation on the causes of violence, one that has resonance well beyond its
Australian setting.

The film begins in Muriel
territory, with three twenty-somethings partying poolside before piling into a
car the next morning.  Liz and Christy
are both British tourists, and their Sydney pal Ben is accompanying them on a road
trip on their way to the airport in Queensland. 
They travel the forbidding spaces of the Great Northern Highway, which
rolls through the arid western deserts with only rare interruptions by a roadhouse
or rest-stop.  When they do finally hit a
gas station, they are harassed by a group of slack-jawed yokels, who threaten
the women with a “gang-bang.”  Ben tries
to man up on the occasion, but it is a role he is clearly uncomfortable with:
he is feminized, and the women are verbally objectified and victimized.  The film will continue to explore the ways in
which gender is as much a product of cultural context as biology.

Soon after this disturbing encounter, they arrive at their
first destination: Wolf Creek, site of a massive asteroid crater.  As they walk around the eerie terrain, the
atmosphere becomes reminiscent of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1972), in which the students and teachers
of a girl’s boarding school go for a holiday outing at a strange and ominous
rock formation, where several of the girls mysteriously disappear.  The dream-like rhythms and surreal landscape
of Wolf Creek evoke a similar sense
of the uncanny, and likewise hint at the spiritual traditions of Australia’s
aboriginal population, so closely linked to the continent’s unique
ecosystem.  This dreamy atmosphere culminates
in the travelers’ watches stopping simultaneously, suggesting a spiritual or
astral influence on the dire events that follow.

Such scenes are significantly enhanced by the film’s
astonishingly inventive sound design. 
François Tétaz composed a score woven out of a collection of field
recordings made from the sound of power lines eerily humming and vibrating in the
desert winds.  When these rise to muted
crescendos, they vaguely resemble the conventional horror movie “stingers” that
punctuate scare scenes, but with a subtle organicism rooted in the ambient
soundscape. 

When they try to leave, their car refuses to start, and as
they wait through the night for the unlikely arrival of another visitor they
are “rescued” by a rugged frontiersman, Mick, who bears more than a passing
resemblance to Crocodile Dundee, but one badly gone to seed and stripped of all
his rugged charms.  The resemblance is
made explicit later on, after an hours-long tow back to Mick’s compound.  As they sit around a campfire before their
good Samaritan goes to work on their car, the gap between rural and urban,
Australian and English, goes from awkward to excruciating, until Ben tries to
break the tension by quoting Dundee’s famous line, “You call that a knife? Now
that’s a knife!” which Mick doesn’t quite get, and assumes he’s being
mocked. 

And, in a sense, he is. 
Earlier in this uncomfortable encounter Ben tells him he’s from Sydney,
to which Mick replies, “Poofter capital of Australia!”  This further hit on Ben’s threatened
masculinity can be seen as motivating his later insult, intended to mark Mick
as a redneck, a bumpkin, a rural relic, lost in the past of a modernizing
nation of which Sydney is the urban symbol. 
But the nation’s repressed history takes its revenge, as Mick drugs them
with what he claims to be “rainwater from the top end.”  Thinking they are partaking of the landscape’s
natural purity, they are in fact being prepared for slaughter.  This irony is anticipated in the campfire
conversation when Ben enthuses about Mick’s life in the open air, his freedom
in nature, to which Mick bluntly replies: “What the fuck are you talking about?”  Idealization of nature is a product of the
urban middle class, not of those who scrabble a living off the landscape.

That campfire exchange, and the class and gender politics
that frame it, is crucial for understanding the violence that follows.  While the women are tortured, they also fight
against, and momentarily escape, their captor. 
It should be noted that much of the film’s violence occurs off-screen,
though Mick’s gleeful sadism and Kristy’s abject fear create an unbearable
sense of dread.  During their escape the
film recalls another great film from the Australian New Wave, Wake in Fright, which makes the
expansive landscapes of the Outback into a paradoxically claustrophobic space
of dread.  Threat lurks everywhere in the
wide-open desert spaces.  Holes appear in
their getaway vehicle, inexplicably, until we realize they are made by a rifle
fired from hundreds of yards away.  As in
the Mad Max films, the freedom of the
open road is turned into a space of entrapment and violence. 

This is the end of the frontier.  The exploitation of the landscape and
near-genocide of the native peoples of Australia is supplanted by a more
mysterious, surreptitious form of violence. 
The film opens with the vague and sinister words: “30,000 people are
reported missing in Australia every year. 90% are found within a month.  Some are never seen again.”  Though this is conventional thriller
verbiage, it is also an altogether different vision of the country than that offered
by Baz Luhrmann’s camp epic Australia or
Paul Hogan’s lovable bushman.   Like the
great films of the 1970s, Wolf Creek
de-romanticizes the landscape, and reminds us that the past is never past, and
that violence can erupt from the most seemingly remote places.

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

Of Literary Television, and the Damage Done

Of Literary Television, and the Damage Done

null

If one accepts that “literary television,” with
its references, counter-references, allusions, character nuances, plot
mechanisms and other trappings typically associated with books, as demonstrated
admirably in shows ranging from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad to Mad Men, is a
part of the cultural landscape that must be reckoned with, then it’s only fair that, given a certain amount of
intellectual distance, one might look at where it is headed. If the sensitive
among us, and those knowledgeable about trends, and where they lead and
where they don’t lead, were to make such an assessment and then not feel a small
ounce of queasiness, as a result, then two things are true: all
is as it’s supposed to be, and we, as a “culture,” have a problem.

There’s no denying the pleasure to be had in stretching out
and watching an episode, or seven, of The Sopranos, listening to Jersey patois
deployed in comic and artful ways, or witnessing the unfolding of eccentric
storylines, or drifting through dream sequences from inside the head of a Mafia
boss. Similarly, entering the desert world of Breaking Bad, with its beautiful
cinematography, and its deranged but sincerely human storyline, or that of Mad
Men, with its cool and yet also jabberingly active period-authentic dialogue, rich
with the thrill of the pursuit of money, provides excellent escape, even
absorption. But it is necessary, at a certain point, to consider what is
involved in that absorption. Any artistic work, be it a sonata or a
blockbuster, makes requirements of its viewers. On one level, of
course, there’s suspension of disbelief—the idea that anything that seems
improbable or unlikely within a story can be forgiven because the work in
question is fictional, not reportage—and that’s just the way storytellers do things. In the case of these shows,
though, something extra is required: a sense that one is, somehow, above the
story being watched, that the viewer is obviously not capable of the depths to
which the characters sink, nor would ever condone the illegal activities and
trespasses depicted. This breeds, with time, a sense of viewer toughness: Of course we can watch a human body being
dissolved in acid and then falling, in a bloody, gelatinous mess, through several
layers of wood, cement and sheetrock. It’s for the purpose of a larger story. Or:
of course, we can watch advertising
executives drink themselves into a stupor at their desks. That all took place
long ago, and we would never, ever do such a thing today. Who could? And we certainly
wouldn’t cheat on our wives, either. The sense is that the viewer, being
“above” the actions portrayed on screen, can digest an episode or two and then
move on, unhindered, unaffected. This toughness, though, is not necessarily
foolproof. You can’t absorb the “smart” part of a series—the cross-references,
the character layers, etc.—and not somehow absorb the part
of that series more commonly considered abhorrent. And if this is the case,
what’s the cumulative affect of all of this absorption, of all of these hours
spent binge-watching?

Take, for example, The
Sopranos. Since the days of The
Godfather, the Mafia, with its secrecy, its sudden violence, its strangely
lyrical mode of verbal expression (“Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes”) has
been seemingly easily digested by the culture at large—so great is the sense
that their comings and goings are separate from ours  that jokes can be easily made at their
expense and have, by and large, lost whatever “edge” they may once have had. To
“make someone an offer they can’t refuse” is a nearly meaningless expression at
this point in time. The Sopranos, as
has been widely discussed, placed viewers in an uneasy relationship with the
Mafia, and with crime in general. To accept the show, or to continue watching
it, would mean that the viewer would have to tread a highly quavery line: that
of accepting the insecurities of its central character, sentimental attachment
to ducks, panic attacks, troubled relationship with his mother, and all—and
rejecting that which one knew to be wrong, i.e. the violence, the extortion,
the bullying, the breaking of the laws of the land. And yet: it would be a rare
viewer who did not, at some point, if only for a second, surrender and suppose:
What if I were him? He has so much
authority. Those guys, they really know how to get things done. And similar
sentiments, all adding up to a sense that, whatever the law and common morality
might say, Tony and his co-workers were an impressive bunch. Said feeling, once
had, would immediately be squelched. And the next episode would be queued.

Similarly, Breaking
Bad required that one both sympathize with its central figure, Walter White, a man
stricken with cancer, and recognize the lawlessness of his actions: the
manufacture of meth, the sale of it for his own treatments and the sake of his family, the murders, the increasingly violent way
in which the day’s activities were completed, the wholesale deception of his
family (at first). The distancing required here, the sense of superiority, was
a bit more complex. After all, there seemed to be a specific reason for this journey,
on which all viewers were passengers, into a dark and forbidding place, both a
mental nadir and a socioeconomic pit, however complexly portrayed it might have
been—and this reason, personal preservation, was a rather primal one. Coupled
with this was the sense that, whatever his trespasses might be, White
was achieving power where he had previously had none, an irresistible tale,
psychological rags to riches, the victory of the underdog. Viewers were given plenty to marvel at besides
the story line: the camera work (which this publication has given
considerable attention), the literary references, the complexity of the plot,
the almost droll attitude the show’s creator took towards its development. This was enough to prevent direct engagement, for the most part, with the actual
content of the show—to somehow allow viewers to both dwell in the mind of a
criminal and step outside of it, to appreciate the form without grappling with
the content, and have that be enough. And yet was it? Wasn’t there some small part
of some viewers that might, every now and then, watch the violence on screen
and cheer inside, get some small charge from it? One might use words like devastating or horrific to describe it—but these words might be code for impressive or, sadly, enviable.

And currently there’s Mad Men, a show about a supremely
unredeemable set of ad executives, from a period in American history that was,
in many ways, horrible, acting viciously towards each other and their loved
ones—and yet doing so with such an immaculately clever script, such a
remarkably accurate set, in such stand-out wardrobes, again eerily faithful to
the period, and with such a natural sense of dynamism and such a crackling,
wired sense of the potential of human conversation that it is difficult, for its
millions of viewers to feel anything but rapt worship for it. This worship
translates into its critical reception; in its most skilled commentators, it
typically inspires flights of lyricism one would best reserve for a creative
writing class, a love letter, or a eulogy. The setting-aside one must do here
is, again, quite complex. To engage with the show on its terms—to follow Don
Draper from his false identity forward, through a career marred but also
invigorated by a healthy diet of booze, adultery, familial betrayal, and
narcissism—one has to both forgive him and separate one’s self from his
misdeeds, issue stern rebukes to the mischievous voice in one’s ear whispering,
What about that martini at lunch? Why not
have an affair? Who needs to tell the truth? How old-fashioned! This is
where toughness comes in: one has to watch the horror-show of sexist, racist,
and classist attitudes circulating through the show’s office hallways and
remind one’s self of one’s natural distance, perspective, and self-respect—and
hope the reminder sticks. The show’s army of recappers all call Draper a
misogynist, a sexist, a pig, any name you might think of. But few of them
dismiss his ad pitches.

So in a sense, what we’re doing when we watch “literary
television” is pretending we’re not watching what we’re watching—we hold the
program at the level of commentary, of satire, seemingly preventing it from affecting us
in any way. The problem is, though, that the shows mentioned touch us in primal
ways, and so they can never be just commentary: mob hits, carnage, adultery,
rampant alcoholism, or what have you all move us, in small ways. We like to
pretend we’re tough enough to place everything, from the most maudlin part of a
TV show to the most horrific event in “offscreen” life, in perspective. And, in
fact, daily life demands that, increasingly. We keep up, steadily, with
whatever happens outside of ourselves: The text messages. The emails. The
Tweets. The Facebook posts. The Youtube videos. The gossip. The commentary on
the gossip. The TV shows. The commentary on the TV shows. And onwards, until
whatever happens in the “real” world is inconsequential until it becomes absorbed,
translated into a language we recognize, posted somewhere, with a photo, or better yet, slipped into a Tweet. In the current social context, a television drama
that asked its viewers to follow, for an extended period of time, a series of
events in the lives of well-drawn, well-acted characters who weren’t gangsters,
drug dealers, or ad executives from a decade largely unknown to said viewers wouldn’t
have much of a chance. Why? Because it would provide no opportunity to escape.
In a world in which escape—from the self, ultimately—is a goal shared by many, such
a show would be decidedly, for lack of a better word, unsexy. I will admit that
I’m happy to live in a time when such brilliant, staggeringly accomplished
shows as those described above are on television—and yet, at some times, I’m
also terrified at what lies ahead.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

On GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA: The Current State of the “Public Intellectual”

On GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA: The Current State of the “Public Intellectual”

null

What does it mean to be a “public intellectual” in 21st
century America? To answer this question properly, you have to answer two smaller
questions: what does it mean to be public? And what does mean to be an
intellectual? The answer to the first is simple. If you have a computer and an
understanding of passwords, you can establish both a Twitter and a Facebook
account in a matter of minutes. Voila! You’re public. Any thoughts you might
have will be shared with anyone who cares to seek them out. The second question
is more thorny. Education has changed. The country has changed. America remains
only a smidgen above third world nations in its educational quality, and has
occupied that spot for many years. So the answer to the question becomes: being
an “intellectual” means being smart enough to make people listen to you, and believe you. (No mean feat.) So
what of the whole label? Can a blogger be seen as a public intellectual? Are
the pundits we read at Salon, Slate, and the Huffington Post the seers we look
to for stimulation of thought and dialogue? Or, to take it farther, when a
Tweeter with nearly a million followers writes a glib 140-character statement that provokes dialogue, can we consider this an act of
public intellectualism? Are the fomenters in comment boxes on Facebook, blogs, news sites, to be seen as public intellectuals, themselves, for the command
of a virtual and potential audience? Think about these questions too hard, and
you might just throw up in your mouth. Seeing Gore Vidal: The United States of
Amnesia might shed some light on the matter, or at least suggest what the strange term “public intellectual” used to mean. 

There was very little that Vidal, who died in 2012, didn’t
do, and the documentary shows us his working life in loving detail. He was a
novelist, throughout his life; his frankly homoerotic 1954 novel The City and the Pillar gave him great
notoriety on its publication, and in fact it guaranteed that the New York Times
would not review his books for many years afterwards. Finding that he needed to
make a living, he turned to plays and teleplays, one of the most successful of these
being the stage play The Best Man, a sharp social drama that saw a revival in 2000 and 2012. Much later in life, he would write the—again—scandalous Myra Breckinridge, about a transsexual,
for which he also wrote a screenplay, which was made into what some think was
one of the worst films ever made. He also ran for public office twice: for the
House of Representatives in 1960, and for the Senate in 1982. His chief
function in American life, though, and that for which he is perhaps most widely
remembered, was as an essayist (for the Partisan Review, the New York Review of
Books, and elsewhere), a brilliant commentator, an eminently witty pundit—a public intellectual of the
grandest type. Despite the fact that he himself came from a very wealthy
background, he was unabashedly liberal. The most hair-raising moments in a
documentary jammed with Vidal’s controversial but wise statements come first
from footage of a famous series of televised debates he had with William F.
Buckley in 1968. As police clashed violently with protesters at the Democratic
Convention in Chicago, Vidal and Buckley talked quite heatedly about, put simply,
ideas. Asked to comment on the riots, Buckley expressed the hardline view that
they were anarchistic, to which Vidal responded that Buckley was a
“proto-Nazi,” to which Buckley responded that Vidal was a “queer” who should
take himself away from his “pornography”—and the conversation went on from
there, verging on violence. This wouldn’t be the only such rodeo for Vidal: in
a similarly famous debate with the notoriously pugnacious and masculinist but
highly articulate Norman Mailer, the two men nearly came to violence. The
topic? Feminism. Vidal was in favor, Mailer a skeptic, natch. There are nits to
pick, here, as virtuous and intelligent as Vidal might seem. When Vidal and
Buckley debate, they often seem here to be competing to see who can do the best
moneyed drawl, the best James Mason imitation, or both. It might also be argued
that, from a position of wealth and privilege, Vidal was not in a position to
change anyone’s mind about anything—as he knew not whereof he spoke, at least
as far as his views on the life of the poor were concerned. (Rarely in the present-day sections of the film do we see Vidal outside of his mansion overlooking the sea, in Italy.) Nevertheless, what he
and his quasi-contemporaries (Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and yes, William F. Buckley, and yes, Norman Mailer)
stood for was the value of the written word, of clarity, of beauty and succinctness of expression.
Along with, of course, superior education and background. These intellectuals
were celebrities because of the way they spoke, not because of financial status
or their ability to dodge flying cars. (Or, for that
matter, because of their legs.) It would be hard, in other words, to imagine Jimmy Fallon,
comically gifted as he might be, sitting down with Vidal and Buckley and
hosting a chat of the sort they had in the 1960s; talk shows, at present, cater to celebrities of an entirely different caste. Christopher Hitchens, of recent thinkers, might come closest to this older standard, in terms of his public presence and his acceptability beside celebrities of other types; indeed, he flickers
in and out of the documentary, once named by Vidal as his unofficial “heir” or “dauphin”
and then rejected when he wrote essays in favor of the Iraq War.

And so, where have we landed? All we can say with any
certainty is that, in some senses, it is easier to command public attention
with words than it used to be. The rise of blogs, personal websites, and other
such publications as sources of commentary and outlets for expression has
elevated the importance of the first-person perspective and given a broader
swath of individuals a mass audience, through the Internet, that they wouldn’t
necessarily have had before. Who’s to say that’s a bad thing? However, perhaps
the general level of our commentary has decreased, with time. Can we say that
Patton Oswalt, who live-Tweets Downton Abbey, or famously race-baited Fox News
through a series of cleverly worded Tweets, or Louis C.K., whose invective
against smartphones spawned a wide range of commentary, or whose recent Tweets against the Common Core aroused attention from many different quarters, represent the 21st
century’s version of a public intellectual? I’m not complaining, if so, because I love
both comics dearly. But then, on the other hand…

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

Truth, Based on a Story: Disney’s MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Truth, Based on a Story: Disney’s MILLION DOLLAR ARM

nullSport is blessed with narrative. In no sport is this more
apparent than in baseball. Through an affection for and addiction to
statistics, one can draw lines between a century of stories. The game, unlike
most others, has barely changed since Abner Doubleday claimed to have invented
it. There’s wooden bats, leather gloves, nine innings, and at any point,
anything can happen. Its exposition is what writers dream of having the talent
to divine. Which makes Hollywood’s penchant for altering its history so
confounding, as displayed once again in Disney’s Million Dollar Arm. In altering the truth the film unnecessarily
takes a compelling story and makes it a contrived and derivative Hollywood tale
of the American Dream.


Million
Dollar Arm is based on a true story born for the silver screen, the
tale of two poor Indians who through luck, happenstance, and determined will found
themselves pitching for a chance at major league contracts. It was quite
literally a rags to riches story. Unfortunately, the film has Disney-fied the
story, corrupting its narrative, and producing a feature that is a victim of
its own attempts to be successful. Cursory investigation of the real story
behind Million Dollar Arm suggests
the filmmakers left a better movie somewhere in the ether of truth.

This has been done before with baseball films. Recently, Bennett
Miller’s Moneyball, the story of
baseball’s statistical analysis revolution,
altered timelines in order to suit Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin’s
script’s desires. Oakland A’s first baseman Carlos Peña is a star on the rise in
the film, which was not the case in reality. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliant
portrayal of A’s manager Art Howe is an interpretation of the real man, and not
at all what Howe or other A’s of that era claim him to be. And Jeremy Giambi is
presented as a player added to the Oakland A’s roster before the season upon
which the film is based, when in fact he was on the team the year before, and
was involved in one of baseball’s most notorious plays, New York Yankees’ Derek
Jeter’s “flip play” in the 2001 American League Division Series. The
changes were not major, leaving one to wonder: Why make the changes at all?

In a sport whose fans are manic and devout in their faith
in statistics and lore, why rewrite an already compelling story? Million Dollar Arm falls victim to the
Hollywood treatment in its attempt to make the story a contrived fantasy about
the American Dream. Sports agent J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm) and his partner Ash
Vasudevan (Aasif Mandvi) are struggling to make their agency thrive in an era
of greed and opulence. Times may be hard indeed: how else might Bernstein be
about to lose his Porsche and palatial L.A. home? In the film, Bernstein comes
up with the idea (while watching cricket and Britain’s Got Talent, no less) to search India for the next great
baseball talent. In reality, Vasudevan was a venture capitalist whose partner
Will Chang came up with the scheme. Would the truth have made a less compelling
film? Not at all.

The true failure in Million
Dollar Arm is not in its reworking of history but in its choice of the lens
through which history is filtered. Disney chose Hamm’s Bernstein, so that a pretty
man with pretty things could get more pretty things, including a pretty wife,
and somewhere along the way have an epiphanical father figure transition moment
all within a 2-hour run time. A more interesting, compelling, and logical
choice would have been to tell the story through the eyes of the aspiring
Indian ball players Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal).
The two youngsters came from nothing and, in real life, ended up far from home
with their one billion countrymen watching as they attempt to do the
impossible. The film touches on their story, obviously, but addresses them as noble
savages, insulting the audience and illustrating the simplicity of the
Hollywood film factory.

Even if the filmmakers had been afraid of non-white males
as leads, another option would’ve been to explore the story through Tom House
(Bill Paxton), the exiled former Major League pitcher and coach, among the
first major leaguers to use steroids, whose coaching techniques were
controversial, using research and technology to assess training needs, and
frowned upon by the traditions of the sport, not unlike the statheads at the
core of Moneyball. There is a natural
redemption story in House’s tale as he attempts to take two boys who know
nothing about a complicated game, who have never held a baseball, and make them
legitimate prospects. But, Tom House is not pretty, and perhaps already had
enough pretty things from a major league baseball career that the filmmakers
figured his story was not one that audience would want to be spoon-fed.

The preposterous misguided swagger of Hollywoodism is
confounding. A producer of last year’s 42
might well have suggested in a meeting to make Jackie Robinson Asian in order
to appeal to the lucrative foreign market. Perhaps in a remake The Pride of the Yankees, Lou Gehrig
could discover a cure for ALS, and rejoin the Yankees as manager, leading them
to a dynasty in the ‘80s. ESPN’s The
Bronx Is Burning, the story of the 1977 Yankees set against the backdrop of
a tortuous summer for New York: blackouts, looting, finanical peril, and the
NYPD’s hunt for the Son of Sam, would have been a far better film had John
Turturro’s Billy Martin caught David Berkowitz, kicked his drinking problem,
found a cure for the energy crisis, and single-handedly put out out the fires
that raged through the Bronx in the summer of 1977.

There are other odd discrepancies in Million Dollar Arm. Patel’s subplot of wanting to buy his father a
new delivery truck is all Disney. Brenda Fenwick (Lake Bell), Bernstein’s love
interest (because you need a love interest) was not a doctor, as she is in the
film. And Patel and Singh were actually from East St. Louis, and not Lucknow,
India. Okay, that last part isn’t true, but: Hollywood indulges in changes to
stories because they don’t trust in the audience’s ability to consume truth.
But baseball is rooted in truth, truth that can be traced back and forward
through generations. That truth is the sport’s lifeblood, its essence, and to alter
it is folly. Million Dollar Arm is
not a horrible film, but in its wake we’re left to wonder if a better film
existed in the truth they chose not to tell.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The
Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among
others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY
with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare
Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publoshing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press,
2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out
Hockey Player (Found Press,
2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

DOWN-UNDERGROUND: The LONG WEEKEND of the 1970s

DOWN-UNDERGROUND: The LONG WEEKEND of the 1970s

nullAustralian cinema came into its own during the 1970s.  The same might be said of Hollywood during the
same period, as directors like Terrence Malick, John Boorman, and Peter
Bogdanovich eschewed constructed sets and artificial lighting to tell stories in which
settings were as important as characters. 
The obvious difference lies in the nature of Australian nature, itself: the vast
desert spaces of the Outback, the dense vegetation of the bush, and the shark-infested
beaches, foster forms of life that seem alien to outsiders, and many of
Australian film’s best stories revolve around forbidding encounters with a
nature that seems unnatural.  As the
country’s great film decade came to a close, a low-budget horror film would appear as a kind of compendium of the era’s visual tropes.  It is also a dark meditation on the era
itself, one that still has surprising resonance.


At the time, Long Weekend was
promoted with an irresistible tag-line: “Their crime was against nature:
nature found them guilty.”  Directed by
Colin Eggleston, the film was released on March 29, 1979, the day after the
infamous nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. 
Just a few months later, on June 3, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico
began spilling 30,000 gallons of crude oil a day, a toxic event that was later
to be echoed in the unforgettable summer of 2010.  Long
Weekend’s theme could hardly have been more timely.  A dysfunctional couple (Peter and Marcia) decide
to get away from it all on a camping weekend: along the way they hit a kangaroo
with their car, start a fire with a carelessly thrown cigarette, dowse their
campsite with insecticides, and kill sundry birds and aquatic animals while
barely restraining themselves from killing each other.  It’s hard to imagine a more unlikable pair of
characters, and when nature begins to strike back, we are firmly on the side of
the nonhuman. 

Thematically, the film has much in common with another
environmental horror film from the same year, John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy.  Waste chemicals dumped from a local paper
mill pollute backwoods waters in Maine, causing birth defects and mutations in
the local Native American population, and bringing into being a monstrous
mutant bear.  Lost Weekend takes a less
heavy-handed approach to the same environmental theme: indeed, it would be hard not
to.  What’s surprising here is the way it
manages to merge social and psychological issues with environmental ones. 

Nature’s threat seems to come as much from the human
characters as from the bush that surrounds them.  The sound design blurs distinctions between
noises in the characters’ minds and howls and whines from the environmnt.  Since they often refuse to speak to one
another, it’s not clear who hears what, as high pitch buzzing gives way to
humanoid cries in the film’s disturbing soundscape.  Driving into the bush, they enter a space that
is as much mental as physical: driving by night, their headlamps light an eerie
tunnel through the forest that seems to go on and on; they pass what they
believe to be an identical tree several times, despite staying on the same
track; at their camp a speargun mysteriously fires on its own, nearly killing
Marcia; later a bird drops a woman’s shoe into Peter’s lap. 

Yes, there are plenty of scenes where animals attack, but as in Hitchcock’s The Birds, what is most
compelling about Long Weekend is the
lack of any explanation of the cause behind nature’s transformation.  Earlier in the film, Marcia overhears a story
on the radio about cockatoos attacking people’s homes, baffling wildlife
experts.  Near the end of the film a bird
flies into a livestock truck, blinding the driver.  In between these incidents, nature’s threat
seems to be directed entirely on the unhappy campers, and while the tag-line
seems to draw a direct connection between the characters’ disrespect for nature and its
revenge, the particular forms taken by that revenge make this less clear.

As we learn more about the couple’s past, the incidents that
befall them in the wild seem eerily to mimic the incidents that led to their
mutual loathing.  Watching Peter swimming
in the ocean, Marcia suddenly sees a large, dark shape in the water, and
screams out a warning.  Peter eventually
makes it to shore, unharmed but shaken.  Though
they suspect it is a shark, neither can identify exactly what they saw.  As they return to their camp, Marcia makes a
mysterious segue: “What would you have done if I’d have died? Would you sell
the house?  Would you have
remarried?”  Later, she asks Peter: “What
do you think that noise was last night? Sounded like a baby crying.”  Peter doesn’t reply: either he didn’t hear or
he doesn’t care about his wife’s concerns. 
Eventually we discover that Marcia has had an abortion, terminating a
pregnancy by another man.  As the sordid
story is pieced together, it seems that Peter actually pushed the two of them
together, so as to leave the man’s wife free for himself.

The story becomes a fitting epitaph for the 1970s, when
fantasies of free love and a return to nature turned violent and deadly.  In what other era could wife-swapping,
abortion, and environmental devastation be so mysteriously, but inevitably,
connected?  Human nature
takes its revenge in the film as much as does that Nature-with-a-capital-n we like to think
exists out there, pristinely apart from us. 
As the couple have it out, Peter arrogantly claims, “You’re so clear to
me, it’s all so clear to me now,” and Marcia replies, “Don’t get philosophical
with me: you poke your head out of your $2,000 camper and you think that’s reality.”  Attempting to escape the confines of
monogamy, they hav experimented with extramarital sex, and it’s torn their
marriage apart.  Hoping to heal the marriage,
they flee to a nature that is anything but nurturing.  There are few films that so cannily invoke
the uncanny in exposing the dark side of our so-called natural desires.   

Frightened again by the dark shape in the water, Peter fires
his gun relentlessly into the surf, as a bloody tide washes in.  Eventually the shape washes up on the beach,
and turns out to be a dugong, a manatee-like creature that was once populous on
Australia’s shores before being hunted nearly to extinction, “for its oil,” as
Peter says with regret.  Both comment on
how ugly the seemingly shapeless creature is, even as Peter notices that it’s a
female, and speculates that the sound they’ve been hearing is its pup: “they
sound just like a human baby when they cry.” 
In a fitting irony, they are most disgusted by nature even as they realize
how human it is.

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