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What Jared Leto Brought to His Role in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

In a red carpet interview on Oscar night, Jared Leto mentioned that, prior to his winning
role in Dallas Buyers Club, he hadn’t been in a
movie in six years. He
started his cinematic exodus after Chapter 27 (January 2007), the
Mark David Chapman biopic for which he put 67 pounds on his lithe frame, an act
of near-superhuman binge eating that gave him gout, skyrocketed his cholesterol
so high that his alarmed doctors wanted to put him on Lipitor, and confined him
to a wheelchair during the last days of the shoot. Old acquaintances he
encountered during the shoot regarded him with pity, the looks on their faces
telegraphing loud and clear that, in their eyes, he’d finally let himself go.
It took him a year to “get back to a place that felt semi-normal,” as
he recalled in one print interview, and you can almost hear the shudder in his
voice as he declares “I’d never do
it again.”

In the almost two decades Leto’s been making movies, his roles
have unavoidably been about the celebration and desecration of his unearthly
prettiness. Jordan Catalano, the crush “so beautiful it hurts to look at
you” in the TV show My So-Called Life (1994-95) got off scot-free
compared to the disfigurement and debasement that befell his other characters,
like the necrotizing heroin addict in Requiem For A Dream (2000) or
“Angel Face,” the pugilist who gets his face pummeled into hamburger
in Fight Club (1999), an act of brutality the nihilistic narrator shrugs
off by saying “I felt like destroying something beautiful.” Leto’s androgynous
pulchritude—and precedent of cinematic self-destruction—made him an obvious
choice to play Rayon, the glamorous trans woman, drug addict
and AIDS patient who helps the
equally ill Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) run a guerrilla treatment clinic
in 1980s Dallas.

But no matter
how lovely his sapphire eyes look framed by false eyelashes—and despite
accusations of “transmisogyny” from activists angered by the casting
of a man as a trans woman—Leto didn’t win his Oscar for Successful Wearing Of A Dress. Consider the harrowing scene where
Rayon, gaunt and naked and
terminally ill, begs her ghoulish reflection “God, when I meet you, I’ll be pretty if it’s the last thing I do.” Critics have dismissed this clinging to beauty as a
caricature of trans women, portraying them as petty and narcissistic (Steve
Friess of Time Magazine warns that
“sad-sack, clothes-obsessed” Rayon will be seen as cringingly stereotypical
decades from now, in the same way Hattie McDaniel’s bravura performance in Gone
With The Wind (1939) is similarly tainted), but I see it differently.
“Beauty” here is shorthand for “value,” for “power,”
for “dignity,” for all the other vaporous externals that we grasp
tightly and futilely in the face of death, and Rayon’s pain in this indelible
scene transcends all other externals like “race,” “class,”
or “gender” that also don’t outlive our bones.

As tartly satirized in Tropic Thunder (2008) with the adage
“You never go full retard,” Oscars for acting can be cynically considered
to be handed out for parlor tricks and impersonations—deaf, blind, autistic,
spastic, retarded, insane—as long as the actor is recognizable inside the role.
Gaining weight within reason for verisimilitude (as DeNiro did for Raging
Bull [1980] or Charlize Theron did for Monster [2003]), is
appreciated, but it gets nowhere near the monomaniacal applause reserved for
losing weight. Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Leto’s co-star McConaughey, and, it
can be tacitly assumed, almost every actress currently working in Hollywood,
get accolades for the self-control and devotion to craft evinced by their
gauntness.

But fat is the worst thing you can be in Hollywood. And it can’t
be completely unconnected that Leto’s shocking fall from Botticelli pinup into
everyman loser for Chapter 27 has nothing to do with being box office
poison for six years hence. (It’s not like Leto had nothing to do in the
meantime—he toured with his band 30 Seconds To Mars during those off years—but
I can’t imagine any actor getting through half a decade of unemployment without
becoming a little nervous.)

Only an actor who’s experienced the ego whiplash of being valued
and devalued for your looks (as specifically connected to your weight), can
competently play a woman. And only an actor who understands how survival, not
just popularity, is on the line with those good looks can play a trans woman.
Leto may have lost, not gained, weight, to play Rayon, but the power of his
performance in Dallas Buyer’s Club is still informed by his previous
weight gain experience for Chapter 27. There’s still much more to be
said about the practice of cisgendered actors playing transgendered parts—and
the “parlor trick” novelty of same—but this woman says Leto
understands enough about the female relationship to beauty, weight and power to
take on roles like this with dignity and meaning.

Violet LeVoit is a video producer and editor, film critic, and
media educator whose film writing has appeared in many publications in
the US and UK. She is the author of the short story collection I Am Genghis Cum (Fungasm Press). She lives in Philadelphia.

METAMERICANA: Paolo Sorrentino’s THE GREAT BEAUTY Is Exactly That

This biweekly column
looks at instances of film, television, drama, and comedy that
are in some way self-referential—”art about art.” Also discussed is metamodernism, a cultural paradigm that uses both fragmentary
and contradictory data to produce new forms of coherence.

The first scene of The Great Beauty
documents an interminably long outdoor rave on a scenic balcony owned
by Italian novelist-turned-journalist Jep Gambardella. It takes some
time for the camera to locate the film’s star, as for many minutes it
rests its gaze instead on a cacophony of delirious partygoers, many of
whom are so enmeshed in riotous frivolity they seem creepily
otherworldly–entirely removed from the space-time continuum the rest of
us live in. As we soon
learn, that’s exactly the point: Gambardella, who decades earlier gave
up a once-promising literary career after his first love inexplicably
abandoned him, has spent most of his life living in Rome amid precisely
this sort of rootless inanity. In one early voiceover, he tells us that
the aim of his life so far has been not merely to be the life of every
party, but to be so central to Rome’s dissolute nightlife that he can,
by word or deed, single-handedly ruin
any party he attends. This destructive instinct presages the thematic
arc of the film, which sees Gambardella vainly seeking meaning in the
meaninglessness of his milieu. It seems a paradox, but the resultant act
of witnessing the film permits is as meaning-laden an existential
adventure as I’ve
had the pleasure to experience in a very long time.

As
the theme of this essay series has thus far been metamodernism in the
arts–that is, the rapid oscillation between (and ultimately the
transcendence of) conventional poles of affect like sincerity and irony,
optimism and cynicism, knowledge and doubt–it’ll seem convenient for
me to say now that The Great Beauty is preoccupied, first and foremost, with exactly this sort of oscillation. But it’s true; Gambardella lives in one of the
world’s most venerable cultures, yet traipses voluntarily through
its dankest ephemera; his amorality mandates that he live in the
present, but his mind turns relentlessly to a tragedy in his past; he
repeatedly encounters objects and scenes of obvious moment, yet he
always slips off, thereafter, into a cesspool of artifice, as if by
rote. All in all, it’s impossible to tell what portion of Gambardella’s
life is real and what portion is fantasy, a state of affairs nearly all
of us can relate to in the Digital Age.

What’s most remarkable about The Great Beauty isn’t the concept behind the work, however, but director Sorrentino’s uncanny visualizations of its particulars. The Great Beauty is
not only one of the most visually arresting films in years,
but also one of its most eclectic: each scene develops a distinct
internal atmosphere through the auteur’s selection of color palette,
stage direction, and (most notably) musical score, giving the moviegoer
everything from a sprightly neo-Surrealist scene of couples dancing at
an outdoor wedding to an almost apocalyptic encounter
between Gambardella, a lost child, and a sewer-grate in a crypt. The
film, in other words, follows in its form the pattern of its hero’s
thoughts: it doesn’t cohere so much as wend through marvels of every
mood and description. The poles of reality and unreality, profundity and
banality, sincerity and artifice alternate so rapidly between
prominence and disappearance that the result is a state of suspended
sublimity. If we define the sublime as anything that inspires awe in us
because of its supernaturally elevated quality, The Great Beauty is exactly that.

Several scenes in The Great Beauty encapsulate this sense that it’s possible to occupy the space between realities—that place where all is neither entirely real nor entirely unreal. In one such scene, the sixty-five year-old Gambardella has
just slept with Ramona, the 42-year-old daughter of an old
friend, and the two have awakened the next morning with plans of taking a
day trip to the ocean. The scene begins with a shot of Ramona’s arm
hanging limply over the side of a bed; the way her arm hangs, one
suspects that the body to which it
attaches is now deceased. But then we hear Gambardella lazily coaxing
Ramona to wake, and we realize that she’s merely sleeping. Yet she
doesn’t stir, so Gambardella calls her name a second time, now with a
note of worry, causing us (once again) to suspect Ramona is dead.
But after several pregnant moments—during which the camera
explores Ramona’s entirely still face and upper body—the
forty-something beauty opens her eyes. We relax; she’s alive. But in the
next scene Ramona’s father is being consoled by a male customer at the
strip-club he manages; “I’m so sorry about your daughter,” says the
customer. So is Ramona dead or alive? We never find out: she’s not seen
or spoken of on-screen again.

A
second such scene is the funeral of a socialite’s son. Prior to the
funeral, Jep and Ramona (still alive) are seen preparing for the event
at a local dress shop. Jep patiently, and not a little conceitedly,
explains to Ramona that there’s an art to acting properly at a funeral.
The art, he says, demands two things above all: That the mourner not
cry, and that he position himself in such a way as to be seen mourning
(but not to seem to want to be seen mourning) by all those in attendance. He finishes his lecture by quoting for Ramona the sort of empty but seemingly meaning-laden platitude one might whisper in the ear of a
bereaved mother.

Later,
during a silent moment in the church where the funeral is being held,
Jep suddenly stands up among the assembled crowd of mourners. His decision
to
stand at such an inopportune moment suggests that the entire scene is a
fantasy, much like the fugue state Jep experiences when he looks up at
the ceiling of his bedroom to see, instead of white plaster, the very
waters in which he nearly lost his life as a teen. But when the much
older Gambardella begins to walk toward the front of the church, we
change our assumption: all right, we think, he must have been asked to
give a eulogy. But when Jep arrives at the front of the crowd, his
silence, and then his awkward statements about the deceased, are so
surreal that we suspect, once again, that the entire event is imagined.
Yet the way the deceased’s mother arises, walks toward Gambardella, and
kisses him normalizes the moment so quickly that we return, once again,
to an acceptance of “reality.” That Gambardella
then whispers in the woman’s ear exactly the absurd
phrase he’d earlier, half-jokingly, told Ramona one might say to a
bereaved family member; that these ingratiating words are accepted by
their recipient as authentic; that Jep then agrees (with some others) to
carry the casket out the front doors of the church; that Jep weeps
uncontrollably as he’s
carrying the casket—all of these subsequent reversals generate the
same sort of reality-to-unreality whiplash of the moments preceding.

There
are other instances of such ambiguity in the film—for instance, an
unforgettable scene in which a giraffe may or may not be present, made
all the more “meta” by the fact that the scene’s dialogue relates to the
difference between trickery and genuine magic—but hopefully the above
elaborations suffice to make the point.

It is often said, of the very best lyric poetry, that much of it is not
factually true, but nearly all of it is emotionally true.
This notion that there are different breeds of truth, and therefore
different planes of reality that are equally true, is endemic to verse
but less well-known in other circles. Certainly, it takes a mind
uncannily willing to juxtapose Art and Life to see no qualitative
difference between the two. Since the nineteenth century, poets have
called this sort of willingness “negative capability”—a suspension not
of disbelief but of belief, a state in which a man or woman exposed to a
sufficiently complex artwork can permit the ignorance of awe to be an
inspiring rather than debilitating experience. Few can achieve this
state of suspended belief, for much the
same reason that few people have ever been exposed to a moment they
could honestly describe as sublime: It’s frightening not to be anchored
by the poles of thought and emotion we know so well, whether they be
reality and unreality, beauty and ugliness, or hope and despair.

The great beauty to be found in The Great Beauty
is the acknowledgment that in fact most of our lives are
lived in this middle (in ancient Greek,
“meta”) state, and that much of the pain and doubt we experience is
caused not by inhabiting such a space but by insisting we don’t. We’re
comfortable saying that we know something, or that we don’t; we’re less
comfortable saying that we do not know what we know. We’re comfortable
being able to ascribe simple adjectives to our mood—words like
“optimistic” or “pessimistic”—but feel dangerously unanchored when we
cannot honestly say exactly how or even what we feel, or what that
should or shouldn’t mean to us, or what it does or doesn’t say about who
and what we are.

Metamodernists
(not coincidentally, much like Buddhists) know that the middle space
between certainties is not a place of weakness and self-destruction, but
of the kind of transcendence no other abstracted space can offer. Nor
is ceasing to tell the story of oneself in terms of polar extremes
disempowering; just as Jep begins his second novel after he realizes he
can no more understand his own mortality as understand why his
now-deceased first love abandoned him, one imagines The Great Beauty to be a screenwriter and director’s acceptance of this
same sublime ignorance. If, several days after seeing it, I still don’t
know exactly what I think The Great Beauty has
done to or for me—except to know that seeing it was an experience I’ll
never forget—that’s due not to ambivalence on my part, or to any
infirmity in the film, but to my recognition that the film delivered on
what at first had seemed like an undeliverable promise: to provide a
glimpse of genuine and permanent transcendence.

The final shot of The Great Beauty is
its most
striking; oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, it’s also its most
understated. The camera, placed on the bow of a small riverboat, tracks
what a person sitting in that spot might see—and might choose to look
at—during a continuous, ten-minute slice of life that’s at once almost
entirely silent and almost inconceivably profound. What Paolo Sorrentino
shows us here is how dramatically his film has changed its viewer;
having experienced first-hand Gambardella’s transformation from amoral
playboy to spiritually awakened artist, we’re now able to calmly see the
world the way it was meant to be seen. My girlfriend and I sat
transfixed as the closing credits rolled over this final shot, and I suspect many reading this essay will do the same if and when they see The Great Beauty.
The sublimity
of unknowing as a pathway to internal quiet and a form of transcendence
may sound like New Age nonsense, but as I’m neither a religious person
nor a devout spiritualist of any kind, I certainly hope it isn’t. What I
know for certain is that the 142 minutes I sat watching The Great Beauty were the most Real—capital-r “Real”—moments I’ve enjoyed in a movie theater. And that’s good enough for me.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Childhood from ADAPTATION to MAD MEN to MOONRISE KINGDOM

For adults, childhood is
perceived as a time of full potential. At the end of the film Adaptation, Susan Orlean, awash in a druggy
love affair with her subject, John Laroche, calls out that what she
wants most is to start over, before things got all messed up. “I want to be a
baby again,” she whimpers, “I want to be new.”

It’s a seductive fantasy,
one less about childhood itself than about our adult ideas of what childhood
represents. In a 2005 Pitchfork review of Neutral Milk Hotel’s album, “In the
Aeroplane Over the Sea,” Mark Richardson commended Neutral Milk Hotel
for capturing how “dark surrealism is the language of childhood”: the newly
developing body, newly awakened stretches of feeling, the inherent strangeness
of sex. Childhood is the time when everything in us cracks open, when we see
the world as it really is for the very first time.

Directors like Wes Anderson,
Noah Baumbach and Spike Jonze often obsessively highlight the combination of
tenderness and terror that comes from being a small, new person in the world.
In The Royal Tenenbaums, the child versions of Chaz,
Richie and Margot are wide-eyed and solemn, wiser than their parents and wiser
still than the grown-ups they end up becoming. In The Squid and the Whale,
the kind of childish acting out that Walt and Frank demonstrate seems like
merely gentle thrashing in response to a grown up world that is not necessarily
beautiful or true. In Where The Wild Things Are, Max’s
wildly yearning heart is consistently coming up against giant monsters
manifesting adult suffering. And in Moonrise Kingdom Sam
and Suzy’s love for each other is steadfast and true, a kind of love that the
adults surrounding them have a terribly hard time replicating in terms of
either intensity or purity of heart.

If childhood is presented as a
time of great potential, it is also presented as a time of incredible loss. Female
children in particular are poised to lose something—their innocence, their
virginity, their baby-faced youth. To my mind, the most touching moments in Mad Men occur when Sally makes tentative
steps towards adulthood. Betty’s icy maternal speeches highlight how
restrictive the adult world ultimately is, how full of suffering by comparison.
After Sally kisses a boy for the first time, Betty warns her, “The first kiss
is very special.” “But I already did it,” Sally tells her matter-of-factly.
“It’s over.”

It’s unclear whether Sally
feels the kind of sadness an adult viewer experiences when hearing those words.
Children learn that first times are important primarily because adults tell
them they are. Our sense of nostalgia for our childhood comes less from the
knowledge that our experiences of the world were more fulfilling when we were
young than from the acknowledgment that these moments were the only chance we
ever had to experience something new for the first time.

*******

Recently I assigned a
personal narrative assignment to my college writing students, most of who are
between 18 and 20. They all wrote about things that 18 to 20 year olds normally
do—first kisses, first deaths, first loves. I was surprised at how many wrote
about nostalgia for their childhoods, since for me, 18 is far enough away to
feel like a piece of my childhood. It’s far enough away that the pain I felt
during the time period doesn’t feel all that painful anymore, and the joys I
felt feel stronger. I don’t remember the eating disorder. I can laugh at the
heartache. But the concerts, the parties, the music, the classes, the first
moments of falling in love: everything is swaddled in nostalgic hues.

I turned 30 this year,
and my therapist, who is probably my mother’s age,
just smiled at me every time I mentioned how afraid I was to hit this year. I
know that my older friends and teachers probably view me with the same sort of
mild amusement I feel when my students tell me similar fears about turning 20.
“I feel so old,” one tells me. “I haven’t figured anything out yet.” “You have
plenty of time,” I reply.

Of course we only have as
much time as we think we do. The inevitable aging process is exacerbated by a
kind of media that is constantly trying to sell us a version of ourselves we
can never entirely attain. My students want to be older and more respected, to be
seen as adults with real feelings
and ideas. They long to be respected and heard, to prove they are actually people, walking through the world.
I felt that way forever too, but somewhere around your late twenties you get a
memo that tells you that you will never be as sexy or wonderful or perfect or
free as when you were young.

When Betty tells Sally that
every kiss she is going to experience from here on out is a shadow of her first
kiss, poor Sally is afraid she already let it slip away. Consumer culture, of
course, is not just about capturing that shadow, but also actively creating it.
This is happiness, we are
told. This is freedom. This is love. We bought it since the
inception of television and we buy it even more today. Activists don’t even try
to tell us to turn off our televisions and to unplug from the Internet. Today we
know what other generations didn’t- that the media world is the real world and, just like in childhood,
our very identity still hinges on someone more powerful than we are, telling us
how we ought to think and feel.

“What I came to understand
is that change is not a choice,” Susan Orlean says in Adaptation, shortly after seeing the elusive
ghost orchid in person and realizing the quest was more exciting than finding
the actual plant itself. “It’s just a flower,” she tells John Laroche flatly.
Our greatest fear is always that the things we love are merely illusions,
smaller and less important than we imagine them to be. Every time I’ve felt
anything that mattered I thought I would never feel anything that strongly ever
again. But I did. I did and I did and I did. And each time wasn’t some shadow
of something I felt before. Each time something new woke inside me, something I
hadn’t experienced yet and something I wouldn’t ever experience ever again.

We are built for
transformation, even though we have a culture that doesn’t encourage us to live
that way, a social media-infused landscape where identity is seen as something
fixed, where our very identity is a brand.

In Moonrise Kingdom, when Sam and Suzy run away
together, Sam asks Suzy what she wants to be when she grows up. “I don’t know,”
Suzy replies. “I want to go on adventures, I think. Not get stuck in one place.”
Escape is, of course, the heart of any love story, because when we fall in love
we live the best parts of childhood, with every atom in us open and alive.

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

On Harold Ramis, 1944-2014

I’ll miss Harold Ramis’s presence in the world because no
one in my generation is getting any younger. Before you dismiss that sentence
as a tautology, I should explain. My generation can be roughly defined as those
born in or near 1970, growing up watching (read: worshiping) Saturday Night Live, SCTV, and other shows like them, and then finding
that comedies such as Caddyshack, Animal
House, and Ghostbusters are part
of their culture, their lives, and their minds, regardless of what supposed
intelligence they may, as viewers, presumably bring to the table—and then,
beyond that, finding that they are quite grateful to have Groundhog Day as part of their culture, and then, going even
farther, finding that they loved all of those films, and can’t conceive of replacements
for them, and can’t, as adults, readily explain why. But there is, in fact, a
reason: these movies, with which Harold Ramis was inextricably associated, in
either a large or small degree, stood for a set of comedic values which are no
longer with us.

What values? Well, these films had, as their calling card
and as a force which animated them, a sense of utter abandonment. To crassness.
To vulgarity. To spontaneity. To irreverence. Anything as openly vulgar and as
indulgent of objectification as Animal
House made these days would either not be noticed or would be placed under
a microscope so intense as to render its integrity as a whole utterly
unrecognizable. No one would dream of making a film as over-the-top as Ghostbusters, with its marshmallow man walking through Manhattan, today—unless it were attached to a franchise, of some sort.
The makers of these films weren’t trying to market anything: they simply wanted
to create an absurd situation and see where it led, to open things up as wide
as they possibly could. Ramis is an indelible part of their success because, as
the most gawky character in the room, he reminded us most strongly of
ourselves, sitting in the dark, living vicariously through others’ adventures
either ghostbusting or being slimed.

And, above and beyond that, these films were successful
executions of outrageous ideas, a harder task to accomplish than one might
think. Groundhog Day is a perfect
example. The story Ramis tells with this movie, that of daily reincarnation, is
a sophisticated one, but he presented it to us with the open-hearted brio of an
everyman filmmaker. The actors he chose, as well, from Murray to MacDowell to
even Elliot or Tobolowsky, are actors it’s hard, in a sense, to dislike—none of
them carried, at the time of filming, any special baggage, any notably
distasteful films in their history, that would have distracted from the
miraculousness of the story—they are wholly participating in the prolonged joke
of this movie, this project, the one they’re in right at that moment. And the
mood Ramis maintained throughout was consistently light—a lightness that
results in a subtlety one doesn’t find that often, an ease of laughter that
recalls much earlier films, even silent films. Is there mean-spirited humor in Groundhog Day? Sure, but it’s comedic
mean-spiritedness. No one’s bones, hearts, or lives are ever at risk of being broken,
though it might look that way: philosophical exercise rendered as comedy.

The cultural influences that produced the sort of comedy
Ramis participated in, wrote, and ultimately directed were very different from
those driving today’s comedies. The cultural legacy Ramis and his
contemporaries had was that of the 1960s and 1970s, eras heralded for their
freedoms and excesses but rarely examined as recovery from the social,
economic, and historical traumas of the 1950s and 1940s. The comedic films made
today are made in the shadow of a technological advancement that has rendered
our culture dispersed and distracted to the point of soullessness. Ramis is, in
a sense, a symbol of certain kind of
comedy: a comedy with a beginning, a middle and an end, all equally ridiculous,
all equally enjoyable, and all developed with the intention of fulfilling a
film’s full potential. Those kinds of comedies—comedies with a soul that you
can practically see—simply don’t exist anymore. Rest in peace.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

“No redneck is this creative”: TRUE DETECTIVE and the Horror of Folk Art

Now and then a television series comes along that seems to
define its own, unique genre: think of Twin
Peaks, The X Files, The Singing Detective.
Now think of True Detective,
which might be described as the first Cult Ritual Serial Killer Southern Gothic
Weird Procedural. Which is not to say it
is without precedents: since its debut the series has spawned a plethora of online
discussions and commentaries tracing the show’s connections with, and
references to, a host of texts, from pulp fiction to true crime, nihilist
philosophy to urban myth. Especially
fascinating in these discussions is the way in which a background of seemingly
unrelated stories and images magically click into place, as if they had been
waiting for a narrative that would connect them.

One of the more distinctive and grimly fascinating elements
of True Detective is its preoccupation
with weird folk art, or what could be called outsider art. Odd and intricate wooden sculptures are found
carefully arranged around the dead body of the series’ first victim, Dora
Lange. The body itself is decked with
antlers and arranged against a tree in an elaborate display of sacrificial
obeisance, the victim’s back tattooed with a mysterious spiral symbol. When Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) returns to the scene years
later, this spiral seems to have taken wooden form, in an elaborately
sculptured circle, reminiscent of Andy Goldsworthy’s environmental art. When clues lead to an abandoned religious
academy, Cohle finds a veritable forest of wooden sculptures inside the
derelict building. The walls are also
decked with drawings of sinister angels, in a primitive style resembling a
painting discovered earlier in a burnt-out church depicting a horned being that
looks like Dora Lange’s dead body.
Whatever might be said of the killer responsible for Lange’s death, he certainly
is prolific. Had he found the right art dealer,
he might have become the next Henry Darger or Judith Scott.

The association of horror and folk art in True Detective, like its many other
thematic strands, has a rich and peculiar history, most notably in film. Much has been written about folk elements in
British horror, as seen in such classics as Wicker
Man, Witchfinder General, and Blood
on Satan’s Claw, and more recently in a new wave of low-budget British
horror films, including The Fallow Field,
Overhill, and A Field in England. But relatively little has been said about the
parallel tradition in American horror, one that is every bit as rich, and which
True Detective helps us to see anew.

Folk art shouldn’t necessarily be equated with what is
called, alternately, outsider, visionary, or naïve art, but they do share a
quality that might be described as obsessiveness. In folk art this is generally a healthy,
robust quality, reflecting as it does extreme care in the application of
time-honored traditions, while in outsider art this obessiveness imparts a
certain strangeness, perhaps from the fact that the artist is usually working
in isolation, outside of an enabling tradition.
The similarity between the obsessiveness of artists and serial killers
may be an arbitrary one, but it is one that many filmmakers have
exploited. Cohle explains why: when
his partner, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), compares their suspect to one in an earlier case,
Cohle replies, “That’s just drug insanity. That’s not this, this has
scope.” A drugged-up killer is
frightening; one with scope is terrifying.
This killer, says Cohle, “articulated a personal vision. Vision is
meaning. Meaning is historical.” The
same might be said of folk art.

One of the most terrifying instances of folk art in American
horror is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
in which a family of demented slaughterhouse workers make grotesque sculptures
out of bones and skin. When one of their
victims enters their house, she discovers a veritable art gallery of gore: rib-cages
and broken turtle shells hanging like mobiles; human and animal bones
intricately connected to form elaborate standing sculptures; teeth, feathers,
and other parts festooning a primitive gas generator; a perverse chaise longue
built of bones and skulls.

Such images clearly derive from the loathsome objects d’art fashioned by notorious
serial killer Ted Gein from his victims’ remains, but director Tobe Hooper
brings to these objects a demented element of pure form that distinguishes this
sculptor as a kind of twisted visionary.
Remembered largely for its gore and violence, Hooper’s film is as
remarkable for its almost mythic evocation of sadism joined to creativity. If the meat sculptures of Texas Chainsaw Massacre convey a
particular zeitgeist, it is one best captured by Rust Cohle’s pessimistic view
of Homo sapiens: “I think human
consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware.
Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself – we are creatures that
should not exist by natural law.”

While Hooper took murder as folk art to a new extreme, his
imagery has precedents, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Norman Bates was,
of course, a talented taxidermist, and his revivified birds loom over the
fateful conversation with the aptly named Marion Crane that precedes her murder. His sculptural talents are shown in their
fullest expression later, when Marion’s sister, Lila, discovers the preserved
body of Norman’s mother sitting in the cellar.
Such perverse craftsmanship suggests the kind of concentrated attention
Bates brings to all of his work, including murder.

In contrast, the sculptures of Texas Chainsaw Massacre derive much of their horror from their
association with folk art, an association seen in a film like Deliverance that plays upon the cultural
prejudice that connects backwoods folk culture with the sinister or malevolent. The brilliance of John Boorman’s film (as with
the James Dickey novel on which it was based) is that it places much of this
associated horror in the eye of the beholders, those Atlanta businessmen who
use the remote Georgia wilderness as their playground. In the famous “dueling banjos” scene, the
character of Drew is barely able to keep up with his accompanist, despite the latter’s
obvious disabilities, and the scene culminates with Drew prophetically shouting
“I’m lost” as he accepts defeat. Though the backwoods banjo player’s birth defects mark him—and by extension his
music—as grotesque in the visitors’ eyes, the inability of the urbanite to master his arcane art
serves as a measure of folk music’s richness and complexity.

The association of rural culture and the macabre is further
explored in The Blair Witch Project,
where the hapless team of documentary filmmakers stumbles on a backwoods site
filled with primitive cairns and elaborate hanging stick sculptures, the clear
precedent for those that appear repeatedly in True Detective. When Cohle
shows his drawings of these sculptures to a pastor, he says they look “like
something my old auntie taught us to make when I was a tyke . . . some folks call
them ‘bird traps.’ Old Auntie told us that they were ‘devil nets.’ You put them
around the bed, catch the devil before he gets too close.” In such moments, the line between madness and
tradition becomes blurred, in a manner that reflects on True Detective’s compelling sense of place. While the Gen-Xers in Blair Witch are horrified at what these sculptures portend, since
“No redneck is this creative,” True
Detective is more intent on exploring the connection between rural culture
and the sinister in the popular imagination.
Cohle’s fascination with the weird folk art he uncovers turns this
association back on the increasingly obsessive investigator himself, and, by
extension, the perversely fascinated viewer who follows his investigation, episode after episode.

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

In Memory: Sid Caesar and YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS

“Your Show of Shows” was a 90-minute, comedy/variety program
that ran on NBC from 1950 to 1954 and featured Isaac Sidney Caesar—Sid, to
you and me—as its star. Caesar was an intimidating, strong-shouldered force
who could also be a face-contorting wiseass. He often barreled through sketches
with a bull-in-a-china-shop ferociousness. Working with invaluable co-stars and
comic supporting actors Imogene Coca and Howard Morris as well as an alpha team of
writers including future comedy legends Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and fellow
sketch player Carl Reiner (Larry Gelbart and a young, nebbishy fellow named
Woody Allen would later write for Caesar on the truncated “Caesar’s Hour”),
Caesar was the aggressively clownish captain of a usually madcap operation.

One of
my favorite sketches from “Shows” was a sketch I actually discovered when I was
nine. It was a parody of that old docu-series “This Is Your Life” called “This
Is Your Story.” Reiner played a host who approaches Caesar, sitting in the
audience as a man named Al, and tells him that’s it’s his life that the show
will be chronicling on this evening. At first, he passes out from shock. Then,
he tries to escape from Reiner’s grip when he attempts to get him onstage. Once
he escapes, he tries to make a run for the exit, only to be chased and tackled
by ushers and ultimately carried onto the stage.

It gets
only more hysterical from there. Morris shows up as his “Uncle Goopy,”
blubbering into Caesar’s arms as they both wail and refuse to let each other go
for several minutes. More family members appear and follow suit, all falling
over each other. Then, a beautiful blonde shows up. Who is she? Caesar doesn’t
know, but he’s gonna smother her with kisses anyway. (She’s supposed to do the
show next week.) Finally, Caesar’s old bandmates the New Jersey Drum and Bugle
Call start marching and blaring all around the stage, as an emotionally wrecked
Caesar is in the middle of it all. It’s still eleven minutes of the most
chaotic sketch comedy I’ve ever witnessed.

While
I’m too young to have seen Caesar in his “Shows” prime, watching old Kinescope clips of “Shows” and other programs of its ilk throughout the years reminds
me how television back then was, at times, entertainingly anarchic. It’s not
anarchic in the sense that these shows came up with their
material on the spot. (“Shows” producer Max Liebman was notorious for
reprimanding those who dared stray from the script and ad-libbed—“you would
have been drummed out of the corps,” Coca once said.) But there was this
feeling of unbridled unpredictability, as these shows constantly threw stuff
out there to see what stuck.

“Shows”
did that with aggression, mostly because the writers were all backstage stampeding
over each other in order to get their jokes and skits on the air. In his 1975
Playboy interview, Mel Brooks compared the writers’ room to “rats in a cage,”
filled with desperate, competitive jesters who lived only to appease the king.
“Everybody hated everybody,” Brooks said. “The pitch sessions were lethal. In
that room, you had to fight to stay alive.”

The
desperation also seeped its way on-screen, mostly through Caesar. In the same
Playboy interview, Brooks noted that his boss “had this terrific anger in him;
he was angry at the world.” Audiences at home could sense it too. Even when he
was being his most lovable and/or ridiculous, the fear that he might just blow
a gasket and go off always lingered. In the book of essays “Prime Times:
Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows,” the late novelist Barry Hannah recalled
his younger years watching “Shows” and seeing Caesar—“the clown so hard-put
in a gray flannel suit,” Hannah called him – put in serious work just to get a
laugh:

“I
recall Caesar sweating, cross-eyed, sputtering. He was a damned fool over and
over again, in any role—a pirate, a businessman, an emperor in the East with
a way big-assed sword. He was just not getting the hang of it.”

Nevertheless,
Hannah took a shine to Caesar, as he and Coca (whom Hannah praises for being
“perfect, drab and scrawny and simply overcome”) mugged and contorted for our
viewing pleasure. “The black and white of that show seemed so grainy and raw,”
Hannah wrote, “Caesar and Coca appeared to be wrestling with the medium
itself.”

Decades
later, that insanity would be the inspiration behind the movie “My Favorite
Year,” where Peter O’Toole played a swashbuckling, alcoholic movie star who
inflicts madness on an already disorganized variety show (Joseph Bologna played
the Caesar stand-in as a blustery softie) and the play “Laughter on the 23^rd
Floor” (written by former caged rat Neil Simon), whose original Broadway run
had Nathan Lane as a pill-popping TV star often going for the throats,
literally, of his neurotic writing staff.

Caesar’s
recent passing at the age of 91 only reminds us he’s the last of the damned
fools—Allen, Berle, Gleason, Kovacs—who became TV’s earliest innovators. These
go-for-broke funnymen made figuring out what would entertain TV audiences for
generations to come a weekly chore—televised trial by fire. “Shows,” a weekly
revue that was as manic and uproarious as it was smart and clever, quietly
invented the sketch-comedy show, leading the way for “Saturday Night Live” and
all its offspring.

However,
even after all these years, “Shows” and those variety shows of yesteryear still
exhibit a loose energy that “SNL” (and even most of television today) is often
too stiff and rigid to indulge in. Everything seems too prepared these days.
But as prepared as those shows might have been back in the day, there was still a
feeling of anything-goes anticipation. As these programs were broadcast live
from coast-to-coast, everybody involved, from the people watching the show to
the people putting on the show, were going on a ride. And there was Sid,
insuring us that the ride would be fun—and a little bit dangerous.

Craig D. Lindsey used to be somebody. Now, he’s a freelancer. You can read all his latest articles over at his blog. He also does a podcast called Muhf***as I Know.

By the way, if Helen Mirren or Christina Hendricks is reading this, get at me, ladies!

Small Things Writ Large: On OMAR

In large and small ways, the media confront us each day
with realities that are larger than we are, and yet rarely do these realities
touch us in any lasting way. Global warming, for example, is a crushing
problem, but most of us won’t be truly concerned about it until our homes are flooded
by overflowing oceans. War, and its daily presence in other cultures, most
certainly in the Middle East, is another one: we don’t think of what life
side-by-side with bombings, terrorism and other horrors must be like because we
never see the details of that life: the news, as reported, is an abstraction. Omar, the newest film from Hany Abu-Assad,
the director of the suicide-bomber story Paradise
Now among other films, brings the concept of life in a war-addled clime to viewers as anything but
an abstraction. The film draws its greatest strength from its smallest touches:
the way someone smiles, the way a love letter is folded, the small habits and
quirks an otherwise brutal person might possess. We watch those details,
absorb them, are fascinated by them. Then, when the larger-than-life world
intrudes, we are all the more horrified because we feel as if, in the
flickering way we might “know” a character in a film, we know the people bearing the brunt of the intrusion.

It doesn’t hurt that the characters here are so personable,
and distinct from one another. In fact it makes the central love triangle in
the film, which is intertwined with the story of three freedom fighters whose working
bond ultimately erodes because of mutual suspicion, all the more wrenching. In
the opening, we watch Omar (Adam Bakri) climbing a city wall in occupied Palestine to see his love, Nadia
(Leem Lubany), the sister of Tarek (Eyad Hourani), one of Omar’s fellow fighters;
Omar is shot at, just as he clears the top. Omar’s path through the film
remains like this: rife with danger and the threat of either death or
imprisonment. The three young men—Tarek, Omar, and Abjan (Samer Bisharat), the
clown of the trio (and also in love with Nadia)—interact with great ease. Their
banter is so spontaneous and funny at times, like electrified small talk, that
it rings Tarantino-esque, even as its backdrop is horrific. Not twenty minutes
into this film, Omar is arrested and imprisoned. His chief questioner, Agent
Rami, is a menace, though you wouldn’t think it. He’s full of humanizing little
gestures, like a nervous consumption of Tic-Tacs. Waleed Zuaiter’s performance
projects a relaxation hiding a more tense, complex spirit—and a deep desire to
get information out of Omar about his operations. Their dialogue has a mood
we’ve seen before, in other films, ranging from Pacino and DeNiro’s interchange
in Heat to Denzel Washington’s prison
interrogation room banter with Russell Crowe’s detective in American Criminal:
predator and prey, circling around each other, pretending otherwise. The
comparison to American suspense movies goes farther, indeed, as there is
something near-breathless about the film’s pace—Omar is a fast runner, but he
seems even faster here because you know what he’s running from. The torture
scenes are unmitigated, as are the scenes in Omar’s cell, where, again, details
take over. Lying still after a long beating, Omar sees a small bug crawling
across the floor. Suddenly he, and we, pay far more attention to that bug than
we might normally, as the camera moves in on it: the bug, in fact, becomes a
metaphor for any number of things. A feeling of humiliation. A sense of
powerlessness. A quality of innocence. At one point, Omar whispers to the
small, green bug: “It will be okay,” summoning hope from who knows what
quarter.

The love story between Omar and Nadia doesn’t really get
happier as it goes along. It starts so sweetly, with Nadia bringing the three
cohorts tea, slipping a note for Omar under his cup, and telling Abjan she
won’t serve him until he imitates Marlon Brando, in a small, Tarantino-esque
move. (Abjan only makes a few sounds, but he does a good job.) The notes Omar
and Nadia pass each other are, yes, an old-fashioned trope, but the clash of
the gesture’s innocence with a violence-drenched backdrop sends out static
sparks. They tell each other little stories in their notes, and speak lyrically
and expansively, the way people do when they first fall in love. Unfortunately,
when the “real world” crashes into their love, all innocence ends. Omar is
placed in prison several times over the course of the film; with each sentence,
his comrades’ suspicion increases that he is informing on them. Also, his love
becomes more complicated with each departure as Nadia’s interest shifts to
Abjan. The love triangle eventually collapses, as one would suspect it would,
and the film milks poignancy from that collapse. There’s no melodrama, here,
very little screaming or fighting. As with the rest of the film, what we notice
are the nuances, such as Nadia’s whispered “okay” when her father asks her if
she will accept her suitor’s hand in marriage, as if he were asking her to pass
a plate of food. The dissolution of love is not the only sad news this movie
brings us—although the other news is delivered with a similarly devastating
lack of fanfare.

It would be enough for Omar
to be a successful action film set in a politically fraught part of the world.
It would also suffice for it be a well-told and tastefully handled love story.
But this film manages to mix and blend the two with tremendous grace. And, more
importantly, it puts a human face on events which are perpetually changing
history but which remain un-absorbed until they are at our doorstep, knocking,
and then entering unasked.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

Electronic Meditation: The Musical Synthesis of Tangerine Dream and Michael Mann

The recent Blu-ray edition of Michael Mann’s influential Thief (1981) has inspired a number of
perceptive reappraisals of this stylish and enigmatic film. Of particular interest has been the film’s
cool, impressionistic cinematography, creating visual moods that bear a complicated
relationship to the story’s tensions and violence. Just as important in setting these complex
moods, however, and just as influential, is the film’s electronic score,
composed by German band Tangerine Dream.
While the sound they pioneered, combining melodic minimalism and taut
synthetic rhythms, would become almost a cliché in films and on dancefloors
throughout the 1980s, in Mann’s film their music serves to create an aural
environment that is simultaneously meditative and driving, and is a crucial
element of the film’s achievement.

While Tangerine Dream would go on to score dozens of films,
this was only their second major soundtrack for a Hollywood picture. Their first was William Friedkin’s cult
classic Sorcerer (1977), itself due
for its first blu-ray release (and hopefully a long-overdue reappraisal from
critics) in April. Friedkin was already
well-known for his innovative use of music, particularly in The Exorcist, where he took the main
theme from Mike Oldfield’s progressive rock opus Tubular Bells and transformed it into a sound that has become as
synonymous with terror as Bernard Herrmann’s slicing string section for
Hitchcock’s Psycho. In its original setting, Oldfield’s music sets
a dreamy, pastoral mood, its ringing bell tones and slowly building piano
arpeggios more conducive to meditation than fear. Yet in Friedkin’s film, the music conjures up an
otherworldly presence, the minor chords and circular melodies casting a
seductive, sinister spell. This
transformation is every bit as striking as Quentin Tarantino’s subversive use of
“Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealer’s Wheel to serve as the disturbingly
cheery accompaniment to Michael Madsen’s gruesome torture of a police officer
in Reservoir Dogs. With the innovative scores used by
filmmakers like Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers and others, we have become well
used to hearing found music used against the grain in this way, but Friedkin’s
use of Oldfield retains an air of mystery about it.

As iconic as this score has become, Friedkin has said that,
had he heard the music of Tangerine Dream before making The Exorcist, he would have asked them to score the film. By the time he first heard their music in the
mid-1970s, the electronic group had evolved from the abstract atonality of
their early years to the increasingly rhythmic space rock of their most popular
period. At the core of the group were
early members Edgar Froese and Christopher Franke, accompanied by shifting
members for the remaining decade.
Friedkin first heard them at a concert given in a darkened cathedral in
the primeval Black Forest, an experience that would play a fundamental role in
his development as a filmmaker. “I’d never seen anything like that,” Mr.
Friedkin said. “They played one long piece of music that sounded like a
combination of Jimi Hendrix and Stockhausen. The whole notion of the film I
later made came that evening. I started to see the images of the movie that
ultimately became Sorcerer.”

Like Mann’s Thief,
Sorcerer balances contemplative,
sometimes abstract visual elements with the taut narrative of the
thriller. This style owes much
to the European New Wave, particularly the films of Werner Herzog and
Jean-Pierre Melville, which recast traditional elements of the thriller into
abstract meditations on destiny and free will.
The story brings together several desperate characters who have fled
from their criminal pasts into anonymity in a remote village in South America. After terrorists blow up a local oil well,
the oil company seeks four drivers to move a shipment of volatile nitro-glycerin
through the rain forest so that the explosives can be used to stop the flow of
flaming oil. Tangerine Dream’s music is
not heard until the film’s second half, depicting this harrowing journey
through excruciating challenges. While
their score has a remarkable range, moving from ethereal drones to blinding
white noise, their signature sound emerges in the form of slowly evolving
modular melodies that grow more taut and rhythmic as the journey’s tensions
increase. A key element of the
soundtrack’s success is the nature of synthesized sound itself, which can be
sculpted into a variety of forms, in which any given sound can change
from melodic to rhythmic by increasing a tone’s percussive attack. The electronic sounds blend seamlessly with
the truck engine’s roar and the driving rain in the film’s complex sound
design, creating a total aural atmosphere of a kind that would be later
augmented by Mann in Thief.

The films also share a preoccupation with their detailed,
seemingly real-time depiction of men engaged in complicated tasks, and both
films depend upon Tangerine Dream’s score to lend focus and tension to these
depictions. Thief begins with a now-famous 9-minute scene in which the
protagonist Frank (James Caan) breaks into a high security vault. The electronic rhythms and pulses of the
score become almost indistinguishable from the iconic image of the giant drill
that fills the screen, sending sparks flying to bounce off of Frank’s
surprisingly hip looking safety glasses.
The repetitive rhythms anticipate those that would later emerge in the
Chicago club scene. Dubbed house music,
this minimal electronic dancefloor sound has become synonymous with techno and
its variants, combining driving beats with stark, industrial sounds uniquely
suited to high-ceilinged dance clubs. It
is a sound oddly suited to the enigmatic mood struck by Mann’s film, in which
grueling, repetitive tasks become existential rituals in which the protagonist
momentarily defies the forces that would trap him.

Tangerine Dream’s music is used prominently in three main
sections of the film, first in the tense opening scene, then over the second
major break-in depicted a little over halfway into the picture, and, finally,
in the climactic scene of the film where Frank violently frees himself from
oppressive obligations. Each of these
major scenes is distinctive for its lack of dialogue and almost total focus on
a particular, grim task. Taken
individually, they assume a quality that’s hard to disassociate from the music
video, a form that was soon to come into its own with MTV, which began
broadcasting the same year Thief was
released. Mann himself, as producer of Miami Vice, would play an important role
in extending the vocabulary of this new form by incorporating extended music
sequences into dramatic narratives, accompanied by Jan Hammer’s infinitely
adaptable electronic compositions.

But the mood of Thief
and its relationship to Tangerine Dream’s music is a much more complicated
affair than the pink and neon night scenes evoked in Miami Vice. Thief conjures a kind of anti-glamour in
which grim-faced criminals pound heavy metal tools, their faces pouring sweat as
they force their way into seemingly impenetrable steel chambers. Without a driving soundtrack and incomparably
rich cinematography, these scenes would be an extremely hard sell, but Thief transforms what might easily come
off as arty and boring into gripping cinema.
Like Mann’s film, Tangerine Dream’s score combines the ethereal and the
meditative with the metallic and the visceral.
The result is a film in which every element combines in a portrayal of
crime as both act and atmosphere, murder and mood.

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

John Cusack in ADULT WORLD: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Several times during his turn as Rat Billings, the grizzled
poet at the heart of Adult World, I wanted to punch John Cusack in the face.
It’s a brilliant performance. In the quirky solar system of odd personalities
making up this tale of a young Syracuse grad who wants desperately to be a
published poet and takes Rat as her guide, Cusack makes an erstwhile and unfriendly
sun: the other characters float around Rat like so many misfit asteroids. While
some aspects of the film have an indie-fied clunk to them, Adult World works beautifully as a sad, sensitive character study,
in which two people who could not be more different find some common ground—even
if that common ground involves hostility. The main story of the film—a young
poet needs money, finds work at a porn store, meets lots of interesting, kind
people, and learns something about herself in the process—seems grossly outshadowed
by the Krazy-Kat-and-Ignatz-style love-hate relationship between Cusack and his
young would-be protégé.

This is a curious film, because the key characteristic that
Cusack has always offered his audience is a certain comfort born of geniality.
His emotional highs and emotional lows are always mitigated by a gentle squint
and a soft, vaguely raspy voice. Even when he is seething with romantic rage as
Rob in High Fidelity, or assassinating people with high efficiency in Grosse Pointe
Blank, or swindling smoothly in The Grifters, you feel sympathy with him: sure,
he just killed a man, but he must be an okay guy, deep down, right? This feeling
we have might stem not so much from an effort on Cusack’s part to please
audiences as from a certain relaxation with the camera—his tendency to “play
himself” in films has been well-documented. His performance in this film gives
little of the prior sense of comfort. Cusack might well be relaxed in the role,
but it’s what he’s relaxing into that’s
significant.

Rat is a certain kind of writing professor, whom anyone who
has gone through a writing program might recognize (director Scott Coffey must
have done his research): once proud, once tough and able to toss off bons mots with great ease, now settled
into teaching at a university, not as well-praised, pushing himself through
writing courses, possibly wondering if the whole thing is worth continuing, and
taking it out on his students. When Amy (Emma Roberts), an ambitious young
writer just out of college, forces herself on him in an effort to learn from
him, he literally runs away from her—as he does from his students at the end of
one of his writing classes. When the two of them have their first conversation,
everything about Rat suggests enclosure: the way he folds his arms and legs in
on himself, the pursed frown, and the cold look in his eyes, which he maintains
throughout the film. Rat’s nastiness comes out most interestingly in the
details, the small things he does. At one point, early in their acquaintance,
Rat asks Amy, “Did Leyner put you up to this? Did Mark…?” Although Cusack and
Mark Leyner, author of urbane humor classics Et Tu, Babe, My Cousin, My
Gastroenterologist, and The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack, among others, are
offscreen friends (they wrote War, Inc. together), mentioning Leyner says a lot
about Rat, or what he once was: a young, cocksure, hip, attitudinal upstart who
drew an audience in the early 1990s through his sarcasm and seeming toughness.
At another moment, after Amy has thrown herself at Rat in a drunken stupor, she
ends up in his lap: he heaves her, without much sentiment, onto a sofa, as if
to show what he really thinks of her. His nastiness comes out in broad strokes
too, of course; as he is about to slam his front door on Amy, he tosses off,
“You’re the kind of muse I’d get,” and she’s thrilled, too naïve to hear the
sarcasm. When he meets Amy’s parents, he confides to her mother that she “lacks
all knowledge.” When a student in his class
asks if a poem’s interpretation will be “on the test,” he tells her, “You’ll be
tested every day, for the rest of your life, and you know what? You’ll fail.” The
director tries to give Rat some moments of tenderness, at the very end of the
film, but it rings falsely; somehow, for him to call Amy a “stem against the
tide,” after having misled her in various ways which I won’t spoil, isn’t quite
enough.

The film is carried, for the most part, by Cusack’s toned-down
but tuned-in performance, though Coffey’s supporting cast is strong as can be.
Funnily enough, John Cullum and Cloris Leachman play the owners of the porn store that gives the movie its title and gives Amy a job:
Cullum’s most famous role in the last 25 years was as Holling in the TV cult favorite Northern
Exposure, in which his character married a woman a quarter his age, and Leachman
made a breakthrough performance in The
Last Picture Show, as a football coach’s wife who cheats on her husband with a
teen-aged Timothy Bottoms. Though there is no romance between Rat and Amy, Coffey seems to nod to its possibility with his casting choices. Evan Peters, as the perky, well-adjusted porn store
manager, may be wildly miscast, but it’s easy to forgive, given the exuberance
and energy he brings to the part. Roberts herself could best be described as
intrepid; she brings as much magnitude as she can to what is, essentially, a
“straight man” role,” that is, playing off of Rat’s jaded, tired, vaguely
poisonous energy. There are many times where the movie’s seams show, where
Coffey hits us over the head with a wanna-be tale of “uplift” and “finding
yourself.” But the most interesting aspect of the film is its significance in
Cusack’s career. This part, along with his performance as convict Hillary in
The Paperboy or Richard Nixon in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, are a long way from his performance as
Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything. It will be enjoyable, if unnerving, to see where Cusack turns
next.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

THE LEGO MOVIE: Turn Down the Nostalgia

Note: This piece contains spoilers.

The vast majority of Phil Lord & Chris Miller’s new
film, The Lego Movie, is inventive, entertaining, sharply funny, and a
particular combination of total chaos and laser focus that makes for an
extraordinarily enjoyable time at the movies. I expect to revisit these
first 80 minutes or so many times in the future. I hope never again to
be put through the last twenty, which felt more than a little
disingenuous. Though it tries to insist that kids’ toys, games, and
movies should be primarily made for and enjoyed by their target
audience, it ends up being guilty of doing exactly the opposite,
crafting a message more geared for nostalgia-ridden adults. This is more
than just an awkward dramatic structure; this is an ideological
paradox.
 
The majority of the film takes place in an animated world,
wherein Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), an ordinary construction worker,
is pulled into a sort of revolution. It turns out that Lord Business
(voiced by Will Ferrell) intends to seal up the walls between Lego
“dimensions” (your city, your Wild West town, etc.), but a few “master
builders” are attempting to put a stop to this, and let every Lego
citizen live as they please. Emmet, it turns out, may have stumbled onto
the exact piece they need to seal their victory.

In those final twenty minutes, however, it is revealed, as perhaps
we’d suspected, that the movie takes place quite literally in the
imagination of a child given control over a giant Lego set. All the
wacky imagination and mishmash of cultural icons, geared to a story so
quickly-paced and nonsensical it could only be the product of someone
tapped in closely to the mind of a child? It turns out there’s an
explanation for that – it actually comes from the mind of a child. What
seemed boundless becomes banal, more explicable than exciting, more
Inception than inventive.
 
As the camera pulls back on Emmet, having dove into what we
believed to be his death, we find him lying on the floor of a
live-action, not animated, set, gazing up at his true master, a young
boy, Finn (Jadon Sand), himself subservient to the actual owner of the
toys – his dad (Will Ferrell, live, in person). The film quickly asserts
that its exploration of the perils of conformity and the unbridled joy
of individual imagination were less a comment on “life in the modern
world,” and much more to do with the conflict that comes when adults try
to retain control on childish things, in the process robbing the very
children around them of their own childhood. Dad is quite agitated to
find Finn at his play set.
 
It turns out Dad and Finn have had this discussion before. “How
many times have I told you,” he says, indicating the “DO NOT TOUCH”
signs tacked onto every corner of the sprawling world he’s created.
“These are block building sets.” “But we got them at the toy store,”
Finn replies. “They say for ages 7-14.” “That’s just a suggestion,” Dad
insists, reaching for the glue to cement every piece in its proper place,
so that no cowboys ride through city streets and no spacemen square
off against dragons.
 
This potent, sadly relevant theme is definitely worth exploring. By
exploring it within The Lego Movie, however, Lord and Miller are
committing the very sin they’re attempting to condemn. Up until the full
revelation of the “real life” world, the film fires on all cylinders,
delivering entertainment and humor that requires no special maturity nor
naivete to enjoy. It’s a true family film. The audience is everyone.
Who is the audience for the finale? Adults, certainly, but perhaps not
even all of them. Those with their own carefully-managed collections of
children’s toys? Those aware that such grown-ups exist? Whatever the
case, it’s not a theme for children: not inappropriate for them, but
rather wildly out of place. The adults have reclaimed the playspace.
 
What’s more, this coda was entirely unnecessary to relay this
theme. Within the animated world, Lord Business enacts figuratively what
his real-life counterpart is doing literally, concocting a massive plan
to ensure that all the toys stay in their proper place, and that
everything works according to arbitrarily-assigned rules. This meets a
two-tiered challenge, villainizing both corporations that churn out
tedious, expository discussions of films in the guise of
action-adventure and the adults who demand such entertainment and wreck
all the fun. That content is all there for audience members who need it.
Those that don’t—the kids‘—can still enjoy a magnificent motion
picture. Until, that is, they’re forced to endure another abrasively
dull discussion on grand themes built not for them, but for an older
generation attempting to keep the toys all to themselves. Their fun be
damned, this is about something. Just like every other achingly dull
superhero movie.

Scott
Nye is a member of the Online Film Critics Society. His work has
appeared on RogerEbert.com, Movie Mezzanine, Battleship Pretension,
CriterionCast, and The House Next Door. He maintains a blog at railoftomorrow.com. Follow him on Twitter @railoftomorrow.