Blogs – Page 15 – Press Play Video Blog

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Dons the Jerk Gear for DON JON

Recently, Buzzfeed published a widely read listicle entitled, “40 Things Every Self-Respecting Man Over 30 Should Own”. Reaction online was mixed. Some men and women considered the list—which included head-scratchers like duct tape, a wine key, a chef’s knife, a flask, playing cards, sunglasses, heavy liquor, a bar set, and a French press—a reasonable tally of objects prerequisite to being a man. Others, largely men, considered the list patronizing at best and destructive at worst. One commenter wrote, “I had twenty out of forty [of these items], and was more proud of the twenty I didn’t have than the twenty I did.” The Buzzfeed list was light on objects indicating any interest in civil society: computers, newspapers, and magazines were deemed inessential. It also lacked objects encouraging men to be interested in their own emotional development. Tools for self-reflection were mysteriously absent, unless you count “a book collection” which, the list’s author noted, didn’t need to have been read, or a record player which, as the list’s author noted, was primarily useful for playing records that make their owner look good. One suspects that a thirty-something male who owns all or nearly all of the items on the Buzzfeed list is more likely smug than admirable—or adult. Enter Jon Martello, the character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the porn-addiction dramedy Don Jon. Martello is just the sort of man for whom the Buzzfeed list functions as an essential guidebook, and if Don Jon is successful in its satire of contemporary living, it is primarily in reminding us—as if any reminder were needed—just how invasive and insidious gender typecasting is in America.

Martello is called
“Don Jon” by his friends because he has a long, unbroken streak of
post-clubbing sexual conquests. As with everything in Martello’s life, sex is a
mathematical function; a night out ends with intercourse just as surely as
Mondays are abs, Tuesdays are back, Wednesdays are legs, Thursdays are chest,
and Fridays are shoulders. Don Jon is the sort of borderline sociopath who,
with pathological self-consciousness, aims at and hits all the markers on the Buzzfeed shopping
list: a decent car (#38), black dress shoes (#2), cologne (#7), proper bedding
(#9), a grooming kit (#14), an ironing board (#22), multiple sheet sets (#35),
and so on.

Needless to say, a number
of these items could indeed be considered useful to both men and women of any
age past twenty-one. The problem is with counting them obsessively, as Buzzfeed
and Martello do, as though the only way to get through life is to regularly
award oneself gold stars for meeting the presumed requirements of adulthood.
Despite these daily self-assessments, Martello is forced to endure his boorish
father’s persistent insistence that he’s not yet a man. This likely explains
the fact that the first half of Don Jon is one of the most depressing
movie-going experiences you’ll ever encounter. Never has a young man’s life
seemed so grasping yet emptily routine. Martello surrounds himself with the
trappings of adulthood, but receives none of its satisfactions in return. Would
picking up a newspaper help? Writing in a journal? Reading a favorite literary
classic? Who knows.

Certainly, Martello doesn’t
own any such items, and even if he did it’s not clear that he’d know what to do
with them. In fact, he has so little imagination that he can’t masturbate
without a visual aid; so little patience behind the wheel of a car that he’s a
road-rage homicide waiting to happen; so little self-knowledge that he reacts
with instinctive anger when his closest friend engages him in conversation of a
personal nature; so little soul he can’t look women in the eye when he speaks
to them; so little emotional support that he never speaks to his parents
without arguing with them (and never speaks to his largely mute sister at all);
and so little self-possession that he falls madly in love with a woman
(Scarlett Johansson) simply because she’s a “dime” (a
“ten”) physically.

On the bright side, he does
seem to own a French press (#31).

Of course, being an adult
isn’t a matter of either/or; it’s possible to both own a French press and also
have a rich inner life. The problem, as Don Jon sees it, is that men and
women alike have so routinized their lives and their identities that these days,
lists like the one on Buzzfeed really do, for many, resemble exhaustive
how-to manuals for adulthood. Perhaps this is why the first half of Don Jon
seems at once harrowingly true-to-life but also dizzyingly pornographic in its
broad brushstrokes and general moral shabbiness. Viewers have no idea why
Martello and his two friends (he appears to have no others) continue to spend
time together, as they do nothing but club and criticize one another; Jon even
gets visibly upset when one of the two deigns to knock on his apartment door
unannounced. Viewers likewise have no sense of Jon’s professional life, as his
unsatisfying bartending job is only alluded to twice and seen on-screen (in a
two-second jump-cut) just once. Jon’s family and church life are little more
than a pastiche of uncomfortable Italian and Catholic stereotypes. His
relationship with the seductive, romantic comedy-loving Barbara Sugarman (Johansson)
is miles wide and inches deep, so much so that it’s difficult to say whether
either of the two says an honest word to the other during the film’s
ninety-minute run-time.

This, then, is what romantic
comedies and pornography alike promise their consumers: a world in which
expectations are obvious and always met, deviations from the norm are both
predictable and harmless, and bean-counting one’s own successes is the only way
to escape one’s suppressed misery. A list of essential man-objects from Buzzfeed
serves much the same function, as it sets easily-attainable expectations for
men while avoiding even the implication that idiosyncrasies are
permissible. Years of being an adult male have taught me that the only
essential objects in a man’s life are those that help him authentically
distinguish himself from his demographic. Equating masculinity with conformity
calls to mind Barbara’s final rebuke of Jon (“I thought you were
different!”)—which is notable primarily because
no viewer of Don Jon could ever have made that mistake in judgment.

Two moments in Don Jon
are particularly revelatory of the movie’s implicit critique of contemporary
masculinity. In the first, Jon patronizingly tells a friend that “if you
do things right,” you end up with a great girl, having the best sex of
your life. It’s a fraught moment because Jon—an under-employed porn addict with
an anger management problem who also (horrors!) loves vacuuming and dusting—has
no more sense of how a man “does things right” than does Buzzfeed.
His sense of a man’s moral obligation begins and ends with confession-eligible
sins, destructive but obligatory family dinners, misogynistic male bonding
exercises, and favoring weightlifting to cardio.

He even misuses the items
on the Buzzfeed list. He drives his souped-up car like an ass, he uses
his dressing and grooming and apartment-cleaning skills to no purpose other
than casual sex with women whose names he doesn’t know, and he deploys his
ostentatious masculinity (one imagines him owning #27, a Leatherman) to
intimidate classmates at night school, belittle his peers, and perpetuate an
emotionally abusive relationship with his father.

In a second great moment of
gender critique, Jon interrogates a priest who’s given him the same penance for
two sins: affectionate premarital sex with a woman he respects, and emotionally
empty premarital sex with multiple women he doesn’t. Having been assigned ten
Hail Marys for each, he asks, “How did you arrive at that number?”
It’s a poignant question, one that could be directed to Justin Abarca, author
of the Buzzfeed list.

How did “40
Things Every Self-Respecting Man Over 30 Should Own” end up including a
flask and not a magazine subscription? Or “good socks” (#32) and not a
pet you have to care for? Or “brown dress shoes” (#3) and not some area of interest you might have actually
read up on, rather than merely (as Abarca condones) appearing to have done so?
Why forty items, rather than twenty or sixty? Why only items you can buy, and not
abstractions you can access for free? What magical fairy-dust alights on a
man’s shoulder at thirty, making him need undershirts (#24) afterwards, but not
before that age? And who is our hypothetical “self-respecting man”
doing this all for, anyway? Himself? A woman who thinks “jumper
cables” (#23) are more essential to a self-respecting thirty-something
than, say, integrity, courage, articulateness, and generosity?

Reasonable people can
disagree as to whether rom-com cliches are as destructive to a woman’s sense of
self and her romantic expectations as pornography is to the same things in
men’s lives. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether hair gel (absent from
Abarca’s list) is a worthy addition to a man’s grooming kit, or—as Martello’s
eventual savior, middle-aged pothead Esther (Julianne Moore), says—entirely
superfluous. But what seems beyond contention or debate is the noxious first
principle proposed by Buzzfeed: that self-respect arises from
a short roster of material goods, rather than strength of character, a sense of
humor, and self-possession. As well to say that a woman may be judged (to
borrow from one Martello voice-over) by whether her breasts are fake, her butt
perfect, her willingness to give oral sex and receive a facial unambiguous, and
her facility with ten or more sexual positions incontrovertible.

The second half of Don
Jon is remarkable—and surprisingly affecting—because in it we see Martello
indulging what are, to him, eccentricities: playing basketball, drinking
coffee, listening to and making eye contact with women when they speak, styling
his hair without product, treating his friends decently, subduing his perpetually
creepy and aggressive body language, and judging a woman by the way she makes
him feel, not by the boxes she ticks on some teenager-ready jerk-off checklist.
Maybe all those who lauded a thirty-something’s version of that checklist—”40
Things Every Self-Respecting Man Over 30 Should Own”—should steal a page
from Martello’s revised playbook and close their eyes, imagine a man or woman
whose presentation and lifestyle hasn’t been pre-approved by American media,
and see whether they can still find physical and emotional delight in the
unsupervised oddities of a real-life man.

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.

You Got the Miley You Paid For, America

Just days after Miley Cyrus’
bizarre, off-putting performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards—which saw
the twenty year-old performer rubbing herself provocatively with a foam finger,
“twerking” against the genitals of thirty-six year-old singer Robin Thicke, and
gleefully slapping the buttocks of her backup dancers—Camille Paglia wrote a
piece for Time decrying Cyrus’
decidedly unsexy three-ring circus primarily on artistic grounds. Miley has
never been given “the time or space to develop emotional depth or creative
skills,” and therefore lacks “professional focus,” wrote Paglia. Paglia ended
her essay with an impassioned exhortation: “Miley, go back to school!” Instead,
Miley went to New York City, where she hosted Saturday Night Live and
announced to a cheering studio audience that her reasonably well-behaved Disney
Channel alter ego, teenage schoolgirl Hannah Montana, had been “murdered.”
Played for laughs, the gag was funny in part because it was true: the Disney
Corporation, with a subtle but equally reckless assist by Miley’s
fans, killed Miley’s childhood dead, and neither wishes nor revisionism
will ever bring it back. It’s a cycle we’ve seen played out with
nausea-inducing regularity: America, its legions of consumers just as much as
its faceless institutions, siphons away any sense of normalcy its artist-heroes
might ever have enjoyed, then stands in mock outrage above the debris field
that invariably results.

The idea that performing artists need time and space—perhaps
even the time and space afforded by a school-like setting—to learn something
about the history of their art and thereby develop so-called “professional
focus” makes a certain sense in the music industry. Because touring brings in
as much or more revenue than album sales do, there’s a strong incentive for
recording artists to stay perpetually in the limelight. The utility of time,
space, focus, and professionalism is less clear in other art-making genres.
It’s easy to see why singers ought to sometimes flee the glare of the national
spotlight and the equally searing heat of their record companies’
profit-margin assessments, but what about poets, sculptors, painters, potters,
and the millions of other artists working daily in unprofitable and rarely
acknowledged sectors of America’s art culture? What (and when and how) should they
be fleeing?

One possible answer: the ravages of a culture that annually
finds ever more ingenious ways to screw up the lives of profit-driven and
profit-blind artists alike. The means of such systemic destruction may be
different in different genres, but the end result is all too frequently the
same—whether it’s for Miley Cyrus or Lindsay Lohan, Justin Bieber or Britney
Spears, Corey Feldman or Danny Bonaduce. Whenever an artistic sensibility is
given too much or too little leash, the risk of a public or private disaster
resulting is high. A young singer with little proper schooling (Miley was home-,
set-, and tour-schooled following middle school), a perpetually abnormal social
life, only sporadic parenting, and too much expendable income to use
responsibly will often enough end up—using Miley as just one example—twerking
on the privates of someone almost twice her age for a screaming national
audience. Likewise, a writer with no job, no health insurance, no stable and
affordable housing, no reliably encouraging community, a spotty sense of
history, and a virtual rogues’ gallery of indifferent role models is equally
likely to end up in an emergency room as making Great Art. When
individuals as emotionally and psychologically temperamental as artists
habitually are lack access to high-quality healthcare, employment, and support
networks, they all too often under-medicate,
under-insure, under-employ, and over-isolate themselves into episodes of
financial and spiritual despair.

Because often it’s lack, not surfeit, that’s most conducive
to artistic greatness, we can’t really say that instability is always unhealthy
for budding artists in the short term. What we can say is that the Muse
of suffering ought not be foisted upon all artists indiscriminately, as even
those who benefit from it often don’t benefit from it for long, and even when
and where suffering inspires an artist one can’t know whether a different
medium might have worked as well or better as a conduit for genius. In any
case, at no point in the process of watching artists’ lives play out do
audiences earn the right to expect more from their artists than the
pitfall-riddled lives to which they’ve been left. You (that is to say, we) get
the Miley we overpaid for, just as we invariably get the poets, sculptors, painters, and potters we’ve habitually refused to pay for at
all. While formal schooling only lends focus to those artists already inclined
to be focused or to benefit from a particular emphasis on skill-development and
historical awareness, the time, space, depth of seriousness, and range of
skills Camille Paglia wished for Miley in her Time essay should be
wished for for all our nation’s artists—and so we shouldn’t be
surprised when the lack of any of these leads an artist to a public or private
meltdown.

This isn’t to say that denying artists time and space for
the development of serious ambitions and a versatile skill-set invariably leads
to disaster, merely to note that the fact that it may is
foreseeable and therefore unworthy of public shamings in Time or
elsewhere. Likewise, none of this is to say that artists should face no
censure for poor behavior; they can be, they should be, and they frequently are held
to account (often unfairly) for bucking the norms our culture so
authoritatively insists upon. A media outlet like TMZ, for instance, exists for
no other reason than to shame artists for their ill-considered antics; the vicissitudes
of the academic and corporate job markets do similar work in ensuring that
literary and visual artists never stray too far from the behavior employers
expect from their investments.

Yet even if we account for all of this, it’s still the case
that public criticism of artists should not be willfully ignorant of the
personal and professional milieu of working artists generally. Those
criticizing Miley Cyrus should somewhere in their critiques give some
indication that they know they’re criticizing a socially maladjusted
teen-equivalent who’s been surrounded by uncaring, selfish, morally incompetent
adults her entire life. Should Miley’s mother be managing her daughter’s most
important professional decisions, thereby confusing two roles with entirely
different expectations, responsibilities, and prerequisites? Should someone
have stopped a fifteen year-old Miley from granting what appeared to be a
topless photo-shoot to Annie Leibovitz? Should the bosses at the Disney Channel
have granted the then-thirteen year-old Miley a shooting schedule that
permitted her to be schooled amongst her peers rather than hurriedly and
on-set? Could Miley’s father, the one-hit wonder country singer Billy Ray
Cyrus—who recently said that Hannah
Montana “destroyed my family . . . I’d take [Miley being on the show] back in a
second”—have resuscitated his own fading career via something other than a co-starring role alongside
his teenage daughter? Absolutely. A bevy of poor decisions—personal,
professional, educational, and otherwise—led Miley to where she is now, and
only a few of those decisions were solely Miley’s to make.

Miley’s decision to appropriate black culture for financial
gain was certainly an elective act—but it shouldn’t be deconstructed in the
same way one academic takes another to task. Rather, critics should in some way acknowledge that
however foolish and race/gender-insensitive Miley’s shtick may be, she’s still
a young woman with little education who’s had no reasonable limits on her
spending since she was a child, who’s grown up in full view of the nation’s
hundred million living rooms, and who hasn’t lived the sort of life that
induces more temperate conduct since, well, never. Miley gets paid an
exorbitant amount of money to have no sense whatsoever of musical history or
even the barest standards of professionalism, and she gets paid that money by
the very same culture that subsequently derides her misbehavior as though it
were evidence of a system failure rather than a young person’s temperamental
decision-making. In other words, Miley’s been exploited by corporations,
unscrupulous charlatans, and blindly adoring fans her whole life, and almost certainly
hasn’t enjoyed a truly “normal” moment in more than a decade. Under the same
circumstances, you’d be twerking, too.

That an artist’s life is a relatively easy one is as much an
invisible presumption of American culture as is the idea that no culture can
long survive without Art. You’d think that decades of celebrity mug-shots, Behind
the Music episodes, and checkout-aisle gossip rags would have convinced us
that the last thing you’d want your son or daughter to become is an artist of
any kind. Yet somehow America still encourages its children to pursue their
artistic inclinations, and celebrates their ambitions and successes as unambiguously
healthy and just. What’s the harm, after all? Sure, we know from mountains of
academic and pop-culture biographies that an alarming number of the literary,
musical, dramatic, and material artists whose work we most enjoy have died
penniless in ditches, or by their own hand, or with their hands on a bottle, or
choking on their own vomit following a drug overdose, but wasn’t that song
sublime? That poem? That novel? That sculpture? We know making Art often takes
a terrible toll on the psyche, on one’s mental health and physical well-being,
and on one’s finances—think Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain, Gary Coleman, or any one
of a thousand other young, much-heralded artists. But nothing can stop American
culture from consuming the energies of its artists so voraciously that hardly
any time or space is left them to catch their breath.

No one but Miley Cyrus’ doctor
and closest family and friends know her mental health status specifically or
her current medical condition generally, and no one outside that circle should
deign to speculate authoritatively on either. But here’s what we do know: Miley
has been in the public eye since she was eleven. When I was eleven, I was still
alone in my room trying to figure out how to masturbate properly. So to
converse about Miley Cyrus as though she were a normally socialized twenty
year-old defies both the evidence and common sense.

This isn’t a matter of crying
“Leave Britney alone!”, it’s a question of knowing the cost and value of the
throes of American culture. In other words, with Miley, as with all artists,
you get what you pay for, America: If you offer your artists no jobs, no
patronage, no supportive communities, and no means for coexisting with any
measure of comfort alongside their fellow citizens, you end up with artists
whose lives are unstable, uncertain, and in at least some identifiable
percentage of instances, psychologically and/or physically unhealthy. Moreover,
you end up with artists who begin to falsely associate infelicities with
predestination, who believe that being at loose ends emotionally and
financially is the only way to make Art that they and—on occasion, perhaps—other
Americans will respect. On the other end of the spectrum, if you throw millions
of dollars at children before they’ve reached puberty, if you pull them from
their local middle school to “help” them avoid paparazzi they shouldn’t have to
deal with in the first instance, if you juxtapose the roles of parent and
manager, if you reward ethical misbehavior or profligate spending or shoddy
songwriting with ever larger and larger royalty checks, you are ruining a
childhood and you’ll undoubtedly see that ruination play out on your television
set in a few short years. The conversation about Miley Cyrus isn’t dull because
we’ve done it before—it isn’t dull because it’s hard to see much daylight
between Paris Hilton, Amy Winehouse, Justin Bieber, Lindsay Lohan, et cetera—but
because it’s so cynically and insidiously hypocritical it’s nauseating. Miley
isn’t shocking; in fact, she’s so predictably derivative of the way our culture
condones the abuse of young artists across all genres that it’s painful to see
all our self-servingly unreasonable expectations unfolding in real time.

Those who take Miley to task for appropriating black
culture, or for undercutting responsible notions of femininity—as Sinead
O’Connor infamously did recently—are willfully missing the point. The time for
cultural critics to have intervened in the fiasco Miley’s life has become was
when she was a corporate wunderkind on the Disney Channel. Time and time again
we’ve seen children ruined by early success go on to harrowing tribulations as
adults—for every resurgent Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake, there’s a
whole dollar-bin of Britneys—yet we speak of an unsocialized teen’s predictable
nervous breakdown (or, the apparent non-clinical equivalent) as though it takes
a gaggle of scholars to sort it all out. Though the analogy is by no means a
perfect one, I for one am no more surprised by Miley appropriating black culture
or undercutting third-wave feminism’s political gains than I would be by an
abused child re-enacting the horrors once visited upon her by insidious
elders.

If indeed Miley has offended or done damage with her
straight-from-the-playbook youth rebellion, I’m more insulted by those who are
insulted than by the one purportedly doing the insulting. If you don’t want
your consumer dollars going directly to the abuse of children whose antics
you’ll later find repugnant and comment-worthy, don’t watch the MTV Video Music
Awards, don’t watch Miley’s YouTube videos or follow her on Twitter, don’t buy
her albums or attend her concerts, and most of all don’t participate in
farcical remonstrations over Miley’s antisocial displays. Not because Miley
does or doesn’t deserve your patronage, but because America’s moral degradation
is long past the point you’ve any right left to ignore it. After all, this is a
country that establishes national campaigns to protect urban youth from the
ravages of drugs—on the theory that many such youth have few or no responsible
adults available to help them avoid drug addiction—and then pounces on them
when they turn sixteen, as the nation’s anti-drug campaign, having failed to
save any of those it was charged to save, turns on a dime into a nationwide,
incarceration-happy flash-mob. Miley bears a good deal of responsibility for
Miley, certainly, but the responsibility of a child to raise herself in a nest
of vipers is by no means limitless. America helped raise Miley in a very real
way—indeed, it did so carefully, consciously, and conscientiously over
more than a decade—so it has little right now to decry its own failure to
protect a vulnerable, impressionable, and naive young artist. To Camille Paglia
I would say, Miley doesn’t need a better school; what she’s long needed, and
what she never got nor will ever get, is a better country to grow up in.

On Hollywood’s False Nobility, and the Growing Power of Hype

Hollywood has always thrilled at its power to pluck a Lana Turner from the
soda fountain at Schwab’s, but it takes onanistic pleasure in the dark side of
its hype machine, too: how believing too much in Tinseltown’s promises can transform
nobodys into somebodies—Monroe, Harlow, Dean, and, even worse, poor
anonymous never-weres like Peg Entwhistle, the frustrated actress who
suicidally leaped off the H of the Hollywoodland sign in 1932. (Rather than die
instantly, she bled to death from a broken pelvis. This town doesn’t cut anyone
a break.)

Most movies about Hollywood’s illusion factory lie somewhere between
self-flagellatingly critical and winkingly celebratory:The Player, Sunset
Blvd.. Get Shorty, Barton Fink, Boogie Nights, Ed Wood, The Stunt Man, Singin’
In The Rain, Tropic Thunder, Bowfinger, LA Confidential. There are some
notable exceptions, such as Adaptation (reality can’t be shoehorned into
art, and certainly not into movies) or Sullivan’s Travels (legitimate pleasure
in movies is a noble pursuit), but most others hold true to playwright Wilson
Mizner’s adage that life in Hollywood is “a trip through a sewer in a
glass-bottomed boat.”

Despite its ambiguity about the Hollywood hype machine, the Academy’s
sentiments about the hard work of making art is completely unambiguous. Ray,
Shine, Precious, Atonement, Hustle And Flow—it celebrates films affirming
the redemptive power of creative craft, and how devoting oneself to its
difficult demands is a way into a better life. (Part of the 2010 Oscar Best
Picture race was between films declaring that devoting oneself to a difficult
craft will save you (The King’s Speech) vs. devoting oneself to a
difficult craft will destroy you (Black Swan). The King’s Speech
won.)

In 2012, both Silver Linings Playbook and Argo
were up for Best Picture, and any smart bettor would have fingered Silver
Linings Playbook as the shoo-in because of its “art saves all”
theme—how a recently released mental patient (Bradley Cooper) and a grieving
temptress (Jennifer Lawrence) heal themselves through ballroom dancing. Argo‘s got no art, just a bunch of hype conjured up by a CIA agent (Ben Affleck) and a pair of weary Hollywood
old-timers (John Goodman and Alan Arkin) looking to spring some hostages with a
story about a non-existent movie. “Art saves” vs. “Hype
saves” is no contest—but, strangely, the Academy didn’t see it that way.

Wink-wink movies about the illusory nature of Hollywood are nothing new. When
Gene Kelly crows at the end of Singin’ In The Rain “Stop that girl! That girl running up the aisle! That’s the
girl whose voice you heard!” it’s a moment of triumph: the illusion
factory drops its veil to celebrate the creators at the core. However, when you
drop Argo‘s veil and there’s nothing there. We’re
not even going to pretend anymore, the Academy announced. Sixty years after Singin’, Argo‘s
Best Picture win legitimized the triumph of hype over art. It announced a new
era of Hollywood sociopathy, where not even style replaces substance: lies
replace style replace substance, and you’re expected to nod and smile all the
way to the box office as your hand closes on a fistful of air.

But come on, you say, lives were saved. Doesn’t that justify a certain kind
of noble falsehood, like in 1997’s Best Foreign Language Oscar winner Life
Is Beautiful, where a father’s perverse recasting of a concentration camp
as game show enables his son to escape with hope unscathed? Or Schindler’s
List, where a German businessman conceives of a semi-truthful scheme to
save Jews in his employ? Or The Counterfeiters, where a group of
concentration camp inmates survive by making fake money? Or Jakob the Liar,
where a Jewish man keeps hope alive in the ghetto by making fabulous stories
about the messages he hears on a secret radio—and then succors the audience
with an alternate, sunnier ending?

The common denominator of all those movies is that they are Holocaust
survival stories. When Argo shamelessly borrows
that “noble falsehood” genre blueprint, it brings the same invisible
weight to a story completely unconnected to the Holocaust. It makes clear
exactly what we’re supposed to think about the movie’s Middle Eastern villains,
while deftly sidestepping any accusations of making a movie about Nazis in
keffiyeh.

But if the villains in Argo are really Nazis,
then what does that make our heroes? Argo‘s borrowing
of the “noble Holocaust deception” genre requires the appointment of
Hollywood as a sovereign Jewish nation, a connection that’s irresponsible at
best and slanderous at worst. And in addition, the surrogate Jews escape at the
end because of cunning, justifiable lies, and the illusion-casting power of
Hollywood in their back pocket—an unflattering toolkit that harkens back to
anti-Semitic canards about how Jews do business and who really runs Hollywood.

Argo is dishonest and shameful for the way it
privileges hype over art. But its willingness to cloak itself in the horror of
the Holocaust for sheer narrative convenience, as well as to milk racist
reactions on both sides of the conflict between the Jewish and Muslim worlds
for emotional resonance, proves it’s the most morally bankrupt movie to ever
win Best Picture. It’s more than dishonest. It’s dangerous, and awarding it
Best Picture showed a lack of concern about the parallels Hollywood is drawing
when we’re at war with the Middle East. Worse, it remains to be seen if
upcoming releases like Edge of Tomorrow, Elysium, or the reboot
of Robocop—all pure entertainment, none legitimized as lauding true
historical events like Argo—are going to play faster and looser with those
parallels in their own metaphorical war landscapes. And considering the
vociferous response to Argo in Iran (the movie is banned, and a feature The
General Staff is being planned as a
rebuttal), those won’t go ignored, either. The only response to the poisonous era
Argo’s Best Picture win has possibly ushered into American moviemaking is its
own oft-repeated refrain: “Argo fuck yourself.”

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.

Why AMC’s HELL ON WHEELS Is a Hot Mess

Television
connoisseurs have long considered American Movie Classics (AMC) the Pixar of
the small screen: Everything the nearly twenty year-old network touches turns
to gold. But much like Pixar, AMC has recently revealed itself to be only an
imperfect vehicle for screenwriting genius. For Pixar, the first evidence of
decline was the trifling Cars (2006), though the company’s four
subsequent masterpieces (Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy
Story 3) were nearly enough for fans of big-screen animation to forgive
Pixar its latest and most underwhelming efforts: Cars 2 (2011), Brave
(2012), and Monsters University (2013). AMC hasn’t yet experienced quite
the downturn Pixar has, though it’s worth noting, despite the current
popularity of The Walking Dead, that no one would ever confuse either
its writing or its plotting for that of network standouts Mad Men and Breaking
Bad. And that’s why when Hell on Wheels came along in 2011, it
suddenly began to seem like the middling scripts and occasional hammy acting of
AMC’s zombie-apocalypse thriller were something less than coincidental. Hell
on Wheels, whose third season premiered just two weeks ago, is widely and
justifiably regarded as the worst offering on AMC to date. The reason? Bad
acting, bad scripts, a bad concept, and a long line of small- and big-screen
Westerns that have done everything Hell on Wheels aims to do, but
exponentially better.

Hell on Wheels centers around Cullen Bohannon
(Anson Mount), a former Confederate officer who’s predictably mysterious and
charismatic, though he also has—of course—the heart of a gentleman. Bohannon
leaves his Mississippi home to work on the railroad, an inauspicious life
decision that shortly takes him to Hell on Wheels, the tent city that follows
the leading edge of the Union Pacific railroad. The landowning Southerner
Bohannon released all his slaves prior to the onset of the Civil War; this is
hammered home repeatedly in the show’s early episodes, lest viewers begin
questioning the likability of a man whose sole occupation at present is
murdering former Union soldiers he has a grudge against. Of course, even
Bohannon’s half-secret homicidal agenda is entirely in keeping with the ground
rules for a television anti-hero: he’s trying to track down the men who
assaulted and killed his wife. However, the fact that he doesn’t know his wife
was murdered when he begins his rampage (incredibly and inexplicably, he
believes her to have committed suicide after being raped) undercuts his steely
determination somewhat.

It’s
not entirely clear what there is about Cullen Bohannon to draw admiration or
even interest. Like thousands of others of his era, he’s a reasonably
good-looking former soldier who occasionally led men in battle capably, who in
the postwar era soon discovered that the homeland he’d once fought for no
longer existed. If it weren’t for the focus of AMC’s cameras, one would expect
such a man to live and die anonymously doing hard labor somewhere in the
American West, or drinking himself to a stupor in Dixie. Given even the
dull-witted viewer’s near-certainty that Bohannon will find and ultimately
execute his wife’s murderers—coincidentally, he’s only got one man left to kill
by the third episode of the series—it’s not at all clear where the character’s
story should go, and there’s no particularly compelling reason for a viewer to
stick around and find out. Anson Mount may be an attractive and suitably
understated leading man, but even a likely suspect for the role can do little
with such thin gruel.

The
show’s supporting cast is equally uninspiring. Tom Noonan plays Reverend Cole,
the obligatory fish-out-of-water evangelist tasked with converting sinners
obviously beyond his reach; as in his appearances elsewhere (ranging from the
great Manhunter to the criminally
underrated films What Happened Was
and Synecdoche, New York), Noonan plays “creepy” exceedingly
well but “ethereal” and “wise” with a glaring ineptitude.
You’d hardly let the man babysit your children, let alone shepherd you to
eternity. Colm Meaney plays a vaguely Irish heavy the way he always has: By
raising his voice and indulging in a series of facial tics that would make
Elmer Fudd blush. Common—a rapper, not an actor—does his level best as recently
freed slave Elam Ferguson, but his every utterance is so charged with
bitterness and dormant rage that it’s a wonder anyone in 1865 would hire him in
the first place, let alone make him de facto spokesman for Union Pacific’s
overworked and underpaid black linemen. Dominique McElligott, clearly slated to
be Bohannon’s love interest from the moment she appears on screen—her bookish
land surveyor husband is predictably written out of the script almost
immediately—is a talented enough actress, but the presence of a British lady in
the midst of Cheyenne territory in 1865 is so contrived as to offend even the
most credulous of viewers. The less said about the show’s heavily-accented
comic relief the better: Ben Esler and Phil Burke do yeoman’s work bringing
outrageous Irish stereotypes back into vogue, as two entrepreneurs whose
unlikely business plan involves a “magic lantern” and blurry slides of Irish
vistas. As AMC has a long history of airing the best ensemble shows on American
television, it’s not exactly clear what’s happened here. Of the ten to fifteen
regulars on Hell on Wheels, it seems all but two or three were chosen by
a ear-plugged and blindfolded talent scout who’d never seen any of their
previous work nor watched even a single specimen of the Western genre.

One
exception to the above is Christopher Heyerdahl, who plays Thor Gundersen, a
ex-Union quartermaster from Norway whose experiences as a POW in Andersonville
prepared him well for his new life as a Union Pacific enforcer. Appropriately
spectral and menacing, Heyerdahl’s performance is undercut by the fact that he
hasn’t actually been given much to do except illegally skim from the company
and shadow Bohannon as he moves about the camp. It’s bad enough that Gundersen,
known in Hell on Wheels as “The Swede,” suspects Bohannon of killing
a company hack on little evidence, as it undercuts viewers’ confidence in his
(strongly implied) intelligence. Far worse are his repeated and coyly cryptic
intimations, to anyone who’ll listen, that “there’s something strange”
about Bohannon. In fact, what supposedly makes the show’s leading man unusual is
the same hackneyed revenge plotline we’ve seen in everything from Django
Unchained to Gladiator.

What’s
most surprising about Hell on Wheels is how poorly written it is.
Meaney’s Thomas Durant is so hamfistedly villainous that he actually slanders
the just-murdered husband of Lily Bell (McElligott) and tries to
ingratiate himself with her romantically during the same horribly contrived
dinner-date. The racial animus between Elam Ferguson and several white Union
Pacific men, much like the cross-racial sexual attraction between Ferguson and
Eva (Robin McLeavy), a former white slave turned prostitute, is so awkwardly
handled and woodenly written it makes the scriptwriters of Glory seem
screenwriting prodigies by comparison. Even Bohannon, who’s been given some of
the show’s better lines, turns in such a desultory performance as a railroad
foreman and selfless do-gooder that he receives from even credulous viewers
only slim credit for either role. One suspects the show’s writers simply had
too much confidence in their creations to realize they’d given them nothing
actually interesting to do or say–a circumstance made all the more surprising
by the fact that watching any previous Western would have offered
sufficient guidance on what mustn’t be done yet again. Instead, there’s hardly
any Western trope that Hell on Wheels fails to not only exploit but
wallow in: a hero of few words; a helpless lady; hapless immigrant sidekicks; a
cunning and humorless adversary; a greedy and unscrupulous businessman; a
“converted savage” (Eddie Spears as Joe Moon, a baptized Cheyenne
whose soul-searching is tiresome and trite); a preacher out of his depth; a
dark secret that leads to many deaths; and so on. Deadwood this is not;
that show, the best small-screen Western this side of Lonesome Dove,
gave us fully-realized characters whose eccentricities and complex moral codes
were entirely novel, and whose alternately dastardly and heroic deeds were, in
consequence, entirely astonishing.

Yet
the real culprit behind the lackluster presentation of Hell on Wheels
is the show’s central conceit: A mobile city of tents that follows the Union
Pacific railroad as it makes its way slowly West. The show makes virtually no
use whatsoever of the transient and ephemeral nature of Hell on Wheels, as not
only does the cast remain fairly static, there are also no major plotlines
associated with having to strike camp and move the entire town every few days.
Nor can the show do much with its 1865 setting, as the fallout from the Civil
War was—at that early point in the Reconstruction process—more or less
predictable, presaged as it was by similarly sudden cessations of military
hostilities in other nations throughout the eighteenth and seventeenth
centuries. 1865 is simply too early for America to have done much
soul-searching with respect to its recent near-dissolution, and consequently
the former soldiers of Hell on Wheels are left asking one another easy
questions like “Who did you fight for?”, “Did you own
slaves?”, and (worst of all) “Did you have sex with any?”
Meanwhile, Durant’s ambition to squeeze as much money as he can out of Union
Pacific’s manifest destiny-driven enterprise is little different from that of
any other war profiteer or shifty-eyed businessman. That the expansion of the
nation’s railroads to California represented for war-torn America a chance to
self-realize its grand ambitions has been so thoroughly investigated in all
forms of media that Hell on Wheels would need to go to extraordinary
lengths to add to that narrative, and it doesn’t.

AMC
has, by now, earned enough trust from its viewership, including this author,
that one finds oneself searching for some complicated explanation for the noxious
badness of Hell on Wheels–rather than simply accepting that AMC
greenlighted a project it should not have. Did the network, one wonders, worry
that it hadn’t yet ventured into Westerns, and was it thus predisposed to pull
the trigger on Joe and Tony Gayton’s flimsy script? Was it hoping to stand on
the coattails of the nation’s abiding interest in Southern culture, as
epitomized by present ratings king Duck Dynasty? Did it see, in the
moderate success of A&E’s Longmire, a possible opening for yet another
cowboy hero? Were the lush settings promised by a Western like Hell on
Wheels simply too much for a cash-flush operation like AMC to resist? Were
AMC executives seduced by writer Tony Gayton’s pedigree, a pedigree that
includes a film-school diploma from USC and an apprenticeship to John Milius, who
was, among other things, the creator of HBO’s excellent but equally
expensive Rome? Certainly, the network must have seen something in
the Gaytons, Tony particularly, yet it’s not at all clear what: Tony’s previous
television work was limited to a single made-for-TV movie in 2006, and he’s
been credited on only five feature films, none of which were notable (the only
exception being 2010’s Faster, which starred Dwayne “The Rock”
Johnson yet grossed only $35 million worldwide).

Critics have been predictably unkind to Hell on Wheels. The
Huffington Post called
it “tedious,” TV Guide “heavy-handed,”
USA Today “as
subtle as a sledgehammer,” The San Francisco Chronicle “cartoonish,” The Philadelphia
Daily News “meandering,”
and Variety “diluted
and herky-jerky.” Slate, The New York Times, and The Los
Angeles Times said much the same. Two glowing reviews from The
Washington Post and The Boston Globe notwithstanding, even the
positive write-ups in Newsday, The Chicago Sun-Times, The
New York Post, The Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal
seemed to conclude that the show was solid if unspectacular, a significant
come-down for a network accustomed to scooping up Emmys by the handful.

The
final nail in the coffin for Hell on Wheels is that scourge of all
television programs that begin slowly: Most viewers simply won’t have the
patience to find out if the show’s writers ultimately find their footing. And
given that the aggregate reviews for the second and third seasons of Hell on
Wheels are not so different from those for the first–Metacritic lists
Season 2 as a middling 60, and (with only four reviews thus far) Season 3 as a
possibly promising 74–it’s not certain that Hell on Wheels can offer
viewers much payoff, even with the long runway it’s been given. If you
absolutely love Westerns; if you’re an AMC completist; if you’re willing to
laugh out loud at dialogue you know isn’t intended to be funny; if you find
either Anson Mount or Dominique McElligott eye-catching enough to warrant
squandering much of your down-time, by all means see if you can muster the
energy to make it to Season 3 of Hell on Wheels. The rest of us will
just have to be satisfied with the final episodes of Mad Men and Breaking
Bad, and remembering fondly the network’s other triumphs: an episode here
and there of The Walking Dead; the first season of The Killing;
and much if not all of the single-season run of Rubicon. As
cable-network track records go, that’s still a pretty good one.

Kill the Rich: YOU’RE NEXT and the Discreet Charms of the One Percent

For a culture obsessed with maintaining control—over our
minds, our bodies, our borders, and our relationships—horror films serve as a
necessary reminder of the futility of such endeavors. Horror is all about disruption, deprivation,
penetration, dislocation and all manner of mess, chaos and spillage. And a horror film is most frightening when it
breaks through the fragile borders that protect what is most precious to
us. Adam Wingard’s disturbing new film
makes the most of such fears by taking up the popular thriller scenario of the
home invasion. And while You’re Next is genuinely frightening,
ranking right up there with other recent films that excel in this mode, such as
The Strangers and Them, it also offers a sharply satirical
take on a distinctively American sense of privilege and entitlement. Embedding his fairly traditional sequential
homicide plot in a dysfunctional family drama, Wingard gives us a taste of what
Last House on the Left might have
looked like if it were directed by Luis Bunuel instead of Wes Craven, and in
the process re-politicizes a genre too often exploited for mindless thrills.

The film concerns itself with the reunion of a very wealthy family
celebrating the parents’ anniversary. But the darker underpinnings are
set by its alarming introduction. The wealth of the Davison family is in inverse proportion to its
sense of community and compassion, as we see when mom and
dad pass a neighbor’s home not far from their own country estate. Noticing a car in the driveway, they remark
that no one has occupied it in quite a while, and Paul (Rob Moran) remarks,
“It’ll be kind of nice having neighbors – we’re so isolated out here.” Struck
by the peculiar novelty of actually living near someone else, wife Aubrey
(Barbara Crampton) eyes him uncertainly and replies, “Um, maybe.”

This sense of narcissistic detachment permeates the family,
and as their reunion gets underway a palpable chill settles on their enormous
country estate that has little to do with the weather. Beyond the usual sibling rivalry, family
relations are strained by a father who seems bored even by his children’s
achievements, while at the same time straining after an illusion of family
warmth and camaraderie. As the house
fills with guests, Aubrey seems increasingly out to lunch, a classic portrayal of a trophy
wife who has ceded her status as an individual. The significant others of the younger family
members are regarded as somewhat annoying curiosities by the other Davisons, as
if they were stray pets who haven’t been entirely housebroken. Significantly, the daughter’s partner is an
underground documentary filmmaker played by one of independent horror’s leading
figures, Ti West. The family is deeply
perplexed by the question of what would motivate anyone to direct low-budget
films, and the oldest brother encourages him instead to direct advertisements,
which he deems the twenty-first century’s premier art form.

Suffice it to say that by the time the masked invaders begin to pile up bodies,
no tears will be shed (at least by the audience). Wingard demonstrates his mastery of the genre
by knocking his annoying characters off in a disturbing, and often amusing,
variety of ways. Many of the murder
scenes verge on elaborate slapstick routines, at times suggestive of Rube
Goldberg stunts designed for the Marquis de Sade. Critics have praised the film’s deft
management of the fine line between horror and humor, and while it’s true that
this series of killings is a genuinely funny and frightening tour de force, the
film’s real appeal is in the pointed nature of its satire.

Early in the film, as Crispian Davison (A.J Bowen) and his
girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson) are driving up to the reunion, she asks him how
his family became so wealthy. When he
answers that his father used to work for a Halliburton-like firm of defense
contractors, he jokingly asks, “Are you sure you’re okay having dinner with
fascists?” Military concessions aren’t
the only thing the Davison paterfamilias has been contracting out: as the
siblings discuss the slow progress of their family estate’s restoration, they
note that dad bought the place as a kind of retirement project, but has lazily hired
other people to work on it rather than restore it himself. As the film progresses, certain members of
the family are shown to have a surprising connection with their killers, and
the film comes to serve as an extended meditation on the connections that exist
between members of an economic and social community, and the impossibility of
compartmentalizing them. The Davisons
would like to believe that they have achieved a pristine sense of isolation from the society they profit from, but their financial ties bind them to a
population on whom they would prefer to turn their backs.

At the other end of the social spectrum is the family
background of Crispian’s girlfriend, Erin. As the dwindling family members hunker down in their embattled home, she
reveals a surprising efficiency at defense tactics, which she confesses having
learned during a peculiar childhood raised in a militia compound in the
Australian outback. Her father was a
survivalist who believed the world’s problems of overpopulation, food and water
shortages would result in global anarchy, and devoted his life to ensuring his
and his family’s continuation. Yet while
Erin’s and Crispian’s families may come from different sides of the class
divide, their social values are surprisingly similar, and reflect some of the
dominant tendencies in American culture. Gun-toting survivalists in their militia compounds and retired
millionaires sequestered behind their capital gains share a common vision of
freedom and independence at any cost, and Wingard’s film effectively shows what
happens when this twisted version of the American dream goes horribly wrong.

While Erin is certainly the film’s most dynamic character
and the closest thing the film has to a heroine, she differs from the
familiar “last girl” figure of traditional horror films. Unlike the resourceful Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre survivor Sally Hardesty, Erin goes beyond
merely getting out of the nightmare in which she finds herself: she becomes an
essential part of that nightmare, engaging in brutal overkills that constitute some
of the film’s most uncomfortable viewing.
In one especially complicated encounter she hesitates before the kill,
before dismissively asking, “Why the fuck not?” as she finishes the bloody
deed. Survivalist Erin is no worse than
the selfish Davisons and their ruthless assailants, but it would be quite a
stretch to suggest that she offers an alternative moral center to the violent
maelstrom in which she finds herself.

In its by turns disturbing and hilarious portrayal of a
privileged family’s reunion gone horribly wrong, You’re Next gives us what is perhaps this year’s most trenchant commentary
on an America increasingly riddled by narcissism and greed. That it chooses to center its satire on a
family gathering points up its difference from the summer’s other major horror
offerings, The Conjuring and Insidious 2, both directed by James Wan. Where Wan gives us a disappointingly
traditional vision of the home as locus of love and solidarity, Wingard reminds
us that houses are designed as much to keep others out as to shelter those
within. Wingard’s film takes its title
from the bloody words scrawled on the walls of the Davison’s home by its
invaders, and these words might be taken as a dark reminder of our common
lot. You might think you’ve landed
yourself a comfortable position and a secure future, but as horror films remind
us, it may be only a matter of time until you’re next.

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

Quid Pro Quo: How THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS Has Informed Our Attitude Towards Chelsea Manning

How THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS Has Informed Our Attitude Towards Chelsea Manning

There’s no precedent for
what we’re supposed to think about the story of Chelsea Manning. In the absence
of an easy answer, our response resembles a replay of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of
The Lambs. The facts run as follows: In February 2009, an army intelligence analyst named
Bradley Manning turned a vast amount of damning classified documents over to
Wikileaks, including a video of a Baghdad airstrike that killed two unarmed war
correspondents, as well as a video of an even more grotesque Afghan airstrike
that killed between 86 and 147 civilians, mostly children. After spending more
than 1200 days in several solitary confinement facilities—including a cell
in Quantico where he saw the sun for 20 minutes a day and was forced to sleep
naked because of potential self-harm concerns—his case went to trial, he was found guilty,
sentenced, and then the condemned
soldier turned whistleblower (or traitor) turned icon announced to the world,
“I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.”

The media can’t get a
handle on what feels like double treachery on Manning’s part: just when justice
closes in on a traitor, the traitor changes shape. America is choking on
Manning’s metamorphosis just like the moth chrysalis shoved deep into the
throat of Buffalo Bill’s victims in Silence—another narrative about
secrets, justice, and perverse transformations. To really understand Manning’s
story requires subtlety and nuance: a deeply unhappy and conflicted young
soldier, motivated equally by moral imperative, deep personal dissatisfaction,
and a profound identity crisis, laid bare our military’s most brutal failings.
But why strive for a true understanding of reality when our pop mythologies
will address our unease?

It’s not an unthinkable
parallel. The Silence Of The Lambs, made in 1991 at the advent of the
first Gulf War, is a movie full of American flags—some where they’re
expected, like courthouses and government buildings and on the uniforms of law
enforcement personnel, but many more in unexpected places. Flags manifest in
violence and cloak its aftermath: peeling back a gigantic flag draped over a
car in a storage unit belonging to Hannibal Lecter reveals a decapitated
mannequin and a head in a jar. A pool of blood left after one of Lecter’s
killing sprees reflects the light glinting off prison bars, cutting the gory
puddle into red and white stripes. Bright muzzle flare from Starling’s gun
reveals how Buffalo Bill’s underground lair is full of stars and stripes,
including a tiny flag at a jaunty angle that suggests the raising at Iwo Jima.
(A vintage poster on a door nearby reads “America—Open Your
Eyes.”)

The first Buffalo Bill was
an American hero, too: Medal of Honor recipient William Frederick Cody, hunter,
showman, slaughterer of buffalo. Not the villain of our movie, the monster we
meet first in a bold headline (“BILL SKINS FIFTH”), then as a stranger ensnaring
a young woman (she’s listening to Tom Petty’s “American Girl” on her
headphones), and then, in all his perverse, naked glory, croaking “I’d fuck
me” while swooning over his own castration. This is what many shamed
transgendered people recall from childhood as their first vision of
“someone like me”: It rubs the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose
again. The script makes clear Buffalo Bill isn’t a transsexual (“his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more
terrifying,” assures Lecter), but this is an empty reassurance that one
forgets with a nauseous shudder after hearing the first bars of Q Lazzarus’s
“Goodbye Horses.”

Buffalo Bill wants to
become a woman by donning a home-sewn “woman suit,” but he’s not the
only yearning butterfly (or death’s head moth) in a movie full of
transformations. Starling sheds her
trainee sweatpants to become a full-fledged FBI agent. Lecter teases Starling
with clues tucked inside anagrams, the verbal equivalent of a caterpillar
inside a cocoon, and flays impostors attempting the same masquerade (his catty
rejoinder to the mother-turned-senator: “Love your suit”), but
he too escapes from his own prison by skinning a man’s face and wearing it as a
mask.

Did Manning think about
this when she borrowed another face to try and escape from a military tour of
duty full of harassment and abuse? Sending a photo of herself in a blonde wig
and makeup to her master sergeant in an email entitled “My Problem” is a
desperate act. It’s true, she was disturbed. There’s no shortage of documented
violent incidents spanning her troubled life, including one in which she was
found curled up on the floor of a storage room, a knife at her feet, the words “I want” carved into a nearby chair.
(“What do we covet, Clarice? That which we see every day.”) The desire to correct one’s gender—or to take a stand
against unjust military secrecy—isn’t stimulated by something as simple as
knowing about a fictional character. But if the virulent legacy of Buffalo Bill
still floats through our culture, making life hard for transgendered people,
maybe it also keeps the unusual, positive example of Starling’s feminine
heroism fresh in our collective mind.

The Silence
Of The Lambs is ultimately
the story of a woman who penetrates a world of underground chambers—basements, storage units, detention blocks behind endless locked doors, wells
dug into dirt floors—because that is
where the secrets are kept.
Manning is tiny, elfin, 5
foot 2 and 105 pounds: birdlike, a Starling. She knew how it felt to be crowded
in rooms full of uniformed men towering over her, harassing, bullying,
badgering. Her fragile mental state notwithstanding, she felt the same dogged
imperative to expose secrets in the name of justice, after finding out American
soldiers were killing noncombatants with the same breezy impunity (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards . . .,”
“Good shot,” “Thank you.”) with
which William Cody killed buffalo on the American plains. And she, too, knows
what it’s like to be imprisoned in small, dark spaces. Turning documents over
to Wikileaks was the end of one cluster of secrecy, but unlocking Chelsea from
the prison of Bradley—a transformation that was much longer in the works
than its sudden public manifestation would suggest—was really the
penultimate secret she needed to set free.

The media
could have seen this parallel and cast her as a Clarice Starling. But that didn’t happen. The aftershocks of a
character as powerful as Buffalo Bill means her male-to-female transformation
is met with exceptional revulsion. She is a turncoat monster, a shapeshifter so
dangerous she must sleep, like Lecter, in solitary confinement, not even
allowed flip flops or underwear because she could turn them into lethal
weapons. Even when she refused to testify against Wikileaks in exchange for a
plea deal, rather than honoring her courage the headlines essentially screamed
BRAD PLEADS FIFTH.

To her credit
she’s not accepting this narrative. She issued a graceful public statement: “I hope that you will support me in this transition . . . I look
forward to receiving letters from supporters and having the opportunity to
write back.” She seeks a dialogue, not the recursive, narcissistic
“I’d fuck me” of Buffalo Bill. William Cody was a hero in his time,
but now we lament the slaughter of the buffalo. It’s funny how our heroes rise
and fall as our perspective changes. Manning got 35 years, but there’s hope
she’ll be the hero whose pop culture example can replace the anti-transgender
legacy of The Silence Of The Lambs. Buffalo Bill’s defunct. How do you
like your blue eyed girl?

The Summer of the Sharknado

Remember when summer blockbusters used to be fun? When Arnold Schwarzenegger absurdly
swaggered through explosions in his shades and leather jacket? When Michael J.
Fox implausibly spun through time in his souped-up Delorean? When Michael
Keaton’s Batman actually spoke like he came out of a comic book rather than a
Dostoevsky novel? Whatever happened to such irreverent, charismatic figures and
the movies that brought them to momentary, flickering life? This year we were subjected to one bloated
action film after another, all of which treated their subject matter, however
ridiculous—whether zombie apocalypse, giant robots defending the earth against
inter-dimensional monsters, or a post-apocalyptic world exploited and abandoned
by the super-rich—with the kind of ponderous gravitas usually accorded to
European art films. Who can save our
popcorn fare from this inflated sense of self-importance? Forget Wolverine, Iron Man, and Thor: this is
a job for Sharknado!

In early July, when the heat wave was hitting its peak in
many parts of the country, and even the air-conditioned Cineplex failed to
provide an escape from the enervating fug of 2013, the Syfy network broke a
years-long record of consistently bad entertainment with a deliciously absurd
ninety-minute escapade with the most irresistible title in recent memory. While
the network has tried several times to present campy, so-bad-they’re-good B-movies
for a contemporary mass audience (Dinocroc,
Sharktopus, Frankenfish), none of them has managed to find that essential
balance between naïve earnestness and shameless exploitation that made those
grindhouse classics of the 70s so bloody wonderful. As Nigel Tuffnel said, there’s such a fine
line between stupid and clever. But
somehow Sharknado happened to find
this line and balance on it, precariously and hilariously. After airing to luke-warm ratings on July 11,
the movie sparked off a flurry of Twitter activity, generating smirking but
admiring tweets from such surprising celebrities as Mia Farrow, Wil Wheaton,
and Corey Monteith (some of the last he posted before passing away). Syfy aired it twice more in July, nearly
doubling the number of viewers of its original airing each time, and produced a
limited theatrical release, which sold out seats in the select cities where it
showed. Other than a great title, what
could make such an inauspicious production into such a phenomenon?

First of all, it’s actually really funny, but not only in
the ways one might expect. Sharknado offers horror-comedy lovers a
grand guignol of gore as herds of sharks are summarily blown up, gunned down,
stabbed with pool cues, hit with bar stools, and chain-sawed from the inside
out. This should come as no surprise, even if it is fun to see how they’re
going to top themselves in violent absurdity. What did surprise me is that I actually started to care about these
ridiculous stock characters, just a tiny bit. Not enough that I’d give up my
place in the check out line to one of them if they had only a few groceries and
I had a full cart, but, if I found myself stuck next to one of them on an
airplane, I might actually listen to that person with more than mere
politeness. This is how the story gets
us to let our guard down long enough to get taken in by the punch-lines. In an absurd
reprise of Quint’s speech in Jaws, as
he recounts the disaster of the S.S. Indianapolis, waitress Nova tells young
pilot Matt Shepherd about how she got the scar on her leg, a mystery apparently
too painful to reveal to the other characters who’d asked about it. During a childhood fishing expedition that
ended in disaster, she says, “Six people went into the water, and one little
girl came out. They took my
grandfather. That’s why I hate sharks.”
Though this last line has been often quoted and Tweeted, my favorite comes
after, when Matt eagerly says: “Now I really hate sharks too!”

Beyond these obviously appealing qualities, however, Sharknado has somehow managed to capture
the mood of the moment by presenting us with a disaster we don’t really have to
care about. In a summer of unprecedented
heat, and the by-now-anticipated escalating number of wildfires, droughts, and floods,
as we anticipate what is expected to be a horrendous hurricane season, the new
normal has become just that, and talking about the climatic apocalypse has
become about as boring as, well, talking about the weather. In his big speech on climate change,
President Obama made the rather banal observation that “all weather events are
affected by it—more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes,” adding
that “the question is not whether we need to act. The question is whether we
will have the courage to act before it’s too late.” The president in The Day After Tomorrow said the same thing about a decade ago. And even such an inauspicious B-movie as Soylent Green offered a more urgent
warning about climate change, and that was forty years ago! I’m not saying it’s
too late to act, but it’s certainly too late to raise the question of whether
we will have the courage to act. Thankfully, Sharknado dispenses
with such platitudes by presenting us with a world surprisingly like our own,
one in which absurdly bad things happen, a lot of guns are fired, and beautiful
people find true love and hug.

This isn’t to say that Sharknado
is cynical, certainly not as cynical as, say, Elysium, a film that presents a stark vision of a ruined world
abandoned to the 99% only to conclude by suggesting we could right the world’s
wrongs with better health care for everyone. Sharknado doesn’t pretend to
offer solutions, but it does manage to capture, or at least reflect, the
weirdness and stupidity of the new millennium better than anything else I’ve
seen this summer. Some of the most effective scenes are those set in Beverly
Hills, where we see torrents of water flooding into wealthy homes and
inundating the manicured landscapes of the affluent. Adding shark fins to such familiar disaster
scenarios seems less gratuitousness than commentary. And while it’s glorious, gory fun watching
the heroes and heroines of the film blow away these sharks with their arsenals,
Sharknado never demeans its viewers
by implying that natural disasters can be overcome with “courage.” The news commentators reporting on the
hurricane and waterspouts threatening California don’t hesitate to state
clearly that this extreme weather is a direct result of global warming, showing
a responsibility in reporting that may be the film’s most implausible element.

And for the record, Sharknado
does take the time to address an issue that has otherwise been given little
attention in the mainstream media. The
opening scene depicts an unscrupulous dealer in shark fins selling his wares to
an Asian buyer to use in shark fin soup. As the camera surveys heaps of dead sharks on the deck of the ship where
the deal is taking place, the foreman barks out “toss ‘em and bag ‘em!,” an
honest reflection of how this horrific practice is carried out. It’s hard to imagine an industry more
wasteful or cruel than the shark fin trade, in which these amazing animals are
caught for only one small part of their anatomy. After the fin is cut off, the shark is tossed
out of the boat to slowly bleed to death as it sinks to the bottom of the
ocean. Despite protests, the trade is so
widespread that last year over one hundred million sharks were killed in this
way (that’s over eleven thousand an hour). Number of humans killed by sharks? 12. The shark dealer in Sharknado enunciates
what might well count as the film’s hidden moral: “You don’t have to be afraid
of the sharks. They are the ones who
should be afraid of us.” You won’t hear
this on Shark Week.

Sometimes the only reliable measure of the absurdity of our
times comes from absurd films. This is a
quality that the earliest spin-offs of Jaws
had in abundance. Piranha (1978) is about a
military-testing operation gone horribly wrong, when a super-breed of killer
fish designed for use against the North Vietnamese is set loose in domestic
waters. Barracuda (1978) and Prophecy
(1979) are about animals made into monsters by toxic chemical being dumped
in the water. Tentacles (1978) is about a giant octopus driven to a killer
rampage by intrusive underwater experiments carried out by a local developer;
one of the characters describes the eight-armed antagonist in terms applicable
to all these silly but socially-conscious B-movies: “It’s an animal, disturbed
by man’s stupidity.” Not a bad tag-line
for the Sharknado sequel.

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

BLUE JASMINE’s Complex Interior(s)

Warning: This review contains mild spoilers.

Critics have widely noted that the scenario of Woody Allen’s
latest feature, Blue Jasmine (2013),
is indebted to A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947). However, cinematically, the film owes just as much—if not more—to an
earlier Allen film: the obscure Interiors (1978).

Blue Jasmine’s indebtedness to Streetcar is fairly obvious. The movie depicts what happens when the blustery socialite
Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), having fallen on hard times, moves in with her
working class sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), initiating a series of class
conflicts. What’s more, Blanchett came to the project after a tenure as Blanche
in a Broadway adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s famed drama.

The
connections with Interiors, however, should
be just as apparent. What obscures them is the fact that Interiors was little-seen in its time, and is today
little-remembered. To be fair, it’s a fairly bleak drama that presumably startled
and confused audiences more accustomed to Woody Allen’s nebbish comedy—indeed,
the film was how Allen chose to follow Annie Hall (1977),
after that film’s success afforded him carte blanche.

Interiors certainly has its problems
(which I’ll get to below), but it remains fascinating if for no other reason
than it was Allen’s first attempt at serious drama. We’re more familiar with
that side of Woody today; since then, he’s also made September
(1987), Another Woman (1988),
Crimes and Misdemeanors
(1989), Match Point (2005)—and
now Blue Jasmine. And so it’s high
time to revisit Interiors, and note
the ways in which Blue Jasmine is beholden
to it.

Some of the
broad similarities between Interiors
and Blue Jasmine include:

Both films
are straight dramas, and fairly sober. (There’s no comedic plotline, like
in Crimes and Misdemeanors.)
Allen
doesn’t appear in either film.
Both films
depict the mental deterioration of their respective protagonists.
In Interiors, Eve (Geraldine Page)
suffers a breakdown after her longtime husband announces his desire for a
trial separation; she clings to the futile hope that they will reconcile.
In Blue Jasmine, Jasmine’s collapse
follows the downfall of her deceitful husband Hal (Alec Baldwin), to whom
she periodically continues speaking, despite his having hung himself in
prison.
Eve is
an interior decorator, a job Jasmine aspires to—going so far as to pretend
to her suitor Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard) that she already is one.
Both
films alternate fluidly between past and present action.
The overall
editing styles of both films are similar, as Allen employs many abrupt
cuts between scenes. Both films, for instance, tend to cut hard on the heels
of the last line in a scene, often using this as an opportunity to switch
between the timelines. (Allen first started matching on dialogue like this
in Annie Hall.)

Additionally, Blue
Jasmine includes other signs that the ever-introspective Allen is now remembering
his previous work. The amorous dentist for whom Jasmine briefly becomes a receptionist,
Dr. Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg), bears the same name as the Brooklyn psychologist
in Annie Hall who assures a young
Alvy Singer that there’s no reason to fear an expanding universe. And the
mentally unstable Jasmine is another variation on a familiar Allen archetype
that includes not only Interiors’s
Eve but also Radha Mitchell’s Melinda in Melinda and Melinda
(2004), Christina Ricci’s Amanda in Anything Else
(2003), Mia Farrow’s turns as Hope and Lane in Another Woman and September,
respectively, Dianne Wiest’s Holly in Hannah and Her Sisters
(1986), and, arguably, Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall.

A
willingness to rework “whatever works” is not new in Allen’s cinema; the man
has long been in the habit of basing his films on preexisting material.
Sometimes the influence is explicit: Stardust Memories (1981)
clearly revises Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), and neither
Match Point nor Crimes and Misdemeanors disguises its debt to Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (1866). Similarly, Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
cribs a fair amount from Fellini’s La Strada (1954), Husbands and Wives (1992)
steals from Bergman’s TV miniseries Scenes from a Marriage
(1973), and September would be
unimaginable without Chekhov’s play Uncle
Vanya (1897/9). At other times, the inspiration is subtler: Deconstructing Harry
(1997) borrows a portion of its central scenario from Bergman’s Wild Strawberries
(1957), a fact that might be overlooked due to the film’s wealth of material
and concern with metatextuality. (Both films are picaresques in which an older
man travels to receive an award from his former university; furthermore, the
scenes depicting Harry’s fictions are arguably equivalent to Wild Strawberries’s dream sequences.) And
To Rome with Love (2012)
is only loosely inspired by Boccaccio’s 14^th-century classic collection
of tales The Decameron. (Its’ working
title was “Bop Decameron.”) Melinda and Melinda
pays homage to My Dinner with Andre
(1981) by including Wallace Shawn among the dinner companions, and takes its
central conceit from Alain Resnais’s 1993 experiment Smoking/No
Smoking (1993) (or perhaps Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof
Piesiewicz’s The Double Life of
Veronique, 1991).

Given this,
it’s worth remembering a fascinating argument made by Brad Stevens in a feature
article in the April 2011 Sight &
Sound (“In Defence of Woody Allen”). There, Stevens claims that all of
Allen’s recent films (those since 2000) are to some extent variations on one
another:

“When viewed as a group, films
that—taken individually—could hardly seem any clearer or less ambiguous in
their intentions begin to feel mysterious and fragmented, diverse parts of a
whole whose contours can be glimpsed only as the various pieces of the puzzle
fall into place.”

In other words, Allen has spent the past ten years basing
his films . . . on his own previous work. Stevens notes that both Small Time Crooks (2000)
and The Curse of the Jade
Scorpion (2001) feature jewel thefts, while both Vicky Christina
Barcelona (2008) and Whatever Works (2009)
feature “women who realize they are gifted photographers as soon as they become
part of a ménage à troi.” Even more
compellingly, Stevens reads Scoop (2006) as a comedic reworking of the material that Match Point presents as tragedy: “both
deal explicitly with the class system and involve males who murder women in
order to preserve privileged positions within that system.” Along these lines, Stevens
notes how the seemingly innocuous Melinda
and Melinda serves as something of a “guide” to reading Allen’s recent
work, serving up tragic and comedic variations of the same story.

All of this
having been said, I wouldn’t want to overlook the substantial differences
between Blue Jasmine and Interiors. Most importantly, Interiors, despite being a beautiful and
intriguing film (especially in the context of Allen’s filmography and career),
is hardly a successful feature. It is for one thing much too derivative of Ingmar
Bergman, especially Persona (1966) and Cries & Whispers
(1972)—the final shot, for instance, feels especially contrived, a blatant copy
of cinematographer Sven Nykvist’s work.

Blue Jasmine wears
its influences more lightly: while the film begins with a scenario taken from
Tennessee Williams, Allen quickly puts his own stamp on the material, and quickly
sets out in his own direction: there is no Stanley Kowalski, no “Stella!”, and both
sisters soon get caught up in romances with other men. Blue Jasmine is also the more successful film in terms of its characterization
and tone. Jasmine and Ginger, et al., are far more complex creations than the
caricatures inhabiting the chilly corridors of Interiors. (The exception of course is Eve; Geraldine Page’s
performance is nuanced and powerful). Moreover, whereas Interiors is marred by the same clunkiness that sometimes haunts Allen’s
dramas (see also September), Blue Jasmine’s dialogue and plotting
recall the subtler scripting on display in Crimes
and Misdemeanors and Match Point.

For
instance, consider the question of Jasmine’s culpability. She gives the impression
that she never had any knowledge of Hal’s criminal endeavors, or even the capacity
to understand them. Indeed, she routinely protests that when she encouraged Ginger
and Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) to invest with Hal, she was simply trying to help
them out. However, after Hal confesses to Jasmine that he has been serially
unfaithful, and what’s more that he intends to marry the French au pair he is
currently seeing, we see Jasmine make a phone call to the FBI, which leads to
his arrest. We might presume that Jasmine offered to testify against her
husband, and therefore knew more than she later lets on. The point is not elaborated
upon, and only Jasmine’s adopted son Danny (Alden Ehrenreich) seems to know
this fact, explaining his desire to have no further contact with the woman.

Thus,
Allen’s filmmaking is more subtle than critics commonly recognize— perhaps
distracted by the broad strokes?—as well as more introspective. Above all else,
Allen recognizes that psychological insight is not threatened by artifice. He has
always been comfortable allowing his fictions to be fictions—always fake, and always based on other works, his own and
others. Part of Allen’s value as a writer and as a filmmaker (and I personally
consider him among the highest ranks in both categories) has always stemmed
from his simultaneous pursuit of psychological insight by means of inherited material. Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine is in many
ways a stereotype, a shallow socialite decked out in Chanel belts and Louis
Vuitton bags; her costuming is anything but subtle. But Allen’s broad signaling
in this regard does not diminish the power of the portrayal. By the end of the
film, Allen and Blanchett & company have constructed a complex character whose
psychological suffering is palpable and unsettling.

Take for
instance the final scene, which is as neat and poetic an ending as could be
hoped for. Throughout the film, Jasmine’s been haunted by strains of “Blue Moon,”
the song that was playing when she first met Hal, who became the source of her
highest highs and her lowest lows. Each time we are given only an instrumental
version. At the end, the song returns, and as Jasmine sits and mumbles to
herself, alone on a park bench, she admits that the words have become “a jumble”
(the film’s last line). But Allen trusts us to remember them:

Blue moon

You saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own

This is the height of Allen’s artistry on display. Watch how
it happens. The song is redemptive, but we see Jasmine solitary and hopeless,
her last chance at redemption blown. Arguably, she deserves her comeuppance.
But who will be the first among us to insist upon that? Allen, meanwhile, hangs
back and quietly observes. Jasmine sits there and he watches her sitting there,
and as the song continues playing we realize the gentle irony of the movie’s title:
“Blue Jasmine.” This is a very sad ending for such a creature, monstrous though
she may be.

But Jasmine
isn’t a monster, which is precisely
Allen’s point: she’s utterly complex, and none the less so for having been
stitched together out of pieces taken from countless prior protagonists. Woody
Allen both inherited her and made her—that’s the real irony. And he keeps on shooting, and dares us to risk caring.

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

Can’t See the Movie for the Screen: THE CANYONS and the American Worship of Celebrities

I could write an entire essay about The Canyons–1000-2000 words, at least–without ever having seen it. The amount of sheer context that has surrounded this wildly underwhelming film, concerning its director, its screenwriter, and its star, provides substantial fodder for conversation. About what? The movies that are made, the movies we choose to see, why we choose to see them, and, frighteningly, what we think of them. The Canyons has attracted lengthy, considered commentary from many corners, including some corners, including the New York Times or Salon, in which you would have thought the critics there, after seeing the film, would have passed on the opportunity to write about it. How could they have passed, though, with all the backstory surrounding it, like an enormous fur overcoat? This backstory grows–and vibrantly–from the American obsession with celebrity culture, which amounts to a near-celebritocracy.

About that backstory, though: let’s start with the film’s director, Paul Schrader. His scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, from nearly 40 years ago, elevated him to near-godlike status among film buffs and regular moviegoers alike. However, that early promise did not lead to sustained, wide-ranging popularity; films ranging from American Gigolo to Mishima to Auto Focus were critically acclaimed, but not sufficiently critically acclaimed to be considered cinematic events (with the possible exception of American Gigolo). As his films have relentlessly explored the seamier sides of life, fewer and fewer viewers have been willing to take the journey with him, beyond a militia of devotees. After his lengthy New York Times article about the difficulties of working with his star, Lindsay Lohan, it was hard not to think that using the star was an attempt to raise his own status at the box office, to prove himself capable of creating a spectacle. And then there’s the screenwriter, Bret Easton Ellis, most famous for early, dynamic novels like Less Than Zero or American Psycho. In recent years he has become more famous for his overbearing presence and his nasty tweets than for his work, which has not struck quite the same loud chord with readers as did his earlier books. Again, it’s tough not to read his engagement with this film as an attempt to pull himself into the spotlight by a notorious star’s bootstraps (to mix metaphors).

But what about those bootstraps? And what about that star?

Oh, that poor star.

There’s a lot you would have to ignore if you wanted to take The Canyons, or Lohan’s performance in it, on their own terms. The prison time. The ankle bracelets. The driving while intoxicated. The missed court dates. The court dates made while wearing stunning apparel. The embarrassing interviews, each more falsely “honest” than the last. And there, almost completely crowded out by all that we’d have to set aside, would sit her two good performances, in Mean Girls and A Prairie Home Companion, the latter of which was probably missed by many. And then there are the aforementioned tales of her behavior on-set, her tantrums, her absences, her lack of preparation, her immaturity, and her apparently newsworthy near-toppling of the whole venture.

And the venture itself? Sadly, it would be impossible for anyone with both a conscience and a wholly functional critical apparatus to find this attention-grabbing film more than marginally interesting, artful, or, least of all, shocking. We can give points, if to nothing else, to the cinematography, which evokes the deadened, shallow, decaying Hollywood we’ve come to expect from countless other films about that same microcosm. The gray, deserted, drab theaters the film uses as interstitial shots provide an admirable backdrop for the film’s satire of moviemaking. The story to which that satire is hitched, unfortunately, is woefully thin: Christian, a young, trust-funded filmmaker (James Deen) “keeps” Tara (Lohan) in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean. He’s cast a studly young man (Nolan Funk) in his new film, who turns out to be an ex-boyfriend of Tara’s. As Christian digs, he finds out information that makes him unusually jealous of Tara, and he promptly loses all control of his drug-addled mind (to make a long story short). Before this happens, though, we gain an insight into this resoundingly unpleasant couple’s lifestyle, transitioning fairly smoothly between an opening dinner scene–in which the couple spends most of their time out with another couple (the star of the film Christian is directing, and his girlfriend) staring at their cell phones–into a scene in which they have a threesome with a man Christian found on the Internet. The sex in the film, though perhaps a shocking move for a former member of the Mickey Mouse Club, isn’t shocking by comparison with other films that have been released, say, within the last 25-50 years. There’s a deflated feeling hovering over the entire film: the dialogue, such as it is, is delivered with awkward pauses after each line, as if the actors were waiting for a laugh track. Lohan’s acting, by comparison with her co-stars, is compelling, but again only by comparison. More often than not, because her co-stars are so inexpressive in their delivery, her excesses of emotion (mainly crying) seem rather unusual, as if perhaps she had walked into the wrong movie.

One could ask, then, why see such a film? Why write about it? Why give it the time? Because it has a mood of controversy about it, and controversy can be fascinating. Because the publicity for it, as is often the case with over-hyped films, transcends the product—but is no less persuasive for doing so. Because it has talent attached to it, and hope springs eternal. But the film itself? Daring? Shocking? The most shocking thing about it is the degree to which it reflects, as a phenomenon, the de-evolution of American sensibility, the allotment of power and, weirdly, aesthetic influence to whichever figure displays most flashingly before us. Ultimately, this film is most interesting as a phenomenon, as evidence of the power of, to put it simply, talk, talk so loud that it shapes our tastes, and ultimately, our lives.

Max Winter is the Editor-in-Chief of Press Play.

THE CONJURING and the Specter of the Seventies

Editor’s Note: This piece contains statements that could, loosely, be construed as spoilers, but honestly, they’re phrased in a way that won’t make the film any less scary, so let’s all just relax, okay? Read the piece, which is, after all, about slightly more elevated things than what’s BOO! scary in the film.

James Wan’s The
Conjuring is that rare thing: a contemporary horror film that doesn’t
suck. Critics and audiences seem to
agree on this point, and I hope that the film’s minimal use of digital effects
and focus on good acting, effective story-telling, and dramatic mood-setting
will be imitated by other makers of horror films. Such qualities once stood, not as the
exception, but as the rule in horror film production, and Wan’s film pays
homage to the genre’s great era, the 1970s.
Set in 1971, The Conjuring is
haunted, not only by the demon tormenting the Perron family in their rural Rhode
Island home, but by the specter of an era that disturbingly resembles our own.

Rising unemployment and inflation, soaring gas prices, oil
spills in the Gulf of Mexico, nuclear accidents, rising gun violence,
terrorism, and divisive party politics: these constituted daily life in the
1970s as they do today. Yet unlike
today, the films of the era reflected these grim experiences, offering
audiences a chance to see their fears and anxieties brought to gritty life on
the screen. Certainly the period had its
share of escapist films, but unlike today, these did not dominate the
Cineplex. The period was also less
attached to that most clichéd of plot devices: the happy ending. But while The
Conjuring succumbs to this temptation somewhat, it remains haunted by the
dark forces of the past the film has unleashed.

Tellingly, these dark forces reside in an archive kept by
the paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Based on the actual husband and wife team who
investigated over 10,000 hauntings, including the Amityville Horror, they are
marvelously portrayed by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who accurately convey
the zealous, sober earnestness that attended unexplained phenomena in the
70s. As a kid I devoured the seemingly
endless documentaries produced for theatrical release by studios like Sunn
Classic Pictures, responsible for such “classic pictures” as The Outer Space Connection, The Mysterious Monsters, and The Bermuda Triangle. It was a great time to grow up, when there
seemed to be a whole lot of adults who believed in the same fairy tales you
did. In The Conjuring, the Warrens look like 70s televangelists, but
instead of a desperate studio audience, they preach to audiences of college
students, who listen to their lectures with rapt attention, and all
simultaneously raise their hands for questions at the end.

The real-life Warrens continue to maintain an occult museum
in the back of their Connecticut home. Its portrayal in The Conjuring remains
one of the film’s more potent images, part Ray Bradbury-esque curio emporium,
part small town museum. All of the
objects stored there are cursed or possessed by spirits, and the Warrens keep
them there for the rest of the world’s protection. The most terrifying of these is a grotesque
doll (is there any other kind in horror films?) named Annabelle, whose story
serves as a kind of prelude to the Perron family haunting. Her sinister grin and lifeless features serve
as reference points to a host of haunted manikins, from the Zuni warrior doll hunting Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror (1975),
to Anthony Hopkins’ malign
ventriloquist’s dummy in Magic (1978), to the evil clown in Poltergeist (1982), not to mention Chucky and his seemingly endless
(and, frankly, not very scary) brood from the Child’s Play franchise. Annabelle
serves as an emblem of the film, which itself is a kind of archive of past horrors
not entirely put to rest.

The Conjuring is
very much a period piece. Polyester and
plaid play a significant role in the costuming, The Brady Bunch plays on the television, and the film texture is
slightly grainy, with the muted palette and natural lighting distinctive to seventies
cinema. As such, it takes its place as
part of a growing list of recent films set in the period, including Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, Super
8, Argo, and key sections of Cloud Atlas. These films project a
common picture of the 1970s, as a decade,rife with random violence, Byzantine
politics, and unexplained phenomena: in other words, the weird decade.

This is a truer picture than the one conveyed by the
period’s better-known denomination, the “me decade.” It has always seemed to me a gross injustice
that the period in which women’s and gay rights issues emerged into political
and social life, along with widespread recognition of gross disparities in the
American economy and the way those disparities served to broaden racial and
class differences, would be given such a selfish sobriquet. That name would better be given to the decade
that followed, when right wing leaders like Reagan, Bush, and Thatcher pandered
to business interests, fostering a culture based on greed rather than
community. In their various ways,
contemporary films that return to the seventies share a mutual preoccupation
with the darker underpinnings of the period, and how it might serve as a guide
to our own. We are left with the legacy
of the eighties’ political and economic injustices—renewed and deepened in the
second Bush era—but we seem to have lost the shared sense of anger, frustration
and fear that characterized the seventies, and that was reflected in the era’s
films.

And yet The Conjuring falls
short of fully realizing such possibilities.
The moral of the story ultimately rests on a conservative affirmation of
the power of religion and of family. The
Warrens marshal the same Christian forces that defeated the demon haunting
Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973),
enhanced by the powerful maternal feelings of the demon’s host, Carolyn
Perron. This triumph of Christian family
values is buttressed by Lili Taylor’s portrayal of Carolyn as a bland, almost
childish mother of five (!), who blithely accepts her husband’s long periods of
absence on his trucking runs, smilingly managing the large household
alone. This is a family portrait rather
out-of-sync with the age of Gloria Steinem, Maude,
and the E.R.A. While Taylor’s Stepford
Wives-like behavior lends an effective character arc for her later
possession—and there is a certain subversive tension in her being possessed by
a witch who killed her own child—the blithe ending seems to foreclose on these
more intriguing possibilities, effectively replacing the values of the
seventies with those of the eighties and the Moral Majority.

But in the last scene of the film, we return to the Warrens’
occult museum, where Ed places a haunted music box from which all of the occult
mayhem emerged. The sinister music
box—an abiding horror trope used to haunting effect in such films as The Innocents, Deep Red, and The Ring—as
if its melody weren’t scary enough, contains a pop-up clown, possible sibling
to Annabelle grinning evilly in the museum’s corner, effigy of the girl doll
who fought back. This music box contains
a mirror that might serve as another emblem for The Conjuring. When we look in it we see a distorted reflection of
what’s behind us. Wan’s film conjures
the sense of unease and violence that permeates our memories of the seventies
and seemingly puts them to rest. But the
grinning doll doesn’t look like she wants to stay put.

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