Video-2 – Page 46 – Press Play Video Blog

GIRLS RECAP 5: HARD BEING EASY

More like "Hard Writing Consistently." What was that?

For four episodes, Girls has stayed on the right side of believable. Not likeable or admirable, necessarily, when it came to the three leads and their behavior (I'll excuse Shoshanna from the discussion for the time being), but we don't have to like characters, or find them attractive physically or emotionally, to see something familiar in them and in the situations they move through. Our interest in a narrative isn't always about comfort, or escape. Sometimes, it's about recognition. I wouldn't characterize Girls as holding a pitiless mirror up to a generation or anything, but I think it gets at certain truths that lie underneath (and/or in) the pretension and self-absorption and unprofessional bumbling, or at least it tries to.

I don't know what "Hard Being Easy" was trying to do, besides annoy/baffle the audience. (Mission accomplished.) The episode has a handful of neatly observed moments, and the usual complement of too-awkward-to-watch bits . . . but the awkwardness didn't come from the characters this week. It came from Lena Dunham losing control of the material.

The Marnie/Charlie storyline picks up shortly after the end of the last episode, and it's well done—but it has to climb uphill from a ridonkulous beginning in which Charlie forces Hannah to read aloud from the journal in front of him and Marnie. Hannah goes along with this, despite the fact that 1) Charlie (well, mostly Ray, but whatever) violated her privacy, 2) Marnie threw a drink on her and called her a bitch, 3) neither of them apologized, and 4) whatever Hannah's involvement, the only credible action for any character would be to hole up elsewhere until the couple's storm blew over. And Hannah not only goes along with it, she corrects them, saying it's "notes for a book," not a journal, and asks for feedback on the writing. Yes, Hannah lives in her own bellybutton, but this isn't believable behavior from anyone.

The rest of Marnie's subplot resonates, though, from Ray overplaying the loyal-best-bud card, to the revelation that Marnie has never gone to Charlie's apartment (once there, she admiringly notes that it looks like "a Target ad"), to the flashback to college in which Marnie and Charlie meet. Marnie has taken an unknown drug at a party and is disappearing down a paranoia-hole. Hannah tends to her for a while, then heads off to dance with Elijah (to the Scissor Sisters, after Elijah "curates" Marnie's bangs with a flick of his forefinger. . . . Hannah really thought that guy was straight? For two years?), leaving Charlie to mind Marnie. The narrative pun on "high maintenance" aside, it makes perfect sense that this is how they met, that Charlie ministered to her from the beginning. (Charlie's wig, however, is inexplicable. I get why the actor is wearing one, but—that one? Did Charlie just come from an '80s-Stamos-impersonator contest?)

Their break-up/make-up/break-up talk the next day is dead-on. Marnie turns up in "my party dress and my sorry face," sure that she can change his mind. Charlie points out repeatedly that she isn't in love with him anymore; she asks repeatedly that he not break up with her. We've all had that convo, fumbling and protracted, desperate not to rip the Band-Aid off because "better the devil you know" and all that. This is where Marnie's at with it, refusing to admit the facts (and probably thinking she'd have been the one to do the dumping). Charlie purposely wounds her by saying he thought he recognized her at the party from a porn flick, Sophomore Sluts; she's shocked that he watches porn. (Ladies: they alllll watch porn. Even the Charlies. It's usually nothing pathological; please stop taking this personally. Thanks.) After she offers him the blowjobs she should be giving him anyway, they end up in his low-ceilinged bed nook, having sex, and he orders her to be nice to his friends and "act like [his] life is real." She agrees. He asks her to keep her face close to his. She does. Then he says either "say 'I love you'" or "stay; I love you"; either way, Marnie physically recoils, saying she can't, and whangs her head on the roof of the bed-nook. Immediately Charlie sits up to make sure she's okay: "I'm right here. I'm riiiight here." That's the problem, of course, and she whispers that she wants to break up.

And this is the least awkward sex in the episode.

Jessa gets it on with an ex-boyfriend, a subplot that seems to exist solely so the two of them can burst into Jessa and Shoshanna's apartment, pawing each other, before Shoshanna can announce herself or vacate. Shosh has to hide behind an Ikea curtain for the duration. The ex gets a high-dudgeon line about "a very tumultuous relationship in which one's Vespa gets destroyed for no reason" that I chuckled at; everything else flopped. Jessa finally notices Shoshanna and teases her for being a creeper, and Shoshanna, always talking at a high rate of speed prior to this point, doesn't say a word to contradict her. . . . What? We got the "virgin is both attracted and repelled" note last week, and we don't watch the show for slapstick—fortunately, since slapstick is demonstrably not its strength. What is this story doing?

Perhaps it's an effort to postpone the inevitable boinkfest between Jessa and Jeff Lavoyt—and that part of Jessa's story this week is sharp. Jessa's in the Lavoyts' bathroom, getting ready to meet the ex; Lavoyt's leaning boyfriendily in the doorway. Mrs. Lavoyt comes upon them there, chatting, and Kathryn Hahn is excellent in the scene, holding the awkward silence exactly the right amount of time, lying that it's okay that Jessa is using her lipstick ( . . . of course she is) because she doesn't want to come off like an unhip harridan.

It's also not really okay that Jessa, hearing about Hannah's boss's handsiness, suggests that Hannah "should hump" Richard "for the story." It's a hundred percent something Jessa would do, and most likely get away with, because she's a confident beauty who wears a kimono to her babysitting job. It's a hundred percent not something Hannah, as written to this point, would do, but, for reasons I can't fathom, she does it. Yeah, yeah, "for the story"—I don't see it. And based on the too-long, all-over-the-place scene that results, Dunham didn't either. Richard asks Hannah for a turkey sandwich; she tells him to cut the crap, because she knows he wants to fuck her. I write in my notebook, "Oh, this is a dream sequence." It isn't, and it's interminable, Hannah insisting that it's what Richard wants, Richard asking if she's high, Hannah switching gears and threatening to sue, Richard snorting that "there's no suing app on your iPhone" but adding that he's not going to fire her because she's "great," Hannah offering to forget about suing for one thousand dollars . . . it just. Keeps. Going. Richard is still trying to convince her to calm down and go back to work when Hannah whines, "I just tried to fuck you, sue you, and extort you! I'm fuckin' nuts, why would you want me in your office?" Perhaps that's Dunham signaling that she knows the twist is ridiculous, but the plot doesn't work, as farce or as commentary. (Hannah's big kiss-off line—"Someday I'm gonna write an essay about you? And I am not gonna change your name. And then you can sue me"—is just weak.)

Alas, the script isn't finished taking an idea over the top and then not knowing how to get back—but like others in the ep, this week's Hannah/Adam sequence starts from an interesting premise about the things we choose to hear. Hannah goes over to Adam's house to find him wearing a shirt. . . . Just kidding. He never, ever wears a shirt. At this point, I know that guy's nips better than I know my own. When Hannah tells him what went down at work (sort of; she says "there was a sex scandal"), he grunts, "Sometimes you say shit that sounds made up"—an on-point comment, since she's also "made up" the idea that her straight talk in the prior episode (and their ensuing intercourse) has bonded them into a couple. "Surprise": Adam didn't hear it that way. What he heard is her saying they shouldn't have sex anymore. But then you kissed me, Hannah points out. "Because you were sad," Adam shrugs. And then we had sex, she points out. "Because we were kissing," Adam duhs, before telling her, "These things have an expiration date—six months or until you stop having fun," and Hannah isn't.

That 100-monkeys-typing brand of observation, simultaneously precise and insensitive, is one of the things that makes the Adam character ring true for me. Hannah, trying to make Adam jealous by over-sharing that she "almost" fucked Richard, buys time with a trip to the bathroom, and as she sits on the toilet, her eyes well up. She's wearing another dress that doesn't suit her—she looks like a hacky-sack with bad posture—and all of that rings true for me too.

But then she comes out to find Adam in his bedroom, jerking it. That he's doing it while Hannah's still there, after turning her down for sex, is galling, as she notes, but it's still in character for both of them—and it's still in character that she can't make herself get angry and/or leave. But then Adam prompts her to verbally abuse him as a turn-on, and she goes along with it, and the scene is once again too long and too aimless, and Dunham’s direction doesn’t illuminate why Hannah is doing this or what she's feeling about it, and when Hannah demands cab fare as part of the "you're a bad boy" stroke-fest, it loses me completely. I don't buy Adam as the masochist when he's gotten off on degrading dirty talk in the past, I don't buy Hannah taking control in this fashion, and the editing is a hash, but the primary problem is a flatness. The scene feels calculated to provoke, theoretical.

That's the ep as a whole. The plots begin with recognizable situations, but veer into almost academic explorations: what if we said this, what if we made her do that, wouldn't it be funny if the other thing. It's not the lack of "realism" (realism isn't always good storytelling, vis. the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the accurate but repetitive downward spiral of its heroine). It's that I can't relate to these situations, or these characters in them, and based on the faltering humor and tempo of the episode, I'm not sure Dunham could relate to them either.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded TelevisionWithoutPity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com.

VIDEO ESSAY – Deceptive Surfaces: The Films of Christian Petzold

If one wants to call Christian Petzold the most important German filmmaker of the last decade, it’s because his films operate on multiple levels whose complexities lie just beneath a deceptively simple surface.

On a basic level, his recent films, like Yella, Jerichow, and Dreileben: Beats Being Dead, work as entertaining dramas centered on themes of sex, greed, and loyalty. The major characters are all driven by the desire for a better life, and they give each film a restless, seeking energy. But they find themselves caught between different worlds. In Yella, a woman from economically depressed eastern Germany seeks a promising career in western venture capital, but the past catches up with her in the form of her estranged, down-on-his-luck husband. In Jerichow, an unemployed ex-soldier finds work with a Turkish businessman, only to fall for his German wife. In Beats Being Dead, an ambitious medical intern with falls in love with a working class Bosnian refugee.

Read the rest of the transcript at Fandor.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY: Depp Shadows: Tim Burton’s Cinema

“Basically Johnny Depp is playing Tim Burton in all his movies.” – Scott Rudin (Producer of Sleepy Hollow)

This ubiquitous quote by Rudin is often the throwaway summation found in most writings on, and dissections of, the cinematic works of Tim Burton with Johnny Depp. Which is a shame, really. The quote is not only too broad—it’s blazingly deceptive. Unlike other repeated director-actor pairings (from Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro to Pedro Almodovar-Penelope Cruz), each succeeding film in the Burton-Depp canon actually becomes less about “digging” into an unknown abyss (e.g. as Scorsese faced male insecurity in Raging Bull and Almodovar celebrated female power over male dominance in Volver) than about the overall art direction of each film. Even though Burton’s prolific filmography boasts its share of critically (Big Fish) and financial successful (Planet of the Apes) non-Depp-starring movies, it’s worth studying the pattern behind those eight Burton-Depp projects. All together, those eight films have broken numerous box office records and have catapulted Burton into a tier of top-dollar directors. Currently, Burton is one of the few directors who could harness a towering financial investment from a studio in order to bring to any stylized, eye-pleasing idea he has to life. In fact, if one were to examine the Burton-Depp filmography from top to bottom, it’s quite easy to see the shift from the personal to the pizzazz-filled.

Burton’s first two films with Depp are still his strongest and best works because each film subtly emoted shades of its creator: the shy, social outcast in Edward Scissorhands and the ambitious young filmmaker in Ed Wood. Even with impressive set pieces and dazzling costume design, both films were dominated by Johnny Depp’s carefully nuanced performances. It was the perfect marriage between Burton’s striking, visual storytelling and Depp’s risk-taking performance-art-style acting. Even though most films employ such marriages of talents, Scissorhands and Wood are unique in that they operate on two levels: the surface level looks and sounds like big budget Hollywood but (after repeated viewings) the pulse and internal workings of those films speak to more personal truths (i.e. the anxieties of the outcast), largely because Depp and Burton channeled one another’s sensibilities toward the material, thus giving those films a palpable vitality.

But then something happened. On their third collaboration, Sleepy Hollow, signs of a new Burton cinema began to emerge. This new Tim Burton cinema canon was more concerned with pushing the boundaries of its production design. In Sleepy Hollow, Depp’s (oft-underappreciated) turn as a morbidly grossed-out Ichabod Crane takes a backseat to the moody set pieces and strong work by the FX team. Gone were the quirky tableside manners of Scissorhands or cross-dressing revelations of Wood; in their place were the technically accomplished renderings of ghouls and the gothic. And Burton’s next two live-action films, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd (both remakes), pushed the eye-candy envelope even further. Chocolate Factory basically forced Depp to become a peripheral player in the Burton blueprint of euphoric, candy-centric visualizations. Although Depp scored a Best Actor nomination for Sweeney Todd, his performance—which largely depended on Depp’s ability to always look sullen—is hardly a return to his intimate, versatile turns in Burton’s earlier works. Todd was based on a revered musical, and Depp rose to the occasion with singing chops; Burton turned in some strong visionary work once again (the bloody and bestial barbershop is a beaut), winning Burton the Best Director prize from the National Board of Review. So there’s that.

The real abomination came after the pair’s animated stint in Corpse Bride (which rehashed the stop-motion gothic fare of the Burton-produced Nightmare Before Christmas) and ironically enough became their biggest commercial success: Alice In Wonderland. A mammoth at the box office but overall critical dud, what Wonderland proved was that the new Burton-Depp formula had reached an apex. Early Burton films like Scissorhands had embedded themselves in pop culture to the point where audiences were simply content with knowing that Johnny Depp would be playing an unusual Burton-esque character in an unusual Burton-esque universe (a world somewhere between a Halloween-themed prom and alternate dimension “Saturn” from Beetlejuice). And it’s not that Burton doesn’t know how to make a surefire blockbuster that is also his own singular work of art (see Batman). In the end, the massively financially successful groove that Burton and Depp are in is probably the natural progression that some artists can make after churning out those intimate stories about dying (Beetlejuice), isolation (Edward Scissorhands) and finding your bicycle (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure). So if the latest Burton-Depp vehicle, Dark Shadows, is not a return to earlier form for the pair, at least it will deliver unmatched art direction and unrivaled commercial success. And if that’s the case, maybe Depp really is playing Burton in all of his movies; only now Burton isn’t the isolated, hungry filmmaker he once was.

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

VIDEO ESSAY – Utopia Online?

Director Sam Green knows a few things about utopia. His Oscar-nominated 2002 film The Weather Underground chronicled the film’s titular radical group’s violent path towards creating an ideal society; his new film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, revisits the futurist designer’s attempts to transform the landscape of the San Francisco Bay.

Green’s utopian impulses not only affect the subjects he chooses to film, but also how he presents them to his audience. In 2009, Green and Dave Cerf went on a world tour of live screenings of four short films all dealing with Utopia, presented with live narration by Green and a live musical accompaniment performed by the band The Quavers. The touring show, known as Utopia in Four Movements, brought a fresh gust of innovation and energy to the theatrical experience of cinema, at a time when movie theaters are trying to reinvent themselves in the age of online movies. Green will continue his “live documentary” work by offering an in-person cinematic narration with live accompaniment by the band Yo La Tengo at his SFIFF screening of The Love Song of Buckminster Fuller.

What does it mean, then, that some of the short films from Green’s innovative Utopia performances are now available to watch online? The occasion makes one pause to reflect on the qualitative differences between the theatrical and online experiences of movies. The point is raised by an essay by Rebecca Solnit, in which she posits the movie theater experience as a utopia in danger of fading out as online, small screen modes of viewing threaten to replace them:

A lot of us now look back at the golden age of cinema as a bygone paradise, a minor but sublime coexistence of strangers in the dark drawn together to see a flicker of projected light come to life onscreen. Television chopped up movies with commercials and put them in the middle of domestic distraction, but that was nothing compared to this moment when films are on your iPhone and your laptop and in fuzzy tiny windows on YouTube. The worst thing about these new modes of viewing isn’t that they diminish cinema as visual and imaginative spectacle. The worst thing is that they’re watched furtively and alone. Cinema, which was once a great banquet in a dream palace is now often a snack devoured absentmindedly in isolation. And only in society, only together, do we have the power to live out those old dreams, or new ones. Is watching movies online a solitary, un-social experience that smacks of absent-minded consumption and a diminished appreciation of what’s being watched?

The following video is offered as a counterpoint to show what special qualities can be gotten from watching a movie online, in a way that demonstrates interactivity, sociability and an enhanced appreciation of the movies. It is also filmed in real time, as a way to pay tribute to the live, in-the-moment experience experienced in Green’s Utopia performances. Perhaps the real point of this video is that, whether you’re in a movie theater or in front of a computer, the experience of being “live,” like utopia itself, may not be tied to a place, but to a state of mind.

Originally published on Fandor.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

AUDIOVISUALCY: How to “Perform” the Video Essay

In “La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia” , Christian Keathley argues persuasively that the current landscape of video essays, including commercial DVD supplements and web-embedded features, is defined by a continuum of explanatory and poetical works. Explanatory video essays follow a thesis and are language-based: “Images and sounds – even when carefully and creatively manipulated in support of an argument – are subordinated to explanatory language.” Essays that lean more towards the poetical register, by contrast, are driven by the basic language of cinema: “These videos resist a commitment to the explanatory mode, allowing it to surface only intermittently, and they employ language sparingly, and even then as only one, unprivileged component.”

Keathley’s text provides a useful framework to assess the video essay as an emerging form of criticism. And it emphasizes that it is more than just an explanation or a poetic meditation. It is a performance piece. The critic uses the film’s very own properties to write cinematically (hence the reference to Alexandre Astruc’s pioneering concept of the caméra-stylo). But, more than that, the critic also uses her voice, her actual voice, in addition to prose, both written and cinematic. Voice-over commentary, the way an essay is narrated, has a profound effect on its impact.

The essay that we are highlighting today is one of the most beautiful examples of the form, and not simply because it remediates a film by Steven Spielberg (and a longtime project by Stanley Kubrick). A.I. Artificial Intelligence – A Visual Study, produced by Benjamin Sampson, a doctoral candidate in the cinema and media studies department at UCLA, is an exploration of some of the titular film’s essential themes and aesthetics. It projects a lucid and cohesive argument with captivating imagery. Sampson uses minimal voice-over. He chooses his words carefully and the deliberate pace and soft pitch with which he narrates the essay lend the presentation a nostalgic, almost magical note.

The essay is, overall, driven by an aesthetically judicious style. The themes are broached verbally, but the full communication occurs via the film’s scenes and Sampson’s own editorial work. Except for chapter breaks and the credits, the essay uses no textual inserts and instead relies on elegantly rendered dissolves, split screen effects, and superimpositions. Sampson manages to create an aesthetic space where the film comments upon itself. The essay seems so natural, so organic, it could be mistaken for a poetic, explanatory epilogue. This is probably why it prompted me to revisit Spielberg’s film, to find new appreciation for it. Is this not the best kind of criticism? Beautiful, stimulating, impactful, all the while in sync with the work it critiques. A.I. Artificial Intelligence – A Visual Study inspires new or awakens old curiosity about the film. And it does so by virtue of an exceptional performance.

Matthias Stork is a film scholar and filmmaker from Germany who is studying film and television at UCLA. He has an M.A. in Education with an emphasis on American and French literature and film from Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has attended the Cannes film festival twice (2010/2011) as a representative of Goethe University's film school. You can read his blog here.

VIDEO: All the Animals Come Out at Night: WALT DISNEY’S TAXI DRIVER

Bryan Boyce's brilliant short film "Walt Disney's Taxi Driver" cherry-picks scenes between psychotic cabbie Travis Bickle and his love object Betsy in Taxi Driver, but substitutes Disney imagery for Travis' obsession with urban decay. This is a masterstroke: not a gimmick, but a flourish. Much writing on Taxi Driver tends to situate the film within its era, and fixate on certain details established by director Martin Scorsese, screenwriter Paul Schrader and star Robert DeNiro: specifically Travis' traumatic experience in Vietnam and his culturally reactionary response to seedy New York circa 1976. Part of what makes "Walt Disney's Taxi Driver" so wonderful is the way that it lifts Travis' character out of context without actually losing the context, so that you can see him more clearly as a literary creation, and recognize that his mania is adaptable and timeless. The 1976 New York setting turns out to be important in this mash-up, but not until the very end. The first part of the video disentangles Travis from his world, lifts him out of the muck (and the almost purely subjective structure of Scorsese's film) so you can get a better look at him. When it returns him to his context, Boyce's short becomes a cinematic time machine, connecting Travis' past and our present. Watch it here:

The first time we see Betsy through Travis' eyes, she's got an animated bird on her arm, which effectively transforms the "angel" Travis describes in voice-over into a Disney princess (same difference, given how asexual Travis is). When Travis takes Betsy to the movies, it's to see Disney cartoons instead of porn. But while the marquee advertises Lady and the Tramp and "Steamboat Willie" as "Explicit! Provocative!", when Travis and Betsy look at the screen we're watching unaltered Mickey Mouse. The images seem faintly sexual only because they've been inserted (heh) into Taxi Driver. Yet the sense of Travis as a tone-deaf, maybe socially autistic misfit still shines through. He's taking a sleepy-eyed bombshell to see G-rated cartoons on their first date? It's not exactly a romantic mood-enhancer. When Betsy shifts uncomfortably in her seat, her reaction now seems to have less to do with the content onscreen than the fact that Travis chose a film program that was of interest only to him. Suddenly the scene isn't about sickness, but how casual narcissism can prevent two people from connecting. "I don't know why I came in here," she says, storming out of the theater with Travis in pursuit. "I don't like these movies!"

The piece builds to a giddy, surreal climax, inserting Disney creatures into Travis' "All the animals come out at night" monologue and superimposing a Mickey Mouse Club cap on Travis during his "You talking to me?" rant (that it's clearly animated makes it seem like Travis' unhinged projection). The asexual, paranoid, controlling traits exhibited by Travis in Scorsese's original movie manifest themselves differently here, but they're alternate versions of the same urges. When Boyce replaces a 1976 object of Travis' ire, couples dancing sensuously on American Bandstand, with the parting theme of The Mickey Mouse Club ("'C' ya real soon!'), it confims that the Disney imagery is all in Travis' head — an aspect of this Travis' pre-sexual, childlike fantasy of cleanness that's different from, but connected to, the original film's fantasy of bloody, righteous cleansing. The filmmaker mucks with Taxi Driver's famous final shot of Travis glancing at himself in the rearview mirror, then slapping the mirror away to avert his own gaze. In this version, Boyce replaces Times Square circa '76 with a composited, modern Times Square that literally been Disneyfied: made bright and cheerful, harmless. It's a genius embellishment that connects present-day megacorporate dominance of Manhattan (and urban life in general) with mid-'70s Silent Majority resentment. The world we live in now is the one that Joe the construction worker, Archie Bunker and other '60s and '70s symbols of conservative disquiet dreamed of; once it became clear there was money to be made in catering to them, their wishes upon stars came true. The Disneyfied Times Square means Travis Bickle won. A real rain came and washed all the scum off the streets: a rain of money.

Sure, You Can Film a Poem: Charles Bukowski’s “The Man with the Beautiful Eyes”

If you're reading this, chances are you don't read poetry too regularly (just a guess). You may even feel slight revulsion towards it, that mysterious, elusive presence in the literary spectrum, that stuff that sometimes rhymes, but most of the time just makes you scratch your head. That's okay! Be revulsed! Be confused! Any reaction is a good reaction.

If someone, like, say, me, or rather I, told you a poem could be filmed, you'd say, "No way!" And in part you might be right. The idea of a filmed poem conjures up a host of images, none of them pleasant: ever seen those placemats with scripture printed on them? Pastoral scenes? Clouds? Windswept plains? Pairs of footprints in the sand? Picture that as a film, with a voice-over by some out-of-work baritone. You get the idea. The concept of filming something without structure or narrative is a quicksand, just waiting for someone to step into it.

But fear not: various filmmakers, animators, and other pasty-faced, tired-looking souls have been hard at work for years, disproving this hypothesis, and the results of their experiments have been fine, indeed.

One of the first products I'll show you is a fairly safe bet: it's an animation of a poem by Charles Bukowski, and a much-beloved animation, at that.

Many people go through a Charles Bukowski phase: usually it's in your college years, when all you see is the openness, the directness, the humanity, and the humor of his poems; because his chronic alcoholism and self-destructive isolationism, along with his rampant misogyny and sexual degradation, seem romantic to you, you're not really able to analyze the quality of the work. He could say anything, literally anything, and you might think it was wonderful.

So you buy all of his books, and you drink a lot, because he did, and you keep reading him, and you keep talking about him, and you keep swapping favorite poem/favorite line stories with your friends, and then, eventually, you read something else. And then? In a year's time, maybe two, if you read enough, Bukowski becomes an "oh, yeah, him, whatever" author. The problem here is not his work, really, which was wildly inconsistent. It's also not the fact that you can cast him aside so easily. It's that the drunken bravado of a lot of his poems ultimately outshadowed what he was really good at, which was telling stories. That, and the fact that he was imprisoned by his style–but that's another blog post altogether. His numerous fictional works (Ham on Rye and Notes of a Dirty Old Man being notable examples) attest to the fact that his narrative impulse always competed with his poetic impulse; when the storyteller took the mike from the poet in his poems, the positive result was always noticeable.

"The Man with the Beautiful Eyes," cast remarkably here in bold, confidently drawn blacks and blues and reds and whites and grays by artist Jonny Hannah and animator Jonathan Hodgson, is a testament to Bukowski's elegant, perfect, utterly personal narrative ability. It's a gorgeous little movie, full of the fear and the wildness and the pure silliness and awfulness of reality that comprise childhood, presented in a rough-cut, aggressive, startling manner that suits Bukowski's work, and all in just over five minutes. It's not exactly new, having been first released in 2000, but if you haven't seen it, it will be a real discovery… Watch it, and see.

–Max Winter

VIDEO ESSAY: BLACK SUNDAY: Three Reasons for Criterion Consideration

VIDEO ESSAY: Burton versus Bava

Just as people ultimately judge a book by its cover, many of us are quick to judge a film by its trailer. When I was asked to set my sights on Tim Burton's upcoming Dark Shadows, a movie based on the cult TV show of the late 1960s, as my next entry point for Criterion Consideration, I immediately knew where my judgment would most likely fall. I might find it hard to veil my contempt for Burton's recent work. His early films had a profound impact on my childhood and may very well be responsible for who I am today, but as I became an adult Burton began rewriting the rest of my childhood in ways that make me confused and horrified. Remaking the classic films from my youth, Burton has me questioning my admiration. Also, with the upcoming release of his animated Frankenweenie, Burton has begun remaking himself. We could list his later films and describe how the themes and storylines are still consistent with his earlier work, so maybe I just grew out of him. Now, every time I see one of his films, I end up screaming at the screen, vowing never to see the next Tim Burton film. Still, I cannot deny that his films are intriguing, innovative, and entertaining, if not infuriating. In his collaborations with Johnny Depp, Burton has given us classics likeEdward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, capturing some of the finest performances from Depp in eight films thus far, but I wish that Johnny would begin to show more discretion. Shilling for Burton in promotional videos, Johnny admits to instigating him to collaborate on "a vampire film," citing the classics of German Expressionism, Universal Horror films from the 1930s, and the Hammer Studio films as an influence for this new adaptation. Thankfully all those classics of cinema are thrown into the meaningless mess of Dark Shadows. Sporting the worst make-up job since Alice in Wonderland, Depp's Barnabas Collins struts in front of the living legends of horror cinema, including a direct (slap in the) face-to-face cameo with Jonathan Frid (who played the original character on the TV show). Even before I saw the trailer for Dark Shadows, I knew there would most likely be a nod to Mario Bava's first film, Black Sunday (or The Mask of Satan from its original title La maschera del demonio). Burton has been vocal about Bava's influence, and over a decade ago there were rumors that he would remake Black Sunday. That never exactly came to be, but Burton did evoke a lot from the film for his adaptation of Sleepy Hollow, which unmistakably borrows Bava's visual style.

One of the most important directors in the horror genre, Mario Bava began his career as a cinematographer for Roberto Rossellini during the Italian Neo-Realist movement. He first learned the tools of the trade from his father Eugenio Bava, who was an expert on special effects and also a cameraman. Mario then was contracted by Galatea Studios, where his skills as a photographer, as well as his ability to work quickly and efficiently, would bring many of the studio’s films to life with stunning chiaroscuro. His films always show a deep understanding of the history of the horror genre, with its strange settings and eerie environments, and a weird and wonderful worldview that would become Bava's trademark style. That style would later influence many notable directors, such as Ridley Scott (Alien), Joe Dante (The Howling), and Burton himself, in Sleepy Hollow. In the late 50s, Bava would have to complete principle photography for Riccardo Freda, who abandoned his directorial duties on I Vampiri (Lust of the Vampire) because of the tight shooting schedule. Bava would do the same thing again with Freda's Caltiki, The Immortal Monster in 1959. To show his gratitude, Galatea's producer, Lionello Santi, allowed Bava to choose his (official) directorial debut, which was the adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's short story The Vij. While evoking the traditional story of witchcraft and vampirism at the heart of Gogol’s tale, Bava simultaneously paid his respect to the classic Universal Studios' horror films and the (then) contemporary Hammer Horror films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Black Sunday relies heavily on the pantheon of 1930's horror, while including the eroticism and gimmicky gore of the new horror wave, creating one of the most beautiful and disturbing horror films of all time.

The film begins with a prologue, describing the superstitious tradition that one day in every century, Satan is allowed to walk the Earth, and his evil disciples can haunt and torment their descendants. We are introduced to Princess Asa (Barbara Steele, a dead-ringer for Tim Burton's old muse, Lisa Marie) and her lover Javutich (Arturo Dominici) while they are standing trial by the Inquisition for acts of Satan worship and witchcraft. Asa is branded with the mark of a witch, before having the iron mask of Satan nailed to her face. Such a gruesome beginning was a standard shock tactic of the time, to keep audiences hooked from the start, but this particular opening was considered so shocking that the British Film Board banned the film for seven years after its release. Before Princess Asa is put to rest, she vows to return from beyond the grave to seek revenge on her family for condemning her to the Inquisition. Two centuries later, doctors Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) and Gorobek (John Richardson) are traveling to Moscow when their carriage conveniently breaks down next to Asa's tomb. After a slight scuffle with an enormous (and barely visible) bat, Dr. Kruvajan accidentally breaks open her coffin, allowing Princess Asa to return from the grave to torment and acquire the body from her living-image descendant Katia Vajda (also played by Steele). Her father, Prince Vajda (Ivo Garrani), is the only member who still believes the family's sordid history, and he becomes instantly aware that Asa has returned when he sees the ghostly vision of her mask in his evening cup of tea. Once Asa summons Javutich from his grave, she hypnotizes Kruvajan to help her exact revenge and take over Katia's body.

Filming in gorgeous black and white, Mario Bava was both the cinematographer and the director for Black Sunday, which has proven to be more than just a meaningless homage to the Universal visual standard. In the decades before Bava’s film, horror had become the subject of parody and pastiche. Classic monster figures suddenly had brides, reverted back to teenagers, and had mutated into radioactive amalgamations, thanks to a wave of low-budget science-y gimmicks. Bava's chiaroscuro masterpiece harkened back to a simpler time, when horror relied on tense atmospheric emotions, technical skills and claustrophobic mise-en-scene and blocking. Bava was able to accomplish this entirely on the Galatea backlot, utilizing the masters’ techniques with a distinctively innovative approach. Keeping his camera on a dolly at all times, the film moves with restless fluidity, creating an ambience unmatched in its time. When Kruvajan first arrives at Vajda Castle, the camera tracks through endless corridors and secret-passageways before leading him to Asa's tomb. It's sometimes hard to believe that Bava was able to create such a genuinely creepy atmosphere entirely on set, but his technical background elevated all the tired horror tropes to engaging new levels. Bava also found an excellent leading lady in Barbara Steele, who would later become the scream queen of Italian horror because of Black Sunday. Notoriously difficult to work with, Steele created problems for Bava in every regard. Costumes had to be changed or altered, false vampire teeth had to be remolded (then only to be removed from the film completely), and once Steele refused to come on set because she was convinced the Italians had developed a camera that could shoot through clothing. But even she remembered fondly Bava's ability as a director and as a cameraman. Somewhat shy about her status as a horror icon, she attributes her standing to Bava and what he was able to accomplish with Black Sunday.

Bava's magnificently malicious worldview still stands the test of time and hasn't aged a day in light of recent splatter-filled gore-fests currently pass as cinema. Perhaps it is because Bava's films helped usher in subsequent movements in the horror genre that Black Sunday remains untarnished and undated. His later film Black Sabbath (with horror legend Boris Karloff) is credited with starting the Italian giallo films and the American slasher movement. With so many directors indebted to Bava's films, it’s no surprise that a director like Tim Burton would return to Bava again and again for inspiration. Whether Burton will decide to remake Black Sunday remains to be seen, but if that should ever happen it will only allow the next generation of filmmakers to fully embrace Mario Bava's original film. Naturally, I would never want Burton to actually reboot Bava's film, since he would most likely set the film in the American 1960s, needlessly inserting some appalling 80s-style comedy. Maybe before Burton's Dark Shadows is released on DVD, Criterion will seize the chance to bring Black Sunday to Blu-Ray, a format in which it so desperately needs to be seen. If Criterion chooses the film, it would categorize Black Sunday as a superior work, allowing all of us film hipsters to say, "I told you so" and put directors like Tim Burton in their place. In the meantime, if you're looking to avoid the long lines at the cinema for Dark Shadows, I highly recommend watching Black Sunday first. It will not disappoint.

Robert Nishimura is a Japan-based filmmaker, artist, and freelance designer. His designs can be found at Primolandia Productions. You can follow him on Twitter here.

MAD MEN RECAP 7: LADY LAZARUS

But listen to the color of your dreams
It is not leaving, it is not leaving.

–The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows."

In the Season 2 episode of Mad Men called A Night to Remember, Betty needs, finally, to confront Don. She wakes him in the middle of the night. It's a stark moment of deep revelation (discussed in our video essay for Season 2), made more so by Betty's pale, unmade-up face. It's the beginning of the end of Don and Betty's marriage.

At the halfway point of last night's Mad Men, Lady Lazarus, Megan wakes Don in the middle of the night. Her vulnerability is accentuated by her unmade-up face. It's a conversation that will change their marriage. (Watch the video below.)

Betty confronted Don about his lying, and though he claimed to love her, he lied all the way through. When Megan confronts Don about her own lying, Don, somehow, is open to listening, although only in pieces. At first they speak at cross-purposes; he truly believes that she wants to work in advertising and will be happy doing it. He sees her talent. Nothing she says persuades him, but, remarkably, she holds her ground.

No one has an accurate perception of Megan's decision. We know that Megan was unhappy at work, that she wasn't nearly as thrilled with her Heinz win as she had a right to be, that her father's visit had rekindled her desire to fulfill her acting dreams. Peggy's snapping at her that the job would be precious to someone else probably moved her to decide. It's pretty clear that she's been afraid to face Don down, but this is what she wants. Yet Don blames Peggy for jealousy and competitiveness, Peggy blames herself for being too hard on Megan, Joan sees Megan's love as gold-digging, Stan sees it as an escape from the compromise and mediocrity of advertising: In other words, they all see themselves in the situation.

As people hear about Megan, they all see their own dreams and disappointments. Don dreams of material success and security, climbing past the back stabbers into recognition; Peggy dreams of doing everything right and having it be rewarded, Stan dreams of artistic recognition, and Joan dreams of a husband who will financially nourish his wife's dreams rather than abandon her.

Pete, too, has a dream. His dreams are sweetly, dangerously romantic. In past episodes, we've noted how Pete is turning into Don—the life in the suburbs he hates, the wife he becomes alienated from, the life lived through business success that brings no emotional rewards. Here's another aspect of Don: He was never really into the casual affairs. Roger was always happy to dip his wick into redheaded twins, or whores, or whoever happened by, but Don fell in love with Rachel, he fell in love with Suzanne, and he left Midge when he realized she loved someone else. Pete, like Don, wants the love dream. He wants a romantic ideal to fill the gaps in his marriage, just as Don did when married to Betty.

Pete wants to love Beth. (Check out their hot first encounter below.) He wants to feel he has her ("I have nothing," he said in the "Previously On" clip). He wants a sense that dreams have been restored to his life.

Beth leaves Pete with a dream. "This can never happen again," she says, and she means it. He feels brutalized by this rejection and does everything he can to fight it, to reject the rejection, but she stands firm. Pete's romance is all by itself when it's a hotel room and a bottle of chilled champagne. But if it's silent longing, if it's fantasy and secret hearts left on windows like a hobo code, she's all in. She just wants the dream.

When we see the layers of secrets and lying, the codes and conspiracies, we know we're firmly in Mad Men territory. These aren't themes of the episode or even the season, they're themes of the series. Two different phone calls this week at the same pay booth make very clear how important secrets are to this show, even as Don gives relatively less attention to protecting his identity. Pete, Beth, Howard, Peggy: they all lie, they all speak in code, they all talk about the things that aren't true in order to obliquely say the things that are. No wonder Megan, speaking her truth to the best of her ability, shakes them all up.

Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" is too dense to analyze here. In part, it's about remaking yourself as a new woman, and in part, it's about surviving suicide attempts. Megan remakes herself, but the scent of suicide pervades this episode. Pete mentions in the opening scene that his life insurance policy covers suicide "after two years" (which have already passed). Pete at first follows Beth into her house because he fears she's suicidal (it's the second clip above). The elevator door opens to an empty shaft—terrifying, foreboding. Megan cooks barefoot (you're not supposed to because you risk electrocution). The Beatles song that Don plays, Tomorrow Never Knows, repeats the lyric "It is not dying," and we see Megan in acting class, lying corpse-like on the floor. That's a lot of death imagery, and it fills me with dread. I can't instantly or easily tie all these images together with the poem and deliver a neat interpretation. Should I? Is interpretation the point? The 1960s are, in part, a time of dread. We hear news reports about Vietnam twice during the episode. War, fear, violence, change . . . society as a whole may be killing itself and arising Lazarus-like. Does the Draper marriage survive this? We don't know. I don't believe we're meant to know. I do believe we're meant to fear.

Don wants to know what's happening with modern music, and Megan hands him Revolver, very possibly the Beatles' best album, released quite recently (August 1966—this episode appears to take place in October or November). She tells him to listen to Tomorrow Never Knows first. It is the most challenging, most psychedelic, least accessible track on the album; the song Don is least likely to understand or enjoy. It's being introduced to new music with a bucket of ice water to the face. Don might easily have embraced I Want to Tell You or Taxman. Instead, he gets experimental music, Timothy Leary-inspired lyrics, and sitar. The world is running away from him too fast to keep up; Lady Lazarus may remake herself, say, by quitting her job in order to act, but it seems like Don can't continue to rise from the dead, although he's done it before.

Some additional thoughts:

Another motif is the interconnection of safety and protection, rejection and danger: Some people feel small and insignificant in their lives, and some people feel protected and supported. Beth is scared of the city. Harry feels belittled at home. Who will watch over the unprotected? Who will feel safe?
Quote of the week goes to Don, both for wit and for meaning: "I was raised in the thirties. My dream was indoor plumbing."
If the physical comedy didn't get to you this week, you are not paying attention. Watch the guys acting out A Hard Day's Night in the fishbowl conference room when Megan peeks in. For that matter, watch Pete wrestle with skis. Or just listen: The sound effect of the scraping skis after he says goodnight to Peggy is worth the price of admission (or would be if AMC weren't basic cable).
Rich Sommer cracks me up. As usual. Thank you, Harry, for finding the Earth from space majestic.

Deborah Lipp is the co-owner of Basket of Kisses, whose motto is "smart discussion about smart television." She is the author of six books, including "The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book."

Watch Mad Men Moments, a series of videos on Mad Men, produced by Indiewire Press Play.

GIRLS RECAP 4: HANNAH’S DIARY

I hoped the title of this week's episode wouldn't imply what I had a feeling it implied. I hoped we'd just see Hannah writing in her diary, or hear snippets in a voice-over—something, anything besides another character reading Hannah's diary and getting information s/he didn't want, while I watched, cringing, from behind a pillow.

No such luck. The information we don't want, the things we can't un-know, the facts we already have but can't face: these form the contents of "Hannah's Diary."

Shoshanna's virginity is the most obvious example; it looks like she's found a likely prospect for dumping it when she runs into an old summer-camp acquaintance, Matt Kornstein, on the street. The flame rekindles with a quickness . . . er, "dork-ness": Matt speaks admiringly of "the most intense kitchen raid" that Shoshanna led as a junior counselor back in the day; she fondly remembers how he saved a camper stuck between two kayaks. Summer-camp nerdery is an easy target, but it hits its mark here; no dummy, Matt avails himself of their mutual raptness by suggesting a hang that very night.

It's still going well as they watch a movie—Matt isn't put off by the trademark Shoshanna hail of verbiage, and smooves his leg onto her lap with an excuse about how it gets achy if he can't stretch it. Next thing you know, he's peeling off her clothes (to reveal the fancy and fairly risqué lingerie she wore for a garden-variety movie date; atta girl) and diving between her legs. The overhead shot that comes next is a deft run of faces by Shoshanna: he's doing his thing, and she's simultaneously ticklish, intrigued, and unable to enjoy it because she's fixated on whether it means she can oust her hymen.

When he surfaces to rave that "this is so chill, the way this is happening, I love it," that's Shoshanna's cue to ruin it with the information that she's a virgin. Matt didn't want to know that: "This is . . . really not my thing. Virgins!" She didn't want to know that, and tries to correct her mistake by protesting that "except for the fact that I haven't had sex I'm like totally not a virgin." Shoshanna's description of herself as "the least virgin-y virgin ever" is the line everyone's going to seize on, but the "except for the fact" line is more striking—not because it's nonsensical, but because it's such a tidy nutshelling of the idea that, until you're not a virgin anymore, you have only a theoretical grasp of these distinctions.

Matt's not going to put too fine a point on it, though: "Virgins get attached. And they bleed. You get attached when you bleed." Thanks for . . . not sugar-coating it? I think this is a widely held belief among both genders (minus the blood part), but the bluntness is bracing. And non-negotiable: Shoshanna's assertion that she's "totally not an attached bleeder" doesn't change Matt's mind. Later, Shoshanna plaintively asks Jessa if she'd fuck a virgin, and when she's told Shoshanna means herself, Jessa sweetly says, "Oh, Shosh. If I had a cock, it's all I'd do."

By that time, Jessa's spent most of a day confronting what she doesn't know yet. She has a power over men, which she exercises effortlessly when she runs into her charges' dad, Jeff Lavoyt (James LeGros; took me a while to track down the character name), and his just-out-of-rehab brother Terry (Horatio Sanz, and you have to wonder where that casting is going) on the street. Terry is gobsmacked that Jeff scored a caregiver who looks like she's from "the back page of the Village Voice," but what they don't know—and Jessa hasn't admitted to herself yet—is that she has no idea what the eff she's doing, or talking about.

Chilling with the other nannies on the playground—mostly women of color who "thought she was an actress with some baby," not a babysitter—she bonds with them by complaining that Lola is acting like a "C U next Tuesday," then assures the others grandly that "I'm just like all of you." The "girl, please" faces pulled in response don't stop her from sitting on the picnic table and delivering a well-meaning but obnoxiously ignorant sermon to them about unionizing, and she's only pulled up short when the Caribbean nanny wonders where Lola and Trixie have gotten to. They're located (by the other nanny) under a gazebo, but Jessa can't make them come out, and she can't stop Lola from immediately tattling to her parents when they get home that Jessa lost them.

The parents just assume Lola is lying, and it strikes a chord in Jessa. Not only does she know the truth about what happened in the park, she knows another truth—about Lola, and then about her own overlooked childhood.

Jessa confesses to their father that she did lose the girls. Lavoyt sighs that "we've all done it," that he lost Lola at a green market years ago, and Jessa admits that she "would run away and tell lies all the time" at Lola's age—like that her mom was awesome and they were best friends. This conversation puts the first chink in Jessa's armor of pretension; Jessa may not know how to take care of Lola, exactly, but she knows Lola.

Hannah has known for a while that Adam is a pig; it's just not something she can admit to herself without it meaning something negative about her—not when he sexts her a picture of his dick, then follows it up immediately with a bone-chilling "sorry, meant to send that to someone else" text; not when Marnie calls Adam "a noted psychopath"; not when Hannah sends him a picture of her breasts in an attempt to play along, and he doesn't respond.

It takes a conversation with her co-workers at her temp job to get the light bulb to go on. It's great that Hannah landed a gig, except that she's in over her head with building charts in Windows, and her boss, Rich (the reliably excellent Richard Masur), is a creeper. After he "demonstrates his Reiki technique" on her as an excuse to handle her boobs, Hannah is concerned and grossed out, but during a bathroom powwow lit to resemble a prison documentary, Hannah's colleagues explain that she'll get used to it, and besides, in exchange, Rich buys them iPods and looks the other way on tardiness and "sick" days. This leverage-based view of sexual harassment is interesting (and/or depressing) on its own, in light of the current economy and Hannah's specific predicament within it; it's even more interesting (and/or depressing) that the co-workers have no problem letting Rich's fingers do the walking, but all-caps demand that Hannah "have a little self-respect" when it comes to Adam. Hannah does ask why the Rich fondling is different, but they don't really answer. (Another instance in which the show presents a complex argument or hypocrisy, then doesn't draw an explicit conclusion about right or wrong. Possibly Girls feels overmatched by untangling complicated motivations; more likely, it's that real-life situations — the emotions surrounding an abortion; the compromises women may make to keep jobs—don't resolve in a narratively neat way, and Dunham doesn't want to force them to.)

After their intervention on her patchy eyebrows left her looking like Frida Kahlo as drawn by a kindergartener, Hannah probably shouldn't ask those two for the time, much less for advice about her personal life. But something in the conversation forces her to see that the only thing she "gets out of" her relationship with Adam is self-loathing and dashed hopes. And she tells Adam exactly that, standing in his doorway and cutting him loose: the dick pic made her feel "stupid and pathetic," which is how she's trained him to treat her, and she really likes him, but she can't anymore, because it hurts too much. "I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time, who thinks I'm the best person in the world, and who wants to have sex with only me." I stop taking notes to stitch that on a pillow, but Hannah's not done—Adam doesn't hear her, and he's not going to change, so sayonara. Adam doesn't say much of anything, but when her lip starts to tremble towards the end, he hooks a finger into the front of her sweater. Ohhhh no no no no no, don't do it! Walk off before he can suck you back i—dammit. Passionate making-out. She stops to say that she can't take "serious" naked pictures of herself, "it's not who I am." "Just be who you are," he says, oh so sweetly, and it's a moment Hannah is going to take out and look at with brimming eyes for months after he goes back to his regular shitheel self. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, and "forgot" it at his place so I'd have an excuse to come over again.

Hannah meets up with the others at Charlie and Ray's open-mic performance. She's all aglow (maybe Adam finally found her clit), but that won't last long, because the scales have fallen from Charlie's eyes. Earlier, doing some daytime song-writing with Ray at the Hannah/Marniehaus, Charlie notes that Marnie's "been completely on edge lately," but doesn't connect this with their relationship. He wants to make her something nice to cheer her up. Ray: "Like a coffee table made out of street garbage?" Actually, Ray, in Brooklyn we prefer the term "found materials," but he's right that Charlie is in denial—although Ray's assertion that Marnie needs to be fucked hard, chained to a post, and whipped "until she fuckin'—whatever" is perhaps more about Ray's hostility issues.

The snooping that follows is definitely about Ray's boundary issues, as he examines Hannah's holey undies, then holds Marnie's vibrator aloft. "That's a shared tool," Charlie sniffs. "You're a shared tool," Ray and I say in unison. But the mother lode is sitting right out on the bed: Hannah's diary, which Ray begins reading and snarking on. Then he falls silent and is suddenly super-eager to get back to helping Charlie build the table. Charlie doesn't understand that ignorance is bliss, and insists on knowing what Ray read.

And he can't un-know it, so he puts it into a song, Kathy-Griffin-on-Seinfeld-style. After dedicating the piece to "my G-friend Marnie" and Hannah, he angrily strums and sings lines from the diary: "What is Marnie thinking / she needs to know what's out there / how does it feel to date a man with a vagina." All things we know, all things we've seen, several things Hannah and Marnie have already discussed in the bathtub and elsewhere. Shoshanna, confused, asks if it's a love song as Ray whips out the diary itself and Charlie begins to read directly from it. Hannah is turning a shade of mortified spearmint; from her right comes the bubbling sound of Marnie's blood reaching a boil. Charlie finishes and storms off-stage, and Marnie, unwilling to accept that this is everyone's fault but Hannah's, dashes her cocktail down Hannah's front and calls her "such a fucking bitch." Or perhaps calls herself that. Not the most realistic burst of plot I've ever seen—but that relationship had to end, so why mess around. It also reminded me of that great line from the Toni Pavone character on Felicity, when she tells Felicity that honesty isn't as important as kindness; every writer has to decide, usually more than once, whether it's more important to nail the description or protect the feelings of those described. Granted, Hannah didn't intend for anyone to read her diary—but it can't be un-read. After Marnie storms off, Jessa chuckles, "That was awesome," and Hannah says glumly that she's going to puke, and both comments are probably accurate assessments of how it's going to feel for Hannah to have to think about someone besides herself going forward.