The Blue Dahlia: Forget-Me-Not

The Blue Dahlia exemplifies the themes of postwar trauma and the problem of memory with the best of the mid-40s films noir. It deals with these subjects so explicitly and yet carefully as to make it overtly accessible to both past and present audiences. While we’re at it, William Bendix must simply “be” the postwar/wartime American man. His portrayal of Gus in Hitchock’s Lifeboat and as Buzz here in The Blue Dahlia make him the working class everyman, the guy screwed over by the war and living life in large part reacting to its effects on him and his beloved lifestyle. Of course, this film would certainly be better had the studio not forced Raymond Chandler to alter his script, incriminating Buzz rather than the old house detective in the murder. Buzz has a plate in his head thanks to a gift from the Krauts, giving him chronic headaches, mass confusion, and temporary amnesia. He’s still got his instincts and, thanks to the studio, his ultimate virtue. Chandler’s finale appeared to vilify Buzz, but of course it really wouldn’t have, would it? Who’s to blame when, following the worst war mankind has ever seen, a soldier with a plate protecting his brain slips into some post-traumatic stress and shoots a woman who’s done some evil to his dearly loved commanding officer? The war, presumably, and the state of a world that would assume that such men could simply move back into society without any fallout from the hell they endured overseas. In the postwar boom years, though, they wanted us to think things were going to be okay. They liked Ike and believed America to be the greatest and most resilient nation in the world. Noir, of course, flicks at the ears of this silly notion, and Chandler perhaps even more. For the record, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake offer something really interesting here for their complete lack of interest. There’s little to no personality in either of them, especially when sharing a scene with Bendix. The would-be heroes and femme fatales of this era may not be as fascinating, Chandler (above all) seems to imply, as the human catalysts for the underlying, sinister drama.

Via

Quickies, Vol. XV

Quantum of Supremacy

Quantum of Solace (dir. Marc Forster, 2008) – Finally gave this one the second viewing it clearly needed, after unfairly measuring it against the standard (whether too high or just too different) of Casino Royale. It definitely sat better this time around, held its own more and seemed more like its own story rather than just an episode. An abundance of political content was hard to ignore. While not a bad thing in spirit, when the Bond franchise tries to make humanitarian statements, it feels a little like Starbucks saying they’re giving x% of the profits from one kind of special seasonal bean off to Africa. Also, how is this not influenced in every department by Bourne? Nothing against this new-and-supposedly-improved Bond, but he’s really more Matt Damon than Sean Connery or Roger Moore, isn’t he?

Grinning or wincing?

The Clock (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1945) – Thanks again, Stanford Theatre. This is kind of a goofy little movie, melodrama at its purest, a musical minus the music. Robert Walker and Judy Garland are a couple fated to fall in love, which they do, and then fated to see the difference between love and romance. Of course, it’s all still very romantic. Aside from a formulaic narrative and some quirky acting, the quintessentially urban camerawork is worthy of praise. Almost seems as if the film hired a cinematographer who was over-qualified for the project. You get a real sense of height and depth. The camera begins and ends the same way: free-floating over crowds, relieving the viewer of the claustrophobia of the characters. It’s a God’s-eye view, or at least a view from the top of a skyscraper, recognizing the comfort that the cinematic audience experiences in contrast to its diegetic subjects. Most of the narrative conflict results from the city drowning out its inhabitants, separating them and crushing them. That the eponymous “clock” functions as the centripetal focus is fitting. It’s only a two-day shore leave, and they’re always at the mercy of time, which seems to tick away faster than it should in the metropolis. The question always seems to be whether they’ll have time, and it’s only when they make themselves and their romance subservient to the clock that they have any success.

"She thinks you're a failure?"

Bottle Rocket (dir. Wes Anderson, 1994) – C’mon, like there’s anything bad about this one. Even Marty Scorsese says it’s completely devoid of pessimism. After more-or-less completing a huge Wes Anderson project that didn’t have room for the beloved first feature, we had to watch it; it was a love-screening. Noticed a couple little edits of the Criterion edition. When Anthony picks up the book during the bookstore robbery, it’s not “Jobs in Government” anymore; it’s some warfare book. And when Bob tells his brother Futureman, “Can I at least have three bucks for gas?” His brother replies, “No, you can’t.” But above all, Bottle Rocket feels way more French New Wave than I ever gave it credit for. Watch some Godard & Truffaut – especially Band of Outsiders, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, and even Breathless and then you see their fingerprints all over Anderson’s first feature effort. Jump cuts, close-ups, zoom-outs, barely-audible dialogue, petty crime, criminals on the lam, funny cars, and that overall attitude of taking everything with an enormous grain of salt; the only big difference is Anderson’s delightful disdain for politics, making him more in line with Truffaut than Godard. There are too many beautiful and hilarious lines in this film to pick just one for here…might need to initiate some kind of new series. Yeah, probably.

Splitting headache

Scanners (dir. David Cronenberg, 1981) – After A History of Violence and watching numerous clips of The Brood, not to mention David Spade’s little joke in Tommy Boy, figured it was finally time to watch Scanners. It’s all there. And it’s not just a movie about photo-copying equipment. It’s been said that Cronenberg likes poking at bodies, but with Scanners he’s poking at them from the inside out. What’s truly horrific isn’t being blown up by a grenade or shot at; it’s one’s own brain exploding. While the dialogue, acting, and even narrative of this film is MST3K-worthy, the ideas presented are quite interesting. Much of it seems like an excuse for Cronenberg to investigate his own fear of the body and expose ours at the same time. There is something quite uncanny or unnerving about the body, isn’t there? Those of us who aren’t physicians can only wonder at what’s going on inside at any given moment in any given area. Not unlike Alien‘s great scene, there’s something freakish about our own innards, and our own obliviousness to the fact is probably a result of suppression more than simple ignorance. Scanners is mind over matter, or something like that, except the formula changes direction to expose suppression rather than wallow comfortably in it. Don’t swallow your puke, just blow chunks, is the idea here.

The Lady Eve: Sinner/Seductress

Unfortunately, the most obvious thing to comment on regarding The Lady Eve may just be the most commented-on issue in film studies, a topic that’s been given more than its due elsewhere here. But, it is what it is: gender role reversal. It’s Preston Sturges again, who gloried in twisting his narrative to clash with viewer expectations. The recently viewed Unfaithfully Yours morbidly allowed us into the fantasy world of a jealous and overly imaginative husband who wanted to murder his wife. Here, we’re given some pretty remarkable access to the woman Jean/Eve (Barbara Stanwyck). The narrative, really, is told from her point of view more than anyone else’s, and it’s her desire that gets the front seat to Charles’ (Henry Fonda) mutual affection countered by his own naïveté. So therein’s the twist, although the title betrays a more conventional tendency, one that has been around since the beginning of time: finger-pointing at the woman, the temptress, the first sinner. Interesting how the original Edenic account got twisted and the blame got shifted; as if there weren’t a serpent in the tree doing the real tempting, poor Eve is not so much seen as the first sinner as the one tempting the man to sin. This constitutes what they call a “trope,” that awful word connoting a pattern that humanity can’t seem to get away from and in which cinema comes to a comfortable rest whether or not it means to. Charles has a pet snake, but he’s rather oblivious to the implications behind such an animal. Eve, on the other hand, is terrified of it to the point of imagining its presence when it’s nowhere near her. We could investigate these things further, but it would be too much.

A History of Violence: That’s Good Coffee

Shock and awe, all the way, especially when you’ve been doing mostly 30s and 40s stuff. This is a take-you-for-a-ride kind of film, one that’s deeply offensive on a surface level but so critical of its content, ideologically sound, and masterfully executed that one can’t help but applaud after a viewing. Being anything but fluent in the work of David Cronenberg, it was necessary to interrogate a crony who is. Was told this: bodily obsession and noir elements. Yes, they are certainly there. It’s hard not to think of Out of the Past, with its raging, suppressed or repressed violent past rearing its ugly head into the realm of nostalgic, rural Americana and forcing a return to the dark and the urban. Or, in this case, the urban intrusion into the rural, its compliments to the coffee and the way that Tom himself uses something like coffee to create his own new fantasy world. How can we not also think of David Lynch, particularly a Blue Velvet or a Mulholland Drive? The first frame of A History of Violence has us looking at the façade of a motel (or something) on a hot day with the loud and, yes, violent buzzing of Midwestern insects.

There’s something deeply disconcerting about bugs that can go on for so long at such a volume, to say nothing of their size (they’re as big as baby birds). It’s the sort of sound you don’t often hear in films, but visit the Midwest and parts of the South and boy is it present. It really offsets the visual effect of a peaceful town where “everyone minds their own business” and “we take care of our own,” and all of that. Something sinister is always there in a human individual and a human society, no matter how rural or urban or repressed or liberated. Cronenberg knows this, which is why this film doesn’t contain any flatly virtuous or “good” characters. Everyone is a ticking time bomb that may or may not be jarred enough to detonate. They inflict violence, either on others or on themselves or both, but not only that. They also want to look at the violent aftermath. The camera shows this a number of times, and the camera is complicit in the act of looking at various bloodied and annihilated faces after the consummation of sadistic desire results in a bloodbath. The body is an interesting thing, as Cronenberg observes, and it’s even more intertwined with our past, our memory, our violence than what’s obvious. Ed Harris’ character doesn’t have the luxury that Tom has, pretending that his past doesn’t exist since his body somehow carries no scars. A scar on your face that permanently clouds your eyeball has a way of remaining very present. This film’s structure is also something else. You’ve got gunfights at the beginning, middle, and end. There is a narrative progression to them that opens wide the dual character of Tom/Joey more and more. There’s lovemaking between husband and wife that begins innocent, albeit fantastic, and ends later with sadomasochism that’s equally fantastic (in the sense of a “fantasy,” of course; not “excellent”). The film exposes the lie that often undergirds a subject’s rebirth. Actions are what they are, and they don’t change with time. Such a renewed person is always a split-second from returning with a vengeance to an earlier state. Cronenberg’s attitude in this film is that such a return entails a return to violence and not its opposite. Tom’s final return home leaves everyone in silence and uncertainty. It’s irreversible, which it always was, but now they know it.

Only Angels Have Wings: Learnin’ to Fly

Another one from Stanford Theatre with the unsurpassed combo of Cary Grant & Jean Arthur; this one with the bonus of Rita Hayworth before she realized how sassy she was. This is a film at least as good as its reputation suggests, refreshing for the old-school themes of memory and the past, concerning which the visuals carry rich connotations: pilots flying around treacherous mountains, brotherhood, what it means to love your lady and love to fly, and flying fast into who-knows-what. In part due to a recent Tom Petty craze, can’t help but think of those lyrics: “I’m learnin’ to fly, but I ain’t got wings/Comin ‘down is the hardest thing/ Well the good ol’ days may not return/ And the rocks might melt, and the sea may burn…” Something about flying goes along with escape and freedom, a connection that Hawks’ film embraces and makes a strong statement about. Beautiful stuff: comradery, faithfulness, bravery, redemption, and guts like you don’t see anymore. Can hardly watch this one without seeing lots of trademark Hawks homoeroticism, for lack of a better term. These guys love each other, and they sorta like their women, too. Put it this way: its a middle-of-nowhere airfield with a bunch of male pilots sitting around kickin it until their next flight, and when Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth show up, hardly anyone blinks. Rita may be married, and Jean may have the hots for Cary, but the only use these guys discover for Jean is to play the piano. Still, we’ll take it over Master and Commander any day.

Alien: Going Rogue

Title character?

Just saw Alien for the first time all the way through. Maybe a coincidence, but probably not, Ridley Scott has a new film out that appears from trailers and preliminary reviews to be decidedly less than the quality of Alien. One recalls Fellini’s famous dictum; something to the effect that a great director makes good films for about ten years. After that, in the parlance of our times: “eh.” Very few have consistently made decent films outside of a ten-year window, Fellini included. In Scott’s case, it’s been a hit-and-miss career, probably with more of the former than the latter. How are you going to equal Blade Runner and Alien, anyway? Not with movies about a cannibal or a woman in the army, probably. Alien is a simple but rich film that’s undergone a ridiculous amount of analysis and held up well. Without knowing where to begin, we’ll do a blind run here; all film, no looking at scholarship. After all, where better to start than with the film itself. It’s a model piece for the theory of the monstrous feminine and all its implications concerning repression.

Her underbelly

The ship’s computer is called “Mother” and you only access Mother when you enter into this little chamber that seems suspiciously like a womb. It’s even all-white, like a blank slate; unlike the rest of the ship, which is dark and metallic and clammy. Arguably, then, the whole ship is a womb and the inner space constitutes the id. This is the source of all bad news and the space of ultimate revelation (return of the repressed, anyone?). Ripley’s attacker ends up being a (male) robot in cahoots with Mother. With some help, the robot is killed and then interrogated following decapitation. This of course contains echoes of the Oedipus myth, with a twist. The twist may be what makes the film most interesting at a Freudian/Lacanian level. This isn’t simple Oedipus or simple return-of-the-repressed. John Hurt’s infamous scene in which he gives birth to the alien, only after having said creature attach itself to his face and obliterate his identity in a horrifically liminal illustration of the abject, first indicates the twist by reversing the biological norm. This is an about an alien, after all, that which is truly other to the human experience. In Lacan and Kristeva, “other” is distinguished from “Other”; the latter representing the maternal, most fitting to this film. That “Mother” would allow this aggression constitutes a real vengeance of the maternal, and that only Ripley (the ballsy woman) can overcome Mother and Alien makes her monstrous in her own way. She’s a hero, but she invokes fear, too. She only overcomes Mother and Alien as a woman, as one who understands both the maternal and the monstrous, who can predicate their next course of action and raise them one.

Sextuplets, and a dud

While we’re talking about the monstrous, it should be noted that the ship’s name is the Nostromo, nearly an aural anagram for “monster.” In this way the connection between Mother and Alien is made official, with the vehicle acting as a nest for Alien and Mother, correlating to both. It always feels slightly unfair to read this theory into films, but the argument goes that it’s not “reading-into,” but seeing these patterns within texts proves the social existence and application of the theory. A film like Alien contains them so overtly that, as with Hitchcock’s films, the viewer wonders if Scott caught up on his Freud before working on it. Even the classic object petit a seems present here, in the constantly recurring feline figure. What point is there to the cat otherwise? Ripley risks life and limb to ensure that the cat accompanies her on her escape from Mother, Nostromo, and Alien. The cat, Jones, is briefly mistaken for Alien, only to create a briefly comic scene serving mostly to contrast the two creatures. The alien’s strange apathy toward the cat – which, one would think, would make a tasty hors d’oeuvre – almost implies the non-reality of Jones. Or, if real, Alien has no interest in a creature like a cat who cares so little about its own vulnerability. A cat, of course, has nine lives. Five crew members, and nearly six, die violently thanks to the alien but the cat survives without a scratch. Pets typically figure into films as symbolic of childhood, a memento mori of a past state. Ripley’s eventual survival with Jones more than anything else is what saves her last semblance of humanity. Without Jones, Ripley is the real alien, the real monster, the Other whom we should fear.

Birth canal?

Interference

C'mon in...water's warm

Obliterated, defaced

It's an it

In the id

The reason for burp rags

VictorVictoria

Jonesing for better days

Clip of the Day 5/13

A Sentence on There’s a Girl in My Soup

Charmed, I'm sure

Silly usurps funny (for the most part) and Peter Sellers usurps Goldie Hawn (completely) in this crackpot British movie pitting the vanity of philandering-but-cultured maturity against the naivete of freewheeling hippie youth, illustrating the ultimate absurdity and ignorance of both social groups during an era of 20th century elitism clashing with its own quite inevitable offspring.

Hetero-dysfunctional, or, auto-erotic

TV-turned-on

Dirty old man

Resistance is futile

Felicity-multiplicity

Do hope I'm not disturbing you?

Cockfight

Odd couple

Briefly matching

European

Compromised

Lovely

5×2: Reverse Decay

One thing in common

This one, while evasive on certain levels, works well to wed form and content in a way that certainly “means” something. The word “wed” here may not be well chosen, since the film presents a universe in which anything like marriage is unworkable if not impossible. Ozon doesn’t seem to be crazy about people in general, perhaps especially straight men. Of course, here it’s not only the straight man who is uglified, but even the straight woman. The former needs to dominate violently, and the latter apparently needs to be on the receiving end of domination. Do they both “need” it, or is this just the only way available to them, is the question. Ironically/fittingly, this film was produced by a studio called “Fidélité.” Faithfulness is obliterated by perfidiousness in this narrative, as if, backwards or forwards, it’s bound to happen. The advantage of a reverse-chronological story is that we see the causes after the effects. This has a way of excusing characters, removing blame, and implying a kind of fatalism: what “will” happen already has happened, so what more is there to do than to investigate underlying causes and motivations? By reversing the timeline, Ozon also gives a happy ending to the film without giving a happy ending to the narrative. In so doing, he exposes the tendency of the “happily ever after” ending as naïve at best and dishonest at worst. One has to grant Ozon this point, on one hand, although it’s a point most effectively made by a cynic: happy endings are only possible through manipulation of real narratives, or, every sad ending had a happy beginning. Relationships may be damned before they’ve started, and if there’s any blame to be laid, it’s on the dude. Fair enough.

The French Connection: Both Engrossing and High-Grossing

In the dark, more or less

After guiding a lengthy unit in the subject of cinematic viewer engagement, everything is now visible only through that lens. The opening sequence of The French Connection could not be more textbook in this regard. The viewer is sutured (using the term loosely viz. spectator theory connotations) immediately to the nameless man on the streets of Marseilles who is following a mark. The sequence is shot so effectively that the audience feels as invisible as the voyeur on the screen think he is. Shots, reverse shots, pans, dollies, tracking shots, zooms, and all the rest are employed here in such a way as to make the man incognito, a chameleon tiptoeing across his domain until, we think, he nails his targets or at least reports valuable info to his contact. This doesn’t happen, of course, making the scene all the more noteworthy and effective. When the man is surprised and killed, the viewer, along with the man’s carcass, are left in the little tunnel as the real pro walks away unscathed. This is not only a superb sequence for what it is; it’s a capsule of the film as a whole. You may see it coming or not see it coming. Either way, it’s as well done as can be from a strictly technical perspective. In a way, what more is there to say about the whole film than what can be said about this first sequence?