Ice Spiders: Ineffable, Sublime

"And I was like, 'Whooooaa!'"

Received two films this Christmas. One was a Criterion Collection Blu-ray: The Darjeeling Limited. The other was a DVD that has not yet received the Criterion Blu-ray treatment: Ice Spiders. It was already known that the former would be worthwhile. And based on the price of the latter and the impressive tagline on its cover (“Hell has just frozen over”), it was clear that it would be just as impressive, albeit in a different respect. In what is destined to become a classic of the sub-genre of arachnid-horror-films-set-in-the-mountains-of-Utah, Ice Spiders is noteworthy for its almost Godard-esque disregard for cinematic subtlety. The hackneyed, (not-so-)special effects are contextualized in a premise that somehow balances out the film’s overall tone of mediocrity: a top-secret government outpost for biological experimentation on spiders gets out of hand when said spiders grow to huge sizes and escape. The initial idea to situate the lab in very cold environs because of the spiders’ inability to survive in the cold ultimately backfires when (spoiler alert) they adapt. Oh yes, and this sinister alpine laboratory also doubles as a popular ski lodge in the great Mormon state. It only makes sense to couple something highly dangerous with clean family fun.

Evil (glasses)

So, being sutured to a bunch of would-be dude-awesome Olympian skiers heading up to the lodge to do some hardcore-bro training, the viewer is as surprised as they are (insofar as the actors convince the viewers that they’re surprised) to discover that a military-associated and government-funded “professor” cares much more about taking the escaped giant spiders alive than he does about saving lives in the short-term. (Side note: just love how many films out there feature the head of a science team who’s known as “the professor” in an utterly non-pedagogical context. In this case, there’s certainly no classroom anywhere near this mountain lab, but anyway…) As for this “professor,” you just know that with glasses like those, he has to be a bad guy from the first moment. It turns out, to everyone’s surprise, that in order to ensure the victory of the humans over the spiders, a previously washed-up skier (whose career was ruined not by a broken leg, mind you, but a shattered one) will need to out-ski a bunch of spiders down the slopes. This is the obligatory penultimate scene that wants so badly to be the end of the original Star Wars: Luke & company outmaneuvering the bad guys and exploding the Death Star (read: giant mama spider).

Dumber

The chemistry between the characters is unsurpassed…extraordinary…amazing…profoundly mesmerizing. On a noetic level, each of them has just the right knowledge on a given subject (be it skiing, spiders, weather, or survival skills) to get them through each harrowing episode of the film. We get to see the consequences of ignorance from the film’s opening scene. There, a couple of rough ‘n tough hunters do the stupid: try to outrun a big spider after unloading a few hunter’s arrows on it. That only gets it angrier. As a result, Dumb and Dumber end up wearing body-length, home-spun stockings as the spider sips their life-juice like a fat kid with a Kool-Aid juicebox. While we could continue with these pensées, it seems better to halt and acknowledge the ineffability that such films as Ice Spiders produces. Are we tiptoeing the line between the immanent and the transcendent? Are we in a realm of the truly “other”? Is this the sort of film that “really makes you think,” or is it the kind of film that stops thinking dead in its tracks? Whatever one’s unique response to this artifact, it remains indubitable that Ice Spiders bleeds, as it were, a surplus of remarkable and possibly unprecedented material to the engaged viewer. Consider yourselves invited.

Clashing colors

Spiders wear shades when it's sunny.

All washed up...OR IS HE???

Silly string

We paid for the guys with muscles, we're gonna SHOW the guys with muscles.

On top of spagheeeeettiiiii...

Token gets eaten

The chase is on

We won, bro!

Epilogue: evil doc gets it in the face

We did it, though, didn't we?

Splice: The Monstrous-Feminine-Other-Uncanny-Liminal-Abject

Formula-fed

Splice exposes contemporary humanity’s deep-seated fears about the prospects of genetic engineering and ultimately attempts to ridicule them. It’s an exercise in campy horror in one sense, containing scene after scene of silly characters doing impossible (for now?) things resulting in overblown consequences with those characters reacting to events in some of the dumbest ways imaginable. While all of this could be interpreted in a variety of ways, foremost among them a simple excuse to make a bloody creature movie, it rather coherently ends up mocking its own premise and any who would begin to believe it possible.

Water breaking

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Splice is as valid an artifact of the monstrous feminine, the O/other, the uncanny, the liminal, and the abject as probably anything David Cronenberg or even David Lynch has directed. This is like Cronenberg’s The Brood meets Lynch’s Eraserhead meets (some other guy’s film) Species. Regardless of the level of cinematic competence of the crew behind the camera, the film’s content speaks enough for itself to earn a position among films like those. If Cronenberg’s characters are often not to be taken seriously, why would anyone think that Adrien Brody and company in this film should be? Plus, Splice has Guillermo del Toro in the credits as executive producer. By this point, we all know how much del Toro both has a sense a humor and enjoys poking at flesh wounds.

Puttin' on the ritz

The husband-and-wife scientist team who splice DNA from various animal breeds with one another, creating freakish (and hilariously phallus-shaped) freaks, pretty quickly start displaying serious problems of their own. The fact that their names are “Clive” and “Elsa” (actor names from the original Frankenstein film) attests to their morally dubious nature. Clive starts displaying pretty classic signs of male impotence not far into the film. This is impotence not of a sexual nature but a social one. He caves to Elsa’s every demand and nags her like the stereotypical wife. Elsa is also a living stereotype, but of a maternal sort. She turns down Clive’s initial suggestion that they have a child together. (They have an interesting exchange at this point. Elsa harasses him, “Why don’t you have a baby?” “What,” he says playfully,” and ruin this perfect figure?” Already at this early point Clive shows a strongly feminine side.)

Cockfight

Despite her objections to having a child, Elsa ends up using her own DNA to create a hybrid animal-human embryo. No sooner does the creature emerge from its post-delivery womb-sack when Elsa begins treating it/her like a human baby. At this point, the creation looks almost nothing like a human, but Elsa swaddles it. Since the creature ages very quickly (conveniently for cinematic purposes) we see Elsa only a few cuts later dressing the creature up in a stereotypical dress. It’s light blue in color and somewhat reminiscent of Dorothy’s dress in The Wizard of Oz. While this could be ultra-analyzed, it seems centrally indicative of Elsa’s desire to raise this offspring in a relatively traditional environment that submits to gender norms. Later in the film, Elsa shows “Dren” how to apply makeup: mascara, blush, and lipstick. Dren’s freakish appearance, barely shrouded behind a dress or makeup, only serves to render her more alien and bizarre.

Image-baring (sic)

Dren’s status as neither human nor animal, but both, may have more to do with hybridity than liminality. She is not so much excluded from both species as she is a combination of each. This places her in a socially liminal space, however, excluded from the animal and from the human. The film only begins to explore these ramifications, however, preferring to illustrate the uneasy territory of the initial idea of inter-species genetic modification. Further still, Splice hopes to reveal the irrational fears behind genetic hysteria and paranoia. By couching something so real-world in the context of a creature horror film, the narrative reveals how absurd is the notion that something so bad could actually occur. Such fears are identified with the equally absurd characters Elsa and Clive within the film. Though it isn’t explored, it’s acknowledged that Elsa had a very strange and unhealthy childhood. How fitting, then, that she insists on bringing Dren to the dilapidated, vacant home out in the woods where she grew up. Clive’s issues have been mentioned, but it’s also worth pointing out how unscientific he is, for being a supposed scientist. He carries himself more like a college student in an alt-rock band, wearing trendy t-shirts under his lab coat and listening to hard rock music.

How embarrassing

All of this combined seems to be Splice‘s way of saying, “Quit worrying about genetics. It’s not like there are incompetent imbeciles in the laboratories creating monsters.” Such a dismissively didactic approach to a major contemporary issue is disturbing. Film’s confronting the potential dangers of, for example, technology have generally taken the subject seriously (as least the good ones), and very often their worries were retrospectively validated. (Consider films like Modern Times, Alphaville, Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Children of Men.) Splice takes genetics as seriously as Dr. Strangelove took the bomb. The two films differ in an important way, however. Whereas the bomb, i.e. the threat of nuclear annihilation, existed outside any remote realm of individual control, genetics has been brought to the level of the voter. Dr. Strangelove was not intended as, and could not have functioned as, a propaganda piece. Splice is something closer to that, taking an issue with enormous ramifications and potential repercussions to human beings on both side of an increasingly blurry fence, and turning it into a joke. In so doing, it argues that those on one side of the fence can’t be taken very seriously.

Opening creature shot

The horror beneath it all

Pollyanna?

Teen angst

Mirror phase

Failed castration

Post-puberty

Revenge of the (S)Dren

Fruit of the Loons

Wait, what??

True Grit, 2.0

On a narrative level, there’s little to say about the Coen brothers’ new version of True Grit that couldn’t be said about the first film. Plenty have talked about the differences; how the Coens stuck closer to the novel than the 1969 film. The differences are relatively negligible, however, with most of them concentrating in the beginning and the end. It wouldn’t be a Coen film without a slightly ominous start and a darker conclusion. Even the style has much in common, from the dialogue to the characters to the type of shots used. More centered on the character of Mattie, this True Grit treats Rooster Cogburn as less legendary and untouchable, more prone to failings of humanity. John Wayne’s Cogburn is more ideal, more fused to the landscape, and given a final shot of riding off into the sunset. In the Coens’ film, Rooster flakes out. He takes off and doesn’t appear again. He makes a last-ditch effort to reconnect with Mattie but dies before the reunion.

In this way and nearly every other, the Coens’ film departs from the nostalgia-driven film from 1969. Whereas that film might have been wallowing in a self-conscious last chance to feature John Wayne as a central hero in a Western film in an era of the genre’s deconstruction and reconstruction, this new film reflects the present obsession with the “real.” The Coens will be the first to emphasize the harsher realities of life (namely, death) and sacrifice the deeper undertones of idealistic heroism that have driven so many older films. Even their comedies reject the traditional happy ending that was part and parcel to the genre. There may be nothing more “postmodern” than the idea and the very term “tragicomedy.” Mattie’s loss of an arm and her image as a slightly unfriendly, mildly haggard “old” maid skips ahead far enough to remind the viewer of certain post-narrative inevitabilities of the kind that many films (including the original True Grit) would prefer to avoid.

As Beardsley pointed out, religious language is live and active here, not unlike in the Coens’ earlier O Brother, Where Art Thou? Grace and redemption are mined for their utility to the diegetic world, the characters, and the story; mostly the first. Mentioned in the introductory voiceover, Mattie talks about grace and hope as a high crane shot captures a God’s-eye view of the town in such a way as to illustrate the brokenness of the world and its need for such ideas for survival. But these are token mentions, instruments to serve a narrative purpose just like they were in O Brother. Still, one can’t help but wonder if, in the Coens’ world, these concepts aren’t more than throwaways. The most hopeless nihilists out there still living need to hold on to the possibility of hope. Since the Coens poke fun at nihilists (see The Big Lebowski) as much as they do at everyone else, and since they made True Grit immediately following A Serious Man, it would seem that they haven’t given up yet.

“Tron: Legacy”: Look, 80s, no hands!

Sweet Dreams

Many would probably say that no viewing of Tron: Legacy is complete without first viewing the original Tron. But, not being much of a sci-fi geek, and based on the already-negative reviews of this sequel, someone had to go see it without any sentimentality getting in the way. As an earlier tweet stated, this one is just a big bag of whatever, for the most part. Still, the film gives into the positive pressure to say something about current global technology issues. It’s “positive” pressure because a film this dependent on technology for its look, and this much about technology in its narrative, ought to have something to say about technology. However. Being so dependent on technology all-around, the viewer already basically knows what it’s going to say: technology is basically good (despite causing our characters some troubles). What the film said (or was trying to say) about technology on a more subtle level was quite difficult to access, mostly because of the MST3K mindset that you really can’t shake while watching something like this.

In an early scene at a conference table for a board meeting, a villainous bigwig decries the “accidental” release of the company’s software to the masses, allowing open-source access. He insists that it should be closed-source, and the character who releases the software to the world is the main protagonist and ultimately a hero. It goes without saying in this scene that Google is right and Apple is wrong. (This is fitting coming from essentially a gaming perspective. Gamers are about interactivity, but more on that to come.) Later in the film, something like the reverse seems to happen when it’s discovered that the bad guy within the program takes over from within the program, on account of the open-source thing. Jeff Bridges’ character insists to his son that accessibility is the main danger. But what seems at first to be a contradiction appears to reconcile itself. The film suggests that the more “users,” the less the chance that the software itself will become an evil fascist behemoth. So, Apple is still bad and Google is still good. The reason why Jeff Bridges gets overwhelmed from within his own game is because he opened the floodgates of code (or something) with only himself to guard it. (Translation: be careful, Steve Jobs. That big Apple might take a bite outta YOU.)

Difficult not to think of Avatar when watching this one, too. Both films rely heavily on the style, look, and feel of video games (despite James Cameron’s refusal to acknowledge this debt and condescending stance toward gaming and gamers). One way in which they’re different, however, has to do with something like palpability. In Avatar, when human characters become avatars, they wallow in the experience in all its grittiness. Cameron went for a semi-realistic feel, wanting to invite viewers into a world that could exist. With Tron, however, things are kept very digital. The point here is not that Avatar‘s look actually is more “realistic” than Tron‘s, although that may be true. Rather, Avatar aims for something more closely resembling reality, something that appeals to the five senses, much more than Tron. Again, this is appropriate considering the content of the two films. Upon re-entering the real world in Tron, our protagonists experience tactile bliss in a way that’s never possible within the game.

In what will likely be only the second of many more mentions of Kristen Daly’s very helpful essay “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive Image” (Cinema Journal, Vol. 50.1 Fall 2010 – see here for the first mention), Tron goes on to prove that we’re in a relatively new, still-blossoming period of cinema history. It would be hard to conceive of a film that proves Daly’s point better that cinema now is moving into a fundamentally more interactive direction. It takes a fairly typical route by highlighting the potential dangers of this new age (as did the original Tron film), namely that the game may take over the user. This is essentially Frankenstein, of course, with a more technological spin perhaps first scene in the infamous episode of The Outer Limits, “I, Robot,” in which the robot overtakes his master (Leonard Nimoy). Tron: Legacy is explicitly about games and interactivity within its narrative, and its form further blurs the increasingly invisible boundary separating the subject from the object. This new, liminal space is now occupied by the “user” rather than simply the “consumer.”

A brief glimpse into a toy store today saw a large rack of Tron: Legacy toys – toys rather fittingly licensed by Disney and deemed “authentic” Tron merchandise. Hardly any film remotely geared toward the younger ages can hope to make back its production costs without merchandising, which is the heart and soul of “Cinema 3.0.” But it’s not just the younger ages. The Criterion Collection alone stands as the ultimate cinephile toy, official merchandise that’s director-approved for the user/viewer (what Daly calls the “viewser”). If it were simply about the films themselves, just about the texts (as many cinephiles would insist), we wouldn’t need 40+ page booklets accompanying the Blu-rays, to say nothing of the multiple discs loaded with supplemental content, allowing the “viewser” to master the films like players hope to master games. Whether it was the interactivity of gaming that led to a shift in cinema, or the early shift in cinema leading to the phenomenon of gaming, Tron: Legacy stands as one big, mediocre example of the shift itself and the accompanying paranoia about what the shift will do to us, the viewsers.

Quickies, Vol. XXVIII

Topper (dir. Norman Z. MacLeod, 1937) – As with all of these, it was awhile ago, invoking the question, why bother? That’s fair. To answer, probably just as a record, in order to lessen the already-high odds of forgetting about them completely. So, this is just a silly little something that was hugely popular back in the day. It is both refreshing and disturbing to see characters in the 30s treating the issue of death with such levity, actually. In the years soon to follow (WWII and aftermath), this would change. This is in the vein of Arsenic and Old Lace, but not quite as well written. Produced by Hal Roach, you can see his Little Rascals fingerprints all over it.

Lady Chatterley (dir. Pascale Ferran, 2007) – Oh, dear. You can call it a literary adaptation of a great novelist, or something much closer to sex-kitsch. The most fascinating thing about this one is getting to see a reverent and painstaking adaptation of a book that probably didn’t deserve the praise it received, D.H. Lawrence’s novel of the same (or a similar) name. As far as cinematics go, this is adeptly done. As far as the content goes, it feels like a Dead Poet’s Society-type embrace of Romanticism even in the face of its glaring pitfalls. It’s fitting that this is in French, filmed by a French guy, despite taking place in England.

You Can’t Take It With You (dir. Frank Capra, 1938) – Dear, dear Frank Capra. This is, in practically every way, the pre-WWII part-one to It’s A Wonderful Life. The “problems” they encounter here are utterly trivial (other than token allusions to the Depression), and the comedy is textbook screwball. Great to have Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart share the screen – is it possible that she and Jimmy click better than she and Cary? Provocative. Lionel Barrymore is the polar opposite of his Mr. Potter in the later film. This may also be a kind of precursor to the family comedies that made My Big Fat Greek Wedding such a formulaic success.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 – Pod People (1983/1991)- Excepting the incomparable Mitchell with Joe Don Baker (and with Hobgoblins close behind), this is the best MST3K episode. We’re watching an ultra-cheap ripoff of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. fused with a seventies teen flick. They combine to form ideal material for riffing: just enough structure and bad special effects to keep it interesting, and more than enough filmic incompetence that it deserves all that it has coming to it.

Apollo 13 (dir. Ron Howard, 1995) – Golden material for someone like Ron Howard, that great cinematic manipulator of emotions. It’s tailored to those who remember the historic event, and intended to function precisely as the historic event to those of us unborn at the time. As if Howard thought, this was such a big deal that we should relive it up-close, and recreate it for our children. Archival news footage is spliced into the film with reckless abandon, as the film insists that its content is real despite its form being quite unreal.

True Grit: The Original

Rooster & Babysister

Gearing up for the Coen remake, it was necessary to revisit this old classic that my siblings and I had practically memorized during our childhood. As is almost always the case with such nostalgic films, it’s quite difficult to offer any “objective” analysis or original thinking, clouded over as one’s perception becomes with preconceptions of greatness. That being said, this one is a real classic. It’s John Wayne as good as John Wayne ever got. Along with his character Ethan in John Ford’s incomparable The Searchers, Rooster Cogburn is a complex figure, not your prototypical Western good-guy. Cogburn, however, is rather the reverse of Ethan. Whereas Ethan appears to be a hero and then displays some ugly but true colors of racism, growing in the process, Cogburn might appear at first to be a sinister, worthless fellow. Only as the story progresses does he display some real humanity and goodness, but then we see that it was probably there all along.

Briefly central

But have we played into the film’s hands by talking only about John Wayne? Apparently the Coens have taken a different route in the remake, following the novel more closely and giving Mattie the priority in terms of viewer engagement/identification. It’s impossible to miss the fact, even in the first film, that this was the original intention of this narrative. A young woman rarely, if ever, was given so much strength and narrative importance in a Western, and so even despite the film’s best efforts to give Wayne the spotlight, Mattie comes across as the central character. She doesn’t narrate the film, but we’re sutured to her at the beginning, plenty before Cogburn makes an appearance. Despite her centrality, the film spins this introduction by using Mattie largely to build suspense before we meet Rooster. We’re encouraged to identify with her, which becomes natural once Rooster shows up. He’s always kept outside arm’s length; he’s John Wayne, the ultimate, canonized Western figure. Mattie, for all her fierceness and bravery, is the more accessible of the two, while Glen Campbell’s LaBoeuf is more annoying than anything else. Wayne marinates in his own legendary status here, apparently as some of the set crew have alleged. If the part wasn’t written for him, the camera shot the character for him. See particularly the climactic showdown with Ned Pepper and his crew, in which Rooster puts the reigns in his teeth and charges at Pepper’s gang across an open meadow with a shotgun in one hand and a six-shooter in the other. Mattie and LaBoeuf admire Rooster from afar, impotent to help him.

Gritty

One wonders if this film doesn’t contain a kind of self-conscious nostalgia for the Western as it once was. Being released in 1969, the same year as Sam Peckinpah’s infamous The Wild Bunch, and following on the heels of Sergio Leone’s deconstructive Spaghetti Westerns, a film like True Grit could hardly star an aging John Wayne without looking down the barrel at the mortality of its own genre. Wayne himself already had half a lung removed by this point, causing him to get winded pretty easily while filming. The toll that his own lifestyle had taken on him was evident enough that much more rugged, edgy characters were written to accommodate the actor’s wheezy, gruff persona. Still, the film refuses to give into a tragic ending, rather rewriting elements of the novel in order to make the film more storybook. (Mattie keeps her arm, for example.)

Rugged

Seemingly, while admitting its own numbered days and encouraging a progressivism of sorts, True Grit ultimately embraces the old, the static, and the established. The last shots of the film have Mattie and Rooster back on her homestead, the farm. She will remain there and, as she tells Rooster, be buried there. While looking at the headstones of her own family members, Mattie points to where she will be buried and tells Rooster she wants him to be buried next to her. Rooster resists the idea, insisting that the spot should be reserved for Mattie’s husband. When they part ways, Rooster accepts Mattie’s dare and jumps a fence with his new colt and rides away “in the friscalating dusklight,” as it were. Rooster refuses to be grounded, refuses to be territorialized. This is consistent with his status as a marshall, at a surface level, and with everything that the traditional Western hero has embodied, courtesy of John Wayne.

Friscalating

Progressive, kinda

Harsh introduction

Juxtaposed justice

The fam

Right at home

There's fifteen of us out here

Mediator

Miss Fire

 

Dark Passage: The City as Haven

Labeled

This one’s loaded, and up there with some of the great San Francisco films noir, including Thieves’ Highway and, Dark Passage‘s 1946 contemporary from Orson Welles, The Lady from Shanghai. Like the latter, Dark Passage includes a few of those kaleidoscope shots that disorient the viewer with a collage of somebody’s face. This is particularly effective in a film that hides the main character’s face through nearly its first half. Problems of identity make noir in part what it is, and Dark Passage quite literally embodies this rupture in Bogart’s character Vincent. Vincent undergoes plastic surgery that reconstructs his face in order to render him unrecognizable and offer him pedestrian autonomy. The viewer is sutured to Vincent’s point of view in about the first third of the film, but not primarily to hide Vincent’s pre-reconstructed face before we see it later. Rather, we enter into Vincent’s myopic perspective as a man on the run, surrounded, confused, and aimless.

Crowded

Myopia is part and parcel to noir, too, and the viewer’s anchoring to a single subjective outlook creates a sense of frustration corresponding to the character. This kind of cinematic effect encapsulates the shift that took place in film right around 1945. Rather than revolving around the film texts themselves, Dark Passage illustrates a new mode, one in which the film’s effect on the viewer becomes primary and the narrative takes the back seat. Hence the kaleidoscope shots, the crooked camera angles, and the intensely subjective POV shots. (Kristen Daly’s essay, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive Image” has plenty to say about cinema’s three phases – Cinema Journal, Vol. 50.1 Fall 2010.)

Eye contact

As far as noir and the city go, Dark Passage toys with the idea of the city not simply as a terrifying concrete jungle but also as a safe haven. When Vincent initially escapes from prison, he makes it his goal to head into San Francisco, which involves crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Does Vincent long for the city directly on account of his criminal status? This is doubtful, since we quickly learn that he was wrongfully convicted. The city is a kind of jungle, one in which a man like Vincent is able to find corners, nests, and rooftops to lodge temporarily. A trope within Dark Passage presents itself early and remains consistently present throughout, consistent with the image of the city as a haven: the fellow urban-dweller as friend. Vincent is assisted throughout his urban travail, by: Bacall’s character, the cab driver, the disgraced plastic surgeon, the diner operator, the stranger who asks for a light, and the hotel clerk. At numerous junctures, Vincent addresses others and is addressed by others by the name, “Friend.”

Urban nesting

The overwhelming force that is on Vincent’s trail cannot be chalked up as “the law,” since other, more sinister, forces are also pursuing him. There is rather an overarching force that is not so much objectively large but subjectively. Granted, the newspaper headlines are dominated by news about Vincent, but in the noir world the overblown size of such headlines can be explained by the subjective lens through which we see them. So, the individual city dwellers are in fact the antidote to urban sickness, or, perhaps better, the safety nets in urban danger. Vincent’s survival depends on their help, a help they’re not only willing to offer but seem obligated to extend. An unwritten code binds them together as fellow survivors in a hilly, overpopulated, concrete desert of artificiality. Vincent’s eventual exit not only from the city but from the country reflects an ultimate inability for him to remain in a city that, at best, can only function as a haven. The rupture in his identity, the impossibility of demonstrating his innocence, and the inescapability of his own history render his bodily transformation only superficial, insufficient ultimately to survive. As with so many other noirs, the permanent haven is found in a more exotic space: South America.

Buddy

Trippin

Faceless

A new me?

Bridge-building?

Evil justice

Free & easy in the tropics

Blow-Up: Sickness of (Z)eros

Shooting blanks

Obviously this deserves a lot more attention than what’s about to follow. It’s one of the quintessential art house films, it’s what made Antonioni even cooler with the English-speaking world, and it’s one of the most engrossing bits of cinematic existentialism ever composed. Like in L’Avventura, the mystery within the film is never solved; only the search is given attention, with a heavy emphasis on subjectivity. As the main character gets bored and wanders, so also does the camera. (At least in Blow-Up the main character at the beginning is still the main character at the end.) It’s not a stretch to think about the lyrics, “Strawberry Fields/ Nothing is real” while watching this film. Much of it takes place in a green park, a weird, enclosed and also public space that’s literally on a different plane than the rest of reality, whatever that is. It’s a postmodern Eden with a sort of stairway to Heaven one takes to get there.

Dislocated

Once there, happenings are a strange mix of poetry, reality, and myth. A serpentine woman tricks a man into his own murder, and a none-too-innocent bystander watches most of it transpire, developing an obsession over it precisely because the woman begs him to let it go. He never reports the murder, and ultimately he doesn’t care. He ascends into his loft where he develops and blows up photographs of the episode, clearly a reference to a similar character in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. If Laura Mulvey is right, the darkroom in that film stands for a kind of repressed id, a realm where the character can be himself in all of his shame and where he grants access to no one. (See also Norman Bates’ basement in Psycho.)

Tint-Id

It’s in this realm where he accesses the grainy, distorted, yet supposedly “real” photos of what took place are developed (an interesting, revealing word). As quickly and easily as the photos come into “being,” they also disappear without a trace. Just as L’Avventura was a double entendre, capturing notions of the “adventure” as well as the “fling,” so also is the title of Blow-Up. The photographer enlarges the photographs, but in so doing he annihilates them and, somehow, himself. We, like the nameless main character played by David Hemmings, only see the photos in his upstairs, private, windowless space. Their disappearance, along with their graininess, make him wonder what really happened, if anything. At the film’s conclusion, the character’s disappearance over the ultra-green (unreal?) grass call into question his existence and what the spectator has seen, or thinks s/he has seen. After all, preceding his dissolution, he gave up on reality. He takes part in a faux game of tennis with a group of hedonistic mimes. Outnumbered, when they depend on him to pick up the non-existent stray ball, he cooperates. So the question of what is real evaporates along with his very being.

Fetch & fade

If L’Avventura illustrated the sickness of eros, Blow-Up depicts the sickness of existence itself. What narrative there is in this film is at the mercy of the character’s whims. His point of being, and therefore his state of being, is in question from the beginning. He takes periodic breaks to become one of the fools that bookend the film. He acts unpredictably and egocentrically, knowing no other ethic. The lack of the real centrality of his ego, however, the problem of his self and identity, ruptures the heart of his ethic.

Goner

The photography that is central to the film contains a primal element, self-referentially alluding to cinema itself. Early shots in the film confirm this rather explicitly. The protagonist, before we know him to be the protagonist, departs a factory in the early morning in the midst of a mass exodus of workers. What is happening on screen, along with the placement of the camera, points back to the first-ever motion picture: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory by the Lumière Brothers in 1895. Whereas that early film featured a static camera that did not stray from the group and did not discriminate from among the workers, the camera in Blow-Up does the opposite. It remains motionless only briefly, then wanders toward a particular individual who essentially sneaks into the film, where he doesn’t belong. This foreshadows his later sneaking into a murder where he doesn’t belong. In all of this, the acts of filmmaking and photographing are given a sinister edge. Any idea of the camera’s objectivity is obsolete, as it becomes clear that there are powers behind the operation of a camera. As in Peeping Tom, the operators are also powerless, however, wrestling with their own obsessions and fears.

Poser leaving a factory

Making out

Bored; how was it for you?

Russian dolls meet Nietzsche

Where is the "I"?

The Fall

Who's who?

Magnifying nothing

Obsessed with the copy

Spectre

Enveloped

Disappearing

Death = all that's real?

Self-confirmation

There's a lady who's sure...