The Lost Weekend

All bottled up

A recent cinematic crush on Billy Wilder prompted another sampling of his work, this time the infamous The Lost Weekend. Knowing of Wilder’s later career comedies has made the earlier, darker works (this one, along with Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulevard) all the more interesting. Wilder seems to have been a provocateur in his day. Ace in the Hole pulls no punches toward the media and their irreverent sensationalism. Sunset Boulevard points the finger at Hollywood itself, chastising the industry from the producers to the directors to the writers to the stars. Some Like It Hot is (insert funk guitar wow-chicka-wow sound here) famous for its cross-dressing and other sartorial suggestiveness with Marilyn. The dark and scandalous humor of The Apartment has license to kill in a way that perhaps only Wilder and Jack Lemmon could have gotten away with. By the time of Avanti!, Wilder puts it all out there while bracketing one of the most morbid facts of human life in the context of a comedy.

Like a prison

As a study of myopic agoraphobia and the problem of memory in postwar U.S. urban environments, it hardly gets any better than The Lost Weekend. It’s 1945: the war is only just over, and the Depression before it, so a sense of wishful idealism pervades the Western world and the U.S. in particular. Film noir marvelously turns this idealism on its head by counteracting it with a new kind of fear: the fear of the self, of ourselves. Once Japanese cinema got back on its feet, some of its most renowned films were the Godzilla (Gojira) movies, which tapped into the return of the repressed, the fear of the monstrous other – the atomic bomb – returning to wreak havoc on urban Japan. In the U.S., the fear reversed itself and turned inward. We had defeated the evil powers of the world and achieved a new high in world domination. The economy was rolling, we had plenty of living war heroes (never mind the other ones), and photos of the everyman returning home to the street and swooping ecstatic and unknowing women off their feet with Lucky Strike-flavored kisses.

All knowing

On the other hand, a certain loss of idealism following the victory in the Great War (the supposed “war to end all wars”) floated just beneath the surface of this joy. This wasn’t helped by post-traumatic stress and the memories of anyone involved in the European or Pacific wars; our own return of the repressed. Fittingly, then, it’s the main character himself, Don (Ray Milland), whose memory is razor sharp. An addicted alcoholic, it’s Don whose flashbacks contextualize the narrative and take the viewers back, interestingly, six years before the main diegesis (1939 – pre-war). Don knows what’s coming with every binge, every bender, every spree. He remembers all too well what got him to this point, which is precisely the source of his hopelessness. On the other hand, his naïve and devoted girlfriend Helen is the amnesiac. She repeatedly has to be reminded of what happened before, what got Don to this point. Though she seems to remember, she’s only too willing to move past it and look ahead to what she insist will be better times. This creates an impossible disconnect between her and Don, one hopeless who can only remember the past and the other optimistic who can only think about the future.

All work and no beer makes Don a dull boy.

This taps into the myopia of most of the characters in The Lost Weekend. Between these two headlining figures, there’s no “good” or “bad,” another fitting feature of noir and the postwar American mood. They’re both fools, they’re both zooming in on a single fact (true or not), they’re both wearing self-imposed blinders that restrict their vision and oversimplify their worldviews. Of course, Don’s myopia is manifest most obviously at the level of the bottle. It’s all he can see and, in a way, all he wants to see. The film itself, through narrative and cinematography, takes on this point of view, apparently to the chagrin of the original pre-screening audience. The effect is exhausting and brutal. It forces the spectator to accompany Don through the dark nights of solitude and addiction, then into the blinding daylight of artificial community with the barkeep and the pawnbroker, all part of the routine to score enough cash for another few drinks.

Optical myopia

These daylight sequences convey what Edward Dimendberg labels “the walking cure” in his excellent Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Postwar malaise and urban claustrophobia necessitates a walking cure, a pedestrian jaunt to cure the sickness by a return to memory. Urban landmarks serve as flags, signals, and triggers to give context to the lone pedestrian. It offers the subject a feeling of place and space, an escape from the “nest” of the apartment and into the urban “forest.” Ironically, however, film noir often illustrates the failure of the walking cure and the impression that the pedestrian subject now has in fact become even more surrounded, encased in a shell rather than simply dwarfed by a forest. It seems that The Lost Weekend was the first film to use the now-cliché device of horizontally-moving, dissolving street signs overlaying the pedestrian subject while walking toward the camera perspective. This is the appeal to memory par excellence, and the evidence of its reverse effect. The pedestrian only becomes more anxious and ill. The internal flood of memories is coupled with the external excess of the familiar, transforming agoraphobia into claustrophobia.

Spaced out

Obsession and addiction, it is well documented, are effects of post-traumatic stress. In The Lost Weekend there is no suggestion that Don ever went to war; on the contrary, he’s been an unemployed writer with a six-year block living off of his brother’s generosity through his girlfriend’s obsessively maternal care for him. This lack of acknowledgment or participation in the war by the main character may be the most powerful aspect to the film. Wilder does not blame his character’s problems on the other but rather on the self. How easy it was in the mid-late 40s to externalize fundamentally human problems through blame-shifting. In the 60s, this worsened by blaming not the foreign other but the domestic other, as if the U.S. political administration was to blame for every problem that followed the Vietnam war, whether directly connected to it or not. Wilder’s film places the blame and the responsibility squarely on the individual’s shoulders while never failing to acknowledge that no man is an island. Don needs Helen to improve himself, but he has only himself to blame for his problems. Wilder here constructs a distinctly postwar setting – it could never be mistaken for anything other. By avoiding the tendency to state the fact of the war, he leaves Don no choice but to restrict his memory to his own self-destructive actions.

WhaddaYOU lookin at?

It may have been an allusion, it may not have been, but one small element in this film reminds the viewer of the war. When Don is visiting numerous pawnshops attempting to sell his typewriter for booze cash, he discovers that they are all closed. He asks a woman if it’s Sunday, and she replies that it’s Saturday. When he asks her why the shops are closed, she states that it is Yom Kippur. Because some of the shop owners are Jewish, there is an agreement with the non-Jewish owners to close their shop on the religious day out of respect (a fascinating spin on pawnbroker stereotypes). It’s not hard at this point to think of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe that had only recently been ended. Perhaps significantly, this suggestion implicitly forbids Don from blaming his problem on the war. If anything, Jews are indirectly responsible for keeping Don away from the bottle. Of course, this possibility breaks down quickly when it’s eventually through a pawnbroker that Don obtains a pistol for the purpose of ending his addiction along with his life. The innocent storeowner, when questioned by Helen, never thinks to worry about Don, perhaps indicating an inability from a Jew in the mid-late 40s to understand the concept of suicide. They had survived genocide, so why would they seek death from their own hand?

Semi-helpful

The shopkeeper isn’t unlike the bartender at Don’s favorite hangout, but the latter is the source of wisdom and eventual hope for Don. Not quite willing to withhold the bottle from Don completely, he knows that Don will get a hold of it one way or another, so he may as well drink in the relative safety of the bar, where Nat the bartender will make the effort to speak reason to him. Even Nat reaches a breaking point, however, and kicks Don out of the bar.

I'm a prostitute, not a loan officer!

All of the above is not without other impressive moments and effective storytelling tools. The detox sequence feels like the nightmare it is. Don’s cyclical sojourn around the city is reminiscent of an episode of The Twilight Zone or perhaps The Shining. The impossibility of escape, the repetition of the familiar, the suffocating choke-hold of the myopic gaze, the prison of subjective memory, and the inevitability of responsibility: Wilder captures the horrors of these quintessentially human realities without succumbing to nihilism. The film ends on an up-note, and not an unrealistic one. It’s less naïve than insistent, less fatalistic than didactic.

Where did I put that...?

Tapped out

Drowning

Detox: the ultimate wtf

Rock bottom

Urban forest, concrete jungle: forever confined or a new view?



Ace In The Hole: Read All About It

When the movie studio renamed Ace In The Hole to call it The Big Carnival in order to attract greater crowds (how fitting), they may have picked a more clever title than they had intended. The carnivalesque element is integral to the film, though it offers plenty of other analytical possibilities. It seems oddly fitting, in retrospect, that a viewing of Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock preceded this one. Both of these films observe open rural spaces becoming invaded with alien inhabitants for a brief time, although for somewhat different reasons. The media element, prominent in Taking Woodstock, is much more important in Ace In The Hole, and yet another recent viewing – this one Robocop (more to come there) – condemns the American reality of media saturation and its negative effects.

Preeminent in Ace In The Hole at a superficial level is the character study of Chuck Tatum, the disgraced reporter who is towed into Albuquerque with bad tires, no money, and the need for a newspaper job. Making it plain from the get-go that he wants the job as a way out of Albuquerque, he’s just as honest about his past record of failures as a reporter; failures that, he maintains, actually prove his devotion to finding the biggest story and getting it published. Kirk Douglas’ performance is strong enough – maybe overdone enough – that this aspect of the film seems to have overwhelmed the rest of it back in the early 50s. It’s not surprising that this was Billy Wilder’s first real flop when one keeps in mind the philosophy of 50s Americana: I like Ike, everything’s going to be okay, and just stay away from those Russkies. Ace In The Hole comes down hard on the freedom of the press and the American everyman, so it figures that it would take fifty years or so for the film to be rediscovered and finally appreciated.

As valuable as the aforementioned point is, however, there is much more to the film than this. Human nature is not all butterflies and daises, to be sure, but Ace In The Hole rewards the viewer who absorbs it through a more phenomenological lens. Observe the spatial shift of the once-sacred Indian cliff territory in rural New Mexico. Said “Indians” have almost a complete non-presence in the film considering the magnitude of the supposed curse that is the film’s narrative catalyst. When Tatum waltzes into town at the film’s outset, practically the first word out of his mouth is directed at a Native American sitting, minding his own business: a mocking “How.” Wilder always was excellent at setting the stage, and the immediate disrespect and condescension Tatum shows toward local Native Americans ends up playing out heavily as the film goes on.

Shortly after arriving at the scene of the accident, a group of quiet Indians stands by as Tatum takes charge of the situation. He ignores them and spits on the deputy’s pathetic attempt to wield power over the crisis. As the narrative moves forward and the previously rural, sacred, undeveloped, and unpopulated space becomes filled with spectators, cars, media, small businesses, and a literal carnival, a main question being posited is, who is the cause/blame of this transformation? Yes, it is Tatum, but who is Tatum in comparison/contrast with these invaders? Of course, Tatum has everything in common with the invaders (in kind if not in degree; he’s a pro and they’re just amateurs) and nearly nothing in common with the locals, or so it would seem. It’s Tatum’s worldliness and the Albuquerque newspaper publisher’s innocence and naïveté that allows a big city reporter like Tatum to demystify a sacred space, capitalize on a human tragedy, and ultimately kill a man whose life might have been saved.

If Ace In The Hole vilifies venture capitalism and the freedom of the press, it embraces innocence, the sacred, and above all truth. When Tatum first makes his way into the office of the Albuquerque newspaper, he observes and ridicules some framed needlework on the wall: “ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH.” The permanence of these words and the respect they are paid contrasts sharply with what Tatum later says when someone commends his own printed words, pointing out that tomorrow they’ll be used to wrap fish. In many ways it is the transience of Tatum’s facts versus the virtuous and lasting truth of the newspaper’s ideals that serve to reveal Tatum’s story-obsession for what it really is.

The small town people are not above Wilder’s critique, though. The sheriff takes awhile to arrive on the scene because he’s busy wooing voters for the next election at, quite fittingly, a snake festival of some kind. In a brilliant detail, the sheriff returns to town with a baby rattlesnake as a pet. Though never mentioned in the film, it has been said that baby rattlesnakes are significantly more dangerous than adults, incapable as they are of regulating the amount of venom they inject in their victims. Not only does Tatum in particular seem quite serpentine in nature, but his youthful mixture of cynicism and idealism (such close and deadly cousins) makes him unable to control the string of lies and manipulations he injects into his story. Appropriately, then, Tatum quickly takes a liking to the sheriff’s snake. The sheriff, however, isn’t the only rural figure that the film rebukes. It’s also the aforementioned sheltered publisher and the parents of the trapped miner (to say nothing of the miner himself) whose ignorance and impotence permit the urban invasion and spatial renovation to take place.

This spatial shift, momentous as it is, is remarkably simple in nature. Fueled by greed, celebrity, and wealth, a single man is able to influence thousands to gather in the name of a good cause with only a nominal care for that cause. Those who find such a notion overly cynical or ridiculous need only question the utility and intentions of many celebrities, musicians, concert-goers, and corporations whose self-congratulatory “giving” stems no tide of suffering in the world but rather inflates egos and fattens already-thick wallets.

Oh, and here's Ace. Lest we forget.

Sunset Boulevard

In the gutter

How refreshing to experience a film so critical of the system that undergirds film itself. And how fitting that Hollywood is located on the West Coast of the US, the land of the setting sun. Norma Desmond, the embodiment of the silent film star – really the aging film starlet – pathetically races the sunset, attempting to undo the death of her career. The allusion to Great Expectations at the film’s beginning is utterly appropriate, especially when one recalls the mansion set in David Lean’s film of that name, which must have been an influence on the set design of the house in Sunset Boulevard. There are so many perfect aspects to this film, it’s difficult to know where to begin. There is the pulpy nature of the narrative, wed to a noirish atmosphere. The voiceover by the dead man lends a grave fatalism to the film; it’s over before it’s started. That the protagonist is a writer (a screenwriter, no less) in a sense validates the film and also creates a conflict of interests. The almost cliché style of voiceover not only serves (1) to confirm Joe’s status as a screenwriter, narrating his own story, but (2) attempts to ground the narrative of this film in something verbal, something concrete. The very fluid and non-concrete nature of the film, however, corresponds to the place of Joe’s demise: the water of a swimming pool. In this era of America, where but in L.A. could a man be shot, then fall into and float in a swimming pool until finally being fished out? Joe’s inability to wield any power of his story through narration is a failure fundamentally similar to his screenwriting career. He has ideas but he can’t pen them, or he pens something void of worthwhile ideas.

Over and under

The term “self-reflexive” only begins to describe Sunset Boulevard‘s own extreme awareness of what it is and how it fits into the broader history of cinema. The death of the stars is as certain as the daily death of solar light; if it survives through the night, it’s only via a pale reflection from another, lesser cosmic body. This film refers so unceasingly to film itself that it almost feels like too much. Parables are not to be concerned with their own semiotic reference points. Cameos from Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille, and numerous mentions of Alan Ladd, Greta Garbo, and Gone with the Wind make Sunset Boulevard simultaneously as insecure with itself as Norma is with herself, and confident in its critique of the blind embrace of fleeting and ultimately empty Hollywood values. At the risk of overkill, does Norma’s obsession with the notion of the “star” connect, as its name implies, with her home address? While the times change in this world, the people who fill it do not; new films and new types of stars will become popular while others are phased out, but whether it’s Norma’s self-obsession or Buster Keaton’s victim complex, they are doomed to live as they are. The impossibility of Joe’s successful shift from the no-good screenwriter he is to a live-in companion to a lonely and rich ex-star illustrates his own inability to become something different.

Relics

Then there is the gender issue. It would at first seem like Sunset Boulevard would not – could not – have worked had it been about a dimming male Hollywood star. Something about the cinematic male gaze and the nature of the woman as objectified (either through idealization or punishment) makes the starlet ripe for the portrayal of Norma. Norma traverses the fine-line boundary between idealization and punishment, moving through her career from the former to the latter without realizing it. One kind of exploitation is fine; she’s been trained for it. The other is a less subtle kind of objectification and one that forfeits her previous image as the actress ideal. Further, it would seem that DeMille’s presence in this film as a still-active member of Hollywood’s elite implies that men are immune to the inevitability of women in Hollywood. DeMille’s success in the film blurs the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, since the set used within Sunset Boulevard for DeMille’s film was the actual set where he was directing a film at the time. However, Buster Keaton’s cameo is more than a cameo. He and the other actor present at the bridge game signify a sad egalitarianism. They may not be on the verge of madness like Norma, but they are washed-up, wrinkled, and gray. Keaton’s only two words spoken in the film are: “Pass. Pass.” His pitiful expression, so familiar from his earlier features, confirm that his career, too, has passed, perhaps like his card hand, despite attempts to succeed again. Perhaps the male gender is no more immune to the Hollywood actor/actress career death than the female. If we want to get all Mulvey here, though, all we need to point out is this: despite Norma’s apparently successful power grab at the end, killing Joe and returning to her castle, Joe’s verbal power dominates the film through narration despite his death. Norma is deprived of a voice in the end, and her madness in the presence of the Hollywood press is perhaps the most humiliating (read: punishing) fate she could have met.

Replacing

Grave

Image-ining

Passed

Darling

Chaps

DeMan

Distracted

Descent

Fading

Quickies, Vol. I

When there’s no time for thinking, let alone writing, time will be made for quickies.

Gran Torino (dir. Clint Eastwood): Great, small movie. Eastwood is a competent director and as an actor, no one plays him better than himself. Has been called everything between “a sleeper hit” and “Dirty Old Man Harry.” Anyone remotely attached to the Christian tradition seems to like it a lot, for obvious reasons. It must be admitted that a slightly less cliched priest character is refreshing. On a social/ethnic/cultural level, it can be applauded for spitting at racists as well as self-proclaimed “progressives” who despise everything traditional and old-fashioned.

The Double Life of Veronique (dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski): Much more to come, dv. Another Kieslowski masterpiece that dwarfs basically everything that’s popular in cinema nowadays. Beauty and death are somehow wed into a reluctant but unbreakable relationship.

Great Expectations (dir. David Lean): The work of a master in the hands of another master. Lean’s late career epics work not because he was an epic director but because he had the sensibility of an old-school British (viz., non-Hollywood) director. Other than those little old technical blips one finds in these older Kingdom films, this is basically flawless, even the casting.

In Good Company (dir. Paul Weitz): Every so often it’s healthy to remember what the masses find funny, admit that Topher Grace is kind of funny, and give Dennis Quaid (the poor man’s Harrison Ford or Kevin Costner) a proverbial slap on the back for sucking it up and maintaining his career.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (dir. Leonard Nimoy): They say II: The Wrath of Khan is best, but they take Trek too seriously. This one is best, not least because it’s the funniest, returning its characters back to the 60s, including even a dose of nuclear paranoia. They moved Monterey to San Francisco, they thought Leningrad would still exist in the 23rd century, and they got away with some serious history-altering. But with Spock swearing, McCoy back in control of his marbles (more or less), and Chekhov demanding directions to the “nuclear wessels,” it’s quite worth it.

Avanti! (dir. Billy Wilder): A silly movie that is, in its way, perfect. Billy Wilder is a master journeyman at this point. Jack Lemmon (like Eastwood, above) plays himself to a T. And instead of death and beauty coexisisting in reciprocated harmony (above again), we have death and comedy, with a slightly more tentative hold on one another. It’s post-code AND in Italy, so along with Wilder finally being free to unveil his actresses (along with Lemmon), the moral of the story is that it’s perfectly acceptable (even admirable) to cheat on your spouse, as long as you do it consistently with only one other person.

A Sentence on Sabrina

The Greatests

Containing performances from Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden, Billy Wilder’s supremely enjoyable Sabrina, which would have succeeded at least as well had Cary Grant remained in the role that eventually went to Bogie, is nothing if not the embodiment of classy, golden-age Hollywood cinema, embracing as it does the American way, the notion of Europe – especially Paris – as the place of finding the self, and above all its own stars.