3 Promising Young Women

Perusing my recent Letterboxd entries, I see that I have watched three films with related themes over the past several days. These connections wouldn’t necessarily occur to me without that site organizing my viewing for me. I choose what to watch for a variety of reasons, not all of them easy to unpack.

I rented 2020’s Promising Young Woman based on a few blurbs and the premise, and the style glimpsed in the trailer and the promise of some humor. It’s a #MeToo era rape revenge film, a problematic genre, historically, with 1970s sexploitation roots, that has often gloried in the victim’s sexual abuse as much (or more) than the violent revenge she enacts in act three. This film changes up that formula in interesting ways. The original violation happened in the past, to a different character, and we never see it. Carey Mulligan’s Cassie was a lifelong friend of the victim, and dropped out of medical school after the rape to care for her friend, who appears to have later killed herself.

Cassie’s response to this tragedy is the twist which gives the movie most of its cathartic power, and dark humor, as she visits bars and nightclubs, pretends to be wasted drunk and allows men to take her home. At some point, when they make a move on her, she drops the drunk routine and enjoys watching them turn white as a sheet and protest, absurdly, that they’re really “nice guys,” even though they had been about to assault or rape her. In some cases—such as when the guy who takes her home is the dorky actor who played “McLovin” so memorably in Superbad (2007)—this is played for uncomfortable laughs.

This is a clever premise and, of course, its ruthlessness in revealing the predator in many a “nice guy” is bracing and troubling. Cassie has a notebook in which she keeps track of how many times she’s done this act—and it’s a LOT. There’s no indication that she has ever suffered any immediate consequences for this, though. This places the film in the range of plenty of B-movie revenge fantasies. It’s a fantasy to imagine that she could recklessly do this, night after night, without ever getting badly hurt. But it’s an empowering fantasy, for a while.

What would you predict would happen next? Yep, she meets an actual nice guy. A sweet, relaxed, respectful guy willing to take things slow. Does he turn out not to be what he seems? What do you think?

The problem with a fantasy is that it’s hard to subsequently shift into something approximating reality, where we might find truthful behavior and possibly redemption. The premise does not really allow us to believe that her Nice Guy is what he seems. Nearly all of the men in the film are predators, or predator-adjacent. So while we wait for the other shoe to drop, Cassie shifts into her real revenge plan. There are specific individuals—her friend’s rapist, a former friend who wouldn’t acknowledge the truth, the lawyer whose aggressive defense of the rapist drove the friend to suicide, the college dean who didn’t do enough to protect the friend—who Cassie targets with the kind of crazy, cruel but cathartic attacks that can only happen in the movies. We are meant to cheer her on and feel these people deserve what they get—and perhaps they do. After all, this is not really a movie about people as much as it is about a broken society that looks the other way and makes excuses for violence against women.

It’s common for tonal shifts in movies to simply not work very well, and that’s what happens here. There are ways this movie could have been a pitch black comedy or a luridly aggressive revenge film; it dabbles in these modes, but also wants to be taken a bit more seriously than that, provoking genuine care and concern for a well-played but not well-drawn character.

I contrast it with, for example, David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), which I rewatched over a couple of nights recently. I read the book series some years ago, prior to the movie, and while it’s amusing and suspenseful, it’s also fairly lurid and ridiculous. That’s what the movie’s got to work with and Fincher makes it haunting and beautiful—but it’s still lurid and ridiculous. He cleans up certain aspects—Daniel Craig’s disgraced reporter is far less of an absurd slut than in the book, in which the character sleeps with pretty much every woman he encounters. Rooney Mara’s Lizbeth Salander is a victim of years of sexual violence and abuse, a ward of the state as a result of her attempts at revenge, but she is also completely in charge of almost everything she does in the film, apart from the abuse she suffers at the hand of her new case worker. She is by far the smartest, most competent, coolest person in the story; plus a parody of the omnipotent hacker trope, plus a righteous revenge goddess from hell. She is not to be trifled with and, if you cross her badly, she will utterly destroy you. Yet she is also sensitive and kind, from time to time, and makes her own decisions about what to do, including fucking Daniel Craig. Dragon Tattoo, the book (and the Swedish film), was originally titled Men Who Hate Women, and the horrors of the story are directly on the nose when it comes to that. There’s a lot of fantasy going on in this story, too, but it doesn’t try to be something else—in Fincher’s hands it’s a diabolical thriller with a deeply committed central performance (of a fantastical character), and it doesn’t waver from that mission.

I also watched Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), a brilliant character study of a difficult teenage girl who also falls prey to an older man’s predation. That is not what the film is about, however; it’s something that happens and, like the whole film, it’s deeply complicated and troubling. Arnold doesn’t tell a story of a promising young woman undone by misogyny. She tells a story of a violent, deeply troubled, utterly believable lower class girl, who views the world with great ambivalence. There’s almost no one she can rely on—certainly not the adults who are closest to her—but must get by on her instincts. She frequently makes objectively bad decisions that seem totally understandable, particularly given her lack of support; but she also has a persistent, if cloaked, ability to hope for something better. Arnold doesn’t offer us much catharsis; instead she offers us humanity in all of its complexity and contradiction.

Schizophrenia, Doppelgängers, Victor Frankenstein and Dory Seif

Having spent some time reading Frankenstein recently, I have had Frankenstein on the brain. Although there is plenty of textual evidence for this not being the case, I certainly entertained the theory that Victor Frankenstein was the monster; that he had committed all or most of the acts attributed to his creation. Although he may simply be a typical Romantic character (when will Timothée Chalamet play this role), his constant emotionalism and nearly endless minor yet debilitating nervous illnesses and other periods of seeming self-delusion and inability to reason effectively suggest serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

Mary Shelley’s book is full of doubles; many characters seem to have a light/dark partner—Victor and the creature, Henry and Victor, Elizabeth and Justine—and then there is the frame story (Walton’s) and the frame within the frame, in which Walton recounts Victor’s recounting of the creature’s tale, a recursive possibly psychological in-growth that starts to look like dissociative identify disorder. As I say, the text doesn’t completely support this reading but it doesn’t completely not support it, either.

I was thinking about this is the context of the latest season of Search Party, season four of which debuted on HBO Max recently (with a final block of episodes coming later this week). The show has been admirably all-over-the-place in its run, first as a clever metaphorical quarter-life crisis mystery comedy, then as a procedural thriller, then as a zany courtroom dramedy and now as psychological horror, while still being weirdly hilarious in a way that undercuts its purported seriousness. But if the show as a whole continues to function as a comic examination of quarter-life melodrama, what are we to make of all the twists and turns, which have taken us far beyond its original somewhat realism-adjacent scenario?

Could it be that, perhaps like Victor Frankenstein’s Romantic ravings, Dory Seif’s situation is actually (if there can be said to be an “actually”) a fantasy of her own mind’s creation? More to the point, whatever it turns out to “be” in the end, could we not understand it in this way?

After all, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the text seems, in some ways, to contradict this reading—we can still understand it as such. I have a feeling there is a name for this interpretation—it’s not that, in the story, it’s “all in her mind,” but rather that the story is what it is, but works better as a metaphor for the experience of the subconscious mind under certain circumstances.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In my years-long project to develop a deep understanding of the “gothic,” I had still never read one of the foundational works of gothic literature, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s 1818 proto-scifi Romantic novel. I finished the book over the weekend—I believe that I read the 1818 version, based on descriptions online of the later revisions, but my free ebook version did not specifically say which text it was, annoyingly. (In what I read, Elizabeth is Victor’s cousin, which likely indicates the 1818 version.) I can say it’s a fascinating text, perhaps not one that I loved, but absolutely crucial. For one thing, my previous understanding of Victor Frankenstein and his monster, from pop culture, was, of course, completely wrong in terms of the book.

I’m trying to think of how I first encountered Frankenstein (‘s monster) as a character or idea. I am tempted to say in a commercial for Franken Berry cereal. I think I’ve never eaten it, but I assume it’s a cereal cobbled together from a sinister collection of bits and pieces of other cereals? and then flavored to evoke berries of some kind? Then there’s James Whale’s great movie, which I had naturally encountered many times long before I actually saw it, and its direct sequel which I still haven’t seen. Plus The Munsters, Scooby Doo, Young Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Coppola-produced 1994 film, and many other references.

Reading the book, then, was a bit disorienting. I expected it to be considerably different from the story I knew, but I also expected the subsequent tellings to have some grounding in the book, instead of practically none. Whale’s Frankenstein, which is the dominant version of the story now, was based on an unproduced American adaptation of a British play that was based on the novel (just barely). The stage-to-screen version of the story adapts the bare bones of the concept and a few of the incidents of the novel, while adding much of what we think of as key elements: the monster’s inability to speak, his lumbering awkwardness, bolts in his neck, the use of electricity in the form of lightning to animate the monster and Victor as a modern “mad scientist” character. Whale does manage to dramatize the fiend’s emotional experience a little bit, making him a sympathetic figure, which is true to the book at least in character.

What surprised me the most about the book was how little detail there is about the monster’s creation. There is practically no description of it, just fleeting mentions of the cobbling together of a very tall human-like creature from used parts that then Victor brought to life—somehow, via some mysterious science he learned about but wouldn’t talk about. He did not scream, “It’s alive!” under crashing thunder and flashing lightning; instead, he felt bad immediately and ran away, then came back later to find his creation gone. A subsequent revision of Shelley’s may have added a bit more detail, possibly involving “galvanism,” an early exploration of electricity, but in the original, nada.

To a modern reader, Victor Frankenstein’s embodiment of Romanticism can be incredibly tiresome, as he fails spectacularly to prevent the utter destruction of his friends and family primarily because he has so many feelings he’s contracted a cold and can’t get out of bed. I have seen the interpretation that the monster may, for Mary Shelley, have embodied certain unsavory traits of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; who knows, but I find it hard not to see Victor as a damning parody of the Romantic man, utterly ineffectual in the face of the rapidly industrializing Europe and the inherent class savageries therein. At least, I would like to look at it that way but I fear I just don’t understand Romanticism very well.

I’ll interject at this point to say that I rewatched Kenneth Branagh’s film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein after finishing the book, and that, though I didn’t remember this until I rewatched it, it’s actually much closer to the book than any other Frankenstein story I’ve seen. A serious attempt is made to follow the outline of the book, at least once the creature leaves his maker, but there is a great deal that is ridiculous about the conception, all the same. Victor, for example, is played by a youthfully narcissistic Branagh as a dashing and well-muscled young doctor, who must remove his shirt to display his hard-won abdominals when practicing his science, and certainly seems pathetic, but not nearly pathetic enough. He is neither as sickly nor as deranged as the original Victor, though he does avail himself of a Shakespearean catalog of feelings. Helena Bonham Carter’s Elizabeth is more interesting than the character in the book, that is to say, she’s crazier here, which is a Bonham Carter mode that has become more pronounced over the run of her career. MSF doesn’t have these two kids as cousins, but does have a hilariously icky moment when they discuss how they are going to have to stop thinking of each other as siblings so they can become lovers, and then they kiss fiercely. (In the 1818 version, they are first cousins and she’s raised from infancy as if she’s Victor’s sister but they are promised to each other in marriage, nonetheless.)

Also, regardless of how the filmmakers strive to downplay it, the fact is Branagh’s Victor implants John Cleese’s brain in Robert De Niro’s head, with much less funny results than one would hope. Cleese is fine in a straight role as one of Victor’s professors, but it’s impossible not to believe De Niro’s monster will inherit a silly walk or two. He does not. It should be said, though, that De Niro is great in this movie, bringing a method actor’s determination to an almost inconceivably appalling character, who is absurdly designed. Both of the reanimated monsters suggest Victor is a terrible doctor, as he has apparently (very badly) stitched them together like a Grand Guignol set at a quilting bee rather than in any rational relation to the circumstances of their human deaths. When he reanimates the dead Elizabeth (also not in the book), there’s nary a mark on her corpse, but he stitches the fuck out of her anyway.

In the novel, the creature is remarkably sympathetic. He only hurts people in self-defense, at first, and has a mighty hope that he will find people who will befriend him. He teaches himself philosophy from first principles, and learns to read and write. Although hideous to behold, he is naturally gentle and highly rational and articulate, and tragically only too aware of his own monstrousness and the rage he feels at his rejection by society. This leads to a bit of murder. But then he asks Victor to make him a companion, swearing he will vanish from civilization with his bride, never to be seen again, never hurting another person.

Victor eventually consents and begins work on this new creature and even almost finishes the work, then he destroys her in a fit when the creature visits him for a progress report. As a result, the creature swears revenge against Victor and all his friends and family and then proceeds to destroy them all—just like he said he would. Victor fails to take this seriously at all, in glaringly obvious ways, to his ruin. He’s a very hard character to find sympathy for, since he could have prevented almost all the violence.

Is Frankenstein the original science fiction? It’s often regarded as such, although in some ways it seems to have such a hostility toward science and the scientific worldview that it’s a questionable designation. At the same time, it isn’t exactly a cautionary tale about a scientific god-complex run amok because Victor is so pathetic. He could have fixed a lot of things by doing more science, but he doesn’t because he’s too horrified. In any case, it remains a fascinating, hugely important work and I’m glad I finally got around to it.

Recently Watched: Peaceful Transition Edition (Fingers Crossed)

A couple of lesser Carpenter films, a Lord-Miller rewatch, a surprisingly good horror remake, a “problematic” early 80s comedy and a Fellini classic—as usual, my film consumption is all over the place, although as I look through my Letterboxd diary I see I’m comfortably in mainstream and B-movie territory without much to challenge me. I think I will need to get artsier again soon, and maybe for awhile.

Several years ago I did a dive into the John Carpenter filmography, but I left several films unwatched. I’ve caught up on two of those, his remake of Village of the Damned (1995) and his Vampires (1998). Considering that his greatest film is a remake (The Thing, 1982), Village of the Damned is not automatically lesser Carpenter, but it feels a lot like a story told well, but too quickly with much elided. An eclectic cast is fun—Christopher Reeve (in his final released theatrical film role before his paralyzing accident), Kirstie Alley, casually tossing off a version of the Ambitious Government Scientist role while chain-smoking colorful cigarettes, and Mark Hamill, of all people, among other faces. It seems strange to say this, but I could have used another 30-60 minutes of this story. I really wanted to know some of the stories of the early years of the alien/hellspawn kids as their “parents” became increasingly suspicious about their origins, but the film skips on from their births to their later childhood, when they start taking control of everything.

The story reminds me somewhat of Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, in which a small Maine hamlet is cut off from the world when its residents fall under the sway of alien technology. An execrable TV movie was made of that book; Carpenter could have done it a thousand times better. He’s always handled his ensembles well, giving each character interesting moments of defining action, even in smaller roles. This would have served the King story well, as it does Village.

Vampires is the more entertaining of the two Carpenter films. Its take on vampire mythology and its gleefully copious gore are reminiscent of Kathryn Bigelow’s outlaw vampire Western, Near Dark, 1987. Instead of a roving band of scummy vampire druggies, here’s a roving band of scummy vampire hunters, led by an obnoxiously charming James Woods and a Baldwin (Daniel). Sheryl Lee (Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer) also shows up to act circles around everyone else. This is a B-movie and it makes little sense, but does it with panache. A motel party gone very wrong is a highlight, as is the role played by the Catholic Church, which has, of course, been hunting vampires for centuries.

The Lego Movie, which I have seen four or five times now, thanks to having children, is one of those rare kids movies that is utterly rewatchable for adults and kids alike. It’s almost a Pixar movie in that sense. The voice acting is great, the writing is great, the jokes are so fast and plentiful that I’m still laughing at things I’ve missed before. Chris Miller and Phil Lord (and their many collaborators), as they did with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (based on a minor classic but very short kid’s book), manage to elevate the source material (plastic toys) so far beyond the “how can this even be a movie” complaint it feels like an original work, even though it’s about as successful a vertically-integrated, synergistic, corporate pop-culture machine-object as you can possibly imagine.

In March, I watched Irvin Yeaworth’s 1958 scifi-horror The Blob, about which I wrote, “Like if Nicholas Ray made The Thing From Another World.” Happy to make a second Thing reference in one post. That earlier version starred an 18-year-old Steve McQueen, who already looked like a 40-year-old Steve McQueen, somehow, as a troubled teenager forced to face off with a wad of gelatinous space goo that tries to eat his town. It’s a gorgeous color FX film, a teen melodrama at heart, with a conceptually frightening monster that’s also gloriously silly, a superbly squishy symbol of teen angst if I’ve ever seen one. The remake, from 1988, is very much the same in terms of its tone and meaning, but the practical horror FX are an 80s gore pinnacle, in the most delightfully disgusting way. It’s not scary but it is a laugh riot while still making us care about (some of) the characters. Shawnee Smith is a standout; so is Kevin Dillon.

The “problematic” 80s comedy was Tootsie, one of the funniest movies, in my opinion, with a peerless cast. I may write about this at more length soon. Or not. We shall see.

Finally, Fellini. I was gifted the gorgeous new Criterion box set for Christmas, so I picked one I somehow hadn’t seen, 1957’s Nights of Cabiria. What can one say? A luminous, heartbreaking masterpiece with a performance for the ages by Giulietta Masina. Maybe a top ten performance in cinema; as full of life in all its joy and sadness as any ever placed before a camera.

A Bunch of Predators, Ranked

Yesterday I finished the fourth of the four main “Predator” movies, The Predator (2018), co-written and directed by Shane Black, who played one of the special-ops soldiers in the first movie, Predator, from 1987. His character wore glasses and was the first to be killed by the alien in that movie. This “franchise” has never really cohered, even though there are four films in the main series and two films in the off-shoot “Alien Versus Predator” series. Here is how I would rank the movies in terms of overall quality:

6. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007) is cold garbage, an incoherent hash of trash.

5. Predators (2010) is hot garbage, with decent effects and dully repetitive action.

4. Alien vs. Predator (2004) is a mildly underrated B-movie that brings some interesting ideas to both the Alien and Predator franchises.

3. Predator 2 (1990) is an oddly giddy, oddly conceived, often entertaining direct sequel to the first film, with a fun cast.

2. Predator (1987) is a ridiculously over-the-top pure-80s Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that sort of works as a vague satire of American foreign policy but is mostly a hyper-masculine celebration of deforestation by ammunition and camp posturing. It has as much on its mind as a wrestling match but is far bloodier.

1. The Predator (2018) is a charmingly winking and characteristically violent action comedy focusing on an hilarious group of Section 8 misfits who join forces with a resourceful government biologist (Olivia Munn) to fend off a couple of dueling predators somewhere in American suburbia. This is the best Predator movie and one can imagine more in this vein if the series’ producers were not so lacking in imagination. It’s hardly a great movie, but it has a good sense of speed and fun. There are also a lot of ringers in the cast, in supporting roles—Keegan Michael-Key, for example, and Tom Jane and Sterling Brown. The kid from Room is also here, playing the lead soldier’s young son whose Asperger’s boosts his tech acumen. (Child Prodigy trope.) Adding a kid into the mix is a classic sequel move (viz. Friday the 13th Part IV, Aliens) that pays off here with some sweet anti-bullying maneuvers. And Munn, in particular, is given one of her better roles here—playing, as usual, the brainy, sexy, down-to-hang fun-time girl, with a lot of grit and humor. (Fun fact, when my wife and I lived in Los Angeles for a few years in the aughts—when I was in film school—she was our neighbor. We refer to her as “Neighbor,” actually. She went by Lisa Munn, then; Olivia is her middle name. It’s been fun to watch her career from afar.)

To find Predator-based creativity, one really needs to turn to the comics. It’s puzzling that more hasn’t been made of these for new movies in the series. The comics (I’ve not read them, apart from a couple) appear to place Predators in the middle of a variety of human conflicts throughout history all around the world, any of which would be cool backdrops for film versions. Also, in the comics Predators have faced off with, not only Xenomorphs from the Alien series, but also a serial killer, African villagers, fishermen, Jesse James, American Civil War soldiers, Judge Dredd, Batman, Superman, Tarzan, Archie and the Terminator.

Having seen them all, I really think the movie franchise should aim higher. I am ready for some variety.

January 6, 2021, a Date That Will Live In Stupidity

I spent much of yesterday with two news channels playing on two screens and with Twitter and YouTube livestreamers open on my laptop, following the chaos in Washington, D.C., as a delusional President exhorted his delusional disciples to storm the U.S. Capitol, and they did. On major news days I often check out the differing ways news networks and other outlets cover events. There was also major news out of Georgia, as both Democratic Senate candidates were confirmed to have won their runoff elections, tilting the balance of power in the next Congress just barely to the Democrats. (Once Fox News reports something counter to its ideology, you know it must have actually happened.)

It’s difficult to predict the medium- and long-term effects of the confederacy of dunces’ play-attack on democracy; short-term it seems to be even more binge-drinking, stress-eating and high-theatrical declamation, and vast, pillowy depression, than were already manifest. Of course, the only people who would have felt any of that were those paying attention, which rules out many Americans, and those who have a basic faith in our democratic institutions, which rules out most Americans. To be fair, most people just want to live their lives without needing to pay too much attention to the news media and politics, which has been one of the chief stressors of the Trump era—feeling the need to know what the fuck is going on and not finding a lot of clearly trustworthy information.

It’s not my intention to spend much time on this blog writing about politics or current events, but there are, of course, many relevant aspects to think about, such as the narrative structures of news media, issues of media literacy and how our politics are recapitulated in our downstream media, such as the responses of Internet culture, television and the movies to this moment in history. I am fascinated by the question of how, for example, filmmakers will eventually characterize the Trump presidency. We’ve had films about the Clintons and Bushes and Obamas; Ronald Reagan even has a cameo in the latest Call of Duty video game. Who will play Trump? How will we tell the story of this era to ourselves in five or ten years? Will January 6, 2021, be remembered by anyone outside of the MAGA death cult? Will we point to this date with some significance as we weather some future anti-democratic unrest? Is it just a speed bump on the road toward, or away from, decline and ruin? Will we wake up with a Trump hangover, purge, drink some Gatorade, have a greasy breakfast and start to feel better, while forgetting the drunken embarrassment of the night before?

Different Children

“People are worried about whether this TV series or this kind of storytelling will become a competition to cinema. I don’t think so. They are just the different children of Lumière.” Wong Kar Wai

Recently Watched: Holiday Edition

Twas the season of comfort movies, old favorites, catching up on a few missing pieces. I had a John McTiernan double-feature, first rewatching his dum-de-dum delightful Christmas movie, Die Hard, followed by the jungle bloodbath of Predator. I got the Predator 4K collection as a gift; when I finish the series, I’ll say more about that.

Christmas with the kids, once the Lord of the Rings fest is over, would’t be complete without Miyazaki (Howl’s Moving Castle this time) and the MCU—my younger son has been wanting to watch Avengers: Endgame again, so we took a long afternoon to do so. I have many issues with the MCU (and most superhero movies, really), but given how beloved this movie is I wanted to give it a solid rewatch. Endgame is fine, for what it is, which is an intermittently charming, interminable effects reel, with lots of feels, which I guess were earned over the twenty or whatever previous movies. It’s impressively excessive, but I will never love this movie.

For my money, Venom is more fun. If I can’t really believe much of what happens in a super hero movie, not enough to have strong feelings about the outcome, I can definitely enjoy one that leans way into the ridiculousness. Tom Hardy’s performance in Venom is delightfully funny—it’s like if Brando did a superhero movie, this mumbly tenor vocalization he does—and none of the movie takes anything too seriously. It’s interesting how “taking it seriously” is so often not what one wants in a movie. At least not a movie about sentient space goo making a washed-up reporter’s midlife crisis a lot zanier.

I also watched (sigh) Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s latest impenetrable think-piece action movie. The harder the movie worked to make me care, the less I gave a fuck. That’s not to say that the visuals were not impressive, or some of the set pieces incredible, but his movies pretend to a sophistication they lack and claim to be heady and full of ideas, and…well, they’re full of something all right. Mostly bad acting, as it turns out.

Why is it okay to like things?

The title is a little disingenuous—the topic requires a lot more attention, IMO—but I was thinking…

My family has made an annual tradition of watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the Christmas holiday break. This year I upgraded the tradition by buying the 4K restoration, which was well worth it—the movies have not looked this good since I saw them in the theater almost twenty years ago. These are comfort food movies at this point. We love them and, although I am personally over them as a film lover who craves novelty, to the point of finding them a bit tedious, the tradition is still a relaxing shared cultural experience with my wife and kids.

Having seen the films many times (and having loved the books as a teenager), the ideologies present in them become more and more apparent and more and more troubling with each rewatch. Not to belabor it, or be dully obvious, but the Lord of the Rings puts forward a breathtakingly conservative, “Rue Britannia” colonialist, classist and white supremacist worldview, which was Tolkien’s worldview to be sure, but which the movies, if anything, only extend and make more explicit. I can’t watch them anymore without seeing this, yet I can say without shame that I still love the movies (and the books) and will continue to watch them and show them to my kids.

I believe it’s inevitable that cultural objects such as works of art (whether high-, middle-, or low-brow, if that’s even a thing to be discussed without laughing) will contain troubling aspects—problematic aspects, to use a term I don’t love—and that our views on these will change over time. And, further, that artists will also often be jerks, or much worse, with the same kinds of prejudices and blind spots as anyone. I still love Tolkien for what his work has meant to me, even though his worldview is very old-fashioned, to put it nicely.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the War of J.K. Rowling, in which an utterly beloved popular artist has blown up her reputation and her own fandom by publishing some tiresomely stupid ideas about trans people in the past year. The worldview evident in Tolkien/Jackson’s work is far worse than Rowling’s ignorant transphobia, counted in terms of the larger impact of the ideas so contained, but for a generation of young people who grew up reading her books, her recent public statements have been an unforgivable betrayal of what they presumed were shared values.

On its own, the disappointment is a wholly reasonable reaction. What I don’t understand is why anyone would allow her wrong opinions to destroy their feelings about Harry Potter, as many have claimed they have. Further—and this is the rub for me—why isn’t the cultural response ever about Let’s help this person we love see the error in her views, rather than, Let’s banish this bigot forthwith from our sight and into the smoking depths of hell where she clearly belongs?

I am asserting without explaining, here. And I am simply reacting to Twitter and the various “think pieces,” so-called, that I have read about Rowling this year, without linking to them or attempting to put together a cohesive argument. Sorry about that. This is a much larger topic than I want to get into at this moment, but I hope to return to it at a later time.

A Reddit Response: the Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Genre

I came upon a post on r/TrueFilm today regarding a subgenre called “Girls with Guns,” making a common argument about genre—that X definitively is or is not an example of genre Y—that is a pastime of many a film fan. I wrote a didactic but hopefully not completely unwanted response about one of my favorite ways to explain genre, reprinted here:

To me, this is one of the things that makes genre so interesting—that these kinds of arguments break out about what does and what doesn't count as an example of a particular genre. One explanation that I've found helpful is the "semantic/syntactic" approach to genre studies, developed by Rick Altman in the early 1980s. (See "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre," by Rick Altman, Cinema Journal, Spring 1984.)

"...we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions which depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like—thus stressing the semantic elements which make up the genre—and definitions which play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders—relationships which might be called the genre's fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre's building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged."

In a nutshell, the semantic approach is what you're taking with your explanation of the parameters of the Girls with Guns subgenre. Altman does not emphasize one approach over the other; instead, he investigates each and writes about how they are both useful approaches.

A syntactic approach would extend the genre potentially well beyond the fundamentals that you mention, allowing us to discuss Aliens, for example, in generic terms, as a Girls with Guns movie, even though it may lack a number of aspects typical in a semantic interpretation.

A different example: Westerns

A semantic approach to the Western would identify the genre as taking place in the American West during the late 19th century, and featuring such elements as horses, trains, guns, outlaws, sheriffs, saloons, brothels, shootouts, cattle drives and more. This description is what we tend to mean when we say a movie is a Western.

However, syntactically, we could talk about the idea of the frontier, the place where organized society and "the wild" come together, issues of individuality and collectivism, the struggles of the law and the meaning of justice, and the concept of civilization itself. This approach allows us to talk about the ways in which, for example, The Mandalorian can be thought of as Western (or as a Samurai story, etc.) in spite of the lack of some of the literal trappings of the Western.

Just to emphasize the point—both approaches are valuable. To me, though, allowing for both helps create a bunch of interesting insights and connections between different types of movies that can be very useful when analyzing how they work and what they mean.

Critical Theory, Today

I attended an unusual college, some time ago now, called St. John’s College. I studied on the Annapolis campus, while there is a second campus in Santa Fe. The St. John’s “Program,” as it’s called, comprises a four year set curriculum for all students, based on a chronological reading of the “Great Books" (of Western Civilization) across many fields. It is a rigorous and intense classical liberal arts education, that the college explains thusly:

If the St. John’s program were to be analyzed by credits into major and minors it would correspond to two majors, one in history of mathematics and science, and the other in philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, and political theory. The minors would be in classical studies and comparative literature. Beyond these fields, students also explore language, history, politics, law, economics, music, art, theology, math, science, and psychology.

It is no humblebrag to mention it; on the contrary, it is a prideful boast that I have a degree from this school; it was one of the best decisions I have made in my life.

No undergraduate experience is perfect, however. For instance, I knew well that I was interested in pursuing a study of, and production experience in, film, when I matriculated, but there were no film classes. There were no real electives, except on a small scale. My campus had around 400 undergraduates, which I’ve come to understand is a very small number. And the curriculum more or less ends well before the mid 20th century.

As I eventually found my way back to school—I earned an MFA in Film Directing from CalArts, with the intention of one day teaching—and since then, as I began a teaching practice, I have read many more texts on media and cinema than I encountered as an undergrad, when I could only read them in my minimal spare time. As my interest in my field has grown and as I have pursued more teaching and research opportunities, I have recognized a need to begin building on the foundation of college a bridge into the realm of today’s academic discussions. By “today’s” I mean “the 20th century” and beyond. I have a lot to catch up on.

A couple of months ago I posted a query on the subreddit r/CriticalTheory, asking for advice in continuing my education and received a number of gracious and hugely useful responses. (In all seriousness, Reddit is my favorite place on the Internet and, by far, the best and most useful “social media.” Due to user moderation it is actually possibly to have pleasant and interesting exchanges with like-minded people on any imaginable topic.) Following up on those suggestions, but not wanting to dive directly into any specific thinker’s work without a bit more context, I found a well-regarded introductory textbook.

Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide earns its subtitle. For someone who read Freud and Marx in school (25 years ago) but did not follow up from there to feminism to structuralism to queer theory to post-colonialism to all of the many, many ways scholars have chosen to interpret texts in the last hundred years, this is precisely the book I was looking for. It builds on what I have read and hugely expands my understanding so I can begin comprehending academic writing on film and literature with somewhat less confusion—not to mention grasp some of the basic ideas that have saturated the worldview of the chattering classes for many years.

One of the most helpful aspects of the book—which strikes a perfect balance of introduction and depth—is Tyson’s use of The Great Gatsby as a common text to which to apply each type of criticism she describes. So far I have read a psychoanalytical interpretation, a Marxist and a feminist reading, and will get to many others. I reread Gatsby recently in preparation for Tyson’s book which, apart from being a great classic, is also quite short, comprehensible and broadly interpretable.

Critical theory is often maligned by partisans (who fail to understand its uses) and misunderstood by well-educated generalists who have found in it a new orthodoxy of the left, in my opinion. I see both responses online and offline daily, in culture war skirmishes, moral panics and rigid political ideologies. But, to me, the endless varieties of critical theory are but a tool, a collection of many frameworks for interpreting the world. More than merely mental exercise, these frameworks prove exceedingly useful in cracking open texts and developing cultural and political understanding.

Recently Watched: Home Video Edition

Managed to feed the movie beast pretty well over the last few days.

I started Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, beginning with the absorbing activist drama, Mangrove. McQueen has released five films in this anthology, the medium of which we still call television, for some reason. There’s been a lot of drama lately (on Film Twitter, for example) about the horror of Warner Bros. 2021 release schedule, in which their biggest films will be released in theaters and HBO Max on the same day. Some are up in arms about how this is an utter betrayal of filmmakers, I think because they expected their films to only be in theaters at first? and they’re concerned that this might finally bring about the long-rumored Death of Cinema? And probably something about a lot of money?

But would Steve McQueen get to drop five movies into theaters in a month, like, ever? The Rise of Streaming has certainly created a content glut on the one hand; on the other it appears that fans have perhaps never had such a diversity of serious film options available in the history of the moving image. Theatrical has been dominated by thunderous, shiny, shitty blockbusters for a long time, but never as much as in the last 20 years. I love (and miss) going to the movies as much as anyone, but I would defenestrate that release window entirely, forever, if it meant more and more artists actually get to make movies.

I also watched Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides, which the Criterion Collection put out earlier this year. This studio melodrama is a good example of the kind of adult-focussed movies that rarely make it to theaters anymore, even without a pandemic. It’s not an art film; it has many flaws from a cineaste perspective. But it also does a lot of things very well, particularly in the performances, and it’s an incredibly rare bird, too: a movie produced and directed by, and co-starring, a major female star. You can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of times that has ever happened.

The Assistant, written and directed by Kitty Green, is a subtle but quietly devastating drama about how the crimes of a Weinstein-type boss implicate everyone around them, and the hell of working in that environment. It has a 1.8/5 audience score on Google—check out the darkly funny and broadly illiterate one-star reviews! The central performance by Julia Garner is a master class in economy and control. I was riveted.

And, of course, I watched some horror. The best among them was one of the cleverest meta-horror satires I’ve seen, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), which manages to successfully spoof both the slasher genre and the found footage genre (in a way), in a very low budget package. I finally watched the 2019 Child’s Play remake, after listening to my YouTube-educated 8 year-old talk about it nonstop (though he’s never seen it). It’s a winking, but surprisingly funny and clever take on Chucky with some good performances and the creepiest implementation of Alexa ever.

Finally, I watched Clive Barker’s classic Hellraiser. I don’t think I had seen it, but I forget a lot of things. Not a fan of this one, which isn’t scary in 2020, but it sure is gross. I like gross, don’t get me wrong, but I may not be the right audience for the S&M-from-hell stuff.

A Warren of Books

Here are some of the books I’ve found in my quest to try to understand camp. It can sometimes be incredibly difficult for unofficial scholars, like me, to track down academic papers. Many of them are locked up behind shockingly expensive paywalls, even though often the authors are unpaid and the research was supported by public tax dollars. But some of the essays can be found in collections that occasionally can be bought used.

Rabbit Hole

We say “went down a rabbit hole” when we chase an idea as far as we can, through many twists and turns and sub-topics and related ideas before we look up and realize three hours have passed. The idiom seems to have originated with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), although we have shorn some of the original connotation of chaos and confusion from the usage. Now we talk about Wikipedia rabbit holes—but perhaps we should use the word “warren,” to suggest the multi-path hyperlinked approach to acquiring information familiar in the “Internet Age,” rather than the original idea of falling, falling, falling into some other place.

I have been exploring a warren of ideas this year having to do with my experiences watching films. Movies, for me, are not just entertainment. They are the realm of my greatest curiosity, my lifelong study, and I am interested, more or less, in every aspect of the moving-image media. David Thomson refers to attempting to comprehend the “whole equation” of the movies—aesthetic, historical, industrial considerations; artistic movements, individual and group practitioners, politics; style, meaning, intention, authorship—the whole shebang. This resonates for me because I have many times felt myself reaching for that (not achievable) totality of understanding.

It’s a topic I find inexhaustibly interesting, which is something of a problem when I want to focus on a more narrow, at-least-theoretically comprehensible sub-category. This fall my thoughts have been coalescing around an investigation of how I watch certain horror movies. I want here to begin to summarize my circuitous path so far, in terms of which texts I’ve accumulated, and what I’ve understood to this point.

2

When I was in high school, I tried writing a horror spoof I called Slasher Basher Dude. For research, I watched the Friday the 13th movies—at that time, there were 8 of them. It was memorable in the sense that I remember doing it, but many years later I had little specific memory of the individual films. This is not surprising, because they are almost perversely repetitive. So this October, I watched them again. I bought the new 40th Anniversary boxset.

There’s quite a cult around these films, which the series’ longevity nourishes, but they are not “good” movies in the usual way that people mean that (a whole other warren). For a nigh-omnivorous movie nerd, however, “goodness” matters very little. A cultural phenomenon is a cultural phenomenon even if it’s bad, and there are many fractions of that “whole equation” that make it worth watching. As I watched and formed adult-film-professor reactions to each film, I began to think about how to describe the experience of enjoying a low-budget slasher film, particularly after rewatching the fourth movie, called The Final Chapter, which became my personal favorite of the series.

Although I am considering cheap horror films at the moment—and I am well-aware that there are many viewers who steer well-clear of the genre—I also think I’m looking into something with much broader application. The thrust of my investigation is What am I doing when I watch a “bad” movie that contributes to my enjoyment beyond what the movie perhaps “deserves” on its own terms?

3

Camp is part of the equation, but that is apparently a famously complex topic. I'm looking at camp, satire, spectatorship; possibly poststructuralism. Just trying to build up some knowledge and inspiration. Read Sontag's essay, Notes on Camp. Everyone refers to it constantly. It's brilliant and useful but also maddeningly inconclusive.

I am trying to understand a viewer's experience, my own, presumably, but maybe it's a larger category. It's about how narratives that are stupid in a particular way, a kind of productive way, work as more sophisticated entertainments than intended (multi-layered), not only in ways that would be considered camp, strictly speaking (though it’s evidently not possible to speak strictly vis-a-vis camp), but in other ways that are more like satire or better understood as pastiche, for example. Adding to that supra-textual layers of meaning, such as production circumstances, the meanings of particular actors and production workers or groups of actors and production workers, as this affects interpretation. An example of this can occur in experiencing Weinstein-related films in the post-MeToo era. There's a whole lot to chew on there already; the real goal of this is to talk about how these intersecting "camps" ("poses"), if you will, relate to the viewer's pleasure and the text's aesthetic success.

The Twits Come for Mank

Predictably, Friday’s release of Mank has yielded the usual backlash on Twitter, as people discover that an artful movie about old Hollywood is not the same as actual history. Many were SHOCKED to discover that old man Gary Oldman (62) was playing a character who was twenty years younger than that when the story took place (of course, Herman Mankiewicz was a heavy smoker and world-class alcoholic, and looked considerably older than we would expect a 40 year old to look today, but never mind). Also, some distress about the white maleness of it all and the lack of Jewishness among some of the actors playing Jews.

Also, man, who were all these people? Are we supposed to know who they were? Why did David Fincher want to bore us with boring old boredom? And where are the women and black people? Why are they being erased? Plus, why was it in black and white, to make us mad? And while we’re on the subject, let’s also complain about the digital cinematography compared to black and white movies shot on film. Jesus, why wasn’t this movie just about other things and starring other people and produced totally differently?

While we’re at it, let’s also complain about how overrated Citizen Kane is. Did you know it was also in black and white?

Recently Watched: Inside Baseball Edition

Our traditional Friday night movie night pick this week, by my wife, was A Christmas Story, which she had not seen. Usefully, it was also the last Bob Clark film on my list to rewatch, after digging into his work earlier in the fall. Christmas Story is charming, of course, and very well-known by now, though I had only seen it once or twice in my life and never had a great affinity for it. That condition continues—it’s cute and strange and has a warm nostalgic blanket thrown over it, like Radio Days or something, without the polish.

Also recently rewatched Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a masterful horror film that fails to announce itself as horror, at first, but creates an unbearable tension by practically hypnotizing us to notice every single instance of the color red. Once we are hooked into doing so, Roeg plays us like a harp, deploying a red menace in bits and pieces in at least half of his frames, as our protagonists lose their grip on reality. One of the best evocations of memory and stream of consciousness as it relates to tragedy in cinema.

And Mank arrived on Netflix yesterday. A new David Fincher movie is always something of an occasion; for me, this was separately exciting because I am an old-Hollywood nerd and Citizen Kane is one of my favorite films. I am a great audience for a film about Herman Mankiewicz writing the first draft of Kane, peopled with legends like Mayer and Thalberg and Selznick and Davies and Hearst and Welles—though I can’t imagine much of a general audience for this film. It’s one of the most inside baseball Hollywood stories I’ve ever seen—which is great for me, but I think far too obscure for audiences made up of people who have never even seen Kane, much less appreciated it, much less ever learned anything at all about Hollywood history.

But it’s a wonderful script—a passion project of Fincher’s late father, Jack—and beautifully filmed and acted. My only complaint—I was more concerned about this possibility before seeing it, but even after—is that it may reignite long-settled arguments about Citizen Kane’s authorship in a confusing way. Pauline Kael’s famous 1971 essay, “Raising Kane,” for years dominated discussions of the creative contributions of the two credited writers on the film, Mankiewicz and Welles, but was largely bunk in the way it tried to excise Welles from the story of the script. This film does nothing to address the impression that Welles was not involved in the creation of the script; this is simply a false narrative. Robert Carringer’s intensive scholarship for his excellent book The Making of Citizen Kane (1996) makes clear that Welles fully deserved his co-writing credit; that the first draft depicted in Mank was a glorious starting point, but was heavily revised before production. It would be a shame if Mank were to mislead a new audience for Kane by omission.

Jason Takes Arsenio

Perhaps the best of the many Jasons was the version portrayed several times by stunt performer, Kane Hodder, who appears here. As did old-school stuntman, Ted White (from Part IV), Hodder brought a powerful physical presence to Jason as he transitioned from actual-person maniac to magical-superhuman maniac. Arsenio Hall might be the perfect foil for this—as much as I’d like to see Letterman do this, he would have likely been too annoyed to play along like Hall.

Defenestration

Parked, waiting for my son at soccer practice, I’m enjoying the lengthy documentary Crystal Lake Memories (on a portable blu-ray player), which is an oral history of the production of the Friday the 13th franchise. I am reminded that, as yet, I’ve heard little talk of Jason’s preferred killing methods. Most people would assume a bladed weapon would be the top choice; but he really loves throwing people out of windows. He also loves breaking through windows to grab people. Hmm. Might be a dissertation in this…

2020 Topics

Shitty year, for a lot of reasons. My brother died of COVID. So did hundreds of thousands of others. Trump was a person I had to know about.

But: for the privileged, “quarantine” isn’t the worst thing you can imagine. I’ve done a lot of reading, and thinking, which I enjoy, and I’ve seen a LOT of movies and gone in a bunch of new directions.

This year, I spent a while reading about the dire state of the environment and looking for “clear-eyed” explanations of the climate crisis. Then, my forever investigation of movies led me to think about the kind of movies I like, and to think about the uses of pastiche, and I watched some seminal John Waters movies, and it got me thinking about camp and satire. I had also been watching a bunch of Takashi Miike movies and it got me thinking about the same shit, and other shit, like horror.

Horror is pretty fascinating—there is always the question of why people enjoy being terrified by a film (that is, the “art horror” effect, that we feel even though we know we are “safe”). Considering this question and related questions over the years (such as the difference between fairy tales and horror, the potential uses of horror, the politics of horror and the construction of major horror tropes) has become a long-term project for me. It fits neatly alongside my study of Gothic tropes and meanings, related to a long-planned narrative project, as well as my general fascination with genre filmmaking.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my rewatching of certain horror “classics” brought me back around to my consideration of camp.

Recently Watched (Three Movies in One Day?)

A casual observer reading my Letterboxd profile might not believe that I’ve really watched as many movies as I say I did. Yesterday, for example, I added three movies to my diary. Ever since I was a teenager, though, I’ve learned to watch movies in installments. I used to sit on my parents’ bed, tucked away in their wing of the house, and watch tapes of movies I’d programmed our VCR to record off HBO. I wouldn’t have time after school to watch whole movies, so I’d parcel them out over several days. While not an ideal way to watch, perhaps, doing this probably helped me understand film structure, since I was breaking the movies apart and putting them back together in my head.

Yesterday, I watched two complete movies: in two sittings, I watched Hulu’s Happiest Season, a well-made holiday romcom starring several of my favorite actors/secret girlfriends, especially Kristen Stewart. The movie is buzzy right now for the cast and especially the premise, which is that it’s a Christmas romcom, and exactly like that sounds, and just as preordained as that, with the small difference that it focusses on a lesbian couple rather than a straight couple. That makes practically no difference to the formula, although it’s central to the setup, but it’s interesting how the realities of being LGBTQ at this moment in America lend the film an extra layer of poignancy and effectiveness.

The second movie I watched was Addams Family Values (1993), Barry Sonnenfeld’s richer, faster and even funnier sequel to The Addams Family (1991). Being a father means I watch a LOT of children’s and family movies, for better (in this case) or worse (I’m looking at you, Disney).

The third movie was me finishing up a rewatch of a movie that put me to sleep in the theater last year, Terminator: Dark Fate, a second Mackenzie Davis movie for the day. I’ve been rewatching this movie for about a week, actually, in drips here and there. That’s how boring it is. It’s probably the worst Terminator movie. Maybe they won’t make any more—but I doubt that.