Paracinema and Internet Culture

I have begun, somewhat systematically, to study my way through the essays and books I’ve collected in response to my interest in camp readings of films. I am reading more or less chronologically the shorter works, for starters, though I’ll circle back to Sontag separately. I’ve read a couple of essays about applying reader response criticism practices to film studies. Reader response, in a nutshell, says that each reader performs the text, to some degree in collaboration with the author, which means that the text does not have a fixed meaning, but shifts in meaning dependent on the reading (performing) process and the reader herself. I found these essays when I learned about reader response (in this book) and became curious about whether teachers were using it with film texts. Short answer; yes. In fact, some think reader response works particularly well with film, because of the “dynamism” of film, its ever-changing nature (given the technology of film, the uses of editing, the multivalent meanings of visual information etc.).

Next, I took another look at Jeffrey Sconce’s mid-nineties exploration of what he calls “paracinema.” It’s a thorough and entertaining description of a cinematic subculture made up of educated viewers who were giving new value to films that were rarely considered in academia. In doing so, such viewers were creating alternative canons and a counter-aesthetic to those that prevailed at the time. This activity was critical of an orthodoxy of “good” and “bad” film categories and often located subversive politics and subcultural identities in the films of the anti-canon. Sconce acknowledges that the celebration of the “badfilm” aesthetic had gone mainstream as he was writing with, for example, Mystery Science Theater 3000 and other projects.

What occurred to me was that the “paracinematic aesthetic,” appreciated by devotees of “bad” movies (and other ephemeral media), forms the basis for a lot of what we recognize today as “Internet culture.” Consider the “reading (performance)” of the trapped audience of MST3K. Their sarcastic commentary and role-play riffing while viewing a stream of terrible films is a performance of the reading/performance enacted by paracinema fans who appreciate the works for their crimes against cinematic norms. There is a throughline from the popularization of this type of “reading” of cinematic/televisual texts to the chaotic non-sequiturs of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which aired in the late-nineties. That show remixed the cartoon elements of the 1960s Saturday morning superhero series, Space Ghost, into a surreal comedy talk show. This recycling of an older pop culture artifact into a decontextualized ironic object exemplified the kitschy post-modern comedy culture of Generation X, coming of age; and Space Ghost Coast to Coast led directly to the Adult Swim block on the Cartoon Network.

Adult Swim is the mature-themed late-night segment of the Cartoon Network. It’s still running nearly 20 years after its launch (which was in early September, 2001, in retrospect a savagely ironic launch-month for a bizarro laugh factory that would indelibly reshape comedy for an era when all bets were off). The lineup of shows featured on AS has changed over the years, but, to sum up—from Wikipedia:

Adult Swim has frequently aired adult animation features, mockumentaries, sketch comedy, and pilots. The block's shows are known for their sexual themes, frank sexual discussion, nudity, strong language, and graphic violence. Many of its programs are aesthetically experimental, transgressive, improvised, and surrealist in nature. Adult Swim has contracted with various studios known for their productions in absurd and shock comedy.

Adult Swim gave us, to cite one example, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! which

features surreal and often satirical humor (at points anti-humor and cringe comedy), public-access television-style musical acts, bizarre faux-commercials with a unique editing and special effects style by Doug Lussenhop to make the show appear camp.

Naturally, I take some issue with the last phrase here—is “appearing camp” somehow different from “camp?” But the raw material for the show (which ran from 2007-2010) was the type of paracinematic detritus Sconce writes about—or, rather, the imitation of that junk; in other words, the show is stewed in the paracinematic aesthetic.

At the same time, the World Wide Web was evolving into a massive self-publishing platform. The rise of meme culture came about concurrently—Know Your Meme started in 2007 as well—and along with it the creation of new forms of media continued on YouTube and other platforms. Today, when my children show me certain YouTube videos, I can barely comprehend what I’m watching—for example, YTP—but I understand enough to see the paracinematic aesthetic blooming in a new garden.

Royal Pains

I’ve spent the last week reading Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe’s probing, enraged telling of the Sackler family’s history. It’s a story of how one family gave us “mother’s little helper” (Valium) and “the opioid epidemic” (OxyContin), and how basically the modern Sacklers are garbage people. Who have still not been punished in any legal fashion for their direct role in supplying the fuel and lighting the match of the opioid addiction crisis that led to 500,000 deaths in the US from 1999-2019, which obviously has not yet ended. They have been cancelled back to the Stone Age, for what it’s worth, their name stripped from museums and colleges.

The Sacklers have always taken the strategy of saying nothing. Even as they were forced to speak, a few of them, here and there, they never admitted anything. As far as they were concerned, if they lied to a corrupt FDA to get approval for a highly addictive painkiller by saying it wasn’t addictive and should be used for regular, non-malignant pain, and the lie worked, it was legal and they shouldn’t he held responsible. And if they kept increasing the available dosages because those pills cost more, well, that’s just good business. All legal and above-board.

Meanwhile, a young woman from a background of rough upbringing and vile abuse, consolidates her power and brandishes her business acumen to become the Queen of Meth, as seen in a new documentary series, a few years before OxyContin hit, in southern Iowa. She is Tom Arnold’s little sister, Lori, and in the late eighties and early nineties she raked in hundreds of thousands a month running methamphetamine into Iowa and selling it across the midwest. Her empire collapsed with her arrest in early November of 1991 near Ottumwa, Iowa, where I was a senior in high school at the time. Everyone in town knew about Tom Arnold, the local boy who had vaulted to Hollywood fame with his girlfriend, later wife, Roseanne Barr. But I have no memory of this major federal raid, which took in fifty members of the drug ring in the Iowa town where I lived, when I was seventeen.

Too much was really happening in my life just then. I’m not surprised I don’t remember this particular story. But it’s incredible to learn about it now, to see an underground world that coexisted in the same physical space as my own, but of which I had no awareness. And, having read the Sackler book…

The Sacklers are billionaires because they got a lot of people hooked on OxyContin. Lori Arnold did two prison terms (so far) for doing the same with meth, except she was more of a millionaire, probably. I read the Sackler book after reading about it and thinking, perhaps, it would give me a little insight into evil—specifically, how people are able to do terrible things, for years and years, and not seem to care. I don’t feel I’ve gained any insight about that, though. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand; only that people will do terrible things and will get away with it if they’re rich enough.

I daresay a lot of people agree with the Sacklers—that the opioid epidemic was the fault of junkies, not the makers of a legal painkiller. This opinion is an example of an easy, obvious prejudice that those who never come into contact with anyone using drugs legally or illegally, either for pain or for recreation, feel is logical, and therefore not something they have to ever consider further—unless they have direct experience, at some point, either because they themselves become addicted or a loved one becomes addicted. It’s an example of the common lack of empathy and compassion so useful for capitalism.

Silent and Deadly

Monte Hellman died last week at 91. He was an interesting guy who taught for a little while at CalArts while I was there; I took a class from him. He’s most well-known for a cool road movie he made in the 70s called Two-Lane Blacktop. He directed a few more features—a couple of scrappy Westerns with Jack Nicholson when they were young and some other oddball things. One of those was a horror sequel called Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out. I decided to check it out but thought I’d better see the two previous movies so I knew what was happening.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a notorious 1984 holiday slasher. The movie was pulled from release after a week due to alarm that a horror movie would be so trashy and scary for children, which took the form of complaints about Santa Claus being depicted as a killer and actual picketing. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert also famously hated the movie and named the companies and individuals responsible on air, to shame them, Siskel calling any profits “blood money.” Those were the days when people actually gave a shit about this kind of thing and popular film critics with a TV show felt it was their job to point out the moral failings of filmmakers and studios.

They were not wrong to hate this movie, however. It’s pretty bad, though some parts are enjoyably campy, including some of the ludicrous kills. I wrote a little about slasher motives recently; this movie is a textbook example of childhood trauma triggering a very specific rampage under just the right circumstances. Billy, you see, witnessed his parents getting killed by a man dressed as Santa Claus, who also tried to rape his mother, and he subsequently grew up in an orphanage run by abusive nuns. He grows up, the plot contrives to get him dressed up as Santa, then, oh boy, you better watch out! All must be punished, including the audience.

The worst sin of the first movie is that it’s mostly rote and dull, with few thrills. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, from 1987, on the other hand, is a zany, ridiculous badfilm. First of all, it renders the first movie obsolete. The new movie team was told to simply re-edit the first film and release it as a sequel; the director didn’t want to do that, however, so, on a shoestring budget he did the next best thing. Namely, he shot an absurdly protracted, illogical frame story—an interview with Billy’s younger brother, Ricky, now grown up and institutionalized in which he “remembers” the entire first movie, but edited much faster, as a thirty minute flashback, then brings us up to speed on Ricky’s subsequent life with a foster family and his activities on one very special garbage day.

Secondly, Part 2 then gets Ricky in on the family business since, owing to his own traumatic childhood, he’s triggered by, not Santa alone, but even just the color red. He’s got a score to settle with an old nun and he settles her good. The movie is an origami nuthouse, folded in on itself—first by its recitation of most of the first movie, second by Ricky and his girlfriend going to a movie theater and seeing the first movie again—centered on one of the great wildly terrible badfilm performances, by Eric Freeman as Ricky.

Two years later, Monte Hellman was hired to make the direct-to-video sequel, Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! He apparently rewrote it over a few days then shot and edited the film in a couple months. Hellman channels his Roger Corman roots and his 1970s grindhouse existentialism into this strange continuation that (along with, for example, The Hidden) also joins the small genre of proto-Twin Peaks movies with some of that show’s cast members doing weirdly Peaks-like things. Richard Beymer and Eric Da Re, who play Ben Horne and Leo on Peaks, play doctor and brother to a girl named Laura; for good measure, Mulholland Drive’s Laura Elena Harding is here, too.

In this movie, Ricky (played by a new actor) is institutionalized in a coma, his brain exposed under a dome that’s bolted to his head, gloriously. The doctor is trying to make contact with him by hooking him up, somehow, to a blind, clairvoyant teenager (Laura). When she “sees” his thoughts, she actually watches scenes from the first movie, now being repurposed for the nth time. Things go badly; Ricky awakes and trails Laura to her grandmother’s house, where Granny has set out a Christmas feast, somehow getting there first. When Laura, her brother and his girlfriend finally arrive, it takes them a long, long time to really get worried about granny’s whereabouts. First, a remarkable amount of time is spent getting to know our characters better. The best parts of this are the sweet brother and girlfriend relationship and the uneasy camaraderie between the doctor and the cop—a manic Robert Culp—who are hot on Ricky’s trail. The character development is both surprising and unnecessary in a movie like this—that is, this weird horror sequel is the first movie in the series that feels like an actual movie about actual people, however nutty their circumstances might be. Must be the Hellman touch!

Catnip

What was I saying?

On vacation, we watched

Hugo (2011), an excellent family film by Martin Scorsese. Marty brings a lot of “toy train set” joy to his first film shot in 3D (though we had one fewer D in our viewing). Its celebration of Georges Melies is poignant, as well.

Animal Crackers (1930), the kids’ second Marx Brothers film after seeing Duck Soup last summer. It almost feels like something this funny might not ever exist again in the world.

The Truman Show (1998), one of the many 90s films my wife missed while she was on tour, is a great and/or infuriating version of a mind-blowing story.

A View to a Kill (1988), the first Bond film I saw, now the first Bond film my kids have seen, is a towering camp delight. I love this movie.

Inside Out (2015), in which Pixar beautifully deploys a classic scifi trope, creating one of its greatest films.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), an under-appreciated Terry Gilliam gizmo, that is too long, but gorgeously designed.

Black Panther (2018), a wildly overpraised, honestly mediocre Marvel outing, with an excellent cast who deserved better. The action scenes are especially terrible, shot with a weirdly static camera that dares us to stay interested.

Catsup

Since I last posted (before today), I have watched 18 movies. Some of the movies, like Duel (1971), I rewatched as part of making my mix blu-ray (maybe that should be called MixRay?). Others were watched to fulfill my self-imposed obligation to watch as many of the Oscar nominees as I can. Still others were vacation movies, watched after days of playing in slushy snow in the sunshine.

Let’s see…

The Oscars are Sunday. I have watched live since the late 80s. Usually with a small group; this year that’s not really possible yet. Most of my film friends hate the Oscars, or are indifferent. The industry, though, is part of my fascination, it’s an area of study for me. Meaning Hollywood—I don’t know a lot about other film industries. I know a lot about Hollywood, though, so I truly enjoy the annual pageant of self-importance.

I have seen five of the eight picture nominees, having recently watched Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7. The former is one of my favorite 2020 films, now; the latter, as expected, is a bit of a cartoon. Nomadland and Sound are my favorites overall. I think Mank could still win. I liked that inside baseball movie; it’s my baseball, after all. But I hope it doesn’t win picture. I particularly want to see Minari.

This is the most diverse list of nominees, and the indieist, I have ever seen. There are notable oversights. First Cow, I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Small Axe, for example, and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, while we’re talking indie. But I can’t complain about most of the nominees and haven’t seen the rest. Films made by women and people of color abound. Movies pretty off Hollywood’s radar under “normal” circumstances.

I watched Hot Fuzz with friends outside using my new projector. Cold night, Hot Fuzz. Hilarious movie, great group watch. The projector is a Viewsonic X10-4KE, which has a couple of interesting advantages as an outdoor movie projector. First, it has built-in sound that is actually decent. It has built-in Harman Kardon speakers—which is an utterly meaningless sentence, since anybody can slap their brand on any pile of garbage they want—which turn out to be quite serviceable for a small group. I would say two to three rows of viewers, max, nice for two-three families on a movie night, say.

The second advantage is that this projector does not have a “bulb” but rather a kind of LED array. This kind of light source has a much longer life than a bulb, in theory, and runs cool. It ought to be replaceable, although I’d guess it’d be likely to cost almost as much as the whole unit. Maybe not. I’m not looking it up. I’ve lost enough time in my life dealing with planned obsolescence while the Amazon burns, when I just want to be able to use my stove or microwave, to care whether I’m accurately representing the costs associated with the LED thingy. Point is, this feature is, IMO, significantly better than a bulb.

This projector, which has a conveniently short throw (it can be fairly close to the screen), needs close to full darkness before it will really work best. It’s not super bright. Once night falls, however, the picture it produces is terrific. In the dark, it’s bright, high resolution, clean with good colors and deep blacks. It got a lot of compliments from the dudes. It’s expensive, though, around $1000. (On the other hand, how much would you pay for a new TV?)

By the way, I am using a 120” screen from Amazon; the linked option goes up easily in about 6-8 minutes, even without help. The screen can be used for front or rear projection and allows for an impressively big but still manageable ad-hoc mini-theater. It assembles using poles similar to tent poles; the poles go through loops on the screen.

Now a bit of bad news. Your mileage may vary, but getting the projector to take an input was hugely frustrating. I had good HDMI cables, and tried several new ones, but I could not get picture AND sound transmitted to the projector from two different Sony blu-ray players; just picture. There was no solution to this problem; after a generous back and forth with Viewsonic tech support I was advised to contact Sony. I suspect that the problem had something to do with the jagoff HDCP copy protection cock-blocking, in spite of the fact I was using players I owned to play discs I owned to a projector I owned. The Sonys, while only a few years old, used the earlier incarnation of HDCP, HDCP 2.0, and an LG 4K player I owned used the newer version, HDCP 2.2. Again, these are just content-protection codes—for 4K discs, so no one can copy them. Naturally, not only do these “protections” fail, historically almost immediately in the product cycle, by getting cracked, but they break other things—like backward compatibility. Only the LG player would work with this projector.

It was also supposed to accept input from, for example, external hard drives. I have not yet been able to get this to work, but, who knows, maybe I’ll figure it out one day. I have been able to connect my smart phone to it (via cable), however.

So, it’s a typical situation—actually pretty good hardware tied to software that trips over itself constantly, particularly around IP concerns that render the machine half-useless out of the gate. Caveat emptor. But if you can get it to work, it fucks.

Ketchup

Some time has gone by since my last post. The kids had Spring Break, so we get in a few days of end-of-season skiing at Boreal, a smallish ski resort just off the 80 at Donner Pass. Now my older son just turned 12 and started going to middle school in-person four half-days a week, as opposed to four full days at home per week. My younger son is also partially back in school in person; but this is all just an interim step and does not represent much of a change for me in terms of getting my life back or anything. There’s actually more work now, in the sense that I have to make two half hour round trips to the middle school each day before 1 PM. The rest of the time, when they are not technically “in” class on Zoom, is devoted to nagging the kids to stop just watching YouTube and get some of their schoolwork done.

I’ve managed to do a few other things, here and there. Skiing, as I mentioned, and a day of snow play at one of the Truckee area’s snow parks. I’ve done a modicum of video editing, gratis, for an elementary school fundraiser. A little reading, a lot of movie watching, little to no writing. I’m getting back to that right now. I also experimented with blu-ray burning software by making a blu-ray mix disc, with several movies on it along with some fun trailers and other bits and pieces.

About the latter, the process is, of course, considerably more esoteric than making a mixtape or mix CD ever was; or even just dubbing a bunch of shit to VHS. No one really wants anyone to do this kind of thing anymore, so it’s punishingly difficult at times, but I was happy with the results, although it was much simpler than I wanted. I should specify that I use Apple products; this difficult process is even tougher on a Mac, since Apple never really got behind the blu-ray medium. I actually downloaded Toast, software I haven’t even considered in about 10 or 15 years. It’s still being made and has some blu-ray capacity but, considering it’s one of the only games in town for burning anything but the simplest blu-rays on a Mac, Toast is astonishingly terrible to use. I had to use Chinese software called DVDFab to create a BDMV file (which is basically a package file for blu-ray content) that I could then burn using Toast; neither of these applications would do the other half of the process well enough to use all the way through. Toast can’t even reliably figure out how big a file is that you want to burn, leading to a lot of frustrating trial and error; DVDFab allows you to treat the file size exactly as is, or resize it in quality to fill up the disc, but then does a shit job of the actual burning. I wanted to have fun with menus, too, but gave up on that pretty early on when I saw how hard it was all going to be.

I mentioned a little bit of editing. Recently, I discovered a subreddit called r/PraiseTheCameraMan. It’s a fun little group that posts video clips for which the camera (person) did a great job in one way or another, usually following some tricky unplanned action on the fly. I noticed that many, though not all, of the videos on the sub are shot in portrait mode. This is how smartphone videos look when you hold the camera normally, as opposed to turning it 90 degrees for a widescreen view, officially called landscape mode. Landscape, which has a much wider view but is less tall than portrait mode, is the way all films and TV shows and home videos have been shot, forever, but now, because it’s possible, a lot of people film with their phones in this other way. I have to work a little bit to not simply be disgusted by this; it’s not necessarily a terrible idea in every case to use this format. It’s what’s used on TikTok, which is where that example came from, and it generally works better for selfies, so it feels obvious and natural to a lot of people, even though it violates the basics of moving image composition as they’ve existed for almost 130 years.

portrait mode with blur.png

But I am always (for some reason) flabbergasted that adults whose awareness of cameras and filmed things go beyond selfies and TikTok would film things in this way. I struggle to understand it. I don’t expect anyone to know anything about composition and framing, let alone any filmmaking basics, because no one knows anything about filmmaking unless they’ve deliberately tried to learn, but even given the usual ignorance this boggles my mind. Can’t the person filming this shot see that there’s a huge amount of wasted space in this image? Are they familiar with basic shapes, enough to know that rectangles can be oriented a couple different ways?

This material is going to be edited into a video to be shown at a Zoom event, where it would take up approximately a third of the screen space if displayed this way. Luckily, unbeknownst to the camera operator, their phone shoots in 4K, so I can crop out most of this image and display it in landscape view without losing detail if I render everything out at lower resolution. But is it so difficult to turn the phone 90 degrees? Ok, end of rant.

Related to this, which honestly just makes me chuckle and shake my head more than anything, is the fact that we have had the moving image medium for more than 120 years without ever considering whether a basic education in its fundamentals might be a good idea for everyone. Never mind that films have been used to trick people since the very beginning and that most people, even today, are almost completely illiterate when it comes to how easily they can be manipulated by video—it’s still not a priority of any kind, or even considered outside of a video class here and there, or an isolated class project on occasion. Luckily, the youngest generation has taken it upon themselves to learn all about moving image media—even TikTokers who only shoot in portrait mode are learning all about editing; YouTubers have figured a lot out on their own.

Monstrous Motives

I was thinking about a story I’d like to write. As a teenager, I wrote—or tried to write—a screenplay called Slasher, which was a silly spoof of slasher films that acted as a kind of origin story for the concept of a “slasher” killer. The idea was that a normal rural teenager, named Simon Lasher (get it?), was walking in a corn field and got struck by lightning, thus becoming a depraved killer. The more he kills, the more infamous he becomes, so eventually that type of killer was named after him. I don’t know that I still have any of the writing I produced around this idea, but I wish I did.

Clearly, at that time, I was interested in the idea that the over-the-top killers of that type of movie really didn’t have any coherent motive for anything they did. Getting struck by lightning was enough to flip the switch. But the story I was thinking about again today is a little different. I’m attracted to the idea of writing a kind of memoir from the point of view of, basically, Jason Voorhees. I like the idea that his self-perception is very different than we might expect—that he’s thoughtful and philosophical and without malice, in a funny, ironic way. Maybe it’s a bad idea, but who cares. I think it would be fun to write. So does Stephen King who, of course, got here first…

But then I got to thinking today that it would be interesting to research (and write about) the motives given in slasher movies for the actions of the killer. There is often some dime-store psychology that pins a slasher killer’s behavior on childhood traumas, for example. Interestingly, too, this explanation of motive doesn’t really stay put—it’s common for a sequel to alter the backstory, or invent brand-new reasons, or simply discard whatever we were told prior. What are we to make of the psychological justifications given or implied?

For example, why does Norman Bates kill Marion Crane in the guise of his mother? In Psycho (1960) we’re subjected to a scene at the end in which a psychiatrist spouts a bunch of Oedipal gobbledygook. What the shrink doesn’t quite say outright is anything about Norman’s homosexuality, but it’s hard today not to pick up on a number of elements of that “diagnosis.”

Or, in Halloween (1978), we get Dr. Loomis’s running commentary about his own attempts to help young Michael Myers, who he has come to feel cannot be helped and must be institutionalized for life. There have been numerous retcons over the course of the series and its remakes that change his family history a bit, but most of them have just been attempts to change Laurie Strode’s relationship to Michael. The inciting incident for Mike’s madness, though, appears to be the scene at the beginning of the original movie in which the child Michael murders his older sister. The movie suggests this might be because she has neglected him while babysitting so she can have sex with her boyfriend—an “explanation” that we either accept at face value or assume must not be the whole story, since it’s pretty flimsy. Yet adult Michael does kill several other babysitters on Halloween night who appear to have done the exact same thing—neglected their young charges so they can have sex. (One wonders if it’s possible that any of John Carpenter’s childhood babysitters might still be alive and have something to confess?)

The motives as given in horror films are typically weak and silly, cartoonish simplifications of psychological concepts. Nevertheless, they might also get right at the heart of the traumas and prejudices such films are actually about—the real agenda.

My AV Club

I was never in AV Club in high school, if we even had one, but I’ve always felt like an honorary member. I can go deep into the warren trying to figure out why Thing A can’t function when connected to Thing B and am willing to spend at least half a day (or much longer) trying to make things work. In the early 2000s, when I was teaching myself video production and editing on Mac computers running the original Final Cut Pro, each editing project was an experiment. How can I get this type of footage into FCP and why is that crash happening? It was not a very efficient way to work, but it was practically the only option DIY filmmakers had at the time. (There was Adobe Premiere but I never knew anyone who relied on it back then—the popular Premiere Pro of today was completely rebuilt in the early 2000s and still wasn’t widely used until Apple introduced its much-maligned Final Cut Pro X in 2011.) The film and TV business still used either old-school flatbed film editing (in which you literally cut and pasted pieces of film) or the original non-linear editing software, Avid (which rose from the ashes of EditDroid, a Lucas-founded non-linear system that was not successful and sold to Avid in the early nineties).

Avid was priced out of reach of ordinary nerds for a long time, as it became the standard in the movie business. You could learn Avid in school or on the job and that was about it. However, with FCP you could teach yourself editing at home, as long as you were wiling to work through the many kinks and shortcomings. FCP was almost immediately a better editor than Avid which, until recently, was an absurdly poorly imagined, difficult to use, klugey piece of shit that Avid editors simply assumed was The Best because they still remembered editing on a flatbed and because a top movie studio Avid installation cost $100,000 plus.

Things have changed a great deal today, but the point is I still think about what I can do with the technology I have and how to make it more useful and get ideas about things I’d like to try and then see if I can make them happen. In the early 2000s, for example, I theorized a future product I called the “Genie,” which would take all of the single use tech we had at the time—camera, phone, video camera, GPS, laptop, DVD player, TV—and put it all into one device. Steve Jobs, it turns out, was having the same thought.

Now I find myself thinking about mixtapes. I loved to make mixtapes in my youth. I was the guy who was editing short videos using two VCRs; I started editing movie clips into my mixtapes, too. I eventually transitioned to mix CDs and I’m kind of sad that this isn’t really a thing anymore (though I have a friend who makes an annual mix CD that he sends out, which I love). But what about a video mix?

I’ve had mixed results trying to create even simple Blu-Ray discs, without fancy menus or anything. But I’m considering trying again with Roxio’s Toast software—which gets pretty bad reviews but is one of the only packages capable of authoring on a Mac. I’d like to include a bunch of fun short videos and play around with interactive menus and make it fun to discover what’s on the disc, and make it playable in a few different ways. But this is already a pretty outdated format that doesn’t reflect how most people watch things today. What I’d really like to do is create a video mixtape with a huge capacity on an SD stick that anyone could simply plug into their computer or HDTV that would just work. It would have a menu system like a DVD and could hold huge HD movie files, at minimum.

Yesterday I started trying some minor tests to see what was possible. I could find no software, so far, that does what I want—although press kit software is a possibility. Another possibility is using HTML. There are myriad problems with these approaches, however. I want to incorporate large video files, which press kits typically do not include. There’s also the interoperability issue. For example:

Let’s say I want to create a USB stick to use on my LG 4K TV. The LG has a USB jack for this purpose. However, it will only accept USB devices formatted as Fat32 or NFTS. I can format the stick to Fat32, but then each file must be smaller than 4GB, which rules out HD and 4K movie files. To get around this, I found cheap software that would allow me format a device as NFTS (which Mac won’t do natively). I dumped a 25 GB video file on this device. My LG was able to detect this drive and even display a thumbnail from the video—but it couldn’t play the file, which was presumably too large. Why? Was the TV trying to load the entire file into memory?

This kind of thing requires a lot of trial and error. It’s also of minimal value to anyone. I enjoy wasting time in this way, personally, but the knowledge gained is pretty esoteric.

Nods, snubs and buzz

The nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards are out this morning, after one of the strangest years in movies pretty much ever. It is the kind of nominee list the Academy has feared for years—since it has a powerful incentive (ad $) to get as many people to watch the ceremony as possible and this list will yield, I predict, the lowest ratings for the show in decades. That this list is also one of the strongest across the board in years in terms of the quality of the films and probably the most diverse set of nominees ever neatly demonstrates the tensions that animate the annual lala-land self-lovefest.

Two women nominated for director! The first Asian woman director nominee and two Asian male actor nominees; plus six black acting nominees! This is how we’ve gotten used to looking at these awards; and the Academy really spread the love around this year. Many worthy nominees from many quarters.

And with all the diversity, there’s still a strong chance that David Fincher’s Mank will dominate because of the old, white voting base of the Academy and that film’s old Hollywood setting. In fact, the nominations for Mank seem calculated almost to give that base something to vote for, since we know the members of the Academy don’t actually like to watch movies all that much. Still, it’s an honor just to be nominated, right? And these nominations will open a lot of doors for this talented group of people, many of whom would never have gotten this kind of recognition in a “normal” year.

Delroy Lindo was snubbed after a terrific performance in Da 5 Bloods. There were no nominations for First Cow or the Small Axe films or Never Rarely Sometimes Always or I’m Thinking of Ending Things, all among my favorites of the year. I think Promising Young Woman has been overpraised and, while I liked Mank, it doesn’t deserve to take the place of some of the ignored films. On the other hand, there is a refreshing absence of stars (there are a few old hands) and a lot of deserving talents elevated for the first time. The ratings might tank, but the triumphant diversity will make history.

The Mouse in Your House

Disney’s streaming service, Disney Plus, has crossed 100M subscribers, according to recent announcements. I guess some people are surprised by this, since it’s only been available for about 18 months. It doesn’t seem all that surprising since children exist, something that some younger journalists and analysts might not realize. On the other hand, the Mouse House has done an undeniably good job with the service, both in terms of functionality and content; the latter is kind of a no-brainer what with the Disney-Star Wars-Marvel-Pixar-20th Century Fox-ness of it all, but they certainly could have whiffed in one way or another. My family watches it every day, now that they fixed The Simpsons aspect ratio problem last summer; we’re also fans of The Mandalorian and WandaVision, both of which have their haters among Star Wars and Marvel fans, but we’re too lazy to put that much thought into it, especially on Friday nights.

There are two types of accounts on D+, a regular account and a kids account, supposedly for children under 7. The child version gives parents control over what their kids watch in the sense that the only stuff that shows up there is the unequivocally inoffensive stuff. No PG or PG13, which means no Star Wars or Marvel. Even Disney’s own live action updates of their animated films (eye roll) are not there—they are PG rated. So, until recently, kids could watch Dumbo (1941) but not Dumbo (2019) on the kids channel.

Now both Dumbos are exclusive to the regular channel. Peter Pan, The Aristocats and a few other films from the vault, have also moved over, joining other media in having a content disclaimer placed in front of them before it plays. The disclaimer warns of “stereotypes” and “negative depictions…of peoples or cultures.” Naturally, this has led to immediate (fake) outrage on the part of the right wing media and its consumers over “cancel culture.”

What Disney has done, as opposed to “cancelling” anything, is essentially re-rate these films and shows to reflect changing cultural norms. Now, in addition to the usual elements that might yield a PG or PG13 rating, such as violence or sexuality or language they’ve added depictions considered racist. (Those who seem confused about this, or express a knee-jerk reaction to it, on Twitter, particularly wonder about Dumbo. Obviously, the disclaimer in that case refers mainly to the infamous singing crows, whose entire act is essentially a minstrel show; of course, for many people who grew up with the movie, me included, the scene features a bunch of hilarious birds singing the film’s best song, with nothing apparently racist to be seen; this is because we were once children who didn’t know shit about history. Peter Pan’s depiction of Native Americans, however, is something most of us who saw it as children have probably blocked out—it’s really bad, far worse than even a lot of old Westerns, if not many cartoons of the time.)

The RW hissy fit notwithstanding, this strikes me as a pretty darn reasonable approach on Disney’s part. The films are easily accessible and unedited. Parents just have to opt in, if they’ve even bothered to set up parental controls in the first place. It’s great that they didn’t just take Dumbo down, which I would never be able to support, but which is the kind of move that would be unsurprising today. Dumbo is a towering classic, exquisitely made; one of the very best Disney movies and simply one of the best animated films ever released. Every child should see it for those reasons and also because it is truly made for them, not grown-ups or even big kids. There’s no sappy romantic princess, just a tearjerking story about a mother’s fierce love for her baby with thrills, spills, the Platonic ideal of a circus choo-choo train and, um, the drunken hallucinations of a mouse and baby elephant. Oh, yeah, and that baby elephant can fly. It would be almost unconscionable to take this from children, who, as I said, have no idea about the subtext of the Jim Crows.

I have plenty of issues with Disney, as do most thinking adults. But in this choice I find myself almost grateful. They could have just erased these movies. It does raise a question though—will they add Song of the South? The company has deep-sixed this movie into the deepest, darkest corners of the vault (except for, according to legend, the Uncle Remus museum in Georgia); but it’s a fascinating piece of art as well, in part due to its controversies and in part due to its technical achievements in blending live action and animation; it also features one of the most popular of all Disney movie songs. If the company is willing to let adults decide what movies to watch or show their kids, why not bring back a major teachable moment from its history?

The Beast with Teeth

This is a picture of Kingdok, the leader of the rat creatures from Jeff Smith’s phenomenal comics series, Bone.

kingdok.jpg

My son and I have been slowly reading it together—he has read it already but wanted to share it with me. The rat creatures are pretty horrifying, but not especially smart or cunning—at least not quite as smart or cunning as the protagonists, which is a good thing.

They remind me of someone else, though. You see, for the last few weeks, I have not been writing as much on this blog because I have been writing fiction. I wrote fiction a lot as a boy, but less as I grew older. I became fascinated with movies and so much of my creative writing went toward developing stories for the screen, or actually writing screenplays.

My wife challenged me to sit down and write a piece of one of the stories I’ve talked about forever, so I did. I chose a small piece—a short story taking place in the timeline of a much larger story (that has to do with the gothic); a story I had been developing for a while, too, so one I felt equipped with enough information to actually write. It was a great experience. I became fairly obsessed with what I was doing. I wrote most days for at least a little while and found that it was something I could, in fact, do.

Writing it, I was able to forget myself and write without self-censorship, for the most part. Being in that space for an extended time, I was able to focus, not doubt myself, just keep pressing on and create a finished draft. Almost the whole time, I was able to keep the Beast with Teeth at bay. This is a demon inside of me, you see, that works very hard, sometimes, to destroy my self confidence, my will, my pleasure and good feeling, and tear me apart, hungrily, until I am a bloody lump of dead flesh. It likes to remind me of all of my shortcomings, real and imagined, and taunt me contemptuously when I am foolish enough to try something creative.

And for a little while, I held him at bay better than I have done in years. But I finished the draft, see. And the Beast came back, more savage and bloodthirsty than ever. It is gnawing away at my insides even now.

The Good, the Bad and the Gump: Irony and Performative Ideology

Having decided to rewatch a popular film from my youth, Forrest Gump (1994), which came out the summer after my sophomore year in college, I thought I would follow up by checking in on all of the things wrong with the movie. I knew vaguely what they were; then I watched it again and I was reminded of them, but I was also reminded of why the movie is a beloved classic, which is undeniable, even if you hate it.

I typed “the worst things about Forrest Gump” into Google. There are 13M results. Here is a sampling of the headlines:

‘Forrest Gump,’ 25 Years Later: A Bad Movie That Gets Worse With Age (Indie Wire)

9 Reasons Why "Forrest Gump" Is Actually The Worst (in case it’s not obvious, this is from Buzzfeed)

16 Extremely Messed Up Things About Forrest Gump That'll Change How You See It (Ranker)

Why I Hate Forrest Gump with the Heat of a Thousand Suns (winner for best title, personal blog)

Forrest Gump: Not Just Bad — Bad for America (Crooked Marquee)

14 Reasons Forrest Gump sucks, according to Reddit (at least SheKnows she’s being honest about where all shitty takes come from)

Why Forrest Gump is a poisonous film (GQ UK)

‘Forrest Gump,’ 25 years later: Why this classic doesn’t hold up (NY Post)

Why we loved - and hated - ‘Forrest Gump’ (CNN)

Clearly, there are a few reasons to dislike the movie. The most convincing, in my opinion, are the tonal complaints—it’s too sappy; also Forrest’s “stupidity” sometimes seems to fluctuate depending on the requirements of the situation. Writers also cite conservatism, conformism, racism, cartoonishness, anti-intellectualism, sexism, dehumanization and ableism. And that’s just the beginning. It’s also cliched and annoying, they tell us, features storylines about rape and abuse that aren’t treated correctly, centers a hero who has no agency that things just happen to accidentally and who also takes credit for things black people actually did; its general take on history is incorrect in a thousand places to the point of being propaganda; and it mocks a disabled person by making the audience laugh at his antics.

I’m not here to argue with all of these interpretations, per se. There are aspects of the film that are problematic, when looked at in a particular way, and it’s also true that it has been somewhat embraced by the right as reflecting, you know, old-fashioned values and such. But there are a few things I find interesting about the way people interpret this movie now (it turned 25 in 2019, which was the occasion for many of the articles linked above).

Many of the critics, in addition to detailing how terrible the movie is, also admit how incredibly well-made it is, from the production design to the performances, to the writing and directing. Some of them come from the position of “I loved this movie when I was a kid who didn’t know better but now I do and I hate it now.” Savvy viewers recognize the ways in which talented filmmakers manipulate them, of course, but it depends a lot on the subject matter of the movie whether this is a compliment or not. For example, typically Hitchcock’s manipulations were seen as masterful, even before he was recognized as a serious artist. Robert Zemeckis, on the other hand, is seen as (transparently) manipulating audiences for maudlin, sentimental effect, or in the service of bad political takes—similarly to a common take on his mentor, Steven Spielberg.

There are also complaints about Forrest’s lack of action—that, rather than make choices that lead to drama, and growing and changing, like a good character should, he just wanders stupidly through the movie and is accidentally involved with history. This is one of a number of what I would call dramatic structure complaints—educated people who know some things about how drama usually works complaining about obvious violations of those precepts. There are many stories, of course—one thinks of picaresques, like Candide, for example—in which the agency of the lead character is negligible. There are also many, many stories in which the characters function more like symbols or metaphors or stand-ins for something else than like “real people.” Surely that, in and of itself, is not a reasonable complaint. Forrest Gump is a picaresque that, like Candide, centers on an extremely naive character. His experiences—which are fictional, of course, but which intersect with many historical events—are like anyone’s experiences, in a sense. They are mysterious (to him, but not to us because we know they’re famous moments in some cases), he can’t adequately interpret them, he can’t say what they amount to but he feels like they amount to something, a life, and they are his experiences from his perspective, which is an exaggeratedly comical perspective.

What about irony? Is Forrest Gump intended to be a history lesson? If so, it’s a miserable failure indeed. But what if the audience is actually assumed to be more knowledgeable than that? Maybe almost everything that happens to Forrest is meant to be understood ironically by the audience? That is, the point is the gap between what Forrest seems to understand about an event and what we understand about the event, the importance he attaches to it versus the importance we attach to it. Complaints about historicity in films often suffer from a strange disingenuousness. Critics and other smart film watchers claim to want films that are provocative, “made for adults,” thoughtful, subversive; yet when a film fails to perfectly represent historical events these viewers will complain about a “dumbing down” of history, or the irresponsibility of artists who aren’t showing things “truthfully,” or the dangers of fictionalizing things, as if the most important task for movies is teaching less savvy viewers what “really happened,” less savvy meaning not as well-educated as the critics. We understand irony, they say, but what about the normies? Shouldn’t you hold their hands a bit, filmmaker? When you do, we will condemn you for being obvious and literal-minded, but never mind.

Then there are the complaints about all the -isms. Clever people learn to make arguments about things, which is a crucial cognitive skill with huge implications for society (it’s called critical thinking), but they often don’t stop to ask whether they might be completely missing the point. Is there racism in Forrest Gump? Ableism, sexism, ageism, conformity? Fuck yes there is. Are some of Forrest’s own attitudes and understandings imperfect? Well, duh—he has a 75 IQ and he’s also a human being. Are some of the characters racist and sexist and ableist? No shit. Are the symbolic structures in the film somewhat simplistic in a way that’s unrealistic? Definitely. Everything bad in the world happens to poor Jenny, so she can be the Experience to Forrest’s Innocence. Are the touches of realism somewhat simplistic in a way that lends itself to a more symbolic interpretation? Yeah, that, too. None of this makes the film racist or sexist, or anything else, unless you require films to, for some reason, promote an ideal world that has never and will never exist. If you believe Forrest Gump is saying, This is meant to be as close to a realistic depiction of life on earth as we can make, well, no, it’s obviously not saying that. If it’s not intended as realism, how is it intended? Maybe it’s a metaphorical exploration of the way ordinary people experience life, completely ahistorical, but ironically set against a painted backdrop of Boomer historical events, that focusses on a completely naive and innocent character who cannot change, even as the world changes around him?

What both troubles and fascinates me about the way many people read this film is that it seems like ideological performance. That is, liberals (and conservatives) feel the need to react to the film from the context of their own politics and, in so doing, perform their ideological commitments, which we always do to some extent, but in a way that willfully twists the film to align with their worldview, rather than attempting to wrestle with what the film is on its own terms. On its own terms, Gump is not entirely successful. But it’s also brilliantly made in almost every technical way that counts (the score is admittedly pretty bad) and offers some very thoughtful, serious and even mildly subversive ideas about our relationship to history and narrative.

I’m mad, too, still, that Gump won all those Oscars that should have gone to Pulp Fiction, but I can’t take that out on the movie. I also prefer movies to be less sappy and more serious, but I think I ought to recognize the powerful craft brought to bear in this case. That’s really hard to do. If I was once more susceptible to the sap, well, that’s growing up—but it doesn’t diminish the art required to elicit those responses. And, just because I could identify problematic ideas raised by the film, that is not the end of the critique but the beginning.

Recently Watched: Reloaded Edition

I’ve watched for the first time and rewatched some genuine classic films this month. I watched the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Marnie (1964), two Hitchcocks I hadn’t seen, both excellent. I checked out The Wages of Fear and William Friedkin’s “remake” (of the same source material), Sorcerer (1977), both of which stand up mightily today. I rewatched Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), one of those movies for which the critically-minded viewer must invent new categories of superlatives.

I also finished watching my collection of BBS productions, with The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), a pretty good Bob Rafelson picture, and the excoriating gut-punch of Hearts and Minds, one of the all-time great documentaries, as infuriating and sobering a film as I’ve ever seen. And I revisited some youthful favorites, the two original Ghostbusters films and Teen Wolf (1985; a really, really terrible movie), as well as a couple of mediocre Marvel movies, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and Iron Man 3 (2013). The former is mostly worthwhile at this point for reminding viewers about Quicksilver, for his interesting connection to WandaVision.

I picked up a 4K Matrix trilogy set recently, believing that surely these are movies that deserve the upgrade. The Matrix (1999) is much as I remember it, but less so. It doesn’t really hold up that well—more an issue of production design than the still very cool ideas the Wachowski’s were playing with. The look of the movie is incredibly tired at this point, though the action is still pretty thrilling. Then, yesterday, I rewatched The Matrix Reloaded (2003). The line about that movie now is it’s “not that good, except for the action scenes,” and that’s nominally true—except I would say it’s “fucking terrible, and even many of the action scenes are not great.” The ideas continue to be somewhat interesting, as long as you don’t have to endure hearing the characters explain them. When they do—such as the "Oracle” and the “Merovingian” and the “Architect,” not to mention Morpheus—it’s practically unwatchable. It’s sadistic, really, to watch these actors trying to plow through some of the most indecipherable dialogue ever written. Even some of the action, particularly the scene where Keanu fights a hundred Hugo Weavings, is cartoonishly silly in ways that are pleasurable (like when Reeves throws one Weaving into twenty, knocking them all down and the sound designers add the sound of a bowling strike) but degrade the overall experience. The freeway chase—narratively pointless as it seems—is still fairly awesome, though.

I rewatched Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999), a funny and harrowing and somewhat underrated film with strong performances. I also rewatched his The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which has scenes among the funniest Scorsese has ever shot, but which, like the mediocre Bombshell (2019, directed by Jay Roach), which I saw for the first time this month, is populated by such objectively awful real-life humans (played by very talented actors) it’s difficult to suss out the point or feel properly entertained without needing a long hot shower afterwards.

Holy Scorsese, Batman

Martin Scorsese has a great essay in the latest Harper’s magazine about Fellini, seemingly tied to the Criterion Collection’s recent box set. Does Marty love Federico? Are you talkin’ to me?

Twitter has been amusing on the subject as well since, naturally, Scorsese takes the opportunity to allude to his previous comments about the MCU—

As recently as fifteen years ago, the term “content” was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against “form.” Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. “Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. (bold mine)

and then he makes a second important point, about how and where we watch movies—

It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores. On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included. (bold mine)

then he breaks some off for the almighty algorithms—

On the other hand, it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema? (bold mine)

The argument online was essentially Marvel fanboys and pop apologists vs. critics and cineastes arguing about whether it’s really okay for Martin Scorsese to say that some movies aren’t cinema, or whether that’s actually what he’s saying, or whether anyone should give a fuck about what this old dude says, whoever he is, obviously Civil War and Endgame are the best movies ever made.

With reference to the first selection about content, above, he speaks the truth. From the point of view of, say, Netflix, The Irishman is simply a unit of “content,” albeit one that has a special shine to it. It was a big outlay for the company, as far as movie budgets go, but they were paying for the prestige of giving one of the greatest directors a huge greenlight to make his picture. I’d say it paid off in that sense, even if the actuarial economics disappear into the streaming black hole, forever detached from understanding.

I remember telling an old boss of mine at the dotcom I worked for in 2001 that my ten year plan was to make media, maybe TV, movies, web video. Something like that.

He said to me, “Ah. So you want to be a content provider.”

I understand how it sounds to Marty’s ears, but I didn’t take it that way. While I liked this guy, he was kind of a business doof. I didn’t really care whether the moving image media that I loved was going to be called “content” now, as long as I could make some of it. So I thought, Yeah, I guess he’s right. I want to be a content provider.

But as Scorsese gets into his relationship to the great films of Federico Fellini, it becomes clear that cinema, for him, means auteur cinema. That is, not that Fellini made films alone, far from it, but that his singular vision created works of art out of the available materials (including his collaborators). There are many reasons to attend to this art, rather than to less interesting films. For Scorsese, films made by a corporate “author” are not cinema.

But why should anyone care about whether Marty says it’s cinema or not? Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest filmmakers; we can respect his opinion. We can respect him and, also, at the same time, disagree with some of what he says. It’s okay! What’s more important is that we understand the point he is making about a real change in “movies.”

I don’t personally have a dog in the fight about what “cinema” means or “film” vs. “movie” or whether the term “content” diminishes the value of certain types of “moving image art.” The word content does diminish anything lumped into that meta-category, but no more than art has always been devalued by the forces of the market. Scorsese’s ability to make films depends on a market that values veteran artists like him who have been able to deliver on that value for the market. The value proposition is in flux, thanks to streaming’s reconfiguring of how the film and TV markets work. This doesn’t mean that this reconfiguration is or will be bad for artists or the art form, necessarily. But if the art form itself, from your point of view, is tied to a specific distribution mechanism (such as theatrical) and to the culture that grew up around that mechanism, the media sea changes of the last forty years would certainly look like an assault on the art form.

It’s undeniable that the theatrical experience has changed. The blockbuster-factory retrenchment of the 1980s studios after the utopian excesses of the 1970s New Hollywood, followed by the rise of home video, followed by the era of corporate “synergy” and consolidation followed by the pointillist fragmentation of all culture and disruption of all media business models in the wake of the World Wide Web, has meant big changes for film culture. Of course, film culture has always been in flux, from the earliest days of rogue patent pirates hightailing it to Chicago and then California to escape Edison’s goons, through the upheavals of war, sound technology, national cinemas, censorship, more war, the breakup of the studio system, the rise of television, more war, the influx of foreign cinema, film schools, the collapse of the censorship regime in the U.S., new wave after wave—the point is that, no matter when you began your personal journey with the movies, it was destined to turn into something else by the time you came of age and something else again later in your life.

They have never made em like they used to. This in no way should be seen to undermine Scorsese’s celebration of Fellini and the auteurist model. Auteurism is a useful way to organize our thinking about filmmaking and film canons, but there are other useful ways to think about these things, as well. Language often gets in the way, as some will insist that “cinema” is this and not that—but we all reach for ways to corral unruly ideas within the fences of language.

There are important differences between Fellini’s work and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; both can be called cinema, but the differences are stark enough that the word isn’t very helpful. People also love to make distinctions between “art” and “not art,” but those distinctions are arbitrary. To say that 8 1/2 is art but Endgame is not art doesn’t ultimately help us understand what either of those movies actually are, or why they are that way.

In the meantime, theatrical has become the domain primarily of hegemonic corporate cinema, made for the largest possible audience, each unit of which costs a quarter to a half a billion dollars, each unit of which had better earn back that money and then some, whereas there are very few big screens left for the thrilling movies for adults that Scorsese (and most critics and cineastes) treasure. At the same time, we have never had so many screens before at any time in movie history, whether they are in our pockets, on our laps or screwed to our den walls. And Marty’s right about one thing—if we don’t find good ways to curate the abundance, and leave it to algorithms, then the culture will simply become an algorithm. This has implications far beyond the cinema.

Can Variety get a Mulligan?

Just read today about a “controversy” about Variety’s review of the movie Promising Young Woman. Just in case Variety changes its mind about this, here is a picture of the apology now appended to the head of the review:

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Now, Variety is an industry rag, of course, but it still purports to be journalism. Take a look at the review and see if you think there is something problematic about a critic expressing an opinion that the lead role was somewhat miscast. Granted, it’s possible, I suppose, if one believes that the Academy gives a shit what critics think, that this modest complaint might harm Carey Mulligan’s chances of being nominated for Best Actress next month. There’s a first time for everything—even though the critic praises the performance itself (“skillful, entertaining and challenging”). Mulligan complained about the review, which she felt was somewhat misogynistic for suggesting, she felt, that she, Carey Mulligan, was less attractive than Margot Robbie, a producer on the film, and that that opinion engages in a problematic way with the subject matter of the movie (rape culture and #MeToo).

A successful, popular actor finding fault with a critic’s take is hardly news. An actor willfully reading malevolence into that review is also not news. But the publisher of the review actually printing an apology that takes the actor’s position as read, without examination, is news, and the news is bad. Variety is “sincerely” apologizing to a subject of its journalism for an opinion that Variety editorially reviewed and signed-off on, effectively throwing the writer (and editor) under the bus, because the review was mildly critical. Having seen Promising Young Woman, I happen to agree with the writer—Carrie Mulligan is somewhat miscast in the role—but even if I didn’t, an apology is ridiculous. It should bother everyone who writes and thinks about film.

I tend to believe that Carey Mulligan was genuinely bothered by the way the review was written. She has a right to her opinion, obviously, but it should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt since a movie she stars in is being criticized. I do not really believe that she is cynically working the awards press circuit via this complaint, although other people might be pushing this story for that reason, an analysis that only the entire history of Hollywood supports. But Variety’s job is to not be taken in by this obvious bullshit. You don’t apologize for publishing a perfectly reasonable review because an actor doesn’t like it!

Paracinema

Learned a new word yesterday, though I’m surprised I hadn’t come across it before. I was on Reddit and someone posted a three-year-old video from Vox about The Room, the 2003 cult film made by Tommy Wiseau that has played in theaters as a midnight movie to ironic audiences for many years. The Room has been referred to as “trash cinema” (see, for example, K. Sarkhosh, W. Menninghaus, Enjoying trash films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions, Poetics (2016)), a term which is not well-defined but generally refers to low budget films that are also amateurishly made. Low-budget is one thing; amateurish is another. The Room has been described, by Tom Bissell, cowriter of The Disaster Artist, an account of its creation, in this way (in the Vox video):

It is like a movie made by an alien who has never seen a movie, but has had movies thoroughly explained to him. There's not often that a work of film has every creative decision that's made in it on a moment-by-moment basis seemingly be the wrong one.

I take some issue with the word “thoroughly” here, but never mind. The Room is such garbage I don’t even particularly find it enjoyable except in bits and pieces—but it is a fascinating and inexplicable disaster. If one set out, on purpose, to make the worst film ever made it would be impossible to do it as well (badly) as Tommy Wiseau did.

But my new word wasn’t trash cinema but paracinema. Paracinema is a term that came from an article in the journal Screen by Jeffrey Sconce, in which he describes the term like this:

As a most elastic textual category, paracinema would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as ‘badfilm’, splatterpunk, ‘mondo’ films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography. Paracinema is thus less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of cultural detritus. In short, the explicit manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic ‘trash’, whether such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture. In doing so, paracinema represents the most developed and dedicated of cinephilic subcultures ever to worship at ‘the temple of schlock’.

(Sconce, Jeffrey. "‘Trashing’ the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style." Screen 36.4 (1995): 371-393.)

As you can see, this explanation is from 1995, whereas The Room and YouTube appeared in the following decade, so Sconce is doing a summing up of a previous era of “cinephilic subculture,” but the term is still relevant. He would probably put The Room in the subcategory of “badfilm,” which includes films made so ineptly as to be entertaining (“so bad it’s good”). Badfilm, though, has an Urban Dictionary definition that uses the term in reference to Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987), which is obviously an insane misuse of the word. That film is a fucking masterpiece.

Given that the partial list of paracinematic forms in Sconce is explicitly incomplete, and must be, since new forms emerge regularly, one might ask if it wouldn’t be easier to simply list the cinematic forms, since so many types of moving image media can be considered para-, that is, beyond or alongside or irregular. But then, a number of generic forms of cinema (horror, beach party, Elvis, daikaiju) seem to be considerable as paracinema, too. Thus "paracinema” as a “reading protocol” rather than a “distinct group of films.” That protocol, though, is not limited to camp readings—it’s not just about movies that are so bad they’re good—but also includes art films that stand apart from mainstream cinematic norms and many other forms that might be successful on their own terms, but can be considered a “counter-cinema” in some way.

Once again, we’ve returned to the topic of the way we read films. Regarding paracinema, it seems as though we’re talking about a political stance—that is, to read a text as though it were outside of whatever the cinematic norms or tastes of the day happen to be. Given how popular culture has reprocessed many of these hitherto outré objects as texts for ironic enjoyment, the very idea of norms is hard to grasp.

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.