American cinema

Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird, USA, 2018)

American cinema, Blogpost, Uncategorized

In April, amid all of the hoo ha about the ‘revolutionary’ nature of Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony and Joe Russo, USA, 2018) – because to make war infinite and to propose an unhappy ending is really revolutionary? – Steve Rose wrote in The Guardian about how Thanos (Josh Brolin) may in fact not be the bad guy… but really the good guy who wants to restore balance to a multiverse that humans have otherwise put out of balance.

Fast forward three months, and Incredibles 2 strikes me as another example of a film where basically I find myself rooting for the baddie, even though I quite like the goodies, too.

For, about a third of the way into the film, the seemingly arch-villain, the Screenslaver, explains the rationale behind his/her plans. Without remembering the speech verbatim, the Screenslaver basically makes the point that superheroes and representations of superheroes have become ubiquitous and that everyone spends all of their time looking at their screens that feature superheroes rather than heading out into and embracing the real world. People have lost touch with reality, and so the Screenslaver wants paradoxically to use the screens in order to bring people back to reality… but he/she can only do this by defeating those superheroes.

Spoilers.

When it turns out – rather obviously – that the Screenslaver is in fact Evelyn Deavor (Catherine Keener), the only question that remains is whether her brother, Winston (Bob Oedenkirk), is in cahoots with her or whether he is blissfully unaware.

It turns out that he is unaware of her plan. So a couple of questions arise.

For, Winston is basically a billionaire media magnate who just wants to develop a strong publicity campaign to bring ‘supers’ back into the fold after they have lost favour owing to the amount of collateral damage caused by their otherwise invisible labour. With the right coverage, people will understand why they have to destroy so much stuff… and then they will be upheld as the heroes that they are.

What Winston is not, therefore, is a media magnate who understands that he should just develop the whole combat between supers and villains as a media spectacle – since it is eyeballs on screens that makes and keeps him rich.

Rather, this is something that his sister realises… and yet she only wants to destroy the media empire – and in the process also to destroy the supers’ hopes of being able to act out their superpowers by getting into large-scale fights in public.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in sorting through the nuances of this slightly illogical plot. As most people would say: it doesn’t matter, just enjoy the movie and go with it.

Except for the fact that the Screenslaver/Evelyn basically argues for what I consider to be the point of my job: namely that people should be much more media savvy and literate than they are, learning how critically to evaluate both what they see and the mechanisms that are in place that allow them to see it. Without such critical thought and eyes, one is simply prey to the propaganda messages that surround us.

Indeed, that Winston is not acutely aware of the money that he will make from the supers is unthinkable. And how the supers are not aware, or even suspicious, from the get-go that they might be patsies within a ‘sinister’ media plan… just begs the question of when a superhero will come along who is capable of ideological critique and who realises that most of their violent actions are simply an enactment of their interpellation into and perpetuation of the systems of violence that keep the contemporary world as it is (which as it turns out is to be on a crash course with ecological cataclysm).

That is, I wonder when a superhero will come along whose superpower is… intelligence – because most of these ‘superheroes’ might be amazing beefcakes, and they may even be able to bend space and time and to invent amazing technologies… but as far as political sensibility is concerned, these guys are fucking dumb (Charles Xavier/Professor X is about the closest to being an exception to this so far; no wonder Lex Luthor doesn’t respect Superman).

In effect, then, Incredibles 2 is saying that film and media studies are the bad guys, and that critical thought/intelligence is bad in a world where supers should just do what supers do (fight), and we should all watch more and more of them on our screens (in a Disney monopoly) as we are fed endless fictions about ubermensch that help us to forget that in our human, all too human capacity, we have basically brought about the destruction of our planet and continue to be exploited into doing nothing about eking every last penny of profit from the environment, its animals and its humans (if they are separate things) because we are interpellated into being unthinking and uncritical subjects by the ideological state apparatuses that surround us, including cinema and films like Incredibles 2.

In other words, if you are critical of capitalism, then you are the enemy. If you question, then you are the enemy. If you think, then you are the enemy.

And yet, maybe some skills in critical thinking would have helped Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) to realise of course she was getting played in putting a camera on her suit so that she can be entered into and win not just a war of perception about whether she is ‘good’ or not, but also a ratings war that Winston pretends to deny but surely cannot be so naïve as to overlook.

But of course, for Elastigirl to out-think her opponents would make for boring cinema. And so here is the rub: given the cinematic values of our society, if you endorse anything that is not cinematic (including intelligence), then you run counter to the role that society has assigned to you, even as the powers that be accrue information/intelligence about you as a result of every keystroke that you make on your laptops.

Did I spoil your fun? Did I spoil your film? I apologise if I woke you from your gentle slumber. Well… sorry not sorry. Sorry. Not sorry.

Tomorrow Never Knows (Adam Sekuler, USA, 2017)

American cinema, BFI Flare, Blogpost, Documentary, Uncategorized

After last year watching and loving a version of his Work in Progress (USA, ongoing), I was particularly glad to see Adam Sekuler’s latest and remarkable film, Tomorrow Never Knows, at Flare, the LGBTQ+ film festival run through the British Film Institute (BFI).

Like Steven Eastwood’s equally profound Island (UK, 2018), which is set to enjoy a theatrical release in the UK in the next couple of months, Tomorrow Never Knowsis a documentary that looks at death, specifically here the build-up to the passing of Shar Jones, a transsexual living in Colorado with her partner, Cynthia Vitale.

Shar has Alzheimer’s and wishes to take her own life, but this is not legal—certainly not with assistance. And so, Shar prepares to die in the only legal way possible, which is by no longer eating and drinking, i.e. by starving herself to death.

Shar is a Buddhist who is interested in the passage of time, as is made clear by her love the Beatles song, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ from which the film takes its title and the lyrics to which we hear Shar repeating/singing several times.

In particular, we might note that the song includes the line ‘it is becoming.’ That is, we live in a universe that is not static, but which always is changing. We cannot control the flow of time, and so perhaps one thing we might do is to accept it.

What is interesting about this interest in the flow of time is the tension that the film sets up both thematically and formally.

Thematically, the fllm invites the viewer to consider how death itself is a form of becoming; it is a passage of our bodies (if not a spirit) into another non-living realm, and in which—at the very least—our bodies are dispersed into the universe.

However, so also is Alzheimer’s a cerebral deterioriation that also involves, in some senses, the dissolution of the self into multiple selves—with some memories at certain points in time and few to no memories at other points in time.

There is no intention here to make light of the disease and the devastating effects that it has its sufferers and those around them.

Nonetheless, while death becomes Shar, she does this in particular by attempting to remove Alzheimer’s from her life—refusing what we might call a passive becoming (the disease) for an active becoming (choosing to die).

Paradoxically, this happens via Shar also refusing both to eat and to drink. In other words, in order to be open to death and in order to close out Alzheimer’s, Shar has to close off her body.

These thematic paradoxes extend to the film’s form/style, as I can explain by making reference to something Sekuler said in the Q&A session after the Flare screening that I attended.

Sekuler spoke of some moments featuring Shar that he had shot, and which we remarkable, but which he did not include in the film because he did not get a clean enough recording.

It is not strictly Sekuler’s aesthetic choices that I wish to question. But I use this anecdote as a way of showing how Sekuler is something of a formalistfilmmaker. That is, he aims for and very often achieves spare shots, in which there is little if any camera movement.

In other words, his style searches deliberately for a certain aesthetic, one that is, like Shar’s body as it progresses from life to death via starvation, one that seeks to shut out the outside and to demonstrate control, in particular through static long takes.

But as the human cannot fully close off the outside, and as the Buddhist might seek becoming, nor can Sekuler close off the outside from his film.

Indeed, in some senses Sekuler cannot make the movie that he might ideally want to because of the very reality that consistently invades his film.

Because Shar and Cynthia’s home is quite small, Sekuler cannot achieve distance, the frame is often cluttered, and in greater close-up, with people leaving and entering the frame a lot. Sound regularly must come from offscreen, and, in the form of traffic and other noises passing by their home, there is nothing that Sekuler can do about this.

Likewise even the light that streams in through Shar’s window.

The effect of these interruptions, though, is remarkable. For, as we see a man dying, we also hear the unstoppable nature of the world outside. The world of Shar seems to be one increasingly defined by containers, including her home and the coffin in which she will be buried, and in some senses, too, both her body and her disease are containers.

And yet these cannot be shut off from the world; the becoming cannot stop. The outside always come in.

The philosophical ramifications of Sekuler’s style hopefully here become clear: it is as if Sekuler is striving to stop the outside from coming in by making a technically flawless and aesthetically beautiful film… and yet he cannot achieve this, meaning that in some senses his film is an exercise in failure… just as every human life, as a result of its mortality, is an exercise in failing to stop death—even if one aid its advent through various measures like those taken by Shar (willed starvation).

A couple more things.

Firstly, some of the more remarkable moments of Tomorrow Never Knowsinvolve the outside and a loss of control from both Sekuler and his subjects. For example, when on a hike, we see Cynthia fall over, before Shar also needs to catch her breath.

Sekuler wants to do his static frame, but really cannot. He wants to keep his distance to film aesthetically pleasing shots, but cannot. The couple want to carry on as if unobserved, perhaps, but neither can nor do, as they talk to Adam, who in turn talks back, a voice entering the frame from offscreen.

In its imperfections, I would suggest that Tomorrow Never Knows shows most life, perhaps even most cinema, even if its struggle with the outside and its struggle for aesthetic control (its struggle to control death?) is equally a sign of life and cinema. But in both cases: cinema is not total control, but an absence of it…

But in this sense, cinema is not unlike Shar: she cannot control her disease—and this is just a fact of life. But she can control her death. So we reach another paradox: to be alive is to choose to die.

Sekuler shows us Shar’s dead body several times—at the start and then at various other points in the film. By starting with her corpse, Shar thereafter is reanimated, as if cinema could bring the dead back to life.

Cinema is thus a record of a world now dead, and it is both beautiful and haunting later to see images of Shar dancing in the countryside, a bridge (the bridge between life and death?) in the distance background.

But in contradicting death (Shar is brought back to life), Tomorrow Never Knows only reaffirms its inevitability—as a classical tragedy will depict its dead protagonists before the action unfolds: we know how this is going to end, with a key ingredient of tragedy being that one cannot escape one’s fate (and is perhaps hubristic to believe that it is possible).

Cinema is becoming, Life is becoming. Death is coming, if not becoming from the perspective of the self (which ends with death). But cinema also makes death becoming as it creates memories—an absence of becoming in that it creates something enduring. But even memories are, like cinema, fragile—as Alzheimer’s makes exceptionally clear.

The beauty of life and the beauty of cinema alike, then, lies perhaps in the shared but inevitably flawed attempt to exert control, to stave off the inevitable, to outlive it, both to become with it and not to become at all. To try to create in the face of destruction is perhaps to show spirit, to show that we have a spirit, a spirit that dances across the screen, before once more fading into nothingness.

As an addendum, I might say that while I will struggle to find time to write about it, Jason Barker’s A Deal with the Universe (UK, 2018) was also a highlight at Flare with its tale of attempts at transexual pregnancy.

Meanwhile, I would also like to give a big shout out to Siân Williams, who managed to have not one but four shorts feature in the UK Film Industry online section/selection at Flare. These included Montage of the Mind (UK, 2017), Bedside Surgeon (UK, 2017), DJ Pygmalion (UK, 2017) and Girl Under You (UK, 2017).

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, USA, 2018)

American cinema, Blogpost, Uncategorized

A Quiet Place depicts a world in which no one can fart, or at the very least where humans have developed exceptional sphincter control in a bid to ease out silent (but violent) guffs rather than make a noise. For, if they do make a noise, then aliens with exceptionally sensitive powers of audition will hear you and kill you.

We open with the Abbott family leaving a city in a post-apocalyptic time when the streets are empty, but strangely not littered with the corpses of humans who have been eviscerated by the monsters—begging the question of how they managed to clear up the devastation without making a noise.

They follow a trail of sand that has been laid down between the city and a farm in the countryside. How any human being managed to carry that much sand in order to lay down a path along roads and through countryside is not explained. Nor is the fact that no one else is travelling along this trail of sand, with the sand acting as a way of muffling footsteps.

By a railway bridge, youngest son Beau (Cade Woodward) puts batteries in a toy spaceship, which starts to make some noise. Given the stakes, this is a dumb move, but Beau’s only three and a half years of age, so clearly does not understand what is going on. Summarily he is slaughtered by an alien, which happens to be in that exact area and an exceptionally fast runner—so fast, in fact, that Beau has not been able to move to a different spot and remain quiet, or throw away the noise-making toy, such that the alien, which is blind and can only hear, can either no longer find him or goes and follows a false trail towards the plastic toy.

Indeed, although blind, the monster clearly roams the wooded area through which the Abbotts travel without bumping into trees, without being distracted by the wind in the trees, and without there being any leaves or twigs on the ground for people to crunch and snap (even though the Abbotts end up on a corn farm, as discussed below, Kellogg’s will clearly have gone out of business in this dystopian world).

The next we know is that it is Day 472—either since the apocalypse or since the Abbott family arrived at the farm.

Even though more than a year has elapsed, the farm is in excellent working order, with pater familias Lee (John Krasinski) having somehow managed silently to maintain a giant crop of corn, which remains in neat rows and has not overgrown at all.

Despite not being able to flush a toilet, piles of faeces do not lie strewn everywhere. Luckily no one in the Abbott family snores. And Lee has managed silently to ejaculate inside his wife, Evelyn (Emily Blunt), such that she is now pregnant. By some stroke of fortune, the electricity is also still working, even though no silent power generators seem to have been developed—meaning that the monsters clearly have not found and disrupted the otherwise noisy electricity grid.

That said, the internet is apparently not working, with cell phones also being out of action, meaning that no one is sending or receiving texts (with ringtone and keypad set to silent, obviously), such that humans can communicate to each other the whereabouts of the beasts, information about them and so on.

Instead, humans exist in isolated micro-communities, every night lighting a fire atop corn towers to let others know that they are there. All very idyllic.

During these 472 days, Lee has managed to install and keep running in a basement an old-fashioned radio kit, through which he sends messages in Morse code saying SOS, even though he also clearly sees the fire signals of others at night. Why he wants to be helped (SOS) seems unclear, and why he does not go see the bearers of the other torches also is unclear (smoke signals might also be a decent way of communicating, except that Native Americans do not exist to pass on such skills).

In his basement den, Lee also has in over a year managed to accrue the following ideas: the aliens follow sound, you must be silent, and you must survive. Even though he has a go at electronics—trying to develop new hearing aids for his deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds)—one gets the impression that if this is the sum of his knowledge after one and a half years of living under alien invasion, then Lee truly is a Salt of the Earth American. Or as Mel Brooks might put it: you know, a moron.

Indeed, while one newspaper headline announces ‘steps to survive the apocalypse’ (or words to that effect—with silent print presses clearly having also been developed, together with a silent transport infrastructure that allows for the silent distribution of print newspapers during the period of alien invasion), Lee has not actually put up on his noticeboard what those steps are. Instead, he just has the headline showing—to let him know that there are steps to surviving the apocalypse. Some humans are happier just knowing that they could improve their lot, with no inclination actually to do so…

Clearly it has been beyond the ken of humanity, with all of its technology and know-how, to learn how to, for example, make noise in one place in order to attract one of these beasts, while actually being in another place, and then using this ruse as a way of trapping the beast and then working out its functioning and, bluntly put, how to kill it.

What is more, poor bloody aliens: they kill or at least attack anything that makes a sound (which in the film includes an alarm clock, previously unseen, and a television monitor). For clearly sound annoys the hell out of them. And yet even though they make one hell of a racket as they go about, they do not attack themselves, nor do they go crazy with rage at the sounds of cicadas, birds, and the wind, and nor do they drown endlessly trying to fight rivers. God knows what they’d make of a thunderstorm.

We do see one of the monsters eat a beaver or some such critter at one point, so the aliens clearly do attack and possibly eat more than humans. And yet, the countryside is not an Armageddon of bleating animals—from cows to mice to rabbit to pheasants to squirrels to badgers to sheep to goats—being torn to shreds by terrible monsters, who also might attack each other. Indeed, given that these monsters have such sensitive hearing, one wonders that they have ended up on the wrong planet, really. With no one realising that because their hearing is so sensitive, sound might actually be used against them. And certainly with no one realising that the aliens clearly are vulnerable when they expose their ears, and thus can be killed really quite simply—if you can shoot inside their open ear rather than at the rest of their impenetrable body.

(Presumably in this scenario, Cuba is safe, since Cuba knows how to use inaudible sound frequencies as a weapon, as per the rendering-deaf of various workers at the American Embassy in Havana. God damn those spick communists for being better able to stave off the apocalypse.)

Back to Lee. In 472 days, he has not been bothered to fix the massive nail that sticks up out of the stairs down to his basement, and on which Evelyn will later tread, presumably because he a) does not really like DIY, and b) because he really just wants to be left alone down there (he wants people to tread on the nail so that they won’t go down, with Lee refusing Regan entry to his den at one point in the film).

Furthermore, even though Lee climbs atop the corn tower every day to do his fire ritual (having not yet run out of lighter fluid), in 472 days and as a full-size human adult, he has not managed to fall through the roof of the corn tower, even though his small son manages to do exactly this later on in the film on what is, as far as we know, his first visit to that place (we can guess this because his son, Marcus, played by Noah Jupe, is a wuss who does not want to venture outside; Lee forces him to go fishing, where Marcus, clearly the inheritor of his father’s brains, finally realises that if he is around things louder than him, he can make noise, although why no one else has decided that behind a waterfall might be a good place to live in the era of these acoustic monsters is unclear).

When Marcus does fall inside the corn tower, one of the aliens arrives to kill him, but is put off by feedback from Regan’s otherwise malfunctioning hearing aid. The monster then bursts through the corn tower and out into the (still perfectly kept) corn field, only to reappear a bit later when Marcus and Regan are inside a now defunct car. But where the monster just ripped through a corn tower with ease, it apparently has much more trouble with car windows, meaning that Lee has time to arrive and sacrifice himself for his kids by causing a distraction.

Meanwhile, Evelyn has given birth and she keeps her new son (a replacement for Beau – yay!) in a coffin to keep him quiet—and an oxygen tank, which hopefully will last for three years or so before the newborn learns to be quiet. Even though this secret room is soundproof, and Evelyn and Lee can talk down there, it has enough holes in it that it floods when one of the monsters sets a pipe leaking upstairs while looking for them.

The point of this blog is not necessarily to demonstrate that A Quiet Place has as many holes in it as Lee’s sound-proofed room. Nor is it to suggest that if this film can get a major release, then The Room (Tommy Wiseau, USA, 2003) really should be upheld as an entirely legitimate film, since it makes about as much sense as this film, and yet was made for so much less money. Likewise, anyone who derides as inferior a movie like Mega-Shark versus Giant Octopus (Ace Hannah, USA, 2009) is duty-bound to do the same with this film—unless it is really cosmetic issues like budget that one wants to deride (i.e. what one really wants to deride when deriding Mega-Shark over A Quiet Place is poverty; this film may not make sense, but it’s a film with money, so it cannot be shit; only poor films are shit, like only poor people are shit, even though they may be much smarter than the rich male ‘heroes’ we have on display here).

Rather than make these points, though, the issue that I really want to address is why A Quiet Place is the way that it is.

Lee basically sits down in his basement doing completely useless things: making hearing aids that do not work, not fixing the nail, managing in 1.5 years to realise that ‘survival’ is key (no shit, Sherlock), and not reading the ways that might help him to survive the apocalypse, but just the headline that tells him that there are ways to do so. In other words, Lee is a redundant male and completely useless, consoling himself as being useful because he can fish and because he can light a fire with lighter fluid on the top of a corn tower, and sending pointless SOS signals via his radio rig.

At one point, we see a list of radio frequencies for him to try, and as Lee crosses out about the fifteenth frequency down a list of about twenty, you wonder whether he has really been trying to get help at all… Fifteen attempts in a year and a half, Lee? I mean, come on, man… how much do you want to get saved?

But this is the point: in its utter flimsiness, and in being predicated like many recent films around the premise of a dead and/or imminent birth (or in this case both), then A Quiet Place would seem to suggest that Lee does not want to get saved (he does not want anyone to answer the SOS call).

And why not? Basically because he fantasises about being in a world where finally his kids shut the fuck up and leave him alone to fuck about in his basement den doing absolutely nothing useful, but pissing away his time in the way that he wants and not responding to the demands of his family.

‘What do you mean I’ve only tried fifteen frequencies in a year and a half? Shut up! I’m busy. And no you can’t come down here to see how busy I am. You’d just get in the way. And ruin everything, like you’re ruining my life!’

‘Thank God that annoying kid got killed by that monster, even if I did make a token effort to save it. And better yet, I can punish his deaf sister for giving him the batteries and still claim to love her, even though she is deaf. And to top it all: hopefully my new son will both shut my wife up as she keeps banging on about replacing my dead son, while the screaming infant won’t have a hope in hell of surviving, so we might as well put him in a coffin already.’

The moral of the film, then, is that your kids will kill you—making your personal way of life untenable and taking away from you every freedom that you had and which narcissistically you do not want to give up, but in fact want to prolong, and preferably by producing not alien monsters, but clone versions of yourself.

Conversely, if you want to be a responsible father, then you must basically die for your kids—especially if humanity is to have a future. But who is prepared to die? While Lee does die in this film, the film is also about the difficulty he has in coming to this decision.

In its transition from selfish to selfless father, then, the film speaks to a contemporary world in which unruly kids are an abomination, and we pathologise and diagnose kids as having all manner of conditions, disorders and diseases in a bid to get them to shut up, and in a bid to get them to internalise as wrong the very things that make them most alive—namely their differences from their parents (with the pathologised kid being made both to shut up and getting to fool themselves that this uniformed shutting up is a signifier of how different from everyone else in the world they are, perhaps especially their parents, such that they feel exactly like an alien; that is, through their pathologisation, the kids are interpellated into solipsistic silence).

‘A kid that cannot behave? Socialise it through medication and medical diagnosis! Get to a world of silence where parenthood involves no sacrifice, but just a continuation of single and perhaps partnered life as usual.’

Perhaps this also reveals the function of horror stories: equally to get kids to behave by scaring the shit out of them (except that we can flush away that shit in our world, while it magically disappears in A Quiet Place).

More: it is the kids that are the monsters, since they, like the monsters, function in a world without language, without sense, in touch with chaos. It is through language (by being made not just to hear, but by being deafened by the cacophony of modernity) that they will be socialised and made to conform to the law of the father. Or else kill the father.

What this film reveals—the narcissism of the middle class white male (and perhaps of Krasinski as director, co-writer and star)—is also part of the problem: in getting to die for his kids, the useless white male is also rendered a hero, in the process having his cake and eating it—being correct to tell his kids to shut up, being allowed himself to do some shouting, and then being correct finally to let the monsters/the little monsters take over from him.

Notably, Regan and Evelyn take about two minutes after Lee’s death to work out how to kill the aliens, while Marcus whimpers in the corner with his baby brother. And so yes, we have an empowered pair of women, one of them ‘even more empowered’ because physically impaired/hard of hearing—which makes A Quiet Place all very fashionable given the presence of mute and/or deaf women in Oscar-winners The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2017) and The Silent Child (Chris Overton, UK, 2017), even if collectively these films suggest a desire for women to be mute and deaf in the era of #metoo.

But then we have just spent the best part of ninety minutes watching the patriarchy. Even when in auto-critique mode, then, the patriarchal film still preens itself in an overblown peacock display of uselessness, asking us to marvel at its ability to fart (or not)—and expecting to be loved for it. Much as there is some capable acting and directing here, A Quiet Place just seems to ask for too much.

NOTE: I arrived a few minutes after the beginning of the film, and so might have missed something important. That said, I asked one guy what happened and he said that he was asleep. And so I asked a couple what had happened, and they said that I had missed nothing (with one of them saying, remarkably, that they could not remember the beginning of the film).

Mini-Mythologies #1 [+ Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug, UK/USA, 2018)]

American cinema, Blogpost, Mini-Mythologies, Uncategorized

 

Don’t ask me why I went to see Tomb Raider. But I did.

However, while I want to offer a brief critique of the film below, I also figured I’d use this blog as an opportunity to start something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, which is basically to write mini-critiques of adverts, both posters and audiovisual pieces – in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Hence ‘mini-mythologies.’

Numerous adverts preceded Tomb Raider, but four caught my eye in particular.

The first was ‘Five Go On a Great Western Adventure,’ a pleasant enough animation that sees the Famous Five take a train journey to the coast, but with dog Timmy getting separated from the rest of the gang and ending up travelling via other means to the same destination.

Created by adam&eveDDB, what is interesting about this advert is that Timmy arrives at exactly the same time as the other four of the Five, in spite of going for a long stretch in a hot air balloon, a motorbike with a sidecar, and then a speed boat.

Now, some speed boats can go quite fast. But on the whole, I’d imagine that a speed boat cannot go as fast as a train by any stretch. Certainly a hot air balloon cannot go as fast as a train.

Except, of course, when the train is very slow because of problems with the signals, leaves on the track, a touch of snow, and all of the other things that go to make British rail services generally disappointing.

In suggesting that the train only goes as fast as a hot air balloon, are adam&eveDDB in fact suggesting the true nature of Great Western Railway trains – namely that they also go at a speed that is dictated by the whims of the weather rather than by man’s technological advantage over nature?

The second advert is Dell’s Introducing Dell Cinema. The above is not quite the version that I saw, but it comes close enough.

Several things. Firstly, Dell suggests that watching a movie on a laptop is the equivalent of watching a movie at the cinema. It may be that we mainly watch films on computers now, as we have progressed from standing to sitting to lying down before movies, in the process prostrating ourselves before cinema as if it were a god. But in other ways, one wonders that what is missing from solo (solipsistic?) film viewing is the communal aspect of the cinema, which is not to mention simply the sound and image quality of the theatrical venue: hundreds of thousands of pounds are spent on cinemas, and unless you are very rich, home viewing, especially on a laptop, will never match it.

Nonetheless – and here is my second point – in suggesting that it can match it, we have a re-emphasis as communal something that is essentially solitary – watching a movie at home.

Thirdly, that the laptop aspires to be cinema suggests that culturally cinema is still at the top of the pile as far as being a medium that connotes power. A laptop does not aspire to be a laptop; it aspires to be a cinema.

Fourth, it is ironic that the snippets of ‘cinema’ that we see are in fact ‘television’/laptop shows like The Crown and Stranger Things. While we do live in an era of technological convergence, whereby laptop shows and movies are made using the same equipment, there is nonetheless a false claim being made here. The Dell machine is not cinematic, but televisual. However, it claims to be cinematic in order to empower itself. In other words, as per the GWR advert above, the advert lets slip that it is lying to us (that it is an advert, if all adverts are in certain respects lies, or mythologies).

Finally, that the laptop – which initially was a tool devised for computing – is now a tool sold for the purposes of viewing, suggests a shift from work to entertainment. Or more accurately, it suggests the immaterial labour that is screen-viewing for the purposes of the attention economy. It suggests how entertainment is used to keep us looking at the screens in order to keep the wheels of commerce turning. And it suggests that consumption via ‘cinema’ viewing is, again, a better thing to do with one’s time than production, especially if one might produce something that challenges the status quo by being a product not from the sanctioned sources. That is, the Dell Cinema is an anti-revolutionary machine designed to keep us staring at screens rather than bringing about a better world.

Third up is Halifax’s Top Cat advert.

In this advert, TC basically lies to a woman at the Halifax in order to get a mortgage from the bank, employing Benny to play a sad violin score, while other cats stand around outside pretending to be homeless children.

Not only is the advert basically a riff on Top Cat as a ‘benefit scrounger,’ lying to the Halifax in order to get money. But in making TC the hero, the bank is also encouraging people to take out loans.

Why is it doing this?

Well, in part it would seem to be doing this because clearly after the 2008 economic crisis, which was in large part based on sub prime loans, it would seem that banks are up to exactly the same thing again: handing out cash to anyone who asks for it.

But more than this… the banks are doing this because we live in a culture that wants to use debt as a form of control. Not only does debt help to stave off crisis (if I have debt that I cannot pay back, then I must create more debt from somewhere else in order to pay it back temporarily, a bit like the gambler who thinks that doubling up a bet after a loss is what will make them their money back). But this attempt to stave off the crisis is unsustainable: using debt to pay off debt will ultimately come crashing down, as happens during crisis and as happens to the gambler.

The Halifax advert, then, is a signal of a new, impending crisis. But not only this: it demonstrates that crisis is exactly part of the natural cycle of capitalism – its very rule, rather than being an exception to it.

And it is this because debt will keep people enslaved, rather than able to create new or different economies. So while TC thinks he is being super savvy in conning the Halifax out of some money, in fact he is being duped. I can guarantee that the bank will not be so kind to him when he cannot pay off his mortgage.

Although not included in the version here, the cinema advert also includes ‘out-takes’ at the end of the advert. A mildly amusing gag, in that animated out-takes are clearly not out-takes at all, the advert uses the illusion of exposing labour (look at the failed attempts that we went through to make this advert) in order to keep labour hidden (but these are manufactured failures and not real failures at all).

Top Cat is a television character, but the ‘out-take’ is more common to cinema. Not only is there an aspiration to being/becoming cinematic going on here, but it also is linked to the idea that cinema is about not working – and that money and good things can and should come for free, an ideological trick that is played precisely to keep people working – in the hope of becoming cinematic…

Another advert, then, another lie.

And finally, there is a new Max Factor advert that I cannot share here, and in which we see make-up being applied to a woman in order to bring out ‘the leading lady’ in her. The usual awful clichés apply, with the advert suggesting that it is ‘her time,’ with the possession of time here being precisely the myth that drives much of capitalist society: that time is something that we can possess and use rather than something that flows through us and which we are incapable of controlling.

What is more, the imbrication to insist that it is ‘your time’ basically is a byword for saying that you will truck nothing that does not sit comfortably with your worldview. That is, the endorsement of ‘my/me time’ is equally an endorsement of greed, selfishness, solipsism and a destruction of relationships with others.

Importantly, this greed/solipsism is linked explicitly to cinema: to behave this way is to be cinematic, or to be a leading lady. So cinema is again a chief tool for capitalism, and something to which we must all aspire.

Notably, this is also at the root of the cosmetics industry. This is not simply a cheap point in that cosmetics reaffirm superficiality and an emphasis on appearances/the visual. But more specifically it bespeaks how numerous humans prepare themselves visually not to be seen by other people, but to be seen by cameras in order then to be seen in images.

For, to be seen in images/to be cinematic is, as mentioned, a sign of power and/or a sign of someone with money (even if it is debt). Indeed, to be in images is to be/become a sign/icon, with money itself being a sign and an icon (i.e. we want to be/become money, or cinema, with cinema and capital thus being basically the same thing). We live in a world that worships icons, that upholds becoming an icon as the highest achievement, and which worships money. To become cinematic is the summum of achievements.

In order to become an icon, one must dispense of or deny one’s body; one must cover or make it up so that it cannot be seen. So to be/become cinematic, and thus to deny one’s body, enables the cosmetics industry to exist as such. It relies upon making people feel ashamed about their bodies, which are too real and not cinematic enough, and thus modifying their bodies not in order to be real, but to be cinematic. So when the advert sells you ‘your time,’ it is in fact selling you a fake time, since ‘your time’ only comes about when you are not yourself, but when you are an image. Again, then, the advert is lying to you.

As for Tomb Raider, a few thoughts:-

  1. Lara starts out poor because she has not accepted her inheritance from her father because she cannot accept that he is dead. Fair enough. On some levels. Except that Lara clearly is not poor, and yet slums it in London. This is disingenuous tourism among the poor (‘poorism’), which makes Lara somewhat objectionable and dishonest. Indeed, when we see Lara’s flat with skylights and rooftop terrace… she clearly has used money from outside of her bicycle courier job – because I could not afford such a place and I earn a respectable wage.
  2. Lara’s daddy issues subvert any claims to empowered femininity that the film might otherwise purport to offer.
  3. Of course, Lara cannot have sex with anyone, and does not. Because powerful women cannot have partners (because they are too good for everyone else?).
  4. When Lara discovers her father’s hidden lair of treasure… we get a sense of how the Croft family wealth is predicated upon theft – a basic re-enactment of colonialism. As Lara denies her class, so she denies in some senses a history of colonial theft – in order to justify and perpetuate it.
  5. The film’s other women are basically carriers of a plague and/or corporate bitches.
  6. Spoiler. Lara discovers at the end that the woman to whom she has given power of attorney over her fortune is basically heading up the evil corporation that is seeking power via colonial theft. Obviously a cue for sequels. But importantly, Lara does not do anything specific about this, like launch an investigation into anything. Apparently she cannot because she does not have ‘power of attorney.’ But if the attorney were unsuitable, a court would surely be sympathetic, and indeed want criminal activity to be investigated and stopped. But Lara does not take this course of action, not least because it would not be cinematic, but instead a bit boring. So what we learn, then, is that Lara really needs her own company to be doing evil things so that Lara can have her adventures. In other words, Lara does not want the evil to end at all, but in fact wants it, because she is part of it. Because she is indeed an expression of rich, white (and here feminised) colonialism, faking some affinity/kinship with the lower classes and in fact justifying the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Lara in fact endorses the slave labour that one of her companies is carrying out. As it is with Lara, so it is with Tomb Raider.

There are other things to discuss (like the fact that the diseased woman that is found at the film’s end infects and kills people really quickly, and yet within the final tomb there are neatly arranged bodies, as if the disease were really just a genteel experience… while the elaborate underground tomb must have taken years of slave labour to build, begging the question of what happened in the meantime to the plague bearer… and a thought that if the threat of her plague were so real,  then you’d just burn the woman and illico/immediately, rather than waiting for ages to build a ceremonial tomb in which to place her… which in being accessible, even if difficult to reach, only begs the usual question about King Kong: if you don’t want the monster to escape, don’t build a gate big enough for the monster to fit through. Clearly the plague is supposed to escape. Clearly Lara wants the plague to spread, just as the map of her company’s holding looks suspiciously like globalisation, like globalisation as plague, the plague being capital, that Lara needs in order to be rich, while at the same pretending to be poor.).

But I shall leave it at that…

Orfeu branco: You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, UK/France/USA, 2017)

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

If The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2017) recently won the Oscars for Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Score (for Alexandre Desplat), then clearly the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is completely incapable of discerning what makes a good film. Or rather, its concerns seem very far removed from mine, and its definition of cinema is vastly different from mine.

The Shape of Water is perfectly competent, and it has a few nice ideas. But it is nothing like the total masterclass in filmmaking that is You Were Never Really Here, which sees three of the finest filmmakers in the world (Lynne Ramsay, Joaquin Phoenix and Jonny Greenwood) at the absolute top of their game (which is not to mention the film’s excellence in cinematography, editing, general sound design and more).

Oscar has deemed fit to reward You Were Never Really Here with zero nominations, suggesting that it is not interested in what I would call mature storytelling, but rather the infantile fantasies that we see peddled in The Shape of Water.

(Although, if Oscar is going to reward kids’ movies, then why it has not honoured the superior Paddington 2, Paul King, UK/France/USA, 2017, seems incomprehensible to me.)

Anyway, a gripe about how the Oscars seem to revel in a kind of puerile conservatism aside (the recognition of Jordan Peele and Sebastián Lelio’s work notwithstanding), this blog just wants to offer up a few thoughts about Lynne Ramsay’s masterpiece, which seems unlikely to be topped for me between now and the end of the year.

Firstly, Lynne Ramsay seems to have seen and to have taken notice of the growing body of work by the Safdie brothers, with its moody, claustrophobic cinematography and Greenwood’s dark retro synth score bringing to mind the recent Good Time (Ben and Josh Safdie, USA, 2017), with which You Were Never Really Here is in many ways comparable, given its emphasis on New York by night, New York on the move, and the interiors of lower middle and working class domestic spaces.

The other recent film that You Were Never Really Here resembles is S. Craig Zahler’s equally moody Brawl in Cell Block 99 (USA, 2017) – with ‘moody’ here clearly being a by-word for an emphasis on darkness, confined spaces, and an ambulatory approach to violence that is physical, intimate and gory.

For, You Were Never Really Here and Brawl in Cell Block 99 are both re-tellings of the myth of Orpheus, who must descend into the underworld in order to rescue Eurydice. But unlike Marcel Camus’ Orfeu negro/Black Orpheus (Brazil/France/Italy, 1959), which casts the myth alongside carnival and the slums of Rio de Janeiro, thereby giving a sense in which poverty is hell, in both Ramsay and Zahler’s films, hell is entering into the dark corridors of power – be that of the state’s penitentiary system in the latter, or the kiddy dungeons of the rich in the former.

The motif of ‘descent’ is clear as on at least two occasions, we see Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe drop into frame from above – giving a literal sense of downwardness to his journey.

But in addition to being about downwardness, the film is also about absence – as the title of the film makes clear.

Joe is a military veteran whose hulking frame carries numerous scars, and who seems to have been shot, or witnessed a shooting, by a kid in a vaguely Middle Eastern-seeming location during his service. Now home, he rescues missing children from sex traffickers, while also living with his mother (Judith Roberts), whose health is clearly not great. Both his mother and Joe suffered at the hands of an abusive husband/father, with both Joe’s childhood and his military experiences being given to us in flashbacks that are haunting both for their brevity and for their beauty.

Ramsay’s film time and again marries the brutal with the tender, with an especial emphasis being articulated time and again on human touch and the feel of objects (hands on windows, hands on hands, hands on feet, and so on). Culture also is able to bring humans together, as characters sing songs (including an astounding sequence that sees two characters sing along to Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’).

What is more, Joe and his mother bond over Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960), a film that is most famous for achieving maximum shock value while also showing next to nothing.

And in this intertext we get a sense of Ramsay’s mastery. It is not just that a good amount of the violence in You Were Never Really Here takes place offscreen, as per Psycho. It is that the film repeatedly stages Joe leaving the frame, with the picture then simply showing the spaces of the film’s action, rather than the action itself. This includes the film’s utterly absorbing final image, in which we see nothing more than a table at a diner where human figures earlier sat.

(Apologies for the vagueness in not saying who those figures are. But where normally I do not care about giving away spoilers, here I think it works to give as little of the film away as possible.)

With its emphasis on ’empty space,’ the space within the film becomes a ‘character.’ But more than this, we get a sense that space shapes character and behaviour more than human agents shape space.

That is, You Were Never Really Here suggests that humans are in effect utterly mindless in their belief that they are in control of their destiny and their choice of action, with the film seeking to make us mindful of how it is the environments that we create that shape our actions. New York lends itself to violence and to the trafficking of children for sex – even if any reasonable person would say that it is humans who are responsible for their depravity. It is not that humans are not responsible for their depravity; but we build environments where depravity is encouraged, and so it inevitably will grow.

Perhaps we can get a sense of this through the film’s final sequence, in which Joe attempts a second rescue in the house of wealthy businessman and state Governor Williams (Alessandro Nivola). The camera emphasises in particular a black statue of a woman, and a painting of a semi-nude woman at the end of a corridor.

We are surrounded by depictions in our contemporary world of women as objects. We divide our contemporary world into small capsules (houses, rooms in houses) that we divide for the purposes of ‘privacy,’ and increasingly we remove common spaces for the purpose of developing property (the city as a pit of property development).

In each of these processes, there is an ideology of separation – of separating humans from each other and from the world that surrounds them through the erection of walls, and through the reduction of humans to objects (statues, paintings). If humans do not view each other as humans but as objects, then it is clear that humans will enact on each other things that are not humane, but which instead reinforce separation and objecthood.

For this reason, I say that sex trafficking is almost a logical consequence of the city.

But in making a film, is Ramsay not herself creating objects? Clearly, this is a risk that she runs. But it is perhaps for this reason that the characters in her film regularly elude the camera’s gaze – Joe leaves the frame, or is obscured from view – such that his life (and the lives of other characters) is paradoxically conveyed to us through its absence (Joe cannot be captured), rather than through its presence (which would be to reduce life by rendering the person an object; life must necessarily be other – otherwise it is not alive; and if it is other, it must necessarily elude us, since in eluding us, we get a sense that it has a life of its own, rather than being something that is there for us to/that we can control).

Through Joe regularly being absent from the frame (in never really being here), You Were Never Really Here suggests how in order to get a sense of ourselves, we have in some senses to question our own reality, rather than simply unthinkingly accepting it and its values.

What I mean by this is that if I am a product of my environment as much as I am an autonomous agent, and if life consists in an otherness that by definition eludes us, then ‘I’ am not what I think I am. In seeing that ‘I’ am not an ‘I’ that is separate from, but rather which is entangled with, my environment, I realise that ‘I’ is not really here. Indeed, I realise that ‘I’ is both here and there. And that to say ‘here’ is to  presume a fixed and autonomous ‘I.’ Properly to discover myself, I have to realise that I was never really here. You were never really here.

If you go with this perhaps necessarily obscure point (it is obscure in the sense that it is hard to see and, like Ramsay’s film, shrouded in darkness; we need to understand the importance of darkness and how to shine a light on darkness does not help us to understand it, but rather destroys it), then perhaps we can ask what cinema is.

For what cinema is, or what cinema can do, is to remind us that there is a world beyond us, and that we are thus not autonomous beings, but entangled beings.

How does cinema do this? Cinema does this by showing us other worlds.

Most films, however, show us other worlds as if they were objects for us to do with what we please. Like the statue and the painting, most films objectify the world that we see, and in the process they make us forget that we are watching a film (as the child molester forgets that he is molesting a human being). They do this through light and speed: there is nothing that eludes that mainstream film, but all is visible (darkness is destroyed), and everything moves so fast that it we do not have time to look at it for long enough to get a sense of its otherness.

In the film’s slowness and in Joe’s lumbering slowness, meanwhile, as well as in its emphasis on sheer physicality, we get a sense in You Were Not Really Here of how the film is other, moving at its own pace and not at the pace that we demand from it like slave drivers torturing their object-slaves into evermore accelerated productivity. Absent and slow, You Were Never Really Here runs the risk of alienating its audience (which is why Oscar does not and cannot acknowledge the film).

But through these very qualities, it takes on a life and shows us another world, reminding us not that we are immersed in a story-object as if we were there, but that we as viewers are seeing something other, and that we as viewers were never really here in the world where the story of You Were Never Really Here unfolds.

That is, the film in its title tells us to our faces that we are watching a film and that while this is a fiction, the power of its falseness lies in telling us that we are not autonomous beings, but that other people exist and that there are other ways of seeing the world beyond simply our own (paradoxically mass-produced) vision.

Not only were we never really here, but we’ve also never really been to me.

In 2010, Joaquin Phoenix returned to cinema after a hiatus with I’m Still Here (Casey Affleck, USA, 2010). In casting Phoenix (as well as in its references to Psycho), Ramsay seems once again to be making a film that self-consciously is a film – and one that approaches the critique of solipsism that we also find in Affleck’s film.

For, in Affleck’s mockumentary, Phoenix plays a would-be rapper called Joaquin Phoenix who is so out of touch with reality that he has absolutely no understanding of himself, so corrupted has he become by celebrity and self-absorption.

With Ramsay, Phoenix seems perhaps to be the only person who can see others as human beings and not as objects – the only person who is not solipsistic (and who rejects suicide on multiple occasions in spite of the pull towards it as an expression of how he regularly is made to feel alone in the world; perhaps it is noteworthy that his sense of otherness is experienced as a trauma undertaken both at home and at war, as if the family were as much a tool for war as military service itself).

What is more, Phoenix embodies arch solipsism in another film where he has to learn that he was never really Her (Spike Jonze, USA, 2013). That is, Theodore in that film must come to understand that the AI called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) eludes him, even though she/it should be an object that he can control.

We are all connected. But we are connected by difference, and not by an ability to control each other. To reduce each other and our world to objects is to destroy the life of that world and those people, much like shining a light on darkness destroys it. Its otherness is a marker of its life.

Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is from start to finish a masterpiece, filled with pregnant images that promise great meaning. Greenwood’s score and Phoenix’s performance are as good as they get.

As Oscar struggles forever to get to grips with otherness (issues of gender, issues of race in the American film industry), it seems a shame that a masterpiece like this one should get overlooked. Perhaps Hollywood cannot recognise otherness when it sees it (and when it does, perhaps it seeks to control it, perhaps even by giving an award to it). In this way, perhaps You Were Never Really Here is better off outside of the Oscars. But I for one feel that my world has improved by having seen it.

F for Fake: Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, Malta/USA, 2017)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

One of the key scenes in Murder on the Orient Express involves Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) exposing Gerhard Hardman (Willem Dafoe) as a fake Austrian scientist as a result of his failure correctly to pronounce Turin. Hardman – if that is his real name – pronounces it TURin, whereas a genuine Austrian, as Poirot reminds us, would have pronounced it TurIN.

Given the importance that the film places upon pronunciation as a sign of authenticity, it is notable that on two occasions we hear the Belgian sleuth incorrectly pronounce the plural of the French word for eggs. The singular, œuf, involves the pronunciation of the f: ‘urf.’ However, when said in the plural, French speakers drop the f sound and say ‘uh’: des œufs (‘des uh’). Poirot, however, on both occasions persists incorrectly with the f and says ‘urfs.’

If it is an incorrect pronunciation that exposes Hardman’s act, then by the same token Poirot’s incorrect pronunciation exposes his own act. That is, if it is because he cannot correctly pronounce words that Hardman is revealed as not Hardman, then because he cannot correctly pronounce words, Poirot is similarly revealed as not Poirot. In other words, it is because of an f that the Poirot of Murder on the Orient Express is revealed as a fake.

What are we to make of this?

On a primary level, we can simply say that it is an error that any actor (here, Kenneth Branagh) might make when saying words in a language that is not his own. That is, the slip is meaningless – the sort of slip that should not be the basis of an entire argument about the film.

But, given that the film itself involves sleuthing based upon such slips, then by the film’s own standards, we can mount a case against the film as a result of its linguistic inaccuracies. If Hardman’s slip is deliberate, in the sense that it provides a clue as to the real nature of what it is that we are witnessing, then so must we read Branagh/Poirot‘s slip as deliberate.

[SPOILERS.]

Hercule Poirot finds himself on a train where 12 people have gathered ritually to murder a man (Edward Ratchett/John Cassetti, played by Johnny Depp) who himself abducted and killed a child in the USA some time prior to the titular train journey taking place. Each has a link to the victim and the victim’s family – and each is sufficiently devastated by the original murder that they are willing to take part in the murder from which the novel – and subsequently the film – takes its name.

The film presents to us as if it is by chance that Poirot happens to be on the titular train. Indeed, the murderers would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for the pesky Poirot’s presence – and an avalanche that happens to keep the train stuck for a day or more near Brod, in what at the time of the film’s setting (1934) was the recently formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and which today finds itself in the Muslim-majority country of Kosovo.

But what are the odds that all of these people with a connection to Cassetti happen to be on the same train – at precisely the same time that the world’s greatest detective happens to be there, too?

As the odds are extremely slim that so many people with connections to Cassetti can be on the same train as him by chance, so, too, are the odds slim that Poirot would be on the same train as all of these people and as Cassetti by chance.

Indeed, as it is not by chance that all of these same people are on the same train as Cassetti (they are here specifically to murder him), so might it also not be by chance that Poirot is on the same train. For, as Hardman is not Hardman, so is this Poirot not Hercule Poirot.

Instead, as indicated by his fake f, this Poirot is in fact an actor playing the part of Hercule Poirot – the world’s greatest detective – precisely so that he can uncover the crime and then use his credentials as a great moral arbitrator in order to excuse those who commit the murder of Cassetti.

That is, this Poirot is not on the train by chance, but, like all of the 12 perpetrators, he is equally on the train as a result of engineering. This Poirot is there not just to uncover the murder, but to justify the murder. He is part of the plot to allow murder to happen justifiably. For if the world believes that even Hercule Poirot allows these people to get away with murder, then everyone will allow these people to get away with murder. It is necessary to fake Poirot’s presence in order to justify murder.

But why do this?

On one level, this must be done in order to keep the train’s owner, Bouc (Tom Bateman), at bay. Where Bouc might otherwise blow a whistle about the murder, thanks to Poirot’s presence and his condonement of the killing, Bouc will keep quiet and let the killing happen ‘in peace.’ Bouc thus is a kind of bouc émissaire, or scapegoat, for the murder – not because Bouc literally takes the rap for what happens, but because Bouc’s naïve belief in the fake Poirot reconfirms (the fake) Poirot’s (fake) verdict that the killers are justified in their actions.

Except that Bouc specifically invites Poirot to take the train when Poirot is called to London to investigate the Kassner case. That is, Bouc is necessary in order to corroborate that this curious man whom we see is Hercule Poirot, while at the same time providing the necessary setting for the murder to take place. Bouc is in on it, too.

It is not simply that Poirot is part of the plot to murder Cassetti, then. It may even be that Poirot – this fake Poirot – is the mastermind behind the plot, a man playing the role of the Belgian detective in order to allow a murder to happen that he himself will expose and then condone precisely so that it takes place without consequence.

What evidence do we really have that Ratchett is Cassetti? None. That is, we have 12 liars who insist that this man is Cassetti, a child murderer who was never caught and the evidence for whose crime is never revealed to us. And then we have the word of a fake Poirot, whose explanations of the crime may be ingenious – but they explain to us neither who has been killed nor why.

Murder in Yugoslavia, or more specifically Kosovo, is therefore justified by the word of a fake authority. Indeed, because of the authority of a fake Belgian who justifies it, it becomes the perfect murder. Collective murder is perfect.

At the outset of the film, we see Poirot asking for the eggs that are the centre of this argument. Four minutes, he says, which presumably means that Poirot likes his eggs with a bit of unboiled snot in them given that five minutes is in my experience the best time to achieve a soft-boiled egg – give or take 30 seconds depending on the size of the egg.

(Furthermore, the boiling point of water falls with decreasing atmospheric pressure, and so it takes longer to cook an egg when one is at a higher altitude, since the boiling water there is not as hot and thus not as speedy a cooking medium as it would be at sea level.)

Having received two eggs that simply by appearance he does not like, the fake Poirot dismisses them and demands two more, which duly arrive.

Poirot (the fake Poirot) then takes out a ruler and measures the eggs, even though the eggs are visibly not the same size.

What is more, having dismissed the initial pair of eggs, he now accepts the second set of eggs, even though they are visibly disparate – and even though measuring them will not help him to know whether they have been boiled for the four required minutes.

In other words, first the insistence, then the refusal and then the nonsensical measurements are carried out in order to convince those around him (and we viewers) that this man is Hercule Poirot, the sort of man who would do such nitpicking. But of course, this is simply a performance by an impostor.

When Poirot makes it on to the Orient Express, he is served two much more equally-sized eggs for breakfast by the train steward Pierre Michel (Marwan Kenzari). How Michel knows to prepare the eggs this way is not revealed to us – and this is Poirot’s first experience on the titular train. In other words, Michel would seem already somehow to know Poirot. And Michel will eventually be revealed as yet another part of the plot to kill Ratchett, whom the murderers also claim to be Cassetti.

What is more, when Ratchett endeavours to employ Poirot to protect him from what he senses is imminent danger, Poirot (the fake Poirot) refuses – in part because he does not like Ratchett’s face.

In other words, not only would it seem that Poirot (the fake Poirot) is known in advance to at least one – but perhaps more – of the criminals who murder Ratchett. But it would also seem that Poirot himself has something against Ratchett. Perhaps it is for this reason that this detective who jumps up and who leaves his berth upon the slightest sound also somehow manages to sleep through 12 humans piling into a berth, stabbing a man and leaving again… because he also was a part of it.

But then who is this fake Poirot?

When the fake Poirot arrives at Istanbul train station with Bouc, he is told that there is no room left on the train – and that he therefore cannot travel in spite of his friend Bouc’s promise that he can.

At the last minute, however, someone suggests that an Englishman named Harris has not made it on time to catch the train. Passengers must arrive 30 minutes before departure, otherwise they forfeit their right to travel – and Harris has not arrived before departure and therefore cannot travel.

What has happened to Harris? Harris may have forgotten or missed his train. Or, given that Harris was otherwise booked on to a train where all of the passengers and even some of the staff members know each other, as an outsider he has been conveniently forced to miss the train – so as not to disrupt the murder that is about to take place (Harris is the victim of a second, earlier murder?).

Or, more simply, Harris does take the train. For the man who claims to be Hercule Poirot is really an Englishman called Harris, hence his inability correctly to pronounce the plural for eggs in French (des œufs/des ‘uh’).

Perhaps it is for this reason that MacQueen (Josh Gad) initially expresses surprise at seeing Harris/Poirot – for he does not recognise his friend in disguise, prompting Harris/Poirot to express his own dismay at MacQueen’s appearance. That is, Harris is indirectly expressing his own disappointment at having to look like Hercule Poirot.

Everything that follows is persiflage, pure show, or simply noise like the whistle of a train (per-siffle-age), including a somewhat nonsensical ‘action’ sequence in which Poirot chases MacQueen along a wooden bridge.

Indeed, this would explain the highly theatrical opening of the film, too, in which the fake Poirot supposedly solves the case of a missing treasure of which a rabbi (Elliot Levey), a priest (David Annen) and an imam (Joseph Long) are accused of stealing.

The fake Poirot himself points out that this is almost a joke scenario to the assembled crowd, who for some reason accept that a trial can or should take place in the open air and under the authority of a fake detective hired by the British government. That is, the trial is indeed a joke.

For, it becomes immediately obvious that there are not just the three religious men involved in this case, since the fake Poirot quickly explains to us that the last person to see the triumvirate was the British Police Chief Inspector (Michael Rouse).

We are told that Poirot (the fake Poirot) solves this crime as a result of a mark left by a shoe on a painting that lines the wall beneath the treasure. But far more simple a solution is to include among the suspects the very man who has known to accuse these three religious figures in the first place.

In other words, the ‘trial’ at the film’s opening is a pure show, a sham that is also put on in order to convince the assembled crowd and we viewers that this fake Poirot is the real Poirot.

The Chief Inspector supposedly steals the treasure, but it seems more logical to this viewer that the crime itself is a set-up so that the trial can be staged and so that the fake Poirot can be inserted into the story world.

That is, the fake Poirot is really engineered by the British – not to sort out who is responsible for the looting of valuables in Jerusalem (where the film opens), but in order to justify the British looting of valuables from Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Empire.

Supposedly called to London for the Kassner case, the British have in fact set Harris up as Poirot so that he can go on to the Orient Express to mastermind and then to justify the murder of Ratchett.

Why do this? Because Ratchett, too, is involved in the business of buying and selling antiques, including fake ones. That is, Ratchett wants to get involved in the very same racket that the British are operating throughout their Empire: stealing antiquities and replacing them with fakes that are sold at high cost.

As an upstart possible competitor, Ratchett must naturally be neutralised – otherwise the claims to power of the British will be exposed as fake. The Empire will be exposed as fake, its pretences to power merely an illusion staged to fool the assembled crowds that its figures of authority (the so-called Poirot) are in fact more powerful than their religious authorities (the rabbi, the priest and the imam).

Only two people will know the identity of the murderer, says the fake Poirot: God and Hercule Poirot. But if Hercule Poirot does not exist, then God may not exist. Or if Hercule Poirot is fake, then God may also be fake. That is, all who claim to be authorities on this Earth are fake, actors in a spectacle that is put on in order to create the illusion of power and in order to convince the spectators to believe in that illusory power.

(It is by this token important that the fake Poirot exposes corruption among the occupying British forces – the supposedly criminal Chief Inspector. In doing so, the fake Poirot would claim to show that the British bring their own people to justice – in the process covering over how the system of Empire will itself never be brought to justice. That is, the small crime is used as a mask for the massive crime that is taking place in broad daylight: the undermining and replacement of the local figures of authority for the purposes of ransacking the territory that the forces of Empire are infiltrating.)

Given the presence among the perpetrators on the train of three to five further Americans – MacQueen, the fake Hardman, Dr Arbuthnot (Leslie Odom Jr), the fake Countess Elena Andrenyi (Lucy Boynton) and the fake Caroline Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer) – it would appear that the British are not alone in ransacking the rest of the world.

Let us not also forget the Russians, including Princess Dragomiroff (Judi Dench) and Count Rudolph Andrenyi (Sergei Polunin), who seems expressly to take pleasure in the murder (as well as being prone to violence in general).

The group is rounded out by naturalised Americans Biniamino Marquez (Manuel García-Rulfo) and Pilar Estravados (Penélope Cruz), as well as British citizens with strong American ties, including Mary Debenham (Daisy Ridley) and Edward Masterman (Derek Jacobi), as well as Jewish émigrée Hildegarde Schmidt (Olivia Colman).

In other words, the major world powers are all united in a front to frame and to justify the murder of a man, Ratchett, whose crime is to seek to get involved in their game. Whose crime is to seek also to be a criminal. And who for his effrontery is branded a child abductor and murderer such that his assassination for theft and the peddling of fakes becomes morally justified.

—

When the fake Poirot performs his charade of egg inspection before a young boy (Yasine Zeroual), the fake Poirot explains that the disparity in size is not the fault of the eggs, but of the chicken. Or rather, that it is an inexplicable mystery.

To what end this prologue, which does not appear in the novel?

Perhaps Branagh is trying to tell us that as no two eggs are the same, so are a film and a novel not the same. That is, one can never get the original to match the copy. And so Branagh is suggesting from the very beginning that this is a fake version of Agatha Christie’s story that we are watching – and that it would be pointless to try to get the one to match the other.

Similarly, the film’s opening by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem does not happen in the novel, which rather opens in Aleppo, and which sees Poirot travel by train (on the Taurus Express) to Istanbul, rather than by boat (as happens in this film).

We have already established how the film’s opening takes place simply for show – in the sense that it is a show designed to convince the world that this fake Poirot is the real Poirot and that the British are thus justified in their dominion over Jerusalem (which of course the British celebrate as being theirs whenever they patriotically sing the hymn ‘Jerusalem,’ as written by William Blake, to whom we shall return shortly).

But here the opening, with its overhead shots and its supposedly reliable flashbacks to the dispute between the rabbi, the imam and the priest, are all designed to convince us not just of the authority of the fake Poirot, but of the authority of the film.

This is especially clear in the fake Poirot’s illusory ability to predict the movements of the Chief Inspector. Firstly, he sends a guard to stand at the south gate in advance of denouncing the supposedly corrupt policeman, while also placing in the wall his walking stick, which eventually the fleeing Police Inspector will run into.

But this miraculous ability to predict the future is not so much magic as simply stage management: it is easy to seem to predict the future when it has been prearranged in advance for the policeman to go to the south gate and then to run into the walking stick.

In other words, the film wants us to believe in the power and authority of the film, when all of this is really staged, a fake that is a far cry from Christie’s novel. This is not Murder on the Orient Express that we are watching, but a fake film created by an impostor.

Put differently, cinema as a whole is an illusion machine that is used to give authority to those who peddle it. Like Ratchett, of whom the fake Poirot and his friends must get rid, cinema passes off fakes as if real, making handsome profits in the process while also stealing real local treasures via Empire, and as rendered here through the use in this film of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall.

Which of course is not the real Wailing Wall, but a fake filmed in Malta.

More than this. As the fake Poirot is put into motion in order to justify the murder of Ratchett, so is cinema put into motion in order to justify murder more generally. As the disappearance of Ratchett is a conspiracy between the British, the Russians, the Americans and various naturalized Americans, so is the disappearance of Aleppo, for example, a conspiracy that is made to look like a struggle between the major world powers.

The point that I wish to make is not specifically about Aleppo, nor Palestine which was the nation in which Jerusalem resided at the time in which the film is set.

Rather, I am using Aleppo and Palestine here as examples of Empire and the role that cinema plays in the continuation of Empire. In bringing this fake magic trick to the world, the power of those who create cinema is justified.

The film regularly features extended sequences filmed from the exterior of the train, such that the train itself becomes a ‘character’ in the film. We might venture further yet, though, and suggest that it is not simply as if the train itself were a key player in the events that are unfolding, but as if the train demanded these events.

That is, the train is like cinema a tool for the creation of modernity. And what is modernity? Modernity is the creation of a system of power whereby some use the trickery of technology in order to demonstrate their power over others, whom they then ransack in order to consolidate their power – a perfect feedback loop of empowerment.

But this empowerment of some over others also involves the disempowerment of others for the benefit of some. This disempowerment is in effect murder. As a human seeking to become god kills others in order to use their life force and blood in order to prolong, increase and perhaps render permanent their own, so does modernity involve the sacrifice of many to sate the claims to divinity that a few are trying to make.

Naturally, anyone who sees through this fakery and who aims to achieve their own power must be removed – hence the murder of Ratchett. Revolution, or not to believe the proclaimed divinity of those who would have power, and to seek to establish via the same means one’s own power, similarly requires suppression, or else power will not be consolidated but distributed.

(It would seem all too human for humans to seek to become gods.)

In order for power to take on magic qualities that reinforce its power (power as appearance), power also seeks to hide its origin. As the projector from which images originate is hidden in the cinema, so is the provenance of power generally hidden. Power comes as if from nowhere, via sleight of hand. It is magical. And thus its authority is not to denied since it is beyond the ken of other, uninformed humans.

The status of Murder on the Orient Express as a Maltese-American co-production, then, functions as a means to hide the film’s own source of power (and that of cinema more generally). This is a film that comes from a ‘small’ place (Malta), but which really just reaffirms the big interests of cinema (Hollywood) – with Malta itself a screen enabled by the tax breaks that drew the production to it in the first place, and which tax breaks function as an invitation to under-pay local, Maltese workers, thereby justifying under-payment and exploitation as a whole.

What is more, as Malta functions as the home of an infamous Masonic order, and as small islands generally function as tax havens, or what the recent leak of documents would confirm to be ‘paradises’ on Earth (or what Nicholas Shaxson further defines as islands of [stolen] treasure), so does the presence of Malta in this production function as a means of burying treasure, turning theft into an illusion – something the reality of which cannot be proven, and which therefore is both godly and not real. To believe in it is to be an insane conspiracist. To be part of it is never to be discovered.

This is how Empire functions: power is nominally regulated through the creation of taxation systems, with the powerful then placing themselves outside of the jurisdiction of such regulation. Regular humans who are too stupid to be crooks are punished for their honesty (their money is stolen from them, and they receive next to nothing in return), while the so-called gods are never punished for breaking the rules that they impose upon other people.

(Europe/the West must be defended from Islam by the Knights Templar of the Order of Malta, a specifically Christian group that aims to put down the revolutionary religion of Mohammad, who is not divine but human, and so who threatens to undermine the claims to divinity of other humans. Murder in Kosovo is justified.)

And what of William Blake? The fake Poirot is called to London for the Kassner case. To what might this refer? Perhaps it refers to the work of author Rudolf Kassner, the man who translated Blake into German and who also was influenced by Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy is a novel in which fabulation becomes impossible to tell apart from truth as we are presented with illusion after illusion.

(Tristram Shandy as a deconstruction of power, and as a deconstruction of cinema avant la lettre/avant la caméra. In famously featuring a black page, Tristram Shandy renders itself antithetical to cinema, which relies upon darkness, but which cannot make darkness visible since this would be to bring to light and to humanise its otherwise invisible and would-be divine workings.)

(And so the ‘Jerusalem’ of Empire is not the real Jerusalem; it is a fake, builded elsewhere in England. But in building that fake Christian as opposed to that multi-faith Jerusalem, so are the dark Satanic mills of Empire put into motion.)

It is a kind of Blakean demonic energy that Ron Rosenbaum attributes to Adolf Hitler in a bid to explain his ascent to power – as if Hitler were the ultimate revolutionary little man born to rob power back from the gods in which he did not believe, and who thus provoked global war as the gods naturally demanded his blood to prove that Hitler was human as Hitler demanded blood to transcend his humanity and to become a god. With their nuclear light, the winners of the war demonstrated that they verily were gods.

The fake Poirot is perhaps, then, called to investigate the rise of Hitler and the role that literature, translation and perhaps even cinema played in that rise. Hitler is one more upstart, like Ratchett, whom the fake Poirot and his British, American and Russian friends must help to put down in order to perpetuate the balance of power as is. America, Britain and Russia may squabble over who has most power between them, but these squabbles merely cover over the bigger question of why they have power at all. They are a cinematic show that plays out so that people believe in their divinity as they rob the world of its treasures, selling back fakes to make yet more money and to consolidate all power in their own hands.

So for the sake of an f, Murder on the Orient Express is revealed as fake.

Or perhaps a simple show of ignorance on the part of Kenneth Branagh (he does not know how to pronounce his œufs) sets in chain a conspiracy theory that nonetheless reveals the very humanity and not the divinity of the world’s systems of power – and the role that cinema plays in creating and maintaining them.

Or perhaps this is just idle conspiracy theoretical fabulation, patterns where there only is chaos, and to be disproved in an ongoing apocalypse of false idols.

Fifteen thoughts about Flatliners (Niels Arden Oplev, USA, 2017)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Uncategorized
1. Resuscitated films end up being haunted and made to feel bad by their past. Kiefer Sutherland is on hand to ensure that this is so.

2. In the contemporary age, suicide becomes the logical extension of the pressure to work oneself to death (and not to be a loser who simply works and goes home at the end of the day).

3. Computers are the urns in which we are always placing our remains.

4. Rich kids are not really haunted by feelings of guilt for their past sins. They in fact love their demons and accept even the most insincere of apologies – because they never really needed one.

5. The future of medicine is the preserve of the already-rich. They will play god with the lives of the poor who come to visit them. Medicine becomes like sport as doctors compete with each other to satisfy their narcissism.

6. “Why do you like me?” asks Nina Dobrev to Diego Luna after they have just boned. “Because you’re really hot,” he answers. Dobrev, her head on Luna’s chest, looks away with a satisfied glint in her eye: yes, I am, she is thinking. And even though Luna then adds that he was joking and that he likes her because she really cares about people, we all know that she does not care about anyone but herself and the only reason that he likes her and the only reason why anyone would like this film is because… she is really hot.

7. If the film is really a celebration of Hot People Boning, this all gets censored out in the UAE (where I saw this film). Meaning that the even less sense that the film makes… actually highlights precisely the senselessness of the film.

8. Death involves seeing oneself as if from outside one’s own body: death is basically the selfie stick/the selfie stick basically offers us a glimpse of death.

9. The fact that death comes back into life after the kids flatline would suggest that really these kids are already dead (inside).

10. People drive cars way too young in the USA. In being a film in which a woman (Ellen Page) is haunted by her sense of guilt after killing someone while answering her phone at the wheel, then it is not just a remake of a 1990s mediocrity, but it is also a remake of Lucrecia Martel’s Mujer sin cabeza/Headless Woman (Argentina/France/Italy/Spain, 2008). As we shall see, as that film is an expression of bourgeois guilt (or a lack thereof) for centuries of exploitation, so, too, is this film (although this does not make it any good).

11. As selfies are a channel through which we can see our own dead bodies, so are mobile phones a channel through which we speak to the dead. That is: mediation takes us away from direct human contact as we prefer instead phantom contact, or contact with phantoms.

12. The Mexican does not need to flatline – because as per Octavio Paz and the character who comes from the place where they celebrate El Día de los Muertos, he is basically already dead, too.

13. Privilege is based upon geopolitical exploitation and murder. But if you have it within you to forgive yourself, then it is okay to be a Nazi.

14. This recalls Slavoj Žižek‘s old observation that it is only when captured that Nazis tended to kill themselves – thereby exemplifying the public nature of shame, which is unbearable, versus the private nature of guilt, with which we can live. The film would seem to suggest a renewed era of shamelessness: I am shamed, but I basically can live with it – because I do not care (and because I am Really Hot). With the ongoing interest in figures like Eva Mozes Kor in mind (hat tip to the wonderful film scholar Leshu Torchin), one wonders that the forgiveness of victims only adds to the sense of shamelessness. Odd though this may sound, perhaps it is not for victims to forgive. Only God forgives. And if we do not think that this is so, then we are opening the door to new fascisms.

(And if there is no God, then we need a Law that can forgive. And if we have no universal Law as the guilty walk free, then who knows what is to happen? As the oppressed forgive their oppressors, then either we live in a world in which the oppressors are correct to oppress the oppressed, since neither God nor Law will judge them, and really there is no human equality, but only entitled superhumans and subjugated subhumans – many species as we cling to the illusion that really we are one species… or we must invent equality, change the Law, invent God, and give those self-proclaimed homines dei something really to be afraid of. The thing that the homo deus fears most in his belief that he is the summum of evolution… is revolution.)

15. Sex is a theme that runs throughout the film: slut-shaming; being a slut for having a one-night stand; paying for an abortion after a liaison with a working-class woman. Having a sexuality appears as more shameful than anything else, and at least on a par with murder – even though sex is designed to create and not to end life. Sex is shameful because it reveals mortality and failure in an era when one is supposed to live forever. In this way, sexuality has become death, an admission of mortality and of a body – as opposed to being an image, a selfie taken from outside one’s own body – about which one ought to be ashamed (it is only after flatlining that the Really Hot People can bone).

Pretty Vacant: Song to Song (Terrence Malick, USA, 2017)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Uncategorized

A Malickian montage of thoughts about Song to Song, the latest film from Terrence Malick.

Kill your gods
There may be a God. There may even be Gods. But there is no god who is a human. And for many years I thought Malick something akin to a god after various films that I enjoyed enormously: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line. I am even one of a few people whom I know who liked To The Wonder.

Things began seriously for me to fall apart with Knight of Cups. Christian Bale moping around his privileged world, standing over homeless black people and moaning on about how tough his life is. A punch in the face and a few gulps of shut the fuck up were what I thought Bale’s character merited upon seeing the film.

And here, with Song to Song, the same trend continues.

More on this below. But the initial point is that Malick – together with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, whom filmgoers also feel can do no wrong… are mortal. Utterly and thoroughly mortal. To this extent: Song to Song made me believe that I am a better filmmaker than Terrence Malick and that my cinematographer, Tom Maine, is as good as Emmanuel Lubezki. And we work wonders from a position of relative poverty. Letters to Ariadne says as much as if not more than Song to Song. And Tom’s images are every bit as beautiful as El Chivo’s.

But this bit of flexing aside, let us look at the film…

Pretty Vacant
Of course latter day sell-out Johnny Rotten turns up to collect his fee by being in Song to Song, thereby evoking the whole history of punk that he has turned his back on as he takes role after role in advert after advert.

And yet this Sex Pistols song, ‘Pretty Vacant,’ effectively sums up Malick’s film: ‘Oh we’re so pretty / Oh so pretty / We’re vacant.’

For we basically get Rooney Mara (actually quite good in this), the Gos, Fassbender and a collection of other, typical Malickameo stars turning up to give us their thoughts and feelings about life, the universe and everything. That is: everyone is beautiful and everyone is ‘Troubled’ because they have, like, you know, relationship and daddy and self-absorption issues.

Real estate and empty parking lots
Song to Song has loads of shots of empty parking lots. America has been constructed around and for the car. What is the car? A machine for travel, of course. But specifically a machine that one uses to travel only in small groups or alone; a private form of transport, increasingly taking on the bulk and the aggression of a tank.

Space is dedicated for the temporary housing of these vehicles. They are often empty. Pretty. And vacant.

Song to Song also features lots and lots of empty apartments. These also are pretty. And vacant. We have real estate for cars and we have real estate for stars. Malick’s film insists upon such spaces so much. The emptiness no doubt reflects the inner emptiness of the characters that we see onscreen. Well done, Terrence, for using ‘Symbolism.’ Repeatedly. But to what end?

Whenever anyone calls anything ‘real,’ they are making a claim about the nature of reality. That is, they are labelling one thing as real at the expense of other things. The real (so say I) effect of the phrase ‘real time,’ for example, is not that we watch things unfold at the pace that they would in the ‘real world.’ On the contrary, the effect of the phrase ‘real time’ is to justify only one particular temporality or rhythm – the rhythm of the media that deliver ‘real time’ footage, which in turn is the rhythm of capitalism – as real. All other temporalities and rhythms are thus demoted to a realm outside of reality. This is a political manoeuvre.

And so it is with real estate: to say that only these estates are real is to consign to unreality those other estates that people occupy: the hovels, the slums. There is no room for these really in Malick’s film; offscreen, they are unreal. Instead, the only reality that he offers is the pretty and vacant world of lavish apartments.

Glass houses and the attention economy
How many windows and glass fronts are there in Song to Song? In the pretty and vacant estates that are passed off to us as real, we see glass house after glass house. ‘Transparency’ is the ‘Symbolic Meaning’ of that: all of our lives are on show, for people to see, constantly under scrutiny from others and our selves.

Oh, how tough it must be to be a star we find ourselves thinking: always being watched, it must So Hard.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not sure that I would care to be Famous particularly (I have not experienced it so I would not know). For, I am sure that being Famous is not such a Good Thing as we are led almost always to believe.

But here we have Famous People being Pretty and Vacant on screen for 129 minutes. They are Pretty, for sure. But to what end is this being shown to us?

Malick’s film is filled with scene after scene of people Acting Out. Look, a Pixie Woman cannot but do a Pixie Dance as she crosses a road because Pixie Women are Free, and Free People do Free Things like Pixie Dances.

But what is the Pixie Dance really about – and why is Song to Song filled with Pixie Dance after Pixie Dance?

Pixie Dances are about Getting Attention. And the reason why people want to Get Attention is so that they can Be Seen, which in turn allows them to Make Money from Being Seen and Getting Attention and doing Pixie Dances. That is, the Pixie Dance is a capitalist performance that feeds into the attention economy.

Is Malick critiquing the attention economy? Or is he really reinforcing it by showing Pixie Dance after Pixie Dance? Why is there basically no dialogue in this film – but instead a relentless collection of solipsistic inner monologues? Look at me! Give me money!

Men handling women
Watching Song to Song, you will notice that the film is also filled with scene after scene of Men handling Women. Gripping, grabbing, tying up, covering over. The film is a relentless demonstration of how men consider women to be property.

Rooney Mara at one points ties up the Gos – but two things: he pulls her along as she holds on to the rope used to tie him up; and then we see her untying him.

Men want to possess women. But does this mean that Malick is critiquing this tendency? Is that why Rooney Mara is only billed third in the end credits, despite having the largest monologue and occupying the most amount of screen time?

And what is the deal with that lesbian relationship with the Unbelievably Pretty (and Vacant) Parisienne who turns up part-way through the film? Oh, that’s not there for the titillation of the male viewer (like the insistence of Lubezki to film Natalie Portman at breast height and for the camera to be on Mara’s waist at every available opportunity)… that is Mara’s character Discovering Herself.

So where is the scene of the Gos sucking off Fassbender? Fassbender connotes Shame. And where McQueen was trying to replicate Malick with the use of thoroughly Hans Zimmer-like music in Shame, it would seem here that at least McQueen has bettered Malick with Shame, while Song to Song remains utterly prurient, even oddly innocent, while trying to give us some sense of Desire as understood by someone who seemingly Does Not Fuck On First Dates.

Indeed, the Gos asks Mara longer than halfway through the film whether she has slept with Fassbender. Are you serious? In my world, I’d have asked her that about three minutes into our relationship… and what does it fucking matter anyway? Of course people can do what they want. But not these ones: they are Troubled and Alone. Ah, the burdens of being Pretty and Vacant.

Montage of the mind and Patti Smith
But you have to understand that Malick is making a New Form of Cinema. Because his movies are not narrative, but rather Montages of the Mind. They are, as they say, Film-Philosophy, because they show that film can ‘think’ and that the Brain is a Screen is a Brain.

Okay. Sure. But then why insist on characters and narrative – even if the montage is choppy, fragmented, and clearly as much concerned by space (and the location of Austin) as it is by story?

Patti Smith turns up a few times to tell us a few pearls. And one cannot but think of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, where Smith rocks up on the Costa Concordia, too. But where JLG pushes for a radical montage that basically says Fuck You to story in a bid to democratise the image, Malick just offers Pretty Vacant Image after Pretty Vacant Image. There is no democracy here, for there is no critique of the rich, even if it is Democratic to explore how they might be Troubled by their Prettiness, too. This is just the Rich and their Troubles. Be Democratic, Terrence and get out of the Privilege – otherwise you are simply blinded by the limitations of your own world and showing us your blindness. No hermophroditic and fortune-telling Tiresias here, though; this is the blindness of the Powerful, who do not see that their own empty Real Estate is about to crumble.

Another Godard touch: an interview with a prostitute, whose pock-marked face perhaps reminds us that not everyone is So Pretty As A Star. She would have been a more interesting film than Song to Song, but Song to Song basically forgets her, just as it stuffs a few dollars into the hand of an old Mexican woman so that we can look at her face for a moment and Remember The Poor People – before going back to being Pretty and Vacant.

No one works
In the world of Austin, Texas, where Song to Song is set, apparently everyone is working on some music. Except that no one ever does any work. Ever.

Maybe the Gos and Mara pluck a few chords – because we all know the Gos can Play Piano after LaLaLand.

But basically No One Works in this world.

Because people basically drive around, park up, and then do some Pixie Dancing in or around Empty Real Estate, before driving on to a different Empty Lot where they do a bit more Pixie Dancing, they have nothing to fill their time or their minds but their worries about Love and Love Things.

But wait… at the end – more shades of a LaLaLand alternative ending montage – we see the Gos working for about two minutes. And we are told by Mara about how he dreamed of the simple life.

Because being an honest, hard-working American is a Simple Life, whereas being Pretty and Vacant is Difficult and Hard and brings with it many Troubles. Oh, to be poor and ugly. Life would be so much easier. And yet, we must carry our burden, and we are so burdened by it that we build glass houses so that everyone can see it. So that we can make ourselves gods, so that people will worship us as we demand their attention and thus earn money so as not to work but to worry about Love and Stuff.

And what work is it that the Gos does?

Of course it is drilling. So he is basically reminding us of how the USA is built upon energy for cars, so that the solipsism can continue. The destruction of the planet as fracking becomes increasingly common and we destroy nature even though we look at Birds and Dogs and Llamas and Deer and Horses and the various other Animals that feature in Malick’s film – along with Water and Air to remind us that there is a world out there and that the Privileged feel So Connected With Nature.

And America is not built upon genocide and slavery. And land grabs. And the claim that the estate created is real.

There is a rumour that Terrence Malick loves Zoolander and quotes it quite regularly. Maybe Song to Song is his Zoolander. But the speed of his Montage of the Mind would suggest more an ADHD editing style that is about Getting Attention as the film itself does Pixie Dance after Pixie Dance to convince us of its Prettiness and Worthiness (because it, too, is Heavy and Troubled). Indeed, for a film that is supposed to go from Song To Song, it seems odd that the film never in fact allows a song to play in completion.

The World Reduced To Symbols. A World Reduced To Cinema. To Be Consumed. And the poor, and women and other estates: they may feature as the playthings of the Rich – so in some senses they are in the film. But why not just commit to rejecting cinema and the values of the capitalist attention economy more thoroughly and make a film that really takes us into a human, even post human democratic or socialist vision of the world?

Even Zoolander, let alone Film Socialisme, manages to do that.

Chaosmopolitan Cinema: Cinema, Globalisation, Holocaust

American cinema, Blogpost, European cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

Yesterday (22 February 2017), the excellent scholar Celestino Deleyto gave a talk at the Centre for Research into Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the University of Roehampton, London.

In the talk, Deleyto outlined an argument that has also appeared in a recent article in Transnational Cinemas, where he discusses the way in which cosmopolitanism can function as a framework through which to understand contemporary cinema, which today is thoroughly transnational and thus cannot be properly understood according to old-fashioned nationalist paradigms (film history as a history of national film movements, with American cinema – Hollywood – perhaps as its defining centre).

In elaborating this argument, Deleyto engages with two films, Io Sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet (Andrea Segre, Italy/France, 2011) and Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, USA, 2011). The first is a clearly transnational film, in that it is a film with a multinational cast about an immigrant Chinese labourer who befriends a man from the former Yugoslavia now living in Chioggia, a town close to Venice, Italy, where the locals speak a mixture of Italian and Venetian.

Deleyto outlined how the phenomenon of acqua alta, where seawater rises up above the banks of the city and into the buildings of Chioggia, functions as a metaphor for the film’s own engagement with border crossings and transnationalism of a different sort: that of the characters in the film, who find themselves in Chioggia having made various crossings of their own. There are literal borders that define the nations of the world, but these borders are porous while also moving: Li and the poet can get to Chioggia, but they cannot necessarily integrate into Italian society, even if the locals are happy enough with water seeping up into their buildings from the sea below.

It is through the lens of cosmopolitanism, then, that we can understand what the film is doing. That is, if cosmopolitanism is broadly defined as an openness to otherness, then we can see how the film is about openness – exploring the crossing of borders in various different ways – even if Io Sono Li ultimately has a pessimistic outlook towards the openness to others/cosmopolitanism of the Venetians who occupy the Chioggia of the film (they do not so readily accept the migrants, especially when they begin to form some sort of solidarity between themselves).

Margaret far less clearly is a transnational film in its story of a self-absorbed teenager, Lisa (Anna Paquin), living in New York. But it is about openness to otherness/cosmopolitanism in various ways. For, while New Yorkers might be believing themselves the most cosmopolitan people on Earth, as they sip Cosmopolitans while reading Cosmopolitan magazine, Lonergan’s film in fact skewers the small-mindedness of its characters in New York post-11 September 2001.

The film does this in various ways, with Deleyto using two scenes to highlight something important about the film. The first is during a restaurant scene in which Lisa, her mother, Joan (J. Smith Cameron), a friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin) and her mother’s boyfriend, Ramon (Jean Reno), discuss politics over dinner.

As the conversation continues, Ramon in particular discusses authoritarianism, which he then equates to Israel and criticizes Emily for being a typical Jew in not being able to take criticism about Israel. During this conversation, the scene cuts to wider shots of the dinner guests, during which we see other diners enjoying their meals.

More significantly, the soundtrack of the film features the conversation of Lisa et al going quiet as we hear also snippets of conversations from those other diners. The technique in effect reminds us of the otherness that surrounds us everywhere, and yet to which we generally remain closed/unaware. Even though the film critiques the self-absorption of its New York characters – including people whose families come originally from Europe (Lisa, Joan and Emily are all Jewish) and Latin America (Ramon is Colombian, but lived a long time in France) and who talk consciously about borders and control – the film itself takes on a cosmopolitan form by opening itself to otherness, as Io Sono Li opens its fictional world to the real world phenomenon of the acqua alta.

Cosmopolitanism is not just a thematic concern, then, but it is also a set of stylistic/formal traits: having the soundtrack open up to other conversations, having the mise-en-scène feature real-world phenomena. Whether or not any given film is transnational or about border crossings, cosmopolitanism becomes a framework through which we can understand all cinema: to what extent is it in its form and content both about and in and of itself open to otherness?

In the era of globalization that has brought with it Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, the Syrian refugee crisis and so on, the question becomes a pressing one – making Deleyto’s work both (un)timely and important.

To return to Margaret, Deleyto ended his talk by showing and analyzing the final scene of the film. At the Lincoln Center, Lisa and Joan watch a production of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, particularly a sequence featuring ‘Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour,’ a piece of music often referred to as the ‘Barcarolle.’

During this scene, Lisa begins to cry; Joan notices this and begins to cry herself; and the two embrace.

In other words, Lonergan’s film is cosmopolitan enough to give some sort of redemption to Lisa, who has actively sought to reject otherness throughout the rest of the film. That is, the scene shows that there is hope for Lisa as she opens up to the otherness of Offenbach’s opera, such that she has an affective encounter (she cries) – even if this is a muted hope at best, since even though art affects her, the opera remains a very classed and safe space that perhaps indicates a ‘false hope’ (we have no real evidence that Lisa will continue to be anything other than an unpleasant, self-absorbed human being).

Here is where we depart from Deleyto’s wonderful presentation and essay in order to push the argument further – and we shall start by considering the production history of Margaret and then ‘Barcarolle.’

As Deleyto made clear, Lonergan filmed Margaret years before it finally got a (minimal) release in 2011. The reason for it being stuck in ‘post-production hell’ is that Lonergan refused to budge on producing a cut of the film under three hours in length. Eventually, Martin Scorsese stepped in and finally the movie got released – albeit in few theatres, meaning that the film has widely been overlooked.

In addition to being unwieldy in its length, Margaret is also difficult to watch (or at least, this was my experience of the film – not least because Lisa is such an unpleasant character). However, too long for commercial release, difficult to watch, barely having been seen: somehow these elements also add to the way in which Lonergan’s film asks us to think about openness.

For, if his film is about openness in a transnational, globalized world, thus affirming that the national is no longer a suitable frame through which to consider cinema, then perhaps cinema, too, is no longer a suitable frame through which to consider… cinema itself!

My intention is not to sound crazy here. How can cinema no longer be a useful concept for understanding cinema? Well, my reasoning goes as follows: if there is one thing that a film involves, then it is precisely a frame – a border that surrounds every image that we see. And if a film is going to be cosmopolitan and to be open to things that are beyond our normal borders, then cinema must look beyond its own frame, i.e. beyond cinema.

We can see this in Margaret through the use of sound, which helps us to think outside of the frame – to think about spaces that lie beyond our usual purview. But we can also see this in the way in which Margaret does not fit into cinemas: it is too long, it is hard to watch. Even though a film, the film itself somehow eludes cinema.

This makes Margaret a film that is truly of its age. Digital technologies have created a world in which cinema is indeed no longer cinema, with stereoscopic cinema even taking images off the screen and out into the audience (what in my forthcoming book, Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude, I call ‘cinema unframed’).

However, what we get in this digital age is not openness to otherness, but more and more of the same: screens everywhere, each featuring the same old things, a kind of ubiquitisation of cinema through the digital, a homogeneisation of space that sees everyone seeing the same things everywhere at the same time.

Margaret is of its age, then, but it is not just a reinforcement of the dominant values of its age: it is a harsh critique of its age, which gives it the impression of being precisely not of its age, since had it been of its age, producers would have let it exist in its elongated version and more people would have seen it.

In being of its age but in seeming not of its age, Margaret is thus untimely. It is both a film, but also somehow not fit for cinema.

Being untimely, being non-cinema, we can reach here a way not quite of critiquing the cosmopolitan framework through which to understand film (it is a good framework!), but perhaps of expanding upon it creatively.

For, if cosmopolitanism is about borders, then there remains an overwhelming emphasis in it upon space.

This is not a bad thing, but (as Caroline Bainbridge also suggested during Deleyto’s talk) it comes at the cost of thinking about the role of time in these processes. If globalization (and the digital era) brings with it the homogeneisation of space – the same shops everywhere, with the local often suffering – then it also brings with it a homogeneisation of time. We can understand this through those ubiquitous digital screens that each show fast-paced movies that match our fast-paced lives, in which we have no time for reflection and no time for imagination. We have no time for Margaret, which is too long.

Time, then, becomes a question in part of rhythm, or tempo: under globalization, we all lead our lives at the same rhythm, which is the rhythm of commerce, whereby I am always looking at screens, checking my emails, being in bed with my phone, always working if not always at work. The temporality of the globalized era is the temporality of work, of business, and thus of capital, whereby everyone is always busy, always working and not open to different times (slow things and people annoy the hell out of us).

And yet, time is more than just rhythm or tempo, even if under globalization the rhythm/tempo of the world is becoming homogeneised, just as space is becoming homogeneised. For time also is change: and if change is anything – if change can happen – then it must involve being open to otherness.

Being open to otherness in terms of time means being open to different rhythms and tempo, not everyone moving at the same speed. In this sense, the very length and slowness of Margaret is part of the cosmopolitanism of the film.

But more than this, if we have to be open to otherness and thus to change, we must in some senses live in a world that is not ordered (a cosmos) and strictly urban (a polis, where space is controlled through walls and roads and wires and other lines), but a world that also is chaotic. In other words, not a cosmos, nor necessarily a chaos, but something that is a mix of the two, or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might, after James Joyce, call a chaosmos.

Chaosmopolitanism, then, is perhaps the framework that allows us to think about both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of being open to otherness, and to think about not just borders in a spatial sense (where they lie) but also in a temporal sense (how they change).

Deleyto demonstrated that the space of New York in Margaret is very hemmed in, enclosed. In enclosed spaces, our world literally shrinks; we become closed-minded and self-absorbed. And in the contemporary, digital world, we close ourselves off from others in many ways, not least by only looking at our screens, headphones in our ears. And as the space of our world shrinks, so does the time, as mentioned: we become constantly on our screens, always working, bored – perhaps even offended – by times/rhythms that are not fast-paced and do not bear the stamp of modernity.

To be slowed down, to slow down: this demonstrates an openness to otherness in a temporal sense, a kind of change that sees rhythms multiply rather than reduce everywhere to one. Chaosmopolitanism is openness to other spaces and to other times.

A chaosmopolitan cinema, then, not only points beyond cinema and its typical frame, but it must also point beyond the fast-paced rhythm/tempo that defines contemporary cinema and much of the other images that we see on the ubiquitious screens that show audiovisual material, and which also must be fast-paced in order for us not to hate and to reject them. I may not like Margaret, but in some senses I must learn to like it, to acquire a taste for its time/rhythm/space in order to become open to its otherness.

But now let’s really take this analysis into its most important realm by returning to ‘Barcarolle.’

There are various things that we can note about the piece. Firstly, the song is about love and about the night – and thus in some senses it is about darkness.

If in a globalized world, it is to be the same time everywhere (instant telecommunications), and if in a world in which screens have brought about this singular rhythm/tempo (what we might call nuncocentrism – only the now of work exists), then in some senses this is to destroy the circular flow of day and night that is the constant movement/rhythm of the natural universe and to bring light to everywhere – for it always to be everywhere daytime, as we are illuminated via the light of the screens and never in darkness (not to be seen, not to be visible, and thus not to be lit, is not to exist). Making such light is, of course, the work of Lucifer.

To celebrate darkness, then, is to celebrate a world of difference, a world in which some things remain hidden, invisible, unspoken, unsayable. Only felt. Only thought. To celebrate darkness is perhaps itself then an act of openness to otherness that we might call love itself: to love not only what we see, but also what we do not and perhaps cannot see. To have a sort of faith: love is best in the dark, even if pornography wants to tell us that love is best in broad daylight.

In being about night and love, then, ‘Barcarolle’ also contains a chaosmopolitan dimension.

Oddly enough, given that the form of the ‘barcarolle’ comes from the boatsmen who pilot gondolas in Venice, Margaret also ends by taking us to Venice, the city that stands on the water and the straight lines of which (cosmos) are interrupted by the lunar, tidal cycles of the night (the chaos of water).

Furthermore, ‘Barcarolle’ is the piece of music that Guido (Roberto Benigni) plays in the concentration camp in order to tell his wife Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) that he is still there in La vita é bella/Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, Italy, 1997).

As the music plays, Benigni’s camera drifts across the camp – from the window at the Nazi party where he is working as a waiter – through the mist and to the dorm where Dora listens.

This is a very cosmopolitan camera movement that breaks down the barriers that have been set up between the Jewish inmates and the Nazi soldiers – a barrier that is broken through music – which like film is a temporal art form. The moment is thus also chaosmopolitan, as it allows Guido and Dora both to remember the past (their love for each other) and to dream of a different future (life outside of the camp). That is, the music allows them to feel/experience a different time beyond the time of the now.

Is it that Lisa is thinking of Life is Beautiful when she hears ‘Barcarolle’ in Margaret – and that she cries as she remembers the suffering of her Jewish ancestors during the Holocaust?

But we have further to go.

Giorgio Agamben argues that we live in a ‘concentrationary universe’ in which the concentration camp becomes the model of the contemporary world under globalization: closed off, not open, controlled, not chaotic, a permanently lit panopticon, that must of course use the techniques of cinema (lighting in order to surveil) in order to function.

If in the camp there is only the now of survival, then the contemporary world that features only the now of work is also a camp of sorts. As Deleyto discussed in his talk, the border can constitute an improvised camp (think of refugee camps near Calais). And so in the globalized world of now and the immanentisation of the camp (it is everywhere), then this is also the immanentisation of the border (the border is everywhere, and every infraction into it – into my personal space – is an offense and a justification of violence as I do not accept or tolerate otherness, to which I am not open, but from which I have instead closed myself off).

In such a world, where cinema has been a key purveyor of the values of the now, of the camp, of the border, a chaosmopolitan cinema must go beyond cinema – beyond the frame and beyond its typical tempos/rhythms. It must involve darkness and entirely different rhythms.

For, without such chaosmopolitan openness to otherness, to change and to difference, then we only have a cinema of light, a cinema of a single rhythm and a cinema of now (timely, not untimely, thereby not being quite of its age so much as destroying the concept of age itself, as nothing ever ages/changes – the capitalist quest for eternal youth).

Such a cinema may seem to make everything visible – but in fact it brings with it an occult crime that is beyond visibility, and which can never be figured on a screen, namely the unholy horror that is the Holocaust itself. If we do not embrace a little darkness everyday, if we do not reject cinema and its capitalist logic, then we lose our memory and we lose our imagination, and we allow for another Holocaust to take place.

But more than this. For if there is one other thing that cinema cannot capture in addition to the Holocaust, then it is globalization itself. Cinema can allude to it, but never really show it, for while globalization involves making everything visible (the permanent working daytime of the screen), globalization is, like cinema itself, invisible. Chaosmopolitan cinema must be self-conscious in order to show itself, it must be self-reflexive, and it must perhaps therefore alienate its viewers.

But yet more. If the Holocaust and globalization are not visible, and yet they are the inevitable consequence of a world that is only about the now of the screens and thus of visibility, then this is because globalization is a sort of Holocaust. In trying to destroy the night, in trying to wipe out darkness, faith and love, then murder becomes a perverted measure of ‘love,’ a jealous destruction of the other for their very difference/invisibility that is a love turned to hate.

The logic is something like this: if you will not show me your total self, if you will remain partially invisible to me, then I shall make you permanently invisible via death, because that is what you seem to be wanting. In this perversion, evil is most truly evil because those who commit it think that they are doing someone else a favour, even though the other did not ask for death. Instead, they just asked to be allowed a little space of their own, a little time of their own, something not controlled, in short some freedom.

As we move into a world of permanent light, permanent work, without sleep, and thus with no dreams, with no space of our own, no time of our own, and no memory, then the border becomes everywhere, and we create a new concentration camp (the camp is created through concentration, i.e. the shrinking of both space and time), a new Holocaust. Cinema plays a large part in that process. A chaosmopolitan cinema must take us beyond that, beyond the light of cinema, into different rhythms, and perhaps beyond cinema and the logic of the screens themselves, and into non-cinema, the non-cinema of night and love, where the water caresses the hard land as it feels the pull of the dreamy moon. A little bit of lunacy. If we don’t love each other, we’ll end up killing each other.

 

From Billy Lynn to Rogue One

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, Uncategorized

In Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ang Lee, USA/UK/China, 2016), there is a sequence where Billy (Joe Alwyn) experiences a flashback to his tour as a soldier in Iraq.

The scene is ultimately innocuous, but as Billy looks around him in an Iraqi market, we see and hear how a soldier thinks: could those kids be throwing a grenade? could that man be reaching for a gun?

In keeping with the film’s arch self-consciousness, the sequence also features one soldier buying bootleg DVDs – of a Disney film – for his daughter. But the reason why I want to discuss this sequence is because the iconography of uniformed soldiers walking armed through a traditional ‘Middle Eastern’ market place, replete with stalls, sandy ground, narrow alleys and sandstone walls, and with people wearing elaborate robes, has also been deployed elsewhere in recent cinema, namely in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, USA/UK, 2016).

The key difference is that in Billy Lynn, which is far more interesting than its unpromising title would suggest, we are with the soldiers, while in Rogue One, we see these scenes of armed soldiers walking through otherwise traditional bazaars and other ‘Middle Eastern’ spaces through the eyes of the rebels – those who are going specifically to pull out guns and lob grenades in order to defy the imperial presence.

It is not that Billy Lynn is specifically critiquing Disney – even if the Disney bootleg is mentioned. Nor is it that Billy Lynn quite offers a corrective to Rogue One, as it offers a sympathetic portrayal of the life of a soldier who ultimately decides to fight for his fellow servicemen – while Rogue One offers a fantasy of striking back against the Empire, the storm troopers of which are disposable enemies.

Rather, both films in fact help us to understand a more subtle but important process – even though they nominally give us completely different perspectives (soldiers and rebels). And this process is the normalisation of Empire via their shared iconography of soldiers walking through ‘Middle Eastern’ bazaars.

Billy Lynn spends a lot of time conveying how contemporary America is a militarised zone. Although it amuses Billy and his comrades that business people describe their workspace as the ‘war room,’ while using other would-be combat terms to describe their work, such moments nonetheless convey the militarisation of the domestic space and its everyday routines.

This is also conveyed in the violence that the soldiers experience not just in Iraq (during Billy’s flashbacks) but at home, where/when the film is set. The film is about the Bravos, a group of soldiers who have become the face of the Iraq war after a journalist’s film camera – abandoned but left recording during a military engagement – captures footage of Billy rushing to rescue Sergeant Virgil ‘Shroom’ Breem (Vin Diesel).

Given their rise to fame, the soldiers are to appear at a show with Destiny’s Child during the halftime interval of an American football game in Dallas. Celebrated as heroes, the soldiers are also in the process of trying to negotiate a movie deal to tell their story.

Without going into too much detail – since it is not the focus of this blog post – the film articulates the way in which domestic America is as violent as Iraq as the soldiers are constantly harassed and abused – even though they receive acclaim from an otherwise patriotic audience.

What is more, while films like Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, USA, 1944) and Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2006) critique the process of using heroic soldiers at spectacular jamborees in order to sell war bonds in a bid to further the war effort, Billy Lynn demonstrates quite clearly in their bid to have their story made into a movie that war provides the material for cinema, and thus to a degree how cinema also provides the material for war.

What is more, while the explosions during the halftime show panic the soldiers as much as does real combat in Iraq (and not simply in a way of setting off a traumatic memory), we get a sense in Ang Lee’s film of how the contemporary USA is indeed built as a simulacrum of war that is itself sufficiently traumatic that the soldiers prefer to bond with each other and to return to Iraq (there are two extraordinary scenes in which men declare their love for each other) rather than to stay at home.

In other words, PTSD is not specifically caused by the trials of war itself – but equally by the never-ending war-like/militarised aspects of contemporary American life: the same car manufacturers (Humvee), explosions, aggressive people, loud noises – except here surrounded by plenty and with a huge emphasis on consumption/consumerism.

Even if the soldiers are doing a job that is not everywhere popular (they themselves understand very well that the major result of their work is that it likely breeds rather than reverses anti-American sentiment), it is in their interactions and experiences with each other that they can find some humanity in a world where otherwise they are simply (undervalued and underpaid) commodities and objects.

This even extends to Billy’s love life; in a remarkable sequence, he realises that Faison (Makenzie Leigh), a cheerleader whom he has just met but upon whom he is sweet, desires him only as a soldier and not as a person (she is disappointed when Billy says that he wishes he could run away with her; a soldier must fulfil his duty). Lee and actor Alwyn subtly manage to capture both Billy’s vulnerability in projecting his own desire for escape on to Faison (the youthful intensity of the recent crush – demonstrating that even though he has fought in combat, Billy is still in some senses a child), as well as the way in which that crush is extinguished in an instant by a single turn of phrase (her disappointment that he does not return willingly to Iraq).

There is a clear critique of Billy Lynn to be made for its treatment of women, including the way in which Billy’s anti-war sister, played by Kristen Stewart, is a woman scarred from a car accident and whom Billy is specifically fighting to protect by serving his country in order to pay her medical bills. But an extended critique will be for someone else to make.

Furthermore, there is of course a critique of the film to be made in its refusal to give us the perspective of those against whom the soldiers fight in Iraq – even though we see at length what it means to take a life by hand as Billy scrambles with someone who might typically be referred to as an insurgent next to Shroom, who has been shot.

However, while Rogue One may in some senses offer a corrective – by giving us the perspective of the rebels (even if in a fantasy universe now owned by Disney) – both films contribute to the same process of naturalising Empire.

Billy Lynn clearly articulates the way in which war is a mediatised spectacle. Everyday life becomes militarised as it also becomes mediatised, while war itself becomes everyday as it, too, becomes mediatised. In its own way, Rogue One does this, too.

While in Billy Lynn Iraqi lives are somewhat disposable (in spite of the extended depiction of the death of the insurgent at Billy’s hands), in Rogue One storm troopers are disposable. While Shroom is killed in Billy Lynn and all of the rebels perish in Rogue One, the imbalance in both films between the numbers of deaths that we see means that both also broadly convey a fantasy of war as simulacrum, or what we might call a war without casualties. War as entertainment. Not war as real (even if Billy Lynn also tries to get to that reality).

This reflects to a certain extent the way in which contemporary warfare is – from the perspective of the West – a war without casualties (we are horrified when the numbers of Western casualties grows – even though countless Iraqis and Afghans have died in this war – as if their lives did not matter or count since they are somehow not quite as human).

In reference to the first Iraq/Persian Gulf War in 1991, French philosopher Paul Virilio argues that ‘[t]he war of zero casualties (or nearly, on the side of the allies) was therefore also a war of zero political victory.’ Saddam Hussein remained in power – which in the fullness of time led to a second war, where Hussein was toppled (one cannot help but think not only of Hussein’s ungainly death, but also of the much more viewer-friendly toppling of his statue; this is a war about symbols and aesthetically pleasing images – and thus about media – as much as it is about humans, who have a propensity to be aesthetically unpleasing, or war, which also is likely not as pleasing to behold in real life as it is in movies – with Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge (Australia/USA, 2016) doing a fine job of hypocritically saying how bad war is before pouring on the war porn in heavy doses), and then to an ongoing war that the American soldiers describe in Billy Lynn as being beyond their understanding as Iraqis now fight each other as well as them.

While Virilio’s assertion is insightful, what he does not quite articulate here is that political victory is not the point. The war itself is the point of the war. The war produces the images, which produces the war, which produces the patriotism, which produces the buying, which produces the consumption, which produces war bonds in the form of bondage to war, which produces cinema, which produces war, which produces cinema, which produces war… and so on.

If there were victory in this war, the war would end and there would no longer be images for us to look at and advertisers and patriots and others for us to get to use those images to make money, and there would no longer be arms sales or private business contracts, or movie deals, and so on. The becoming-everyday of war is matched by the militarisation of everyday life, then, since both are the same process of keeping capital going, with the media playing a major role in the making-everyday/naturalisation of this process.

More than this. If the war cannot end, since this would also mean the end of capitalism, then soldiers in the ‘Middle East’ is to become an everyday – or at least repeated – occurrence. This is, in other words, Empire-building. It is not colonialism, or at least will not go by that name, since a) colonialism is unfashionable and generally condemned and b) because it does not involve colonisation specifically so much as an ongoing and repeated military presence in such places – because the perpetuation of war (war as capital) demands it.

In this sense, Rogue One is for all of its rebellious bluster serving the same purpose as Billy Lynn, even though the latter critiques it: normalising images of invading/Western soldiers in ‘Middle Eastern’ locations – because this is indeed our new reality.

What is more… while Rogue One plays the card of giving us a fantasy of rebellion, it still only perpetuates fantasies of violence, while at the same time demonstrating that Disney’s attempts to regain/retain global domination also involves a kind of militarisation of cinema/a making-cinematic of war.

For, as Disney via the Star Wars franchise and Marvel shows us how we are set to have endless, perhaps infinite, stories set in each fictional universe (not just sequels and prequels, but ‘Star Wars stories’ and the infinite regression of the Marvel spin-offs), so, too, is Disney normalised as the only reality.

This process of normalisation – as delimiting the human imagination such that it can do nothing other than imagine the world as it is, and not a different world that we may ourselves forge – is itself war. It is an ideological war that is about getting people to buy only certain products and to mistrust others (it can be seen in Tesco, Sainsbury and Waitrose opening stores all across the UK and which are putting out of business countless ‘corner shops’ – perhaps not coincidentally run often by immigrant families with brown skins). And this war is waged through the media, which in turn depict how war is a supposedly necessary and normal part of our lives.

It is a complex and confusing world, where we are – specifically to use war terminology – bombarded by images and sounds that render us all always nervous and on the edge of our seats – in a world very far removed from the quiet and the natural sounds of pre-industrial humankind. It is a war waged for the control of our planet and of each other, with the idea of fighting for control and/or of seeking power becoming naturalised such that no one even questions it anymore. That is, we do not object to being controlled – as we instead reach constantly into our pockets to receive micro-hits of cinema from our smartphone screens, so normalised has this disciplining via militarisation of the everyday become.

The question becomes, then: do you buy into this world of warcraft, or not?