American cinema

On Facebook, On The Social Network (David Fincher, USA, 2010)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

I’m not entirely sure I have that much to say about The Social Network that has not already been said.

Zadie Smith has written an excellent article on the film in the New York Review of Books, and countless others have chimed in with, predominantly, praise for Fincher’s film, some critiques of Aaron Sorkin’s rather too stylised dialogue and the possible sexism in the film aside.

As for Smith’s article, it seems strange that she had not yet come across ‘software studies’ before writing it, but this is perhaps only my own small-world view; given that I research the role of digital technology in cinema, among other things, software studies entered somewhere into my feeble brain a couple of years ago – and I just assumed that I was as usual late in thinking about software.

But either way, Smith is correct in thinking about how the choices given to us when using software are not necessarily liberating. Perhaps we should all learn how to write code in order to be able to write our own software that can allow us to express ourselves as opposed to having software (arguably) always compromising what it is that we want to say. Software, in other words, is as ideologically constructed, consciously or not, than is a film.

Facebook is, as Smith also points out, certainly a simplification of life, as is a business card, as is a biography, as is everyone else’s opinion of us, as Jerry Thompson has so memorably found out. As is a sled, for that matter.

Shopping malls and the likes of Tesco are successful, because they save us the bother of having to go to lots of different shops, or at least lots of different shops in different places. Everything is brought to one place – and life is made easier. And while buying everything in one mall/megastore is easier than traveling around town or further afield for the things one wants or needs, buying tout court is easier than having to source raw materials and make and/or grow everything one’s self.

You bet that Tesco has transformed, say, the book market because it offers to readers a small selection of choice titles that satisfy the need for books in most people. As a result, Tesco, HMV, and the Oprah Winfrey/Richard & Judy book clubs ostracise the majority of authors from the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Chris Anderson has argued that Amazon reverses, to some degree, the ‘Tesco’ trend (as I am terming it), since Jeff Bezos‘ baby allows buyers to find the books that they want – because they have a larger choice online than in, say, even the wonderful and massive Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London.

And yet even Amazon comes at a price. Even though the Amazon marketplace does help many booksellers to work with and not against Amazon, its sell-everything approach and its tight grip on the online book sales market has put paid to many individual booksellers in the flesh and cyber worlds.

Smith points out at the end of her essay that audience members laughed when the characters of The Social Network discussed the primitive predecessors to Facebook, such as LiveJournal. Strangely, I do not find myself laughing in a similarly superior fashion when I think about what would otherwise translate into the ‘ineptitude’ of the independent second- and first-hand booksellers that Amazon has put out of business. I find myself saddened in some respects. Some types of obsolescence, it seems, we can cruelly laugh at; others will always make us feel sad (especially when it is our own turn to go on the old scrap heap).

What is linking Tesco, Amazon and Facebook, then, is the fact that each unifies in a single place a bunch of things that might otherwise be dispersed and hard to find. As such, they are simplifications, of course, and saddening ones in certain respects. But their success is based upon the fact that they save humans from having to learn a computer language, hire some web space, and put themselves online – as seemingly we all should do (a position that is replete with its own ideological assumptions concerning the ‘superiority’ of a technical and mediatised presence).

In other words, Facebook is the internet redux before it is life redux; the internet, the bigger version of what Facebook is, is life redux, such that we have an order of largesse: Life > Internet > Facebook. In the same way that shops saved us from growing our own, so, too, does Facebook save us from making our own websites. Facebook is the fast food of the internet, its prefab apartments; if you want a mansion or even a nice house, you have to pay someone more dearly to build it for you, or you learn the skills to build it for yourself.

Now, there is a difference between Tesco and Amazon and Facebook. Facebook is about people, while the former two stores sell stuff. Beyond truisms and urban myths about how family members have discovered the copraphilia of relatives, etc (if you’ve seen that fake, viral Facebook page), and the odd gaffe that most people do not notice (because most of us don’t have time to read other people’s Facebook profiles all day long – as most people don’t read these blogs – a pet hate: people who assume that you have kept up with their life because they report on it via Facebook), and beyond UK murders based upon slurs made on Facebook (revealing that we really do believe erroneously that everyone is looking at us and – more particularly – judging us?; as per one of Smith’s commentators, Facebook allows us all to be famous in our own postcodes; perhaps there is an element of ‘becoming light’ attached to Facebook that does appeal to the appeal of being mediatised, turned into an image, made into a star), Facebook is not really the be-all and end-all of our lives. Indeed, it is only when we confuse Facebook with the internet that we begin to think this way, while my ‘identity’ online consists of numerous email addresses, membership of various sites, some obsolete stuff, comments left in hundreds of forums (to which I never return), and so on. I don’t think anyone takes Facebook to be real life, in the same way that there has been a now-long-standing backlash against the ideological critique of films, because audiences are not dumbly passive to the questionable messages being peddled at them in movies. Facebook alone might constitute something of an implosion of the self, a shrinkage as Smith puts it; but the internet as a whole, especially when considered alongside that even greater medium for (compromised and intersubjective?) self-expression, reality itself, constitutes what Sean Cubitt once described (perhaps rather hyperbolically) as a ‘big bang of the self,’ so many ‘identities’ (or aspects of a single identity) can and do we have floating around in cyberspace.

Jean-Paul Sartre has said that looking at a dice in real life/in existence is a richer experience than imagining one. He says that while in our heads/imaginations we can see all six sides of the dice at once, in real life we can only see at best three or four (unless the dice is in suspension and we have mirrors, although this is my own cheeky contention, not Sartre’s). As such, existence trumps the imagination, hence Sartre as an existentialist who feels that it is better to engage in reality than to disappear into self-invented worlds.

Now, the internets as a whole might be self-invented worlds (though there is grounds to defend them, not least from a postmodern perspective). My invocation of Sartre, however, is not to call people to reject Facebook (as Smith has done), but to suggest that when we look at Facebook, we are only seeing two or three of the many sides of the people we are regarding. Reality is always more rich than Facebook; we know Facebook is a simplification, in the same way that we know a hammer makes simpler the task of making some shelves. Sometimes we would be fools to bloody our hands for the sake of not using simplifying tools to insert some nails in the construction of our lives.

By this rationale, The Social Network is a simplification of the story of Facebook, and this is not surprising given how stylised the film is, with its signature Fincher shady interiors, its dialogue that normal people can only think of after the opportunity, and other flourishes, including, as Smith has also explained, a memorable sequence in Henley, which, as Smith fails to mention, borrows the tilt shift technique made remarkable recently by Keith Loutit, and a good example of which, Mardi Gras (Australia, 2008), can be seen below.

I’m not sure how to interpret Fincher’s tilt shift sequence, except perhaps that, by rendering human endeavour into a cartoonish, or better a stop-motion-like and seemingly toyish form, Fincher is directly commenting upon how his film involves a simplification of a reality, a toyification of the raw material from which he ‘sculpts’ his work.

(It might also suggest that Fincher is uncomfortable shooting outside of the USA. Considered in the light of other of his films, especially The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [USA, 2008], it might also suggest that Fincher is offering a prolonged consideration in his work of the effects of cartoons/simplifications on the human psyche – though in some respects this is no profound thought.)

Even though my last paragraph has dealt with the use of tilt shift in The Social Network, it is time to say that, quite a ways into this blog, we finally are talking about the film as opposed to its subject matter. Smith makes no claims to be talking solely about the film in her essay, so this is not something to hold against her, but it is worth pointing out that no one – myself included – seems capable of talking or writing about the film without using it as a platform for talking or writing about the Book of Face itself.

So Facebook has us in its grips – but we really did not need a film to tell us that. Even several years after joining, I still use it regularly, still ‘stalk’ pretty regularly, and still feel that it is the best self-updating address book I have ever owned (and feel that the rest is fun when I want it to be, and annoying when I don’t). But it’s not as if Facebook is not working alongside various other bits of hard- and software in changing our worlds: mobile phones, the internets themselves, iPhones, iPods, iPads, YouTube, Bit Torrents, and more. Facebook is only a small component of this. We have quickly become habituated to them, so one wonders whether The Social Network might one day be the You’ve Got M@il (Nora Ephron, USA, 1998) of a slightly younger – but still Radiohead-listening – generation.

More important, then, than Facebook, is, after Sartre, reality and people. What does The Social Network have to say about society, about ‘the soul’ and things that Facebook no doubt slightly influences but which more importantly it simply allows to be expressed, whether or not what it expresses is only the Harvard sophomore in all of us?

Rather than being a rewriting of what has been written, and certainly rather than being the final word on The Social Network (which is a superior film by a superior filmmaker, but not necessarily his best), this blog, then, is only supposed to bring out an element of the film that seems to be overlooked by most commentators.

The element that I wish to discuss is the grouped idea of class, private property and commons in the film.

One thing that Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) wants is to be recognised as the author of Facebook. The fact that Facebook for a long time in real life contained the legend ‘A Mark Zuckerberg Production’ on every page has been pointed out. This implies that the internet, like television before it, aspires to the movies in order to be considered legitimate, but it also implies that Zuckerberg is interested in authoring something that is supposedly a collective enterprise. “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook,” says the fictional Zuckerberg, before he allows all of his collaborators to get screwed over. Zadie Smith reads this Zuckerberg as someone who wants to be liked, but he is also one of those odd types, whom I can see sometimes in myself, who will screw over his close friends, precisely, perhaps, because Groucho Marx-style, he disrespects anyone who actually does like him, because they must have lousy judgment in human beings.

I have no interest in the real Zuckerberg, but the fictional one at least is a self-absorbed but complex chap who wants to give to the world something ‘free,’ but who, megalomaniacally, also craves recognition for the same. And this is the real paradox in the Zuckerberg character presented here, which does make it perhaps a 2.0 Person created by a 1.0 Person, as Smith says, but which also hints at the 1.0 that holds back the 2.0 in all of us: he talks of an open and free society, but he walks in a privatised world of intellectual property. Zuckerberg’s real genius is not having written Facebook. Contra the ‘great man’ of history (or at least computer programming) that Zuckerberg self-servingly espouses (much like Steve Jobs has done recently on the similarly self-important TED), Zuckerberg’s real genius is in winning his legal battles. Someone else most certainly would have designed Facebook or something like it (indeed, we know this, because various other people are working on this idea in the film), in the same way that someone else would have come up with the fonts for word processing software that Jobs claims as making him/his computers so special. That it was this Zuckerberg – in the film – is simply a twist of fate, a moment of hazardous (inevitable?) chance. But getting the world to recognise that he was the author of this phenomenon – this was the greatest coup. And yet this recognition relies solely on the notion of being a 1.0 person – someone whose ideas are shaped by the rights of private and intellectual property – while claiming to be a 2.0 person – someone who believes in the common, the free, and the abolition of intellectual property. Someone who pretends to be a team player but, whether he ‘actually’ stole from the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer) or not, is anything but a team player, as Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) finds out.

In this way, Fincher/Sorkin’s Mark Zuckerberg is not the face of the future, but the Janus face of the past in the present as it comes head to head with the future. Is Zuckerberg a breed that is dying out, however, as thousands of anonymous programmers work for minimal money or for free on open source software around the globe and around the clock in a real self-organising commons of soft wares? Or is he the lingering face of capitalist greed, regardless of whether the real Zuckerberg has pledged to give away a large proportion of his wealth during his lifetime?

The Social Network is not about Zuckerberg, then, but about a world that is on the brink of potentially undergoing huge social change, upon the brink of becoming, or at the very least welcoming into its fold a generation that is, a network society not of homogeneised kids putting their mindlessness down in their live feeds, but of heterogeneous and collaborating humans who will pool information and resources in such a way that private property, both intellectual and material, is replaced by a sense of a common wealth. A society in which, pace Fincher/Sorkin’s Zuckerberg, emphasis is not on the individual, but, after Hardt and Negri (whom I am quoting a lot at the moment – apologies!), on the multiple singularities that we are both collectively and ‘individually.’ A generation that recognises its own participation in a reality that is far too complex and ‘existential’ than any single film or piece of software might be able to convey.

Zadie Smith should know well that Judith Butler has, among others, argued that gender is, or at the very least can be, a performance. And while Smith might decry Facebook as a reduced or impoverished life, I would contend that we must think about the performative aspects of Facebook, and understand that few are the people who take it for real. In fact, the performative aspects of Facebook are what make it a liberating tool. A tool for prevarication, perhaps, but also a tool that perhaps also makes a political statement out of prevarication; like the Goldman Sachs employee who preferred networking to making money.

To perform is to perform for others; it is fundamentally an act of communication. As such, performance is fundamentally a means of building relationships with others. Rather than isolating us, Facebook, and the internets more generally, can be considered as a means of bringing us towards a multitude.

To be circumspect, this is unlikely to happen with Facebook as it currently stands. Facebook is indeed too homogeneous/homogeneising, too simple, simplistic and simplified. But given how creative people are and can be with Facebook even now, when we all come to be contributing to an even more complex site at even more complex levels of creativity, and without laughing at Facebook as we would not laugh for poor, defunct booksellers, then perhaps we can see the creative impulses of Fincher/Sorkin’s Zuckerberg as a step in the right direction, a 2.0 wish, that was stymied by 1.0 desires.

As a meditation on authorship and private property, it is intriguing that The Social Network has Fincher and Sorkin stamped so clearly over it. Perhaps this film remains too steeped in the mythology of cinema as the work of a single auteur. On the other hand, Smith has attributed to Fincher a genius for casting in her article. In some senses, we need not attribute this to Fincher; certainly, we need not attribute the great acting solely to Fincher. For even if some elements and the general high standards of the film suggest the presence of his genius, it is not the only one, and actors, editors, cinematographers, writers, directors, and others all deserve credit for what they have achieved here.

Cinema, in spite of a(n understandable – and still in some ways rightly influential) detour into auteur theory as the main means of understanding it, has always been a collaborative process. Even for productions the goal of which is to make the maximum amount of money for the least amount of effort, many people contribute such that cinema is often a work of a/the multitude. Indeed, when one lets one’s collaborators do their own work, such that they are not just actors or crew members but what Gilles Deleuze might term intercessors, or people who truly bring their own genius to the pot, then something great can be born. Filmmaking is no doubt about teamwork, even if great teams also have great managers, trainers and captains.

Paradoxically, then, Smith might have it all wrong: cinema was always already (at its best? anyway?) the 2.0 endeavour, while the younger media, including the internet, are still stuck – as per the people versus Mark Zuckerberg court cases brought here – at the 1.0 copyright level. In some respects, Thomas Edison‘s insistence upon claiming copyright for his cinematographic invention stymied early cinema production, even though Edison shamelessly copied Georges Méliès’ Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (France, 1902). In other respects, by going away from Edison to the West Coast, and by in effect shamelessly pirating his hardware, the film industry got going.

Even though it is easy to decry Hollywood for its overriding power and seemingly (but unfairly) homogeneous products, sometimes perhaps we can interpret it in a different way. Whatever it has become, the film industry in the USA might well have been founded upon a collaborative, multitudinous principle. And software, or the internet, is still in its Edison stage, with Zuckerberg as the (counter-?)Edison of his time. Even if the movies have had to evolve, as Dudley Andrew contends (rather self-evidently) in his latest book, sometimes cinema has evolved in beautiful directions, perhaps because through its multitudinous and emergent means of production it is flexible enough to change. As software, similarly, evolves, hopefully it, too, will have some beautiful iterations that allow the multitude to realise itself.

Notes from the LFF: Amigo (John Sayles, USA, 2010)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

Filipino cinema has seemingly had a bit of a renaissance recently – although why I say this will need to be put in context.

From what I understand, the Philippines did have a thriving local film industry in the 1930s, with plenty of domestic stars that mitigated the unrelenting presence of Hollywood products. The country’s art house peak, meanwhile, is perhaps exemplified by the work of Lino Brocka, who was a prominent figure on the film festival circuit in the 1970s and 1980s.

But of late a ‘new wave’ (whatever this term means these days) has been spearheaded by Brillante Mendoza, by whom I have only seen Lola/Grandmother (France/Philippines, 2009), which was excellent and which makes me want to see more. In other words, it seems as though the Philippines has its own fair crop of talented filmmakers and that Filipinos are more than capable of telling their own stories – as perhaps has been clearly exemplified in the realm of literature by the work of José Rizal, whose novel Noli Me Tangere (1887) forms a core part of Benedict Anderson‘s analysis of nations as ‘imagined communities.’

Rizal perhaps inevitably gets a mention both in this blog (as the only Filipino some of whose work I have read) as well as in John Sayles’ latest film, Amigo, in which a character declares that the Philippines will be saved one day by Jesus Christ and José Rizal riding into town. The moment raised a laugh in the audience, perhaps by people who had heard of Rizal in a bid to vocalise the fact that they recognised the name, but more likely because a fair number of London’s Filipino community seemed to be in attendance at this London Film Festival screening.

And while the mention got something of an approbatory laugh – suggesting that the desire for Filipino economic independence may still make of the the Philippines something of a ‘people to come‘ – it also got me to thinking: why is this film being made by John Sayles?

Don’t get me wrong: I find John Sayles a most intriguing filmmaker. His stilted, even belaboured dialogue can be heard a mile away (not least because it is often spoken, as in this film, with the voice of Chris Cooper). And yet his films, didactic though they can be, are still committed in their righteousness concerning the effort to revivify/sustain America’s ever-dwindling left. That and the fact that Sayles started as a writer on films like Piranha (Joe Dante, USA, 1978), Alligator (Lewis Teague, USA, 1980), and The Howling (Joe Dante, USA, 1981).

Furthermore, Sayles has been a filmmaker committed to making films about issues that are not necessarily connected to him. By which I mean to say, that from his treatment of lesbianism in Lianna (USA, 1983), to his treatment of race in The Brother from Another Planet (USA, 1984), TexMex relations in Lone Star (USA, 1996 – and my favourite Sayles film to date), and Mexican life in Men With Guns (USA, 1997), we might argue that Sayles has taken up ’causes’ with which he may well share all levels of kinship, but which sometimes are the kinds of stories that those involved in these situations must tell for themselves. In other words, Sayles is neither a lesbian, nor black, nor Mexican.

Nor is he Filipino. And yet here is directing a film in part about Philippine independence. For Amigo tells the story of a village chief, Rafael (Joel Torre), who must deal with an invading US garrison at the turn of the last century, which has helped to relieve the Philippines of Spain’s colonial presence, only to decide to take the country for itself/as its own.

As in any Sayles film, we get a plethora of viewpoints on what is happening in the film, including that of many of the American soldiers posted in the baryo, a bunch of the locals, a Spanish priest (Yul Vazquez) who is lingering to retain control of his flock, and even some Chinese workers whom the Americans employ (and who soon into the film are slaughtered by Filipino rebels living out in the wilds).

In other words, Sayles is ‘fair’ as a filmmaker in at the very least trying to give as many of the myriad possible viewpoints there could have been and perhaps were of/at this particular moment in world history. Interestingly, the war depicted here has apparently been referred to by Sayles as a ‘forgotten war.’ But this does beg the question: forgotten by whom? I have no idea whether this was is a monumental war for Filipinos, but it seems most likely that this is a war ‘forgotten’ by Americans.

But if this is the case, then why have no Filipino filmmakers (whose work is at all available outside of the Philippines) addressed this moment in Philippine history? Perhaps because it is forgotten in the Philippines. But this still cannot prevent the film from seeming at times like a lesson in other people’s history. More ironic: the film implicitly is a critique of American imperialism (Rafael, who is perhaps an impossibly/infallibly good guy in the film, ends up being pointlessly executed after a ceasefire), and yet for an American to tell Filipino history is potentially to mirror on a cultural level the economic/political/military ‘imperialism’ carried out by the USA 100+ years ago.

As mentioned, the film is ‘fair’: there are good and bad American soldiers, those who make an effort to get on with the locals (including the obligatory young GI who falls in love with a girl with whom he cannot verbally communicate – the stuff of a true, loving relationship, for sure), and those who remain somewhat ignorant/racist. There is one particularly bad local (Nenong, played by John Arcilla) who is looking to find a way to depose Rafael, and some rebels who are not so much bad as constrained to carry out an attempted murder on Rafael because they recognise that he may be perceived as helping the Americans (when in fact he just trying to keep the peace). But on the whole, everyone is likeable(-ish). It is not that the film should have villains that are readily identifiable; but the film does have a couple of these, and it also has a couple of readily identifiable ‘hero’ types, not least Rafael himself. The problem arises, then, in that by idealising Rafael the versimilitude and the veracity of the film seem compromised…

Sayles should not and does not maintain mere gringo-bashing as his sole agenda, however. In fact, the baryo successfully takes on and uses their new access to democracy to vote in Rafael over Nenong at one point; the imposition of democracy might even be a laudable thing in several respects. But whatever problematising that the film makes of the various issues at play (maybe imposing democracy on people who do not have it is sometimes an okay thing to do), applies to the film itself (telling other people’s histories for them can sometimes be okay, but we should be wary that it is a complex and thorny issue, out of which Sayles wishes to take something of an easy way out, it seems, because, speaking frankly, the film is not particularly self-conscious about its role as a representation of history, even if the acting sometimes has a touch of the Brecht about it).

If we compare Amigo to Lola, then arguably we can see something of a difference to be highlighted. Bearing in mind that I may be prey to believing Lola as a ‘true’ portrayal of contemporary Manila, because its handheld, digital shooting style is of course designed to induce credulity in me/the audience, not least because that and associated techniques have historically been linked to movements involving the word ‘realism,’ Lola does at least have an ‘imperfect’ or ‘raw’ look to it. This suggests that Mendoza works with a very small budget and outside of even the Philippine mainstream (let alone outside of Hollywood), which probabilistically if not de facto means that Mendoza can make a film that must respect/allow to creep into its being reality itself – because the filmmakers do not have the budget to shoot the whole film in a perfectly controlled manner.

Sayles is well known as an independent filmmaker, who uses script editing as a means to finance his films – i.e. he has limited funds, too, and makes films his own way. His latest film is set over 100 years ago, and so shooting on location (which he did) becomes hard to achieve without some falsification, such as the construction of the baryo in which most of the film takes place. But as an American filmmaker who makes plenty of cash from script rewrites in Hollywood, his level of ‘independence’ – regardless of whether chosen or enforced – is far greater than that of Mendoza, in the sense that he does (likely) have greater control over what happens on set, which means that fewer extraneous or, as I am arguing here, ‘true’ elements can or will find their way into the film.

It is not really about the story that is told in either film, then (FYI: Lola sees two grandmothers enter into each other’s lives, one as she tries to raise money for her grandson’s funeral, the other trying to raise money for the bail of her grandson, the murderer of the first grandson). Rather, it is about where the films are made and how much reality is allowed into them.

To malign Sayles on this level is in some respects unfair to him, since little or no reality from the past will make its way into any film, let alone his (in spite of the detailed and I would expect accurate mise-en-scène that his film does offer). But it is to say that Filipinos can and perhaps should tell their own stories – even if, as already mentioned, Sayles’ film is relatively ‘fair’ – in all senses of the word.

But while a Filipino audience might watch a Filipino film about independence from Spain and, subsequently, from the USA, would an American, British, or any non-Filipino audience go to watch that film? Do subtitles really make that much of a difference (there are subtitles in Amigo, but we (anglophone viewers) also get guidance from the American characters)? Do subtitles put audiences off films so much that they could not care to watch them? Given that few relatively few people will see Amigo, can we surmise that most audiences want to ‘forget’ (i.e. would prefer never to know) about the Filipino independence movement and America’s war over there? Given that fewer still will watch Lola, can we surmise that most (Western?) audiences want to ‘forget’ (i.e. would prefer never to know) about Filipino life at all? Given that relatively few people in the Philippines watch Mendoza’s films (which therefore might be considered ‘festival films’), can we surmise that few Filipinos want to watch films about their own country (or at least would prefer escapist fare to neorealist-influenced, art house fare? Can we surmise that few people want to watch art house films full stop?

If, as seemed the case with the elements of the audience in London that I took to be Filipino/interested in the Philippines, Filipinos are grateful to Sayles for telling this story, is this because he is bringing to the attention of the non-Philippine/anglophone world a moment in history that should be remembered? In other words, does the film function as a way of bringing attention to the Philippines full stop? (Film as a tool for tourism?) Or are they grateful that the film has at least interested someone because neither Filipinos nor anyone else is/seems interested in making a film about Filipino independence? And if this is the case, why is this so? Because we have fatigue from information overload and few are those who are prepared to grit their cerebral teeth and keep on taking in information? Or because the globalising processes that have in part helped to bring about information overload are truly ‘eurocentric’ processes that privilege the global rich over the global poor – hence my own personal anger and attempts to swallow my frustration every time I hear a student tell me straight-faced that they don’t like art house (especially politically-minded art house) cinema because it is ‘boring’?

An interview with Sayles is to be found here for your consideration.

Brief thoughts on (Not) Going the Distance

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Uncategorized

This blog will feed out of my former Ning blog, Cinema Salon, which is now defunct after I refused to pay to put my thoughts online (cheers, Ning!).

Where that blog was a collective endeavour to which anyone could and some people did contribute, this new wordpress blog forces me to do it the old-fashioned way – on my own.

It is to a certain degree appropriate, then, that my first – but brief – blog on this site will be about masturbation – or more particularly phone sex as (not) depicted in Going the Distance (Nanette Burstein, USA, 2010).

During this film, long distance partners Erin (Drew Barrymore) and Garrett (Justin Long) decide that, if anything is going to help his blue ball syndrome, then they must engage in some phone sex.

This is fair enough – and what happens is a relatively comic scene in which the couple begin to get it on before realising that they are engaged in different fantasies, which ultimately they find something of a turn off and mutually decide not to complete their telesexual and phony coitus.

In the same way that Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, USA, 2007) did not dare to show anyone shagging a sex doll (compare to Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s superior but still oddly dissatisfying Kûki ningyô/Air Doll (Japan, 2009), in which the doll gets pumped – and penetrated – on many occasions), Going the Distance similarly refuses to, well, go the distance when it comes to depicting sex on screen.

The phone sex moment is only one of several acts of coitus interruptus in the film: the couple’s first night together is spoilt – at least initially – by the ‘soundtrack’ provided by Garrett’s flatmate Dan (Charlie Day); their reunion shag after Erin has moved back in with her sister is spoilt by both sister Corinne (Christina Applegate) and her humdrum husband Phil (Jim Gaffigan – of whom Philip Seymour Hoffman is the rich man’s version). In the second case, frantically are they making love on the dining room table that they wake up Corinne, before realising that Phil was having a midnight snack alongside them all along.

Yes – this is all amusing, particularly when Dan interjects and explains that he was enjoying the fantasy that Garrett was putting forward on the phone. But what is interesting is what I shall call the prudishness of the whole affair: there is a level of frankness at play – sex happens – but never are we going actually to see it. Even though the film shows us more or less everything but a couple shagging in the dining room scene.

This is perhaps just all very standard Hollywood: no sex, please, we’re evangelicals. But what is interesting is that in the cases of sex, one gets the impression that no one minds being seen. That is to say, after Dan’s initial interruption, Erin says that he can deejay and they continue to make out (we cut to the next morning). And when Erin and Garrett are caught by Phil on the dining room table, one gets the impression that happily they would have carried on (for him), had Corinne not come down to spoil their fun. In other words, Erin and Garrett are happy to talk about sex. I would wager that they themselves are happy to ‘perform’ sex in front of other people. But the filmmakers are unhappy for them to perform sex in front of us.

What is interesting is that the characters in the film are wary of their audience and as such their sex is not just an intimate moment between two people, but it is a performance of sex that knows very well that it is being watched. Where diegetically Erin and Garrett are performers, Justin Long and Drew Barrymore as actors in the film will not perform that which their characters are prepared to. For the actors, sex remains private, but for the characters it is a public show – to which we audience members do not gain access.

This is not about film ratings necessarily. Or if it is, it is an issue with film ratings in general – because of course this film wants to maximise its profits and can only do so by achieving certain certificates (cue the usual argument about how extreme violence gets barely any censorship, but put human reproduction on a screen and everyone is up in arms). What I am trying to say is that Going the Distance suggests that Americans are very happy to perform sex, but that this performance – for other people – surely uncovers a refusal to engage in sex as a participatory activity between those doing it as opposed to a participatory activity between those doing it and those watching it. This is not just Garrett using Erin as a springboard to kudos from Dan (although there is an element of this at play somewhere in the film), because Erin is complicit in this and wants to show off her own sexual prowess to her sister and brother-in-law, after all. This, then, is about how in these cutesy relationships, people are not engaged with each other as people, but they are engaged only with themselves and an obsession with being perceived by others as ‘in love’ – as opposed ‘really’ to being in love (if we can know what that is).

Phil emerges as the bad guy when he criticises Garrett for his romantic gestures towards Erin. It is not that ‘real love’ is or must be devoid of romance; but the probably more ‘real’ relationship is critiqued for not involving the same element of performance of love. Or at least, so it seems.

For the film decides to damn Phil even further by telling us that he is into frotting – i.e. sex without penetration – something that Garrett and Erin catch Phil and Corinne doing at the film’s climax. In other words, the film projects on to Phil and Corinne the refusal of intimate contact that in fact lies at the heart of Erin and Garrett’s own relationship – this in spite of the fact that Phil and Corinne ostensibly have a child (I think played by Taylor Schwenke) – i.e. despite the fact that they obviously have had ‘real’ and reproductive sexual relations.

The phone sex scene can round off my thoughts about this film. While the film in general is cute, charming and often amusing, the refusal to perform phone sex (even though Dan must have heard Garrett wanking in the past – and vice versa, given how thin their walls are) seems odd. This surely would be precisely the kind of performance of sex that Erin and Garrett are into. Well, no. And the reason is because Erin and Garrett are into performing sex instead of enjoying each other – but only when they do not have to admit that their love-making is just a performance. For this reason, when faced with the obvious fact that they are performing sexually for each other, everything breaks down and they refuse to finish themselves off.

Or rather, if Garrett really has blue balls and if Erin really is turned on, one suspects that they happily finish themselves off – but not telephonically in front of the other person (even if Garrett will do so in front of Dan). What is it about the contemporary condition that people prefer to masturbate – or, in the case of Garrett and Erin’s sex, projected on to Phil and Corinne, to masturbate mutually – as opposed genuinely to making love with the other person?

We can turn this around: when was sex ever about genuine shared enjoyment as opposed to the reflected glory of masturbating into another human being in front of other people? But I’d probably stick to the first way of phrasing this conundrum, because masturbation definitely exists, it is an intensely private pastime, and one that few people, I mean couples together, manage to address. By which I mean to say: as humans seem to pursue ever greater lengths to pleasure themselves alone (check here for a recent shocking example, complete with a link to a photo that I did not dare to look at), few seem to be able to achieve the supposed satisfaction from love making that one would seem to get from wanking and other solitary sexual activities.

Perhaps it has always been thus and to hypothesise that it has ever been otherwise is to romanticise a mythical past in which things were different.

But if film has any influence on us at all, then the solitary act of fantasising about images, which is part and parcel of how the film industry seems to want to work with regard to audiences, cannot help to make this romantic and presumed superior notion of genuine contact any the more real. Film wants us to want images, not people. To get (to) a person, one has to go a distance further than simply a geographical distance, as happens in this film. In the same way that Erin and Garrett never go the sexual distance in the film, nor do they go anywhere towards love.

Perhaps they know this when they both say that they want to marry their best friend (i.e. Dan?). But one feels sorry for Corinne and Phil for giving it a go and for having the film mock them from start to finish for not being cynical hipsters in the Erin/Garrett mold.

Indeed, credit to Corinne and Phil: it might seem dysfunctional, but paradoxically it is more intimate of them to share their masturbatory practices with each other than it is for Garrett and Erin to refuse to acknowedge that this is what they are doing, preferring instead to hide the performative nature of their sexual relations. That Corinne and Phil do it on the same dining room table might suggest that both want to be like Garrett and Erin, in fact – but the film would of course not want them to be the happier couple and so that they are forced to engage in their own (mocked, unfairly) sexual practices in the same place as Garrett and Erin engaged in their ostensibly more real but paradoxically more dysfunctional relations is to be expected from this film.

A final note: Erin and Garrett get together at a gig performed by a band (The Boxer Rebellion) managed by Garrett. Performance brings this couple together – but in nothing like the provocative and ultimately quite destructive if productive way that Michael Winterbottom’s under-rated 9 Songs (UK, 2004) does, with its immensely graphic representation of sex. That film, Winterbottom’s, really does go the distance (and one wonders that Going the Distance even knowingly copies Winterbottom’s digitally shot film during a dinner sequence also shot on digital camera – by the looks of it – and in which Justin Long performs one-liners to Drew Barrymore wearing a Playboy-esque bow tie – what else?)…