I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Week 11: Celluloid Heroes

This was possibly the week my students were most looking forward to, since many of them first came to know these characters through their movies. I have to admit, I initially regarded the unit as a bit of a chore, something covered more out of obligation (and because I figured the class could probably use an easy week late in the semester) than any scholarly passion.

I was more interested in teaching the critical readings, which paired noted film scholar David Bordwell and Will Brooker, who is evidently pleased to identify himself as a Batman scholar. They make very different arguments--Brooker traces all the political readings of The Dark Knight that Bordwell more or less dismisses--yet they end up at the same point, noting the "strategic ambiguity" (to use Bordwell's phrase) of blockbuster films that want to seem topical and important without taking any coherent political stances that might alienate part of their potential audience.

When I first sat down to write up my lecture notes, that political balancing act intrigued me more than the movies themselves. For all that it marked the beginning of the superheroes' current reign at the box office, Spider-Man looks incredibly immature compared to what followed; one of my students compared it to a Power Rangers episode, and she's not wrong. The Dark Knight is simply ponderous, and holds the distinction of being the only text I did not rewatch or reread for this class. We had a rewarding discussion about Heath Ledger's Joker (and specifically the ways critics and viewers have appropriated or misread him) but I just couldn't bring myself to sit through another two and a half hours of grim pronouncements and quasi-meaningful catch-phrases. Some men do just want to watch the world burn, but after the fifth or sixth time it gets kind of old, you know?

The surprising exception was Iron Man. Jon Favreau's movie is no more ideologically sophisticated than the others (by design, Bordwell would say) and yet it carries that ambiguity better than any of its peers--that is, without veering into juvenile simplicity or sulking pretension.

Condensing three movies into one week left us woefully unprepared to discuss the visual narrative strategies of film the way we have with the comics, and frankly, few of these movies would offer much to reward such a reading. But we did manage to fit in a highly productive look at the scene where Iron Man travels to Gulmira to battle the Ten Rings. That sequence crystallizes the power fantasies at the heart of the contemporary superhero movie--not just the fantasy of having power, but of using it in just the right way, taking out swarms of terrorists with precision strikes without harming their civilian shields, or knocking out a lumbering tank with a toy rocket whose design you trust so implicitly you don't even have to watch it impact. These are fantasies of technological superiority, but also of wisdom and flexibility and moral purpose. Much as I appreciate Bordwell's warnings against "zeitgeist readings," this scene is perfectly pitched to both acknowledge and shore up America's foundering self-image, right down the gunfighter twitch in Stark's gauntlet.

All the other old fantasies are there too, including the adolescent sex fantasies of Robert Downey Jr.'s Bond-style Tony Stark. Yet they felt like a major step up after the prepubescent chastity and self-denial of the Nolan and Raimi movies, where girls are only good for pining after and occasionally kissing and of course saving from the bad guys. Or not saving, as the case may be. (At least Rachel Dawes doesn't get attacked by a gang of rapists in the middle of what appears to be a wet t-shirt contest.) RDJ's Stark is a boor, and all the women around him have a nasty habit of validating his boorishness, but at least he's an adult.

And he eventually realizes he's a boor and sets out to fix himself while every single person in his life--even Rhodey--even Pepper!--pushes him to go back to his old carousing, womanizing, munitions-dealing ways. The guy gets more emotional support from his AI and his robot helpers, a post-human hero if ever there was one. Not to mention a post-traumatic hero whose origin adapts itself seamlessly to the War on Terror without losing a single important detail. If the movie is still as ideologically timid as its vacillating competitors (selling arms is bad, but mostly when they get used against our boys, mmkay?) at least it delivers the carefully ambiguated message with strong performances and the kind of self-mocking humor that has always been a key ingredient of the Marvel style.

In the end, I had so much to say about Iron Man that I regretted condensing both Marvel movies and the Nolan into a single unit--either one could easily support their own week. I'm not sure I would have wanted to do two weeks of contemporary superhero movies, not when there's so much else to add, but I know that when I come back to this course, Iron Man is going to get the space it needs and the space it deserves.

Men of Steel

It came so very, very close. When Man of Steel gets the characters right--which is about 90 percent of the time--it gets them exactly right. But when it gets them wrong, it gets them spectacularly wrong.

(Spoilers ahead.)

The first part of the movie seems to be drawing from the animated series origin of Superman, which makes sense: if you're going to steal, steal from the best. I like watching Jor-El as a man of action on Krypton, displaying all the similarities of character that neither father nor son will ever get to see. And I love the idea that Zod is the only other person who sees the danger Krypton is facing.

The cast is perfect from top to bottom. Henry Cavill makes a good Superman, physically imposing but not aggressive. Amy Adams is a great Lois Lane; you can see why the world's most impressive man would be attracted to her equally impressive, equally fearless investigator. And Michael Shannon is fantastic as Zod, easily surpassing Terence Stamp. (That's because the script gives him a lot more to work with, but Shannon manages to wring a note of sympathy out of Super Space Hitler--especially when he says that's what he was designed to be.)

Unfortunately, the movie all but does away with Clark Kent as a secret identity for Superman. Having Lois Lane work it out from the beginning is probably smart--it removes the one thing that's always made her ridiculous in the comics, the idea that the world's greatest reporter is fooled by a pair of glasses. But the trail she follows to figure it out is so broad, with so many signposts, that pretty much any other interested party could also work it out if they wanted to, which means that Clark Kent is less a secret identity than a shared lie. Future movies will have to ignore all that if they want to make Clark work. Based on his limited exposure here, I'm not certain that they will.

The movie has an odd timeline, jumping straight from the destruction of Krypton to the adult Clark and then filling in his Smallville history through flashbacks. I can see how a more linear story would front-load the boring parts of Superman's growth, and force a lot of time jumps in quick succession, but let's face it, this is a Zack Snyder movie--even the boring parts feature a bus crash and a tornado.

Unfortunately, they also feature a very problematic take on Jonathan Kent. His "maybe" (in response to whether young Clark should have let a bus full of his classmates die) is inexcusable. This character is obsessed with maintaining his son's secrecy rather than teaching him to be a good person. That leads him to choose a completely unnecessary death, which might have been more moving if it had been in the service of something other than saving a dog.

Like the ponderous Superman Returns, Man of Steel can't resist the cheap and easy Christ imagery. The subtext isn't helped when the villainous Kryptonian starts talking about how evolution always wins or how morality is an evolutionary weakness. Which I'm pretty sure is not how evolution works, but Snyder made his point.

(The Superman I love the most, the genial scientist and humanist who walked into a golden sunset in 1986 and reappeared for a dozen glorious issues in the mid-2000s, would no doubt respond with some gentle corrective about how morality is humanity's greatest evolutionary adaptation. And then knock Faora into orbit.)

The biggest problem is the sheer scale of destruction as the movie wears on, and Superman's utter inability to stop it--which borders on downright lack of interest. (Mark Waid has an impassioned take on this at his blog.) The movie escalates from destroying a good swath of Smallville to laying half of Metropolis to waste--a sanitized waste, mind you, in which we see falling skyscrapers but not a single body. (Don't worry, I'm sure all the dogs made it out safely.) It's eerily reminiscent of Zack Snyder's similarly antiseptic take on the cataclysm at the end of Watchmen, and like that movie its violence is all the worse for being so clean. It's mass death as spectacle with the human cost politely swept away.

But in one respect it's even worse than Watchmen, because this is a Superman movie--and Superman isn't supposed to let that shit happen on his watch. The script attempts to duck that by contriving to send him around to a boring, pointless fight on the other side of the planet while Metropolis shatters--this is a movie that is actively looking to deliver a massive death toll. Nobody involved seems to have realized how that diminishes its hero, or human life in general.

Because in the most humane interpretations of the character, any death, just one death, is enough to send Superman into paroxysms of grief or self-doubt. It's a reminder that all life, every life, is precious, and not just to him. But as another self-proclaimed man of steel once said, one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Unless you don't even count up the million, in which case it's a Hollywood action movie.

Don't get me wrong--I loved 90 percent of this movie. I loved that Superman actually did heroic things and fought titanic battles instead of just floating around stalking his ex. I loved that Zod's followers were Super Space Nazis (and that I could tell the creepy doctor was Jax-Ur even before the credits rolled). I loved the little heroic moments it gave to Perry White and Steve Lombard--because you have to see that humanity is worth saving. Ninety percent of it was a great Superman movie. But the other ten missed one of the most important, fundamental things about him.

Here's a cheat sheet. If you want to have Superman earn that Christ imagery? Try having him save some people.

Blog to Print (Finally)

It's here at last:  the spring 2008 issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction has my article on comic books and metaphor in Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which first germinated as this post more years ago than I care to think about.

In other, not even remotely blog-related news, my first published piece of film criticism, an article on Citizen Kane and Nixon, sees print in the summer 2008 issue of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

And the piece I've been waiting the longest to see in print, on noir and nostalgia in The Big Lebowski, appears in the current, all-Coen brothers issue of Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities.  Sadly, it's been stuck in the pipeline for too long for me to become known as "the Lebowski guy," but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

None of these journals are terribly easy to track down outside of a university library (though you can order copies of Critique through the link above), but if you happen to read any of these articles I'd be glad to hear your reactions.

More projects on the horizon, but it's too early to announce them.

Update:  Forgot to mention that I also have a review of Scott McCloud's Making Comics in the Spring 2008 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art.

I'm Not There

In an age where the musician biopic has become such formulaic Oscar-bait that it now has its own parody movie, Todd Haynes has given the genre an original, distinctive twist.  Maybe we can start calling the Todd Haynes biopic a subgenre in its own right, since his Bob Dylan sextuple biography I'm Not There shares that twist with Velvet Goldmine and, to a lesser extent, Superstar:  a willingness to leap outside the particulars of its subject's life, to jump into allusion and parody and outright fantasy and so arrive at some larger, less easily represented truth.

Not that you can pin down anything as specific or confining as a Todd Haynes formula.  I'm Not There bears a few crucial differences from its predecessors, and one unmistakeable advantage--this time Haynes made sure got the rights to the music.  Velvet Goldmine arguably thrived under its constraints since the fake Bowie numbers dovetailed so perfectly with its themes of fabricated authenticity, and those Shudder to Think songs are fantastic homages.  But that's not a trick a director can pull twice, and while I'm Not There also pivots around the idea that its subject created his own identity, many times over, Haynes's polymorphous Dylan doesn't work quite the same way as his gloriously fake Bowie.  He isn't creating fantasy personas like Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or The Thin White Duke; he's creating Bob Dylan, many Bob Dylans, and to tell his story nobody else's music will do.  (The movie isn't exactly hurting for use of his back catalogue, either.  I'm not sure you could find a more bittersweet soundtrack for the collapse of Robbie Clark's marriage than "Visions of Johanna.")

The six lead roles are split between different periods in Dylan's life, different aspects of his personality, and different idealized conceptions of himself, with a few actors getting to walk the line between fact and fantasy.  Christian Bale plays the most squarely historical Dylan and the most boring one.  His late-developing paunch and the small crowd at his church strike me as a devastating shot at the Christian Dylan, but it's perceptive of Haynes to have the same actor playing the young, fiery, protest-movement Dylan everybody lionizes.  (The casting makes such telling insights that the script doesn't always pull its own weight.)  Heath Ledger gets some of the most moving scenes as the married Dylan, while Cate Blanchett gets the most fun Dylan and the most successful stunt casting--although Marcus Carl Franklin is unbelievably good as 11-year-old "Woody Guthrie."  Ben Whishaw plays what appears to be a purely ideal Dylan who never enters the biography, which is just as well since the movie is already bursting with Dylans.

We shouldn't overlook Bruce Greenwood, who contributes a great turn as all the various authority figures Dylan pushes against (one of them, naturally, named Mr. Jones). If Blanchett, Ledger, et al are one person fractured into many guises then Greenwood is the perfect antithesis, many forces compressed into one stoic face.  Sadly, a quick intercut almost ruins the trick by making the dual role too obvious, but Greenwood pulls off the aging Peckinpah villain and the sanctimonious BBC gatekeeper with equal aplomb.

I was hoping the Billy the Kid sequences would culminate in a burst of redemptive violence a la Peckinpah, but I guess that wouldn't be true to Dylan or his music.  Instead those scenes link up with one of the movie's most conflicted and compelling themes, an ongoing question of whether art is compatible with political engagement.  For most of the movie Dylan (in all his various guises) tries to wriggle free of everybody who wants to claim him and his music for their cause, but his scorn for awards banquets and possessive folkies quickly shades into total quietism and withdrawal.

This is where we pick up Richard Gere's Billy the Kid Dylan, in hiding from the world and his own reputation.  He learns soon enough that sometimes the world won't leave you alone--first through the sounds of jungle warfare echoing from the woods around his cabin and then, with a less heavy hand, when the law encroaches on the strange and mournful town of Riddle.  When Billy pushes back it's not with the gunplay his name and his cinematic inspiration seem to demand, and it's not terribly effective either, but the point has been made:  independence and artistic freedom are all well and good until the forces you've been ignoring set their sights on you.

Plenty of people, artists or otherwise, will tell you that art should never engage with politics (not infrequently after they encounter a work of art whose politics they don't share).  It's a common enough stance but, for me, an unsatisfactory one, especially when your country is engaged in something as monumentally, unavoidably evil as an unnecessary and unjust war.  I'm Not There flirts with the ascetic approach but says it can't work for long.  And if the movie comes back around to something like the other Dylans' position that music doesn't need a cause or a champion, if it resists being locked into one message just as much as Dylan does one identity, it still feels stronger for having questioned and ultimately rejected Billy the Kid's confusion of freedom with escapism.

That's not the only movie in I'm Not There.  At best, it's one of about five or six.  This is also a movie of haunting musical numbers and smart period jokes, of Fellini and Richard Lester and D. A. Pennebaker parodies (reminding me again of Velvet Goldmine and its playful exhumation of Citizen Kane), of Julianne Moore in a Joan Baez wig and David Cross on a golf cart.  A movie as witty and cryptic and passionate and melancholy and mercurial as its subject.

Thank You, Ed Brubaker

While we're thanking people, let's nod to Ed Brubaker for the neo-noir round-up in the latest issue of Criminal.  (Come to think of it, Matt Fraction had a piece of that, too.)  I hadn't realized this was out on DVD until I read his glowing review:

Two years ago, a couple of films sent me on a neo-noir kick. I wanted to see all the antecedents for The Limey and several of the movies excerpted in Los Angeles Plays Itself.  The gaping absence in my viewing was Point Blank, not yet out on DVD--I must have missed it by a couple months.  Brubaker and company have finally shown me the light.  The DVD is worth a rental just for the commentary track, which has director John Boorman talking with Steven Soderbergh, who cheerfully admits he's been ripping off Point Blank for most of his career.

Ideally I should have watched this two years ago, right between Charley Varrick and Vanishing Point (not a neo-noir, but still the most seventies movie ever made).  I may not have quite the same craving for stories of taciturn loners out for revenge anymore (Terence Stamp is still my favorite, by the way), but at least half of my interest in Point Blank was for its use of architecture and that still holds up.  Boorman puts the hideous late-modernist design of Los Angeles to great use, creating a spatial atmosphere as relentlessly inhuman as his characters.  The interiors are no less repellent, an overdecorated world of mirrored walls and wet bars; Point Blank comes from a 1967 where there's no Vietnam, no Sergeant Pepper's, and San Francisco has an Alcatraz but no Haight-Ashbury.  It's what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if Elvis had won the war: Graceland uber alles.  Point Blank is the dying fantasy of a decadent postwar culture--dead, but it doesn't know it yet.

So thank you, Ed Brubaker.  This concludes our latest installment of Things I Should Have Read or Seen a Long Fucking Time Ago Theatre.

Casino Royale

It broke my thirteen-year-old heart to see James Bond playing Texas hold 'em.  I could almost accept it in Casino Royale's Bahamian scenes, but attiring Bond in a tuxedo and sending him to an old-world casino while the dealer intones in an elegant continental accent about "the big blind" was a damn waste.  Why not have Bond drink Coors Light and drive a Ford truck and scream "I'm James Bond, bitch!" while you're at it?  Put the man in a game that reminds me of Sean Connery, not Dave Foley.

I realize the producers chose Texas hold 'em because everybody already knows the rules and can follow the game (and I suppose the game's televised popularity stems from the fact that it's so easy to follow, with most of the cards visible on the table and a betting system that lends itself to cheap theatrics--did any hand in Casino Royale not end with somebody going all in?).  But if you're going to choose the game because you don't need to explain it, you don't then need to have the characters standing around telling each other what a "tell" is, especially as Bond gets taken in by an obvious feint.  Besides, the Bond franchise is supposed to lead the curve, not follow it: maybe Casino Royale could have started a nationwide baccarat craze.  No, probably not, but it would have been fun watching your old college buddies and that slightly obnoxious guy from work buy those little paddles and the shoe.

Other than the choice of game, the biggest disappointment was the theme song by Chris Cornell (hopefully on his last stop before "I ♥ the 90s" color commentary), all feigned emotion and canned soul.  It would be hard to think of a less Bond-like singer who doesn't perform with a headset mike and a cowboy hat; another wasted opportunity, especially since the opening titles finally outgrew the naked-chicks-dancing-in-front-of-a-gun motif.  Otherwise the music was as great as it's always been since David Arnold came on board the franchise--he knows exactly when to play it cool and modern, when to introduce a loud John Barry flourish.

My gripes aside, the movie is a highly successful reinvigoration of the Bond franchise (although, as a Brosnan fan, I didn't think it needed much reinvigoration--just redirection, which Casino Royale supplies).  The film is unusually front-loaded on the action (I don't think I was able to exhale once during the Le Parkour chase scene) but I didn't mind the shift to intrigue and betrayal.  Daniel Craig handles himself well, presenting two very different faces of Bond:  the stoic, all but sociopathic killer of the Fleming novels and the first couple of movies, and a more humane person who surfaces only briefly before he is submerged again (literally).  The movie has too many false endings, although that's largely due to the imperfectly climactic source material.  This is the most complete and faithful adaptation of a Fleming novel in a long time, a sound strategy for bringing James Bond back to basics.

Of course, James Bond is always going back to basics.  The critics praised Timothy Dalton for playing a grittier, meaner Bond after the bloated Roger Moore years, and that only led to a couple of movies where he fought the Nancy Reagan-approved scourge of drug dealers--and Wayne Newton.  Pierce Brosnan started out with the cynical Goldeneye (directed by Casino Royale's Martin Campbell, apparently the franchise's go-to guy for realistic reinventions) and three movies later he was fighting villains who wore powered armor.  We'll see how long Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson can resist the temptation to include unkillable henchmen and submarine cars.

That said, I know Le Chiffre originally worked for SMERSH but I'll be disappointed yet again if the mysterious organization turns out to be anyone other than SPECTRE.  (Preferably a newer, quieter, more sinister SPECTRE but SPECTRE just the same, white cat and all.)  There are basics and then there are essentials.

Torture Heroes

In today's Washington Post, Stephen Hunter bemoans the lack of heroism in modern action heroes.  (Free registration required.)

Initially, his taste in movie heroes looks pretty good.  Effusing over John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Hunter looks for the qualities D.H. Lawrence identified in his survey of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales ("The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer").  But he finds them so lacking in today's leading men that he can only assemble them in a Frankenstein compilation of traits culled from the men who ruled the silver screen in the 1960s and early 70s, when Hunter was presumably coming of age.  He devotes a lot of attention to individual body parts, until the whole column reads like a mash note to the strictly heterosexual crushes of his puberty.

But he can't swoon over the tough guys of his past without first running down the presumably softer heroes of the present, implying that we're suffering some sort of manliness shortage.  He never really explains why Matt Damon (star of the admirably unsentimental Jason Bourne movies) and company aren't tough enough except to say that Ben Affleck is "too pretty"; the production department pitches in by running a picture of Johnny Depp in all his kohled-up Jack Sparrow glory.  Hunter wants but cannot permit himself to say that the new stars are just too goshdarned effeminate, although again the production department comes through for him.  In the illustration that accompanies the print version of the article, they've pasted the features from a half-dozen older stars onto a shaved, waxed, faux-hawked male body that looks like it's walked straight out of an underwear ad.

Since he won't directly voice this masculine anxiety, Hunter's case is mostly hypothetical and mostly negative as he inventories the things the new heroes won't do:

Today's stars need love.  They don't want to be feared, they want to be hugged.  They want to be told, "It's okay, big fella."  They don't want to shoot anyone, if possible; they certainly won't beat a confession out of a suspect [...]

In other words, today's male action heroes are wusses because they won't torture people.  By the end of the paragraph, this celebration of brutality isn't even subtext anymore:

They never get even, they don't punish, they see the folly of vengeance, they inflict pain only on special occasions.  (Last year's "Sin City" was one such occasion, where the point of the film was its removal from a moral spectrum, thus allowing its brutish heroes the freedom to torture, which they did.)

Sin City must be a tough case for Hunter, providing exactly the kind of swaggering, suspect-beating, bitch-slapping heroes he pines for yet rendering them as moral and physical grotesques.  I didn't much like Sin City but if it troubles Stephen Hunter by holding up a mirror to his ethic of abusive toughness then it did exactly one thing right.  (It also foregrounds and amplifies the misogyny of those old-school heroes, something Hunter studiously dances around in his paean to them.)

Elsewhere in the same paper Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan (our freedom-loving partners in the Global War on Terror), provides another perspective on interrogation and torture as seen from outside the comforting darkness of a cineplex:

The next day, an envelope landed on my desk; inside were photos of the corpse of a man who had been imprisoned in Uzbekistan's gulags.  I learned that his name was Muzafar Avazov.  His face was bruised, his torso and limbs livid purple.  We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow.  Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived.  It said that the man's fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the fine line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid.  He had been boiled alive.

And, if this should seem far from home:

According to a press release distributed to local media by the U.S. embassy in Tashkent in December 2002, the [Uzbek President Islam] Karimov regime received more than $500 million in U.S. aid that year alone.  That included $120 million for the Uzbek armed forces and more than $80 million for the re-branded Uzbek security services, successor to the KGB.

In other words, when the prisoner was boiled to death that summer, U.S. taxpayers helped heat the water.

But I'm sure the authorities got their confession, administered by torturers with the eyes of John Wayne, the lips of Clint Eastwood, and the callused, manly hands of Lee Marvin.

Hunter gives away his game when he writes that "Only a few boys seem to have the man-junk that can get them through the heavy lifting of a hero's role."  (The first one he lists is Samuel L. Jackson.  Mr. Hunter, I offer you this advice:  you might want to reconsider any sentence construction that has you referring to fifty-seven-year-old Samuel L. Jackson as a "boy.")  There it is, surfaced at last--the man-junk.  He wields the words with all the dexterity of a middle-aged dad picking up slang from his son, but the meaning is clear:  our generation of sensitive, torture-averse heroes just don't have the balls for the job.

His essay provides yet another reminder of the inadequate, appalling, embarrasingly Freudian explanation for the Bush administration's misdeeds in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and "black prisons" all over Europe.  We have inflicted horrible violence on the world, our principles, and ourselves because on September 11, 2001 our masculinity was threatened.  With the White House occupied by the worst possible people under those circumstances--a pair of guys who ran on a hawkish platform but had ducked the military conflict of their youth--our leaders became desperate to reassert our (their) manliness by any means necessary.  Too many of us, equally threatened, fell right in step behind them.  (Hunter, by the way, is a conservative movie reviewer and novelist who praised Dick Cheney's "samurai" qualities after the VP shot his hunting/drinking buddy in the face.  Apparently the modern samurai can coast by on draft deferrals--the important thing is the steely resolve with which he sends other people to fight.)  And so a bunch of the softest, most cowardly bastards in history play at hard men by ordering their subordinates to shock, drown, strip, beat, and humiliate prisoners, while the Stephen Hunters berate our fictional heroes for not joining in.

Which brings us to one of the most puzzling things about Hunter's piece: our culture currently has no shortage of torture heroes.  From movies to TV to comics, you don't have to look far to find entertainment that luridly dramatizes, justifies, or outright glorifies the business of inflicting pain on captives.  (An aside to my academic friends:  another sign that most culture doesn't "subvert" a damn thing.  An aside to my conservative friends:  still more evidence that "liberal Hollywood" doesn't just make liberal product.  Popular culture eagerly offers itself up to whoever's in power, ready to spread whatever good news they dictate.)

We would all do well to remember another piece of film criticism from New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels:

In even the most morally unsophisticated forms of popular storytelling, it is certainly not violence in itself, not even killing, that unmistakably separates good guys from evil ones. It is torture. Heroes may kill; villains torture [...]

Our government would like to obliterate that difference in its desire to excuse its own crimes.  We don't have to help them.

Beating a Dead Man's Chest

As one of the Curmudgeons used to say, this is not a review.  There's no point to reviewing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, a movie that has proven quite review-proof.  Hell, you've probably already seen it anyway, quite possibly in a theater filled with people your own age or older dressed in halfassed or occasionally fullassed pirate "garb."

If this were a review I might ask how a movie can run more than two hours and post several prolonged climaxes and still not have an ending.  I might bemoan that every successful franchise tries to force itself into the Star Wars trilogy model, complete with the requisite dead, captive, or comatose protagonist at the end of the second installment, observing that this one skips the carbonite and sends its hero straight into a floating Sarlacc Pit.  I might wonder why, given the runaway popularity of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, the producers still gave more screen time to boring Orlando Bloom.

But it's already too late, was always already too late, for reviews, even spot-on ones, so this is not a review.  It's a response to one dull, disturbing, and completely unnecessary element that all but ruined the movie.

The trouble starts with an overlong sequence in which Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl find themselves captives on an island.  The eventual escape is choreographed amusingly enough but the entire episode is a narrative dead end, an obstacle to getting the movie doing what it should have been doing all along--imitating the first one with some more swashbuckling on the high seas.

Instead we get what feels like a solid hour or so of vintage racial caricatures as the pirates are held captive by savage natives.  Of course they're cannibals, even if we now know that stories of Caribbean cannibalism were rumors used to justify European colonialism and slavery.  (The term "cannibal" comes from a name Columbus used for the Carib nations; apparently it originally meant "brave and daring" to the Spanish and had nothing to do with eating human flesh.)  Of course Jack Sparrow is their white god.

But none of this is supposed to be real, right?  I'm pretty sure real pirates didn't have swordfights in runaway mill wheels or get chased by giant krakens either.  Everything in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Placeholder Before the Third and Hopefully Final Movie is drawn from a surprisingly shallow repository of cliches, but there's a difference with the cannibal stuff.  Two differences, actually:  it uncritically recycles racist propaganda and it's part of a larger pattern of insulting portrayals of nonwhite characters.  When a fatal fall in the same sequence kills half the crew of the Black Pearl--the reckless, treacherous half, so they deserve it--it claims all of the nonwhite pirates.  Treacherous white characters like Jack Sparrow or Elizabeth Swann or Gareth from The Office and the guy who got his thumbs broken on Seinfeld will live to see the third installment, but the dark-skinned ones aren't so lucky.  And while the surviving white pirates all have some kind of identifying gimmick or maybe even a name, the darker shipmates are just anonymous scum.

Treachery, cannibalism, and cannon fodder aren't the only roles for nonwhite characters.  They have one more part to play, the same one as always:  providing spiritual guidance for the white leads.  Jack and company escape the anthropophagists but not the stereotypes; their next port of call is some sort of maroon settlement with a hammy voodoo priestess who sets them on the right path (although, in the manner of this movie, she tells them almost nothing they don't already know or need to know--the better to stretch this wafer-thin plot over two and a half hours, and to make sure no audience member is too stupid to follow along).  Oh, and she flirts with every attractive male in sight, just another hypersexualized black character.  The rotting teeth, I concede, are a novelty.

All these screaming cannibals and voodoo hags are queasily reminiscent of the Skull Islanders in Peter Jackson's King Kong, but Pirates lacks even the arch movie quotations and pretentious Conrad passages that served as Jackson's halfhearted acknowledgement that there is something objectionable about his loving recreation of the racist fantasies of the 1930s.  At least Jackson knows his source material is troubling and tries to anticipate that response; Pirates enthusiastically embraces every stereotype it can find without considering where they come from or what baggage they might carry.

Responding to these stereotypes is difficult.  It's not enough to fold our arms and frown and say these caricatures are racist (although they certainly are), as if that label alone could change people's minds, because clearly it doesn't.  Instead it triggers a tiresome confrontation where the script runs something like this:  piece of pop culture makes disturbing or outrageous use of racial stereotypes.  Critic (preferably one of those elitist journalists or academics) calls it racist, confident that this settles the matter.  Indignant fans flood comment box, accusations of political correctness mingling with declarations that you're not supposed to take pop culture seriously anyway, frequently delivered with a spittle-flinging rancor that makes the critic's point better than they ever could.  Go here for a typical example.  What's your favorite reply--the guy who praises Lord of the Rings for showing "that a whites-only movie, geared toward a white audience, can succeed at the box office" (at last, a movie white people can watch!) or the guy who seems to think Moby Dick doesn't have any subtext?  Meanwhile the next blockbuster to feature cannibal darkies is already in postproduction.

Maybe we shouldn't settle for merely identifying racist stereotypes as if we expect everybody to agree that they persist in our popular culture and that they're a problem--two assumptions we can't afford.  Maybe we need to explain why they're a problem: in the case of Pirates because they reduce all nonwhites to mindless savages, backstabbing idiots, or cheerleaders for white people.

Most importantly, maybe we should ask why, in the twenty-first century, we're still taking such great pleasure from the racist propaganda of the twentieth century, or the nineteenth... or, now that Dead Man's Chest has bested all competitors, the fifteenth.  Maybe we need to mock these caricatures relentlessly wherever we find them.

As long as we don't do it in a review.

More Movie Fun

The nicest thing I can say about Crash is that it plays like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie gone horribly wrong.  (I realized this after the montage of disconnected Angelenos gazing forlornly out their windows to the accompaniment of some sweetly-sung dirge, but before the miraculous precipitation that ends the film.)  But that's too kind; Crash may be yet another movie intertwining the lives of a handful of socially and racially disparate citizens to offer a searching social commentary on How We Live, but it has none of Anderson's subtlety, humor, or joy.

This is a movie whose idea of dramatic tension is a father giving his little girl an imaginary invisible cloak that supposedly protects her from harm.  Its idea of symbolism is a detective pulling a Saint Christopher statue out of the dirt.  Its idea of epiphany is a black car thief deciding not to enter the slave trade.  And its idea of theme is making nearly every character an outspoken racist.  Of course, it's pretty easy to be a racist when all the other characters are walking stereotypes, from the fat indignant black female bureaucrat to the Asian woman who can't drive to the furious entitled yuppie housewife to the trigger-happy white cop.

The movie is basically a sincere version of the racial confrontation game Michael Scott inflicts on his staff in the American version of The Office:  hit everybody with their own worst stereotypes and lean back with arms smugly folded, confident that you've just opened a dialogue that will heal America's racial divide.  But Steve Carell knows Michael Scott is a self-important ass, whereas Paul Haggis and the thirteen other producers of Crash all proudly slap the "Martin Luther King" card right on their own foreheads as they wallow in our hatred.

Cocks and Bulls

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Martin Rowson
Tristram Shandy:  A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom

I wish I had minded what I was about when I encountered, on two different occasions last week, two different modern adaptations of Mr. Laurence Sterne's classic eighteenth-century parody Tristram Shandy:—had I considered that not merely a few evenings' pleasant diversion but the production of a rational Blog Entry was concern'd in it, this review should have made quite a different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see it.

I'd been looking foward to one of those adaptations for some time.  Martin Rowson's graphic novel treatment of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which converts the classic poem of modernist angst into a hard-boiled detective story starring a Robert Mitchum lookalike, is one of the wittiest comics ever written.  His version of Tristram Shandy does not disappoint; like the earlier Waste Land (which receives a quick nod or two), it captures the most important qualities of the original while tossing out deadly accurate send-ups of other works of art, literature, and popular culture.  But the bar has been raised somewhat higher.  In The Waste Land, the mere act of quotation served as a clever formal analogue to and parody of Eliot's densely allusive poem; in that sense no reference could ever seem out of place. Tristram Shandy, however, adapts a much earlier and less frantically allusive work--in the wrong hands the extranarrative quotations might seem anachronistic, even desperate.  Somehow, though, they never come to that; lacking the formalistic excuse of his Eliot adaptation, Rowson's manic references instead replicate the freewheeling spirit and the endlessly self-devouring self-awareness of Sterne's tale.

The quotations aren't just anachronistic, they're completely anarchic.  Narrator Tristram Shandy leads us through his conception, birth, christening, and accidental circumcision by windowpane while taking countless digressions into matters geneaological, historical, theological, metatextual, and scatological.  With this as his source material, Rowson can blend his inventions almost seamlessly into Sterne's style no matter how jarring the change in cultural register:  thus the faux George Harriman page or the Oliver Stone film version.  (Think Born on the Fourth of July for the latter, not JFK--it's surprisingly apt, given uncle Toby's condition, but then most of Rowson's jokes are.)

Nevertheless, the contemporary references become a little overbearing by the novel's end, where Rowson glosses over the last five volumes with a barrage of jokes about Martin Amis, Raymond Chandler, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Andrew Davies under the wafer-thin pretext that Tristram Shandy has been downloaded (or uploaded?) into cyberspace.  Those later volumes are a good place to cut material--although Rowson doesn't do justice to the Widow Wadman story--but the modern satires briefly eclipse the source material.

Fortunately, these japes are more than balanced by plenty of period-appropriate references, including some of the work's most impressive parodies:  A set of diagrams of seventeenth-century siege emplacements metamorphose into a wonderfully coarse sexual joke.  Ominous carceral landscapes from Piranesi represent the interior of a certain much-priz'd part of the male anatomy.  The digression-within-a-digression tale of Slawkenbergius is told through an art catalogue (a trick used to equally striking if less satiric effect in Tobias Tycho Schalken's Balthazar).  Best of all, though, are Rowson's many spot-on parodies of Hogarth's engravings.  The Hogarthian print is perfectly suited both to Rowson's antic, chicken fat-laden compositions and his fine-lined pen and ink style.  All of the Hogarth references are illustrated in suitably ludicrous detail; one even comes with mock Sean Shesgreen-style annotations.

If the pastiche does occasionally stray too far from the text of Tristram Shandy, it always remains true to the style.  Unlike Rowson's Waste Land, which seizes every opportunity to mock Eliot's poem for its deliberate inscrutability, his Tristram Shandy bears a genuine affection for its source and a winning desire to match or beat it at its own game.  (The bile is reserved for any academic or literary critic who presumes to analyze it.)  As Rowson tells his canine companion Pete, these self-conscious artistic digressions are perhaps the only way to adapt an arch, self-reflexive novel that's about the impossibility of writing a novel in the first place.

Before I'd finished the comic I stumbled across Michael Winterbottom's recent film adaptation Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which played in Nashville last week.  Winterbottom takes a similar approach to Rowson--much lighter on the allusions (everybody is lighter on the allusions than Martin Rowson) but just as self-conscious about the making of the movie as Rowson is about the composition of his comic, as Sterne is about the writing of the novel.  The movie stresses the impossibility of turning Tristram Shandy into a movie, especially in an industry that's established rigid and dreary formulas for the period piece.  A Cock and Bull Story hits on all of them, right down to the obligatory/gratuitous casting of the American actress (ably filled by Gillian Anderson, who doesn't even have the decency to be American).

The movie is funniest when the shooting of the Tristram Shandy movie-within-the-movie stops, and we follow lead Steve Coogan's attempts to quash a scandal, visit the mother of his child, hit on a sexy production assistant who's far too into German cinema, fund the movie, pretend he's read Tristram Shandy, and fend off a power play by very funny second lead Rob Brydon.  The industry critique isn't particularly cutting edge but the movie never pretends it's throwing bombs at the Man, always directing the mockery first and foremost at itself.  (Contrast with Swimming with Sharks, and pretty much every other "biting" Hollywood satire made in Hollywood.)

The Shandy adaptations, unfortunately, are less successful than the behind-the-scenes material.  The screenplay discards Sterne's language for a contemporary narration that manages to be more blunt and yet less direct than the vigorous if verbose eighteenth-century prose.  (Rowson keeps the original language, cutting out reams of it and saving the very best.)  The difference between our clumsy, modern euphemisms for penises and Sterne's flippant Georgian ones is profound; he seems less embarrassed by sex than we are, even with all those rows of *********************.

The movie's many digressions, self-reflexive jokes, and flights of fancy are more true to the novel, whether they operate through literal adaptations like the film equivalent of Sterne's famous black page (allow me to quote:

)

or inventions like the giant womb Coogan gets shoved into.  The truest Shandian humor, though, comes in the parts least tied to the novel.

Ultimately, both adaptations succeed because they're faithful to the spirit of Sterne's work.  But Rowson, working with a larger canvas, fewer time constraints, and no incentives to dumb down the material, manages to be faithful to the letter as well.