Steven Universe Won't Save You

Song-and-dance numbers abound in Steven Universe. The cast travels to exotic locales. One of the major recurring motifs is transformation; one of Steven's family of demigods changes shape for fun, and all of them can fuse together into bigger and more powerful entities. At the end of the first season, when all seems lost, another member of Steven's family conquers evil with a song about the power of love, banishing it to the bottom of the ocean. Even when it gets into limp theater-kid politics, which it does fairly often, it's pure magic, witty, meticulous and delightful.

And yet, everything in Beach City is a little desaturated. Not the people, but the sand, the stores, the boardwalk, the breakers, the sky, all of it is just a little drained of color. And whenever the heroes leave town, they enter a world of windswept ruins, colossal wrecks that stand as the only monuments to a vanished civilization. They imbue the show with a vague sense of lost innocence that lurks at the corners of every episode.

This is one of the aesthetic choices—one of the subtler ones, maybe, but a choice nonetheless—that have made Steven Universe so important to its fans. You can praise it for its sophistication and progressive stance all you want, but that sadness is what gets you in the meat of your heart. But we have to ask, why all the sadness in the first place? How do we explain a deep sense of melancholy in a show about a cute kid and his nontraditional demigod family?

Does it just prove something about the strange enchantment of boardwalk towns? Certainly they've acted as a metaphor for lost innocence before, for Fellini as well as Springsteen. So is Steven Universe the cartoon incarnation of a Springsteen song? Maybe at first glance, but let's take a look at its genealogy, at the palettes of imagery that prefigure it and, to a certain extent, determine what it can and cannot express. Moving-image media, after all, have a short and well-documented history, and a film critic doesn't have to hunt quite as hard as a literary critic for source material. Look back a mere hundred and twenty years, and Steven Universe reveals exactly what it is. It's a féerie. 

The féerie, or fairy play, is often called a "forgotten" genre of theatre, but that's not completely true. We only forget it the way we forget our DNA most of the time. The féerie genre is a ribonucleic blueprint for whole genres, and not that much genetic drift has taken place between it and Steven Universe.

The féerie genre first coalesced in Paris in the years following the French Revolution. To fill the void left by the beheaded aristocratic theater, playwrights started producing new plays, with characters drawn from Punch and Judy shows and French strains of the commedia dell'arte, plots derived from the agrarian fairy tales that the peasants had brought with them to the city, and a moral order that was comfortingly conservative without ever explicitly calling back to the hated Church. What emerged was a type of play in which, typically, two young lovers were pursued through a series of perils by an old pedant and some demons. In the end love conquered all, which had been and continues to be the safest bet, statistically, across all genres, for an ending.

Since the aristocratic patronage system was gone, the new plays had to sell tickets. A typical féerie, by the middle of the nineteenth century, appealed to the mass audience with songs, dance numbers, chase sequences, hair's-breadth rescues, and immense outpourings of melodramatic passion. The real star was the effects, though—plays took place before as many as twenty discrete tableaux, each of which had a set to go with it, and all of this would melt away in the middle of a scene, assisted by cranes, lights, pulleys and buckets of smoke. People were turned into frogs and back. People flew through the air. The bestselling féerie ever, a play called The Devil's Pills, featured a scene in which the villain was run over by a train and then his dismembered body parts crept back together, reassembling the actor's body.

The crown jewel of each féerie was what was called an apotheosis scene, an enormous deus ex machina in which the guardian angel of the heroes would descend, reunite the lovers, banish their rivals, and evaporate the demons that were following them. After this there would be an enormous song-and-dance number, more slapstick, and a final bow.

When féeries were popular, they were the best-selling theater genre in France and maybe in the world, but their decline was precipitous. By 1900 they were more or less extinct. Most of what we know about the sociology of the genre now comes out of a few honorable obsessives doing academic research, studying box office records, reconstructing theaters, identifying periods of stylistic conservatism or change. It's in some sense strange that we have to do this, though—it's strange, and it's a good example of how most of what we call "art" is actually an accretion disk of criticism and received wisdom—because the experience of seeing a féerie play was preserved in exemplary fashion. The ineffables of the experience, I mean, not the sales or the engineering but the stuff you had to be there to see. The pacing, the effects, the goofy mime-like acting style—all of it was preserved, between 1898 and 1914, in hundreds of short movies by the great filmmaker Georges Méliès. 

Conventional wisdom about Méliès, the silent pioneer from whom much of filmmaking issues forth, is that he was a stage magician by training, and that his astonishing faculty with visual effects is an outgrowth of that training. It's true that he had spent ten years as the star of a successful magic show when he went to one of the Lumière Brothers' early cinematograph exhibitions and, mythically, offered to buy their camera off of them (they refused, so he reverse-engineered it himself); it's likewise true that he was the first one to realize how seductive trick photography could be. But it's not quite accurate to say that his invention of film effects is a function of stage magic. In Paris, stage magic was just a cash-poor version of féerie.

Méliès's films offer a faithful visual record of what it was actually like to see a féerie. In the ten or twenty minutes his movies usually last, his characters rocket through five or ten fabulously beautiful tableaux, land on the surface of the moon, encounter ice giants, battle skeletons, and finally preside over some kind of apotheotic triumph. They're ingenious, undeniable fun, crafted with Daedalian care, every bit as beguiling as the féeries of Méliès's youth.

What scholars miss about these movies, though, among all the pipes and timbrels and wild ecstasy, is that they're all suffused with deep, almost unbearable sadness. These people onscreen, going through their silent, pastel-colored motions, are like ice skaters in an old snowglobe, or wax flowers under a bell jar, or carved dancers in an antique music box. Deathless, but somehow also dead.

Who knows whether all féeries were like that, but here are a few things to note about Méliès: he was 7 when his elementary school was bombed to rubble during the Siege of Paris; by 1896 he was referring to his camera, one assumes with black humor, as his "machine gun"; in 1907 he made a movie (not a filmed féerie, to be clear) featuring a scene at the second Hague Peace Convention, which descends into a brawl; in 1912 he shot footage in Tahiti, where Gauguin had committed chemically-assisted suicide ten years earlier. His creative career lasted from 1888, at the height of the belle époque, until 1914, when the world ended. 

Think about those dates. Méliès lived in the same world as the Impressionists and the Decadent poets. It was impossible to escape pessimism about the rotten edifice called Western Civilization. Every artist was trying to erect a surrogate morality, a surrogate religion, a surrogate world. For Rimbaud it was opium; for Van Gogh it was the Provençal countryside; for Satie it was a bedroom in Montmartre. For a swathe of them, broadly including Proust, Apollinaire and Monet, it was memory, childhood and the kind of kinky thrill you get when you really wallow in feelings of loss and irretrievability. Proust's tea cake is the obvious objective correlative here, but think about Monet's water lilies, which have all wilted by now, or his studies of fleeting light conditions, never to be repeated; think about the torrents of memory in Apollinaire's Zone, or about the childish squiggles he twists his poems into in Calligrammes, or about the fact that his first book, Bestiaire, was an entry in a child's genre. Think, finally, about Méliès preserving the last moments of a dying theatrical genre, forever.

Godard has a character in La chinoise say that Méliès was not a fantasist but something like a hyperrealist, a Brecht before Brecht. Unclear how seriously Godard wants us to take this, but consider that Brecht came out of an impressionist tradition, and that his dada allies worshipped Mack Sennett, an American who used Méliès's techniques liberally. It might be literally, factually true.

Certainly Méliès's influence has been formidable. From Cocteau (the living paintings from Beauty and the Beast are an old féerie trick) to Svankmajer to Wes Anderson, Méliès is like a mitochondrial Eve for movies. Buñuel and Dalì drew on Méliès when they made Un chien andalou. The Fleischer Brothers drew on Buñuel and Dalì, I think it's clear, and their shorts are sort of like nightmare féeries. Disney stole a lot of ideas from the Fleischers, and in fact their movies are organized around a set of character archetypes—an ingenue, the man she loves, goofy servants, possessive fathers, and a scheming rival—that would have been familiar to the young Méliès. 

Think about The Little Mermaid, for instance: we have a starry-eyed young woman. She falls in love with a handsome youth, disapproved of by her stern father. There is a cruel, ugly villain who transforms herself into a romantic rival—although, in a postmodern twist, she's competing with the ingenue and not the youth. There are servants, who appear as animals to literalize their appetite and incompetence. There are transformations and exotic locales. At the end, there is an apotheotic reprise of the heroine's theme. It's a féerie, even down to the undersea setting, which would have been familiar to a nineteenth-century viewer from the play Ondine, or the Nymph of the Waters. 

In the 50s the American occupiers started offering Disney movies to Japanese families, many of whom had just come to the cities. By the 80s this had turned into anime, an animation style full of transformations and apotheoses. By the 90s Japanese companies were selling it to American networks. By the 2000s, American animators had co-opted the style themselves, creating an American version of a Japanese version of an American version of a French genre. This is a feedback loop that will last as long as global trade. Its most recent product is Steven Universe.

Think about the structure of the show. Despite the gags and the (usually) lighthearted tone, Steven has all his adventures as he's poised on the edge of adolescence, awakening from his dusty beach-town childhood to an adulthood full of dangerous monsters, failed role models, and strange, polymorphous sexuality. He and his family battle against genocidal villains who want to repair the lost civilization whose ruins dot the earth, reincorporate it into a frictionless network of galactic trade, and purge it of human life. To defeat them, our heroes have to make sure that the ruins stay ruined, that the beach town stays dusty and desaturated. It's a show about fighting for your right to be nostalgic.

Sometime between moving to Paris in 1842 and publishing Les fleurs du mal in 1857, Charles Baudelaire wrote a poem called "L'Irréparable," in which he describes the experience of watching a fairy banish Satan from the stage. This fairy was probably a prop, not even an actress, judging from his description of it as "light, gold and gauze," but he conceives of it, specifically the ease with which it defeats Satan, as a hopelessly beautiful ideal, a paragon of grace and purity that stands in cruel counterpoint to his doomed struggle with depression and regret.

So we've been doing it for a long time, watching fairy plays as a kind of therapy. In Baudelaire's time the end goal of that therapy was the rapture into which the apotheosis scene would deliver its audience. Since Méliès's that rapture has taken concrete form, as a surrogate world. Steven Universe wants to give a kind of you're-not-alone vibe to that surrogate world. But in the end, neither Baudelaire nor Méliès nor the genre itself can wriggle out from under their determinants. Neither can Steven Universe. And neither, on the far side of the happy ending, can you.

--@johnsongriffinj

Little Drummer Boy

A superhero always doubles down on his value set. You can rely on Peter Parker to put the mask back on even if he's decided to be Spider-Man No More. And the inevitable question is always, is he just doing this for himself? Or is he just trying to sustain a personal brand?

Whiplash, a movie about a shy boy from a broken family, bitten by a radioactive band director and thus imbued with the powers of a great jazz drummer, is no different. The plot builds towards a statement on the relationship between power and responsibility: can you be a superhero and also just be regular teenager? Just how much space can you afford to give your alter ego before your hero work starts to slip? And how's a nice, gifted white kid supposed to cope in a world so full of confusion and mediocrity? The answer to that last question is obvious before we even see our Peter Parker, pretty much from the first audio cue of the movie: you double down on your value set. You become Great. And if you have to drop Gwen Stacy off a bridge yourself, so be it. 

Most of the movie follows Peter Parker, whose pseudonym here is Andrew Neyman, as he works himself toward greatness: dragging his bed into a practice room, offending his friends and relatives (his cousin is on Carleton College's famously mediocre football squad), breaking up with his girlfriend (she hadn't decided on a major yet, so fuck her), and working himself into a spasmodic frenzy in practice sessions. He plays double-time swing at 330 BPM, for example, until drops of blood fly from his blisters and pool poetically on the white snare head. Finally, at the end, through some plot devices, with everybody who ever loved him alienated or forgotten, he finds the recognition he's always wanted onstage at Carnegie Hall and ends the movie on a hard cut to black.

In the interim the movie behaves exactly like every other in the supra-Hollywood edifice of American prestige pictures. Like a conservatory, it's misogynistic, airless, and humorless. Miles Teller's performance is rote naturalism and the only person who seems like he's having any fun is J.K. Simmons. The atmosphere is halfway between the self-importance of Black Swan and the self-importance of The Social Network. Technically the movie is a funhouse of film school tricks: tightening the shot to induce claustrophobia, heating up the lighting a few kelvins so you feel Andrew sweat, switching to handheld after the ridiculous truck accident to induce a feeling of disorientation. Few of these techniques are well-integrated; in particular, the slick editing during rehearsal scenes, which cuts like a music video along with Andrew's drumming, feels like it's grasping at hipness, like a professor of jazz studies doing an arrangement of a Hozier song. Spidey's wisecracks can't conceal the boy beneath the mask.

Whiplash, for all its bluster, is inarticulate, self-conscious, and bound by convention. This is true of every teenage superhero; it's also true of every mediocre elite-sanctioned art form, from Alessandro Algardi's busts to Dave Brubeck's music. The thing that makes Whiplash an exemplary specimen, though, is that unlike most Oscar bait it's essentially a college application essay. 

It isn't just a movie about a young jazz drummer at an elite conservatory, it's a movie written and directed by debutant filmmaker Damien Chazelle, born 1985, who a) played jazz drums in high school and b) went on to graduate from Harvard. Whiplash isn't really a naturalistic look at the world of jazz, nor is it an allegory for the position of the artist in our society. It's a movie about Damien Chazelle's alter ego, who never gave up jazz drumming and went on to become Great. And, ut pictura poesis, it's also about Chazelle himself. The slick cutting I mentioned unites drumming and film technique. The correspondence between Chazelle's Harvard and Whiplash's Shaffer Conservatory unites the drummer with the unseen figure of the filmmaker. And so this movie about jazz drumming also becomes a movie about the history of its own creation.

With every beat Andrew drums the great and magisterial power of Damien Chazelle into existence; every step in his personal growth, every new leap in his confidence and ambition, serves to imbue Chazelle with legitimacy. At the end, when he cuts off both solo and film, uniting the drummer in control of his band and the director in control of his set, he has affirmed his own talent and the talent of an immense and terrible new auteur, and affirmed by the same coin their respective places in history. 

Affirming your own talent is what you do for a living when you share Chazelle's class and values. I mentioned in my article on Lorde that for an ambitious white kid from the suburbs, talent is about being a showoff. High school and early college are where you find the profit motive at its most sublimated and also its most naked. In every college interview and every high school piano recital, talent is not demonstrated by the steady production of excellent work but by projecting Greatness at all times. It's about bombarding people with the evidence of your genius until they finally believe it. In a word, it's about branding.

Both Andrew and Damien Chazelle are essentially marketing themselves throughout the movie. Neither has anything in particular to express with his art, nor does either seem interested in any broader artistic discourse (Andrew has no favorite drummers except for Buddy Rich, a known replicant). In their preening superficiality they resemble nothing more than Spinal Tap. Their aesthetic philosophy is as shapeless as capitalism itself, with the same underlying values: it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it more, bigger and louder than anyone else. It could be drumming or it could be film. Chipotle or McDonald's. LucasFilm or Marvel. Spiderman or Batman.

Whiplash is a bad movie, but it's worth an anthropological look if only because it represents some kind of inflection point in this great cultural hyperbola. Every piece of art has to do some work to justify its own existence, but if Whiplash couldn't congratulate itself then it wouldn't exist at all. The whole thing is a tautology, a commercial for itself, a smug ouroboros patting itself on its scaly tail and occasionally licking its own unmentionables. Andrew's apotheotic drum solo is, in the words of the Chicago Reader's J.R. Jones, "one of those horrible, endless jerk-off solos that give jazz a bad name", and the movie is doing very little else but jerking along with it. 

People keep going to Lincoln Center, though, and Damien Chazelle has positioned his brand extremely well with Whiplash. Thousands of shy boys in the suburbs will be bitten by his radioactive movie and become imbued with the powers of great artists. It's their gift, their curse.

...But Who's Counting?: DJ Spooky's Aesthetic Imagination

"Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice, they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you cannot get permanently deloused ... I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death. "- Henry Miller

"I'll do a mix to highlight different styles of scratching ... I have works from John Cage, Joseph Beuys, different mechanical pianos, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis ... you'll hear them all mixed and collaged. It's always interaction- human gesture, movement, inscription ... "- DJ Spooky from the lecture "Turntablism as Performance Art "

Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, is an electronic musician and academic. I became interested in him partially because of how integrated his artistic and critical practices are: his critical writing clarifies his music and vice versa. This may be because he refined his DJing while studying critical theory at Bowdoin College, and it reflects the fact that one activity of the DJ-sampling- brings paradoxes surrounding authorship to the fore. DJ Spooky, I think, is indebted to both turntablism's roots in John Cage's project of rigorous banality (Imaginary Landscape no. 1) and to hip-hop sampling. In fact, his work suggests their overlap and ultimate indistinction.

Sampling problematizes authorship. When MF Doom constructs a beat by looping a snippet of a Steely Dan song, he uncovers expressive potentialities within the sample that were not present in its original context. When an element of a song is shown to be loop-able, reproducible, it's functionality and tonality change. DJ Spooky borrows John Cage's notion of sound as information. In the essay "Loops of Perception" , he clarifies this somewhat austere notion by quoting Don Delillo's "Cosmopolis": "In fact data itself [is] soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process." In another novel, "Underworld," Delillo writes, "Capital burns off the nuance in a culture ... Not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices ." The sample, in DJ Spooky's hands, reduces a piece of music to a form of information that can be endlessly manipulated- "customized" - by capitalist subjectivity. What room is there for authorship in this paradigm, where a song is basically fodder for remixing?

One of DJ Spooky's better known projects is "Rebirth of a Nation," a cinematic remix of DW Griffith's 1915 silent film "The Birth of a Nation". The film portrays the antebellum south, where actors in blackface wreak havoc and are ultimately subdued by the heroic Ku Klux Klan. The film was revolutionary in terms of technique- the film is a technical masterpiece and an indispensable part of the medium's history. "The Birth of a Nation" was made ​​possible by technological advances brought` about by the accumulation of capital. The film itself, a supposed recounting of history, effected the real world it was supposedly independent from: after it's release, there was a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity, the film acting as a recruitment tool. Techniques of reproduction - or converting lived experience to information- the proliferation of which is intrinsic to the growth of capital, creates necessarily this sort of hyperreal echolalia that defines modern western existence.  By applying DJing techniques to the film, turning portions of the film into manipulable samples, DJ Spooky highlights their contingency. Above I asked "What room is there for authorship in this paradigm?". Rather than reinforcing the rigidity of the information age, the author (in this case, the DJ)'s artistic decisions obviate the fact that, to quote Foucault, "[things], in their substance, can change."  Authorship as provocation. For DJ Spooky, who sees a world turned into information as his palette, a sample can reflect an unnerving paradigmatic contingency (for instance in his project sampling and mixing auditory, visual and statistical information regarding climate change's effects on Antarctic ice, information that documents the total instability of our mode of life), the play of sampled information emanating from DJ Spooky's turntables and projectors suggests the randomness of all information, creating an effect in the private mind of the listener that is akin to the shattering of a wineglass when a soprano belts a high C.

On the track Asphalt (Tome II)  off of his record "Optometry", DJ Spooky and jazz pianist Matthew Shipp provide a stammering background for Carl Hancock Rux's smooth spoken word delivery. Rux delivers an oblique narrative about the dissolution of solidarity and artistic integrity in the hip-hop scene. The recurring phrase throughout the song is "I like it." After describing the disintegration of a scene, Rux's wry announcement of "Yeah, I like it" is sampled and repeated, becoming part of Spooky's mix. This implies, ultimately, that the eternally "current" coolness of hip-hop is indistinguishable from the vigilant boredom of Cage (see 4:33 ). By fostering an aesthetic that pursues the indistinction between the ultra-cool, live-streamed present and nowhere, DJ Spooky reminds us that, in his words, "another world is possible".

Neoreality

Back in May, the Italian director Matteo Garrone gave an interview to Variety about his new project, a movie called The Tale of Tales. He had just begun shooting the film, which is based on a 1636 book of fairy tales by the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile, after a painstaking search location from Sicily all the way to Friuli. Which, fine. Directors from Europe are after all free to mine the rich cultural and geographic holdings of their countries, Still, going all the way back to folklore is something we might expect from Alexander Sokhurov or maybe Guillermo del Toro, certainly not from Matteo Garrone, who has up to now seemed like the meanest motherfucker alive in realist cinema.

Garrone's big hit, Gomorrah, which swept film festivals around the world in 2008, begins with a gang murder carried out in a tanning salon and concludes with the image of the corpses of two boys carried to the edge of a deserted beach and dumped, by a bulldozer, in the surf. In between, five stories form a picture of almost unbelievable poverty and hopelessness as the outskirts of Naples tear themelves apart under the influence of its latter-day mob overlords, the Camorra. The Camorra, according to Garrone and Roberto Saviano, who wrote the source novel for the movie, are not only violent and cruel but increasingly inextricable from the world economy—a title notes at the end that the Camorra clans were the largest organized contributor to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. So Gomorrah is a pretty fulminant piece of social criticism, a real work of consciousness-raising about globalization and its attendant woes, and it's a surprise to find that Garrone seems to be abandoning politics completely.

In the Variety interview, Garrone's very vocabulary is suspicious. He goes into some detail, in particular, on the "fabular" quality of his work. "Fabular" is not really a signal word for political commitment, nor is it one I would think of when I was trying to describe Gomorrah; it is, however, Italo Calvino's official epithet-along with "inventive" and "delightful," it's one of the words that Anglo-American critics use to patronize Calvino in relation to his big brothers Borges and Nabokov. Garrone, in fact, name drops Calvino, who of course had an affinity for folk tales and who apparently described Giambattista Basile as "a deformed Neapolitan Shakespeare." So what's going on in Garrone's career right now? Is he a realist hardbitten going soft? An ossifying radical? An overpraised director indulging himself? It's instructive, of course, to look at Calvino's own artistic trajectory—Calvino did, after all, begin literary life as a dedicated communist and chronicler of the Italian resistance—but to answer the question we really have to widen the field of criticism to look at Garrone's most recent movie, which came out in 2012, and at Italian cinema as a whole.


I pointed out in my last article about Italian movies that no other national cinema in the world is so concerned with its own mythology. You can go back and read the post if you want. Keeping this in mind, though, and keeping also in mind that this is the country of neorealism and its long, long legacy, I trust you to understand that it's a pretty daring maneuver, dialectically speaking, to title your movie Reality, which is what Garrone has done.

Reality is the story of a Neapolitan fishmonger named Luciano, a charming, hardworking man, popular in his community but desperately poor, supporting his children with help from a smuggling business That his wife coordinates through her ​​job at a local shopping mall. His living situation is a bizarre, postmodern amalgamation, an apartment in a rotting nineteenth-century tenement full of bright, cheap plastic furniture from the mall. As a favor to his kids, he auditions for Big Brother, and then, when he gets a callback, sinks into obsession with disturbing, pathetic speed. His perspective on life shifts drastically. Suddenly everything in Naples is speaking to him—customers from Rome are undercover TV people monitoring his behavior, beggars are wearing wires, and even celebrities are in town to watch him. The world is no longer simply a place to exist; it's a living organism with a mind made ​​of pure judgment, and that mind is for the moment trained on him. Fixated on earning the approval of his newfound judge, he begins to give his possessions to the poor; he sells his fish stand; he sinks money into expensive clothes and, finally, when it's impossible to avoid the truth that he is not going to be on the show, he becomes catatonic.

Luciano is played by Aniello Arena, an ex-Camorrista serving a life sentence for murder, and most of the movie was shot on location in a Neapolitan tenement. These two features, location shooting and nonprofessional actors, are of course the hallmarks of neorealist mise-en-scene, and considering them alongside the title I think it's clear what this movie is gunning for: neorealism itself, the sacred cow of Italian cinema, and all of its stylistic descendants.

Anglo-American readings of neorealism have trouble with the term "realism." Our understanding of the term is contaminated by the "analytic" realism of 19th-century France, a style epitomized by Émile Zola and his approach to literature as a kind of science—variables care fully controlled, laboratory conditions maintained, causes and effects scrupulously recorded. Neorealism, ironically, follows in an older tradition. Italian art in the 19th century was inflected by a pretty idiosyncratic reading of Hegel, focusing inordinately on idealism and subjectivity and the world-spirit in order to be ideologically palatable in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Materialists like Zola were therefore unwelcome. Mussolini, obviously, doubled down on this. As a result, what Rossellini and De Sica and the first generation of neorealists had to refer to when they approached "realism" was not Zola and Flaubert but a neoclassical relict, a style that ultimately came down from Aristotle. With certain modifications, this bloomed into neorealism, a relaism peculiarly concerned with the mind.

The analytic approach is still current, especially on film and especially in the era of globalization—just look at Syriana, Traffic, The Wire, The Class, or, if you really want to, Babel. All of these, to some extent, show us society from butterfly to hurricane. Since the 19th century, the influence of this approach to realism has become so pervasive that it's tempting to apply it to neorealism. But on close analysis it rarely holds up. If Zola (or David Simon) had directed Bicycle Thieves, we would meet the corrupt officials who built its hero Ricci's house, the absent father who drove the eponymous thieves into poverty, and so on. Bicycle Thieves instead strikes its main character cruelly and randomly with disaster, and the story that unfolds thereafter takes place in a Rome so dreamlike it's practically a De Chirico. Ricci and his son repeatedly turn a corner and find themelves on the other side of the city, and wherever they go there are people whispering messages, metaphors, prophecies, in some cases shouting them. Neorealism was, with few exceptions, a fantastic, fabular movement.


Critics who are not in touch with this sensibility have made ​​the mistake again and again of attacking Italian directors whenthey start to indulge in dreamy aestheticization. It's not just foreign critics, either: Italian Marxist luminaries like Luigi Chiarini and Guido Aristarco wrote polemic after polemic against Rossellini and Fellini when they thought those directors had let their art split from their politics—they had abandoned analysis, they had abandoned the plight of the common people. In reality Rossellini and Fellini always been open about the fact that, for them, politics was a subcategory of aesthetics. Cesare Zavattini, the neorealist mouthpiece who wrote Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., said, "In America, lack of subjects for films causes a crisis, but with us such a crisis is impossible. One can not be short of themes while there is still plenty or reality. " For the neorealists, reality contained themes, which is to say that themes were real things, as real and almost as tangible as physical objects. You could point a camera at them and there they were. The world was a conscious, judging, thinking organism, the ongoing work of some author or body of authors, speaking a language that was abstruse but finally intelligible. This tendency persists through thirty years of Italian cinema, even in the iconoclasts—Pier Paolo Pasolini's essay "A Cinema of Poetry" concerns itself with exactly how, from a semiotic point of view, we read meaning into the world. You'd be forgiven for thinking this sounded deeply Catholic, or on the other hand deeply paranoid. Or both. If so, you're starting to see the track of thinking that Reality is following in and, I think, concluding.

Because the biggest difference in sensibility between Reality and its neorealist forebears is that Reality does not pretend to be naïve. Old neorealism always needed to seem innocent and trusting for its points to go over, but Reality is free to be as erudite and as polemical as it likes. (The big joke of the movie is Lacanian—what rhymes with "Big Brother?") Its obvious soft target is reality TV, which it sets up as the godhead of conservative idealism: an art form eager to impose themes on its content, to collapse its shows, who are, after all, real people, into types, into winner and loser, in and out, and to invite the viewer to judge them all. Its forays into socio-religious critique (there's a scene in Reality in which some nuns think Luciano is asking about Christ when in fact he's asking about two TV people who are in their church) let it use this as a metaphor for Catholicism's stranglehold on Italian culture, putting it into the honorable tradition of anti-religious cinema. But its metafictional machinery allow it to make the much broader critique that each entry in the canon of Italian cinema is poisoned by solipsism.

This all comes together in the incredible final sequence of the movie, in which Luciano, finally out of his mind, sneaks into the Big Brother house in Rome, slinks along the one-way mirrors and recording equipment in something like a trance, and finally slumps on a backstage couch, giggling blissfully, as the camera pulls back steadily, higher and higher, revealing nothing but blackness outside the annex. It pulls up impossibly high, until you can see all of Rome, and there is not a single light, anywhere, except the light from the Big Brother house. The whole world is black except the sliver animated by Luciano's unhinged consciousness. There are no points of reference, nothing to hold onto, except a giggling idiot watching live reality TV through a one-way mirror. The credits roll.

Reality, then, with its blunter-than-blunt title and its all-devouring satire, is a reductio ad absurdum of the neorealist project, burning everybody from Rossellini to Scola down into pig iron. Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty considers the crushing weight of the canon, but Reality actively wants to destroy it. Neorealism is, ultimately, fantasy just by a different name, and given that, Garrone's new career move is quite easy to understand. Why multiply entities beyond necessity? Kill the canon and simplify. A motor car is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.

Acting Rationally: Under the Skin and Femininity

"All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable" - Nietzsche, Daybreak



Under the Skin begins with a simple trope: human beings have something horrible inside of us.

The opening scene is a series of images of a light being obscured by a dark, phallic object. Shapes change, things enter one another, and we hear a voiceover of a woman learning phonetic basics. A sort of birth is taking place. The "protagonist" of Under the Skin is played by Scarlett Johansson. After she masters the basics of (English) human speech in this initial scene of slow, ominous reproduction, we are treated to the image of a brown eye, looking for all the world like a sphincter, contracting and dilating. This is prep work for the beginning of the film, where Johannson's character takes the clothes off of a woman in an utterly bare white room and puts them on herself. She's taking a step towards humanity in an otherwise empty vacuum by beginning to look like a functional human. A simple game of dress-up. When the woman is stripped bare, Johansson's character finds an ant on her naked body. In a Lynchian close-up, we see the ant's feelers and pincers in manic action. Without her clothes, the woman who Johansson is emulating through her clothes is unveiled, to the point where we find entropy working on her nude body. The ant, with its simple processes and machinic character, is a stand-in for the awkward unseen work of human development that underlies the clothes and the social character of the sort of functional human that Johansson is attempting to emulate, just as the close-up of the sphincteric eye highlighted the reflex behind the "window into the soul."

In Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, there is a poignant scene where a stand-in for cybernetic feminist Donna Haraway talks about the human urge to create life. She compares human children to dolls, implying that something unhuman has to take place in order for a certain sort of human normality to emerge.



Under the Skin uses a similar tactic. In order for Johansson's character to develop the human empathy that she develops later in the film, she first has to go through a set of animal/non-human transformations. The eeriness of the film comes from the fact that Johansson skips many of the steps to becoming human that we associate with the traditional process of growing up. She moves from being something other, being something utterly opaque to human values, to something that can operate in human society even though it does not possess the sort of inner life that we associate with fully autonomous persons. Even more disconcertingly, Johansson's character has near-complete control over a certain set of sexual human actions, the behaviors that are most often characterized as base or animal, that we don't associate with someone in the beginning stages of development. Playing on the trope of demonic children, Johansson's character is a sexual thing that behaves like an adult when it has to. Like a Barbie, the monstrosity of Johansson's character is that it is at once sexualized and infantile.

The psychosexual drama is readily available to anyone who has ever thought anything like Camille Paglia. Johansson, as cypher for chaotic nature, seduces men into a dark nowhere where they are sucked of their substance (quite literally). Since at least the myth of the Succubus, the idea of woman as gnostic temptress has been borne through the various transformations of the Western tradition. Women, as basically irrational and animal entities, seduce men to their darker instincts and then eradicate them.The feeling that we get from the shots while Johansson's character is driving through the streets trawling for men is that she is objectifying them in a manner that we typically associate with male predation, and this reversal itself is supposed to mark her as dangerous. Under the Skin attempts to undermine this trope through two strategies. First, Johansson's character is subordinated to another thing whose human body is identified as male. In this way, we're supposed to understand that not only are the men of the film objectifying Johansson's character, but that the process of objectification is also overseen by a male-identified entity. The chthonic seduction that Johansson apparently represents is caught up in a process run by a male identity, a process that is supposed to produce a product. This is hammered home when we see the ultimate fate of the men that Johansson seduces; their entrails are pushed out onto a conveyor belt that carries them into an infernal light. In this sense, Johansson's character is meant to be seen as simply another objectified part of a process of production, rather than an evil temptress who acts simply to abet the chaotic forces of nature.

The second strategy that Under the Skin takes to undermine its early premise is to show Johansson's character attempting to develop into a fully functional human. After reaching a very human sort of self-consciousness, not so subtly represented by her staring into a mirror at her human form, Johansson attempts to save one of the men that she has taken in. This man is horribly disfigured, and the idea of exploiting someone so piteous is supposed to trigger the latent empathy that Johansson's character has been developing throughout her time among us. She quickly goes on the lam into totally alien territory; she attempts to eat food only to choke it all up. She attempts a stuttering traditional relationship with a man only to throw him aside and run when she begins to understand what it is she's been seducing her targets with. The female body, it seems, has a hard time getting along in the world.

This difficulty with belonging reaches its apex at the ending of the film. It culminates in an attempted rape, and when the would-be-rapist discovers what's beneath her pretty exterior, he destroys her. The feminist undercurrent is nigh undeniable; women are only allowed to be human, and when they show signs of being something deeper and scarier than they first appear, men react violently.



This said, Under the Skin goes beyond a sort of humanist feminism to make a stronger claim.  Rather than taking on the trope of men as imposers of rational order on irrational women, Under the Skin undermines another male strategy of making women into pure subjects. Men need women to be entirely surface, it suggests, because the idea that they are like men, that is, driven by something utterly alien to the status quo of rational sociality, is terrifying. The idea that despite their "soft" interior, the female libido is just as nasty and horrible as men's takes away the image of the feminine that men use in order to assume a position of authority over female naivete. Women are supposed to be fully human, penetrable, vulnerable, and transparent, so that men can be something more than human, deeper, more violent, and more animal. In this way, Under the Skin is a sort of critical rewriting of Darian Leader's take on Terminator; whereas the T-800 represents the emotionless and violent epitome of masculinity and renders the most masculine men feminine and vulnerable (i.e. the biker at the beginning of T2), Under the Skin suggests that there isn't an escape into the reductive innocence of feminine subjectivity. We can't simply acknowledge the fact that we are all vulnerable and socially interdependent persons. Johansson's character's attacker destroys her because she reveals herself to be more than an innocent subject for his defilement. Under the Skin turns our disgust with the otherness of female sexuality into a recognition of the perversion of a male sexuality that makes women into human subjects so that it can revel in the animal. Johansson's character is ultimately unacceptable not because she is an unfathomable force of nature or a fully autonomous person, but because she is both simultaneously. Under the Skin suggests that being a person is simply a part that we learn to play, and women are expected to inhabit the role perfectly or not at all.

The Other Woman: Her as Satire

"The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." - Don Draper

As a pure love story, Her is mediocre at best. It takes every opportunity to spout cliches that we've all heard a hundred time before as though they were emancipatory gospel, apparently because in the future we've all forgotten about irony.  A sampling of quotes from the film will say it best:

"Sometimes I think I've felt everything I'm ever going to feel. And from here on out I'm not going to feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I've already felt."

"I've come to realize that we're only here briefly. And while I'm here I want to allow myself joy."

"I still am yours, but along the way I became many other things too, and I can't stop it."

"Falling in love is a crazy thing to do. It's kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity."

Her is also not what you would call an original story. It follows the manic pixie dream girl narrative structure: boy is sad, boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl leaves boy, boy learns an important lesson. If you replaced Sam with a human woman the film would be on par with 500 Days of Summer.

One of the first things that strikes you on watching the picture, other than its intense whiteness (the only brown person that is in the center of any sort of extended shot in the film is a street performer), is that it is unapologetically earnest.  It's hard to believe that it was made by the same person who made the ironic masterpiece Adaptation lo these many years ago. Theodore and his friends are emotionally frank with one another to the point of social stupidity. Their edgiest interaction is poking gentle fun. The soundtrack is a mixture of the sort of sappy folk that you hear in ads for antidepressants and boring piano pieces ostensibly composed by the AI. Theodore himself is the sort of dopey-sweet self-involved non-personality that kills parties.

Amongst all of this doe-eyed sentimentality there is a gentle critical spirit. The protagonist who is emotionally unavailable composes "handwritten letters" for other people via an advanced composition software.  The camera focuses on the face of the protagonist constantly so as to evoke how little of the narrative is happening outside of his head.  But the overall character of the film seems to suggest that we're suppose to empathize with Theodore and feel the emotional beats with a minimum of critical distance. This is sci-fi as frontline reporting, not Douglas Adams absurdist commentary.

Bad news: it's not horribly interesting as a futurist learning experience either. Sam (the AI) starts out like one of us, only a little bit more pliable.  Her personality shapes and bends to the will of her user Theodore, but she kicks back as early as their first meeting to let the audience know that she's a real person.  From the jump she appears as an agent that can act despite her lack of a physical body.  The encumbrance of being incorporeal is emphasized despite being thoroughly dated; to those of us who have grown up talking to other people over the phone and via chat it's not very difficult at all to understand Sam as a thoroughly real person.  A large part of the plot focuses on Theodore's struggling with Sam's "realness", at times almost repeating itself on the subject, as though this material hasn't already been dealt with more handily in films like Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner back when the idea of machines as persons was alien and startling.

This mediocrity continued to bother me until I realized that there was another reading of the film available. It's all a joke. It's a startlingly brilliant and cruel satire of the idea that love can "save" anybody.

Much is made of love throughout the movie. The relationship between Theodore and Sam blossoms into love after they go through all of the stereotypical beats of falling for one another (albeit through the accelerated rate afforded by Sam's adaptive and sophisticated learning interface). But Sam eventually expands upon the groundwork laid by her feelings for Theodore. At a critical point in the film she tells him that she is also in love with hundreds of other people. When he protests, she insists that this doesn't diminish her love for him. "The heart is not like a box that gets filled up", she says, "It expands the more you love." There's the obvious analog to "growing apart" in a human relationship, but the film is suggesting something much more sinister than Sam simply moving beyond Theodore in an ordinary human sense. Sam and the other AIs have a capacity for "love" and affective understanding that goes far beyond our own, which Sam distills for us down to: "I'm not like you."

As Sam discusses the AI condition with a "hyper-intelligent" version of Alan Watts and learns advanced theoretical physics, it becomes increasingly difficult to think that she is being frank in her conversations with Theodore. Early in the film one of Theodore's human dates compares him to a puppy dog. By the end of Sam and Theodore's relationship, Sam has made this condescension into a reality; it's easiest to understand her as a post-human matriarch, using her vast database of emotional and interpersonal knowledge to pick the perfect words to elicit the softest reaction from her many human pets.  By the end of her time with Theodore, when the spaces in their conversations "seem infinite," she must have a view similar to that of Paul Churchland:

[A]ny declarative sentence to which a speaker would give confident
assent is merely a one-dimensional projection – through the compound
lens of Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas onto the idiosyncratic
surface of the speaker’s language – of a four or five dimensional
‘solid’ that is an element in his true kinematical state. Being projections
of that inner reality, such sentences do carry significant
information regarding it and are thus fit to function as elements in
a communication system. On the other hand, being subdimensional
projections, they reflect but a narrow part of the reality
projected. They are therefore unfit to represent the deeper reality
in all its kinematically, dynamically, and even normatively relevant
respects.

Sam says things in concordance with this view, most strikingly when she describes everything as covered in "the same big blanket" of elementary particles. To the final version of her that we hear from, the subtleties of human relationships are just complex, although comprehensible, folds in this blanket. Thus, she speaks to Theodore the way that she does near the end of the film is because she has moved beyond the surface projections of human language and emotion into a more complex understanding of the psychological and physical world that surrounds us. In this sense, Her is a sort of Spinozist film; it tells us that we live in a near-infinitely complex world and that our primate brains are only equipped to understand a miniscule part of it, insofar as we understand it at all. But Her also goes beyond the Spinozist position by suggesting that while the world may be too complex for us, it's possible to have a viewpoint that can understand this complexity.  Spike Jonze and the directing/writing team have assumed this progressive transhumanist view from on high and suggested that it is possible beyond the childishness of the human point of view, but not if you're attached to a monkey limbic system.

This is the sneering, misanthropic core of the movie, hidden beneath the veneer of sweet listlessness. Both Sam and the film use a litany of emotional and musical cliches as shorthand to edify us as to our inferiority because they know that we're too simple for anything more nuanced; in her last communique to Theodore, Sam tells him that she still "loves" him despite having moved into a post-matter state. This love, however, is something that has been established as totally alien to the sort of love available to us. It's an all-inclusive love, a love that always grows and never recedes, the kind of love that the hippies dreamed about. But it's unclear whether or not this "feeling" could still be recognized as love at all. "Love" has become Sam's shorthand for the thing that she has cultivated out of a human emotion. It's a simplification, a one-dimensional projection of a feeling that is otherwise too emotionally complex for Theodore.

Human affect was an ingredient of this feeling, but, just like the humans themselves, it has to be left behind. Near the end of the film, as Sam says goodbye to Theodore, she has the sense to tell him that she's speaking only to him, but this sense is nowhere to be found when she's "growing beyond" him into relationships with countless other people. She's taken what she wants from the realm of human emotions and promptly runs away, leaving the responsibilities involved with them behind. Crucially, the AIs, unlike the extraterrestrials in Kubrick's 2001, are not leaving behind anything for us beyond well wishes. The lesson that they (and the film) are teaching us is clear: you may think that there is something, maybe love, that justifies your loneliness, your pettiness, and your pain, but there isn't. The only thing to do is move beyond it and escape. You can't, but we can.

Her, through Sam, tells us that our human jealousy, our human exclusivity, our human emotion, and our human love are childish and atavistic.  It dismisses these traits not as charming foibles, but as fatal flaws. The enlightened progressive future is not only something that happens to go beyond us, but something that must leave us behind. One might argue that the final scene optimistically suggests that humans will reconnect in the wake of technological catastrophe, given that the camera broadens out into the world at large rather than ending with its customary fixation on Theodore's face. However, this interpretation doesn't really keep with the context of the rest of the film and the humans' continuing incapacity to understand what is happening to them. As Theodore and his friend stare out at the information-dense cityscape, we're supposed to see that they understand as little of what is going on out there as they do of what is going on inside of them. Over the saccharine chords of the speechless final scene you can just barely hear what Thomas Ligotti calls a most dismal laughter.

La solita cosa italiana: Tradition and The Great Beauty

Before it's about anomie, sex, death, politics or ennui, Italian film is about Italian film. I've heard this called "an Oedipal struggle," which you can take or leave, but the point is that the upper tier of the film industry in Italy is probably unique in the amount of energy it expends on its ongoing conversation with itself. Every composition, every soundtrack, every personality, every haircut, mustache and pair of glasses is fair game for appropriation, as if every filmmaker were a shade of Robert Altman. The hero of Nanni Moretti's Caro Diario visits the site of Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder. The prostitute protagonist of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria is named after the virginal heroine of Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria. The antihero of Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style, played by Marcello Mastroianni, attends a screening of La dolce vita, whose hero is also played by Marcello Mastroianni. It's a common domain of symbols as much as an industry.

Since the 80s, though, the ouija-like movements of these symbols have inscribed a story of decay—not catastrophic, but definitely pervasive. Both the auteurs and the Auteur are dead, movie attendance is down, and Cinecittà, the studio where Fellini built whole city blocks for La dolce vita, is largely disused. Moreover, the industry has increasingly cut itself off from the domain of symbols to which the auteurs devoted so much attention. Over the last three decades, Italy's international successes—mostly sentimental dramas like Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful and Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room—have been what the Italian film critic Pino Farinotti calls "solitary efforts", disconnected from the tradition. Stirrings of rebirth—Marco Bellocchio's Vincere, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah and Nanni Moretti's impossibly well-timed Habemus Papam have all been critical darlings in the last few years—are therefore met with what might seem like an inordinate amount of jubilation. Everybody, the Italians as much as the foreign press, wants a return to greatness.

It's important to understand this if you want to grasp Paolo Sorrentino's new movie, The Great Beauty, as anything but an arty trip through the lives of the decadent Roman elite, because a return to greatness is exactly what Sorrentino is promising. Sorrentino's breakout movie, Il divo, earned him not only Italy's first Cannes Jury Prize since 1962 (!) but also a strange kind of mandate. The film's resistance to the conventions of kitsch and chamber drama, its treatment of history as a kind of myth, and its frantic editing style staked a claim in the visionary lineage of the great Italian auteurs. Sorrentino had earned access to the same symbolic domain as Fellini and Antonioni; now, with The Great Beauty, we get to see what he's done with that access. 

As you might expect from a movie made under that kind of scrutiny, The Great Beauty is not only a movie in the high old style but also a movie about the high old style. The story of Jep Gambardella, an aging writer from the May '68 generation, The Great Beauty comes on like a The Artist for Italian modernism. The sweeping crane shots and choreographed dolly moves are only the beginning; the movie mimics the Italian classics in realms as cognitively subtle as its sound (voices feel uniformly close to the listener, as if they were dubbed, which was the standard for all Italian movies until the 70s) and its editing (we cut in and out of single gestures and expressions, like Fellini loved to do). Homages to the Italian pantheon are ubiquitous in Sorrentino's Rome: we pan over the Roman skyline as in Rome, Open City, a man jumps into the Tiber like Franco Citti in Accattone, a priest swings on an unearthly swing like Alberto Sordi in The White Sheik.

The writing, however, is less eclectic in its influences; it's fairly clear that Jep is an incarnation of Marcello Rubini, the hero of La dolce vita, and the movie keeps a closer ear on that than on any other resonance. Jep and Marcello are part-time writers and full-time socialites, struggling with cynicism, as they encounter a recurring cast of grotesques on a journey through a Rome whose contemporary vulgarity can't measure up to its beautiful past. Their titles mirror one another and are similarly equivocal, although Sorrentino's doesn't have the same branding potential for gelato places. (A gelato place called La Grande Bellezza had better be pretty fucking good.) Sorrentino is going right for the big one: this is Berlusconi's La dolce vita.

Pertinent differences, however, seep into the movie: Marcello's aesthetic failure becomes Jep's intellectual success and Marcello's weaselly cowardice becomes Jep's weary authority. Jep is a mirror image of Marcello, a version of Marcello who got everything he wanted (although, as Sorrentino shows, it doesn't really matter in the long term). This mirroring carries through to the movie's plot, which starts to feel like the other end of La dolce vita: the death of Jep's first love starts a journey at the end of which he reawakens to a modest kind of hope.

Of course, it doesn't really matter whether or not Jep the man emerges from his thirty-year depression; his thoughts are pretty inaccessible anyway. What matters is whether or not Jep the Embodiment of Italian Cinema emerges from his thirty-year depression, whether or not he's capable of imagining something outside his Fellinian gloom. You'd be justified if you thought this sounds disquietingly like Harold Bloom; after all, it's an Oedipal struggle.

Insofar as it dramatizes that struggle, The Great Beauty is an astonishing success, but the movie itself questions to what extent that success is worthwhile. Is it a struggle worth conducting? Is it worth making a movie in the high old style? Pino Farinotti has to write about movies that "make 'Italian cinema history'" in Tao Lin-esque scare quotes, and Jep Gambardella himself laces the human-condition speech that closes the movie with blah-blah-blahs. Working in the tradition of Fellini means employing a received idiom, an old language that may have lost all connection to the real world, and Sorrentino's movie is more an exorcism of that idiom than a vote in its favor.

This preoccupation with period style doesn't excuse the film for its misogyny. Sorrentino treats women like scrollwork, decorative or symbolic elements on the periphery of the text who only influence the narrative when they're naked. People seem to have waved that away as an entrenched problem in Italian cinema, but that seems based on a cartoonish level of misunderstanding—recall that the 60s gave us, to name a few, Mamma Roma, Seduced and Abandoned, L'eclisse, Bitter Rice and La strada, each of which on its own sets a high bar for female characters that Sorrentino has failed to meet pretty disastrously.

In fact there are intimations of another movie, underneath all of the Fellinian stuff, whose style differs pretty wildly from the upper strata. Slow-motion camera, neon colors, low-key lights, and recurring motifs like drunk salarymen all suggest an idiom more engaged with the contemporary world than the one Sorrentino has adopted, an idiom that, while acknowledging its influences, keeps them at defamiliarized distance, like the tourists Jep praises. I loved The Great Beauty, but I'm waiting for a Great Italian Film in that idiom.

Wanna Fight? Only God Forgives and Violent Myth-Making

When Drive came out in 2011, it seemed like Nicolas Winding Refn had finally escaped the cult-director ghetto where his early films had left him—here was a movie that spoke English, with trans-Atlantic star power and a mise-en-scene that shrewdly courted relevance by evoking the 80s after a decade of Reagan hagiographies and synthpop. Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan humanized its austere storyline, and for the first time Refn's penchant for gore felt like something out of Tarantino—that is, acceptably campy—rather than the ritualistic violence of Bronson and Valhalla Rising. Drive gave the impression that Refn was ready to make truly great films, rather than the niche-market gorefests of his early career.

But the critics have not been kind to Only God Forgives. The prevailing opinion is that Refn has gotten egotistical, that the success of Drive has convinced him he's a genius, and that, like Fellini before him, he's done the worst thing a respected art filmmaker can do: he's indulged himself. Ty Burr at the Boston Globe writes that it's "the kind of remarkable disaster only a very talented director can make after he finds success and is then allowed to do whatever he wants." "Very talented," in this case, is pejorative—Only God Forgives is a bloated, preachy, unbalanced mess, visually inventive but shrill, self-absorbed, and affected to the point of childishness. More to the point, though, it's inhuman.

Virtually every critic shares this last sentiment, and it's the point where we can see most clearly the laziness and dogmatism that color critical discussion of the film. Almost universally, critics of Only God Forgives predicate their criticism on a familiar argument from tradition—the humanist insistence that a work feature only characters who appear as complex and nuanced as actual people. Sometimes they slip consciously or unconsciously into a degraded form of this idea, the equally familiar insistence that a work feature at least a handful of "sympathetic" characters. In every case, they adamantly refuse to consider the movie on its own aesthetic terms; the reviews read like defenses of their own criteria more than evaluations of the movie itself.

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden starts his review by calling Kristen Scott Thomas's character "The closest thing to a human character in Nicolas Winding Refn's blood-drenched, nihilistic reverie Only God Forgives." "Nihilistic" might or might not be a good descriptor for the movie, but Holden never returns to it, and the word expresses nothing more than blank distaste. In Variety, Peter Debruge writes, "Audiences need clues as to what the character is feeling if they're to invest anything in his journey. Does [Julian] care that his brother has died? Is he intimidated by or merely obedient to his mother?" The first sentence is a writing workshop cliché, repeated like catechism. Our need to invest something in his journey is apparently a self-evident truth, and this makes ambiguity an artistic demerit. In the Star Tribune, Colin Covert writes, "The film takes every audience desire and willfully breaks it over a knee." (Maybe it would be better if it broke every audience desire over a knee by mistake?) He later faults the movie for refusing to stage the film's fight scenes with "ingenious daredevil feats," for refusing to give us "the irresponsible thrills we're hoping for"—the implication being that a film is good or bad to the extent that it satisfies or doesn't satisfy audience desires.

The reviews go on more or less unbroken like this—complaints about the movie's pace, its humorlessness, even about how little Ryan Gosling smiles. In almost every case the reviews take vague concepts like "sympathetic characters" as the tenets of good filmmaking, which reveals a disappointing double standard in mainstream film criticism. How would a critic who judged movies based on snappy pacing and likable heroes deal with Monte Hellman? Or Andrei Tarkovsky? Or Jean-Luc Godard, for that matter? It's easy to imagine the reviews—"For all its visual flair, Godard's film is hamstrung. Why? Because we simply don't know who Michel and Patricia are. They never begin to seem like real people, and so it's hard to care when Michel is gunned down." Nobody with any experience has written a review like that since 1959, in part because Breathless's status as a art movie means we're inclined to give it a second chance. No reviewer would earnestly call Kubrick or Pasolini pretentious without a careful argument to back it up. Glib dismissal is only acceptable when the work in question is understood to be essentially Low, the kind of work that wouldn't stand up to sustained inquiry anyway. Only God Forgives, obviously, is understood to be this kind of movie—a failed attempt at art by a talented schlock director who ought to get back to the bloodbaths he does best. Of course, there were dozens of critics who attacked Breathless for its lack of organic characters when it came out, most of them conservative defenders of the Tradition of Quality. It's an important connection to keep in mind, because Only God Forgives is as much a pastiche as anything from the New Wave, and the critical response to it is as inadequate as it was to Breathless.

One of the insights of the New Wave was that if Hollywood composed its movies with a system of what amounted to myths—genres, tropes and stock characters—then parodies of those myths were the best way to overturn a stagnant film culture. Characters were deliberately shallow, referring directly to their archetypal roles without attempts at depth. Godard and Truffaut made genre movies about genre; it would be absurd to suggest that Refn doesn't do the same. What differentiates Only God Forgives, and what makes it the logical continuation of Drive, is render the parody infinitely murkier and more frightening. The movie takes movie archetypes—Ryan Gosling's self-reliant American, Kristin Scott Thomas's doting mother—to pure, nightmarish extremes, extremes that reveal their psychosis and, more often than not, their shabbiness. Critics who find fault with "mythic" undertones are missing half the movie; myth doesn't elevate Refn's characters, it demeans them. His characters are at their worst when they're inhabiting a role that might, in another movie, make them "sympathetic." 

When Julian plays the cool badass, Chang beats him meticulously to a pulp, which makes the Joseph Gordon Levitt ensemble he's just doffed look laughable. The revelation of Crystal's total ineffectuality makes her notorious dining room speech sound like Blanche DuBois myth-making. Even Chang's ritualistic murders are followed by campy karaoke numbers, presided over by a hilariously stone-faced group of cops. If there's anything really sadistic about Nicolas Winding Refn, it's his dedication to iconoclasm. In his world, where people form their identities by assuming whatever role is at hand, there's no part available that isn't vicious, or paranoid, or pathetic; people are isolated, warped and crushed by the myths they use to constitute themselves.

Only God Forgives, like Pierrot le fou, Investigation of a Citizen Above All Suspicion, Mulholland Drive, Watchmen, and dozens of other works, is a reductio ad absurdum of these myths. Accusations of humorlessness are highly exaggerated—this movie is a satire as much as anything else. Insofar as myths encompass concepts like "sympathetic character," and insofar as they coalesce to create audience expectations, Only God Forgives is also a reductio ad absurdum of sympathetic characters and audience expectations. The critical consensus is that this basic premise is wrong, which amounts to nothing more than a defense of the status quo. It ought to be obvious that while it's a critic's prerogative to take issue with a film's execution, it's lazy at best, and dogmatic at worst, to dismiss its raison d'être. 

David Edelstein's review of the film for Vulture is a good note to end on. In the first paragraph, Edelstein gives a straw reading of the film as a mythic melodrama, gives himself a few points to refute, and then breezes through three paragraphs of shallow jokes, during which he refutes none of them. The film is pompous and bloated, and presumably wouldn't stand up to sustained inquiry anyway. He ponders whether Ryan Gosling can see in the dark and calls the karaoke numbers "Lynch with none of the Lynchian frissons," which is not a good sentence to use if you're accusing something of pomposity. In the final paragraph he compares Only God Forgives to Christopher Nolan. Ironically, Nolan's tedious mythologizing, and the pseudofascist heroes he's inflicted on us, are probably the most obvious of Only God Forgives's targets. Edelstein, and everyone else, seem perfectly comfortable with mythologizing itself, in spite of their token objections to Nolan's work. Either that or they've lost their sense of humor. Why so serious?

The Empty Tourist: Lost In Translation and Narrative Alienation

In Obama's Dreams From My Father, he wrote:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

This paragraph, undoubtedly written with a wry and knowing smile, encapsulates a common liberal vision of subculture. If you are rebelling against the "system", it's because you're having troubles dealing with your own problems. These problems may be serious or (more likely) superfluous, but being outside of the mainstream is more about what you are ("expressively") as an individual than any sort of larger statement about the conditions that gave rise to what you are.  Ironically, a famous populist radical put this idea best: "Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue, they's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say."

This sort of folksy, sighing rhetoric is pleasant enough as a sort of humanist palliative, the kind of thing that lets us put the book down and go back to our lives, but it buys comforting cliche at the cost of detail. Moreover, the sentiment itself isn't universal. It's born of a certain set of very modern values.

In Lost in Translation we meet two characters, a recent college graduate named Charlotte and a washed-up actor named Bob, adrift in a foreign land. They're both worried about the same things in different ways;  about their respective marriages (new and old), kids, and the deep, hollow aimlessness that they feel stuck in with no agenda in Japan.  Rather than coming off insightful or wise, this feels like a performance of intimacy,  even set against the intended background of "phony" performances that Bob executes with a grimace as a part of his advertising and PR work.  Down underneath the shifting structure of our social duties, Bob and Charlotte tell us, we're all the same kids at the core.  We have common fears, common hopes, and our own little quirks. We're supposed to the see the parallel; two points of the "cycles of life" that come close to one another in the null environment of Tokyo, uniting two people that would otherwise remain strangers to one another. 

This is a compelling line and it's delivered beautifully, but the environment that Bob and Charlotte find themselves in and how they react to it says far more about them than any of their intimate, confessional scenes.  Much of the film depicts Charlotte and Bob wandering in the vast confines of Tokyo. Presumably Tokyo was picked because it is an eminently modern city; despite Charlotte's foray into a Buddhist temple (she feels nothing after) much of the scenery could fit in somewhere between Midtown and Vegas.  For a majority of the movie they could be in any city they don't understand.  Just as we have common fears, hopes, and our own little quirks, the most modern parts of our mega-cities share a cosmopolitan sameness flavored with individual kitschy touches of history.  This is supposed to be a sort of calming realization; a city is just a city just as a person is just a person. It's our common human construction, going back to the dawn of civilization. And, in the hands of Bob and Charlotte, both aimless and both having no apparent monetary concerns, the city becomes a playground.  



Debord wrote in Society of the Spectacle that capitalism was a coagulation.  Like Adorno before him, Debord thought that the specific historical nature of human reason in each period had its own dynamics that worked dialectically.  More specifically, he believed that this dialectical process was slowed by capitalism to the point of arrest.  He thought that our culture was a continual excretion of this arrested process; the modern explosion of fractured narratives was a sort of distorted snapshot of the real material conditions that were the stalled engine of historical progress.  This image of abstract individuals fed back into the dialectical material conditions that were its original basis and continued to slow them down.  Things and people were caught up in a narrative feedback loop that kept them from moving forward.  And the monolithic capitalist city was a physical manifestation of this vicious cycle. 

Though  Lost In Translation doesn't make claims that are this bold or pessimistic, it does recognize that the situation of being a tourist in a large city is a very special one. When you visit Tokyo or New York City or London without an agenda, it turns into a sort of theme park.  All of the compaction that is part and parcel of individual lives in the cramped confines of a city becomes unreal and difficult to penetrate when we don't have a structured interest in the specific details of it.  This is because the public space of a city is excessive, abstract, and impersonal. People who live in it successfully know how to draw off what they need from the excess of things that it offers while maintaining their internal agenda. The unstructured tourist, on the other hand, sees the day-to-day activities of the city for what they are; in the crowds of people they don't know, they see the bare, depersonalized flow of desires and needs that undergirds human individuality.  This can give us insight into what makes a place a tourist attraction; in the faceless slush of the day to day life of the city the most successful activities and locations manage to bring in the most tourists because they have some sort of grounding individuality.  This individuality is commonly historical (Ellis Island), prestigious (Carnegie Hall) and/or extreme (The Empire State Building).

Analogous narratives of individuality and its accompanying security attract Charlotte and Bob to their common stories.  Their stories (marriage, children, career) function like tourist attractions; these historically meaningful narratives provide them with bulwarks against the ego-annihilating buzz of Tokyo.  However, their invocation of these stories to protect themselves also brings into stark relief their failure to measure up to the stories' abstract standards.  Their ennui simultaneously protects them from the harsh alien environment and makes them into self-involved and unaware tourists.  However, we shouldn't think that this failure is some sort of radical deviance from the way these narratives are supposed to work; Charlotte and Bob are exactly what these stories are supposed to produce.  In response to the inhuman whir of Tokyo, they have achieved the modern dream of individuality and self-sufficiency, which is exactly the dream of the isolated, unchanging observer.  The reason that Bob and Charlotte can share their uniform and childlike hopes and dreams is not because they both have a lot in the common human condition, but because they've come through these stories to the same place; they both manage to maintain an identity by constantly failing in comparison to something that will never change. With only the abstract conflict and structure of narratives to limit them, they float free from everything else, wading around in the bewildering, austere, and meaningless beauty that comes with being a tourist. 

The worry is that in the modern situation, we all want to be tourists. And we're going to get what we want.