What Ennui Hath Wrought, Part One

This is the first part of an ongoing series I'm writing about contemporary comedy films.

I don't know if there's a more widely damned stock character in cinema these days, at least in the parts of the blogosphere that discuss representations of women in movies, than the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. We all know her, right? Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, Natalie Portman in Garden State, Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer, etc. People condemn her so completely that it's amazing that she appears so often. She's held up as an example of everything bad about screenwriting these days: she's shallow, precious and ornamental, and she gives the sense that the writer believes that women basically exist to provide direction and guidance to brooding men. Despite all of this, though, she keeps cropping up, and she keeps cropping up even when she's not supposed to be able to. Even when the writer has obviously tried painstakingly to subvert every aspect of the stock character, as in Kate Winslet's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who was created specifically to quash the archetype (and even almost succeeds, in a couple of monologues), in the end she still feels like a Manic Pixie, like the persona is a demon that even the forces of Hollywood can't exorcise no matter how hard they try.

What that says to me is that there's nothing innate in these poor women that's causing them to transform into Manic Pixies; rather, it's probably something about the situations that screenwriting today creates for its characters that stick them with the Manic Pixie label. If character qualities alone aren't enough to form a definition of her, it would probably be more productive to analyze the role she inhabits in the plot . So rather than look at a list of personality traits (zaniness, lack of inhibition, fun dress sense etc.), let's look instead at how she functions and what she represents.

How she functions, I'd argue, is as a source of direction. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, regardless of whether she has blue hair or pink hair, whether she wears vintage sweaters or Doc Martens, is in the movie basically as a catalyst, a plot device to kickstart the main character's inert life. Her personal traits are totally irrelevant to this fact; she could be anything as long as she gets the catalysis done. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a cross between a messiah and a muse: she not only inspires, but she does it at a moment of dire need, when the protagonist is so stuck, professionally, and emotionally, that inspiration is basically interchangeable with salvation. All of which is to say that she can't exist in a movie that doesn't have a directionless protagonist, and that the Enemy in her movies—the force so evil and all-encompassing that only outside salvation can defeat it—is inertia itself. Not just unleaded plebeian inertia, either, but the high-octane moneyed twentysomething variety. Without inertia, she has no in. And the corollary of that is that if the movie is about inertia, she will appear. Any movie about educated twentysomethings that is fundamentally about one man's struggle with inertia, and has a major subplot that is romantic in the conventional sense, will tend to produce Manic Pixie Dream Girls. 

So now we have not only a definition but a way of predicting when a Manic Pixie will show up—and also, we're no longer just talking about this particular character archetype, but rather the whole style of screenwriting that created her—that is, screenwriting obsessed with inertia, awkwardness, and "finding yourself."

This sector of screenwriting is what gave us the careers of Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach, Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, Lena Dunham, and a lot of others, and it cleaves pretty closely to their general style. It's preoccupied with adolescence, ennui, arrested development, lingering family issues, and the utter inability to cope with the choices provided by privilege. None of this is new to screenwriting or narrative in general, though—John Hughes movies are often about these issues, The Graduate certainly is, and, of course, so are Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Augustine's Confessions. 


What differentiates this new kind of screenwriting is its obsessive focus on the minutiae of the lives of the characters it describes, the premium it places on realism. Movies like Greenberg, Superbad and Tiny Furniture are precise. They resist the standard Hollywood dialog style—nothing is ever glossed over by resorting to standard popcorn-movie diction, characters often speak with likes and whatevers intact, and nothing happens that could not happen in real life. (Notable exceptions like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are careful to present their fantastic elements as realistically as possible—the Lacuna Inc. set is as quotidian a dentist's office.) They reject the high-toned wit of classic comedies like My Man Godfrey, the "one word: plastics" satire of The Graduate, the outrageous sitcom tone of Ferris Bueller's Day Off and even the condescending sneer of Dazed and Confused in favor of a level-headed, sympathetic inspection of their misbegotten heroes exactly as they are. They are invariably about intelligent but listless middle-class people, people who have their heads on straight but are maybe a little selfish, maybe a little numb, and usually very socially inept.

Now, not all of these movies have Manic Pixie Dream Girls. There's none in Superbad, none in Tiny Furniture, none in The Squid and the Whale. But in the solo straight white male twentysomething genre—Greenberg, (500) Days of Summer, Garden State, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—she's inevitable.

These movies, the white-dude-living-alone ones, are also typically the ones that are most concerned with wallowing in carefully observed realist aimlessness. The style—disfluencies in dialog, realism in storyline—is so completely united with the subject matter, it comes to embody the aimlessness and ennui that the movies are about, and transcending that aimlessness is inextricable from transcending the style. So the plots require an instrument like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who wears sun dresses when everyone else is in t-shirts and jeans, who sings songs from children's television when everyone else is talking in monotone, and who does her own social thing when everyone else is trapped on the middle-class twentysomething treadmill. She's the only character who's allowed to break out of the obsessive, precise realism of the movies, just as she's the only character who's allowed to break out of the cynical realist conventions of the plot. Both in style and in subject, she's the one concession the movie makes to real fantasy, and this fantasy is what interrupts the main character's doldrums for long enough that he can learn to love again.

Her slightly outrageous behavior, cloying and precious as it is, is really the most parsimonious way to make the movie work. What's more, she reveals the fact that movies so ideologically fixated on minute realism require the implosion of that very minute realism to function; the type of screenwriting that produces the Manic Pixie Dream Girl produces her to destroy the realist style it's created, which is the only way it can resolve itself. She's a lazy, sexist character archetype, yes, but the movie needs her nonetheless. Rather than critique her in a vacuum, then, it's probably best to critique the environment that creates her, the sterile focus on verisimilitude and aimlessness that necessitates her. Browbeating writers into paranoia isn't going to make her go away; she'll just appear in ever more subtle and devious ways, because she's a consequence of movies about white dudes in their twenties with their own apartments. So shut up about the poor Pixie, O thou bloggers. It's not her fault. Society made her.

Hot Springs and Train Tracks: The Global Village in Spirited Away

Spirited Away, anime juggernaut, credited with finally outing what had been called "Japanimation" a few years before as a "legitimate art form," seems at first blush like an extremely Japanese movie, almost to the point of exclusivity. Like many of Hayao Miyazaki's movies, it avoids the western-friendly science fiction trappings of other big movies like Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion and draws on Japanese mythology instead to build up its fantasy world—a wester viewer doesn't have a big Cold War crater in the middle of Tokyo or a ton of Biblical allusions to give them a foothold. What they have is an aggressively traditional bathhouse full of inscrutable Shinto spirits spirits, the assumption that a viewer passively knows things about the 1980s boom economy, and a ton of calligraphy. It doesn't seem outwardly surprising that Disney sunk so much money into its dubbing job and its advertising—Spirited Away feels Japanese enough that it needs a lot of naturalization to be accessible in America.

But the thing is that it's not. The outer "Japaneseness" of the whole affair is only briefly convincing. As an instructive comparison, let's look briefly at Princess Mononoke, another of Miyazaki's movies that I would say is truly nativist.

Princess Mononoke is set during the Muromachi period, around the 15th century, about as distant as medieval Sweden in The Seventh Seal. Its plot centers around an exile from an Emishi community in Japan who comes west to find that an industrial iron-mining operation is moving into a forest that's under the protection of a group of territorial spirits, and tries unsuccessfully to find a way to navigate the process without whipping it up into a war. It's a fairly nightmarish movie, in a lot of ways—in the first scene the main character gets himself cursed by a giant boar, the movie ends with a Godzilla-sized monster made of terrifying black goop tramping through a forest, and in between are a lot of lepers, bleeding pigs and massing of squirming black worms festering inside of wounds, the upshot being that the magical elements of the movie are persistently presented as terrifying and unknowable, even when they're not necessarily malevolent. Moreover, a lot of them are physically amorphous—the huge Godzilla monster at the end is an extreme example, obviously, since it's mostly made of black goo, but even the strange little forest spirits that recur throughout the movie have a melted, colloidal look to them.

The effect of all this is that the spirit world in Mononoke is best understood as a kind of force rather than as a cohesive world that truly intersects with our own. It's more of an immanent disordering principle than a separate setting in and of itself. Mononoke's setting—from its local geography to its details—is extremely, intricately, obsessively fleshed out, but the points at which the spirit world intersects with it, things become fuzzy, and the rules don't really apply anymore, or at least become extremely inconsistent. Much of the movie relies on juxtaposing the human need to impose order on nature with nature's ultimate, uncontrollable irrationality. It's a conceit as old as history that Mononoke repeats enthusiastically.

Spirited Away, on the other hand, inverts this formula. It's set in a vision of modern Japan, a country of infrastructure, highways, and a national economy, which collides with an idiosyncratic vision of a spirit world that isn't immanent in our own but highly segregated, and isn't a disordering principle but a highly ordered one. Our heroine, a girl named Chihiro, stumbles with her parents into an abandoned amusement park (built, her father informs us, during the boom economy of the 1980s, and quickly closed once the recession of the 90s hit) and, from there, into a strange otherworld, in which she worms her way into a job at a bathhouse for the spirits.

Through the entire world-building of the movie, it neatly flips around Mononoke's spirit/human dichotomy: what little we see of the world outside the bathhouse, in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, is an amorphous mass of highway interchanges and houses that flow by outside the window; it's not so much a distinct place as a backdrop, and contrary to Miyazaki's usual obsession with detail, it's absolutely indistinct. There's no way to navigate it; it's an anonymous Potemkin village, seen completely in transit. More than anything in Miyazaki's work, it resembles Ozu's depiction of Tokyo in Tokyo Story in its total anonymity: the infrastructure of contemporary Japan makes it impossible to navigate the outside world as a coherent geographical space, and it becomes more like a subway tunnel, connecting space to space without any real spatial existence of its own. In this way it's as immanent yet indistinct as the spirit world in Mononoke.


Once we get into the spirit world, the movie once again uses the exact opposite effect as in Mononoke. The bathhouse where Chihiro works—once her name has been Le Guinned away from her and she's been rechristened Sen—has a very carefully mapped out geography that the viewer quickly picks up on. The administrative offices are at the top, the boiler is in the basement, the baths are along the ground  floor, the workers' quarters are along the sides; the water is controlled by a system on little wooden cards with painted symbols on them that the staff and the boiler room send back and forth; there's a system of elevators that links the floors of the bathhouse. Even more, there's a system of trains that connects the bathhouse to other parts of the spirit world. They go by at regular intervals throughout the day. The spirits themselves typically look more or less like humans or frogs; when they approach black goo status, as in the character of No Face, it's treated as a bizarre exception. Employment at the bathhouse requires signing a contract; getting into it requires payment whose value is agreed upon beforehand. Diegetically, the spirit world is far more "structured" than the interstitial material world. This organized structure raises a more interesting observation about the spirit world: not only is it structured like a contemporary capitalist institution, but it's also globalized like one.

When we look back at Mononoke, we see that it's set in a medieval past so distant that's it hard to distinguish from fantasy in some ways; communities are totally insular, with no question of infrastructural connection or even necessarily of linguistic compatibility, and the movie hinges around the rampant tribalism and outsider status that this engenders. The main character's Emishi heritage makes him an outsider from the iron-mining community he encounters; the iron miners in turn define themselves as separate from the spirits in the forest. The factional conflict that this creates is worthy of Starcraft.

Tribal borders in Spirited Away, as it were, are far hazier. It's true that when Chihiro first enters the spirit world, she's clearly marked as a human and has to hide from spirits who might hurt her if they knew. However, there's already a bureaucratic solution in place to her problem; all she has to do is make her case to the owner of the bathhouse and sign a contract, and she's immediately accepted as a member of the workforce. This kind of slippage between the human and spirit worlds would be almost unthinkable in Princess Mononoke's world of rigid tribal boundaries, in which the girl-raised-as-a-wolf character of San is exceptional precisely because there's no template for her. Where San functions as a red flag on the tribal boundaries that drive the narrative in the movie, Chihiro's status is unusual but fully precedented.

This kind of easy slippage between cultural identities extends all the way to the mise-en-scene. In the scene in which the spirits are first introduced, they disembark from a Mississippi River steam ferry and process through a town full of tacky neon lights, many of which say "Café" in the Roman alphabet, while an Okinawan (not Japanese) shamisen plays in the background. The owner of the bathhouse lives in an elaborate apartment with European decor and wears Victorian dresses. Nobody ever remarks on any of this. Miyazaki seems to be presenting a world in which a huge number of cultural and social influences coexist more or less peacefully—albeit not without corruption—and that's a far cry from Mononoke, which effectively centers around a race war.

If you accept the thesis that the spirit world is an abstract manifestation of Japan's cultural psyche (which is itself a pretty big assumption that I'll leapfrog right over, but if you'd like further reading there's a chapter in Susan Napier's book on anime about that phenomenon) and that the bathhouse is a place where that psyche can be literally purified, then it's telling that Miyazaki goes to such trouble to make it both global and functional. It would be pretty facile to conclude by saying that Miyazaki's rejection of the simplistic antimodern predilections of earlier Japanese films means that he's evolved as a writer past his easy condemnations of tribalism in Mononoke, so I'll just add that if there's any pop culture phenomenon that better embodies the twenty-first century than Spirited Away, a movie that casts a sympathetic eye on the possibilities of pluralist society, using a medium that was appropriated from the west and is now being re-imported as an important Japanese art form, I can't imagine what it is.

He Who Must Not Be Served: The Anti-Aristocratic Sentiments of Harry Potter

THERE IS NO GOOD AND EVIL. THERE IS ONLY POWER...AND THOSE TOO WEAK TO SEEK IT
- Voldemort

Harry Potter, insofar as it is literature, is pop lit.  The series is built around a slightly mysterious and nite-lite foggy world that can be charitably called "quirky"; despite how much Rowling is able to pack into it, this world has never been anything more than a backdrop to me. As in most plot-driven pop lit, the world is an elaborate prop. Part of the appeal of the wizard world is that so much of it can be twisted around (by MAGIC) to serve any purpose. No wonder Harry Potter fanfiction is so popular. Things don't happen when Harry and his friends turn away, except insofar as they set up the next magical encounter or emotionally salient moment. In fact, one of the real achievements of Rowlings' vision is that the world is a beautifully designed Rube Goldberg machine to put Voldemort back into power. Every nook and cranny in the world is full of implements and techniques that he can turn to his own ends, whether it be unicorn blood or horcruxes.

But this is not (primarily) a whine about Harry Potter's shallow, usefully magical context.  Instead, I want to talk about what it means when this elaborate mechanism is turned to a certain purpose.  Rowling's world is a fable world; it is built and bent for a specific purpose.  It does not strive for realism.  It is a delivery mechanism for a moral spectacle, or, more often, a collection of moral spectacles.

In order to locate Voldemort within Rowling's ethical map, let's take a minute to watch the Death Eaters as they commune:



Voldemort and his cadre are primarily pale, well kept, mannered, thin, and surrounded by austere and antique furniture.  They are, for the most part, well off.  They keep servants. They meet in cavernous mansions.

The pattern here is far from subtle. Rowling makes no secret about the fact that the Death Eaters represent a caricatured aristocracy.  For them, values like love and friendship take a backseat to fidelity, purity, and strength.  Those Death Eaters that aren't valued for their blood or their loyalty are treated like mercenaries or hired help, able to be dismissed via Avada Kedavra at any moment.  When we see the scene above in the context of some of the warm and casual meetings of the Order of the Phoenix, the dichotomy is made bare.

And nowhere is the contrast between the Death Eaters and Harry's contingent made clearer than on the issue of equality.  At Voldemort's ministry of magic, the statue of the wizard crushing the muggles beneath his boots is the centerpiece: the Death Eaters are more powerful than the muggles, and therefore the muggles are inferior. The Death Eater philosophy embraces a "natural order" that goes back to Aristotelianism if not before; according to the Death Eaters, the world is stratified into levels of objective value and all of the levels are better off for it.  The commoners should stay with the common, the mudbloods with mudbloods, the warriors with the warriors, and the house elves with the house elves.  The Death Eaters are reactionary, but they have a positive program.  By contrast, Harry and his friends often seem more defined negatively; they are not the Death Eaters.

This quasi-Manicheanism illustrates one of the fundamental tensions of the book: Harry is a Death Eater in disguise.  He comes from a pureblood background, wields great power, and sits on immense wealth.  His identification with Voldemort is even less a coincidence in these lights.  When de Tocqueville came to America, he saw an aristocracy increasingly held to the standards of the growing middle class.  They had to be useful and humble; unlike their european counterparts, they did not have history and culture to support them.  The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality simply would not allow them to sit idly on the same patrician chairs they did in Europe.  Harry is the American aristocracy to Voldemort's old world traditions.  No wonder He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has such a refined accent.

Compromise is key to Rowling's contrast between good and evil; Harry and his friends realize that morality is painted in shades of gray, in sharp contrast to the absolutes of Voldemort et al. But for me, the truly interesting negotiation of both Rowlings' books and the movies is finding exactly where the compromises stop for Harry and his friends. Like so much morally concerned pop media, the problem negotiated is where to find the moral rock to stand on. Harry will kill, but only the right people.  He'll use unforgivable curses, but only in the right situations. Rowling and like minded writers are concerned particularly with placating middle class moral anxieties. In the face of globalism and pluralism, aspects of the western middle class ache to find principles to found a new set of timeless values. This is why Voldemort represents a threat; against a marketplace of fluid values and ideas, the Death Eaters stand as anachronistically principled and insular. Malfoy makes his friends by connecting with the families his family has connected with for centuries; there is no comparison of shared interests, little uncertainty, and limited negotiation. By contrast, Harry's relationships seem more tumultuous and varied, and thus Harry's greatest strength is his unerring intuition. He can feel through his relationships and moral quandaries, and though he may sometimes stumble or compromise, he always ends up in the right and we envy him for his successes. This is yet another contrast;  Harry and his friends feel what is right while the Death Eaters know what is right.

This negotiation of modern value confusion animates Harry and his friends and, at times, is their heaviest burden. For example, the very fact of Slytherin's continued existence pulls at the bounds of tolerance, another middle class anxiety. Everyone at Hogwarts knows that "those people" tend to be bad for the most part, but we allow them their say, because, after all, everyone has a right to their say.  The tolerance of intolerance is a heavy burden to modern liberalism, and Harry and his friends bear it resentfully.  In fact, whenever a Slytherin turns out good, it is seen as a happy, surprising exception and celebrated as a success of Harry's openness. To be welcome at Harry's liberal consensus, you need only be willing to enter the dialogue.

I do not mean to reduce Harry Potter to the modern anxieties it expresses. In many ways, Harry's story is structurally similar to stories told in the Western tradition for thousands of years.  But even the fact that it is not a straightforward repetition of those stories casts light on part of Rowling's narrative agenda. Harry Potter is successful in large part because it succeeds at being what it tries to be; an anchor and an anthropological document for a generation of middle class desires and insecurities.

The Chameleon Circuit: Doctor Who and Postmodernism Lite

Postmodernism had been around for a while – since Borges, Nabokov, Rauschenberg and Warhol, but awareness of the phenomenon outside of France didn't blow up until the culture wars. The Yale School did most of its publishing in the eighties; campus speech code controversies picked up in the late eighties and early nineties; Harold and Allan Bloom (no relation!) wrote their big, fat books about the problems with intellectual culture around the end of the eighties; Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote Fashionable Nonsense in the middle of the nineties.

This had a Reaganomic effect on culture: postmodernism trickled down from journals to grad schools to undergrad philosophy departments to high school English classes – where students now have to learn about "the other" – and, inevitably, into television. And what this trickling down congealed into, if you ask me, was the revival of a show called Doctor Who.

Doctor Who owes a lot of its popularity right now, I think, to the ways people think it differs from the "average" science fiction show. There's something about it that – speaking from personal experience, before I fell off the wagon – feels a little fresher than your average science fiction show, and I think it owes a lot of that to its adherence to the aesthetic dictates of a kind of Postmodernism Lite, the kind of Readers Digest postmodernism that you can explore in a forty-minute episode without cutting too many of the effects shots. But to explain exactly what that means, it's useful to look at the "average" science fiction show, and for that I'll turn, obviously, to Star Trek.

Marshall Berman defines two dominant threads in modernist expression: "cultural despair," the type practiced by Eliot, Faulkner, Sartre and Stravinsky, which is your average gloom and doom about anomie, alienation and ennui, and "modernolatry," the type found in the International Style and Futurism, which is all about enshrining the machine age, embracing globalism, and the belief that all social problems can be solved by strong central administration and efficient use of resources. This is the big utopian historical-narrative type of modernism that led to Pruitt-Igoe and the moon landings, and I don't think it's a stretch to see Star Trek (or at least the 1960s version) as an incarnation of it.

In fact, Star Trek really has it all: a multiethnic, utopian Worlds Fair of a crew who never broach the topic of race, a Futurist fetish for speed and violence, a progressive and omnipresent administration, and, most importantly, a highly self-contained and cohesive universe. It's true that there isn't a real geography in Star Trek (not there is in other fantasy, like Tolkien, anyway) but we know that when we encounter a Klingon, he isn't just a monster of the week; he's part of a faction that has institutions and politics of its own. We know that there's a Starfleet organization; there are things happening on Earth and on every planet that we visit. The crew are just the lens that we view things through; other stories, we can imagine, are being told elsewhere in the universe. The series works very hard to make sure that nothing in the show every breaks the illusion of the coherence of the universe – not the jokes, not the time travel, not even the music is allowed to interrupt the show's universe. Everything works on one register. In other words, it's a utopian, humanist, rationalist approach to constructing a fictional universe – an approach that's colored, I'd argue, by nothing as much as International Style modernist ideology.

Doctor Who, right from the beginning, has taken the opposite tack. There's no effective universal administration, no multiethnic crew members (at first, they're all white; as the show goes on it starts to deal halfheartedly with class and race), and certainly no preoccupation with speed and motion. In fact, there's no real sense of space as such in Doctor Who – the Tardis basically takes on whatever interior dimensions are convenient, and they never rationally fit inside of the phone box; moreover, it doesn't fly off into the stars like the Enterprise, it disappears and reappears somewhere else with apparently no motion involved at all. When characters do talk about "flying" the Tardis, it's abstracted and usually not particularly convincing; one of the show's running gags is how the knobs and levers in the Tardis can't really be assigned specific functions. It seems to move in some sort of frictionless way. The only real analog I can think of for the way the viewer understands the Tardis's motion is the hypertext link, actually: we find it in a new place, without even imagining that there might be intervening space between where it takes off and where it lands. Marinetti would be horrified.

But the real thing that I think sets Doctor Who apart from Star Trek, and from most science fiction shows in that mold, is its utter disregard for a cohesive universe. Doctor Who's focus on travel through time means that literally any character from any time period could potentially appear in any episode. This foregrounds the artificiality of the whole thing, demands that the reader view the episode not as one of many potential stories unfolding within a self-contained universe, but as something that could only happen under the exact circumstances of the episode. Even when the show does linger in one setting for a long time, even when it works at setting up a self-contained universe to inhabit for a few episodes, we're so colored by our experiences of all of the previous episodes and their own universes that we refuse to accept it on any level as absolute. Star Trek's universe has narrative impact because it feels new and fresh; the modernist ideal of art always plumbing new depths. The societies the Doctor encounters ultimately always seem like constructs, backdrops for the episodes, rather than places the viewer could really inhabit; their narrative impact comes simply from their exposure to the Doctor, and not from anything distinctive about themselves. A season of Doctor Who samples a lot of different settings; none of them suggests wider narrative any more than a three-second sample of the Amen Break really suggests the entirety of "Amen, Brother." Doctor Who's narrative avoids the totalizing, rationalist outlook that Star Trek seems so wedded to embraces meaning constructed out of the juxtaposition of elements, and throws in its lot with artificiality, irrationality, fragmentation and playful irony – all things that any freshman humanities textbook will tell you are emblematic of Postmodernism.

But clearly none of the really difficult aspects of Postmodernism come up in Doctor Who. Doctor Who is interested in the Nam Jun Paik/Grandmaster Flash kind of postmodernism, the kind that's fun and colorful and isn't heavy on theory. There's no micropolitics in the Tardis, no infinitely deferred meaning, no exploded subjectivity unless you count all the regenerations. For all its innovation, Doctor Who is ultimately humanist in the same stale way as Star Trek – it's more reductive in its humanism, certainly, but still humanist. Star Trek had the comfortable modernist belief that people, organized by administrators, could solve all their problems. Doctor Who also believes that people can solve all their problems, but legitimizes this, at least in the new series, not by endorsing universal government but simply by letting the Doctor talk about human potential until his face turns blue. It's always unconvincing, and it comes across, I've always thought, as a kind of ideological concession, a way of propitiating the ghost of Star Trek humanism even though Doctor Who, in the twenty-first century, knows a lot more than Star Trek about how insurmountable our problems are.
I read this as a real reluctance on the part of modern culture at large to embrace the kind of pessimistic outlook that Doctor Who's sense of rootlessness, isolation, fear and artificiality could engender. The audience is more than willing to consume Doctor Who if it tempers the threatening parts of its narrative with token humanism and whimsy. So as much as Doctor Who seems like it could qualify as a "postmodern" show on some level, it's really rooted in the same humanistic tradition as any other science fiction show that's on TV right now. It blends in, but it's smaller on the inside than the outside.

Syriana and Emergent Institutions

BEIRUT RULES, MR. BARNES?

- Dean Whiting, Syriana

Syriana has been one of my favorite movies for a very long time.  Along with its companion film Traffic, it takes advantage of the medium in a way that few other films do.  For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a film about the oil business.  What aspect of the oil business, you ask?  Well, what do you have?

Syriana is a part of a trend of fractured filmmaking in the early 2000s. These films follow Robert Altman's sprawling Nashville in weaving together a collection of disparate storyline that all connect together in something that looks a little more like a narrative web than a narrative line.  This kind of non-linear storytelling has been around for a long time, but the transfer of it to film brings a new dimension to the technique. Using the framed visual style of film can bring attention to the fact that what you're seeing is an inherently limited frame, and things occur outside of that frame that affect the things inside of it.  Syriana is exciting to me because it shows how these frames intersect, clash, and complicate one another.

Syriana is primarily concerned with the rights to mineral deposits in Kazakhstan acquired by a relatively small oil company called Killeen and the acquisition of Killeen by the larger Connexx.  We see this story through the eyes of one of the men working on the ground at an oil refinery in the fictional country of Syriana, (a thinly veiled Saudi Arabia), the royal family of said oiltopia, the law firm brokering the deal between Connexx and Killeen, and a CIA agent.  In true thriller fashion, everyone has their own agenda, and each of them are at the mercy of forces larger than those they can comprehend. Unsurprisingly, everything gets twisted together pretty quickly.




Syriana is well paced, well written, and well acted, but that's not why I love it.  I love it because it does not let anyone off the hook and, for the most part, refuses to place blame.  That is to say, at its best, Syriana is portraying an abstract system, not a collection of acting agents. Sure, the film is made accessible and visceral by its characterization and the idiosyncratic (read: convenient) events that drive the plot forward, but we always get the feeling that, as I mentioned above, the structures behind the characters' actions don't reduce to their individuality.  We get the feeling that although we're seeing the flow disrupted, by the end of the film the system (or assemblage of diverse systems) has corrected/adapted itself to equilibrium and the individual actions of the characters that we follow, while not unremarkable, are assimilated back into a resorted order.

Take, as a grounding example, the case of the CIA agent Robert Barnes (here a stand-in for the author whose books the movie is ostensibly based on, Robert Baer).  He begins the movie as a good cog in the bureaucratic machine, a man of action who does his job and doesn't ask questions.  When he's thrown into a dangerous situation and begins to encounter difficulties with the niche he has carved out for himself at the agency, the system of which he is a part attempts to repurpose, eject, and finally, (inadvertantly) eradicate him.  He runs the gamut of institutional mechanisms designed to deal with faulty elements.

And this is where my real fascination with the movie lies.  The film has two registers; the human and the institutional.  It overtly gives us the drama, the morality, and the pathos of the human situations that it deals with while it simultaneously takes us on a profoundly impersonal tour of the institutions in which they are imbedded.  I am reminded of Manuel DeLanda's fascinating book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines in which he essentially argues that we are witnessing a kind of pregnancy of the human race with the new emergent order of technology.  He speculates that this "machinic phylum" has several possible ways in which it could evolve beyond human dependence and warns us away from the military route.

With the help of theorists like DeLanda, director Stephen Gaghan is participating in a wave of 21st century multimedia statements that bring together an emergent approach to institutions with a certain breed of American realism.  The idea of the institution as a very special breed of parasite that fundamentally changes its host holds a profound aesthetic sexiness that goes a long way toward explaining people's fascination with the books of Foucault and the appeal of The Wire. This approach to institutions is made explicit in Michael Clayton, another fucking spectacular (if far more moralistic) Clooney movie.



Together, this axis of dour 21st century pragmatism and cynicism can be riveting.  Syriana and its ilk make you feel as though you are witness to what's really going on behind closed doors. They create the illusion that they are showing you how the real world, the greedy, violent, impersonal one behind all of our comforting narratives, is produced and has been for time untold.  In their finest moments, they show you the unthinking, amoral inhumanity of human systems.

Statements like Syriana have the potential to engender a sort of sober quietism, a kind of serene shoulder shrug in the face of monstrous odds.  But, far more interestingly to my mind, they can also bring about an increased awareness of the pervasiveness of insitutional intervention in our lives and the way these interventions govern our interpersonal relationships.  Gaghan, alongside Delanda, Deleuze, Zizek and Foucault, realizes that the minute politicization of lives is already always a reality and that the first (and perhaps best) thing that we can do is be mindful of it.

Don't Drink This: Yacht Club / Lily Bart

Every so often, Izzet and Boros come up with a shitty idea for a drink and ask you to get together with your friends to drink it.  We call it "Don't Drink This".

Social mobility has been on the collective societal brain a lot in the last four years, and the cultural archetype of the nouveau poor is increasingly prominent. With this in mind, we here at Inebriated Spook think it's important to embrace versatility in drink recipes, and so we give you a beverage with two faces: one is great to sip on the deck of your weekender while you're enjoying the glittering Cape Cod sun, and one (special thanks to Edith Wharton) tastes almost as good and brings up pleasant memories of days gone by while you're licking your financial wounds in your one-room apartment in the Bronx. Either way, you're prepared – which is the best thing you can be in this economy.

The Yacht Club:

1 part limoncello

1 part champagne

2 parts single-malt Scotch

Serve straight up in a chilled highball. Garnish with a twenty dollar bill and enjoy.

The Lily Bart:

1 part lemonade

1 part Andre

2 parts Jack

Serve with ice in a plastic cup. Garnish with a thin lemon slice and attempt to enjoy.

Learn the Power of the Dark Side: Why Star Wars is a Better Movie than Shame

Steve McQueen's minimalist angstravaganza Shame has been in the Serious Cinema press a lot in the last few months. It's one of the year's big international auteur-type movies; it won the biggest acting award at the Venice Film Festival this year; it uses a careful color palette and scads of beautiful long takes to coax delicate and nuanced performances out of its stars, Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, who are both flawlessly beautiful and extremely talented. More than anything, though, it's its subject matter, which is disturbing, raw, and largely unexplored on film, that people have responded to most strongly. 

I've read a lot of reviews of Shame, and most of them open with a sentence like "Michael Fassbender has an awful lot of sex in this film – but believe me, it's far from sexy." It's become an instant cliché. Like any cliché, though, there's a molten core of truth to it: Shame de-eroticizes sex almost completely; it takes the perfect bodies and enthusiastic noisemaking we're used to seeing in movies and plunders them of all of their positive associations, rendering the act cold, isolating and robotic.

Shame's Greek god of a leading man, Michael Fassbender, plays a New York executive with something to hide. You've heard it before: He Seems To Have It All, But Under The Surface He Harbors A Terrible Secret. It's a formulaic formulation, yes, but that's not the point – what matters in the movie is how this particular Terrible Secret is portrayed. Fassbender's character, Brandon, is a sex addict. We gather that he can't go more than a few hours without having an orgasm; he masturbates in the bathroom at his office, menaces hapless women on the subway, and spends the lion's share of his free time with prostitutes or internet pornography. The noise of moans and gasps floats out of his computer whenever it's open, until we become numb to it, like we're numb to the noise of taxis and nightclubs outside his window. It's not simply that sex is de-eroticized – it's de-exoticized. It's not even special. 

Different critics have taken different positions on whether Brandon's few friends know about his predilections; I think that's clear evidence that McQueen and company are purposely being obfuscatory. It's never clear how much his coworkers know: either they're playing dumb because they're too embarrassed to confront him, they genuinely don't know, or – and this is the most compelling option – they'd confront him about it if they didn't know that he had just as much dirt on each of them. We have the sense that everybody in Shame is hiding something just as filthy as Brandon is, that nobody can really cast the first stone: his boss is cheating on his wife, the girl he chases on the subway at the beginning has decided, by the end, that she might want to be chased after all, and his sister Sissy is a serial couchsurfer and an emotional lamprey. Brandon is just the one we happen to settle on.

Sissy, speaking of her, is who throws a monkey wrench into Brandon's well-oiled (well-lubricated?) machine of a lifestyle – abandoned by her always-offscreen boyfriend, she turns up in Michael's bathroom one day and insists she's just there until she finds a place to stay. You can surmise what that means. Initially we have the impression that she's your average washed-up jazz singer, lazy and basically untalented. However, Brandon and his boss make their way to a nightclub where she's singing (and where the sound designer slyly cuts in twenty seconds of the late Coltrane Quartet to make it sound, improbably, like she's the featured act in an ensemble that also includes McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes) and discover how talented and expressive she is: her rendition of "New York, New York," shown entirely in one long closeup, is unexpectedly beautiful, and we wonder immediately why she isn't more successful – why she doesn't have her own place, at least. And then, as she throws herself into the arms of Brandon's sleazy boss and takes him, of all places, back to Brandon's apartment, we realize that she has the same problem that Brandon has: she's emotionally crippled, insecure, and irremediably lonely. It might manifest itself differently in her case, but she has fundamentally the same problem as her brother.

As she reaches out to him over the course of the movie, she threatens to further and further damage his hermetic lifestyle, and he pushes her away more and more violently – and as he does this, his guilt mounts and he becomes more and more desperate for real emotional connections, and more and more frustrated as they collapse. He starts offering drinks to prostitutes and even tries dating a woman from his office, but everything falls apart, and it all culminates in an agonizing fifteen-minute scene in which he takes off on a depraved sex spree, bouncing aimlessly from location to New York location like Leopold Bloom on Viagra, talking dirty to strangers and plunging into gay bars as the camera slowly zeroes in on his o-face, which looks more and more like a scream the longer we look at it. The whole time we're aware that Sissy is falling apart emotionally, and when somebody leaps in front of the subway train on Brandon's way home, the entire tragedy of the movie comes together in a way that's uniquely horrible. Brandon anxiously takes the elevator up to his apartment and finds Sissy limp on the floor of his bathroom (the first place we ever saw her, remember, and the place where Brandon, in a very ham-handedly Freudian way, shunts everything he's ashamed of) with her blood all over the walls and the ceiling, having slashed her wrists.

But never fear, dear reader: by the end of the movie she's been patched up and it looks like she's going to be okay, and Brandon pointedly averts his gaze when  the perky young woman from the film's first scene tries to pick him up on the subway. 

On the surface, Brandon seems to have a lot in common with Raskolnikov: they're both cut off from the rest of humanity, talented but overwhelmed by internalized guilt that they struggle to intellectualize away (Brandon has a brief monologue about his philosophical opposition to long-term relationships) and ultimately saved by fragile, wilting orchids of women.

But that comparison isn't doing Dostoevsky justice, because the thing that animates Crime and Punishment is how far we get to follow Raskolnikov's logic: we're submerged in his murky rationalizations practically from the first page of the book, and there's a terrifying suggestion that if we swim down far enough, we'll get to a place where double murder is perfectly okay. There's a tantalizing, diabolical hint throughout the book that Raskolnikov's guilt might not be absolute. That piece of proto-existential subtlety is what makes Crime and Punishment such a brilliant book, and it's what keeps Shame firmly on the other side of the fence with the other two-toned morality tales.

So let's step out of the Western Canon for now and compare Shame to something that Harold Bloom probably won't be lionizing any time soon: the second Star Wars trilogy. Here's another story about personal isolation and the fine line that all of us have to walk between morality and immorality; it's got a young, attractive, misunderstood protagonist who's tortured by guilt about his personal failures and it's got a sensitive, talented female co-star who tries to reach out to him and ends up dragging him down. It's a little less Dostoevsky and a little more Verdi, maybe, but let's not get hung up on that.

Anakin Skywalker, an innocent and completely ingenuous boy from the provinces, is snatched by forces beyond his control and granted unbelievable power and prestige – on two conditions. He needs to take a leadership role in an extremely complex world, and he needs to keep away from the only person who might make things easier for him. This completely arbitrary set of rules takes its toll on him – his increasing distrust of the Jedi he's supposed to be loyal to, his repressed adolescent sex drive, and his deep-rooted need for more power all lead him to turn on his friends and destroy the society that his psyche was essentially invented to protect. But that doesn't bring any catharsis, it only exacerbates his internalized guilt, and at the end of Episode 3 he's left in an increasingly suffocating personal situation, anesthetized, effectively castrated, and enslaved, a situation that's mirrored externally in the hopeless, totalitarian gray of his surroundings in the original trilogy. 

Obviously, we see this from a few different points of view, interspersed with a lot of politics, intrigue, fanwank and scenery-chewing, but I don't think it's debatable that the fall-from-grace plot is the central narrative thread of the prequel trilogy. And the compelling thing about it, at least in a vacuum, is that most of it is sympathetic to Anakin. Through the whole plot we receive every successive element in Anakin's psychological collapse as an intense negative experience for him – the death of his mother, his inability to act on his feelings for Padme, his sense of betrayal by Obi-Wan, and his overall feeling that no matter what he does, no matter how successful he is, he ends up offending somebody or making something worse. The effect is that we empathize with Anakin. We understand him, fundamentally, the same way we understand Raskolnikov – somewhere, deep down, both of them are trying to find a psychological space where the evil they're doing isn't evil anymore. The temptation of the Dark Side is the temptation of a total, irreversible absolution from guilt.

Shame is an excellent movie, mostly: the performances are Oscar-caliber if you don't count Carey Mulligan's American accent slipping a little every time she says "no," the photography and the soundtrack are both beautiful, and the handling of the imagery and pacing are perfect. Star Wars, especially the prequels but really, be honest, the original trilogy too, is a clumsy mess of sci-fi clichés and misappropriated Campbellian garbage that makes Heinlein look like Tolstoy. So the perplexing thing is how much less sophisticated Shame is when it comes to examining its characters. We never get enough of a look inside of Brandon's head to see anything but agony; we never get the sense that he has any kind of agency or selfhood outside his addiction, and I refuse to accept that it's just that it's "consumed him" or anything like that; it just seems like misguided writing to me.

I've heard critics spin the film's detachment as "observational," that it's not supposed to explore the morality of sex addiction and that all we're supposed to do is watch the pathos unfold, but I find that extremely shallow. Pathos in a vacuum gets you a lot of mileage in static visual art, but not in narrative and certainly not on film. There's a difference between writing an unsympathetic character and writing a character primarily as a subject of pity; it's the same as the difference between avoiding a person and petting a dog. 

I've heard Shame derided as being hysterical and Catholic – it was in response to a scene where Brandon goes to the basement of a gay bar (it's red and hot, like Hell, see) and frantically forces one of its denizens to go down on him. As apt as that characterization is, I'd rather say that it's shallow and vaguely dehumanizing, and it's disappointing to me that people are pushing it so hard as one of the best indie films of last year. Lots of sex, but not sexy; lots of pathos, but not sympathetic.