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.

I Went to Disney World Alone And Here Are Some Senior Theses I Could’ve Written About It

For a cool $23952095 this hat can be yours when YOU complete your mandatory exit through the Rock'n'Roller Coaster through the gift shop. 

1. No-Fun Schoomarms As The Enemy: The Corporation’s Role In Undermining Workplace Supervision

      Evidence: On the “Rock’n’Roller Coaster Featuring AEROSMITH” riders are greeted with a video depicting Aerosmith clashing with their uptight manager, who can’t convince them why whisking their adoring fans away in limousines capable of going 0-60 m.p.h. in less than a second to their concert might not be a logical move financially.

Lamb couscous and beer at Marrakesh at the Morocco pavilion in Epcot. My first solo meal; I wore a shirt with badly written French on it and the waitstaff, who all spoke French, made fun of its inaccuracy. My food got to me in about 3 minutes. 

2.  $8 Popcorn and Truly Budget Hotels: The Achievement of Monetary Dissonance
      Evidence: Everything at Walt Disney World is about a million times as expensive as it would be outside the parks; however, their hotels they advertise as “budget”—the All-Star Music Resort that I stayed at included—are ACTUALLY KIND OF AFFORDABLE.

Cinderella's Castle, visible from the carousel on the other side of Fantasyland

       3.  Cinderella’s Castle, Tiana’s Gazebo: The Racialized Architecture of Princess Culture  
      Evidence: Compare the Cinderella Castle, the end-all be-all of Disney World’s recognizable buildings (with Future Earth, also known as the Giant Golf Ball, running closely behind) with the tiny hidden structure from which Princess Tiana greets adoring children and you have Disney Princess Whiteness Values™ in a nutshell.

I Snapchatted my way around the World Showcase in Epcot. 

4. The Amalga-Fetishization of Polynesian Cuisines: Dole Whip, A Case Study
      Evidence: Dole Whip, a soft-serve pineapple “Dessert”, literally only exists at Disney World/Land and on the Dole Plantation in Hawaii. Its Wikipedia page cites it as “Vegan, Cholesterol Free, Fat Free, Gluten Free, and Lactose Free” but it is also probably Dole Free.

Me, far left, Space Mountain.

5. When FastPasses Fail: Examining Neotechnology in Tomorrowland 
      Evidence: I spent the whole trip with a green rubber Magic Band around my wrist, which functioned as my room key, ticket to the parks and FastPass for rides I wanted to ensure speedy access to. Once at Space Mountain, my Magic Band stopped working and I had wave a screenshot on my phone’s Disney World app of my itinerary to get seated till the end of the trip; upon explaining this to one of the Cast Members (what Disney calls its employees), he said, “I hope that’s the MyDisneyExperience app, not a SCREENSHOT” and I rolled my eyes a lot.

My hotel (the All Star Music Resort), which also boasted giant cowboy boots in front of its Country Inn section (where I stayed), a 3 story saxophone in front of the Jazz building and pools shaped like a piano and a guitar, had up a shrine to Selena Gomez in the lobby.

6. Mono-Rail, Mono-Linguilism: Current Research in Public Transit Discourses
Evidence: On the monorail to the Polynesian Resort for a breakfast of "Tonga toast"-- fried french toast filled with bananas--I heard a woman rave about her orthodontist, who was Egyptian and "spoke Egyptian, which is one of the hardest languages to read or write." 

This ride includes a dancing skeleton mariachi band.

7. Childhood and Nation at the Mexico Pavilion
Evidence: At the Mexico pavilion of Epcot’s World Showcase, you can go inside a giant reproduction of an Aztec pyramid and take a ride down the “river” within that is nearly identical aesthetically to It’s A Small World except that the entire ride focuses on Mexico. Being the only person in my "party," I had an entire 5-row riverboat to myself. It’s really a better ride if you ignore the animated Three Caballeros (including Donald Duck) tailing your every turn.

The Heffalump/Woozle view from my solo ride (I had my own honey pot car to rollick around in the "blustery day") on The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

8. Judgment Dad: Fatherhood’s Connection to Psycho-Projected Pseudoanxieties
Evidence: The only people I met who seemed genuinely concerned/baffled I was traveling by myself were Dads. Note the capital D—the kind of Dads that complain about their Old Ladies taking too long doing Lady Stuff to ride the Tower of Terror at the desired time and wear visors. 

 

Mussels and bread: eating Pacific Northwestern cuisine alone at Artist's Point, a "signature dining" (read: "expensive") institution inside the Fort Wilderness Resort 

9. Gone Fishing (for Protozoans): Some Bioethical Concerns About Public Fountains 
Evidence: I stood by Cinderella’s Fountain in the Magic Kingdom waiting for a few kids to stop splashing in it so I could take a photo, only to be approached by a frazzled older woman asking me if the kids were “mine.” Upon discovering that the toddlers trying to get at pennies were not the property of the girl wearing hamburger socks and one smushed sneaker (I developed mild tendonitis pretty early in the trip and had to hobble around with a self-fashioned medical clog for three days), the woman informed their true parent that her child had gotten a serious virus from that very fountain years ago.

Me meeting Princess Aurora/Sleeping Beauty. The young Polish girl behind me in line graciously took this.

10. Solitude in a Sea of Soulmates: Leisure as Amouro-lubricant for Romantic Pairings in the Age of Post-romanticism and Post-lubrication

Evidence: If you're over the idea that there's "someone for everyone," go to Disney World. I saw a short, freckled fat woman paired with a buff, baby-oiled man at Animal Kingdom, two petite men in baseball caps holding hands while passing through Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom, an old man hobbling through the crowd while pushing his equally frail wife in her monogrammed wheelchair at my hotel's shuttle bus stop, a pair of Virginians in baseball caps that sat with me at the Mexico pavilion while I accidentally drank too much frozen margarita who owned a TIME SHARE in Disney- my list could go on infinitely.

Point Omega and Waveland: the Political Background of Literary Minimalism

“If the critical intellectual is in the process of disappearing, it seems by contrast that his phobia of the real and of action has been distilled throughout the sanguineous and cerebral network of our institutions. In this sense, the entire world including the military is caught up in the process of intellectualization.”- Jean Baudrillard in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

"There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create."- Don DeLillo, Point Omega

Don DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega takes place at a ranch in the Sonoran Desert, “or maybe it was the Mojave Desert or another desert altogether”. The ranch is owned by Richard Elster, a “defense intellectual” who served under president Bush and aided in crafting the Iraq war; young documentarian Jim Finley joins Elster in the desert, hoping to film him commenting on his experience. Instead of offering a big, important, definitive statement on the war on terror, DeLillo offers a slow and vague book that has the most fleshed-out characters and least action of any of his works that I have read. I might go so far as to say that it is character driven insofar as it is plotless—DeLillo recognizes that we no longer have much to do with the grand narratives that ostensibly inspire and mobilize us.

Or with narratives at all. Point Omega begins and ends with an unnamed character (ostensibly Jim Finley) at MoMA watching a video installation called “24 Hour Psycho”- Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho without sound and slowed down to 2 frames per second, causing it to last 24 hours instead of two. Rather than exacerbating that movie’s claustrophobic suspense, this divorces the film completely from Hitchcockian narrative and reduces it to a succession of abstract units. “When an actor moved a muscle, when eyes blinked, it was a revelation. Every action was broken into components so distinct from the entity that the watcher found himself isolated from every expectation.” If one attempts to grasp scope through abstraction, one loses touch with whatever their object of inquiry is and ends up participating in idolatry. It is interesting that DeLillo chose to frame his meditation on the war on terror with descriptions of this video installation. Finley is obsessed with film, and the room where "24 Hour Psycho" is being screened is a safe haven for that obsession and from everything that lies beyond the screening room's door, "that strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there...". The fictional occupation of "defense intellectual" is an inversion on the real occupation of filmmaking; where the filmmaker creates realities on screen, the defense intellectual attempts to create reality itself. The Baudrillard quote I cited at the beginning is useful for understanding "Point Omega". Richard Elster, the main character, personally embodies the traits of an intellectual that Baudrillard lists. When he is brought into the Pentagon in the months preceding the Iraq war, however, he doesn't find what he expects- a well oiled machine dedicated to defending America- instead he finds a well oiled machine dedicated to obviating Western hegemony. When Baudrillard accuses the military of being "caught up in the process of intellectualization", he means that the military bureaucracy is as out of touch as an intellectual perched in an ivory tower. Islamic fundamentalism doesn't offer a real threat to our way of life, and a war waged against it is a theatrical affirmation of the rightness of our way of life rather than a defense of it. 

Michel Foucault

           

Philosophers like Theodore Adorno and Michel Foucault wrote about how enlightenment is a double- edged sword. Perceived increases in intellectual understanding go alongside actual increases in surveillance and control; the rational mind ends up merely rationalizing the existing order. "Defense Intellectual" is a contradiction—how can an intellectual play an instrumental role in a senseless police state? As a country with a bloated and paranoid military-industrial complex, the war on terror is a war on our own sense of terror, our inability to understand our situation.
       
Confronted with this morass, Richard Elster retreats to his desert compound seeking out "geologic time". The desert is "womb-like and world sized". The filmmaker Jim Finley joins him; eventually Elster's insular daughter Jessie does as well and the situation becomes familial. The film never gets made, and the three people fade into a routine of meals and idle discussion, Finley discussing film and Elster his intellectual preoccupations. This continues until, out of the blue, Jessie disappears without a trace. Search parties are disbursed to no avail and the case is declared inconclusive. The mystery is that there is no mystery. 

It seems that "Point Omega" attempts to engage with power and ideology by locating the contradictions of western progress in the character of Richard Elster, but the film meant to capture these contradictions never gets off the ground. Why is this? Elster is a richly drawn character full of thoughts and feelings, but if Michel Foucault's contention that individuals are an effect of power rather than possessors of power is true, a critique of ideology cannot take the form of a film criticizing Elster's personal foibles or "moral failings". DeLillo's character studies have an ambivalent tone because he is politically committed.

DeLillo's tone is an influence on the literary movement known as "minimalism" that came to prominence in the 80s, typified by writers like Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore and Frederick Barthelme, and continuing today with the scene surrounding Tao Lin. While not all of these authors are as overtly leftist as DeLillo, I think that minimalism is an exemplary genre for situating societal critique within. Barthleme's most recent book is 2009's "Waveland". It documents middle class life in post-Katrina Mississippi.

"Waveland" revolves around three characters- a community college architecture professor named Vaughan, his ex-wife Gail and new girlfriend Greta. They are all able to "ride out" the storm and  continue living comfortable, if boring, lives  amongst the wreckage. Their resigned attitudes reflect the wasted landscape around them. They watch TV. They eat Thai food. Vaughan wanders around his house thinking about his failed marriage, plateuing career and splintered family. They watch more TV and eat more Thai food. At the novel's end he finds redemption not by rediscovering love or artistic fervor, but by gratefully accepting the anonymous stability of middle class life in a decaying society and curiously fading into normal existence:

"He imagined what his life with Greta might be in the future- isolated, inconsequential, apart from the world and yet in the world in a new, more immediate way, full of sensory things, a sampler of ordinary pleasures. He imagined their daily life as a succession of such pleasures, a river of tiny recognitions- the pleasures of toast...hot sunlight, of the dark scent of wet dogs, of summer nights, of the crush of sudden thunder, the warmth of winter socks, the surprise of skin indented by furniture. These weren't the pleasures he had dreamed of, and it wasn't a life he had dreamed of, nor sought, nor even imagined for himself; but facing it, finally, he thought it was a life for which he was now well prepared."

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.

Everything Stays the Same: Drake Alone in First Class

In his hour-long interview on Canadian interview show Q, the host Jian Ghomeshi asks Drake what he thinks about his status as a "social media" rapper and icon of the millennial generation. Drake responds: "I hate the gist of living your life on the internet and telling everybody personal details about yourself on social media." The irony, of course, is that if you drop the internet references this is a perfect description of how he has made eight or nine digits in the past three years.  His distaste for the characterization and insistence throughout the interview that the stories on his records are all him, all Aubrey Graham autobiography, and not rap fairy tales are telling. Drake thinks that his success lies in his successful navigation between the Scylla of total naked confession and the Charybdis of bland genre convention.

This is exactly what is questioned in the article "Is Drake the Voice of the Millenial Generation" by David Drake (hereafter referred to as David). The author attempts to provide a survey of the "Millennial Drake" arguments and a bit of pleasant commentary. He muses that rather than representing self-obsession as the characteristic of a specific generation, Drake evokes a universal moment in the process of growing up. In this light, it's unsurprising when he writes:

"The most evocative moments are ones when reality intrudes upon the interior narrative, when Drake's abstracted ideas are replaced by concrete details [...] Oddly, these moments imply considerably more about Drake's internal world than the narration of his thought processes, and give oxygen to the world outside of his head. The confessional "Too Much," a rare moment of personal honesty about his family, is not unprecedented in Drake's catalog, but it explores a part of his life with a sincerity that is absent elsewhere. These are moments when he is least like a caricature of Drake, and most like a human being."

David thinks that Drake is making a move toward a fully realized adulthood on NWTS by demonstrating that he is becoming "emotionally responsible," with an implied wise wink suggesting that the millenials as a whole are reaching the same stage of their collective maturity. His laudation of Drake's patently relatable frustrations with his family on "Too Much" is helpfully understood as analogous to "Family Business" on Kanye's breakout The College Dropout or even 2pac's classic "Dear Mama".  These songs have to do with the artist-as-human-being, with the details of their families and therefore their histories. They try to get back to origin of the struggle, the emotional world from which the superheroes of rap extremity emerge. It's no surprise that the modesty and frankness of these tracks are striking to critics like David who think they articulate the "sincere" humanist undercurrent of the genre.  It's comforting to many to know that even the most talented and successful are damaged and vulnerable. At the heart of this rather dull aesthetic outlook is the thesis that nothing makes us more earnestly human than our family, which here represent the bedrock of our social responsibilities to one another.

Against this sort of pallid interpretation of his catalog, I want to say that the strongest moments of Drake's work are the moments of dehumanization.  These moments come in part out of his itinerancy. The boy that spent summers in Texas and winters in Ontario insistently raps about his home, but because he has never really belonged to only one city and travels constantly he often finds himself rapping about his homes.  His attachment to Toronto is more of an adoption than he commonly lets on. Remember that on "Club Paradise" one of his countless exes accuses him of "not knowing this city anymore" to which he gives a dismissive shrug. Even in his love letter to the city in the music video of "Started From the Bottom", he can't help but fly away and end the song with a vacation.



But Drake's predicament doesn't end with rootlessness. In the final calculus, it doesn't really matter where he is in the world. In the Pitchfork review of NWTS, reviewer Jayson Greene writes: "There is no uncomplicated forward motion in Drake songs; usually one small element worms forward while everything sits around it, a haze of rhythmic and harmonic indecision. " He's hit upon a critical insight; the thing that makes Drake's music work is that it's frozen in-between. As he says in "Furthest Thing", he's "Somewhere between psychotic and iconic/Somewhere between I want it and I got it/Somewhere between I'm sober and I'm lifted/Somewhere between a mistress and commitment." This sort of equivocality is often used to comfort by suggesting moderation or normalcy, but when it becomes a lifestyle things become much more problematic. On NWTS Drake flies between Miami (Hold On, We're Going Home), Memphis (Worst Behavior), and Toronto (Started from the Bottom), and everywhere he feels the same, and what he feels is very little.  But this isn't unique to Drake; the reason that it resonates with the rest of us is that his life exaggerates a contemporary world that we're all familiar with in the wealthiest countries. Money has bought us security, and with security has come insulation, and with insulation has come abstraction.  But after the complicated police-action wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, the more recent and hesitating pseudo-operations in Syria and Libya, and the realization of our collective impotence in the face of the world market in the recent financial crisis, it's hard to ignore the feeling that our comfortable position has very little to do with us.

Similarly, Drake's perpetually glamorous lifestyle has an element of inexplicable election; he's as bewildered by the spectacle of his success as the rest of us. Everywhere the citizens of the richest countries go, we're given the license and right to be unproblematically "what we are" and, similarly, wherever Drake goes he's accommodated as Drake. When we're protected that way, when we're shielded by money and cultural capital, the only thing that we can talk about are the times when we weren't so safe, our formative struggle. Drake raps about the girls that he was with, the women that pushed back against him when he was Aubrey Graham, and not the women that he told us about in Take Care when he said: "I got some women that's living off me/Paid for their flights and hotels, I'm ashamed/Bet that you know them, I won't say no names/After a while, girl, they all seem the same." This helps us to understand Drake's obsession with his emotional history and his crew; it's lonely at the top, and the only thing that you can see up there is everything that you passed up below you.  The people that he keeps around him are souvenirs and reminders of what he was beyond the fame, but they're not much more than that.  After all, how can they relate to him when he spends so much time struggling to relate to himself?  His reflective speech after receiving his Grammy is revealing (starting about 4:02):


   
On NWTS, Drake thinks that he's strong enough, famous enough to continue to push himself as a person into the limelight, rather than lapse into his identity as Drake the artist. The aggressive presence of Drake the man on this record is a reaction to the monstrosity of Drake the icon, and thus it's not surprising that NWTS comes off as Drake's most desperate record. No matter how much Drake might want to pose as relatable and aspirational, as an individual with personality and charm, with a claim to stake and name to defend, and no matter how much he insists on his authorship and authenticity in every verse, what draws us to him is his continual awe at his own lack of agency over his success. He's obsessed with his fame because he doesn't understand it and he desperately wants it to last, but at the same time he's not content with things staying the way that they are. When he proclaims "Came up, that's all me/Stayed true that's all me/No help that's all me/All me for real," the irony is so thick that it's hard not to cringe.

God is Gay and You Were Right: Thoughts on Sonic Youth

(This is a collaborative post. The first half is by regular spook Max Bowen, the second half is by guest contributor Sophie Durbin. The title is a lyric from "Androgynous Mind")

Sonic Youth has been my favorite band for a long time. They broke up 2 years ago, and it is getting easier and easier for rock critics and fans to call them “rock legends” instead of engaging with their body of work. Sonic Youth are not rock legends. Rock legends have touring, costumed tribute bands (Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and Elvis impersonators, for instance) that allow 60 year olds to relive their glory years. The idea of a touring Sonic Youth tribute band is absurd, partially because of how untheatrical of a band they were, and partially because of where they emerged from, namely New York’s No Wave scene.  No Wave is a catch-all term used to describe the downtown art scene in the late 70s and early 80s. It is difficult to find objective common features (like jangly guitars or vocal multi-tracking) among No Wave bands and artists, but they all conveyed a sense of stylistic homelessness and claustrophobic urgency. For instance, James Chance and the Contortions featured front man James Chance raving like a more-deranged James Brown  (when I get in the place/ there won’t be nothin left of the human race!) over noisy funk guitars and taking, ahem, “atonal” alto sax solos. Composer Glenn Branca initially gained notoriety doing experimental theater in Boston before relocating to New York and deciding to write symphonies featuring hordes of distorted guitars. Sonic Youth members Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo played in Branca’s groups, which were an important antecedent to Sonic Youth’s sound.

       

Thurston Moore

 
Even though there is zero puerile lore surrounding SY, they are nonetheless influenced by the classic rock sounds that came before them. 80’s hard rock and hair metal baldly embraced the most misogynistic elements of classic rock (case in point, Poison’s “I Hate Every Bone in Your Body But Mine”) and insulted Jimi Hendrix’s experiments with feedback and entropy by turning noise into a calculated cross-eyed spectacle (Van Halen’s “Eruption”, or Yngwie Malmsteen). SY made noise and experimentation a cornerstone of their approach. On tracks like Silver Rocket, the catchy power chord riff that churns the song eventually drops out entirely and is replaced by layers of feedback and guitar tinkering. Whereas previous rock music mostly used noise to add electrified pathos to clichéd blues licks (I’m ignoring Metal Machine Music, but that was a middle finger pointed directly at Robert Christgau anyway), SY makes noise for its own sake. Songs like “100%” feature skewering, flickering feedback alongside sullen, dumb guitar riffs. The idiotically idiomatic coexists with the completely non-idiomatic for a totally uncanny and addictive effect.

           
In addition to effacing genre conventions and seeking out new approaches instrumentally, SY’s lyrical content presents a radical departure from normal rock and roll subject matter. No idealistic, pugnacious sing-a-longs here. Instead, the lyrics are often cryptic- even if you find yourself singing along with one of their more apparently catchy choruses, you’ll soon be wondering what the fuck you are saying:

Kim Gordon

Inhuman off of Confusion is Sex: “My body is a pastime/ my mind is a simple joy/ I learned my lesson/ the hardest way/ but you don’t know me/ a complete inhuman”

Doctor’s Orders off of Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star: “Mother’s such a mess/ she forgets how to dress/ but she’s no longer depressed/ she thinks she’s looking her best”

The Neutral off of Rather Ripped: “you won’t seduce me/ or attract me/ just ‘caus you’re a stray… he’s neutral/ yeah he’s weary/ and he’s so in love with you”

Disconnection Notice off of Murray Street: “Did you get your disconnection notice/ mine came in the mail today/ they seem to think I’m disconnected… everything’s right here inside your file/ you're not so free to be unprotected/ a secret Mona Lisa hides behind her smile”

These lyrics describe people at the fringes of society, but their angst isn’t directed at republicans or cops; it’s aimed directly at the relentless mechanisms of normalcy. Liberation and self-discovery, the by-words of rock and roll’s Woodstock forebears, are absent here. SY’s “self-discovery” is self loss. The acid rockers of the Woodstock era thought love and camaraderie could be found on off-the-grid farmland and behind closed tour bus doors.  When a genre tries to be openly subversive or “alternative”, it ends up sealing its own fate. Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo’s lyrics convey the persistence of love and curiosity in the face of the neutralizing effects of time and power- they are opaque yet honest, horny yet ghostly. Similarly, "Disconnection Notice" describes a sense of being unsynchronized with the obscure bureaucratic processes that, through their effects, constitute our individuality.  What makes Sonic Youth so radical is that they affirm the status quo within the “alternative” genre of independent rock, thereby showing how perverse the status quo really is.
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“Liberation and self-discovery”—those buzzwords, those cornerstones of so-called “free love” of the late 60s, when millennials who weren’t there like to imagine rock music was at its purest and human sexuality at its freest—those terms that in fact symbolize to me an aesthetic that is/was predicated upon the availability of female bodies as muses and sex objects. Inextricable from this aesthetic is formal phallogocentrism, which has been argued to enforce the standard format in so-called “great art” that gradually rises, climaxes and returns slowly to “normalcy” à la the male sex response. This structure so thoroughly permeates the way “Western culture” formulates narrative that to destroy it or find alternatives at first looks like an attempt to destroy art itself, to tear fairy tales and soaring choruses out of the hands of the masses. I do not pretend that my forthcoming analysis will put a dent in, let alone destroy, how anyone conceptualizes art, but it is my hope that my exploration of non-phallogocentric form (or gynocentric form, to center the feminine) in the work of Sonic Youth may cause others to reflect on musical structure’s impact to uphold or subvert cultural constructions of gender.

(One important caveat before I begin: it is indeed essentialist to posit that a gynocentric form is inherently different from a phallogocentric one; that is, some women do experience a sex response process thought of as “male” and some men experience a “female” one. However, our culture’s folk wisdom about who gets erections, who has the capacity for multiple orgasms and who penetrates/is penetrated is highly dependent upon a clear-cut gender binary, and in order to analyze how this binary affects Sonic Youth’s music I will be using the binary itself. In summary: some women have penises and some men have vaginas. That does not negate phallogocentrism as a systemically applied, deeply embedded tradition in art.)

Evol

Drawing upon French post-structuralist feminists’ (Hélène Cixous in particular, for the purposes of this thought experiment) ideas of l’écriture féminine—writing centered in non-linearity, the pre-Oedipal/pre-language bodily being and a general rejection of phallogocentric structure-- I argue that much of Sonic Youth’s music may qualify as “musique féminine.” Obvious complications arise here: literature and music are different animals entirely and Sonic Youth does not have a spotless past in terms of—at risk of sounding quaint--privileging the phallus (see: Thurston Moore’s tongue-in-cheek-but-not-totally renaming of “Kill Yr Idols” to “I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick” in response to the aforementioned Robert Christgau’s negative review of an SY show). Even so, bear with me and take a look at EVOL, commonly cited as the key “transition album” for the band as it floated from No Wave chaos toward a (slightly) more melodic, ordered sound.

As Max said, for Sonic Youth self-discovery is self-loss. There is no unique essence to the band’s musical philosophy—it is created through the bodily act of music-making and performing. This is a stark contrast from bands whose aim has always been to strip away layers of artifice until the truth appears: EVOL layers on the artifice with glee, spinning it and inverting it and cycling it through itself until no truth can be grasped at and no phallogocentric narrative structure privileging linearity and singular climaxes remains.

Richard Kern

The artifice and slippage begins with EVOL as a physical object. The album art itself makes the listener question linear aesthetics: everything is slightly askew, from a photograph of Moore’s hands with eyes drawn on covering his face to a black-and-white image of the band framed by a sugary pink-red heart to the presence of Lung Leg, a model/actress known for her unnerving appearances in the films of transgressive filmmaker Richard Kern (I recommend “You Killed Me First,” which is her best role and also showcases the legendary performance artist Karen Finley). The copy I listened to while preparing this piece was a later issue on candy-pink vinyl, making the listening experience also a compelling visual one as the pastel record spun. Film stills from “Friday the 13th Part II” and “Children of the Corn” also adorn the jacket—what to make of this Easter-egg colored record encased in such a sleeve? The track listing is out of order, there are no specifics as to who is playing what instrument, Lisa Crystal Carver’s liner notes are disjunctive and pasted together like a premonition of the riot grrrl zine craze—is the album’s sound equally disjointed, cyclical, intricate?

Like I said before, EVOL is aural evidence of Sonic Youth’s journey through the world of chaotic noise toward a lusher sound more accepting of melody and pattern. The melody and pattern present, however, does not reify previously conceived notions of verse-chorus-verse-key change-climax-fade. Such structure does not apply here musically or textually. I will conclude with notes from a listen to “Shadow of a Doubt”, where the lyrics—some of the most eerie on the album—imply an intimacy with a stranger that, for whatever reason, causes the song’s protagonist—if there is one, as protagonists themselves are evidence of the all-pervasive patriarchally defined narrative of the individual/hero—to explicate as if in a confession booth: “I swear it wasn't meant to be/From the bottom of my heart/He was looking all over me /Together ever after/He said/"You take me & I'll be you"/"You kill him & I'll kill her.” Kim Gordon’s voice—a paradox, a whisper and scream simultaneously—weaves in and out of the instrumentation, rising and falling repeatedly without giving way to any singular climactic moment or musical peak. One could also conceptualize these pulsations as a multitude of peaks—of orgasms, if you will—multiple ones, at that, which bear the possibility of infinite unique pleasures experienced through a female (or at least androgynous) bodily construction of artistic narrative.

Kessler Syndrome: Gravity and the Fear of Entropy

So George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are astronauts. The camera floats in a beautifully realized 3D space. George Clooney is very confident and Sandra Bullock is very high-strung. The Russians, those motherfuckers, blow up a dead spy satellite with a missile, which triggers a chain reaction in which a cloud of bullet-like space debris knocks out most of the satellites over North America, cuts off connection with Houston and kills all the astronauts but George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. George Clooney eventually dies in a freak accident. Sandra Bullock grits her teeth and makes it back to Earth.

Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón's new movie, has inspired what seems to be an inordinate amount of boilerplate criticism. Not that boilerplate is anything new, obviously, but criticism of Gravity has been exceptional in both its laziness and its reverence. The few negative reviews, by and large, are no less lazy for being condescending; Vanity Fair calls it a "chick flick" and Bret Easton Ellis attacks it mainly by spoiling its ending. An interesting exception to this, though, is Richard Brody's recent article on the movie on the New Yorker's blog. His argument doesn't lend itself very well to summary because it coalesces around a series of concepts whose meanings become more subjective the more Brody tries to define them, but a reduction of it for Spook purposes is that Gravity's dedication to material realism, and the worldview that accompanies that realism, render it strangely flat. I'll quote him at length: Gravity is "a material fantasy that flatters the studious humanism of critics who honor the attention to so-called reality—which they define in terms of physical phenomena and everyday people—as an aesthetic endowed with a quasi-political virtue."

Brody's is far more perceptive criticism than the film has been getting, but it's worth noting that giving reality a "quasi-political virtue" is nothing new in cinema. (Brody uses "quasi-religious" in another article, which demonstrates how precisely he's using his terminology.) Reverence for a mystical idea of preserved reality is at least as old as Andre Bazin; Bazin himself said it was as old as the Pharaohs. Across his articles on liberal cinema, Brody argues basically that it's the business of political filmmaking not to record reality but to pass it through human subjectivity. Realism is a "musty, mild worldview"; it needs an injection of, you know, libidinal/visceral/intuitive/subjective/fantastic/imaginative energy to be compelling. The example he cites in support of this, bizarrely, is not a movie but Bill Clinton, who embodied in "the same great man" both the high-handed compromiser of 1990s consensus and, well. The fact that Brody is almost certainly aware of this Bazinian pedigree, that he seems to be using it as a way to claim classicism, does not make it any less flawed; moreover, it misses the extent to which Gravity really does focus on what he'd call "the inner life."

It seems futile to look for a developed sense of subjectivity in a movie that basically functions as a tech demo, but there is a clear narrative of personal growth in Gravity. Sandra Bullock's feelings of helplessness and abandonment find objective correlatives in the void, and like a success story in some cosmic Scared Straight program she finds the will to live again. Lingering shots of Chinese Buddhas and Russian Orthodox icons on the dashboards of spaceships draw a symbolic connection between self-control and salvation; the theme of rebirth is not so much suggested as screamed. Sandra curls up like a fetus in the International Space Station while umbilical hoses curl in zero-g around her; she swims out of a womblike escape pod in the last scene. The symbolism is both so specific and so pervasive that the entire movie looks like the protagonist's hallucination. The extravagance and triteness of this internal narrative doesn't make it any less internal; depicting the Inner Life isn't a sure path to aesthetic success.

Brody's article links to another one in which he briefly discusses Steve McQueen's movie Shame, which is an instructive comparison. I reviewed Shame a few years ago for this blog; you can go back and read the review if you want to, but the relevant takeaway right now is that Shame, like Gravity, is an exercise in astounding cinematic and dramatic technique that looks at its characters primarily as collections of problems. "Drama" is too strong a word for a movie like Shame—it's more like a case history. Gravity is the same way; the self-discovery and growing confidence of its hero read like a cure rather than an epiphany. These are stories told from a clinical point of view, preoccupied with both the material and the subjective as sites where things can go wrong. You can be addicted to sex, you can be trapped by the memory of your dead daughter, Carey Mulligan might attempt suicide in your bathroom or George Clooney might drift off into the void. If these two movie are afraid of anything, it's collapse: cascades of mechanical failures, personal neuroses, descents into the grotesque. The possibility of entropy is what's really scary. Their redemption narratives are really normalization narratives—Sandra Bullock and Michael Fassbender struggle to be socialized, not reborn, in spite of all of Gravity's fetus imagery. Of course, the re-establishment of normality is one of the oldest plots in the world, but in classical comedy the threat is simply conflict, not absolute unraveling.

Gravity, in filling its objective reality with subjective symbolism, simply unifies psychological collapse with material collapse. If The Wire, Syriana, Zero Dark Thirty and other pieces of analytic realism dramatize the operation of a complex system, then Gravity dramatizes the disastrous collapse of such a system; unlike the The Wire and friends, it insists that such a system only becomes dehumanizing when it collapses. What's really disappointing about Gravity, then, is its inability to imagine possibilities outside of the reestablishment of order. Bret Easton Ellis noted (albeit spitefully) that we never really think Sandra Bullock is going to die; this is probably because, symbolically interlinked with imperiled order itself, Sandra Bullock would be a vote of no confidence against the concept of complex, diversified society if she were to die. This doesn't seem to be something we're ideologically prepared for. So it's ideologically imperative that Sandra Bullock emerge a stronger person; it's likewise imperative to at least imply that the mechanical failure that drives the plot (which entails the breakdown of world communication) is more a nuisance than a death blow. Brody complains that Gravity reduces "the spectrum of human life to a narrow consensus of decency"; maybe that's because outside this narrow (and narrowing) consensus, all we can see is the void.