Intercut Issue Three

issue two / static

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issue three / fantasy

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Intercut Editor-in-Chief Vincent Warne Assignment Editor Kira Newmark Art Director Sariel Friedman Designers Dylan Levine Matthew Wallock Editors Arnaav Bhavanani Jamie Cureton Beatrix Herriott O’Gorman Kalee Kennedy Annie Ning Megan West Financial Manager Megan West Publication Advisor A.O. Scott Illustrations & Photos Ezra Scott-Henning Vincent Warne

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Contents Lessons on Female Friendship in Daisies

Julia Levine

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Blood and Innocence

Alp Eren

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Interview with Mia Mullarkey

Beatrix Herriott O’Gorman

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A Time Traveler Falls Behind the Times: The Antiquated Past and Hopeful Future of Doctor Who

Sophie Dienstag

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Annihilation and the Limits of Psychedelia

Babe Howard

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On Watching

Megan West

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Marvel and the Lure of the Cinematic Universe

Sherwin Yu

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First Impressions of the New Directors/New Films Festival

Vincent Warne

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When the Stars Gaze Back: Narration in Fairytales Onscreen

Jack Warren

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From the editor Fantasy stories traditionally center around a quest, a hero’s journey. A young, inexperienced boy must leave his home and venture into a treacherous dark forest, vanquishing the forces of evil and maybe rescuing a princess along the way, all for the sake of restoring balance to a broken world.

There’s always something magical about images. They rip an occurrence from reality and reconstitute it in a two-dimensional form, freezing the chaotic rhythms of life into a mummified likeness. For the last hundred or so years, the movies have been the defining mode of images—they move us, make us think, and allow us to escape into a fantasy where the troubles of the real world melt away, if only for a few hours. In this issue of Intercut, we pay tribute to the fantasy of the movies, that fun and whimsical element that sweeps us off our feet and casts a spell over our hearts. But, as critics, we must not let the spell work too well, lest the bright colors and angelic choirs of fantasy make us entirely forget the other side of the screen.

Because, despite all appearances to the contrary, even the most fantastical of images have their basis in material reality, a necessary distinction as the two become increasingly difficult to tell apart. Some of the defining, and not unrelated, disruptions of our current political climate rest on issues of representation and visibility in the media. The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have amplified whispers about Hollywood men’s rampant sexual misconduct into a full-on chorus of empowered women, striding towards equality in a historically unequal industry. The unprecedented success of Get Out and Black Panther, along with a renewed attention to whitewashing casting practices, have ignited ongoing conversations about race on film and the future of diversity in the movies.

Meanwhile, the rabid 24-hour news cycle churns out an endless stream of content which transforms even the smallest dregs of intrigue into profitable, hungrily-consumed images. Any moment of the remotest cultural significance is liable to be turned into a meme and shared with millions. Images, accelerated by technology, are changing the world more rapidly than ever before.

Whether you want to call it postmodernism, late capitalism, the spectacle, or the simulacrum, we’re undoubtedly living in an era where the boundary between images and reality is bending in strange and unexpected ways. We would appear to be entering the chaotic dark forest of our civilization’s story. Or, maybe civilization is itself the dark forest, and has been all along. But if something is to be done about it, it’s clear enough that the model of a boy saving a princess and taking evil by force is not only insufficient, but a major cause of the problem. Our embedded cultural narratives need to be rewritten from within, and it is our hopes that the critical thoughts on movies offered in these pages can, in some small way, contribute to the conversation. Enjoy the fantasy, without getting too caught up in its spell.

Vincent Warne Editor-in-Chief

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Printed by Paladin Printing

Funded by Wesleyan Center for the Arts SBC The Green Fund Special Thanks A.O. Scott Lisa Dombrowski Jeanine Basinger Film Society of Lincoln Center

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Lessons on Female Friendship in Daisies

by Julia Levine

Though censors’ official reason for banning Věra Chytilová’s Daisies was the excessive amount of food wasted in its production, this film has far more to teach us about misbehaving than just how to ruin some perfectly good meals. In fact, there are very few rules that don’t manage to get broken in its scant seventy-six-minute runtime. Still, despite the constant madness and bad behavior depicted on the screen, if Chytilová is leaving us with any lesson at all, and perhaps she is not, then it is a lesson not of right or wrong but of the force of friendship. Amid the manifold rebellions, the protagonists’ connection is the lifeblood of Daisies.

Daisies follows two young women, both named Marie, who decide in the opening scene that since “everything’s going bad in this world” they’ll go “bad as well.” The ingénues then embark on a series of rebellions against

society, delivered in a surreal, psychedelic package whose unconventional narrative is tied together by Chytilová’s vision of her impish protagonists rather than any logically motivated sequence of action. No linear storyline emerges, and instead the Maries’ relationship with their world and with each other is the impetus for all that is shown to viewers.

The single element which grounds the film and ties its discrete features together is the girls’ friendship. Chytilová’s visual style is manic and fantastical and viewers might get lost in the many colors and locations she presents if not for the nexus of the Maries’ bond. Each different physical space the girls enter come with different boundaries to be pushed, always those of societal convention but often of aesthetics too. The film lapses into black and white or finds scenes inexplicably tinted red, blue, or or-

ange. One location leads into the next with creative cutting to lead the audience through the varied landscape of the young women’s mischievous lives, and it is clear to viewers that their lives are not separate but tied closely together.

They give meaning and order to the meaningless, disjointed visual world they inhabit.

The Maries navigate a variety of locations with a token flair for doing whatever they please, seeming to jump from space to space as if by the same magic that leaves them looking like some sort of New Wave fairies in stylish, coordinated outfits in every scene. In a string of loosely connected sequences, they romp about in their apartment, at train stations, docks, cabarets, and restaurants. At lunch, brunette Marie ( Jitka Cerhová) goes on dates with older men which blonde Marie (Ivana Karbanová) crashes.Though blonde Marie is 7

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an unwelcome guest, she orders she orders as many dishes as she can. She stuffs her face with visible, gratuitous delight, shown in close-up to catch her large glinting eyes and the crumbs of food around her mouth as she consumes each new dish. After the meal, the young women let the men pay before seeing them off on the soonest train. Though brunette Marie did not expect blonde Marie to appear, she is glad of her presence. The two girls never function alone; their schemes and adventures are joint efforts.

Back in their apartment, the Maries continue to wreak havoc. In one scene they sit on their bed and devour various phallic foods from pickles to sausages, cutting them into pieces before savoring each bite.

Their motions feel both violent and indulgent. The metaphor is heavy-handed, but anarchy never purported to be subtle. As the girls eat, a man professes his love to blonde Marie over the telephone. After they’ve finished, she lies back on the bed, satisfied, and knocks into the receiver. She realizes too late, and with little concern, that she’s hung up on him.

The men who drift in and out of their lives can remain nameless.

Marie is the name that matters, aptly shared by both girls, a verbal signal that they are two parts of the same whole. Their romantic 8

relationships do not matter. Their sisterhood is paramount.

The Maries butt up against each other almost as frequently as against those they come upon, but of course this is how true friends behave. In another apartment scene, the Maries lounge on their comforter, now adorned with large leaves. They both don green dresses that match the surrounding verdure. It is clear that their home is a domain where they fit in. There, they reign, with the freedom to behave as they wish. In other places, they must take that freedom, but it is not a given. Like families, home is where they fight not their external society, but each other. Often in their own bed, the girls find cause to bicker, cutting at each other’s clothes, teasing, and making faces, yet we feel certain that they are still a united front against the outside world. This is underscored by the fact that their apartment never lapses into black and white or becomes tinted in one hue, but remains always in full-color, their refuge and playground.

Though the protagonists spend plenty of time tearing apart food, fabric, and in a pleasantly bizarre scene, their own bodies, it is clear that blonde Marie is ultimately there to build and bolster brunette Marie and vice versa.

Together they affirm themselves and each other, and the very facts of who they are intertwine. “How do you know you exist?” one young woman asks the other slyly as they sit at opposite ends of a milky bathtub. After a moment of thought, the answer comes: “because of you!” The first girl agrees, but goes on, saying, “otherwise it would be hard to prove, in your case. You’re not registered at this address. You have no employment. There’s no evidence of you.”

A later scene picks up on the question of identity when the Maries grow upset because it seems as if nobody notices them.

To combat this, they scatter armfuls of stolen corn on the ground and state their existence, chanting the affirmative anthem “we are, we are, we are!” as they skip in tandem. As long as they are able to validate each other and stand as a unit, they need nothing else.

They do not say “I am” but speak in the first person plural, as a “we” which encompasses them both.

“Your legs are crooked,” says one of the Maries as the other lies on their bed. “Don’t you know that’s just what I based my whole personality on?” replies the girl, looking up at her. Their characters arise out of style, whim, and rebelliousness, believable only because the two young women so wholeheartedly believe in each other and in the surreal, uncanny

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world they are a part of.

At its heart, Daisies is as much about the connection between the Maries, played with candidness and spirit by nonprofessional actresses, as it is about their mischief. They are best friends causing trouble, and without their intensity, the film’s bare, disjointed narrative would be nothing. Together they make their messes - see the scene the censors were so hung up on where a discovered banquet table becomes both their personal feast and (literal) stomping ground - and together, in the end, they attempt to clean their messes up.

Still, despite efforts to mend their destruction in the final scenes, there are no real admonitions against rebellion to be gleaned from this film, only a powerful promotion of friendship.

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BLOOD AND INNOCENCE

by Alp Eren

It was in 1764, in the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, that Voltaire released his Philosophical Dictionary. This dictionary consists of Voltaire’s short essays on a variety of subjects, one of them being vampires. Voltaire’s essay on vampires starts with a cry of disbelief, as he asks to his readers: “What! Is it in our eighteenth century that vampires exist? Is it after the reigns of Locke, Shaftesbury, Trenchard, and Collins?” Throughout his essay, Voltaire expresses shock and annoyance at how much theologians and the common people are interested in vampires. However, at the end, he states that the interest 10

and belief in vampires are finally no more. How disappointed would Voltaire be if he saw us today? Vampires, in typical undead fashion, have risen up from their graves 350 years after Voltaire declared them dead, and have infiltrated our entertainment. Film specifically has featured vampires across a variety of genres, from teen romance (the Twilight series) to mockumentary (What We Do in the Shadows). The key reason for the sustained relevance and presence of vampires in film has been the shifting forms and functions of the vampire helping it to remain constantly relevant to contemporary audiences.

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Since Nosferatu (1922), vampire films have moved away from the vampire as a force of evil towards the figure of a lonely outcast who reflects the flaws in our society. In the 21st century, movies like Let the Right One In and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night have used tropes established by Nosferatu to subvert the conventions of vampire films and turn the vampire into a ‘hero’ while condemning the human as the ‘villain’.

Nosferatu and the Establishment of Vampire as Pure Evil Nosferatu, as the first vampire film, established some of the major tropes that have come to be indicative of a vampire movie, complete with the appearance of a pale skinned creature of the dark who sleeps in a coffin, and comes out at night to prey on innocent women. The story of the film is quite known too, as director F.W. Murnau took the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and just changed the name of the characters. The vampire of Nosferatu, Count Orlok, is portrayed as the physical embodiment of evil and an unstoppable force of nature. Throughout the majority of the movie he relentlessly pursues Ellen, wife of our main character Hutter, in an attempt to suck her blood and corrupt her innocence.

The theme of innocence is cen12

tral to the movie and is the main thing that Orlok is attracted to.

Through shadowy cinematography and meaningful editing, Murnau turns the conflict between Ellen and Orlok into a conflict between good and evil, innocence and corruption.

Murnau uses Orlok’s shadows to change Orlok from an individual character to an abstraction of pure evil. Orlok’s shadow is often substituted for Orlok himself as a way of conveying to the audience how the vampire, darkness, and evil are really the same thing, and to give Orlock the impression of omnipotence. It does not matter if Orlok is present on screen or not, as his shadow evokes the same feelings of dread and hopelessness in the audience that he does. In the now famous scene of Orlok ascending the stairs towards Ellen’s room, we see only his distorted and grotesque shadow. Similarly, it is not Orlok but his shadow that opens the door to Ellen’s room. Murnau employs this technique to communicate that Orlok is the embodiment of evil and does not need a physical presence to defile Ellen’s purity.

Frequent comparisons between Orlok and wild predators are made throughout the film to prevent audiences from sympathizing with Orlok and to further alienate him from us. The audience is constantly reminded

that Orlok is inhuman, that he is a mindless beast like a Venus flytrap or a spider. This makes Orlok into a character that the audience cannot empathize with.

The portrayal of the vampire as pure evil, established in Nosferatu, has become a cliché, now sneered upon by most filmmakers and moviegoers (or at least considered passé and uninteresting).

In our current society, audiences are no longer convinced or entertained by purely good or evil characters, and are asking for more moral ambiguity and challenging stories. Let the Right One In and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night subvert the theme of innocence presented in Nosferatu and use it to show flaws in our society.

Let the Right One In, Cruel Children and the Innocent Vampire Let the Right One In is a Swedish vampire film directed by Tomas Alfredson that refuses to fall into the traps of a traditional vampire film; it is devoid of many things that we have come to expect from this kind of ‘monster movie’. Its vampire, Eli, is neither as ghoulish as Count Orlok in Nosferatu nor as suave as Count Dracula in Count Dracula (1931). She doesn’t live in a castle in Transylvania or travel via a casket. Eli just seems like a lonely 12-year-old. There are no help-

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less damsels getting preyed on by lustful vampires in this film.

Instead, there is an intimate yet painful relationship between two children on the brink of adolescence. Sexuality, traditionally very important in vampire films, is missing in this film. Just like its protagonists, Oskar and Eli, Let the Right One In is an outsider. It cannot truly be fit in a box. The theme of innocence is central to the film as it lets the director subvert the conventions of the vampire film. It is through the exploration of this theme that we come to understand the nature of the relationship between Oskar and Eli and see how much it is different from traditional relationship between humans and vampires portrayed in film. Another theme in the film that help us get to the essence of the relationship between Oskar and Eli and that is childhood. Innocence and childhood are bound together in this film and both help the film break away from the traditional relationship between the vampire and the human protagonist.

Let the Right One In doesn’t look at childhood through rose-tinted glasses. The children in this film are cruel, manipulative and violent. The bullies that are led by Conny relentlessly mock and beat up Oskar, even attempting to murder him near the end of the film. Even Oskar

himself regularly fantasizes about stabbing his bullies and keeps a scrapbook of crime news. Eli, the vampire of the film, is the most innocent out of all the characters in Let the Right One In. This is a subversion of the tropes of the vampire genre, as it is usually the humans who are innocent and the vampire who is cruel and evil.

If we compare the relationship between Eli and Oskar to the relationship between Count Orlok and Ellen, we can see how much Let the Right One In strays away from the long-established portrayal of the relationship between the vampire and the human. In Nosferatu, Count Orlok desires Ellen with a feral lust and the way in which he sucks the blood out of Ellen is portrayed in a sexual way.

On the contrary, the relationship between Eli and Oskar hardly involves any sexuality all. The relationship between the characters is desexualized, and both the children are ambiguously gendered.

In addition, compared to the bullies and Oskar, Eli seems to be the most reluctant character to exert violence on others. When she has to kill Jocko, one of the local men of Blackeburg, she cries over his dead body. Similarly, when she slaughters the bullies she leaves the one who is helplessly crying in the corner untouched. These actions show to us that she does not take pleasure in bloodshed 13

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like Count Orlok or like Oskar.

Like she says to Oskar in his home, she kills people because she “has to”. Although Eli is this ultimate killer she is extremely reluctant to use the power that she wields. She has the power that Oskar wishes he had, but she sees it as a curse rather than a gift.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Patriarchy, and Humans as Vampires A Girl Walks Home takes inspiration from and pays homage to films from a variety of genres, from the traditional horror to the spaghetti western. This wide 14

range of influences makes A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night an innovative vampire film that explores themes including nature and gender inequality. However, the film is still deeply affected by classic tropes of the vampire film.

Vampires drink blood. Their livelihood is dependent on sucking the life out of humans. This aspect of the vampire figure is essentially what makes them so terrifying and inhuman. However, with this film, Amirpour holds a mirror in front of our faces and makes us see that, in a way, we humans are vampires too. There are three scenes in the film that focus on the oil derricks of the fictional

location of Bad City. The first is in the beginning of the film, and the derricks are revealed through a change of camera focus. At first, the camera is focused on some bushes. The bushes do not have leaves on them, which gives the impression that nature is barren and lifeless in this city. In the background we can hear the diegetic sounds of the derricks, but we cannot see the machines themselves. Then, with a change of focus we see that the derricks directly behind the bushes were in the frame all along. The camera then cuts to a close-up-shot of the derricks, specifically their ‘heads’. This shot draws a paral-

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lel between a vampire sinking his teeth into his victims and an oil derrick sinking its head towards the earth. Just as vampires are draining the blood out of humans, humans are draining the resources out of our planet. It is through this simple comparison that Amirpour flips the traditional approach of humans being innocent in vampire films on its head. Being compared to vampires helps us to empathize with them and aids in humanizing the character of The Girl.

There is a significant difference between who a vampire feeds on in the films Nosferatu, Let the Right One In and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

While in both Nosferatu and Let the Right One In the vampires do not seem to choose their victims according to a certain code or rule set, in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Girl appears to only feed off of men who have committed immoral acts against women. She has a certain principle that she abides by and this makes her seem more morally just than depictions of vampires we are used to seeing on screen.

She isn’t simply a loner tortured by her addictions but is a kind of vigilante hero, out in the streets to get revenge for the women who are abused by men. What makes this purpose of the character so interesting is that by wearing the

veil, she too is a victim of the society that she lives in. Like Atti ‘The Prostitute’ says to The Girl, “Idiots and rich people are the only ones who think things can change”. The Girl, no matter how many people she kills over how long of a time, cannot change the patriarchal system that she lives in. She knows this herself too, but cannot bring herself to ignore all the immoral acts that she sees in Bad City. In terms of their vampires A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is even more unorthodox than the already transgressive Let the Right One In. Vampire films are very similar to vampires in two ways. Both are ancient, and both need to adapt to the culture around them in order to survive. Despite its old age, the vampire genre has done a successful job at reinventing itself in order to remain relevant to modern audiences. As we saw in Nosferatu, the first vampire film, vampires used to be more separate from humans than they are now. They used to be portrayed as so otherworldly and distinct from humankind that the audience would have a hard trouble identifying with them. On the other hand, human characters would usually be portrayed as epitomes of innocence and goodwill. The worlds in these films would be like dreams and nightmares, providing escapism to people during

times of war.

However, as times passed, and a relative age of peace came, the vampire genre strayed away from its escapist roots. Filmmakers influenced by the classics began to look for ways to subvert the genre and use vampires not as bogeymen but as conduits to look into the human condition. Vampires started to look and act increasingly like us. However, even when trying to break the conventions of the genre, the essence of the vampire still remained the same.

In Nosferatu, the vampire was an outcast. Count Orlok was a representation of the diseased and the excluded. Modern vampire characters are outcasts too. In Let the Right One In, Eli is a girl with an ambiguous gender. She is not able to attend to school and cannot have friends because of her need for human blood and the necessity for her to frequently travel to not get killed. In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Girl is a veiled woman living in the Iranian city Bad City. She constantly sees women getting abused around her and is pushed to the fringes of society because of her rebellious nature. Overall, both Eli and The Girl are vampires that are more human and more relatable than Count Orlok.

They are presented as the victims of a hostile and violent environment and their own impulses.

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INTERVIEW WITH MIA MULLARKEY

Irish writer and director Mia Mullarkey hails from a remote island off the West Coast of Ireland and has been making movies with her siblings and a simple camcorder since she was young. Now, a prominent force in the world of documentary short filmmaking as well as music video direction in Ireland, the head of Ishka Films and 2018 Dublin International Film Festival winner Mia Mullarkey, sat down to talk to Intercut about her origins, her inspirations and her upcoming projects. Beatrix Herriott O’Gorman was lucky enough to meet Mullarkey after a screening of her fiercely compassionate and moving 2017 short “Throwline” and has since spoken to her via email and over the phone for this interview. Mullarkey’s most recent release is an award-winning documentary short, entitled “Mother & Baby”, about the harrowing experiences of women forced to live in Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. It is a profoundly powerful and timely study of the persistent authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the enduring denial of Irish women’s bodily 16

by Beatrix Herriott O’Gorman autonomy and personal agency. parts of the brain than any other art form, when it’s done right, and BHOG: What attracted you to we become deeply stimulated and documentary filmmaking? What opened up. do you think about film as a medium makes it a powerful tool to BHOG: Growing up were you inform and inspire. Did you al- an avid film watcher? If yes, what ways intend to tell stories through films struck your fancy early on film? and what documentaries do you remember (if any) having a proMM: When I was 8 I lived on a found impact on you? Are there small island off the West coast of any female filmmakers specifically Ireland with a population of 97, that you’ve especially looked up to including my family of 7. Our over the years? national broadcaster RTE made a short documentary about our MM: Growing up our family lives on the island and I was the watched lots of Marx Brothers main character. I got to go into films, Jim Henson films, Steven the recording studio to record Spielberg. So very mainstream the narration I had written for and no documentary. But we all the film. That definitely planted loved films in our house growing a seed. After studying philoso- up. I started discovering docuphy and psychology I decided to mentaries in my mid to late teens. take filmmaking seriously and Two that blew me away were since then I’ve made a number of Koyaanisqatsi and The Corporation, short documentaries. I think film they made me become really curiis powerful because it connects ous about documentary. In terms to so many parts of the mind; for of female documentary makers example our sense of space and Kim Longinotto was my first distime through camera movement covery and I adored her intimate and editing, or our sense of emo- style. Lately I love Lynne Ramsey, tion through music and acting. I but she’s fiction. think film possibly activates more

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BHOG: Do you enjoy working in short form - is there something special and stimulating about working within that time limitation? Does it force you to be more creative or is it simply the most direct and appropriate way to tell certain stories?

inequality in financing films, and they’re making huge progress in Sweden. So I feel hopeful and fortunate to be making films at this time when state funders are taking big strides to create equality. I certainly intend to make feature films, soon. I think women will grow in confidence as the MM: I’ve been making shorts be- captain of the ship while I’m not cause I want to learn about film- certain about gender quotas as a making. long-term plan I think it’s essential and highly effective as a shortBHOG: According to Kate Kin- term plan. ninmont, chief executive of British organisation Women in Film BHOG: Can you tell us about your and TV, “Lots of women are mak- recent film releases “Throwline” ing short films but the move to and “Mother & Baby”? Where do making a feature is where women you begin in the research process don’t seem to be able to get the fi- for your documentaries and what nance”. Do you believe there is a are the origin stories of these two lack of faith in the money-making projects? How have they been repotential of certain films direct- ceived differently and what has ed by women? Do you intend to been similar and what has been make feature films in the future? distinct about the process and reAnd if so, what challenges do you ception of the two films? expect to come up against?

MM: “Throwline” is a short docMM: The Irish Film Board re- umentary about Irish taxi drivers cently launched a scheme to men- trained in suicide prevention. It tor and finance three feature films won numerous awards worldby budding female writers and di- wide including Best Short Docrectors, which is an amazing step umentary at the Galway Film towards balancing the gender gap Fleadh 2017. I read a newspaper in Ireland with regards to financ- article about a taxi driver, Derek ing women’s first feature films. Devoy, who had set up a non-profTwo years ago I went to a semi- it group called Taxi Watch to save nar by CEO Anna Serner of the lives. I contacted Derek immediSwedish Film Institute who trav- ately with the hopes of making els the word talking about gender a documentary about his work,

and was delighted to be invited to meet him in Kilkenny. Sharing his tales of rescue, Derek drove me around the city in his taxi, pointing to sites where people had been helped.

My most recent short documentary, “Mother & Baby,” explores the memories of Mother & Baby Home survivors who were sold or fostered out by the Irish church and state if their mothers conceived them out of wedlock. “Mother & Baby” was funded by the Irish Film Board and premiered at Cork Film Festival 2017 where it won Best Short Documentary. It then screened at Dublin International Film Festival 2018 where it won Best Irish Short Film and the Discovery Award. I met Catherine Corless, the woman who uncovered the secret of what happened in the Home, and asked her about filming her. It was quite a bit of time before I applied for funding, and that time was valuable because I was able to develop the story.

“Throwline” was self-financed with a budget of €4,000, including festival submissions.

“Mother & Baby” was financed by the Irish Film Board for €20,000.

More planning and paper-work went into Mother & Baby. Both films had a community impact around Ireland.

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A Time Traveler Falls Behind the Times:

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The Antiquated Past and

Hopeful Future of Doctor Who

by Sophia Dienstag

Doctor Who, one of television’s longest running shows, premiered its first episode in 1964 on the BBC. I watched my first episode forty-six years later at eleven years old. For those unfamiliar with the show’s premise, Doctor Who centers on a onethousand-year-old time-traveling alien called “The Doctor” and his typically human companions who travel with him through time and space. The Doctor looks completely human, but he has the unique ability to forego death by “regenerating” into a new body, allowing a new actor to take on the role every few seasons. The show can thus continue year after year, as it’s been doing for nearly half a century, albeit with a break from 1989 until the show’s

reboot in 2005. Thirteen actors have played the Doctor since the show’s inception, all of them men, and around forty-five companions have traveled with the Doctor, twenty-eight of them female.

In July 2017, the BBC announced that for the first time in the show’s history, the Doctor would finally be played by a woman. Jodie Whittaker made her brief debut as the Doctor in the last few minutes of the 2017 Christmas special, and her first full season is set to begin in the fall of 2018.

While my enthusiasm for the Doctor as a female character -- a much needed step forward for the show -- is now unbridled, I am reluctant to admit 19

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that this was not wholly the case when I first came across the idea a few years ago. In theory, there is no reason the Doctor should not be able to regenerate into a woman. He is a thousand year old, shape-shifting, time-traveling, alien genius who belongs to an infinitely more advanced and complex species than our own, the Time Lords. The assumption, then, that the Doctor can regenerate into both male and female bodies is far from the most absurd thing about him.

As a girl who began watching the show at eleven years old, however, I subconsciously became accustomed to a specific template: the Doctor was a powerful, all-knowing man, and his companion was a wide-eyed woman, often curious and intelligent in her own earthly way, yet oblivious to the complexities of the universe. The Doctor may be an alien, but, for the past fifty years, his identity has been inextricably linked to his being a man (and because this piece primarily focuses on past Doctors, I will be using he/him pronouns).

The Doctor is an emotionally complex character; he always chooses love over hate, peace over violence, and his friends over himself. Yet, for all the people he helps and all the worlds he saves, his legacy is inescapably moored in death and destruction. Doctor 20

Who is first and foremost a children’s program, but its widespread success comes from its ability to pair pain with joy. The Doctor may be a genius who works tirelessly to save humanity from the evils of the universe, but he struggles with moral dilemmas and regrets. In some ways, then, he is an utterly human character. But he’s also someone who knows he’s the smartest person in the room; he can be brash, arrogant and preachy, and the show, especially in recent seasons, has let him get away with it.

Over the past few years, the show’s audience has nearly halved in size. While this is likely due to a combination of factors -- increased use of streaming services, a long hiatus between seasons, a later air time, overly-complicated plots -- I submit the Doctor himself as the primary source of the ratings drop.

Many fans and critics alike have lauded the most recent actor to take on the role, Peter Capaldi,for his portrayal of the 13th doctor, especially in the face of increasingly convoluted material. But despite Capaldi’s best efforts, his rendition of the Doctor failed to connect with the show’s key demographic: young people, most of whom, like me,only began watching the show post-reboot.

I believe showrunner Steven Moffat unknowingly came

close to articulating the source of this inability to emotionally connect to today’s young Doctor Who fans while answering questions at the Oxford Union in 2016. He described how Doctor Who “always adapts itself to the current television landscape… that’s why it’s a survivor. It always adapts perfectly and impeccably to the modern world.” By explaining the malleable nature of the show, Moffat illuminates its problems. In waiting so long to cast a woman in the role of the Doctor -- and by instead casting an older, white man, reminiscent of the show’s earliest Doctors of the sixties and seventies -- Doctor Who has lagged behind the times.

Capaldi’s Doctor takes after the original incarnations, not only in age and outward appearance, but in temperament as well: he’s serious, a bit of a grouch, and, at times, patronising -- as all of the Doctors are, to be fair. But watching his seasons, I always got the sense that he was telling people to “hush!” and “shut up!” and “be quiet!” more than any other Doctor in recent memory. According to an infographic from Cultbox, it turns out that Capaldi does in fact say the words “shut up” more times in his first season alone than the first ten Doctors did during all their seasons combined. While the repeated uttering of these words could be seen

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as a way to give a recognizable style and character to the 13th Doctor’s speech, these words in particular work to silence everyone in his presence, including his companions. They point to the Doctor as being the sole person in the room capable of saving the day.

I think part of me initially rejected the idea of the Doctor being a woman because I have never seen a woman be able to act like the Doctor and get away with it. I know many strong, intelligent woman, and I’m seeing more and more such women portrayed onscreen, but they are rarely, if ever, allowed to be as bossy, demanding and self-important as the Doctor.

They rarely get to acknowledge that they are the smartest person in the room. When I first encountered the conversation about whether it was time for a woman to take over the role, my own inability to imagine such a character as a woman demonstrates the extent to which a now much-talked about problem -- the dearth of confident, complex, commanding female characters on screen -pervades the film and television world.

If I had to choose between being the Doctor and being a companion, until recently, I would have chosen to be a companion. After all, the companion is the relatable audience surro-

gate, a relatively normal person who gets to travel through time and space. The Doctor, on the other hand, comes with some heavy emotional baggage, not to mention the occasional responsibility of having to save, quite literally, the entire universe. But when I asked my brother, to my surprise, he responded, “Doctor,” in a heartbeat. I don’t have the information to know if this is representative of a larger trend relating to gender, or if it is merely indicative of differences in personality, but I do wonder if our answers will at all be affected by the upcoming season. Moffat once said, “It’s important to me that the little girls watching see Amy or Clara or Rose [the Doctor’s companions] and want to be like them.” There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be like a companion, but that shouldn’t be the limit. I hope that after Whittaker takes over, a few more elevenyear-old girls out there will strive to be the smartest in the room and know that they, too, can save the entire universe, if it comes to that.

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Annihilation and the Limits of Psychedelia

by Babe Howard I. What Did You Eat?

One year ago I drove into the desert and swallowed several mushrooms coated in peanut butter in the company of three close friends. I knew, to some degree, what to expect; had steeled my brain for momentary recalibration by firmly deciding it was necessary.

I don’t feel a need to relate the intricacies of what happened next and haven’t for a while. Like most other things I’ve experienced as either very good or equally bad (original sci-fi, donuts, relationships) the more I attempted to outwardly distill what exactly was special about taking a drug, the looser my internal grip on whatever its actual meaning was became. Talk is cheap, people might tell you, but they’ll skip the part about it being occasionally unnecessary, too.

Anyone who might laugh or frown at the mental image of a bunch of boys getting high in an exotic locale would certainly be justified in doing so. In the months that followed I laughed at myself plenty, holding somewhere that 22

insecurity, hesitant to proclaim that one day had changed me for the better but sure that it had changed something, somehow.

Of the questions that continued to clang around inside, What am I doing? became the most persistent, vague enough to apply to a handful of specific parts of my life. Not knowing what you want out of the world, anyone

“Then I saw Annihilation.” else, yourself – these had always been bound to stay romantic for a limited time. Over the next year that sheen faded, as I contorted myself to tie any stray feeling of instability back to the same sweaty, loosely desperate March afternoon.

Then I saw Annihilation.

II. It Refracts Everything…

Natalie Portman stands amongst a mess of trees, crying her eyes out.

There is a single shot

during the buildup to the muchdiscussed final act of Alex Garland’s latest darkly meditative sci-fi thriller that looks at its star from below, a portrait of abject despair or a loss of sanity or maybe something in between.

We’ve just returned from a brief jaunt to happier times, watching Portman’s Lena on the couch of the home she shares with her husband, a serviceman on leave between classified missions.

She reads The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and he looks up from his magazine to stare at her as only Oscar Isaac can, a mix of desire and unease playing out from those eyes. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she replies. They hold the gaze for an extra moment, one whose status as loving or uncomfortable is unclear.

That the latter scene leads directly into the former implies a reaction to a memory, and indeed it is one of many shredded flashbacks placed throughout Annihilation’s main arc, the bulk of which unfolds inside a breathtakingly rendered astral field of blown-out primary colors near the Gulf Coast. It’s been dubbed “The Shimmer”

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by the U.S. Government, who has in turn sent a handful of scientists – Lena, a biologist, among them – to journey to its source, a lighthouse where the responsible meteor first made contact. It is tacitly accepted as a suicide mission, and we are given a handful of reasons that each of its undertakers might want to risk their lives – or not care to live anymore – during a sequence near the top of this vague expedition.

As the five women paddle across a creature-infested swamp, Lena finds herself sharing a canoe with Cass (Tuva Novotny), a geologist, who shares a clump of personal information regarding each of their fellow Shimmer-venturing scientists: Josie (Tessa Thompson) has a history of self-harm, Anya

(Gina Rodriguez) is an addict, Ventress ( Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a Mystery whose cancer we will come to learn of later on.

This deluge of exposition calls attention to itself by way of its neatness as a plot device, but it’s also an opportunity for Garland to slip in a distillation of personal trauma that is alternately poetic and blunt. In mentioning her own burden – her daughter’s death at the hands of Leukemia – Cass says, “I lost two people at once: Her, and the person I once was.”

Most crucial among any of these individual stories is Lena’s motive for entering the Shimmer: her husband’s disappearance on a secret mission inside the Shimmer, and his fraught return as a vacant, otherworldly version

of himself that opens the film.

Sergeant Kane – the “real” version of him, at least – is not only Lena’s world, but stands for the person she has lost touch with being, too. She makes her way into the Shimmer not just to understand what is wrong with her now-ailing husband, but to get in touch with that other previous version, perhaps even by way of wiping the slate clean.

Garland makes this text in a short monologue, as Leigh’s Ventress, a psychologist, explains to Lena that she is “confusing suicide with self-destruction, and they’re very different. Almost none of us commit suicide, whereas almost all of us self-destruct.

Somehow. In some part of our lives. We drink, or take drugs, 23

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or destabilize the happy job...or happy marriage.”

Those last three words are a direct barb at Lena, who we have come to know cheated on Kane with a university colleague while he was out on deployment.

Advancing into the unknown, she ends up breaking herself down as a mode of discovery and ultimately survival, a last resort foreshadowed not only by Ventress’ words but the film’s title itself.

But reality remains inescapable. Observing a set of

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plants that appear to resemble the shape of a human body, Thompson’s physicist Josie realizes that the Shimmer and all of its bizarre creations are only mutated refractions of the world we know.

Moving out of the yard to which the greenery belongs and into an abandoned house, Garland frames introductory images of the space almost identically to those of Lena and Kane’s home, a stairwell and kitchen table becoming refractions in their own right. Soon enough, after avoiding the violent paranoia of

Rodriguez’s paramedic, Lena will find herself thinking back to that house, remembering the couch and Kane’s stare, realizing now that he must have known of her infidelity. By the time she reaches this particular memory, the remaining members of the team have succumbed to or welcomed self-destruction in one way or another, Josie and Ventress each wandering off after Anya assaults the team and is ultimately mauled by another strange beast.

Then Lena is back in the forest, crying from the depths of

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some mix of discombobulation and despair as she’s stuck inside another dilation of time, not sure if she even wants to live inside the reality of the moment she’s pining for anymore. It’s tremendously sad and, as the film’s imagery has generally been described, very psychedelic. I don’t just mean this in the visually-geared sense of the word, but in terms of its emotional reality as well. In those few seconds, before Garland drops us at the lighthouse where the film’s mind-cracking conclusion takes place, I see a woman at

a self-imposed crossroads. Or maybe it’s more complex than that, in that Lena isn’t even aware of whatever options she may or may not be confronted with. Her world may be an unfamiliar one, but the image of Portman alone in turbulent reflection on the heels of a flashback is stirringly recognizable.

III. The Silence Around It Is Louder than Usual

In a Reddit AMA (that ever-revered mode of public engagement) promoting Annihilation’s release two months ago, Garland was asked if there was “something new” his movie would “bring to the table.”

“Psychedelia,” he replied. Indeed, plenty of reviews deemed it likely the film would be consumed in an altered state by plenty. Its later imagery – from Portman’s discovery of and face-off with her own carbon copy in the bowels of the lighthouse to the dazzling end credits – certainly does not refute this.

I can’t really imagine having seen Annihilation in such a way. But I also remain unable to divorce one sequence – and to some degree, the rest of the movie – from an experience had nearly a year prior. Walking out of the theatre here in February, I tripped over myself a bit. It was raining and my stomach was bothering me and I thought about all the times I’d felt like Lena in that moment before the third act,

alone and trying to pull free from an anchor to a wholly different time and, above all, deeply confused. Mostly, I thought about losing myself; the different ways I’d done it, the actual and internal places it’d happened, if it ever really had to begin with.

Asking yourself if you’re still the same person can be something of an exercise in futility.

I would prefer not to continue lending that afternoon last spring as much weight as I have up until now. Ideally, I’d get a hold on whatever it gave me and use that to move forward, not being ruled by an event but rather by all that it implied. The presentation of that dynamic is part of what Garland accomplishes, almost in reverse, in Annihilation, abstracting a sensation into action in a series of escalating setpieces. “You’re not Kane, are you?” Lena asks her husband in the last scene, having discovered the nature of his duality before escaping the Shimmer. “No. I don’t think so,” he says, taking a pause not unlike his silence on the couch before countering: “Are you Lena?”

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On

Watching

b y M e ga n We s t

For many years, my favorite movie was 13 Going of 30. My best friend at the time (elementary school) owned it and we watched it every time I slept over her house. I knew all the previews on the DVD by heart; you couldn’t skip them.

I remember the wat the down comforter felt underneath my popcorn-salty hands during the Miss Congeniality trailer. I remember the ring of condensation my can of soda left on the hardwood floor next to the bed. If I ran to the bathroom it was only during the endless loop of the title screen, never the precious 108-minute runtime. If I told you that I think that it is a perfect movie, it would be with the down comforter in mind, the can of coke, my old best friend.

I am never prepared for questions like, “What’s your 26

favorite movie?” or “Who is your favorite director?” I feel as if even friendly acquaintances are pretending—closed-mouth grins concealing fangs. Avoiding criticism when answering requires preparation.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. This is Film Studies Me, after all, forever curled inside myself. There must have been a time when someone asked me this question with innocent curiosity and I answered honestly. Here’s the thing: If you claim to love something publicly, sometimes it starts to feel as if yo owe it something. Prove it. Prove it or love it quietly, all alone.

As a teenager I watched everything even remotely romantic, huddled inside a cave of pillows in my bedroom. Every Molly Ringwald movie, all the low-budget independent queer

cinema on Netflix, the most recent sexist rom-com from a Major Studio. “What are you watching?” was a question I dreaded, even when it came from a seemingly harmless source, like my own mom. “Cinema” was for pleasure, I thought. Hidden pleasure. Shameful pleasure. I didn’t know how to defend these movies. They weren’t carefully constructed classics. They weren’t allegorical or avant garde. They were about teenagers in the suburbs, suffering from a general malaise that infuriated their parents. They were about girls riding their bikes down the street past the houses of the boys they had a crushes on. Sometimes the dialogue was bad or the acting was bad or both were terrible. I knew that what I loved watching wasn’t “good,” but felt as if I still had some stake in liking “good

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movies,” or at least understanding them. I didn’t want to be dumb.

I am now a Film Studies Major. I watch 6 “good” movies per week for class alone. I find pleasure here, too. Beauty and skill and, yes, sometimes romance. But I do not find comfort. Despite formal training, exposure to the greats and the not-so-greats, lessons on terminology and history and mis-en-scene, I still feel as if I am pretending, hiding some part of myself that will never really understand how to get what I am supposed to get out of movies. My love is unlearned.

In class, we deconstruct and deconstruct until it seems as if all movies are cut from the same cloth, as if camera movement and editing and color and blocking and framing are really all there is, as if there might be a formula, as if this is what makes me cry, laugh, feel angry, feel alone, feel known. And perhaps it is, but…

But movies can’t “make” us do anything, right? We watch, or don’t. We walk into the middle of them while our loved ones sit on the living room couch, engrossed.

We rent them and stream them and buy them. We sneak in late and leave early. We read about their creation and follow their celebrities. Their plots are spoiled by trailers on television and by spiteful or oblivious friends. We watch them in class, in theaters,

on our laptops, projected onto screens or walls or backyard sheds painted white in the summer, ankles bitten by mosquitoes. They run for their determined duration, fabulously alive and yet oblivious to the circumstances under which they are being played. We often fail to mention the multiplicity of ways in which films will be filtered through different eyes on so many different days, perhaps because it is so uncontrollable, so emotional, so distanced from the making of the thing itself.

But I am interested in the experience of watching, possibly more interested than I ever could be in the process of making, of intentionality, of history. My best movie experiences have felt unexplainable. I’d like never to define them. Maybe this is contradictory, reactionary, and foolish, but feelings of intellectual inadequacy feel inextricable from my experiences with film analysis and discussion. The compulsion to lie about my knowledge of movements and directors for fear of being seen as inexperienced has turned genuine love into embarrassment, enjoyment into self-doubt.

Although I first viewed this feeling as a hurdle to surmount, racing to watch as much as I could as fast as possible, I realized that the pursuit was ultimately unproductive.

It

doesn’t matter how many classics I see. I might always feel bad, or stupid, or inadequate. Viewing ‘the best of ’s with the attitude that they might change my place in the whole of movie culture did neither me nor them any favors.

It is an impossible weight to hold.

I have fully invested myself in the emotional, the intangible, the undefinable. I have sectioned myself off best I can, because the magic of movies is something too important to me to be spoiled by calculated words.

I choose “favorite” over “best.”

I want sticky movie theater floors and Bargain Tuesdays and Blockbuster outings as rewards for good behavior. I want to talk about the new Spiderman with the guy at the AMC counter. I want to watch Wes Anderson while home sick from high school, not knowing all that loving it implies. I want Chungking Express to forever be the best ever recommendation from my older brother, want to think every time I watch it, he knows me so well. I want to have my first kiss during Lion King 3D and never be able to see it the same way again. I do not want to be told how to feel.

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Marvel and the Lure of the Cinematic Universe

by Sherwin Yu Marvel and the Lure of the Cinematic Universe

On November 29, 2017, the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War (2018) completely shattered the record for most-viewed trailer within a 24-hour period--in just a single day, the trailer was viewed over 230 million times.

I personally contributed approximately ten views to that total; I remember arriving back to my dorm and checking my Twitter when I saw my entire timeline bombarded with news and reactions concerning the two-minute clip for the Marvel Cinematic Universe “final showdown” film that had been ten years in the making. Immediately, 30

I postponed my original plans to head to the library and began replaying the trailer, researching plot theories, and finding people to share my nerdy elation—nay, obsession—with. It was not until later that night that I wondered to myself: why do I care so damn much?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) was largely masterminded by Kevin Feige, who had been one of Marvel Studios’ producers since 2000.

He had a vision for an extended universe connecting all of Marvel’s great heroes and villains (similar to the comic book format) and when he was named president of production for Marvel Studios in

early 2007, he finally transformed his vision into reality. The MCU’s big bang began with the release of Iron Man on May 2, 2008.

Audiences had seen nothing quite like it; there were no overeccentric CGI mutants like those in X-Men (2000) and no harsh, ominous noir-ish tone like that in Batman Begins (2005). With help from director Jon Favreau, Feige carved an easily digestible, quasicharismatic hero out of Robert Downey Jr. and coupled him with a palatable “save the world” plot to get the audience hooked and eager for more of the same.

Fast forward a decade and we finally see the phenomenon Feige created and Iron Man inspired. Audiences have become engrossed and emotionally invested in the stories of a myriad of characters. From the financial numbers alone, we can identify the overwhelming fan support and love for universe; not including

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the recent Black Panther (2018) and Infinity War, Marvel Studios’ 17 feature films have grossed over $13 billion worldwide, not to mention merchandise sales, partnerships, and the plethora of spinoffs. So clearly, I am not the only one on the borderline of obsession; hundreds of millions people across the globe are. With such an endless supply of financial support and a devoted fan base, the newest Avengers flick is bound to garner an unprecedented amount of attention.

Why? Because Marvel knows how to walk the fine line between connectedness and focused storytelling.

The uniqueness of Marvel lies largely within its extremely well-choreographed connectedness. Many trilogies and remakes suffer with maintaining reciprocal quality and independent strength; yet, Marvel has now released 18

different feature films that not only stand alone with great marks, but cleverly reference each other and build a cohesive macrocosm of reality and fantasy that we have grown to care about.

That is not to say that these films are not independent; many of the films are origin stories or onehero shows that do not need to rely on cameos and gimmicks to lure in audiences. However, in these individual stories, we see the gradual development of crossover characters and plotlines (think Agent Nick Fury and the Infinity Stones), which link strong parts into a stronger whole. Connections are organic and natural, allowing for greater suspense and emotional investment in future Marvel movies. A studio producing 18 well-received films is special as it is, but when all the films build off and elevate the storytelling and character qualities of each other, then the perfect storm of imaginative and affecting entertainment is created.

Marvel’s connectedness is only powerful, however, when its films contain quality and consistent storytelling. In an interview with Mashable, Feige claimed that “to this day, if there’s a formula, it’s that the individual movie, more than anything else, is more important than the connectivity.” Feige has stayed true to his mantra; every Marvel

movie is at worst a watchable film, and at best a superhero classic. Each major character has their own set of convictions and obstacles that they must grapple with when confronted with an enemy, and individual struggle is the most important struggle to explore. For example, you can watch Doctor Strange (2016) without any prior knowledge of Marvel and still enjoy the development of Stephen Strange’s character from a cocky surgeon to a resentful car crash victim to a mystic arts master.

Especially with origin stories, Marvel excels in creating strong character backgrounds and building the different worlds that they inhabit. Essentially, the studio builds pillars on which they stand on and profit off of; making sure that Iron Man or Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) are strong films about their titular characters help the stability and quality of their universe at large.

Marvel films do have their flaws, though. Go to Youtube or Reddit and you’ll find a plethora of video essays and forums scrutinizing each movie. Most often, you will find the studio criticized for its tired “Marvel formula,” which is referring to Feige’s formulaic approach to crafting storylines. The formula goes as follows: a threat is introduced, an unassuming or reluctant hero 31

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must step up, cue the first battle, then some turmoil, a regrouping, a final boss battle, and a satisfying victory. This recipe holds up for many of Marvel’s most successful films; check out Guardians of the Galaxy or Doctor Strange and you will find strong resemblances.

Though some may find this general storytelling guideline tiresome, I find little wrong with it. Feige crafts stories this way because it works; the “formula” is simply a slightly modified version of Joseph Campbell’s famed “Hero’s Journey” that applies to all hero-driven narratives. Is there really much difference between Indiana Jones and Tony Stark?

What about Marty McFly and Peter Parker? Storylines may get repetitive, but characters do not. There may be a “Marvel formula,” but if it ensures tightly constructed and emotionally affecting movies (and billions of dollars in revenue), there seems to be no reason to deviate too much away from it.

Because the MCU has become a force to be reckoned within the entire industry, the influence of Marvel on film itself can no longer go unnoticed.

Though Feige has provided us with lovable heroes and hours of entertainment, he has also sacrificed individual creativity for collective vision and unconsciously fostered a new Hollywood wave 32

of adaptations and blockbusters.

There has been documented discord among top executives and directors about the direction of certain Marvel films, most notably Edgar Wright with AntMan (2015) and Joss Whedon with Avengers: The Age of Ultron (2015). In both cases, the creative vision from the esteemed director differed with that of Feige and the studio, thus resulting in a relief of duty for the director. We have sacrificed a possibly innovative and superb Edgar Wright AntMan for a more conventional yet still satisfactory Peyton Reed one. Personal greatness is overshadowed by “the greater good”; perhaps this is a theme that Marvel makes not just in its plotlines but in its studio policy as well.

Also, as a byproduct of Marvel’s success, Feige has also inspired a new age of adaptation that can be considered detrimental to original blockbuster filmmaking. The MCU has thrived on the comic book stories written years ago by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, inspiring studios to fund retellings and reboots of already proven features. Instead of greenlighting original pieces like Gladiator (2000) or District 9 (2009) in years past, Hollywood has now almost entirely shifted its focus on remakes. Some of the latest examples include Fantastic

Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), The Legend of Tarzan (2016), and The Dark Tower (2017). In lieu of the next big original thing, an oversaturation of old stories are now being made available to us. This is the price we pay for a MCU that continuously churns out films in great quantity and ample quality.

And yet we are glad to pay it, every single time.

Hollywood has quickly realized this, and has moved quickly to copy. With Marvel’s immense success, there is no doubt that others in the entertainment industry are envious. As a result, we see the MCU being used as a sort of blueprint for other possible cinematic universes to take shape; but, imitators seem to be falling short of the critical and commercial achievement they seek. The DC Extended Universe, Marvel’s biggest rival, has suffered because of its weak pillars of foundation and overreliance on connecting films; think of the underperforming Man of Steel (2013) or panned Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). These failures can perhaps be attributed to the lack of Feige-type; with no mastermind orchestrator, the films are subject to stylistic and narrative inconsistencies that can plague the tone of a delicate universe. Moreover, the DCEU

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started five years after the MCU with Man of Steel, and has essentially been playing a game of catch-up, rushing world and character building in an attempt to replicate Marvel’s critical and (more importantly) financial success as soon as possible. By the time The Avengers had released, movies about Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and Captain America (four of the first six Avengers) had already been made, with the remaining two Avengers getting ample screen time across those films. Comparatively, prior to the release of Justice League, only Superman and Wonder Woman had movies made about them (Batman in Batman vs Superman doesn’t count). Three of the six Justice League mainstays, Aquaman, Cyborg, and the Flash, made their introduction to audiences in the supposed “climax” film. How are we supposed to care about the team if we don’t know the members? We can’t, and the numbers showed.

Justice League bombed at the box office with an unsuccessful gross of $658 million in addition to mediocre critic and audience reviews.

Aside from the DCEU, Universal Studios recently flopped critically and commercially with The Mummy (2017), and due to such heavy criticisms on the script and characters, Universal

is reconsidering its initial plans to build a Dark Universe for its famed monsters. Warner Brothers’ King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) was originally greenlit with the intentions of kicking off an Arthurian cinematic universe spanning at least six films, but after mediocre reviews and losing the studio over $150 million in the box office, plans were abandoned. Marvel has found little competition and has continued to move forward with powerful and well-scripted stories, and with movies like Black Panther and Captain Marvel (2019) just released or on the horizon, the studio will continue to draw audiences to witness the origins and development of already well-known characters.

Whether or not you like Marvel’s monopoly in the superhero film industry, chances are that you are going to go watch Infinity War at some point. And to Feige, that is all the conviction that Marvel needs to know that what they are doing is working. He and Marvel Studios have not yet let us down, and we should not expect them to anytime soon; we live in a Marvel saturated world and we are still on its addictive high. Even after Infinity War, we will end up still wanting more. And Marvel will undoubtedly be obliged to supply it. Cue “Phase 4,” Feige.

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First Impressions of the

New Directors/New Films Festival

by Vincent Warne

This Spring, I was lucky enough to attend several press screenings for the 47th annual New Directors/New Films Festival, put on by the Film Society of the Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Focusing on works by first- or second-time directors, New Directors/New Films brings together the highlights from other festivals across the world, including Sundance, Rotterdam, the Berlinale, and more. As always, the programmers have curated an eclectic and exciting lineup, and I expect this won’t be the last we hear from many of the young filmmakers featured. Below are my impres-

sions of the six films I managed to see, starting bright and early at 10 am after a 5:30 am arrival into New York City.

Notes on an Appearance

Notes on an Appearance, the debut feature of Brooklyn local Ricky D’Ambrose, was the first screening I caught. Seeing it on so little sleep was probably not the ideal circumstance for a film that demands, and tests, the viewer’s patience. But it must be an indication of the film’s quality that I managed to stay awake the whole time, and was for the most part engaged. The plot is simple, but told in a highly abstracted manner. David, a Chappaqua transplant, arrives in Brooklyn and quickly joins his friend Todd in researching an obscure, recently deceased political theorist named Stephen Taubes. Soon enough, David disappears, and Todd searches for him, leading to questions of the potential threads of violence running through Taubes’ controversial writing. On its surface, the setup of the film has much in common with other

low/no budget indies—a focus on white hipster twentysomethings, a meandering plot, tasteful obscurity. The fact that its working title was The Millennials may give you an idea of what you’re in for.

But to focus solely on the film’s familiar content would be deceptive, because the story is told with an uncharacteristic formal rigor reminiscent of austere European art films of yesteryear.

On the film’s Kickstarter page, D’Ambrose cites Antonioni, Bresson, Straub-Huillet, Duras, Resnais, and Robbe-Grillet, among others. The Devil, Probably stands out as the heaviest influence and closest analogue. Like the impressive lineup of filmmakers he cites, D’Ambrose exerts precise control over his framing, favors silence and contemplation over conversation or exposition, and consciously draws attention to the interplay between text and images. Much of the movie consists of close-ups of handwriting, periodicals, maps, and other mass-produced images, typified by the postcard that adorns the film’s poster. Fake newspaper 35

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and magazine articles from the likes of The New York Times and The New Yorker about Stephen Taubes were so expertly done that I was convinced he was a real person before a post-film Google informed me otherwise. The film’s discourse on images is theoretical, obscure, and often alienating, as prickly as it is occasionally playfully ironic.

Whether the film reaches the high marks it has set itself against is a question I can’t answer with confidence. D’Ambrose’s hyper-stylized choices are a double-edged sword; every potentially positive aspect carries with it a danger of preposterous self-seriousness. The flat acting style, for example, may very well be consciously alienating in a Brechtian sense, but it sometimes just comes off as bad. The more aggressive stylistic flourishes, like cuts to green instead of black, or conversations framed with characters against primary-colored backdrops and the unexpected intrusion of classical music, toe the line between profound and pretentious, which could also be said of the film as a whole. It raises the question of the line between inspiration and imitation, and I can’t decide if D’Ambrose’s material fully justifies his anachronistic formal pastiche.

On the one hand, I’m a fan of all the filmmakers D’Am36

brose draws inspiration from, and even spotted some eerie similarities with a film I’ve been making for the last six months (perhaps the source of some of my discomfort with the fine line between artistry and fraud). On the other, the film’s self-consciousness felt more like an ironic intellectual defense than an invitation to engage. But, for what it’s worth, D’Ambrose has a genuine vision, and I’m curious enough to keep an eye out for whatever he comes up with next.

center worker scams old women into withdrawing large sums from their bank accounts and giving her the money—I fell asleep for a good portion of its runtime.

What I saw felt like the austere satire of Lanthimos applied to an affluent world of dehumanized technology and commerce, but none of the jokes seemed to land for me or anyone else in the room. I managed to come to full consciousness for the end of the film, which left me as unsatisfied as I was at the beginning. While I can’t offer any objective judgment Those Who Are Fine on the film considering that I was asleep for about half of it, it didn’t

I have to admit that my seem like I had missed much; afredeye-induced sleep deprivation ter the credits a disgruntled critic overcame me on this one. After nearby bitterly declared it “lousy.” witnessing this seemingly darkly deadpan Swiss film’s setup—a call The Nothing Factory

This Portuguese “neorealist musical” was the standout film I saw at New Directors/ New Films, by far. Based on true events, The Nothing Factory is a stitched-together document of the death throes of capitalism, telling the story of a group of workers who occupy their factory in retaliation when the bosses intentionally try to shut it down and buy everyone out. It stands out from the rest of the primarily digital slate by being shot on beautifully grainy 16mm, and its director, Pedro Pinho, is a docu-

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a giddy hit of spectacle. It maintains a balanced, rigorous probing of labor and capitalism without ever feeling overly didactic or serious, and filters them through enough genres and tones to keep it interesting throughout. I would watch it again in a heartbeat.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

mentarian turning to fiction for the first time. His roots show in the raw style of the acting (mostly by non-actors) and loosely-flowing editing. It’s also 3 hours long.

Audacious, ambitious, and punk to its core, I think it deserves every minute.

The film goes through so many permutations in plot and style over its lengthy duration that a summary would be impractical. Instead I’ll just say that if a mélange of the proletarian rebellion of Tout va bien, the self-reflexive recession discourse of Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights trilogy, and the vibrant anarchic energy of a good protest song sounds appealing, give it a spin.

Highlights include a Marxist intellectual’s roundtable (featuring Anselm Jappe, and seemingly unscripted), a kickass punk show, and an unexpected musical number that injects the final act with

This debut feature from RaMell Ross made headlines at Sundance, which is refreshing for a film of such quiet ambitions.

Broadly speaking, Hale County This Morning, This Evening is an immersive, expressive documentary (using the term loosely) exploring the daily lives of black Americans in Hale County, Alabama. As the press notes indicate, it’s a region made famous by Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but even without that additional context the film is a great example of the intersection of the formal and political. Cut together from footage taken by Ross over his five years living in Hale County as a basketball coach and photography teacher, the film focuses on the quotidian moments of its subjects’ lives: car rides, basketball games, birthday parties, haircuts, church, hanging out and doing nothing at all. Ross’s depiction of the black experience draws

out the profound, universal, and historical undercurrents lingering beneath the surface of the banal.

The movie is at its strongest in the moments of simple poetry that emerge from Ross’s shallow-focused camera, and there are plenty of them to choose from.

That Apichatpong Weerasethakul served as the creative advisor becomes apparent when the movie lingers in this flow of raw, experiential material, vibrating with a serene energy worthy of the best of the famous Thai auteur. It faltered a bit for me at the times when a precious, non-diegetic score got overly intrusive, imposing an unneeded emotional flavor on scenes that could have stood on their own, along with a few too many time-lapse montages. And the constant return to

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the same subjects throughout the film dilutes some of the power of its larger tapestry of lives—it feels like a mixture of two incompatible styles of documentaries

unhappily mashed together. Still, when it works, it really works, and Hale County remains a powerful experience from a director I’m excited to see more from.

Our House

Our House was probably the biggest disappointment of the festival for me. Directed by Yui Kiyohara, a protégé of the excellent Kiyoshi Kurosawa, this one seemed to have everything going for it. Two seemingly separate stories taking place in the same house, a mysterious and understated supernatural connection, a restrained filmmaking style—sounds like a recipe for 38

success, no? No. Kiyohara’s film starts out on a promising note, with a troupe of young girls at a sleepover dancing to upbeat pop music. After the restrained beauty of Hale County, the vibrancy of this dance sequence had my interest piqued. One of the girls, who turns out to be the protagonist, Seri, is drawn away from the group by a mysterious and unseen force. The scene promises more than the movie delivers, crackling with an energy and enthusiasm that is muffled to a whisper for the rest of the film.

After the introductory vignette, the film proper begins.

Seri lives alone with her mom in a charming old house in a sleepy coastal Japanese town, spending her days in melancholy reflection, missing her father. She seems to possess a certain awareness of some unseen visitors in the house, which introduces the film’s enigmatic parallel plot, spliced in at various lulls in Seri’s story. The second plot is introduced dreamily, as Sana, an amnesiac, encounters the young woman Toko on a yacht in an evocative nighttime scene. Toko takes her in to her home, the same house as before, and the two try to figure out what to do about Sana’s lost memory.

The two plots play out in parallel, the first a low-key family drama, the second a slightly harder-edged tale which has shades of

Mulholland Drive. But Kiyohara treats them both with the same muted style, never allowing any of the interesting tensions to bubble to the too-calm surface. When the parallel stories finally do collide, it’s with a dull thud, neither answering any questions or creating any worth asking. The ending is similarly vague, a frustratingly ambiguous non-resolution that provides no satisfaction. Ultimately, the film is a victim of its own enigmatic mysteriousness, pushing its ascetic style so far that nearly any intrigue or interest is drained away. Its failure is made all the more disappointing by its potential. Hopefully next time, Kiyohara will be able to apply her talent for minimalist precision to a more deserving script.

Nervous Translation

This second film from Shireen Seno tells the story of Yael, an introspective eight-year old Filipino girl who spends her days watching TV and cooking comically small meals in a tiny doll-house kitchen. Offering a look into the daily life of a Filipino family in the 1980s during the Marcos regime, Nervous Translation attempts to use Yael’s childhood perspective to give an impression of the fragmentation and confusion of living in politically and economically uncer-

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tain times. One example of this is provided by Yael’s split family unit. Yael’s father works overseas to provide her and her distant mother Valentina, and his presence in the film is limited to his voice, heard through cassette tapes he sends the two of them.

Yael listens to these tapes compulsively, and records herself over them to feel closer to her dad. The tapes factor into the beginning of the film heavily, and by the fifth time she replayed the same tape Yael’s pathological repetition began to grate. Valentina, likely due to the sultry tapes she and her husband exchange privately, disapproves of Yael listening to the tapes, leading to some low-key mother-daughter drama that fizzles out without much fanfare.

Other plot threads include the visitation of family and friends, including Yael’s uncle, who may or may not be her real father, and Yael’s desire to buy a Japanese pen that she saw in a commercial. The segments with the extended family shine the brightest, thanks to the welcome presence of Sid Lucero as Yael’s uncle. Having enjoyed Lucero’s devastating perfromance in Norte, the End of History, his much friendlier turn here was a nice surprise, and these scenes offer the clearest illustration of the friction between the worlds of adults and children. Less successful is

the lengthy pen subplot, backed by a rather annoying commercial jingle, which dominates the latter part of the film. Meandering and slow, the pen business culminates in a rather silly and unconvincing dream sequence and an anticlimactic journey out of the insular world of the house. The film’s conclusion seems to come out of nowhere, and I left this final screening feeling baffled.

Nervous Translation’s frayed plot threads, though occasionally offering interesting moments, never cohere, and their slackness contributed to an off-kilter pacing that made the 80-minute runtime feel closer to three hours. The potentially interesting themes it touches on—colonialism, labor, family, Filipino identity—are diffused and abstracted by a jittery lack of focus.

This fragmentation may be appropriate to Yael’s perspective, but it doesn’t make for a very compelling watch. I admit my knowledge of Filipino history and film history are both limited, so it’s possible that someone more well-versed in the milieu the film explores could have a richer experience. Personally, I never connected to it, but I was charmed enough by individual elements that I’ll give Shireen Seno’s next film a chance.

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WHEN THE STARS NARRATION IN FAIR

by Jack Warren Why do we outgrow fairy tales? Maybe we stop believing in the good of knights and the magic of witches. Or maybe we witness too many of the world’s evils to think they can be tied up in a wolf to slay, or a tower to climb.

In The Shape of Water (2017), and throughout his filmography, Guillermo Del Toro has another answer: maybe we’re just watching the wrong fairy tales. For 25 years, Del Toro has made films about vampires, ghosts, demons, and other monsters, but they 40

blend their supernatural elements with distinctly adult themes. The Shape of Water is no exception.

And, like many of Del Toro’s films, it is not a story for children.

Del Toro isn’t alone in making films for adults that feel like the stories we heard when we were children. While being far more family friendly than Del Toro’s oeuvre, William Goldman and Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987) utilizes self-awareness to keep adults engaged. It may be an impossible, fantasti-

cal world, but Reiner knows how ridiculous it is, with numerous winks to the audience letting them in on the joke (Buttercup’s “perfect breasts” and Inigo Montoya’s “I want my father back, you son of a bitch!” probably wouldn’t make it into your average Pixar movie, anyway). Whether it be the Rodents of Unusual Size, the “mawwiage ceremony”, or names like Vizzini and Miracle Max, Princess Bride is full of elements that might otherwise seem out of place in a more serious fan-

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GAZE BACK:

YTALES ON SCREEN tasy world, like Middle Earth or Westeros. Rather than being jarring or out of place, these aspects further convince adults that it’s okay to have fun, because it doesn’t expect the viewer to believe the story as “real”. The film is framed as a story told by a wise old narrator to his grandson, who would much rather be watching TV. Played with smarm by Fred Savage, the boy slowly overcomes his aversion to the tropes of the romance fantasy, and the audience goes with him.

Coming out 20 years later, Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust (2007) is far more lurid than Princess Bride, and thus has less work to do to establish its adultness. Although somewhat tamer than the Neil Gaiman book it was adapted from, the film is unabashed about its treatment of sexuality and—to a lesser extent—violence. Stardust begins with the story of the protagonist’s conception, and while we may not see what happens behind the closed caravan doors, the film

makes no bones about what goes on there. Later, we see witches dismember animals, blood spilled from a slit throat, and the numerous gruesome deaths of the various heirs to the throne. Here, the narrator serves to remind viewers that despite the sex and death, they can still expect a happily ever after. Though he only appears at the beginning and end of the film, there are other aspects of the film that perform similar functions to the wise old grandfather of The Princess Bride. Throughout the 41

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middle of Stardust, the narrator is replaced by a growing greek chorus of dead heirs to the throne, who comment on events in the narrative despite never being seen by any of the characters. They coo in response to the lovemaking of Tristan and Iyvane, and desperately trying to warn Lord Primus of the witch’s devious plans, acting as audience surrogates while drawing attention to the ways in which the beats of the fairytale plot affect us as viewers.

But stories don’t need magic or monsters to be fairytales.

While it lacks the castles of Stormhold and Florin, the Florida suburbs are home to TV’s beachside fairytale Jane the Virgin. The show uses the tropes of a telenovela to tell the story of Jane Villanueva, a woman artificially inseminated with the sperm of her boss (and former crush) Rafael Solano. Here the the narrator adds fairytale magic while also pointing it out for laughs.

Every episode begins with the musical voice of Anthony Mendez recounting the events of the series so far--from love affairs, to assassinations, to book deals, to international crime--usually ending with: “Sound just like a telenovela, right?!” This self-awareness allows viewers to enjoy the over-the-top twists and turns of a telenovela without feeling like they’re watching something that 42

might be considered low brow or--god forbid--childish.

In other stories, the narrator lends ambiguity to a story, calling into question just how literally the events of the film are supposed to be interpreted. In Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), the authenticity of Edward’s Bloom’s narrative is constantly being called into question by his son, Will. Will narrates his own story alongside Edward’s, telling a grim, realistic tale of reckoning with his estranged father, while Edward self-mythologizes with tales that grow taller in each re-telling. The two narrations finally coalesce when Edward is dying, and Will tells him the story of a death more in line with the rest of his father’s (presumed) fantastical life. Life as it is experienced is sad, but with Edward’s (and later, Will’s) narration, it becomes a fairy tale.

Life of Pi (2012) further plays with the question of real and unreal, crafting a story on the edge of the unbelievable with a narration to guide viewers through it.

Pi recounts his life story through a retrospective interview, matter-of-factly telling stories of mysterious islands and friendly tigers. It is only at the end of the film, in another interview, that Pi suggests the story he tells may be false. This is done not through narration, but instead in close-up, as he tells two insurance adjusters

that he escaped the boat with crew members instead of animals, that they turned on each other, and that he was forced to kill one of them. Shortly thereafter, the older, narrator Pi returns and refuses to claim that this grimmer, darker version is the “reality”. Like in Big Fish, the world looks brighter when it is filtered through a narrator, and just because it may not be entirely factual doesn’t mean it does not contain truth.

This is also played with in an earlier Del Toro film, Pan’s Labyrinth, in which a young girl, Ofelia, discovers a world of magic after moving to the house of her stepfather, fascist military man Captain Vidal, who is hunting down communists in the woods.

The film may be read one of three ways: a historical drama about the struggles against fascism in Franco-era Spain, a fairytale in which young Ofelia must undergo a series of tests in order to reclaim her crown as princess of another world, or both. The film ends with Ofelia’s death in the mortal world, but the narration insists that this is an illusion—in fact, she “went back to her father’s kingdom…reigned with justice and a kind heart for centuries and that she was loved by all her subjects”. Unlike Big Fish or Life of Pi, Pan’s Labyrinth does less work to reconcile the real with the fantastical, leaving the decision of

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what to believe to the viewer.

Shape of Water has no such ambiguity. It doesn’t contain any of the self-awareness of Princess Bride or Jane the Virgin, and while there is blood and sex aplenty, none of it is played for laughs like it is in Stardust. But it isn’t looking for realism, either. From the opening narration, it’s clear that this is a story about princes and princess that just happens to take place in 1960s Baltimore. It is a fairy tale with none of the caveats, demanding that viewers believe in it not for its verisimilitude, but for its poetry. Or--in more fairy tale terms--for its magic.

No film can make any grown adult become a child again, but fairytale films allow viewers to visit the world of their childhoods like they’re stumbling through a magical wardrobe to Narnia. No one can stay forever, but if done well, a two-hour runtime can feel like a lifetime of magic and adventure. And whether it exists to laugh at what once was wonderful, insist that there can still be magic in the face of sex and violence, or cause the audience to question everything they see, the voice of the narrator guides viewers through a world they thought was lost to them.

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