SCREEN MACHINE | ISSUE 3 | REDEMPTION by Screen Machine

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2012

ISSUE 3

“REDEMPTION”

NOV/DEC 2012

ABOUT THIS ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS on p.1 FROM THE EDITOR on p.2

ESSAYS TEXTUAL PROMISCUITY IS NOT A CRIME by Robbie Fordyce An appreciation of the cinematic experimentation in “Southland Tales.” p.4 LOVE IN ALL ITS HORROR by Brad Nguyen How “Twilight” embraces the danger inherent to love. p.12

MAKING A SPECTACLE OF MONTAGE: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN PICKS UP WHERE THE RUSSIANS LEFT OFF by James R. Douglas On the affective use of montage in Nolan’s oeuvre. p.19 THE TRUE HORROR OF PROMETHEUS by Anders Furze A discussion of anti-humanism in “Prometheus.” p.26

REVIEWS Whitney Monaghan on LORE on p.32 Andrew Gilbert on DREDD on p.34 Elliott Logan on BREAKING BAD on p.37 Louise Sheedy on BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD on p.40 Stephanie Van Schilt on LOOPER on p.43

CONTRIBUTORS James R. Douglas is a Melbourne-based writer, critic and sometimes blogger for Meanjin and Meanland. Find him at @anthroJRD. Robbie Fordyce is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include post-autonomist Marxist media theories, the political usage of computer networks and film theory. Anders Furze recently completed an honours thesis exploring industrial and theoretical perspectives on screenwriting at Monash University. He blogs at film247.tumblr.com. Andrew Gilbert studied film at Columbia College and is currently based in Chicago, working on his Masters in Gender Studies. His favorite film is Robocop. Ruby Hoppen (illustrator) is an artist living in Melbourne. You can find her work at rubyhoppen.tumblr.com. Elliott Logan is a Masters student at the University of Queensland. Whitney Monaghan is Melbourne-based critic currently working on her PhD in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her research examines the figure of the queer girl in contemporary screen culture. Brad Nguyen (editor) is an Honours student at Monash University. His writing has appeared in Senses of Cinema, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Overland, and he blogs at inalldirections.tumblr.com. Louise Sheedy is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne and the President of the Melbourne CinĂŠmathĂ¨que. Luke van Ryn (copy-editor) is working on a PhD on food media at the University of Melbourne. Stephanie Van Schilt is a writer, editor and Kill Your Darlings Online Assistant. This issue of Screen Machine was commissioned with funds from Copyright Agency Limited.

FROM THE EDITOR

ndrew Sarris and Psycho. Cahiers du cinema and the films of Jerry Lewis. More recently, Nicole Brenez and Abel Ferrara. The history of film criticism is littered with such moments when a critic “redeems” a film or a director, unrecognised or disavowed by the majority of the arbiters of “good taste.” What is the significance of this history of critical redemption? It’s that the critic, in what might seem to some paradoxical logic, stands against good taste in their championing of certain films and directors. The idea of “good taste” always assimilates art to the logic of the culture industry; always reduces art to a game of accumulating “cultural capital,” whereas the critic could could care less about creating good little consumers. What interests the critic is the production of radical affects and ideas that

emerges in the encounter of art with its audience. But the critic who, in the name of art, intervenes in the field of good taste always faces a trap; that the film or director they redeem in the eyes of the majority will then become assimilated into the game of cultural capital. A figure like Alfred Hitchcock may be elevated from the position of a guy who makes disreputable genre films to that of genius auteur but only at the price of “Hitchcock” becoming a banal mantra used to assert one’s identity as a culturally enlightened consumer.1

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 On a related note, Jacques Rancière writes in Film Fables (New York: Berg 2006, pp. 10-11): “It is true that today we seem more than willing to rehabilitate a cinema of craftsmen in the face of the impasses of an ‘auteur

! Perhaps this trap is inherent to the idea that critical redemption is about uncovering “hidden genius.”2 This third issue of Screen Machine is an attempt to engage in the practice of critical redemption without falling into this trap. The task of the writers for this issue was to write on films they felt could not be categorised as “good films” but that, nonetheless, had a redeeming quality or feature. The goal was to write positively about these “bad films,” not for the purpose of celebrating trash, but to identify points of possible resistance, those discrete moments when our commodity culture is beautiful in spite of itself. The result is no doubt provocative. Robbie Fordyce redeems Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales for what he describes as its deployment of cinematic “heterotopias”; James

R. Douglas marvels at the more abstract level at which The Dark Knight Rises operates as an example of Eisensteinian montage; Anders Furze writes on the compellingly inhuman quality of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus; and I describe how the mash-up of genres in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 produces a progressive idea of love. This issue will unfortunately not provide you with any cool names to name-drop in the company of the cultural elite. But, hopefully, we will have given you an impression of the viewer’s power to wrest beauty from an industry that generally operates to suppress it. This issue also features several reviews of film and television: Whitney Monaghan looks at the aesthetics of touch in Cate Shortland’s WWII drama Lore; Andrew Gilbert waxes ambivalent on the ideological content of the comic book adaptation Dredd, directed by Pete Travis; Elliott Logan focuses on a “glittering shard” from season 5 of Breaking Bad; Louise Sheedy excoriates the racism of Beasts of the Southern Wild; and Stephanie Van Schilt reflects on the factors causing her inability to engage with Rian Johnson’s time travel thriller Looper. This issue’s illustrations were created by the talented Ruby Hoppen.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! politics’ whose culmination seems to be the aestheticism of publicity campaigns. Nobody needs to be prompted to reiterate Hegel’s diagnosis that the work of the artist who does only what he wants succeeds in showing no more than the image of the artist in general. All we add today is that this image is bound in the end to be confused with the image of a name brand on a product.” 2 Not to mention that critical redemption as the “uncovering of hidden genius” is oxymoronic. If the “bad” film/director is IN REALITY a “good” film/director, then the notion of redemption is redundant – there was never any original sin for which the film/director needs redeeming.

—Brad Nguyen, Editor

Robbie Fordyce

TEXTUAL PROMISCUITY IS NOT A CRIME An appreciation of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Southland Talesâ&#x20AC;? for its sequences of cinematic experimentation, regardless of narrative incoherence.

outhland Tales is a film riddled with heterotopias. By producing unusual filmic spaces, out of joint with the general expectations of Hollywood cinema, Southland Tales develops both its primary weaknesses, but also its greatest experiments in film-making. It is a film that denies its own status as a film in order to engage with other

genres and media: videogames, comic books, theatre, poster art, soap operas, music video, home video, film noir, pornography, documentary, and celebrity journalism. It is a film that engages in the most motley assortment of B-list actors, who seem strangely out-of-place in their roles, but also completely within their element as television

character actors. It makes little sense as either the narrative science fiction movie that it pretends to be, nor as the acceptably antagonistic or psychological artwork that we might expect from the director of Donnie Darko (2001). If it is to have a critical capacity redeemed from its frames, then Southland Tales finds its strength in its ability to produce questions as to what “orthodox experimentation” might be, and contains its pleasures for the viewer in passing over and through the assemblage of this motley, mange-ridden narrative, rather than dwelling on the content and the meaning of the individual sequences. The first step to exhuming the redeeming qualities of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is to acknowledge the total accuracy of all criticism of the film’s narrative; the second step is not to mistake this essay’s goal as an attempt to find a masochistic joy in the truly bad elements of the film. The issue, then, is to extract the enjoyable elements without consigning the piece as a whole to the dustbin of disappointments. In order to appreciate Southland Tales it is worth quickly detailing the extent to which the film was totally excoriated by many film critics; after all, it is only from the absolute nadir of criticism that we can look up and appreciate the faint glow of sunlight. It may be possible to consider being booed at Cannes to be a rite of passage, but this was only one of the many

critical frames that descended from aesthetic distaste to ad hominem vitriol. While the New York Times presented a favourable review,1 much of the remaining criticism is highly unfavourable. Empire’s Damon Wise after watching the prerelease cut classed it as an immediate career ender for Kelly, and described the theatrical release as “both too much and too little” mainly in reference to the narrative, with the political critique of the US wars in the middle east as “clumsy and a bit redundant.”2 Roger Ebert’s own review refers to Kelly’s work as having “no sympathy at all for an audience unable to understand his plot.”3 At the most extreme comes Lou Lumenick, stating: “If a more incoherent and self-indulgent movie has been released so far this century, I'm not aware of it.”4 Perhaps we can take something from this. The simplest of responses to this would be to say that Southland Tales was designed to operate as a self-reflexive exposure of orthodox Hollywood

1 Manohla Dargis, "Apocalypse Soon: A Mushroom Cloud Doesn’t Stall 2008 Electioneering," New York Times, 14 November 2007. 2 Damon Wise, "Southland Tales" (review), Empire. 3 Roger Ebert, "Southland Tales" (review), Chicago Sun-Times, 16 November 2007. 4 Lou Lumenick, "Let's not do the timewarp," New York Post, 14 November 2007.

cinema as a generally selfindulgent exercise, and that Lumenick "doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get it," but I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think that this is a particularly meritorious means of addressing the film. Such acts of prescriptive intentionality are seldom useful in film criticism. The goal to watching a film for critical aesthetic purposes cannot simply be a case of pure pessimism. In other modes of criticism, certainly: let us break apart the economic or gendered political contents of any film! But when aesthetics are concerned, pessimism only stifles creative experimentation. Coincidences that point to a new shift in aesthetic delights are all too easily prevented from emerging under the gaze of strikingly dogmatic film reviewers like Roger Ebert. We should seek to undermine the approaches of such reviewers and champion new developments - intentional or otherwise. Finding the gems within Southland Tales requires us, as viewers, to accept that the narrative is barely comprehensible and delivered in strangely extra-diegetic moments where characters debate their own purpose in the film. There are two developments that Southland Tales provides cinema viewers: one is the function of the bad narrative, the second is the complications of viewer expectations of celebrity and genre.

confusing storyline, which, in its incomprehensibility, pushes the aesthetic considerations that are most rewarding to the surface. Soap opera stories of long-lost twins, missing husbands, amnesia, multiple identity disorder, religious overtones, changing career paths, changing frames of reference and satirical commentaries forced into play combine to produce a mire of metastable plots and subplots. Included into this witchesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; brew is the sci-fi staple of multiple characters engaging in timetravel, which totally upsets any reliability of the previous dramatic elements. On top of this is a layer of untrustworthy narration, extra-textual plot development, and multiplynested frame narratives which do nothing to help the film to make any overall sense in the long run. Finally, the film starts in act four! Three whole chapters of explanation have already been developed in a series of comic books. This confusion has not prevented various dedicated denizens of the richardkellyfans.com forums (not a real website) from redeeming a narrative from this mess. After Kelly had already cut his teeth on a complex but well-developed non-linear time travel narrative in Donnie Darko, he should have been able to effectively render the time travel in a comprehensible manner in Southland Tales. The complexity that the various narrative tricks provide are at total odds with the

he central site for criticism of Southland Tales is the

simplicity of the underlying narratives themselves, for instance the conspiracy theory subplot; a conspiracy theory that is so obtuse and simplistic that all it amounts to is a monolithic corporation’s control of governments and global energy resources that is denied by no character in the film. Why, why, why, why, why induce such a stupid and insipid set of conflicting storytelling devices? Is there a more trite establishment of a character than the “Hello, I have amnesia” routine? Maybe there is, and it’s to be found in the character of Ronald/Roland who is his own twin. The schizophrenic politics of the militant feminist neo-Marxists are just a vague excuse for elements of a conspiracy theory genre. But that’s just it. The narrative as a whole is an excuse, a distraction, and a necessary basis for experimentations in genre and acting that are worthwhile and enjoyable. The claim isn’t that there is no narrative, that the narrative is anything other than conventional, nor that the film does not provide anything to be unpacked, but rather that (the) film’s most interesting creative decisions become much more apparent when the narrative is considered as a ruse, to be ignored and nothing else. All the elements of instability that the critics claim to apply to Southland Tales operate to destabilize the viewer’s ability to tell what it is that they’re actually observing in terms of a

storyline, and instead encourages the viewer to focus on the immediate.

o, what enjoyments can we have in the immediate then? Before discussing this, I’ll return to the idea of the heterotopia. The idea of the heterotopia stems from medical discourse, and describes a section of the body that is out of place within an organism. We can think to the news reports of lambs with two heads, or dolphins born with an additional set of flippers over their vestigial rear legs, in order to understand the most literal representations of biological heterotopias. Perhaps a more uncomfortable idea is the emergence of teeth in organs with developmental differences. It is Michel Foucault who takes this idea and turns it into a useful concept outside of medical discourse.5 We can think of a heterotopia as not solely a biological organ, but a social one. A heterotopia then becomes a social space designated for a specific purpose or role, which engages in the specifics of this role in a utopian fashion; that is to say, a space that serves a purpose, and serves only that particular purpose. The particular idea emerges when Foucault attempts to deal with the problem

5 Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," 1967. Published in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984.

of the utopia, and proposes that, instead of utopian perfect spaces, humanity produces spaces that are utopian for particular purposes: these are the heterotopias outside social time and space. The heterotopia is a slice through society that is found in the cemetery, as a perfect means of dealing with the dead, or in the honeymoon, as a perfect means outside society to deal with the ritualized loss of virginity. Museums, schools, libraries, zoos, and all manner of other specialized spaces are different types of heterotopia designed to suspend the normal operations of social time or space in order to achieve some specific task, such as the enclosure of children or animals, or the storage and display of cultural objects outside of their conditions of production. The list could go on and on, but the issue of the heterotopia as a specific site for the development of a particular task is necessary in order to appreciate Southland Tales in the way that I believe it should be appreciated. Southland Tales is a journey across cinematic heterotopias. The metastable narrative allows Kelly to cut diagonally across genres, media, and aesthetics in an exploratory fashion. If one attempts to follow these changes expecting stability then what emerges from this is a terrible cacophony of loud mise en scène and frustrated viewer expectations that is not dissimilar to attempting to watch someone else’s evening spent television

channel switching. Think instead of Canterbury Tales, or 1001 Arabian Nights, or If on a winter’s night a traveller — grand narrative cohesion is far less important to the readers than the significance of the individual stories. The radical nature of this cut through filmic genres is hidden by the familiarity with both the actors—wrestling’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Buffy’s Sarah Michelle Gellar, pop musician Justin Timberlake, and so on—and the familiarity with high-gloss/bad-plot science fiction film. If this cut across cinema is not enough to appreciate on its own for the audacity of this move in such a high-budget film, then perhaps we can reconcile an appreciation of the individual filmic moments in the manner of an assemblage of cinematic experimentation. There are so many examples to choose for discussing Southland Tales and its relationship to satire and film criticism, due to the fact the film consists almost totally of barely connected vignettes, but we should perhaps address a few of the most interesting. The first heterotopia I wish to highlight is the music video sequence involving Justin Timberlake lip-syncing The Killers’ “All These Things That I've Done” at the midpoint of the film. It is a dance sequence shot in lush long-shots that focuses on a direct address to the camera by Timberlake’s character, Private Pilot Abilene. The scene functions solely within the genre of music

Timberlake’s regular celebrity status finds its sarcastic and farcical representation in his performance as the violent and crude Pilot Abilene. video, and its purpose is barely narratively excused as a drug experience, but it’s totally unclear as to whose. Music videos are where Timberlake is most at home in his screen presence as a celebrity, but his role in this piece within Southland Tales is at odds with his star persona as a pop musician. The clip confounds a directly diegetic or non-diegetic origin for the vocals, as Abilene switches between singing, drinking, and mute stares at the camera and his surroundings, without the vocals of the song ever ceasing. Out of nowhere a crew of white-blonde nurses appear, and centralize Abilene at the focus of the stage, and yet, Abilene only seems vaguely aware of them. More content to stumble drunkenly through the set, pouring beer and women everywhere, the confusion of this three minute piece with regards to its genre and narrative motivations places Timberlake, not Abilene, as the critical aspect

for examination. So far as this is concerned, Timberlake’s star persona is addressed from a totally new angle. Covered in facial scars, only barely cognizant of his surrounds, Timberlake’s performance as a drug-addled war veteran, incapable of walking straight, let alone able to perform his usual complex dance routines, Timberlake’s regular celebrity status finds its sarcastic and farcical representation in his performance as the violent and crude Pilot Abilene. Replacing his usual metrosexual class stylings with a boorish military jockishness, the idea of “Timberlake” as a star is recast at the site where it is at its strongest. The threshold between Abilene/Timberlake, presentation/representation, diegetic/non-diegetic is doubled once more, as Timberlake is the narrator for Southland Tales itself. In his role as narrator he retains a level of clarity about geopolitical events, and the beginnings of

World War 3, with his lucidity placing him external to the role of Abilene, but still implicated totally within the star persona of Justin Timberlake. This scene is totally narratively isolated from all the other scenes in the film, pays homage to concerns that are entirely external to the film, and engages in direct criticism of a number of cultural objects: star persona, pop music, masculine heterosexual objectification of women, and the drug-addled veterans of US military engagement. The second heterotopia that is worth considering is the filming of the real-fake-murders of Dion Element and Dream. Dion Element is played by Wood Harris, probably best known as Avon Barksdale from HBO’s The Wire, whereas Dream is played by Amy Poehler - better known for her comedic roles, particularly as Leslie Knope in NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Dream and Dion are part of a plot to fake an extra-judicial killing by a police officer. Also implicated in the plot are a fake police officer Ronald Taverner (played by Seann William Scott), and action movie star Boxer Santaros (played by action movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). Santaros is engaging in his first role as director, and innocently joins Taverner as a cameraman in a reference to the documentary police television shows such as COPS. Dion and Dream are outfitted with extensive and unconvincing facial prosthetics,

fake teeth, blood packs, and squibs, and engage in the most obtusely under-prepared improvisation of a domestic argument. “Ooooohhhh! I fucking hate you! You don’t marry a ho you can’t make a ho a housewife! Aaaarrrgh!” Combined with ineffectual air punches and puerile tantrums, the acting of bad acting is an excellent expression of Roland Barthes’ idea of “the third meaning” of the image. After Taverner and Santaros are called to the disturbance at the house, the film starts alternating between a handicam video aesthetic complete with markers of authenticity such as timestamp and shaky camera operation - and a standard steadicam. Fog starts to creep across the set, and the film engages in an ethereal slowmo panning shot of the actors emerging from the house’s boundary hedge in a manner more reminiscent of a jungle than a southern Californian garden. This scene reaches its climax when a real police officer arrives at the disturbance (we’ll ignore for now the fact that he is later revealed to be a fake as well). In response to a terrible free verse poem from Dream (”My vagina will not be denied a vote in your subjective election - that’s an original poem…by Dream!”), police brutality comes to the fore, and Santaros films this unexpected officer executing Dion and Dream at close range (”Dream over”). Hearing the gunshots from offscreen, a film

technician queues the squabs in Dion and Dream’s blood packs, which explode several seconds after the shots have been fired. The murderous police officer coolly grabs the camera and turns it on Santaros and tells him to leave. “You’re not really here,” he tells Taverner, who then flees the scene, before the film dives into the fog. In the non-place of the fog, a traumatized and fingertapping Santaros loses his selfidentity and takes on the role Jericho Kane—a character from his film script—before the scene then cuts to an advertisement of two cars copulating. As is highly apparent, this nesting of multiple truths within truths is needlessly complex and serves little narrative purpose other than to render much of the earlier parts of the film redundant in terms of plot progression. Kelly’s ability to shift registers within the script is probably at its most apparent at this point in the film, and does the greatest amount of work to undermine any particular plot progression by having multiple levels of truth confound each other. These elements alone are not what this scene provides for film criticism; rather, it is the immediacy of filmic truth. None of these realities can be granted supremacy over the others, and even once some semblance of "what really happened" starts to become apparent later in the film, the actual significance of the scene has been dropped. Only the immediacy of the mise-en-

scène can be treated as real. For Kelly to take Harris and Johnson, who are so overcoded in their masculinity in other texts, and extract such interestingly nervous and uncomfortable performances from them is a wondrous thing. The actors thrust a punctum through the surface of the film, and we can no longer consider the narrative to be the primary site of appreciation. These heterotopias point to particular sites where a variety of immediate, surface-based exercises in filmmaking can be appreciated, primarily in terms of the mise-en-scène. Perhaps this isn’t an act of experimentation worthy of a manifesto on the level of the Dogme 95 movement, but it at least makes a cut through a form of experimentation in cinema that needs to be made more often. I agree that these examples I have chosen could be addressed as critical political commentary on the US military or the ineffectual nature of many leftist political organizations, but I believe that this is not the ideal manner to address the film as a whole. Yes, the narrative is bad, but it doesn’t matter. Kelly cuts to the core of character actors and generic styles in order to expose their radical potential for experimentation, and Southland Tales should be appreciated for this reason. Southland Tales, as suggested by its name, is not a story, but many stories, many moments, and all should be independently examined beyond their relationship to each other.

Brad Nguyen

LOVE IN ALL ITS HORROR “Twilight” embraces the danger inherent to love.

ora Ephron once made a distinction between two traditions of romantic comedies: The Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition. In the former, external forces keep the lovers from getting together. In the latter, the only obstacle keeping them apart is the wouldbe lovers’ neuroses. In this sense, When Harry Met Sally (for which Nora Ephron wrote the screenplay) is the paradigmatic Jewish romance: In the film, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are not able to declare their love for each other until twelve years after they first meet, well into the second

half of the film, and the only thing keeping them apart for so long is their differing ideas about life and the anxiety of reconciling these ideas with reality. If When Harry Met Sally seemed somewhat revolutionary when it was released in 1989, then at this popcultural moment it appears that the Jewish romance has become the dominant form. In Sex and the City, for example, there is nothing really that prevents Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie from being with Chris Noth’s Mr. Big except for her constant wrestling with her sense of self, who she wants to be and what values she wishes to live

by.1 The Twilight Saga therefore appears as an anachronism in our cultural moment. The two teenagers cement their love at the very beginning of the first film (there are five films in the series) through a simple shot-reverse shot exchange of glances, that most crude of cinematic devices used for indicating love, and for the following three films,2 this love is never put in question. Every serious threat to the couple—the disapproving father, the jealous alpha male, the strict authorities—is external. There is an implied ethical dimension to the Christian/Jewish opposition – the move from the Christian formula of Romeo and Juliet to the Jewish formula of Annie Hall is meant to be the move from the unrealistic, idealised portrayal of the romantic couple to the more realistic form that shows people with all their complex psychology and all the self-sabotaging behaviour that prevents healthy, functional romantic relations. But what if, in fact, the opposite is true? What if the myth of the

perfect romantic couple finds its true idealisation in the Jewish form of the romance? Take Bridesmaids, the breakaway hit of last year – its protagonist, Annie, begins an affair with the affable policeman Nathan, but this all falls apart when Annie angrily rejects Nathan for encouraging Annie to follow her dream of running a bakery business. In the tradition of the Jewish romance, the problem here is Annie’s neurosis: She rejects Nathan in order to avoid the trauma of remembering losing her first business. Annie, of course, overcomes her neurosis and ends up happily in love, but pay attention to the depiction of Nathan: He is witty, caring, selfeffacing and good-looking in a harmless teddybear manner. His only flaw is that he is too caring! He is essentially the perfect sensitive new age guy; a fantasy figure to help Annie get her life back on track.3 The emphasis on internal obstacles becomes a way to keep the myth of ideal love alive. The fantasy sustained by the Jewish romance is that once you resolve all your inner neuroses and anxieties, you will be free to enter into a normal, perfect romantic coupling with

Other examples: In Clueless (1995), Alicia Silverstone can only properly fall in love with Paul Rudd after giving herself a “makeover” of the soul. In Girls (2012), Lena Dunham can’t properly accept the love of Adam Driver because of deeply-ingrained feelings of self-loathing. The list goes on. 2 At the time of writing, I have not been able to see the last film in the series.

3 This is a gender-reversed version of what has come to be known as the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” a term coined by Nathan Rabin after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown. See Nathan Rabin, “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown,” The A.V. Club, 25 January 2007.

the man of your dreams. What is the romantic vision of The Twilight Saga? Its central genius lies in its marriage of the horror and romance genres: Kristen Stewart’s Bella is a typical teenager in love but the object of her affection is a vampire, Edward, whose kin are locked in an eternal battle with werewolves. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the interest lies in the interplay of the realistic and the fantastic. The first Twilight film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, is a study in the ordinary teenage rituals of life in Forks as much as it is a supernatural teen melodrama. Scenes of grisly encounters with vampires sit side by side with dead time scenes of girls trying on dresses before their prom night or funny, mundane discussions between teenagers in the high school cafeteria. While the earthy, social-realist aesthetic of Catherine Hardwicke’s entry has slowly disappeared in the subsequent entries in favour of the more recognisable, montageheavy slickness typical of Hollywood’s fantasy epics, the emphasis on the cycle of ordinary human experience remains: Over the course of the series Bella falls in love, Bella gets married and Bella has a child. Forget the nonsense in the films about the ancient battle between vampires and werewolves or the sinister vampire authority known as the Voltari – what is essential in The Twilight Saga is the drama of the everyday. The films even have

Ozu-esque titles that link the dramas of the narrative to the passing of the seasons: New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn.4 The question is: What is the function of the horror element in relation to this element of ordinariness? In Buffy, the horror functions fairly conventionally: the ghoul is a metaphor for something that threatens to upset the ordinary course of things (the overbearing mother who lives vicariously through her daughter, the teacher who seduces students, Internet predators, school bullying). It is Buffy’s function to “slay” these threats to ordinary life and return Sunnydale to a state of equilibrium. In Twilight, the horror functions differently. Though Edward warns Bella that his vampire-passion might cause him to destroy her, she nevertheless pursues him. When she becomes pregnant to a halfvampire baby that threatens to crush her body from within, she stubbornly refuses an abortion despite the protests of her family. The horror is not an external threat to Bella’s existence; it is an inherent part of her romantic utopia.5

4 I’m referring, of course, to titles such as Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960) and The End of Summer (1961). 5 The contrast between Buffy and Twilight also puts lie to the claim that Twilight is an anti-sex phenomenon. Buffy has sex with Angel, a vampire

To be clear, this has nothing to do with masochism. Rather, what we are talking about is the assumption of risk by the person who pursues their passion. In his book In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou offers two images of love: The first is the “security state” image of love propagated in the mass media. Here, the pursuit of love is envisaged as a rational process in which the would-be lover insures herself against any intrusion that threatens her identity. Internet dating services are an example of such processes. The illusory promise is that one can sort through hundreds of profiles evaluating important statistical data (measurements, hobbies, music taste, etc.) and that through this process one can participate in dating and find love without having to deal with the problem of difference. This is an essentially narcissistic and impossible fantasy in which the function of the lover’s partner is to perfectly complement all the

elements that constitute an individual’s identity. The other image of love, which Badiou passionately defends, is one that relinquishes the demands of identity: Now, when the logic of identity wins the day, love is under threat. The way it is attracted to difference, its social dimension, and its wild, eventually violent side are under threat . . . The identity cult of repetition must be challenged by love of what is different, is unique, is unrepeatable, unstable and foreign.6

Love in practice and as it is to be defended is always marked by a minimum level of risk, the danger of losing one’s self. To the extent that the penultimate film in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn – Part 1, is alive to this dark underside to love, it must be defended as a bold piece of popular art. BDP1 benefits from the fact that its director is Bill Condon who is no stranger to the horror genre. He started his directing career with the supernatural Southern Gothic Sister, Sister (1987); contributed the second entry in the Candyman series, Farewell to the Flesh (1995); and presented with Gods and Monsters (1998) an account of the last days of James Whale, director of such classic Universal Horror films as

cursed with a soul, but because this event causes Angel to fully assume his vampire side and become the evil "Angelus," the lesson learned is that Buffy and Angel should never have sex again. Twilight, on the other hand, is all about the erotics of waiting – the series builds slowly and inevitably to the point of Bella and Edward having sex and when it does happen it is dangerous, subversive and guilt-free. Buffy is structurally barred from enjoying sex while Bella will presumably fuck Edward for eternity.

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, London: Serpent’s Tail 2012.

Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Although Condon is commonly discussed as a figure that belongs to the world of “prestige films” such as Dreamgirls (2006), what really qualifies him to direct a Twilight film is his ongoing interest in those cinematic genres that present the body in extremis.7 This goes even for more respectable fare such as Kinsey (2004), a biography of a pioneer of scientific research into the expanses of human sexuality. The story of BDP1 is incredibly rich with possibilities for body horror in the vein of a David Cronenberg film: Bella marries the vampire Edward and they consummate their marriage on an island in Brazil. Although it is assumed that vampires cannot procreate, Bella falls pregnant and the entity that rapidly grows inside her has severe effects on her own body. What is remarkable, especially given Twilight’s status as a mainstream blockbuster franchise, is how committed Condon is to realising the potential for horror in this scenario. After Bella and Edward’s first night of amorous abandon, she awakens with bruises over her body. The film lingers as she inspects the bruises

that she didn’t know existed until Edward pointed them out. Edward is wracked with guilt but Bella is not having a bar of his interpretation of what happened the previous night: “You knew this was going to be tricky, right? I think we did amazing. I mean, it was amazing for me.” When Bella falls pregnant, Edward’s family argue over what exactly is inside Bella—a foetus, a baby or something else—and when Edward does some research on the Internet, the gallery of ghoulish imagery provides no comfort. Whatever it is, it is hurting Bella – the doctor informs her that the entity is crushing her bones from the inside and sapping all the nutrients from her body. When she reveals her swollen belly, it is bruised all over from the strain of the rapid pregnancy and in one particularly disturbing scene as Bella undresses to enter the bath, her gaunt, drained, emaciated body is displayed for the camera. A Cronenberg version of BDP1 would probably have tipped the scales more towards the horror of the situation, but while the horror is certainly there on the surface of the film, it is emotionally balanced out by the soundtrack – a parade of MOR indie rock/adult contemporary flavours of the month. While I don’t necessarily share any enthusiasm for the artists that feature on the soundtrack, the effect of the songs in the context of the film is quite striking. For example, when Bella first discovers she is pregnant

Film scholars such as Carol Clover and Linda Williams refer to “body genres,” genres that effect the human body such as horror, porn, comedies and melodramas.

“You knew this was going to be tricky, right?” during her honeymoon, feeling something moving inside her belly, and uncertainly inspects herself in the mirror alone, the impending sense of doom is accompanied by Imperial Mammoth’s “Requiem on Water,” a ballad sung in whispered duet to plaintive guitars. This is not an ironic juxtaposition as in Reservoir Dogs where Mr. Blonde cuts off the policeman’s ear to the upbeat sounds of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.” A juxtaposition by definition assumes the existence of opposites. But in BDP1, the horror of the situation is not juxtaposed to the romance of Imperial Mammoth’s ballad. Rather, what Twilight does is constantly bring the mood of the love story into a liminal space between romance and horror. Love is everything but it is not ideal. Rather, love always exists within a zone of undecidability between pleasure and death. This logic comes to a head in BDP1 in the film’s epic birth scene. It is a tortuous sequence shown almost exclusively through close-ups of Bella’s eyes and point-of-view shots from Bella’s

perspective: Her belly convulses at the baby-thing’s writhing movements. They inject her with morphine but there’s no time for the morphine to spread. They slice her belly open. She screams. One of the vampires gets excited at the sight of blood but is quickly subdued. They need to get the baby-thing out, but the scalpel is useless against the vampire-strength amniotic sac, so Edward bites his way through the amniotic sac and pulls the baby-thing out. Blood everywhere. Suddenly the thudding score drops to some tender strings and a piano. It’s a beautiful girl… Isn’t this wonderfully overblown scene only a slight exaggeration of what happens in delivery rooms everyday? The birth of a baby is always a horrific trauma as much as it is an event of miraculous beauty. There is no need to decide. One is immanent to the other. The Twilight franchise has garnered much criticism for its supposed anti-feminism: David Cox of the Guardian criticises the Bella character for her devotion to the man she loves rather than pursuing a career like a good modern girl;8 Leonard Sax of the Washington Post is concerned that Bella’s being pregnant prevents her from assuming more assertive, masculine

8 David Cox, “Twilight: the franchise that ate feminism,” The Guardian, 12 July 2010.

roles;99Carmen D. Siering and Katherine Spillar scold Bella in Ms. Magazine for not having sex with Jacob when Edward leaves her like a true sexuallyemancipated woman;10 and Richard Lawson in The Atlantic Wire decries the “anti-choice themes” of a story in which Bella chooses not to abort her baby thereby risking her life for the life of her child.11 But should we accept the peculiar articulation of feminism in whose name these critiques are made? Or should we not, rather, articulate a feminism that, contra David Cox, prizes the relations of love over the relations of capital; a feminism that, contra Leonard Sax, does not assert traditionally “masculine” behaviour as the benchmark of emancipation; a feminism that, contra Carmen D. Siering and Katherine Spillar, embraces emotional involvement in love and the consequences thereof rather than the dispassionate fulfilment of one’s lust; and that, contra Richard Lawson, can acknowledge the virtue of selfsacrifice. In short we must try to articulate a feminism that accepts the challenge of love and the

attendant risks it poses. Perhaps Twilight is an iteration of this feminism. Perhaps we should take a note from Judith Butler who beautifully writes, “One knows love somehow only when all one’s ideas are destroyed, and this becoming unhinged from what one knows is the paradigmatic sign of love.”12 When the oldfashioned fairytales told us, “And they lived happily ever after”, this signalled the end of the story and the end of narrative conflict thus invoking the fantasy of a perfect world in which lovers exist in pure harmony. Twilight is the antidote to this fantasy. It shows us that “happily ever after” always contains its own immanent dramas and conflicts. These eternal dramas are the truth of love, and yet love remains worth pursuing. The image of Bella’s emaciated body may not provide comfort to those cultural commentators who demand positive representations of women as empowered figures. Here, they claim, is yet another female martyr, and perhaps they are right. But if Bella is a martyr for anything, it is ultimately for her own passions.

Leonard Sax, “Twilight Sinks Its Teeth Into Feminism,” The Washington Post, 2008. 10 Carmen D. Siering and Katherine Spillar, “New Moon, Same Old Sexist Story,” Ms. Magazine, Fall 2009. 11 Richard Lawson, “Love, Lust, and Loss in Paradise,” The Atlantic Wire, 18 November 2011.

Judith Butler, “Doubting Love,” in Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation From People Who Know a Thing or Two, ed. James L. Harmon, New York: Simon & Schuster 2002.

James R. Douglas

MAKING A SPECTACLE OF MONTAGE: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN PICKS UP WHERE THE RUSSIANS LEFT OFF Christopher Nolan’s films evince a fascination with the affective capabilities of montage.

Has there ever been another great art so persistently misapprehended? I refer not, of course, to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises—which is by no measure great art, and by some measures bad art—but to the cinema itself. And I avoid the term misunderstood deliberately. It’s not that the cinema has not been understood, in some fashion; it’s that the terms on which it is grasped are so often the ones of least significance. So much of the contemporary dialogue around cinema—and especially around blockbuster events, like The Dark Knight Rises—is tuned to the wrong frequency.

An audience may ask any number of questions to decide the worth of a film. Is the narrative coherent? Are the characters believable? Do I find its politics acceptable? But a great deal of contemporary critical discourse tends to neglect those questions most fundamental to apprehending film; like, is this really cinema? Does this film instantiate, in some notable and compelling way, the qualities of cinema as art? The issue here is not one of enjoyment, but of understanding the fundamental criteria that delineates cinema as a unique art form. The fact of the matter is: a bad movie can also be great cinema.

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, this year’s blockbuster conclusion to his Batman trilogy, is, in ways both obvious and numerous, a bad movie. It is dramatically inert, visually indecipherable, and deeply malformed on the level of narrative. But it is all these things in a manner that is entirely consistent with the qualities, both good and bad, of Nolan’s other blockbuster productions. And this makes it valuable. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has a handy summary of Nolan’s faults. The most common complaints about Nolan’s films, he writes in a conversation for Notebook, are that:

moments have the appearance of the director absent-mindedly disregarding the normative ways in which cinema establishes the spatial and temporal conditions of a scene. The film’s central villain, Bane, is shot away off-screen by Catwoman in a flurry of action occurring over a matter of seconds, and then disappears from the rest of the film. Where did he land? What is his condition? A typical narrative approach would be to visually establish the final resting place and fate of a film’s villain— characters might even discuss their satisfaction with the outcome—giving the audience the opportunity to soak up this narrative turn. Instead, Bane’s absence from the screen registers as a matter of some confusion. The politics are equally tangled. Bane instigates an Occupy Wall Street-style uprising against Gotham’s one percent, and the film’s hero is an eccentric billionaire who dresses up in order to mete out beatings to the proles. Nolan throws in these visual and thematic resonances with contemporary politics, but fails to make anything coherent out of them. The plot presents difficulty as well. Taking the time to map out the logic of Bane and his mistress Talia Al Ghul’s plot against Gotham is beyond my means. I suspect it is impossible. Hold an entire city hostage for six months, and then blow it up anyway? Disguise yourself in order to have sex with the man you have sworn vengeance on, to

(1) they have a shoddy grasp of space and time, despite always being centered around chronologies and intercut action; (2) they use political issues and reference-points and take contradictory stances on them; and (3) most of them use personal traumas and public tragedies as plot points, but have no sense of the emotional.1

The Dark Knight Rises is guilty of all three. Nolan’s grasp on space and time in this film is just as shoddy as ever. Many

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, "The Big Murk: A Conversation Around Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises," Notebook, 27 July 2012. The second point here, I tend to feel, is an issue with Nolan's plotting more generally. He is apt to feed his audience contradictory narrative information.

no apparent end? Imprison that man in an unsupervised prison half a world away, so he can watch his city’s downfall on a shoddy TV? Make of all this what you will. The emotional content is similarly confused. Bruce Wayne fakes his own death—devastating his oldest companion, Alfred— specifically in order to expose that ruse to Alfred months later but also deliberately never acknowledge him. No one remotely sensible would do this ever, and so it is difficult for a remotely sensible person to be emotionally satisfied. The logic of all this presents us with difficulties because it is not the logic of the classical narrative film, but rather—as I shall assert—it is the logic of montage, and montage is the essence of cinema. The question of how to define cinema is found in its most productive form—for me at least—in the theoretical tête-àtête between André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein. The contest, here, is at heart an argument about which formal moves express the essential character of cinema. For Bazin, essential cinema is found when a film has straightforward respect for the unity of space and time in the photographic image.2 The photographic image, so Bazin

contends, shows the thing itself, as no other art has done before. The subject of cinema—be it narrative, or thing— should properly be articulated through steady, lengthy takes, generously wide angles, and long depth of field, allowing the thing to simply exist before the audience, with minimal optical interference. A sequence of shots should serve to elucidate the subject of the image while preserving its consistency in space and time, never contradicting it. Montage, which has as its central capability the juxtaposition and scrambling of the photographic image and the distortion of space and time, is, for Bazin, the anti-cinematic process par excellence. But it is this very same process that Eisenstein holds to be the essential character of film: cinema is literally the "art of juxtapositions."3 The most durable thing in Eisenstein’s theory is his conviction that montage is the quintessential way in which cinema can arouse an audience’s attention and feeling; the method no other art can reproduce. No other art can structure its content with so fine a control of the measurements by which it unfolds itself in front of the audience, with

3 Sergei Eisenstein, "The Montage of Film Attractions," in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell, London: British Film Institute 1998, p. 36.

André Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. H. Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press 1967, p. 46.

so fine a control on the distribution of narrative or thematic information, and the duration of their stay as the object of the audience’s attention. Montage is the equation by which the affect of cinema on its audience is calculated, and it is— or can be, when employed properly—so rigorous and strong, that the audience is thoroughly fertilised by the meaning of the piece, and united in shared experience. David Bordwell refers to this as "ecstasy": "the most exalted experience that art can offer its spectators."4 But, perhaps due to their association with Eisenstein’s Marxist, Soviet milieu (Eisenstein’s statements as to the political significance of certain types of montage now appears to us as rather passé), the "montageist" position is in some ways out of favor in contemporary discourse about cinema, restricted to discussions of the avant-garde, or the obsessions of die-hard cineastes. Whenever I hear a film addressed in terms of the coherence of its plot, or the believability of its characters, of whether X could really happen, or whether Y would really act in such a way—any critical discussion, in short, that concerns itself solely with the ins and outs of the world of the film and its narrative—I know that the spirit of Bazin lives

on. The affective capabilities of montage, now that they have been so effectively colonised by advertising, are more likely to seem to us some sinister tool of influence.

Cross-cutting disparate arenas of narrative action into lengthy montage streams. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, despite the aforementioned ways in which it is a bad film, finally clarified for me Nolan’s central set of formal concerns as a filmmaker, which is the resuscitation of montage as the building block for the audience's experience and enjoyment of spectacle. His major

David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1967, p. 192.

deficiencies as a filmmaker are all explicable, if not forgivable, in light of this larger concern. His three most recent films, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, and The Dark Knight, represent the fullest exploration of this project. Each of these films is formally built on cross-cutting disparate arenas of narrative action into lengthy montage streams. These long montage sequences are both the basis of Nolan’s storytelling generally and, during periods of narrative climax, are a core component of his strategies for fulfilling the blockbuster paradigm’s obligation to spectacle. The final acts of these three films are each played out across three or more locations and feature a diverse range of characters. Nolan aggressively intercuts these disparate strands to generate in the audience the sensation of experiencing a single unified event. But this is not the kind of event which could be captured by the Bazinian photographic image—some discrete event in space and time—rather, it is a narrative climax occurring over an entire territory—a city, a many-tiered dream-world— and it can be articulated only by the method of montage. The climax of The Dark Knight Rises is nothing less than a citywide uprising, with the resources of Batman and his sundry companions arrayed against the forces of Bane and Talia Al Ghul, with a nuclear bomb somewhere

in the middle. Nolan distributes various narrative functions to each character—Batman has to beat up Bane, Jim Gordon has to find the bomb, John Blake has to save a bus full of kids, or whatever—and sets them bouncing around and off each other, advancing his climax along multiple threads and multiple locations. His method is the same in his previous two features. The climax of The Dark Knight has Batman trying to beat up the Joker; while Gordon heads up a SWAT team; while Lucius Fox does something with tracking technology; while Harvey Dent goes on a murderous rampage; while boatloads of citizens decide whether or not to blow each other up; and so on. Nolan’s most extreme version of this climax, in Inception, has Dominick Cobb’s team of dream infiltrators pursuing a diverse range of objectives over three distinct territories—an arctic base, a plush hotel, the streets of LA—which are temporally and spatially nested inside each other. Nolan’s approach is to wind all these strands up tight and then let one spring loose—in Inception, this is Cobb’s final journey to face his deranged dream-wife; in The Dark Knight, this is the face-off between Batman, Gordon and Harvey Dent; in The Dark Knight Rises it is Batman’s final sacrifice over the ocean. He collapses these threads together to form a narrative resolution, but the substance of the climax of these films is in the audience’s

experience of these multiple narrative strands being stitched together in montage. Nolan’s intensive use of this form is an attempt to capture and direct the attention of the audience, to fertilise them with both narrative sympathy and visceral sensation. He is aided, in these three films, by the use of the most directly affective soundtracks yet employed in his career, composed by Hans Zimmer (collaborating with James Newton Howard on The Dark Knight). The scores of Inception and The Dark Knight Rises return again and again to pounding rhythmic refrains, which echo across and stitch together the disparate montage ingredients. In Inception, this is the deep bass BRAWMP-BRAWMP familiar from the trailers—apparently, according to Zimmer, an appropriation of the opening beats of Edith Piaf’s song "Non, je ne regrette rien."5 In The Dark Knight Rises, it’s the tribal-esque chant of the Moroccan phrase deshi basara (rise up), which is the recurrent theme of the villain Bane.6 Montage is an innately musical form—Eisenstein had a tendency to describe various methods of montage in musical terms; of

tone, and metre, and rhythm— and the development of montage sequences in a film is generally structured and accentuated by the unfolding of its score. Steady rhythmic pounding is an innately affective ingredient in music (I hope this statement is uncontroversial), and its use by Zimmer and Nolan serves to intensify the affective capabilities of montage, to carry the audience to ecstasy, as tribal drumming may once have done. Contemporary Hollywood blockbusters are typically marked by their emphasis on the delivery of some spectacle. They are, to follow from Tom Gunning, cinemas of "attraction"; reveling in their ability to show something.7 This is now usually delivered in the form of some digitally rendered wonder; cars transforming into robots; enormous armies of orcs or elves; the exotic fauna of Avatar. But in a Christopher Nolan blockbuster, the Hollywood spectacle form is enlarged from the mere presentation of visual stimulation, into the delivery of visceral experience, via montage. Both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises do feature moments of pure visual spectacle—such as the flipping

7 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds. Robert Stam & Toby Miller, Oxford 2000: Blackwell, pp. 229-235.

Dave Itzkoff, "Hans Zimmer Extracts the Secrets of the ‘Inception’ Score," New York Times, 28 July 2010. 6 Kara Warner, "'Dark Knight Rises' Chant Rooted In Real Language, Hans Zimmer Says," MTV, 25 July 2012.

semi-trailer, and the exploding hospital in The Dark Knight, or the masses of policemen marching against Bane in The Dark Knight Rises— but they tend to be practically accomplished. Inception, certainly, has its fair share of digitally rendered spectacle, but Nolan has a tendency to fold these images, as he does in the Batman films, into his montage streams; they might punctuate a sequence of shots, rather than being the subject of that sequence. Compare this to Steven Spielberg’s style, which is to generate an entire sequence around the revelation and visual appreciation of some spectacle. Recall the dramatic close-ups of Sam Neill and Laura Dern’s faces, just before the dinosaurs wander on screen in Jurassic Park. Nolan rarely clues his audience in to the advent of some notable shot in this way. The raison d'être of his mode of spectacle is not the shot, but sequence; not the word but the sentence; not the image, but the experience. Part of taking cinema seriously as an art-form means accepting that films will not always satisfy on certain familiar levels, even as formal qualities determine that film’s merit. This is a problem all art forms face, for example the complaint directed at abstract expressionism that "my kid could paint that." But the economic conditions of the consumption of film, and especially Hollywood blockbusters, make this especially difficult. With our

investments of time and money upon entry to a film, and a general aura of popular anticipation of the thing, we are accustomed to having our desires and expectations fulfilled in pleasurable, familiar ways. But good films do not always satisfy the conditions of cinema as art— be that montage, or something else. And formally accomplished cinema does not always satisfy as entertainment. This is not, I hope, going to be taken as an argument that Christopher Nolan is some unheralded avant-garde genius. I have tried to explain how I think certain formal aspects of his technique are operating, and how they fit into the lineage of cinema history. I have tried not to pass comment on whether I find his technique especially skillful. I have called his montage affective, but it is not necessarily effective. Although their inner structures make it possible, whether or not The Dark Knight Rises or Nolan’s other blockbuster induce ecstasy, is, I suppose, a private matter between the films and their audience. It is the fact of his technique that is significant here. Nolan advances a robust, ambitious, and consistent formal program, and it is a contemporary take on a historically auspicious but critically neglected style. This is, I think, a reasonable definition of good art.

Anders Furze

THE TRUE HORROR OF PROMETHEUS In “Prometheus,” Ridley Scott imagines a cinema to which humans are irrelevant.

Storytellers have been getting us through the night for centuries. Hollywood is the current campfire.

it simultaneously lost me and yet redeemed itself: for in that instant, when Charlize Theron as Vickers invests the word “Father” with all the weight of the universe,1 Prometheus instantly disregarded its narrative. So Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) is Meredith Vickers’ Father, and this has absolutely no effect on anything whatsoever? Sure, why not? But then of course you keep coming back to this moment, keep wondering why, despite the crazy narrative, despite the slick visuals, despite the overly earnest soundtrack, the film retains an unsettling quality. This is partly to do with its setting: As Alien taught us all, in space no one can hear you scream, and there is something inherently off-kilter already about characters running around doing things on a planet that is, the film informs us, 3.27 x 10^14 km from earth. Yet Prometheus’ desire to subsume its narrative under the weight of its own technological prowess greatly intensifies this unsettling

—Gloria Steinem, as told to William Goldman

I. A CONFUSING MOMENT “A King has his reign, and then he dies. It is inevitable. That is the natural order of things.” “Anything else?” “No (pause) Father. That’s it.” —Meredith Vickers to Peter Weyland in Prometheus

ate in Prometheus—after Millburn inexplicably reaches out to touch a clearly dangerous space snake, after Shaw’s desire to overcome her infertility leads to a situation wherein she self-administers an abortion that rips out an alien baby gestating in her body for all of ten hours, after Vickers’ desire to prove she is not sexually barren leads to the captain abandoning his post and thus indirectly to the deaths of two scientists, zombification of another and the deaths of three more, but before David’s disembodied head starts leaking milk—the film lost me. Or rather,

1 How cruel of Scott to direct her so. In the context of the film’s events the line is completely meaningless.

A computer revelling in the spectacle of computer –designed imagery.

quality, implicating us directly in some rather disconcerting conclusions about nothing less than humanity’s relationship with the universe. II. A MOMENT REFLECTION

III. STORY AND SPECTACLE

he generally incoherent state of Prometheus’ narrative is much commented on. Casting aside the problematic notion that narrative coherency is an inherent marker of film quality (it isn’t2), it is easy to see that the narrative of Prometheus ranges from challenging-to-keep-up-with to non-existent. Rather than waste time methodically ridiculing every narrative (non)event in the film, I direct you to Screen

SELF-

hen the android David asks the human Holloway, “Why do you think your people made me?” he replies, “We made you 'cos we could.” “Can you imagine," asks David, "how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?” Holloway replies, “I guess it’s a good thing you can’t be disappointed, huh?” The movie-going public, however: we’re not so lucky.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, for example, uses narrative incoherence to criticise Prometheus as “muddled,” yet to praise Holy Motors for being “barking mad.”

Junkies’ “Honest Trailer” for Prometheus, which offers a concise, if exaggerated, summary of the film’s narrative “problems.”3 As the list of “Honest Trailers” demonstrates, contemporary Hollywood blockbusters offer no shortage of material to criticise from the perspective of narrative. There has been forever a tension running through Hollywood between narrative and spectacle. The former is an inherent quality of classically constructed narrative cinema in which events proceed through a cause-and-effect chain to a denouement, whilst the latter is characteristic, Tom Gunning argues, of early cinema and its revelling within the spectacular possibilities of the newly minted cinematic form. Thus he deems films of that era a “cinema of attractions.” Gunning writes that “the act of display on which the cinema of attractions is founded presents itself as a temporal irruption rather than a temporal development.”4 Such arbitrary, humanly constructed notions as “narrative” are marginalised in films developed in this mode, wherein the purpose is to revel partly in the possibilities of the technology that made the cinema

possible. This cinema of attractions stands not so much in contrast to as aside from the temporal development of classically constructed Hollywood narratives. Perhaps the greatest proponent of this mode of cinema, screenwriting manual writer Syd Field, connects temporal development through conventional three-act structure with no less than the human condition.5 Field argues that the beginning-middle-end structure is mimetic of birth, life and death. Field explicitly connects narrative with humanism, the audience’s very act of constructing a narrative is mimetic of the lived human experience. We can thus arrive at a roughly constructed binary between technologyfocused cinema of attraction on the one hand, and narrative, which is inherently mimetic of a certain view of human existence, on the other. Within a contemporary environment where Hollywood cinema faces competition on all fronts: from piracy, from television, from video games, from home-theatre, there has been something of a return to this emphasis on cinematic spectacle. This tension—between narrative and spectacle, dominant and excess, technology and humanism—is apparent in countless Hollywood films. What

See Honest Trailers — Prometheus (Andy Signore & Brett Weiner, 2005). 4 Tom Gunning, "Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions," The Velvet Light Trap, Fall 1993.

Syd Field, Screenplay, New York: Random House 2005.

makes it relevant to Prometheus is that the film simultaneously renders this tension explicit, and incorporates it into its unsettling conclusions. Thus we have the scene wherein David activates the alien spaceship’s navigation systems. The cavernous room instantly fills with holograms depicting intergalactic flight paths. David might be an android, but he reacts seemingly with awe6 at the intensely visual surrounds he, and thanks to the film’s use of 3D, we, find ourselves in. The film’s score reaches full crescendo as David and we marvel at the spectacle, only for the music to instantly cut when David turns off the display. What better exemplary image for contemporary Hollywood than a computer revelling in the spectacle of computer-designed imagery? This fleetingly intense focus on spectacle explains in part why the film’s narrative is so difficult to follow. We cut instantly from this awe-inspiring moment of 21st century photogénie back to the narrative of Holloway’s rapidly deteriorating health. He dies and suddenly we are with Dr. Shaw,

who spends no time grieving for her partner and is now suddenly pregnant with an alien baby, which will soon be extracted from her body in a visual moment the film similarly revels in. Less cause-and-effect narrative, Prometheus is a series of evermore-crazed set-pieces. Whatever pretensions to character development, linear narrative and thus humanist underpinnings the film may have are dropped in favour of spectacle, culminating in the aweinspiring sight of an almost unfathomably large alien spaceship literally rolling over two human figures. The disjointed narrative of Prometheus, the confused character motivations, even the much commented on fact Vickers seem to only be capable of running in straight lines — both she and Shaw have ceased to be “protagonists” at this point, instead functioning as human figures, whose sole purpose is in providing scale for the visual splendour of a crashing alien ship. In heavily criticising Prometheus, Film Crit Hulk argues that the narrative is incoherent, an “UNHAPPY MESS OF CONTRADICTIONS.” Regarding theme, he writes that

Modeling his behaviour after Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Fassbender’s uncanny performance has been heralded as the stand-out feature of the film, pointing both to a nostalgia on the behalf of critics for the classical cinema Mr. O’Toole signifies, and a desire to find something concretely “human” in Prometheus to glorify.

THE ENTIRE THEMATIC APPROACH OF THE FILM IS BOILED DOWN TO A LONG SERIOUS (sic) OF EXCHANGES THAT LOOK EXACTLY LIKE THIS: PERSON A: “I want to know the answers!” PERSON B: “You can’t know the

answers!”7

BEHAVIOR HUMAN UNDERSTANDABLE?

Hulk has a point, of course. In between the running and the flame throwing and the incredibly forced “regular people talk,”8 all the film really concludes is that uncovering existential answers is difficult. Yet in this singular thematic “stalemate,” if you can call it that, and there is nothing inherently “bad” about a film telling us this, there is a unity around which the spectacle is organised. Hulk demonstrates nicely the major issue taken with the film’s character motivations, writing:

AND

I would argue that this inability to find their behaviour “human” and “understandable” matters a lot; in fact, it is the key to Prometheus. When Meredith Vickers says, “Father,” the moment is absurd and ridiculous and hilarious but also disturbing, precisely because it is absurd and ridiculous and hilarious. It is disturbing because you realise that this film doesn’t give a damn about such “humanist,” in the ideological sense of the word, ideas as character consistency, progression and the like, instead wanting to revel in its own CGI sandbox. Prometheus bursts forth from the chest of liberal humanism and flails like crazy in the process. Which might not be such a challenge: after all, spectacle done well induces emotion, which is in turn a reinforcement of our humanity. Yet here the spectacle is combined with, as Film Crit Hulk demonstrated, a thematic stalemate: the answers are just unknowable, from the questions of the film’s characters (“Why did you create us?”) to the questions of its audience (“Why are the Engineers in the holograms running?”). The fact is, the film either does not know, or obscures these answers. The frustration so many have with Prometheus is a result of its utilisation of God-like spectacle to convey deep ambivalence, both on a large scale and small.

(CHARACTERS) ARE CONSTANTLY FUCKING OVER THE INHERENT LOGIC OF DANGER IN THE NAME OF GETTING THEIR QUESTIONS ANSWERED... WHICH LINDELOF WOULD ABSOLUTELY ARGUE IS THE POINT AND ALL THESE PEOPLE ARE LIKE OBSESSED AND STUFF, BUT SHOULD THAT MATTER IF WE CAN'T FIND THEIR

Film Crit Hulk, "The Damon Lindelof Intervention," Badass Digest, 17 June 2012. 8 After a cringe-worthy bet on the outcome of their expedition, one of the co-pilots says, unseen and somewhat incongruously in comparison to all the awe-inspiring conversation about finding the answers to life’s great questions etc.: “Put it towards a lap-dance with Miss Vickers, how about that hey?” The jarring nature of this “slice of life” conversation instantly renders it strange, alienating us further from the film’s weak attempts at humanism.

Between the Engineers who created us and the robots we have created, humans are completely irrelevant.

IV. THE TRUE HORROR OF PROMETHEUS

disregard for conventions of fireplace storytelling means it also enacts it. The technological revolution may indeed have turned humans into Gods, capable of creating entire planets in our computers, but Prometheus demonstrates that we are Gods in a fundamentally agnostic universe.

n a fake TED lecture clip produced to advertise the film, Peter Weyland states with gusto that, â&#x20AC;&#x153;We can create cybernetic individuals who, in a few short years, will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: We are the Gods now.â&#x20AC;?9 Yes, but. The real horror of Prometheus lies in its only real conclusion; that wedged between the Engineers who created us and the robots we have created, humans are completely irrelevant. The film not only makes this point, but its

See Prometheus Viral Clip #1 (TED Talk 2023) (2012).

REVIEWS THE AESTHETICS OF TOUCH Review of “Lore” by Whitney Monaghan

the treacherousness of the journey. But it isn’t entirely about the physical obstacles that stand in the way of their progress. By the end of the film, particularly for Lore, Grandmother’s house is not the beacon of hope that it was at the beginning. And in the journey that comprises the film’s narrative, we come to realise why. Like Shortland’s previous film, Somersault (2004), Lore employs a kind of sensual aesthetic, a poetic or visual mode of expression, to foreground the movement from childhood to adulthood of its young, female protagonist. This passage from innocence to experience is the real journey that the film is concerned with and it expresses this through a recurring cinematic gesture: a touch. Or, to be more specific, a close up of a touch. This is the kind of close up that is rich, affective, and textural. It is the kind of touch that is, at times, inquisitive and curious as if seeing with your fingertips, at other times violent and forceful, it is the touch of destruction. Early on in the film, the children laugh, run and play in the black forest in a scene that captures Shortland’s aesthetics of touch. Warm, soft sunlight shines in beams through the trees and the camera sweeps across the landscape. Neatly dressed with smiles on their faces, the children

et in the months after the end of World War II, Cate Shortland’s Lore follows the children of an SS officer as they travel across the war-torn German landscape after the incarceration of their parents. It incorporates a kind of fairytale narrative in which the children set out alone in search of their Grandmother’s house, a place of hope and security with “windmills on the walls” as the eldest, Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), remarks to her younger siblings. Much like a fairytale, one of the primary concerns of the film is expressing

float in and out of focus, as if dancing to the sweet non-diegetic soundtrack. When the children stop moving and look to the sky, the music disappears. The camera moves in, reframing them against the backdrop of the now ominous black forest. In this moment we realise why the children have ceased their playfulness as ash floats through the sky like little black snowflakes. Touch in this scene is delicate. The fragments that float through the sky are fragile, turning to dust when the children reach out to grasp them. This could be a whimsical scene but it is not. One child bends down to pick up a burned, scorched photograph of Hitler that had floated to her through the sky. This scene captures that moment when innocence begins to be lost and throughout the film the recurring gesture— that of touch—captures a kind of slow building and intense passage from this youthful innocence to a darker, more cynical, adult experience. Caress is another form of touch that Shortland highlights throughout the film. However, this is not the caress of bodies but rather that of objects. The film is peppered with close ups of valuable objects that Lore trades at each obstacle she encounters. These objects – earrings, jewellery, silver cutlery, coins, her mother’s wedding ring, a broken watch – are marked as valuable in the caress both of Lore’s fingertips and the camera, closing in on them in the centre of

the frame. Carefully wrapped up by Lore’s mother at the beginning of the film is a porcelain deer. Her fingers glide over its smooth but fragile form and gently wrap it in several layers of cloth. Lore saves this precious item until last, offering up everything else of potential value in order to survive. When she has nothing left to trade, Lore cautiously unwraps the porcelain deer, presenting it to a fisherman who she hopes will help her cross a river. He tells her that this item is worthless and she offers herself to him in an act of desperation. Here, the fisherman emphasises she shift in that dialectic between innocence and experience that is at the heart of the film, remarking, as he unbuttons her dress, “You smell like death, child.” In this scene, the gesture of touch changes into something more sinister: from the comforting and careful caress of the object to the violating touch of the old fisherman on the flesh of the young woman to the fatal blow that kills him. When the children eventually arrive at their grandmother’s house, Lore carefully places the deer amongst a large number of other porcelain animals on a dressing table in a room that we assume to be her mother’s. She carefully unwraps the figure, checking for signs of damage and returns it to its home in what seems to be a poetic conclusion to this fairytale journey in which the deer acts as an emblem of hope, arriving unharmed at

Grandmother’s house despite the obstacles and dangers of the voyage. However, this is not the end of the narrative and, as noted earlier, at this point in the film Grandmother’s house is not the beacon of hope that it was at the beginning. As Shortland says of the film in an interview for the Sydney Film Festival, it’s “about what it means when you find out that the people you love have lied to you.”1 Lore’s realisation of the sinister background of her parents and their Nazi ideology is tied to her passage out of youthful innocence and, again, is expressed though touch. Like the black dye that drips from the clothes at a Nazi woman’s house in one scene halfway through the film, it is the stain on the fingers of the unknowing children. At the end of the film, Lore returns to the bedroom where she carefully placed the ornament and smashes all of the precious animals. Shortland’s camera lingers on broken shards of porcelain that litter the floor and in that familiar, sensual close up with the edges slightly out of focus, Lore places her mother’s deer amongst the wreckage. Remaining at floor level, this shot captures the last touch, the forceful touch of Lore’s foot as she crushes the ornament with her boot. !

THE SCHLOCK DOCTRINE Review of “Dredd” by Andrew Gilbert

here is a fleeting moment in this lean B-picture where Judge Dredd finds himself standing before an American flag. It registers as both camp and sincerity. It could easily be folded into one’s disdain of American exceptionalism or mesh with torch-bearing faded glory patriotism. The film shirks immediate identification and remains ideologically ambiguous. Like the crassest of Hollywood products, it can be whatever you make of it. At its core it’s just another vigilante film that prescribes state-sanctioned (masculine) violence as the cure to complex (feminine) social problems. But it has many holes, many windows into different worlds and moments of reflection that cast doubt upon the film’s unthinking pleasures. Dredd is compelling and dangerous. The plot is simple. Dredd, a seasoned Judge of the Hall of Justice, is ordered to evaluate a psychic-mutant rookie on her last chance. Circumstance leads them to investigate a triple homicide in a Mega tenement building and quickly they find themselves

See Cate Shortland - Lore - Sydney Film Festival 2012.

locked inside the headquarters of the Ma-Ma Clan, a ruthless and enterprising drug syndicate with designs on the entire city. Dredd, his partner Anderson, and a handcuffed suspect must fight their way through eighty stories of gunmen while trying to reach Ma-Ma, the sadistic CEO of the high-rise. The barebones narrative anchors the hyperfocused film, which rarely leaves the narrow scope of Dredd’s vision. His simplistic position on right and wrong and his unquestioning allegiance to the Hall of Justice lead us through an expansive world that we barely see. This is a film of atmosphere and allusion, no superfluous effects shots or establishing montages to create a bloated idea of what this future world is. In pessimistic detective mode, we see it from the ground up. Dredd delivers death without reflection, and director Pete Travis ushers us through its brutal violence with a sense of survivor’s urgency that renders the snuffedout lives of henchmen as meaningless as Romero’s undead or John Carpenter’s multicultural Street Thunder gang. The film takes several queues from Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, most notably in transforming modern urban spaces into isolated pioneer outposts where the morality of law and order are sidelined by survival horror scenarios. Dredd is as ruthless as those he fights and derives almost as much pleasure from killing. Anderson becomes the de facto

moral compass. Like most female leads in the tradition of classic Westerns, she embodies what Dredd is fighting for. But despite the gendered moralizing, Anderson is a window into alternative possibilities: one that not only catches Dredd’s attention but also destabilizes the simplicity of the murder-as-justice philosophy. The life of a man she executes returns to her memories and brings her into contact with other lives affected by his death. Regardless of the kill-or-be-killed scenario, the execution is not clean; it overflows, and can’t be walked away from. These moments take up considerable time in a relatively short film. The post-collapse future envisioned by Dredd is carved up by twin poles of competing influence. The fascist monolith of the Hall of Justice is both a militarized police force and the prison industrial complex. It fights for order and justice or whatever in a landscape that is mostly dilapidated shopping malls. The Ma-Ma Clan recalls the venture capitalism of American frontier mythology: it carves out a space, transforms it into a feudal company town, seeks expansion, and struggles to eliminate all competing visions of social organization and the encroachment of civilization. There is almost no in-between, save for a handful of street protesters dismissed by Dredd as symptoms of a retching system, but the film leaves space for them in its world, unlike other comic

book dystopias that conflate dissent with terrorism (The Dark Knight Rises). But Travis’ conception of business and government are clearly separate, contradicting the global discourse that examines neoliberal dominance as an integrated collaboration of financial entities, technocratic governments, and militarized police. Dredd pits them against each another, with the exception of a handful of corrupt Judges who work for Ma-Ma. This oversimplification resists much of the political complexity of the film, but the conflation of organized crime with free market capitalism may be my own projection. Dredd is an often contradictory mixture of gangster film tropes wherein the examination of organized crime as a perverse embodiment of free market capitalism is the antithesis of the vigilante genre’s depiction of social outsiders corroding social order. It’s possible that Dredd is more interested in reflecting the war on drugs, but the narrative is too indebted to those countless crime families and ranching empires to simply be a film about drugs and drug dealers. But Dredd has another problem: it harbors a deepseated misogyny and a subtle racism that is par for the course for these types of white-manvigilantes (unlike Carpenter’s more complex deployment of gender and race in Precinct 13, which resists the white male

supremacy of its own genre). I’m hesitant to cry sexism over the cruel female villain who could just as easily be a man, in keeping with the tradition of the genre. A representation of a sadistic woman is not misogynistic per se. However, the filmmakers chose to call her Ma-Ma (sounds like momma), to associate her with castration anxiety (twice visualizing her biting off penises), and makes absolutely certain that you understand she was once a whore who got what was coming to her. Anderson’s naiveté is the flipside of this coin, standing as an example of a model woman: empathetic, compassionate, subservient, and the subject of a black man’s rape fantasy. The contempt for Ma-Ma is embedded in the film itself, not merely in the bias of Dredd the unreliable narrator. In this way Dredd carries on the social function of the American vigilante film, which is to divert serious attention away from the difficult issues of the time and instead blame marginalized groups of people: ethnic minorities, feminists, queers. And offer pleasurable moments of respite from that complexity. And oh, what respite! It blames perverted mother smother for the perils of modern society. But the film’s specificity of perspective complicates such grand prescriptions. It’s possible to read Ma-Ma as a monster created by an oppressive patriarchal system: despite its utter lack of interest in her, it still revels in her punishment.

Yet the film’s conclusion throws everything back into doubt. Anderson hands in her badge determined to find another way to help the people and Dredd watches her exit with respect and puzzlement. Is he reconsidering how he engages in the world? Dredd is both reactionary and open-ended. While it’s filled with plenty of retrograde ideas it is too deliberately inconclusive (and visionary) to be cast aside. !

particular demands of reviewing an episode of television? There are a few issues to consider here. Even in its drastically shorter, more bounded forms, the cinema typically gives us works in which only a few moments especially strike us, and so compel the critic to share them. As George Toles writes: Let us concede that most movies do not achieve a compelling unity or find the ever elusive ‘appropriate form.’ … Yet instead of arguing for the value of the whole because of the exceptional force of certain pieces, one might rather consider how a movie dreams its own way, with onerous digressions and mishaps and bewilderment, to the piercing clarity of certain glittering shards.2

A MOMENT, AGAINST THE TURNING OF THE EARTH Review of “Breaking Bad” (season 5, episode 7, “Say My Name”) by Elliott Logan

Even more so than a movie, our memories of a long-running television series are likely to be strung-together but scattered collections of moments, “with onerous digressions and mishaps and bewilderment, to the piercing clarity of certain glittering shards.” Each episode will be a complex weaving together of new lines of development in the ongoing unfolding of its characters’ personal histories. Some bits of these lines being strung out and

midst the growing volume of sites and voices reviewing the vast array of television’s output, "recapping" as each episode of the latest series rolls out onto our screens, it seems an appropriate time to ask a fundamental question: how do we "review" a television episode? It is obvious enough that duration, and so time, is one of the major distinctions between television and movies, if not the major distinction. So what are the implications of this for the

2 George Toles, “Rescuing Fragments: A New Task for Cinephilia,” Cinema Journal, volume 49, number 2, Winter 2010.

tied together from week to week will arrest us more strongly than others. So when we turn our attention back to the show in order to share our impressions of it, do we really need to go back over and allow each of its strands an equal glance, as much online re-capping seems compelled to do? Or is it ours to pick and choose among their variety? Making judgments of selection seems to be an obligation of all criticism, just made more vexing by the scope and richness of the choices on offer in the best television series. A related problem of critical choice is one of trying to isolate for evaluation the intertwined parts of a stillsprawling object. Steven Peacock asks:

penultimate episode of the first part of Breaking Bad’s fifth and final season, “Say My Name.”4 The sequence ends the arc of Mike Ehrmantraut, begun at the end of season two. Once a cop, then the grizzled enforcer of locally respected businessman and drug kingpin Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), and now the reluctant organisational force behind Walt’s upstart new operation, Mike is played with a heavy but graceful weariness by Jonathan Banks. About halfway through “Say My Name,” Mike finally goes to leave town to avoid arrest by the DEA, disappearing from the granddaughter in whose name his drug money was earned. Hiding out, he arranges for Walt to bring a bag stashed with money for his escape. Mike meets Walt in an isolated, pastoral setting, a dusty clearing amidst scrubby trees above a riverbank thick with bulrushes; the afternoon sun beats down as the two men confront one another. Walt demands Mike surrender the names of his former associates held in prison so they can be gotten rid of; Mike refuses to be party to their deaths. The meeting climaxes with Walt pulling a pistol and rashly shooting Mike through the window of his car; Mike falls on the accelerator and crashes near the riverbank. When Walt catches up to the car, his quarry has disappeared, leading a trail of

How do we judge a television work's unity if it is open-ended, changing and building across episodes, still in flux? How can we make decisive discriminations of a particular moment if its relationship to the (incomplete) whole is as yet undeclared or undecided?3

Perhaps we sometimes experience particular moments that, through their arresting power, guide us to a resolution of these uncertainties, if only for that moment. I think a “glittering shard” that provides such illumination closes the seventh,

Steven Peacock, “The Television Moment,” Critical Studies in Television Online, 20 January 2012.

The second part of the sixteenepisode season will screen next year.

blood into the reeds. At its halfway point, Breaking Bad’s fifth season is already an extraordinary achievement. So, moving towards its mid-season climax, the penultimate episode is expectedly rich with remarkable moments. Yet I find what follows Walt’s walk into the reeds to be my defining memory of the episode, often to the exclusion of what else it has to offer (the light bubbles of joy sent off by the money-drop montage, the eloquent poignancy of the too-late maturity and moral strength discovered in Jesse’s voice when he refuses all and any money earned with Walt, past and future). Why? It has to do with the particular way the scene treats a moment that is at once an ending and a continued passage, a mood that is increasingly pressing upon Breaking Bad and my experience of it, a condition this medium finds in common with human life. Crucial to the scene’s power in this respect is the choice to stage it in a pastoral setting, unusual for Breaking Bad, which is typically set in suburbs or desert. The show finds in this staging ways to create a number of effects that evoke a mood conducive to contemplating the fact of Mike’s death in relation to the ongoing cycles of the world. We first see this effect upon Walt. When Walt first steps into the reeds his stance is anxious, but as he confronts his victim he is overcome by a different feeling. Striding into the thickets, Walt

holds his pistol out with both hands, arms taut. But as he walks around to his right his anxiety softens. One hand comes off the pistol; he withdraws his weapon just a little. As the camera follows Walt it reveals what has relaxed his fear. We see Mike sitting slack amidst the reeds, mouth hanging open, staring listlessly ahead as crickets and insects form a harmony of noise around him. The setting sun casts a warm glow upon the dying man’s face as his life ebbs out. Then a wide shot from above lets the river dominate the frame, its surface shining the sun’s last glimmer. In the frame’s bottom right corner Mike and Walt’s stilled figures can be glimpsed in silhouette. Each man’s shaved head is made an echo of the other by the way the sun plays off his skin; the light’s glare suggests solidarity in tension with separateness. Now Walt becomes agitated, pacing and shaking the pistol against his leg. Becoming still again, he gently rasps out of his dry mouth: “I just... I just realised that Lydia has the names, I can get them from her.” The camera’s angle from behind the two men places them as spectators to the river’s ceaseless flow. Over this image Walt continues to speak. “I’m sorry, Mike,” he says quietly. “This whole thing could have been avoided.” But Mike breaks his stillness and silence to cut Walt off. “Shut the fuck up, and let

me die in peace.”5 Again reduced to silence Walt turns his gaze to join Mike’s, both men staring out at the water moving past them. A return to the high, wide shot fills the screen with water and sun. Mike’s body falls to the left and disappears from view into the reeds and riverbank. The episode cuts to black and the credits play over the continuing hum of the crickets, and the sound of water endlessly rolling on. The sequence of Mike’s death stands out on its own as a “glittering shard” for the way it uses its pastoral setting in relation to the slow ebbing of a life. It invites us to join Walt in his quieted mood and sit with Mike as his blood flows out, considering how the river’s passage catches and reflects the sun, its light dying as the piece of Earth onto which Mike’s body will fall spins away from what continues to give this planet life. This setting finds harmony between the scene’s image of irrevocable change, and

its sense of perpetual continuity, which defies our feeling of time’s passage. It suspends us in this moment. ! LET THEM EAT CRAB Review of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” by Louise Sheedy

Is the episode asking what can possibly be said in response to what Walt sees, and so what we see? How can words be more eloquent than these sights? This is another problem for our response to the best moments television shows us: the limits of our expressive capacity ranged alongside that of the medium’s best works. I’m thinking here about Jason Jacobs’s response to moments of Mad Men and The Killing. See: Jason Jacobs, “Criticism, Submission, and Time: Mad Men and The Killing,” Critical Studies in Television Online, 1 June 2012.

n a hot night in a ramshackle house a group of drunks share the spoils of a post-flood abundance of seafood. A brimming basket of shrimp is poured in piles directly onto the table before them, the last of it thrown on the floor for a group of waiting children to devour. Sixyear-old Hushpuppy finds a crab amongst the swarm, and the man

next to her begins to instruct her how to open the shell with a knife. Her father slams his fist on the table and screams, "No!" She’s visibly frightened. He wants her to "beast it," and begins chanting the phrase as he pounds his fist, the others around the table joining in. The little girl puts down the knife, breaks the crab open with her hands and sucks out its insides. The drunks cheer as she stands proudly on the table. Her father grins approvingly, his tutelage complete, and a shaky camera swerves around a room of happy faces. Such is the mood of 2012’s indie darling of the festival circuit, Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film that invites its audience to delight in images of a small child living in squalor, sharing animal carcasses with dogs, and being neglected and abused by her drunken father. Through environments and situations explicitly evoking the imagery that blanketed television screens in hurricane Katrina’s wake, a little black girl and her father navigate a hero’s journey into the land of the noble savage. Beasts of the Southern Wild is director Benh Zeitlin’s first feature film. It was made on the small budget afforded him by his selfstarted film collective, and to Zeitlin’s credit the film’s polished appearance, owing largely to skilful art direction and cinematography, belies its humble purse. The filmmaker and his team commendably assemble a junkyard-esque settlement amidst a post-apocalyptic and

swampy landscape, aptly named The Bathtub, laid out for a nonprofessional cast to play out their characters’ wretched existence. The problem is that this fantastic tale of unwashed, gallant miscreants isn’t set in a nonspecific abstraction of desolation and mystery; it is very pointedly situated in the aftermath of arguably the most politicised natural disaster in US history. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed 1833 people. New Orleans, the hardest-hit city, contains some of the poorest areas in the United States, with more than 65% of black children living on or below the poverty line.6 The poorest, predominantly black citizens tend to live in the lowest-lying and thus most flood-prone areas of the city.7 Its Lower Ninth Ward (the "Bathtub" of the film) was the worst hit of these areas after a catastrophic breech of the levee on both sides of the industrial canal sent flood waters crashing into residential areas, flattening the homes and infrastructure of this already disadvantaged area. The slow response of then President Bush to the disaster, and the subsequent failings of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the coordination of

Bill Quigley, "Katrina Pain Index 2012: Seven Years Later," Huffington Post, 24 August 2012. 7 Patrick Sharkey, "Survival and Death in New Orleans: An Empirical Look at the Human Impact of Katrina," Journal of Black Studies, Volume 37, Number 4, 2005.

emergency relief efforts in the days and weeks after the hurricane’s landfall, garnered a barrage of criticism so widespread, so damaging to the Bush administration that it gave birth to the neologism "Katrinagate." Bush’s delayed response was repeatedly attributed to racism, the disaster seen as a lower priority due to the region’s largely black and impoverished demographic. I put these facts back on the table since they have been oddly obscured by Beast’s brand of magic realism. The director instead uses the echoes of the tragedy more as a kooky backdrop for a menagerie of characters, adding cultural "flava" to group of people so thoroughly othered through hackneyed speech, filthy half-dress and animalistic behaviour that audience connection is difficult to obtain without the help of a fetishistic gaze which treats abject poverty as a rollicking good time. Many critics have described the blurred lines between the real and imagined world of The Bathtub as a brave and poetic flourish but on closer examination it becomes apparent, apart from the few dream-like cutaways to crumbling icecaps and prehistoric beasts, that these plays with realism work specifically to exaggerate the "beastly" living conditions and characterisation of the heroes, and so becomes the driving mechanism behind their fetishization. And so, mixed with

lovely visuals and continual mythical connections made between the survivors, cave-men ancestors and the natural world, Zeitlin seems to suggests that the poor want, or more accurately, need to stay that way and that anyone that offers help is part of the problem, man. This idea is made most clear when a forced evacuation sees Hushpuppy and her father in a make-shift hospital, the clean white walls and the polite manner of the staff rendered as an oppressive civilising force from which escape is the only sensible option - a sentiment that prompted Ben Kenigsberg of Time Out to fittingly dub the film "a Republican fantasy."8 Beasts of the Southern Wild was made by a young, no doubt wellmeaning white filmmaker who unfortunately paints the survivors of the catastrophe as idiot curios, amusing and sweet in their scramble for survival. Zeitlin’s brand of magic realism takes the marginalized survivors of the catastrophe and uses them as entertainment, by magically transforming New Orleans’ wounded landscape into a petting zoo just fantastic enough to offer liberation from the discomfort of any lingering issues of class and race that Katrina’s fury may have stirred up. Incidentally, the title of the film is taken from a story by

8 Ben Kenisberg, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" (review), Time Out Chicago, 5 July 2012.

Doris Betts which, in the words of cultural scholar bell hooks “has one of the most sexist and racist representations of black masculinity in contemporary southern literature.”9 The ambiguity of the title—does it refer to the aurochs or the residents themselves?—serves as a final indictment of the filmmaker’s questionable politics and a reminder of a cultural blind spot which allows such films to keep afloat on a sticky sea of praise, a sea on which "Oscar buzz" has already started to foam. !

over two halves clearly distinguished by a "twist." However, I do not intend to reveal any bombs here or play the written equivalent of movie minesweeper; no spoiler alert will be issued as I won’t be exposing the twist that splices the film. Instead I’ll focus on my experience of the film, and the strange distance I felt from it on my first viewing. This may seem like a cop out for a review, and if I’m honest, in part it is. To describe the whole plot of Looper would require a fair amount of potentially confused word count that detracts from the things that most intrigued me about the movie. So, to summarise what you can discover from readily available promotional ephemera: Looper is a high-concept, sci-fi/action film fixated on time travel, the human condition and dystopian futures. Set in 2044 where time travel is yet to be invented, young hitman Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is hired to kill his older future self (Bruce Willis), sent back from the 2070s. So far, so simple. Complications ensue when (young) Joe botches the assassination. Like writer/director Rian Johnson’s acclaimed indie-noir Brick (2005), Looper is a puzzle film, which feeds both its charm and folly. Quandaries surrounding the notion of facing your future self are implicit, as are philosophical questions around existentialism and nihilism. According to various critical

A GIRL AND HER FUTURE SELF WALK INTO A CINEMA Review of “Looper” by Stephanie Van Schilt

t is impossible to give a comprehensive plot synopsis of Looper without it being a giant spoiler-fest. Looper is a dense, knotted story that unravels

bell hooks, "No Love in the Wild," NewBlackMan (in Exile), 5 September 2012.

appraisals, benefits from multiple viewings. At the time of writing, my present self has only seen Looper once. Subsequently, I found myself more intrigued in the different ways that Looper has been consumed, discussed and defended, than the interesting high-concept nature of the film itself. There are always particular buzzwords that, threaded through different reviews or online forums, attach themselves to films. Often these words reflect a consensus, a level of mutual understanding in the assessment of a film. "Nit-picking" is now, for me, and it seems countless others, forever affiliated with Looper. I was hyperaware while viewing Looper that I was, indeed, viewing Looper. I was unusually unable to become wholly immersed in the world presented before me. My favourite way to watch a film is without any associated press on my mind: no interviews or directorial mission statements, only a familiarity with the key players’ body of work. This isn’t to say I am unable to form my own opinion or that I’m a passive mind mute when I go to the cinema, I’m just impressionable (and aware) enough to know how planted seeds can soon impede upon my viewing processes. Granted, the "thoughtprovoking" nature of Looper lends itself to questioning. Perhaps it was the combination of Bruce Willis and a sci-fi-action premise, with the connotative power of

Joseph Gordon Levitt and Brick injecting a dose of indie-noir, selfaware sentiment that offset me from the beginning. Additionally, I was forever trying to critique Gordon Levitt’s fun portrayal of an action icon: what parts of his reconstructed Willis-esque face were make up and what parts CGI? And how much of the embodiment was Gordon Levitt’s physical mimicry and performance prowess? This, alongside a jarring lack of redeemable qualities, meant that I never really connected with this character. Possibly, because Johnson is prone to making puzzle movies, I was attempting to find more pleasure in solving the story than experiencing the world of it. Or just maybe I wasn’t in the mood to relax into a nihilistic, dystopian sci-fi film that is explicitly violent: the imagery of hooded enemies being blown away alone musters direct political affiliations that are terribly confronting and uncomfortable, among other acts of violence that shall remain (for spoiler reasons) unlisted here. While I spent a lot of time looking for different errors or inconsistencies in Looper, I also spent time hoping not to see what are often the inevitable breaches of logic and indiscretions that take place in time travel movies. Essentially, whether attributed to my want to outsmart it or my want to be won over, the spaces between myself and the movie were too apparent. I love movies and always enter a cinema hoping

to like a film; I believe in the adage "never let the truth get in the way of a good story" and prefer to praise than naysay. Consequently, I genuinely think that my tendency to nit-pick here was due to both what Looper was trying to do and my general enthusiasm to critically engage it. Looper’s allusions to other sources and deliberate inclination for homage, drawing meaning from associations with a varied cultural catalogue including La Jetée,10 Terminator and the work of Ray Bradbury,11 does inspire a heightened form of viewership. Criticwire blogger Matt Singer recently tweeted: "LOOPER nitpickers make me glad THE TERMINATOR came out before the invention of the Internet." And while online discussions do illuminate tall poppy tendencies and reflective know-it-all-ism, this is the same democratic sphere in which intense, loyal fan-bases are formed and interesting insights often emerge. I shall not digress and join the dialogue surrounding online criticism but instead note that, in essence, Looper has definite threads that can be picked up to unravel certain cinematic seams, but it also has its

staunch defenders. With all of this in mind, I do intend to sit down and watch Looper again. I remain hopeful that, on the advice of various critics, a second viewing is worthwhile. So, loaded with the knowledge of how the story unfolds, I truly hope that my past nit-picking self can reconcile with my future film watching self, and that second time around, I can sit back and just enjoy the film. !

For more on the influence of La Jetée on time travel films, see A.O. Scott, "What 'Back to the Future' and 'Terminator' Owe to 'La Jetée'," New York Times, 26 September 2012. 11 See Jeremy Baril, "Rian Johnson talks directing 'Looper,' influences, and time travel," Hypable, 28 September 2012.