SCREEN MACHINE | ISSUE 4 | ANTICIPATION by Screen Machine

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2013

Less a film about God than it is about the spatial dynamics between a boy, a boat and a tiger.

ISSUE 4

“ANTICIPATION”

FEB/MAR 2013

ABOUT THIS ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS on p.2 FROM THE EDITOR on p.4

THE BEST FILMS OF 2012 Our top twenty on p.5

ESSAYS TAKING IN MIKE by Huw Walmsley-Evans How the marketing of “Magic Mike” obscured its finer qualities. p.18

IS THE HOBBIT EVEN A FILM ANYMORE? by Robbie Fordyce On the cultural, political and economical implications of “The Hobbit” for New Zealand. p.26

REVIEWS Brad Nguyen on LIFE OF PI on p.33 Elliott Logan on ZERO DARK THIRTY on p.35 Melanie Ashe on INSIDE NATURE’S GIANTS on p.39 Andrew Gilbert on DJANGO UNCHAINED on p.41 Whitney Monaghan on THE NEWSROOM on p.46

CONTRIBUTORS Melanie Ashe completed her Honours in Film and Television at Monash University in 2012. Her writing has appeared in Peephole Journal and Australian Film Blog. Phil Coldiron is a writer and programmer living in Brooklyn. He is the Film & Electronic Art editor at Idiom Magazine, and his work has appeared in Cinema Scope, Moving Image Source, and LA Weekly. Aaron Cutler lives in São Paulo with his wife and collaborator, artist Mariana Shellard. He keeps a site, The Moviegoer, at aaroncutler.tumblr.com. 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. 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 Cinémathèque. Stephanie Spartels (illustrator) is a Melbourne-based illustrator and designer. She works predominantly with children’s books. You can view her other work at studiospartels.withtank.com.

Luke van Ryn (copy-editor) is working on a PhD on food media at the University of Melbourne. Huw Walmsley-Evans is a film critic and doctoral candidate in Film, Media and Cultural Studies based in Brisbane. His research examines film criticism as a cultural institution at the beginning of the 21st century and he can be found at @hWalmsleyEvans. This issue of Screen Machine was commissioned with funds from Copyright Agency Limited.

FROM THE EDITOR significant effects derive not from the substance of films themselves but rather from the external machinery of anticipation that supports it. This issue of Screen Machine, taking “anticipation” as its theme, features Huw Walmsley-Evans writing in his essay “Taking in Mike” about Steven Soderbergh’s stripper film Magic Mike and how after watching the film, university students still described the film as what was marketed to them rather than what the film actually was. Robbie Fordyce describes in his essay “Is The Hobbit even a film anymore?” the disturbing effects of the Lord of the Rings juggernaut on New Zealand’s labour laws and local culture. This issue also features myself reviewing Ang Lee’s 3-D fable Life of Pi, Elliott Logan reviewing Kathryn Bigelow’s War on Terror procedural Zero Dark Thirty, Melanie Ashe reviewing the animal dissection documentary Inside Nature’s Giants, Andrew Gilbert reviewing Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist western Django Unchained and Whitney Monaghan reviewing Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom. Finally, the spectacular illustrations for this issue are by the talented artist and designer Stephanie Spartels.

wards seasons, festival circuits, trailers, teasers for trailers — having a stake in film culture increasingly means letting one’s self be moulded by a giant machine in which the experience of actually watching and engaging with films is less important than participating in a perpetual and insistent chain of anticipation. Films are only watched in order to anticipate what critics will deem to be important, critics whose work is read in order to speculate on who will win the major awards, whose results are only relevant to what projects will be produced in the future, which form the basis of a sophisticated and gargantuan publicity industry, whose labour defines what films we are excitedly anticipating, and so forth. Where does this machine leave cinema itself? Perhaps it means that cinema’s most

— Brad Nguyen, Editor

THE BEST FILMS OF 2012 The top 20 as chosen by Screen Machine

THE BEST FILMS OF 2012 life! Then it turned out the family he was returning to was a bunch of monkeys. Well played, Carax, well played. AF

HOLY MOTORS Directed by Leos Carax

here comes a point in Holy Motors when M. Oscar retires for the evening, his scheduled appointments (and a few spontaneous ones) (perhaps) successfully completed. As he is driven home to what I presumed was the family we saw at the start of the film-possibly-within-thefilm, a song plays whose lines Leos Carax (or whoever makes these decisions) deems notable enough to subtitle for those of us who only speak English. If memory serves correctly, and when it comes to Holy Motors it probably does not, the song's lyrics reference, in a somewhat oblique but contextually satisfactory way, identity formation and the performance of everyday life. We are performing, all of us, at all times etc. etc. As the subtitled lines flashed up and M. Oscar entered his apartment, I thought to myself, Yes! This is it! This is what Carax is saying! We are, all of us performers! This is a profound meditation on the roleplay that is life and the role cinema plays in

MOONRISE KINGDOM Directed by Wes Anderson

erhaps the cutest film of the year, Moonrise Kingdom nostalgically renders that fleeting moment between childhood and adolescence, brilliantly captured in that brilliant scene in which the two pre-adolescent protagonists Sam and Suzy create a camp in an isolated cove. Having run away from their governing authority figures they carry with them possessions both impractical and practical, including survival tools, record player, a kitten and library books. Alone on the beach— in the centre of one of Anderson’s carefully constructed symmetrical frames— the two runaways put on a record and dance effervescently together in their underwear, small waves almost licking their ankles. Like the film itself, this scene is nostalgic, sentimental, eccentric and totally charming. WM

power is alluded to but never so overtly as to offer the audience a comfortable prism through which one could neatly read the film. It is possible, though, to venture that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd is a stand-in for Anderson; Dodd whose peculiar power over people is derived from his mastery of storytelling. (Anderson has also described Dodd as an Orson Welles-like character.) But Dodd, in this regard, would be a stand-in for the younger Anderson so eager to prove his directorial mastery in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The Anderson who has emerged with There Will Be Blood, and now The Master, is a mixture of Dodd and Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell, displaying both mastery of the form and a nervous, unpredictable, jittery, termite quality. In one of the final scenes, Dodd suggests that no-one can live without a master. But thank god Anderson has learned to live with his Freddie Quell. BN

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY Directed by Hong Sang-soo

ong's thirteenth feature puts Isabelle Huppert in a loose and breezy comedy that deftly holds all the art and magic you’d expect from a collaboration of this kind. Huppert is given the run of not one but three leading characters, each the star of a story that repeats itself, with characters and action being altered slightly with every revolution. The oddball array of characters and situations cohere into a sweet tale of travel, language, sex and romance which displays all of Hong’s trademark subtlety, sensitivity and explorations of the ordinary. LS

THE MASTER Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

TABU Directed by Miguel Gomes

ot at all the exposé of Scientology that everyone was expecting, Paul Thomas Anderson instead elected to give us an intimate character study whose greater allegorical

oving beautifully between “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise,” or, contemporary Portugal and colonial Africa, Miguel Gomes’ Tabu is a film about obsessive

love, melancholy and crime. The first part, set in Lisbon and shot in rich black and white, shows an elderly woman on her deathbed asking after a man named Gian Luca. When he is found, he tells an incredible story of their passionate affair five decades earlier. Here the film stock is replaced by grainy 16mm and dialogue is dispensed with in favour of a soundtrack of background noise and the voiceover of Gian Luca. Tabu has a deliberate literary feel to it, but as Daniel Fairfax has wrote in a previous issue of Screen Machine, it has the feel of “a literary adaptation of a text which does not exist.” WM

two brothers of I Wish are able to reunite their family; rather it is Koreeda’s presentation of all the gestures and objects that make up the boys’ worlds that invests this film with life: the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of chips, a lucky dime underneath a vending machine, grandma’s hands dancing a graceful hula — these images are brought together at the end of the film in an impressionistic montage that is at once an encapsulation of the film that precedes it and Koreeda’s marvellous career as a whole. BN

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES Directed by Lauren Greenfield

irector Lauren Greenfield has her fingers on the pulse of the dominant visual aesthetic of our time — the surreality of television's gonzo stylings that are at once pop art distortions of everyday banality and a documentation of the warped homogeny of late capitalist décor. And it’s never been more succinct, more totally perfect than in The Queen of Versailles, her multilayered and opulent wedding cake of a documentary that perversely constructs an allegory of postLehman Brothers recession and austerity out of the most obliviously decadent people in

I WISH Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda

ou could try to fault Koreeda’s latest offering for being too cute or too saccharine but that would be ignoring its firm place within one of contemporary cinema’s most quietly radical bodies of work. Koreeda’s method of subversion is always to introduce some obvious “narrative obstacle” (whether it be a terrorist attack in Distance or, in this case, the divorce of one’s parents) and then deftly set it aside. It becomes unimportant whether or not the

America. But for all the schadenfreude and the oh-mygod-they-just-said-that low-brow delights, it is a sobering and unnerving penetration into the private realms of the titans of capital who seem as clueless as the rest of us. AG

PROMETHEUS Directed by Ridley Scott

rometheus was seen by both critics and general audiences as an atrocious addition to cinema in 2012 but the film does a service to a certain cinematic tradition: it recovers the xenophobic moods of isolated space travel that have been lost to sci-fi, a genre which has recently tended to direct its gaze inwards to planet earth, rather than outwards towards the stars. The inclusion of gestures to the monstrosity of humanity are palpable in the gigantic and shamanistic, pale â&#x20AC;&#x153;Engineers,â&#x20AC;? with their strange mortogenetic practices and their crude equivalent in the synthetic cyborg played by Fassbender who gives an unforgettable performance, sitting well inside the uncanny valley as an affect-less, but strangely convivial, psychopath. RF

COSMOPOLIS Directed by David Cronenberg

ike so many of the bodies in Cronenberg's oeuvre, this electrifying adaptation of Don Delillo's 2003 novel takes the road movie and turns it inside out. The icy lines of a limousine's interior form the backdrop of an unfolding, unhinging journey of the obscenely wealthy and emotionally void Eric Packer, played by Robert Pattinson, as he glides calmly through a city crumbling into chaos and dystopian despair. The film is structured by the meetings Packer takes inside the claustrophobic car, which Cronenberg uses as a launching point for acrobatic displays in language and direction. What results is a vicious and calculated critique of late, late capitalism as profound as it is alienating. LS

Stalin once remarked that the perfect Bolshevik combined Russian dedication and American pragmatic spirit: here is a film that meets that formula perfectly. BN NO Directed by Pablo Larraín

he final entry in Larraín’s “Pinochet Trilogy” dramatizes the 1988 campaign to reject a continuation of Pinochet’s dictatorship and the argument that develops within the “No” campaign between the principled men who want to draw attention to Pinochet’s atrocities and the young upstart played by Gael Garcia-Bernal who spearheads a pragmatic campaign to oust Pinochet using the techniques of the advertising industry, appealing to Chile’s citizens with happy images and shallow, feel-good catch-phrases. The argument is mirrored by the film's formal qualities where the slightly alienating effect of the garish, low quality images (the film was shot using a nearobsolete video tape camera used by Chilean television news in the eighties) interplay with a narrative that, with its high doses of comedy and its appealing protagonist, is constructed with a view to gaining a wider, more mainstream appeal than Larraín’s previous films. (The presence of international heartthrob GarciaBernal is key here). No is therefore a film obsessed with the question of aesthetics and its importance to political strategy.

THE EXTRAVAGANT SHADOWS Directed by David Gatten

he concept is elegant. The pure continuity of the digital image (= in time) is highlighted by the duration of a simple act: the painting, and subsequent drying, of a glass frame, repeated again and again in a variety of hues of quick drying paint over the film’s threeplus hours. Concurrently, Gatten weaves texts throughout this repetitive structure (presented as is typical of his work as onscreen type), piling attempts at communicating some fact of the world (whether via an epistolary romance or a science manual) in and around this folded and layered accretion of digital time. The result is something that’s closer to the late novels of David Markson than anything in cinema; any satisfactory consideration of the relationships between language, time, and the digital image that Gatten uses as the very stuff of The Extravagant Shadows would require far more space than this couple hundred words, but just know that this is a

rare example of cinema that might properly be considered as doing philosophy. PC

ZERO DARK THIRTY Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

he Dubya years had Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise; the Obama era has Kathryn Bigelow’s diptych on the War on Terror. You can spend a few days wading through the various controversies and debates surrounding Zero Dark Thirty, but beyond all the confirmation bias and click baiting there’s a movie that gets at the central tension of this administration: in a world that reduces everything to data, where do we locate ethics (to say nothing of morals)? The film's closing moments – call it The Passion of Maya – in which Jessica Chastain’s ostensibly triumphant C.I.A. agent sits alone in a military jet, tears streaming down her face in tight close-up against a bit of netting that looks more than a little like the American flag, seems to me a terrifically clear expression of a truth beyond words about my country’s trajectory. This sudden flood of affect, the very thing that the age of drones and data mining and rational Liberalism would seek to squeeze out, is both lament and intervention. PC

BARBARA Directed by Christian Petzold

film about surveillance that doesn’t announce itself by obvious visual markers. Just people watching people. Barbara is invested in consequences, without visualizing the acts that demand punitive measures, only alluding to them through quiet surveillance. Petzold’s film plays like a simple character study, but one framed by geometrical structuring and narrative mirroring. While I fear this might diminish the movie’s standalone brilliance, I cannot help but offer it as a tonic to counter the glut of statesurveillance movies that peddle allegorically stupid images of dystopian societies. Petzold shows that people respond in unpredictable ways to authority. They continue to live their lives. To make decisions. And ultimately that is what Barbara is invested in: the decisions of people thrown together by circumstance and policy. AG

Heights. It is a delicate rendering of complex social structures as well as a sensual portrayal of metaphysical existence. It invites critical analysis and rewards visceral engagement. Absent here is the baggage of dogmatic reductionism and pseudospiritual distancing. Like Arnold’s previous features, Wuthering Heights is about spaces and the people who occupy them, about boundaries and those who transcend them and the consequences they must endure. Arnold explores the suffering that is the flipside of sensual pleasure and the crushing anxiety that trails ethereal splendor. Very few films are ever this beautiful and ugly. AG

HEADSHOT Directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang

en-ek Ratanaruang’s “Buddhist-noir,” about an assassin who sees the world upside down after being shot in the head, is textural, visceral, and rhythmic. The film tells two parallel stories. The first of these focuses on Tul’s beginnings as an assassin. The second focuses on Tul’s experiences in the present as he copes with his new inverted visual field. Whilst the images of the past are upright, something particularly beautiful is captured in the awkward and uncertain upside-down cinematography of the present. Headshot is one of the most aesthetically captivating films of the year. WM

BACK TO STAY Directed by Milagros Mumenthaler

schewing narrative resolution and linearity, Back To Stay quietly meanders through the wreckage of a broken home and ends up a richly rewarding study of the brutality and beauty of sibling relationships. The three sisters are young adults languishing in the large house left to them after the death of their grandmother. They eke out semi-ordinary lives as the weight of their

WUTHERING HEIGHTS Directed by Andrea Arnold

ndrea Arnold balances two seemingly incompatible modes of filmmaking within Wuthering

abandonment starts pushing on the fragile bonds keeping the little household together. Mumenthaler’s careful dissection of the sisters’ intricate, personal politics evinces a masterful and intimate use of gesture and characterisation. Made from small moments strung together through razor sharp dialogue, Back to Stay resonates deliciously well after viewing. LS

down cracks the likes of Judd Apatow barely manage to paper over. This film also contains the most accurate approximation of in-cinema advertising of any movie in 2012. AF

HIMIZU Directed by Sion Sono

ecause you possess this knowledge of cruelty," film critic Nicole Brenez once said to filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, "you are the only person who has won the right to reintegrate sentimentality." One could say the same thing about Japanese enfant terrible Sion Sono who follows his "Hate Trilogy” with this slice of teenage angst. Himizu shares the deliciously overstated performances, artpunk aesthetic, cartoonish situations and ultra-violence of Sono’s earlier films such as Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance. But it’s in the final moments when the film’s two maladjusted teenagers run down a desolate road, crying out desperately to themselves, “Do your best!” that Sono truly stuns us with his naked sentimentality. Himizu is a risky film (not least because it poetically deploys images of the devastation wreaked by the 2011 tsunami) but like Shohei Imamura’s classic The Eel (which

DARK HORSE Directed by Todd Solondz

ypically for a Todd Solondz film, Dark Horse is an excruciating experience. Unconcerned with critiquing the self centered slob who serves as the film's protagonist, Solondz instead focuses in on an American popular culture that loves nothing more than to glorify that archetype. Dark Horse is shot ultra conventionally and the soundtrack vanishes from memory the moment you hear it, as if a moderately skilled Hollywood hack was directing. Indeed, the overwhelming feeling I got from the film is that it feels flat: hilariously, engagingly flat. In both aping conventional Hollywood filmmaking technique and utilising this filmic throughline, Solondz demonstrates just how easy it is to shine a light

Himizu often resembles), it is a film that cannot fail to move us in the way it bares the sincere heart of a misanthrope. BN

MARFA GIRL Directed by Larry Clark

arry Clark's latest film takes as its setting the Texan town of Marfa, whose previous claim to fame was as the punchline to the “Marfa Prada” art installation. Whilst the thinking behind that installation might be that ironically juxtaposing signifiers of immense wealth with extreme poverty is an “edgy” statement, Clark lets the town itself speak. The result is an uneasy, at times hilarious, but never not compelling clash of melodrama (Jeremy St. James as a borderline deranged Texan police officer) and realism (freewheeling shots of Adam Mediano skating to and from school). It would be easy to criticise this as being more of the same Larry Clark: revelling in the spectacle of teenagers having sex and doing drugs. Of course all of that is in here, but as long as Hollywood thinks of teenagers as either 14-year-old upper-middleclass white boys or wanting to be, there exists a desperate need for Larry Clark. AF

NEIGHBOURING SOUNDS Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

leber Mendonça Filho’s debut feature takes place within a suburb in the large northern Brazilian city of Recife filled with white walls, gates, and locked, barred doors. Behind them work servants and live middle-to-upper-class families. The private lives inside these places are interrupted by external commotions, more often heard than seen. Neighbouring Sounds can be watched as a thriller in which, at any moment, any danger is possible; it can also be viewed as a history-inflected case study of the paranoia (both in the film’s characters and in its audience) that engenders this thinking. Yet the sum of Mendonça’s film grows more compelling than either single approach, without burying any of those meanings. The more that I encounter the film, the more I feel it becoming about how families can strengthen bonds while, and even by, pushing outsiders away. AC

THE INDIVIDUAL LISTS

Robbie Fordyce:

Phil Coldiron:

1. HOLY MOTORS Leos Carax 2. TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY Tomas Alfredson 3. HAIL Amiel Courtin-Wilson 4. LORE Cate Shortland 5. IDES OF MARCH George Clooney 6. LOOPER Rian Johnson 7. IRON LADY Phyllida Lloyd 8. THE HOBBIT Peter Jackson 9. COSMOPOLIS David Cronenberg 10. PROMETHEUS Ridley Scott

1. THE EXTRAVAGANT SHADOWS David Gatten 2. ZERO DARK THIRTY Kathryn Bigelow 3. MONUMENT FILM Peter Kubelka 4. THE COMEDY Rick Alverson 5. LEVIATHAN Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Varena Paravel 6. THE GREAT CINEMA PARTY Raya Martin 7. DJANGO UNCHAINED Quentin Tarantino 8. YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET! Alain Resnais 9. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK David O. Russell 10. KUICHISAN Maiko Endo

Anders Furze: 1. HOLY MOTORS Leos Carax 2. DARK HORSE Todd Solondz 3. MARFA GIRL Larry Clark 4. GAME OF THRONES (S2, E9: "Blackwater") Neil Marshall 5. PARANORMAN Chris Butler 6. MOONRISE KINGDOM Wes Anderson 7. THE MASTER Paul Thomas Anderson 8. THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES Lauren Greenfield 9. IN ANOTHER COUNTRY Hong Sang-soo 10. PROMETHEUS Ridley Scott

Aaron Cutler: 1. ORGY OR: THE MAN WHO GAVE BIRTH João Silvério Trevisan 2. THE RED LIGHT BANDIT Rogério Sganzerla 3. NEIGHBOURING SOUNDS Kleber Mendonça Filho 4. THE OPTION Ozualdo Candeias 5. HARD LABOUR Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra 6. RAÚL - THE BEGINNING, THE END, AND THE MIDDLE Walter Carvalho & Evaldo Mocarzel 7. RAT FEVER Cláudio Assis 8. BELAIR Bruno Safadi & Noa Bressane 9. LOOK AT ME AGAIN Claudia Priscilla & Kiko Goifman 10. JARDS Eryk Rocha

Andrew Gilbert: My list betrays me as an autuerist, despite my attempts to deny it. Missing

here is a handful of brilliant works that I’d like to endorse: Bernie, Cosmopolis, Dark Shadows, Dredd, Django Unchained, Girls, Killer Joe, Magic Mike, The Master, Moonrise Kingdom, Silver Linings Playbook, and a special consideration for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. And I’m still chomping at the bit to see Differently Molussia, Leviathan, The Last Time I Saw Macao, and Wrong.

8. MOONRISE KINGDOM Wes Anderson 9. LORE Cate Shortland 10. MAGIC MIKE Steven Soderbergh Brad Nguyen: 1. NO Pablo Larrain 2. I WISH Hirokazu Koreeda 3. HIMIZU Sion Sono 4. MOONRISE KINGDOM Wes Anderson 5. IN ANOTHER COUNTRY Hong Sang-soo 6. THE MASTER Paul Thomas Anderson 7. HOLY MOTORS Leos Carax 8. PROMETHEUS Ridley Scott 9. MAGIC MIKE Steven Soderbergh 10. SKYFALL Sam Mendes

1. BARBARA Christian Petzold 2. WUTHERING HEIGHTS Andrea Arnold 3. TWIXT Frances Ford Coppola 4. TABU Miguel Gomes 5. RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION Paul W.S. Anderson 6. THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES Lauren Greenfield 7. GOON Michael Dowse 8. THE WAR James Benning 9. HOLY MOTORS Leos Carax 10. UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING John Hyams

Louise Sheedy: Special mention: The Minister (Pierre Scholler), Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Lorene Scafaria) and Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (Matthew Ackers & Jeff Dupre). Retrospective highlights: Man on a Roof (Bo Widerberg), screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and The Savage Eye (Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers & Joseph Strick), screened at the Melbourne Cinematheque.

Whitney Monaghan: 1. HOLY MOTORS Leos Carax 2. HEADSHOT Pen-ek Ratanaruang 3. MOSQUITA Y MARI Aurora Guerrero 4. TABU Miguel Gomes 5. PITCH PERFECT Jason Moore 6. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES Christopher Nolan 7. THE FOURTH DIMENSION Aleksey Fedorchenko, Harmony Korine & Jan Kwiecinski

1. COSMOPOLIS David Cronenberg 2. BACK TO STAY Milagros Mumenthaler 3. PARADISE LOVE Ulrich Seidel

4. IN ANOTHER COUNTRY Hong Sang-soo 5. TYRANNOSAUR Paddy Considine 6. I WISH Hirokazu Koreeda 7. AMOUR Michael Haneke 8. A SIMPLE LIFE Ann Hui 9. MARGIN CALL J.C. Chandor 10. BROKEN Rufus Norris

Huw Walmsley-Evans

TAKING IN MIKE The marketing of “Magic Mike” disguised a film that sits comfortably within Steven Soderbergh’s oeuvre.

three of those twenty.1 There were a couple of reasons for this. 2012 was, for me, The Year of The Blu-Ray. 21st century technology spurred me to spend more time at home with the back catalogue than at the multiplex or the arthouse. My exile from the Brisbane International Film Festival also continued to bite, limiting my

n this first issue of Screen Machine for the new year, contributors were asked to provide a list of their favourite films for 2012. I opted out, not because I have an aversion to lists, it’s just that I don’t know if I even saw ten new releases in 2012. The averaged “20 Best” list of Screen Machine contributors’ favourite films speaks to just how estranged from the contemporary cinema I was last year; I saw just

1 For the curious, these were, in order of their appearance on the list: Moonrise Kingdom, The Master, and Prometheus.

access to the sorts of films we tend to fall for at this publication. I can’t help but feel like a bad cinephile for being so disengaged. Though prescriptions vary, it seems at least part of cinephilia is remaining conversant with current offerings. However, my cine-guilt complex is a topic for another day. In addressing the theme of “anticipation” I would like to share some thoughts on what I am very pleased to call my favourite film of last year, and so make up for a lack of breadth with depth. This is a film that does not feature on the “20 Best” list, but should. I want to talk about Magic Mike.

Mike was to be semiautobiographical, a dramatization of the young Tatum’s former life as a stripper before hitting The Big Time in Hollywood. These details only compounded the likelihood that we were going to witness the very best kind of genre nonsense, perhaps made all the more piquant by hamfisted attempts at “the personal” and “authenticity”. I never sought any more information about the film. Between the poster and these few nuggets I knew all I needed to. To be honest, they had me at Matthew McConaughey. When I finally saw the film I couldn’t wait to share it with the first year screen studies students I was tutoring that semester. There had been a lot of Magic Mike talk out of me in the preceding weeks and my building anticipation of the film had become a class motif. Though my fevered anticipation was genuine, it nevertheless served an important rhetorical function: it upset certain expectations they had about what the permissible and impermissible objects were to be “at a university level”; it upset their idea of what a film expert would like, and be like, hopefully recasting me somewhat from the forbidding aesthete I know I can come across as; and accomplished some small gesture of queering (God knows they need all of that they can get) as in: “Why would this hetero guy be interested in the male stripper film for straight women and gay men?” So it was in this vein that I

knew that I wanted to see Magic Mike as soon as those posters started going up. Its lurid blue and purple palette and lashings of ripped torso reminded me of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, and there was every indication that Magic Mike would prove to be a male counterpart to that famous exercise (sexercise?) in sublimely trashy bad taste. I picked up a little more contextualising information via (possibly breakfast television mediated?) osmosis. The central hunk on the poster, vaguely familiar to me, was Channing Tatum, a recently minted piece of beefcake best known for his turn as “John” in Dear John, one of those Nicholas Sparks novel adaptations. Apparently, Magic

had expected to speak to them about what I had seen, and that they, in turn, expected to be spoken to about what I had seen. Imagine, then, their shock when it was the forbidding aesthete rather than the eclectic cultist who wanted to talk to them about Magic Mike. Imagine their shock when I told them that, as far as I was concerned, it was The Film of The Year.

this formulation. It is a small, often sad, film about relationships, concerned (but never ponderously so) with the compromises to personal integrity that come with pursuing the American dream in a sclerotic economy, evoking an utterly convincing and compelling sense of place and character throughout. It was immediately apparent that this was going to be a very different film to the one I had anticipated. It opens on McConaughey’s character, “Dallas”, the owner/manager/director of the show. He addresses his fevered all-female audience, providing the male review equivalent of the in-flight safety demonstration. “Can you touch this?” he asks, grabbing and rubbing various parts of his body in turn. Each time his answer, drowning out a chorus of rowdy squeals, is “no, no, no, no, no”. But then comes the caveat: “the law says you cannot touch… but I see a lot of law breakers in the room tonight. And I don’t see a cop in sight.” Dallas is an ideal vehicle for McConaughey, who is allowed to completely discard the “genteel Texan” undercurrent of his screen persona in favour of a pure capitalist vulgarity pursued with Tom Cruise-like glassy-eyed intensity. His shamanic performance has the crowd, both on-screen and off, positively vibrating at this point, ready for a big, bombastic opening number. Instead, we get an abrupt cut to a

hat sort of film is Magic Mike? Its marketing cues us for particular expectations. Its poster, and its home theatre release cover, utilise the cheesy aesthetics of the “all-male review” advertisement. The pull-quote on the jacket could be for one of these shows. NBCTV’s Manny De La Rosso calls Magic Mike “fun, hot and sexy”. The home theatre releases offer extended sequences of the film’s dance numbers and a “party mode” feature, which allows you to play these one after another on a continuous loop. I had expected the film itself to be much like this: a sequence of thrust-heavy dance sequences, with a completely disposable narrative and some ludicrous dialogue providing a thin semblance of “feature filmness” to justify the exploitation of man-meat. But despite the marketing campaign for the theatrical release, and the continuation of the ruse through the home theatre release, Magic Mike is precisely the inverse of

title card, white text on black: “June”. It’s a bold move to withhold like this, and the scene on the other side of the card similarly upends our expectations. Instead of the show itself, we’re offered the show behind the show, which is, for all of its smutty “adult situation” appeal, completely banal. We meet Mike (Tatum) in the bleary morning after last night’s threesome. He banters in a friendly but non-intimate way with Joanna (Olivia Munn). She dresses while he idly shaves his pubes. They wrack their brains for the name of the third party; she’s passed out, a faceless feminine curve on the bed. They bicker over who this memory block reflects more poorly on, agreeing that, whoever she is, “she was fun”. It’s not quite as perfunctory as, say, the hotel scenes in The Graduate: there’s no tinge of bitterness or regret, or mismatched expectations (these come later), but it’s decidedly unsexy. Slightly surprised at this stage that we’re encountering real characters and being invited to make such determinations, we figure Mike is some kind of hedonist jerk. But then there’s something in the way he talks about the coffee table Joanna admires that strikes a different tone to the rest of their

Its poster utilises the cheesy aesthetics of the “all-male review” advertisement. value-free conversation. It turns out that Mike’s an entrepreneur and that stripping’s just one iron in the fire, a means to an end. It’s all heading towards his own custom furniture business: only “the market hasn’t really hit the sweet spot yet and I’m just waiting for the banks to start making the competitive loans that I’m looking for before I swoop in.” It’s a relief, given that we’re to be spending a couple of hours with this guy, that he stands for

something beyond group sex, but then there’s something practiced in the line about getting the financing together. We intuit that Mike’s less in control of the matter than he would have you believe. Mike departs for one of his many day jobs, tiling condo roofs, leaving psychology student Joanna, as well as the audience, slightly miffed by this unsolicited complexity in Mike’s character. On the construction site Mike makes the acquaintance of Adam, or “The Kid” as he’ll come to be called. A non-union Craigslist ring-in, The Kid casts aside jobs with the same voracity as Mike accrues them. After walking away from a football scholarship and dropping out of college, The Kid drifted to his sister’s couch and breezed through a series of odd jobs. At home, later, he explains to big sister Brooke (Cody Horn) that he won’t be going back tomorrow because “the boss accused me of stealing, so I fuckin’ quit.” Also, he had that job interview at T-Mobile, but they “asked me to wear a fuckin’ tie, and you know how I feel about fuckin’ ties.” Sensible, circumspect Brooke, the ranking adult in the picture, speaks for us: “Why don’t you just wear a tie?” “Sorry, you know what my rules are” comes the response. There’s something infuriating in The Kid’s cute affect that makes Mike’s industry, whichever way it’s directed, seem inherently virtuous. While the film’s marketing leads us to believe the story will be about The Kid’s

deliverance from a life of banality into one of glamour and pleasure—and for a few reels it is—the real story is the development of these barely hinted aspects of the main characters: Mike a fixture of Tampa’s nightlife but with an eye on the door, The Kid innocent and naïve, but also formless, coreless, and eminently corruptible. One of the film’s best scenes sees Mike pack a briefcase with his custom furniture business prospectus and thick wad of cash from his wall safe. Introducing himself to the bank loan officer as “Michael Lane”, he wears a suit, tie and round wire-rimmed glasses. Like Stringer Bell’s forays into legitimate business on The Wire, this is a disguise that is only kept from being completely convincing because the wearer’s frame is so unequivocally built for something other than deskwork. He flirts with the female officer, but to no avail. Mike’s credit history (perhaps ten years ago he made some similar choices to The Kid) makes him an unacceptable risk in an economy where the credit has stopped flowing. “I get it, I understand. You hit buttons and you think you know something about me,” says Mike, proud and injured. We see Mike in the same territory in his personal life, when he runs into Joanna in a restaurant. She recoils, and her date steps into the awkward void to introduce himself as her fiancé. We see the same disbelief and realisation on Mike’s face in this

second vignette illustrating the disconnect between his inner life and external perceptions. Mike has become increasingly emotionally invested in their trysts, but suddenly it is apparent that there was never anything to it as far as she was concerned. “Magic” Mike was just a fun fuck, an extension of the “behavioural analysis” that had brought them into contact in the first instance. On their last and final night together Joanna was on the cusp of graduating: “People will have to start paying me,” she said. Where professional life— respectable life—begins, the life that Mike was part of ends. Mike desperately wants to make this same change. However, the same confluence of respectability and market value doesn’t exist for he who must trade away respectability in the short term with a view to recouping it in the long term. Each transaction takes its toll. With the horizon for personal and professional growth seemingly ever more distant, Mike goes about confirming the worst suspicions about his character by disappointing Brooke, always Mike’s litmus test for success at life in the daylight. The courtyard scene where Mike apologises to her for not looking out for her brother sees the crescendo of Mike’s struggle to reconcile his conflicting interests, desires, and personas, and of Tatum’s Brandoesque study in articulate inarticulation. Brooke, ever sensible, fair, and level, admits

that Adam was probably going to follow his own destructive path regardless, and that Mike’s basically a good guy, but that she can’t “be around his lifestyle.” Mike’s reaction (“Am I ‘Magic’ Mike right now talking to you?”) is an unsettlingly metaphysical response. "That's my job," he continues, “That’s not what I do. I mean it is what I do, but it’s not who I am”. It’s a naked moment, an embarrassing exposure. What’s at stake in Magic Mike is nothing more or less than the morality of the “lifestyle” it purports to document. The scenes in the club where Mike and Co. do their stuff are exciting and amusing and thoroughly enjoyable. However, particularly on rewatching Mike at home, I was struck by how few and far between these numbers are, and how often we see them through the eyes of another. I’m thinking of Dallas standing off-stage watching The Kid’s on-stage defloration. McConaughey’s intensity is unsettling, not because he’s getting off on The Kid’s artless striptease in a carnal sense, but because we can see him projecting grosses and amending marquees in his mind's eye, and getting off on that. Then there’s the scene where Brooke makes a visit to the club. She watches her brother’s solo set with incredulity and suspicion, then is very nearly seduced by the following performer. Brooke’s mouth, firmly set for her brother’s performance, is slightly open now, and her shoulders relax. The

way Mike moves seems to defy the laws of physics, and he generates an irresistible heat. He somersaults off the stage, lands, and scoops up an audience member chair and all, laying her out on the stage. Brooke’s expression turns and the intercutting between her gaze and its object quickens as Mike simulates sex. As he position his crotch over the giggling patron’s face and makes a definitive thrust, Brooke breaks her gaze, repulsed, upset at herself for having been even momentarily taken in. All you need to know about the economic and sexual politics of the film is that its only genuinely erotic moment comes at the very conclusion. Brooke has broken up with her idiot boyfriend and Mike turns up on her doorstep to tell her that he has renounced stripping, the benefits no longer justifying the costs. They can finally go on the breakfast date they’ve been threatening all summer. The trouble is Brooke’s favourite place doesn’t serve breakfast for another six hours. She wonders aloud, very deliberately, what can they do to kill six hours? It’s hot.

film. Perhaps buoyed by my anticipation, Magic Mike had proved an incredibly popular subject for this task. Perhaps also taking their lead from me, nearly all of these reviews talked about the film as the genre bauble we had anticipated. To these reviewers, Mike was the fun-hotsexy time that the posters had promised. There was pleasure to be found, but it was the guiltiest kind. Its innovative uses of miseen-scene, its often-devastating cutting, its ragged-edged, slightly improvised-feeling performances, its narrative economy and flawless structure, its complexity of character and evocation of time and place, in fact all the formal elements and thematic currents in the film, were either completely ignored or else dismissed as awkward, unwelcome distractions. I did wonder about the audience that I had seen Magic Mike with, and whether they might have some grounds for feeling annoyed about, essentially, being tricked into seeing something serious and worthy.2 However, I don’t know that the story got out that Mike was something other than what we all thought it would be. Even with the film well into its home theatre release I’m still looked at askance for holding it in such

hose of all my students most shocked to hear Magic Mike talked about in these terms were the significant percentage of young women (only young women) in each class who had written their 500 word film review assignment on the

2 I wondered if some might have the same reaction as the woman who tried to sue the marketers of Drive for its unrepresentative trailer.

Soderbergh film.3 Had I gone in expecting an “auteur” film my feelings about it might have been quite different. As advanced information about films becomes more accessible and ubiquitous, you really have to work at being as ignorant as I was walking into this film. Us film studies people are the worst for this. We know all the players and the angles, and we sort and classify and contextualise before we even see frame one. But we also know how to distinguish an advertisement for a film from the film itself. The story of reading Magic Mike is much like the story of Magic Mike itself: there’s more and deeper pleasures to be had by seeing what’s really there, rather than being taken in by the glossy façade.

esteem. I put a picture of some recent Blu-ray purchases on Facebook the other day, Magic Mike sharing space with Drive and the big Hitchcock box-set, among others. My cousin commented, “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong, lol.” I’m quite sure I know which title she was referring to. I don’t know whether she’s seen Magic Mike or not, but this might be immaterial. If my students were any indication, the marketing discourses can be a more powerful influence on our perception of a title than the actual film itself. I had a couple of students who were able to recognise Mike for what it was, and even spoke to the distance between the actual film and its marketing. These were the naturals. For the rest, their screen education will be a gradual process of learning to see in this way. Part of the reason I am so enamoured of Mike is precisely because it turned out to be so wildly different from what I had anticipated. I went in with the barest [mis]information about the film, but very defined expectations. I remember being thrilled by what I was seeing, thinking “this is like a Steven Soderbergh or something!” It was such a pleasure to work in reverse, going to see what I expected to be big studio fare, locating a distinctive perspective, sensibility, and set of concerns in the work, and finding out at the end that it was indeed a Steven

And not just any Steven Soderbergh film. Soderbergh has announced that his new film, Side Effects is to be his last, making Magic Mike his penultimate theatrically released film.

Robbie Fordyce

IS THE HOBBIT EVEN A FILM ANYMORE? For New Zealand, the inevitability of “The Hobbit” has implications on its culture, politics and economy.

1. VIRAL ANTICIPATION

however: anticipation begins spreading and reproducing and, to use internet slang, it becomes a "viral" thing. When the adoption of an aesthetic begins to seep out into various conventions, costuming and redecoration, then the anticipatory effects are largely out of the control of the marketing department. Anticipation becomes an unguided emotional intensity, where the obsession with a

he two Tolkien-based film series by Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, are fascinating in the way in which anticipatory factors are involved in guiding the expectations of the films’ audiences. Anticipation is an odd beast, most recognizable as an affect of the marketing industry. The issue goes deeper than that,

subject is not represented in terms of expectations, but rather as desire. At times, for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings franchise, this anticipation has exceeded the ability of audiences to sit waiting, and has led to the production of two fan-made films — one even reviewed by Roger Ebert. This anticipatory mode has two effects with regards mainly to New Zealand’s anticipation of the films. The first is the manner in which the Hobbit in particular exists as a totally preconceived and predetermined artwork. The second is the effect of what we could call the "anticipation industry" on the social and economic concerns of New Zealand. From the perspective of film theory, the influence of anticipatory preconception on the Hobbit films is particularly fascinating. One element of the production process that I think is worth pointing out as particularly significant is the allowance granted to Peter Jackson in the production process, namely the fact that the Lord of the Rings films were preconceived and funded as a trilogy. Of course, Tolkien’s books were a trilogy, and there have been attempts at adapting other classic trilogies (Lynch’s notorious Dune attempt being a well-known example). But this was the first time that a trilogy has been funded in its entirety, prior to any production work beyond the script being committed. The effects of this widely-reported "first" were never examined in the

press. This economic decision played into a massive marketing process that has lasted since 2000, and continues under the guise of marketing The Hobbit. An example: a gigantic mannequin of Ian McKellen’s Gandalf continues to overlook Wellington’s Courtney Place as part of the continued presence of Tolkien works as an ambient part of New Zealand society. This aesthetic anticipated the release of the film itself by at least a year, and was widely distributed. One could argue that the illustrator Alan Lee's influence on the books’ aesthetic development had meant that the films’ aesthetic had been, in fact, cast several decades earlier. By the time the Lord of the Rings series concluded, anyone that cared had already read the books, and was swamped in a particular representational form mainly comprised of computergenerated composites of New Zealand landscapes, miniatures, and a touch of the familiar orange/blue wash that Hollywood was accustomed to at the time. So, where to for The Hobbit? So much of what makes The Hobbit a film is, to quote Deleuze, its dedication to a "repetition of the same." The aesthetic of the film was already a given: Weta Workshop was retained from Lord of the Rings as the primary postproduction unit. Again, it was filmed in New Zealand, with plenty of moments of composite scenery (and as far as a film review goes, I considered the scenery to be the strongest

Indeed the absence of an industrial era in New Zealand is what made it possible to shoot films like The Hobbit. element). The casting was well publicized, and where new characters were concerned we were given great detail and plenty of cinematic stills to reassure us that what we were going to see was well inside our comfort zone. The plot itself was based on a book that is even older than The Lord of the Rings, and the alleged adaptation from novel into film at a rate of 40 seconds per page means that The Hobbit will take slightly longer to watch than to read. This might suggest that there is a more solid relationship between the books and the films, which is perhaps not entirely the case. The Hobbit films are grossly over-coded by the burdens of a borrowed aesthetic, a plot that is the best part of a century old, and a marketing strategy that has washed the film of any potential to live up to the expectations. All these elements combine to construct a cinematic experience that mainly lies outside the text

itself. Or, perhaps it would be better described as a film that can only be adequate: to perfectly fulfil a long chain of anticipatory expectations that finds its roots in the mind of a British scholar of Nordic and Teutonic languages early in the twentieth century. Given this, The Hobbit barely seems to operate as a text any more. It is little more than the meagre fulfilment of an anticipatory machine that has been ossified by Peter Jackson in film. The general condition is that The Hobbit seems to be unable to surprise or dismay its audience, and will probably lead to the remainder of the Hobbit trilogy being merely successful enough in the future. The metaphor that I would use to understand this comes from a point in TV series Malcolm in the Middle where Hal, in the midst of a mid-life crisis, pours all his energy into a frenzy of painting a work of art. Like a man possessed, he becomes obsessed

with the act of painting, and cannot even begin to engage with his own artwork. Over the course of several days he finally perfects the piece, but before he (or the audience) can even fully comprehend the work’s content, the sheer volume of paint causes the entire piece to detach from the canvas and, like a giant wall of multicoloured jelly, it collapses upon him. The level of enthusiasm for The Hobbit from large portions of New Zealand almost garnered a level of self-sustaining sentience separate from any relationship to the films themselves. My own family considered it a Christmas event to go and see The Hobbit as part of this process of collective anticipation. I will admit to trying to determine exactly where we were in the Waimakariri river basin when Gandalf was slinging flaming pine cones across the screen. I distinctly remember after the film, everyone being "not quite disappointed" with it that strange sense of cinematic ennui which popular anticipation for the Tolkien/Jackson fugue seems exactly to try to avoid. What are the effects of such an absurd aesthetic over-coding? Or, in other words, given that we know what the characters look like, what the story is, and what the aesthetic is—in fact, what the "New Zealand" aesthetic demanded—what do we have left in the film? It has become the communion wafer of New Zealand cinema: the film-going public on their knees waiting for the sacrament itself. A miracle of

transubstantiation where the bread of the film is turned into holy flesh through a simple act of total conviction. 2. A COUNTRY'S MISRECOGNITION OF ITSELF

here are three facets to the effect of this anticipation: unionism, the dual spectre of globalization and postcolonialism, and the effects on the New Zealand economy. Perhaps no other film has been more central to the damaging of labour rights in New Zealand. Damaging to the extent that the New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations published a special issue in 2011 dedicated to addressing what was known as the “Hobbit Law.” Certainly the film has a phenomenal level of emotional and nationalistic investment from a substantial portion of the New Zealand public. This has allowed for the business-friendly National Party government to engage in a process of legislative unionsquashing. The “Hobbit Law” was instituted in order to prevent union representation for limitedterm contractors, which was key to retaining multinational interest in the production of The Hobbit within New Zealand. The New Zealand film economy is, despite the massive profits produced through The Lord of the Rings, a relatively small and unstable employment environment. Additionally, due to the projectbased nature of the work,

individuals are employed on limited terms, under individual contracts. Unionization is an important device for any labourer, but the small number of employment opportunities in New Zealand for film workers means that it is doubly necessary in order to enable collective bargaining. During the filming of The Hobbit, however, many actors, as well as set and model workers, began industrial disputes after the producers refused to consider the union’s bargaining agreements. The odd result? The public of New Zealand protested against the unions, which allowed the National government a brief period of hyperbolic political capital to institute legislation that renders film industry union organization legal only for those involved in permanent contracts — essentially excluding any film worker of any kind. Such legislation means that any further employment on films within New Zealand is subject to fairly harsh labour conditions, and this opening does not bode well for other sectors of the project-based digital economy in New Zealand’s future. If I were to have any specific worry about the combined effects of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings films, it would be the investment in the films as providing a national culture for New Zealand. It is fine for the movies to be filmed in New Zealand, and it is fine for New Zealand's geography to be represented on the big

screen. I do not begrudge New Zealand the economic benefits to either the film sector or its tourist economy. The problem is the replacement of other cultural forms with an aesthetic that has been imported from overseas. The legal conditions regarding employment produced by The Hobbit can perhaps be overturned eventually, but New Zealand’s misrecognition of itself in The Lord of the Rings is what allowed this to happen. The postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon notes that once a cultural form has been overtaken by the importation of culture from elsewhere it is almost impossible to return to the original practice. Whether the film is, in fact, a "New Zealand production" is a fairly banal question. The jingoistic position seems to be prepared to deny the political economic considerations that are involved in having foreign private corporations fund the whole endeavour, or the fact that the source material is based in repainting an idyllic, pastoral England into a fantasy setting. On the other hand, the film is also produced, staged and directed mainly by New Zealanders in New Zealand. The issue is not whether the film is a New Zealand production or not — it is simply another index of globalization. The question should be how cultural production ties the process of globalization to the economic and cultural concerns of minor countries such as New Zealand.

bestial trappings and tribal imagery that means that, at best, Māori are not recognizable as such on screen. At worst, they are recognized on-screen as nothing other than an army of soldiers recalling the eugenicist discourse of the International Human Genetics Meeting in 2006, where one presenter suggested that Māori possess a gene that predisposes them to violence. My own perspective on the effects of the films on New Zealand are mixed. On the one hand, Jackson's films suggest that New Zealand is able to develop a postindustrial economy in a fairly interesting manner — that is, to move from being a country whose economic portfolio is largely agricultural to having exports that operate in terms of "immaterial labour" (labour that is focused on information, communication and socialization) without moving through an industrial production stage. Indeed the absence of an industrial era in New Zealand is what made it possible to shoot films like The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, various parts of the XMen franchise, and a range of other period dramas. The lack of industrial smokestacks or highspeed freight rail has meant that New Zealand can sell its landscape on the global stage. The move by the current National government to open up natural reserves to mining seems to be a move away from the postindustrial nation, and instead looks back fondly towards the colonial era of resource

3. CASTING ORCS, SELLING GEOGRAPHY

t’s worth considering the postcolonial concerns surrounding the production's casting choices for the Uruk-hai, the monstrous, dark-skinned and shamanistic orc breeds: these roles were mainly filled by Māori, leaving the role of many of their rivals, the beautiful, fair-skinned, monastic elves, to be played by Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent), with the speaking roles being given to international actors. There are certainly a number of excuses that can be made to justify such decisions such as needing to use larger and more muscular actors in the role, the use of certain Māori cultural practices for the orcish war chants and the like, and "positive discrimination" giving space to Māori as actors. But these are simply post-factum justifications of pre-existing stereotypes and inequalities. Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies that there “are problems when we do not see ourselves in texts. There are problems, too, when we do see ourselves but can barely recognize ourselves through the representations.”1 Māori are on the screen, but under a veil of

Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books 2012.

extraction and environmental exploitation. That said, many New Zealand governments have recognized the trends towards a postindustrial economy on several levels at different times: the Labour Party under Helen Clarke invested in various arts programs that enabled artists to operate as small businesses and essentially fostered an entrepreneurial element within New Zealandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s culture industry. On the other hand, more recent governments have worked to cut down benefits provided by film industry unions in order to foster overseas interest. Given that, as several commentators have noted, the first Lord of the Rings film, by itself, represented a staggering 1.33% of the whole of the New Zealand GDP for 2001, then both the potential of a postindustrial economy in New Zealand and the importance of fostering national support for the squashing of labour unions and other systems is fairly apparent. The thing to acknowledge is that the adoption of the Tolkien mythos as an aspect of New Zealandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s national identity is at once both a wonderful and dreadful thing, and should be taken as a case study of the function of national anticipations of film in the process of globalization. This is the reason to question the nature of The Hobbit as a film: not because it does not exist on film-stock, but rather that the most important elements of the production of the film do not lie in the cultural content of the

work itself, and we should instead be interrogating the responses that have emerged around it.

REVIEWS A CHOREOGRAPHY OF BODIES Review of “Life of Pi” by Brad Nguyen

origins in a much more fundamental way.1 The opening credit sequence of Ang Lee’s 3-D film Life of Pi is a series of shots of animals doing nothing in particular. A giraffe stands around eating leaves off a tree. In another shot, some flamingos walk into frame. There are a few CGI-enhanced flourishes: a presumably real sloth hangs from a tree branch while a presumably digital hummingbird darts around its face hovering inches from the camera. But still, it’s CGIenhanced “nothing in particular.” Which is important, for in its opening sequence, this megabudget Hollywood film doesn’t resemble any other Hollywood film as much as it resembles the recent avant-garde documentary Bestiaire by Denis Côté; a film that consists almost exclusively of shots of animals doing nothing in particular. The opening of Life of Pi also recalls the way Leos Carax

t’s funny how cutting-edge technology brings out the nostalgia in filmmakers. Remember when “digital backlots” produced such throwback films as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Sin City? Or remember that 3-D brought us Martin Scorsese’s paean to film history Hugo? Yet it appears that with more recent films such as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and now Ang Lee’s remarkable Life of Pi, that current 3-D technology is bringing multiplex fare back to cinema’s

1 I shall, for the purposes of this review, leave aside the fact that there is a fascinating history of 3-D being used by art film directors such as Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and Wim Wenders (Pina) and respected auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock (Dial M for Murder) and Douglas Sirk (Taza, Son of Cochise) not to mention that Jean-Luc Godard is currently producing a film in 3-D called Adieu au langage.

opens Holy Motors with footage from the very beginnings of cinema: simple images of a man running, from a time when the illusion of movement being conjured by the succession of still images was still a novelty. One could deride Life of Pi as hokey digital pageantry, but it is Ang Lee’s efforts to deploy 3-D and exploit the medium’s strengths that bring this film in its opening moments a degree of purity. What we experience here is cinema brought back to its first principle, which is not the telling of stories, but rather, fascination with the image.2 Why has 3-D brought this about? Because 3-D, more fundamentally than traditional 2-D cinema, is about immersion: 3-D articulates the volume of bodies, emphasises the intervals of distance between things on screen and creates the illusion that the audience is in the real presence of those things on screen. Thus, by its nature 3-D favours long shots and deep focus, a visual grammar that is out-of-step with contemporary mainstream cinema.3 Use flat

staging and the technology is wasted. Edit too quickly and the immersion effect is destroyed.4 Keep in mind the film scholar David Bordwell’s work on average shot length (ASL, by which is meant the average length of time a shot is held before the editor cuts to another shot): In his book The Way Hollywood Tells It, Bordwell writes that ASL has reduced significantly over time from 8-11 seconds in films before 1960 to 4-6 seconds in contemporary cinema.5 The opening sequence of Life of Pi has an ASL of about 10 seconds. Yes, the sequence is designed to show off 3-D technology but the message behind the images is remarkably simple: They ask us to do nothing but stay a while and have a look. Watch these animals and pay attention to how close they seem to be. 3-D has managed to make audiences marvel at images again without sensationalising the content of those images. The question is: How to deploy the fascination engendered by 3D technology for the purposes of

whereas Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Roy Andersson and Béla Tarr would probably make brilliant 3-D films if they cared to. 4 I’ve discussed at more length how 3D might be used more effectively in “Five films to convert to 3D,” Killings, 6 April 2012. 5 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley: University of California Press 2006.

I am referring here to Tom Gunning’s work on the Cinema of Attractions. See: Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle, Vol. 8, No. 3 & 4, Fall 1986. 3 We can state without a doubt that Michael Bay, Paul Greengrass and the late Tony Scott are/were fundamentally unsuited to 3-D

telling a story? (Despite the way I’ve seemed to characterise the film so far, Life of Pi is indeed a film whose central theme is storytelling, both its impossibility and its necessity.) The answer given by Ang Lee is not earthshattering, but it is worth remembering — cinematic storytelling is the art of showing bodies in space and 3-D can aid this storytelling by articulating in a wholly novel way the spatial relationships between those bodies. Life of Pi is a story that is particularly suited to 3-D because despite its lofty themes it is, at a basic nuts and bolts level, a choreography of bodies: A boy is stranded at sea with a wild, untamed Bengal tiger. Watch out! He’s too close to the tiger! Now they are apart. Now something brings them closer again. And so it goes. Life of Pi translates the source material’s abstract, literary concepts (Pi’s relationship to the tiger as a metaphor for man’s difficulty in reconciling the idea of God with the meaningless chaos of nature) into a physical, eminently cinematic idea. One of the characters at the start of the film anticipates that the story being told is one that will “make you believe in God” but Life of Pi is less a film about God than it is about the spatial dynamics between a boy, a boat and a tiger. It’s this level of intimacy which makes the 3-D compelling and more than a gimmick. !

FORGET FACT OR FICTION Review of “Zero Dark Thirty” by Elliott Logan

he scene in Zero Dark Thirty in which CIA interrogator Dan feeds ice cream to his pet monkeys nicely captures the eloquent symbolism and ambiguity of the movie’s realism. The animals are kept in a cage in the grounds of a CIA black site, and Dan seems to take great joy spending a spare moment of rest with the animals. We watch him smile as he feeds them ice cream from his own fingers, and teases them with the cone; he is delighted by the mischievous bravado of one monkey who steals most of what’s left over. Although it seems a mundane pause in-between the more seriously grave sequences

of action and talk, which pivot around terrorism and torture, details of the scene are significant about what kind of a world Dan inhabits and its implications for his view of others within it. Crucial to this scene's significance, and its achievement of expression through the mundane, is the ice cream. When thinking over this scene, I wondered: why ice cream? Why not some more practical treat, such as M&Ms, or even dates? It makes no difference to the monkeys, but I think it does to us. If we care to consider it, the choice of ice cream becomes significant. The obvious difficulty of providing a frozen dessert in this desert hell suggests the extent to which the military culture tries to maintain the trimmings of Dan's domestic comfort even as it pursues a brutal and brutalising program of secret kidnapping and torture. Given a moment’s thought, the ice cream comes to represent a direction of energy and attention, at an institutional and individual level, that seems shockingly inappropriate within the context of the CIA’s interrogation program. It reminds me of a member of the medical corps at Auschwitz who, after recording in his diary “the most horrible of all horrors,” writes the next day of his enjoyment of “magnificent vanilla ice-cream.”6 Like the

dessert enjoyed at Auschwitz, Dan’s ice cream is just ice cream: it’s hot, he wants something cool and sweet that maybe reminds him of home. But it also works as a symbol that stands for the attitudes of the CIA as an institution, and Dan as one of its parts, raising issues of moral perspective pivotal to the movie (and the controversy that has swirled around it). This banal prop allows us to see two more things about Dan and his context that are crucial to the scene’s function. As we see the ice cream melting down Dan’s fingers, it not only gives evidence of the extreme heat, but also shows Dan being prepared to get messy in his relation to the monkeys. These two points cohere around another detail in an ironic way that conflicts with readings of Zero Dark Thirty as a rational endorsement of America’s recent history of kidnapping, torture and killing, and thus as an apology for its kidnappers, torturers and killers. The scene with the monkeys begins with an aerial shot of the black site. This allows us to see in the middle of the dusty, sunbaked yard a large cage in which several men in orange jumpsuits and black hoods languish under the same sun that melts Dan’s ice cream. The wide shot gives a sense of the prisoners’ exposure to this gruelling heat, so we are

Concentration Camps, New York: Henry Holt 1997.

Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the

more likely to notice in the following shot that Dan has thoughtfully provided his monkeys with shade. As we watch him delight in the company of his pets, in the background we see that he lets men bake. One might see the scene’s purpose as being to "humanise" Dan by softening out his violence with sympathetic displays that demonstrate his charming capacity for good, which regretfully has to be "put away" to properly encounter and subdue a world of terrorism and chaos. However, such a reading would require that we, like Dan, ignore in favour of pet animals the suffering and indignity of human beings to which Bigelow gives us plain access.7 Although the scene depicts the joy Dan takes in an act of care, it does not show us what he possesses that lessens our sense of the evil he contributes to the world. It rather shows that his is a soul incapable of feeling itself in proper relation to others, an absence that allows him to see those other human beings tied up in the sun nearby as less

deserving of human treatment than he is, certainly less deserving than these monkeys are. It is this perspective on his relation to the world that allows Dan to shackle another man from the ceiling until he shits himself, to pour water over that man’s face so he experiences drowning, to stuff him inside a plywood box the size of a small suitcase. The scene is rich in how its way of presenting a throwaway detail that can be passed over without a thought belies how those acutely observed details resonate within the surrounding drama. Bigelow’s shots here do not declare or assert a moral catastrophe made obvious through the extreme: they instead challenge us to perceive one through ordinary human actions and omissions which take on symbolic dimensions and present ambiguities. It is at the level of symbol and ambiguity that we should look for the point of why Zero Dark Thirty is the way it is, not in the intellectually arid arguments over some starkly drawn and defended line between fact and fiction, and where the movie can be found to lie on either side of it. In this respect I was recently pleased to read David Stratton noticing a resonance between Bigelow’s movie and John Ford’s The Searchers.8 The importance of

My reading here is indebted to Peter Thomas’s unpublished doctoral dissertation “‘Flourishing Inside a Bastardism’: The Significance of Textual Miscegenation in PostClassical Hollywood,” in which Thomas describes the ironic deployment of conflicting generic frames that disrupt easy affirmations of meaning in the extreme violence of several post-Classical Hollywood movies.

David Stratton, “Zero Dark Thirty tackles an unsettling obsession with

Stratton’s discovery of this relation lies in its move away from issues of fact and fiction. Stratton squarely identifies Zero Dark Thirty as a symbolic drama, and locates it within a long tradition of narratives that deploy genre in order to dramatise histories and experiences of (specifically American) imperialism. The best examples of these narratives are also in some way about themselves as narratives, as mythic constructions of history, and their impact as myths on a national psychology and character.9 This makes me think about Zero Dark Thirty’s stunning, discomforting opening. Over what feels like a few minutes of black screen we listen to real recordings of people who, trapped inside the burning World Trade Centre towers, speak with loved ones for the last time. The first images we see after we hear these recordings are of Dan torturing a shackled Arab prisoner as masked figures look on, one of whom we learn is central character Maya, whose obsessive pursuit of bin Laden drives the movie. There is an obvious connection being made between the events of September 11 and the CIA’s later program of

torture. But it’s important that we specifically hear recordings removed from the immediacy of the event, and that we move from these sounds to images of Maya in particular, whose identity is revealed to the audience when she insists on participating in the ongoing torture without a mask, as if through her willingness to see this course through she reveals who she is. So the opening sequence seems to be about more than torture as simple revenge, instead considering the mediation and memory of September 11 and its aftermath as playing some role in the construction of Maya’s subjectivity and character. (Another compelling example of this is the opening credit sequence of Homeland.10) So is the scene not asking us to also think about Zero Dark Thirty as a movie at least somewhat about the War on Terror, and the killing of bin Laden, as mythical narratives whose particular ways of being told play a part in the continuing construction of a national psychology? !

Osama bin Laden,” The Australian, 26 January 2013. See Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Western and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy, New Haven: Yale UP 2010.

10 See Jason Jacobs, “Homeland, Time, and Titles,” Critical Studies in Television Online, 23 November 2012.

ANATOMY OF THE SUBLIME Review of “Inside Nature’s Giants” by Melanie Ashe

morbid trophy of the dead lion or other beast often arranged into a frozen pose of aggression. Although the format of control has differed within these examples, humans’ relationship with the natural environment has always contained an anxiety towards mastering and understanding the awesome and all-powerful wilderness. Susan Sontag argues that, like the act of shooting with a gun, "there is something predatory in taking a picture."11 In this way, the invention of the photograph can be seen as a strategy for scientific knowledge and cultural understanding. "The gun has metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy," she claims, "because nature has ceased to be what it always had been – what people needed protection from. Now nature— tamed, endangered, mortal— needs to be protected from people." Yet the act of taking a picture is still deeply entrenched in exploiting the subject and, in this case, exploiting the mystical and often sublime wonders of the natural world. Inside Nature’s Giants continues to use photography to capture and control the aweinspiring functions of the animal kingdom, yet it does so with an unusual level of unvarnished materiality and human intervention. While a quick glimpse of David Attenborough’s

round 1895, two brothers from Britain built an artificial bovine out of rawhide, hiked it somewhere into the British moors, climbed inside with their heavy and cumbersome camera equipment, and waited. They were Thomas and Cherry Kearton, among the first wildlife photographers, taking one of the earliest wildlife photographs. The "imitation ox," as the bovine was called, was especially designed to get as close as possible to nature without human interference in order to capture an untempered and authentic photograph of wildlife in its true form. Even in the tradition of safari an attempt to seize and control the wild and magnificent natural world was evident, the

Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin Group 1977.

latest showcase of the natural world will recall with high-speed camera fluidity a group of Alaskan grizzly bears catching salmon jumping upstream, Inside Nature’s Giants has more in common with a gore-heavy horror film or a forensic procedural. Each episode in the series takes a look at a very large animal as a team of gleeful scientists dissect and examine the anatomy and physiology behind its lifestyle. In one episode, a sperm whale the size of a bus has washed up on a Kent beach in the UK. Joy Reidenberg, the gung-ho anatomist, begins by digging her knife into the animal right up to the hilt. It is here that the visceral realities of a fresh animal corpse become apparent. Blood seeps from the fresh wounds made by the knife and oozes downwards. Giants emphasises these elements of the abject body with deliberation: shots of blood pooling on the ground, mixing with mud and sand. You can almost smell the gassy aroma rising off the steaming surface of the body as you look at it. These shots do not display a disrespectful treatment of the animal body per se, but display a non-spiritual, scientific and curious perspective. The result is messy, and perhaps akin to what you would expect to see at the local butcher. As a viewer without a scientific background, viewing Giants—especially when new to the series—is jarring. Standard tools of dissection don’t work with creatures the size of whales, so

the team call in a local to use a chainsaw to penetrate the thick layers of blubber and bone. Shredded whale meat flies through the air. To successfully peel back the blubber to access the digestive tract and respiratory system, the team hook a layer of blubber onto a bulldozer and remove it with brute force. The relatively unfiltered sound and floodlit lighting do not allow any comfortable distance when watching. Peeling and playing with bits of skin, one of the team reaches in and hauls out armfuls of intestines, even a handful of parasites that have been living within the whale’s stomach, throwing them with a splatter to the ground. None of this is noneducational, and it is the team’s visible fascination with the mechanical function of the body that makes the series so engaging. As Joy cuts through the blubber on the whale, she accidently punctures the stomach lining, and an explosive array of stomach juices and guts erupts over her face. Excitedly explaining that the whale’s internal organs are filling up with gas and that it is poisonous, she calmly asks a crew member to wipe her face down. Later on in the episode she grabs the whale’s penis with both arms and demonstrates that the organ is prehensile in order for the whale to successfully have intercourse in the ocean. The series also strongly pursues the idea of human intervention in the nature

documentary. While the act of intervention into the pristine natural environment is evident through the performance of a dissection in itself, Giants takes it a step further by emphasising the meta-levels of the documentary. The series sometimes spoils our immersion in the two scientists carrying out the dissection on the beach by breaking away into a shot that shows another 7 or 8 crew holding microphones and cameras. This episode in particular acts as a procedural look into the spontaneity of documentary shooting as the event of a beached whale cannot be planned in advance. Filming on a cold British night on a beach also offers many challenges. ‘Where would you like the lights?’ asks one of the crew, as they rearrange the set up constantly to suit the task at hand. This sense of industrial operation, from a level of science and filmmaking, is incongruous to the usual natural documentary set up. The intense dissection scenes on the beach are broken up as the amiable biologist Simon Watts takes a detour to explore the similarities between human freediving and the deep sea diving abilities of the whale. Richard Dawkins, the patron saint of evolution, also makes an appearance to discuss evolutionary ancestors. These components add insight and pacing to the dissection process, and again offer another, more human, angle into the nature documentary genre. While the

series performs several abstractions on the animal body by cultivating several ideas that you don’t usually see together in the nature documentary context, it ultimately thrusts humans and the natural world together in a way not often achieved in this kind of television. The kind of bodily intimacy shown here – while disgusting for some – remains abjectly fascinating for the exact same reason. And now while after watching, the insides of a sperm whale are empty of any mystique, I am still filled with wonder. ! WHAT’S THE WORD? Review of “Django Unchained” by Andrew Gilbert

iewers and critics have wondered whether Django Unchained is racist or anti-racist. Such questioning

presupposes that a movie cannot be both and limits the possibilities of discussion. I would like to try and disentangle Django’s many provocations, truths, and illusions. To do this I must consider it as a central object in a messy discourse about race and the politics of taste and decorum. I’d like to focus on the language that has come to define Django. The word on everybody’s mind is "nigger" — ever present yet invisible. This word makes us uncomfortable. Despite its dense history of appropriation and censure the word is incapable of neutrality — and rightly so. A concern is that Django tosses the word around flippantly and with relish, but the nature of this discourse exposes an attempt to quarantine and erase this word. It is treated less as a reference to real-life oppression and more of a slippage of manners. This implies that writing or saying the word, regardless of context, makes you racist by association. This rhetorical move among critics to prove how much they dislike this word avoids the implications that Django makes about American culture and ignores the more problematic elements of the movie, elements that are more racist than this discourse would suggest.12

Instead the N-word has come to dominate almost every review I’ve read, which is not totally unreasonable.13 David Edelstein admits his review wouldn’t have been published if it weren’t typed out as n-----.14 It’s difficult to quote the movie or refer to its many linguistic motifs without writing or saying the word. This critical attitude of avoidance privileges surface level engagements with the work. It ignores what the word reveals about characters and situations in the movie.15

which has seen the republishing of his works with all instances of "nigger" and "injun" rewritten as politically correct anachronisms in an attempt to rewrite history and avoid teaching the unpleasant realities of American culture. 13 One only has to poke around the positive and negative reviews to get a taste of what I mean. I would not consider David Edelstein’s to be among these, as he genuinely engages with the movie. Glenn Kenny’s negative review of Django Unchained is a perfect example, particularly when compared to his positive review of Lincoln. I’d also recommend Metacritic’s sampling of popular reviews. 14 David Edelstein, "Django Unchained is Manna for Mayhem Mayvens," Vulture, 20 December 2012. 15 I would like to draw your attention to the historical legacy of Richard Fleischer’s 1975 film Mandingo, whose influence is inscribed all over Django Unchained. As critic Robin Wood points out in his essay, "Mandingo: The Vindication of an Abused Masterpiece," it was mostly white middleclass male critics who attacked

This is not an uncommon phenomenon in American race discourse. Consider the treatment of Mark Twain’s anti-racist novels within the contemporary educational system,

Consider the repetition of “nigger on a horse,” a phrase employed throughout the narrative to literally yank Django down from an elevated place reserved for whites and to strip him of his agency. Or when Dr. Schultz exposes his charade of looking to buy a slave because of his inability to convincingly convey a normalized racist posture; his discomfort at saying the word betrays him. This stands in sharp contrast to plantation owner Calvin Candie who says the word as if he were referring to an inanimate object. Its normalization becomes sinister. This doesn’t make it less painful to hear, but this isn’t merely Tarantino getting away with

something as some have suggested. Django is dependent upon its language to flesh out its world, which is equal parts history and horseshit. While Django is dismissed for its prevarications, films like Lincoln, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and The Help have been praised as paragons of civil rights cinema. They have the sensitive wherewithal to never verbalize violent oppression, which is what saying nigger does. Yet these films are guilty of as many historical falsehoods as anything dreamt up by Tarantino. The critical attack on Django for historical revisionism ignores the movie’s clever play with legend formation and manifested desires. The acceptable narratives employ a sublime revisionism, one that congratulates the viewer for being on the right side of history without implicating them in an ongoing history of violence. As Kate Masur observes, films like Lincoln erase Black agency by depicting Blacks as recipients waiting for the gift of freedom to be bestowed upon them by white men.16 No Fredrick Douglass. No Sojourner Truth. No Nat Turner. No Black Abolitionists. The point articulated by many of Django’s detractors is that it both trivializes history by exploiting it for entertainment and for being so unabashedly crass. Lincoln thus

the film as disgusting trash, usually in reviews filled with factual errors and assumptions, despite the reality that many Black communities and the NAACP celebrated the film’s brutal honesty. As I mention in this review, Mandingo, along with other works influential to Django Unchained, such as The Legend of Nigger Charley and Boss Nigger, are uncritically lumped into vague categories of Trash, Exploitation, and Schlock, without any distinctions of what the films are attempting to say on a subtextual level, but labeled as racist because of the uncomfortable scenarios represented in the films. On a personal note, I find Mandingo to be a superior film to Django Unchained and perhaps the greatest Hollywood film to tackle the subject. See also Andrew Britton's essay on Mandingo as well as Jonathan Rosenbaum's capsule review.

16 Kate Masur, "In Spielberg's 'Lincoln,' Passive Black Characters," The New York Times, 12 November 2012.

becomes something higher than entertainment: it’s History. Meanwhile Django’s gross oversimplifications of racism and slavery go mostly unexamined outside of Black critics.17 Django repeats this pattern of sidelining Black history to some extent. Its narrative structure proffers an enlightened white man who frees and civilizes Django—a slave who just happens to speak and act like an educated white man (along with his wife Broomhilde) despite every other Black character speaking in the dialect and grammar of slaves. Tarantino attempts to rectify this by killing off the main white characters in order to hand over the climax to the Black characters—a move which pits Black-on-Black violence as the core of the film and functions as a hip bastardization of Malcolm X’s House Negro / Field Negro lectures, while bringing this legacy back into the spotlight. Wrapped up in these devices is the historical relevance of exploitation cinema, something our critic friends have attempted

to dismiss by decrying the work as immature shock-mongering. One of the functions of exploitation cinema has been to visualize anxieties and desires that do not fit into the sanctioned structures of mainstream fare. These are the experiences of marginalized peoples coming back to haunt and dismantle the white bourgeois society that oppresses and erases them, often in outrageous power fantasies like Django (again, Mandingo is relevant here. See note 4). The outright dismissal implies that trash cannot have serious political meaning. David Denby’s review for The New Yorker18 dismisses exploitation in toto in favor of mature cinema like Zero Dark Thirty, a movie that neatly avoids the anti-Arab racism that pervades the War on Terror and rewrites history by way of omission, but is treated like an historical document! His piece is indicative of the pretension that dictates popular American film discourse: books are to be judged by their covers, not the ideas they are grappling with. As exploitation Django is opening up the nasty history that has been buried deep by safe cinema. And its abhorrent violence (which apparently is less objectionable than its language) is the inevitable burst of suppressed

As Blair L.M. Kelley writes in "The Price of ‘Django'," the film neatly avoids the complexity of slavery as an economic system that built the foundations of the nation while amassing fortunes that still exist today. Furthermore, she argues that slave owners were complex individuals and not “bizarre cartoon villains or the bumbling protoKlansmen depicted in Django Unchained.”

18 David Denby, "'Django Unchained': Put-on, Revenge, and the Aesthetics of Trash," The New Yorker, 22 January 2013.

race problems.20 Django Unchained is a very clever movie, and its complex deployment of language is its strongest feature. Everything else, however, misses the mark, but we can’t have this discussion if we only judge movies based on how comfortable they make us feel about ourselves. !

racial tensions built up over decades, albeit in the misdirected form of a white man’s anemic fantasy. It is a dangerous yet powerful prescription for a movie culture that refuses to address such topics and often talks over the Black directors who do it already and to better effect than Django.19 Django is being maneuvered into a position that absorbs all of the critical flak for its many trespasses, deflecting scrutiny from more troublesome, but “serious” movies. This has become both Tarantino’s modus operadi and his critical fate. The obvious targets of his films— racists—pose a critique of our social blindness. Unless evil announces itself we don’t even notice it, or as Calvin Candie says, “if it were a snake it would have bit me.” His heroes are just as cruel and sociopathic as his villains and most of the moral separation is done by the audience, not the actual film, something that is rarely considered a deliberate move on the part of the filmmaker, but rather a sign of moral ineptitude. This isn’t meant to deflect criticism away from Tarantino, only that these amoral scenarios function as a social litmus test, and in the process exposes how unwilling many of us are to speak frankly about America’s ongoing

20 I’d like to draw attention to two essays that are relevant to my thesis, but I didn’t have space to mention. bell hooks’ review of Pulp Fiction, "Cool Cynicism," is very applicable to the structural issues of Django Unchained. Also, I will defer to Slavoj Zizek’s recent piece on Zero Dark Thirty, a movie that I attack for its moral weaknesses, but cannot give sufficient argument in this review.

I highly recommend Charles Burnett’s 2003 film Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property.

WHAT IS NEWSWORTHY ANYMORE? I MEAN, WHO KNOWS? Review of “The Newsroom” (season 1, episode 1, “We Just Decided To”) by Whitney Monaghan

political leanings, he's faced with a question from a naive college student that the host of the session will not let go unanswered: What makes America the greatest country in the world? Pressed for a response, he replies flatly, "It isn't." And thus begins one of contemporary television's more breathtaking monologues: And you—sorority girl—yeah— just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, fortyninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labour force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defence spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies. None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORSTperiod-GENERATION-periodEVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about?! Yosemite?!!! We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor

efore the credits even roll at the beginning of Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series The Newsroom, we're introduced to Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), a disenfranchised but popular news anchor. He's likened to Jay Leno: popular because he doesn't offend anyone. In a lecture theatre filled with students, Will sits on stage flanked by a conservative and a liberal. His positioning is reflective of his supposedly unbiased politics. Initially following an argument between the conservative and liberal, Will soon tunes out and the conflicting voices fade to nothingness. After a series of shots of the argument, the audience and a few brief responses from Will regarding his

people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbours, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world's greatest artists and the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn't belittle it; it didn't make us feel inferior. We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn't scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is oneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

Having established this as the ambition of the series, the opening credits begin. A sentimental and almost nostalgic piano provides the melody that comprises the theme tune. The credits begins with black and white footage of a satellite moving around the globe before cutting to a series of shots that dissolve into one another. Here titles of news programs dissolve into faces of news anchors that then dissolve into images of news being recorded. Finally, the image softly dissolves into the cast of the series. Tying in with Will's comment about the "great" and "revered" men behind the news, the visuals take the audience through the history of television news, historically locating the series amongst the newsrooms of the past. But the newsroom is more than a setting in this ensemble drama. The newsroom is also more than the space where the news is broadcast â&#x20AC;&#x201D; although this does have a prominent role within the series, each episode culminating in or significantly featuring at least one broadcast. Beyond this, the newsroom is a significant setting as it is the space where decisions regarding newsworthiness are made. That is, it is the place where news value is established and thus where some news events are valued over others. Events gain news value when the gatekeepers of content, those behind the news, decide that they are newsworthy. This is where

In the second half of this monologue, Will articulates something noteworthy, discussing why America was once the greatest country in the world. He muses lyrically about a moral, decent and aspirational America that was driven by an informed populace: "We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered." The strength of any nation is directly related here to the strength of its fourth estate, its media. And before the series even really begins, its primary concern is established. That is, a concern about the strength and credibility of a crumbling fourth estate.

much of the conflict arises within the episodes of the series, as the different characters hold competing views on the value of some news events over others. However, one thing remains persistent throughout the series to date. As one of the promotional videos released weeks before the premiere episode states: "The mission of the people in the newsroom on this fictional show is to bring proper, decent news to as many people as they can." Although one of the characters, executive producer Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) states in this same episode that "there's nothing more important in a democracy than a well informed electorate," we should note that the goal of the show within the series is not to provide its audience with balanced dialogue on key political issues but rather to present "proper, decent news" to a broad populace. Enforcing a strict hierarchy of value and taste, it is only the news deemed "proper" or "decent" that is considered newsworthy within the series. Later episodes explore this further, but the conflict between the proper and the improper, the decent and the indecent, highbrow and lowbrow culture proves to be one of the central anxieties within The Newsroom's narrative from the very beginning. The question of newsworthiness is also the title of a teaser trailer uploaded to HBO's YouTube channel approximately two weeks before the premiere

episode. In this trailer, each of the primary cast members are posed the question, "What is newsworthy?" and this same conflict is reflected in each of their answers. One actor responds, "'Newsworthy' by definition, I believe, is supposed to be of a necessity. Like this is something you need to know. And now itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about... this is something you want to know." Another actor discusses a dilemma faced by every journalist: "They have to decide if they're going to fill the next 20 minutes with speculation and their opinion and pass it off as fact or whether they're going to just report facts." "What is newsworthy anymore?" another actor asks, "I mean, who even knows? Anything is sort of up for grabs in being newsworthy these days." But is it? And further, should it be? The Newsroom condemns this practice, instead lauding a highly moral news culture that constantly reiterates hierarchies of taste and value. Like Will's opening monologue, each of these responses mourns a moral, decent and aspirational America that was driven by a news culture built upon these hierarchies. And with real news events peppering the narrativeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; for instance, the first episode centres on the BP oil spill of 2010â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the authenticity of the series is emphasised at every turn, making this commentary on the contemporary media landscape all the more explicit. !

I wondered whether the audience might have some grounds for feeling annoyed about being tricked into seeing something serious and worthy.