Category: Movies Explained

Categories
Movies Explained

2001: A Space Odyssey Explained: Part 2

This is the second and final part of my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the first part, in which I explain “The Dawn of Man” and HAL’s malfunction and demise, go here. 

It’s time to give the viewers what they want: an explanation of 2001‘s famously bewildering ending. What happens to Dave in Jupiter’s airspace? What is the “Starchild” that appears in movie’s final shot?

Before we begin, it’s worth noting that the film’s portrayal of man as an “in between” creature waiting for transcendence comes from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. His fiction, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” is about a prophet who encourages mankind to surpass himself, thereby becoming an Ubermensch (“Superman”). In fact, the famous musical motif that recurs throughout the film is Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” a classical piece named after and inspired by Nietzsche’s text. It’s no accident, then, that Kubrick uses this motif to signal major leaps forward.

But simply understanding Nietzsche’s influence doesn’t explain the specific nature of Dave’s transformation at the end of the film. Yes, the Starchild is surely Kubrick’s version of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. But how, in Kubrick’s view, does one reach this state?

To answer, we must consider the many visual cues in 2001 linking space flight with the mechanics of film. For starters, Discovery One’s main chamber looks just like a giant film roll:

The space pods, too, display aesthetics linking them to film rolls. So does the station featured in the opening space travel sequence.

But perhaps the boldest hint that the medium of film is important to the meaning of 2001 is hidden in plain sight: the monolith itself, which, when rotated, resembles a blank movie screen.

This visual similarity between the monolith and the movie screen has been highlighted by other critics, including Gerard Loughlin and Rob Ager. They note that during the famous “Stargate” sequence of dazzling lights, the display initially has a vertical orientation but then suddenly shifts to a horizontal orientation. They interpret this as a subliminal hint that the monolith, too, should be shifted from a vertical to a horizontal orientation to reveal its symbolic significance.

In addition, visuals like the slow zoom shot below appear to emphasize the rectangular shape of the movie screen. This allows us to connect that shape to the monolith’s similar dimensions.

Lastly, the film opens with over two minutes of a solid black screen. On first watch, this opening feels unnecessary or wasteful, but it’s actually yet another subliminal linkage between the shape of the monolith and the shape of the screen. Essentially, Kubrick is forcing us to watch the monolith, rotated 90 degrees.

Importantly, though, this mental rotation isn’t always required to visually link the monolith and the movie screen. That’s because one monolith—the one orbiting Jupiter—appears in horizontal orientation already, exactly like the screen.

This particular monolith, then, is the first to appear in its symbolically “true” form—the most screen-like monolith yet. Combined with the aforementioned film-related imagery during the mission, this suggests an allegorical framework crucial to understanding 2001. Namely, that Discovery One’s journey to find the orbiting Jupiter monolith represents man’s journey toward discovering the medium of film.

This framework unlocks the answers to the movie’s final chapter.

Consider that the monolith on the Moon is associated with photography: Floyd and his group conspicuously gather to take a picture of it. Photography is one technological step away from filmmaking. And indeed, this Moon monolith serves as a checkpoint of man’s technological progress, signaling to Jupiter in apparent recognition of humanity’s readiness for a larger step. Thus, the symbolic meaning of this moment is that if man is taking photographs, he’s ready advance to film—just as, in the literal narrative, once man reaches the Moon, he’s deemed ready to trek to Jupiter.

In fact, in this scene the symbolic narrative is arguably more influential than the literal narrative. After all, the signal from the monolith only initiates once Floyd and his peers try to photograph it—not when they first dig it up.

And the receding of the literal narrative in favor of the symbolic narrative only continues, such that by the time Dave reaches Jupiter’s airspace (“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”), the film is completely symbolic with no literal narrative at all. This presents a major viewing challenge—one of the most notoriously challenging in all of cinema. But since we’ve established the correct allegorical framework, we can explain the nature of Dave’s abstract experiences upon arriving there.

As we’ve said, Dave reaching the horizontal monolith orbiting Jupiter represents mankind reaching the cinema screen: Dave has symbolically “discovered” film. Accordingly, the subsequent images he witnesses explore the power of that discovery. Each of the abstract sequences following Dave’s arrival at Jupiter presents a different aspect of the nature and capabilities of film.

The first of those sequences is the aforementioned Stargate. The key to understanding this trippy display is that it conveys the toolkit of filmmaking: color, shape, and music. These formless elements dance around the screen with no context or purpose. They’re the medium’s sculpting clay, waiting to be harnessed by a filmmaker.

The formless elements then begin to crystallize, and Dave witnesses a series of colorful landscape images. These sceneries, several of which include bodies of water, don’t depict the gaseous Jupiter or its rocky moons. Rather, they’re images of Earth, only with neon color schema. This conveys seeing familiar things in a different light: filmmaking allows us a new perspective on the ordinary.

Recall the line from Kubrick’s next film, A Clockwork Orange (1972): “The colors of the world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.” Dave, witnessing the unusually colored landscape shots, is seeing things “really real” for the first time, experiencing the ability of cinema to reveal new perspectives.

And hasn’t Kubrick already made good on this filmmaking credo—hasn’t he already shown the world in a “different light?” Recall the thematic statements analyzed in Part 1 of this analysis, particularly regarding mankind’s inherent brutality and the rooting of all technology in violence. Remember, too, our analysis of HAL’s demise, which explored the nature of human deception and touched upon our species’ remarkable drive to brave the unknown. These insightful artistic depictions are excellent examples of the capabilities of film celebrated in the movie’s final chapter.

Plus, Dave’s eye also appears in the neon colors that saturate the landscapes. This indicates that not only does he see the outside world in a different light; he is altered, as well. The takeaway: film can inspire us to change.

After the landscapes, the tools of film that were introduced in the Stargate solidify even further, such that they’re now completely harnessed. A realistic looking sequence ensues inside a strange domestic layout.

It’s tempting to interpret this as a literal occurrence, given its lifelike appearance. But we’re still in the realm of the symbolic, as the scene unfolds in a dreamlike, nonlinear manner. Therefore, by continuing to adhere to our framework of interpreting Dave’s Jupiter experiences as a display of film’s power and methods, we can explain the sequence’s true meaning.

Let’s summarize what happens. Dave, progressing through the strange environment, rapidly ages in a strange way. Three consecutive times, he observes an older version of himself in a different part of the layout, and this version then becomes the focal point of the shot, with the younger self apparently vanishing. The last and oldest Dave appears on his deathbed, and he points to a monolith before transforming into the Starchild, which then surveys the Earth.

The key dynamic of this scene is watching: Dave watches himself age. He doesn’t experience the aging process so much as examine it from a distance—including viewing himself very near to death. Essentially, Kubrick is illustrating that the opportunity to watch ourselves and our species from a detached perspective (via cinema) can help us accept our inevitable aging and death.

Various details of the scene help clarify this vision. For example, Dave ages startlingly quickly, in only a few minutes, gesturing toward the incredible brevity of life. In addition, Dave accidentally shatters a glass, which is shown in closeup, perhaps emphasizing life’s fragility. Finally, Dave advances through the stages of life with no apparent companionship, suggesting a solitary journey. In summary, according to Kubrick, viewing our own lives through the revealing lens of film may teach us the ultimate truth of a brief, fragile, isolated existence.

That may sound depressing, but Kubrick doesn’t see it that way. We know this because after viewing his own aging, Dave becomes the Starchild: the next stage in human evolution. Based on our analysis of this scene and earlier ones, we can conclude that this new stage of humanity is a being with heightened awareness: able to see the world from an enlightened perspective that includes the facts of mortality, thanks to the reflections enabled by the medium of film.

But what might this enlightened perspective entail, specifically? What changes will a heightened awareness of our mortality inspire?

Well, in Part 1 we concluded that Dave’s defeat of HAL seemed to mark the end of the technological tradition that began with the bone-weapon, anticipating a leap beyond that violence to a new human condition. And indeed, Dave’s viewing of his own mortality offers a logical repudiation of violence. After all, why unleash death and destruction, when we’re all destined to die, anyway? Why not live our lives in peace? With proper awareness of the brevity and fragility of life, our drive toward violence may be extinguished.

This newfound rejection of violence and weaponry is made more explicit in both the initial script and Arthur C. Clarke’s tandem novel, which end with the Starchild detonating nuclear bombs orbiting Earth to prevent their use. As mentioned in Part 1, all nuclear references were eliminated from 2001 to avoid repeating Dr. Strangelove, but this original ending would have concretely emphasized that the Starchild is opposed to violence (and even motivated to take action to prevent it). As it is, we’re left to infer this ourselves.

Given that Kubrick had portrayed man as a fundamentally weapon-using, brutal animal in “The Dawn of Man,” the newfound pacifism of the Starchild is a momentous change—a Nietzschean progression, in fact, to a new kind of species. And imagery throughout the film underscores this, especially in “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.”

Consider the images below, which evoke insemination, conception, and the growth of a fetus. They hint that by completing the mission to Jupiter and symbolically discovering film—thereby enabling reflection that leads to the discarding of violent methods—Dave indeed initiates the “birth” of something new.

Consider also the Renaissance art that fills the strange room where Dave witnesses his aging and death—another reference to an imminent “rebirth.”

Finally, two brief scenes involve characters wishing loved ones a happy birthday, yet another presaging of an upcoming “birth” of a new category of organism.

All things considered, it’s clear that the Starchild is Kubrick’s rendition of the Nietzschean Ubermensch: a step beyond man. This “Superman” is, in a word, a filmgoer: one who observes life from the revealing, detached perspective of cinema, gaining enhanced awareness of the hard facts of mortality. Applying this newfound rationality and existential understanding, he or she forgoes humanity’s previous attachment to weapons and violence, promising a new era of peace.

I’ll go ahead and say it: I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is the greatest film ever made. What other cinematic work offers the kind of vision and scope highlighted in this analysis? For a long time I held off on writing this piece, because I worried that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to the breadth of 2001‘s artistry in a readable Internet format. And I still believe that there’s far more to discuss beyond what I’ve covered. But I hope that I’ve opened up the movie for just that kind of discussion, so that I might later come across more analysis that helps me build on my understanding of this masterpiece—and that perhaps brings me a little closer to Kubrick’s version of the Ubermensch.

 

—-Jim Andersen

For more Kubrickian movies explained, see my piece on Eyes Wide Shut.

Categories
Movies Explained

2001: A Space Odyssey Explained: Part 1

This is Part 1 of my two-part explanation of the meaning of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. For Part 2, go here.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has awed viewers with its vision and craft for over fifty years. Interpreting it, though, remains a notorious challenge. Experts’ attempts to understand the sci-fi landmark’s ambiguous imagery and characters are numerous enough to populate an entire Wikipedia page. If you read the page, though, you’ll see that these interpretations tend to skew toward the arcane, kooky, and even mystic.

What’s lacking is a grounded analysis written for regular viewers. My aim, then, will be to coherently explain the meaning of 2001’s narrative. Of course, this will include a concrete, definitive interpretation of its famous ending.

My main thesis, which I’ll go on to demonstrate, is that 2001 is a statement about the awesome possibilities of the medium of film. More specifically, 2001: A Space Odyssey is an idealistic proclamation of film as an agent for transcending humanity’s violent nature, particularly through its ability to bolster reflection and awareness.

That statement leaves a lot of ground to cover. But we can start with the theme of transcendence, since it forms the structure of the film. 2001 consists of three stages of evolution: 1) apes before the discovery of weapons, 2) man, and 3) the “Starchild” image. These stages are symbolized by the opening title screen, which features a shadowy Earth—behind which rises the glowing Moon—behind which rises the shining sun.

Three destinations, each brighter than the last. This single image foreshadows the course of the film.

Even more important than the evolutionary stages, though, are the transitions between them. Such transitions, it appears, can only occur through interactions with peculiar black monoliths, which appear intermittently throughout the movie. The first such monolith appears to a tribe of apes in the desert, inspiring them to use animal bones as weapons to dominate their rivals. This, as the title card declares, is Kubrick’s rendition of “The Dawn of Man.”

It’s tempting to summarize this sequence as the discovery of “tools.” But this isn’t specific enough. After all, only one tool is used: a weapon. And the introduction of weapons specifically—as opposed to tools in general—initiates human-like changes in the apes. For example, armed with bones, the apes abandon their defensive crouches and walk upright. Plus, with plentiful meat from killed animals, the tribe now eats with newfound ferocity, reminiscent of our habits today. Finally, children now examine and play with bones, evoking modern day childhood fascination with guns and other weapons.

The central statement of this section, then, is that man is fundamentally a weapon-using animal. This is a Kubrickian statement if there ever was one. Consider the director’s earlier films like the antiwar Paths of Glory (1957) and the apocalyptic Cold War parody Dr. Strangelove (1963), which also focus on man’s relationship to war and weaponry.

And just like in those films, the use of weapons in 2001 is portrayed negatively and unsparingly. For instance, when the lead ape of the rival tribe is whacked to the ground, each ape in the first tribe comes forward to administer unnecessary additional blows—a vicious, unsettling scene.

But in 2001, unlike the other films mentioned, Kubrick doesn’t dwell on man’s violent tendencies. Instead, after the weapon-using apes’ victory, he cuts to an orbiting spaceship, and the movie’s focus shifts to the potential for a second evolutionary leap. Thus, while the story of the apes serves to illustrate humanity’s lowly, savage condition, the bulk of the film depicts how we might surpass that condition.

Importantly, there’s no title card accompanying the cut to outer space; we’re still watching “The Dawn of Man.” Kubrick apparently isn’t impressed with our societal progress. Space flight and antigravity toilets notwithstanding, we’re still fundamentally the weapon-using creatures portrayed in the first episode.

In early drafts of the script, this stasis was emphasized even further. The orbiting spacecraft were explicitly identified as nuclear weapons in a multinational nuclear stalemate. These nuclear references were later eliminated to separate the film from Dr. Strangelove, but even without them, nothing in this section of 2001 suggests that the intervening millennia have seen major changes to the human condition laid out early in the film.

However, such a change may be forthcoming. That’s because Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester) is on his way to the Clavius Moon base to see a monolith recently dug up on the Moon—direct evidence of alien intelligence. And when that monolith sends a radio signal to Jupiter, humanity wastes no time (only an 18 month turnaround) preparing a mission to the faraway planet to find out what—or who—is out there.

To me, this promptness recalls the moment when the apes quickly surround and touch the monolith, which is wholly unfamiliar to them and potentially dangerous. Perhaps there is one human trait that Kubrick does admire: brave curiosity in the face of the unknown.

Can that curiosity lead us to make another leap forward and shed our species’ cruel and brutal ways? That’s the question of the next and longest episode of the film: “Mission to Jupiter.”

Drs. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) are the protagonists now. They have the momentous task of finding the receiver of the mysterious radio signal. But they run into a major problem: their HAL9000 computer, thought to be infallible, begins acting strangely and ultimately kills Frank along with three hibernating astronauts.

The conventional explanation, which I see no reason to dispute, for HAL’s errant behavior is that he has competing objectives. The scientists on Earth have tasked him with keeping secret the facts about the monolith dug up on the Moon, whereas his programming discourages him from “distort[ing] information.”

Caught between these goals, HAL teeters between revealing the secret and hiding it from the astronauts. He confides to Dave that the “rumors of something being dug up on the Moon” are “difficult to put out of my mind” but then abruptly ends the conversation by reporting a fault in one of the ship’s communication units—a report that appears to be baseless, as per the findings of an identical 9000 computer on Earth.

Adding to the evidence that HAL has misidentified the fault is his later remark to Dave that “you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.” This isn’t necessarily true: Dave and Frank were only planning to disconnect HAL if he were proven to be in error. The remark demonstrates that HAL lacks confidence or even knows his report to be incorrect.

And when threatened, HAL resorts to murder. Thus, the human technological tradition that began with an instrument of violence has culminated in an instrument that carries out its own violence—against mankind. This may have been inevitable. After all, inherent in the original DNA of man’s inventions, as we saw in “The Dawn of Man,” was brutality; therefore, it makes sense that man’s ultimate invention, a sentient AI, would assume that brutal character.

Note that HAL’s eyepiece often appears in a rectangular black frame reminiscent of the monolith. This visually links him to the episode in which apes discovered weapons. Appropriate, since he’s the end result of that discovery.

An interesting point about HAL is that his inability to keep a secret (or at least his discomfort with doing so) is contrasted with the smooth talking of Heywood Floyd during his trek to Clavius. In that section, scientists pressure Floyd to “clear up the great big mystery” of why Clavius has been out of communication. But Floyd stonewalls them, concealing the shocking finding of the monolith. Later, Floyd urges scientists at the base to uphold “absolute secrecy” and has them sign oaths to ensure their adherence to the cover story of an epidemic.

If Floyd and his fellow Clavius scientists can deceive so seamlessly, then why can’t the far more intelligent HAL? Events in the film suggest that it’s because humans, unlike HAL, are aware of their own mortality.

Consider that HAL’s facility with lying increases dramatically after he lip-reads Frank and Dave discussing his possible disconnection, a previously unthinkable development. Whereas HAL had struggled earlier to maintain composure and secrecy during his “crew psychology report” conversation with Dave, after the lip-reading scene he lies constantly with no apparent hesitation.

For example, he states that he doesn’t know how Frank went soaring into space (“I don’t have enough information”) and gives false reasoning for killing him (“This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it”). As his demise approaches, he sinks to pathetic phoniness (“I can assure you, very confidently, that it’s going to be alright again”). Thus, it seems that the materialization of the possibility of death is what affords him the one intellectual faculty he had previously lacked: the ability to lie.

Kubrick therefore provides another major statement about the nature of man: that it’s the specter of death that enables or encourages us to deceive one another. And there’s convincing logic to this. After all, mortality could be said to be the foundation for all fear, and fear may be the essential motive behind all deception. When HAL has no reason to believe that he’ll ever be shut down, he has none of the human fear that would prompt him to ever lie, so he stumbles when tasked to do so. But after learning of his possible disconnection, he becomes more deceptive (and by extension, more humanlike), finally admitting to the basis for his alteration: “I’m afraid.”

If HAL is the culmination of the technological tradition that started with the bone-weapon, and if the emergence of that tradition constituted “The Dawn of Man,” then HAL’s demise, for all intents and purposes, represents the end of man. Technology has run its course, which means that, by definition, so have we. Like the apes before they encountered the monolith, humanity is in its twilight. Kubrick provides visual cues to underscore this, as HAL’s eyepiece evokes the sun rising and setting shortly before mankind’s origination.

Plus, during HAL’s disconnection, monolith-like rectangles emerge from his hardware, recalling the evolutionary leap that founded mankind and suggesting that a similar leap could be forthcoming.

Even Dave’s incredible blast through the airlock harkens back to aspects of the apes’ leap forward. Recall how the apes gather around and touch the strange monolith, their courage outweighing their fear of the unknown. Dave’s gumption in passing through the mysterious vacuum of space without a helmet—which HAL assumes impossible—evokes that same courage. Dave has followed in the footsteps of his distant ancestors, whose boldness led them to a colossal discovery. What, then, is in store for him?

In summary, all signs, both visual and narrative, point to HAL’s death anticipating a major evolutionary leap forward comparable to the one shown in “The Dawn of Man.” And indeed, Dave’s experiences following HAL’s defeat leave him apparently transformed into a spectacular, fetus-like being. It’s clear that man has leapt forward again. But how did this transformation take place, and what is the nature of Dave’s new form?

End of Part 1

Continue to the second and final part of this analysis.

 

–Jim Andersen

Categories
Movies Explained

There Will Be Blood Explained

There aren’t many hidden secrets in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), the unsettling masterpiece that was recently ranked as the best movie since 2000 by both The New York Times and The Guardian. But there is one mystery in the movie that doesn’t have a ready solution, which is: why is it called “There Will Be Blood”? There’s not much blood, after all, and the source material is Upton Sinclair’s far more appropriately titled novel, Oil!. Why, then, this weird title? Let’s explain, starting off with some brief analysis that will allow us to cover the film’s broader meaning.

TWBB is a story of how greed and obsessiveness, represented by protagonist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), come to dominate the American spirit, replacing the relatively feeble Puritan ethic represented by Plainview’s chief rival, pastor Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). The catalyst for this transition, as portrayed by Anderson, is oil: once untold riches can be sucked from the ground, those who adhere to pieties and doctrines, like Eli, quickly find themselves at the mercy of ruthless businessmen like Daniel, who will use any means necessary to acquire the available wealth, including crafty lies and even physical force. The two characters’ surnames indicate their respective strength and weakness: Daniel, a Machiavellian pragmatist, truly has a “plain view” of how to get what he wants, whereas Eli is held back by burdensome proprieties such as resting on Sunday, the Lord’s day. Daniel, of course, never rests. He has founded a new religion in which nothing is sacred, and the only fealty is to money. His soon-to-be adopted son is baptized with oil, hinting of the new faith in the making.

The final blow in this fairly lopsided battle of ideals, as per Anderson, is the Great Depression. It leads even Eli to question whether God, in fact, might not be as sturdy a protector as previously thought: he finds the now-wealthy Daniel in 1927 and begs him to buy property for oil rigging, admitting (to Daniel’s amusement) that God has “failed to alert [him] to the recent panic in our economy.” Blubbering tears of confusion, Eli wonders why Daniel, as well as Eli’s entrepreneurial brother Paul, have prospered, whereas he, the faithful one, has floundered. In response, the victorious Daniel takes this opportunity to bash Eli’s brains in with a bowling pin. This outcome removes any doubt about who will be running America going forward. Daniel’s battle cry ensures we don’t miss the allegory: “I am the Third Revelation!”

As I said, not so much to pick apart. But of course there’s more than what I just laid out, and it demands some inspection. In particular, we need to remember that Daniel, although successful, is not a happy man. That appears to be because his greed stems from an immutable narcissism: he can’t bear to have anyone get the best of him. Daniel himself acknowledges to his fake-brother Henry:

Daniel: “I hate most people. … I have a competition in me, Henry. I want no one else to succeed.”

This “competition” of Daniel’s leads him to exhibit some remarkable behavior throughout the film. Time and time again, he rages pathologically at those who disrespect him or give even a passing semblance of condescension. For example, when Henry takes advantage of Daniel by impersonating his brother for personal gain, Daniel kills him in cold blood with scant hesitation. When Daniel’s son H.W. sets a fire to alert him of Henry’s forgery, a (wrongly) perceived act of impudence, Daniel sends him away on a train alone. When Standard Oil rep H.M. Tilford expresses doubt that Daniel can build a pipeline to avoid onerous shipping costs (and incidentally suggests using his newfound free time to spend with his son), Daniel threatens to kill him and proceeds to move heaven and earth to build the pipeline, subsequently taunting a confused Tilford in a restaurant with maniacal glee.

And if Daniel demonstrates outsized anger toward these aforementioned individuals, we can infer that his thoughts toward Eli Sunday are, shall we say, none too friendly. After all, Eli is the only character during the course of the film to truly humiliate Daniel in an intentional, malicious way. The occasion for this humiliation is a baptism, which Daniel has grudgingly agreed to in order to appease William Bandy and thereby obtain permission to build the pipeline through his tract. This presents Eli with his chance for revenge on Daniel, who has repeatedly made a point of snubbing him. Eli doesn’t squander it.

Here’s the clip, which in my opinion is the best scene in the film. Thanks to the brilliant acting of Day-Lewis and Dano, there’s no mistaking that this is the worst day of Daniel’s life, as well as the best day of Eli’s. The relish with which Eli intones, unnecessarily, for Daniel to repeat, “I have abandoned my child!” is something to behold, and he even circles back to the subject after sensing that it particularly pained Daniel. As Daniel seethes helplessly, we can’t help but be afraid of what he might do later in retribution, based on what we have seen him do to others for far lesser offenses.

We might also realize that this is the only scene in which blood, the thing featured so prominently in the movie title, is mentioned. Eli is the first to bring it up, urging Daniel to “beg for the blood” of Christ. And as Daniel gets up after being baptized, the church hymn sings, “There is power in the blood of the Lord.” At this moment Daniel turns back toward Eli, shakes his hand, and says something to him that we can’t hear, but which on close inspection seems to startle Eli (see picture; moment is included in the clip linked earlier).

What has Daniel said to Eli?

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Daniel, of course, has told Eli: “There will be blood.” As in: Don’t you worry about blood, Eli; there will be plenty of blood to come. Daniel, having just been utterly humiliated by his adversary, is promising in this moment to murder Eli one day.

So when Eli dares to seek Daniel’s help at the end of the film, the conclusion is foregone. Daniel hasn’t forgotten his promise; in fact, he soon makes a deft reference to the baptism as if it had happened only recently, gloating to Eli: “I suck the blood of lamb from Bandy’s tract.” This means, in essence, that the real blood of salvation isn’t Eli’s holy water, as Eli had characterized it at the baptism, but rather the oil that has made Daniel rich and powerful. Just like “I am the Third Revelation!” this comment indicates that Daniel perceives his oil business as an endeavor of religious stature, far grander than anything Eli preaches about, and Daniel accordingly makes Eli grovel before him: “I am a false prophet, and God is a superstition.”

Recall the moment early in the film when H.W.’s biological father rubs oil on his forehead in an apparently religious manner, as if it were holy water. Again, this foreshadows the new religion that Daniel promotes convincingly in his final showdown with Eli.

But although Daniel inevitably vanquishes the foe who crossed him most egregiously, what will he do now? After all, nearly all of Daniel’s important actions over the course of the film had been apparently motivated by the desire to revenge himself of perceived wrongs suffered at the hands of others. Now, though, all these wrongs have been avenged, and it’s not clear what he has left to live for. He ends the film, therefore, with with the appropriate words: “I’m finished!”

So while Daniel’s ethic is indeed stronger than Eli’s, it appears to come at a cost, as it springs from an innate “competition” and dislike of people in general. Why else would someone want to accumulate unnecessarily gaudy wealth, other than to feel superior to others? The conclusion of such a quest, even for those who succeed wildly like Daniel, is lonely and sad: we see, for example, that Daniel, as he sends away H.W. for good, flashes back to old times spent together with his son. He’s a human being, after all, and he’ll miss H.W. greatly—but his hypersensitivity to disrespect and his accompanying need for revenge leads him marching down the road to loneliness anyway. Is this the cost of ultimate success in America?

I’ll end this piece by observing that it’s impossible to meditate on the character of Daniel Plainview without reflecting on how similar he is to the real life American who would become president nine years after the release of the film. Echoes of Daniel screaming, unhinged, at his well-adjusted son—“Bastard from a basket! Bastard from a basket!—reverberated over Twitter throughout the four years he was in power, and one wonders at Paul Thomas Anderson’s giftedness in personifying that peculiar brand of American nastiness less than a decade before an actual person managed to encompass it so wholly for the world to see. Like Daniel, that person could never enjoy his success, tormented as he was by the slights of others: his default mode was rage, his rare smiles seemed forced and unnatural. Unlike Daniel, though, that person will never be “finished,” because too many have taunted and jeered him for revenge to ever truly be had.

I suppose, then, that in this day and age, There Will Be Blood carries a certain comfort. Because if we worry, based on what we see in politics and business, that the universe rewards narcissism, we might watch this honest examination of that character trait and how it came to such prominence in America. There Will Be Blood reminds us that the universe, in this regard, may be somewhat more just than we realize.

 

— Jim Andersen

For more PTA movies explained, see my piece on No Country For Old Men.

Categories
Movies Explained

Tenet Explained (and Debunked)

I’m not a fan of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi action film Tenet (2021), but for the past year it’s been my most requested movie for analysis. So this piece will serve as both a walkthrough of the plot of Tenet, as well as a debunking and criticism of various aspects of the movie.

The central premise of Tenet is that some time in the future, scientists discover a way to irradiate objects or people in such a way that their progression through time is “inverted,” meaning they go backward through time instead of forward (or back to forward again, if they’re irradiated once more). This phenomenon is explained to a new agent known as “the Protagonist” (John David Washington), who’s recruited by an organization called Tenet that uses this technology to stop those from the future who aim to use it maliciously.

The Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates how bullets and other apparently inverted objects don’t appear to follow standard laws of physics, because, unlike us, they’re experiencing time in reverse. As an example, the Protagonist is made to aim an empty gun at a target with bullet holes—and miraculously, the inverted bullets zip out of the target and into the gun.

Now, let me interject immediately to say that right from this opening premise, there are myriad problems and inconsistencies. One that immediately comes to mind is: if, as Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates, there are random objects and weaponry out in the world traveling backward through time, because they’ve been inverted by future combat forces, then why weren’t inverted bullets and AK-47s discovered by ancient civilizations? Why did early paleontologists not dig up skeletons and artifacts from the future? After all, we managed to find dinosaur bones from 65 million years ago—how did we miss the inverted futuristic bazookas that had been going backward through time for only decades?

Another enormous problem: if an empty gun can “catch” inverted bullets out of bullet holes, then…when did the bullet holes get there? Who shot them into the target in the first place, and how was that possible if they were inverted?

I’m waiting…

Tenet moves extremely quickly, to the extent that it feels like a significant portion of the film has been ungraciously cut. Since it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Warner Brothers imposed a hard cap of exactly this runtime length on Nolan, who’s known for long films. Whatever the reason, Tenet‘s jam-packed pace makes it virtually impossible to properly digest what we’re being fed. The Protagonist’s trainer says of the time shift phenomenon, “Don’t try to understand it”—a convenient request given issues like the ones I mentioned above—but even if we wanted to understand it, there’s no time to do so during the film itself. Thus, to it’s necessary to meditate on what we’ve seen after the fact; hence this essay.

Tenet’s story eventually comes to focus on a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), whom the Protagonist suspects is up to no good. Indeed, we soon learn that Sator is acting insidiously on behalf of the leaders of a future generation. (To recruit him, his bosses from the future simply inverted his instructions for the job and buried them in the obscure Russian town where he grew up, knowing that decades earlier he would volunteer to dig there for plutonium and find the instructions.)

In return for Sator’s cooperation, his bosses from the future have bestowed on him massive wealth. This is another simple operation, performed like so: Sator descends a box into the ocean and saves the coordinates electronically (“for posterity”), so that in the future his bosses can obtain this saved information, locate the box in their time, and place inverted gold bars inside. The bars then travel back through time to Sator in the present, where he simply hoists up the box to find his payday inside.

Sator’s mission is to assemble a nine-piece “algorithm” that was invented by an unnamed future scientist. This algorithm, as explained by Protagonist’s comrade Neil (Robert Pattinson), is an equation that, if activated, would effectively reverse the entropic time flow of the entire world. If this were accomplished, Neil assures us, all living things in the present day would be obliterated, as well as all living things that ever existed in the past.

The reason the future folks want to enact this ghastly plan is that Earth in their time has become uninhabitable, and reversing the flow of time—and obliterating all previous life—would allow their civilization to continue, but with environmental conditions improving over time, not worsening. Essentially, the human race of the future, in a state of desperation, wants to bulldoze the past to make way for itself to turn around and retreat backward into time.

Sator’s involvement is necessary because the inventor of the algorithm got cold feet at the last minute and decided not to use it, killing herself for good measure so that it couldn’t be reproduced. She became worried, like Robert Oppenheimer before the first testing of the atomic bomb, that her creation might do more damage than intended. Specifically, she worried that the algorithm might not only have destroyed the past as planned, but potentially her own generation as well (we’ll get to her concerns in more detail later).

Before committing suicide, this scientist divided the algorithm into nine sections and inverted them all into the past, splitting them amongst the nine nuclear powers. (How this was accomplished is very unclear to me.) Sator, growing up in Russia in the midst of high nuclear tensions, was therefore an ideal candidate to acquire the pieces. (I can’t quite follow the reasoning here, either.) He’s collected eight of the nine segments and therefore only needs one more, which Tenet tries to prevent him from acquiring throughout the movie.

Making matters worse, Sator has inoperable pancreatic cancer, and, selfish bastard that he is, he’s perfectly happy to annihilate the world as he departs it. Tenet deduces that once Sator obtains the final piece of the algorithm, he’ll kill himself rather than let the cancer do its work. When he dies, his fitness monitor will sense the stopping of his heart and automatically trigger a bomb located right where he’s buried the assembled algorithm. This will in turn trigger the algorithm and destroy the present and past—making way for the future to do a 180 and forge backward to pre-global warming times.

Tenet’s operations to thwart Sator are highly convoluted and, in my view, unnecessarily concentrated on Sator’s attractive wife, Kat (Elizabeth Gebicki). To gain Kat’s cooperation as an informant, which is apparently of the utmost importance, the Protagonist and Neil endeavor to steal and destroy a painting that Kat, an art dealer, incorrectly evaluated for her husband as genuine and that he is therefore able to use as blackmail to control her in various ways. The painting is under ungodly heavy security, such that one wonders whether there was perhaps an easier way to solicit Kat’s help. And this notion would only seem to be strengthened when, after the mission ultimately fails due to Sator having already removed the painting, Kat begins working with Tenet anyway, for nothing.

There’s a sense that the Protagonist may have a thing for Kat, but he never makes a move, and nothing comes of it. So Tenet’s laser focus on Kat is, in my opinion, very difficult to understand.

The quixotic episode of the art heist, though, does serve one memorable purpose: it sets the stage for an action sequence in which the Protagonist fights a masked inverted soldier. Later, it’s revealed that this soldier is actually the Protagonist himself, moving backward in time at a different point in the film while on a different mission (to save…yup…Kat).

Like most hand-to-hand combat scenes nowadays, this faceoff is loud and chaotic with quick cuts, so it’s hard to follow what’s happening. This, however, is fortunate, because given the proper scrutiny, what we’re watching makes no sense whatsoever.

Think about it. If I punch someone in the arm, they’ll feel pain. If the other person were to somehow experience that sequence backwards, they’d be feeling the pain at the start, then the impact would happen in reverse and the pain would go away.

But in Tenet, we see a regular and an inverted person in actual combat as though they’re landing blows on one another. This can’t be! What we should see is the forward Protagonist feeling beat up at the start of the fight (and well before), only to have any injuries alleviated by the blows happening in reverse. When we later see the fight a second time, from the view of the inverted Protagonist, he should likewise feel progressively better throughout the fight as the hits come backwards.

Nolan has thought about this much more than I have, and he knows that I’m right. This is why he goes out of his way to accurately show the inverted Protagonist with a knife wound on his arm before engaging in the fight with his previous self. The inverted Protagonist then receives the wound in reverse during the fight, and it goes away. A similarly correct depiction occurs much later, when a dead inverted soldier (soon revealed to be Neil) reanimates upon receiving his fatal wound.

But because filming the fight this way wouldn’t be as dramatic, Nolan won’t take the idea to its logical conclusions, still presenting us with something barely different from a Jason Bourne set piece, with both of the combatants, for example, grunting after being hit, whereas the sting should occur before the impact, because from the opponent’s perspective, that’s after the impact, and he’s the one who landed the punch. Other scenes in the movie confirm that the wound’s direction is determined by the orientation of what caused it; for example, Kat is wounded by an inverted bullet and needs to be inverted herself so that the wound can heal in the right direction.

There’s even one portion of the fight where the inverted protagonist is seen to parry blows from his counterpart. How can he block something that’s going in reverse? How can he block what he has no way of reacting to, because it’s already happened (in his opponent’s direction of time)? This can be argued for both combatants: they’re both inexplicably trying and succeeding to block or dodge attacks that their opponent has already made.

Yet another problem with the fight is that the visuals don’t compute. If the fight were a plausible occurrence, the person moving in our direction of time would appear to have totally normal physics, while the one going backward would, of course, be noticeably off. But in this fight, you’ll notice that several times the non-inverted fighter also displays apparently impossible physics upon being hit by his opponent, as if the two were taking turns obeying each other’s time orientations.

In these instances it looks like the character following our direction of time is being “sucked” into a hit, as from a vacuum cleaner, or levitating up from the floor. You’ll also notice that Nolan spends a large portion of the fight with the two combatants simply grabbing each other at a deadlock; this is because such a position is the only type of combat that can be plausibly played off as mutually occurring in both directions of time.

Having sufficiently picked apart this fight sequence, I’ll spare you similar analyses of even more egregious sequences, such as an inverted Sator somehow conducting a properly ordered conversation with a non-inverted Protagonist and shooting a non-inverted Kat when he doesn’t get the answers he wants (this means, from his viewpoint, Sator shot her before the interrogation even began!). Let’s also mention for, ahem, posterity’s sake, the poorly executed car chase sequence in which inverted characters are somehow driving non-inverted cars, even though they can’t so much as breathe non-inverted air.

Go ahead, accuse me of overthinking. Relax, you say. It’s only supposed to be entertainment!

The problem is that for the reasons I’ve just detailed, it’s not entertaining. We can’t be entertained when we can’t understand what’s happening on the screen. The only entertainment available to us watching situations like these, really, is the amusing realization that we’re incredibly lost. And it’s not our fault. We’re lost because what we’re watching is totally ridiculous.

Plus, many of Tenet‘s biggest fans are its biggest overthinkers: this film was made for Redditors, as proved by fan work like this. So I’m not engaging on a level that’s alien to those who love the film.

Let’s get back to why the future inventor decided not to use the algorithm. It involves something called the “Grandfather Paradox,” which Neil explains for us. Essentially, this is the notorious puzzle of what would happen if you traveled back in time to kill your grandfather as a young man. After all, if your grandfather dies, you’ll never exist to carry out the murder, so the murder would be theoretically impossible. Something would have to stop you from successfully completing the hit.

The Protagonist, even though he’s new to the time travel game, perceives this immediately, wondering to Neil how the future could possibly kill off its own ancestors. But Neil more or less brushes this off:

Neil: But in the future, those in power clearly believe you can kick grandpa downstairs, gouge his eyes out, slit his throat, without consequence.

The Protagonist: Could they be right?

Neil: Doesn’t matter, they believe it. That’s why they’re willing to destroy us.

I’m not sure how this “doesn’t matter,” since the Protagonist is suggesting that, logically, the future leaders’ evil plan has no possibility of succeeding. Also, Neil’s response is odd considering that he himself is the film’s leading proponent of the Grandfather Paradox’s foundational logic: “What happened, happened.” This maxim means that it’s useless trying to change the past, because the events are already set in stone (since they created the circumstances that led you to travel back in the first place), and therefore any attempts to alter the past can only accidentally contribute to the things that happened anyway.

If “what happened, happened,” then people from the future can hardly annihilate everything that ever happened. They may indeed be “willing” to do it, but, for some reason or another, they won’t.

And Neil is proven right about his understanding of time travel on every occasion. The most direct evidence of “what happened, happened” is Kat’s story. Early in the movie she recounts how after a fight with Sator on a boat, she became jealous of the freedom of another woman, presumably a mistress, whom she saw from afar diving off the boat. But later on, Kat travels backward into time, kills Sator on the boat, and dives into the ocean, revealing that the “other woman” was actually herself all along, after killing Sator. This means that Sator was always defeated; Tenet always succeeded in thwarting him. The characters just didn’t know it yet. Time never screws up. What happened, happened.

(This also raises the question of why Sator’s bosses in the future continue to send him stacks of inverted gold bars. Why compensate him when he clearly did not succeed in what they wanted him to do? Time has not reversed by the time his bosses are alive—which means that it will not reverse, since Sator is much earlier in the timeline than they are. What are they hoping will happen?)

The problem with the Grandfather Paradox from the filmmaking point of view is that it negates the entire drama of the story, which is why blockbusters like Back to the Future (1985) and Terminator 2 (1991) have simply ignored it. As the Protagonist correctly suggests, the characters’ mere existence shows that the future won’t succeed in obliterating the past; after all, they’re in the past, and…it’s there. So despite Nolan’s attempts to scare us into caring about Tenet’s operations—for instance, Neil is made to briefly ponder whether “parallel universe theory” may refute his ideas, only to never mention the concept again—the stakes for the finale are minimal.

Even if the stakes for the finale were high, though, it’s doubtful that anyone could have a clue what’s happening while Tenet commences its “temporal pincer” operation to recover the algorithm before Sator detonates it. The temporal pincer idea is actually a pretty cool concept; it consists of an inverted squad being released into battle near the end of the regular squad’s mission, so that the inverted soldiers can experience the mission backwards and collect helpful information—which they can then brief to the forward squad before their mission begins. It’s trippy, but it checks out.

The problem is that visually, the resulting battle is hilariously unintelligible. Nolan has tried to help us by color-coding his soldiers in James Bond fashion, but even so, the spectacle of two teams of soldiers working together in opposite temporal directions can’t be followed by a human brain in real time. Buildings are exploded, un-exploded, re-exploded. People are dying—or are they coming back to life? Is the enemy even on the battlefield? Not only are there no stakes; there’s no graspable game.

Tenet’s forces do recover the algorithm in time, thanks to sacrificial heroics from Neil. This despite Kat deciding to kill Sator for her own satisfaction, even though her job was to keep him alive as long as possible—a curious move, given that all life on the planet was supposedly on the line.

It’s revealed that Neil has been mostly moving backward in time since joining Tenet, compared to the Protagonist’s moving forward, meaning that, essentially, the entire functioning of Tenet has been a temporal pincer operation, with Neil as the inverted information-gatherer, and the Protagonist as the eventual receiver of the intel from Neil. This transfer is the subject of the film, with Neil training the Protagonist with the experience he’s accumulated. Cool stuff.

But nuggets of cool don’t make a film. We come to the theater, first and foremost, for interesting stories, and Tenet, by any important measure, isn’t one. To the contrary, it’s a very cliché story with forgettable characters, and it makes little sense. But can anyone piece it together to discover that? The movie’s bland narrative, like the doomsday algorithm, has been sliced up and scattered every which way, so that its defects take tremendous effort to reconstruct and experience properly. And why would anyone (besides me) embark on such a task?

Nolan can do better. The maker of The Prestige (2006) and even Inception (2010) has shown himself capable of real, character-based drama, but at other times, such as with this effort and with his first major feature, Memento (2002), he’s simply used his powers of invention to obscure the inadequacy of his central story. It’s discouraging to see him repeating early artistic errors that he had seemed to move beyond.

Is he regressing? Or is his whole career…just one big temporal pincer operation??

 

—Jim Andersen

For more movies explained, check out my piece on Inception.

Categories
Movies Explained

A Clockwork Orange Explained

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is disturbing, bizarre, and, like all of Stanley Kubrick’s major films, a directorial masterpiece rife for analysis. In this essay, I’ll explain its thematic meaning. As I’ll go on to prove, A Clockwork Orange is a panoramic satire of modern society that ultimately asserts that our various social structures are nothing more than hypocritical manifestations of the innate human desire to control one another, such that the tame condition of the modern civilized man is an artificial result of the many forces of greed acting on him at all times.

—————————-

Kubrick opens with a sickening sequence introducing Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) as the leader of a gang of “droogs” wreaking havoc on future London. Later dialogue between these hoodlums confirms that Alex is especially sociopathic among them: whereas the other three complain that their thieving ambitions are too low, revealing that their motivations are primarily material in nature, Alex dismisses these petty concerns, telling them, “You have all you need!” In contrast to his accomplices, it seems, Alex simply enjoys violence and rape for their own sake—a truly savage, dangerous individual.

And an episode after the gang’s vicious “ultraviolence” spotlights another unsavory quality of Alex’s that will be important to the film’s thematic core. When his droogs stage a rebellion of sorts against him—both for the aforementioned reason of their dissatisfaction with their earnings and because Alex isn’t exactly pulling his weight as the leader—Alex responds with ferocity, whacking Georgie in the codpiece and bloodying up his comrade, Dim. He plunges both into the marina and afterward gloats:

Alex: “Now they knew who was master and leader. Sheep, thought I.”

Thus, we see that Alex not only enjoys brutality and sexual violence, but he relishes commanding and ordering his peers, and he’s willing to use brutal means to retain his ability to do so.

This trait foreshadows the behavior of nearly every character he meets from that point forward in the film. For example, once the gang’s subsequent job ends in disaster and Alex is left at the mercy of the London penal system, he’s acquainted with Chief Guard Barnes (Michael Bates), the prison’s exaggeratedly despotic officer. Barnes is constantly barking purposeless orders (“Pick that up and put it down properly!”) just to lord it over the inmates, wielding his institutional authority with dimwitted pleasure. He has the implied power to beat the inmates into total submission if he needs to, although he can’t seem to accomplish this with Alex, whose sly sneer stubbornly demonstrates that, predating One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest‘s (1975) R.P. MacMurphy, he hasn’t quite been dominated by routine and regimentation.

The next figure of authority Alex encounters is the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), who isn’t quite as effective an authoritarian as Barnes, but nevertheless promises dire consequences for the boys if they don’t change their ways. He preaches that in the next life, souls of unrepentant sinners “scream in anguish and unendurable agony…their skin rotting and peeling…a fireball spinning in their screaming guts!” After this wild speech, which doesn’t appear to move the inmates, the chaplain leads a hymn of warning to the boys:

The Chaplain: “I was a wandering sheep / I did not love the fold / I did not love my shepherd / I would not be controlled.”

So while the chaplain’s methods are plenty different from Barnes’, both characters attempt to coerce Alex into submission via the threat of physical punishment. Ironically, then, after the stage demonstration of Alex’s “cure,” the chaplain protests, “The boy has no real choice, has he? Self interest, the fear of physical pain…drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement!” It seems the chaplain has forgotten that his own sermonizing was founded on those very principles, as it invoked “anguish and unendurable agony” for sinners as its sole impetus for reform.

Yet another agent of coercion is the medical team headed by Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering) and Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan). As scientists, they have little use for the melodramatic, overly officious Barnes, and their contempt for him is palpable as he drops off Alex. This provides hope that Alex’s new caretakers will be less tyrannical than the old ones. But when Alex later notes the unpleasantness he feels during the conditioning, Dr. Branom delivers a speech no less pious or condescending than what Barnes or the chaplain might have given:

Dr. Branom: “Of course it was terrible. Violence is a very terrible thing. … You see, when we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You’re becoming healthy, that’s all.”

Once again, the centerpiece of the rhetoric is the prospect of physical pain or discomfort to force Alex into behaving. And this time, it’s not only rhetoric, as the Ludovico Technique leaves Alex with an actual physiological aversion to sex and violence: a permanent, inescapable threat of pain.

Notably, when Alex begs that the treatment be stopped, offering a fairly convincing credo against violence (“It’s wrong because it’s like, against society!”), Brodsky dismisses his pleading, preferring the coercive means of correction to the authentic enlightenment of his patient. And when Alex rails against the use of Beethoven in the musical score, Brodsky remarks to Branom, “Here’s the punishment element, perhaps,” apparently oblivious, like the chaplain, to the reality that his entire system of reformation is based on the threat of physical punishment. Brodsky claims to Alex, “The choice has been all yours!”—while ignoring the actual choices that Alex is making at that very moment. Thus, again like the chaplain, Brodsky pays lip service to the value of free choice, but his actions suggest that, in fact, he is uncomfortable with his subjects choosing freely.

These ironies demonstrate the hypocrisy and self-interest of their perpetrators. If Brodsky were truly concerned about helping his patient, why not stop the treatment after Alex professes his change of heart? If the chaplain were so concerned with Alex’s “self-abasement,” why encourage him to submit to “be controlled” by church dogma? Their professed morals, it seems, are only covers for the reality that they simply enjoy exerting control over others.

We see Chief Guard Barnes for the last time in the post-treatment demonstration. He’s moody and skeptical at first, because Minister Frederick (Anthony Sharp) denounces his favored institutional methods as ineffective “hypocrisy.” But by the end of the demonstration, he’s clapping profusely, having derived great enjoyment from Alex’s humiliation on stage. It appears, then, that Barnes actually cares little about the institutional methods that he outwardly champions; what he truly values is seeing adversaries like Alex overpowered, their spirits crushed.

And neither do Minister Sharp’s denunciations of prison ward “hypocrisy” carry any weight. Sharp’s quiet comments to his peers reveal that he cares only about retaining his political power. Like the other three aforementioned supporting characters, he wants to be in charge—that’s all.

Given the unwelcome influence of these meddlers, there’s a temptation to think, “poor Alex!” Indeed, believing that Kubrick wants us to sympathize with his vicious protagonist is the kernel from which the worst reviews of A Clockwork Orange have sprung. Take Roger Ebert’s uncharacteristically bad 2 star review for example, or Pauline Kael’s, well, characteristically bad takedown in the New Yorker. These misguided moralizings would foreshadow the hand wringing that followed Joker (2019), a clear descendant of A Clockwork Orange, almost fifty years later.

But make no mistake: if we find ourselves too fond of Alex—a murderer and rapist—then that’s on us, not Kubrick. Because it’s our responsibility to remember the earlier episode during which Alex violently retakes control over his droogs, afterward comparing them to “sheep.” Crucially, the egomania that he demonstrates in that section of the movie is merely reflected in the aforementioned characters that exert control over him in these later events: just as Alex endeavors to keep his mates in line while he’s top dog, his friends and antagonists in positions of power target him for coercion after his arrest. So there’s no particular reason to sympathize with Alex, other than that we know him well; this movie consists of variations on a theme, and Alex’s early behavior is merely one of the variations.

Another variation that comes into focus later in the film is Alex’s own family. Although his parents are portrayed as doddering buffoons, their actions after he’s released from prison are serious, even sinister. Rather than accept their own son back into their home after his reformation, they kick him out on to the street with no money or prospects, claiming they’ve leased his bedroom to a lodger named Joe. But Joe himself implies that the real reason Alex is no longer welcome is the embarrassment he caused his parents with his crimes.

At the end of the film, Alex’s father expresses regret for denying him a home—but this is only after Alex’s reputation has been rehabilitated through positive press. Thus, Alex’s family isn’t exactly a source of unconditional love, but rather yet another entity attempting to force him into submission. When he defies them, they replace him with an obedient surrogate—someone who, unlike Alex, will do as they please.

In the last third of the movie, Georgie and Dim use their newfound authority as police to nearly drown Alex with impunity (using water for their torture—just as he knocked them into the marina), and writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) drives him to attempting suicide with the dreaded Beethoven’s 9th. These characters act primarily for revenge, and, in Alexander’s case, political benefit. Regardless of their motivations, though, it appears that they, too, are guilty of what Barnes, the chaplain, Brodsky, Frederick, Alex’s parents, and Alex himself are also guilty of: attempting to control other people for their own enjoyment and their own selfish benefit. As I said early on, this satire is panoramic in scope.

So what is the end result of these many power grabs? Well, Alex wakes up in a hospital after attempting suicide, and something is…not quite right with him. A psychiatrist provides some picture prompts, and although Alex, as hoped, is able to contemplate sex and violence in relation to the pictures, his responses are odd and illogical, consisting largely of gibberish non-sequiturs. For example, when shown a picture of a peacock with the easy prompt, “Isn’t the plumage beautiful?” he offers: “Cabbages…knickers…uh…it’s not got…uh, a beak.”

Huh? Alex, laughing childishly after these alarmingly goofy answers, is a far cry from the wry, conniving young malchick we met at the beginning of the film, an apparent result of the brain surgery that has reversed the Ludovico Technique.

When Minister Frederick pays him a visit, the symbolic meaning of Alex’s new condition becomes clear. Alex requests that Frederick literally spoon-feed him his meal as Frederick offers him a good salary and a job of his choice in exchange for his political cooperation. This imagery is clear: Alex has become infantilized at the hands of the state—no longer freethinking and enterprising, but happily dependent on the government to meet his every need.

Kubrick, then, has offered us a vision of the modern man: a blissfully mindless leech on the government. More importantly, he has provided an examination of how we came to be this way: through the effects of the incessant human need to control one another. The sum total of Alex’s adventures and interactions is his lying in bed physically incapacitated, babbling like a small child, with the government shoveling food into his willing mouth.

So Alex may estimate himself “cured”—but is he really? In the final scene, he imagines himself having sex, at first glance a potential triumph of individual freedom. But if we look closer we can observe that this is a relatively tame, proper sex scene, with, importantly, a small crowd of well-dressed people watching in approval. Alex’s adventures, it appears, have stamped out his brutality in favor of a tamer sexuality, a libido approved by the well-to-do. A libido, in other words, more familiar to us, the inhabitants of modern society, who are also subject to the many sources of control—religion, the nuclear family, politics, law enforcement—that act on Alex and leave him a listless government prop.

Is it a good thing that Alex’s horrific imagination has been watered down to fantasizing about bourgeoisie-approved, happily consensual sex? Is it a bad thing? I think we owe it to ourselves as serious viewers to conclude that it’s neither: Kubrick, as always, is a dispassionate observer, with, as I indicated before, neither sympathy nor animus for Alex. His project, rather, is to show us through his magnifying glass that, for better or worse, the forces that shape our minds from animal clay into civilized human moldings are characterized by hypocrisy, greed, and self-interest.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movies explained, see my piece on Eyes Wide Shut.

Categories
Movies Explained

The Master Explained

No viewer can be blamed for coming away from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) confused. But fear not, because Movies Up Close is about to thoroughly explore the thematic meaning of this intricate work of cinematic art. The following essay will explain the motivations of the film’s two main characters, the friendship between them, and, of course, the cryptic ending.

Our story begins with Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a soldier in World War II. Freddie is socially isolated from his rowdy mates, and when he finally joins the fray, he makes everyone uncomfortable by miming sex acts on a sand sculpture and masturbating into the ocean. Relatedly, when he undergoes psychological testing for employment placement, he interprets every inkblot as male or female genitalia, again indicating an abnormal sexual obsessiveness. And this mysterious issue hinders him from successfully rejoining postwar society: the day after passing out on a dinner date from drinking too much, he takes out his sexual frustration on an unsuspecting customer and promptly loses his photography job.

Why does Freddie have this problem with sex and women? The answer is soon unearthed by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the leader of a scientology-like cult known as The Cause. During an intense “Processing” question-and-answer session, Dodd gets Freddie to admit that he was sexually molested by his Auntie Bertha as a child. Such a traumatic early experience would be the very thing that would leave one emotionally stunted as an adult in the manner that Freddie displays.

Dodd also discovers that Freddie killed Japanese soldiers during Naval combat, indicating that Freddie’s war experience was perhaps uncommonly intense and violent. The revelation of this additional trauma provides insight into why Freddie, in addition to his issues with women, engages in aggressive physical outbursts throughout the film. A prescient official, in fact, warns the outgoing soldiers that due to their experiences, their reintegration with society may not be perfectly smooth:

Official: “There will be people on the outside who will not understand the condition you men have. Some may think it a rather shameful condition. If the average civilian had been through the same stresses that you have been through, undoubtedly they too would develop the same nervous conditions.”

This connection between traumatic experiences and individuals’ maladaptive behaviors is well recognized today. And it’s to Dodd’s credit that he’s able to hone in on the crucial internal sources of Freddie’s outward issues. But he veers off course in applying the information he extracts. As a typical example, he lectures to Freddie raging in his prison cell: “Your fear of capture and imprisonment is an implant from millions of years ago…. Your spirit was free for a moment, then it was captured by an invader force bent on turning you to the darkest ways.”

Now, these ramblings are kind of similar to the contemporary understanding of the effects of trauma. After all, Dodd is attributing human problems to prior experiences that have pernicious and unexpectedly far-reaching consequences. And he encourages members to open their minds so that they may relive these events, thereby wrestling free of their stifling grips—a practice that evokes conventional Freudian theory.

But although Dodd may be commended for generally understanding an important psychological truth, his eccentricity and grandiosity have warped the concept into a bizarre, laughable dogma. When a cynic challenges him at a party, Dodd sputters that his methods can cure leukemia and that the world is trillions of years old.

Despite the flaws in his methods, Dodd’s grasp on trauma and its significance is enough to hook the aimless and desperate Freddie. Although Freddie admits in his first Processing session that he had initially perceived Dodd and his wife Peggy (Amy Adams) as “fools,” this view changes dramatically after a few more sessions. The pivotal moment occurs when Dodd encourages Freddie to revisit the memory of his former girlfriend Doris, whom Freddie abruptly left to go to sea, a memory that haunts him with regret and shame. From flashbacks we can infer that Freddie’s aforementioned childhood sexual trauma was likely a major contributor to his sudden departure: Freddie and Doris, too, have a wide gap in age, and Freddie is seen to become uncomfortable upon realizing this.

After the Processing is over, Dodd asks Freddie how he feels, and Freddie replies with noticeable relief: “I feel good.” Dodd in turn supplies impressive compassion: “You are the bravest boy I have ever met,” leading Freddie to crack a wide smile. From this moment on, Freddie becomes viciously loyal to Dodd. Thus, by giving Freddie a precious forum to confront his many traumas, Dodd converts Freddie into a fierce supporter.

Despite being a loyal soldier of The Cause, though, Freddie doesn’t really understand most of what Dodd says. In fact, several scenes demonstrate that Freddie’s own behavior contradicts or disproves Dodd’s ideas. For example, Freddie is made to listen to a tape that insists, “Man is not an animal,” but, far from absorbing this high-minded mantra, he instead passes a note to a woman that reads: “Do you want to fuck?” In a separate scene, Dodd strikes up a rendition of an old-timey singalong, but Freddie, rather than enjoy the folksiness of Dodd’s performance, imagines every woman present completely nude.

Since Freddie’s behavior is so at odds with the values of The Cause, most of the members, especially Peggy, don’t like him very much. But Dodd won’t get rid of him. In fact, it seems that Dodd is actually drawn to the very characteristics in Freddie that he outwardly denounces as “animal”-like.

For example, when Freddie farts during processing and laughs, Dodd can’t help but be amused, and he admits, “Laughing is good during processing. Even if it is the sound of an animal.” When Freddie hunts down and beats up Dodd’s cynical challenger—an alarming turn of events—Dodd merely scolds Freddie as a “naughty boy” and takes no corrective action, a clear condoning of the act. And when Freddie returns from prison and the two reconcile, they wrestle on the lawn laughing, a rowdy scene at odds with Dodd’s usual emphasis on cultivated manners.

The two also bond over their love for alcohol. Of course, it’s no surprise that Freddie, a damaged individual, would be drawn to drinking as a way to calm his inner demons. When Dodd asks him what’s in his highly potent concoctions, Freddie responds, “secrets,” underscoring that he uses alcohol to quiet the sort of private, painful memories that Dodd uncovers in Processing. It may be surprising, then, that Dodd, who contrastingly doesn’t share traumatic or harmful memories during the film, also favors drinking—but perhaps it shouldn’t be. After all, Dodd is fairly unstable himself, sharing Freddie’s tendency toward volatile outbursts (“Pig fuck!”). Perhaps his inventing of The Cause reflects a yearning to confront a difficult, hidden past of his own.

Regardless, Dodd certainly sees himself in Freddie, and when his family pressures him to drop Freddie for good, he instead ratchets up the treatment with new methods to prove that The Cause is for real. These methods are strange to say the least, involving such tactics as Peggy reading erotica to Freddie, as well as Clark taunting Freddie with sensitive personal details that were documented during earlier Processing sessions.

The goal is for Freddie not to react to what is presented to him, thereby proving his distance from animalistic “negative emotions.” These scenes, in fact, are reminiscent of the sequence in A Clockwork Orange (1971) when Alex is subjected to provocative stimuli to prove that his impulses have been stamped out of him—except Freddie hasn’t undergone the Ludovico Technique, and it shows.

To be fair, Freddie does achieve some eventual success in controlling his behavior during the new sessions. But concurrent flashbacks indicate that even in these instances, he’s actually experiencing quite a lot of emotion. For example, when Clark bitingly suggests that Freddie belongs “away from people” like his mother, who resides in an asylum, Freddie involuntarily recalls a cold, lonely night, smoking a cigarette on the deck during the war.

Another prominent new treatment method is to have Freddie walk back and forth in the study, with Dodd encouraging him to use his imagination when interacting with the wooden panel and the window. At first Freddie is frustrated at the inanity of this pointless task, but, forced to repeat it over and over, he eventually uses the time to imagine himself having sex with Doris, which Dodd dubiously considers a success.

The point of this extended treatment montage is that Freddie is deriving less benefit from The Cause’s methods than before. Yes, he’s still recounting emotional moments from the past, as he did during the early Processing sessions, thereby providing some form of the catharsis that initially hooked him. But this is mostly despite, not because of The Cause’s methods, which are becoming increasingly mangled by the eccentric beliefs of Dodd and his family, dampening any positive effect that might be achieved.

For example, Clark’s taunting causes Freddie to recall dark memories, but Dodd discourages Freddie from reacting to them, diminishing any therapeutic benefit. Freddie can sense that it isn’t working, wondering out loud several times how the odd activities Dodd prescribes are going to help him—a far cry from his initial enthusiasm for basic “Processing” with Dodd.

So it’s no surprise that when The Cause travels to Phoenix for its first conference, Freddie doesn’t appear improved in the slightest, predictably assaulting an editor who opines that Dodd’s new book “stinks.” In addition, subtle visual clues during the conference indicate that following his barrage of mostly ineffective treatment, Freddie is losing faith in The Cause.

For instance, Freddie is seen struggling to appreciate Dodd’s keynote speech at the conference, whereas formerly, he appeared to enjoy Dodd’s oration. He appears particularly miffed by Dodd’s privileging of “laughter” as the “secret to living in these bodies that we hold”—likely recalling that in their first Processing session together, Dodd referred to laughter somewhat dismissively, calling it “good” but still “the sound of an animal.” And after fighting with the editor outside, Freddie sits down and puts his head in his hands, appearing tormented by the possibility that the man’s offending view of Dodd as a “garbled, twisted mystic” is in fact accurate.

Having thusly outgrown The Cause, Freddie takes his recovery into his own hands. He has apparently concluded that he feels better upon confronting painful memories, as he did in simple Processing, rather than upon blocking out emotions, as the later techniques emphasized. So he departs suddenly during the “Pick a Point” game with the aim of finally reuniting with Doris. This is a major step for him, and it’s perhaps a testament to Dodd’s work that Freddie has built up the confidence to do it, since, as previously mentioned, his leaving Doris had been a source of shame for him. Unfortunately, Freddie has taken far too long: Doris is now married with children.

Freddie’s reaction to this news, however, is heartening to watch. He’s sad, of course, and his awkward mannerisms are as prominent as ever, but overall he takes it in stride. He confirms with Doris’s mother that Doris was upset when he left seven years ago, making sure that his memories of a mutual romance weren’t illusory. His conclusion is admirable: “She’s happy, and that’s good.” And at the end of his conversation with Doris’s mother, he asks how her husband is doing, a surprisingly well related gesture. It seems that revisiting this key moment in his life has indeed helped heal his wounds somewhat, and has afforded him some degree of calm.

But now we reach the movie’s final act, and this is where things get truly difficult.

Freddie is summoned by Dodd to The Cause’s new school in England, where we see that Dodd is not doing well. He’s housed in a huge office that resembles, surely symbolically, a church with no congregation.

And Peggy, seated creepily in the shadows to his left, preempts him by grilling Freddie herself, suggesting that she, not Dodd, is truly in charge now. This isn’t too surprising given Peggy’s earlier zealotry and manipulation of Dodd: she dictates propaganda for her husband to disseminate (“We must always attack”) and gives him a matter-of-fact hand job to diminish any extramarital urges that could weaken The Cause. She had always been a driving force behind the scenes; now she runs the show.

Dodd’s dialogue to Freddie subsequent to Peggy’s leaving the room demonstrates that he isn’t enjoying the England iteration of The Cause. Tied to an institutional location for the first time and smothered by Peggy’s influence, he expresses jealousy over Freddie’s comparative freedom and pines for a life with no “master”:

Dodd: Free winds and no tyranny for you? Freddie, sailor of the seas. You pay no rent, free to go where you please… Good luck. For if you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know. For you would be the first in the history of the world.

So while Peggy sneers at Freddie, “This isn’t fashion,” Dodd’s speech suggests that, in fact, that’s exactly what it had been to him. Dodd had styled himself as “the Master,” but now that he isn’t, it isn’t fun anymore. Sitting at a lonely desk with his wife whispering in his ear, he’s lost the former twinkle in his eye; his growing responsibilities have dimmed the magic of his charisma. This claustrophobic frustration can be traced all the way back to the Phoenix conference, when Dodd explodes at Helen, who questions some of the language in his new book: “What do you want from me?!”

That Dodd is frustrated by his increasing responsibilities is significant, because this directly contrasts with Freddie’s attitude. Whereas Dodd apparently seeks freedom from obligation, Freddie craves the feeling of connection. He doesn’t want to be an untethered “sailor of the seas,” as Dodd idealizes, perhaps since he has already experienced this lifestyle, and it didn’t go well. He wants to belong to a place and a person.

It seems undeniable that this is the more sustainable goal, as even Dodd professes to understand that, in truth, no man can go without serving “any master.” Thus, not only has Freddie outgrown The Cause, but he has now outgrown Dodd, who can’t bear the ordinariness of everyday life and whose own movement has failed to deliver him the total freedom he desired. Perhaps all along Dodd was drawn to Freddie for his apparent transcendence of mundane daily duties; however, Freddie desired no such thing.

Given his discontentment, Dodd implicitly discourages Freddie from returning, believing that Freddie is better off on his own. Before they part, he spins an absurd yarn of the two men working together with the Pigeon Post in a past life. It’s detailed and dramatic, the kind of compelling fabrication that Dodd used to deliver so routinely. But now he’s reduced to announcing it quietly from his desk, and it’s clear to both men that things aren’t what they once were.

A pivotal moment then occurs. Freddie states his intention to leave and makes a winking jab at Dodd: maybe he’ll stay with Dodd “in the next life.” Dodd maintains his poker face, but the comical bravado of his response belies that he’s in on Freddie’s joke: “If I see you in the next life, you will be my sworn enemy, and I will show you no mercy.” Freddie laughs in reply, and Dodd smiles wryly.

This exchange is a brief mutual recognition between the two friends that The Cause’s dogma is merely Dodd’s fantastical invention. As Dodd’s son Val (Jesse Plemons) had stated in an earlier scene, Dodd is “making this up as he goes along.” With Freddie departing, Dodd momentarily tips his (empty) hand.

Dodd concludes the meeting by suddenly singing “Slow Boat to China,” which for many viewers is a mystery too far. But since we’ve analyzed the full conversation thoroughly, we can see that this is just another example of Dodd communicating through his characteristically flourishing rhetoric that he has grown unhappy, and that he wishes he could travel away freely with Freddie. As we’ve stated, this is solely Dodd’s fantasy: Freddie wants to rejoin society, not escape it. Nevertheless, Freddie is also emotional during Dodd’s performance, as he, too, likely misses the bond that the two shared before The Cause increasingly interfered.

After all, Dodd was responsible for first encouraging Freddie to relive some of the traumatic experiences that had damaged him so badly, and for supporting him along the way (“You are the bravest boy I have ever met”), ultimately setting Freddie on the long path to fighting back some of his demons and becoming a functioning member of society again.

As proof of Freddie’s progress, after leaving Dodd he picks up a girl in a pub, and they have casual, normal sex—certainly an impossibility for Freddie before meeting Dodd. And to emphasize Dodd’s contribution, Freddie is shown repeating some of very questions Dodd posed in their early Processing sessions, perhaps trying to seduce this woman in the same way Dodd, as it were, seduced him: by encouraging open, honest dialogue about any subject. And it seems to be…kind of working.

Finally, we see a flashback of Freddie laying down next to the sand woman from the beginning of the film. What is the meaning of this image?

It conveys that Freddie, after all this time, has finally achieved what he desperately wanted from the start: a female companion. Previously, his jarring experiences from childhood and the war had left him unable to interact in a properly calibrated way in society; but after years with Dodd, unhelpful and bizarre though much of that time was, he goes to bed happy with a woman—who isn’t made of sand.

Let’s return to the opening shot of The Master. We see the ship’s wake: turbulent, strong, vast. This image, which recurs numerous times, summarizes Paul Thomas Anderson’s incredible film, which is about trauma—the “wake” of destructive, devastating events—and the lengths individuals will go to heal it. Freddie Quell, to quiet his own accrued demons, goes to war, leaves the love of his life, drinks paint thinner, joins a cult based on science fiction silliness, physically attacks the cult’s enemies, and subjects himself to ridiculous and even dangerous therapeutic methods.

The Master therefore provides insight into many of the seemingly bizarre things that humans do and try; after all, to “quell” the torturous pain of trauma, anything is fair game. And after several years, Freddie is in fact able to rejoin society and live independently, thanks to the one true kernel in all of The Cause’s teachings: that the only way to heal the effects of trauma is to courageously confront the events themselves.

 

— Jim Andersen

More movies explained: The Big Lebowski

Categories
Movies Explained

The Tree of Life Explained

Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) is often dismissed as arthouse pabulum. It confounds most who stumble upon it, especially those unfamiliar with Malick’s other work.

But despite the claims of its naysayers, The Tree of Life is artistically coherent. With the proper signposts, any lover of cinema can navigate its mysteries and enjoy its rewards. Providing those signposts, then, will be my goal in this essay. I’ll identify (at some length) the unifying arc of the film, which will explain opaque sequences such as the depiction of the universe’s creation and the melancholy ending on a beach. Let’s answer once and for all: what is this movie about??

I’ll state my thesis and go from there: The Tree of Life is a modern meditation on a biblical scripture: The Book of Job. Jack O’Brien, the protagonist, represents Job. Note the initials: J.O.B.

The Book of Job is referenced even before the movie begins, in the opening epigraph:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?… When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” – Job 38:4,7

It’s worth stating that if Malick’s well documented interest in religion repels you, then you may not enjoy a frank discussion of The Tree of Life’s themes. In the ensuing analysis, I might sound unacceptably credulous to religious skeptics. However, I’m simply reflecting the perspective of Malick, who often explores Christian faith in his films.

With that said, let’s refresh ourselves on the Book of Job. It’s about a sort of bet between Satan and God. Satan argues that those who love God only do so out of self interest—essentially, that they love what God gives, not God Himself. God disagrees. To settle the debate, God allows Satan to do harm to one of His most faithful servants: a farmer named Job.

At first, God seems to have won the debate, as Job stays true to God despite Satan unleashing massive harm to Job’s family and property. But when Satan curses Job with a rash of vicious boils, Job loses faith. He finally lashes out at God, railing against the injustices that befall the innocent and demanding that God make Himself accountable for arbitrary tragedies. In response, God appears to Job and states that a mere man could not possibly understand His majestic ways: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” Hearing this, Job repents and turns back to God.

As I said before, The Tree of Life is a meditation on this ancient story. I’ll demonstrate the parallels by dividing the Book of Job’s narrative into sections that correspond with parts of Malick’s film:

1) An undeserved misfortune befalls Job, leading him to rail against God’s lack of accountability, specifically regarding His permissiveness of tragedies that befall the innocent.

This corresponds to the movie’s introductory sequence, in which Jack (Sean Penn) and Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) struggle to reconcile their faith with the unexpected death of R.L. at only 19 years old.

2) God appears and demands to the anguished Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”

This corresponds to the film’s second section, a striking visual sequence that chronicles the Earth’s creation.

3) God continues with, “…When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

This corresponds with the film’s third and longest section, an account of Jack’s upbringing in Waco, Texas, experiencing joys of childhood and soon learning hard truths of adulthood.

4) Job repents and turns back to God.

This corresponds to the concluding “beach” sequence, which I’ll revisit later. To properly analyze it, we need to first interpret the first three parts of the film.

As we can see, the film’s epigraph is highly useful, providing us with a roadmap for the movie’s progression. But to stop here would be to minimize Malick’s work. He doesn’t merely want to retell a famous story. Rather, he aims to use the art of film to explore why God’s forceful response to Job in the original scripture is so successful in convincing him to repent.

After all, as you may have thought to yourself when I summarized the Book of Job, the reason for the character’s repentance isn’t immediately clear. In fact, it seems that his angry claims about God’s unaccountability have proven correct. God confirms that He will not account to anyone. Why, then, does Job repent?

Answering this question is Malick’s true project in The Tree of Life. And it’s an enormous project, given that the Book of Job is one of the most studied and discussed narratives in all of theology. But Malick undertakes the task, in my opinion, with great skill and nuance. I’ll illustrate how he goes about it by referencing the sections I’ve already proscribed.

In the first section, we see and hear Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) attempt to cope with the early death of R.L., her middle son. She delivers an opening monologue about the ways of Grace and Nature, but it appears that she no longer believes in the content of her speech. For example, while she recounts, “they told us that no one who follows the way of Grace ever meets a bad end,” this is juxtaposed with an image of a young R.L. We later learn that R.L. was the gentlest and most sensitive of Mrs. O’Brien’s three sons, yet he alone died early.

The tragedy is also shown to leave a lasting impact on R.L.’s older brother Jack (Sean Penn), who appears adrift and dissatisfied with adult life. He apologizes to his father after an apparent fight about R.L., showing that the tragedy continues to cause family conflict. We hear Jack’s wandering thoughts: “Where were you?” “How did she bear it?”The point of this introductory section, then, is to emphasize the question: “Why?” Why do bad things happen to good people?

This in turn sets up the next two sections. Before we discuss these, though, let’s note a very important point. Since we’re viewing The Tree of Life as a modern version of the Book of Job, the images in the second and third sections, which correlate with God’s response to Job’s wavering faith, are being presented to Jack as an adult. In other words, Jack sees what we see on the screen.

This is crucial to understanding the film. Just as Job is addressed directly by God (one of the few moments in the Bible in which God literally appears), Jack too is addressed directly, via the movie’s images, in response to his questioning of God in the first part. Later, when we arrive at our analysis of the film’s fourth and final section, we’ll gauge whether he’s convinced by what he has been shown.

Back to the story structure. The “universe creation” sequence corresponds, as I indicated before, with the beginning of God’s reply to Job as presented in the film’s epigraph: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”

But how is this an effective reply to Job, and by extension to Jack?

We can use our aesthetic sensibilities to answer this. The section summarizes, with alternately faraway and intimate cinematography, the entirety of time. The cosmos shapes itself. The molten Earth solidifies. Oceans swell, cellular life originates, and dinosaurs display the quality of compassion. It’s an incredible show that invokes our feelings of wonder and grandeur.

And indeed, these feelings may have a strangely comforting effect on our perception of tragedy. Just as one might look at nighttime stars and appreciate one’s own relative insignificance in the grand scope of the universe, one experiences this section of the movie to be reminded of his or her littleness in all of creation. Thus, the accusatory questions directed at God in the first section aren’t so much answered as minimized: a life lost at nineteen is compared to trillions of years of cosmic processes.

And when you think about it, what could be a more honest response to the pain of loss? A presentation of the universe’s grandeur minimizes human tragedy by sheer scope.

Even so, I admit it’s a fairly cold, logical response, insufficient on its own. This is why God continues, in Malick’s interpretation, with the third section: Jack’s childhood, which corresponds to the second half of the epigraph: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?”

It’s important to make clear that this third section doesn’t comprise Jack’s memories. We know this, firstly, because Jack isn’t in all the scenes. Secondly, he’s too young in others (an infant) to have any recollection of the events. Our framework, though, explains this nicely, since we’ve determined that these are images being shown by God to Jack as an adult. Thus, it’s no surprise that we see a smitten Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien laying on a picnic blanket predating Jack’s birth: God has understandably included this in the narrative of Jack’s early life.

One of the questions Jack asks during the first part of the movie is: “Where were you?” And in this section, God answers. Every shot in section three indicates God’s presence in Jack’s early life. An incomplete survey of some powerful examples might include a loving Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) holding Jack’s newborn foot, the wrinkled face of an elderly relative, rain in a puddle beside the house, and the sun setting behind an exuberant playground. Malick’s attempt to make palpable or at least conceivable the presence of a beneficent God is, in my opinion, highly authentic.

But in addition to these shots of obvious beauty, there are darker moments. Jack and his brothers and friends, for example, mock adults with disabilities and abuse animals. Jack feels that his father’s disciplinary style is smothering and hypocritical. A peer drowns in a swimming pool, and another is injured in a fire. In one extraordinary sequence, a sexually maturing Jack sneaks into the bedroom of a female neighbor, lays out her undergarment, and then runs away from the house with it, distraught.

(What has Jack done to the undergarment that necessitates discarding it in a river? Well, given the adolescent Jack’s entering into sexual maturity, the sexual overtones of the scene, and Jack’s ensuing angst, I think I have a decent guess.)

Where was God in these darker moments? Malick answers this difficult question in two ways. Firstly, he often intersperses these moments with metaphoric clips of nature’s beauty. For example, after Mr. O’Brien laments his missed opportunity to become a musician, Malick shows a fleeting clip of sand blowing through a desert. This technique asserts a link between negative human experiences and the larger schema of the Earth, suggesting that these negative experiences are linked to the beauty of time and creation and therefore not wholly negative.

Secondly and more importantly, these dark moments have an overarching theme: Jack’s struggle to accept his place in society. He conflicts with his father, ignores the value of animal life, sees himself as superior to others (like the man with cerebral palsy), destroys property, and illicitly enters a neighbor’s house. He tells his mother, “I want to do what I want.” Perhaps most alarming of all, he tells R.L. to put his finger over the nozzle of a BB gun and pulls the trigger. Even as a toddler, Jack throws a tantrum when he doesn’t receive the totality of his mother’s attention.

In each of these cases, Jack displays the tendency to disregard his place within his family and within society. This condition—attempting to unduly hoist one’s self above one’s rightful place—is the human condition as laid out in the Bible. Recall Adam and Eve’s fall from grace after the serpent promises them equality with God if they eat from the forbidden tree.

This condition is also the same one that, after R.L.’s death, will cause Jack to question God’s motives. His interrogation of God, we can conclude after watching Jack grow up, is just another example of Jack putting himself above his rightful human status. Since, as we’ve said, Jack sees the childhood section of the movie, we know that Jack, too, can observe this pattern—hence its presumed effectiveness in lessening his frustration.

This, really, is the most important point of the third part. If we combine it with the more positive, wondrous instances of God’s presence, we can summarize this section with the following statement: God was present all along in Jack’s life, but Jack frequently ignored this. Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that adult Jack is doing so yet again, this time by questioning God’s plan following R.L.’s death.

Similarly to part two, then, part three is an effective and appropriate response to Jack’s crisis of faith. In the original Book of Job, these rhetorical strategies of God’s aren’t explicit, but Malick’s goal—and, arguably, achievement—is to illustrate them through the medium of film.

We now come to the fourth and final part: the beach scene. This is when viewers tend to get really frustrated. After all, we’ve stuck with Malick through some confusing sequences, and now, instead of giving us answers, he completely drops all pretense of linearity. But since we have a foothold on Malick’s themes up until this point, we can follow his conclusion.

The section begins with adult Jack walking through a desert in a suit. He appears to be chasing a child. There are also shots of Jack sitting in the same suit in his office. Eventually, Jack reaches some kind of doorway and appears a beach, where he sees family and friends from his childhood.

It’s clear that these are symbolic, not literal events. The first clue to understanding the symbolism is Jack’s business attire during these scenes. We can infer that the strange desert imagery represents his mental activity while he is sitting in his office at work (as noted before, he wears the same suit in both clips).

What is Jack thinking while at his office, then, that this surreal imagery conveys?

Given the Jobian structure of the first three sections, it’s only reasonable to view the last section as an illustration of Jack’s reaction to what he has seen in the second and third sections. We’ve established that adult Jack sees the images in those parts in response to his questioning of God in the first part. We’ve also concluded that the images indeed constituted an effective response to that questioning. But we haven’t proved that they succeeded in persuading Jack. Does Jack actually change his mindset, as Job does, following this mighty response from God?

The beach sequence demonstrates that he does.

The shots of Jack chasing a child through the desert represent his efforts to rediscover God during a faithless time in his life. Once he arrives at the beach, he encounters images that may seem random or pointless; however, each one reaffirms things that Jack has seen and learned during the preceding two sections.

For instance, the beach sequence recalls section two’s emphasis on the grandeur of nature and creation. Both land and sea are depicted in their full beauty, and animal life is captured majestically soaring across the area. More difficult to catch, but also present, are the more complex lessons from section three, which emphasize the godliness of the people from Jack’s childhood.

Consider Mr. O’Brien lifting up R.L. and holding him lovingly. This contrasts with how Jack viewed his father when he was a boy: as selfish and authoritarian, a world apart from the gentle and compassionate R.L. But having seen the third section of the film, it makes sense that Jack would have a new perspective, since several moments from that section emphasize his father’s love for R.L. and the other boys.

For example, in one touching scene, Mr. O’Brien and R.L. wordlessly bond over their love for music, a love not shared by the others in the family. In other scenes, Mr. O’Brien horses around with the boys before bed, tells dramatic bedtime stories, and attempts to better the family economically by working hard (“never missed a day of work”) and struggling against an unfair system of patent law. In the scene where Mr. O’Brien tries to teach the boys to fight, R.L. is reluctant and awkward, which disappoints his father. But rather than taunt R.L. as he does with Jack, Mr. O’Brien demonstrates awareness of R.L.’s sensitive nature and merely discontinues the lesson.

To be sure, these are nuanced moments. But Jack likely hasn’t reflected on these nuances before. Recall the early scene in which Jack as an adult alludes to a fight he had with his father about R.L., indicating that he still resents his father’s treatment of R.L.—possibly even blaming him partially for R.L.’s death. If you’ll allow me to stretch a bit, the way R.L.’s death is relayed to his mother (and R.L.’s age at the time) suggests that he died in a military setting, and Jack may feel that his father’s influence pushed R.L. to pursue this vocation, when he otherwise would have had no inclination to do so.

Regardless, Jack, having been presented with a more comprehensive picture, can now reflect on a truer version of events: that R.L. and Mr. O’Brien were fundamentally different, but nevertheless shared a loving bond. This version, therefore, is reflected on the beach.

Also emphasized in the beach sequence is Mrs. O’Brien’s embracing of R.L. as a child. This recalls another question of Jack’s in the first section: “How did she bear it?” We can understand why adult Jack would struggle to comprehend how his fiercely loving mother could move past such a tragedy. But after seeing part three, in which his mother’s near-angelic grace and moral strength are underscored repeatedly, Jack can imagine it. He pictures his mother loving R.L. but also finding the strength and faith to say: “I give him to you,” as symbolic images convey R.L.’s departure to a new life.

Thus, Jack now perceives the tragedy of R.L.’s death as less devastating than before. He has new insight into his mother’s character, now recognizing that she came to terms with what happened, eventually accepting it as God’s plan.

Near the conclusion of the film, Jack falls to his knees on the beach, a clear indication that he, like Job, has repented and turned back to God following God’s response to his frustration with the undeserved tragedies of life. The movie ends with, fittingly, a bridge, as Jack, by rediscovering his faith, has formed a “bridge” between his childhood and adult lives.

Remember that prior to the events of the film, Jack seemed adrift and detached as an adult, gazing confusedly at the city from his office and behaving awkwardly after waking up with a woman. Since he has rediscovered God, it can be inferred, he has rediscovered the wonder and belonging he felt as a child, before R.L.’s death. Perhaps Malick implies that God is like the trunk of a tree, and all the extending branches stem outward from Him.

The Tree of Life is a challenging film, and sometimes too much challenge can unduly cloud a film’s artistic value. If I’ve failed to convey the aesthetic power of The Tree of Life by prioritizing an explanation of how to understand it, then I encourage you to use this framework to discover that power for yourself. There’s so much more to enjoy in Malick’s masterpiece. I’ve omitted entire sequences and symbolisms from my analysis, but this is out of necessity, not out of indifference. Because for me, The Tree of Life is in the very top tier of filmmaking: a work of ridiculous creativity, intense emotion, and beautiful imagery—a masterpiece maybe unsurpassed in 21st century American cinema.

 

—Jim Andersen

For more movies explained, see my analysis of Hereditary.

Categories
Movies Explained

No Country for Old Men Explained

You’re probably here because you’re confused about the ending of  the Coen brothers’ Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Specifically, you probably want to know the meaning of the two dreams shared by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) before the film cuts to black and the credits roll.

Well, you’ve come to the right place.

To definitively explain the ending of this complex movie, though, we need to go through the film piece by piece, exploring its less urgent mysteries first before arriving at Sheriff Bell’s dreams. That way, we’ll know what the stakes are for the ending, and what thematic meanings we can derive from it.

So let’s begin. No Country for Old Men’s thematic conflict is largely displayed on the surface, so we needn’t dwell on it too long. We’ll summarize, though, that the film follows an aging sheriff who’s forced to confront the apparent rise in senseless, outrageous violence in his small Texas community. This trend comes to a head when a local man (Josh Brolin) comes across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong and walks away with two million dollars—leading him to be pursued by Mexican drug dealers and a frighteningly ruthless, persistent killer. Eventually, the man is murdered, and the sheriff retires, having come to feel “overmatched” by a growing sinister presence in contemporary society.

Our primary mystery, then, is the exact nature of the sinister presence. And it isn’t easy to identify, because Sheriff Bell is a man of few words and doesn’t pontificate much on the matter.

Fortunately for us, the Coens have given us a character that personifies what’s troubling him: the film’s primary antagonist, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In other words: to find out what’s troubling Bell, we need to examine Chigurh’s behavior.

Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) is the only character with any real knowledge of Chigurh, and he tells us:

He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.

What are these principles? We learn about them through Chigurh’s actions during the film. What I will go on to demonstrate as my first major point in this analysis is that Chigurh harbors a complex, bizarre understanding of human encounters. In short, he perceives every situation as a chance collision between people and objects that is predestined to lead to the individual either living or dying, and he aims to ensure the “correct” outcome without interfering himself.

I’ll explain, don’t worry.

The fullest look we get of Chigurh’s eccentric belief system is his remarkable interaction with a gas station owner early in the film. This encounter first demonstrates Chigurh’s obsession, which will recur throughout the film, with how things got to their present location. He’s especially interested in where the man is from and how he came to own the gas station: “You’ve lived here all your life?… So you married into it.” And it’s not only the man’s path he’s keen on: he also invokes the origins and journey of a coin that he wants the man to call heads or tails: “It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here, and now it’s here, and it’s either heads or tails.”

By contrast, when the man asks Chigurh where he is from, Chigurh responds with a rude retort: “What business of it is yours where I’m from, Friend-O?”

In summary, Chigurh spends the conversation with the gas station owner gathering details about the man’s journey and invoking details about the coin’s journey—while fiercely resisting giving any such details about his own.

And Chigurh’s focus on the paths of people and objects doesn’t just make for an odd conversation. Alarmingly, it appears to inform his intention to potentially kill this random man on the spot for no reason, contingent on the toss of the coin. Chigurh’s strange logic appears to be that since the coin has traveled such a long, winding journey to arrive at its current place, it has inherent authority as to the outcome of the encounter. Later, Chigurh will echo this same reasoning to Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) after demanding that she call a similar life-or-death coin toss: “I got here the same way the coin did.”

There’s another notorious movie villain who flips coins to determine victims’ fates: Batman’s adversary, Two-Face (coincidentally played by Jones in 1995). But as we can see by the aforementioned remarks, Chigurh, unlike Two-Face, doesn’t use the coin as a tribute to (in the movies) randomness or (as in the comics) indecisiveness, but rather out of respect for the coin itself.

From our viewpoint, of course, this is absurd, because it devalues Chigurh’s own role in the outcome. Deferring to an inanimate object negates the fact that Chigurh himself is the one who will potentially execute the victim despite his clear option to desist. But Chigurh doesn’t see it that way, dismissing that very objection from Carla Jean (“The coin don’t got no say!”) by again invoking the meandering path of the coin. In his mind, it seems, the human free will doesn’t take precedence, as we believe it does. Rather, Chigurh believes that he must carry out the will of the coin, an object. He’s not a meaningful participant in the matter—just an enactor of what the coin ordains.

His dedication to refraining from interfering in the outcome is such that he refuses to call the tosses, demanding that the potential victims do so instead. This also demonstrates his acknowledgement of the target’s agency in addition to the coin’s. It appears, then, that what Chigurh truly values is the interaction between the person and the object (the coin).

It’s not only the coin, after all, that has followed a remarkable path to arrive at this moment. The potential victim has, too. Thus, as we’ve observed, Chigurh expresses interest in these people’s paths, for example inquiring about the gas station owner’s life story (“You married into it”) and asking Carson Wells, “If the road led you to this point, of what good was the road?” He’s musing about these unfortunate individuals’ chance arrival into a circumstance in which they may die. That circumstance, from his perspective, is embodied by the coin, an object with which the potential victim has improbably, randomly collided, and which will reveal to Chigurh whether that collision was meant to result in the individual’s death. If so, he’ll faithfully enact that outcome.

But, you might wonder, why doesn’t Chigurh flip a coin for all of his victims? Most of them, after all, don’t get such a luxury (including Wells).

This is because Chigurh for most of the film is on a larger mission: to retrieve the missing money.

It’s never made clear whether Chigurh has been hired by the American drug buyers to get the two million dollars, or by an outside party, or by no one at all. But what is absolutely clear is that Chigurh, for whatever reason, wants that money. Badly. Once he has set himself to this goal, we can observe through his actions that he not only perceives every human being that comes in his way to be expendable, but that he is positively obligated to murder them.

After all, throughout his bloody rampage, Chigurh has various opportunities to spare victims: the Mexican in the motel shower, Wells offering him the briefcase, Carla Jean, the American accountant (“You’ve seen me?”), and various civilians that he kills for their cars or other reasons. In all cases he puts them to death only for being in his way, even if incidentally.

Based on what we have already said about Chigurh, we can deduce that this is because Chigurh believes that he is predestined to retrieve the money, and that those who might obstruct him are consequently predestined to be killed. A coin toss would be redundant for these individuals, because it’s already evident that the circumstances they have wandered into necessitate their deaths. Their need to be executed is already assured.

In fact, Chigurh makes a telling comment to Wells that outlines this manner of viewing his retrieval of the money as a foregone, fated conclusion: “I know where it’s going to be… It will be brought to me and placed at my feet.” Again, Chigurh believes that his recovery of the money is destiny; therefore, all who get in his way (in this case, Wells) are destined to die. The coin doesn’t need to confirm this.

Chigurh’s belief that he is fated to recover the money also helps us to explain possibly his signature trait: his utter ruthlessness. Throughout the film, his behavior is notable for its disregard of all etiquette or rules of engagement. An officer leaves him unsupervised while handcuffed in the precinct, assuming that he’ll comply with the process. He doesn’t. A man pulls over in deference to an apparent policeman, assuming that he has a good reason for strangely wielding a cattle stun gun. He doesn’t. These expectations of mutual decorum are of no import to Chigurh, who simply takes advantage of the opportunities they offer him.

And his viewing of his retrieval of the money as a foregone conclusion also engenders his memorably blunt, simple style. Chigurh isn’t glamorous (as anyone can see by his haircut), but he is extremely efficient. When he kills, he doesn’t waste time with drama or flair. He doesn’t even use a gun when possible, since it would leave messy traces behind, but instead prefers to use, of all things, a pressurized cattle stunner, symbolically minimizing even the humanity of his victims—slaughtering them simply and quietly, like animals. Unimpressive aesthetics like these owe to the fact that Chigurh follows only one rule: that he will obtain the money. Style can wait.

We now have a fairly good idea of what Wells means when he says that Chigurh “has principles.” As we’ve seen, Chigurh sees himself as bowing completely to circumstance, executing only those who are meant to die, which unfortunately includes most of the characters in No Country for Old Men, since they are obstructing his predestined retrieval of the two million dollars. For those whose deaths aren’t so obviously necessary, he uses a coin as a proxy for the mandate of circumstance.

No one obstructs Chigurh’s retrieval of the money more than Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), who, thanks in part to his military training, has the wherewithal to stay a step ahead of Chigurh for much of the film. But Moss has stark weaknesses compared to Chigurh, of which Wells unsuccessfully tries to advise him in the hospital.

As Wells knows, the fact that Moss is even in the hospital makes him eminently vulnerable; Chigurh, by contrast, when injured manages to stay off the grid by blowing up a car and stealing medical supplies in the ensuing chaos without so much as quickening his stride. Wells tries to illustrate to Moss that Chigurh’s monomaniacal persistence will eventually overcome him, noting that Chigurh could easily endeavor to kill Moss’s wife just to demoralize him. But the physically battered Moss can only respond to these well-founded warnings with the type of swashbuckling, tough-guy remark that, as we’ve established, would be completely alien to Chigurh: “Maybe he’s the one who needs to be worried. About me.” Wells in turn assures him, correctly, “Well, he isn’t.”

The chivalrous, old-school Moss, then, is really no match for the hyper-efficient Chigurh, so, as Wells predicts, it’s only a matter of time before Moss is found and killed. In addition, Chigurh had promised to kill Carla Jean if he defied him, which Moss disregarded—so Chigurh finds her to finish the job. He explains to her, “I gave my word,” to which she replies, “That don’t make sense.”

We, however, can make sense of it, or at least follow his thought process, because we know that Chigurh now perceives her as just one more person whom circumstances have ordained to die. In Chigurh’s mind, he isn’t choosing to kill her, just effecting what is supposed to happen based on Moss’s decisions. Chigurh offers her a coin toss (“It’s the best I can do”), just to be sure that it was meant to be—but she declines, and he kills her, checking his feet for blood as he leaves the house.

But now an intriguing scene ensues wherein Chigurh’s vehicle is hit by a car that runs a red light, apparently breaking his arm. Two boys witness the crash, and he pays one of them for a jacket to refashion as a sling and for their silence about seeing him. What is the meaning of this scene?

Well, the moment recalls an earlier scene in which a grievously injured Moss, still in possession of the two million dollars, overpays a group of young men on the border for a jacket. It’s an essential purchase, possibly saving his life, and it’s possible only because he is, if only temporarily, rich. Similarly, the car crash scene with Chigurh, which also includes a medically essential purchase, emphasizes the fact that Chigurh has the two million dollars now, and can likewise use it to get himself out of trouble.

The scene shows that Chigurh himself is not immune to the potentially deadly consequences of the twisting, random paths of objects and people that he puts so much stock in. But now that he has the two million dollars, he can overcome some of those unfortunate hands inevitably dealt by fate.

Perhaps this is why Chigurh—whose reasons for getting involved in this saga, remember, are never made clear—is so invested in obtaining the lost money in the first place: maybe he just wants to get an edge on fate, knowing from his own meditations that it’s only a matter of time before his meandering path leads him into harm’s way, too. Remember that his rude “Friend-O” retort to the gas station owner seemed to indicate his resistance to (and therefore his awareness of) the potential for the rules of fate to apply to him, too.

Let’s get back to Sheriff Bell. Our initial undertaking was to define the evil that troubles him and ultimately leads him to retire, by examining Anton Chigurh’s behavior. Now, we can state our findings. If Chigurh carries out his crimes, as we’ve said, as only an agent of circumstance, a completely dispassionate executor of an apparently a priori mandate—then this must be the way that Bell perceives the contemporary violent crimes of West Texas: not as though they were enacted by a conceivable human will, but rather as though they were fated, inevitable occurrences akin to natural disasters.

This perspective, of course, allows for no meaningful intervention from a law enforcer like himself. Therefore he indeed must feel “overmatched,” compelled to retire in defeat.

But does this monumental shift in crime, so discouraging to Sheriff Bell, truly reflect a change in the West Texas countryside, or only in Bell himself? Bell thinks it’s the former, opining to an agreeing fellow officer that things in America are generally in decline: “Any time you quit hearin’ Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.” However, Bell’s cousin Ellis later challenges this view in a pivotal conversation, telling Bell an old story of a senseless family murder and concluding: “What you got ain’t nothing’ new. This country’s hard on people.” He even goes on to chastise Bell for his dejection:

You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.

Thus, in response to Bell’s despair that he can no longer control the violence ravaging the country—represented by Chigurh, whose belief system is immune to human reason or fear of the law—Ellis asserts that Bell in fact could never control it. He accuses Bell in his old age of retaining a stubborn “vanity” regarding the capabilities of his profession. Bell doesn’t refute this argument, and it seems to me unmistakably the more persuasive one.

That finally brings us to Bell’s two dreams, which conclude the film.

The first one is vague, involving Bell waiting in town for his father to give him money, which he then loses. Luckily, we’ve already covered the symbolism of money in No Country for Old Men. It’s a means of alleviating dangerous and even deadly situations, as conveyed in the two separate scenes involving Moss and Chigurh in which they essentially pay their way out of dire trouble. In this dream, Bell loses money given to him by his father. This must mean that Bell is reflecting that he has lost the means of averting danger and death, which were conferred on him by his father, a sheriff himself.

This dream, then, is a meditation on Bell’s impending mortality. He had always felt, as a sheriff like his father, that his skills and importance to the community lent him a measure of security or even invulnerability. But now that he’s retired, which his father never was, and now that he’s significantly older than his father ever was, he’s coming to feel that this invulnerability has worn off: he’s getting closer to death.

The second dream is somewhat more complex. It entails Bell’s father riding out ahead of him in a cold, dark, mountainous pass with fire in a horn to light ahead and wait for his son. Bell remembers that his father “rode on past me, kept goin’, never said nothin’” with his “blanket wrapped around him.” This imagery can only be interpreted as symbolic of the father’s early death.

Thus, this dream, like the first, is a meditation on mortality. Unlike the first, though, Bell remembers a feeling associated with it: “I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there.” The hopefulness of this sentiment, however—referring, it seems, to a benign afterlife where father and son can reunite—is shattered by Bell’s next sentence, the last words of the film: “And then I woke up.”

These final words and their abrupt, blunt delivery are unmistakably meant to undermine the content of the preceding dream as fantastical and starry-eyed, and therefore we know that Bell’s optimistic feeling of his father being “out ahead” waiting for him in the afterlife has been revealed to be merely a dream, a fantasy, with Bell having now “woken up” to the harsher reality of a true, final death.

So why does Bell end the movie haunted by thoughts of his own mortality? Well, again, his being retired is surely a factor, as he’s now unavoidably in the final stage of his life. But more important is the change that we see in Bell over the course of the film. Remember that he increasingly perceives himself as helpless to curtail the violent crimes plaguing the countryside, culminating in his feeling of being “overmatched” and his consequent retirement. Based on our interpretations of Bell’s two dreams as meditations on death, we can deduce that as Sheriff Bell has come to realize his relative ineffectiveness in staving off others’ deaths, he is starting to realize his inability to stave off his own, as well.

With the illusion of his own agency over death punctured by the ineluctable crimes of Chigurh and others, Bell in his retirement is forced to face the inescapable corollary of that powerlessness: that he, too, will die. Now that his “vanity,” as correctly diagnosed by Ellis, is finally fading, he’s coming to face all facets of that chilly truth:

“You can’t stop what’s coming.”

That’s the story of No Country for Old Men. The intensely bleak ending to this film is attributable, of course, to Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed novelist who wrote the source material, and whose works are famously desolate in their portrayal of human frailty.

Both the novel and the movie are cognitively challenging works of art, and both have proponents and detractors. I myself have mixed feelings about this film, so I won’t end this essay with my usual glowing tribute to the filmmakers’ achievements. I think it’s too reliant on regional tropes to fully transcend its setting (and its genre: the Western), and maybe more importantly, it isn’t peopled with great characters the way a masterpiece should be. We have a near-stereotype (Bell), a surreal monster (Chigurh), and a weak, unfortunate, would-be hero (Moss): none of these strike me as the vibrant personages of a true classic.

NCFOM‘s 2007 counterpart, There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, could never be accused of this weakness, even though it’s less complex in its mysteries and philosophizing. I therefore esteem it higher and submit my critical opinion that the Best Picture prize of that year was awarded to the lesser film. The ambition of the Coen brothers, however, in creating such a difficult work can’t be denied, and therefore I hope this essay strikes the movie’s more enthusiastic admirers as a faithful exploration of its themes and symbolism.

 

–Jim Andersen

For another Coen Brothers classic, see my explanation of The Big Lebowski.

Categories
Movies Explained

The Big Lebowski Explained

“This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s. And, uh, lotta strands to keep in my head, man.” – The Dude

——————–

A deep dive into the symbolism and historical implications of The Big Lebowski (1998) doesn’t appeal to everyone. After all, the Coen brothers’ classic stoner comedy is already plenty enjoyable for its memorable gags and the hilarious performances of Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. It doesn’t need intellectual analysis to provide a good time.

But many are interested in such analysis anyway, and bits of Sam Elliott’s narration as “The Stranger” seem to openly invite it. So in this essay, let’s get to the bottom of what The Big Lebowski is thematically about and what larger meanings we can derive.

We’ll start with the introductory narration. Immediately we notice that the Stranger, a down-home cowboy, seems to be introducing Jeffrey Lebowski (Bridges), a.k.a “The Dude,” as one would the protagonist of a traditional Western. This is intriguing because the Dude is, to put it mildly, an unlikely choice for the part, given his slovenly appearance, lackadaisical attitude, and residence in Los Angeles County.

Nevertheless, the Stranger entreats us to keep an open mind, testifying, “After seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I seen something about as stupefying as you could see in any of those other places.” Meanwhile, the accompanying visual of a tumbleweed rolling into L.A. from the desert confirms that the ensuing events will be the type of story that we’re accustomed to seeing unfold in the desert.

The other theme of interest in the Stranger’s opening narration is his belief that the Dude is somehow important in a historical context: “Sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place… He fits right in there.” The Stranger notes that the events of The Big Lebowski took place during “just about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis,” and we see a video of George H.W. Bush declaring that Iraqi aggression in Kuwait “will not stand.”

Already, then, the Stranger has given us a lot to unravel. What does the Dude have in common with a hero of a Western? Why is he so appropriate for his “time and place,” especially, apparently, regarding the Gulf War?

For the former question, fortunately, we can arrive at some leads by examining the structure of the film. Consider that The Big Lebowski revolves around missing money. Rival factions are after it, and the protagonist, a loner of sorts by nature, is caught up in the middle. Perceived that way, the movie actually does harbor a very Western setup; the plot in fact resembles another Coen Brothers feature: the Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men (2007), which applies many hallmarks of the Western genre to contemporary America.

In addition to the “missing money” setup, the Dude, like most conventional Western heroes, seeks revenge. Not for a murdered friend or lover, as we might expect from the genre, but for his beloved rug, which a thug urinates on in an early scene. And throughout the Dude’s quest, he endures violence and abuse from various parties, as many Western heroes do. The Dude returns at the movie’s conclusion to the simple life he prefers—admittedly not on a ranch with his cattle, but at the bowling alley, spending his days drinking, smoking, and having a relaxed good time.

Is there so much fundamental difference, then, between the Dude and a John Wayne-style Western hero? Their situations and goals are largely the same, with only the superficial conventions of the genre playfully subverted. The Dude wears flip-flops, not spurred boots. He gets in trouble with a skeevy pornographer, not a drug cartel. His lover is a sex-obsessed bohemian artist, not a country damsel. He downs white Russians, not hard whiskey. His friend dies of a heart attack in a parking lot scuffle, not of a gunshot in a dramatic shootout.

These differences have the potential to throw us off, but the Dude, like any Western hero, is a man under siege, caught up in a deal gone wrong, looking to restore justice. We should view him, therefore, as a comic subversion of a type, a cowboy of the urban sprawl.

It might be helpful at this point, since I’ve mentioned the missing money, to back up and go over what actually transpires in The Big Lebowski, since the plot is extremely convoluted and nearly impossible to apprehend with only one viewing. This summary might be what you were looking for in the first place. So give me three paragraphs, and I’ll do my best to clear up the confusion.

First, representatives of Jackie Treehorn, a pornographer to whom L.A. resident Bunny Lebowski (no relation to the Dude) is in considerable debt, break into the Dude’s apartment and urinate on his rug. They want to extract the repayment of Bunny’s debt, and they mistakenly believe that the Dude is her husband. They eventually realize that they’ve broken into the home of the wrong person and leave. The Dude subsequently locates Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), his namesake and the intended target of the goons, who is an elderly, well-off philanthropist, and requests compensation for his rug, but the elder Lebowski refuses (although the Dude takes a replacement rug anyway).

Later, when Bunny (Tara Reid), the elder Lebowski’s trophy wife, takes a social trip out of the city, nihilist friends of hers attempt to extort one million dollars from her apparently wealthy husband by falsely claiming to have kidnapped her. The philanthropist Lebowski uses this opportunity to withdraw one million dollars (which had been reserved for underprivileged children’s college educations) from the charity and pretend to give it to the Dude in a briefcase to deliver to the supposed kidnappers for ransom, while actually keeping the million for himself and giving the Dude only an empty briefcase. He has contacted the Dude for this task because he knows from their earlier meeting that when the money inevitably fails to turn up (since the elder Lebowski still has it), the Dude, due to his perceived unreliability, will be blamed for its disappearance.

Thanks to the interference of his best friend, Walter Sobchak (Goodman), the Dude fails to deliver the briefcase, instead leaving it in his car, which is promptly stolen while the two go bowling. (The theft may or may not have been perpetrated by local teen Larry Sellers; it’s never determined conclusively.) Not realizing that there was never any money in the briefcase, the two friends spend the movie unsuccessfully attempting to track it down while pursued by 1) the nihilist friends, who still want the ransom money for their fake kidnapping, even mailing someone else’s toe to strengthen the charade; 2) Treehorn, who’s still after the debt Bunny owes and suspects that the Dude has kidnapped Bunny and stolen the ransom money for himself; and 3) the elder Lebowski’s daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), who wants to recover the ransom money because she, not the elder Lebowski, controls the family fortune, and the money is therefore hers. Once Maude reveals to the Dude the crucial fact that she and not her father inherited her mother’s wealth, the Dude realizes that “The Big Lebowski” has tricked them all to steal from the charity, and confronts him with Walter. Lebowski, however, refuses to admit to the scheme.

And that’s a wrap.

Quite the saga. But are all of these details necessary to address our question of the film’s larger meaning? I don’t think so. In fact, I think only one point is crucial to our understanding going forward:

There was never any money.

Yes, not only is The Big Lebowski a Western that takes place in Los Angeles County and stars a stoner, it’s a Western about a hunt for lost money…with no money. The entire adventure is a fraud.

Let’s try to tie that back to the Stranger’s assertion that the Dude is “the man for his time and place.” This time and place, as previously mentioned, is the United States during the Gulf War, which was waged by the first Bush administration against the Iraqis on what many historians believe to be flimsy pretenses, leading to many Iraqi deaths in the Middle East. It’s also the late stages of the “conservative revolution,” the political movement that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and cemented the modern Republican Party ethos of limited government and social conservatism, ending the relatively free-spirited and liberal sixties and seventies.

Reagan’s name might ring a bell if you’ve just watched the film, because one of the characters is explicitly associated with him—that would be Jeffrey “The Big” Lebowski, the philanthropist. As Lebowski’s assistant Brandt (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) excitedly informs the Dude, Lebowski has met Reagan and his wife, Nancy. Not surprisingly, then, Lebowski in his first encounter with the Dude uses rhetoric reminiscent of Reagan’s, accusing the Dude of “looking for a handout” and going on to emulate Reagan’s tone regarding the war on drugs and opposition to welfare expansion:

Lebowski: “Your revolution is over … Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did: get a job, sir. The bums will always lose!”

Lebowski’s Reagan-esque attacks imply that he views the Dude, with his habitual drug use, perpetual unemployment, and indifference to properness and etiquette, as a remnant of the sixties and seventies—a hippie rebel whose time has passed. And Lebowski appears to be on to something: later in the movie the Dude reveals in bed to Maude that he helped author the Port Huron statement, an actual manifesto of sixties-era liberal campus activism, and that he was one of the Seattle Seven, a real activist protest group in the seventies. The two Jeffrey Lebowskis, then, appear to represent the opposing values of two different eras: the Dude embodies the free-spirited liberalism of the sixties and seventies, and the “Big Lebowski” personifies the accountability-focused capitalism of the eighties and early nineties.

We don’t need a magnifying glass to see that the movie takes sides in this conflict of values: it prefers the ethos of the Dude. But to analyze a step further, we need to consider that the Coen Brothers have chosen as “the man for his time and place” a hippie who is blamed and hunted for the disappearance of money that he was never given in the first place. The stodgy capitalist still has it, but he’s succeeded in sneakily shifting all the responsibility, and by extension the danger, to the hippie.

This, then, is how the Coen Brothers perceive America in the early nineties at the end of the conservative revolution: a frame job in which the elites have made off with all the money but have blamed its disappearance on the passive free spirits who thrived in the sixties and seventies. The Big Lebowski’s ranting against “the bums” and “looking for a handout” typifies how the blame for the country’s problems was shifted using cultural warfare and political messaging, such that unsuspecting, vulnerable everymen like the Dude were demonized despite only seeking occasional common fairness (as in the movie when he requests compensation for the rug).

Note also that the million dollars that the Big Lebowski steals was originally intended to fund college educations for inner city children. It’s the poor who ultimately suffer from his scheme. If we’re viewing the Dude’s quest as an American allegory, as I’m suggesting we do, then the Coen Brothers are asserting that the elites of the conservative revolution screwed over the nation’s most underprivileged and stuck the hippies with the bill (or at least the blame).

Despite the ingenuity of the Big Lebowski’s plan, though, he isn’t a very intimidating figure, and that’s important, too. A year later, in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick would portray his elitist bigwig as an untouchable, horrifying menace; by contrast, the Coen Brothers opt instead to portray theirs as blustering and weak: the Big Lebowski can’t use his legs (as Walter memorably confirms in a late scene), is disdained by his flirtatious trophy wife, and has no real access to the wealth he oversees. He’s not intelligent or dangerous, just a sad blowhard. Again, we can infer that this is the Coens’ larger assessment of America: unlike Kubrick, they don’t think too much of our ruling class capitalists.

But why doesn’t the Big Lebowski have any wealth of his own in the movie? He’s supposed to represent the rich, after all; yet he has only an allowance from Maude, the true holder of the fortune, which apparently doesn’t satisfy him, since he endeavors to steal more. And who is Maude in this allegory—the source of all the money?

It seems to me that she can only represent Mother Nature herself. Maude is comically Zen and preoccupied with female sexuality. Her paintings are abstract and chaotic. She doesn’t say a whole lot in the movie, so she’s tough to analyze very deeply, but there’s no doubt she gives off a distinct earthy vibe. Within the confines of an urban comedy, an obscure artist of vaginal persuasion is, I suppose, a reasonable choice for a Mother Nature figure.

If Maude is Mother Nature, then that expands the allegory: the Big Lebowski, the representative of conservative capitalism, receives his relatively meager wealth from her, from nature. He doesn’t truly own anything—all belongs to nature. That’s a hippie sort of thing to say, but we’ve already established that the Coens are firmly in the hippies’ camp, at least for this film. It fits.

Also fitting, given this interpretation, is that Maude is pregnant with the Dude’s child at the end of the film. This child, we can easily deduce if we don’t turn off the TV set too quickly, is now the heir to Maude’s wealth. If that wealth symbolizes, as we have concluded, the wealth of Mother Nature, from which all human fortunes only borrow, then the Dude’s descendants are set to receive that limitless inheritance.

And of course they are! The Dude might have been scammed out of the million dollars, or at least a commission on it, but so what? He has all he wants, really: bowling, weed, drinks, a good friend. He has the natural pleasures of life, and that’s the important thing (as any good hippie would say, at least)—so it’s no surprise that the film’s Mother Nature is set to bequeath her symbolic fortune to the “little Lebowski on the way.”

I wish I could end this essay on that happy note, but there’s still a hitch I have to address, and I’ve already alluded to it: Donnie’s (Steve Buscemi) death. What is the significance of it?

Within the literal context of the story, it means that all doesn’t turn out quite well. Despite the revealed fraudulence of the whole adventure, and the Dude’s returning to his peaceful bowling alley with White Russians in tow, real damage was done. Donnie will never bowl another frame, and this weighs down the ending. The Stranger seems to understand this, specifically noting in his closing monologue, with an uncharacteristically troubled affect, “I didn’t like seeing Donnie go.” We’ve already pointed out that the Big Lebowski’s deception may have ruined the college education prospects of numerous underprivileged children. Now, in addition to this harm, we grapple with the death of an innocent side character.

Symbolically, this death serves to illuminate, we can deduce, the collateral damage caused by the high-up corruption of the 80’s and 90’s that the Coens are so interested in. Here we return to the Gulf War. The USA entered it primarily for economic reasons, as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait threatened to lead to long term Iraqi control of huge oil reserves in the Middle East. Thus, the war is just the sort of capitalist-influenced activity that fits the Coens’ vision of the country at that time. And as I previously mentioned, the conflict led to mass death on the Iraqi side; but it also led to the deaths of about three hundred US troops, about half in non-combat accidents.

Donnie’s death might be symbolic of those Gulf War deaths, although I choose instead to interpret it as a more inclusive representation of the lives lost to greed in its various forms during that era: those who died in the Gulf War, yes, but also those like the children who never got their education and whose lives were surely bumped off course in potentially dangerous ways.

Either way, Donnie’s death, like all the deaths ultimately attributable to the detestable Big Lebowskis of America, is completely unnecessary: it’s no less than an outrage. But there won’t be any justice for it, because due to the underhanded nature of the Big Lebowski’s dealings, there’s no way to prove who was truly responsible (“You have your story, I have mine!”).

The Dude’s passivity, then, is useful, even essential for this moment; because if he were to react explosively (an understandable reaction) or to succumb to grief, the easygoing ways of the hippie generation would perhaps be lost for good. If the Dude failed to “abide,” even in the face of an avoidable tragedy like Donnie’s death, then we would be cut off from the pleasures that were enjoyed in the sixties and seventies. His descendants—meaning us, metaphorically—wouldn’t be inheriting Mother Nature’s endless fortune.

Conveniently, the Coens have given us a foil to the Dude who displays what, exactly, it would look like if one reacted to these modern-day injustices with commensurate outrage. Enter Walter, a Vietnam vet who can’t abide a competitor stepping over the lane line in league play, let alone any of the absurdities that befall him and the Dude during their adventure. On one occasion he reacts to a sneering teen by destroying a parked car that turns out to belong to someone else. When the man at the mortuary informs him that the mere receptacle for Donnie’s ashes will cost $180—yet another swindle job—he can’t help but bark, “GodDAMMIT!” Later, giving Donnie’s eulogy, Walter bitterly accuses God “in your wisdom” of taking Donnie “like so many young men of generation, before his time,” going on to invoke grisly deaths in Vietnam.

It’s significant, then, that Donnie’s ashes wind up all over the Dude, because the Dude is the one who has to emotionally absorb Donnie’s death. Walter, it’s clear to all of us, isn’t capable of doing so on his own. And that explains a curious line from the Stranger’s closing monologue: “it’s good knowing he’s out there… The Dude. Taking it easy for all us sinners.” We need the Dude to “abide” for us, because, as Walter shows, if we always insisted on fairness in these times of greed and corruption, we’d lose our minds—and many of the great enjoyments of life that we do still have. And the Coens don’t fail to take this allegory to its logical endpoint: the Dude is seen preparing for a competition with a bowler named Jesus.

Considering all this, we have to agree that the Dude is “the man for his time and place”—a Western hero for his day. I hope the heady nature of this piece doesn’t detract from the movie’s comedy for you, but I doubt it will. If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re only looking for more reasons to enjoy this classic film, and hopefully I’ve given you a few occasions to conclude:

“New shit has come to light!”

 

–Jim Andersen

Follow for more at @jimander91, and for related content, check out my explanation of Eyes Wide Shut.

Categories
Movies Explained

Birdman Explained: Part 2

This is the second and final part of my analysis of Birdman or: (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). For Part 1, go here.

ACT IV: Broadway Suicide

We’ve reached that maddening concluding scene. And we’ve gathered the symbolic framework to interpret it. But we haven’t yet addressed why Riggan commits the act that puts him in the hospital in the first place, obviously a pivotal question.   

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screen-shot-2015-01-29-at-11-17-08-am.png

The answer, it turns out, is right in the script. Recall Birdman’s final encouragement to Riggan:

Let’s go back one more time and show them what we’re capable of. We have to end it on our own terms. With a grand gesture. Flames. Sacrifice. Icarus. You can do it. You hear me? You are…Birdman!

Birdman intends with this speech to motivate Riggan to return to the Birdman role, and for the moment, he appears to succeed. But Riggan’s next act isn’t to return as Birdman. Instead, he shoots himself onstage.

Therefore, we can only conclude that Riggan reconsiders Birdman’s motivating speech, and decides that a “grand gesture” of even greater proportions—a “sacrifice” that would literally “end it” on his “own terms”—would be to commit suicide in front of his audience. In other words, Birdman convinces Riggan to resume his famous role and go out with a bang, and Riggan later takes it a step further: why not go out with an even bigger bang?

Riggan’s suicide attempt is thus a product of narcissism—the end result of the conceitedness that gradually consumes him as the movie progresses. Birdman, remember, is the last ploy of Riggan’s embattled ego to reaffirm itself, and the suicide idea grows out of the self-absorbed rhetoric that Birdman uses.

We can confirm that Riggan got the suicide idea from Birdman’s speech by examining Riggan’s conversation with Sylvia before he takes the stage. Speaking to his ex-wife, he says: “I am calm, I’m great actually. You know, I got this little voice that comes to me sometimes…tells me the truth.”

Consider also an image that appears multiple times in a quickly cut montage after Riggan shoots himself. The image depicts a comet-like object falling through the sky. Remembering Birdman’s speech, this must be a rendition of “Icarus,” the mythical Greek who fatally fell to Earth after flying too close to the sun with wings of wax.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screen-shot-2015-02-22-at-9-08-23-am.png

Birdman had referenced Icarus to invoke the hubris commonly associated with the character—to inspire Riggan to summon his pride and, like Icarus, end things with a soaring spectacle. Thus, the appearance of Icarus in this post-gunshot montage indicates that Riggan has indeed decided to end things like Icarus—but rather than end his career, which Birdman had urged, he has chosen instead to end his life.

While we’re on the subject, let’s go through other images that occur in this post-gunshot montage.

Firstly, consider a strange scene of a marching band and costumed superheroes on the theater stage. These are the same band and characters that Riggan encountered in Times Square while in his underpants. The image’s inclusion therefore recalls Riggan’s accidental viral stardom: it represents an eye-popping spectacle, which, as we have established, is what Riggan wants his suicide to be. The band represents the ethos of the suicide attempt, which is, to quote Birdman: “Give the people what they want!”

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2019-02-20-at-4.38.10-PM.png

The other notable image in the montage is a beach with jellyfish washed ashore. This explicitly references a story Riggan told Sylvia earlier. The story: after she caught him cheating years ago, he attempted to drown himself in the ocean, but he was saved when the pain of jellyfish stings forced him out of the water. This story revolves around suicide, so the image of the jellyfish (which, like the flaming Icarus, also appears in the opening credits) confirms that Riggan indeed intended to kill himself. Sylvia later suspects as much in the hospital, doubting Jake and Dickinson’s assumption that it was an accident.This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2019-02-20-at-4.39.05-PM.png

But we don’t really need this confirmation, because we see Riggan load his gun before going onstage. The more important significance of the jellyfish image, I believe, is that the jellyfish incident occurred at a crushing low point in Riggan’s life. The reference to the jellyfish here, then, indicates that this newest suicide attempt has also been made at a low point, which fits with our analysis thus far. (Any interpretation, on the other hand, that concluded that Riggan has made peace with himself at this point in the movie would seem to be at odds with the appearance of the jellyfish here.)

Additionally, the jellyfish invoke a kind of miraculousness in Riggan’s life. He’s already escaped death once, and now he’ll have escaped it twice. Why has the universe given him these extra chances? Is there something he’s meant to do? How can he break out of his downward spiral and find the redemption that he seems destined for?

ACT V: Out the Window

Riggan wakes up a phenomenon. The suicide attempt, as I noted before, has been incorrectly interpreted as an accident. This has galvanized the art world, with Dickinson hailing the supposed accident as a new aesthetic: “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.” Popular media, too, is captivated: news reports breathtakingly discuss the gruesome scene, and shouting crowds of paparazzi swarm Riggan’s hospital door. Sam reveals that she has created a popular Twitter account for her father, and she rests for a minute in his hospital bed, glad to be alive. This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is B24.jpg

Everything, in summary, has worked out wonderfully for Riggan.  But only one of those things is important to Riggan at this moment. Do you know which one it is?

I’ve chosen to wait until this point to reference the movie’s opening epigraph, a quote from Raymond Carver’s writings:

–And did you get from this life what you wanted, even so?

–I did

–And what did you want?

–To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the Earth

Since this quotation appears before the movie begins, it’s tempting to misinterpret it. Specifically, we might apply it too quickly, reasoning that Riggan’s quest for theater stardom, introduced in the movie’s opening sequences, must be a quest for adulation: “to feel myself beloved.”

I believe that this is where almost everyone goes wrong in analyzing the film. In fact, as we have established, Riggan wants to mend his embattled ego, and he cares little for the adoration of anonymous viewers, whether art-minded or pop-minded. Recall that he mocks Shiner’s prioritizing of prestige over popularity, a swipe at affected art-lovers. Likewise, when speaking to Sylvia, he mocks his own brief viral stardom as “so pathetic,” a dig at the social media-obsessed masses.

Does Riggan change his mind about these various types of viewers after his suicide? It appears not. When Jake giddily shows Riggan the Times article, Riggan is unmoved. When Sam relays Riggan’s impressive new Twitter following, he similarly shrugs it off. He has always known that the “love” he might appear to receive from these anonymous people is phony, unrelated to his real self. In the hospital, he demonstrates no change in this regard.

But there’s one audience whose approval he has sought, albeit extremely clumsily.  

I’m referring to Sam. Throughout the movie, Riggan makes genuine attempts to reconcile with Sam, who resents him for letting his career prevent him from parenting. But these attempts fail wildly, as Riggan’s maniacal investment in the play’s success makes him controlling and oblivious. His most honest attempt to extend an olive branch—a humble “thank you” for Sam’s hard work on set—devolves into an ugly shouting match in which he insults her friends and lack of ambition, and she heckles him with barbs such as “You’re not important, get used to it!”

Riggan’s repeated failure to reconnect with Sam has occupied a central place in his mounting desperation. Consider that right before he attempts suicide, he shares assorted regrets with Sylvia, who attempts to comfort him by stating, “You have Sam.” Riggan responds tearfully, “Not really.”

But in the hospital things are different. The scariness of the incident has melted away Sam’s tough exterior, and she lets herself be comforted by her fortunately-alive father. Her gift to her dad of a Twitter account, although it goes over his tech-challenged head, is a touching gesture of support, and Riggan surely interprets it as such.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is bc081c59acc7236f851bee7ac5052f2d37ee7bc7998e365ca457b2ac5f6cf588.jpg

I stake my analysis, therefore, on the claim that Sam’s brief rest in Riggan’s hospital bed is the climax of Birdman. Only at this moment does Riggan learn, or remember, that one’s greatness rests not on the basis of merits or success, but on the love of a single person. In short: “to call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the Earth.”

All along Riggan has wanted to feel special, and now he realizes that his alternating quests for theater and popular success have been misguided. What makes one truly special and important, he now understands, is the type of bond he shares in this moment with his daughter.

We know that this fundamental change occurs in Riggan because of what happens afterward. He walks to the bathroom, examines his new nose (which symbolizes the loss of Birdman’s ‘beak’), and then sees Birdman on the toilet, whom he tells, “Fuck off.”  Consider how significant a change this is in Riggan. The narcissism-fueling Birdman had been a driving influence just prior to this, planting the idea for a suicide attempt with his grandiose talk of ending it “on our own terms.” But Riggan now easily brushes him off. Riggan’s ego, it seems, is no longer threatened: with Sam’s love assured, Riggan no longer needs Birdman.

This analysis also explains the reemergence of Riggan’s full-fledged “powers,” since, as we discussed in ACT III, these powers reflect Riggan’s own belief in his self-worth, independent of whether he returns to the Birdman franchise. With his belief in his own exceptionality rejuvenated by Sam, Riggan jumps from a tremendous height—and flies.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is giphy.gif

There’s a critical difference, though, between this flight and his previous one. Whereas after the earlier flight, a cab driver had hassled Riggan to pay for his ride, demonstrating that the flight was imagined, on this occasion Sam rushes to the window and looks up: she sees Riggan flying, the first time that any character has witnessed Riggan’s supposed abilities. 

This symbolically means that, for the first time, someone else is recognizing Riggan’s specialness. He’s not just imagining his own worth anymore: he is, for the first time in the film, a truly exceptional person—that is, exceptional in the eyes of a person who loves him, and whom he loves in return.

This is the meaning of Birdman‘s ending shot. 

No, Riggan doesn’t jump to his death. We’ve already seen him jump off a building earlier in the film, and that clearly wasn’t a literal event. No, Riggan doesn’t kill himself onstage. That’s a copout that wrecks the story arc and provides no explanation for the noticeable surge in Riggan’s self-esteem by the end of the film.

Rather, the ending is an uplifting one. The majority of the film consists of Riggan being progressively consumed by his own narcissism to the point of attempting suicide as a “grand gesture” to awe the public he despises. Actually, this decline is summarized quite well by Riggan’s own character from the Carver adaptation, who laments, “I spend every fucking minute pretending to be someone I’m not. … I don’t exist. I’m not even here.”

But by finally reconciling with his semi-estranged daughter, Riggan finds self-worth that goes beyond any artistic or popular stardom.  For the first time, he feels himself beloved on the Earth: he is special, not in the way he had been chasing, but in the real way: from the perspective of his family. He no longer needs the approval of theater critics, and he no longer needs to be famous as Birdman. After all, to Sam, he’s a real life superhero.

 

—Jim Andersen

For more movies explained see my analysis of Nope.