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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

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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
Movie Reviews

2020 Best Picture Nominees Ranked

Nine nominees, but only one can be crowned the Movies Up Close best film of the year… Here we go!

 

#9: Ford vs. Ferrari

There’s not that much to say about Ford vs. Ferrari. It’s formulaic and light, a feel-good flick similar to endless horse racing, high school football, and boxing dramas. It features a washed up genius back from retirement, the aghast faces of stuffy old guys, and someone asking, “But honey, how’ll we pay the mortgage?” A misplaced nomination.

 

#8: Jojo Rabbit

Somewhere buried underneath this movie is a kernel of a good idea. But director Taita Waititi’s craftsmanship is lacking, and it brings down the film. The main problem is Waititi’s handling of the movie’s central character, 8-year-old Jojo. Unlike Wes Anderson, a natural with precocious children, Waititi struggles with the basics. How smart is Jojo, exactly? What does he know about the world? What are his basic personality traits?

Different scenes portray him differently. For example, Jojo usually displays wit and cunning beyond his years, but toward the end of the film, it becomes clear that he dimwittedly believes that he has deceived a new friend with comically obvious forged letters. And whereas Jojo typically comes across as sensitive and big-hearted, weighed down only by blind faith in an evil government, he incongruously makes mean comments to his overweight friend, and toward the end of the film commits a disappointing act of rank selfishness. How does one describe Jojo the character? By the end of the film, it’s still unclear.

There’s also the issue of Jojo’s apparent imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, who makes arcane WWII references that are surely out of an eight-year-old’s reach. Is this really Jojo’s imagination? Or is it Waititi wanting to be clever and forcing jokes where they don’t logically belong?

These aren’t trivial inconsistencies: they subconsciously confuse us, precluding the film’s intended emotional payoff. So while Jojo Rabbit is funny (thanks, Rebel Wilson), it’s also an exercise in failed sentimentality, aiming for the toylike pathos of Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) but, due to its flaws in craft, accidentally coming off as flippant about the Holocaust, soft on Nazism. Again, a nominee undeserving of its place in the field.

 

#7: Little Women

After the wonderful Lady Bird, it’s tough not to be a little disappointed by director Greta Gerwig’s well-made but safe period piece follow up. The greatness of Lady Bird lied in its personal, intimate filmmaking, while Little Women juggles the many characters of a classic novel; there’s simply no opportunity here for Gerwig to write and direct the kind of hyper-relatable, two-character scenes that made Lady Bird so enjoyable. The attempts that she does make to inject her personal sensibility into the familiar tale feel forced and, unfortunately, not very personal at all—instead feeling general in their would-be inspiring rhetoric, even cliché. One finishes the movie with the sense of a talented director constrained by an old story that isn’t quite hers.

I think Gerwig’s third film will be the make-or-break. She may have chosen Little Women as a vehicle for collaborating with stars like Emma Watson and Laura Dern, and one hopes that she’ll shortly parlay those new relationships into a more ambitiously creative filmmaking project.

 

#6: Marriage Story

I really enjoy these types of movies, so maybe I’m a little biased toward Marriage Story. I like when things are said between characters on screen that typically don’t or can’t come out in real life. Let’s face it: we censor ourselves a lot in our daily interactions, so characters letting loose in all their meanness and wild emotion is a filmmaking sweet spot.

Adam Driver, who was likely chosen based on his work in relevant scenes from Girls, pulls off his share of the lead, as does Scarlett Johansson as his somewhat less likeable counterpart. But I throw my hat in the large ring of folks declaring Laura Dern the true star of the show. As a go-getter at the top of her profession, incredibly impressed with herself, she provides even her character’s most reasonable lines a shroud of falsehood, so that by the time she proves her true colors with an absurd final tweak in the settlement, we already know her for what she is: a phony within a phony.

Yes, Marriage Story is too cutesy at times. A scene involving a closing gate made me cringe. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the film, and it deserves whatever acting or screenplay awards it might receive.

 

#5: Parasite

Writer-director Bong Joon-Ho (Snowpiercer) has created a premise worthy of Dickens or Mark Twain: a resourceful lower-class family manages to better themselves through a sequence of ruthless trickeries, becoming employees of a wealthy family. Endless insights and social commentaries seem inevitable.

But alas, Joon-Ho can’t quite deliver. Although scarcely a negative critical word has been said about Parasite, I have a few. The fact is that Joon-Ho’s vision is thinner than most have concluded, which I began to suspect when I realized that, almost an hour into the movie, I was still watching the setup: the protagonists still hadn’t completed their infiltration. A simple jump-cut would have sufficed for at least one of their devious plots, but Joon-Ho prefers to dwell here, because, as I had begun to worry, he doesn’t know what to do with his characters after his first act.

Various character arcs have been set up by this point in the film, most intriguing among them a budding romance between two characters that promises to bring dramatic conclusion to the film’s class tensions. Joon-Ho, however, de-prioritizes these arcs, and the movie consequently undergoes a rapid decline in quality. What had promised to be an incisive class satire devolves into, essentially, a spy movie, with a second act that consists of the characters scampering about the mansion trying to avoid detection. Dickens, meet Mission: Impossible.

And when real tomahawks eventually appear, inexplicably, at a kid’s birthday party, anyone who’s seen Joon-Ho’s prior feature, the dystopian Snowpiercer (2016), knows what’s about to happen. It’s a real disappointment. An ending like this lacks any poignancy. No character reflects on what they’ve done, no character vows to change their ways, no character reaches a goal. It kind of feels climactic, because there’s blood, but what has been resolved?

I can’t deny what’s obvious: Parasite is one of the most inventive movies of the year, and has some of its funniest and scariest scenes. I have to give special recognition to Cho Yeo-Jeong, who plays the clueless mom of the Park family and is responsible for virtually all of the movie’s satire. But while many have said that Parasite is Joon-Ho’s breakout after the impressive Snowpiercer, I say that it’s about on par with Snowpiercer: another nightmare of class conflict—improbable, bloody, and cruel—that falls back on its director’s fetishes at pivotal moments. Joon-Ho may have big dreams, but his director’s playbook is still too small to fill them.

 

#4: The Irishman

This was the hardest movie for me to rank among the nominees. We’re dealing with strictly legendary talents across the board here, and they don’t disappoint: Scorsese weaves his camera with his usual ironic flair, Pacino and Pesci steal scene after scene, and De Niro truck-drives us through the life of an average Joe who ascends into the upper echelons of organized crime.

At times, though, these legends seem to be displaying their brilliance in a vacuum, with no larger purpose to their scenes. It’s like watching hall-of-fame baseball players take batting practice: it’s entertaining, but without the context of a real game, there’s no thrill to it. For example, in one particularly well-done scene, a hit is executed in a barbershop, complete with great set design, stylish narration, and Scorsese’s signature tracking camera. But what’s the point of this scene? It doesn’t lead anywhere; it’s just another hit job in a movie with many, many hit jobs. The hittee wasn’t even a character, but I guess he’s dead now. Scene after scene is like this: acted perfectly and shot beautifully, but without any clarity about what kind of story it’s meant to be a part of. At times you want to shake the elderly Frank Sheeran, narrating all of this for us, and ask: what is your point??

Maybe Scorsese doesn’t feel the need to make a point at this stage in his career. He’s playing with house money courtesy of Netflix, so he can direct the kinds of scenes he likes to direct and let us figure out the rest. I’m up to the challenge, so here it goes: I think The Irishman is a film about evil. The three main characters represent the three ways of arriving at it. Pesci’s Russ Bufalino represents cold, calculating logic: fixated on results, devoid of feeling. Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa is wild vengeance: uncontrolled, unforgiving, maniacal. And De Niro’s Frank Sheeran is the worst of all: unthinking loyalty.

Sheeran doesn’t seem like much of a villain for most of the story; after all, he’s liked by everyone and merely follows orders. But toward the end of the film, when a priest hears Sheeran’s “confession,” and he attempts to reconcile with his family, the truth becomes evident: this man has no morals. Unlike Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, the film’s closest non-Scorsese parallel, and unlike even the grim reaper-like Russ, who seeks out a priest voluntarily before his death, Sheeran feels no remorse for what he’s done—not even the killing of his best friend. The only thing he knows is loyalty to Russ; nothing else registers. No wonder the gangsters liked him so much. Sometimes, I suppose, likeability is a poor barometer for goodness: many people only cherish those they can control, and the absence of a moral compass can, in such cases, be an immense social aid.

 

#3: Joker

I already devoted an entire article in praise to this movie, and if you’ve read it, you may only be wondering, given my tenor in that piece, why I didn’t rank it #1.

Well, most of the film’s deficiencies spring from its unfortunate responsibilities to its source material: Bruce Wayne’s parents die again (ugh), Arkham Asylum is name checked, etc. It’s really too bad, because this version of the Joker has at most superficial similarities to the comic book version; it would have been more appropriate just to the character a new name and acknowledge that the creative team started from scratch. But then again, such a movie wouldn’t have grossed over a billion dollars, so.

The screenplay is also heavy-handed and lame at times (“You’re on seven different medications, Arthur…”), which I can’t overlook. Still, I stand by my praise in my original article, and I sincerely hope that Joker’s authentic grappling with present day issues, even in the face of controversy, inspires similarly discussion-provoking movies in the near future.

 

#2: 1917

When you go to a movie theater, 1917 is exactly what you want to experience. It’s smart, scenic, powerful, and it doesn’t waste your time: within minutes, the action has begun, and it never stops. Character development isn’t sacrificed for this expediency: director Sam Mendes works it into the action with skill and feeling.

Mendes puts dialogue in the backseat, which I always prefer—we’re watching a movie, after all, not listening to a podcast—and the film’s visuals and music create overwhelming tension throughout, placing the viewer right with the main character as he experiences the brutality and confusion of war. In an early scene, he accidentally sticks his finger with barbed wire, and Mendes makes clear that the character is in real pain despite the mundane nature of the injury, a bold directing choice. It pays off, because we know thenceforth that Lance Corporal Schofield is no Marvel superhero, which allows his final dash across a developing battlefield to be the showstopper that it is. In fact, it’s the kind of movie moment that reminds one of the highlights of old Hollywood: an act of individual heroism captured in an original shot that peaks the emotional arc of the film.

I loved 1917, but I admit that I have a strange feeling that it’ll soon be forgotten, even if it does win Best Picture, as it’s predicted to. Like Dunkirk (2017) before it, 1917 uses the newest technology to spike maximum adrenaline. But how long before even newer technology spikes even more adrenaline? In this genre, the next big effort is never far behind. Dunkirk has already faded from memory a bit. We’ll see how history treats Mendes’ impressive filmmaking achievement.

 

#1: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

What is happening in this movie? That’s what I thought to myself a half-hour into Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, when no plot lines seemed to be forming, and alarmingly long tangents were being indulged. It might be a pretty movie, I thought, but where was Tarantino going with this?

The film, essentially, revolves around a fading actor (played by Leo Decaprio) and his loyal stuntman (Brad Pitt), the latter a WWII veteran, in 1960’s Hollywood. Already this exposition is interesting: DeCaprio’s character is an actor, but Pitt’s character, the handy veteran, is the real thing—the kind of rough hero that DeCaprio’s character plays onscreen. But since all of this is itself an actual movie, we can observe that Brad Pitt himself is doing the sort of job—playing the rugged hero—that Decaprio’s character does in the film. The two characters, their actors, and their occupations reflect back on each other in this mind-bending manner, leading to the question: who, if anyone, is the most authentic? Pitt’s character? DeCaprio’s character? Pitt? DeCaprio’s character’s…character? My advice: don’t think about it as much as I have.

What follows from this heady premise is even riper for analysis. Essentially, Tarantino is chronicling the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, which is often marked historically with the brutal murder of Sharon Tate and four others at the hands of Charles Manson’s followers in 1969. But when this moment inevitably arrives for Tarantino to portray, something strange happens: it doesn’t occur. Instead, through a fortunate coincidence, Manson’s followers are redirected toward the war-trained Cliff Booth (Pitt), who whoops the three of them with the help of his trusty dog and his friend Rick Dalton (DeCaprio).

Tarantino, then, rewrites the tragic history of the Golden Age—especially tragic in his eyes, because, as his scenes make clear, he adores the work of this period—using the rules of the films and shows that comprised it. The rules are as follows: good guys win in style, bad guys get their asses kicked.

We shouldn’t be surprised: the movie is called Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood for a reason. It doesn’t show how things were; it shows how things would have been if the Golden Age’s ethos were reality. Many other scenes exemplify this. In one, Booth rides out to the Spahn Ranch, where Manson’s followers are living. But instead of being killed, as stuntman Donald Shea was on that actual ranch in August 1969, Booth coolly beats up a menacing “hippie,” demands that he change his tires for him, and rides away untouched. The moment feels surreal—because it is. In real life, a stuntman was murdered; in “Once Upon a Time” land, as in the shows and movies of 1960’s Hollywood, a cool war veteran comes out on top.

In another example, former star Dalton shows up to a new set hungover and struggles with his lines while a dedicated child star puts him to shame. We know where this is going: he’ll screw it all up, escalate his drinking, let his career spiral into oblivion, and die a sad death. But wait! In “Once Upon a Time” land, Dalton somehow forces himself to learn his lines during break, crushes his scene, and awes the child prodigy. This leads to some decent roles in Spaghetti Westerns, and along the way he finds a wife in Italy. At the close of the movie, he’s about to meet big shot director Roman Polanski, promising even more success. Huh?

Many have said that Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is Tarantino’s “love letter” to the Golden Age—so many, in fact, to provide near-insurmountable proof that top critics plagiarize one another. And indeed, Tarantino makes clear that he loves this period. But the effect of his complex filmmaking is much darker than such a simple summary implies. At the end of the movie, when Sharon Tate walks inside unharmed, we don’t feel happy—at least I didn’t. We feel, despite Tarantino’s ahistorical interventions, the sadness of her death. We feel the unpleasant reminder that in real life, good guys don’t always kick bad guys’ asses. Each of Tarantino’s choices only emphasizes that. He knows that he’s created a fantasy world, and he knows that we know that he has. Thus, every time he averts a tragedy with the brazen gusto of the Golden Age—so unconvincing when applied to real history—we feel it all the more.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more rankings, see my reviews of Best Picture nominees from 2021.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

The Tidiness Appeal: How Star Wars Fell Back to Earth

It’s conventional wisdom that the 1977 release of Star Wars: A New Hope was the dawn of the modern blockbuster. And indeed, director George Lucas’ innovative emphases on world-building, special effects, and outsized adventure revolutionized the industry, making way for today’s franchise-heavy film landscape. But over the past few years, it seems to me that the influence of another film has surpassed even A New Hope as the most influential of all blockbusters.

That film is A New Hope‘s immediate sequel: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Unfortunately, I don’t mean that the general filmmaking of The Empire Strikes Back has increasingly influenced contemporary filmmaking. That would have been a welcome development, since The Empire Strikes Back has a darker tone, more complex character development, and a more interesting plot than its predecessor.

But instead, my thesis for this essay is that one specific scene in that movie has had such a disproportionate impact on contemporary moviemaking that it has essentially become a multibillion-dollar industry in itself. The scene, of course, is this one:

I would’ve warned for spoilers, but this is probably the least spoilable scene in the history of movies; even the most Star Wars-naïve are familiar with its content. If you’re not in a video-friendly environment, here’s the often-misquoted dialogue:

Darth Vader: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.

Luke: He told me enough. He told me you killed him!

Darth Vader: No: I am your father.

Luke: No…no… That’s not true… That’s impossible!!

In context, this scene is unquestionably a gut-wrencher. The hero of the series discovers that his foremost adversary, the most charismatic villain in the universe, is in fact a blood relative; and not just any blood relative, but his presumed-dead father. It’s a horrifying clash of two ultra-relatable human drives: the drive to discover and cherish one’s lineage, and the drive to uphold one’s principles. Consequently, it puts Luke in a terrible bind, hence his despairing reaction. What will he do? Fight his own father? Turn to the Dark Side??

It’s also completely unexpected. The fate of Luke’s father hadn’t been dwelled upon in the first or second movies, and Vader’s masked appearance and filtered voice had obscured any resemblances to Luke, as well as his age. The setup is perfect. And the result is such a shocker that director Lucas is comfortable with it effectively ending the movie, leaving viewers rabid for the last film in the trilogy.

All of these were certainly his aims, and he succeeded. But I detect another, perhaps unintended appeal to the scene. It’s difficult to describe, but I think the best way is to observe that the revelation of Luke and Vader’s familial bond, in a very abstract way, connects things in the Star Wars universe. Before this moment, Luke and Vader are adversaries improbably thrust together by their opposing goals, as heroes and villains typically are. After “I am your father,” though, things suddenly aren’t so improbable anymore. The hero and villain are destined to fight one another; they’re part of a more compact web than before, a juicy family web rather than the loose, giant web of general humanity.

Why is this appealing for viewers? Well, it seems to me that it can’t be reduced further than to say that there’s an aesthetic tidiness about it. It simply feels good for us to know that things onscreen connect and circle back so thoroughly. It allows us to wrap our brains around everything that’s occurred: whereas loose ends are inscrutable and unknowable, the discovery of family linkages ties up these loose ends, and that feels good for us. Luke’s dead dad used to be an irrelevance; now there’s one fewer irrelevance. The Star Wars universe after the Vader reveal has become pleasurably cleaner in this way, regardless of the impact it has on Luke’s character and on the story.

By examining the next forty years of blockbuster adventures, we can deduce that this final, unintended appeal to Lucas’s great twist—the Tidiness Appeal, let’s continue to call it—was, in fact, the most compelling one. Look no further than the very next installment of Lucas’ trilogy, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983), where Lucas reveals that Princess Leia, the main female lead, is actually Luke Skywalker’s sister.

Well, then!

This twist, unlike the first, isn’t very important to the story. In terms of tone and drama, it doesn’t really matter that Leia is Luke’s sister. The revelation from Yoda doesn’t put Luke in a dilemma, or engender really any emotion at all from Luke, or for that matter Leia; it’s just revealed, and that’s it. Later in the film, Darth Vader catches on about Leia—and he, also, barely reacts at all. If anything, the twist functions as a rather convenient escape hatch, dampening character emotions by dissolving what was previously a tense, interesting love triangle between Luke, Leia, and Han Solo.

And yet, we have to admit that there’s something strangely attractive about the discovery. After all, now three of the four main characters are related. Cool!

So George Lucas, a few years removed from leaving audiences gasping for breath at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, decided that for his series’ next surprise, he didn’t need to drop another bomb that puts the characters in difficult, human positions; instead, he decided that the aspect of the first twist that he most wanted to replicate was simply that two of his characters were related. He preferred the shell of the twist to its contextual importance.

As did, it seems, everyone else. Like a virus accidentally created in a lab, the motif of the surprise family relation spread through the movie industry, infiltrating other blockbuster franchises. And just as in Return of the Jedi, the family ties discovered in these knockoffs typically had no dramatic significance to the story.

Take The Terminator (1984), which came out just 4 years after The Empire Strikes Back and launched a major franchise of its own. At the end of this movie (spoiler), it’s revealed that main good guy Kyle Reese is in fact the father of the very resistance leader whose birth he was sent from the future to enable.

This twist could have been left out by director James Cameron with absolutely no change in the movie’s emotional tone: not only does it not affect the character arcs or dramatic tension in any way, but Reese’s character is already dead by the time it’s learned, so there’s not even any time for it to do so. The movie just ends, having presented us with its final gift: Reese is somebody’s dad. Ah, the Tidiness Appeal!

Despite blockbusters like The Terminator trying their hands at “I am your father” moments, though, the true potential of the family linkage discovery went largely untapped until Lucas, the mad scientist who unleashed it in the first place, returned to show us the way.

Enter the prequel.

At the time Lucas’s Star Wars prequels were released, they were met with disappointing, mixed reviews, with critics and viewers bemoaning the films’ unwelcome political drudgery and lack of character depth. Lost in that legacy of disappointment is the fact that, combined, the three films made over 2.5 billion dollars at the box office.

Why were these films so successful? After all, although we now think of Star Wars as a juggernaut brand assured of unstoppable success, back then it was only a highly successful trilogy trying to extend its appeal to a new generation. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) came out sixteen years after Return of the Jedi (1983)—plenty of time for even a massive brand to fall into irrelevance. Plus, as mentioned, people didn’t think very highly of the movies. Why, then, these windfalls of galactic proportions?

Well, Lucas knew instinctively that prequels by nature would be veritable breeding grounds for the Tidiness Appeal. Since they inherit an entire universe of established characters to reference, the opportunities for characters and families to be blood-linked are endless. Fans of Bobba Fett? Meet his clone dad, Jango Fett! He was the clone for the clone army! Hold on, C-3PO was built by Anakin? And there’s the glamorous queen—wait, she’s Luke and Leia’s mom?

A blueprint for franchise filmmaking takes shape. A troupe of new characters, even insufferably forgettable characters, is introduced, and by linking them one by one to the characters that we actually, you know, liked—we get, through the Tidiness Appeal, a somehow alluring moviegoing experience. Although a prequel inherently has no true drama, since we’ve seen the ending already, a kind of facsimile of suspense can nevertheless be brought into being by emphasizing the potential uncovering of family trees.

Consequently, prequels now rule the day. Consider the latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise, one of the few that rival Star Wars in (cultural) capital: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018). It’s the second Harry Potter prequel, and its plot centers on the quest of one character to find out who his family is.

Oh, the tantalizing possibilities! Screenwriter J.K. Rowling has already created so many beloved characters in her original heptalogy that in her Hollywood years she can opt to do this: decline to invent or create, instead lazily encouraging us to wonder in delight at which of her old characters will be called back into relevance by virtue of being related to a barely-known new character.

Remember that, again, this is a prequel of the Harry Potter series, so we all know that regardless of whom this boring person is related to, a wizard named Voldemort is going to kill Harry Potter’s parents and eventually be defeated. So it might be worth stopping for a second and thinking about why, exactly, we care about this plot point at all. Well, anyway, it turns out that he’s related to Dumbledore. Nice. It grossed $650 million.

Thus George Lucas, the accidental inventor of the Tidiness Appeal, is also responsible for distilling it into the pure, potent form in which we consume it now. We started with “I am your father;” now we’re here: we trace fictional genealogies backward into infinity; we speculate endlessly on the parentages of characters so bland that they barely have names. Story and drama are second; connecting the dots is first.

That’s my lengthy introduction to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). With Lucas now out of the picture, having sold his property to Disney for a clean $4 billion, JJ Abrams up to bat, and he’s the second best thing, as he always is. As a professional corporate reviver of dying franchises, he knows what the Star Wars faithful are here for. They want parents. And siblings. And every character accounted for on a one-page guest list of invited families. They want, in short, Tidiness.

Abrams understood from the beginning that the Tidiness Appeal had come to overshadow in importance the sizable merits of the original Star Wars trilogy. His first crack at a Star Wars film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), gave us as practically its only significant new pieces a villain who’s Han and Leia’s son, and a heroine who’s the daughter of…well, guess you’ll need to watch the next two movies to find out! The movie was beloved by fans.

But when Rian Johnson, director and writer of the following film, had the impudence to decide that the heroine’s parents were “nobody,” fans revolted, the movie’s box office fell a whopping 68% in its second weekend, and Disney brought back Abrams to correct the error.

And correct it he does. Rise of Skywalker’s screenplay is devoted almost entirely to hyping and then solving the mystery of trilogy heroine Rey’s origins, with an obligatory final battle ensuing. It erases virtually every new plot point from the previous installment and casually makes up capabilities of the Force with insane implications totally inconsistent with Lucas’s movies. The purpose of these jarring walk-backs is to bring back to life a character who was definitively killed in Return of the Jedi and reveal that—wait for it—he’s the heroine’s grandpa.

I won’t say that I predicted this, because I didn’t give it much thought at all, but I venture that a Star Wars fan who hadn’t seen the movie or any spoiler information would stand a decent chance of logically predicting the reveal, since, of the characters from the original trilogy, the only significant ones who hadn’t already been explicitly ruled out as Rey’s relatives were Obi-Wan (possible), a black man, two droids, a wookie, a giant slug—and this guy. It’s this guy.

Let’s now be frank: we are being manipulated. Rise of Skywalker is a lousy excuse for an adventure movie: its story is elementary, its characters are mechanical, even its action sequences are awkward and lame. The one thing it has to offer is the resolution of the intriguing situation, hatched by its dollar-savvy director two films ago, that the main character hasn’t yet been identified as anyone’s long-lost something. And after four weekends, it’s projected to easily clear 1 billion at the box office.

George Lucas may responsible for creating and hooking us on the Tidiness Appeal, and lazy writers like Rowling and Abrams for perpetuating it, but we, ultimately, are responsible for seeking out its increasingly absurd applications. Is this really how we want to spend our time and money? Shoring up the family trees of fictional individuals? Have we forgotten what a true twist feels like?

To that end, I’ll finish this piece by returning to the climax of The Empire Strikes Back. We remember Vader’s pivotal delivery, but it seems to me that we’ve forgotten its equally important follow-up, unfortunately never quoted or even misquoted:

Luke: No… No… That’s not true… That’s impossible!!

Now that’s what a movie moment feels like. The shock! The anguish! When will Hollywood give us another pop culture milestone like this one?

I suppose it’ll be when we start demanding from the Disneys and the Abramses of the world not mere echos of classic moments, neatly wrapping up oddities and loose ends for our dopamine-hungry pleasures, but rather new stories that channel the inventive spirit that enabled those old moments. I wonder whether we’re not secretly a little averse to a great reveal like Darth Vader’s: maybe the emotion involved is a little too painful to us by proxy, maybe it would bring down some of our Christmases if the Dark Side were to score another blow like that.

If this is indeed the case, let’s all make a New Year’s resolution to ask more from our entertainment and steel ourselves to the truly unexpected, even if it shakes us; after all, in the words of Luke Skywalker himself: “Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi.”

 

–Jim Andersen

For more on disappointing franchises, check out my criticism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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Uncategorized

Laughter and Blood: Joker Reviewed

Even with a few months remaining in the year, it’s safe to say that 2019’s most talked-about movie will be Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019), starring Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. That’s partially because the character of the Joker is one of pop culture’s most notorious villains, made especially relevant to contemporary audiences via Heath Ledger’s brilliantly manic portrayal in 2008’s The Dark Knight; but even more so because Joker’s thematic material differs, shall we say, violently, from other comic book movie installments.

Ah yes, violence. We just can’t get enough of it, so the cultural narrative goes. And the Narrative has a point: violence now pervades our favorite shows, our favorite films, and our favorite games. It’s so often the glue that holds us to our screens: it makes us gasp, cry, cheer. If we take a step back from those screens, we might notice that the commonality shared by the most critical- and viewer-acclaimed television shows of the past decade is that they feature most of their characters being brutally killed. Netflix in particular has become proficient in stirring up one bloodbath after another, spoon-feeding us drug cartels, mafias, murderous politics, zombie apocalypses, medieval wars, serial killers, even fire breathing dragons. Where there’s murder, there’s Netflix ™.

But there’s something strange about all this pop-violence that we supposedly love so much. What I mean is that it’s always oddly distant, fantastical, not at all relevant to our lives. It takes place in strange worlds. For instance, there are no actual zombies. There are no dragons. The mafia isn’t exactly a major presence at this point. Sure, these popular entertainment landscapes are violent, but they’re fictionally violent in an obvious way; they lack the threat of nearness. We feel brave in the presence of this brand-name violence: since it’s largely irrelevant to our lives, it can’t shake us.

It’s not just television, either. The most celebrated cinematic movie villains share this fantastical otherness to their evil deeds. The typical movie murderer is mentally ill and simply predisposed to violence without any explanation or hope for change: take Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) for example, who appears to have been born with incurable bloodlust; or Norman Bates of Pyscho (1950), whose mommy issues are so ingrained as to leave him staring gleefully from his cell at the film’s conclusion. Even Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight is explicitly stripped of a backstory, leaving us to assume that he simply grew up wanting to blow up hospitals—that he doesn’t need a reason to do so, other than his own insanity.

But this is kind of portrayal is divorced from reality. This is not how mental illness actually works. As a psychiatrist myself, I can testify to the gross inaccuracy of the perception, brought about in large part by such films, that violence is a symptom of mental illness. Filmmakers seem to like this notion, however, and one might venture that they have embraced it because it makes their movies scarier.

I disagree. Rather, it seems to me that they have embraced it because it makes their movies less scary—and thus more tolerable.  Sure, if a man truly did exist who drank Chiantis and listened to classical music and ate human brains, and could not distinguish between the fineness of these activities; then yes, this would be frightening. But we know on some level that this man does not and could not exist, and this makes the supposedly terrifying character bearable, even fun. Neither do we shrink from Ledger’s Joker—we want more. Why wouldn’t we? He has nothing to do with us, with our world. Just like zombie apocalypses, characters like these pose only mimed threats; they suck the horror out of brutality.

Phillips’ Joker restores that horror. Here is a different kind of violence; here is that rare, daring film that serves us our craved daily dose of murder—R rating thoroughly deserved—without the comforting distance of a fictional world or an inconceivable killer. Joker isn’t ostensibly set in present day America, but its universe is unmistakably our own world, and the killer is equally real; that is to say, he’s a man very similar to many other men who exist at this very moment in virtually every community in America, and he commits gruesome acts that, as evidenced by recent headlines, are quite plausible indeed for such men to commit, given the wrong combination of circumstances.

Over the past twenty years, since the Columbine shootings of 1999, we’ve seen people, typically young men, sometimes but not always mentally ill, go on murderous rampages leaving several, sometimes dozens, dead. Why and how is this happening?

Director Phillips, with the help of the prodigious Phoenix, credulously illustrates the stepwise progression into this very type of real-world homicidal behavior. I’ll spend the bulk of this piece moving through that progression as Phillips plots it, noting as I go the insights contained therein.

——————————–

Let’s begin. Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), our protagonist, is mentally ill and severely so. When we meet him, though, he doesn’t seem to harbor any propensity for violence. He is, in a word, pathetic—struggling mightily to hold a job, in part because of bad luck (a gang of boys steals his promotional sign and beats him with it), but in larger part because he is socially awkward in the extreme. When a passing woman in his building mimes a gun to her head in a humorous manner, he attempts to flirt with her by mimicking the gesture with a far more gruesome flair, demonstrating a disconcerting inability to pick up and act on routine social cues. He aspires to be a comedian, but even his mentally ill mother, who has faith in her son’s goodness, knows that he lacks even the remotest feel for humor.

In addition his social ineptness, Fleck, thanks to a childhood brain trauma, has been saddled with a painfully uncontrollable laugh. This means that, like many real people with mental illness, Fleck can’t hide among the mentally healthy. In contrast with Travis Bickle, the protagonist from Martin Scorsese’s classic noir Taxi Driver (1979) (which many have compared to Joker) who carries on normal conversations and only occasionally sends ominous signals, Fleck doesn’t have the luxury of brooding undetected: because of his inappropriate laughter, everyone who meets him knows something’s up. He writes in his journal that the worst part about mental illness is the expectation of pretending not to have one—an expectation he is unable to fulfill.

A turning point comes when Fleck acquires a gun. Here we are forced to reckon with our American society, in which it would in fact be fairly easy for a sick man similar to Fleck to get his hands on a lethal weapon. Very tellingly, we soon see Fleck brandishing the gun in his living room while playing out a curious fantasy: he imagines impressing a woman with his dancing skill (a highly improbable occurrence) and fatally shooting her other suitor. The scene—Phoenix’s much sadder rendition of Taxi Driver’s “You talkin’ to me?” monologue, updated to reflect our new incel-inhabited world—shows us that Fleck harbors jealous resentment toward more socially adept men, as well as frustrated desire to successfully woo women, and that these internalities are immediately merged with the possibilities offered by the firearm. Fleck’s “good dancer” fantasy, in essence, is that the gun (and the discharge of it) will turn the tables, make him cool.

It’s no wonder, then, that Fleck soon thereafter commits the alarming blunder of bringing the gun into a room full of children. It’s clear based on this act that he’s already attached to the weapon; it must go with him everywhere. When he’s justly fired for this misstep (and he’s lucky this is all that happens, as he’s already fired the gun in his own apartment by accident), we sense something brewing: the ostracism induced by the carrying of the gun has actually led him deeper into the very social hole of which it already seemed to him that only the gun could lift him out.

And when three Wall Street bros on the subway venture to beat up the hopelessly laughing Fleck, an incident similar to the one he endured in the opening sequence, the gun is indeed the equalizer. Two are dead in seconds, but it’s not just a defensive impulse: Fleck menacingly tracks down the third and shoots him five times in cold blood. The gun therefore makes good on its previously felt promise: not only to get revenge on the cool kids, but, later we see, to make Fleck himself cool, as a substantial number in Gotham subsequently rally behind the murder, wearing clown masks in homage to its perpetrator. Fleck soon afterward tells his therapist: “For most of my life I didn’t know whether I really existed. But I do. And people are starting to notice.” Thus, Fleck’s initial inkling that the gun could provide the social calibration that he longed for is dishearteningly proven correct.

Relatedly, immediately after the incident, Fleck imagines or hallucinates himself finding and kissing the woman that he attempted to flirt with in the elevator earlier, and continues to believe that he is in fact dating her. We can deduce that due to the positive attention (though anonymous) that he is receiving for the triple murder, he sees himself for the first time as valuable, worthy. A girlfriend is, for the first time, conceivable, and he’s able to imagine the notion as reality. Again, violence has for the first time given Fleck a sense of acceptance and social standing.

Another interesting development is that media largely interprets the rallying behind Fleck’s triple murder as a watershed protest against wealth inequality in Gotham. But this is interpretation is incorrect. Fleck’s acts on the Subway are fueled by the men’s cruelty toward him (and possibly also by their cruelty toward an unknown woman on the same car), not by their perceived wealth. He confirms as much in the movie’s climax, telling talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) that he is not at all political.

In fact, it seems that the city’s media has largely misinterpreted the entire uprising that progressively envelops Gotham throughout the film. While newspaper headlines and Thomas Wayne dismiss the increasingly numerous protesters as jealous have-nots, the event that eventually sparks virtual anarchism on the streets has nothing to do with wealth inequality. Instead, it’s Fleck’s lament on live TV that there is “no civility” anymore, followed by his (likely true) accusation that Franklin merely invited him on the show to laugh at him—followed, of course, by Franklin’s brains landing on the back of the set. When Fleck is arrested, he is rescued by protesters from the cop car and raised up as the movement’s leader.

It appears, then, that the wealth inequality issue has been mostly a red herring popularized by the Gotham press. The hatred motivating the protesters has originated not in wealth disparity but in the social cruelty that the city’s common folk have experienced. Fleck’s words on Franklin’s show, as ensuing events demonstrate, strike at the true heart of the matter: the rebellion is against the cool kids, the bullies—not the rich, although these two groups may often overlap. I wonder if 2019 politicians are absorbing this insight.

I’ll move now to perhaps my favorite scene in the film: the one in which Fleck is preparing for his appearance on Murray Franklin, and his two friends from the clown agency, Randall and Gary, arrive to share their worries about the progressing police investigation into the triple murder. Fleck takes this opportunity to murder Randall in gory fashion, leaving the diminutive Gary whimpering in the corner in fear. Fleck allows Gary to leave, but a problem arises: Gary is too short and cannot reach the latch to unlock the door.

I suspect that the effect of this moment can only be fully felt watching the film in a theater. That’s because the situation is so absurdly unfortunate—Gary attempting to escape a murderer but hampered by the unremarkable height of the lock—that it compels laughter. During my viewing, most of the audience, including myself, gave in to (at least cautious) laughs. But Fleck doesn’t find it funny in the least, apologizing to Gary and sending him on his way, noting that he was always one of the few to display kindness to the killer. It struck me in that instant that the Joker, if he did exist (and I’ve already posited that, in some form, he does), then I, as well as most of the audience, would be among his targets.

This admonishment to the audience is completed when, during Fleck’s ensuing talk show appearance, he complains to Franklin: “I’m tired of people telling me what is funny and what isn’t.” He’s thus challenged us to some introspection, a rare happening in contemporary film: can we justify laughing at Gary for failing to reach the lock? Maybe we can’t; maybe we were wrong to do so. But if that isn’t funny, what is? Does the real humor lie, as Fleck contends, contrastingly, in the demise of the bullies, like the Wall Street friends on the subway? After all, we’re going to laugh at someone—who’s it going to be?

When a subway riot leaves a few police officers at the mercy of protesters, Fleck howls with laughter and dances a jig. This is behavior typical of the Joker character, as we might have seen from Jack Nicholson’s or Heath Ledger’s renditions (or, for 90’s children like myself, Mark Hamill’s); but now there’s a weird accusatory feel to it. Why laugh at Gary, vulnerable to a murderer because he can’t reach a simple lock—and not at the heretofore-powerful cops, now in mortal danger themselves?

Joker ends with Fleck in a mental institution, and insinuates that he imagined the whole thing. I sympathize with viewers who were irritated by this last layer of ambiguity, but I wasn’t. That’s because this device allows Fleck to challenge us once more, as he laughs in reflection of the film’s events, whether real or imagined, and calls them “a joke.” He tells his psychiatrist, certainly our stand-in, “You wouldn’t get it.”

And we wouldn’t; we didn’t. We, contrastingly, laughed at Gary trying to reach the lock. We laughed at Fleck walking straight ahead into a glass door in front of two cops. We laughed at Fleck melting down in front of his first comedy club audience. We laughed at the quips of Murray Franklin. We did not laugh at Fleck’s sparking rebellion and anarchy in Gotham.

But when the downtrodden Fleck first picked up the gun, his thin fingers sliding, enticed, over the metal, it irrevocably clicked for him that there was in fact a way to deal with us and our collective failure to laugh—a way to finally flip who gets to laugh at whom. The movie ends with Fleck exiting the interview room, tracking on his feet the blood of his humorless audience.

—————————-

As I alluded to in my introduction, Joker has caused controversy and polarization. The source of this controversy is the temptation to be outraged at Phillips for implicating us in our own society’s ills—for suggesting that, in Fleck’s words, we “get what we fucking deserve.” I only need to refer you to Joker’s rating on the dismal review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes to demonstrate that even some of our finest critics have fallen to that temptation.

But it would be a mistake unworthy of even a casual viewer to seriously evaluate Fleck’s vengeful morality, and it would be even more egregious to base our favor for the film on our concordance with it. Rather, we must evaluate the truth of what we see. We must evaluate whether it’s indeed realistic that a man could come to harbor such a morality based on his experiences in society, and whether many would indeed exalt him for expressing it.

Based on the insights I laid out in this review, I say that it is, and that they would. That’s why I, for one, found Phillips’ and Phoenix’s collaboration riveting, authentic, and, dare I say it… scary.

 

— Jim Andersen

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Avengers: Endgame and the Childishness of the MCU

In 1989 The Walt Disney Company invented the children’s movie as we know it today. That was the year that Disney Studios released The Little Mermaid, the undersea musical that kicked off a remarkable run of successful animated films: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998) and Tarzan (1999). If you were born in the late 80’s or early 90’s, as I was, this string of hits, now known as the “Disney Renaissance,” may well have been a defining phenomenon of your childhood.

Before the Disney Renaissance, kids’ movies were anything but consistently good. After a run of misfires spanning the 1970’s and 80’s culminating with the inexplicably dark and terrifying The Black Cauldron (1986)), the animation arm of Disney Studios was almost dissolved. How, then, did they suddenly pull off this incredible sequence of hits? What recipe did they suddenly stumble on in 1989? 

Well, let’s analyze. I can identify four unshakeable rules that apply to every Disney Renaissance film:

  1. Good triumphs over evil
  2. An uncontroversial moral theme is emphasized
  3. Colors are vibrant and dazzling
  4. A formulaic plot trajectory is adhered to

Let’s call these the Four Laws of Kids’ Movies. Adult movies generally don’t adhere to all of them; at most, they may follow one or two. In The Godfather (1970), for instance, good doesn’t defeat evil, if the two are even distinguishable at all. Pulp Fiction (1994) doesn’t teach us a lesson about moral goodness, and it doesn’t follow a familiar plot arc. Schindler’s List (1993) doesn’t, um, dazzle us with colors. 

But for children, these rules are natural fits. Most would agree, for example, that many young kids aren’t fully ready to confront a situation in which evil triumphs over good or in which the clash is ambiguous, so in kids’ entertainment, it’s probably advisable for good to defeat evil. And kids may not have crystallized their moral compasses yet, so reinforcing various aspects of goodness may be suitable and healthy. Thirdly, it’s well known that kids are drawn to colorful things, so the rainbow brilliance of Disney Renaissance flicks comes as no surprise. And finally, the not-fully-developed information processing capabilities of children may lead them to struggle with unpredictable or complicated plots, so it’s better to stick with a formula that won’t cause confusion or unsettlement.

Again, kids’ movies before The Little Mermaid had not yet adopted these rules as essential. You’ll quickly notice if you watch scenes from such movies online that their color palettes are relatively drab and dull, even though bright colors (#3) were perfectly accessible to the animators. And these older films often take random detours into bizarre and scary situations, messing with the paced predictability (#4) that could have been achieved. 

Even the memorable successes helmed by Walt Disney himself, such as Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941), trip over these avoidable stumbling blocks. Nowadays we associate the Disney brand with safe and sentimental plots—but back in Walt’s day, Pinocchio, a wooden marionette, transformed halfway into a literal jackass because he was drinking and gambling (?), then without any explanation for this development, was forced to personally hunt down an infamous whale that ate his father off-screen without ever having been introduced into the movie until that point.

Then, he became a real boy.

That was then. During the Renaissance, no more of that. Lessons of tolerance, like the one emphasized in Dumbo, were retained in accordance with Law #2, but were woven into formulaic, never-in-doubt romances like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, rather than meandering, occasionally nightmarish journeys like the older films. Supporting characters became (literally) colorful charmers, like Flounder from The Little Mermaid and Zazu from The Lion King. Villainy and intolerance, rather than being immutable characteristics of larger society, as Dumbo all-too-honestly portrayed them, were henceforth perpetrated by a single larger-than-life baddie, who was always thoroughly beaten—all in accordance with Law #1. 

With the Four Laws firing on all cylinders, Disney had a killer product on its hands, captivating a generation of kids. But unfortunately from Disney’s business perspective, kids grow up.  And this means that the brand loyalty that Disney had built for itself during the Renaissance, although intense and widespread, had an expiration date: the adolescence of its viewers. Unless something were done, Disney was primed to have built the most devoted customer base in entertainment history only to have it completely disintegrate via puberty.

But something was done. In the mid-90’s Disney partnered with and later acquired then-unknown newcomer Pixar Studios, which released an industry revelation: Toy Story (1996), a film in new CGI technology that, in the modern Disney tradition, stuck to the Four Laws—but also offered jokes and tidbits to the more mature members of the audience. (Sheriff Woody: “The word I’m searching for… I can’t say, because there are children present.”) Pixar also did away with catchy, bubbly songs, a modification surely approved by very cool twelve-year-old boys, and it nixed the recurring motif that one of the characters be a princess, because fourteen-year-old girls were, like, past that phase.

With Pixar’s slightly different take on the same Four Laws foundation, Disney prevented the imminent exodus of its customers while still attracting new ones. Young children who missed out on the Disney Renaissance loved Finding Nemo (2003), while adolescents who lived through the Renaissance were kept in the fray due to the less theatrical tone and the scattered witty quips. The money doesn’t lie: Finding Nemo became the largest grossing animated movie ever made, surpassing Renaissance titan The Lion King. Disney was still producing child-friendly movies adhering to the Four Laws, but had pulled off the impressive feat of convincing teens and preteens to stick around.

Even more eye opening than Finding Nemo to those in the industry was Pixar’s next film, which was expected to reap relatively meager totals but became a surprise smash hit and critical sensation.  The film was The Incredibles (2004), a story about a family of superheroes.

You see where I’m going with this.  In 2009, with Pixar still seemingly unstoppable, The Walt Disney Company acquired Marvel Studios, which had just launched what would come to be known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a canon of intertwining superhero sagas. Since 2008’s Iron Man, the MCU has spawned 22 films grossing a combined eighty zillion dollars, or something, and the series of MCU mashups known as The Avengers has produced four of the top eight grossing movies of all time.

What accounts for this unprecedented popularity? Well, it appears that Disney is doing exactly what it did with Pixar, only casting an even wider net than before.

Just as Pixar added a slightly more mature flavor to the Four Laws to keep then-adolescents interested, Marvel has tilled the soil for even older audiences, employing a variety of adult-friendly add-ons to draw in 20-somethings. For example, Hollywood’s biggest stars are regularly paid boatloads to appear in MCU movies even for minuscule screen times, so if you just think Chris Hemsworth is super hot, you’ll be in the seats, minus $14. (Next to you will be a six year old with a toy hammer.) Subtle clues and Easter eggs are dropped mid-credits, so if you like deciphering things on Reddit all day, you’re invited to the party. (Also on the guest list, a seven year old whose mom doesn’t let him use the Internet.) 

As I said, a wider and wider net. MCU films are aimed at kids (as their source material was), but also appeal to the now-adolescents who grew up on Pixar movies, and also to the now-adults who grew up with the Disney Renaissance and enjoyed Pixar in their adolescences. This last generation, the Renaissance generation (my generation) might be the mother load for Disney: we’re old enough to drive to theaters and buy tickets with our own earned money. Disney, in other words, has successfully carried us late-80’s and early 90’s babies from toddlers to ticket buyers without ever sacrificing its appeal to children. 

Such a sacrifice has never been necessary because Marvel Studios, like Pixar and Disney Studios before it, founds its films squarely on the Four Laws. Clashes between forces of good and evil comprise the substance of MCU plots (#1), lessons of tolerance and responsibility add the thematic flavor (#2), and shiny beams of CGI color are the icing on the cake (#3).  And just like a cake, every part is pretty much the same (#4).

That brings us to Avengers: Endgame (2019). The plot, in conjunction with its precursor Avengers: Infinity War (2018), revolves around a charismatic, cynical purple villain who seeks and eventually obtains control of a virtually unlimited power, only to suffer an improbable final defeat.

Does that sound familiar to anyone? Let me jog your memory.

Look. We are still consuming the same product that we were introduced to as young children: the Disney product, the Four Laws product. This despite the fact that—to get to my inevitable point—this product is simply not appropriate for adults. 

Yes, the Four Laws are great for children, for the reasons I outlined earlier. But in no way are they relevant to our sensibilities as grown human beings. A triumphant victory of good over evil (#1), for example, has no heft for adults, because we know now that things aren’t so defined and easy. Moral lessons from a movie (#2) aren’t useful to us, either, because unlike children, we’ve already learned these lessons, and if we haven’t, a movie will hardly change our perspectives. Flashy color schemes (#3) might still be fun, but they aren’t needed when we have the ability to concentrate on more realistic palettes. Finally, the presence of a predictable plot (#4) shouldn’t still be essential, since adult brains can easily process and assimilate unexpected information. 

You might be expecting me to criticize Endgame.  But I’m not going to—frankly, it’s an excellent movie. I have every respect for it. It features strong acting, appealing visuals, excellent buildup and pacing, and satisfying character arcs. But its excellence is designed for a child—for the worldview of someone without the experience and perspective that we now have. No matter how hard I try, I can no longer genuinely share in the enjoyment of that kind of excellence. 

My generation, though, barely has anything to contrast against Avengers, so for many it passes as genuinely profound. Most of us have never graduated to adult entertainment, since Disney’s successful business model has excused us from having to make that transition. The most blatant example of this is that Disney has taken to simply rereleasing its own Renaissance animated films in live action form. Talk about predictable: we’ve already seen these movies, shot for shot! And yet, the regurgitation of Beauty and the Beast (2017) was the second highest grossing film of the year!  The cringeworthy Aladdin (2019) made an undeserved sultan’s ransom, and up next is The Lion King, sure to be the most lucrative yet.

Disney would have us view these as nostalgia projects that allow us to turn back the clocks and feel like kids again. But what adult-oriented movies did we flock to the theaters to see, to then return to Disney? Are we reliving our childhoods… or did we never grow up?

You may still argue that the Four Laws merely comprise escapism. And they do. But while there’s nothing wrong with escapism, what does it say about our generation that our particular escapist fantasies involve reverting to tenants of a child’s view of reality?  

It says, actually, all the worst things that are often said about us: that we’re black-and-white absolutists (#1), that we’re moral puritans (#2), that we have broken attention spans (#3), and that we shrink from novelty and unpredictability (#4). Especially criticized for their juvenility these days are men, who make up the MCU viewer majority.

Entertainment has always been a way to make early connections with a more mature, truer version of the world, and because of the efforts of various corporations, Disney included, we haven’t had the same exposure to such entertainment that previous generations did. It only makes sense that this would affect us in our attitudes toward and interactions with the world around us.

But this problem, though significant, may be resolving itself thanks to the growing accessibility of content via streaming services. Produced with less studio and network meddling than are typical in traditional entertainment models, streaming content now offers various nuanced, adult entertainments for our easy perusal. Of course, Disney has noticed, and is now planning a rollout of its own streaming service, “Disney+”, which will feature new superhero shows and other content related to its various franchises. If the past is any indication, they’ll continue to produce child-centric content while pandering as best they can to adults.

So it’s time to band together, moviegoers! We must resist this tyrant! On our own we’re weak, it’s true, but together as a team—a team of heroes, you could say—we’re strong! Yes, Disney owns an intimidating array of Four Laws studios—an Infinity Gauntlet of studios, if you will—but despite this awesome power, our teamwork and collective virtue can pull us through! No corporate power is insurmountable!

So…anyone have a time machine?

 

–Jim Andersen

For more analysis, check out my commentary on Daniel Craig’s James Bond.

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Uncategorized

2019 Best Picture Nominees Ranked

Here’s my ranked list of 2019 Best Picture nominees.  When I think a movie deserves a certain award, I’ll list it below the review—but I haven’t seen all the movies that produced the other nominees in various categories, so take those pronouncements with a grain of salt. 

 #8: Vice

I’m very comfortable ranking Vice as my least favorite 2018 nominee.  Director Adam McKay hit a home run with The Big Short, but he’s brought back the same snappy, resourceful style to a subject that decidedly doesn’t need it, the result being an aimless, whimsical highlight reel of Bush-era politics.  It’s poorly edited and tonally erratic, but most damning of all is that it has nothing in particular to say about Dick Cheney, other than that he is bad.

At times I felt like I was watching a Star Wars prequel (fitting, because Cheney was so often compared to Darth Vader): we see the characters before they are themselves, and are expected to watch in earnest as they’re forced into lame backstories that clumsily try to explain the signature traits for which we know them.  Christian Bale does a good job as Cheney, I guess, but Steve Carell is badly miscast as a demonic yet strangely juvenile Don Rumsfeld, and Sam Rockwell overdoes George W., as everyone does.  Even Amy Adams, who specializes in Lady MacBeth roles, is surprisingly boring as Lynne Cheney.  Skip this one and go watch some old SNL footage.

Awards: Best Hair and Makeup

#7: Black Panther

Black Panther is a welcome addition to the ever-growing comic book movie family, certainly the best since 2008’s The Dark Knight.  It refreshes the genre with new features: complex social commentary that doesn’t detract from the fun, a large and interesting supporting cast, and visuals that are at times extraordinary—I loved, in particular, the scenery of the cliffside gladiator-type fights.  I’m glad Black Panther was nominated, as it deserves recognition for such resounding success in multiple respects.

But give me all the flak you want: a movie like this simply doesn’t require the same level of creative energy as the other nominees.  It may have refreshed the genre with new layers, but it’s still squarely planted in that genre, meaning that we as viewers expect, and get, a movie that mostly consists of a likeable lead who acquires impossible abilities, various action sequences that highlight those abilities, a CGI-laden final battle, and a halfhearted love story.  We also get a perfectly happy ending, because although Black Panther has the guts to temporarily blur the hero/villain line, that line eventually comes back into clear focus, as it must: after all, we’re in the Marvel Comic Universe, and unlike the Real Universe, where all the other nominees have the burden of taking place, this universe is governed by certain child-friendly rules.  For example, good guys win, bad guys lose.  (Look out, Thanos.)

Black Panther simply sets an easier bar for itself than the other nominees.  In one scene, our hero T’Challa, after a car chase scene featuring some breathtaking deployments of kinetic energy, is maskless in front of a crowd of smartphone-filming spectators.  Later, he reveals his big secret to a shocked United Nations, demonstrating that, somehow, no one during all that time has attempted to figure out the identity of the guy with superpowers on the highway.  You might say, “Don’t take it too seriously, it’s just a superhero movie!”  Exactly: in the end, it’s just a superhero movie.

Awards: Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing

#6: Bohemian Rhapsody

Rami Malek has the gargantuan task of playing larger-than-life rock icon Freddie Mercury, and he… doesn’t quite nail it, in my opinion.  If Mercury were alive, it’s hard to believe that he would have stood for this portrayal without objection, because, intentionally or not, the character’s most notable trait is childishness: he’s reined in again and again by his contrastingly cerebral band mates, and the considerable anxiety he builds up in his tempestuous personal life is vanquished wildly onstage. 

I don’t think Mercury was like this in real life.  In interviews he spoke of his stage presence as a finely tuned act, underscoring his total control over his art.  And he wrote the majority of Queen’s hit songs, surely not all the works of an eccentric musical mad scientist, as the movie portrays him, but of an impeccable craftsman.  It’s hard to summon the proper admiration for this version of Freddie Mercury, because he doesn’t seem to be in control of any aspect of his life, including his music.

Still, the movie is fun, and puts a magnifying glass to the recording of hit songs.  We see arguments with producers, recordings of challenging harmonies, arguments over musical direction, and even the shoestring budget production of an all-important first album.  When we get to Live Aid, recreated beautifully, the dominant feeling for us as viewers—and properly so—is relief: creating music, we now feel, has so many challenges and pitfalls that simply reaching the defining moment is perhaps more miraculous than the incredible performance we remember.

#5: A Star is Born

In the most buzzed about movie of the year, two of our biggest stars portray artists striving to maintain their authenticity in today’s conformist industry, developing a memorable, touching romance and delivering some of the year’s best original music. 

The year I’m referring to is 2016, and the movie is La La Land.

Alright, I’m being mean.  If people like the formula, why not give it another go?  Plus, A Star is Born separates itself with a truly amazing performance from Lady Gaga, who is absolutely this year’s Best Actress even in a year crammed with great female performances.  I’m not much of a fan of her music, but she works magic in this movie, taking the well-worn role of undiscovered talent from blue collar America and elevating it with tremendous subtlety and complexity.  Her character is terrified, overwhelmed, insecure, in love, and yet aware of her abilities—and all this comes through in Gaga’s performance.  Her delivery of “Shallow,” a slam-dunk for Best Song, is an inescapable stand-up-and-cheer moment.

I’m not as enthusiastic, though, about Bradley Cooper’s contributions.  To be sure, his acting is impressive at times, but when he finally sobers up, it becomes apparent that some of the intonations that we interpreted as conveyances of drunkenness were actually his attempts at a down-home Midwest growl, accidentally creating confusion about whether his character is secretly still drinking.  And his direction focuses too heavily on his own character’s tailspin, such that the movie is less about the emotional power of music or the characters’ romance than about the pitfalls of alcoholism.  He was snubbed for a Best Director nomination, so on this one the academy and I agree.

Awards: Best Actress (Lady Gaga), Best Song (“Shallow”), Best Sound Mixing

#4: Green Book

Led by two strong acting performances, Peter Farrelly’s Green Book charms us through a low-key story.  Viggo Mortenson’s creation of everyman Frank Vallelonga is a pleasure, and through the movie this character learns complicated, emotional truths about race in the United States.  The main interest of the movie for me, though, was his more nuanced counterpart: musician Don Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali. 

I can’t think of a character similar to Shirley in any movie I’ve ever seen.  He’s out to break barriers for the benefit of the black community, but he doesn’t appear to have any ties to that community.  This distance from his roots initially appears to be a consequence of his artistry’s heavy demands, but later developments suggest that Shirley himself may be maintaining it in part by his own choosing; for example, the revelation of his sexuality raises questions about why and how he has isolated himself.  The amiable Vallelonga, irresistible in his likeability despite his frequent ignorance, causes a change in Shirley that leads him to swallow his pride (previously an impossibility for him) and join Vallelonga’s family dinner.  But what was the nature of that change?  Is Shirley henceforth likely to attempt to reconnect with the black community?  Does it matter?  The movie leaves these important questions to us.    

Green Book is at times a safe, sentimental film.  But at more worthy moments it intrigues us with multifaceted characters and situations, which is why I’ve ranked it fairly highly among the nominees.

Awards: Best Actor (Mortenson), Best Supporting Actor (Ali)

#3: BlackkKlansman

Like Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Spike Lee’s BlackkKlansman employs a daring combination of comedy, horror, and timely social commentary.  Unlike Peele, though, Lee doesn’t seek to blend these disparate elements into a cohesive tone, instead letting them take turns dominating the narrative.  This gives the film a disorientating, scattered quality that might turn off viewers who value a smooth artistic experience, but I for one enjoyed the approach, because it allows Lee to pack more of a punch with each separate element.  No scene in Get Out, for instance, is as laugh-out-loud funny as Ron’s (John David Washington) self-reveal to David Duke (Topher Grace) with friends hooting with laughter in the background—and no moment in Get Out is as scary as the excellently shot and scored cross burning at BlackkKlansman’s finale.

This disjointed approach also engenders interesting and useful meditation after the film is over.  Is the KKK in some ways—as multiple scenes depict—kind of funny?  If so, does that make the organization less terrifying?  More terrifying?

Lee puts all his cards on the table for the epilogue, which, for a conventional film, might be a bit disappointing.  But BlackkKlansman is already transparent in its contemporary politics long before the epilogue, and with subject matter such as this, I’m not sure Lee could have been anything less than heavy-handed.  It works.

Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay (Lee), Best Editing (Barry Alexander Brown), Best Original Score (Terence Blanchard)

#2: The Favourite

Yorgos Lanthimos’ dramedy about royal chaos during the early 1700’s makes no pretense of its characters behaving as though they are actually in the early 1700’s.  Rather, Lanthimos has coached his actresses to channel the likes of “Doctor Who,” summoning irreverent wit, endless innuendo, and contemporary deadpan.  This is all for the better: what do I care about adherence to the timeline?  I wasn’t there. 

Freed from period piece conventions, The Favourite lets sparks fly with memorable characters and hilarious dialogue.  Olivia Colman kills it as a bonkers, bunny-obsessed Queen Anne, whose wildly fluctuating self esteem is the movie’s major plot driver; and Rachel Weisz outshines an also-nominated Emma Stone, the former playing an aggressively ruthless manipulator and put-down artist who somehow has us all rooting for her by the movie’s end. 

Just as importantly, the cinematography is strictly top flight.  Channeling Stanley Kubrick for wonderful candle-only lighting in several scenes, Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan have turned a fairly typical setting into a memorable visual experience.  The liberal use of wide-angle lenses underscores the kookiness gripping the castle, and even routine tracking shots are framed sharply and beautifully.  It would be an easy pick for Best Cinematography if not for the #1 movie on this list…

Awards: Best Supporting Actress (Weisz), Best Original Screenplay

#1: Roma

The clear winner. 

In terms of artistic vision and execution, Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma dwarfs any movie made this year. Scene after scene of this portrait of Mexico City family life circa 1970 supplies us with an abundance of rich visual detail, courtesy of a slowly rotating camera that highlights the observant gaze of the film’s quiet but keen protagonist, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio).  Contrastingly, these scenes deny us explicit information about what we’re seeing.  We learn things just as Cleo learns them: through hints and implications, such that final confirmations of truths, such as matriarch Sofia’s announcement of her separation with her husband, are notable not for their content, but for the way in which they are handled by all involved. 

Cuaron is without a doubt this year’s Best Director.  This is Cleo’s story, and Cuaron accordingly makes sure that we experience it as Cleo does.  When Cleo’s boyfriend departs to the bathroom at the end of a film, Cuaron leaves us in the theater with Cleo to feel with her the growing realization that he isn’t coming back. When Cleo wanders out of the theater and the man is indeed gone, Cuaron doesn’t cut away; instead he puts us on the steps with Cleo and lets us suffer with her.  When Cleo wades into a choppy ocean to save two children, already having stated that she can’t swim, our hearts are pounding louder than in any cinematic moment this year: we know, like Cleo, that one or all of those involved could easily perish.  

The cinematography is so good that it contributes to our understanding of Cleo as a character. For example, when Cleo visits an obstetrician, we feel her discomfort not just because of Aparacio’s great acting but because the camera is so uncharacteristically close up. Cleo prefers watching at a distance, we can feel, and with the focus so sharply on her, she’s anxious and embarrassed.  

Indeed, even around her best friend Adela, with whom she’s relaxed and playful, Cleo mostly plays the role of listener, commenting on Adela’s amusing stories but offering few of her own.  This is why, when the movie ends with Cleo’s line to Adela, “I have so much to tell you!” we know that Cleo’s experiences have left her a changed woman—more confident, comfortable, and in control of her own story.

Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Cuaron), Best Cinematography, Best Foreign Language Film

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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.   

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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.

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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!”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Uncategorized

Birdman Explained: Part 1

You’re probably here to find out what happens at the end of Alejandro Innaritu’s 2014 Best Picture winner, Birdman or: (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). If so, you’re in luck.

First, however, I’ll need to address a lot of other, subtler mysteries in the film, because the ending scene is too vague to interpret without context. Thus, this piece will be a thorough examination of the themes and symbolism of Birdman, capped by a convincing deduction of what, exactly, happens after a washed up actor draws a loaded handgun onstage.

ACT I: Riggan’s Quest

Birdman is the story of Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton), an aging actor attempting a comeback. He’s best known as the titular hero of a pioneering superhero franchise. With his youth long behind him, however, he’s endeavoring on a “serious” comeback as writer, director, and star of an upcoming Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver novel.

The most noticeable thing about this comeback idea is that it has pleased exactly no one. The blockbuster audiences that adore Riggan for the Birdman films are averse to the play’s heady, arcane source material. Theater aficionados like cast newcomer Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) and critic Tabatha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan) resent Riggan for coopting their beloved medium and think him a mere “celebrity.” Riggan’s daughter Sam (Emma Stone), ex-wife Sylvia (Amy Ryan), and some time lover Laura (Andrea Riseborough) lament the destructive behavior he exhibits in his desperation for the play to succeed. 

So the first puzzle to solve is: Why is Riggan doing this? Why is he attempting a Broadway comeback that nobody wants, to the detriment of his most cherished relationships? 

The characters offer various answers, but none ring true. Riggan himself claims to Sam that his goals are artistic: he wants to create something “important” that “actually means something.” But he clearly betrays this notion in conversations with Shiner, defending popularity at the expense of artistic merit. Sam, for her part, cynically opines that Riggan is merely trying to “stay relevant,” but that doesn’t quite hold water either: if this were the case, why wouldn’t Riggan just return for another Birdman film, as many people (such as the Asian man at his press interview) seem to want?

Another answer is supplied by Riggan’s agent Jake (Zach Galifinakis), who reminds Riggan that the project was conceived for garnering “respect.” But if that’s true, whose respect is Riggan chasing? After all, his family and friends are, if anything, losing respect for him, and he demonstrates on multiple occasions that he doesn’t care much for mindless Twitter masses or snobbish theater gurus.

Again, then: why is Riggan doing this?

The correct answer and key to the film, which I will go on to support, is that Riggan is attempting to preserve his long-held notion (now threatened in his advancing age) that he is exceptional—that he is better than everyone else.

As a former megastar, it’s reasonable—expected, even—that Riggan would have come to harbor such an idea. But as he’s aged, all the evidence has piled up against him. His family life, for instance, is a mess. He has wasted all of his money. His looks have faded (“I look like a turkey with leukemia!”). And maybe worst of all, the superhero genre that he helped launch has proved an easy avenue to success for any number of questionably talented actors.  

Riggan’s ego, then, has been under heavy fire, which, we can infer, is why he’s embarked on this foolish project. He needs to re-separate himself, to prove his specialness to himself, not to others. And he has envisioned that this play will do just that: maybe anyone can play a superhero, but only a true great could do that and a successful Broadway show!

Unfortunately, by the time the movie starts, this fantasy has all but crumbled. Riggan doesn’t really know anything about theater, so he has written a mediocre script and hired a shaky cast. With opening night fast approaching, the wheels are coming off the production, and Riggan knows the play isn’t any good: to Jake’s disbelief, he tries to cancel the first preview. The arrival of the talented Shiner seems to offer hope, but ultimately, the arrogant new costar only gives Riggan’s ego more of a beating, criticizing Riggan onstage and stealing the spotlight in the newspapers.

How will Riggan deal with failure? After all, if the play flops, the only publicly visible avenue left to Riggan would be to return for another silly Birdman film. And that wouldn’t help demonstrate his greatness, right?

Wrong, says a voice in his head.

ACT II: Birdman

The crucial point to understanding the voice (and later appearance) of the Birdman character is that it comes to Riggan out of a necessity: the necessity of making a case for his own greatness.

As we’ve seen, the play was devised to reestablish the validity of Riggan’s oversized ego, but with this plan now seeming likely to fail, the bankrupt and attention-starved Riggan may be forced to return to the superhero franchise that made him famous. Consequently, he begins to fall under the persuasion of a rather convenient new idea: that, actually, such a return to the Birdman movies would be far more evidentiary of his excellence than the play’s success would have been. This idea, in a piece of inspired movie fun, is personified by the actual character of Birdman.

Birdman’s arguments are, of course, pure sour grapes. He chiefly relies on baseless mockery of theater and Riggan’s new theater persona: they are simply “lame,” unworthy of Riggan’s inherent excellence. Birdman especially hates, not coincidentally, plays just like the one Riggan is about to screw up, declaring, “People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit.”

Translation: Riggan isn’t any good at theater, so theater must be stupid. The logic of a narcissist.

And Birdman doesn’t stop at mocking Broadway, either. In fact, he demeans, Trump-like, just about everything that threatens Riggan’s supposed greatness. When Dickinson tells Riggan, “You’re no actor, you’re a celebrity,” Birdman later hits back: “Forget the Times, everyone else has.” Regarding Riggan’s insecurity about the growing list of lucrative superhero successors, Birdman sneers: “You’re the original, man. You paved the way for all these other little clowns.” 

These wishful, masturbatory takedowns show us just how tenacious Riggan’s ego is. But we should take a step back to note that Riggan isn’t all narcissist. Remember that for most of the movie Riggan resists Birdman. And in various moments he displays a genuinely good heart, for example comforting his supporting actress Lesley (Naomi Watts) after Shiner’s crazed behavior onstage leaves her distraught. Riggan also wants the best for Sam and regrets his lackluster parenting.

The problem is that despite this generally good disposition, Riggan can’t give in to mediocrity. He needs proof that he is exceptional, and the only proof that exists, currently, is Birdman, who notes as much in a particularly biting taunt:

Without me, all that’s left is you: a sad, selfish, mediocre actor grasping at the last vestiges of his career.

Thus, when Dickinson promises that she will indeed “kill” Riggan’s play, definitively ending his dream of theater success, the voice of Birdman wins out.  In perhaps the movie’s most memorable sequence, Birdman sells Riggan on a new path forward, in which he triumphantly returns to the Birdman role, inspiring awe and transcending common folk.  “You are a god,” Birdman summarizes.  “You save people from their boring, miserable lives!”  Faced with mundane failure, Riggan goes full egoist (and full crazy), convincing himself that his last remaining career option is godlike and awesome.

ACT III: Superpowers

Importantly, this sequence also features the most dramatic manifestation of Riggan’s “powers,” a mysterious motif throughout the film. In multiple scenes, Riggan defies gravity and moves objects with his mind. What is the significance of these abilities?

I’ll first point out that when other characters observe Riggan using his powers, it becomes clear that Riggan is only imagining them. In a typical moment, we see Riggan using telekinesis to destroy his dressing room, but when Jake walks in, we see from his vantage point that Riggan is merely heaving his TV to the ground. When Riggan “flies” to work, a cab driver demands payment.

Since Riggan’s imagined powers appear to be the superpowers of the Birdman character, and since, as previously mentioned, the Manhattan flight scene is the most prominent manifestation of both Birdman’s influence and Riggan’s powers, it might seem that the two motifs represent the same concept.

But multiple scenes contradict this. In fact, every time we see Riggan use the powers except for the flight scene, he seems to be using them in opposition to Birdman’s rhetoric. When Riggan demolishes his dressing room, for example, he argues against reclaiming the Birdman mantle (“I was miserable!”). When he levitates in the film’s opening shot, he seems to be clearing away negative thoughts such as Birdman’s complaints about the premises.

And besides, one “powers” moment in particular proves that the abilities are independent of Birdman’s influence. It comes immediately after Sam scathingly accuses Riggan of hopeless attention grabbing:

You’re worried, just like the rest of us, that you don’t matter. And you know what? You’re right! You don’t.

Based on what we’ve already said about Riggan’s ego, we can infer that these remarks will cut deep. Indeed, Riggan is clearly shell-shocked after Sam’s tirade. But then he does something strange: he looks down at the object on the table and begins rotating it with his mind.

This moment has nothing to do with Birdman. We don’t hear Birdman’s voice or get any indication that Riggan is contemplating returning to the Birdman franchise (in fact, he adamantly dismisses that option to Sam). Rather, in this moment Riggan is focused on his own self-worth, showing us that Riggan’s powers symbolize his own belief in himself, independent of whether he returns as Birdman. By moving the flask, Riggan is stubbornly resisting Sam’s criticism: “I am important,” he means to insist with this gesture. “I do matter.”

It makes sense, given this framework, that Riggan’s powers sometimes oppose Birdman and sometimes align with Birdman. In the flight scene, when Riggan believes that returning to the Birdman franchise will reestablish his excellence, the two work together. In other moments, when Riggan still believes that a Birdman return would be a lowbrow, disappointing move, the two are at odds.

This distinction is critical, and you may have already deduced why.  I’m referring, of course, to the necessity of interpreting the sequence in which Riggan sees Birdman, tells him, “Fuck off,” and then flies out of the window.

To continue to the second half of this analysis, click here.

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Movies Explained

Inception Explained

Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a movie that leaves viewers’ heads spinning. The story is fully presented, but the film moves so quickly that the meanings of various events and conversations are easily missed. So this essay will lend a helping hand by providing an extended explanation. And don’t worry: I’ll then give a careful interpretation of that wobbly totem seen in the ending shot.

The premise of Inception is that a new technology, initially invented by the military for training, exists that allows individuals to enter others’ dreams. This enables hired criminal “extractors” like Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to try to access the valuable secrets of important individuals.

In the opening sequence, Cobb and Arthur attempt such an extraction. Their target is wealthy industrialist Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe), and their plan involves a complex setup: a dream within a dream, meant to lure Saito into revealing his business secrets once he’s tricked into believing he has woken up. The plan fails, however, because Saito identifies a mistake in the dream design of the first dream level: the floor rug is composed of the wrong material.

Here are the rules of dream technology that we learn during this opening sequence and in later scenes. They aren’t dwelled upon, so it’s important to go over them:

  • Each level of dream must be dreamt by one particular person, and the others “follow” that individual into his dream.
  • Whoever is dreaming the dream that the group is currently in cannot follow the others into the next level; he must remain in his own dream level.
  • Each dream must be “designed” beforehand in a way that feels consistent with the rules of reality. Otherwise, the subconscious projections of those who have followed the dreamer into the dream will hunt down the dreamer as a foreign invader.
  • If anyone dies in a dream, he or she will wake up in the previous level (or in reality, if there are no previous levels).
  • If anyone feels pain while sleeping, this pain will feel the same as any other pain, since pain is generated in the mind.
  • A sleeping team member can be woken up by giving them a physical jolt—a “kick”. The team member administering the kick can alert the sleeper that a kick is imminent by playing music in his partner’s headphones, which that partner will hear while still dreaming.
  • Time is perceived differently in different dream levels: each minute is perceived in the next dream level as about 20 minutes. This effect compounds for every level, such that one minute in reality translates to 400 minutes (~7 hours) in the second dream level and 8,000 minutes (~133 hours) in the third.

It’s revealed that Saito was previously aware that an attempt might be made on his secrets. He had welcomed this attempted mission, since it would serve as an “audition” of Cobb and Arthur for a future project that he would bankroll: the planting of an idea in the mind of competing tycoon Ross Fischer (Cillian Murphy) that would lead Fischer to break up his dying father’s empire. Saito is suitably impressed by Dom and Arthur, so he recruits them for the job—but admonishes them to choose a better team, as their previous dream designer (or “architect”) blew the mission by using insufficient detail on the apartment rug.

In return for the future success of this “inception” mission, Saito offers not only a large sum of money, but also the chance for Cobb to “return home.” As we later learn, Cobb has been a fugitive for years ever since an extremely unfortunate sequence of events: his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) became wrongly convinced that she was living in a dream world, leading her to commit suicide to “wake up.” In addition, she framed Cobb for murder so that he’d be motivated to kill himself and join her in the supposed real world.

We also later learn that, tragically, Mal’s mistaken views were the result of Cobb successfully incepting in her mind the idea that her world wasn’t real. At the time of the inception, this was true: they had been existing in a “Limbo” of unconstructed dream space. But the idea unexpectedly affected her even after waking up.

We see in the opening sequence and its aftermath that not only has Mal’s suicide ripped apart Cobb’s family and legal standing, but it has also severely impaired his ability to complete dream extraction. This is because his ongoing guilt results in Mal herself appearing as a subconscious dream projection and sabotaging Cobb’s missions. Cobb can therefore no longer be the architect of dream levels, as his subconscious (Mal) will then know the layouts and thwart the missions.

These revelations are imparted to new architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), and in one remarkable scene involving a very creepy elevator, Ariadne learns that Cobb is regularly reliving painful memories by dreaming, so that he can feel as though his wife is still alive. We’ll come back later to this important point.

——————————

Back to the plan. Cobb recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), an expert “forger;” and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who creates sedation that enables them three levels of dreaming.

The three levels that Ariadne designs for the mission are as follows:

  1. A city level, dreamt by Yusuf.
  2. A hotel level, dreamt by Arthur.
  3. A hospital on a wintry mountain, dreamt by Eames.

The team decides that the most effective implanted idea that will lead Fischer to break up his father’s empire is that his father always wanted him to be his own man, not simply an imitation of his dad. They decide on this strategy based on Eames’ desire to whittle the situation down to a simple essence, not a complicated business decision, and on Cobb’s desire that the idea be based on positive rather than negative emotion.

The plan to incept this idea is that Eames will use his “forgery” talents to impersonate Peter Browning, Fischer’s godfather and his dad’s right hand man. In this guise, he’ll be able to suggest new truths about Fischer’s dad’s plans for his son, which the team will then emphasize in later levels. If all goes well, Fischer’s subconscious will begin to increasingly reflect these new truths, so that eventually Fischer will “convince himself” of the idea about his dad (this way, he won’t be able to trace the idea to its outside source, in which case the inception would fail).

But things start off terribly. In the first level the team is immediately attacked by Fischer’s militarized subconscious, a result of prior dream defense training that didn’t show up in Arthur’s background research. Cobb is livid at this unexpected development, since he alone has conferred with Yusuf and understands that because of the unusually heavy sedation required to achieve three dream levels, dying in these dreams will not result in waking up, but rather descending into Limbo, which, as mentioned before, Cobb inhabited with Mal when she was alive.

Worse still, Saito has been shot in the melee and appears to be quickly dying. If and when he descends into Limbo, there’s no telling how long he’ll perceive himself to be there, and whether his mind will be able to hold up for a potentially enormous period of existence.

Once this grim reality sets in, Cobb explains to the team that the only way for all of them to avoid being killed by Fischer’s subconscious in level 1 and descending into Limbo is to complete the mission as fast as possible—much faster than they had planned for. That’s because if the inception takes hold, Fischer’s subconscious will cease its attacks.

Thus, Eames must conduct a rushed impersonation of Browning, during which he witnesses Fischer’s resentment of his father’s perceived coldness, and his feeling that his father was “disappointed” in him. Eames as Browning tells Fischer of a legal will that would break up the Fischer empire, which his father supposedly meant as his “most precious gift” to his son. Fischer doesn’t understand why in the world his father would do this, but he appears to believe Eames’ lie. Next, Cobb and Arthur force Fischer into naming a random 6-digit code to open a safe, which will be important later.

Pressed for time, they then climb into a van and enter the second dream level. Yusuf stays back to drive (remember, the first level is his dream), evading Fischer’s armed subconscious. It’s clear, though, that he won’t be able to hold out for long. Luckily, the multiplied time in successive dream worlds affords the team some flexibility.

In the second level, the team is almost completely improvising, their meticulous plan in shambles. Cobb insists on a ploy he calls “Mr. Charles,” in which he poses as a dream security officer and alerts Fischer that he’s dreaming. This is risky because Fischer’s subconscious projections will then hunt down the dreamer (in this level’s case, Arthur)—but Cobb is able to convince Fischer that he is a friend, not a foe, keeping Fischer’s subconscious at bay.

Carrying on the mission, Cobb and Arthur ingeniously convince Fischer that Browning staged the kidnapping of Fischer and himself in level 1 (which Fischer at this point believes is the real world) in a traitorous attempt to get access to, and destroy, the will that would break up his business empire. Just as the team had hoped, Fischer’s subconscious projection of Browning then admits to the crime—evidence that Fischer is buying it.

The projection of Browning frames this supposed will as Fischer’s dad’s “last insult”: a “challenge” for his son to build something for himself. Fischer still claims he wouldn’t enact such a self-defeating strategy (“Why would I?”), but the mere fact that his own subconscious is suggesting this possibility is encouraging to the team. Plus, Fischer is visibly emotional about the prospect of his father having previously unknown plans for him.

The team then tells Fischer (lying of course) that they need to enter Browning’s dream world to find out what he knows about Fischer’s dad’s plans, and they all hurriedly enter level three, the skiing/hospital level, dreamt by Eames. Arthur stays behind, as level 2 is his dream.

The problem that arises now is that Yusuf, driving the van in level 1, has run out of time faster than they’d wanted. He plays the cue music, which Arthur hears on the second level and the rest of the team hears on the third, signaling that he’s about to provide the kick by driving through the guardrail. But they’re not ready.

Arthur, who’s been busy single-handedly battling armed guards in whirling hallways, can’t provide a kick in time to bring the rest of them back to level 2 (to thereby receive Yusuf’s kick from level 1); and anyway, the team in level 3 needs much more time to get Fischer to his dad in the hospital and complete the inception. They therefore miss the kick as Yusuf drives through the rail. They know, however, that there will very shortly be a second kick: the van hitting the water.

At this point, two important things happen. The first is that because the van in level 1 is now airborne, level 2 loses gravity, making it extremely difficult for Arthur to provide a kick to bring the team back. The second is that Cobb orders Ariadne to lead the team on level 3 to a direct pathway through the labyrinth to save time. Such a measure, of course, is what Cobb was trying to avoid by having Ariadne design the levels. After all, with his own dangerous subconscious knowing the solution to the maze, the mission is in jeopardy.

But the too-early kick on level 1 has forced his hand. He knows that if Arthur kicks them back to level 2 before the job is done on level 3, they’ve failed. And if Arthur can’t kick them back to level 2 before the van hits the water, they’re all done for.

In a James Bond-esque sequence, Cobb and Ariadne then split from Eames, Saito (who’s still dying from the gun shot on level 1), and Fischer, with the five of them assaulting the armed hospital. When Eames and Saito successfully escort Fischer to the hospital, however, the worst-case scenario occurs: Mal drops from the ceiling and kills Fischer, sending him into Limbo.

It looks like they’ve failed the mission, but Ariadne has a plan to salvage it. This part gets complicated, so stay with me. Ariadne insists that if she and Cobb follow Fischer’s mind into Limbo, gaining the additional time afforded to a deeper dream level, they’ll be able to find Fischer, enabling this sequence to take place:

  1. When Eames on level 3 hears Arthur’s music begin, signaling that a kick will soon bring them back to level 2, he defibrillates Fischer.
  2. Ariadne and Cobb sense the defibrillation in Limbo and ensure that Fischer rides that as his kick back to level 3.
  3. Fischer achieves catharsis with his father in level 3, completing the inception.
  4. Eames blows up the hospital in level 3, providing a kick for Ariadne and Cobb to return to level 3.
  5. Arthur’s kick occurs in level 2, bringing everyone in level 3 back to level 2.
  6. Yusuf’s van hits the water in level 1, bringing everyone back to level 1.

The one hitch is Saito’s health. It’s been a foregone conclusion that he’s not going to survive the mission, and Cobb knows Saito’s going to be dead before they get Fischer out of Limbo. So when Ariadne rides Eames’ kick (blowing up the hospital) back to level 3, Cobb, after finally confronting Mal, stays in Limbo to find Saito, who, due to the unpredictable nature of time in Limbo, has become an old man living alone, having forgotten that he is not living in the real world. This serves as the introductory scene of the movie.

Let’s go back to Fischer. Here’s a summary of how the inception succeeds:

  1. In level 1, Eames (impersonating Browning) tells Fischer that his father had a hidden last will and testament to break up his empire. After that, the team extracts a random 6-digit number from Fischer.
  2. In level 2, the team convinces Fischer that Browning orchestrated the kidnapping in level 1 so that he could gain access to the supposed will and destroy it. Fischer’s subconscious projection of Browning admits to this crime, and frames the will as an “insult,” a “taunt,” and a “challenge” for Fischer to build a better company than his father could. Importantly, in this level the 6-digit code that Fischer randomly named is fed back to him twice: it’s the phone number written by the girl (Eames in disguise) in the lobby, and the hotel room that they use.
  3. In the third level, Fischer meets his dying father and projects what was told to him by his own subconscious projection of Browning in the previous level: that his father wanted his son to break up his empire. But he imagines it not as a taunt, as the projected Browning characterized it in level 2, but rather as a highly emotional bonding moment that reveals that his father harbored untold fatherly love for him, and that if his dad was indeed “disappointed” with him, it was only because he “tried” too hard to emulate him. Crucially, the 6-digit code that Fischer himself generated in level 1, and then which was emphasized in various moments in level 2, is the code to the bedside safe—so that he feels as though he alone knows the code, creating a false sense of father-son closeness.

As you might have noticed, Fischer’s subconscious plays along very well with the team’s goals. This is probably because Fischer already had a deep longing for belated connection with his father. In level 1, Yusuf finds in Fischer’s wallet a sentimental picture of him as a kid with a pinwheel; later, Fischer projects this pinwheel as in the safe with the will, readily linking the will with a positive father-son moment from long ago.

Thus, in trying to convince Fischer that his dad wanted him to “be his own man,” they’re unknowingly giving him exactly what he’s always wanted: an explanation for his father’s frosty demeanor that allows for the notion that his dad truly loved him. A lucky break for the team. (Cobb: “The bigger the issues, the bigger the catharsis.”)

Once the team is safely out of the sinking van in level 1, Fischer confirms to Eames/Browning that he now believes that his dad wanted him to go his own way and that he’ll run the business empire accordingly. It’s also worth noting, here, that based on the mission timeline (they’re on a 10 hour flight), they still need to wait around in level 1 for a whole week before waking up—no challenge now, since Fischer’s subconscious will no longer be attacking them. Understandably, this isn’t shown to us.

————————————————

So that’s the plot explained. But there’s still that spinning totem to talk about, and this requires a thematic analysis of the history between Cobb and Mal. So stay with me for one more section. This is the interesting part.

Recall Cobb’s confrontation with Mal in Limbo. He emotionally overcomes her pleading with him to stay, but not before she makes a hefty argument: that the entire exposition of the movie seems kind of like a dream:

Mal: No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted, Dom? Chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces, the way the projections persecute the dreamer? Admit it: you don’t believe in one reality anymore. So choose. Choose to be here. Choose me.

Of course, Cobb is actually talking to his own subconscious here; this argument is being made by his own mind. This makes sense, since on a number of occasions Cobb has indeed shown that he cannot reliably distinguish between reality and dream—especially when he fails to shoot the projection of Mal before she kills Fischer in level 3, instead wondering aloud at the critical moment whether she might be real. He also frequently rushes to his totem after waking up from dreams, demonstrating a lack of confidence in reality.

Why does he have this problem? It seems to be the result of something I mentioned earlier: that Cobb has taken to intentionally dreaming actual memories of Mal in an effort to keep her “alive.” Ariadne swiftly exposes this when Cobb warns her not to use real places for her dream designs lest she lose her grip on reality: “Is that what happened to you?”

The really interesting thing about this, which I believe is lost on just about every viewer, is that the idea that Cobb planted in Mal’s mind—that this world isn’t real—has now begun to possess him as well.

Consider an overlooked line toward the climax, when Cobb and Ariadne are searching for Mal in Limbo.

Cobb: Listen, there’s something you should know about me. About inception.… An idea is like a virus: resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can redefine and destroy you.

Here, as we know, he’s starting to explain to Ariadne that it was his incepting of his wife’s mind that ultimately led her to commit suicide. But less obvious is that Cobb is undeniably stating that he, too, has now been affected and destroyed by that same idea. Why else would he note that ideas are “highly contagious” and compare them to viruses?

And we can see exactly how this contagious “virus” has spread to Cobb: after Mal’s suicide, his subconscious dream projection of her continues to argue the idea that was planted in her mind (because in real life, this is in fact what she would have been arguing) and, perversely, begins to succeed in convincing Cobb of that very idea (!).

After all, it’s implied that Cobb’s grasp on reality is progressively weakening—that “it’s getting worse.” With more time listening to Mal in dreams, he’d likely become completely detached from reality. Accidentally, he’s almost incepted himself! Recall that in an early scene right after the failed extraction on Saito, Cobb is harrowingly brandying about a gun in his apartment. He seems to be considering suicide: going Mal’s route. He must be legitimately weighing the notion that “this world isn’t real”: not only has he been infected by the “virus” that he himself created, but it’s on the verge of killing him, as it did Mal.

Now we come to the final scene, where Cobb, after the success of the mission, reunites with his family and spins his totem, which teeters before a cut to black. Is Cobb dreaming this happy ending?

Well, all the evidence suggests that he isn’t. For one, only in this scene does he see the faces of his two children, in my opinion a clear indication that the dreaming is over. Also, Cobb only dons his wedding ring in dreams, and in this scene he’s not wearing it.

Maybe most importantly, though: there really just isn’t any good reason to think that Cobb is dreaming at this point. The mission timeline checks out, Saito clears Cobb for entry as he promised—nothing is noticeably off. Why would Cobb dream such a moment, anyway? He’s shown that he prefers to dream actual memories in which he wishes he had acted differently, not potential happy scenarios.

Nevertheless, Mal’s words hang over us: No creeping doubts?

The ending shot, then, is a test: Have we been infected? Have we, too, succumbed to the resilient, contagious idea that this world isn’t real? Despite all evidence, have we been persuaded by what started as a strategy to get Mal out of Limbo and grew into a destructive, dangerous virus of an idea?

I know that when I saw this movie in theaters, the audience’s reaction indicated that a large portion was indeed persuaded. Ideas, it seems, are indeed powerful: as Cobb says, the smallest seed of an idea can grow.

And perhaps I’m not so immune either: after rewatching Inception to write this piece, I couldn’t help—and I’m sure many can relate—but look around the room once or twice and wonder:

Is this really real?

 

— Jim Andersen

For more on the work of Christopher Nolan, see my explanation of Tenet.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Why The Breakfast Club is a Failure

Few films are more cherished than John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985), the story of five troubled high schoolers who bond in weekend detention. Decades after its release, the movie continues to enjoy adoration from old and new viewers, and is often cited as a defining work of the 1980’s and of the high school genre. Who doesn’t like The Breakfast Club?

Well, I don’t. And before you click away from that heresy, hear me out in this short essay, in which I’ll lay out my reasons for disliking the film. My points, I hope, aren’t of the snobbish variety; no one claims this film to be a cinematic masterpiece, and I don’t intend to criticize it for not being such. My central issue with the film is that although it purports to debunk the convenient, lazy stereotypes that adults use to define kids, it in fact relies on those very stereotypes for its entire entertainment value.

I’ll begin my critique with the observation that my friends who like The Breakfast Club (so all of my friends) nevertheless dislike two scenes in the film. Perhaps you, too, even if you like the film, will agree that these two scenes are worthy of criticism, which will start us off on common ground.

The first scene is near the end, when the characters pressure Brian to write the required essay on behalf of the entire group. The second, even more reviled, is also near the end, when Claire gives Allison a makeover to look “pretty,” wooing Andrew.

I’ll get to this second scene later; for now I want to focus on the first, the one in which Brian is forced to write the essay, which might seem to be a strange way for the film to end. After all, haven’t the characters just learned to respect Brian as a relatable whole person, not merely an academic performer? Wouldn’t it be appropriate, given this poignant lesson, for the five new friends to share the duty?

This incongruence is only emphasized by the content of the essay that Brian then writes, which claims, despite what the other four have just done, that “each of us” is “a brain”:

“You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.  But what we found out is that each of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal.”  

Now, if Brian writing the essay for everybody were the only moment in which the movie fell back on the characters’ supposed “types,” rather than showing their capacity to transcend those types, I’d be inclined let it go as harmless, maybe even cute. But Brian writing the essay is actually harmonious with the rest of the film, since The Breakfast Club paradoxically leaves us with memories of the characters fulfilling the labels bestowed on them by the adults.

In one scene, for instance, Allison, the basket case, is drawing a picture and uses her dandruff to simulate snow. The audience has a laugh: what a weirdo! Later, Allison confesses that she was never assigned detention; instead, bizarrely, she chose to attend. More guffawing from us (and the other characters): the girl is crazy!

But, again, aren’t we supposed to be watching a movie about how the kids’ labels don’t adequately describe them? Comedic moments like these are just ammunition for the Mr. Vernons of the world: they pigeonhole the characters into lazy stereotypes. If Allison is indeed more than just “a basket case,” why is she repeatedly shown to be…such a basket case?

Likewise, Brian is purportedly more than a nerd, but he’s written in the screenplay to be kind of a nerd, isn’t he? He lies about his virginity, sycophantically counts Bender’s detentions, and has a fake I.D. so that he can vote. It’s all real hilarious; nerds are funny. And yeah, he does everyone’s homework at the end. Classic!

Hughes would have us believe that the kids’ stereotypes have been foisted upon them by dismissive adults, but he has written the characters to exactly embody those labels, engendering suspicion that the adults, in fact, are justified in using them. Are we really going to vilify, for example, those who think of Claire as a “princess”? She is a princess, as exemplified by every scene she’s in. At one point, she opines that for her and Andrew, being seen with the other three takes more courage, because the friends of the other three “look up to us.” When Brian and Bender call her out, she cries.  If she’s more than a princess, it’s not by much.

Even the characters’ silly dance moves fit their respective stereotypes.

You might object that although, yes, the characters have familiar quirks, the important thing is that all of us mutually recognize one other’s quirks—sure, laughing at them when appropriate—and thereby develop real affection for each other.

But in The Breakfast Club, the recognition isn’t mutual: one character, in fact, is never the brunt of the joke. That would be Andrew, the jock. He’s the “normal one” in the film, always a staple of 80’s entertainment, which means he’s the only one with any insight, while the other characters are oblivious to their assorted weirdnesses. When Andrew recounts the bullying deed that landed him in detention, he’s tearful with remorse—a far throw from Bender, who regrets nothing, and Claire, who can’t seem to wrap her head around the fact that she’s a spoiled brat. Andrew has all the important lines; for example, he interrupts a silly Bender/Claire shouting match to wonder, touchingly, “My God. Are we gonna be like our parents?”

Andrew is the audience’s stand-in. He’s troubled, sure, but stable, self-aware, able to steer the plot toward catharsis for all. It’s as if Hughes couldn’t quite free himself of the prevailing assumption that he wanted to challenge: that the cool kid is the center of the action.

So of course Allison is made up as a pretty girl in the end. What, was Andrew going to go goth or something? Ew, that would’ve been so weird! We are Andrew, so the movie caters to him and us.

Thus, no real shedding of stereotypes occurs in The Breakfast Club. The movie wants to transcend social labels, but it also wants to emphasize them for entertainment purposes (just like a high school jock would), and given the choice, it always picks the latter. The result is an exploitative movie.

———————-

For most fans of the film, though, this is all beside the point. That’s because what really constitutes the cherishability of The Breakfast Club isn’t deft debunking of stereotypes, but rather sweet, sweet nostalgia.

In the opening shots, Hughes’ camera, with 80’s pop music pumping, roams through the school to remind us how life used to be. The cafeteria, the hallway clocks, the student graffiti, the prom stuff, lockers with gay slurs. The effect isn’t glorification, per se, but it’s certainly wistful: “Yup, that was high school, alright…”

The characters that we subsequently meet are just more of that: reminders of bygone days. Days when the cool kids were cool, the bad boys didn’t give a shit, the principal hated kids, and nerds did everyone’s homework. And there was always that crazy girl who didn’t talk to anyone—remember that?

But this is a sad way to reflect on our youth. When we were actually in high school, we didn’t think like this. It was clear, then, that everyone was a unique individual with unique traits and a unique story. It’s only now, after the fact, that these labels carry meaning for us, because the world that we lived in for four years is too complex to remember all of it clearly. The nuances of high school life, formerly observable every day, aren’t accessible to us anymore. So we need these labels—jock, criminal, princess, brain, basket case—as memory crutches: they enable us, long after graduation, to tap into the nostalgia we want so badly.

Thus, I interpret The Breakfast Club and similar movies as peddling a kind of psychological trick.  They offer us a false nostalgia, a nostalgia founded on simplicity and generalization, then absolve us of our caricaturing by exposing caricatures as unnecessary and malign, and inviting us to nod in agreement.  

It’s fun for many to turn the movie into a game: which character are you? Are you the princess? Are you the nerd? Which one?? But let’s be honest: when we enjoy the movie we are, in fact, Mr. Vernon, the insidious labeler. He’s disguised in the film as a cartoonish grump, so it’s difficult to recognize ourselves, but take away that disguise and we’re left with the one truly relatable character. That’s to say, his flaw is our flaw: that being older now, we can’t, as much as we try, remember high school as anything more than a bunch of “types” just trying to get through it all.

 

Sincerely yours,
–Jim Andersen

For more criticism of beloved movies, check out my commentary on Avatar.