Category: Commentary and Essays

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Commentary and Essays

The Greatest Slasher Movie Ever

Originally published October 2021

It’s almost Halloween, which means ‘tis the season for “slasher” flicks, the movies about insane killers murdering dumb, attractive teenagers.

The slasher formula is actually a little more complicated than that but still has some instantly recognizable tropes:

  1. A group of teens or young adults who typically wander into an eerie, remote area
  2. A killer, usually masked but not always, who kills off the kids in succession, often using a knife or other brutal means
  3. A “final girl” who outlasts the others and may ultimately overcome the killer
  4. A pattern in which the characters who have sex are typically murdered shortly afterward; by extension, the final girl is often a virgin

So which films fit the bill? In my view, these are the staples:

  • Friday the 13th (1980)
  • Halloween (1978)
  • The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Later hits like Child’s Play (1988) and Scream (1996) would use slasher elements, too, but with modern twists or alterations. And each of the four films I listed spawned several sequels, all with the same basic premise.

The big question, then: which slasher film is king? To me, there’s no contest:

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the best slasher movie ever made, and not only that; it’s one of the most terrifying movies of all time, a true American masterpiece. I didn’t bother to see it until recently, because I had inferred by its title that it would be a simple, mindless gore-fest not worth the time. If you’re of similar thinking right now, you’re wrong, and you need to watch this incredibly dark, disturbing movie, which actually isn’t gory at all.

You’ll notice that TCSM, directed by Tobe Hooper, is chronologically the earliest of the four movies I listed; it can therefore be said that it “invented” the slasher genre. It may not be surprising, then, that it’s superior to the others: the original is usually the best. Of course, prior landmarks like Psycho (1960) influenced TCSM heavily, so it’s not as if TCSM’s aesthetics appeared out of thin air. But it crystallized the concept, in particular, of a relentless, masked killer picking off teenagers, and apparently, it did so memorably enough that endless franchises and box office revenues were to follow in its wake.

The second best film of the four I listed is Halloween, a great film in its own right due to excellent craftsmanship, solid acting, and a classic score. But the key difference between Halloween and TCSM is that TCSM seems to suggest a broad, expansive horror just beneath the surface of normal American life, while Halloween treats its bloodshed as only an aberration. Michael Myers is so wildly demonic that he scares even a seasoned forensic psychologist and is repeatedly compared to the Boogeyman. TCSM‘s Leatherface, on the other hand, seems only to have a developmental disability and a sadistic family. Who do you think you’re more likely to run into?

Many have noticed that the film appears to contain a statement of sorts about animal cruelty: Leatherface and the Sawyer family treat their victims as mere animals ready for butchering. This pushes us to reconsider these practices. I’d add that this conceit is also inherently frightening in that it allows Hooper to question how much higher, evolutionarily, we really are than the animals we eat. After all, before Leatherface arrives, the gang of teens is mostly preoccupied with sex and isn’t very kind to a member of their group in a wheelchair, at one point carelessly allowing him to fall on his face while he tries to urinate. Is Leatherface on to something by treating us like mere beasts?

Now that’s a scary thought.

The issue of resenting sex is an interesting one in TCSM, especially since its many knockoffs, especially Friday the 13th, would center it so obviously. What’s notable about TCSM’s treatment of the topic is that the first person to express jealousy or resentment isn’t one of the villains but rather Franklin, the wheelchair-bound boy who can’t partake in the shenanigans of the others.

This jealousy is only echoed later by the Sawyers, all of whom are male and defer to a barely-alive patriarch, and who clearly enjoy watching women suffer, judging by their treatment of Sally at dinner. The Sawyers’ boorish jeering recalls Franklin’s show of sarcastic anger with his peers when they leave him downstairs at the old house. And Leatherface, like Franklin, appears to have a disability. Is the fact that we can’t see the killer’s real face a subliminal way of linking him with Franklin?

Again, these sorts of ideas create more terror than a simple Boogeyman does.

But I think the key insight into the film’s themes involves industry and capitalism. The hitchhiker early in the film reports that technological advances have led to job losses in the slaughterhouse, meaning, like Norman Bates, whose interstate moved away, the Sawyer family has been cut off from American prosperity, stranded in a dilapidated rural wasteland—the water hole metaphorically dried up. We may not think much about what happens to people like this, but Hooper, like Hitchcock before him, has thought about it, and he’s concluded, like his predecessor: very possibly, madness.

The Sawyers are very clearly a nightmarish rendition of the average American family. They show us our own folksy customs mangled by poverty and isolation. For example, the dad—if he is the dad; it’s never confirmed—chatters amiably to a bound Sally in the car while also laughing maniacally and beating her with a stick. The hitchhiker acts out and talks back like a typical deadbeat son—while simultaneously torturing Sally at the dinner table. To complete the nuclear family, Leatherface is made to dress up as a housewife.

The point seems to be that our traditions and culture, which we take such comfort in, are entirely corruptible given the wrong circumstances. And TCSM subtly suggests that depraved crimes are occurring all over: we hear stories over the radio of nasty deeds, not all of which could have been committed by the Sawyers. And why wouldn’t there be similar families? The Sawyers can’t be the only ones cut off from prosperity due to technological changes.

TCSM ends in spectacular fashion, with Sally riding away on the back of a pickup truck and Leatherface raging (dancing?) with his chainsaw as the sun rises. This final image grants him the aesthetic grandeur that he deserves. The symbolism of the rising sun is open to interpretation, but I view it, circa 1974 following Vietnam and Watergate, as a warning from Hooper that there’s a new day in America, and the Leatherfaces of the country, out for blood and swinging savagely, are going to be a part of it. Watching the scene in our current era of politics only heightens the resonance.

So don’t let the campiness and predictability of the slasher genre that formed years after the release of this film lead you to dismiss it. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a rightful classic with a disturbing, uncomfortable view of the American way, and there’s no better time to watch it than this fall season. Happy Halloween!

 

–Jim Andersen

For more analyses, check out my look at the visuals of Avatar.

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Commentary and Essays

Avatar’s Visuals Aren’t That Great

One of the more welcome recent developments in the entertainment industry, in my opinion, is that video games have largely become more like movies. That’s due in part to improved console technology, which has allowed for more expansive and detailed world creation, but also in part to gamers maturing and developing appetites for more intricate narratives and characters. I’m no gamer myself, but the rise of cinematically influenced franchises like Fallout and Mass Effect seems like a good thing, a burgeoning venue for authentic artists to work relatively free from big dollar pressure.

What has been perhaps less expected is that at about the same time, some movies have endeavored to become more like video games—a trend that came to full fruition with the 2009 release of James Cameron’s Avatar. It’s maybe the most overpraised movie of the century thus far. (Slumdog Millionaire (2008) at least had the good sense to fall out favor eventually.)

Notice that I said overpraised, not overrated. That’s because critics and fans alike have been sober from the beginning about Avatar’s more obvious weaknesses, and because of those weaknesses, no one claims it as high art. Specifically, it’s agreed that film’s storytelling leaves much to be desired. It recycles an “invaders versus natives” plot line that’s been more interestingly fleshed out in, among others, Dances with Wolves (1990), FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), and even Pocahontas (1996).

For what it’s worth, my favorite of that bunch is FernGully, which has surprising candidness in celebrating the virtues of pacifism and environmental stewardship while also acknowledging their inevitable vulnerabilities in the face of hostile actors. By contrast, Avatar wants to have its cake and eat it too: the nature-spiritual religion of the Na’vi somehow turns out to be…scientifically correct? There’s a literal synaptic connection between the trees and the… Actually, let’s not get into it.

The point is that Avatar’s story sucks, and everyone knows it. I’d be remiss not to also mention the facepalm-worthy writing that pervades even non-story elements of the script. The humans, for example, seek to obtain…“unobtainium.” (Spoiler alert, they don’t.) The natives are called the “Na’vi,” in the same way that Dwight Schrute’s dentist’s name is Crentist. Why these lazy bits were allowed to stand throughout the production process is beyond me.

But as previously mentioned, failures like these were generally recognized by both critics and casual viewers and therefore need no expanded treatment here. The subject of my essay, instead, will be the effusive praise of the film as a monument of stunning visuals, praise that continues to this day.

Roger Ebert called Avatar a “technical breakthrough,” and David Denby of The New Yorker praised it as “the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years.” Pretty much anyone who has seen the film—and pretty much everyone has—will tell you that, although, sure, the plot is lame, the visuals of the movie’s invented world, Pandora, are unquestionably amazing.

But let’s examine closer.

If we’re going to talk about visuals, we need visual evidence. So take a look at some spoiler-free scenes from classics that, in my opinion, deserve their reputations as visual masterpieces. We’ll start with the desert trek from Lawrence of Arabia (1962):

Notice the perfect framing of the faraway shots, as well as the wonder captured in the shots nearer to the characters’ viewpoints. The camera always lingers a while, underlining the protagonist’s amazement with the surroundings, as well as giving us the opportunity to survey and absorb the vast beauty of this exotic, otherworldly location, which is totally real—no CGI.

Next, here’s the famous space ballet from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):

Similarities abound between this sequence and the one from Lawrence. Both linger with their shots, confident in the beauty of what’s being presented. Both exemplify meticulous framing, leading to a succession of aesthetically balanced, painting-like images. They emphasize vast, empty space. They feature musical scores grand enough to suit their visuals. And while 2001, unlike Lawrence, is effects-driven, its effects are understated, deployed unobtrusively. This allows viewers to appreciate the aforementioned scale and framing in a similar manner to Lawrence.

Now, here’s a visually oriented scene from Avatar:

The first noticeable difference is that the camera is moving a lot more in this sequence than in those of the first two films. There isn’t a single shot where the camera isn’t twirling around or even shaking as though it’s being held by hand. In addition, the camera cuts far more quickly, lasting only a few seconds per shot. These differences create a more frenetic, disorienting experience: there’s limited chance to take in any rich visual detail compared with the first two films.

But if the surroundings are so historically brilliant, as the film’s proponents claim, why not allow the viewers to survey them at leisure? Because—and here I finally state my thesis—they’re not that brilliant.

It’s impressive that these visuals were created, yes. They surely required a lot of work from many talented people. But because they consist solely of CGI imagery—which necessarily falls short of the detail offered by reality, even in its best attempts to simulate it—they can’t stand up to the scrutiny of truly great cinematic visuals.

I think the first tip that there’s something lame about the world of Avatar is that real people aren’t used in any of the supposedly gorgeous shots. Instead, humanoid, uh, creatures, have replaced the actors, so that no one will notice any discrepancy between the appearance of real life and the appearance of Pandora. It’s difficult to say, exactly, how real the surroundings look when there’s no human being around to compare them to.

Thus, a simple mental exercise of imagining the human characters actually walking around Pandora can illuminate just how insufficient the CGI of Pandora is as a believably realistic world. Such a scene would be a visual mess, a clash between reality and kind of reality, with Pandora surely looking awkward and tacky next to real people with skin blemishes and full sets of facial muscles.

Cameron can only allow his CGI jungle to be invaded, late in the movie, by some outfitted troops. Their humanness is safely hidden from view by gear and weaponry. When Colonel Quaritch lands in Pandora, the only non-anonymous person to do so, he remains inside a machine in a strangely large clearing. This is by necessity: people and Pandora are oil and water. The Na’vi, with their smooth, plasticky blue skin (no wrinkles in sight), set a low bar for detail that Pandora can meet. Humans, not so much.

Perceived in this way, the film’s title is perhaps more appropriate than it might initially seem. I know that after my own first viewing back in 2009, I wondered why the film was named after the not quite narratively central device of having the characters exist in substitute bodies. (Especially when this title would certainly cause confusion with the popular television series of the same name.) But now I realize that the concept of the Avatar was likely the film’s first idea. It’s certainly its most important one: it’s the curtain behind which the wizard, Cameron, operates his magic show.

You might think it unfair of me, though, to compare Avatar, a summer blockbuster, with two titans of classic film, regularly ranked among the greatest of all time. I’d argue that the degree of praise heaped on Avatar’s visuals warranted that, but fine. Let’s compare Avatar instead to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), an equivalently popular blockbuster. Watch:

For my money, these three minutes are more visually enjoyable than every scene in Avatar combined.

Awesome special effects are crucial to this sequence, but, as with 2001, they’re understated and draw as little attention as possible. The shot of Dr. Grant and Dr. Sadler looking up the neck of the dinosaur creates the feeling of enormous scale that Avatar, for all its precision, neglects to establish. The dinosaur’s one act—rising to its hind legs and crashing back down—is mild but breathtaking, and Spielberg has the patience to watch it play out, allowing his gentle monster to be a purely visual wonder.

This dinosaur’s purpose—beauty—is served in this one scene. Cameron, the weaker filmmaker, by contrast needs his beasts to be narratively consequential: they all return in the finale to kick some human butt, placing any potential visual grandeur in the backseat.

But the primary value of this Jurassic Park scene in the context of this essay is that it demonstrates the wonder that can be achieved in cinema by placing the impossible within the realistic. The sight of the herd at the pond (the end of the clip) is visually powerful because impossible creatures have been made to look believable, and have been placed in an actual, real landscape. They are a ridiculous creation, but because they appear on an actual grassy plain and are observed by actual men and women, we’re nevertheless forced to accept them as legitimate for two hours. That’s the power of special effects in film.

By contrast, on Avatar’s Pandora nothing is real—all is CGI. If Jurassic Park places the impossible within the realistic, Avatar places the impossible within the impossible. The juxtaposition of fiction and reality that makes the Jurassic Park sequence so goosebump-inducingly memorable is lost; there’s no compelled legitimacy for what we’re seeing. It’s Pixar on steroids. And just like a Pixar film, Avatar‘s visual pleasures are only the manufactured kind: technologically impressive, yes, and fun at times, but lacking the power to create authentic awe.

Now, it’s not Cameron’s fault that total CGI can’t compete with reality, but we need to be clear: it can’t. The floating mountains of Pandora, suspended with keyboard clicks and computer code, are nothing next to the majestic desert of Lawrence of Arabia or the picturesque outer space of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and also pale in comparison to the visuals of superior blockbusters like Jurassic Park.

Just watch the characters’ reactions. While Drs. Grant and Sadler are struck dumb with shock upon seeing the dinosaur, Jake Sully’s avatar bounces around Pandora like a kid on the monkey bars. This is merely cool for him. It’s merely cool for us, too.

There is a realm, though, more appropriate to Avatar’s accomplishments. A realm where placing the impossible within the impossible is indeed praiseworthy, where absurd worlds are computer-built (by necessity), and absurd characters are accordingly developed to populate them. I refer to the realm of gaming.

I’ve read online commenters remark that Avatar would make a great video game. But such a game would be redundant, because the movie, for all intents and purposes, is already a video game. It’s a journey through a scenic CGI landscape complete with passing, forgettable allies; surreal creatures; fierce, colorful battles; and an angry, generic final boss. But it’s less fun than other video games, because we don’t have any say in what’s going on. That leaves us with an entertainment of questionable value.

James Cameron has made some great movies. The Terminator (1984) has stood the test of time, and I’d call Aliens (1986) one of the best sequels ever made. Even Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Titanic (1997), although they demonstrate Cameron’s increasing emphasis on special effects at the expense of narrative authenticity, have some great moments. It’s a shame that he forgot, or never realized, that those moments were predicated on the raw things that truly impact moviegoers: relatable human stories, complicated human emotions, and, most basically of all, the humans themselves—without which any CGI achievements exist only for their own sake, and are therefore in danger of becoming groundless, farcical, and weak.

 

–By Jim Andersen

For more analyses, see my commentary on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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Commentary and Essays

Die Hard’s Enduring Entertainment

The action classic Die Hard (1988), directed by John McTiernan and starring Bruce Willis, is a movie far better than it has any right to be. It’s so well crafted that it can essentially function as a textbook for how to pull off onscreen action entertainment, even though it never pretends to be anything more than a genre flick. So in this piece, I’ll pick apart Die Hard to find out what makes for old-fashioned, pure movie fun.

In short, the secret to Die Hard’s success is character development. Everyone knows that character is crucial to a good screenplay, but few invest in it as heavily as McTiernan and screenwriter Jeb Stuart in this film, and few are as savvy in their execution.

The first character developed, of course, is John McClane (Willis), and like many action heroes, he’s a rough-around-the edges tough guy with a turbulent family life. But Die Hard adds uncommon nuance to his exposition. Within minutes of watching John and his wife, Holly, we learn that John is not some inscrutable rage-machine, as his many predecessors and copycats tend to be, but rather a man in a truly complicated situation: she moved away from him for a job opportunity, but his attachment to his work as a NYC cop combined with his innate stubbornness made moving West a bitter proposition. And not only does he want his woman back, as is standard fare for a troubled action hero, but she wants him back, too: the maid knows to make John’s bed in the guest room without needing to be asked, just in case he shows up for Christmas.

Later in the film, an emotional scene takes place wherein an injured John radios his friend to ask that a message be relayed to his wife if he dies: that he wishes he had been more supportive, and that although he said “I love you” many times, he never said what was needed: that he was sorry. This only packs such a punch because we already know that the situation between the two was complicated and understandably difficult for John, even if he was ultimately in the wrong. The audience can relate.

Perhaps other directors have trouble pulling off this level of nuance because it requires creativity to squeeze in so much of it before audiences get impatient for the excitement to start. Die Hard rises to the occasion in this regard. One example of effective, rapid exposition is the aforementioned conversation between Holly and Paulina, the maid. Another is the clever screenwriting device of Argyle (De’voreaux White), the nosy limo driver who teases out key information. A third great idea is the character of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner), a goofy would-be suitor whom Holly rejects, John snaps at, and Holly dismisses to John as having no chance with her—all within the early minutes of the movie.

Merely through Ellis’ presence, then, we learn that Holly a) prefers John to a fresh start, b) isn’t the type of woman to intentionally inspire jealousy in John despite resenting him, and c) is comfortable talking frankly with John in a husband-wife manner. We also learn that John is still very protective of his wife despite having resisted moving with her to the West coast.

These revelations mean that when John and Holly reunite, we’re rooting for both of them. This is actually a rarity, because, sadly, the woman in these situations is often portrayed in a negative light throughout the film to bolster the plight of the protagonist. After all, if she’s short tempered, demanding, and disloyal, then the hero seems more justified—so we like him more, right? Eh, maybe, but we also can’t understand why he wants her back in the first place, so their reunification doesn’t make us happy. Another unfortunate cliché (potentially derived from High Noon (1952)) is to have the hero’s love interest suddenly become a badass toward the end of the film and start whooping bad guys herself—maybe even finishing off the main villain—to show that she’s had a change of heart toward the hero. Since Holly is already likable, that isn’t needed in Die Hard.

The positive portrayal of Holly also means that John doesn’t “get the girl” through his action heroics: instead, he had her from the start. The only alteration comes from John himself, who, faced with the probability of death, realizes the wrongness of his stubborn ways and vows to change if he gets the chance. Thus, there’s a true arc for the main character, a fundamental requirement of enjoying a movie that’s nevertheless often neglected by action films, most of which prefer to make their heroes so skilled in killing people that their love interests simply can’t resist them, surely a male fantasy rather than a depiction of reality.

Not only is the character development in Die Hard nuanced; it’s unorthodox. Surprisingly late in the movie, we meet Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the main supporting character. Because he arrives in the thick of the action, his exposition is shallower and his arc is less detailed. But that arc is memorable all the same, completed when he guns down a thought-dead villain at the finale. It would have been easy to write Powell as merely a helpful, supportive guy, and leave it at that. Die Hard goes the extra mile, even supplying Powell with a meddling chief to emphasize his acumen in the field and his loyalty to John.

Now to the villains, which is where things go from great to masterful. Everyone remembers Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), but why?

Well, for starters, Hans is very good at what he does. His plan is meticulous, and he deals with setbacks calmly and effectively. His deliberate style also provides a clear contrast to John, who is forced to improvise his way through events, and who is often visibly upset when things don’t go his way or gleeful when they do. To be sure, Hans does encounter unexpected challenges, but he responds not with instinct and guts, as John does, but by quickly creating new, clever plans, such as feigning an American accent when cornered and shooting glass to injure John’s bare feet.  This stylistic difference is reinforced in the script by the two characters’ opposing valuations of cowboy heroes like Roy Rogers: Hans perceives these figures as implausible products of a dumbed-down American commercialism, while John sees them as valid inspirations for his career in law enforcement and his efforts to take down the terrorists.

But sneakily, Hans is also similar to John in a fundamental way. This becomes clear in a late scene when Holly accuses Hans of being nothing more than a “common crook.” Hans reacts to this by becoming truly angry for the only time in the film, wrenching Holly toward himself and correcting the record: “I am an exceptional crook.”

Perhaps the money, then, is only a secondary motivation for Hans: what truly propels him is outsized personal pride, the very flaw that Holly accuses John of allowing to destroy their marriage. We could imagine a similar exchange taking place between John and Holly before their separation. But whereas John, the hero, eventually sees the error of his ways (“Tell her I’m sorry”), Hans, the villain, never does—taunting John at the movie’s climax instead of shooting immediately, his only major mistake throughout. And when Hans finds himself hanging out a 30th story window with his plot certainly thwarted for good, he doesn’t scramble for safety; rather, he pulls a gun at the pair that wounded his ego.

Hans is also charismatic and likable, which adds to his villainous appeal. It’s tricky to make a villain likable, but again, Die Hard rises to the occasion. As before, the character of Ellis facilitates development, as he returns to misguidedly barter with Hans and winds up dead. I’ll admit that this is probably the worst scene in the movie, because Ellis is really too stupid to be believable, but by being so unlikeable he forces us to root for Hans, who responds to the insufferable interlocutor with appropriate sarcasm. We want him to kill Ellis, and he does. And when arrogant FBI officers take over and ignore Powell’s pleading for caution, we want them to pay a price, and Hans again obliges us, giving the order to obliterate their forces with bazookas.

The top-notch villainy extends beyond Hans, though. The rest of his team is memorable, too. Like Sergeant Powell, these are characters that would have received little to no development in a standard action movie, but McTiernan manages to give most of them recognizable personalities, sometimes with only one scene to work with. Theo (Clarence Gilyard), the tech specialist, is a jackass and relishes it: a malicious version of the equally exuberant Argyle, who fittingly takes him out later on. Karl (Alexander Godunov) is the strongest and most ruthless of the gang, but he’s not a mindless brute in the fashion of James Bond henchmen; rather, he’s angrily avenging the loss of his brother, the first of the crew killed, who is briefly shown to be the more cerebral and cautious of the two brothers.

I also appreciated the scene in which Powell first arrives to investigate and is met by Eddie (Dennis Hayden), a member of Hans’ team responsible for manning the security desk. In a lesser film, this would have been Hans himself, to increase his airtime and emphasize his cleverness. But the fact that Eddie is so effective in his job—nonchalantly watching football and making small talk with Powell—increases our appreciation for Hans much more than an appearance from Hans himself would have done. As the leader, he has chosen a skilled team and delegated with purpose.

As I near the end of examining an action movie, I can’t neglect to discuss the action. The strange thing is, there isn’t all that much of it in Die Hard. There are a few short confrontations in which John kills Hans’ crewmembers, and one extended fight scene between John and Karl. These scenes are fine. I think what I most appreciate about them is that they don’t try to reach some unattainable degree of coolness with characters pulling off impossible moves and demonstrating superhuman strength. Instead, they are what they are: human fight scenes, won by John. Since we’re rooting for John (and we kind of like the villains too), this suffices. In our current post-Matrix movie landscape, this approach is rarely seen.

Also noticeable in 2020 is the lack of stunts.  To be fair, there are a few, but by modern standards they’re not awe-inspiring.  John’s leap from an exploding roof and subsequent reentry through a window is certainly a true stunt sequence, and again, this scene is fine.  It’s not Mission: Impossible-level cool. The emphasis on John’s bloody feet increases the tension, reminding us that this is not an invincible hero, but mostly, the effectiveness comes from our concern for John. While I was watching Die Hard, I actually found myself wondering whether stunts in movies tend to decrease the overall tension, by building it up unsustainably high and then releasing it. Since Die Hard has so few stunts, there are few releases; thus, the tension remains high throughout.

John McTiernan had previously directed Predator (1987), which is also a good action movie but has noticeable weaknesses compared to Die Hard. Both feature highly successful character exposition and focus on cat-and-mouse tension rather than stunts and combat scenes. But Predator’s hero is a hulking Arnold Schwarzenegger, a casting choice surely influenced by producers with the aim of emulating Sylvester Stallone’s then-popular Rambo franchise—so laughably macho in retrospect that it’s now the stuff of easy parody.

Schwarzenegger’s presence severely limits what can be done with the script, and the result is a kind of “in-between” action hero: McTiernan seems to have envisioned a relatable everyman for the role, but a snarling Austrian bodybuilder can only be so unassuming. Both Stallone and Schwarzenegger turned down the role of John McClane, thank God, allowing McTiernan’s talents to be fully realized, as little-known Bruce Willis was given the opportunity to play the lead in a chatty, emotional manner that the 80’s had heretofore avoided.

Why haven’t we had an action movie equal to Die Hard since its release in 1988? As I indicated, it seems to me that during the 90’s, special effects breakthroughs in movies like Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and The Matrix (1999) raised the bar so high for the action sequences themselves that attention to character development was diminished, with producers fearful of boring audiences with comparatively tame set pieces and accordingly funneling their efforts in that direction. Today’s popular action franchises, like the juggernaut Fast and Furious movies, have shrugged off not only character development but also all notions of remote seriousness, instead pouring dollars into visually amazing stunt sequences.

Despite this, I think there’s still a market for a movie like Die Hard. After all, it’s still massively popular: doesn’t that indicate that action audiences haven’t lost the taste for a well-written script? We’ll see what the next decade of moviemaking brings. For now, I recommend a re-watch of this classic, a master class in movie craftsmanship.

 

— Jim Andersen

For more on blockbuster hits, check out my criticism of Avatar.

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Commentary and Essays

The Worst Best Picture: The Badness of Slumdog Millionaire

Everyone knows that winning Best Picture doesn’t guarantee that a film is any good. In the past few years alone, duds like Spotlight (2015) and Green Book (2019) have snatched the prize, so you don’t need to think very far back for evidence that the Academy isn’t always clear-eyed. But there’s one disaster of a movie that in my opinion tops them all for taking the honor without merit.

That film is Slumdog Millionaire (2008), directed by Danny Boyle. You’ve probably seen it or at least remember hearing a lot about it, since it was a sleeper hit at the time of its release and was the subject of numerous parodies and pop culture references in the ensuing years. Its badness is multifaceted enough to sustain an entire essay, which I’m happy to write. Then, I’ll try to draw some conclusions from its award success.

Slumdog Millionaire follows Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an Indian teenager on the brink of winning “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Unfortunately for him, the show’s host believes that he’s a fraud and alerts the police of his presumed cheating. He must then explain to the police, who endeavor to torture him, how he has correctly answered every question in the trivia game show thus far despite his humble origins in the slums.

This premise is already irredeemably ridiculous. Why, exactly, is host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) so upset about this situation? He appears to believe that he’s being upstaged, fuming, “it’s my fucking show!”—but in real life, undoubtedly a game show host would delight in participating in the dramatic story of a modest, likable underdog beating the odds. Instead, Jamal, who has generated the very human interest that the show is designed for, is…electrocuted? And…beaten to a pulp?

Neither does the police’s logic behind the suspicion of Jamal make any sense whatsoever. The officer in charge of the interrogation sputters that “doctors, lawyers” struggle with the show’s questions, whereas Jamal, a “slumdog,” impossibly answers them correctly. But as Jamal himself accurately protests, “You don’t have to be a genius” to answer these questions, as they’re all related to culture or pop culture. What do the contestants’ occupations have to do with whether they can answer these random trivia? I see no connection, but apparently the other characters have decided that the relationship is so ironclad that Jamal needs to be treated like a POW.

As an aside, I’ve noticed that when various media try to parody Slumdog Millionaire, they inevitably run into problems with this particular flaw, because it prevents the parody from distinguishing itself from the actual plot of the movie. For example, a spoof character is shown being interrogated and having to explain how he “knows the answers” due to comically improbable events that have occurred recently or during his life. But no matter how improbable and silly these parody events are, the parody invariably isn’t very funny, because Jamal also encounters the answers to the game show’s questions at extremely improbable moments—equally improbable, to be sure, as in the parody. Thus, the parody can only replicate the original, not subvert it with commonplaces. The plot device of Slumdog Millionaire, sneakily, is already commonplace: don’t we all learn the answers to potential trivia questions at very random moments during our lives?

Another important moment occurs when Kumar attempts to feed Jamal an incorrect answer. Kumar interprets Jamal’s disregarding of the lie as proof of cheating—but this is never even referenced by the interrogating officer, perhaps because it doesn’t prove anything at all. Maybe Jamal didn’t see the letter written on the mirror; or maybe he knew the answer already and only used the 50:50 lifeline to be sure; or maybe, as is actually the case, he simply doesn’t trust Kumar (for good reason). Yet another head-scratcher of a plot point.

But enough with the plot for now. Even more important to this film’s unsavoriness is the filmmaking itself.

I’ve never been to India, but on first viewing, I nevertheless sensed something false in the way the setting in this movie was treated. On repeat viewing, the issue is clear: Boyle, a white director, is only interested in the Indian slums for shock value, and his scenes accordingly employ the slums as a spectacle, even a gag at times—never as a complex world of fully realized, struggling characters. Of course, from our American perspective, the lack of resources in this environment is shocking. But focusing solely on this aspect poisons the relevant scenes with unreality; it prevents us from feeling as though we’re seeing the whole story. Boyle, by staging scenes like Jamal’s fall in the outhouse, is being greedy, sifting through the slums for their most alarming images. And it’s all for the titillation of American viewers.

At his best moments, Boyle gestures toward a kind of Indian Oliver Twist, with angry, heartless grownups and scared, meager children. But whereas Dickens and his true successors stare unflinchingly at poverty, painting the world of the poor with the authenticity of experience, Boyle, a stranger to the setting, is too astounded at what he sees to be true to us. He’s repulsed by the slums, and, scene after scene, it shows.

I leave it up to others with more relevant expertise to comment on the morality of what Boyle is doing here, and a quick Google search reveals that plenty have indeed done so. But there’s no question that from an artistic perspective, it’s malpractice. The setting of a film can’t be cheapened like this. Whereas Boyle could have cast an insightful lens on overlooked terrain, he instead leaves us with the impression of the slums as a zany launching pad for the two leads, a madhouse unworthy of their admirable personal qualities. There’s a Disney-esque aspect to this attitude, actually; I suspect Aladdin (1992) as one of Boyle’s subconscious influences.

A similar laziness applies to the relationship between the two leads. Jamal is our protagonist, and his goal is to save and marry Latika, the love of his life. Latika, who starts out with him in the slums but later winds up trapped in the world of a cruel crime lord, is very much the “damsel in distress” cliche. Now, I grant that this archetype can bear an interesting story if the characters are treated with nuance. But Latika barely receives any characterization at all throughout the film: she’s extremely bland, having no discernible personal qualities as an adult. She’s “tough,” I suppose, because she endures the slums and gets scarred with a knife (but it turns out looking kind of sexy, phew); still, rom-coms have better leads. Heck, Princess Peach has more personality.

Again, I leave it to others to argue about whether portrayals like these are socially damaging, but there’s no doubt that artistically, they don’t work. The characters of a film need to be true to life, and entirely bland people like Latika don’t exist, so when they appear on the screen, the film becomes merely abstract entertainment and loses its power to move us.

Let’s skip ahead to the monumentally absurd climax, where Jamal uses his “phone a friend” lifeline during a live broadcast of the show. It’s beyond obvious that this wouldn’t be allowed, since the person receiving the call could easily be cheating by looking up the answer. What’s more, the show’s producers don’t seem to know what phone number Jamal is dialing, which is also not how the show works, since he could theoretically be calling an expert on the subject whom he’s never met. This contrived situation leads to Latika picking up the phone even though she isn’t the intended recipient of the call, another irregularity that threatens the integrity of the show.

I’ll take a second to rewind here, because, as I recall, everybody seemed quite concerned about Jamal cheating when there was literally no evidence to suggest it. But here, they casually allow him to phone an unknown individual who, honestly, would be stupid not to be cheating, given the clear opportunity to do so unchecked. If only Jamal before the second broadcast had told someone, anyone, to be near a computer, look up the answer, and wait for his call…

Well, screw it, Jamal wins the grand prize anyway (if you didn’t predict that from the movie title), randomly guessing the answer out of the four choices. After he reunites with Latika and kisses her new (aesthetically pleasing) scar, the movie ends, and we get a dance number.

Now, I apologize to all the die-hard Bollywood fans out there—but come on. Liam Neeson doesn’t break out in a tap dance at the end of Schindler’s List. Let’s remember that this, um, wasn’t exactly a merry movie, featuring at one point, for example, the intentional blinding of children to maximize their utility as beggars. But that doesn’t matter, apparently; only the two main characters do, and they’re fine. So cue this tone-deaf final note.

In summary, my dislike of this movie spans virtually every aspect of production. The film features an implausible story; shallow, functional characters even in lead roles; a phony, sensationalist portrayal of an important setting; and inconsistent tone and message. Each of these flaws on its own should be sufficient to disqualify a film from Best Picture contention. This film boasts them all.

Sadly, though, not only did these attributes not disqualify Slumdog Millionaire from contention, but instead, they likely fueled its success. That’s because all of us, even experienced critics, are liable to be fooled into accepting the semblances of profoundness and depth without thinking twice about whether we’re been tricked. We’re liable to be caught up in ghastly images of the slums and believe we’re seeing the brutal truth, when we’re actually being fed a caricature for shock value. We’re liable to pull for Jamal as he pursues the woman of his dreams without wondering ourselves why, exactly, Jamal even likes her in the first place given her disconcerting lack of personality traits.

There’s a word for this dynamic: sentimentality. We’re conditioned to feel emotion when it’s conjured up, even when it’s not earned. And because of that, directors like Boyle will always be around, cynically offering us a feel-good high without any substance behind it. The films of these directors, of course, will eventually be relegated to obscurity, forgotten as Slumdog Millionaire nearly is despite winning only a decade ago—but by taking advantage of their viewers’ hunger for positive emotion and catharsis, and the consequent leniency those viewers give to films with a rough start and a happy ending, they can achieve both financial and critical success in the short term.  Ignore these charlatans, and focus on the films that put in the effort to do things right—even if the Academy often doesn’t.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more criticism of Best Picture winners, check out my review of Forrest Gump.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Twists That Don’t Work, Featuring Shutter Island

Everyone loves a twist ending. I do, too, but only if it’s done correctly. Below I present two groups of films: one group of famous twist endings that, in my opinion, deserve their acclaim; and another group of twists that don’t.

Good Twist Endings:

  1. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
  2. The Sixth Sense (1999)
  3. The Prestige (2006)

Bad Twist Endings:

  1. Shutter Island (2010)
  2. The Usual Suspects (1999)
  3. Memento (2000)

I can feel the huffing and puffing already, especially over the denigration of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which is one of the most commonly requested movies I get for extended analysis, hence this essay. But I don’t have much to examine—at least with any admiration—, because Shutter Island and the other two on the second list, in my view, are artistic failures. I’ll spend this piece explaining why. For favorable contrast, I’ll intermittently refer to the films in the first group.

The core problem with Shutter Island is that almost the entire movie consists of irrelevant nonsense. The narrative of the film is set up as a mystery, and Scorsese leads us to become highly invested in that mystery, which is: what shady dealings on Shutter Island have led to the disappearance of dangerous murderer Rachel Solando? Our protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DeCaprio) dives into this puzzle, collecting clues and opinions from various island residents—clues that involve, among other things: Nazi experimentation, governmental testing of nuclear weapons, and scary new psychotropic medications.

But as the runtime drags on, these various potential conspiracies don’t seem to be bringing us much closer to the solution. And indeed, it turns out that they’re all for naught. There are no shady dealings. There is no Rachel Solando. There’s not even a Teddy Daniels.

The reason this is a terrible twist ending is that the revelation is a joke on us: we’ve wasted our time watching the body of the film. There’s no reason to re-watch Shutter Island, because now that we’ve seen its ending, we know we’ve been strung along by caring about the rest of it. A.O. Scott of The New York Times nails it:

“Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.”

Indeed it is a “contrivance,” because the fantasies of Andrew Laeddis that we observe over the course of Shutter Island are not in any way tied to the event that precipitated his madness: the murder of his children by his insane wife and his subsequent murdering of her. Instead, Laeddis conjures up random red herrings designed to avert him from reality. No meaningful analysis of these red herrings is possible, because they’re explicitly deployed by Laeddis’ psyche to be as misleading as possible—to have no traceability back to the truth.

Contrast this with the seminal twist ending of The Wizard of Oz (1939). As everyone knows, Dorothy Gale wakes up at the end of the movie: as the cliché goes, “it was all a dream.” But dreams aren’t random: they’re grounded in reality, and indeed, the colorful characters that Dorothy has dreamt appear to have been based on her actual family and acquaintances in Kansas. Thus, it’s fruitful to examine the connections between the dream characters and the originals: one might observe, for example, that Dorothy longs for a faraway escape (“Somewhere over the rainbow”) and accordingly dreams one up. But, previously unrecognized by her, she truly loves the quirky and odd personalities that she lives with Kansas, so they, not exotic strangers, populate her dream. No wonder that she eventually concludes, “There’s no place like home”: her fantasized escape was barely different from her current, humble life.

Andrew Laeddis in Shutter Island also has dreams, and these dreams also gesture toward reality, faintly hinting at the darkness of his past. But Scorsese doesn’t want us to know the big secret, so he spends relatively little time in the dreamscape. He prefers Laeddis’ fantasies and delusions, which by contrast have no connection to the truth. As a prominent example, Laeddis believes that Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) is his trusty detective partner, but in reality, this man is Lester Sheehan, Laeddis’ psychiatrist. Unlike in The Wizard of Oz, there’s no thematic connection between these two roles, no substance to analyze. One is real, one is made up—that’s it.

Scorsese is hardly the first to attempt a twist that renders his entire movie a waste of time. Another wrongfully celebrated film is Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1999), which consists of a story told by a character named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) about a gang of street crooks who are tricked and sabotaged by an uber-criminal named Keyser Soze. But Kint, as it turns out in the movie’s finale, is Keyser Soze.

Oh boy. This one is even worse than Shutter Island, because whereas Shutter Island consists of the protagonist’s delusions, The Usual Suspects consists of the protagonist’s intentional lies, such that after the twist we have no idea what actually occurred before it. Every single thing we have seen is now liable to have been whimsically fabricated by Kint/Soze.

This becomes palpably clear on re-watch toward the end of the film, when Kint recalls seeing a dark figure on a boat, assumed to be Soze. Duly reflecting his version of events, we see the dark figure onscreen. But since this figure obviously never appeared to Kint, all of what we have seen is now felt to be useless, since it also reflected the story told by the lying Kint in service of his evading arrest.

Reinforcing this, Kint/Soze is picked up from the precinct by a friend, who was seen in Kint’s story as Soze’s lawyer “Kobayashi,” the man who brought the crooks together. But we now know that this man isn’t called “Kobayashi.” So…if his name was a lie, was his supposed role in the job one, too? Was he even there? We can never know.

Another analogous failure to Shutter Island is Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). Like Shutter Island, Memento features a narrator with severe perceptual limitations who aims to avenge the murder of his wife, and in both films, the twist is that the protagonist, in fact, killed his own wife. (Borrowing a bit, eh Martin?) Nolan’s premise is more sound than Scorsese’s, though, because he exposes Leonard Shelby’s (Guy Pearce) limitations from the start, subsequently building toward unveiling what those limitations have been hiding from the character and from us. This should allow for emphasis on the telling of an actual story that we can invest in and not get punked for caring about.

But alas, Memento punks us anyway, falling into the same trap as Shutter Island. The solution to the puzzle is that there is no puzzle. We’ve longed to discover the identity of the murderous “John G,” but—sike!—there is no John G: we’ve been watching a wild goose chase. Like Shutter Island, Memento uses a protagonist with an infirm grasp on reality to misdirect us for two hours, building suspense for the answer to a question that, it turns out, needn’t have been asked.

This approach digs both films’ screenplays into deep holes, out of which there is only one way to climb: painful verbal exposition. The finales of both movies, therefore, consist of disappointing monologues told by supporting characters that spell out for us (by necessity) what in the world has been going on.

To be fair, in Shutter Island, there’s at least a plot-related justification for the character delivering the monologue, as Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) wants to impart these revelations to Laeddis for therapeutic benefit. But in Memento, there’s no such justification: the supporting character, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), simply explains the truth to Leonard for no apparent reason, starting, as he very well could have foreseen, a process that culminates in his own death. It’s a huge storytelling letdown. Nolan, it seems, has bit off more than he can chew with his innovative narrative structure, working both backward and forward to reach the all-important fulcrum of…a supporting character being unbelievably stupid.

Contrast these droning finales with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), one of the best twists in film history. No verbal exposition whatsoever is needed for this famous reveal, because the story we are invested in actually happened. The protagonist has perceptual limitations (“They see what they want to see”), but they’re not so great as to negate either what we have been watching on the screen (a la Shutter Island and The Usual Suspects) or the central drama of the film (a la Shutter Island and Memento).

This means that Shyamalan doesn’t have to pull the whole rug out, as the others do. Instead, he merely shows clips from before, which now have massively altered significance. For instance, he repeats the shot of Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) grabbing at the dinner check too late—but now we know why his wife got to it first. This is how authentic shock and amazement is created: it feels believable, given Shyamalan’s direction, that Malcolm didn’t realize he was dead. We saw what happened, and things seemed legit to us, too.

Unlike the three negative examples I’ve discussed, the bulk of The Sixth Sense’s runtime isn’t wasteful. It contains an interesting and dramatic arc: Cole’s acceptance of his gift, which grants Malcolm redemption for failing Vincent Grey. It also sets up honestly the arc that the twist will eventually complete: Malcolm’s struggle with regret over letting work get in the way of his marriage. Thus, re-watching The Sixth Sense is genuinely worthwhile, even when we know the twist in advance. I’ve been critical of the film (and Shayamalan’s entire body of work) for other reasons here, but credit where credit is due.

It appears that Nolan learned some lessons from Shyamalan. We can infer this because Nolan tried another big twist in his 2006 film The Prestige, and it’s far more successful than the one from Memento. (The Sixth Sense came out only a year before Memento, so it’s reasonable to assume that Nolan had only absorbed its influence after Memento’s release.) Nolan’s surprise, this time, is that Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) has been sharing a life with an identical twin, an arduous and painful endeavor for both men undertaken for the single-minded purpose of enabling impressive magic tricks. This shocking truth is the most extreme example yet of the desperate measures to which the competing magicians in the film go to best each other, so the twist adds to the central thematic drama, rather than nullifying it. Therefore, as with The Sixth Sense, we continue to appreciate the full storyline, and we benefit from seeing The Prestige again, even with all the knowledge the twist bestows.

———————————————-

I think I’ve laid out a pretty sharp demarcation between the two groups of twist-featuring films I provided in the beginning of this piece. Nevertheless, most moviegoers enjoy all of these six films, so it’s worth speculating on why we enjoy twists so much in general, even when they come at our own expense and add nothing to the movie’s themes or meaning.

I suppose it’s because it’s fun to be in on something. It’s fun to leave the theater with a secret—a secret known to only those who have seen the movie. It’s fun to observe, firsthand, a newbie gasp as you did: although I’ve repeatedly noted the pointlessness of re-watching the negative examples in this piece, I admit that seeing a friend’s confusion turn to understanding (when you’ve understood all along) can be a real thrill.

These enjoyments, though, are out of the realm of art or even the realm of entertainment. Their value is more akin to practical jokes, to the gag-type pleasures of the world. Recommending Shutter Island, The Usual Suspects, or Memento is like offering a handshake with a buzzer attached to your palm; watching these films for the first time is like going in for the shake and getting zapped yourself. Is it fun? For many, yes. But is it greatness? Is it genius? Let’s not get carried away.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more about Christopher Nolan flicks, check out my explanation of Inception.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Movie Review: The Trump Presidency

-Originally published April 2020

The new film, The Trump Presidency (2017), melodramatically set to be released just a day before the imminent inauguration of Mr. Trump, is ostensibly a sort of liberal nightmare, a speculative epic that imagines our soon-to-be president’s very worst traits careening the nation toward catastrophe and devastation. Though it benefits from fine performances and at times wild creativity, I found it tasteless, monotonous, overlong, and worst of all, implausible.

Even given Mr. Trump’s faults—and, as any objective observer knows by now, there are many—the movie simply fails to project a feasible vision for our country’s next four years, instead bouncing from one impossible episode to the next. In one sequence, for instance, now-President Trump openly threatens witnesses deposed by a special prosecutor about Russian involvement in the 2016 election—and indeed publicly berates the prosecutor himself—while suffering no legal or even political consequences. While this is dramatic and at times entertaining, I fail to see how congressional Republicans and even conservative journalists, most of whom are good, upstanding people, would stay silent in such a scenario; it’s as if White House activity in The Trump Presidency occurs within a vacuum, isolated from the checks that would certainly reign in or, if necessary, punish such behavior.

But this is just one ludicrous chapter among many. Other subplots, written evidently for sensationalism rather than conceivability, include the president having paid off a porn star (the week before election day, of course), who then graphically details their affair on, of all programs, 60 Minutes; his personal lawyer going to prison in connection with the same scheme; the government being shut down for a month with no apparent objective or result; whimsical nuclear threats being made toward multiple countries; and the president demanding that a vulnerable foreign government pretend to investigate Joe Biden to preempt his supposed 2020 candidacy (Trump, it should be noted, is subsequently impeached for this—but oddly, no one in the film seems to care).

Other imagined moments, especially those driven by Trump’s racial insensitivity, feel more authentic given his campaign rhetoric in 2016, but these, too, come off as overdone and ham-handed. Early in the film, a deadly neo-nazi-style rally—chillingly filmed—leaves the nation wounded, and Trump predictably fails the test of leadership. But rather than use the scene to develop the nuances of Trump’s ideology and personal flaws, the movie portrays him as almost a spokesman of the rally, robbing the moment of the poignancy it deserves. And later, when the administration sloppily attempts to enact the harsh anti-immigration measures it promised during the campaign—an admittedly inevitable moment—children and parents are subjected to treatment the likes of which aren’t fully describable here, but which, I’m not so cynical to doubt, would be swiftly curtailed by better heads if they were ever put into practice.

The film is ultimately a character study about a man, Donald J. Trump, fueled by petulance and narcissism. Indeed, his obsession with negative press coverage provides the true arc of its narrative. In the opening, Trump’s press secretary lies about the attendance of Trump’s inauguration, setting the tone for a barrage of chaotic misinformation—dubbed, in perhaps the film’s signature scene, as “alternative facts” by Kellyanne Conway—that only intensifies throughout Trump’s aforementioned misadventures in office. This quixotic quest is aided by the personalities at Fox News, who, in an impressive, dystopian twist, are seen not only to advance a pro-Trump narrative, but also at times to generate alarming policy ideas that Trump quickly adopts. (It appears that in this movie’s peculiar universe, the President has no more pressing responsibilities than to endlessly watch cable news.)

By the finale, the nation reaps the consequences of Trump’s addiction to convenient untruths, as he characteristically underplays a larger-than-life virus and blunders his way through the ensuing crisis, contributing to wide scale death and an economic meltdown. I found this an interesting, if overly fantastic ending, one that expands the film into a parable of sorts: a warning of the dangers of veering too far from facts and reality in our ever more personalized media bubbles.

Nevertheless, this idea drowns in chaos and spectacle; this film lacks the subtlety characteristic of better material. Mr. Trump will certainly have his failures in office, as all presidents do, but a portrayal as exaggerated as this accomplishes little, other than to aid those who would criticize his vocal opponents as hysterics.

I am no hysteric. I, for one, wish Mr. Trump success in his endeavors to improve our country for all Americans. As this is 2017, and none of these events have happened or will happen, now that I’ve finished writing this review I plan to go to the gym; and later I’ll meet my friends at the bar to watch a game; and tomorrow I’ll go to work at the hospital where I, of course, am completely safe; and this weekend I’ll see my grandparents; and I’ll continue to duly appreciate, as I often do, that most of the people in my life are healthy, employed, and out of harm’s way.

Yes, it’s a good time to be an American—don’t let the worriers get you down.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more on horror films, see my explanation of The Shining

 

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.

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.

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.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Donnie Darko Explained

This won’t be a lengthy piece covering the nuances of Donnie Darko‘s (2001) science fiction rules and minutiae—because in my opinion, that would be a waste of time. If you want that, you can go here and knock yourself out. I’m instead going to focus on why Donnie Darko, despite its famously bonkers plot, is in fact a great movie deserving of critical recognition that it doesn’t often receive.

When Donnie Darko is referenced in critical contexts, it’s usually as an example of a “cult classic.” I think that’s a veiled insult and a mischaracterization. While a cult classic would appeal strongly to a select group and be ignored or forgotten by everyone else, Donnie Darko has contrastingly enjoyed continued popularity and notoriety since its release. Some of its images (especially of Frank the giant bunny rabbit) are among the most recognized in 21st century American film.

The reason for the critical undersell is probably that the solution to the movie’s time travel puzzle 1) is impossible to extract from the original cut of the movie and 2) adds no thematic value whatsoever to the viewing experience. Hence my opting not to touch it in this piece. Apparently the entire plot rests on a made up set of scientific principles that only appear in Richard Kelly’s Director’s Cut. This means that anyone watching the theatrical cut (e.g., virtually everyone who sees the film) will finish the movie with no idea what has taken place. It’s understandable that critics wouldn’t be thrilled with this directorial strategy. 

Plus, even the principles laid out in the Director’s Cut don’t seem to solve the sci-fi puzzle. Apparently the entire movie is centered around a time loop in which every character must push Donnie Darko toward his destiny of saving the world from time fragmentation when a jet engine accidentally enters a wormhole. Yet the overwhelming majority of the movie has absolutely nothing to do with that. Multiple characters, for example, don’t seem to be pushing Donnie toward anything, preferring to stand awkwardly in random places.

But although the movie’s plot makes no sense, it has a unique effect on the movie’s mood, and that dynamic provides the artistic interest of the film. Essentially, Donnie Darko is a mashup of high school movie cliches that is made satirical and creepy by the fact that we have been told that the world is ending.

For instance, Donnie develops romantic feelings for classmate Gretchen, but is this really relevant when we’ve been told the end is so near? Donnie struggles against sappy, overwritten authority figures, but why is he wasting valuable time doing so? The coach of a young girls’ dance team loses perspective, but is this really a pressing matter right now? Mrs. Pomeranz admirably stands up against censorship in the classroom—but what does this have to do with the end of the world? Is any of this even real?

This kind of anxiety isn’t induced by any other film that I’ve seen. Cliches are supposed to make us comfortable; Donnie Darko’s make us panic.

Frank’s dire prediction also means that the tone of Donnie Darko’s comedy can’t be found anywhere else, because we can’t help but wonder what it’s doing in the movie in the first place. Donnie launches into a rant about The Smurfs that would fit neatly into a sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory” maybe, but here the humor is uniquely dark, because Donnie’s situation is inescapably dark. Any lighthearted jokes must exist on a foundation of dread.

Donnie Darko is innovative not because it discards standard cliches, but because it uses them in an environment in which they don’t belong. I wish more movies would do the same. I think artists get proud of themselves for transcending stock characters and scenes, but if they use the same old setting and mood, not much transcendence has really happened. This is a movie worth a rewatch; just don’t overthink it.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more trippy fun, check out my analysis of Mulholland Dr.