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Birdman Explained: Part 1

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

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

ACT I: Riggan’s Quest

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

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

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

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

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

Again, then: why is Riggan doing this?

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong, says a voice in his head.

ACT II: Birdman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACT III: Superpowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Movies Explained

Inception Explained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————————————————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this really real?

 

— Jim Andersen

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

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Why The Breakfast Club is a Failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————-

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sincerely yours,
–Jim Andersen

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

Categories
Movies Explained

Toy Story 3 Explained

Toy Story 3 (2010), directed by Lee Unkrich, is the greatest American animated movie ever made. I know this pronouncement will inspire scorn, since, although the film is popular, it doesn’t get the same reverence as rightful classics like The Lion King (1994), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). But even against heavyweights such as these, Toy Story 3 is king. I’ll dedicate this essay to arguing this claim with a careful analysis of the movie’s themes and characters.

I.

I’ll start by noting that Toy Story 3 is in some ways a remake of an earlier, lesser-known animated feature: Disney’s The Brave Little Toaster (1987), a film about anthropomorphic gang of household appliances whose owner has seemingly left them behind. The gadgets, who only spring to life when humans leave the vicinity, depart the house in desperate search of their “master” and wrestle with the possibility that they’re simply no longer valuable to him.

The Brave Little Toaster is remarkably dark and in some scenes outright disturbing. The movie climaxes in a junkyard, where broken down cars are being chomped to their deaths in a compressor, all the while singing about their assorted regrets. Their laments are harrowing and severe. For instance, you may notice if you watch the clip (linked above), which I’ll continue to refer to throughout this essay, that the final car, who sings of his loving owners eventually having to abandon him when he became too old for use, doesn’t need to be craned to his death—instead, he voluntarily drives into the compressor. (It’s no wonder so many of the YouTube comments recall childhood nightmares stemming from this film.)

But for all TBLT’s embrace of dark situations, the final punch is pulled. That is to say, unlike the junkyard cars, Toaster and his buddies have an owner, Rob, who, inexplicably, actually does want to keep them—so badly, in fact, that when he finds them in the junkyard, he almost dies trying to pull them off the electromagnet. The whole thing was a misunderstanding: he never meant to leave them behind.

So the movie ends happily with a reunion. Still, the overall effect is unsettling: what would have happened to Toaster and his friends if their owner weren’t a fanatical junk enthusiast? What happens to every other toaster, lamp, radio, vacuum cleaner, and blanket in this universe? The Brave Little Toaster attempts to lift our spirits, but it only makes us thankful that Rob is a borderline insane individual.

We’ll give it a pass, though. TBLT confronts a thorny theme that probably doesn’t belong in a children’s movie to begin with: the dark prospect of abandonment. Who could blame it for a less than honest ending? Come to think of it, even for adults, is there any film in existence that takes that most shudder-inducing of real world facts—that our loved ones sometimes move on from us—and gives it authentic positivity? Would such a film even be possible?

 

II.

Eight years after TBLT’s release, one of its lead animators, John Lasseter, directed and co-wrote the first full-length CGI film ever made, Toy Story (1995). And it features a suspiciously familiar premise: household objects are secretly alive, and they pine for love and usefulness. For the second time, Lasseter uses this concept as a springboard for exploring themes of replacement and moving on: the story revolves around protagonist Sheriff Woody’s (Tom Hanks) coming to terms with losing his role as “Andy’s favorite toy.”

But despite the excellence of Toy Story, the viewers are again spared: Woody ultimately befriends newcomer Buzz and realizes that they can both be loved by Andy: the jealousy and competition were, it turns out, unnecessary. Woody’s line from early in the film proves correct: “No one is getting replaced.”

Lasseter returns to write and direct Toy Story 2 (1999), though, and this time he’s bold enough to suggest that, actually, one day, things might not be so rosy. One of the antagonists, Stinky Pete, repeatedly raises the uncomfortable truth that, one day, all toys are thrown away:

Stinky Pete: Idiots! Children destroy toys! You’ll all be ruined! Forgotten! Rotting for eternity in some landfill!

And a new character, Jessie, exemplifies this trajectory in the movie’s most emotional sequence. But in the end of this relatively weak installment, Woody and friends simply decide to return to Andy and triumphantly do so.

It’s plain to see what’s happening. The series is careening closer and closer to The Brave Little Toaster. It’s as if the evil electromagnet were pulling us (or, more accurately, Lasseter) back toward that creepy junkyard, where Toaster and his pals witnessed the truth about what eventually happens to anthropomorphic junk.

And in Toy Story 3 (2010), with Lasseter co-writing, we finally get there. This time, there’s no deus ex machina: Andy is a normal boy on his way to college, not a weird trash lover like Rob, and like every normal college-bound boy, he no longer plays with toys. Our beloved characters, whose existences were defined by Andy’s love in the first two movies, are put away for storage and accidentally thrown out.

 

III.

Why does this premise have such an emotional hold on us? We in the audience aren’t toys or toasters; we don’t need to be played with or used; we don’t have owners—and yet, this is a heartbreaking exposition. Why?

Consider that these characters, unlike any other characters in the history of cinema, are literally mass-produced. They’re made in a factory, painted, distributed. They have many identical replicas in the world. As Buzz painfully learns in the first movie, they’re not unique.

I think that our peculiar attachment to Woody and his pals is for precisely this reason. It allows these movies to tap into a feeling characteristic of contemporary life, a kind of dread, actually: the worry that we aren’t meaningfully unique, that we’re completely replaceable.

It affects all of us. On one hand, we know that we have personalities and experiences that make us unlike any other single person. But on the other hand, don’t our experiences sometimes bitterly suggest that even those who love us can find a person just as good, if not better, when the time is right?

These days, we move around a lot: home to home, employer to employer, relationship to relationship, group of friends to group of friends—and there’s always someone to fill our places. Plus, we live pretty long—long enough, in fact, for many of us to see the day (like the last car in the junkyard) when our caretakers simply leave us. Are we actually so unique and invaluable, then, in today’s world? Or can anyone be replaced on a whim?

 

IV.

Enter Lots-o’-Huggin Bear, the most terrifying animated villain in movie history. I assure you that the evil queen from Snow White cowers before him. Ursula’s tentacles quiver at the mention of his name. Scar whimpers like a kitten, I’ve heard, at a whiff of his strawberry scent. 

Like every Disney or Pixar villain, Lotso is a selfish fiend. Unlike the others, though, he’s not out to gain anything. He’s not trying to take over a kingdom or marry the protagonist. He already runs Sunnyside, and he’s content to continue doing so. His selfishness, rather, is the avoidance of his own emotional pain—at any cost.

This alone makes Lotso infinitely more relatable than the typical larger than life villains trotted out by animation studios. He’s especially relatable, in fact, to the heroes of Toy Story 3. After all, his story isn’t so different from theirs in the prior installments: after being separated from his beloved owner, he arduously treks home to rejoin her. But instead of slipping happily back into place, as they’re able to do, Lotso finds that he has already been replaced by an identical toy.

What if, during Woody’s absence in Toy Story, Andy’s mom had bought a new sheriff? Or a new Buzz in Toy Story 2? It isn’t farfetched at all: as I noted before, the toys are literally mass-produced objects.

So how can they refute Lotso when he preaches the doctrine that all toys are nothing more than interchangeable pieces of plastic? Not only could they have easily met his fate, but they are also at this very moment essentially meeting it anyway: with Andy on his way to college, his toys are obsolete. He has replaced them with a new life, his young adult life. Even Woody, who’s coming along for sentimental reasons, will never be played with again.

Lotso thus has the upper hand, and he exerts it calmly in their haunting confrontation atop a dumpster:

Lotso: What are y’all doing? Runnin’ back to your kid? He don’t want you no more!”

Woody: That’s a lie.

Lotso: Is it? Tell me this Sheriff: if your kid loves you so much, why is he leaving?

There it is, plainly put. This question from Lotso, although it may not be clear at first viewing, is what the trilogy has been working toward all along. It’s the question that The Brave Little Toaster was ultimately too timid to ask but which Lasseter has finally built himself up to pose with seriousness: If a loving bond ends in abandonment, how can it have been real love?

The toys must use all they’ve learned and experienced over the course of the series to respond to this frightening rhetoric. For example, when Lotso drawlingly suggests they come back and “join our family again,” Jessie bursts out, “This isn’t a family! You’re a liar and a bully! … I’d rather rot in this dumpster than join any ‘family’ of yours.” Consider how moving this is from Jessie, who early in Toy Story 2 was desperate to have Woody complete her “family” of Roundup characters so as to avoid being shoved aside as she was by her previous owner. Now, she’s willing to accept oblivion. She’s learned a new definition of family, and she won’t settle for anything less.

Next we get another inspiring moment, this one from an unlikely character. When I first viewed Toy Story 3, I wondered early on why Pixar opted to introduce Barbie and Ken to the mix; after all, they’re a bit overdone. But in the face of Lotso’s taunting, that very ubiquity enables this show-stopping exchange:

Ken: Don’t do this, Lotso!

Lotso: She’s a Barbie doll, Ken! There’s a hundred million just like her!”

Ken: Not to me, there’s not.

Ken has been wholly comic relief until this line, so there’s a temptation to laugh it off, but where in all of Pixar/Disney is there a more genuine romantic moment?

I’m serious. Sure, the studios have fed us memorable love stories for decades, but they’re fairy tales. They’re fated, mandated by destiny. The characters are so exceptional—being various blends of every admirable quality imaginable (and usually royalty, too)—that how could the pairings not work out? Meanwhile, Ken confronts the existence of an infinite number of exactly equivalent options, and, risking death, still chooses Barbie—because….she’s herself. You tell me which is more romantic.

These heroic stands by Ken and Jessie jab at Lotso’s bleak philosophy, but they don’t really faze him. His question still stands: If your kid loves you so much, why is he leaving? He hurls Ken over the dumpster and makes the point again:

Lotso: I didn’t throw you away, your kid did! Ain’t no kid ever loved a toy, really.

For me, this is brutal to watch. He’s hitting them where it hurts. How can the toys, who have sacrificed so much for Andy’s love only to be put away in the attic and left behind, disprove Lotso?

Luckily for the toys—and for us, since, as I’ve indicated, we’re invested in this philosophical clash too—there’s one toy equipped through experience to do rhetorical battle with Lotso. Only Sheriff Woody can save the day.

Woody alone in the series has felt the pain of being replaced. Recall that in the first movie, he’s overcome by jealousy when Buzz becomes Andy’s new favorite toy, and is driven to reprehensible acts. He knows what this feeling can do to a toy, so he steps up and diagnoses the problem:

Lotso: Then she threw us out.

Woody: No. She lost you!

Lotso: She replaced us!

Woody: She replaced you, and if you couldn’t have her, no one could!

Although he’s referring to Lotso’s treatment of Big Baby here, he’s more generally criticizing Lotso’s overall philosophy, essentially arguing: “If you couldn’t be loved, then you decided love was impossible for anyone!” He’s pointing out the disingenuousness of Lotso’s cynicism, speaking, as I’ve said, from experience.

The truly inspiring development, however, is that after Woody recognizes that Lotso was indeed replaced, he insists: “She loved you, Lotso. As much as any kid ever loved a toy.”

Think about this. Woody isn’t saying that Daisy still loves Lotso in any practical sense; he knows she doesn’t. He’s saying that she did love him, and that’s enough. Even though she found another to fill his place, it was love while it lasted, and it was worthwhile. Only someone who was replaced, got past it painfully, and adjusted to a new normal could have made this remarkable statement. Consider too that Woody is by extension admitting that Andy, too, may one day no longer love his toys—perhaps he already doesn’t—but at the same time is declaring that, really, it’s beside the point.

As proof, Woody throws over Daisy’s heart badge. It’s now plain for everyone to see: Woody’s right. Who could’ve made that adorable badge, besides a girl who loved her toy? So what if he was replaced?

But Lotso doesn’t break. Rather than concede defeat, he reveals himself as not merely a commentator on interchangeability, but a purveyor of full-blown nihilism, screaming this horrific line, which, re-watching the scene, gives me chills:

Lotso: We’re all just trash, waitin’ to be thrown away!

What doctrine could be sadder? The event of Lotso’s replacement has led him to this: a declaration of total meaninglessness. It’s no surprise, with this worldview, that at the crucial moment later on, he effectively attempts to murder the toys, departing with an absurd taunt that reinforces his ignorance of anything not beneficial to survival: “Where’s your kid now, Sheriff?” The character of Lotso thus demonstrates the particular route to evil that begins with loss.

 

V.

But as Woody later remarks, “He’s not worth it.” They’ve refuted him and his cynicism, so, unlike in The Brave Little Toaster, the junkyard becomes not bleak and harrowing, but merely the unfortunate end of a long road. Since they’ve experienced love and friendship along that road, they’re prepared to accept it. Out of good fortune they’re rescued by their alien friends (who, it seems, have completed their own arc, now controlling ‘The Claw’ for the good of others rather than accepting it as an agent of fate, perhaps inspired by Woody’s recent saving of one of their own), and so they’re free to start anew with Bonnie.

The ensuing scene is mostly tear-jerking that doesn’t need analysis, but there is one interesting moment. When Andy introduces his toys to Bonnie, he mostly describes their media personas—Buzz as a cool space ranger, Jessie as a spunky cowgirl—but summarizes Woody by saying, “He will never, ever, give up on you.” That’s a strange sendoff for Woody. What about his selflessness and leadership—far more defining traits throughout the series? What is Andy referring to?

He’s talking about Woody’s clash with Lotso. Woody alone was able to argue that Andy’s necessary departure and separation from his toys doesn’t make him unloving; it doesn’t take away all they went through together when Andy was younger. Woody alone never gave up on Andy’s love, temporary though it unfortunately had to be. Woody, chiefly, has enabled this moment, where Andy can give them a simple confirmation that, indeed, Lotso was wrong, and everything was real:

“Thanks guys.”

 

P.S.

You may believe me guilty of overthinking a heartwarming family film. Maybe I have. But when themes like these are concerned, it’s far better to overthink than to under-think. Remember Lotso’s raging line to the toys atop the dumpster: “This is what happens when you dummies try to think!”

This is a revealing insult, because Lotso’s original error is that he doesn’t think. When he sees Daisy with the replacement Lotso, he immediately lets his emotions get the better of him and never looks back. He never stops to consider that in order for Daisy’s parents to buy her an identical replacement, she must have been inconsolable when she realized he was gone.

He doesn’t think about the tantrums that must have occurred. He doesn’t think about the tears, the screaming, the devastation. Had he done so, his goodness could have been salvaged.

It’s a very relatable mistake. It’s hard to think clearly when things seem so terrible. But watching movies like Toy Story 3 helps us sort out these issues so that, perhaps, they won’t ruin us in real life. Woody dissuades us from believing our gut reactions that tell us, inaccurately, that we were fooled in thinking we were loved—that “we’re all just trash, waitin’ to be thrown away!”

And that’s why Toy Story 3 is an amazing movie.  But, I know, I know: that’s great, but you still like The Lion King more.

 

— Jim Andersen

For more analyses of popular movies, check out my explanation of Donnie Darko.

 

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.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Does M. Night Shyamalan Believe His Own Premises?

It’s tough to find examples of filmmakers with serious intent who make bad movies, since those filmmakers are generally weeded out by a studio system that won’t allow anyone except a certified master to try anything interesting. Fortunately, we still have one bona fide hack to learn from: M. Night Shyamalan. Some have said that Split (2016) is his return to form, but that a) is not true and b) presumes he had good form at some point, which is also probably not true.

Shyamalan’s formula for writing a movie is as follows:
1) Come up with an interesting, supernatural premise.
2) Spend an entire movie trying to explain how that premise could actually be true in the real world.

It’s obvious where he goes wrong. Every good artist should ask “what if?” But instead of creating a world to fit the hypothetical, which a good artist would do, Shyamalan insists that the world be the real world exactly as he knows it: banal, Philly-suburban family life, with all its soccer mom bustle and banter, its casual pop culture, its intimidating schoolyards.

Only The Sixth Sense (1999) can even somewhat solve this compatibility issue, and it does so by creating a ridiculous mythos: dead people don’t know they’re dead, and they see whatever they want. Very convenient. But even with this catch-all structure, problems emerge. Is it really possible, for example, that all of the many ghosts who haunted, threatened, and injured Cole were merely trying to be friendly the whole time? If dead people are everywhere, how come everyone isn’t always cold?

It only gets more strained thereafter. In Unbreakable (2000), Shyamalan posits that superheroes exist, and then instead of creating a world in which this might be plausible, he devotes the film to inventing an absurd backstory that explains how a regular man could have superpowers for his entire life without becoming the greatest professional athlete in human history, or some kind of famous psychic.  Does Shyamalan expect us to believe, given this backstory, that it may, in fact, be possible that superheroes exist?  Apparently he does, because there would be no other reason to spend the entire film telling it.

In The Village (2004), we meet a medieval community that doesn’t know it’s 2004. It’s not too far off a modern road, but, as always, Shyamalan thinks he has his bases covered: as he himself explains in cameo, a no-fly zone was declared over the area.

A no-fly zone, you say?  Maybe such a village could exist!

You get the idea, but skip ahead to Split, where dissociative personality disorder confers unpredictable mutant abilities. It’s a fine premise, but why must a stock psychologist spend so much time explaining to us how, via the brain’s natural defensive mechanisms, this can be an actual phenomenon, when we know it can’t be? Even the psychologist herself seems to lose credulousness toward the end, reminding her patient, “there must be limits to what a human can become.” But apparently, there aren’t: she’s immediately killed off after this statement, and the patient later absorbs point blank shotgun blasts. So the psychologist was tasked with convincing us that this patient’s abilities were possible, but then could not believe the degree of those abilities. Is this the real world, or isn’t it?

Shyamalan spends his movies endlessly clarifying his own interesting ideas, because he can’t let go of the possibility that they are actually true. What a strange flaw. It’s almost enjoyable to watch him tie himself in knots, but in the end, it’s just tiring. Stick with X-Men.

-Jim Andersen

For more on overrated movies, check out my article on The Breakfast Club.

Categories
Movies Explained

Eyes Wide Shut Explained: Part 2

This is Part 2 of my analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. For Part 1, go here.

I’m aware that my analysis in Part 1 only explained the movie’s symbolism and didn’t fill any of its frustrating plot holes. This is because only through an understanding of the symbolism can we piece together the disjointed plot.

First we’ll focus on the mystery of Mandy the prostitute, a.k.a. Amanda Curran, who has three appearances: first she overdoses in Ziegler’s bathroom; later, she “redeems” Bill at the orgy; finally, she turns up dead in the morgue. Ziegler denies foul play in her death, but he’s extremely unconvincing in doing so. He merely discredits her as a “hooker” and even exclaims at one point, “her door was locked from the inside, police are happy, end of story!” It’s pretty clear to Bill—and us—that Mandy was killed.

But the big, unresolved question is: Why would Mandy’s act of redemption at the orgy lead to her having been killed? What does “redeem” even mean?

The key is that this line of questioning is misguided, because it assumes that the events of the orgy scene are their own unique events. As we’ve established, however, the orgy is Bill’s dreamlike reflection of the party at Victor Ziegler’s house. Thus, what we should be asking is: what does Mandy do at the Ziegler party that would cause her to be murdered, and how is that projected by Bill into the orgy scene?

Once we ask this, we arrive at an almost too-simple answer: Mandy is killed to protect Ziegler’s reputation following the incident in his bathroom.

This is not a farfetched speculation. Although Kubrick films the bathroom scene in a low-key, casual tone, the situation is horrific. Ziegler, a married man of tremendous wealth, has a drugged, naked prostitute lying unconscious in his own bathroom while he throws a house party.

I doubt anyone would argue that Ziegler is above ordering someone’s death, especially someone as low on the socioeconomic ladder as Mandy. Remember that later on he demonstrates ugly contempt for her: “She was a hooker. That’s what she was.”

Plus, by examining Bill’s dreamlike reimagining of Ziegler’s party—the orgy sequence—we can see that Bill feared for Mandy’s safety even before she was killed. The man in the red cloak, who, as we’ve determined, represents Ziegler, tells Bill, ominously, “Nothing can change her fate now.” This represents Bill at the end of the bathroom scene worrying that Ziegler will have Mandy killed to keep her from talking.

Thus, despite Bill’s composed demeanor in Ziegler’s bathroom, we know from the orgy scene that he was (justifiably) concerned and even pessimistic about Mandy’s safety.

It also seems, given the words of the man in the red cloak during the orgy, that after the bathroom scene Bill feared for his own safety, as well. At the end of the bathroom scene, Ziegler gently requests that Bill keep what he has seen “just between us.” But in the orgy sequence, this is translated as a fearsome threat from the red-cloaked man: “If you tell anyone about what you have seen, there will be the most dire consequences for you and your family!”

It’s interesting to note that, during Ziegler and Bill’s final conversation in Ziegler’s billiards room, they’re ostensibly discussing the events at the orgy, but most of their dialogue sounds more like they’re talking about Ziegler’s bathroom. Bill asks regarding the newspaper article, “Is this the woman at the party?”—but how does Ziegler know that Bill is talking about the orgy and not Ziegler’s own party, when it was the same woman at both events? Plus, a “party” isn’t quite what I’d call the ritual-like event at the mansion, yet Ziegler somehow doesn’t get confused.

Consider also Ziegler’s insistence: “When they took her home she was just fine.” He’s talking about the end of the orgy, but his words evoke Bill’s advice to Ziegler at his own party: “Then, I’d have someone take her home.” The conversation is written this way to indicate that, while the characters discuss the orgy as a literal event, we should really be focusing on what transpired at Ziegler’s house, viewing the orgy as its dreamlike double.

Mandy’s “redemption” at the orgy, therefore, is a representation of how Mandy justified and validated Bill’s presence at the Ziegler party by overdosing, requiring his assistance. Early in the Ziegler party Bill feels insecure and out of his league, but Mandy’s troubles allow him to prove his worth, hence the “redemption.” He projects her medical distress as a melodramatic, intentional intervention on her part. (Ziegler: “You saved my ass.” Bill: “Glad I was here.”)

This all fits neatly together, but I acknowledge that there are some things that still don’t. You may be wondering, for example, about the identity of the mysterious man on the balcony of the orgy mansion. He appears twice: firstly in the aforementioned zoom shot standing on the balcony, during which he and Bill appear to recognize one another; and secondly in a separate scene in which he silently escorts a woman to Bill’s side.

If we were to view the orgy as its own independent event, we would conclude that the man must be Ziegler, since Ziegler later claims to have been there and is the only person we know who could’ve recognized Bill. But even if we were to view the orgy this way, the man’s actions don’t fit Ziegler at all. We first see the man in the grey mask, as previously stated, nodding cordially to Bill; we next see him calmly escorting a woman over to Bill, apparently encouraging her to have sex with him. Contrastingly, Ziegler later reveals that he is furious with Bill for attending the event. The two characters are simply not compatible.

And we know by now that we shouldn’t be asking who the man in the grey mask is literally. It wouldn’t make sense anyway: how could a masked Bill recognize and single out another man in a mask, and the man recognize him in return? We should be asking whom the man represents from the Ziegler party. Ziegler is already represented by the man in the red cloak (flanked by two men in blue, symbolizing his wealth). It can’t be him.

There is, however, a character that Bill recognizes at the Ziegler party and exchanges cordial greetings with: the piano player, Nick Nightingale.

Now, Nick is technically already at the orgy, but don’t get hung up on that. It’s absolutely clear that the man on the balcony represents Nick at the Ziegler party. Consider that Bill sees the man in the grey mask elevated on the balcony, just as he sees Nick elevated onstage playing the piano. And the reciprocal nod between Bill and the man at the orgy is reminiscent of Bill’s catching up with Nick, not of any other exchange at the Ziegler party.

But now the plot hole: we also see the man in the mask escort a woman to Bill at the orgy, while Nick does no such thing at the party.

Or, to be more precise, we don’t see him do any such thing.

When Nick and Bill talk during the party, Nick makes a strange remark during their greetings. Bill says, “I see you’ve become a pianist,” and Nick replies, “Yes, well, my friends call me that.” It’s subtle, and Bill lets it pass, but it’s not clear what Nick is getting at. What do his non-friends call him?

Soon after this, an anonymous man appears and demands: “Nick, I need you a minute.” This is similar to how Bill is later summoned to Ziegler’s bathroom. But if Nick is only playing piano at the event, why would his presence be needed elsewhere? It’s never explained. Something’s off.

Fortunately, what Kubrick hides in the party sequence, he reveals in the orgy ritual. Nick is responsible for procuring the prostitutes at Ziegler’s party. This is made clear by the aforementioned scene in which the man in the grey mask leads the woman to Bill’s side. This woman, who flirtatiously suggests going “someplace quiet,” represents the two models that flirt with Bill at Ziegler’s and all but offer him sex. It’s implied in the orgy sequence, then, that it was Nick who encouraged these “models” to approach Bill at Ziegler’s party. Recall that we never see their introduction, even though we see Sandor Szavost introduce himself to Alice elsewhere in the mansion.

In addition to explaining the Nick’s suspicious comments and activity at the party, this explains another key discrepancy. If we’re assuming that the orgy ritual is only a dreamlike reimagining of earlier events, then it doesn’t make sense that Nick was forced back to Seattle only because he told Bill about the orgy. As with Mandy, we have to find the reason for his punishment within the Ziegler party, not the orgy. And this problem is solved immediately by realizing that it was Nick who hired Mandy, who in turn embarrassed Ziegler by overdosing and necessitating outside help.

Last section. I know it’s been a long read, but I saved the best for last. The only thing we haven’t covered is Alice’s representation at the orgy ritual—because, for some reason, she isn’t represented at all. Or…is she?

Taking a quick, related detour: it’s incongruous that the orgy sequence features appearances multiple appearances from Mandy, given that she only appears at the very end of the Ziegler party episode. Her early appearances at the orgy largely consist of cryptic warnings to Bill, such as, “Go while you still can,” no parallel of which is observed at the Ziegler party, since Mandy doesn’t interact with Bill during the party. If the two sequences are analogs, how to explain Mandy’s expanded role at the orgy?

Now recall that Alice’s bedroom confession causes Bill to worry whether his sexual relationship with Alice has been sustained only because of his income. This dynamic is disturbingly similar, Bill knows, to prostitution, which is why, as I detailed in Part 1 of this analysis, Bill’s subsequent encounters involve prostitution in various forms. We can fill in the last symbolic gap, therefore, by realizing that at the orgy, Mandy represents herself during the redemption scene—but Alice prior to that.

Bill has reimagined his wife as a prostitute. The fact that he projects Alice and Mandy as the same woman in the orgy shows that he perceives uncomfortable similarities between their lifestyles.

This claim works on all levels. When Bill arrives at the orgy, the red-cloaked man “pairs” him with Mandy, just as Ziegler greets Alice and Bill and sends them off with approval. Mandy’s remark, “I’m not sure what you think you’re doing,” is reminiscent of Alice’s “Do you know anyone here?” early in the party. Finally, when Bill asks Mandy at the orgy, “Who are you?” she responds mysteriously with, “You don’t want to know.” Of course he doesn’t: she’s his wife. Bill is reflecting on his own unwillingness to “unmask” the truths of his marriage.

Since this has been a long, heady analysis, I’ll leave its adjunct part up to you, as you watch Eyes Wide Shut again. We’ve talked only about Bill’s psychological experiences and how they manifest in an elaborate, dreamlike sequence. We haven’t talked about Alice’s experiences—but we could if we wanted to, because Alice also reports some dream sequences of her own. Using the manner of analysis that I’ve laid out here, try to connect Alice’s experience at the Ziegler party to her own dreams, which, although not visualized onscreen like Bill’s, are plenty weird and emotionally packed in their own right. 

Perhaps the image that best summarizes Eyes Wide Shut is Ziegler’s pool table. Since we’ve established that red is symbolically linked with sex, we can interpret this image as a commentary that Ziegler, the epitome of the invulnerable elite, uses sex as a game, like billiards, with those of lesser status as the symbolic billiard balls, all for the purpose of maintaining and abusing power. Even well-off people like Bill are mere billiard balls to true bigwigs like Ziegler. The masses act in their own sexual interests, oblivious to the control being exerted on them from the elite.

I suppose, then, that, in the end, my analysis is ultimately a conspiracy theory. Hopefully, it’s been an enjoyable and informative one. Happy re-watching!

 

–Jim Andersen

For more Kubrick masterpieces explained, check out my equally thorough piece on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Movies Explained

Eyes Wide Shut Explained: Part 1

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick’s last film and one of his most difficult to understand. Viewers will likely finish the film with major questions about key events. Who was the woman at the ritual? Who was the man in the grey mask? What was the meaning of the film’s unusual narrative? What was real, and what was a dream?

This piece will definitively answer all of those questions, plus several more. While most analyses of Eyes Wide Shut that I’ve seen focus on connecting the film to dubious, real-world conspiracy theories, my essay below will use actual evidence in the film to draw well supported thematic conclusions. Let the analysis begin.

The action of Eyes Wide Shut begins when Bill Harford’s (Tom Cruise) wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), makes a confession that rattles him. She shares that, in the early years of their marriage, she found herself fantasizing uncontrollably about a naval officer. Since this precipitates such discomfort in Bill, many have concluded that the subject of the movie is sexual jealousy. Jealousy, however, doesn’t quite fit Bill’s behavior. A jealous husband, upon hearing Alice’s confession, would likely have increased his oversight of her out of suspicion. Bill, on the other hand, leaves the house for long periods to go on adventures of his own.

So the first question that will help us understand Eyes Wide Shut is: why does Bill’s bedroom conversation with Alice leave him so upset, and what is the nature of his emotional state following that conversation? The answer, which I’ll go on to support with evidence, is that Bill has become afraid that Alice married him for his money and that, by extension, she doesn’t desire him sexually. 

How this insecurity could arise from Alice’s confession is fairly clear. Her brief fantasy involved a striking officer of presumably lower economic status than Bill, a doctor. Therefore, the story, intentionally or not, casts Bill as the safe, steady choice—and the officer as the desirable but unviable suitor. Although she was “willing to give up… my whole fucking future” for the man, she ultimately remained with Bill, suggesting that she merely settled for him due to his affluence.

And we know that the interplay between money and sex is Bill’s primary concern post-confession because it dominates his subsequent encounters. Bill’s conversation with Marion Nathanson, for instance, replays Alice’s story of the naval officer with Bill in the role of the desirable stranger. Soon afterward, Bill nearly has sex with a prostitute, and after that, he witnesses costume store owner Mr. Millich discover his young daughter in a sexual situation, a discovery that Millich later profits on by prostituting her.

These minor episodes, however, are only thematic openers to the famous “orgy” sequence, in which Bill manages to gain admission to an event that features masked men and women having sex in bizarre, ritualistic fashion.

The key to understanding the orgy is that it represents Bill reflecting on a previous event—the party at Victor Ziegler’s house—through a new lens that has only become available to him following Alice’s confession. As we’ve said, because of Alice’s story about the naval officer, Bill worries that she married him out of economic incentive. Because of that worry, he reflects on the earlier Ziegler party as a hub for the unsettling exchange of sex and money—a reflection brought onscreen in the dreamlike orgy sequence.

Consider that both scenes—the Ziegler party and the orgy—take place at extravagant mansions, and the prospect of sexual adventure, even outside of marriage, is prominent in both. At the Ziegler party, both Bill and Alice flirt with strangers. Ziegler himself, also married, gets in trouble after a prostitute overdoses in his bathroom, necessitating Bill’s medical intervention. Nearly every scene at Ziegler’s party highlights sex as a driving social force.

In addition, the two scenes feature a common dynamic between men and women, in which men are of higher status and women display sex appeal. At Ziegler’s, Bill banters with “a couple of models,” and Ziegler later admits that the woman in his bathroom was “a hooker.” Meanwhile, Alice’s suitor is a rich “friend of the Zieglers.”

It’s fairly obvious that the models who converse with Bill were paid by Ziegler to attend the party, given that even Bill and Alice feel out of their league at the event. Optimistically, the models may have been hired as eye candy; perhaps more realistically, they’ve been paid to be available for the male guests: they all but offer Bill sex, a rather unlikely development unless explained by professional obligation.

Is the Ziegler party, then, all that different from the orgy scene when it comes to the subject of sex? Recall that at the orgy, a red-cloaked man commands women to undress and sends them off with wealthy male guests. Metaphorically, this resembles what Ziegler has done by paying vulnerable young women to attend his party. A great YouTube video exists here detailing the interesting visual cues that link Ziegler to the “man in the red cloak” who leads the ritual at the orgy. It’s difficult to disagree, based on the evidence in the video, that Kubrick wants us to recognize that the two characters play essentially the same role at their respective events.

To understand the orgy sequence, think of it as a dream. Of course, it’s not a literal dream, since Bill does attend the event in reality, as evidenced by his costume rental and his later discussion with Ziegler, who references the orgy and claims to have been a guest. But it unfolds in the manner of a dream, with its events and characters based on real events. Eyes Wide Shut is loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler’s book, Traumnovelle, or “Dream Story,” so it makes sense that the story progresses (in parts) as a dream would.

Having definitively established this link between the movie’s two most crucial episodes, we can explore the symbolic cues they provide for the rest of the movie.

First, I’ll focus on Kubrick’s use of color in the two scenes. The Ziegler party is lit by Christmas lights, multicolored and decorative. The orgy scene, on the other hand, features darker lighting and emphasizes red and blue.

ews partyews orgy

We can infer that the multicolored lights represent the “façade” of the Ziegler party, with its formalities and splendor disguising an ugly interior. Indeed, most sets that Bill passes through during the rest of the movie feature Christmas trees with multicolored lights are present. These invoke the Ziegler party, indicating that Bill is still thinking idealistically, clinging to the façade, resisting his growing suspicion that money and sex are intertwined.

However, after Bill’s final talk with Ziegler, he returns home and turns off the Christmas tree lights, indicating that he’s given into that suspicion, acknowledging its truth. He opens the refrigerator and sits down at his table with a beer. This is truly “where the rainbow ends”—the rainbow revealed to mean the rainbow-colored lights that symbolize idealism, as first introduced at Ziegler’s party.

But what of the red and blue scheme featured in the orgy scene? That, too, recurs throughout Bill’s adventure, and those colors signify, respectively, sex and money. Red is always linked with sex, as it was in the orgy scene when the women undressed on the red carpet, and blue is always linked with money.

Consider firstly the costume store. When Bill first visits, the prominent color is red, as Mr. Millich discovers his daughter having sex with two men. But the second time Bill visits, Millich wears all blue. His daughter enters from a red-lit room with the two men seen earlier, and Millich hints that he has prostituted his daughter (“we have come to another arrangement”). Thus, Millich wears blue to represent his monetary gain, while his daughter still wears red, evoking her sexual participation.

ews costume ews costume2

Secondly, consider the scene with Domino the prostitute. She wears purple, the only character in the film to do so. Purple is a mixture of red and blue; fitting, since Domino’s profession embodies the interplay between money and sex. Consider also the image below that features a red and a blue light behind her head.

ews domino ews domino2

There are many other examples of red and blue being used with these connotations. To survey briefly, however, recall the Harfords’ bed (red), the lighting in the Harfords’ expensive apartment (blue), the bars of the orgy mansion doors (blue—only the rich may enter), and the toy store at the end of the movie (red—the couple agrees that the best solution is to “fuck”).

This framework enables a more telling interpretation of some scenes. Let’s return to Bill’s early cab ride, in which he pictures Alice having sex with the naval officer. The images of Alice and the officer are filtered in grey-blue. But why not red, if red is supposed to be associated with sex? It’s because Bill is only now wondering about the economic motivations of sex following Alice’s confession. Although he’s picturing his wife in a sexual act, he isn’t really thinking about sex; he’s thinking about money and its relationship to what he’s picturing.

ews alice

Now that we’ve covered colors, let’s move on to a different motif: masks. In the orgy sequence, everyone wears them. One might wonder why, if the orgy represents the “true” Ziegler party, the participants have been disguised. But this would be a misinterpretation of the relationship between the two scenes.

Think of it like this: since the the Ziegler party operates via facades and deceptions, its guests are represented in the orgy sequence as wearing literal masks. The orgy doesn’t uncover any secrets to Bill; rather, it represents Bill reflecting on the true nature of the event following Alice’s confession.

It’s significant, therefore, that Bill “loses” his mask at the orgy: following the reflection on money and sex that the orgy represents, he’s less able or willing to put on the same social façade as before. Shortly after he loses his mask, he turns off his Christmas tree lights, a similar symbolic event. This, as stated before, is “where the rainbow ends.” Not surprisingly, then, the costume store is called Rainbow Fashion.

But after returning to his apartment after his conversation with Ziegler, the mask is sitting on Bill’s pillow. Why is the mask there, and how did it get there? The answer is that the mask’s presence symbolizes Bill’s last chance to suppress what he has witnessed. The mask represents the social facade of Ziegler’s guests, a facade that Bill also formerly assumed. But Bill has now become aware of that facade after Alice’s confession: he has “lost” his mask. Kubrick signals to us by cutting to the mask that Bill has one more chance to assume the facade again. The mask isn’t literally there; it’s a symbolic visual.

Notice also that Kubrick cuts to the mask on the pillow long before Bill even enters the bedroom. Kubrick is communicating that Bill is considering this return to his blissful ignorance as soon as he enters the apartment. Bill probably thinks it over as he drinks his Budweiser. Ultimately, though, he decides against reclaiming the mask, instead breaking down in tears to Alice (“I’ll tell you everything!”). In a bizarre, Kubrickian way, it’s an uplifting ending, especially since the couple endures the ensuing difficult conversation and decides to remain together.

 

End of Part 1

Continue to Part 2, which explains the mysteries of Mandy the prostitute, the man on the balcony, and whether Alice was at the ritual.

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movie analysis movie review

Citizen Kane Explained

citizenkanepic

Citizen Kane (1941), directed by and starring Orson Welles, is often regarded as the greatest American film ever made. It is ranked as #1 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years 100 Movies list, and has topped the Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll almost every time it has been eligible.

But more casual movie fans often question the movie’s premier standing.  Perhaps it’s because, unlike with more recent classics like The Godfather (1972), there’s little drama to Citizen Kane‘s plot, because it’s mostly told in retrospect.  It may also be due to a perceived lack of style, a flaw which no one could accuse Pulp Fiction (1994) or Schindler’s List (1993) of having.  Whatever the reason, Citizen Kane eludes some contemporary movie fans.

My goal, then, is to explore the themes of the movie, especially concerning the meaning of its famous ending, in an attempt to make Kane easier to appreciate for skeptics.

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The structure of Citizen Kane, for those in need of refreshing, and so that I can reference it in my analysis, consists roughly of six segments:

  1. Charles Foster Kane dies, and journalists subsequently compose a newsreel outlining the major events of his life. Dissatisfied, the editor sends a reporter, Jerry Thompson, to uncover the meaning of Kane’s last word.
  2. Thompson reads the diary of Walter Parks Thatcher, a banker who, at Mrs. Kane’s behest, took a young Charles away from his Colorado home to be educated.
  3. Thompson interviews Mr. Bernstein, Kane’s former manager. Bernstein describes Kane’s success in increasing circulation of the Inquirer.
  4. Thompson interviews Jedidiah Leyland, Kane’s former friend. Leyland describes Kane’s personal life, and how it affected his political and journalistic career.
  5. Thompson interviews Susan Alexander, Kane’s second wife. Alexander details Kane’s bizarre attempts to turn her into an opera star and describes how she later left him.
  6. Thompson leaves Xanadu, and a slow tracking camera shot reveals the secret of “Rosebud.”

Consider the elegance of the storytelling. The four main interviewees (#2-5) tell, in conjunction, a coherent story of Kane’s life. First, Thatcher’s diary describes Kane’s financial story. Then Bernstein, in perfect segue, tells of how Kane’s operation of his major financial venture—the Inquirer—was influenced by Kane’s own personal qualities, notably charisma and determination. Leyland then reveals how those same qualities eventually led to Kane’s political and marital ruin and a decline in the Inquirer’s journalistic standards. Alexander completes the portrait by expanding on Kane’s dark side, especially regarding his inflexible, controlling nature, and his perceived attempts to be loved without offering love of his own.

As I said: an elegant, enjoyable construction. But other movies have elegant constructions, maybe even equally elegant, and they don’t receive the same accolades. The intricate portrayal of Kane’s positive and negative qualities deserves high recognition as well, but, again, lesser known movies also feature complex character portrayals.

Citizen Kane only truly separates itself in its last sequence, beginning with Thompson being asked, “What did you find out about him, Jerry?” and he responding, “Not much, really.”

This might seem like a strange response, given the four well-told stories he’s heard. But he has a point: despite the elegant storytelling, what have we really learned about Kane?  The interviews illustrate various chronicles that were covered in the newsreel that the journalists had already put together: the rise and fall of Kane’s finances, the rise and fall of the Inquirer, and the rise and fall of Kane’s two marriages and political career. About the most interesting thing we see through the interviews is the recurring theme, emphasized by Leyland and Alexander, of Kane wanting love without giving any in return. As Thompson summarizes, however, that doesn’t amount to much.

Plus, every one of the living interviewees ends their contribution by passing Thompson on to another person, insisting that this new interviewee is instead the best candidate to shed light on Kane’s life. Even Alexander, who was married to Kane for years, believes that Raymond the butler, who subsequently offers essentially no information, can give more insight than she. The interviewees know that they could never gain access to Kane’s deepest self.

Tragically, this also means that no one, with the possible exception of Kane’s deceased mother, ever really knew him, since the four interviewees (five, counting Raymond) were supposedly those closest to him in life. Since Thompson can’t answer his boss’s question “Who was he?” even with all five stories put together, it seems that no one ever will.

But wait.

There is in fact one more interviewee. It isn’t a person, or any character at all. The final interviewee is Welles’ camera, which, unlike the characters in the film, solves for us the mystery of “Rosebud.”

Right before this dramatic reveal, Thompson contemplates what it would have meant to solve the mystery. He is dismissive:

Thompson: “Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything… I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a… piece in a jigsaw puzzle… a missing piece.”

The tension between this quotation and the subsequent “Rosebud” reveal is the heart of the movie. Clearly, Welles’ sly camera thinks it’s found the key to Kane’s lock, a key that Thompson doesn’t believe exists. Does it? Can a word explain a man’s life?

Each time I watch Citizen Kane, I feel differently. Sometimes I side with Thompson: a man’s life is indeed so complex, I decide, that “Rosebud” by necessity leaves so much untouched.

But other times, incredibly, I believe the camera. And it is in these instances when I see clearly the case for Citizen Kane‘s eminence. “Rosebud” comes at us not as a trick, as with other surprising movie endings, but with an aesthetic majesty, a confidence—shared by all great works of art—that its image touches all of life, that it has somehow packaged the incomprehensible into something that its audience can experience.

In this case, the incomprehensible is the loneliness felt by a boy who was jarringly taken from home and was never able to form a true relationship again. He was not “a man who got everything he wanted and lost it,” as Thompson offers, but a man who never had anything, at least not in the way of proper companionship, since his childhood, and who spent an unsuccessful adult life trying to figure out how to get it.  Faced with impending death, he can only turn to the happiness he felt before money and fame.

The themes of loneliness and the search for companionship, however, are important to more than just the character of Charles Foster Kane. He may be the most extremely isolated character in the film, but he isn’t the only one who struggles with interpersonal connection. In fact, all of the characters are unimpressive in this regard. Thatcher has his items stodgily stored in a depressing, impersonal library. Bernstein is amiable, but there’s also a sadness to him, as if he wants nothing more than to have someone to chat with, and now that he does, he’s already resigned to the impending end of the conversation. Leyland is clearly a loner at the nursing home, unable even to connect with the nurses. And Alexander appears isolated to the point of clinical depression.

Forming human connections is perhaps the most difficult challenge of life.  There are so many obstacles to it—pride and fear prominent among them—and for some, like Charles Foster Kane, those obstacles prove too great.  But Welles isn’t deterred by this. The genius of Citizen Kane is to convincingly assert that despite the often-insurmountable difficulties of loving and knowing each other, there is for each of us an emotional, human story.

How many films, even well-made films, are ultimately only Kane before the Rosebud reveal—only empty character portraits, maybe interesting and coherent but still lacking life? How many of our own relationships in real life are Kane pre-Rosebud? Most of them? All of them?

Recall the fence sign that opens and closes the movie: “NO TRESPASSING”. This is an easy metaphor for Kane’s demeanor: he lets no one too close, shutting out those who would have been friends and lovers. But have we, by witnessing the secret of “Rosebud,” done the seemingly impossible—have we trespassed on Kane?  Depending on your opinion, the second and final shot of the sign is either frustrated and defeated, like Thompson leaving for the train, or ironic: the victorious camera mocking the naysayers.

Everyone has different reactions to great pieces of art, but after a well-timed viewing of Citizen Kane, I personally feel tremendous optimism, as if loneliness, although still very real, had been demonstrated to be unimportant.  Charles Foster Kane couldn’t share his story or his self with anyone—but he tried, didn’t he?  And that, Welles illustrates with the authority of a master, may be the most human thing that one can do.

 

–Jim Andersen

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Movies Explained

The Shining Explained: Part 2

This is the conclusion of my analysis of Kubrick’s The Shining. Part 1 untangled the movie’s reincarnation mysteries, explained the ending photograph, and examined the symbolic meaning of “shining.” This part will explain the mysterious Room 237 scene, the man in the bear costume, and Kubrick’s use of mirrors. 

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Contradiction #6: Jack, after encountering the lady in Room 237, calmly tells Wendy afterward that he saw nothing. This lady may be the mother of the murdered twin girls, but for half of the scene she appears as an elderly woman.

This is the most difficult segment of the movie to comprehend, because at first it doesn’t seem like a contradiction. Jack’s words to Wendy seem like an obvious cover up of what he has just experienced in Room 237.

Actually, though, Jack is telling the truth about finding nothing in Room 237, which explains A) his calm demeanor during the subsequent exchange with Wendy and B) his adamant refusal to leave the Overlook, which would be a strange position for someone to take after being chased by a naked, rotting ghost-woman.

My central insight here has already been argued elsewhere, by Rob Ager of collativelearning.com. I intend to clarify and add to that insight, which is this: immediately following the awkward scene in which Danny attempts to retrieve his fire truck from his room and winds up having an eerie conversation with Jack on his lap, Jack molests Danny off-screen. This incident results in Danny’s neck wounds and causes him to become almost catatonic for the remainder of the movie (“Danny’s gone away Mrs. Torrance…”).

Stay with me. This is a heavy claim, and might seem like a stretch. But the evidence is extensive. First, consider the eeriness of the fire truck scene itself.

Jack’s dialogue in this scene is noticeably strange, consisting largely of cryptic phrases like, “I can’t [sleep]. I’ve got too much to do.” Danny clearly notices that something is off and appears quite scared, even requesting reassurance that “you would never hurt mommy and me, would you?” The scene abruptly ends with an out-of-place “bump” in the instrumental score.

Keeping the strangeness of this conversation in mind, consider the infamous scene near the end of the movie in which Wendy comes across a man apparently receiving fellatio from another man in a bear costume (left). This scene is often cited for its apparent randomness, as the man’s identity and behavior are never explained. But recall the scene early in the movie in which Danny talks to the psychologist.

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During that talk, the above image of Danny’s face beside the face of his pillow recurs several times. The pillow, as you can see, depicts a bear. Thus, this image reveals the purpose of man in the bear costume: to tell us that Danny (who is the bear, as the pillow implies) has been sexually forced upon Jack.

This argument opens a gaping hole in the narrative, however. Why, then, did Danny say he was attacked by a “crazy lady” in Room 237? That’s easy. It’s reasonable—expected, even—that Danny would make up a story to avoid implicating his father. The “crazy lady” story sounds very much like what a child would invent to repress a trauma.

Therefore, the scene in which Jack explores Room 237 and finds a nude woman is not a literal event, but Danny’s repressed version of the molestation as he communicates it telepathically to Dick Hallorann. (Remember that during that scene, there are intermittent shots of a trembling Danny and a horrified Hallorann.) The Room 237 scene is the fire truck scene, viewed through Hallorann’s mind as he “shines” it from Danny, who has repressed the literal events. In this repressed version, Danny has been replaced with Jack, and Jack has been replaced by the “crazy lady.”

For evidence, consider the many parallels between the Room 237 scene and the fire truck retrieval scene. Both scenes take place in rooms with the same layout. Both scenes involve an entrant progressing through the layout and seeing someone unexpected—Danny sees Jack awake, Jack sees a woman in the bathtub. Next, this unexpected person makes the same exact motion: Jack’s “come here” gesture to Danny is exactly the same as the bathtub woman’s moving away the curtain. Then, the entrant approaches the unexpected person and the two interact: Danny sits on Jack’s lap, Jack embraces the nude woman.

The fire truck scene cuts here, but we can infer from the Room 237 scene what happens next. In that scene, Jack, after embracing the young woman, sees the woman rotting in the mirror, and he recoils in horror. Symbolically, this is what happens to Danny: he readily approaches his father and then, upon being assaulted, realizes the repulsive side to the initially appealing figure.

There’s a mirror at the foot of Jack’s bed that Kubrick emphasizes with fancy camerawork in multiple scenes. Danny would have seen his own molestation in this mirror, which is why in the Room 237 scene Jack first sees the ugliness of the woman in a mirror. There’s also an editing choice toward the end of the Room 237 scene that shows the old woman rising from the bathtub, which is odd given that our first sight of the woman was as a young woman, not old. This represents Danny’s realization that the figure he approached (his father) was evil all along—that his initially favorable impression of his father was incorrect.

The old woman rising from the bathtub therefore represents Jack waking up from his nap as an ugly, evil person. The shot only comes late in the scene because Danny only realizes too late that he was fooled by his father’s reassuring demeanor.

The brief scene in which an unseen presence rolls a ball toward Danny while he plays with cars is the initiation of Danny’s telepathic communication to Hallorann. Danny is noticeably missing his fire truck in this scene, an indication that his entering Room 237 represents his entering his apartment to retrieve the toy. The scene cuts as Danny enters Room 237 because at this point Danny begins to repress the events; when we next see Room 237, Danny, in his “shining” rendition of events, has replaced himself with his father, and has altered and repressed the sequence as previously described.

So Jack indeed inflicted the bruises on Danny’s neck during the off-screen molestation. Jack denies this to Lloyd, but he does so right before exclaiming that the last time he hurt his son was “three goddamn years ago,” demonstrating that at this time he is personifying his “past” 1920s-30s incarnation, and his recounting doesn’t apply.

Danny attempts to deal with the traumatic event in various ways, firstly by creating the childlike story that his aggressor was a “crazy lady in one of the rooms” and secondly by succumbing completely to Tony. As the psychologist had deduced earlier, Tony had helped Danny to cope with prior violence from his father. Now, as the harm from his father escalates, so does Danny’s reliance on Tony.

The final question to be answered about the Room 237 scene is: why, if it’s Danny’s psychological invention, does it feature such adult content? The answer is that Hallorann also influences what we see, since he receives the vision. He sees Danny’s “crazy lady” fabrication through his own personal lens. Note the two conspicuous pictures of naked women on Hallorann’s bedroom walls immediately before he “shines” the scene from Danny. It makes sense that the molestation as visualized by Hallorann would feature nudity, rather than fatherly love, as the initial “attractor.”

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The 237 scene can be watched, therefore, as a blend between 1) the actual event of Jack molesting Danny, 2) Danny’s childish coping story, and 3) Hallorann’s adult perspective. Truly an original, complex piece of filmmaking that demands even more analysis than I have room for here.

Contradiction #7: Although Danny is white and male, he’s still the victim of violence, which doesn’t fit the Overlook’s history of violence targeted toward women and minorities.

In every scene after the departure of Stuart Ullman, who wears red, white, and blue, Jack and Danny don these patriotic colors. By contrast, Wendy wears greens and browns and at one point a dress with Native American motifs. The message: Ullman, Jack, and Danny have entered the role of the white men who drove away and killed Native Americans, while Wendy has assumed the unfortunate role of the Native Americans.

And Chef Hallorann, too, bears visual association with Native Americans. In the first storeroom scene, directly behind his head is a Calumet baking powder can, adorned by its “chief” logo. Hallorann dies on top of a Native American floor design, as previously mentioned. (And “Chef” and “Chief” are very lexically similar.)

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Since, as we observed in Part 1, the Overlook’s power structure excludes women and minorities, it makes sense that Kubrick visually links women and minority characters to Native Americans, the first “outsiders”—and the first hunted people—in US history.

But Danny, who wears red, white, and blue, is victimized along with Wendy and Hallorann. Why?

Because Jack is a foolish and ineffective perpetuator of the violent tradition. Danny should be allied with Jack, but Jack’s repeated violence and abuse against Danny halts this potential alliance. Remember that Jack endows Danny with the ability to “shine” by drunkenly dislocating his shoulder. Recall also that Danny later uses this ability to call Hallorann, which saves both Wendy and himself. It’s Jack’s own fault, then, that he fails to kill his family and satisfy the Overlook elites.

Delbert Grady foresees the problem, warning Jack: “Your son has a very great talent. I don’t think you are aware how great it is. And he is attempting to use that very talent against your will.” Grady worries specifically that Danny “is attempting to bring an outside party into this situation.”

Minorities are not to meddle in the affairs of the Overlook, Grady implies with this warning, and Danny, who, by virtue of his race and gender, should be a conspirator, is instead helping the outsiders. Grady suggests based on this that Danny and his supportive mother “need a good talking to….perhaps, a bit more.”

This evokes political attempts to curtail others’ rights and opportunities. For outsiders to gain entry into structures that have long excluded them, they need some help from the inside, from those already part of those structures. Someone highly invested in the status quo would indeed be alarmed upon seeing this take place. They would advocate dealing with it “in the harshest possible way.”

Danny, then, ruins everything from the Overlook’s perspective. He doesn’t follow in in his father’s footsteps; instead, he helps the intended victim—Wendy—escape her fate. Recall that in Jack’s final moments in the maze he acts like a drunkard. Fitting, because it’s his own drunken injuring of Danny that, in the end, fatally foils his attack (“Hair of the dog that bit me!”).

Contradiction #8: All of the “ghosts” that Jack converses with appear in front of mirrors. However, there’s no mirror in the scene where Jack speaks to Grady in the store room.

Many believe, incorrectly, that the mirrors demonstrate that Jack is talking to himself rather than Grady, Lloyd, and the woman in Room 237—that they’re the mere inventions of an insane man. This theory loses steam in several places. Firstly, Danny and Wendy also encounter ghosts, and these ghosts don’t have mirrors behind them. Secondly, Grady physically lets Jack out of the store room (where there isn’t even a mirror), definitively disproving all arch-theories of the “None of it was real” variety.

The ghosts are all too real. And as previously discussed, the tangible intervening of Delbert Grady demonstrates the tangible influence of old power structures.

What of the mirrors, then?

The mirrors are simply another reinforcement of the connection between past and present, which we’ve already seen in the inclusion of a Charles and Delbert Grady and with two separate Mr. Torrances. Put succinctly: When Jack talks to Lloyd and Grady, he is talking to people just like himself, hence the mirrors. (The Room 237 scene is not a literal occurrence, as we’ve seen, so the lady’s appearance in the mirror is not relevant here.) Grady, Jack, and Lloyd are all part of the Overlook’s “boys club,” so Jack can see a lot of himself in those two companions. This is the meaning of the mirrors in these two sets.

But there’s even more to the mirrors. Watch again the scene after Wendy accuses Jack of harming Danny’s neck—a correct accusation, as we’ve seen. Jack walks down the hallway in front of the Gold Room, passing mirrors on his right (our left). Each time he passes a mirror, he makes a gesture of frustration, accompanied by a jolt in the musical score. This is Jack feeling guilty: he can’t stand the sight of himself after what he has done.

The important question, though, is, can we, the viewers, stand our own reflections? This is the underlying premise of another famous scene, in which Danny uses Wendy’s lipstick to write on the bathroom door, “REDRUM.” When Wendy wakes up, she sees in the mirror what Danny has written, which now appears as “MURDER.” The takeaway: if we as a nation were to look honestly in the mirror, we would see murder: the murder of Native Americans, the spirit of which continues to inform the everyday reality of the United States. 

The Shining, then, is a damning criticism of the United States from Kubrick, but he does more than criticize: he offers a solution. Remember how Danny escapes Jack in the maze. He retraces his steps. This heroic act is what Kubrick wants us to do, figuratively.

To have knowledge of history, to act based on this knowledge, to “shine”—this is how we escape the maze and save our society from violence and corruption. By film’s end, Kubrick wants us to shine with Danny and Wendy, to have awareness of the sinister undercurrent of our nation’s history and to prepare to retrace our steps and correct the problem.

An honest appraisal of our history would be a major change. As Kubrick shows us, the tendency heretofore has been to simply “Overlook.”

 

—-Jim Andersen          

For more Kubrickian analyses, check out my piece on Eyes Wide Shut.