Lino Brocke was Filipino film-maker. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whom he resembles in certain respects, Brocke was openly gay and fantastically productive -- he is said to have made nearly 60 films between 1970 and his untimely death in a car crash in 1986. Brocke was a tormented figure before he discovered his vocation. Raised as a Mormon, he traveled to Hawaii from the Phillipines and worked among the lepers on the island of Molokai. His homosexuality and religious doubt plagued him and he abandoned his mission after a couple of years, traveling then to San Francisco. In San Francisco, he worked menial jobs, at times caring for the elderly in nursing homes. He returned to Manilla during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Working in TV first, Brocke established himself as a hyper-efficient and economical director. He was recruited into the film industry and, essentially, established a Golden Age of Filipino Cinema. Of course, his Leftist political leanings made his films suspect with Marcos. He was jailed on occasion and managed also to offend Corazon Aquino, Marco's Leftist successor. She also threatened him. Many of Brocke's films are acclaimed as masterpieces. But, until the restoration of his signature work, Manila: In the Claws of Light, an adaptation of a novel by Edgardo Reyes, most of his movies were either lost or on the verge of being lost. Efforts are now underway to restore his most important works, Manila: In the Claws of Light was painstakingly restored from various fragments in the collection of film archives in the Phillipines, the U.K. and Italy. The restoration, financed in part by Martin Scorsese's International Film Foundation, was done in conjunction with the Bologna Ritrovatta foundation.
Manila (ITCL) is Dickensian. It's like Oliver Twist in which Bill Sykes triumphs. The movie is harrowing and, although I'm glad that I watched it (and would recommend the picture), I don't think I would willingly endure the ordeal a second time. Shot on the streets of Manila during a period of ferocious repression, the movie has a documentary look, although it is composed and edited intelligently in the manner of well-made movies and TV shows produced in the Seventies -- the film was released in 1975. The picture contains a surprising amount of overtly homosexual subject matter -- in this way, the picture seems to presage the nonchalantly gay sequences in films made by the Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethul. There is a hoax or false premise in the film that considerably debilitates its persuasiveness, although the picture is intensely gripping, often, disturbing, and will rouse violent passions in its viewers.
The story concerns a young man from the boondocks who has traveled to Manila to find his childhood sweetheart. It is immediately clear that she has been lured to the big city and trafficked into the sex-work industry. Prostitution is central to the film and depicted as pervasive and ubiquitous. The young woman bears the tendentious name "Hilda Paraiso" ("Joyful Paradise") and she has been coerced into becoming the sex-slave of a Chinese oligarch named Ah Tek. The film is about 125 minutes long and the hero doesn't find his long-lost girlfriend until the last half hour of the picture. The first part of the film shows the protagonist, the 21year old naïf Julio, played by Rafael Roca, Jr., struggling to survive on the mean streets in Manila City, mostly at the intersection of Misericordia and Ongpin, a crossroads over which Ah Tek's importing firm looms, the place where Julio thinks Hilda is held captive. Julio works on a construction site. On his first day of work, he's so hungry that he passes out on the job although his fellow-workers are kind, give him some food, and, ultimately, show him how to sleep in a construction hut on the premises. The work is dangerous and, when people get horribly injured, there doesn't seem to be any workers compensation in evidence. Filipino society is portrayed as uniformly corrupt on all levels: A Chinese woman harangues her customers while she bargains with them, the boss on the construction site defrauds his workers, the contractor employs a system call "Taiwan" to make the laborers pay 10% for the release of their paychecks, prostitutes of both sexes roam the streets, and people pretending to be cops shake-down pedestrians and steal their money. Purse-snatchers abound and people who complain about the corruption are shot down or tortured to death by death squads in jail-house cellars. Rapacious land-owners oust peasants and steal their land -- it's a dog-eat-dog world with horrific slums in which children swim gaily in sewage. All of this is pretty much displayed as a full-frontal assault on the audience and, after about a half hour, the audience is hankering for some sort of payback. The film is conventionally shot and plotted so that we are encouraged to wish that the poor will rise up and violently revenge themselves upon their tormentors. But this doesn't occur, except problematically in the last ten minutes of the picture. Julio has various adventures while he searches for Hilda, including a stint as a male prostitute servicing wealthy homosexuals -- these scenes are shot in a totally matter-of-fact way: the young prostitutes proclaim to one another that they are heterosexual while performing tricks with the businessmen who pick them up on the streets. (Brocke is expert as shooting in darkness on location -- a scene at park where men cruise for sex is expressionistically lit by huge neon advertising signs. His scenes in the terrifying slums and the male brothels are all shot with natural light in locations that must have been very difficult to manage, particularly with harassment by Marcos' goons.) Finally, Julio finds Hilda -- her captor has allowed her to attend Church for Christmas. She goes with Julio to a movie theater where they talk while watching King of Kings re-released for Christmas and, then, take a room at a cheap hotel. There follows a long and emotionally devastating scene in which Hilda explains how she was trafficked, forced into prostitution, and, then, sold to the Chinese businessman. He abuses her and threatens her baby -- she has had a child in captivity. The sequence is shot like some of the more harrowing sequences in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage -- Brocke uses long takes with his camera close to the two nude protagonists: he shoots them talking into the camera from the shoulders up against the bare wall of the poverty hotel where they are hiding. Julio encourages her to meet him that night so that they can flee to the village where they were childhood sweethearts. Of course, the villainous Ah Tek (like Bill Sykes) gets wind of the plot, beats Hilda to death and, even, kills her baby. The rest of the film is a variant on Scorsese's Taxi Driver -- Julio goes to Ah Tek's place, located above a long squalid set of stairs, stabs the villain repeatedly while he squeals like a pig, then, pitches him down the steps. The Filipinos, who show a strong propensity (then as well as now) for vigilante justice, chase down Julio and, presumably, beat him to death. The films ends with slow-motion and, then, a freeze-frame of Julio shrieking at his tormentors. The slaughter of Ah Tek, stabbed about thirty times with an ice-pick, is pleasingly cathartic -- although, I regret, that the audience is supposed to applaud this murder. Brocke is didactic -- before murdering Ah Tek, we see a Communist parade on Main Street, lots of red banners and people singing the Internationale. Julio and his buddy turn away from this parade, representing, I suppose, a positive political approach to the country's injustice, and, then, uses "self-help", as they say, to avenge Hilda.
The film contains frequent annoying interpolations showing the idyllic village and Julio's sweet love affair with Hilda by the sea-side. These shots are golden with panoramic sunsets and blue frothy sea -- the interpolated imagery looks like an ad for a Sandals resort in the Dominican Republic. This imagery is a lie: if village life were so idyllic, why does Mrs. Cruz, the evil sex-trafficker, have no difficulty recruiting village maidens for a life of horrific abuse? Why are the squalid slums full of folks from the country? The fact is that the city is awful and full of predators but it is still better than the impoverished life that these people are fleeing in the country. (Brocke is honest enough to show this -- one of the laborers at the medieval construction site gets a night school degree and ends up making an excellent wage in advertising. No sooner a member of the middle class, the man begins oppressing his fellow workers.) The film's other deficit is the performance by Rafael Roca as Julio -- he is prettier than Hilda, pouting and batting his sad doe-eyes for the camera. I would have preferred a more robust leading man, but, maybe, this criticism is a bit unfair.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Thursday, March 28, 2019
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht)
In 1973, the ferociously prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, produced a four hour mini-series named World on a Wire for German TV. Thought lost for many years, the program resurfaced around 2010 as digital file shared between Fassbinder fans. Subsequently, a print of the series was discovered and the film was lovingly restored by the Fassbinder Stiftung (Foundation). Fassbinder died at 37, the victim of various kinds of debauchery, but he was a tremendously efficient work-horse when it came to making theater, film, and TV. World on a Wire is Fassbinder's only venture into science fiction and, in fact, turns out to be prescient -- the movie anticipates many later films such as The Matrix and explores themes relating to artificial intelligence and computing that seem remarkably contemporary. Fassbinder's direction is wildly histrionic, baroque, and inventive -- he seems to have had some contempt for the subject matter and, therefore, amused himself by configuring a delirious mise-en-scene for the mini-series. Just about all of Fassbinder's regular acting company are on display in the movie. Most of them seem to have been urged to speak their lines mechanically and as fast as possibly -- Brechtian estrangement effects are everywhere in evidence. But since the plot involves robots and artificial intelligence, the blank robotic manner in which the film is acted seems, more or less, appropriate to the subject matter.
Fassbinder takes his time developing the premise -- in fact, the first two hours seem structured as a sort of lackadaisical crime story, and the true situation, involving a parallel reality, although hinted-at from time to time, isn't really explained until about 100 minutes into the story. A sinister corporation (is there any other kind?) named Institut fuer Kybernetisches Zukunftforschung -- the Institute for Cybernetic Research into the Future (abbreviated IKZ in the show) -- has created computer programs that simulate real people and situations and, then, runs these programs to predict how consumers will respond to certain stimuli. The simulations are realistic and powerful and can be used to accurately determine how current economic trends will develop. It seems that IKZ has a contract to predict market demand in the steel industry and this commitment by the corporation is the focus of skullduggery. A director and chief programmer named Vollmer dies after advising that his head feels like it will explode. As he is dying, Vollmer tells a security agent, Herr Lause, that something is rotten in the State of Denmark (here IKZ). Lause, then, vanishes while talking with another corporate executive, Stiller, at a depraved-looking party -- lots of people posturing in states of semi-nudity and diving into a pool enclosed in some sort of ovoid steel egg: at this party a chanteuse sings the Marlene Dietrich tribute to "the boys in the back room" in English and about an octave below the range used by the husky-voiced Dietrich -- it's all lavishly outré. Stiller spends the next hour or so looking for Lause who turns out to be some kind of "sim" -- that is, a simulation himself. Stiller's secretary seems to be laboriously, if picturesquely dying and has been replaced by the ridiculously buxom Miss Fromm. She seems to be an agent for IKZ engaged in surveillance of Stiller, although this remains unclear from beginning to end. Stiller's love interest is Eve Vollmer, the daughter of the deceased executive. She intermittently vanishes but, then, turns up on odd occasions when the embattled Stiller needs her. Fassbinder's relation to women was complex and the females in the program are all bizarre caricatures of one sort or another -- they seem highly decadent and Eva Vollmer, for instance, is gorgeous and anorexic: she is like a corpse bride.
Fassbinder's stages this material in a showy, even grandiose display of his ingenuity as a director. People are used as motionless décor and there are perverse tableaux. Just about every scene involves mirrors or semi-translucent planes of glass -- Fassbinder, who was famously efficient, often uses mirrors to stage dialogue between two widely separated actors without having to change the angle or position of the camera: if you can see both participants in the conversation in one shot via the use of mirrors, why use a different camera set up? Fassbinder's mannerist use of reflections seems labored sometimes in films like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant which Welt am Draht closely resembles stylistically -- but, here, in a plot involving a parallel mirror universe, the obsessive interest in reflected images seems appropriate, even, necessary. The colors are deeply saturated and there are portentous zoom shots, huge inexpressive close-ups, and, even, a startling ankle-high tracking shot across a floor. The acting is highly stylized and the dialogue either laconic or densely informative (and, so, delivered in a kind of Brechtian amplified and hyper-speed shriek.) The soundtrack is a weird mélange of opera, kitschy tangos, Nazi marching songs, and electronic skreeling -- each scene is scored differently and the musical numbers playing beneath the action begin when the sequence starts and neatly end when it ends. Generally, it's impossible to figure out the correlation between the music, curiously independent from the images, and the scenes that they underscore.
David Thomson remarks apropos Fritz Lang that the director's movies became better in America because the U. S. studio system required that he produce a film running less than 2 hours for which he would have used three or more hours screen time in Germany. Fassbinder's narration in World on a Wire is profoundly (and perversely) inefficient -- it's like Lang's enormous spy thrillers involving Dr. Mabuse, the picture just goes on and on and on. At about the two hour mark, Stiller figures out that he is probably a computer program running amidst other computer programs or "units". In his world, the characters periodically enter another realm that they believe to be simulated by IKZ -- but, in fact, this simulation is merely a simulation within another simulation and, ultimately, it's not clear how many iterations of simulated world are superimposed on one another. For some reason, Stiller's discovery of this fact causes the authorities at IKZ to determine that he must be "deleted". This leads to an extended chase that begins after about two hours and forty-five minutes. This chase, which is intermittently exciting, continues until the end of the movie. The chase makes no sense -- I don't understand why the "programmer" doesn't just press "delete" and erase the pesky Stiller on his computer. Instead various thugs and sinister corporate execs have to capture and kill him resulting in gun battles, car chases and, even, a showy explosion. (I think the idea is that Stiller's understanding that the whole world is a fiction destabilizes the simulation and will cause it's characters to behave in deviant ways that may imperil the program's integrity -- after all, the program is being run to ascertain the future of the steel economy. This is just speculation, however. True to form, no one's motivations are ever clear.) Fassbinder's technique is spectacular throughout the picture, even when the mini-series stalls out and becomes almost unbearably tedious -- it has about an hour that is intensely boring about midway through the show. (The same problem occurs even more dramatically in Berlin Alexanderplatz in which about four hours of the 16 hour program are so dull as to be unwatchable -- nothing occurs and this nothing is filmed in sewer-brown darkness.) The chase is outlandish and requires poor Klaus Loewitsch, playing Stiller, to bound and leap over obstacles and run at high speeds during extended takes through a sort of parkour course. Loewitsch is bow-legged and tiny -- the women in the film tower over him. In Hollywood and TV movies a short leading man would be filmed in ways to make him look taller and bigger -- Alan Ladd and Tom Cruise are examples of diminutive leading men who were shot in ways to enhance their stature. Fassbinder will have none of this -- he stages his shots to emphasize that Loewitsch, who looks a bit like a small Humphrey Bogart, is a homunculus, adding to the film's sense of unreality. (Hollywood defines what constitutes "realism"; paradoxically, deviations from Hollywood norms see "unrealistic.") Elements of the program are extravagant to the point of operatic excess. Stiller has speculated that his world is Platonic -- in other words, a shadow play in which reality is only dimly reflected. This notion is embodied in a bizarre scene in which we see the shadows of marching Nazis, hear the marching song "Ach du schoener Westerwald" and, then, watch Ingrid Caven singing "Lilli Marlene" in her deep, raspy baritone voice -- the Nazis shoot her at the end of the scene. This is supposed to be some kind of cabaret act although it's so bizarre as to be "unreadable". Of course, these kinds of scenes, with their attendant absurdity, call into question the film's realism and, in fact, are consistent with the notion that the world Fassbinder portrays is entirely illusory, at one point described as a "computer program with a mad programmer on the keyboard." Gorgeous half-naked men appear out of nowhere, the chase scene has no continuity -- it just jumps from locale to locale, people wear outrageous clothing and there are bizarre instances of color coordination (mostly acrid oranges) between the scenes. Toward the end of the movie, the shots are littered with zombie-like extras, people listlessly dancing in strange rooms or forming equally listless mobs shouting "Murderer! Murderer!" as poor Stiller performs his gymnastic parkour routines. One servant has perfectly coiffed black spit curls like Betty Boop. My favorite German actor, Peter Kern, appears as a thug with his hair dyed to a crisp flaming red and poor haggard Eddie Constantine, Godard's star in the similarly exotic Alphaville, makes a cameo appearance -- he looks like death warmed-over. In the end, Stiller is redeemed by love; it turns out that he is the spirit of someone loved by Eva Vollmer and injected in Stiller's tiny, if muscular, body. Reality is established by the use of a hand-held camera signifying the true, non-digital world -- also notable for having windows and not mirrors and shag carpets. Fassbinder anticipates the universe of pictures like The Matrix with uncanny prescience. But he doesn't get phone technology right -- for some reason, Fassbinder thought that phones would get larger and more exuberantly colored in the future. People peck out phone numbers are yard-wide orange telephones. Fassbinder was only 27 when he made this movie but, from the perspective of sheer style, the film is an accomplished masterpiece. It's not something I would want to watch again, but it's certainly astonishing in many respects.
Fassbinder takes his time developing the premise -- in fact, the first two hours seem structured as a sort of lackadaisical crime story, and the true situation, involving a parallel reality, although hinted-at from time to time, isn't really explained until about 100 minutes into the story. A sinister corporation (is there any other kind?) named Institut fuer Kybernetisches Zukunftforschung -- the Institute for Cybernetic Research into the Future (abbreviated IKZ in the show) -- has created computer programs that simulate real people and situations and, then, runs these programs to predict how consumers will respond to certain stimuli. The simulations are realistic and powerful and can be used to accurately determine how current economic trends will develop. It seems that IKZ has a contract to predict market demand in the steel industry and this commitment by the corporation is the focus of skullduggery. A director and chief programmer named Vollmer dies after advising that his head feels like it will explode. As he is dying, Vollmer tells a security agent, Herr Lause, that something is rotten in the State of Denmark (here IKZ). Lause, then, vanishes while talking with another corporate executive, Stiller, at a depraved-looking party -- lots of people posturing in states of semi-nudity and diving into a pool enclosed in some sort of ovoid steel egg: at this party a chanteuse sings the Marlene Dietrich tribute to "the boys in the back room" in English and about an octave below the range used by the husky-voiced Dietrich -- it's all lavishly outré. Stiller spends the next hour or so looking for Lause who turns out to be some kind of "sim" -- that is, a simulation himself. Stiller's secretary seems to be laboriously, if picturesquely dying and has been replaced by the ridiculously buxom Miss Fromm. She seems to be an agent for IKZ engaged in surveillance of Stiller, although this remains unclear from beginning to end. Stiller's love interest is Eve Vollmer, the daughter of the deceased executive. She intermittently vanishes but, then, turns up on odd occasions when the embattled Stiller needs her. Fassbinder's relation to women was complex and the females in the program are all bizarre caricatures of one sort or another -- they seem highly decadent and Eva Vollmer, for instance, is gorgeous and anorexic: she is like a corpse bride.
Fassbinder's stages this material in a showy, even grandiose display of his ingenuity as a director. People are used as motionless décor and there are perverse tableaux. Just about every scene involves mirrors or semi-translucent planes of glass -- Fassbinder, who was famously efficient, often uses mirrors to stage dialogue between two widely separated actors without having to change the angle or position of the camera: if you can see both participants in the conversation in one shot via the use of mirrors, why use a different camera set up? Fassbinder's mannerist use of reflections seems labored sometimes in films like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant which Welt am Draht closely resembles stylistically -- but, here, in a plot involving a parallel mirror universe, the obsessive interest in reflected images seems appropriate, even, necessary. The colors are deeply saturated and there are portentous zoom shots, huge inexpressive close-ups, and, even, a startling ankle-high tracking shot across a floor. The acting is highly stylized and the dialogue either laconic or densely informative (and, so, delivered in a kind of Brechtian amplified and hyper-speed shriek.) The soundtrack is a weird mélange of opera, kitschy tangos, Nazi marching songs, and electronic skreeling -- each scene is scored differently and the musical numbers playing beneath the action begin when the sequence starts and neatly end when it ends. Generally, it's impossible to figure out the correlation between the music, curiously independent from the images, and the scenes that they underscore.
David Thomson remarks apropos Fritz Lang that the director's movies became better in America because the U. S. studio system required that he produce a film running less than 2 hours for which he would have used three or more hours screen time in Germany. Fassbinder's narration in World on a Wire is profoundly (and perversely) inefficient -- it's like Lang's enormous spy thrillers involving Dr. Mabuse, the picture just goes on and on and on. At about the two hour mark, Stiller figures out that he is probably a computer program running amidst other computer programs or "units". In his world, the characters periodically enter another realm that they believe to be simulated by IKZ -- but, in fact, this simulation is merely a simulation within another simulation and, ultimately, it's not clear how many iterations of simulated world are superimposed on one another. For some reason, Stiller's discovery of this fact causes the authorities at IKZ to determine that he must be "deleted". This leads to an extended chase that begins after about two hours and forty-five minutes. This chase, which is intermittently exciting, continues until the end of the movie. The chase makes no sense -- I don't understand why the "programmer" doesn't just press "delete" and erase the pesky Stiller on his computer. Instead various thugs and sinister corporate execs have to capture and kill him resulting in gun battles, car chases and, even, a showy explosion. (I think the idea is that Stiller's understanding that the whole world is a fiction destabilizes the simulation and will cause it's characters to behave in deviant ways that may imperil the program's integrity -- after all, the program is being run to ascertain the future of the steel economy. This is just speculation, however. True to form, no one's motivations are ever clear.) Fassbinder's technique is spectacular throughout the picture, even when the mini-series stalls out and becomes almost unbearably tedious -- it has about an hour that is intensely boring about midway through the show. (The same problem occurs even more dramatically in Berlin Alexanderplatz in which about four hours of the 16 hour program are so dull as to be unwatchable -- nothing occurs and this nothing is filmed in sewer-brown darkness.) The chase is outlandish and requires poor Klaus Loewitsch, playing Stiller, to bound and leap over obstacles and run at high speeds during extended takes through a sort of parkour course. Loewitsch is bow-legged and tiny -- the women in the film tower over him. In Hollywood and TV movies a short leading man would be filmed in ways to make him look taller and bigger -- Alan Ladd and Tom Cruise are examples of diminutive leading men who were shot in ways to enhance their stature. Fassbinder will have none of this -- he stages his shots to emphasize that Loewitsch, who looks a bit like a small Humphrey Bogart, is a homunculus, adding to the film's sense of unreality. (Hollywood defines what constitutes "realism"; paradoxically, deviations from Hollywood norms see "unrealistic.") Elements of the program are extravagant to the point of operatic excess. Stiller has speculated that his world is Platonic -- in other words, a shadow play in which reality is only dimly reflected. This notion is embodied in a bizarre scene in which we see the shadows of marching Nazis, hear the marching song "Ach du schoener Westerwald" and, then, watch Ingrid Caven singing "Lilli Marlene" in her deep, raspy baritone voice -- the Nazis shoot her at the end of the scene. This is supposed to be some kind of cabaret act although it's so bizarre as to be "unreadable". Of course, these kinds of scenes, with their attendant absurdity, call into question the film's realism and, in fact, are consistent with the notion that the world Fassbinder portrays is entirely illusory, at one point described as a "computer program with a mad programmer on the keyboard." Gorgeous half-naked men appear out of nowhere, the chase scene has no continuity -- it just jumps from locale to locale, people wear outrageous clothing and there are bizarre instances of color coordination (mostly acrid oranges) between the scenes. Toward the end of the movie, the shots are littered with zombie-like extras, people listlessly dancing in strange rooms or forming equally listless mobs shouting "Murderer! Murderer!" as poor Stiller performs his gymnastic parkour routines. One servant has perfectly coiffed black spit curls like Betty Boop. My favorite German actor, Peter Kern, appears as a thug with his hair dyed to a crisp flaming red and poor haggard Eddie Constantine, Godard's star in the similarly exotic Alphaville, makes a cameo appearance -- he looks like death warmed-over. In the end, Stiller is redeemed by love; it turns out that he is the spirit of someone loved by Eva Vollmer and injected in Stiller's tiny, if muscular, body. Reality is established by the use of a hand-held camera signifying the true, non-digital world -- also notable for having windows and not mirrors and shag carpets. Fassbinder anticipates the universe of pictures like The Matrix with uncanny prescience. But he doesn't get phone technology right -- for some reason, Fassbinder thought that phones would get larger and more exuberantly colored in the future. People peck out phone numbers are yard-wide orange telephones. Fassbinder was only 27 when he made this movie but, from the perspective of sheer style, the film is an accomplished masterpiece. It's not something I would want to watch again, but it's certainly astonishing in many respects.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Moon
Morose and disturbing, Moon (2009) is a science-fiction film that, if not exactly entertaining, is, nonetheless, worthwhile in its modest, non-assertive way. The film is reticent, makes its points quickly, and quietly and seems strangely non-declamatory -- there's an apologetic aura about the movie, as if it doesn't really want to disturb its viewers with the full implications of its plot, but, rather, seems reticent and suggestive -- the movie counts on those watching it to draw appropriate conclusions from its ascetic narrative.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) believes that he is a worker assigned supervisory duties at a lunar mine. He works alone, aided by a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey imitating the suave, sinister, and ingratiating tone of Kubrick's HAL). Sam is lonely and looks forward to being reunited with his wife at the end of his three-year contract. But something seems wrong -- communications with Earth have failed and Sam seems oddly distracted. When he goes out to service a mining vehicle, a "Harvester", an accident occurs. He awakes in the infirmary -- strangely, the cut he received in the accident and a burn on his hand seem to have completely healed. How much time was he unconscious? When Sam goes to the site of the crash with the mining "Harvester", he discovers himself, severely injured in the wrecked vehicle. He carries his own body back to the lunar station where he works and, then, when the injured man wakes up engages in a debate with him -- which one of us is the clone? Ultimately, the two men discover that they are both clones and, in fact, just part of a series of workers stored in hibernation in the hidden bowels of the lunar station -- as one worker fails, another is brought on-line to replace his predecessor. Although the point is never made explicitly, Sam (and the series of Sams) are just replacement parts, apparently designed with a three-year life expectancy -- when the loneliness and danger overcomes one clone, another is activated to take the old clone's job. Their memories of home are artificially implanted -- a theme more fully developed in Bladerunner. This is an interesting premise, but it really can't go anywhere. Working together, the two Sams discover the horrible truth about their existence. They break down towers jamming communication with the lunar mining station and discover that, at least, 12 years have elapsed since the first Sam began his three-year contract at the mining operation -- Sam's toddler daughter is now 15 years old and his wife has died. (There are holes in the narrative -- what were the people back on earth told about Sam's failure to return? And, in fact, if there are multiple Sams, why not let the original guy go home?) The dying Sam, at the end of his three-year "contract", is vomiting blood and losing his teeth. He looks awful. He volunteers to be deposited as a casualty in the wrecked "harvester" where he dies and the new Sam somehow gets shot home -- fired across space to land on the Earth. This occurs under time-pressure as a group of thugs from the Corporation on en route to the mine to suppress the discoveries made by the two Sams. In a final voice-over, Sam, who has reached Earth, is described as "either a wacko or an illegal immigrant, in either case he should be locked up." Thus, the perfidy of the Corporation continues.
The movie is suitably austere, cold, and sorrowful. Sam's physical deterioration, a little like the obsolescence built into the replicants ('skin-jobs') in Bladerunner, is shown in ugly detail. The Harvesters are huge robot-trucks that throw off plumes of debris as they scarf-up precious rock for use in powering Earth -- the home-planet has run out of energy resources. The special effects are sometimes charmingly tatty: the moon locations look like models. The film features an innovation: the sinister-sounding robot is actually kind and generous -- in one scene, he comforts the injured Sam by gently stroking his shoulder.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) believes that he is a worker assigned supervisory duties at a lunar mine. He works alone, aided by a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey imitating the suave, sinister, and ingratiating tone of Kubrick's HAL). Sam is lonely and looks forward to being reunited with his wife at the end of his three-year contract. But something seems wrong -- communications with Earth have failed and Sam seems oddly distracted. When he goes out to service a mining vehicle, a "Harvester", an accident occurs. He awakes in the infirmary -- strangely, the cut he received in the accident and a burn on his hand seem to have completely healed. How much time was he unconscious? When Sam goes to the site of the crash with the mining "Harvester", he discovers himself, severely injured in the wrecked vehicle. He carries his own body back to the lunar station where he works and, then, when the injured man wakes up engages in a debate with him -- which one of us is the clone? Ultimately, the two men discover that they are both clones and, in fact, just part of a series of workers stored in hibernation in the hidden bowels of the lunar station -- as one worker fails, another is brought on-line to replace his predecessor. Although the point is never made explicitly, Sam (and the series of Sams) are just replacement parts, apparently designed with a three-year life expectancy -- when the loneliness and danger overcomes one clone, another is activated to take the old clone's job. Their memories of home are artificially implanted -- a theme more fully developed in Bladerunner. This is an interesting premise, but it really can't go anywhere. Working together, the two Sams discover the horrible truth about their existence. They break down towers jamming communication with the lunar mining station and discover that, at least, 12 years have elapsed since the first Sam began his three-year contract at the mining operation -- Sam's toddler daughter is now 15 years old and his wife has died. (There are holes in the narrative -- what were the people back on earth told about Sam's failure to return? And, in fact, if there are multiple Sams, why not let the original guy go home?) The dying Sam, at the end of his three-year "contract", is vomiting blood and losing his teeth. He looks awful. He volunteers to be deposited as a casualty in the wrecked "harvester" where he dies and the new Sam somehow gets shot home -- fired across space to land on the Earth. This occurs under time-pressure as a group of thugs from the Corporation on en route to the mine to suppress the discoveries made by the two Sams. In a final voice-over, Sam, who has reached Earth, is described as "either a wacko or an illegal immigrant, in either case he should be locked up." Thus, the perfidy of the Corporation continues.
The movie is suitably austere, cold, and sorrowful. Sam's physical deterioration, a little like the obsolescence built into the replicants ('skin-jobs') in Bladerunner, is shown in ugly detail. The Harvesters are huge robot-trucks that throw off plumes of debris as they scarf-up precious rock for use in powering Earth -- the home-planet has run out of energy resources. The special effects are sometimes charmingly tatty: the moon locations look like models. The film features an innovation: the sinister-sounding robot is actually kind and generous -- in one scene, he comforts the injured Sam by gently stroking his shoulder.
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Stan and Ollie
Were they ever really funny? This is the most troubling question posed by Jon Baird's 2019 Stan and Ollie. On the evidence of this movie, containing lovingly detailed recreations of Laurel and Hardy "bits", the comedy duo's gags were always more disturbing than funny, Kakaesque loops in which simple tasks become inexplicably difficult, protracted, subject to dream-like delays and obstructions -- when I saw this film in Edina, no one in the audience laughed at anything in the picture. (Samuel Beckett is said to have claimed that the duo in Waiting for Godot was modeled on Laurel and Hardy.) The funereal silence enveloping the hall made me feel uncomfortable and, even, a bit ashamed.
Stan and Ollie documents a tour of British theaters that Laurel and Hardy undertook, probably around 1953 or 1957. (The movie is based upon a non-fiction book about the tour.) Out of date and unappreciated in the United States, Stan and Ollie traveled to England, reprising some of their most famous scenes from the movies made with Hal Roach in the thirties that had made them international stars. The tour was supposed to be coordinated with meetings with British film producers in support of a new movie project, a parody of the Robin Hood stories written by Stan Laurel, the creative brains behind the duo. Financing isn't available for the movie and Laurel is treated shabbily by a studio executive who refuses to meet with him. However, the tour, commencing with tiny crowds in remote towns, becomes wildly successful, possibly because Laurel and Hardy consent to appear in a series of publicity stunts aimed at promoting their shows. They play packed houses in London. This turns out to be too exhausting for Oliver ("Babe") Hardy who collapses with congestive heart failure. Although it's pretty clear that he is dying, Hardy performs with Laurel one last time on the London stage -- he does the famous dance ("Commence to dancin' , Commence to prancin'") from Way out West. A closing title tells us that Hardy died in 1957 and that Laurel lived another decade, continuing to write comedy routines for the duo that had ceased to exist with Ollie's death.
This sort of material is sentimental in a necrophile way, and, more than a bit morbid. Stan is played by the British comedian Steven Coogan and Ollie is impersonated by John C. Reilly wearing a complicated prosthetic fat suit -- both actors are excellent and, at times, their resemblance to the famous clowns seems uncanny. The emotional trajectory of the film is supplied by Stan's anger that Ollie "betrayed" him in the mid-thirties by making a film alone -- it's called "the elephant film" in this movie (actually the 1939 film Zenobia). Stan was renegotiating his contract with Hal Roach, portrayed as a loudmouthed bully in this picture. Ollie was under contract and, when Stan refused to perform, felt obliged to work with Roach on the "the elephant movie" -- something for which Stan has never forgiven Ollie. The men's relationship is complicated by their wives -- Ollie has a minuscule dame for his wife: she's got a high-pitched voice that could shatter glass. Stan is married to a mercenary Russian dancer who once performed, she proudly repeats to others, for Preston Sturges. The women are also interesting, do a good job with their roles, and add some additional emotional grist to the mill -- both of them, of course, are fierce partisans for each of their husbands, thus creating additional conflict between the two men. The film begins in 1936 on the set of Way out West with the famous dance in front of the saloon (at the height of their fame, Stan tells Ollie he has rented a boat to cruise to Catalina and Clark Gable and Carole Lombard will be in attendance) -- the picture also features a reprise of Oliver and Stan's wonderful duet "On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine." Throughout the picture, the film makes allusions to some of the famous comedy bits that the boys performed in earlier movies -- including a scene involving references to the Oscar winning two-reeler "The Music Box." Stan and Ollie are always "on" -- that is, they seem to think it is their duty to entertain casual onlookers with "bits" and gags. It's somewhat sad and not funny at all. For me, the film has strong nostalgic appeal -- I was raised with these skits since my father was a great admirer of the comedians. For twenty-five years, my father (the son of a Lutheran minister) skipped church to watch old Laurel and Hardy movies over and over again on Sunday mornings. The movie has good production values and is handsomely mounted and contains many scenes that will cause admirers of the comedians to "tear up", but I wonder for whom the picture was made -- how many fans do Laurel and Hardy have today? In my experience, very few women ever found the boys' antics amusing and the strange homosexual undertones to their many of their scenes probably disturbed those few females who sat through Laurel and Hardy's pictures. Modern audiences, I assume, will regard the "slow-burn" gags as too protracted and tedious -- this is how I experienced them myself forty years ago watching the murky-looking movies on TV with my father. The picture seems made for a "Sons of the Desert" fan club that has long since ceased to exist. That said, the picture is emotionally satisfying, in effect, a story of forgiveness narrated in the context of a long and complex marriage -- that is, the intimate relationship between the two comedians. (When Ollie says that he is cold after his heart attack, Stan climbs into bed to warm him -- an understated gestures that is nonetheless intensely moving, particularly in the context of a viewer recalling the many scenes in their movies featuring the two men sharing the same bed.) In the penultimate sequence, Stan and Ollie do something called the "double door gag" -- this involves the two comics searching for one another when one has entered one door and the other another door: the gag begins with befuddlement and, then, moves into surrealism: the geometry of the set requires that the men encounter one another back stage, behind the double doors, but, somehow, they keep missing one another; space and time are warped -- they wander on the stage, exposed to the audience, with their backs to each other, oblivious that the other man is only a few inches away. The scene goes on for a long time and parts of it are shot in slow motion and there is a genuine sense of confusion and, even, growing panic as the gag goes on and on without the two men coming face to face notwithstanding their increasingly desperate search. It's disturbing, symbolic of something like the onset of dementia, and, of course, raises the question with which I began: Was this stuff ever really funny? The director cheats with lots of audience reaction shots -- everyone is laughing uproariously. But no one was laughing in the theater in which I saw the movie.
Stan and Ollie documents a tour of British theaters that Laurel and Hardy undertook, probably around 1953 or 1957. (The movie is based upon a non-fiction book about the tour.) Out of date and unappreciated in the United States, Stan and Ollie traveled to England, reprising some of their most famous scenes from the movies made with Hal Roach in the thirties that had made them international stars. The tour was supposed to be coordinated with meetings with British film producers in support of a new movie project, a parody of the Robin Hood stories written by Stan Laurel, the creative brains behind the duo. Financing isn't available for the movie and Laurel is treated shabbily by a studio executive who refuses to meet with him. However, the tour, commencing with tiny crowds in remote towns, becomes wildly successful, possibly because Laurel and Hardy consent to appear in a series of publicity stunts aimed at promoting their shows. They play packed houses in London. This turns out to be too exhausting for Oliver ("Babe") Hardy who collapses with congestive heart failure. Although it's pretty clear that he is dying, Hardy performs with Laurel one last time on the London stage -- he does the famous dance ("Commence to dancin' , Commence to prancin'") from Way out West. A closing title tells us that Hardy died in 1957 and that Laurel lived another decade, continuing to write comedy routines for the duo that had ceased to exist with Ollie's death.
This sort of material is sentimental in a necrophile way, and, more than a bit morbid. Stan is played by the British comedian Steven Coogan and Ollie is impersonated by John C. Reilly wearing a complicated prosthetic fat suit -- both actors are excellent and, at times, their resemblance to the famous clowns seems uncanny. The emotional trajectory of the film is supplied by Stan's anger that Ollie "betrayed" him in the mid-thirties by making a film alone -- it's called "the elephant film" in this movie (actually the 1939 film Zenobia). Stan was renegotiating his contract with Hal Roach, portrayed as a loudmouthed bully in this picture. Ollie was under contract and, when Stan refused to perform, felt obliged to work with Roach on the "the elephant movie" -- something for which Stan has never forgiven Ollie. The men's relationship is complicated by their wives -- Ollie has a minuscule dame for his wife: she's got a high-pitched voice that could shatter glass. Stan is married to a mercenary Russian dancer who once performed, she proudly repeats to others, for Preston Sturges. The women are also interesting, do a good job with their roles, and add some additional emotional grist to the mill -- both of them, of course, are fierce partisans for each of their husbands, thus creating additional conflict between the two men. The film begins in 1936 on the set of Way out West with the famous dance in front of the saloon (at the height of their fame, Stan tells Ollie he has rented a boat to cruise to Catalina and Clark Gable and Carole Lombard will be in attendance) -- the picture also features a reprise of Oliver and Stan's wonderful duet "On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine." Throughout the picture, the film makes allusions to some of the famous comedy bits that the boys performed in earlier movies -- including a scene involving references to the Oscar winning two-reeler "The Music Box." Stan and Ollie are always "on" -- that is, they seem to think it is their duty to entertain casual onlookers with "bits" and gags. It's somewhat sad and not funny at all. For me, the film has strong nostalgic appeal -- I was raised with these skits since my father was a great admirer of the comedians. For twenty-five years, my father (the son of a Lutheran minister) skipped church to watch old Laurel and Hardy movies over and over again on Sunday mornings. The movie has good production values and is handsomely mounted and contains many scenes that will cause admirers of the comedians to "tear up", but I wonder for whom the picture was made -- how many fans do Laurel and Hardy have today? In my experience, very few women ever found the boys' antics amusing and the strange homosexual undertones to their many of their scenes probably disturbed those few females who sat through Laurel and Hardy's pictures. Modern audiences, I assume, will regard the "slow-burn" gags as too protracted and tedious -- this is how I experienced them myself forty years ago watching the murky-looking movies on TV with my father. The picture seems made for a "Sons of the Desert" fan club that has long since ceased to exist. That said, the picture is emotionally satisfying, in effect, a story of forgiveness narrated in the context of a long and complex marriage -- that is, the intimate relationship between the two comedians. (When Ollie says that he is cold after his heart attack, Stan climbs into bed to warm him -- an understated gestures that is nonetheless intensely moving, particularly in the context of a viewer recalling the many scenes in their movies featuring the two men sharing the same bed.) In the penultimate sequence, Stan and Ollie do something called the "double door gag" -- this involves the two comics searching for one another when one has entered one door and the other another door: the gag begins with befuddlement and, then, moves into surrealism: the geometry of the set requires that the men encounter one another back stage, behind the double doors, but, somehow, they keep missing one another; space and time are warped -- they wander on the stage, exposed to the audience, with their backs to each other, oblivious that the other man is only a few inches away. The scene goes on for a long time and parts of it are shot in slow motion and there is a genuine sense of confusion and, even, growing panic as the gag goes on and on without the two men coming face to face notwithstanding their increasingly desperate search. It's disturbing, symbolic of something like the onset of dementia, and, of course, raises the question with which I began: Was this stuff ever really funny? The director cheats with lots of audience reaction shots -- everyone is laughing uproariously. But no one was laughing in the theater in which I saw the movie.
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Who would have imagined that one of the most noteworthy exemplars of the High Romantic Sublime would be a movie for children, indeed, the third installment in the franchise How to Train Your Dragon. This film is what might be called a cartoon -- although, in fact, none of it is drawn: rather, the movie is an elaborate computer generated animation, a state-of-the-art assemblage of colorful pixels, programmed by the digital wizards working for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks. Although the plot is generally insipid and the human characters uninspired, the scenes showing combat between a vast armada of ships and thousands of dragons are genuinely phantasmagoric, a delirious extravaganza of color and motion. Similarly, images depicting the titular hidden world, apparently the spawning territory for the dragons, are exuberantly psychedelic. The picture is beautiful almost beyond belief, a tempest of diving and soaring through vast spaces illumined by iridescent cave formations or huge icy grottos. In the upper world, above the torrents of ocean draining into an enormous misty maelstrom, it's always the "magic hour" -- the sun held in a suspense over an orange-yellow horizon, long shadows cast by the towering cliffs and trees, a glowing void such as those painted by Claude Lorrain.
In Paradise Lost, Milton imagines Lucifer, the morning star, falling from the crystalline battlements of heaven, plunging into the fiery abyss a full nine-days falling. This is the sort of imagery presented in this film -- the picture combines the cosmic dimensions of Milton's vertical paradise and hell with wild imagery from the Battle in Heaven: elephantine creatures with fire blossoming around them as they soar through space like enormous dirigibles. In some scenes, we see buzzing, infernal hordes of dragons, many of them insect-shaped, pouring in huge multi-colored plumes through a sky in which the sun is always setting or through towering ramparts of cumulo-nimbus clouds cleft by lightning. The dragons en masse sometimes look like flocks of nimble, brightly colored parrots -- in other scenes, they are like the rebel angels poured out of heaven in Bosch and Brueghel's paintings or the swarms of hideous winged beasts flapping leathery wings over the Inferno. The Miltonic sublime re-occurs at the dawn of the 19th century in Wordsworth -- particularly passages such as the crossing of the Alps in The Prelude -- and in Coleridge's nightmarish vistas of the Arctic ice in his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (as well, I suppose, as the "caverns measureless to man" in Kubla Khan's Xanadu very much on display in this film): Shelley's longer poems particularly the ones on Mont Blanc and the Witch of Atlas explore this enormous, inhuman space echoing with the cascades of innumerable waterfalls and Mary Shelley parodies the form in Frankenstein and, of course, both Byron and Melville exploit these effects in their books. This kind of grandiose imagery drives How to Train Your Dragon. In the pixel film, the dragons attack a huge armada in the twilight -- the masts tall as mighty sequoias are set on fire by the flame-throwing jaws of the dragons. When the masts fall, we see hundreds of tiny figures on the decks of the burning ships, scurrying this way and that -- it's an enormous, terrifying image, something like Milton's Samson pulling down the temple of the Philistines in Samson Agonistes. Everything is aerial, a dream of flight -- soaring, falling across the screen from top to bottom, diving, plummeting, winged figures toppling down from the heavens, plunging through infinite, glowing spaces. The spectacle is overwhelming and hallucinatory.
The film's plot has something to do with a toy-like hero rescuing two dragons, a black male and a white female, from the clutches of a long-jawed blonde-haired Aryan villain at the helm of the biggest ship in the armada. (The two dragons are odd creatures, winged salamanders that spit radioactive-looking fire a bit like Godzilla -- the male salamander is a little clumsy; he is ardently in love with the white female who looks more like a very expensive and haughty cat - she has huge eyes and is exquisitely feline in the way that she moves. The best aspects of the film are pure animation -- almost abstract sequences that focus on the dragons and let us see how they move and fly: the pas de deux between the male and female dragons is wonderfully subtle and erotic.) The film is the Whitest film most Caucasian film that I know -- there are no people or characters of color in this picture ostensibly derived from Nordic folklore. In fact, the "hidden world" of the title is beneath a maelstrom in which the seas of the earth empty in enormous cataracts of white, frenzied water and the imagery is derived, I think, primarily from Edgar Alan Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and his story "The Descent into the Maelstrom".) There's some dull dialogue and a little uplifting stuff about achieving the impossible -- it seems like one of the chief, and most pernicious, lies being disseminated to the children of today is that, if the spirit is willing, anything can be achieved, something that is palpably and, often, tragically false. The human characters are animated so that carefully delineated expressions of grief, bewilderment, wonder, fear, anger, self-righteousness, humor etc. succeed one another in rapid gales -- this is deeply and profoundly unreal. In general, people don't show much emotion on their faces but this movie insists on depicting so many motions in chaotic flight over the faces of the protagonists that they seem to be twitching in a frenetic seizure.
This movie has to be seen on the big screen, preferably, I suppose, under the influence of some mind-altering substance. It's wonderful and crazy and astonishing.
In Paradise Lost, Milton imagines Lucifer, the morning star, falling from the crystalline battlements of heaven, plunging into the fiery abyss a full nine-days falling. This is the sort of imagery presented in this film -- the picture combines the cosmic dimensions of Milton's vertical paradise and hell with wild imagery from the Battle in Heaven: elephantine creatures with fire blossoming around them as they soar through space like enormous dirigibles. In some scenes, we see buzzing, infernal hordes of dragons, many of them insect-shaped, pouring in huge multi-colored plumes through a sky in which the sun is always setting or through towering ramparts of cumulo-nimbus clouds cleft by lightning. The dragons en masse sometimes look like flocks of nimble, brightly colored parrots -- in other scenes, they are like the rebel angels poured out of heaven in Bosch and Brueghel's paintings or the swarms of hideous winged beasts flapping leathery wings over the Inferno. The Miltonic sublime re-occurs at the dawn of the 19th century in Wordsworth -- particularly passages such as the crossing of the Alps in The Prelude -- and in Coleridge's nightmarish vistas of the Arctic ice in his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (as well, I suppose, as the "caverns measureless to man" in Kubla Khan's Xanadu very much on display in this film): Shelley's longer poems particularly the ones on Mont Blanc and the Witch of Atlas explore this enormous, inhuman space echoing with the cascades of innumerable waterfalls and Mary Shelley parodies the form in Frankenstein and, of course, both Byron and Melville exploit these effects in their books. This kind of grandiose imagery drives How to Train Your Dragon. In the pixel film, the dragons attack a huge armada in the twilight -- the masts tall as mighty sequoias are set on fire by the flame-throwing jaws of the dragons. When the masts fall, we see hundreds of tiny figures on the decks of the burning ships, scurrying this way and that -- it's an enormous, terrifying image, something like Milton's Samson pulling down the temple of the Philistines in Samson Agonistes. Everything is aerial, a dream of flight -- soaring, falling across the screen from top to bottom, diving, plummeting, winged figures toppling down from the heavens, plunging through infinite, glowing spaces. The spectacle is overwhelming and hallucinatory.
The film's plot has something to do with a toy-like hero rescuing two dragons, a black male and a white female, from the clutches of a long-jawed blonde-haired Aryan villain at the helm of the biggest ship in the armada. (The two dragons are odd creatures, winged salamanders that spit radioactive-looking fire a bit like Godzilla -- the male salamander is a little clumsy; he is ardently in love with the white female who looks more like a very expensive and haughty cat - she has huge eyes and is exquisitely feline in the way that she moves. The best aspects of the film are pure animation -- almost abstract sequences that focus on the dragons and let us see how they move and fly: the pas de deux between the male and female dragons is wonderfully subtle and erotic.) The film is the Whitest film most Caucasian film that I know -- there are no people or characters of color in this picture ostensibly derived from Nordic folklore. In fact, the "hidden world" of the title is beneath a maelstrom in which the seas of the earth empty in enormous cataracts of white, frenzied water and the imagery is derived, I think, primarily from Edgar Alan Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and his story "The Descent into the Maelstrom".) There's some dull dialogue and a little uplifting stuff about achieving the impossible -- it seems like one of the chief, and most pernicious, lies being disseminated to the children of today is that, if the spirit is willing, anything can be achieved, something that is palpably and, often, tragically false. The human characters are animated so that carefully delineated expressions of grief, bewilderment, wonder, fear, anger, self-righteousness, humor etc. succeed one another in rapid gales -- this is deeply and profoundly unreal. In general, people don't show much emotion on their faces but this movie insists on depicting so many motions in chaotic flight over the faces of the protagonists that they seem to be twitching in a frenetic seizure.
This movie has to be seen on the big screen, preferably, I suppose, under the influence of some mind-altering substance. It's wonderful and crazy and astonishing.
Monday, March 4, 2019
True Detective (Series 3)
Two small children set out on their bicycles at dusk in a small, impoverished Arkansas village. The children don't return. Police find one of the children murdered and left in ceremonial repose in a rock fissure in a place called Devil's Den. Two detectives, one of them Black and the other White, are assigned the case. Various horrors ensue and the detectives become entangled in tragic mysteries that contort and deform their lives. The criminal investigation extends across the professional careers of both men and the mystery is finally solved only when they are old and frail -- indeed, the crime is solved too late for the Black detective: he is suffering from dementia with short-term memory loss and can't recall that he has crowned his life's work by establishing the truth about the children's disappearance. Instead, he is left within a labyrinth of painful uncertainty: images trigger torturous memories for him but they no longer coalesce into any sort of meaningful pattern. He is trapped within painful, interminable cycles of cruel recollection and self-recrimination. At the end of the 8 episode HBO series, we see two small kids on bikes, this time the hero's grandchildren, setting off into the dusk. Then, the old man remembers his time in Vietnam, shown as a flashback of the detective as a young man walking fearfully through a dense tropical jungle in the failing light at the end of the day. This summarizes Nick Pizzolatto's True Detective (Third Series), a maddening, frustrating program that is, nonetheless, far better than it seems for most of the time that you are watching.
True Detective (3) is so dark, dismal, and sordid that, at times, it seems a parody of itself. The characters are, mostly, poor White trash from a disrespected and squalid rural county in Arkansas -- everyone seems addicted to drugs or booze, sexually promiscuous, hateful and racist, desperately poor and hopeless. The White cop is a little man with a chip on his shoulder who takes solace in bar fights and torturing suspects -- he's well-played by Stephen Dorff as a diminutive bully with a whiskey-raw voice, wearing leathery-looking leisure suits, highly intelligent, sardonic, a loner who ends up isolated, drunk, and caring for stray dogs. The Black detective is acted by Mahershala Ali, playing the part in such a vein of miserable, depressed funk that much of the show is half-risible. The Black cop is damaged goods when the show begins, suffering from a first-class case of repressed PTSD due to his time in Vietnam -- he was some kind of lone reconnaissance assassin. Ali speaks in a guttural mumble about two octaves below ordinary human speech -- he's too miserable to articulate his words clearly and half of what he says is completely unintelligible. The series is too long, repetitive, and defeated by its own structure: the action takes place at three points in time -- the early seventies, 1980, and the present. As is often the case, the old age make-up for the principals isn't particularly persuasive -- it's more Kabuki-like than realistic. The show's system of complex flashbacks -- an image will trigger a flashback or flashforward -- convolutes the narrative, delays action, and, generally, frustrates the viewer. Just when events in one time plane threaten to congeal into meaning, the show will cut forward or backward. It's a typical cable series ploy, a long, long delay to keep the balls in the air for 8 episodes when the story really could be told in half that time. As is characteristic for these shows, everyone acts up a storm and the individual scenes are effective and compelling. When the show starts to flag, about the third or fourth episode, the program delivers a big gun battle with machine guns and claymore mines (an Indian Vietnam veteran is under attack by heavily armed local rednecks) with a high body-count. After this flare of violence, the show settles back to periodic beating and torture scenes, ghastly marital squabbles, and constant bitching between the two cops who quarrel like an old married couple. The detectives intimidate their suspects (really their victims) with threats of prison rape and torture people -- of course, this isn't a very effective way to advance an investigation and their methods only result in most of the viable suspects and informants ending up dead, often by suicide. The cops are portrayed a loner psychopaths, obsessed with solving the crime, and ruining their own lives, and the lives of those around them, in the process. Everything is authentically gritty except that, of course, the world isn't as dark and bloody a place as the show posits and, so, ultimately, the whole thing, notwithstanding its surface verisimilitude, is fundamentally untruthful and mannered -- it looks authentic and smells authentic, but the portrait painted by the show is flawed. The malodorous gloom just continues and continues and continues.
And, yet, if you are patient, the program's annoying sub-Proustian structure of nasty madelines and flashbacks, actually, pays off. There is a spectacular misdirection in the penultimate episode, a reference to the first season of True Detective, the now-famous narrative with Matthew McConnaughy and Woody Harrelson confronting a cabal of powerful child molesters. This misdirection suggests that we are going down that sordid path again -- the missing girl will have been trafficked by a conspiracy involving a wealthy child rapist. But, in fact, the solution presented in the third series is a lot stranger, more interesting, and, in some ways, less savage and terrible. And, in fact, there is even an intimation of a happy ending, an alternative solution to the mystery narrated by a ghost or angel, a denouement that just might be true. The problem is that the old man to whom the secret is told is too demented to remember it for more than a few blissful minutes. The last ninety minutes of the show is excellent -- the question for the viewer is whether it is worth enduring all the grim horrors of the first six or seven hours to get to that point.
In the first series of True Detective, Office Rustin Cohle paraphrases Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence of the same -- "time" he says, "is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do, we will do over and over and over again forever." I don't know if this is true or not in general. But it is certainly true in the world of this TV series: the same motifs and themes repeat over and over and over again: powerful men abuse children, junkies commit suicide, children are irretrievably lost in one way or another, the cops will brutalize witnesses and suspects, everyone is concealing a dirty, sordid secret. In the first series, the concept of time as a flat circle of eternal recurrence was described but not dramatized. It's in the nature of a TV series, however, for time to have this characteristic -- Lucy remains whacky, funny, helpless across a 100 episodes; Gilligan is always obtusely stupid; Perry Mason always wins his cases; the friends on Friends always confront the same humorous situations over and over again; Barney Fife remains Barney Fife; Mary Tyler Moore is forever exuberantly tossing her hat in the air. The detectives on True Detective confront human evil and become, in some respects, the terrible things that they see. It's the nature of TV.
True Detective (3) is so dark, dismal, and sordid that, at times, it seems a parody of itself. The characters are, mostly, poor White trash from a disrespected and squalid rural county in Arkansas -- everyone seems addicted to drugs or booze, sexually promiscuous, hateful and racist, desperately poor and hopeless. The White cop is a little man with a chip on his shoulder who takes solace in bar fights and torturing suspects -- he's well-played by Stephen Dorff as a diminutive bully with a whiskey-raw voice, wearing leathery-looking leisure suits, highly intelligent, sardonic, a loner who ends up isolated, drunk, and caring for stray dogs. The Black detective is acted by Mahershala Ali, playing the part in such a vein of miserable, depressed funk that much of the show is half-risible. The Black cop is damaged goods when the show begins, suffering from a first-class case of repressed PTSD due to his time in Vietnam -- he was some kind of lone reconnaissance assassin. Ali speaks in a guttural mumble about two octaves below ordinary human speech -- he's too miserable to articulate his words clearly and half of what he says is completely unintelligible. The series is too long, repetitive, and defeated by its own structure: the action takes place at three points in time -- the early seventies, 1980, and the present. As is often the case, the old age make-up for the principals isn't particularly persuasive -- it's more Kabuki-like than realistic. The show's system of complex flashbacks -- an image will trigger a flashback or flashforward -- convolutes the narrative, delays action, and, generally, frustrates the viewer. Just when events in one time plane threaten to congeal into meaning, the show will cut forward or backward. It's a typical cable series ploy, a long, long delay to keep the balls in the air for 8 episodes when the story really could be told in half that time. As is characteristic for these shows, everyone acts up a storm and the individual scenes are effective and compelling. When the show starts to flag, about the third or fourth episode, the program delivers a big gun battle with machine guns and claymore mines (an Indian Vietnam veteran is under attack by heavily armed local rednecks) with a high body-count. After this flare of violence, the show settles back to periodic beating and torture scenes, ghastly marital squabbles, and constant bitching between the two cops who quarrel like an old married couple. The detectives intimidate their suspects (really their victims) with threats of prison rape and torture people -- of course, this isn't a very effective way to advance an investigation and their methods only result in most of the viable suspects and informants ending up dead, often by suicide. The cops are portrayed a loner psychopaths, obsessed with solving the crime, and ruining their own lives, and the lives of those around them, in the process. Everything is authentically gritty except that, of course, the world isn't as dark and bloody a place as the show posits and, so, ultimately, the whole thing, notwithstanding its surface verisimilitude, is fundamentally untruthful and mannered -- it looks authentic and smells authentic, but the portrait painted by the show is flawed. The malodorous gloom just continues and continues and continues.
And, yet, if you are patient, the program's annoying sub-Proustian structure of nasty madelines and flashbacks, actually, pays off. There is a spectacular misdirection in the penultimate episode, a reference to the first season of True Detective, the now-famous narrative with Matthew McConnaughy and Woody Harrelson confronting a cabal of powerful child molesters. This misdirection suggests that we are going down that sordid path again -- the missing girl will have been trafficked by a conspiracy involving a wealthy child rapist. But, in fact, the solution presented in the third series is a lot stranger, more interesting, and, in some ways, less savage and terrible. And, in fact, there is even an intimation of a happy ending, an alternative solution to the mystery narrated by a ghost or angel, a denouement that just might be true. The problem is that the old man to whom the secret is told is too demented to remember it for more than a few blissful minutes. The last ninety minutes of the show is excellent -- the question for the viewer is whether it is worth enduring all the grim horrors of the first six or seven hours to get to that point.
In the first series of True Detective, Office Rustin Cohle paraphrases Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence of the same -- "time" he says, "is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do, we will do over and over and over again forever." I don't know if this is true or not in general. But it is certainly true in the world of this TV series: the same motifs and themes repeat over and over and over again: powerful men abuse children, junkies commit suicide, children are irretrievably lost in one way or another, the cops will brutalize witnesses and suspects, everyone is concealing a dirty, sordid secret. In the first series, the concept of time as a flat circle of eternal recurrence was described but not dramatized. It's in the nature of a TV series, however, for time to have this characteristic -- Lucy remains whacky, funny, helpless across a 100 episodes; Gilligan is always obtusely stupid; Perry Mason always wins his cases; the friends on Friends always confront the same humorous situations over and over again; Barney Fife remains Barney Fife; Mary Tyler Moore is forever exuberantly tossing her hat in the air. The detectives on True Detective confront human evil and become, in some respects, the terrible things that they see. It's the nature of TV.
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