La Belle Noiseuse

What is a work of art worth?  H.L. Mencken once quipped that he would sacrifice all the men in New Jersey for The Heart of Darkness.  Jacques Rivette's vast La Belle Noiseuse ("the beautiful troublemaker") is a mysterious and spectacularly beautiful meditation on the subject of the human cost in making great art.  It's one of Rivette's finest films and worthy of close study. The picture is a very loose adaptation of a story by Honore Balzac called "The Hidden Masterpiece".  The story, which is classic, is worth reading before you watch this four-hour long film.  (Nice, legible copies of the Balzac story are readily available on the Internet.)  In the Balzac story, two painters, Nicolas Poussin and Porbus (a 17th century portrait painter) visit the elderly eccentric painter, Frenhofer.  Frenhofer lectures both men on art, arguing that a great painting simulates nature so well that a nude woman painted in frontal perspective will seem to have a back side as well.  Nicolas allows his mistress, who is also his model, to pose for Frenhofer.  Frenhofer has been working for many years on a painting called "The Beautiful Troublemaker", an image of a famous Parisian courtesan.  Poussin loses his mistress to the rigors of working with Frenhofer.  When Frenhofer displays the finished painting, it is an abstract convulsion of chaotic colors with a foot pointed in one corner.  It's now clear that Frenhofer is mad.  When no one can understand his painting, Frenhofer burns it and, then, dies.  Rivette summarizes this tale in an earlier movie and his acquaintance, the great female director, Clair Denis, challenged him to make a picture based on the Balzac story.  Of course, several of the premises of the story no longer apply -- painters don't feel obliged to follow the mandate of Appelles, that is, to paint nature so realistically that real birds will dive down in an attempt to eat painted grapes.  Photography has rendered moot the canon of realism.  (This is dramatized by the opening sequence in the film in which one of the characters uses a Polaroid camera to take the picture of another character.)  The artistic esthetic espoused in La Belle Noiseuse  (1992)is avowedly expressionistic -- real things have a hidden appearance, a secret essence that can only be displayed by systematically distorting actual photographic appearances.  The artist's agony is to wrest from appearance the inner essence or spiritual dimension (as Kandinsky and the German expressionists would say) of the thing portrayed.       

The film begins on narrative bedrock -- an inn at which travelers are gathered, sitting at separate tables on a sweltering afternoon.  Rivette likes indirection and false starts -- the movie's first image shows us two women, probably gay, who have nothing to do with the story, and who speak English discretely to one another.  The camera tracks to show a handsome young man sitting alone.  Then, we see him from a curious angle, looking down from a second floor exterior gallery on  the side of an old stone building.  This is the vantage (POV) of the belle noiseuse ("the pretty troublemaker") who, true to her nickname, has emerged from her room in the inn and uses a Polaroid land camera to take picture of her boyfriend, the handsome young man at the table below.  Polaroids of that kind made a lot of noise and everyone looks up at the young woman scandalously carrying a camera that has been undoubtedly used in sex-play with her boyfriend.  (The two Lesbians comment adversely on the couple.)  An older man joins the couple and they walk to the huge manor of Frenhofer, described as a genius and an incorruptible painter's painter.  The ancient alleyways in the town somewhere in southern France are so smooth and have been polished by so many feet that the young woman can remove her shoes and comfortably walk barefoot behind the two men.  As the friends leave the inn, an odd thing happens -- a tremendous gale blows suddenly, carrying dull, brown sand by the bucket.  The gale nearly knocks the three people over, but they are oddly disinterested in the strange, destructive gust of wind -- in fact, they seem to pay it no heed.  This is the first of several odd, even uncanny, events that the film will show us -- evidence, it seems, of some kind of afflatus or inspiration, whether demonic or divine, is uncertain.

Frenhofer's manor is an ancient castle.  We first see the artist ambling across his garden carrying a dead hare in his hands. Frenhofer wears a turquoise shirt and blue slacks.  These colors represent the artist and we have earlier noticed a turquoise sheet of paper inexplicably pinned, it seems, to the door frame at the room in the Inn where Nicolas and Marianne are staying.  (The doors to Frenhofers's studio are similarly turquoise -- Marianne remarks that the place reminds her of a church to which the artist replies that it was previously a stable.)  Dialogue informs us that Frenhofer hasn't exhibited for many years, that his last show was before Marianne was born, and that he imagines a consummate painting, but one that he cannot complete, "la Belle Noiseuse", a portrait of a famous 17th century courtesan.  Frenhofer makes some sinister and uncompromising remarks about painting -- that a work of genius must have "blood on the canvas".  Porbus, Frenhofer's agent (and also a chemist) speaks about persuading the great painter to produce a last masterpiece.  When he faints or has some kind of seizure, dropping inert to the table where his head thunks loudly, everyone is alarmed.  It is another uncanny event that seems to pass without much comment.  The men adjourn to the studio where Nicholas agrees that Marianne will pose for Frenhofer's last painting.  Later, Marianne is understandably outraged that Nicholas has offered her for this service -- "you sold my ass," she says.  But the next morning, before Nicholas is awake, she dresses and goes to Frenhofer's manor to pose for him.  She is given a suitably grand entrance, passing through strange rooms in the manor to the sound of loud music (Stravinsky's Petruschka)  -- Frenhofer is in the kitchen and we see his maid's daughter outside, practicing dance steps to the accompaniment of the music.  These shots are portentous and lensed in deep focus -- Frenhofer and Marianne in the kitchen in the foreground and, outside, the young girl dancing on the grass.  (The house is full of odd retreats-- there's a library gothic with old musty books and a chimera room with sphinxes and strange murals on the wall.  People make odd comments:  "I thought you were the police; I work with endangered species" and "Justine ate all of the hydrangeas" and "The place was once a jungle."  Frenhofer's sad and laconic wife is making bug-repellent soap with arsenic, something that Porbus says is a bad idea.")  First, Frenhofer draws the girl in a sketchbook -- we see his pen scratching away at the paper.  Then, she takes off her clothes and he draws her nude on largest sheets of paper with wash and pen and some watercolors.  Frenhofer forces her into bizarre poses and begins to paint her on larger sheets of paper, outlining her form silhouette with chalk.  The sound of pen or brush marking the paper is amplified, an eerie creaking and squeaking.  Nicholas comes to the house and is greeted by a girl wearing a surgical mask -- an odd and alarming image for this moment of viewing.  It turns out that Frenhofer's wife is a taxidermist and she is mounting rare bird species in a tower overlooking the manor.  Frenhofer's wife assures Nicholas that "Frenho is a gentleman" -- that is, that he would not seduce his model.  She's not the most reliable source for this information because Frenhofer seduced her and made her his wife.  (They have now negotiated a "truce", the woman says.  "Each tends to their own wounds.")  Frenhofer says that he wants to rip Marianne apart and expose what's inside of her.  He increasingly sounds less like a painter and more like some kind of serial killer.  The dialogue and mise en scene become increasingly bizarre -- Frenhofer refers to a sculptor named Rubek who was killed with his model in an avalanche in Norway:  this is clearly a reference to Ibsen's last play When we dead awake.  A huge picture of a nude woman seen from the back was prominently displayed when Porbus, Nicholas, and the two women with Frenhofer toured the studio.  Now we see Frenhofer making the picture modeled on Marianne's muscular derriere.  Something is wrong with the continuity -- how can he be making this picture now, after we have previously seen it displayed.  Frenhofer manipulates Marianne's body as if she were an echorche or some kind of articulated marionette.  There are long passages of silence broken only by the sound of the artist's chalk or pen marking the paper.  For three or more minutes at a time, the camera simply shows Frenhofer's hands drawing on the paper.  Sometimes, he makes weird forms that we can't correlate to Marianne's pose.  But, then, the camera shows us that time has passed and that she has been forced into a different pose.  Marianne, played by Emmanuelle Beart is naked starting one hour and 14 minutes into the film and remains naked until the intermission at 2 hours and 14 minutes.  And this is only half way through the picture.  There's a remarkable shot that passes so swiftly you might miss it:  Marianne is stepping through threshold and framed by the door.  In that instant, Frenhofer perceives that she is an apt subject for his last masterpiece.  Throughout the film, doors and windows serve as frames. 

An intertitle tells us that Intermission will last a few minutes "before the next pose."  Part Two continues the sessions in which Marianne poses nude for Frenhofer.  The artist seems stymied and wants to give up the project but Marianne persists and won't let him abandon "la belle Noiseuse".  She and Frenhofer get drunk on cognac or brandy.  (This is highly stylized:  a few sips renders the characters picturesquely drunk, but when they need to be sober, the booze has no affect on them.)  Liz appears and watches the proceedings with palpable anguish.  Marianne asks why she is being used to "replace Liz".  Marianne tells Frenho that she is done with Nicolas.  And, in fact, she spends the night in Frenho's gargantuan castle.  (This is an expressionistic set -- to reach the bedrooms, the characters have to climb an enormous spiraling staircase that leads to corridors about 100 yards long and weird warrens of bedrooms.  One of Rivette's characteristic motifs involves figures entering through separate doors, but, then, converging into a single space behind those doors -- I recall the oddly visceral impact of this motif in ...: in that film, a man and a woman, maintaining distance between them enter separate rooms in a hotel only to access suites that are interconnected by a door; the couple, who have maintained their distance on the street, immediately embrace in the interpenetrating space behind the doors.  Similarly, Frenho and his wife part in a hallway, enter separate doors, at least on of which that seems to be locked and, then, are shown in an odd, gloomy labyrinthinth, a sort of haunted house in which all the rooms seem to be connected.  Marianne, when she stays over on second night is installed in a small apartment somewhere within this warren of small, cell-like rooms.)  On the next day, Frenho is late to the studio, a passive-aggressive gesture that enrages Marianne who is now chain-smoking.  Frenho appears, seems somewhat abashed, and begins to overpaint a large canvas on which he has painted, a decade earlier a study of Liz as a somewhat felilne "la belle noiseuse."  There are long sequence shots showing Frenho's hands painting over the image of Liz's face.  Frenho doesn't return to his living quarters that night -- instead, he beds down on a cot in the studio.  Liz is with Marianne, who is becoming increasingly frazzled.  Liz can't sleep and so she goes the the studio in the middle of the night, finds Frenho sleeping, and leaves a muddy footprint on one of the studies strewn on the floor -- Frenho has taken to climbing into the loft and surveying his work from that height above the studio space.  (The muddy footprint that Liz leaves reminds us that Marianne took off her shoes when she first walked through the village to reach Frenhofer's castle.)  Liz observes that Frenho is using a canvas on which appears for the work showing Marianne and she's justifiably outraged about being effaced from the picture.  The action is complicated by the appearance of Porbus who talks to Liz -- it is intimated that Liz had an affair with Porbus after she was involved with Frenhofer.  Furthermore, Nicolas, who has now been, more or less, abandoned by Marianne, now meets with his sister -- she has inexplicably come to his rescue.  The sister, Julienne's appearance in the movie is a bad mistake, a serious misstep by Rivette and his writers.  We don't need a new character at the three hour mark in this film and Julienne's motivations are extremely vague, underwritten, and enigmatic.  I understand the practical problem in the narration -- once Marianne is holed-up with Liz and Frenho, Nicolas has no one to talk to.  The creates a problem that is solved by importing Julienne into the movie.  A little backstory is provided:  Nicolas and his sister were living together; he met Marianne and she moved in with them.  The apartment was too small and the women clashed.  Julienne's story is offputting and trivial -- suddenly, the film seems to be about (in part) housing problems in Paris.  There are queasy suggestions of incest between the brother and sister and, certainly, Julienne acts more like a lover than a sibling.  By this point, everyone is angry with everyone else -- Julienne fights with her brother and, then, later fights with Liz.  Liz fight with Marianne.  Frenhofer is annoying aloof.  Sometime on the fourth day, with Marianne posing in the remote distance, Frenho finishes the picture.  Marianne sees the canvas (which we don't ever view in its entirety) and flees the studio in horror.  Liz looks at the picture, again concealed from us -- also shows horror and marks the back of the canvas, where Frenho has put a date (1990) with a black cross, seemingly signifying that the picture is posthumous.  Liz lays in bed with Frenho and they discuss the fact that they are both now dead -- whatever the canvas shows, it signifies that Frenhofer is done, kaputt:  either the canvas is a transcendent late masterpiece or it is a horrible failure.  In any event, the canvas signifies some type of creation that is terminal --something that you can't go beyond.  In the middle of the night, Frenhofer with the assistance of his housekeeper's little girl (the child that we saw dancing to Petrushka in the first half) puts the big painting in an alcove, walls it up with mortar, and, then, plasters over the place where the picture has been interred.  Frenho then paints a large merely decorative nude that doesn't show Marianne's face.  On the next day, all the characters are gathered for the unveiling of "la belle noiseuse".  Frenho shows the innocuous nude, a pleasing enough picture but not the titanic canvas that  he has painted and walled-off.  Porbus isn't disappointed -- he has a new Frenhofer painting and will make a fortune from it, whatever it's merits.  Porbus who is a compulsive womanizer makes a play for Julienne.  Marianne rejects Nicolas plea that they return to Paris via Barcelona and the Spanish coast -- she's done with him.  Nicolas realizes that the canvas is a failure and tells Frenhofer that he doesn't want his own career to end as a "comedy."  Liz knows what Frenhofer has done and praises him for a last masterpiece -- not the canvas given to Porbus but the picture that has been immured in the studio wall and that "masterpiece" of the act of renunciation reflected in the walling-off the now-invisible and "hidden" canvas.  The final sequence is pastoral, shot in gliding, sinuous camera movements on the shady back lawn of the castle -- lush trees and grass all around and a table buried in flowers and fresh fruit.  

La Belle Noiseuse is extremely beautiful and once a viewer accepts it languorous, if hypnotic, pacing, very gripping.  The scenes of Frenhofer painting (which feature the hands of the French artist, Bernard Dufour) are like images of mortal combat -- the stakes are unbearably high and the sound of the brush against the canvas is amplified until it sounds like a cannonade.  The interaction between model and artist is scrupulously observed -- each manipulates the other.  Marianne's nudity becomes casual -- it's her uniform, just as Frenho is always wearing the same levis and turquoise work shirt.  The vast and ancient castle is remarkably palpable and the color scheme is coherent and stunning.  Michel Piccoli as Frenhofer is suitably intimidating and passionate.  Emmanuelle Beart (Marianne) is exquisitely beautiful, her face always stricken as if with dismay at her own beauty.  Liz is haggard and frightening -- there's poison in the house and she controls it.  Nicolas is a cipher and I don't understand his sister's motivations at all.  Porbus is sinister -- there's a slight anti-Semitic tinge to the character:  he's clearly a Jew and here represents the seductions of money and finance.  His toasts,L' Chaim, are ironic because the film's last half-hour emphasizes that the completion of Frenhofer's invisible masterpiece is also his death.  The film explores the notion that representing something requires killing it:  Liz, the taxidermist says, that "you (Frenho) painted me out of love and, then, once you really loved me, you stopped painting me" -- the idea being that Frenhofer's work is like her taxidermy:  it requires that the subject die.  Liz has warned Marianne in the opening scenes:  don't ever let him paint your face.  The movie, which seems autobiographical to Rivette, is about the high cost of making art.  And the pursuit of a masterpiece may destroy not only your marriage but you entire life.  To love an artist, Marianne says is to love someone who will never put you first.  La Belle Noiseuse is not without flaws -- the scenes with Julienne didn't make sense to me -- but it's odd to watch a four-hour movie and wish that it were longer.  (DVD is now the ideal format to watch this film -- the movie was shot in Academy ratio, that is, 1:33.  Very few movie theaters can project the film in the format in which it was shot.  Using a 1:66 ratio, now customary, the top and bottom of the very carefully composed and painterly composed images will be cut off.)

Grant

There's no need for viewers to take the time to watch the History Channel's dramatized documentary about Ulysses S. Grant.  This is unfortunate because Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most fascinating figures in American history and, certainly, praiseworthy in all respects.  I write this note on the day after a night of riots and looting triggered by the death of yet another African-American man at the hands of police -- this time a killing orchestrated by four officers in south Minneapolis.  These events remind us that the legacy of the Civil War haunts us now 160 years after Appomattox Courthouse and that, therefore, it behooves all Americans to know as much as possible about Grant, the man who defeated the South but, then, despite his best efforts lost the peace.  As Faulkner reminds us:  "The past is never dead; it's not even past " --  in fact, an ongoing and, often, lethal burden on the present.

Grant is based on a bestselling history of the same name by Ron Chernow, one of the many talking heads who provide response and characterization to what we see.  The show is six hours long, most of this screen-time is devoted to the the Civil War.  Grant's presidency, now much re-evaluated from the calumny heaped on him during the middle of the 20th century, is remarkably fascinating in its own right and tremendously consequential.  Only about a half-hour of the show addresses this period.  The heavy emphasis on Grant's leadership during the Civil War is more than a little bit redundant. First, the finest and most revealing history of Grant's actions before and during the War of the Rebellion was written by U. S. Grant himself.  Grant's autobiography is a classic of American literature -- cogent, understated and self-deprecatory, and written in pellucid prose that is as much a masterpiece of American discourse as Caesar's de Bello Gallico.  If you haven't sampled Grant's autobiography, I must recommend it to you without reservation -- and, further, will tell you that Grant's writing is often very funny.  Grant's clarity of expression is such that the book although praised by American writers as various as Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein was, essentially, disregarded for most of my lifetime.  People in the South were unwilling to accept his clear-sighted perspective on the War.  When I was growing up, Grant was regarded as a dullard, General Lee's idiot country cousin, a drunk and a corrupt President.  As Grant makes clear, these views were induced by the need for American history textbooks to be sold in the benighted South.  Southerners were unable to accept their loss in the War of the Rebellion and constructed a deceitful history alleging that the Civil War was fought over abstruse concepts of Federalism -- that is the proper relation of State and Federal government, sometimes encoded in the phrase "State's Rights."  This wasn't what Lincoln thought nor the view of General Grant -- or, in fact, the view of any major politician contemporary with the War.  The Civil War was waged over the South's detestable determination to preserve the "peculiar institution" of slavery.  Grant makes this clear time and time again in his great history:  at one point, he says that the South fought valiantly for their "cause, although that cause was the worst for which anyone has ever fought."  This is so apparent from Grant's autobiography -- a book that also denounces the American imperialism that led to the War with Mexico -- that the great fons et origo of all Civil War studies, Grant's own account of the War that he won, was (and remains) seriously neglected.  Therefore, instead of spending six hours watching this show, you would be better advised to spend twice that time, perhaps, simply reading Grant's long, but absorbing, book.  In large part, it's redundant to study the Civil War from any perspective other Grant' sown  eagle-eye view -- at least, all students should first master Grant's account before proceeding to other points of view; everything else, although perhaps, valuable, is secondary.

Grant is about one-third reconstruction of historical events staged like a low-budget, if earnest, made-for-TV movie.  One-third of the show is interviews with talking heads who comment on the action.  About another third of the show is Ken Burns' style archival images, maps, and various portraits of Grant and his generals (and adversaries).  Many of the images of Grant are colorized -- this allows the program to use as two images what is  actually a single photograph.  The colorized pictures are a bit jarring at first, particularly the famous images of Lincoln that all Americans have seen since early childhood.  Currier & Ives engravings and political cartoons are sometimes shot in three-dimensions -- that is, parts of the picture plane are manipulated to be either in the foreground or background.  This is an interesting gimmick but it doesn't materially add to the pictorial aspects of this material.  The "usual suspects", that is, archival pictures of corpses, battlefields, and generals standing in front of taut-linen  tents or ranks of horses are tirelessly rounded-up and, then, recycled.  The pundits are generally informative, enthusiastic, and well-informed:  Chernow appears as does retired General Petraeus, a jolly guy from Princeton named Allen Guelzo, the renowned Ta-Nehisi Coates, and various other museum curators and battlefield site supervisors.  One commentator named Gregory Hospodor appears wearing a natty bow-tie seemingly styled from the stars and bars of the Confederate flag.  The dramatic reenactments are best when they are low-key and don't attempt to capture the experience of Civil War combat.  The man playing Grant is particularly good -- he scowls fiercely and, when he's drunk,there's a brutal quality to his silent brooding; he resists the impulse to show Grant as avuncular or with a common touch and there's certainly no sense of any kind of concealed "heart of gold."  Grant is the frosty, grim embodiment of Mars, the God of War -- people remarked upon his grey ice-cold eyes.  The actress playing Julia Dent Grant, the General's wife, is a handsome woman -- she's a poor fit for the ugly Julia, generally photographed (in period images) in profile to conceal her odd-looking squint eye; some period pictures show her to be cross-eyed as well.  When the camera records her profile, we see that she's a dumpy little woman with a heavy double-chin.  She must have had good qualities because Grant, who was a handsome man, was fanatically devoted to her.  The commentators heap praise upon  Grant who was, in fact, an exemplary man in many ways -- when he was poor, other planters derided him for working in the fields side-by-side with his slaves; later, Grant liberated his only slave, granting freedom to his only real income-producing asset -- this scene is depicted with austere dignity in the show:  the slave accepts his freedom as his natural right and doesn't fawn over Grant or, even, particularly praise Grant's virtue and Grant doesn't seem to expect any of these reactions:  no one should enslave anyone else and Grant treats his liberation of the man with matter-of-fact indifference -- as far as he is concerned, the man was already free in all but name and legal status.  It's fortunate that the scenes portraying Grant are low-key and without much to cause us to warm to the chilly protagonist -- the pundits are supposed to tell us how great Grant was; the re-enactments, accordingly, cut against the grain of the laudatory narrative provided by the talking heads.  The battle scenes are mostly embarrassments  -- they are often ingeniously shot to conceal the fact that the Shiloh or the Battle of the Crater are staged with extras numbering no more than fifty to sixty men.  To hide this paucity of means, the camera stays close to the soldiers, stages many scenes in dense fog or mist, never shows anything like the panorama of a battlefield and, often, shoots Grant from low-angles to conceal the fact that he is, more or less, alone.  To make up for the absence of spectacle, the show distracts viewers with gore -- people's heads explode and jets of blood shoot from wounds.  But the budget is so low that the film-makers couldn't  really afford to show any artillery in action.  We see battlefields today with ranks of cannons and old pictures, but artillery, the branch of the military that Napoleon called "the god of War", is never displayed in action -- this is a distortion, of course, because Civil War battles were notable for their artillery duels and enormous cannon barrages. This low-budget approach to combat works well in the third episode in which there are a number of massacre scenes -- sequences in which 15 men kill another eight or nine guys work well in this format.  And when the Ku Klux Klan starts killing Freedmen, the film perks up a little.  These scenes are shot from a steep overhead POV that is claustrophobic and, also, disguises the fact that there's nothing but a sound crew and technicians on all sides of the tight melee.     

A program of this kind is almost unwatchable due to the commercial interruptions. By the end of each two-hour session, commercials are interpolated into the film at a rate of a two minute commercial every ten minutes.  Furthermore, the commercials are repeated interminably -- we see the same pitches, most of which are witless, again and again and again:  insurers pat themselves-on-the back for refunding premiums (since no one is driving); fast food places tout their wares, and on-line correspondence schools with sinister reputations praise the fortitude of their students who are buying useless degrees.  It's all profoundly depressing.

Casablanca

Casablanca is a film that has steadily grown in stature during my entire lifetime. I came to the study of cinema when the picture was accounted a "guilty pleasure", consistently under-rated, and damned by faint praise.  In the era of the auteur, Michael Curtiz, the picture's director, was deemed a hack -- he was simply too adroit in too many genres to be taken seriously.  In architecture as in the arts, the curse of Oedipus prevails -- sons must dislike the art objects that their fathers made or acclaimed.  Turner Classic Movies could not have existed in the sixties or seventies -- the films that it shows were available, albeit cut to ribbons and intercalcated with commercials in dim, scratchy TV versions.  By and large, people of my generation disliked those movies as verbose, platitudinous, and evasive with respect to violence  and sex -- Casablanca uses concentration camps in support of a romance plot and contains vast amounts of ultra-stylized chatter.  It's also full of aphorisms and patriotic sentiment.  Accordingly, the picture's merits were invisible to my generation.  It's now clear that Casablanca is a film noir -- and, certainly, one of the most accomplished and brilliantly cast.  Viewed as a film noir, the picture takes on additional resonance and, of course, I've reached an age where some of the prejudices of my youth can be cast aside.

The narrative arc in Casablanca is clear:  an embittered American expatriate Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) is hunkered down in Casablanca, a place nominally under the control of the Free French.  He runs a saloon called the Cafe Americaine.  Rick's primary enterprise seems to be the operation of a casino though this kind of gambling is illegal in Morocco -- the casino is tolerated by the worldly, cheerfully corrupt territorial governor, Renault (Paul Henreid). The set up is classical:  the characters are in a kind of decadent limbo, ghosts of their better selves, until something happens to awaken them to their patriotic duties.  The event that triggers the film's plot is the arrival in Casablanca of the heroic freedom-fighter and resistance leader Victor Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman in one of her most iconic roles.

The plot seems to divide into five acts.  In the first act, the milieu is established, partly in a bravura sequence that cuts between tables in the saloon at which we hear snippets of dialogue defining the situation.  The bar is full of desperate, well-heeled refugees who are trying to escape the Nazi menace on the continent -- the escape route, we learn, runs through neutral Portugal by way of "the plane to Lisbon" that everyone wants to board.  A small-time criminal played by Peter Lorre has killed a couple of Germans and taken from them "Letters of Transit".  In the film, these "Letters of Transit" which have magical powers -- you can cross any border without question if you are bearing one of these -- is the so-called MacGuffin, the object that everyone is pursuing.  At the end of Act One, Ilsa and Laszlo appear and Rick is knocked into a bitter funk.

Act Two is an extended flashback to Paris, rather flimsily shot with unconvincing rear projection -- the rear projection, as is typically the case, imparts a dream-like aspect to the scenes in which it is used.  It's before the Nazi conquest of France.  Rick falls in love with a beautiful, mysterious woman, Ilsa.  They plan to depart Paris, just ahead of the German advance, but when Rick goes to the station for the train to Marseilles, Ilse doesn't meet him -- he's left standing in the rain.

In Act Three, Laszlo and Ilsa are summoned to Police Prefecture where they are threatened by the German general who is also frequenting Rick's Cafe.  Captain Renault remains studiously neutral -- the issue is in doubt in Europe and he wants to be on the winning side.  Rick broods about Ilsa's betrayal.  She comes to see him and he responds to her with disgust.

Act Four is complex with a swiftly arising and swiftly resolved subplot.  It turns out that Renault is exchanging visas for sex and he has his sights set on a beautiful young Bulgarian girl, newly married and only 17 years old.  Rick arranges for the girl's husband to win at roulette so that she can avoid her tryst with Renault and buy a visa or passport from the enormous and corrupt  Sydney Greenstreet, the owner wearing a sinister-looking fez and the owner of a rival tavern, the Blue Parrot.  While Laszlo attends a resistance meeting, Rick entertains Ilsa and she tells him  that she didn't meet him at the train station in Paris because she had just learned that her husband (whom she presumed dead) had escaped from the Concentration Camp and was continuing the Resistance movement.  Rick forgives her.  But, by this time, Ilsa is in love with him again and announces her passion, saying that she will leave Laszlo for him.

Act Five is the denouement and involves Rick surrendering the magical Letters of Transit, which he has been hiding, to Laszlo so that he and Ilsa can escape to continue the fight against the Germans.,  Rick insists that Ilsa go with Laszlo.  The German general,  informed by Renault of the plot, gets to the airport too late and is shot to death by Rick.  Rick and Renault wander off into the fog, celebrating the "start of a beautiful friendship".  The story's themes are clear:  the world war leaves no one on the sidelines -- either you're against the Nazis or with them; love and romance must be sacrificed to the war effort; America (embodied by Rick) is justified in joining the fray.  All of this is presented in the blithe, weightless manner of forties' crime films -- there are some famous songs including Sam (Dewey Wilson) performing "As Time Goes By".  The minor roles are all impeccably performed and the photography is excellent -- the Cafe is a glittering ballroom when it is alive with people and a dark cavern full of remote, enigmatic highlights when the place is closed.  Moorish filigree casts intricate shadows on the action.  A rotating beacon shoots a beam of brilliant light through Rick's darkened cafe about every forty seconds -- why exactly the beacon is aimed toward the ground isn't clear to me.  When Sydney Greenstreet tells Rick he's being "shadowed", the sinister shadow of a parrot darkens an adjacent wall.  Ingrid Bergman is shot with tiny scintillating rays of light in her eyes (which are often luminous with scarcely withheld tears.)  There are famous set-pieces, most remarkably the sequence in which the decadent and panicked patrons at Rick's sing the Marseillaise to the discomfiture of the pompous German brass.  Everything seems to cohere in the best film noir style and the dialogue is a treasure-house of aphorisms and snappy dialogue, much of it justifiably famous.  However, viewed in the clear light of day, away from the romantic moonbeams and perfumed shadows, a lot of the film is rather sloppily contrived.  For instance, the ending in which Renault calls the Germans to create "ticking clock" suspense -- will Laszlo get away or will the Germans intercept him? -- makes no sense.  Laszlo has the "letters of transit" which conquer all and so the Germans couldn't stop him if they wanted.  Similarly, Renault, who will shortly switch sides to become an anti-Nazi, has no motivation to call the German general who arrives, conveniently, without any of his armed staff.  The film shows a great deal of anxiety (due to censorship issues) about the role of Ilsa and her relationship to Laszlo.  Ilsa is excused her dalliance with Rick in Paris because she thought that her Resistance fighter husband had died in the concentration camp.  But she really doesn't act much like a grieving widow when she's with Rick and, in fact, tells him that she is willing to leave Laszlo for the American.  It would have been better just to show her as a woman torn between her love for the picaresque Rick and the upstanding, righteous, courageous (and dull) Laszlo.  But the film wants to insist upon her marital virtue and, so, simply highlights the whole problem which is really central to the film.  In pictorial terms, the movie addresses this issue effectively -- when Ilsa sees Laszlo leading the patriotic song in the bar, she flashes him a look of unconditional adoration (although, perhaps, not love) and, thus, seems to be moved to continue the struggle with him.  But the film is incoherent on this subject because shortly after this scene, Ilsa comes to Rick and declares her love for him and her willingness to leave Laszlo for him (a proposal that Rick, who has become engaged in the struggle will, with great reluctance, reject.)  At one point, someone says:  "Since no one is to blame, I'll ask no questions", a nonsensical if picturesque remark that seems to govern the script.  In a famous scene, Rick says that "at this hour, America is asleep", a reflection on the idle dream that America could stay neutral in the world war and avoid the conflict.  But Casablanca is four hours ahead of New York City.  If it's 10:30 in Casablanca, it's 6:30 in New York City.  The speech doesn't work if Rick says"  "Right now, in America, they're sitting down to eat supper" which would actually be the case.  Notwithstanding these reservations, the film is almost as good as its current reputation and this is saying a lot.

Ishtar

In Tropic Thunder (2008), the action star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is chastised by his co-star, Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) for going "full retard" in his sentimental film Simple Jack.  Lazarus says that if  you want to win an Oscar, you should play the role of a mentally disabled person as "part retard" -- like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.  Going "full retard" is unsettling to the audience; it's better to make your mentally challenged character wry and charming.  A "full retard" performance that is too naturalistic, too true to life, will simply be perceived as unpleasant.  In Ishtar, Elaine May's much-derided comedy from 1987, the two leads played by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play their parts "full retard" -- this is catastrophic, at least with regard to Beatty, and has led to the film being almost uniformly vilified.  Viewed in a certain light, Beatty's acting in the film could be considered brave -- he certainly takes risks that no other A-list Hollywood performer has ever attempted.  (What he does in the picture would be tantamount to John Wayne playing a cowardly weakling or Cary Grant slumming as derelict, alcoholic bum.)  The singular success that Beatty and Hoffman achieve in playing moronic and painfully awkward (and untalented) singer-songwriters has long confused critics -- people who despise this movie can't get over the fact that the performances are "full retard"; Hoffman and Beatty have the temerity to play their parts realistically -- it's method acting applied in a way that makes audiences uncomfortable:  the two actors play clueless, unpleasant losers so effectively that they trash the movie. 

Rogers and Clark is a singing duo comprised of Lyle Rogers (Beatty) and Chuck Clark (Hoffman).  They write their own songs and perform them at wedding receptions and low-rent bars.  Although they are constantly improvising new tunes, and complete one another's rhymes, they have zero talent -- they can't sing (their voices are grating), their ability to play their instruments is rudimentary, and their stage-presence wholly lacking in charisma.  (This latter defect is a triumph of acting by Hoffman and Beatty, two highly charismatic movie-stars.)  They aren't so bad that they're good or, even, marginally passable -- they are simply downright bad performers who make those watching them uncomfortable.  And, of course, they don't have a clue that they're terrible.  Strangely enough, Rogers and Clark have an agent (this seems implausible) and he books them into the Chez Casablanca a dowdy, over-lit cabaret in Marrakech.  Flying budget from the States, the singers land in a miserable country that borders Morocco called Ishtar.  (Ishtar is like Saudi Arabia but without wealth.) A popular revolution is about to begin against the villainous Emir who rules Ishtar.  A beautiful female revolutionary enlists the help of Clark in smuggling a prophetic map into Morocco (for reasons that are unclear to me).  The ancient map, found in a ruined city, prophecies the arrival of two angels who will lead a revolution against the tyrant ruling Ishtar.  After Clark is enlisted as a smuggler, a sinister CIA man recruits him to subvert the revolution in Ishtar, asserting that the rebels (who are labeled "Shiites") are communists.  In Morocco, Rogers and Clark perform to a group of utterly deluded tourists and Arabs who applaud them wildly -- they aren't performing their own tunes in the cabaret, but covers of Dean Martin and musical comedy numbers.  In the morning, the female freedom fighter (played by Isabelle Adjani) persuades Lyle to go to the "camel market" and "buy a blind camel."  These instructions are meant to be code-words but Lyle takes her instructions literally and, in fact, buys a balky, ill-tempered blind camel.  After a shoot-out between KGB, CIA, and Turkish operatives all monitoring the activities of the Ishtar rebels in Morocco, the boys are sent out into the desert.  The plan is to simply get them out of town and into the wilderness where they will certainly perish.  But Rogers and Clark manage to survive overnight and, in fact, make contact with arms merchants who are selling machine guns and rocket launchers.  Somehow, they pretend to be Berbers and Clark even imitates an auctioneer.  The weapon vendors flee (for some reason that makes no sense) leaving Rogers and Clark in control of a large cache of guns  and other ordinance.  The CIA, who has been plotting to quash the rebellion, dispatches helicopters to kill the Americans who appear to be aiding the rebels.  The girl terrorist and a sidekick appear suddenly -- more or less out of nowhere and without any real motivation.  They help the two Americans fight off the CIA helicopter attack.  By this point, the CIA's complicity in the crushing the rebellion is about to become public.  Rogers and Clark's booking agent negotiates a deal with the governmentg that includes a recording contract for the hapless duo and a big concert at the Chez Casablanca that American servicemen and generals are pressganged into attending.  I guess all ends well, at least for the Americans -- presumably, the rebellion in Ishtar is savagely crushed or, maybe, not.  I think some "social reforms"are mandated but it's just not clear. 

None of this is particularly funny or well-staged.  The gunfight in the Marrakech market looks a little like Hitchcock's The Man who knew too much in the version with James Stewart and Doris Day.  Of course, the set-up seems to harken back to the popular Bob Hope and Bing Crosby musical comedies of the late forties, particularly The Road to Morocco.  But the Hope-Crosby "Road" movies had engaging songs, neatly performed by Bing Crosby, and a plausible love-interest in Dorothy Lamour.  The songs in Ishtar are cringeworthy, simply painful to the ears, and Isabelle Adjani's female freedom fighter is completely wasted -- she has no good lines, her motivations are baffling, and, for most of the movie, she's mistaken for a boy and has to flash her breasts to make the point that she's a woman.  Somehow Warren Beatty completely dampens his famous charm.  He plays a man who is terrified of women and regarded as wholly unattractive -- and, amazingly, he makes himself seem unattractive.  Beatty squints and mumbles and stutters -- he seems to be twice the size of the braggart and bully Chuck Clark and stumbles around clumsily like a version of Lenny in Of Mice and Men. (Both Clark and Rogers are shown as married or with steady girlfriends in the film's beginning scenes -- Tess Harper and Carol Kane play these women who figure out that the two men are completely useless and abandon them.)  An early scene involving Clark's attempt at suicide epitomizes what is wrong with the film.  Learning that his girlfriend has left him, Clark clambers out of his apartment window, perching on a ledge about a hundred feet above the street.  Elaine May, who directed this film, has no idea how to stage the sequence --  somehow, she manages to make it singularly uninvolving.  She doesn't exploit the danger, barely aims her camera down at the street to show the lethal height from which Clark is threatening to jump.  In fact, she stages the scene as if it were in someone's front yard with Clark teetering on the edge of a curb or something on that order.  The sequence isn't funny nor is it thrilling or fearsome -- it's just utterly bland, a plot point from the script perfunctorily filmed without any finesse or imagination whatsoever.  This is true of the more elaborate scenes in Morocco as well. The notion that the two singer-songwriters might be mistaken for the angels from the prophecy and hailed as the leaders of the revolution is suggested, but never actually developed.  The parchment map is just a MacGuffin that triggers some listless chase scenes -- it has no other significance even though we see people killed for it at the beginning of the film.  Everything is weirdly off-key.  Beatty, I suspect, has larded the film with references to Anwar Sadat, Ghaddafi, and the Shah of Iran, but none of this satire goes anywhere and, ultimately, seems too detailed for a movie that is really nothing but feather-brained fluff.  The tyranny in Ishtar is described in these terms:  "The dome of the Emir's palace in Ishtar is gold.  But the people have never seen a refrigerator."  Refrigerators are fine appliances and everyone should have one, but I don't know of any revolutions fought under the slogan:  "Give the masses refrigerators!"

Certain contrarian critics have made large claims for Ishtar.  Jonathan Rosenbaum, formerly of Chicago Reader and Richard Brody at The New Yorker have asserted that the movie is a great film that has been unfairly derided.  This is rubbish.  The movie is pretty bad -- it's not abysmally bad, just garden-variety bad and has a couple of mildly funny sequences -- blind camels, I guess, are just inherently funny.  I suppose one could praise Beatty in particular for playing so violently against type:  he actually says "Women don't like me."  But his performance, utterly devoid of even a hint of charm (we can see why women wouldn't like him) is one of the reasons that the film goes off the rails.  Elaine May was gifted as a comedian, but she's a listless, lackluster director -- the movie looks like it was made for TV.  (And she's sloppy as well; in The Goodbye Girl, she put mountains in Minnesota; the continuity in Ishtar is a mess.)  Elaine May and Paul Williams wrote the horrible songs -- they had fun; the audience does not.   

Naked and Afraid

Like all reality TV shows, Naked and Afraid isn't real and, indeed, is scripted in large part.  That said, the show feels as if Samuel Beckett wrote the script and it's such a disheartening experience that I have never been able to watch any of the hour-long programs in their entirety.  Indeed, my guess is that most folks who tune into Naked and Afraid stay for a half-hour or so and, then, find something a little more cheerful on the tube.  The program is so relentlessly bizarre, however, that it's worth a look -- not for a while episode, mind you, but for maybe the space between two commercials.

Here is the premise:  a male and female contestant are each brought to a remote location.  They travel separately in a jeep or pickup truck.  The contestants boast about their prowess and stamina and, further, declaim that they will not be so weak as to "tap out" -- that is, abandon the adventure before their 14 or 21 day sojourn in the wilderness is complete.  The two naked protagonists meet on a beach or a tract of spiny-looking chaparral.  After greetings, they follow a map to some location where there is a source of water near which they can camp until it is time for their "extraction" -- that is, removal from the wilderness.  Each protagonist wears a necklace with a sort of plastic bead transmitter.  This necklace picks up their words and allows dialogue to be recorded..  The participants have a burlap satchel that they can sling over their shoulder.  This contains one survival item that the participants are allowed to use during their ordeal.  The satchel also contains a small mini-camera for shooting at night when the ordinary camera crew and sound personnel are not on-hand.  The premise is that the participants, who receive supposedly nothing but bragging rights for their pains, are all alone in a vast and forbidding wilderness.  They must bond, encourage one another, and work cooperatively to overcome the hardship of being "naked and afraid" in the wilderness.

Of course, the premise is mitigated by all sorts of factors, including, most obviously, the presence of a camera crew and sound men with generators, tents, and, apparently, plenty of provisions and medical gear.  The show features garish inserted shots of hazards -- venomous snakes, poisonous plants, huge spiders and centipedes, and, even, in some cases crocodiles and bobcats.  (We don't ever really see the protagonists interacting with hazards of this sort.)  The man and woman who have volunteered for this ordeal, tramp around gingerly, so as not to embed thorns in their feet, and spend their time squatting in the bushes -- they generally don't succeed in creating any more than a branch-thatched shelter and, if it rains, they seem to be out of luck.  During the day, they swelter and listlessly stagger around looking for seeds or roots to eat, but, most of time, seem to just huddle in the shade of their branch-remuda.  Nights are uniformly miserable -- biting insects torment them, they can't sleep, and, generally, are half frozen by dawn.  If they light a fire, the blaze roasts half their body while the other half is frozen.  Sometimes, the fire gets out of hand and burns away part of the chaparral.  The participants invariably bicker and, as they get more and more, sleep-deprived, become more or less catatonic, spending long periods of time just staring out into the distance.  The camera records the characters as they quarrel, fights that generally result in someone withdrawing to a sand bar in the lagoon or a rock pile in the desert to disconsolately sit with arms wrapped around knees, rocking autistically back and forth and sobbing.  There's lots of praying and petitions to God for assistance and strength.  Sometimes, the characters get so hungry that they become dizzy and lose balance, although ordinarily no one topples over.  Every night is a horror-show -- predators howl and the characters writhe on their stony or thorn beds as swarms of horseflies or mosquitoes whirl around them.  The nudity of the characters is neither heroic nor titillating -- the images are manipulated to conceal their private parts and, when the characters are filmed from a distance, they appear as basically heads and knees with the mid-sections of their bodies softened into a discrete pinkish or brownish blur (the show is multi-ethnic often coupling a White contestant with a Black or Asian person).  Buttocks are always on display.  If you like looking at naked butts, this is the show for you.

What makes this show compelling is its utter, stark minimalism -- there isn't generally anything like drama.  The participants just sit among the thorns or, sometimes. listlessly forage in a tangled thicket or patch of desert about the size of a small backyard.  They sometimes weave fish-traps that don't work or build dead-falls that don't catch anything.  On occasion, if there is water around, they try to catch fish, but never with any success as far as I have seen.  Sometimes, they cut gourds or calabashes to collect filthy water that they try to boil to drink.  Most of the time, they hope for rain and suck droplets of water as they fall of branches and twigs.  The men usually whittle some type of lance or spear that turns out to be totally useless.  More practically, the women pleat twigs together to make shelters, but those seem to be wholly useless as well -- they don't keep out the cold or the rain or, for that matter, provide much shelter against the sun.  The men enthusiastically inhale bugs but whether this provides them with any meaningful sustenance seems unlikely.  The women are more picky about their food and, generally,just use the ordeal as a two or three week starvation diet.  As the show progresses, the horizons of the protagonists shrink -- pretty soon they are confined to a tiny space where they just slump against one another on the bare earth, waiting for the day to end and the night to torment them with sleeplessness.  Everyone seems too tired to talk and, after a few days, there's next to no dialogue -- the characters conserve their energy by just squatting motionlessly on the ground.  Sometimes, one of the contestants will tap out.  About half of the time, the participants complete the ordeal, trek to some beach or lagoon or hilltop where they are rescued and the whole pointless thing ends, not on a note of triumph but with a sense of utter, dispiriting absurdity.  The show has an idiotic gimmick of rating the protagonists according to their primitive survival index.  This PSI seems totally meaningless -- we don't know the criteria used for the rating.  A character who walks into the wilderness, naked and afraid, with a PSI of 4.6 will leave, usually about three to seven pounds lighter (inadvertently the show displays how difficult it is to diet), with an enhanced PSI, if the ordeal was successfully completed, of 5.9 or something -- on a scale of what to what, who knows?  In King Lear, the titular character roams a moor in a thunderstorm, rips off his clothes at one point, and wishes to reveal to the audience what man is most fundamentally:  "unaccommodated man is such a poor forked animal as thou art," the fool says. This show relentlessly exposes the sheer meaninglessness of life in the wild, the bizarre and hopeless idiocy of pitting yourself against nature -- an endeavor that involves vast amounts of sitting in one place and trembling either with cold or shock induced by starvation.  It's like a visit to some kind of concentration camp -- the parameters of survival are the heat of the sun, the cold at night, the degree to which you can find water, and how well you will endure two to three weeks of starvation.  None of the participants does very well at all -- I've yet to see a contestant who thrived in the wild.  (But, of course, I have to admit that I've only seen fragments of the show, although many of them -- the program has run now for ten years and episodes are pretty much ubiquitous on the Discovery Channel.)

It's, more or less, fake, of course, although I guess the insect bites, thorns, sleeplessness, and discomfort are real enough.  A tent full of food is always about just off-screen and contestants observe that crew-members would often give them water and victuals to keep them going.  In fact, one of the contestants who almost perished got sick, not from eating beetles or snake innards, but from dining on curry that one of the cameramen shared with her.  Women have been provided with emergency tampons.  One woman who ate some poorly prepared turtle had severe diarrhea -- we don't ever see any of this sort of thing on the show -- and had to be given two infusions of fluids and antibiotic by IV.  If you complete the ordeal, you're paid $20,000 or $25,000 so there's an incentive to suffer.through the whole thing.  In fact, contestants are allowed four or five survival items, not only one as the show proclaims.  The producers hover around the campsite and try to goad the participants into fighting with one another -- usually successfully since the protagonists are severely sleep-deprived.  Far from being remote, the campsites are generally within a mile or two of a town with a Walmart and a clinic -- contestants recall often meeting locals in this notional wilderness.  Of course, those encounters are edited out of the show.  None of this makes the show less existentially dire and threatening -- in fact, these details make the ordeals suffered by the protagonists all the more depressing.  It's one thing to perish in the remote jungles of the Amazon, another thing to suffer completely inanition and coma due to thirst and starvation within a half-mile of a Walmart.       

The General

Although considered Buster Keaton's masterpiece, The General (1926) is also the film that destroyed the comedian's career.  Contemporary reviews were scathing and the movie failed at the box office.  Keaton's producer, Joseph Schenk, traded the film maker to MGM where he was, in effect, muzzled. The General was the last film over which Keaton exercised control -- and it demonstrates the risks that even beloved auteurs face when they produce a movie that doesn't meet the expectations of their  audiences and fans.  The fact is that The General doesn't comfortably fit within any genre -- at least, as genres were defined in the late twenties.  It's too grave and consequential for slapstick, too comically deflating to be a war movie, unacceptable as romance (Keaton slaps his girfriend around and literally treats her like a sack of potatoes), and not really funny.  People who claim that they split a gut laughing at this movie are either lying or have a very strange sense of humor.  Expensively produced, the film cuts against the very grain of silent humor -- Laurel and Hardy two-reelers are generally set in vacant lots and back yards in Los Angeles; their masterpiece, The Music Box takes place on an elongated flight of concrete steps  in a middle-class neighborhood and features the two boys and, maybe, four or five other character actors.  Keaton filmed The General in Oregon on narrow-gauge timber industry railroad tracks (to simulate the pine forests around Atlanta), he adapts an actual episode in the Civil War, and filmed the action with three period locomotives, dozens of box cars, and 500 members of the Oregon National Guard as extras.  The real Hollywood successor to The General is Steven Spielberg's much-despised and huge-scale 1941 -- also a movie based on real-life episode, but exaggerated and amplified to gargantuan dimensions.  1941 like The General assumed that it was a comedy -- the genre-signifying element is the presence of comedians in the movies (for instance, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi in 1941; Keaton, of course, in The General)  But both films turned out to be too portentous for comedy -- 1941 is just too big, too strained, and too violent for comedy (although I've always thought that the film does succeed within its own terms and is one of Spielberg's best and mightiest pictures); The General is pictorially modeled after the Civil War photography of Mathew Brady -- people die, not just one or two, but presumably scores, in the film.  Can you have a comedy in which there is wide-spread carnage?  This question remains unanswered -- and films with a comedy slant involving actors pretending to be killed still make audiences uncomfortable.  A lot of people didn't like Dr. Strangelove. and film critics tend to shunt these pictures off onto an ill-defined side-track --  that is, "black comedy."  In fact, The General is a dire romance about technology, a fantasia about moving machines.  It's real successors today are the Mad Max films, movies that construct elaborate gags around careening, roaring war-machines and the Fast and Furious franchise in which the stunts take priority over any sort of human interaction.  Keaton's misfortune was to invent a style of filmmaking 80 years before the world had any need for such movies.

The plot of The General is simple enough.  A railroad engineer has two loves:  his locomotive (The General) and a girl who lives in the small whistle-stop of Marietta, Georgia.  When the Civil War is declared, all the men in town sign up, but Keaton's character, Johnny Grey, is deemed to be too essential for the military -- after all, he's a railroad locomotive engineer.  (No one lets Grey in on the reason for his deferment and so he thinks he's either too diminutive or too puny for military service.)  Grey's somewhat porcine girlfriend thinks Grey is a coward and says she won't talk to him until he's 'in uniform."  A year later, some Union officers infiltrate the railroad system and steal The General.  (Their plot is to use the locomotive to reach railroad bridges that they intend to destroy behind them; they also plan to cut the telegraph lines to cover a Union advance.)  Johnny Grey pursues the locomotive, ultimately chasing it with another train.  Oblivious to the movement of troops parallel to the tracks. Grey ends  up far behind the Union lines.  Grey's girlfriend was on the train when it was hijacked and she is being held as a prisoner by the Federal soldiers.  Grey catches up to the invaders, rescues the girl, and learns their plans for battle the next day.  With the girl (she's hidden in a burlap sack), Grey seizes The General and with the Union forces chasing him with their locomotives, he drives south.  Ultimately, the Union locomotive, advancing over a burning trestle, crashes into a creek and there's a fierce battle at the river when the Federal troops try to ford the stream.  Johnny Grey participates in the battle and is hailed as a hero.  He's given a lieutenant's uniform in recognition of his heroism and gets the girl.  The first half of the movie, involving the locomotive chase to the north, is one of the most fantastically exciting sequences in all cinema -- it's suspenseful, full of terrifying stunts, and mildly humorous.  The interlude in which Keaton's character rescues the girl, spies on the Union generals, and spends the night in a violent storm is not very funny -- but it's a necessary respite from the spectacular scenes involving the trains.  Then, Johnny Grey steals the General and flees south, another brilliant sequence, although shorter and ending in the battle at the ford and the destruction of the Union locomotive on the burning trestle.  The stakes are higher here -- we actually see Keaton's character kill a sniper, although by accident (waving his sword, he flings the blade and impales the Union rifleman) and the fight at the river ford is clearly lethal, although the movie doesn't really show the carnage -- it's just suggested:  for instance, the Confederate artillery is aimed right down into the river, firing shot at point-blank range at the cavalry surging into the swift, flowing water.  At one point a coffer dam is blown apart and a huge wall of water sweeps away the Union assault -- it's left to our imagination as to the slaughter involved, but it's clearly not inconsequential.  Variety, in a contemporary review, claimed that the movie lagged -- that it was just "interminable train chases".  It's a bizarre canard -- the film is jammed with complicated and beautifully staged action stunts and the whole movie must be about 80 minutes long.

In point of fact, the movie (like many silent films) isn't really funny.  Keaton is a bizarre-looking leading man with his huge beak of a nose, his completely mask-like face, and his tiny, if fantastically athletic, figure.  You don't really warm to him -- nor are  you supposed to.  The movie is filled with pratfalls -- if there is a stumbling block anywhere within a dozen feet, Keaton will find it, stub his toe, and land flat on his face.  These jokes make no sense.  Keaton is shown to be remarkably athletic, lithe, and well-coordinated.  He scales the locomotive from front to back, clambering up its cow-catcher up to the top of the locomotive where he prances around entirely heedless of the obvious dangers associated with his balletic capers.  He dives between cars, uncouples them with his feet, dodges mortar shells, and hops from place to place with demonic agility and energy.  Therefore, it's bizarre to imagine him constantly falling over his own feet -- something that the movie seems committed to show whenever possible.  There are loopy jokes that aren't amusing at all -- lightning strikes and a tree falls on Keaton, later there's a menacing bear in the woods and Keaton's girlfriend gets her foot caught in a bear-trap.  Then, Keaton is snared by the trap, not once but a couple times.  You wince watching these gags.  Keaton puts the girl in a burlap sack and hurls it onto the baggage car of the train -- later, Union soldiers throw big barrels and trunks into the same baggage car causing us to suspect that Keaton's girlfriend has been battered to death.  Aspects of the physical world are closely observed -- when Keaton spends the night in an embrace with his girlfriend, his leg goes to sleep and he has to massage it back into sensation; if something can pivot, it will twist and turn to cause mayhem.  If there's something balanced, it will be used as a devilish sort of teeter-totter.  Everyone is equally inept -- the Union troops can't figure out how to throw a damaged switch that is impeding them on the railroad.  They labor over this for three or four (unfunny) minutes, swarming the problematic switch like Keystone Kops and doing more harm than good -- finally, a burly engineer with an ax steps forward and with one blow cuts the Gordian knot.  When Keaton finally gets his uniform, it's too big for him and his ceremonial-looking saber reaches down to his toes -- hence, he's always stumbling and falling over his sword.  Some of the gags aren't merely unfunny -- they have a dismal nightmarish aspect.  When Keaton stuffs his girlfriend into the burlap sack (an image that is unsettling enough), he first has to empty it out -- the sack is full of about two dozen shoes and boots.  Somehow, Keaton loses his own shoe from one of his feet and, then, has to desperately rummage among the footwear for his missing boot -- the Union troops are approaching and this sequence has a fearsome, dream-like intensity.  Keaton (and the corresponding Union soldiers) continuously use axes to cut apart parts of their trains to feed the debris into the locomotive ovens.  Tracks get pulled into pretzels and telegraph lines are snagged by chains and pulled behind the locomotives to block the way.  At  one point, Keaton lifts huge ties and pitches them on the wood-car, only to have them fall back on him again or to throw them too far so that they tumble down on the other side of the tracks.  The effort is obviously enormous and you wonder about Keaton getting his hands shredded by slivers and the whole task is so onerous that it has a Sisyphean aspect.  Several of the grandiose sequences have a documentary-style magnificence:  Keaton is shoveling wood into the fire while huge numbers of men and horses and caissons roll by, moving in a direction opposite to the train -- the shot is a deep-focus masterpiece..  As in the Mad Max films, the locomotive rolls through walls of fire and emerges burning on the other side.  A high angle shot shows the burning trestle, a locomotive advancing toward it, and a hundred cavalrymen on a cross-roads also converging on the bridge -- this shot has a brutal diagrammatic clarity and it's an indelible image.

The General is a great film.  But let's be honest -- it's not really a comedy and the critic for Variety, who denounced the film as not being funny, was merely reporting the truth -- the movie isn't funny; it's far greater than mere slapstick comedy.  The film suggests that history, with all its great men and noble battles, is merely a chronicle of inept bunglers falling on their faces as they try to do the best that they can.  There's no real grandeur in history -- The General suggests wars and battles are intrinsically without grace or nobility.  The movie doesn't make fun of history; it suggests that historical events, in their essence, are merely a series of accidents; it's all a monstrous pratfall.

Al Capone

Al Capone (1959 directed by Richard Wilson) is an Allied Artists' B-picture chiefly interesting for its photography (by Lucien Ballard) and an odd, curiously muted, performance by Rod Steiger as the titular crime-boss.  There's a little misdirection at the film's outset -- the picture is narrated by someone that we can't exactly identify.  At first, we take the narration, which is cynical and a bit indifferent, to be words spoken by a sleazy journalist who seems attracted to hoodlums (played by Martin Balsam).  Near the end of the picture, the narration becomes judgmental and didactic -- the narrator starts to use the first-person and we discover that the speaker is, in fact, an incorruptible Chicago cop.  Of course, if we knew at the outset that the narration would be tendentious support for law enforcement (and an admonition to root out organized crime) we would probably have rejected this perspective as uninteresting, obvious, and preachy.  Accordingly, the picture conceals the identity of its narrator until close to the end of the film.  The voice-over narrative is also peculiar in that it doesn't add anything to what we are seeing.  In fact, someone was uncomfortable with the whole concept of the film -- the picture wants us to identify with the righteous cop (at least when this is convenient) but first causes us to accept the point of view of the journalist, someone who is exploiting Capone's story for cheap, sensationalist effects -- exactly the sort of trashy appeal that this film presents as well.  Accordingly, the whole thing is more than a little inauthentic and, even, seems to be in bad faith.

The movie is 105 minutes long and presents a straight-forward chronicle of Al Capone's career in organized crime.  The plot seems rooted in real events and appears to be factually based.  Capone appears at the outset as a minor-league thug working for Johnny Torrio, a bartender who runs gambling rackets in Chicago.  Torrio works for Big Jim Colosimo, a gangster who controls most of the South Side of Chicago.  Capone's ambitious and charismatic.  He talks Torrio into bumping off Colosimo and, then, when Torrio is machine-gunned as part of an ongoing gang war, Capone takes over the whole South Side. (The logic of the film is that Capone will also arrange for the death of Torrio -- but he's oddly loyal to the man, allows him to retire, and, later, even calls on him to mediate a gang-war.)  One by one the other mobsters are whacked.  Capone engineers the St. Valentine's Day massacre from Miami where he is hiding out.  An incorruptible cop, someone who has disdained him from his earliest days in Chicago, colludes with the Feds and Capone is convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for 11 years.  Some of his enemies plot to beat him savagely while he's imprisoned at Alcatraz.  We see him sprawling on a rock-pile with his face smashed almost beyond recognition while the narrator, whom we now know to be the cop, earnestly tells the audience to cooperate with local authorities to "root out" organized crime of the kind represented by Capone.  Along the way, the unscrupulous journalist is enlisted to betray Capone, gets threatened by the mobster, and defies him -- he gets whacked in a subway.  When Capone killed Big Jim Colosimo, his gunsels also shot down a kid who is in the wrong place at the wrong time -- this is our assumption, otherwise, we would have to assume the young man is just another expendable gangster.  Capone delivers flowers (from O'Banion's place) to the young widow, falls for her, and, like Richard III, courts her, basically on her husband's casket.  She becomes his mistress closing her eyes to what is obvious -- that is, that Capone killed her husband.  (He has made some other thug confess the crime to her --but it's obviously staged.)  When Capone oversteps the bounds of decency, attempting to bribe the righteous cop when he's out on the town, celebrating his anniversary with his wife, the outraged police chief snarls that the gangster killed his mistress' husband -- thus, precipitating an awful confrontation with the woman back at her apartment.  Capone slaps her up a bit, while she dramatically begs for the mobster to kill her and put her out of her misery.  This dramatic quarrel leaves Capone fatally wounded emotionally and the next thing that we see is a Courtroom where he's being sentenced to prison.

Curiously, Steiger's performance isn't over-the-top.  He imagines Capone as rather courtly, a cultured man who loves the opera --he's impressed by Colosimo's signed picture of Caruso and can sing tenor parts from Verdi and, even performs a little aria, while he's gunning down the big boss who has, in fact, treated him as a son.  After that killing, Capone retreats to the sidelines when it comes to homicide.  He doesn't kill anyone else except by proxy.  We see Hymie Weiss, O'Bannon, and the others murdered -- but the dirty work is always done by confederates and Capone is careful to maintain alibis with respect to these assassinations.  Capone isn't psychotically murderous --  he fancies himself a business-man and is happy to venture into legitimate pursuits, including trucking.  Prohibition is visualized as the chief cause of the crime-wave in Chicago.  The only time Capone has to use his fists, he gets beat up -- this is early in the film when he is working as a bouncer for Johnny Torrio.  (He doesn't bash out anyone's brains with a baseball bat as in films like The Untouchables). Lucien Ballard's dramatic photography features big, dramatically lit and lurid close-ups and several scenes are shot with high-contrast and glaring black-and-white, particularly a very showy sequence in which Capone and his thugs threaten Keeley, the crooked journalist played by Martin Balsam.  The movie looks authentic and the sets are well-configured to provide a documentary feeling to the picture.  The voice-over is superfluous and seems a sop to censors who wanted to avoid a making a picture that could be accused of glorifying the mobster.  Capone has some showy speeches about how he's just a businessman, merely supplying booze, broads, and gambling that people want and that they will inevitably purchase whether he's involved or not -- Steiger speaks these lines with conviction and is good in the role.  The inevitable problem with the Capone story is that the crime boss' death from tertiary syphilis isn't photogenic -- the bad guy doesn't die in a hail of bullets and, so, the audience feels a little cheated.  (We want our mobsters to expire in an apocalypse of gunfire as in Scarface and, so, the quasi-documentary ending of Al Capone, although true enough, is an anti-climax).

Babylon Berlin (third series) -- with comments on Westworld and Casa de Papel

Reading David Bordwell's interesting book on Hollywood narrative innovations in the forties, Reinventing Hollywood, focuses my attention on the way plots are designed in contemporary films and TV.  The long form dramatic TV series has, I think, fostered a new kind of narrative.  Shows like Westworld and Babylon Berlin display this new sort of plot and I think it's worth considering.  Westworld is so abjectly terrible that I won't address that show here -- although I confess I watched all episodes out of a perverse desire to see how bad things could get.  The show hooked me with a very interesting program mid-series and, so, despite my reservations, I watched the rest of Westworld -- in fact, I wrote an earlier note on an episode that intrigued me and suggested that the program might actually achieve something worthwhile.  Alas, I was misled and the program deteriorated week by week until it had achieved a majestic state of total incoherence.  Babylon Berlin  illustrates the same kind of narrative, although much better written and less chaotic than Westworld and, so, I will use this show (which I haven't finished watching) as my example.  I don't have a good title for the kind of narrative that is exemplified by these programs -- but will describe their traits.  These shows imagine a specific milieu -- that is, a city or a historical period or situation that will be interest viewers.  The show, then, establishes a closely inter-related group of protagonists and sets into motion a phalanx of plots, unified by the (arbitrary) relationship between the protagonists (they work in the same place or live in the same area or are related by marriage or blood somehow -- in Babylon Berlin all of these categories are more or less operative.)  Conventionally,a plot can be devised as a main story with a subplot or parallel and thematically related plots (for instance, King Lear - two parallel plots involving betrayal of older members of a family by their juniors) or main plot with several digressions (a good example of this is John Ford's My Darling Clementine in which the main narrative which involves the fight at the OK Corral is interrupted for an hour by romantic and other digressions that have nothing really to do with the central story.)  Babylon Berlin doesn't adopt any of these schema.  Instead, the show sets up, at least, eight to ten plots, runs them simultaneously, cross-cutting between an episode in one plot and a simultaneously occurring episode in another plot,but, generally, glances at each of the stories in a single 45 minute episode.  (The show is comprised of about ten episodes each between 40 and 50 minutes long).  By the eighth episode or so, several of the plot lines are exhausted -- that is, the conflict or project posited by the plot has been resolved.  Those episodes, then, drop out of the show, more or less, with the final two programs resolving the plots that remain, although always keeping one or two narratives alive so that the program can be renewed for another year.  The advantage to this kind of narrative structure is that the film maker can deliver a kaleidoscopic (or prismatic) series of experiences to the audience and, in effect, suggest that the show is exhaustive or encyclopedic with respect to the era or situation presented.  Most fundamentally, this complicated narrative system keeps the audience's attention because something exciting is always happening -- maybe three or four of the narratives are slowly establishing the perquisites of their plots; but simultaneously, another three or four of the stories are moving rapidly to their climaxes so that the viewer isn''t bored, as it were, with mere exposition --some of the plots are involved in preliminary expository development but others are careening toward a climax.  This schema also allows for multiple climaxes.  Beginning around the fifth episode, the director can stage one or more climaxes per night, but still keep the show moving forward -- in other words, a climax doesn't necessarily spell the end of the program; it just terminates one of the moving elements in the multi-pronged plot.  There are disadvantages, of course, to this kind of narrative structure -- most obviously, unless very carefully written, the group of stories can devolve into chaos.  This happened both last year and this season with Westworld -- I don't know anyone who can reliably tell me what happened in that show.  Things reached a saturation level and, although the violence was picturesque and, even, exciting (women fighting with samurai swords, dismembered robots, etc.), none of this mayhem mattered because no one could explain what anyone was fighting about.  The other risk that Westworld also illustrates is that the plots became so diffuse that the audience's emotional investment in the characters simply evaporated -- I didn't care who lived or died because the proliferation of plots (and confusing flashbacks) inevitably attenuated my interest in the proceedings.  Germans are good at organizing things and Babylon Berlin can actually be followed -- in other words, the viewer is able to keep the plots separate in his mind and follow them, even, though there are, by my count, at last, ten narratives taking place in the show.  Babylon Berlin's superiority arises also from its production values -- the show is the most expensive TV program in German history and is mounted on a vast and spectacular set simulating Weimar-era Berlin.  The set, called Berlin Mitte, can be examined on a web-site in which its owner at the Babelsberg Studio offers the place for rent.  It suffices to say that with CGI and matte effects, the enormous buildings and street sets achieve a remarkable presence -- the place looks like the huge city sets that Murnau used at UFA and, then, at Fox in Hollywood for his greatest film, Sunrise (1928).  Furthermore, the acting in Babylon Berlin is excellent from top to bottom -- the main characters are fascinating and don't really look like Hollywood types:  the scrawny saturnine Detective Rath is, in fact, a bit rat-like, like a rodent David Duchovny, the leading lady, Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter is fantastically engaging and, like many great screen actresses, can oscillate between looking drab and exhausted and incredibly beautiful.  The subsidiary characters are all wonderful, have great weird-looking mugs, and represent physical types not often seen in mainstream TV -- for instance, the police chief and the big bosses, including the gangsters, have the beefy look of actors like Wallace Beery or the hard-pressed burly cops in the films featuring Dr. Mabuse (they look like Emil Jannings or Heinrich George).  The blonde, but sleazy Nazis, the Jewish journalist, the haggard tenement mothers and streetwalkers (who look like figures from George Grosz and Kaethe Kollwitz), the mutilated German generals and commanders left-over from World War Two, the upper-class Prussians with their dueling scars, the manipulative stockbrokers -- all of these minor characters are vibrantly alive and represent a main reason that I can commend the show to you.

The Seventh Episode of the program represented a major climax.  The people who directed this program can stage suspense and savage violence with the best of Hollywood's directors and the program featured several gory killings, a Vertigo-style scene of a woman falling into a forest of hands upraised to catch her, and a couple of horrific fights -- all of this was done with breathtaking skill and represented an ending, ostensibly, to the one of plots developed by the show.  In the Eight episode, the following narratives were advanced:   

1.
A murderer in a bizarre black cape and mask is killing people on the set of a UFA film.  Two gangsters have financed the film.  This is a mystery story involving Phantom of the Opera elements and involves police detective work (Rath and Charlotte Ritter);

2.
In the last season, Fascists blew up a police chief's house killing him and his small daughter.  The crime has been pinned on the Communists.  A woman named Greta Overbeck has been condemned to death for complicity in the crime.  Her child is threatened by the Fascists and so she refuses to identify those involved in the terrorist act (she thought they were commies but they were Nazis).  A Communist lawyer has filed an Appeal on her behalf and this is a standard "race against the clock" story -- she will be beheaded in six days;

3.
A Jewish journalist exposes a deal between Lufthansa and the German military to restore the Luftwaffe.  The Fascists are chasing him and he has to hide.  This is a variant of the crusading journalist story known to us from films like All the President's Men;

4.
Fascists allied with Prussian military officers humiliated after the last war plot to engage the Nazi's to lead street-fighting with the Communists to distract from the conservative effort to seize control of the Republic.  This is a  political intrigue story a bit like Seven Days in May;

5.
Detective Rath's wife is living in luxury with a mysterious benefactor.  She's pregnant with Rath's child and seeks an abortion.  The benefactor is the mysterious and sinister Alfred Nyssen, a financier and stock market whiz.  What is going on here?

6.
Fraulein Seegers is a right-wing general's daughter.  But she's working for the Communists in order to provoke her chilly father and, in fact, is involved in Greta Overbeck's appeal.  Is she sincere or a double-agent for the Right Wing elites?

7.
Fraulein Ritter, who is working to become a police detective (and experiencing sexist discrimination in the police force) must save enough money to finance her sister's eye surgery.  Her sister is going blind.  Miss Ritter has worked as a bar-girl and part-time prostitute and she goes back to sex work to pay the medical bills.  (This is an ancient plot that dates to Victorian melodrama and before.)

8.
Rath's step-son -- his wife was previously married to Rath's brother who was killed in the war (although Rath had an affair with the woman)-- is recruited by the Nazis for their youth group and goes on a weekend outing to the Grunewald;

9.
Charlotte Ritter's younger sister flirts with a sinister pimp and considers becoming a whore;

10.
Alfred Nyssen plots to get Berlin investors to speculate, planning to create a financial panic and, then, profit by short-selling.  He plots to short-sell 100 million Marks worth of stock.  The series began with a sequence showing panic in the German Boerse or stockmarket and the entire program is a flashback to five weeks before the stock market collapse.  Nyssen plans to blame a cabal of Jewish stockbrokers for the financial panic.

All of this material is packed into the 8th episode.  I've left out a love affair or two and an alarming sex-show performed for the benefit of a Right Wing general in which Charlotte Ritter participates.

The density of narrative is astonishing.  But we are dealing with a form that invites binge-watching.  In other words, the episodes aren't doled out to the viewer on a weekly basis -- requiring that the viewer recall the plot over a period of six or seven day between episodes.  (A problem with Westworld on HBO.).  Rather, all episodes are simultaneously available since this is a Netflix program.  Thus, the viewer can watch two or three episodes per night and, at the very least, watch one episode on consecutive nights.  Thus, the labyrinthine plot can be kept in mind.  The principle is that demonstrated by forties film noir like The Big Sleep.  The viewer doesn't need to recall the twists and turns in the first four episodes, let's say -- it's sufficient if the viewer can bring to mind key plot points in the two or three episodes preceding the one that you are watching.  Although the whole trajectory of the narrative may be obscure, the viewer can be counted on to recall enough of the two or three preceding episodes to make sense of the plot as it is unscrolls.

Furthermore, the writers can slow down the frenetic pace and, indeed, sometimes have to stall-out the plot to prevent information overload.  For instance, in the 9th episode, the show pauses to stage a birthday party for a gay police photographer, an  affair that doesn't really advance the action but that shows the esprit d' corps  at the police force.  (The scene also provides an opportunity for Rath and Fraulein Ritter to passionately kiss -- Rath's romantic life has gone badly awry, but Miss Ritter is, at least, bi-sexual and, maybe, lesbian, a sexual orientation that doesn't bode well for their nascent romance.)   This scene serves no obvious purpose -- it involves a gay couple who aren't really in any kind of closet and, I suppose, is a cultural comment on sexual mores in the Weimar Republic.  (Among other things, Babylon Berlin is a musical -- the gay cop gets into drag and sings a torch song for his boyfriend.)  There's also a curious sort of commentary on the action proposed by a psychoanalyst with one side of his face badly scarred.  This fellow appears from time to time counseling the various characters -- he's a profoundly ambiguous fellow, so much so that we can't tell if he's a good guy or bad guy (or where he aligns on the political spectrum which is pretty much the same thing.)  Here, this character asserts that the war was an occasion for creating "the new man", a sort of cybernetic figure:  if an eye is shot out during the War, it can be replaced with a camera; if an arm is torn off, a robotic limb can be substituted.  Similarly, the war caused fear and, thus, has occasioned a sort of somnambulistic fatalism and fearlessness in its survivors.  The psychoanalyst broadcasts these remarks by radio -- a transmission that all the major characters are shown attending to.  (This seems symbolic to me, possibly non-naturalistic).  The psychoanalyst's ideas are transformed into a re-edit of the film that the gangsters financed  --the leading lady has been murdered so the movie is going to be re-cut into a robot version of Orpheus and Eurydice, not that bizarre of a plan since there is a disruptive (Communist) female robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

I don't know what to call this multiple plot structure.  In some ways, the presentation is novelistic and, so, I wonder if this narrative might be characterized as a Tele-novella structure -- although I am aware that Tele-novella has a specific meaning, particularly in Mexican and Latin-American media.  The form is fantastically flexible -- for instance, it allows cross-cut climaxes between the different plot-strands scored to a single musical theme or number:  this is a staple of the form and creates an abstract sense of coherence, although showing the different characters musing while a song plays on the sidetrack really doesn't actually unify anything.

Babylon Berlin is sophisticated about the Weimar culture that it documents.  In the 8th episode, Fraulein Seeger cites Walter Benjamin when the suave and cultured Right Wing aristocrat (who is prone to murder) quotes Ernst Juenger.  There are obvious glaring errors.  The film is set in 1930, just before the German stock market crash, but the UFA production on which the leading lady is murdered looks like a variant on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the echt-Expressionist classic made in 1919 -- by 1929-1930, German cinema was no longer expressionistic, but, rather, savagely realistic on the basis of what was called the Neue Sachlichkeit ("the new objectivity").  Sordid films like Pabst's Dreigroschenoper ("Three-penny Opera") and Pandora's Buechse ("Pandora's Box") ruled the screen.  In fact, the leading lady who is murdered is replaced, at one point, by a woman named Tilly Brooks, an American who is obviously modeled on the Kansas femme fatale, Louise Brooks.

It's my contention that the plotting shown by prestige Netflix and HBO productions represents something new, an enhanced level of narrative density that presses the limits of the form -- Babylon Berlin seems to pile on new plots and characters as if to test the viewer's tolerance for narrative complexity.  This is, by no means,the only paradigm available.  A counter-example is the Netflix show La Casa de Papel, a Spanish series that is, perhaps, the most popular show in the world right now. Broadcast in subtitled form on Netflix as Money Heist, the series involves a group of criminals who stage a raid on the Spanish mint.  Wearing orange jump-suits and Salvador Dali masks, the criminals take hostages and proceed to print 980 million euros.  The police besiege the Mint for ten or 12 days before the criminals successfully elude capture and escape with their loot.  Several of the criminals are killed but the core of their group survives and, even, escapes to Thailand.  La Casa de Papel is successful because it establishes fascinating, fully rounded ("thick") characters who are intensely appealing.  The heist is engineered by a shy, even fearful, criminal mastermind, referred to as the "Professor". Superficially realistic, the show is completely absurd, featuring a panoply of love affairs, thousand-bullet shoot-outs, and operatic torture scenes.  The program realizes that it's strength lies in the development of the Robin Hood-style gang of criminals (they steal from the rich to give to the poor) and it doesn't conceal its superficial and nonsensical plot behind a fancy narrative structure.  Rather, the show tells a single story, albeit with many characters with differing agendas.  The presentation is straight-forwardly chronological although the show begins in media res with the heist and, then, uses flashbacks to fill in information as it becomes necessary.  The series is precisely calibrated to produce cliff-hangers at the end of each 45 minutes episode, thus compelling the attention of the viewer.  But the appeal of this program, and it's very exciting and brilliantly made, lies in the sequential and simplified plot -- a design amplified by schematic oppositions:  cops v. criminals, criminals v. hostages, husband v. wife, the rich v. the poor, inside the Mint v. the streets outside, even upper levels of the mint v. the tunnels underground.  Casa de Papel espouses an anarchist sensibility and is also anti-Fascist (one of the musical themes used in the show is Bella Ciao, an anti-Fascist love song):  the series argues that the bail-outs of bankers and lenders in the wake of the 2008 financial crash was a kind of robbery akin to the money heist at the Mint -- both thefts involve redistribution of wealth, either to the rich or the poor.  This is questionable on many levels but it gives the Spanish show a popularist "us against them" zing that carries the audience's interest from episode to episode and helps the viewer to forget the ludicrous nature of much of the action presented.  Casa de Papel is scrupulously linear (although freely uses flashbacks), and the show represents, in some ways, an apotheosis of straight-out chronological plotting, solving the problem of how to extend a simple situation (worth about two hours in a movie) into a plot five times that length or more -- I think the show has 15 episodes per plot line.  (Two seasons for the Royal Mint heist with 15 episodes; two season in the new series that I haven't yet watched.)  Casa de Papel, which has been called a Tele-novella by some critics, is an example of elaborate conventional plotting in contrast to the maze of parallel plots that characterizes Babylon Berlin (and the much weaker Westworld).  The Spanish show demonstrates that there's plenty of vitality remaining in standard single-plot narrative.