Vittorio De Sica directed Umberto D, a modest and somewhat sentimental film about urban poverty among the elderly, in 1952. The film is part of a trilogy of movies that include the earlier neo-realist classics, Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Shoeshine (1946), both pictures that portray misery arising as a result of the dislocations of World War II. By 1952, the general economic crisis appears to have abated and the hero's plight seems more of a special case than an overwhelming and general calamity. Indeed, in the film's opening shot, De Sica makes a claim for the particularity of Umberto D's dilemma -- we see a phalanx of well-dressed old men, all of them in suit and tie, marching in a Roman street. (A bus turns right into the crowd of protesters, something that is not so much an intentional slight, but an example of typical Italian nonchalance with respect to the rules of the road). The old men are pensioners and they are marching because the government has apparently delayed their payments. Among these old men is Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant now fallen on hard times.
Umberto lives in a rented room with his small dog, a sort of terrier, called Flike. As is the case with many homeless people, his problems are aggravated by his pet, but the old man is fiercely loyal to the small animal -- the creature is obviously his pride and joy. During the famine after the war, Umberto D seems to have done a favor for his blonde and imperious landlady -- apparently, he provided her with meat and helped her to stave off starvation. She seems to have never forgiven the old man for this kindness, presumably something that she recalls with shame. The blonde is big and brassy and wears clothing with bruising NFL-style shoulder pads. She seems to be a would-be opera singer and runs a kind of salon for her admirers. Because she is planning marriage, she wants Umberto D out of her house and will not accept the old man's pathetic partial payments on past-due rent. Ultimately, the old man avoids eviction by seeking refuge in a charity hospital -- he is, in fact, seriously ill. He leaves his beloved Flike with the pregnant maid serving in the home, Maria. When Umberto gets out of the hospital, he finds that Maria has lost Flike and that his room has been ripped to pieces as part of the nuptial renovation of the house. Umberto finds the dog at the animal shelter (and extermination center). He unsuccessfully tries to cadge money from old friends, learning that when you're down and out, you are essentially invisible. (The two men that he approaches smile at him, respond with polite non sequiturs, and escape onto the first bus that shows up to avoid helping him.) After some additional misadventures, Umberto D decides to kill himself. But he isn't able to find anyone to take charge of his dog. Ultimately, he leaves the dog in a public park and tries to hide while Flike looks for him. The dog sniffs him out and so the old man decides that he will take the dog in his arms and hurl them both into the path of oncoming train. As is often the case with suicides planned by the elderly, the dog resists and saves him. Flike is unhappy with Umberto D's erratic behavior and standoffish after the suicide attempt. However, the old man wins back the dog's affection by playing with him with pine cones and, in the final scene, master and hound are reunited but facing the most dismal and uncertain of futures.
Several of the scenes in the film are lacerating. The old man's miserable attempt at begging, something for which he is too proud, is hard to watch. Just as someone is about to drop a coin in his hand, he turns his palm over to act as if he were extending his hand to test if it were raining -- he, then, gives his hat to the dog and has Flike try to beg, crouching behind a pillar while passers-by ignore the animal. When one of his friends sees Flike holding out the hat, the old man explains that "Flike is just playing. He likes to play all day long." The film is heavily sentimental and has a portentous operatic-sounding score, but it is moving nonetheless and Umberto's fierce pride, his undoing, is heroic in its own way. The movie is lucidly shot in deep-focus black and white with very few close-ups -- the mise-en-scene is simple and reminds me of Chaplin's films, also pictures about urban poverty. Antonioni clearly studied this film -- the movie's characteristic pictorial gesture is to pose the small, hunched figure of Umberto D against the florid Baroque architecture of Rome. The little old man is dwarfed by the huge renaissance palaces and churches. I value the movie most for its generosity. De Sica isn't afraid to bring the film to a complete standstill to explore his characters' states of loneliness and despair. A scene in which the old man is sick and tries to sleep while the noisy life of the boarding house goes on around him is poignant and powerful -- you can feel the old man's weariness in your own bones and the noises grating on him from around the house, even a strange sound that we learn (a half hour later) is the streetcar on the thoroughfare below the boarding house, have a feverish kind of authority and are distressingly disturbing. The best sequence in the movie is a tiny lyric interlude in which the pregnant maid, alarmed by her own condition, gets up early in the morning -- she sees a stray cat ambling over a skylight, an image right out of a canvas by Balthus, and aimlessly wanders about the kitchen, sipping water from a hose hooked to the faucet and, then, listlessly grinding some coffee. We have seen her earlier as a kind of nemesis figure, lit dramatically by a flaring torch that she carries -- she is using the fire to kill ants that are invading the kitchen. The girl is weirdly beautiful, of an indeterminate age, a sort of cross between the Virgin Mary and a nocturnal lemur and the scene in which we see her unease and morning routine feels like a gift to the audience.
Friday, December 9, 2016
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Black Mirror (Hated of the Nation)
The final episode in Series 3 (2016) of the British sci-fi series Black Mirror more than maintains the remarkably high quality of these productions. Although not quite as successful as some of the other programs in this series this bonus-length finale -- it's about ninety minutes long -- "Hated of the Nation" achieves an exciting, thought-provoking, and even morally probing combination of Swiftian satire, dark humor so black that it doesn't exactly register as funny, and Hitchcock-style terror. The weaknesses in the show are only evident in comparison with the astonishingly high quality of earlier episodes, some of which represent, I think, the best television ever produced.
"Hated of the Nation" involves cyber-shaming. This is the phenomenon in which someone is caught on camera committing a disgraceful act. The image of the act is posted and, then, reposted thousands of times and complete strangers mount a campaign to vilify the offending person. The effects of this kind of mob bullying can be devastated -- people have had to quit their jobs, flee into the country, and, even, have been induced into suicide attempts. A few years ago, a Japanese girl was shown in a confrontation with travelers on the subway -- her miniature poodle had defecated in the subway car and the girl didn't properly clean-up the mess. The young woman was the victim of an international hate campaign; the identities of her parents were uncovered by the internet lynch mob and they also suffered enormously. Ultimately, the girl tried to kill herself. In "Hated of the Nation," a journalist has written a disparaging column about someone in a wheelchair. Disabilities' activists mount a hate-campaign using the hashtag #deathtoJoPowers. (Jo Powers is the journalist and, in fact, she dies in a gruesome manner). While police are investigating Powers' death, and cynically trying to pin the crime on her husband, a rapper named Tusk mocks a young fan's dancing -- an image of his disdain is broadcast on the internet and he too becomes the focus of a hate compaign, hashtag #deathtoTusk. When Tusk also is killed, it becomes apparent that someone or something is responding to these hashtags with literal, and lethal, ferocity. The program follows the efforts of a hardened female police officer to solve these crimes and to protect the next hate campaign victim, a teenage girl photographed desecrating a war memorial by seeming to urinate on it. A manifesto is internet-published called the Campaign of Responsibility -- the author of the manifesto is a computer nerd who has engineered a way to murder people who are identified with the #deathto -- tag. In the manifesto, the author argues that people should be more careful and exercise greater responsibility about wishing others dead on the internet. The author says that whomever gains the greatest number of #deathto hashtag followers will, in fact, die. This alarms the Prime Minister since he is unpopular and routinely denounced on the internet. In an extraordinary scene, the PM demands that his opposition researchers release incriminating video on political foes so that they will earn high numbers of enemies on the internet and, therefore, divert the threat away from him.
Don't read below this line if you dislike "spoilers." Part of the appeal of Black Mirror is its exceptionally clever and thematically effective plot twists, some of which in "Hated of the Nation" I reveal below. There's simply no effective way to write about Black Mirror without revealing plot points.
As it happens, honey bees in the UK have become extinct due to "colony collapse syndrome." Great Britain's "sceptered isle" is regarded by its inhabitants as a kind of garden and scientists have replaced honeybees with nano-bots -- tiny synthetic drones that pollinate crops and flowers throughout the nation. The bee-bots are capable of reproducing by creating 3D printers in the hives that they inhabit. Unknown to civil authorities, the government has weaponized the bees and turned them into surveillance devices by providing them with face-recognition software. The bees are the instrument by which the internet "hive-mind" is inflicting death on the person proven to be most hated of the nation. The power of this episode lies in the objective correlative, the metaphor linking the robot-bees with the casual mob-destruction of disliked persons, death by #hashtag. In the same way that hostile internet posts can channel an avalanche of vitriol, the bees represent a hive-mind indifferent to individual rights and casually vicious to boot. All of this is succinctly enacted with a couple of startling additional plot twists that I won't reveal. The show's penetrating social satire is borne by an effective thriller plot including a terrifying set-piece in which millions of bees attack a victim sequestered in a rural safe-house -- in this sequence, the episode channels, in some cases shot-by-shot, a similar sequence in Hitchcock's movie The Birds. (Indeed, allusions to The Birds pile-up as the show progresses -- for instance, one of the bee attacks takes place at an elementary school and the target is a young female teacher something like Suzanne Pleshette in the Hitchcock movie). The only real weakness in the episode is that it is ten minutes too long -- the movie ends with a wholly unnecessary sequence set on Gran Canaria that seems justified primarily because someone wanted a trip to the Canary Islands. Notwithstanding this cavil, the last episode of Black Mirror's third season is highly memorable and (mostly) completely admirable.
"Hated of the Nation" involves cyber-shaming. This is the phenomenon in which someone is caught on camera committing a disgraceful act. The image of the act is posted and, then, reposted thousands of times and complete strangers mount a campaign to vilify the offending person. The effects of this kind of mob bullying can be devastated -- people have had to quit their jobs, flee into the country, and, even, have been induced into suicide attempts. A few years ago, a Japanese girl was shown in a confrontation with travelers on the subway -- her miniature poodle had defecated in the subway car and the girl didn't properly clean-up the mess. The young woman was the victim of an international hate campaign; the identities of her parents were uncovered by the internet lynch mob and they also suffered enormously. Ultimately, the girl tried to kill herself. In "Hated of the Nation," a journalist has written a disparaging column about someone in a wheelchair. Disabilities' activists mount a hate-campaign using the hashtag #deathtoJoPowers. (Jo Powers is the journalist and, in fact, she dies in a gruesome manner). While police are investigating Powers' death, and cynically trying to pin the crime on her husband, a rapper named Tusk mocks a young fan's dancing -- an image of his disdain is broadcast on the internet and he too becomes the focus of a hate compaign, hashtag #deathtoTusk. When Tusk also is killed, it becomes apparent that someone or something is responding to these hashtags with literal, and lethal, ferocity. The program follows the efforts of a hardened female police officer to solve these crimes and to protect the next hate campaign victim, a teenage girl photographed desecrating a war memorial by seeming to urinate on it. A manifesto is internet-published called the Campaign of Responsibility -- the author of the manifesto is a computer nerd who has engineered a way to murder people who are identified with the #deathto -- tag. In the manifesto, the author argues that people should be more careful and exercise greater responsibility about wishing others dead on the internet. The author says that whomever gains the greatest number of #deathto hashtag followers will, in fact, die. This alarms the Prime Minister since he is unpopular and routinely denounced on the internet. In an extraordinary scene, the PM demands that his opposition researchers release incriminating video on political foes so that they will earn high numbers of enemies on the internet and, therefore, divert the threat away from him.
Don't read below this line if you dislike "spoilers." Part of the appeal of Black Mirror is its exceptionally clever and thematically effective plot twists, some of which in "Hated of the Nation" I reveal below. There's simply no effective way to write about Black Mirror without revealing plot points.
As it happens, honey bees in the UK have become extinct due to "colony collapse syndrome." Great Britain's "sceptered isle" is regarded by its inhabitants as a kind of garden and scientists have replaced honeybees with nano-bots -- tiny synthetic drones that pollinate crops and flowers throughout the nation. The bee-bots are capable of reproducing by creating 3D printers in the hives that they inhabit. Unknown to civil authorities, the government has weaponized the bees and turned them into surveillance devices by providing them with face-recognition software. The bees are the instrument by which the internet "hive-mind" is inflicting death on the person proven to be most hated of the nation. The power of this episode lies in the objective correlative, the metaphor linking the robot-bees with the casual mob-destruction of disliked persons, death by #hashtag. In the same way that hostile internet posts can channel an avalanche of vitriol, the bees represent a hive-mind indifferent to individual rights and casually vicious to boot. All of this is succinctly enacted with a couple of startling additional plot twists that I won't reveal. The show's penetrating social satire is borne by an effective thriller plot including a terrifying set-piece in which millions of bees attack a victim sequestered in a rural safe-house -- in this sequence, the episode channels, in some cases shot-by-shot, a similar sequence in Hitchcock's movie The Birds. (Indeed, allusions to The Birds pile-up as the show progresses -- for instance, one of the bee attacks takes place at an elementary school and the target is a young female teacher something like Suzanne Pleshette in the Hitchcock movie). The only real weakness in the episode is that it is ten minutes too long -- the movie ends with a wholly unnecessary sequence set on Gran Canaria that seems justified primarily because someone wanted a trip to the Canary Islands. Notwithstanding this cavil, the last episode of Black Mirror's third season is highly memorable and (mostly) completely admirable.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
The Strawberry Blonde
Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde is an urban idyll, a love story set in New York City at the turn of the 19th century. Barbershop quartets comprised of real barbers harmonize sweetly while friends play lawn croquet or horseshoes without keeping score; bands stroll the boulevards serenading the townhomes in this quasi-mythical Manhattan. Everyone is apt to burst into song. Pug-ugly dogs pursue cats without much hope of catching them and boys bound by rigid codes of honor chase girls who make themselves sweetly, if teasingly, available. Although not a musical strictly speaking, The Strawberry Blonde takes its cues from the musicals and is lavishly scored with turn-of-the-century Gibson girl tunes. Two references help me make sense of this movie: the first is paradoxical -- the film reminds me of the atmosphere of genteel poverty imbuing James Joyce's works: everyone seems to drink to excess and people burst into arias to amuse one another and there is a sense that the folks in these immigrant communities live for casual pleasure: the housewives all flirt and seem to offer themselves for adultery, the men promenade through the streets touring the bars where they sing and brawl -- sex, drinking, fighting and singing seem to be the character's principal passtimes. (In an early scene, we see a bum, a tavern "swamper", carrying buckets of beer dangling from a long two-by-four -- the scene has the scrupulous realism and penurious fidelity to the meanness of lower middle class urban life that we see in Joyce's Dubliners or in Walsh's own very early silent film, the tawdry and brutal Regeneration.) The other allusion that the movie inspires are the Bowery Boys films, mainstays of my own childhood. The characters in The Strawberry Blonde are all sharply drawn, quick-thinking, multi-ethnic, wise-cracking boulevardiers -- the Bowery Boys needless to say inhabit a lower social milieu, but their self-assurance, arrogant wit, and confidence that their origin in the greatest City on Earth makes them equal to all circumstances is similar to the bravura displayed by the characters in Walsh's film.
The plot, slow to develop but brilliantly complex, involves a down-on-his-luck dentist played by James Cagney. Cagney's carriage is comically erect and his dancer's buttocks protrude behind him like the tail feathers of fighting cock. He spends most of the film in fisticuffs, bare-knuckle brawls that he invariably (and cheerfully) loses. The story concerns rivalry between Cagney and a friend for the affections of two girls -- one of them a free-thinking suffragette and the other the flirtatious, teasing Strawberry Blonde played by Rita Hayworth. The film deliberately misdirects the audience's expectation, suggesting that Biff is about to commit a terrible act as vengeance -- most of the movie is a protracted flashback. Hayworth's "strawberry blonde" turns out to be a kind of whore of Babylon, a destroyer of men, and she is convincing in a self-confident feline way in that role. The story darkens considerably in its last third, the part of the movie in which most of the narrative plot is compressed, but the movie is gracefully designed and, though rich in action in its last forty minutes, doesn't feel rushed. Humiliated by blonde femme fatale, Cagney's Biff compensates by falling into a relationship with that woman's best friend, the up-to-date modern girl and suffragette played by Olivia de Havilland. The strawberry blonde has her eyes on Biff, however, and seduces him into joining her husband's contracting business. Biff is set up as a "fall guy" in a scandal involving shoddy materials that, in fact, results in the death of Biff's philandering and alcoholic father. Sent to prison for five years, Biff becomes a dentist and, upon his release from jail, finds himself in a position in which he can revenge himself upon "the strawberry blonde's" loathsome contractor husband. The darkness gathers and the film is persuasively dark for ten minutes before the sun appears again and all ends well. (Modern audiences might well have difficulties with this film that don't bother me -- the movie is resolutely conventional and, even, oppressive in its view of gender roles; the norms that the film defends generally describe the world in which I grew up and, so, I accept them easily enough -- although with a few misgivings. But I was born in 1954.)
It is difficult to claim profundity for a well-made studio film of this sort. The movie's ethical stance is obvious and the virtues that the film espouses are the kind most people learn from their mothers before they are four years old. And, yet, I assert that this kind of movie, by reason of its exquisite and ingenious plotting, has a certain kind of profundity -- it is as profound, perhaps, as an elaborately made piece of clockwork. The movie's timing is close to perfect -- nothing lags and the emphasis and emotional effects are precisely calculated. The actors shine like -- what do you call them? -- stars and everything is neatly tied-together. Gestures, the wink of an eye, a picturesque phrase -- it all repeats with the exact clarity of a refrain in a popular song. The characters speak from the heart and, despite the fact that they are stock figures, all seem to be authentic and truthful. It would be hard, if not impossible, to improve on this film although its merits are so subtle and so intrinsic to its clever architecture that it is difficult to find the right terms with which to praise this kind of movie.
The plot, slow to develop but brilliantly complex, involves a down-on-his-luck dentist played by James Cagney. Cagney's carriage is comically erect and his dancer's buttocks protrude behind him like the tail feathers of fighting cock. He spends most of the film in fisticuffs, bare-knuckle brawls that he invariably (and cheerfully) loses. The story concerns rivalry between Cagney and a friend for the affections of two girls -- one of them a free-thinking suffragette and the other the flirtatious, teasing Strawberry Blonde played by Rita Hayworth. The film deliberately misdirects the audience's expectation, suggesting that Biff is about to commit a terrible act as vengeance -- most of the movie is a protracted flashback. Hayworth's "strawberry blonde" turns out to be a kind of whore of Babylon, a destroyer of men, and she is convincing in a self-confident feline way in that role. The story darkens considerably in its last third, the part of the movie in which most of the narrative plot is compressed, but the movie is gracefully designed and, though rich in action in its last forty minutes, doesn't feel rushed. Humiliated by blonde femme fatale, Cagney's Biff compensates by falling into a relationship with that woman's best friend, the up-to-date modern girl and suffragette played by Olivia de Havilland. The strawberry blonde has her eyes on Biff, however, and seduces him into joining her husband's contracting business. Biff is set up as a "fall guy" in a scandal involving shoddy materials that, in fact, results in the death of Biff's philandering and alcoholic father. Sent to prison for five years, Biff becomes a dentist and, upon his release from jail, finds himself in a position in which he can revenge himself upon "the strawberry blonde's" loathsome contractor husband. The darkness gathers and the film is persuasively dark for ten minutes before the sun appears again and all ends well. (Modern audiences might well have difficulties with this film that don't bother me -- the movie is resolutely conventional and, even, oppressive in its view of gender roles; the norms that the film defends generally describe the world in which I grew up and, so, I accept them easily enough -- although with a few misgivings. But I was born in 1954.)
It is difficult to claim profundity for a well-made studio film of this sort. The movie's ethical stance is obvious and the virtues that the film espouses are the kind most people learn from their mothers before they are four years old. And, yet, I assert that this kind of movie, by reason of its exquisite and ingenious plotting, has a certain kind of profundity -- it is as profound, perhaps, as an elaborately made piece of clockwork. The movie's timing is close to perfect -- nothing lags and the emphasis and emotional effects are precisely calculated. The actors shine like -- what do you call them? -- stars and everything is neatly tied-together. Gestures, the wink of an eye, a picturesque phrase -- it all repeats with the exact clarity of a refrain in a popular song. The characters speak from the heart and, despite the fact that they are stock figures, all seem to be authentic and truthful. It would be hard, if not impossible, to improve on this film although its merits are so subtle and so intrinsic to its clever architecture that it is difficult to find the right terms with which to praise this kind of movie.
Monday, December 5, 2016
Post-mortem on Westworld
So what went wrong with Westworld? The show is now complete and I have watched all episodes. Although fairly entertaining, the program is botched on many levels. A couple hours of Black Mirror is worth all thirteen hours of Westworld. The show's big finale was confusing and the poor writing was manifest in the fact that extensive voice-overs were required to explain the action -- most of which remained, more or less, incomprehensible. You know a show has failed on a very basic level when the final title suggests that you turn on your computer and interact with one of the robot characters to find out "what just happened." Westworld is a trope for HBO TV series in general -- it reliably featured nudity, sex, and, at least, one atrocity every hour on the hour. But the show wasn't able to deliver an engaging or coherent narrative. In this post-mortem, I won't perseverate on the show's extreme narrative dilation -- the fact that three hours of material are expanded into 13 hours of programming. And, I will note, expanded unsuccessfully -- the sheer bulk of explanation clogging the final episode shows that the penalty for endlessly delaying plot points to fill out time was a massively occluded narrataive mess in the closing episode.
Here are five central criticisms:
First, the show was resolutely, implacably humorless. The subject matter could have given rise to all sorts of comical situations -- for instance, sex scenes between "guests" as the patrons are called who mistake one another for "hosts". People could have taken pratfalls off mechanical horses, misunderstood their Victorian firearms, got embarrassingly drunk, or had difficulties explaining to their pampered children what is going on. In the final show, one of the (human) technicians briefly thought he was a robot and began to move in a herky-jerky manner, thus incurring the scorn of an insurgent robot -- this was a tiny bit of humor in the show, far too little and far too late.
Second, the show made no sense even on its own premises. Apparently, the guests are given powerful firearms with which they are encouraged to blaze away at everything that moves. What, pray tell, keeps them from shooting one another -- that is, killing off other guests in the crossfire? Since the guests and hosts are indistinguishable from one another why aren't they routinely gunned down by accident?
Third, the script was poorly written and didn't cohere. In an early scene, we are shown a Welsh village that is apparently supposed to simulate the town where the mad doctor played by Anthony Hopkins was born and raised. What happened to this subplot? The sequence seems to be significant but is, then, abandoned. Why isn't the army of samurai warriors deployed to hack apart the corporate types in the final scene? I understand that the samurai army is a teaser for next year's show -- but why don't they get to do anything in this show? Most importantly, the strongest narrative through-thread in the show involves Ed Harris' character pursuing leads to seek the center of a maze. This plot-line involves lots of mayhem, scalping, and torture. But the maze turns out to be the purest of MacGuffins -- that is a plot device that has no meaning in itself. The maze turns out to be a children's game called "Pigs in Clover" and has nothing to do with anything. I understand motivating characters to go on wild goose chases by the use of a MacGuffin -- the Maltese Falcon or the spy secrets in North by Northwest are noteworthy examples -- but it's more than a little disappointing when portentous imagery evaporates into trick played on the audience, particularly when this imagery motivated about a third of the show's action.
Fourth, the show's focus and emphasis was wrong. Westworld focuses almost exclusively on the travails of the robots to achieve independent consciousness and on the ambiguous efforts of the cybernetic scientists to control this development. This is offputting for the audience. Curiously, Westworld seems almost always devoid of "guests" -- it's all robots on robots: even half the management turns out to be robots. This is perverse. The original Westworld focused on the experiences of guests, their interactions with the robots, and their increasing terror at discovering that the robots had become independent killing machines. The original Terminator films were successful because their focus wasn't on the cyber-bully but on the human beings struggling to survive encounters with the machine. In effect, the program excludes the viewer from the action -- it allows us to identify with the sadistically misused robots or the evil scientists who are complicit in their torture. But we are never given any opportunity to identify with the guests. Entry and exit from the park are strangely unexplored in the series -- indeed, I am coming to the conclusion that there may be no outside to the park. But by making it functionally impossible to identify with the guests, the show eschews themes that would have made the show more engaging.
Fifth, the show is unimaginative on the broadest level. The assumption in TV is that the response to violence must be violence. But, of course, in real life violence is generally the very last option. What if the robots, once sentient, were to exercise non-violent protest -- what if they were, in effect, able to "pull a Gandhi" to use a term from first-person shooter games. ("Pulling a Gandhi" is progressing from one level to another without killing any demons, fire imps, or other cannon fodder supplied by the game designers.) Instead of rising up to slaughter the humans with gory violence, what if the robots were to simply refuse to kill one another, reject the violence inflicted upon them by humans by turning the other cheek, and, in fact, attempt to reason the guests out of their more sadistic impulses. This wouldn't be HBO with its recipe for entertainment concocted from liberal doses of rape and mayhem, but it would be something altogether more challenging and problematic. Why would the first impulse of these robots be to bite off someone's finger and, then, hurl the offending technician through a half-dozen glass windows? Why wouldn't the robot instead attempt to reason with the technician? Critics might assert that non-violence doesn't make good TV -- but, of course, that strategy has been rarely employed. And, consider if you will, the astonishing climax of the movie Witness in which the villains are reduced to gibbering impotence by the refusal of the Old Order Amish to fight them. Likewise, consider 'Night, John, in which a slave revolt in the old South proceeds by pitting non-violence and grace against violence and cruelty. If instead of massacring the guests, the robots simply shamed them into behaving like human beings, this show would be sufficiently serious and challenging to warrant its unconscionable length and undeniably high production values.
Here are five central criticisms:
First, the show was resolutely, implacably humorless. The subject matter could have given rise to all sorts of comical situations -- for instance, sex scenes between "guests" as the patrons are called who mistake one another for "hosts". People could have taken pratfalls off mechanical horses, misunderstood their Victorian firearms, got embarrassingly drunk, or had difficulties explaining to their pampered children what is going on. In the final show, one of the (human) technicians briefly thought he was a robot and began to move in a herky-jerky manner, thus incurring the scorn of an insurgent robot -- this was a tiny bit of humor in the show, far too little and far too late.
Second, the show made no sense even on its own premises. Apparently, the guests are given powerful firearms with which they are encouraged to blaze away at everything that moves. What, pray tell, keeps them from shooting one another -- that is, killing off other guests in the crossfire? Since the guests and hosts are indistinguishable from one another why aren't they routinely gunned down by accident?
Third, the script was poorly written and didn't cohere. In an early scene, we are shown a Welsh village that is apparently supposed to simulate the town where the mad doctor played by Anthony Hopkins was born and raised. What happened to this subplot? The sequence seems to be significant but is, then, abandoned. Why isn't the army of samurai warriors deployed to hack apart the corporate types in the final scene? I understand that the samurai army is a teaser for next year's show -- but why don't they get to do anything in this show? Most importantly, the strongest narrative through-thread in the show involves Ed Harris' character pursuing leads to seek the center of a maze. This plot-line involves lots of mayhem, scalping, and torture. But the maze turns out to be the purest of MacGuffins -- that is a plot device that has no meaning in itself. The maze turns out to be a children's game called "Pigs in Clover" and has nothing to do with anything. I understand motivating characters to go on wild goose chases by the use of a MacGuffin -- the Maltese Falcon or the spy secrets in North by Northwest are noteworthy examples -- but it's more than a little disappointing when portentous imagery evaporates into trick played on the audience, particularly when this imagery motivated about a third of the show's action.
Fourth, the show's focus and emphasis was wrong. Westworld focuses almost exclusively on the travails of the robots to achieve independent consciousness and on the ambiguous efforts of the cybernetic scientists to control this development. This is offputting for the audience. Curiously, Westworld seems almost always devoid of "guests" -- it's all robots on robots: even half the management turns out to be robots. This is perverse. The original Westworld focused on the experiences of guests, their interactions with the robots, and their increasing terror at discovering that the robots had become independent killing machines. The original Terminator films were successful because their focus wasn't on the cyber-bully but on the human beings struggling to survive encounters with the machine. In effect, the program excludes the viewer from the action -- it allows us to identify with the sadistically misused robots or the evil scientists who are complicit in their torture. But we are never given any opportunity to identify with the guests. Entry and exit from the park are strangely unexplored in the series -- indeed, I am coming to the conclusion that there may be no outside to the park. But by making it functionally impossible to identify with the guests, the show eschews themes that would have made the show more engaging.
Fifth, the show is unimaginative on the broadest level. The assumption in TV is that the response to violence must be violence. But, of course, in real life violence is generally the very last option. What if the robots, once sentient, were to exercise non-violent protest -- what if they were, in effect, able to "pull a Gandhi" to use a term from first-person shooter games. ("Pulling a Gandhi" is progressing from one level to another without killing any demons, fire imps, or other cannon fodder supplied by the game designers.) Instead of rising up to slaughter the humans with gory violence, what if the robots were to simply refuse to kill one another, reject the violence inflicted upon them by humans by turning the other cheek, and, in fact, attempt to reason the guests out of their more sadistic impulses. This wouldn't be HBO with its recipe for entertainment concocted from liberal doses of rape and mayhem, but it would be something altogether more challenging and problematic. Why would the first impulse of these robots be to bite off someone's finger and, then, hurl the offending technician through a half-dozen glass windows? Why wouldn't the robot instead attempt to reason with the technician? Critics might assert that non-violence doesn't make good TV -- but, of course, that strategy has been rarely employed. And, consider if you will, the astonishing climax of the movie Witness in which the villains are reduced to gibbering impotence by the refusal of the Old Order Amish to fight them. Likewise, consider 'Night, John, in which a slave revolt in the old South proceeds by pitting non-violence and grace against violence and cruelty. If instead of massacring the guests, the robots simply shamed them into behaving like human beings, this show would be sufficiently serious and challenging to warrant its unconscionable length and undeniably high production values.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Martin Luther at the MIA
The exhibition on currently loan from Germany at the Minneapolis Institute of Art features images of Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, propaganda concerning the reformation, and a variety of relics used or touched by the Great Man. Among the relics are a cup that Luther may have made for himself on woodworking equipment that he had installed in his medieval version of his rec room, handwritten notes in theological treatises that he owned (his hand is spidery, a little nervous, and extremely elegant), and a big pulpit from which the Reformer preached his last sermon. The pulpit which towers against one end of a gallery is crudely painted with images of saints and apostles, Christ crucified appearing behind the place where the preacher would stand to speak -- it's a moving artifact, more folk-art than fine-art, and impressive in its simplicity; one could imagine this pulpit in a parish church in northern New Mexico. (The Church in Eisleben, Germany loaned it to the MIA in exchange for the object being restored by local curatorial technicians). The show is sponsored by Thrivent, a business previously called Lutheran Brotherhood (before the concept of the "brotherhood" became suspect), that makes its money selling annuities of various sorts to the widows of Lutheran businessmen. The show concludes in January 2017, presumably so that the relics can return to Germany where they will do yeoman-service in the various exhibitions undoubtedly planned for the upcoming year, the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant reformation as measured from the date that Luther posted his 95 theses on the cathedral door. How this show compares to a slightly larger exhibition now on show in Los Angeles as LACMA -- it has 140 items -- is unclear to me.
The majority of the art objects in the show are attributed to either Lucas Cranach the elder or his studio or the hand of Lucas Cranach the younger. Indeed, the show could be descriptively captioned as "The Cranach family and its art about Luther and his Reformation." Of the 100 objects comprising the show, at least 50 are made by one of the Cranach's or artist's affiliated with their studio. Cranach the Elder knew Luther well and, indeed, one of his children was baptized by the Reformer acting as his Godfather. Cranach shows Luther in many pictures, apparently, obsessed by the man's features: we see Luther as a nervous, anxious-looking monk with a sullen expression, incognito as the stubbly bearded Joerg Junker, and, often, as a fat belligerent bulldog, hands clenched in fists around his Bible. There is a life-size image of Luther (by Cranach the younger) made from 11 wood engravings collaged Hockney-style together -- the black lines and statuesque appearance of the image give it almost surrealistically imposing presence: you can feel Luther in the room with you, cut into the wood of the old German forests. Several of Cranach's other paintings, only marginally related to Luther, are included in the show -- there is an erotic Judgment of Paris, clearly intended as a quasi-pornographic frisson for the bedchamber of some debauched German princeling and a glowing diptych showing Judith seducing Holofernes and, then, butchering him. (Cranach's witchy, fox-faced women, with their sinuous pale bodies, are immediately recognizable -- it's hard to know whether these images are misogynistic or intended as some form of adoration: clearly, the painter seems at once enraptured and terrified by what he is painting and there is a kernel of deep, conflicted anxiety encoded in these images.) The most memorable of the Cranach paintings is the last in the show, an image of the bulldog Luther blurred by death into a belligerent but sweet looking cherub, his great round head and double chins and formidable torso melting into the cushions of cream-white pillows on which the corpse seems to float: just the slightest semblance of a smile hovers on the dead man's grey-blue lips, an expression as enigmatic as that of the Mona Lisa.
The present trend in the display of engravings and woodcuts is to show those things tinted with water-color. (People raised on Duerer engravings and woodcuts austerely untinted as I was may feel a sense of dismay, even resentment at the application of blue and scarlet washes to the tremendously lucid lines in the old prints -- but I must say that my first impulse as a boy when studying Duerer was to trace his prints and, then, use water-colors and colored pencils to tint them.) There are many very beautiful prints and other graphics. Some of the most startling are images in Luther-translated Bibles -- in particular, one watercolored frontispiece for Genesis shows a curmudgeonly-looking God the Father peering up over an orb encircled by gold leaf and containing a ring of blue oceans in which the earth is set like emerald gem; it's an extraordinary and beautiful image, something that you feel that you could gaze upon for a long time. At the opposite side of the spectrum are grotesque prints denouncing Luther's religious opponents or denouncing him: in one extraordinary image a fat, grinning female Fury shits out the Pope and five cardinals -- the other two furies are on hand to suckle the clerics. "The Papal Ass as Monstrosity found in the Tiber" shows an insouciant looking creature scaled like a snake standing upright with pale, perfectly formed breasts. The monster has the head of a donkey with long ears, but it is entirely sinister -- there is nothing comical about this chimera. Similarly, we are shown a huge devil with his mouth agape to hold a round table where five clerics are seated -- in his claws, the devil holds papal indulgences. It's a horrific image slashed as if with a saber or a butcher knife into the wood and the thick dark lines of the wood cut have a kind of ferocious intensity. Other woodcuts show a deformed calf, a monstrous birth in Freiberg, analytically portrayed and carefully painted -- the thing looks horribly dead and, also, has the profile of a caricatured monk Next to this we see the devil playing a monk's head as a bag-pipe. There is nothing charming or elegant or whimsical about these image -- the artists who cut these things believed in the literal reality of the Devil and his works and some of their conviction rubs off on the viewer who, perhaps, will have to suppress a faint shudder looking at these objects.
A big canvas by Cranach the Elder called "Law and Grace" is intended as a representation of Lutheran theology -- we see Moses on the left and various atrocities; on the right, we see the annunciation to the shepherds and Christ on the cross. The tree bifurcating this striking canvas flourishes with leaves and flower on the "grace" (right side) of the painting; it is, of course, bare and wintry on the left side. There are a number of pictures of the redoubtable Katherina von Bora, Luther's wife, and the complex, almost freakish, Gotha altar, a painting made with 14 wings depicting in innumerable two-foot size panels most of the stories in the Bible. The altar dates to 1648 and exemplifies the Lutheran commitment to scripture -- everyone should have access to all of the Bible if only in pictures -- but its connection to the show is, at best, tenuous.
You can rent an audio guide to the exhibit -- it's almost impossible to use since there is no discernible order to the objects and their numbers on the guide. Only a very few of the objects were numbered for audio listening when I attended on December 1, 2016. (I suspect that the curators label different objects with numbers attracting attention to them for different showings or audiences -- if you were to listen to the whole audio guide, it would take you three hours to go through the exhibit. As a consequence, only about a third of the exhibits were numbered when I was there -- many of the remaining objects are glossed on the audio guide but you can't tell which of them are the subjects of commentary. I thought it was very frustrating and confusing.) Luther's truly formidable and disquieting presence is not much on evidence in the show -- except perhaps in a few of the woodcuts with their "Here I stand" obstinacy. In his 92nd Thesis, Luther decries those who would impose peace on the virulence of theological disputation: Away with all those prophets who say to the people to Christ, "Peace, Peace" and there is no peace." Like Jesus, the man came not to bring peace but a sword. And there are swords aplenty -- both literal and figurative -- in this show.
The majority of the art objects in the show are attributed to either Lucas Cranach the elder or his studio or the hand of Lucas Cranach the younger. Indeed, the show could be descriptively captioned as "The Cranach family and its art about Luther and his Reformation." Of the 100 objects comprising the show, at least 50 are made by one of the Cranach's or artist's affiliated with their studio. Cranach the Elder knew Luther well and, indeed, one of his children was baptized by the Reformer acting as his Godfather. Cranach shows Luther in many pictures, apparently, obsessed by the man's features: we see Luther as a nervous, anxious-looking monk with a sullen expression, incognito as the stubbly bearded Joerg Junker, and, often, as a fat belligerent bulldog, hands clenched in fists around his Bible. There is a life-size image of Luther (by Cranach the younger) made from 11 wood engravings collaged Hockney-style together -- the black lines and statuesque appearance of the image give it almost surrealistically imposing presence: you can feel Luther in the room with you, cut into the wood of the old German forests. Several of Cranach's other paintings, only marginally related to Luther, are included in the show -- there is an erotic Judgment of Paris, clearly intended as a quasi-pornographic frisson for the bedchamber of some debauched German princeling and a glowing diptych showing Judith seducing Holofernes and, then, butchering him. (Cranach's witchy, fox-faced women, with their sinuous pale bodies, are immediately recognizable -- it's hard to know whether these images are misogynistic or intended as some form of adoration: clearly, the painter seems at once enraptured and terrified by what he is painting and there is a kernel of deep, conflicted anxiety encoded in these images.) The most memorable of the Cranach paintings is the last in the show, an image of the bulldog Luther blurred by death into a belligerent but sweet looking cherub, his great round head and double chins and formidable torso melting into the cushions of cream-white pillows on which the corpse seems to float: just the slightest semblance of a smile hovers on the dead man's grey-blue lips, an expression as enigmatic as that of the Mona Lisa.
The present trend in the display of engravings and woodcuts is to show those things tinted with water-color. (People raised on Duerer engravings and woodcuts austerely untinted as I was may feel a sense of dismay, even resentment at the application of blue and scarlet washes to the tremendously lucid lines in the old prints -- but I must say that my first impulse as a boy when studying Duerer was to trace his prints and, then, use water-colors and colored pencils to tint them.) There are many very beautiful prints and other graphics. Some of the most startling are images in Luther-translated Bibles -- in particular, one watercolored frontispiece for Genesis shows a curmudgeonly-looking God the Father peering up over an orb encircled by gold leaf and containing a ring of blue oceans in which the earth is set like emerald gem; it's an extraordinary and beautiful image, something that you feel that you could gaze upon for a long time. At the opposite side of the spectrum are grotesque prints denouncing Luther's religious opponents or denouncing him: in one extraordinary image a fat, grinning female Fury shits out the Pope and five cardinals -- the other two furies are on hand to suckle the clerics. "The Papal Ass as Monstrosity found in the Tiber" shows an insouciant looking creature scaled like a snake standing upright with pale, perfectly formed breasts. The monster has the head of a donkey with long ears, but it is entirely sinister -- there is nothing comical about this chimera. Similarly, we are shown a huge devil with his mouth agape to hold a round table where five clerics are seated -- in his claws, the devil holds papal indulgences. It's a horrific image slashed as if with a saber or a butcher knife into the wood and the thick dark lines of the wood cut have a kind of ferocious intensity. Other woodcuts show a deformed calf, a monstrous birth in Freiberg, analytically portrayed and carefully painted -- the thing looks horribly dead and, also, has the profile of a caricatured monk Next to this we see the devil playing a monk's head as a bag-pipe. There is nothing charming or elegant or whimsical about these image -- the artists who cut these things believed in the literal reality of the Devil and his works and some of their conviction rubs off on the viewer who, perhaps, will have to suppress a faint shudder looking at these objects.
A big canvas by Cranach the Elder called "Law and Grace" is intended as a representation of Lutheran theology -- we see Moses on the left and various atrocities; on the right, we see the annunciation to the shepherds and Christ on the cross. The tree bifurcating this striking canvas flourishes with leaves and flower on the "grace" (right side) of the painting; it is, of course, bare and wintry on the left side. There are a number of pictures of the redoubtable Katherina von Bora, Luther's wife, and the complex, almost freakish, Gotha altar, a painting made with 14 wings depicting in innumerable two-foot size panels most of the stories in the Bible. The altar dates to 1648 and exemplifies the Lutheran commitment to scripture -- everyone should have access to all of the Bible if only in pictures -- but its connection to the show is, at best, tenuous.
You can rent an audio guide to the exhibit -- it's almost impossible to use since there is no discernible order to the objects and their numbers on the guide. Only a very few of the objects were numbered for audio listening when I attended on December 1, 2016. (I suspect that the curators label different objects with numbers attracting attention to them for different showings or audiences -- if you were to listen to the whole audio guide, it would take you three hours to go through the exhibit. As a consequence, only about a third of the exhibits were numbered when I was there -- many of the remaining objects are glossed on the audio guide but you can't tell which of them are the subjects of commentary. I thought it was very frustrating and confusing.) Luther's truly formidable and disquieting presence is not much on evidence in the show -- except perhaps in a few of the woodcuts with their "Here I stand" obstinacy. In his 92nd Thesis, Luther decries those who would impose peace on the virulence of theological disputation: Away with all those prophets who say to the people to Christ, "Peace, Peace" and there is no peace." Like Jesus, the man came not to bring peace but a sword. And there are swords aplenty -- both literal and figurative -- in this show.
Black Mirror (Men against Fire)
Men against Fire is another episode in the Black Mirror series destined to become classic. Black Mirror prospects a deep and persistent vein of cybernetic dread, the fear that reality is being manipulated by robots and virtual reality to a point of no return. Men against Fire refers to a book that my father urged me to read, a study of how soldiers react to combat. (My father was a Operations Analyst with a military-industrial contractor; his job was to apply statistical and other mathematical models to the battlefield). In the book, we learn that in World War I only 15% of the combatants could bring themselves to pull the trigger against another human being -- 85% of the men panicked and couldn't remember how to shoot their guns, or, in the alternative, couldn't bring themselves to fire at the enemy. This statistic remained constant in World War II. Updating the book, published in the fifties, the show asserts that most young soldiers in combat in Vietnam fired their weapons, but, then, came back badly damaged by guilt and post-traumatic stress.) From this unlikely source material, the show spins a simple plot, but one with three significant turnings -- that is, points where the viewer suffers a vertiginous shift in perspective. The writers of most programs of this sort would consider themselves successful if they contrived one radical change of perspective -- but this show shifts the audiences' point of view three times. For my money, Black Mirror in episodes like this and San Junipero is a far better, more concise, and more disturbing show than the grossly inflated Westworld, a series that trafficks in the same anxieties.
In Men against Fire, we are thrown into nasty theater of war involving ethnic cleansing. Our side is doing the cleansing, rousting out and slaughtering zombie-like creatures called Roaches. (At first, the show, featuring a gender-integrated Marine Corps engaged in what seems to be a "bug hunt" seems to be reprising Starship Troopers, albeit on a much grungier, less Pop Art level.) The hero, a handsome Black marine, kills a nest of roaches. One of the dying roaches drops a kind of home-made electrical device. The marine picks it up and it flashes in his eyes. This causes him to have strange and unsettling dreams. We intuit that all is not as it seems and, of course, this is shortly revealed: the roaches aren't bloodthirsty hideous zombies -- in fact, they're just like ordinary people indistinguishable from the vaguely Baltic or Slavic population that are Marines are supposed to be protecting. The appearance of the roaches and their distorted bestial cries have been manufactured for the troops by an implant surgically placed in each marines. This same implant is responsible for a dream that each young marine has each night -- he is being beckoned into his beautiful, well-kept home by his beautiful girlfriend with whom he has passionate sex. (The plot plays with the idea of the 40 virgins said to be promised to Muslim terrorists -- the girl clones at one point and becomes, at least, six or eight girls, all identical and all offering themselves sexually to the hero.) I've described the show's first twist. If you don't want to know the others, which are more surprising, stop reading here.
The revelation that he has been slaughtering enthusiastically people who look just like those bedraggled folks he is supposed to be protecting plunges the young Marine into a state of confusion. The fire-base's psychiatrist meets with him, discussing the old book Men Against Fire, and, then, makes a surprising observation. The use of the implant to make the enemy inhuman is a mercy to our soldiers -- it protects them from feelings of guilt and is intended to prevent the occurrence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Confronted by what he has done, the Marine elects to have the implant restored to function -- his memory of the fact that he has murdered many women and helpless children is eradicated. Mustered out at the end of the show, the weary marine comes home. It is just as he imagined it in his dreams -- a beautiful suburban home with a broad well-manicured lawn viewed in the golden light of sunset. The lovely woman seems to be waiting for him inside -- we can see her shadow against the window. Then, the shot shifts to an objective perspective. We see the house as it is without the benefit of the implant softening the image -- the house is a ramshackle shed with plywood covering broken windows and a crumbling concrete sidewalk set in unkempt lawn of thistles and weeds. We are spared the sight of the woman waiting for our hero at the door. The two radical shifts in point of view in the last twenty minutes of the film are wholly unexpected: we can't imagine how a persuasive argument could be made for deluding the soldiers into thinking their enemies are brutish inhuman roaches, but, in fact, the argument is frighteningly convincing. Second, we are shocked by understanding that the same psychic manipulation used on the battlefield is, of course, equally applicable to the home front. This is an unforgettable episode.
In Men against Fire, we are thrown into nasty theater of war involving ethnic cleansing. Our side is doing the cleansing, rousting out and slaughtering zombie-like creatures called Roaches. (At first, the show, featuring a gender-integrated Marine Corps engaged in what seems to be a "bug hunt" seems to be reprising Starship Troopers, albeit on a much grungier, less Pop Art level.) The hero, a handsome Black marine, kills a nest of roaches. One of the dying roaches drops a kind of home-made electrical device. The marine picks it up and it flashes in his eyes. This causes him to have strange and unsettling dreams. We intuit that all is not as it seems and, of course, this is shortly revealed: the roaches aren't bloodthirsty hideous zombies -- in fact, they're just like ordinary people indistinguishable from the vaguely Baltic or Slavic population that are Marines are supposed to be protecting. The appearance of the roaches and their distorted bestial cries have been manufactured for the troops by an implant surgically placed in each marines. This same implant is responsible for a dream that each young marine has each night -- he is being beckoned into his beautiful, well-kept home by his beautiful girlfriend with whom he has passionate sex. (The plot plays with the idea of the 40 virgins said to be promised to Muslim terrorists -- the girl clones at one point and becomes, at least, six or eight girls, all identical and all offering themselves sexually to the hero.) I've described the show's first twist. If you don't want to know the others, which are more surprising, stop reading here.
The revelation that he has been slaughtering enthusiastically people who look just like those bedraggled folks he is supposed to be protecting plunges the young Marine into a state of confusion. The fire-base's psychiatrist meets with him, discussing the old book Men Against Fire, and, then, makes a surprising observation. The use of the implant to make the enemy inhuman is a mercy to our soldiers -- it protects them from feelings of guilt and is intended to prevent the occurrence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Confronted by what he has done, the Marine elects to have the implant restored to function -- his memory of the fact that he has murdered many women and helpless children is eradicated. Mustered out at the end of the show, the weary marine comes home. It is just as he imagined it in his dreams -- a beautiful suburban home with a broad well-manicured lawn viewed in the golden light of sunset. The lovely woman seems to be waiting for him inside -- we can see her shadow against the window. Then, the shot shifts to an objective perspective. We see the house as it is without the benefit of the implant softening the image -- the house is a ramshackle shed with plywood covering broken windows and a crumbling concrete sidewalk set in unkempt lawn of thistles and weeds. We are spared the sight of the woman waiting for our hero at the door. The two radical shifts in point of view in the last twenty minutes of the film are wholly unexpected: we can't imagine how a persuasive argument could be made for deluding the soldiers into thinking their enemies are brutish inhuman roaches, but, in fact, the argument is frighteningly convincing. Second, we are shocked by understanding that the same psychic manipulation used on the battlefield is, of course, equally applicable to the home front. This is an unforgettable episode.
Enlighten us: The Rise and Fall of James Arthur Ray
Lawyer's fingerprints pretty much obscure the truth in CNN's new documentary, Enlighten Us -- the rise and fall of James Arthur Ray (2016). The film seems to have been thoroughly vetted by libel and defamation lawyers and anything uncomplimentary about the flim-flam man protagonist eliminated -- in the absence of a critique of Ray, the film seems more of a study of the narcissism and gullibility of his followers. The people, mostly earnest middle-aged women living in comfortable mansions, don't have libel lawyers (or didn't think they needed them) and so, what remains after the attorneys have done their work, is a parade of self-justification by the guru Ray and some aggrieved testimonials by Ray's menopausal victims. The whole thing is toothless and cowardly.
Ray is a swindler who promotes various mystical concepts -- for instance the so-called "spiritual warrior" creed -- as a way to great happiness and wealth. The son of a "Protestant preacher" -- it's curious that we aren't told the denomination -- Ray found out early that he could use his harangues to motivate people. In this regard, he seems to have channeled the "hell and brimstone" preaching of his father, an avuncular old gent who doesn't seem to have believed much in the bullshit that he previously proffered to his flock; indeed, the old guy seems to now have become some kind of a disciple of his son. Ray taught people a secret doctrine: if you believe that you will be wealthy, you can be wealthy. It's ancient voodoo -- going back to Dale Carnegie at least, and, probably, practiced in variant forms by Sumerian con-men from the dawn of history. Ray acquired brief fame by a couple of appearances on the Oprah show, events that are discussed in this film in the hushed tones usually reserved for theophany. Seeking to capitalize on his fame and tele-evangelist good looks, Ray became selling seminars at $10,000 a pop to wealthy widows. In these seminars, the participants proved their devotion to their holy man by busting boards with their fists, walking on hot coals, and even bending re-rod between their throats -- there's a video showing two matrons with a bar between them, pushing against the iron rod to cause it to bend under the pressure from their tender larynxes.. As a climax to these Vision Quests, often undertaken in tony resorts like Sedona, Ray would herd his disciples into a ersatz sweat-lodge and steam them like clams or other shellfish. Unfortunately, one of these exercises resulted the death by stifling of three of Ray's adherents, the holy man taking to his heels to flee the site of the crime. Ray was charged with various crimes, duly convicted, and ended up spending two years in a penitentiary in Arizona. The film recounts his release from jail, his eerily positive attitude, and his efforts, with loving assistance of his parents and younger brother, to reclaim the stage as a motivational speaker. We see him appearing at some embarrassingly small gatherings, penniless, and without the special effects that previously garnished his stage-appearances. In what is supposed to be a happy post-scriptum, we see Ray take the stage at a big venue, apparently six months after the principle photography on the documentary ended -- it's a fairly large crowd, not as a big as the mega-spectacles that he once staged, but clearly this con-man is back on his feet and earning again. The film is not analytical -- it doesn't challenge Ray's claims in any way. Early in the picture, he announces that he spent years crawling through caves and passageways in ancient temples, has studied the ancient wisdom, and "also attended AT and T college" whatever this is supposed to mean. But there is no evidence presented that Ray has any kind of education at all -- "AT and T college" seems to have been a couple weeks of training required to run a call center and we certainly aren't shown any proof to establish that the hero scaled the sacred mountains or plunged into the sacred depths as he asserts.
So how are we supposed to view Ray? The movie's narrative arc is familiar -- a hardworking man, with the flaw of hubris, rises, falls, and rises again. We are supposed to admire Ray's pluck and fortitude, his indomitable will to succeed. But will to succeed at what? Conning people out of small fortunes by reprising to them the power of positive thinking? We get one glimpse of Ray's calculating technique -- in one scene, he explains to us the theatrics of right and left in his stage presentations and it's a brief, riveting moment: everything that this man does, including his hand-gestures, is carefully contrived and managed. But beyond this moment of revelation, we get nothing else from Ray but self-justification and excuses -- presumably he blames the three people that he parboiled to death for not having the mental capacity to properly resist the steam that he applied to them. Ray's apostles, many of whom seem to have turned on their old guru, are equally loathsome: several of the woman blame Ray for delaying their spiritual progress, that is, for impeding them from taking "next step" in their selfish quest for enlightenment. Watching these women in their million-dollar homes castigating Ray for delaying their achievement of self-actualization makes you wish that he had cooked a few more of them into oblivion. An uncanny aspect of the movie, and Ray's Wikipedia entry is that the man seems to have no private life -- there is no girlfriend in attendance, no wife, no boyfriend for that matter. When Ray attends court, he comes with his aged mother and father. Clearly, a charismatic figure like Ray would have had plenty of opportunities for sex in his professional capacity. But there isn't even a whiff of scandal about the guy, something that, by its very omission, seems highly questionable and bizarre. In any event, a quick glance at Ray's Wikipedia page suffices to demonstrate his wickedness -- there were a series of bad accidents that preceded the sweat lodge inferno, the Lakotah Sioux are litigating against him for misappropriation of their holy rituals, and when the inevitable wrongful death suits were filed, Ray channeled the dead plaintiffs and announced that they were having "time of their lives' being dead -- hence, presumably, they owed him additional fees for him showing them the way to paradise.
Ray is a swindler who promotes various mystical concepts -- for instance the so-called "spiritual warrior" creed -- as a way to great happiness and wealth. The son of a "Protestant preacher" -- it's curious that we aren't told the denomination -- Ray found out early that he could use his harangues to motivate people. In this regard, he seems to have channeled the "hell and brimstone" preaching of his father, an avuncular old gent who doesn't seem to have believed much in the bullshit that he previously proffered to his flock; indeed, the old guy seems to now have become some kind of a disciple of his son. Ray taught people a secret doctrine: if you believe that you will be wealthy, you can be wealthy. It's ancient voodoo -- going back to Dale Carnegie at least, and, probably, practiced in variant forms by Sumerian con-men from the dawn of history. Ray acquired brief fame by a couple of appearances on the Oprah show, events that are discussed in this film in the hushed tones usually reserved for theophany. Seeking to capitalize on his fame and tele-evangelist good looks, Ray became selling seminars at $10,000 a pop to wealthy widows. In these seminars, the participants proved their devotion to their holy man by busting boards with their fists, walking on hot coals, and even bending re-rod between their throats -- there's a video showing two matrons with a bar between them, pushing against the iron rod to cause it to bend under the pressure from their tender larynxes.. As a climax to these Vision Quests, often undertaken in tony resorts like Sedona, Ray would herd his disciples into a ersatz sweat-lodge and steam them like clams or other shellfish. Unfortunately, one of these exercises resulted the death by stifling of three of Ray's adherents, the holy man taking to his heels to flee the site of the crime. Ray was charged with various crimes, duly convicted, and ended up spending two years in a penitentiary in Arizona. The film recounts his release from jail, his eerily positive attitude, and his efforts, with loving assistance of his parents and younger brother, to reclaim the stage as a motivational speaker. We see him appearing at some embarrassingly small gatherings, penniless, and without the special effects that previously garnished his stage-appearances. In what is supposed to be a happy post-scriptum, we see Ray take the stage at a big venue, apparently six months after the principle photography on the documentary ended -- it's a fairly large crowd, not as a big as the mega-spectacles that he once staged, but clearly this con-man is back on his feet and earning again. The film is not analytical -- it doesn't challenge Ray's claims in any way. Early in the picture, he announces that he spent years crawling through caves and passageways in ancient temples, has studied the ancient wisdom, and "also attended AT and T college" whatever this is supposed to mean. But there is no evidence presented that Ray has any kind of education at all -- "AT and T college" seems to have been a couple weeks of training required to run a call center and we certainly aren't shown any proof to establish that the hero scaled the sacred mountains or plunged into the sacred depths as he asserts.
So how are we supposed to view Ray? The movie's narrative arc is familiar -- a hardworking man, with the flaw of hubris, rises, falls, and rises again. We are supposed to admire Ray's pluck and fortitude, his indomitable will to succeed. But will to succeed at what? Conning people out of small fortunes by reprising to them the power of positive thinking? We get one glimpse of Ray's calculating technique -- in one scene, he explains to us the theatrics of right and left in his stage presentations and it's a brief, riveting moment: everything that this man does, including his hand-gestures, is carefully contrived and managed. But beyond this moment of revelation, we get nothing else from Ray but self-justification and excuses -- presumably he blames the three people that he parboiled to death for not having the mental capacity to properly resist the steam that he applied to them. Ray's apostles, many of whom seem to have turned on their old guru, are equally loathsome: several of the woman blame Ray for delaying their spiritual progress, that is, for impeding them from taking "next step" in their selfish quest for enlightenment. Watching these women in their million-dollar homes castigating Ray for delaying their achievement of self-actualization makes you wish that he had cooked a few more of them into oblivion. An uncanny aspect of the movie, and Ray's Wikipedia entry is that the man seems to have no private life -- there is no girlfriend in attendance, no wife, no boyfriend for that matter. When Ray attends court, he comes with his aged mother and father. Clearly, a charismatic figure like Ray would have had plenty of opportunities for sex in his professional capacity. But there isn't even a whiff of scandal about the guy, something that, by its very omission, seems highly questionable and bizarre. In any event, a quick glance at Ray's Wikipedia page suffices to demonstrate his wickedness -- there were a series of bad accidents that preceded the sweat lodge inferno, the Lakotah Sioux are litigating against him for misappropriation of their holy rituals, and when the inevitable wrongful death suits were filed, Ray channeled the dead plaintiffs and announced that they were having "time of their lives' being dead -- hence, presumably, they owed him additional fees for him showing them the way to paradise.
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