Bone Tomahawk (2015) only serves as a sad reminder that the most beautiful of film genres, the Western, remains dead. Although the film presents all the classical trappings of the Western (it even has a ballad, "Four Doomed Men Rode Out," sung by a husky-voiced baritone over the closing titles), there is no money available to produce a Western per se, and so Bone Tomahawk was probably pitched as gross-out horror film. The horror elements don't necessary falsify the nobility of the film's Western structure, but they result in some mighty odd, and implausible, plot contortions.
The initial problem that the film must solve is that of establishing an effectively nasty and remorseless adversary. In the fifties, and even up to about 1970, renegade Indians could play the role that zombies now occupy in action films -- that is, the robotic, savage killers prone to rape and torture their victims (zombies just eat your brains). Movies like the great Ulzana's Raid or The Searchers posited the Indians on the warpath as irredeemably brutal, an "Other" with which we can't co-exist and that must be exterminated. (Of course, The Searchers, a film that is really a portrait of an archetypal figure in Western mythology, the Indian-hater, is much more complex than this sketch -- but the film's narrative is founded in an almost Old Testament vision of the Indian enemy as a figure beyond any moral redemption.) Political correctness does not permit the portrayal of Indians in this way any longer. Accordingly, Bone Tomahawk must posit a tribe of "troglodytes", mud-caked savages living in a sort of primal horde in a cave high above a remote desert valley. The "troglodytes" are said to non-Indian. Indeed, Bone Tomahawk recruits to its estimable cast a famous and authentic TV Indian (the handsome Zahn McClarnen who played Hanzee Dent in the second season of Tv's Fargo). This actor has only one function in the movie: he establishes that whatever the "troglodytes" are, they aren't Native Americans. But, of course, this is completely absurd -- the "troglodytes", although caked in eerie white mud, use bows and arrows, howl like wolves to signal one another, and slaughter their prey with "bone tomahawks". If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Therefore, the film's machinations designed to exempt it from claims of racism are both ineffective and risible -- it suffices to say that the bad guys in Bone Tomahawk are some kind of Indians.
For reasons that are unclear, "troglodytes" (previously ensconced more or less harmlessly in their remote valley), have left the reservation and abducted three people from the town of Bright Hope. Bright Hope is purely notional village -- it has no economic or industrial basis, a little idyllic village set down in the middle of a completely empty wilderness. (This is not inconsistent with classic Westerns -- in The Searchers, the pioneers live in Monument Valley and seem to be farmers and ranchers: but, of course, there is no way to farm or ranch in Monument Valley). The town's sheriff played by Kurt Russell leads a posse of three other men in pursuit of the savages. This aspect of the film is played out in a way that will be reassuringly familiar to fans of the Western -- Russell has a school-marmish (but sexually frisky) wife and is accompanied by the "back-up Sheriff", an loyal old man in the Walter Brennan mold. One of the posse members is an Indian killer who has notched his belt 116 times, but otherwise the very picture of a dude-ish southern gentlemen. The fourth member of the posse is the husband of the woman who has been snatched by the savages, his participation in the venture hampered by the fact that he has a badly broken leg and, after their horses are stolen, literally has to crawl through the desert in his quest for the missing woman. The men's trek across the deserts and mountains is pleasantly filmed and involves many vistas of men on horseback traversing empty wastelands. There are some encounters with other desert dwellers, including a pointless shooting of two Mexicans described as the "definition of Manifest Destiny" and suitably criticized by the film. Ultimately, the heroes reach the narrow and hideous defile where the savages live and there is a protracted and very gory last act involving lots of slaughter on all sides.
Although Bone Tomahawk invokes many films from Hitchcock's Rear Window to Monte Hellman's minimalist Westerns, the movie that seems to be the greatest influence on the film is the Coen brothers' 2010 version of True Grit. Like that film, Bone Tomahawk features florid Victorian dialogue and one of the Coen boys' best supporting actors, the redoubtable Fred Melamed, playing the saloon-keeper of the Learned Goat. The film is the first picture directed by S. Craig Zahler and, if truth is told, the film making is not particularly polished. Zahler has a tendency to edit away from the action to extreme long shots. The long shots are often not particularly expressive and, indeed, sometimes produce the feeling that we are looking at a master shot because something went wrong with close-ups. (This is probably the case -- the movie with its elaborate set-pieces was shot in the Mojave desert in only 28 days.) The actors are uniformly excellent -- Richard Jenkins plays the Walter Brennan role and Patrick Wilson, recently featured on the second season of another Coen brothers' project, Fargo, is the aggrieved and crippled husband. Matthew Fox plays the Indian-hater. The scenes involving violence are all unexpected and effectively staged -- our heroes get repeatedly wounded and are, more or less, effortlessly mangled by the bad guys. The film's rhythms are all wrong and a lot of the dialogue, although cleverly written, doesn't ring true. There is lots of over-the-top gore. And every cliché in the film and TV industry is on display -- when an African-American kid goes into a barn at night, we know what to expect. It's the old Star Trek rule -- always teleport down to the alien planet with one Black guy in the crew so that someone can be killed without having to harm a major actor with a continuing role in the show. Bone Tomahawk is pretty good and it's always pleasant to see a Western, but it's not as good as it should be.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Friday, June 17, 2016
Goodbye CP
Kazuo Hara's 1972 documentary Goodbye CP is hard to watch, technically ragged, and depressing on all levels. A documentary film can expose some social injustice and justify itself, perhaps, by suggesting means to ameliorate that injustice -- indeed, many documentaries follow this norm. Or a documentary may simply arouse consciousness about some aspect of human existence (or scientific interest) as a matter of education. Finally, I suppose, a documentary can be a kind of freak show -- near the end of Hara's film, the protagonist, Yokota Hiroshi, a man severely disabled by cerebral palsy, is sprawled in the center of a public square, bawling out a poem that he has written. The man is afflicted by clonic-tonic spasms and writhes horribly, his face contorted into a series of grotesque grimaces. It's not clear that anyone can understand his distorted voice -- the film's subtitles benefit non-Japanese speakers unfairly, I think; my suspicion is that most of what Hiroshi bellows would be incomprehensible to those around him. Finally, someone cries out that this is a "freak show" and should be stopped and the camera, for the first time in a film resolutely focused on the grimy pavement, tilts up to survey the skyscrapers and the sun before the frame freezes. Although condemning both Hiroshi's poetry reading and the movie as a freak show is simplistic, there is some merit to the anonymous interlocutor's cry. How are we supposed to react to the imagery in this film? Cerebral palsy is a not a social injustice and, probably, isn't a legitimate subject for intense biological scrutiny (something the film doesn't provide in any event) unless you are a nurse or doctor or victim of this condition. Hara's film is designed to make us look, and look closely, at something to which we would normally avert our eyes -- but does this justify this harrowing and invasive film?
Yokota Hiroshi is a man who walks on his bent knees -- he looks a bit like a maimed frog as he creeps across the pavement in Tokyo. In the beginning, the film shows him hurtling himself across a cross-walk, trying to get off the road before the traffic hits him. Hiroshi moves with surprising speed but it is exceptionally painful to watch him repeatedly smashing his knees against the hard concrete, his glasses falling off his face, as he drags himself forward with the strength of his upper body. At first, Hiroshi seems to invite the viewers' admiration for the feat, but, of course, we wonder -- why isn't he using a wheelchair? Isn't the spectacle intended to appall us? Later, a group of five or six men with CP set up a donation box and solicit small contributions to something they call the "Green Lawn" -- the soundtrack consists of interviews explaining why the onlookers donated money, most of them sending their terrified toddlers up to the donation box to drop in paper money. The reasons people donate money are mostly banal and related to a mixture of fear and pity. A lengthy series of interviews, filmed in extreme close-up, consists of the badly disabled men telling the camera about their first sexual encounters -- of course, this is painful material, but it is hard to measure the men's reactions because their faces are continuously twisting into masklike grimaces. The camera is so close that we can sense the spittle oozing from their lips spraying onto the lens. At a meeting of the Green Lawn, Hiroshi's wife, Yoshiko, also terribly twisted and mutilated by CP, berates the protagonist for walking on his knees, something that she thinks is grotesque. Yoshiko accuses Hara, the film maker of encouraging undignified and freakish behavior. This leads to full-scale fight in which Hiroshi and Yoshiko flail away at one another -- one of them starts bleeding. Of course, their two children, both toddlers, are alternately horrified and delighted by their parent's violent antics. Hiroshi rides the subway -- how he gets on and off is terrifying to see. One of the men with CP is married and his wife, also afflicted, has a normal baby. The man and his wife carry the baby through heavy traffic, staggering so much that we are afraid that they will drop the baby on the road -- it seems astounding that they can even walk, let alone carry the child successfully. The man says that he is very happy that the baby seems normal, something that he admits is shameful because he has been taught to embrace his CP. A man carries Hiroshi on his shoulders to a poetry reading. Everyone ignores Hiroshi. They go to another public square where Hiroshi recites his poem to a large crowd of gawkers but someone, possibly a policeman, stops the performance. On a lonely bridge in an ugly industrial district, Hiroshi shows us his body, squatting naked on his battered knees in the middle of the road. Hiroshi, now clothed, says that he participated in the film to show what he could do, to demonstrate his prowess in getting around, but, now, he admits that he can do nothing on his own -- during the last three minutes of the film, he wriggles around on the pavement like a worm someone has cut in two. He seems to have lost the ability to walk on his knees, or, perhaps, because of his wife's objections, he will not move in that way. He cries out that he is completely helpless and on that note the film ends.
Goodbye CP is shot in grainy black-and-white, probably 8 millimeter blown up to a larger format. The soundtrack is not synchronized -- or, at least, mostly non-synchronized. The synchronized parts of the sound track are signaled by someone stabbing a battered-looking microphone into the faces of the people appearing in the screen. The picture is resolutely unpicturesque, ugly, grimy, poorly cut -- it's like punk rock film making. And the movie refuses to provide the viewer with any solace. Most films of this sort would celebrate the heroism of the victim of CP battling against terrible and painful affliction -- this film does the opposite: Hiroshi seems to become more frail and more disabled as the movie progresses and, at the end, proclaims that he is completely helpless. Hiroshi is an unlikely hero in any event -- a wife-beater and narcissist who seems obsessed with reciting poetry to people who aren't interested in hearing his work and who are probably unable to understand his speech in any event. The film revels in suffering with no indication that this suffering ennobles anyone -- the bystanders simply avert their eyes and the people suffering aren't magically cured, don't get better, and aren't reconciled to their plight. Furthermore, the Hiroshi's poems suggest a horrifying zero-sum view of the world, the same view that, I think, subconsciously appalls those who see him: he cries out that because the able-bodied have legs he has no legs. In other words, CP is an affliction that is visited on a sacrificial victim, Hiroshi, so that he others will not have to suffer from this curse. This notion is primitive and awful, but, I think, explains the sense of almost religious awe and obscenity that we experience in watching Hiroshi and the members of the Green Lawn. Is CP somehow contagious? Does he have the disease so that I won't have to suffer from it? Ultimately, Goodbye CP suggests a couple antecedents. The first is a film about lepers made in Iran in the early 1960's, The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad) -- although this film is famous in Europe and the Middle East and very harrowing, it is ultimately, perhaps, a surrealistic picture: the horrors shown are depicted in intense chiaroscuro and there is a certain grim poetry in the picture. The other antecedent to Goodbye CP are certain works by Beckett, prose and plays in which the characters are systematically stripped of everything and end as mutilated lumps of flesh. Beckett, of course, is making a metaphorical point about despair and the human condition. There is nothing metaphorical about Goodbye CP.
Yokota Hiroshi is a man who walks on his bent knees -- he looks a bit like a maimed frog as he creeps across the pavement in Tokyo. In the beginning, the film shows him hurtling himself across a cross-walk, trying to get off the road before the traffic hits him. Hiroshi moves with surprising speed but it is exceptionally painful to watch him repeatedly smashing his knees against the hard concrete, his glasses falling off his face, as he drags himself forward with the strength of his upper body. At first, Hiroshi seems to invite the viewers' admiration for the feat, but, of course, we wonder -- why isn't he using a wheelchair? Isn't the spectacle intended to appall us? Later, a group of five or six men with CP set up a donation box and solicit small contributions to something they call the "Green Lawn" -- the soundtrack consists of interviews explaining why the onlookers donated money, most of them sending their terrified toddlers up to the donation box to drop in paper money. The reasons people donate money are mostly banal and related to a mixture of fear and pity. A lengthy series of interviews, filmed in extreme close-up, consists of the badly disabled men telling the camera about their first sexual encounters -- of course, this is painful material, but it is hard to measure the men's reactions because their faces are continuously twisting into masklike grimaces. The camera is so close that we can sense the spittle oozing from their lips spraying onto the lens. At a meeting of the Green Lawn, Hiroshi's wife, Yoshiko, also terribly twisted and mutilated by CP, berates the protagonist for walking on his knees, something that she thinks is grotesque. Yoshiko accuses Hara, the film maker of encouraging undignified and freakish behavior. This leads to full-scale fight in which Hiroshi and Yoshiko flail away at one another -- one of them starts bleeding. Of course, their two children, both toddlers, are alternately horrified and delighted by their parent's violent antics. Hiroshi rides the subway -- how he gets on and off is terrifying to see. One of the men with CP is married and his wife, also afflicted, has a normal baby. The man and his wife carry the baby through heavy traffic, staggering so much that we are afraid that they will drop the baby on the road -- it seems astounding that they can even walk, let alone carry the child successfully. The man says that he is very happy that the baby seems normal, something that he admits is shameful because he has been taught to embrace his CP. A man carries Hiroshi on his shoulders to a poetry reading. Everyone ignores Hiroshi. They go to another public square where Hiroshi recites his poem to a large crowd of gawkers but someone, possibly a policeman, stops the performance. On a lonely bridge in an ugly industrial district, Hiroshi shows us his body, squatting naked on his battered knees in the middle of the road. Hiroshi, now clothed, says that he participated in the film to show what he could do, to demonstrate his prowess in getting around, but, now, he admits that he can do nothing on his own -- during the last three minutes of the film, he wriggles around on the pavement like a worm someone has cut in two. He seems to have lost the ability to walk on his knees, or, perhaps, because of his wife's objections, he will not move in that way. He cries out that he is completely helpless and on that note the film ends.
Goodbye CP is shot in grainy black-and-white, probably 8 millimeter blown up to a larger format. The soundtrack is not synchronized -- or, at least, mostly non-synchronized. The synchronized parts of the sound track are signaled by someone stabbing a battered-looking microphone into the faces of the people appearing in the screen. The picture is resolutely unpicturesque, ugly, grimy, poorly cut -- it's like punk rock film making. And the movie refuses to provide the viewer with any solace. Most films of this sort would celebrate the heroism of the victim of CP battling against terrible and painful affliction -- this film does the opposite: Hiroshi seems to become more frail and more disabled as the movie progresses and, at the end, proclaims that he is completely helpless. Hiroshi is an unlikely hero in any event -- a wife-beater and narcissist who seems obsessed with reciting poetry to people who aren't interested in hearing his work and who are probably unable to understand his speech in any event. The film revels in suffering with no indication that this suffering ennobles anyone -- the bystanders simply avert their eyes and the people suffering aren't magically cured, don't get better, and aren't reconciled to their plight. Furthermore, the Hiroshi's poems suggest a horrifying zero-sum view of the world, the same view that, I think, subconsciously appalls those who see him: he cries out that because the able-bodied have legs he has no legs. In other words, CP is an affliction that is visited on a sacrificial victim, Hiroshi, so that he others will not have to suffer from this curse. This notion is primitive and awful, but, I think, explains the sense of almost religious awe and obscenity that we experience in watching Hiroshi and the members of the Green Lawn. Is CP somehow contagious? Does he have the disease so that I won't have to suffer from it? Ultimately, Goodbye CP suggests a couple antecedents. The first is a film about lepers made in Iran in the early 1960's, The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad) -- although this film is famous in Europe and the Middle East and very harrowing, it is ultimately, perhaps, a surrealistic picture: the horrors shown are depicted in intense chiaroscuro and there is a certain grim poetry in the picture. The other antecedent to Goodbye CP are certain works by Beckett, prose and plays in which the characters are systematically stripped of everything and end as mutilated lumps of flesh. Beckett, of course, is making a metaphorical point about despair and the human condition. There is nothing metaphorical about Goodbye CP.
Monday, June 13, 2016
Pedro Almodovar and "Talk to Her"
Almodovar
Pedro Almodovar Caballero ("Almodovar") is the most flamboyant and representative figure in la Movida Madrileno – the "Madrid Movement," a cultural explosion arising in the aftermath of Francisco Franco’s death. This efflorescence of the Spanish avant-garde, both in life-style and the arts, spread from Madrid to Barcelona, Bilbao, and other parts of the country. La Movida Madrileno had its own dialects (cheli and posata – working class and slum speech), favored certain kinds of recreational drugs, and inclined toward transgressive art – a landmark of the movement was the display of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in a Madrid gallery in this heavily Catholic country. Almodovar, who is homosexual, was part of this sex-friendly counter-cultural revolution and his early films like Labyrinth of Passion depict the sudden, hedonistic, and productive confusion that ensued when Franco’s death released previously repressed energies in Spanish culture.
Like similarly utopian moments in the United States, the movement was crippled by the fact that there was a price to be paid for all of this pleasure. AIDS and drug addiction were the dark side of la Movida Madrileno, and, ultimately, society reverted to some extent to more conservative principles.
In the mid-nineties, a Spanish lawyer interned for a few weeks in our office. The lawyer was a young woman of the aggressive, and fantastically stylish, variety shown in Almodovar’s films. By American standards, the young lawyer was overly made-up and, somewhat, histrionic, bigger than life, in her gestures and demeanor. She walked with a swagger. I took her to court with me to observe the eviction of a welfare mother and her children from HUD housing – our office represented the housing authority. The Spanish lawyer was predictably horrified – the social welfare safety net is much tighter in Spain than in this country. But she was also aristocratic in her perceptions and I understood that she was dismayed by the squalor exhibited by the welfare mother who was being evicted for making threats of deadly violence against other tenants. After the hearing, I met some of my colleagues and we had a few drinks in a downtown bar. I asked the Spanish lady-lawyer what she thought of Pedro Almodovar. She looked at me with mild disdain. "Actually, I have never gone to his movies," she said. My paralegal asked the woman what films she particularly enjoyed. The lady-lawyer said that the best film that she had seen recently was Patch Adams, a comedy starring Robin Williams as an avuncular doctor ministering to sick children.
Almodovar was born in a small village in Castile-La Mancha in 1949. His father was a wine-maker and his mother read and transcribed letters for other villagers who were illiterate. (Later, his parents ran a gas station and bodega where they sold home-made wine.) Almodovar studied for the priesthood but has said that his real education was watching the films of Luis Bunuel, the great Spanish surrealist, then, in exile from the Franco regime.
Almodovar moved to Madrid in 1967. He did not attend film school because Franco had closed that institution. Almodovar supported himself by writing articles for various underground rock music and art journals. He worked in the vanguard theater where he met Carmen Maura, the woman who was his principal actress and muse for a decade. Initially, Almodovar made pornographic films on 8 milimeter. He sang in a parody glam-rock band and wrote critical articles under the pseudonym Susie DiPhusa. Almodovar couldn’t figure out how to synchronize his sound tracks with the 8 mm films that he made so the gave the pictures asynchronous music and sound cues. The short films were shown in bars and at parties and garnered Almodovar some fame, particularly in the homosexual community.
In 1980, Almodovar made his first feature-length film, Pepi,Luci,Bom. The movie became a cult film – it was shown at midnight for three years at one of Madrid’s art houses. (The picture is like a John Waters’ movie crossed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but much more sexually explicit – the film contains an infamous "golden shower" sequence.) Based on the success of his first movie, Almodovar made Labyrinth of Passion (1982), another cult film and Almodovar’s first collaboration with Antonio Banderas, an actor with whom he has made a number of movies.
Almodovar produced a film a year, mostly transgressive "black" comedies for a decade – his European breakthrough film was the 1986 Matador, the first of his pictures to achieve international distribution. (The film is archetypal early Almodovar, extremely violent and filled with graphic sex scenes – I showed the movie in Austin to this group in the early 1990's. The film features both Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas.)
Since Woman on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Almodovar’s films have all been shown to considerable acclaim in the United States. Indeed, he is one of the few foreign film makers whose pictures generally make money in the States. His films have won every possible award and include All About my Mother (1999), Volver (2006), Tie me up, tie me down (1990 – rated X in this country and attacked by feminists), and Bad Education (2004).
Almodovar’s three recent films demonstrate the breadth of his talent. The Skin I live in (2011) is horrific torture porn – it is one of the most disturbing films that I have seen, a homage to films like George Franju’s Eyes without a Face. Almodovar followed this film with I’m so Excited (2013), a very light, almost weightless, comedy about a plane having trouble mid-flight with its landing gear – a trio of homosexual stewards gets the first-class cabin drunk and all is well in the end; the film features song and dance numbers with campy kitsch humor. Almodovar’s most recent feature, Julieta, has been torpedoed by factors outside of his control – the movie was slated for release in the summer of 2016 but has done poorly at the box-office. Almodovar operates a production company called Deseo; the Chief Financial Officer for Deseo is Augustin Almodovar, Pedro’s brother – we see him in a cameo role as a priest officiating at a wedding in Talk to her. When the Panama papers were published, it became clear that Augustin was sheltering income in banks in Panama, a scandal that adversely affected the box office with respect to Julieta. The Almodovar brothers are regarded as figures of national importance in Spain and the revelation that Augustin was hiding money to avoid taxation overshadowed interest in Julieta, by all accounts a modest film about the life of a woman.
Cucurrucucu, Paloma
In Talk to Her, the great Brazilian singer, Caetano Veloso, performs a version of the Mexican song, "Cucurrucucu, Paloma". The song is about lovesickness and sometimes called in English Coo-coo Dove.
On my first night in Mexico City, my wife and I were seated at an outdoor café in an expensive part of downtown. The spectacle of the place was overwhelming: street kids were begging tourists for coins, skinny-looking Indians in ill-fitting khaki uniforms cradled machine-guns in their arms as they guarded ATM machines, crowds of stylishly dressed Mexicans hustled in and out of the Sanborn’s across the street, either buying cups of coffee or using the toilet, and storms of battered-looking VW bugs rushed from streetlight to streetlight, gypsy cabs alternately picking people up or letting them out. Three guys dressed in mariachi outfits, with tasseled sombreros, drum major vests of gold and velvet, and side-arms in rhinestone-adorned holsters, came down the avenue. To my horror, they marched up to my table and the fat leader with the violin called me amigo and asked: "What is your favorite Mexican song, Senor?" I was dumbfounded – I didn’t know any Mexican songs except La Cucharacha and it didn’t seem appropriate for me to ask them to play that tune. I told the man that he should surprise me and that I was sure I would enjoy whatever he played. The mariachi nodded to his compatriots and they began serenading me with the song that I now recognize as Cucurrucucu Paloma. The song was soft and delicately performed with a complex rhythm, huapanga de Mariachi. When the singer reached the refrain where he imitates the sounds of a lovelorn dove, he paused, whistled the tune, and, then, sang it in a high-pitched falsetto with his lips tightly pursed as if he were kissing the air. My wife thought the spectacle amusing: a fat gringo being serenaded by a fat mariachi pretending to be a lovesick dove. I wasn’t sure how much to pay the mariachi band for the serenade. I either overpaid or underpaid them; it doesn’t matter now and I don’t recall anyway.
Citations
Almodovar’s cinema has never been sealed or self-contained. His films are open to outside influence. Initially, Almodovar’s movies cited popular telenovelas, homosexual melodrama, the films of Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk, comic books and glam rock bands. As Almodovar’s pictures have become more sophisticated, his allusions to outside art have also progressed in sophistication. Almodovar’s earlier films used allusion and citation to make jokes. Talk to Her uses citations more poetically, as signs that the issues raised in the film are grave, profound, and constant in human affairs.
In Euripides’ Alcestis, a faithful wife exchanges her life for her husband’s continued existence. So that King Admetus can remain alive, and, indeed, even provisionally immortal, he must find someone willing to pay the price of his existence to the dark god, Thanatos. Only his wife, Alcestis, is willing to die for her husband. As Thanatos takes her away, a maidservant tearfully tells the chorus: "She is alive. And dead." Alive and, yet, dead characterizes the ontological status of the two women in Talk to Her – perhaps, the two male lovers are also comatose in a way, trapped in deathly obsession from which they can not escape. Later, in Alcestis, Heracles descends to Hades and rescues Alcestis – she remains on-stage for the last half of the play, but remains veiled and does not speak, a theatrical way of depicting her ambiguous ontological status: not fully alive, but not dead either. As we shall see, the motif of the sleeping and unresponsive beauty is ubiquitous throughout the world. The Bride in Kill Bill, Vol. I is comatose and repeatedly raped by her attendant in that state – her first act after awakening is to slaughter the attendant who has abused her. Yasujiro Kawabata’s 1961 novel, House of the Sleeping Beauties, describes a speciality brothel in which beautiful young women are rendered temporarily comatose by sleeping pills; old men pay handsomely to sleep with them but are not authorized to touch the young and unconscious women. Gabriel Marquez describes a similar whorehouse in his book Memories of my Melancholy Whores. It is not wholly clear what this symbolic structure reveals, but it suffices for us to understand that it is, apparently, archetypal, a motif that arises in many different cultures.
Pina Bausch
Born in 1940, Pina Bausch is regarded as the greatest choreographer of the last half of the 20th century. Two of her dance pieces are cited in Talk to Her. These citations appear as an epigraph or introduction to the narrative of the film and, then, at the end of the picture as a kind of coda or afterword.
Bausch attended the Volkzwangschule where she studied with Kurt Joos. Like piano playing and philosophy, dance is taught by imitation – an older master passes the great tradition down to a younger disciple. Joos, born in 1901, was the most important choreographer in Gemany, during the years leading to, and after, World War Two. Joos pioneered a kind of wordless, narrative choreography that was intensely expressive. Bausch learned from Joos and, then, traveled to New York where she trained at Juilliard. In the mid-sixties, she returned to Germany. The great German dance companies are allied with opera – each German opera company has an associated ballet that provides dancers for the opera productions. Bausch’s famous Tanztheater Wuppertal began as the Wuppertal Opera corps d’ ballet. Bausch’s dance productions, many of them lengthy and immensely ambitious, soon outstripped in fame and importance the Wuppertal opera. The Tanztheater became known as the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
Bausch made many famous dances including Café Mueller and Masurca Fogo ("Fiery Mazurka") shown in the film. Her production of The Rite of Spring is performed on an actual sod floor imported into the theater for the dance.
A striking presence, Bausch appears in Fellini’s film And the Ship Sailed On in 1983. (Fellini’s unerring eye grasped Baush’s spectral charisma and she plays a melancholy representative of the doomed Austrian-Hungarian nobility before World War One.) Almodovar’s use of Bausch’s dance pieces in his movie inspired the German director, Wim Wenders, to produce a documentary film about Pina Bausch in 2009. Bausch was a heavy smoker and she died of lung cancer the weekend before Wenders began filming. Wenders persisted in the project, shooting the film in 3D, and his movie, Pina, was released to great critical acclaim in 2011.
Bausch’s dance pieces are complex and exhausting. Masurca Fogo is two-hours and 45 minutes long – it features Portuguese fado music, gamelin orchestras, as well as songs by k.d. lang and jazz interludes to the music of Duke Ellington. Café Mueller is an hour long and, generally, performed after intermission – the first half of the show is Bausch’s dance work for Stravinsky Rite of Spring.
Coma
People sometimes awaken from comas. However, there are complex distinctions as to the degree of coma and it is unclear to what degree these distinctions affect outcome. People who are comatose may be in a minimally conscious state or a persistent vegetative state. The prognosis is far worse for those who slip into a persistent vegetative state, but there have been a few cases of people allegedly recovering from this condition.
Jan Grzbski, a Pole, was in a coma of some kind for 19 years as a result of a brain tumor. He emerged from the coma in 2006 wondering what had happened to communism and why the food was so much better. (The strain of his resurrection killed him – he died of heart attack two years after his revival.) Terry Wallis from Arkansas was badly injured with resulting quadriplegia in 1984 – he remained in a "minimally conscious state" for 19 years. When he revived, he thought it was still 1984. The South African Ayanda Niquinan, another automobile accident victim, was comatose for seven years – a regimen of ambien treatment revived him. After one of his motorcycle stunts, Evel Knievel was comatose for 29 days. A few years ago, an unnamed patient in the United States was revived by DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation) after six years in a comatose state.
Rip Van Winkle it may be remembered was apparently comatose for 20 years. Philip Fry in Futurama is comatose for 1000 years. The seven sleepers of Ephesus, seven royal pages who were converts to Christianity and who fled into a cave to avoid persecution, remained unconscious for, at least, 180 years. (Holy Qu’rn says they were comatose for 300 solar years). They awakened during the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius, came into Ephesus to get food because they were very hungry, and promptly died shortly thereafter.
One way of looking at Talk to Her
But that what you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.
William Blake writing to Dr. John Trusler, August 23, 1799
Talk to Her is a fable, a kind of myth or fairy tale. The elements of the narrative are familiar to us from ancient stories: a sleeping princess under some kind of malign enchantment, an ardent lover, the devouring mother, a forbidden object of desire – these are the components of stories as diverse as The Golden Ass by Apuleis, Wagner’s Die Walkyrie and Siegfried, and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. By presenting us two parallel stories of sleeping beauties, Almodovar boldly suggests that these motifs are not particular, or individual, but universal. The strategy is similar to that deployed in Shakespeare’s King Lear – both the principal plot and the subplot involve the revolt of children against their elderly parents and toxic sibling rivalry. When plot and subplot double one another, the artist is suggesting that the dilemma is an affliction not unique to one set of characters but something suffered by all of us.
Almodovar is a homosexual raised under a right-wing dictatorship in a repressive Catholic culture. From earliest childhood, Almodovar was taught that his objects of desire were forbidden. Accordingly, one of the director’s great, and persistent, themes is that forbidden object of desire – this subject is also characteristically Spanish; we need consider only the films of Luis Bunuel to be persuaded of this fact. Almodovar now lives (and loves) in a sexually emancipated country. But his early education persuades him that all objects of desire are, perhaps, initially off-limits – indeed, the piquancy of desire is that it seeks that which attracts because it is inaccessible or forbidden. In Talk to Her, several forbidden objects of desire are suggested: first, there is the comatose, sleeping beauty whose body should be off-limits because she is unable to consent to Benigno’s caresses; second, Marco‘s love for the skeletal and morose female matador seems to contain elements of the perverse – indeed, even a suggestion of homosexuality (in Almodovar films. bullfighting and matadors symbolize a repressive inversion of the libido that transforms eros into a death instinct); third, Benigno is under the thrall of his mother and, probably, also a closeted homosexual – it seems that he is in love with Marco at the end of the film. These forbidden objects of desire are contrasted with ordinary, banal heterosexual love. The plain-looking nurse who works with Benigno clearly desires him. Her plight resembles that of the character played by Barbara Bel Geddes in Hitchcock’s similarly perverse and obsessive Vertigo – Jimmy Stewart is in love with a dead woman, callously rejecting the pathetic advances of his very much alive, and loyal, gal pal. Indeed, a characteristic of forbidden love is obsession, the force of perverse passion that overcomes the resistance of the censorious super-ego to the prohibited object of desire. Obsession is the engine that drives great art – the ballet-master seems obsessive and, perhaps, she also loves her student, Alicia, resurrected from her four-year coma. At the end of the film, Geraldine Chaplin’s ballet teacher jealously watches over the resurrected dancer – she wants that dancer all to herself and, in the final scenes of the movie, appears as another embodiment of obsession, a chaperone resentfully obstructing Marco from romantic access to Alicia. (It is a measure of the film’s subtle and generous complexity that the dance instructor’s jealousy can, also, be interpreted as solicitude and kindness, an attempt to protect a naive and vulnerable young woman from an older man.)
Obsession, one of the film’s great subjects, is notoriously blind. This is dramatized in the opening dance sequence, the scene from Pina Bausch’s Café Mueller, in which two women who seem to be blind repeatedly hurl themselves at a wall while a male figure, subservient to their obsessive and repetitive actions, clears the way for them. As in Vertigo, the male character’s obsession entirely denies humanity and ordinary transactional agency to the beloved – Jimmy Stewart dresses and stages Kim Novak’s hair as if she were a doll. Benigno’s obsessive love for the comatose Alicia is dependent on the fact that the object of his desire is silent and wholly passive – a contrast, one supposes, with Benigno’s demanding mother. An obsession is not a relationship. One who loves obsessively, in fact, doesn’t really care about the well-being of the object of that obsession. The object of the obsession is, in fact, almost wholly imaginary, a creature devised and loved in the eye of the beholder but otherwise denied any capacity to act or have any feelings or ideas of her own. The severely damaged Benigno would not love Alicia if she were able to speak and interact with her – his relationship with her is essentially necrophiliac, that is, dependant on her corpse-like passivity.
The power of Talk to Her lies in our recognition that the mythic scenes that the film presents are representations of the universal. All love runs the risk of becoming obsessive. Indeed, at its inception, romantic love is characteristically obsessive. The challenge for the lover is to progress from obsessive, delirious amour fou toward something like love based upon friendship and mutual understanding. Almodovar’s model for true, mature love expressed in Talk to Her is Marco’s friendship with the wounded Benigno – although Marco knows that Benigno has done a terrible thing, he remains loyal to him and seeks his friend’s well-being to the film’s bitter (or bittersweet) end. Fairy tales present love in this light. The princess is sleeping and can not be aroused except in a certain magical way – her plight symbolizes the "marriage of death", the imprisonment of the soul in the purely carnal; this is Psyche’s state before she dares gaze upon Eros. Purely sexual love is obsessional and bestial – it is like being trapped in the "donkey-skin" in Apuleis The Golden Ass. The sexual lover appears in fairy tales as a toad or a frog demanding to be brought into the maiden’s bed, as a debased animal. Romantic love humanizes the sexual relationship and restores the elements of friendship, comity and mutuality to the intercourse between lovers. Benigno commits a rape because he loves a body (and an imaginary woman) who is without a soul. At the end of the film through a series of trials, Marco seems on the verge of becoming a human lover – the desired woman is the man’s soul. (This is the message of Plato’s Symposium, a work imagining carnal love rising by stages to spiritual love and the radiance of the truth.) At the end of the film, we see lover’s dancing in an elaborately formal style – their bodies are controlled and regimented by the dance: this is an image for romantic love that has escaped the temptation of the merely obsessive. Almodovar signals this by imposing a title on the film: Alicia y Marco – that is, Alicia and Marco will now be a couple.
As Camille Paglia, and many others, have pointed out, male sexuality, not controlled by the limits of reproduction, is highly abstract, conceptual, and prone to fetishism. For women, sexual desire has a reproductive component that physiologically precludes (in most cases) the sort of obsessive and bizarrely abstract fetishism to which men are prone. Men can fall in love with leather whips, shoes, stallions. I know of one case in which a man fell in love with his front-end loader, gave the machine a name, and caressed and made love to that implement – the result was, as you might imagine, ultimately fatal. As shown by Talk to Her, the lure of eros carries the risk of excess, the danger of either too much or too little. Benigno is complete lord and master over Alicia’s corpse-like body – in the throes of his obsession, he treats her as a body without a soul. It is important to understand that this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love her – the problem (and this is characteristic of male sexuality) is that he loves her too much and in the wrong way. The reason Benigno has fallen into this necrophiliac obsession is that he was totally subservient to his mother. With Benigno, relationships with women have always been all or nothing – either he is in complete control when he caresses Alicia’s body without a soul or he has no control at all. This is demonstrated in powerfully archetypal terms in the silent film that "screens" or conceals, as it were, the physical fact of Benigno’s rape of Alicia. The silent film represents the aspect of male sexuality that is completely submissive, wholly masochistic, powerless between the thighs of the great and all-devouring Mother. In the silent film, we see the male shrinking into insignificance and, then, creeping into the Great Earth Mother’s womb – at least, he can provide her with some pleasure before he shrinks into invisibility. The silent movie at the center of Talk to Her accordingly provides us with a key to Benigno’s sexuality – his sadistic manipulation (rape) of the unconscious Alicia is merely the inverse of his completely submissive, wholly masochistic sexual fantasies. For Benigno, the woman is either someone who devours you or a completely passive body without a soul. Any man who has thought about this subject knows not to scoff at Benigno’s plight. How many of us have engaged in love affairs that have oscillated wildly, and violently, between the demand for complete and selfish dominance and total humiliating abjection? Benigno, the fetishist, invades Alicia’s private living space before she becomes comatose and steals her hair-clip. The toothed hair clip that Benigno manipulates obsessively provides us with an image of the tooth-mother, the dangerous vagina dentata – a fetish of Alicia that colludes with Benigno’s self-destructive relationship with his mother (who, in effect, devoured him) and that represents his desire to be wholly consumed by the female, to return to her womb and die, thus, the motif of the stillborn son. Benigno has never really been born – he has not successfully exited his mother’s womb.
Talk to Her is probably Almodovar’s greatest film to date. It is the function of great art to show us the truth by devising ways to make that truth visible. One way to make the truth visible is to exaggerate. Almodovar contrives a freakish and unnatural situation – as freakish and unnatural as Psyche’s rape by Eros or Apuleis transformation into an ass. By embodying universal aspects of the human imagination in a grotesque, but gripping way, Almodovar educates us as to what it means to be fully human.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Film Essay: I Served the King of England, Jiri Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal
I Served the King of England, Jiri Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal
At the end of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel, I served the King of England, the hero Ditie (Czech – diti means "child"), contemplates burial at the very summit of local peak in the European continental divide:
I wanted to be a world citizen after death with one half of me going down the Vlatava into the Laba and on into the North Sea and the other half via the Danube into the Black Sea and eventually the Atlantic.
In an essay on Hrabal, the critic James Wood cites this passage as evidence of a characteristic of the Czech imagination – the desire to be both intensely parochial and true to the geography and unique history of Czech Bohemia as well as the contradictory aspiration to perform on the great international stage.
In Too Loud a Solitude, said to be Hrabal’s best novel, the narrator Hanta works at a garbage dump operating a trash compactor. Hanta preserves books that he admires from destruction. The novel is an extended soliloquy and ends with a thousand-word sentence that contains the phrase: What is down is up and what is up is down. This assertion could be an epigraph to the topsy-turvy world presented in I served the King of England.
Hrabal’s career as the most important Czech writer remaining in his native country is inextricably linked to the work of Jiri Menzel, one of Czechoslovakia’s best known film makers. Hrabal and Menzel worked closely on the script of Closely Watched Trains (1966), a film based on the author’s novel and the winner of an Academy Award in 1968 for Best Foreign Picture. Menzel’s first commercial film, a segment called "Pearls of the Deep" (1964) for an omnibus movie is based on a short story by Hrabal. Menzel collaborated with Hrabal again in adapting a series of short stories into the film Larks on a String. This picture was completed in 1968, a time that coincided with the Soviet crack-down on Eastern Bloc nations – as a result both Hrabal’s anthology of short stories and Larks on a String were suppressed and not commercially released until 1990. After 1970, all of Hrabal’s books were censored. This censorship was ineffective. Samizdat editions of the writer’s novels were in wide circulation and the expatriate Czech novelist, Josef Skvorecky, then-living in Toronto, published each of Hrabal’s books in their original language in Canada during the decade of the seventies. Hrabal was prolific writer – his works run to 19 hefty volumes in the collected edition issued after his death in 1997.
Hrabal’s novel Cutting it Short, about a Czech brewery, was made into a movie by Menzel in 1980. Another Menzel comedy based on a Hrabal novel, The Snowdrop Factory, about life in small town catering to the tourist trade, was produced in 1984. This was followed by Menzel’s 1985 adaptation of Hrabal’s book My Sweet Little Village, the most popular Czech film ever produced.
In the eighties and nineties, Hrabal himself appeared frequently on Tv and in films – he had an important role as an amiable psychiatrist in the Czech TV show Hospuda ("The Pub"), apparently a knock-off of the American series Cheers. Hrabal often uses an elaborate and baroque prose-style, two of his novels consist of a single vastly engorged sentence. He was an important influence both Ivan Klima and the much more famous expatriate Czech writer, Milan Kundera – Hrabel was a generation older than Kundera. Kundera praises Hrabal’s ability to combine the baroque and surreal with a warm depiction of everyday life. Hrabal’s books are described as picaresque novels with effects that may be characterized as "magical realist." I served the King of England, at about 300 pages, is one of Hrabal’s longer novels – it was written in 1970, but could not be published in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, the novel circulated in the Canadian edition published by Skvorecky and in "secret anti-Communist" editions and was well-known to Czech literati.
From its first Samizdat publication, Menzel wanted to adapt the novel into a film. After the collapse of Communism, Menzel had some difficulty navigating the commercial film production system. Here is an Eastern bloc paradox – the most difficult, politically problematic films were readily produced in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries; money was available for such movies and they were duly made, then, censored into oblivion and shelved; it seems almost as if the production of politically subversive films was a kind of safety valve to the repressive system – you could make the movie, but the authorities didn’t have to release it. By contrast, no money is even available for political challenging films in the capitalist system. Thus, the paradox: people like Menzel, Tarkovsky, and German could make politically challenging films, they just couldn’t show them publicly; in the market system, these film makers weren’t even able to get their films produced. At a film festival in Karlovy in Eastern Europe, Menzel learned that his producer at Prague’s legendary Barradnov Studios had sold the film rights in Hrabal’s I Served the King of England to another competing production company. Menzel was so outraged that he attacked the film executive, beating him with a big stick. Later, Barrandov Studios was able to re-capture the rights to the picture so that Menzel could produce the picture. The stick that Menzel used to attack the film executive was auctioned off to raise money for the picture.
Menzel’s version of I Served the King of England was released in 2008. The film was nominated for an Academy Award but did not win. (This was Menzel’s third nomination for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film – he won in 1968 for Closely Watched Trains and was nominated as well for My Sweet Little Village in 1986).
Bohumil Hrabal had been dead for eleven years when I served the King of England was first shown to paying audiences. In a number of his books, Hrabal stated his opinion that the best way to commit suicide was by throwing oneself from a warm and cozy apartment on the fifth floor. A fall from that height would reliably kill instantaneously but would not create a great deal of gory mess. In 1997, Hrabal fell from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment in Prague. It is said, however, by witnesses that the old man was trying to feed the pigeons, lost his balance, and fell to his death.
Menzel, now 79, continues to work extensively in the Czech film industry. His eight-part film The Skirt Chasers (2013) was nominated for a number of international awards, but, ultimately, disqualified because the production was made for, and first broadcast on, television. He is married to one of the producers who worked on I Served the King of England, Olga Menzelova-Kelymanok, a glamorous blonde who seems to be about 30 years old. (There are several wonderful images of Menzel – in one picture taken at the Berlinale, we see the gnome-like Menzel peering at the camera from a location that is literally between the breasts of two starlets wearing very low-cut gowns – one of the women is apparently his wife; in the other image on You-Tube, a pretty female interviewer, also about 30 years old, lays sprawled in bed with Menzel where she interviews him.) In his 28 films, Menzel embodies the Czech spirit of carnal sensuousness, a playful and subversive attitude toward sex that ranks love affairs as events of importance equivalent to the world-historical movement of armies and battles fought between nations. The Czech sensibility is anti-heroic, summed up in a line from Closely Watched Trains – after some German trains are blown-up, a characters proclaims that the world would be a better place if everyone "just stayed home on their arses." Human motivation is sordid – Menzel focuses on greed and lust as the impulses driving most human action. Menzel is not judgmental, however -- in his hierarchy of sins, greed and lust are petty compared with the more terrible crimes committed by idealists in the name of politics. The Czechs, who have been the victim of idealistic, world-changing ideologies, have earned the right to their cynicism. Note that, although Menzel depicts, with great tact and horrible objectivity, the execution of some young Czech partisans, this sequence occurs in the context of the hero’s inability to successfully masturbate to climax – an incapacity afflicting our hero because he is listening to one of Hitler’s speeches on the radio. Furthermore, the characteristic violent gesture in I Served the King of England is someone pouring food or beverage over someone else’s head, an indignity that is more slapstick than anything else.
The garlanded pubis
From a poem by Thomas Campion:
The peacefull westerne winde,
The winter storms hath tam’d,
And nature in each kinde
The kinde heat hat inflam’d.
The forward buds so sweetly breathe
Out of their earthly bowers,
That heav’n, which viewes their pompe beneath
Would faine be deckt with flowers.
Ditie impresses his girl-friends by covering their naked bodies with flowers. This quirk seems to please his lovers immeasurably. Ditie drapes the German phy-ed teachers groin with spruce needles. (In the novel, there is an extensive and pleasantly pornograpic account of how these spruce needles get in the way and end up in both lover’s mouths.)
How should we take this motif? Clearly, it is important to both Menzel and Hrabal. What does this mean?
Differences between novel and film version
The novel is darker in tone than the movie version of I Served the King of England. In the novel, Ditie narrowly escapes committing suicide when he is wrongfully accused of stealing a gold spoon – he goes into the woods to hang himself but is scared away after encountering the corpse of another suicide. At the end of the book, Ditie works as a road repairer in a remote part of the country. (The motif of the German village from which all ethnic Germans have been cleansed, integral to the movie, is not a central theme in the novel – although the depopulated regions around the border are important in the book’s final recuperation of Ditie.) In the novel, Ditie and his German wife have a child. But the baby, although blessed with "perfect Aryan genes", is born retarded and, as he grows up, spends his time hammering nails into the floor of Ditie’s apartment.
In some ways, I Served the King of England, is similar to be both Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik and Guenter Grass’ Danzig trilogy – the books offer a "worm’s eye view of history". Ditie experiences history not as a series of great political events, but instead as picaresque episodes in the life of a roguish bell-boy who later becomes a millionaire. Ditie’s main concern is seducing women. Nonetheless, the Zelig-like Ditie meets famous people during his varied career – in the novel, he spends time with Tomas Masaryk, the founder of the Czech republic between the wars (characteristically, Ditie sees him with his French lover) at a hotel where he is working. He also meets the American author, John Steinbeck.
Hrabal is clearly a magisterial prose stylist. He works in long sentences that wander associatively from one topic to another. I Served the King of England is constructed in massive blocks of prose and resembles, superficially at least, the work of the great Hungarian novelist, Laszlo Kraznahorkai (as well as Gyorgy Konrad the author of The Social Worker) – although Hrabal’s subject matter is brighter and, of course, substantially more hedonistic. (There is sex or a naked woman on just about every page of the novel and Hrabal describes the various nude women and their sexual encounters with a connoisseur’s practiced eye.) There is an intense joi d’vivre in the novel that wars with aspects of the book that are indisputably melancholy. From the perspective of the little man, like Ditie or the good soldier Schweik, what is important in life is women, sex, and food – everything else is politics and politics is bad for the soul. Hrabal’s Slavic melancholy captures the last forty pages of the novel – near the end of the book, Ditie retreats into the wilderness with a German shepherd dog, a goat, a pony, and a skittish cat. Avoiding human contact, Ditie broods on his life and, ultimately, becomes a kind of ascetic saint. In essence, he renounces human society as fundamentally corrupt and withdraws into a world of literature – at the end of the novel, we see Ditie beginning work on the memoir that will become I Served the King of England. (In this part of the novel, the action is all internal to Ditie and, so, this part of the book is not well-served by Menzel’s film.)
Sudetenland
Czechoslovakia was a nation-state that arose in the wake of the Great War and the German defeat in 1918. The country was carved out of territory that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Large numbers of ethnic Germans, about 3.5 million people, lived along the west and north borders with Germany – these were the Sudetenland Deutsch. The center of this area was the city of Cheb, called Eger in German, and the regional capital of what was known as Egerland – Ditie’s girlfriend is an ethnic German phy. ed. teacher from Cheb. This part of central Europe is mountainous and heavily wooded. The Germans who lived in this area, many of them Hussite refugees who settled in the forests during the Wars of Religion in the 17th century, supported themselves largely by manufacturing glass from the sandy soil in the forests. (Industries making use of silica deposits in the area are still prevalent – when I traveled to Prague about 15 years ago, I recall the huge sand and gravel mines near the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia.) These people were patriotic Germans – Sudeten Deutsch suffered some of the highest casualty rates for any region in World War I, 34 dead for every one-thousand people.
In 1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Hitler sought to annex Sudetenland to German. Ultimately, Neville Chamberlain and the western powers acquiesced and the provinces of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany became part of that country. This measure, of course, did not avoid war – Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. During the war, the Nazis persecuted the Czechs and committed a number of atrocities; the Germans also deported the 300,000 Jews living in the country to death camps, including the notorious Theresianstadt in Bohemia, where the they were murdered. The Sudeten Germans were strongly pro-Nazi – in Germany proper, NSDAP membership never exceeded 7.5% of the population. By contrast, the Nazi party boasted 17.8% membership in the Sudetenland.
The Germans lost the war and, at the 1945 Potsdam conference, it was agreed that all ethnic Germans would be deported from Sudetenland. Deportations began in 1946 and continued for three years. Some of the Germans were simply moved into the Theresianstadt concentration camp where a number of them were murdered. Several massacres occurred and large numbers of Germans were killed by the avenging Czechs – the total number of Germans slaughtered in the exodus is somewhere between 15,000 and 270,000 according to various sources. (The true figure is probably close to 15,000 than the larger estimate.) There are presently about 40,000 Germans remaining in Czech Republic – a tiny proportion of the 3. 5 million Germans who once lived in that country. Reparations for confiscated German property were proposed and some legislation considered on this issue in 2010 – the legislative measure did not pass.
The Communists felt that it would be wise to maintain buffer zones between Czechoslovakia and German. As a result, the areas where the Germans had lived were simply left empty and, in some cases, made into National Parks, for instance NP Sumava. As a result, there are many ghost-towns in Moravia and the former Sudetenland, German villages emptied of their people and allowed to fall into ruin. This is shown in some detail in Jiri Menzel’s film.
Representative Men
The notion of the representative man, at least in its modern understanding, arises from Carlyle. In 1841, Carlyle declared that the "history of the world is the biography of great men" – this doctrine is developed in his lecture series On Heroes and Hero Worship. Emerson subscribed to this view as well and, also, lectured on seven great men said to be representative of various aspects of human endeavor – in Emerson’s lectures, Shakespeare embodied "poetry," Goethe was the representative of "writing," Swedenborg was the "the mystic," Napoleon the "man of the world," and Plato "the philosopher" and so on.
Menzel and Hrabal seem to have something similar in mind. Indeed, I Served the King of England, can be interpreted as demythologizing the notion of the representative man. To Menzel and Hrabel, the idea of the heroic "representative man" is problematic – in the breeding station where nubile German girls are mated with Aryan warriors from the Wehrmacht, the pregnant women contemplate images of great Teutonic heroes; beholding pictures of these men is supposed to make their children strong and heroic as well. The film and novel present a counter-perspective. Ditie is a little man and there is nothing heroic about him – at every point, he is shown to be venal, lustful, selfish, even, cowardly. But, ultimately, Ditie’s cowardice is probably preferable to the courage of the German soldiers – heroics that result in their mutilation as shown in the scenes involving the amputee warriors. Czechoslovakia was a young country. Among nations, Czechoslovakia might be considered a child, that is "ditie." In effect, Ditie is the man who represents the plight and particular characteristics of the Czechs and their nation. The Germans were, once, a great nation as are the French and Russians and Americans today – accordingly, these countries seek to exercise their influence on the world stage. Great nations have big armies and engage in large-scale conflicts. Great nations wish to impose their will on others. Great nations are afflicted with great ideas: democracy, communism, national socialism – they have heroic agendas that end in tears. By contrast, a "little, childish" nation like Czechoslovakia doesn’t have a big army, espouses no great political ideas, and doesn’t wish to force its will on others. Big warrior nations seek victory and wish to export their ideas. Small nations must be content with cultivating pleasure, living well, enjoying wine, women, and song.
When the Germans ceased to be a great nation, they were suddenly happy, a people devoted to managing their pleasures – strolling the streets of Berlin, this is immediately apparent. Anyone who has set foot in Canada will acknowledge feeling a great sense of relief – when an American enters Canada, we are exiting from the world-historical stage and there is a distinct pleasure that arises from that sensation. The burden of the world does not rest on the shoulders of the Canadians, nor does it rest on the shoulders of the Czechs. In this respect, Ditie seems to be a representative man, a figure that typifies the ethos and hedonistic morality of the small nation.
QUIZ:
1.
"The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true but it proves nothing against the heavens because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows."
The author of this aphorism is a famous writer from Czechoslovakia. In Czech, this writer’s name means crow. Name the writer.
2.
This Czech scientist invented frequency hopping and spread spectrum technology instrumental in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other high-tech communications. She also appeared naked in an early Czech film, Ecstasy, (Gustav Machaty, 1930) and was filmed in close-up having an orgasm.
Name this scientist.
At the end of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel, I served the King of England, the hero Ditie (Czech – diti means "child"), contemplates burial at the very summit of local peak in the European continental divide:
I wanted to be a world citizen after death with one half of me going down the Vlatava into the Laba and on into the North Sea and the other half via the Danube into the Black Sea and eventually the Atlantic.
In an essay on Hrabal, the critic James Wood cites this passage as evidence of a characteristic of the Czech imagination – the desire to be both intensely parochial and true to the geography and unique history of Czech Bohemia as well as the contradictory aspiration to perform on the great international stage.
In Too Loud a Solitude, said to be Hrabal’s best novel, the narrator Hanta works at a garbage dump operating a trash compactor. Hanta preserves books that he admires from destruction. The novel is an extended soliloquy and ends with a thousand-word sentence that contains the phrase: What is down is up and what is up is down. This assertion could be an epigraph to the topsy-turvy world presented in I served the King of England.
Hrabal’s career as the most important Czech writer remaining in his native country is inextricably linked to the work of Jiri Menzel, one of Czechoslovakia’s best known film makers. Hrabal and Menzel worked closely on the script of Closely Watched Trains (1966), a film based on the author’s novel and the winner of an Academy Award in 1968 for Best Foreign Picture. Menzel’s first commercial film, a segment called "Pearls of the Deep" (1964) for an omnibus movie is based on a short story by Hrabal. Menzel collaborated with Hrabal again in adapting a series of short stories into the film Larks on a String. This picture was completed in 1968, a time that coincided with the Soviet crack-down on Eastern Bloc nations – as a result both Hrabal’s anthology of short stories and Larks on a String were suppressed and not commercially released until 1990. After 1970, all of Hrabal’s books were censored. This censorship was ineffective. Samizdat editions of the writer’s novels were in wide circulation and the expatriate Czech novelist, Josef Skvorecky, then-living in Toronto, published each of Hrabal’s books in their original language in Canada during the decade of the seventies. Hrabal was prolific writer – his works run to 19 hefty volumes in the collected edition issued after his death in 1997.
Hrabal’s novel Cutting it Short, about a Czech brewery, was made into a movie by Menzel in 1980. Another Menzel comedy based on a Hrabal novel, The Snowdrop Factory, about life in small town catering to the tourist trade, was produced in 1984. This was followed by Menzel’s 1985 adaptation of Hrabal’s book My Sweet Little Village, the most popular Czech film ever produced.
In the eighties and nineties, Hrabal himself appeared frequently on Tv and in films – he had an important role as an amiable psychiatrist in the Czech TV show Hospuda ("The Pub"), apparently a knock-off of the American series Cheers. Hrabal often uses an elaborate and baroque prose-style, two of his novels consist of a single vastly engorged sentence. He was an important influence both Ivan Klima and the much more famous expatriate Czech writer, Milan Kundera – Hrabel was a generation older than Kundera. Kundera praises Hrabal’s ability to combine the baroque and surreal with a warm depiction of everyday life. Hrabal’s books are described as picaresque novels with effects that may be characterized as "magical realist." I served the King of England, at about 300 pages, is one of Hrabal’s longer novels – it was written in 1970, but could not be published in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, the novel circulated in the Canadian edition published by Skvorecky and in "secret anti-Communist" editions and was well-known to Czech literati.
From its first Samizdat publication, Menzel wanted to adapt the novel into a film. After the collapse of Communism, Menzel had some difficulty navigating the commercial film production system. Here is an Eastern bloc paradox – the most difficult, politically problematic films were readily produced in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries; money was available for such movies and they were duly made, then, censored into oblivion and shelved; it seems almost as if the production of politically subversive films was a kind of safety valve to the repressive system – you could make the movie, but the authorities didn’t have to release it. By contrast, no money is even available for political challenging films in the capitalist system. Thus, the paradox: people like Menzel, Tarkovsky, and German could make politically challenging films, they just couldn’t show them publicly; in the market system, these film makers weren’t even able to get their films produced. At a film festival in Karlovy in Eastern Europe, Menzel learned that his producer at Prague’s legendary Barradnov Studios had sold the film rights in Hrabal’s I Served the King of England to another competing production company. Menzel was so outraged that he attacked the film executive, beating him with a big stick. Later, Barrandov Studios was able to re-capture the rights to the picture so that Menzel could produce the picture. The stick that Menzel used to attack the film executive was auctioned off to raise money for the picture.
Menzel’s version of I Served the King of England was released in 2008. The film was nominated for an Academy Award but did not win. (This was Menzel’s third nomination for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film – he won in 1968 for Closely Watched Trains and was nominated as well for My Sweet Little Village in 1986).
Bohumil Hrabal had been dead for eleven years when I served the King of England was first shown to paying audiences. In a number of his books, Hrabal stated his opinion that the best way to commit suicide was by throwing oneself from a warm and cozy apartment on the fifth floor. A fall from that height would reliably kill instantaneously but would not create a great deal of gory mess. In 1997, Hrabal fell from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment in Prague. It is said, however, by witnesses that the old man was trying to feed the pigeons, lost his balance, and fell to his death.
Menzel, now 79, continues to work extensively in the Czech film industry. His eight-part film The Skirt Chasers (2013) was nominated for a number of international awards, but, ultimately, disqualified because the production was made for, and first broadcast on, television. He is married to one of the producers who worked on I Served the King of England, Olga Menzelova-Kelymanok, a glamorous blonde who seems to be about 30 years old. (There are several wonderful images of Menzel – in one picture taken at the Berlinale, we see the gnome-like Menzel peering at the camera from a location that is literally between the breasts of two starlets wearing very low-cut gowns – one of the women is apparently his wife; in the other image on You-Tube, a pretty female interviewer, also about 30 years old, lays sprawled in bed with Menzel where she interviews him.) In his 28 films, Menzel embodies the Czech spirit of carnal sensuousness, a playful and subversive attitude toward sex that ranks love affairs as events of importance equivalent to the world-historical movement of armies and battles fought between nations. The Czech sensibility is anti-heroic, summed up in a line from Closely Watched Trains – after some German trains are blown-up, a characters proclaims that the world would be a better place if everyone "just stayed home on their arses." Human motivation is sordid – Menzel focuses on greed and lust as the impulses driving most human action. Menzel is not judgmental, however -- in his hierarchy of sins, greed and lust are petty compared with the more terrible crimes committed by idealists in the name of politics. The Czechs, who have been the victim of idealistic, world-changing ideologies, have earned the right to their cynicism. Note that, although Menzel depicts, with great tact and horrible objectivity, the execution of some young Czech partisans, this sequence occurs in the context of the hero’s inability to successfully masturbate to climax – an incapacity afflicting our hero because he is listening to one of Hitler’s speeches on the radio. Furthermore, the characteristic violent gesture in I Served the King of England is someone pouring food or beverage over someone else’s head, an indignity that is more slapstick than anything else.
The garlanded pubis
From a poem by Thomas Campion:
The peacefull westerne winde,
The winter storms hath tam’d,
And nature in each kinde
The kinde heat hat inflam’d.
The forward buds so sweetly breathe
Out of their earthly bowers,
That heav’n, which viewes their pompe beneath
Would faine be deckt with flowers.
Ditie impresses his girl-friends by covering their naked bodies with flowers. This quirk seems to please his lovers immeasurably. Ditie drapes the German phy-ed teachers groin with spruce needles. (In the novel, there is an extensive and pleasantly pornograpic account of how these spruce needles get in the way and end up in both lover’s mouths.)
How should we take this motif? Clearly, it is important to both Menzel and Hrabal. What does this mean?
Differences between novel and film version
The novel is darker in tone than the movie version of I Served the King of England. In the novel, Ditie narrowly escapes committing suicide when he is wrongfully accused of stealing a gold spoon – he goes into the woods to hang himself but is scared away after encountering the corpse of another suicide. At the end of the book, Ditie works as a road repairer in a remote part of the country. (The motif of the German village from which all ethnic Germans have been cleansed, integral to the movie, is not a central theme in the novel – although the depopulated regions around the border are important in the book’s final recuperation of Ditie.) In the novel, Ditie and his German wife have a child. But the baby, although blessed with "perfect Aryan genes", is born retarded and, as he grows up, spends his time hammering nails into the floor of Ditie’s apartment.
In some ways, I Served the King of England, is similar to be both Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik and Guenter Grass’ Danzig trilogy – the books offer a "worm’s eye view of history". Ditie experiences history not as a series of great political events, but instead as picaresque episodes in the life of a roguish bell-boy who later becomes a millionaire. Ditie’s main concern is seducing women. Nonetheless, the Zelig-like Ditie meets famous people during his varied career – in the novel, he spends time with Tomas Masaryk, the founder of the Czech republic between the wars (characteristically, Ditie sees him with his French lover) at a hotel where he is working. He also meets the American author, John Steinbeck.
Hrabal is clearly a magisterial prose stylist. He works in long sentences that wander associatively from one topic to another. I Served the King of England is constructed in massive blocks of prose and resembles, superficially at least, the work of the great Hungarian novelist, Laszlo Kraznahorkai (as well as Gyorgy Konrad the author of The Social Worker) – although Hrabal’s subject matter is brighter and, of course, substantially more hedonistic. (There is sex or a naked woman on just about every page of the novel and Hrabal describes the various nude women and their sexual encounters with a connoisseur’s practiced eye.) There is an intense joi d’vivre in the novel that wars with aspects of the book that are indisputably melancholy. From the perspective of the little man, like Ditie or the good soldier Schweik, what is important in life is women, sex, and food – everything else is politics and politics is bad for the soul. Hrabal’s Slavic melancholy captures the last forty pages of the novel – near the end of the book, Ditie retreats into the wilderness with a German shepherd dog, a goat, a pony, and a skittish cat. Avoiding human contact, Ditie broods on his life and, ultimately, becomes a kind of ascetic saint. In essence, he renounces human society as fundamentally corrupt and withdraws into a world of literature – at the end of the novel, we see Ditie beginning work on the memoir that will become I Served the King of England. (In this part of the novel, the action is all internal to Ditie and, so, this part of the book is not well-served by Menzel’s film.)
Sudetenland
Czechoslovakia was a nation-state that arose in the wake of the Great War and the German defeat in 1918. The country was carved out of territory that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Large numbers of ethnic Germans, about 3.5 million people, lived along the west and north borders with Germany – these were the Sudetenland Deutsch. The center of this area was the city of Cheb, called Eger in German, and the regional capital of what was known as Egerland – Ditie’s girlfriend is an ethnic German phy. ed. teacher from Cheb. This part of central Europe is mountainous and heavily wooded. The Germans who lived in this area, many of them Hussite refugees who settled in the forests during the Wars of Religion in the 17th century, supported themselves largely by manufacturing glass from the sandy soil in the forests. (Industries making use of silica deposits in the area are still prevalent – when I traveled to Prague about 15 years ago, I recall the huge sand and gravel mines near the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia.) These people were patriotic Germans – Sudeten Deutsch suffered some of the highest casualty rates for any region in World War I, 34 dead for every one-thousand people.
In 1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Hitler sought to annex Sudetenland to German. Ultimately, Neville Chamberlain and the western powers acquiesced and the provinces of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany became part of that country. This measure, of course, did not avoid war – Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. During the war, the Nazis persecuted the Czechs and committed a number of atrocities; the Germans also deported the 300,000 Jews living in the country to death camps, including the notorious Theresianstadt in Bohemia, where the they were murdered. The Sudeten Germans were strongly pro-Nazi – in Germany proper, NSDAP membership never exceeded 7.5% of the population. By contrast, the Nazi party boasted 17.8% membership in the Sudetenland.
The Germans lost the war and, at the 1945 Potsdam conference, it was agreed that all ethnic Germans would be deported from Sudetenland. Deportations began in 1946 and continued for three years. Some of the Germans were simply moved into the Theresianstadt concentration camp where a number of them were murdered. Several massacres occurred and large numbers of Germans were killed by the avenging Czechs – the total number of Germans slaughtered in the exodus is somewhere between 15,000 and 270,000 according to various sources. (The true figure is probably close to 15,000 than the larger estimate.) There are presently about 40,000 Germans remaining in Czech Republic – a tiny proportion of the 3. 5 million Germans who once lived in that country. Reparations for confiscated German property were proposed and some legislation considered on this issue in 2010 – the legislative measure did not pass.
The Communists felt that it would be wise to maintain buffer zones between Czechoslovakia and German. As a result, the areas where the Germans had lived were simply left empty and, in some cases, made into National Parks, for instance NP Sumava. As a result, there are many ghost-towns in Moravia and the former Sudetenland, German villages emptied of their people and allowed to fall into ruin. This is shown in some detail in Jiri Menzel’s film.
Representative Men
The notion of the representative man, at least in its modern understanding, arises from Carlyle. In 1841, Carlyle declared that the "history of the world is the biography of great men" – this doctrine is developed in his lecture series On Heroes and Hero Worship. Emerson subscribed to this view as well and, also, lectured on seven great men said to be representative of various aspects of human endeavor – in Emerson’s lectures, Shakespeare embodied "poetry," Goethe was the representative of "writing," Swedenborg was the "the mystic," Napoleon the "man of the world," and Plato "the philosopher" and so on.
Menzel and Hrabal seem to have something similar in mind. Indeed, I Served the King of England, can be interpreted as demythologizing the notion of the representative man. To Menzel and Hrabel, the idea of the heroic "representative man" is problematic – in the breeding station where nubile German girls are mated with Aryan warriors from the Wehrmacht, the pregnant women contemplate images of great Teutonic heroes; beholding pictures of these men is supposed to make their children strong and heroic as well. The film and novel present a counter-perspective. Ditie is a little man and there is nothing heroic about him – at every point, he is shown to be venal, lustful, selfish, even, cowardly. But, ultimately, Ditie’s cowardice is probably preferable to the courage of the German soldiers – heroics that result in their mutilation as shown in the scenes involving the amputee warriors. Czechoslovakia was a young country. Among nations, Czechoslovakia might be considered a child, that is "ditie." In effect, Ditie is the man who represents the plight and particular characteristics of the Czechs and their nation. The Germans were, once, a great nation as are the French and Russians and Americans today – accordingly, these countries seek to exercise their influence on the world stage. Great nations have big armies and engage in large-scale conflicts. Great nations wish to impose their will on others. Great nations are afflicted with great ideas: democracy, communism, national socialism – they have heroic agendas that end in tears. By contrast, a "little, childish" nation like Czechoslovakia doesn’t have a big army, espouses no great political ideas, and doesn’t wish to force its will on others. Big warrior nations seek victory and wish to export their ideas. Small nations must be content with cultivating pleasure, living well, enjoying wine, women, and song.
When the Germans ceased to be a great nation, they were suddenly happy, a people devoted to managing their pleasures – strolling the streets of Berlin, this is immediately apparent. Anyone who has set foot in Canada will acknowledge feeling a great sense of relief – when an American enters Canada, we are exiting from the world-historical stage and there is a distinct pleasure that arises from that sensation. The burden of the world does not rest on the shoulders of the Canadians, nor does it rest on the shoulders of the Czechs. In this respect, Ditie seems to be a representative man, a figure that typifies the ethos and hedonistic morality of the small nation.
QUIZ:
1.
"The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true but it proves nothing against the heavens because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows."
The author of this aphorism is a famous writer from Czechoslovakia. In Czech, this writer’s name means crow. Name the writer.
2.
This Czech scientist invented frequency hopping and spread spectrum technology instrumental in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other high-tech communications. She also appeared naked in an early Czech film, Ecstasy, (Gustav Machaty, 1930) and was filmed in close-up having an orgasm.
Name this scientist.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Blackhat
Some very bad hombres are out to destroy Malaysian dams so as to flood the four largest tin mines in the world. These bad hombres have invested in 74 million (stolen) dollars in tin futures and, of course, will make an immense profit from this criminal enterprise once the mines are kaput. In the cinema, thirty years ago, the criminals, an ethnically mixed and interracial team of bad guys, would assault the dams with high explosives. In Blackhat (2015), the bad guys, comprising a ethnically diverse, interracial team, plan to hack into certain computers controlling the flow-rates of water at the dams. Notwithstanding this high-tech approach to crime, the sinister computer hacker is accompanied by a Maori body-builder, a gaunt Zombie of an Ethiopian/Somali mercenary, and everyone's all-purpose bad dude, an Albanian-Serbian skinhead with a permanent scowl. The high-tech aspects of Blackhat seem more than a little extraneous to the plot, a chase across several countries that involves a series of fire-fights with machine guns and other high-powered weapons, culminating in a mano y mano fight with knives and screwdrivers. The trappings of computer hacking really have nothing to do with the plot -- a story pitting a small cadre of good guys against the bad dudes involving a series of violent physical encounters.
The good guys in Blackhat are Chris Hemsworth, horribly miscast as a rough-and-tough computer hacker who, nonetheless, reads Derrida and Foucault during the term of his imprisonment, the beautiful Chinese girlfriend, her loyal brother, and a very tough African-American lady secret agent. (Hemsworth is the film's greatest defect: he scowls, mutters threats in a totally phony American accent and seems to be a complete moron.) When a Chinese nuclear reactor is hacked by the bad guys, led by a furry Australian guy with a bearish figure wearing a Hawaiian shirt, an atomic catastrophe almost ensues. The US NSA releases Hemsworth, the world's greatest computer hacker from his cell in a cartoonishly violent and hellish maximum security prison. Hemsworth is deputized to lead the international team tasked with capturing the evil hackers. This leads to a series of spectacular gun battles and, finally, a climactic confrontation in Indonesia in which the bad guys get their just comeuppance, although the hunky Hemsworth is badly wounded. Michael Mann directed the film and it has received mixed reviews. Mann made one certifiably great film, Thief (1981) and his 1986 version of the Hannibal Lector story, Manhunter, is arguably better than Jonathan Demme's adaptation. Many critics regard Heat (1995) as Mann's best picture, a view that I don't share -- indeed, I think Heat, featuring spectacular firefights on Wiltshire Avenue in LA signifies the beginning of Mann's collapse as a film maker. Heat looks great but big chunks of the picture are idiotic and the famous gun battles that many critics have lauded are over-sized, over-produced, and fundamentally unrealistic, a characteristic shared by the battle scenes in Blackhat. Sure Robert DeNiro (in Heat) or Chris Hemsworth looks good shouldering a long gun or advancing into enemy fire with his machine gun blazing -- this is an argument for putting DeNiro (or Hemswoth) in a properly scaled Western or war movie, not an urban thriller. The same problem afflicts Blackhat, although even on its own terms the film is pretty much gibberish -- if you are going to make a movie about computer hacking why incorporate so much garish combat in the picture? The ending of Blackhat is unintentionally funny and racist to boot. The Indonesians are in the throes of some kind of wild festival involving women dancers on the plinth of a huge monument and thousands of men wearing red bandanas moving in choreographed lines. Into the midst of this gigantic dance, the bad guys and heroes engage in a big gun battle and, then, knife fight -- the Indonesians, all of them a full half-yard shorter than the protagonists don't seem to notice all of this violence. Then, people start shooting their guns and automatic weapons, mowing down dozens of hapless Indonesians who find themselves in the cross-fire. Why didn't these people react sooner by calling the cops or engaging in a little mutual aid to catch the wild-eyed foreigners armed to the teeth and running amuck in their midst. But, apparently, that's just not the way that things are done in the exotic islands of Indonesia and, therefore, the big battle goes unobserved, although it is happening in plain sight, until the two sides start shooting everyone down. (This is a movie involving unerring marksmanship -- the good guys can kill a bad dude at a range 150 yards with a stubnosed revolver.) In the end of the movie, the surviving heroes go to the ATM and extract a couple hundred euros pocket money from their Swiss bank accounts -- can you really access top-secret Swiss bank accounts from a Jakarta airport ATM and, if so, will you really get a receipt showing that you have 47,654,801 Euros remaining in your checking account?
The good guys in Blackhat are Chris Hemsworth, horribly miscast as a rough-and-tough computer hacker who, nonetheless, reads Derrida and Foucault during the term of his imprisonment, the beautiful Chinese girlfriend, her loyal brother, and a very tough African-American lady secret agent. (Hemsworth is the film's greatest defect: he scowls, mutters threats in a totally phony American accent and seems to be a complete moron.) When a Chinese nuclear reactor is hacked by the bad guys, led by a furry Australian guy with a bearish figure wearing a Hawaiian shirt, an atomic catastrophe almost ensues. The US NSA releases Hemsworth, the world's greatest computer hacker from his cell in a cartoonishly violent and hellish maximum security prison. Hemsworth is deputized to lead the international team tasked with capturing the evil hackers. This leads to a series of spectacular gun battles and, finally, a climactic confrontation in Indonesia in which the bad guys get their just comeuppance, although the hunky Hemsworth is badly wounded. Michael Mann directed the film and it has received mixed reviews. Mann made one certifiably great film, Thief (1981) and his 1986 version of the Hannibal Lector story, Manhunter, is arguably better than Jonathan Demme's adaptation. Many critics regard Heat (1995) as Mann's best picture, a view that I don't share -- indeed, I think Heat, featuring spectacular firefights on Wiltshire Avenue in LA signifies the beginning of Mann's collapse as a film maker. Heat looks great but big chunks of the picture are idiotic and the famous gun battles that many critics have lauded are over-sized, over-produced, and fundamentally unrealistic, a characteristic shared by the battle scenes in Blackhat. Sure Robert DeNiro (in Heat) or Chris Hemsworth looks good shouldering a long gun or advancing into enemy fire with his machine gun blazing -- this is an argument for putting DeNiro (or Hemswoth) in a properly scaled Western or war movie, not an urban thriller. The same problem afflicts Blackhat, although even on its own terms the film is pretty much gibberish -- if you are going to make a movie about computer hacking why incorporate so much garish combat in the picture? The ending of Blackhat is unintentionally funny and racist to boot. The Indonesians are in the throes of some kind of wild festival involving women dancers on the plinth of a huge monument and thousands of men wearing red bandanas moving in choreographed lines. Into the midst of this gigantic dance, the bad guys and heroes engage in a big gun battle and, then, knife fight -- the Indonesians, all of them a full half-yard shorter than the protagonists don't seem to notice all of this violence. Then, people start shooting their guns and automatic weapons, mowing down dozens of hapless Indonesians who find themselves in the cross-fire. Why didn't these people react sooner by calling the cops or engaging in a little mutual aid to catch the wild-eyed foreigners armed to the teeth and running amuck in their midst. But, apparently, that's just not the way that things are done in the exotic islands of Indonesia and, therefore, the big battle goes unobserved, although it is happening in plain sight, until the two sides start shooting everyone down. (This is a movie involving unerring marksmanship -- the good guys can kill a bad dude at a range 150 yards with a stubnosed revolver.) In the end of the movie, the surviving heroes go to the ATM and extract a couple hundred euros pocket money from their Swiss bank accounts -- can you really access top-secret Swiss bank accounts from a Jakarta airport ATM and, if so, will you really get a receipt showing that you have 47,654,801 Euros remaining in your checking account?
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Look Who's Back (Er is wieder da)
It's not hard to resurrect Hitler, even easy, I think, to put him through his paces in encounters with current fashion and events. But it's not so easy to get rid of him once he has been summoned for whatever metaphorical or political or artistic purpose. This message is clear enough from both Timur Vermes' bestselling comic novel, Er is wieder da (He's Back Again) and the movie based on that book. I counted at least three and, possibly, four endings to the film, a pretty clear signal that the film makers have tapped into something larger than their project and have unleashed a genie that is not so readily crammed back into his bottle. Vermes' novel imagines Hitler suddenly appearing in Berlin, seemingly resurrected from the wreckage of the Fuehrer bunker. The novel imagines Hitler is various comical situations and reads, at times, like outlines for skits in a sketch-comedy revue -- Hitler examines a cell-phone, Hitler on a date, Hitler interacting with various minorities, Hitler surfing the internet. The novel is written in the third-person and part of its charm lies in Hitler's diction -- he applies grandiose Nietzschean language about strife and combat to every day life and remains supremely confident of his powers, certain that he is a man of destiny, and, indeed, enormously resourceful in exploiting all circumstances to his benefit. Unwittingly, Vermes makes Hitler seem a bit endearing, a kind of half-mad Don Quixote, and, ultimately, the book has nowhere to go -- like the movie, it can't quite bring itself to an end and, if I recall properly (I read the novel last year) the book simply peters out. The film is more inventive and its creators labor mightily to bring some closure to the fantasy. Ending 1 shows the hero, Sawatzki, Hitler's discoverer and promoter, finally learning that the man that he has been displaying to the world is really der Fuehrer somehow revived after his death in April of 1945 -- the knowledge drives Sawatzki mad. In the second ending, Sawatzki kills Hitler by pushing him off the edge of skyscraper; Hitler falls to his death but, then, immediately reappears proclaiming that he will always be a part of Sawatzki, and, presumably, all Germans. In Ending 3, really a meta-ending, we discover that Sawatzki is directing another actor playing Sawatzki (in a hyper-realistic plastic mask) and that the whole thing is just a movie, a kind of grandiose fantasy enacted on a massive scale like the all-encompassing theater work in Synecdoche, New York -- this is a variant on The Wizard of Oz notion that it was all just a wacky dream. In the fourth ending, really a part of the closing credits, Sawatzki chauffeurs Hitler around modern-day Berlin in an open car and the bemused men and women on the street alternately hurl insults at him or salute him enthusiastically with arms upraised as if the proclaim "Heil Hitler!" -- this sequence is intercut with images of European politicians making xenophobic comments about immigrants, pictures of anti-immigrant protests as well street fighting all scored to Dowland's funeral music for Queen Ann, synthesized as in Clockwork Orange for maximum portentous and sinister effect. The fourth ending epitomizes an aspect of the film that is derived from Sasha Baron Cohen's pictures, most obviously Borat -- the man impersonating Hitler wanders around Germany encountering various bemused people who are clearly not actors and not aware that they are being filmed: some of these people seem to revile Hitler; others greet him with warmth and remark that they've missed him and that German democracy is a failure. (German privacy laws apparently forbid the filmmakers from showing anyone on screen who has not given a proper release of his or her image -- as a result, many of these scenes are disfigured by little black strips covering the eyes of the people shown and signifying that they wish to remain anonymous.)
The movie is reasonably funny. Like most comedies, it is indifferently lit and photographed: the film is shot like a larger-scale version of an American TV show like The Office, mostly handheld camera on overly bright sets with snappy editing. The film follows the efforts of a recently fired TV producer, the hapless Sawatzki, to exploit Hitler and win his way back into TV production. He discovers Hitler lumbering around in the background of some shots that he has made in Berlin. (He's making a documentary that no one wants to see about homeless children and poverty in Germany's big cities.) Sawatzki hauls Hitler around Germany during the first third of the film and that part of the movie features the most Borat-style interaction with puzzled non-actors. Back in Berlin, Hitler appears on comedy-show, a sort of Teutonic version of the Howard Stern show; the program is called (in translation) "Whoa, Dude!" Hitler disconcerts everyone by a staging a wild tirade. The public thinks that Hitler is merely a comedian and takes his rants to be ironic comedy. But as with Archie Bunker in the American TV series, All in the Family, a sizeable portion of the population seem to agree with Hitler and, in fact, he becomes a popular TV personality. Unfortunately, Hitler is filmed shooting a dog and falls from grace. But, because he is Hitler, he writes another book, refuses to be discouraged, and mounts a comeback. (The novel ends with Hitler re-establishing his party through the internet and TV appearances, an apparently irresistible force.) As in the novel, there are lots of sequences that are designed to exploit the sheer incongruity of the absurdly charismatic, but sinister dictator interacting with the more silly aspects of modern life -- we see Hitler in love, Hitler commenting on a TV cooking show, Hitler berating neo-Nazis for not being tough enough and so on. Parts of the film are evasive, a characteristic shared with the novel. In the book, Hitler discovers that Sawatzki's goth girlfriend is part Jewish and, in fact, confronts her elderly grandmother who complains about the deaths of family members in the war. Hitler commiserates about the brutality of allied bombing campaigns only to be told that the family members were murdered in the camps -- in the book, Vermes sets up a confrontation between the old lady, a victim of Hitler's anti-Semitism, and Hitler, but, then, he shifts the subject and deflects the issue, suggesting obliquely that even the Jewish grandmother could be won over to Hitler's side by his sheer charisma. The movie follows this plot line quite closely -- the movie is not particularly faithful to the novel in general -- but doesn't seem to know how to handle the old woman's wild-eyed and hysterical revelation that this man is, in fact, the real Hitler and not merely a comedian with a gift for remaining in character. The old woman shrieks wildly at Hitler and, the movie changes the subject. The movie is interesting, fairly amusing with a few laugh-out-loud scenes. And the picture is particularly revelatory in light of the United States election and rise of Donald Trump, the main reason, I think, that this picture can be found on Netflix.
The movie is reasonably funny. Like most comedies, it is indifferently lit and photographed: the film is shot like a larger-scale version of an American TV show like The Office, mostly handheld camera on overly bright sets with snappy editing. The film follows the efforts of a recently fired TV producer, the hapless Sawatzki, to exploit Hitler and win his way back into TV production. He discovers Hitler lumbering around in the background of some shots that he has made in Berlin. (He's making a documentary that no one wants to see about homeless children and poverty in Germany's big cities.) Sawatzki hauls Hitler around Germany during the first third of the film and that part of the movie features the most Borat-style interaction with puzzled non-actors. Back in Berlin, Hitler appears on comedy-show, a sort of Teutonic version of the Howard Stern show; the program is called (in translation) "Whoa, Dude!" Hitler disconcerts everyone by a staging a wild tirade. The public thinks that Hitler is merely a comedian and takes his rants to be ironic comedy. But as with Archie Bunker in the American TV series, All in the Family, a sizeable portion of the population seem to agree with Hitler and, in fact, he becomes a popular TV personality. Unfortunately, Hitler is filmed shooting a dog and falls from grace. But, because he is Hitler, he writes another book, refuses to be discouraged, and mounts a comeback. (The novel ends with Hitler re-establishing his party through the internet and TV appearances, an apparently irresistible force.) As in the novel, there are lots of sequences that are designed to exploit the sheer incongruity of the absurdly charismatic, but sinister dictator interacting with the more silly aspects of modern life -- we see Hitler in love, Hitler commenting on a TV cooking show, Hitler berating neo-Nazis for not being tough enough and so on. Parts of the film are evasive, a characteristic shared with the novel. In the book, Hitler discovers that Sawatzki's goth girlfriend is part Jewish and, in fact, confronts her elderly grandmother who complains about the deaths of family members in the war. Hitler commiserates about the brutality of allied bombing campaigns only to be told that the family members were murdered in the camps -- in the book, Vermes sets up a confrontation between the old lady, a victim of Hitler's anti-Semitism, and Hitler, but, then, he shifts the subject and deflects the issue, suggesting obliquely that even the Jewish grandmother could be won over to Hitler's side by his sheer charisma. The movie follows this plot line quite closely -- the movie is not particularly faithful to the novel in general -- but doesn't seem to know how to handle the old woman's wild-eyed and hysterical revelation that this man is, in fact, the real Hitler and not merely a comedian with a gift for remaining in character. The old woman shrieks wildly at Hitler and, the movie changes the subject. The movie is interesting, fairly amusing with a few laugh-out-loud scenes. And the picture is particularly revelatory in light of the United States election and rise of Donald Trump, the main reason, I think, that this picture can be found on Netflix.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974
It is hard to write about Kazuo Hara's alarming documentary Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 without adopting a morally judgmental tone that might disturb some people. We are told that all families, whatever their configuration, are equal; we understand that women must be accorded full control over their reproductive systems; in principle, I suppose, we are willing to salute those who dare to be different, those who are willing to risk an experimental life-style: in Chasing Amy, the protagonist says something to this effect: "I'm an experimental girl. If I came with an operator's manual, no one showed it to me." That stated, Hara's Extreme Private Eros portrays a kind of specifically female pathology, a sort of amoral squalor that is characteristically gendered and pretty much instantly recognizable -- the film explores the uneasy boundary between behavior that might be thought to be vaguely feminist in nature, but that, also, has a decidedly perverse and self-serving character. Simply put, the film poses the question of whether the women depicted in the movie are skanky promiscuous losers or bold sexual outlaws. My inclination is to see the heroine and her friends as the former, but, I should note, that there are a number of reviews that tend toward the latter interpretation as well. Everyone has glimpsed the world shown by Extreme Private Eros -- it's an entirely female world, ruled by women who live on government entitlement checks, a place where men are merely transient, unwelcome guests, generally prized, and, then, despised for their violence and sexual selfishness; in this world, no one has any money, everyone raises everyone else's children, the girls and women seem never to have heard of birth control and are all casually promiscuous, the babies have no fathers, diapers are always dirty and everyone has a grievance against everyone else. Masculinity, of course, has its own pathologies and they are mostly violent and cruel, but the milieu depicted in unsparing terms in Hara's film is one that is terrifying to most men -- an abyss where everyone is enthusiastically making babies without any concern as to how those children will be cared for.
Hara's picture records his ongoing relationship with the rather squat and plain-looking Takeda Miyuki. Miyuki is Hara's ex-wife and the mother of his small son. She announces that she intends to travel to Okinawa. Hara pursues her to that place, corners her with his camera, and films her incessantly. At first, we see Miyuki, who is a vicious nag, verbally abusing her taciturn girlfriend. While rug-rats creep on the floor, Miyuki belabors the other woman who ignores her, sulking as she gnaws on her fingernails. This lesbian love affair collapses and next we discover that Miyuki has an African-American GI boyfriend, a nice-looking kid named Paul. This love affair lasts only three weeks but results in Miyuki's pregnancy. Miyuki hangs around low-rent bars on a squalid GI strip in Okinawa -- the various homely bar girls explain how they have been abused, beaten and knifed. Inserting himself in this depressing situation, Hara has brought with him to Okinawa his present girlfriend, the much more attractive, chipper, and aggressively cute, Miss Kobayashi -- she sticks the microphone in Miyuki's face so that the heroine can engage in her tireless rants about her happiness that she is pregnant with a "mixed" (that is, half-black) child. Miyuki has the baby in an alarming single-shot sequence with the camera aimed directly at her vagina -- Kobayashi holds the microphone up to laboring mother's mouth but, otherwise, doesn't help her at all; Miyuki's little boy sits next to his mother's spread knees and wails during the bloody spectacle. (Hara is overly excited and the image is out-of-focus, something that is, I think, a blessing.) Later, Miyuki's lesbian lover also has a half-black baby -- that kid is born very floppy with head crushed into a cone and, for a few alarming minutes, it seems that the child is not going to survive. Along the way, Miyuki has authored a tract about the evils of prostitution -- the tract is supposed to help the hapless bargirls and warns them to stay about from "Black men with their big cocks." The local pimps are not amused and beat up Hara for fomenting trouble among the girls. We see Miyuki taking a bath in a tub full of infants, a grotesque kind of earth mother. In the final scene, she is dancing naked as a go-go girl in the bar on the GI strip.
The film is casually cruel -- apparently, Miyuki's mother suggests to her daughter that she kill the half-Black baby -- and everyone is constantly berating everyone else. These tirades are disorienting because the sound doesn't synchronize with the image -- we hear the voices but lips don't move. The movie is made in black and white and its intentionally shoddy -- the images are out of focus, either under-lit or over-lit. The shabby concrete block apartments are like something from a nightmare -- you can almost smell the filth, the tropical heat, the dirty diapers and rotting food. In one scene, Kobayashi and Miyuki discuss Hara's deficiencies as a lover -- as usual, Miyuki is warning someone about imminent trouble. The two women are lounging against a wall. When the camera pulls back at the end of the conversation, we see that both of them have been standing in about six-inches of nasty-looking bilge-water under a sea wall -- they seem to be literally ankle deep in crud. The film is astonishing enough -- it's about a rough, negligent, lawless life-style and the movie is shot in a casual way that is wholly consistent with the subject matter. The picture is about a woman who just doesn't give a shit although she has endless outspoken grievances and the movie is made in such a way as to make it obvious that the woman's carelessness is commensurate with the studied carelessness of the way the picture is produced: it's complete poverty on all levels -- no money, no father, no income stream to support the babies and their mothers; no money to make the film and not even any commitment to getting things in focus or making the sound match the motion of people's lips.
Hara is famous for the film he made 13 years later, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On -- the ultimate in investigative journalism. In that film, the protagonist wants to get war veterans to admit that they encouraged cannibalism in order to survive in the jungles of New Guinea. When the old men balk at this admission, the hero literally beats the truth out of them. The movie is staggering and Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 is, in its own way, equally uncompromising.
Hara's picture records his ongoing relationship with the rather squat and plain-looking Takeda Miyuki. Miyuki is Hara's ex-wife and the mother of his small son. She announces that she intends to travel to Okinawa. Hara pursues her to that place, corners her with his camera, and films her incessantly. At first, we see Miyuki, who is a vicious nag, verbally abusing her taciturn girlfriend. While rug-rats creep on the floor, Miyuki belabors the other woman who ignores her, sulking as she gnaws on her fingernails. This lesbian love affair collapses and next we discover that Miyuki has an African-American GI boyfriend, a nice-looking kid named Paul. This love affair lasts only three weeks but results in Miyuki's pregnancy. Miyuki hangs around low-rent bars on a squalid GI strip in Okinawa -- the various homely bar girls explain how they have been abused, beaten and knifed. Inserting himself in this depressing situation, Hara has brought with him to Okinawa his present girlfriend, the much more attractive, chipper, and aggressively cute, Miss Kobayashi -- she sticks the microphone in Miyuki's face so that the heroine can engage in her tireless rants about her happiness that she is pregnant with a "mixed" (that is, half-black) child. Miyuki has the baby in an alarming single-shot sequence with the camera aimed directly at her vagina -- Kobayashi holds the microphone up to laboring mother's mouth but, otherwise, doesn't help her at all; Miyuki's little boy sits next to his mother's spread knees and wails during the bloody spectacle. (Hara is overly excited and the image is out-of-focus, something that is, I think, a blessing.) Later, Miyuki's lesbian lover also has a half-black baby -- that kid is born very floppy with head crushed into a cone and, for a few alarming minutes, it seems that the child is not going to survive. Along the way, Miyuki has authored a tract about the evils of prostitution -- the tract is supposed to help the hapless bargirls and warns them to stay about from "Black men with their big cocks." The local pimps are not amused and beat up Hara for fomenting trouble among the girls. We see Miyuki taking a bath in a tub full of infants, a grotesque kind of earth mother. In the final scene, she is dancing naked as a go-go girl in the bar on the GI strip.
The film is casually cruel -- apparently, Miyuki's mother suggests to her daughter that she kill the half-Black baby -- and everyone is constantly berating everyone else. These tirades are disorienting because the sound doesn't synchronize with the image -- we hear the voices but lips don't move. The movie is made in black and white and its intentionally shoddy -- the images are out of focus, either under-lit or over-lit. The shabby concrete block apartments are like something from a nightmare -- you can almost smell the filth, the tropical heat, the dirty diapers and rotting food. In one scene, Kobayashi and Miyuki discuss Hara's deficiencies as a lover -- as usual, Miyuki is warning someone about imminent trouble. The two women are lounging against a wall. When the camera pulls back at the end of the conversation, we see that both of them have been standing in about six-inches of nasty-looking bilge-water under a sea wall -- they seem to be literally ankle deep in crud. The film is astonishing enough -- it's about a rough, negligent, lawless life-style and the movie is shot in a casual way that is wholly consistent with the subject matter. The picture is about a woman who just doesn't give a shit although she has endless outspoken grievances and the movie is made in such a way as to make it obvious that the woman's carelessness is commensurate with the studied carelessness of the way the picture is produced: it's complete poverty on all levels -- no money, no father, no income stream to support the babies and their mothers; no money to make the film and not even any commitment to getting things in focus or making the sound match the motion of people's lips.
Hara is famous for the film he made 13 years later, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On -- the ultimate in investigative journalism. In that film, the protagonist wants to get war veterans to admit that they encouraged cannibalism in order to survive in the jungles of New Guinea. When the old men balk at this admission, the hero literally beats the truth out of them. The movie is staggering and Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 is, in its own way, equally uncompromising.
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