Monday, January 21, 2013

Deforming the Rom-Com for the Better

People are very surprised when I tell them that David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook was the best movie of 2012. They expect me to say Lincoln, or The Master, or Moonrise Kingdom, but not a flick with an unattractive poster, an indecipherable title, Bradley Cooper and Chris Tucker. Those who did see the film, who weren't as enthusiastic about it as I was, remind me of my skepticism toward Hollywood movies, with their heavily plotted story lines and their mandated happy endings, and wonder why I gave the film not one but two viewings, with a likely third on the way. Only one friend, whose passion for film exceeds my own, really got it. He called Silver Linings Playbook the return of a Billy Wilder-type film, a comedy for grownups. That's what it is, and that's why it's important to give it credit for rescuing the romantic comedy from the chick-flick graveyard.

The romantic comedy demonstrated the best of Studio Era Hollywood, as it depicted highly erotic courtship within tight constraints during the Production Code era. In order to attract an audience that expected sex from the beginning but would not mind if they were denied sex even after the closing credits, directors paired Katharine Hepburn with Cary Grant or James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart with Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper with Barbara Stanwyck, or, in the case of The Apartment (1960), Billy Wilder matched Shirley MacLaine with Jack Lemmon. Neither actor dominated the other, or they took turns bending the other to their wills; the films were vehicles for neither star, or both stars. Of course, many films flopped due to lack of chemistry between a man and a woman. The most memorable of the movies, however, proved how difficult, yet how rewarding, it was to watch two adults sparring with brilliant dialog and charisma as their chief weapons, if not their only tools. What marked classic romantic comedy was its subordination of the romance to a compelling story involving the development of characters, even if it felt to the audience that the plot was just an excuse for love to flourish. Mainstream feminist film critics, such as Molly Haskell, Marjorie Rosen and Jeanine Basinger, have viewed the classic Hollywood romantic comedy as a golden opportunity for featuring equality between the sexes, as women held their own against men. 

The Sixties, and the shift from a universal Production Code to a more permissive, if ultimately confusing and politically motivated ratings system, encouraged the proliferation of many genres, including the Western, the detective story and horror, but it diminished the power of the romantic comedy. Another, possibly more powerful influence, reduced the genre, as women’s roles diminished, and “bankable” women stars virtually disappeared for well over a decade. Starting with the late Seventies, however, with one example being Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (with Diane Keaton opposite Allen), a reversal took place. Unfortunately, as the 20th century came to a close, the romantic comedy appeared to be quite different from the canonical works of the Studio Era. Women were, for the most part, restored to “bankability,” as Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan and Melanie Griffith proved that they could draw a sizable audience. 

What never returned, or appeared so rarely as to seem the exception to the rule (Allen’s works, mainly), was the maturity of the better works, the substance of the narratives that reminded audiences that the love story shared the screen with interesting stories and characters. The characters seemed stock, one-dimensional and predictable, and the plots were mere springboards for the insipid roles played by actors who got a chance to demonstrate more charm than talent. As promising as Nora Ephron was as a journalist and budding screenwriter, her films weakened the romantic comedy genre as a whole. Entire productions were constructed around a single star, sometimes male but usually female, and the foil was decidedly inferior. Even when there seemed to be an even match, as in the case of Notting Hill, with the often imposing Hugh Grant falling for Julia Roberts, the plot was threadbare. The genre took on a new nickname, one reflecting its increasingly diminutive status. Just as “the women’s picture” (of Davis, Crawford, Joan Fontaine and Olivia DeHavilland) became, by 1980, the “chick flick” (of Roberts, Bullock and Ryan), the “romantic comedy” earned the prosaic title of “rom com.”

Before I discuss Silver Linings Playbook in detail, in order to emphasize the practical miracle performed by David O. Russell on this moribund genre, I would like to mention the first time I became aware of Bradley Cooper. It was in a chick flick/rom com entitled Failure to Launch, a name which said more than was intended, I think. I can’t even remember the name of the female lead, and, while I could look it up on imdb.com, it might not be worth the effort. The male lead, however, I remember, because the flick was yet another job for Matthew McConaughey, who had been banished to the rom-com purgatory after eccentric behavior, including a drug bust, derailed his upward climb toward stardom as the new next Paul Newman. (To be fair, I must mention that 2012 was a redemptive year for the actor, as he shone in Magic Mike and Bernie, and gave audiences a chance to see once more what Richard Linklater saw in him during the making of Dazed and Confused.) In Failure to Launch, Matthew McC played a charming womanizer who refused to grow up, living with his parents (played by the unlikely but winning couple of Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw), and going to yoga class with his buddies, one of whom was Bradley Cooper, who functioned as a sort of Eve Arden to McConaughey’s Barbara Stanwyck. With a pretty face that registered charming bemusement as well as goofy abandon, and a dazzling white smile that almost upstaged his captivating stare, Cooper showed great promise for...something. He spent years in rom-coms and gross-out teen boy comedies, particularly The Hangover series, in which he registered aging frat boy charm more than the compelling vulnerability required of a true movie star. Limitless started out as a cautionary tale about the dangers of over-reliance on medicine to cure social ills but ended up another capitalist tycoon superhero fantasy, and it seemed to doom Cooper to a career of generic forgettables. In a risky but glorious move, the actor became executive producer of David O. Russell’s latest picture, as well as its male lead.

Based on a novel, Silver Linings Playbook could have been a J.D. Salinger imitation, the self-absorbed, sarcastic tale of a mentally ill young man and his battles with the world around him. It could also have been a domestic drama, similar to the returning soldier narrative, showing the awkward adjustment of a disturbed son returning to the family home. Possibly it could have been the indictment of modern medicine that Limitless set out to be, without the science fiction undertones and the action flick carnage. Instead, Russell decided to take elements from all three of those approaches and combined them with the chief characteristics of the classic romantic comedy, with man and woman evenly matched, battling each other as well as their own internal conflicts, against a backdrop of interesting, human, funny and substantial supporting characters. 

While it is undeniable that this film is Bradley Cooper’s showcase, proving to the world his facility at conveying the complex undercurrents of the golden boy without defaulting into the narcissism of Seventies Robert Redford or pre-AARP aged Paul Newman, the film would not have worked without the force of nature that is Jennifer Lawrence. Her previous successes, Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games, displayed alpha-female power in a woman barely old enough to vote. However crass Lawrence has appeared on awards shows and on interviews, seemingly too baldly ambitious and arrogant to be tolerated by a fickle audience. no one cannot acknowledge her prodigious talent and amazing star quality. The thrill of Silver Linings Playbook lies in the discovery of her flair for comic timing, and her willingness to show the fragility of her character’s outlook on life as often as she sports her bravado. As Cooper’s parents, Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver are sweet, humble, appropriately worried and eccentric without being grating or, for even one second, false.

The film has been released for months now, rendering a plot summary not only less necessary but possibly in danger of spoiling the mysterious appeal of Silver Linings Playbook. This can be said: Pat (Cooper) leaves a mental institution, where he was held and medicated following a violent attack that ruined his marriage, and he struggles to find his place in a town that won’t let him forget the past while refusing to let him face the past, and he wonders whether to return, Gatsby-like, to his old love or to sort the problem out for himself. He stops his medication, only to resume it when he inflicts his violent energy upon his parents. His desire to reconcile with his wife, who has a restraining order against him, is a single-minded pursuit that both gives him a reason to live and keeps him from having a life. Not until he is forced to meet Tiffany (Lawrence), the sister of the wife of his old friend, does he have an alternative to his monomaniacal focus on the past. Their courtship is rocky, and the film alludes to a variety of texts, from Cyrano de Bergerac to Simply Ballroom, as it shows how Pat and Tiffany become friends, despite or because of their mutual emotional instability. (Tiffany, a young widow, turned to promiscuity and pills in order to medicate her grief. Her story functions as a sobering counterpoint to Pat’s often self-inflicted psychological struggles, as well as his own self-obsessiveness.) 

What reminds the viewer that this is, in the last analysis, a romantic comedy, and not a Paddy Chayevsky kitchen-sink drama or a Snake Pit investigation of mental illness, is the ensured presence of the happy ending. That there will be a happy ending is safe to mention in this review. What matters is HOW the film journeys toward that ending, and how happy, indeed, it will turn out.

I confess that I fell in love with Silver Linings Playbook in a way that made me uncomfortable as a film studies major. As I detect the mechanisms of the various genres referenced in a film, and as I evaluate how successfully a film upholds or subverts the conventions of a genre, I try to maintain a lack of “suspension of disbelief.” I concentrate on design, and note the skill with which characters, plots and twists are arranged, as if pieces on a chess board. While I managed to maintain such attention while watching Russell’s film, I also found myself disappearing into the diegesis (the world of the film), vanishing into the plights of Pat, Tiffany and their respective families, arriving to the point of talking back to the screen: “Don’t walk out now!” “You shouldn’t have said that.” “Don’t look there!” as if the characters could hear my comments. I cared about these people as if I knew them. I wanted to know them. I rooted for their triumph, as opposed to their failure, because I wanted the best for them. That really, really surprised me, and left me with no small sense of delight. (I also cried. Tears choked my throat after Les Miz, but the eyes remained scrupulously, mercilessly dry.)

I don’t think I would have enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook as much as I did, had tragedy not cast a shadow over the comedy and vice versa. In a way, tragedy and comedy were the equally-matched lovers in this film, as strong as Hepburn and Tracy, carrying on as if clearly aware that two conjoined is better than one left single. If the characters find happiness, not only did they earn it, but they appreciate it because sadness is just around the corner. 

The film has won a lot of awards already, and is up for eight Oscars. Honors are pleasant, but they are best seen as marketing boosts. If a prize or two gets people to watch Russell’s film, then the ceremony serves its purpose. It’s also too soon to tell whether the movie will stand the test of time. I hope it does, as it reveals the sham that was Failure to Launch and all of those chick-flick/rom coms that audiences over 35 have been forced to endure for decades. It is my wish that Silver Linings Playbook leads the way toward a truly adult cinema.
 


Monday, January 7, 2013

Waves of Nausea: Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Impossible" (2012)

I wasn't going to review "The Impossible," Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona's fictionalized account of one of the worst tsunami disasters in history and the rich white people with accents who take up most of the screen time. While I was curious to see the film, largely because I wanted to see Ewan McGregor run around half-naked, dirty, streaked with blood and sporting a posh haircut, I kept putting it off until I was too depressed to stay at home any longer, and drove to Pasadena and saw the Sunday, 10:20pm showing, alone, with three other people scattered throughout the theatre. That part was awesome. Then I had to watch the movie.

(Okay. I give my mea culpas regarding the glib opening paragraph, riddled as it is with cheap shots. Let's get serious.)

"The Impossible," written by Sergio G Sanchez from a story by Maria Belon, is a conventional film, but it is an excellent Exhibit A for discussing cinema and its relationship to realism, narrative and audience expectation. While viewing "The Impossible," I know for a fact that this is the product of a photographic age; its camera takes me to places never travelled, enables me to see from different vantage points, and permits me to move from one person's experience to another's in a completely different setting.

A text about a disaster provides a superb opportunity to compare and contrast different forms, and what may be represented about the disaster in those different forms. For example, the Broadway musical Titanic enabled an audience to watch a proscenium stage lift to a dangerously raked level, but that was about it. The musical depended upon story, character, song and libretto to bring the disaster to "life." In other words, verbal imagery carried the responsibility of conveying the magnitude of the loss, and, for many theatregoers and Tony award voters, it was a success. However, as an opportunity for vicarious experience, James Cameron's 1997 film (also called Titanic) trumped the play. The cinematography lead viewers on to the ship, hanging from the stern rail, jumping into lifeboats, sinking down, down, down into the icy Atlantic, even below the surface. Of course, Cameron's movie featured, and required, plot, character and dialog (if not show tunes), but it could have been a silent movie and been as compelling a record of life during disaster. (I will not make the obvious joke that it should have been a silent movie, sparing us all Celine Dion. The joke makes itself.) A play maintains a distance between audience and action; a movie can dissolve the "feeling" of distance, if not the actual distance itself. Due to the psychological trick called "suspension of disbelief," a text can create a sense of "You Are There" for a viewer, provided that the quality of the cinematic elements-mise en scene, photography, editing and narrative-work together to sustain the illusion of lived, as opposed to witnessed, experience.

As realism, "The Impossible" triumphs at virtually every turn. (I will confess to a slight skepticism, if not outright disbelief, during the high angle, overhead shots as the tsunami swept over an area of several miles. It did look like a miniature, model town, perfect for Smurfs if not Barbies.)

Had Bayona's film remained a recreation of a tragic disaster, it would have remained pure cinema, a testament to the artistry possible within realism. For better or worse, however, "The Impossible" is an example of narrative cinema, and it accepts the conventions of narrative in order to achieve an expected outcome in capitalist film fictions: the audience must leave the theatre with a happy ending, some resolution of a conflict in order to feel satisfied, and the resolution should be congruent with the expectations built into their daily lives. Family may fight, but family remains strong. Vacations may be problematic, but it's good to go on vacation, preferably someplace cheap but far away. In narrative cinema, a world may end, but the world does not end, as the status quo continues without serious challenge. Without such a reassuring conclusion, a film guarantees its financial failure in the capitalist market. (Of course, one could argue that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) violated that expectation by killing off its heroine, played by Janet Leigh, within the first hour of the film. The rebuttal to that argument consists of the survival of the heroine's lover and older sister, and, more importantly, the containment of the conflict through the incarceration of the murderer; law and order prevails, preventing a disruption of the status quo threatened by the film's first hour.)

In the case of "The Impossible," a family, one family, is the center of the film, not the tsunami itself. The movie asks us never to consider the meteorological origin of the natural disaster: it simply exists, and is either survived or not. What qualifies Bayona's film as "movie," that is, narrative cinema, is its focus on the unity of a family. Therefore, the film begins with the family in crisis. The father worries that the house alarm was not turned on, therefore laying his home to the threat of invasion by outsiders. He also worries that he might lose his job, threatening his family's financial security. His wife's willingness to return to her old job (as a doctor, no less) does not ease the conflict embedded in the drama. Furthermore, the oldest of their three sons is acting out as adolescents do, asserting his independence from the others, distancing himself from his younger brothers, to the concern of the parents. Their plane touches down, and they arrive on Fantasy Island, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. As they did on the plane, the family occupies center stage, with the Thai hotel clerks and anonymous and mostly Anglo tourists as the dance ensemble. At this point, the film could be a play with no problem. The family frolics around the hotel pool in their bathing suits, kicking a ball, writing in a journal, basking in the sun, and we watch this tableau from a safe distance.

Then...out of NOWHERE...comes this big, fat, enormous, scary WAVE! and, for the next ten minutes, we are literally swept away. Those ten or so minutes, reprised if re-imagined much later on in the film, are film moments par excellence. As we watch Naomi Watts and Tom Holland (as mother and oldest son, respectively) whirl around automobiles, buildings, dead bodies and sewage (raw or otherwise), we are as close as we ever would want to be to a natural disaster of that proportion. The tight close ups and fluid (pun intended) tracking bring us up against Watts as she speeds into broken tree branches that stab and impale her, and we are breathless with anticipation: will this end? will this end well? will she survive? (Thanks to Janet Leigh, no one can be certain of a star's lifespan in a full-length movie.) There is a built-in moment of suspense when Watts and Holland grab on to a mattress, reach out a hand, almost touch the other's hand, then are yanked away by the currents of nature, and the violence continues for another few minutes. As breathtaking this sequence might be, it is not the entire film, and soon, it must end, and the "real movie" must begin.

As I have established, the family is in conflict from the opening frames of the film; their status as nuclear family is threatened. Suddenly, what seems to be a "real" conflict, the tsunami, has invaded their plot, but it soon becomes clear that the tsunami, as real a conflict as it was to the hundreds of thousands of casualties and their loved ones, is but a trope. The wave "stands for" the economic and hormonal threat to the McGregor-Watts brood, and, instead of a home break-in or a job layoff, the tsunami has split the family apart. The rest of the film dwells on one question: will they reunite or not?

Granted, the filmmakers and actors perform theatrical magic as they take the viewers through the often heartbreaking and sickening journeys of the characters. Pathos haunts the atmosphere as the oldest son is abandoned by his bedridden mother; despair hovers as father gets lost after he sends the two younger boys off to a rescue camp. I hesitate to go into much detail, as audience suspense, and the element of surprise, inform the conventions of narrative cinema, particularly those of the genre of domestic melodrama. One thing is clear, though. In order to succeed, someone must survive the tidal wave, but, preferably, everybody survives.

"The Impossible," obviously, operates on two levels of realism: the realism of the tsunami re-created in all of its turgid splendor, and the realism of the bourgeois domestic narrative. The latter's realism is one part wish fulfillment and one part affirmation of an ideology perpetuated by a capitalist society. It is no coincidence that this film is "based on a true story" of one family's experience with the tsunami, that the "true" family in question was actually of Spanish origin and therefore had more in common with the islander population that was largely devastated by the tsunami, but, in order for the film to be made for a commercial market, the family had to be cast as vaguely English language speaking but firmly anti-Third World. (I say "vaguely" because McGregor is Scottish, Watts is British-Australian and their fictional family resides in Japan. When Watts, before the disaster, expresses a desire to move back "home," one is never sure where that might be: Sydney? Edinburgh? London? Hollywood?) Many critics have complained about the dearth of non-white characters in "The Impossible," and that the natives remain largely set decoration for the pandemonium disrupting Anglo lives and limbs. I would prefer not to repeat that criticism, as it has been said before, and well, by others. What needs to be said, though, is that audience sympathy depends upon familiarity, not just the suspension of disbelief. With familiarity comes identification, and therefore sympathy. This is what film has in common with theatre, and, to a certain extent, fiction: there are leads, and there are supporting players. The audience gets a chance at familiarity with the leads, because they get to journey along with them. The others remain strangers, however kind hearted they are. The Bennett family (aka the McGregor-Watts family) happens to be affluent and pale skinned, as well as the occupants of 92.9% of the screen time. By default, everyone else is reduced to a walk on, and by "everyone" I refer specifically to the non-white population. (Even the choice cameos are given to the pasty-faced: Geraldine Chaplin makes a splendid comeback to the screen in a lovely scene with the two little boys, and a decidedly hot French guy with a cell phone and a bad leg limps his way to our hearts.)

How the tsunami-ravaged island survived its own economic disaster remains unspoken in the film, but it is obvious that a reunion of the family virtually guarantees their financial security if they manage to fly away from trouble and back to the paradise of homeland.

Here are a few observations. Watts and Holland give powerful performances, and awards might be possible, if not hoped for. McGregor does well with his role and his lack of clothing, and is brilliant in one scene while talking to a cell phone. (McGregor, who hit big with Trainspotting, has a "beta" personality, and has established a decent career opposite strong women such as Jane Horrocks in Little Voice and Watts in this film, not to mention those latter-day Star Wars sequels.) The script, editing and music are clearly manipulating the viewers's emotions, with an occasional payoff for the sentimentally inclined. The director demonstrates firm control of mood and mise en scene.

"The Impossible," like the better docu-dramas, might serve as incentive for further historical research, and viewers might learn more about the people who didn't get a chance to board a plane away from the wave-ravaged land.








Thursday, January 3, 2013

Deforming History for the Purpose of Reform: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained

I have admired the work of writer-director Quentin Tarantino for nearly 20 years, largely because I identify with him. Both of us were born in 1963, spent a childhood in the South Bay area of Los Angeles which is also called the Beach Cities, lived with a single mother, and escaped reality by watching as many movies as possible. Tarantino gathered an encyclopedic knowledge of international cinema while I went off to college, where I learned that some texts are "art" and others were "trash." Tarantino, who didn't go to college, came of age without that discriminatory perspective, and ended up writing movies that reflected influences as low as the drive-in sexploitation flick and as high as Wagnerian grand opera. I imagine Tarantino, as a young teenager, watching LA television's channels 5, 9, 11 and 13, which screened formula gangster films, Japanese monster movies, gladiator films, westerns (especially Italian "spaghetti" ones) and cautionary melodramas, mostly from the Fifties and Sixties, typically B-fare from American International Studios or Roger Corman. (Perhaps, like me, he watched network television, with its florid but popular miniseries such as Roots, with its emphasis on civil rights, as well as its plethora of cameos from has-beens and never-weres of TV and film.) With access to revival houses and art theaters, and later the VCR, he could learn about the international auteurs of cinema, the "Ten Best" films and, most of all, the elements of film form.

Through an instinctive understanding of genre, and an appreciation of the possibilities within the critically-dismissed "popular" genres, Tarantino set out to deform film. I say "deform" in order to stress the positive and negative reputation of the filmmaker: he re-shaped genres, even blending them as he made a point, but he also (as critics claim) undid traditional genres to the point of ruining their simple pleasures. Tarantino also brought a natural talent for narrative structure and dialog that would have made him an innovative playwright, had he been exposed to legitimate theatre as a child, an unlikely prospect growing up in the working-class South Bay. With a formal education, whether through a private prep-school experience or a University adolescence, Tarantino might have grown to dismiss the B-genres of Hollywood cinema, and embraced canonical cinema, theatre, literature and the fine arts, but he did not. He grew up as a self-made, self-taught man, distilling the textual influences of his childhood with his natural gifts, and made friends in high places who opened doors for him.

As a result, Quentin Tarantino has produced a filmic body of work that eludes categorization. With Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, he combined the film noir with the buddy film, the slapstick comedy and the romance, with Biblical and classical allusions coming out of the most unlikely characters. With Jackie Brown, he wove the blaxploitation detective film with the mob-gangster picture and, of all things, the melodrama of growing old. With Kill Bill, he took on the Eastern tradition of martial arts, as well as the post-Alien concept of a female gun-toting heroine. With Death Proof, one half of the underrated but masterful Grindhouse, he took on the Russ Meyer sexploitation film as well as the biker-gang and rape-revenge horror pictures. Through it all, he gave jobs to lots and lots of people who had been big (John Travolta, Kurt Russell, Bruce Willis), were kinda big (Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel), should have been bigger had they not been dismissed as cult figures (Pam Grier, David Carradine) and those who barely escaped a footnote in a Whatever Happened to... book, many recognizable from bad Sixties formula television, B-pictures from the 50s to the 90s, popular mainstream pictures and tabloid scandals. A Tarantino picture was as much comedy as drama, as much philosophical treatise as gunfight, as much trip down memory lane as it was a star-maker. One could be guaranteed a high level of dialog, clever editing technique, convoluted storytelling and buckets and buckets of blood. As the years went by, however, a growing number of critics had an increasingly legitimate complaint: why won't the great auteur make a "mature" film, the way that Stephen Spielberg, the barnstorming director of Jaws, could make a dignified film about the Holocaust, Schindler's List? 

Django Unchained, Tarantino's latest film, is an answer to that question. The movie is his most political yet, taking on America's most shameful legacy, its history of African slavery at its ugliest and most brutal. A childhood spent in the Seventies watching television revealed years of exposure to dramatic anti-racist shows such as Roots and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, not to mention often-insightful but just-as-often offensive sitcoms such as Good Times, The Jeffersons and What's Happening! Later on, such as child would have some way of seeing filmic representations of anti-slavery, albeit in a sensational, luridly sexual text such as Mandingo or Drum. That period, however, also showcased independent filmmakers inspired by the Black Arts movement and the civil rights movement, who received funding from the same B-producers who funded knockoffs like Bloody Mama. Fred Williamson, Godfrey Cambridge and Gordon Parks made powerful anti-racist films that were also popular with audiences looking for entertainment. As violent as they were, the blaxploitation films of Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson provided a catharsis for racial minorities and feminists. In an early 70s Ms. magazine article, the author quotes a black woman coming out of a Pam Grier film: "Damn, that movie felt GOOD." Tarantino synthesized all of these influences, and combined them with a narrative influenced by the spaghetti westerns that also began airing on TV in the Seventies, as well as those that screened at drive-ins.

America's slave history has been called a "Holocaust" on the scale (or, arguably on a larger scale) of the Nazi murder of the Jewish people in Europe during World War II. In the late Seventies, when the NBC-TV miniseries Holocaust aired, famous author and camp survivor Elie Wiesel condemned such fictional representations as reducing mass murder to "kitsch," and began a heated and ongoing discussion about the ethics of representing such histories through any form of art. By the time Jonathan Demme released the film version of Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, images of the horrors of slavery were kept fleeting and were referenced obliquely, as a past that should not be repressed, but should not be exposed, either. The emphasis was on living with the effects, rather than dramatizing the event itself.

Tarantino responds to this discussion by employing "kitsch," or, worse, "schlock," as the medium through which he explores the Holocaust of American slavery; rather than reducing history to kitsch, he elevates kitsch through his treatment of history. Django Unchained combines the spaghetti western with the plantation melodrama and the rape-revenge/vigilante thriller, and his synthesis of genre  contains a narrative that alludes to a German tale dramatized by Wagner. Doing so, Tarantino produces what must be acknowledged as a work of art.

I don't support a criticism that involves too much plot summary, as it is so readily available online and elsewhere. However, a brief synopsis will provide detail. A former dentist turned bounty hunter, played by Christoph Waltz, purchases a slave, Django, played by Jamie Foxx, and enlists Django in the pursuit of wanted criminals. Django was separated from his wife, Broomhilda, also a slave, and he aims to find her and rescue her, even bring her freedom. The film takes Dr. Schultz and Django through two plantations, site of a few of the most graphic depictions of cruelty shown in any "slave-genre" film, as they find Broomhilda. Django, called "fastest gun in the South" by Dr. Schultz at one point, rages over the injustice he experiences and sees, and slowly builds a strong case for the revenge he plans to seek.

The faces of racism belong to several recognizable but forgotten faces, including Bruce Dern, Don Johnson, Dennis Christopher (Breaking Away, Stephen King's "It"), Franco Nero (whose spaghetti western series Django is referenced here) and Michael Parks, as well as current stars such as Leonardo DeCaprio. They are not merely employed for camp comedy; they revive their careers and redeem their names as they give legitimately powerful performances. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, DeCaprio tries but fails. DeCaprio long has had Edward Norton's film career; watching The Aviator, J Edgar and this film would have been much better had Norton played those roles. As someone best called "Uncle Tom from Hell," Samuel L. Jackson gives a ferocious portrayal of monstrously misdirected rage.

The heart of the film belongs to the triad of Waltz, Foxx and Kerry Washington (as Broomhilda). As Dr. Schultz, Waltz brings a charm, charisma and compassion that perfectly complements his bravura, award-winning turn as the Nazi of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Foxx has the highly difficult job of reacting, mostly without words, or with words very carefully chosen, while projecting great reserves of strength through enduring pain. He emerges as a powerful hero, with a quiet vulnerability in the presence of Waltz and Washington.

Kerry Washington might have the most challenging role of all. Throughout Tarantino's career, he has objectified women through a fetishized heterosexual lens. Grier, Thurman and Rosario Dawson (in Death Proof) were not necessarily exceptions to that rule, as they showed strength through a decidedly erotic angle. The character of Broomhilda, a slave taught German from a German mistress, is used sexually on the plantation, and her nudity is displayed for gut-wrenching torture scenes (including a bullwhipping, a branding and imprisonment in a "hot box"), but Tarantino, for reasons not entirely clear, does not present her as the object of a heterosexualized male gaze. Instead, she is filmed as a strong woman who endures the abuse of history; being dressed is depicted as violation, too. Much has been made of the decision to present an African-American woman as "damsel in distress," rescued by the African-American hero at the end of his quest. To her great credit, Washington radiates dignity, intelligence and guts despite being made a spectacle of abuse that is not necessarily (sadistically-) sexual. Of course, her natural beauty shines through, in order to show the moviegoer her appeal to Django.

(As a kind of aside, it is worth noting that Tarantino, known for displaying the female foot as a sex object in his films, refrains from doing so in this film. The foot is a cinematic image in Django Unchained, but he shows the foot as a symbol of the monstrous cruelty of slavery in America, as the slaves are forced to trudge barefoot through a prickly desert in the film's title sequence. It is a torture almost as uncomfortable to watch as the snapping of a bullwhip just before it hits the body.)

Aside from the motley crew of "has beens" and allusions to genre cinema, other, more subtle qualities mark this as a Tarantino film. Broomhilda's name embraces both high and low art. While there is the reference to Siegfried and Brunhilde in German art and folklore, there is also a sly reference, in the spelling of her name, to the "Broom-hilda" comic strip. The musical score remains eclectic but perfectly appropriate to the scene; Ennio Morricone's music is predictable if delightful, but Jim Croce's "I've Got a Name" befits the assertion of Django as freed man as well as alluding to Croce's ubiquitous presence in early Seventies pop culture. Don Johnson, more portly than he was during TV's "Miami Vice," wears another white suit, but it is that of a plantation owner, and he is given the name of a Tennessee Williams iconic figure, "Big Daddy." Other examples are included, and they all remind the viewer of the postmodern force that has been Quentin Tarantino, as he continues to deconstruct both genre and hierarchies of cultural capital in his films.

Many Tarantino's films end in a festival of gunfire and attendant blood, and Django Unchained is no exception. This one opens the filmmaker to the charges of historical revisionism as well as immaturity (the audience cheers for the bloody revenge enacted by Django), but it is dramatically effective and satisfying to watch. To his credit, the use of sound accentuates the lethal power of the gun, and its explosions, resulting in mutilations as well as splashes of blood, show the danger of treating guns as kid toys.

To sum it up, Django Unchained is a step forward, a surprisingly relevant, ethical and necessary social comment on America's racism, and a confirmation of his intellectual depth as well as visual cleverness. To translate into plain English: Yes, I liked it! Thumbs up! Go see it! (Happy now?)

A postscript: I forgot to mention the influence of the 19th century slave narrative, particularly Frederick Douglass' and Harriet Jacobs' accounts. The torture of Broomhilda, witnessed by Django (as shown in flashback) seems to allude Douglass's witnessing of a woman being whipped by her white owner. Furthermore, as I re-read this blog entry, I realized that my choice of the word "deform," and the ways in which I defined the term, was influenced by the African-American scholar Houston Baker. He invented the opposing concepts of "mastery of form" versus "deformation of mastery." The former reflected the work of black writers whose work affirmed the influence and status of dominant culture. On the other hand, "deformation of mastery" indicated the texts by black authors that attempted to destabilize dominant culture through expression of minority voices at the level of form as well as content. If I applied these terms to Quentin Tarantino's film, I might think that Django Unchained posited a more revolutionary anti-racist stance through his deconstruction of critically maligned genres, as opposed to a stately, reverent "mirror of reality" film along the lines of a Spielberg history film.

Here's a link to an extended definition of Houston Baker's oppositions: http://blogs.cofc.edu/modernism/mastery-of-form-deformation-of-mastery/

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Advice Finally Taken

Welcome to my blog. I realized that I spent too much time on Facebook writing lengthy critiques of films and plays when I should have been posting photos of Korean dinner plates or drooling kittens. The discussions that emerged from my analyses amused and enlightened me, for the most part. On occasion, however, I would receive that chilling comment, "You're reading too much into it," or that withering note, "you ARE obsessed, aren't you?" I usually heed the advice embedded within scholar Jacqueline Rose's quote, "[i]interpretation of a literary work is endless," from her brilliant and controversial The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, but it doesn't stop me from questioning my willingness to continue mining a film or theatrical text for further insight, when even those who love me the most question my interest in interpretation. 

Rather than surrender to their questionable request to "stop talking about that [play/movie/documentary/____], I have decided to continue the conversation, or the lecture, elsewhere, which brings me to the creation of this blog.

I chose to call this blog "Form is Function," because I believe in the principle. When I examine a cultural text, I make sure that I have a clear understanding of the genre in which it is located, so that my discussion proceeds from the text's proper placement in, or employment of, that genre. When it comes to communicating with an audience, each genre has its own purpose. Yes, one can argue that all genres have the aim, even the obligation, to entertain. Even so, the musical comedy relates to an audience in a different way than a detective novel, or an opera, or a social network posting. When the genres are markedly divergent at the very level of form, then purpose becomes a critical question to pursue. 

Photography, from the still image to the motion picture, has the capacity to record life in a detail impossible to achieve in the novel or the theatrical play. Realism is the function of film, and it haunts the form; the manipulation of elements such as editing, camera angles, mise en scene and sound may accentuate or diminish the realism, but it will not eliminate the realism from film. 

Theatre has a much more complex, and painful, relationship to realism. A play is both closer to life, and further removed from it. "Live theatre" is the experience of producing a text in front of a group of people at a certain moment; both players and audience are gathered together in the moment, and they breathe from the same source of oxygen. When the play ends, the experience is over. The actors remove their makeup backstage; the audience members exit the theatre. The play will never exist again, unless it is preserved on film, and if it is preserved on film, it ceases to be pure theatre. This ephemerality distinguishes theatre from film, and it is the most successful connection that theatre has to realism. Problems begin when theatre attempts to replicate reality, particularly through narrative structure but also through "realistic" sets, costumes and styles of acting. No matter how detailed or "authentic" a play's realism might be, it will always remain a temporary construct, obviously "pretending" to be something real, but always clear to the viewer that the play consists of actors dressing up as other people, moving around on a stage separated from an audience for two to four hours at a time. Performers and audience members enter into a contract, and agree to accept the play as it is, and "suspend disbelief." A fire alarm, an earthquake or a sudden heart attack in the sixth aisle can stop the play in an instant, and everyone is suddenly made aware of the fragility of the agreement. That is both the curse and the blessing of theatre. In my opinion, the more successful theatrical works will use the artifice of performance to its advantage. Any attempt at realism will be seen as a self-conscious attempt and not a given. The show will exploit the space of the stage and employ the distance and closeness between performers and audience, in whichever way seems appropriate. 

I begin this blog with a rather generalized definition of realism and its comparative relationship to two similar but clearly different forms (film and theatre) in order to establish the terms of my analyses. My objective, in this blog, is to explore movies, television shows, plays and musicals, some of which have overlapping relationships through the act of adaptation from stage to screen and vice-versa. Adaptation from one genre to another is a problematic enterprise, yet it is an exciting field of interpretative exploration if one comprehends the function of the varying art forms, and what can happen if appreciation for the differences is deficient in the adaptors. I am also interested in revivals and remakes, and how changes made are usually the result of a misunderstanding of the stakes involved in the consequences of those alterations. 

So...I have begun. Hopefully this explanation will make it easier to follow my readings of the texts I choose to explore.