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Do you remember the breathtaking moment in 1984′s This Is Spınal Tap when the founding members perform a lovely a cappela version of “All the Way Home,” a skiffle song from their early days? A Mighty Wind captures that sweetness and wraps it up in satire.
This 2003 mockumentary from Christopher Guest purports to tell the story of three once-prominent folk groups now gathering to memorialize their late mentor and producer. The characterizations and songs are eerily well-drawn. Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Guest himself (the trio made famous as Spinal Tap) appear as The Folksmen, a fictional fusion of folk groups like The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins head the New Main Street Singers, a second-generation pop-folk neuf-tette that make their bread & butter playing to bored crowds at amusement parks. Mitch and Mickie (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara) are the sweethearts of the folk world, once madly in love but now face to face for the first time in decades.
Here, Guest manages the delicate balance that characterizes the finest satire: he knows his subject inside-out and understands what makes it great as well as what makes it absurd. We’re treated to a loving send-up of folk excesses, all swaddled sweetly in the lovely music (much of it written by the cast). Mitch & Mickey’ beautiful theme “A Kiss At the End of the Rainbow” received an Academy nomination for Best Song — and deservedly so — but I’d argue that there are even finer songs in this film.
A particularly fine example is The Folksmen’s “Never Did No Wanderin’.” At first listen, it’s a perfect piece of folk music: haunting, mournful, potent, stirring. But then the lyrics sink in and it reveals itself as a deliciously witty indictment of folk’s cozy niche in the hearts of comfortable well-heeled suburbanites. It’s a wicked bite of parody and a fantastic song all rolled up together, indivisible.
Last night as we settled down to watch a movie, I waggled the DVDs and asked The Fella the greatest movie-night question ever: “So, French zombies or Shatner in Esperanto?”
(Les Revenants isn’t a proper zombie movie: it’s mournful and elegiac and beautifully crafted. Incubus is exactly what you’d expect when a sub-Corman director decides he’s Bergman. In Esperanto. So. Um. Y’know.)
I’ve heard people complain that the Coen Brothers specialize in caricatures, making a career of mocking ordinary honest doggone downhome folk. This accusation especially dogged the heels of Fargo, their heartrending tale of the petty, sorry aftermath of crime gone horribly wrong. I disagree: I say Fargo is both observational and proverbial, a mediation on the tragedy of lives shaped by greed, with a resonant moral showing the significance of modest accomplishments.
Some viewers react strongly to the film’s depictions of violence, perhaps because we’re accustomed to seeing violence as something stylized, glamorized, fetishized — not brutally simple and sad as it is here. In the world of Fargo, violence is wincingly realistic. It happens suddenly, nastily.
The Coens don’t mock their characters; they simply refuse to glamorize them. William H. Macy’s performance is achingly eloquent; he is a simple man, a seemingly honest man, a family man who allows his greed and ambition to outreach his feeble moral scope, and he pays for it terribly. Frances McDormand (as Chief Marge Gunderson) is the heart of the film, radiating calm intelligence and solid, earnest kindness — a sane center in a sad, mad little world.
Oh, boy! Who doesn’t love overstated dystopian paranoia? Nobody doesn’t love overstated dystopian paranoia!
In the wake of the Third World War, the surviving government of the future (and the pointedly very near future, at that) outlaw “the true source of man’s inhumanity to man: his ability to feel.” That’s a direct quote from Equilibrium’s opening moments, which gives the proceedings a faint whiff of the middle-school English class.
In an effort to eradicate emotion, the surviving populace is tightly controlled and dosed regularly with mood-suppressing drugs. Special tactical teams circulate solely to round up and destroy artifacts and practitioners of emotional content. In other words, they burn all the artwork they can find, starting with the Mona Lisa, and execute “Sense Offenders.” Judging by the largest trove we see, “art” includes not only Leonardo and Beethoven and Yeats, but anything kitschy or old-tyme-y, but evidently not the super-sleek Modernist regalia and equipage of the regime itself.
Our hero is the blank-faced stormtrooper John Preston (Christian Bale, doing blank-faced rigor as no one else can), who accidentally commits the capital crime of, y’know, feeling emotions. Equilibrium feels almost like a very dry satire of the tidy-future post-apocalyptic genre (for example, Gattaca and 1984 and, uh, Gattaca again) mixed with a somewhat sloppy send-up of The Matrix.
But it’s not all poorly executed lightning-fast fights! The director wants you to know he’s all philosophical, too, so he serves up a mish-mash of societal indictments. By my count, Equilibrium takes a stand against: war, totalitarian governments, personal betrayal, anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, organized religion, and puppy-killing. (This is not a joke.)
What is Equilibrium in favor of? Uh… freedom! And art! And, like, emotions, which manifest themselves largely through Beethoven and puppies and blowing stuff up with lots and lots of bullets. AWESOME.
I spent the first act trying to categorize this film: Is The Dying Gaul a psychological drama? a love story? a character-driven domestic thriller? It kept me off-balance and guessing for a long while, which was a welcome change.
The story in a nutshell: aspiring screenwriter Robert Sandrich (Sarsgaard) meets with high-powered Hollywood producer Jeffrey Tishop (Scott), who wants to option Robert’s screenplay… but only if Robert consents to one deeply substantive change. As he wrestles with his guilt over selling out, Robert bonds with Jeffrey’s wife Elaine (Clarkson), herself a disillusioned former screenwriter. Three powerhouse actors — Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson, and Peter Saaaarsgaaaaaard — take the chief roles, and they’re a large part of what makes the film so quietly, intensely gripping.
Campbell Scott plays the serpent with great bonhomie, painting Jeffrey as a man who takes his power, his persuasiveness, and his pleasures as givens, as absolute and unquestioned rights. Patricia Clarkson walks a delicate line, balancing Elaine’s kindness and compassion with her potent rage, manipulative skill, and a deep hunger for vengeance. And it’s such a pleasure to see Sarsgaard exercise his considerable talents playing something other than his recent stable of heavy-lidded crazies. He’s remarkable here: charming and nervous and sexy and petty and grave. The film rotates around the dynamic between these three, but power and money loom large as silent characters in this tale.
The Stepfather, a.k.a Jerry Blake, is a jovial, easy-going fellow with a modest but handsome home, a lovely wife, a booming business, and a dark secret. “Jerry” is a madman, a man obsessed with the bland, impossible perfection of happy home, a man motivated by the unending search for a brand of happiness never seen outside a Hallmark ad.
He courts single mothers, endears himself (more or less) to their kids, and establishes himself as the idealized father figure he desperately longs to be. But family life is rarely perfect, and Jerry cannot tolerate imperfection; when the inevitable stresses of life with children or teenagers arise, so do Jerry’s inner demons. In his search for perfection, he’s left a trail of murdered families and bloodied, smashed midsized homes in his wake.
This sounds like the stuff of a shoddy Lifetime movie-of-the-week, somehow simultaneously boring and sensationalistic… and it should be. It would be, but for the compelling performance of Terry O’Quinn (“Lost,” “Millenium,” “Alias”). O’Quinn’s layered, intelligent portrayal shows Jerry as an amiable everyman who believes in deceptively simple values, who thinks that attitude and elbow grease can make a home perfect, who would use phrases like “elbow grease” and “stick-to-it-iveness.”
The Stepfather’s most shocking moments — and, more impressively, its most banal moments — are enriched by O’Quinn’s portrayal of Jerry as a cheerfully determined man with modest aspirations, the kind of can-do guy who doesn’t let circumstances get him down, goshdarnit. Even at the movie’s grimmest, it’s hard not to feel a grudging admiration for Jerry’s pluck. And this is the sly wit of the movie: it’s a subtle attack on the supposedly strong “family values” faction of Reaganite America.
In most formula horror movies, and especially the slasher films of the 1980s that formed The Stepfather‘s milieu and matrix, violence is triggered in part by the unleashed sexuality and hedonism of the victims. In The Stepfather, the sexuality of both wife and stepdaughter (Shelley Hack and Jill Schoelen) is presented as perfectly normal and healthy, in no way threatening or perverse; it’s Jerry’s reaction to the norm that is perverse. Jerry is driven by an obsessive need to preserve his limited sense of perfection and purity, to preserve the patriarchy at all costs, to defend his pathologically narrow views about old-fashioned values and the sanctity of the family.
Whew, Road House. MST3K’s Michael J. Nelson calls it “the Fanny and Alexander of bad movies.” Roger Ebert said “Road House is the kind of movie that leaves reality so far behind that you have to accept it on its own terms.” They are not wrong. Watching Road House is a bit like watching Last Year at Marienbad or Synecdoche, N.Y., if those movies were a little more nonsensical and, oh yes, risibly awful.
The only reasonable way to engage with Road House is to accept that it takes place in its own universe, a world that is cosmetically and physically indistinguishable from ours, but where our social and legal norms do not apply. Let’s examine the social, economic, and legal forces at play in this world, shall we?
Dalton, our hero, is a famous Zen bouncer. Patrick Swayze conveys the “Zen” part by delivering his lines with a blank, Keanu-esque lack of affect. [1. In this universe, evidently "Zen" = "vacantly stupid." 2. In this (presumably also pre-internet 1989) universe, there are famous bouncers. How do the throngs of fans learn about the top-notch bouncers? In bouncer-specific magazines and journals? Playbounce? Bouncer Homes and Gardens? Can you pick up Bounce Fancier at the news stand?
He's so renowned that a club owner from a smallish Missouri town pays Dalton $500 a night (plus $5000 upfront and all medical expenses) to come oversee the bouncing squad at his seedy smalltown roadhouse, "the kind of place where they sweep up the eyeballs at closing time." [3. In this universe, a smallish town can provide enough low-life-loving heavy drinkers to support an enormous bar --- so enormous that it requires a squad of half a dozen full-time bouncers, and so remunerative that the owner can pay the new head bouncer somewhere between $2500 and $3500 weekly for an indefinite period.]
Dalton moves to town and finds a fully furnished residential loft space above a nearby barn, conveniently within view of the home of his nemesis, the evil liquor distributor, mwah-hah-hah (played with growly relish by Ben Gazzara, mwah-hah-hah) who will eventually start killing people with startling sang-froid. [4. In the rural Missouri of this universe, residential housing is notably rare --- a whole town has only two houses --- yet the few available spaces are lavish and the unhoused never remark upon their homelessness. 5. Smalltown businessmen harbor personal grudges to such an extent that they routinely commit or incite others to commit murders. 6. Though this universe has police sirens, they have no actual police force.]
The whole scenario has an uncanny sense of being both familiar and deeply foreign, a potent sense of the Unheimliche. Compounding the audience’s cognitive dissonance are several images and outtakes that make little social sense in our world: an all-but-nameless love interest (Kelly Lynch, listed in the IMDb credits as “Doc”) who remains fully clad and blankly impassive during the big love scene, only to showcase her boobs and butt for the soulsearching midnight chat; a bucket-o’-blood dive bar refurbished into what looks like an Applebee’s/rollerdisco where the local bourgeoisie clamor for a table; the venerable Sam Elliot smilingly unbuttoning his trousers well past the point where most venerable actors would stop unbuttoning, for goodness sake!; “Pain don’t hurt”; a trophy room that might as well be a museum; a polar bear attacking a bad guy.
You can watch it in muted confusion or hollering hilarity; there’s little middle ground for Road House. I’m telling ya, if David Lynch had directed Road House, film students would be discussing in hushed tones surrealist leaps, its measured ambiguity, its self-contradictory pseudo-pacifist theme, and its sojourns into magical realism. But he didn’t, so instead we watch it with hoots of derision and hilarity.
I’ve discovered an unexpected side effect of watching The Karate Kid for the first time in my 40s. For the past few weeks, any time I have to push myself or offer a little self-encouragement, I hear a little internal soundtrack:
Sometimes that soundtrack gets externalized in the form of me singing the chorus — and only the chorus — in a strained whisper-yell as I putter around the house. It’s fitting when I’m lifting weights for my physical therapy or doing crunches for core strength… but even I admit that it’s a little funnier when I’m rolling out pastry dough.
It also intersects oddly with a standard household compliment peculiar to us; we routinely tell each other “Aw, you’re the best girl.”* The conflation leads to exchanges like this morning’s:
Elsa: No hurry! We’ve got plenty of time to get everything done. We’re the best! arou-ound!
The Fella: You are the best.
Elsa: AROU-OUND!
The Fella: I know! You’re the best girl.
Elsa: [punching the air] And nuthin’s gonna EVER KEEP ME DOWN!
*You read that right.
[Note: The Bridge may pack a powerful trauma trigger for the susceptible.]
This documentary paints a vivid, poetically mournful image of a very specific form of suicide. The Bridge uses extensive footage of the Golden Gate Bridge, its compelling expanse thronged with visitors and travelers… and, occasionally, suicide jumpers. Seemingly at random, it focuses on giggling groups of children, tourists snapping photos, and people who clamber over the side and jump.
Interspliced with this jarring footage are interviews with survivors, family, friends, and witnesses. The effect of the whole is haunting, pensive, almost elegiac, and at once distant and harrowingly intimate. It’s also obscene: seeing a person climb over the railing is startling, and seeing these suicidal acts committed to film is downright surreal.
The film maintains an unflinching distance*, but the viewer is unlikely to do the same. Even with the mediating effect of film, it’s gutwrenching, horrific. More unsettling still, the voyeuristic style — observing tourists and commuters as they walk along the bridge — pokes at the dark underside of your brain, spurring morbid speculation each time someone lingers too long by the railing.
The Bridge also plays some interesting meta-textual tricks. One interviewee, a photographer who witnessed and closely photographed a stranger in the act of climbing onto the bridge’s ledge, discusses the distance imposed by the camera. The film itself leads us to romanticize the act of jumping, then abruptly reframes it as a gesture of futility, mirroring an interviewee’s speculation about her friend’s emotional landscape as he contemplated and then committed suicide.
*Despite the apparent aesthetic and ethical distance of the final film, the filmmakers actually did try to intercede, training themselves in suicide prevention and calling in reports to the bridge patrol; apparently they prevented six suicides in their months of filming.
When “Twin Peaks” was first broadcast, my friend S (who didn’t have a TV in her tiny rented room) used to come over to my big, often-empty house on a rambling village road to watch the show with me. We would make popcorn or, one happy night, cherry pie and coffee, and gasp with delight and horror as we watched.
We were, what, 19, 20? Just the right age to be totally enveloped in that baroque, silly, scary world, to feel fellowship with Laura and Audrey and Donna and even thick-headed James, too sappy to be a Brando and too soft to be James Dean.
Every week, S would get so spooked that she’d put off walking home in the dark by herself for as long as she could, until — every week — suddenly it was midnight, and now the streets would be even darker and completely deserted.
So, every week, I walked S home after midnight, down long winding roads lined with old trees creaking in the breeze, few streetlights, and deep pockets of shadow looming everywhere. We’d chatter in a subdued way, mocking our ridiculous fear even as we drove it off with titters of laughter.
And every week, I would leave S at her brightly lit doorstep, take a deep breath as if I could breathe in that bright light and carry it with me into the night… and then I would step into the dark to start walking home.
Alone.
More than any of the spooky motifs, the sudden twists, the dreamy vignettes, or the in-jokes, I remember those walks home in the dark, where the mundane landscape of my youth suddenly loomed so menacingly, where the perfectly normal things of daytime became imbued with mystery and danger. It seems to me that’s what “Twin Peaks” is all about.
*This entry is cross-posted from MetaChat.
Elli
Elsa