(Hi. I'm trying to stick to my schedule of updating regularly every Sunday and Wednesday, but I have plans which will hopefully leave me incapacitated tomorrow, so you get this a little early. It's long as all fuck, so there's that.
Oh, and I just noticed that I have comments [thnx yall], so I'll get around to responding to those when I get a chance. Enjoy.)
The Scariest Place On Earth
There are moments when I get embarrassed by the fact that I’m forever drawn to some ludicrous, shitty movies – if one’s taste can be taken as representative of their character or intellect or whatever, yada yada yada. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s not so much that I’m drawn to bad movies through any personal defect as it is that when you get down to brass tacks, I’m pretty lucky to live the life I live. The fact that I have no use for a movie like Mystic River, in other words, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate its qualities; it just means that because the world I inhabit isn’t so skewed that I feel any compulsion to get a new perspective on molestation or family duty or whatever. When the problem you deal with most consistently is basically “There’s all these damn snails everywhere and I keep accidentally stomping on them in the dark”, it makes sense that you’d find more value in lighter stuff.
Except, of course, for international terrorism. It’s not that I’m afraid of being blown to bits or seeing a plane screaming at my window (although I do live in Los Angeles and objectively, we’re pretty lucky to have not suffered an attack yet), but that doesn’t mean terrorism has no weight in my life. Terrorism has affected the way we travel and vote and spend our money, and the fact that it doesn’t affect us as profoundly as it does an Israeli or an Iraqi doesn’t mean we aren’t being affected at all. Terrorism gives momentum to modernity in the same way that the issue of civil rights did forty years ago; it doesn’t surprise me in the least that all those superhero movies keep breaking the bank.
Thing is, those aren’t the movies “about” terrorism that interest me; it’s not that they have nothing to say, but simply that they all draw from a conception of the threat that I just don’t have. Movies like Spider-Man work because you understand the threat implicitly - Doctor Octopus wants to fuck up the city because XYZ happened and so on. This always seemed like a nice, neat little way to wrap everything up which really doesn’t work that well in reality; it’s convenient and tidy to say that Zarqawi keeps beheading people because he’s an Islamic fundamentalist who hates what the West stands for, but anyone – ANYONE - who devotes more than two seconds of serious thought to the matter will concede that it’s probably more complicated than that.
I’m not trying to say that it’s the duty of movies like Spider-Man to aim at a shades-of-grey reality; I tend to think that kind of decision is best left up to the filmmaker, and anyway we haven’t even begun to see the movies actually “about” terrorism yet. It’s just that the movies about terrorism that I like make an active effort to subvert your understanding of the threat; the best ones tell you nothing beyond how you’re going to die. This, I think, is more the point of terrorism itself; the scary thing about 9/11 wasn’t that your plane could get hijacked and atomized, but rather that that’s the kind of potential situation you’d have to be conscious of from now on. I think of terrorism as the constant threat of being violently reminded that we don’t always get to understand the world, and if I’m going to interact with a movie on that level, it’s the movie’s first task to make things as uncertain as possible.
Consequently, Armageddon is by far the best movie I’ve ever seen about terrorism, and I’ve been pretty passionate about looking. The facts are pretty simple: we know that we’re all going to get crushed from above somehow, but we have no way of knowing how or why we’re going to die. The only thing we know is that this shit happens because it’s happening right now, and that’s the key to appreciating this movie; it’s about people dealing with the most threatening, least comprehensible situation possible, and if that doesn’t have any resonance after 9/11, we aren’t interested in the same kinds of movies. The only difference between 9/11 and the events of Armageddon is that if we buy into the film, we know for a fact that the asteroid’s going to wipe us all out; it promises to deliver where al-Qaeda can only threaten.
I’m aware, of course, that you’ve got to buy into a certain level of abstraction in order to connect 9/11 to Imminent Space-Rock Death, but the buy-in actually turns out to be a lot cheaper than you’d think. I remember seeing Armageddon in the theaters and walking out in a state of anger at having wasted my money; I don’t think I actually stalked the halls of the Wynnsong theater howling about that dumb-ass movie where they blew up New York with rocks, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that I had. Today, of course, the Kill New York scene is one of the most fascinating scenes in the movie simply because of how much shit Michael Bay got right; the scene is full of things like skybound objects smacking into the World Trade Center and panicky mobs and Mark Curry (!) howling about how “Saddam Hussein is declaring war on us!” and such. These simply aren’t historically neutral images anymore.
I don’t mean to imply that Armageddon is full of accidental pre-references like this – I mean,
it absolutely is, but if that was the extent of the movie’s allegorical
relationship to 9/11, I’d have probably been done with it by now. No, in
reality I’m most fascinated by how well the main story (the one about the team
of deep-sea drillers enlisted to go blow up the giant space-death-rock hurtling
towards us all) matches up with the story of Flight 93, the plane which crashed
into a Pennsylvania field instead
of (apparently) the White House. Quite frankly, I can’t see how the two stories
are different at all: both are pitched to us as stories of everymen sacrificing
themselves in order to overcome a threat the enormity of which they have
absolutely no way to comprehend. It’s hardly a perfect match, of course, but I
absolutely think it’s fair to say that understanding the drama and significance
of one can lead to a deeper understanding of the other. In 1998, for instance,
the infamous Bruce Willis/Liv Tyler exchange had me choking with laughter, but
once transcripts of those cell-phone calls from inside the plane cabins started
emerging it suddenly played a lot more seriously; when I watch it now, it’s
actually a poignant (if unsophisticated) piece of storytelling. We can
understand the movie now in a way we couldn’t then, simply because the movie
isn’t a work of complete fantasy anymore.
But complete understanding of Armageddon, however, comes when you remember that on September 10th, the events of 9/11 would have been considered just as fantastic as the movie. We’re in our fourth year since the attacks and we’re still having issues sorting everything out; huge gaps persist in our understanding of how and why everything happened that we’ve barely begun to address. What Armageddon and similar movies offer us, then, is a chance to run through a simplified allegorical version of reality so that we can actually come away with some sort of understanding of what actually went on. Which isn’t to say that Armageddon has some buried explanation as for why nobody scrambled fighter jets to intercept the airlines, of course – that would be asking far too much of a movie about blowing up a rock in space – but the movie is an unavoidably thorough exploration of what it’s like to actually be terrorized, and that kind of understanding is absolutely helpful in understanding why things happened the way they did on 9/11. Other movies, for instance, have had quickie life-flashing-before-the-main-character’s-eyes montages before, but in the context of a guy sacrificing his life to save the citizens of the world of Armageddon, I’ll admit that I started wondering if that’s what it was like for Todd Beamer. The fact that I have zero way of ever knowing for sure if it is or isn’t barely matters compared to the way the sequence actually gets me to put myself in Beamer’s shoes; it’s remarkable enough that the movie connects me so directly with reality that I don’t much care if the movie itself bothers to do so.
I am, of course, aware that most people would prefer to eat a used diaper than to use Armageddon to connect to reality; we’re nearly seven years removed from its release and people still jump to bash it. I can’t deny that Armageddon is in many ways a deeply terrible movie, especially whenever Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler have to share screen space in front of me; I don’t have a comeback for the people who accuse it of being jingoistic (except to point out that the Americans have to work with the Russians to beat the rock) or provincial (except to point out the diversity of the crew marshaled to beat the rock) or overblown and unfunny (except…ah, pick your battles). All of this stuff is absolutely, unavoidably in there, whether you agree with it or not; I personally don’t think they’re good enough reasons to ignore Armageddon, but generally I just shrug and assume it’s their loss.
What I don’t get, however, is the dogmatic insistence of most critics that the stylistic choices of Armageddon make it totally frivolous and unworthy of discussion; I haven’t heard people get so worked up by a piece of art since Piss Christ. Michael Bay’s movies, if you listen to most people, are an affront to the cinema; it’s apparently a bad thing to move the camera that violently and cut so aggressively and carpet your movie with loaded music, or at least it’s a bad thing when you’re just doing it to make a movie about a rock in space. I’ve been dealing with these people ever since I contracted my strange and uncontrollable fandom of Michael
Bay; clearly they’re not going anywhere. Imagine the exact inverse of the Star Wars fanatic (and I find that the one is very frequently the other), and you’ve got it.
These people are idiots. Armageddon is a Great film in the same sense that I Stand Alone or L’Avventura are Great; it is a work that gets at reality by doing something completely different and unconventional. The caveat, of course, is that my version of reality is completely autonomous from everybody else’s. I can live with this, because my point isn’t that my version of reality is the right one: it’s that I bet my version of reality is a lot closer to most people’s versions than ever gets discussed.
Because I live on the West coast, I slept through 9/11; I only found out about it when my friend Eric called me after the last plane had hit. As such, I experienced 9/11 second-hand; I only saw the planes collide with the towers in footage being replayed, and the towers collapsed while I was in class (reading, of all things, this). What this means is that while I can absolutely claim to be fully versed in the events of the day, I missed out on the uncertainty and surprise of the event itself entirely. I’ve heard over and over again how people thought the first crash was just a horrific accident, and that it took the subsequent crashes to force them to realize that these were acts of war; all I can say is that that’s a very different experience from waking up and hearing that the country’s under attack.
Most people, if pressed, would probably tell you that they experienced 9/11 like everyone else, and that it all came as a shock and that they saw it happen. I just don’t think that’s true; if 9/11 were a movie, my guess is that most people would be able to tell you the plot and their reactions to it, but I doubt that most people were following the events so explicitly. I’d bet that more people experienced 9/11 like my mom, who had a dentist’s appointment and heard what was happening as the assistants kept running in the room to tell everyone. I’m not trying to diminish anyone’s experience, of course, but there’s something to be said for processing the information yourself as it comes instead of simply putting it in order
So you can see why I might be drawn to the visual chaos of Armageddon: I may have missed processing all the information live on 9/11, but the film’s a pretty damn good analogue. Bay gets a lot of criticism for making his movies “hard to follow” due to all the camera tomfoolery, to the point where I wonder if it might not be worth considering that he’s doing it on purpose – not to confuse the audience, of course, but rather to overload them with information and refuse to let them settle into any particular logical pattern. Which isn’t to say that there’s no rhyme or reason to his films – nobody on earth right now can hold a candle to Bay when it comes to quickie montages, like the one introducing the drilling team in Armageddon – but rather that the logic of his movies isn’t necessary for understanding it. God only knows how laughably simple Armageddon is to understand; a four-year-old could get it (although I never hear anyone criticizing The Wizard of Oz for that particular sin). But all we know about the rock itself is that it’s way too big for us to even imagine what would happen if it touched down, and way too alien for us to ever be able to visualize with any degree of satisfaction (Bay meticulously animated the asteroid, going so far as to layer dust trails on dust trails on dust trails, in an effort to guarantee that the audience never saw the same asteroid twice). Well, that and that we’ve got to stop it in order to protect our way of life. Perhaps you see why I can connect this movie to terrorism.
As funny as it sounds, I’ve been
trying to write about Armageddon for
a couple of years now, and I’m still not sure I’m able to do a good job at
getting across how deeply satisfying a movie experience it is. Granted, it
wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying had it not been suddenly and
unexpectedly plugged into a reality we can all point to, but interesting is
interesting is Armageddon is
interesting. I can honestly say it’s not an inverted case of
sacred-cows-make-the-best-hamburgers (although I have to admit that it is a fun
angle to play); it’s simply a case of reality and fabrication intersecting in a
very unexpected fashion, and that’s good enough to cancel out a vomitous love
story any day of the week in my book.
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