sickpeople

Myopia and...*squints*...uh, you

Because I am a sad little man, I spend a lot of time poking around on the internet in search of random bullshit which amuses me momentarily. I realize, of course, that this is the 21^st century equivalent of wasting your life away doing the Junior Jumble; it’s just that every so often, this process leads you to something inadvertently transcendent, and that’s good enough for me. Yesterday, for instance, I found this:

Feel free to stare. A few concessions: yes it’s a joke, yes it’s in poor taste, and no there’s not anything intrinsically wrong with you if you don’t get it. But I have to admit that it made me laugh out loud (in the literal sense); of all the uses that I could have come up with for my copy of Echoes, photoshopping Terry Schiavo’s head onto the cover was never one of them. (I’m aware, incidentally, that Amusing Photoshop Edits are situated in the hierarchy of comedic sophistication somewhere between a Tim Allen routine and hippie protest signs, but we all have our things. I laughed my ass off the first time I saw the one of Lee Harvey Oswald with the guitar, too, so I just have to conclude that I have a weakness for the form. I am, after all, from North Carolina.)

Anyway: Seeing as how I was already on the internet, I figured I’d post a link on a forum where I tend to hang out. Now, keep in mind this is the internet, possibly the only space (real or imaginary) in history where one would face more difficulty trying to find the phone number of a pizza place than trying to find images of people eating poop. Then take the next step and consider the fact that the forum where I posted the link exists mostly so that lonely dorks can congregate and devote an excess of attention to professional wrestling. Suffice it to say, I figured I was in the clear.

Well, no. A few minutes later, I checked my email and found that my account had been temporarily suspended; for the rest of the week, I wouldn’t even be able to access the message board. The irony, of course, is that I’d never been suspended from the board for any reason before despite going way beyond the Echoes parody on occasion. By way of contrast: A few months ago, a sex tape involving ex-WWF wrestlers Chyn@ and ><-Pac surfaced (ah, sweet google-proofing). One of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many reasons to avoid this particular sex tape forever is the fact that the viewer is (apparently) forced to confront Chyna’s gargantuan clitoris; it is (allegedly) the approximate size of a mason jar. For weeks and weeks and weeks on this same forum, you could barely read a thread without someone referring to said monstrosity and someone else inevitably linking to pictures. It’s more than a little funny that laughing at the delicious irony of Terri Schiavo on the cover of an album with the song “Sister Savior” is somehow out of bounds. If my suspension from this pro-wrestling internet message-board hadn’t accidentally afforded me an arcane summation of one of the chief problems facing modern existence, I’d probably be a little pissed.

Because my friends are, by and large, not gigantic dorks like I am, most of the conversations I have about philosophy take place entirely within my head. As you might imagine, these exercises tend to be somewhat reductionist in nature; I inevitably find that the best answer to whatever question I’m posing to myself is the one that uses the fewest words. This is of course only occasionally productive – most of the great pithy philosophical soundbites are taken – but every so often I’ve actually gotten results. Like this:

ME: Okay, I got one – what’s the most basic flaw with modernity?
ME: Easy. If I say “cat”, you know what I’m talking about, right?
ME: Uh, I guess – do you mean “cat” like housecat, or like a tiger, or what?
ME: Like a housecat.
ME: Oh, okay. Got it.
ME: Okay, describe what a cat is.
ME: Uh – four legs, furry, tail…erm…can be loud…uh…
ME: That sounds about right.
ME: Okay, so what?

Well, me, it’s simple: The problem is that even though we can both make reference to the same template of cat-ness, there’s absolutely no guarantee that we’re talking about the same cat. My first cat ever was a stray named Max who’d lost his tail in a fight, apparently right before wandering up to my family’s house. When my counter-ego throws “tail” in among the terms he associates with “cat”, it is therefore completely plausible that I could have leapt up in my cubicle and loudly called him (me) a myopic jackass with no practical knowledge about the term itself. I will assume that you have at least passing familiarity with The O’Reilly Factor and can therefore figure out how productive this approach is.

This is, of course, hardly news; postmodernism has a (paradoxically) long and storied history throughout the course of human consciousness, to the point where we’re all so familiar with the term that we don’t even blink when we hear it mentioned on the E! network. What we’ve lost contact with, however, is the fact that although postmodernism may be a philosophy, it happens to be a philosophy with profound practical applications. It’s one thing, after all, to split hairs with yourself over the difference between two different conceptions of a term like “cat”, but replace “cat” with “evil” and “yourself” with “the President” (or depending on your political alignment, "bin Laden") and suddenly you’re dealing with (overrated yet still relevant) real-world issues. I don’t think that my definition of the general linguistic category of “evil” is all that much different from that of George W. Bush, but there’s a real-world split between us due to the fact that the events and causes that he plugs into that category differ wildly from the ones I would choose. Or, for an even more immediately concrete example, consider the issue of love.

Up until last year, I always thought that my only reason for defending the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary was that it reflected my own experiences as a catastrophic failure with women with unspeakable clarity, and then sent me home happy with exactly the right ending. (I had similar misconceptions about the genius of the Kaplan/Elfont masterpiece Can’t Hardly Wait, and I say that without irony. As you might imagine, 1998 was a great year for movies tailor-made for James Cobo.) Now that I have owned the DVD for some time and have watched it (1) apart from a crowd, which is essential if you want to determine what your particular relationship is to a movie, and (2) a thousand fucking times, which is essential if you want to determine if a movie still has substance once you’ve wrung all the freshness out - now that all of that’s happened, I can safely say that There’s Something About Mary’s status as one of the all-time great films in the Hollywood canon has less to do with what it says about my life than what it says about life in general.

I always get nervous whenever I hear the phrase “stalker comedy” applied to Mary, which means I get nervous a lot since the film might as well have employed the phrase in its press kit (it actually might have, but again, I am a lazy person). Usually, I’m only discomforted by critical terms when I don’t have a clue as to what they mean, which is why I run screaming in the opposite direction from anything pitched to me as “realistic” or “classical” or “-ian” (usually “Brechtian”, but you can fill in whatever). “Stalker comedy”, however, I can grasp with shameful ease, because that’s basically the way I look at my life. I hate the internet for a vast array of reasons, but if you invent a chip to be implanted into the brain that gives the subject uninterrupted access to the internet, I will fight my way to the front of the line to be the guinea pig. This is due to the fact that in the real world, I am by far the worst conversationalist you will ever meet (aside, perhaps, from Terry Schiavo) because I am governed by the impulse to Not Be Sleazy And/Or Intrusive, and I am sick enough in the head that asking someone – lord, especially girls – even the most banal personal information feels to me like a profound breach of etiquette. This, in turn, comes from the fact that I generally decide the extent to which I like someone within the first split second of meeting them (and I am rarely wrong); given that I already know whether or not I like someone, asking follow-up questions seems like a useless pretext, and I like being straightforward (or failing that, drunk). My general attitude towards people’s personal lives is that if I need to know something, it’ll be made known to me.

You begin to see, of course, why calling Mary a “stalker comedy” would make me nervous. Ben Stiller is tortured by guilt over whether or not he’s intruding too much on Cameron Diaz by hiring Dillon and so on; meanwhile I live every day of my life willfully denying myself the right to Google-spy every girl I’ve ever had a crush on. “Willfully denying” may actually be an understatement; my relationship to the internet’s power to provide me access to people’s personal information without being broadcasting my intrusiveness to the world at large (until now, I guess) is pretty close to that of a crystal meth addict, insofar as that I want to do it constantly but cannot shake the awareness that it’s ruining any chance I have at being a human being worthy of respect. As such, when I watch Mary I usually find myself understanding Stiller with perfect clarity as a stalker and a helpless idiot for Diaz.

Now obviously, a lot of the credit for this has to go to Stiller, who to be fair really does nail a lot of little things about the profound shittiness of this particular schism to within three or four decimal places. But Mary isn’t The Usual Suspects; if they’d made Mary exactly the same but replaced Stiller and Diaz with, say, Joshua Jackson and Tea Leoni, it would still be a movie worth watching, and credit for that has to go to the Farrelly brothers. Mary is a deceptively tight movie; it has no shortage of extraneous “stuff” (the dog, for instance), but overall there are surprisingly few moments in the film that you can’t trace to the actions of Stiller. About a fifth of the way through the movie, for instance, Dillon goes down to Miami in search of Mary; what’s striking isn’t so much what Dillon does as it is his approach to Mary. Stiller inadvertently zips his nuts up to his neck in an effort to demonstrate the purity of his intentions towards Mary; this is of course in sharp contrast to Dillon’s switching to higher-powered binoculars in order to scheme a better peek at her rack. The closer you read the actual shot-by-shot text of the film, the more apparent it gets – compare Dillon’s interactions with Mary to Stiller’s, and you’ll see that Dillon and Diaz are frequently kept separate by conversing in shot-reverse shot form, whereas Stiller and Diaz have a number of nice little moments in a quiet, restrained two-shot (my favorite probably being the conversation they have sitting on the car after dinner). You can even point to a number of jokes which visually hinge on Stiller or his actions occupying the center of the frame, which I was taught is where you’re supposed to put the action that you want the audience to focus on. You’d be surprised how nuanced a movie Mary really is, considering that most people remember it for Ben Stiller wrestling a dog.

On one level, of course, this is just textbook “good filmmaking”. I, however, no longer care about that level; I think that the skill involved in getting the audience to comprehend the way Stiller understands his world is far less interesting than the actual feat of, y’know, getting the audience to comprehend the way that Stiller understands his world. And this understanding is crucial if you’re going to “get” the drama of the film’s closing; if you can’t see both how Ted sees himself and his life and his chances of being a worthy companion for Mary AND how Mary might see virtue and value in Ted, then the ending is roughly as sophisticated as the last reel of a silent movie (although if that’s what you think, you should probably watch more silent movies). It’s the kind of understanding you can only get from only being presented with the opportunity to identify with one character, and that in turn is exactly the way human beings live their real lives. The pleasure of Mary, in other words, comes from the revelation that in spite of everything we know about the world, both of the main characters – both the one we understand and the one we idealize – have the same definition of “cat”.

The opening essay in Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs deals with the idea that all scenarios of love promised by cinema are inherently artificial, and I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment that if you sit around waiting for things to work out like they do for Ted, you’re in for a lifetime of bullshit. But there’s no shortage of movies about losers who end up getting exactly what they want and the audience feels they deserve, and yet There’s Something About Mary towers over all of them. The idea, after all, that there may in fact exist complementary subjectivities to your own – complementary subjectivities that you want, even – is infinitely more valuable than the idea that you can get the impossibly hot girl after all’s said and done. It’s telling that although critics can debate the aesthetics and the social weight of Mary until the cows come home, the film remains nearly universally respected among ordinary people (which makes me want to compare it to Goodfellas, but this is long enough already) who actually pay money for tickets and DVDs and such. To me, that says that this approach works on ordinary people because this is how ordinary people live their lives, and the fact that it works gives me hope for humanity. Which isn’t to say that Mary offers a glimpse into some Candyland of linguistic clarity and shared humanist values – it’s not Mystic River, thank fucking Christ – but rather speaks to a frustration in the modern person about the limits of experience, and to a hope that this frustration isn’t insurmountable. There’s Something About Mary hasn’t and won’t change the world, but (at the risk of LiveJournaling it up) if we can at least all agree that a better world is possible, that's a start.  And hopefully - hell, by definition - this world will be completely devoid of Chyn@'s nether thumb.

(bonus content for making it this far: Here is the link to the entire photoshop thread. It is even funnier/more horrible than you could have possibly imagined.)

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Gloriously Inappropriate

By this point, my guess is that I’ve enjoyed Roger Avery’s The Rules of Attraction more than just about anybody on earth not involved in its production. Of course, considering how nearly every single thing I heard about it upon its release in 2002 was unhesitatingly negative, this may not be much of an accomplishment, but facts are facts, and the fact is simply that I can watch this movie forever in a completely unironic way. Everyone who writes this movie off as “shitty” or “empty” is both wrong and stupid (though mainly wrong), and I am right. It’s that simple.

It’s not that I can’t understand why people hate Rules so much – far from it, since their reasons were pretty much sufficient to keep me away from it for close to two years after its release. When people complain about how it’s oppressively stylized (read: “annoying”) or how it doesn’t come to a resolution (“depressing”) or how it takes the cheap way out with lots of drug use and sex and pop music (pretty self-explanatory, although I never really saw it as a negative), I can’t really mount an argument. Rules is absolutely a movie that offers no reassurance whatsoever and inflicts a degree of artistic oppression on its audience usually reserved for the two loathsome Andersons; being opposed to it is simply the other side of the coin of being opposed to Reality Bites because it’s “too Hollywood”. This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable stance to take.

Of course, I love Reality Bites too: movies about philosophical concepts are rare enough, but movies about philosophical concepts that don’t come down to the formula of Story + Talking About Philosophy, that actually operate under the conditions that they propose – those are rarer than hen’s teeth. We’re ten-plus years removed from the release of Reality Bites and, if the post-9/11 media is to be believed, at least four years removed from the “death of irony”, but I continue to be impressed by the way the film’s definition of irony (paraphrase from memory: “It’s when the situational meaning is completely different from the literal meaning”) plays out in the film’s resolution; what else is the conclusion to that movie besides characters making a choice between the literal and situational meanings of the term “love”? Movies like this are incredibly useful if you like to think about what nebulous concepts like irony have to do with your life – certainly useful enough to put up with all the bullshit that led the movie from conception through production and right up to the point at which you saw it.

I guess it’s possible to describe myself as “lucky” in at least one way: if someone asks me to define my life in terms of one idea, I can comfortably say “propriety” without feeling like I’m leaving much out. My guess is that I’m not alone, if simply because I can’t be the only person whose parents did their damnedest to instill values in them contradictory to their place in society. My dad was a respected ophthalmologist for Duke University, and my family kept some correspondingly high-brow company; when I went home for Christmas, my mom told the story about how she nearly had to decapitate Stanley Fish when, at a party, he knocked a glass of wine out of her hand and shrank into the background to avoid being blamed. Yet in spite of that, I was essentially raised as a post-sixties liberal – I still remember being “corrected” when I came back from elementary school having been shown and impressed by a video of one of Reagan’s speeches, for instance, and I can’t even begin to count the number of lectures I sat through about notions of equality between races or genders or whatever.

My point is this: while I certainly don’t begrudge my parents even a little bit for their efforts or their net worth, I can say without hesitation that to a certain extent, it does play hell on a kid’s mind to reconcile notions of equality with the presence of the housekeeper. It’s really not even so much the contradiction between the two as it is the fact that you have to deal with it seemingly straight out of the gate: it turns issues of class into day-to-day stuff, and the process of learning about issues of class and other issues like it almost becomes part of the background noise rather than the developmental signal itself. Over time, you barely even recognize that you’re making a decision in the first place, and that’s where the trouble starts.

I don’t mean to imply that Rules is all about class (although the three protagonists clearly come from some level money), but it is about the result of the same kind of process – the effects that arise when people confuse “instincts” with “decisions”. Rules goes above and beyond most movies ever made in an effort to get you into the characters’ head-spaces; you may be horrified and outraged by what the characters are doing, but moments where you’re unclear as to what you’re watching happen in Rules are few and far between. Following Rules, in other words, is easy; it’s just that the characters themselves are so profoundly and distinctly fucked up that it’s occasionally a little difficult to make any sense out of any of it.

This is, I think, because Rules doesn’t necessarily try to make sense; it merely plunges you into the subjectivities of the characters and leaves everything else up to you. Rules has a very long and complex pre-title sequence; it opens with Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) telling you that the story you’re about to hear isn’t necessarily worthwhile right before throwing you into a maze of voice-over and editing tricks and oppressively subjective shots. And yet right from the jump, you can tell that there’s a profound disconnect between the values these kids project onto the world in order to make it make sense and the way the world actually works. Deciding whether someone’s gay or not is a profoundly political action with legitimate real-world consequences, and yet Paul (Kip Pardue)’s first line in the film is a conclusion to that effect. Clearly we’re not following these characters from the beginning of their story – only from the beginning of the film’s story.

I eat shit like this up with a spoon. One of the main problems that I always have with reading and discussing movies is that since they’re pitched as such complete and self-contained products, I’m tempted to draw conclusions about reality from a thing which offers artificial openings and conclusions. Suppose that twenty years after the conclusion of Casablanca, Rick decides that he hates Captain Renault and gets back together with Ilsa – what does that do to the lessons of the movie itself? More importantly, what if we don’t get to see any of that; what if it just happens and we have no way of knowing about it? By contrast, Rules is clearly “incomplete” (it even ends in the middle of a line of dialogue), and as such we’re free to take whatever we want out of it. It’s just a movie, right?

But here’s the thing about Rules: it matches its realities up the same way real-world realities match up. Put another way, we can’t necessarily point to things in the movie and say “reality”, but we can talk about the movie using the same terms that we’d use to talk about the real world. Midway through the movie, Paul goes home for some reason and suffers through an incident where a friend of the family (named “Dick”, hurr hurr hurr) makes a gigantic scene seemingly for no reason. That’s fucked up, no matter how you slice it; my friends might not have picked a fight with my family exactly like that or for Dick’s reasons (whatever they are), but friends picking fights with your family = fucked up. The open-endedness practically forces you to make independent value judgments.

And then it throws you completely for a loop. It’s a little tricky to discuss the central scene in the movie without giving a lot of the movie itself away; for the sake of convenience, I’ll call it the Harry Nilsson scene, since the whole scene is set to A Certain Amazing Harry Nilsson Song. Formally, this isn’t unusual for the film; as soon as the opening credits stop rolling, it dives right into a montage set to the Cure’s “Six Different Ways” (AKA the good song by the Cure), and not too much later there’s a VERY neat split-screen montage to a Donovan song. Unlike these earlier side-trips, however, the Harry Nilsson scene isn’t just a fun/interesting way to get to Point B; it’s about showing you something and making damn certain that you understand how serious it is.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I doubt I’m making any sense (although you’ll thank me when you see the movie. Which you will). What’s important that you understand is that all of a sudden, the world of the movie will treat some things with profound gravity. However, this movie being what it is, I do have an alternative example of the kind of seriousness I’m dancing around.

Rules occurs at a college, and consequently a lot of the events take place at parties. Now, because Rules was adapted from a (presumably loathsome) Bret Easton Ellis novel, these parties are all given coolly apocalyptic names – the “Dress To Get Screwed Party”, the “Pre-Saturday Night Party”, and most relevant here, the “End of the World Party”. Yeah yeah yeah; all in good wry collegiate elitist fun, right?

Well, according to IMDB, the End of the World Party was filmed on September 11^th, 2001. Hell of a downer, innit?

The value of this movie, then, is based entirely on its capacity to call your sense of propriety before the judge. Set next to the Harry Nilsson scene, the logic of the characters seems trite and petty, just like the logic you use to figure the movie out seems pretty small next to the events of September 11^th; it has power because it can all of a sudden make you confront things which are much bigger than you ever expected. The term I want to use to describe this movie (even though it’s patently unfit for service here) is “wake-up call”, simply because few movies actively call your judgment into question on any level, let alone two at once. And while I understand that not everybody wants or needs to have their values checked (and as such should probably stay far, far away from this movie), I can’t see how that diminishes the accomplishments of this movie in any way. That it works at all is miracle enough.

 

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Then I'll Dig A Tunnel From My Window To Yours

I tend to be pretty inconsistent with my touchstones. The longest I’ve ever had a “favorite” movie was probably the five years I spent supporting Pulp Fiction (which, along with my copy of the Stop Making Sense soundtrack held over from eighth grade, still stands as one of the two objects I can cite on to assure myself that I had some taste before I went off to college), but it’s easy to be loyal when you don’t know any better; by my first college Christmas break, that title had changed hands dozens of times. “Best”, too, never really settled down, even once I was able to divorce “best” from “favorite”. It really only gets worse as you get more specific – “funniest”, “best written”, “coolest”, and such are all just a disc change away from revolution – to the point where now I really don’t bother to keep track, except in good fun.

The exception to this is “most interesting”; I have yet to see anything come close to being as interesting as Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece Playtime, and in spite of the fact that I never anticipated seeing a movie like Playtime before actually seeing it, I still can’t imagine anything else being as completely engrossing as it. The caveat, of course, is that this is only true because I am a sad little dork of a person who reads film theory and nonfiction for fun, and there is a wide gulf of opinion between me and people for whom those damned Lord of the Rings movies are the ideal cinematic experience. This is fine; this is democracy in action, and I am no longer an (avowed) socialist. But I have yet to come across a cinematic category of interest into which I can’t find a way to shoehorn Playtime, and it has a nasty long-standing habit of crushing all contenders.

Playtime is a visual movie, a phrase which, if you don’t think “cinema” has any self-sustaining appeal all by itself, generally means “boring as all fuck”. This is not an unfair way to describe Playtime, I guess; the film basically follows Tati’s iconic character Monsieur Hulot around for a day in a big city as he tries to get a job, meets an old army friend, goes to a club, blah blah blah. The fact that it’s a comedy doesn’t really help anything in this case; Tati’s brand of comedy is descended straight from the silent tradition, so it’s less Uproarious Laughter and more Humorous Little Things. There really isn’t any possible way to make it sound cool.

And then you start watching it and you forget all of that. The essence of what Playtime actually is is basically “Here’s how the modern world works” rendered as a comedy, and the essence of what makes it so mindfuckingly interesting is how literally what I just said plays out. Playtime is all about showing you components of modern life and how they actually look when you pay attention to them apart from their actual use; if you’ve seen Crumb (and get to the video store right the fuck now if you haven’t) and remember the photos he drove around the city taking and then worked them into his drawings ever after when he’d forget what telephone poles looked like – okay, imagine if someone made an entire fictional film with that attitude. “This stuff isn’t put here to be visually pleasing”, Crumb points out; it’s there to fill a function, and we tend to ignore it when we’re not engaging with that function. Like Crumb’s art, Playtime is all about confronting this stuff at a distance from its functionality; if it has a point, it’s pretty much just that the modern world is a crazy, disorganized place where ridiculous stuff happens all around you all the time and you just don’t notice it.

And I do mean “all around” and “all the time”. What defines the character of Playtime’s greatness is how absurdly busy every shot is: shots will contain dozens of sight gags, all happening simultaneously, and all you can do as a viewer is dart your eyes around the frame trying to keep up. You can sit there awed by the giant scope of the cavernous rooms, but you’re going to miss the nuns’ headdresses flapping like birds’ wings’, and you’re not going to be able to try to discern which figures up against the windows are real and which are cardboard cutouts, and there’s even a pretty good chance that you’ll miss out on the central character’s introduction in the film (which I did until I saw the film for a third time), not to mention about fifty other equally minor things which are just fun to notice. And this is all within the first three minutes of the film.

Playtime is a very, very, very, very, very big movie. It’s shot in 70mm, so basically you can see twice as much stuff going on as you normally could, and Tati’s sets were so gigantic that they were actually referred to by the film press as “Tati-town” since basically he had to build a fake city (it’s worth mentioning that Tati went broke making Playtime, both financially and in terms of critical reputation). But the end result is something huge and unique; you’ll never see a movie try to force you to sort through more stuff at once – it actually pretty much sets you up to fail. I’ve seen Playtime close to ten times now (only once in the theater), but every time I watch it, I notice new sight gags which make the timeline of the film’s events just a little bit clearer.

If there is a problem with this method of filmmaking, it is that it makes for some intensely frustrating struggles trying to describe why this is worthwhile. The easiest way would just be to suggest that you click on the picture to the left and imagine everything moving –all those little elements distinctly operating on their own, each a potential site for something cool and wonderful. Thankfully, however, this is 2004; we live in a hypertextual world, and I can safely assume that my readers know about the Arcade Fire.

When the Arcade Fire’s debut album Funeral came out last year, the critical community was split into two camps: the overwhelming majority who claimed that Funeral was one of the most vibrant, compelling albums to come down the pipe in a long, long time (true), and the tiny (yet very vocal) minority indignantly pointing out that the Arcade Fire weren’t necessarily doing anything new or interesting or particularly significant (also true). But even the haters couldn’t deny the power of the Arcade Fire’s live show, where all eight thousand members of the band would be switching instruments several times per song, and you’d have to deal with all these people singing at the top of their lungs right at the audience, and periodically a guy who looks like Napoleon Dynamite runs around and wails on the walls with some drumsticks. My friend David went to go see their first show in Los Angeles and said people were just staggering out of the club, clearly unable to process the tidal wave of stimuli they’d just been brought to face; I saw them live last month and I can absolutely vouch for this.

The difference, of course, is that with the CD, you the audience retain a certain degree of control over the experience – the experience of their songs is pretty self-evident, and you can pretty much get it without mining every second of every song to figure out which instruments come in where and why. But the live show is just a tornado; the organs of perception have their limits, and you can’t focus on Napoleon Dynamite over by the walls and the girl playing violin with the most passionate intensity you’ve ever seen at the same time. It just takes you over, and the fun lies in keeping up – or, if you’re lucky, being totally unable to keep up with the parts and just giving yourself over to appreciating the sum. Because you’re in charge of how you receive the experience, the quality of the time you spend in the band’s company is entirely up to you.

Okay, Playtime is that. You can’t possibly keep up with it; the challenge and the fun lies in noticing things, little elements that flesh out the logic of the world, and this is a completely independent exercise. Playtime’s reward for You The Viewer is a genuine sense of an individual experience, which is rare enough in any medium but especially in the medium of film. Film is all about the shared experience, which is completely interesting on one level and insanely frustrating on another; I can’t tell you how dispiriting it is to argue with clods who’ve seen a movie you find meaningful but got something random and completely idiotic from it, because unless you’re enough of an asshole to say that they’re wrong for not having your catalog of life experiences, then their position is wholly supportable by the text. (You have no idea how many skulls I wanted to thump after Fahrenheit 9/11 on both sides of the political divide. Jesus.) But with Playtime, theoretically you could have someone make a chronological list of every single thing they noticed in the film and still get an entirely different experience from it simply because your eyes wandered at a certain point. Compare that to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (an insanely interesting film in its own right, but absolutely one which guides you along a path to a point), and, well, there you go.

Consequently, I don’t really want to get into any of the reasons why I continually find Playtime to be such a fascinating viewing experience, although I will anyway: I can find stuff in it about the relationship between modernity and the individual, or I can find stuff in it about how you can organize a movie, or I can relate the viewing experience to the experience of walking around in the world, or I can find stuff in it about the ongoing dialogue between the medium of cinema and our notions of “reality”, or I can just sit back and enjoy some masterfully-crafted physical comedy, or god only knows what else. The point which Playtime alone seems to be able to convey cinematically is that finding the point isn’t the point; the point is to look in the first place, and even if you find something, the point is to keep looking. I’d pretty much describe life as having the same point, but of course that’s hardly the point.

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I submitted this to Stylus Magazine a while back; I was told that Josh Timmerman was slow in the getting-back-to-folks department, but after a month and a half I figured I just got shot down. However, I still think it's one of the better things I've ever written, and now I have this blog. SO:

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Two Things

I have two things to say about the film 11"9'01:

1. By this point, having seen 11’9”01 five or six times, I have found one conclusion to be inescapable: Fuck a Michael Moore. Seriously. I mean yes, fuck a Fox News too, but with television’s transparent corporate structuring you kind of have to factor (no pun intended) in a certain level of institutional perversion. Michael Moore, on the other hand, makes movies – hell, he makes movies which repudiate the corporate structure both in essence and substance. I have the right to expect better of him.

It’s not that I disagree with his views – far, far from it – but rather with the paradoxical lack of democracy in his films. Your faith in Moore as a filmmaker is fundamentally tied to whether or not you believe what he shows you – that is to say, if you buy into his assertion that, say, corporations have no right to abandon their workers, then you’re probably going to get more out of Roger & Me than someone who doesn’t. I don’t mean to come down on agitprop cinema or anything, but seriously, good god, has the corpse of cinema decomposed to the point where even in light of the global events of the last few years, this Manichaean pot-bangery is still the best available option?

Thank God for films like 11’9”01, films which attempt to break free of the vacuous objectivity that plagues most movies and damn near all political ones. Allow me to quote the monograph that gradually fades in to open the film:

11’9’01, September 11^th: A Film.
11 Directors from different countries and cultures.

11 Visions of the tragic events that occurred in New York City on September 11^th 2001.
11 points of view committing their subjective conscience.

Complete freedom of expression.

11’9”01, you see, is an omnibus film, an assemblage of short films contributed by multiple directors focusing on a single topic. In addition to being a really fun and interesting way to make and/or watch a movie, the approach also has the effect of forcibly preventing the audience from locking into a single subjectivity due to the constant hopping from short to short. Apply that formula to a historical event with the inherent potency of a September 11^th, and you’ve got the recipie for a damned interesting, damned thought-provoking movie. I found many of the shorts to be dull or amateurish, but there’s no denying the alchemic tension when you’re forced to confront, say, a harshly critical piece (Ken Loach’s recounting of the American-sponsored coup in Chile) immediately after a work of charm, if not outright fantasy (Idrissa Ouedraogo’s story of five poverty-stricken African boys who plot to capture Osama bin Laden for the reward money). It’s not so really that fourth gear differs radically from third; rather, it’s the fact that you, the viewer, are forced to do the shifting yourself.

Of course, the inherent downside to this approach – and here’s where it gets good – is that since the films aren’t necessarily going to be equally good, not all of the viewpoints are going to command the same degree of respect. A few weeks ago I watched If You Were Me, an omnibus film organized by the Human Rights Commission of Korea, and forgot nearly everything outside of what the “best” contributions had to teach. It’s a serious flaw in that it disrespects the issues being presented even more than the artists presenting them, and given that omnibus films are inherently issue-oriented, well, it ain’t good.

Again, this is why the Lord put 11’9”01 on this earth. In an effort to ward off this critical negligence, producer Alain Brigand (director of Microcosmos and Winged Migration) imposed one elegant limitation on the filmmakers: the films each had to be exactly eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame long (hence the title). I can’t say that I don’t see where the haters are coming from when they write this off as a gimmick since nobody’s really going to notice a single frame missing, but to do so almost seems like an act of willfully missing the point. It isn’t just that In This Galaxy Of Short Films None Is The Correct One – it’s that no viewpoint is formally privileged above the others. Everyone gets the exact same box of crayons.

The point of all of this, of course, is not to force the audience to pick a viewpoint which appeals most to them, but rather to meditate on what September 11^th and “context” have to do with each other. In terms of movies that get the audience to play along with the mechanism, I afford 11’9”01 the kind of esteem I usually reserve for things like Playtime; given the talent involved in the film, resisting the urge to choose “a favorite/the best” is a fruitless exercise at best, but doing just that goes against the film’s sine qua non. It’s an immensely nuanced work, one where participation on any level demands a certain level of political participation whether you’re aware of it or not. It’s also a work which, by virtue of the fact that your life doesn’t exist in a vacuum either, has held up outrageously well for me in the year since I’ve had it; I have yet to watch it without drawing a new conclusion on one or more of the shorts. But, I mean, hey, who needs that when we’ve got Lila Lipscomb beating us over the head with her sorrow?

Seriously. Fuck a Michael Moore.

2. MOTHER OF GOD, YOU HAVE TO SEE THE ONE BY ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ INARRITU. I MEAN MOTHER OF MOTHERFUCKING GOD, Y'ALL.

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I Can't Remember A Time Before You Were Telling That Story

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton is easily summed up: Small-Town Boy Loves Small Town Girl Who Loves Monolithic Movie Star; Hijinx Ensue, Characters Are Eventually Revealed, and It All Ends Just Like You Think. This, combined with the facts that the cast is led by two (essentially) non-actors, (2) the camera moves maybe two inches the entire time (helicopter shots excepted), (3) significant portions of this movie are tantamount to extended ads for Pringles and the Piggly-Wiggly chain, and (4) the soundtrack features a song whose hook is the horrendous line “We’ve got more bounce in California/Than all y’all combined” – and if your skin crawled when you read that, wait until you hear it – might reasonably lead you to presume that Win A Date is a bad movie, which it may well be. I certainly couldn’t tell you; I flat-out adore the piss out of it. Win a Date was easily – and I mean by a shameful margin – my favorite movie of 2004; I liked Oldboy far more, Invisible Ballots was way more interesting, and Before Sunset was better in every way, but favorite? Forget it.

Allow me to explain: at the time of this writing, I am 23 years old, and I have never gotten to be in love. This is, I hasten to add, very different from never being in love; I fall in love as regularly as a frat boy buys cheap beer. Some people are just emotionally hardwired for certain events; some people get enraged easily, others weep like little bitches at the drop of a hat. I fall in love. It’s what I do.

The point I want to make, however, is that I don’t get to fall in love; it just happens, and when it does, it tends to manifest itself in wildly inappropriate ways, and thus nothing ends up working out like I’d like. (Aside: It should hardly be a surprise that I get so worked up about the music and movies and books and such that I love; “inappropriate” doesn’t really matter when you’re dealing with an inanimate object. And before you say it, anyone who thinks that loving a song or a movie is any different from loving another person must be boring as all fuck. There’s a self-evident reason the same word applies to both situations.) Which, of course, sucks, but then again it pretty much sucks consistently for everyone; I can count the people I know who’ve legitimately found and held onto love on one hand and have fingers left over, and even in those cases I’d like to see how their stories play out. A giant chunk of the human experience involves coming to terms with the fact that You, Chosen Scion of History, aren’t necessarily entitled to fulfillment; you may end up being an incomplete wreck like everybody since the Garden.

There are, of course, a million billion better movies than Win a Date at addressing this precise dilemma, even if you want to confine yourself to lightweight teenager movies. I, however, am not shackled by an allegiance to quality; I just want to see something that I want to see. And when I want to see a movie about a loser-y guy who shouldn’t get to fall in love with some impossibly perfect girl, I end up with Win A Damn Date in my DVD player like clockwork, because it doesn’t aim to do much other than that, and it milks that for all it’s worth. Fuck, just look at the poster:

The one piece of practical knowledge I took away from the lone filmmaking class I took during film school is that you organize your frame by dividing it four times, like the keys on a numeric keypad (just look at your keyboard), and give the most space in that middle square to the most important part of the frame. Look back at the poster: if you divided it like a frame, the most important part would be dominated by Kate Bosworth and Josh Duhamel, with poor Topher Grace sulking somewhere in the back.

In essence, this is the whole movie. You may THINK that a story about Small Town Girl Loves Et Cetera is actually about the girl, but it ain’t. This is absolutely Topher Grace’s movie; in twenty years, when we’re all light-years beyond sick of him and he’s accepting his fourth Oscar for playing some Brave Person Stricken With Crippling Disease/Addiction/Retardation, you will hear Win a Date brought up overandoverandover again. If you can successfully follow this movie without judging it, you’ll see that while Bosworth and Duhamel receive more screen-time and anchor more of the film’s drama, Grace is the one who actually has to do something; it’s his character who actually nuts up and takes charge of the situation while everyone else sits around taking advantage of the situation. (I guess it’s fair to say that Grace is basically just playing Eric Foreman. It’s also fair to say that you can probably trace a lot of Tom Hanks back to Bosom Buddies, or a lot of Welles back to Shakespeare. Originality is a shell game at best.)

And what Grace does is fucking PHENOMENAL. It’s easy to be a character actor – which Grace is, and will continue to be for at least the foreseeable future – if you don’t mind being one-dimensional. Topher Grace is, in a word, not. He plays his character as being as furious as he is decent, as vicious as he is sweet, as myopic as he is aware, and thankfully he does it seemingly without a hint of Tobey Maguire-esque “Look at how deliberately I teeter between these two poles” (which is of course the OTHER big trick of the character actor trade, especially when someone has aspirations of losing the “character” part). I realize that I’m asking a lot from most of you to take me at my word on this one, but I’ll stick up for Grace’s performance in this movie the way that guitar people stick up for Eddie Van Halen: either what he does works, or fuck you.

Last night, I sat down with a gigantic E&J & Ginger Ale to re-watch Chasing Amy. When I say this, I don’t quite mean what you think I mean; I mean that I watched Chasing Amy with the commentary track playing, which in a way means I didn’t watch Chasing Amy at all. I do this pretty frequently (considering that I would support the violent launching of Kevin Smith into the sun) for two reasons: first of all, the commentary track is deeply, deeply funny (and due mostly to Ben Affleck, of all people), but secondly and more important, the movie just doesn’t hold up for me. I tried to watch the movie properly a few months ago and just couldn’t do it, and it isn’t even due to the fact that giant sections of it are really crappy: it’s that I can’t find a single interesting thing that this movie has to say about reality. I’ll grant it that it’s constructed far more skillfully than Win a Date, which genuinely doesn’t play a single unexpected card, but my experience watching Chasing Amy wasn’t fundamentally different from watching a hypothetical high-school production of Brigadoon. It exists in the world of texts as something that you follow along until it’s over, and then move on (and frankly I can sit here all day listing things I’d rather follow along than a sexual-identity love story spangled with Kevin Smith dialogue).

But the dirty little secret about Chasing Amy is that it doesn’t really have anything to say, outside of maybe a few interesting little nuggets about the choice-versus-destiny debate over homosexuality (which, in any event, it abandons completely once the two characters need to hook up). The situations that occur in this movie are pretty specific; the sudden realization that the object of your romantic desire eats from a catcher’s mitt is pretty far abstracted from the kind of realizations most of the audience has to tap into in order to actually connect with the drama. The genius at the heart of Win A Date, by contrast, is its sweeping general immediacy; Bosworth and Grace can’t happen because, I mean, LOOK AT HER. LOOK AT HIM. LOOK AT HER. LOOK AT HER SOME MORE. The dynamic stands on its own two feet without a single thing to do with your life (although if you are, like me, Less Than, it’s pathetically easy to empathize), and this carries the film throughout: you may never have attempted to assert your virility by chopping more wood than the other guy, but surely you’ve tried to out-_____ some other guy for a girl before, right?

Maybe now you see what I’m getting at when I froth at the mouth about Grace’s greatness in this role. What he brings to the character is conflict; the film makes no effort to try to hide his cognizance of the fact that he’s not good enough for her, but damned if he doesn’t just say “Fuck it” every so often anyway, albeit in halting Topher Grace-esque fashion. As such, Win a Date affords him ample opportunities to do two things: seethe and give up. Anyone who’s ever watched That 70s Show knows just how good Grace is at both of these; now imagine him doing them in a movie environment, where he isn’t compelled to go for the Big Laugh every minute and actually lets him explore the pathos. It absolutely hits home.

The irony, of course, is that, if asked which was the more realistic movie, most people would probably answer with Chasing Amy, justifying every snarky comeback you can imagine me making. Chasing Amy is more realistic in a very limited, arguably artificial sense: it’s closer to reality in that there are lesbians and cigarettes and facial hair and sometimes it looks like it might rain. But it has much less to do with real life; if, in real life, you kiss your best friend (especially if this friend is a guy), odds are he won’t sit around listening to you justify why you two should have sex. Win a Date’s kiss-yr-best-friend scenario plays out much more realistically; there’s actually shock and terror and uncertainty involved, and it wraps up with a miserably deflating copout. This is at least in the neighborhood of what would happen.

But ultimately, Win a Date is the more realistic movie because they actually talk about more realistic things, by which I mean that they talk about amorphous, indefinite things like love or celebrity. I’ll admit that it’s not done in any particularly skillful way – Win a Date is definitely one of those movies where everybody gets a turn to speak their piece, and they speak it In Character – but since when is that really the point? The monologues in Win a Date are the kind of phenomenal where, if you’re prone to thinking about this kind of stuff, you catch yourself stealing the movie’s lines; lord knows I’ve applied the “love/big love/great love” thing (and about seven thousand other equally effective things) to my life because it just makes sense. Chasing Amy, on the other hand, is nearly useless when it comes to its talking points; it offers the protagonist two opposing (and idiotically outlined) viewpoints, and then the protagonist…fucks up. And life goes on. And then the movie’s over. I suppose that’s a more “realistic” treatment of life compared to the happy ending of Win a Date, but it’s not like I needed a movie to remind me that life goes on; I have late-night reruns of Dear John for that.

Win a Date, to reiterate, is a shitty film, an embarrassing travesty to own, and the kind of possession that drives you to demand that your friends call before they come over so that you can hide your shame. I, however, also own a Girls Aloud album AND BaseketBall, so there’s not really a whole lot of damage left to do. But if you have a need for a movie like this, Win a Date is unhesitatingly the one I would recommend. For one thing, you can love it as much as you want.

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