The Handsome Camel

This is my previous blog, from 2000-02, called "thx-1138" and powered by diaryland.com (God bless 'em!). This covered most of the same points of interest as the Camel, but all mixed together. I've tried to clean up most of the dead links and format it a little, including correcting some typos, but otherwise this is it, unedited. Like a regular blog, it's in reverse chronological order, so the last entry on this page is the first entry I wrote.

2002-06-15 - 020615_77.html long entry on short subjects

The drought is over. Thx-1138 was moving to new digs -- the lovely Inman Park neighborhood in downtown Atlanta, mere blocks from the Lefont Plaza Theatre and the Atlanta Baha'i Center on Edgewood, and less than a single block from the rehab center. Should one need such a thing.

My reconnection with the online world coincided with the Atlanta Film Festival. I've never patronized this festival, for no good reason, but it has become quite a big deal, attracting well-known filmmakers and films and drawing good audiences without contracting the entertainment press blight or becoming a display case for Hollywood tropes and trophies.

The programming reflects the Atlanta indie film scene perfectly: fiercely off-Hollywood and DIY, knowledgeable, but with a taste for kitsch and sounded to its depths by ambivalence about Hollywood. On the one hand, it clearly stands apart from Hollywood and is a venue for films which are virtually non-distributable through traditional channels: the avant-garde, documentaries, and weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. On the other hand, it offers panels like "Climbing the Creative Ladder: Film School or Production Assistant?" And it seems strangely focused, in its narrative selections, on American films which are responding in one way or another to Hollywood. Like everything to do with filmmaking in Atlanta, this festival is at once original and independent and, always, a tad wistful about the big game that seems to be going on without us in California.

With a full schedule, and anxious to support my fellow Artists of Limited Duration, I saw only shorts at the Festival. Seeing shorts is actually one of the most money- and time-efficient things you can do at a festival. You gain exposure to the widest range of styles and artists, you see works that are inherently less likely to show up on video or TV, and if something is particularly dreadful, you only have to sit through 10 or 15 minutes of it.

Thursday's Animation Extravaganza was by far the most interesting of the programs I saw. Its ten pieces ran the spectrum of styles and techniques, and split evenly between serious subjects and playful experimentation.

I've been wondering since what makes animators, of whatever stripe, so much cleverer, more concise, and more focused in their ideas than are, on average, their live-action colleagues. Perhaps it's that animation is extraordinarily labor-intensive, and this encourages a great deal of pre-shoot paring and shaping; when you're spending thousands of hours on the actual shoot (or computer modeling, or whatever), you want to refine your ideas as much as possible beforehand.

"Strange Invaders" was a nice, charming story about the fear of babies. Babies are remarkably capable of turning an ordinary home into chaos, so it's perhaps no surprise that Cordell Barker envisions them as marauding alien invaders. A wacky animated couple have sex, and a bizarre creature lands in their home. It proceeds to take over the house, take everything apart, and reduce its hosts to petrified onlookers. And worse, it seems to be the mere beginning of an invasion -- it seems to be calling its siblings via a Macgyvered radio transmitter, a l· E.T. Not for those contemplating parenthood.

"Hamilton Mattress" I slept through. It's about an aardvark. Apparently aardvarks are the nerds of the animal kingdom, though Hamilton discovers that if you're a drummer in a famous band, you suddenly become a lot less nerdy. Or something like that.

"Black Soul" is a kind of wordless Black History Month special. Its painterly, ever-shifting animation is lovely, and the themes it explicates (Black Pride, the upward struggle) are worthy, but it went on for a long time with too little variation in tone. The continuous morphing from one scene of Black History to the next was reverential and consistent, but tended to homogenize the history and make it bland, too.

"Vessel Wrestling" has one of those perverse summaries in the program guide that make you think the festival organizers aren't taking their artists entirely seriously: "A woman serves dinner. She waits. Stuff happens." But this extremely pleasurable and visceral film by Lisa Yu manages to pack an awful lot of "stuff" about domestic relationships, sexuality, the sensual pleasures and sensual disgust surrounding such ambiguous textures as Jell-O and body hair, and the material challenges of working in clay into its 13 minutes -- by far my favorite short of the festival, and one of my favorite shorts ever. Very sexy. Quite wondrous.

"The Hunger Artist" was clearly meant to be the show's centerpiece. At 17 minutes, it's the longest piece, yet it never drags, despite a langorous, melancholy pace. It's based on Kafka, so you can see the unhappy ending coming. But the Hunger Artist's complete dedication to his utterly useless craft fascinates and saddens, and every inch of this film is perfect in the attainment of craft. If I find its underlying theme -- the alienation and irrelevance of the artist, despite his to-the-death commitment, -- somewhat repugnant, still, there are few finer or more sympathetic expositions of such a theme.

"Parthenogenesis": fast, compact illustration of the cycle of love. I had no particular feelings about this piece.

"Better Life" reminded me greatly of Waking Life in its attention to repetitive elements in daily life, but without that film's growing sense of eerie transcendence. This film's goals are more modest -- a gentle, sad testing of the claims of consumer culture, and a critique of the isolation it can produce. That the film can combine toilet humor and exquisite, semi-abstracted figurative painting is only one of its merits.

"Hierarchy" is a perfect, pointed, self-deflating monologue accompanied by, not animation, exactly, but a film of the process of animation, a little like Chuck Jones's old "Duck Amuck" cartoon. Very funny.

"Major Damage" -- more of a sketch than a complete idea, this is nonetheless a very sweet and entertaining film that cribs good-naturedly from Calvin and Hobbes.

"Populi" shows a single object (or, as we later discover, a single type of object) undergoing a tremendous number of permutations of setting, lighting, orientation, color, and covering, all in 8 minutes, set to the martial thunder of Holst's "Mars." Like "Hierarchy," it documents its own making -- we constantly see hands in the frame, moving and shaping the object, which is something like a store mannequin and something like Brancusi's famous "Bird" scupltures. Fun, funny, arty -- I had a great time with this one.

Tales of the Weird lived up to its name. Like the "Cult Films" section at the video store, the pleasures to be found here are a little sickening, but they're here nonetheless.

"Sylvester" is a dazzling display of photographic know-how -- in many ways equal to last year's gorgeous The Man Who Wasn't There. But like that film, this is short on original ideas or meaningful characterization. Also like that film, it tends to put the grotesque and (here, literally) carnivalesque on display without much motivation or insight. Like many of Francois Ozon's short films, it's essentially a shaggy-dog story made celluloid, but this lacks Ozon's casual, easygoing manner, which all bad jokes require. Kevin Molony's operatic style may be self-parody, but it doesn't come off that way.

"Everyday Something" is another sort of joke-turned-film, this time modeled on amusing newspaper clippings like the syndicated "News of the Weird." The first and funniest, for example, is about two neighbors, both amateur bird callers, who for years are calling only to each other -- each being convinced that the other is actually a real hoot owl. But underneath the jokey surface is a deep compassion for women, sufferers of various (at times hilarious) forms of domestic abuse, and those for whom isolated, compartmentalized industrial life has proved too much. The jokes start to turn serious about halfway through, as strange recurring images resolve into painfully realistic vignettes. The most worthwhile of this series.

"Casablanca" is exactly the kind of obnoxiously portentious student film that Christopher Guest so rightly lampooned in one of his early films, The Big Picture. If you have anxiety dreams about violin recitals or giving big parties, this might be for you. It got on my nerves, although I must admit it seemed to be partly making fun of itself, which mitigated the nuisance somewhat.

"Inside" is a nicely eerie if at times overly literal vision of Multile Personality Disorder. Worthy because it both skewers and explains the idea of "recovering" from mental illness. Good performances and good use of sound.

"Cultivation" -- I honestly have no memory of this one. It's on the schedule, but I don't remember seeing it. Either I fell asleep again (not entirely unlikely -- I seem lately to be stricken with theatrical narcolepsy), or they left it off for some reason after the schedule was printed. The program's description: "Cultivation centers on a mysterious board game in which the game pieces produce a triangle of desire, jealousy, and anger among the three main characters."

"Grasp" seems a Tales from the Crypt episode escaped from its pen, complete with well-known character actors and the twist ending, but (sadly?) minus the gratuitous nudity. Blair Brown and Dylan Baker are both having a lot of fun as stereotypes (the tough dame cop and the ultraweird coroner, respectively) in this story of a severed hand found in a laundromat. Not bad.

All the films included in Of This Earth strove for a kind of rural lyricism. I had the greatest sympathy for this kind of filmmaking, and therefore was generally pleased with the films, even when they didn't quite hit their ostensible marks.

"Son of Man" was directed by local Jim Burer, and had many of the hallmarks of what might be called the "Atlanta style": an obssession with Gothic or bizarre family relationships, Christian theology re-worked as a horror-film prop, dusty interiors splashed with golden light, kistchy, trailer-park design in subdued browns, beiges, and greens, and flat, poker-faced acting in comfortingly unprofessional accents. It tells the story of a large, quiet young man who apparently has miraculous heailng powers, as he and his mother discover when he brings his dying father back to life. The film makes a great deal out of its quiet, tense atmosphere, and its use of a televangelist's sermon as background noise is quite effective. One wishes it had more substance and were able out to draw and define its family relationships carefully, instead of being so caught up in its supernatural weirdness. As a portrait of a Messiah's coming of age, it is airless and stale, but as a snapshot of a family waiting for its patriarch to die, it frequently catches one's interest.

"The Failure of Pamela Salt" is an engaging film set in the Southwest desert, about a young woman who is rejected from medical school, then meets a dazzling eleven-year-old girl who seems to have limitless potential. Her irrational jealousy of the girl and her tense relationship with her perfectly nice, but possibly out-of-touch, artist father are good, compelling material, and director Annie J. Howell augments her story with a great sense of the supreme calm of the desert and some clever imagery involving circles, especially concentric ones. Dazzling observations of light, reflection, and other interesting visual phenomena also pepper this stylish film. Good stuff.

"Freaky" is an odd, poetic Austrian film about the sometimes tender, sometimes jealous, sometimes tense relationship between a younger girl and an older one. There's a lot of clean, pretty imagery and spectacular woodsy landscape, but I think the point of this one escaped me. Won Best Europen Short at the 24Ëme Festival international de films de femmes de CrÈteil, so perhaps I just wasn't paying proper attention. I freely cop to this.

Finally, "The Hanged Dog Tree" was full of more gorgeous European landscapes, but I didn't really connect with its story of a Jewish woman on the run from the Nazis who has to leave her child with a farm girl. Years later she and her husband (having survived the camps) find the child by identifying a tree where she hid his necklace and birthright. The ending reminded me of Empire of the Sun, and had some power. But overall its story seemed too generic to be deeply affecting. It doesn't work as well as the well-known feature films which have combed this ground -- Europa, Europa, Lelouch's Les Miserables -- because it seems to lean on the awfulness of the situation without any particular moral implications for any particular characters. Generic suffering Jew A leaves generic innocent babe B with generic good-hearted farmgirl C. Unfortunately, this isn't a shaggy-dog story, and one wishes, eventually, for a good clean joke instead of by-the-numbers string-jerking.

2002-05-02 - 020502_90.html a tattoo of sorts

More about illumination: religious art wants to cover all available space with meaning -- specific doctrinal or narrative meaning. This is often literally the case -- as in Islamic religious paintings whose empty spaces are covered with calligraphy. But even in more restrained religious art the conceptual "space" exists primarily to communicate religious content of some kind to the intended audience.

In "non-religious" art (as we are using these terms) a woman's gesture would be explored for its own sake (the beauty of its form) or for its human, emotional content (as the natural indicator of certain internal conditions). But in a Renaissance painting of Mary, we find that her hand gestures are not "natural," or even cultural, expressions of her feelings or inner states.

This is true even of religious feeling. True, her face radiates serenity and even ecstasy -- but the hands are doing something else. They are doctrine, written or engraved on the work itself, making a kind of extra layer of information, or an extra layer of habitation -- a place where the religious feeling of the artist and the audience exist, wholly independent of, but not unrelated to, the religious feeling of the character or the scene.

2002-04-27 - 020427_47.html what I don't know could fill volumes

I need to learn to be more innocent.

2002-04-26 - 020427_57.html every child should have a switchblade and a ton of dynamite

"Terrorism" is used today much the way "savage" was used in the 19th century. In both cases, the word is applied as a dehumanizing, mystifying mechanism, by which the more powerful and influential party denies that military actions by a weaker enemy are, in fact, military actions. These words deny that the enemy is behaving "reasonably," with normal, self-interested political ends in mind. They attempt to locate the cause for the violence in some nonpolitical, natural phenomenon -- the ignorance and innate brutality of the "savage," the unreasoning hatred, the sheer madness of the "terrorist."

When we say that a building has been destroyed, or people have been killed, by a "terrorist," we have short-circuited discussion about his motives, what he hopes to accomplish, or how best to reach a peace with him -- in short, all the questions one nation would be forced to deal with when facing another nation.

This was exactly the way that 19th-century white Americans and Europeans avoided treating native Americans and Africans as full-fledged nations. After all, if one is attacked by the army of another nation over a territorial dispute, the logical solution is to try to come to some sort of agreement over the territory. But if one is attacked by savages, there is no use in reasoning with them, no need to deal or offer solutions. They are not an army, not the enforcement power of another nation, but a natural force that must be resisted and conquered.

Yet it must be admitted that most of the "terrorists" we are facing today think of themselves as representing an oppressed people. In some cases (the Palestinian bombers, for example), this is literally the case. In other cases, the claim of foreign agents like those who orchestrated the September 11th attacks to represent a coherent constituency may be tenuous at best. But in either case, the tactics involved do not justify the use of the word "terrorist."

There seem to be two definitions of "terrorism" available in common usage. The first is the use of violence to achieve political ends, and the second is the deliberate attempt to terrify a people. But it's hard to see how these definitions exclude nearly all military actions. All military violence is political -- that is, intended to influence the policy of the enemy. And all successful military action intimidates the enemy. American actions in Dresden, Hiroshima, and now Afghanistan bear this out.

We are left, then, with a description of terrorism based on tactics rather than intent. This confuses the issue somewhat; we are likely to call a Palestinian suicide bomber a "terrorist" because he personally detonates an explosive device in a civilian area, rather than, say, dropping it from airplanes overhead.

Yet it's clear that Palestinian bombers, representing a specific people with a well-known grievance, and taking the only military action available to them against a vastly better-equipped and more powerful enemy, are in a different category from Timothy McVeigh. And of course the September 11th bombers fall somewhere in the middle -- lacking a clear constituency or mandate, but still acting militarily against a foreign power perceived as an interloper. To lump all these people together under one rubric, simply because they use the same tactics, seems to needlessly muddle the separate realities of all these individual cases.

Yet it is most convenient to label people based on tactics, for it is in tactics, rather than in justification, that we are most clearly separated from our enemy. If we can but establish that there is a legitimate way to wage war -- preferably with costly technology and overwhelming force, the measures in which we Americans excel -- then we can be in the right, and establish others as being in the wrong, without ever facing directly the moral interrogation of the cause of war itself.

2002-04-21 - 020421_55.html exalted margin-doodling

Richard Linklater's Waking Life is, really, a series of videotaped conversations, small vignettes, the sum of whose intellectual content, while interesting and valuable, doesn't comprise the entire conversation with the viewer. The visual transformations to which characters and landscapes are subject are, themselves, meditations on the film's themes of dreaming and spiritual awakening.

But surely these themes are not the only ones to which this kind of a-realistic use of animation and computer graphics can be applied.

Waking Life initially reminded me of Ralph Bakshi's Cool World, in which small characters conducted bits of amusing animated business in the background or to the side.

But perhaps a more appropriate comparison (and this will lead us away from thinking that these techniques are only available to animated films) would be with the practice of illumination in medieval manuscripts, in which characters and scenes were added at chapter heads and in the borders, often taking on a life of their own. Or a more fully integrated example: Blake's combination of poetry and painting, in which it's impossible to determine whether he wrote poems and decorated them with paintings or made paintings and decorated them with poetry.

Why are we waiting? Why do films still look the same, although there are obvious new possibilities for the transformation, extension, and decoration of ordinary scenes? Why are we filmmakers bound to conventional vehicles of expression -- why lighting, camera movement, and costume, but not animation, morphing, layering, 3D digital sculpture -- and not just as "special effects," as a low-cost alternative to achieving traditional ends, but to achieve effects inherent in them, integrated with traditional photography and videography in such a way that they can't easily be separated.

Moreover -- and in a way, this is the more important point -- these possibilities ought to reflect back to traditional techniques; if digital imaging allows for a greater range of possibilities, a greater range of ideas (visual, and also correspondingly intellectual, moral, and spiritual) which can be expressed, it ought also to be teaching us to think in new ways about traditional aspects of filmmaking. We ought to be considering, always, ways to "illuminate" our own "manuscripts."

If illumination was able to take on a life of its own in medieval texts, in many cases influencing our understanding of the texts in ways wholly independent of the texts themselves, it ought to be possible, too, for us to create a separate level of existence in movies which speaks of, and yet acts independently of, the main "text."

2002-04-16 - 020416_22.html luftwaffling

Burger King's new Chicken Whopper ad is an unsettling, perspective-altered evocation of Triumph of the Will. Chickens march over the horizon to eerie, triumphal kazoo music and form crossed, not-quite-swastical patterns on the ground, goosestepping toward the farmer who waits in a high window in a silo, perhaps to address the crowd.

But then, instead, he unfurls a horrifying video banner of a chicken breast grilling over open flames.

We are then whisked away to a generic brand-identification splash screen, and we never find out the chickens' reaction. What did they think of the farmer's chicken-scary picture?

All sorts of questions arise. Had they come to the farm to impeach (perhaps to tar and feather) the farmer, the killer of chickens? Or had he lured them there, possibly with false promises (a pot for every chicken)? Was it some sort of bizarre chicken parade? A celebration? Then why the menacing, monotonous music? And why was it seemingly so carefully modeled on the Riefenstahl film?

The ad certainly captures the attention. But if this is its sole aim, it marks the complete trump of image-processing and image-regurgitation over conscious knowledge and understanding of filmcraft.

To evoke these potent images, still fresh as yesterday for many people, and yet not understand what you are evoking.... And then, by making the relationships and the meaning of the moment so ambiguous (why is the farmer smiling so cheerfully? does he have some kind of arrangement with chickens in which they march themselves, in this elaborate ritual, to the slaughter?), you turn the images into the cultural equivalent of a flashing light, a honk-honk-woo-woo -- nothing but a neon worm to draw us to the hook....

2002-04-13 - 020413_84.html the name of the nose

"Unless there be thirst, the salutary water will not assuage. Unless the soul hungers, the delicious foods of the heavenly table will not give sustenance. Unless the eyes of perception be opened, the lights of the sun will not be witnessed. Until the nostrils are purified, the fragrance of the divine rose garden will not be inhaled. Unless the heart be filled with longing, the favors of the Lord will not be evident."

-- Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace

There's a secret in this passage, a description of the human heart through metaphor. It is half desire, and half sense organ.

These five sentences look like they all have the same form, but actually the first two address the first half of the fifth sentence, and the next two address the second half. "Unless the heart be filled with longing" -- thirsting, hungering -- "the favors of the Lord will not be evident." Evident to what? To sight? To smell? These are only metaphors.

2002-01-14 - 020114_98.html THIS SITE ON HIATUS UNTIL APRIL

THX-1138 will be offline until April. I am going to Brazil to see the world, learn Portuguese, and serve the Baha'i Faith. Feel free to browse the archives (nearly 300 entries!), and be sure to drop by www.savetherobot.com in April for photos and THX-1138's travel journal, or visit them now for cool music reviews and cultural criticism.

Love to all,

THX.

2002-01-14 - 020114_92.html the sixth sick sheik's sixth sick sheep

For children, everything is difficult, and every difficult thing is equally important. This is reinforced by school and by sports, both of which are designed to reward technical rather than moral achievement. The child who says, "But why should I learn to jump rope? Why are we having a spelling bee?" is more often than not given a good tongue-lashing and set down in front of his peers as "uncooperative." And perhaps he is, after all, only stalling. But, self-serving or not, his question is the best one -- it gets at the root of education.

In Hollywood, too, it is considered a little mulish to ask about meaning or morality. It should be enough that one has perfected some little bit of special effects trickery. (Or, perhaps, a more sophisticated kind of special effect: witty dialogue, non-linear plotting, acting through a great "range"....) But to ask, "To what end? To what end beautiful scenery, to what end screenwriting cleverness, to what end magical effects?" seems, somehow, to be calling the whole game into question.

It is as though one had somehow elected to judge tongue-twisters, not by the number of similar consonants they forced one to navigate, but by the meaning of the sentences thereby formed.

2002-01-12 - 020112_88.html heart-shaped box

One of the great insights of modern science: when we say we are disgusted by the smell of death (eg, the smell of a rotting corpse), what we really mean is that we are disgusted by the smell of life -- fecundity disgusts us, when we are not the ones being fecund. Bad breath, body odor, the smell of feces -- all these are signs, unwelcome signs, that we are colonized, that life, which we often think of as tentative and about to slip away, is, in fact, abundant, rich, and inescapable. We shudder; but the shudder is not for death itself. We shudder that life should be so robust as to survive us.

Man : microbes :: rich : poor, and the rich man knows it, which is one reason he may be secretly revolted by the poor. He knows that his wealth is no protection, any more than size is a protection. He knows that if he disappeared tomorrow, his wealth would not stand as some proud monument to him, but would simply be dissolved by teeming, unstoppable life.

A dead body frozen is an interesting phenomenon -- it presents a different kind of horror. There is no smell; one is relieved; yet it should have disappeared, should have decayed, and hasn't. This is, itself, unnerving.

Or take a pickled organ. I once did a photo essay of the morgue for my college newspaper. The pathologist who showed me around was very jolly, very friendly, liked to shock people in a good-natured way. He took a heart out of a jar of formaldehyde, and explained that it was enlarged because its owner had been grossly overweight. "He died of something else, but this heart would have given out under its own weight pretty soon." He looked at me with jovial malice: "You want to touch it?" I didn't. There was something uncanny about it, a heart taken from its surroundings, yet perfectly preserved. It had been abandoned by life, in all senses. Even the microbes no longer wanted it.

There is something of the pickling in complex wills, trusts, and other legal apparati designed to maintain a coherent body of wealth after the owner is gone. One feels he has tried to create a monument to himself, in opposition to the natural order of things. The estate tax was designed, one imagines, by those who felt the uncanny in too much preservation.

2002-01-12 - 020112_73.html the first thing that comes into your head

The psychoanalytic, "breakthrough" model of screenwriting, in which the main character is placed in some stressful crucible, some intense experience usually obeying the Aristotelian unities, such as a family gathering, a reunion of old friends, or the taking of hostages, and then has a "revelation" about himself, fails, consistently and abjectly. It fails because the screenwriter doesn't know what torturers have known for centuries: people in pain are just as likely to blurt out lies as the truth. Emotional crisis is not necessarily a truth serum; in a tight fix, with no chance to think, a coherent lie may actually seem to be the truth. Taking what one says at moments of peak emotion to be the "real" thought "behind the facade" is a dangerous business. It denies the linear, ongoing nature of our experience of truth. One is not a thing, but many things; whenever we feel that we know the one, true thing about ourselves, we are almost certainly deluded; yet the delusion is never more appealing than in moments of stress.

I have found that, at the most important moments, I am almost mute, because I have nothing to say that wouldn't shrink the experience.

2002-01-06 - 020106_53.html counting Crowe

Lloyd Dobler: I'm a dick. You must think I'm a dick.

Diane Court: You're not. Lloyd, we shared the most intimate thing two people can share.

Lloyd Dobler: You shared it with a dick.

-- from Cameron Crowe's Say Anything

Vanilla Sky is, perhaps, Crowe's first honest film to date.

But first, the obligatory: it's gorgeous. Everything is gorgeous. The title is based on a character's description of an impressionist painting, and the film then proceeds to provide us with a concrete, coherent meaning for what ought to be a hopelessly dumb piece of pseudo-art-appreciation. The skies in this film are, in fact, cotton-candy pink, but the film is one vast confection, an unfolding candybox of soft, inviting beauty. The leads are beautiful, the poetic imagery is strong and appealing, the lighting and the design offer endless treats from a tasteful Miami pallette of electric blues, painterly pinks and marine greens, and everywhere one finds exquisite, perfectly shaded acting from a cast that stands almost unequalled, a dream team of bit players, including Kurt Russell, Noah Taylor, Timothy Spall, and the incredible Tilda Swinton.

Cameron Crowe is best known for his talky romantic comedies: Say Anything, Singles, and Jerry Maguire. I've always found him enjoyable, in a sickening way -- the characters telegraphing their feelings in semi-profound, semi-witty, finely-honed full paragraphs that bear absolutely no resemblance to real conversation, the plots resolving, always, on improbable reunions which fulfill, by proxy, my eager, desperate romantic need to have someone, just once, turn around and come back.

Cameron Crowe's films are the sort of films that gull you, that sell you back your childish wishes of easy reconciliation and a past ameliorated; his characters are the sort who, miraculously, phallically, can always ejaculate the true essence of their souls as soon as they feel a (narrative) climax approaching.

But in Vanilla Sky, Crowe seems, finally, to have developed a sort of critique of his own methods. Sure, all the same elements are there: the obssession with youth and with ideal romance, the snappy, not-quite real dialogue, the reunion with the beloved accomplished by a clever speech which magically erases the obstacles to happiness. But they are scrutinized in this film and given a good exorcism of all the bullshit.

Crowe does this, at first, by means of actual good writing -- writing in which the characters' smarmy justifications are undercut by their obvious motivations and by their actions. The film posits a sort of love quadrangle between the Tom Cruise character, his best friend, his female "fuck-buddy," who wants to be more, and the girl he steals from his best friend because... they are destined for each other.

They proceed with the terrible dialogue, as though someone had handed each of them their "motivation," printed neatly on a 3-by-5 index card, but this time Crowe is smart enough to play the dialogue against the characters' true motivations. Instead of explaining themselves and their view of life, endlessly, to anyone who will listen, the characters use their clever observations about life, love, and their own foibles as tools, to defuse a difficult situation or to get in bed with someone or to hurt someone or even to express a feeling, which is not the feeling described by the dialogue, but which can be communicated using the dialogue to stand for what they're feeling.

This is Dialogue 101, of course, but it represents a great improvement on Crowe's previous films and most other Hollywood romances.

In the middle of the film, things take an abrupt shift. The ambitious "fuck-buddy" turns out to have been an obssessive stalker. (One could call her a nightmare version of the John Cusack character in Say Anything -- obnoxious and pushy, but in the name of romance. It would almost have been plausible for her to have modeled herself on him.) She persuades Cruise to get into her car, then drives off a bridge with him.

Disfigured by the accident and in recurring pain, Cruise nonetheless works up the courage to seek out the girl destiny brought to him one night on the arm of his best friend. The three of them have an uneasy, painful evening together at a nightclub, and Cruise winds up literally drunk in the gutter in front of her building.

But in the pink glow of sunrise, she appears again, literally lifting him out of the gutter, forgiving his nasty behavior, and agreeing to love him. "I don't have a 'Mother Savior' bone in my body," she tells him -- and then proceeds to act as exactly that. It's the kind of move that would normally end one of Mr. Crowe's lesser films, but here it acts as a springboard into a grand paranoiac's nightmare.

Throughout the film little snippets of ads for something called "LE" -- Life Extension -- have played in the background, and as weird transformations turn friends into enemies and the world into an uncertain, shifting field against which he cannot create any sensible perspective, he follows a trail of clues back to Life Extension, where the mystery is at last revealed. Cruise, a wealthy playboy, had himself cryonically frozen not long after the night at the club. He has been living a fantasy life, a dream within a coma, in which everything from the reconciliation in the gutter onward has been a wish fulfilled. The film strongly indicates, however, that the dream couldn't last because Cruise himself couldn't believe it.

We are given, here a sort of metaphor for the relationship of Mr. Crowe's movies to reality: they portray hardship and difficulty as too easily resolved, resolved with a kiss and kind, clever words from a too-forgiving lover. The two women represent both the fiction of ideal love that Crow has been selling -- the destiny girl -- and the grim reality of trying to put that fiction into action -- the stalker.

Mr. Crowe's awareness of the difficulties which romanticism can present works effectively to control the audience's rising disbelief. The science fictional elements are less problematic than the inevitable tendency of a film like this to try to rise to some transcendent crescendo -- as the pieces all come together, a writer naturally wants to whip up our interest by reaching for grandiose conclusions. But Mr. Crowe resists admirably.

A sort of fairy godfather appears to Tom Cruise; he calls himself "tech support," and he is part of the "LE" company's "Lucid Dreaming" software. He resembles Morpheus in The Matrix: he functions as a catalyst for the dreamer's awakening. But where Morpheus is presented as a sage figure, full of wisdom, onto the truth, Tech Support is merely part of the system that creates the dreams; his wisdom is limited and worldly, because he is only a functionary.

In one of the film's best moments, he solemnly repeats a piece of wisdom from the best friend character, played by Jason Lee, a bit of genial horseshit about the need to taste the sour in life as well as the sweet; Tech Support says this while presenting Cruise with the opportunity to opt out of the dream by jumping off a tall building. At just that moment, the Jason Lee character improbably appears on the rooftop with them. He shrugs and smiles, and we know that what Tech Support is merely recycling homilies from Cruise's own mind. There is, then, no finalizing conclusion, no ultimate wisdom imparted by the god from the machine; there is only what he already knows; like everyone, at every moment, he is forced to decide for himself.

By resisting both his own cliches and the cliches of what must now be considered a mini-genre (which we might call the "is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex?" genre), Crowe manages to move us greatly and still not disappoint; he presents both our ideals of love and the obvious complications, without denying either, or allowing one "side" to "win." It's a fine piece of work, one that shows maturity and, finally, wisdom.

2002-01-03 - 020103_71.html monogamy's too cruel a rule

Falling in love, for an intellectual, can mean falling in love with an idea, or an ideology, as much as with the person herself. Small wonder, then, that he feels, always, slightly cramped, as though, hitherto unrestrained, he has been forced by love to take a single perspective on the world, in order to keep loving. And small wonder that, when it ends badly, he feels a small, guilty relief. Many and shallow are the pleasures of an uncommitted mind.

2002-01-02 - 020102_23.html to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings poses interesting questions about the nature of performance and characterization.

One tends to see the actor as the sole author of the character, with guidance from the director -- but this may no longer be so. We are used to stunt doubles, of course, but this film, which takes upon itself the peculiar challenge of attempting to make actors who are all approximately the same size appear to vary greatly in size, has taken things to unusual extremes.

Peter Jackson writes in the Times (registration required) that at one point there were four Gandalfs on set -- a stunt double, a stunt rider, a "Big Gandalf" to make the hobbits look hobbit-size, and the official "actor," Ian McKellen. Beyond this, one can also note a computer-animated Gandalf in several of the vaster panoramic shots. Mr. McKellen, it's safe to say, probably appears at most half the time that Gandalf is onscreen.

If we accept the premise that films are a form of phenomenology, that they record and present phenomena, and that an avant-garde film and a Hollywood film differ in this regard only the choice of which phenomena to study (the avant-garde studying, say, the interplay of light and shadow through glass, while the Hollywood film studies the personality, physical characteristics, and behavior of the "star") -- if, as Caveh Zahedi interprets Bazin in Richard Linklater's Waking Life, all filmmaking is a form of recording or reproducing the ongoing moment of God's creation -- then we begin to have certain problems with the observation of, not a real phenomenon, but a mental construct.

If "Gandalf" the character does not, now, have a roughly one-to-one correspondence with Ian McKellen, the actor (while recognizing, of course, that Mr. McKellen's "self" is the complete set, and "Gandalf" merely a subset, of his behaviors), then it seems we are observing, not the behaviors of an actor playing a role (and not, therefore, a specific, localized phenomenon), but an abstraction played out by any number of actors and technicians working together. It is the idea of a phenomenon, the idea of a character, rather than the specific phenomenality given to a character by a specific actor.

I can't help feeling there's something being lost, here. No doubt Mr. McKellen still maintains control of the part in all his close-ups and "dramatic" bits. Yet because of the sizing issue, he probably appears onscreen, projects his physicality through stance and gesture, far less than he would have in an ordinary film, because in all the reverses, in all the greenscreen and splitscreen shots, he simply isn't in the space. His place is taken by a double, or he acts with air.

This is a trend that's been going on for years, of course; in all special effects films, the trend is away from the actors, or even real stunt men, and toward a sort of generalized "character" who is accomplished by a variety of techniques.

The problem is not computer animation itself, or the stuntmen themselves. The problem is the lengths to which filmmakers will go to preserve the "realism" of the fictional world by pretending that the actor, the computer double, and the stuntmen are all one thing, when in fact they are not.

There is nothing wrong with a film which exploits the possibilities of the new technology -- by, say, aggressively considering the physical possibilities for a computer character which are not available to an actor, and exploiting and exploring the difference. A film like Who Framed Roger Rabbit incorporates, not just animation, but a thorough testing of the relationship between the animated characters and the actors -- every scene, every gesture, every gag contributes to the phenomenology of animation. Roger Rabbit never keeps its phenomena hidden, never conflates phenomena of two different kinds, never tries to pass them off under some umbrella "character." It gleefully exposes its techniques and then asks, "And what is wonderful about this?"

The trouble with Jacksonian illusionism is that, however well it serves the story here, it loses all the qualities of observation that are so exciting in filmmaking. The film is indebted for some of its visual design to Ralph Bakshi's 1978 version (or perhaps they simply both draw from the same well), but Bakshi's version, though crippled as storytelling and often cheap-looking, was at least fully engaged with the visual possibilities of both animation and certain special uses of live action, and it contrasted the two with sometimes dazzling, sometimes rather silly effect.

Jackson's film, on the other hand, looks magnificent and propels the story forward with surety and grace. But its characterizations and phenomenology, particularly after leaving the Shire, are smeared out like butter; they have no sharp edges. There is no single, vibrant thing which exists and is Gandalf, or is Ian McKellen -- there is only a concept of Gandalf, introduced by McKellen in the early scenes but then maintained by the audience, more as a category, a tool of reference, than a real object with which one might interact, either emotionally or intellectually.

If the writers of a film caused a character to behave uncharacteristically halfway through the film, simply to propel the plot, we would all recognize this as a failure. But shouldn't we recognize the same thing when a character's state of being is changed halfway through the film?

2002-01-02 - 020102_21.html a hop, skip, jump of faith

Religious man faces a certain puzzle, and perhaps a metaphor from Peter Jackson's lavish film of The Lord of the Rings will clarify the problem.

The motley gang of characters, our heroes, are in the Mines of Moria, an abandoned underground kingdom in which fearsome creatures still prowl. They've awakened, by accident, the dread demon of the ancient world, the balrog. They flee through a hallway that leads out to a narrow, railless stairway descending into a great, fiery chasm. Behind them, certain death; below them, certain death; forward they go, down the stairs towards safety on the other side.

The balrog shakes the earth as he approaches, causing the ancient staircase to shudder and, in places, crumble. A section in front of them falls away. The nimblest of the party leaps across, and one by one they jump or (in the case of the small hobbits) are thrown, until at last only Frodo and Aragorn are left. Then more stairs crumble away -- the two flee upward, safe for the moment, but now separated from their companions and the door by an even greater gap, one which cannot be leapt or spanned.

Then something even worse happens -- the section of staircase the two are on begins to sway. It breaks away from the wall and begins to rock, woozily, like a top about to go over. And then, nearly miraculously, it rocks forward -- closing the gap and enabling them to step across to safety. The section they had just been standing on rocks backward once more... and crumbles into the chasm.

Now here is the metaphor. One runs forward in life, confronted by obstacles, tests and difficulties. One reaches certain peak moments, moments of decision, moments in which every alternative seems bad and every support seems ready to crumble. One cannot turn back -- the past is cut off. One cannot stand still -- the ground is shifting. All seems lost, one feels hopeless -- and then the right action appears, providentially, in the mind's eye; one feels the Hand of God at work; one feels guided. And if one does not hesitate, one can step forward, make the right choice, and avoid the abyss.

But observe the problem -- one can imagine a great number of Frodos on a great number of crumbling staircases: all of humankind, each facing his or her own individual test. And as one particular Frodo steps to safety, he looks over at another -- and the other Frodo's staircase never teeters over to meet the safe side. It simply sways erratically, and falls into the pit.

Now, this metaphor can be applied two ways -- let us say, on two different levels. On the material level, one can say: "For every problem, there is a solution, which comes with faith. If one has faith, the solution will open up to him."

The religious man feels guided in his life -- pushed by life in certain directions. He feels that his tests and troubles are far from random -- that they are a communication from the Divine Physician.

This is why the religious man balks at the suggestion that people suffer needlessly -- because in his experience, none of his own suffering has been needless. It has always had some pedagogical purpose, or else was the result of his own stubbornness. Moreover, the solution always appears in time.

A critic says, "But what about material problems for which the individual may truly have no ready remedy -- terminal disease, say, or totalitarian oppression?"

But the religious man is ready for him, and bats it back: "Then the solution is reliance on God and an awareness that one's true nature is spiritual, not physical. Temporal suffering is short-lived, and only serves to remind us that this world is not the end of our existence."

Fair enough.

But this is problematic. One thing a religious life will often reinforce is the feeling that good results are correlated with good actions, and this is not always so.

And now the religious man has shifted ground on us. Before the teetering staircase was some material problem, and all one had to do was have faith and be ready to take the step when the time came.

(This is, we must remark again, often literally the case for many religious people -- their whole lives, they may bounce along with a certain Taoist, go-where-God-takes-you spirit, and it may serve them well. Rely on God, and He will ultimately see you through.)

But one can't help looking over at someone else in a similar situation, whose situation did not improve. When one is confronted with the fact that staircases do fall, often without any reprieve, one must regroup, redefine.

Perhaps those people for whom things turn out grimly have simply failed to have faith. This is possible, and is initially appealing. "The problem is not that the staircase failed to lean toward the safe side, but that Frodo failed to step across to safety."

But now one is using the metaphor in a second, different way. Before it was a material problem with a material solution -- now it is a material problem with a spiritual solution.

Again, fair enough. The metaphor now becomes about faith -- that even if the material circumstance is a disaster, there is some avenue of faith always available, so that the soul of man always arrives on top, even if the mind suffers and the body perishes.

(This is, in fact, the essence of faith: "Thou art My dominion, and My dominion perisheth not.")

The Hand of God tips the staircase, and one leans forward and steps to the spiritual safe ground.

But now we must imagine, with no small amount of Escher-like glee, a tiny little Frodo-soul inside the Frodo-body, and it, too, is on a teetering staircase -- the staircase of faith. Will the staircase lean close enough? Will he be given the opportunity to make the leap -- and have faith? How would this work? Would there be the same possibility of volition? In other words, would he have to have faith to make the leap of faith to begin with?

One can regress as far as one likes, to small and smaller staircases inside smaller and smaller Frodos, each facing a leap of faith. For there are two parts to the scene: the staircase tipping forward to safety (God's part, the part of circumstance), and the actual step itself (man's part, the part of volition).

For we are at a loss to explain faith, or the lack of faith, itself.

Let us assume that it is true -- that the Lord always provides a way, if not to solve a problem, at least to adapt to it, to grow spiritually from it, and to draw closer to Him.

Yet now each person who makes it safely to the realm of faith must confront the fact that there are others who do not. For every Frodo of faith, who, when the time comes, steps to the other side, there will be another who hesitates, and is lost.

"Well," one might say, "it is God's prerogative to treat us all differently, and to give us each different challenges. I only know my own challenges. Perhaps, for him, the fall was what was important, and at the bottom is, say, a bed of flowers, and not a fiery pit after all."

We are, then, using subjectivity to deny the existence of the circumstance itself -- that is, we deny that there are any real falls, but only things which look like falls from the outside.

This is, again, possible, but it makes for a sort of queer world, in which Hume and Nietzsche and other unrepentant atheists, and Eichmann and Stalin and others who have fallen morally, and also children who die at the hands of abusers without ever seeing the inside of a church or mosque, must also be under God's guidance, simply working out, one supposes, their "issues." This is not altogether satisfactory, either.

A man stands on the edge of the safe side of the chasm and looks back. His faith was a gift, nearly an accident, in any event not something he could count on.

Ah, but the step, the step!

2001-12-27 - 011227_53.html avoiding the prune juice finale

"Old people who are rich are not deemed old."

-- an elderly activist quoted in Studs Terkel's The Great Divide

2001-12-27 - 011227_9.html history as a horror story

We have a certain contempt for the past, a certain condescension -- we fail to believe that the people of the past knew what they were doing when they chose to put in place the system we now see as antiquated and barbaric. There may be some lip service to the inevitable awfulness of past ages -- "Well, they really had no other choice" -- but there's never any acknowledgement that we, ourselves, are in the same situation.

We look back in horror and mute astonishment, and fail really to put ourselves in the position of the people who chose kingship as the best form of government, or believers who chose to let priests rule, or women who chose to take the home and hearth as their domain. We see these systems from their endpoints, when they were crumbling and in ruin, and we feel a little tingle of fear, knowing that the world was once so unruly and wild, and the people so benighted and superstitious.

We often don't fully imagine the realities of the people of the past, see things from their perspective. We don't really believe in their capactity to make rational choices in their own best interests. We tend to think of them as dumb animals, herded into their decisions by historical forces over which they had no control. This is, of course, not true of us.

But perhaps the past was not so benighted. Perhaps the forces that shaped the peoples of the past were no more terrible, no more frightening and animalistic, no more bizarre and unfathomable, than the forces that cause us to live in single-occupant dwellings, work for obscenely wealthy multi-national corporations, and engage in, at best, serial monogamy.

Historical dilettantes and armchair anthropologists of the future will look at us (pityingly and with a little disgust), feel that we had no choice, and fail to understand the intricate calculations that each of us made in keeping the system alive; the myriad little acts of resistance that were always at play in the system; and the way that that resistance always acted as an undertow, pulling things in a new direction, even as we got most of what we wanted out of whatever system was at hand.

2001-12-25 - 011225_21.html is that a banana in your pocket, or is this an exploitation film?

Catherine Breillat's A ma soeur! (literally "To My Sister," but given the inaccurate and highly misleading English title Fat Girl) invites many beginnings, most of them passingly clever:

"Catherine Breillat's A ma soeur! asks the daring and highly interesting question, 'What is child pornography anyway, and what's so wrong with it?' "

"Catherine Breillat's A ma soeur! asks the provocative and very stupid question, 'Isn't all sex really rape?' "

"Catherine Breillat's A ma soeur! is a remarkable achievement -- the cure for sex. Upon seeing it, if you are a man, you will be too filled with shame and self-loathing to have an erection, and if you are a woman, you will avoid men like a hypochondriac avoids the lettuce in Mexico."

But all of these are dismissive, and Breillat's film deserves slightly better. Slightly.

The ad copy for the film on Yahoo.com reads as follows:

A thin 15-year-old girl, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), and her overweight 12-year-old sister, Anais (Anais Reboux), are vacationing with their parents at the beach. While Elena enjoys the attention of interested boys and flaunts her pretty young body, Anais looks on in resentful fascination. While the complexity of the relationship between the sisters is awesome, it is nothing compared to the horrible consequences of their actions.

This is as misleading as the image that accompanies it, a rather benign still of the "fat girl" of the English title slathering herself in sunscreen -- one of the few gentle and whimsical moments in the film.

I must object to the characterization of the end of the film as the "horrible consequences of their actions." What happens to them is certainly horrible, but it could only be considered a consequence of their actions by someone who believes that nothing is accidental, that everything that happens to us, however gruesome, is a result of our own wickedness. This is a hard position to maintain.

Nonetheless, the first two sentences of the ad are pretty accurate, albeit a little witless about the subtleties of the relationship between the sisters. (To say that this film is about the difficulties of being the fat younger sister is true but unsubtle -- like saying that La Joven is about how hard it is to be black.)

So where do we begin? With the above synopsis?

Is it a harmless seaside coming-of-age tale, with hard-won but uplifting lessons learned about love and life, everybody say amen? Mercifully, no.

It's a highly philosophical film, a film with a point to make, and the most calculated way of making it. It's also an honest, fascinating portrait of early adolescence for young girls, with fine performances by the two young leads, Anais Reboux and Roxane Mesquida.

But mainly, it's a horror film. It suggests, contrary to Yahoo's slovenly description, that the girls live in a world of consequences far beyond their actions, a world of alternating abuse and neglect at the hands of men. In doing this, it plugs into the primary appeal of the horror film: it releases a long-repressed childhood fantasy of outside evil -- sudden, malevolent, unavoidable, gruesome, and played out in an unending, unalterable present.

A little plot. Anais, 12, and Elena, 15, are vacationing with their parents. Elena falls in love with a much older, rather manipulative boyfriend. The boyfriend sneaks into the girls' room one night, and he and Elena have a long night of carefully negotiated sex.

Elena wants to remain a virgin, but he accuses her of forcing him to find another woman, and they eventually compromise with anal sex, followed, rather unsanitarily, by oral sex in the morning. Anais watches from her bed.

A few days later, the official defloration may or may not take place on the beach, and he gives her a ring, telling her it's an engagement ring. It turns out to be his mother's, and she shows up demanding it back.

This turns the pleasant family holiday into an intensely crabby series of quarrels between the girls and their mother as they first go shopping and eventually begin the drive home. (The father returned home early to work.) The drive is harrowing and exhausting, with giant trucks continually crowding the family car, and they stop at a rest area for some sleep. In the middle of the night, a maniac smashes in the windshield, kills Elena and the mother, and (sort of) rapes Anais. When the police come, she claims she wasn't raped; they believe her to be in shock, and she snarls, "Don't believe me if you don't want to." Freeze frame, end of movie.

All of this is very skillfully accomplished; although I haven't seen Ms. Breillat's earlier films, I am ready on the basis of this film to call her one of the most skilled filmmakers working today. She finds what Stephen King calls the "psychic pressure points" and works them as skillfully as Spielberg whipping up a crowd of children into a frenzy of adoration for a cute, adorable alien/slave/Jew/robot boy/whatever.

Or perhaps that's too much -- let us say, then, that she is as skilled as Larry Clark. Yes, that seems right. And like Mr. Clark, she uses her skill to create a sealed universe of inescapable horror which is only magnified by infrequent moments of partial and compromised tenderness.

There's a real loathing for humanity that permeates Mr. Clark's Kids and also this film; both of them seem to argue for suicide or genocide or both.

The basic point of the film -- if we're ready for this -- is that men are pigs and women are their victims. The masculine world can be divided between efficient, dictatorial men who've shut themselves off from feeling (the father, the police) and unvarnished sexual predators, whether clever (the boyfriend) or simply brutal (the killer).

The difference between Elena and Anais, according to the film, is that Elena is somewhat complicit in her victimization -- by allowing herself to fall in love with Fernando, she weakens herself, allowing his pathetic, shopworn arguments to convince her to do things she doesn't want to do.

Anais, on the other hand, maintains at the beginning of the film that it's better if your first time is with someone you don't love, and when this scenario is played out in the film's difficult semi-rape scene, she seems almost content with it.

The point is made: which is worse, really -- to be victimized by a stranger, or by someone you love? Fine. It's an interesting question. But it's a question that can't be asked of the audience without them calling on their own experience, which tends to negate the closed, binary system the film proposes.

In the absence of any information about the sexual lives of the other characters, and in the regrettable absence of any knowledge of Ms. Breillat's other works, we are forced to conclude that she sees these two options as the only real options for young girls.

But we know from experience that this is not the case. We know that many people have rather sweet, loving "first times" that don't involve victimization at all. Sometimes (perhaps, today, even most of the time) the relationship ends not long after. But this doesn't, itself, suggest predation or victimization; only the vicissitudes of youthful romance.

This is another way in which the film is functionally a horror film -- it asks us to ignore the unlikeliness of its inescapable situation, and concentrate on how awful it is. But its horror structure, though effective, undermines it as convincing drama.

The film suffers in comparison to Jennifer Montgomery's 1995 Art for Teachers of Children, a semi-autobiographical film which, like Caveh Zahedi's A Little Stiff, re-enacts real events from the filmmaker's life using amateur actors. Art for Teachers tells the story of a young girl at a boarding school who comes to have an exploitative relationship with her married dorm counsellor. He interests her in photography, and she poses nude for him. She eventually also sleeps with him. Years later, she understands that he has used and in some way abused her, yet still defends him when he's arrested for possible possession of child pornography.

It's not a particularly well-made film. Some of the camera movement and lighting is nice, especially with more abstract shots like the POV looking up at all the campus buildings when she first arrives at the school. But the dialogue is often awkward, and it's hampered by the complete amateurishness of the two actors. (This adds a peculiar element of discomfort to the proceedings, as though we were watching someone's fantasies being acted out in a home movie.) The story is also paced oddly, with several false endings.

But Art for Teachers is a more honest film than A ma soeur! It doesn't compromise its exploration of the nature of exploitation by trying to score points against men or by trying to shock. Its less diagrammatic structure leaves more fruitful avenues for those who may not agree with the filmmaker's main point. Montgomery may be less skilled and less experienced than Breillat, and her actors may be cloddish, but she is also less manipulative and more subtle in her portrayal of the hazards facing young girls.

Both films deserve credit, however, for not letting the viewer off the hook, and for raising unsettling questions about the audience's complicity in what happens on screen. A ma soeur!, at least, features underage actors in highly explicit sexual scenes -- no information is available about the age of the actors in Art for Teachers, but both films compromise us, invite us to participate in the scenes in some erotic fashion while specifically defining the characters as underage and vulnerable.

Art for Teachers goes further; in one of the last scenes, we look over a woman's shoulder as she reads through a book of nude photos, many of children and teenagers, and the film's points about the relationship between art and exploitation become bluntly, immediately personal. At what point does one stop the tape, walk out of the theatre?

(I watched to the end. By contrast, the same night I happened to see The Royal Tenenbaums, a film which lifts a lot from John Irving's sweet tales of adolescent disappointments and familial betrayal. When Luke Wilson kissed his fictional adopted sister in that film, the four people in front of me got up and left. Predictably, I stayed.)

But really this is an issue we face with all sexually explicit material, albeit an issue carefully disguised by Hollywood, as it pushes the bounds back further every year. (Depictions of erect penises and explosions of semen are now allowed in R-rated comedies -- can outright sexual intercourse be that far behind?)

It is only because these movies deal with teenagers instead of adults, and because these two filmmakers are so obviously exploring questions of exploitation and guilt, that we become uncomfortably cognizant of the moral ambiguities of sex on film.

2001-12-22 - 011222_87.html gorilla my dreams

Why the hatred of women, of femininity? What is it that allows women to hate themselves and perceive it as self-love, or that allows men to hate women, and think it the natural flow of things?

Women are women, but "woman" is a symbol, a construct with certain meanings wholly independent of the reality of individual women. And the construct "woman," in our post-Victorian, post-Darwinian schema, is a symbol of modesty, restraint, civilization, servility; she is a guard against excess, she is the anxious parent reminding us of safety and duty.

We still see this in revolting, if sometimes clever, beer commercials and sitcoms: men are impulsive, willful, silly, and childish, while women are cast as the bulwarks of decent behavior, reeling men in from their self-involved, delusional, but charming misbehavior.

In short, the hatred of women is often merely the hatred of the moral, the chaste, the decent, and the restrained in one's self.

The male is prerogative; the female submission and cooperation. Which side, then, is the religious man on, and which side the devil?

Submission and servitude; the bending of the self; these are hard taskmasters, and those with a strong sense of self must hate them a little. Nietzsche hated women, and for precisely these reasons.

Pro-porn feminism is often ascribed to self-hatred in the women who espouse it, but we must be careful here. It may actually spring from a surfeit of self-love, and a hatred of "woman," the selfless ideal.

There is no real difference between the man who buys Hustler to beat off and the pro-porn feminist who thinks that intellectually stimulating lesbian porn can act as a critique on the dominant culture.

They may frame it differently, but they have both taken the same side on a larger scale -- they both pursue the absolute liberty of the self, both reject cultural limits, shame, moderation, anything which does not allow for the instantaneous gratification of desire.

The difference, of course, is that the truck driver beating off in the john probably feels some lingering shame, and so his feelings are more complex and interesting; his rebellion is more meaningful for being conflicted. There's something positively boring about college-dorm sexual libertinism.

Facing our assigned roles in life, we are more inclined to hate the ones we cannot live up to than the ones we find merely pointless or absurd.

Women who hate motherhood, submission, and service may see weakness in themselves that men never have to face.

But men, too, should be trying to become "woman." Fatherhood, submission, and service are our divine ideals, too. One senses most keenly that men who fail with women, and come to hate them, feel in some way rejected by morality itself.

Perhaps the men who hate women the most are the ones most sensitive to how great a gulf stands between them and the ideal woman.

2001-12-19 - 011219_95.html Schweppervescence

There is a scene in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Marriage of the Blessed which achieves the grace of a simple mystery, one much more profound and interesting than the relatively mechanical suspense that is Hitchcock's unfortunate legacy.

One sees the grand entrance hall to the home of a wealthy Persian family. It is night, and the man and woman of the house are just coming home; there is only a single hall light on. But from the left hand side of the frame, bubbles keep floating into the shot. Lovely, clear, Lawrence Welk bubbles drift through the scene.

The man and woman talk as they wander in and out of rooms, getting undressed and winding down from the evening. They talk about their daughter's engagement to a man who's half-mad with shell-shock. The man looks for his pants. They walk back and forth across the hall, chatting. The bubbles continue, until finally the woman walks off-camera and brings back the retarded houseboy, who has been blowing bubbles and is also wearing his master's pajama pants.

There's nothing to this scene, really -- and yet it's magical. It helps establish a sense that things can happen, strange things, beautiful things, without warning or seeming reason. The conversation goes on so long with the bubbles that we forget to question them; the solution to the ostensible mystery is withheld for such an extended period that it fails to defuse the sudden sense of fresh possibilities which the scene brings. The logical, concrete explanation has been delayed too long; mystery obtains despite it.

2001-12-19 - 011219_18.html King Solomon's mines

The story of the soldiers entering the temple in search of gold is a parable about art. It is often understood as a story about the ignorance of the soldiers -- they enter seeking treasure, but find only God's Word in the inner sanctum, carefully tended by priests who would die to keep it safe. The irony, of course, is that to the priests, the scripture is the treasure.

But it is less often commented that the priests, too, are mistaken. The real treasure is the temple itself -- or rather, the love of the Word which the temple expresses. The treasure of the temple is in the love which inspired men to build it, and in the joy they took in doing it. The treasure of the temple is in the stonecutter's hands and the heat of the goldsmith's shop.

2001-12-19 - 011219_39.html I thought love was only true in fairy tales

Perhaps we should not tell boys so many stories of princesses. For the sweet princesses of fairy tales have a grace born of aristocracy, the natural generosity of those who have never wanted. No -- no more of princesses -- let us tell our boys stories of thick-waisted peasant girls, girls with hard hands and hearts made brittle by suffering. For by the time they are wise enough to recognize a princess, she will have become a washerwoman anyway.

2001-12-12 - 011212_62.html I'd do anything, for your smile, anything

Falling in love is so pleasurable, at least in part, because it makes one a servant. With one's lover, at least, one is forbearing; one is patient; one goes out of one's way. With a lover one is always willing to serve, to abstain, to make sacrifices. Biology forces one to behave toward at least one person the way one ought to behave toward everyone. It is the religious ideal fulfilled by hormonal fiat -- "Thou shalt prefer thy lover to thyself." This is the secret of marriage, and the reason it is a commandment and an obligation. Sex will make us moral.

2001-12-09 - 011210_58.html dancing on air

Perhaps dance demands a certain visual abstraction to make its grace and precision apparent. This would account for the simplification of the mise-en-scene of musicals in the transition from black-and-white to color. Compare the rather complex visual design of the background in a Fred Astaire RKO dance or a Marx Bros. musical routine to the simplicity of an On the Town or an Oklahoma dance sequence. In the latter, color films, visual design is often simplified to the point that dancers appear on a flat field of a single color, dancing in an abstracted nowhere that emphasizes the movements of the bodies.

Part of this may have to do with the increasing marginalization, as time went on, of the dance sequences into realms of fantasy or at least expressionism, rather than being naturalistic, diegetic expressions of character. But part of it, too, may have to do with color adding another dimension of complexity to the picture -- or, to think about it another way, perhaps black-and-white, lacking color, is already a simplification, an abstraction of the visual field, making it easier to see the dance moves. When color is introduced, it can, without careful control, muddy the field a bit. Hence, in the later, color films, one sees certain design strategies which sacrifice naturalism in favor of clean, clear figuration of the dancers.

2001-12-08 - 011208_89.html there's something unspeakable in me, and it's not gas

One of my favorite passages in the Baha'i Writings goes:

How great the multitude of truths which the garment of words can never contain! How vast the number of such verities as no expression can adequately describe, whose significance can never be unfolded, and to which not even the remotest allusions can be made! How manifold are the truths which must remain unuttered until the appointed time is come! Even as it hath been said: "Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, nor can everything that he can disclose be regarded as timely, nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the capacity of those who hear it."

This is a passage about the nature of the relationship between truth and expression, and it stands in opposition to both the modernist/scientific belief that everything can be known and expressed and the post-modernist dogma that the only truth in the world is what can be expressed in language. It is the only plausible religious viewpoint, it seems to me, and it sets the Baha'i Faith apart from the modernist context in which it first emerged. We are a religion, not a feel-good cult of rational optimism, and it is this passage which makes that clear.

Baha'u'llah cannot reveal all truth to us. Why not? Well, not everything He could disclose could be regarded as timely -- some information, obviously, is not yet relevant or even sensible -- and we, His hearers, are not necessarily ready to hear it.

But the primary reason, the most interesting and compelling and religious reason Baha'u'llah cannot divulge everything He knows is that there are things He knows which cannot be expressed.

One feels this, too, in the life of the ordinary individual, and it is the root of the religious impulse -- the feeling that one can feel things and know things which cannot quite be expressed. One of the characters in Richard Linklater's Waking Life suggests that time is an illusion, because all of life is really a single moment, the moment of God asking a question, and the individual answering "Yes" or "No." And I feel this most intensely, all the time now, regarding the choice between feeling that there is something personal and ineffable within me, and feeling that the only reality is the "objective" one which can be expressed.

There is a tension in Baha'u'llah's writings -- maybe in all religious writings -- between the sentiments expressed in the following passages:

No one else besides Thee hath, at any time, been able to fathom Thy mystery, or befittingly to extol Thy greatness. Unsearchable and high above the praise of men wilt Thou remain for ever. There is none other God but Thee, the Inaccessible, the Omnipotent, the Omniscient, the Holy of Holies.

and

First and foremost among these favors, which the Almighty hath conferred upon man, is the gift of understanding. His purpose in conferring such a gift is none other except to enable His creature to know and recognize the one true God--exalted be His glory.

or sometimes expressed in a single passage:

Too high art Thou for the praise of those who are nigh unto Thee to ascend unto the heaven of Thy nearness. (emphasis mine)

Like Sally Kellerman reading Molly Bloom's speech, I want to shout, "Yes! Yes! and I say Yes!" God, through the universe, asks a question, and I say, "Yes! Yes! There is something about me which cannot be expressed. Yes! I am like You, O Lord, in exactly that way." But I don't know if it's true.

One paradoxically hopes for a God who is both secret and familiar, who is "The most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden." What is it we want? We want two Gods, and find instead one God Who seems to encompass both traits. We want a God Who is above us, "immeasurably exalted." We like the idea of a majestic God above our concerns -- "My Majesty is My gift to thee." At the same time, we hope for a God who is near to us and knows our secret selves: "I have breathed within thee a breath of My own Spirit, that thou mayest be My lover."

2001-12-06 - 011206_46.html phototropism

My friend Lacey moved to Chicago, but she's got a pretty cool photo-weblog site up at lay-c.com. Really nice stuff -- she just got a digital camera, and she's got quite an eye.

2001-12-04 - 011204_51.html how tasty was my little Huxley

A friend sent this to me recently:

"Eccentricity. . . . It's the justification of all aristocracies. It justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you're to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That's the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself---often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and the new-fangled thinker don't inspire it with that fear and loathing, and disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is a sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of Poor Whites--colonial at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport themselves---often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it offers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites, en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of the ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations; the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then? Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile knowledge? Will Anne . . ."

"And you," said Anne, interrupting him, "will you be allowed to go on talking?"

"You may rest assured," Mr. Scogan replied, "that I shall not. I shall have some Honest Work to do."

Aldous Huxley: Chrome Yellow, 1921

I wrote this in response:

Funny you should send me this, P----; just today I've spent the whole day watching movies that deal, in one way or another, with colonialism, and the problem of leisure. I watched two Brazilian films, Quilombo and How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, and an American film, You Can't Take It With You. Your quote has inspired the following torrent of commentary:

The two Brazilian films are explicitly about colonialism: the first is a story of slave revolts in the 17th and 18th centuries, in which black slaves escaped and formed their own free communities in the mountains, while the second is about a Frenchman mistaken for a Portuguese and taken prisoner by cannibal Indians.

Watching Quilombo is like sticking your head into a barrel of Afrocentric propaganda and not coming up for breath for two hours. But it's pretty enjoyable nonetheless, particularly if, as is the case for me, Afrocentric propaganda and revolutionary utopianism bring you pleasantly back to a 1970's childhood. In Quilombo, the revolutionary condition is seen, ideally, as a freeing of all peoples (including Europeans) from the European division between the working class and the playing classes, and, indeed, from the division between work and play itself. In its more idyllic moments, it suggests that all will work and work will be joyful, like play, in the revolutionary utopia.

But it also suggests that this condition can't be maintained for very long, because it threatens the wealth and the interests of the enslaving powers. In the end, the quilombo becomes a sort of dream for which the revolutionaries are constantly fighting. They have no time for either work or play, but instead live the grueling lives of guerrillas.

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is a better, more thoughtful film, though its photography often seemed, like that of ethnographic films, poorly exposed and too contrasty. But it is an ethnographic film of sorts -- albeit one with a fairly upfront agenda. The Frenchman of the title is brought into the tribe as a Portuguese slave. (He tries to explain that he is French, and therefore their ally, but the Indians, unable to tell one white man from another, believe him to be Portuguese anyway. There's a very funny sequence in which he and another prisoner are told to speak, so the Indians can compare their accents; frightened, they can't think of anything to say, and so end up reciting recipes for fried eel.) The chief warns him that they will eat him, but in the meantime, they teach him to fight and to farm, give him a lovely wife, and take him to war against another tribe.

Interspersed between the scenes are quotes from European colonials about the savageness of the natives in Brazil, but their savagery ends up seeming much more humane and gentle than the enslavement of the blacks and Indians under the Portuguese. The Frenchman is at least given a chance to live for a while, and to be treated honorably, as an enemy, rather than as a chained and beaten animal.

It reminds me of the argument that cockfighting is actually more humane that poultry farming, because prior to their death in the cockfight, the cocks are well-fed, free to roam, generally pampered, and allowed to live longer than food poultry are. It's an interesting film; particularly good is the fairly erotic scene between him and his wife, in which they playfully act out the death ritual. It's sex play, in a way, but she's also preparing him, very seriously, for his role as the enemy of the tribe, and for how to die as a brave. It's a tough, complex scene.

By contrast, You Can't Take It With You is downright disingenuous about both colonialism and leisure. It's a fine film, in some ways -- Jimmy Stewart is his usual terrific self, and Frank Capra had a gift for getting very natural, spontaneous performances out of actors who had to do some very silly things.

The movie is about a family of eccentrics who "do what they want, when they want," led by feisty-but-charming old Grandpa, who was a banker until "one day I realized I wasn't having any fun." The idea of fun as the basis for a moral system is enough to make most philosophers quiver, but these guys take it as far as they can.

The film's central themes -- that the pursuit of money doesn't lead to happiness, and that wealth is to be found in friendship, fun, and creativity -- are, on their own, no worse than any of the rest of the muddle-headed romanticism one finds cluttering up screenplays ancient and modern. But they're savagely, brutally undercut by two key points -- the film never spells out how this family stays alive (though it's hinted that Grandpa has some money socked away, and all of them have little hobbies that presumably bring in a certain amount of money), and they keep a black housekeeper and servant to do all the cooking, cleaning, and shopping.

The family is supposed to be a kind of attainable leisure class -- the film strongly suggests that anyone can simply give up ordinary drudgery and take up his dream if he so chooses. This is made explicit when Grandpa seduces a bank clerk away from his adding machine and back to their house to begin a new life as an inventor of toys. Yet the costs of leisure are only marginally and unsatisfactorily addressed -- most shamefully because it's obvious that the servants do the lion's share of the maintaining and daily drudgery in the house, but also disingenuously, because their income is never satisfactorily explained.

There's also a totally gratuitous scene in which Grandpa humiliates a sputtering IRS man, challenging him to define what it is government does. The writers totally undermine the IRS man here, leaving him flapping in the wind, though during the Depression, particularly, it must have been painfully obvious exactly what good the government could and did do. Indeed, in another scene, the servants specifically talk about being on government relief. I wish I could say this was intentional commentary on Grandpa's attitudes toward government, but in context it struck me as nothing but mildly racist humor at the expense of the black characters. (Substitute the word "welfare" for "relief" and the racial stereotype becomes obvious and immediately unpleasant.)

But what does the film propose in place of government assistance? A sort of naive communism, actually, of the variety proposed at the end of a much better Capra film, It's A Wonderful Life. Capra's theory seems to be that if a person is decent and kind and lives life well, then when he gets into a spot of trouble, all his friends and neighbors will rush to give him money. The defining principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his popularity."

2001-11-27 - 011127_59.html I prefer not to

Or, to think of this in a broader way, outside the scope of parenting: there is, in general, something tiring about all this drama -- something that tries our patience.

To take another example: one would almost rather have an honest drunk than someone who makes a big secret out of it, struggles with it for years, goes on and off the wagon, and never really licks it. This, even though during his sober periods, the latter person might contribute greatly to society, might be a decent citizen and loyal family man.

Or take temper. One can adjust to a thoroughgoing bastard, someone who's just sharp and rotten all the time. But one feels a certain annoyance with people who are sunny one day, snappish the next. It is so obvious that they know the right thing to do -- why don't they just do it?

Or again with laziness -- nothing can frustrate an employer more than an employee who is intermittently spectacular at his job. One doesn't wish to fire someone with such capacity -- but what to do with him the rest of the time, when he may be sullen, sluggish, and bored?

There is something terribly galling about someone who is only good or evil on a whim, or in a mood.

2001-11-25 - 011125_30.html banana Nazi

In the market, I discover a hideous, frightening faultline, a seam in my character.

The woman standing next to me argues with her small son, who wants a banana. He pulls out the ace too early -- he starts crying. Annoyed and embarrassed (possibly because he's making noise in front of me), she hits him, and I cringe.

I'm embarrassed for her -- embarrassed at her lack of control, embarrassed that she's so lost in her own world that she's not embarrassed for herself. Mostly, I'm saddened that she feels it's still okay to hit a child in public, that none of us will call her on it. And she's right.

But the boy only cries louder when she hits him. I expect another hit -- but instead she says, "I'm sorry." And I discover that I despise her for it.

I despise her for the weakness, the vacillation. Follow through, I think. Stand by what you've done, or he won't respect you. A moment before, I was silently disgusted by the violence; now I'm silently disgusted that she repented -- that she could not even be a convincing brute.

There's a weakness in my reaction that troubles me -- a need for order and consistency that makes possible fascism and also the glamorization of criminals, a perversion of the notion of character which equates it with single-mindedness.

2001-11-23 - 011123_33.html i can no longer shop happily

Small omens portend grave ills. In the supermarket, I notice that I have about fifteen different bags. When I get to the parking lot, I discover that the bagger has bagged practically everything separately.

It's a sign, I think -- a sign that he's given up, that he's beaten. Rather than risk packing the bags wrong (say, canned goods on top, bread on the bottom), my bagger has turned the responsibility back on me by packing everything separately. Eggs? Separate bag. Bread? Separate bag. Fruit? Separate bag.

Too ethical or too scared to do a bad job, but lacking the training or the time to do a good job, he simply elects to do no job at all. Every item gets its own bag, and it's up to me to pack them correctly in the back of my truck so that nothing gets crushed.

Is this store policy? Surely not. But is it passive aggression? In either case, what sort of life is this person leading? Either he's had all responsibility removed from him by policy, or he's decided to decline any responsibility. This is some last, horrid, desperate stage of life.

2001-11-22 - 011122_15.html reach out and touch someone

When one is approached on the street, one often feels a mixture of spontaneous joy and apprehension. There is always the spark, the hope, that this stranger has taken an interest in you for yourself.

There is something quite magical about the first moment of communication between strangers -- perhaps about nothing at all: the time, or directions. Do you know where the Plaza is? Yes, you're headed in the right direction. It's not the next light, but the one after; it's on your right. There's a diner just before it, call the Majestic, and then you'll see it.

Or perhaps you've both come from the same place. Were you here for the test? Yeah. What did you think? It was easier than I thought it would be.

Or something happens. Look -- you can see the fireworks from here. We tried to go last year, but we got to the train late and had to watch them from the station. Where do you live? Decatur. I thought Decatur had their own fireworks.

We're all waiting for an excuse. Who thought up this idea that we'd all walk around ignoring each other, anyway?

Yet when someone approaches for no reason -- without an excuse -- we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. No matter how friendly and casual the greeting, no matter how compelling the story, no matter how much one may wish, in one's heart, to believe that this conversation is truly spontaneous, one always has the feeling that pleasure is about to turn to disgust.

One always waits for the pitch. Listen -- I don't mean no harm, you know, but I'm trying to get back to my sister's house, my sister's house, and she lives out in Cicero. I don't mean no harm to nobody, but if you could help me out with some change....

I often have this feeling, too, with advertising -- especially advertising that catches me unawares. I'll be changing channels, and some image, some word or sound, some color catches me, makes me linger momentarily. I am intrigued. There are often moments of great beauty in advertising, and you don't always see the pitch coming. Some mendicants don't look or smell any different from you.

(And sometimes, even when you know it's coming, you can somehow suspend your disgust for a few moments; there's a pleasantness to conversation, if the person seems harmless. Why not stop and talk, even though you know where this is leading?)

But it's the same feeling.

There's a certain feeling you get from art. Art is a stranger, trying to engage you. It starts a conversation; it breaks taboo; it goes against convention. That is, it shows an interest. Art is not content to sit across the subway car from you and pretend you don't exist; art says, "Who are you? I want to know -- and I have something to tell you."

I was once in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sitting on the benches next to the window. It was a dark, rainy afternoon, and my companion and I were exhausted.

We watched a young man outside for a while. He was clearly waiting for someone. We watched him, and he watched us. Finally, he came to the window. He put his hand against the window and pointed at it. I looked at my friend; she shrugged. He pointed at his hand again. Tentatively, I put my hand against the window, too, so that we were hand-to-hand. He smiled and gave me the thumbs-up.

He walked away and looked for his friend some more. Then he came back to the window, faced away from us, and put his foot on the window. So I stood up and put my back to the window and placed my foot over his. He grinned, thrilled. He walked away again.

Then he came back and put his behind against the window. I thought we might be edging into creepy territory. I looked at my friend again, but now she got up and pushed her behind against the glass. So I did it, too.

The guy smiled winningly, and, knowing he'd embarrassed me with the last one, put his forehead to the window next. I put my head to his. We smiled at each other.

Eventually, his friend came, and he walked into the museum. He never spoke to us, but he waved as they strolled across the lobby. We waved back, and laughed.

And this is why advertising is so revolting -- because it pretends to be one thing, and ends up being another. Because it hasn't the dignity to launch straight into its sales pitch, but instead wants to make conversation, wants to pretend at new friendship. It shows you something, it reaches out to touch, it makes contact, and then it makes its pitch.

One feels, then, that advertising, if it must exist, should be bad advertising. As a filmmaker, one feels a moral duty not to contribute to advertising for this reason. Advertising should be left to hacks and people who don't know what they're doing. It should announce itself as what it is. It should renounce both cleverness and beauty. If it is beggary, it should be honest beggary.

There's a line of thought in popular culture right now that a clever filmmaker can turn advertising into something grander and finer than a mere sales pitch -- and indeed, the greater the advertising budget, the closer the ads come to pure abstraction. Mercedes-Benz produces short subjects on the beauty of mechanical engineering. Calvin Klein has created a whole industry of gorgeous erotic photography. The Gap runs the only viable musicals left, exhilirating dance scenes that swing from vibrant celebrations of youth to out-and-out Busby Berkeley visual patterning.

But I... I favor Wal-Mart's pokey, hokey commercials. They focus squarely on price; their jingles are terrible renditions of corny standards; the lighting is flat; the concepts are prosaic. Wal-Mart's ridiculous dancing smiley-face campaign shows a complete indifference to art, grace, subtlety, and beauty -- and so is respectable.

2001-11-18 - 011118_76.html lazy eye of the tiger

A small moment in Rocky IV reveals Sylvester Stallone's gracelessness, clumsiness as a director, so that despite the relative strength of the first half of his script and the attentive, serious performances, we should not be surprised when the whole thing goes to pot in the second half.

(Stallone and Carl Weathers are solid, as always, but Dolph Lundgren is particularly nice: he presents Ivan Drago as a squeaky-clean country boy who's appalled by all the showboating on both sides. Most of the time he looks a little lost -- except, of course, when he reverts to the stone face of his professional persona. There's a great moment during the second fight -- and I'm snottily inclined to attribute this to Lundgren and some clever editor rather than the negligent director -- where he sees the gigantic poster of himself and the fireworks going off all around it, and his look of embarrassment reminds us that Apollo Creed, too, was heralded by fanfare and fireworks and spectacle, just before Drago crushed him.)

The small moment, then: at Apollo's funeral, the director chooses to start with a long shot of mourners standing around the grave. A gravestone dominates the foreground. To get both the mourners and the stone in focus, the shot is taken with a diopter -- a special lens with two halves somewhat out of alignment with one another, so that the right side of the frame focuses in one plane, while the left side focuses in another. To be clear: the stone is on the right, Apollo's grave is on the left, and they are probably fifty feet apart.

Now, on the left side, all the mourners are in focus. But, scanning across the screen from left to right -- all of a sudden, the mourners fall out of focus! There is an obvious, annoying fault line running down the middle of the screen. Then scan across further -- and you find the stone, perfectly in focus!

Would it have been so hard to stage the scene so that all the mourners were to the left of the diopter divide? Or, failing this, couldn't we just have lived without the damned stone?

2001-11-18 - 011118_41.html our love smells of mothballs

Summer is the season for sins of excess,
Winter for sins of melancholy.
Beware both kinds of sin,
And try to see God's purpose in every season.

Think how you fall in love --
in summer you chase each other

like fireflies

and brush against naked flesh
and smell the spice and salt of your beloved's scalp;
You talk philosophy and new plans
and how to change the world.

But in winter you lie together

limp and tangled

like vines gone dormant and brown,
And in quiet murmurs
in warm rooms
Try just to remember the world
and so keep it alive.

Would you change your lover with

the season,

Folding love carefully
And placing it in the cedar trunk
at the foot of the bed
Until it's needed again?

Or would you,
things growing colder,
Leave love out on the lawn

like so much patio furniture,

Until the season of iced tea

and Chinese lanterns
and lingering twilights

Returns, and you feel again

like celebrating?

2001-11-18 - 011118_81.html we are marching to Praetoria

"All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization." In this verse of Baha'u'llah, which we Baha'is are prone to put on our mantles, above our doors, in large gold letters over posters of jubilant, multi-ethnic crowds, are all the secrets and paradoxes of our religion.

"All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization." I had dinner with friends last night, very fine, decent people, who do no special harm in the world. We ordered massive, fruity drinks and heaping portions of food, more than we could finish. We talked about shopping and our favorite episodes of The Simpsons and the people we worked with. We told the same jokes we always had. It made me sad.

Man is not meant to feed at the trough, to have his wants satisfied, to let happiness become a matter of course. The next sentence in the passage goes, "The Almighty beareth Me witness: To act like the beasts of the field is unworthy of man." Mind you, not the beasts of the forest -- not the tigers and snakes and so on. The beasts of the field -- the domesticated animals, the cattle and the sheep. Man is an ambitious creature, in the best and worst senses -- but whether he proceeds in a spiritual manner or a worldly one -- whether he becomes a Saint Peter or a Tsar Peter -- he would despise himself if he did not proceed at all.

"All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization." In this, too, is an answer to the plaint, often disingenuous but occasionally very real, "Oh Lord -- why did you make me so low? Why so weak, so imperfect, so thoroughly sinful on the one hand, and so subject to the winds of fate on the other?"

There is some confusion, still, in our minds.

Suppose we have made some progress, in some aspect of life, whether personally, or as a civilization. We are glad to be better than we were before, we take pride in our accomplishments, we look back with shame, scorn, or at least amusement at our former selves. Yet at the same time, we often harbor a certain resentment against God that we must still be lower now than we could be. Yet it is logically obvious that the two are necessarily linked. "All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization" -- which means that all men have been created lower than they might be, weaker than they might be, in order to advance.

2001-11-17 - 011117_71.html on your toes

Another way of looking at redemption: We don't know whether we want God to be rigorous or personal. Suppose He establishes the Law, and those who accord with the Law are saved, and those who don't are damned. Or suppose again that He makes a decision to forgive everyone -- a sort of general amnesty, to clear His books.

In both cases, there's something a little too mechanical about it -- forgiveness seems reduced to another mechanical law, another predictable element in the universe. Grace loses something of the miraculous when it becomes a given.

There is something startling, disturbing, but awe-inspiring in Muhammad's statement that God bestows "His grace on such of His servants as He pleaseth." When the Baha'u'llah writes:

How often hath a sinner, at the hour of death, attained to the essence of faith, and, quaffing the immortal draught, hath taken his flight unto the celestial Concourse. And how often hath a devout believer, at the hour of his soul's ascension, been so changed as to fall into the nethermost fire.

it touches a certain hidden nerve in the religious mind. It strikes at our desire for a capricious God -- a God whose grace is unpredictable, uncertain, always slightly out of reach... and therefore magical when attained....

2001-11-16 - 011116_82.html all the little lassies go this way and that way

All sorts of philosophical problems seem to come down to our inability to make up our minds about how the world ought to be. That is, if we knew how we wanted things to be, we could more easily devise a philosophical system that would sit comfortably in our minds.

Juliet says to Romeo,

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

But, of course, Romeo's love is like the moon -- he has just, within the month, been despondently in love with Rosaline. Now, of a sudden, he loves Juliet?

Juliet wants his love fixed, constant -- yet a fixed and constant heart would never allow for the love of Romeo and Juliet. Constancy in love implies a certain inertia -- it denies both sudden starts and sudden endings. Like a great mass, such a love takes considerable force to get it started and considerable force to make it stop.

Now, you may say, "Well, what she really wants is for his love to be somehow eternal -- that is, pre-existent and unchanging, so that the suddenness we perceive in their love is really the suddenness of discovery. Perhaps they loved each other ever, each being the ideal of the other, but their souls only became aware of this love by being presented with the embodiment of those respective ideals."

But how does one distinguish this eternal love from mere whimsy? Since from the outside they appear identical, only feeling makes it so. And this means that the love is constant only so long as the feeling is constant.

To remove from love all sense of habit, duty, formality, institution, custom -- to make it a matter of a good feeling -- to say that the love ends when the euporia wears off.... We see that we are very far from the constant love Juliet desires.

What was it we wanted from love when we started? Was it constancy in feeling, or only in effect? For surely even thirteen-year-old Juliet can see that constancy in feeling is impossible -- after all, he can't be "in love" all the time, even when he's asleep, or sick, or on the toilet. But we're afraid of calling love a duty. (There's something unpleasant about it, even though habit and duty are, surely, what keep a love alive.) It smacks, somehow, of being there against one's will.

Likewise in theology, we run into this problem: we don't know what we want God to be. On the one hand, there is the God of Paul, or in the Baha'i Writings, "the All-Forgiving," Who effaces our sins. This is very comforting, but also appalling. Who wants to worship a God who forgives Pol Pot?

We feel powerless to effect justice in this world, and wish for some measure of retribution in the next. Yet, by offering forgiveness to all who ask, God seems to throw the problem of moral justice back on us. This is not an easy position to take, though it seems fair to point out that Pol Pot exists only by common agreement -- that is, by the agreement of armies and supporters, and by the lack of any opposing, more just candidate for leadership.

Perhaps even the desire for justice is only a concern of this world. Perhaps seeking justice in the next world is still a sign that one is not fully detached from this one.

2001-11-10 - 011110_80.html I never dreamed you'd leave in summer

You can't move in autumn.

We set our couches (inherited from relatives, a nice tan set, faded from the original pink)
out on the driveway,
and the leaves fell and collected on them,
cheerfully threatening to bury them like the past --
or maybe to get away from us,
down between the cushions,
little brown stowaways on an adventure to New York,
waiting to surprise us years later like memories,
showing up in an alien environment where their trees don't grow,
isolated reminders of something rooted somewhere else.

2001-11-02 - 011102_95.html Socrates' lovers

Does one really read the philosophers for their ideas? I find myself constantly distracted by their whimsy, the homeliness of their examples, the sweet idiosyncrasy of their personalities. When, in the course of making a rather serious point, Wittgenstein suddenly, and amusingly, refers to someone divining water with a divining rod, it is as though the whole enterprise of his philosophy existed in order that he might share this one colorful bit of fantasy.

2001-11-02 - 011102_87.html you'll know it when it happens

Man on Porch: Kiss her! Why don't you kiss her instead of talking her to death?

George Bailey: You want me to kiss her, huh?

Man on Porch: Aw, youth is wasted on the wrong people!

-- from It's a Wonderful Life

When the time is right, I never know it.

You send me signs, and I see them as one sees mile-markers on the highway -- in passing, too late.

You sent me, O Lord, one woman as a sign, as a sign that I have no business with signs. It was a clear, brilliant Chicago night, and we walked to the store, and then I came back to her room, where she lit candles, and changed into pajamas, and crawled into her bed, and asked me to sit with her, and put my arm around her -- and only then did the notion form that she wanted me to kiss her.

But other than that, I've never known when was right. I've always asked, and spoiled the moment.

Oh God, I can't even do what men do naturally. How, then, can I interpret the least of Your signs?

I cannot read the body of the woman next to me. How can I read the body of this world for clues to Your design?

Oh Lord, I am a clueless lover, and You are too shy.

2001-11-02 - 011102_54.html our Sunday best

Photographers, filmmakers: let's fool posterity! Let's make them believe that this time was the most beautiful time to be alive -- that everything was shining, glimmering, fantastic, unearthly in its beauty. Let us show them, not every angle of a thing, but only what makes it special and unique. Let's make them jealous of the past, and anxious to make their own world as gorgeous as we've convinced them ours was.

2001-10-28 - 011028_10.html the weakest link

Too often, especially in film criticism, we celebrate an artist's failures, because they are easy to categorize, and ignore his true accomplishments.

The auteur theory, while useful in redefining film as art, created by the individual conscience, rather than as product created by the "genius of the system," proceeds in a rather peculiar way, especially in its American scholarly variants. In order to make the theory a provable (and therefore marketable) piece of scholarship, rather than (as it often was for the French Cahiers critics) a defiant polemical stance, scholars have insisted on cataloguing a filmmaker's thematic obssessions or stylistic tics, to the point of excluding parts of an artist's canon which didn't seem to fit the pattern.

But these patterns (Hitchcock's Freudianism, Capra's small-town humanism, Ford's repeated apposition of civilization and wilderness) are frequently the intellectual failures in the canon. An artist strives to put forth new ideas, in the same way as a philosopher or scholar might. And just as we have little respect for a scholar who creates a revolutionary theory in his twenties and thirties, but then spends the rest of his life on the defense of that theory, rather than striving for new and more mature ideas, so we should suspect an artist who repeats himself.

The repetition, the patterns, if done consciously, can represent a reworking of the same ground through more mature eyes. But in many cases -- unfortunately, in many of the most sanctified cases in the "auteur" canon of traditional film scholarship -- what has happened is that the filmmaker started out toward a new line of thought, but found himself incapable of escaping the pull of the familiar. He reverts to learned patterns rather than completing an original new thought. In essence, he plagairizes himself, and in so doing limits himself.

One feels this all the time, as an artist -- the danger of going back to the same place without new wisdom.

2001-10-24 - 011024_90.html zen and the art of the standard shift

Discipline is the foundation of effortless bliss. But an obssession with discipline is about as useful to the spiritual life as an obssession with the clutch pedal is to good driving. Clutch operation should be an unconscious gesture, not an accomplishment.

2001-10-23 - 011023_40.html the Vulcan nerve pinch

Self-awareness, yes; examine your feelings; but incessant probing only numbs the spot.

2001-10-23 - 011023_73.html hippo in a tutu, or, La Giaconda

A failed attempt to be casual is more embarrassing than honest passion.

But perhaps through these failures we learn how to be graceful -- we learn the form of grace first, and then over time it shapes us into more graceful people.

2001-10-21 - 011021_75.html must be in want of a wife

There's something in the order of the sisters, and the form their loves take, in Pride and Prejudice. If the older sisters outrank the younger ones in Austen's fictional society, perhaps their loves take the same order in the moral structure of her novel. Lizzie and Darcy are, to be sure, the center of the novel, and their love clearly outranks the degraded passion of Lydia and Wickham. But Jane and Bingley, who love without complication or internal struggle, but with hope and unfailing kindness, seem to love best.

Of the four marriages in the book, we can see a kind of schematic: the three Bennett girls who marry -- Lydia, Lizzie, and Jane -- all marry for some kind of love, while Charlotte Lucas marries for convenience and income. So, within the family, love, and outside the family, economics. (These two forces are always in conflict in Austen.) But within love, there are different categories of love. Roughly, these are:

Misguided, self-centered passion (Lydia)

Difficult, prickly, cautious love (Lizzie)

Easygoing, selfless love (Jane).

We find different degrees of morality here: If Lydia is pure id, Lizzie is wisdom and maturity. She can be charmed, but rarely fooled, and never compromised, because she always behaves morally. This is a fine station, and perhaps the station Austen herself belonged to. Certainly she spends the most time on Lizzie.

But there seems to be another station, beyond that one. It is, perhaps, the station of saints; that of the person who has gone beyond practical wisdom to an unblemished love inspired by the purity of her own soul. Bingley and Jane both have this quality; as the dialogue indicates, they are determined to see the good in everyone. "And why not?" is Bingley's simple reply.

I'm again reminded of one of my favorite passages in the Baha'i Writings:

"71. O SON OF MAN! Write all that We have revealed unto thee with the ink of light upon the tablet of thy spirit. Should this not be in thy power, then make thine ink of the essence of thy heart. If this thou canst not do, then write with that crimson ink that hath been shed in My path. Sweeter indeed is this to Me than all else, that its light may endure for ever."

-- Baha'u'llah, The Hidden Words

We all get there in the end, but there are different, easier, better ways of going than that tenacious, difficult struggle that some of us make of things, love included.

2001-10-21 - 011021_65.html mirror imagery, as I pull a lexical magic trick

Love as money:

What do we know about love as an economic force? There is a whole underground economy of love, a marketplace in which ordinary market considerations are undermined -- an economy which must have its effect on the mainstream economy, but which stands apart from it, part anomaly, part rejoinder.

We must be specific in our analysis of this economy of love; it includes only a certain kind of transaction. We speak here not merely of gifts, which are a separate thing, but of actual business transactions which are mitigated by love.

I can't