Over the last month and change I have foregone blogging on the image culture partially due to a need to pursue other things, but primarily, I must admit, due to frustration at the films I was seeing and the fact that I have been so profoundly uninspired in terms of generating a need or desire to toil with language adequate to their too-often-too-paltry demands. Part of my frustration is that the films themselves so often use the same visual language the way a speaker might use clichés (nothing really new there), and that in the wake of a new renaissance in American cable television feature films these days very often seem so utterly slight in comparison. I have nonetheless been confronting a steady volley of film texts, sinking into them to the best of my ability, or combing across their denuded surfaces when it serves me, whether at the theater or on my laptop, mulling them over, and certainly finding plenty to digest, assimilate, or otherwise reincorporate into an underlining personal metatext. It’s just that I’m not sure what I want to say. Along with this comes the ever-present voice of blogger doubt: why and for whom am I even bothering to say anything? The answer is of course that it helps to make what I am experiencing and where I am at intelligible to myself, while at once at least attempting to reach out and start a kind of conversation, if finally perhaps only a theoretical one. What is most affecting me right now in cinema is the rendering of private moments, oftentimes serving purposes for me independent of the texts in which they are contained. Perhaps because so much of my life is occupied by time with myself, much of my rebuilding of myself stemming from a post-ironic need to affirm that I even am a self to begin with. One of the moments in recent cinema that touched me the very most occurs near the beginning of Clint Eastwood’s Invictus; a scene depicting Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela making his barely ruffled bed after slipping obsequiously out of it in the morning, very much a man still habituated to the procedural protocol of day-to-day prison life, not unlike a kind of especially dehumanized barracks life (or my no-so-long-ago life in hospitals, psych wards, and rehabilitation centers, where the first things I would do each morning would be to pull the corners of two sheets back over the small lonely looking spot where I had just slept). That this seemingly inconsequential private moment speaks infinitely more to me, and in so much deeper a register, than the portentous scene that precedes it in which Madiba’s motorcade passes along a road between opposing fields with athletes lined up along a fence looking on – on one side white rugby players standing stolid and dismayed, the coach going so far as to foresee the end of civilization as they know it, as on the other black soccer players experience the event triumphantly, their expressivity and ecstatic collectivity of movement signifying that they are so much more alive – suggests why by the end of the film, when private moments of individuals alone with themselves or in dyads, triads, or relatively small groups give way entirely to national sporting spectacle, Invictus has lost me. The movies and I just haven't been comfortable in a crowd for a good long time. It is the same way I feel so close to Colin Firth when he is most utterly alone in A Single Man (though he is perhaps most alone wandering the campus where he teaches as opposed to in his home), a film that is so powerful to me because it shows how reaching a certain threshold of psychic trauma makes any kind of perception sting like hell. Firth’s George has organized and beautified his private world to such an overdetermined extent that he has made of his surroundings a narcotic, and like any junkie he winces when anybody or anything interposes, disrupts, or otherwise ruffles the sheets. He has lost his lover and has turned his whole world into a mausoleum of finery because he can hardly bear to see, hear, or smell anything anymore, repeated shots of a body’s slow motion immersement in water a repeating metaphor for the shutting off of his senses, the dying that has become his only reason for living in a world which he is already perceiving through a kind of protective integument. This perception-as-pain subtext also finds a home in Pedro Almodóvar’s brazen movie world melodrama Los abrazos rotos, a kind of ode to such Hollywood-on-Hollywood melodramatic kitsch as Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (’68), in which two movies-within-the-movie, one a frothy screwball comedy of the sort Mr. Almodóvar used to make in the 80s starring Penélope Cruz’s Lena, and the other a behind-the-scenes documentary-cum-act-of-investigative-jealousy, each bankrolled by her wealthy sugar daddy, demonstrate how cinema becomes a metaphor, like the orrery in the small beach community where the star and her director lover Mateo go to get away from her keeper, of how we try to mechanize the irrepressible chaos of desire at our own ultimate peril. The director Mateo is blinded in an accident that kills Lena, and as such serves his penance and is reborn with a new name (Harry Caine) and divested of the agony of having to see a world from which his glorious fetish object of a lover/star has been so unfeelingly subtracted. In the end Harry Lime finishes editing the principal film-within-a-film which Mateo has had taken away from him, consummating the relationship with Lena who is herself reborn as an image that he cannot see, becoming for him rather a new kind of tactile thing: a voice and a rhythm, fixed within the machinery of his film, perhaps also as a kind of narcotic. Other moments out of recent cinema that have reached me lately: how in Jennifer Lynch’s underrated Surveillance a surrealist logic of threes – not only is the story told in three-pronged parallax like Rashômon, but all kinds of things keep mirroring this structure (three cars lined up along the side of a highway, three video cameras in three rooms, etc.) – culminates in a subversively erotic, even pleasurable, ménage à trios sex murder that will remain in my head for a very long time; a series of wonderful scenes in Woody Allen’s otherwise pretty awful-if-awfully-harmless Whatever Works where characters come to accept things wincingly but with dignity, like we have to in real life, where other movies would have made a big deal of what a goddamn drama this all is, especially when Larry David’s chess teacher physicist Boris realizes that Evan Rachel Wood’s wizened hayseed Melody is dumping him and awkwardly-adorably tries to reframe the situation as him gruffly coaching her on the next chess move of her life after him, knowing that it is all perfectly reasonable but still fucking hurts; the moments in The Young Victoria where Emily Blunt, playing the child Queen with her eyes in the inverse way to how Anothony Hopkins played Hannibal Lecter with his, and Rupert Friend, playing Prince Albert, the man whose name became a euphemism for men's parts, express the give-and-take sparkle of emrgent coupledom between two intelligent and determined people, or the scenes in Orphan where Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard, conversely, explicate how a well-meaning marriage can become far nastier a monster than any murderous moppet of indeterminate origin ever could; or what about every scene in James Gray’s extraordinary Two Lovers where Joaquin Phoenix demonstrates in a way Ethan Hawke can only dream of how painful it can be to watch a lonely guy be charming especially when the precarious balance of the entire atomized dude lays so assailable in the balance? Though I may have seen and felt a lot by virtue of the cinema over the last month or so, this post nary scraping the scorched-earth surface, it is these films and moments within them that rise to the top right now. And I just wanted to share. The silence can get awfully deafening ...
1 comment:
Great post.
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