The Demon-Haunted World

“How could she know whether I could see them or not? I wondered. Squinting, I had thought I'd made out a thin strip of land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and duelling with swords as they did in my comic books. But maybe she was right. Maybe it had just been my imagination, a little like the midnight monsters that still, on occasion, awakened me from a deep sleep, my pyjamas drenched in sweat, my heart pounding. How can you tell when someone is only imagining? I gazed out across the grey waters until night fell and I was called to wash my hands for dinner. When he came home, my father swooped me up in his arms. I could feel the cold of the outside world against his one-day growth of beard.”

In the introduction to his 1995 best seller The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan ponders the above when as a child he told his mom that he could see people across the ocean from his bedroom window. His mother quiets his youthful exuberance with facts, but it springs Sagan into contemplating if imagination can ever fully be ruled by the realities of the world.

Taking stock of the mid 90s hoopla surrounding spurious tabloid claims of life of Mars or the Moon or elsewhere, Sagan wonders if the world, particularly the United States, had become overwhelmed by pseudoscience – if the world of rationality have bent to the whims of the fantastical. Sagan was and is perhaps right that the marketplace of ideas has become marred by inadequacies, but what of the public consciousness? Rarely are people given more license, encouraged even to imagine “midnight monsters,” ghouls and goblins galore than on Halloween and with horror films.

In a world ruled by laws, rules, and science, horror films are the chaotic melting pot for our basest carnal desires. We, like Sagan, like to downplay our violent, senseless roots best typified in Kubrick's “Origin of Man” sequence from 2001, but as Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscience blogger, recently wrote, “Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine” (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/is-self-knowledge-overrated/). And while we hopefully eliminated the worst of our biological origins through the our throws of civility, our collective id is always lumbering and craving sustenance.

For many, one of the only places to release with unbridled enthusiasm our primordial schadenfreude is at the movies on Halloween. Stephen King in his well known essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” says as much: “It is true that the mythic 'fairy-tale' horror film intends to take away the shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all.” Like Sagan, King connects irrational imaginings with childlike wonder. It is children who are the most vulnerable to regression back to violence as a means of conflict resolution, whether as perpetrators or victims. Indeed, parents must civilize and protect the younger generation from the “cold of the outside world” that Sagan feared.

John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is a fairy-tale – more a cautionary tale – of its own kind but at its heart it poses an intriguing question: What if the Boogey-Man were real? In a place already ripe with superstition and mythos and pseudoscience, what if the world was actually haunted by demons?

Sam Loomis is the film's hero. He is a doctor, a profession at its root that is driven by the scientific search for truth. As Sagan himself notes, “Hippocrates introduced elements of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous observation: 'Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. . .'' (8). But Loomis is not an ordinary doctor or an ordinary hero. He is not the strapping model, romantic interest leads that would later come to dominate the slasher genre opposite strong female survivors. He is a different archetype: the lone nut. Typically, the crazed old timer who knows the apocrypha of the killer or the killing fields is around just long enough to warn the headliners and simultaneously serve as a red herring for first time viewers before getting offed in rather gory fashion in the second or third reel.

But Loomis persists through the whole film as an apparent voice of reason. He is the only one who knows the truth about Michael Myers, and like the lone nut, he continually reminds everyone of the dire fate that awaits if they do not heed his Cassandran rants. Yet, the irony is that Loomis abandons his scientific grounding for fantastical theories. In his first scene, he nervously rides with a psychiatric nurse to the hospital where Michael has been held for the past 15 years. The nurse is apprehensive because of Loomis's ramblings about Michael's capacity for evil but Loomis is the one that succumbs to paranoia. He intentionally refers to Michael as “it,” not “he” as if characterizing a supernatural force. In a later monologue, he cautions the local sheriff to take Michael and the threat seriously because of his eyes – “the Devil's eyes” – and the darkness, the evil lurking behind them.

Loomis's embrace of folklore and superstition would ordinarily be at odds with his role are a man guided by science and rationality, but instead, it is evidence that he has been converted into this anti-faith (“atheism”) by witnessing first hand the purity of Michael's evil. If he were to be discarded as the lone nut, he would die prematurely or alternative authority figures would replace him. However, all of the other possibilities are underdeveloped or easily discarded. In fact, part of the cause (as opposed to the solution) for Michael's insane spree is the film's adults.

Continually, we see that parents are absent and babysitters or siblings are unattentive. In the film's opening scene, Judith Myers says to her boyfriend that her little brother Michael is “around here somewhere” and then she proceeds to make out and have sex with her boyfriend. Of course, we see and hear all of this through Michael's six year old perspective from outside voyeuristically looking through a window. Michael's parents only arrive after he has fatally stabbed his sister several times with a butcher's knife. Later, we see Tommy Doyle bullied at school and then walking home alone with no teachers or parents around; Michael Myers is the only adult to witness the neglect. Similarly, Annie's plan for her night of babysitting is to stick Lindsay in front of the television for hours while she has sex with her boyfriend like Michael's sister Judith. Lindsay's and Tommy's parents are both gone for the night on Halloween, unusually remiss considering Halloween is a holiday most commonly for kids to celebrate under the supervision of adults. Like Sagan and King both indicate, adults are the ones culturally and socially that are supposed to rein in the kids' delusions, but in Haddonfield, they are nowhere to be found. Even the film's other authority and adult figure, Sheriff Bracken, who casts reasonable doubt on Loomis's nightmarish tales, is no better, because as he mounts his sternest defense against the doctor midway through the film, he is unaware that his own daughter Annie has already been strangled by the very killer he can't find and doesn't believe exists.

While Loomis is Carpenter's sage, Laurie Strode is his moral compass and his scientist in waiting. She doesn't date; she's smarter than other girls and boys; she babysits responsibly; she does well in school; and she doesn't believe in superstition. She repeatedly sees Michael Myers throughout the day lurking in the shadows and at times in broad daylight, but she never subscribes to their validity. Again and again, she disregards these close encounters. Obviously, children are the ones most apt to jump to fantastic, sublime conclusions. The boys that harrass Tommy at school tease him with ghost stories of the Boogey Man coming out on Halloween. Smartly, we later see how the victims of such teasing become the instigators as Tommy does the same to Lindsay by hiding behind the curtain in the living room and whispering her name during the horror movie playing on TV.

However, while kids are obvious targets and purveyors, it is the adults that seem to thrive on perpetuating myths and tricks on each other and children and Laurie is the prime target. Twice, Annie calls Laurie only to ominously pause or pretend to be someone else hoping to elicit a scare or scream. Sheriff Bracken sneaks up on Laurie and later does the same to Loomis while he is decamped at the Myers' house. While not directed at Laurie, we even see Dr. Loomis, the supposed voice of reason, taking perverse pleasure in torturing the schoolyard bullies by whispering ominous menaces from the bushes. Moreover, because the adults are comfortable and practiced enough in the realm of youthful pranks, they do not hesitate to repeatedly express that it was “probably kids” that did a number of criminal acts around the town including robbing the hardware store, killing a dog, breaking into the Myer's house, and stealing a graveyard headstone when in actuality all of these were committed by Michael Myers. Their unreason has crippled their discerning ability to their own detriment.

In this sea of irrationality and hazing, Laurie is the objective observer. She is interested in the real and the physical, not the imaginary and the mystical. While others are quick to heighten fears and prolong agony, she shows maturity by quelling Tommy's fears about the Boogey Man. She discourages him from reading the comic books, (“Laser Man, Neutron Man, Tarantula Man”) a medium fraught with modern myth, and is the only adult telling him that the movies he's watching, the comics he's reading, and the ghost stories he's reading are make believe.

There's an obvious qualification to make though: When Tommy sees Michael Myers, who he believes to be the Boogey Man, Laurie is quick to dismiss that as make believe as well. Despite seeing the same looming “Shape” many times herself earlier in the day and during the night, she refuses to acknowledge that Tommy might actually be seeing a flesh and blood killer, which is what Michael Myers is, regardless of Loomis's disbeliefs. Even though the film flirts with the idea of the occult and the later sequels embrace this whole-heartedly, in the original film, Michael Myers is human, a possessed, depraved, inhuman, subhuman (but not superhuman), unstable, unstoppable force of nature, but a concrete individual that exists in the here and now.

By film's end though, Laurie's role has inverted. Whereas previously she is the children's sole protector, she now ventures forth into the night to confront the Boogey-Man. Tellingly, when attacked, she seeks refuge at the next door neighbor's house shouting, “Please! Help me!” only to be turned away. We see them turn on the lights and look out the window only to ignore her and mind their own business. You can imagine them suspicious and ignoring the interruption as “probably kids” playing a prank. Loomis arrives at just the right moment to empty his revolver into Michael Myers sending him careening from the second story to the ground below. Because Michael survives and escapes, Laurie, the actual voice of reason, is in shock. She cries out, “Was that the Boogey Man?” Loomis answers in the only way he knows how, “I believe it was." In the face of death and the unexplainable, she abandons her rationality, like her earlier forgotten chemistry book at school. The transformation is complete. The nonbeliever has become a believer of a world haunted by demons.

In one of the more famous reviews of Halloween by Richard T. Jameson, he argues that Carpenter is a mythological sadist by creating a world where his victims like Laurie and Loomis are unable to escape the fantastical world of superstition created by the trauma they have experienced: “Halloween toys with the possibility that 'His' mania might be catching, if only in that the experiences of this night may so traumatize the survivors that they could rehearse the mayhem forever, weird without end. This is less a serious threat or serious point than simply another angle from which to terrorize and tantalize us. John Carpenter doesn’t want this kind of cinematically invigorating evil to end; it’s intrinsic to a classical order he believes in” (http://parallax-view.org/2009/10/30/review-halloween/). Given, the self-conscious lecture in the classroom about whether or not fate is a spiritual or natural element in the world, Jameson's reading is certainly plausible. Perhaps though, Carpenter intended the film not as the first in a modern folk franchise, but as a singular trauma akin to the Boogey-Man campfire stories forced on Tommy by the bullies. After all, “it's Halloween; I guess everyone is entitled to one good scare.”

Deception: A Journey into Film Trailers and Music

A friend once told me that film was the pinnacle of art because it could combine the best of all other media: visual art, textual art, and musical art. But film scoring and composing is one of the least appreciated aspects of the medium. Despite the wealth of wonderful music created over the decades, only a handful of songs have penetrated beyond the confines of film circles into the cultural zeitgeist. Most of these examples are by the legendary John Williams with his well-known themes from Star Wars, Raiders of the Last Ark, Superman, Jaws, Harry Potter, ET and many others.

However, other music-makers like Philip Glass, Danny Elfman and the vast majority of composers are lucky if a single cue of their's registers with the audience. Even then, if it does strike a chord of memory with the viewers, they can't place it. Identification eludes them as does praise and reward for the composers. The hows and whys of this phenomenon are many, but what are the implications? Can great music be labeled as such if it is not remembered? Is memory a sign of validation or inconsequential?

Another composer often slighted for accolades is Clint Eastwood. Like John Carpenter, Eastwood in recent years has chosen to score most of his own films to minimize costs and maximize the aesthetic consistency. Much of Eastwood's music including that for Gran Torino, Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby is sparse. Echoing his visual style, Eastwood creates an aural palette that is both contemplative in mood and minimalist in dynamic. There are no sweeping melodies or whirlwind crescendos to test the audience's resolve for majesty.

Therefore, it was a bit jarring to hear the background music for the trailer to Clint Eastwood's latest film, J. Edgar. Visually, the film certainly looks like an Eastwood picture. All of the footage in the preview is washed out to avoid even a shade of bright colors as previously seen in his twin Iwo Jima films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, and even more starkly in The Changeling and Hereafter. Yet, the music overwhelms.



The pounding base dominates to give the trailer a seedy feeling of forced importance. If the music sounds familiar, it should.



While not identical in entirety, the blaring base notes are common to both. However, Eastwood did not direct or score Inception – that was Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer respectively. The plot thickens when another teaser is added for Immortals.



Neither Eastwood nor Nolan or Zimmer had a hand in the making of Immortals. This raises an obvious question: Why is Zimmer's music in the trailers for J. Edgar and Immortals?

Studios, producers, editors and directors have been borrowing, reusing, and recycling music from other films since the advent of sound with The Jazz Singer. If one link in the final cut chain is dissatisfied, scores are abandoned and replaced by late additions. While the most famous studio excisions are footage related as with RKO burning Orton Welles's final reel of The Magnificent Ambersons or Tony Kaye dressing like Jesus Christ to object to the editing of American History X, the same pitfalls have happened with music. One of the more notorious falling outs was over Jerry Goldsmith's score for Ridley Scott's Legend being bumped for a synth, electronic rendition by Tangerine Dream. A similar complication arose over the composing of Scott's Blade Runner as well.

My first exposure to this trend was watching Halloween: 20 Years Later as a teenager. While not well-versed in the minutia of filmmaking or criticism, I was diligent and obsessive enough about the films that I enjoyed to know their inner workings. Over the course of 1996 and 1997, I had many nights of repeated viewing pleasure of Scream. The meta-, reflexive dialogue and self-conscious heroines was a much needed shot of adrenaline to a dormant genre, but I also enjoyed Marco Beltrami's score. It nicely complimented the on-screen thrills with effective, if formulaic tension in the strings and percussion. When the news trickled out that Kevin Williamson, writer of Scream, was working on a sequel/reboot of the Halloween franchise, I was ecstatic. Fast-forward to the release and I was happy with the picture, but I couldn't shake the nagging sensation that I had heard all of this before. Like the people struck by selections from Glass's “Pruit Igoe” or Clint Mansell's “Lux Aterna,” I knew I had heard the music previously but it took a while for the realization to sink in. As pointed out at Filmtracks: Modern Soundtrack Reviews, H20's original composer John Ottman, most well known for his scoring and editing of The Usual Suspects, had his score replaced in post-production by Miramax (http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/portrait_terror.html).

Another recent example of this trend was in the heralded documentary/docudrama, Man on Wire. MOW is a rendering of Philippe Petit's successful, high wire act between the both towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. As noted by film critic Godfrey Cheshire, director James Marsh's choice for the score is mostly reused sections from Michael Nyman's scores of Peter Greenaway's films and a few from Jane Campion's The Piano (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2008/07/man-on-borrowed-piano-wire/). Though the criticism was later retracted after additional information from the director in a follow up post (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2008/08/man-on-borrowed-piano-wire-follow-up/), I am particularly interested in Cheshire's questioning of the intellectual honesty of recycling film scores:

“Unquestionably, purloining one's score from other, more artistically serious movies is taking the easy (and sleazy) way out. Most filmmakers use pre-existing music during the editing process, then set about the task of having a composer fit the film's themes and images with their own score... And contempt for the audience's intelligence is implicit in the assumption that viewers either have no memory of past cinematic achievements or don't care when they are traduced.”

There is a degree of shamelessness to the repatriation of music and themes for other films. It smacks of a disconcerting carelessness on the film's part and an expectation of audience ignorance to such aspects. Won't many home viewers regard the use of Zimmer's Inception theme in J. Edgar along with the appearance of DiCaprio in both as an implicit sign of correlation? If they did, who could blame them? Or are these examples somehow unrelated because they are regarding music in film rather than music in film trailers?

Deception in advertising, even film advertising is old hat as well, but generally it is visual editing that carries the tinge of dishonesty. One need look no further than Moneyball to see how the film marketing shifted from week to week depending on box office receipts. Initially, it was marketed as an Apatow comedy mixed with screwball sports film like Major League only to be repackaged as a heartfelt, true story, feel good sports movie of the year akin to Remember The Titans (http://www.awfulannouncing.com/2011-articles/october/moneyball-the-feel-good-movie-of-the-year-the-oddities-of-movie-marketing.html). Who is to blame for the advertising schizophrenia? Directors? Producers? Editors? Studios? It seems the usual critical punching bags are off the hook for trailer integrity.

Most film trailers are utterly disconnected from the filmmaking process. Instead, they are assembled by independent companies and freelancers like Mark Woollen and his company, Mark Woollen and Associates. His latest notable successes for trailers include Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, The Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, and David Fincher's The Social Network (http://blogs.indiewire.com/mattdentler/archives/mark_woollen_qa/) . However, much like the trailer for J. Edgar, the initial teaser for The Social Network contains “non-diegetic” music. While the online community was abuzz at the brilliance of the Radiohead “Creep” cover by Scala and Kolacny Brothers, the film's later audience did not have the pleasure of hearing the music or even experiencing the narrative of the film's trailer. In a way, it was almost disappointing that the trailer was so layered and complexly dovetailed with “Creep” while the film itself had no such apparent connection. Can a great trailer with a fantastic mixture of interpretative yet inconclusive cuts and a wonderfully symbolic score somehow unfairly prejudice an audience's expectations for a film? Can a trailer overshadow a film when the music and stories of each don't match?

Ferris Bueller: Perceived Adulthood and the Class of 2015

This week, the Beloit College annual “Mindset List” for incoming freshmen was released. As usual, the list contains a myriad of references to pop cultural trends and icons from bygone eras and how they fit (or don't fit) into the class of 2015. The most striking to me was a passing reference or two to Ferris Bueller as a potential parent to a recent high school graduate. There's something so sacrilegious, so wrong, so culturally shocking to consider Ferris Bueller as a father figure to anyone. But what could it be?

The math and dates make sense. Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released in the summer of 1986 meaning Ferris would walk the isle to Pomp and Circumstance in the spring of 1987 and today Ferris would be 42 years old, certainly capable of having multiple children of age. Matthew Broderick who brought Ferris to life, himself, born in 1962, was 24 when the film was released and today is 50. But seeing Broderick get older was never a cause of concern or a moment to reflect. The actor aging is not the same as the character aging.

The offense arises not from chronological gripes but from thematic ones. We feel that Ferris Bueller cannot age because he represents youth, or at the least the zeitgeist conception of youth from the 1980s. Most people don't remember the details of their high school experience, but they remember what films (and music and television shows and...) best tapped into its social relevance and energy. It would feel just as violating to suggest that John Bender is now a high school principal or janitor or that Samantha Baker is a day over 16. The actors come and go freely, but the characters are ours, forever frozen in celluloid for our enjoyment and dissection.

However, what if those wounds are felt in error from romanticism, not just of our own memories of our lives but memories of memories – memories of films? Does Ferris Bueller stand for youth and fighting for your right to party? At first glance, it certainly seems to. Ferris lives a high schooler's dream life: he breaks all the rules but never gets caught; he does next to nothing but gets all the credit; and most importantly, he's popular with everyone including the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads. They all think he's a righteous dude.

But all of this notoriety with teenagers buys him no currency with adults. Every obstacle that comes Ferris's way comes for two reasons: because he lies and because he's a teenager. Moreover, all of Ferris's lies are because he's a teenager without a car, a job, independent income, a house or a degree – all the hallmarks of being “adult.” That being said, Ferris's problems can be merged into one collective issue: Ferris lies about being an adult because he's a teenager. The eighteen year old's fantasy is to become a grown up or at least be treated like one.

If this seems self-evident, it stands in direct contrast to the nostalgia of Ferris as a paragon of youth. In the film, he is able to accomplish nothing as himself and nothing alone other than to fool his well-meaning yuppie parents. He needs Cameron's help to get Sloan out of school, but even then, they must pretend to be Sloan's parents on the phone and dress up as her father to pick her up. They can only get a seat at the finest restaurant in Chicago by again placing prank phone calls posing as police officers and sausage barons. When they get to the big city, they oddly spend time at the NYSE, an adult business institution, where Ferris suggests to Sloan that they embark on another adult institution, marriage. In the film's universe, fake adults can get more accomplished than teenagers.

Yet, even as Ferris, Sloan and Cameron struggle to apparently escape their teen years through reaching for perceived maturity, they collide back with their real parents because their lives are inextricably governed by their parents. They have to “borrow” Cameron's dad's car for their adventure. Ferris runs into his dad at the restaurant and again in traffic. When trying to hurriedly get home before they arrive, he is almost hit by his mother and sister driving. As they ascend the Sears Tower, Cameron first thought at reaching the then-highest man-made point in the world was, “I think I see my dad down there.”

The lone naysayers to this trend in the film are Ferris's sister, Jeanie, and his principal, Ed Rooney. Jeanie and Mr. Rooney despise Ferris and his attempts to circumvent the normal teenage rigors of going to high school and taking classes. Jeanie's attempts to play by the rules though are not rewarded by the film. After calling the police about a crime, she is the one arrested for prank calling and taken to another, darker adult institution: jail. Rightful Teenage actions have placed her in adult entrapment. She meets Charlie Sheen, the Shakespearean fool shouting wisdom that is often not followed due to the lowly source. Sheen tells her to lighten up and live her own life. When next confronted with the intruder Rooney, she has the opportunity to turn Ferris in to either her parents or to her principal. But she interprets Sheen's advice as to stop playing it straight and instead fake adulthood. Jeanie converts to Ferris's mantra of perceived adulthood and pretends to be Ferris's mother and kicks Rooney out of the house. At the film's close, Rooney the sole person not persuaded by Ferris's antics has lost almost all markers of true adulthood: his car has been towed, his wallet now belongs to a fierce canine, his clothes are shredded, he has to ride the school bus like a child, and he may lose his job after this very visible incident of student harassment.

Much earlier in the film, though Ferris knows he has his mark in his parents, he's not satisfied at escaping school and pissing off his sister. He ups the ante by openly mocking traditional paths toward success and maturity. He sarcastically quips, “I want to go to a good college and lead a fruitful life.” Similarly after Ferris has foiled the “snooty” restaurant host, the maitre d is left to aggressively shout, “I weep for the future.” He's not the only one.

Fast Times at Mel's Diner: American Graffiti and Lost Innocence

American Graffiti opens on a still of Mel's Drive-In, the popular hangout spot for the locals. Like a framed novelty picture that would be sitting on the wall of a modern diner, the photograph is a simultaneously celebration of the era but a reminder of how unapproachable it is. Though set in 1962, the first song played with the drive-in still is an anachronism, Bill Haley's “Rock Around the Clock,” a hit from the late 1950s. The song and the image signal that though the film plays like a documentary, it more closely resembles a class reunion where distance and time away have distorted perception to where everything feels just a few years off and everyone reminisces about the good ole days that may not have been so good.

But George Lucas's ode to his high school years seems less a fond remembrance and more of an ironic commentary. The film is permeated by a sense of nostalgia tinged with melancholy. The characters mourn their lives even as they live them, as if they know that in just a few short years Vietnam will start and all of this will be gone. John Milner is the fatalistic, outlaw philosopher akin to James Dean's Jim Stark from Rebel Without A Cause. He has the fastest hot rod in town but spends all of his time visiting the junkyard and wondering if each new race could be his last until his number is up.

The town is experiencing economic, social, and moral decay. Milner complains that the strip use to be so much longer and bigger just a few short years ago. Though Modesto, California had apparently escaped the economic and social contraction that plagued Anarene, Texas in The Last Picture Show a decade earlier, it has now come to pass. The local arcade owners and the Moose Lodge are giving away their first ever scholarship to encourage kids to leave the town because they can better prepare themselves for the future elsewhere. In this town, the film insinuates that one night stands and meaningless sex are common and schoolwork is done by parents for their children. While intimidating, The Pharoahs gang is much older than the rest of the teenagers and spend their time committing petty thievery for quarters from pinball machines and bullying people that sit on their cars. And they show their small-time status further by getting caught up in the awe of Milner's drag racing narrative wondering when and if he'll ever lose. The grown ups are no different. A popular teacher in his late 20s tried to go to college but wasn't the “competitive type” and came back home, the film implies, to violate ethical codes by sleeping with his students.

Even the iconic Wolfman Jack is demystified. Through the use of diegetic radio for ambiance, the film builds Wolfman into a folk hero, a mythical figure that escaped the town to evade the law and travels the world and comes back only to deliver the occasional pirate broadcast. Everyone has a Wolfman Jack story to share that is half collaboration from other urban legends and half confabulation to inflate the storyteller's sense of self-importance. When we meet him on the outskirts of town, Lucas cleverly shrouds him in darkness as a gatekeeper guarding the secrets of music and life. He is The Wizard of Oz, Marshak from A Serious Man, The Oracle from The Matrix – he is film's semblance of inspiration and answers. We can only enter through a backdoor maze, but when we see him the illusion is dropped for reality. Like the malt shop commemorative picture of Mel's Drive In, Wolfman Jack's legend does not match his appearance. He is a middle-aged disc jockey eating popsicles too fast so they don't melt first. Seemingly unable to crush our dreams, he perpetuates the mythos of Wolfman Jack even after we've seen behind the curtain. He is another in a long line of locals who was unable to flee the small town's grasp.

The younger, recent graduates also feel a sense of pessimism about their plight. Though they try to escape, they are unable to avoid reliving the same experiences. Steve, the exiting class president, plans to fly out of town the next morning for college and break up with his girlfriend. After unsuccessfully ending the relationship, he spends his remaining hours at a freshman dance back at school getting back together with his girlfriend and delaying the trip back East. Terry the Toad, the loser of the group, itches to be cooler than he is. He borrows Steve's car for the night driving the strip and tries to adopt a new persona. He changes his nickname, puts on airs to pick up a girl, drinks more than he normally does and gets into a fight he is sure to lose. However, by night's end, he has lost the car twice, had the fight broken up by Milner, and gotten sick from alcohol poisoning. At night's end, though Debbie gives him hope that they can hang out again, Terry is left to beg Milner to let him ride with him during the race against loud-mouthed comic relief Bob Falfa played by Harrison Ford. Even Milner, despite his posturing and existential angst, reprises his role as drag strip king in another race at film's end to reinforce his inability to alter his course.

Curt, the brain, is the film's one exception. Like the others, he “wants to remember all of the good times” as well by going to the dance. He even wanders the halls of the old school and gets back together with his ex-girlfriend for about an hour. However, symbolically, he is unable to reopen his old locker by using the same combination because he has been locked out of his old life and forced to branch outward. He is given multiple avenues of change. He pursues a blonde siren in a white chevy all night. He is forced to hang out with the Pharoahs but wins them over and gets invited to join the gang. He receives the scholarship from the Moose Lodge and also plans to leave town in the morning. But he's also the one that talks to the hedonistic teacher and meets Wolfman Jack. He hears all the tales of misspent youth and wasted opportunities. He has been granted knowledge that Terry lacks, Milner appreciates, and Steve fakes, but none are able to act on other than Curt. He is the only one able to break the destructive cycle of small town life and escape the picturesque Mel's Drive-in.

American Graffiti possesses one of the saddest codas in film history but perhaps the most honest. As Curt boards the plan and flies back East for college, a title scrawl brings us up to date with the characters. Milner, in spite of his prescient wisdom and familiarity with all the fatal car wrecks, is killed by a drunk driver only two years later presumably in a drag race. Steve still lives in Modesto, California as an insurance agent repeating the path of the teacher and Wolfman Jack. Although given a glimmer of hope with Debbie, Terry does not get the comic epilogue that Bluto does in a similar situation in Animal House by marrying the blonde and getting elected to congress. Terry goes to Vietnam and is reported MIA near An Loc just three years later. Curt, like George Lucas himself, becomes a writer and moves to Canada, perhaps to avoid being drafted into Vietnam like his friends.

The film like the nostalgic still of Mel's Drive-In is an artifact of a by-gone time before Kennedy's assassination, before Vietnam, and before Watergate that can never be recreated.

Modern Villains's Objective Correlatives: Voldemort in Harry Potter

In the climatic scene of Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Voldemort enters Harry's spirit and mocks his store of memories to shatter his confidence. Voldemort's attempt at psychological warfare fails when Harry ably points out his lack of a raison d'être: “You’re the weak one…and you’ll never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry for you.” Harry's dismissal of Voldemort stings because it rings true, perhaps not as a character truth, but as a structural truth. The series, much like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, is juvenile opera. It's epic, melodramatic, and prolonged but its villains lack complexity. None of the films linger long on the diurnal existence of the antagonists because their sole motivation is antagonism. They can't succeed, because their purpose is to lose. There are no victory celebrations, speeches or yells of jubilation amongst the band of bandits because they “never know love or friendship.”

This is not so much a criticism of the villains as it is of poor backstory attempting to answer the unanswerable and failing to provide an adequate objective correlative. T. S. Eliot, the originator of the term, describes the objective correlative as follows: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Put another way, there needs to be sufficient story drama to validate a character's actions. For Hamlet to grieve through the majority of that play, he should be afflicted by enough trauma to cause paralyzing guilt. While Eliot only deals with the highest of arts, his statement provides insight into the structural mechanics of all dramatic endeavors: an explanation for a character's state of mind should be sufficient. Taking Eliot a step further, I would add that if insufficient, better not present.

This one of the reasons why the Star Wars prequels landed with such a hollow thud. In over eight hours of special effects and senatorial speechifying, George Lucas was not able to manufacture a compelling reason for Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader. The perceived slights and miscommunication seem so petulant and unbelievable like the confused outbursts of a brat. The original trilogy succeeds because Vader is a compelling creation because of his nebulous origins. The “Dark Side” is creepily stoic but necessarily thin because further explanation is unnecessary. When “midichlorians” are discussed, the mythos loses its dreamy quality and is replaced by a concrete dreariness.

The same writing flaw permeates many recent horror films and updates wherein monsters are deconstructed through ingratifying psychoanalysis to become depressingly human. In Scream (1996), when Casey Becker is quizzed on scary movies, the killer is amusingly fuzzy on details. Nightmare is the one where “the guy had knives for figures” and Halloween is “the one where the guy in the white mask stalked babysitters.” If these descriptions appear circumspect, their triviality is trumped by their veracity. Freddy Krueger has a glove with razor blades and Michael Myers has a William Shatner mask and returns to his hometown on Halloween night to reenact the killing of his sister. Their is no further explanation because none was needed. Later in Scream, Billy Loomis mocks Sydney Prescott's search for motive in the plot's machinations: "Well I don't really believe in motives Sid, I mean did Norman Bates have a motive?. . . Did we ever find out why Hannibal Lector liked to eat people? Don't think so. See it's a lot scarier when there's no motive." (Ironically, writer Kevin Williamson's reflexive sense of humor would rear its head by pointing out this narrative truth while in a film where the two characters have motives: maternal abandonment and violence in film.) But modern writers have subtracted through adding exposition.

Part of Halloween's (1978) genius is that Michael Myers has no personality or devolution. He never speaks; he simply kills. He eats dogs and even stares at a victim by turning his head sideways like a confused animal. But later films added in plot points that made Laurie Strode his sister and made him bent on killing the rest of his family including nieces, nephews, and cousins. Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) takes the sacrilege further by attributing motive to Myer's rampage: a physically and verbally abusive stepfather along with a stripper mom and hints of incest between the stepfather and his sister. The explanation is as unsurprising as it is uninteresting.

Similarly, Jason Voorhees had always been written as unstoppable gatekeeper – biblical even – unkillable, surviving drowning, stabbing, shooting, toxic waste, beheading, and electrocution. He is a mythical archangel that acts as the conscience of Crystal Lake offing teenagers for engaging in premartial sex, drinking and driving, and breaking and entering on private property. Jason is the red right hand of the silent moral majority, but as the series wore on, writers became more focused and less imaginative in detailing Jason's motivation. His killings were transformed into the cries for help of deformed boy was who belittled and knowingly allowed to drown by lifeguards and camp counselors. Jason is no longer a force of nature; he is a victim of malevolent nurturing.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) re-envisions Freddy Krueger as a kindly maintenance man bullied and mistakenly accused of his crimes. This narrative U-turn is later upended as a trick, but Wesley Strick's and Eric Heisserer's twist is a gross miscalculation with the net effect of momentarily attempting to provoke sympathy for a child murderer and failing. What the remake misses is that Freddy's crimes are symbolic of the negligent effects of absentee parenting. In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street's (1983) opening scene, Tina is awakened from a nightmare by her mother and lecherous boyfriend. This is the last we see of Tina's parental figures and their departure allows a sleepover with Tina's abusive boyfriend and Tina's death the next night. Nancy has an alcoholic mother and a workaholic father who's never at home. Glen's parents lock him in his room and drink beer on the patio gossiping about the neighbors while Glen dies upstairs in his sleep. As far as we can tell, Rod has no parents and dies in his sleep in jail. In all of these examples, the writers' attempts to prolong a series by re-educating the audience with new hamartia to elicit additional catharsis flounder because of their illegitimacy and deficiency.

But unlike these horror films, the Harry Potter series like Star Wars aspires to be greater than a kid's serial boogeyman story with new chapters every year. Despite their ambitions, the films remained grounded in a jejune, adolescent, simplistic view of good and evil as well with poor objective correlatives. Voldemort is an allegedly irredeemable villain who has forsaken salvation for domination. He rules through fear and deception. Yet, though being the most electric and enigmatic of the characters, Voldemort's screen-time is surprisingly low. He reappears from time to time to hiss and wax acerbic on the futility of resistance, but there's little indication of depth outside of Ralph Fiennes's tour de force performances. Like Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, he simply is... evil. Even the series' notorious double agent, Snape is driven by a schoolyard crush for a fallen love. Though in the background for significant portions of the films, his defining characteristic serves as the lynchpin for most of the plots, and one gets the feeling that if Snape were told to “grow up” there wouldn't be a story to tell.

Furthermore, like scary movies, the HP films use their antagonists only for enlightenment of the inferior heroes. True tragedy embraces its villains and presents them centerstage because they are the most compelling characters due to their hypocrisy and irrationality. Macbeth to Lear to Oedipus are all the main agents of their own demise and their self-ignorance is realized a moment too late. The villain's corpse is disposed and order is restored. The audience has learned a lesson from his trespasses, but the stage and play's fictive world is smaller due to the death of his larger than life persona. But Voldemort's end in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows II feels truncated and unsatisfactory. Where is the rejoice and release? Despite hinting in the direction of Paradise Lost by making Voldemort's visage a snake, there is no sense of corporeal debasement or a perpetual extinguishment of conscience for the bodiless Voldemort at film's end like there is for Satan. He just vanishes into thin air like apparating in previous entries. For a series that lingered extensively on death and misery among the Hogwarts school (Cedric Diggory's death, Voldemort's graverobbing of Dumbledore, Snape's dying tears, Malfoy's “septum sempra” bloodletting in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Aragog's funeral), Voldemort's death scene is quick and painless unlike say Washizu's downfall in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

As a series, Harry Potter is less than the sum of its parts. The emotional resolution never feels complete because Voldemort's objective correlative was inadequate to his dramatic flair and bombast. In 2007, during an interview after the writing of the books, JK Rowling revealed that she always considered Dumbledore gay. This came as quite a surprise because it was not mentioned in any of the books and felt disingenuous to those that had read them all. Hopefully, she doesn't reveal in subsequent interviews that Voldemort was secretly Harry's father and wanted him to join the Dark Side.

Tom Hanks is Larry Crowne

Simplicity is a virtue, so sayeth the proverb. But is it the best virtue? Robert Zemeckis's and Tom Hanks's respective films and their collaborations provide an interesting point/counterpoint on determining the statement's truth, if not its accuracy.

The duo's most popular effort is Forrest Gump in which the unassuming, guileless title character is able to get one over on the whole world. Whether it's winning national championships for the University of Alabama, starting the jogging craze in the United States, becoming the catalyst for the anti-war movement, or inspiring Elvis's famous gyrating hips, Forrest's greatest attribute is his credulity. The film embraces a dangerous anti-intellectualism. More than just championing Forrest's ignorant ingenuity, it reimagines famous moments in history, not as products of greatness or genius, but as the hapless happy accidents of the artless dodger. These are moments where we know the stories and know the participants, and as a society, we aspire to emulate their abilities, but Zemeckis seems content to reorient their achievement away from Edison's inspiration and perspiration toward coincidence.

A similar theme underlies Zemeckis's Back to the Future franchise. Canyons are named after famous western actors and names are mistaken for underwear designers because of the past and the future colliding in chance encounters. It's amusing that most of the planned interventions in the series are foiled time and time again, but the unintended ripples spiral outward early and often with little resistance. Most interpretations, including those by Cracked, focus on the racial overtones of Marty McFly's wrinkles in time. He tells the black menial worker at the diner that he should run for mayor and plays Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode” years before either of those events happen. Similar to Forrest Gump, Zemeckis again rewrites the Civil Rights movement and the history of rock 'n' roll as products of white influence rather than black activism to comedic effect.

However, rather than racial, there are other dimensions to Marty's misadventures, namely democratic populism. Like Tom Hanks most well known characters including Forrest Gump, Marty McFly is an everyman, even if the suburban 80s teenager version. He is doing poorly at school due to lack of effort and disillusionment with the system. When he auditions for the school talent show, he is immediately disqualified due to being “too loud.” His family fares no better. As the film lays out the family dynamics at the beginning, they are well-meaning, “average,” middle class and share much in common with Middle America – an important populist touch. His dad works an unsatisfying job for an unappreciative, abusive supervisor, Biff Tannen. His mother's family has a few relatives in jail, possibly unjustly. Despite being out of high school, his older brother and sister still live at home working dead end, minimum wage jobs. The family all share a car that Biff wrecks and shamelessly refuses to pay for repairs.

But, by film's end, through the deus ex machina of nefarious time travel, Marty's family has been given, not earned, the American Dream. His father is a successful science fiction writer, his brother and sister have better jobs and better clothes, his mother is thin and has given up her alcoholism, Marty has a brand new truck and Biff now works for them washing cars and other odd jobs. His "new" family bears more resemblance to his happy, Republican home from Family Ties than his family from the film's beginning. Also, there is no sense that they are more talented or smarter than Biff or that their new circumstances are the result of effort. Instead, Marty's mad scientist routine has realigned his new 1985 and derived even his parent's successes from his DeLorean eucastrophe. Of course, there is no eulogy or remorse for Biff's plight, because in the film's universe, he deserves his new station because he's a jerk (and attempted rapist) and Marty's family “deserves” their success because they aren't.

Not all of Zemeckis's films follow this pattern. Another collaboration with Tom Hanks, Castaway is about a higher level executive with Fed Ex whose plane tragically crashes and strands him on a deserted island for 2 years. Chuck Nolan is no everyman; he is the Nietzschian superman, a demigod who makes fire and creates beings (Wilson) in his own image. He is ingenuous in his efforts to survive and thrive in the island's harsh, Hobbesian environment. Perhaps, Zemeckis's politics had changed or Hanks had a stronger voice in the creative direction as he is listed as a producer.

Tom Hanks's initial directorial effort from 1996, That Thing You Do, seemed to openly dispute Zemeckis's worldview offered in Forrest Gump and Back to the Future. That Thing You Do is a melancholy tale about how smalltown success does not always translate to life in the big city. Hanks's TTYD at the outset gestures toward a similar Zemeckis-esque conclusion and theme. Initially, the band is unsuccessful and Guy Patterson, between costing his parents' money at the family-owned store and being a terrible salesman, plays drums late at night to records. But an accident takes the drummer out of the picture and fate comes knocking for Guy to join The Oneders (later The Wonders). All that's missing is a phone call from the lead singer's cousin overhearing Calvin Klein playing Beatles hits at a high school dance. Yet, the film takes a different course: they don't end up conquering the music industry to become rock stars. The base player joins the army, the rhythm guitarist marries a showgirl, the lead singer breaches his contract by refusing the record the album in Spanish, and Guy leaves show business for the married life. Hanks as Mr. White has an important speech that flies in the face of Zemeckis's triumphant simplicity: “You know, Horace was right about you, Guy; you are the smart one. Lenny is the fool, Jimmy is the talent, and Faye is well, now, Faye is special, isn't she? And you are the smart one. That's what I think, anyway.” In Hanks's film universe, talent and intelligence exist and can lead to great things, but they are often clashing and prone to self-destruction.

With the just released, Larry Crowne, Hanks might be repositioning himself back in line with Zemeckis's initial philosophy though. Crowne shares the quality of consummate, professional adequacy with Forrest Gump. The marketing campaign has centered on Crowne as a multiple employee of the month award winner at a department store but is fired for not having a college degree. While sharing the bittersweet quality with TTYD's ending, Crowne's set up appears headed for a crowd-pleasing finale where the average man is able to succeed without the noisome prerequisites of gainful employment like education and training. If the moral of the story is that skills and abilities are unnecessary and “ah shucks” camaraderie takes priority, Larry Crowne could be an endorsement for a race to the middle.

It's very comforting to feel that success is a result of luck rather than hard work and that fringe benefits are given rather than earned. It's tempting to believe that the towering achievements of history are the result of Forrest Gumps rather than Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandi. The comfort and temptation of these modern myths mystifies the true labors that lie at the heart of our fruit. If nothing else, though, at least our children can save us from perpetual mediocrity and redeem us thanks to the flux capacitor.

Boston Cinema

In the 15 years since Good Will Hunting was released, perhaps no city has been more represented cinematically than Boston. From the adaptations of Dennis Lehane's novels to occasional film from Matt Damon or Ben Affleck, audiences are privy to a recounting of an entire city's modern crime history and its generation of fatherless children. Frequently, the screenplays do not attempt to attribute an overarching motive or reason for the crime aesthetic. And when they do, the answer is always the same: family. Like a Bushido oath, a life of crime is seemingly inherited from father to son and brother to brother. Despite having many male relatives serving decades in prison and coming from broken homes or foster care, the sons maintain a stoic attachment to their forebearers that inevitably dictates their futures. The Town, written and directed by Ben Affleck, is a superior genre picture because it places itself within this Bostonian crime heritage.

Affleck gives significant mileage out of the locale, because, unlike a slew of similar genre films, Boston is as much a character in these films as the people themselves. Rather than try to hide identifying features by using aspecific surburban stand-ins, the gold dome of the Boston State House, Boston Harbor, and Fenway Park are all showcased to consciously fixate the film in a specific place. Ordinarily, this might appear as flashy posturing to unnecessarily draw attention to the scenery, but this is not the case. Affleck smartly incorporates the local fixtures into the story to illustrate the different socioeconomic backgrounds of his main characters. Doug is a working class, second generation (at least) criminal from Charlestown; Claire is a white collar, Bank manager transplant from a rich neighborhood. The film never directly attributes their plights to their upbringings, but it lays out all the pieces for that conclusion. Whereas Claire is funded enough to be able to quit her job and still afford a picturesque loft apartment, Doug and his friends are always in search of more money despite being in the lucrative trade of robbing banks. The Charlestown Boys and Girls Club has no ice for the hockey rink and even the local garden is overgrown and haggard. These realities are not attributed to fate or circumstance. Claire, Doug, and even his friends all allude to the government's disregard for the community and its inhabitants. Because of this, the local criminals are seen as heroes.

Crime then becomes a matter of pseudo civic virtue and vigilantism becomes justice. Like his father and like his "brother," Doug robs and eventually murders but is not portrayed as a villain. At the film's end, he uses the money to relocate and escape and leaves the rest to be donated for the local ice rink. He is the hood with a heart of gold. Through narration and exposition, we learn that when he was younger his hockey talent gave him a way out, but he squandered it. Like Chuckie Sullivan from Good Will Hunting, he is wiser than he is intelligent. He understands that he is too gifted for manual labor but too stubborn for an honest day's work. For him, it's simpler and more honorable to level the playing field through petty thievery and chicanery than to go it straight.

However, if the tortured genius of Will Hunting and the wasted potential of Doug McCray are possible outcomes that both lead to flirtation or outright affairs with crime before Joycean departures, we see one other possibility: working for rather than against the system. In Mystic River while Jimmy Markum is a crime boss, Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) becomes a cop. In Boondock Saints while the Brothers MacManus are hitmen with a higher calling, Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) is the FBI agent leading the hunt for them. But in these films, the cops and criminals are both motivated by similar passions of revenge and redemption. In The Departed, all of the main characters (Billy Costigan, Frank Costello, Colin Sullivan, even Sgt. Dignam) have allegiances, hidden and apparent, on both sides of the law. In The Town as well, Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), while being an FBI agent, is more ruthless, predatory and conniving than the criminals. Amazingly, Affleck has managed what 5 years of womanizing and chronic alcoholism could not: he has demystified Don Draper. The ease and natural smoothness he displays while seducing Krista Coughlin belies a deeper truth -- that in the cinematic Boston, police are the thugs and criminals are the defenders.

The unnatural inequalities present in Charlestown are what foster the breeding ground for crime. Simultaneously though, crime is a life raft and an anchor for the town. Despite their best misguided efforts at escaping lives of ill means and repute, the Bostonian men are perpetuating the destructive cycle that has lead to their predicament. While they toil away in jail like Stephen MacRay or die prematurely like Jem Coughlin, their wives and sisters and children "survive" them in name and trade only. The smart ones leave and become cops (or filmmakers), the honest ones get blue collar jobs, and the "honorable" ones follow in their fathers' footsteps. If the recent cinematic history of Boston has taught us anything, it is that in Boston and particularly in The Town, there is honor amongst thieves. 

Tortured Soul: Monster Movies, Tragedies, and Mystic River

Sometime in the past 30 years, monster movies were reduced to the filmgoing fare of their primary character types: clueless teenagers eager for instant hedonism. The cinematic equivalent of punk rock: simple, gratuitous, repetitive, and explicitly not high art, as if reveling in second-tier status. However, unlike punk rock, monster movies have had no Lester Bangs to restore the record or at the least, present the counterargument. At their root, these movies are the one of the oldest and most celebrated dramatic forms: tragedies. The ghouls and goblins of modern horror movies are not far removed from the witches and ghosts of Macbeth, nor is the grotesque violence distant from Gloucester's eye gouging in King Lear or the two deposed kings being dragged behind Tambaurlaine's chariot in the Christopher Marlowe play of the same name.

The reasons why Shakespeare and even Greek tragedy escape contemporary hand-wringing are many but first, the best genre pieces disguise the genre by surrounding it with other tropes. A recent example would be from 2008's I Am Legend. One of the strongest scenes involves Will Smith forced to venture into the darkness to rescue his dog from an abandoned Manhattan building. Once inside, the pitch black claustrophobic interior is only penetrated by a flashlight beam mounted to the butt of his gun. As he creeps around each corner of the building, the anticipation grows before he and the audience are caught off-guard by a horde of the infected and he has to race outside to sunlight in a gripping chase. Though the words are never spoken, this is a “haunted house” scene in a “zombie” picture. The scene works because of the stock genre trappings, but also because the rest of the film does not pull from the same bag of tricks.

Similarly, Taxi Driver is undoubtedly a film about urban, moral decay and Travis Bickle's descent into messianic madness but it also bears another reading. In the recent June issue of American Cinematographer, Michael Chapman, Scorsese's famous DP, recounts his labors in making Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. Other than discussion of particular shots and techniques, the most interesting excerpt is his interpretation of Taxi Driver's genre placement: “In one sense, you can think of Taxi Driver as a werewolf movie. . . Think about it: even his hair changes! And the red, the blood, is just right for a werewolf movie.” By night, in the depraved streets of New York City, Bickle, like The Beast in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete, transforms into subhuman, supernatural personality that threatens and massacres for perceived love. It's romantic, even romantically gothic in the same sense as Frankenstein and Dracula. It's also terribly violent and tragic like monster movies.

But if Taxi Driver can be seen as a werewolf movie, then Mystic River is a vampire movie. Other than the monologue in the middle of the film from Tim Robbins's Danny Boyle and the corresponding diagetic placement of John Carpenter's Vampires, there are more identifying features. Rather than the stark red pictured throughout Scorsese's film, Eastwood opts for softer, colder blues that drain the brightness from already somber affair. Even when Jimmy Markum is sitting silhouetted against the light of the neighborhood gathering questioning his actions, the icy blue haze overwhelms any warmth the sunlight would provide. Moreover, while lacking the sensuality of recent entries like True Blood and Twilight that elevate vampires to sex starlets, Mystic River is truer to the grim realities of horrific monsters protrayed in Nosferatu. In portraying the tortured soul of an abused child turned “damaged goods” father, Tim Robbins even adopts an ambling, Max Schreck-like gait for many scenes. He says that when he emerged from the basement of his abuse, he doesn't know who came out of it, but it wasn't Dave because Dave's dead. Like Louis from Interview with the Vampire, he has lost his soul but refuses to become the parasitic feeder of his makers. Rather than turn against himself or against others, he kills another pederast from feeding on the young. Perhaps, he hopes that this will lead to a path of redemption, but again like vampires and like tragedies, the monsters in Mystic River are doomed to their fate.

The inescapable grasp of destiny highlights another reason for Shakespearean tragedies place in the artistic canon as beyond reproach: there are events beyond human control and agency. One of the hallmarks of a tragic hero is that, despite his admirable qualities, he will meet a gruesome end due to his own failures. The same should be said of Jimmy Markum in Mystic River. When alone with his daughter's corpse, he keenly proffers that he doesn't know how but he is ultimately responsible for her death. Unfortunately for the victims in the tragedy, the hero's self-awareness arrives too late to prevent the destruction. Again at the film's climax, Jimmy feels he has found his daughter's killer. In a brilliant crosscut, Eastwood intersplices scenes from Jimmy's forced attrition of Danny with the true killer's comeuppance. It is the film's Godlike way of mocking the proceedings at Jimmy's “trial” and his attempt to enact justice. Frequently, Eastwood chooses roving helicopter shots as another touch of the God POV that quietly looks on at the chaos created by the characters' own hands.

Some critics, including Ramin Bahrani (http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/05/can_one_bad_shot_ruin_an_entir_1.html), have derided some shots and directorial decisions by Eastwood in Mystic River. Particularly, Bahrani noted the insertion of a cutaway to a bullet hole in the ceiling after a shot is fired in a climatic standoff. Additionally, Jim Emerson along with many have criticized the parade at the film's conclusion as a misstep. However, both choices are there to enhance the tragedy of the film's conclusion. The bullet hole shot has a matching scene during the procedural portion where Sean Devine and Whitey Powers are investigating the gun. They make a trip to the liquor store and meet its owner where he tells them his suspicions about Just Ray Harris being the robber. The entire scene appears unnecessary and could have been conveyed with an inserted throwaway line. However, the scene's purpose is not for its information but for its thematic emphasis of cyclical, tragic destruction. Just as Just Ray's gun stayed in the family once and was passed down as noted by Powers, the insert is an indication that sometime in the future another murder may occur with the same gun (perhaps by Michael Boyle even if he and his mother receive $500/month) that will be tracked back to that bullet.

For its part, the parade and the preceding Lady MacBeth speech from Annabeth Markum are Shakespearean staples of faulty attempts to restore order and justify the monster's demise. After the violence of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and others, there is always someone left behind to rebuild the kingdom. Sometimes there is a coronation, sometimes there is just a speech, but there is always a sad remembrance for the fallen with an eye toward making a better tomorrow. Typically, however, the restoration scenes ring desperately false to provoke the audience to question the validity of the play's new moral compass. Is the world a better place because of the violence that has transpired? Is New York City better for Bickle's rampage? Is the planet better for Dr. Robert Neville's Samsonite martyrdom? While the answer to Mystic River's riddle is much simpler, the cavalier indifference of both Markum and Devine at the film's conclusion to Dave's death is tragically common.

The Shining Review

The selling point for The Shining couldn’t have been the idea of Stanley Kubrick crafting a horror film because every Stanley Kubrick film is a horror film. But the pitch could have been a Kubrickian horror movie; incidentally The Shining is both a Stanley Kubrick film (and therefore a film about life’s horror) and also a horror movie. It has all the gothic trappings of midnight showing shock fare: ghosts, an axe murderer, lots of blood, and soundtrack-fueled paranoia. However, it is the wedding of these trite conveniences with Kubrick’s vision that truly elevates The Shining.

The plot is harmlessly pedestrian. Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic/school teacher who takes his family to Colorado to be the winter caretaker for the isolated and haunted Overlook Hotel. As the weeks pass, his cabin fever worsens and he begins to suspect of family of conspiring against him to keep him from his “work.” Reading that description perhaps prompts more intrigue than is merited. In his adaptation, Kubrick seems intent upon removing nuance or progression and even most violence from the story.

Jack Nicholson’s much noted performance is famous for his externalization of Torrance’s madness, but the significance lies in the film’s first dialogue scene. With each exaggerated raise of the eyebrow and jut of the lips in his meeting with Mr. Ullman, we know that Torrance is crazy well before he begins threatening his wife and son with an axe. As Nicholson hams his way through various scenes with gusto, the plot unfolds rather unremarkably. He snaps at his wife; his son sees ghosts and hears voices; he has a frighteningly realistic nightmare; he grows more paranoid and sees ghosts and hears voices. If the methodical yet mundane set up is the expected prologue for relentless violence to follow, the payoff never fully arrives. There is murder, but Torrance is a pitifully inept villain. His wife dismisses him with one swing of a baseball bat and locks him away in a walk-in cooler. He is left to parlay with a condescending hallucination only to be outsmarted by his 10 year old son.

The most surprising element in the film is that none of this is surprising. If the pitch was in discovering how Stanley Kubrick would make a horror movie, he seems disinterested in following through. From the moment Mr. Ullman divulges all of the shockingly unnecessary details about the previous caretaker’s murder of his wife and twin daughters with an axe, viewers know that it is inevitable that Torrance try the same with his wife and son. The conclusion’s inevitability only increases the anxiety that it takes so long to arrive there. Ten minutes in, the script neatly lays out the monster, his motive, his weapon, and his intended victims. It takes another 130 minutes in which little new information is offered before the film reaches its psychological climax.

However, the main reason that The Shining doesn’t fail miserably is that visually the film penetrates the proscenium to unite the film’s space and the viewer’s consciousness. In redirecting the cinematic gaze away from the plot, Kubrick demands that the audience focus on other things. By announcing all of the story’s details at the outset, Kubrick signifies its insignificance. Instead, he offers a psychological landscape for viewers to lose themselves. Mood overpowers and dominates the story. The long, unbroken helicopter tracking shots accompanied by the depressingly labored electronic score that open the film are a study in visual storytelling. As the mountains and cliffs overwhelm the placid yellow family car ambling through the scenic curves, we realize that we like Jack Torrance are descending into the locale’s isolation. With signature images like the elevator gushing blood and the gradual zoom in on Nicholson’s wearied manic face, The Shining is more rewarding when taken as a silent film than a horror movie.

Another similarly ambitious horror film is Halloween. Carpenter, like Kubrick, tells a visually compelling story with such talent that the ordinary nature of the script can be forgiven. But if Halloween is about how absences in the frame can form an imaginary and real presence, The Shining is about how camera movement heightens the viewer’s identification with the characters and more importantly the frame’s environment. Through the invention and implementation of the steadicam, we follow Danny as he discovers more and more of the hotel’s dark corners, while Jack stays isolated and stubbornly and fruitlessly bangs a tennis ball against the wall. This contrast creates dual feelings of claustrophobia and agoraphobia when seeing the frame of different character’s perspectives. The Shining is a marvel because it is perhaps the first and only 3-D horror film.

In repudiating the horror genre and its conventions, Stanley Kubrick has made a bold gesture. Rather than a genuine attempt at a scary movie, The Shining is an experiment in psychological warfare. In a different world, it could easily be the darker sibling of the films that Alex Burgess is forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange. With his scope and ambition, Kubrick has transcended the horror genre by revealing its inadequacies to create a different type of work. The Shining is a terrible horror movie but a great horror film.

Caché Review

Beginning creative writers are told to “write what they know.” Stephen King adjusts this to say “write what you know is true.” In Cache, Michael Haneke has achieved a nearly impossible Socratic wonder: he has achieved both by creating a film and characters that seem to know nothing and lie about the rest.

As viewers, we like to feel that a film has answers to the questions that it asks. It reassures us. It makes things easier. It promises us that someone somewhere has answers. Hitchcock, the master of suspense, wanted his audience to leave the theater frightened but with closure. In Rear Window, the voyeuristic injured photographer is threatened, but he is threatened because he first suspects and then he knows who the killer is. The apprehension lasts only as long as something remains in doubt: whether a crime has been committed, whether Jeffries will be attacked, etc. As the film ends, we have secure answers and a happy ending. Even more recent suspenseful fare, like The Sixth Sense, Fight Club and The Usual Suspects, seduce viewers only as long as the finale appears unknown. Successive viewings lose their punch because we already know the answer.

But every once in a while, a film asks questions and doesn’t provide answers. At first glance, Cache is a fairly simple whodunnit. Georges Laurent, his wife, Anne, and his son, Pierrot, are an upper class Parisian family. They begin receiving cryptic surveillance videos and violent, threatening drawings. This basic set up is the inverse of Rear Window. We are not privy to the machinations of who sends the tapes or why. We are placed in the role of the Mr. Thorwald to ponder along with the Georges and his family why these events are happening and who is watching. But unlike Mr. Thorwald or even Jeffries, we initially do not feel threatened of being discovered for our crimes or of being harmed for our presumptuousness. We are safely behind the fourth wall that is never penetrated. Bob Dylan asked, “Who watches the watchmen?” and film as a medium provides one possible answer: us -- strangers whose curiosity provokes them to glance and poke and prod beyond our concern. But rarely is this exploited. Even in films about voyeurism like Rear Window or the recent update Disturbia or the comedic take The ’Burbs, we are simultaneously observing the action and the observers themselves. Even as the ending approaches and the murderers zero in on the watchers, our distance protects us from accusation or culpability.

Cache does not provide this same sense of security. Given the premise, you can picture the conclusion to a lesser film: A Mexican standoff where Georges corners the kidnapper who has taken Pierrot hostage on top of a skyscraper. Georges wrestles the gun away and saves his son as the villain falls stories below seconds before every cop within a 10 mile radius arrives just in time to do nothing. Cache ends braver, simpler, and more nuanced. The effect is unsettling.

The static camera is in long range and using a wide lenses. We are looking at the entrance to Pierrot’s school from the same distance as an earlier shot. This could easily be mistaken for an establishing shot or what Ozu called a pillow shot. But the camera lingers too long. There is a crowd of students and parents are picking them up. This continues until Majid’s son appears but the camera stays wide and lets your gaze focus wherever you choose. He finds Pierrot and they have a conversation but we can’t make it out. Their posture is intriguing. Are they friends? Majid’s son does not appear to be threatening him but we can’t be sure. What does this mean? The conversation ends and the credits roll as the nondescript scene continues. How does this answer anything?

Much in the spirit of Jacque Tati’s brilliantly difficult Playtime, Haneke lets the scene and frame unfold organically – as if spontaneously. People come and go but we are left to focus or not. The concluding scene has narrative relevancy but seems to suggest that the answer it provides is meaningless. It is a simple composition but it forces the viewer to make the decision, and in doing so, reduces the impact of the meeting but elevates the film’s theme.

Like the film itself, the characters are disinterested or uninterested in passing on the knowledge they possess. Anne and Pierre are uncomfortably comfortable with each other but she admits to no affair. Majid and his son must know of the tapes but both plead ignorance. Pierrot casually dismisses his afterschool activities and his disappearance. Georges’s mother refuses to remember almost adopting Majib and won’t satisfy Georges’s questioning.

In having the most knowledge but the least truth, Georges is the film’s sophist. He expends the most time and energy trying to control and manipulate what others know and what they see. He hides information or outright lies to his wife, his son, his mother, his friends, his boss, and his adopted brother. He believes that his attempts will shield the truth from others and keep it hidden, because as a literary critic, he sees the world through the lenses of art and interpretation. He surrounds himself at dinner and at work with hundreds and hundreds of books and stories. He is Joseph Campbell investigating the Hero’s Thousand Faces or James Frazer decrypting the Golden Bough. After all, it is no accident that after being confronted with the stark reality of Majid’s suicide Georges seeks the comfort and reassurance of cinema.

But even as an interpreter among other interpreters, he cannot insulate himself from uncertainty. As the head of a literary roundtable, he interprets stories for others, but he also manipulates the discussion before it is relayed to others through the editing room. He seeks comfort in arranging the information before it is passed along to others.

The film does not support Georges's story either, though. As viewers, we reject Georges's preferred role as storyteller because we see things that contradict his narrative. The narrative's integrity is compromised by the periodic insertion (interruption?) of unknown segments. We see sequences where Majid has a bloody mouth from tuberculosis and Majid does try to frighten Georges with the knife (or do we?). Are these scenes dreams? Memories? Nightmares? Confabulations? We don't know.

Cache rejects the simple questions and the easy answers. From the film's first frames that unfold and then literally rewind, the audience is never on solid ground, and like Rear Window's Jeffries, we wonder if we can trust our eyes or the answers our view provides. But unlike Jeffries, we reach no satisfactory conclusion about the tapes or who sent them. The narrative "ends" with an antinarrative denouement that necessitates more questions. But this is Haneke's point. By allowing viewers to decide for themselves, he has created an apt cinematic model for morality where we are agents of our own plight of ignorance or knowledge and where any notion of a larger truth is hidden.

500 Days of Summer Review

“Tom could be a really great architect if he wanted to be,” announces Summer from an elevated background like a Grecian choral Id during a loft party late in 500 Days of Summer. Indeed, Tom's problem is that he doesn't try hard at anything. He's almost fired then quits from his job as a greeting card writer; he gets drunk on a blind date and sadly expounds about his romantic failures; his heavy sweaters and disheveled appearance complete with cowlicks often reflect his lackadaisical disinterest with his life; he cannot even muster enough effort to beat an 8 year old at Wii tennis.

So why do care when Summer rejects him? Because he could be something or more accurately could become something. He could be an architect and he could also be a really great boyfriend for Summer if he wanted to be and if she wanted him. He has all the qualities that would seem necessary to succeed in this relationship. He's attractive, he's funny enough, he has an affinity for obscure hipster causes, and he has a meaningless job that affords him enough disposable income, but Summer is left wanting something that she can't put her finger on. This intangible quality is what separates Tom from being a boyfriend and being “perfectly adequately,” the effacing compliment she pays him on first meeting him.

Their fling begins innocently enough. At a karaoke night for the office, a garrulous coworker informs Summer that Tom likes her. She tries to confirm but Tom shields his insecurity behind the addendum, “as friends.” Given his inability to gather his rosebuds, that should be that but Summer won't relent because she finds Tom “interesting,” another disarming but underwhelming expression. At this stage, we have seen little to support this adjective, but the film smartly utilizes a number of cinematic gambits such as POV daydreams, a brilliant split screen of reality vs. expectations, a musical number and a non-linear narrative clearly inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that allow us snapshots of the more interesting Tom from their relationship and its aftermath.

Still even in the flashbacks of their liaison’s heights, Tom is shallow and his strongest characteristic is his passivity. His attempted romantic overtures including double entredres and overanalyzing casual conversations such as “How was your weekend?” do provide superb comedic relief but also belie Tom's true nature of being a Palahniukian “single serving” entity. He thinks Summer is the one for him because she likes The Smiths and spontaneously she kissed him at work. He further admires her Belle & Sebastian yearbook quotation and her strange ability to increase yogurt sales. But Tom is brought crashing down to Earth by the common sense quipping 8 year old Rachel who opines, “Just because she likes the same bizzaro crap you do doesn't mean she's your soul mate.”

We want to like Tom and his coupling with Summer because we view their first few dates where he is genuinely charming and witty. But once things begin to take a turn for the worse, Tom is only able to repeat the same jokes hoping to rekindle that initial spark. After the break up, he continually tells his friends that he will get her back but only sends Summer an email message and waits for a terse reply. When they request updates, he evades the subject because unlike Lloyd Dobler of Say Anything or even Ben Braddock of The Graduate on whom he has mistakenly based his entire notion of love, he has no grand gestures to offer because he has no creativity that we can see. His crowning life achievements are a Bar Mitsvah greeting card and a framed sketch on his desk.

His existence and their relationship is infused with markers of impermanence and dissociation. Instead of a portfolio or sketchbook, he draws skylines on arms that can be washed and chalkboards that can be erased. Rather than moving in together, he and Summer visit an Ikea and pantomime the intimacy of a more mature couple. Even when exiting, the camera can't help but linger on the Ikea tagline that proudly states, “We make true everyday quality” echoing their perfectly adequate but unextraordinary relationship.

His paralyzing inertia carries over into the rest of the film. The film's initial narrative movement is not from Tom, but from Rachel's frantic bike pedaling to get to Tom's apartment and help console the dumpee. But once she arrives, we see there was no hurry because Tom is roboticly breaking dishes – even his tantrums lack passion. Later, in a sepia-toned home movie reel where his friends peer directly into the lense and give their own definitions of love, when it is his turn, he pauses awkwardly and turns off the camera because he doesn't have an answer. More and more, Tom seems a supporting character in his own movie.

It is only after their break-up and toward the end of the film that he begins to show signs of life. When he painstakingly croons The Clash's “Train in Vain” with a fiery resonance and defiantly walks out of a board meeting, we can feel him turning a corner. He abandons his nostalgia for the affair's highs and begins to remember its belittling lows. He goes after his dream job and meets a new potential flame whose name fittingly enough is Autumn, the season of change. The final revelatory encounter with Summer is a necessary catharsis for the audience, the character, and perhaps the creator whose story obviously has a lot of personal relevance. For once, if his real life pain led to this artistic fruit, one could honestly say, “Breaking up with her was the best thing to ever happen to him.”

The Anti-Social Network

The Social Network manages to conjure feelings of personal irrelevancy and motivation at the same time. It is a movie about the corners we cut and the lengths we’ll go to in order to impress others -- not so much ourselves. The characters exist in a world where friendship is an illusion masked by money and social capital -- who you know is more important who are you and how much money you have is more important than how you came by it. All the while, the people seem gluttons for their self-absorbed, self-conscious fears of not being ‘cool.’

Rather than seek salvation from predatory environments, they stay; they participate; more importantly, they create more predatory environments of their own. Mark and Eduardo seem doomed to be the same people they were before Facebook became their lives -- Mark, the lonely detached destructive workaholic and Eduardo, the trusting honest duped friend. How can it be that after 500 million friends and $25 billion that they have earned nothing and are still hoping for the same thing: acceptance?

Yet Aaron Sorkin has a masterful way of glamorizing the nonstop drudgery of long hours spent being religiously devoted to a cause. Whether it was in The West Wing, Sportsnight, A Few Good Men, An American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, or now in The Social Network, Sorkin characters are always the epitome of dedication. They maniacally lose themselves in their work. They sacrifice friends, marriages, and stable relationships for their careers.

Typically, their persistence is rewarded with achievement and reassurance that the world is a better place because of them. There’s an undeniable sense of optimism running through Sorkin’s entire oeuvre. Morose subjects like disillusionment and death are treated sincerely but tinged with passionate idealism. There is suffering in his fictive world, but the grim reality is always kept at arm’s length and dramatic conceits are surrounded by moments of levity. 

But in The Social Network, David Fincher manages to let Sorkin’s acerbically witty dialogue convey the mood but his darker, dystopian vision tempers provides a strong counterweight to balance the overall tone. The cinematic grandstanding of Panic Room and Fight Club are gone, but their washed out palettes remain; even California looks depressingly suburban and overcast.  We see a world of dark reds, browns, and earth tones that matches the documentary-like detail of  Zodiac. In an expressionistic touch, the environments reflect the character’s internal states. Despite all the talk about final clubs, colleges, and parties, we never get indications visually that these are places we want to be or people we want to know; instead, they are “wired in” to a digital interface but disconnected from school, family, friends, and life.  

In standard Sorkin fashion, the characters struggle to balance personal and professional lives and wind up with an uncomfortable, unsatisfying mixture of the two. Therefore, it is somewhat fitting that we see people who sacrifice social lives for a social network. With the brilliant final shot of a pitiful Zuckerberg compulsively reloading the page hoping for virtual acceptance from a real lost friend, the film declares that it wasn’t worth the payoff. It is a significant movie about insignificant people.