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.