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.