All the King's Men

Just saw All the King's Men (2006). I haven't yet read the novel, but rest assured, I will. The film was panned by critics though I think it did a bit of box office. I loved it. We have the Christopher Marlowe Faustus tale, mixed in with the American democratic metanarrative, combined with individuals with disordered goods, Neitzsche, Dante, Beatrice and Sean Penn. What more can you ask for? Oh, and I forgot the Freud (killing the father), the Rene Girard (violence), the Kennedy assassination, and the great camera work. Wow, did the critics suck hole on that one!

Infernal Affairs and The Departed

I saw both of these films some time ago. I watched Infernal Affairs because I wanted to go see The Departed. I fear that I may spoil both films for those who haven't seen them. I'll tread lightly. It struck me this morning while cleaning the bathroom that The Departed might be Scorsese's apology for the just war, and I do believe his grammar is Catholic. This is all based on the ending, which is the biggest change from Infernal Affairs. The ending in IA is much different. And its difference seems to be resigned to something, not to apathy, but to perhaps something more Buddhist - all life is suffering perhaps. But The Departed seems to avoid this ending. Scorsese seems to claim that all life is suffering but this doesn't mean you must resign yourself too it.

Does he, however, perpetuate suffering or limit it, if only slightly?
This is the eternal question. Is pacifism the refusal of justice or the only just act? Does pacifism ever act violently on behalf of peace?

When we frame The Departed thus, we find Nicholson falling into the role of Satan, DiCaprio as Christ - especially in his suffering - and Wahlburg as Angel of Wrath, the Wrath of God. Interesting to see that DiCaprio has an absent father, who's legacy follows him everywhere he goes in Boston. Ah the Christian metanarrative, narrative, mythos...whatever.

FYI: A brief, simplistic, yet good account of Just War Theology. One will notice very quickly that America's war of terror (thank you Borat) does not fill the requirements. Might I add that these requirements are from the era of what we call "The Dark Ages". I think we are safe to assume that we are in the "Even Darker Ages" as long as we don't live up to (or supersede) the best of the ethical norms such an age produced.

Dogville by Lars von Trier

I watched Lars von Trier's film Dogville the other night and was impressed. How was I impressed? The only film I'd seen of his previous to this was Dancer in the Dark, with Bjork. It was really slow developing and it had a romantic view of a factory worker, but there are scenes from it that still come to mind now and then: when Bjork would be overcome with music, pulling together the sounds of the factory to create her own symphony. P.T. Anderson used this motif in Punch-Drunk Love, where it was also very effective. But everyone who had seen DitD knew Anderson was just ripping it off.
So how was I impressed by Dogville?
1) the film is set in a small American town in the Rockies, but the town is only sparsely constructed. Most of the town remains as chalk lines on the floor of a film studio.


2) the genre of the film is a mix of Winnie the Pooh like Narration (I think I can call this a genre) - tons of voice over, which implies that it is an adaptation of a novel, though no novel exists. The voice must be the writer/god. Indeed this confusion is encouraged because the film is anti-realist and mostly told in a "mythical" type mood. Everything is universal. Particulars are erased from the script so that the message can extend as far as possible. This relates to the minimalist stage.
3) the one exception to Dogville's universality is that the film makes a big deal about being a commentary on America. The end credits are all pictures of the down and out from the depression, complemented by more pictures of the down and out from later on - in colour. This is all set to David Bowie's tune "Young Americans".
4) Nicole Kidman plays a character named "Grace" who comes to a small town - dogville - which doesn't want to keep her because there is someone on the look out for her - seems like a gangster. The town comes to love her (Palm Sunday), then comes to hate her (very last supper - even Judas shows up). Then something very interesting happens and we have a scene between "Grace" and her Father (I don't know where the spirit was during this). Then Grace does something that seems a bit odd given her name. She refuses the Atonement. (Kidman gives a great performance, as does Paul Bettany, James Caan and Ben Gazzara)
5) The refusal of the Atonement (I will not tell you the details), seems to be the part that von Trier wants to pin on America. This is the only part of the film that seems bogus. The rest of the film is exceptional, but the use of the Christian mythos for an explicit critique of America (which I am not broadly against, just particularly in this case) seems to limit the effect of the film's penetration of the social problems that humans 'naturally' come by. Not just American humans.
6) Grace thus seems not to be the transcendent grace of Christ, but a specifically American reincarnation. This makes the film explicitly political and twerps the myth (which can still be political).

Go rent this three hour film. You'll enjoy it, but you may have the same problems as I did. I found this review to be quite good.
Drop me a line if you had similar problems with Dogville.

One last moment of praise for von Trier. This film does things with metafiction, the ability for a story to expose the fictional mechanisms of the narrative which pervade it, that I haven't seen rivaled by any other film. The device is so obvious and at the same time it is a stroke of genius. I'm speaking of the minimalist stage carved out with chalk lines and various props. Dogville draws a direct line from Marxist theatre, through the postmodern, and into what ever Dogville is. It doesn't seem postmodern , because it insists on truth. This story isn't about relativity folks.

Stranger than Fiction

I just finished watching Stranger than Fiction, which I really enjoyed. Talk about realism! Anyway, I noticed one of my comp books on the shelf of Dustin Hoffman's office - After Virtue, with a "used" sticker on it. I'm not sure if you can see it in this picture, but I do have to say, the TV in corner office is a nice touch.

Frank Gehry and his Critics: Sketches of Frank Gehry

Magnanimity is a quality that is lost on critics. I've just finished watching Sydney Pollack's Sketches of Frank Gehry (the architect that does the wavy titanium pieces - the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao Spain, the Music hall in LA and I think he's redoing the AGO in Toronto) , and I've been surfing around with the reviews. Figures like Eva Hagberg, weren't fans of this film, and I suspect they aren't fans of Gehry either (though I think Hagberg is ambivalent). Hagberg's probably right about Pollack's film, it is a bit too much of a celebration - not enough of an evaluation... what can you expect from a friend? But Hagberg, let's face it, you don't need to be an expert to tell if a piece of architecture is aesthetically interesting (technically interesting yes...). Now the average Schmoe won't be all that specific, though she may surprise you (you wanted me to use the male pronoun there didn't you). Gehry's Bilbao and his LA piece radically alter the aesthetics of their place for the better for the moment. Does architecture need to be eternal? Well the best pieces will have longevity, but it must also speak to the phenomenology of the contemporary city dweller, and on that level, Gehry's work all but forces a viewer to dwell poetically. It stands out in the midst of tall city shit, like an iceberg. Not necessarily there for eternity, but something to gawk at, in awe, for the time being. And the awe that a Gehry invites us to partake in is not the awe of totalitarianism...it is the awe of the passionate inwardness - the romantic expressivism of that aging hippy generation (you know the type - they drive Mercedes and hang on to the revolutionary urges of their youth).
Hal Foster, very much the aesthete, doesn't think that Gehry's work is worth all the hoopla. Foster gives the impression that he is rooting for the architect who ruptures the metanarratives, renders open the closures, the messianic type who celebrates provisionality and makes the ordinary (chain link) extraordinary. To Foster the early Gehry is an artist, the later Gehry...a sellout. But let's examine the nature of this sellout. I can agree that some of his stuff is pretty shitty, but I can also ascent to the praise that is extended to his work at Bilbao. Bilbao and the LA piece do rupture the skyline. They explode the city forms. They look like futurist sculptures that are lived in. Now Foster is right to say that Gehry shouldn't be heralded as the greatest living artist because of this, but this shouldn't take away from the sublimity of his work. I, for one, can appreciate his pieces without the need to deify him. After all, there are lots of 'conformity buildings' to compare his work to, and I can tell the difference without any training.

To Foster's credit, he claims that he needs to hold to a critical line, as a critic, so that the public will know that dissenting voices are permitted, available. I think this is a valuable role for an artist to play, but lets identify the object we are playing with - consensus - and not the object of art. Magnanimity is worth exploring. Greatness, something both Foster and Gehry know a bit about, is a privilege that is not a privilege for the sake of debasing others. Greatness need not exist on a Darwinian plain of violence and competition. Greatness can stand on its own, in its own presence, among other great presences, without fear of limited space.

By the way, Hagberg is on point about Julian Schnabel; Pollack completely mis-reads him:

"and Julian Schnabel, who (in a brilliantly critical farce that Pollack seems to have missed) shows up in a terrycloth robe with a brandy snifter in one hand and a cigarette in the other, dropping loaded one-liners like "It makes me want to put my stuff in there." They get it: Frank's just fucking with us".

What Hagberg isn't clear about who her "us" is that Frank fucks with...I think Frank is fucking with them, for our benefit...

Download the Gehry film at Greylodge (lord knows neither he nor Pollack needs the money)

Note: Zizek! and Sketches of Frank Gehry have both shocked me with the quirkiness of their subjects. It is interesting to see such heterogeneous personalities, with their odd gestures, tones of voice, neuroses. You swear it was a Woody Allen conspiracy.

Flicks: Zizek!; Double Indemnity; the Tommy Douglas Story; Dreamgirls

"The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's 'Capital': 'They do not know it; but they are doing it'" Zizek! (12:27)

Last night I watched the documentary Zizek! (2005); today, to escape the bitter cold (-25 Celsius), I stayed inside and watched Double Indemnity (1944), a film that Zizek is looking for in his documentary (and one that I have been meaning to watch for some time). Now I'm watching Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story (2006, CBC mini-series). Last night before Zizek, I saw Dreamgirls (2006). I was very disappointed in Dreamgirls, which is nominated for almost everything this award season (though I was glad to see that it wasn't nominated for best picture). Dreamgirls is poorly written. It is a musical that is badly translated into film. I'm tired of this musical to film business anyway. Also, the Motown story would be much better as just that, the Motown story, and not the almost Motown story. I will say this: Jennifer Hudson can sing like a banshee, and she's not a bad actor. Also, Eddie Murphy does a good job of playing a James Brown-like soul man who is forced to sing like Lionel Richie by the Berry Gordy Jr analogue (Jamie Foxx).

The common thread in all these films (and the good thing about Dream Girls): the corruptions of capitalism. Zizek is a lacanian-socialist, Tommy Douglas was a Baptist Socialist (the best kind - much better then the National Socialist), Double Indemnity's lesson is on the corruption of money, and has a corrupt insurance sales man who kills an oilman (sounds socialist to me...though the best detective ends up being the claims guy, Keats, at the insurance company). Bill Condon tackles the market's effect on the forms of black music (though he seems to bask in the production of Motown parody). At one point the Gordy Jr. character (Foxx) tells the Diana Ross character (Beyonce) that he made her lead singer over the Florence Ballard character because Ross's voice was so thin that he could put anything he wanted into it, whereas Ballard's voice was too rooted in black tradition to for him to control.

The Tommy Douglas story is excellent. There is a great representation of the 1931 Bienfait Miner Strike, where the RCMP killed three peaceful, protesting and singing Miners, calling them Communist (mostly because of racist attitudes towards Ukrainians who populated the town). Here is a little exchange between Douglas and the man he beat as Premier, Jimmy Gardiner:

Jimmy Gardiner: Bit of a difference between your table and my mine isn't there? People notice these things you know.

Douglas: If people notice that I don't need a private room to eat my dinner that is, ah, fine by me.

Jimmy: That's not what they notice. They notice that you may be premier but this is still my table in my restaurant in my town in my Provence, you've only got it on loan.

Douglas: We all get it on loan Jimmy that is the concept of democracy.

Gardiner: No sir the concept of democracy is that business goes on as usual regardless of who gets elected. You could call yourself a socialist reverend, but this is a capitalist country and the people won't stand for it.

Douglas: Well the capitalists lost this time. Enjoy your table. (5:1 4:00)

Now I'm not sure about Douglas's position on democracy, but I certainly like how he practiced justice. One of my biggest fears as of late is that democracy is the opiate of the masses, the idea that you can have effect, that you can control the market. I think the real problem in 21st global politics is that democracy has little hold on the market and political forms won't until we have some sort of global political power that can restrict and discipline the market. Our environment hangs in the balance, as do our particular identities, our localities, our religions, our accents, our languages (other then English).

A word on the Zizek! documentary: I was amazed at how quirky he is. I've been reading his works for three years now and I had no idea what he was like in person. I'm also very impressed by the film, especially the ending. But this is what I'm most impressed by: the film was made by Astra Taylor, who was born in 1979 in Saskatchewan, who studied at the New School for Social Research, has published a book, and is working on her third film or so. She's also taught two courses. It makes me feel like I'm letting the world pass me by.

Economies of Death - Butch Cassidy, Derrida and Updike

Coffee is the bane of my existence. I love the taste. But it eats my belly lining, and it dances through my nerves at 4:30 in the AM. Which makes me get up and watch the ends of movies that my wife has fallen asleep in half way through and we've never got back to. This morning it was Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Two things to rave about: 1) the cinematography in the first five minutes of the film was exceptionally tight - all shadow work in B&W with nice textured shots of a western town; 2) Death! I've never been so excited about death as I was watching BC&TSK. Death follows them around through the desert after a botched train robbery. I loved it, because I've been thinking about being-toward-death. Heidegger used to claim that authenticity emerged from being oriented towards the ultimate end. He was an atheist, so death takes on that sort of finality for him. I also just finished Derrida's The Gift of Death, where he meditates on how death must be met by each of us. He also looks at the death of the other through the Abraham and Isaac story, via Kierkegaard. He tries to problematize the teleological suspension of the ethical (putting God before man when ethics says no : ie.: Abraham and Isaac and murder). Derrida reasons to the point of redefining God (which should be completely problematic from a deconstructive position):

God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. Once such a structure of conscience exists, of being with-oneself, of speaking, that is, of producing invisible sense, once I have within me, thanks to the invisible word as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what i call God in me, (it happens that) I call myself God - a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from "God calls me," for it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret (108-9)

And here is the clincher:

"God is in me, he is the absolute "me" or "self," he is the structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard's sense, subjectivity" (109).

I think that Derrida could have used a bit more tact here, perhaps more homework or research was needed (but that would not suit his polemical end). David Bentley Heart distinquishes between that which is God of God and the space of not-God in God. Which is completely paradoxical, but essential for an understanding of creation within a conception of God as the positive. God is the abyss of being, in which all being has it's being, which is so transcendent that even in being there is space for other being. Thus preserving the distinction between subjectivity and, well, God, and swerving around what Ignatieff calls the idolatry of human rights (the idol of the human).

Now let me link this back to BC&TSDK. Death follows them around, yet they have no trouble killing others for their cause. In fact each of their lives is worth about 12 Bolivian lives if I counted correctly, which is quite an economy of death if you ask me. But death hounds BC&SDK, it just keeps knocking at their door. It gives their life meaning. But, unlike Derrida, they have no subjectivity. Their ends are objectively represented. Death is external, on horse back. The law is death, and neither BC or SDK has any authentic relationship to this end. They just seek to evade it. They don't try to understand it, only anticipate how death will move. I was reminded of Bergman's The Four Horseman of The Apocalypse, with the figure of death playing chess, chasing down main characters. But Bergman is much more playful, much more ironic. With Goldman(?) we have a film that is sincere in its brotherly love, nasty in its romantic love, playful with money, and damn serious about death. Could this be the difference between Europe and America? What a huge leap. Interesting to see that America has no God, while Europe has a comedic God. An old God who has seen too many deaths. If America had a God, it would be young and afraid of death. Neither vision gets to the heart of Christianity, which has a God who sees through death, in suffering.

Perhaps America's God is a God of money. Updike had something to say about this last night in In The Beauty of the Lilies: (Speaking about a Minster- Clarence - who has lost his faith and stepped down from the pulpit)

"Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates: dollars were the flourishing sigh of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot" (he now sells encyclopedias, door to door). (90)

Updike has a flare for film in this text, perhaps he's talking about BC&TSDK. One Christian thing about the film: The deaths of others (BC&TSDK) provided great wealth for Redford and Newman! Which reminds me, the death they saw on horse back is immanent in my computer chair. I must retreat! Pow Pow.