Nebraska (2013) and The Payne of Landscape

     Typically, it takes about three films from the same director before I start to get a strong sense of not only their style, but their commitment to film. In other words, identifying patterns throughout a directors work can reveal motives. For instance, it wasn't until I watched Amour, Funny Games, AND White Ribbon that it became clear that Michael Haneke hits you in the gut by disturbing the audiences sense what constitutes intimate space (see earlier post of "intimate violations"). And like Haneke, I've developed a stronger appreciation for Alexander Payne's distinct take on human frailty. In Sideways (2004) The Descendants (2011), and Nebraska (2013), Payne uses visible landscapes to reflect the invisible mental states of his protagonists. For instance, in The Descendants the flora and fauna of Hawaii symbolize the delicate ecosystem that is extended family. Although selling the King family's 25,000 acre plot of pristine beach front property would benefit their finances, it would do so at the expense of the family's historic connection to the land. In Sideways, Miles' hapless travails through Santa Barbara wine country represent the state of his life: a region that is pretensious and over-intellectualized on its surface, concealing mundane lives of discontentment, unfulfilled expectations, and escapism through alcohol. Likewise, in Nebraska the rusted and decaying post-industrial landscapes that stretch from the Rockies to the great plains reflect the fact that Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is an elderly man in decline. All three films explore the concept of entropy, or that all things are, in some fashion, decaying. While this outlook seems moribund, Payne's approach seems to suggest that it is how we react in the face of our frailty and decline that matters. In short, each film suggests that our shared frailty require empathy and an appreciation for a sense of place (which makes us who we are).

     Woody Davis has never refused anyone a favor. At the same time he is a cantankorous alcoholic and a distant father. His naive belief that he has won a sweepstakes contest (for a million dollars) - that most of us would throw in the trash - demonstrates that he is also a man whose ultimate kindness and trust in others leads him to be exploited. Indeed, he is a complicated portrait of both our flaws and our humanity (sometimes what makes us kind is also what makes us vulnerable). His travels with his son David (Will Forte) through the rusting rural towns and postindustrial landscapes of the great plains (from Billings to Lincoln) is simultaneously a detour through a man who is also breaking down. That is to say that the decaying landscapes of middle America show that we too start our lives with the same promise and vitality but will all inevitably meet the same end. Industriousness and beauty give way to the forces of entropy. The beauty, however, is in how each of us relate to each other through the experience. Of course, Woody and David travels disrupt the myth that some great fortune can make us invulnerable. Instead, their travels confront the mirrored disarray of their own inner-scapes. Like the corroding towns and hamlets depicted in the film, we will also be absorbed back into the land. At the same time, we all share a connection to the places and spaces we inhabit. I, too, was struck with sentimentality as the camera panned across the rocky outcroppings of Billings and the stretches of I90 I traveled so often when I was younger. Payne helps audiences see the characters and even ourselves in the landscapes (both the picturesque and decayed) and the mis-en-scene. Nebraska is painfully beautiful, both comic and tragic.  

   
"Have a beer with your old man, be somebody!" - Woody Davis.

Oscar predicting vs. Oscar deserving

Michael Haneke and Intimate Violations

     Director Michael Haneke (White Ribbon, Funny Games, Cache) has perfected the art of cultivating audience discomfort with shots that violate our sense of personal intimacy. In short, Haneke uses shot techniques and character interactions that violate our most taken-for-granted personal spaces. For instance, in the self-conscious Funny Games (2007; 1997) a pair of unlikely petulant young serial killers are invited into unsuspecting family's vacation homes under false pretenses. After being invited in to "borrow an egg or two" they proceed to escalate the tension by requesting inappropriate accommodations and asking questions that violate common decency, until the tension ultimately produces an explosion of violence. For us, the discomfort of Funny Games is in its resonate violation of person intimacy. The two killers are not spectacular monsters, but rather mundane overprivileged sadists.  The terror they inflict is on the personal space of the home (emasculating the father, sexually terrorizing the mother, forcing the family to play games that pit them against each other with torture and death the inevitable outcome etc.). Haneke makes the audience an intimate member of the family, taking us along what would have otherwise been a family's pleasant but ultimately boring vacation. After we are invited into the home, he tears it to pieces. The violation is accentuated by the killers direct address of the audience. The killers use a "universal remote" to rewind the film itself after making a fatal mistake that results in their captives gaining the upper hand. One of the killers looks at the camera and in so many words tells the audience to give up their own revenge and escape fantasies: its not that kind of film. The audience is reminded that they are also the captives, so they might as well play along with the killers sadistic fantasies (the inference being they represent the latent blood lust of the horror film audience). After the family is finally dispatched, the pair moves on to the next home, reminding us that the cycle of violence and bloodshed will continue without consequence. 

    Haneke brings audiences into places we typically have no business being (or at least places where the audience is not supposed to go; the spaces of ellipses where gaps in time (cuts) are connected through inference). Of course, many films bring us into the home, but not with the kind of uncomfortable intimacy Haneke cultivates. It is his technique that at once constructs a sacred intimate space and violates our comfort by introducing something person or force that represents the profane.  For instance, in White Ribbon (2009) Haneke takes us inside the homes and community of interwar rural Germany. Throughout the film, rising actions that violate the community's strict religious norms are never actually depicted but nonetheless cue us into the inevitability of a reactionary response by the town's male authority figures. We see very little action, only causes and consequences. We are taken into the homes of “the Volk” and invited to take note of the abusive and reactionary (perceptually mystical) forces that ultimately give rise to German fascism. The actions are mundane; the consequences are tragic. 

     Similar to Haneke’s other films, Amour is a beautiful yet painfully intimate and fearless portrayal of precarious life. It depicts the life-long bond of an elderly couple (Georges and Anne, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) tested by human frailty. As Anne suffers a series of debilitating strokes, Georges struggles to maintain her dignity and care, as he vacillates between perspectives of debt and obligation to burden and liability. The story takes place inside the cloistered world of their Paris apartment and is filmed predominantly in a medium shot that captures the facial expressions and body language of each character as they respond to each other’s presence and absence. What is remarkable is how Haneke makes the audience live in the mundane and uncomfortable space between the ellipses: long takes of Georges brushing his teeth, reading, listening to music; the couple sharing routine conversations and meals together (both of which become more difficult as the Anne’s condition worsens). 

Typically, shots are cut and arranged to create visual storytelling that infers connections between disparate moments and places where action is inferred. Consider how montages advance the action by speeding up time through jump cuts that infer not only character improvement but also a significant passage of time. The spaces in between are often erased to make room for only significant actions. Audiences can infer that the characters eat, sleep, and go to bathroom without the actions being explicitly represented. Haneke, however, builds tension and propels the story not only through cuts that infer the passage of time but also through long takes of events that most films would edit out for continuity and efficiency. Again, the audience is held captive in the couple’s apartment, much like the couple themselves whose world has shrunk on account of Anne’s failing health. 

     As he did in Funny Games, Haneke positions the audience as an uncomfortable voyeur that - by virtue of watching the film - will be invited to gaze upon the parts of life that take place in the kind of intimate spaces that they are typically not privy or accustom. The film begins with Georges and Anne (without close ups of the couple or any cues that they are the film’s protagonists) taking a seat in crowded musical theater. The audience’s seating arrangement mirrors that of a movie theater (our theater was, however, remarkably empty). The audiences are forced to stare at each other uncomfortably, waiting for their respective shows to begin. Perhaps this introduction is a self-conscious gesture at the film’s voyeurism, its uncomfortable closeness to the daily activities most films spare the audience. While this process sounds excruciating, it brings the audience closer to understanding the smallest and taken-for-granted gestures, habits, and behaviors that bond each of us to each other. When those intimate habits are destabilized, made more arduous and lonely, or deprived of meaning and value, we are forced to confront the nature of love and structure of our frailty. 

     It is also remarkable that Haneke is able to achieve this effect without the use of overwrought emotion or extreme sentimentality. He gives attention to the detail and routine of life without wallowing in overly dramatized and hackneyed reflections on the nature of life and death (like the kind seen in some tear-jerker films that get panned by critics). For example, Georges recalls a film he watched in his youth. He cannot recall the details of the film or what made him cry, only the experience of trying to recount the details of the film to someone else and feeling ashamed that the emotions were ever more powerful the second time around. For the audience, the details of the rising action in Amour are not as important as the structure of feeling it evokes. When asked “what was Amour about” by a friend, I was similarly at a loss for words. The plot can be summarized quickly, as there were very few characteristically major plot moments to mark the rising action. Yet, when asked to recount the film today, I could not help but feel nearly overcome with feeling and emotion. Like Georges, I could remember few of the details in the same way that I cannot tell you what I had for breakfast or at what time I brushed my teeth; however, I can feel the passage of the day and describe the warming presence of others throughout the mundane exercise of my life. Watch the film with a loved one and appreciate what Haneke attempts to have you see in yourself.

SAG and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Since it is a work day and I have an actual job that I must show up for (though i'd prefer to just talk about films all day), I'll put this out there for those who may have more time. I have more to say about the film itself (on the question of whether it is "poverty porn", which I think is a bit simplistic of reading, but that's for later) Beasts of the Southern Wild did not follow SAG guidelines for low budget films and many are concerned that the actors were not compensated fairly or that they did not receive the union protection they deserved (See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/01/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-sag-ineligible_n_1930670.html). As a supporter of union labor but a supporter of the film's concept and non-professional aesthetic, I am reasonably concerned but want to hear what other people have to think.   Does this call into question the filmmaker's integrity? Does it make paying to watch the film complicity with potential under-compensation of non-union workers?  

Dick Gregory on "Django Unchained"

We are working on an article project about Django Unchained and the public imagination of slavery with a colleague of ours in political science (Dr. Terri Jett). I may post some of our thoughts about the project (in a blog friendly form). In the mean time, listen to famed civil rights activist (and comedian) Dick Gregory give his perspective on the film. I am struck by his suggestion that that film "freed the inside of him" like no other (and that he calls Spike Lee a "thug" and a "punk").  

The End of Cinema

I would encourage anyone who reads this blog to also read The End of Cinema (http://theendofcinema.blogspot.com). Truly great "best of" lists and explorations of films beyond the mainstream and the time period.

Can torture be represented?

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag writes that "the imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers - seen close-up on the television screen - and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what causes the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence" (p. 102). After viewing Katherine Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012), a cinematic account of the CIA's detainee program and the pursuit and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, I keep asking myself: can torture be represented in film? Is there a way of representing the brutality of something like the US detainee program that could induce more than ambivalence or moral ambiguity? Can torture be presented without utilitarian reservations about its potential efficacy (i.e. endless "what if" scenarios that  might erode an audiences moral prohibition against cruelty in pursuit of safety or security)? As Sontag writes, the representation of suffering often produces in the voyeur a bemused awareness that atrocities happen, rather than an embodied and full-throated demand for action. Worse, our sympathy toward those who suffer functions as a mask for our complicity. In other words, we deplore the cruelty, feel for the victim, but accept the inevitability of both. In Zero Dark Thirty, the means of justice are morally dubious, but undeniably "effective". In an open letter to the Los Angeles Times, Bigelow defends the film by asserting that "those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement, If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhuman practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time." In light of the depth and complexity of the critical responses to the film's representation of torture, this response is anemic at best and naive, if not dangerous at worst. Imagining the camera as a neutral medium that merely documents events without framing them, dismisses the concept that framing choices matter: selection and deflection, highlighting and lowlighting, and so on shape how the audiences are invited to perceive what is depicted (how they will feel and related to the image and narrative on the screen). This is the kind of cop-out I wouldn't accept from my first-year students.

Whether by design or incident, the film does much more than "delve into the thorny subjects of our time". In the first third of the film, the audience is invited into the moral vacuum of the US detainee program, where suspected Al Qaeda members endure brutality and humiliation at secret detention facilities throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The films begins as rising intelligence officer Maya (Jessica Chastain) joins the forwardly deployed operations at a secret site in Afghanistan. Dan (Jason Clark) - detached and cruel - introduces Maya to brutal and abject techniques of "enhanced interrogation." I would argue that the audience is introduced and acclimated to the CIA culture of torture by way of familiarization, fraternization, and ultimately psychological doubling. At first the torture sequences visibly disgust Maya. The audience witness her desire for the subjects to capitulate in an effort to make the violence come to an end. At first, she winces or diverts her eyes as pain is inflicted on the detainees. However, as she become accustom to the interrogations, they begin to become routinized parts of her work-day gathering intelligence. She begins to take a more active role in the interrogations, directly addressing the detainees and, eventually, leading interrogations accompanied by armed personnel in masks who inflict pain upon on their subjects upon her command. Torture, indeed, is just part of the job. While Maya does not revel in dispensing pain, she appears to grow numb to its repetition. Moreover, torture gets compartmentalized from the rest of her professional duties and socialization. The torture takes places in windowless storage units and dark basement rooms that are easily sectioned away from the rest of life on the military bases and detention facilities depicted. The characters exhibit what Robert Jay Lifton calls "doubling", in which people who commit extreme acts of cruelty as a part of their work (the case study for Lifton is Nazi doctors) split into two selves: the professional self (the "Auschwitz self", he dubbed) and the private/public self (the often kind, empathetic persona that the same person exhibits outside of their work environment). The process of doubling explains how people can be acclimated to cruelty as a part of their professional obligations but at the same time be loving and caring people in non-professional settings. In the film, torture is an act that can be compartmentalized from the rest of torture's life and professional duties, it is left behind or perhaps repressed to the dark windowless recesses of an abandoned storage tanker. Like Maya, the audience is socialized into the professional culture of torture where cruelty is regrettable but a part of a national service.

Finally, doubts about the efficacy of torture are removed as it ultimately provides the intelligence information that leads to the assassination of Bin Laden. In fact, Maya and her colleagues bemoan the loss of the detainee program and the damage it did to the CIA's pursuit on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The film confirms that if it were not for the detainee program, and Maya's nearly obsessive pursuit of Bin Laden's couriers and associates, he would have never been eliminated. While I cannot speak to the veracity of this narrative, I can say that within the text of the film, torture is credited for more intelligence victories than losses (overload, misinformation, etc.). Thus, torture is sutured to a narrative of national triumph, while its consequences for the victims and the perpetrators is backgrounded or otherwise silent. Many people have written about torture and depictions of the body in pain (too many to cite here), but one common element of agreement must surely be that to depict torture is anything but neutral. Films can absolve torturers, make witnesses or bystanders out of audiences, stoke the desire for revenge and retribution, create detached spectators, shock the conscience, or invite critical engagement and action. I have seen countless films that depict torture (inevitable when you watch a lot of horror films and follow directors like Eli Roth), and recognize the degree to which as a US filmgoer, shock followed by detachment or bemusement is an easy response. While depiction is not endorsement per se, depiction is by the same token not criticism. The question is what lessons about the moral standing and use-value of torture can audiences derive from film's narrative? How are we invited to make sense of and evaluate the role of torture in the outcome of historical events? What will we do when we are asked once again to torture in the name of national security, justice, or some other abstract value?

References:
Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. New York: Picador.
Lifton, R.J. (1991). The genocide mentality: Nazi Holocaust and nuclear threat. New York: Basic Books.