Film Review

Public Service Denouncement, by Tom Jennings

edited version published in Variant, No. 33, October 2008

In ‘CSI: The Big Sleazy’ (Variant, No. 31), I discussed The Tin Roof Blowdown, James Lee Burke’s 2007 crime novel set in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina, in terms of the anger and sadness of the author at the abject failure of government institutions to respond adequately to the scale of that disaster. In the narrative, Burke’s surrogate is Dave Robicheaux – an ageing Louisiana police detective, Vietnam veteran and recovering alcoholic drafted in to bolster the restoration of law and order in the flooded city – whose progressive social conscience and keen class- and race-consciousness contrast with his proclivity towards the violent resolution of conflict and frustration. In effect, this character’s obsession with his individual weaknesses – expressed, for example, in nostalgia for a mythic past and a chivalric ideal of personal integrity that cannot tolerate or withstand the complexities of contemporary society – leads him to continually recreate the circumstances which cause him such pain in his life. Furthermore he projects these same dynamics onto his perceptions of the world around him, which are thus reflected in his professional conduct, personal relationships and impact on the lives of others. I concluded that analogous patterns of self-defeating, cyclical fantasies circulate culturally and politically too; an angle which helps to illuminate the ways Burke tries to weave larger phenomena into the unfolding of his scenarios. Operating within the detective mystery genre then allows the writer to dramatise these sorts of contradictions, linking macro- and micro-levels in a particularly powerful and compelling way.

Meanwhile crime fiction has enjoyed something of a renaissance since the 1980s – aspiring to the status of serious literature as well as pulp populism, and embracing ambitions to critical social commentary from pungent perspectives outside of and in opposition to mainstream complacency. Many younger writers were inspired by neo-noir pioneers like Burke, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, who built on the genre’s founding characteristics pitting independent ‘working stiffs’ and ‘little guys’ against the corporate corruption of the monstrous modern urban machine. However, these authors’ somewhat old-fashioned, backward-looking sensibilities – partly, no doubt, due to their generational positioning – result in a pessimistic, ultimately even conservative, outlook concerning prospects for change. Beyond, that is, the temporary victories of cynically lovable rogues unmasking the amoral excesses of the rich and powerful – but which promise no enduring impact, either on the overarching societal structures and conditions which foster and shelter large-scale wrongdoing, or on the range of strategies employing variations of brutal and cunning self-seeking machismo shared by heroes and villains alike. These dispiriting trends are reinforced in the most popular latter-day descendants of private eyes in visualisations of urban chaos and crime at the cinema, where earlier shades of grey in classic film noir had mutated by the 1990s into lurid stylisation and the glamourisation of cartoonish violence – such as in films by John Dahl and Quentin Tarantino – with social and political context or nuance obliterated by technicolour nihilism and comic-book characterisation.

But there is another trajectory in recent noir fiction which starts from the empirically obvious proposition that the suffering associated with criminal violence falls disproportionately and routinely on the poor. Lower-class strata may be stigmatised and marginalised in terms of media portrayal as well as in achieving American dreams, yet constitute the bulk of the population – so that a point of view properly rooted within their milieux and lifeworlds may more accurately encapsulate the contours of present social ills. Alongside authors such as Walter Mosley and Michael Connelly (Los Angeles), Andrew Vachss and Richard Price (New York), and George Pelecanos (Washington DC), a prime exponent of this new wave is Dennis Lehane, whose Boston-based stories deal with urban impoverishment, gentrification, racism, organised crime and political and institutional corruption in such a way as to meditate on how ordinary people collectively understand and negotiate extremes of adversity – preferring vernacular verisimilitude in geographical and temporal specificity to the quirkily baroque, drifting grifting misfits elsewhere. Since this writer attracted widespread attention with Clint Eastwood’s multiple Oscar-winning 2003 version of Mystic River (first published in 2001), several more of his books are now the source material for big-budget films whose producers expect equally impressive worldwide audiences. The next adaptation to reach the screen and fulfil the projection was Gone, Baby, Gone (directed by Ben Affleck, 2007; originally published in 1998), providing a convenient opportunity to evaluate any advances made by this revisionist hardboiled realism.

In Loco Parentis

Based on the fourth book in Lehane’s acclaimed Kenzie & Gennaro series, Gone, Baby, Gone’s UK theatrical release was delayed in sensitivity to the Madeleine McCann case – an association no doubt boosting box-office despite the two child abduction scenarios bearing scant resemblance. The salacious jostling of news-team vultures would be one common denominator – here descending on the depressed environs of Dorchester, South Boston, Massachussetts. Their typically hysterical saturation coverage highlights single-mother Helene McCready (a magnificent Amy Ryan) lamenting her disappeared four-year-old Amanda, shepherded by steely-eyed police with neighbours and family rallying supportively even in a prevailing mood of ominous pessimism. First-time director Ben Affleck (co-scriptwriter with Aaron Stockard) as well as the story’s creator also hail from these mean streets, while thirty-something protagonist PIs Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) have lived there all their lives. Passionate attachment to the blue-collar ’hood is reflected in the latters’ preoccupations (e.g. Kenzie: “Things you can’t choose … make you who you are”), and in the camera’s regular carefully naturalistic pans around inner-city blight, alighting on variously battered and beleaguered, resigned and/or residually energetic real residents – many of whom are also cast in supporting roles and minor caricatures complementing consistently fine acting by star-turns.

Despite high-minded pronouncements by Crimes Against Children Unit cop supremo Captain Jack Doyle – who years ago lost his own child to kidnappers – and ace detectives Remy Bressant and Nick Poole being assigned to the case (Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and John Ashton respectively lending grizzled gravitas to proceedings), official inquiries quickly falter. Specialist skip-tracers hunting down debtors and errant spouses, the initially reluctant Kenzie and Gennaro are beseeched by Amanda’s aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) and uncle Lionel (Titus Welliver) to join the investigation. After putting the word out on the street, local confidence in their discretion immediately yields leads – first, a recently-paroled child-molester may be in the area; then, the potential involvement of notorious gangster kingpin Cheese Olamon (Edi Gathegi) and missing drugs-money. Helene’s own substance-abuse, chaotic self-centred behaviour and neglectful parenting compound suspicious unreliability, and her elusive boyfriend Skinny-Ray Likanski’s (Sean Malone) sudden violent execution clinches the link. No longer patronised by the police for naïve amateurism, the investigators uncover the cash and Doyle brokers a highly unorthodox exchange for Amanda at a remote flooded quarry. Unfortunately the botched switch leaves Cheese shot dead, and she’s believed drowned when a favourite doll is found floating in the treacherous waters. Doyle is sacked for culpable incompetence and retires in disgrace to the sticks; the little girl’s funeral is held; crime-and-punishment pundits seek new shock-horrors; and everyone sees tragic closure achieved.

Except for Kenzie, who still smells a rat – but a subsequent spiralling descent into the violent degradations of child abuse and addiction eventually reveals depths of duplicity at all levels even he’d never dreamed (surely also wrongfooting most viewers – so anyone not wanting the suspense ruined should not read on). When another local child disappears, Kenzie’s old schoolfriend, now drug dealer, Bubba Rogowski (Boston rapper Slaine) confirms that cocaine addicts Leon and Roberta Trett (Mark Margolis and Trudi Goodman) are sheltering paedophile Corwin Earle (Matthew Maher). Not waiting for backup, Kenzie, Bressant and Poole’s shootout with the Tretts leaves the latter three dead, whereupon Kenzie finds the missing boy already murdered and kills Earle in cold blood. Soon afterwards, uniformed cop Devin (Michael Kenneth Williams) – another mate from back in the day – provides vital corroboration of the suspicions Kenzie has developed about Bressant who, disguised as a stick-up artist, desperately threatens to assassinate Kenzie and Titus to seal their silence. But a trigger-happy bartender gets him first and Titus confesses their collaboration in Amanda’s disappearance. Putting it all together, Kenzie and Gennaro travel upstate and discover Amanda playing happily with Doyle’s wife. However, refusing Gennaro’s ultimatum to leave the child where she’ll have a chance of a decent life, Kenzie reports the crime and Doyle is arrested. When the dust has settled, Kenzie visits the reunited mother and daughter. He finds Helene apparently cleaned-up, but preparing for a new date (courtesy of the local celebrity status afforded her by the media) and obligingly babysits, considering the situation thoughtfully as Amanda gazes mutely at the television …

Rule of Law

These plot twists in the last part of the film certainly serve to undermine our assumptions as cultivated so far – and Kenzie and Gennaro’s too, leaving them disagreeing over a final dilemma so fundamental as to terminate their professional and romantic relationship. Nevertheless, ultimate judgements and justifications concerning rights, wrongs and likely consequences remain suspended. Not only are heroic rescue, reassuring redemption, and cautionary tragedy refused, but the conservative grounds upon which viewers might expect such outcomes – from banal Hollywood crime-action pulp to the parallel (but no less fantasy-ridden) morbid tabloid shock-horror over current affairs – are comprehensively undercut. Such disquieting limbo was obviously deliberate, and scriptwriting decisions altering and cutting the source novel wholesale pass the buck to us even more starkly. But, when the crunch comes, the alternative courses of action are already so thoroughly tainted by association with webs of corruption, collusion, dishonesty and degeneracy that imagining integrity in any pat answer is out of the question. The story’s unusual strength, then, is to insist that apparently straightforward moral choices, posing isolated individual instances in simplistic good-versus-evil binaries, don’t stand scrutiny once their complex, ambivalent contexts and histories are laid bare – ‘doing the right’ thing thus depending on what inevitably has to be ignored, assimilated, or denied.

The critical consensus concerning Gone, Baby, Gone, however, has been that the potential force of any such sophisticated philosophy is scuppered by the denouement’s implausibility – deeming it unbelievable that the entire saga should constitute a conspiracy choreographed by Doyle in connivance with his lieutenants all the way down to Helene’s disapproving relatives; with varying material, malicious and purportedly altruistic interests and self-righteousnesses interweaving in spiriting the lass to ‘safety’ while her mam drank in the bar. The ensuing host of casualties, whether dead or bereft – unmourned criminals, Bressant and Poole, sundry written-off lower-class dupes – are then blithely sacrificed, pawns for the patriarch’s peace of mind on relinquishing burdensome responsibility. But what really galls, one suspects – for those of conventional bent – is that out the window also go all pretensions of institutional credibility. Crucially, the scheme’s success hinged on acceptance at face value of the normal scripts, cliches and homilies of governance, public service and basic decency among higher- and lower-order model citizens obeying the law along with those charged with upholding it. Whereas not only does the arrogance of power lead the rogue detectives to assume they can get away with their scam, but we are invited to tacitly underwrite their belief that their actions are in the best interests of the child – which was supposed to be the official remit all along.

Criminal Justice System

Now, this narrative device – of illegal activity by law-enforcement personnel seeing no other way to fulfil their sworn duty – can be interpreted not as a rare unfortunate exception, but rather a particularly vicious and vivid expression of business as usual. Such might be the response, for example, of those on the habitual sharp end of prejudicial insult, harassment and stitch-up from police officers and, for that matter, officialdom in general. In which case an overarching metaphor comes into focus – the police force standing for the entire institutional paraphernalia of government, including its purportedly benevolent arms – whose main function is to keep the lid on all the cans of worms threatening polite society. From this jaundiced perspective, at least, Gone, Baby, Gone’s plot may not seem outrageous at all, resonating far beyond its particular setting to the War on Welfare everywhere. But in a South Boston rapidly decaying beyond reasonable hopes of salvation, Kenzie and Gennaro are cast as representative of a grass-roots, working-class sensibility, yet without the luxury of cynical fatalism if they are to nail the truth and do their job. And although the film loses the bulk of Lehane’s meticulous dialogue conveying the full convincing texture of conflicting attitudes in action, viewers are given several hints among the blood-red herrings that the protection of childhood innocence is a (perhaps the) primal pretext for other, guiltier, agendas.

So, encouraged to perceive Helene harshly through circumstantial implication, explicit condemnation, and the harsh glare of unforgiving attention, we never glimpse direct evidence of her actual everyday relationship with her daughter. We are expected to assume the worst. Kenzie, though, sees genuine grief (as opposed to self-pity) beneath her white-trash bravado – which inclines him to accept the mission – while Gennaro embraces advocacy for Amanda herself, regardless of the concerns of the adults. These combined criteria, without which the case would have gone decisively cold, specifically rebut any stereotypical dismissal of Helene. Contrariwise, Doyle’s parental fitness is unchallenged, despite his known trauma and willingness to wreck lives to heal it. Who is the child, to him, beyond a substitute salving private pain? Do his influence and affluence – displaced from urban hell to rustic idyll – guarantee saintly credentials in arrogating to himself godlike choice? Then shouldn’t all the suffering children be saved from the agony of the ghetto and the evils impoverishment produces? Even if the manner of its accomplishment adds to the oppression and injustice nourishing desperation in the first place, simultaneously precluding youthful renewal? While, irrespective of increments of positivity which might (arguably) transpire, serving the selfish desires and fantasies of those in positions to exploit the system to advantage? … Anything for a happy ending?

No. The relentless message from media and politicians is to abandon the irredeemable poor, demonising any deviation from passively respectable defeatism. The innocent purity to be protected here, then, is the lingering quasi-religious illusion that things might turn out right by trusting the benevolence of those in charge and believing their rationalisations. Whereas, surely, if a single soul spared is the best to hope for, this betrays an utmost cynicism – the complete collapse of legitimacy of the status quo to match its guardians’ insincerity. But Kenzie won’t give up on his people (or himself), following simple ethics, fulfilling his promise – returning Amanda to her mother – when others see Greater Good accepting thoroughgoing corruption in a broken society. Even he suspects he chose wrong, in the final scene mournfully contemplating prospects, Helene again out on the razzle. Yet with no individual correct solution to a collective quandary, maintaining honesty, integrity and compassion and nourishing them around you may represent a pragmatic faith preferable to fairytale wish-fulfilment making token exceptions to busted-flush rules. Credit is due to Gone, Baby, Gone’s makers for going against the grain to render such thorny issues even conceivable on mainstream screens.

To Protect and Serve

While acknowledging that it was no mean feat to adapt over five-hundred pages of original novel down to a script five-times shorter – yet still managing to effectively convey the spirit and overall ambivalence that the author intended – it is worth looking more closely at the heavy culling involved in the process of visualising Dennis Lehane’s scrupulously character- and dialogue-driven prose. In his writing, responses to, evaluations of, and wider ramifications pertaining to even the most harrowing experiences are contrived to flow naturally from the culturally and emotionally realistic perspectives of his protagonists and their idiosyncrasies – rather than the arbitrary manipulation to serve externally-imposed stock motivations that Hollywood is notorious for. Most obviously in this respect, the blockbusting set-piece action scenes and the extremes of violence portrayed sit awkwardly with the unsentimentally direct depictions elsewhere of mundane everyday poverty and its smaller-scale, if no less corrosive, aggressions and menaces. In fact Lehane admits to imagining the kinetic, balletic characteristics of such sequences according to cinematic iconography, and the film treatment certainly obliges – although with a consistent concentration on the visceral and psychological suffering incurred, evoking horror rather than cartoon titillation. Nonetheless the slick revelation and negotiation of their ugly depths cannot conceal the fact that the pivotal confrontation at the quarry and storming of the paedophile’s den, for example, are side issues both in terms of the specific narrative logic as well as the more abstract themes being developed.

True, there is a balanced, gradual progression of heightening danger, more immediate physical threat and raised stakes the further and deeper into the mire Kenzie and Gennaro stumble. But in the book’s trajectory, although each blow dealt, injury sustained, and narrow escape accomplished wreaks indelible damage on bodies and psyches that is never trivialised, the objective qualities of these deadly situations are overshadowed by the shared struggle to interpret their significance in the light of limited, provisional understanding. So, not surprisingly, the very real evils of organised crime and the undoubted prevalence of child sexual abuse were considered prime candidates to account for Amanda’s abduction. As favoured moral panics they also feature centrally in prevailing discourses justifying the whole panoply of legal powers whereby the state protects society via monitoring and intrusion. Whereas here these are manifestly unfit for purpose, dysfunctioning only as pretext and smokescreen, so that any regressive catharctic release after the usual suspects are disposed of dissipates rapidly as no payoff accrues. With the child still missing, only obstinate dissatisfaction with received wisdom, relentlessly seeking sense, eventually makes the difference. And this perverse persistence feeds on a constant interplay of repartee, interplay and synergy between Kenzie and Gennaro mulling over matters arising within their network of close friends, colleagues and acquaintances among criminals, cops and ordinary folk – an immersion which is precisely what the film’s condensation abandons.

A world in flux to be deciphered by the hard graft of socially-situated knowledge instead hard-boils down to showcase showdowns in a static fantasy universe of heroic fallen angels and archetypal demons puppet-mastered by unseen fiendish hands – resembling all those tiresomely mechanical detective thriller formats onscreen and in the genre literature, which pander to disgusted fascination at the depths of human depravity while working overdrive to reassure us of our distance from it. But Lehane’s version flirts with these conventions only to flout and transcend them, and Kenzie is no lone crusader for justice – despite the screenplay’s best efforts. Most importantly, Gennaro’s role is attenuated to the extent that she appears no more than a feminine accessory representing empathy, concern and support counterpointing Kenzie’s masculine detachment and objectivity – whereas practically the opposite is the case in the book, where he is intuitive and she more practical and organised, a better planner and indeed a better shot (she actually shoots Bressant, and saves Kenzie’s bacon much more often than vice versa throughout the series). As a partnership of rough equals, their conflictual relationship is central to the investigation’s progress, and their contrasting perspectives on relationships and family arising from their own wretched childhoods have left them both deeply flawed and of questionable moral stature in various different respects. Their estrangement at the end then reflects the deeply personal resonances of the situation rather than dogma – and even this is accommodated in the subsequent instalment, Prayers For Rain (1999), by which time each sees the merits of the other’s position.

Moreover Kenzie, Gennaro, Rogowski, and Cheese, along with other excised characters, were all childhood friends, schoolmates or neighbours with shared histories straddling all sides of the law. Bubba Rogowski is the couple’s most steadfast friend and protector, not just an old acquaintance – a borderline-psychotic weapons-dealer and feared enforcer with extensive Mob connections rather than a local pusher. Devin (and his partner Oscar) are longstanding close friends too, and Homicide detectives (not patrolmen) into the bargain. They have been kept in the loop and in fact make the decision to arrest Doyle, who had not lost his own child at all; while Bressant was ex-Vice squad (where the rogue activities originated) and married to a former prostitute. Unable to have biological children or adopt legally, they had also stolen a child – with strong hints of an established pattern involving many parents deemed deserving or unfit. Thus, among countless elements lost from the plot, such details indicate that, for Lehane, the function of Kenzie and Gennaro’s familiarity with their neighbourhood wasn’t simply getting information from people who don’t trust the authorities. More ambitiously, it was to develop all of the themes of the story from the bottom-up, within a working-class community split along all manner of fault-lines, where no one’s hands are clean or consciences clear – our heroes being just as implicated in the degeneracy that they encounter and sometimes initiate as are the residents saturated with it, the police powerless to control it, and the traditional villains of the piece seeking to profit.

Duty of Care

Despite Ben Affleck’s laudable effort to translate the substance of its original subtlety and force into screen entertainment, then, Gone, Baby, Gone’s passage from the written word loses, to a significant extent, its characters’ embedding in a collective search for meaning in relation to self, family and class in a concrete historical setting. Here, the worldviews of those who grew up poor in the 1970s and 1980s, when the economic, political and geographical profile of urban America twisted so drastically, inevitably involve particular inflections of disillusionment with grand narratives of democracy and freedom and broken promises of upward mobility and social inclusion. The moral landscapes, intellectual priorities, and practical choices of those of the younger generations who still pursue a better life without succumbing to the seductions of materialistic misanthropy can hardly be expected to show patience with the middle-class liberal pieties that have failed them so miserably. Instead they fall back on their own resources – such as they are – and manage in this story to penetrate opaque veils of deception and delusion, misdirection and malice. In the process the fascistic overtones are exposed of a contemporary cultural eugenics foisted on the weak by the strong in the name of a humanistic duty of care which no alternative means can be found to fulfil. Yet the critics deem this preposterous to the point of mendacity – so that one wonders which world they inhabit.

Without in any way minimising the dreadful anguish precipitated by a lost child, Lehane cultivates those associations of this iconic image which loom largest in today’s deprived neighbourhoods – not least the shattered aspirations of parents for their offspring and the vain hopes of a bright future among the youth themselves. The careful accretion of biographical detail and the backstories of the protagonists situate these problematics squarely within their lived experience, modulating their ethics and conduct, so that they are fully part of a local scene which, on the other hand, the filmmakers can only objectify in sweeping anthropological survey. Here, Casey Affleck’s self-effacing lead performance at least captures the author’s intention to sidestep the tortured existential solipsism of the traditional private dick (along with his femme fatale’s Oedipal supplement) as the driver of the narrative arc – even if the central role of Kenzie’s extended elective family is also sadly sidelined in the filmic logic. But in fact plot structures are secondary in most Lehane novels, being tailored to wider organising metaphors and signifying chains connecting working-class adjustment to changing conditions – especially in A Drink Before The War (1994) treating racism, gang warfare, political corruption and child abuse and Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) with serial killers given succour by family, neighbourhood, criminal and municipal complicity, as well as in Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River.

However, while Eastwood’s cinema version of the latter retains the quasi-Shakespearean symmetry of three characters representing disastrous facets of masculinity, the emphasis was shifted entirely by downgrading its grounding in the mutual deterioration of their socio-economic and psychological wellbeing – a comparable truncation to that observed with Gone, Baby Gone. So it seems that mainstream US media remain unwilling or unable to countenance stories which properly respect the real misery neoliberal barbarism produces at home among its surplus populations, but also hint at the potential for “genuine solidarity and the pursuit of shared purpose in circumstances in which business as usual is decisively threatened” (see my ‘Rose Coloured Spectacles’, in Variant, No. 27). Whereas the opportunity to follow such lines of flight is increasingly exploited in new-school American crime writing, on screen the balance consistently tilts towards old-school staples of vicious impasse and hopeless tragedy – from, for example, Spike Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Richard Price’s Clockers (1992) through to HBO’s much-heralded television soap opera The Wire, chronicling the small-time drug trade and its policing in Baltimore, Ohio (featuring scripts by Price, Pelecanos and Lehane, among others). Conversely, one cinematic exception to this recalcitrant rule is Ray Lawrence’s remarkable Jindabyne (Australia, 2006). Here an attack on a child again radiates heart-wrenchingly throughout a community, with the murder whodunnit also irrelevant, yet the film closes optimistically as ordinary townsfolk mobilise their sorrowful social fabric towards fellow-feeling and a fresh start (see my review for Freedom magazine, available at http://libcom.org). In other words, it can be done – in the imagination as in real life – however much we are encouraged to disbelieve it.

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

Telling Tales of Torture, by Tom Jennings

Iraq, 2003. Thousands of fleeing civilians and comparable numbers rounded up on extremely tenuous suspicion of involvement in the full-scale insurgency cower at its epicentre in Abu Ghraib prison between Baghdad and Fallujah under constant mortar attack and with guards outnumbered several hundreds to one. Ranking Guantanamo veterans and military, CIA and privately-contracted interrogators parachute in to extract information by any means necessary, backed by the Commander-in-Chief and his White House cronies with policies trashing the Geneva Convention. A contingent of young army grunts fresh to this hellhole witness the routine humiliation, torture and murder of detainees. Some complain, but are told it’s their professional and moral duty as warriors for liberty, and with varying degrees of diligence and enthusiasm comply with orders to ‘soften up’ prisoners using ‘standard operating procedures’ devised by superiors. Still partially disbelieving, many shoot cameraphone stills and videos of the planned and sanctioned insanity. These then leak into the public domain, and the rest is history – which director Errol Morris proceeds to comprehensively dissect in his new cinema documentary.

Standard Operating Procedure centres around spoken testimony from five of the seven low-ranking ‘bad apples’ scapegoated by subsequent inquiries. Sergeant Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick – ringleaders choreographing the sexualised humiliation rituals – were still in jail, but Javal Davis, Sabrina Harman (notoriously smiling thumbs-up over a murdered ‘ghost’ detainee unlisted in prison records), Lynndie England (with hooded prisoner on leash), Megan Ambuhl (now married to Graner; supervising with Harman and England the ‘human pyramid’ of naked Iraqi men) and Roman Krol feature, as do several other former military police alongside their Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski (now demoted to colonel) and the Criminal Investigation Division’s Brent Pack (who assisted the prosecutors) [1]. The interviews – filmed using Morris’ famed Interrotron, whereby interviewees answer straight to camera while actually seeing the questioner – and the gigantised iconic snapshots and video clips (some never seen before in mainstream media) are supplemented by staged ‘illustrations’ of the events described, with ominously-lit widescreen cinematography and melodramatic score reconfiguring Abu Ghraib’s bedlam as sinister gothic otherworld.

The film’s rendering of human beings in an inhuman situation rather than emblems of evildoing erodes stereotypes of underclass psychopaths relishing malevolence, despite rationalisations of unconscionable cruelty characterised by ambivalence, alienation and disgust at themselves, colleagues, and military and government hierarchies as well as towards purported enemies. Facing uncertain prospects for physical and career survival, the pathetic patriotic training-camp pep-talk of ‘noble causes’ couldn’t completely erase their intelligence and sensitivity or fully underwrite the twisted sadism required of them. And certainly neither could it equip them to comprehend their later demonisation without hefty doses of the bitter fatalistic cynicism and resentful detachment radiating from them now. So letters home from Sabrina Harman to her partner support her assertion that, whereas she saw no option but to follow orders, the photographs were intended as proof of what occurred. Naturally she didn’t imagine them scuppering an otherwise successful cover-up orchestrated by her top-brass – explicitly commanding all relevant visual evidence destroyed once the shit hit the fan – or that she would end up in the dock when those who actually tortured, maimed and killed detainees were never even considered targets of justice. In that sense, then, the whitewash worked.

Telling Tales of Torture

Thus far may have sufficed for your bog-standard crusading investigator exposing the stitch-up of relatively defenceless underlings as primary villains of the piece – their bosses all the way to the top wriggling and squirming behind pseudo-legalistic sophistry while pinning medals on each other. But ex-private eye Morris always digs deeper to deconstruct the framing of images (as well as of people) and their deployment in media and informational management to advance institutional interests – The Thin Blue Line (1988) famously saving the life of a prisoner on Death Row, and the Oscar-winning The Fog Of War (2003) laying bare the delusional arrogance of the powerful in the person of Robert McNamara (one of the US government architects of the Vietnam War). Here the material leads in many fascinating directions – most only hinted at, such as the much-vaunted prominence of women in the US armed forces unraveling into archetypal virgins (e.g. Jessica Lynch subjected to faked ‘rescue’ by US Special Forces), witches (Karpinski as ‘bad mother’) and whores (Harman et al fucking with Iraqi men’s heads); yet all, of course, puppet-mastered by patriarchs large and/or small-minded.
In interviews Morris emphasises that ‘The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us’ [2] and a rare achievement of his film is showing this awareness emerging naturally among the MP patsies, irrespective of philosophically sophisticated ruminations on virtual hyperreality and spectacle [3]. To Ambuhl, “The pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don’t see forward, you don’t see behind, you don’t see outside the frame”; Harman concludes “The military is nothing but lies. I took these photos to show what the military’s really really like”; and England shrugs, “It’s drama, it’s life” – cementing the theme of fictionalisation at all levels. The questioning thus extends beyond why these particular images arose, survived and proliferated, to not only their editing and incorporation into discourses concerning the war but, most crucially, what focusing on them as the ‘truth’ of the matter therefore facilitated being excluded from consideration. More conventionally worthy efforts sometimes tackle such complexity – such as the Tate Modern media art exhibition 9 Scripts from a Nation At War [4], which presents the thoughts of various protagonists and observers with different positions, perspectives and prevailing understandings of the Iraq conflict. But the visceral impact of Standard Operating Procedure undermines any simplistic or transparent relationship between information and scientific ‘reality’, exposing the manner of its manipulation in wider structures of contemporary power.

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Notes
1. The book version, Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris (Picador, 2008), integrates the participant accounts of the operation of Abu Ghraib’s torture regime gathered in research for the film.
2. see, for example, www.greencine.com/central/morrissop for a comprehensive discussion.
3. An exhaustive analysis of Sabrina Harman and the Cheshire Cat McGuffin of‘that’ smile can be found in Morris’ New York Times blog (‘The Most Curious Thing’ at http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/).
4. June-August 2008; see Imogen O’Rorke’s review, ‘Flipping the Script’ at www.metamute.org.

for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

Hunger – Steve McQueen (UK 2008) Michael Fassbender; Stuart Graham, Rory Mullen
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 4 Nov 08; Ticket price £6.85

Film morphs into installation

Steve Mc Queen’s Hunger takes as its subject Bobby Sands (BS) IRA commander and prisoner, who elects to die on hunger strike rather than to bow his head to the will of the British political establishment. With its bold use of close-ups and mounted camera to frame its subject it looks like McQueen has paid close attention to Carl Dreyer’s 1928 movie the Passion of Joan of Arc. Hunger might well be titled The Passion of Bobby Sands, as flesh transmutes into spirit. This Passion is divided into three distinct parts each of which emphasises both an attribute: body mind spirit; and an outer form based on: opposition, dialogue, unity.

It is the first section of the film that takes on the structure of installation. By this I mean that it resembles an assemblage of elements which are ingenuously offered to the gaze of the viewer to connect understand and interpret. Also Hunger as installation creates for the viewer temporal space to absorb and understand what has been shown. Hunger uses time images such as the long shot of the screw in passing down the length of the block using a squeegee to clear up the pools of piss thrown out of the cells. The camera is still as the screw works his way down the length of the corridor into the eye of the camera. We need real time, our own time to understand this shot.

The installation section of Hunger is defined by a series of oppositions that define the visual and audio fields: clothed and naked, the flesh and the will, inside and outside, cleanliness and filth. Hunger as an installation located in an infamous setting at a time now passed. A film set up in an H block of a present now past where the fittings fixtures and authentic props are frozen forever and the corridors landing and cells are haunted by holograms and soundtracks of the prisoners and screws locked into the eternal recurrence of their enmity. Walk through Auschwitz. Walk through Abughraib. See. Listen. Walk thru. Walls imprinted with collective memory.

The installation section is charged with the key idea that the Maze prison ( like so many prisons, what a strange yet appropriate name) contains both the prisoners and the guards. There is no escape from the confines of this gaol. When the screw exits the gates of the prison to go home he never escapes its shadow; he is held ever closer in its thrall. The Maze confines and contains always and everywhere. It is defining in the same way as the Court Room in Rouen contained and defined Joan and her enemies and tormenters. In Hunger the prisoners and guards in this situation are bound together by ties of blood piss and shit, in unwanted inescapable intimacy. The Maze isn’t metaphor. It’s microcosm. It is the political situation in Northern Ireland compressed to its unbearable essence. Casual cruelty and cold murder. The body politic of intimidation denial and forceful suppression is faithfully replicated within the confined space of the prison onto the form of the human body.

The body is at the centre of the opening section. The body as an instrument of the collective will of political power. The body as an extension of the singular will of the individual, a protoNietschean statement of an overcoming. Hunger opens in the home of a screw with a series of big close ups as in the morning he washes his hands in the wash basin. His grazed knuckles rinsed in the pellucid water. The sequence proceeds through his breakfast and the shadow that falls over him as we see the security procedure he follows before getting into his car. This opening sequence, with its series of close-ups comprising: tap wash basin plughole fried egg underside of car, set up a set of heightened oppositions against which we are able to understand the forces that are in play. In the Maze the IRA prisoners are ‘on the blanket’ – naked. They refuse to wear issued prison clothing and demand the right to wear their own clothes. Denied access to the toilets ( in order to slop out) by the screws (government) they exist in the putrid conditions of their own piss shit and bodily filth. Their bodies are caught up in a system of constraints privations obligations and prohibitions which their will refuses to acknowledge. In their nakedness, with their shit daubed on the cell walls, and their piss spilt out into the corridor, they oppose the political will of Margaret Thatcher.

As Bobby Sands notes in the diary he kept at the beginning of his hunger strike, “ All the power of the British Empire never broke the will of a single man.” In performance the body lies at the epicentre of volatile concerns, a signifying system that is a battle ground for competing ideologies. Hunger works on the bodies of both parties in the Maze capturing them in their oppositional systems: the clean and the dirty, the shaved and the unshaven, the naked and the clothed, the beaters and the beaten, the alive and the dead, the inside and the outside. The screws break the bodies of the IRA; the IRA can kill in revenge culpable screws. In Hunger Mc Queen testifies to the separation; he also gives witness to the greater terrible unity of which both sides are also a part. The prison of Northern Ireland contains them all forever.

The second section of the movie is a 17 minute long dialogue between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest. It seems to represent mind as BS and the priest verbally joust over the morality of BS’s intention to go on hunger strike. Again there are echoes in this section of the verbal jousting between Joan and her interrogators in the interplay of subtlety and mental strength that characterises the exchanges. The only section in the dialogue which I felt was suspect (others might not find it so) was the long story BS tells about an incident in his childhood which is intended to justify and explain his nature. It falls into a long line of such stories told on screen ( and to lesser extent on stage) such as Brando’s Kurtz telling the story in Apocalypse Now. BS story in this situation seemed formulaic, hence uninteresting. A sign the film was flagging.

The last section – spirit – the culmination of the Hunger Passion, with its medical ritualisation and all white spiritual ‘production look’ is the culmination of the film.
I think that this attempt to transpose the medical into the spiritual doesn’t work. We have a series of images, all immaculately posed and framed with that ‘white look’ taking us through the stages of BS’ death. The section never transcends or becomes anything more than a series of medical shots. McQueen has not found a language or an image that expresses the final stage of Sands’ Passion. In the final part of this section Hunger abandons its premise of staying with the BS in the now, and filmically elects to take us on a fake trip, supposedly his final vision complete with natural sounds, back to an arcadian reconstruction of Sands’ childhood (are we in the final section of 2001). This finale fails to do justice to what has preceded it; it feels like a cliché. The final section of the Passion needed a huge coup of bold imagination to complete. It probably might need to be short in duration and comprise of very few shots, as was Dreyer’s manner in finishing his Passion of Joan of Arc.

For all its perceived weaknesses, McQueen’s Hunger remains a film bold in concept that remains true to a governing filmic idea that is mostly executed with stunning confidence and filmic awareness.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gomorrah – Mateo Garrone (2008 Italy) Salvatore Cantalupo, Carmine Paternoster, Alfonso Santagale
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 21 Oct 08 ticket: £6.80

Location Location Location Location Location

Gomorrah has been flagged as a realist portrayal of the situation in Naples where whole areas of life are under the control of the local Mafia the Camorra.
The film is structured in what seems to be the favoured fashionable form of the moment as: five intercut stories. Five stories that involve different characters unrelated to each other except that generically the characters are all either part of the criminal network or member of communities in which the networks operate. The characterising feature of the stories is that they are not interrelated or interlaced rather strips of action that serve only as exemplars of types of criminal activities: trash disposal, drug dealing, garment industry etc that define the relationship between gangs and populace. As such the film is a simple transposition of some selected elements of Roberto Saviano’s book that adds nothing filmicly or challenging to his propositions. Indeed this film of book, like most such adaptations detracts and cheapens the substance of its original form.

In effect the film is an impoverishment of the books thesis ( the toxic effect of gangster control of areas of society) because lacking the book’s facility to support its point of view and journalistic incrimination of the Camorra, by piling up detail and statistics of the effects of a criminalised culture, the film is reduced to a banality of affective detail in which the links between action and effect are mechanically transposed onto the screen only through the medium of expressed violence. In Garrone’s Gomorrah there are no cognitive or ideational linkages through sound or picture allowing the audience to make connections that characterise a sick culture. The links in Gomorrah are all through the glamour of the gun; not through the effects of what happens after the gun. The realist settings are just a type of architectural backdrop to what is just another gangsta movie.

When I say that the linkages in Gomorrah are mechanical I mean for example that the connections that the film suggests to its audience mostly film stem from either violent action or architecture. We are given simplistic film generated cause effect relationships that gloss over the latent forces at work.

Linkage in relation to action. Gomorrah shows us men with guns. They shoot other men whom they see as opponents or in their way. The men with guns deal in death and fear, they get their way and assert control over whatever: drugs trash garment industry. The film is a simple fable of the ganagsta means: the ends of the gangsta in Gororrah are actually unclear. By repute I understand that the Camorra liked the movie. Of course they did. The gangsta loves the exercise and demonstration of his original power which stems from force and violence, and he approves of its filmic celebration.. What Garonne has achieved is a celebration of the gangsta through banal mechanical linkages. What Garonne has not filmed, and what was object of Saviano’s book are the consequences of the gangsta take over of social mechanisms, and the freezing (through fear) of social response to these consequences. The ends rather than the means. What we don’t see in Gomorrah are the piled up mountains of trash and filth that are caused by this situation; what we don’t see are the effects in disease caused by dumping of toxins in landfill. The corruption. Garrone sticks to the banality of the action, which we all know from long series of gangsta films. What the gangster’s fear, and what has caused them to run Savione out of Italy is the exposition and detailing of the real price people pay when the gangsta moves to take over vital areas of economic and social activity. The bang bang your dead bit is the least of the interesting connections to be made. The other mechanical connection made in Gomorrah is ‘architecture’. I think that the film fails because it substitutes, or perhaps confuses a concern with architecture for a concern with ‘world’. At one level this looks like copping out. It is much easier to send out a location scout and find fruity sexy backdrops for the action than to undertake the filmic chore of creating a sense of ‘world’. The function of architecture is fundamental to the working of Gomorrah. The exteriors and the interiors work as metanyms. In particular the main setting of the concrete housing project where the turf wars rage. The concrete structure of the housing project is used as an encompasser, a building that literally doesn’t just contain the life within it but also defines and orders it. In this sense the building is a metanym: its function in the film is to stand for something rather more than what it is. Gorarrah is using this structure to say that the compression and squalor that it represents mould and contaminate the people whom it accommodates. The problem is that I think that Garonne was content to leave the housing project as a symbol. We never get closer to the people who live there than this statement of architectural determinism. The people, except those busy killing each other, are sort of phantom entities who fill out the crowd scenes the way dust fills in cracks. The huge housing project is ultimately an empty shell, just another setting, a theatrical backdrop against which action can take place. Even in a film like Meirelles’ City of God which has a gangsta action/ revenge core, there is more of a feeling for the texture of Rio favella life. In Gomorrah there is an absence of anything other than fat men wearing T shirts of gruesome taste. It’s not enough. Likewise with most of the other locations: the quarry, the marshes, the subterranean car parks. The filmic objective seems to be to overwhelm rather than inform. The five strip intercut structure of Gomorrah seems to lead nowhere. The structure is a favoured shape for contemporary directors and such a structure it should give to the film some dynamic. A dynamic that might reveal itself in many ways: some emotive such as interdynamic bathos or pathos; some cognitive such as exemplative or understanding complementing or contrasting or both. There might be connections such as colour, geometry or auditory. The problem with Gomorrah was that the five action strips were all of a muchness. They had few characterising idiosyncrasies or distinctive features other than the architecture. The individuals populating the stories were often difficult to distinguish and the only character whose name I could remember was the tailor, Pasqualle. The only purpose served by the intercut sequences is to provide a series of dramatic cutting points. Even this has diminishing returns as the film progresses through its two hour plus duration. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Fall – Peter Whitehead (UK 1969) Doc with Peter Whitehead and Alberta Tiburzi

Viewed 16 Oct 08 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket price £4 In the beginning was the image

The final shot of The Fall (TF): Peter Whitehead (PW) is peering down the viewer of the moviola and looks up at the camera; the camera pans to the right bringing into view an early reel to reel black and white Sony VTR which displays on the adjacent monitor a grainy image of PW; the picture is poor in definition but strong in its etched solidity as an image of PW. PW has become an image and as we look at his image, the tape runs out and the screen turns blank radiating a white picture noise; there are no sound effects. A shot that is in effect a condensation of the film journey.

It feels that through both the political uprising and social excess documented in TF, as if PW in the course of making his film has stumbled upon realisation about the nature of the image in the media. That at the very moment of filming TF, PW sees that image poised to take over the channels of communication: to pervade and invade our senses distorting consciousness and corrupting perception. TF, at some point in its making (edit stage?) becomes PW’s personal journey in which his camera as a scalpel opens up the vista of a multiplication of new types of manipulated realities which like cancerous tumours will overwhelm and destroy us.

‘The Fall’ is of course a reverberating Biblical idea. It encompasses both the Fall of Lucifer and the Fall of Man. Differentiated events but both conveying a similar idea: the establishment of a new situation in which the forces of evil and malice are let loose in the world, abroad in the cosmos to do as they will. Lucifer and Adam and Eve, fall from a state of Grace into a state of sin. Both are caste from the numinous all embracing presence of God into a world of dark putrescent matter, in which they must survive howsoever they may. Alan Ginsberg who features in TF published a collection of poems in 1971 entitled the Fall of America.

I think that PW’s camera probes not only America’s fall from Grace, the political inability to see or accept the evil that the US was perpetrating in the name of democracy (in particular at this time the war America was waging against Vietnam). His camera also probes the advent of the image and the fall from Grace that this moment heralded, as Western society and culture embraced the image as a primary source of perception, as a primary tool upon which judgements would be made and opinions formed. A situation developing where no one is innocent and also where no one is guilty.

TF is shot by PW at the moment when democracy is shifting from the shibboleths of class and party, to a new situation in which everyone can form an opinion: or more presciently, have their opinions formed for them. In the beginning is the image: and in the image is manipulation. In the media ideas persons places start to exist as a sort of intensified concentrated iconography: nothing else. Increasingly form this point in ‘time’ (and I mean PW’s time. TF is his film; it has guided him to this insight) things would be judged not for their intrinsic worth, but for their extrinsic value to interested powerful parties. Perhaps the crystallising event was PW’s participation and presence at Columbia University student occupation and his witness to the distorted way images of the event were to be manipulated by the media and political establishment. But the PW’s disquiet goes deeper than this specific instance and broadens into a general realisation that this is the way things are and will be.

Amidst the rawness of the footage of a New York in turmoil, PW is the star of his own movie. At first I found his mannered acting out, in particular of the relationship with his ‘girlfriend’ Alberta Tiburzi (AT) annoying and over deliberated. As if PW had seen Blow Up and had decided to make and perform an affected fashionable homage. As the film progresses this relationship declines in prominence, overtaken by PW’s documenting the New York streets and his confessions and ruminations during the edit. However as the film develops, I began to think that perhaps there was a point to the manner in which the personal had been incorporated into the film. For instance there is a ‘Blow Up’ type sequence in the first part of the film when AT models’ a ‘Peace’ dress made up from fabric whose pattern comprises the multiple replication of the CND anti nuclear peace symbol. The CND symbol in its multiple replication becomes a pure pattern, loses its power of protest as it is sinuously subsumed, through the curvaceous posing of AT, into fashion statement. Likewise the relationship between AT and PW also feels like a fashion accessory rather than something real. Relationship as gesture. The director and the model. An exemplar of the media marriage, consummated for effect not affect. In this situation gesture is empty of everything except the selling of the self. Narcissism. It is possible that PW accepted even enjoyed this casting of his relationship with AT; but that he was aware of the process both at a personal and social plane. The process leads directly to entrapment in the appearance of things not the actuality of things: entrapment within the self for the self rather than life for the world.

Looked at from an historical perspective PW documents the streets saying ‘NO!’ to what was taking place in the US. And in this respect the film shames us today. Comparing the anger and ferocity in New York in ’68 and comparing it to reaction to the Iraq war between 2003 and 2008. The question is posed, ‘What has happened to us today? ‘ Why did protest against the Iraq invasion barely register? In’68 with wild swinging camera PW documents an uncompromising rejection of this system that makes war on the world: whether it be Vietnam or students demanding fairness and justice in education. Today we seem so much more contained. Unable to break out of the confines of an intellectual and mental prison in which we are trapped. Our responses tend to be more self absorbed and distracted from what is happening about us in our ‘democracies’. And there is an answer to our shameful contemporary inertia that is located deep in the fold of the Fall as the second half descends into a gloomier mood and PW analyses with his camera and talks through with his Moviola what is happening and what is to come. We are now trapped in the image of someone else’s movie, the movie of the government the big corporations and the media.

In a sense the pivotal point of the film is PW’s documenting of a piece of performance art. PW is filming in a small room where something’s going on. Who are the people performing in the small room? Who (besides PW) comprises the small audience in the small room watching the performance. We see a man and a woman on a ‘stage’ with an upright piano. The woman has a chicken on her lap. The man takes the chicken from the woman and using its feet plays a series of rills up and down the keyboard of the piano. The man returns the chicken to the lap of the woman. He picks up a long handled axe and sets to demolish the piano. The piano is destroyed. The steel wires of the sound-board remain upright amidst the shatte0red casing and frame. The man replaces the axe and takes the chicken from the woman. Holding its body firmly under his arm to prevent it struggling he drags its head back and forth along the piano wire until it has been decapitated and reduced a bloodied stump. He gives the chicken back the woman. The camera pans to the audience who watch in silence. gazing at the stage area. PW has filmed what has happened: we still do not understand what has happened. It was real; the suffering brutal. We have no language to describe what we have seen. Perhaps we reject what we have seen. In TF this scene is the pivot. The mood darkens. We do not understand what is happening.

The film turns to on the unravelling of political events. In particular the revolt by Columbia students and the occupation of the Columbia University faculty. But it is not straight reportage. PW is now aware (at least at the editing stage) that this is an event that is the subject of media manipulation. This is the moment when PW peers into the future and the events are documented not only dynamically as they unfold in the presence of PW’s camera, but also accompanied by PWs insights and reflections as he edits and reconstructs the events of which he has been a part. Looking through the viewer of PW’s moviola we see an empty white screen. Blank.

Finally filmically PW shoots his film to deny himself the fake authenticity of the documentary film maker. There is no match cuts no formal continuities. It is in the spirit of the time. The camera is used in a wild libidinous frenzy denoting more an intense emotive subjectivity that is true to itself not any externalised objective statement of fact. PW’s camera is a statement of the truth owed to the self: to thine own self be true. But there are powerful filmic statements built up within the body of the film at the editing stage. None more powerful than the creation of a pure sound picture of the retaking of Columbia by the military and the police. Shot at night the picture is almost black nothing can be seen but edited onto the picture are the ritualised sounds of the men preparing themselves for violence beating their shields with their night sticks and chanting in unison. It is a moment of the promise of death intended to be heard by the students in the darkness behind the barricades waiting for their own destruction.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes:Everyman as nowheremanLinha de Passe   Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas – Brazil – 2008;
   Sandra Corveloni
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 30 Sept 08 Ticket price £6-80

Everyman as nowhereman

With Linha de  Passe (LP) Salles and Thomas have produced a curiously ineffectual and anodyne movie.  LP is based on the idea of threading together five separate stories of one slum dwelling family. Each story leads to a moment of epiphany or revelatory realisation.   Where Salles and Thomas falter is in the creation of a filmic world of the slum in which their characters can move.  The consequence is a movie that is possessed by a sense of emptiness, in which meaning depends on the audience filling in background and making connections that only exist symbolically on the screen.  

For the individuals and their stories to carry the weight of authenticity(why else  unless your name is the Disney Corporation, film a story about poor slum people?) the film would have express something of the palpable nature of the compressive forces exerting pressure on the individuals in this environment.  A place which has moulded them and  encompasses the horizon of their vision.  Bunuel’s Los Olvidados is one obvious example in which the texture and weight of the inner city shanty works as a defining force on the characters and permeates their stories.  The environment in Los Olvidados doesn’t delimit but it is elemental to the filmic project:  the closeness of man and beast, the closeness of man to man, the bounded nature of the individual’s perception. This sense of world is weak in LP.  Sao Paulo is depicted rather than experienced.  It is understood more as a background against which the stories unravel, not a milieu in which they take place. From time to time LP cuts to very wide establishment shots of the city which we see splayed out in its vastness.  But it’s as if Salles and Thomas were unable to figure out any other way of signing to their audience that their stories are actually linked to this city other than by this iconography. 

Without a world to contain them, the five stories in LP are detached from any source and float in bubbles of a discrete internalised relevance.  The effect is for the individuals in the stories to lose the very singularity which place lends body and psyche to form character.   The characters in LP come across as individuals who are construed as modern types.  They are reduced to being examples of urban slum stereotypes: defined by religion, race, sport, motorbike  unending serial pregnancies. The characters become sort of anyperson anywhere.  The perfect human counterpart to the modern development of urban space which from city to city is anyspace whatever anywhere: the mall the skyscraper, the contemporary piazza the inner city highway with its decks ramps tunnels and bridges.  Now we have anystereotype whatsoever fitted out in jacket trainers and jeans.  The trouble is decontextualised types can generate interest only through their doings. 

It is possible that Salles and Thomas are trying to communicate this observation to us and  have developed LP as an expression of the characterless nature of the modern.  No one is singular space and time: there is only anyone anywhere; there are no stories just general patterns.  But if this is the point and intent of the LP, then it lacks wit and intensity of vision in its communication. To make their points, in relation to their stories, the ultimate expressive recourse of Salles and Thomas is the mordant sentimentality of the soap opera rather than structural rigour and intelligence. 

The recurring image:  the mother attacks her blocked kitchen sink with a rubber suctioned plunger.  An ineffectual remedy for a deeper malaise; a shot that repeated half a dozen times exemplifies the poverty not of the woman’s resources, but rather of the film’s thinking.  It feels as if the film makers wanted this shot to work as a sort of metaphor, saying that underneath what you see in LP there is a compressed solid of rotting matter that blocks anything that tries to flow away.   And now I understand why LP is so ineffectual.  Metaphor and the metaphoric replace the actual:  and the film is the poorer for it because the viewer is given a symbolic interplay of  filmic material that invites the audience to invent an interpretive schema to understand what they see.  In LP impression is favoured over expression as the film’s currency.  The problem is that everything in LP slides inexorably towards the disaster area of metaphor as the film lurches towards  the interpretative and everything comes to stand in for something other than what it is: the buses, the sink, football, Episcopal religion, the motor bike the pregnancy.

In making LP Salles and Thomas have chosen to structure the film using linkages of a conventional classical Hollywood manner. The sensory motor linkages within  and between the stories are charcterised by conventionally shot and edited images: action, perception and affection images.  Use of images which build a conventional form of relational narrative dynamic, a dynamic that fosters the idea of continuities and the consequent interpretation of those continuities.  In creating filmic worlds that represent particular moulding and encompassing environments (such as the slum or the monastery) it is in fact the discontinuities that comprise the strongest formal elements of expression, discontinuities of both sound and vision that pitch the characters and the audience into an expressive world of compelling signs.  Interthreading 5 stories does not create discontinuities it simply gives an unending supply of editing points and invites the viewers to create an interpretative schema for understanding what they have viewed.

LP seems to have been produced the wrong way about. The project looks like it started with the question of how five stories could be inserted in the slum milieu of Sao Paulo, rather than asking how the milieu might surrender its secrets in the form of the wondrous characters that haunt its streets.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:Machine gun dreams: a moral taleBilly Liar   John Schlessinger   UK  1963; Tom Courtenay ; Julie Christie
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18-09-08  Ticket price: £4-00
 
adrin neatrour writes: a body without organs – a moral tale

retrocrit
Billy Liar (BL) is usually described as a movie about a habitual dreamer fantasist called Billy Fisher.  Billy the young man with ambitions to be a writer trapped in a small Northern industrial town.  The usual explanation of the film is that Billy gets away from his actual reality by escaping into a world of his own imaginative longings.

But Billy doesn’t escape reality through his fantasial life; his fantasies in fact bind him more tightly to the reality he wants to put behind him.  Each indulgence in his imaginings commits him the more deeply to what he opposes.  And each indulgence increases the need to feed the habit of escape that is no escape.  The device of fantasy Billy uses as a means of escape is actually the path to deeper entrapment. Billy is a dreamer: a body without an organ: a pure psychic effect.

Billy is usually described as a ‘dreamer’ without however the nature of his dreams being examined.  The core of BL is Schlessinger’s (JS) filmic realisation of  Billy’s  dreams and JS’s understanding of the context of the fantasy. Billy’s fantasies don’t centre on pleasure but on power.   There are two main motif’s in Billy’s fantasy sequences: the obliteration of his enemies; and Billy as dictator: the leader of a  military machine.  As in the case of Hitler, who is certainly parodied here by JS, the powerless often have their psyches colonised by the very forces that they perceive as constructing their personal humiliation. The warped internalisation of the very forces that are seen as destroying the self, has ironic and often unpleasant consequences.

Set in the encompassing thrall of a small Lancashire industrial town, Billy’s fantasies of death and militaristic power point not so much to Billy as dreamer but to Billy as a frozen entity.  A Billy who is frozen into the  economic and social matrix of a  culture defined by mechanical hierarchical relationships.  A culture where the machine form defines all the  areas of social interactions: life and death, family and work.  It is a culture in terminal decline captured at the point in time where the machine will start to breakdown to be replaced by cultural form based less on constrained cohesive relations and more on organic/desire relationships.   Where failure will be a personal rather than a collective responsibility.

 Billy appears not as a young man escaping through fantasy but as a young man whose fantasies reveal that he is actually a psychic projection of  the encompassing mechanistic regulatory system.  His fantasy world doesn’t oppose the machine; rather it seeks to control the machine and thereby is of course controlled by it.  Lacking the resources to build an opposing fantasial apparatus Billy simply appropriates the machine’s hierarchic and mechanical form for his own ends and  satisfactions.  People are reduced to puppets under his control and those who oppose are exterminated.  The concentration camp and the execution squad, the logical extension of Billy’s imaginings, are the frozen products of a society built on mechanised life and death.

 
BL  is not structured on plot but rather on state of mind:  the frozen fantasy.   The film comprises a series of strips of action, triggers that fire Billy’s subjectivities.  The action strips are located in different parts of the social/economic machine but the fantasial responses from Billy indicate an internal time mechanism in which the hands on the clock are immobile.  In a sense it is replication of the state of mind of Adolf Hitler whose pent up frustrations during eight years in Vienna taught him ( according to Mein Kampf) everything he knew.  The years in Vienna, a hierarchical mechanical apparatus taught Hitler to hate and project the sclerotic forms of the Austro-Hungarian empire onto a solution of  the Jewish question.  Hitler frozen into his fantasies carried forewards his fantastic hatred into an eventual programme of mass murder.  JS’s Billy has similar artistic ambitions to Hitler ( Billy wants to write) but like Hitler suffers from an internalisation of the very institutions that humiliate him.  An internalisation that sabotages both development of ability and vision.   

Billy fails to see that he is living in a form of social organisation that is in its death throws.  The sequence which comprises the opening of the first supermarket is a filmic tour de force, but it works to indicate the development of a new form of social contract based on desire rather than mechanical obedience.  Billy sees nothing of this.  Death riddles his psyche boring through outer carapace of the film like the worm with a message.  Billy himself works in the the death industry, his gran is dying and some of the most effectively shot sequences in BL take place in the municipal grave yard as death itself watches over life.  Eventually Billy offered the chance of life by the charged vital ( but irrelevant ) presence of Julie Christie, chooses death. There was never any other alternative and JS remains true to moral intent and purpose rather than giving way to a faked ignoble open or ‘happy’ ending. 
adrin neatrrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?
Man on Wire – James Marsh – UK 2008  Doc (with dramatic reconstructions)
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 16 August 08;  Ticket:  £6-80

Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?

Marsh’s Man on Wire (MoW) is interesting in that it poses heuristic questions concerning the nature of the documentary tag.  Of course it isn’t the first film to sell itself on its documentary status but leave open issues pertaining to the validity of its claims to be factive.  MoW opens up the debate as to what constitutes a documentary film?  After viewing MoW with its archly crafted dramatic story and  finessed style I was left asking if it had any more claim to documentary status than films like Dam Busters or The Great Escape. 

Like the Dam Busters and The Great Escape, MoW  is about an Event.  It is event filmed as a pure discrete occurrence which is set in a time stream that comprises a deeply mythologised past and closed off future.  Marsh apparently got the idea to make a film about Philippe Petit’s (PP) epic wire walk across  the Twin Towers of WTC, after hearing PP on Desert Island Discs.  (Desert Island Discs is a staid BBC radio show, a vehicle that allows celebrities to select the music they’d take with them to a desert isle.)  Marsh in putting together MoW has in many ways modelled the film on the Desert Island Disc ethos.  Celebrities on DiD are interviewed in an uncomplicated manner, and unchallenged are allowed to be ‘celebrities’.   Likewise  MoW  permits PP to present his take on the Event, his heroics undisturbed by any awkward questions.  MoW celebrates the crossing as an event preserved in aspic drawing an iconic and decontextualised image of Petit, decontaminated from the forces of life and time.  The  film is constructed so as to present a unidimensional and consistent picture of PP.  PP is given a concentrated form as pure heroic image.  Like John Wayne, Bogart or those propaganda biographies of Stalin.  And yet life itself is never like this.  Even in MoW, with its carefully composed and edited contributions from friends companions and colleagues, there is a discernible darker shadow that lurks behind PP.

The Event, the wire walk, is transposed into a sort of mythological Great Time by allowing PP to present the crossing as a occurrence that was destined to happen from  his earliest days.   Destiny and the hero.  It is a common feature of myth that the subject is preordained to achieve their fame by signs that can be read in their childhood.  By the child shall you know the man (or woman).  Hercules is an obvious example but people like Houdini were also quick to claim childhood provenance. MoW encompasses time within the heroic fold of destiny. In an early sequence we see PP, as a boy at the dentist reading in a magazine about the proposal to build the Twin Towers.,  PP claims to have been imaginatively fired by what he read on that day, and at that moment somehow knew that these proposed gargantuan structures would one day play a defining role in his life.

And yet right from its opening, MoW seems to need to distort unwelcome facts and to bend them to the film’s project of mythologizing PP.  The sequence at the dentist appears to be falsely presented.   According to WikiPedia, PP read the article on a visit to the dentist in 1968 when he was about 19 years old, an adolescent (PP was born 13 August 1948) .  In the film’s reconstruction PP is represented as being a boy, certainly not an adolescent. This type of misrepresentation is grist to the mill for Hollywood film biopic vehicles that claim to be a dramas; but for a movie vehicle claiming to be a documentary it simply poses the question as to what terms and conditions are in play in regard to the validity of the product?  And what is the relationship of the validity of the material in a film to its claim for documentary status?  And how the intentions (as they reveal themselves on screen) of the film maker relate to the claim to documentary status?  The answer of course may be that like the wire they are highly elastic and that, for instance  misrepresentation of fact is no bar at all to documentary status. All that matters is that you intend to make a film and claim that it is documentary: either as a marketing ploy or because you believe it to be so.   
 
 Marsh uses much of the first part of the film creating the myth of PP.  PP’s childhood is structured as a hallowed pathway leading to the Event.  In re-constructed sequences we see soft focus recreations of PP learning to walk the wire and evidencing the necessary personal philosophy, firmness of purpose and purity of intention that will be necessary to meet the demands and strictures of the Event.  The key to the nature of the film is Marsh’s decision to represent PP as a mythic image.  The consequence of this decision is to decontextualise PP and construct his persona strictly according to the needs of the Film.  

MoW tells nothing of PP’s past, his family parents or geography.  All these are subsumed into the halo effect of the Event.  PP emerges from nowhere, stands alone and proceeds through the success of Event into a future that is nowhere.   Marsh exploits  PP  as a celebrity frozen in celestial space and time, like the figures in the great constellations of the night sky.   We are not informed in any certain manner about how PP earned his living.  We see ( in reconstruction) that he busked the streets in Paris with his act: but did he make enough from this to fund the Twin Towers walk?  His financial affairs about which there are legitimate questions of interest are left unprobed.  PP is a figment of the celebrity heavens and nothing sordid or earthbound, the money or the rent, is permitted to sully him.   We see PP, throughout the film interviewed in 2007, 33 years after the Great Event.  We find him frozen in time, defined only by this one action, the Event.  Nothing has changed, we have the same folksy quasi superman philosophy, a man who has learned to wear his media mask with ease.   As if he were a prisoner of the Event, and 33 years have passed in this prison.  PP has grown older ( more slowly than some), but nothing else seems to have happened.  

Marsh has made a film according to the old rules:  you tell the audience what is going to happen: they see it happen; and then they are told it has happened.  MoW is like the classic film of the man slipping on the banana skin.  Marsh has carefully stylised MoW to give it a contemporary feel.  He exploits the convention of tastefully filming the respondents with high key lighting against black or greatly dimmed settings to decontextualise their inputs. The interviewees feel like people playing themselves, taking on pre-agreed roles  in describing the Event. It feels as if they have been well rehearsed (or possibly edited by Marsh) in the course of their responses.  They only exist in relation to the Event not in relation to PP the man. They avoid or are edited by Marsh, so that it appears they avoid, really talking about PP as a person rather than as the projection of the film.  Two of the respondents – the ex girl friend Annie and Jean- Louis, intimate some deeper psychic reservations and ambiguities that caused them to disassociate themselves from PP.  But they remain covert, guarded intimations that are not allowed to disturb the polished reflective surface of  PP the celebrity. It feels like we are experiencing the careful construction of a lie, the filmic reduction of life to myth.

 Marsh appears very confident about the film he wants to make.  However there are odd signs of a latent insecurity.  The use of date and time intertitles.  These titles, which are typically used to lend a spurious authenticity to dramatic reconstructions may appear either as title cards or superimpositions informing the viewer, for instance, that a particular establishment shot represents:  New York –   4th January 1974 –  09:21.  This technique is now so hack and incorporated into spoof and mockumentaries it is often avoided.  In particular what should be avoided is specificity in relation to the minute hand of time.  But Marsh uses this device on a couple of occasions in reconstructing the Twin Towers preparations.  On both occasions it was unnecessary since minute by minute planning was not the order of the day (as it might be in a heist).  

Another sign of Marsh’s insecurity with the material is his decision to reconstruct the sex scene as a mock humorous silent movie. The humour in the sequence being reinforced by shooting (or editing) at 18 fps and projecting at 25 fps creating out of the action, funny jerky movements.  What happened is that after the sky walk the conquering hero PP was propositioned by a young woman – nymph(ette). In terms of Marsh’s mythic recasting of PP this is perfect.  All earthly women desire the seed of the hero.  PP as the hero gets his lay.  But there are indications in the interviews that this tryst was a turning point: a time when everything changed and old relations fell apart. Instead of celebrating the success with his friends and supporters he went and fucked a strange woman.  A God-Hero can do as he pleases.  Perhaps it was the final straw, the final act of arrogance perpetrated on his team by PP.  PP is allowed to get away with explaining what happened with a shrug of the shoulders.  This is his privilege.  But Marsh takes things a step further.  In filming the sequence as an opera bouffe,  he reduces it to a silent comedy.  In pandering to the viewer’s prurience MoW effectively minimalises the importance of what happened in personal terms and effectively folds the seduction and sex scene into the mythic.  A filmic act of displacement.

The film often seems to fall short creatively. For instance, the score is undemanding and emotionally honed to induce in the audience a certain compliance with PP’s iconic status.  The music at one point seems to me indicative of creative bankruptcy when Marsh for the film’s highlight, the Event, the Walk Between the Towers chooses to regale us with Satie’s Gymnopedie ( the usual one that is all the adverts and all the films) .   To exploit such an overworked piece of music belies either insecurity or lack of imagination. But that’s show business folks!

Man on Wire (MoW) celebrates an extraordinary event with a very ordinary film, a sort of standardised glossy re-enactment and recapitulation of the event that asks no questions and gets no answers in an exercise in stylistic misdirection.  Ultimately it is not in principle distinguishable from a regular biopic such as Reach for the Sky or Bonnie and Clyde.  All the news that fits, all the material the fits the film.

Of course MoW has been very popular, popular because it is built on an extraordinary event which the public want to believe in.   People enjoy believing the myth and Marsh has made a popular film fictionalising  the situation surrounding the Event, fashioning of the Event a feature film of crass simplicity and little integrity.  I might conclude that it falls into a category of degraded documentaries.  However I think MoW raises deeper questions about our confidence in our abilities to discriminate.  The category or even genre of documentary panders to the conceit that we can tell the real from the fake and fact from fiction.  In the world of endless manipulation of image and information our facilities are increasingly unable to make these distinctions.  But the sake of our self esteem and self image we cling to the idea embedded in the word ‘documentary’ as a sort of protective shibboleth.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Retrocrit: pleasure for pain; sex for death
Kiss Me Deadly – Robert Aldrich  USA 1955:   Ralph Meeker – Maxine Cooper
Viewed Star and Shadow Newcastle  13 July 08 Ticket price £4-00

Retrocrit:  pleasure for pain; sex for death

The Kiss Me Deadly (KMD) opens with a disorienting travelling shot that is dominated by its sound.  We are in almost complete darkness.   We’re in the back seat of a car, behind the driver and his female passenger and we’re driving through the night.  Our attention is fixed not on the visual field which comprises of poorly defined shapes outlined in the blackness, but on the sound issuing from the woman.  At first I thought that the panting and clonic gaspings of the woman were sexually stimulated which given the year of production surprised me.  It was only when the film cut to the reverse shot, face on to the couple, that I realised that in fact the woman was crying. 

The mistake had the effect of making me feel self conscious for being so palpably wrong footed, for completely misconstruing the sound effect and interpreting pain as pleasure.  Was I conditioned by the sexual crudity of contemporary drama so that I automatically equated rhythmic female panting with sex? Or did Aldrich exploit, as his opening gambit, the ambiguity of the sound made by the woman,  intending to put the viewer on alert, to induce latent uncertainty as a core premise in the working out of the movie.  Beware:  pleasure is uncovered as pain; beware what men covet and prize beyond value is deadly and worthless: it will lead us into doom. 

The female passenger in the car – a hitchhiker on the run – is the first victim in the film: the first of many.   And the opening sequence, the unrelenting drive through the hell black night, ends with her words –“ Remember me!”  The drive has a dream like ominous quality that engendered in me a gloomy and oppressed state of mind, a mood that remains imprinted in the film till its explosive eschatological ending.  This driving sequence is a powerful filmic device, a metaphor that anticipates the terrible drive into the future, and its cost in human dignity and lives, not just in the play out of the mechanics of the plot of KMD but also for the  future of a planet driven by consuming desire to possess nuclear weapons that ensure mutual annihilation. We are on the road to the doomsday machine of Strangelove.

“Remember me…!” the hitchhiker commands Mike the gumshoe as they drive through the night.  The film lingers and worries about the meaning of her words, the words of the first victim, underlining and reemphasising them in the course of the plot.  What did she mean?  But where else do we have we heard and read these words?  “They shall not be forgotten…”   “Remember!” is the rubric that adorns the graves of the war dead, the headstones and walls where the names of the Fallen are carved in stone so that they are not forgotten but remembered.  “Remember me” is the command of the war dead lest we forget the reason for their dieing.  The young woman’s words are a sign pointing to the potential bleak future where millions of innocents might be annihilated in nuclear war.     

Neither the mechanics of the plot nor the acting are any more than accessories to the real dynamic of the movie which is the strategic use of the camera set-ups and movements to create both worlds of immanence and amplified circuits of tension that inform the states of mind of the viewers.   Two long sequences in particular stand out (the sequence establishing the swimming pool at the gangster’s house is also very fine) that are composed in one single shot: Mike’s visit to the gym; and his visit to the garret of opera singer.  The in-frame edit of the action through camera movement engenders in both scenes an amplified spatial tension.  And as the camera tracks through the spatial axes it works as a force amplifying and transforming the spatial tensions in relation to the verbal intercourse that takes place between Mike and the other players.  This heightened tensile awareness could not have been created through use of the  traditional montage device of cross cutting which generally through action cutting increases pace and attempts to induce tension through juxtaposition opposition etc but at the cost of losing durational time dynamic.  In KMD Aldrich has produced a movie that creates its spatial tensions not through action cuts but through time images. Having noted above that the mechanics of the acting are accessories to the film it must be said that all the players, in particular Meeker, have the fine technical sense of timing necessary to the delivery of the film in this particular form. 

The set-ups used by the camera are also definitive of he KMD.  The consistent framing of shots so that they conceal rather than reveal. The framing of feet and legs is integral to the style of the film.  This has of course been done before, but integrity and panache with which the shots are et up and incorporated make them part of what KMD is expressing, a world that is corporate rather then individual.  Likewise the use of the camera set-ups from surveillance angles points to more than just a Hitchcock conceit: it seems to be saying something a society which is in the process of developing  collective paranoia.  Likewise the most noteworthy prop on the set: Mike’s early prototype Anasphone which is a ¼ inch tape recorder fixed into the wall and tripped by the phone.  It’s prominence and position in the film rather than its role in the plot suggest that like the rubric ‘Remember me!’,  it is a sign not a symbolic function.

Some Hollywood films have gone for fiery Armageddon types of endings – White Heat for example. But as far as I am aware although the visual effects were uncompromising the message of such endings is always moralistic.  Aldrich in KMD brings down the curtain with a holocaust, a nuclear explosion from which his protagonists vainly flee.  There is nothing moralistic, only the moral that the technology that we have brought into the world is indifferent to our desires and works on the simple logic of being a force for universal annihilation. No prisoners are taken. There is no salvation.  There is no hope. I imagine Antonione watching KMD with some interest.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Film as installation: first there was drive in now we got walk through movies. There Will Be Blood – Paul Anderson – USA – 2007   Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul Dano, Kevin J O’Connor
Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle   30 June 08  Ticket: £6-80

Film as installation: first there was drive in now we got walk through movies.

There Will Be Blood (TWBB) is a Hollywood gloss on Upton Sinclair’s big novel, Oil!  One of the most politically radical of America’s 20th century writers, Oil! is written on a broad historical canvas taking in the Great War, the Russian revolution and the tide of socialism in Europe and setting it against labour and political strife in the oil fields of Southern California.

Oil!  Chapter X11 The Monastery: ‘It had become clear to him that the present system could not go on forever – the resources and wealth of the Country carried off by the greediest.  And when you asked who was going to change the system there was only one possible answer – the great mass of workers who had learned that wealth was produced by toil.’

Anderson’s solution as to how to film Oil! is to replace Marx with Freud, to deflect the shaping of the narrative away from  political concerns inwards into psycho familial dynamics.  Upton Sinclair’s observations that chiliastic religious fervour de-energised and deflected American labourers from more pointed class concerns is taken up by Anderson, but then twisted and deformed to serve his own purposes in  providing TWBB with a final gothic  tableau:  the death of Eli bludgeoned to death by Daniel Plainview in private bowling ally of his mansion.  In TWBB religion justifies the final cryptic setting for this contemporary take on American Gothic involving the oil business –  fire – murder – blood.

Anderson has styled TWBB as  modern American Gothic, and it is Gothic script which provides the only opening title of the film, the date 1898  (white on black field)  which opens up the first of Anderson’s photo tableaux.  Sinclair’s novel is not stylistically gothic.  Rather it is informal and conversational in form and politically didactic in content.  Anderson’s solution to the transposition of the written to the filmic is to make of the film a series walk through photo installations, a set of tableaux as beloved of nineteenth century artists or current practitioners such as Bill Viola

So TWBB opens with the silver mine installation (birth)  and proceeds through a series of linked set-ups, the business meeting (sharp practice),  buying the farm to exploit the mineral wealth below its surface (underhand mendacity); the oil well blow out (the demonstration of the forces of nature), the dismissal of the son (rejection), the murder of the false brother (Cain and Abel), the humiliation of Daniel at the Temple by Eli (shame and humiliation) and the final tableau, Daniel’s slaying of the Preacher Eli ( Death: revenge on God and his two faced priests on earth)  The tableaux are spread over time, each temporal sequence introduced with the date in Gothic.

It is the camera work that indicates that what we are watching has been conceived as a photo installation. The film is characterised by a large number of long tracking shots that take us through each of the tableaux. I wondered at first what the tracks were accomplishing: they didn’t seem to have an obvious purpose either moral or instrumental. In fact the tracking shots in TWBB are a simulated replication of the effect the audience would get if they were walking through a photo installation.  The film is simply an installation in film form. The big production value centrepiece of TWBB the Biblical column of fire caused by the oil blow out reminded me of one of Viola’s walk through installations that featured a  cascade of water.  The hyperrealisation of natural phenomena, overdetermines response of the viewer to create awe (Fear and Awe) without engaging the question of meaning.  Anderson has adapted Oil! as a walk through installation.    TWBB has been made to fill out the gaze of the audience as it moves through the film.  TWBB is filmed to be cool  and to satisfy  all consuming but ephemeral vapid ambulatory curiosity.  It has not been written and shot for audience engagement with either context issues or emotions.  

To complete the installation effect, two other characteristics of the film production  are fully articulated.  The sound design concept is central to the walk through experience.  From the opening establishment shot of mountains accompanied by a crescending siren effect TWBB is only rarely (for instance when cutting to the deaf  mute point of view) without a sound accompaniment that fills out and points to the angle of the gaze; and meaning that the gaze should construe.  The score literally presses down and in and onto the film. With the its surround technology the sound is an active physical presence that preempts audience reaction to the visual stimuli.  By turns it is  ominous, the biosuggestive,  cosmic and of course weird.   The object of the sound concept is the colonisation of the viewers understanding, or at least the denial to mind of coherent response to the offered stimuli. Like the adverts on TV the sound track to TWBB is an enforcer; it is not a deepener of insight or reflection.

In similar manner, the mis-en-scene,  sets and costumes. are designed to fill out the gaze’s field of vision with confirmations of authenticity.   Attention to detail, another aspect of photo installation work, ensures all the detailing of the sets has a hyper real perfection so that nothing interferes with the smoothen path of the spectator’s trail through the film.  Anderson’s objective is total immersion in the encounters with the installations mediated by the richness of the interiors and costumes of the turn of the nineteenth century.  TWBB is populated by a series of players whose screen persona is characterised by a sort of Biblical patina invested with fake mythological persona.  DDL looked at times like a gremlin sorcerer out of the Lord of the Rings.  

The fragmented temporal structure serves Anderson’s purposes by being coherently inchoate.  TWBB time fragments intrerconnect but not in a way that compels specific readings; rather in such a way that the individual viewer can construct there own understandings as to what has happened.   Anderson\s replacement of Sinclair’s out front Marxism with back door Freudianism results in subjectivities determining meaning.  The viewer instead of  looking at the failure of organised labour in the US, instead can muse on the meaning the death of Eli in the bowling alley or the deafness of HW. In Anderson’s recourse to ever more heavy handed symbolism, an increasing vacuity and emptiness characterises the film.  By the final credits I had a feeling that I had been watching a shell of a movie in which  the core of the drama was missing: as indeed was the case.  I left the cinema saying to myself, not Oil! but So What!
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk