The Face Knife

During the last half of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, I must have fallen asleep at least a dozen times during the three sessions in which I tried to finish watching the movie. Each time, I started from the fracture point again, where the narrative spins out into the jungle and into some essential dream-time. I don’t think that Weerasethakul would be insulted if he heard about the sopoforic effect his film had on me, and I certainly don’t mean it as an insult. In fact, perhaps this could be by design - perhaps one is intended to watch the film while slipping in and out of hypnagogic reveries. Maybe that’s how the shaman/beast devours you… I’m reminded of a book a friend of mine lent me a few years ago, The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin. That book, which is much more interesting than the title may seem to indicate, concerns a malady that either causes you to fall into an eternal, horrific dream-sleep, or maybe it causes you to believe that you have contracted a malady that causes you to fall into an eternal, horrific dream-sleep, or maybe there’s no such thing as the malady. It’s a maddening puzzle of a book, and it’s hard to keep the layers of “reality” in order when you’re reading it, and when I first started reading it, I kept drifting off into disturbed sleep.

I think Tropical Malady may be a film about memory, and what memory means in terms of love but that’s sort of an idee fixe for me so I may well be far off base. The first part of the film, which reminds me a lot of a Jia Zhangke film in the way it’s shot, the youth of the protagonists and the use of pop music and references, concerns the friendship and then romantic relationship between two Thais, one a soldier and the other a young man struggling to find his place. As the soldier is recalled to his unit in the jungle, things change greatly. A tiger, the spirit of a long-dead shaman, is bound to the woods and haunts and perhaps kills intruders. The soldier and the tiger begin a hunt, though it is often unclear who is the hunter and who is the hunted. The soldier receives clarification from a Hanuman-y monkey, who tells him that he must either kill the Tiger and release him from the spirit world, or be devoured by him and join him in that world.

The hunt of the Tiger - the nearly hour long sequence in which I hit the aforementioned sack a dozen or so times - is a tour de force of under used techniques. The soundtrack is entirely bare of music, so that the sounds that do emerge - a shot in the dark, static from a radio, the chirp of the monkey are all that more effective. Much of the hunt takes place at night, with the soldier’s flashlight illuminating jungle vines inches at a time. It’s gorgeous and I don’t think I’ve ever seen “night” done quite like this in a film. The blacks are not the jagged shards of coal from a noir; they’re more like the the blacks of a goya painting, rich and warm and enveloping. It’s a cozy feeling, sort of, until you snap back awake to realize that the face of a tiger now fills the screen, watching you with patient eyes.

I’m hoping Weerasethakul’s other feature, 2002’s Blissfully Yours is released on DVD here soon. There’s also apparently a hybrid documentary called Mysteries Object at Noon, based loosely on an exquisite corpse premise (and you know, all things based on the avant garde excite me), and a film, unscreened in the US so far, called “The Adventure of Iron Pussy,” which Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek describes as “a heartfelt adventure-musical about a transvestite action hero.” Given the way the awards season is shaping up, perhaps some distributer will snap that one up as some Oscar bait. Here’s hoping.

Adaptations are tricky buggers. Even when not inspiring vocal, maniacal fatwas from comic book guys¹, the writer and/or director responsible for the adaptation is seen as a sticky-fingered tamperer: why mess with a good or an as-good-as-good thing? And what kind of fool would dare try to re-make an adaptation? A: Yet another filmmaker with daddy issues.

Tim Burton’s movies pretty much sit up and beg for psychoanalytic criticism², and it’s no big trick to suggest that the earlier adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic, the more appositely titled Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is the clearest cinematic antedecent of Burton’s exceptional m?lange of grotesquery and sentimentality. What better way to act out the anxiety of influence than the rebuild your dad, Dr. Frankenstein style³, from the parts and pieces of your own life?

The genius animating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the brain Burton has stolen from his past - the brain of Johnny Depp. That’s not to say that Burton isn’t responsible for the amazing things about this movie, it’s just that Depp’s “choices” -to use a word from the “craft”- are the nougat that binds together the tough nuts of sentimentality and brutality that lace Dahl’s story.

The fact that those choices more or less amount to an impression of an accused child molester is more or less on point. I realize that Depp and Burton wouldn’t want association with Michael Jackson to taint their work⁴. But bracket, if you can, the intimations of kiddie fiddling on the part of Jackson and concentrate instead on his own story, his narrative of childhood lost and regained, and there you have the story of Willy Wonka’s factory, oh, and the story of present-day America as well.

It’s a story of willful disregard of hard truth and adult reality in favor of a hyper-real simulation of what you think the world should be like - in the case of childhood, an orgy of candy and doing like you feel. And screw anyone who would tell you different. Immediate gratification of your desires - which must be right because they’re YOUR DESIRES - is the only way to live. If the world fails to conform to your desires, well, either force it to or withdraw into your own fantasy land. The gummy boat on the river of chocolate had better well run on time!

The secret core of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that Willy Wonka has spoiled himself rotten, just as the parents of the ‘bad’ children have. He has far more in common with a Veruca Salt or Mike Teevee than he does with Charlie Bucket. No wonder he can’t stand those other children - it’s like looking in a mirror. Wonka is your average creepy moral hypocrite. He’s Bill Bennet on a sugar jag and Motherfucker doesn’t even floss.

Going back as far as Edward Scissorhands Burton has used repetition and similarity as a visual stand in for normality. The romantic misfits of Burton’s imagination pop out against the cookie-cutter background. It’s a neat aesthetic strategy, and in Charlie makes great use of it, from Charlie’s dad’s job in th the toothpaste factories to the Gursky-esque arrangements of Wonkabars to the most striking use of CGI this summer, the multitude of Oompa Loompas, all played by the same actor.

However, what does that strategy really mean? It means that everything outside the self is an interchangable unit; one Oompa Loompa is the same as the next Oompa Loompa, children don’t need names, and all factory workers are more or less thieving scum (did I mention that Wonka is ANTI-LABOR? I mean, the Oompa Loompa work for Cocoa beans - how can the domestic workforce compete with that?).

The high level of formalism, the reliance on CGI and the dubious moral philosophy mark Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as the fraternal twin of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, even though there’s a disappointing poverty of amputations in this children’s film. That shouldn’t surprise me. But then again, most of the films I’ve seen this summer have been children’s films in one way or another and they’ve had plenty of amputations.

If the moral of The War of the Worlds is that we (AMERICANS!!!!) would do anything to protect our children and the moral of Sin City is that there are some things that decent people (children and women) aren’t meant to see (but are nonetheless necessary for maintaining social order) the moral of Charlie is to become as a child and your wildest wishes will come true⁵ - provided that you love your daddy and mummy above all else.

The reverence Charlie Bucket shows to his cinematic parents (and grandparents) is the same reverence Robert Rodriguez showed to his source material, and is the same reverence that Steven Spielberg showed to his source material (even if he really didn’t understand it⁶). Luckily for Tim Burton, his warped personality doesn’t permit that kind of reverence, and even though the new movie is pretty faithful to it’s source (more or less), the imp of the perverse differentiates it enough so that it becomes a darker, funnier beast.

The darker aspects stem from the fascistic nature of the inner child unleashed - as well as the funnier parts. When Wonka and the bad kids are acting as (non-sexual) id unleashed, the funniest lines pop out of them. Charlie, alone, is completely unfunny and unsympathetic. Who gives a fuck about Charlie? Who would possibly want to be Charlie? Yet, he’s the moral paragon of the film, the center around which the whole chocolatey froth churns. Are we really supposed to want our kids to be like Charlie? Little fascists in trainings? Charlie and the Brownshirt Factory?

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film. It’s a great piece of cinema, and it really creates a wholly believable, self-contained world. Just don’t ask me to live there. What, no fucking snozzberries?

¹ For a current example, see this week’s New York Times Magazine for an article about the Sci-Fi channel’s Battlestar Galatica
² The scene with the Oompa Loompa therapist…
³ Maybe Bride of Frankenstein style is more appropriate, the camp tone of that movie finding great (though less homosocial) expression in Burton’s works.
⁴ But then again, why give the puppets at the beginning vitiligo?
⁵Pretty close to Me and You and Everyone We Know
⁶ the ending of the original War of the Worlds was ironic because it showed how insignifcant even higher beings are and how significant lower beings are. By making his movie into a heroic epic journey, Speilberg totally ignores the chilling, anti-human message of War of The Worlds and turns it into another heart-warmer. AND, AND! He resurrects that fucking teen soldier-wannabe son!!!! How offensive was THAT?

As a self-appointed critic, it is my duty to drain the fun out of everything and attempt to provide a reason why what you’re enjoying is not simply amusement but a more important and altogether cogent statement about Art and Life.

Then I’m confronted by something like Princess Racoon, which is altogether impossible to exhaust. 82 year old Japanese director Seijan Suzuki has taken a simple fairy tale story of a love that should not be and collaged it with a grab bag of visual and audio source materials, creating a mix of formalisms that would be annoying if it weren’t so exhilarating.

The forbidden love is between a “Tanuki” Princess, a mischievous forest demon who can assume bat, racoon-esque, and human form, and your standard young fairy-tale human prince, who has been banished by his father, master of Castle Grace, for threatening to usurp his place as “the fairest of them all.”

So far, this sounds like it could be the plot for a standard Hollywood CGI special effects blockbuster, but instead of using the latest cinematic technology to create a “realistic” version of what a fantastic world should be like, Suzuki uses what are more less ancient methods derived from theater to create the cinematic space. The horizon is delimited by backdrops that are reminiscent of wood-block prints, or simple composite shots. For instance, Castle Grace is a bare stage set with a large Gate, a crater, a baroque-looking oil painting, a purple sky background, and, lest I forget, human beings as candelabras and other furniture (the Master’s favorite way of torturing those who have disobeyed him - including his parents).

Most of the action itself takes place in similarly minimalist ways - combat consists of ritual exchanges of blows (and Suzuki takes this formalism to the last degree, culminating a duel to the death in a rock, paper, scissors contest, the most arch indication of the method to Suzuki’s madness).

I cannot help but think of Sergei Eisenstein’s thoughts on Kabuki theater in Film Form. Granted, I wouldn’t know Kabuki from Tanuki, and I have no idea if Eisenstein’s thoughts were actually correct, but his description of the conventions of Kabuki in the forms of gestures, costume, background and sound, and how they are all treated equally as units of theater, were instrumental in constructing his program for the Sound Film. In one example Eisenstein gives, long-distance travel is indicated on stage first through a movement toward the front of the stage, then a change in a folding screen backdrop to denote perspective, a clothe obscuring that screen to denote that the starting place had vanished, and finally, samisen music of a certain rhythm.

However, to me, rather than the montage techniques for which Eisenstein was justly famous, this type of formalism has the opposite effect of the time and space distorting effects of montage. Montage is discontinuous - in Princess Racoon, even though the scene may change, it’s still linked to the same (magical) world. Tanuki Palace opens it’s doors to several different parts of the world, all at once. It is a nexus of cinematic continuity - the camera can track out of Tanuki palace and onto the beach, into the forest, up to the forbidden mountain.

Going back to the fight scenes again, these are also examples of a preference for all-overness rather than montage. In the fights (as well as the many dance sequences) , there is a prescribed area that the actors move through - their motions render depth of field visible to the viewer, and seem all that more exciting and ‘real’ for it - even though they’re so formalized. Contrast to the standard “fight scene” of contemporary film - the constant cuts, the close ups of hand and claw in a dizzying spectacle that disorients but doesn’t excite. The editing used in those scenes I would say is completely uncinematic, which is sad because human combat is such a great subject for film, to show off the way the lens captures reality. In the only other Suzuki film I’ve seen, Youth of the Beast, he uses depth photography very effectively, in static compositions as well as action.

This is not to say that Princess Racoon is a dry exercise in experimental cinema. In fact, it’s uproarious, fun, and silly, with a magic bowl of eggnog, a Ninja named Ostrich and many, many songs in many, many styles. It’s not necessary to think about technique and what it might mean when viewing the film, but it gives me a little to talk about.

—–

Filmbrain, where I was tipped off to the existence of this film, has a great review today, much better than mine at getting across the fun of the film.

Anyone have any ideas for illustrations? I’m sort of at a loss…. Frog of Paradise?

Okay, what’s the deal with the explicit Christianity of the denizens of Castle Grace? Ideas?
I’m going to continue to edit this today, and maybe add a cartoon.

The Face Knife* believes that the optimal ending sequence for a film should include either an extended dance number, or a death, or both (though I haven’t seen this done). There’s nothing that will leave an audience in a better, more invigorated mood that seeing someone dance their cares away. Exemplary final dance sequences include Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Russian Ark, and the film I’d like to discuss, Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert.

Inspired by the story of St. Simeon Stylites, a 4th century saint who retreated to the desert to live atop a column in order to avoid sin. Buñuel’s film opens with the droll humor of Simon being awarded a taller, more ornate column by the monks of his order and the surrounding townspeople. Through the power of prayer, he manages to restore the hands of a thief who had them amputated**, who proceeds to use them to smack his kids. The townspeople are really not that impressed with the miracle - it’s sort of anticlimactic. Simon is not that impressed by the townspeople either - he certainly doesn’t love them at all. There’s a midget who proudly displays his goat’s full udders to a slightly disgusted Simon (mirroring the cow-milking scene in Viridiana), and a beautiful woman whom he reflexively calls a “cross-eyed hag.”

Maybe he has a good reason to be afraid of her, besides body-terror, because it’s Silvia Pinel as the Devil, to come and tempt him off his column. She enjoins him with such aphorisms as “What you have lost, consider as totally lost” and “indulge yourself until pleasure sickens you” (as she kicks a lamb). Simon, though tormented, resists all her temptations until the final one, where she brings him on an Jumbo Jet across time and space to a “black mass,” which turns out to be a rock concert. I think
Pope Benedict XVI can explain the connection better than I can:

… Rock music seeks release through liberation from the personality and its responsibility … [it is] among the anarchic ideas of freedom which today [1985] predominate more openly in the West than in the East. But that is precisely why rock music is so completely antithetical to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact opposite.

Simon watches the dancers raptly, and asks Satan what the name of the dance they’re doing is. She replies that it’s the latest - and last - dance, “Radioactive Flesh.” Simon wishes to leave the club, but he can’t he’s stuck there til the end, and just as in Viridiana, the night is long and you’ve got to find something to do…

It’s a beautiful little film. The features of the monks in the desert remind me of El Greco, all elongated faces and tapered fingers. Run time is less than an hour, because the producer ran out of money. In his autobiography, Buñuel states that many sequences ended up “literally on the cutting room floor”, so perhaps that footage exists and can be used in an eventual criterion style DVD package.

As such, it’s currently not available on DVD, but if you want to check out the 3 minute 31 second version, click here for Canadian power-pop demigods The New Pornographer’s video for their song The Laws Have Changed, which is about the fact that there’s no better place to throw a party than a decaying empire.*** Buñuel was Joycore before his time.

* Don’t really like this convention, but…what else can I do?
**No wonder this is a Face Knife favorite.
***Another song on the same record (Electric Version), Chump Change, written by Destroyer main dude Dan Bejar, fits in more with the Simon of the Desert treatment, featuring lines about how “The saints in the desert use their hands”, the carnal/spiritual opposition of “there is you/and then there is your body” and a wittgensteinian injunction that “the world is that which is the case.”

Luis Buñuel film in which Fernando Rey plays an aging lecher. Okay, that’s a feeble joke. Look for a “Which Buñuel film am I watching?” flowchart to completed sometime this summer.

Viridiana is a blasphemous film about the consolations and proper uses of religion.The titular character is a novice nun who returns to the world one last time before taking her vows in order to spend some time on the estate of her widower uncle Don Jaime (Rey), who has sponsored her entry into the convent. As with most of the characters played by Rey in the Buñuel canon, Don Jaime is very wealthy and inflamed with lust by any young woman, and as such he tries to tempt Viridiana to marry him and stay with him. The night before Viridiana is to return to the convent, Don Jaime asks the naif if she would do him a favor, which consists of wearing his dead wife’s wedding dress and shoes, which we had seen him caressing earlier. With the help of his maid and some drugs, Don Jaime prepares to ravish Viridiana only to find that he cannot go through with it. In deep shame, he kills himself, though Viridiana only finds this out as she is about to board the bus back to the convent.

Viridiana inherits the estate, but she has to share it with Don Jaime’s out of wedlock son, Jorge, who is a typical modern smoothy who wants to bring electricity and modern farming methods to the estate.

Viridiana wants to use her wealth to help people, and starts a home for some begging invalids. This doesn’t turn out to well, as as soon as they are left unsupervised, they throw a raucus party culminating in a tableau vivant of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” and dancing to Handel’s Messiah, the only phonograph record Don Jaime had, which he used to play the organ along to.

As the beggars give in to their urges, one of them says of his cohorts “Let them sin…it’s good for the soul….then they can repent.” which to me is pretty much the summation of any functional version of Christianity. The rules-based ascetiscism Viridiana learned in the convent and tries to apply to real life is just not practical for human beings.

In the wonderful ending, (which, apparently Buñuel adapted from the censors’ suggestions) Jorge invites a chastened (but ready to become unchaste) Viridiana to play cards with him and maid, with whom he is already having an affair (unlike his father, who remained faithful to his dead wife, or so we are led to believe). A rock and roll record blares on the phonograph, with the chorus “Shake your cares away,” and Jorge explains the rules of the game to Viridiana, and that they play cards because the “nights are long and you have to fill them somehow.” The consolation of other people, of being the bride of the world rather than the bride of Christ, is the only option left to us, born sinners who would certainly not be able to deal with paradise even if it were given to us. It seems a little odd for me to use a film banned in Spain and other countries for blasphemy as an example of the kind of religion I find attractive, but I really see a kinship between the themes of this movie and the earthly spirituality of a Dostoevsky or Bresson, and I don’t think that Buñuel would necessarily think that that’s a bad thing.

Viridiana is currently unavailable on Region1 DVD

I still don’t know if I can forgive Todd Solondz for Happiness or Storytelling, but Palindromes is really an excellent film, his best by many miles. Stylistically and morally, Solondz has opened himself up, going beyond the closed universe of sitcom style set-ups and misanthropy that characterised his earlier work. Solondz will still never be accused of being a great stylist - can you think of a Solondz shot that doesn’t involve Philip Seymour Hoffman’s semen - but there are some great, lyrical moments in Palindromes, particularly the Night of the Hunter-inspired river escape.

Palindromes is a comedy about teen pregnancy and abortion, but it’s not a particularly topical movie, which is something I think confuses critics. They see these hot button topics (also pedophilia) and think the film is *about* these things - how could it not be - but, in the case of Palindromes (and again, I’m not going to defend Solondz’s earlier films - not a fan), they’re really metaphors for a larger message about how human beings stumble towards intimacy (not the sexual kind) with each other in a world that causes us to mistrust and hate our neighbors and ourselves. Solondz’s characters are constantly making the wrong choice, but for the right reason, and that’s what makes them ultimately lovable, their infinite fallibility. Just when you think they can’t make a worse choice, they do. In the past, Solondz seemed to dwell on this aspect of life, to mistake it for all life, all human experience, especially in the context of Suburbia, and his films often mocked the characters for their mistakes. They were cruel films, but Palindromes is uncommon in its sensitivity and gentleness, without being ever sentimental, a particularly difficult thing to do when children and childhood are part of the project. I’m tempted to revisit his earlier films, but my memories of them are too strong and too negative, so instead I’ll just look forward to his next project. Hopefully, it will be even more influence by the surrealism of Bunuel, because I think their respective humanisms have a lot in common. Both are interested in the malfunction of human desire and the way that one cannot change one’s innate drives without repression and horrible consequences*. A full-blown surreal Solondz film I think would be a revelation.

* in the vernacular, “you can’t unfry things. you can’t change who you are” (Strangers with Candy).