The Face Knife

Even though I graduated from Fight Club University and studied at The Matrix Institute for Advanced Studies (though I dropped out after year 2, like a lot of people), my mind was still not properly prepared for the fucking given to it by Wanted , the latest self-help movie catering to dweebs seeking enlightenment and/or a hot, kind of crazy girlfriend with inscrutable tattoos. I think there’s a near-universal tendency to believe that there’s a hidden order behind the world, and that history is approaching a singular moment of crisis, and that our own inner existential torment is unique and special and therefore the fact that we’re required to, like, wake up on time and pay for stuff is a sign that something has seriously gone wrong with the sacred order of the universe and our Fate. My strong preferences for what I think reality should be like would totally be coming true right now if it weren’t for the world, and you, and you, and YOU just totally fucking with me. Honestly, didn’t you roll into work this morning, look at your meager surroundings, sigh, and think “won’t someone rescue me from all these forces of Control and control me in a new, hot sadomasochistic way, and then turn me into an Entemann’s cake?”

Wanted gives hope to those whom the invisible hand of global capitalism has pinned into a cubicle and fingerbanged their faithless girlfriend. All it’s gonna take for you to muster up the courage to break the shackles is a few extended sessions of being tied to a chair and punched in the face before you, too, can become a fully-actualized asshole capable of inflicting grevous bodily harm with pistol and ergonomic keyboard alike. One of these days you’ll be filling your Ativan prescription and meet cute with a raccoon-eyed fembot, and after a brief and post-modern gun battle you’ll learn how you were noble-born into a legacy of bitchin’ assassins with vague superhuman powers and a penchant for fruitily ornate weaponry, exactly like what all those kids currently daydreaming about being drafted into Hogwarts will be fantasizing about once they start getting embarrassing erections during trig class.

A beautiful assassin who clearly studied this video will drive your ass to an urban castle-cum-textile factory where a profound black man will introduce you the secret story of your life and also the secret story of history. Soon, in between beatings and archiving, you’ll have the run of the place, which includes an octagonal library, a romantic candle-lit spa complete with tubs full of wound-healing frosting, a garment sweatshop manned by killers, and a meatpacking facility*. All you have to do is admit to your tormenters/saviors that “I don’t know who I am!” (after they slap you around).

Sure, your face will get broken every day, and you’ll get stabbed a whole gang of times by various ethnic stereotypes, and soon you will be begging for that hot chick to hold a gun to your head so that you can “do that thing,” but compared to office work it’s at least…interesting, right? Even more so when you fully accept the fact that your lot is to simply to kill based on the word of God.

Well, not quite God, just his Word manifested through a mystical, long-lived…um, Loom, that weaves the story of reality, which looks a whole lot like a rough, featureless beige rug. Although beneath that bland surface of things, it appears that Loom works in mysterious ways, as some clever Druid or prophet figured out that God was communicating not through cross-stitch messages (as he does in cozy kitchens across the land) but through a binary code cleverly disguised as errors in the fabric of the weave (there’s an excellentLuddite joke in here but I can’t quite get it to where it should be). Dude, to me that totally sounds like the Demiurge’s steez but I guess I would kill for him too if, like, given the choice between that and waking up at 7am to go to an office job every day or some such bullshit.

Particularly if Loom’s instructions for me are to get revenge for the death of my daddy. You know, the one who abandoned me when I was a wee child. I loved that dude! His killers have to die, for some reason! Possibly so I can impress that chick! Or win back my cheating girlfriend! Or Both! Damn, don’t I look hot with this gun?

Wanted is kind of berzerk with unwholesome creativity. The mayhem is varied and absurd, and I’ll not spoil it by detailing all of the silliness. (okay: live rat-bombs). It’s the first Hollywood movie by Timur Bekmambetov, the director of the cult (in this country) sort-of-vampire films Night Watch and Day Watch. I’m not going to say that it’s not entertaining, particularly if you have the “over” in a gentlemen’s bet about the number of “flying cars” to occur (note to future bettors: trains count as cars, one per carriage), but I think there’s something kind of wrong about a film that more or less defines self-actualization by the attainment of the ability and desire to do extreme violence on other people at whim, and at the behest of a higher power than yourself. Coupled with the over-the-top sadomasochistic depiction of pedagogy and the claim that since your dad has been spying on you constantly since he left your family when you were a child, he really, really loved you (and someone else can connect the Foucauldian dots here, if you miss grad school), the structure of the universe in Wanted is extremely twisted. Which, if the film was actually some sort of parody of Fight Club-ian stuff, would be sort of interesting, but I don’t think it’s quite coherent enough to manage that. Anyway, I guess my takeaway from the film is, if I see the Buddha coming around the corner, I’m gonna curve a bullet and blow that fucker away.

* The only explanation for which I can think of is that the Chicago Meatpacking Union still has a lot of juice.

No Sympathy for Little Miss Vengeance
Since I’m a great fan of what we in the pre-random subway search days used to call “due process,”¹ endorsements of vigilantism tends to rub me the wrong way, particularly when the film in question feels the need to exculpate the underage Bronson (Ellen Page) in question by rigging the plot so that the viewer can go home without any messy questions of justice to lose sleep over. It helps to have a pretty despicable villain on tap, too.

Lucky for us, then, that the perp (Patrick Wilson) in Hard Candy does not only have excellent modern taste in interior design but is also by profession a photographer, two perennial signifiers of shifty if not outright villainous characterization. Much like how the cinematic scientist is usually an over-reaching god-mocker⁴, the cinematic photographer always has something to hide, and while sometimes that secret happens to be the power to crawl up walls and shoot webs from your wrists, most of the time it’s something pretty pervy. ²

The photographer in Hard Candy is, natch, a pedophile, and at first it seems our precocious Punisher’s task is to figure out exactly which level pedo he is in order to mete out the appropriate level of punishment. This happens through a lot of talking and a little bit of shake-the-camera search-the-house . The talking, although sometimes veering into weird Gilmore Girls gone gritty territory, is a lot better than the shaking, although towards the end of the film neither method of ratcheting up the tension makes much aesthetic sense³. Hard Candy, whatever the theme of the film is, is a classic “stand-off” situation where characters are withholding information from each other in a limited setting. The current gold-standard of this kind of film is Reservoir Dogs, which uses the position of the characters and the camera within the confined space so effectively as to nearly obviate the appearance of cutting, except when it comes to important things, like amputation. Which Hard Candy does have, in the form of a radical orchidectomy.

Only, not really. Page’s pre-emptive torture/strike/whatever turns out to have been merely shock and awe enabled by a stagily placed TV monitor and a VHS copy of “Castration Jams ‘05″, a bravura performance put on in order to convince the pedo to….what, exactly? The error of his ways? At this point, the plot becomes hopelessly contrived as it tries to rehabilitate the psycho-leaning Page and irrevocably damn Wilson, who may have been effective in “duping” some in the audience with his psychoanalytical rationales for his behavior. I suppose that’s necessary, because we don’t want sympathetic pedophiles in our movies, unless Todd Solondz is responsible, and even then…yech.

The ending “reveal” is just useless, and the way justice is finally done elides any questions by making it happen at the hand of villain. Though I guess the hanging modality of the execution does bring to mind the spectre of lynching.

Maybe I have a problem with this rough justice only because I serendipitously watched Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936)the same morning, which was a specifically pro-due process film and quite effective at it (if equally narratively implausible as Hard Candy) or maybe, you know, it’s the Zeitgeist even though the blogosphere told me that Bordwell banned that word or whatever. But fuck, what is this movie for? Is it an empowerment fantasy? If so, empowerment for whom? I know that the proliferation of camera-phones has made the world an even less understanding place for subway flashers, and good for them, but um, do we want our middleschool students taking time out to cut off some creep’s cock? Or even fantasizing about it, for that matter?

Coming Next Week: The Face Knife Summer Movie Comparison Chart 2006 (2005),(2003)

¹Except in the case of vampire-hunting, but only because there’s no good legal recourse for that problem yet. Constitutional Amendment, people!
² See my upcoming review of The Notorious Bettie Page for more on this
³ Though, when do micro-second handheld shots edited together ever make sense?
⁴ Since I wrote this entry, this Slate slideshow about cinema’s Scientists was published.

First off, the infamous octopus eating scene? Really cool. I’m not some sort of raw food iconoclast and I don’t self-identify with Renfield or anything but I can see that after a decade and a half of fried dumplings, one would want to eat something fresh, you know what I mean? I suppose the symbolism of the octopus has to be linked with the other being that protagonist Oh-Dae Su promises to eat alive - his tormenter, the guy who kept him imprisoned for 15 years without explanation and who must have metaphorical tentacles in every corner of Oh-Dae Su’s life, but just as Oh-Dae Su chokes on the octopus, he….

Let’s stop here for a second. Part of the tendancy I like to call creeping Fincherism, beside the over-fondness for sick greens and mauves in the production design and the desire to move the camera like a spastic playing a car racing video game, is the purposeful insertion of plot “spoilers” (to use the geek argot) that preclude any serious discussion of why or why not a film works, story-wise, unless you want to give the game away to potential viewers. On the one hand, placing the viewer on the same epistemological level as the protagonist (various levels of ignorance) is, you know, in line with certain of my modernist sympathies, but on the other hand, how many times can one’s fictional world get TURNED UPSIDE down before the gesture becomes rote and meaningless? There is a certain kind of nihilism evident in this tendancy - that the agent in the world of the film will never, ever know anything until it’s too late - never know who is controlling their fate, why their fate is being controlled, and just how extensive fate is being controlled. As far as that goes, it’s sort of baby-grade existentialist, but then the conventions of narrative filmmaking require that the plot MUST be explained, and heck, its the work of a superheroically intelligent and/or rich individual WHO FUCKS WITH YOUR REALITY, man, and I can’t abide by that. There’s no DUDE like that, just like you don’t like in God’s potemkin village. The “reveal” is philosophically and cinematically meaningless, and as such these films more or less suck. There’s no need to treat your audience like children in order to build “suspense.” I’m firmly on the side of dramatic irony, where the audience knows more or less what’s going to happen to the protagonist but is forced to look on in horror as he tries and fails to avoid his fate. THAT’s suspense.

So what do you get from Oldboy besides this Fincherism? Not a whole lot. The plot, as such, doesn’t make a lick of sense, unless you buy that there are people out there who really CAN control you and have the whim to do it. The violence can be excrutiating, and the denouement, well, is totally expected and gruesome. It’s a well made film, within the context of it’s genre, but I certainly don’t think it’s a very good film.

There’s nothing more disreputable than fundamentalism, even when the infallible holy text to which the devotee pays obeisance is the Word of a half-crazy* anarcho-libertarian with a severe design sense and a warped sense of humor. The literal, humorless** fidelity of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) to Frank Miller’s comic books somehow manages to warp to the parodic sentimentality and brutality of the source to such an extent that they’re no longer parodic - they’re bathetic. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the take-away of Sin City (the film) is that, as two of the protagonists say, there’s some things decent people*** weren’t meant to see, but they’re necessary in the pursuit of justice. That’s a fascist message, even if we, the audience, are implicated in the category of not-decent people since we’re watching the carnage on screen and presumably getting a kick out of it.

It may be too much to expect a responsible politico-moral stance from the Rodriguez/Tarantino axis. The early films of Tarantino were dismissed as being reprehensibly violent but at least they coupled that violence with a knowing, ironic distance****. Kill Bill and Sin City are all about KICKS, but the former is not as irresponsible as the latter because the former’s mission of vigilante justice is altogether personal, while the vigilantes of Sin City are a reaction to the amoral WORLD of Noir (and presumably, early 21st century America). It’s a political statement even if it’s unwitting, even if the point of the film was to be about the art.

Which, I have to say, is pretty good. It could have been better, as Rodriguez is not a great director, but the effects were marvelous. I have no problem with the movie itself; my problem is with the project, and it’s hard to take a moral stand against something without coming off as Bill Bennett. But although my lifestyle and tastes would most likely be considered as degenerate by much of the U.S., I feel like I have to object to the mainstreaming of the ethos that lead, not altogether hyperbolically, to Abu Ghraib and the idea that being Right is license to do anything in the pursuit of justice. Sure, the protagonists of Sin City are psychologically sick but they’re be more or less normal in the context of contemporary political discourse, and the further normalization of the anti-rule-of-law position without explicit (or even much implicit) condemnation is an unwise project.
— – ———-
In addition to the faithful reproductions of comic book panels, there’s another interesting kind of reproductive dialogue going on here, with Sin City being shot on digital, produced digitally, distributed digitally and (when I saw it, though obviously not widespread yet) digitally projected. Someone want to go Benjamin on this?

* though not as comic creators seem to go
** the movie itself, however, can be funny
*** in the film, all women
****though this creeping Tarantinoism was the bane of 90s cinema just as creeping Fincherism is turning out to be the bane of the 00s.

Based on a novellete by Denis Diderot, Robert Bresson’s minor-key drama Les Dames… is the story of the revenge jilted Hélène exacts on her feckless lover, Jean, by striking at that most vulnerable organ of the aristocracy, the reputation. It is not simply that Hélène engineers a romance between Jean and Agnès, a former society girl reduced to cabaret dancing and more or less prostitution. The rehabilitation of a “fallen woman” could certainly be affected provided her lover/sponsor was aware of “the rules of the game,” so to speak, but Jean is completely unaware of Agnès’s very recent and very scandalous past (for example, in a shocking scene, after a disrespectful swain blows smoke at the top-hatted Agnès’s, she furiously stubs the cigarette out in his face and runs to her room, which by the way precipitates another great Bresson off-camera sound moment. ) and is thus unable to finesse the shock and titillation of ’society.’ Perhaps even if he did know what he was getting himself into, Jean would be unable to pull it off (or unwilling), as his dialogue, written by Jean Cocteau, is full of the airy, pseudo-poetic flights of fancy that would embarrass even the most ardent lovers, if not the writer.

Les Dames… includes several Bresson stylistic tics that will show up to greater effect in later movies such as Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and A Man Escaped (1956). I’m not sure how he does it, but the eyes of characters in Bresson can communicate more than the whole bodies of most actors, and most of that is simply through reflected light! In Les Dames… the light in the eyes means sad resignation, in A Man Escaped fierce rebellion, and in Diary the divine inspiration of God. The off camera sound moment I’ve already mentioned, but the most striking thing that unites the three films is the use of writing, particularly writing by a character that will not be read by anyone else. Agnès tries to confess her past to Jean in a letter, which he at first tries to tear up, then gives back to her. As he speeds away in a car, Agnès puts the letter in the window, only to have it, in a beautiful sequence, blow off the car and directly back to her. A Man Escaped of course featured a pivotal moment when Fontaine refuses to give up his pencil to the Gestapo, even though he could be shot for it, and Diary’s many writing scenes need no mention (except this one). The character of Agnès herself prefigures the women of New Wave, like Demy’s Lola, Truffaut’s Katherine, and Godard’s Nana, in her inability to escape from the role a few mistakes (or actions taken on purpose) have condemned her to.