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.

The Face Knife Endorses the Use of Spoilers
The X-Men, who by the way are a revolving band of Superheroes who also teach at prep school, have this practice facility that goes by the poetic name The Danger Room. The Danger Room allows them to hone their skills, powers and witty one-liners while experiencing a likely scenario (such as a giant robot attack), under parameters that almost infinitely fiddle-able (the giant robot attack may occur in the dark, with smoke and fire all around, or the giant robot may have been dispatched by an overzealous government, or the giant robot might be a manifestation of their DEEPEST FEARS) with the help of cutting edge CGI. While some of our mutant heroes just take the Danger Room exercise as a chance to blow off steam by indulging in some consequence-free environment, others take the simulation far too seriously. And I guess, to spell it out, some of us fall somewhere in between.

Although I like to think of myself as a fundamentally silly individual, I take movies seriously, sometimes even those that have no business being taken seriously. ¹ Some movies and genres sit up and beg to be taken seriously, and Science Fiction in particular has a history of using speculation or amplification as a lens to examine How We Live Now (as the NYT would put it), and the X-Men series of films has been more explicit in this regard than most. So when X-Men: The Last Stand makes allusions (some more graceful than others) to the ex-gay movement, The War on Terror and employs an actor that makes me think, god, what the hell is Vernon Jordan doing in this film, it makes me bracket my “holy shit is that poor green screen work” and “I soooo would join Magneto’s (Sir Ian MacKellen) ‘Brotherhood’” reactions and think about the film in a social context, and maybe I’m a huge dork but I think it’s just as fun to react to movies this way as it is to cheer when a blue-furred Kelsey Grammer whacks some guy in the face. On second thought, maybe there ARE dorkier dorks than I.

As I understand it, and this is based on an early teenage immersion in the Paperverse, the X-Men were Marvel Comic’s most popular property for two reasons: a realistic portrayal of the mindset of the outcast and an unprecedented level of interpersonal psycho-sexual melodrama (that often veered into what now looks like to be really kinky territory). The films have tried to replicate that formula and have had much more success with the former than the latter, which has been hampered by in some cases poor characterization and in some cases poor casting.

The filmmakers early on boldly jettison major character and fan-favorite (fan of the comics, that is) Cyclops, who it becomes apparent met his demise during an offscreen session of reunion boning. Cyclops was the heir apparent to run the team after Professor Xavier (Patick Stewart) died/retired/was trapped in another dimension, but as he had progressed from tight-ass whiner to, um, even more tight-assed and whiny during the period between the last sequel and this, his presence as leader would have dragged the Team as well as the film down into maudlin bullshit. So, even before his atomization, the Professor turns over the reins to Storm, played by bona fide major star Halle Berry, who must have been cast when the filmmakers were all like, “Hey, she’s black, and a woman, she’s perfect.” Berry is completely charisma-free (except for her hair) so it only makes sense when she more or less lets Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) the loner-rebel dude, make all the major decisions when it comes to how and where they should fight, etc.

While the X-Men makes the female characters powerful in terms of the ability to kick ass, their personal lives are still more or less characterized by reactions to the male characters in the film.

Part of the film’s plot centers on a ‘cure’ for the mutant condition, and two of the female characters are directly affected by it in profoundly sexist terms. Rogue (Anna Paquin), the touch of whose skin is like being slipped a Roofie, sees the cure as a chance to be able to lock down her wandering dweeb of a boyfriend by becoming able to, you know, “kiss.” After being admonished by Wolverine (who says he is not her father) to not do it because of “some boy” she goes ahead and does it. When she returns sans powers and but ready for action her boyfriend says “this is not what I wanted,” but the fact that what provoked Rogue to leave the school was seeing her BF ice-dancing with another girl puts all of this in perspective.

Mystique, played by Rebecca Romijn in full-body makeup that makes one expect her to hurl herself against one of Yves Klein’s canvases, is forcibly denuded of her powers by the government, and promptly turns traitor because she is a “woman scorned.”

Jean Grey, the only class-5 mutant on the planet (mutants are ranked like Twisters) is more or less the love-interest of not the virile Wolverine (in fact, her sexuality proves to be WAY too much for him) but the point of a love triangle between a dude who is paralyzed from the waist down and a crypto-gay. Telekinesis, which is one of Jean’s powers, has a cinematic tradition of appearing in female characters at the onset of sexual maturity, and in this case, her supreme power is explicitly linked with “joy and lust and destruction ” (or something like that). The male characters result to all sorts of gambits to restrain her but her power proves to be too much, that is until Wolverine manages to penetrate her with not one but 3 foot-long appendages in a patriarchal recuperation of the scenario at the end of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2.² Go Team!

Only Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde manages not to land herself in a sexist predicament, and that’s probably because she’s supposed to be like 14 and she’d cut your balls off if you tried.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise then, that the X-Men become more or less counter-revolutionaries and defenders of the status quo, more or less reflexively so. Magneto, who in addition to being a bundle of charisma is right about nearly everything including the reflexive perfidy of the government, is stopped when the X-Men use the ‘unfair’ weapons and tactics of the enemy against him.

In spite of all this revolution recuperatin’ and woman subjugatin’, I enjoyed this movie, though I’m glad I’m writing about it the day after I saw it because I’m sure the details will soon fade from mind, like the first two, which I can barely recall. The film gets high marks from me because of the relatively short run-time and decent pacing - and it’s really rare that you see an action movie combine those two qualities these days. The CGI was acceptable except for a few moments of really shitty green screen (Angel flying?), and I guess that’s all I can ask for from CGI, is to be acceptable. But that’s a subject for another day.

¹ My favorite justification is that films are “things to think with” and although I sometimes try to get into criticism about form or style, none of those things are as important as what the movie makes me think about (and I hope it goes without saying that some of these thoughts are far more tongue in cheek than others). Call it philosophical criticism, biographical criticism or just good old self-obsession, that’s largely what you’re going to get here. Oh, and spoilers. Tons of spoilers.

² Not the only call-back to Buffy. As Matthew pointed out to me, in a weird mobius strip of pop-culture red-heads, Famke Jannssen is inflicted with the “Dark Willow” make-up from Buffy 6, which was directly inspired by the Dark Phoenix X-Men comic books

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.
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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.