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.

(just a short squib, even though everything here is still not 100%. For more ephemeral stuff, visit How’s Yr Face? until stuff gets reorganized here.

The 800+ Year-Old Virgin, or, We are all idiot man-children now, even the robots.

Even though I really liked Wall-E, and though it was adorable and clever and fun, I have this irresistable urge to start cutting on it. Basically, my problem with Wall-E is that the heteronormative romance projected onto the robot protagonists is just another variation on the schlub/hottie dynamic that has been ruling romantic comedies in TV and movie formats for years. I mean, think about it:

(trying not to really SPOIL anything by spelling it out).

1.) Lonely male robot living by himself with a collection of odd pop culture ephemera.

2.) Lonely male robot has a menial job obviously beneath his skills.

3.) Meets cute with a much more put-together, driven and dynamic (not to mention more aerodynamically designed) female.

4.) Who somehow unaccountably falls for him, even though he is capable of communicating his feelings on the most basic and primal level.

5.) Then, he puts his seed in her.

6.) They’re separated by her career

7.) He has to win her back through haphazard though valiant effort.

8.) Which of course works, but only because:

9.) he gains a supporting cast of even more schlubby defectives who help him , and:

10.) the love of a hot chick inspires a loser man-child to face up to it, and do great deeds.

11.) She gives up her career for him.

This begs for a chart of some sort. Sigh. Too bad I gave up on doing that.

It is all too easy to be embarrassed by a movie like The Fountain. Writers get to hide their most outlandish scientific speculations and half-assed religious syncretisms behind the rubric of “the Novel of Ideas” but someone like Darren Aronofsky (Pi, the abysmal Requiem for a Dream) is stuck actually showing us a bald Hugh Jackman and his tiny, tiny ears in a bubble made of Karma ascending through the Xibalba Nebula. That’s some hard shit to pull off, particularly with a contemporary science fiction/fantasy film’s necessary reliance on show-off CGI artistes, but although I’m not anywhere closer to believing that death is just a cosmic new beginning, I do think that Aronofsky made a good-looking (and with apparently ground-breaking visual effects*), emotionally involving film based on the idea (or is it a misprision?) that the human race is in exile from a decidedly Earthly paradise.

Personally, 2006 provided more than ample evidence that we live in a fallen world,** and while I’m not sure that gobbling all the “ethnobotanicals” in the world is going to do much to assuage that maybe you want to check erowid.org or the works of Terence McKenna or Daniel Pinchbeck for an alternate point of view. ***

Aronofsky’s ideas are not quite so shroomed-out as those of the psychonauts above, but they come from a similar desire to impose meaning and order on the World. The Fountain traces a tripartite struggle to find the key to the redemption of the Flesh over a period of a thousand years, but the film moves along at a brisk pace and we are not as encumbered by plot or exposition as is normal in such films. This being a Hollywood movie, part of the metanarrative is that to escape our fallen nature you must embrace monogamous, heterosexual love and romance as the end all and be all to life - until you die. Then flowers shoot or roman candles shoot out of your abdomen or something. That sounds very painful but it looks really cool.

The main point of The Fountain seems to be that be you an ascending Buddha, a cancer-riddled novelist or warrior for Spain, there is a “good” way to die. Being a neurotic New Yorker, I just want to lapse into Woody Allen-esque jokes here but it might be good to engage with the ideas of the film. On the one hand, there’s the cryptic line uttered by a Mayan priest - “Death is the road to awe.” I’m not sure what that means, but when a guy decorated with more body parts than Leatherface’s cottage is shouting it at you as he’s about to decapitate you with a flaming sword, it gets you to think about it. Not sure it’s going to become anyone’s catchphrase, though.

The Fountain is not all about the persistence of metaphysical notions like the Soul or Love, and that’s what makes the movie itself, in the end, redeemable. The body and the various urges to accept or deny it are portrayed in some sharp vignettes. For instance, one of the film’s villains is another of the recent parade of cinematic, literal, gory self-flagellants, and the most heroic character, as part of the progress of her death, loses the ability to feel any physical pain (however, this reveal comes right after she’s enjoyed a sloppy bathtub shagging, and the subject is not broached whether or not she has lost the ability to feel pleasure either).

I don’t think very many people’s minds are going to be blown by The Fountain, at least the way Aronofsky intends them to be blown, but it is nice to see a science fiction epic that pushes the medium forward in new and cinematic ways.

* The “space” effects were generated using macro-photography of chemical and bacterial reactions. See Wikipedia.
**and indeed, there were a spate of similarly apocalyptic films released at the end of the year (Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men and, er, Apocalypto), each of which I hope to engage individually in the coming days, as it proved too intimidate a task to combine all into one essay
*** Oh, and like the film, for optimal effect make sure your room is decorated with subtle, tasteful patterns and mandalas (even the hospital glass had some arabesques applied) to provide a nice floorshow as you transcend consciousness or whatever.

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

Maybe it’s just because as of late my business card happens to read both “Whitey” and “The Man” , but I’m finding it harder and harder to get properly exercised about the supposedly criminal lifestyle choices of the international Bourgeoisie. The effort of filmmakers like Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke to expose the plush, tasteful underbelly of mainstream Liberals may actually be a decent and essential goal in the service of international liberation, and sometimes they come close to convincing me (like, I really hated that Paul Bettany character in Dogville) but I’m far too out of shape to become a street-fighting man without spending a fortune on pilates lessons, which requires a decent paying job, you know?

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a prosperous middle class couple who begin receiving anonymous, affectless (though as beautifully composed as a Mondrian painting, though that may be the result of the eminently tasteful architecture of their flat) surveillance videotapes of their house, seemingly taken at all hours from the alley directly facing it. Sometimes, the tapes are accompanied by a sanguineous crayon drawing. Naturally, this state of affairs leads to escalating paranoia and the facade of the life they’ve built for themselves begins to crumble as events from the past surface and frayed nerves are rubbed.

While it’s tempting to add Caché (Hidden) to my long list of films from 2005 that concern the ultimately futile attempt of a solipsist to come to a communion with the “Other”, what’s really been hidden about the film is the total lack of critical comparison to another formally daring expos? on the French Bourgeoisie, Godard’s Week-end. The big difference, aside from the fact that one of these films is far better than the other, is the static set-up of the “surveillance” shots of Caché as compared to Godard’s berzerk and breathtaking use of tracking shots. I would almost say that Caché has to be an ‘answer’ film to Week-end, if one that totally dispenses with the savage humor of the 60s film.

The difference between the “despicable” protagonists of the films is that the couple on the run in Godard’s film has nothing in the way of self-reflection or self-consciousness, whereas the “hunted” couple of Caché has nothing but that. Both films are the wish fulfillment fantasies of their protagonists. Caché is the ultimate Liberal guilt-trip fantasy film. It is the dark fantasy of the politically “responsible” (though not actually engage? ) that they will somehow, sometime, be taken to account for their failings, even if their deepest, darkest, evilest acts occurred when they were perhaps six years old, or more to the point, what they would consider their evilest acts.

Indeed, the narcissism -the infantilism- of Georges’s persecution fantasy is made clear in the drawings that accompany the videotapes. The most pathetic scene occurs when Georges watches the videotape that apparently was filmed right after his initial confrontation with Majid - the extended tape of the old Algerian crying. Naturally, Georges feels awful. Poor Frenchman! He made the sub-altern weep! Look how evil and powerful he must be, even in his most unconsidered moments!

Georges’s construction of the Other becomes even more absurd in the fantasy of Majid slicing his own throat as some sort of penance. (and I maintain it was probably a fantasy, given the lack of police response, etc. ) Only a true narcissist would think that his actions could cause another to take his own life in such a way.

The attribution of the tapes is a total act of projection - Georges tries to generalize from his own experience and from pieces of media he consumes (it’s not for nothing that his job is on TV, or that his home is virtually filled with media) the inner lives of the Other, what their motivations and drives might be, and succeeds only in exposing the loathing he feels for himself and his lifestyle, and a metaphysical need to somehow be held responsible for his situation.

Ultimately, there is no one attempting to hold Georges responsible for anything - just as there is no one who will hold us responsible for our failings. Georges wishes there were someone who would either punish him or reassure him for leading an okay life, like the power he has over his child, Pierrot. When Pierrot starts to rebel, Georges is faced with an uncomfortable mirror that does not reflect, a reminder of his own place as a radically free and radically alone agent in a world without a hidden order.

Despite the slow poison of a Jurassic Park: The Lost World or a The Phantom Menace, to take two notable examples, I’ve been unwilling to altogether abandon the tradition of the summer event film. Special effects blockbusters have their charms, and who am I to be immune: Criterion has an edition of Armageddon ^1,2. There’s always room for seeing shit get blown up real fucking good, and as long as there’s craftsmanship and a certain childlike enthusiasm involved, I can really get into it.

Then there are films like The War of the Worlds an amazingly bad film that shows just how shoddy action adventure craftsmanship can be. It’s enough to put me off recent film for the rest of the summer, which would be a shame because my chart needs updating.

Let me put it this way: You have a budget that is for all intents and purposes unlimited. You have one of the biggest stars on the planet, before he went (publicly) batshit insane. You have teams of nerds trying to build the best destruction of the Outerbridge Crossing every committed to film. And your big cinematographic idea during these no doubt very expensive and very meticulously planned sequences?

Shake the camera.

It’s nothing new, but I’m still flabbergasted I see this kind of backyard “realism” appear in a ’spectacle’ film. Does anyone see a shaking picture onscreen and think “my, this is exactly what I would feel like if there were aliens popping out of the ground on flatbush avenue?” Does anyone have a reaction other than “could he stop shaking the frame so I can see what’s going on?” What kind of literal-minded moron thinks that this is an effective way to convey action and excitement and danger cinematically?

But the retarded visuals of The War of the Worlds aren’t the worst thing about it. The worst thing, the thing that nearly made me walk out of the theater, was the fact that this film couldn’t even remain faithful to it’s own grounds of ‘realism’. I can suspend disbelief for a lot of things. A movie can make me buy that lightspeed travel is possible, that there could be androids indistinguishable from humans, that there could be a black president of the United States some day. All you have to do is remain consistent, and I’m on board.

Thus, when you say, repeatedly establish the concept of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) and what that does to electronic equipment (makes it stop working) maybe it would be a good idea NOT to show some guy using a FUCKING CAMCORDER 5 minutes afterwards, and what’s more, give a close-up of that camcorder’s LCD screen after dude holding it has been disintegrated. I can only imagine that the producers must have sold a product placement to Sony and the camera had to be worked into the story prominently SOMEHOW, and heck, maybe Sony DOES make a camcorder that’s shielded against EMP in case someone drops the Neutron Bomb on your vacation, and heck, maybe it’s also IMPERVIOUS to disintegration.

That’s the kind of film this is. The kind of movie where a jumbo jet razes a suburb and yet the hero’s minivan, parked in the driveway, would have suffered more damage if he left it in the supermarket parking lot for an hour. It’s the kind of film where we’re asked to buy Tom Cruise as a dockworker and neglectful father. It’s the kind of film where we’re supposed to buy that, in a crowd of hundreds of Americans, post-apocalypse, waving a revolver around could make them back off (and only one other guy has a gun, a pistol). It’s the kind of film where they kill a main character for rhetorical effect (the selfless heroism of our military and OUR BOYS who make it up, natch) and then bring him back for a tearful reunion at the end.

It’s the kind of the movie where, apparently no one on the planet has seen The Empire Strikes Back because man, when Tom Cruise gets sucked up into the Wicker Man-esqe underbelly of the Tripod and tosses some grenades in there, it’s a revelation.

In Sin City, there’s the repeated refrain that there are some thing “decent people” aren’t meant to see. There’s an analogous scene in this film, where Cruise blindfolds young Dakota Fanning so that he can go murder the shell-shocked dude who rescued them. It’s okay to murder, as long as it’s to maintain the sanctity and safety of the family. The parallels with our current geopolitical situation are appalling, no matter if Spielberg thinks he’s a leftist - there’s brainless references to Algeria and other ‘occupations’ that failed. The dark heart of Steven Spielberg is that he couldn’t exist without cataclysm, he couldn’t exist without powerful exterior forces that rend “families” apart. In trying to use Science Fiction as a metaphor for our own terror-stricken times, he reveals just how much of an alien he is to real human experience.

¹ A film which a friend of mine has described as a “perfect crystal of schlock. I haven’t seen it. Maybe I could get him to write a piece…
²Then again, they’ve also put out the films of Kevin Smith…

The reigning Face Knife standard for judging summer special effects blockbusters is the number and quality of on-screen amputations, and by any reasonable measure, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith fails to live up to its potential to surpass the reigning champion, Sin City. Indeed, what sort of weaponry can be more hazardous to limb and other limb than the lightsabre, which as we’ve seen, is capable of cutting human bone like butter? Sadly, these campy swords were mostly used to disassemble robots - excuse me, droids, which is nowhere near as satisfying. Please consult The Face Knife Summer Movie Comparison Chart for a complete tally of amputations, along with other critical information to assist you in your moviegoing experience.

At this point, you know what you’re getting into when you go to see a Star Wars film, and any reasonable individual has lowered expectations with regard to plot, characterization and particularly dialogue. Still, it’s nearly impossible for anyone with any remote sense of storytelling to not gripe about the construction of the film. Lucas actually has a fairly compelling central theme, and with a little wit the film could even have functioned as commentary as political satire. Sure, some ersatz Kracauer will undoubtedly read Sith as a digital mirror to the Bush regime, much as Fritz Lang’s Mabuse were more or less spuriously read retroactively as a foretelling of the Nazis (the genesis in the adventure serial form being a nice point of comparison between the two series).

Still, one has to give credit to Lucas for using the last movie of his series to highlight the ultimate nature of the Dark Side/Jedi allegory, finally bringing out the essential dichotomy of the social and moral universe of Star Wars (and our own): the eternal struggle between Asshole and Douche (and Hammett). Beside Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Star Wars can be seen as a key text in the development of Asshole and Douche (and Hammett) theory. Indeed, it is possible to model this dynamic superstructure as Asshole and Douche (and Vader), as counterintuitive as this may seem.

While I’m sure at this point any serious student of human behavior is aware of the major characteristics of Asshole and Douche (and Hammett) theory, a quick refresher might be in order. In simplest terms, Asshole and Douche (and Hammett) posits that within every human relationship between two people, one person occupies the Asshole position and the other, the Douche. The main theoretical model for this theory is the band Metallica, where the long-lasting and fruitful cooperation between Asshole James Hetfield and Douche Lars Ulrich is a great example of the monetary and spiritual haul that can result from maximizing one’s position as Asshole and/or Douche, in conflict with an Asshole or Douche who is also maximizing his or her potential. The struggle between Asshole and Douche and the resulting synthesis is the crucible of every collaboration creative act.

Broadening the scope to include more individuals within a group dynamic, the Hammett (or Vader) position soon appears. The Hammett is a latent Asshole or Douche whose tendencies towards one pole are sublimated under the stronger Asshole and Douche tendencies of two of the other group participants. The Hammett, in the classical sense, takes the path of least resistance - without effort, without conflict, an Asshole or Douche tending individual will slip down to the Hammett position - there’s a gravitational pull to Hammett that affects even the strong willed. Usually, a Hammett will think he is satisfied, but rarely gets his own way and therefore suffers. Some Hammetts can unconsciously use their position as a bargaining chip in the greater Asshole/Douche conflict to maximize their power, but once they realize that they are doing this, become either an Asshole or a Douche.

George Lucas, or perhaps his rumored script doctor Tom Stoppard, who is undoubtedly well-versed in Asshole and Douche (and Hammett), has given Asshole and Douche (and Hammett) a new archetype, a new way of modelling the third position that is a new synthesis between the ways of Asshole and Douche. In effect, the “prophecies” that Mace Windu speaks of are actually true - Anakin Skywalker brings balance to the force by being the synthesis of Asshole and Douche.

Clearly, the Jedi are a collection of Douche tending people. Any organization that has a council is clearly Douchetacular, and the whininess underlying the character of, for example, Obi Wan Kenobi, clearly indicates Douche tendencies. Each of the main Jedi Douches tries to out-Douche the other, not through direct competition but through influence on Anakin, the designated Hammett. Yoda’s lordly Douching batters Anakin into submissiveness, until he realizes that in order to maximize his potential within the Douche hierarchy of the Jedi, he must embrace his inner Asshole, perfectly modeled by his soon to be mentor, Palpatine. When Anakin and Palpatine first interact, the arch-Asshole’s injunction to “Do it!” - cut off Count Dooku’s head - and Anakin’s quick acquiesence shows the boy’s thrall under the power of the greater Asshole. Soon enough, Anakin is laying waste to Douche and Douche alike, the Jedi Douche factory being unprepared for the assertiveness of Asshole. Even his lover, uber-Douche Padme, is overpowered simply by a trace of Asshole, resulting in a supreme feat of Douchery when she dies of heartbreak after childbirth, abandoning her children in the ultimate selfish move.

Anakin, or Vader, in his role as a proactive Hammett, is still trapped in that role because he’s in the thrall of the Emporer. It was not his body but his Douche nature that was preserved by that shiny plastic helmet. He is a walking nightmare of self-involved Asshole/Douche conflict until his son, Turbodouche of the galaxy, removes his helmet and frees the Douche spirit.

The message of George Lucas’s trilogy is thus that being a Douche is somehow objectively better than being an Asshole (really, can you think of a bigger fictional Douche than Luke Skywalker), which is absolutely untrue. The Emperor, in this case has it right - Asshole and Douche are two sides of the same thing, and the key to balance is to know which role is yours to play in a given relationship, and become a better Asshole or a better Douche within the relationship. Star Wars is nothing more than a tool of Lucas’s foul and false Douchism, the Jedis being the Douchist majority and thus writing the rules of history.

(A better telling of nearly the same story is perhaps the Conor arc on Angel (Conor is practically the same character as Anakin but given more life), with Angel remaining a Douche (of course) and Holtz is the Asshole position to Conor’s tortured Hammett. )

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) is the cutest space adventure since Carrie Fisher braided her hair and joined a tree-top teddy bear picnic, but this cute, thankfully, never gets cloying, even when the mice start talking. Maybe the whimsy is balanced by the manic, unhinged energy of Sam Rockwell, who plays literally half-brained Galatic President Zapod Beeblebrox, a strutting, preening pretty boy with Allman-esque hair and a 1000-watt smile, or the oddly Ford Prefect, played by that rapper with the twee-est warddrobe, Mos Def. Two things are for certain: if you are looking for someone to play befuddled sweetness or the sweetly befuddled, the only person you have to call is Martin Freeman (Tim from “The Office”), who plays bathrobed earth-man Arthur Dent, and if you’re looking for saucer-eyed cuteness, Zooey Deschanel could not be more adorable unless she was knit from fuzzy wool.

Although I enjoyed all the performances, (and I have to keep listing to include Alan Rickman as the voice of droid whose cuteness makes R2D2 look like a puddle of puke) the film felt more like a prologue than a self-contained narrative. The plot, as such, is more or less unresolved, leaving a lot of questions for the inevitable sequels, which I would go see. The effects are quite good, especially breathtaking when Arthur is taking a tour of a planet-building facility. I can only hope the sequels will maintain all that was good about this film and tighten up the story and ratchet up the latent humanist and atheist elements of the story.