cinema verite

Female Characters and Homosexual Undertones in Scream 4

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 12:07:06 -0400

by corie anderson

A prominence of female characters and complex sexual relations have always been essential elements of the teen slasher film, whose conventions show “sexually attractive young women being stalked by a knife-wielding, virtually indestructible psychotic serial killer.” Films like Black Christmas (dir. Bob Clark, 1974)and Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978) gave birth to the teen slasher film, a subgenre of horror commercially popular with youth (especially female) audiences of the 1970s and 80s. In 1996, Scream and its two sequels (dir. Wes Craven, 1997, 2000) revived the dormant subgenre by using “postmodern” techniques to call attention to generic conventions. The Scream films explicitly reference the familiarity of slasher conventions that made the genre so profitable through characters well versed in horror mythology, dialogical references to classic horror films, and explicit commentary on generic rules (mostly by the character of Randy), in addition to an adherence to slasher standards itself. The films’ young characters — who discuss and argue about horror films — were relatable to the “media obsessed and, hence, pop-culture literate, extremely self-aware” teen audience of the 1990s, allowing Scream to prove how popular slasher films could be again.

Eleven years after Scream 3 was released, the Scream trilogy became a series with Scream 4 (dir. Wes Craven, 2011). The fourth film continues Scream’s commentary on the slasher genre’s “trend toward spin-offs, sequels, and imitators” and highlights the timely tradition of remakes by placing itself in that category. While many feminist theorists have written on female characters and sexuality in slasher films, including Scream, there is limited scholarship about this latest addition to the series. This essay will show how Scream 4 continues typical slasher portrayals of gender and sexuality through the generic roles of victim and the final girl in the characters of Sidney Prescott and Jill Roberts. However, this essay will also prove that Scream 4 transcends its series and subgenre by examining horror’s female psychopath with regard to Jill, homosexual undertones in Jill and Sidney’s relationship, and the sexually ambiguous characters of Kirby Reed and Robbie Mercer.

Scream 4 begins when victim-turned-survivor Sidney Prescott returns to her hometown of Woodsboro, California where a ghost-masked killer (nicknamed Ghostface) had stalked her and her friends fifteen years earlier. Sidney’s return triggers a new Ghostface to emerge, once again targeting Sidney and killing those around her. Scream 4, like the previous Scream films, focuses mainly on Sidney and her friends Gale Weathers and Dewey Riley, but also introduces a younger generation of characters, led by Sidney’s High School cousin Jill Roberts, as targets of the murders. The self-reflexive positioning of Scream 4 as a horror remake (of Scream) allows an interesting interaction between this older and younger generation. Initially, Jill takes on Sidney’s Scream role of innocent victim targeted by Ghostface, and in the context of Scream 4’s remake status, would go on to lead a new trilogy of films. However, in the end, Jill is revealed as Ghostface, the whole younger generation of characters have been killed off, and Sidney, Gale, and Dewey once again defeat the killer and survive.

From the beginning, the audience is meant to draw a comparison between Jill and Sidney, whose similarities are explicitly announced visually and in dialogue. This parallel is shown with the girls’ matching hairstyles and color, similar-looking high school boyfriends, and scenes that re-create moments from Scream when Sidney was Jill’s age. After getting a threatening call from Ghostface, Jill’s ex-boyfriend, Trevor, climbs through her bedroom window to console her. When Sidney walks in on them, she seems to experience déjà vu (and so does the audience) as Sidney’s high school boyfriend Billy had done the same thing after she was attacked in Scream. This is helped by the fact Trevor is strikingly similar to Billy, with his short dark hair, good looks, and “popular” status in high school. At this moment, Sidney makes the connection overt when she tells Jill, “You remind me of me.” This bedroom scene also introduces the underlying homosexuality of Jill and Sidney’s relationship, as Sidney’s interruption of the heterosexual couple creates an awkward moment between the three characters. As Sidney enters the room, Jill is startled and suddenly moves away from Trevor, her voice nervously referring to him as her ex-boyfriend. Sensing the tension, Trevor moves toward the window to leave, distancing himself from Jill and coupling Jill and Sidney in close proximity. As Trevor rambles about picking up a copy of Sidney’s book, Jill rolls her eyes and sighs in exasperation until he finally leaves. Jill’s embarrassment in the company of Sidney hints at this attraction to her cousin and her excitement in recreating an emotional scene from Sidney’s past.

Jill seems poised to recreate Sidney’s role in Scream, as she initially fulfils the slasher conventions associated with the final girl character who “tends to stand apart from the others” and is “intelligent, resourceful, and usually not sexually active.” As the classic final girl, there is absolutely no hint of Sidney’s sexuality in Scream 4 (or even Scream 3). And while Jill’s character has romantic attention from her cheating ex-boyfriend, Trevor, the sexual element of their relationship is in the past and she visually abstains from sexual activity for most of the film. Once Jill is exposed as Ghostface however, she also exposes the more sexual side of herself, contradicting with qualities of the final girl and unleashing her repressed female (bi)sexuality that would threaten the binary-driven, patriarchal society. Jill aggressively kisses her accomplice Charlie, suggesting a sexual relationship, before stabbing him in the heart and taking castrating revenge on Trevor by shooting him in the groin. This much is clear: Jill is not Scream 4’s final girl.

In the ending scene, Sidney eventually defeats Jill’s threat and positions herself as the film’s true final girl. Jill is thus proven to be the female psychopath, who shows that a “woman transforms into a monster when she is sexually and emotionally unfulfilled.” After Jill’s reveal, she takes revenge on Trevor when she says, “I am not the girl you cheat on” and shoots him in the genitals. She then tells Sidney how it felt growing up in her family with, “all I ever heard was Sidney this and Sidney that” and exposes her motivation for murder when she cries, “well now I’m the special one!” The sexual betrayal of Trevor’s infidelity and emotional distress of Sidney’s overshadowing victimhood cause Jill to transform into the female psychopath. Her reference to a childhood haunted by Sidney’s celebrity also reveals the extent of Jill’s (possibly lesbian) fixation on Sidney, one that has spanned a lifetime.

Once this change is revealed, the two characters (of Sidney and Jill) are consistent with Deborah Jermyn’s reading of dangerous women in horror and noir. One way Jermyn attributes conflict between oppositional females is as an “external representation of the victim/wife’s own internal battle.” In Scream 4, Sidney returns to Woodsboro to promote her book, Out of Darkness, in which she ironically writes about transcending the “victim” label to become a survivor. After Ghostface returns to target her however, Sidney reverts to her victim status, something she tries to escape and Jill desperately seeks to steal throughout the film. In scenes between Jill, Sidney, and Ghostface, Jill successfully acts as innocent victim while Sidney repeatedly tries to protect her, physically fighting Ghostface in Jill’s defense. Here it is not Jill’s heterosexual partner, Trevor, who fights for her, but her female role model (and strong final girl) Sidney, showing their close, loving relationship. Near the end of Scream 4, Jill’s accomplice Charlie tells her exactly what she wants to hear with, “You’re the perfect victim.” Jill is delighted by the compliment, but seconds later she stabs Charlie in the heart and explains, “What the media really loves…is a sole survivor.” Her sexual manipulation and rejection of Charlie position Jill as the noir female psychopath character (or even femme fatale), and once again hint at her homosexual connection with Sidney, violently choosing a female over her male partner, Charlie, and ex-boyfriend, Trevor.

Jill’s intense desire to become a victim is made explicit when, in the end, she stabs Sidney and says, “This has never been about killing you, it’s been about becoming you.” Jill’s need to “become” Sidney also exemplifies Jermyn’s idea of “doubling” and the “female doppelgänger.” Here, Jill is dually the external representation of Sidney’s internal struggle to overcome victimhood and a psychotic woman obsessed with taking over Sidney’s life. This idea of the female doppelgänger, famously exemplified in Single White Female (dir. Barbet Schroeder, 1992) also carries the connotations of lesbianism in the antagonist’s eerie physical and sexual obsession with the protagonist. Jill’s friend, Olivia, is killed early in the film, mirroring the murder of Sidney’s best friend, Tatum, in Scream. This early death places Jill as a victim of the attacks (aligning her with Sidney) and, once she is revealed as the perpetrator, shows just how much Jill is willing to sacrifice, as she tells Sidney, “stay true to the original.”

Beginning with the bedroom scene described earlier, Scream 4 has many instances of Jill and Sidney “merging their identities.” Two shots at the end of the film confirm this “disintegrating of boundaries between the heroine and her female foil.” After stabbing Sidney and presuming she is dead, Jill’s psychotic state is fully exposed when she rips out her own hair, stabs herself in the shoulder, and jumps through a glass table to create realistic injuries. As police sirens approach, Jill lays down next to Sidney’s body. In this close-up two-shot, Sidney is on the left side of the screen and Jill on the right, modeling the position of her face and hand to perfectly match Sidney’s. The shot evokes conventional “doubling” techniques like the use of mirrors and twin imagery. Here, the two women look like sisters, lovers, or as if Jill is seeing her own victim reflection by gazing at Sidney. In Jill’s mind, the replication is complete. She thinks she has become Sidney by making herself physically similar, commenting on her generation’s fixation on looks and crisis of identity. Jill’s pleasure in the resemblance to her seemingly dead cousin also confirms her material fixation with Sidney and completely irrational state.

This same shot recurs once it is revealed that Sidney is not dead by Jill’s hand. The women’s last face-off in the hospital represents a final attempt by Sidney to destroy her victimhood and by Jill to become Sidney at last. Here, Jill and Sidney’s physical similarities are foregrounded in their matching hospital gowns and bloody, bandaged wounds. In the end, Sidney finally kills Jill as The Final Girl, saying, “You forgot the first rule of remakes, Jill, don’t fuck with the original.” With this defeat, Sidney wins her internal battle and maintains external individuality. The close-up face-to-face shot returns when Sidney falls to the ground in exhaustion, landing on the left side of the screen facing a dead Jill on the right. This ending reinforces the stereotypical roles: Sidney as the final girl who is “rewarded with survival for conforming to gender schemas concerning appropriate female behavior” and Jill as the female psychopath, whose brutal death is punishment for her “deviance from normative behavior accorded to women.”

Jill’s ultimate death stays true to the endings of the first three Scream films, where Ghostface is always killed, but also brings in elements of noir and non-slasher horror where the threat of the monstrous feminine who represents an excess of femininity must be “defeated or expelled at the end.” Deborah Jermyn writes in relation to the larger category of psychological thrillers that not only is this external risk eradicated, but so is the internal figure that draws attention to seemingly natural “roles society has assigned to other women.” This can be read as both an easing of male anxieties in order to sustain a patriarchy or more positively as illustrating the “precarious nature of the symbolic order” inherent in arbitrary gender roles.

When Scream was released in 1996, it challenged familiar conventions of the slasher genre by featuring two killers acting together (as Ghostface) instead of the typical “male acting alone.” Scream 4 further complicates this reading by revealing Ghostface to be Charlie and Jill, once again showing a partnership instead of a lone killer, but more importantly allowing a woman to be the homicidal instigator. Male and female partners had previously played Ghostface in Scream 2, with Sidney’s friend Mickey and Mrs. Loomis, the mother of her ex-boyfriend Billy (the original Ghostface). In the final scene of Scream 2, Mrs. Loomis murders Mickey and reveals her plan to avenge her son’s death by killing Sidney. This is similar to Scream 4 when Jill murders Charlie, her male counterpart, in order to kill Sidney herself. Here, the character of Mrs. Loomis can be seen as an early form of the female psychopath, but is mainly used postmodernly to refer to classic horror mothers such as Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13^th (dir. Sean Cunningham, 1980). In Scream 4, Jill’s character goes even further than this.

Because of the unique remake quality of Scream 4, where two generations of characters are targeted by Ghostface in the town of the original killings, Jill as protagonist of the younger generation, seems capable of carrying on a trilogy of her own. This makes her reversal even more shocking, allowing Scream 4 to not only show how women can be the intelligent killers, but that the externality of a person is not necessarily representative of their internal state. Jill’s character also contradicts slasher conventions where women usually die by the male antagonist’s hand simply “because they are female.” In Scream 4, the main killer is a female herself, shown attacking male and female victims in even numbers and for specific reasons. Furthermore, the audience is made to intensely identify with Jill before discovering she is a psychotic villain, something rarely done with main characters in slasher films. Scream 4’s release in the 2010s also allows commentary on its generation’s desensitization and obsession with celebrity, exemplified when Jill validates her motivation for murder with, “I don’t need friends, I need fans.”

Scream 4 also breaks from conventional slasher characters and practices of the first three Scream films with its sexually vague characters of Kirby Reed and Robbie Mercer. Throughout the film, there are many scenes that suggest Kirby as a lesbian character. When the audience first sees her, Kirby is speeding in her SUV, blasting loud rock music, and sporting a leather jacket and short, cropped hairstyle — reminiscent of the cool style of (also sexually ambiguous) James Dean. This introduction is full of symbolic references to her lack of femininity. Even the name Kirby represents a sexual vagueness, which could easily belong to a male or female. Her sexuality is also called into question in relation to Charlie, who she knows has a romantic interest in her. In their first screen interaction, Kirby ignores Charlie then calls him a “dork,” prompting Jill to advise, “you could do a lot worse.” Kirby’s rejection of Charlie could signal a disinterest in men altogether, especially since Jill’s dialogue proves he is a perfectly suitable male mate. Near the end of the film, Kirby and Charlie’s relationship progresses and they share a kiss, cut short by Trevor’s interruption. This brief encounter does little to clear up her sexuality though, which is further confused by this sudden interest in men.

The film also presents a mystery about the relationship between Kirby and her friend Olivia, whose few interactions are evocative of romance. Between the three friends (Jill, Kirby, and Olivia), Kirby and Olivia are automatically coupled in their single status and Jill’s constant complaining about heterosexual problems with her boyfriend. Additionally, while the friends frequently talk about Jill and Trevor, neither Kirby nor Olivia discusses their own romantic encounters that could hint at sexual preference. Following Olivia’s death, Kirby rationalizes her attendance at a scary movie marathon by telling Jill, “I think Olivia would understand…she’d want me to be around other people.” Her phrase evokes the idea that Kirby should be grieving Olivia’s death instead of enjoying herself, like a lover of the recently deceased would do.

Robbie Mercer is introduced at the high school when he asks Jill, Kirby, and Olivia, “what’s your favorite scary movie.” Physically, Robbie does not come across as overly sexual or masculine. He is skinny, not very tall, and seems almost childish, serving only as comic relief in most scenes. When he asks Trevor the same question, “what’s your scary movie,” he angrily jumps at Robbie, who fearfully (and femininely) cowers and runs off screen. Like Kirby’s mysterious connections to Olivia and Charlie, Robbie’s character has small moments of romantic interest that further confuse his sexuality. In his opening scene, Robbie records his interaction with Jill, Kirby, and Olivia on his video podcast, looking to Olivia with, “Robbie Mercer here with the luscious Olivia don’t look at my tits I have a mind Morris.” As he says this, the camera cuts to a POV shot from Robbie’s camera that tilts from her face down to her chest then up again. Robbie’s statement and camera movement here are potentially rude or sexist, but don’t seem to bother Olivia coming from his non-threatening character. Her casual reaction indicates that their relationship is not significant. Robbie also jokes that Olivia will officially never go out with him while at the crime scene of her murder. This is also said in a casual way, as a joke to make light of the situation instead of actual grief. Furthermore, though Charlie is shown to lust after Kirby, he and Robbie rarely appear on screen without one another, hinting at a gay relationship between the close friends.

In a scene where Charlie and Robbie are leading a cinema club meeting, the editing playfully suggests the homosexuality of these characters. Speaking of the remake horror rules, Charlie explains, “the only sure way to survive a modern horror movie… you pretty much gotta be gay.” This idea ironically contrasts to classic cinema where queer characters were either easy victims or monstrous villains, as seen in much of Alfred Hitchcock’s work. Immediately after he mentions being gay, the film cuts to a shot of Kirby in the club’s audience then back to a coupled Charlie and Robbie. Here, the sexually uncertain characters (Kirby and Robbie, and Charlie as well) are shown in context with the idea of homosexuality in horror films, postmodernly referring to their sexual identity and possible survival. In the end however, Kirby and Robbie (and Charlie too) are killed by Ghostface, either proving that neither of the characters is gay or the proclaimed remake horror rules are false.

The most explicit reference to homosexuality is Robbie’s death scene. After getting drunk outside by himself, Robbie becomes disoriented and is surprised by Ghostface. As he runs away, pleading for his life, he screams, “you can’t, there’s rules! I’m gay!” This scene confirms the suspicions about Robbie’s sexuality but undermines the commentary on slasher genre conventions, explicitly defining and then breaking them. According to remakes, if Robbie was truly gay, shouldn’t he be the one to survive? This is further confounded when Charlie tells Jill, “I got great footage of my Robbie kill,” revealing himself as the murderer of the only self-professed gay character, therefore breaking the rule of horror remakes he had explained in the cinema club scene. This moment highlights the Scream tradition of calling attention to conventions only to break them. It also references horror films of the 1960s and 70s where queer characters were the first to be killed and even sexually confused villains were not safe from punishment, seen in Dressed to Kill (dir. Brian De Palma, 1980).

The ambiguous representation of these two characters and their ultimate deaths suggest the sexual anxieties of Scream 4’s cultural context. Lynda Hart writes how lesbian and gay bodies “are less secure, harder to read, and presumably less fixed in a visual economy” — essentially that sexuality is harder to physically diagnose than race or ethnicity. This is apparent in Kirby and Robbie, whose sexualities are not clearly visually judged. Furthermore, the idea that homosexuality cannot be seen and thus is “nowhere” can also mean it is “everywhere,” explaining why Scream 4 kills off its two characters with even the slightest homosexual tendencies. Like the need to destroy the monstrous feminine to alleviate male fears about women, a homophobic attitude dictates that these potentially non-normative sexualities, which represent a “constant potential threat,” must be disposed of.

In general, each character type of the teen slasher genre offers a complex view of sexuality. As Carol Clover puts it, “we have in the killer a feminine male and in the main character a masculine female,” who represent the genre’s tendency to “fix on the irregular combinations” of sexuality. These combinations are present in the characters of Sidney, Jill, Charlie, Dewey, Gale, and most overtly in Kirby and Robbie. Almost every character in Scream 4 can be argued to represent the ambiguous mixture of masculinity and femininity, what Robin Wood calls a “constitutional bisexuality” and it’s externality as a patriarchal demand for “surplus repression.” By including Kirby and Robbie as characters, Scream 4 calls attention to horror’s (negative) generic practice more explicitly than ever before in the series. However, by ultimately killing both characters, this theme becomes a potentially homophobic comment on the film’s 2010s environment.

Just as the original Scream films had done in the 1990s, Scream 4’s unique context allows it to comment on and reinvent aspects of the teen slasher genre. Scream 4 not only successfully continues the postmodern and generic aims of the three previous films, but also adds to them by introducing non-slasher horror ideas such as the female psychopath and concept of doubling through its female characters of Sidney Prescott and Jill Roberts. Scream 4 also includes subtle homosexual themes in this female relationship and the intentionally sexually ambiguous characters of Kirby Reed and Robbie Mercer, a topic not breached in the previous Scream films. Within the context of a new 2010s audience, Scream 4 effectively adds to slasher genre conventions, shows increased representation of strong women in horror, and more explicitly comments on homosexuality in the genre.

Melancholia: A Realization in Color

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:17:46 -0400

by hilary campbell

Lar Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) is a film injected with subtexts which extend beyond a basic understanding achieved through solely viewing the film. In order to fully appreciate the film, a viewer must excavate the references, histories, and theories presented in the text. As a result, the film becomes a work of art constructed for an educated and eager viewer, such as film critic, art historian, or a Von Trier aficionado. This is not meant to suggest that Melancholia is not a film rich in cinematic meaning. Rather, Von Trier has constructed a film with immense layers of understanding. Like the tip of the iceberg, its surface reveals only part of its beauty. In this analysis, the color patterns and artistic strategies of the film will be examined as one possible entry point to understanding the narrative underpinnings of Melancholia.

The Duration of Film

Andre Bazin (1918-1958), a French film critic and theorist, wrote a short essay entitled “A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery,” in 1956, which analyzes and discusses Clouzot’s documentary. His main subject is pictoral duration. Bazin views duration, which is the process of art making, to be an “integral part of the work itself, an additional dimension, which is foolishly ignored once a painting has been completed” (Bazin 58). What sparked Bazin’s interest in the film was not necessarily Picasso’s work as an artist. Rather, Clouzot revealed not only the process of painting, but the stages of work behind the final piece, which were not “subordinate and inferior realities,” but “paintings that are underneath paintings”(Bazin 58). Each layer with its own story, unfortunately, must be “sacrificed in order to get to the next painting” (Bazin 58). While a painting may have no choice but to exist in one final form, Bazin argues that film is the only art that “could make us see duration itself” (58). Applying this theory to Von Trier’s Melancholia opens a door to understanding the structure and process of the film. Von Trier is certainly not the first filmmaker to approach cinema in this manner, but as Bazin says, “nobody is ever the first to do anything” (58).

Von Trier is highly successful in constructing a film layered in paint. Melancholia is broken down into three sections: The Prologue, Part One: Justine, and Part Two: Claire. If the slow motion images of the prologue are considered as final paintings, then the narrative of Part One and Two become the layers behind the paintings, therefore allowing a durational understanding of the fabula. The duration of the fabula encompasses the realization of melancholia by the two protagonists. This realization of understanding is manifested on an aesthetic level with the transition from yellow to blue tones. Without the durational abilities inherent in film, Melancholia would not be able to achieve its goal.

What is Melancholia?

It is necessary to work with the two definitions, and implications, of melancholia that are pertinent to the film. The first literal definition, existing outside the diegesis of the film, is melancholia as a mental condition. A quick Google search will inform a viewer that this condition is characterized by manic depression. People often suffer from extremely low levels of enthusiasm and eagerness for activity, complain of bodily pains, hallucinations, and delusions. It is even defined as the feeling that the world is going to end. Claire’s husband in Part Two of the film explicitly defines the second definition of melancholia. Melancholia is a planet that was first “black…now blue, hiding behind the sun…it will be here in five days and it is not going to hit us.” Part Two of the film is filled with debates over whether or not this planet will hit and in fact bring the end of the world, just as the melancholia victim believes it will. These two definitions become the subjects of Part One and Two of the film. If Justine is the mental state of melancholia, then her sister Claire suffers from the fears of Melancholia, the planet.

However, while the two parts of the film may seem to be affected by either the former or the latter, the film is not a dichotomy. Rather, when one factor seems more dominant, the other’s presence continues to affect the fabula events. The planet is present from the point of attack, but does not fully reveal itself until Part Two. Justine’s illness arrives in Part One, but continues to unfold during Part Two. Both melancholias are united through their color tones. The planet and the illness hide behind a yellow light (physically for the former, aesthetically in the latter) for the duration of Part One and reveal their true, blue color in Part Two.

The Prologue

While traditional film color theory attributes the title sequence as the marker of the film’s color palette, Melancholia’s prologue acts as the establishing factor. In this section, the color triad strategy of the film is set as yellow, blue and green. The pending blues in space counters the unsettling yellows of the characters. The only natural and inviting colors are located in the greens of the Earth which draw both the characters and the audience in.

The prologue consists of sixteen slow motion fabula events, which can be considered as the final paintings of the film. These events are presented in the syuzhet out of fabula-order. Some are repeated in the syuzhet, but most are not explicitly redundant. The prologue—in a cryptic and muddled way—presents the entire fabula, thus revealing the ending, and eliminating any mystery of how the film will end. This does not subtract from the viewer’s intrigue because the events depicted are difficult to understand. Like a painting, they present the final images, but for a complete understanding, the viewer needs to see the layers underneath and the process that lead up to these moments. The images presented are not only paintings that are representative of their own narrative, but they also extend beyond the diegetic world of Melancholia into a history of cinema and art.

The first event of the prologue depicts Justine (Dunst) in a close-up. As her eyes slowly open, it appears that birds are falling from the sky. The color tones of this first event establish her false happiness that will be revealed in Part One of the film. Her face is a very pale and sickly yellow and her blonde hair is almost gray. In the backdrop, the clouds in the sky are a muted faint tan, and the birds are a darker yellow with hints of brown. Each hue of yellow can be found within each object and surface of the mise-en-scène. While the events of the image are suspicious, if not unreal, the overall tone of the scene is kind to the eye because of its monochromatic tone. By introducing Justine with these pale and sickly tones, the audience has identified her and her emotions with this color. Yellow is often a color associated with feelings of happiness (like a yellow smiley face) but the yellow in this shot is deceptive. The audience is fighting between the cultural connotations of yellow and the deep unhappiness in Justine’s distressed face. This ill yellow will become indicative of the false happiness Justine is trying to hide behind.

The second event the narration presents is a fantastic garden scene, infused with incredible greens. The intense saturation of this setting presents a stark contrast to the mute and bland yellows in the previous shot. While these greens are more inviting to the eye, the transition to here from the previous shot is not uneasy for the viewer. Instead, it is a build up; yellow and green share hues, because of their relationship within the color spectrum. The intensity of the greens in this shot

continue to draw the viewer in, as well as Justine, for the duration of the film. After the viewer moves through the color of this shot, the setting itself becomes even more fantastical. The aesthetics of this shot are a direct reference to the impossible garden of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961). While in Resnais’ setting, there are nonexistent shadows, Von Trier’s image has an excess of shadows, with each tree producing two shadows. These extra shadows and darkness are produced perhaps because there is more than one sun in the sky. Melancholia creates a second shadow, thus casting more darkness over the Earth. In referencing Resnais’ famous shot, Von Trier evokes thoughts and emotions associated with Last Year at Marienbad. It becomes clear later on of the connections between the stories; aristocratic parties with dysfunctional relationships that seem to be unbound by space and time. This information might not be affective if the viewer has not seen Resnais’ film. However, Von Trier as an auteur probably does not attract a general audience, but rather a cultured and well-versed cinephile.

The third image of the film is Pieter Bruegel’s paintings “The Hunters of the Snow” (1565). This setting returns to pale tones, this time consisting of grays and blues. The winter setting seems rather droll and dare I say, melancholy. Again, Von Trier is asking his audience to recognize the cultural and historical implications of this painting. This dead winter setting depicts a group of hunters,

that are returning from their work and without out any substantial game. Their unsuccessful hunt marks a moment of failure and defeat. This renaissance painting is a part of Bruegel’s larger collection that included pieces for different times of the year. It was completed during a time of religious revolution in the Netherlands and is often used today as a secular piece. The winter setting displays a world of death that is cold and bare of life and sustenance. This nonreligious setting reflects throughout the entire narration as the characters are forced to return to the religion of nature rather than a God above. The pale blues presented in this scene become more intense in the following shot, suggesting its slow, but powerful effects on the narrative. The scene displayed in the fourth event consists of two large planets, one appearing to be Earth, that move slowly toward each other. By expanding the blue theme with the planets, it becomes associated with a larger than life feeling; something more powerful than human agency that overrides the characters’ actions and emotions.

In presenting the events through slow motion, the narration draws the viewer in to further examine the image. The average Hollywood cut is between three to six seconds long, but here the narration encourages the viewer to search the screen longer because of the prolonged screen time. Already, the narration is working on several levels of understanding.

Part One: Justine
The first shot of Part One: Justine, is an aerial view of a stretch limousine entering an “S”-shaped paved road through a field of trees and shrubbery. The white limousine awkwardly attempts to move through nature, and becomes stuck because it literally does not fit into the setting. The yellows from the prologue return here, but are overridden by the plentiful greens of nature. Justine and her newlywed Michael appear to be happy when they inhabit this environment. Justine’s cheerful attitude can be attributed to the color palette of the setting. When she is enveloped in the natural, green tones, she is more comfortable. Once Justine and Michael arrive at their reception they are hit with a yellow light. It has traces of the first yellow, but contains more shades of orange and looks more artificial. The yellow is introduced in attachment to the house of the reception. The newlyweds are not greeted in a welcoming manner, but rather with lines of resentment from Justine’s sister Claire:
“I won’t even bother saying how late you are”
“This is very much not my project”
“I spent the whole week with the dullest man on Earth”
“So you want this?”

A shift in Justine’s emotions has already become apparent, if not through the emotion and dialogue, then in the color tones that pose a direct threat to Justine’s nature. As her first decision, Justine stalls entering the yellow and glowing house-of-doom by going to see her horse Abraham. It is not coincidental that her horse has such an overtly biblical name. Their relationship will deteriorate as both realize their philosophies inherently collide.

Before Justine enters the house, the yellow tones are broken up, which hinders the flow across screen space. Justine’s skin tone, which earlier held traces of yellow, now contains white and gray hues that demonstrate her body’s clash against the house. This poses an obstacle in the narrative; if Justine cannot happily inhabit the yellow hues, she will not be able to survive her wedding. Once Justine enters the reception, her skin tone changes from a pale gray to a color containing traces of the sickly, unnatural yellow. For at least a few moments, it seems she functions in this environment, but as events begin to unfold, it becomes clear that the yellow tones have entered her world and body; and push her into a shell to hide her emotions. Justine’s mother, the only one dressed in blue, is the first to point out the futility of this event. She blatantly states to the reception that she does not support marriage.

“I wasn’t at the church, I don’t believe in marriage…’til death do us part…forever and ever…enjoy it while it lasts. I myself hate marriages, especially when they involve my closest family members”

Justine’s façade, marked by yellow tones, begins to clash with her fears and emotions that her mother, in blue, recognizes. After her mother’s speech, Justine’s psychological and emotional state drastically changes in her facial expression. The single shot of Justine returns to the structure and tone of the first image. Justine’s distressed face is centered with blurred streaks of a darker yellow in the background, which somewhat resembles the falling birds. From this point on, Justine continually attempts to escape the yellow tones and the wall over her emotions by leaving the house and exploring the golf course. The green and picturesque “paintings” of the prologue begin to

have more layers of understanding once the context is given. We can understand why the greens were so inviting — the protagonist is drawn to these types of settings rather than the religious and superficial wedding setting. In the beginnings of Part One, as Justine moves into the green, the yellow continues to follow her because she is not accepting her emotional state. The green hues

seem to have a yellow tint rather than the natural color we witnessed earlier. Justine denies her relapse to Claire, who is familiar with Justine’s habits and emotional cycles, in defending herself saying, “I smile, and smile, and smile.”

A major issue within Justine’s psychological state is her clash against the modern and materialistic setting. When Claire pulls Justine aside to discuss her behavior, Justine rebels against her surrounding that is filled with abstract art, by replacing each picture with Baroque, Romantic, and Renaissance paintings. One of the paintings present in this mix is John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia.” The painting depicts Shakespeare’s Ophelia, lying in a river of water after she has fallen to her death for love Hamlet. That narration does not overtly highlight this painting’s presence, but a conscious viewer will recognize this scene’s redundancy from the Prologue. The fourteenth event of the prologue shows Justine, in her wedding gown, floating down a green river. The viewer is asked to wonder here, if Ophelia jumped to death for her lover, then who would Justine sacrifice herself for? It has already become clear that Justine’s commitment to Michael is wary. Perhaps Justine is not the bride of Michael, but the bride of Melancholia and the bride of death.

By the end of Part Two, when Justine’s marriage has become futile and her emotions have become unable to hide, she can finally set herself free of the yellow light. Demonstrative of this shift in her character is the scene where the wedding party releases the large, glowing lanterns into the sky. Justine no longer needs to hide behind the yellow light, or the sun, because she is ready to move into her melancholic state and allow the blue tones to take over her environment.

The first scene the narration shows of Justine after the wedding consists of blue and gray tones, with a minimal trace of the previous yellow hues. With this shift, the narration can now move into the second half of the film, to embrace the blue physically, emotionally, and aesthetically.

Part Two: Claire
The layers of Part One allow the viewer to piece together fabula events to understand the paintings of the fabula. Part Two continues to unravel the layers. As stated previously, the color tones began to shift in the closing of Part One, as Justine begins to transition into her depressive state. The second definition of Melancholia, which was mentioned earlier, is not revealed to the viewer until Part Two of the syuzhet. Claire reminds her husband John she is scared of that “stupid planet.” He reassures her that Melancholia, the planet that has been hiding behind the sun, will pass them by in five days. The narration presents a definite time frame for the viewer, who already knows the planets will in fact collide. Just as Justine has been hiding behind the yellow light, Melancholia’s presence was hindered by the sun, but it is now prepared to show its blue face.

The blue tones of Melancholia do not fully invade Claire’s environment until Justine returns in her fully-depressed state. The narration cuts between the scene of John and Claire filled with yellow hues to blue and grey hues when Claire watches Justine arrive. Throughout Part Two the characters wear

an assortment of blue and tan clothing and are surrounded by a dark environment. It seems Justine’s melancholic state — and the planet in the sky — have taken over their world. Their presence is demanding attention from everyone. Claire is not used to this type of setting. The uncertainty of her life and situations surrounding her make her anxious and unsettled. Her mental state begins to deteriorate under the blue light, while Justine flourishes. The blue planet literally calls to her in the middle of the night. The blue hues of the environment are more welcoming to her nature. The narration shows Justine offering herself to Melancholia, lying naked in the Earth. It seems, again, that Justine was never meant to be the bride of any human being.

The narration shows how calm Justine becomes throughout Part Two since she accepted her mental condition. While throughout Part One she seemed irrational and abrasive, in Part Two she is logical compared to Claire who spirals into a state of panic. As the days pass, Claire becomes

increasingly restless and attempts to find different ways to cope with her emotions, but she is unable to escape when the blue tones invade. The narration encourages the viewer to recognize the oppositional qualities between Claire and Justine not only by their actions, but also their aesthetics and placement in the mise-en-scène. Justine’s melancholy against Claire’s paranoia is depicted in every scene. At the most basic level, the color of their hair is oppositional: blonde to brunette.The narration reinforces this conflict through lighting and arrangements of the mise-en-scène, often placing the sisters on opposite sides of the screen. As Part Two concludes and Melancholia is moments away, Justine is more at peace than ever because she has been ready for this moment while Claire’s fear is unbearable. Once Melancholia hits, the blue hues consume the screen, enveloping the Earth.

Conclusion
Melancholia ended just as the narration demonstrated it would, or did it? The planet arrived and collided with Earth. In critically analyzing every moment of this film, it seems there is something that the narration is not telling us about the afterlife. The first shot of the film with Justine and the falling birds suggests Justine’s presence after the collision and after Melancholia’s arrival. I cannot help but wonder if Justine survived and continues to live in a world in which Earth and Melancholia coexist.

Whether or not my hypothesis is true, Von Trier achieves a beautiful piece of art examining the effects of depression on a person as well as their surroundings. In showing different perspectives of emotions, the film allows the viewer to understand what it might feel like to suffer from depression as Von Trier does. The states of depression are manifested in the film through the use of color. As Justine and Claire realize their world is ending with Melancholia’s arrival, the color palette of the film transitions from yellow to blue, from happy to sad and from light to dark. The structure of the film can be seen as a construction of sixteen beautiful paintings, whose stories might not be clear at first, but have layers of meaning that need be excavated.

Work Cited

Andre, Bazin. A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery. 1956. Ed. Brian Price. Color, The Film Reader. Ed. Angela D. Vacche. New York: Routledge, 2006. N. pag. Print.
Melancholia. Dir. Lars Von Trier. Perf. Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Zentropa Entertainment, 2011. DVD.

Racing Around Rome

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:13:08 -0400

by kevin soulé

When Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen, 2011) was released last year, it had such a unique charm to it that I immediately began thinking of it as “the Woody Allen movie for people who don’t like Woody Allen movies.” Allen’s new film, To Rome, With Love (2012) shares many similarities with Midnight — even the opening credits are in the same style and font — especially in how the European locations are glamorously shown off. The most notable difference, of course, is that Allen himself appears in Rome as a retired opera director, who apparently had just about as successful a career as his marching cello player in Take the Money and Run (1969). Rome is also different from Midnight in that, instead of one story, Allen cuts between four.

One of the better storylines introduces Jesse Eisenberg as a young architect living with his girlfriend, played by Greta Gerwig. Eisenberg meets Alec Baldwin, another architect who used to live in Rome, and proceeds to find himself being attracted to Ellen Page, an actress friend who Gerwig has invited to stay with them. What is interesting is that the film introduces Baldwin’s character, and follows him as he, and we, meet Eisenber. What we come to suspect, though, is that Baldwin is an imaginary character. He and Eisenberg get into arguments that clearly no one else can hear, but every once in a while another character WILL acknowledge Baldwin’s presence. Even as I walked out of the theater, I did not know for sure whether he was entirely in Eisenberg’s imagination, or if the two had perhaps met for a short while and Eisenberg imagined that Baldwin was still following him around. Like Midnight in Paris, and even the underrated Scoop (2006), Allen indulges in a lot of lighthearted magic — something that’s not necessarily supposed to make sense logically, but something that serves the story in both emotional and comedic ways.

And comedic it is.

Ellen Page is in Rome not even five minutes before she starts turning on the charm — or as Baldwin calls it, “the bullshit.” Many scenes feature Eisenberg and Page alone together, and then Baldwin inevitably appears, essentially representing Eisenberg’s better judgment. Much like Owen Wilson in Midnight, Baldwin cannot stand pseudo-intellectuals, which he suspects Page to be. When she finds common ground with Eisenberg in their admiration of Ayn Rand’s character Howard Roark, Baldwin rolls his eyes and says, “come on, she saw the MOVIE ‘The Fountainhead.’” I saw a critic commented that it might have been better had Gerwig and Page switched roles, since Gerwig is the more obvious choice to play a seductress. I agree, but having Page play the visiting friend does make her advances on Eisenberg much more of a surprise.

As for Allen, he arrives in Rome with his wife to meet their daughter’s fiancée and future in-laws. Allen is immediately unimpressed when he discovers they own a funeral parlor, but is amazed when he hears the father’s opera-worthy voice while singing in the shower. Allen is bored with retirement (“It’s possible I could die one day, of course I’m thinking fifty or sixty years down the road….”) and decides to make the man a star. The “Allen twist” is that the guy can ONLY sing when he’s in the shower. This leads to a scene that could not happen in anything but an Allen film: a special shower is wheeled out onto a theater stage so the father-in-law is able to wash while singing opera.

Allen’s and Baldwin’s stories are the best two in the film. The third (and all-Italian speaking) is about a newly married couple (Alessandro Tiberian and Alessandra Mastronardi) who get separated — if Wilson loved roaming the streets in Midnight in Paris, Allen shows here that the streets in Rome are much more poorly laid out. The wife gets lost and meets the Italian actor of her dreams, while the husband is visited by a prostitute (Penlope Cruz). Unfortunately, it is at this moment that the husband’s family shows up to meet his new wife — so he pretends Cruz is his bride, which causes a couple of awkward moments, particularly when they all go to tour the Vatican. The funniest scene in this story is when the husband, sitting with Cruz and his family in a restaurant, looks up and finally finds his wife, being escorted by the movie actor. It’s a nightmare: trying to hide his “affair” while simultaneously spying on his wife’s “affair.” Finally, at the end, Allen adds the movie star’s wife and a common hotel burglar into the mix to create a funny climax.

The final story, which is also spoken completely in Italian, stars Roberto Benigni in a fantasy/allegory about a man who suddenly becomes famous. Exactly WHY he is famous, no one knows. We are confused just as much as he is when photographers descend on him one morning outside his house, and the obsession with celebrities’ every thought or preference is parodied very well. I found the fantasy elements in the Alec Baldwin storyline a little easier to buy into, though, and I can’t help but think that the fast-paced journalist/media lingo loses something in having to read it off subtitles all the time. Still, looking back, I can’t think of much that I didn’t like about this episode.

I have not seen a whole lot of Woody Allen’s movies, I will admit, but this was a fun movie-going experience (I saw it in a packed theater as well, which always adds to the enjoyment for me when seeing a comedy). It’s not as good as Midnight in Paris, but is a funny follow-up (if I could be so bold as to use that term). The inter-cut episodes are an homage to some of his earlier movies, and To Rome, With Love is even told by an objective narrator (unlike Midnight): a traffic policeman who gets so wrapped up in introducing the stories that he inadvertently causes a crash. For Allen, Paris had a smooth, mystic quality about it; Rome embodies some of that too, but it is definitely shown as a crazier modern-day city.

Lost & Found

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 20:10:10 -0400

by ian barling

In the postmodern age, technological innovation is thought to be causing increasingly intricate processes of spatial and temporal shrinkage and consolidation among cultural arenas. Communication is nearly instantaneous; cultural hybridity is inevitable. Modern technology has allowed for the movements of people and information to transcend previous limits of space and time at alarming speeds and with remarkable efficiency. Often referred to in cultural studies as the “global village” phenomenon, the postmodern technological age, with all of its delimiting potentialities, tends nevertheless to be one of physical isolation and artificial interaction. Work has become specialized, human contact has become virtualized, and false representations of physically disconnected cultures and pastimes run rampant. As a result of such depersonalizing effects on increasingly compartmentalized societal structures, nostalgic and fanciful envisions of past times and places pervade the minds of those trapped in the confines of their meager existences as a form of escape. Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012) seems to be both problematizing and catering to audiences who are subject to such tendencies of nostalgic longing in its depiction of the psychological effects of human isolation within a somewhat romanticized postmodern setting.

Moonrise is the story of two runaway love-struck adolescents, one an attentive and observant outdoor youth scout, Sam (Jared Gilman), who is an orphan and a black sheep among his otherwise ideologically homogenous “Khaki” troop, the other, Suzy (Kara Hayward), an imaginative literary fanatic claimed psychologically troubled by the adults who govern her seemingly monotonous life. Taking place in a New England, almost-too-picturesque island town named “New Penzance” in 1965, the film’s diegesis, as mentioned above, is presented as stylistically, yet subtly, otherworldly. Nearly every scene is comprised of shots of typical Andersonian symmetrical precision with geometrically strategic camera pivots and tracking. Also an Anderson motif is the miniature white picket fence houses, lighthouses, churches, and camping tents, which are virtually always shot from the eye level of a child. Supplementing this whimsical perspective is the use of wide-angle lenses to give the film a warped, exaggerated atmosphere. Additionally, the entire film appears to be shot on an attractively grainy 16mm format, with a noticeably warm and vibrant color palette.

Such formal techniques undoubtedly work to convey a sense of nostalgia to the audience, yet within a controlled, regimented setting. Not only does the island geographically isolate its inhabitants from other people and places, the orderly frame assemblage depicts the internal structure of New Penzance as one of psychological isolation. The picture’s very first scene does well to support this claim. The sequence is comprised of only a single long take, with the camera systematically traveling through the miniaturized Bishop household. As the camera tracks from left to right, the audience is presented with each of the members of the Bishop family, all in different rooms, all presented as next-to lifeless; Mr. Bishop (Bill Murray) mechanically reads the newspaper in his office; Mrs. Bishop (Frances McDormand) secretly smokes a cigarette in the kitchen; the twins play in the foreground of a room in which Suzy is in centered in a window seat, consumed by book. On this island, the adults, and even most of the children, seem to be enveloped in a type of existential glaze, all carrying out their days in the unrewarding and unrelenting fashions that are apparently expected of them. This would explain the main characters’ overt stereotyping of rule enforcing occupations, including bland lawyers, a desensitized social worker, an aggressive police officer, and a couple of domineering khaki scout masters.

Sam is introduced as the first character to break the chain of tedium and order, the first to take a minute (or a hike) to smell the roses, even before the audience sees his face. Thus, it is not surprising that the discovery of Sam’s disappearance via a poster-covered hole in his scout tent undeniably borrows from the discovery of Andy Dufresne’s escape route in The Shawkshank Redemption (1994); both are prisoners of ideologically, and thus physically, limited/ing power structures.

When the audience does see Sam for the first time, he and Suzy have impeccable pronunciation, speaking in a type of unrelentingly rapid and complex prose with a dramatized maturity and logicality intentionally devised for comedic effect. Anderson’s aims seem to be to validate the reasoning capabilities of the youth, to valorize true love in general, and to dispel the oft-stated (or implied) aphorism of rationality over emotion. In Moonrise, the children are depicted as more aware of their surroundings, and of the possibility of escape, than are the adults. They seek isolation, not in totality, but from the other form isolation from which they have been subjected – traditional customary practice. Whereas the adults have already chosen their life paths of police officer, lawyer, or social service worker, all jobs working for the perpetuation of the existing ideological system, Sam and Suzy want out; they desire to create their own future, their own reality. Moonrise Kingdom, the cove in which they finally settle, serves as this utopic ideal. It represents the very lifestyle many of the adults (of the audience) dream about, but are too invested in other things to commit to.

Yet, aware of ideological power structures’ all pervading nature, Anderson abruptly ends Sam and Suzy’s escape/ade, one full of skimpy clothing, French kisses, and portable record players (all objects meant to induce a sense of nostalgic adolescent innocence), with the violent lifting of their tent by Mr. Bishop. Upon returning to the town, though, a number of adults express, in their own understated ways, their acknowledgement of the righteousness of the kids’ actions. Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), for example, tells Sam that his camping base was one of the best built he had ever seen. Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) decides to adopt Sam, as he apparently sees a part of himself, or who he wishes he could have been, in the young boy. Additionally, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop begin to come to the realization that their kids are worth their attempting to work at their marriage problems.

Thus, thanks to the young children’s courageousness, the radical and revelatory possibilities of love touch the lives of many New Penzancers. In the beginning of the film, Benjamin Britten’s well-known “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” can be heard sampling the different musical instruments in isolation, a musical representation of the psychological isolation among the characters. And as Sam climbs down from Suzy’s window and into his new father’s police car, yelling to her, “See you tomorrow,” the culmination of Britten’s piece, in which all the musical instruments first introduced in singularity triumphantly play in unison, increases in volume until the credits. This last scene enforces the notion of newfound community in the small allegorical city, one whose postmodern tomorrows are filled with hope, acceptance, and human connection.

Absent Sex/Present Desire

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:50:00 -0400

by kelsey brannan

On June 15, Ausente (Absent) (dir. Marco Berger, 2011) played at the Carnegie Institute for Science Theater in Washington, DC as part of the Reel Affirmations LGBT Xtra Film Installation series leading up to 2012 Reel Affirmations LGBTQ Film Festival in November. This Spanish psychological drama brilliantly exhibits a lustful homosexual desire between a young student, Martin (16) and his swimming instructor, Sebastian (37). I was one of the only gay females present in the crowd of gay men at the screening, yet the sexual tension exhibited between the two characters even had me on edge. This film intelligently used the “gay” gaze (see endnote #1) to grab hold of all audience members, no matter what their sexuality.

Ausente opens with extreme close up shots of Martin’s naked body, as fragments of his body — his arm, leg, a portion of his ear, groin, and eye — fill the screen. It is not until a male voiceover asks Martin his weight and other health-related questions that it’s made clear that Martin is having a physical examination before his after-school swim class. Throughout this disorienting introduction to Martin’s character, the viewer gets the sense that Martin is still in the process of discovering his body “parts,” and more importantly, his sexuality. This is also underscored at several moments in the film when Martin repeatedly “checks himself out” in the mirror. Martin’s homosexuality becomes evermore evident during the opening locker room scene, where Martin cannot help but look at all the other boys undressing around him. His gaze towards the phallus is intense, forcing the viewer to embody Martin’s eagerness to see what lies beneath.

Pretending to have unluckily caught a piece of glass in his eye during swim class, Martin’s swimming instructor, Sebastian, offers to take him to the doctor to check it out. There seemed to be nothing wrong with Martin’s eye, so Martin casually asks him to take him back to school to meet his friend for a sleepover. Upon arrival at the school, Martin already crafted up a “web of lies” about why he cannot return home and convinced Sebastian to let him stay the night at his house.

Sebastian Sensing Martin’s Presence

The night in which Martin sleeps over at Sebastian’s house is a long, suspenseful and sleepless night. The film cuts back and forth between the two men sleeping in separate rooms. Martin, on the couch, and Sebastian in his bed. At one point during the night, Martin, unable to control his sexual emotions any longer, walks into Sebastian’s room and gently touches Sebastian’s leg while he is in deep slumber. Stirred by Sebastian’s sudden movement, Martin leaves abruptly, unable to take his desire further. The following day, Sebastian discovers that his parents were up all night looking for him. This is when Sebastian realizes what real intentions the boy had, a hope “that something would happen” between them. Sebastian’s infuriation with the boy manifests itself in newly emerged homosexual desires to sleep with Martin. When Martin unexpectedly dies in a freak accident, Sebastian’s nature becomes increasingly disturbed.

Sebastian’s sadness at losing the boy is conveyed through several flashbacks. But as Sebastian reflects on his moments of ‘opportunity’ with Martin, the viewer wonders whether or not they are Sebastian’s dreams or diegetic flashbacks. The film plays with temporal order to convey the sense of guilt that overwhelmed Sebastian’s life following the loss of a boy he could and should have loved. Many storylines are left open-ended, and one begins to wonder whether or not Sebastian and Martin ever did kiss or have sex. The gaps in the plot and Sebastian’s continued desire for the boy after his death, however, are what keep the audience interested.

The externalization of Sebastian’s inner struggle with homosexual desire on the cinematic screen reminded me of Freud’s thesis in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents: the notion that humans must repress their deeper pleasures to fit the rules and laws of society. Sebastian was forced to hold back his sexual desire for Martin not only because his school would fire him, but to respect his devotion to his girlfriend. It is important to note, however, that as much as the audience desired to see Sebastian and Martin have sex, if the audience did, then the pleasure of hide and seek that occurred between the two characters throughout the film would have been lost, and ultimately so too would have been the interest of the viewers. Thus, although sex was ausente, the attention of the desire was most certainly not.

Kelsey Brannan is the Social Media Manager at the Reel Affirmations Film Festival and also doing her M.A. thesis on female LGBT community development practices in DC at Georgetown University.

Endnotes

1. Like the male gaze (see Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”), but used between two men.

Related Links

Reel Affirmations LGBT Film Festival XTRA: http://www.reelaffirmations.org/xtra.php

Melbourne Queer Film Festival: http://supermarcey.com/2012/03/19/mqff-12-absent-ausente/
Movie Reviews - Gay Themed: http://alternatesexuality.blogspot.com/2011/07/ausente-spanish-absent.html
Gender Bender International Festival: http://www.genderbender.it/eng/dettaglio.asp?id=440

Cliche & The Cabin in the Woods

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:04:36 -0400

by riley jauchen

The Cabin in the Woods (dir. Drew Goddard, 2012) is one hell of a parody film. It does not poke fun at any one particular slasher movie, but instead points out — and then twists — the conventions and clichés that so tightly define the genre. More importantly, the film reminds us that the events onscreen occur solely for the amusement of the audience. While picking the clichés apart, Cabin also suggests that they would not be exist in the first place if not for the large and loyal fanbase that loves them so much.

Cabin’s makers choose to parody the archetypal slasher film largely by drawing attention to the genre’s many unspoken, yet unbreakable, rules. Each of the film’s five young, attractive protagonists are called explicitly, at one point or another, by their slasher-victim archetypes — “dumb blond,” “alpha male,” “stoner,” etc. Even the film’s tagline— “you think you know the story,” — suggests that the film aims to toy with otherwise well-worn ideas. I won’t belabor this point, as Cabin’s makers are perhaps purposefully heavy-handed in their articulation of slasher movie clichés. Cabin’s goal is undoubtedly to critique the slasher genre with only slightly more subtlety than would a film from the Scary Movie franchise.

That lack of finesse in parody films usually bothers me. I can take a joke as well as anyone else, but movies that unashamedly point out the staleness and predictability of [insert genre here — be it slasher, western, or buddy cop thriller] almost always get my goat. These parodies remind me of how shallow my own tastes are. They dissect a particular group of films that I’ve already fallen in love with and remind me of how played-out the genre in question really is. They remind me that I can watch twenty different movies featuring, for example, some derivative version of a seven-foot-tall mute with a mask and a machete without being bored to tears. Am I really that lame?!?

But while Cabin inarguably points to the clichéd nature of slasher films, it makes concessions that redeem its critique of the genre’s admittedly tired conventions. Like the less-comedic Funny Games (dir. Michael Hanake, 1997), Cabin suggests that by simply watching the movie, the audience is perhaps collaborating with both the filmmakers and the film’s vicious antagonists. Cabin reminds us that we’re watching of our own volition.

The film argues that we’re seeing what we want to see.

Cabin does this by intercutting between the eponymous cabin in the woods — in which the five victims-to-be reside — and a sterile industrial facility filled with computer terminals and giant movie screens. It is via these screens that individuals employed by an unnamed organization watch the five protagonists through video cameras hidden around the cabin. Without spoiling too much for those who have not yet seen the movie, the employees act as an audience within the film. They respond emotionally to the events on the screen. They serve, perhaps, as reminders that without an audience, the film would — at best — be playing for an empty theater or — at worst — would not exist at all.

We viewers who love the films that Cabin lampoons are therefore vindicated. The employees of the aforementioned organization enjoy watching monstrous murderers attack twenty-something-year-olds as much as we do. Furthermore, the organization which monitors the victims is hell-bent on maintaining the very clichés that Cabin satirizes; they drug the blond to make her dumb and convince the victims that they should split up while they’re being chased by the creatures that safeguard the cabin. It is for these reasons that Cabin seems like more of a celebration of the slasher genre than a sharp-toothed critique. The films from which Cabin draws influence are indeed stale — and God help us all if the genre doesn’t evolve soon — but this movie seems to suggest that there’s just something timeless about nightmarish beasts slaughtering preppy college students.

Bourgeoisie Brawl

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:05:30 -0400

by kevin soulé

Roman Polanski’s film Carnage (2011) plays like an examination of human psychology: we get to see how four seemingly normal people lose all rationality and almost plunge into insanity over the course of an hour. It’s a “comedy” where you don’t laugh because of how funny the characters are, but rather because you simply can’t believe how incredibly ridiculous they are — you almost feel sorry for them.

The story is simple enough.

The characters played by Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly have invited those played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz to their New York apartment to discuss what should be done about a fight between their sons. The kids are never seen except in a wide shot at the very beginning of the film, and we learn that Foster’s and Reilly’s son ended up in the hospital. All four people are polite enough to each other at the start, and they agree that the kids should meet and make the necessary apologies (there’s a small disagreement about who ought to apologize, though). A conversation that should have taken about fifteen minutes begins to get dragged out, however, by a series of minor events and formalities, and the couples begin to learn more about each other. As this occurs, disagreements about numerous issues soon immerse the four characters in one of the most amazing shouting matches ever filmed.

There are many things I liked about the film, the first of which being the structure of the script (which was based on a play). How does one go about writing an 80-minute argument? The emotions of all four people are on roller-coaster rides through the whole thing, and it’s fascinating to see how transitions between different issues and vocal outbursts are handled. In terms of who argues with whom, I think every possible combination is employed: the couples stand off against one another, then before long the two men are arguing against the two women about something, and at one point I think even Reilly and Winslet team up.

Another thing I loved about the film is the many times when you can tell characters want to yell what they really feel, but force themselves to put on a smile instead. There are several instances early on where it is obvious a character is upset about something, but waits until later to bring it up again when the argument is really getting out of control. One such instance is when Reilly tells Winslet and Waltz that he got rid of their hamster the day before — and by got rid of, he means he dumped it in the gutter and let it go to fend for itself in the streets of Manhattan. Winslet is shocked, but the subject gets changed fairly quickly. About fifty minutes later, she brings it up again while insulting Reilly, showing that it had stayed in the back of her mind the entire time. Tactics such as these are often used in real-life arguments, which makes the film sort of scary: we feel the whole thing is ridiculous, but what’s to prevent us from getting in such an argument some day?

Even the traditional custom of offering food to guests is touched upon: Foster and Reilly serve their prized cobbler (made with an unusual ingredient — as I recall, it was pears), which was left in the refrigerator by their maid. (I should point out that neither couple is depicted as particularly wealthy, but they both definitely reside at the upper end of the middle-class spectrum.) While Foster vents about this, Winslet begins to feel ill and asks for some soda (which was left out of the refrigerator), and proceeds to throw up on Foster’s collection of art books. We can tell immediately that Foster’s day is only going to go downhill from here.

There is a fifth star in the movie, I might add: Waltz’s cell phone. About every four minutes throughout the film, his phone rings and the entire conversation is suspended — no one hardly talks at all, for that matter, until he finishes his call. This simply adds to the tension and impatience among the characters, and it is Winslet herself who finally snaps and decides to do something about the phone (which still gets the last word in the argument, however).

Carnage, except for the first and final shots, takes place entirely in one apartment. Winslet and Waltz manage to make it to the hallway elevator three times during the course of the movie, but something inevitably drags them back in at the last minute. All the characters (and the audience, for that matter) can’t really bear the thought of going back into the apartment, but some comment always gets made just as the elevator opens that someone objects to and has to go back to take issue with. Polanski himself makes a cameo as a puzzled neighbor who peeks out his front door at the commotion, but apart from that, no one else in the building intrudes on the argument.

The final scene is an intriguing one: it returns to the park where the two boys fought and shows various groups of kids playing. It’s not clear whether it is the two kids in question, but it seemed to me that the movie was trying to show that the boys settled their differences on their own while the parents spent the day arguing about how to make them do just that. Overall, the movie is a rather quirky/bizarre comedy (but with what turns out to be some pretty unlikable characters) that I would have been interested in seeing again. But alas, this is the type of movie that disappears from the theaters pretty quickly. And for those of you who are wondering — yes, the movie does resolve the issue with the hamster, and it’s a happy ending.

Gimme Shelter

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 19:28:00 -0400

by sara-fay katz

This is a call to redefine what your mind understands to be the concept of fear; that is, what has been spoon-fed to you through decades of flesh-slashing, blood-spilling, torture-driven gore. You may scream, sweat, tense up, cry, and dream of unthinkable terrors. But do not ignore the stark difference between the cartoonish nightmares conjured up merely to yield a sick, bodily reaction and the true essence of what makes a horror film. This rift I put forward is the difference between the slasher film sub-genre of horror, which has become synonymous with the notion of horror itself, and its altogether unique, parent genre. In short, we have replaced what truly scares us with what makes us sick to our stomachs. We have opted for the pornographic over the emotional. We have forgotten our deepest fears.

Take Shelter (dir. Jeff Nichols, 2011) forces us to remember. It is a film that seduces our psyches and toys with our grips on reality. It is scary in the most human way possible – it makes us feel uncomfortable and vulnerable because if a personal, psychological meltdown were to occur in our own minds, we would have no control over the descent into madness.

Our main character, Curtis, is a hero we pray for but unhurriedly lose faith in. He is a family man with such strong values and respect for the mother of his child, played by Jessica Chastain, that he is willing to compromise his ego to save them (his daughter is a young girl who is deaf and struggling to connect with those around her). Curtis is played by Michael Shannon, an actor with a face that immediately foreshadows intensity. A simple furrow of his brow and we lose touch with the man we thought we knew. Out of this chasm, a shared experience is born between Curtis’s wife, Samantha, and the audience. We share her ignorance. Just as she struggles to discover the root of her husband’s abnormal behavior, so do we. We are by her side in unlocking this mystery, not his, and that is why we will never really solve the puzzle.

There is a looming presence of the paranormal throughout the film. We are torn between whether these visions and otherworldly experiences Curtis endures are due to a mental instability or physical manifestations, albeit foreseen. Therefore, as viewers, we are internally divided about the nature of the film itself. Is this drama or science fiction? Romance or tragedy? Is Nichols merely playing with us?

The beauty of this film is in this wretched frustration we experience. It is different and we can’t really figure out why. All we are certain of by the end is that we have been left wanting more.

So why is this horror? Well, paired with the film’s main subject, which I would argue is anxiety within the domestic sphere, there are moments in the film that literally make us jump in terror. The score is the heartbeat of Curtis’s madness and it does its job of keeping the nightmare alive. However, more than sound, and even image I will suggest, the intensity of the plot line contributes to the nightmare.

Follow my thought just a little further here.

Horror in the cinema, I offer, is socio-historically contextual. In brief: what was scary then is not scary now, and what is scary now would have been unthinkable to publically display in the past. We always admire and remark on films that are ahead of their time. So let us not neglect to tip our hats to a film that is past its time. Take Shelter looks back and remembers the pure fear we once felt. It is the first Hitchcock we’ve been able to experience for the first time in years.

In the end, this is a film that reminds us not that if you cut us we bleed, but rather, that without our balance, we fall. Curtis’s visions frighten us because we see them too. We can’t escape thinking about them later and they will continue to haunt us.

Though we may not spend our family’s savings on extravagant bomb shelters, we all have our own little, eccentric quirks through which we manifest our paranoia. Nail biting, therapy, bed-time rituals, alcohol, pills, alarms, even prayer. The thing is, if we let any comfort we ourselves “take shelter” in become an obsession, Curtis’s nightmares could be our own. And that’s scary.

Spoonful of Sugar

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:58:33 -0500

by natalia cohen

Like most folks, when I am sick (which I have been for the past few weeks), I gravitate towards items of comfort.

Hot beverages are good. I’ve been known to decimate entire boxes of herbal tea in mere days. The same goes for orange juice. (Do I think that if I drink enough orange juice, the Vitamin C will render me immortal? No. Do I subconsciously think that it will cure me of smaller ailments? Perhaps).

However, my biggest source of comfort during flu season is film. Lots of film.

When I’m a tad sniffly, I set my bag of used Kleenex aside, and rummage through my DVD library or Netflix for a particularly fitting title. I don’t necessarily go for cinema gold every time (though I have re-watched American Beauty during random bouts of the flu. But that’s just because it’s American Beauty and is therefore necessary for life.)

I go for what’s comfortable. While certainly not a rule of thumb for everyday life, I think that indulging in films for healing purposes isn’t all that terrible. Naturally, they won’t heal one of anything (says the girl who suspects that orange juice may possess healing powers). Still, they can be a most beautiful distraction.

In no particular order, here are my top five films for sick days:

Benny and Joon (dir. Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1993)

This film is so 90’s, it’s a thing of beauty. Flower print dresses and Mary Stuart Masterson’s awesome bangs aside, this weird Johnny Depp vehicle is a love story about two weirdos who are actually pretty weird (and adorable, naturally). Nice soundtrack, as well.

Muppet Treasure Island (dir. Brian Henson, 1996)

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS MOVIE IS GLORIOUS. You’ve got your muppets. You’ve got your island. And (wait for it), you have the treasure that is Tim Curry, all saucy and dressed up as a pirate, singing about how pirates are awesome—accompanied by a muppet chorus. Nuff’ said.

This Is Spinal Tap (dir. Rob Riener, 1984)

Because even though you have that nasty bronchial cough, at least the replica of Stonehenge that you ordered for your concert isn’t dwarfed by the little people you hired to frolic around it. At least you have that.

Steel Magnolias (dir. Herbert Ross, 1989)

“I love ya more than my luggage,” is just one of the many lines that you too can pull out to annoy your friends! I don’t know why I love this movie so much (it’s actually something of a tearjerker), but I do. I just do.

Beauty and the Beast (dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; this movie is a constant reminder of the fact that, if anyone buys me a gorgeous, multi-story library full of books, I’ll probably have to marry them. Just kidding! Kind of…

Silent Stars and Tailored Spies

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:17:02 -0500

by kevin soulé

A short time ago, I made a three-hour car ride to the nearest theater that was showing both The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius, 2011) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (dir. Tomas Alfredson, 2011). These two films could not be more different from each other, but I feel it is appropriate in my case to discuss both of them, considering I saw them one after the other.

The first, The Artist, is a movie I didn’t think could even get made today, much less appeal to an audience. I was amazed, therefore, at the number of people who turned up for a screening on a rather ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Being a nearly all-silent movie, it was interesting for me to see how the audience reacted to certain scenes. It was quite obvious, for instance, that people were much more conscientious about whispering to one another, for fear they would be overheard. The black-and-white cinematography, the absence of dialogue, and even the 1920s-inspired opening credits, all work together to put the audience in a special type of mood. I could tell how captivated the theater was near the climax of the film when the musical accompaniment stopped at one point: not only was the movie completely quiet, but so was the whole room. There was not one sound in the entire theater (and a fairly good-sized theater too, not a standard multiplex). It honestly felt as if everyone was holding their breath.

The Artist has a fairly simple and conventional story about the decline of the silent era, a subject that has been explored by several other movies, notably Singin’ in the Rain (dirs. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952). And yet it remains captivating, almost magical. I was reminded of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), which explores the amazement people had for early cinema. The Artist is not only an homage to that amazement and wonder, but it recreates it in today’s movie theaters. For modern audiences, it forces us to watch differently, in a way that may seem challenging at times but is so rewarding as well. It also allows us to see how differently actors must perform when dialogue is not involved. They become more than actors, in fact. They become — if you’ll pardon the expression — artists.

People don’t clap at the end of movies much anymore, but they sure did at the end of this one. I think it’s clever enough and stylish enough to appeal to a lot of people who don’t typically like silent cinema, and it’s sure to please classic Hollywood cinema lovers. Many references are thrown in from movies that came after the era The Artist is set in, but they all feel at home. There is a breakfast montage that echoes the one in Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941), a dog exactly like the one in the Thin Man series, and a couple of moments that seem straight out of Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950). Even the music in one of the final sequences is a rather extensive piece from Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958).

Before I saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, however, the people I heard coming out of the theater sounded less than satisfied. The main words I heard were “confusing” and “disappointing.” I had not read the book, but I had high hopes for the movie. I saw it with several other family members, and their reactions afterward were mixed. I wasn’t all that impressed with it, either: it was a great-looking film and had lots of plot points to keep track of, but I didn’t walk out feeling it was the masterpiece I hoped it would be. I went to go see it again about a week later, though, and I enjoyed it far more than I did the first time. I think the reason is that the movie initially seems so daunting and complicated, but the second time around you can appreciate the little details. I was worried that I would like the film even less since I already knew the solution to the mystery, but in fact it turned out to be the opposite: you can better understand what is motivating certain characters, and you can listen for specific things to figure out who knows what.

Despite being a spy movie, the film does not have a lot of (or for that matter, any) explosions and car chases. Instead, it relies on the tools that spies probably use more than anything else, namely talking and listening. The hero, George Smiley (played by Gary Oldman), is a man of few words, to say the least: it’s about twenty minutes into the movie before he utters a syllable. Spies have to be patient, and we in turn have to be patient while watching. This is not to say the movie is boring in any way, but it just follows a different pace than a “typical” spy film.

The first time I saw Tinker, Tailor, many of the early scenes felt very broken up and unnecessary. There would be a ten-second shot of Smiley in his house, then a five-second one of him in his car, then an eight-second one of him walking down the street, little shots of people meeting on rooftops, and then finally a long dialogue scene. What I understood the second time, however, was how they all related to each other. In a way, the film actually moves faster because it trusts you to connect certain things. Rather than go through a whole scene of Smiley being picked up and driven somewhere, the movie simply shows Smiley hearing a knock on his front door, then a shot of him in the car, and then his destination. Each individual shot might seem confusing (why did we have to see that one shot where nobody talks and everyone is just looking at each other?), but they combine to show the audience everything that is happening in a way that won’t make the movie ten hours long.

In thinking back over the last year, The Artist clearly stands out as one of the best films, right up there with Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen, 2011) and The Tree of Life (dir. Terrence Malick, 2011). I’d put Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, J. Edgar (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2011), and Hugo (all of which are period pieces) into the mix as well. All these films would be worth seeing at least twice. Here’s hoping that 2012 brings us its fair share of great films….

Dead Snow: Blood, Brains, and the International Language of Exploitation Films

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:07:00 -0500

by riley jauchen

Dead Snow (Tommy Wirkola, 2009), a gruesome Norwegian zombie flick in which a group of vacationing medical students is attacked by a horde of undead Nazi soldiers, might best be described as a shameless gross-out film in which gory, no-holds-barred action sequences border on the comically offensive. Entrails are spilled, throats are slit, and bodies are decapitated. A young woman falls into the pit of an outhouse. Self-mutilation (for the purpose of sterilizing a zombie bite) is the subject of an uncannily long scene. Los Angeles Times critic Mark Olsen notes that this violent imagery is so central to the film that “When an undead soldier cracks a student’s skull open … the moment needs no subtitles” (see endnote #1). These grotesque sequences comprise the majority of Snow; the primary focus of the film is inarguably a long series of macabre visual spectacles.

Beneath the pulpy, blood-‘n’-guts exterior of the movie, however, lies an enticing argument about the multinational appeal of the shock-and-appall brand of exploitation film that Snow was modeled after. The film itself is superficially Norwegian—the eclectic soundtrack, which features everything from heavy metal to a century old orchestral piece, was composed exclusively by Norwegian musicians. Furthermore, the film’s geographic nexus—Oksfjord, a town located on Norway’s northern coast—is made relevant to the narrative when the main cast is informed that it was occupied by Germany during World War II in order to block trade between Russia and England.

But Snow undoubtedly draws influence from America’s exploitation and camp film cultures. The filmmakers even go so far as to insert references to well-known American films that influenced Snow’s absurd premise and gratuitous action sequences. Olsen notes, “in ‘Dead Snow’ there is a discussion about Sam Raimi’s ‘Evil Dead’ movies and lines of dialogue from ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ and the first ‘Terminator.’ These serve in part as signposts to the audience that the filmmakers are working from the same set of reference points, even from half a world away” (see endnote #2). Sometimes, the filmmakers even use these references to self-reflexively cite the ways in which conventions established by American films inform Snow’s narrative. When the students find themselves in a remote location with a single, dead cell phone and no way of contacting the outside world, they joke lightheartedly that they’d be the perfect targets for a Jason Voorhees-esque killer. When a zombie bites one of the characters’ arms, the man determines that he must amputate the limb because his late friend—a horror film buff—told him that such a bite would cause him to become “infected.” The filmmakers therefore encourage viewers to read Snow intertextually, alongside a long series of over-the-top, violence filled, primarily American films.

By creating a self-consciously “Norwegian” exploitation flick that features a slew of references to American movies, Snow’s makers suggest that the exploitation film genre employs a series of conventions that are easily understood, regardless of national context. Quoting film festival programmer Colin Gedds, Olsen notes in his review of Snow that “The language of thrills is universal. … Whether it’s a gore scene or a cat-and-mouse stalker scene, you understand it. It’s all the language of visuals. You can sense the rhythms, and you can sense the patterns of terror” (see endnote #3). Snow’s aforementioned emphasis on macabre visual spectacles therefore makes the film universally understandable. Snow is a movie in which the language of the visual takes precedence over phonetic language; there are few dialogue-driven scenes in which the subtitles demand more focus than the filmic image. Furthermore, the cultural references featured in the film do little more than highlight the camp-horror style that Snow’s makers drew upon when creating the film. The hack-and-slash conventions of exploitation horror films—foregrounded in Snow—are largely intuitive and rarely require much prior, culturally specific knowledge to understand (interestingly, the zombie genre, unlike other monster genres, has “no direct antecedent in the written word because of the monsters’ essentially visual nature; zombies don’t think or speak—they simply act.” The zombie’s legacy as an almost exclusively visual monster makes it the perfect focal point for a film in which the picture is paramount (see endnote #4). Snow therefore serves as a prime example of film’s ability to speak in the universal language of visual spectacle and easily understood generic conventions.

Endnotes

1. Mark Olsen, ” ‘Dead Snow:’ What’s more evil than Nazi zombies?” Los Angeles Times, 28 June 2009, web, 2 January 2012 <http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/28/entertainment/ca-indiefocus28>.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

3. Kyle Bishop, “Raising the Dead,” Journal of Popular film and television 33, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 196-205, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed January 2, 2012), p. 196.

Photo

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:12:39 -0500

I Love You But...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:12:00 -0500

by kevin soulé

The new film Like Crazy (dir. Drake Doremus, 2011) presents a young couple apparently very much in love, but in the middle of a difficult situation. The girl, Anna (Felicity Jones), is from England and meets Jacob (Anton Yelchin) in Los Angeles, and is so swept away that she exhausts her student visa. A short time later, government offices discover her mistake and deport her back to London. Jacob comes and visits her once in a while, but he has a business in LA and can’t really afford to keep flying between continents. They can barely even talk to each other over the phone because of the time difference and their respective jobs. This scenario is at the center of the story, and the question then becomes whether they can keep their relationship intact over the many months until the visa problem gets sorted out.

Jacob stumbles relatively quickly, getting involved with his assistant who I suppose has an advantage over Anna considering that she at least lives in the same city (not to mention country) as Jacob. Anna does very well at her job in England, is able to be with her parents, and begins living with someone as well. It’s very telling, therefore, that the only lovemaking scene in the movie takes place when Jacob and Anna are with other people! The movie cuts between the two of them, almost making it seem that they are in the same bed. The truth, however, is that each of them are starting to treat the relationship of their life as if it’s “on hold.” When the subject of marriage finally comes up, it’s almost more of a death knell than a happy chance to be able to be together again.

The movie I keep comparing Like Crazy to is this year’s One Day (dir. Lone Scherfig, 2011): both films focus on couples struggling to make their relationship work against uncontrollable obstacles. I found Like Crazy more interesting, though, because it relied less on fate and more on people’s personal decisions. Another difference is that One Day spans an entire marriage, while Like Crazy practically ends at the beginning of a marriage. It was remarkable to me that the two characters were still in love with each other by the end of the movie, considering all the uncertainty and “dating infidelity” (yes, a completely made-up term) that Anna and Jacob had been through.

The style of the movie conveys a lot of this uncertainty and instability, too. There are a great deal of hand-held shots and jump cuts throughout the film, resulting in a few seconds being skipped over here and there. There is also something of an episodic structure, with a fair amount of fadeouts and a rather unclear timeline — we know the two lead characters are apart for a long time, but exactly how long? When a new scene begins, have a few months passed, or just a few days?

Are Jacob and Anna really in love with each other? Do they discover a new type of love? My guess is they don’t really know the answer themselves. One of the last images of the movie is each of them thinking about the “happy times” early in their relationship, but they don’t seem to have any of that happiness left now that they’re about to spend the rest of their lives together.

But then again, something does draw these two people together. Jacob found another woman who loved him and Anna actually got proposed to by another man in England, but each of them can’t forget the other. Would they have had a happier marriage if there had never been a problem with the visa? Would they have gotten married at all? We just don’t know — neither do they.

Even though they both obviously care very deeply for each other, I must admit that I didn’t feel too optimistic about their relationship by the time the movie ended. Toward the beginning, Jacob gives Anna a bracelet with the word “patience” on it. It finally breaks as she’s having sex with her boyfriend in England. There’s so much symbolism in that scene that I won’t even begin to try and analyze it. Overall, however, it led me to wonder if these characters’ tolerance (both for each other and the bureaucratic system keeping them apart) just ran out. Jacob and Anna seem to know instinctively that they belong together, but they have trouble convincing themselves of that.

I don’t know if two people in real life could have made the situation depicted in Like Crazy work. I’m not sure how many moviegoers will like the film — I’m not even sure I did. What I do know is that a lot will depend on your own views about love and whether people can (or should even try to) stay together through the most dire circumstances. Perhaps Jacob and Anna will end up having a long and successful marriage. They were plenty happy in the beginning, after all, but then the government got involved, and things just never quite seemed the same after that.

3 Reasons Home Alone is a Die Hard Remake (But for Kids)

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 15:23:00 -0500

by cameron huntley

If you’re reading this, my miniature abstract (that’s what I call my title) has reeled you in either because you have nothing better to do and like looking at words on a screen or you actually like John McTiernan’s 1988 Christmas masterpiece Die Hard and Chris Columbus’s classic 1990 Die Hard remake: Home Alone. Yes, that’s right; you didn’t have a stroke just now (and neither did I, I hope.) Home Alone is hands down a Die Hard remake — it’s just targeted for kids. If you believe me, you can stop reading right now; I’ll cut you some slack because its the holidays.

However, if you don’t believe me, I’m about to explain three reasons why Home Alone is bringing the kids and families into the audience of the hardcore action genre of Die Hard in a way that only a dummy like Chris Columbus could.

The answer is magic or something.

1. The Hero

First of all, if you haven’t seen Die Hard or Home Alone, you obviously have no adulthood and definitely had no childhood. You’re awful and you should feel awful. For the rest of you (the cool, attractive people) try to picture our respective heroes from these two movies.

In Die Hard, we have John McClain.

“Can you tell I’ll go bald by the fourth one?”

McClain is a New York cop on vacation who happens to be in the can (bathroom) during his wife’s business/Christmas party in an office building when “terrorists,” who turn out to be robbers, strike. John is able to evade their notice and has the rest of the movie to take them down meticulously while quoting old movies, which is, let’s face it, what sounds like the best Christmas present anyone could ask for.

On the other hand in the more “modern” Home Alone, we have the young Kevin McAlister.
This is when he realizes that his face won’t look good as an adult.

Kevin happens to be left at home during a family rush to the airport and goes unnoticed because he is in a room that could have been a bathroom had his little cousin been in there too. The cousin was a bed wetter apparently. Ok, this similarity is a stretch, but there’s more! So Kevin is left at home when burglars strike. Kevin is able to avoid their initial notice and has the rest of the movie to take them down meticulously while quoting old movies, which is, in this case, almost exactly what Kevin wished for for Christmas. See? We’re getting there.

Both John and Kevin are smart guys. Wise guys, even. And while only John McClain has gone through the incredibly intellectual process of becoming a police officer, Kevin McAlister is just as resourceful. Apart from their age differences, they are pretty similar characters due to a mixture of McClain’s childishness and McAclister’s precociousness. We’ve already established that they both quote old movies: McClain declares himself a Roy Rogers fan, uses Roy as a cover name, and says “Yippie Ki-yay, Motherfucker!” at one point or another. Kevin, likewise, uses lines from an old film in the film to conceal his age, making the line “Keep the change, ya’ filthy animal” an instant classic. But the trait that McClain and McAlister (omg! did you, like, notice how their names are totally similar?) have in common is their mutual sadistic taste for cruel and unusual punishment. McClain, who keeps track of the terrorists on his arm with a sharpie, sends a dead one down in an elevator dressed as Santa Claus with the words “Ho Ho Ho! Now I have a machine gun” written on his chest in red letters. McAlister is arguably worse, as he destroys his own villains with blow torches, molten door handles, nails in their feet, and tarantulas on their faces. I mean, this is pretty medieval stuff. Home Alone will probably be revealed to have been a Dexter prequel in a few months.

2. The Villains

Let’s start by classifying what the bad guys are. Technically both sets of villains are burglars, even though the Die Hard baddies may seem more like robbers. And in a Hollywood sense, which is unfortunately becoming common sense, they sure are. However, the definition of burglary is entering into any building or room to commit a felony; and that’s exactly what both these sets of baddies do. Anyway, let’s just stick to comparing the lead baddie in each film. I mean movie.

In Die Hard, we have the masterful Hans Gruber who invented the way Dumbledore died.

On the top, Alan Rickman is dying. On the bottom, Alan Rickman is killing.

Gruber had a plan. He was not a stranger to stealing large sums of money and disguising himself as a terrorist willing to negotiate terms with the FBI was a genius tactic. But he let it all fall by the wayside because of one guy who ruined his Christmas. Essentially, John McClain was Hans Gruber’s Grinch.

Harry the burglar, a role that won Joe Pesci an Oscar in his favorite dreams, had a plan too, even if the credits didn’t give him a last name.
This is my cousin’s evil twin, Harry.

I mean the guy had it all worked out. He knew when the neighborhood families were going to be out of town and he knew when their Christmas lights turned on automatically, down to the second. But Kevin McAlister just had to get left behind to muck up the burgling plans. Harry is to Bob Cratchit as Kevin is to Ebenezer Scrooge; and this is before all those ghosts showed up.

What’s funny is that both sets of hero and villain interacted with each other at one point during the movie while the baddie was in disguise. In Die Hard, Gruber pretended to be one of the hostages when he was found on the roof by McClain, but he was found out because he tried to shoot McClain with an unloaded pistol, which in my books is a dead give away that something isn’t right with a person. In Home Alone, Harry pretends to be a cop to check out which houses he’s going to burgle. He does this by wearing a police uniform and going into each house and asking the owners if they have proper security and stuff. Yet, this exceedingly clever ruse is discovered by Kevin who notices Harry’s metallic tooth both when Harry’s disguised as a cop in the beginning and later when he’s driving an old plumbing van. Looking back, I guess it would be kind of strange to see a cop in uniform one time and then later see him driving a shabby plumbing van while wearing a black toque. I’m just saying.

3. The Outside Helper

Lastly, both Die Hard and Home Alone have a sympathetic character with a sad story that saves the day in the end, when in the beginning you think he will be no help at all. Shall we delve in?

In Die Hard, we have officer Powell. Powell is the guy that John McClain talks to on the radio throughout the movie to provide mutual character development. It’s a symbiotic relationship and it’s beautiful. Here’s Powell:

“I am supplying the only voice of reason from law enforcement in the entire film, dammit!”

Powell is a desk jockey who happened to be in the area buying Twinkies (seriously) on his way home. He used to be more of a patrolman but he shot a kid who had toy, laser gun that must have looked real. Don’t judge him; he was startled and it was dark and it was an easy mistake. I’m sure we’ve all done something similar. What’s that? We haven’t because we’re not idiots? Point conceded. Anyway, at the end Powell shoots the last living baddie who apparently was just playing dead. Hooray. Also, belated spoiler alert.

In Home Alone, we’ve got Old Man Marley, an appropriate Christmas name if you’ve ever read Dickens or seen a Jim Carrey movie (sigh.) Marley seems to be really creepy at first as he walks around late at night with his snow shovel, salting the sidewalks with what we are told by a fat ginger is the remains of his family.

”I represent people’s mistaken assumptions! Die now, child.”

So he looks a little intimidating. But it turns out that he has the same story [structure] as Powell’s. He got into an argument with his son and now they don’t talk and now maybe they will and now there is mutual character development for Marley and Kevin who give each other much needed advice. Also, when it seems like Harry and his side kick are about to really do in McAlister at the very end, Marley shows up and whips out some snow shovel justice on the baddies. He instantly incapacitates them while simultaneously proving to the audience that he is indeed greatly capable of murder. Again, belated spoiler alert.

If you liked this article, check out Cameron’s other CV article about how Wall-E is secretly a post-apocalyptic horror film: http://truthcinema.tumblr.com/post/11837483899/3-reasons-wall-e-is-a-terrifying-post-apocalyptic

“I believe in just having as many representations as possible of...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:59:47 -0500

“I believe in just having as many representations as possible of women onscreen … good, bad, shitty, whatever. There just needs to be volume. ”

— diablo cody, http://nymag.com/movies/features/diablo-cody-2011-12/

All Work and Even More (Word) Play

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:18:00 -0500

by nadia ismail

Young Adult (dir. Jason Reitman, 2011) was a pleasant surprise of a film. The movie, as you can imagine, is about change. I had a clear image of Mavis Gary’s “before” portrait — a diet coke, trash television, chick lit addict with a permanent morning-after nonchalance to her. What would the “after” picture bring? Would she evolve into a novelist with nuanced characters and respectable storylines? Would she swap the diet coke for coffee, or (god forbid) water?

See, the thing is, I was expecting this superficial, predictable change in her character.

I was the one supplying the tropes and clichés, even when the film itself wasn’t offering them. And this is why I walked out of the theater feeling really great about Young Adult and somewhat bad about myself for not trusting Diablo Cody a little more.

The film’s plot surrounds Mavis’ desire to win back a high school ex-boyfriend after she learns about his newborn baby. A wild impetus for reigniting an old flame no doubt, but of course this is crucial insight into our protagonist’s off-kilter moral compass. The town she returns to is called Mercury. Three-quarters into the film (it was a slow day for me), I saw the connection.

I’d always associated the word “mercurial” with the word “change” — I actually thought the two were synonyms minus the former’s stance as an adjective and the latter’s noun/verb function. The difference between the words, albeit slight, is central to the way I digested Young Adult as a work and encapsulates the main message I took away from it.

While “mercurial” is associated with change, it is more so indicative of volatility or instability. It doesn’t necessarily connote development, similarly to how the word “adult” doesn’t necessarily translate into growing up (the film’s tagline, by the way, is “Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.”) In terms of personal development, change is gold. It’s assurance that external stimuli is indeed causing you to adapt and evolve, that you are a faithful disciple of Darwin.

While Mavis is certainly unstable (she breaks down numerous times throughout the film and consistently reaffirms her despicable character), she fails to change. Even though she stops at all the landmarks of bildungsroman/coming-of-age works — including returning to her hometown, recontextualizing people and places from her past, and having her present cave in on itself — Mavis learns nothing from these situations because she inevitably doesn’t change. She decides, finally, even when the evidence is piled high against her in the case of Mavis v. World that the fault lies entirely with everyone else.

On some levels, this is of course disappointing.

It goes against coming-of-age convention and so in essence, we’ve watched Mavis make even more of a mess of her life and learn nothing from it. But this is why Young Adult was so refreshing. It’s honest about the redundancy of life lessons, and how real world growth is neither formulaic, guaranteed nor concrete but rather involves an inordinate amount of denial and self-import. We spend so much of our lives running in circles, only to reassure ourselves that the path we’ve chosen is the right one.

Oftentimes, this is the only choice we have.

Admitting a wrong turn anywhere would require too much heartache and disorientation. With the infinite splitting paths on the road to character development, it can often be easier to persevere stubbornly into the heart of hell rather than admit that there was ever a path to heaven and that 500 miles back, you lost it.

Charlize Theron’s genuine portrayal of the protagonist lends just enough nuance to Mavis’ character to make her a figure that invokes sympathy. Even though she’s this horrible person, she offers a shattered, unflattering mirror in which to see ourselves and the many times that it’s easier to shrug off growth rather than face the beast. Of course, this is not to say that change as a person (either onscreen or in real life) is impossible or not worth it, but rather to admit once and for all that character development is so much more laborious and involved than the Disney channel lets on.

Brave New World

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:11:57 -0500

by natalia cohen

Brave (dir. Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, 2012), I have just met you and I (hope to) love you.

As a longtime fan of Pixar Animation (and by longtime, I’m talking the first grade), I’m looking forward to Brave’s June release. The film has a special appeal to me beyond its Pixar pedigree; for the first time ever, a Pixar movie will have a female in the lead role—a curly-haired, confident red-head, no less.

Though, pre-Brave, Pixar films have never featured a female protagonist, I wouldn’t venture to say that Pixar’s roster of female characters are all one-dimensional princesses-in-waiting, who sit cross-legged in pretty dresses and re-apply their lip gloss. In Toy Story (dir. John Lasseter, 1995), Bo Peep has a certain spark to her (though her role diminishes throughout the series). EVE is in many ways Wall-E’s savior, and Violet and Helen Parr are powerful women who are certainly agents of change within their story.

Still, as interesting as Pixar’s female characters have been, The Incredibles (dir. Brad Bird, 2004) was Mr. Incredible’s movie; it was he — the super-family’s patriarch — who stood, paunchy and balding, at the forefront of the film’s promotional material. The same goes for Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008); as the film’s titular character, he’s naturally at the center of the film’s universe.

At Pixar, girls have never been given the chance to ‘run the show,’ so to speak.
This could be due to the fact that, while narratives with a male protagonist can easily appeal to both boys and girls, the opposite does not always hold true. That or, prior to Brave, no one at Pixar had dreamed up a great story with a lady in the lead role. (I’m hoping for the latter).

Of course, I didn’t grow up bereft of animated films that featured women in lead roles. Disney’s fifty plus animated films offer a wealth of female protagonists, though whether or not they’re always positive role models is another story entirely.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a fan.

There was a period in my life when, according to my mother, I had “Princess Ariel” everything: socks, sweatshirts, pencil-toppers, you name it. I found her compelling, probably for the same reason that most little girls did (and do); she’s pretty, adventurous, and capable of belting out several very catchy tunes (some of which may currently be stored on my iPod. I have no shame.) All that, and she has awesome hair.
Still, it’s interesting that even though The Little Mermaid (dir. Ron Clements, John Musker 1989) isn’t archaic by any means, the film’s storyline (upon finding her soul mate, an impressionable sixteen year-old girl is saved by a handsome prince, and leaves her undersea friends and family to marry him) probably wouldn’t fly in 2011.
Most of Disney’s princess-centered films in recent memory — Tangled (dir. Nathan Greno, Byron Howard, 2010), The Princess and the Frog (dir. Ron Clements, John Musker, 2009), Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lima, 2007) — have featured ladies who rescue themselves (not to mention their Prince) and acquire true love on the path to self-fulfillment and maturity. One can only imagine that this has been a deliberate choice on the part of Disney executives in an effort to keep Disney as P.C as possible. (If they can’t tame Miley, at least they can keep Rapunzel kid-friendly). Calculated or not, it’s a nice change.

Brave comes at the intersection of these two types of films — the Disney Princess flick and the Pixar films; for, unlike Ariel or Giselle, Merida isn’t a singing, dancing, handsome dude magnet (though she is a princess). At least, the trailer doesn’t make her seem as much. She’s a Pixar heroine, and thus joins the ranks of other fantastically unconventional protagonists (Wall-E, Buzz Lightyear, Remy, etc.) — all of whom who happen to be male. Merida will no doubt be an unusual hero — it’s the Pixar way — but it remains to be seen what qualities will make her unique besides her thirst for freedom and her unruly mane. I’m interested to see what she has to offer.

“Disney Princess” films may have somewhat warped my generation’s notions of what love is, and how long it takes to fall into the aforementioned emotional state. That being said, I’m not insinuating that the aforementioned films were truly emotionally scarring, or that Pixar’s absence of female leads made the younger me question my agency as a young woman.

All I’m saying, is that, with Brave, we may very well see the emergence of a heroine who encourages girls to go to “Infinity and Beyond,” by giving them a strong cinematic role model to emulate.

I, for one, am hoping for the best.

That was a REMAKE?

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:27:02 -0500

by kevin soulé

Many people I talk with adhere to the popular philosophy that movie remakes are typically poorer than the films they were based on. Every once in a while there will be remakes that hold up to, if not vastly supersede, the original — like His Girl Friday (dir. Howard Hawks, 1940), The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941), and Ocean’s Eleven (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2001). But then there are also films that I’ll mention that the original was better and I hear “wait, there was an original?”

You see what I’m up against?

What follows are a few titles that have been remade over the last decade or so, and whose remakes seem to overshadow them quite often. If you have seen or know of these original movies, more power to you! If you have not, they might be worth checking out sometime. If you don’t even know the remake, well…I’ll leave it up to you.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Dir. Joseph Sargent, 1974)

After I had watched this movie for the first time (before the 2009 Tony Scott version), I could not believe what I had been missing out on all during my life up to that point. It is a quintessential 1970s movie, with photography in and below the streets of New York. Indeed, New York itself seems to be a central character in the film — when the villains announce that they are hijacking a subway car, the passengers practically roll their eyes and check their watches, and the subway dispatcher yells “you’re out of your skull!” to the guy with a semi-automatic machine gun and nearly twenty hostages. There are also some funny scenes about city politics (the mayor decides at one point just to give up the subway car: “We have lots of others, we won’t even miss it,” before realizing the small group of hostages might be his only sure votes in the next election), and Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw get to play excellent lead characters.

The In-Laws (dir. Arthur Hiller, 1979)

This one actually goes right down the middle: I don’t think I have ever met anyone who has seen either the 1979 or 2003 version of The In-Laws. The Peter Falk/Alan Arkin one was a staple in my house when I was growing up, and I still use lines from it to this day. Peter Falk (who many know as TV’s Columbo) plays an “unconventional” CIA agent (although he claims that everyone in the agency looks and acts just like him) who ropes his future in-law (Alan Arkin) into an international fraud scheme. One of the film’s many great scenes comes when the two families meet for the first time: Falk tells of a recent trip to South America where he saw humongous flies carrying babies off in their beaks. Arkin stares at him for a second, and says: “BEAKS? Flies with BEAKS? I’ve been getting National Geographic for years and I never….” The flies, as it turns out, are protected under a treaty known as the Guacamole Act of 1917. And they fit all this in about five minutes of the movie.

The Thomas Crown Affair (Dir. Norman Jewison, 1968)

As much as I love both Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, it’s pretty tough to top the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway combination, not to mention the fantastic 1960s split-screens and music. The plot has several inconsistencies, I will be the first to acknowledge that point, but it’s one of those rare movies that is just so much fun to watch that you accept pretty much whatever is thrown at you. It was written by Alan R. Trustman, who also wrote one of McQueen’s other great movies, Bullitt. The remake is very stylish as well, and Faye Dunaway even makes a cameo appearance. Michel Legrand’s song “The Windmills of Your Mind” also appears in both films, and it is sung by Noel Harrison (son of Rex) in the original. The chess game scene is the highlight of the film, but the opening credit sequence is practically a masterpiece all on its own. It was created by Pablo Ferro, who worked on Bullitt as well (in addition to many other films).

Okay, now that I’ve shot my lid, we can open it up for a discussion on this fantastic resource that is Cinéma Vérité: do you tend to like originals or remakes? Why? Should movies be “updated?” All right, that’s question #1.

Question #2 is what I almost wrote about for this week’s article. What are some of your favorite SCREENPLAYS of all time? By that I mean, what movies do you love listening to, just for how the characters talk to each other (or not talk)?

For me, some of the best-written movies are:

1. All About Eve (written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
2. Casablanca (written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942).
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (written by Horton Foote, based on Harper Lee’s novel, directed by Robert Mulligan, 1962).

Many of the courtroom dramas and “morality tales” tend to have great dialogue, of course, but what are some that stand out to you? The one guy who has taken screenplays to a whole different level in recent years is probably Quentin Tarantino, but surely there are others?

congratulations to current and former UC Santa Barbara film...

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:44:30 -0500

congratulations to current and former UC Santa Barbara film students who were involved in the production of Leslie David Baker’s debut music video:

Kathy Trinh (Co-Director/Writer/Producer), Amanda Driggs (Art Director), Celeste Wong (Art Director), Michael Lopez (Assistant Art Design), Kyle Thompson (1st AD), Fred Buckley (Gaffer), Michael McSpadden (Key PA and Sound), Kasey Lubin (Production Manager, Co-Producer), George Davidovich (Script Superviser), Ted Arnold (Best Boy Electric), Cory Cullington (Set Photographer/DIT), Brian Wray (Boom Operator), Matt Roberts (PA), Carlos Zammbrano (PA), Todd Ziegenmeyer (PA), David Atsbaha (cast), Pedro Chairez (cast), Annalysse Padtra (cast), Brent Pella (cast)

meet us on the dance floor, gauchos

Ricocheting Between Worlds

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:15:00 -0500

by nadia ismail

Martha Marcy May Marlene (dir. Sean Durkin, 2011) follows a young woman who has escaped from a cult and attempts to reassimilate into a comfortable, “normal” existence in upstate New York. As the most unstable character in the film, Martha is the shifting core of our story and thus the stage is set for a narrative that turns everything — including the spectator’s psychological and moral orientation — upside down.

Martha’s time in the cult is relayed almost entirely through flashback while the present unravels as a choppy, frail timeline that is hindered by her inability to reconcile the two livelihoods. Martha Marcy May Marlene is captivating particularly because its exhibition reveals Martha’s past and present simultaneously but without necessarily prompting the viewer on which world is the right one.

We’re not really sure whether it’s the blue pill or the red pill we’ve swallowed. It’s all relativity.

In the cult livelihood, Martha must subscribe to a suffocating patriarchy wherein the initiation is none other than rape under the guise of purification. In the mainstream livelihood, Martha’s expected to attend housewarming parties and wear cotton dresses while partaking in vapid chatter.

Both existences position the individual as a direct product of social norms and expectations; it’s just a matter of which norms make more sense to the participant.

The cult is ideologically appealing to Martha because it initially satisfies her thirst for immediate value and function within a society. She is a “teacher and leader” within the cult, while mainstream society regards her as a miscreant and lowlife. She is a member of a family within the cult — albeit a male-dominated, incestuous family — while her lone relationship with her blood sister is fractured nearly beyond reconciliation. Martha is particularly vulnerable to the fringe dogma because it so clearly provides her with the value she lacks in her former mainstream existence — it’s as if she’s taking the starring role in a subpar play rather than hanging in the wings of her own life.

The past and present are spatially and temporally linked within the film, demonstrating the tangle of experiences that now constitute Martha’s worldview. Martha asks her sister after fleeing the pastoral prison “How far are we?” then clarifies “from yesterday.” Her sister corrects her, “You mean from where I picked you up?” The time and place of the cult are analogized in the film and this is consistently reinforced as Martha often confuses where she is, who she’s interacting with, and what behavior she’s expected to have in which life. She climbs into bed with her sister and husband when they’re having sex. She goes skinny dipping with her sister’s husband. She ignores guests at a house party. She’s not “normal” because her social compass has been reconfigured one too many times.

The film aligns with Martha’s perspective in order to provide a similar jolting and disoriented unease for the spectator. A conversation that begins between Martha and her sister ends as one between cult members, without a hint of apology from the film for the unmarked transition between worlds. There’s a brewing sense of foreboding that follows Martha as it becomes clear that the lines of her past and present aren’t parallel but will indeed intersect somewhere, somehow.

What I appreciated most about the film — and why it’s now my favorite film of 2011 — is that it ends right before the firefight. I was worried that Durkin might tie up all the loose ends and piece together Martha’s life all too cleanly. I had braced myself for a traditional climax, wherein a character’s two worlds finally intersect and she must defend the one she deems morally superior. But Durkin doesn’t let Martha decide this for the viewer. You’re abandoned, like Martha, at the intersection of two very opposite existences and thus must continue the story yourself, in true postmodernist style. For this reason, Martha Marcy May Marlene is perfect fodder for the curious mind.