Film review: "The Trip"

I call this a "film" review in honor of my friend Kyle Grady, who mocks the distinction between film and movie when I make it, because he's a Heideggerian and they are above high-low culture distinctions.

"The Trip" is not a story of some intrepid soul's experimentation with acid and the adventures that followed thereupon. Such a film was made in 1967 by Roger Corman, starring Peter Fonda. I saw it in college, I think. It is funny, but like all films of that era, drug experiences are categorically frightening.

No, "The Trip" that I'm referring to is a contemporary film starring two British actors, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who drive across the northern part of the UK, but south of Scotland, I think, on a tour of several different restaurants. I suspect, if you knew more about British film and television, this would be even more funny, but even without that knowledge, it's pretty damn funny.

Coogan is presented as this very self-involved and frequently unhumorous character, who is going through a breakup and has only invited Brydon because Coogan's girlfriend cannot go (and claims that he tried to invite others who equally turned him down, such that he was left with ... ). Brydon, by contrast, is a hilarious fellow, but only if you enjoy continual impressions of British actors (and Woody Allen).  Y and I thought it was pretty funny, actually, although she asked what was wrong with this guy. I thought that question was funny, but I think that about most of the things she says about films are funny (best example: at the end of "The Piano Teacher", she says to me, "I guess she just didn't find the right guy").

There are many scenes which I think were contrived to show off the incredible landscape.  They work. The landscape is breathtaking, despite being Britain and having British weather. Watching these two eat at restaurants is interesting, partially because of the food that they eat, but mainly because of their conversation, in which Coogan's megalomania is contrasted with Brydon's continual impressions in response. And then, after that, there are the back stories behind these characters: Coogan's failed relationship and affairs with other women; Brydon's attempts to have phone sex with his wife, who is at home taking care of their new baby. This latter aspect lends a brilliant ground to the hilarious banter between them, and a somber, even somewhat sad ending. Emotionally, it hits all of the pleasurable notes and ends with a deep breath.

Nothing thoughtful to say about this. I'm just trying to write more frequently about film.

By the way, if you have Netflix, you can "watch instantly".

Cineme: Cold War Paranoia

Do you also do this when you teach, trott(ha)ing out ideas from your undergraduate education that have been with you, that perhaps you have not developed in the slightest regard, like miniscule seeds that somehow brought you to the present but which seem to remain in the infantile stage of development ...? (there is a question there).

For me, the course was "Cold War Lit", taught by Prof. Daniel Bourne, the year was 1993, perhaps?. One of the things I appreciated about that class was Bourne calling out some genius for not operating on "all 4 cylinders" ... I was thinking then that there was too much kid-gloving in teaching. That may tell you something about my present pedagogy. The idea, however, was the film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) exemplified paranoia about the effects of communism on human life in an imaginative form.

In other words, the story of aliens landing on Earth and slowly but surely subverting all normal human life by creating exact duplicates of existing humans. These duplicates are by all external appearances indistinguishable from the originals, except to those who know them well and notice subtle yet significant psychological differences. In particular, the duplicates lack human emotions. And most insidiously, the duplicates are appearing more and more frequently, and the normal humans are becoming more rare--that is, the duplicates are replacing all of the normals.

The claim is that Communists are like these duplicates: by all appearances they are normal, but at the most profound human level, on the level of emotions (hold on a second, has anyone here read any of the canon of the history of philosophy, which generally agrees that intellection is the factulty that constitutes the anthropological difference? ...), they are not American and not human.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry on this film, there is some discussion about these Communist readings, which are concluded with statements from those involved in the production that no such intentions existed. Fuck, thanks for clarifying that. Now we can die knowing that all such interpretations are false, deluded, etc. (another pet peeve of mine, the intentional fallacy). Whew. Good thing we didn't need to call Encyclopedia Brown. His fees are getting expensive.

I take it the idea at the core of the film is a cineme, by which I mean merely a concept that has some considerable cachet in the business of film production. I draw this conclusion because this film has been remade so many different times, both under the original title and numerous others. A cineme is an "idea" in film because it has certain components which are inseparable from the medium, such as the visual narrative representation of the duplicates and the ineffable but horrifying process by which the originals are replaced by duplicates. Perhaps there are other elements as well that belong especially to film, rather than to literary fiction (the narrative was originally a short story by Jack Shitlips).

Last night I felt into, unwittingly, what I out of honor would hereby like to call the Encyclopedia Brown problem, of determining, if the idea is a Cold War artifact, why the cineme continues to be so meaningful, even now some 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. although the are probably other examples, Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig recently starred in the "The Invasion"(2007), which I had the unfortunate displeasure of watching. Probably a lesser Encyclopedia Brown would claim, cleverly, that the film sucked and the reason is that it's raisin d'être is now absent. But a more courageous Encyclopedia Brown would not stop there. For what have we to do with outcomes?!? I mean, it did spend some time in the theatres and didn't go directly to video. Or more seriously, it was made, right, and that is what means something ...

After a seed like this, it was easy to swallow Jameson's Third World Unconscious argument.

Monsters (2010): Reflections on Narcoterrorism

"Monsters" is a poorly titled film about aliens that inhabit the "infected zone" of northern Mexico. This area, all along the border of United States and Mexico, extends south for a hundred miles or so, and not coincidentally, cohabits the same space that is presently contaminated by Mexican drug cartels. Not a word is spoken of the latter, because "Monsters" is set in contemporary America, six years after a NASA probe, having examined a meteor believed to hold extraterrestrial life, falls back to the earth on its return and spreads its payload across this "infected zone." In the six years succeeding, the aliens have reproduced and established domain over the entire area.

The narrative follows a photojournalist who is given the initially unenviable assignment of escorting his publisher's daughter from somewhere around Mexico City to the eastern coast of Mexico, where she is expected to take a boat by the Gulf of Mexico to the United States. Of course, the daughter turns out to be very beautiful, albeit avoiding the return that will reunite her with her fiancé (the reason for this is never explained). The trip turns out to be more complicated than it should and, as you might expect, rather than going around the "infected zone," they must go through it.

What interests me is the concept of the "infected zone." In the film, we do not know much about it, except that its borders are strained and the monsters seem to be pushing beyond them. The monsters are these long-legged, octopus type creatures, except that they are 100 feet tall and glow at times and, of course, have legs in addition to tentacles. They are spawned from a larva that attaches to trees and then somehow enters into the water source, in which they grow.

But the point is not the reality or irreality of the creatures, but the concept of the "infected zone." Both the American and Mexican military are struggling to control the zone, and are apparently failing therein. At the beginning of the film, by way of introduction to the "monsters", we see one attack a city outside of the southern border of the zone, and at the end, we learn that they have broken through the US border. In the zone, the two main characters are escorted by armed men who look like guerillas. The latter turn out to be a sympathetic group, who are essentially the residents of this zone. They must wear gas masks at times, to protect themselves from the gases spread by American planes. They are eventually victims of the creatures they attempt to avoid. When the protagonists approach at the US border, they first spy it from the top of what looks like a Mayan temple. From this vantage point, they are able to see its enormity: it is a fortified concrete wall, hundreds of feet tall and extending, presumably, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean (see photo below). The protagonists enter through one abandoned checkpoint--a surprising state of affairs, indicating that the borders have been breached.

Inside the border, towns have been evacuated and laid waste to, and no humans remain, save an old homeless woman pushing a shopping cart, who is mad. The protagonists eventually find a gas station that is empty, but lighted as though someone just left. They call the police and military are dispatched to collect them. As they wait, one of the monsters arrive at the station. It extends its tentacles into the store and focuses on a television. Perhaps it has eyes at tips. Then another monster arrives. The two monsters seem to embrace each other and glow, make noises, indicating love and affection. These creatures have desires. After they leave the protagonists, having grown attached to one another, kiss for the first time. The female says, "I don't want to go home." The Marines come and pull them apart, into separate humvees. The humvees depart, but one hears a Marine humming the "Ride of the Valkryies" (this happened in the beginning of the film, also).

The latter moment is to me an unquestionable reference to the famous scene in "Apocalypse Now" where Robert Duvall's character spearheads an invasion into Vietnamese territory with speakers attached to his helicopters playing this song (and that image recalls one from the beginning of Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will", as Hitler's airplane descends on Nuremburg from the heavens to a Wagnerian accompaniment).

To me what is interesting about this film is the way in which it speaks about something that it does not think it is speaking about. The filmmaker, in a featurette online, spoke about the plausibility of extraterrestrial life, particularly in the backstory for the film, that the NASA probe had visited Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, and one of the few known bodies with sufficient water for life to occur. Yet the issue is the "infected zone," not even the extraterrestrials. They are incidental, represent the threat, but are not meaningful in themselves.

The "infected zone" cohabits the space where, presently, a devastating drug war is unfolding and nothing can seem to stop it. One might imagine a component of this film describing how the "infected zone" became what it is: that is, how the aliens were discovered and how it was evacuated of the human life that is found there now. Would that story countenance narcoterrorism, and describe its eradication by the aliens? That story would be the imaginative solution to the current social-political problem. But it would leave Mexicans economically destitute (as portrayed in the film) and involve an American police state.

Yet nary a word is spoken of immigration (in one of the trailers, the words are telegraphed between montages "they arrived six years ago ... they were aliens ... now they are residents") or narcoterrorism. The guerillas are the closest representation of the drug war or the immigration (in addition to the protagonists, they are escorting several Mexican families to the border).

Film Forum’s Heist Series

For those who haven't been to the Film Forum, it is a movie theater in SoHo (literally on the south side of Houston) that specializes in second run and art films. I have always loved it and I would say that my experiences there are the ones that I most associate with what is wonderful about this city (as well as The Met). 

The first film series I saw at Film Forum was Fellini, and it was the experience from which I drew all judgments on Fellini (later work, generally overrated, early, strong). This Heist series has had a similar meaning for me. I think that I have always thought that heist films are the core genre in film and if I did some research I might be willing to try to defend that claim.

This series has an excellent selection of films. This is not to say that all of the films are good.  Several are probably choices based of availability and budget (like The Anderson Tapes, which is really forgettable), rather than cinematic virtue.  For example, one great heist film is Spike Lee’s 2006 Inside Man, but this was not included. Or Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), which is probably one of the best heist films. Or The Getaway (1972) or Out of Sight (1998). Etc.

Here’s a rundown of what was shown.

Among those I had seen before are:

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974): Good, with Walter Matthau, back when he was a kind of sex symbol … yeah? … and Robert Shaw; certainly much better than the tepid remake with washed-out Travolta and old-earnest-kept-down Denzel Washington (the same character is better in Inside Man).

The Anderson Tapes (1971): A Sidney Lumet film with Sean Connery that is underwhelming.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, but generally an uninteresting story (and the remake is worse, in my view, mainly because of Rene Russo, but assisted by Denis Leary [who let this guy in front of a movie camera?]).

Reservoir Dogs (1992): A great film with unforgettable performances by everyone.  Even the guy who loses his ear.

Kansas City Confidential (1952): An interesting narrative arc, with a totally creepy Lee Van Cleef, but otherwise predictable pulp.

The Killing (1956): Great early Kubrick film, with Sterling Hayden, whose character should lead, but is in fact displaced by the brilliance of other, seemingly minor characters. Every character is so filled with longing and tragic fate. 

The film starts with Johnny Clay (Hayden), just out of prison, and Fay, and he explains how his next heist is going to work and the mistakes he made last time, and she says she can't bear to be away from him again, because she's not pretty or smart. I mean, right there, you are caught. But then you've also got this weird, homoerotic money man (Jay Flippen), a skeevy sniper (Timothy Carey), an existentialist, chess playing strong man, and the most pathetic man on the planet who is being relentlessly emotionally assaulted by his two-timing wife.

I shall write more about this film in the next post.

Le Cercle Rouge (1970): Fucking Melville.  If you don’t like this shit, check your pulse.

A Fish Called Wanda (1988): Hilarious, with great performances by everyone.  There really are not any bad scenes in this movie. 

Thief (1981): by Michael Mann (one reason to see it, the other being an actual good performance by James Caan, who is otherwise mediocre)

Bob Le Flambeur (1955): Again, Melville. Cool and good.

Violent Saturday (1955): I think I only saw the latter part of this, but it has Lee Marvin (enough said) and some Amish dude sticks a gangster with a pitchfork.  Price of admission right there.

Jackie Brown (1997): Categorizing this as a heist film is kind of insulting, although this could be said for several of the films in the series.  This is a great movie and demonstrates Taratino’s incredible sensitivity to gender and race.  Everyone, even fucking Bridget Fonda, is good in this movie.

The films that I hadn’t seen:

Charley Varrick (1973): Now I see why Clint loves Don Siegel so much.  This is a good, fun-to-watch film. Walter Matthau as a sex symbol? What? But it develops its tension well.  Although I read this elsewhere, Joe Don Baker is clearly the archetype for Anton Chigurh, although Anton Chigurh would make Joe Don Baker run back to his mama.

The Hot Rock (1972): A strange inertia moves this film, but the heist business is all pulp in relation to the performance by Zero Mostel, which makes the movie worth watching.

Sterling Hayden

The Asphalt Jungle (1950): A film so good that I feel embarrassed for not having seen it before, especially since it’s a Huston film and I loved Key Largo and the Maltese Falcon (Y and I saw this in Paris on our first trip there together and we both loved it …).  Stars Sterling Hayden, who is the unexpected emotional core of this film, although he plays the role of the muscle, as well as Marilyn Monroe, John McIntyre and Sam Jaffe. The trajectory of this film is assured, but you want to watch every minute of it.  It's the kind of film that you realize, while watching, this is really good ... and maybe you don't know why.  That is an exciting feeling.  

I will write more about this in the next post.

The Sicilian Clan (1969): Camp and a half. Alain Delon without any charm.  Jean Gabin with the largest nose in Europe and no charm.  Lino Ventura, fucking hilarious with the quitting smoking bit. This combination should be genius … is not.  Is one to watch, but basically a camp commentary on other heist films.

Classes Tous Risques (1960): Fucking Lino Ventura is beautiful, always. That guy is like the Toshiro Mifune of France—has incredible range, always impressive. This film has weight and a great narrative. The desperation and pathos is palpable and beautiful. Jean-Paul Belmondo is a little too self-conscious of himself as JPB, at the beginning, but he grows into this character appreciably throughout the film. And the ending is brutal and right.

What I didn’t see, but still want to:

Un Flic (1972): Melville, with Delon and Deneuve.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954): Lino Ventura, Jean Gabin, and a young and breathtaking Jeanne Moreau.

Rififi (1955): by Jule Dassin.

A Band of Outsiders (1964): Godard.  I’m really embarrassed about this.  I’ve only watched the first 30 minutes.

Criss Cross (1949): by Richard Siodmark, with Burt Lancaster and Dan Duryea.

Nightfall (1956): by Jacques Tourneur, with Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft.

Vera Cruz (1954): by Robert Aldrich, with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster.  A western heist film! And an evil Burt Lancaster!

Colorado Territory (1949): by Raoul Walsh.  I’ve just got a feeling about this one.

Topkapi (1964): by Jule Dessin.

What is Philosophy?

Because it is unfortunately that time of year and the state of the world is what it is, I am going on the market. This activity requires revising a "teaching dossier" in which I talk about my teaching style and pedagogical principles, etc. This year, in revising it, I am treading the same path that I have pursued in the past by defining philosophy ... and I find this task making me wonder, in a way much like my erstwhile colleague Dr. J, who has recently done so on her blog.

She has challenged myself and others to provide an explanation in 200 words, to avoid terminological pedantry and to distinguish between the profession and the discipline. 

On my account, philosophy has two aspects and these aspects are actually not complementary, but indicate an internal conflict.

On the one hand, philosophy is an activity, by which I understand the skills of "critical thinking." That is, so as to counter the natural tendency of students to believe that philosophy is an abstract matter, I  stress that as an activity philosophy depends upon the skills of reading, writing and discussion, which are skills that we use everyday, although not in the "critical" mode.  I say a lot about the conditions for this critical thinking, but here I will only say that it should inspire "intellectual curiousity". Intellectual curiousity is a state, in which we encounter the world with the greatest of fascination. The accumulation of knowledge could allow our expectations and assumptions to make us bored with the world. Intellectual curiousity, by contrast, is a state in which we find the world fascinating, so as not to allow the possible cynicism of certain wisdom to afflict us.

On the other hand, philosophy is a vibrant historical discipline, meaning that it has passed down practices of thinking and questioning, determinations of appropriate objects, the canonization of important texts and philosophers. This history develops and changes in relation to the events that occur within philosophy, the academy and outside. Being a philosopher means knowing that history, appreciating it and contributing to it.

Now for the interesting part. I think that many contemporary philosophers accept the former description, presuming that philosophy inquires into meta-disciplinary areas, some traditionally occupied by philosophy (metaphysics) and others new (philosophy of science), but that they see themselves as related to their past as merely a narrative about what happened before. What is more, they liken their activity to the activities of theorists and scientists in other disciplines.

But I think those philosophers would be uncomfortable by the philosophers who work from and in the historical institution (I am one of those). That is, I am dubious about the scientific-like assumptions of philosophy as an activity, and instead perceive my work as reading and developing the history of philosophy. The big problem is this: I think that should be an end without being legitimated by possible application. In other words, I think that history should be done for its own sake--the antiquarian, I believe, that Nietzsche critiques in his famous essay.

A last brief note: I have no idea how to distinguish the discipline from the profession. The former it seems to me is the activity and the historical institution. My inclination is to hold the profession to be the conferences and professional societies and journals and publications.  But it is equally reasonable to say that the profession is very much about teaching in the university system.

A pickle, as a Romanian philosopher used to say.

Revisiting Barton Fink (1990)

Why has Barton Fink (1990) not weathered time well? This may be a completely subjective and/or personal question and among film historians or theorists the film may still hold its worth.  But I suspect that many of the later works by the Coen brothers, particularly Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), have eclipsed this film. 

One reason simply may be that the latter won Oscars for Best Picture and while Barton Fink was not nominated for those awards (although it did win at Cannes for Best Director and Best Actor, and Cannes is a slightly more reliable criterion [and yet, The Ladykillers (2004) was also nominated and won, in the categories of Best Director and the Jury Award respectively … and I think we can agree that the film was a complete catastrophe]). The Oscars seem to mean a great deal when worthy films grace its award and mean nothing when lesser films do (Titanic? Crash?).

Perhaps this is a useless question. But the question is about trying to intimate how time and culture will treat a work of art.  What is obscure or mediocre now may, in a new light, become terribly important.  No Country for Old Men is an important film because it is timely (i.e. Mexico), because it is based (almost verbatim) on a book by a probably first-order contemporary American writer, because it contains one of the most terrifyingly provocative characters to greet the screen since Orson Welles’ “Captain Hank Quinlan”, namely, Javier Bardem’s “Anton Chigurh”, because it does this while meaningfully narrating the anxieties of an old man, no longer welcome, Tommy Lee Jones’ “Ed Tom Bell”.  And it has an unsettling, serious ending.

Barton greets the subject of his hotel room painting.

Whereas Barton Fink is lighter fare. It has no serious ending, but rather ends in an unrealistic, somewhat comic manner, with a man contemplating a scene he has seen before, in a painting on the wall of his formerly transient, now residential, hotel room. And this man carries a box which we can only conclude contains the head of a woman  that he made love to (perhaps the only one) a handful of nights before. Yet he claims that he does not know what is in the box, and as he has not looked in the box, this is at least apodictically true, albeit not probablistically.

One of the reasons for the decline of Barton Fink’s fortunes may be an aesthetic shift, away from a style of artistic craft that weaves ideas and images together, but without closure or, possibly, basic synthesis. You can see an example of this in the episode “Crocodile” from the first season of Dexter, which begins and ends with an image of someone their head halfway submerged in the water. In the episode there actually happens to be a crocodile, which is supposedly the lure for a would-be killing, disturbed by the goodie Dexter, who then accidentally stumbles into the former.  The title of the episode is a reference to images bookending the episode, as well as one of the momentary subjects of the episode, but lacks any meaningful thematic synthesis.

Barton Fink, thankfully, does not traffic in this reductive version of the non-synthetic (nor analytic), non-cohesive style.  Instead, it concerns itself with the ironic search of a playwright turned screenwriter for the “theater of the common man”, a murderous everyman character, the soul-pulverizing forces of the early film industry, and haunting images. But it does allow a significant amount of screen time to be spent on this closing image of a woman sitting on the edge of the surf.  This image is some kind of focal point, among a series of events of varying gravity, to give the eponymous character some evanescent stability while the world that he knows slowly collapses.

Barton Fink lacks a moral center and it intentionally avoids judgment by settling for a elliptical, oneiric vision. The most sympathetic character appears to be a friendly albeit stressed door-to-door salesman, but is then discovered to be an axe-murdering Nazi (John Goodman as Charley Meadows, a.k.a. “Karl ‘Mad Man’ Mundt”.  The main character is a pretentious, snobbish intellectual of sorts who believes that he writes from the vicissitudes of emotional conflict in attempt to contribute to the humanistic mission of a “theater of the common man.” He claims a moral obligation to this working class fellow, but repeatedly fails in the basic attempt to “listen” to him, as Charley/Karl eventually points out. And of course, there is nothing more ironic than the fact that Fink strives for a theater of the common man, seeing screenwriting as merely means to that end, completely oblivious that film is the only remaining “theater of the common man.” There is no way we can identify with Fink.

Does this mean that Barton Fink has been passed aside in favor of Fargo and No Country for Old Men precisely because of the moral judgments of the latter? Have we unwittingly become fiends for moralistic art?

Travels with the idiot man-child

I have never begrudged the idiot man-childs ("childs" not "children") the numerous advantages they have enjoyed at the expense of civilized persons such as myself.

I met this fellow in Memphis TN.  His name is Jeffrey and claimed that he spelled it with a P-A-R-K-E-R. I laughed nervously and stepped back, in part because of the foul air of mediocrity wafting slowly, like the gentle violence of raw, unrefined petroleum. But I also stepped back because I am one of the few people who believes that spelling is a vital skill without which we all slowly return to the primordial soup.